Some more

Theology
I find it interesting how people will argue about various religious details at length, but very rarely talk about the overall theology that guides their thinking. Maybe they have one but it operates unconsciously. Or maybe they are just repeating bits of things they’ve heard, which may well be contradictory. This is no way to conduct business.

A couple of the core questions that need to be addressed: what is the deal with humans? And why is God interested in us? I am sticking to Christian worldview here; clearly the conversation could be much broader. Here is my latest thinking.

When you ask the question “is man inherently good, or evil?”, most Christians will start talking about Original Sin and quote verses on our falleness. Though they are right about the corruption, to take this as the starting point inevitably leads to a situation where the foundation of God’s relationship to man is one of pity. Why does God care about us? There is no real reason, we got lucky so you better not blow it. What is his purpose with us? Not sure, just do what he says and don’t rock the boat.

Yet if you go back to the beginning, our creation was billed “very good”. The Fall is a transition to a corrupted state; the original state was uncorrupted. This sets up a different dynamic, one of restoration. Like a piece of defaced artwork, the original design was subverted. God is the artist, and he wants his pieces back the way he designed them. It adds intention to the relationship.

In addition, it decouples God’s interests and intentions from our own. Restoration is not about us; it is about God fulfilling his intentions. God is jealous, and he doesn’t appreciate having his stuff messed with. Imagine God paints the Mona Lisa, and she later decides to grow a moustache. You better believe the paint thinner is coming out, regardless of Mona’s opinion on the matter.

Fortunately, God’s restoration is ultimately in our best interest. He does love us and care, and will give every opportunity to get with the program. But do not be fooled; if you insist on standing in front of the steam roller, you will be flattened. There is a larger agenda at work. Do not mistake being a beneficiary of God’s work for God answering to you.

This touches directly on prayer as well, and gave me a new lens on the below comic. Where did we get the idea that God would be interested in doing something just because we said he should? It is laughable that we might choose a deity based on whether they complied with our wishes. Being fallen, shouldn’t getting our way be cause for suspicion more than anything?

Blowing people’s minds              
I’ve noticed an interesting dichotomy among people. Some accept things at face value, while others have a need to fit anything new into their existing mental framework. Two examples: I have a t-shirt with a design of a guy pointing a gun at his shadow, and I have some Fivefingers shoes that are sort of like slippers with separated toes and a rubber sole. The first group will say things like “I like your shirt” or “that’s interesting” or “are those comfortable?”. The other group will say “what is it?”. For the shirt I might say “it’s just artwork” and for the shoes “they are shoes”. But this is not enough. “But what does it mean”? “But what ARE they? Are they water shoes?”. The intensity of the questioning is a little disturbing sometimes. I can tell that the uncertainty actually bothers them. I wore the shoes to the airport and they pulled me aside for special screening because the guard could get his mind around the idea that they weren’t exactly socks and weren’t exactly shoes (his manager was annoyed and apologetic).

Dude, that ruler rules!
I like language. Remember as a kid you would have measure things in class, and would get out your trusty ruler? Then you got older, Bill & Ted had their excellent adventure (somewhere in there), and suddenly if something “ruled” it was pretty awesome. Yet the rulers we had at school were pretty much the opposite of awesome. To be a ruler that does not rule seems like some kind of karmic punishment.

Anyway, I gave it some thought and became pretty pleased with myself. As a device, the ruler took measure of things; it was the standard that ordinary items were assessed against. As a person in charge, the ruler is the one who makes the rules. That is to say, they set the standard of behavior, and evaluate cases to determine when an act fails to measure up. Now this is just amateur etymology, and you probably could have come up with the same thing if you thought about it. But I’d encourage you to keep the mental association between measurement and justice/leadership/administration. The qualities that define a good “ruler” are strikingly similar across both meanings.

Prison? Hilarious!
Sometimes at work they will have a “lockup” in the atrium, where the police show up and will “arrest” the person of your choosing if you make a suitable donation to charity. The person then either has to serve their time for an hour, or can bail themselves out by making a similar charitable contribution. Yeah, I get that it is for charity and all in good fun, so it seems touchy to complain about it. But the last time they did this it hit me… the idea of getting locked up seems funny to us precisely because it is not part of our daily reality. It works for the well-off, mostly white banking audience. But I suspect there might be a different reaction if you tried to run a similar event in the hood, where the same cops doing the fake lockup had maybe done a very real lockup just the night before. Imagine playing “concentration camp” with some Jews shortly after WW2. I really don’t want to become so humorless, but the idea of an event that is only funny because we aren’t usually on the business end of the cops just seems a little backward to me.

What’s wrong with the Church
Nah I’ll save this one for later.

Motorcycles and Zen
In college, I was very interested in Zen. “Zen and the Art of Archery” was one of my favorite books, and I quoted it in probably 25% of the papers I wrote. I remember learning about “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance”, but I had zero interest in motorcycle maintenance so I never got around to reading it. So fast forward 12 years, and now I have a motorcycle and the book seemed to capture 2 of my interests! Lo and behold, it turns out the book is not actually about zen at all, or even motorcycle maintenance really… it is just this dude’s kinda sub-standard philosophy! I feel like some slice of my mental bandwidth has been wasted for over a decade. W.T.F.

Sometimes I think I could create an interesting chronology of my life by laying out a series of outrages. One of the first was when I begged and begged mom to buy me Mrs. Butterworth’s maple syrup… she finally gave in, and when we got it home I said “ok, turn it on”. How was I supposed to know it didn’t talk and move around like in the ad? Can’t trust anything… This zen and motorcycle thing feels kind of similar.

Actual motorcycle experience
So, more interesting than the last section, this summer I learned how to ride a motorcycle and bought one of my own. If you are considering following a similar path, by all means take the MSF class at your local community college! It was perfect for a total beginner; they provide the bike, and start you out from absolutely rock-bottom basics. It is 2.5 days of instruction, mixed between classroom and the field course.

The classroom portion is very repetitive and boring, a clear case of instructional design principles gone wrong. Some of the information turned out to be actually helpful, but you don’t realize it until you are actually out and can feel it for yourself on the bike. If you are reading this blog I suspect you will have a similar reaction to the classroom portion as me, but tough through it because the riding is a different story.

Getting on the bikes for the first time is a mix of exhilaration and mild terror. Going slow is the hardest kind of riding, but you are too scared to go fast, so you wobble all over the place and hope you can remember how to stop. At first you just go straight and use your feet in a “power walk”, then going on the bike’s power, later working your way up to circular laps and weaving through cones.

More elements are continually added (shifting, turn signals, weaving), and I was always just on the edge of cognitive overload. It is hard to worry about using your signal when you are hoping not to tip over. For awhile I had a bad habit of grabbing the front brake with a bit of a downward twist, which also opened the throttle. But you can’t let it get in your head, the less you think about what you are doing the smoother it goes. By the end we were doing emergency stops and figure 8s in a tiny box, and I was feeling pretty confident.

