weekdays

I wear black pants every weekday. What does this mean? It is different than if I were to say I wear black pants every day. But they are all week days. So who decided that there were week days and not week days? But you know what I mean when I say the first. So is a week really only five days in length? I suppose it can be argued to that point. And while I am on the subject it seems only right to call it the “weekends.” There are two of them. Yes they do touch each other, but there are still two of them, and sense they aren’t week days I am going to call them peak days. Most people amongst the masses look forward to these two days. One is a peak play or get-everything-that-you-need-to-done-in day and the other is naturally the peak day of spirituality. It is great. Two days that the world definitely could not do without. So why are they not weekdays?

training

I started Helicopter School this week and it has been great. I have been here in UT now for about a month and a half and I am finally starting what I have come out here to do. I now go to the airport every weekday. I have 2 to 2 1/2 hours of one on one instruction from Vincent Baker, my instructor, and then he and I go fly an R22 Robertson helicopter for about an hour. It is wonderful. I am having a blast. I think my favorite part of flying thus far is air-taxiing. It is a blast. I love zipping around 5-20 feet off the ground. Flying at high altitudes is fun too but it isn’t quite as exciting as zipping around the airport or somewhere else. So far I have learned straight and level flight; turning, accelerating, and decelerating while maintaining steady altitude; climbs and descents, and hovering. Hovering is fun too, but is takes a little work to do well. I have not yet perfected it, I have only done it twice, but I am not too bad at it- especially for only doing it twice.

There is a lot to know about helicopters and a whole lot more than what I originally thought goes into flying- that goes for both rotary and fixed wing flying. It is amazing what all effects flight.

All in all, school is great, it is a lot of learning but that is what makes it so exciting. I love learning. If only I loved learning as much in high school as I do know, I would probably be a whole lot smarter.

too perfect

Consider with me a moment perfection. I heard recently an idle remark “it is just a little too perfect.” That doesn’t sound right, too perfect! What is perfect? Perfect is absolute, it is the best, the highest point of achievement. Therefore something cannot be beyond perfection or “too” perfect. “Pinnacle of perfection!” that is a term used often in regards to perfection. So in my mind I have come to the conclusion that perfection, if plotted would resemble an inversed parabola, or perhaps more ideally, a bell curve.

As I ponder more on it, it occurs to me that there are two different forms (definitions) of perfect. There is perfect which is often associated with middle ground or balance- “not too… and not too.., but perfect,” and then there is perfection as associated with supremacy or the best, “as good as it gets,” into which category Godly Perfection would fall. In such instances as the first, as in temperature or judgment, Graph A would appropriately depict the situation, the vertical axis representing degree of perfection, the horizontal axis would respectively be hot and cold or mercy and justice, with the extremes lying at either end.

The latter form which I will call supreme perfection is not a middle ground between two extremes as the former is. It is not a balance. It is a progression. Though supreme perfection has many different examples its best example, and the one that I wish to expound here, is that of Eternal progression, Divine Perfection. It took me a few days to think of what this graph may look like but I think I now have it. As already mentioned Divine Perfection is not a balance between good and evil, nor is it a balance between body and spirit. It is not a balance of anything. It is a pinnacle. It is the lofty height of humanity to which we each fix our gaze and our path. It is the greatest of greats. I imagine its graph to look much like that of Graph B, the square root function. Part of why I thought of this particular graph is my feeling that the closer something approaches supreme perfection it requires more effort to reach it so the curve will flatten out drastically. So in this instance the horizontal, or y-axis is effort, as the vertical remains degree of perfection. This is actually a watered down version of my entire thoughts on this form of perfection but that is not really the topic of this post. It is a topic for another day; it really does get quite better and at least makes much more sense in my mind.

In the first cast to be too perfect would be to be to the left or right of the climax and therefore no longer be perfect. In the case of the second too perfect is folly. If perfect is supreme, the height of heights, how do you go beyond it? It is a lot of thought and writing for such a conclusion but that is me I suppose. I am not the simplest individual.

