Flowers, Finance and Happy-Dancing Feet

I had one verrrrry interesting day yesterday. It was so full of strange and wonderful things, that it's hard to know where to begin, so I guess the only way to do it is to be boringly linear.

First, I went outside. *gasp* I know, right? It's a bit shocking to those who know and love me, but every once in a while I meander from the safety of the confines of my apartment. Actually, the real shock is more that I went out during daylight hours...well, maybe that I was awake during daylight hours. Wherever your shock might originate from, I was awake, I was outside, and it was daytime. And it was spring! Sort of.

Lo and behold I saw tulips, my friends!! Red ones, yellow ones and purple ones. For some strange reason I saw a single, lonely white one, and occupied my mind for a time as to the reason there would be a single white one among the other colours. Suffice it to say I came to the conclusion that it was an accidental planting. There was probably a mix-up in the box of bulbs they got, and they never intended to plant that lone white tulip. I also had to wonder for a time if the person who planted the garden wasn't just a little ticked off when they saw the exact shade of the tulip. Had they seen it yet? Did they consider yanking it out?

Anyhoo, I completed my errand and toddled back to my apartment to resume regularly scheduled activities. The day appeared to settle back into its usual routine, but one never knows what interesting entertainments await in the land of social media. Facebook had a couple of surprises in store for me. The first was a conversation with someone regarding cutting-edge science. A woman commented on one of my posts that she only had access to because I'd tagged someone she was friends with. We were discussing a project that involved basically putting the consciousness of a brain into a computer, and it reminded me of another scientist. I asked if her friend was working with him, or had met him or talked to him. She had and did. Not only that, but the woman I was talking to apparently knew this scientist I admired.

A lot of people might not recognize the name +Ray Kurzweil but you really should Google him if you don't. He's the Director of Engineering with Google now, and the whole thing with the brains will soon be a reality from my understanding. I've been getting the Kurzweil AI newsletter in my e-mail for some time now, so it's probably not surprising that I would be happy to be talking to someone who has apparently known him for years. Most people have heard of Neil deGrasse Tyson at this point, who does +StarTalk, and that's about the level I'm talking about. Or maybe you've heard of Elon Musk, who started with eBay and PayPal, did some stuff with the space program (with SpaceX) and then moved on to create Tesla Motors, (which, by the way, is kicking some serious stock market butt from what I'm hearing). Richard Dawkins is another one you may have heard of.

However, if you haven't heard of Ray Kurzweil, you will be really shocked to find out everything he's done in his career. He's one of those amazing visionaries who people try to write off as insane or silly, and have then been proven right so many times that it's mind-blowing. I mean, nobody laughs at Walt Disney these days, do they? But they did, because apparently feature-length animated films would never fly at the box office. Right. Kind of like Mitt Romney calling Tesla an expensive government mistake. Right. And their share price is at what now? Of course, if Mitt Romney could make viable predictions, his political history wouldn't be such a disaster.

The next phase of my Facebook happenings led me to a possible writing job. No guarantees at this point, so I won't say a lot about it for now, but it has to do with writing about finance, and since I have massive experience in multiple areas of finance I'd like to think there's a good chance something will come of it. A little bit at a time, my writing becomes more than just a pipe dream. It has already become more than that to me personally, as I already feel internally validated in that respect. I write what I like to write, and quite a few people enjoy reading it, so even without a paycheque it doesn't get much better than that.

Getting paid to do what I love takes it to another level, and one that will validate my writing for others, perhaps, but it's certainly not the main reason I do it. I write because I have to. I can't stop. I've been writing for almost thirty years now. Yup. You read that right. I'm really, really old. Okay, I was twelve when I started writing and I'll be 42 in June, so maybe I haven't quite hit the winter of my life yet, but I'm not a spring chicken either. I've hit smack dab in the middle-age world, and it was kind of a cushy landing, because I just didn't care. I don't care that it might be weird for me to listen to hip-hop, or dance hip-hop for that matter. I'll do whatever I want to do, for as long as I'm able to do it. Dancing is one of those things.

I don't even care that I have injuries that are supposed to stop me from doing things. Other people can waste their time thinking strange thoughts about me, or judging me for not 'acting my age,' but that tells me more about them than it does about me. Those are some unhappy people. Me? I'm looking forward to doing a whole lot more dancing throughout the rest of my life. In fact, I have some very specific dancing plans. When my feet start doing a happy-dance, there's no stopping them, and right now they're pretty darn happy with just about everything. I just got an image in my head of Kevin James in the movie, Hitch, when he's showing Hitch how 'well' he dances, and he's saying very quietly, "You can't stop it, you can't stop it, you cannot stop it!" Hitch tries to slap some sense into him, but in the end, nope, you cannot stop it. The dancing always wins. If not, you can always knock 'em down with a good hip thrust!