I've been having bad dreams lately, mostly about sex. Today, I woke up at 3am after a dream about serena, whom I've wanted since I was 16. In the dream, she was talking to me on the phone about how she had become a sex-worker to earn money while in desperate financial straits. She never came right out and said that she had become a prostitute, but rather sort of danced around the issue and implied it. The author of the dream intended to preserve that ambiguity, much like the writers of 'the simpsons' hint at springfield's location, but don't really want the viewer to know; the uncertainty is the point. So, I was feigning brotherly/fatherly concern for poor sex-worker serena, trying to generate emotional closeness (which is supposedly the next best thing to physical closeness) when in reality all I was thinking was 'she is having sex with everyone in the world but me.'
The entire dream comprised just a single phone call. In real life, talking on the telephone amounted to 99.9% of serena's and my interaction -- she never wanted to see me. Here's something that I wrote about that, but never published, back in October of 2004.
I just talked to serena, and it made me realize something: she's not really a friend. All I do is talk on the phone with her. I often ask her to come over, and she always has some excuse, or says that she 'doesn't like my house.' all I want is some company, and she tells me how she's busy this day or that day, or needs to visit this friend or that glamorous friend in DC. I just wanted her to come over for a little while and talk to me -- she's only two miles away, and I don't get to see that many people.
Furthermore, she only calls me to detail the problems in her life, and to seek therapy from me. I have kept fairly careful track of this, and I'm almost certain that she has only picked up her phone once when I've called in the past 3 years or so. She is uninterested in having me contact her -- she must always be the one who controls the relationship. On the other hand, she calls me whenever she is bored, upset, distressed, etc, and expects therapy. Then, when I call her, she just lets it ring. Once or twice I could excuse as 'she's just busy' or 'she's not there,' but really -- a mobile phone is on a person at all times. If she doesn't pick it up, literally ever, for 3 years, then something is up.
She has this wonderful life: she's thin, pretty, rich, has a top-tier education, etc, and she has the nerve to call me up and whine to me, a fat, mentally ill bum in his mother's house, that she is depressed or angry or can't deal with anything. Then, when I try to tell her about some problem in my life, she doesn't listen, or changes the subject. We spend 90% of our phone time talking about her and her ridiculous, asinine 'problems'.
And, of course, when I want to actually hang out and try having a real friendship, she gives me some lame excuse. She told me the other day over email that we have 'great friendship.' maybe it's great for her, because she gets what she wants out of it: a therapist who can help her with her narcissistic whining and poor-little-rich-girl problems. She's clearly not depressed, but is rather a bratty, histrionic narcissist who finds it helpful to seek attention by whining to 'friends'. Hers are the problems of a 15 year old girl, and they're clearly not debilitating.
She's not a friend. She's self-centered and bratty, and uses me. I'm not going to talk to her anymore.
Serena really did have sex with everyone but me. She's fooled around with or dated a number of my friends (including one of my best friends, immediately after I told her I had feelings for her), and enjoyed an active sex life in the DC swinger scene (or whatever you call it -- hipster?) for some time. She told me, long ago, that she wasn't attracted to me, which should have been good enough.
But for some reason, I've remained stuck on her for 14 years. I thought I was definitely over her, but clearly, as indicated by my upsetting dream, there is some subconscious nagging that needs to be resolved. Let's look at the reasons serena doesn't want me:
Actually, there's a fair bit of lore about 'the friend zone' (i think I'm copping that from an old chris rock routine) on the web. First, here's a good quote from slashdot:
There are two types of guys in a lot of women's eyes. The kind you fuck and the kind you go crying to when you can't get to a guy you fuck. The latter type is also the one you put in charge of fixing your car, raising your kids, and providing general emotional support.
The second reference I'll give is an entire website, authored by the sage dallas lynn of los angeles CA, devoted to the phenomenon called intellectual prostitution. Here's lynn's definition of an intellectual whore:
A useful definition is: person A is an intellectual whore to person B if person A wants to shag person B and person B will not shag person A but keeps person A around for entertainment, emotional support etc...
