We’re not always happy. This isn’t just about me. I’m not sure why anyone would want to be happy all the time. Or sad. Or some gray, in-between. Any person with eyes that see the world could not possibly remain happy. Nor could they remain sad. If they do, something is has gone wrong. Some part of their vision of themselves, or of the world, has become blocked and set into a reinforcing loop.

Oddly, I’m reminded of a science fiction movie I saw years ago, where a machine could record people’s thoughts and feelings. And those thoughts and feelings could be played back into another, for them to fully experience. At one point, a scientist recorded himself having sex with someone, and one of his colleagues spliced the recording so that the orgasm was played over and over again, continuously. He was found a day later, staring ahead with a peculiar blank look upon his face, mildly twitching and completely disconnected from reality. I have little doubt the result would be the same, with pain.

The experiences we have in life are transitory; lived and then left only within our memories. It is the curse, and the blessing of our consciousness as it moves through time, that we might only experience a singular moment, and then it is gone. And yet some part of ourselves remembers, and some part of ourselves anticipates the future, and another part paints shades of color onto all we see and know around us, colored by our memory and colored by what we imagine might be. And this is how, as each of our true moments pass, that our histories steer our way into our future.

Psychologists like to enter a person’s past to uncover those memories which exert a force upon our present perceptions. The goal is to “integrate” problem memories, through a process of discovery and acceptance. Only then, they believe, can our futures be unfold how they ought to, with those biases and predispositions tamed. On the other hand, psychiatrists will often leave memories however they might be, unexplored, and instead will dole out drugs meant to “balance” the chemicals within our brains to help us become happier, with little regard to our life’s experiences.

Eastern philosophies often take a different approach. For them, there is little separation between the mind and the body. What happens to our psychology becomes manifest within the body. And conversely, what happens to the body, becomes manifest within the mind. They are inseparable. They are aware that memories cannot be simply reasoned into behaving, any more than a cancer in the body will leave the mind untouched when it is cured. Their notion for our betterment is the unblocking of all that accumulates within us, in both body and mind, to achieve a harmony – even when the harmony achieved is different from how we imagine ourselves to be. In fact, how we imagine ourselves to be is a blockage in and of itself. For while we are alive, we are forever changing.

It may seem strange to ask this question: “what is the difference between psychology and yoga?” The psychologist archetype would look at you funny and answer, psychology is a science while yoga is exercise. However, a yogi would answer quite differently: “psychology is about confusion and suffering. Yoga is about bliss.” But bliss is really just a word that westerners easily understand. The actual word is samadhi. It is not happy. And it is not sad. Nor is it some gray in-between. It is an integration and acceptance of all that we are, physically, mentally and spiritually — an integration that is experienced wholly in the moment — an empty yet wholly connected balance of our essence.

Interestingly, this is true for more than just yoga. Similar thinking is prevalent in Kung Fu, Tai Chi, Chi Gong, Tui Na, and even various eastern religions. I suppose it is not too surprising that a more holistic approach to medicine, which we are only just now adopting in the West, comes to us, in large part, from civilizations thousands of years older than our own. But I do admit, and so do they, that Western medicine is much better at treating broken bones, or other various traumatic injuries that Eastern medicine, as well as many physical diseases.

What we cannot overlook, though, is the totality of the person. To set a broken shin is not to balance the forces of the body, through the hips, and into the other leg, to relieve the small turning that will result in the spine and travel up into the neck and shoulders. To treat the psychological effects of PTSD is not to alleviate the memories stored in the body through tightening inward, and the quick motions of alert musculature. So often people are simply left to suffer whatever fate they feel befalls them from various injuries, both physical and psychological, and to assume that their lot is sealed, when in actuality, they are only half healed.

It is a time of injury, for many people right now. Injuries of all types and sizes, both superficial, and ones that run very deep. Be conscious of the blockages you have. You can feel them within both your mind and your body. This is not your fate, except in very rare circumstances. But it is your choice.

All good change begins in humility, moving through openness and finally that small bit of bravery. Look beyond what you are, and what you know. Because what you know, is really just illusion, in a universe of change. And that is you.

Neutron stars are insanely wild things, a little like a failed black hole, where all the matter gets squished up super tight, but can’t fit down the drain – and that does very bizarre things to that matter. And these stars spin like nobody’s business – around 1,000 times per second, and all with intense gravitational and magnetic fields that shred any matter into their component parts.

Neutron stars are dead stars, of a sort, but they die so spectacularly that they are left in a state where they can carry on indefinitely by sucking from other things. If you’re interested, I have a short little piece called Life From the Undead about Betelgeuse, a red giant star very near to us that could well explode in our lifetime into a supernova, with its core collapsing into a neutron star, that would light up our skies for days.

But the point of this piece is to let you know of a new discovery of an actual atmosphere discovered around a neutron star. An atmosphere of carbon, of all things. There is very little hydrogen and helium as you might expect, and it is suspected that the intense temperature of the newly-formed baby neutron star was hot enough to cause nuclear fusion even around its surface, which produced this carbon.

