A World Without Oil

Quick history lesson: When Earth was very, very, very, very young, its atmosphere was mostly full of carbon dioxide.  The massive oceans were full of single-cell life. Those organisms used photosynthesis, where they would take the sun's energy and carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and made food for itself. Because both of those were in massive abundance, these organism multiplied colossally. They greatly thinned out the carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, ran out of food, then died and sank to the bottom of the seas, congealing into a black goop. We know this goop as crude oil. (For the record, just because they are called fossil fuels, that does not mean that they came from dinosaurs.)

Humanity has made incredible progress in technology over its relatively short time on earth, but it has incomprehensibly exploded in the last 100 or so years. This is due entirely on the discovery of crude oil. It is a substance which provides incomprehensible amount of stored energy. And this is literally hundreds of millions of years worth of stored energy.  What is insane is that we will have burned through hundreds of millions of years of stored energy in about 2 centuries.

If you imagine a fictional world, it is almost impossible to have one without cars and plastics and all sorts of products that come from or run on oil. If you do try to make a fictional world without oil, it always sounds like you're making a medieval fantasy.

As an exercise, I really do enjoy trying to envision a world that didn't have oil. t forces you to think about what is available and how much. It forces you to think about sustainability. It really allows you to understand why things changed very slowly before oil was discovered. Everything is different in a world without oil, down to core principles and philosophies.

I challenge you to try imagining a world where crude oil never existed. How advanced could we ultimately get? How long might it take humans to reach that level? How close could we come to a world like ours today?

You Aren't Your Past Self

Have you ever seen a situation that was really screwed up, but due to the circumstances, it was hilarious? Like imagine your friend dropping a wedding cake in the middle of saying that he wasn't going to drop it. Hilarious, but wrong. 

In these situations, everybody thinks it's funny except your friend that experienced it. And invariably, one person says "it's only funny because it didn't happen to me" and another person will say "this is the kind of thing you will look back on and laugh at."

When paired together, they make a curious thought. Maybe, the reason that a negative experience is only funny when a lot of time has passed is that you are a different person by then. In that case, you would be looking at your past self the way you would look at a stranger. And when enough new experiences have come your way, your past self will truly be as estranged and ignorant as a general stranger and deserves to be treated as such. 

This, of course, flies in the face of "common sense", but that is of little consequence. What matters is managing the idea that we are actually not the same people were, and how drastically it can change people's views. 

Lose Yourself To Dance

One of the songs on the new Daft Punk album is called "Lose Yourself to Dance" and that line is repeated several times through the song. As I hear it and ponder the phrase, I realize that there are two distinct interpretations one could have. 

The first idea is like "lose yourself to the dance". It's like this command that people dance so much and so thoroughly that they lose their sense of self and instead move to the will of the music. Admittedly, this is the idea that I think is intended. 

The other thought, though, is like "lose yourself in order to dance". It's more of a prerequisite - you may not dance until you lose yourself. I kind of like this concept because it speaks to all the nervous wallflowers out there who don't feel comfortable letting loose (or the people who think they need to get drunk to be able to dance).

I often think about how amazing it is that a slight change in one word can totally change the interpretation of a sentence, but this is a whole new level. This doesn't even need different words to do that. 

I think the concept of "lose yourself to dance" is interesting, both because it has these different interpretations and because the ideas of those interpretations are compelling to explore. There is much fertile material to play with (and it's a pretty sweet song, too), so have fun. 

Understanding Ideas With Their Opposites

A friend of mine posed the thought that one cannot understand something without experiencing its opposite. We cannot know good without bad, happy without sad, sweet without bitter, warm without cold, etc. I immediately shot down the idea.

We can understand what sweet things are without knowing what bitterness is. Sweet things taste awesome and make us happy. We know what happiness is. It is a feeling of ecstatic joy. I said that the idea was ancient bunk.

