My favorite dis­cus­sion this year in my Pub­lic Admin­is­tra­tion class cen­tered around whether civil ser­vice was a call­ing [or not]. This led me to think about why I get so much sat­is­fac­tion out of my gov­ern­ment web design gig. The answer I usu­ally shell out is because every day I get a chance to improve the way gov­ern­ment inter­acts with its cit­i­zens. Despite this being true and the most imme­di­ate reward of my job, I fig­ured there has to be more. It’s my fam­ily, and Catholic school.

My grandpa fought in World War II and then was was a mail car­rier with a rural route for the Post Office for years. My mother taught spe­cial edu­ca­tion her whole life. The Holy Cross broth­ers at Notre Dame also empha­sized ser­vice. After awhile it gets ingrained. I enjoy work­ing for the gov­ern­ment because it is service-driven, not profit-motivated. When­ever I get a call for­warded to me from the help desk, I always make sure I don’t send them around on another bout of transfer-tag. If I can’t answer their ques­tion or help them out, I make sure that if I do have to trans­fer them, they get sent to the exactly cor­rect per­son, not just the cor­rect office. The reward is their gratitude.

So, I guess it is easy to see where I fall on the argu­ment. I feel called to civil ser­vice, so I think it is a calling.

It might seem like an excep­tion, but the Selec­tive Ser­vice (a fas­ci­nat­ing Wikipedia arti­cle), and the fact that I had to reg­is­ter for the [non-existent] draft in order to receive fed­eral stu­dent loans is a big rea­son why I never signed up for the Armed Forces. I’m non-combative by nature, but I’m also stub­born as hell when some­one tries to force me to do some­thing. It is fit­ting then, that I would resent sign­ing up for the draft; it is an enforced civil ser­vice (among other things), and there­fore incon­sis­tent with my opin­ion that civil ser­vice is a calling.

I’ve been feel­ing a dis­tinct lack of trust in my life lately. Usu­ally I’m fine in my inde­pen­dence, but some­times I need some­one I feel com­fort­able talk­ing to. It is a weird sort of lone­li­ness, as if every­one who knows me is con­tent with their own per­cep­tions of who I am, unin­ter­ested in any­thing other than casual under­stand­ing. I feel like I’m on no one’s pri­or­ity list. I wish I felt com­fort­able talk­ing to some­one, but even when I talk to my mom I feel like she has no con­fi­dence in my abil­i­ties and no desire to accept that I’m not the per­son she has always wanted me to be. She will read this and, as usual, think that I’m paint­ing her in bad light instead of real­iz­ing that I feel this way because, though I love her, talk­ing to her causes me stress and that I haven’t felt com­fort­able telling her what is close to my heart since junior high. She will feel attacked instead of won­der­ing why, when­ever I talk to her, the only thing I hear is dis­ap­proval. My uncle Col­lier gave me some frank and excel­lent advice about this while fish­ing in Canada one year, which is one rea­son why those trips are so spe­cial to me.

I’ve been try­ing to help peo­ple out with their prob­lems, small and large, quite a bit lately. I get the idea that other peo­ple need my help more than I need theirs. So on the rare occa­sions when peo­ple ask me if I need any­thing, I feel oblig­ated to say no. I don’t want to bother them with my uncer­tain­ties and fears. This is a prob­lem I’ve always had. I don’t like appear­ing weak or vul­ner­a­ble. This comes across as aloof­ness or arro­gance to many peo­ple and pre­vents me from becom­ing close enough to tell and trust some­one with the things I need help with.

I think my fear of trust­ing was born from three dif­fer­ent sources.

1. My father: find­ing out that he cheated on my mother, see­ing his vio­lent, hate-filled and hurt side to the point where jump­ing out of a car was a viable and best solu­tion. That was much worse than his nor­mal casual indif­fer­ence and manip­u­la­tive disapproval.
2. My mother: In junior high, shar­ing with her the ini­tials of a girl I had a crush on, and her ask­ing around and find­ing out who it was. I was mor­ti­fied that other peo­ple, strangers, knew who I had a crush on. Also, when she put my dog Rosie to sleep with­out telling me. Cou­pled with her dis­ap­proval, I’ve not felt secure talk­ing to her about any­thing remotely per­sonal since then.
3. My room­mate: Pretty much the only friend I had in the class of 2003, he hooked up with a team­mate he knew I had a crush on when I went home for my mother’s 50th birth­day and pro­ceeded to bla­tantly fool around with her in our room for the rest of the school year.

Writ­ing that last part made me real­ize that the whole rea­son I started this weblog was to place my trust issues in a place exter­nal to me where they can be exam­ined and [most likely] for­got­ten about for a time. I might be cre­at­ing my own inter­nal infor­ma­tional cas­cade. Lately I’ve been doing my best at being com­pletely open and hon­est about my inse­cu­ri­ties with one per­son, but it is very scary because, even though I’ve been doing so, I still don’t know if I can trust them.

I expect that I’ll get a few com­ments say­ing “You can talk to me, man.” but that will be the same mech­a­nism as when some­one talks about how they need a hug and some­one imme­di­ately offers one. Some of the authen­tic­ity of the offer is lost. Of course, the pre­vi­ous is also just me pre­emp­tively say­ing that I don’t need any help. A cleft stick of my own devis­ing, and the only way out is to just go ahead and trust.

I par­tic­i­pated in a thread about male-female com­mu­ni­ca­tion at one of the com­mu­nity sites I fre­quent, and have con­tin­ued think­ing about it offline. It kind of bleeds into my ever-evolving thoughts on mas­culin­ity, and since I haven’t done much thought­crime lately, I fig­ured I’d flesh it out a bit here. One of the com­menters is some­thing of an anthro­pol­o­gist, so her thoughts usu­ally get me think­ing in that mode. Much of what was said had a Men are from Mars tone to it, but the point was made that this par­a­digm is facile and in real­ity we’re all indi­vid­u­als [except that guy] and our com­mu­ni­ca­tory ambi­gu­i­ties are unique as well.

I think this is a use­ful and true state­ment in an objec­tive sense, but doesn’t do much in actual appli­ca­tion. That’s where the Men are from Mars par­a­digm rules. I tried to flesh out my thoughts, quot­ing myself:

What I’ve noticed … through the asso­ci­a­tions I’ve had with girl­friends and girl friends is that women have a cer­tain way of talk­ing about their feel­ings that men don’t have. I’ve seen sev­eral instances in this thread of peo­ple say­ing men don’t have feel­ings, which is wrong. For me, I don’t talk about my feel­ings unless some­one asks. I don’t inter­pret lack of ask­ing as non-interest in my feel­ings; I think that women are used to talk­ing about such things with­out the need to be asked. What I’m get­ting at is that there might be an expec­ta­tion on each of your parts that the other will behave in the way that they’re used to.

I agree with [the idea that each com­mu­ni­ca­tory act is unique] in con­cept, but I don’t think it is actu­al­ized very often, because emo­tions nec­es­sar­ily pre­vent an objec­tive exam­i­na­tion of the mech­a­nism in which they are com­mu­ni­cated. They aren’t reasonable.

Of course, this is how I deal with my emo­tions, for the most part. I don’t com­mu­ni­cate them [unless asked] but objec­tify them and deal with them ratio­nally. So, when some­one does ask about them, I sense incip­i­ent bore­dom right off the bat because I’ve got them con­trolled and ana­lyzed to such a point that I don’t talk about them in a way that has been inter­est­ing to the female friends I’ve had.

Com­mu­ni­cat­ing emo­tions with my male friends is much dif­fer­ent. No one asks, because most of the time there is no need to. The cor­rect type of space is auto­mat­i­cally defined and given. The male emo­tional empa­thy is so strong. The most out­reach I ever give or have been given usu­ally con­sist of “Are you alright, man?” “Okay, if you need to talk, I’m around.” This is kind of sad to me since the def­i­n­i­tion of “Amer­i­can Male” is so simul­ta­ne­ously rigid and neb­u­lous; emo­tion­ally dan­ger­ous, that any waver­ing from the macho bravado is “gay.”

That is all prob­a­bly over-simplified, Men are from Mars crap, but like I said before, so many peo­ple buy into that par­a­digm that it has some utility.

So what inter­ests me here is my rather quick state­ment about the rigid­ity and neb­u­lous­ness of “Amer­i­can Male”, some­thing that has been sim­mer­ing on a back-burner since the dis­ap­point­ment that was US Guys. Basi­cally, what I meant by that state­ment is that, men have a def­i­nite list of attrib­utes which are given to us through cul­tural incul­ca­tion and expec­ta­tion to fol­low. Such as not being emo­tional in a cer­tain way. The neb­u­lous­ness rolls in two sep­a­rate ways. The fact that the list of Amer­i­can Male attrib­utes is so long that it might as well be infi­nite, and the fact that there are no assem­bly instruc­tions. It is like hav­ing all the ingre­di­ents for an apple pie, and a pic­ture of an apple pie, and being told to make one. That, I think is the fun­da­men­tal prob­lem with being male. The entire con­struct is arranged in such a way that there is lit­tle to no sup­port net­work, each must fig­ure it out for them­selves. They sys­tem is so arranged that attempts to cre­ate a deeper, more mean­ing­ful sup­port net­work [from a fem­i­nine stand­point] are imme­di­ately and extremely awk­ward for all male par­ties involved.

