Gross, Ugly Realities

This is what you might be wondering, if you’re following along. We’re all mired here in this bog of quarantine where time feels a little like honey, and you pop in and out of schedules with abandon. We’ve heard news and read articles about the effects of racism from the beginning of the COVID19 epidemic to now. Maybe, we’ve even experienced them. I’ve been seeing waves of outrage and anger toward blatant perpetrators of racism, reprimands towards those who unconsciously realize structural racism in their inaction, and support for the victims of it. It’s a wild time to be alive, for sure. It’s important that these issues are coming to the surface, and I pray that violence will stop being used as a solution to one of the gross, ugly realities of the world we live in. We have hope that there will come a time when all wrongs are made right, and in the character of Jesus we can place our trust, because he has borne our gross, ugly realities and turned broken people into adopted and loved children. There are so many ways to respond to the injustices that happen each and every day, and one of the steps we can take is to put our walk behind our talk, and try to make an impact now.

That doesn’t just mean posting stories about racism or violence toward PoC on social media, though that is a step we can take. It also means opening communication with those in our lives who have experienced or perpetrated racism. It means donating to causes that support survivors and the families of non-survivors. It means loving the people around you that you don’t necessarily want to love because every battle we can win in our fight against our inherent desire to put ourselves first is a small victory against the gross, ugly reality of racism.

Life Update

I actually didn’t intend to write the bit above because I was just planning on writing down what I’ve been up to these past couple of weeks. It feels like time flies and it flew once again when I wrote down that racism is a very present reality for us right now. Time flew and now we’re a couple of paragraphs into what was supposed to be a short post.

I’ve been holed up in a basement, reading the news and working on a summer class; a study of engineering economy. It’s been a lot of supply and demand, depreciation, accounting stuff, more supply and demand, time value of money, cost of capital, bonds, and stocks and stuff like that.

There’s a condition that I am definitely misdiagnosing called Flight of Ideas. I did no in depth research on it, but just took the name. At the same time I love how it applies to my current mental state. Perhaps it’s due to the lack of social interaction, or even the boredom of quarantine, but I keep finding interesting topics and things to learn. Day after day, new ideas take flight, and so I have become a lazy person turned hummingbird, flitting back and forth between topics I know little to nothing about, and toward whatever takes my fancy.

Here’s a short of list of them, mostly for my future reference:

• Particle Swarm Optimization.
• Learning HTML and some stuff that might help me with this website.
• Writing more on this website and making it look more pretty so that it doesn’t seem like a project I forgot about.
• Learning how to create buildings and floor plans to further my (not so) budding architecture career.
• Learn how to use Blender for many of the same reasons as above, but also because it’s an open source alternative to get the nice animations I was using ANSYS for, albeit without the useful engineering measurements.
• Write SaladBowl4, a food trivia quiz composed of famous (and not so famous) foods from literature, movies, and TV shows.
• Write a screenplay about a dream I had that is just begging to be turned into a movie.
• Write more children’s books. I’m in the process of getting my first children’s book Jack the Jet Engine illustrated, and I’m retooling my Baby’s First Bessel manuscript so it tests better with children than laughing mathematics professors. Other ideas for books: Complex Numbers for Children, Fourier Series at Four and If you give a kid an eigenvalue.
• Sourdough bread starter, like the rest of the world that can’t find yeast.
• Tepache: a fermented pineapple rind with sugar and cinnamon gone bad, I plan on letting my tepache ferment into a pineapple vinegar. It still needs a few more months.

That’s all for now, I’ll check in later with more updates!

Thanks for reading,

Nikko