Keep writing these brilliant things outside of my blog, and then want to post them outside their original environments. This is something I wrote for the SDF bulletin board, regarding a thread on 'if you had unlimited money, how would you spend your time?'
I think what's really being asked with that question is 'what would you do if you didn't have to work to survive?' hehe, this is sort of similar to my life, actually (the similarities between the lives of some idle prince of the riviera and a railroad hobo are rather striking).
I'm going to attempt a definition of money:
::barnacle pre-emptively ducks::
Money is a way of abstracting work, so that 'work' can be more easily applied to different problems and transferred from person to person.
The problem comes from things like investment speculation and insider trading, where money is generated that is less clearly a form of work. A big economic issue that has emerged in the past 100 years or so is that investors and 'money manipulators' are increasingly the principle locus of money, as opposed to industrial and labor production. Or something like that -- I don't really know the terminology in economics.
Baw pointed out that unlimited money would be, tautologically, worthless money. Perhaps if a situation is ever developed so as to eliminate work from the survival equation (freud said 'love and work' are all people need to be happy, complete beings, as if that were so easy to accomplish), then that person's life will cease to have meaning.
As mine arguably has...
Hehe. I do a lot of writing on bboard, wikipedia, my blog, internet papers, and emails, as well as paint and play the guitar. So I haven't descended completely into the existential vacuum yet. The problem is, no one is willing to 'pay' me for my 'work' (at least not very much -- I've sold a few paintings).
I just wrote my third wikipedia article. The previous two have been edited beyond all recognition of my orignal writing, which is as it should be. Anyway, the short article I wrote today was on the entry 'counter-intuitive' -- you can read it here, bearing in mind that it will likely be edited quickly. Here is my original writing (contrast and compare):
Something is counter-intuitive if it does not seem likely to be true using the tool of human intuition to perceive reality. The phrase is most often used to describe bits of scientifically-discovered, objective truth that, for one reason or another, our right brain, intuition, emotions, and the sum of our cognitive processes outside of deductive rationality interpret as 'false' or 'wrong.'
For example, string theory is an extremely counter-intuitive theory, simply because it postulates reality being made up of 2-dimensional vibrating loops that stretch and slide around, and this doesn't ring true, so to speak. In other words, 'string theory' is not intuitively true for many people, including a great many quantum physicists. However, the math works out, and string theory reconciles rifts between quantum mechanics and relativity, so there is objective evidence for a string-composed universe, even though intuitively this has little meaning.
Of course, the subjective nature of intuition make it impossible to say with any objective accuracy what is counter-intuitive -- what is counter-intuitive for one may very well not be for another, since the sources of intuitive 'knowledge' are very much open to debate and epistemological inquiry.
All in all, one can safely label something as 'counter-intuitive' if it is mathematically or scientifically proven to be true, while seeming, according to one's own gut-feeling, to be false.
I'm pleased with it. It'll be interesting to see how the article evolves, if at all.
Tonight, I picked up two fresh applications from whole foods, because I've managed to screw up my original application as well as my one safety copy. So, I now have four applications at various states of completion, with various errors, sitting on the table. I wish I had a typewriter. I have one of those walk-in interviews scheduled for next Wednesday at 7pm, and even though it's a bulk-interview (many prospective employees), the woman I talked to told me that she would put my name down for 7pm so I would get 'priority over everyone else.' whatever. Here's what I foresee:
'Hi...i was told to come at 7pm, and that I have been assigned a special place in the interviewer's heart.'
'Huh?!? What?!? Back of the line!!'
'Actually, what I meant was that I have a bona-fide interview, and it happens to be scheduled at 7pm.'
'That's impossible. Our walk-in interviews are then. There must have been a misunderstanding.'
at this point, the employee thinks to itself 'now what's more likely? That this loser with a beard is confused and stupid, or that our usual policy has deviated without my knowledge?''Well...i spoke on the phone with someone, and she told me that I'd be given 'priority over everyone else.''
'Do you know who you spoke to?'
'No.'
'BACK OF THE LINE, PEON!!
At this point, my inner voices are feebly whining 'you should always get the name of the person you spoke to' so SAVE IT FUCK-O. I DON'T WANT TO HEAR YOUR SHIT. I dunno, man. It's hard. It's really, really hard sometimes. I don't want to say 'i don't like people and I want to see them all reduced to a quivering mass of bloody, lacerated meat,' but I sure do feel something an awful lot like that sometimes.