Getting home to my own bike was quite a shock. They taught us on little 250cc bikes that you could toss around pretty easily. Mine is a 1050cc, and I found out pretty quick that you can’t ride it the same way as the little guys. It is also very different being on a real street compared to a glorified parking lot. My first ride through the neighborhood I was in the middle of the street and didn’t even think about looking at the controls or in my mirrors. I passed a woman pushing a baby carriage, and was paranoid that I would run them down.

It is crazy that you can get a learners permit and legally be on the road by simply taking a written test at the dmv without having any road experience. Even with the MSF class I was somewhat hazardous. Fortunately I was able to practice a good bit on the back roads, and now am able to get around with a pretty good degree of safety. The acceleration is amazing… I can go as fast as I care to go, as far as I dare to open up the throttle. You experience the road in a different way; every bump is felt, you can smell the air and the oil on the road and flowers and anything really… What has surprised me the most is how other riders will wave, but pedestrians and people in cars will give dirty looks, even when you are friendly and wave at them. My bike is not obnoxiously loud, and I am not popping wheelies or doing anything stupid. Oh well, screw them I suppose. It starts to make sense why bikers tend to stick together.

Random Stuff
For whatever reason, people haven’t been seeing me recently (visually). If there is a chance of someone stepping into my way or turning around and bumping into me, I will definitely happen. I’ve gotten to where I can see it coming and get out of the way, but what the heck. Maybe I need neon clothing.

Counseling… is not for me.

If someone says “I think that answers my question”, and the answerer says “Excellent”, are they saying that their answer was excellent? What, precisely is it that managed to excel?

The post office in the basement of our building used to have a stamp vending machine. It was recently removed, replaced by a sign that says “you can buy stamps at blah blah, 50c a piece”. Stamps are 44c currently right? Is it even legal to sell stamps for more than the face value?

There are some who do horrible things, but seemingly feel no effect. All actions leave their scars; what becomes calloused is not the abused area, but the pain receptors. It is a form of leprosy, the soul is still damaged even if the pain is not felt.

Scams – If you really hate a particular musician, you could buy up all the tickets to their show, and then refuse to be searched at the door, and they have to refund your money. They would end up with no ticket revenues, but still have the expense of renting the area, all the promotion, etc. Evil genius.

Health Care
This is the number 1 issue that is pissing me off right now. I realize that it is not my problem to solve, and no one will listen anyway, so my goal is to lay out my points here and then leave it alone. I am coming to believe that with our democracy, we get exactly the kind of leadership we deserve. When the citizens are ignoramii, one can hardly expect the government to consist of wise statesmen. So I will say my piece and then just watch.

First – if you believe that there is nothing wrong with the current health care system, then have the balls to come out and say so. If you are going to protest the democratic plan, then you have to either come up with an alternative, or give your affirmation to the current system. Seeing as no alternatives are being presented, I have to conclude it is the former. But if that is your position, then you need to answer why it is acceptable that we pay more than other nations, get worse results, and have so many people being ruined by medical bills. If you are going to block reform, you de facto prefer the status quo, right? That is fine, but own up to it and be ready to accept accountability.

Second – Insurance is NOT a “value-add” industry. Meaning, a pool of money is collected from a broad set of people, and redistributed based on medical need. The amount of money is fixed; the industry does not add to the pool, it can only shrink it based on administrative costs and the profit margins required for investors in the private companies. Because there is no value add, THE VIRTUES OF COMPETITION DO NOT APPLY! There is no such thing as insurance innovation, there is no “better mousetrap”. All you can do is reduce administrative costs as much as possible. And as a result, when you have 2 insurance companies splitting the pool, you have duplicate administrative costs (two buildings, two CEOs, two advertising campaigns, etc). Make the companies private, and not only are their administrative costs, but you also have to build in a profit margin to keep the investors happy. HAVING DUPLICATIVE ADMINISTRATIVE FUNCTIONS IN ADDITION TO REQUIRED PROFTS CAN ONLY INCREASE COSTS!!!! One can legitimately argue over how efficient a single gov program would be, but a single gov plan has huge advantages coming out of the gate (which I don’t believe a set of multiple private plans could ever overcome, but that can be debated).

Third – All the talk about “revenue neutral” and reform costs relative to GDP are a red herring. The reality of what needs to happen is somewhat “socialist”, which is why people won’t come out and talk openly. But the idea is that the gov takes on health care instead of private industry, and as a result the gov spends a lot more than currently. But since industry no longer is paying for private coverage, you could easily institute taxes to reclaim a similar amount of spend and fund the more efficient program. Yes, the government is spending more money than before, but they can also collect more since industry gets a huge gift by no longer paying for employee coverage. At a national economy level, it IS revenue neutral. But to insist that the gov not spend more than they do currently hamstrings the whole thing; the whole point is that healthcare is paid for centrally. No one thinks it is socialist for the gov to manage all the roads, so I’m not sure why this gets people so worked up.

Fourth – Please please please, if you are going to talk about this issue, focus on solving the problem (i.e. don’t tell lies). These people who are going to town hall meetings and shouting down the speaker and refusing to engage in actual discussion; what do they actually want? Are they really so thrilled with the current state of affairs that they can’t bear to even discuss alternatives? Or have they been mislead by media personalities? Hmm, if we look at other countries and they are getting better results than us, what is so bad about DISCUSSING whether we could emulate what they are doing? Maybe there are good reasons it wouldn’t work here, maybe not. But to refuse to even talk about how we might make things better? Bunch of jackholes.

Fifth – Giving everyone insurance does not solve the problem. As mentioned, the role of insurance is to spread the costs around, so that no individual suffers a debilitating loss. This is important, because I think most of us recognize that health is something that transcends an individual’s ability to pay (we do not want a society where poor people are dying in the streets, and the furor over “death panels” would seem to back this up). Because we aren’t refusing treatment to anyone currently, and nothing in the discussion suggests we are about to start, no amount of monkeying around with insurance coverage is going to change the total amount the country spends on healthcare, and that amount is on a steep upward trend. To reduce costs, we need to talk about strategies outside of insurance. Here are some possibilities (we can debate relative merits, but savings have to come from somewhere, unless we are happy with status quo): remove administrative costs by consolidating current insurance companies, use national insurance leverage to negotiate reduced drug/service prices for care, allow important of prescription drugs (forcing prices down), offer preventative care to everyone regardless of ability to pay (prevention is cheaper than cure), publish actual costs so patients can price shop on care, close emergency rooms to those who can’t pay, etc. I haven’t heard a single argument from the conservatives for how costs can be reduced, just obstructionism against anything the liberals propose. If they love the current system then fine, but then they need to answer for it.

Light and Dark
I heard a song with the lyric “It’s like Darkness and the Light going toe to toe”… this is the only conflict that really matters. We need to understand it. But I don’t think “toe to toe” is the right description. Darkness doesn’t “exist”… it is the absence of light; the presence of light negates darkness. Toe to toe the fight is over before it begins. We aren’t talking about two cavemen hitting each other over the head with clubs.

 I hear people talk about the conflict, and they usually reference external things that impede their religious impulses; the car wouldn’t start, the police wouldn’t let us distribute food outside the library, the gov wouldn’t approve our tax exemption. These are not the fight.

