I'm trying to define myself politically and having a seriously hard time of it. Part of this is because the definitions out there are, when you actually sit down and look at them, incredibly vague, while part of this is also because I don't know if there actually IS a category for me.
It's really a huge mess when you think about it. For instance, I don't believe in a strong central/federal government at all. On the other hand, what would we do about those things in our lives that do require public funding? This is part of why the Democrats and Republicans chase each others' tails forever in a perpetual stalemate; neither side's views are workable on their own.
A central government with the ability to essentially control the national economy is a bad idea because it restricts individuals and small communities. A total free-market economy is also a bad idea for the same exact reason. Both sides are touted as "the solution" but each only serves to quash the abuses of the other while leaving us open to its own inherent abuses.
The problem with both is that each shifts power from the general public to a small group of people, to either the federal government or to multinational corporations. What's really horrifying is that nowadays I think we have both entities against us.
But hey, what's so wrong about that? Plenty. The problem is that absolute power corrupts absolutely. We need checks and balances and we don't inherently have any, for one important reason I'll get to in a moment. The lack of power we as a people have right now is horrifying simply because of the rapid advance of technology. We have weaponry that's practically impossible to defend against, we have satellite imaging that can find virtually anything or anyone anywhere, and we have ways to monitor any and all forms of communication. And this is only the beginning. We have yet to develop the means to actually access the human mind, but we will.
The common response to this usually falls along the lines of "Corporations / the government wouldn't violate our basic rights because they're constitutionally-protected, and also because we'd protest." Neither argument holds any water, ironically because we are a democratic republic. Yes, we have a government, on paper at least, that is run by the people for the people. But if "the people" can be convinced that they do not need certain rights because the government/some multinational corporation will take care of them, then we lose those rights.
And this is exactly the reason I mentioned earlier for why we have a frightening lack of checks and balances at the moment. We are inundated with promises that a particular large institution, be it government or corporate, will "take care of us". And people buy it; I see this on a daily basis. The people I hate dealing with the most in my job are those who think that since they're paying my company to have internet access, we should also be responsible for fixing and maintaining their computers as well.
I've talked to people who honestly believed that I could physically see them somehow (one guy thought that cable boxes had hidden cameras in them). What's absolutely terrifying to me is that these people are totally okay with the idea that a corporation can monitor absolutely everything they do. These people are okay with the thought of having absolutely no privacy so long as they don't have to think for themselves.
The problem of course is that both government and corporate institutions are really trading right now off the whole "we'll take care of you" thing. If I was a conspiracy theorist, I'd say this is all planned and that the overall goal is to make us utterly dependent on the state to pave the way for some sort of awful fascist nightmare. Maybe this is going on on some levels, but I don't think things are coordinated enough for it to be a "conspiracy" of any kind. I think it's going on simply because people are fucking lazy and stupid and they let it go on, and it's good for corporations because it hooks in new customers and makes them new money.
However this is dangerous because if someone in government *should* happen to decide that we need more controls or less rights, we'll have no defense against them. Ordinarily this wouldn't be a problem, but if the public is conditioned to believe those in power are supposed to take care of them, they will hand over power, and once that is done, there is no going back. It's arguable that the seeds for this have already been planted.
What can be done about this? About the only thing I can see to do would be to make efforts to start independent, self-run communities which do not need much assistance from the government. If this were to happen at a large enough scale, the power of the government and/or corporations would be reduced dramatically and the people could regain control of their own lives.
Of course, this also assumes that enough people even want to take charge of their lives... and that's not something I'm at all convinced of, but I think the idea is sound enough to try anyway, at least until a better one comes along.
Friday, March 26, 2010
Thursday, March 25, 2010
yikes
I lost my password to this account and got locked out for months and months. So here I am again. Aren't you lucky? (/sarcasm)
I'll start posting here again shortly, my first post being a general political rant that'll go up as soon as I'm done with this one...
Just as a general update... I'm currently working on a website that's going to be kind of a cross between Facebook and DeviantArt. Both sites do what they do very well, but personally I'd just like to have a single place where people I know can upload what they've been working on so that I don't have to run all over the ends of the earth (or internet, as the case may be) to find their own personal Tumblr or DeviantArt or whatever.
I have some other ideas for sites as well, including an online marketplace-type thing that also provides the ability to actually TRADE for stuff (something the eBays of the world lack) and some other features. No matter how popular or successful any of these sites are, they build up my web design/programming portfolio and that's really what I need.
As a side note, I've been kind of isolated and distant and hardly ever around over the past few months... there's a very simple reason for that. Aside from my friends, whose numbers are dwindling as they venture off to other lands and places (and as those few who are here get tired of my free-wheeling, wild-dog-esque comings and goings and unreliability), and my family, my life sucks hardcore.
I'm still living at home so that I can save up money for more schooling / whatever, my free time is incredibly limited because I work 10+ hours a day, and I'm moving later this year so the present for me right now is basically just a long, drawn-out closing down of things I've loved and come to take for granted. There's very little that could draw me back into the science field; I went into it thinking it would be financially lucrative (HA!) and that, being science, it would be more logic-oriented and thus fitting with my personality. Nearly two years in the field taught me that there's very little on this earth LESS logical than the science/pharmaceutical industry.
Besides, if the one recruiter I talked to about 6 months ago was correct, I'm essentially obsolete and unemployable in the science field anyway, thanks to my being out of it for over a year. In short, I need to build up my portfolio for web / programming stuff so I can show potential employers what I can do so that they'll hire me and then for the first time in my life I'll actually have a job I actually kind of enjoy.
So, we really have two choices here... I can be around more often and spend a lot of time griping about how much I hate my life. Or, I can spend a good deal of my free time at home squeezing out PHP and Javascript code in the vain hope someday this will make my life better.
I only bring this up because, thanks to my job, I've had a lot of alone time in which to think about how many people I've alienated over the years in one way or another. It's always been due to one of a handful of reasons: I'm too distant and people think I don't like them, or, out of fear of this happening, I'm entirely the opposite, too involved or present or considerate or whatever, and it gets cloying and bothersome.
Or, I get into a party situation with a lot of people, and I drink too much in order to block out my paranoid guardedness, and then I wind up doing something inappropriate.
I've had enough Enforced Time Alone over the past year, though, to have come to terms with a lot of this, and I'm actually kind of okay with it for the first time ever. I used to get frantic if I was alone for too long. Now I kind of enjoy it.
Sometimes you just have to face facts... I am not going to be most people's cup of tea. I'm entirely too guarded to be really open and spontaneous. I had to deal with family issues at a very young age that licensed psychiatrists with 20 years experience had trouble dealing with, and while you can certainly work with the lack of trust and openness that causes, with time, the basic circuitry is still there and probably isn't going to change much.
On the other hand, I have met a number of people over the past few years that, despite being in very close proximity to them for extended periods of time, often in completely bizarre states of consciousness, I have yet to alienate. Of course, 90% of them have left the immediate area, but it's nice to know I'm not completely impossible.
That's enough on a personal front for right now. Up next! Political ranting which may or may not be cogent!
I'll start posting here again shortly, my first post being a general political rant that'll go up as soon as I'm done with this one...
Just as a general update... I'm currently working on a website that's going to be kind of a cross between Facebook and DeviantArt. Both sites do what they do very well, but personally I'd just like to have a single place where people I know can upload what they've been working on so that I don't have to run all over the ends of the earth (or internet, as the case may be) to find their own personal Tumblr or DeviantArt or whatever.
I have some other ideas for sites as well, including an online marketplace-type thing that also provides the ability to actually TRADE for stuff (something the eBays of the world lack) and some other features. No matter how popular or successful any of these sites are, they build up my web design/programming portfolio and that's really what I need.
As a side note, I've been kind of isolated and distant and hardly ever around over the past few months... there's a very simple reason for that. Aside from my friends, whose numbers are dwindling as they venture off to other lands and places (and as those few who are here get tired of my free-wheeling, wild-dog-esque comings and goings and unreliability), and my family, my life sucks hardcore.
I'm still living at home so that I can save up money for more schooling / whatever, my free time is incredibly limited because I work 10+ hours a day, and I'm moving later this year so the present for me right now is basically just a long, drawn-out closing down of things I've loved and come to take for granted. There's very little that could draw me back into the science field; I went into it thinking it would be financially lucrative (HA!) and that, being science, it would be more logic-oriented and thus fitting with my personality. Nearly two years in the field taught me that there's very little on this earth LESS logical than the science/pharmaceutical industry.
Besides, if the one recruiter I talked to about 6 months ago was correct, I'm essentially obsolete and unemployable in the science field anyway, thanks to my being out of it for over a year. In short, I need to build up my portfolio for web / programming stuff so I can show potential employers what I can do so that they'll hire me and then for the first time in my life I'll actually have a job I actually kind of enjoy.
So, we really have two choices here... I can be around more often and spend a lot of time griping about how much I hate my life. Or, I can spend a good deal of my free time at home squeezing out PHP and Javascript code in the vain hope someday this will make my life better.
I only bring this up because, thanks to my job, I've had a lot of alone time in which to think about how many people I've alienated over the years in one way or another. It's always been due to one of a handful of reasons: I'm too distant and people think I don't like them, or, out of fear of this happening, I'm entirely the opposite, too involved or present or considerate or whatever, and it gets cloying and bothersome.
Or, I get into a party situation with a lot of people, and I drink too much in order to block out my paranoid guardedness, and then I wind up doing something inappropriate.
I've had enough Enforced Time Alone over the past year, though, to have come to terms with a lot of this, and I'm actually kind of okay with it for the first time ever. I used to get frantic if I was alone for too long. Now I kind of enjoy it.
Sometimes you just have to face facts... I am not going to be most people's cup of tea. I'm entirely too guarded to be really open and spontaneous. I had to deal with family issues at a very young age that licensed psychiatrists with 20 years experience had trouble dealing with, and while you can certainly work with the lack of trust and openness that causes, with time, the basic circuitry is still there and probably isn't going to change much.
On the other hand, I have met a number of people over the past few years that, despite being in very close proximity to them for extended periods of time, often in completely bizarre states of consciousness, I have yet to alienate. Of course, 90% of them have left the immediate area, but it's nice to know I'm not completely impossible.
That's enough on a personal front for right now. Up next! Political ranting which may or may not be cogent!
Saturday, July 11, 2009
yaaaaaaay!
So I didn't want to post this elsewhere due to people on my LJ having numerous relationship problems and whatnot. I believe pretty strongly in other people's thoughts having effects on your life, i.e. if enough people wish you ill, it'll probably show up somewhere in your life. And in all honesty, I don't have that much going on that's good right now and I'd like to keep what I do have.
So anywho...
Tonight was awesome. I brought a friend from work to a party a few weeks ago where we decided to start dating casually. Tonight was our first actual "date", AKA some drinking mixed with a lot of cuddling, talking, and watching Samurai Champloo. Which I highly recommend (the Samurai Champloo part, though I recommend the first three as well, of course), but that's neither here nor there.
I may have mentioned her... rather novel.. living situation, but I won't do so here. The important thing is, I really, honestly don't care.
So! Day three of my seven-day-straight work week is over.. four more to go. The last three days, of course, are ten-hour days, but hey, I'll get through it eventually.
Yaaaaaay!
In my spare time (spare time? what's that?), I'm studying for my chemistry GRE, which I will most likely have to take October-December-ish so I can go to grad school next fall. I've realized that, for some reason, I absolutely cannot learn anything I don't teach myself. I've learned more chemistry in the past 2 weeks than I learned in four years at UD.
Very weird.
So anywho...
