Giving Thanks...

So here it is, Thanksgiving again.

I make it a habit to be thankful for the things i have.  Like, wisdom.  My good health, such as it is, in between bouts of cold and flu season.  A roof over my head.  Some little bit of money in my pocket.  That my eyesight may not be great but i at least I am not as blind as some people with better vision.

I am thankful the elections are over.  Despite what was won or lost this election, politics is always going to be about who is the better liar, until it becomes a contest to see who can live up to their campaign promises, which it should ideally be.  If even half of what they said, they tried to do, the world would be a better place.  Because seriously, who votes for someone who promises to do bad things and then lives up to that promise?

I am thankful it's the holiday season.  Good food abounds.  Christmas music plays constantly on the radio.  I am thankful for the simple things in life.

I am thankful I have the freedom to be annoyed by completely trivial things.  Like, wtf is up with movies and people with glasses?  Check out The Mummy to see what I am talking about.  Not the original horror film, the adventure comedy type thing with brendan frasier that came out in the 90's.  I actually love watching that movie for several reasons, one i think rachel weisz is hot, two i love egyptology and three, that movie is full of magic, undead, killer beetles, mummies and all manner of godly intervention.  Definitely qualifies as monster movie fare.  Arnold Vosloo plays the mummy, imhotep, extremely well.  i think they should make a 4th mummy movie and bring him back.  He kicks ass.  But back to my point.  In the first movie, there's this guy.  He's one of the ones that brings down a curse on himself by opening up the box with the canopic jars that contain Anuk-sun-amon's organs.  At least, i think that's how you spell her name, the chick Imhotep is trying to resuscitate.  So he's the first victim of Imhotep, he gets chased down a pyramid hallway and OOPS!  he trips and his glasses fall off.  DAMMIT!  Now he can't see AT ALL!  But, it doesn't really work that way.  Three things anyone with glasses can tell you.  One, you can still see SOMETHING without your glasses on.  Even me, with my bad eyesight, often walk around my house when i misplace my glasses, wondering where I put them.  I don't bump into walls, I don't feel around in front of me, going "I CAN'T SEE!  WHERE ARE MY GLASSES I AM NOW BLIND!" with my eyes closed.  I can even, occasionally, see where I put my glasses without actually having them on.  And I NEED them to see.  Two, when you need your glasses to see, you are pretty well aware of where they are at all times, even when they fall off.  It's the movie equivalent of an assassin dropping his gun during a fight or something.  Even if he can't get to it right away, he knows about where it went, it's just something he makes a mental note of so  he can retrieve it later.  Same thing with glasses.  The only time you ever forget where your glasses might be is if they are off your person for an extended period of time.  Which I have done.  At no point when my glasses were off, did I suddenly close my eyes, drop to the ground, and start feeling around for them.  lol  Three, the last thing you do is close your eyes.  Glasses are generally hard to replace unless you have extremely minor vision problems.  So you are using what eyesight you have to try and locate them immediately...  not feeling around in the dirt with your eyes closed.  Also, if you note the glasses in the Mummy (and this is usually the case with anyone who loses their glasses in movies) the lenses are so thin that the person probably didn't need them to see to begin with, and yet they always immediately shut their eyes and start feeling around on the ground for them, which conveniently lets some other person step on them and break them.  Utter silliness. Luckily mine are made of flexible metal and unbreakable plastic, because I'd be lost for days without a new pair if mine ever broke.  lol

