hmm, I was just thinking the things we are doing about this Swine Flu epidemic sound like pretty good things to do to me!  

I mean think about it.

Washing our hands!  Covering our mouths when we cough! 

Those things are pretty good things to do, in general, right?  Maybe we should, *gasp*, ALWAYS DO THESE THINGS! Wouldn’t that be awesome?

It gets even better.  No more handshakes! No more kisses on the cheek! W00T! I’m all for that! No more *hugs* either. Certainly no random hugging of strangers. (we can settle for texting one another *hugs* as a sufficient show of affection)  And also everyone staying a few meters away from me at all times generally sounds pretty nice. Certainly it’ll make dealing with body odor easier.

And even better, we’ll slaughter all the pigs and stop eating PORK! YES! We’ve been trying to get people to stay away from that dangerous and unhealthy red meat for ages. Now we have an excuse to truly STOP. We’ll just get RID of it all. Sweet!

And here’s the BEST part of all… CLOSE ALL THE SCHOOLS!  Terrible dens of evil indoctrination that they are anyway. Good RIDDANCE!

I don’t know I’m thinking this swine flu is giving a prescription for an ideal social organization. Even the MASKS are kinda nice. It’s a new consumer product that can be totally stylized and customized and create a whole new fashion industry! Maybe it’ll revive the economy!

And if you think about it these methods will prevent the spread of MANY diseases.  It’ll be GREAT.

Thank you SWINE FLU for leading us ever closer to the UTOPIA we’ve been waiting for!

One day I was in College sitting at a table of one of the clubs that meets in my school during lunch in the Cafeteria. Now I wasn’t one for sitting with any of the clubs or really with any people at all except the few people who I had through random fate and happenstance came to regard as interesting enough to spend time with. That sounds arrogant and it is and it has nothing to do with what I am writing about today.

On that day, a sort of weird thing happened. There were about four people sitting in at the table talking at the time besides me. I was there and not saying a word as usual. And the four people though each and every one of them had a unique way of speaking. I don’t know what it was exactly that made their tones unique. Maybe it was accent, maybe it was the volume, maybe it was the tone, maybe it was speech impediments or something else just under the surface. But they were all happy and laughing and joking and chatting just like any friends would.

For some reason though the experience felt jarring for me. Something about their voices flowing back and forth felt WRONG to me. It bothered me a lot. I wanted more than anything just to get as far away from that table as I could. It was the sounds that bothered me. Not the people. Not the subject. Just the sounds. Weird huh?

I was talking to a good friend of mine the other day and this person was telling me about how they find it hard to like “loud” people. Being around people who speak in loud volumes makes them uncomfortable. It can even give them a headache or make them angry. They believe that people should control their tone of voice and keep it within an acceptable range and that speaking louder than that however natural it may be to someone is somehow wrong.

 I am reminded of being in classes where certain kids always got yelled at for talking too loudly when as far as I ever knew them they’d never spoken in a different tone or volume of voice. Other teachers also didn’t mind, but some did.  Also I remember reading about cultural sensitivity training too, that educators now undergo. Part of what they learn is that people from different cultures are taught from a young age different habits about what is considered a proper tone or volume of voice. Fascinating isn’t it? Some might perceive a loud tone as threatening. Others might consider a quiet tone as meek and submissive, a person to be ignored. Likewise with smiles, ironically. Americans see smiles as good, other cultures see it as a sign of weakness.

I remember another time long ago when I heard someone berate someone for speaking “too quietly”. I remember his words “I hate it when people mumble. People need to learn to speak up if they want to be heard!”  This person literally couldn’t stand people who didn’t speak loudly enough for their taste. And he wasn’t the only one. I’ve met others who expressed the same complaint and digust at people whose voice to their ears sounds like whispering and who do not as they see it expend the appropriate amount of effort to be heard. In other words the exact opposite of those who were complaining about the overly loud tone of voiced individuals.

So clearly there’s supposedly this middle ground of vocalization volume that is “appropriate” but who determines that? And indeed wouldn’t it be primarily in the eye of the beholder? Just like I was irrationally disturbed by those four entities at that lunch table through no fault of their own, surely when we are equally judgmental about loud or quiet tones of voice we are perhaps directing our judgment indirectly at those who are not in and of themselves to blame.

However, it seems we, the critics, don’t really have a choice in the matter ourselves either. It almost seems like it’s inevitable that certain of us have certain biases against certain sounds or sound combinations that we can’t even control. It’s not that a person who hates loud noises can’t be friends with a loud speaking person, they clearly can, but it requires some expenditure of energy. It’s not simply choice. They may become accustomed to the louder tone to some extent, but most likely the entire time they are friends the person will have to swallow annoyance at the other person’s speaking mode.

There are other similar weirdnesses delaing with how sound effects us. Take for example just now I was watching a movie on my television and for the first time this year we had the air conditioner running and it’s a new apartment.  The problem is the air conditioning fan vent is right next to the television and it is LOUD. It’s not the fan vent in and of itself bothers me. It’s fine. But it combined with the sound of the movie just grates on my nerves.  I mean it was really starting to drive me CRAZY.  I had to turn the volume up on the television really loud to hear the speakers and then turn it down again during the action squences. Eventually I just go so sick of it that whenever the air conditioner fan turned on, I paused the movie and read my book and then when it turned off again I unpaused the movie. It took much longer to watch the movie that way, but it was infinitely more enjoyable to me than it would have been had I had to suffer through that jarring cacophony.

Another example. My younger brother is autistic and his sensitivity to certain sounds seems even more extreme. Certain music for example will make him absolutely freak out especially when he was younger. It was really remarkable since most other people couldn’t even detect anything particularly different about these particular songs or even see what they had in common. But his reaction to them was quite profound. He seemed to be in almost physical pain he hated them so much. It was like the effect I had at that dinner table or my friend has around louder speaking individuals mutliplied by a thousand.  He also reacts the same way to the sound of a thunderstorm btw.

Still another example, my roommate and I often travel places in the car and listen to songs we both enjoy on burned CDs through the car stereo. Only sometimes she’ll set the volume to a certain point and it’s just too high for me. It literally annoys me. I can’t enjoy the music at that volume, it’s just ever so slightly too loud. On the other hand she doesn’t enjoy the music nearly as much if I leave it as quiet as I am wont to have it. 