That’s where we end up with throw­away com­ments like “that’s gay”. Any male behav­ior that devi­ates from the norm in such a way as to chal­lenge it is “gay”. So, at least for my gen­er­a­tion, there is no room for homo­sex­u­als in the soci­etal con­struc­tion called Amer­i­can Male. I’m sure this will change, and I hope that as it does, the rigid­ity and neb­u­lous­ness will reduce to some­thing at once a bit more cod­i­fied and broad-minded than the yee­haw toe-the-line emo­tional trea­sure hunt that men have been rough-painted as.

There might be some­thing sim­i­lar for women, but I’m not qual­i­fied to speak on that subject.

I think in the past I’ve thought that doing your best sim­ply meant giv­ing full effort to a task. That com­pletely neglects the use of judg­ment in the process. Just fol­low­ing the first would mean that you would sprint a marathon, run as fast as pos­si­ble the entire way; full effort, not much judg­ment. I prob­a­bly need to start con­sciously exer­cis­ing my judg­ment and inte­grat­ing it into what I mean when I do my best.

I think one of the rea­sons I’m so rigid in my reck­on­ing of life is that at a fun­da­men­tal level I’m a cow­ard. Some­times when I’m caught by sur­prise and have to think fast about some­thing, I choose what appears to be the eas­i­est or safest way, or some­times just refuse to think about it at all and go pound sand with my head. The enforced rigid­ity has cut down on my oppor­tu­ni­ties to let myself fuck up, but the side effect of this is that I have been or am becom­ing a proud ass­hole. I guess I should stop feel­ing smug about my sup­posed suc­cess and fig­ure out how to take myself down a peg or two.

I think I’m going to reject the act of nos­tal­gia from my life. Hind­sight, reflec­tion and appre­ci­a­tion of the past are fine, but com­par­ing the past to the present’s detri­ment is inef­fi­cient, irre­spon­si­ble and inau­then­tic. All moments are incom­pa­ra­bly pre­cious and moments past should not dis­tract and detract from the value of the moments present.

So I did a mild redesign. Not much changed on the front end, but I basi­cally coded this one from scratch and it is 50% less crufty and 50% more cro­mu­lent than before.

I had a half-formed thought last night about how moments are pre­cious because most of them get lost to mem­ory dur­ing the abyss of time that is life; life always seems short because we for­get most of it. So each moment has to be used up to the last nub­bin, because even if we for­get it, we’ll know it wasn’t wasted.

I like cruis­ing down the dirt roads of the inter­net to see what pops up. Dead sites, deleted threads, ran­dom things from the Inter­net Archive and some­how by doing this I ended up on a zed-list celebrity gos­sip site that had paparazzi pic­tures of Brit­ney Spears no-no spot. In an inter­est­ing bifur­ca­tion of thought I clicked on the link. I didn’t really want to see it, but I was inter­ested in what all the fuss was about. It looked like any other no-no spot. What was more inter­est­ing to me was the c-section scar.

In any case, there is this preva­lent fas­ci­na­tion with what cer­tain celebri­ties look like with the wrinkly bits vis­i­ble. Almost as if, since they have celebrity, their junk must look or some­how be bet­ter than some­one elses. It is self-consciously chuckle-dumb. Every­body has the same bits, more or less, so pay­ing atten­tion to per­son­al­ity, focus and wis­dom should be the main swing of things. Except it’s eas­ier to let the lizard hind-brain do the think­ing, espe­cially when teh inter­nets are involved.

Years ago, I read an essay about the cul­tural con­struc­tion of white­ness in Amer­ica; the author’s claim was that white­ness is defined as a void, eas­ier to dis­cuss in terms of what it is not, rather than what it is. I can’t remem­ber if this was men­tioned in the essay, but I believe this loss is derived from the ubiq­uity of white­ness itself. Try­ing to define white­ness is boot­strap­ping. Even the vocab­u­lary involved in such dis­cus­sions of eth­nic­ity is insuf­fi­cient to prop­erly address the issue. By virtue of their minor­ity sta­tus, it is pos­si­ble for folks in a non-white con­struc­tion to hone their self-awareness in terms of their asso­ci­a­tion with what­ever their minor­ity is. So a black folk has an eas­ier time grap­pling with what it means to be Black because their black­ness is less promi­nent when com­pared to white­ness. This applies just as well to sex and gen­der roles, and even works in sub­cat­e­gories of white­ness based on coun­try of origin.

I’m some­times envi­ous of peo­ple who have this kind of asso­cia­tive chance. I have no legacy to use to direct my self-definition. My fam­ily, awe­some as it is, shows no eth­nic traits, like a focus on food from the old coun­try, songs and sto­ries, or even knowl­edge of dis­tant fam­ily over in Europe. This is why that essay res­onated with me so strongly, it seemed to be describ­ing my life exactly. Because my cul­tural back­ground is ubiq­ui­tous to the point of mean­ing­less­ness, I’m miss­ing out on an entire facet of exis­tence. This was likely the nascent impulse that made me so inter­ested in anthropology.

Some­thing Alixa + Naima said the other night sparked this thought process. In an amaz­ing poem about Hur­ri­cane Kat­rina, they made dis­parag­ing ref­er­ence to being white. After, they explained that it wasn’t a remark about race, but about a cer­tain state of mind they call “white.” To me it seems like this state of mind is the same as the ubiquity/void that I’m talk­ing about. It makes sense, but is also trou­bling. Their sense of cul­ture and legacy was very promi­nent in their read­ing, in direct con­trast to whiteness.

Yet where does that leave me? There is no Ital­ian or Pol­ish or Hun­gar­ian or Irish or Jew­ish her­itage for me to lean on. I can­not adopt myself into any of those par­a­digms and be authen­tic. On the pos­i­tive side, this void leaves me free to define myself in any terms that I choose; except these always seem to remain in the void and the process gets awfully old after awhile. It is almost eas­ier to just be meaningless.

Since my library books and Ama­zon order haven’t arrived yet I started reread­ing David Cooper’s Exis­ten­tial­ism last night. I picked this up at a table in the fac­ulty build­ing at Notre Dame many years ago. This was a very cool table. Profs would drop what­ever books they no longer had a use for there for other profs [and pirat­i­cal stu­dents like myself] to snatch. Unfor­tu­nately I didn’t find out about this table until my junior year, thereby miss­ing two years of poten­tially awe­some library building.

In any case, apart from a few copies of The New Yorker whose cov­ers I cov­eted until I threw them out, this vol­ume is the only one I can actu­ally be cer­tain came from the holy table. Com­ing as it did, post– my exis­ten­tial­ist phi­los­o­phy course, this book has served as a refresher since that day. Last night, the same sec­tion that always catches my eye caught my eye last night in the same sec­tion. If you use Amazon’s Search Inside This Book fea­ture and go to page three you can read it for your­self and a bit more. I’ll still excerpt the crit­i­cal point.

…to quote Kierkegaard again, ‘an exist­ing indi­vid­ual is always in the process of becom­ing.’ …no com­plete account can be given of a human being with­out ref­er­ence to what he is in the process of becom­ing. … “As Hei­deg­ger puts it, the human being is always ‘ahead of him­self’, always unter­wegs (“on the way”). …Unlike the stone, whose essence or nature is ‘given’, a person’s exis­tence, writes Ortega y Gas­set ‘con­sists not in what it is already, but what it is not yet…Existence…is the process of realizing…the aspi­ra­tion we are.’

This is always a good reminder for me when I get frus­trated about the dif­fi­culty in real­iz­ing my aspi­ra­tions. As long as I exist, I’ll be in the process of becom­ing some­thing new. Sat­is­fac­tion and must arise from the jour­ney while moti­va­tion must arise from the des­ti­na­tion, even if never reached. That’s almost exactly the point of Camus’s The Myth of Sisy­phus.

My appli­ca­tion and under­stand­ing of this idea doesn’t bind fully to a pure exis­ten­tial­ism [which prob­a­bly doesn’t exist], but it works well enough for me.

I’ve writ­ten about my resis­tance to labels sev­eral times. Yet after The Shon­des show the other night I found myself think­ing in other paths. I was wear­ing my Don Hertzfeldt “Rejected” shirt, per­haps as a mostly uncon­scious asso­ci­a­tion with the mean­ing of The Shon­des and the fact that I was going to a show full of per­form­ers who are mar­gin­al­ized. Yet in ret­ro­spect I feel that in my dis­dain of labels I might have appro­pri­ated one that I have no right to.

I’m a Catholic white middle-class straight male. I’m any­thing but a shonde, any­thing but rejected [except when it comes to get­ting a new job]. In my label-disdain I think I neglected to rec­og­nize that when peo­ple will­ingly label them­selves [in con­trast to accept­ing a label] a sub­tle exchange of power takes place. This is prob­a­bly right in there with the recla­ma­tion of “nig­ger” and “queer” which I’ve under­stood in the­ory but never internalized.

By embrac­ing the label of a mar­ginal group a per­son gains grist for the grind­ing away of the mill­stone sta­tus quo. Because the accep­tance of the label is willed instead of enforced, my old saw about how labels limit more than they spec­ify changes. The lim­i­ta­tion now becomes focused [like a laser beam, Andy] and strong enough to bal­ance the exchange of power to those who don’t rec­og­nize this next bit. It is almost like “Tom Hanks as Tom Hanks in Tom Hanks from Space”. By that I mean the label-chooser retains all the power of label­less human­ity in addi­tion to the focus pro­vided by their cho­sen label; to those who under­stand the rea­son­ing behind their choice. So, for exam­ple, The Shon­des are even more pow­er­ful than the peo­ple who have cast them out real­ize. By going on mak­ing rock as “just folks” who hap­pen to use shonde-itude as a slap-back to soci­ety, they’re oper­at­ing on a dif­fer­ent level.

