Midnight Thoughts of a Wandering Mind

The difficulty of runing a corporate Blog

2010-09-07T15:12:00.000-07:00

I was recently tasked with runing a corporate blog, dealing mostly with crisis management and communicatios. This being supposedly a corporate affair, many people are supposed to contribute articles and posts, but so far of those I have only received one, and the rest have been written by me, and that has really been complicated, since I am running out of ideas and topics to write about without giving away too much proprietary information, or teaching people how to do waht we sell... Oh well, I truly hope this works in the end, and if you are intereste in crisis management and can read Spanish, visit my corporate blog

A deep sense of loss

2008-10-20T07:23:00.000-07:00

Every day, as I reach my office and sit sown at my desk, I can't help but think how monotonous our lives have become. We have lost the sense of the extraordinary, and have substituted it with a desire for more commodities, gadgets and toys. This seems to be the result of an over-technification of our world; we no longer have a need to exert ourselves to achieve every day tasks, there is nothing hidden out there, nothing remarkable happening in the streets of our cities. If you want to keep the thrill you have to go to some really nasty places, such as Baghdad or Beirut or some other war torn country, and even then life becomes "predictable" the fear becomes a constant, the threats are familiar and you get used to them and build your mundane life around them.

We have lost the capacity to marvel at the world, to think there are fairies in the woods, or goblins in the cupboard. Monsters have been expelled from closets and from under our beds, the age of discovery has brought us nothing but a lack of discovery for the average John and Mary, and the worst of it is that we are content to let it happen, to have our orderly lives remain so, to see that our own internal status quo (not to mention the social one) remain unaltered, and that we can look forward to next year's new car model to change the one we now have, or the latest electronic gadget from one of the few big manufacturers, and all of this while we drift into nothingness, and like Willy Loman feel we are better because we are liked, that we have struck it big with all of those gadgets, when in reality all we have done is loose a vital part of human spirit, the drive to change, to explore, to face insurmountable odds and conquer the world.

I sure hope I can live long enough to have a life, and not a collection of commodities and debts to relate my life to the world...

Racism and Bigotry

2007-02-21T12:48:00.000-08:00

What have we really accomplished since the days that Martin Luther King Jr said he had a dream? have we truly learned to live alongside each other? or rather, have we simply changed the focus of our racism and bigotry? Is it not true that now, not only in America, but in every "civilized", "modern" country, the population look down on immigrants, both legal and illegal, with scorn, pity and hate? and this is evidenced by the bias in British schools against Muslim girls and women wearing their traditional head coverings, for reasons that can be easily dismissed, or the announced building of a wall between the US and Mexico, or the suspicion of the Venezuelan people against Colombians in their land, treating all of them as potential paramilitary, or drug traffickers.

As the world is an ever shrinking place, and the effects of globalization carry people from one country to another, and trade and commerce force families to move, and war in the middle east creates an unending flow of refugees, we should probably reflect once again on the words of Martin Luther King Jr. and see if we have really learned what he wanted to teach us, if we have come any closer to fulfilling his dream, or if instead, we have stayed on the same spot, but changed the focus of our hate, racism and bigotry.

Global Warming

2007-02-05T21:23:00.001-08:00

Fisherman's Village
Originally uploaded by Polluxg.

I know this is an issue that everyone has an opinion about, even if it is to consider it all a load of crap. However, the latest news seem to have finally gotten people to listen, and think about global warming.

But still, I don't think anything is going to be done in the near future, since most people still have that selfish way of looking at things that says: "Hey, I won't live long enough to see it." After all the predictions are for 2090, which is still a long time away, and by the time most people realize the real threat posed by this shift in the planet's weather, it's going to be, not only too late, but of catastrophic proportions.

After all, thinking of a few inches more of sea level seems insignificant, but when that means that most coastal cities might be closer to flooding, and tsunamis much more frequent, as well as less beach space, then people will care, for it will be their lives, and more importantly, their properties, which will be at stake, then people will care, and therefore corporations and governments as well.

