2 posts in one day!? What is the world coming to?

I know this is unheard of (check below for new home pics)...but I was just sitting here pondering...and thought is was time I shared some thoughts of mine...

and f.y.i....yesterday Thailand's prime minister was ousted by a military coup...it can sometimes take me awhile to get the news since I'm never around tv's...but it's really amazing the major things going on in the world that we have no clue about. And when I did read more indepth about the Thailand coup...there's peices only I could understand because I was in Thailand and knew some background-the telling in the news just doesn't do all the angles justice.

on to my ponderings...

You know, when I moved to Oakland…I never missed vegas. In the bay area I never longed for the familiar…maybe because I never liked vegas much. Anyways, I was just sitting here longing for the familiar. People, places, family, whatever. And I was feeling pretty lonesome and helpless…because its not like I can visit anything or anyone familiar to me here yet! I was thinking how if I could be anywhere, doing anything at this moment, I’d like to be sitting here on my bed curled up with my old dog, Zoot. Then I realized a hug sounded good. Then I realized that today, one of my little neighbor girls gave me a hug, just a couple of hours ago. Like a little angel she was there. And she actually gave me 2 hugs and clung on to me and I remembered feeling just a little awkward in the moment because it was such a long hug…but now that I think of it, I really needed her touch, and that was a gift.

On to another subject. I’m looking up this guy, Joseph Lister (like Listerene.) My microbiology teacher told me to look him up just for kicks…and like a total geek, I was doing just that on a Saturday night! So anyways, Lister is the guy who first innovated aseptic surgical technique. Now, this may not sound like too huge a deal – but it was back then! This was back in (really the not too distant past, the mid-1800s) the times when people didn’t even know what caused disease. Or why, when a piece of meat was left out, did it go bad? They didn’t know about bacteria. So this guy Lister, early on in his career, saw a problem. The problem was that more then half of the people undergoing successful surgery, later died of infection. Lister, as well as other scientists of his time, were seeing things awry, asking questions, finding out the answers, and thereby changing the course of history!
Fast forward to present day. Sure there are still scientists exploring the minutia of the natural world and how the body functions…but really, that all looks a lot different from the good ol’ days of the 1800s – somehow it’s just not so clear cut anymore. However, in the moment that I was grasped by amazement for the way these scientists were questioning, and probing, and thinking in terms of completely asinine theories (or so it was thought, until they were proved to be geniuses)- I was at the same time grasped by another thought of who is taking the role of these innovative, life-seeking scientists today? The time for that sort of science has passed…but there remains to be many things figured out in this world – and there persists these human misconceptions/un-understanding of our world! Why can’t it happen in dealing with poverty? Why can’t it happen in healing truly broken people? Being a social scientist as it were. Where are the innovative social scientists!?….observing and questioning the ill structures in the world and giving their lives over to finding the answer/solution to the question. Not every scientist out there was a success…many were trying to prove bunk theories….but if there weren’t scientists, all urging each other on and working off each others findings…we’d still be dying of plaques and thinking that meat rots because it caught a bad spirit!
I want to be a social scientist.