My thoughts.

I was reading a post today from someone who was asking if others sometimes felt like things were pointless. Not depressingly so, just a “what’s the point?” sort of feeling. I wrote back the following:

I totally understand your feeling. Sometimes, I think we all feel that way. But I know for sure I do. I am an atheist and sometimes, when times are tough, I feel like what is the point of it all. I don’t believe there is a ‘higher being’ or that there is a purpose to existence. I consider it all a happy accident. But, then I wonder if awareness was the worst thing evolution gave humans. We could have just been blissfully ignorant, like the rest of the creatures on Earth. Instead, we sit and wonder why.

Then I think more and turn it around. A quote I heard once helped. “You are the universe experiencing itself.” I don’t take this as the universe being “aware”, but I do like the idea that, if it weren’t for us, this would all go on unnoticed, so to speak. So, we get to use our eyes and experience to look around and marvel at the wonders, lament the sadness and just experience life. We will be gone one day, but we have to hope, in some small, almost infinitesimal way, we made things a little better for others. Or we some how document what we see and feel, through writing or art or something.

At worst, it just means we were briefly here, enjoying the wonder of that happy accident. At best, we make it better for those yet to open their eyes.

My thoughts.

DC Comics Relaunch

Geeks of Doom posted the following industry video from DC Comics:



Granted, this is PRO-relaunch all the way, because it IS from the company itself. But I am just as excited as these bigwigs at the company are.

Some fans - heck, A LOT of fans - are up in arms over this relaunch, reboot, renumbering. They don't want to "lose" their DCU or the characters they love. But I have been reading the awesome book "DC Comics Year by Year: A Visual Chronicle" and it has helped me see that this is not the first time DC has redone things. It may be the first time they have done it so blatantly, with a total restart all at once, but DC has had many incarnations.

Maybe this is so different because fans are now so connected, with the internet, and can be a united, vocal voice. But should DC just stay the course and hope for the best? No. They need to do whatever it takes to survive as a company. That's just common sense. And they have always done that. Heck, look back to the 70s and the "DC Implosion".

This relaunch could end up crashing and burning, but I hope it succeeds. I hope this is the beginning of a great, new age for the company and that, one day, in a revised and updated version of "DC Comics Year by Year", my grandkids are reading about this new start and all that came after.

For more on the relaunch, and a gallery of the #1 issue covers,
check out DC Universe: The Source

Cover to Aquaman #1

The Coffee Cup Analogy

A group of alumni, highly established in their careers, got together to visit their old university lecturer. Conversation soon turned into complaints about stress in work and life.

Offering his guests coffee, the lecturer went to the kitchen and returned with a large pot of coffee and an assortment of cups: porcelain, plastic, glass, some plain-looking and some expensive and exquisite, telling them to help themselves to hot coffee.

When all the students had a cup of coffee in hand, the lecturer said: “If you noticed, all the nice-looking, expensive cups were taken up, leaving behind the plain and cheap ones. While it is normal for you to want only the best for yourselves, that is the source of your problems and stress. What all of you really wanted was coffee, not the cup, but you consciously went for the better cups and are eyeing each other’s cups.”

“Now, if Life is coffee, then the jobs, money and position in society are the cups. They are just tools to hold and contain Life, but the quality of Life doesn’t change. Sometimes, by concentrating only on the cup, we fail to enjoy the coffee in it.”

So please, don’t let the cups drive you…enjoy the coffee instead.

via Age of Reason

100th Post - And Some Thoughts...

Can't believe I have done a hundred of these posts. Time flies. Funny, too, that it coincides with something I have been thinking about for awhile, but was unsure how to put into words.

Recently I read a review that went into all the things that have been "wrong" with different aspects of the various Star Trek shows. One of them stuck with me and still annoys me.

The writer said that one of the problems with Star Trek: The Next Generation was that the main characters all "got along" and that was just too unrealistic for him. I thought that sounded so depressingly pessimistic! Why can't a bunch of highly intelligent and well disciplined people (as a Starship crew would be) all work at getting along and being friends? Is it that far-fetched of an idea?

Are shows where the main characters all antagonizing each other, or flat-out disliking each other, so ingrained in us now that we expect that to be the norm? Do we even WANT that to be the norm? Why can't a show that is supposed to be based in the future, with an advanced and progressive human race, be a nice place where people are capable of getting along?

This then got me thinking about the way we live now, or at least the way we seem to expect things to be. Is it wrong to want to live in a positive world, where optimism and good will are the rule rather than the exception?

It reminds me of this scene, from Knots Landing (jump to 9m 44s), after Gary dismisses Karen as a "Pollyanna":

Karen: "I wanna be a Pollyanna. I don't want to look at the world through rose colored glasses, I want the world to be rose colored. I want people to be nice. People should be nice. Nice should be the norm. I hate it that I can't trust anyone! I hate it that I can't put my daughter on the front lawn by herself! I hate it that I have to lock my car, and that I have to worry about an alarm system in my house, and I can't send cash in the mail! That's not the way it's supposed to be, Gary! I liked being a Pollyanna, I want to be a Pollyanna!"

I have to agree with a lot of what is said by Karen here: Why is it passé or naive to want the world to be a rose-colored place? Why is her positive outlook the one sneered at as silly?

Will Ferrell is a hit-or-miss comedian, but the character he played in Elf is a great one. Buddy is without sarcasm or pessimism, totally happy with the world and wanting it to be a good place filled with good people. Yeah, he grew up in the North Pole with happy little elves, but it is when he interacts with people in the "real world" that you see how out of place he is. And all he is doing is being positive, happy and upbeat. Why is he the one so out of touch?

Another example would be Phoebe on Friends. She is usually just taken as the daffy, flighty, air-head, but if you watch the character develop, she is wonderfully interesting. How many sitcom characters have a past that involves a dead-beat dad, a mom who killed herself, and a life living on the streets? Yet Phoebe is hardly ever morose and dark. She is upbeat, loving the world and her time in it. And yet again, she isn't the norm, but rather the "odd one".

I know - I am being naive. The world is too complex, filled with too many different people and cultures wanting, needing and doing different things. And it isn't bound to change any time soon.

Just sometimes makes me sad.

I guess the only way to help change things for the better is to just be one of the positive, upbeat, optimistic people, no matter how "cool" it is to be dark and pessimistic.

Maybe, someday, rose-colored will be the norm.