All this from an idle word, or remark. Who know that such a thing can have so much sway, or can provoke so much thought in my mind. Be careful what you say around me.

animal of choice

It is a question whimsically asked on occasion, if you were an animal what animal would you be? Or what animal do you feel you most resemble? Now it would be cheating, I suppose, to say ‘a human’ for people forget every now and then that we too are animals. But I have had difficulty with this in the past just as I have had difficulty with choosing favorites. There are so many options, so many good things to be or traits I posses, so many possibilities that I can not narrow it all to one. The more and more I ponder it however I have in recent months settled on a conclusion. The subject of my conclusion, of my settlement is an adventurous creature, full of energy and curiosity. He is tame and docile, yet contains a vein of ferocity and rebellion. He is a wanderer, a nomad at times, yet loves attention and affection, willing to return such affection in abundance. He is playful, generally passive, and struts a tinge of arrogance. These have been my thoughts through the last few months and today I read the following description of this animal by D. H. Lawrence. Said he in his book Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine, “Of all the animals, there is no denying it, the Timsy is the most pretty, the most fine. It is not her mere corpus that is beautiful; it is her bloom of aliveness, her ‘infinite variety’; the soft, snow-flakey lightness of her, and at the same time her lean, heavy ferocity.” I find these words accurate and beautiful. The common cat is a very alive creature and one of note. There are so many qualities that it possesses and I feel it a worthy vessel of an animal embodiment of my personal attributes.

think to yourself

Is there any other kind? You often hear “…I thought to myself…” and I wonder if there is any other kind. I even say it myself! If you think about something you are obviously thinking about it to yourself, it would be rather difficult to think something to another person. You can definitely think about another person but you can’t think to another person. Our thoughts are our own so why in English do we say that we thought to ourselves? It is proper to differentiate between those we speak to by adding a pronoun and where better suited a proper noun but to think is not to speak. Thinking hopefully comes before speaking. I suppose that collectively a group of individuals can think on a subject and that is what we are differentiating in the case of thought. But in that case we would be ‘thinking with.’ One would not say that he is thinking to a group of friends, he would say that he was thinking with a group of friends. So why do we say we think to ourselves? Is it proper? I think it is redundant.

soap

Maybe it is because I hardly ever watch TV, but it is not like I watch it a whole lot in my younger years… What happened to soap commercials? I was lathering up the other morning with a bar of Lever 2000 (for all my two thousand parts) and I thought to myself that I don’t think there are soap commercials on like there used to be. And then I thought “why would that be?” Soap is still a daily part of all hygienically stable people’s lives. There is still market for it. Are people just not interested in what kind of soap they use? Perhaps there are other things now days that people are more interested in. Clive Barnes has been quoted as saying that “television is the first truly democratic culture - the first culture available to everybody and entirely governed by what the people want. The most terrifying thing is what people do want.” TV, including commercials is what ‘the people’ want, if they don’t want it, it quickly becomes not TV. So it is not that people don’t want soap, it is just that there are “more important” things to advertise.

For someone who doesn’t really watch TV I sure have a lot to say about it.

four, floor & flour

The letters o-u can make both the “ow” sound and the ō sound. Why is it that four says ‘for’ and flour says ‘flower’? All you are doing is adding an “L.” And to think that a person floating down a stream is not a flow-er! What is going on here, I haven’t even made it to the thought that the word floor has the double ‘O’ which every first-grader knows makes the “ooooo” sound in words like food. This only goes to show that American’s not only enjoy braking rules (or is it rools), they seem to look (luke; wait a minute, double ‘O’ can’t make too different sounds too!) for new ones to make up just to break them. Maybe that is not what it proves (proov’s) but it seems to show that we enjoy to complicate things. If you take our and put an 'F' in front of it you get four but that 'f' now magically changes the way the 'our' sounds, add an "fl" and we are back to 'our' again. It is a good thing we do not teach kids all these words at once so that they have time to forget some of the rules before learning the next word.

read the following line out loud as fast as you can; it's a killer.
our, hour, four, flour, floor, flower, slower, flow?