BigCat’s Blog of DOOM

Something has always puzzled me about the model for the evolution of man. Our current best-guess model based on the fossils we’ve found shows that we got taller for a while, and then the neanderthals which likely co-existed with humans got a lot bigger, stronger, thicker bones, and smaller brains. The problem is that in terms of hunter-gatherer / predator type of animal kindgom the neanderthal with similar brain capacity (although less) should have been a little higher on the food chain due to size and strength. So, why did we evolve a big brain when a the brain requires a whole lot more sugar and nutrients. What kind of long string of punctuated equilibrium events arrived at us having a lot bigger brain when it is a metabolically inefficient organ?

Well there are lots and lots of thoughts and theories on this, all of them I’ve read sound pretty good, but I’ve never heard an entirely satisfactory answer since it is mostly based on conjecture (since well, no one wrote down what actually happened). And the fact remains that a good portion, a really good portion, of what we eat every day goes to powering our brain.

So, what does that have to do with me being sick…well, I’ll tell you.

My brain makes everything look all peachy and what not, but behind the scenes it is secretly devouring all my energy.

Case in point, I’m sick as all get out yesterday. I start to feel a little better during the day, I work on my webpage, start to feel worse towards bed time. But I sleep better, I feel almost like going to work this morning, but still have a fever. So I stay home to make sure I get enough rest and don’t relapse. I sleep in till about 10:30, get up, read LJ, post a little. Work some more on my website. Feel even better almost go to work at noon, fever is still there, decide to stay home in an effort to not get anyone else sick. 2:30ish coughing gets worse, headache increases, so does fever. Lauren gets worse, I get worse. I take a shower, hack up a lung and part of small intestine. I don’t feel safe driving, otherwise I would go out and get tougher cough medicine and some arbys (she has a craving, and no she isn’t pregnant).

So what has this got to do with anything. My brain is sucking up my energy, making me sicker, not letting me actually rest. The more I think “Gee it is easy to sit here and type, or to fix my web page” the more sick I get. But how do you stop it, I’m not tired enough to sleep…I tried that, you can’t just shut off your brain. And to make it worse, when I’m sleeping I have weird half feverish, half something entirely more concrete (boardline prophetic maybe). So my brain is still working…overtime.

I can’t make it stop, when I get feverish I write, read, and think faster. That is to a point…after that point I get delerious and slow, but that happens later. At either point with a fever I can’t talk or listen very fast, go figure.

And here I am writing again, watching that crazy Gilmore Girls DVD’s w/ my wife, both taxing. And I can’t make my brain stop working…and here I am sick, and not getting better cuz my brain is burning up all my sugars I’ve taken in today.

Crazy, just plain crazy…I need a new brain, or an immune system that knows how to shut down my brain to work its magic.

Well, it appears that it is the Catlin’s turn to be sick.

I don’t know why I came into work. If I don’t feel better by lunch I’m going home.

I want to take Ibuprofin, but my throat hurts and I’m afraid I’ll start coughing again if I do. And once you start coughing it is hard to stop.

This is my punishment for being negative about Lauren’s little sister in my other post.
Not really, but it sorta seems like anyway.

I almost fell asleep driving here…this was a bad idea.

I’ve been thinking about the method of scientific inquiry a lot lately, mostly due to my other post about scientists. I came to a conclusion that sums up why a postmodern is right in saying the idealism of modernism (or science specifically) is doomed to leave us holding the ball without really making life better for everyone (like moderns susposedly believe).

The problem is in asking the basic questions of science or journalism, which is WHO, WHAT, WHEN, WHERE, WHY, and sometimes HOW (or always HOW in science’s case). In science, specifically, you are concerned with WHAT, WHY, and HOW as your primary problems, and then WHEN, WHERE, and WHO are used to determine the WHY and the HOW for your WHAT. The WHO is irrelevant, unless that person or thing has a trait that your are exploiting (same goes for the WHERE and the WHEN, but I’m interested in WHO today)….but that thing in the experiment which you are testing, or the hypothesis you are proving, is the WHAT, not the WHO. In fact, your goal is to describe WHAT with your WHY and HOW, so that you can apply it to any WHO-ever, WHEN-ever, and WHERE-ever, i.e. if you have a good WHY and HOW, you can always get the WHAT you desire.

Enter postmodernism, all this is important, but the emphasis goes back to WHO, WHEN, and WHERE. WHY, falls by the wayside, and WHAT is close behind (thats right, I’m criticising the lack of accountability and relativism inherent in postmodernism). HOW is still important sometimes.

This is good I think, especially in terms of Christianity. In Christianity, WHO is always more important than anything else. WHO is number one, Jesus was more concerned with WHO than anything else. Second he was concerned with WHEN and WHERE as a subset of HOW. As in “How much time are you spending, and how are you spending that time.” Finally it was WHAT he could do for them, while spending time with them.

