Not for nuthin', but suppose God decided to grant every living person one wish?
An aside before I continue: this premise is meant to set up a thought exercise. If you're looking for, or afraid of, any form of either proselytizing or blasphemy, look elsewhere. I'm decidedly indifferent (if such a thing is possible) about religion and all its attendant Supreme Beings. I just need an omnipotent foil for the sake of argument. I suppose I could have used Q from "Star Trek:The Next Generation," but God requires no backstory
Anyway ...
So God grants everyone a wish, with some particular caveats. Your wish has to be as creative as possible. Granted, there's bound to be a lot of overlap, what with several billion people all wishing for one thing or another. But it can't be the usual things people pray for, like peace on earth or goodwill toward others or hitting the lottery or wishing that your boss suffer a sudden bout of spontaneous combustion or that the random meteorite cut loose from the Oort Cloud should make a beeline straight for your drunk stepbrother's noggin.
Actually, the last one is at least somewhat creative, if not entirely original, so that would pass muster. And it would have to, because that's the other caveat -- if you don't conjure up something beyond the usual trite pleadings directed toward heaven, you forfeit your wish. Of course, God gets to decide what's sufficiently creative because -- well, you know, the Master of the Universe/Creator of All Things thing.
I frankly don't know what my wish would be in a case like that. Hopefully there would be some time granted to ponder the possibilities. And since this is my thought experiment, let's take that as a given. So God presents you with an arbitrary deadline (as many deadlines are), and you go off to think about what you really, really, really want. And you know what I really, really, really want?
I don't want it to be something that God could create or cause to occur simply with an "I Dream of Jeannie" blink or a finger snap.
I want it to be something so fraught with consequences that even God would say, "Wow. That's a tough one."
Therein lies the thought exercise. What would constitute a conundrum for God?
The purpose of this isn't to elicit random Facebookesque (Facebookian? Facebookish?) responses for no discernible reason, like those posts that say, "List a street name in the Bronx without an E in it," (I really saw that, by the way -- and I could almost see the pride bursting through the screen from everyone who bent their brains to come up with "Boston Road.")
Rather, this is the kind of weird shit that goes through my mind in times of existential crisis. Which is pretty much always for me. As I ponder how to confront my own challenges, it makes me wonder whether I'm overreacting to the trivial or failing to sufficiently emphasize the profound. I get confused because the line between the two is somewhere on the quantum level.
The result: I've come up with a trivial thought experiment about a profound question that is ultimately nonsensical. So am I wasting my time pondering trivially profound nonsense about a scenario that can't possibly happen?
Yes! And I love it. God help me.
By the way, it's not really relevant to the philosophical musings, but I did come up with a wish. I don't know if this would be a conundrum for an allegedly all-seeing, all-knowing, all-powerful entity, but depending on your point of view, the consequences for me would either be wonderful or horrific.
My wish would be for the Almighty to sit down with me and recite, to the final digit, the value of pi.
Some would interpret that as Heaven: assuming pi has no resolution, you'd be seated beside the Almighty forever. But you have to assume that listening to an eternal recitation of pi would be Hell in Heaven.
Probably better than I forfeit my wish. But that would lead to another existential blog about some other trivially profound nonsense.
I love a paradox.
Wednesday, March 9, 2016
Friday, March 4, 2016
The Battle of the Bulge
Ok, that's a cheap and clichéd headline, found on scribblings about weight loss ever since the real Battle of the Bulge was fought, but I gotta tell ya -- it really is a battle.
On the advice of one of my doctors (and I have several), I've taken up calorie-counting. I also keep track of my daily steps on the Fitbit tracker my wife bought me for my last birthday. It's been great for my weight. It's been murder on my nerves.
It's easy to get obsessive about every excess joule and every moment spent seated. I overheard someone at a gathering recently declare, "sitting is the new smoking," and I've been antsy in my chair ever since.
Eating had been a reliable, pleasurable experience for me once, when I was young and my metabolism could handle it. Now it's an exercise in getting enough exercise to indulge myself, and even my self-indulgence is greatly tempered. I went out for a couple of beers the other night, but I was unable to bring myself to order more than one, fearful that an additional 148 calories would prove fatal. The idea of one more beer was almost as mortifying as the thought of ordering a light beer -- and my gut is telling me, figuratively and literally, that that day is coming very soon.