Then again I CAN listen to those songs really loud and enjoy them, well not as loud as she would enjoy them, but still pretty loud, but it rathe depends on certain circumstances. The problem is when I am in the car with my roommate and the music is too loud it disrupts my ability to think and communicate. I don’t like speaking OVER the sound of the music. When it’s noisy in a room I don’t really want to raise my voice to be heard even though I am more than capable of doing so. It bothers me to add my loud voice to the already loud environment. It’s jarring. It doesn’t sound or feel right. My voice overlappign with the rest, just makes things worse. So when the volume on the music is too loud then I feel almost as if I am being cornered and being forced into the solitude of my own mind. I can’t talk, or rather I refuse to talk at least not in a tone that can be heard.

Similar happens at a party or a social gathering, a concert or somtehing where the music is blasting. Or anywhere where a lot of people are talking at once. I am already a naturally quiet person but under those circumstances I become absolutely silent to the point that people think I’m brooding. But I’m not. I’m not even upset about the loud voices and sounds. Rather is the overlapping and disharmony that is bugging me. Like the four voices at the lunch table. Like the air conditioning vent and the movie.  I couldn’t stand to speak under those circumstnaces and if I did I don’t believe I’d be heard anyway. And the whole situation just makes me feel out of it and uncomfortable.

Of course there are other people who are the EXACT opposite. Being in an environment where everyone is quiet and soft spoken and there isn’t a lot of music or background noise or stuff going on will make them extremely uncomfortable or freak tehm out. I’ve heard people complain LOUDLY that it’s TOO QUIET in here under this or that circumstnaces. And I’ve known people who have to interject background music into any quiet room, even if it is soft music just under the surface.  Now undoubtedly there’s a point where things are too quiet for me too but it’s at a WAY lower volume than it is for these people.  They need stuff going on. They need more noise!  Often they assume that people being quiet are unhappy, uncomfortable, or not having enough fun.

There’s all kinds of things like that. For example the thought of someone texting during a movie would in no way bother me at all and yet it is banned in most theatres even if your phone is on silent or vibrate. In fact a vibrating phone in a movie theatre is no disruption for me at all. I literally wouldn’t care in the slightest. Same with a random loudly spoken comment about the movie being seen. Who cares about that? Unless they are talking at an inpportune time and making me miss dialogue I don’t care. However the fact that these phenomenons are banned in many theatres and those that aren’t are often the subject of much scorn and disgust in any number of water cooler conversations suggest that for a lot of people these things really DO bother them. They bother htem A LOT. Enough so that they get pissed off about it.
 
And I can understand it too. Although I’d sympathize with the mother’s dilemma,  a crying baby in a theater would bother me A LOT. Likewise would a person insisting on holding a detailed conversation either in person or on the phone in the middle of a movie. That would bother me a great deal. Then again these are the kinds of the disruptions that really ARE likely to make me miss dialogue. And if I am missing dialogue, especially important dialouge then I DO care. And that again was the problem with the damn AC vent. I really only want to watch a movie ONE time unless it is totally exceptional so if I miss dialogue the one time I see it then I’ll probably NEVER know what they said cuz I aint watching it again and so if I miss important story details I’ll just miss them and my appreciation of the story will be decidedly less.

It seems that the way we process and perceive sounds has a huge impact on our lives. I wonder if it even effects who we choose as our friends and our mates, who we get along with at work and what kinds of people become our enemy? Heck differences in speaking patterns could even have an impact on our likely political affiliation and the social groups we are willing to associate ourselves with.  These differences may well effect our grades, our social standing, our likelihood to get jobs. It could integrate into everything. Audial biases, conscious and subconscious, may well be one of the least known and least understood biases effecting every day life.

What do you think? Do you have an audial biases? Have you experienced or observed any in others? How do you think they effect our daily lives? And how do you suppose we both as the noise makers and the noise receivers can work to get past and help conflicts caused by these biases?

Talk like Shakespeare day is apparently coming up on Thursday hence the philosophic nature of my subject today.  No I’m serious. That’s a real thing. http://talklikeshakespeare.org/   Apparently pirate talk wasn’t enough for people. They wanted more crazy language days.  

I’d like to  take note that according to this article, talk like Shakespeare day was announced on April 20th. That’s 4/20. It makes me wonder if the guy who came up with this was high when he decided it. I would not be at all surprised.  Honestly it’s going to be a pain of a day. I lack the verbal prowess to do a proper Shakespearean dialogue so I might just skip out on it.  I’d much prefer a day where everyone questioned each other like Socrates. That’d be really awesome.

So those of you who follow such things may have noticed that obviously I haven’t written much lately. My brain has been kinda bouncing all over the place lately and I haven’t been able to focus on anything at all. A lot of things have been happening in the present and in the mean time the future and past keep bouncing back and forth competing for space in my brain.

Do you ever wonder why you have the friends you have? Or why you know the people you know? Where’d they come from? Where will they go afterward? No connection really stays the same forever and eventually people go off to do whatever it is they do. So why are they here, in your life, right now? Are you supposed to learn something from them? Or are they supposed to learn something from you? What if you each miss the lessons?

I was trying to think of stories from my past to recount. It’s always a difficult process for me. I can’t really find anything that really focuses my mind on the past. I remember a lot but it’s all fuzzy. There are few images, more like a bunch of dry facts like something you would read in a dictionary.  It’s like I’ve already shared the best stories. I was never really very good at reminiscing. 90% of the time when I gather with people and they start reminscing I don’t even remember the events about which they are reminiscing. I just smile and nod. Is that weird? And yet people seem to find reminiscing so much fun! It makes me think that maybe I should take more stock in my daily experiences and try and *remember* them better. Maybe make them into clever sounding stroies that I can tell boastfully or jokingly the next time I see the people involved. Is this not the normal way people do it? Do you learn how to do that somewhere? Maybe it’s another lesson missed.

I don’t know if or how much I’ll be writing for the remainder of April. My enthusiasm for some of my writing has dried up. I still want to write, I just don’t want to exert the effort. And I really hate it when I try to write something great, exert a ton of effort only to have it fall flat. It’s annoying.

