Break Symmetry

What color is the sunset? Red? Yellow? Orange? Or cobalt?

This picture was neither taken nor posted in the fall (but shh—you don’t know that!)

Dear diary,

I fear I have been drawn into a conspiracy. Every day, I am increasingly surrounded by nonsensical words and ill-conceived abbreviations. Today, my coworkers could only speak gibberish to me, a strange language of wtf’s and lol’s. When I ask them to clarify, all they would say is: “STFU N00B!”

I am NOT a n00b… am I? (Note to self: look up what “n00b” means.)

I did my research. The madness is spreading, escaped from the bowels of Internet chatrooms and now infecting the very fabric of reality. My spell checker finds corectly-spelled words and then misspells tehm. Random l3tters on my keybo@rd stop w0rking, forcing me to use numbers in pl4ce of the a1phabet. A black lolcat crosses my path. What does it all mean?!?

No communication is safe anymore. They are monitoring and filtering everything, converting l’s into 1’s and you’s into u’s with swift, deadly precision. This computer program is my last hope. With it, I can turn their newspeak against them. I can disappear into the noise. I can take a stand.

P.S. If any of you dirty agents find my diary, IT WAS JULIA! Take her away instead!

Highlight and Shadow. Seattle always had the prettiest clouds.

Welcome to Break Symmetry, the personal website and weblog of Johnny Tran. You will find musings, rants, photographs, writings, computer-readable writings, and maybe, just occasionally, a glimpse of meaning. And purpose. And beauty.

In other words: Here be dragons. Philosophical dragons.

Why Break Symmetry? Quite simply, because we exist. And because, one could argue, we probably shouldn’t exist. We are an infinitesimal probability in an infinite universe full of nothing and devoid of anything. But nevertheless, we do exist—the symmetry of the universe has shattered into billions of brilliant stars shining against a backdrop of eternal black: us.

We are a speck of asymmetry in a sea of infinity.

And if our fate is to shine like suns in the darkness, only to one day return to it, then at least let us shine brightly! Let what happens in between, however insignificant, be what defines us. Let us create something from the nothingness, and meaning from the meaningless.

Let us defy the darkness.

Let us break the celestial symmetry.