How to waste time on internet--inconvenient curiosity

Curiosity is a virtue. It is evolutionarily advantagious because it enables human beings to learn new things and to expand the horizon of their living situation. However it's becoming more and more of a hinder for human mind with the advent of internet. The problem is that internet provides too much information—so much that it diverts and distracts us from our task or goal, while feeding our brain with useless information.

Like the gold fish: Gold fish doesn't know what is to be full. If you have a tank of gold fish, and you keep feeding them, they will keep eating until they are so full that their stomach burst and they die, it seems that there is no "threshhold" in their poorly under-evolved nervous system to process what is being "full".

The curiosity of human mind is just like the appetite of gold fish, we will keep absorbing and reading, and getting to know more things as long as they are availble. This trait was very useful in acient times, when knowledge and new information was very scarce so our brains were evoloved to be very readily attracted to new knowledge and information and to get them all. At that time to miss a crucial information could be fatal, like missing the information of which area there are tigers and which area there are food. (and it can't be looked up on internet )

However, the mordern society and internet provides too much of knowledge for our poor brain to absorb for a life time, but the trait of being generally curious still get inherited till now. We still don't want to miss one single information even when there is waayyyy too much information already. That's why we can't drag ourselves away from facebook to get to work, or why we spend endless time jumping from one useless link to another. The reason you clicked on my article, is probably not because you believe there would be valueable source of information (which it is actually :) ), but more because of you see a link and your curious brain start to fire a natural instinct and you clicked on the link without being aware of what you were doing.

The result of this inconvinient curiosity, is tons of time wasted on internet.

The way to deal with this problem, is to train a task-oriented curiosity to replace the general curiosity. So we should learn to be only curious about the information that is related to the goal or task that I have to achieve at hand, and be able to abandon or disregard all the information unrelated to our goal. At the same time, we need a clear perception of what our brain is tricking us to do and a strong will power to not do so when the result is not desired.

I am not sure if I am able to do that, but I can write it down in my silly blog and give my deepest sigh to the fragile and under-evolved human beings.

Poems writen during CW106

So I was taking a creative writing class last semester--introduction to poetry writing. The instructor was fantastic, kind and extremely humorous, the classmates were very young, talkative and apparently less bounded by social rules compared to engineering or science students. I was the only non-native English speaker, the only science student, the only Asian student and the only graduate student in the class, and I should've felt like an outsider in so many ways. Yet I only realized how intelligent, open-minded and friendly that English-major students are, and I felt fit right in there in that classroom. A room full of poets, where sensitivity is appreciated, messed-up-ness is common, cliches are ruthlessly condemned, and where I can safely express my darkest side while receiving compassion and reciprocation.

We wrote poems and then read and discuss each others poems. I shared some of my poems and got surprisingly positive feedback, along with kindly corrected grammar and  word spellings. So I decide to summon up my courage to put some of my poems here, while crossing my fingers wishing for my emotions and ideas to come through.

1.

Ideal Man

I go and save the world

You put away my dirty laundry

Scattering around the floor

I get depressed over the peace of the planet

You drag me into the sunshine

On a Caribbean boat

I go and break myself to pieces

You sew me up with clumsy stitches

We smoke and pray

We do drugs and yoga

We read my silly poems

that I scribbled down at the blood stained lines

of the old notebook in my battleship

You tell me how beautiful I smile

Over a pot of steaming Chinese tea

 2. 

Queen of Pain

Robe made of Self-Hatred

Throne made of Guilt

Jewelry made of Fear

Scepter made of desperately clinging to the unreachable

Crown made of viscous attack and judgment

I am the Queen of Self-Sabotaging

I am the Queen of Pain

3. 

4. 

Just friends

Perhaps love is lurking under

Frivolously oblivious

and

aged with emotions.

Shaped by denial

heated

attracted

complicated

entanglements

did not last through.

Label the uniqueness of ambiguous desire

black and white

When liberty refuses

a straightforward definition

5. 