For me, my dis­dain of labels is prob­a­bly caused by the fact that I am so mainstream/majority. I have no need to adopt a label because, at a fun­da­men­tal, self­ish level, the world has already set my plate the way I like it.

I’m not cre­ative like an artist or musi­cian or a poet or a chef or a film­maker or a writer, but I am cre­ative. I’m cre­ative because my need to to build and sup­port rather than destroy or under­mine makes me a cre­ator. Cre­at­ing com­mu­nity or rein­forc­ing net­works might not be as imme­di­ately edi­fy­ing as a well writ­ten poem or a pretty tune or a tasty din­ner, but I think intan­gi­ble cre­ativ­ity of that sort [par­ent­ing could be another exam­ple] lets the cre­ator retain his cre­ative integrity longer.

What I mean by cre­ative integrity is that a cre­ator should cre­ate not for his own edi­fi­ca­tion or the use of oth­ers, but for the cre­ation itself, that it may be. Append­ing value onto the cre­ation is nec­es­sary and appro­pri­ate, as is edi­fi­ca­tion and effec­tive use, but I feel most edi­fied dur­ing the process and com­ple­tion of cre­ation. Effec­tive use can be striven for, but is not guar­an­teed, which is why I feel it is sec­ondary to the exis­tence of a cre­ation itself. There is a sort of amaze­ment at accom­plish­ment and a simul­ta­ne­ous loss of power in a fin­ished prod­uct. That moment of equi­lib­rium main­tains cre­ative integrity. If the amaze­ment rules, ego can take prece­dence over the act of cre­ation. If oth­ers begin to deter­mine the cre­ative path, the cre­ator becomes an automaton.

What if all of us think in the same man­ner, but only our reac­tions to those thoughts and stim­uli are what shape the per­cep­tions that other peo­ple have of our personalities?

The above state­ment has been sit­ting in draft form for a few months. I had noth­ing much to add apart from the prob­lem­atic half-idea that it is. I fin­ished Haruki Murakami’s Kafka on the Shore [which reads like anime watches] last evening and a prostitute/philosophy stu­dent started toss­ing around Hegel quotes specif­i­cally relat­ing to the subject-object prob­lem. After the brief amount of research on this that I have done this morn­ing, I think that’s what my half­matic problem-idea was aim­ing at. As usual, when­ever I think of some­thing that might be rev­e­la­tory, I find that great minds have been there long before me.

This promises to cover lots of ground in leaps and bounds. I am once again hav­ing the same trou­bles with agency that I’ve been hav­ing all my life. The first read­ing at Mass yes­ter­day was the story of Abra­ham and Isaac, one which has caused no end of prob­lems for no end of thought­ful per­sons over the years. After Mass, I went home and busted out Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trem­bling and reread bits and pieces of it, search­ing for a hint about what was bug­ging me from the read­ing. I didn’t exactly find it there, but I did remem­ber some­thing I assim­i­lated some­time in the mists of the past.

I remem­ber being taught that since God has given us every­thing that is our exis­tence, when he requires it back from us, we should will­ingly give it. If that is true, all right. But essen­tially it seems to indi­cate that we have no agency of our own. If every­thing is a gift from God, none of my actions and efforts earn me any­thing. No mat­ter how hard I work I ulti­mately have to depend on some­one else for approval. This might sound like a “life is unfair” whine, but my main com­plaint is that I feel like I have no proof that my action A will result in effect B.

It really shouldn’t be a sur­prise that I’m cur­rently dis­sat­is­fied; the job inter­view process requires exten­sive amounts of effort and stress but ulti­mately places all power in the hand of the prospec­tive employer. To my cur­rent employer I’m noth­ing more than a resource to be exploited for as hard and long as pos­si­ble. This week­end I ran into a neigh­bor and he men­tioned that I’d been bitch­ing on my blog and said it in such a way that I felt he thought I had no right to be dis­sat­is­fied with my life as it stands. So I sup­pose I haven’t effec­tively artic­u­lated my dissatisfaction.

The conun­drum: I want to feel like the work that I do earns me the means to live a life that I enjoy. I want to end each day feel­ing that I have accom­plished some­thing worth­while and con­grat­u­late myself for that and reen­er­gize for the next day’s accom­plish­ment. Yet my cur­rent lot does not pro­vide any of these things. The job seach exac­er­bates this feel­ing of help­less­ness because it is basi­cally beg­ging dressed up in a tie. My pride resents that. But how do I find a path that fills me with agency?

I’ve always wanted to be in full con­trol of myself, and I know that in some ways my life would be much more var­ied if I let loose a lit­tle, cared a lit­tle less about my feel­ings and those of oth­ers. Trusted more. What­ever. The times I’ve attempted this usu­ally ended painfully. I don’t want to depend on some­one else’s approval to live my life.

I think this means I should be self-employed. But what to do and how to afford it? I’ve got no ideas on that account. I’ve got a phone inter­view with a place in NYC today, and hope­fully another one will be lined up by the end of the week. I’ve got­ten more action from NYC in a week than I did in 9 months in Cleve­land. Places there seem to like my resume, which is nice to hear; I’d been start­ing to think it wasn’t any good. I’m tired of being less than my best by some­one else’s leave. I’m flail­ing around, try­ing to grab on to some sort of rock to steady me, but I have to be my own rock. As much as I cher­ish my self-reliance, it feels awfully stale sometimes.

Power cor­rupts because it is so dif­fi­cult to obtain. When some­one has strug­gled to gain power and finally suc­ceeds, they often spend the rest of their time try­ing to hold on to it. What can get lost in the shuf­fle is the rea­son for seek­ing power. Iron­i­cally, power as a means to its own end is impo­tent on a per­sonal level because it is based on exter­nal control.

Empow­er­ment, on the other hand, is not for its own sake, main­tains its strength from inside itself and is obtain­able by every­one. The abil­ity to be, with­out strug­gle, with­out con­text, is to be empow­ered. Then you can do anything.

This is the the wrong time of year for this post, but I thought about it any­way so stop judg­ing me already!

Sin [or immoral or uneth­i­cal behav­ior or the oppo­site of Right Action or what­ever you want to call it] is sub­tle. You can do some­thing that isn’t sin­ful, but if done with that kind of evil intent, would prob­a­bly still qual­ify. [These thoughts mayn’t be canon­i­cal, I dunno.] So if there is an orchard of apple trees and you sneak in and grab a cou­ple to eat and sneak out and eat them, with the idea that if you get caught you’ll get in trou­ble [even if the lady who owns to orchard really doesn’t mind if peo­ple come take her apples] then you’re sinning.

Sin­ful thoughts are hard to avoid, but as long as they don’t inspire inter­nal rev­elry or exter­nal action, then they aren’t really sin. But one can also do no harm although they intend to do so and I would con­sider that a sin. There is also doing some­thing with evil intent that has a pos­i­tive [though unin­tended] res­o­lu­tion. The unin­tended part is cru­cial because oth­er­wise you fall into the “a wrong doesn’t make a right” sit­u­a­tion. The eas­i­est exam­ple of evil intent with unex­pected pos­i­tive res­o­lu­tion that comes to mind is at the end of The Return of the King, when Gollum’s lust for the ring results in its destruc­tion. I think that’s prob­a­bly still a sin, because it appears my def­i­n­i­tion of sin­ful­ness is pred­i­cated on what my momma taught me, will­ful dis­obe­di­ence is always a per­sonal feel­ing of self­ish­ness. What about not know­ing you are doing wrong, but do wrong? I think that only becomes a sin when the igno­rance is rec­ti­fied and behav­ior is not changed, nor resti­tu­tion sought. I think that cov­ers it.

I’ve writ­ten about this before and I’ll write about it again I’m sure but since it is so mind-bending I’m going to write about it now. The prob­lem is that I can’t ever explain it to anysort of sat­is­fac­tion because the state of mind you have to be in is so strange. I’ve done a bit of glos­sary on Zen Bud­dhism and I’ve got Zen Mind; Beginner’s Mind, on my read­ing list. Although I haven’t read it, I think Beginner’s Mind is a good con­cept to use in my own context.

So I’m lay­ing in bed, just got done read­ing about Bud­dhist breath­ing exer­cises, so I’m lis­ten­ing to myself breathe. Not think­ing about it, or con­trol­ling it, just observ­ing it. This is a hard thing to start con­sciously and thank­fully I man­aged to do it uncon­sciously and then real­ized what I was doing. So I started think­ing about how frig­gin com­plex the sim­ple, auto­matic and taken for granted act of breath­ing is. The diaphragm changes the air pres­sure in our lungs which causes exha­la­tion and inhala­tion. Alve­oli in the lungs help trans­fer car­bon diox­ide and oxy­gen between the blood­stream and the lungs and then the lit­tle blue RBCs get all red with their load of oxy­gen and truck around my body deliv­er­ing it to var­i­ous things. And I never think about it. It just hap­pens, taken for granted.

Then I zoomed out just a tad. I’m in this huge galaxy that is just one of a huge num­ber of other galax­ies that all do their things with grav­ity and light in vol­umes and dis­tances so huge that only a con­certed effort will let you com­pre­hend them. And I take all that for granted as well.