I just hope that by the time the planet is too hot to live in, or the northern and southern halves too frozen to be habitable, mankind will have found a way to colonize new planets, and maybe, just maybe, have learned to care more about the environment, and less about their own pockets, wallets, and bank accounts.

Dead Cities

2007-01-11T19:48:00.001-08:00

Wild Bird
Originally uploaded by Polluxg.

I've just spent a couple of days away from Bogotá, in a quaint little place called La Cuncia (a degenerated form from La Concepción "The Conception"), and now that I'm back in the city I've found myself thinking that it's dead. Whereas in La Cuncia I could see tens of birds bathing on the automatic sprinklers used in the garden, or hear the concert of frogs, toads and many other night animals, and even got to see an Armadillo; I've realized that cities lack life, aside from humans that is.

Even the cities that have big extensions of land devoted to parks, such as Bogotá, have lost a lot of the life that once thrived in its place; the wildlife left to the cities is the kind that tried to hide as far from human eyes as possible.

I fear living in a city is turning us into these homo-centric beings, who have forgotten the beauty and joy that comes from the symphony of hundreds of birds singing, to the rhythm of a river's gentle flowing, or even the raging sound of a waterfall. We have lost those accents to life, and replaced them to the blaring of horns and emergency sirens, or car alarms. And the worst part of it all is that we can no longer go back to nature; we've become trapped in the cities, enthralled by their destructive appeal, by that single mindedness of purpose: To gather human beings in a single entity.

"Sacrifice Life And Limb" but for what?

2007-01-04T18:49:00.000-08:00

Recently I've had some very troubling thoughts. If these guys are willing to sacrifice life and limb for the ideals of their society, for a common belief that we call a nation, then why are they mistrusted, and in some cases even despised?

I know the fact that they carry weapons is a factor, and another part is that some of them believe that because of that sacrifice they're willing to make they are above the rest of us; but despite these rotten apples, have you said thank you to a soldier on the street lately, and if you don't see soldiers close to you, have you at least thought about them lately? or are they just something you'd rather forget?

The only problem is when you think about enemy soldiers. Then you feel the right to hate, despise, loathe and many other things. But aren't they fighting for the same reason as ours? to defend their ideals? their notion of right and wrong? (and bear in mind that this applies to soldiers, not to criminals who use car bombs and murder tens or hundreds of civilians just for the media spectacle of it) they are just like our soldiers, and I say ours without distinction, because in the end it doesn't matter to which country they belong to, they are out there fighting and dying so someone, probably you and me, can live the way we do, and if not us, then someone on the other side.

Maybe what we should do is simply abolish every single army in the world, or better yet, combine all of them into a giant security core, dedicated to maintaining the peace between mankind. The only problem is that before something as Utopian as that to happen, we all have to learn a basic truth that most religions and governments on this side of the world have forgotten: "No One Man Has The Universal Truth". Not about God, nor about how to rule a country; we are all as right or as wrong as the next persons point of view.

Oh, What to write

2006-12-26T12:08:00.001-08:00

It's been a year since my last post. But as I started to notice that my Blog wasn't getting enough visits, I asked myself, is all the effort worth it? and the answer was NO. If I wanted to write for myself I would do it on an old notebook I keep on my bedside table, which is what I've been doing for the past year, but now I've been reviewing some of my old posts and realized that even though visitors were few and infrequent I had some, so I decided to try it again, and maybe this time try and have the patience necessary to build a reader base; but this hits me with a new dilemma: What should I be writing about? What do I have to say that will catch the attention and interest of a disenfranchised humankind that seems to care naught about what someone else thinks? Should I be writing about the same things everyone does? sports, politics and entertainment? Have we really reached a point where some out of the box questions don't attract enough attention, or am I just paranoid?

When Harry meets Frodo

2005-12-05T12:14:00.000-08:00

As the sun sets down over the hills of Hobbitton in the Shire, and a bespectacled boy looks out the window of the Griffyndor common room, the greatest and most fearsome creatures of darkness, in two different worlds but no less evil for this fact, are doing everything in their power to find and destroy them. How would a meeting between these two relatively unimportant (well not really so unimportant in the case of Harry), small, relatively defenseless characters be?