Tonight was awesome. I brought a friend from work to a party a few weeks ago where we decided to start dating casually. Tonight was our first actual "date", AKA some drinking mixed with a lot of cuddling, talking, and watching Samurai Champloo. Which I highly recommend (the Samurai Champloo part, though I recommend the first three as well, of course), but that's neither here nor there.
I may have mentioned her... rather novel.. living situation, but I won't do so here. The important thing is, I really, honestly don't care.
So! Day three of my seven-day-straight work week is over.. four more to go. The last three days, of course, are ten-hour days, but hey, I'll get through it eventually.
Yaaaaaay!
In my spare time (spare time? what's that?), I'm studying for my chemistry GRE, which I will most likely have to take October-December-ish so I can go to grad school next fall. I've realized that, for some reason, I absolutely cannot learn anything I don't teach myself. I've learned more chemistry in the past 2 weeks than I learned in four years at UD.
Very weird.
Monday, May 25, 2009
the society of the spectacle
Holy shit.
Read this book in its entirety. It's fairly short, so it shouldn't take you long.
This is exactly what I believe in. It details everything I've known was wrong about modern life, all the delusions and falsehoods those in power have tried to get us all to believe. I understand so much more why I've had the problems I've had in my life, in my personal relationships, and in my professional/career development.
I used to wake up and look at everything and just sort of try to figure out how I was going to deal with whatever bullshit I was inevitably going to face during the day. I had no real goals or dreams, I just wanted to have fun- and even this usually seemed impossible in the face of all the cultural programming we're all indoctrinated with. Sure, I could have fun by myself. I've always had to do that. But it's so much MORE fun to involve other people in things, and, aside from our little conglomerate of artists, free-wheeling drug prophets, renegade programmers, and vagabonds, it's really hard to get people fucking interested in ANYTHING beyond stuffing their faces and/or Collecting It All (TM).
But now? Now I wake up and I look at everything differently. Everything I see and think, I consider as a means to overturn everything, to smash through the web of lies and illusion we've had spun around our heads our whole lives. Words, music, art, and even simple objects can become weapons against the soullessness and emptiness of our everyday lives.
I've got a whole metric crapload (this is an official unit of measurement, you understand) of projects I'm working on right now. All projects listed below, other than the Shrub Book, are on hold, until I get everything for the latter in order.
Long-term goals, of course, involve either getting a better job 6 to 12 months down the road, or going to grad school, both of which I'm only doing for the money. And yes, the desire for money seems entirely counter to everything I was talking about above. But it isn't. I'm one of the least materialistic people you'll ever meet. I only want more money because it gives me more power to do things with more scope and grandeur. It's sort of a "use their own weapons to destroy them" kind of thing.
Fuck yeah. Life is looking pretty good right now.
Read this book in its entirety. It's fairly short, so it shouldn't take you long.
This is exactly what I believe in. It details everything I've known was wrong about modern life, all the delusions and falsehoods those in power have tried to get us all to believe. I understand so much more why I've had the problems I've had in my life, in my personal relationships, and in my professional/career development.
I used to wake up and look at everything and just sort of try to figure out how I was going to deal with whatever bullshit I was inevitably going to face during the day. I had no real goals or dreams, I just wanted to have fun- and even this usually seemed impossible in the face of all the cultural programming we're all indoctrinated with. Sure, I could have fun by myself. I've always had to do that. But it's so much MORE fun to involve other people in things, and, aside from our little conglomerate of artists, free-wheeling drug prophets, renegade programmers, and vagabonds, it's really hard to get people fucking interested in ANYTHING beyond stuffing their faces and/or Collecting It All (TM).
But now? Now I wake up and I look at everything differently. Everything I see and think, I consider as a means to overturn everything, to smash through the web of lies and illusion we've had spun around our heads our whole lives. Words, music, art, and even simple objects can become weapons against the soullessness and emptiness of our everyday lives.
I've got a whole metric crapload (this is an official unit of measurement, you understand) of projects I'm working on right now. All projects listed below, other than the Shrub Book, are on hold, until I get everything for the latter in order.
- First off, the Shrub Book. I just gave Part One of a history of the Smear Summer (you'll understand why it's named that once you read it) to Jan for review. I've been working non-stop on Part II. I'm also working on an "afterword" sort of piece that ties Situationism in with what I've learned and experienced through my time in The Shrub, as well as where it all could potentially go. There's another piece about Acid Night I'd really like to finish, time permitting, but we'll see. That one's currently 9 pages, single-spaced, and it's maybe half-done. The Smear Summer history is potentially going to be about 30.
- I'm also still working on a novel. It's tentatively titled "Repent, Resent, Reset" and is about a captain of a spaceship who wakes up entirely alone one day. His spaceship is equipped with nanotechnology that keeps him alive without his doing anything, so he spends the next 300 years or so progressively going insane. Telling you more would spoil the story, but I will say that it's intentionally Lovecraftian, in a sense, not because I'm trying to rip him off, but because I see this story as kind of a counterpoint to the Situationism I've been getting so into lately. It's basically taking the delusional narcissism our society is so enraptured with to its logical extreme. I'm only 20 pages or so into it, and it's already horrifying.
- In a few words: I Only Speak In Pictures. This is the album I've been working on for the past three years. Completely unintentionally, since I didn't even know what Situationism was three years ago, and I've only recently gotten into it seriously, it's entirely Situationist in theme. It's a concept album detailing the journey of one person from a horrific, consumer-culture-imposed nihilism into a realization of the beauty, freedom, and general awesomeness of life. Before I started working hardcore on the Shrub Book, I was well on my way to mixing and mastering it.
- Now that I'm working again, I can gather together some musical equipment and hopefully start doing live music. I've tried a few times, even when I had more equipment, but my setup has always been so terrible that people just look at it and don't take it seriously.
- This is kind of a minor thing, but Emily's party is going to be pretty wild. I know, I know, it's just a party, but it has a breaking laws/transgression theme. I've got some pretty bizarre ideas for it that I can't wait to bring into reality.
Long-term goals, of course, involve either getting a better job 6 to 12 months down the road, or going to grad school, both of which I'm only doing for the money. And yes, the desire for money seems entirely counter to everything I was talking about above. But it isn't. I'm one of the least materialistic people you'll ever meet. I only want more money because it gives me more power to do things with more scope and grandeur. It's sort of a "use their own weapons to destroy them" kind of thing.
Fuck yeah. Life is looking pretty good right now.
Friday, May 15, 2009
dan deacon
Another thing I want to do: play a show with Dan Deacon live.
Okay... watch the video and listen to the music, then consider the fact he works directly with waveforms (like sine waves, square waves, and so forth), just like I do...
...and now look at his Wikipedia entry. Specifically, look at the third through fifth words.
That's right. He's born THE SAME DAY AND YEAR AS ME.
I found this to be a really awesome coincidence.
Okay... watch the video and listen to the music, then consider the fact he works directly with waveforms (like sine waves, square waves, and so forth), just like I do...
...and now look at his Wikipedia entry. Specifically, look at the third through fifth words.
That's right. He's born THE SAME DAY AND YEAR AS ME.
I found this to be a really awesome coincidence.
Thursday, May 14, 2009
situationism is amazing
With my life having somehow exploded into a massively exercise in indecision and confusion, I've found myself needing new things to think about to distract me. As a result, I've really gotten into the following, at least intellectually:
Culture Jamming
Situationism
Paris Uprising of 1968
All of these having been heavily influenced by Guy Debord, who I know about primarily due to his being quoted and a huge influence on Orchid, one of my favorite bands ever.
So, I had the following ideas:
I'm really starting to think that not doing drugs has returned me to being almost as weird as I was before I started doing drugs.
Culture Jamming
Situationism
Paris Uprising of 1968
All of these having been heavily influenced by Guy Debord, who I know about primarily due to his being quoted and a huge influence on Orchid, one of my favorite bands ever.
So, I had the following ideas:
- Someone needs to hold an entire church service, preferably a really important Mass of some sort... entirely in Klingon.
- This one I'll probably actually DO, once I get enough money. ...Essentially, I want to create billboards for entirely fictional products and have these billboards appear on major highways. The billboards should be vague and obtuse, i.e. a picture of a dog smelling something and the words "Enjoy a Baft today!". 25 miles or so down the road, another billboard should be present. This one should also be ambiguous and vague and should say something to the effect of "Did you get your Baft?"
- I want to stage a Whirl-Mart demonstration. No, seriously, I REALLY want to do this.
- I need to buy monk robes for this, and some of you have heard of this already, but... I want to make a short film based on a dream my sociopathic grandmother had in the 70's. Essentially, she walked up to this weird Greco-Roman-Atlantean temple and met these robed wise men. She tried asking them questions about her life but they never said anything.. UNTIL she asked about my mother. Immediately thereafter, they started yelling "TELL HER TO GO TO THE MOUNTAINS!!!!" at her. I want this performed, and I want the robed people to not yell "TELL HER TO GO TO THE MOUNTAINS" in unison all the time. "TELL HER TO-" "TELL HER- " TELL HER TO GO TO THE MOUNTAINS!" TELL HER TO GO TO THE MOUNTAINS!!!" ...Yeah.
- I also want to have the Newark equivalent of subway parties, featuring alcohol of course, but also featuring people wearing the robes in item number four.
I'm really starting to think that not doing drugs has returned me to being almost as weird as I was before I started doing drugs.
Friday, April 17, 2009
my homage to icanhascheezburger
This is my first attempt at anything icanhascheezburgeresque. I doubt I can actually submit it because I found the image on Wikipedia.
It was the cat on the right that I found funny, really.
Sunday, March 15, 2009
life
I used to think life was this big journey we all took together, and that the point was to get as far down the road as you could, with as many people as you could.
I don't necessarily think that, anymore. I think life is just kind of there. It is what it is. I keep repeating this to myself as a sort of mantra. It is what it is. Doesn't that sound great? It makes the bad things not seem as bad, and it puts the good things in perspective, too. I have trouble doing both.
This ASCII art above isn't a complete metaphor for life, but it certainly captures something about it.
Sometimes you're the thing on the left, sometimes you're the one on the right. I don't know whether the thing on the left is being menacing or inspiring. I don't know if the thing on the right is frightened or inspired. I don't know which creature I am, or what I'm doing.
On a totally-unrelated note, it would be nice to stop having nightmares where some awful extraterrestrial entity parks itself above my house and zaps me with destructive energy that I can feel physically. Yes, that would be very, very nice. (hint hint, Universe...)
I don't necessarily think that, anymore. I think life is just kind of there. It is what it is. I keep repeating this to myself as a sort of mantra. It is what it is. Doesn't that sound great? It makes the bad things not seem as bad, and it puts the good things in perspective, too. I have trouble doing both.
/\/\/\/\
# # ##
#### # O O# ###
# # = # #
# # VVV# #
# # | # # !!!!!
# # ^^^# #
################
#########
######### OO*
######### ***
######### |
######### -----
######## |
######## ######## / \
This ASCII art above isn't a complete metaphor for life, but it certainly captures something about it.
Sometimes you're the thing on the left, sometimes you're the one on the right. I don't know whether the thing on the left is being menacing or inspiring. I don't know if the thing on the right is frightened or inspired. I don't know which creature I am, or what I'm doing.
On a totally-unrelated note, it would be nice to stop having nightmares where some awful extraterrestrial entity parks itself above my house and zaps me with destructive energy that I can feel physically. Yes, that would be very, very nice. (hint hint, Universe...)
Thursday, March 5, 2009
hooray! good news for once!
News:
I have an interview coming up. I have to take and pass two tests before I get the interview, but they're sending me stuff so I know what to study for, and even without it I'd probably pass with flying colors anyway.
