Things I’m Wondering About
Good morning. I finally feel human again. Or at least, reasonably so. How about you?
Since today is a catch-all type of day, I figure I’ll do a catch-all kind of post, of Things I’ve Been Wondering Lately. I wonder about a lot of things and I suppose this is my chance to share the joy.
* I finished reading The Guns of August and immediately wanted to know more about the First World War. I’ve got a couple books about Tannenberg and the Eastern Front during WWI (I needed to do this for character research for the YA). I guess the clearest thing coming through, when reading about war, is what a waste it is. A monumental, colossal waste. I wonder why people in power are so fond of it?
* Not just that, but I’ve been seriously wondering lately about economic issues. I’d wonder why capitalism always wants to have a huge base of “cheap” (read: as close to “slave” as possible) labor, and those who profit from that cheap labor are usually rich and spend a lot of money ensuring the supply of cheap labor–but then I think of other economic systems that rely on a mass of cheap labor, like Stalinist Russia or even modern China. It makes me wonder if cheap labor is a political question instead of straight economics.
* And the more I read about economics, the more I realize that it IS a political question, because the intersection of money and power is political. Or to put it another way, if you don’t have enough money or control over your production, you probably yearn for revolution and social progress a lot more than if you have a whole fortune to lose if you have to start paying your workers decent wages.
* Which makes me wonder about imperialism too. Is a condition of empire to have a huge poverty-stricken underclass to provide that cheap labor?
*Why in the bloody blue blazes are they saying it’s going to be in the mid-nineties tomorrow? What the hell is going on here?
* Education is something I stand firmly behind. But the current norm in schooling isn’t education, it’s indoctrination. And then there’s the problem of funding–schools and libraries, if you look at the money spent on them and their staff, are just not a priority in America. (Neither, apparently, is healthcare or the eradication of poverty. See above.) Is it different in other places? Where would I find the stats on that?
* I wonder if trees are singing in math. You know, look at their branches, and the mathematical expression of regularity the branch structures have, and yet they are also flexible complex systems interacting with the world around them. They have to be singing. But it’s probably in math.
* I hate math. My second-grade teacher always told me I wasn’t any good at it. I believed her for years.
* Why aren’t more people really interested in wolverines? I mean, these creatures are fascinating. Although they are weasels. That is a strike against any creature. Not as big a strike as belonging to the rodent family.
* I realize a lot of people love cute little mice. But I HATE rodents. Mostly rats. It’s the beady little eyes and the naked little tails. How can one think anything with a naked tail is cute? GAH.
* The more I think about it, the more I think politics functions on the same principle (though with different social processes) as inner-city gangs. I once read somewhere that people still function in tribes, and they don’t care too much unless someone from their tribe (the group of thirty to fifty people they really know) is affected by something. Political parties seem to function just like gangs, which are really just violent tribes, or confederations of violent tribes. More on this when I finish reading Islands in the Street.
* I’m about to announce the Sooper-Sekrit Projekt.
* I wonder why the sky is a different blue in winter–a thin blue–than in summer, when it’s deep and hazy? And spring blue, washed with rain, is different yet. Is it light refraction and temperature and humidity changes? Or is it what I think in my heart of hearts, that the sky is speaking to the earth below?
* Oh, and I need a glossary if I’m going to write the second Steelflower. *headdesk*
For right now, that’s a little bit of what I’m wondering. Scary, ennit?
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