Life as Metaphor

 bs"d
i wish the government rulers would just duke it out and leave the civilians out of this...

i have decided to post filtered journal-entries from now on (i am simply not much of an exhibitionist!)...

all new friends should understand that this journal will only be readable to those who know how to speak politely.... and also know that i am finished with the "Facebook" mentality and methods of that sort of social-media....
 
the Orwellian "thought police" behavior is not welcome in this journal.... everyone is entitled to their own opinions but no bullying or trashing each other will be tolerated –– there are manners to disagree with someone while not being intentionally malicious... 

be warned: i am a bookaholic and a bit of a hyper-graphic sort of person; so if long rambling posts annoy you, then you probably should not add me to your friends list...

but i do suspect it might happen soon..... wait, now that i think about it ----

i must confess, i was very much addicted to signing into my FB in the morning (during breakfast) to see if anyone had commented to the night before's post, and feeling so happy to see that a handful of good (possible) friends were talking to me... but it was getting so pathetically silent that i watched the numbers going down for years (and this has nothing to do with losing my friends to covid!)...

i think i was simply boring everyone away.... i also suspect that people that were actually *reading* what friends had written, was decreasing at an alarming rate... the majority of FB-users appear to just wanna see memes and go thru "groups" and fotos..... whenever i read any comment or (supposed!) post, they were often forgetting their ABCs....

i am currently reading a book called "Irresistible" that discusses behavioral addiction and how sites such as FB and Instagram are feeding off of humans' weaknesses... he hasn't mentioned anything about the loss of literacy that we might get from using those sites, but if he DOES mention it, i seriously will not be surprised...

you can "hear" a person's tech. devise when you read what they have written.... i can always hear that a person is using a cell-fon while punching words into a comment... their words are often reduced to abbreviations or single letters, and misspelled words galore (even worse than my own)... the worst aspect of this fon-speak is that whatever they say might sound very cold...

a few years ago, i was surfing the net and coming across a webpage that showed pictures taken of microalgae... i noticed that the admins of that page did not have any fotos of a particular algae that i actually had growing in my dining-room (NOTE : this isn't because my dining room was filthy ;) ... it was back in the days when i kept my cultures and microscope in that room; it was my substitute-lab)... i sent the admins a letter and told them that i had pictures of that algae, and they can use them for their site...

after i sent this email, i ended up having a quick friendship with a doctor (of phychology) at that University... we had a wonderful conversation developing in email.. he even sent me a manuscript of a poetry book (he was translating from German)... but then one day he sent me a rather curt, snappy, rather cold and disinterested in what i had just said to him in our last email.. i was shocked and convinced that i had said or done something terribly wrong... i realized that he was giving me the cold shoulder and i simply stopped writing him...

then after a month or so, i wondered what had happened between us, so i went back to our emails, hoping to see what had set him off like that.... i re-read *all* of it, and still none of it made sense UNTIL i finally saw that tiny little alert at the bottom of his last note -- it told me that he had sent that note from his fon.

wow. i think that etiquette is taking a far back-seat in our modern SUV of online-relationships...

– Chavah & co.

 one good thing about menopause is the cleaning every room in your home (not metaphorically speaking), but after a bit of that you find yourself cleaning your email addies, and next comes cleaning your closets (this time, metaphorically) –– erasing "friends" form LJ....

i don't use LJ anymore... the site became a wasteland to me, strangely a lot of this "leaping" seems to have taken place around 2012... i have no idea if it was FB or the Russkies, but i am sure that both played a part...

the majority of friends on my DW page are all just links to the LJ-folk... if i have no idea who the journal name is/was, i immediately delete them.. and if i click on their journals and see the top posts being a DECADE old, you can guess what i do...

you will laugh to hear that i am looking at journal names and thinking "hm, i like that name" and clicking, seeing a journal that i created myself... this gives me a little pang-imme-chest .. talk about bittersweet...

no regrets, though..
– Chavah & co.