And guess what? It's not in science. At all.
I've been involved with computers since I was 9; I learned BASIC on my ancient-even-for-1991 Apple IIe-knockoff then, I moved on to learn C and 6502 and Z80 assembly (the latter of which I do not remember in any way, shape, or form), then the horrific version of HTML that was present in 1997, then Python, and now I'm teaching myself PHP and MySQL and making an abortion of teaching myself Javascript and Ajax.
Suffice it to say... I like computers. Over my past 6 months of joblessness, I've been running over in my mind how much easier programming/IT is for me than actual science, probably because I really enjoy it, but also because that's basically how my mind works. So I've been wondering if I shouldn't just abandon science and go for an IT-related career.
Well, the job in question is an entry-level IT position with Comcast, so if I do get it (and chances are good that I will, like I said), I guess I am indeed abandoning science, at least temporarily.
Look, I do enjoy science/chemistry and so forth, but the people in it? Dear Universe, they're awful. I've only met one person- okay, two, now that I think about it- who I really liked who were also scientists. One of them reads this blog (hello!), the other is a good friend whom I've lost touch with, unfortunately.
Everyone else I met in the biotech/pharmaceutical/chemistry industry is... ugh.
I can explain this most easily through an example. I talked to the Comcast hiring/recruitment lady today, and I couldn't believe the reception I got from her. I mean... she was not only polite, but... dare I say it... friendly? She treated me like a human being. In contrast, all but one of the recruitment people I've dealt with in trying to get another pharmaceutical/biotech job over the past 6 months (I'm up to 57 applications, now) have treated me like something they scraped off their nether regions.
"Why did you leave your last job?" At this point I would give one of a number of explanations, usually centering around the fact that I didn't like where the management was trying to steer me (metrology, ugh), and that I left to pursue other opportunities without fear of wasting my company's time.
There were other reasons, certainly, such as the fact they switched me from an hourly rate to a salary, meaning that they could (and did) require me to work 15+ hours a day without reimbursing me at all (forget overtime pay, I didn't get anything), the fact that I was doing the same work the Master's degree people did, and was even SUPERVISING them towards the end of my time there, but they got paid more than I did simply because they had a Master's degree, the fact that we were expected to work miracles with equipment 20 years old in some cases, the fact that I spent most of my time repairing HPLCs so that I could even attempt to work miracles, instead of actually.. I don't know... doing the job I worked myself nearly to death (literally) in school in order to even have... and the list goes on. I apologize for the run-on sentence.
But regardless of what reason I gave these recruiter-beasts, the answer was always the same: "Oh." (long, long pause) "I see." You could hear the contempt dripping from their fangs.
Getting my degree, I realize now, really, really, really hit me hard in the self-esteem department. I have to admit, I did some pretty amazing things prior to starting my degree, and even during my first year of school. I made an unfinished, but still far more literal and technically advanced translation patch of Fire Emblem for the Famicom (ask me if you want this, I still have it... somewhere...), I created my own style of music (TBMPHE!), I had webpages, my friend and I made an entire tabletop RPG system, I was programming an ACTUAL NINTENDO GAME at one point... you get the picture.
Then I hit my second or third year at UD, and... everything creative-wise on my part fell to shit. My one and only accomplishment was Fox For The Five, my second TBMPHE album. (I'm quite proud of that one, but it needs work... lots of work.) I had no time for any sort of creative pursuit, for one thing, my one and only outlet at the time being the insane mindscapes DXM produces, and even if I had had the time, I doubt I would have made anything significant anyway.
Because at some point, I stopped believing in myself at all, probably because of professors like the one I had that called me into his office the day before class started to tell me in no uncertain terms that I was going to fail his precious course. It was a second semester organic chem course, and I had enrolled in it without the benefit of receiving the divine wisdom he no doubt spewed forth during the first semester. I had had an organic chem course at Cecil, and thought it would at least prepare me somewhat for it. Not at all!
So I spent morning, noon, and night working through the old homeworks and tests he had available on his website, teaching myself graduate-level organic chemistry. I outright refused to go to that stupid old fuck for help. No one tells me I'm going to fail. I passed with flying colors.
As a side note, I eventually had to take his precious first semester course anyway, so I did during my last term of my last year. I never went to class except to take tests or if it was raining and I didn't want to walk home. I got an A in the course. This is a personal victory of mine.
Moral of that story: do not insult me, or I will eat myself alive, literally if necessary, in order to defeat you. And I will never, ever, ever forgive you. I don't treat people badly. I take it very personally when people do so to me without cause.
Okay, I'm going off on tangents and taking up your valuable time. I'll cut this short.
So let's say I was born with the responsibility of curing some disease or advancing medical or scientific knowledge to a higher level. Let's say that my refusal to accept this responsibility leads to a lower quality of life for many.
But if I have to out-and-out destroy myself in order to do it, and I spend my life in absolute misery... is it worth it?
I'm starting to think not.
I'm excited. It's probably very obvious, but I think my life will go better in general if I feel positive about myself and what I'm doing. My tenacity (or, more accurately put, my stubbornness to the point of insanity) is also a weakness for me; I'll keep banging my head against the same wall for years until I knock it down, no matter what the cost is to me. I'm the same way in personal conflicts.
It's not so much that that's a bad trait, it's just that my aim is off with it.
I have an interview coming up. I have to take and pass two tests before I get the interview, but they're sending me stuff so I know what to study for, and even without it I'd probably pass with flying colors anyway.
And guess what? It's not in science. At all.
I've been involved with computers since I was 9; I learned BASIC on my ancient-even-for-1991 Apple IIe-knockoff then, I moved on to learn C and 6502 and Z80 assembly (the latter of which I do not remember in any way, shape, or form), then the horrific version of HTML that was present in 1997, then Python, and now I'm teaching myself PHP and MySQL and making an abortion of teaching myself Javascript and Ajax.
Suffice it to say... I like computers. Over my past 6 months of joblessness, I've been running over in my mind how much easier programming/IT is for me than actual science, probably because I really enjoy it, but also because that's basically how my mind works. So I've been wondering if I shouldn't just abandon science and go for an IT-related career.
Well, the job in question is an entry-level IT position with Comcast, so if I do get it (and chances are good that I will, like I said), I guess I am indeed abandoning science, at least temporarily.
Look, I do enjoy science/chemistry and so forth, but the people in it? Dear Universe, they're awful. I've only met one person- okay, two, now that I think about it- who I really liked who were also scientists. One of them reads this blog (hello!), the other is a good friend whom I've lost touch with, unfortunately.
Everyone else I met in the biotech/pharmaceutical/chemistry industry is... ugh.
I can explain this most easily through an example. I talked to the Comcast hiring/recruitment lady today, and I couldn't believe the reception I got from her. I mean... she was not only polite, but... dare I say it... friendly? She treated me like a human being. In contrast, all but one of the recruitment people I've dealt with in trying to get another pharmaceutical/biotech job over the past 6 months (I'm up to 57 applications, now) have treated me like something they scraped off their nether regions.
"Why did you leave your last job?" At this point I would give one of a number of explanations, usually centering around the fact that I didn't like where the management was trying to steer me (metrology, ugh), and that I left to pursue other opportunities without fear of wasting my company's time.
There were other reasons, certainly, such as the fact they switched me from an hourly rate to a salary, meaning that they could (and did) require me to work 15+ hours a day without reimbursing me at all (forget overtime pay, I didn't get anything), the fact that I was doing the same work the Master's degree people did, and was even SUPERVISING them towards the end of my time there, but they got paid more than I did simply because they had a Master's degree, the fact that we were expected to work miracles with equipment 20 years old in some cases, the fact that I spent most of my time repairing HPLCs so that I could even attempt to work miracles, instead of actually.. I don't know... doing the job I worked myself nearly to death (literally) in school in order to even have... and the list goes on. I apologize for the run-on sentence.
But regardless of what reason I gave these recruiter-beasts, the answer was always the same: "Oh." (long, long pause) "I see." You could hear the contempt dripping from their fangs.
Getting my degree, I realize now, really, really, really hit me hard in the self-esteem department. I have to admit, I did some pretty amazing things prior to starting my degree, and even during my first year of school. I made an unfinished, but still far more literal and technically advanced translation patch of Fire Emblem for the Famicom (ask me if you want this, I still have it... somewhere...), I created my own style of music (TBMPHE!), I had webpages, my friend and I made an entire tabletop RPG system, I was programming an ACTUAL NINTENDO GAME at one point... you get the picture.
Then I hit my second or third year at UD, and... everything creative-wise on my part fell to shit. My one and only accomplishment was Fox For The Five, my second TBMPHE album. (I'm quite proud of that one, but it needs work... lots of work.) I had no time for any sort of creative pursuit, for one thing, my one and only outlet at the time being the insane mindscapes DXM produces, and even if I had had the time, I doubt I would have made anything significant anyway.
Because at some point, I stopped believing in myself at all, probably because of professors like the one I had that called me into his office the day before class started to tell me in no uncertain terms that I was going to fail his precious course. It was a second semester organic chem course, and I had enrolled in it without the benefit of receiving the divine wisdom he no doubt spewed forth during the first semester. I had had an organic chem course at Cecil, and thought it would at least prepare me somewhat for it. Not at all!
So I spent morning, noon, and night working through the old homeworks and tests he had available on his website, teaching myself graduate-level organic chemistry. I outright refused to go to that stupid old fuck for help. No one tells me I'm going to fail. I passed with flying colors.
As a side note, I eventually had to take his precious first semester course anyway, so I did during my last term of my last year. I never went to class except to take tests or if it was raining and I didn't want to walk home. I got an A in the course. This is a personal victory of mine.
Moral of that story: do not insult me, or I will eat myself alive, literally if necessary, in order to defeat you. And I will never, ever, ever forgive you. I don't treat people badly. I take it very personally when people do so to me without cause.
Okay, I'm going off on tangents and taking up your valuable time. I'll cut this short.
So let's say I was born with the responsibility of curing some disease or advancing medical or scientific knowledge to a higher level. Let's say that my refusal to accept this responsibility leads to a lower quality of life for many.
But if I have to out-and-out destroy myself in order to do it, and I spend my life in absolute misery... is it worth it?
I'm starting to think not.
I'm excited. It's probably very obvious, but I think my life will go better in general if I feel positive about myself and what I'm doing. My tenacity (or, more accurately put, my stubbornness to the point of insanity) is also a weakness for me; I'll keep banging my head against the same wall for years until I knock it down, no matter what the cost is to me. I'm the same way in personal conflicts.
It's not so much that that's a bad trait, it's just that my aim is off with it.
Wednesday, January 21, 2009
news, and also novelty.
So... I've been thinking a lot over the past few days.
First of all, my friends Jan and Jesse are planning on compiling a book about the Shrub; I've been invited to have a major role in it. I still have to actually sit down with Jan and map out exactly what's going to be in the book, but I've been writing some anecdotes that I think portray the Shrub from a variety of different perspectives. There's stuff about happier times, yet there's also stuff about some of the more... detrimental.. characters that have popped in and out of Shrub folklore. I'm writing a piece about Mark Eyerman, and if I can, I'd like to get John and Emily together and grill them about The Night Nick Went Insane.
I also have about five companies that have my resume now, and they're all supposed to get back to me in the next week or two. Supposedly. The one job sounds absolutely great; it's in Newark, and it's a night-shift job on a rotating schedule. This leaves my days free for personal fun stuff, keeps me from having to get up at 5 or 6 AM every day in the bitter, freezing cold to drive a gazillion miles to a place I hate, and gives me days that aren't weekends off. Yay! So I hope I get this job.
