“I’m getting my PhD in Mechanical Engineering.”
“And what does a Mechanical Engineer do?”
“Well, when a company wants something new, we take some old things and squish them together. There’s a few more bits and bobs to it, but that’s the general gist.”
(San Francisco, CA)
stole this off a post on Facebook, but i feel like tumblr needs to read this.
Morgan Freeman’s brilliant take on what happened yesterday :
“You want to know why. This may sound cynical, but here’s why.It’s because of the way the media reports it. Flip on the news and watch how we treat the Batman theater shooter and the Oregon mall shooter like celebrities. Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris are household names, but do you know the name of a single *victim* of Columbine? Disturbed
people who would otherwise just off themselves in their basements see the news and want to top it by doing something worse, and going out in a memorable way. Why a grade school? Why children? Because he’ll be remembered as a horrible monster, instead of a sad nobody.
CNN’s article says that if the body count “holds up”, this will rank as the second deadliest shooting behind Virginia Tech, as if statistics somehow make one shooting worse than another. Then they post a video interview of third-graders for all the details of what they saw and heard while the shootings were happening. Fox News has plastered the killer’s face on all their reports for hours. Any articles or news stories yet that focus on the victims and ignore the killer’s identity? None that I’ve seen yet. Because they don’t sell. So congratulations, sensationalist media, you’ve just lit the fire for someone to top this and knock off a day care center or a maternity ward next.
You can help by forgetting you ever read this man’s name, and remembering the name of at least one victim. You can help by donating to mental health research instead of pointing to gun control as the problem. You can help by turning off the news.”
So every once in a while, someone (or a couple of someones) will get it into their heads that it’d be cool to come visit us in real life by tracking down our addresses and knocking on our doors, or leaving presents on our doorstep or in our mail box.
As harmless as that no doubt is, it is for…
I can’t sustain happiness. Is that normal? To not sustain it for more than a small snatch of my day at the most? It’s something I stopped aiming for a while ago, instead I worked more towards functionality, health and kindness (not very well, I might add) but I have to wonder whether I’m just…
Not sure if anyone can reliably be sustainably happy throughout a day or, indeed, a lifetime. I think being happy would lose a lot of its “meaning” (Maybe not meaning? Impact? :s) if it were easy to constantly keep hold of and conjure up at will.
I don’t think it’s something one should work towards like some sort of goal, either. You know of the things that you enjoy doing and you do them because they provide enjoyment. Some days you don’t get to do so many nice things, some days you do. Of course, that falls apart if you lose sight of the things you enjoy doing, but they get rediscovered/replaced eventually :)