It’s a stunning insight into the life cycle of supernovas and neutron stars. And as such, a stunning insight into the processes that happen, all the time, all around us – the same processes that coalesced to form the material of our bodies, and all the solid things we perceive around us.

The International Space Fellowship has a great little article on this discovery.

Our leaders somehow just found $700 billion for the Pentagon to keep it running for just one more year. In comparison, the worst case scenario for the health reform price tag with a public option is $100 billion for one year. Often news outlets say that health care reform will cost $1 trillion, but what they don’t say is that it is spread out over 10 years. For the Pentagon and intelligence agencies, we spend over $1 trillion each year. If we look at the Wall Street bailout, the cost so far, including loans, is more than $3 trillion. So really, health care reform is just a very small drop in the bucket. And supporters even propose to pay for health care reform by raising taxes slightly on the wealthiest people in the country, so that it won’t cost us anything extra in budget deficits.

Still, I cannot understand how our leaders are so eager to give away our tax dollars to a perpetual war machine, and to corporate criminals who were likely very well aware of their nefarious actions upon our economy even as they committed them. Poorer people are having their property taken away by the very banks who caused the economic crisis, while those same banks continue getting more money and benefits from taxpayers. And yet so many of our leaders continue to claim we do not have enough money to care for our own people who cannot afford medical care. The insurance companies might lose profits. And if they do, our leaders fear that campaign contributions from the lucrative health insurance lobbies might take a significant hit. Right now corporate health concerns have six hired lobbyists for each and every member of congress and are spending well over a million dollars per day trying to control any health care reform that might happen.

Over the last few days I have had the fortune of reconnecting with an old friend who happened to spend years serving in our country’s military, including the Gulf War. The effects upon him from his service are apparent, physically, emotionally and mentally. Thankfully, he was both smart enough and humble enough to recognize that he needed help dealing with his situation, and has got some. But tragically, all at his own expense.

You see, our defense and intelligence agencies, despite their monstrous budgets, won’t pay for any of his medical treatment, neither physical nor psychological. And since we provide no health care for our own citizens, he has paid for his own recovery as best he can out of his own pocket. This has not been easy since some of the physical ailments suffered afterward left him hospitalized multiple times, and once with brain surgery for an infection that was somehow related to his lungs. He suffers from several chronic symptoms and has lost an inordinate amount of body mass. To top it all off, he also developed diabetes, requiring regular insulin injections, even though his family members have no history of diabetes. Interestingly, the Department of Defense and the Veterans Administration only recently acknowledged that the onset of diabetes was directly correlated to Vietnam Veteran’s exposure to chemicals, after more than 30 years of keeping people hoping for some type of financial assistance. Many of the symptoms exhibited by Gulf War veterans can be explained by similar autoimmune problems resulting from chemical exposure, including heavy pesticide use, forced inoculations for anthrax with vaccines unapproved by the FDA, experimental pills for biological weapons effect mitigation, and even such things as 300 tons of depleted uranium being dispersed in the skies. Yet these veterans are forced to claw their way through a dizzying maze of paperwork and departments to even prove they were deployed soldiers, let alone made ill during their service, in order to have any hope of medical assistance, and even then their efforts are often thwarted by one bureaucratic dead end after another. And it certainly doesn’t help matters when the DoD loses all records related to inoculations, both for the soldiers and for any scientists who may wish to study the causes of Gulf War Syndrome. No causes have yet been determined, yet the suffering of these soldiers is very real.

It angers me that we are a country who can treat its own people so callously, sending them off to war to risk their lives under the guise of an honorable patriotism that cares for its people, and then shrinks from its own responsibility to those people after they are spent. It angers me that we cannot even care for our own people’s basic medical needs. Because if we did care, at least these veterans would not need to try begging money to find treatment from the hands of those who sent them to die in the name of honor. Honor that is apparently nothing more than marketing tactics to the armed forces. It is clear: any claim to honor rests solely within the soldier alone. To our armed forces agencies, any notion of honor is meaningless. As meaningless as honor is to a medical insurance company, or any person who would deny anyone, soldier or not, the care of a physician in their illness or suffering.

I started writing this piece as a cost comparison to help us realizes the priorities our leaders have when allocating our public money. Their words are duplicitous, and any claims toward acting in our best interest are outrageous. Yes, that is a gross generalization. However, the voices of the very few leaders who genuinely do place our best interests first are drown out or marginalized into ineffectual whispers by the large money interests.

This friend I mentioned has, though he will not admit it, become demoralized trying for so many years to get the help he deserves, in futility, even as he continues to suffer with his afflictions. I am going to do all that I can to help him. Right now, he is grateful to me, but also laughing at me, saying he approached it with similar zeal until the bureaucratic behemoth finally beat him down. I expect all of you to help. Public money is our money, not just big company’s money. And we need to be there, for each other.