But the taken-for-grantedness is one step too far. I only got to that after pro­ceed­ing through a stage of joy­ous won­der which is my ver­sion of Beginner’s Mind. Since I was a child I’ve told myself I wasn’t going to lose my sense of won­der and so far I have suc­ceeded. All of these things and innu­mer­able threads of oth­ers are all hap­pen­ing in con­cert and I’m a part of it. The won­der comes from not tak­ing things for granted, and until that won­der comes when you regard a cer­tain thing, you are tak­ing it for granted. The obvi­ous next response to this is grat­i­tude for being a part of it. My grat­i­tude is directed into my faith, but even if some­one doesn’t have a faith, this sense of grat­i­tude is still legit­i­mate and should be present, I hope.

My ver­sion of Beginner’s Mind is also hum­bling, because won­der and grat­i­tude have humil­ity as a pre­req­ui­site. I’m being this spe­cific so that the state of mind I am talk­ing about can be iden­ti­fied and sep­a­rated from other ones. The mind is cun­ning, and mem­ory and tak­ing things for granted are two ways it uses to assure us of our own power and impor­tance. By tak­ing things for granted and using mem­o­ries to tell sto­ries about our past we keep our egos healthy.

I’m not say­ing that one should live in either state all the time. I’m say­ing the oppo­site. Every­one should be able to engage and act and focus on a spe­cific point in the world and take things for granted in order to accom­plish what­ever needs done. This would be the enthalpic drive, our God-like abil­i­ties yearn­ing for use. But we should also be able to put our­selves in uni­ver­sal con­text, real­ize our rel­a­tive insignif­i­cance, cast even that aside and just sit in obser­va­tional won­der at existence.

There is a nec­es­sary ten­sion between these two things, and when their use is out of bal­ance [if some­one has for­got­ten won­der, for instance] then the other side gets twisted by its own weight. Strive for Balance.

Here endeth the les­son. I hope I learned something.

Just about every time I run into Steve Gold­berg and Star­bucks is men­tioned, he starts talk­ing about how they sell con­sis­tency instead of good cof­fee. There is a poem by Richard Brauti­gan that is par­tic­u­larly tren­chant in this context:

Xerox Candy Bar

Ah,
you’re just a copy
of all the candy bars
I’ve ever eaten.

So I guess another vari­able can be thrown in with the quan­tity and qual­ity argu­ment that I had with myself a while ago. Quan­tity, Qual­ity and now Con­sis­tency. I can see no prob­lem with con­sis­tency if the qual­ity is high, but con­sis­tency at the price of qual­ity is a bit trou­bling. I’m pretty sure the root of this fool­ish con­sis­tency lies with the Eli Whitney’s cot­ton gin, or Samuel Colt and his revolvers, or per­haps even as late as Henry Ford’s assem­bly lines; and with the first man­u­fac­to­ries . I’m not aim­ing at some sort of Lud­dite anti-Industrial Rev­o­lu­tion­ism here, although any­more I have to won­der if the price is worth it.

Instead I’m try­ing to say that we’ve become accus­tomed to con­sis­tency and com­forted by it. We’d rather have the same burnt cup of cof­fee and the same depart­ment store lay­out each place we visit instead of tak­ing the risk of being star­tled by changes in the qual­ity of the prod­uct. I guess it is no sur­prise at the world-listlessness of many folks if you think of it in these terms. If you eat the same feed every day it is no sur­prise you start think­ing like a cow.

Lately I’ve been run­ning across var­i­ous things deal­ing with quan­tifi­ca­tion [via Jack/Zen]and qual­i­fi­ca­tion and value. I’m engaged with these thoughts and have been reshuf­fling and retelling them in order to get closer to… some­thing. The heart of the mat­ter? At least, some­thing that feels right.

Ques­tions I’ve been ask­ing myself include:

• Does every­thing need to be quan­tifi­able?
• Must every­thing fit qual­i­fi­ca­tions?
• What things nat­u­rally resist quan­tifi­ca­tion or qualification?

The quan­tifi­ca­tion ques­tions are eas­ier to answer, eas­ier to quan­tify, because they obey their own rules. Ask­ing the ques­tion in terms of need is sub­jec­tive, and there­fore a bit disin­gen­u­ous, but the answer to that ques­tion adds con­text to the ques­tion: Can every­thing be quan­ti­fied? For me, the answer to both is no. I’m even of the opin­ion that things that can be quan­ti­fied don’t nec­es­sar­ily need to be quan­ti­fied exactly. We can’t avoid mea­sur­ing and judg­ing; dis­tance, how much salt is in a pinch, whether we have time to eat break­fast in the morn­ing, but when the mea­sur­ing and judg­ing takes prece­dence over the expe­ri­ence of toss­ing a foot­ball or bak­ing brown­ies then quan­tifi­ca­tion is get­ting out of hand.

Ques­tions like: “How much do you love me?” are bad ques­tions because I think this is the area where quan­tity and qual­ity start to get mixed up. If the answer to “How much do you love me?” is “Big­ger than the uni­verse.” then the quan­tity ques­tion has been answered in terms of quan­tity. If the answer is “More than warm blan­kets and hot cocoa on a winter’s day.” then the ques­tion has been answered qual­i­ta­tively. Qual­ity argu­ments [like the main thread of Zen and the Art of Motor­cy­cle Main­te­nance] are sub­jec­tive and there­fore slightly dif­fer­ent from each other qual­ity argu­ment. Even in groups that sup­pos­edly espouse the same set of qual­i­fi­ca­tions there is a lot of elbow room.

Jeff Hess frames a qual­ity argument:

Since the Eng­light­en­ment the argu­ment has run some­thing like this: Yes, here are fanat­ics and fun­da­men­tal­ists who com­mitt evil in the name of their god, but that real­ity should not be allowed to deny the solace of faith to those who do not seek to deny oth­ers their free­doms and faiths.

Do you think that argu­ment still holds true, or, as Sam Har­ris argues in The End Of Faith, is it time to rec­og­nize that all faith sys­tems are based on super­sti­tion and are inher­ently dam­ag­ing to the future of humanity?

This sort of ques­tion is a tough nut to crack for sev­eral rea­sons, but the main one I can see is that it takes one set of qual­i­ta­tive cri­te­ria [the post-Enlightenment belief in Rea­son] and sets it against the qual­i­ta­tive cri­te­ria of other belief sys­tems. For me at least, this is a ques­tion that can never be answered because to me it is apples and oranges. Prob­a­bly the best expla­na­tion of this comes from a MetaFil­ter com­ment:

Pure sci­en­tific fact is just a mean­ing­less pile of num­bers. Sci­en­tific the­ory is just a fal­si­fi­able pre­dic­tion. Humans can’t live on that alone. They can fit those pre­dic­tions and data into a view of what the world is, who they are, and how those two relate, but that’s a story–that’s a mythology–no mat­ter how you cut it. A pre­dic­tion about human pop­u­la­tion dynam­ics over the next 100 years is a hypoth­e­sis; believ­ing that humans are defined and enno­bled by the very same fac­ulty of rea­son that paves the eter­nal road of progress on which we march is mythol­ogy. Not in the sense that it isn’t true, but in the sense that it is unfal­si­fi­able, unsci­en­tific, and philo­soph­i­cal. In short, in that it is human.

I’m not try­ing to cre­ate an argu­ment about the verac­ity of one set of qual­i­ta­tive cri­te­ria against another, instead I’m of the opin­ion that any set of qual­i­ta­tive cri­te­ria must be tem­pered by doubt in the qual­i­fi­ca­tions of the qual­i­ta­tive cri­te­ria. This also includes doubt in the qual­i­fi­ca­tions of quan­ti­ta­tive data. If you fol­low me.

Cer­tainty is hubris.

Frac­tals are inher­ently nat­ural; and nature loves to repeat pat­terns. This really isn’t a sur­prise, because every­one knows that there is alot of sym­me­try [which is a bit dif­fer­ent than pat­tern­ing, yes] in nat­ural objects. It’s like in π where the Golden Ratio [a sort of frac­tal] can be found every­where. For years one of my doo­dling habits has been, unknow­ingly, an echo of the Golden Ratio. I draw a right tri­an­gle and then sec­tion it off by draw­ing a line per­pen­dic­u­lar to the hypotenuse from the right angle of the tri­an­gle. The result is two more right tri­an­gles, which I then do the same thing to. Smaller and smaller and smaller. Another way of describ­ing frac­tals uses the exam­ple of a coast­line, if you’re mea­sur­ing the length of a coast­line, the closer you get the longer the coast­line becomes. A finite area bounded by an infi­nite line.

Asymp­totes come to mind here as well, and the old saw about a frog jump­ing halfway to the pond with each jump. He’ll never reach the pond, math­e­mat­i­cally speak­ing, because he only halves the dis­tance remain­ing with each jump. This is why I can never know any­thing, despite the fact that I’ve learned so very much in almost 25 years, I’m still only halfway to wher­ever there is. This might be a very good expla­na­tion for why we can’t ever really know God or reach per­fec­tion on our own, but I’m way off track at this point.

Branches were the impe­tus to write this post. So many things branch, and branch the same way, that it gives me the good willies. When I truly real­ized that there has to be a rea­son behind the sim­i­lar­ity between rivers and trib­u­taries, the branches of a tree, our veins, cap­il­lar­ies and arter­ies it was one of those minor mind­blow­ing things that only really occur to me when I see some­thing ubiq­ui­tous and mun­dane as if for the first time. The sphere is another reoc­cur­ing pat­tern, from sub­atomic par­ti­cles up to plan­ets– rain is spher­i­cal, or would be with­out the work of grav­ity. This makes me think that size does not mat­ter. Another thought I had the other day, atoms are mostly empty space. The uni­verse is mostly empty space. Sci­ence has this idea of dark mat­ter, and they think it must fill the “empty space” of the uni­verse. I won­der if any­one has thought to look in the empty space of atoms.