On an entirely personal, not-connected-to-anyone front, I feel better than I have in a long time.
For once in my life, I don't feel like I'm doing anything "wrong". This probably sounds silly or stupid, but I've always felt totally out of place in this world. Have you ever played Tetris? If you have, you remember what it's like when you get a piece that absolutely will not fit anywhere; you have to put it somewhere, and anywhere you put it leaves a giant gaping hole that bothers you immensely until you fix it. That's basically how I've always felt about myself.
What has always made me feel that way is that I've known from a very early age that I didn't see the world the same way as everyone else. Most people, once they hit kindergarten, and sometimes even sooner, quickly get acclimated to the whole human jungle, and learn to change themselves to better fit within it. Not me.
I've always thought the whole human program, the whole set of guidelines that dictates who wins or loses, who's "right" or "wrong", and so forth was complete and utter horseshit.
It wasn't the first time I perceived this, by any means, but one of the most profound experiences I had encountering the darker side of human nature happened when I was seven. It was second grade, and I had just transferred to East Bradford Elementary, my third elementary school, so I didn't really have much in the way of friends, yet. (And yes, I did get "asked to leave" St. Agnes, but I only left my kindergarten because it was a program offered by Immaculata College. I wasn't completely antisocial.)
It didn't really bother me, though. Not having friends meant I could explore the absolutely gigantic playground we had at my leisure, making up whole new worlds for myself in my mind. And sometimes I didn't even need to imagine things to be amused or stimulated.
This one day, I found this little fuzzy caterpillar. I had never seen one like that before. He was black with brown stripes of fur, and he wiggled around in the most adorable self-important manner ever. In short, I thought he (she? it?) was the absolute shit.
That is, until some third or fourth grade loser came up to me, saw me watching the caterpillar with abject fascination, and subsequently stomped on it. I looked up at him from where I was sitting on the ground. He gave me this slow, chilling smile that's never really left me.
The last straw at St. Agnes was a fight I got into in defense of my best friend, Lauren. She and I had a really cute first-grade romance-type thing going on. This one kid that had been picking on me all year started insulting her in the middle of class one day, so I got up out of my seat, and dove on him, beating the shit out of him and dragging him out of his chair.
But had this been my only incident, I probably would have been allowed to stay. Obviously, it wasn't.
I was really kicked out because of my attitudes regarding religion... at six years old. To make a long story short, I thought the whole religion thing was complete bullshit.
I'm not at all an atheist. I went through an atheistic period, but I was also severely depressed during that time period; it's kind of hard to believe in anything if you don't believe in yourself anymore.
But I can't point to any one particular system of belief or set of godforms and say "Yup, that's what I believe, and everything else is wrong." Anyone that knows me really well knows of my personal relationship with Kali as a godform, but explaining that is well beyond the scope of this little missive. So what do I believe in? What do I worship?
I worship life. I worship complexity. I believe in novelty and change.
Anything that survives long enough as a complex system- and this can be anything: a work of art that's survived the creation process, a relationship that's passed the first stages, a body of knowledge or even a new theory or hypothesis regarding something- is defying the laws of entropy. The laws of thermodynamics essentially dictate (correct me if I'm wrong) that everything is eternally trying to progress towards a disordered state, which is paradoxically the state in which the highest potential energy occurs. Absolute potential can also be defined in another way: as zero. You can't divide by zero, it was explained to me once, because you don't know exactly what you're dividing by.
I guess I'm sort of a Neo-Taoist, in a way, because I see existence as a constant battle between the number system, representing change, novelty, complexity, creation, and life in general, and zero, representing stasis, stagnation, absolute potential, and death. It's easy to get fooled by the seeming paradox between "absolute potential" and "death", because we tend to see the former as "good" and the latter as "bad", but that's because we're human. Absolute potential is nice, yes, because anything can happen out of it, but the thing to remember regarding absolute potential is that nothing does happen out of it, because the instant something does, it's no longer potential.
A good example of zero in practice is seen in a lyric from the Nine Inch Nails song, "I Do Not Want This":
"I stay inside my bed
I have lived so many lives
All in my head"
The protagonist here is depressed and sad due to having all these dreams and plans for life but never actualizing them. As living, conscious humans, we can't stand much zero in our lives, unless we're profoundly disturbed or wildly sociopathic.
This has turned into a long tangent, but to bring things back to the point, the fuzzy caterpillar I was so enraptured by was an example of the number system, of life in general. He/she/it was just going about his daily business, doing caterpillar stuff, whatever that is. It's fun to imagine what life would actually be like as a different lifeform; as a caterpillar you'd probably be mostly concerned with avoiding predators and gobbling enough to eat to survive your period in the cocoon or chrysalis you know you're going to have to make at some point so you can turn into something completely alien to you.
It's foreign to us, but it's still just one of a myriad of living, complex systems that have taken untold millions of years of evolution to become what they are now. And it can all be ruined in an instant by some stupid fuck who apparently really got off on inflicting pain and suffering.
I don't feel bad about myself anymore, however, because I've realized how firmly I've committed myself to opposing such things, to opposing the Zero in the world.
Am I going to have a traditionally happy life doing this? Absolutely not! I'm going to be very alone, most of the time. I always have been, and probably always will be. Most people are stuck playing out their little patterns endlessly. Sometimes they learn things, but a lot of the time they just wind up repeating the same patterns over and over again. They get bitter, and cynical, and if they even wind up successful enough in a biological sense to have children, they pass on the bitterness and cynicism to their children, and the whole thing repeats itself all over again. The noose tightens just a bit further and we all wind up just a little closer to zero.
Fuck that.
If you know me well at all, you know that I push myself and my surroundings to the utter limit. I'm never content with "just being". I try to inspire people, to push them to be better than they think they are. I try to get people to realize that what we're told we're supposed to be happy with is complete bullshit, for lack of a better word, and that we have the right, or maybe even the responsibility, to be, do, love, and see everything we possibly can. I can't stand anyone that tells anyone else that they "can't" do this or that, or that they're "not good enough" in one area or another. I try to counter the toxic effect the Zero people have on those unfortunate individuals I wind up loving.
But people like their boxes. They look for people that will fit in their boxes. People will stay in their boxes even if the boxes are horribly painful to them, because the boxes are familiar. They know the rules of their boxes, so, they reason, if they just do this or that, regardless of how this or that chafes at them as a person, they can still "win", in the end.
There really aren't any rules, though, other than "don't put people in boxes".
It's become apparent to me that what I do need to work on is the application of my all-your-box-is-belong-to-me, to paraphrase a tired internet meme, because it scares people off. I need to learn to be more low-key with it, though this depends on the situation.
But while my application may be way off at this point, my overall goal is not. There's not too much that could convince me otherwise right now. I've seen myself have a definite, positive effect on a number of people, and I have to admit, I had a lot of fun doing it.
"Be the trouble you want to see in the world."
I'm trying to do just that. And I'm going to have an absolute fucking blast.
First of all, my friends Jan and Jesse are planning on compiling a book about the Shrub; I've been invited to have a major role in it. I still have to actually sit down with Jan and map out exactly what's going to be in the book, but I've been writing some anecdotes that I think portray the Shrub from a variety of different perspectives. There's stuff about happier times, yet there's also stuff about some of the more... detrimental.. characters that have popped in and out of Shrub folklore. I'm writing a piece about Mark Eyerman, and if I can, I'd like to get John and Emily together and grill them about The Night Nick Went Insane.
I also have about five companies that have my resume now, and they're all supposed to get back to me in the next week or two. Supposedly. The one job sounds absolutely great; it's in Newark, and it's a night-shift job on a rotating schedule. This leaves my days free for personal fun stuff, keeps me from having to get up at 5 or 6 AM every day in the bitter, freezing cold to drive a gazillion miles to a place I hate, and gives me days that aren't weekends off. Yay! So I hope I get this job.
On an entirely personal, not-connected-to-anyone front, I feel better than I have in a long time.
For once in my life, I don't feel like I'm doing anything "wrong". This probably sounds silly or stupid, but I've always felt totally out of place in this world. Have you ever played Tetris? If you have, you remember what it's like when you get a piece that absolutely will not fit anywhere; you have to put it somewhere, and anywhere you put it leaves a giant gaping hole that bothers you immensely until you fix it. That's basically how I've always felt about myself.
What has always made me feel that way is that I've known from a very early age that I didn't see the world the same way as everyone else. Most people, once they hit kindergarten, and sometimes even sooner, quickly get acclimated to the whole human jungle, and learn to change themselves to better fit within it. Not me.
I've always thought the whole human program, the whole set of guidelines that dictates who wins or loses, who's "right" or "wrong", and so forth was complete and utter horseshit.
It wasn't the first time I perceived this, by any means, but one of the most profound experiences I had encountering the darker side of human nature happened when I was seven. It was second grade, and I had just transferred to East Bradford Elementary, my third elementary school, so I didn't really have much in the way of friends, yet. (And yes, I did get "asked to leave" St. Agnes, but I only left my kindergarten because it was a program offered by Immaculata College. I wasn't completely antisocial.)
It didn't really bother me, though. Not having friends meant I could explore the absolutely gigantic playground we had at my leisure, making up whole new worlds for myself in my mind. And sometimes I didn't even need to imagine things to be amused or stimulated.
This one day, I found this little fuzzy caterpillar. I had never seen one like that before. He was black with brown stripes of fur, and he wiggled around in the most adorable self-important manner ever. In short, I thought he (she? it?) was the absolute shit.
That is, until some third or fourth grade loser came up to me, saw me watching the caterpillar with abject fascination, and subsequently stomped on it. I looked up at him from where I was sitting on the ground. He gave me this slow, chilling smile that's never really left me.
The last straw at St. Agnes was a fight I got into in defense of my best friend, Lauren. She and I had a really cute first-grade romance-type thing going on. This one kid that had been picking on me all year started insulting her in the middle of class one day, so I got up out of my seat, and dove on him, beating the shit out of him and dragging him out of his chair.
But had this been my only incident, I probably would have been allowed to stay. Obviously, it wasn't.
I was really kicked out because of my attitudes regarding religion... at six years old. To make a long story short, I thought the whole religion thing was complete bullshit.
I'm not at all an atheist. I went through an atheistic period, but I was also severely depressed during that time period; it's kind of hard to believe in anything if you don't believe in yourself anymore.
But I can't point to any one particular system of belief or set of godforms and say "Yup, that's what I believe, and everything else is wrong." Anyone that knows me really well knows of my personal relationship with Kali as a godform, but explaining that is well beyond the scope of this little missive. So what do I believe in? What do I worship?
I worship life. I worship complexity. I believe in novelty and change.
Anything that survives long enough as a complex system- and this can be anything: a work of art that's survived the creation process, a relationship that's passed the first stages, a body of knowledge or even a new theory or hypothesis regarding something- is defying the laws of entropy. The laws of thermodynamics essentially dictate (correct me if I'm wrong) that everything is eternally trying to progress towards a disordered state, which is paradoxically the state in which the highest potential energy occurs. Absolute potential can also be defined in another way: as zero. You can't divide by zero, it was explained to me once, because you don't know exactly what you're dividing by.
I guess I'm sort of a Neo-Taoist, in a way, because I see existence as a constant battle between the number system, representing change, novelty, complexity, creation, and life in general, and zero, representing stasis, stagnation, absolute potential, and death. It's easy to get fooled by the seeming paradox between "absolute potential" and "death", because we tend to see the former as "good" and the latter as "bad", but that's because we're human. Absolute potential is nice, yes, because anything can happen out of it, but the thing to remember regarding absolute potential is that nothing does happen out of it, because the instant something does, it's no longer potential.
