I played a lot of wow two weeks ago, and for a stunning twist I spent pretty much all of last week hanging out with other people. I missed the weekly. Big deal, I know. Sometimes I complain about living here. Actually, a lot of the time I complain about living here. There’s nothing to do and no real clear hangout to meet people at. Everyone who has lived here for a significant portion of their lives has essentially their own clique of friends. Certainly, there’s overlap, but they all grow up with the mindset that you know who you know and meeting new people is pointless because you already have a group or two to hang out with. Make new friends but keep the old, the first one’s silver, the other gold. It permeates every person born or raised here. No one is free from it. That’s why no one escapes. That’s why people live here for all of their lives, or move out and move back, or have friends they’ve known from high school in the same area. It’s a mindset. It’s stagnancy. This area is very fortunate to be as wealthy as it is, but that wealth breeds complacency. It breeds ignorance and hostility. It breeds a warped perspective on “the way things really are™. It’s an illusion, an oasis in the desert of life.
It’s wealth, is what it is. It’s the lack of needs. Mankind’s most compelling reason to associate with each other is nearly always linked to some sort of need, some survival necessity that cannot be gotten on one’s own. We collaborate, it’s what we do. It’s what makes us unique from nearly every other animal besides hive-based insects. But here we have people without needs. Without compelling reasons to collaborate with others. They’re provided for. Their parents cover the cost of living. In the event of lacking needs, Humans have this amazing capacity to create more needs. Needs that don’t exist, needs that have very little relation to legitimate survival. So they need coffee. They need cool hangouts. They need the latest gadget or doodad. It’s really not all their fault. A lot of companies wised up and realized that these people had a bunch of money to waste and nothing in particular to waste it on. So they spend billions each year convincing them to need the things the companies sell. It’s a very tidy operation. Unfortunately it becomes a mindset, a consumerist lifestyle. Things become more important than people. Things become a means to an end. Shopping malls become a place to hang out, not just to shop. Artsy stores become hip and trendy.
But none of these things are necessary. No one goes to grocery shops to hang out. There are no trendy hardware stores. The hippest people wouldn’t be caught dead in a Wal-mart. It’s just as superficial and hollow as money itself. Part of the process, though is the buy-in. Once a person is invested in all these things, they can’t stop, they can’t give it up and admit it’s a sham. That would be foolish and they would feel foolish. It’s a modern Emperor’s New Clothes.
Bah, what am I complaining about?
I guess I’m complaining about the crosswalk buttons that loudly state “Cross street with caution, vehicles may not stop.” I’m complaining about the 2,000 seat theatre set to be built right next to the 500 seat theatre, within 2 years of that theatre’s opening. I’m complaining about the pine tree with yellow ribbons and American flags next to a giant downtown flag in front of two fountains and a very noisy and very busy street. I’m complaining about the fact that a major issue raised by some old woman in a city council woman was that they were worried that all the new buildings might make it hard to see aforementioned giant American flag from afar.
I guess I just want to live really far away from here and nearly everywhere else I’ve been and forget they all exist. But I can’t. Not yet anyway. I need to play the game for a little while longer. I need to live here for a little more. But I’m not letting that time go to waste any more. As long as I’m stuck here I am going to make sure everyone I know and everyone I meet knows exactly why and how this place is terrible. I will do everything in my power to make it less terrible. I’ll get away as much as I can, even if they’re only sojourns. I will not let this bullshitty bullshit place keep me down. It’ll be hard, especially with me being as retardedly shy as I am, but by George I will do it. For starters, I joined the school paper for next year, on which I intend to spend most of my time complaining. I also joined the radio, where I will mostly play techno and rant about politics. I’m working on an advanced level academic project, which will hopefully vastly improve my ability to get the hell out of this town. I’m getting the hell out of this place for a few weeks next week, which should help ameliorate my dissatisfaction with everything. Please, if you live here and also hate it, hit me up when I get back. I really don’t do a whole lot with my time and I secretly actually like people, even though I sound angry and misanthropic. It’s crowds I don’t like. Crowds and cliques and authority.
I also canceled my wow subscription (again(haha(until cataclysm comes out(this game should be illegal(fucking crack-game))))).
Monday, June 21, 2010
Wednesday, June 2, 2010
Whorled Of Wharfcraft
I spent the last week or two playing a lot of WoW. Pretty dorky, I know, but I got hooked back in after quitting for a few months. I’ve finally got to level eighty where they have all this nice stuff for max level players to do so they don’t get bored and quit. Very cool. They’ve got this “emblem” system that doles out emblems for every boss kill in heroic or “hard” dungeons, or two for completing one entire dungeon. The thing is, you need like 40-60 of the easy to get kind to get anything cool with them, like better armor and stuff. And then there’s the best tier armor that you need to collect at least 60 for the cheapest parts of it, but you can only get two of those a day, and like another 9ish per week. Plus some more in Icecrown Citadel, the final final boss zone. More or less. Vance once told me that he didn’t like WoW because he felt like it was too artificially paced, intentionally made that way to keep people playing for longer periods of time. It was too obvious and fake to him. I can totally get where he is coming from, actually. It is pretty fucking annoying that end-game gear is set up precisely that you’d need to make multiple runs of raids that you can literally only do once a week to get any really decent stuff. It’s pretty messed up.
Of course the difference between him and me is that I am totally hooked. I have a totally different perspective on it, I think, because I do dumb things like collect Jarritos bottle caps. I only buy them maybe three or four at a time, and most of the lids are only one point (unos puntos) so it has taken me quite a while to collect them. I still don’t have enough for the awesome our lady of Guadalupe bottle cap earrings that I want because it so perfectly iconizes the commercialization of Mexican culture into a form acceptable to the American model of capitalism. I collect them anyway, even though I only get one maybe every week on average because that is what I do. I suppose the difference is that I am paying fifteen bucks a month for the privilege of collecting virtual bottle caps. It really could be worse. I could play Magic: The Gathering Online and pay real money for packs of virtual cards. Man, that just bugs the bejeezus out of me. On the other hand, I do pay four bucks for tiny packages of art printed on worthless paper. Haha. I guess I’m just doomed to frivolously spend money on things that tangentially make me feel happy or accomplished. It’s the curse of the consumer. This might be a nice launching point for some anti-consumerist, anti-capitalist invective. Nah, I don’t really want to talk about that.
I am not a big fan of American culture. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again. I hate American culture. I hate the culture of competition. I hate the idea that in order to get anywhere I am supposed to stab my brother in the eye and step on the backs of everyone else. It’s just dumb. I hate the concept that we must be vigilant for every other nation or obscure terrorist cell is out to steal our freedoms. This constant war, this constant masculinity wears on me. It really does. I dunno, I guess it’s just cause I am lazy. I don’t want to compete. Too hard. Maybe I don’t think I will do a great job. Maybe it’s my lack of self-esteem that keeps me from going out there and batting all comers off with my huge dick. Maybe I am just too much of a pussy to appreciate the eternal struggle that is America. I just don’t accept the popularity of sports. They reinforce the constant conflict that America is in. I should be contributing to the conflict. I need to be fighting. I need to be throwing my money at American produced products and supporting our soldiers in times of war and peace and so on and so forth. I need to do it, because America is always at the edge of the precipice of disaster. We’re always about to collapse forever. We need to be. If we weren’t so busy trying to prop up America from its perceived dangers, we might become complacent and learn to forget the meaning of America, the purpose of a national boundary. We might lose pride in being American. We might figure out that our borders are just invisible lines that mean nothing to anyone outside of the government. We might forget that we’re better and different than everyone else because we have more guns. Heaven forbid we might lay down those guns and forget that we have enemies and remember that first and foremost, we are brothers and sisters. We might remember that all of us are human and this is to be celebrated.
No, I’m pretty much an idiot. We Americans love peace. We would gladly share our peace with everyone, but they don’t want it, the ingrates. That is why we have to go over there and enforce peace. It is our job to keep the peace, by shooting anyone who disagrees with us. Peace in the majority, friend.
I keep telling people that money doesn’t exist. I will keep telling them this and I will shout it at them until I am blue in the face, because so many people live their lives focused on money. Their existence depends on it. Their very self-worth is attached to the cash they make. In an Asian or other traditionalist cultures, your very worth to your family is how much money you make. I can’t tell you how messed up this is. It’s worship. It’s a distorted sort of secular worship, but it’s still worship all the same. We pray at the altar of mammon, and the douchebags up in Wall Street who generate money from thin air are our priests. We watch crap like Jim Cramer’s Mad Money because we need someone to interpret the market for us. He’s a modern diviner, coming down from the mount to tell us to buy, sell, or hold. It’s absurd. I don’t care about money. I am a jerk for this, I suppose, but really it has long lost its original point and become a farcical tool of social demarcation. It’s no different from pretty much every society since we discovered crop rotation. At least one family gets really lucky and really rich and dictates the activities of everyone else because they seem more valuable than anyone else. It really hasn’t changed. I am so dull. Look at me complaining about the same thing people have complained about for thousands of years.
The problem is that our competitive nation is tied to its money. We need to be more financially active. We need more guns and more peril, we need to be leaning on the red button at any given time. Why? So we can justify our money. Money as it is today is essentially based on the idea that the American government won’t fail. That’s about it. Money has even less meaning than when it was tied to shiny bricks of metal. It’s laughable. Money has exactly as much value as we believe it has. Maybe more appropriate, money has exactly as much value as we can be convinced it has. Money in the real world has literally no more value than money in WoW. They even translate. About 1k gold is $2 according to gold-sellers. Maybe a better analogy is EVE online. You can convert about $15 into an in-game item that lets you play for another month. This item is worth about 300 million Isk, the in-game currency. So voila. Money is getting translated back and forth (well, money is mostly being putting in, as the company is understandably reluctant to hand out money, though I am sure plenty of player-to-player interactions exist) from a virtual space to a real one. Clearly it doesn’t have any legitimate physical worth. But we keep it up anyway, because money really is the best tool we have for measuring what other people think of us, more or less. Our value to society, supposedly. This idea too falls apart before the absurd billions made by companies that produce nothing but ways to kill us or rot out our teeth or waste our time. I don’t find Blizzard a particularly necessary company, especially since they’ve been bought out by those douchebags at Activision. I don’t consider WoW much of a contribution to society. I enjoy their drug, however, so I send them money. Rather, Visa sends them money and then breathes down my neck for me to give them money back for it. It’s a very neat system. I am not really against it. It really is a fantastic tool. I don’t really think we need to get rid of it or anything. I just want a re-evaluation of the current model of fiscal purpose. I want to see money being used in a realistic and reasonable fashion. No one needs billions of dollars. Hardly anyone needs more than a few million dollars. I expect such largesse to be matched by an equally amazing contribution to society, such as solving overpopulation or discovering a new and more efficient process for generating nutritious and plentiful food for the exploding population that hasn't been solved. Perhaps money could go to the people who successfully find a way to mediate conflict between two societies with conflicting views and conflicting homesteads. Maybe I sound a bit retarded, but I really think a Nobel Prize model of payout is vastly more effective than rewarding people who cut costs by refusing safety checks and allowing bullshit like the Deepwater oil volcano happen.
But, no, the people demand oil and cars and such, so they can set what prices they like. People demand cool movies and neat cell phones that do all sorts of stuff. People demand cosmetic surgery and 3d TVs. People demand the latest shiny crap and they’re willing to pay whatever they can to get it. Maybe what I’m asking for is not to trust the people to get money where it needs to go. Maybe I am asking for income redistribution by the government. I suppose I am asking for socialism (since communism is… you know… dead.) to take away those darn rich people’s monies and give them to the poor. Really, I just can’t help but think that there must be a better way than this. And by George, I’m an American. I demand only the best in governing practices.
My net worth is in the negative, by the way. Therefore I am an active detriment to society and everyone hates me. I would make a terrible Asian. However, I have a level 80 druid healer in WoW that is fully geared in T9 stuffs and will be getting her first t10 piece before the week is out. This is quite a feat of dedication and I am very proud of my virtual accomplishment.
Of course the difference between him and me is that I am totally hooked. I have a totally different perspective on it, I think, because I do dumb things like collect Jarritos bottle caps. I only buy them maybe three or four at a time, and most of the lids are only one point (unos puntos) so it has taken me quite a while to collect them. I still don’t have enough for the awesome our lady of Guadalupe bottle cap earrings that I want because it so perfectly iconizes the commercialization of Mexican culture into a form acceptable to the American model of capitalism. I collect them anyway, even though I only get one maybe every week on average because that is what I do. I suppose the difference is that I am paying fifteen bucks a month for the privilege of collecting virtual bottle caps. It really could be worse. I could play Magic: The Gathering Online and pay real money for packs of virtual cards. Man, that just bugs the bejeezus out of me. On the other hand, I do pay four bucks for tiny packages of art printed on worthless paper. Haha. I guess I’m just doomed to frivolously spend money on things that tangentially make me feel happy or accomplished. It’s the curse of the consumer. This might be a nice launching point for some anti-consumerist, anti-capitalist invective. Nah, I don’t really want to talk about that.
I am not a big fan of American culture. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again. I hate American culture. I hate the culture of competition. I hate the idea that in order to get anywhere I am supposed to stab my brother in the eye and step on the backs of everyone else. It’s just dumb. I hate the concept that we must be vigilant for every other nation or obscure terrorist cell is out to steal our freedoms. This constant war, this constant masculinity wears on me. It really does. I dunno, I guess it’s just cause I am lazy. I don’t want to compete. Too hard. Maybe I don’t think I will do a great job. Maybe it’s my lack of self-esteem that keeps me from going out there and batting all comers off with my huge dick. Maybe I am just too much of a pussy to appreciate the eternal struggle that is America. I just don’t accept the popularity of sports. They reinforce the constant conflict that America is in. I should be contributing to the conflict. I need to be fighting. I need to be throwing my money at American produced products and supporting our soldiers in times of war and peace and so on and so forth. I need to do it, because America is always at the edge of the precipice of disaster. We’re always about to collapse forever. We need to be. If we weren’t so busy trying to prop up America from its perceived dangers, we might become complacent and learn to forget the meaning of America, the purpose of a national boundary. We might lose pride in being American. We might figure out that our borders are just invisible lines that mean nothing to anyone outside of the government. We might forget that we’re better and different than everyone else because we have more guns. Heaven forbid we might lay down those guns and forget that we have enemies and remember that first and foremost, we are brothers and sisters. We might remember that all of us are human and this is to be celebrated.
No, I’m pretty much an idiot. We Americans love peace. We would gladly share our peace with everyone, but they don’t want it, the ingrates. That is why we have to go over there and enforce peace. It is our job to keep the peace, by shooting anyone who disagrees with us. Peace in the majority, friend.
I keep telling people that money doesn’t exist. I will keep telling them this and I will shout it at them until I am blue in the face, because so many people live their lives focused on money. Their existence depends on it. Their very self-worth is attached to the cash they make. In an Asian or other traditionalist cultures, your very worth to your family is how much money you make. I can’t tell you how messed up this is. It’s worship. It’s a distorted sort of secular worship, but it’s still worship all the same. We pray at the altar of mammon, and the douchebags up in Wall Street who generate money from thin air are our priests. We watch crap like Jim Cramer’s Mad Money because we need someone to interpret the market for us. He’s a modern diviner, coming down from the mount to tell us to buy, sell, or hold. It’s absurd. I don’t care about money. I am a jerk for this, I suppose, but really it has long lost its original point and become a farcical tool of social demarcation. It’s no different from pretty much every society since we discovered crop rotation. At least one family gets really lucky and really rich and dictates the activities of everyone else because they seem more valuable than anyone else. It really hasn’t changed. I am so dull. Look at me complaining about the same thing people have complained about for thousands of years.
