Plans and Dreams
I've lived for close to a quarter-century now; if the current average life expectancy in Spore is anything to go by, I have a half-century more to go before cancer or disease or accident claims me--that is, of course, assuming I don't stray off into some sort of natural disaster or get murdered or something.
I just wonder, what would a good life goal be? I mean, what do I want a description of me, say, when I'm thirty years old to be like? How about at forty? One would think it might be an idea to describe comprehensively the kind of person one wants to be at some given future point; that way one has an idea of things to do, milestones to pass, etc.; one would also think that this description should, where possible, be specific and not tied to transient standards (e.g. "spends less than 50 hours a week on the Internet" is good; "less time online" is bad).
So, let's get to describing.
...or at least that was what I was going to type up... the day before yesterday. How a couple of days changes one's mind! But really, it's more that I've been thinking it over and then... well, let's see.
Conventional wisdom says that it's good to plan ahead, the farther ahead the better. That way, as I said, one can plan for contingencies, prepare for surprises or eventualities, take steps that will further the plan, etc. On the other hand, I put little to no faith in conventional wisdom: people are just as often wrong as they are right, and if plans were so easy to make then Batman wouldn't be half as awesome as he is. And quite frankly the whole idea of making plans means that one requires some sort of power or ability to execute those plans, or at least the means by which to acquire the means to execute plans. And then the Bible has James--"si Dominus voluerit. Et: Si vixerimus, faciemus hoc, aut illud"--and Proverbs--"multæ cogitationes in corde viri: voluntas autem Domini permanebit"... never mind the whole "can God make a stone too heavy for Him to lift" conundrum. Should I even have plans for my life?
Of course there are arguments on each side. If there weren't, this question would be rhetorical; but it isn't. So--conventional wisdom says planning is good, because everybody needs a direction in which to be headed, goals to strive for, etc; helps one deal with disaster, provides motivation for action, makes one able to prioritise and arrange; allows for cooperation should multiple people have the same goals, which then leads to all kinds of wonderful things; and so on. Religion appears to imply (to put it mildly) that planning is bad, because all is vanity, God has His own plans for one and will reveal the relevant parts at the right times, and we're much too puny in might or understanding to make good plans (let alone best-case-scenario ones), or even if we had them, to execute them. Which, of course, seems like the approach of a very lazy person: "oh, the future is so frightening and so full of unknowns, let's get God to deal with it and I'll just sit here and wait for stuff to resolve itself!" And it's certainly more comforting to be doing something than to be waiting for something...
...this seems like something I should ask somebody else about. Perhaps a good debate could be made of it.
I've had strange dreams these two days; I shall recount them here, in as much detail as I can remember; it's usually that the dreams I remember are the strange and slightly puzzling ones, but hey. Both these dreams were the ones I had just before waking--thus, both occurred on the mornings of the days in question, and both were interrupted. Given the content of the dreams, though, that might be a good thing.
The dream on Friday morning started pretty benignly; I and some of the friends of the House of Bread were sitting around the electric piano; it was a sunny afternoon, and we were singing "All Creatures of Our God and King" in quite passable four-part harmony. At some point, we noticed that the hymn had a lot more verses than we'd seen before, so we turned the page and continued. At that point the hymn's tune changed into something I've never heard before, but we went singing on--and then it changed completely into a story about this box in an attic that contained something unspeakable, and it belonged to a woman who lived in that house, who was a hired servant of some sort--governess or nurse or maid--and it was kind of this isolated country house, all wooden walls and floors and hay and straw and twine, and set on a countryside where everything else was fields and grasslands. And then along came this incurably curious young boy, who went into the attic and opened the box, which wasn't locked, and discovered the unspeakable secret--but he was caught by the woman. The next two lines of the song were "fearful young shepherd with his head full of stone/ sing tremble!/ sing tremble!" and then I woke up. I've tried to figure out where I might have heard that tune or those words before, but so far it eludes me--Googling has turned nothing up.
The second dream I had this morning. I dreamed about being at a camp or a sleepover party or something of the sort; at any rate I was on the floor, preparing to go to sleep on a sleeping-bag or a thin mattress or some similar soft surface. On either side of me were strangers, and I don't remember anything about them other than that they were male. Then the lights went out, and I dreamed of falling asleep; and when I woke, the strangers on both sides of me had woken and were whispering to each other, because I had apparently somehow turned upside down in my dream-sleep (i.e. head and foot had exchanged places) and I was using the leg of the person on my right as a bolster, but he was okay with it. And then I woke up for real.
...one of the neighbours has this thing about the ceiling light in the attached toilet where he never ever turns it off; I'm not sure why. I just keep getting up whenever he's been using the toilet to turn the light off; goodness only knows why he keeps turning it on, even in the daytime.