A good example of zero in practice is seen in a lyric from the Nine Inch Nails song, "I Do Not Want This":
"I stay inside my bed
I have lived so many lives
All in my head"
The protagonist here is depressed and sad due to having all these dreams and plans for life but never actualizing them. As living, conscious humans, we can't stand much zero in our lives, unless we're profoundly disturbed or wildly sociopathic.
This has turned into a long tangent, but to bring things back to the point, the fuzzy caterpillar I was so enraptured by was an example of the number system, of life in general. He/she/it was just going about his daily business, doing caterpillar stuff, whatever that is. It's fun to imagine what life would actually be like as a different lifeform; as a caterpillar you'd probably be mostly concerned with avoiding predators and gobbling enough to eat to survive your period in the cocoon or chrysalis you know you're going to have to make at some point so you can turn into something completely alien to you.
It's foreign to us, but it's still just one of a myriad of living, complex systems that have taken untold millions of years of evolution to become what they are now. And it can all be ruined in an instant by some stupid fuck who apparently really got off on inflicting pain and suffering.
I don't feel bad about myself anymore, however, because I've realized how firmly I've committed myself to opposing such things, to opposing the Zero in the world.
Am I going to have a traditionally happy life doing this? Absolutely not! I'm going to be very alone, most of the time. I always have been, and probably always will be. Most people are stuck playing out their little patterns endlessly. Sometimes they learn things, but a lot of the time they just wind up repeating the same patterns over and over again. They get bitter, and cynical, and if they even wind up successful enough in a biological sense to have children, they pass on the bitterness and cynicism to their children, and the whole thing repeats itself all over again. The noose tightens just a bit further and we all wind up just a little closer to zero.
Fuck that.
If you know me well at all, you know that I push myself and my surroundings to the utter limit. I'm never content with "just being". I try to inspire people, to push them to be better than they think they are. I try to get people to realize that what we're told we're supposed to be happy with is complete bullshit, for lack of a better word, and that we have the right, or maybe even the responsibility, to be, do, love, and see everything we possibly can. I can't stand anyone that tells anyone else that they "can't" do this or that, or that they're "not good enough" in one area or another. I try to counter the toxic effect the Zero people have on those unfortunate individuals I wind up loving.
But people like their boxes. They look for people that will fit in their boxes. People will stay in their boxes even if the boxes are horribly painful to them, because the boxes are familiar. They know the rules of their boxes, so, they reason, if they just do this or that, regardless of how this or that chafes at them as a person, they can still "win", in the end.
There really aren't any rules, though, other than "don't put people in boxes".
It's become apparent to me that what I do need to work on is the application of my all-your-box-is-belong-to-me, to paraphrase a tired internet meme, because it scares people off. I need to learn to be more low-key with it, though this depends on the situation.
But while my application may be way off at this point, my overall goal is not. There's not too much that could convince me otherwise right now. I've seen myself have a definite, positive effect on a number of people, and I have to admit, I had a lot of fun doing it.
"Be the trouble you want to see in the world."
I'm trying to do just that. And I'm going to have an absolute fucking blast.
Wednesday, January 14, 2009
meanwhile...
I'm in Olney, MD, in a Starbucks using the $3.99 / 2 hr "free" WiFi while Ashley is at work.
If I had known a relationship could ever be anything like this, I think I would have been a lot less willing to put up with things in my previous relationships. And if I had known that anything like this was even potentially in my future, I think I would have been a lot less inclined to spin off into existential despair.
I don't have the words to describe it, aside from saying she's wonderful. I tell her this, and all sorts of other things, all the time. She rolls her eyes and says I'm blind.
But I'm not blind.
I feel like I can see more clearly than ever.
Relationships like this put your whole life into perspective. You start being able to see yourself as a whole being, not as a collection of faults that make you undesirable. You stop trying to "fix" yourself, attempting to scourge yourself of your bad qualities to become some impossible perfect ideal. Because people aren't equations to be solved, they're complex, paradoxical, quixotic creatures whose differing parts of their natures do not always cancel out in the end.
As I said, I've been having a lot of trouble wording what I want to say on this subject. All I can say is that it's been life-changing.
I look at myself as a person, now, and, for the first time ever, I see a complete picture. I was always trying to focus on particular parts of myself, either to "fix" them or to escape the parts I didn't like. I'm not looking to escape anything, now. I just want the picture to develop as fully and strongly as possible.
( <3 )
If I had known a relationship could ever be anything like this, I think I would have been a lot less willing to put up with things in my previous relationships. And if I had known that anything like this was even potentially in my future, I think I would have been a lot less inclined to spin off into existential despair.
I don't have the words to describe it, aside from saying she's wonderful. I tell her this, and all sorts of other things, all the time. She rolls her eyes and says I'm blind.
But I'm not blind.
I feel like I can see more clearly than ever.
Relationships like this put your whole life into perspective. You start being able to see yourself as a whole being, not as a collection of faults that make you undesirable. You stop trying to "fix" yourself, attempting to scourge yourself of your bad qualities to become some impossible perfect ideal. Because people aren't equations to be solved, they're complex, paradoxical, quixotic creatures whose differing parts of their natures do not always cancel out in the end.
As I said, I've been having a lot of trouble wording what I want to say on this subject. All I can say is that it's been life-changing.
I look at myself as a person, now, and, for the first time ever, I see a complete picture. I was always trying to focus on particular parts of myself, either to "fix" them or to escape the parts I didn't like. I'm not looking to escape anything, now. I just want the picture to develop as fully and strongly as possible.
( <3 )
Sunday, January 11, 2009
various rants and musings
I hardly ever post anywhere (here or my ultra-secret other blog) anymore... I don't usually have the time.
My sister broke up with her boyfriend of 5 years on New Year's Eve. Apparently, while Ashley and I were at the New Year's parties, my mom had been trying to talk to him (the boyfriend) about... well.. actually being a decent boyfriend. He was cheap, controlling, childish, and petty, for starters. There's a whole bunch of things I could say about him, but in the interest of time, I won't.
To make a long story short, The Boyfriend got incredibly pissed off at my mom and said a bunch of nasty things (in front of Ashley, no less). Cait (my sister) immediately came back with her own insults, and I yelled "fuck you" to him while he was going down the stairs. He didn't challenge me. I wish he had.
I hate this kid. I shouldn't say "kid" because he's about a month older than me, but whatever.
I don't just hate him because of how he treated my sister, or my family for that matter. I also hate him because he's disillusioned me in a number of ways.
This kid was very punk. He lived that whole lifestyle, and embodied the whole "you can't tell me what to do" ethic. But he was a complete asshole, and, in so doing, he made a mockery of the entire punk movement.
The punk ethos, to me, is about equality, tolerance of differences, libertarianism, and self-reliance. It's funny; a lot of hardcore punk kids hate hippies... but in all honesty, they (we? I used to be a hardcore kid myself) were actually far more idealistic than many of the hippies they despised. But so many people pervert these ideals... Equality and tolerance become warped into simply another form of class-ism, while libertarianism and self-reliance become a childish refusal to cooperate with anything.
It's disillusioning because no matter how much you believe in the positive ideals, people will automatically associate you with people like Alby if you believe in these ideals.
I've always believed very strongly in the whole movement, but my beliefs are kind of crumbling now, and the sad/scary part is, I don't know where to go from here.
It all comes back to one thing- competition. I absolutely fucking hate competition. I think it's a retarded holdover from our animal pasts. And yes, we are indeed descended from the animal kingdom in an evolutionary sense. But for god's sake, do we need to GLORIFY this the way we do?
In all honesty, too, it isn't even so much the various cruelties and unhappinesses I associate with competition that bothers me.. it's more complicated than that.
It's sixth and seventh grade all over again.
REDNECK KID (so hormonally imbalanced that he's physically an adult at age twelve): Hey faggot! (pushes me into a locker)
(At the limits of my patience, thanks to this happening an uncountable number of times, I kick REDNECK KID in the solar plexus as hard as I can. He slumps to the ground, groaning)
REDNECK KID'S REDNECK FRIEND: What the fuck'd you do that for?
REDNECK KID (weeping indignant tears): I's just playin' wit' ya.
No, you weren't "playin' wit'" me. You were challenging me. I responded in kind. You wound up on the ground crying, so I guess that means I "won". But I didn't win; I never did... because I was supposed to win according to the rules of Redneck Kid's asinine gorilla dominance ritual. I had learned through painful experience that little asthmatic prepubescent me was not going to win a "fair" fight against the towering behemoths that went to my school.
In other words, I was supposed to play a game I never wanted to play in the first place, and have my behavior during said game restricted by rules that were meant to benefit the opposing side.
And the most incomprehensible part is that I'm supposed to enjoy such things. It's supposed to be fun. In fact, for most people, the "thrill" of playing a game that's not only idiotic but stacked against them from the beginning is practically their entire reason for being.
(head explodes) I don't get it.
If we're going to embrace Social Darwinism and glorify our animal heritage through competition, then let's get rid of the fucking value judgments and rules. Let's get rid of traffic lights, smoking bans, and laws forbidding child abuse, murder, rape, and the various other inhumanities we inflict upon each other. Survival of the fittest, right? The strong would survive, the weak would not. I'm not advocating this in any way; I'm merely presenting this as an intellectual exercise.
"But that's anarchy!" you exclaim. You're right, it is. The animal kingdom has no government; you don't see a United States of Lionland anywhere, do you? If we're to idolize our animal heritage, we should keep that in mind. But anarchy doesn't work for humans. You'd have absolute chaos for a while, with the sociopaths of the world killing, looting, and pillaging everything they could while those of us with more conscience or restraint would probably have a fairly good time of things, living our lives however we saw fit.
But then we'd eventually polarize into two or three groups per locality. If the sociopath types worked together to any capacity, the non-sociopaths would have to do the same in order to protect themselves. And we're forgetting a crucial factor- humanity is not split between sociopaths and non-sociopaths. It took me a long time to learn this.
It's more as if the sociopaths could almost be lumped in with the sort of people with which I tend to try and surround myself, even though the two "type" are practically polar opposites. Sociopaths need to be dominant; they believe they are the only people on the planet who are real. The people I like best are so against control and dominance that the outside world tends to see them as "aimless" or unproductive. But they struggle and work and sacrifice for their freedom just as much as the "normals" struggle for their little niche in the rat race. Since they fall outside conventional social mores, they could, in theory, be classified in with the sociopaths of the world. Neither group wants to be ruled; it's the ways in which they achieve this that are wildly different.
But the real division within humanity has nothing to do with sociopathy. The real division is between who wants to be ruled, and who doesn't. The former group is much, much larger than the latter.
Thus, any anarchic situation would eventually (d)evolve into a few control-and-power-loving sociopaths here and there leading a whole bunch of little sheep around. You might occasionally see an anti-control person or people in charge of a group devoted to opposing the sociopath groups, but these would be rare, and numbers count for a lot in warfare.
So it would basically be the same old story over and over again. The people who love power and control would take over with the help of the thundering masses that love being controlled, while a few shining lights in the darkness would continually try to fight the oppression. It'll repeat over and over again, throughout the remainder of human history, a constant cycle of structure leading to oppression followed by revolution followed by the beginnings of potentially oppressive structure all over again. It'll never change. 's why I don't usually "do" politics.
Where am I in all this? I used to think I was staunchly a part of the non-sociopathic anti-control group. I am, at heart, and always will be.. it's the expression of this that needs to change.
After a lot of soul-searching, I've realized I'll definitely have to rejoin the corporate machine once again. I've spent the past few months desperately trying to find ways out of this, but it's inevitable. They have The Power and I will have to grit my teeth and do what they say in order to take some of it for myself... because it's not just for myself, it's for anyone who wants to benefit from it.