What would they say to one another? Would the conversation be of ordinary things like the weather, or flowers or owls, or some less common but to them just as ordinary such as Quidditch or elves? or would they sit down to discuss the burden of having the task of saving the world? Would they compare notes on how to be a hero?

All of this is assuming they have already gotten over their acquaintances, and explanations of their own peculiar worlds. One of the most likely outcomes of such a meeting would be a deep sense of relief on the part of both of them, for finally they would have someone to understand them in a way that no one else will ever be able to; after all, only those burdened with the fate of the world on their shoulders can really understand what it feels like, not just the delusion that you are going to save the world, but the brutal knowledge of it being a given fact, and that should you fail the result would not be just a disappointment for those who believed in you, but most likely their deaths would be in order. Talk of a way to screw up one's mind!

On the French and Kidnapping in Colombia

2005-10-04T12:16:00.000-07:00

This image comes from a rally in fron of the Paris City Hall, to pressure the French government to do something, in order to achieve the release of French - Colombian citizen Ingrid Betancourt, who was a presidential candidate at the time of her kidnapping by the FARC terrorist organization in Colombia.

This was 3 years ago. Since then, there have been thousands of protests from French citizens, demanding that Ingrid is released, the largest demonstration of this is the one in the picture. There have been dialogues between the French government and the Terrorist organization, without the approval of the Colombian government, the latest of these in Ecuadorian territory, WITHOUT the Ecuadorean government's approval either.

What drove the French government to deal with terrorist groups? The fate of this One citizen? a real concern for kidnappings in Colombia?

A lot of people would say that the last one is the correct answer, but then, there's a nother question that arises: if the concern is for the situation of people kidnnaped by terrorist groups in Colombia, why haven't the French complained about the fate of Colombian soldiers? thos who have been kep away from their homes for as long as seven years in some cases, and who are kept in the jungle in cages such as those used to keep hens? surronded by antipersonnel mines, and being underfed and mistreated?

Are we the children of a failed generation?

2005-09-21T11:48:00.000-07:00

Have you ever wondered why the people between 36 and 26 years old, are said to belong to the X generation? as in the mathematical equation, we are a variable, and cannot be classified. Given the fact that generational gategorizations refer to uniting trends, or similar characteristics, the fact that our generation does not have them implies that there's no overarching generational goal, no one true theory.

Could this be due to the fact that our parents belonged to the generation that advocated for peace and love, unity among mankind, but then went on to become the same people who brought along the gulf war, now Iraq, and above all the terrorist movements that have plagued us since the 1960's? Thre are also those whose ideals died in the haze of pot smoke or in an Acid overdose, or even worse fates, such as that of John Lennon, who advocated for peace among mankind and was brutally murdered...

Is it safe to assume then, that the ideals of our parents generation, that fostered so many changes in the world, some good and others bad, came short of what they most desperately wanted? were they finally overcome by the system they so loathed and fought against? and has their failure become a warning for our generation not to have a unique uniying ideal? Sometimes I think that we can't unite because we're afraid of suffering the same fate of our parents, better to have individual dreams, selfish in nature, that can be achieved on our own, than to commit yourself to something that involves your entire being, for which some might even give their lives, and one goal that in the end might come short...

Age and the problems of dating

2005-09-20T07:22:00.000-07:00

Have you ever wondered how it was you did, during your teenage years, to have a constant dating scene? Then it was so easy to find someone to date, to establish a relationship was a common thing, but as time pases and we grow older, dating becomes more and more complicated, it's as if single people just dissapeared; some can be accounted for, loke the ones that are either married or attached to someone, but what about all the rest? is every man or woman of your age married, attached or otherwise engaed? I don't think so; in fact, I have friends, of both genders, who are single and looking, but they just can't seem to find someone to date, and that has me thinking of what are the changes that bring about this "loneliness".