The fight is one of perseverance, of faithfulness. So long as the light shines, the dark is defeated. Corruption of the will is the true enemy. “What you are doing doesn’t matter”. “No one cares what you are saying”. “For every one you help, two more will fall”.

You cannot see the true results. What you see with your eyes does not matter. For as long as you burn, the Light will win. Guard the fire, it is all that matters.

Song

More thoughts

The worlds coolest tattoo
I had the worlds coolest idea for a tattoo (forgive me if I’ve shared this before). You know the buddhist koan “what is the sound of one hand clapping”? Imagine, if you will, that you took just the second part of that phrase, “… the sound of one hand clapping”, and translated it into chinese characters. Your tattoo would be the very answer to the koan! So awesome. The only downside is that I don’t think Chinese works like English that way, and it probably wouldn’t work. But if it DOES work I would seriously consider getting a tattoo like that. Or maybe just a fancy hand-drawn calligraphy copy to display.

Ode to an Ode (On a Grecian Urn)
I love language (not the “Love Languages”, but that is a whole other deal). Not only does an expanded vocabulary expand your ability to communicate subtleties (and enhances your inner life in the process), but just by looking at the words you can come to new insights as to how the world is put together. What do you think of when you see the word “wrong”? Likely you think of morality, e.g. “murder is wrong”. But there is also the aesthetic meaning, “Andre the Giant was all out of proportion, he just looked wrong”.  It is my contention that these two in fact converge; morality is itself aesthetic. We do not feel compelled to respond to injustice because of the injustice itself, but because at a deep level we see it is “not right”. The pattern is broken, the beauty is marred, the original vision is corrupted. I find this good argument for the Fall… if Good were an emergent property we were growing into, it wouldn’t make sense that our aesthetic sense would exceed our ability to make things right. It strikes me as a memory of what once was, that there was a time when things were not thus, and there may be such a time again. Anyhow… this also explains to me why we feel good about doing good deeds… it is an act of creation; we are creating/restoring beauty.

Backlash Revisited
Last time I talked about Backlash and the shades of futility that come from trying to change anything. But I thought of two exceptions. In the case of gravity, it is true that by raising an object you are engineering its fall. But with a suitable anchor (such as a boulder) the object will stay elevated indefinitely. With rocks they will eventually wear away (or melt when the sun envelops the earth). But in a spiritual sense if you have God or something equally permanent to rely on you can escape the consequences. But more interesting than that is the case of nuclear energy. The whole idea of backlash is that there are forces at work that made the world as it is, and moving in one direction is like stretching a rubber band. But in the nuclear case, you undo the very bonds that hold things together. And in the process you release tremendous energy that can be used for other purposes. If the current world does not suit you, the nuclear option lets you undo the very fabric of reality. This is figurative of course, but the point is we do not have to be constrained by the properties of the universe as we know it. To undo even the smallest of bonds releases tremendous potential.

Mysteries of Fashion
There are plenty of things I don’t understand, but fashion is pretty high on the list. Why in the world is it considered poor form if you wear a new shirt that still has the manufacturers fold lines visible (i.e. you didn’t wash and iron it first before wearing). If the shirt is brand-new, that is as good as it’s going to get, right? I can imagine some ultra-wealthy person refusing to wear anything but brand new clothes, and the creases would be a mark of distinction (you can’t recreate those at home). Why is it desirable to pretend that you’ve had the article of clothing for a long time? It’s like trying to replace your “new car smell” with the funk of a rotting bananna or something. Can anyone explain this?

While I am on fashion, I’m thinking it is time for the cape to make a comeback. I read a story today where some crazy guy made threats to kill Obama while he was visiting the bank (http://www.timesunion.com/AspStories/story.asp?storyID=807770). The main reason he stood out was because he wore a cape. We can’t sit by while a perfectly good fashion is given a bad rap before it’s inevitable resurgence. I don’t know where you can even buy a cape, or under what circumstance it would be appropriate for me to wear one (work and social settings both seem out). Let me know if you have any ideas.

The Library That Isn’t
They recently completed the Billy Graham library here in Charlotte, and there are a number of billboards that say “No books to check out, just his story”. This struck me as odd, until I realized that there were probably a good number of people who showed up at the library with the intention of checking out books. At first I thought those people were morons, but on review I’m left thinking the whole concept of a memorial library is mildly absurd. In ministry, to elevate the minister is borderline idolatry… I’m not familiar with the Billy Graham setup so I don’t want to presume too much, but he is famous because he pointed people to God, right? So if people are focusing on the minutiae of his life, doesn’t that imply they aren’t taking his advice to make God the focus instead? If we are saying “he was a one-of-a-kind great man, none of us will ever be like him”, doesn’t that undermine his whole teaching? Anyway it got me thinking about my own legacy… not that this will happen, but if someone were to build a library of my life, what sort of documents would be included? Maybe a list of credit card purchases; meals at taco bell, music cds, movies, video games? A print out of these blog posts? My google listings? All the information would fit in a shoebox. I better start leaving a better paper trail, just in case.

A Theme
The world is always bigger than we think. We (or at least me) have a tendency toward the epic, thinking that wherever we are or whatever we are doing is supremely important, that we are in the final stages of the game, and our actions in this moment will surely “echo in eternity”. Eventually we will be right I guess (you have to die sometime), but for the most part we are very melodramatic. Back to the “eternity” quote, remember that this was said in the first scene of Gladiator… he was talking like they were about to die, yet it was just the first scene of the movie. Or take Lord of the Rings, where Frodo barely makes it to Rivendell after being poisoned, and talks about how it was a great adventure, but he is glad it is over and he gets to hand over the Ring and go home. Sorry dude, you are just getting started, two and a half more books to go. Or imagine the old-time settlers heading West… you hit Ohio or wherever the border was, and feel like you have finally left civilization and are about to reach your destination… except it keeps going… and going… and then you hit the Rockies…  getting out of civilization was just the prologue, but at the time I bet many of them thought that was the bulk of the journey. Arrival in Heaven will be like this, guaranteed.

Arguing
You would think this was common sense, but before you to get into an argument with someone, take a moment and think about exactly what it is you are trying to accomplish. Presumably, in most cases you are arguing because you believe that you are right and the other person is wrong, and you want them to agree with your point of view. Supposing you are really are in the right, do you think yelling and lobbing insults is going to bring them over to your way of thinking? Has that approach every changed YOUR mind? It is horrible strategic choice. Maybe they are a rival, and you are both trying to look better than the other in front of some third party. Is flying off the handle going to impress the judge? I think not. If your goal is to make the other person like you even less and possibly harm their self-image, you may have found the right approach. But hopefully you have higher aspirations than that.

Spiritual Monkeys
We are quite a mess. Our vision apprehends the loftiest of ideals, yet we are driven by the basest of physical impulses… even the most ascended spiritual masters struggle with hunger and sex and temperature and physical safety. No matter your beliefs regarding pacifism, you still have to eat, and that means killing and/or defending your crops against invaders. Or in modern society you contract it out, paying your taxes to the .gov who provides police, military, etc. In a romantic relationship you may wish for a merging of souls, but in practice you don’t get much beyond base rutting. It all makes for a difficult dilemma; where must aspiration end and realism begin? Do you govern with an eye toward what we hope to be, or instead seek to manage the behavior we will inevitably see? It is the liberal/conservative split in essence, and I have no idea what to do about it.