About a week later, after having mulled it over in my head, I returned to the subject, with a fuller understanding and better words:

Things that are rare are special. It is inherent to the human psyche (I think). When you live in high altitudes, mountains are not special. That's just how the background looks. But when you see a beach and the ocean, it blows your mind. The same thing is true when the person living on the coast sees the mountains in real life.

If a person grows up in a life of privilege, eating the finest food and wearing the finest clothes, they certainly enjoy them because they are nice. But they cannot appreciate how much better they are than scraps and rags because they have never had to wear low quality clothes or eat poor people food.

So, a person whose first relationship is with a kind soul will still be able to appreciate the good relationship, but somebody who has had several horrible relationships before finding a nice person will appreciate it significantly more.

I Prefer Parentheses (Personally)

I think one of the more interesting parts of language (both written and spoken), is seeing how scattered one's thoughts are. People have a tendency to throw a lot of information at us and it tends to come in all jumbled. First drafts, especially, show us the thoughts as they come into the author's head, and these thoughts are sorted in a few different possible ways.

Some people use hyphens or dashes. These present a natural break in the thought - ideas can be inserted without worrying too much about mechanical grammar/syntax - and the original idea can be continued unimpeded.

Most people use parenthetical commas. It is the smoothest way to introduce information, a little mark to begin and to end a separate thought, and is best used when the inserted thoughts are more supplemental to the original thought.

Lastly, there are actual parentheses. They work the same way as parenthetical commas, but they use a different symbol (a bolder, more powerful one to me). Parentheses really make things stick out, more than dashes and commas.

In general, I prefer parentheses. They are the natural way that I add distinct thoughts and I find them clean and efficient. However, it should be noted that I actually use all three forms that I've mentioned. Each one has a different feel, and thus, a different function for communication. Understanding how these symbols have slightly different effects on the way a reader interprets your sentences will give you more tools at your disposable and a finer palette with which to tell your stories.

The Value Of Rings

Rings are strange things to me. They don't really do anything. They just sit on your finger. When I was a kid, it really bothered me why people wore rings because they had no use. 

The first thing that really changed my view was hearing one of the oldest uses for them: transporting wealth. Imagine that you lived in a time before paper money or bank notes. If you wanted to pick and move from one town to another, how would you transfer all of your money there? It would be really heavy to fill a trunk with copper pieces, and so would it attract a lot of unwanted attention. 

What people would do is purchase a fancy ring with a big gemstone in it and in exchange you give everything you weren't going to take with you. When they reach their new town, they can then sell that ring for the money they might need in this new place. 

So rings didn't have to do anything; their value is being a very condensed form of wealth. It is in their portability and simplicity that we can see its value. 

With that in mind, I thought to the wedding ring, or more so the engagement ring. These things are expensive. And some people feel like the more expensive it is, the more it means. Originally, they were a form of payment or dowry. The giver of the ring showed how much he cared for and valued the woman by offering this attractive and valuable ring to her. As times change, some people care about the exchange rate of the ring, but others care more about the story of it (did it belong to somebody important? was it purchased together on a special day?)

In all cases, one simple thing becomes clear about rings: the value of rings is based on what it represent, not what it does. And being able to walk around with an item of great value wrapped around your finger at all times is admittedly pretty awesome. 

Normal vs. Special

I've heard it said that people spend their childhood wishing they were normal and their adulthood wishing they were special. This isn't always completely correct though. Sometimes the opposite happens. Sometimes the change in either direction never occurs. What really matters here is the principle behind it.

People who are special feel isolated. They cannot connect with others because they don't have a common ground or a common means of communication. Feeling alone is counter to the social needs of humanity.

The problem is that people who are normal feel boring. We generally prize rarity. The more common something is, the less valuable it becomes. So if you are perfectly normal, you are basically worthless. You are in interchangeable cog in the mechanism of life.

What makes this the worst is that these two feelings are diametrically opposed. Being normal makes you not special. Being special makes you not normal. Ultimately, one must realize where in the spectrum they lie, where they want to be, and must find happiness where they end up.

File this one under "just as true for authors as it is for their characters".