If I do write then here are some of the topics I intend to write about:

1. Climate Skeptics -  I want to write about how they are full of shit
2. Drug Legalization – yes it makes sense. no legalizing marijuana will not “fix” the economy
3. An Intro to Me – I always wanted to write one of these and never could figure out how to do it in typical Nephyo Style. I need to have something to show people though who are curious about who this crazyass they stumbled upon is.
4. Crazy Ideas – I have a ton of crazy ideas that have been popping into my head over the last couple of months so I want to just describe some of them.
5. Web Comics – A post with sample comics and links to some of my favorite web comics I sometimes read ending with a request for others to share their favorite web comics
6. In Defense of Pirates – political post cuz somebody really needs to defend the pirates. no i’m not joking.
7. Obama and Drugs – grrr, want to rant about his dumbass response to marijuana legalization question and bad policies about the same.
8. Education – what an ideal education system might look like

That’s IF I write anything. I might not.

Have you ever been lying in like the most perfectly comfortable position ever and feeling completely at peace and utterly unwilling to move when suddenly you realize you need something and it’s annoyingly located all the way across the room? It’s annoying isn’t it? You have to get up! Gah!

For this reason I really want Telekinesis to exist. That’s pretty much the only reason I’d use it. The only other good use would be pulling off pranks but that’s only cool if you are the only one or one of the few people with telekinesis. If everybody has telekinesis it would suck. I think we’d have to have a universal pledge against pranking.  Otherwise things would get out of control quickly.

Well since I don’t have telekinesis and they say everything fantasy is just a reflection of Science maybe I can compromise. I’d need to be rich or at least moderately wealthy. But I think I could outfit my house with a series remote controlled conveyer belts and large robotic arms hanging from the ceiling. If I integrate it into a smart control system I can even make it voice operated. So I can say, glass of water, and it will pour and bring me a glass of water. How cool would that be? It would make me lazy though but I think I’d only use it for those times when I’m perfectly comfortable and can’t stand the thought of moving.

Sadly though I’m not rich or moderately wealthy and such a system would take a long time to perfect anyway so for now I have to get my ass up. Yuck! And I imagine you probably had to do the same last time this happened to you. Doesn’t it suck?

And you know what the worst part is? When you go back and lie back down or sit back down in your super comfy chair, it’s never *quite* the same as it was before you got up is it? I mean it’s still comfy but it’s no longer perfect.  You’ve ruined it.  By moving. You disrupted your perfect comfort. Man it pisses me off!

You know the same kinda thing happens with writing too. Sometimes you’re just in the zone and it’s just going perfectly. The words are like flowing at the speed of sound and you just KNOW what to write and you KNOW it’s going to be awesome. And then!

Crap!

You get distracted. Maybe you see something out of the corner of your eye. Or you find you have to do something. Maybe you suddenly remember that doctor’s appointment you’re almost late for. Or some annoying past thought of something that was bothering you flitters into your brain breaking your concentration.  Or perhaps most similar of all you find you need some piece of information to finish what you are writing that you just don’t have available and have to break to look it up. Or there’s one litlte thing you can’t think of like the name of a new character you are about to introduce. 

Whatever happens you’re flow gets broken. And it’s SOOO annoying! Sure once you get done whatever it is you need to do you can get right back to writing, but it’s never QUITE the same as it was before. It’s no longer perfect. It’s just another thing you’re writing. grrrrr

I can’t tell you how many writing projects I’ve started and then abandoned because of experiences like that which disgusted me so much I didn’t want to finish it. It very literally drives me crazy!! But there’s no writer’s telekinesis to help you. There’s only diligence and quiet and concentration and prepartion to prevent you from these horrible outcomes.

Anyways, I’m thinking I might also write a random entry about a lot of the movies I’ve been watching lately. I’ve seen a ton. I’ve got a few more I’ll be watching soon too, like City of Ember, Crank, and Casablanca. Weird trio huh? I may also talk about books I’ve read and games I’ve played. I may also do a few more of the writing suggestions people made in response to my previous request.  That’s still IF I write anything that is.

Have you ever been missed some possibility that should have been mind numbingly obvious but for some reason your brain just refused to contemplate the possibility? Like an obvious precaution you should have accounted for but like a moron didn’t.

And then once it finally hit you, did you freak out? Like I mean like totally overreact in fear of the possibility and full of self hatred for your idiocy in not seeing it. Like how on Earth did I not even CONSIDER that? An I’m a total dumbass, kinda feeling.

I’ve also got some long term writing projects I never really wrote that I really want to get done one of these. The biggest of these is probably a series of entries titled The Top 10 Superpowers. I thought up a ranking of the top 10 super powers many many months ago. My elder brother assisted me. It’s awesome and funny but it takes a while because I have to include evidence and proof, pictures and videos and the likes. It’d be at least 6 entries in the series, but probably closer to 10. This project I think would be general interest enough that it might be worthy of using my built up languishing credits to try and plug it from time to time. 

Have you ever been so consumed with worry that you couldn’t quite think straigth for a long period of time? Like the kind of fear that made you unable to sleep at night? And then when you found your fears were unfounded did you find that like you couldn’t quite get out of that worrying mode of mind? Like you just got this sense that SOMETHING bad is going to happen. Maybe not that thing you were worrying about but SOMETHING. It’s like worrying became so natural that you can’t stop no matter how hard you try. It’s rather annoying.

I’ve also had for the longest time this urge to post regularly about good resources people can use to learn things about the world, to get different perspectives and learn truths they can’t get elsewhere. And in so doing start to open up a dialogue whereby people can suggest ideas for places for ME to go to learn more about the world and gain unique perspectives too. That’d be awesome as it would make Xanga more informative for everyone. And I really believe the more informed we all are the better off the world will be.

Have you ever written something so random that almost nobody can possibly respond to all of it and most people probably won’t even know where to start, just because it’s just so all over the place?

I have.

Imagine if you never had normal dreams.

Suppose you dreamed all the time, but none of your dreams were just good or just bad. They were always the most extreme dreams you could imagine having.