All this came from the holidays, because it seems like the holidays force us to try to see family. All jammed packed into short periods of time. Really all we need is a large quanity of time, not a focused / forced memory time centered around presents. It is like each time you are with family you should treat it somewhat like it is a holiday. This is because to make memories, especially the most special memories, you don’t need to focus on a what (holiday or big ticket event like a wedding) you need every week small groups where you share yourself. You need super-bowl parties, drinking / eating after church, football games, food give-aways, etc. You get the point. WHERE should equal, as many places as possible. And WHEN should equal, as much as possible. This is how relationships really work, not just on holidays.

That is some of what I think modernism inherently loses. Now, postmodernism has it’s own failings, and that is usually the focus drifting away from WHO you are becoming in WHAT you are doing to something along the lines of WHO do feel you are, and subsequently less good stuff gets done and everyone loses sight of goals…but that is a generalization, and there is something else I want to talk about.
( A more personal look at this )
So, WHO am I? I’m a church-planter, I’m a husband, brother, son, and in-law, I’m someone worth praying for, I’m a friend, I’m loved, I’m a Christian, I’m someone who God will use to bring his light to others. Is much else important? So understanding the WHO is somewhat more important to me right now than my other W’s, and I hope I don’t lose that again any time soon.

So we opened presents for eachother tonight. I came home with cinimon bread and a cinimon roll for Lauren, and a bagget for me, so I can drink wine and eat cheese.

I got Metroid Prime 2: Echoes, which looks friggin awesome. Unfortunately I’ve vowed not to play it until I beat the first one, and I’m on the water level, which gives me a wicked bad headache when I play it. I gave Lauren the second season of Gilmore Girls and the Postal Service CD (mostly to apease dwchang who said I should buy it when I had the money, but gave me a bootleg mp3 of his cd anyway). She likes them a lot, I think they are really cool too.

The nice thing about Metroid Prime 2 is it has a 4 player death-match mode so I can play it w/ people from church, which is cool, cuz I like 4 player games. Gaming is more fun w/ multiple people.

It was -8 degrees on the way to work today according to the bank sign, and my car said -4 outside. -2 when I was driving home. But oddly I thought there was a threshold of cold, where if you get colder than that your body will shut down instead of getting used to it. I thought that would have been now, but after spending most of the week at less than 0 degrees F, I’ve grown used to it. I can walk around outside for a while w/o buttoning my coat, don’t need a hat very often, and only need gloves for outside working over extended periods.

Finally I’ve been thinking about this saying lately. Part of growing is learning to let that which does not matter, not. The best person in the world is for learning how to get better at this is arexchi. Now, he suffers from the problem of not knowing when stuff does matter sometimes, but he knows that….and mostly doesn’t care, but none-the-less, if you want to get better at letting things go, you stay with him for a while. I miss that, and I wish he was around cuz he helps me make things simpler and not matter as much.

EDIT: Someone just stole our load of whites out of the dryers. Who steals clothes? Isn’t that nuts, we lost a bunch of my underware and socks, as well as my undershirts. Also, we lost some of Laurens work shirts. Anyway, this is insane, and more annoying and weird than anything else. I don’t know how to approach the appartment company about adding some security to the laundry rooms, since it already requires a key and they have a “management not responsible for theft or damage to clothing” sign. Crazy world we live in where a guy in a controlled access building can get his clothes stolen.

This is to keep you entertained Ellen
Yesterday I almost died…I spun my car around on the slick ice that formed on the street, and was staring down on-comming traffic from the lane I was in. This was better than the cross-traffic that just started moving at the light that changed at exactly the wrong time for me to make it through by running it, or to stop on a sheet of ice. So I turned the car sideways, partially cuz it was going that way, partially because I knew spinning like that would stop me faster converting some of the cars forward momentum to rotational momentum. The lady that caught up with me first in a jeep was laughing at me, I know this cuz I was looking right at her by the time I stopped. I pulled the car around, and used the turn lane to get around, and backed right to where I should have been if I would have stopped normally, so no harm, no foul.

I made it to work an hour late. Traffic was a nightmare because of sed sheet of ice that feel all over the place. The freeway was a parking lot. The part of my trip that normally takes about five minutes, took 45. I got through the tunnel thing on 94 at about the time I normally arrive at work. I also almost hit a ford focus, and generally remembered and got better at pumping my breaks to stop with the car under control. I’m a pretty darned good driver, but this kind of weather is worse than snow, and my car no matter how well it is BMW balanced is not cut out for driving on a sheet of ice.

This is how I am going to frame the rest of my day.