And for you conservatives who feel you know what honor is, look at yourselves. You cannot say it is honorable and necessary sending someone to die, yet dishonorable or unnecessary to help save someone’s life. To believe that is the mindset of a sociopath.

It’s one of those days where too little sleep leaves me unwilling to work, yet not tired enough to go sprawl out in bed. Such is the season of gas-powered leaf blowers wielded by morning-fixated do-gooders, who you can’t really condemn because their sheer weight in numbers grants them some ephemeral right to produce blaring noise outside your window.

So I’ll kill some time writing about something most of you will find completely uninteresting.

Not long ago I started another big project that requires the use of programming languages. I was a late-comer to object-oriented programming, and never really understood it until I gritted my teeth and dug into the formal structures. This, despite several times asking Anthony to explain it to me, which he tried, valiantly to do. It is, perhaps, like the concept of recursion – it just happens to you one day, and from that day forward, it just makes sense.

I would have explained it better than Anthony, though, I think, who focused upon the semantics. Object oriented programming is almost exactly like procedural programming, except that your functions have their own namespace (class), and multiple functions can be grouped together within that namespace (methods), sharing variables (properties) between them, or with a scope limited to a given function (method).

I think that would have made me understand object-oriented programming much easier, but through hindsight, it’s impossible to say. My apologies, Anthony, if I drove you nuts back then, trying to get me to understand the concepts and their relevance.

Object-oriented programming has become fairly well the de-facto way of programming for most applications. The sales pitch is, you can create logical objects that can be re-used easily by other programs, and it helps keep your code organized, both physically and logically, simply by adhering to the tenets of object-oriented programming. And, you can make changes in one place, without worrying that it will break other parts of your system, as long as you adhere to your defined interfaces and abstractions. It’s almost like utopia, really. Well, until you get there.

Like just about anything, it sounds great until you bring it home and live with it for a while. Then you like it, and you hate it, and helps you, and it gets in your way, etc., etc. What it does do, more than anything, is force you to think in terms of fitting blocks together, rather than flows. Oh, certainly, you can think in terms of flow to some degree with object-oriented programming, but only as much as blocks are allowed to flow. It becomes a balance, and a trade-off. Creativity can be messy, while organization can be restrictive. And one can come up with all sorts of reasons why one thing is worth the costs within the other.

Java is the language I was most interested in working with for this project, mostly because in all these years, I have never bothered to learn it. When it arrived it was meant to represent the pinnacle of the object-oriented approach to programming, with a minimal set of syntactical requirements, and the rest of the language’s functionality coming from the objects people would begin creating. After a while, people made quite a few objects, and they were put into various libraries. And marketing forces caused some of these libraries to be the more complex, “premium” libraries, while others remained in the core. However, after years of accumulating objects that represent the way things are to be done, there are so many objects, so many libraries, so many different standards that overlap, or duplicate effects, or are wholly incompatible, that Java appears to have reached an odd state of senility through its adherence to these organizational precepts.

That’s all well and good, I suppose – I don’t mind senility that much. But I do find it very difficult to chart a good course through the maelstrom of methodologies and standards that does not leave me in a position of reaching some dead-end to the path I have chosen to adopt, if contingencies might come into play along the way. Of course, you can always wrap this object in that one, and connect it over to here, when the original two were incompatible, but who knows what mammoth-sized baggage you’ll have to pick up and bring in along the way. It leaves me wishing, somewhat, that I could have grown senile along with it. But more, I think, happy that I did not. I’ve spent some good time with it and have learned it takes a good deal longer to accomplish many things with Java than it does using other languages. But it’s performance, after the fact, is almost worth it. For this project, no.

It’s so easy to fall back on PHP. You know why. It just fits right into web servers. No muss, no fuss, no effort. But it’s hideous, and clunky. I considered Perl as well, for the free and open fields, being object-oriented where you want, procedural, or even functional. Nothing is more versatile, even after all these years. Unfortunately, its use has become arcane to most, and I am not at all fond of ModPerl, which lets it run fast in web servers. Python is still transitioning between versions, and is fascist. Scala looks wonderful, but carries a good deal of Java baggage along with it, in the libraries, which some consider a huge benefit, while others consider it a nightmare. I’m left with the same, sad question from last year: where is my Perl 6? I’ve loved every bit of how it’s coming together. It’s gorgeous.

I’ll shamefully confess I decided to at least prototype in PHP. I’m telling myself, for prototyping, it’s just too damn convenient. Yet I also know, after having so much prototyping done, laziness will likely keep me with PHP. I need to be kicked in the head, shaken by the throat, then delicately caressed into doing something better, and more aesthetically enjoyable.

It may well be that I should back out, and just enter into the dark, murky swamp of Java, with all its quicksand and grabbing tendrils. Even though creating things is more time consuming, there is a final, satisfying quality to it, when complete. But I also don’t like company logos hanging off the various approaches I decide to take, and Java is packed with them.

The road through senility might just be the best path.