I plan to travel to the future one minute at a time.
At least until they invent a time machine that can transport something bigger than a subatomic particle, and only milliseconds into the future at that.
PROMPT: Future Travel
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Tag Archives: dailyprompt
PROMPT: Modern Society
In short, I think we need to foster emotional intelligence and not just academic intelligence, and we need to rebuild social interaction in a super-tribal world (i.e. a world too big for everyone to know everyone else.) [But do the latter without the xenophobia.]
To elaborate:
First, I think we need some true coming-of-age experience that facilitates a sense of self-empowerment. This would not just be collecting envelopes of cash and dancing a dance or reciting a prayer, but something more akin to being dropped in the woods for a week. Of course, this would require engaged parenting and skill acquisition and not just leaving kids with video games and social media. It seems like a lot of our present problems result from people with no sense of empowerment or the emotional intelligence that comes therefrom. Such people may have passed all the tests but still have “imposter syndrome” and the like.
Second, we need some sort of way to build tribal-scale groups in which people interact with a small group of others repeatedly — in person and face-to-face. The challenge is that this needs to be done without increasing xenophobia, which is already trending the wrong way. I think there is a problematic tendency to be virtually engaged but not personally engaged with others in humanity. Even in I, who am intensely introverted, the social impulse remains, but we live in a world where people can successfully dropout.
Some people get one or both of these experiences in any number of ways, but it seems like an ever-increasing segment of the population lacks confidence (even if they had a 4.0 gpa the whole way through their formal education,) and lacks human interaction (even if they have 2000 social media “friends.”)
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PROMPT: Listen
I don’t. I could listen to instrumental music while writing or doing other mental work, but I can’t have anything with words / lyrics involved. It’s distracting and can warp my writing.
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PROMPT: Comfort Food
It depends on where I am. I recently discovered that my Busan comfort food is “Hotteok with seeds.” In Central Asia, it’s tandoor bread — by whatever name it’s called in the local tongue. In Tblisi, it’s khinkali. In Peru, a lomo saltado is a beautiful thing. Chicago is the only place I’ll eat a hotdog, but I do love one there.
As a traveler, I find it’s important to not get attached to any one thing. If you crave a bagel, you’re great if you’re in New York or Tel Aviv, but if you insist on one in Hyderabad, it will be a sad experience. But, by the same token, if you order Chicken Biryani in Des Moines, expect to be underwhelmed (or — if not — to pay an exorbitant amount, either way it’s depressing.)
Probably the single most widespread comfort food would be whatever the local dumpling is, be it called mo-mo, khinkali, pierogi, dim sum, etc. All quite unique, but with an underlying familiarity.
So, in the immortal words of (the apparently quite slutty) Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young, “If you can’t be with the one you love… love the one you’re with.”
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PROMPT: Game
I go through periods of playing chess on my phone. I guess I enjoy that as much as anything. It’s a fine time pass. Though I’m not any good. If one were to go by what I do reasonably well, that would be more word puzzles or Scrabble — things that rely upon verbal skills. I’ve never been big on games of any variety.
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PROMPT: Foods
I’ve never baked a bread. That sounds satisfying.
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PROMPT: Dogs or Cats?
Who would win in an interspecies death match? That’s a tough one. Dogs obviously have size and pack-fighting coordination, but cats are duplicitous, excel at the sneak attack, and are not constrained by moral conventions. (They’ll push things off the counter just to see them fall.) So, I doubt we’ll ever know.
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PROMPT: Lose Track of Time
Everything but waiting the five minutes to press the plunger on the French press. As Tom Petty said, “The waiting is the hardest part.”
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PROMPT: Bothers
I once got a masala cookie beside my coffee at a cafe that took itself way too seriously. What’s a masala cookie, you might ask? It’s treachery, I say. It sits on a plate pretending to be a delightful sugar cookie, but without sugar or sweetness of any kind — just salt and a spice mixture. It was supposed to bring out the notes of cherry, chocolate, and… Blah, Blah, Blah. You know what would bring out the notes of chocolate in the coffee, some fucking chocolate in the cookie — that’s what. You can’t just impersonate a cookie and expect anyone to tolerate that level of betrayal. I certainly don’t want to live in such a world. That’s it, the only offense of recent years that I haven’t gotten over. A few years after it happened, I walked by that place and saw that the cafe had gone out of business, replaced by a Hello Kitty phone-case store. Good! I hope the owner and staff have moved on, putting their liberal arts graduate degrees to good use, teaching at community colleges as they should, rather than terrorizing the public with pseudo-cookies to make their overpriced coffee seem more of a bargain. I’ll end my rant here to go sit with my trauma.
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PROMPT: 10 Things
List 10 things you know to be absolutely certain.
1.) Nothing is permanent.
2.) The world is not what it seems.
3.) One’s subjective experience is not determined by the state of the world.
4.) Nobody grasps enough truth to be intolerant.
5.) Uncertainty is the root of all fear.
6.) Fear is the root of all hatred.
7.) Hatred is a subjective experience (See #3.) Also, uncertainty is the root of all hatred (by the transitive property,) hence the benefit of travel.
8.) Any who: a.) has suffered a string of hardships; b.) allows themselves to believe that some “other” is wholly responsible for said hardships; and c.) who lacks a sufficient sense of self-empowerment to avoid surrendering entirely to a group identity can (and likely will) become a Nazi (or the equivalent of their day.)
9.) No one can predict the future. [Regardless of how much we all love to try. (See #5.)]
10.) Entropy increases (ultimately, in a closed system.)
NOTE: I remain ready to abandon any certainty in the face of better information.
Tiger Riding for Beginners 