Bonus Music – One of my favorite songs:

One good idea and some other detritus

Inauspicious
My head feels full of cotton and I haven’t slept right in awhile. Midnight and 2am are inauspicious times to consistently wake up. Actually “inauspicious” is really just a fancy word for “it sucks”. Maybe it would be fun to compile a list of euphemisms for “sucks”.

Classy euphemisms for “it sucks”
Inauspicious
Sub-par
Pedestrian
Underwhelming
Development need
[comment with more, my creativity is shot]

Backlash
There are various principles at work in the world, gravity, conservation of mass, karma, etc. Though different in their natures, all have acted to form the world as it is currently. And as a result, they all become imbued with the property of restoring equilibrium. Any attempt to change the world from its current state is a de facto challenge to the principle that established the world as it was before your attempt. To anthropomorphize a bit, whenever you try to do anything constructive in the world, you are basically pissing off the cosmos. Climb a ladder, and you are storing up energy for your eventual fall. Every action has an equal and opposite reaction. We have to get this principle and prepare for it. The harder you push, the greater the resistance. Plan for it. Dig in, or plan a deflection, or temporarily disappear. But don’t just stand there like a chump admiring your achievement, you will get taken down every time.

“You have to feel it to heal it”
I started going to counseling last week, finally got too worn down from being an imminent headcase. A lot of damage never really got resolved, and the cumulative impacts were running me into the ground. Interestingly, counseling philosophy runs perfectly counter to what I had been saying last week about flushing all personal history. Right now, my task is to write down pretty much every crappy thing that has ever happened, what I felt/feel about it, and how I think it might have impacted my future behavior. I told him, “who wants to relive all those things? Wouldn’t it be better just to live in the present and start life fresh?”. His response was “Answer to the first question is ‘no one’. As for the second, how’s that been working for you?”. Touché.

A really good idea
This is the best idea I’ve had in awhile… I want to start a product review-style site where users can write in with their personal reviews of different philosophies/ideologies/”religious” beliefs that they have experimented with. It is fraught with peril, as there is huge potential (and built in incentive) for people to use it to evangelize rather than just report on their experience. The key would be to keep the entries narrow enough that no one entry represented a full world view. I’m imagining things like “Solipsism – Avg. Rating 1.8 stars, 18 reviews”. “While solipsism is initially very skeptically sexy, I soon got bored after realizing that the whole thing was useless for giving guidance in how to live a good life”. Or “Pre-destination – Gave me great reassurance and courage to live nobly” or “ultimately made me lazy and less interested in reaching out to others”. I really want to make this happen. Letme know if you are interested in contributing; there will be a big need for thinkers/authors to help define the initial list of views to be rated, as well as people on the technical side to get things set up, and huge need for help around promotion, how to get the word out to the proper audience that would be open minded and participate as intended vs. spewing dogmatic crap everywhere.

Sweet Karma
I, for one, welcome this turn of events that finds republicans in the unfamiliar position of staging protest rallies and fearing authoritarian government overreach. I don’t especially agree with the democrats, and purposely avoid thinking too much about the bailouts and overall mismanagement of what is going on in order to avoid getting an ulcer. But I take special delight in seeing the shoe on the other foot finally, and perhaps the “conservatives” will learn from this and actually become conservative again. The idealist in me says “hey at least they are trying to fix things”, but the cynic knows that if you don’t understand the situation and have a clear route to fix it, you might as well save the money and do nothing because you are going to end up at the same place in the end. But does anyone understand what the “tea party” protests were specifically protesting? Tax rates didn’t change, so surely it wasn’t that… if it’s the bailout, well Bush went the same direction. If what we are seeing is truly a break away from BOTH parties, then I am all for it. Anyway, my favorite thing is how people are getting outraged over the report about the possibility of right-wing extremism. Timothy McVeigh anyone? Michigan Militia? Armed Secessionists? Actually I don’t mind secessionists so long as they pursue it as a proper vote among the people. States rights, amirite?

Banks and Bailout
Speaking of Congress et al., I must voice my displeasure at the way everything has been bungled re: the banks. You can find an array of details online if interested, but I focus on the lack of focus from the start. At the beginning, regulators said “here is this money (by the way you HAVE to take it so no one in particular looks bad). Um, we don’t really care what you do with it, you just have to take it”. Then congress comes around later and is outraged(!) at the banks for not being able to give an accounting for exactly how the money was used. Imagine I gave you $100 a couple months ago, and you put it into your checking account. Would you be able to tell me exactly how you spent my $100 today? Second point: a big part of the reason banks were forced to take money was so that their capital ratios would once again fall within “safe” benchmarks, as losses related to bad mortgages and derivatives strained reserves to very low levels. Fair enough. But then Congress gets in a huff because the banks didn’t use the money to make more loans to consumers! YOU CAN’T USE THE SAME MONEY AS BOTH CAPITAL RESERVES AND LOAN IT OUT AT THE SAME TIME!!!! As a final kick, there is outrage that banks (which had been losing money consistently until this quarter) have jacked up various fees… IF YOU ARE UPSET THAT THE BANK IS LOSING MONEY, DO NOT GET PISSED WHEN THEY TAKE STEPS TO RAISE ADDITIONAL REVENUES!! Fucking idiots. This is not sophisticated stuff; if you are going to give out billions of dollars you better have at least a passable understanding of what the money is supposed to be used for. My respect for our representatives as a whole couldn’t get much lower.

Health Care
Since I am already ranting… it seems clear to me that the answer to the problem of health care costs lies along the road of “socialized medicine”. Doubtless the thought sends many into convulsions, but look at the return-on-investment we are getting here vs. the socialized systems in other industrialized countries. Unless you believe health costs can continue to rise indefinitely without undermining our society, something needs to be done. And I haven’t heard a single even slightly compelling thing come from the conservative side on this. As a result, most of the talk on health care reform focuses on the government’s role, and how that power can be leveraged to reduce costs. But now the counter argument I’m hearing is that if the government gets involved, the private insurers won’t be able to compete because the .gov can command lower prices than the privates are able to achieve. But isn’t that EXACTLY the point?!? There is now a movement afoot to require the government to pay higher rates so that the private insurers can continue to make their profit and remain competitive. This is going to help reduce costs how, exactly? If you are going to get in, go all in and reap the benefits along with the costs. Or stay out and leave things to the market, if that is the kind of country we collectively want to live in. But this half-assed stuff is just going to get us all the costs with none of the benefits.