For one part, there is a reduced number of "available" people, but on the other hand, the spaces where you can go looking for a person to date become greatly reduced, even if you take into account the pedople who go to bars looking to hook up with someone for more than a one night stand. During teenage years, you crash into parties uninvited, you go prowling around high school looking for that someone, or you just don't really care about the results, you're not looking for the "Perfect One" just for "Someone", and thus you're nos scared of talking to a person you meet at the mall or other such palces, even if theoretically teenagers are scared of facing the world, and run away from each other as often as not, but the truth is that they are braver than us, who claim we've overcome those "childish" fears, but still we can't muster enough courage to go looking, just waiting to find someone, even if it's no the "Perfect One", we're so scared of making one fatal mistake that we don't date as often, and often wonder why not...

Soccer or Footbal

2005-09-09T16:55:00.000-07:00

This has nothing to do with either of the sports, in fact it has to do only with the fans. It's something I've been wondering over lately, specially since a youn man was killed by the fan of one soccer team; the crime: wearing the T-shirt of a soccer team different than the one the murderer likes.

It's such a senseless crime, a waste of life on the account of something designed to entertain and bring people together; it's the crumbling of sports into a reason for murder... Anyway, what I've been pondering is the differences between the fans of soccer and those of football; maybe because I don't know much, but every so often I read on the news about riots caused by Hooligans, and other fan groups of soccer teams, but I still haven't heard that from the fans of Football, even if it is a sport apparently more violent than soccer; why is it that a mild sport (in terms of physical violence) has such violent fans, and a much rougher one has more calm fans? If anyone has an idea on why this is so, please let me know, for I can't think of an explanation for it.

A baffled mind

2005-09-08T08:52:00.000-07:00

What happens when you have so many things in your head that you just don't know where to start? Does your brain get cluttered like the attic or storage room back home? Can we just empty it? or is it something we have to take wherever we go, like an unwanted burden, or maybe one we want to have?

Does the brain have a limited amount of storage space (as Sherlock Holmes believed), or is it an endless content repository? Sometimes our brains feel as if they're filled to the brim, and then all of a sudden it's as if it emptied, but the knowledge is still in there somewhere, stored in the back, as it the brain could, at will, become a knowledge compressor. Maybe what we assume is lost knowledge is just a part of the archived and compressed things that have to be processed back into being, if we only knew how to do that...

Where have all the geniuses gone?

2005-08-22T08:32:00.000-07:00

Throughout history there have been several people considered as geniuses, not only by their contemporary fellows, but more importantly by mankind afterwards, the is to say, they have entered history as geniuses. One interesting facet of these people is that according to the historic period where they have lived they can be almost grouped into different endeavours.

In antiquity, when the universe was "new", that is to say when human knowledge of the universe was still in its infancy, the genius of mankind was devoted to the discovery of what we now call the bsaics of science, philosophy an politics. This was the contribution of the Greeks and Romans; Afterwards come the Middle Ages, when the interest of mankind was drawn away from the mundane world, and started focusing on the intagible, and divine, so the new interest of geniuses was that, and to show we have the likes of Saint Thomas of Aquine and Saint Augustin (I'm not sure these are their names in English for I learnt them in Spanish and have read most of their works either in that language or in Latin).

The divine is once more replaced by the humane during the renaissance, and genius is once more focused in human affairs, and we have the great endeavours of Michel Angelo, Leonardo and many others who dedicated their lives to pursuits such as anatomy, architecture, and most importantly, the arts, centered on mankind, long gone are the days where art was reserved to angels and portraits, to be replaced by such masterpieces as the David, or the Giocconda, there's even the daring of Michelangelo of painting God when he imbues Adam with the spark of life.

After this period there comes the new expression of mankind in the Age of Lights, where the old monarchies are faced with revolutions and problems of their own, the church continues on its downward spiral, losing more and more power to the secular governments; this new state of affairs provides a new interest to mankinds geniuses, and once more it's necessary to retake the study of Philosophy and Politics, giving birth to the modern conception of government, but this was not all, art was another important part of mankind's endeavours, specilly in the field of music, where we have Beethoven, Mozart, Chopan, Schubert, and so many others.

