Sometimes one of life's accidents -- misfortune, a deeply moving encounter -- rattles the relatively factitious and solid edifice that a human being has built up for the comfort of his existence. Shaken to what he believes to be his roots, he is burned for an instant by the fire of a question, a doubt: who am I? why am I living? where am I going? At this moment of reality, he thinks. But such moments are almost always exceptional and accidental, particularly for the specialized men conditioned by social attitudes, withdrawn into vicious circles in the shadows of their consciousness that our modern civilization produces in abundance. But the edifices semblance of balance is rarely compromised in a serious way. For the question who am I, civil status, first names, last names, positions, professions, titles, ranks, social circles, mirrors, ambitions, vanities and laziness are there to give the pretense of an answer. If the person is of a slightly speculative nature, his little internal philosophy also keeps answers to these rattling questions -- brilliant, consoling or approximative answers -- in reserve. And man, that phantom vessel, sets off again under his illusory rigging on the waves of this world where, at times, a real vessel leaves its wake.
Other random thoughts
I've known for some time that the quickest way for me to never complete a task is for me to use the phrases "I will..." or "I'm going to..."; yet I often find myself falling into this trap. A week ago I said that I was working on the photo galleries for my website, I actually finished them, but not to my satisfaction. The code wasn't convenient enough, it would have required too much effort to add new galleries, etc., so I'm going to redo the code sometime when I feel the chi move that way again - for now I have more than enough to chew on.After three years of trusty services, a piece of my Apple laptop has finally failed: the power supply. It started acting up a month or so ago, and has denigrated to the point that it can no longer be trusted to function on a regular basis. It is working about 50% of the time now. Three years of daily usage with no major hardware failures - see how many Dell, IBM, or HP laptops can compete with that.
