Alice and I are rubbing noses. She started it.
First and foremost...
I'M HOSTING AN AMANDA FUCKING PALMER HOUSE PARTY!
FUCK. YES.
I could not be any more excited about it without becoming physically ill. As I'm writing, Amanda's Kickstarter is quickly approaching 17,000 backers with an average of about $50 pledged per person. The money is going towards her new album/tour/art book and it's sounding RIDICULOUS already.You can get the first single FREE from her website now!
SHE JUST REACHED $800k!
Anyway. To life.
I went to see Kimbra Monday night. She is gorgeous and her band and songs have evolved into something truly spectacular since seeing them last year at The Astor and later Southbound 2012. When she runs on stage with those unreal legs with a huge grin on her face you can see her get lost in the joy of performing. It's infectious. I found myself staring at the amazing woman in front of me thinking 'this is the shit. She's made it. Completely. Move over world, etc.'Then I looked a little closer...
I don't mean to assume I could read her every thought...but I sensed something that worried me. She looked put off when even the smallest thing went wrong. Things that nobody else cared about that she was bringing unnecessary attention to. The time that comes to mind first is when she was playing Wandering Limbs and was struggling with the vocal distortion...Which she was doing all live; a feat in itself. She ended up starting the song again, apologising profusely. It was clear that she was beating herself up about it. It was a little heartbreaking.
It sometimes slips my mind that this unbelievably talented, mature woman is only 22- less than 2 years older than me. She must be plagued with insecurities like anyone in their early 20s...maybe that's why she insists on the costume changes and such...filling up her performances with distractions...maybe? I don't know. All I know is that she doesn't need it. I guess she hasn't been around long enough to know she has it in the bag yet.
I thought about this shit while walking to my car. When is the right time to consider ourselves successful? I think I'm a complete failure some days but whenever I voice this, people tell me that I'm talking rubbish and studying physics and chemistry at university is success in itself. Maybe I'll never be completely satisfied with my life and my achievements. Maybe no one is.
Then I thought of this:
Alice is dreaming. So should I.
LOVE x
"Maybe I'll never be completely satisfied with my life and my achievements. Maybe no one is."
ReplyDeleteThat's the way it works. I figure as an atheistic, intelligent life-form, and one who recognises one's insignificance in the vast enormity of the universe, that our opponent is the universe itself, and the laws of thermodynamics. The three laws of thermodynamics have famously been summarised as you can't win, you can't break even, and you have to play the game. We know we can't win, eventually the sun will expand and kill all life on earth. If we escape earth then eventually the heat-death of the universe will do in all life everywhere as all the stars go out and the universe returns to being cold and dark with an even distribution of energy at slightly above 0 Kelvin. It sounds pessimistic, but it simply means that the game of life isn't to win, but that you can set whatever win condition you want for yourself before you ultimately lose. You and Kimbra are both young, and young people make mistakes. Kimbra wants to be the best performer she can be, and she's learning from her mistakes. Eventually she'll incorporate a mistake on stage into her performance, as seasoned professionals like Amanda Palmer do. You're studying the ultimate science, physics, and applied physics, aka chemistry. That's a big challenge, and is setting you up to achieve a lot. But it's what you do afterwards that will determine your satisfaction level, and how you define the win condition is up to you.
I think we can win. As we've seen from the theories arising from Dark Energy recently, our understanding of even gravity is being questioned. I don't think we can claim to know all about thermodynamics either.
DeleteI'm not convinced by the current age given to the universe. I don't want to be convinced either. The thought of life as a whole having an expiry date is terrifying to me. Maybe that's just being young too though...
Sure there's stuff we don't understand yet. The acceleration of the Voyager probes, for instance, is in clear violation of Newton, leading to all the theories about dark energy and dark matter. Since we haven't detected evidence for either, I'm unconvinced by both of them. Thermodynamics, on the other hand, stands up everywhere. Increasing entropy even shows us the direction of time - entropy never spontaneously decreases, so if a broken glass suddenly reassembles itself, or all the oxygen molecules in a room rush back into their pressured container, then you've invented time travel. The universe will likely end, but there's still a chance we can make it out by skipping across into a different brane, or travelling through a black hole, or setting up a quantum tunnel from a million years in the future back to now(-ish). There's more pressing problems to solve though - let's get to another solar system before we worry about Andromeda smashing into us at a million km/hour in four billion years' time!
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