How we live and die...

So, another quote from where I can't find (even with Google's help) the sayer (not verbatim but I'll put quotes anyways):

"As a Christian, the way we live is important. Also important, even more so, is the way we die" - Probably a saint)

This weekend's Memorial Day weekend. A chance to honor those who sacrificed their life for our country. A noble thing we did, to have the day off, to remember, to give thanks.

You see the thing is, back in day (like, prehistoric times), people were only concerned (probably) with the basic necessities of life. Being able to just stay alive, to see tomorrow alive, that was their goal. Now, I'll argue its a bit more complicated. Sure basic needs must be met, duh. But there's layers and layers beyond that of things we may not even be aware of (ended with a preposition, whatever). For example, see Maslow's hierarchy. What I'm trying to say is, there are a lot more things now that we have to worry about than just physically dying -- perhaps the most important thing to realize is that death itself isn't even strictly physical anymore.

For the longest time, I have always known that death is more of a continuum than an either/or state. Just like life and living is a continuum (popularized in the famous Nicki Minaj song ft. Drake "Cause everybody dies but not everybody lives). You can sort of die and not really die. Far end: physical death. In the middle, a person can die a more nuanced death... internal death, emotional death, character death. There's incremental stages to death.

Problems fall under this category. Thing like drug addiction, gambling addiction, sexual addiction, etc. These are things that actually hurt you on the inside. You're changed (or, at least, a part of you is changed -- see previous blog on "fractured selves").

Here comes the kicker: how you face these problems is not only a statement on how you handle the way you live -- it's also a statement on how you handle the way you die. And, as said in the aforementioned quote, it's important how you die. Why? Because, just as how people can imitate (out of inspiration, etc) the way you live, one could also look up to how the way you die.

PS: I'm tempted to consider the continuum of life/death as one scale on which one side is more alive and the other is more dead rather than two dimensions. But the idea that we can have fractured selves opens the door to the idea that one can have some selves more alive/dead than the other selves.

Summary: basically, now, staying alive is more than just an eat, breathe, and exercise thing.

Two blogs in one day?

Why not? I haven't written two blogs in one day in a long time.... perhaps never. But hey, I got a lot of free time today, so why not? It's enjoyable on a day off  (yeah I work on Saturdays).

Social media, data, and modeling (kind of essay-ish):
So we have 140 characters in Twitter. A status update on Facebook. A picture on Instagram. I write blogs on Blogspot. Here's the thing, I remember starting my blogspot as a way of chronicling my life as a cohesive unit. Kind of like a real journal. But I never realized this. Looking back on all of my blogs, sure, sometimes there was some semblance of a narrative. But for the most part, it's severely fractured. Which, if you didn't already know, is a very real modern thing. Disjointed events. Vignettes of lives. Our brains naturally try to configure a story that makes sense from all of our "updates". I have reason to think these conjectures aren't very accurate. Consider this: I can post a relatively happy tweet, but can actually be having the worst day of my life. You would never know. It's the stories we sell that create an artificial self. The real kicker is that it may not even be an artificial self that I'm creating by posting a happy tweet in a sad state;  I could still very well be happy that moment and still be living the worst day of my life. What I do is create a second-self. Not a lie, just not the whole truth. A disjointed, second self.

What's more, social media doesn't help that much, either. I'm forced to be brief -- it induces the fractures. It feeds into this modern, fractured way of living. Sure you can try to be cohesive. But it's so much easier to be brief (disguised as "simple"?). Oh I can post this now and explain later. I have to be real-time. Says the pressure to stay up to date. Says the pressure to boast, to show everyone I'm okay right now. Sooner or later, we start liking the convenience of not being a whole. Of course, people should be free to sell whatever self they want on social media. The irony is that sometimes we can't even recognize the self we sell. Until we have to pick up the pieces of ourselves and try to make sense of them. Realizing we can't make any sense of such a fractured mess. We're disjointed wholes, a lot of us are. I've become one, too. The trappings of modern life.

Again, not that any or all of this is bad, per-se. But it sure is confusing sometimes. And whatever story you feed yourself  about yourselves, that's the story that keeps you going. Again though, however, sooner or later, we all have to face ourselves.

In the moment

I heard it said once that "...in the moment, we have all we need to be happy...". It was a saint who said this, I believe. I can't remember who said it exactly and I wish I knew. It's an amazing thought, to think that in every moment, we have all we need to be happy. 

I'm going to try that thought out.
--- ---
I wonder what was happening when van Gogh painted The Starry Night. What made him go to that vista? Was he alone? Was he lonely? Was he thinking "Oh I have nothing to do today, thinking about another landscape painting". Did he think it'd be worth so much money in the future? Did it make him happy?  (All this assuming it took him one shot to paint it, which I don't think it did).

--- ---
So this one time at the tables, I was UTG with pocket aces. I had about 45 BB behind. I raised four times the big blind. Probably the best scenario for a short stack. Action folded to the button, who called. Villain in the SB reraised to 8 times the big blind. Hell. Yes. I 4-bet all in. Button, after thinking for like a minute throws his cards into the muck. SB, thinks... calls. He had me covered. We show our hands and go to the flop.

AA vs 99
Flop: 3 7 T rainbow
... okay, not bad.
Turn: Kh
... YES, now just had to fade the river.
...
...
River: 9


.... Wow. That's some Aristotelian catharsis for you.

And hilarity ensues

Lol, for some reason it seems like my blogs have been a lot on the downer side these days. Or at least for the last year. I'm not sure if I can extrapolate for its entirety, but I'm sure there's some discernible weaved thread that agrees.

"Christianity, if false, is of no importance, and if true, of infinite importance. The only thing it cannot be is moderately important". - C. S. Lewis

Often times I get bogged down in the details, sometimes the whole. A lot of emphasis these days is based in subtle things, for example: microaggressions. Well, if C.S. Lewis is right, which I think he is, and if Christianity is true, then it follows that every little thing that happens matters: microdecisions and microevents.

The Creator of the universe, then, His will unravels in everything, every little thing, that happens. And in the long run, it's for our good.

A couple of weeks ago, my laptop was stolen from me. It's made me really sad. A lot of poems in there, a lot of things really. I've had it for about two years....

Holding on for better times. Turning 25 in about two weeks!