Like imagine your good dreams were absolute perfection. They were beautiful: colors so bright and vibrant they make everything you’ve ever seen in the real world look like black and white. Smells, sounds, feelings, equally exquisite. Touching moments more endearing than any scene from a classic movie. Soaring moments of joy, passion, and moments of total contentment and satisfaction. And here was humor too! Delightful entertaining humor that left you rolling in your mind with uncontrollable fits of laughter. And music! Classical music only like nothing any mortal composer could ever design. Far more intricate and gorgeously beautiful and invoking the deepest emotions. Your dreams that were just better  in every way than anything you experienced or could even HOPE to experience in real life. And yet the dreams left you wanting and wishing for that perfection with all your heart.

But at the same time you had bad dreams that were as horrible as the good dreams were beautiful. They were torturous nightmares of the most horrifying nature. Again perfect visuals, smells, sounds, feelings. More real than being there. More terrifying, painful, tormenting than anything you’ve ever experienced in waking life. It was all the darkest possibilities, the cruelest outcomes. You saw in your dreams a future devoid of hope, filled with doubt, longing, suffering, and despair. In your dreams you saw Death in the starkest terms possible, again and again and again.

And imagine then that 90% of these dreams, good and bad, centered around you. They were about your future. You saw yourself in your perfect future and you saw yourself in the darkest possible future imaginable, the kind that left you weeping and shaking when you awoke every single time.

Imagine you dreamed like this. That you had done so all your life, ever since you were a little kid and you were sickly and forced to be in bed all the time alone with your own mind and your torturous and wonderful dreams.

How would this change your outlook on life?

Would you feel blessed to have such wonderful dreams. Would you appreciate the good in life in comparison to the bad of your nightmares?

Or would you, far more likely, be left a mess. Ever would you be terrified of the darkness breaching from your dream reality into the present. Maybe those nightmares are my inevitable future, you might think. What if I can’t escape them?

And at the same time, the good dreams, would poison the good you experience. Every good experience would seem not as good, not as perfect as those that you dreamed of.  Every happy moment, would be tinged with a sense of inevitable end. Like a dream, you’d have a sense ever present that this good can’t last. It’ll be over before you know it and the nightmares will return full of force and cruelty.

Would you be left with a sense of always striving to make your reality match a dream world? Would you be constantly running away from a nightmare reality that always seemed to be right at your heels threatening to devour you?

How would you escape this feeling? How would you learn to appreciate the good things that happen to you here and now, to see them as good and wonderful in their own right and not reflections of a dream that may never be real? Would there be anyone who could help you do that? Or would you ever be left trying to grapple with the fact that your wishes will never come to pass but you can’t help yourself from wishing for them anyway.

I don’t have dreams like this. It’s just a hypothetical. But I think if I did I would cope by writing stories to try and capture the vivacity of my dreams. And once they were locked in paper I would try and forget them and see the present for what it is. Imperfect, true, but beautiful in its own right. In many ways more beautiful because it isn’t perfectly good or perfectly bad but filled with flawed imperfect people doing an amazing job of trying their best to be the best that they can be. And I’d do my best to never believe that the darkness of my nightmares is coming. And if it does, I’d want to have as much joy as possible before that day comes to pass.

And heck one day my stories might turn into best selling novels and then at least I’ll have my riches to console me.

For you Megaman fans out there check this out. It’s pretty silly and funny. Not safe for work though.

*cough* *cough* *hack* *cough* *hack*

If I were forced to speak this entry that’s all you’d hear right about now.  Thankfully due to the magic of the keyboard I’m able to communicate semi-intelligibly even as I feel like my lungs are about to fly out of my mouth and slap against by laptop screen.

So yeah I woke up in the middle of the night with a hacking cough that is holding by breathing hostage. I’d say I feel like shit, but I said that yesterday during the day. So right now I think I must feel like something unspeakably disgusting that shit doesn’t like to touch for fear of being contaminated. And my fucking back still hurts too! grraaah!!

I never imagined I could start to feel so sick so quickly. God, on the 15th I felt pretty damn good, well enough to go out to dinner. Maybe that was my fatal mistake. The whole free gift card was a ruse to get me in there where I could be contaminated by this secret virus designed to incapacitate me so that my enemies can get away with their evil plot for world domination!  Or maybe my waitress was just sick and didn’t like us so decided to give a couple of good coughs onto our food before serving it to us.  Either way, someone must pay!

Likewise if you out there decided to cast some vodoo magic spell on me to make my throat burn, my head pount, my eyes water, and nostrils stuffed, I’d like to invite you over to my nice apartment. Please stand over by the wall and relax while I stick large, sharp, pointy objects into you slowly and with relish! Don’t worry, you’ll be fine. I won’t let you bleed to death. At least not quickly. I want you to suffer…

Gah! Does anyone know if it’s ok to take mucinex and sudofed together? I’m not talking about the stuff you can just pick up in the aisles too. I’m talking about the real shit. The stuff you gotta show your ID and sign your life away to get a hold of.  Will taking those together cause some unspeakable horrors? What about if I take it with some benadryll, ibuprofen, aspirin, and cough drops and maybe some zicam max cough spray on top. That’s all the medicine i’ve got around right now. Well I don’t have the zicam but I’m thinking about going and getting some.

If you’re concerned for my safety, don’t worry I haven’t tried the medicinal overdose strategy yet. Instead I took a 1000 mg Vitamin C suplement with a glass of OJ and finally ate my chicken noodle soup.  I did take one ibuprofen and I’m sucking a cough drop but that’s all I’ll do for now. However, if I still feel like this by tomorrow, drastic measures may be necessary.

Yeah drastic measures like, god forbid, going to a fucking doctor.  God I never go to doctors. I don’t even have a primary care physician right now. Do you know I’ve never been to a doctor for myself since moving to Indiana? I don’t even know where to find one. And then I gotta fill out all the new patient paperwork crap. I also have to figure out a way to drive there without hacking myself off the road into a ditch somewhere. It’s such a pain.

Maybe one of you can drop by and slip me some under the table amoxicillin instead? Or mail it? I’m pretty sure that’s what I’ll get if I go to a doctor, that or just some fucking slightly stronger stupidly expensive cough syrup. Waste of money and time.

