Do you ever have that nagging feeling that you’re supposed to be in an important meeting, but have no idea why?

Amnesty Internation has declared that human rights are being rolled back around the World, and the United States is the chief culprit. “When the most powerful country in the world thumbs its nose at the rule of law and human rights, it grants a licence to others to commit abuse with impunity.”

CNN
Washington Post

We should congratulate ourselves. As citizens of a state that democratically elects its leaders, and which just reelected the leaders responsible for these policies, we share in this guilt.

Peter Lynds: read the article about him and his theory of time that was published in the latest print issue of (Wired). Honestly, it surprised me. I thought that his theory (and I’m hardly doing it justice)–that there is no time, only changes which, relative to each other, give the illusion of time–was a generally accepted theory. Guess not. Makes me wonder where I first heard the idea. Perhaps I thought of it myself? Doubtful, since I don’t much like the theory.

Xbox: can’t remember what I was going to say here, originally. I will say that I believe “they” are right when they say that video games cause your brain to release endorphins or some other neurological chemical to which you can become addicted. I’ve been playing Kingdom Under Fire every chance I get since I got it, and I’m not even sure why. It’s fun, but it’s very repetitive. I finally decided to quit playing for a few weeks so that I can focus on other parts of life. Nothing else seems half as interesting when I have been playing video games.

Of course, that may just be it. Maybe nothing else IS as interesting. Video games provide compressed, distilled excitement, with none of the risk and tedium that are part of any real life, no matter how exciting. A police officer once told me that his job was “five percent terror and nintey-five percent paperwork.” The moments of exhileration also bring fear and real risk, and they are widely spaced by long stretches of dull routine. Video games give you all the good stuff and none of the bad stuff (other than arthritis and lack of sleep). Perhaps I shouldn’t wonder why I like them so much, or why they make everything else seem dull. The involved brain chemistry may simply be the physics of the obvious, like the theory of gravity.

Life: I don’t know whether women struggle with this, but most of the men I know do. I know it is true for me.

I need to be building something, creating something. Something that I believe in, something unique. I realized that some of my dissatisfaction with being a corporate wage slave is that I don’t particularly believe that there’s any “meaning” in a large corporation. We exist in order to exist. Everything else, such as the products we produce, the lives we fund with our salaries, the charities we support, these are just means by which we continue to exist, and by-products of that existance. And at a personal level, I see nothing I want to achieve within the corporate structure. I don’t aspire to any significant, unique role within the corporation. Not that I don’t want promotions, don’t want to make things better, etc. But there aren’t any jobs within the company that seem meaningfully different than mine.

What does this mean? I’m not sure, yet. So many career paths would lead to the same place, in a short amount of time.