In other words, an intellectual whore is a man who wants to fuck a particular woman, who she keeps around for emotional or intellectual stimulation, not being attracted to him (since, in this case, she is higher on the 'ladder'). Lynn expounds on the concept of the 'ladder' in something called (surprise) ladder theory, which I've thought about and written about, calling it 'mating game commodity value'. Some people have more than others, and those higher on the ladder (or with more value) won't date others lower on the ladder (or with less value) unless they have a severe self-esteem problem. Serena is higher on the ladder than I am.
Lynn is a very persuasive, fluid and logical writer. I'm sure you'll enjoy reading his site, especially if you're bitter and cynical, as I am.
I was clearly serena's intellectual whore. I realized tonight that I will NEVER get over serena. But, I think I can accept the fact that I will never get over her, and learn to live with that.
Let me continue the list of reasons serena isn't attracted to me, except I'll re-name it 'why no non-deformed, non-desperate, non-retarded girl will ever, under current circumstances, be attracted to me'. Or, just 'reasons I'm a loser' (really, this is just an excuse to use the 'ordered list' tag again).:
Optimistically, I think that's about all. I have some qualities some girl might like (literacy, artistic tendencies, tallness, and 'good bone structure', as ex-girlfriend #1 liked to say). Also, those listed bad qualities are changeable, if not readily changeable. If I were facially hideous or very stupid, then I would have more serious issues. I don't know how I might change some of the problems above (notably the earning of $8 an hour, and, consequently, the living with my mother, to some extent the poor dressing/grooming, and possibly even the obesity, since I can't afford to join a gym), but at least they're theoretically changeable.
Maybe now, with the therapeutic aid of publication, I can stop dreaming about serena, at least for a while.
For some reason I've been thinking about free will and determinism again, after a long (and peaceful) hiatus. I started wondering if there was enough doubt in pure determinism to approach life with the belief that circumstances can be changed by a conscious, causal agent, that behavior can be learned that wasn't predetermined to be learned, etc -- that things that would not have ordinarily happen can happen, due to a fluctuation in the ether at which reality splits into two possible paths. It turns out that yes, there's a fluctuation in the ether, but this doesn't amount to an individual having any control over that fluctuation with 'will'.
In quantum mechanics, the behavior of a quantum (unit of matter, unit of energy, unit of gravity, unit of time, etc) isn't perfectly predictable, no matter how arbitrarily strict the controls on the behavior of that quantum are made. Its behavior is literally impossible to predict, because it turns out that there's some inherent randomness there. Related is the uncertainty principle, which states that 'the more precisely the position is determined, the less precisely the less precisely the momentum is known'. Ie, the impossibility of perfect prediction (newtonian determinism).
Since these quanta compose everything else, their randomness is transfered to all reality. Ie, from our perspective the future isn't set -- quantum randomness could see it on any number of paths. If there are an infinite number of possibilities branching off at every given instant, can our path along the route of these possibilities be navigated, to a degree, by a 'change in action'? Is there such a thing as 'free will', that manipulates the quantum randomness along a particular path?
No, because the agent of change is governed by laws of quantum indeteterminacy itself; we aren't gods.
Quantum mechanics refutes strict, newtonian determinism, but doesn't prove 'free will'. Rather, it suggests 'randomness', or 'nondeterminism' if you will, as a fundamental quality of the universe. Even if we experience the illusion of the will being exercised, then the path of time and events leading to the exercising of that will was still set by randomness. The particular path of randomness that our continuity of concsiousness takes -- our memories of events -- has been determined by indeterminacy.
One interpretation of quantum mechanics, which a lot of physicists agree with, is the 'many worlds' interpretation. It has the advantage that it's somewhat understandable, even though I think it's ultimately harder to wrap one's mind around because it includes other dimensions and questions like 'why are we in this particular one? What's so special about it?'