At this rate I might not be able to go to work tomorrow. I know my boss says sick days don’t really count against me but I don’t really believe him completely. I mean how does he know I’m sick and not faking it? I hope he heard me coughing yesterday in the office but how should I know. I didn’t say anything and I was trying to seem normal since I thought it was just particularly strong allergies and not anything more serious.

Then again if I do go to work I’d feel horrible if I infected my boss and that spread to his whole family. I wouldn’t feel bad at all about infecting any of the other imaginary people I work with. Their names are Joe, Bob, Kate, and Sarah and they work in cubicles in the top drawer of my desk. I call them my little peeps. They call me GOD but who can blame them since I’m a huge not so invisible man in the sky looking down on them. Tomorrow they’ll be in for a surprise though cuz first thing I’m going to do when i go into work is open that drawer and give a nice big hacking cough on them just to be mean you know? I kinda feel like that’s whtat my big guy in the sky did to me last night. Jerk.

Times like these I feel very small and inconsquential. Powerless. Well getting sick’s not the only thing that occurred yesterday to make me feel tiny and irrelevant but it’s the only thing I care to write about right now. It’s a horrible feeling. Like you have no control over your destiny. Like your precious living time is slowly being sucked away and stolen from you. It’s misery.

ARRRRGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!

I hate this feeling! I hate being sick! I hate being unable to sleep! I know I sound like a whiny little bitch right now but who fucking cares. Sickness fails. I loathe thee sickness! Come out and fight like a man so I can beat the crap out of you! Or something.

Sigh. I guess I’ll try to sleep again. Now that I’ve exhausted myself with random incoherent ranting maybe there’s a chance I’ll succeed. The ibuprofen is starting to kick in too which is helping a bit. I’ll give it a shot. Hopefully I won’t be back here in two hours writing about how I feel even *worse* than before. Actually I probably wouldn’t be back then. I’ll probably have smashed my laptop into the floor in an incoherent rage and started jumping up and down on it. That kidna makes it hard to type blog entries. So for the sake of my laptop, please let my body get better or at least not get any worse.

Anyways, wish me luck.

This has been another pointless random rant brought to you by Kellen’s Misery International, bringing you the pain and suffering of Kellens around the world 24/7 for 29 years. For Misery you can trust to make you feel better in comparison, always rely on KMI.

I don’t really have anything profound or interesting to write today or even amusing. So I’ll cheat and ramble on for a while and call it an entry.

To be honest I’m sick with a pounding headache and coughing up a storm. So I couldn’t really concentrate on a meaningful entry anyway. Really all I want to do is be asleep right now. My back hurts too. Not sure what I did to my back and shoulder but just as soon as my cough started to subside even a bit it started to ache.  I wonder if it’s a chain reaction kinda thing. Once my shoulder heals a bit some other part of me will start hurting and so on until my whole body aches just a bit and one part of me hurts like hell. Wouldn’t that just be great?

I broke a glass today. It was ever so slightly stuck to the table. It had fruit juice in it from a smoothie I had drank the night before courtesy my roommate who decided we needed to drink healthily too and decided to make smoothies. Unfortunately this one involved grapefruit juice since we were out of OJ and I’m not a big fan of grapefruit juice so I couldn’t finish mine. Anyways an hour was spent cleaning up grapefruit smoothie and glass shards while coughing all over myself. Yeah my day was just so wonderful today.

Earlier before I broke the glass we went to go pick up glasses for my roommate (fricking absurdly expensive glasses are)  and get some healthy food to hopefully combat our sickness. (roommate is apparently sick too though not as sick as me or else she hides it better) Pita pit pitas and soup from panera bread. I didn’t even drink my soup, it’s sitting downtairs on the counter, can’t really bring myself to eat it.  We also picked up OJ but I don’t feel like getting it either. Not a wise way to get healthy but I don’t care. Right after I finish writing I’m likely going to fall out.

I was surprised that nothing bad happened during the trip. Seems like today was such a shit day something bad would have to happen. I even took the time to print out my latest insurance card so I could put it in the car with me (haven’t done that in like a year and a half, stupid i know, but it’s just the same information with different dates, seems like an idiotic practice and a waste of ink). Anyways, I was I that I might have an accident. Don’t know why, just felt like bad things were destined to happen to me today.  I almost decided to just stay home.

I got lucky though the trip was entirely uneventful and when I got home I only broke a glass and got subjected to much roommate ridicule for my folly. That I suppose in the grand scheme of thing aint so bad. Cold, headache, backache, and a broken glass. If that were the worst that could befall me, I’d take it only a daily basis and still be content. Annoyed. But content.  I still wonder if perhaps the universe decided to bring these things upon me because of hubris in writing my offensive entry yesterday.  Or perhaps its sort of reverse karma. Things had been going so well lately with everything it was time for some bad luck. Heck yesterday I even got a free fucking $20 gift card to a very nice restaurant randomly int he mail and got to go out to eat for FREE. That kinda good luck has to have consquences right?

I’ve been listening to this song I like a lot lately it’s by the Fray and it’s called, actually my head is pounding too much to remember the name so screw it. It’s a conversation with God. For a nominally not at all religious person for some reason I really like conversations with God and the likes. I even sometimes have them myself. I think I wrote about that once before but maybe I dreamed that, I can’t really keep track of what I write anymore. Anyways, maybe there’s some tiny nugget of faith buried deep within my hardened skeptical soul. I doubt it though. I think I just like stories and diety conversations make for good stories.

So yeah I’m almost done rambling. But I feel as if I should write or say something I dunno at least a little interesting or important sounding to justify your wasting your time reading this long. So let me ramble on about an utterly abstract, probably incoherent topic that just popped into my head five minutes ago. I was thinking about the size of the world. Not like miles but in human connections. Have you ever noticed how sometimes the world seems really small? Like everyone knows everybody and everything’s connected. People say “small world” and such statements, right?  But how come people don’t remark about the times when the world seems really large. Like impossibly huge. To me it feels the later more often the former. It feels like people are just so far away and we don’t really know or understand each other at all. It’s like we’re all shouting at each other from across a great Ocean and only picking up vague echoes of what each other is thinking or feeling carried on the waves. We’re all on our own little islands. Not small. Large world. Too fucking large. We need to gather up all the pine trees on our islands and build fucking rafts. Maybe we’ll drown on the ocean but there’s a chance we might run into somebody and actually get to know them. 