The problem is that our competitive nation is tied to its money. We need to be more financially active. We need more guns and more peril, we need to be leaning on the red button at any given time. Why? So we can justify our money. Money as it is today is essentially based on the idea that the American government won’t fail. That’s about it. Money has even less meaning than when it was tied to shiny bricks of metal. It’s laughable. Money has exactly as much value as we believe it has. Maybe more appropriate, money has exactly as much value as we can be convinced it has. Money in the real world has literally no more value than money in WoW. They even translate. About 1k gold is $2 according to gold-sellers. Maybe a better analogy is EVE online. You can convert about $15 into an in-game item that lets you play for another month. This item is worth about 300 million Isk, the in-game currency. So voila. Money is getting translated back and forth (well, money is mostly being putting in, as the company is understandably reluctant to hand out money, though I am sure plenty of player-to-player interactions exist) from a virtual space to a real one. Clearly it doesn’t have any legitimate physical worth. But we keep it up anyway, because money really is the best tool we have for measuring what other people think of us, more or less. Our value to society, supposedly. This idea too falls apart before the absurd billions made by companies that produce nothing but ways to kill us or rot out our teeth or waste our time. I don’t find Blizzard a particularly necessary company, especially since they’ve been bought out by those douchebags at Activision. I don’t consider WoW much of a contribution to society. I enjoy their drug, however, so I send them money. Rather, Visa sends them money and then breathes down my neck for me to give them money back for it. It’s a very neat system. I am not really against it. It really is a fantastic tool. I don’t really think we need to get rid of it or anything. I just want a re-evaluation of the current model of fiscal purpose. I want to see money being used in a realistic and reasonable fashion. No one needs billions of dollars. Hardly anyone needs more than a few million dollars. I expect such largesse to be matched by an equally amazing contribution to society, such as solving overpopulation or discovering a new and more efficient process for generating nutritious and plentiful food for the exploding population that hasn't been solved. Perhaps money could go to the people who successfully find a way to mediate conflict between two societies with conflicting views and conflicting homesteads. Maybe I sound a bit retarded, but I really think a Nobel Prize model of payout is vastly more effective than rewarding people who cut costs by refusing safety checks and allowing bullshit like the Deepwater oil volcano happen.
But, no, the people demand oil and cars and such, so they can set what prices they like. People demand cool movies and neat cell phones that do all sorts of stuff. People demand cosmetic surgery and 3d TVs. People demand the latest shiny crap and they’re willing to pay whatever they can to get it. Maybe what I’m asking for is not to trust the people to get money where it needs to go. Maybe I am asking for income redistribution by the government. I suppose I am asking for socialism (since communism is… you know… dead.) to take away those darn rich people’s monies and give them to the poor. Really, I just can’t help but think that there must be a better way than this. And by George, I’m an American. I demand only the best in governing practices.
My net worth is in the negative, by the way. Therefore I am an active detriment to society and everyone hates me. I would make a terrible Asian. However, I have a level 80 druid healer in WoW that is fully geared in T9 stuffs and will be getting her first t10 piece before the week is out. This is quite a feat of dedication and I am very proud of my virtual accomplishment.
A whirlwind of activity.
I am going to update my blog with everything I have written on Facebook. I hope this works out okay, because I added pictures and stuff to some of them.
EDIT: it worked out okay. welcome to a much more fleshed out blog.
EDIT: it worked out okay. welcome to a much more fleshed out blog.
Tuesday, June 1, 2010
Some Whiny Bullshit
I.
Me.
Again.
Let’s talk about something else for once. Yeah. Let’s talk about. Hmm. Let’s talk about grades. I think I already talked about this, but not fully. Nope. Okay here we go.
I—fuck. I did it again. Well, dick it, You’re getting my ego whether you or I like it or not. I was in the 99th percentile for reading comprehension in first grade. I was reading at a high school level in third grade. Then I kinda quit any intense legitimate reading (I read comics, lots of Doonesbury and Dilbert and Calvin and Hobbes and Far Side) for a few years and pursued videogames. Then I lost all my videogames and got back to reading. I didn’t read the lord of the rings until I was thirteen and the movies were already two thirds of the way done. I thought the book was pretty dreadful, Tolkien was a fantastic world envisioner, but a dreadful writer. I will fisticuffs anyone who disagrees. Anyway, by that point I was going through about 3-4 novels a week because I had shit-all else to do at RICA or at home. I am not actually all that well-read, though, because I read the books that interested me, and that was pretty much comics and fantasy novels.
Anyway, I am a very good reader. I’ve got great reading comprehension, as competitive testing against other average students will show. I took an IQ test once because my therapist requested it and psychiatric professionals ejaculate all over that sort of thing. I got a score that was reasonably high but not shared with me for fear of blowing up my ego and letting me trumpet it around and feel superior to everyone. Or something. Ironic, given that that was pretty much the exact opposite of my behavior in tenth grade. I heard the number anyway cause the home ec lady (an amazing excommunicated catholic with one eye after a classmate had jammed a pencil into one of them when she was young. Also she was like seven feet tall. Not even kidding) was telling me off for something and was all like “how can someone with an IQ of 132 be so dumb yada yada yada” and I was all like “how do you know what my IQ is,” playing it all smooth, acting like I knew all along. Anyway my point is by some objective measurement, I’m really smart.
So I’m smart, right? I must do real good in school, where smarts count. Haha, no. I squeaked by every grade except ninth. In ninth I had straight A's and I was on the honor roll because I was living at rica and I had to do my homework or I couldn’t go do the activity and had to sit in my fairly bare room with nothing to do but feel badly about my decisions. So I did my homework. It’s a pretty shocking twist from 6th grade, where I got a 28% in math despite showing up every day and the only class I did good in was English, because quite frankly I was horrified of the teacher, Ms. Beadle, who might have been crazy. Got an 83% in that class. The kicker too is that I took geometry in ninth grade like all the good students who took algebra in eighth and I got me an A. So what is my point? Clearly grades are not correlated with smarts. I have buckets of that. I try my best to give it away. Nope, grades are about effort.
Now this is probably pretty obvious and not all that thrilling to all of those neat folks I know who spend a bunch of their time studying for all their tests and who do all their homework. I really think you guys are neat, and I appreciate that you have the passion and interest enough in your classes to do that sort of thing. I don’t. I really don’t do any homework. This last semester was a bit of a marvel in that I did quite as much as I did. Part of it was because I really liked the classes, part of it was because the homework was largely short quizzes I took on the internet once a week. Nothing too difficult, but I still did them the night before class. Cause I am a lazy motherfucker. I am as shortsighted as the day is long, too. If I had any real sense of consequence to my actions, I probably wouldn’t have done such a shitty job the semester before last. I also probably would have gone to the final for that bullshit music class, even though it was a bullshit class full of the most bullshitty bullshit any government spent $78 plus the $100 books and CDs on. But I need the grade. I need that letter that demonstrates the effort I put into the class. It doesn’t matter that the class was nothing but open book tests and rushed powerpoints being delivered by a person who I could barely hear, let alone comprehend. It doesn’t matter if the tacked on assignments were tacked on, like a “group presentation” that consisted of me listening to a series of people presenting the life history of lil’wayne and Johnny Cash. It most certain-buttfucking-ly does not mean that a damned person in that room learned a damn thing about music. No, it just means I put enough effort, flipped enough pages, knew where to find the right answers at to demonstrate that I did well in that class. I probably failed.
And I don’t give a fuck.
Thank god not every class is like that, otherwise I would have quit and taken to whoring myself on the street or ended up dead on the train tracks next to the transit center so I could be as big an inconvenience as possible. I would have died holding an extra bucket of blood or two just for good measure. What a story it would have been. “Young man, 18, dies while crossing train tracks with buckets of blood. Suicide has been ruled out for sheer unlikelihood.”
No, some classes have been sane. I really liked Polysci with Dr. Shumaker. Although she has an undeniably dour expression on her face that almost always makes me cringe and feel guilty when she looks at me, she is actually a funny and interesting person. Total shocker. I loved her class. No homework, just participation and tests. I spent all year listening to Professor Hasten lecture people who were doing poorly in her class that big kids college was gonna be nothing but a lecture delivered by a guy who doesn’t know your name and then exams. Seriously that is the best news I have had all year. I hate high school kiddie bullcrap. I hate the fact that I am in “college” and I still get assignments to make presentations and fucking posters. God. Damn. It. I am an adult, for fucks sake, and adult who is spending his government’s money and his own future money to learn things and instead I am being told to make posters about the things I have learned. Christ on a stick this shit is ridiculous. And most people don’t care. For most people it’s just more of the same. They went through all of their schooling doing this stuff back when the concept of doing a poster had a purpose: to keep kids from getting bored doing the same thing over and over. Now they’re adults and they take it for granted that instructors will go out of their way not to bore them. I love Professor Hasten to death, I think she’s a great teacher and a fascinating woman, but even I sat through some lectures that were essentially her repeating herself. Yes, it was boring, no I didn’t wave my hand around and demand that I be given something to color with. I’m a fucking adult. Doing boring things is what we’re supposed to do. We spend all our childhood being surrounded by glitz and glamor and epic struggles against fate and all sorts of things and then we grow up and realize that no, you’re going to spend a lot of your life doing pretty much the same things again and again. You get up in the morning, brush your teeth, go to work, and come home. You do whatever it is that you like to do and then you go to sleep. For the next 60 years. Yeah, it sucks, but that’s what all of you business majors are aiming for. So why does this college feel the need to pull the wool over our eyes and pretend that the future is full of all sorts of neat posters and powerpoints and awesome field trips and all sorts of things. If college is so “career-oriented” why does it spend all of its time teaching me how to do things that I probably won’t ever do in a career?
Fuck I wouldn’t care, but it’s my dollar. I go to college to learn, not to put effort into stuff. The effort is already in the dollar I gave you. General education requirements are already pretty bullshit. It ought to be my business if I want to be a well-rounded person or just take every history class I can get my hands on and fuck all the rest. Again, I wouldn’t care, but colleges are so expensive and profit driven these days. I am fortunate to go to such a cheap college, so maybe I should appreciate the cheap education I get. We’re even green, too. We just blew a whole wad of cash on building a fancy new theater arts center and putting in solar panels over the parking lot. Isn’t that great? So great we have a 50 inch plasma tv in the 2400 building telling us just how much electricity we’re saving! And it’s on 24/7! Way to go, Laspo.
Ugh, I just hate this place. I am only here because I didn’t apply to anything else in senior year of high school. I didn’t really want to go to college; I just wanted to be dead, mostly. People will tell me “quit and get a job and come back to college after a few years” as if that were actually feasible. As the job market continues to upgrade even its most unskilled labor into degree requiring positions, getting by without a degree continues to become less feasible. There’s a good reason for that, and it is money.
Money and immigrants, probably. The people who go to college are the people who can afford to or who have the guts to go into debt for it. Already right there that excludes most of the poor, the so-called “working” class that make up pretty much half of America. So great. Keep that riff-raff out of the proper jobs. The poor have no manners and no taste. I know because I watched the king of queens reruns for a really long time. So here we have an excellent system of social stratification. Keep the riff-raff and the people unwilling to play the debt game here in America at the bottom by reserving all of the nicely paying jobs for people who get degrees irrelevant to the positions they are working in, and ignore the probability that simply working in these positions should provide one with all of the skills necessary to effectively work in that position in due time. It’s a barrier to social mobility, and only a fairly recent one at that. Used to be if you wanted to be a bigwig in a company, one either worked their way up from the bottom or knew somebody that knows somebody. Nowadays one first goes to college and then works their way to the middle or so and stays there or else they know somebody that knows somebody and get to the top. The reason presented, the ostensible purpose of this system is to identify the people who would put in enough effort to complete college and thus hire only those who are capable of putting effort into things. What a load of it. Poor people work fantastically harder than I ever have. For every strung-out couch surfing meth addict there is a harried single mother working two jobs and all sorts of people in between. And that’s primarily blue collar work. Undesirable work. Stuff that isn’t ritzy in the least. The middle and upper class get white collar jobs, easy desk work, stuff that is not nearly as physically demanding. What effort is it exactly?
Globalization plays a role here. Immigrants from countries with conservative cultures such as Pakistan, India, China, Taiwan, Japan, and Korea have flooded in for essentially the same reason people always flock to America. Money. Of course they bring their culture with them, and of course they adapt it to American traditions. Financial success is a matter of great concern for the families coming here, given their reason for emigration. In America, that success is inexorably linked to becoming a person in great demand, such as a doctor, or a lawyer or an engineer. So families pressure their children to become successful doctors, lawyers, or engineers, because to the people of these traditional cultures, children are not independent beings, but carriers of the family legacy and products to be exploited for the family wealth. This is a wholly un-American point of view, but one that has been embraced in a very American fashion as a great source of wealth for colleges. These families will invest huge amounts of money into their children, as they assume them to be presumptive nest eggs. Many are, as that is the culture they are brought up into. They grow up being treated kingly and then they fulfill their end of the bargain and score top marks, earn the best grades, get the best degrees. Colleges and high schools pick up on this, and try to get as many hard-working Asians as they can into their schools so it looks like they’re a top-notch organization worth being funded by the government, when really they just happen to have tapped into a culture that values responsibility to the family over responsibility to the self. These kids aren’t “smart.” They’re certainly not smarter than me. They’re just hard working because they know their families will disown them if they don’t work hard.
It’s all a game, like everything else. I wish I had been born into an earlier time when colleges were reserved solely for the rich not through monetary exclusion, but simply because the poor didn’t need a college degree and often found it an effeminate and unnecessary privilege. The only people in college were the people who either cared about this stuff or were too lazy for a “real” job and preferred to read books and tell people what they thought about things instead of contributing anything worthwhile to society. I asked what kind of effort modern college demonstrates. The answer is probably something close to “how much bullshit will you put up with?”
Me.
Again.
Let’s talk about something else for once. Yeah. Let’s talk about. Hmm. Let’s talk about grades. I think I already talked about this, but not fully. Nope. Okay here we go.
I—fuck. I did it again. Well, dick it, You’re getting my ego whether you or I like it or not. I was in the 99th percentile for reading comprehension in first grade. I was reading at a high school level in third grade. Then I kinda quit any intense legitimate reading (I read comics, lots of Doonesbury and Dilbert and Calvin and Hobbes and Far Side) for a few years and pursued videogames. Then I lost all my videogames and got back to reading. I didn’t read the lord of the rings until I was thirteen and the movies were already two thirds of the way done. I thought the book was pretty dreadful, Tolkien was a fantastic world envisioner, but a dreadful writer. I will fisticuffs anyone who disagrees. Anyway, by that point I was going through about 3-4 novels a week because I had shit-all else to do at RICA or at home. I am not actually all that well-read, though, because I read the books that interested me, and that was pretty much comics and fantasy novels.
Anyway, I am a very good reader. I’ve got great reading comprehension, as competitive testing against other average students will show. I took an IQ test once because my therapist requested it and psychiatric professionals ejaculate all over that sort of thing. I got a score that was reasonably high but not shared with me for fear of blowing up my ego and letting me trumpet it around and feel superior to everyone. Or something. Ironic, given that that was pretty much the exact opposite of my behavior in tenth grade. I heard the number anyway cause the home ec lady (an amazing excommunicated catholic with one eye after a classmate had jammed a pencil into one of them when she was young. Also she was like seven feet tall. Not even kidding) was telling me off for something and was all like “how can someone with an IQ of 132 be so dumb yada yada yada” and I was all like “how do you know what my IQ is,” playing it all smooth, acting like I knew all along. Anyway my point is by some objective measurement, I’m really smart.
So I’m smart, right? I must do real good in school, where smarts count. Haha, no. I squeaked by every grade except ninth. In ninth I had straight A's and I was on the honor roll because I was living at rica and I had to do my homework or I couldn’t go do the activity and had to sit in my fairly bare room with nothing to do but feel badly about my decisions. So I did my homework. It’s a pretty shocking twist from 6th grade, where I got a 28% in math despite showing up every day and the only class I did good in was English, because quite frankly I was horrified of the teacher, Ms. Beadle, who might have been crazy. Got an 83% in that class. The kicker too is that I took geometry in ninth grade like all the good students who took algebra in eighth and I got me an A. So what is my point? Clearly grades are not correlated with smarts. I have buckets of that. I try my best to give it away. Nope, grades are about effort.
