Informative Collation

The other day, my mother called me up saying that I'd received a thick packet from some legitimate sounding organization. I asked her to open it, and she said there were a bunch of booklets and four sheets describing what was going on. I asked her to try to read it to me, but the only words she could discern were "United States District Court of Delaware". I looked up the organization on the internet. They specialized in bankruptcy. Since someone committed credit card fraud using my card a few months ago, I immediately worried someone had stolen my identity, bought a house, then went into bankruptcy, and I was liable. What followed was some frantic credit checks and preparing to drive up there, until I asked her to just photograph the papers, then send me the images. It turned out that I can be part of a class action suit, and could recover (maybe even thirty dollars!). But, naturally, it freaked me out.

I live in a different state from my parents. My father receives a lot of spam mailings about his Medicare. The problem is that occasionally, there is legitimate mail that goes to him that he needs to fill out. He worries about it a lot, and I can't always be there to read it the day he gets it, so he stresses about it until I take a look. Strange how these worry habits are passed from parent to child. For the past few years, I've taken regular trips up to review the piles of mail and sift through what was junk and what was not. He had to wait for a while for me to review some of these at times. Why we didn't hit on this solution before, I don't know.

Technology is a wonderful thing. It enables my parents to transmit images of letters within minutes, allows me to review them, then lets me send back comments and completed forms, sans signature, which my dad needs to provide. Cars have enabled me to travel from one state to another, to move more than fifty miles beyond where I was born. Scientific progress allows me to learn about more in a day than people could have learned in a lifetime three hundred years ago. Information has become cheap and plentiful, and we are all enriched for it.

Or are we? My parents could email the images, but if I lived a few blocks away, unable to move further, I could just walk over and check. I can learn so much in a day, but how much is actually useful, and perhaps more important, how much do I actually apply to life? William Kamkwamba built windmills out of junk. I read about humor and go on about my daily life. This is the problem with plenty, you no longer desire it as fully as you might if you had to work for it. People that download an inordinate amount of material tend not to use it, because there's no need to use it. It was too easy to get.

We do not respond well to being given everything, because there needs to be some sort of struggle in our daily lives in order for us to feel complete. This is why people manufacture drama, because without actual struggle, they need some sort of conflict to feel real, and alive. Buy a pot pie, it tastes OK, you forget about it. Make a pot pie (Correctly), and you remember it, and you cherish it, because you put in real work. I have handheld devices that could play music nonstop for a week. Don't really care, it's almost worthless with all that music.

With all this information, ignoring the issue of labor required to keep the physical society going, it almost gets to the point where it's not necessarily the person with the most information, but the person with the best ability to organize and sift through it. Mycroft Holmes is the person we need. Somewhere out there is an individual that doesn't even realize that all the information they're collating and storing away could be key to helping society.

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That rambled much more than what I normally write for this blog. I think the issue is that due to various changes, I'm no longer as stressed about the things in my life that stress me. As the depression disappears, so does the edge to my writing. I am always torn when an author I like finds happiness. The quality of their work drops, but on the personal level, they're happy. It's something of a push, but I guess the tie goes to the happy person. Not that there was much quality to my writing to begin with, so when I get happy, it really becomes crap.

Long story short? Expect somewhat bland and meandering posts until things go to hell in my life again.