But I’m too lazy. And I can’t swim too well. Some days I think it’d be better for me to just dig a hole in the sand and make myself a nice cozy little bed and stop wasting all my days standing on the beach straining to overhear the conversations of people who aren’t even nor ever intended to be fucking talking to me anyways. I like it on this island. It’s cozy. And in my hole it’s even quiet. I’ll get bored eventually but that’s the way it always was anyways.

OK I’m done for today. Enough silly incoherent rambling.

Huh this was pretty easy, maybe I should just do this every day. Saves me from having to actually think.

The suggestion was made that I write about my opinion about the Gay Marriage vs Civli Unions issue and considering the recent debate on Xanga’s front page about similar topics I thought it a good issue to approach.

The basic question was this, do I think that Civil Unions are an acceptable compromise. An interesting question. Hmm, let me this as succinctly and clearly and simply as I can.

FUCK NO!!!!

It is not acceptable. It is not tolerable. It is not ok. It is not alright. It’s fucking idiotic and the very idea of compromising on basic human rights would make me throw up if I weren’t too consumed with my violent urge to throttle the people who suggest it.

We clear?

Maybe you think I’m being a little uncharitable, a bit unfair. Well that’s OK. I’m not in a particularly charitable mood today. I’m not in the mood to coddle selfish arrogant pricks whose only real problem with Gay people is that to admit that they are the same as everyone else would require them to feel bad about every lame prejudiced gay-joke they ever made while growing up. Aww, what a shame!

Basically, I’ve only ever heard two even half way reasonable pleas for the Civil Unions compromise.  Almost everyone else is just hiding behind a thin syntactical membrane to hide their obvious grotesque prejudice. They’re all “we don’t want you to marry, but we’re not prejudiced because we’re ok with Civil Unions.” Bullshit. They only are ok with civil unions because if they admitted to not being for it, they’d have to admit to being no better than Nazi’s, slave owners and chauvinist pigs. It’s exactly like people who said they were perfectly ok with black people just so long as they don’t have to eat at the same table with them or share a bathroom. What’s wrong with separate but equal anyway? Bullshit.

Now the “good” arguments and I use that word extremely lightly. One argument, the best argument really, comes in the form of those heartfelt pleas by people who are homosexual who believe that this is a matter of rights. They really don’t give a shit about the larger moral implications. They just want to be able to have the same rights with regards to their significant others and their children as other married couples have. They don’t give a damn what it’s called, they just want to be treated the same. And these people, generally think well why not just call it civil unions if that gets the job done? Many of these people don’t really care much for the historical underpinnings or religious undertones of marriage anyway. In their mind this is a legal matter. It’s a question of the best possible strategy to ensure that they get the rights they want. Do you use the term marriage or civil union? To them it depends on which works.

And that argument makes a lot of sense right? I mean from their perspective yeah if they get the rights to be treated the same however that comes about all the better right? Let’s compromise!

The problem is, I hate to break it to them, but this issue isn’t just about them.  It’s as much or more about the rest of us. Those people who call themselves straight and pretend to care about rights and freedom but still can’t bring themselves to attend a gay rights rally because that means god forbid they might have to stand next to a queer person. Those of us who claim that we’ve moved beyond prejudice on the basis of race, religion, gender, or sexual orientation and yet still can’t help but squirm when they see a gay couple kissing or make a big deal about a main character in a story happening to be gay. That’s the problem. It’s about our capacity, as a peoples, for tolerance and acceptance and justice. That’s what we want to improve.

It’s about our culture growing to the point where we as a whole actually do not think of homosexuality as an aberrant characteristic. That’s what matters. And I’d fight for that even if the mechanism to obtain it meant that it denied particular gay people from getting their immediate access to rights related to marriage. I don’t give a shit about who gets to share health care with their significant others or not. (the health care system is sick and broken anyways) I care MUCH MORE about what we THINK about one another.

As far as that larger struggle goes, the question of marriage versus civil union isn’t just a trivial insignificant word choice difference, it’s essential.

You hear a lot of bullshit about how the battle for gay marriage isn’t comparable to the battle for civil rights during the 60′s. That’s total crap and I don’t even feel like dignifying it with a serious response. However, if what you mean is that there is a fundamental difference between being ‘black’ and being ‘gay’ well gee what a fucking surprise you know? Yeah I have to agree black!=gay.

It’s mind numbingly obvious of course, but it isn’t insignificant to contemplate. Gay rights are as much a struggle for rights and equality as any other struggle for rights and equality on the basis of race or gender or disability or anything else. But each of these struggles is different. And it’s important to understand and contemplate their differences. In fact in the question of gay marriage the obvious and far too unspoken difference in characteristics between these struggles actually reveals the very reason why gay marriage is a big deal. In fact it’s one of the biggest deals.

Because as much as people want to skirt around the fact, being gay is a matter related to SEX. Yeah I know black!=gay, gay is about sex, I’m full of shocking declarations today aren’t I? But the distinguishing characteristics of being gay is related to differences in sexuality, sexual identity, and sexual preferences. That’s really it. Just as much as skin color is the primary distinguishing characteristic of being considered “black”. (as opposed to being descended from slaves or from Africa which some idiots claim)

Now, let’s put our thinking caps on. What institution, in our society, has for countless generations been the primary vehicle and symbol of sexual behavioral acceptance? Gee I wonder what? I give up. Oh wait, could it maybe be marriage that I’m getting at? No way it couldn’t be! Oh wait. OF COURSE IT FUCKING IS!

For many, rightly or wrongly, marriage is the passage into adulthood and acceptance. It’s the symbolism that says you are an adult, accepted pairing in the society capable and approved of creating and raising children. It’s been this way for ages.  Why is sex outside of marriage, still, in many circles a matter of contention? Because people have been raised to think that marriage is what validates sex. Unmarried, you are seen as neither mature enough nor sufficiently chained to social tradition to be able to make rational decisions about who you are sleeping with. We allow people to do it as a society, but then we turn our noses up at it, calling those people who do so derogatory names when it’s out in the open while carefully sweeping it under the rug in ‘accepted’ social collectives. In contrast, “married” people are judged adults who can do what they want together in the privacy of their own home no questions asked, mind your own business. Fucking outside of marriage is seen as a sign of immaturity, childishness, and impropriety.

