Time Travel

Time Machine in the Making

What would the future look like if we traveled in a time machine to take a peek of our future? There have been books and movies made that tell us about time traveling to the future or back in time to pre-historic history.  In our English book there are authors such as Carl Sagan and a fiction writer H. G. Wells who speaks about time travel and what an exciting adventure of exploring our past and future world it would be.  Author Sagan talks about time travel and being able to travel backwards or forward there is so much possible understandings about our future history of this world.  I was thinking if we were able to travel in a time machine to the future, would we want to change history while traveling to the future? I would be tempted too.

Maybe someday someone will be able to build a machine that you can travel into the future or maybe I am watching too many Back to the Future movies.

Mind Games

The mind can be a strong and powerful to a human being.  It is known that the mind can be devious and can play tricks on you.  I believe it is not our mind that can or cannot be trusted, it is our senses and emotionally thoughts that tell our mind what we interpret to what we are seeing when looking at objects, pictures, conversations, and reading.  Our mind processes information that we hear, see and feel.  We teach our mind at a young age what we need to learn.   As we get older we have conditioned our mind to react from all our senses.  Here we have a picture that people see and they interpret it differently than what you do.  What do you see here? Your mind tells you that this a picture of what?

When I saw this picture I saw immediately a face, but there is the word liar written out.  We are asked to trust our intuition because most of the time is telling our brain to trust it.  I believe that our emotions override our brain most of the time. 

It is considered that our mind is the final arbiter of truth. 

Hip-Hop Artistic Expressions

My Hip-hop dancer, my nephew

The literary world is changing around us everyday.  We have up and coming new artists who shares their talents with us so that we may appreciate it.  Every artist expresses himself or herself in differently.  We have poets, writers, musicians, painters and the list can go on.

I am from the older generation where Poets for example are Robert Frost, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson and many more.  I feel the world’s younger generation cannot relate to these types of poetry or literature so they are expressing their artistic abilities through hip-hop music.

Jeff Chang who is known in San Francisco started off as their hip-hop journalists.  He believes that hip-hop music and their lyrics is more of keeping it genuine with for our younger generation to relate too.  Hip-hop music can be considered a trend of the artist’s opinions and America’s culture with our younger people.  It is more common to see hip-hop artists wearing or using lines from the artist’s lyrics in their daily vocabulary.

I need to keep an open mind to our younger generation feelings and their artistic talents for this is their turn to come out and shine.

Our Environment

To me it is so important to get involved in keeping our environment clean and beautiful.  All over the world there has been so much emphasis about how the environment is changing and it has not been for the better of the world.  Our former vice-president Al Gore wins the Nobel Peace Prize for his documentary of global warming and that we need to be aware of how the climate is changing around the world. 

Here in California in most of our major cities that there are so much air pollutants that have enters into our air that we breathe in.  These are caused from automobiles, industrial manufacturing plants, diesel trucks and our summer heat. 

In California we have automobiles that have emission control systems so that when we drive our cars that the exhaust is treated before it leaves our exhaust pipe.  We have special summer gasoline blends for our cars to run without contributing to air pollution. To help us save on gasoline we have cars that are full hybrid electric cars.  These type of cars use electricity, gas or diesel. 

We have taken an important step in trying to save our environment and with everyone in the world can reduce items that cause environmental decline we will have a better environment for generations to come.

Foucault & Our Prison Structure

Our prison system leaves much to be desired.  The government believes that if we get rid of the lawbreakers, somehow the citizens will feel comfortable in living their lives peaceably and the government hopes to deter any potential lawbreakers. 

Foucault tells us that these prisons turn bad people into worse than before they entered in the prison.  There are gangs among the prisoners, some wardens assault and abuse the prisoners, drug addicts that get worse, and not enough programs to help rehabilitate these prisoners to enter back into society. 

Do we need to put juveniles into our prison system?  If they have not murdered anyone let them go into boot camp for juveniles.  Let’s put our tax dollars to use for these types of programs to help these juveniles learn discipline, morale and self-confidence.   For non-violent criminals, let us think of ways to rehabilitate them by working out in programs that could use volunteering such as senior citizen centers or church group functions that need help. 

Let us think of ways of helping these non-violent criminals and our young people so they do not turn into worse offenders.

Appreciation and Thankfulness

In my English class we read a chapter of war stories that different authors have written.  They are of stories of how to plan a war, what the soldiers carried while in combat and how they affected many innocent lives.  We know the ugliness of war, but what is the outcome for these people that were affected by war?  

Did we better their lives or make it worse?

My reaction after reading these stories is of sadness, appreciation and most of all thankful that we have brave men and women who will fight for our freedom.   After the Korean War’s peace treaty was signed, the country was left in ruins.  Six years later I was born to a country that was still in ruins. I may never know my biological parents but they were thoughtful enough to leave me at an orphanage because there were no signs of this country being rebuild.  This is where my appreciation comes in. I am thankful for the men who fought for South Korea’s freedom.

War is ugly but I hope the outcome can be positive with the people of all nations to live in peace.

One of Life's Joys

With most young adults turning of age means adventure, freedom and responsibilities.   I remember when I turned 21 years old I did not know what to do with my life.  I was single, living on my own and working on a career in the real estate industry.  Still I felt I was missing something in my life.  Most of my friends were married with children and enjoying their lives. I thought having a boyfriend would make me feel better but it did not so I decided to concentrate on my career and forget about men.

Then one day while working for a finance company I had the responsibilities of collecting real estate loans.  I called a customer of ours and reminded him that his mortgage payment was due.  I then asked if he knew of a certain guy named Curtis and was he still working there.  Of course this guy was working there and he put me on hold to go get him.  I just stared at the phone speechless because I didn’t want to talk to him I was just being nosy.

Curtis got on the phone and we started talking, than all of a sudden we were making lunch plans.  These luncheons turned into dinners and the movies.  During our 3 years of hanging around each other we both were not interested in a relationship, we planned on remaining good friends. 

A challenging situation came into my life and I was not sure of what I was going to do.  It was Curtis who was there to handle the situation and he handled it smoothly and efficiently.  A few days later I woke up and realized that this man who was there for me continuously without fail is the man I am falling in love with.  I couldn’t get him out of my mind; I felt a tingling feeling of joy and happiness whenever I was with him or thought of him.  I did not know this but Curtis was feeling the same way with me.  We realized that we were both in deeply in love with each other.  I am not saying that we have a life of happily ever after.  We truly do have our arguments, life’s challenges and bumps in the road in our marriage, but we are in love with each other.  We just celebrated our 25^th Wedding Anniversary in June 2012.