Susan Boyle and the Chocolate Rain
By now everyone has probably seen the video of Susan Boyle, the unlikely heroine of Britain’s Got Talent. If you haven’t, an improbable looking woman comes out to sing, and the audience is snickering and expecting a disastrous novelty act (but she sings really well and blows everyone away). It’s not my intent to take anything away from the woman, but the collective reaction is strangely out of proportion and surely reveals something about our collective character. Are we REALLY that taken with her singing? I will admit she clearly has talent (fitting the show), but her style is not pop-mainstream, and I doubt many of the people who call themselves her “fans” listen to that type of music on a regular basis. So if it isn’t the music itself we enjoy, what explains the fascination? I maintain that it is the contrast. We are fascinated, because THAT sound shouldn’t have come out of THAT woman. When I first saw the video, I thought it was a gag and she was lip syncing. You know when else I had that same reaction? The first time I ever saw “Chocolate Rain” by Tay Zonday. Who will ultimately prove more popular? Why is Tay relegated to meme status while Susan becomes a sensation? Or perhaps the meme will outlive 15 minutes of more conventional fame? I don’t know what to do with this, but I sense it is highly significant.

Miscellaneous
Both the “samurai sword” and machete continue to be disrespected in our media. I now own a machete, but am at a loss as to how to bring more respect to the blade. Fabric band-aids for the ultimate win over plastic; the bands on my heels have stayed on since sunday, through 3 separate showers. The whole “Miss California” thing is idiotic. Perez Hilton is a douche (and I don’t use that word lightly). I don’t eat onions any more. Some days I feel really lonely. Some days I feel like I’m doing pretty damn good, all things considered.

Another one

Worth

“Something is worth only as much as people are willing to pay for it”. Basic economics. This has huge implications in Christian spirituality, but I’m not going to go there for now. Instead I want to talk about nachos. At work, I often like to go to Salsarita’s for lunch, where my meal of choice is the nachos. A few weeks ago, they had a scratch-off lottery style promotion, where you could win free chips, a burrito, etc. But win or lose, everyone had a coupon for $4.99 nachos (retail price is $6.50 or so). You would think I’d be happy; hey, cheap nachos! But instead it made me feel like I had been getting ripped off. If they were trying to steer us to the nachos, it must mean they are a high profit-margin item. Clearly they can comfortably sell them at $5, so I am a sucker to buy at $6.50. I got over it pretty quickly though, because hey, cheap nachos.

 

Tailoring

I was on a kick for awhile where I was trying to find some good dress shirts. One thing I learned is that, the cheaper the shirt, a) the more pins they put in to secure it, and b) the more likely you are to get stabbed trying to get the pins out. Also the worse the shirt, the more likely it is to be in my size (17 neck, 36 arms, feel free to shop for me).

 

But I also have found that the shirts that fit me the best are invariably the cheapest and made out of the most inferior materials. This is precisely what motivates me to want to make my own clothes. If I could just take the items that fit me best and reverse-engineer the design, I could recreate them in good fabrics and have a perfectly tailored wardrobe. This did not work when I tried to hand-sew a t shirt, however.

 

A request for advice: I have a couple shirts that were labeled “Tall”… apparently this means it fits like a normal shirt but is 12 inches longer?? So the question is, would it be ill-advised to trim the bottom of the shirt with scissors? What are my options here?

 

Line, please

Sometimes I hear people say things like “get out of here with those weak pickup lines”. Doesn’t this imply that things would be fine if only the pickup lines were stronger? What would be a suitably strong line? The thought amuses me greatly. But really, do ANY pickup lines work? As best I can tell, if you are good looking enough it doesn’t really matter what you say. And if you are homely, you will either come across as creepy or weaksauce.

 

Macho

Some words have been ruined forever, casualties of our changing culture. I am sad to report that “macho” is one of those words. Between the Village People and Randy “Macho-Man” Savage, no one who is seriously described as “macho” can be taken seriously. The closest you can get to respect is to refer to “machismo” as a characteristic of hispanic culture, but that only avoids being derisive on account of cultural sensitivities. What are some other words that should be mourned?

 

Confidence

If you are going to accomplish anything in the world, confidence is a must. Despite appearances, no one has everything figured out, and except within very narrow domains, no one really knows what they are doing. So to a large extent, confidence is a choice rather than an emergent property. I find there are 4 approaches:

 

0. Lack thereof. You are basically dead in the water, and must count on someone to go your direction out of pity, or perhaps they will take you under their wing as a mentor.

 

1. Fire and Anger. This is the “damn the torpedos” approach. Snarl at the world, consider all else inferior, and run over any who get in your way. This can be efficient, but is not healthy, will wear you out, and burns bridges.

 

2. Superior Product. Establish something that you truly believe is better than the alternatives. Let your creation do the talking and it’s brilliance will be recognized. Requires a lot of work and prep, you are only as good as your last idea.

 

3. Self-Worth. Even though you don’t have anything in-hand at the moment, you have seen enough come and go that you trust inspiration to come when it is needed. At this point you begin to flow with a certain grace, though your confidence can still be shaken by failures.

 

4. Transcendence. The realization that what needs to happen WILL happen, that your choices are but different currents in the same stream. Detach yourself from the outcomes and put value in the act of choosing instead (choosing well has nothing to do with getting a particular result).

 

Army vs. Retail

I’ve seen people say things like “working retail sucks. If this keeps up I’m going to join the army”. The clear implication was that armed service and working at the mall were roughly equivalent, with the edge probably going to the mall. Something is fundamentally wrong with this. Incidentally, I would not call myself much of a patriot, but I do “support the troops”. But my support does not come from belief in their mission, but rather for their service in the face of senselessness. I don’t know why people try to conflate the two so often, “saying we shouldn’t be in iraq is disrespectful to the troops!”. You don’t hear this so much now that iraq is unpopular (gotta love the public), but people now seem less grateful when I think they ought to be moreso.

 

Golden Rule

There is a stupid joke that goes “It’s the Golden Rule: the one with the gold makes the rules. ho ho ho”. Why is this considered funny at all? It’s a straight read of base human nature.

 

Voices In My Head

When I notice an attractive woman, about half the time I hear in my head the voice of Pedro from Napoleon Dynamite saying “she’s pretty good looking”.

 

Conservatives and States Rights

So I read a book about the Supreme Court, and have followed some good analysis of court cases, and it find it all rather disturbing. But my current hang-up is around “limited government” and state’s rights. Now excuse my naivety, but to me, being in favor of limited government means one supports limits on the government’s power, that individual rights are paramount. But instead what I see (mostly from Scalia and Thomas) is a desire to limit the federal government’s ability to put the brakes on overreaches from state and local governments. The emphasis is not on preserving individual rights, but on preserving the state’s ability to limit those rights. (Granted, I am using “rights” and “non-illegal behavior” somewhat interchangeably)

 

Why is there no faction that believes the government should have an active role in PRESERVING the freedom and independence of the individual? The left wants to use the gov. to control people directly, and the right wants to prevent national gov. from putting the brakes on local governments. I can’t think about this stuff because it just pisses me off. For whatever it’s worth, I think the stimulus is a bad idea (non-sequitur, which is a great word and lets you sound intellectual when saying something pointless).

 

Left Behind

In one version of the “end times” thinking, all the Christians get raptured up into the sky, and not long after the world pretty much starts going to hell. I haven’t seen it explicitly stated, but there is an implication that the removal of the Christians plays a big role in making the world worse (which is true if they are really “salt and light to the world”). But think about the world now… if all the people who talk about the rapture a lot were to disappear tomorrow, would the rest of the world feel worse off? On the contrary, I think a lot of people might be quite ok with it. This is both a tragedy and cause for cynicism. Christians, what the hell are we doing? Would anyone miss you if you were gone…. instead of being a depressive’s meditation, turn it around as a challenge. Love love love, be like Derek Smalls says at the end of Spinal Tap “we’ll make them miss us”.