Now this is probably pretty obvious and not all that thrilling to all of those neat folks I know who spend a bunch of their time studying for all their tests and who do all their homework. I really think you guys are neat, and I appreciate that you have the passion and interest enough in your classes to do that sort of thing. I don’t. I really don’t do any homework. This last semester was a bit of a marvel in that I did quite as much as I did. Part of it was because I really liked the classes, part of it was because the homework was largely short quizzes I took on the internet once a week. Nothing too difficult, but I still did them the night before class. Cause I am a lazy motherfucker. I am as shortsighted as the day is long, too. If I had any real sense of consequence to my actions, I probably wouldn’t have done such a shitty job the semester before last. I also probably would have gone to the final for that bullshit music class, even though it was a bullshit class full of the most bullshitty bullshit any government spent $78 plus the $100 books and CDs on. But I need the grade. I need that letter that demonstrates the effort I put into the class. It doesn’t matter that the class was nothing but open book tests and rushed powerpoints being delivered by a person who I could barely hear, let alone comprehend. It doesn’t matter if the tacked on assignments were tacked on, like a “group presentation” that consisted of me listening to a series of people presenting the life history of lil’wayne and Johnny Cash. It most certain-buttfucking-ly does not mean that a damned person in that room learned a damn thing about music. No, it just means I put enough effort, flipped enough pages, knew where to find the right answers at to demonstrate that I did well in that class. I probably failed.
And I don’t give a fuck.
Thank god not every class is like that, otherwise I would have quit and taken to whoring myself on the street or ended up dead on the train tracks next to the transit center so I could be as big an inconvenience as possible. I would have died holding an extra bucket of blood or two just for good measure. What a story it would have been. “Young man, 18, dies while crossing train tracks with buckets of blood. Suicide has been ruled out for sheer unlikelihood.”
No, some classes have been sane. I really liked Polysci with Dr. Shumaker. Although she has an undeniably dour expression on her face that almost always makes me cringe and feel guilty when she looks at me, she is actually a funny and interesting person. Total shocker. I loved her class. No homework, just participation and tests. I spent all year listening to Professor Hasten lecture people who were doing poorly in her class that big kids college was gonna be nothing but a lecture delivered by a guy who doesn’t know your name and then exams. Seriously that is the best news I have had all year. I hate high school kiddie bullcrap. I hate the fact that I am in “college” and I still get assignments to make presentations and fucking posters. God. Damn. It. I am an adult, for fucks sake, and adult who is spending his government’s money and his own future money to learn things and instead I am being told to make posters about the things I have learned. Christ on a stick this shit is ridiculous. And most people don’t care. For most people it’s just more of the same. They went through all of their schooling doing this stuff back when the concept of doing a poster had a purpose: to keep kids from getting bored doing the same thing over and over. Now they’re adults and they take it for granted that instructors will go out of their way not to bore them. I love Professor Hasten to death, I think she’s a great teacher and a fascinating woman, but even I sat through some lectures that were essentially her repeating herself. Yes, it was boring, no I didn’t wave my hand around and demand that I be given something to color with. I’m a fucking adult. Doing boring things is what we’re supposed to do. We spend all our childhood being surrounded by glitz and glamor and epic struggles against fate and all sorts of things and then we grow up and realize that no, you’re going to spend a lot of your life doing pretty much the same things again and again. You get up in the morning, brush your teeth, go to work, and come home. You do whatever it is that you like to do and then you go to sleep. For the next 60 years. Yeah, it sucks, but that’s what all of you business majors are aiming for. So why does this college feel the need to pull the wool over our eyes and pretend that the future is full of all sorts of neat posters and powerpoints and awesome field trips and all sorts of things. If college is so “career-oriented” why does it spend all of its time teaching me how to do things that I probably won’t ever do in a career?
Fuck I wouldn’t care, but it’s my dollar. I go to college to learn, not to put effort into stuff. The effort is already in the dollar I gave you. General education requirements are already pretty bullshit. It ought to be my business if I want to be a well-rounded person or just take every history class I can get my hands on and fuck all the rest. Again, I wouldn’t care, but colleges are so expensive and profit driven these days. I am fortunate to go to such a cheap college, so maybe I should appreciate the cheap education I get. We’re even green, too. We just blew a whole wad of cash on building a fancy new theater arts center and putting in solar panels over the parking lot. Isn’t that great? So great we have a 50 inch plasma tv in the 2400 building telling us just how much electricity we’re saving! And it’s on 24/7! Way to go, Laspo.
Ugh, I just hate this place. I am only here because I didn’t apply to anything else in senior year of high school. I didn’t really want to go to college; I just wanted to be dead, mostly. People will tell me “quit and get a job and come back to college after a few years” as if that were actually feasible. As the job market continues to upgrade even its most unskilled labor into degree requiring positions, getting by without a degree continues to become less feasible. There’s a good reason for that, and it is money.
Money and immigrants, probably. The people who go to college are the people who can afford to or who have the guts to go into debt for it. Already right there that excludes most of the poor, the so-called “working” class that make up pretty much half of America. So great. Keep that riff-raff out of the proper jobs. The poor have no manners and no taste. I know because I watched the king of queens reruns for a really long time. So here we have an excellent system of social stratification. Keep the riff-raff and the people unwilling to play the debt game here in America at the bottom by reserving all of the nicely paying jobs for people who get degrees irrelevant to the positions they are working in, and ignore the probability that simply working in these positions should provide one with all of the skills necessary to effectively work in that position in due time. It’s a barrier to social mobility, and only a fairly recent one at that. Used to be if you wanted to be a bigwig in a company, one either worked their way up from the bottom or knew somebody that knows somebody. Nowadays one first goes to college and then works their way to the middle or so and stays there or else they know somebody that knows somebody and get to the top. The reason presented, the ostensible purpose of this system is to identify the people who would put in enough effort to complete college and thus hire only those who are capable of putting effort into things. What a load of it. Poor people work fantastically harder than I ever have. For every strung-out couch surfing meth addict there is a harried single mother working two jobs and all sorts of people in between. And that’s primarily blue collar work. Undesirable work. Stuff that isn’t ritzy in the least. The middle and upper class get white collar jobs, easy desk work, stuff that is not nearly as physically demanding. What effort is it exactly?
Globalization plays a role here. Immigrants from countries with conservative cultures such as Pakistan, India, China, Taiwan, Japan, and Korea have flooded in for essentially the same reason people always flock to America. Money. Of course they bring their culture with them, and of course they adapt it to American traditions. Financial success is a matter of great concern for the families coming here, given their reason for emigration. In America, that success is inexorably linked to becoming a person in great demand, such as a doctor, or a lawyer or an engineer. So families pressure their children to become successful doctors, lawyers, or engineers, because to the people of these traditional cultures, children are not independent beings, but carriers of the family legacy and products to be exploited for the family wealth. This is a wholly un-American point of view, but one that has been embraced in a very American fashion as a great source of wealth for colleges. These families will invest huge amounts of money into their children, as they assume them to be presumptive nest eggs. Many are, as that is the culture they are brought up into. They grow up being treated kingly and then they fulfill their end of the bargain and score top marks, earn the best grades, get the best degrees. Colleges and high schools pick up on this, and try to get as many hard-working Asians as they can into their schools so it looks like they’re a top-notch organization worth being funded by the government, when really they just happen to have tapped into a culture that values responsibility to the family over responsibility to the self. These kids aren’t “smart.” They’re certainly not smarter than me. They’re just hard working because they know their families will disown them if they don’t work hard.
It’s all a game, like everything else. I wish I had been born into an earlier time when colleges were reserved solely for the rich not through monetary exclusion, but simply because the poor didn’t need a college degree and often found it an effeminate and unnecessary privilege. The only people in college were the people who either cared about this stuff or were too lazy for a “real” job and preferred to read books and tell people what they thought about things instead of contributing anything worthwhile to society. I asked what kind of effort modern college demonstrates. The answer is probably something close to “how much bullshit will you put up with?”
Monday, May 24, 2010
I have several points
Last month or so, I wrote about how I wanted to say something, and how I wanted to write the truth. I wasn’t real clear on what exactly it was I was trying to say, though I dropped a few hints and said a few things about it. I know what I want to say, I really do, I’m just not sure how to say it. Hmm. I had a shitty childhood. Straight up. I’m saying it right here. Both of my parents would probably argue that it’s better compared to a Nigerian child who grows up poor and dies young. Tons of internet cynics would too. Lots of people, droves of them. And they might be right. They might agree with the part of me that says that too. But I don’t give a fuck. I had a shitty childhood. It did not leave me as a capable and responsible adult. It did not leave me with a cornucopia of friends and the social experience to match. It did not help me understand much about who I am, though it taught me plenty about who other people want me to be.
This is a tirade, straightforward and up-front. I am complaining about stuff I have already complained about. If you already hate me or hate listening to me complain, please, there’s the little tab up there, x out of it.
My point here is: my life sucks. Or at least sucked for a very long and very influential period. Shit happened. I am sort of over it now, but I really don’t think I can be over it. And certainly, when I go to other people’s houses and meet parents and families that aren’t horribly dysfunctional and made of rational and (relatively) mature people, I do feel jealous in spite of myself. I don’t know if that will ever go away. It’s a dumb thing to get hung up on, and I know it.
So what I want to say comes down to essentially “holy shit, this shit is bullshit, you fuckers.” I hate it so much. I hate the feelings that I went through. I hate the situations I was in. I hate myself for letting it happen, I hate the world for letting it happen, I hate everything. I am a very bitter person. Really, I am. It’s the truth. And I realize, though, that this bitterness isn’t going to get me anywhere. I’m not going to stop this kind of crap from happening to other people just by hating it. So I do my best, whatever I can, to fight it. I wish I could say something really impressive and be all like “oh yeah I stopped like thirty teenagers from suicide by talking them out of it and raised such and such amount of money for foster care and child protective services,” but obviously, I can’t. I suck. I suck too much for that kind of thing. I can barely handle my own issues, let alone solve anyone else’s.
Suicide annoys me. There are large and obvious reasons for a person to want to kill themselves, and I went through all of them. The biggest problem though, Is people’s reaction. They act like it’s a tragic event and attempt to comfort the people they left behind and so on. Suicide hotlines are set up so that really depressed people can talk to someone and get talked out of ending it all. Drugs are prescribed that are supposed to “level” your mood so that you won’t off yourself. All of this shit is bullshit. They’re addressing the symptom (suicide) and not the cause. People don’t just suddenly up and decide to off themselves, they do it because they can’t bear to live in the world. Why not? Lots of fucking reasons, but pretty much all of them come down to other people. My mother is fucking insane. She would whip from caring and being kind to me to being the meanest bitch on planet McBitch. She made every effort to eliminate my control over my life, all while questioning me. “Why won’t you take control of your life, Jacob? Fix your problems, Jacob. You need to look inside yourself and find out where your problems lay, Jacob.” All of this shit was directly related to how psychologically crazy she insisted I was. A new diagnosis popped up for her every couple of months. I went through half a dozen different psychiatric programs. To this day, I am still listed as an emotionally disturbed person in Montgomery County, Maryland. All of this thanks to her. And what bugs me most of all is that I still have a voice in my head that tells me “well, maybe you are crazy, Jake. Maybe she was right.”
That shit made me want to kill myself. I had no control over my life, right when I was a teenager, the time you’re supposed to start taking control of your life. I had no friends, because I was too busy going through the psychiatric wringer. I had no life, my mom wouldn’t let me get a license, let alone drive me anywhere. I had nothing but the material possessions she bought for me. Even those I lost at her whim. I had no options, no way out. So suicide seemed pretty good, but I never did go through with it. I never really had that option either. If there were some legitimate drugs or a nearby bridge or an actual gun at that house, I might not be here bitching about shit.
So anyway, my point is everything sucks and I know why it sucks and I don’t want it to suck any more. I don’t like the way western society is run. I have problems with the fundamental understanding of this society. Yes, it’s partly capitalism, yes it’s partly Christianity, but the problem is bigger than that. The problem is the basic assumptions people make about other people. The problem is our flawed understanding of how people work or how society works. I have a problem with the moral and social underpinnings that allow the average person to accept the wholesale disregard for human life that is so popular today. I have a problem that happens to be the same problem many people have had for a very long time, so it’s often and readily dismissed by those who find change too difficult or too painful to handle.
There are too many of us. That’s all it comes down to. The world is getting rather full, and some of us are taking larger slices of it than others. We have here in America a system that not only allows for it, but morally justifies it with the idea that they’ve somehow contributed more to society than most. A lot of the time when you hear teachers demand greater pay, that’s the message being delivered “we help society more than some corporate slave, pay us better.” It’s a huge sham, of course. Bill Gates didn’t invent the computer, nor did he invent the GUI operating system, nor much else of worth, but his aggressive business tactics propelled his company to the forefront of equally qualified competitors. Nothing Windows does these days can’t be done in some other way. Yet still, he is sitting on a fortune that is the approximate lifetime earnings of about 27,000 average college educated Americans. And no one gives a shit. It’s just how it is. Not even you, you don’t give a shit. You’re reading this and thinking “oh you” instead of being angry. I’m angry. I’m really angry. No one in a society is worth that much. We will not suddenly lose that much of our GDP if Bill Gates died tomorrow. No one will starve, and very few will be unhappy. His wealth is totally contrary to the very system underlying it. And again no one cares.
I’m not saying “abandon money.” Money has a purpose and is pretty handy as far as a human tool goes. I’m saying “Stick to your principles or abandon the pretense.” I’m demanding consistency in message and in action. The stock market at its simplest is not a terrible idea. People collaboratively pool their money and invest it together with other people to make up corporations that can get lots more done than a single person can. Collaboration is important. That’s how we’ve got all of the nice things we’ve got. The problem is when stocks began to be bought with money that people don’t actually have. The problem began when corporations became able to purchase other corporations or spend money on campaign contributions or pay its employees more than its investors. The problem began when people started valuing housing far beyond the actual labor and costs that went into building it. It’s when we lose touch with the purpose of our inventions that we begin to take them for granted and assume that their current iterations are the proper ones. When we forget that a bank’s purpose is not actually to lend money but to hold it and keep it safe from thieves, we allow them to take that money and lend it back to us while charging interest. Banks become a profit-driven organization. You put your money in a bank, and you essentially hand your money to someone who really really doesn’t want to give it back. That was ultimately the cause of the first great depression. People wanted their money back and banks just plain didn’t have it. The numbers in the columns didn’t add up to the amount in the safe.
But I’m getting away from the point. What I’m trying to say, what I want to say is that we as a species need to start thinking as a species. Yes, part of it is that we need to stop thinking “east” and “west” and “Christian” and “muslim” and “this culture” and “that culture.” We’re smarter than that. We’ve identified the mental processes that generate these logical missteps and we may even have found a gene that codes for it. National boundaries are meaningless in this day and age just as they were thousands of years ago. Every single line between “us” and “them” exists solely within our minds.
We need to stop thinking in the short term. Humans in general have this problem, and it’s a very good way of thinking when survival hinges on your short term decisions, it’s very bad when your survival depends on what goals you operate on in the long term. Humans are unique in the animal kingdom of being able to frame themselves in the long term and think past their children all the way to their grandchildren. We really ought to embrace this very divergent quality of ours and start thinking not about how we’re going to get more oil out of the ground, but how we’re going to live without it. It may not happen in 50 years, it may not happen in a thousand, but it will happen, and ignoring it is at our peril. We need to consider what may be happening to the climate. Changes have and will happen, with or without human intervention, and we need solid, sustainable strategies for adaptation. “It’s too expensive” won’t cut it. Money doesn’t exist.
We’re going to run out of space on earth. It’s inevitable. There is literally no way around it. So it baffles me to hear people describing the space program as a waste of time and money. We need to get out of here. We need to get off this planet. Or. And that’s a big Or, we need to cut down and enforce population limits. We can’t stay here and have babies willy-nilly. We cannot have it both ways. It appalls me that we halted operations in space just because a shuttle’s worth of crew members died back in 2003. We would have never gotten here from Europe with that kind of misdirected value for life. I read an article recently about the oil volcano lamenting the 11 people who died. WHO THE FUCK CARES? THIS OIL VOLCANO IS GOING TO KILL US ALL IF WE DON’T DO SOMETHING.
