769 In Search Of.

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I could have sworn I used this title before, but none of my searches turned it up. Just hearing those words makes me hear the theme song in my head.

Anyway, I can’t think of anything interesting to say that isn’t just me being randomly angry, so I’ll hold my peace.

29 Comments

Im in agreement. The magic we were brought up beleving in like ghosts, santa, easter bunny etc. It feels horrid when you find out that it was never there. I still believe maybe not in the santa and the easter bunny. I personally keep searching because I do believe that there is something and it isnt gonna let itself come out on its own… gotta have faith to find it…

Thats my reasoning for doing anything I do…cause Magic is freaking lazy and wont do a damn thing by itself…
side note: The magic of the search is more rewarding then finding the ending.

I’m almost 21 and I still go to bed early on Xmas eve because I know Santa won’t leave any presents if I’m awake.
Is not as much about believing but more in keeping true to the traditions that made you happy as a kid, so that you won’t be an unhappy adult.
I did stop writing letters though…but that’s just because I became a lazy adult and have awful penmanship =P
Also, IMO, magic exist, as magic is just science without answers and we’ll never have all the answers so they’ll always be magic.

Nice quote there. Might have to use it sometime. Because Magic sure as fuck aint gonna find itself.

Yeah.

Dear god, this conversation makes me feel old and I’m 21….I’ve taken my fair share of Psychology and Philosophy courses so I’ve though introspectively like this quite a few times, but every time I do I feel old.

Either way, thank you for continuing to write a story that matches my oddly deep sensibilities and nerd sense of humor.

If I ever have kids, I refuse to lie to them about Santa, the Easter Bunny, the Tooth Fairy and whatever else.

Santa Claus is a title, not a name. His name is Reg, he’s a biker, and a foreman at the local cable factory.

And Pixie is my dog.

I commented on this not so long ago. Can’t remember where, but I was talking about the new Harry Potter amusement park. The commercials fill me with both extreme happiness and terrible sadness because– I seriously want to go there and that would be awesome, but everything there isn’t real and it’s just another nail in the magic coffin. :( Nothing drives the death of magic home more than seeing it commercialized some of it with only the vaguest attempts at realism.

I think I just fell in love with John a little. Just a little. Most of my love is still reserved for Jo and Nina.

I think it’s more cruel the way the world stamps it out, not raising kids to believe in it. Personally, I feel it would be more cruel not to raise kids with the magic and pixies, though knowing they’ll learn it’s not real would be tough.

Saint Nicholas is technically real, there have been more than 20 Saint Nicholas and scientists themselves pretty much believe in magic, what else can you call quantum physics which runs on nothing but chaos and requires observation to determine reality just like certain descriptions of magic

It requires observation because quantum is about what happens when mages/scientists interact with the universe in certain VERY particular ways. Actually everything is like that but we don’t notice as readily at the level of common sense, if at all, because our senses evolved to guide our interactions at these scales and we can’t be fussing with tech like CERN and high-end math just to find something to eat, e.g..

when i here the words “in search of ” it reminds me of a program that used to be on the history channel back in the 90’s In seach of history well its still on tv but its no longer narrarted by Leonard Nimoy so yeah lost all its cool factor tho you can still catch the old episodes around 4pm on history international

I’ve always felt the same, and thought it was amazing when i heard Eddie Vedder reference the same theme in the song/soliloquy “I’m open”

When he was six he believed that the moon overhead followed him, by nine he had deciphered the illusion trading magic for fact.
No tradebacks.
So this is what it’s like to be an adult.
If he only knew now what he knew then…

I just love/hate the line “No tradebacks” because it’s so true.

Eh, it’s always there; it’s just given more reasonable and logical explanations. Even some things that have reasonable and explained causes are still magic. For instance, even parents must wonder about the creation of a new life, even though they know effectively how it came about. Magic is all around; we’re just given the ins and outs of it as we grow up, and even then, even then, we can find things that defy all our explanation as magic shows its face once more.

Anything that causes somebody to feel a bit of wonder and amazement can be classified as magic, even if the ways and means of that thing are completely mundane and ordinary in origin. Magic is, more than anything, a way of looking at things so as to bring the wonder out of them.

Word.
That’s what Darwin said at the end of The Orign of Species, that if you get evolution by means of natural selection, it’s a view of the world that’s full of wonder.

Quick, what’s the difference between the smart phone in your pocket and one of Harry Potter’s wonderful magical artifacts?

Answer: you take the smart phone for granted. Some may know how it works, but to most it’s just a little glowing box that might as well have an imp inside for all you know. Same goes for cars, air conditioning, automatic weapons, etc.

Magic and technology are not the same thing, but the emotional impact that the idea of magic has is defined by exotic vs. mundane. Stuff that you see & use every day isn’t “magical” to you no matter how impressive it is or how little you may understand it. If you lived in the Harry Potter world, real magic really wouldn’t have any more flavor or mystique than any of the tangible stuff you deal with in the real world. This is true of natural phenomena as well as technology.

I don’t credit semantics theory too much, but I have to admit it is at least partially valid when I see how people can treat an object with the same abilities and which they understand to the same degree differently if they think it’s “magic” instead of “technology” or vice-versa. And conversely, when people who don’t understand one concept well enough to avoid conflating it with the other, like people who consider science another religion, or Erinovauch’s comment about quantum mechanics above.

What’s more, the “magic” doesn’t go away when you understand something. If you love something and are fascinated by it, understanding adds dimension and layers to the magic. Like opening a Russian doll, or zooming in on a fractal pattern.

Magic as a feeling isn’t in external stuff like ghosts or TVs or Santa Clause or large hadron colliders: it’s in your head. Vainly pining for things you already know don’t actually exist seems a little self-defeating when the world is so full of very real things both strange and mundane that can give you the same feeling.

Did you know that satellites and astronauts actually have to adjust their clocks every once in a while to keep them in sync with clocks on the ground because of gravity-induced relativistic time dilation? Time itself actually moves a wee fraction of a second slower dirtside than it does in orbit.

Did you know that thunderstorms actually produce small amounts of antimatter as a byproduct? Apparently this is normal, and it’s only recently that we’ve been able to detect it.

Ever taken a cup of hot coffee/tea/chocolate outside on a cold morning, held the brim up to your eye and looked across the liquid’s surface like you’re looking out across a lake? Did you see the tiny rain falling on the lake? It’s “just” rising steam getting shocked back into liquid by the cold air and falling back down in micro droplets, but the illusion is beautiful in its perfection.

Mostly right on, except Erinovauch is right about quantum, but I think both your views are compatible. Anyway, as Arthur C. Clarke. Said, any technology sufficiently advanced will be indistinguishable from magic. As Stevie Wonder sang, if you believe in things that you don’t understand that’s superstition.

The original santa claus lived and died a millenium and a half ago. But people figured his work was so important there’s now secret society to carry it on. The members are the real santa clauses. No. I won’t tell you I’m in it or not. It’s a secret society. But I tell children, someday when you grow up, maybe you’ll get to join it yourself.

I was so ready to dismiss this string because, well, who says there’s no energy we haven’t tied down and learned to measure? T. came through, though, and here’s hoping we can all have that experience that convinces us that we don’t know as much as we think we do. . .

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