briel_brigels.jpg

Although I haven’t taken any good pictures with my phone lately, today’s Wikimedia Commons Image of the Day fits the theme of this post well, so it’s today’s thumbnail. It was taken by Agnes Monkelbaan and you can find it at https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Breil-Brigels,_Lag_da_Breil-_Flem._23-09-2022._(actm.)_11.jpg.

“Going with the flow” is something that I think I’d like to do more of. There’s a cycle that just keeps repeating: I get some momentum, I get some sleep, I get some caffeine and I start coming up with ideas. During the semester, I work on projects, I work on schoolwork, and then my sleep schedule keeps declining and declining until I catch bronchitis or something from the person across the table from me in physics class and then I feel like I’ve been hit by a truck for the rest of the week.

Maybe that was just a first-semester thing. You know, just adjusting to the germs in my new semi-faraway environment (I go to school something like seven or eight hours away by car from where I’ve lived all my life — it’s certainly not a distant land, but far enough for them to have some strains of the flu that my immune system has never seen before).

Anyway, I’d kind of assumed that I would be safe from that over the summer. I’m back home, less classes, working will make me more tired, I’ll be more relaxed — what I got, though, was the residue of that school-year energy. I keep signing up for more and more days at work and trying to make more money, coming back and studying for the summer class that I’m taking, you know, on and on… then, a few days ago, I caught some cold or whatever. Completely unrelated to everything else happening in my life.

But sometimes getting just a little bit sick is a good thing. It always changes my brain a little and makes me calmer and more reasonable. I don’t have the energy to be impulsive. I’ve been taking a shower in the morning and at night. I mean, I’m really not that bent out of shape, I’ve been living my life completely normally for the few days that I’ve had this little, you know, whatever it is — it’s been just enough to make me realize that “going with the flow” is the philosophy in life that I want to try to adhere to. I have my own beliefs and goals and ideologies and whatnot, but, like, if something is terribly beyond my control and I keep worrying about it, that won’t do anything. Cool heads and chill people get things done.

We’ve also got a giant heat wave coming in (I live in the northeastern US, which should make a good bit of sense for most people reading). It was almost a sauna outside today, but it’s supposed to keep getting hotter — with all the negative thoughts swirling around, this had climate change more on my mind than it even usually is. You know? I mean, that’s the big issue that no one person can solve and that everybody stresses about. First, at a personal level (which really isn’t where I think we solve this problem, but anyway…) I don’t feel like I’m an atrocious weight on the carbon footprint of humanity — I live in a town where most of the power comes from a hydroelectric dam anyway (I’m just lucky for that), I’m already a vegetarian (not in a pretentious way, I just really like soy-based food products), but I do have to drive around my mom’s old SUV because I live in a town without public transportation. 哎呀。

I had already been thinking about a certain thing for a while, anyway — they seemed popular enough on campus — I’ve really been looking into buying an electric bicycle or an electric scooter. Electric bicycles tend to be expensive (usually upward of a thousand dollars), and they’re big and kind of a shiny target for people who want to steal vehicles (on the car-free campus at my school for which I’m so grateful, stealing bikes is the only and highest form of grand-theft-auto, which makes me worry about it slightly more). Scooters are smaller, lighter, and cheaper, so after a little bit of on-and-off research, I bought a NIU KQi2 Pro. I mean, I know this “NIU” company was created by the former CTO of Baidu and they even advertise as a selling point on their website all the user data that they collect in order to improve their products for city travel, but it was only $450 at Best Buy and, you know, hopefully I can just use it without connecting it to the Internet.

So, anyway, electric scooter aside, all I can really do myself to fight climate change is to get educated, so I’m going to start trying to do my research where it counts (not just about which electric scooter I should buy). I’m going to try to listen to some climate-change informative podcasts, and I find any good ones I’ll recommend them here. And to survive the coming week, I’ll just have to stay hydrated.

Until the hole in the ozone layer closes, global temperatures regulate themselves, and tech companies start respecting user privacy, I appreciate you for reading! I apologize that I’ve just realized now that in the WordPress theme I use (“Twenty-Fifteen”, the default one from nine years ago), the thumbnail images for posts are downscaled so low that they look pretty fuzzy on most modern displays (even on my 2015 MacBook Pro, which is of course from the same year and has a Retina display that makes those image thumbnails look less than optimal). If you like any of the featured images, I’ll start putting links to the full-quality versions at the top of the blog posts. I’ll even edit my first post to include the same thing.

Thanks again!