 was thinking about this as soon as i woke up today... i had a memory pop into my head, of looking thru my microscope at madly wiggling chloroplasts in a leaf, from a plant of mine... the chloroplasts were visibly "lively", and swam around a multitude of cells -- i had to smile.... but then i was done looking at these moving little bits of the plant, took off the slide and brushed the slide (and the plant leaf) into the garbage.... i then did the same with the plant i had pulled the leaf from, because the plant itself was obviously "dead" in spite of all the moving organelles that still inhabited it...

i changed my behavior a bit later... i originally had done this because i assumed that every microorganism that was living within the plant was aerobic and would ergo suffocate now that the plant was no longer taking part in respiration --- but i late considered the "rights" of the anaerobic microbials that were dwelling in the plant-body, and would continue to live there, after the plant had been thrown away.... so i had then decided that i would throw the shredded-plants/plant-parts into a small bucket of dirt (my new garbage bin) and then onto the soil outside my building (after i was done in the lab)....

but it is tricky to label the chloroplasts (along with mitochondria) as actually alive when they are so tied to the cells/organisms in order to continue to exist... chloroplasts are completely dependent on the host-cell in order to reproduce and that is a clincher of earning the title of "alive".... so being wiggly and creation of its own food aside, the chloroplast can't make new chloroplasts, ergo, they are not alive...

however, in the case of the mitochondria, they can divide themselves (replicating) independent of the activity of the cell --- is the mitochondria alive? it is certainly more alive than the chloroplasts.... in either case, neither organelle can survive independent of the cells... 

the habit of the government, public media, and consumer products, don't seem to be at all interested in teaching the human population the truth about microorganisms.... instead they just tell them all that they want to, in order to get the humans to react in a way that is beneficial for the "speaker" : i.e. "this soap will kill viruses", "wearing this mask will block the viruses"[1], "this shot will kill the virus", etc....

the bottom line is that it is impossible to kill a virus, because a virus is not alive.

anyone who has taken Microbiology 101 could tell you that.

viruses do not create or seek their own food.... viruses do not reproduce or replicate themselves (they need the host to do this for them).... they are not made out of cells (more like DNA/RNA in a tiny corked bottle)... they can not stabilize their own body.... they do not ever grow or morph their "capsule" on their own: how they are built/born is how they were remain until coming into contact with a host.... 

speaking with a friend (who was a working virologist and had a PhD), he told me that it is closer to the truth to state that viruses can be *broken*, such as their capsid / surface of proteins / envelope being damaged and exposing the DNA/RNA to the elements (and making them unable to successfully invade a host).... 

ways to crack the evil-nut are with a human's/etc. immune system or mild radiation (i.e. ultra-violet light)...


it is so strange to think of a non-living organism causing us harm, but it makes sense when we think that many chemical compounds can do the same thing...

we should never forget that "life" is over valued at times as something which has "rights" over everything else... but do not forget that if you keep driving our focus deeper and deeper into an entity you come to realize that all living creatures are made (ruled) but innumerable non-living organelles/components --- we are the living, that is controlled by the non-living.

shalom! - Zora & co.

[1] the protection provided to the mask-wearer is questionable (it is safer to self-isolate, keep distant and have good hygiene); but it might be helpful to the other people that the mask-wearer comes near; by minimizing the water droplets in the mask-wearers breath, that carry many viruses, but the breathing holes of the masks are too large to stop the viruses themselves.

 i am sitting here eating breakfast and had to smile because Rossini came on the classical-music TV-channel... all i could see in my head was Bugs Bunny! hahaha.....

we might want to make fun of ourselves, for how so many of us were often exposed to classical music via cartoons, but the truly sad part is that i wonder how often modern children are exposed to classical music....

do they all get music lessons in school? are they practicing instruments every day, after school?
bs"d

sometimes i have this scene playing in my head (i think i saw it in a movie a while ago)... in it there are a professional group of "mourners"... a group of people who were actually paid to walk in in a funeral procession, wailing and moaning... in the scene i see mostly these twin girls (i think they were orphans who were supporting themselves)... and i see the girls getting on their knees, moaning and rubbing sand into their hair....