Some random crap

A few miscellaneous things:

I saw a car with a license plate of “Keanu” at best buy. Could Mr. Reeves himself be in Pineville with a NC plate? Is it a fan? Someone else with the same name? I struggle to think of the thought process the person must have gone through. Maybe it was some kind of prank?

Probably my favorite comment from 2008 was when McIntyre said to me “you don’t look like you would be educated”. I’m not entirely sure what he meant, but I don’t think he meant to be insulting. It’s sort of the opposite of the time I was accused of being a “white collar worker”.

One day at work this week I wore a white shirt and tie, which is an upgrade from my usual colored dress shirt sans tie. It could be my imagination, but I could swear that I got more attention from women, better service, and people called me “sir” and actually seemed concerned that I had a quality experience. The opposite of this is when I went furniture shopping while looking grungy, couldn’t get anyone’s attention even though I was ready to drop several thousand dollars on couches, chairs, etc. I imagine this is a very small taste of what racial discrimination must feel like. When you really have the money, you just want to throw it down and say “in your face”. Speaking of which…

The top facebook status of 2009 so far goes to Joe Jackson, who had “Joe is going to the dentist today. Yes! In your face! In my face, actually”. He is the first recipient this year of the Outstanding Achievement in the Field of Excellence award.

I was playing a game with some friends where everyone writes an answer to a question, and the guesser has to try to determine which answer goes to which person. One question was “if you could ask the current president one question, what would it be?”. I said “What does Vladimir Putin’s soul look like?”. Only Christina appreciated it, but that is probably the best thing I have come up with so far this year.

A close second: if you ever have a drink that mixed gin and tequila, it needs to be called “The Gila Monster”. I have yet to make the proper impression on anyone with this, but I assure you it is hilarious. GIn + tequiLA = GILA. At conception I had mixed up the komodo dragon and the gila monster, so the actual creature is less impressive than I first imagined, but the overall idea is top notch. It would be helpful if anyone who agrees with me would speak up…

About a week ago there was a nasty lightning storm at 4am, and it was so close that the light flashed so bright I could see it with my eyes closed, and the thunder literally shook my headboard. This was not a normal storm, and being asleep I didn’t quite know what was going on. Might it be that we were being bombed? I figured that if it were nuclear, being close enough to see the light and feel the shockwaves would have meant that I was already dead. It could be conventional though, maybe china or russia was bombing us? I thought about what it would mean if we were at war… would I still go to work? What would happen if the ATMs and credit card readers went out? I bet 99.9% of the country has no idea what to do if disaster like that strikes. Makes me want to build a fallout shelter. This country is pretty fragile…

I read a thing about teens taking virginity pledges, and how as a group they were no less likely to have sex than their peers. The tone of the article was almost one of disappointment that the technique didn’t work… isn’t the thinking here backward? Don’t parents want their kids to avoid sex because of the kid’s personal convictions? It was presented as “the pledges don’t work, back to the drawing board for some new techniques”. Isn’t a greater concern here that a pledge from these kids is more or less worthless? If they swear up and down they won’t do something, and then do it anyway, don’t you have a more fundamental problem? I can’t be too hard on the kids, as hormones are strong and they were likely pretty heavily coerced into taking the pledge. But I really wish there would be more concern about character than outward behavior. Gotta have our whitewashed tombs…

What is up with paper towels, I just bought a 12 pack and it was 17 bucks. They assure me, however, that my 12 rolls are REALLY 18 regular rolls, so I suppose it is a bargain. Maybe Vince was right about the value of the Sham-wow.

Somebody just recently did a replication of the classic “Milgram study”, and unsurprisingly got the same results. If you aren’t familiar with it, basically the had an “authority figure” in a lab coat tell subjects that they needed to keep giving electric shocks to a victim in another room, even though the voice on the other end was screaming in pain and eventually went silent (there wasn’t another person, the voices were faked). The lessons are often related to the Nazis, kind of explaining why people went along with the horrible things done by that regime. This finding raises interesting questions about human responsibility. If it is basically in human nature to “do what we’re told” (there is a Peter Gabriel song about this study), is it really fair to treat someone as a war criminal who was merely following orders, no matter how horrible? I mean, most of us would have done the same thing in those circumstances; can we really punish people for not exhibiting heroic bravery? But at the same time, the acts are so horrible, they can’t go unpunished. It is quite a dilemma. Anyway, the article I read that talked about the replication of the study focused on the ethics of doing the study itself, and they seemed genuinely surprised that the results were consistent with what Milgram found originally. Why would they think anything had changed? And while I appreciate that people are upset when they realize they are capable of killing an innocent just because someone in a lab coat told them to, isn’t that very fact PROOF that they need a deeper knowledge of themselves? Most of psychology is rather boring; individual differences get washed out and most findings are generic and uninteresting. But to find something like this, that is both horrible AND universally applicable, warrants attention from all corners. We can’t just bury this.

Hierarchy of Condescension:
There are a variety of terms that one can use when addressing another to convey their inferior status. This is guy addressing guy; the dynamic radically changes on some of these when said by a woman. I hope this can be a collaborative effort, but here is an initial hierarchy, in order of least to most condescending:

Sir
Man
Dude
Bro
Chief
Bucko
Kid
Tiger
Son
Champ
Lil’ Buddy 

When I look at my soul, I find that I have an untapped core of rage. It isn’t huge, and certainly isn’t out of control or anything like that. In fact, I think of it as something of an asset; were I to be jumped in the street, I could tap into this, let loose, and pound the guy into the pavement without realizing it. Sort of like being on PCP or something. At the same time, I doubt it is healthy to carry something like this around, and as part of maturing, growth and development, it will need to be defused. It isn’t associated with anything specific, just an accumulation of all the shitty things that accrue over a lifetime. Some reflect real wrongs and injustices, others are just wounded pride and occasional shame. I can feel the power of this thing; is it really safe to give it up? There must be a cost to carrying it, but would life truly be better without it?

Social theory: people are <50% good/interesting/useful/anything positive. The percent isn’t 0, so you can easily find quality in individuals, probably in ALL individuals. But in aggregate, you are betting against the house. In Vegas, the house only wins 51-60ish percent of the time… it is not at all uncommon for people to come out having won more money than they put in. But you run enough people through the system, or have any individual play long enough, and in aggregate you lose all your money. Practical application: the larger the group, the more likely things are to go to hell (colloquially speaking). Forget about trying to help “humanity”, because they are a bunch of ingrates and you will just get depressed. Help individuals. Bring out the good in particular people. Change specific lives. Love and caring don’t scale.

2008 Year in Review

2008 Year in Review

The last couple days I have meant to write this, thinking I would first have a beer to put me in a writing mood. Unfortunately this only served to put me in a Warcraft mood, and suddenly the day was gone and I hadn’t accomplished anything. So it is now Saturday afternoon and I am attempting this in a different room.

