nick and I went to seneca park yesterday to see the cicadas. I was quite disappointed -- the flat, muddy ground of the trail was absolutely covered with little holes made by emerging cicada nymphs, but we didn't see or hear many adults. The few adults that we did see were in the process of dying after having mated. One that we picked up was singing as he died, and we could see the strange little organs on his abdomen vibrating. I had a theory that the reason we saw so few cicadas was because of the odd weather we've had lately. The past two winters were unusually cold, long and snowy. This year, there was almost no spring; it seemed like winter turned immediately to summer. So, I was formulating environmental conspiracy theories. but I'm told that the cicadas don't really make themselves known in the late afternoons, and I read in a few web articles that they're not yet out in anywhere near full force. We saw lots of carpaces, though -- clusters of lifeless, translucent-brown insect shells clinging to the green leaves of saplings. One frail branch might have 10 cicada nymph shells fastened to the leaves, about one shell for every leaf.
Nick took a few pictures, and I tried to as well. I discovered more ways in which my camera is practically unusable. First of all, it won't turn on. Even if it has plenty of battery power, it will flash a red light at you and refuse to turn on when the switch is set to 'camera.' the switch usually needs to be flipped three times in a row before the camera decides to cooperate. So, one has to go through this little dance of turning it off and on, three or four times, before it stays on. Then, once it is on, it automatically shuts off after about two seconds of being idle, and then the operator has to recommence the dance. Second of all, what you see in the view-frame doesn't match the captured image, so this necessitates using it in 'live view' mode, which drains the batteries in a few minutes. Also, the internal memory is tiny, and holds about 10 pictures. It forgets all of the instructions it was given (exposure compensation, flash setting, picture quality, etc) when it is turned off (or turns itself off). Finally, the color quality and focus are just bad. Essentially, it's a toy camera.
But I managed to get two shots that I liked. It's not so much that it's a toy camera, but that it doesn't even work right in its limited way. Really, the worst thing is that it turns off so quickly, and then can't be turned back on. But it's also the tiny memory. And the low charge capacity. It's just a bad camera. Maybe there is an option to supress automatic shut-off. However, I can't get the stupid thing to stay on long enough for me to explore the interface. I think it doesn't like the fact that it's been put in 'live view' mode, and therefore self-induces a coma after 2 seconds of being on.
A good example of bad hardware, bad software. The software is much worse, though. It's the most poorly-written piece of shit I've ever seen.
Anyway, here are web images of the two pictures that were comparatively decent. Really, though, I need a new digital camera. This one is just not functional.
Above: the lake.
Above: some trees and the path.
I've been reading up on the consequences of not paying back my student loans. At first, it appeared as though the worst case scenario was being sued by the federal government, at which point failure to make court-ordered payments would result in contempt of court charges. But, I'm seeing here that all the government has the power to do in such a suit is incur a 'judgment against (my) record,' which only damages a credit rating further. In short, there's no way to that non-repayment will ever result in jail time.
Possible consequences of non-repayment:
It boils down to the fact that the government could damage my ability to function productively in society. I'm not sure whether this ability is already so damaged that it would not matter, or if it's already so damaged that further damaging it would send me over the edge into abject poverty, homelessness or criminality.
Not endeavoring to repay is certainly tempting -- is $25,000 worth the right to 'function productively in society,' to be a cog in the machine? I don't think it's likely that I'll suddenly change my behavior and become socially responsible. I'm far too solipsistic and angry to be socially responsible. These personality traits can probably be corrected with drugs.
It's funny how some people see themselves as part of society, and others don't. Some people take personal offense when I say things like 'i have nothing but contempt for society,' whereas others agree with me. Probably most people fall somewhere in the middle -- this assertion makes them uncomfortable, because certainly they are included in my definition of society. But they also feel some sympathy, because they too feel compelled and coerced by social forces. The degree to which I respect and identify with another person has a lot to do with the degree to which they reject the main stream of the cultural current. Basically, I don't like uncreative conformists, and want nothing to do with them, unless I'm hunting them for sport.
In the meantime, there's still the superficial problem of my student loans. To repay or not to repay: that is the question. Do you think I should repay, if I can? Should I try to engineer my life into such a position so that I am able to pay? Ie, lose weight, buy some idiot clothes, and smile like a monkey on a series of job interviews until I get accepted into some corporation's welfare track? Some people to whom I've talked feel that not repaying student loans is somehow morally wrong, and that I should be 'responsible' and pay them back. I don't quite understand this, and I think my inability to grasp this concept is related to some hard-wiring differences. The only reason I would even consider repaying my student loans is that there are consequences if I don't. As far as I understand it, laws serve the purpose of preventing me from killing whom I want to kill and taking what I want to take.