I just wonder, what would a good life goal be? I mean, what do I want a description of me, say, when I'm thirty years old to be like? How about at forty? One would think it might be an idea to describe comprehensively the kind of person one wants to be at some given future point; that way one has an idea of things to do, milestones to pass, etc.; one would also think that this description should, where possible, be specific and not tied to transient standards (e.g. "spends less than 50 hours a week on the Internet" is good; "less time online" is bad).
So, let's get to describing.
...or at least that was what I was going to type up... the day before yesterday. How a couple of days changes one's mind! But really, it's more that I've been thinking it over and then... well, let's see.
Conventional wisdom says that it's good to plan ahead, the farther ahead the better. That way, as I said, one can plan for contingencies, prepare for surprises or eventualities, take steps that will further the plan, etc. On the other hand, I put little to no faith in conventional wisdom: people are just as often wrong as they are right, and if plans were so easy to make then Batman wouldn't be half as awesome as he is. And quite frankly the whole idea of making plans means that one requires some sort of power or ability to execute those plans, or at least the means by which to acquire the means to execute plans. And then the Bible has James--"si Dominus voluerit. Et: Si vixerimus, faciemus hoc, aut illud"--and Proverbs--"multæ cogitationes in corde viri: voluntas autem Domini permanebit"... never mind the whole "can God make a stone too heavy for Him to lift" conundrum. Should I even have plans for my life?
Of course there are arguments on each side. If there weren't, this question would be rhetorical; but it isn't. So--conventional wisdom says planning is good, because everybody needs a direction in which to be headed, goals to strive for, etc; helps one deal with disaster, provides motivation for action, makes one able to prioritise and arrange; allows for cooperation should multiple people have the same goals, which then leads to all kinds of wonderful things; and so on. Religion appears to imply (to put it mildly) that planning is bad, because all is vanity, God has His own plans for one and will reveal the relevant parts at the right times, and we're much too puny in might or understanding to make good plans (let alone best-case-scenario ones), or even if we had them, to execute them. Which, of course, seems like the approach of a very lazy person: "oh, the future is so frightening and so full of unknowns, let's get God to deal with it and I'll just sit here and wait for stuff to resolve itself!" And it's certainly more comforting to be doing something than to be waiting for something...
...this seems like something I should ask somebody else about. Perhaps a good debate could be made of it.
I've had strange dreams these two days; I shall recount them here, in as much detail as I can remember; it's usually that the dreams I remember are the strange and slightly puzzling ones, but hey. Both these dreams were the ones I had just before waking--thus, both occurred on the mornings of the days in question, and both were interrupted. Given the content of the dreams, though, that might be a good thing.
The dream on Friday morning started pretty benignly; I and some of the friends of the House of Bread were sitting around the electric piano; it was a sunny afternoon, and we were singing "All Creatures of Our God and King" in quite passable four-part harmony. At some point, we noticed that the hymn had a lot more verses than we'd seen before, so we turned the page and continued. At that point the hymn's tune changed into something I've never heard before, but we went singing on--and then it changed completely into a story about this box in an attic that contained something unspeakable, and it belonged to a woman who lived in that house, who was a hired servant of some sort--governess or nurse or maid--and it was kind of this isolated country house, all wooden walls and floors and hay and straw and twine, and set on a countryside where everything else was fields and grasslands. And then along came this incurably curious young boy, who went into the attic and opened the box, which wasn't locked, and discovered the unspeakable secret--but he was caught by the woman. The next two lines of the song were "fearful young shepherd with his head full of stone/ sing tremble!/ sing tremble!" and then I woke up. I've tried to figure out where I might have heard that tune or those words before, but so far it eludes me--Googling has turned nothing up.
The second dream I had this morning. I dreamed about being at a camp or a sleepover party or something of the sort; at any rate I was on the floor, preparing to go to sleep on a sleeping-bag or a thin mattress or some similar soft surface. On either side of me were strangers, and I don't remember anything about them other than that they were male. Then the lights went out, and I dreamed of falling asleep; and when I woke, the strangers on both sides of me had woken and were whispering to each other, because I had apparently somehow turned upside down in my dream-sleep (i.e. head and foot had exchanged places) and I was using the leg of the person on my right as a bolster, but he was okay with it. And then I woke up for real.
...one of the neighbours has this thing about the ceiling light in the attached toilet where he never ever turns it off; I'm not sure why. I just keep getting up whenever he's been using the toilet to turn the light off; goodness only knows why he keeps turning it on, even in the daytime.
Oh, and the FYP appears to finally be winding down; we're out of machinable substrates, and anyway the machines we've been using are slow and/or have malfunctioning parts, so it's not like we have the time or resources to make more substrates on which to grow the cells. All of this just means that come next Friday--if all goes well--the laboratory phase of the FYP will actually be over and done with, and it'll all be about trying to figure out how to explain the results we've got--very stressful I expect that to be. Just like yesterday; yesterday was quite stressful too.