Chris Coyne has made a math­e­mat­i­cal pro­gram­ming lan­guage [redun­dant, I know] that can cre­ate beau­ti­ful pic­tures, includ­ing some with branches.

Quick, explain any dif­fer­ence you see between being “drunk” and being “a drunk”. Not much, is there? Just one let­ter. Per­haps I am excep­tional but I would be will­ing to wager that many peo­ple do not con­sider how indef­i­nite arti­cles can dras­ti­cally change read­ing com­pre­hen­sion. What, exactly, does “a” do? In my drunk exam­ple, “a” turns adjec­tive into noun; my descrip­tor cod­i­fies into tan­gi­bil­ity by adding one let­ter. This is dan­ger­ous, I think. I have been, on record, resis­tant to labels from nearly webl­o­go­ge­n­e­sis; I believe I have finally dis­cov­ered that this resis­tance resides in “a”.

It makes things too strong for me. Per­haps I have lit­tle faith or much arro­gance in think­ing that real­ity or noun­hood can­not with­stand this weight of being, but words don’t describe real­ity; so it should be no sur­prise if the vest­ment of “a”, when worn by adjec­tives, takes peo­ple fur­ther from fact. I have been through most of this before. Some­thing new: Using “a” in ref­er­ence to spe­cific per­sons, includ­ing one­self, is noth­ing more than sub­tle vio­lence. It pigeon­holes and sin­gles out for more pigeon­hol­ing. I’d much rather be described as “some­thing” than defined as “one of some­thing” Using “a” in this man­ner; “I’m a Catholic”, “She’s a fem­i­nist”, “He’s a black”, has dis­tinct “Oh, one of those peo­ple…” over­tones. Say­ing “I’m Catholic”, “She’s fem­i­nist”, “He’s black” gives equiv­a­lent fac­tual infor­ma­tion but avoids any sort of pigeonholing.

Or not.

I believe I used no arti­cles [except as exam­ples] while writ­ing this post.

Links of the Day: Gallery of Regret­table Food and The Com­pany Cook­book.

This post from a while back, and more specif­i­cally, the first block­quote in the post, have hopped up to the fore­front some­what again lately here. Yes.

The­sis: Anger stems from dis­sat­is­fac­tion caused by our mor­tal imper­fec­tions.
(more…)

I hes­i­tated in regard to writ­ing about this, for fear of shame or embarass­ment, but since I was about ten or twelve and I had a long con­ver­sa­tion with my par­ents about “nam­ing my feel­ings” I’ve had this voice telling me to do so when­ever there is some­thing that I am afraid of in myself. So why not talk about sex­ual urges? I’ll put it past the jump so you don’t have to read about it if you don’t want to. I’m sure there is going to be TMI for some of you.

And no, I’m not gay.
(more…)

In high school, senior Eng­lish intro­duced me to the cod­i­fied world of fal­la­cious rea­son­ing. Through­out col­lege I learned a bit more about it, but it seems the only peo­ple who really under­stand log­i­cal fal­lac­ies thor­oughly are philosophes and rhetori­cists. They’ve always been con­sid­ered bad things, and in strict terms of argument-in-order-to-win, I sup­pose they are. But I think they can do some good too.
(more…)

One of the char­ac­ters in Stand on Zanz­ibar is a syn­the­sist. Every­one else refers to him as a dil­letante, and even the gov­ern­ment agency he works for is col­lo­qui­ally called the Dil­letante Dept. Don Hogan’s job is to browse through this giant ency­clo­pe­dic com­puter archive [sort of pre­fig­ur­ing the inter­net] and learn about what­ever he wants, and report on the inter­dis­ci­pli­nary asso­ci­a­tions he makes. In a sense he is a spy.
(more…)

On the way in to work this morn­ing I real­ized that the phrase “your name is ‘mud’” applies to me in a a quite real sense. My name is mud. I love puns. But that’s not impor­tant right now. Entropy. It has been on my mind lately. So many things are on the old nog­gin and lit­tle bits appear in my other ram­blings until I real­ize there is a filet mignon cut up into all the ham salad of my other posts. Or at least a sir­loin.
(more…)

A con­cept in one of the works of C. S. Lewis popped into my head the other day while I was run­ning around Tremont. It boils down to the idea that there are no bad emo­tions, just poor appli­ca­tions. I’ll repro­duce it for you past the jump.
(more…)

I think the world pen­du­lum swings in twenty year cycles. Reces­sions occur every twenty years or so, We seem to go through a ten year con­ser­v­a­tive phase and then a ten year lib­eral phase cycle. Schools of thought seem to flex the pen­du­lum a bit more and last a bit longer, but they also fit the pen­du­lum swing. Newton’s Third Law even holds true for cul­ture. Until the heat death of the uni­verse. Any­way.
(more…)

I spend too much time on MetaFil­ter, but I find it quite intel­lec­tu­ally stim­u­lat­ing when I don’t find it quite silly. Sub­lime and ridicu­lous. Any­way, I’m some­what of a minor­ity there since I’m Catholic and it seems at least the most vocal peo­ple are quite sec­u­lar. This is good for me.
(more…)

The heat death of the uni­verse as framed through the 2nd law of ther­mo­dy­nam­ics prob­a­bly makes such thoughts as I have been try­ing to have lately quite impos­si­ble, but the Wikipedia man­ages to toss in just enough doubt [string the­ory!] on the sub­ject that I’ll go ahead and hash out what­ever the hell it is that I’ve been think­ing. I wish I knew more physics.
(more…)

I am pretty con­sis­tently pulled in two dis­tinct direc­tions. In one, I feel that my life should be full of celebrity and glory. That I should be famous and con­tribute to the bet­ter­ment of mankind. It rejects the com­fort and mun­dan­ity of work­ing a nor­mal job and liv­ing a nor­mal life.
(more…)

Advent is the time in the church cal­en­dar when we are sup­posed to look ahead, in expec­ta­tion, in hope for redemp­tion. Today at church, the priest, whose hom­i­lies are very lulling, gave me a bit of food for thought about hope. He described hope as a cen­ter from which two pos­si­ble bas­tard [he didn’t say bas­tard, but it is the right word to use] ver­sions may arise. Despair on one end, and pre­sump­tion on the other.
(more…)

By now every­one on the inter­net has read Ron Suskind’s With­out a Doubt which was pub­lished in the New York Times. The whole arti­cle sort of hinges on one quote and you prob­a­bly know which one it is.
(more…)

I am in one of those stages where I think it is the height of arro­gance to be always think­ing through myself and blog­ging about things I think or the way I think I think things. Yet I’m still doing it because maybe per­haps I will actu­ally fig­ure out some­thing new. Com­ing in to work today as I passed the steel mill, it’s heat bleed stack was afire and the sky was the color of a fresh bruise, dis­turbingly pretty.
(more…)

I heard through a sec­ondary source that some­one once explained me as some­one who “never assumes anything.” I’m not sure if this is cor­rect, but I will assume it is and try to watch it play out.
(more…)

Over the week­end I had a con­ver­sa­tion with B rd over at edlun­dart about time and since then I’ve coin­ci­den­tally read sev­eral short sto­ries deal­ing with time travel by Michael Swan­wick.
(more…)

This might be alto­gether too vague to make any sense.
(more…)

I won­der far too much for my own good, so much in fact, that I won­der about my won­der­ing.
(more…)

A cock­roach can lose its head, have its cara­pace crushed and be sub­jected to intense radi­a­tion and not admit defeat. I am uncon­quer­able, invin­ci­ble. In any con­test the loser is the one who thinks he has lost. Los­ing is only a men­tal­ity, it does not exist unless it is believed in, like the closet mon­ster. If this seems grandiose and unrea­son­able to you then I think I will say that you do not real­ize being beaten requires your acknowl­edge­ment and agree­ment to the state of beat­en­ness. If some­one stuck a pin-pulled grenade in my mouth, lobbed off my hands and tied me to an oil drum on a leaky boat in the mid­dle of the Sar­gasso sea, I would still not admit defeat; like the cockroach.

I. Of things some are in our power, and oth­ers are not. In our power are opin­ion, move­ment toward a thing, desire, aver­sion (turn­ing from a thing); and in a word, what­ever are our own acts: not in our power are the body, prop­erty, rep­u­ta­tion, offices (mag­is­te­r­ial power), and in a word, what­ever are not our own acts. And the things in our power are by nature free, not sub­ject to restraint nor hin­drance: but the things not in our power are weak, slav­ish, sub­ject to restraint, in the con­trol of oth­ers. Remem­ber then that if you think the things which are by nature slav­ish to be free, and the things which are in the power of oth­ers to be your own, you will be hin­dered, you will lament, you will be dis­turbed, you will blame both gods and men: but if you think that only which is your own to be your own, and if you think that what is another’s, as it really is, belongs to another, no man will ever com­pel you, no man will hin­der you, you will never blame any man, you will accuse no man, you will do noth­ing invol­un­tar­ily (against your will), no man will harm you, you will have no enemy, for you will not suf­fer any harm. — Enchirid­ion, Epictetus.