Seriously, almost worse than that are the suggestions that we should blow up some nukes underwater to stop it. What kind of messed up backwards retarded idea is this? This isn’t an oil well, where we pump the stuff out most of the time, following an initial surge, this is a compressed gas and oil volcanic monstrosity that will continue to flow up and out until all the gas is dispersed. If you nuke the sides of it, you’ll just be treated to some hilarious rock shooting action, blasting them out of the hole and only serving to make it wider.
And fucking nukes, my god. We’re already dumping oil into the ocean, are we going to irradiate it too? This is exactly the kind of thinking that led to this disaster: Short term and without concern for the consequences. It’s a problem. It needs to stop. Fixing these disasters, applying safety regulations, making broad statements of concern, these are all aimed at treating the symptoms of this mindset and not the cause.
Most importantly, we must not be complacent. We cannot fall into the familiar old routines of our lives and forget about the world we live in. I don’t care what your personal politics are. I don’t care if you hate everything I’ve said. All I care about is whether or not you are actively expressing yourself. If you feel some way about something, don’t be afraid to let other people know. Don’t flip your shit if they disagree either. That’s just the way it is when there are literally billions of other independent consciousnesses out there. What matters is that you make your life a statement of intent. What matters is that your life has meaning to you. You won’t get that by just going with the flow, living day to day. You won’t get that by staying silent for fear of offense. You’ve only got one life, and that’s gonna end one way or another. Make it count.
Ugh. I feel so dull when I write this stuff. I also hate it. I hate everything I write within a few days of writing it. I literally don’t trust the opinion of anyone who thinks my writing is good, at least when it comes to writing. But that’s me. I have an awful self-image, about half the time. People who take interest in me clearly have something they want from me, because no one actually cares what I’m like. I don’t care how many people prove me wrong, that’s just how I feel most of the time. A lot of that is tied to my childhood. It’s a hell of a downer when your mother treats you as though you were deranged. On the other hand, I try to make the best of it. I’ve got more than one voice in my head, and at least one of them is telling me that I’m doing the right thing and that “Hey, you look pretty good” or “Hey, that was a darn good joke you told.” For every embarrassing conversation that gets played back in my head for some reason, I get a nice positive experience played back some other time. I dunno.
I don’t really practice what I preach. Well, I do, in that I participate in long-term thinking and I seriously don’t let my judgments affect my behavior, but I am not great at expressing myself. I say that here in an expressive essay, sure, but in person I’m really very shy. Like retardedly shy, if you’ve ever spent any time with me, you’d probably notice that. I’ve been working on that, trying to put myself out there more, but it’s still pretty hard. It’s not really that I’m afraid of people, it’s just that I’m afraid that I will go and put myself out there and then hear that cynical part of me talking back to myself. I dunno, I guess I’m just being typical. I better shut up now. I like the people I have been hanging out with forever now okay because I know I can be myself with them and they won’t just up and leave. Maybe that’s it. Maybe it’s an abandonment thing.
ANYWAY I hope this essay has left you with a little more understanding of who I am. I’d fill these things with my own conclusions, but then you’d just be hearing who I think I am, and not me per se. I am glad that some people bother to read these. I was told once or twice by anonymous to put them in a text file and keep them on my computer and never share them, but then where would I be? What would be the purpose of expressing yourself if you’re not communicating it to someone else? Of course all forms of self-expression are regarded as pointless egocentrism by anonymous, as that is their goal and purpose for being anonymous in the first place. It’s really very interesting.
This is a tirade, straightforward and up-front. I am complaining about stuff I have already complained about. If you already hate me or hate listening to me complain, please, there’s the little tab up there, x out of it.
My point here is: my life sucks. Or at least sucked for a very long and very influential period. Shit happened. I am sort of over it now, but I really don’t think I can be over it. And certainly, when I go to other people’s houses and meet parents and families that aren’t horribly dysfunctional and made of rational and (relatively) mature people, I do feel jealous in spite of myself. I don’t know if that will ever go away. It’s a dumb thing to get hung up on, and I know it.
So what I want to say comes down to essentially “holy shit, this shit is bullshit, you fuckers.” I hate it so much. I hate the feelings that I went through. I hate the situations I was in. I hate myself for letting it happen, I hate the world for letting it happen, I hate everything. I am a very bitter person. Really, I am. It’s the truth. And I realize, though, that this bitterness isn’t going to get me anywhere. I’m not going to stop this kind of crap from happening to other people just by hating it. So I do my best, whatever I can, to fight it. I wish I could say something really impressive and be all like “oh yeah I stopped like thirty teenagers from suicide by talking them out of it and raised such and such amount of money for foster care and child protective services,” but obviously, I can’t. I suck. I suck too much for that kind of thing. I can barely handle my own issues, let alone solve anyone else’s.
Suicide annoys me. There are large and obvious reasons for a person to want to kill themselves, and I went through all of them. The biggest problem though, Is people’s reaction. They act like it’s a tragic event and attempt to comfort the people they left behind and so on. Suicide hotlines are set up so that really depressed people can talk to someone and get talked out of ending it all. Drugs are prescribed that are supposed to “level” your mood so that you won’t off yourself. All of this shit is bullshit. They’re addressing the symptom (suicide) and not the cause. People don’t just suddenly up and decide to off themselves, they do it because they can’t bear to live in the world. Why not? Lots of fucking reasons, but pretty much all of them come down to other people. My mother is fucking insane. She would whip from caring and being kind to me to being the meanest bitch on planet McBitch. She made every effort to eliminate my control over my life, all while questioning me. “Why won’t you take control of your life, Jacob? Fix your problems, Jacob. You need to look inside yourself and find out where your problems lay, Jacob.” All of this shit was directly related to how psychologically crazy she insisted I was. A new diagnosis popped up for her every couple of months. I went through half a dozen different psychiatric programs. To this day, I am still listed as an emotionally disturbed person in Montgomery County, Maryland. All of this thanks to her. And what bugs me most of all is that I still have a voice in my head that tells me “well, maybe you are crazy, Jake. Maybe she was right.”
That shit made me want to kill myself. I had no control over my life, right when I was a teenager, the time you’re supposed to start taking control of your life. I had no friends, because I was too busy going through the psychiatric wringer. I had no life, my mom wouldn’t let me get a license, let alone drive me anywhere. I had nothing but the material possessions she bought for me. Even those I lost at her whim. I had no options, no way out. So suicide seemed pretty good, but I never did go through with it. I never really had that option either. If there were some legitimate drugs or a nearby bridge or an actual gun at that house, I might not be here bitching about shit.
So anyway, my point is everything sucks and I know why it sucks and I don’t want it to suck any more. I don’t like the way western society is run. I have problems with the fundamental understanding of this society. Yes, it’s partly capitalism, yes it’s partly Christianity, but the problem is bigger than that. The problem is the basic assumptions people make about other people. The problem is our flawed understanding of how people work or how society works. I have a problem with the moral and social underpinnings that allow the average person to accept the wholesale disregard for human life that is so popular today. I have a problem that happens to be the same problem many people have had for a very long time, so it’s often and readily dismissed by those who find change too difficult or too painful to handle.
There are too many of us. That’s all it comes down to. The world is getting rather full, and some of us are taking larger slices of it than others. We have here in America a system that not only allows for it, but morally justifies it with the idea that they’ve somehow contributed more to society than most. A lot of the time when you hear teachers demand greater pay, that’s the message being delivered “we help society more than some corporate slave, pay us better.” It’s a huge sham, of course. Bill Gates didn’t invent the computer, nor did he invent the GUI operating system, nor much else of worth, but his aggressive business tactics propelled his company to the forefront of equally qualified competitors. Nothing Windows does these days can’t be done in some other way. Yet still, he is sitting on a fortune that is the approximate lifetime earnings of about 27,000 average college educated Americans. And no one gives a shit. It’s just how it is. Not even you, you don’t give a shit. You’re reading this and thinking “oh you” instead of being angry. I’m angry. I’m really angry. No one in a society is worth that much. We will not suddenly lose that much of our GDP if Bill Gates died tomorrow. No one will starve, and very few will be unhappy. His wealth is totally contrary to the very system underlying it. And again no one cares.
I’m not saying “abandon money.” Money has a purpose and is pretty handy as far as a human tool goes. I’m saying “Stick to your principles or abandon the pretense.” I’m demanding consistency in message and in action. The stock market at its simplest is not a terrible idea. People collaboratively pool their money and invest it together with other people to make up corporations that can get lots more done than a single person can. Collaboration is important. That’s how we’ve got all of the nice things we’ve got. The problem is when stocks began to be bought with money that people don’t actually have. The problem began when corporations became able to purchase other corporations or spend money on campaign contributions or pay its employees more than its investors. The problem began when people started valuing housing far beyond the actual labor and costs that went into building it. It’s when we lose touch with the purpose of our inventions that we begin to take them for granted and assume that their current iterations are the proper ones. When we forget that a bank’s purpose is not actually to lend money but to hold it and keep it safe from thieves, we allow them to take that money and lend it back to us while charging interest. Banks become a profit-driven organization. You put your money in a bank, and you essentially hand your money to someone who really really doesn’t want to give it back. That was ultimately the cause of the first great depression. People wanted their money back and banks just plain didn’t have it. The numbers in the columns didn’t add up to the amount in the safe.
But I’m getting away from the point. What I’m trying to say, what I want to say is that we as a species need to start thinking as a species. Yes, part of it is that we need to stop thinking “east” and “west” and “Christian” and “muslim” and “this culture” and “that culture.” We’re smarter than that. We’ve identified the mental processes that generate these logical missteps and we may even have found a gene that codes for it. National boundaries are meaningless in this day and age just as they were thousands of years ago. Every single line between “us” and “them” exists solely within our minds.
We need to stop thinking in the short term. Humans in general have this problem, and it’s a very good way of thinking when survival hinges on your short term decisions, it’s very bad when your survival depends on what goals you operate on in the long term. Humans are unique in the animal kingdom of being able to frame themselves in the long term and think past their children all the way to their grandchildren. We really ought to embrace this very divergent quality of ours and start thinking not about how we’re going to get more oil out of the ground, but how we’re going to live without it. It may not happen in 50 years, it may not happen in a thousand, but it will happen, and ignoring it is at our peril. We need to consider what may be happening to the climate. Changes have and will happen, with or without human intervention, and we need solid, sustainable strategies for adaptation. “It’s too expensive” won’t cut it. Money doesn’t exist.
We’re going to run out of space on earth. It’s inevitable. There is literally no way around it. So it baffles me to hear people describing the space program as a waste of time and money. We need to get out of here. We need to get off this planet. Or. And that’s a big Or, we need to cut down and enforce population limits. We can’t stay here and have babies willy-nilly. We cannot have it both ways. It appalls me that we halted operations in space just because a shuttle’s worth of crew members died back in 2003. We would have never gotten here from Europe with that kind of misdirected value for life. I read an article recently about the oil volcano lamenting the 11 people who died. WHO THE FUCK CARES? THIS OIL VOLCANO IS GOING TO KILL US ALL IF WE DON’T DO SOMETHING.
Seriously, almost worse than that are the suggestions that we should blow up some nukes underwater to stop it. What kind of messed up backwards retarded idea is this? This isn’t an oil well, where we pump the stuff out most of the time, following an initial surge, this is a compressed gas and oil volcanic monstrosity that will continue to flow up and out until all the gas is dispersed. If you nuke the sides of it, you’ll just be treated to some hilarious rock shooting action, blasting them out of the hole and only serving to make it wider.
And fucking nukes, my god. We’re already dumping oil into the ocean, are we going to irradiate it too? This is exactly the kind of thinking that led to this disaster: Short term and without concern for the consequences. It’s a problem. It needs to stop. Fixing these disasters, applying safety regulations, making broad statements of concern, these are all aimed at treating the symptoms of this mindset and not the cause.
Most importantly, we must not be complacent. We cannot fall into the familiar old routines of our lives and forget about the world we live in. I don’t care what your personal politics are. I don’t care if you hate everything I’ve said. All I care about is whether or not you are actively expressing yourself. If you feel some way about something, don’t be afraid to let other people know. Don’t flip your shit if they disagree either. That’s just the way it is when there are literally billions of other independent consciousnesses out there. What matters is that you make your life a statement of intent. What matters is that your life has meaning to you. You won’t get that by just going with the flow, living day to day. You won’t get that by staying silent for fear of offense. You’ve only got one life, and that’s gonna end one way or another. Make it count.
Ugh. I feel so dull when I write this stuff. I also hate it. I hate everything I write within a few days of writing it. I literally don’t trust the opinion of anyone who thinks my writing is good, at least when it comes to writing. But that’s me. I have an awful self-image, about half the time. People who take interest in me clearly have something they want from me, because no one actually cares what I’m like. I don’t care how many people prove me wrong, that’s just how I feel most of the time. A lot of that is tied to my childhood. It’s a hell of a downer when your mother treats you as though you were deranged. On the other hand, I try to make the best of it. I’ve got more than one voice in my head, and at least one of them is telling me that I’m doing the right thing and that “Hey, you look pretty good” or “Hey, that was a darn good joke you told.” For every embarrassing conversation that gets played back in my head for some reason, I get a nice positive experience played back some other time. I dunno.
I don’t really practice what I preach. Well, I do, in that I participate in long-term thinking and I seriously don’t let my judgments affect my behavior, but I am not great at expressing myself. I say that here in an expressive essay, sure, but in person I’m really very shy. Like retardedly shy, if you’ve ever spent any time with me, you’d probably notice that. I’ve been working on that, trying to put myself out there more, but it’s still pretty hard. It’s not really that I’m afraid of people, it’s just that I’m afraid that I will go and put myself out there and then hear that cynical part of me talking back to myself. I dunno, I guess I’m just being typical. I better shut up now. I like the people I have been hanging out with forever now okay because I know I can be myself with them and they won’t just up and leave. Maybe that’s it. Maybe it’s an abandonment thing.
ANYWAY I hope this essay has left you with a little more understanding of who I am. I’d fill these things with my own conclusions, but then you’d just be hearing who I think I am, and not me per se. I am glad that some people bother to read these. I was told once or twice by anonymous to put them in a text file and keep them on my computer and never share them, but then where would I be? What would be the purpose of expressing yourself if you’re not communicating it to someone else? Of course all forms of self-expression are regarded as pointless egocentrism by anonymous, as that is their goal and purpose for being anonymous in the first place. It’s really very interesting.
Monday, May 3, 2010
The New Locality.
Humans escaped Africa by working together. Small tribes of people shared knowledge, tools, food, and love. This altruism is the key factor in humanity’s dominance over all of nature. None of us is as strong as all of us, a concept only shared by colonies of insects in the wild. We worked hard to get where we are today, and most importantly, we worked together. This is true in every society, in every culture, all across history. Altruism is the single most important factor in our survival, more than any amount of intelligence, any number of weapons, or any development in agriculture. Nowadays, however, we don’t live in tribes. We don’t live in communities that have to work together for survival. It’s perfectly possible and incredibly common for people to get along just fine without knowing anyone in their neighborhood. My parents didn’t have any friends. Friends and the like are for school, where you’re forced to rub up with other people and navigate socially. Once you’re done with schooling, all you have to deal with is co-workers, who you don’t get to choose. There’s no reason to make friends, so many people don’t. And why should they? Having friends is tough. There is all sorts of interpersonal drama inevitable with any size of group. You can avoid any of that altogether by simply not having friends. You can’t be disappointed if you don’t care about anyone enough to expect things from them.