The flip side of this is that all of my angst has brought about considerable weight loss. I don't want to say exactly how much I weigh for fear of putting a whammy on my ultimate goal, but I'm down more than 20 pounds in the last few months. But the discipline required to achieve that loss has not come, as many insisted that it would, with some sense of Zen generated by treadmill-boosted endorphins. If anything, it's been the opposite.
In short, I've traded stress eating for stress dieting.
I suppose I could just take off the damned Fitbit, which I wear day and night (to measure the quality of my sleep), but it has somehow psychologically fused itself to my left wrist. I've convinced myself that life as we know it, perhaps even whatever life exists throughout all dimensions of spacetime, will come to a screeching halt if I don't make it to 70,000 steps every week.
I'm also become convinced that the food industry is entwined in a vast conspiracy with the pharmaceutical industry. If you eat stuff that's bad for you, there's no shortage of drugs to combat your diabetes, heart disease, high blood pressure, intestinal gas and halitosis. Eat stuff that's good for you and there's no shortage of mind-altering meds to ease the depression caused by a constant diet of stuff that tastes like cardboard or artificial turf.
Plenty of healthy foods that taste good, you say? It's a con, I say! If it's low in carbs, it's probably high in sodium. If it's low in sodium, it's probably high in sugar. Fruit, you say? Fruit's fine. I like fruit. But one plum too many and you're doubled over from the bloating. Insane in the methane!
Yes, there are foods that are low in carbs, sodium and sugar that don't generate enough gas to power a small car. All you have to do is develop an affinity for the taste of wallpaper paste.
If not for nuthin' else, at least I've figured out why I've had severe writer's block in the last few months. I'm hungry!
Anyway -- gotta stop now. Off to the gym. I have 7,757 steps to go today.
On the advice of one of my doctors (and I have several), I've taken up calorie-counting. I also keep track of my daily steps on the Fitbit tracker my wife bought me for my last birthday. It's been great for my weight. It's been murder on my nerves.
It's easy to get obsessive about every excess joule and every moment spent seated. I overheard someone at a gathering recently declare, "sitting is the new smoking," and I've been antsy in my chair ever since.
Eating had been a reliable, pleasurable experience for me once, when I was young and my metabolism could handle it. Now it's an exercise in getting enough exercise to indulge myself, and even my self-indulgence is greatly tempered. I went out for a couple of beers the other night, but I was unable to bring myself to order more than one, fearful that an additional 148 calories would prove fatal. The idea of one more beer was almost as mortifying as the thought of ordering a light beer -- and my gut is telling me, figuratively and literally, that that day is coming very soon.
The flip side of this is that all of my angst has brought about considerable weight loss. I don't want to say exactly how much I weigh for fear of putting a whammy on my ultimate goal, but I'm down more than 20 pounds in the last few months. But the discipline required to achieve that loss has not come, as many insisted that it would, with some sense of Zen generated by treadmill-boosted endorphins. If anything, it's been the opposite.
In short, I've traded stress eating for stress dieting.
I suppose I could just take off the damned Fitbit, which I wear day and night (to measure the quality of my sleep), but it has somehow psychologically fused itself to my left wrist. I've convinced myself that life as we know it, perhaps even whatever life exists throughout all dimensions of spacetime, will come to a screeching halt if I don't make it to 70,000 steps every week.
I'm also become convinced that the food industry is entwined in a vast conspiracy with the pharmaceutical industry. If you eat stuff that's bad for you, there's no shortage of drugs to combat your diabetes, heart disease, high blood pressure, intestinal gas and halitosis. Eat stuff that's good for you and there's no shortage of mind-altering meds to ease the depression caused by a constant diet of stuff that tastes like cardboard or artificial turf.
Plenty of healthy foods that taste good, you say? It's a con, I say! If it's low in carbs, it's probably high in sodium. If it's low in sodium, it's probably high in sugar. Fruit, you say? Fruit's fine. I like fruit. But one plum too many and you're doubled over from the bloating. Insane in the methane!
Yes, there are foods that are low in carbs, sodium and sugar that don't generate enough gas to power a small car. All you have to do is develop an affinity for the taste of wallpaper paste.
If not for nuthin' else, at least I've figured out why I've had severe writer's block in the last few months. I'm hungry!
Anyway -- gotta stop now. Off to the gym. I have 7,757 steps to go today.
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