Peter told me a happy story over the phone yesterday. He mentioned the theoretical existence of something called a 'hypernova,' which is essentially an enormous supernova (an exploding star). When these hypernovae go off, they emit enough gamma radiation to kill pretty much everything within a significant portion of the galaxy they're in. So, Peter told me that it's been postulated that these hypernovae function as the janitors of the universe, cleaning up unwanted life before it evolves far enough to upload its consciousness into computer that fill interstellar rockets, and thus infect other regions of space with the relentless capitalism of competitive evolution married with superior intelligence. So, maybe there's nothing to worry about -- only a matter of time before some gamma rays kill of the ugly, ugly human race like the viruses they are, long before they can go on to infect any other regions of the universe. Truly, nothing would make me happier than knowing the human race was doomed to extinction. We're not a good species, and we need to die off for the sake of cosmic harmony.
I'd always postulated that any planet will inevitably give rise, through competitive evolution, to a species that is so hyper-evolved as to make its own competition hyper-successful. Then, the fantastic success of that species will inevitably lead to overpopulation, destruction of that planet's environment, and the exhaustion of that planet's resources, resulting in the mass-extinction of that species. It's a universal truism if I've ever heard one.
But hypernovae are even better, just because I like the idea of gamma rays cooking people as they sit in their SUVs.
I wonder when this started sounding like the blog of a crazy person? I think it might have been a gradual process.
I discovered that mcdonalds is very cheap. On my way to pick up more job applications, I stopped at mcdonalds and had dinner for $2.10. This is much better than the tres-chic fast food joints that are springing up, like chipotle, quiznos, ricky's rice bowl, etc, for which $10 is a better meal-cost estimate than $5. I spit on those who snobbily avoid mcdonalds.
I bought a Greyhound ticket to NYC to visit lester, the 46 year-old gambian woman who is commissioning my current painting. It should be a fun trip. Only $50 round trip! Good deal.
What the hell, I'll post a photo of it, as well as include my original sketch, on which the final painting was based. Later, I'll get nick to come over and take better photos of it with his camera, because mine has problems photographing artwork. The lack of a real lens or manual focus makes it impossible to take non-blurry photos of things closer than 20 feet or so. And really, even photos at a distance are a little bit blurry.
Above: the original computer sketch, drawn with a mouse using photoshop's paintbrush and pencil tools on a filled background. I don't think *too* many people are still in a world of 'the computer drew it for you,' but I want to make sure for the sake of the more challenged among us. I'll always remember a day in high school, when I turned in a superpaint illustration for a 'political cartoon' assignment. My teacher's reaction was priceless: 'oh wow! A COMPUTER-GENERATED image! I've never seen a COMPUTER-GENERATED image before! You must have a really expensive computer!' ok, the teacher (mr. Lubenetski, 10th grade social studies) didn't actually say the 'expensive' part, but the rest is a very accurate paraphrase, and the spirt of his comment has been preserved: that any creative endeavor that makes use of a personal computer as a tool is somehow cheapened, and somehow less the artist's 'own work' than an image drawn with a pencil, paper, set of erasers, india ink, colored pencils and/or watercolors.
Yes, these are tools (photoshop, its fill-bucket, its paintbrush that draws with soft edges, and its pencil that draws with hard edges), but so are rulers, airbrushes, and certainly oil paints, scraps of old t-shirts, dinner plates, chopsticks, turpentine, plastic wrap and a 'real' paint-brush. I get tired of explaining this to myself over and over, but I just can't shake the feeling that cretinous idiots lurk and walk among us, although probably less so than I tend to think. I should stop calling everybody 'stupid;' it contradicts a lot of the other ideas I've espoused and tinkered with, and it doesn't exactly win friends and influence people, so to speak.
Moving along.
Above: I printed out the image on a color laser-writer at kinkos. The paper got all messed up, stained with paint, and generally art-ified over the course of the past few weeks.
Above: obligatory supplies. Clockwise from the top left: ceramic dinner plate covered in a huge gelatinous blog of excess purple paint, and then covered with plastic wrap. Can of turpentine. Drying oil that I only used in one undercoat of yellow, because it made the paint look like glistening, shiny snot. Various tubes of paint (cadmium yellow, cadmium red, prussian blue, titanium white, and lamp black). A small glass to hold turpentine. A chopstick for mixing the paint. An el-cheapo brush. Bits of old t-shirts to use as rags. Plastic wrap to cover the paint. I also used numerous paper towels, which have been thrown away.
Above: 24 inches x 36 inches, oil on canvas, standing on its easel in the backyard on an overcast day. My camera isn't professional quality, so this image is a bit blurred towards the bottom (not to mention the heavily-compressed jpg adding all kinds of weirdness to the texture and color).
