Savers, for those that don’t know, is a cheap clothing institution. I’ve lucked out from time to time and picked up 2 pairs of Florsheims, a Marc Jacobs shirt, 2 Zegna shirts, and an Armani shirt and tie for the amounts they’re actually worth (about 6 bucks each). The problem is the low prices seduce you into buying clothes that, were the cost a tidge higher, you’d leave on the rack.

Hence, you end up with clothes you’ve never worn. I’ve got perhaps 15 t-shirts, 5ish of which I’ve bought from Savers and never worn.They may be more comfortable, fashionable and less full of holes than my other shirts, but I just don’t give enough of a stuff about them to pull them on. They don’t excite me. The t-shirts I do wear however have something about them that makes me want to put them on.

That one’s from my brother – he bought it with his pocket money because he thought I’d like it. That one I wore to a Chemical Brothers concert the day I drove to Melbourne from Canberra for the first time. The one I’m wearing right now I found in someone’s living room at a party after I’d lost mine – fingers crossed it’s original owner has my lost shirt in his/her rotation still too.

Looking at clothes I’d never worn, I realised they still feel like Saver’s clothes. Like they still belong to the store. Holding my trusty black t-shirt however –  that I had bartended in, urban-caved in, walked the dog in – was an entirely different feeling. That shirt, that in my minds eye had personal narrative woven in with the cotton, was mine.

Stuff you buy isn’t yours until you’ve done something with it. Until you and whatever it is that pulled your wallet from the back pocket of your jeans have a story to share, a lived connection, it’s not yours. The place you swapped it for money in still owns it.

This teaches me two important lessons.

1) Don’t buy too much shit. If you’ve got to much stuff to realistically forge a narrative with, sell it or give it away with someone who’s got more time. It does you no good, it’s not even yours.

2) Now that I know the reason I avoid some clothes for years, I can make a concerted effort to wear them when I’m up to something mischievous, replacing the story of where it was bought with the story of my choosing instead.

I wonder what else this line of thinking could apply to?

How is that not just the accepted norm?

Ya dig.

http://yoxi.tv/

Now we just need an Aussie one.

But things will be sorted soon. I struggled with what I should or shouldn’t be putting here, but now I’ve decided to chill out and just write about anything I want to, and share anything I find really interesting.

From sociology, philosophy, the environment to cocktails and pop culture basically this blog will become a peek inside my noggin.

I also intend to add some serious things, like ideas I have for non-profits, using this blog to test the water for them and let them germinate and be improved by argumentative discourse.

Rocknroll

(I also intend to improve this post later. The whole blog will be undergoing a reorganisation. Should be awesome.)

Infinity is a tricky bastard though. If you measure infinitely, the measurement becomes infinitely complex and we are all then tied to the largesse of the concept of infiinity, which then makes all infinitely accurate measurements kind of the same.

So, due to the nature of infinity and measurement we are all completely unique and we are all completely the same.

Awesome.

ps: I promise to get a little less abstract soon.  Probably.

If you haven’t come across them before have a look at this or this or this or this.  Or just use Google.  I’m easy.

I first came across fractals in Encarta ’95 way back in the day, and have thought on and off about them ever since. Patterns repeat endlessly sometimes, up and down the scale. No matter what magnification you choose to view a fractal through, it will exhibit the exact same pattern. Look at the edge of an ice crystal, and you will see a series of clearly defined shapes. Look at the edge of that any one of those shapes on the edge of the ice crystal, and again you will see the same series of shapes.

I think fractal-like patterns exist with emotions and life in general as well. The feeling a person would experience from feeding thousands of refugees or one homeless man on the street is the same feeling (pattern), just at a different magnification.

The worth of a person who has fed and watched a family of magpies as they have grown, left the backyard, returned and reproduced over a period of years and the enjoyment they get from that is no less than that of a School Principal graduating their students, or a mother raising a brood of children.

So what matters in the end is not the grand scale on which we act, but the patterns we see and feel and experience through those actions.

People shouldn’t feel like they have to hold out for something bigger and better, on a grander scale than their life currently is. If they do, it is at the detriment of their own life as they allow patterns to pass them by in the hope they see a bigger one, when size doesn’t matter.

Engaging in the world around you is the key. Whether what you are looking at and experiencing is big or small isn’t of consequence: What is vital is that you look at it and experience it.

View the world with the open eyed wonder you’ve always been jealous of others for having. It isn’t a special trait, it’s a choice people make.

You can shut out the beauty and vitality of the real world and focus on rushing through your subjective reality until it the race is over and you can get out,

or

You can look and feel and think and love and smell and taste and simply be with the knowledge that everything, absolutely everything, is mindblowingly amazing and worthy of your attention, time and interest. You can engage with every inch of your life, just like you’ve always wanted to.

You can.

Entropy is the passage of all things from order to disorder, and the only quantity in the physical sciences that implies a particular direction in time (forwards….duh). As we go forward in time the entropy of an isolated system increases (moves from order to disorder towards its most stable state) or stays the same, never going in the other direction, where order would appear out of the swirling chaos. (Props to Wikipedia)

Thinking about this the other day led me to a pretty interesting idea.

The largest isolated system that exists is existence itself; the Universe. As the entropy of the Universe increases, and order moves to disorder, stars and planets and galaxies and whatever the hell else is out there will shake itself out into its most stable configuration, and if it all hasn’t come crashing back together again before it we will have what is known as the Heat Death of the universe, where everything is so spread out that it is  a constant temperature and still. So, at the Big Bang the Universe was as ordered as it could possibly ever be, and at the Heat Death of the Universe it will be as disordered as possible. It follows then that the Big Bang it was infinitely small, and at Death it will be infinitely large, but I digress from the point I want to make.

This all means that from the time the Universe was ‘born’, just like us it has been dying. Its very creation has as a corollary it’s impending death, just as our birth has as its yang the fact that we will one day die. The gas that was inside the balloon of the universe that was popped at the big bang is expanding into disorder, and instead of simply diffusing into the gas around it like air does in our reality, the death throes of the universe creates life as we know it.

Everything we do on our little corner of the vastness that is the Universe then can be viewed thus;

Life, civilisation and everything we hold to be important is simply the way the Universe slowly dies.

bam.