'Many worlds' states that at every split in events where quantum randomness is excercised, a parallel universe branches off, perhaps into 'another dimension'. If this were the case, I would wonder what pushed our memories along a particular path of events -- along one in particular of the many worlds. 'many worlds' would posit that this set of experiences is only one of infinte ones, and in other universes there are those who didn't drop that glass in 1987, who instead of going to school on a particular day was sick, and who was never hit by that car in 1997. If that is so, then why is this instance of me, the one in this universe, so important? It's the only one I'm aware of. If there is a junction of endless possible outcomes at every instant, and there are infinite varieties of the universe, then why particularly this one? Perhaps I just can't grasp the concept of other dimensions properly.
An easy solution would be to reject 'many worlds', and adopt a determinist, one-universe view of quantum mechanics. Yes, there's quantum randomness, but this randomness happened to happen in the particular way it did. This one output of infinite aeons of quantum randomness only gives rise to the one particular universe we're in. From this, we can derrive that in a sense quantum randomness isn't really random at all. If we roll a die, and it comes up '5', sure, there was some chaotic randomness that determined where the die landed, but in retrospect it could not have landed on any other number. In a sense, everything that will randomly occur has randomly occured already. There isn't any such thing as 'the past' or 'the future'. Time is all of one substance, and not a linear path.
Arguments for free will seem rooted in anthropocentrism -- why must there be something like 'individuals' and 'self' that are so all-important? Why are we even considering something called 'will', as if we were somehow exempt from the randomness of events? Why does a boy choose a purple popsicle over a green one for the first time in his life due to some cosmic 'driver's seat' that controls quantum randomness, while an 'unconcsious' entity like a die falling on a 'five' hasn't 'chosen' to fall on that five? Why are our brains so special, even though they're composed of elementary quantum particles like everything else? They're complicated, but certainly not infinitely so. The best we can do with quantum mechanics is derive that all we can do is look out the window during the ride and watch things pass by the side of the road. Free will, famously, is an illusion.
But even so, does this reduce a world-view to bitterness and cynicism along with necessary fatalism? No. If we understand that there isn't any such thing as 'free will', then we can finally relax and let the tides take us where they may, so to speak. If we have no control over reality, then there's no sense in worrying about it.
It is often said determinism is a crippling world view because it encourages resignation, rather than standing and fighting to better yourself. On the contrary -- I think the idea of free will is crippling. If we suspect that we always could have done better, and that we're not living up to our potential, then we can never really relax and enjoy what life brings, what the universe offers up, what quantum randomness determines.
In a world-view steeped in free will, there's always the suspicion that something could have happened another way, and furthermore that that possibility is a result of a decision on our part; a fork in the road in which a wrong turn is 'our' 'fault'. Quantum randomness is ultimately deterministic: the path an entity takes only appears to be nonrandom to that entity, because whatever has happened to it, has happened to it.
If everyone believed this, in a fatalistic, deterministic view of the universe, we might just sit around doing nothing all day, eating ho-hos. But instead, we strive for progress, because without some choice of effort on our parts, progress would never be achieved. The question has been posed 'is progress really progress?' are we happier now, as a civilized society, than we were when we wandered around hunting elk? I'm getting off-topic, and I really do have to leave for work NOW.
Civilization: is it generally getting better or generally getting worse? Let's define 'better' or 'worse' as 'more or less human suffering.' the problem is, this can't really be measured objectively; it's entirely possible that someone who is fired from his job at mcdonalds suffers as much as someone who has his leg amputated, sans anaesthesia, in 3rd century byzantium or some place like that. Also, you can't really compare psychological and physical suffering, I don't think. Personally, I think psychological suffering is worse. At least when I'm in physical pain, I don't have to think about how phenomenally shitty life is, existential ennui, postmodern angst, etc. But I can't speak for everyone, I suppose.
