2:13pm
I just discovered my path in life. I'm a dada-zen nihilist, most aptly summarized by discordianism. Basically, I believe that nothing is worth taking seriously, that a non-rational awareness of reality should be developed, and that there is no moral imperative. I spit on you.
9:45am
I'm going to blog some more about weight loss. If you ask any intelligent entity that has your best interests at heart (like a google university search) the question, 'how do I lose weight?,' then the answer will invariably be 'burn more calories than you consume through a combination of sensible (limit sugar and other simple carbohydrates, saturated fats, large portions and eating between meals) eating habits and regular aerobic exercise, the goal being no more than 1-2 pounds a week of weight loss.'
This is almost completely useless.
Everyone knows 'how' to lose weight: one needs to 'eat less and exercise.' that's the way the mechanism of fat storage works. Instead of 'how do I lose weight?,' a better-phrased question might be, 'how do I battle the innate, prehistoric, passionate urge to consume massive quantities of food at every opportunity?'
Why do the overweight consume more calories than they require? Is it a subconscious fear of starvation? Maybe. Perhaps everyone has this need, and some are better-able to suppress their instincts in the face of civilization than others.
I can't say with certainty that there will never be a food shortage, that my reserves of fat won't someday come in extremely handy. In a way, being fat is almost a form of survivalist idealism, and becoming thin represents a surrender to society in that 1) one caves into its demands that everyone be 'thin,' and 2) that one trusts society to keep available a supply of food that is so plentiful that one can in essence 'live paycheck to paycheck,' and only consume as many calories as one needs for the few hours until one's next meal. All in all, weight loss represents knuckling-under to society, something I've struggled against all my life.
Well, there you have it -- I think I figured out why I don't/can't/won't lose weight.
That coupled with a love of shoveling pleasant-smelling, pleasant-tasting matter into my mouth, chewing it up and swallowing it. But I think the reason I'm not willing to give this up for another set of benefits is that the other benefits represent surrender to and trusting of an entity that I roundly despise.
Maybe losing weight just isn't worth it. The only non-shallow reason I might do it is to improve my own health. But I'm really quite healthy, I think -- I ride my bike all the time and take katy for long walks. So I think the only complaint is that I am fat-appearing to everyone else, and this is unpleasant for them to behold. Well, fuck everyone else, as if I needed to bring up my core philosophy again.
Besides arguably health, one good reason to lose weight is that if I didn't find myself so unattractive, I would have a better relationship with ana. The necessity of 'finding ourselves attractive' only comes up in romantic and sexual union; in a human relationship like this, you become 'one' with your partner, in both a figurative and literal sense. Finding yourself attractive in such a union is just as important as finding your partner attractive; in fact, they become the same thing.
Of course, it's possible that I just watch too much porn, and see too many lithe, tawny bodies writhing around in plastic, performative spectacle-sex.
I digress.
I should lose weight.
Dinner tonight with helen. HAHAHAHAHA
5:00pm
Today, I took katy for a long walk, made a tutorial on getting random signatures set up in mutt, rode to the bank, yelled at them for not sending my new checks, deposited a check in my account, posted on usenet a bit, went over to mrs. White's house to collect some leftover potatoes from a potato bar at her workplace, watched some tv, and did some random google searches.
Tomorrow, my mom and I go to dinner at helen's house. It should be fun -- I'm sure she'll have some nice red wine.
Josh was the first person to read this.
Thu 20 nov 2003
11:40am
It's a really nice day today, but I can't pull myself away from the computer. I got interested in getting a random email signature program working, and have been sending emails, searching google and posting on usenet all morning, trying desperately not to offend the snotty little community of unix elitists from whom I'm requesting counsel. Being a prick on usenet is part of the culture, it seems.
And of course, the question is: what will I accomplish through all this effort? Probably nothing at all, but even if I do manage to get a random signature appended to each of my emails I don't think I'll land a job or lose 65 pounds as a result. But it would, I think, improve the quality of my life a little, maybe injecting into it some gameish joy. This computer shit is really a constant struggle.
There are countless users wasting their time on things similar to this randsig.pl program. In unix, I've found that people often devote huge blocks of time to configuring things the way they want them to maximize efficiency, and then never actually get around to outputting much. The old cliche portrays the computer user spending hours and hours searching for a quick, hackish workaround, and inevitably spending more time than s/he would if inefficient methods were used (or 'brute force,' if you're familiar with the jargon file). I find that this model is invoked a lot in the unix world. Theoretically, one gets to the point where one really does have things set up optimally, and can thus get real work done a lot quicker. But I think people like this are pretty few and far between, and most unix users are stuck permanently in the recursive configuring stage, like some kind of dante-esque circle of hell. Of course, as always, I'm basing my sweeping generalizations about society/culture on my own self-analyses; maybe I'm just an idiot.
