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29 Jesus said, "If the flesh came into being because of spirit, that is a marvel, but if spirit came into being because of the body, that is a marvel of marvels.
Yet I marvel at how this great wealth has come to dwell in this poverty."
http://users.misericordia.edu//davies/thomas/Trans.htm
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I live in poverty. I have always lived in poverty. I don't know any other sort of life. I've never even reached the dazzling heights of lower-middle-class. It seems like to me that even though I am poor, and have always been poor, and most likely, I will die even poorer than I am is now. When a body gets old and helpless, as far as the medical profession is concerned, it's the old highway robbery yell-out "Your money or your life". Doctors don't become doctors to help their patients as much as to help themselves. No blame. I experience happiness and sadness within the limits of my poverty in equal measure to those who are as rich as Midas.
I might concede that other people appear to "see" my poverty as if it is all that I am or ever can be. They see me as if I am poverty itself. An untouchable. As poverty, I am is indeed that. I am is what they "see" they would be like if they walked the streets in my shoes, but for their own reasons. When the higher classes of people see me coming toward them on the sidewalk, they usually cross the street in order not to pass near me. As though poverty is contagious just by breathing the same air as they breathe. Whatta I know? Maybe they're right. They appear to be convinced they'll come down with some horrible disease that might lead them eventually to their deathbed, and if they can just manage to avoid being near me, they will remain immortal for another decade or so.
I don't know why people think they're immortal right up until they get sick like everybody else and die. How can anyone consider themselves to be immortal if their own parents have died before them? Died anyway, despite how they loved and adored them? Isn't love what gives people life and the very air they breathe? Isn't God love?
Why won't God's love keep you from getting sick of some deadly disease and killed with the ensuing and inevitable pain. I propose that God, whatever you've decided that is, never has caused sickness and death, and it never will. Of course, the "never" part can seem fairly trivial and unprogressive if one's experiential acknowledgment of how long "never will" lasts, and how it ends when they croak. There have been times when I've considered life itself to be a deadly disease. Is life like a childhood disease people think they will eventually grow out of?
Even though I live in poverty and I am the poverty I live in, I don't think I'm the poverty in which great wealth has come to reside as the saying above implies. If I were I think I'd be a more impulsive buyer than I am. It's difficult for me to make final decisions about buying things because I never seem satisfied that I have sufficiently "future-proofed" my purchase. Particularly in regard to high tech gadgets.
I just spent an hour or so looking at the TV sets for sale at newegg.com. I've shopped with them for years when I go to buy something over the internet because they've never argued with me about returning a product if I'm not happy with it. Once they even upgraded the gadget to the latest model when they sent me the wrong version of something and I complained.
This is not the first time I've spent an hour or so at an online site looking and reviewing TV sets. I'm not any closer to buying one than I've ever been. Budget-wise I can only afford a new TV or a new computer. The economic crisis seems to favor the reduced prices on LCD TVs, but the tech advances I've been lusting for a decade or more is just now arriving on the consumer market.
I started lusting for a 64-bit computer more than ten years ago. There were a few 64-bit chips around then, but no 64-bit operating system. Then AMD came out with 64-bit chips, and Windows and Linux came out with 64-bit OSes, but there were no drivers written for the individual consumer, just enterprise services for huge conglomerates that had money up the ying-yang.
This summer Apple is supposed to upgrade their Leopard Operating System to Snow Leopard, and all of it will be 64-bit, drivers and all. I don't need this computer to be happy with myself. I need it to satisfy a frivolous whim. The most important of all true impulse buyer's motivations available for prime time. The big deal is that it won't cost me an arm and a leg like it would have when I first started lusting for this 64-bit system.
The other technical advance I've been waiting to drop in price has been a solid stated drive that replaces the standard platter-spinning hard drive devices. They are bigger and cheaper than they have ever been in their short history. The fetch and deliver rates are approaching the speeds of regular DRAM memory. Whatever I buy it's gonna be faster than anything I've ever bought before, and relatively inexpensive at that.
The biggest improvement will be the video part of it. Apple has changed over to the Nvidia chipset that's lots faster than the Intel motherboard graphics chipset. Now they're using a video card AND the motherboard graphics unit in tandem AND the CPU together due some new technology coming in the Snow Leopard 64-bit Operating System.
"Similarly, a feature called Open Computing Language (or OpenCL), will let any application tap into the vast gigaflops of GPU computing power previously available only to graphics applications. Snow Leopard will also raise the software limit on system memory up to a theoretical 16TB of RAM and introduce a new version of QuickTime optimized for modern audio and video formats."
http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/08/09/30/apple_to_unleash_first_builds_of_snow_leopard_since_wwdc.html
If this Open Computer Language works as advertised it will probably speed the graphics systems of most laptops up to the point that they can be used to play most video games right out of the box. Desktop systems appear to be going the way of all good things. If I understand this right, this new system level firmware will find and use any idle processor of any kind on the entire computer and it's peripherals to speed the graphics rendering up more than an order of magnitude or more. In my imagination I can envision the display manufacturers putting extra GPUs in the circuitry of the computer monitors and TV sets themselves just to advertise that you can speed things up just by buying their product instead. Why would they not? That plays directly into some people's "need for speed". I have a little bit of this speed need. I just can't afford it.
I do not attempt to tell the God's own truth here because I don't know what the truth is or hardly ever. I try to capture the drifting thoughts that randomly appear in my imagination for reasons I may not understand. I don't know if the content I capture with these words is true or false. The Comments settings are turned off to prevent me from having to defend what amounts to little more than fanciful, sometime crude speculation. Great moments in our lives never return.
