In responding to a comment, I brought up Taran's Constant - something I haven't really defined in writing until now. The general theory behind it is that there is an overwhelming amount of people who, no matter how good their intentions, want something for nothing. Robert Heinlen wrote in The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress: TANSTAAFL. Expanded, it becomes There ain't no such thing as a free lunch.

(If you want to know about the picture to the left, read Ownership.)

In a wonderful, happy-clappy¹ world things would all be free. If you wanted something, someone would give it to you or would not complain if you took it. Whatever you needed, whatever you wanted, it would be yours for the asking. Unfortunately, this is not the world we live in: Things have a limited supply, and as such there are people who fill the niche attempting to explain how things with a limited supply are dealt with by the descendants of those who used shellfish and stones as barter. These people are called 'economists', and are often made popular by taking very interesting and sometimes exotic positions on just about everything. Looking back at my life and knowing what I know now, I probably should have become an economist.

Making sense of chaos is a popular pastime around the world, yet that pastime is limited by our own concepts of order and chaos. Expanding 'chaos' to include order makes the word chaos null and void. There is no chaos. There is just order that we don't understand.

Life right now seems like a sitcom of chaos, flotsam of a rejection of every definition of order that I can find. The old mathematics instructor on my shoulder tells me to simplify, but how does one simplify so many things that seem unrelated... but are related through the nexus of me? How is it that some have such neat lives whereas mine always seems to be in a extended period of upheaval? I do not know.

Maybe the answer is in the question. And maybe I'm not asking the right question.

Chaos is a word for something that seemingly does not have order, yet everything has some sort of order... the trick is figuring out where that order is derived from, why things happen as they do, and how to make them happen the right way as opposed to the wrong way.

Driving down the Solomon Hochoy Highway, I get a call from another life - asking me what I'm doing. 'Driving on the highway'. I'm asked if I'm going to a conference in Hungary related to information technology.

I process this. Hungary. A few months ago Hungary would not have seemed so distant, but with recent changes, it seems very distant. In fact, it seems pretty much impossible - I've already canceled my trip to Prato, Italy to present a paper on virtual worlds. The real world has emphatically shook me back into the fold. Here I am, in a tangible position of reality, being asked if I want to go to a conference in Hungary about something that I never understood the need for conferences for. Either you grok or not.

'No'.

As if I hadn't said 'no', the conversation goes into a reasoning as to why the caller wanted to know if I was going - and the answer was...

'But I'm not going.'

And I'm not. Maybe in the future I will place my foot into that life again, but for now my foot is grounded in the mud and a dream of something that I never had before.

Today I went to get a haircut - a regular thing these days, as my hair grows quickly and I've been spending so much time outside. While awaiting the barber to become free, a man walked in speaking Spanish - a language I can speak.

He asked me, in Spanish, whether this was a place to get a haircut - I responded 'si', and then he asked me how much it cost. The cost is $45 TT, but for some reason my mind drew a blank on translating 45. The answer, of course, is 'cuarenta y cinco' - but in retrospect I noticed I made a mistake in the way I handled the situation.

You see, it became about my ability to say 45 in Spanish. And that really wasn't the problem - the problem was that he didn't know the answer to the cost. The young woman who didn't speak a word of Spanish flashed her fingers to 45 for him, and he got it.

That's how I learned Spanish, actually. So I screwed up - I began addressing my problem instead of the immediate problem that he had. It's the same issue I often complain of in others, and there it was - as plain as day, something that I did. A reminder upon introspection, and a refresher on 45.

The solutions are many. Picking the best one for the situation is important. Reminder noted.