I applied for a job last night, prompted by an AIM buddy at 2 in the morning.
I think I might be doomed, in more ways than one.
12:07am
Holy shit, I just thought of something. I keep talking about 'innate structures' being responsible for actions, rather than anything like free will. But aren't innate structures a form of determinism? A kind of a priori knowledge? Or maybe this is just a problem of language, something for wittgenstein to tackle. For the time being, keeping up with this impossible language-tangle that we're building, I will defend myself against myself by saying that an innate structure is not necessarily predeterministic because having a cause preceding it doesn't make it the opposite of 'innate;' in this sense, something extraneous to our model. This is getting too hard.
10:17pm
Don't you think I would lose weight if I could? What would possibly motivate me to remain fat except the inability to become thin? The rewards of thinness are many, varied, and obvious, including measurable health, financial, and relationship benefits. No one would remain overweight if it were indeed an option to lose weight, since attaining a normal weight is so universally and obviously beneficial. I heard a tv sound bite tonight that mentioned 'one more reason to take off the pounds.' people don't need additional reasons to 'take off the pounds;' everyone is already quite aware that being overweight is an unhealthy, socially crippling thing, and yet people remain overweight. So obviously, it's not a matter of motivation, but rather one of innate propensity. There are very, very few people who deviate, at least for very long, from their natural body shape; those who are fat tend to stay fat, and those who are thin tend to stay thin. When I say 'natural,' I mean it within the context of a civilized society; the human metabolism is engineered for an uneven food supply, and a constantly plentiful food source wreaks havoc with it.
In conclusion, I am filled with hatred. I'd like to get my knife again -- I wish I hadn't lost it. My mom suggested that I keep a raw steak next to the computer, and tear it apart with my teeth when I get angry. I think this might help. When I get really mad, my thoughts always turn to sinking my teeth into flesh and ripping it away. For me, there is direct connection between my temper and my teeth. Of course, seeing fear in my prey is nice too. I have innumerable fantasies of mass murder in a place of employment, of tearing apart dozens of people at an office until it stinks of blood. If you know of any people that are hiring, be sure to pass the word along.
They'll never take me alive.
12:30pm
It's windy outside today, and it's supposed to monsoon or do something else horrible. So, I'm not able to ride my bike around. However, I don't see any rain falling outside, so I might go on a short ride somewhere. I ate the plate of pork roast mrs. White gave to me for lunch. I was feeling bikeish last night, and so rode around bennington a little bit, ending up at her house. I told her about my food problems, and she offered me a plate full of pork roast, vegetables and potatoes. I had it for lunch today. Now, for the remainder of today and tomorrow until roughly six pm, I have more or less a large sack of potatoes to live on. I think I'd manage to stay fat in all but the most adverse of conditions.
This is hard for me to describe, so I'm going to try to do it really informally, and hope that helps me through it. Nothing can be attributed to effort or lack thereof; it's all a matter of innate structures or abilities. For example, if you work really hard and get a promotion, you can't really say that it was because you worked really hard. Instead, the things that is responsible are the innate traits that lead to your working hard, whether they were environmental or biological. So essentially, people can't really take credit for anything. This is all smacking of the same problems with cause and effect I blogged about last week. Everything has a preceding cause, and in order to deduce anything you have to move infinitely far back along the chain, or pick an arbitrary stopping point and call it an 'axiom.'
Another way to look at this would be predeterminism, or something like that (I'm not really interested in words other people have coined to describe the same thing). If there is a preceding cause for every event, then free will is clearly an illusion. Right now, I have the 'choice' of getting a glass of water or a glass of milk. But my brain is structured in a certain way which will determine which one I choose. Or, my set of experiences will determine it. As I consider it now, I think I will go get a glass of milk, because it tastes better than water. But let's say that in order to demonstrate free will I opt for a glass of water. Then it would be my desire to prove a point that influenced my choice. There are always going to be causes for every effect, and it is the existence of these causes that nullify both axiomatic deduction and free will.
Not that wonderful a portrait I'm painting of the universe; maybe this is the root of 21st century nihilism. We can't even believe in free will or science, let alone an angry desert-god named yahweh.
Our only hope is to go with the flow -- base everything on induction, on our perceptions. Stay dedicated to reality as we experience it, and live completely in the moment. I think zen, or buddhism, or mindfulness, or whatever you want to call it, might be the solution to all of our problems. Also, apparently modern quantum mechanics does strange things to the chain of cause and effect when you do things like curve spacetime. Also, there are all kinds of parallels between eastern philosophy and modern physics.
I blame the ancient greeks for setting us all on the wrong track.