Overall, the best description for my 2008 was “uneventful”. I guess in a world and national sense there is a lot that went down, but personally I found it mostly forgettable. After 2007 perhaps that is nice, but I’m hoping 2009 is more interesting.

 

Work: A-

The company went bankrupt and got bought out, locking in my stock options as forever worthless and crushing my stock awards by 95%. I may also be out of a job in a few months. So that sucks. But in terms of my direct reality, it was a great year. Worked on several interesting projects that all turned out very well, and all the crummy projects went away before I had to do anything too unpleasant. I have a high degree of respect and influence in our group, and can exceed expectations without having to work particularly “hard”. Worst-case for 2009 has me getting 7 months of severance payments, and a new job could be a good thing. Similar to 2007, work is the area where things probably went the best.

 

Home: C

I am sick of being a home owner. I don’t need the space and hate the maintenance; it was probably a mistake. I tried to sell in the summer/fall, and had zero interest and a lot of stress. I like the house ok, and if it manages to sell anywhere near projection I should make at least a little money on the whole experience. But no one is buying, and the cats seem determined to ruin as much as possible in the meantime. I also have a roommate now, due to unfortunate circumstances. It isn’t something I would have sought out, but we get along and it is nice to have a bit of rent coming in. Hopefully in the spring I can sell and get back into an apartment or something where I belong.

 

Relationships: D+

No one stole from and cheated on me in 2008, so bonus points for that. No broken hearts, just one solid bruising and a handful of disappointments. Nothing went the way I would have liked, but I’d rather be alone than in something terrible and I seem to be a pretty bad judge. Every “matchmaker” friend I’ve talked to has come up empty, so I must be pretty unique. Here is a handy cheatsheet of qualifications: can’t like TV too much, should enjoy giving and receiving backrubs (specialty in shoulders a plus), athletic, attractive (I am a guy after all), joins in my flights of fancy or at least finds them endearing, good at scheming, ridiculous sense of humor, philosophic tendencies and love of language, awareness of what is going on in the world, good at directions or at least ok with getting lost.

 

Friends: B-

Not sure how one writes a section like this without offending someone. I would describe 2008 as a splintering. There is now no one that I hang out with on a “regular” basis, i.e. no conversations like “so what are we all going to do tonight?”. I’m still friends with everyone from before and not any less so, but the cohesion is gone. Some new groups are coalescing, but I am peripheral there and will likely stay so. Reconnected with Is this year, which is a major boon (you should move to Charlotte and we can cause some trouble). Facebook offers a new dimension of sorts, MySpace is dead. Not much more to say.

 

Culture: B

The world is getting weirder, and mostly in a direction I approve of. Burger King has created a cologne, which was beyond anything I would have dreamed. It feels like people are starting to emerge that create in my style, where I can finally enjoy the lunacy without having to generate it all the time. With the repudiation of Bush I am hopeful that we are moving away from anti-intellectualism, though the eagerness of many to praise Palin still gives me pause. I think people are bound to be disappointed with Obama (it is hard for any president to have a direct positive impact on anything), let’s hope the inevitable backlash doesn’t land us in theocracy.

 

Spirituality: A-

Learned a lot this year, mostly about how it doesn’t much matter how much you learn . We have everything backwards, almost everything is broken. Souls are in complete disarray and everything is clouded. A lifetime isn’t enough to sort things out; at our best we can barely sketch outlines. Forget the “culture wars”, it is a distraction. Fight things like Despair, not the guy who cut you off in traffic. Start to open your eyes, but don’t lose sight of where home base is. Um, it was a pretty good year but nothing that lends itself to words really and nothing I predicted or could place on a linear path of any sort.

 

Miscellaneous

- Favorite album of the year is The ’59 Sound by The Gaslight Anthem. I joined emusic for about 6 months and had 75 songs per month, which is a great way to try new things. Found lots of good stuff, but this one is my favorite as an album. If you don’t like it, I am baffled by the differences in human taste and will find it pretty much pointless to ever recommend anything again.

- Best facebook responses of the year: Tom (Is as close runner up). The one about dancing and catharsis is the crown jewel, but I’m impressed by the consistent quality and bringing new things to the table (I never even saw “unibrow” in that picture).

- Most unplayed videogames sitting on shelf at one time: 7, right now. I am at a loss and don’t even know how to proceed. Should I stop sleeping? Give up exercising? These are all good games that I want to play but I need to focus on one at a time or I get confused.

Futility

The world is largely fixed. Everything acts according to its nature, as sure as gravity or magnetism. At times this is good; the rains fall, animals find food, mate and reproduce. But in many things, the nature is twisted. Genetic disease is the most literal form, but it goes into greed and hatred and the spiritual. And there is not a damn thing you can do about it… you can manage the symptoms, but bad trees will produce bad fruit. Your attention will slip, you will get bored, and eventually you will be dead. Nature will have its way despite your best efforts.

I see this in my life, small but infuriating examples of the futility of our efforts. Animals crap in the house and I scoop it up. A laundry basket that is always at least half full. Mowing the lawn and spraying for weeds. A couple years ago I made a huge effort to get a decent lawn; killed the old stuff off, rented a machine and aerated, seeded and fertilized, and went out twice every day for a month watering everything. Grass came in nicely, but a year later it was all dead and now I’ve nothing but weeds. Pointless. Now I just cut it as close to the ground as possible to mask the true nature of the plants. I regret even trying.

Many times it is not nature itself that is the problem, but rather our attempts to force incompatible things together. Without shade, more water, and cooler temperatures, grass is not going to grow in my yard. But I tried anyway. Animals are going to do their thing, so why would I keep them inside? This is all very taoist, “Anything that goes against the tao soon ceases to be”.

But what can be done when following your nature leads you into a pit? If I were to stop taking blood thinners, in a matter of months clots would form around my metal valves and my own blood would kill me. At this moment I am skipping a birthday party because psychologically I do not have the resources or frame of mind to socialize and meet new people. This sucks, and this is me. I could force myself out, but from experience this only deepens the isolation. But I cannot disappear from everything. Exceptions to the natural order pile up, each one carrying a new obligation, each one pushing closer to exhaustion.

Change and transformation are largely illusions. How many “breakthroughs” and “revelations”  fade with time, and in the end leave you where you started (but with deeper cynicism)? The wheel turns, the same seasons and cycles come around again and again. Will you struggle and fight to maintain the same position, or will you let go and be spun into the wall? Is there anything to be learned besides ways to hold on tighter and tighter? Accept the dysfunction and live in it, or bang your head against the wall looking for a solution that will not come?

Updates:
Here is an article from the Onion that captures the need to kick ass that I talked about.
I’ve also discovered that the opposite feeling of kicking ass is when you’re out running and you’ve got diarrhea and are trying to hold it while you walk the last mile home.

Progress

As so often seems to happen, I was recently in a discussion about human nature, deterioration of society, the future of humanity, etc. By a lot of measures things would seem to be getting worse… I was just recalling a time when the catholic church was considering making Brittany Spears a saint due to her work as an abstinence spokeswoman. If you look around and everything seems to be going to hell, it takes a certain amount of faith to hang around and not become a hermit in a bunker.