Genomic Conversation

ATGCCTGACCCCTATA

we are the murmuring of 

a four-letter language

scarlet blood stream running through our veins

is the silent song of our creation

the rhythmic beating of our heart

is the cadence of the eternal whispering

God talks with our genome

6.

You better not

cry that loud

or pretend to cry

or place your pink chubby warmth

of a face

next to mine

and pout your lips

for a kiss

7. 

Adrifted

You are a sailor with wrecked ship

Drifted in the ocean with your tiny life raft
thousands of miles away from any land

Your life is completely empty
and open
as the ocean

it’s the first time you cry
because that is the state of your life.
 

from in front of the TV,
I said

That was my life too.

8. 

Center of the world

Of course everyone pays attention to you

              & examines you in the utter most

details

of your stubbornness strand of hair

              that collide with your eye glasses

of the slight crookedness of glasses

             on your nose

of the crooked glasses standing on your nose

             that cover your smudged eye liner

of the meant-to-be-delicate-turned-out-to-be

             clumsiness way of your disposition

of the clumsy disposition manifested from

             short and chubbiness of your legs

of the chubby legs walking around betraying

             your ungraceful upbringing

of your pimple

of your fat-line

of your un-matching dress

of your accent and awkward word choice

            and idiotic expression when you open your mouth

            when people start to talk about a movie/band you've

            never seen

            or heard of

or perhaps you never watched a movie

or knew what a movie is

or what a "LOL" is

or what a "ROFL" is

or what a "FOB" is

or who "Elvis Presley" is

or who "John Wayne" is

or how to dance

           like the little lady in that black dress waiving her ass

or how not to be so tense

          to laugh with your body shaking and arms swinging

or how not to be so anxious

or how to initiate a conversation

         that last for more than 3 lines

         which does not end up in hmmm and hmmm

or silence

or a spilt drink

or all the endless/nightmarish parties

in which everybody despises you

                            hates you

                            envies you

                            pushes you

which reminds you as that little girl

with horrible hair-cut by your mom to save money

with greasy hair not washed for days for lack of shower

with oversized jean from your aunt tied at waist with a rope

         yet sweeping on the floor

with too outdated of a dress from your grandma's friend

         at the fish market

with a 5-buck a pair of shoes that's hurting your heel and toe

without a bra to cover your newly developed

         breast and nipple

         as your mom said you don't need it yet

without proper dentist attention that your tooth

         are yellow and cracked

without one single toy from your parents your whole life

         to play with

of course you hated yourself

of course everyone judges you

       because you are the center of the world

       jewels of the universe

       but your parents told you

       that you are short, dark, selfish and ugly

and you are all by yourself. 

Religion is being lazy

I walked by a church today, and saw “Jesus is the answer”

It’s a very interesting sentence, in that firstly it implies everybody is looking for an answer, and it also implies that misery and pain people felt in the search of the answer, and then it gives you an ultimate solution: Jesus.

But my meager experience and knowledge of the world tells me that there is no such thing as “ultimate solution”, instead, most attempts to solve complicated problems in very simple ways result in horrifying tragedies, like holocaust in second world war or cultural revolution in China.

We are troubled by the question of “what’s the meaning of life”, “why is there poor and rich, happy and miserable”, etc etc. And everyone lives their lives looking for answers,  trying out different theories, or practicing certain rituals believing they will lead them there. And, the process is hard work. Life is hard. What if now somebody just gives you an answer to all your questions and frustrations? That will be so enticing.

I remember in the hilarious sci-fi novel “hitchhikers guide to the galaxy”, in a distant planet where very smart aliens built a gigantic super computer as large as the planet itself to calculate the meaning of life. After thousands years of super computer’s calculation, the answer is out, it is “42”. Nobody knows what it means, and now an even bigger computer needs to be build to interpret this answer. The whole story is just as ridiculous as Christianity, where Jesus or bible is given as an answer and the whole Christian theology is built to explain why that is the answer.

