Hexadecimalgrams

For my eighteenth birthday I was given a set of runes that purported to be useful for foretelling the future. I scoffed at the notion, of course, since although I am a determinist through and through, the problems of chaotic systems on the macro level and the Heisenberg effect at the quantum level mean that prediction of the future is not feasible.

Nevertheless, being a good engineer, I read the user manual thoroughly, and came across an interesting idea. The idea behind the runes was not that they predicted the future at all! Just like the I Ching, the runes claimed only to draw the user's attention to certain aspects of their own life. In a way, it's a kind of guided introspection more than anything else.

This really appealed to me, and for a while I tried using the runes on a regular basis to get a deeper insight into life. I soon fell out of the habit though, since they are a bit clunky to use and I had other things on my mind at that age.

But I did learn the habit of keeping an eye out for things "out there" in the world that may shed light on what was going on "in here" inside my head. That's why the Italo Calvino quote above jumped out of the page at me. Hmm, re-reading the previous sentences makes me sound a bit nutty. Just think of it as me having a conversation with the world.

PTR
Hello world! I am in a bad mood today...

World
Oh look! A frog!

PTR
Wow! That's awesome! I wonder if frogs ever feel down?
I wonder what kind of things they think about to cheer themselves up?

It's a process of keeping a sense of perspective I suppose. You just have to be receptive to things that come your way. Anyhoo, this is all just a long preamble to what I wanted to post.

Yesterday after seeing someone off at the airport I went to the ticket machine to pay for my parking. The ticket machine screen said, in large letters on the screen, "CHANGE IS POSSIBLE".

And I thought that was very uplifting.