Tag: photog’s Corner

Mid-Summer Mumblings

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Here we are in the last week of July.  Wow.  The days fly by when you’re too busy with annoying drudgery.  So that’s a strange way of looking at it.  While engaged in the drudgery it’s crawling along.  But when I finally escape, the day is already wasted away.  And what’s left flies down the gravity drain into the past in the blink of an eye.  So, I’m just annoyed at the present situation.  And it’s only gonna get worse in August and so I’m terribly disgruntled.  But until I figure a way out of the trap I’m in, it’s gonna be status quo.  Enough.  Well, at least I have the weekend off so I’m going to enjoy the next two days as much as is humanly possible.  So, stop complaining!

We’re five episodes into the first season of “Landman” and it’s a very odd experience.  The main story of Billy Bob Thornton’s character trying to manage a chaotic mix of oil field accidental mayhem, narcotraficante related mayhem and roughneck related mayhem is interesting but the subplot involving his terminally self-absorbed ex-wife is extremely annoying.  The other themes associated with his son and daughter are pretty good and his son’s story is expanding into a larger role.  Camera Girl and I are enjoying the experience of having a show that we can both watch with at least some degree of interest.  There was one scene that I found particularly funny.  Tommy Norris’s ex-wife is trying to stage a “family” dinner with herself, Tommy, their two kids and the two oil company guys who are staying at the company “house.”  She insists that they all join hands around the table for a prayer and after it’s over the two outsiders are talking about it and one guy says, “Well, that was the first dinner prayer I can remember that was explicitly blasphemous.”

Friday, Saturday and Sunday’s weather is supposed to be beautiful.  The kids came over to use the pool today and they said the temperature was perfect.  And the butterfly bush is finally in full flower and monarchs and swallowtails (tiger and pipevine) are increasingly present as photographic subjects.  And the raspberry canes are starting to produce a bumper crop of berries.  So, this is peak mid-summer experience and if I wasn’t committed to an annoying task I would be in seventh heaven.  Well, I guess it’s not that bad if I can take the time to complain this much about it.

One of our neighbors put out a bit of video from her bird feeder.  It was of a black bear’s nose stuck up against the camera.  The bear’s claws were fairly impressive and a good reminder that even a black bear is not a Disney character that you can approach with impunity.  We have a bunch of blueberry bushes that are just about ripe so we may be getting a visit from Yogi and company at any time.  I have a game camera mounted but I didn’t return the memory stick last time I downloaded the files.  I probably should.

Well, that’s enough for now.  Just regular stuff going on.  Enjoy July.

Blow-Up Godzilla and Highway Mayhem

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The Third of July was a busy day.  We had to get the pool vacuumed before guests arrived and then there were chores around the yard.  And then we had a good summer cookout with burgers and potato salad, corn on the cob, sausage and peppers and watermelon.  No wonder losing weight is such a slog!

And it was a good visit with reminiscences about summers up in Maine when my kids were young and other trips.  And I had an interesting conversation with Princess Sack of Potatoes.  She said something about how useful mothers were.  So, I mentioned to her what fathers were useful for.  I asked her if she ever got tired while out somewhere and her father carried her around like a sack of potatoes?  Or what exactly would happen if the car got a flat tire far away from a tow truck?  Or if suddenly traffic stopped on a crowded highway in the middle of summer and after an hour someone would have to get out and walk up the road to see how long the stoppage would be.  And this caused a yelp from Princess Sack of Potatoes’ mother.  She remembered that day very well after all these years.  And she was still upset by it, remembering how certain she had been that I would never come back alive.  We all got a big laugh out of that.

This was shortly after I had moved out of New York City but I was driving into Manhattan to attend a wedding in SoHo.  It was a science fiction themed wedding with a blow-up Godzilla in attendance.  We were on the FDR Drive when the traffic screeched to a halt and nothing happened for about forty minutes.  So, since it was very hot that day and my car’s air conditioning was non-existent, I shut off the engine and started walking between lanes of traffic to see what was going on.  And about a half mile up the road there were police, fire and emergency vehicles blocking the road in both directions.  And along with several crashed cars there was a very fancy sports car that was upside down and wrapped around a light pole and some other parts of the highway infrastructure.  The firemen were cutting away what was left of the frame to get at what was left of the driver.  It looked pretty grim.

