52 days to go

My sister and I took my 16 year-old cousin Sam shopping today. I remember exactly what it was like to be 16, how much I cared about the jeans I wore, the shirts, the shoes, and so on. I am still in love with clothes and shoes but it doesn't have the same urgency. I wondered today if my thirties and fourties would be decades of increasing carelessness of one's appearance. I mean I see this with parents you see at Walmart or the malls, walking around with strollers or their kids, and not caring about the way they look, its one of my least favourite things about looking at the future. I hope that I keep ensuring that I care about what I wear, but I do wonder how these people lost that about themselves.

We spoke with my cousin about some of the choices he has to make soon, like university. Its interesting, he doesn't know a world without the internet. I remember when the internet started becoming popular. I was about 12 or 13 when I had my first email account and used Netscape. Then in university at about 18 years of age I had a Hotmail account, which at the time was the be-all and end-all of emails. We started having course websites and using the internet for research and now its a part of each and every day. Until the ninetees the internet was just not a part of everyday life and now to Sam, its a part of life. Not only the internet, but pagers, then cell phones, now smart phones, 3G, 4G, GPS, bluetooth, infrared technology, and so on are part of every day language.

I remember computer games in the eightees, we had a triathlon or was it a decathlon game on our first computer? You had to press the Y and T keys really fast with two of your fingers to make the guy run and jump over the hurdles. One of my other cousins spent his days asking his parents for an Atari. Computing, engineering, and robotics have seen amazing advances in the past three decades, amazing things have happened.

First day of 2010

New year's eve was fun but of course it comes with lots of baggage. Emotions and thoughts of where I am and where I want to be, where the world is and where it needs to be, and what can I do to change things for the better.

I am absolutely desperate to help make a positive difference. To stop the wars and feed the hungry, and at almost thirty I still don't know how. Reader if you have some suggestions do tell me. Its not like I haven't tried, I volunteer in several organisations, I have a sponsor child, and would have many more if I could afford it, I am constantly hoping and trying to get rich so that I can help those less fortunate. But so far I feel as though I have not done anything significant, and I'm right, I haven't. I always thought by 30 I would be very rich and accomplished and would be saving the world and driving my Porsche Carrera.

So there are 53 days left until I turn thirty now. I still feel like I'm a child, I can't believe I'm twenty nine and will be thirty soon. I haven't managed to mentally get past nineteen or twenty. It's not like I've had an uneventful 29 years either. I've lived through an eight year war between Iran and Iraq almost all of my childhood prior to moving to Canada at 10 years of age. Moving to a new country is an ordeal that no one forgets and mine was relatively smooth thanks to my fantastic parents. I have been to two of the best universities in the world, one in Canada and one in the UK. I have traveled extensively seeing our world and learning about it. But now about to turn thirty and I'm not sure if I want to. I feel like in the next 53 days I need to make a point, make a difference, figure something out, I need your ideas here.

Apart from such popular words and concepts as 'Ground Zero', 'Islamists', 'terrorists', 'suicide bombs', 'Guantanamo', 'Axis of Evil' and so on, the past decade has also been incredible from a technological and therefore social perspective. The internet grew exponentially, so did social networking sites like Orkut, Friendster, and then Facebook, Twitter, and so on. Texting became a common and very popular mode of communication. Smart phones became all the rage, and everyone became completely e-human.

Inspiration

I watched Julie & Julia last night and I loved it. Julie blogged about her experiences as she cooked through Julia Child's recipes and it eventually ended up affecting many others and also saved her in some ways. I have thought about blogging many times before but often thought it could more wasted time than anything else. However, in the past few months as I begin to entertain the concept of 30 and all that has happened in my lifetime and all that I think and feel and want to share, I think in the least its a good outlet, and I hope that maybe someone might read my blog and maybe even be inspired.

I turn 30 on February 24, 2010. As of today, December 31, 2009, I have 54 days to go. I want to write down my feelings and thoughts in the next 54 days. I am more or less an ordinary girl, I don't have any major issues, I have a great family and great friends, and so I thought it would be good to write about what someone relatively normal in North America, in particular in Canada, feels and thinks about turning 30 in today's world.

First of all tonight is new year's eve. Another new year's eve where most of my feelings begin to crash down on me about the state of affairs of certain things, in particular the state of the world and in lower points of the day I tend to get a bit sad about the fact that I am still not in love. I try and quickly ignore the issue as the world has bigger problems and I am definitely one of the luckiest ones. But soon the lack of a partner links to the world's political problems which I will explain some other day.

The state of the world today is what crushes me usually, sometimes paralyzes me. I spent most of my twenties in the post-9/11 era. Can you imagine? Images and sounds of suicide bombings, drones, carpet bombings, rockets, black hawks, and so on have been a staple on television, websites and other media for so long. My question has always been: WHY HAVEN'T WE LEARNED?

Did we not recently go through two world wars? Since recorded history there have been the Crusades, the Spanish Inquisition, the Mugals, partitions, world wars and many more wars and each have caused enormous calamity. I would have thought by now we would have figured it out. I thought by now we would have peace in the world, understanding, and on top of that we would have solved issues like hunger, common diseases, and energy issues. The very obvious issue is that we can, I know we can. I am a scientist by training and I know the science and technology is out there. I know that if we can send men to the moon and make a robotic hand that takes command from the user's own brain, that we can stop fighting, we can solve hunger, and we can have clean energy.