That’s the world we live in today, here in suburban middle class America at least. Social interaction is voluntary and altruism outdated. Only here in this society, only here in this culture will you hear the idea that humans are all “competing” or that we’re all “ruthless motherfuckers who would stop at nothing for want of some resource” or the idea that humans are “inherently selfish.” It’s not surprising. We live in a culture that gives us the luxury of being selfish, but without significant moral or historical grounding for this attitude, so we start making the assumption that it’s just a base part of human nature and we selectively cherry-pick examples from nature or history or biology to support this simply so that we can justify our culture to ourselves. It’s not that we’re heartless. It’s not that we’ve stopped being altruistic. We just don’t live in a time or a place that supports it. Americans grow up and get out of high school and typically leave their homes and travel some fairly large distances away from their families and hometowns. We have to. We need to go where the jobs are to make a living. Our locality is determined by the fiscal potential of a place, much like nomads traveling the desert in search of oases. The difference is that now it is just you traveling, not your family or your tribe. So communities are destroyed simply by dint of necessity. It’s not a new thing, not at all. Here is a Time article from 1972 covering a book discussing exactly that. The author mentions that his closest relative is 110 miles away. How close is your family? I have two living relatives within fifty miles. Every other one is at least 300 miles away.
So here we have a situation that is anathema to the very functioning that humans developed to survive. It’s being held together by artificial concepts like money and the over-emphasis of very real concepts like individualism, but it’s not enough, and people know that. Have you ever wondered why high school musical is so popular that they went back in time and made a prequel called grease? Have you ever heard the phrase “high school was the best 4 years of my life?” What makes high school so magical and different? It’s the community. It’s the fact that everyone knows everyone else. That jokes can be shared across a huge body of people because they’re all familiar with the subject matter. That the people you see are the same people you’re going to see for the next four years. It is magical. It is totally outside the scope of adult experience. Like it or not, here in America and now at this time, you’re not likely to experience anything like it ever again. Sometimes I describe Las Positas as “high school part 2.” It would be true, except that there is no real sense of attachment to LasPo. Even at the larger schools, unless you’re in a fraternity or a member of dozens of clubs, the experience is just a hollow mockery of what high school was. People realize that. That’s why high school is so thoroughly fetishized in our culture. That’s why ridiculous things like alumni clubs, yearbooks, reunions, letter jackets, and all that stuff exist. When you get a job, you don’t take a lot of pictures and conglomerate your experience into a book every year. If you’re lucky there may be an employee of the month program or the occasional snacks in the breakroom.
So we do realize that we need community. We realize it to the point of worship. And we do try our best. There are dozens of clubs and groups and hangout spots even here in Livermore, all trying to keep a membership going and find people with similar interests to do stuff with. Heck, before it became over-saturated thanks to starbucks and its ilk, coffeeshops used to be a major hangout for the literati. But none of these are working, because not enough people care or are aware of their existence or are too scared to try or they simply don’t like and don’t trust strangers. That’s understandable; strangers are pretty much the most horrifying thing you’ll meet on a day to day basis. Other people walking around with the free agency and potential to kill you are good enough reason for many to stay in. But even so, everyone wants to “be a part of something,” even if that something is hating strangers. Humans are incredibly community oriented. What’s stopping us is not internal or mystical or interesting, it’s just simple geography. We live too fucking far from each other.
That’s not really new either. We spread across the U.S. pretty quick and spaced ourselves out quite a lot, under the (correct) assumption that the land would be totally worth something someday. For a long time, we didn’t have any real way of distant communications. There was the mail, which you could get on trains and such, but that still took a fairly large amount of time and was largely unavailable to most folks until the middle to late 19th century. Then we invented the telegraph, which was just like mail, but faster and shorter. It was rare and not particularly widespread until we ended up building lines all over the place. Good timing too, because we invented the telephone shortly after, which used those lines. And woah. Suddenly you’re hearing voices from the other side of the country. The phone played and still plays a huge role in the American life today. It has long since displaced mail as the primary method through which families keep in touch. It’s just something about hearing the human voice. Now we have the internet.
The internet blows the doors open for non-local interactions. It took all of our previous methods of communication, combined them, and added more. Want to send a letter? Send an e-mail. Want to have a chat with someone? Use any of the dozens of voice transmission services available for free. Want to post on a bulletin board for people in your area? Craigslist. Want to make friends with people who have similar interests? Join one of the hundreds of thousands of internet forums or BBSs. Hell, just want to talk to strangers and see their faces? Chatroulette is but one of several websites that do just that. Want to share the stuff you do with your time? Take your pick of twitter, facebook, tumblr, livestream, whatever. It’s amazing. This is where it’s at. These forums are communities, with personalities, drama, crises, all of the things that would affect a community in real life. Even better, these communities are totally voluntary unlike early human tribes, so you can be certain to find people who actually do think like you or share your interests. And if it upsets you, you can simply walk out without the bothersome worry of dying in the wild. At last we have overcome the problems of distance and isolation. At last we have transcended the physicality of our bodies and discovered a new locality, one that is not limited by petty things like “proximity” or “propinquity.”
In the end, though, it’s me sitting here with my laptop. Mern, as much as I love her, is just a blinking icon and some text and some low resolution video. Ina is a girl who I might have met once but I probably wouldn’t recognize in real life. Emily is a shout “hey you” and a fleeting glance. Both Gavins are just static pictures and interesting conversations to me. Ryan is an identity on a forum I was banned from plus some pictures. Adam is a guy I met based solely on his putting his aim screenname on 4chan. None of these people are “real” to me in any traditional sense. No matter how complicated and thorough interactions on the internet become, they’ll never be the same as being physically near someone. No matter how many quizzes are taken and pages liked, who you are on the internet is still a grossly distorted version of who you are in person. Many are comfortable with this facsimile, just as many use it only as a supplement to their “real” lives. It fills a need, even if not as satisfactorily as it could. Socialization lite, now without the potential anguish of a “Real” relationship. Still, physicality exists. Still, locality is a barrier. Still, I am trapped here in myself.
That’s the world we live in today, here in suburban middle class America at least. Social interaction is voluntary and altruism outdated. Only here in this society, only here in this culture will you hear the idea that humans are all “competing” or that we’re all “ruthless motherfuckers who would stop at nothing for want of some resource” or the idea that humans are “inherently selfish.” It’s not surprising. We live in a culture that gives us the luxury of being selfish, but without significant moral or historical grounding for this attitude, so we start making the assumption that it’s just a base part of human nature and we selectively cherry-pick examples from nature or history or biology to support this simply so that we can justify our culture to ourselves. It’s not that we’re heartless. It’s not that we’ve stopped being altruistic. We just don’t live in a time or a place that supports it. Americans grow up and get out of high school and typically leave their homes and travel some fairly large distances away from their families and hometowns. We have to. We need to go where the jobs are to make a living. Our locality is determined by the fiscal potential of a place, much like nomads traveling the desert in search of oases. The difference is that now it is just you traveling, not your family or your tribe. So communities are destroyed simply by dint of necessity. It’s not a new thing, not at all. Here is a Time article from 1972 covering a book discussing exactly that. The author mentions that his closest relative is 110 miles away. How close is your family? I have two living relatives within fifty miles. Every other one is at least 300 miles away.
So here we have a situation that is anathema to the very functioning that humans developed to survive. It’s being held together by artificial concepts like money and the over-emphasis of very real concepts like individualism, but it’s not enough, and people know that. Have you ever wondered why high school musical is so popular that they went back in time and made a prequel called grease? Have you ever heard the phrase “high school was the best 4 years of my life?” What makes high school so magical and different? It’s the community. It’s the fact that everyone knows everyone else. That jokes can be shared across a huge body of people because they’re all familiar with the subject matter. That the people you see are the same people you’re going to see for the next four years. It is magical. It is totally outside the scope of adult experience. Like it or not, here in America and now at this time, you’re not likely to experience anything like it ever again. Sometimes I describe Las Positas as “high school part 2.” It would be true, except that there is no real sense of attachment to LasPo. Even at the larger schools, unless you’re in a fraternity or a member of dozens of clubs, the experience is just a hollow mockery of what high school was. People realize that. That’s why high school is so thoroughly fetishized in our culture. That’s why ridiculous things like alumni clubs, yearbooks, reunions, letter jackets, and all that stuff exist. When you get a job, you don’t take a lot of pictures and conglomerate your experience into a book every year. If you’re lucky there may be an employee of the month program or the occasional snacks in the breakroom.
So we do realize that we need community. We realize it to the point of worship. And we do try our best. There are dozens of clubs and groups and hangout spots even here in Livermore, all trying to keep a membership going and find people with similar interests to do stuff with. Heck, before it became over-saturated thanks to starbucks and its ilk, coffeeshops used to be a major hangout for the literati. But none of these are working, because not enough people care or are aware of their existence or are too scared to try or they simply don’t like and don’t trust strangers. That’s understandable; strangers are pretty much the most horrifying thing you’ll meet on a day to day basis. Other people walking around with the free agency and potential to kill you are good enough reason for many to stay in. But even so, everyone wants to “be a part of something,” even if that something is hating strangers. Humans are incredibly community oriented. What’s stopping us is not internal or mystical or interesting, it’s just simple geography. We live too fucking far from each other.
That’s not really new either. We spread across the U.S. pretty quick and spaced ourselves out quite a lot, under the (correct) assumption that the land would be totally worth something someday. For a long time, we didn’t have any real way of distant communications. There was the mail, which you could get on trains and such, but that still took a fairly large amount of time and was largely unavailable to most folks until the middle to late 19th century. Then we invented the telegraph, which was just like mail, but faster and shorter. It was rare and not particularly widespread until we ended up building lines all over the place. Good timing too, because we invented the telephone shortly after, which used those lines. And woah. Suddenly you’re hearing voices from the other side of the country. The phone played and still plays a huge role in the American life today. It has long since displaced mail as the primary method through which families keep in touch. It’s just something about hearing the human voice. Now we have the internet.
The internet blows the doors open for non-local interactions. It took all of our previous methods of communication, combined them, and added more. Want to send a letter? Send an e-mail. Want to have a chat with someone? Use any of the dozens of voice transmission services available for free. Want to post on a bulletin board for people in your area? Craigslist. Want to make friends with people who have similar interests? Join one of the hundreds of thousands of internet forums or BBSs. Hell, just want to talk to strangers and see their faces? Chatroulette is but one of several websites that do just that. Want to share the stuff you do with your time? Take your pick of twitter, facebook, tumblr, livestream, whatever. It’s amazing. This is where it’s at. These forums are communities, with personalities, drama, crises, all of the things that would affect a community in real life. Even better, these communities are totally voluntary unlike early human tribes, so you can be certain to find people who actually do think like you or share your interests. And if it upsets you, you can simply walk out without the bothersome worry of dying in the wild. At last we have overcome the problems of distance and isolation. At last we have transcended the physicality of our bodies and discovered a new locality, one that is not limited by petty things like “proximity” or “propinquity.”
In the end, though, it’s me sitting here with my laptop. Mern, as much as I love her, is just a blinking icon and some text and some low resolution video. Ina is a girl who I might have met once but I probably wouldn’t recognize in real life. Emily is a shout “hey you” and a fleeting glance. Both Gavins are just static pictures and interesting conversations to me. Ryan is an identity on a forum I was banned from plus some pictures. Adam is a guy I met based solely on his putting his aim screenname on 4chan. None of these people are “real” to me in any traditional sense. No matter how complicated and thorough interactions on the internet become, they’ll never be the same as being physically near someone. No matter how many quizzes are taken and pages liked, who you are on the internet is still a grossly distorted version of who you are in person. Many are comfortable with this facsimile, just as many use it only as a supplement to their “real” lives. It fills a need, even if not as satisfactorily as it could. Socialization lite, now without the potential anguish of a “Real” relationship. Still, physicality exists. Still, locality is a barrier. Still, I am trapped here in myself.
Tuesday, April 20, 2010
Vance asked me last Saturday “are you going to go home and write another status about how your friends redeemed yourselves?” and I was like “what? How can you redeem yourselves again? You already redeemed yourselves once and you haven’t fucked that up yet.” I think at the time I was missing the point. Apparently I know people who legitimately care what I think of them, which is entirely fascinating to me because it happens to be near a time when I’ve finally managed to get over caring so much what other people think of me, at least to the crippling degree I did before (I still fret constantly over stupid things I’ve said and done, I just do my best to not let it affect my behavior) and it’s throwing me for something of a loop.
In the same week I talked to two (2) different people who professed a desire to live a life of hermitage (they also know each other. I am intensely interested in whether or not they have said this to each other and formed some sort of mutual hermit pact.) which I find endlessly fascinating, as these two are people that I think of as being very “cool” and “sociable” because I hear about all sorts of parties and things that they do that I don’t and I feel dumb and a bit jealous. It’s funny that they should mention hermitage to me, because frankly I’ve been there. When I was 14-15-16-17-18 that was all I wanted to do in life. Social interaction was too fucking scary. It took years to get out of that mindset, and those were pretty much years where I didn’t talk to anyone that wasn’t essentially virtual. I was invited to one thing by a crazy guy who I have immense respect for during that time and it was a ton of fun, though it scared the crap out of me at the time.
I’m really not saying “don’t do it, man” or anything, because frankly I think people should experience everything they can. I just feel a bit sad and dumb that they’re just now deciding to pursue this just after I finished realizing how shitty it really was. Plus I feel a bit ironic that they would tell me that they wanted to live a life totally away from people, because that’s essentially what I do.
Maybe I’m just being unrealistic. Mern tells me, though, about all this cool stuff she does with or did for her friends and I feel… well a bunch of stuff. Partly jealous, partly happy, partly some sort of vicarious pleasure in hearing about things that I’d like to think that I would do if I were in that situation. She’s the kind of person who bakes things for people and shows up at their dorms with candy and hugs when they’re sad and cries on the phone for hours when faraway friends have their mothers in the hospital and stuff like that. I just think “wow” most of the time when hearing this.
I tell people that I want to be a prophet, but I tend not to be clear on what exactly I want to be a prophet of (a religion where everyone is fucking everyone else all the time, I said once). I want to be a prophet of peace and love, I suppose. There’s some great words. Jamie Whyte terms them “hooray” words, words you can say and everyone will say “hooray!” like “justice” or “democracy.” They’re words that you can say and everyone in your audience will have a different idea of what it means. And by not elaborating you can avoid alienating some portion of your audience who disagrees with you. It’s a very popular political trick. I’ll go kind of against the grain here and define exactly what I mean by peace and love.
Peace as in the unconditional agreement not to harm other people. Don’t be a dick. On a personal scale, it’s pretty much unavoidable, but on an international scale, it’s downright unforgivable. There is no fucking reason to start a war with another country. There never has been and there never will be. This includes interfering with another country’s governance. Putting economic and political pressure on other nations simply because you don’t trust their motives is schoolyard bullshit and totally inexcusable, especially from nations who spend so much time trumpeting their impressive “freedom.” Fortunately, globalization should cover this. The continued economic and cultural merging of the globe should hopefully result in a relatively homogenous world and (I dare to dream) political stability under a unified world government. Or it will collapse into petty squabbles over resources or fascinating proxy wars between corporations. We’ll see.
Love as in the understanding that every other person is another person; complete with all the same fears, hopes, desires and needs as you. I envision a world where everyone has a friend or three like mern, and everyone does what she does for everyone else. Because being lonely really fucking sucks. Love is about the connections people have to one another, not some mystical ideal, not a single emotion. Love is turning to your fellow man and saying “He too, is me.” It is about turning to your fellow woman and saying “She too, is me.”
I’m not saying everything will be perfect. Far from it. Putting yourself out there and caring how other people think is almost always a risk. Interacting with other people and investing yourself into these interactions is almost always a whirlwind of suck. There will always be relationships that fall through, spurned lovers, cheating, lying, ugly rumors, and so on. I just want no one to be alone in this. Everyone needs a friend like Mern, and they’re only lying to themselves when they say they don’t.
