"These boots were made for... walking?" as I stumbled forward with my torso leaning forward fully intended to step forward, except the boots didn't budge.

Gandalf-ish, standing at 7 feet tall with a willowy body shape swept behind me and leaned next to my right ear, whispered, "fly, you fool!"

I looked down, before my head could answer how the hell do I do THAT? The boots shot out feathered wings from each ankle, and it started flapping. "GANDALF-ISH!" I yelled in fear, as I've been knocked off my balance and now hanging in the air upside down with my feet fighting each other to pull me left, right, up, down.

Gandalf-ish sighed and bellowed, "BEHAVE!"

My boots snapped together and swung me upright, flapping its swings in unison, I breathe out and could feel my body relaxed, "Thanks...I needed that."

"It's rabbit poop", I squinted at a small batch of miniature brown egg-shaped dung, "undeniably small, brown, and pebble-shaped, Ma'am."

Stacey visibly annoyed, retorted, "first off, not Ma'am. It's Miss. Ma'am's your mother. Secondly, rabbits haven't existed since last century. The last AI crisis completely eradicated the specie because some asshole miscalculated the parameters and now nature is uninhabitable for rabbits. We can miscalculate the AI, but AI never miscalculates its outcomes."

I crouched down and poked at one of the brown pebbles with the back of my pen. I flattened the clay-like consistency pebble, its composition showed blades of yellow, brown, green grass mixed into the brown dough. "I can take it back to the lab, but I'm 99.9% sure this is rabbit poop." I could feel the hair on the back of my neck standing up. If this is true, it could mean that the AI have blindspots...immunity from AI's calculated reach. This is big. This is really really big.

I took out a ziplock bag and laid its opening on the ground; I flicked each pebble into it. Zipped it up, "I'll let you know once I get the lab results."

We're all prisoners of our time, and each new generation takes on the mantle of the previous and unapologetically question, to fight, to ask for better of what the prior generation passes to them; as did the prior generations ahead of them did in the past.

I think about how our perception of time changes at the cusp of each decade, time speeds up; and we feel closer to our mortality and the delicacy and harshness of life.

I think the older generation looks mostly in fear that the young burst into the world feeling too invincible, too trusting, too...naive; and in a stern voice, the 'old' tries to guide from their own experiences in a sea of changing times.

the old goes 'you don't understand the way of the world'

the young echoes back 'you don't understand us'

a game of blind mice describing what an elephant is like.

I think the young might be too eager to take the entirety of the world into their outstretched arms; too eager to see it all, feel it all, breath it all in. In their youth, they felt time as expansive as the universe; as expansive as the multiverse; they felt the forever so poignantly, so casually -- that I remember in every note I wrote to my best friend in elementary school, I sign it with 'we'll be best friends 4ever' as small charms on bracelets and barbie doll clothes are etched to echo the state of forever and ever in the minds of single-digit aged humans.

prejudices on both sides, if we take the easy reductive lenses.

each generation has a role, has a voice - even if it is said in what sounds like ignorance from one side or another.

listen, find merit in those voices.

only then may we get closer to understanding the elephant in a soup of ambiguity.

When Jessica and her mother goes travelling; strangers often mistaken Jessica to be the mother and the mother to be the teenager. Jessica never wanted this, in fact, to Jessica, Benjamin Button was a documentary of her inner life struggles; a boy/man aging backwards as time moves forward. She yearns for the moment when she can visualize her childhood, to experience fully what a child experienced in the early dawn of what life has to offer. Maybe when she's 80, she can finally open her eyes and look at the world with fresh wonderment; with her entire life ahead of her. Until then, she is trapped in this crazy house.

I'm a little teapot

Short and Stout

Here is my handle, here is my spout

That was my favourite rhyme, when I was FIVE.

At ten, I smash teapots. I break its handle; I break its spout.

I smashed it through my gran's window when I catapulted one on the backyard's seesaw.

Teeeeaaaaaapot! What has gotten INTO you? Look what you've done! You apologize to Gran right this instance!, yelled my mother.

My body shook as I heard the shrilling voice. My mother's silhouette behind the porch door's mesh; her body arc; her anger devours the entirety of the doorway. I dragged my feet towards the door.

It was an accident...., I whimpered. (It wasn't. I hated my name, I hated teapots. What good is a teapot if it doesn't want to hold tea? Is it just a Pot? And why of all the things in the world, I had to be a Pot for JUST Tea? I told Tom, my bestest friend in school, that I don't care how I'm gonna do it, but I'm gonna be a pilot. I'm going to be the first Teapot that flies.)

Talking to David is like an exercise of having your messages land only 70% of the time. It's no wonder as I imagine, his reputation is at risk; or rather the risk was already experienced. A leader that asks "WHO WILL FOLLOW ME?" and has no one following, is not because he failed on sound reasons nor failed in good intentions; he failed, because he failed to ask the one thing that moves people -- trust.

David stresses to me his frustration on how *his* urgency that he wants his siblings to follow him to this new land, how he came here first so that he can be ready to support them -- and yet, at a time when masses of people from home are leaving; none of the siblings came.

I didn't understand back then. But after being on the receiving end of his deaf ears; his willingness to participate what I see as a silent bystander; his blindness to my yells of frustration -- his inability to admit fault, his failings. I imagine this is what his siblings saw, experienced -- maybe not all to the same degree; but being burned in that way; to felt betrayed; this is something that's hard to salvage; even if complete good intentions is the underlying foundation. He failed to consider the most important element in decision making - each person involved. Literally everyone. Women, Children, Men.