The next stage in the history of human genius is Modernity. Here there's an interesting change of affairs, where one of the postulates is that art is useless, and early modern philosophers, such as hegel, proclaimed art was dead, which brings us to the age of reason, where artistic genius is no longer focused on those things that worry the greater community of mankind, but rather focuses on those things society most desperately tries to hide; this as a protest to the new label of uselesness cast upon it by the self righteous masters of philosophy; however, despite this new label, art had been an endeavour of genius for so longm that it still attracted many of the brightest minds, but a new field emerged: pure science. This was the new way to go for geniuses, and that's why we have Einstein, Freud, the Curie marriage, and many others.

Which brings me to today, where art is no longer the domain of genius, but rather of talent and in many cases not even that. Genius was devoted to science untill they gave us the atomic bomb and WWII, and on the fringes were the artists, complaining of it, such as Picaso's Guernica, and other similar works. But the devastation of WWII was such, and the guilt so big, that genius changed once more its focus, hence, we have not had reports of anyone as genial and aweinspiring as any of the people I've mentioned in this article; so the question remains, where have all the genius gone?

A friend of mine made me realize that in the post modern are genius is centered in bussiness. The new genius is a man like Bill Gates, who has managed to get a great portion of mankind to buy his products and use nothing else; so is this what in the future will be seen as the genius of our times?

Contractions: the new form of shorthand "speech"

2005-08-12T19:49:00.000-07:00

Have you ever stop to look at the language used in the many Internet environments dedicated to human interface? say chat rooms, multiplayer games and other such multiuser communities? it's an entirely new form of language, one that is merely a reduction of frequently used phrases and words, contracted into as few letter (not even words) as possible.

Some of the most comon ones are:
LOL = Laughs Out Lod
AFK = Away From Keyboard
BRB = Be Right Back
GTG = Got to Go (Which in itself is a variation of I have to go)
THX = Thanks (Contraction of Thank You)
K = OK (And it's unuasual to find a two letter word reduced even further)

There are still other variations on all of these, and it's funny to think that things that ten or fifteen years ago would have been saved as acronyms for companies and agencies, has become everyday language between millions of Internet users.

Is art to the left of mankind?

2005-07-30T18:18:00.000-07:00

A few days ago I was discussing with a friend an idea I had for a theatre play, but when I mentioned that in this play the "bad guy" was going to be a left wing politician, she said to me: "you can't do that, art is left winged".

This statement came rather as a surprise to me, and it got me thinking about this unusual posture, or to be more honest, this rather clichéd perspective of art, and I must confess that I was rather shocked at the comment coming from this person in particular, whom I thought to be broader minded, but well, she proved me wrong… anyway, as I was saying, this conversation got me thinking about the political inclinations of art, and my first thought is that art has no inclination whatsoever, not even to the center; in fact I believe that art as a universal concept is devoid of ideology, and it’s the artist who decides to which side he inclines himself, I furthermore think that we have been dominated by the idea of the “revolutionary” artist, whom I dare say has rather died out, just as social revolutionary movements have been dying out, or in cases like Colombia, turning into common criminals.

Now if we look into the furthest left a man can be, or cold have been prior to 1989, that is to say a member of the Soviet Communist Party, then we will find that in left wing nations, governments and sates, art was subverted for the use of the political class, therefore depriving it of it’s revolutionary role, for to be a revolutionary in the Soviet Union, would have meant to being anything other than leftist, and why not, a full blown right winged idealist, which obviously labeled the artist as an enemy of the state, and was sentenced to either lifelong – however brief – service in a Siberian Gulag, or a much faster and merciful firing squad, so this has brought me back to the topic I started writing about: Art’s political and ideological inclinations.

I don’t know if the reader will agree with me or not, but in the painting above, which happens to be the work of a soviet painter, Ivan Ivanovich Dubish, all I can see is an attempt by a left wing government to use art to it’s own purpose, which for me is just as bad as when the Nazis used artists for their own ends, so I’ve come to the conclusion that art it self is free of political inclinations, but unfortunately the artists are not.

