Life feels as though I am always walking at a constant speed, but my environment is moving past me at an ever increasing speed. It seems the two speeds are independant of each other. I could run, but that won’t change the speed at which life will past me by.
There are other times, though, when it feels as though I’ve slept too long and lost more time. Like, I went to bed Sunday night and woke up on Wednesday. What happened? I can’t remember doing anything? Did I really sleep through it? Did time slip and warp me ahead further? Or is it that I am ever still catching up to the increasing speed of my environment? Perhaps that’s it, I am not accustomed to the newer speed and so things seem to be slipping away.
Is there anything I can do about this rate of acceleration? Can I slow down this ride so as to not miss so much? Weeks already feel like days used to and years feel like summers now. I fear that soon my decades will feel like years. Is there anything I can do? Time itself is slipping away.
Why am I here? I could have gone anywhere to be a welder. I suppose it was just the first opportunity that came my way. Travel the world and see a new area! Sure, or just feel uncomfortable somewhere else. Here I am in my little kitchen, in my little apartment cooking eggs that taste just like the ones in the States. I was discontent in the States, but somehow I thought coming over to Okinawa would fix that. The reality is that I brought my discontentment with me.
I feel lost, yet I have everything in front of me. In my calm, cool little apartment everything is relaxed, but in order. I’ve figured out all my favorite places to eat. I am on a first name basis with guys down the hall. Heh, it is just like home, but yellower. And, at the same time I feel just as empty. My job is good, have plenty of money to make a good living. I just feel like something is wrong. Life just feels wrong.
I can hear a whistle blow outside over the sizzling of the eggs in the frying pan. Must be the train to the south side. My part of town must be waking up now. The once quiet morning is slowly turning into a bustling array of movement outside. I take sip of my coffee and feel like I’m preparing for another day of distraction. The town gets busy and so do I. It is as though that’s all I know to do: get busy. Even though I’m twenty three I feel like I’m acting like a sixty year old. You know, the puttering kind that just tries to keep busy because that’s what they’re used to doing. That’s what life is like: puttering because you’re supposed to.
All I want to do is play the guitar. Not that I ever played it well, before the war, but the feeling it gave me was unmistakable. I would get lost in the sound and especially the feel. It was always best when I’d play with my brother and friends. We would play until our fingers hurt and then run down to Circle K together to pig out. Its all I can think about now.
Yet, here I am in the pouring rain with gunshots in the distance. If I let myself get distracted I’ll never make it back, but the memory is what keeps me going for the hope that I will play again. Maybe what I’m really missing is home or a sense of home. Its been two years since I was in the States. Sure feels like ten years though. Time is ambiguous and relative out here. One minute of gunfire feels like a day and a quiet day at the barracks feels like a minute. Is it strange to want more bloodshed just to pass the time? It doesn’t seem so if that is what we are told will end the war.
It is a crazy mixture, the desire to kill so I can kill no more. Shoot so I won’t have to hold a gun. The routine becomes a part of you, so much that you don’t even realize what you are doing. You hold a gun, aim and shoot, ending a life in the process. But, that’s all it is now, a process. The killing part is just like the reloading part.
I feel like a machine. My days are unanticipated, but my job is the same. My procedures are clear and I know what to do. When in doubt, kill. Even my sleeping and eating are numbered. I might as well be a car, every ten thousand paces I need refill.
Who am I? I look like everyone around me. We smell and look the same. We even talk the same by now. Its always a game to share a memory that no one else cares about. As if telling a story will make you feel better. What’s a story to a machine anyway? Hardly anything when we are all the same. Freakin’ stories are the same anyway. “There was this one girl…” “This one time in high school…” “My first…” Nothing’s new, its all the same and we are too.
The enemy is always out there, never far enough away. Sometimes you can feel him breathing right behind you. You turn around and see an empty stained coffee cup staring you down. There is no place to hide forever, he’s out there. You cannot escape him, but you can face him. Although you have seen others do that and had to bury them.
It seems that a mixture of stupidity and courage are required to survive this mess. You have to be a little crazy to get up out of your hole and move forward, because staying put forever is worse. The problem is when you go too crazy. Saw this sergeant, trembling fiercly in the maelstrom. Suddenly, as the grenades were exploding all around our building, he jumped up and ran out the door of the basement we were in. He only made it to the door. I had to crawl out the back window to escape.
