SuperWonderBang

This blog has officially moved back to http://aezell.wordpress.com. I just got tired of fiddling with all the Wordpress updates. It’s easier to let them do it for me. 

This made me guffaw like a cretin. Yes, I am 8 years old.

My wife and I currently rent a house in a really nice part of Franklin. It’s a little old and needs work and since we rent, we aren’t jumping at the chance to dump a bunch of money into the house.

So, I have been looking at rentals in the Nashville area and for some reason, people are asking for absolutely crazy amounts of money in rent. The Nashville housing market seems to be very hot with lots of new development, both in-town in the form of condo buildings and around town in new subdivisions. Houses are going up for 60 miles around Nashville and the condo buildings in-town are becoming more and more exclusive.

With all that building going on, I can’t understand how the prices have stayed so high and seem to be continuing to rise. Is there really that much demand? Nashville doesn’t seem to have that much of an influx of residents yet demand is the only reason the prices could continue to climb in the face of the amount of building going on.

In short, if you want to live anywhere near town, you should be prepared to pay through the nose or live in a large, McApartment complex. Even in the huge apartment developments, prices are keeping pace with the single family housing around town. It’s really baffling.

In conclusion, the wife and I may end up living way out of town and that means I’ll be killing the Earth and my wallet on the daily commute. Oh joy!

A thought has been bouncing around inside my head for a few days now. I’m certain that it’s not wholly original. In fact, I can trace the seed of it to Joseph Campbell’s “The Power of Myth.” I’m sure there are some other really smart people to blame for this mild obsession.

This is as simply as I can summarize it: All of the “explanations” that humans have created for everything are really just narratives that tell the story of an unknowable “all.” Let me explain.

First, let’s look at religions (a lot of this is Campbell). Many of them are bound up in stories whose proof is only in their professing of their own truth. These are narratives that attempt to explain actions, conditions, behaviors, and reason through the use of examples, symbols, and allegories. They are stories that we humans have created to attempt to grasp the capital-T “Truth.”

Religions are probably more effective at this in that many of them are based on some aspect of historical truth. That is, someone named Moses, Jesus, Buddha, or Mohammed probably did really live. He may have done or said some things that seemed really intriguing and insightful. It’s this nugget of truth which makes the narratives within religion so compelling.

Second, let’s take physics. I don’t know much about physics, which will be painfully obvious rather quickly. It seems, though, that physics spends an awful lot of time trying to explain things for which its previous explanations have simply failed to suffice. Quantum physics nearly rendered the entire subject obsolete when it arrived on the scene. It helped usher in the amazingly oxymoronic Chaos Theory. So, now the story of physics tells us that certain things are immutable: gravity, the speed of light, or the wavelength that makes my wife’s eyes green. Then, in its next chapter, it wants us to wrap our head around the idea that all of that may not matter and in fact can’t matter.

The narrative is being written as we read it. Religion’s narrative is long and like some Xmen comic book has a huge continuity to keep intact, but the narrative of physics gives us a narrative framework in which the continuity is infinitely malleable. That’s very convenient.

Math seems to spend a lot of its opening chapters giving us constants like physics does: 2+2=4 for example. Yet, it strives to so much more because it begs the language of religion to come play along. We are to take on faith the notion that a negative number is somehow something with which we should have some concern.

Math also wants us to believe that there are numbers, like Pi, which we cannot fully comprehend. It’s like the belief that Mohammed asks us to take when his overly convenient revelations say that the Meccans can continue to worship a few lesser gods and still be his followers. Pi never ends and the djinns of the desert still fit into Mohammed’s absolute monotheism.

These are examples of the classic author’s intrusion into the narrative. A sort of deus ex machina for which we must take a leap of faith and simply suspend our disbelief. Whenever the story gets written into a corner, we change the rules a bit to open up new vistas and new locations for our characters to enjoy.

I should say here that there is nothing wrong with any of this. It’s important to try to understand the world around us and our place in it. I applaud the fact that this effort takes the form of a narrative. I believe in the power of stories to help us transcend the earthly bonds and truly grasp some greater commonality. I believe just as strongly that its important to understand these things as stories. We should not only realize that they are narratives crafted by the human hand, but that they are not the only narratives.

The bookshelves at the local Barnes and Noble are full of stories which might illuminate some dimly-lit corner of the human story. No one author or character has the monopoly on the “right” story, or if you must, the “Truth.” Every story is important and valid. Whether it be religion, evolution, math or the latest chick lit, it serves as a reflection of the story of us–all of us.

The upshot of all this is that the conclusion to all these stories is unknowable. In fact, they are mere reflections of the unknowable nature of the cosmos. I don’t trust the man who says, “I know that light moves at 299,792,458 meters per second.” I don’t trust the man who says, “I know that if I died tonight, I would go to heaven with Jesus.” That’s the man who presumes to know who the killer is in a Raymond Chandler novel after only reading the first three chapters.