I hate all of this. It scares the living Jesus out of me. (Literally. I renounce Christianity every time someone shouts “boo!” behind my back) I spent my life acting more or less like this song here by Regina Spektor that made me cry so much when I first heard it I tried to go to sleep to make it stop. It just reminded me of how totally lonely I really am. (Yeah yeah, what a fucking pussy loser. Crying over a song he must be a huge fucking faggot. You can say what you like, but I already said it to myself. You’d just be repeating after me. I can outdo Gavin for self-deprecation; I just don’t go on about it.)
ANYWAY. My point is that I spent so long trying to get along without anyone else that I’m just absolutely frightened of opening up to anyone. But I’m not a brain-dead moron like Daniel, and I realize that Opening up is exactly what I need if I am ever going to get out of this horrible funk. If I ever expect anyone to be friends with me, first I’m gonna have to be friends with them, and all. I remember hearing that a lot in elementary school. I still think this just goes to show that you learn everything you really need to learn about the world from Disney movies and kid stories and that just gets fucked up later by reactionary cynicism that declares “Oh ho, that must not be true because it was made for kids” or that ridiculously pervasive lie “It’s not that simple.”
So I am spending all my time trying to not be a hermit, to the best of my ability and tolerance for doing things out of the norm. If you click on my profile there (or take my word for it, if you’re reading this on my blog) I copied and pasted the Meyers-briggs personality thing from some site or other that I consistently get, ENTP. There’s a bit I particularly like that goes “Aside from those two areas, ENTPs tend to be oblivious of the rest of humanity, except as an audience -- good, bad, or potential.” which I find pretty accurate. I hate myself for it, but I’m pretty judgmental of everyone I meet, though I do my best to not let it color my actual actions, I’m polite to everyone regardless of how hideous ore dumb I think they are. That said, it does provide myself with ammunition to argue myself out of making friends with people. Stuff like that. As if the cognitive dissonance wasn’t apparent enough, I more or less love everyone I know. I am annoyingly uninterested in my own activities to the point that I will pretty much drop everything and go help someone else if I really thought it would help.
I dunno, here I am back to talking about myself and making statements that I’ll regret and hate in 3-5 days. I should probably stop here.
I just feel like dicks lately and I wanted to tell no one in particular. Actually I wanted to tell one guy I really respect, but he raincheck’d. Now I’ll feel dumb bringing it up again because I already wrote about it and I variate wildly from assuming everyone reads everything I write to assuming that no one reads anything I write.
Yep, I’m nuts.
In the same week I talked to two (2) different people who professed a desire to live a life of hermitage (they also know each other. I am intensely interested in whether or not they have said this to each other and formed some sort of mutual hermit pact.) which I find endlessly fascinating, as these two are people that I think of as being very “cool” and “sociable” because I hear about all sorts of parties and things that they do that I don’t and I feel dumb and a bit jealous. It’s funny that they should mention hermitage to me, because frankly I’ve been there. When I was 14-15-16-17-18 that was all I wanted to do in life. Social interaction was too fucking scary. It took years to get out of that mindset, and those were pretty much years where I didn’t talk to anyone that wasn’t essentially virtual. I was invited to one thing by a crazy guy who I have immense respect for during that time and it was a ton of fun, though it scared the crap out of me at the time.
I’m really not saying “don’t do it, man” or anything, because frankly I think people should experience everything they can. I just feel a bit sad and dumb that they’re just now deciding to pursue this just after I finished realizing how shitty it really was. Plus I feel a bit ironic that they would tell me that they wanted to live a life totally away from people, because that’s essentially what I do.
Maybe I’m just being unrealistic. Mern tells me, though, about all this cool stuff she does with or did for her friends and I feel… well a bunch of stuff. Partly jealous, partly happy, partly some sort of vicarious pleasure in hearing about things that I’d like to think that I would do if I were in that situation. She’s the kind of person who bakes things for people and shows up at their dorms with candy and hugs when they’re sad and cries on the phone for hours when faraway friends have their mothers in the hospital and stuff like that. I just think “wow” most of the time when hearing this.
I tell people that I want to be a prophet, but I tend not to be clear on what exactly I want to be a prophet of (a religion where everyone is fucking everyone else all the time, I said once). I want to be a prophet of peace and love, I suppose. There’s some great words. Jamie Whyte terms them “hooray” words, words you can say and everyone will say “hooray!” like “justice” or “democracy.” They’re words that you can say and everyone in your audience will have a different idea of what it means. And by not elaborating you can avoid alienating some portion of your audience who disagrees with you. It’s a very popular political trick. I’ll go kind of against the grain here and define exactly what I mean by peace and love.
Peace as in the unconditional agreement not to harm other people. Don’t be a dick. On a personal scale, it’s pretty much unavoidable, but on an international scale, it’s downright unforgivable. There is no fucking reason to start a war with another country. There never has been and there never will be. This includes interfering with another country’s governance. Putting economic and political pressure on other nations simply because you don’t trust their motives is schoolyard bullshit and totally inexcusable, especially from nations who spend so much time trumpeting their impressive “freedom.” Fortunately, globalization should cover this. The continued economic and cultural merging of the globe should hopefully result in a relatively homogenous world and (I dare to dream) political stability under a unified world government. Or it will collapse into petty squabbles over resources or fascinating proxy wars between corporations. We’ll see.
Love as in the understanding that every other person is another person; complete with all the same fears, hopes, desires and needs as you. I envision a world where everyone has a friend or three like mern, and everyone does what she does for everyone else. Because being lonely really fucking sucks. Love is about the connections people have to one another, not some mystical ideal, not a single emotion. Love is turning to your fellow man and saying “He too, is me.” It is about turning to your fellow woman and saying “She too, is me.”
I’m not saying everything will be perfect. Far from it. Putting yourself out there and caring how other people think is almost always a risk. Interacting with other people and investing yourself into these interactions is almost always a whirlwind of suck. There will always be relationships that fall through, spurned lovers, cheating, lying, ugly rumors, and so on. I just want no one to be alone in this. Everyone needs a friend like Mern, and they’re only lying to themselves when they say they don’t.
I hate all of this. It scares the living Jesus out of me. (Literally. I renounce Christianity every time someone shouts “boo!” behind my back) I spent my life acting more or less like this song here by Regina Spektor that made me cry so much when I first heard it I tried to go to sleep to make it stop. It just reminded me of how totally lonely I really am. (Yeah yeah, what a fucking pussy loser. Crying over a song he must be a huge fucking faggot. You can say what you like, but I already said it to myself. You’d just be repeating after me. I can outdo Gavin for self-deprecation; I just don’t go on about it.)
ANYWAY. My point is that I spent so long trying to get along without anyone else that I’m just absolutely frightened of opening up to anyone. But I’m not a brain-dead moron like Daniel, and I realize that Opening up is exactly what I need if I am ever going to get out of this horrible funk. If I ever expect anyone to be friends with me, first I’m gonna have to be friends with them, and all. I remember hearing that a lot in elementary school. I still think this just goes to show that you learn everything you really need to learn about the world from Disney movies and kid stories and that just gets fucked up later by reactionary cynicism that declares “Oh ho, that must not be true because it was made for kids” or that ridiculously pervasive lie “It’s not that simple.”
So I am spending all my time trying to not be a hermit, to the best of my ability and tolerance for doing things out of the norm. If you click on my profile there (or take my word for it, if you’re reading this on my blog) I copied and pasted the Meyers-briggs personality thing from some site or other that I consistently get, ENTP. There’s a bit I particularly like that goes “Aside from those two areas, ENTPs tend to be oblivious of the rest of humanity, except as an audience -- good, bad, or potential.” which I find pretty accurate. I hate myself for it, but I’m pretty judgmental of everyone I meet, though I do my best to not let it color my actual actions, I’m polite to everyone regardless of how hideous ore dumb I think they are. That said, it does provide myself with ammunition to argue myself out of making friends with people. Stuff like that. As if the cognitive dissonance wasn’t apparent enough, I more or less love everyone I know. I am annoyingly uninterested in my own activities to the point that I will pretty much drop everything and go help someone else if I really thought it would help.
I dunno, here I am back to talking about myself and making statements that I’ll regret and hate in 3-5 days. I should probably stop here.
I just feel like dicks lately and I wanted to tell no one in particular. Actually I wanted to tell one guy I really respect, but he raincheck’d. Now I’ll feel dumb bringing it up again because I already wrote about it and I variate wildly from assuming everyone reads everything I write to assuming that no one reads anything I write.
Yep, I’m nuts.
Tuesday, April 13, 2010
“Our greatest fear is not that we are inadequate, but that we are powerful beyond measure.”
I am a lucky person. I get to listen to impassioned speeches about how great las positas is because when I go to “real” college (or “a four-year”) there won’t be all this support to help me learn the material. I’ll be in a big room with two hundred students and a professor that doesn’t know my name and the class will be entirely lecture and then a midterm and a final and that’s it. The only people who will really be helping me will be graduate student researchers (interestingly enough, the very people my aunt hires at berkeley) who are essentially TAs. It will apparently be a horrifying experience, compared to the high-school-like student numbers at laspo. I am very lucky I do not have to go through this.
The thing is, it’s the high-school-like classes that are killing my grade and me as I keep getting hit with mundane busywork assignments that serve only to inflate the grade, rather than assist in comprehension. Sure, ultimately it’s my responsibility to complete this stuff, but when I can take a class that’s purely a midterm and a final and get an immensely better grade than a class that has homework and projects up the wazoo, there’s clearly a problem somewhere. Humh.
“Jake you’re just a lazy asshole”
Yeah, pretty much.
It’s my choice to be one, I suppose. It’s my freedom here in America to choose lazy assholedom over studious application of talent. Capitalists and libertarians might say “well, you’ll never get anything that way. There’s no way to make money without working hard (besides inheritance, which you clearly don’t have).” I hugely beg to differ. If I wanted to make money I could totally do it. Lots of lazy assholes do, somehow. They trade stocks. They make connections in a business and jump straight to manager. They start businesses and cheat on their taxes. They start websites based off of other people’s ideas and then spin them off to be sold for huge chunks of money tosuckers larger businesses who think that the advertising revenues alone is totally worth it.
“Jake, those people work hard.”
No, they don’t. They most certainly do not work as hard as the millions of people who hold more than one job just to pay rent and utilities. What’s the difference? They’ve got connections. Or they’re smarter. Or they’ve just got a different worldview. I dunno. Tim Rogers, still my favorite writer even though he hasn’t responded to my legit and totally awesome game ideas, wrote recently “All around the world, people like myself and Bob [Pelloni, of bob’s game fame] are finding ourselves in a state where legitimately earning money is about as complicated as downloading pirated music.” And it’s sorta kinda true. It’s really bugging me for two reasons, those being “fucking fuck you capitalism” and “why am I not getting some of that?”
I dunno, this stuff sucks dicks to think about. I have been wildly blitzing through money lately, a shocking twist from last year when making rent was such a huge deal that I would often end up finding myself with exactly twenty dollars to last me two weeks and budgeting out groceries to fit. Now I ended up moving back in with my dad and my attitude has gone totally downhill (so regardless of what happens this fall I’m moving the hell out). I don’t know what to tell you.
I love school, though. I can’t tell you how much joy I take in listening to lectures on rituals and anthropoidal evolution and political maneuverings and all of this stuff. I want to be in academia for the rest of my life. I want to do research and learn everything I can about anything I feel like. Leave no stone unturned, no argument mystified. I want to be one of those people that news magazines call up and say “hey what is your opinion on this?” and I whomp out some two thousand totally accurate words stating and defining a position. I want to start a cultural movement that sweeps the entire world and paves way for a proper unified world government and hegemony, giving globalization a real chance at succeeding and incentivizing space exploration as the next logical step of human existence, now that all of earth is one unified government and wars are outmoded methods of expression and limited to skirmishes between rival local factions that are quickly pacified by a council of affair and police corps made of the countrymen of that region.
Yes.
It’s all very radical and I’ll bet people who’ll argue against it are a dime a dozen. I want to shoot these people. Ugh. I hate traditionalists. I hate people who thrive solely on nostalgia for a time they hardly remember. I hate people who are old and don’t appreciate the new. I’m not saying that novelty is really a great factor in decision making (no suh) but for christ’s sake, neither is nostalgia. Seriously, social conservatives and reaganites and all those people who seem to think the middle ages were the best ages because “knights were still chivalrous and wars were fought with honor” (HAH) and then they dress up and prance around and pine for something they have absolutely no experience with outside of what little writing and oral histories survived them are infuriating. It gets worse as the years move up. People who whine about how cell phones are destroying the capacity for people to form communities and neighborhoods (that shit died in the fifties) or that the internet and video games are the devil because they’re teaching kids things without censorship are even worse. No renaissance fan, no matter how rabid, legitimately considers the idea of re-instituting a medieval society. At worst they simply want to integrate parts of it they like into the modern era. But those other folks have hundreds of thousands of people who support the censorship and destruction of our communications infrastructure simply for the cause of recreating an idyllic past that exists solely in their minds.
It’s a stubborn, dogmatic point of view, and it’s remarkably difficult to defeat. Just a hint of the mindset was demonstrated in the demonization of the healthcare bill and the uncanny lockstep reaction to its passage. This is not the way humans will survive. This is not the way we have survived. The reason we have all this great shit, hell the reason these people can behave like this is because some humans were deviant little bastards who decided the world ought to be different than it was or is. Social conservatism is literally the cancer that is killing the human race. They’re eating the telomeres of society. We’re going to end up with another dark age because we’re halting innovation in favor of delusion.
Man, that just bugs the fuck out of me.
So let’s kick ass, you and me. Let’s tell those fuckers to shove it up their crusty assholes and forge ahead to a brilliant new future. Let’s maniacally flail around in desperation, doing everything we can to do anything we can. Let us lose the wisdom to know the difference between what we can and can’t change, but gain the courage to change it anyway. Let us ditch the patience and understanding to accept what is and forge our own path through life. Let us make mistakes, let us triumph, let us fail spectacularly and succeed amazingly.
Let us live our lives on our terms, not the terms others shackle us with. We are alive and we are always free.
The thing is, it’s the high-school-like classes that are killing my grade and me as I keep getting hit with mundane busywork assignments that serve only to inflate the grade, rather than assist in comprehension. Sure, ultimately it’s my responsibility to complete this stuff, but when I can take a class that’s purely a midterm and a final and get an immensely better grade than a class that has homework and projects up the wazoo, there’s clearly a problem somewhere. Humh.
“Jake you’re just a lazy asshole”
Yeah, pretty much.
It’s my choice to be one, I suppose. It’s my freedom here in America to choose lazy assholedom over studious application of talent. Capitalists and libertarians might say “well, you’ll never get anything that way. There’s no way to make money without working hard (besides inheritance, which you clearly don’t have).” I hugely beg to differ. If I wanted to make money I could totally do it. Lots of lazy assholes do, somehow. They trade stocks. They make connections in a business and jump straight to manager. They start businesses and cheat on their taxes. They start websites based off of other people’s ideas and then spin them off to be sold for huge chunks of money to
“Jake, those people work hard.”
No, they don’t. They most certainly do not work as hard as the millions of people who hold more than one job just to pay rent and utilities. What’s the difference? They’ve got connections. Or they’re smarter. Or they’ve just got a different worldview. I dunno. Tim Rogers, still my favorite writer even though he hasn’t responded to my legit and totally awesome game ideas, wrote recently “All around the world, people like myself and Bob [Pelloni, of bob’s game fame] are finding ourselves in a state where legitimately earning money is about as complicated as downloading pirated music.” And it’s sorta kinda true. It’s really bugging me for two reasons, those being “fucking fuck you capitalism” and “why am I not getting some of that?”
I dunno, this stuff sucks dicks to think about. I have been wildly blitzing through money lately, a shocking twist from last year when making rent was such a huge deal that I would often end up finding myself with exactly twenty dollars to last me two weeks and budgeting out groceries to fit. Now I ended up moving back in with my dad and my attitude has gone totally downhill (so regardless of what happens this fall I’m moving the hell out). I don’t know what to tell you.