Frightening times. I don’t know how I’ve made it this far, but I gotta keep going. Nothing could have prepared me for this, but I don’t think would have wanted to be anyway. The only way to know this hell is to experience it. Its enough to make me sick when I think of how things used to be. I just want to go home and play. I just want to go home and play guitar until I forget it all.
To see across that social landscape, past superfluous gestures, and view everything entirely would be so tranquil as you can merely take it all in. And, yet to see everything would be so deeply frightening that I should wonder if it be worthwhile at all. But, to the one unknowing in blissful ignorance it sounds still charming to see so clearly all around. Although I still want to look at a crowd and see past the impurities in the communication and hear/see truth of character and intended statement, I wonder about what I would see and its affect upon me. To see it all would be breathtaking, for sure, but damaging? Perhaps it all depends on what one sees. If I looked out and saw endless pain and stabbing remarks, I feel I would succumb to the voices shouting in my head, given the hypothetical situation at present. My greatest fear would be to hear the cries of endless suffering and to see the wounds upon everyone’s bodies. I suppose the question is whether or not I want to see a clear vision or keep things blurry. My nightmare would be to glance about and see horrific emotions plastering the landscape to the horizon. Some images you cannot easily put out. What would I see, if I saw into the very heart of every man, woman and child? Whereas my fear of what I’d see is clear, my hope is other. I’d hope I saw health. I’d hope I saw goodness. I’d simply hope to see well-being.
After much web surfing, I have found what appears to be a great way to hack the USB Panic Button. I will show you how I can get it to do basically whatever I want with a little tweaking. For my purposes I wanted to be able to set the button to a keystroke, like ctrl+alt+del. To do this, we need to download software that was hacked together for us.
Run the application:
The 32-bit version is in \Panic Button\PanicTray\PanicTray\bin\Release\PanicTray.exe
Now, open up notepad and type in (I recommend not copying and pasting as that gave me problems):
Dim objShell
Set objShell = CreateObject(“WScript.Shell”)
objShell.SendKeys “{2}”, True
Save as test.vbs on the root of C: (So, it would be c:\test.vbs, this is arbitrary but easier for explaining)
Go back to the Panic Button software and type in the command area: C:\test.vbs
Now, when you hit the panic button it will send a keystroke, in this case the numeral “2″. So, to test, open up a notepad and make sure you have a blinking cursor and then hit the panic button. You SHOULD start seeing 2’s show up.
Now for tweaking, the key to this is in the VBS script that we created. The “2″ in the third line is the keystroke. So, here is a Microsoft list of compatible keystrokes (not fully tested):
Key
SendKeys Representation
BACKSPACE
{BACKSPACE}, {BS}, or {BKSP}
BREAK
{BREAK}
CAPS LOCK
{CAPSLOCK}
DEL or DELETE
{DELETE} or {DEL}
DOWN ARROW
{DOWN}
END
{END}
ENTER
{ENTER} or ~
ESC
{ESC}
HELP
{HELP}
HOME
{HOME}
INS or INSERT
{INSERT} or {INS}
LEFT ARROW
{LEFT}
NUM LOCK
{NUMLOCK}
PAGE DOWN
{PGDN}
PAGE UP
{PGUP}
PRINT SCREEN
{PRTSC}
RIGHT ARROW
{RIGHT}
SCROLL LOCK
{SCROLLLOCK}
TAB
{TAB}
UP ARROW
{UP}
SHIFT
+
CONTROL
^
ALT
%
BACKSPACE
{BACKSPACE}, {BS}, or {BKSP}
All function keys, like F1, are represented by the button name contained within braces for example, {F1} for the F1 button and {F2} for the F2 button.
So, now you have the resources to program your USB Panic Button to do whatever you want, keystroke-wise. I, personally, wanted to have it to hit next track in iTunes. So, I set the last line to: objShell.SendKeys “{^}{RIGHT}”, True This effectively sends a CTRL+RIGHT-ARROW keystroke which in iTunes means hit next track. Pretty cool, eh?