Again, it’s not wrong to create these narratives, as long as we don’t talk about them in absolutes. We must treat them the way we do a Seamus Heaney poem. We are respectful and gentle, but not afraid to tear it down into its combinant parts in an effort to see past the reflection into the “there.”

There’s certainly more to explore within this idea. I would love to hear some comments on writers, thinkers, musicians who are playing around with this idea. I’ll say it again. I know this is not original thought, so please share with me some of the places I might have picked up pieces of this.

It’s official! Today, I became an official, full-time employee of Emma.

Emma does permission-based, stylish email marketing. It is by far one of the easiest email marketing systems available today. I am excited and proud to be a member of the team. The people at Emma are one of the finest groups of people with which I have had the pleasure to work.

I am excited about the opportunities to learn that I will have. There are a lot of amazingly smart and creative people at Emma. I look forward to the impressive possibilities that lie ahead of us.

Specifically, I will be on the development team. I will mostly be tasked with writing code but will also do a fair amount of helping with the escalated support requests that come in to the support team.

Support is one area where Emma stands head and shoulders above their competition. Every single support request is handled personally by a friendly and personable human being. There are no automatic responses telling you to just read the FAQ. These are real people who make it their job to ensure the client gets the help they need.

Emma also is on the forefront in development. I won’t go into details here, but Emma is not a company which rests on outdated technologies. We will be pushing the envelope in both database and application development.

I might be one of the few people who has never seen a Segway in person. Just now, I look out my kitchen window and the guy who goes around reading the electric company meters is riding one.

He let me take it for a little spin in the driveway. It is pretty cool and it seems that is job is a perfect one to benefit from the Segway. He can get around to the sides of houses easily and quickly and be on his way.

The Segway still seems a little gimmicky to me, but it is intriguing.

Today, in the shower, I looked up and noticed that my showerhead was made by a company called “Ugenex.” Now, Google tells me that the company is a subsidiary of Jing Mei Industries, but I immediately thought of “eugenics.”

I’m cynical enough to think that most Americans wouldn’t know what “eugenics” was except for a vague memory of having heard it in school before. According to Wikipedia, eugenics is “a social philosophy which advocates the improvement of human hereditary traits through various forms of intervention.” Really, “eugenics” was a failed attempt to scientifically justify racism and supposed genetic cleanliness.

It’s a dirty term filled with the same baggage as any other term that tried to justify racism. Eugenics is the faux science that lead to thoughts like “black people are a musical people” or “jews are good with money.” In practice, eugenics is what lead to ideas in Nazi Germany of breeding the super race. The genetic component of racism is the crux of the matter her.

At any rate, I was standing in the shower thinking “why would a company name itself so as to imply such a dark connotation?” In the end, I suppose it was poor translation or just a mistake, but it caused me to pause and wonder how many other folks might have looked up during a shower and thought the same thing.

Once again, I find myself looking for work. I guess that’s the problem when you love new challenges. Sometimes, they don’t work out. If anyone knows of web development work in Nashville, TN, let me know.

My resume is here.

Is it me or is the rest of the country just ignorant to the fact that rich white kids in the South are, for the most part, racist. That’s not to say that they are bigots. They may not act on that racism against other races, but they certainly think it.

Take this story on CNN, Racist Party at Clemson. They seem almost breathless that white kids might be insensitive on MLK, Jr. day. As a graduate of a southern state school, I can guarantee that those kids knew exactly what they were doing. They were intentionally exhibiting stereotypes of black people in an attempt to belittle and mock MLK, Jr. day. Some of it might have been motivated by a misplaced sense of hipster irony, but the majority of it was that they simply don’t see anything wrong with what they were doing.

What bothers me most is not the racism itself (that cause is far beyond my ability to solve for anyone other than myself and those I deal with), but the fact that journalists and others around the country seem so surprised. In that same vein, CNN is also showing some video coverage of the “E-Gate scandal” out in Seattle. The tone of the whole thing seems to be surprise and mocking horror.

I wonder what world these people live in that they see such little racism around them. It’s hard to avoid in the news, in commercials, and in almost all media. How can these people not be aware of the huge undercurrent of racial tension in this country? How can they not see that the poor and the minorities are still being walked on, even in the military, where they serve as cannon fodder while only hoping to make a step up the ladder.

Where does this surprise come from?

Nick Bradbury, of Homesite, TopStyle, and FeedDemon fame, is asking folks in Nashville to spread the word about Max It Out. This is a worthwhile charity event, and though I’ve not attended it (I’m new to Nashville), you can read more about it from Nick.

The charity is involved in raising money to study and hopefully, cure bacterial meningitis while raising awareness of how devastating the disease can be, especially in children.

If you’re in Nashville, check it out.

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