As I near my 24th birth­day I find myself becom­ing more and more set in my ways. It is a sub­tle process, eas­ing into my old man pants.
(more…)

I’ve still not been think­ing about much, lately. So I’m pulling out a topic I’ve had in stor­age for a while. I had Ethiopian food this week­end, Kitfo is spiced raw beef that looks like vis­cera and Ethiopian bread is like zom­bie flesh. And it was all tasty But I’m not writ­ing on that.
(more…)

I read a folk tale, years ago, where a boy receives a purse that always con­tains a gold coin. This handy source of income helps him on his quest, which I can­not recall. When he takes out the coin, there is still a coin in the purse. Always. Magic!
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self-ac?tu?al?ize: To develop or achieve one’s full poten­tial. It really isn’t that fair to cri­tique a sim­ple def­i­n­i­tion of self-actualization with­out address­ing it in a engaged and intel­li­gent man­ner, but I am too lazy to reread what I’ve already read and catch up on what’s hot these days in per­sonal def­i­n­i­tion.
(more…)

What most peo­ple would call split­ting hairs, I call find­ing seams, weak­nesses and assump­tions that, for me at least, need expli­cated to my some­what sat­is­fac­tion. Mostly these things end up cir­cu­larly and noth­ing gets resolved except my under­stand­ing of cer­tain sub­tleties. Infin­ity equals zero, or some­thing like it.
(more…)

Dis­claimer: I am in no way, shape, form or man­ner plan­ning, think­ing about plan­ning, plan­ning of think­ing about plan­ning or attempt­ing sui­cide. Quite a bit of time in my anthro­po­log­i­cal learn­ing process was devoted to the study of sui­cide, this stems from that. Some bits and pieces also come as a result of my delv­ings into exis­ten­tial­ist phi­los­o­phy. Thank You.

Emile Durkheim talked about both sui­cide and anomie; anomie being a state that can cul­mi­nate in sui­cide. Snitch­ing from the linked site, we get two definitions:

Camus’s The Myth of Sisy­phus makes a philo­soph­i­cal case against sui­cide, some­thing which Camus was might­ily con­cerned. His asser­tion that sui­cide is a state­ment that life is not worth liv­ing seems to apply more to Durkheim’s ego­is­tic sui­cide than the altru­is­tic ver­sion, this makes sense to me because Camus is con­cerned with a per­son as an indi­vid­ual entity instead of some­one who can dampen their will to sac­ri­fice for oth­ers. A mean­ing­less life is the ulti­mate absur­dity and this is fine. What seems to have trou­bled Camus so is that sui­cide is a rejec­tion of life because the life does not fit the mold of the per­son liv­ing it. Sui­cide is there­fore the dumb­est philo­soph­i­cal thing some­one could do.

Those bloody Romans had all kinds of ideas about sui­cide too. But all too often it seems that sui­cide was more of a polit­i­cal act than done for Durkheim’s take on altru­is­tic or ego­is­tic rea­sons. Cato for instance, did not kill him­self because of the degree to which he was or was not inte­grated into soci­ety. He killed him­self because he would not live under Cae­sar. This seems to threaten Camus’s take as well, because I don’t see how Camus can den­i­grate Cato’s use of Cato’s life for a sui­cide that is done in this manner.

In one of my recent National Geo­graph­ics, a state­ment [which cou­pled with a sort of A Mod­est Pro­posal spin gave me the idea for this] along the lines of ‘Only a ninety per­cent reduc­tion in human pop­u­la­tion can result in the preser­va­tion of endan­gered and threat­ened species in nat­ural habi­tat.’ This was in order to keep some species from being wiped out and oth­ers from being mere curios [only kept alive by con­stant human breed­ing and inter­ven­tion]. This brings me to my case for sui­cide. Instead of folks killing them­selves because ‘no one cares’ or because ‘the world is a ter­ri­ble place’ why not axe your­self in the name of con­ser­va­tion? It is altru­is­tic and you’ll be in good com­pany with the likes of Cato, because you are also doing it because you will not live in a world where ani­mals are mis­treated. I’d do it myself but I’ve got to go spread the mes­sage. You under­stand I’m sure.

Here I go again with more of this think­ing stuff. You ever get the feel­ing that you’ve thought of some­thing mind­blow­ing and then find out later that some­one else thought about it 100s of years before you and it was prob­a­bly just chill­ing in your sub­con­scious? Yeah, I hate that. So a few days ago I was blab­ber­ing about ontol­ogy to lit­tle avail. Almost a year ago I was blab­ber­ing on the nature of know­ing to basi­cally the same end.

And now, last night, they, unsur­pris­ingly in ret­ro­spect, merged. [damn lotta com­mas] So I guess this is my ver­sion of the onto­log­i­cal argu­ment. It ends with God = Noth­ing, which is rather surprising.

Assume:
x = some­thing
y = noth­ing
z = God

If y ⊆ x exists, where y is a sub­set of x, and z ⊆ x exists, where z is a sub­set of x, then y = z.

Pos­tu­lates†:

1. Is y a sub­set of x?
   • If x is the set of all that exists then y exists. Ergo, y is a sub­set of x.
2. Are y and x opposites?
   • At first blush it seems so, but if y were not a sub­set of x then y would not exist. [i usu­ally start bog­gling at this point.]

Proof†:
If y DNE then there would be no con­cept of y.
There is a con­cept of y. Mere dis­cus­sion of y proves this.
There­fore, y exists.
If z DNE then there would be no con­cept of z.
There is a con­cept of z. Mere dis­cus­sion of z proves this.
There­fore, z exists.
If y exists and z exists and they are both sub­sets of x, then y equals z.

Fal­lac­ies†:
I am equat­ing the con­cep­tual with the fac­tual. I have appar­ently also decided that every­thing in the set of x is mutu­ally exclu­sive to every­thing else. So it appears that every­thing is per­mit­ted. So lets do what­ever we want.

I was rum­mag­ing through my old sheet music last night in search of some­thing sim­ple enough for me to play on my gui­tar. While doing this I came to the con­clu­sion that eight years ago I was a damn good sax­o­phon­ist. Up until high school march­ing band killed my love of musi­cal per­for­mance [a love that had already waned since becom­ing involved in orga­nized ensem­bles in 6th grade] I was start­ing to play some Coltrane and learn­ing the art of jazz impro­vi­sa­tion. Then I up and quit. The upshot of this is that all of my sheet music is far too com­pli­cated for me to play on my gui­tar. For now at least. But some­thing as mun­dane as this did get me think­ing. [surprise!]

I am in a con­stantly strug­gling with my art. I have a well of cre­ativ­ity and imag­i­na­tion that I can’t quite ever fully tap into. I feel like I am stand­ing in front of a leak­ing dike with a bowl and just catch­ing drib­bles until I have enough to take a drink. I fig­ure this might be the typ­i­cal state for many artists, and the peri­ods of rapid pro­duc­tiv­ity and genius are when the levee breaks. Since all art [except for writ­ing*] is, by its nature, inef­fa­ble I think my dif­fi­culty lies in the basic con­nec­tion between trans­lat­ing the inef­fa­ble into some­thing. Which is a pretty damn big prob­lem. A fun­da­men­tal one in fact. A prob­lem that says, per­haps I shouldn’t be doing art at all if I can­not translate.

My prob­lem is that I’m not very good at any of the art forms I’ve been try­ing. I’ve avoided draw­ing and paint­ing because I don’t know how to do them and I don’t think my mind is arranged prop­erly to deal with that type of visual artistry. Film­mak­ing is the clos­est visual art to my mind­set because it is sig­inif­i­cantly eas­ier to make things look the way I want them to. My writ­ing breaks down because I always end up writ­ing about writ­ing about things. I want to tell sto­ries, not be a writer or film­maker. I want to be a poet, not write poems.

So I’m think­ing that per­haps music is an art I can be good at. With music I don’t need to describe the inef­fa­ble because I can make it myself. This strikes me as the reverse of what I have just talked about. Instead of inter­pret­ing that which can­not be fully inter­preted, if I play good music I can lead myself and oth­ers to a place where things can­not and do not need to be inter­preted. Because being there is enough.

I love lan­guage because it is a code; because it is so mal­leable. I love watch­ing young peo­ple pick it up and turn it into their own code. My Clas­si­cal Greek pro­fes­sor once said that babes and chil­dren cre­ate and change lan­guage more than adults. I sup­pose this is because chil­dren are still being indoc­tri­nated, don’t know all the rules, make their own. His exam­ple was caca, a baby word for shit. Once chil­dren becomes expert enough work­ing within the lan­guage, I sup­pose they start work­ing within the code, chang­ing its periph­ery instead of its nexus.

Where I am now, as a rel­a­tive adult, I can love lan­guage because within this code oth­ers can be cre­ated, cod­i­fied, destroyed, rein­vented. Sim­ile and metaphor are per­haps the most basic of codes within The Code. Puns, rid­dles, dou­ble enten­dres — these are, per­haps, the sec­ond level of spe­ci­a­tion? If I am in a con­ver­sa­tion with two peo­ple, I can speak one sen­tence that has vastly dif­fer­ent mean­ings to each per­son. Or, at least, I can do it if I am suf­fi­ciently skilled in cre­at­ing these codes.

This breaks down when a code is mis­in­ter­preted [always a threat] or when a code is only under­stood by the per­son cre­at­ing it. Skill level comes in when a code is cre­ated and dis­sem­i­nated. The skill is teach­ing oth­ers how to read the code. Com­mu­ni­ca­tion is an art, and Art is com­mu­ni­ca­tion. blah blah blah.