I love school, though. I can’t tell you how much joy I take in listening to lectures on rituals and anthropoidal evolution and political maneuverings and all of this stuff. I want to be in academia for the rest of my life. I want to do research and learn everything I can about anything I feel like. Leave no stone unturned, no argument mystified. I want to be one of those people that news magazines call up and say “hey what is your opinion on this?” and I whomp out some two thousand totally accurate words stating and defining a position. I want to start a cultural movement that sweeps the entire world and paves way for a proper unified world government and hegemony, giving globalization a real chance at succeeding and incentivizing space exploration as the next logical step of human existence, now that all of earth is one unified government and wars are outmoded methods of expression and limited to skirmishes between rival local factions that are quickly pacified by a council of affair and police corps made of the countrymen of that region.
Yes.
It’s all very radical and I’ll bet people who’ll argue against it are a dime a dozen. I want to shoot these people. Ugh. I hate traditionalists. I hate people who thrive solely on nostalgia for a time they hardly remember. I hate people who are old and don’t appreciate the new. I’m not saying that novelty is really a great factor in decision making (no suh) but for christ’s sake, neither is nostalgia. Seriously, social conservatives and reaganites and all those people who seem to think the middle ages were the best ages because “knights were still chivalrous and wars were fought with honor” (HAH) and then they dress up and prance around and pine for something they have absolutely no experience with outside of what little writing and oral histories survived them are infuriating. It gets worse as the years move up. People who whine about how cell phones are destroying the capacity for people to form communities and neighborhoods (that shit died in the fifties) or that the internet and video games are the devil because they’re teaching kids things without censorship are even worse. No renaissance fan, no matter how rabid, legitimately considers the idea of re-instituting a medieval society. At worst they simply want to integrate parts of it they like into the modern era. But those other folks have hundreds of thousands of people who support the censorship and destruction of our communications infrastructure simply for the cause of recreating an idyllic past that exists solely in their minds.
It’s a stubborn, dogmatic point of view, and it’s remarkably difficult to defeat. Just a hint of the mindset was demonstrated in the demonization of the healthcare bill and the uncanny lockstep reaction to its passage. This is not the way humans will survive. This is not the way we have survived. The reason we have all this great shit, hell the reason these people can behave like this is because some humans were deviant little bastards who decided the world ought to be different than it was or is. Social conservatism is literally the cancer that is killing the human race. They’re eating the telomeres of society. We’re going to end up with another dark age because we’re halting innovation in favor of delusion.
Man, that just bugs the fuck out of me.
So let’s kick ass, you and me. Let’s tell those fuckers to shove it up their crusty assholes and forge ahead to a brilliant new future. Let’s maniacally flail around in desperation, doing everything we can to do anything we can. Let us lose the wisdom to know the difference between what we can and can’t change, but gain the courage to change it anyway. Let us ditch the patience and understanding to accept what is and forge our own path through life. Let us make mistakes, let us triumph, let us fail spectacularly and succeed amazingly.
Let us live our lives on our terms, not the terms others shackle us with. We are alive and we are always free.
Saturday, April 10, 2010
Turns out I can totally backdate these.
Good morning. I went swimming today. It was fun, but I ate too much pizza last night so I felt kind of ill afterward. Woah hold on. I just saw a commercial for a scooter with a swivel wheel. Woah. Man. Woah, here’s a commercial about reading the serving size on the food you eat.
What the fuck? Being a kid these days is weird.
But this super hero super squad show is great! It’s condensing all of those complex and horrible plotlines in the comics to a sort of nice summary. They’ve got all sorts of stuff just in this episode. Skrulls, the super-skrull, hulk and things weird animosity, fucking thanos and his infinity gauntlet, which appears not to be as great as it usually is. “zounds! My symbolic tool of righteous aggression!” Out of thor losing his hammer (which is also symbolic for a penis, aww yeah)
Oh hey check it out. The same commercial for zoobooks they had on like fucking 12 years ago when I was a kid. I remember zoobooks. I had a ton.
Oh god. The skrull invasion plan was on a facebook page.
Oh god.
I think I’m in love.
Oh, I see. Thanos was really a skrull. Explains the lack of ULTIMATE UNIVERSE DESTROYING POWER. “it makes string cheese. For all their advances, the skrulls were never able to make string cheese. String theorists would make a fortune from this tube.”
Oh man. That was so great.
Anyway, yeah being a kid is hella weird these days. Like there are so many things that companies are expected to push on you to keep you healthy. Responsibility for this thing has shifted largely from parents to the entertainment companies that sell things to parents for their kids. Why? Cause parents have money. also corporations are evil. Evil like taxes. Anyway so you grow up being told on the tv “go outside and jump around and do stuff. Stop watching tv” and you end up largely ignoring it cause what the fuck, you’re watching tv. God damn. If I wanted to be outside I would be outside.
Though, I guess it’s not really new. The spinach industry totally ran the popeye comic. If you learn nothing from it, you learn that hamburgers hake you fat and worthless and that spinach makes you beat up dudes you don’t like. Maybe I’m just being silly. I just get kind of annoyed when videogames ask me to take a break like once an hour. God damn, what happened to free enjoyment of the media I’m consuming? By George, I am going to write a book one of these days that between every chapter says “Get up and go outside and meet people, you horrible shut-in. This book will do nothing to help your life.” That way irate readers can’t sue me when they realize they’ve wasted their life reading a series of cheap starcrafty knockoffs (I’ll call them “Spacewar: the final war in space.” The first novel will be subtitled “the obscure threat” or “fighting advanced”) and become horrible neckbeards who spend their lives fapping to ships of the hot three titted alien bimbo chick and the shy nerdy girl with the glasses that maintains the space library.
Man, the other day I was at a borders wandering around and not buying things (pfft, paying for books. That’s what libraries are for. I have been not paying for things long before napster or any of that shiz) and I wandered into their study section. So that got me to thinking. There are absolutely hundreds of books in this section, right? There are all these books on. Passing all manner of tests: GREs, LSATS, AP courses, and so on. It got me to thinking how weird this was, that there’s an entire cottage industry of helping people pass these tests that are supposed to be indicative of how much a person has learned or exactly how smart they really are. So instead these tests become not about how smart a person is, but how much money they spent on study books, or how well they absorb these study books. What the hell is up with that? AP courses especially. They’re supposed to be something for students who find their regular classes mindlessly dull (*cough*) to look forward to, because they’re all college and at a higher level. Then the AP tests started counting for college credit (or maybe they always did. Dunno) and it became an important part of an achiever’s job to get a 5 on the tests so that they can secure an early start for their future college careers. Fuck the achievers man. They don’t give a shit about the material. Seriously, you talk to them. They have no passion beyond scoring that A. They treat school like a job.
And school is a job these days. Kids go to school to learn valuable knowledge for their future careers. It says so right on the mission statements of most high schools. That’s also fucked up. Why does a high school have a mission statement? No wonder everyone hates it. You don’t go to school to learn about the world around you. You go to school to pass a test and get a job that pays you money so you can afford to have kids and pass on your genes. School is just a means to an end, and that end is your inevitable death. If you’re lucky, your kids will have done well in their schools so they can afford to support you on top of their families and you die comfortably in a nice rest home.
“oh no, that is not me” you think. “I am destined for something much more fascinating and also I never want kids or to get married.” Ha. Ha. Ha. You don’t think that millions of other people don’t also think the exact same way? Simple economics and statistics dictate that your dream is foolish and irresponsible and simply not likely. What’s all the worse to me, is that these delusions are inevitable in an environment like this. You spend your childhood growing up and watching cool kids and cool people on tv and in movies doing awesome things and you decide that you also want to be cool and awesome and that eventually through sheer moxie or something, you too will obtain the coolness of these tv and movie people. Yes.
What the fuck? Being a kid these days is weird.
But this super hero super squad show is great! It’s condensing all of those complex and horrible plotlines in the comics to a sort of nice summary. They’ve got all sorts of stuff just in this episode. Skrulls, the super-skrull, hulk and things weird animosity, fucking thanos and his infinity gauntlet, which appears not to be as great as it usually is. “zounds! My symbolic tool of righteous aggression!” Out of thor losing his hammer (which is also symbolic for a penis, aww yeah)
Oh hey check it out. The same commercial for zoobooks they had on like fucking 12 years ago when I was a kid. I remember zoobooks. I had a ton.
Oh god. The skrull invasion plan was on a facebook page.
Oh god.
I think I’m in love.
Oh, I see. Thanos was really a skrull. Explains the lack of ULTIMATE UNIVERSE DESTROYING POWER. “it makes string cheese. For all their advances, the skrulls were never able to make string cheese. String theorists would make a fortune from this tube.”
Oh man. That was so great.
Anyway, yeah being a kid is hella weird these days. Like there are so many things that companies are expected to push on you to keep you healthy. Responsibility for this thing has shifted largely from parents to the entertainment companies that sell things to parents for their kids. Why? Cause parents have money. also corporations are evil. Evil like taxes. Anyway so you grow up being told on the tv “go outside and jump around and do stuff. Stop watching tv” and you end up largely ignoring it cause what the fuck, you’re watching tv. God damn. If I wanted to be outside I would be outside.
Though, I guess it’s not really new. The spinach industry totally ran the popeye comic. If you learn nothing from it, you learn that hamburgers hake you fat and worthless and that spinach makes you beat up dudes you don’t like. Maybe I’m just being silly. I just get kind of annoyed when videogames ask me to take a break like once an hour. God damn, what happened to free enjoyment of the media I’m consuming? By George, I am going to write a book one of these days that between every chapter says “Get up and go outside and meet people, you horrible shut-in. This book will do nothing to help your life.” That way irate readers can’t sue me when they realize they’ve wasted their life reading a series of cheap starcrafty knockoffs (I’ll call them “Spacewar: the final war in space.” The first novel will be subtitled “the obscure threat” or “fighting advanced”) and become horrible neckbeards who spend their lives fapping to ships of the hot three titted alien bimbo chick and the shy nerdy girl with the glasses that maintains the space library.
Man, the other day I was at a borders wandering around and not buying things (pfft, paying for books. That’s what libraries are for. I have been not paying for things long before napster or any of that shiz) and I wandered into their study section. So that got me to thinking. There are absolutely hundreds of books in this section, right? There are all these books on. Passing all manner of tests: GREs, LSATS, AP courses, and so on. It got me to thinking how weird this was, that there’s an entire cottage industry of helping people pass these tests that are supposed to be indicative of how much a person has learned or exactly how smart they really are. So instead these tests become not about how smart a person is, but how much money they spent on study books, or how well they absorb these study books. What the hell is up with that? AP courses especially. They’re supposed to be something for students who find their regular classes mindlessly dull (*cough*) to look forward to, because they’re all college and at a higher level. Then the AP tests started counting for college credit (or maybe they always did. Dunno) and it became an important part of an achiever’s job to get a 5 on the tests so that they can secure an early start for their future college careers. Fuck the achievers man. They don’t give a shit about the material. Seriously, you talk to them. They have no passion beyond scoring that A. They treat school like a job.
And school is a job these days. Kids go to school to learn valuable knowledge for their future careers. It says so right on the mission statements of most high schools. That’s also fucked up. Why does a high school have a mission statement? No wonder everyone hates it. You don’t go to school to learn about the world around you. You go to school to pass a test and get a job that pays you money so you can afford to have kids and pass on your genes. School is just a means to an end, and that end is your inevitable death. If you’re lucky, your kids will have done well in their schools so they can afford to support you on top of their families and you die comfortably in a nice rest home.
“oh no, that is not me” you think. “I am destined for something much more fascinating and also I never want kids or to get married.” Ha. Ha. Ha. You don’t think that millions of other people don’t also think the exact same way? Simple economics and statistics dictate that your dream is foolish and irresponsible and simply not likely. What’s all the worse to me, is that these delusions are inevitable in an environment like this. You spend your childhood growing up and watching cool kids and cool people on tv and in movies doing awesome things and you decide that you also want to be cool and awesome and that eventually through sheer moxie or something, you too will obtain the coolness of these tv and movie people. Yes.
Thursday, April 8, 2010
I used the word “I” 158 times in this document, not counting that one. Man I am so self-centered.
Woah man. I just watched an entire episode of aqua teen hunger force. I didn’t laugh once. What is this thing on tv for. And yet like a sucker I sat through the entire thing. I was thinking about making this into a rant about tv, but I thought “naw, no one actually watches tv any more.” At least hardly anyone I know does. Which is good. Good for you guys. Tv is awful and terrible and just awful.
It’s kind of fascinating to me how very ocular we are as a species. We evolved this vision essentially to help us avoid running into branches and to see fruits from afar and we’ve taken it to the point where we’ve got devices that are pretty much standard in pretty much everything that show us all manner of abstract information. It’s totally fascinating to me and probably inevitable for a species like –
You know what they say “if there’s snow on the fields, plow it from both ends”
Sorry, still watching tv.
Anyway, a species like us.
Wow that was the weirdest show. Titan maximum or something. It was sort of like a high speed webcomic.
By the way have I mentioned that I love webcomics? They’re so great. They’re a visually appealing way to get a nice story and some good characterization across. And since they’re pretty much self-published, censorship is non-existent. Like for serious, ever since I found “kong: the gay barbarian” I have not needed porn.
Huh. “drinky crow and gabby” (or something) was pretty interesting. It’s basically just “draw blood, guts, use bizarre 3d cell shading techniques.” But it had some fascinating writing. The show was a snappy commentary on the purpose and concept of god and religion, delivered entirely too quickly. I’ll be honest, it wasn’t very funny, but it was contemplative.
Anyway webcomics. Yeah man. I read them. I spent the last couple of days being absurdly depressed and reading the entirety of shortpacked and finally getting around to reading questionable content. I am so full of weird transformers references and witty indie band quoting I’m ready to burst. Man. I love the character work on both of them. They’re interesting people. Genuinely fascinating and pretty well developed. No blank and obvious stereotypes here. That’s what you get when you (let your heart win) get your stories raw. The less middlemen in the way of art, the closer it can hit home. That’s cool. I love it when people do things just for the hell of it, not because it will sell. And the internet is totally the best platform for this. Space on the internet is essentially unlimited, as it can grow by exactly the amount your thing needs. On tv space is limited by literally time (if time were infinite would space be infinite too? Is this equation correct: t/∞+s/∞=2?) That’s neat.
Er, sorry, totally not focused here. In the newspaper you only have so many pages to print. In film, only so much money to spend on making them. In life itself, there is only so much room for so many foodstuffs and for so much housing. It’s a bit crazy that the internet destroys all that. Granted, the internet will run out when we run out of oil, just like everything else. But that will never happen. Not in my lifetime, anyway. Discussion for another time.
I don’t really understand the obsession with comedy, though it is entirely probable that I am just a cranky son of a bitch ((no, really) the bitch part, I mean) right around this hour of night. I like things, and I find some things very funny. For example the daily show earlier had on a muppet version of perennial whackjob micheal steele saying the outrageous things he says. It was fucking hilarious. Also steve carrel is much more likable when he isn’t acting. Also Colbert made a joke about the muslims and jews having to quit smoking and how that might make them a little edgy. I laughed absurdly hard. But comedy itself I just don’t really appreciate. Well, that’s not it. It’s comedy that adds something else. Or something else that adds comedy. Like, I dunno, that titan maximum cartoon. It was some sort of comedy/action mashup. And it entirely failed to amuse me. It’s like trying to have a serious moment in a dungeons and dragons game and having a dude start yelling “the eyes demand sacrifice” or “blood for the blood god.” It’s like trying to have a conversation with someone who bursts out in song every couple of minutes.
I dunno, maybe I am being grouchy. I like humor, I do. Some people seem to think I’m a reasonably witty guy (I SO am) and it really bugs me how often a joke I make in passing I hear told back to me a few dozen times as some sort of meme.
Speaking of memes –
Actually, look, if I say something that doesn’t make sense to you, please do me a favor and google it. You’re already here on the internet. google is literally in a box straight up the screen there. You have no excuses for not educating yourself about what I’m talking about. Google has rendered all oblique references opaque. You know the first time I read the word opaque was in an animorphs book when I was twelve. I remember looking it up later in an actual physical dictionary, rather than ignoring it and just assuming that the author was smarte—another discussion for later.