Above: this is where it was painted, mostly (the first layer of red was put down in the basement). This image illustrates some of the problems with jpg and gif compression. See how the red area looks kind of fuzzy and blotchy? If I wanted it to look somewhat decent, I'd have to make the image enormous (as it is, it's about 18k). Gif compression of an image of an oil painting is even worse -- any and all subtleties of color are completely lost. While gif compression can be a nice effect in and of itself, it doesn't work in photo representation, or really any image where there are many subtly interlaced colors (like a textured oil painting). Unfortunately, photoshop has lousy png compression, so that image format (.png) is left unexplored by many photoshop users, even though it very well might solve some of the gif/jpg compression issues.
Just for fun, here are the two images, side-by-side: the original sketch and the final painting. The painting differs from the original sketch in a few ways. It is slightly skinnier than the sketch. All of the shapes and lines are somewhat different. The colors are very different. The foot on your left has five toes. The mauve square in the painting's middle-left is missing. The image was originally obviously made up of two figures: one standing on two legs while cradling another in its arms, with the held figure's legs (leg?) dangling on the standing figure's right. I obscured some of the lines, creating continuity where there shouldn't be any (representationally speaking), and removing continuity where there should have been some (representationally speaking). The result is that there are a few different interpretations of what's going on in the painting. Ultimately, it's comprised of patches of color arranged in some plan on a canvas.
I'll get a good portfolio shot of the image once nick can come over and lend the use of his super-camera. The painting will be hanging in a home somewhere, which I prefer to it being in a museum. I hope the final owner has lots of company. I'm putting off signing it -- I have to think of a relatively design-complimentary place to put it.
Sorry for not having blogged in so long, but I've been exhausting my creative resources on painting lately. Also, who the fuck do you think you are? It's a lot easier to read these things than it is to write them, you useless sponge-sheep. Why don't you go fill out some forms, or hoard some money? You seem to excel in these areas. Haha, I'm kidding -- I love everyone.
Finally, after weeks and weeks of drying in layers, the painting is finished. Almost. I think. I'll keep considering it. Oil paintings are weird that way. I think it might be finished. I'll see how I feel about it in a couple of days. But it's funny -- completing (nearly completing?) this painting has made me realize that I'm better than most people. Haha, what I mean is that I'm better in a lot of ways than a lot of people. And what I really mean is that a reductionist approach to cognitive and mental ability in the form of a series of standardized tests would show that some of my test-areas concentrated in certain test-spectrums outstrip the mean scores of test-takers in my age, race, gender, height and testicle-size group by 98%. Or, I could just say 'i am is better,' and save some tax dollars for other research.
YOU ARE NOTHING. BOW TO ME, HUMAN.
I just had an insight: human cognition can be divided into a tripartite structure of pattern recognition, aggression and creativity. Any of these things, for example, can lead to success in business, relationships, personal finance, hunting, exercise, health, etc. Literally any human endeavor a reasonably experienced person can conceive of can be approached successfully in term of one, two, or all three of these areas of cognition. Let me try to think of a weird example, just so I can avoid listing lots of examples.
1. Painting a picture and aggression. That's a good one. Imagine painting a picture. It isn't turning out right. You get angry at yourself, remember times you have made paintings in the past that have worked out and want to replicate this, remember times you have made paintings in the past that have not worked out and want to avoid this, and think of your peer artists, making paintings that are working out the way they want them to. The urge to compete, both with your peers and yourself, is fired up. This can be described as a competitive impulse, assertive impulse or an angry impulse, but perhaps the best way to classify it is as an aggressive impulse. So, through aggression, you successfully endeavor to paint a picture. If it's helpful to you to reclassify 'aggression' as 'assertion' or 'competition,' then by all means do so -- your particular use of language depends on your culture and mood.
Let's do another example, just for fun. Literally, you can pick *anything* that people do, and think about how aggression (competitive sentiments and impulses directed towards yourself and your peers, be they friendly or not), creativity (generating 'new' things by combining many old elements, experiences, bits of knowledge, etc) or pattern-recognition (something very close to IQ) can lead to success in that endeavor. It's a good exercise -- try it! I'll go through one more with you.
2. Saving money and pattern recognition. This is sort of an obvious one, but most of these are going to seem obvious (that's how you know I've devised a helpful reductionism). You go through your checkbook, and see that towards the end of every week you tend to spend a lot on 40oz beers. Because you are able to recognize this pattern, you can become more conscious of it and begin to save more of your money. Conversely, you might notice that whenever you're getting a lot of sleep for several days in a row, you tend to deposit more money in your savings account. This, by the way, is why record-keeping is so essential to money-management. And this also illustrates that some activities seem to match more readily with one of the three cognitive areas, such as saving money to pattern recognition. In this case, pattern-recognition amounts to record-keeping, counting, and correlation.