But one guy had a different perspective… I put the exact words in his mouth (though he agreed), but at essence he said that he placed his faith in Progress. Whatever challenge arises, be it global warming, starvation, or flesh eating bacteria, mankind has an overcoming spirit and will always find a way. Interesting… from a technology perspective, I think he’s right. It’s the core of “science”, the repeatable, observable, and verifiable research that builds an ever-increasing foundation over time (i.e. standing on the shoulders of giants). Thomas Kuhn and paradigm shifts aside, what you had in the past at least WORKS, so if the new direction is a dead end you can always fall back and end up no worse than you started. Problems arise, and the science will change and adapt until the problem is solved. Granted there is a time lag and theoretically we could get wiped out before the problem is solved, but at least we’re getting somewhere.

But for those of us with a liberal-arts bent, I’m afraid the picture is not so rosy. What problem is solved by the poet, the artist? Mere entertainers, giving us a way to pass the time? Shining light into the darkness of the soul? It is a bottomless pit, not to be filled with song and sophistry. And God help you if you want to be a philosopher…

See this is where my train of thought kind of derails. We’ve got science where there is progress, yet for all the problems (diseases etc) we solve, new ones pop up to take their place. Agriculture is wonderful and all, but it doesn’t change the fact that the ground is cursed. And human nature is bent, no amount of pharmaceuticals can bring about real restoration. Perhaps solving external problems just makes the internal ones more pronounced? In any event, the problems that most need solving, the root causes, are the ones addressed by our “weaker” arts. And they are all in conflict! MAKE UP YOUR MINDS, LIBERAL ARTISTS! Ugh, this is what you get when you train generations of people to use “critical thinking” and “devil’s advocate” techniques.

Though they will never tell you this, most of psychology is rubbish (all the interesting stuff, anyway). The research methods are worth learning, and some of the physiology is ok (though really biology at that point), developmental has its merits too, but if you want to know “what makes people tick” the content is all over the board and has universally thin support. The few well-documented findings are largely asinine (setting goals can improve performance! Some people are intraverts!). Philosophy doesn’t pretend at research for the most part, but the brillant rarely seem to come up through the philosophical academy. I.e. Great philosophers don’t study philosophy. I’m not positive that this is always true, but I’d largely stand by it.

What of religion? Objectively speaking, religion is the same as philosophy except with a richer cultural background, less flexibility, and a more engaging set of literature. To put it another way, studying religion never saved anybody. Well there is another difference: the tolerance of mystery. And maybe that is a clue that we are moving in the right direction. For a problem we can’t quite define, it seems only reasonable that the cure would be something we can’t quite understand. If there were a pill to take, science would have already created it.

Not sure where to go next with this… so science progresses and cures a bunch of ills, but it never solves the problems deep down. The arts attempt to address those problems, but ultimately just swirl around and around because each is independent, there is no foundation to build off. So can there be a science of depth psychology, or is it all determined by some new-agey “personal journey”? I don’t know, here is a comic instead.

Also: I need a better name for this blog, “a little of everything” is, frankly, stupid. I’m going to try to post more, even though the quality will likely decline, so watch for that.

Kids

On Friday I had the privelege of visiting my friend’s pre-K class, reading them a book and hanging out for recess and lunch. I was a little wary going in, but it turned out to be one of the best experiences I’ve had in a long time. The world is a strange place; things open up when you least expect.

Now apparently to attend this school, you have to be at a pretty low status socioeconomically; under either $17k or $22k, if memory serves. But you would never know anything like that from this group, they were just kids. There was a real purity and simplicity, an openness and authenticity that is missing from the adult world. After being introduced to a new person, everyone came forward for hugs. And instead of lurking on the periphery, the loneliest and neediest kids parked themselves front and center and wouldn’t be denied. As much as I like sarcasm at times, it would be even better to live in a world where there was no REASON for sarcasm. And sitting with this group offered just such a glimpse.

Yet as good and clear as everything was, the seeds of corruption were also present. My hands would be full, so a kid would grab another kid’s arm and try to pry them loose. Another would get tired and turn whiny. There were battles over where to go on the playground next, and no one wanted to eat their squash. Minor things in themselves, but in that environment they just stood out as so clearly foreign and wrong… I mean, I know better than to walk right into the “noble savage” myth of yore, but it is heartbreaking to see these beings on an inevitable trajectory to become just like the rest of us (if not worse). If there were a fix, I would make it my life’s quest. But alas, to become “adult” is to take on the corruption… without the jaded cynicism it might be impossible to function. But this should not be.

I think at some point I may have a daughter. Laura claims that I changed my MySpace status from “Undecided” on children to “Someday”. I don’t recall consciously making a change, but I guess it is possible. But tonight I am semi-envisioning the future, and I can nearly see it. If I have a boy he will be a holy terror, I can just tell. But a daughter is practically real before my eyes. This is strange to me and unexpected, as I don’t necessarily want kids at all. Who knows where this comes from. The world is a strange place, has a mind of its own.

Is there a way to prevent this Fall? To live through it as a parent seems very difficult. Yet it’s hard to imagine a higher calling.

Kick Ass

As a first entry this is not all that auspicious. My plan is to have each entry dedicated to a single topic, and thus to go into more depth than I have in the past. The only problem is that to do this well you sort of have to plan and maybe even have an outline to work from. Which is a little too much like work, not my style. But this space has been sitting open for too long now and I finally have some free time. So you can like it or you can lump it*.

* I have no idea what this means, but it is an old-timey saying.

The topic of the day is “kick ass”. Yes, technically a foot to the buttocks qualifies, but there is so much more. It’s an attitude, an action, a state of mind. It’s a means to an end, and an end unto itself. Though it didn’t make Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, it does show up in Murray’s need for dominance. It is the driving force behind every action movie, sports event, and video game. From the burliest dude to the pencil-necked hacker, it suffuses the human/male experience.

When it’s happening, the feeling is sublime. You are faster, stronger, smarter than everyone else. You are in the zone and cannot be stopped. Maybe you are deftly making all the right lane changes during a traffic jam. Or maybe everything you are saying at work is brilliant and the right people are finally listening. Or maybe someone tried to mug you, and you just laughed and spun their head into the concrete, I don’t know. But when it’s working, you are 3 steps ahead and there is an almost eerie calm and grace to everything. Highly desirable.

But much like the sex drive, this deep call to kick ass leads to all manner of problems. Every illegal street race, every baroom brawl, every “you talkin’ to me?” confrontation has this at it’s root. Martial arts instructors have to face this head on, or the school would turn to chaos. New students are not allowed to participate in sparring - not because they would get beat up, but because they don’t have the self-control to handle a simulated combat situation without flipping out. To be effective you’ve got to get outside yourself and see the situation objectively.

So there is a dillema. We want, need, to kick ass. But trying to kick ass is often the surest way to make sure it doesn’t happen. Is this just another word for hubris? Is this need anything other than the pride that goeth before the fall? Or is it possibly just competence writ large, a desire for quality and perfection that takes us to a higher place?

I don’t know. I do know it is time for bed. Maybe I’ll revise this later with some kind of conclusion.