I just hope I can stay the course. It's hard to walk a path when you can't see more than a few feet in front of your face.
And it's even harder knowing that even if you walk the right path, if you walk in an incorrect way you stand to alienate yourself from everyone you love.
My sister broke up with her boyfriend of 5 years on New Year's Eve. Apparently, while Ashley and I were at the New Year's parties, my mom had been trying to talk to him (the boyfriend) about... well.. actually being a decent boyfriend. He was cheap, controlling, childish, and petty, for starters. There's a whole bunch of things I could say about him, but in the interest of time, I won't.
To make a long story short, The Boyfriend got incredibly pissed off at my mom and said a bunch of nasty things (in front of Ashley, no less). Cait (my sister) immediately came back with her own insults, and I yelled "fuck you" to him while he was going down the stairs. He didn't challenge me. I wish he had.
I hate this kid. I shouldn't say "kid" because he's about a month older than me, but whatever.
I don't just hate him because of how he treated my sister, or my family for that matter. I also hate him because he's disillusioned me in a number of ways.
This kid was very punk. He lived that whole lifestyle, and embodied the whole "you can't tell me what to do" ethic. But he was a complete asshole, and, in so doing, he made a mockery of the entire punk movement.
The punk ethos, to me, is about equality, tolerance of differences, libertarianism, and self-reliance. It's funny; a lot of hardcore punk kids hate hippies... but in all honesty, they (we? I used to be a hardcore kid myself) were actually far more idealistic than many of the hippies they despised. But so many people pervert these ideals... Equality and tolerance become warped into simply another form of class-ism, while libertarianism and self-reliance become a childish refusal to cooperate with anything.
It's disillusioning because no matter how much you believe in the positive ideals, people will automatically associate you with people like Alby if you believe in these ideals.
I've always believed very strongly in the whole movement, but my beliefs are kind of crumbling now, and the sad/scary part is, I don't know where to go from here.
It all comes back to one thing- competition. I absolutely fucking hate competition. I think it's a retarded holdover from our animal pasts. And yes, we are indeed descended from the animal kingdom in an evolutionary sense. But for god's sake, do we need to GLORIFY this the way we do?
In all honesty, too, it isn't even so much the various cruelties and unhappinesses I associate with competition that bothers me.. it's more complicated than that.
It's sixth and seventh grade all over again.
REDNECK KID (so hormonally imbalanced that he's physically an adult at age twelve): Hey faggot! (pushes me into a locker)
(At the limits of my patience, thanks to this happening an uncountable number of times, I kick REDNECK KID in the solar plexus as hard as I can. He slumps to the ground, groaning)
REDNECK KID'S REDNECK FRIEND: What the fuck'd you do that for?
REDNECK KID (weeping indignant tears): I's just playin' wit' ya.
No, you weren't "playin' wit'" me. You were challenging me. I responded in kind. You wound up on the ground crying, so I guess that means I "won". But I didn't win; I never did... because I was supposed to win according to the rules of Redneck Kid's asinine gorilla dominance ritual. I had learned through painful experience that little asthmatic prepubescent me was not going to win a "fair" fight against the towering behemoths that went to my school.
In other words, I was supposed to play a game I never wanted to play in the first place, and have my behavior during said game restricted by rules that were meant to benefit the opposing side.
And the most incomprehensible part is that I'm supposed to enjoy such things. It's supposed to be fun. In fact, for most people, the "thrill" of playing a game that's not only idiotic but stacked against them from the beginning is practically their entire reason for being.
(head explodes) I don't get it.
If we're going to embrace Social Darwinism and glorify our animal heritage through competition, then let's get rid of the fucking value judgments and rules. Let's get rid of traffic lights, smoking bans, and laws forbidding child abuse, murder, rape, and the various other inhumanities we inflict upon each other. Survival of the fittest, right? The strong would survive, the weak would not. I'm not advocating this in any way; I'm merely presenting this as an intellectual exercise.
"But that's anarchy!" you exclaim. You're right, it is. The animal kingdom has no government; you don't see a United States of Lionland anywhere, do you? If we're to idolize our animal heritage, we should keep that in mind. But anarchy doesn't work for humans. You'd have absolute chaos for a while, with the sociopaths of the world killing, looting, and pillaging everything they could while those of us with more conscience or restraint would probably have a fairly good time of things, living our lives however we saw fit.
But then we'd eventually polarize into two or three groups per locality. If the sociopath types worked together to any capacity, the non-sociopaths would have to do the same in order to protect themselves. And we're forgetting a crucial factor- humanity is not split between sociopaths and non-sociopaths. It took me a long time to learn this.
It's more as if the sociopaths could almost be lumped in with the sort of people with which I tend to try and surround myself, even though the two "type" are practically polar opposites. Sociopaths need to be dominant; they believe they are the only people on the planet who are real. The people I like best are so against control and dominance that the outside world tends to see them as "aimless" or unproductive. But they struggle and work and sacrifice for their freedom just as much as the "normals" struggle for their little niche in the rat race. Since they fall outside conventional social mores, they could, in theory, be classified in with the sociopaths of the world. Neither group wants to be ruled; it's the ways in which they achieve this that are wildly different.
But the real division within humanity has nothing to do with sociopathy. The real division is between who wants to be ruled, and who doesn't. The former group is much, much larger than the latter.
Thus, any anarchic situation would eventually (d)evolve into a few control-and-power-loving sociopaths here and there leading a whole bunch of little sheep around. You might occasionally see an anti-control person or people in charge of a group devoted to opposing the sociopath groups, but these would be rare, and numbers count for a lot in warfare.
So it would basically be the same old story over and over again. The people who love power and control would take over with the help of the thundering masses that love being controlled, while a few shining lights in the darkness would continually try to fight the oppression. It'll repeat over and over again, throughout the remainder of human history, a constant cycle of structure leading to oppression followed by revolution followed by the beginnings of potentially oppressive structure all over again. It'll never change. 's why I don't usually "do" politics.
Where am I in all this? I used to think I was staunchly a part of the non-sociopathic anti-control group. I am, at heart, and always will be.. it's the expression of this that needs to change.
After a lot of soul-searching, I've realized I'll definitely have to rejoin the corporate machine once again. I've spent the past few months desperately trying to find ways out of this, but it's inevitable. They have The Power and I will have to grit my teeth and do what they say in order to take some of it for myself... because it's not just for myself, it's for anyone who wants to benefit from it.
I just hope I can stay the course. It's hard to walk a path when you can't see more than a few feet in front of your face.
And it's even harder knowing that even if you walk the right path, if you walk in an incorrect way you stand to alienate yourself from everyone you love.
Wednesday, December 10, 2008
Monday, December 8, 2008
the christmas spirit- a short play
This is the skit I performed at the Shrub Christmas Pageant. I was The Christmas Spirit. :D
BEHOLD!
ACT I
The scene is Christmas Eve in a typical suburban house.
NARRATOR: The scene is Christmas Eve in a typical suburban house. A mother and father have come to say good night to their two sons, who are unaware of the unspeakable horror that awaits them.
MOTHER: Good night kids! And remember, go straight to sleep, because it's Christmas Eve!
FATHER: That's right! Now that you boys are over seven, The Christmas Spirit can come for you at any time!
MOTHER: He only takes you if you're awake! So go straight to sleep!
(MOTHER and FATHER start to leave)
MOTHER: Momma wants a beer!
FATHER: And remember-
Good or bad? It's not worth squat
He only cares
If you're awake or not!
FATHER (leaving room again): Good night, kids! See you tomorrow... I hope!
(FATHER leaves room)
ACT II
("Neyhadar Zeytkewen" by Tewelde Redda begins playing- note: this is Tigrinya pop music)
(THE CHRISTMAS SPIRIT emerges, wearing a ski mask and robe)
THE CHRISTMAS SPIRIT (making a hissing noise, looking around): HWEEEH!
(strides over to two sleeping kids)
THE CHRISTMAS SPIRIT (discovering kids): HWEEEH!
(bends down to snarl at kids)
THE CHRISTMAS SPIRIT (to BOY UNDER BLANKET): HWEEEH!
(pauses, looks thoughtful while looking at other boy, then bends down to snarl at BOY IN SLEEPING BAG)
THE CHRISTMAS SPIRIT: HWEEEH!
BOY IN SLEEPING BAG: Nooooo!
(THE CHRISTMAS SPIRIT throws hands up in glee, then begins dragging BOY IN SLEEPING BAG away)
THE CHRISTMAS SPIRIT (suddenly running over to other boy): HWEEEH!
(looking disappointed, THE CHRISTMAS SPIRIT resumes dragging BOY IN SLEEPING BAG away)
BEHOLD!
ACT I
The scene is Christmas Eve in a typical suburban house.
NARRATOR: The scene is Christmas Eve in a typical suburban house. A mother and father have come to say good night to their two sons, who are unaware of the unspeakable horror that awaits them.
MOTHER: Good night kids! And remember, go straight to sleep, because it's Christmas Eve!
FATHER: That's right! Now that you boys are over seven, The Christmas Spirit can come for you at any time!
MOTHER: He only takes you if you're awake! So go straight to sleep!
(MOTHER and FATHER start to leave)
MOTHER: Momma wants a beer!
FATHER: And remember-
Good or bad? It's not worth squat
He only cares
If you're awake or not!
FATHER (leaving room again): Good night, kids! See you tomorrow... I hope!
(FATHER leaves room)
ACT II
("Neyhadar Zeytkewen" by Tewelde Redda begins playing- note: this is Tigrinya pop music)
(THE CHRISTMAS SPIRIT emerges, wearing a ski mask and robe)
THE CHRISTMAS SPIRIT (making a hissing noise, looking around): HWEEEH!
(strides over to two sleeping kids)
THE CHRISTMAS SPIRIT (discovering kids): HWEEEH!
(bends down to snarl at kids)
THE CHRISTMAS SPIRIT (to BOY UNDER BLANKET): HWEEEH!
(pauses, looks thoughtful while looking at other boy, then bends down to snarl at BOY IN SLEEPING BAG)
THE CHRISTMAS SPIRIT: HWEEEH!
BOY IN SLEEPING BAG: Nooooo!
(THE CHRISTMAS SPIRIT throws hands up in glee, then begins dragging BOY IN SLEEPING BAG away)
THE CHRISTMAS SPIRIT (suddenly running over to other boy): HWEEEH!
(looking disappointed, THE CHRISTMAS SPIRIT resumes dragging BOY IN SLEEPING BAG away)
Saturday, November 29, 2008
what i'm doing
What am I doing? I hear this a lot, given that, you know.. I don't have a job and all that.
It's a little frightening and a bit disappointing to realize how much people confuse identity and self-worth and all that with one's job, especially once one has worked in the hive mind-esque confines of a corporation. We haven't evolved much in the past several thousand years; we're still looking to subdivide everyone into tribes, except these tribes have nothing to do with territory and blood relations, which might actually make sense. These tribes are entirely based on what sort of mindless repetitive tasks you're willing to perform and spend all your time thinking about every day.
It's also a little disheartening to realize how much YOU'VE bought into the whole "I am my job" bullshit, especially when you realize how much you've missed out on in life as a result.
Being out of the rat race for the first time in probably 10 or 11 years has given me time to think about what I really want and what's actually important to me. You'd think this would be an easy thing to figure out, but you have to also consider how much cultural brainwashing as well as knee-jerk reactions to said cultural brainwashing there is sitting smugly on top of whatever it is you really do want out of life.
So what do I want? What's really important to me, after all the "I shoulds" and "I musts" have faded away?
