Cementery of Forgotten Memories

Daniel here. I'm a simple guy: 29 years old, living in Mexico City, help desk supervisor, frustrated historian and chess player, unhurried math student, stubborn scientific materialist and realist, tech enthusiast, left libertarian, secular humanist, fitness newbie, almost beaten real love searcher.

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I loved bossa nova since I was a child. It was a heritage from my father. I remember that, a random day, he arrived home with a CD containing pieces of the genre. I didn’t know back then, but I met Astrid Gilberto the afternoon he played that disc. Her voice was like an angel, so melodic. Nowadays, The Astrud Gilberto Album (1965) is one of my favorites. Yes, in it, “Agua de Beber” stands out, but “Meditation”, “So Finha de Ser Com Voce” and especially “Dindi” are spectacularly beautiful.

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Remembering

I found myself reading one of the few posts I have in Tumblr. I barely can believe I wrote that because I didn’t quite remember. But the fact of deeply knowing a past state of me was very interesting, which is why I’ll try to keep some records of important experiences of my life. Fortunately, nobody is interested in reading these stories, except me, lol.

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For historical reasons, the term "creation" is laden with the notion of a creating agency or cause external to the created objects. In this important respect, this word differs from the neutral term "origination." Moreover, the terms "nothing" or "from nothing" as used in conjunction with "creation" carry the connotation of the traditional theological notion "ex nihilo." Alas, the recent literature on some versions of quantum cosmology contain inappropriate uses of these locutions which may suggest that this theory abets creationism. For example, such physicists as Hartle and Hawking (1983) and Vilenkin (1983) speak misleadingly of certain primordial physical states as "nothing," even though these states are avowedly only "a realm of unrestrained quantum gravity," which is "a state with no classical space-time" (Vilenkin, 1983). By the same token, in his essay "Creation of the Universe as a Quantum Process," the English physicist Isham (1988, p. 401) characterized Hartle and Hawking's (1983) version of quantum cosmology as featuring "creation from nothing." Indeed, he adds: "The creation from nothing is precisely that."

Adolf Grünbaum (1991)

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The "see food" diet

I took a new job recently (one month and one week ago to be exact). Now I'm a tier 1 service desk analyst at CompuCom Systems, an outsourcing IT company headquartered in Dallas (although I work in one of its Mexico City sites), which means that I give technical support to other companies, in my case to a human resources company specialized in payroll, with worldwide presence.

I think it's a good opportunity for several reasons. I like physical technologies and enjoy manipulating electronic devices, from just using and exploring, to fixing. Yes, I lack a lot of technical knowledge, but I find beautiful to learn about it, specially if they reward me with expensive certificates that can be useful in future jobs. I spend most of my life in front of a computer or an smartphone, and I can't get tired of it. Also, the pay is pretty decent and, so far, I have a weird but nice schedule.

As a friend said it, my schedule is kind of Australian, a country where the working week is 38-hours long and more than 2 days off are common, compensated by longer workdays during the working week. Well, I rest from Wednesday to Friday, and my longer workdays are throughout the weekends, with regular time on Monday and Tuesday, except for the part that those days I'm on the after hours shift.

So, sometimes I work in the day, others in the night; and some days I work more hours than others. The problem is that my routine has become completely maladjusted. I no longer know when, where and what to eat. It appears to me that I must cook my own food and carry it to work, something that I've never liked not only because of the effort, but also because food is never fresh.

As a result of this maladjustment, I'm eating an incredible amount of crap and I'm starting to feel bad. Trying to solve this issue, I found myself reading the book Fitness for Geeks (Perry, 2012), where I found this curious quote that I'm still attempting to catch.

I like Boston Marathon winner Jack Fultz’s “see food” diet—“see food and eat it”—for its simplicity. Eating in the modern world is anything but simple these days. The act of eating has been completely medicalized, and has become sociopolitically militant to boot. The vegans are hurling pies (nondairy, of course) at the meat eaters, the vegetarians are aiming online flames at the omnivores, and the raw foodists are, well, refusing to cook anything.

The trap seems to be in the word "food" that mostly refers to real non-processed-junk food (like the Cheetos Puffs I ate on my Tuesday's lunch hour). So the problem remains the same: the availability of real food.

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I'm a materialist

When I talk to someone and say I'm a materialist, people often get surprised. They immediately appear to be thinking in moral materialism, also known as hedonism, the moral philosophy according to which humans should pursue only pleasure (in its classical version), or profit and commodities (in a market-oriented update). Although I certainly try to avoid suffering, as the majority of healthy human and nonhuman animals, my ethic is far beyond hedonism. So, when I say I'm a materialist, I refer to ontological materialism, or naturalism in the broad sense, the view that the world is composed exclusively of material objects (though not necessarily natural), or things for short, such that immaterial objects, like spirits and self-existing ideas waiting to be thought, don't exist really and aren't part of the world. Because moral and ontological materialisms are logically independent, i.e. none of them is implied by the other; and the reference of the narrow concept of matter isn't the set of pleasures; I'd rather say that the former's name is misleading, that when someone says he's a materialist, you shouldn't assume he's referring to hedonism.

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Last night, I watched Volver (Almodóvar, 2006) and the situations around Irene’s apparent return reminded me the scene with the explanation of what a ghost is, narrated by the brilliant Argentine actor Federico Luppi, in the amazing Spanish-Mexican movie El espinazo del diablo (Del Toro, 2001). Fortunately for Paula, the tragic event in this case, the daughter’s sexual abuse by her father, couldn’t be completed; after all, the film wasn’t really a ghosty story.