On a (seemingly) unrelated point, I don't dislike all people, but rather some people; it's so simple and yet so profound. Actually, it's a bit more complicated than that: I don't like certain things about certain people, and behavior that I find offensive in one person I won't necessarily find offensive in another. Furthermore, certain people exhibit a greater frequency of this relative objectionable behavior than others. I'm going to start keeping my eye out for 'objectionable behavior,' and begin a mental tally ascribed to each individual when it occurs. Then they'll be sorry.
Whoops, it's raining really hard all of the sudden. Lucky I didn't go out.
7:52pm
I will finish this entry in eight minutes, so I can watch Star Trek. Most of the episodes are horrible, but some of them are ok -- notably the ones featuring q or a tangled morass of political intrigue within the klingon empire. The bike people installed a new rear derailleur, and I was so happy with it that I didn't mind forking over the extra $10. I like new parts on my bike. Also in the news: I figured out how to configure greymatter to the point where I can get it to look exactly the way I want it to, but then I broke it, and it won't re-install. Oh well...who cares? Caring about computers is a waste of energy -- if they work, then great, but if they don't, then move on with your life.
Soon I will destroy all who oppose me. Be forewarned.
9:49am
Consider the possibility that google feeds its database of all your searches to the nsa. Or, more plausibly, that if subpoenaed, they will release this information to local authorities or the fbi. Just from an anthropological perspective, a person's google searches paint a unique portrait of that person.
Here are my most recent google searches, as indexed by my google toolbar in firebird (i think the searches span about 24 hours):
"start your own business"
"September 11th" funny
man links unix browser
man links
paper volcanos
"grandparents day" poem
josh
yahoo chat rooms french
aim chat rooms french
mena suvari forehead
mena
bjork
"minnie driver"
"steel pole bathtub"
polvo
"sonic youth" slaapkamer
dell "installing memory"
"tim nohe"
"dandy warhols"
robots.txt
taskmanager "physical memory"
available memory windows xp
bronagh
"comcast sucks"
comcast sucks
respect enemy vietnam
digital art
"turn off virtual memory" xp
toy "dump truck"
flower
kite
12^7
"smoked oysters"
internet history
duchamp fountain
"have sex"
"brotherhood of man"
"queer edward ii"
"edward i"
"edward i" pagan
"edward i" christian
volvo
"european cars" audi saab bmw volkswagen volvo
"european cars" audi saab bmw volkswagen
"european cars"
audi
saab
shucks
"sails of charon" tab
Interesting stuff, eh? Rest assured that this list is completely unedited. A complete collection of google searches is interesting in the same way a journal is interesting: it provides a record of your thought processes over time, the relevance and genuineness thereof increasing as (some of) our conscious minds become more and more linked to and dependent on the internet. The existence of a huge information database within easy access does, I imagine, strange things to the human mind's ability and willingness to store its own data. If you can simply look them up, then suddenly devoting time and mental energy to memorizing formulas, facts, and procedural minutiae becomes obsolete. Human cognition is becoming more and more augmented by the internet. I can imagine a day when our thoughts are linked directly to the internet, and finding the lyrics to 'gloves of metal' by manowar while you're in a public restroom at a basketball game is simply a matter of accessing the internet using computers and wireless internet devices small enough to reside in your body somewhere, their commands interfaced with particular shapes of brain waves. This technology doesn't fall all that far in the future, actually. In the meantime, someone should develop software to better catalog google searches, that lists a configurable number of searches along with the time and date of the search.
3:10pm
I bought my Greyhound bus ticket yesterday -- that's going to be hardcore, just in the fact that I'll be taking a bus to West Virginia for something like 15 hours. Greyhound/peter pan/whatever buses are full of the poor and destitute regardless of where they are headed, and I imagine that one destined for WV will be even more so. It'll be fun, in a way. I'm thinking that I will need 1) _dune_ by frank herbert, 2) a few crossword puzzle books, and 3) some form of portable music. Ana's mother seems eager for me to join her family, but less eager to let ana join mine. I heard in some movie: 'a son...you raise them, and then they go off, find families of their own, and they're gone...but a daughter, she's yours FOREVER.'
If by the end of this week comcast doesn't get on the stick and improve my connection reliability, I'm going to switch to starpower.
I did some usenet posting: a link to my writing page on misc.writing.moderated, a link to music on rec.music.experimental, and a link to art on rec.arts.fine. We shall see what happens.
12:01pm
Maybe I should accept the fact that I require human contact, that I basely seek it out. No matter how many times I say 'i hate people,' the truth is that I can't hate them -- I might want to, but I'm programmed to be a gregarious pack-animal, and fighting your DNA is rarely a worthwhile battle.
Most people, when they mutter 'i hate people' (I've heard this many, many times), are really trying to imply that they're better than everyone -- that they're somehow not a person, and that they're unique and different because they can step back and make the blanket statement 'i hate people.' unfortunately, *everyone* says that they hate people. *everyone* wants to be unique, to be different, to stand out in the crowd.