The good news for us was that our direction on the highway would be released as soon as the ambulances got their patients stowed away and headed to the hospital.   The other side looked like it would be stuck for hours.  So, after satisfying my morbid curiosity for a few minutes I headed back to my car with the news that we would be moving in less than another half hour.  And my youngest daughter looked so relieved when I managed to return before the traffic had started to move.  She was convinced that if I hadn’t gotten back before it started to move then of necessity I would be squashed like a bug in a cartoon.

It’s funny, up until today I hadn’t thought of that day in thirty-some-odd years.  Funny what stuff just pops into your head.

The Middle Way

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Lately my days have been filled with frustrating road blocks.  Things that should resolve themselves easily instead get bogged down in endless complication and delay.  Because of this I’ve been pretty stressed out.  So today while I was contemplating this it occurred to me that I shouldn’t allow days at a time to go by without any fun.  So, I’ve decided to try and add at least one fun thing into each of my days.

Sounds easy.  But what it means is that I have to first free my mind from the annoying things I’m trying to overcome and instead think up some small diversion that I can do in a short amount of time.  For instance, today I dragged out my camera, the Minolta 200mm f/4 macro lens and a bellows mount and started taking some macro shots of a dead preying mantis that I’ve had sitting on a house plant for a few months.

Now was this a terribly valuable use of my time?  No, not at all.  But it was fun and it got me thinking about what kind of a macro rig I’d like to set up.  The bellows device I was using had a bunch of problems associated with it.  It didn’t attach to my tripod very well and it was not rigid enough to avoid a lot of vibration.  But working around these issues was stimulating and fun.  And it made me think about something other than my problems.  It was a distraction and it lightened my mood brilliantly.

So, for the foreseeable future (meaning, until I get past my problems), I will be trying to add something fun to my days in order to stave off depression.  But in general, maybe I’ve hit on something worth pursuing.  I’ve never been someone who lived a balanced life.  My instincts have always been a sort of all or nothing strategy to most things in life.  Probably this was a matter of necessity caused by an almost pathological laziness that left me always forced into an eleventh hour, hail Mary effort to stave off disaster.

So maybe late in life I’ve discovered a miraculous unheard-of strategy; balance.

Tomorrow is a big family party.  But I think I’ll get up early and try to set up a focus bracket with the 90mm macro lens and some interesting macro subject.  I think I saw a dead spider down in the exercise area.  I think he might make an interesting target.  If not, I’ll find some still life thing; a feather or a coin or something.  And I’ll have some fun.

And that will leave Sunday to do some work.  I need to figure a few things out that have been stalled for a couple of weeks.  And then Monday and Tuesday are unavoidable hell.  I thought Tuesday would actually turn into a horrifying fiasco but blind luck stepped in and turned a horrifying nightmare into a merely tedious exercise in futility.  But just two days later and it will be Thanksgiving and that should be a wonderful way to recover.

Balance.  What did Siddhartha preach?  The Middle Way?

Utopia and Nukes

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Okay, I said I’d get down to details in setting up “photopia.”  Well, where do we start?  The first question is how do you start such a thing from where we are now?  In the past the founder would be a prophet.  Moses, Jesus, Mohammad, Joseph Smith, L Ron Hubbard (!).  For my founding I’ll settle for a trillionaire with virtually unlimited resources of artificial intelligence.  Then he’ll have to be a humanitarian, a philanthropist, a lover of mankind.  Because he’s going to have to take the long view.  He’ll know that to save mankind he’ll have to start by rejecting a good chunk of humanity at the start.  Because as humanity currently exists, there is a definite percentage of the population that can’t be included in an optimized human environment.  There is a twenty percent group that is hopeless.  Some of them are uncontrollably violent.  Some are completely unwilling to do work.  Some are anti-social to the extent that they habitually commit various types of crime.  It goes without saying utopia has no place for such individuals.

The system that our founder builds must begin by trying to select a core of people that are unmistakenly outside of this 20%.  The only way that the system can be founded is to start with the best starting material.  So extremely careful biographical research into the initial candidates will have to be performed to rule out any unacceptable or even sub-optimal individuals.  Ideally, married couples and even families of the highest quality should be incorporated in the starting material.  This will build additional stability in the structure.

