mahiwaga

The faster and faster you go, the more and more energy it takes to continuing accelerating, almost, but never quite reaching the speed of light

If it’s dry, moisten it. If it’s moist, dry it. If you’re not on steroids, start using them. If you are on steroids, stop taking them. — almost everything I learned about dermatology, taught to me by a general surgeon

Worried that if I start, then I won’t finish
all these loose wayward threads
I am still shuffling, still scavenging
untying knots and burning frayed ends

The words don’t come any more, my mind is in disarray
Giving shape to my thoughts
giving form to my misgivings
Where am I? And where have I been?
the mind whirls and twirls and spins

Maybe if I find a rhythm? Maybe if I can craft and fashion a rhyme?
Once upon a time those movements saved me
giving hope through the fire and darkness and the bleak empty silence
only the distant roaring of the ocean
the sonic static surging of the cosmic wind
phosphors blink on and off on my windscreen

It was that bridge and that awful feeling
the smoke and the smothering heat
those memories are intertwined now
like strangling roots, striving for space
for a little bit of sunlight and water and cool soil

There were chances and there were risks
none of them taken
nothing ventured, but perhaps at least a little gained
regret for what you didn’t do is a solid thing
you can carry it all the way to the grave

yet still the paths were laid before me
to meet the angel waiting for my arrival
though she did not know it
and I nearly lost my faith
surely hope is a strange and fickle thing

I cannot know where this twisting, turning leads to through this garden of forking paths up past the oak trees and the ash
giving way to fir and pine and the mountaintop looming

The words lead me here, syllable by syllable
I did not know the way
I still do not know the way
But maybe for a single moment,
I can be still

As I grew frustrated with wrestling with Foursquare’s bizarre password reset system that either kept asking me for the password that I couldn’t remember or asking me to log in first, I got to pondering:

I was especially thinking of that scene from “Office Space” with the printer.

And while unfeeling people may be even worse than unfeeling machines, I think the expectation is different. I think even cynics and misanthropes expect to be able to elicit some sort of emotional reaction from a human, no matter how heartless they might be (although I don’t think truly heartless people can last very long in customer service positions—I don’t think they’re very good for PR) but I think everyone knows a machine doesn’t care at all.

Apparently, the only thing mosquitoes are really good at is spreading disease. Anything they do (pollination, serving as food for birds and fish) can be done by other species who don’t bite humans and drink human blood.

And eradicating them entirely won’t cause a global ecocatastrophe.

Ecology: A world without mosquitoes • 2010 Jul 21 • Janet Fang • nature

Genetic engineering has been explored as a solution, by creating male mosquitoes that will inseminate wild-type female mosquitoes whose resultant offspring will be non-viable.

Genetically Modified Mosquitoes Join The Fight To Stop Zika Virus • 2016 Jan 26 • Greg Allen • goats and soda • NPR

But this is going to work on a species-by-species case, and there’s a concern that eradicating one species will just result in another mosquito species occupying the niche the eradicated species did.

(While <p>A. aegypti</p> is the dominant disease-carrying species, there are 41 species capable of transmitting malaria and 4 species identified as carriers for zika)