One more, just to fill all three slots.
3. Gardening and creativity. This is probably the hardest to conceive of an example for, since in order to do it one actually has to be creative (I'm trying to think of a way creativity can be used to enhance the process or facilitate gardening). Just off the top of my head (this is a silly example): one could fill an enormous plastic ice-bag with water, poke holes in the bottom, and use it to water one's garden. I also suppose converting one's entire kitchen into a greenhouse in which one also stores indoor plants would be a creative solution to the problem of how to keep indoor plants in an easily-accessible, convenient, space-economical environment. In general, creativity in gardening amounts to conceiving of brand new, original, 'creative' solutions to problems inherent in gardening. Or, you could abandon the 'problem-solution' mind-set entirely, and just make gardening fun by doing it creatively (setting up a model railroad in between all of your outdoor plants, for instance).
By the way, these three things (creativty, aggression and pattern-recognition) can also be motives -- so much for my original 'four motives of humans.' I think I've found a much better reductionist approach to cognition/behavior/personality/psychology. Aggression (imagine a man punching another man), creativity (imagine a man painting a painting) and pattern-recognition (imagine a man solving a math problem) can motivate behavior. Of course, the above examples are obvious pair-matchings, and one could just as validly pair creativity as a motivator (and a facilitator) for fighting, pattern recognition as a motivator (and a facilitator) for painting, and creativity as a motivator (and a facilitator) for solving a math problem.
We have the motive, and then the completion of the task, both of which relate to one, or two, or three of the three cognitive areas (aggression, pattern recognition, and creativity). We should all endeavor to aggressively create patterns, and then be sure to finish what we start.
DISCLAIMER: THIS IS OF COURSE REDUCTIONIST, AND IS AN APPROXIMATION OF REALITY THAT USES LOGIC/LANGUAGE TOOLS TO LABEL, DESCRIBE AND EXPLAIN RATHER THAN BRING YOU TO ENLIGHTENMENT. REMEMBER: EVERYTHING IS ONE, AND/OR EVERYTHING IS INFINITE.
Logical writing is really quite debilitating. It's always a question of 'how deep do you want to take this'?
In other news, I'm going out job-hunting today, even though ana's mother confessed that it doesn't matter whether or not I have a job -- she'll still say I am 'wrong for ana,' and do everything in her manipulative, domineering power to prevent ana and me from being together, simply because I'm not of the business shark persuasion. You read about people being this shallow in books, but you're never quite prepared for it when it hits you. Of course, the central issue is not ana's mother's narrow and parochial world view, but rather her relationship with her daughter. Even though ana is 19, her mom is willing to say 'i have decided that this boy is not right for you (because I think he wouldn't be right for me, and I'm projecting myself onto you because I view my offspring purely as extensions of myself rather than unique and seperate entities), and I'm going to use my powers over you to make sure your relationship doesn't work out.' she has actually admitted this much to ana: that her expressed goal is to get ana and me to break up by making it impossible or very difficult to see each other. And it's working, too. Ana is almost completely dependent on her mom, and ultimately acquiesces to all of her mother's manipulation and psycho-emotional tactics. But, that's not my problem -- it's ana and her mother's problem. What *is* my problem is the fact that ana's mother is interfering with ana's and my relationship. The only solution is for ana's mother to change her mind, for ana to relinquish her dependence on her mom, or for me to get an MBA and go to work as a bottom-line sniveler in a suit, like the rest of you idiot americans. Hehe, sorry. I'm a little bit mad.
Or, ana and I can wait -- four years? Five years? However long it takes? For her mother's grip on her life to naturally fade. But the disturbing thing is that ana's grandparents share a duplex with ana's mother -- clearly the seeds are sown for stifling co-dependency masquerading as familial closeness.
Realistically, all ana and I can do is wait however many years to have a meaningful relationship, or break up. I never thought something could be so simple, but ana's mother *is* the source of all of our problems. One person. Quite amazing, no?
But I digress.
I have some resumes printed out, as well as some references, and I'm going to float around from building to building, seeking out balding men in suits to whom I can give my crookedly-printed, two-page resumes. I suppose I should wear pants as opposed to shorts, even though I live in the lovely subtropical rain-forest/swamp that is Maryland, to impress upon employers my willingness to suffer. Maybe there's a direct correlation between how uncomfortable a suit of clothing is and how impressed a prospective employer will be. Perhaps I'll put on one of those inverted spiked collars -- I'll be as good as hired.
Maybe I have a bit of a needlessly adversarial attitude towards the workplace.
In other news: I'm considering seeking treatment for epilepsy, but I'm worried that the drugs will inhibit my creativity.