7wondering

I’ve been planning the trip to Panama.  Oh wait.  I guess I haven’t blogged that I’m going to Panamá.  Well I am.  With Jase, Simon, and Joe.  I’ve been wanting to do a guy trip and here it is (Ethan has left the nest).

We’ll be there from June 30th to July 17th (2008).  The plan is to get in as much of Panamá as we are able while still having fun.  If the camera doesn’t get stolen I’ll have photos.

Mary was asking me what I was writing and I said that I was writing about how preparing for travelling was different.  Different than: going to Perú? with lots of little children? before we had kids?

Actually I was thinking about how preparing for travel has changed since web 2.0.  For many years we’ve been able to read websites and email addresses in the travel guides.  We’ve been able to google places, hotels, restaurants, tours, and everybody with a website and a product.

Now, though, the web provides us with the powers of Greek gods.

With web 2.0 I can see into the future and see everywhere anywhere at any time.

I was just now poring over maps of Panama City and trying to get a feel for the place.  A few nights ago, before we found out about the Panama tickets, I was waiting for something to finish on the computer and opened up Google Earth.  I decided to fly around Machu Picchu to see from the sky what I had seen up close.  It was dramatic and wonderful.  I could zoom in to Aguas Calientes and follow the train tracks around to the restaurant at which we had our first lunch.  I could click on little camera icons and look at photos that other Google Earth users had uploaded - I could see from the sky things that I could only see from the street a few months earlier.  As a side note, it was fun to look at the photos and note which ones were in the wrong place.

Now, what about seeing the future?  Maybe it is a little bit more like omnipresence?  These are awfully grand words, but they are reflecting some ideas in the book “Stumbling On Happiness” by Daniel Gilbert.

Gilbert’s idea was that if we would consider the choices of others who had already made a choice that we were about to make then we could benefit by making the choice that created the result we want when the other people made that choice.

To me this says blog or amazon.com.  We have the truly amazing capability to do something unheard of in all the world up till now (and many are not hearding of it now) - we can see a record of nearly all choices that are there to be made.

I suppose it would be difficult to read what somebody wrote about his successful suicide and it would be equally ridiculous to try to read about which car to select from a model year that has yet to be designed.

But, for most things that humans can do and will make choices about there exists a large number of people who have made these choices already and who are sharing them for free on the internet.

So, I can read blog entries and forum discussions about what a particular hotel in Panama City was like, or whether to go snorkeling on the Caribbean side or the Pacific side of the country.

I can fly over the parks and forests in my supernatural Google Earth view and see what I am up against.

How high is Volcan Baru anyhow?

Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about things virtual, but within those things have been percolating things human, especially dreams.

One of the most interesting filmmakers I know is Michel Gondry. I am on a Gondry kick right now, because he is a good symbolic representation of my theme. Gondry funnels his dreams into his films.

Stéphane is a character from Gondry’s movie “The Science of Sleep” which is a downright weird movie. I bring it up here because it is one of the instances where a Gondry dream shows up in a movie. In the movie, Stéphane has a nightmare in which his hands grow and grow and they horrify him.

I had seen this theme before in a video Gondry directed for the Foo Fighters in which the hero’s hands grow into huge malformed things which he uses to protect his girlfriend from thugs.  In a sort of “making of”  video on the “Works of Michel Gondry” DVD, Gondry explains that, as a child, he would wake up terrified after having dreams of huge hands.

If you pay attention to his films, you will be able to spot other dream references and recurring themes.  

I really love the idea of virtual things - things that aren’t really there, but my brain thinks they are - because, in a sense, everything I know is simply electrical impulses in my brain.  This begs the question: If I cut off my head in a forest, do you still exist?

Here is Gondry solving a Rubik’s Cube with his feet.  

Well, not really.

The time has come to move SevenWondering to a new home, this time hosted by zwaaa.org.

I’m always working on three times more projects than I actually have time for, but I will make an attempt to put some thoughtful posts here.  I also need to port all the stuff in from the previous incarnation (assuming you believe in incarnations), including photo albums, videos, and blogs written in Latin America.

Thanks, John, for the space and the groovy theme.

Jim, AKA WonderDad