And that should illuminate quite clearly one of the biggest struggles the gay rights movements face. People still have a tendency to perceive being homosexual as less a matter of genetic disposition and more a matter of childish choice. Many people, though they’ll never admit it openly, see people who are homosexual as immature children who are playing around and need to grow up and admit to their “true” sexuality.  Many perceive being homosexual as a kind of joke, an object of humor or ridicule not as an acceptable way of being. Others perceive it as a thing done by creepy outsiders who they don’t really want to accept into the greater society anyways.

And that, any idiot should be able to see is WRONG. Why should homosexuality be associated with youth? Your sexual identity doesn’t disappear as you grow older. A 40 or 50 year old homosexual ought to be as accepted a member as society as a 20 year old. People don’t “grow out” of their genetic code. And certainly there’s nothing about girls liking girls and guys liking guys that makes anyone into a creep. There’s plenty of heterosexual people who do a good job of being creepy and weird all on their own. But they can get married and it’ll be applauded.

You know when I first found out that gay marriage was a controversy I was very literally surprised. I really hadn’t ever thought about it before.  I just kinda assumed that anyone could marry whoever they wanted. I was naive. I just thought homosexuals didn’t want to marry by and large and nobody had ever tried.  But I never thought the law would deny them that right and I assumed that if they wanted to people would be fine with it. I never imagined people would be up in arms about it. I never thought people would actually vote to deny people that right. I mean why the Hell would anyone do that I thought? What the fuck does their marrying have to do with you?!?

It was a long time before I came to really understand what this struggle is about. There’s no accident that people are sooo very opposed to ‘marriage’ for gay people.  It’s because being gay IS about sexuality. If you allow gay people to marry, then they really are just like you. They’re in adult acceptable relationships. It becomes as acceptable as any other marriage. Just like when two heterosexual kids run off together and live together in a romantic relationship people keep deluding themselves into thinking its temporary and insignificant, an act of childish immaturity right up until they get married and parents are forced to see their children as being adults. Marriage is a right of passage. It’s a gateway to permanent social propriety backed by the full force of the law. But people want to keep thinking of gay relationships as perpetually permanently improper, unacceptable, and temporary.  Oh of course people *hate* the idea of making it legal.

If we compromise with marriage and call it civil unions many people will smugly continue to think of it as different. They’ll see homosexual relationships as something other into which they can place their own flawed and false and absurd belief structures. Those two are in a civil union, but at least they aren’t married. Why should we let them hide behind that syntactic sugar that makes people like that feel better?

Which brings me to the second argument that is halfway decent. In this argument smart people say, look, we know the idea of marriage makes people uncomfortable. So let’s not rock the boat. Let’s allow them their absurd misconceptions and advocate a softer gentler approach called “civil unions” that won’t upset them and get their back up and cause them to fight back. Then slowly, over time as civil unions become common and people get to know people who are adult, mature, families raising children but just happen to be of the same gender in a civil union relationship they’ll see it’s, you know, the same as marriage and they’ll all unbeknownst to them start to equate it to marriage in their small little brains. And in the end the two terms will be effectively equivalent to society. And besides the old people who are against it will eventually die out and young people are much more likely to accept gay marriage. Over time the civil union language and marriage language will merge and we’ll all live happily ever after.

In other words this argument is about pragmatic compromise in the present as a gateway to an inevitable long term future. Advocates say let’s get what we can right now, civil unions, and slowly work our way up to more. Often they also say this is the only reasonable strategy because it’s just as important to respect the different view points of others even if we don’t agree with you and try and understand the tightly ingrained social attitudes that are a part of who they are. It’s arrogant to try and force them to change their views.

To that I say, FUCK THAT SHIT!  I don’t WANT to understand the social attitudes of bigots. I don’t give a shit about how you grew up and blah blah blah that makes you continue to mock and ridicule people who are different from you. I don’t want to hear your sob story that makes you think you have a right to deny others their basic rights.

Take this for an example, undoubtedly it’s a matter of some serious important academic interest to understand where White Supremacy and Antisemitism comes from and what leads people to be that way. But if you’re a Jew in the middle of the holocaust, that’s rather insignificant to you right now. Actually if you’re ANYONE witnessing the holocaust it’s meaningless. Nobody cares where these attitudes CAME from. Not then and now. We just want them to fucking change it.

I don’t care if making arguments like this makes people uncomfortable. I WANT them to be uncomfortable. I want them to open their fucking minds and hearts to their fellow human beings. And if in the process of doing so that requires some deep introspection and realization of your own internal sick, unfair, and unacceptable biases, SO BE IT! That’s what I want. That’s what I think we should ALL want. Why in the hell is it such a huge problem to make people feel bad when they are in fact in the wrong!?!?

It’s not that hard you know. It takes all of two seconds to change your mind and say okay, gay marriage is fine by me. It’s not like it hurts you to do so. Well maybe it hurts your pride if you’ve staked your miserable reputation on decrying gay people. Oh God no! Excuse me while I go cry myself to sleep over your intense suffering.

It’s not hard to see that people are in fact wholly capable of stopping at any moment spouting the bullshit anti-gay marriage arguments that are so mind numbingly stupid they want me want to weep to hear that homosapiens are capable of formulating them.  I mean really? drug abuse, teen pregnancy, sex outside of wedlock, prostitution, incest, polygamy, bestiality? Really? You think these things seriously turn on the question of gay marriage? You really think that being gay gives people some genetic disposition to be bad people and bad parents? You really think that there’s some special magic about having a male and female parent that makes kids turn out a-okay? You really think that generations of kids will suddenly all be “doomed” to being gay or bi or trans just because you allowed gay marriage to be allowed? Really? Honestly? 