Something else that bugs me.  So I'm talking to my nephew earlier, and somehow we got into a discussion about physics.  Basically, because it contained math and he hates math.  Which is fine, I am not that much of a math lover, either.  in fact, to illustrate my point about math being bad, i mentioned the "Great Attractor" that's supposedly pulling galaxies towards it at an unprecedented rate.  I basically told him that the great attractor was probably just a math error, as was the supposed "dark matter" controversy.  The controversy being, physicists were running numbers in math equations, something they've been doing for years, and instead of the normal results, they get numbers that indicate most of the matter in the universe is stuff we can't actually see.  So physicists begin pushing this "dark matter" theory, which is akin to religion, for me.  I mean, look at the parallels.  "There's a great being in the sky who controls everything and loves us and created us and guides us.  YOu can't ever prove that he exists or doesn't exist, but trust us, he's THERE."  and in the dark matter theory: "There's this dark matter and energy that we can't see or feel or detect in any way, but it's all around us and it shapes the whole universe.  Trust us, the math says it's THERE."  It sounds totally made up to me, and I am a man used to hearing lies.  I assume the lies are covering up a math error that no one has discovered yet.  I hope to be proven right eventually, because I know one thing for certain, 100% sure...  Humans make a lot of mistakes.  lol  Now here's what confuses me.  Because my nephew had never HEARD of the great attractor, he basically told me I was an idiot.  I'm not really sure why me being an idiot is a fallback position for him, but it is.  He is convinced that scientists do not believe there is a thing called the great attractor and that they do not believe galaxies are being pulled towards it, because, as I said, he'd never heard of it.  I even provided him with a couple links to the topic, so that he would understand that it was a real thing and not something i just made up to try and fool him, for some strange reason, and he refused to read the links because one was wikipedia and another was a forum topic.  Honestly, i didn't bother trying to push the discussion any further, because I know the difference between ignorance and stupidity.

Let me explain in case you don't know.  Ignorance is the simple fact of not knowing something.  Stupidity is not only not knowing something, but not wanting to know it.  These may not be the textbook definitions, but this is how I compare them.  I am, for instance, mostly ignorant about car engines.  I know the basic principles of how they work, but I do not know a thing about how to fix or maintain them.  Now, I am also stupid about car engines.  I do not want to know how to fix them, mostly because the idea of me sliding under a car and getting oil, grease and dirt all over myself while trying to find a problem I know nothing about seems ludicrous to me. Just makes more sense to let a professional fix the issue, someone who knows what they are doing, so i know it's been done right, instead of trying to fix it myself and maybe gumming it up (humans make a lot of mistakes, remember?).  So I refuse almost any attempt others make to show me how to do something to fix a car.  It's not that I am proud of my ignorance (like some people are proud of not knowing a thing about science and adhering to religion to solve all their problems), it's just that I realize cars are complex machines that require extensive knowledge to repair effectively, and again, humans like me make a lot of mistakes.  So yes, I am not only ignorant about engines but I am stupid about them.  There are other things in life I am ignorant of, like computer programming, that I would dearly love to learn, but have not had the time or the opportunity to do so yet.  Just because I am ignorant of something, does not make me a bad person.  Let me also say, being stupid does not make me a bad person, either, it's just that stupid people are hard to reason with.  Mostly because they are being stupid, and don't WANT to know any better.

Much like my nephew was being stupid when he told me the great attractor doesn't actually exist and I am badly misinformed because I happen to keep up on astrophysics.  And in fact, he may be right about it not existing (i happen to agree and think it's a math error, as I said), but it's not because I am badly misinformed.  His own ignorance/stupidity may blind him to the latest research in physics until such a time as they've explained what exactly is going on there.  In any case, it's not that my nephew is a bad person, it's just that I recognized that he did not WANT to know about what i was talking about, so he ridiculed me and told me my links were useless because I hadn't thoroughly researched my topic and had scientifically proven references handy.  lol  And because I recognized he didn't know, and didn't want to know (and thus, was being stupid by my definition), I let him go back to playing computer games.  Which of course, is a noble pastime in and of itself.  :-D

I suppose being intelligent isn't really about knowing things.  It's about knowing that there are things out there that I DON'T know, and recognizing my limits.  So perhaps I can take pride in not knowing a damn thing about cars, because chances are good that, in my ignorance, I would screw things up horribly whilst trying to fix a broken engine, and so I am proud that I am wise enough to leave that sort of thing up to the people who know more than I do.  So even if i were the most ignorant person in the world, simple recognition of that fact would make me smarter than most, who think because they think they know something, they are smarter.  For me, it's always been a case of, the longer I live, the more I recognize that I really know absolutely nothing.

So when are the young going to learn this simple truth?  That everyone actually knows almost nothing, and what little knowledge we have is based solely on our point of view?  Who knows.  All I know is, even when I was young, I knew this.

And I am thankful for that, too.  Happy Thanksgiving everyone.  I hope you didn't over stuff yourself with too much turkey, but I know most of you did, just like me.  lol  Always remember, being smart doesn't mean you don't make mistakes, it just means you might recognize that you make them, and can learn from that.  If you want to.  :-)  Me, I want to keep making that eating too much on Turkey Day mistake.  I am wise enough to know to enjoy good food when it's handy.  ;-)