Poetry, paint­ing, sculp­ture, these are art forms that to a great extent have become estranged from gen­eral soci­ety because their code is no longer acces­si­ble. Or, per­haps, it was not acces­si­ble for so long that most peo­ple lost inter­est in it. or maybe its just TV. yeah that sounds fine.

to die:

1. see: to live.
2. a process that results in death. Also, dying.
3. often mis­used in place of dead. Exam­ple: He died. Instead of He is dead. This is like say­ing He lived. It is obvi­ous and there­fore need­less. He is alive is much bet­ter. see also: When You Die, You’re Dead. This usage is sim­i­lar to the use of bald­ing. A thing is either bald or not bald. The process of bald­ing takes so long as to be mean­ing­less.[NB]

death:

1. The lim­i­nal state between dying and dead.
2. The last instant of life. [Assum­ing dead is not a state of being.]
3. The first instant of being dead. [Assum­ing dead is a state of being.]

dead:

1. No longer alive.
2. An objec­tive state [only to those alive] in ref­er­ence to the body of some­one who who has fin­ished dying and expe­ri­enced death.
3. A sub­jec­tive state [only to those alive] in ref­er­ence to the sentience/consciousness/soul of some­one who has fin­ished dying and expe­ri­enced death.
4. An objec­tive state [only to those dead] in ref­er­ence to their body. [Assum­ing dead is a state of being].
5. A sub­jec­tive state [only to those dead] in ref­er­ence to the sentience/consciousness/soul. [Assum­ing dead is a state of being].
6. A mean­ing­less word.
7. A word with too many meanings.

I think that I am a rel­a­tively dis­ci­plined and respon­si­ble per­son, but doesn’t that sound lame? I go to bed at 11:30 at night and wake up at 6:45 in the morn­ing. The seven hours and fif­teen min­utes I give to sleep are nec­es­sary for me. I do not like the way I feel when I have not had enough sleep and when I am groggy I am unable to per­form to the best of my abil­ity. Last night I was asked if I ever stay up late when I have to work the next day and whether I do this because I care so much about my job. The answer is no, I never stay up later than around eight hours before I need to func­tional and alert the next day. I don’t do this because I care about my job, I do this because I take pride in doing good work. I have tried to stay true to the idea that if I am unable to do some­thing to the best of my abil­ity then I should not be doing it.

This, I think, is the foun­da­tion of my efforts at orga­ni­za­tion and dis­ci­pline. The more I con­trol the minu­tiae of my life, the more ful­filled I feel. I am by no means obsessive-compulsive, I make plenty of messes, I just hate look­ing at them. I am always fight­ing pro­cras­ti­na­tion. If I leave dishes in the sink for over an hour after I done eat­ing, I start wor­ry­ing about it. I don’t like leav­ing things unfin­ished. If every job is com­pleted, or at least orga­nized, I feel quite sat­is­fied in leav­ing it behind and direct­ing my full atten­tion to the next thing that con­fronts me.

I also worry that with­out strong dis­ci­pline, I could lose all con­trol. When I like some­thing I don’t like half mea­sures, I get involved in it. I haven’t and prob­a­bly won’t ever use drugs and I don’t drink very often because I am afraid of what might hap­pen if I release my dis­ci­pline. When I seem quite detached with a new per­son, activ­ity, or what­ever, it is because I am judg­ing whether or not this new thing is some­thing that is worth invest­ing some part of my soul in. This method might be a bit strange, but it pro­tects me from myself and from the pos­si­ble hurt that a hasty deci­sion might result in. A bit self­ish I suppose.

As strange as this sounds, my dis­ci­pline allows me greater free­dom, I can now do things spon­ta­neously. If a friend calls, I can typ­i­cally take off and hang out. Unfor­tu­nately, most of my friends around here don’t have jobs and are night owls. I haven’t hung out with them since my new job has started because they aren’t ready to hang out until I am head­ing to bed. And when I leave someone’s house because I have to go home and get some sleep, I always feel like a loser. Maybe I care too much about com­ing home to an apart­ment where every­thing is pretty much in place, maybe I care too much about mak­ing sure I can pay off my debts as quickly as pos­si­ble, maybe I care too much about doing excel­lent work, maybe I should relax and not worry so much about responsibility.

I just find it hard to be enthu­si­as­tic about what is in front of me if I have other things to do.

we seem to spend much of our lives in tran­sit, or wait­ing. tedium. how many ways have we to take up all the list­less lim­i­nal states of devel­oped life? this entry for instance. portable video games, cell phones, cheap mag­a­zines and romance nov­els. the inter­net above all has become a redoubt for those afflicted with over­bear­ing ennui.

this is why just about every­thing can be found on the inter­net. cheap art seems to fes­ter when bore­dom is present. at least for me though, bore­dom kills what­ever artis­tic rush flows through me. a per­pet­ual neap tide. words flow but mean­ing sinks into the abyss. 20,000 leagues into iner­tia. hurry up and wait. kill some time because when we don’t need it there is always too much.

I came across this great arti­cle by Wen­dell Berry on Arts and Let­ters Daily. I find it to be a chal­leng­ing and suc­cinct analy­sis of life as a part of the mod­ern indus­trial com­plex. It spoke to me in some ways that I rec­og­nized as coin­cid­ing with my own beliefs, but also impulsed me to exam­ine the ways in which I have bought into tech­no­log­i­cal mass con­sump­tion, and have rebelled against it. I will most likely mas­ti­cate on this for quite some time, and hope­fully dis­cov­er­ies will abound. Here is an excerpt:

The sta­tis­tics of life expectancy are favorites of the indus­trial apol­o­gists, because they are per­haps the hard­est to argue with. Nev­er­the­less, this empha­sis on longevity is an excel­lent exam­ple of the way the iso­lated aims of the indus­trial mind reduce and dis­tort human life, and also the way sta­tis­tics cor­rupt the truth. A long life has indeed always been thought desir­able; every­thing that is alive appar­ently wishes to con­tinue to live. But until our own time, that sen­tence would have been qual­i­fied: long life is desir­able and every­thing wishes to live up to a point. Past a cer­tain point, and in cer­tain con­di­tions, death becomes prefer­able to life. More­over, it was gen­er­ally agreed that a good life was prefer­able to one that was merely long, and that the good­ness of a life could not be deter­mined by its length. The sta­tis­ti­cians of longevity ignore good in both its senses; they do not ask if the pro­longed life is vir­tu­ous, or if it is sat­is­fac­tory. If the life is that of a vicious crim­i­nal, or if it is inched out in a ver­i­ta­ble hell of cap­tiv­ity within the med­ical indus­try, no matter?both become sta­tis­tics to ?prove? the good luck of liv­ing in our time.

I’m fairly well read in exis­ten­tial­ist lit­er­a­ture, I still buy into por­tions of it, for they allow great strength to be present within an indi­vid­ual, thereby strength­en­ing myself.

But as with all things in me, there is an inevitable back­lash. Although I am not quite sure this one is a true back­lash or merely another spin.

Instead of free­dom of choice in the world, we are totally lim­ited by that very freedom.

My under­stand­ing of exis­ten­tial­ism, is that, though the world is inher­ently mean­ing­less, we as humans, have the abil­ity to cre­ate our own mean­ing for our­selves within the world, thus giv­ing our­selves con­trol over our lives.

But this series of choices has another side. If I make a choice, by its def­i­n­i­tion, I have also excluded other choices, thereby lim­it­ing my own exis­tence. How­ever, if I make no choice [in and of itself still a choice], I remain stag­nant and limit myself in that way.

An exam­ple:
(more…)

Bear with me here, please.

After brief con­scious mas­ti­ca­tion, fol­lowed by a long boil in the sub­scon­scious, and another bout of con­scious bang­ing my head against this thread [and accom­pa­ny­ing arti­cle], these are what I think about some stuff.

We always know noth­ing. [Yes, that con­tra­dicts itself, as do most of my navel-gazings].

Here we go.

What started me off was this state­ment by one Ryvar:

It’s impor­tant for peo­ple to real­ize that all of the expe­ri­en­tial processes you have within the course of a day or year can be explained while accept­ing that there is no mys­ti­cal com­po­nent to consciousness.

Now, I dis­agree with this quite a lot, but I’ve noticed when dis­agree­ments arise it is usu­ally the result of a fal­lacy in a higher order of thought on the part of all par­ties, so after I gnawed on this for a bit, decided what was wrong with his argu­ment, I then applied it to my own.
(more…)

A big deal is often made of hope, mostly pos­i­tive, Pandora’s Box con­tained hope, to assuage the mis­eries it released. The Matrix: Reloaded even makes a point about it. Hope appar­ently is a sav­ing grace, some­thing that keeps us humans dreaming.

I don’t see it that way, to me, hope is some­thing of a wolf in sheep’s cloth­ing.
(more…)

I’ve seen The Matrix: Reloaded twice now. Fit­tingly I will give it two entries, one on phi­los­o­phy and one on its cin­e­matic qual­i­ties. This is the philo one. Most likely they will both con­tain spoilers.

To start out, those who say that this sec­ond film lacks [in sub­stance and thought pro­vok­ing mate­r­ial] are idiots.
(more…)

dis­cussing stereo­types has resulted in the fol­low­ing conclusions.