But what's really ironic is that if there were no laws, I don't think I'd be particularly inclined to take anything or kill anybody. If forced to rely on my own moral judgment, I think I'd actually do pretty well and not harm others or their property. The fact that I'm not allowed to rely on my own moral judgments makes me want to disobey imposed moral judgments, just out of spite, and even if they happen to correspond to what would be my own moral judgments. Essentially, I have a problem with social hierarchy. I don't like to be told what to do, and this includes repaying my student loans.
Certainly if I get a job that pays enough so that I don't feel strapped for survival, I won't mind making my monthly payments. But people aren't too eager to hire me, because I'm sort of sociopathic, bizarre, and poorly indoctrinated.
Of course, this all has to do with the fact that I say things like 'i hate people' all of the time. I really think I might be a sociopath, or something very much like one. I'm sure there's treatment, but I'm also sure that this treatment involves brain-damaging psychoactive medication. Coercion and control really just aren't my cup of tea, and it's my unwillingness to be coraled that is going to be my undoing.
Last night, I was supposed to meet tom at his house, but he never showed up, because the thing he was attending before I arrived ran late. I lay down in the front seat of my mom's car outside of his house listening to 'mandatory metallica' on 98 rock for 23 minutes before deciding that something had not gone according to plan, and embarking on the trip back home. To console myself in the face of this lost rare opportunity for social activity, I stopped at the grocery store and bought $20 of groceries that I really wanted, as opposed to getting things that are specially engineered to be the best combination of cheap, nutritious and having an optimal preparation time (not too long, but more importantly not too short and easy, or they'll be in danger of disappearing very quickly). Last night I ignored all of these rules, and bought food that I really like: a block of white, extra-sharp, new york-style cheddar cheese, a half gallon of organic 1% milk, a box of quaker granola cereal, some oscar meyer sliced smoked turkey, a loaf of pepperidge farm 'soft oatmeal bread,' and a half gallon of store-brand grapefruit juice (by far the best tasting brand). It's now 24 hours later, and most of these spoils are gone.
The problem certainly isn't that I don't like healthy foods -- I very much prefer them, in fact. The problem is that I simply cannot stop eating them. It feels like a force overwhelms me and makes me eat. I can sit back and watch myself getting a bowl out to pour some cereal in, and think on some level 'i really shouldn't be eating this,' but forces that are stronger than anything else keep my hands moving through the motions of pouring the milk.
Doctors often think they are doing society a favor by giving 'tough love' to the overweight. The attitude of derision and contempt that contemporary western medicine assumes towards the too-fat is not going to convince them to lose weight. They already know that they're endangering their health and that they're despised by society for being ugly. They understand the consequences of their behavior, and yet they're still fat. Isn't it obvious that if the benefits of slenderness are so clear, so widely touted and known, and so applicable to everyone, then the overweight person must not be overweight by his or her own choice? This seems like a no-brainer to me. I obviously know that it's not good to be fat, that being fat carries very real consequences that are debilitating in many ways: socially, financially, romantically, and in terms of health. I completely understand this (as do the vast majority of fat people in the united states), and additional derision and comments aren't going to cause me to suddenly change my ways. I certainly would have changed my ways by now if this were possible.
What follows is a message to everyone. The next person who pokes fun at me for being overweight, who mentions it in an even remotely nasty way, is going to face consequences. It should be obvious to you that I am this way not because I am choosing to be, but because I'm not able to change. If I were able to change, wouldn't I have changed by now? Are you saying that I must not fully grasp the consequences? Are you calling me stupid? Careful, human. Think about the holes in my wall. Think about my size and strength. Think about my history of gun violence, and willingness to steal from, cheat and lie to society if I feel that it's moving against me. Think about how smart I am. Think about the fact that I would love nothing more than to sink my teeth into a human face and tear it apart. Just be careful.
Haha, just kidding. Sort of. I wonder if threatening one's readers is a good way to increase readership? I'll bet that it is.
I think I'm becoming more and more agorophobic. My weight problem is starting to combine with this, and fears of leaving the house are exacerbated by fears of being fat in public. Also, I think sitting on the computer all day doesn't help. I have this fun little world here that I'm getting so used to and accomplished in dealing with -- coming out into the real one seems next to impossible. There are just too many variables.
Thank morax for the second amendment, eh? If they come to take me away, they end up full of perforations. The right of the every american to protect his or her self extends to the insane, as they protect themselves from imaginary enemies.