We can't analyze these things. Again, I'm forced to use my psychic powers. My psychic powers tell me that civilization is getting neither better nor worse. People still die horribly. People still suffer unimaginable pain. People still experience the joys of love and romance. Some people are still excluded from this for whatever reasons. Nothing, really, has changed, from the ziggurats at ur to the world trade center in nyc. The only difference is that the population has swelled. However we haven't gotten any more enlightened. Sure, there are a few people who recognize that killing people and fucking up the biosphere aren't good things, but there probably were way back when, as well.
This morning in a chatroom, someone asked me how I'd describe my political beliefs. I answered in a good way, much better than the way I answered when my manager at the bike shop asked me the same question ('which way do you lean?'). I told my manager that I was above politics, which sounded snobby and evasive, and sort of idiotic -- something someone who had given it no thought, because his tiny brain was unable to give it any thought, would say. Here's the answer I gave in the chatroom:
how something as insignificant as the human race chooses to resolve issues of resources and hierarchy is pretty much beneath my radar.
I'm just now realizing that that's just a more detailed way of saying 'I'm above politics'.
Even though this was crafted to sound bad-ass, it's still pretty much true. I don't really consider politics, most of the time. For one thing, I'm far too immersed in myself to consider the interconnectedness of society. If I were to take a position of self-interest, I'd be ultra-liberal, I suppose, because I want as many handouts as possible, being largely incompetent in the real world. The real world isn't upon me yet, but I hear it scratching at my window with its sharp, twisted, satanic fingernails.
If I'm feeling cynical and grumpy, then my ideologies tend to drift towards the right, with the added bonus that I get killed off as result of social darwinism.
I think that if I were a better person I'd be a consistent lefty, and be concerned with helping people out. But, a lot of the time I don't really care about people. Most of the time, they're very abstract to me -- I sit here in this chair reading about 150 of them getting killed, next to the article about michael jackson's trial. The people I meet in the bike shop don't inspire love for my fellow man, but instead feed my suspicion that 95% of humanity is lazy, dumb, uncreative, unfriendly, deliberately ignorant, aggressive, selfish and impatient.
Why should I care about these people? Why should I care about politics? My life will be over in another 30 to 50 years, and I could, I think, live those years in just an isolated a state as I've lived the past five.
I'm not really interested in hoarding money, although it would be nice to either pay off my student loans or somehow avoid paying them. I'd also like to sleep in a warm, dry, preferably padded place.
I should mention here that I slept on the floor for about a year in baltimore. This toughened me up quite a bit -- I could fall asleep anywhere after that (including a canoe floating down the potomac river). I've since softened, though.
I'd also like enough nutritious food so that my gums don't bleed and I'm not too weak to climb a staircase.
This is a romantic notion: to think 'hmmm...what do I REALLY need?' and arrive at the conclusion that one needs nothing. This kind of sneering-down-the-nose at western culture in lieu of some zen ideal is overdone, and has become stupid and meaningless.
It's also related to one of my biggest criticisms of the left: that most lefties aren't actually very interested in helping people out, but are rather interested in being 'the person who helps everyone out'; altruism isn't the motivator here, but rather ego -- a moralistic desire to be 'the good guy'. In this case, by pointing out this zen ideal of 'needing nothing' to the poor ignorant suburbanite as he shovels big mac after big mac into his greedy mouth, the west-coast gold-plated granola-muncher is 'the smart guy', 'the enlightened guy', 'the good guy'. Liberalism, like so many things, is often in large part motivated by egoism.
Along with food and shelter, I also need a lot of time alone, and medication to keep me from killing others and myself. I think I need to love and be loved, I think I need to work, and I think I need to express myself creatively.
Of course these 'needs' assume that my goal is to remain happy and alive.
