about creating...

About creating things, I've been consuming more so I can create more recently. And by that I don't mean I've been consuming food or anything, just knowledge and other sources of information.  I hope that I can do this when I return to Southern California as well.  I'm so much happier when I'm able to create and do and write.

I was reading something on from the OkCupid blog about Race vs. rate of message reply for same-sex data.  It was interesting to analyze and synthesize the data in the respective races.  It is also interesting to snythsize the data with the opposite-sex data as well.  All this comes out of a conversation I was following on RealJock's forums about the racial "hierarchy" of "hottness."  The OP's point was "hot is hot" no matter the race.  What ensued was something less about percieved attractiveness, more about how "preferences" are "just that" preferences.

Of course, in my mind, I don't see preferences as "just" preferences.  There's a reason why they exist and also there's a manner and method in which they were created.  Part of being a human is coming to the realization that one is imperfect and that there are areas for improvement.  This reminds me of the poem President Ikeda wrote to the members of Los Angeles:

As each group seeks their separate roots and origins, society fractures along a thousand fissure lines. When neighbors distance themselves from neighbors, continue your uncompromising quest for you truer roots in the deepest regions of your lives. Seek out the primordial "roots" of humankind. Then you will without fail discover the stately expanse of Jiyu unfolding n the depths of your life. Here is the home, the dwelling place to which humankind traces its original existence - beyond all borders, beyond all differences of gender and race. Here is a world offering true proof of our humanity.


If one reaches back to these fundamental roots, all become friends and comrades. To realize this is to "emerge from the earth."