I've been working on my painting today. It's now on the middle floor as opposed to languishing in the damp basement (where it was refusing to dry), and today I filled in the big yellow area towards the bottom of the canvas. When this dries a teeny bit I'll go over it with more paint, and make it opaque, thick and luxurious. I think I've discovered the secret to life: to always be working on at least one oil painting. The nature of oils is such that one can fiddle around with them endlessly, and almost literally 'never finish a painting' (i heard this once at a portfolio review, and didn't really understand what the fruity art-man was talking about). This is a very different approach than the one I employed for the acrylics I used to work with in high school, which dry into shiny plastic blobs within minutes. I used to finish acrylic paintings very quickly, in around two hours.
I just got up and looked at the three acrylic paintings I have hanging on the dining room wall, and they seem now to have an unfinished, scribbled quality to them that is sort of disturbing. They almost look mass-produced. I don't think this is necessarily a bad thing, and I've railed against art being discounted if the viewer is unable or unwilling to conceptualize the work behind it (as happens in web-art), as well as the assumption that creative effort is necessarily equivalent to man-hours. But I have to admit that it's nice to see hours and days implied in a piece of artwork, as they are in an oil painting. An oil painting looks like a great deal more thought has gone into it than, for instance, might go into an acrylic painting. This might simply be by necessity: if one has to wait days and days for the stupid thing to dry, and the paint is readily shapable, removable and changable during that time, then it seems obvious that a comparative lot of thought is going to get put into what is intrinsically such a slow process. With an oil painting, you spend so much time mulling over the thing that I'd say most of the work is in your head, planning the piece and wondering how the process will shape up over time. Oil painting is a meditative, patience-oriented exercise. At least more so than any other visual art medium I've fooled with.
If I can preserve at least one painting at some indeterminate state of completion at all times, then whenever someone asks me 'what are you doing?' I can answer with 'working on my oils,' and a sort of hushed reverence will follow, because who in their right mind would criticize that? It's a real racket, to tell the truth.
I think, though, that this particular oil painting might be a bit unusual in that I'm doing it in layers, and have the design and colors so carefully planned out. I'm using the paints like a printer -- just a mechanical process for realizing a visual concept that's already come into being. But even so, working on the painting gives it a life of its own, even though I'm essentially duplicating what I see on a printout of something I drew with a computer mouse in photoshop.
What's also interesting is that anyone, if they wanted to, could do the same thing with my original gif image: print it out in oils. But somehow, I don't think too many people will. And even if they did, I think I would be more flattered than instilled with intellectual property paranoiac rage. I would see it as akin to someone duplicating my experiment, or mirroring my website -- a tribute of sorts. Of course, if someone else were to attempt a painting based on my sketch, it's likely that I would be unhappy with their efforts. Well, unless they were a very accomplished oil painter. But it's doubtful that a very accomplished oil painter would spend his or her time replicating someone else's concept. I dunno, perhaps this is a shame. One sees beginning painting students sitting in museums with their easels (and possibly berets), duplicating master paintings.
Rethinking the situation, I think I might feel angry and powerless if someone printed out my image, made from it an identical oil painting, signed it, and then sold it for $2,000. But the internet is part of my practice, and trying to hoard intellectual property on the internet is a losing battle, as we've seen in things like open source and peer-to-peer file sharing. The internet has made it that much more difficult to sell an idea, something I'm not concinced should be sold in the first place. If a high school art student mirrored my website and turned it in for his final grade in some class, my reaction would be amusement and concern that the student wasn't learning anything about art. However, if someone mirrored my website and was somehow able to take credit for and sell the ideas therein, I would be furious. I think. Or maybe I'd just sort of shrug and produce more ideas.
I don't think I'd like to see someone duplicate something I'd drawn/written/painted/etc and sign it -- put his or her name on it. But I think after the initial anxiety has passed, my reaction would be sort of similar to 'so what?' to tell the truth, there could be a million kids linking directly to my online images and presenting them as their own (i don't have referrer logs enabled, so I don't know from whence my web hits are coming). This happened to nick, and his response was to add a copyright notice and url to those images that were being 'stolen.' to be honest, I think I'd rather have my images free of copyright, which is not only visually ugly but sort of politically and conceptually ugly as well. However, I don't mind the copyright notice on my index page, nor do I mind signing artwork. I didn't used to like signing artwork, but now I don't think I'd be able to leave a canvas nameless.
However, it seems a futile, desperate thing to add signatures or try to restrict/control the duplication of binary data on the internet in any way. The internet is there to provide easy access to information, and I don't like the idea of hindering or controlling this access.
I think the key is that web-art doesn't exist -- it's all just 0s and 1s (haha, tired old phrase). It literally cannot be stolen, but only duplicated. To copyright or sell electronic data seems, on some level, not only ridiculous but impossible. Just as the RIAA can't stop people from sharing music, I can't stop someone from downloading my image, printing it out as-is, signing the printout and selling it for $50,000. The internet is here to stay, and the days of intellectual property are as good as dead.
Ownership and other forms of property might be as well, but let's take things one step at a time.
