Philosophy @ MindSay

I'm stuck in the middle with them. A great male friend of mine has been dating a even better female friend of mine for about 2 yrs., well that is now an official time line because they are no longer together. He confessed to thinking he may be bi-sexual! Now I'm all for equal rights and all, and am not condemning him for his realization. But on the flip side why did it take 2 yrs. to figure this out? Especially when he had a beautiful, caring, girl by his side all the while.

I'm getting an ear full from both of course, and both want me to take their side. Well, that's easier said than done. I am just telling them that I will still be friends with both no matter if that's ok with the other or not. It's difficult to deal with though.

The girl involved is a strong and feisty person who has no problem speaking her mind. I love her for that. She is hurt, angry and confused beyond words. I say understandably too. I will say this...well I'll say what George Congreve said in part from his 1697 play 'The Mourning Bride": 'Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned' .

I told her to listen to this song and she happily thanked me after. These are some of the most beautiful angry lyrics!

This song has been in my head for 2 days now. I guess because I've been in sort of a reflective mood on my so-called-life. This isn't a bad thing though, in fact, it's been a eye opener in some ways of just how grateful I am to be where I'm at and how I got this far.

This song means a lot to me. I love the lyrics because it describes how I felt all through my middle and high school yrs. Being an Asian American, it's well known that Asian parents want the best grades possible at almost any cost. It's sadly one of the few true stereo types about Asians. At least it was true for me, my brother and my sister. A 'B' grade was considered barley acceptable to my parents. We also had the added burden of having a mom who was a teacher and a dad who was an architect. I couldn't ask my mom things like how to spell a word (she'd just grab the dictionary and shove it to me) or say things like "Me n Bob are going to the movies"...only to hear "That's Bob and I dear". My dad would want to see all my math homework both before I did it and after it was finished. They wouldn't allow us to go do anything with friends until they were satisfied with our homework. So, yeah, between the 2, I didn't have much of a social life (though I do play a mean game of solitaire!)

I posted this video cuz....urr..sorry...because... I hope it helps someone who may be going through...or went through..what I did growing up. Parents are so frustrating sometimes....but they DO love you and only want the best for you. Really. I now understand this more than ever, but I vow never to be as demanding as them when I have children!

When I was fourteen or so, yellowjackets made a nest in the mortar of the brickwork of my window. This allowed them passage to my room, and I would come in most nights to find a pair circling my ceiling light, long legs dragging at the air in their confusion. Once one got caught in my hair, and kept trying to crawl out, buzzing angrily. I was terrified of yellowjackets and all their winged stingy brethren for years.

I don't know how related it is now. There's something in me that will sometimes see a hornet and squash it, just because it's a hornet.

And there's something in me that'll see one, and leave it alone, and watch it, and tell other people to leave it alone, until it flies away.

And then I'll find one bumbling slowly on the streetcorner of the crosswalk I take from work to my car, obviously slowed down because of the cold, where he's going to get stepped on. And there's something in me that crouches down and studies him for a bit, and then remembers that I have a sandwich box and carefully opens the box to scoop this little creation into it. And take it home with me.

I don't know why. Maybe because it's clearly at the end of life, and I think it's better to die warm then cold. Maybe because I'm tired of things dying, even when they're tiny. Maybe because I learn something from new experiences. Maybe because I think it shouldn't die because someone just didn't see it and didn't know it was there. Maybe it's the years of training that mean you help an animal in trouble.

But is it helping at all? He's more active when he's warm, certainly, and he's got food in there (assuming that a yellowjacket can make use of breadcrumbs and honey drips). But he's still going to die, at some point. Would it have been better to just relocate him to someplace he wouldn't get stepped on, but that would still be somewhat normal for him? Let's face it - Glad Plastic isn't exactly their home environment.

I'm philosophizing about a hornet as though it's a dog. All of this makes sense for bringing home a stray dog. These guys, it's a bug? Who cares? It's little, and there's billions more of them than there are of us. And they don't live long enough to invest too much time in one.

Says a girl who wants to work NICU someday.