The fear of a blank page or canvass

2005-07-27T11:48:00.000-07:00

One of the biggest fears artists have is that of a blank page or canvass. After all they face infinite options and possibilities, there’s a wealth of information within their heads, bulging, pushing against their temples trying to get out, making their hands twitch, their eyes pop, and still sometimes they’re at a loss where to start.

This is a clear example of an existential crisis. This is the fear of mankind to make choices; the wider the range of possibilities, the more difficult it is to make up your mind, which is a law of economics, although I admit I don’t know exactly who stated it first. Whenever you go into a super market to buy toothpaste, it’s a real mess, with so many options to chose from that people will usually stick to the brand their parents used, or the one the neighbor suggested, just to spare themselves the need of consciously making a choice.

No picture that you have an infinite amount of possibilities, that the entire realm of human imagination is at your disposal, and then you can start to picture just how difficult it is to start writing, or painting, or sculpting, or composing, or creating in any way, even if it’s a dull monthly activities report for your boss. Albeit this last case at least has a much smaller realm of possibilities.

Now this brings me to a new and more challenging problem: how to fight the blank page syndrome? There are no magic brain chemistry pills to do it for you, and a shrink is too expensive, so if anyone has any suggestions I’d really appreciate them, although given the fact that I seem to be the only person reading this Blog, then I’ll just have to keep on looking for the answer myself.

Beds and Airplanes

2005-07-26T06:31:00.000-07:00

Have you ever looked over the edge of your bed before getting out of it? Been overwhelmed by a sense of foreboding while doing it? After all, facing life every day can be as daunting as jumping out of an airplane; if you're not careful you can end up splattered against the ground with such force as to be an unrecognizable mass of blood...

But on the other side there’s an undeniable exhilaration, an unlimited range of possibilities, the whole world is there, waiting for that first step, that as Tolkien said in The Hobbit, can lead you anywhere; all you really need to do is just step out the door into the road, but I would go even further back, all you need to do in life is simply take that first step out of your comfortable bed, and face the world. Well, jumping off an airplane can be a little like that too; or if you are slightly less daring, so is getting off a plane once it has landed: you’re in a far away place, even if far away is only a few hundred miles, maybe you have friends in this city, or maybe you don’t, but in either case you still have to face the hassle of the traveler.
There are many other similarities, if we take into account the fact that many people travel to fulfill a dream, like the Muslim pilgrimage to Mecca, or the Jewish trip to Jerusalem, or the Catholic pilgrimage to Rome, or if in a somewhat more mundane fashion a vacation to Europe or the US for a Latin American middle class family; these are dreams that many times have visited their owners while lying in bed, and as John Lennon once said “You may say I’m a dreamer, but I’m not the only one”, so lose your fear, and simply get out of bed or jump of the airplane, after all the world is out there waiting for you.

A warm welcome

2005-07-26T06:29:00.000-07:00

To any and all who happen to read this, welcome into the window of my thoughts. I won't say it's a window into my soul for a machine is far to insensitive to allow that, but anyway, I wish to explain a little about the purpose of this Blog: I just need a space where to store all of the ideas I have that are to disconnected from one another to be held by a coherent text, so a fragmented setting like this one is a really useful receptacle for them. Maybe some of you will find them interesting, or hate and loathe them, but after all they're just the musings of a perplexed soul in search of a higher truth, and before anyone can say anything, I'm not talking about God, I’m talking of the higher truth hidden in mankind, for I dare not try and look beyond the waking world, for my findings could be something I don't want to see or I can't handle, so I'll stay put in the world of mortal men. But anyway, as I was saying, this is just a space where I can think in a collective fashion, for I hope to create some kind of reaction with my writings, no matter what they are. And a word of caution beforehand, my native language is Spanish, so this will be a bi lingual Blog, for some of the texts I'll post will be in English and some in Spanish, and they will not be a translation of previous posts, just new ideas...Well, without further ado, let the reflection begin