The answer: creativity, and service to the world. I want to be learning something new all the time. I want to feel that my existence has meant something to others.
And how do I propose to do these? I think I've finally hit on a solution, and it's been taking up most of my waking time.
I'm currently studying a whole truckload of internet-and-computer-related stuff, namely PHP, MySQL, Javascript, XHTML, Python, and CSS (for the moment), because my eventual goal is to do freelance programming and web design.
If I can pull this off, it solves everything. I'll be able to support myself, but I won't have to sign my life away to some company that'll chain me to one particular location, tell me when I have to get up, when I can eat, when I need to go to bed, and force me to deal with people who have already given up on life for 8+ hours a day. I'll have the freedom to actually DO volunteer projets around the world, or to make music, write, and/or learn more of the arcane, delightfully binary, and human-interaction-free programming stuff I've been in love with since I was eight.
And, if the unthinkable happens, and I actually decide I want to settle down with someone later in life (not likely, given my current love of freedom, and provided, of course, anyone would even be willing to do so, ha), I'll have enough skills and experience built up by that time to get a nice, cushy, $100K+ job somewhere as a database administrator or something.
I finally finished Snow Crash, and before my free time turned into me sitting in front of my laptop with a disheveled semi-circle of books surrounding me, I was playing FFX religiously. Both of these reinspired me in terms of my computer-philia, for reasons I'll explain in some other post (must get back to work).
But, I don't know... I think this is a viable option, and probably better for me in terms of my basic makeup than anything I've decided to do in, oh, I don't know.. the past 13 or 14 years.
It's a little frightening and a bit disappointing to realize how much people confuse identity and self-worth and all that with one's job, especially once one has worked in the hive mind-esque confines of a corporation. We haven't evolved much in the past several thousand years; we're still looking to subdivide everyone into tribes, except these tribes have nothing to do with territory and blood relations, which might actually make sense. These tribes are entirely based on what sort of mindless repetitive tasks you're willing to perform and spend all your time thinking about every day.
It's also a little disheartening to realize how much YOU'VE bought into the whole "I am my job" bullshit, especially when you realize how much you've missed out on in life as a result.
Being out of the rat race for the first time in probably 10 or 11 years has given me time to think about what I really want and what's actually important to me. You'd think this would be an easy thing to figure out, but you have to also consider how much cultural brainwashing as well as knee-jerk reactions to said cultural brainwashing there is sitting smugly on top of whatever it is you really do want out of life.
So what do I want? What's really important to me, after all the "I shoulds" and "I musts" have faded away?
The answer: creativity, and service to the world. I want to be learning something new all the time. I want to feel that my existence has meant something to others.
And how do I propose to do these? I think I've finally hit on a solution, and it's been taking up most of my waking time.
I'm currently studying a whole truckload of internet-and-computer-related stuff, namely PHP, MySQL, Javascript, XHTML, Python, and CSS (for the moment), because my eventual goal is to do freelance programming and web design.
If I can pull this off, it solves everything. I'll be able to support myself, but I won't have to sign my life away to some company that'll chain me to one particular location, tell me when I have to get up, when I can eat, when I need to go to bed, and force me to deal with people who have already given up on life for 8+ hours a day. I'll have the freedom to actually DO volunteer projets around the world, or to make music, write, and/or learn more of the arcane, delightfully binary, and human-interaction-free programming stuff I've been in love with since I was eight.
And, if the unthinkable happens, and I actually decide I want to settle down with someone later in life (not likely, given my current love of freedom, and provided, of course, anyone would even be willing to do so, ha), I'll have enough skills and experience built up by that time to get a nice, cushy, $100K+ job somewhere as a database administrator or something.
I finally finished Snow Crash, and before my free time turned into me sitting in front of my laptop with a disheveled semi-circle of books surrounding me, I was playing FFX religiously. Both of these reinspired me in terms of my computer-philia, for reasons I'll explain in some other post (must get back to work).
But, I don't know... I think this is a viable option, and probably better for me in terms of my basic makeup than anything I've decided to do in, oh, I don't know.. the past 13 or 14 years.
Thursday, November 20, 2008
jesus christ this week has been insane
Hmm, let's see. This week, despite having a cold/flu/whatever that was bad enough to drive me to see a doctor, I have:
Essentially, I drove Nur to the airport on Monday so she could go to Utah to be with her estranged husband. She was supposed to give me her apartment key, so I could give it to her friend, who was going to take two of her cats. If she did (and I'm almost positive she didn't), she waited until we were all massively frustrated at the obtuse postmodern nightmare that is JFK International Airport, and Lauren and I were desperately in need of a restroom. Thus, if she did give me her key, it was invariably lost in the generalized airport chaos.
Fortunately, I will not have to commit burglary in order to save her two adorable four-month-old kitties from starvation and/or dehydration. Nur did send the key to Sam, so he'll be taking things from there. I need to help him find someone to take the cats, since he apparently can't. :/
In terms of other subjects, NYC is... not so gret akshually. I'm sure it's fantastic if: #1 you arrive there with someone who knows the city like the back of their hand, or #2 you have extremely detailed maps that show you which way every one-way street is, and so forth. As it was, our main objective was to find our friend Cat, and, barring that, to get food. We never achieved the former, and the latter took us four hours.
And I suppose I could say that another thing I've learned (as recently as... well, now) is that not only did I have a DXM problem years ago, but I'm also enzyme-deficient. I took 30 mg of it (the recommended dose, believe it or not) two hours ago and I am definitely kind of zwalped. According to the FAQ, this shouldn't happen.
- driven to NYC for the first time ever to drop off a friend at the airport (I've been to the city twice before, but either with family or with a huge field trip group)
- answered a three-year-long question, albeit in a disappointing manner (not saying any more about this on here, sorry)
- discovered that NYC is... not quite my cup of tea
Essentially, I drove Nur to the airport on Monday so she could go to Utah to be with her estranged husband. She was supposed to give me her apartment key, so I could give it to her friend, who was going to take two of her cats. If she did (and I'm almost positive she didn't), she waited until we were all massively frustrated at the obtuse postmodern nightmare that is JFK International Airport, and Lauren and I were desperately in need of a restroom. Thus, if she did give me her key, it was invariably lost in the generalized airport chaos.
Fortunately, I will not have to commit burglary in order to save her two adorable four-month-old kitties from starvation and/or dehydration. Nur did send the key to Sam, so he'll be taking things from there. I need to help him find someone to take the cats, since he apparently can't. :/
In terms of other subjects, NYC is... not so gret akshually. I'm sure it's fantastic if: #1 you arrive there with someone who knows the city like the back of their hand, or #2 you have extremely detailed maps that show you which way every one-way street is, and so forth. As it was, our main objective was to find our friend Cat, and, barring that, to get food. We never achieved the former, and the latter took us four hours.
And I suppose I could say that another thing I've learned (as recently as... well, now) is that not only did I have a DXM problem years ago, but I'm also enzyme-deficient. I took 30 mg of it (the recommended dose, believe it or not) two hours ago and I am definitely kind of zwalped. According to the FAQ, this shouldn't happen.
Thursday, November 13, 2008
the 60-day aspartame experiment
My dad refuses to drink regular soda at all. Not surprisingly, if you know my father, he views any sort of modern health news (particularly that meat and dairy products are, in fact, bad for you) as complete rubbish. Thus it is going to be an enormous, titanic struggle to get him to even consider the fact that the aspartame in diet soda may in fact be quite toxic.
I was reading http://www.dorway.com, though, and a lot of the evidence there makes a frightening degree of sense. I still get anxiety attacks (though see last post as well about this... ), chest pains, and heart palpitations despite having quit caffeine, and there's always the matter of my occasionally rather disturbing short-term memory issues. I figured the latter was due to DXM, even though I've had these issues since way before I ever ingested that stuff.
Moreover, I wonder if some of the actually somewhat unusual side effects I used to get from DXM (serotonin syndrome, for one) were not in fact caused more by the effects of the aspartame I would consume in vast quantities. Aside from being converted at temperatures greater than 86 degrees F (or 30 degrees C) to methanol, aspartame is also converted in vivo to aspartic acid, also known as aspartate.
DXM works on a vast number of neuronal receptors, including but not limited to sigma opioid (function is largely unknown), PCP2 (dopamine blockade, AKA when you come off DXM addiction you're subjecting yourself to the equivalent of cocaine withdrawal), and serotonin receptors, , but its primary means of action is through blockade of NMDA receptors. Let's flesh out the acronym: N-Methyl D-Aspartate. DXM blocks these receptors.
In other words... DXM is something of an antidote (albeit with horrible side effects) to aspartame. It kind of makes sense. I started drinking diet sodas when I was 14 or 15, and also began having all sorts of weird psychological issues which I attributed, probably at least partially accurately, to the situation I was living in. However, when the situation ended, some of the issues remained. It's not too far-fetched to imagine that I may have picked up my DXM habit in a bizarre attempt to self-medicate my apparent aspartame poisoning.
NMDA receptors are named thusly because they show a higher affinity for NMDA, a synthetic substance, than for glutamate. Glutamate is present endogenously, however, and so NMDA receptors could also be referred to as glutamate receptors. The glutamatergic system is involved with excitatory (stimulating) responses, while its counterpart is the GABAergic system, involved with inhibitory responses.
This is a strange, strange world we live in; we drink poison every day, and try to counteract it with another poison. Hmm.
It's funny; I wrote in a personal journal once that my one of my biggest problems in life is that I feel as if the volume knob has been turned up to 11 on every possible stimulus. I think I've always been like this, from birth; as an infant, if anyone sneezed or made any sort of loud noise, I'd scream continuously. I've also mentioned having asthma as a child. Both the excess stimulation and the asthma can be linked directly back to an excess of glutamatergic responses, most likely made far worse by aspartame.
The site I mentioned above proposes an experiment: avoid all aspartame-containing products for 60 days straight, and compare your mental state at the end of the experiment to how things were at the beginning. If you notice a significant improvement, aspartame is the culprit.
I'm going to try this, starting tomorrow (today, really). If my anxiety attacks and heart issues have lessened by the end of 60 days, I'll have my answer.
I was reading http://www.dorway.com, though, and a lot of the evidence there makes a frightening degree of sense. I still get anxiety attacks (though see last post as well about this... ), chest pains, and heart palpitations despite having quit caffeine, and there's always the matter of my occasionally rather disturbing short-term memory issues. I figured the latter was due to DXM, even though I've had these issues since way before I ever ingested that stuff.
Moreover, I wonder if some of the actually somewhat unusual side effects I used to get from DXM (serotonin syndrome, for one) were not in fact caused more by the effects of the aspartame I would consume in vast quantities. Aside from being converted at temperatures greater than 86 degrees F (or 30 degrees C) to methanol, aspartame is also converted in vivo to aspartic acid, also known as aspartate.
DXM works on a vast number of neuronal receptors, including but not limited to sigma opioid (function is largely unknown), PCP2 (dopamine blockade, AKA when you come off DXM addiction you're subjecting yourself to the equivalent of cocaine withdrawal), and serotonin receptors, , but its primary means of action is through blockade of NMDA receptors. Let's flesh out the acronym: N-Methyl D-Aspartate. DXM blocks these receptors.
In other words... DXM is something of an antidote (albeit with horrible side effects) to aspartame. It kind of makes sense. I started drinking diet sodas when I was 14 or 15, and also began having all sorts of weird psychological issues which I attributed, probably at least partially accurately, to the situation I was living in. However, when the situation ended, some of the issues remained. It's not too far-fetched to imagine that I may have picked up my DXM habit in a bizarre attempt to self-medicate my apparent aspartame poisoning.