Crit­i­cal Assumptions:

1. Stereo­types are false.
2. Stereo­types are neg­a­tive.
3. Stereo­types are exter­nally imposed.

Stereo­types are nei­ther false nor true, but are the result of the ossi­fi­ca­tion of value judg­ments into appar­ent facts. Quite often the foun­da­tion of the stereo­type lies within fact (ex: a woman is usu­ally found in the home, cook­ing, rais­ing chil­dren, etc.) now, while this is not true for all women, it has in the past been true of most women, there­fore it is based in fact. How­ever when the state­ment becomes ‘A woman’s place is in the home’ a stereo­type has appeared. Why? A value judg­ment has been made. ‘A woman’s place is in the home’ is actu­ally say­ing that the proper place for a woman (also improper for a man) is in the home. It is a state­ment of what ought to be, not nec­es­sar­ily what is. This value cod­i­fi­ca­tion into fact ignores the real­ity of change in roles and asso­ci­a­tions. The value judg­ment inher­ent in a stereo­type is what makes it false, because val­ues are subjective.

Stereo­types are neg­a­tive. Well, most peo­ple agree with this, but there are exam­ples of stereo­types that are embraced. The Amer­i­can cow­boy for exam­ple. Rugged indi­vid­u­al­ism, on the fron­tier, Man­i­fest Des­tiny, a chance to make good, and the auton­omy pos­ses­sion of a gun and the knowl­edge of its use entails, all offer an appeal­ing exam­ple of the Amer­i­can ideal. Peo­ple latch on to this roman­ti­cized image, because of the stereo­typ­ing, even though the actual life of a cow­boy was very lit­tle like the west­ern por­trays it. per­haps the con­tem­po­rary exam­ple is how peo­ple adapt them­selves to fit a cer­tain image be it techno-geek, euro-punk, scrawny-modelesque or what have you. Unfor­tu­nately an image is just that, not real­ity. so we live as stereo­types. Peo­ple see them­selves within a type and embrace that. I feel that the need to do so is fun­da­men­tally neg­a­tive however.

All that leads to the dis­cus­sion of exter­nal impo­si­tion. While the value judg­ment of the stereo­type is cre­ated exter­nally (ex: Irish stereo­types of vio­lence, drunk­en­ness, etc. were cre­ated by the British dur­ing col­o­niza­tion) the peo­ple these judg­ments are applied to must either ignore them and hope they go away (inef­fec­tive) or inter­nal­ize them and adapt. This inter­nal­iza­tion can have two major effects. The stereo­typed group/person can live with it. Or use the stereo­type as a weapon to fight itself. (ex: some rap that uses nig­ger in a way that throws its loaded sig­nif­i­cance right back into the faces of white suprema­cist cap­i­tal­ist patri­archy). It takes alot of courage to be able to do this, quite often it can backfire.

I’m sure i’ve just writ­ten that loaded with value judg­ments, so i’m stereo­typ­ing stereo­types. hypocrite!

Some­thing vaguely Lacan­ian has been run­ning through my mind the past cou­ple of days. a monolec­tic about iden­tity. when a person’s iden­tity is secure, (and by secure i mean that the pos­i­tive aspects that a per­son per­ceives in them­self are val­i­dated, affirmed and reit­er­ated by some­one else) this enables them to revisit the dark moments in their past and learn and heal from them. this revis­i­ta­tion is not nos­tal­gic which in effect cre­ates a world that is an ide­o­logue and can­not be returned to. the revis­i­ta­tion instead is truly cathar­tic, the truth is con­fronted and dealt with instead of mythologized.

the dif­fi­culty is suc­cess­fully chal­leng­ing this trauma-memory with­out sac­ri­fic­ing your own iden­tity in rela­tion to it. that is why you need a buddy to reaf­firm and hold on to your self while you are off slay­ing what­ever drag­ons are in your past.

i don’t know quite if this is right or not, but i think i have been either brave or fool­hardy and gone off to wres­tle with mem­ory with­out hav­ing the nec­es­sary backup. may­hap, it has made me more indi­vid­ual or may­hap this thought is a result of an indi­vid­u­al­ism that existed before trauma was con­fronted. in any case i’ve a prob­lem with indi­vid­u­al­ism. but that is another story.

i sup­pose i’ve been suc­cess­ful at these con­fronta­tions (if they actu­ally hap­pened) oth­er­wise i’d be a bit loony.

i used to think that when i finally met the girl of my dreams she would be one to know every­thing about me. every last detail. i real­ize now that is bull. i don’t really think any­one truly wants to know every­thing about some­one else. after all, most peo­ple have trou­ble try­ing to know every­thing about them­selves. and as soon as you know every­thing about some­one, what is left? wouldn’t the rela­tion­ship go stag­nant and sour? with noth­ing left to know things would get rather bor­ing. with me it runs in cycles, at first impres­sion peo­ple find me unap­peal­ing, but after putting up with me long enough they think i’m cool, any­time i let peo­ple go deeper, they usu­ally get scared off. i don’t know if there is another level of appre­ci­a­tion past third order fear. i guess i’ll be a life­guard and keep peo­ple from going into the deep end of me.

it seems that i have been talk­ing about end­ings lately. get­ting things done, last chances, last expe­ri­ences. i must be weary. i’m not focus­ing on the begin­nings to come. i don’t really under­stand why i must be goal-oriented at all times and why i always worry about what i am attempt­ing to accom­plish. what i need is to take time to do noth­ing. NO, that is wrong. i don’t need to take time to do noth­ing. that just means i am sched­ul­ing absence into my lin­ear goal-oriented rou­tine. i need to do noth­ing. just absorb, pon­der, accept, phi­los­o­phize. regain a per­spec­tive on exis­tence. i’ve been con­cen­trat­ing on find­ing the cheese for so long, i’ve for­got­ten how to run the maze. once i remem­ber how to do that i can take yet another step back­ward and for­get to be the rat. even­tu­ally accom­plish­ment ver­sus per­spec­tive reveals itself to be noth­ing more than a choice of levers: one gives crack and the euphoric sense of win­ning, the other gives food and means survival.

what is the dif­fer­ence between inno­cence and con­fi­dence, plea­sure and hap­pi­ness? what ambi­tions derive their source in our darker selves and what does the light side con­tain of power? why do inani­ties dis­tract us from mean­ing and struc­tured under­stand­ing of moti­va­tion, desire, and actu­al­iza­tion? why do we live out our time in rote mech­a­nisms that turn life into an ‘insert slot-A into con­nect­ing tab-B’ in order to get the cap­i­tal­ist bour­geois lifestyle that offers no true chance at mean­ing­ful exam­i­na­tion of life? why do i strug­gle against this while at the same time desir­ing the sim­plic­ity of a herd men­tal­ity life?

this morn­ing as i wan­dered in the gen­eral direc­tion of my next class, i began to won­der why i never see peo­ple cel­e­brate the dif­fer­ences they have with oth­ers. i think it is because we have a faulty idea of what equal­ity should be. we equate equal­ity with con­for­mity in a vaguely Har­ri­son Berg­eron kinda way. Hege­mony empha­sizes equal­ity while actively work­ing against it, and pop cul­ture assists in the shroud­ing of this act by encour­ag­ing con­for­mity. the Amer­i­can ide­ol­ogy of indi­vid­u­al­ity becomes one in which each per­son is sep­a­rated from each other per­son despite the fact that we all dress, talk, and act alike. Obscured in all of this are the some­times minute, some­times mag­ni­fied idio­syn­crasies of the indi­vid­ual. True equal­ity based on mutual respect would occur if, instead of being automa­tons we appre­ci­ated each other for the unique abil­i­ties that we all con­tribute in excel­lence of our own lim­i­ta­tions. (i get along with billy BECAUSE he can play a mean game of bas­ket­ball, and i get along with sally BECAUSE she can fig­ure out a dif­fer­en­tial equa­tion in no time flat, and they get along with me BECAUSE i’m a gan­gly mother).

today i talk about death. log­i­cally peo­ple should have no fear of death. illog­i­cally we try var­i­ous and sundry forms to pro­long our lives and use ter­mi­nol­ogy such as escape, cheat, and avoid in ref­er­ence to death. News flash. no one can escape, cheat or avoid death. period. life and death are dichoto­mous and can­not exist apart from their oppo­site. if there is no death, there can be no viable idea of life if it has no point of ref­er­ence, no fini­tude. per­haps that is why infin­ity is so hard to com­pre­hend, since we are infi­nitely finite. this holds true for all dichotomies.

there is also the null set, indif­fer­ence, lack of either life/death, love/hate, sacred/profane. where all is void. unex­plain­able by me.

i don’t asso­ciate myself with my body or my name. my entity is con­tent to define itself merely as psy­che. per­haps that is why i only take care of my appearence when soci­ety demands i do so. why i shave once a week, instead of not at all. why i have mul­ti­ple changes of cloth­ing instead of just a few. answer­ing to my name is just pavlov­ian response, and body lan­guage and small talk cour­te­sies merely mus­cle mem­ory guided by my ego into what i hope is a non­threat­en­ing appearence. it gives me time to think.

i am inter­nal. too much so most likely. but my mind is the only thing that can hold my atten­tion for more than one mom…look at the purty lights!

labels are use­less. they only serve as lim­iters when applied to a per­son. i am a Fencer, Anthro­pol­o­gist, Hick, or Roman­tic. all of these con­tain some truth but exclude other truths. i am more than a label, and my chal­lenge is to make sure that i do not label a per­son. mul­ti­fac­eted and polydimensional…aren’t we all? per­haps i am ADAM, but per­haps i am more than that. it is hard to know how much cul­ture is a ben­e­fit and how much of it impedes us from self-actualization. guid­ance comes from within but can­not suc­ceed with­out help from with­out. or is it the other way around? what is it that makes team­work so instinc­tive and indi­vid­u­al­ity so prob­lem­atic. how do i know if i am being true to myself and not delud­ing my psy­che into a realm of my own imaginings?