Watching him explore around, now that he's warm enough to move properly again. He seems more like a machine than a creation - he's too perfect. Isn't that odd? I expect created things to have things wrong with them - they stumble, they get injured, they have physical quirks. If a machine is less than perfect, it gets chucked and replaced with a perfect one. I don't know enough about the species, maybe this one is somehow flawed, but I would have to observe a lot of others to know that. Weird. The fingerprint of something being made by the flawed creature is that it measures up to the design standard, and the fingerprint of something being made by the perfect is that it doesn't.

Or maybe it's the fingerprint of something being made by the forgiving. Where we'd chuck a machine that doesn't work, we're so loved that we're forgiven for not working the way we were designed, and

I've caught and held other creations. A hamster. A cricket. My beloved. My little almost-nephew. The cat. I guess you can't really hold a horse. I've dissected different animals after they're dead. And I wonder about the concept of the life-spark. How small it must be to be contained in this insect, and yet lend life throughout the entire magnificence of my beloved's body. I can't make it. I can theorize about a way of taking tissues and stretching and reconstructing them to the point of making a body, mimicking the wondrous art of creation. But I can't make life. I can probably conceive, but I don't know how to do it - what I could possibly do to make the difference between a new life and a stillborn.

Those two wings, rising from his back, barely an inch long, give him a gift that I don't have, and could never emulate. I can play the piano, I can hold a baby, I can run, and laugh. He can fly. I don't know that it's something to envy, so much as something to observe. Different abilities, but his seems all the more fantastic because it's something that I don't have, never will, and no one in the history of my species has had.

Can an insect feel joy? Anyone can see a dog's joy in running across a field, and running right back to you because you're the light in his world. Dogs have a lot of light in their worlds. I've had people tell me that I'm the light in theirs, sometimes. It's part of where the name "Phirefly" comes from. Does something so small have the same capacity for inner light, or just base its world off of the sun? Does flying bring him more joy?

It's a warm day. Much warmer than it's been all week. I could let him go today, and he could fly. He's miles from wherever his home must be, and he'll die tonight when the cold comes down again. Or he'll get caught and eaten by something else out there. I could keep him in the box for a few more days, and he'd live longer. There's some point in life-ethics where the line of quality of life clashes against the quantity of life, and you're stuck with trying to figure out which one to pursue.

I wrote most of this at noon, thinking things through. Took him outside, pried the lid free, leaving him room to climb out. Watched him take off in a big arc, legs dragging at the air, covering a huge distance for something so tiny. Felt better. Went off to Oxbow and climbed around for four hours.

I love random, useless, non life-changing trivia. :) The following handy batch of 'impress your friends' tid bits comes from my favorite place to get my fix: Mentalfloss.com


Your foot is the same size as the distance between your wrist and elbow. You can put your foot in that area and it will fit. Your forearm and foot are the same size.

After going into heat, an unaltered female ferret can actually die if she does not mate. Similarly a spider can die when molting because it requires using every muscle and tremendous energy.

Goosebumps are actually caused by a muscle. It is called the arrector pilli muscle.

Yahoo! is an acronym for “Yet Another Hiearchical Officious Oracle.”


“Britney Spears” is an anagram for “Presbyterians”.


Istanbul, Turkey, is the only city in the world that lies in two continents.

Over 1/2 the population of Uganda is under 15 yrs. old.

The first seedless grapes were kind of an accident. Thousands of years ago in the Middle East, a random genetic mutation caused a group of grapes to spontaneously abort their own seeds before the seeds could develop hard casings. The result: seedless produce. To reproduce the fruit, a sly farmer simply cloned the vine (with no seeds, there’s nothing to plant)—meaning that all seedless grapes today are direct descendants of that one mutated grape vine.

Foreign Accent Syndrome is a rare side effect of brain trauma, whereby a patient’s enunciation is altered to the point where it begins to resemble a foreign accent. Perhaps the most famous example occurred in 1941, when a young Norwegian woman began speaking with what sounded like a German accent after being hit in the head with shrapnel. Her community, thinking she had Fascist sympathies, shunned her.