Radiolab produced an interesting episode on things.

The first half of the program explores how people come to attach value to objects which otherwise have little extrinsic market worth.  We can form sentimental bonds with things for several reasons: they may remind us of a special event, a place, a person, an accomplishment, a failure, a bygone era in our lives, and so forth.

The Radiolab segment shares a story of a guy who kept a candy sugar egg for over 40 years.  Initially, this seems like an odd item for someone to hold for most of his life.  But as you hear the interview, you come to appreciate what the egg represented to him.

This characteristic (forming an emotional bond with things) is one of the traits that make us unique.  Some people do so relatively easily (they like to keep things), while others tend to discard unnecessary stuff as “clutter.”

I’m not a hoarder, but sometimes I lean toward the former camp.  For the past month I’ve kept an otherwise worthless trinket merely because of who gave it to me.  It’s not even a person I know well, but I got caught up in the moment.  Speculative sentimentalism, if you will.

I don’t think I’ll keep the trinket for 40 years, like the guy with the sugar egg.  But for now, I won’t throw it away.  It’s the tangible form of an idea that’s worth more (to me) than the value of the item itself.

Once in one of my college literature classes we were saddled with making a presentation.  I chose this carpe diem classic by Robert Herrick:

To the Virgins, to make much of Time

GATHER ye rosebuds while ye may,
Old Time is still a-flying:
And this same flower that smiles to-day
To-morrow will be dying.

The glorious lamp of heaven, the sun,
The higher he’s a-getting,
The sooner will his race be run,
And nearer he’s to setting.

That age is best which is the first,
When youth and blood are warmer;
But being spent, the worse, and worst
Times still succeed the former.

Then be not coy, but use your time,
And while ye may, go marry:
For having lost but once your prime,
You may for ever tarry.

To make my talk more interesting, I distributed a rose to each female class member.

I don’t know what said classmates truly thought of my feature.  In hindsight, it may have been a bit of a downer.  All carpe diem literature has a depressing element to it (we’re all going to die), but this poem suggests females have an even shorter shelf life (of desirability).

Oh well.  At the time it seemed like a good idea to break the monotony of class lectures.

I was thinking about a scene in the movie Contact.  I don’t embrace the premise of the film, but one line has stuck with me since I first saw it.

It occurs when Ellie is transported by the pod to a distant “beach,” where she meets a being purported to be her father:

The alien offers an observation about humans:

You’re an interesting species. An interesting mix. You’re capable of such beautiful dreams, and such horrible nightmares. You feel so lost, so cut off, so alone, only you’re not. See, in all our searching, the only thing we’ve found that makes the emptiness bearable, is each other.

There’s so much packed into that third sentence.  We live such a dichotomous existence.  On one hand, you see people capable of such beautiful acts of selfless love.  But on the flip side you also see horrible people doing brutal things to others.

Internally, I’m often torn between viewing people favorably, or seeing them in a darker cast.  In some cases, I go back and forth between the positive and negative views in the span of a few seconds.

Sometimes it’s difficult to reconcile.

I’ve been doing a little reflecting on blogging as I decided to resurrect this site.

Things have changed during the three years that I was on vacation.  For many years I stuck with the Movable Type platform, even after its slide out of public favor.  Now it has apparently quit free licensing for individual bloggers, so I finally jumped ship to WordPress.

Once you get past the technical installation hurdles, it’s pretty easy to get a blog up and running with WordPress.  Pick a theme for your site, add some plugins, and you’re ready to go.  I kind of miss tinkering with my own “theme” that I did in the old days.  Maybe I’ll do some of that later.

Speaking of layout, the trend has been toward a less cluttered look with more emphasis on content.  The blogroll appears to be losing favor.  The default font with this theme is large–possibly too much so.

I reviewed some of my earlier posts.  Many of them were political musings.  I’m still interested in politics, and do discuss them on forums and elsewhere.  But I don’t feel as compelled to blog about that now as I once did.

These days I’m reflecting more on other things: life, love, learning, meaning, purpose.  I don’t know the extent to which I can convey those thoughts into writing, but I may shift more in that direction.  We’ll see.

Several years ago I interacted with another blogger, Say Uncle, on a local site.  I haven’t “seen” him in a long time, but one saying he used has stuck with me since:

I do this to entertain me, not you.

That sounds a bit narcissistic, but the point is clear–if you’re not blogging about something you find interesting, why bother?

It’s been a while since I posted anything here.  So long, if fact, that the dinosaur platform I had been using, Movable Type, appears to no longer offer a free license for individual bloggers.

So I’ve joined the blogging herd and migrated to WordPress.  There may be a few site quirks during the transition.

Thanks for reading.