Maybe I’m late to the party, but did you know that you can sell your junk on the internet, and people will actually buy it? I sold a book on Amazon and a some trash on eBay, and now I’m rich and have no stuff!

This is part of a bigger project to lighten my load and eventually have space for a bed in my new apartment. To that end, I have a bunch of stuff to give back. If you think I have something of yours, you should ask for it. Particularly if these borrowed copies of Ulysses and 101 Philosophy Problems are yours.

What does it mean to serve humankind?

The great challenges of the next century revolve around the environment. Billions will die as a result of climate shifts and dried up resources. By 2050, 40% of species, most wetlands and reefs, the sugar maple, Louisiana, and southern Florida will be gone, and there’s nothing we can do about it.

But we can stop the damage there, with work (take last Saturday’s 350 day). “How do I help?” is a question with many answers.

I’m a card-carrying computer geek– I make web pages for fun, I read xkcd, and some of my favorite foods are chips and cookies. But the world does not need computer geeks. Certainly scientists, engineers, and technical others help people, and we need some of their work. But I believe our impact on the world’s poor and climate is largely negative, and our efforts are at best tangentially directed at people.

To enter grad school in international development or environmental policy would be to voluntarily let my talents rot and my computer go cold. I might be able to use technical tools to help– to bring opportunities to developing countries, inculcate lifestyle change in the West that will diminish our impact, model the effects of projects on the needy and nature. But to pursue an education or more experience in those things is irresponsible without a deeper delving in the world of salmon-saving, bungalow-building, and AIDS-aiding.

I think I have the obligation to do it whatever the world calls for, and my background is mostly a curse. But how can one know?

Socrates dedicated his life to corrupting the youth of Athens, in willful misinterpretation of his reoccurring dream the he should “make and cultivate music.” I wonder sometimes where we’d be if he had decided to learn the lyre.

I dreamt about all of you last night– the Rockies, the Scadians, the MIT folk, the dear others. I miss you all and something in the air of the greater-Cambridge area too.

I’m settled now in Washington, DC with Flame for the year, and working on demystifying grad schools and finding a new job that let’s me work for good. And working on growing older with dignity (I feel so young, but these white hairs are blowing my cover).

So here is my foot in the door to better communication in the blogosphere. More soon.

Our ship lies at harbor, she’s ready to dock,

I hope she’s safe landed without any shock,

If ever we should meet again by land or by sea
I will always remember your kindness to me.

Does it surprise you that life just keeps happening, balanced on the blunt edge of choice? The challenges of life always deepen to match you at every point, and never stop calling you forward onto an ever-lengthening road. No matter what decisions we make, we know that any resulting bliss or agony will be largely temporary, any new human connection will be mixed with alienation, and any new truth will only provide more ground for uncertainty.

Our deepest internal flaws will forever confront us, and are reflected in every moment. In life, we perceive exactly the challenges we’re ready for, and we will never find a situation that provides lasting contentment, by virtue of how we’re built, not how the world is built. The world we perceive is a projection of ourselves.

Brain scientists, Plato, Heidegger and others agree: we create our world. There is a huge gulf between the messy data that we’re exposed to, and the orderly world we experience. Ours is a world of actions and properties and causation, even though these things are not really out there. The things that we perceive do not exist at all. Man is the measure of everything we know, but nothing at all. If you saw the world from a fly’s perspective, or a tree’s, it would be largely unrecognizable. The world no doubt exists in some form, but it is just beyond our perceptions of it.

What if every aspect of our world is explainable in this way? What if everything we experience is just a reflection of our own yearnings, like a dream? The people we sit near on the train, the flies that never leave our food alone, the latest news never actually happened. I meet the women I do because they represent the beauty I’m ready to perceive and patches on the flaws I hide in myself. We are like genius amoebas, experiencing primitive sensations and creating an elaborate story to occupy ourselves.

I do believe there’s something outside of us. There is a potential to do good and pursue love. Our actions in this created world have some effect on the real world. I suspect that the real world is much more inside us than we realize (we don’t think any part of the world is inside us now), and that actions are only proxies for the real work being done internally-and-in-reality. Life is a fabulous and very-serious game, specifically designed by our own minds out of their encounter with a primordial something. We are offered the opportunity to pursue this woman because she represents beauty, or to help this child as an exercise in providing.

Something in this scares me to the core of my being. I believe that the world runs by scientific laws because I’ve been told it does. But my own experiments in school have more often defied those laws than confirmed them. It is as though the world was knocking on my consciousness’s door, asking to let it defy everything I know. If there’s no science, then no biology, no technology, no civilization. My whole life may be like the delusions of a man in a coma, yet littered with clues of its falsehood and the muffled voice of someone trying to talk me out of it.

Where does the time go? I’ve been thinking a lot about the nature of time and the virtues and vices of priority.

I’m in Prague, in a huge two-bedroom, four-meter-high flat. Flame and I have started discovering the hip and eccentric as well as the beautiful and historical.

Since last post, we drove all over the south of France with friends, had adventures on low gas at midnight in nowhere, and attended the most precious contemporary art festival in the world (Art Basel).

The best way to know about my goings-on is to read Flame’s blog on the Travelers Network: http://travelersnetwork.org/johanna.

Here’s the last of three posts I mean to write about recent events.

Flame and I are in London! We didn’t mean to be– we should have been in Marseille, France, by now. But such is the price of weather in Philly.

After visiting a half dozen half-price ticket booths near Leicester Square (Leicester Square half-price ticket booth, The half-price ticket booth, The official half-price ticket booth, and The half-official Leicester-price booth, among them), we got some full-price tickets to see Wicked, the Mists of Avalon of Oz.

In celebration Johanna ducked into a steakhouse for a bathroom. I started handing out Travelers Network flyers on the busy Leicester way, which is populated more with flyer-hander-outers than not.

A young man and woman approached. “Wahnt one?”, the woman asked, holding out a yellow leaflet.

“Sure, want to trade?” I offered her a flyer.

“No, its for a show, for tonight,” the guy said.

“I’ve already got plans, but I’ll take one if you’ll take one,” I explained.

“Waht? Ewe cahnt be seerias.”

“It’s a social network for travelers. Here, look.”

“Oh! I’m trahvelling next month!” To Argentina and Brazil– and Iguazu falls– it turned out. We chatted and she took a flyer, and I got away paper-free.

Want to see the new Star Trek with Flame and I at the Church St. theatre at 10pm tonight? I think a big group would be a fun way to watch!

Get tickets beforehand, tell me, and we’ll try to grab a block of seats.