At work I was a little jittery when I got there. I screwed up a bunch of stuff, not bad, but still annoyed me that I was making stupid mistakes. I sat through a meeting about what my boss should talk to our suppliers about when he is in Taiwan. I had very little useful input, at least I had some though. Lunch time rolled around, I read my LJ comments, started posting back, realized I was a little pissed about what I was writing about, and shouldn’t have even posed the question in the open if I was still upset about it, so I stopped answering most of the comments…maybe a few here and there, but I detatched myself from it emotionally, or I let the rest of it go in private.

Jeff emailed me this really nice email, almost made me cry at work…the bastard….making me all emotional at work. Said a lot of good stuff. Stuff my wife already thinks about me mostly, stuff that I have no idea how to process. I base so much of my identity in my ability to learn from things (past experience, others experiences, books, school, etc) and my current level of knowledge, and finally my ability to inturpret those things and use them to make informed opinions and decisions…problem solving.

My wife says my gifts aren’t primarily as a problem solver, but as a leader. My pastor says I need to give all that up and just learn how to be loved. The problem is that it is easier for me to love than to be loved, so leading is not a problem, but it will default to me trying to make peoples lives better (problem solving) which isn’t always good leading. And mostly it sets me up for a martyr / savior complex depending on the situation.

Why can’t I feel loved? I don’t know. I wish I knew. I wish I didn’t have to pick a fight every time I wanted an honest assesment of something….cuz I will often get one. I wish I didn’t thrive on conflict. I wish people would see my willingness to challenge everything as an asset, not as an annoyance, or just me being beligerant. I wish that if that last one isn’t how people see me, that I wouldn’t percieve that as how people see me. I wish I didn’t have a fear of not being heard when I say “the way we have always done it is not an acceptable answer.” (I don’t actually ever say that, I just think it a lot and then shut up for fear of being ignored) I wish I felt trusted, all around me I see words fly and actions that don’t match, it might be my intepretation of the actions that makes them not match, but either way I don’t feel trusted.

I think that last bit boils down to responsibility and respect. When I am given responsibility I feel trusted and respected. But that isn’t important because I’m not sure if that is how I feel loved. I don’t want to start leading to feel respected. I want to feel like I can respect myself, or that I can gain my respect from God first.

Well at anyrate, I still feel weird and small. I don’t know what is going to change that.

I wish when I dreamed big, I saw myself in those dreams. I wish I knew what my deepest desire was for myself…like how I fit into my big dreams, since all I can seem to dream big about is laying the foundation for a huge church.

Anyway, that is all for todays session of Ben getting touchy-feely on you, while being dark, brooding and not so mysterious. If you want to read more crap like this go so www.i-suck-at-life.com (don’t really I just made that up to be funny)

I’ve been thinking a bit about pride lately. This is because at some point (I forget when) I decided to be completely un-apologetic about seeing myself as “good” or “talented” in some areas, and completely un-apologetic about sucking at others. I thought this was a good way to prevent denial and false humility. But I think it gets on my wifes nerves sometimes, because she usually makes the “and humble too” kind of comments. So I heard Jeff and Caleb talking a while back about praying for humility and then being humiliated, and I was thinking that things don’t usually work quite the same for me.

I don’t usually get humilitiated when I pray for humility, I usually piss someone off, make a big mistake, or humiliate someone else accidentally which makes me feel terrible. But rarely am publically humiliated. So I was wondering how other people experience humility. And how do you know when you are being prideful instead of honest. If you want to talk about that and don’t want to write about something personal you can talk about me, and how you think I’m prideful, and how you would correct that….I can handle that criticism. But that is my question today, what is pride in your life (or around you…no names or accusations unless it is about me), what is humility in your life (or around you), and what is the difference between being honest about yourself and being falsely humble / prideful.

P.S. If you think I’m more prideful than honest, let me know, cuz I wouldn’t know the difference from a hole in my head, and Lauren told me that she thought I have a streak of pridefulness…which would make sense after having U of I engineering smoke blown up my ass for 5 years, and I would be willing to work on accountability for that.

So today I noticed that there was an icon on the bottom of my screen indicating a link to a news feed while I was checking my Gmail. I click on it, it allows me to add a “live bookmark” (like I talked about before) to my gmail account. Then live bookmark appears in my bookmark bar, I click on it, and low and behold the unread mail subjects appear.

Just one more reason firefox is awesome….it has all the features of a news reader /aggregator that I would use, built right into my browser….no more trillian plugin necessary.

Again, if you don’t understand what a “Live Bookmark” is, check out this page, explaining how they work.

Seriously….everyone should get this now…it is so easy to use, and set up, has tabbed browsing, the best feature you never knew you couldn’t live without, pop-up blocking with site specific settings, and live bookmarks. Even Jeff, the never-adopter, should just download this without seeing it on my computer because it is that cool and easy to use. And you don’t have to run Ad-aware as often since almost no one attacks this browser and it is more secure anyway. Dave Lin also approves….so all nerd must unite and force our non-nerd friends who have gmail accounts to switch to a better browser, and take back the web.