Well, it is certainly an ease to just give up the quest and accept Jesus as the answer to everything. Like my Christian friends trying to convince me: “look at the world, the trees, the sky, they are so beautiful, delicate and complicated, how could they not be created from a higher intelligence?” Well yes the world is big and complex, and it’s extremely hard to figure it out. But that means we will have a hard time figuring it out that’s all, it does not logically lead to the conclusion that they are created from a higher being. In fact human beings have made a lot of progress figuring out trees and sky and such, even though merely a teeny-tiny fraction of all. By just exclaiming and say “shit this is too hard, it’s got to be GOD”, that’s called laziness (or stupidity...) in my dictionary.

Therefore I can safely conclude that religion is being lazy.

How to waste time on Internet--false starts

Would you go to the grocery and return half way because you lose interest midway?
Will you start a conversation with someone in person and stop in the middle for no reason, only to resume the conversation two days later?

Those behaviors don’t sound rational in real life, but that’s what we do on Internet all the time. We read emails without replying, we click on a link with intention to do something, only to be distracted to somewhere else and never finish it.

The problem with reading emails without replying, is that when you do reply, you need to read the email again. It’s a waste of time to read an email twice unless it’s super important. And the problem with clicking on a random link with out finishing the original task, is that the task will never be finished until you do it all over again.

We choose to do this kind of “false starts” online but not in real life, because compared to real life tasks/errands/chores, the price of abandoning a task halfway online is quite low, and we can pick it up very conveniently anytime anyway.

However, because we use Internet so frequently and we do false starts frequently enough that the accumulative wasted time is actually very high. I’ve never done any experiment on it, but just do a quick calculation based on email: if I have 10 emails everyday that needed reply, and I need 2 minutes to read each email, I will have 20 minutes wasted if I don’t reply them immediately, because if I reply later, I have to read the email AGAIN.

The distraction on Internet is huge, and if we don’t realize how much time false starts could waste, we will find our times slipping away without any ideas of how it happened. And a serious person as molly is pointing this out to herself and to you my dear blog reader.

Permannet job

So I was making plans for job searching. Then I have a sub-category called “temporary job searching”, meaning if I don’t find a satisfying job, I should have a backup plan to get a job to at least keep myself alive&sane.


BUT, there is a question of definition (like always): What is a temporary job? How do I draw a line between a temporary job and an ultimate/permanent one? A job to keep myself alive? or A job that is not satisfying but pays money? or A job that is not my ultimate dream but help me achieve that goal? How is a temporary job different from: A job that pays a lot of money or a job that gives me a lot of fame despite my dislike of the job? What about people that are stuck in a job which they consider as just a way of income? 


Most people in the world go through their lives going from one temporary job to another, only closer to what they wanted, but never quite there. To some extent, all job in the world could be considered as “temporary job”. As one’s understanding and experiences advances, the jobs that one originally considered as “ultimate goal” would drift and become a temporary job. And the definition of temporary job could only make sense if presented with an alternative--a “permanent job”. 


What would be my permanent job? The first idea, is that whatever job I do I will keep writing, I will be a writer of my own, that’s my permanent job. (The funny thing is, even though I assume temporary job is easier to get than permanent job, the fact is that I am already doing my permanent job, yet without a mean of sustaining my live-hood....) Then more ideas related to my permanent job as a writer flashed: learning all knowledge in the world, practicing perception capability to see past human flaws and rationalizations, experiencing the deepest love and compassion, helping people, revolutionizing Chinese female rights, spreading worthwhile ideas, facing up and downs in life calmly, building  deep relationships…...........


Those are my permanent jobs. Basically my permanent jobs will be trying to live a worthwhile life in which I lived it to the full extent AND providing value to this world.....in this sense the idea of permanent job is not accurate, because it’s not exactly a job, it’s rather an altitude in everything that I do.


Everything is temporary at the face of the the mortality of human being, the relentlessly passing of time and eternity. But at this particular moment where I am writing and you are reading, this moment will be permanent. And I am glad that I am doing my job.