Time for Time

Warning: This post will be confusing. Do not read while operating heavy machinery.

As I stood in my kitchen doing the dishes just now, something occurred to me. It regards time, like you couldn't figure that out from the title. It is a well established fact that time flies when you're having fun. Therefore, to slow down time, you must have no fun at all, or even... anti-fun. If you achieve such a state of anti-fun, you will notice (and every student has had at least one experience of this, mostly in college) that time will all but stand still. As Einstein theorized, time and space are related. The faster you move through space, the slower you move through time. Therefore, anti-fun equates to high velocity. It may be possible, even, to move backwards in time. The secret to this form of time travel is to go faster than light, to make time slow down so far it goes backwards. So, if were going close to the speed of light, and had a college economics class full of liberal art majors, the combined effect would send you hurtling backwards in time. However, nobody would be aware of this, because professors of such classes notice nothing but the lecture at hand, and the students are all asleep. So time travel is useless. Let us look at fun again, however. Since time is going faster, that must mean that it is the same as not moving at all, thereby allowing time it's full velocity. As every mother's child knows, you can't accomplish anything sitting on your duff all day. So fun is the opposite of productivity, which is why jobs always suck. Anyone who really loves their job must then themselves suck, to counteract the anti-productivity of the fun. So, to sum all this up, here are your options. You can either A) be a time traveler but completely unaware of any of it, B) have a crappy job but otherwise be a pretty cool person, or C) be a douche but love your job. And if you disagree with me, you can D) kiss my butt, you humorless ice queen.

The 3rd is on 3's

Someone, a rather special someone, asked me what my thing is with threes. Now, if you were to ask me my favorite number, I would say four, but I (both subconsciously and consciously) tend to do things in threes. Three points, Three M's on the name of the blog, and so on. Like right there. I answered him, but I don't feel the answer was sufficient.

The number three has a built in balance. The central point flanked by the other two. Evens, while still technically balanced, do not have this pivot point, and thereby lack the balanced feel. Photography especially takes advantage of this in the rule of thirds. While not all photographers follow this, many strive to have a set of three objects in their photographs: three trees, three people, three beams of light. Arrangements also tend to follow threes. The half hour of Mamma Mia that I watched once was completely full of 3 groups. Noticed three, ironically. Main girl's necklace had three stars, there were three groups of three people, and people kept popping up on the screen in threes. Anyway, this balance is somewhat true for all odds, however with 1, it lacks the effect of having repetition, and 5 is

usually a bit too much.

There are also an abundance of threes in nature (we're going to skip over religion completely on this conversation, by the way). Three perceived dimensions, three primary atomic particles, three "normal" states of matter (yes, there are more than three, plasma and supersolids jump to mind, and glass might be considered a separate state technically, I'm not sure on that), and there are more if you care to look for them. I don't, and I feel I've made my point with just these three. See? I didn't even intend for that one.

This third and final point is the (in my twisted brain) psychology of the third. One point, you might just be lucky. Two points, and you know a bit, but it's still iffy. Three, you come across as knowing what you know and being confident about it. Four is just a bit too much, and five is just showing off. Of course, from time to time overkill on points is needed, such as the situation where you need to completely overwhelm a thought someone has that is completely wrong and immediately harmful. Such as the hypothetical "You're looking for someone else, aren't you?" conversation or the "I'm going to jump, don't try to stop me" talk. Then, the more reasons the merrier.

And now it is irking me that this is five paragraphs rather than three. However, grade school pounded it into my head that you HAVE to have an opening and conclusion when you write an organized paper. Paper, this is not, but it's too organized and structured to leave as it was. Plus it was an even number, and you already read what I think about evens.

A Musing on Fate

I've never been quite sure how I feel about Fate. On the one hand, I don't like the idea that we can't control our own destiny. On the other, things just... work out somehow. A few years ago, maybe more than a few, I came to a conclusion. Fate is simply God's/the creator's/whatever name you choose for a higher power's way of showing off. The key part of omniscience is knowing EVERYTHING. That includes how you will choose something in condition set "x." So, by simple arrangement of events outside the control of free will, it would be possible to make a tapestry with the desired effects and interactions. That, however, seems a bit morbid in the case of bad situations. A bit to "eh, take one for the team" for my tastes in a belief structure. That leads back to simple free will, with no pre-arrangement. So, then, do things such as instinct or gut feelings or hunches come into play instead? Could this be a nudge of "fate" to say "hey, this way's a good bet!" or "do this, and something good will come out of it, sooner or later." Maybe. I don't know. I'm still fighting it out with the whole fate concept. Besides, who am I to dictate anything? These are just my ramblings. Maybe it will inspire some thought in someone who needs a nudge in that direction. Maybe I'm an agent of fate by typing this. Or maybe I'm getting a bit full of myself to even jokingly say that. And maybe, just maybe, I like using the word maybe a bit too much. What I can say (without using maybe) is this. When you make a plan and do your best to keep to it, for your own self preservation and your own long term good... when you try to do things how they should be done... When you have a PLAN and you try to stick to it, and then events come out of the blue and shoot that plan to hell and everything ends up much better than it was before, there is only one word for that. Fate.