Just possibly it just might be that allowing civil unions as a compromise will work out ok. I mean we can see society changing and becoming more tolerant by the day. Younger generations more and more are accepting of sexual differences. But even so I never really was too fond of the wait for the bad and/or dumb people to die strategy. That never seems to work out, especially since the dumb people aren’t ever nearly as dumb as you think and the bad people always tend to stick around to spread their bullshit a lot longer than you ever imagined they would. Not to mention the sheer practical concerns that civil unions will in fact likely leave lots of legal loop holes that have to be challenged on a case by case basis. And the even more pressing concern that in the mean time while we’re ‘waiting’ for people to grow up and realize they’ve been being morons about this for the past few years, people are workign to pass constitutional amendments designed to explicitly restrict the rights of gays to marriage. Such things are exceedingly hard to overturn and for good reason. Messing around and striving for less than full marriage rights could very well all opponents to push back the struggle for generations. This is no time for complacency.

But even beyond that there’s a deeper question here. To me it’s not an issue of can society accept a Civil Unions compromise. It isn’t even a question of whether doing so will work in terms of securing rights for homosexual couples. It’s not whether compromise is ok. It’s that we SHOULDN’T HAVE TO.

Nobody should have to compromise to appease bigots and brats and arrogant self-centered bastards who think they have the right to dictate how YOU live. FUCK THAT SHIT Fuck it sideways with some sort of indescribably large painful object. YOU are the bad guys. You may well be an otherwise good and productive members of society, but in THIS you are dead wrong. IF you think being gay is a sufficient justification for denying people the same fundamental terminology you use for other “real” people, you’re being a evil shithead, and you need to fucking stop.

THAT’s what I believe with regards to gay marriage vs civil unions. This is a civil rights issue. It’s not a special case. And we have to stop pretending that you can fix a matter of justice without making anyone feel bad.

(originally posted April 15,2009)

Go here and watch the video introducing the Congressional panel overseeing the administration of the TARP program.  http://cop.senate.gov/reports/library/report-040709-cop.cfm

I read both dissenting arguments and a good chunk of the report itself too. It’s quite fascinating stuff and rather disturbing.

Basically the super simple gist of it all is that there is a question of whether the government is doing too little or too much. The consenting view of the report is that while we can’t know for sure, there’s a great deal of evidence from other countries and our own nation’s history to suggest that there may well be very good reason to believe that we are doing too little.  The dissenter, effectively are worried that we might go overboard and do too much, interfering with private industry, and whatnot. 

The dissenting view very much pisses me off. Because implicit in this idea is that it’s ok if we do too little. But a moments introspection suggests the exact opposite. I mean think about it. If we go overboard sure there will be problematic consquences but the real problem, the huge mess we are in RIGHT NOW will be fixed. There’s no risk of that not happening. Liquidating the banks will fix banking and pave the way to recovery. Taking them over very likely will do the same. Both strategies have worked in numerous major crises in the past. It may not be the best solution but it certainly is *A* solution.

The problem with pussy-footing it instead is that it very much might NOT work. Trying to be clever and do all kinds a sneaky run arounds to fix the banking system might just push the moment when we have to do the major solution back and back all the while the economy suffers. If it did work, it’d be great as it might avoid some of the distasteful disadvantages of the more extreme alternatives, but what if it DOESN’T work? Where will we be in a year or five or ten?

Most likely the answer to that is that we’ll be in the same situation only much worse. Some stress to the system will happen sooner rather than later and the Federal Government will realize that they can’t play around anymore and have to do some extreme response then. The only difference is by then we’ll have lost months or years of time and growth and trillions of dollars. What’s more during the course of that period, the gap between the rich and the poor will have continued to expand and public discontent and distrust of everything the government could do will grow.

And the people’s cynicism will be well justified. If things got worse and we were forced in an Emergency situation to do what we should have done months or years ago isn’t the risk of going overboard in our counterreaction all that much higher? I mean if the people are pissed off the environment will be such that grandstanding politicians will do just about anything to regain public suport.

If you’re going to have to do some sort of extreme action, it’s better to get it out of the way SOONER for that very reason. The faster and more decisive the better. If not the risk and uncertainty just breeds more uncertainty, mroe doubt, more fear, and worse ultimate outcomes.

We know an extreme solution would work? At least all the historical evidence points to that it will. If it doesn’t it would be a historically unprecedented event. So why is the government trying a tact with only a mixed success rate instead? Why, if we are calling this the GREATEST crises since the great Depression are we only trying solutions that are SMALLER and LESS comprehensive than solutions we’ve used successfully for other smaller crises in the past? How does that make sense?

I am afraid things will look better for a small while giving us false confidence in a system that cannot work. And it’ll keep being like that for months and months that drag on into years where we think things are getting better and then a bit worse and then a bit better, but really we are stuck in stasis while the heart of the economy is stagnating. And in the worse case that crises will just bleed right into the next major crises that shatters our economic system. It could be, and probably will be our impending healthcare crises but it might be something smaller sooner. But if THAT happens, we’ll see a change to our social fabric unlike anything we can imagine right now.

Stories of the great depression may one day seem quaint to us.

So we better hope this fricking Treasury plan *works*. Or else they get smart and realize it’s not, much sooner rather than later.

So according to this person, April was arbitrarily declared Blog Every Day April. And like the crazy person I am, I decided to jump on the bandwagon  and declared in a post I hoped none of you would ever read that I was going to try to do blog every day  in April too.

And now, quite predictably I’d like to announce my abject failure.  Admittedly I was off to a bad start to begin with since I had already missed a day before I even decided to do it. I then missed the  very next day after I announced it. And then *another* day 4 days later.  I would have missed yesterday too except I cheated and wrote a post about how I’d forgotten what I was going to write. Clever wasn’t it? And now today yet again I find myself in the last moments with nothing to write and little chance of making my deadline without resorting to a cheap gimmick.

In short.  I FAIL.

And so I come to you my beloved readership with hat in hand to beg thee for thine assistance! Please do what you can to help me from being as completely and totally a failure as I am currently on the road to becoming. I’m no good with writers prompts so how about something different.  Instead, YOU tell me what to write! Just reply to this post or send me a message with ideas for what I should write about! Please suggest anything that you think might interest me!  Stories, essays, jokes, speeches, biographies, I’ll write just about anything about anything. Or at least I’ll do my best. So send me a topic! I can’t promise to write about it, but if I do,  I’ll include a link to your blog in the post I write for your topic.

I’m appointing this task to you Nephyo-readers, whoever you are. And if you do not find a way. No one will.