I woke yesterday morning and had plans for the day--9.30am to 12pm machining, 12pm to 3pm fiddling with cells, and 3pm to 5pm at the scanning electron microscope. All of that went poof pretty quickly, I can tell you. The thing is, the machine I was using is only available one day a week to each project team, and my projectmate--bless her generous little heart--had given our day (Friday) away to one of the other students, and had not told me. So the other student (who had the machine on Thursday) hadn't cleaned up after himself and so I spent half an hour removing the stuff he'd been working on; I also carelessly used the wrong tool in the experiment and very nearly ruined the last of the raw samples, until I realised my mistake and replaced the tool with the correct one, by which time my carelessness had also led to a scratch across the back of my thumb, which was bleeding but not profusely. At any rate the machining only actually started around 10.30 or so, by which time I had got a quite bad stomachache, most likely from the oyster omelette I'd had for supper with the roommate the night before. So the machining went on until 12.30pm--which was just a little off from the plan, which was a good thing. Then I went to the cell culturing lab, and took the results from the previous batch of cells being cultured--killing, fixing, staining--and as usual the results were (at best) mixed; that's also when I realised that the machine tool must be definitely deformed to the point of unusability, because the samples were in such a condition as to be useless for the purposes of the experiment. (Admittedly, though, it might be possible to still use them--it depends on what the professors say.) I fiddled around there until about 2.30pm, when I went to get lunch and then went to the scanning electron microscope... where I got the good news that the gold-sputtering machine, which has been down since the 25th of February, was now fixed; but the scanning electron microscope itself had a burnt-out filament, which would take two hours at least to replace--and the SEM is such a popular machine that it is only available to each student for two hours a week. It left me in such a foul mood that I had to watch two videos from the Nostalgia Critic to motivate myself to go back to the cell culturing lab, or else I'd have just gone "what's the point, the universe hates this experiment" and thrown my hands in the air and gone back to the room for chocolate. At any rate I showed back up in the cell culturing lab at 5.30pm, and was there until 7.30pm (when it was still light out!) checking on cells, passaging and splitting and seeding and photographing. All in all yesterday was... really quite bad, discouraging even. Still, the FYP is winding down--the next step? Presenting the results to the professors and going "what do Code Monkey think?"--which I expect to be just as discouraging, if not more. But that will happen when it happens.
I woke yesterday morning and had plans for the day--9.30am to 12pm machining, 12pm to 3pm fiddling with cells, and 3pm to 5pm at the scanning electron microscope. All of that went poof pretty quickly, I can tell you. The thing is, the machine I was using is only available one day a week to each project team, and my projectmate--bless her generous little heart--had given our day (Friday) away to one of the other students, and had not told me. So the other student (who had the machine on Thursday) hadn't cleaned up after himself and so I spent half an hour removing the stuff he'd been working on; I also carelessly used the wrong tool in the experiment and very nearly ruined the last of the raw samples, until I realised my mistake and replaced the tool with the correct one, by which time my carelessness had also led to a scratch across the back of my thumb, which was bleeding but not profusely. At any rate the machining only actually started around 10.30 or so, by which time I had got a quite bad stomachache, most likely from the oyster omelette I'd had for supper with the roommate the night before. So the machining went on until 12.30pm--which was just a little off from the plan, which was a good thing. Then I went to the cell culturing lab, and took the results from the previous batch of cells being cultured--killing, fixing, staining--and as usual the results were (at best) mixed; that's also when I realised that the machine tool must be definitely deformed to the point of unusability, because the samples were in such a condition as to be useless for the purposes of the experiment. (Admittedly, though, it might be possible to still use them--it depends on what the professors say.) I fiddled around there until about 2.30pm, when I went to get lunch and then went to the scanning electron microscope... where I got the good news that the gold-sputtering machine, which has been down since the 25th of February, was now fixed; but the scanning electron microscope itself had a burnt-out filament, which would take two hours at least to replace--and the SEM is such a popular machine that it is only available to each student for two hours a week. It left me in such a foul mood that I had to watch two videos from the Nostalgia Critic to motivate myself to go back to the cell culturing lab, or else I'd have just gone "what's the point, the universe hates this experiment" and thrown my hands in the air and gone back to the room for chocolate. At any rate I showed back up in the cell culturing lab at 5.30pm, and was there until 7.30pm (when it was still light out!) checking on cells, passaging and splitting and seeding and photographing. All in all yesterday was... really quite bad, discouraging even. Still, the FYP is winding down--the next step? Presenting the results to the professors and going "what do Code Monkey think?"--which I expect to be just as discouraging, if not more. But that will happen when it happens.
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