But one thing that will be true is that even within this foundation of selected individuals there will need to be a continuous weeding out mechanism for people who fail or for the offspring who will be identified as failures.  And if offspring are rejected, often the parents and siblings will find it impossible to stay inside the group.  And not because this community is a hermetically sealed bubble.  Everyone inside will be in contact with the outside world continuously.  But if children of group members become dangerous, they must be kept outside of the community and that is hard to enforce unless the rest of the family is ejected.  So, it becomes apparent that policing the group for anti-social activity will become one of the most important activities of the administrators.

And as I mentioned in the earlier installment of this essay, those who are ejected are given the equity that they’ve earned in the community when the leave so that they can find their own place in the world.  So, what exactly are the rules of this club?  Well, the founder gets to decide those.  If he’s wise, these rules are ones that will tend to increase stability, prosperity and social cohesion.  What exactly these rules are may be dependent on the values and personal traits of this “prophet.”  And ideally, there could be a number of different foundations to allow for the different but equally valid personality types that exist in our species.  And maybe some of these will be failures and some will thrive.  But over the course of time by trial and error a calculus for creating human communities could be derived.

Now, what happens to those who can’t be included.  Well, nothing.  They’ll be on their own.  This assumes that the larger human community still exists outside of these enclaves and that it has to deal with the full spectrum of human types.  And that is why prisons and welfare exist.  And that brings up another point.  How would these societies be viewed by the outside world.  My guess will be; poorly.  I believe many nations would try to destroy them or at least force them to accept members that they would reject.  And for that reason, the location of these societies may be one of the most important questions that the administrators will have to decide.  Of course, trillionaires can do wonders with the right amount of bribery.  But let’s just say that a nuclear weapons program may be a necessity for this utopia of mine.

When I write the next installment (and I may have to think about it for a while) I think I’ll talk about education.

photopia

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“It has been said that history repeats itself. This is perhaps not quite correct; it merely rhymes.”

Theodor Reik

 

When I think about what is going on in the world, I have to wonder whether the nonsense that we see all around us can go on forever.  Now it goes without saying that human folly is a tapestry that envelops all of us in a pattern that generates pain, fear, violence and death at a prodigious rate.  And that there has never been a full century in history when the majority of human beings lived in peace and happiness.

And this isn’t anything surprising.  This is just what human beings do.  We’ve always lived in a state of wary hostility even when we were nothing but small family groups living around a campfire to keep the cave bears and sabretooth tigers at bay.  We’re not peaceful creatures.  We may live now in enormous groupings measured in the millions and even billions of individuals but at all times and in all places, we seem to end up at each other’s throats.  But, does this have to be?  Could it be possible for humans to organize themselves into groups that interact in ways that lead to long term and abiding cohesion and satisfying cooperation?

The track record for utopian communities is definitely poor.  Some of the religious groups have thrived and shown some ability to cooperate in many community endeavors but this is a small minority of the human race.  And even they can’t completely eliminate anti-social behavior.  Currently, communities that live in affluent areas and support a robust police presence and a conservative judicial philosophy seem to do the best at creating a workable human environment.  But as we’ve seen since 2020 the forces of chaos can unleash barbarism even in the most affluent areas of the country.

But what if technology can provide a system to guarantee both social cohesion and material security?  We’re seeing the dystopic version of this in the Chinese system of social control called the “Social Credit System.”  Here those who don’t follow the rules are blacklisted and denied access to various important social advantages like good schools and better neighborhoods.  But think of the opposite.  Imagine a multitude of organizations that figure out ways to find compatible people and build social systems that bind them together and allow them to thrive.  I imagine these as completely voluntary associations.  And if someone doesn’t work out, they get the equity that they put into the system and are assisted to find another association where they would fit better.  But such an ejection would be considered a failure by the organization, which would use the most advanced research to analyze personalities before candidates are accepted into the association.

In the next installment I’ll discuss what facets of life would and wouldn’t be included in these organizations.  And I’ll talk about what I think are the human realities that make something like this extremely difficult to pull off outside of a science fiction story.

Too Soon for Cabin Fever

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Too many irons in the fire.  More and more “stuff” dumped in front of me to trip over.  Boredom, frustration, ennui, blah, blah, blah.  Okay, whatever.

So, I’m trying to concentrate on the important stuff.  I got my cover artist signed up.  He needs some information from me and I’m working to answer the questions.  I’m still waiting for some answers from the experts on small stuff and big stuff that has to be decided (when, how and how much).