After a long weekened of having altogether too much fun with friends, I now get to relax and introvert it up. Hmm, perhaps some introspective writing will help me unwind…
I find the human mind fascinating. It seems to be the most complex puzzle I have ever encountered yet not totally impossible to grasp. Instead, I often find that I can figure out what someone is thinking once I get enough information from them. Some of this is sillily simple, someone may actually just say what they are thinking or leave an incredibly obvious hint. However, going through this leads me to build a profile for the person, I(we) do this subconsciously. If someone does something and then tells me how they felt about it, I can then figure out next time when they do that thing, or something similar, how they will feel. Realize that this is a simple correlation of applying a memory to a future scenario. This makes sense, but it gets increasingly complex with more intricate situations: more people involved, pre-existing moods when entering said situation, multiple factors/variables within the situation that trigger ideas, etc.
I find that many times I, and everyone else, have exceptions to mental rules. I would say that watching a movie sounds like a good idea to me. However, if someone I dislike wanted to go see the movie with me, then that would cancel out the desire to see the movie and my thoughts would be on the person not the movie.
Furthermore, I find the tie between my emotions and thoughts to be quite intriguing, and alarming at times. Here’s an idea: it is pretty obvious to everyone that our emotions shade/color our thinking, but do you think our thinking shades/colors our emotions? I believe they do. If you think to yourself that you aren’t good at something eventually you will believe it AND you will have a negative emotional response to it. You will probably start realizing that the “thing you’re not good at” makes you sad. Now, conversely, we have all met people who were actually terrible at their sport or hobby, but played it anyway. Why? They aren’t good, like really aren’t that good. So, what’s the difference? They don’t tell themselves that they are not good. They focus on the sport or hobby as an end in and of itself to be enjoyed and improved upon. That, my friends, is healthy. Whatever you do, do it positively.
Q.6-1 “In your opinion, are marketers likely to be faced with more ethical dilemmas than members of other functional areas of the firm like finance, accounting and manufacturing? If you believe this to be true please explain why.”
Personally, I am a very black and white person, but I’m finding that marketing ethics is… complicated. I would assert that marketing ethics is more difficult than and therefore raises more ethical dilemmas than functional industries. There are parts that bother me about marketing and parts that seem to make a lot of sense. What is great about the manufacturing industry, and others like it, is that you have fairly quantifiable metrics to use. Do not steal is pretty simple. In manufacturing there are objects, do not steal them. Should safety be upheld in manufacturing environments: a resounding yes. True, we could make this more complicated by asking to what degree do we need safety regulations/practices, but that is a second level sort of question. Marketing on the other hand raises this dilemma for me: taking advantage of a persons situation = excellent marketing strategy? Case and point: elder emergency response beepers (for lack of a better term). I’m sure most of us have seen those ads on tv for “Life Alert” little beepers that page 911 when you press a button. The idea is good, great even, you find yourself in an emergency and press a button to alert the authorities. This is great for the elderly because they may fall and be in a situation where they cannot reach a telephone. So how do you market that? ‘You can feel safe and secure with your beeper thing from ACME, Inc!” Would that not be preying on the insecurities of the elderly? For a tv spot we would have footage of the elderly on the floor writhing trying to get to the phone to prove the point that they NEED a beeper thing. The problem for me is that this product does just that and how else can you market it? The beeper thing saves lives, but marketing that the elderly need it by pointing out frightening realities leaves a bad taste in my mouth. For me, marketing ethics brings up a lot of these conundrums that do not exist in functional industries that simply provide straight products.
I used to, and still do, wrestle with whether or not to share my political beliefs. I’d like to think that I base my political stances on Biblical standards to the best of my ability. The problem is that when I am communicating with non-Christians, how do I hold them to my Christian standards? Is that even appropriate? I am not saying that I was wondering whether or not I should tell them that they are steeped in sin, but rather whether or not I agreed to a piece of legislation (focusing on my viewpoint of a law or issue).
I ended up realizing that: 1. we all have a right to our opinions 2. if I am wrong in an area then I need to know about it and that concept is true of others as well (golden rule + iron sharpens iron)
So, now I try to voice my opinion on politics more and express that I have a right to believe what I believe and that my audience has that same right too. Further, I try to emphasize that it is out of love that I vote to uphold what I understand to be God’s law. It get’s rough when a non-Christian wants to know why I am voting on something that affects non-Christians as well as Christians but will ‘adversely affect’ the non-Christians (“holding them to my standard” as they would claim I am doing). My response is that their voting for/against whatever is holding ME to THEIR standard too. This is MY country and MY community. Every piece of legislature affects me too.
Having said all this, I still wrestle with this a bit, but my conviction is to hold to the decision I have made: uphold God’s standards in my community.
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