a future with talking animals:
A lot has happened recently, and I haven’t really processed any of it. It sits in my cheeks like hamster food. Or in my cow stomach. I’ve really become obsessed with whales. They are such magnificent creatures, don’t you think? Whenever I find a scientist I ask them how the whales got back in the water and so far every scientist has told a different story. These stories are fantastic because they skirt the line between science, the evolution story, our repressed religious anxiety (or lack thereof), and pop culture. Everyone should know about the whales. Some people think that the water mammals co-evolved, and never actually came by way of the land mammals. Others hypothesize cows, horses, dogs, hippos, and even frogs (okay, that’s my theory).
Why must we treat history with such a strict eye on the truth? Why not make history fun, make it a story we can tell our children, one involving how frogs turned into tadpoles and tadpoles turned into ferns and ferns turned into whales? One involving jolly red men who deliver presents through our chimney. One involving fairies, dinosaurs, why sharing is important, why one shouldn’t eat watermelon seeds, why Noah didn’t care about the plants, why holding your face in a certain position is a poor idea, why one must eat all of one’s food, why the US must kill people that are evil, and people that aren’t evil but are near evil people, why the Rubik’s cube is so difficult to solve without tricks, why good people come up with bad ideas, why bad things happen to kittens, why eating before sleeping causes bad dreams, why sometimes two people who love each other also aren’t good for each other, why love dies, why coins flip heads 50% of the time, why Ruby is better than Java, why the internet is making us happier, why pop culture is making us smarter, why people are different in the cities than in the country, why being drunk on gin is different from being drunk on pbr or sake, why sometimes medicine helps, why sometimes it doesn’t, why some people wake up early and some people late, why that song and this coffee combine to make me so happy.
More and more I’m realizing that there’s a magic hidden world in between doing what you love and being successful. If you’re doing what you love, and being unsuccessful at it (but successful enough to sustain the activity for the time being), that is where the golden happiness is. If you become too successful, you become owned. Without that, you can move, change, try new things, and enjoy it without the fear of disappointing everyone that has come to expect so much more from you. The only problem, is that you have to not let the lack of success get to you. If you can ignore that, and realize that it wouldn’t make you happier anyway, then you can find that magic zone. That’s a bit random and doesn’t make sense… but that’s what I think.