And I’m looking to sell off a bunch of lenses I don’t use much and exchange them for that new 100mm f/2.8 macro lens from Sony.  It’ll be good to move out a bunch of stuff that’s just sitting around and concentrate on what I like to play around with.  I’ll probably also buy a macro rail and maybe some doo-dads that will let me experiment with tilt shift and other technical adjustments.  I was watching a video from a guy in England who does a lot of product work.  You know, pictures of corn flakes boxes and shampoo bottles.  He was demonstrating his technical camera.  It’s a digital “back” attached to a bellows with a lens on the other side attached to a support that allowed for all kinds of motion for the lens; tilt and shift and any kind of motion relative to the digital back.  In addition, the digital back can tilt and shift also.  This allows the image formed by the lens to strike the sensor either straight on or at any angle desired.  Now I think this is really great.  I’d love to have this capability.  But the numbers being thrown around for a medium format digital back and the other components runs into the tens of thousands of dollars (well, pounds for that Brit).

But it occurred to me that with a little ingenuity and a slight downgrade in kit (e.g., a full frame camera like my Sony A7IV instead of a medium format back) I might be able to get almost the same effects for very short money.  And since the winter is beginning to bite into my soul (we had the first noticeable snow cover this morning) this would be a marvelous time to distract myself from the realities of Dunwich in the winter.

Tuesday and Wednesday will be boring work days.  Saturday is another family party (great!).  A week from Tuesday will be a day of tedium not to be imagined and then Thursday is Thanksgiving.  I guess you must take the good with the bad.  But I’m not very patient.  Camera Girl is much better at that sort of thing.  She was raised to be hard-working and dependable.  I, on the other hand, am lazy, easily bored and unreliable.  I like to think this is because I am like my idol; Wiley Coyote, a super genius.  I like the way that sounds, WILEY COYOTE, SUPER GENIUS!!!!!!

I’d better cut this short.  It’s becoming too much like me talking to myself and that’s not healthy for anyone.  It’s too close to the scene where Wendy Torrance starts reading the manuscript that Jack has been working on and finds that it’s hundreds of pages of text that consists of variations on the sentence, “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.”  It’s just too early in the winter to start getting cabin fever.

Sort of a Personal Butterfly Effect

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When I was about ten, I got my hands on a box full of books that came from the library of a New Jersey Catholic High School in the Philadelphia area.  It had a lot of stuff I wasn’t interested in but it did have a few items that I was.  There were copies of two books by C.S. Lewis; “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe” and “The Screwtape Letters.”  The first book whetted my appetite for fantasy and the latter was an oddity that combined a comedic take on the devil with theology that didn’t currently interest me.

But a third book that was in that box was a book on astronomy.  It was called “Neighbors of the Earth.”  It was a collection of articles from the astronomy magazine “Sky and Telescope” that concerned the planets and other bodies that travelled around our star and made up the solar system.  For a young boy many of these articles were somewhat opaque because spectrographs were beyond my level of scientific accomplishment.  But there was plenty of things I could understand that changed a lot of the “facts” I had about the planets that I had begun to accumulate from science fiction stories.  The statement that, “the atmosphere of Venus consists largely of carbon dioxide” seemed to put the kibosh on my idea of a planet colonized by humans working on farms raising tobacco and coffee.  Later on, the surface temperature being 600 degrees Fahrenheit sealed any hopes of Venusians of any kind.  Then, the article, “Is There Vegetation on Mars?” provided the death blow to my thoughts about Martians.

But the book had many thought-provoking and for me enjoyable articles.  An article called, “Internal Structure of Jupiter and Saturn” introduced me to the concept of “metallic solid hydrogen.”  The idea that a gas could be turned into a solid metal was so exotic to my juvenile understanding of science that it probably sparked my first wishes to understand the mysteries of chemistry.

But looking at the book recently, I noticed that I never was very interested in the mysteries that surrounded the relatively recently discovered planet Pluto.  Even back then, the fact that Pluto seemed much too small to account for the perturbations in the orbit of Neptune was very disturbing to the astronomical community.  So, theories to explain this included either trying to convince themselves that Pluto’s diameter was much larger than observed or that its density was enormously higher than any other body in the solar system.  There was an “experiment” with metal balls of different materials and coated with materials of differing reflectivity to show how “specular reflection” could make a larger object look much smaller.  I’ll have to say it wasn’t very convincing.  And this made me think of all the current theories using dark matter and dark energy that are being used to explain measurements that defy the current models of how the universe works.  And this reminds me that our knowledge is always incremental and that we will never have all the answers.