This is precisely because we're largely identical. We, as humans, have hugely more in common than we do iconoclastic traits. Even 'weirdos' are motivated by the more or less same things, and behave in more or less the same way.
Others often respond to any assertion or statement you make about yourself with something along the lines of 'everyone does this' or 'i think that's pretty common.' in fact, I'm doing it right now with the statement 'others often respond to...' this is an adversarial instinct, born of a desire to counter claims of uniqueness in others. Claims of uniqueness is a threat to the respondent's own perception of his/her uniqueness, since uniqueness depends on the sameness of others. So, we essentially have a situation where everyone in the world is standing on a stepladder, and shouting 'I'm unique! In unison. Then, as an afterthought, they say again in unison, 'and you're all the same.' it's important to remember that the self-concept of being unique is reliant upon the world-view of everyone else being the same.
I think the reason we americans don't think of this (humans' fundamental similarity) as a source of comfort, but rather as something to rage against, has a lot to do with capitalism and the 'frontier mentality' that's still responsible for a lot our behavior. In this country, the idea of the unique individual is championed. So, an inner conflict is created when on one hand we have mass-marketing that results in conformity, and on the other hand a national identity forged largely around ideals of individualism and iconoclasm.
The irony of the conformist results of advertising and marketing is that products are presented to make you think you become more individualistic by using them. For example, a car commercials almost always show a single, shining, unique car speeding along a country road; they never portray thousands of identical cars creeping along during rush hour traffic (i think there may have been a commercial that did precisely that, hoping to capitalize on some kind of awareness of this particular big lie, and say to the consumer 'see? We're on your side...we know the score.' I don't know how well this worked -- I don't see it on the air anymore).
We've developed, in this country, an odd dichotomy: a system that depends simultaneously on our personal illusions that we are unique individuals, and also on the fact that we behave with clockwork predictability. It's much easier to sell 1,000,000 coffee makers if you know for a fact that 1,000,000 americans have exactly the same tastes in coffee makers.
So, to summarize, capitalism relies on conformity generated through the lie that you, the consumer, are unique, and specifically become even more unique and demonstrate your individuality through the use of the product being sold. The lie is as gratuitous as it's possible for a lie to be: 'you'll be more unique by behaving just like everyone else.' it's absolutely comical if you think about how it would look to space aliens: 250,000,000 creatures watching the same commercial on television that blares at them 'use this product! Adopt this image and lifestyle! By doing so, you will demonstrate your uniqueness!', and then promptly and proudly, in unison, marching out onto the street with their new hat or gloves or jennifer aniston haircut, and thinking to themselves 'I'm unique. I'm an individual,' while ignoring the 249,999,999 others doing exactly the same thing.
I'm not condemning all conformity as morally repugnant, by any means. It's only my goal to point out that advertisers, marketers, and other people who are in power and want to stay there use the myth of individuality to foster a conformity that keeps them comfortably behind the wheel.
Conformity is often associated with communism and socialism, of vast throngs of people doing the same thing and wearing little drab uniforms. But the truth is, conformity works to foster authoritarian hierarchy under any economic system, whether you are selling 1,000,000 widgets to 1,000,000 people who you know will like the same widget because you've engineered it that way, or you are submitting 1,000,000 fliers of official state propaganda to 1,000,000 people you know will respond in the same way, because you've engineered it that way.
Whether it's the vanguard group and mcdonalds or the kgb and stassis, we're in trouble either way.
Oh, and also, you're not unique.
10:58am
My bike is in the shop, getting repaired. I opted for a $50 drive train disassembly-cleaning-and-reassembly, and the attendant repairperson hinted that 'a lot more would probably get done to it,' since the weather has turned cooler and the season has slowed down. I just hope they don't break it more than it was broken already, which happens not infrequently with repairs. It happened with my guitar, several times in a row, until I found this one guy in baltimore who now hides out and refuses any direct contact, because he's become so popular. The mechanics of reality...
If you have a particular sweater you like to wear, you will be in contact with it more -- putting it on, taking it off, hanging it up, taking it to the cleaner's, washing it, folding it, etc. And through these manipulations, you are more likely to lose, damage, or wear out this sweater than you would a sweater you never manipulate, because you don't like it. The mechanics of reality...
If you are fat, you get hot more easily, and want to take off your clothes. But you can't take off your clothes, because you are fat and will be reviled. The mechanics of reality...well actually, this is more the mechanics of cultural conditioning...or maybe reality; I don't know.
12:00am
I just wanted to start the new week's blog before I went to bed, and get last week's entries transferred to the archives. This blog is time consuming; maybe it's only because I insist on writing so much. Last week's entries were pretty interesting, I thought, as far as blogs go. Not to toot my own horn. It's down there in the yellow box, in the most recent archive (hint).