DAILY PHOTO: Waterfall & Mossy Rock
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PROMPT: Who We Are?
Daily writing prompt
Do you think we’re shaped more by our experiences or by who we are?
Is a salad lettuce or is it tomato? [It’s both, yet it’s neither. It’s an amalgam that cannot be spun out into component parts any more than one can pluck a solitary fart out of a football stadium — i.e. the fart, the whole fart, and nothing but the fart.]
It sounds like this is meant to be a restatement of the nature versus nurture question, though I’m not sure I understand the question. I would argue that it presents a false dichotomy. Who is one (if not an experience-having machine?) I can’t answer because I think the question assumes a simplification that doesn’t exist in the real world.
I’ve just been reading David Brooks’ book, How to Know a Person, in which he offers a relevant quote from Aldous Huxley: “Experience is not what happens to you, it’s what you do with what happens to you.” I can’t say whether Huxley was entirely correct, but I believe that how one experiences what happens to one is inseparable from who one is. (Also instructive is Brooks’ definition of a person as a point of view.)
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Reading Clouds [Haiku]
at rest on a hill,
clouds form & shift shapes;
i read their story.
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Hoosier Discovers the Deluge at a Distance [Free Verse]
I’ve been caught in
many a sudden downpour.
And I’ve been warned by
the sweet scent of corn,
swept in though a
screen door,
or over the pasture.
But nothing in my flatland youth
prepared me to look down upon
the underside of a cloud —
to see its neatly-edged opaque
wall, defining the area
of deluge.
It wasn’t until much later that I’d
see the massive cloud columns
rising above the base layer
of a cloud floor —
warmly lit as seen from a
jetliner, though I knew it must
be brutally gray to
ground-dwellers.
The deluge closes slowly,
and yet I can’t escape it.
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Know the Weather [Free Verse]
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DAILY PHOTO: Donggung Palace Pavilions
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PROMPT: Animal
Daily writing prompt
If you had to be an animal for a week, which one would you be and why?
I guess this means “another animal” as I have to be an animal EVERY week — i.e. Kingdom: Animal; Class: Mammal; Order: Primate; Species: H. sapiens.
Let’s see. Getting comfortable landing in a week would be a challenge, so flying / gliding animals are out. I wouldn’t want to be anything that is popular to hunt. I wouldn’t want to be anything that eats garbage. Seeing what’s in the ocean would be fun. Maybe a shark.
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Steamy [Haiku]
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DAILY PHOTO: From Netravati Peak
PROMPT: 20 Years
Daily writing prompt
What’s a piece of technology you’re convinced will exist in 20 years?
I think cell phones will be replaced by cheap cyborg implants that fulfill the same myriad functions and more. Just as we were convinced that we were being given a great benefit with social media, when — in fact — we were just handing over our attention and data on the cheap. This time we’ll be signing away a great deal more — we’ll be meat puppets for the billionaires, carrying out consumption function programming as ignorantly blissful as Cypher from The Matrix. Welcome to the Cyber-Sheep economy. BAHaaaaah.
Proviso: People (me included) are shite at forecasting. We call broken clocks “genius” based on those two times a day they are right, but forecasting genius is just selection bias plus Mrs. Cleo pseudo-psychic tactics (be vague, sound specific.) Also, remember we are always one nuclear winter away from flint knapping being the prevailing mode of technology.
Tiger Riding for Beginners 