NMDA receptors are named thusly because they show a higher affinity for NMDA, a synthetic substance, than for glutamate. Glutamate is present endogenously, however, and so NMDA receptors could also be referred to as glutamate receptors. The glutamatergic system is involved with excitatory (stimulating) responses, while its counterpart is the GABAergic system, involved with inhibitory responses.
This is a strange, strange world we live in; we drink poison every day, and try to counteract it with another poison. Hmm.
It's funny; I wrote in a personal journal once that my one of my biggest problems in life is that I feel as if the volume knob has been turned up to 11 on every possible stimulus. I think I've always been like this, from birth; as an infant, if anyone sneezed or made any sort of loud noise, I'd scream continuously. I've also mentioned having asthma as a child. Both the excess stimulation and the asthma can be linked directly back to an excess of glutamatergic responses, most likely made far worse by aspartame.
The site I mentioned above proposes an experiment: avoid all aspartame-containing products for 60 days straight, and compare your mental state at the end of the experiment to how things were at the beginning. If you notice a significant improvement, aspartame is the culprit.
I'm going to try this, starting tomorrow (today, really). If my anxiety attacks and heart issues have lessened by the end of 60 days, I'll have my answer.
Tuesday, November 11, 2008
not sure what to make of all this
I'm aware I've been really reclusive lately. It's nothing to do with anyone except me, so please don't worry. I'm having anxiety issues, but I'm not ingesting weird chemicals and having subsequent horrors. On the surface, everything is good, and it seems OkCupid may be coming through for me yet again. Enough on the latter subject. Back to the anxiety issues:
Warnings From World Leaders All Within 72 Hours
A Second 9/11
U.S. Is Funding Iranian Nuclear Program
So... yeah. Fear-mongering? Maybe. It wouldn't surprise me. I've seen the whole "We're in for another terrorist attack! Remain loyal to your corporate-controlled government! Only STATE-OWNED media will give you the truth!" spiel before. Nothing ever happens.
On the other hand... I've had a seriously bad feeling for about a month now. I've learned to pay attention to these.
Part of my anxiety is the result of my finally processing and letting go of the past three years or so. In a nutshell, this time period, despite all the fun and nonsense and adventure, was, on a deeper level, about me facing my Jungian "shadow", as well as my past. And so I've been playing out this weird shadow puppet drama, with an improvised script and all my best and worst qualities out on display, because the only way you *can* face your shadow is to run out there and meet it head-on. You can sit at home and analyze it all you want, but until you actually get out there and deal with it in practice, you're not going to get anywhere.
At least that's how it is for me. But as a result, I've made a lot of mistakes, I've lost a lot of people and situations that were dear to me, and the resultant guilt was enough to propel me into my first and hopefully only foray into the delightful world of serious depression, which lasted from about January 2007 until April or May 2008.
But I've beaten that, too, and come out stronger, happier, and more independent. I've been increasingly more and more able to put it all behind me, to not get caught up in useless nostalgia for the good times, and to not get sacked by guilt and sadness over the bad times. "Letting go", though, is a difficult process, and it's not surprising it's caused me quite a bit of anxiety recently.
I don't feel, however, that this is the *only* reason behind my anxiety, though. I've had similar feelings before, though never like this, and... I don't know. Something feels very, very wrong.
My question is, though, what can we do? I'm already working on a (probably wildly unimportant) website aimed at bringing people together a la Facebook but minus the inherent divisiveness. If I think of anything else, I'll do that as well, but.. will it be enough, should something unthinkable happen?
If the economy collapses, will everyone I know and love be all right? And this is of course being well aware that the economy collapsing is a *pleasant* scenario compared to some of the other possibilities.
I'm stocking up on rice, beans, and canned vegetables. I suppose I should stock up on bottled water, as well.
Am I being completely paranoid? Probably. Is everything going to be okay? Possibly, though the current economic crisis is a very real and very powerful reminder that maybe things aren't all sweetness and light out there.
I just wish some sort of higher power would come down and give me even a hint of what's going to happen. I hate waiting for anything.
Warnings From World Leaders All Within 72 Hours
A Second 9/11
U.S. Is Funding Iranian Nuclear Program
So... yeah. Fear-mongering? Maybe. It wouldn't surprise me. I've seen the whole "We're in for another terrorist attack! Remain loyal to your corporate-controlled government! Only STATE-OWNED media will give you the truth!" spiel before. Nothing ever happens.
On the other hand... I've had a seriously bad feeling for about a month now. I've learned to pay attention to these.
Part of my anxiety is the result of my finally processing and letting go of the past three years or so. In a nutshell, this time period, despite all the fun and nonsense and adventure, was, on a deeper level, about me facing my Jungian "shadow", as well as my past. And so I've been playing out this weird shadow puppet drama, with an improvised script and all my best and worst qualities out on display, because the only way you *can* face your shadow is to run out there and meet it head-on. You can sit at home and analyze it all you want, but until you actually get out there and deal with it in practice, you're not going to get anywhere.
At least that's how it is for me. But as a result, I've made a lot of mistakes, I've lost a lot of people and situations that were dear to me, and the resultant guilt was enough to propel me into my first and hopefully only foray into the delightful world of serious depression, which lasted from about January 2007 until April or May 2008.
But I've beaten that, too, and come out stronger, happier, and more independent. I've been increasingly more and more able to put it all behind me, to not get caught up in useless nostalgia for the good times, and to not get sacked by guilt and sadness over the bad times. "Letting go", though, is a difficult process, and it's not surprising it's caused me quite a bit of anxiety recently.
I don't feel, however, that this is the *only* reason behind my anxiety, though. I've had similar feelings before, though never like this, and... I don't know. Something feels very, very wrong.
My question is, though, what can we do? I'm already working on a (probably wildly unimportant) website aimed at bringing people together a la Facebook but minus the inherent divisiveness. If I think of anything else, I'll do that as well, but.. will it be enough, should something unthinkable happen?
If the economy collapses, will everyone I know and love be all right? And this is of course being well aware that the economy collapsing is a *pleasant* scenario compared to some of the other possibilities.
I'm stocking up on rice, beans, and canned vegetables. I suppose I should stock up on bottled water, as well.
Am I being completely paranoid? Probably. Is everything going to be okay? Possibly, though the current economic crisis is a very real and very powerful reminder that maybe things aren't all sweetness and light out there.
I just wish some sort of higher power would come down and give me even a hint of what's going to happen. I hate waiting for anything.
Wednesday, November 5, 2008
spontaneous parades, whee!
So tonight I went to an election night potluck dinner at White Clay, bringing thrice the normal amount of aloo gobhi with me (it was eaten entirely, hooray!).
A lot of THC was consumed, as was a lot of alcohol. This is important for later in the story.
Sometime around midnight, Steve Fox (who does not imbibe in the former intoxicant, btw) heard Obama jubilation coming from west of us. Shouting "Parade!", he led all 15-20 of us to the northern part of the UD campus, where we discovered a lot of people yelling and cheering and screaming.
Somehow, we wound up taking them all with us.
Over the course of the night, we wound up with somewhere between 300-600 people, all screaming at the top of their lungs, periodically stopping so that the original group of people could give speeches. Steve Fox gave a number of these as well, all very inspiring.
The solidarity was amazing; I've never seen or experienced anything like it. I do of course know that probably 90% or more of the people we somehow accumulated were only there to take part in a spontaneous parade. (I mean, seriously.. wouldn't you?)
Black of spirit and cynical as I am (I spent a good portion of the beginning of the parade thinking about how I could easily see how people get caught up in things like Nazism), though, something about tonight really warmed some as-yet-uncorroded part of my heart.
When we all started to head our separate ways, after the final speeches, the cops, who had been harassing us all night, cornered the organizers from the original group we met up with. They were wearing University of Delaware shirts and were far more obvious targets than any of us. As a group, we all converged on the cops.
"The cops would have harassed them for at least an hour or two if 200 people hadn't shown up in support," Jack said afterwards. He was probably right.
Intimidating the police.. yet another first of the night.
The really funny thing is... this all started because we were high as shit.
A lot of THC was consumed, as was a lot of alcohol. This is important for later in the story.
Sometime around midnight, Steve Fox (who does not imbibe in the former intoxicant, btw) heard Obama jubilation coming from west of us. Shouting "Parade!", he led all 15-20 of us to the northern part of the UD campus, where we discovered a lot of people yelling and cheering and screaming.
Somehow, we wound up taking them all with us.
Over the course of the night, we wound up with somewhere between 300-600 people, all screaming at the top of their lungs, periodically stopping so that the original group of people could give speeches. Steve Fox gave a number of these as well, all very inspiring.
The solidarity was amazing; I've never seen or experienced anything like it. I do of course know that probably 90% or more of the people we somehow accumulated were only there to take part in a spontaneous parade. (I mean, seriously.. wouldn't you?)
Black of spirit and cynical as I am (I spent a good portion of the beginning of the parade thinking about how I could easily see how people get caught up in things like Nazism), though, something about tonight really warmed some as-yet-uncorroded part of my heart.
When we all started to head our separate ways, after the final speeches, the cops, who had been harassing us all night, cornered the organizers from the original group we met up with. They were wearing University of Delaware shirts and were far more obvious targets than any of us. As a group, we all converged on the cops.
"The cops would have harassed them for at least an hour or two if 200 people hadn't shown up in support," Jack said afterwards. He was probably right.
Intimidating the police.. yet another first of the night.
The really funny thing is... this all started because we were high as shit.
Sunday, November 2, 2008
a non-personal post! part 2
This one has unfortunately been read by one of the whopping three people who ever read this blog. Well, two and a half, I guess, because John has read *a post* of this blog, yet hasn't read the rest. I guess the material here *is* a little dense. :D
The post below, however, is not. It's just weird.
I do want to perform this, however...
****
Looking for something to spice up those lazy Saturday afternoons?
(shows two people sitting in room looking bored)
Try new Maximum Strength Wonf!
(shot of person 1's hand sprinkling something out of a spice bottle, clearly marked "Maximum Strength WONF", into a drink)
(shot of person 1, looking at camera)
Person 1: It's guaranteed to liven things up!
(shows both people; person 2 takes sip of Wonf-laced drink)
(Person 2 immediately changes; his/her head is wrapped entirely in a towel, and he/she is gesticulating wildly)
Person 2: Ouuouooul! Ouuouuul! (wordless howling noise)
(person 1 winks)
(person 2 thrashes about even more frantically, continues wordless howling, begins knocking over furniture while person 1 looks on, pleased)
(shows closeup of Maximum Strength WONF bottle)
Narrator: Maximum Strength Wonf. It's refreshing.
Person 2 (1/2 body shot): OOOUOUUOUL!
The post below, however, is not. It's just weird.
I do want to perform this, however...
****
Looking for something to spice up those lazy Saturday afternoons?
(shows two people sitting in room looking bored)
Try new Maximum Strength Wonf!
(shot of person 1's hand sprinkling something out of a spice bottle, clearly marked "Maximum Strength WONF", into a drink)
(shot of person 1, looking at camera)
Person 1: It's guaranteed to liven things up!
(shows both people; person 2 takes sip of Wonf-laced drink)
(Person 2 immediately changes; his/her head is wrapped entirely in a towel, and he/she is gesticulating wildly)
Person 2: Ouuouooul! Ouuouuul! (wordless howling noise)
(person 1 winks)
(person 2 thrashes about even more frantically, continues wordless howling, begins knocking over furniture while person 1 looks on, pleased)
(shows closeup of Maximum Strength WONF bottle)
Narrator: Maximum Strength Wonf. It's refreshing.
Person 2 (1/2 body shot): OOOUOUUOUL!
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