But it’s interesting to see how that one box of unwanted books seems to have informed many of my intellectual leanings.  Sort of a personal butterfly effect.

A Respite.  What’s Not to Love?

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Another day, another mass killing in a church.  Okay we need a break today.  Need something that won’t push me over the edge into catatonia.  Let’s see.

So, Camera Girl and I went to a gathering of my weekly zoom-call buddies.  It was a rescheduled Labor Day party that was cancelled because of weather, I think.  Our host had a pork roast in a smoker and other delicacies.  Camera Girl baked a ricotta cheesecake and some other stuff and we relaxed around a giant fire pit in a cauldron hung from a heavy chain attached to a tripod.  We ate and socialized.  There was a lot of talk about music.  Our host is a musician.  He’s a singer and guitar player and after dinner he set up a band and played country favorites and some eclectic tunes along with songs of his own.  The audience was very appreciative as well they should have been.  It was very enjoyable.

Afterward there was some political discussion amongst a few of us but my heart wasn’t into it.  It was much more enjoyable to discuss the merits of and differences between Hank Williams Senior, Junior and the III.  And talk about who really played the instruments on the Beach Boys, “Pet Sounds” (apparently studio musicians called, “The Wrecking Crew”).  Sure, we did talk a little about Charlie Kirk’s murder, but I much preferred spending time talking about the old days and some of the characters who we worked with but hadn’t thought about in a long time.  Reminiscing actually is a lot of fun.  And there were people there I hadn’t seen in a long time.  And everyone got along great.  And I did hear some very good health news about someone who had had a terrible accident.  So, all in all, it was an excellent night.

But all too soon Camera Girl reminded me I needed to head home and we said our goodbyes.  But when I got home, I was inspired by the musical nature of the night to dig out a bunch of CDs that I had bought but never ripped onto my computer and put on some thumb drives to listen to in my car and around the house.  You see I’ve never gone in for streaming.  I don’t use a cell phone at all (well, I have a flip phone that I charge up if I have to go out of town).  So, my music is based on my CD collection.  Well, I had about ten albums that I hadn’t heard in a few years so I added them to the playlist and damn!  All of a sudden, my music was light years better than it’s been in forever.  So, ignoring the present apocalypse has been very pleasant.  Sure, I’ll have to come up for air soon and the horror is just waiting for me to come back to the surface but for a short exciting moment I was living in a happier world without trans-psycho-killers, Antifa losers and government shutdowns.  What’s not to love?

The Chiropteriad

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So last night around midnight I was trying to fall asleep in bed when I heard some noise coming from a window.  In the summer this window has one of those screens with the bracing handles that snugs into the frame of the window.  I had noticed that it wasn’t completely sealed into the window frame but figured it would keep 95% of the bugs out so I didn’t bother to fiddle with it.  Anyway, it was dark so I couldn’t see anything but there was a scurrying and scratching noise.  So, I turned on the light and almost immediately a small black object fell to the floor under the window and immediately opened its wings and flitted around the room.  It was a bat.  I woke Camera Girl and like the good woman she is she ran screaming from the room.  Being a man of action, I started swatting at it with a sweatshirt I had on hand.  That proved to be less than useless.  So, I procured a kitchen broom and ran around the room swatting at it.  No go.  I opened up the door to the balcony and tried to force him out that way.  When a second bat entered the room by the door, I reconsidered this tactic and closed said door.  Now I was ineffectually swinging a broom at two bats that were swooping around the room.

Having a low tolerance for useless effort I closed the doors to our closets and bathroom and beat a hasty retreat to the hallway outside where Camera Girl confronted me on my failure as a protector of the marital bedroom.  I declared a temporary retreat but swore a terrible oath on the River Styx that in the morning I would reconquer our sacred homeland and evict the flying vermin with all of my strength and cunning.  So, we were marooned in one of the spare bedrooms and greatly was I wroth.  After a surprisingly comfortable sleep I woke up raring to settle the score with these winged interlopers.  I brought a six-foot ladder, a child’s butterfly net and a stiff piece of cardboard to trap the beasts inside the net.