Speaking of memes, I hate them. You all have figured out by now that I browse 4chan, right. 4chan.org, once a haven for creepy japan-o-philes now a hipster hang out, because like, it’s so edgy dude. Seriously, it has totally lost the reputation it never deserved in the first place. And I don’t care, cause I’m a hipster who is so edgy. Anyway, memes come from 4chan, supposedly. It’s not actually true, memes come from all over the internet, but the entire internet eventually ends up on 4chan anyway. So they go there to breed, more or less. Like salmon. They’re awful, because they’re essentially a crutch for people who are incapable (it can’t be done!) of making jokes. They’re the hip and edgy equivalent of a 13 year old girl (or Amanda Frescas (:p (eh, who am I kidding, you’re not even reading this))) yelling “spork!” for no reason. It’s pretty uncool. I, with my superior wit, do not need such a crutch to generate spontaneous laughter. I simply do.
Fake superiority complex aside, my real superiority complex dictates that if you make a joke, don’t make it more than once (unless the opportunity comes up more than once and you’ve hit the point where making that joke again would invite a sense of recognition and camaderie rather than simple spite or boredom). Make a new joke every time. Because the world is made of jokes. So many jokes that there are two fake news shows on back to back more or less every night (I think) that do nothing but make fun of the same day’s news. It’s great.
I dunno, maybe I’m just really bugged by it because I hate hearing my own joke thrown back at me with no real addition in humor. Plus I hate to see jokes run ragged.
Hmm. I complain about a lot of things, I think. I’m not really doing it out of any legitimate resentment, but I think I’m discontent. And the only way to fix discontentment is to change something in yourself or your environment. This is part of that to be honest. I complain because I want to get my complaints down on something and I want to enunciate them and have them disputed or understood. I think I’m mistaking that (and I think a lot of people will probably mistake that) with complaining for the sake of complaining. I’m trying to make changes in my life. I’m working on this issue, because it’s a pressing one that bugs me with annoyingly suicidal thoughts from time to time. (note to people who care too much about me, please don’t take this as a sign for intervention. This is something that I need to do, otherwise I may as well have died.)
I just need my life to go somewhere. I was hoping college would help me do that, but so far college has sounded like high school, and I’ve largely treated it like I treated high school: by avoiding everyone around me because I am too damn scared to talk to them. I need to change this. I am already flailing about blindly through life. I need to flail harder. I need to learn to take risks. I need to learn to get up from a fall. Most importantly, I need to stop rejecting myself before I even feel rejected.
So I’ve decided to be gay.
I’ll make housecalls.
No, I’m kidding. Actually I will make housecalls. To play scrabble or something. Actually monopoly. I kick ass at collecting money from hapless tenants.
Ugh, now I’m trying to change the subject, because I am not really sure where to go from here. When I write, I write very seriously. Everything I put into a work that I write has some reason for being in it, mostly because I delete the stuff that shouldn’t be in it. I am hoping that when I am dead and my lesbian bondage fiasco novels have made me world famous, historians will look back on my early writing and write critical essays determining through divination just exactly how gay I was anyway. Nobody with any actual balls writes about his feelings. A lot of the time, I wish I were dumb. I wish that I could pick just one retarded hobby and stick with it. I wish I could just say “oh, hey, transformers, that’s my shtick” or “oh hey, guitars and various rock trivia” or “oh hey, I’m ridiculously flamboyantly queer” or “yeah, man, I love the shit out of recreational drugs.” It’s funny, because the typical response is something like “oh yeah well real people aren’t like that.” I beg to differ. Like for serious. People telegraph what their main interests are, and boy do they enjoy them. Me? I dress sorta-kinda hipsterish but I look kinda intimidating (all 150 pounds of me) and then I talk to people about videogames, then I turn around and discuss philosophy or fucking sci-fi novels, and then I go on about religion or current events, or then I start talking about 4chan or something. I dunno. I don’t have anything that defines me, really.
When I was thirteen, I really really wanted to be a video game developer. I even downloaded rm2k and had something of an epiphany as to how games actually work. Along with the epiphany was the realization that, shit, this shit is a lot of work. So then I decided I wanted to be a journalist at some point, because I really like reading the newspaper. Then I realized that I really enjoyed reading the newspaper much more than I enjoyed writing it. For a while, I wanted to be dead, because everything sucked. Now I kinda want to be a prophet, but I’m finding it really hard to convert people because I can’t fucking talk to them one on one. Like, seriously, I am the only person I know who gets shy and nervous when a waitress tries to make small talk. I am a shitty-ass prophet.
It probably doesn’t help that I spend so much time trying to get away from things or from people. I go outside walking wearing reflective dark sunglasses and huge, loud headphones so that I don’t need to see or hear anything when I walk around. I call my outdoorsy stuff my “sensory deprivation apparatus” because I am a huge dork. It’s really bad. It really worries me when I go about telling things to people over the internet that I don’t tell to people I actually know, based wholly on the assumption that people on the internet can hurt me less. Man, I’m messed up.
Maybe the problem is that I’m not embracing the right things. Maybe tv is a good thing, because it helps me avoid my problems like everything else. I have a pet theory that if I ever actually bother to get drunk, I’m going to end up an alcoholic, because it’s a vastly more efficient means of escape than lying in bed in the middle of the night and imagining I gain the ability to fly or being at home alone and doing silly stances and pretending I’m an earthbender (((toph is so hot) I don’t care that she’s twelve, she’s a fictional character) my name’s toph, which sounds like tough, which is what I am).
I read QC and stuff to live vicariously a life where people care about what I say or what I think about, and those people happen to be in the same apartment building as I am. Same with shortpacked. And it’s retarded. I’m trying to pretend to be someone I’m not without actually changing myself into that person. It’s like a super-lazy version of escapism.
I really hate it. I hate being smart enough to know that that won’t work. I wish I was autistic and could truly believe in the idea of having a virtual furry girlfriend who I photoshop into all of my photos, or believe that a licensed character re-color rip-off is actually my best friend. Instead I get to spend all my time sitting here thinking “gee, Jake, you got problems. You should, like, go fix them or something” and replying “eh, too lazy. I don’t know how to use photoshop anyway.”
It’s kind of fascinating to me how very ocular we are as a species. We evolved this vision essentially to help us avoid running into branches and to see fruits from afar and we’ve taken it to the point where we’ve got devices that are pretty much standard in pretty much everything that show us all manner of abstract information. It’s totally fascinating to me and probably inevitable for a species like –
You know what they say “if there’s snow on the fields, plow it from both ends”
Sorry, still watching tv.
Anyway, a species like us.
Wow that was the weirdest show. Titan maximum or something. It was sort of like a high speed webcomic.
By the way have I mentioned that I love webcomics? They’re so great. They’re a visually appealing way to get a nice story and some good characterization across. And since they’re pretty much self-published, censorship is non-existent. Like for serious, ever since I found “kong: the gay barbarian” I have not needed porn.
Huh. “drinky crow and gabby” (or something) was pretty interesting. It’s basically just “draw blood, guts, use bizarre 3d cell shading techniques.” But it had some fascinating writing. The show was a snappy commentary on the purpose and concept of god and religion, delivered entirely too quickly. I’ll be honest, it wasn’t very funny, but it was contemplative.
Anyway webcomics. Yeah man. I read them. I spent the last couple of days being absurdly depressed and reading the entirety of shortpacked and finally getting around to reading questionable content. I am so full of weird transformers references and witty indie band quoting I’m ready to burst. Man. I love the character work on both of them. They’re interesting people. Genuinely fascinating and pretty well developed. No blank and obvious stereotypes here. That’s what you get when you (let your heart win) get your stories raw. The less middlemen in the way of art, the closer it can hit home. That’s cool. I love it when people do things just for the hell of it, not because it will sell. And the internet is totally the best platform for this. Space on the internet is essentially unlimited, as it can grow by exactly the amount your thing needs. On tv space is limited by literally time (if time were infinite would space be infinite too? Is this equation correct: t/∞+s/∞=2?) That’s neat.
Er, sorry, totally not focused here. In the newspaper you only have so many pages to print. In film, only so much money to spend on making them. In life itself, there is only so much room for so many foodstuffs and for so much housing. It’s a bit crazy that the internet destroys all that. Granted, the internet will run out when we run out of oil, just like everything else. But that will never happen. Not in my lifetime, anyway. Discussion for another time.
I don’t really understand the obsession with comedy, though it is entirely probable that I am just a cranky son of a bitch ((no, really) the bitch part, I mean) right around this hour of night. I like things, and I find some things very funny. For example the daily show earlier had on a muppet version of perennial whackjob micheal steele saying the outrageous things he says. It was fucking hilarious. Also steve carrel is much more likable when he isn’t acting. Also Colbert made a joke about the muslims and jews having to quit smoking and how that might make them a little edgy. I laughed absurdly hard. But comedy itself I just don’t really appreciate. Well, that’s not it. It’s comedy that adds something else. Or something else that adds comedy. Like, I dunno, that titan maximum cartoon. It was some sort of comedy/action mashup. And it entirely failed to amuse me. It’s like trying to have a serious moment in a dungeons and dragons game and having a dude start yelling “the eyes demand sacrifice” or “blood for the blood god.” It’s like trying to have a conversation with someone who bursts out in song every couple of minutes.
I dunno, maybe I am being grouchy. I like humor, I do. Some people seem to think I’m a reasonably witty guy (I SO am) and it really bugs me how often a joke I make in passing I hear told back to me a few dozen times as some sort of meme.
Speaking of memes –
Actually, look, if I say something that doesn’t make sense to you, please do me a favor and google it. You’re already here on the internet. google is literally in a box straight up the screen there. You have no excuses for not educating yourself about what I’m talking about. Google has rendered all oblique references opaque. You know the first time I read the word opaque was in an animorphs book when I was twelve. I remember looking it up later in an actual physical dictionary, rather than ignoring it and just assuming that the author was smarte—another discussion for later.
Speaking of memes, I hate them. You all have figured out by now that I browse 4chan, right. 4chan.org, once a haven for creepy japan-o-philes now a hipster hang out, because like, it’s so edgy dude. Seriously, it has totally lost the reputation it never deserved in the first place. And I don’t care, cause I’m a hipster who is so edgy. Anyway, memes come from 4chan, supposedly. It’s not actually true, memes come from all over the internet, but the entire internet eventually ends up on 4chan anyway. So they go there to breed, more or less. Like salmon. They’re awful, because they’re essentially a crutch for people who are incapable (it can’t be done!) of making jokes. They’re the hip and edgy equivalent of a 13 year old girl (or Amanda Frescas (:p (eh, who am I kidding, you’re not even reading this))) yelling “spork!” for no reason. It’s pretty uncool. I, with my superior wit, do not need such a crutch to generate spontaneous laughter. I simply do.
Fake superiority complex aside, my real superiority complex dictates that if you make a joke, don’t make it more than once (unless the opportunity comes up more than once and you’ve hit the point where making that joke again would invite a sense of recognition and camaderie rather than simple spite or boredom). Make a new joke every time. Because the world is made of jokes. So many jokes that there are two fake news shows on back to back more or less every night (I think) that do nothing but make fun of the same day’s news. It’s great.
I dunno, maybe I’m just really bugged by it because I hate hearing my own joke thrown back at me with no real addition in humor. Plus I hate to see jokes run ragged.
Hmm. I complain about a lot of things, I think. I’m not really doing it out of any legitimate resentment, but I think I’m discontent. And the only way to fix discontentment is to change something in yourself or your environment. This is part of that to be honest. I complain because I want to get my complaints down on something and I want to enunciate them and have them disputed or understood. I think I’m mistaking that (and I think a lot of people will probably mistake that) with complaining for the sake of complaining. I’m trying to make changes in my life. I’m working on this issue, because it’s a pressing one that bugs me with annoyingly suicidal thoughts from time to time. (note to people who care too much about me, please don’t take this as a sign for intervention. This is something that I need to do, otherwise I may as well have died.)
I just need my life to go somewhere. I was hoping college would help me do that, but so far college has sounded like high school, and I’ve largely treated it like I treated high school: by avoiding everyone around me because I am too damn scared to talk to them. I need to change this. I am already flailing about blindly through life. I need to flail harder. I need to learn to take risks. I need to learn to get up from a fall. Most importantly, I need to stop rejecting myself before I even feel rejected.
So I’ve decided to be gay.
I’ll make housecalls.
No, I’m kidding. Actually I will make housecalls. To play scrabble or something. Actually monopoly. I kick ass at collecting money from hapless tenants.
Ugh, now I’m trying to change the subject, because I am not really sure where to go from here. When I write, I write very seriously. Everything I put into a work that I write has some reason for being in it, mostly because I delete the stuff that shouldn’t be in it. I am hoping that when I am dead and my lesbian bondage fiasco novels have made me world famous, historians will look back on my early writing and write critical essays determining through divination just exactly how gay I was anyway. Nobody with any actual balls writes about his feelings. A lot of the time, I wish I were dumb. I wish that I could pick just one retarded hobby and stick with it. I wish I could just say “oh, hey, transformers, that’s my shtick” or “oh hey, guitars and various rock trivia” or “oh hey, I’m ridiculously flamboyantly queer” or “yeah, man, I love the shit out of recreational drugs.” It’s funny, because the typical response is something like “oh yeah well real people aren’t like that.” I beg to differ. Like for serious. People telegraph what their main interests are, and boy do they enjoy them. Me? I dress sorta-kinda hipsterish but I look kinda intimidating (all 150 pounds of me) and then I talk to people about videogames, then I turn around and discuss philosophy or fucking sci-fi novels, and then I go on about religion or current events, or then I start talking about 4chan or something. I dunno. I don’t have anything that defines me, really.
When I was thirteen, I really really wanted to be a video game developer. I even downloaded rm2k and had something of an epiphany as to how games actually work. Along with the epiphany was the realization that, shit, this shit is a lot of work. So then I decided I wanted to be a journalist at some point, because I really like reading the newspaper. Then I realized that I really enjoyed reading the newspaper much more than I enjoyed writing it. For a while, I wanted to be dead, because everything sucked. Now I kinda want to be a prophet, but I’m finding it really hard to convert people because I can’t fucking talk to them one on one. Like, seriously, I am the only person I know who gets shy and nervous when a waitress tries to make small talk. I am a shitty-ass prophet.
It probably doesn’t help that I spend so much time trying to get away from things or from people. I go outside walking wearing reflective dark sunglasses and huge, loud headphones so that I don’t need to see or hear anything when I walk around. I call my outdoorsy stuff my “sensory deprivation apparatus” because I am a huge dork. It’s really bad. It really worries me when I go about telling things to people over the internet that I don’t tell to people I actually know, based wholly on the assumption that people on the internet can hurt me less. Man, I’m messed up.
Maybe the problem is that I’m not embracing the right things. Maybe tv is a good thing, because it helps me avoid my problems like everything else. I have a pet theory that if I ever actually bother to get drunk, I’m going to end up an alcoholic, because it’s a vastly more efficient means of escape than lying in bed in the middle of the night and imagining I gain the ability to fly or being at home alone and doing silly stances and pretending I’m an earthbender (((toph is so hot) I don’t care that she’s twelve, she’s a fictional character) my name’s toph, which sounds like tough, which is what I am).
I read QC and stuff to live vicariously a life where people care about what I say or what I think about, and those people happen to be in the same apartment building as I am. Same with shortpacked. And it’s retarded. I’m trying to pretend to be someone I’m not without actually changing myself into that person. It’s like a super-lazy version of escapism.
I really hate it. I hate being smart enough to know that that won’t work. I wish I was autistic and could truly believe in the idea of having a virtual furry girlfriend who I photoshop into all of my photos, or believe that a licensed character re-color rip-off is actually my best friend. Instead I get to spend all my time sitting here thinking “gee, Jake, you got problems. You should, like, go fix them or something” and replying “eh, too lazy. I don’t know how to use photoshop anyway.”
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