Libertarians think they've got it all figured out because they can see beyond the political dichotomy of democrat and republican. But something occurred to me today: libertarians might be the dumbest of them all, because they assume that all democrats think one way and all republicans think another. This dichotomy exists because of a peculiarity in our electoral system, but it doesn't necessarily divide the ideologies of the country into two groups, as I'm afraid most libertarians presume.
I have spoken.
Here's an article for all to consider.
I don't know if I'll be able to bring myself to eat a cicada, but the idea is really nice. For two weeks, or however long the cicadas are supposed to be around, we have at our disposal a free, plentiful, easy food source. There's absolutely no reason to buy groceries for two weeks. I've come to rely on eggs, beans and rice as cheap sources of protein, but nothing beats cicadas.
It seems incredibly wasteful to buy up frozen groceries at the foodstore when there are millions of fresh cicadas crawling around, just waiting to be eaten.
Eating insects is no more disgusting than eating shrimps, crabs and lobsters, which are just as creepy, crawly, otherworldly and strange. In fact, they're members of the same phylum: arthropods. How can one condemn eating an insect if one is willing to slaughter an intelligent, loving mammal such as a pig or cow, and eat it? This is not to imply that the suffering of an insect (they do have simple central nervous systems) is any less than that of a mammal, but rather to illustrate that to condone eating one creature while forbidding eating another doesn't have any basis in logic.
If I had to kill my own cow and take big, ragged, bloody, furry bites out of the carcass, I would be less inclined to eat cow. If cicadas were de-winged, de-legged, gutted, de-shelled, de-eyed, presented on a styrofoam tray covered with plastic wrap, and then fried in olive oil after being spiced with saffron, curry and salt, then I don't see what would make them any more inherently repulsive than bloody lumps of mammalian muscle tissue.
If one isn't willing to kill one's food, then one shouldn't be willing to eat it. Everyone who eats meat is killing animals, and if they aren't willing to kill a thinking, feeling, loving mammal themselves then perhaps they shouldn't be eating meat. Our sprawling population demands that animal flesh be factory farmed in order for it to be widely available for consumption (if one assumes that consuming flesh is necessary, a tenuous assumption indeed). I'm willing to say that this is morally questionable. But I'm unwilling to say that killing an animal and feeding on it is wrong per se.
If one eats meat, one is a killer. Meat is murder. However, murder, killing another one of your own, is not an inherently bad thing. Nothing is an inherently bad thing -- even the most podunk state university humanities major has by now grasped the einstein-nietzsche concept that morality is relative, just like space and time, and that absolute 'good' and 'bad' simply don't and can't exists.
Eating a chicken nugget is the same thing as grabbing a chicken and breaking its neck with your hands. But there's nothing wrong with this, per se.
Humans are designed to be omnivorous. Unfortunately, there are so damned many of them teeming on the surface of the planet that this unprecedented burgeoning of the species has necessitated the orwellian horror-nightmare of factory farming in order to maintain their old habits. There are many things worse than death. Death is neutral, and a part of life. Mammals that are jaw-droppingly similar to humans genetically are being tortured so they can be killed and eaten efficiently, because humans are unwilling to change their hunter-gatherer diet even though they've become like a plague of insects on the face of the planet. Feeding ourselves in the same ways has consequences that most of us are too eager to ignore.
I have to take an aside here to point out that, yet again, the abrahamic desert religions are squarely to blame for humans' 'mastery of the animals,' and their ensuing willingness to blindly disregard their suffering. Absolute morality and free will: probably the two most harmful and debilitating myths to come out of human thought.
Really, what's gone wrong is that there are simply too many of us. There are too many humans for the earth to support without perversions like offshore drilling, strip mining, massive air pollution and factory farming. If we're going to survive, we have to change the way we live, and change the way we think about our relationship with the earth. This bottom-line, cost-benefit, grab-bag approach isn't going to cut it anymore. But, it's pretty inconsequential: either we change our ways or get killed off by our own mistakes. Either way, the earth will recover. Then, 5 billion years down the road, the sun will expand to swallow the earth, which will have been left uninhabitable and mars-like, then mercury-like, a fiery, airless rock in space, long before then. But until that day, in order for 7 billion people to survive on this planet, they're going to have to start using those terrifically swollen, over-evolved cerebral cortexes of theirs, and re-think some of the things they've always done. There's no way we can go on like this, and 'this' includes commercial factory farming.
So, get out there and eat a few cicadas when they pop out in a few days. It's recommended to get them right after the pupae shed their skin -- after that, they start to become crunchy and winged. If you're grossed out, then maybe you should rethink your place on the planet as part of the interconnected ecosystem.
Also, I'm sure I'd lose weight on a 2-week all-cicada diet.