too long and too short

Often my time is spent in looking for things. I put it somewhere and the action was not mindful. Now I spend hours looking for it, either in my computer or at home, not in the lab any more as I have no wetlab. The amount of time I spend in looking for things as well as organizing and removing what I thought I need but not any more is enormous. Out of the days of our lives, the real time we utilize to do some thing meaningful is very short, unless we add every thing from brushing teeth to talking over the phone as meaningful. Every one has the potential to do great, but in real we either have no time nor the interest to do something. We would rather watch something some one else is doing, be a consumer.

My life is too long when I look in one way and too short when I look differently. Daily incidents of the past get quickly overwritten by the event of the present and the memory often glosses over the past, making it more horrific or terrific. I have almost forgotten most of my childhood, even Amgen days are now seems so distant. When I was going to study at USC in the evening, it seemed as if those days will never end. Then suddenly every event becomes a spec of the past and shrouded by later events.

It is like the children, who were born and now they are adults. During the time they lived at home all the time, they slowly grew up, became teenager and then left for college. Some how it seems as if they grew up with a flick of a switch and there were no intermediates, unless I look at the photos. What happened to all those bodies, the cute toddlers, the naughty boy’s, the adorable girl’s and the teenagers’ when the hormones started metamorphosing the body?

Gene, the scapegoats

Soon after their discovery, genes have become a part of our social expression in addition to being the darling of research. They also have become the scapegoat for any thing that happens to us, from our anger to the diseases we get. First they were selfish, using our body to propagate themselves. Once we have transmitted them to our progeny, then genes don’t need us and lead us to the path of demise and death.
They were supposed to be the cause of cancer, the oncogenes. They were supposed to be the reason for our mental illness, for our behavior of all kinds, even if we shoot some one for fun, we can always blame the genes, they made me do it. I am not at fault.

I think the more I learn about genes, I feel that the gene excuse is less scientific than thought. For sure we can be predisposed due to certain mutation in our genes to get lung cancer. However if we refrain from smoking and from the polluted smog filled areas, there is much less chance of us getting it. The same is true for how long we live or what we can become. The potential is there, but unless it is triggered by one or more of our behavior, eating a lot, doing no exercise, eating wrong kind of food or being under stress to be millionaire instantly, the chance of genes leading us astray towards our destruction is kind of remote.

Today's thoughts, May 6, 2008

20 000 people might have died due to cyclone in Mynamar (Burma). Death is ever present and comes due to so many different factors. Death is teasing us every day in different accounts in newspapers, TV and online. Still we think it will not happen to us or to one of our loved ones.

Injection of a twist in the normal thinking process leads to eye opening of the mass and hence the recognition. Many have been recognized and appreciate long after they succumbed to death. But how that recognition benefits the deceased?

We fail to see most of the time the obvious. Every thing that looks familiar will cease to be that once we look close and hard enough. The simplicity hides the complexity and the ingenuity in common things or beings we encounter all the time and ignore its importance. It could be either or man made, such as a paper clip. Just think about the ingenuity behind those inventions or designs. We take fingers for granted. We don’t think about how effortlessly we are able to talk, even sing, unless we encounter some one with a defect, who can not speak a word. As long as we are not unfortunate enough to lose function of any one those, we ignore its importance and the complex engineering that has been in place to make us functionally active.

What does attract our eyes and our attention out of myriad things and phenomena that we conveniently ignore every day? What makes a girl heart throb and a picture that is worth thousand words? There has to be a common esthetic yard stick, a common beauty yardstick in our brain to make us agree in choosing what is beautiful.

all creatures large and small

The diversity of beings in the world is amazing. The evolution as such is a tinkering process, trying out small changes at one time to find out if it can survive. Some thing that is lost in the translation is the evolution of higher organisms, is that each organism as a specie, is capable of survival, adaptation to the changing environment.

Higher organisms have better brain capacity, so that they can carry out additional functions. But they are not necessarily better in the game of survival. Every being from unicellular to human have the basic engines to eat, grow, propagate one way or other and communicate with their kind and also with the environment.

Trees are amazing as they have very few needs and withstand a lot of insult including cutting of limbs. Each organism is fittest in its own way. Otherwise there would be no amoeba or crocodiles any more. Some organisms have better sights than us, better hearing, better tactile response and motor action. Some insects can jump 10 times or more of their body length. Some organisms like fish and bees can change sex when needed and have eggs develop without fertilization which we can not.

Her (Julie's) Prayer list got longer

The limits around us
Surround us

Sorround her
Like the layers of an onion
She can only think of you
And without the blink of her eyes
Connect you and upload all her wishes
To give her a hand
If you have one
To be patita paabana
Again and again
To heal the aching bodies
The aching stomachs
The aching hearts
Of all your children
By visitng us

as avatars

As mother Teresa
As Gandhi

As Martin Luther King

And
As others

I am too ignorant to know.

Dawn to Dream about the Dearest

Today morning opens the door
To a quiet and quite mysterious winter day
Outside so surrealist
Thanks to snow and winter mix
A perfect time to close eyes
And think about you

Or
Rather
Think about us
Where we started
How we fumbled
Into the vortex of ecstasy
Jumped over hoops
To live and let live

Our paths
Cross and crisscross
Merge and diverge
After a snow storm in June
We walk again
Hand in hand in soap bubbles.

We walk on rose petals
Spiked with cactus thorns
We drink nectar from the flowers of deadly plants
Eat fugu sushi in golden plates
To be together
To enjoy again
Today
The Valentine’s day.

Spring cleaning

In my childhood
I learnt to do daily chores

In the morning
To brush, to go to toilet
And take a bath to clean my body
Every week I clean my clothes I use
And so often I clean my bed sheets

We dust and vacuum our house once a week
And go through my mails every day
To clean up the unwanted snail mails
Messages in Outlook and in mobile phone
On a regular basis
I get rid of old files from laptop too

and update the software bundles

So quickly,
My desk becomes a mess
So I clean it regularly and file documents
And once in spring
We have a garage sale
To get rid of what we don’t want
But we did or thought we did
Once upon a time.

I always forget

To clean something else
My mind
That has accumulated

Stuff for generations
From my childhood believes

To traumas, nightmares
To what my parents said to be true
To what my society taught me to be right
To what my old books said to be state of the art.

With time every thing has changed
But I never bothered to look at my mind
To wake it up from siesta
To question

The validity of my believes and thoughts
To update them
Or to delete the obsoletes.

My mind
Remains a storehouse of fossils

An old banyan tree trunk
Of all I wanted to survive in the past
But may be hurting me now
Still
I do not dare to remove them
And confront my own inadequacy.