the way things change

change is in the air. i can feel it.

the one big ability our mortality affords us is the ability and motivation to change*. changes come in all stripes: good, bad, positive, negative, reinforcing, deconstructing; what those stripes are depend on your interpretation. are zebras white equines with black stripes, or black equines with white swaths of hair**? someone go shave a zebra please.

apart from the subjective changes, there are also objective changes: categories of change that have no element of interpretation.

i have a pair of stereo headphones that came with a little radio i got back in the late 90s. i thought they were cool, because of the way they wrapped around my head and bent to fit into my ears. i've used them consistently as computer headphones for the past 2 years. a few weeks ago, i noticed that the sound from the left side was noticably missing. after doing a quick diagnosis (plug in different speakers/headphones while running the same video), i've concluded that this pair of headphones has changed, i.e. failed, just through the daily grind of being worn and translating electronic pulses into timpanic vibrations. this kind of change is what i would call an Environmental Change, like erosion or tectonic motion; it just happens.

Environmental Changes can be positive or negative; by positive, i mean additive, like how the Mississipi River deposits silt at the Gulf of Mexico to form a delta, and by negative, i mean subtractive, like winds of the Arctic carve away at boulders.

the other objective change is the Deliberate Change, where an agent or sentient force exacts a premeditated alteration to something that is not operating in the desired way. in psychological terms, this would probably be Operant Conditioning. when i first started to use my laptop, it would not connect to wireless networks automatically, requiring mouse movement to click on the network manager icon and selection of the desired network. you know how much i hate unnecessary mouse movement***. so in an effort to become more efficient, i exacted a change that allowed me to connect to networks automatically, but sacrificed a hardware button to turn off my wireless card. this resulted in further changes, whereby the wireless card was disabled through keyboard shortcut. the rest of the story is documented in its entirety in a previous post.

by nature, or by intervention, i am being positioned for something promising and interesting. old paradigms crumble in place of different, and hopefully better ones.

* yes, BSG viewers, i totally swiped that from Natalie-Six.
** polar bears have black skin and clear fur.
*** i know some people that still click the Enter button with their mice after entering something into a form field.