i have no IDEA where the hell i saw this, or what sort of movie it was in, but i know that it was set in ancient Egypt... have any of you heard of doing this? (rubbing the sand in your hair)...

and btw, i see this scene whenever i hear of a death of a human (as though the Collective is reminding me), and i think about the girls moaning/rubbing-hair and how they actually didn't even know the person that was getting buried... it makes me think about so much of the "visible" mourning of the living might very well be for public-relations (this is obviously NOT true for all the crying mourners, many of the tears are genuine)......

never forget, that when someone you love dies, however you are feeling is COMPLETELY correct for you... don't ever feel obligated to shed a tear to prove to the world that you care about them... crocodile tears (or affectations of sadness) at funerals, or when speaking of a departed love one, are *very* nauseating for us empaths (and don't forget, we e's are more numerous than you would think) bs"d

i decided to study the book Logical Labyrinth by Raymond Smullyan (with hopes of not losing my WHOLE left-hemisphere to this menopause)...

i am going to just type one of the puzzles per night, if anyone has thoughts to share, feel free!

and the following day i will post the next puzzle for that day, and the solution of the day before....

here is today's puzzle:

Edgar Abercrombie was an anthropologist who was particularly interested in the logic and sociology of "lying" and "truth telling". One day he decided to visit a cluster of islands where a lot of lying and truth-telling activity was going on! The first island of his visit was the Island of Knights and Knaves. (Knights always tell the truth; Knaves always lie)

PROBLEM 1.1 (a classic case): On the day of his arrival, Abercrombie came across three inhabitants, whom we will call A, B and C. He asked A: "Are you a knight or a knave?" A answered, but so indistinctly that Abercrombie could not understand what he said. He then asked B: "What did he say?" B replied: "He said that he is a knave." At this point, C piped up and said: "Don't believe that; it's a lie!"
Was C a knight or a knave?

 the Ethics class starts on Tues.... by then i should have *all* of the first 3 weeks readings (have read all of the textbook chapters, highlighted the virtual-book and wrote a gazillion notes).... so during the class' 5 weeks, i only have to read 2 of the week's textbook-chapters.... i have enough notes to help me participate with the class and spend the majority of time concentrating on writing the class' weekly papers....

as for the Microbiology class, i have finished my portion of this week's team's project (finished it yesterday), and only have one more post i have to make to the class discussion... ❤️ BS"D.

 a very very odd set of dreams last night.... one right after the other.. usually, when i  wake up to go to the bathroom, it's like rebooting my brain and cases me to start a totally new dream, just as i fall asleep, but this wasn't the case last night...

the first dream i remember an ex-boyfriend (a boy i dated back when i was 17-18ish)....we were together for a couple years, until he decided to commit to a gf that he was seeing at college (yes, this was one of my first experiences of being with a "player").... last night i remember him kissing me a bit and looking at me with a very warm look to his face.. it was as though he were trying to memorize my face.... then i had to pee.

i walk to the bathroom thinking about how odd the dream was, i hadn't really thought of him for decades.... climb back into bed, assuming that i was about to have a new dream.... guess again.

and yes, i had to tinkle 3 times that night (i'm coming up on 50, what do you expect).. and each time i fell asleep again, BAM, there he was...

nothing really "happened", there wasn't a long drawn out amounts of items/entities that i was interacting with, just a lot of sitting there while he stared at me (and i was trying to figure out why this was happening)...

the really disturbing part is that he wasn't acting like a "dream person" more like a "dead person"!... this is exactly how my beloved friends/family interact with me JUST as they die (and maybe a couple months or so after).... it had me a bit perturbed! is M. dead??

i googled his full name with the word "obituary" and clicked on the Images tab and nothing popped up that resembled him....

i have to assume that perhaps he happened to be thinking of that dorky/artsy little girl that he slept with during school breaks.

shalom! - Juju & co.