After a somewhat thorough inspection of the ceiling, I couldn’t locate my enemies.  Then I looked behind the blinds of one of the other windows that was opened and found one of the critters wedged in the upper corner between the screen and the frame.  I lowered the open window as far as I could while still allowing my hands to force the screen outward and then pushed.  Now the screen was hanging below the window on the outside of the house.  I assumed the bat would fly off in fear.  I was mistaken.  The stupid creature was clinging to the screen.  I got my head and shoulders out of the window and with the leverage I now had I banged the screen against the wall and finally the bat let go and ended up on a flat roof below the window.  Apparently stunned, he later flew off.

I went back and made a closer inspection of some curtains and found the other varmint tucked between the wall and a curtain rod.  I angled the butterfly net and the cardboard as close to the critter as possible and then scraped him off the wall with the cardboard and trapped him with the net.  With Camera Girl nervously entering the room to open the balcony door (and quickly shutting it behind me!) I was able to shake the flying invader out of the net and whoosh; he winged into the woods.

Dunwich has many hazards.  Vampires, lycanthropes of various descriptions, ghouls and even Democrats haunt the swamps and graveyards of this cursed land.  But I feel that my actions today deserve some very special tribute.  Some kind of testimonial with perhaps a cash award would be reasonable, I think.  In a more creative era, the local poet laureate would dedicate an epic poem, possibly in dactylic hexameter, to immortalize my titanic struggle to make Camera Girl safe in her own boudoir.  Maybe I can get Grok or ChatGPT to put something together.

Let’s see.

Sing Muse of that hero skilled in the netting and ejecting of chiropteran monsters in all their horror

Who climbed to great heights and swung the broom to protect the goddess Camera Girl from any harm

Bring him to my mind’s eye and let me praise him with great praise.  What a man, what a man, what a mighty good man!

 

Or something like that.

Lesson Painfully Learned

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So, what have we learned?  What have I learned?  After fifty years as an adult living in the United States I have learned one thing.

The only thing that counts from leaders is results.

In addition to that are all the other things you learn by living in the madhouse that was the last quarter of the twentieth century and the first quarter of the twenty first:

  • Talk, of all kinds, is cheap and almost meaningless.
  • Good intentions by themselves achieve nothing.
  • Action that is not informed by intelligence and purpose can sometimes be worse than inaction.
  • Most politicians are liars and crooks.
  • Those that aren’t, often are insane.
  • Everyone has ulterior motives. The trick is to align with those whose motives are compatible with yours.
  • There are no angels out there, only men. Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good.
  • Allies can come from the most unexpected corners.
  • Stay far away from really stupid people. They’ll get you killed.
  • Lots of conspiracy theories have turned out to be true. Be careful whom you talk to.
  • Just because you’re the only one in a dozen people who think something is a bad idea doesn’t mean you’re wrong. It might mean they’re feds.
  • Someone can be really smart and have all the facts and still come to the wrong conclusions. Use common sense.
  • There are nuts on both sides of the political divide. Use common sense.
  • Don’t let political differences destroy your family. Tread gently here.
  • Keep a sense of humor. You’ll need it.
  • Don’t let hate eat you up. Most of the people on the other side aren’t monsters.  A few are but don’t transfer that status to everyone.  Unless you live in some kind of red bubble you will meet up with the Left.  Don’t become unhinged.
  • Don’t become manic or depressed. There will always be victories and defeats.  Learn how to live in the real world not a wonderland that will never be.
  • No one is God except God. Trump is a man.  He’s just as imperfect and prone to error as everyone else.  He will not save us and one day he won’t be in charge.  Remember the big picture.
  • Figure out your actual convictions. What do you truly believe in?  What is unimportant?
  • Figure out what you want to achieve in your life and decide if this is likely under the current political regime.
  • Align your goals with the world as it really is. For example, cable news anchorman may no longer be a reasonable career path.  Whereas news influencer has some currency.
  • Don’t waste too much time agonizing over things you have absolutely no control over.
  • Spend the time prioritizing the actions you can achieve according to how much they will benefit you.
  • Spend as much time as you possibly can with people you like.
  • Learn how to communicate with people who hold extremely differing views from you. For instance, learn how to disagree with someone in a conversation without insulting him.
  • Find some friends out there and laugh with them when you can.

There, that was fun.