But enough of this crap -- I'm getting philosophical and off-topic. I'm reasonably sure that if I had some money, as opposed to being $25K in debt, I'd be a lot more conservative. But as luck would have it, my situation demands a self-interested liberalism. However, I wholeheartedly recommend conservatism for those who are interested in holding onto their piles of money; I don't think one school of political thought to be more 'correct' than another.
A key conservative objection to liberalism is that liberals want to forcibly redistribute these piles of money; liberals want to change others' behavior against their will. On the other hand, conservatives don't really care what everyone else does -- the conservatives have theirs, and as long as armies of homeless don't break into their bedrooms and steal diamond earrings, they're quite content to live and let live. Liberals, on the other hand, want to change behavior and control private wealth. In this sense, conservatism becomes an issue of 'freedom'; freedom to do what you'd like (and allow others to do the same) without having your resources taken from you. This, of course, presumes that we really are free to do what we want, and that some people don't have their miserable lot in life thrust upon them, and need to be helped along.
Liberals who aren't self-interested, and therefore essentially conservative in nature (like myself), or who aren't simply on the ego trip that broadcasting their helping of their fellow man provides, are simply good people who feel others' suffering, and want to make it stop. They feel that preventing suffering is a better alternative than allowing people to protect private resources. For them, these 'real liberals', action is simply a matter of priority: joe banker gives up 1/20 of his money-pile so that joe homeless can get some AIDS medication. It doesn't make good social sense for 95% of the world's wealth to belong to 5% of the world's people -- if this situation were remedied, a lot of physical suffering would end. Furthermore, it's the liberal position that capitalism is NOT just what happens to people when they're unregulated in their behavior. Rather, it's an imposed economic system designed to benefit the wealthy.
The polarization of ideologies can be oversimplified, poetically, into this paraphrase: do you love yourself more than your brother, or your brother more than yourself? Of course, the conservative stance is that what benefits the individual benefits the whole of society. And, in america we don't have a whole lot of desperately poor people, so this gives some credence to that view, possibly, depending on what you base the wealth of nations. In other capitalist economies there are significant percentages of poor people. What sort of damage might our own capitalism have done to other countries? There are certainly poor countries, and poor people in the world. And, just because statistically and politically the homeless in america don't comprise a significant force doesn't mean they don't exist, and should not be helped. In fact, because there are so few of them, helping them should be no problem. There's really no excuse that anyone in america should go cold or hungry, be without medical care, or be without packs of ho-hos bought at 7-11.
Another fundamental question might be: 'do you believe in free will or determinism?' if you're all about determinism, then the poor can't help being poor. If you're all about free will, then they could pull themselves out if they merely had the resolve to do so. The determinist tends to focus on causal phenomena, like racism, lack of education, lack of inheritance, etc, and appoint these as causal to poverty and low social status. The free will enthusiast will be likely to think that the human spirit and the power to change circumstance with a decision are enough to overcome any odds, and that the poor could, if they would like, pull themselves out of poverty.
Yet another fundamental question is: is there a limited or unlimited amount of money in the world? If it's unlimited, then everyone can realistically aspire to wealth. If it's limited, then there need to be some poor people so that the wealthy can remain wealthy.
Every self-proclaimed liberal wants to believe that they're a 'real liberal' (unless they're enlightened beings such as myself). Oftentimes, this isn't the case -- they either want handouts or want to play 'good guy'. These motives are easy to mask in ideology.
There are 'real liberals', the people who genuinely care about everyone, and want to make sure that no one goes hungry or is cold at night. This is the kind of person I'd like to be. Unfortunately, I'm not, because I'm a cynical, nihilistic, hermetic blowhard.
Here's where I stand, politically: it really depends on my mood. Right now, I'm editing this blog in the morning, when I tend to be in a good mood, so I'm feeling more liberal. But when I started it, I was feeling more conservative. Conservatism is the ideology of the cynic, and that's me a great deal of the time.
Most of the time, I'm fundamentally self-interested, and therefore am 'liberal', because I expect to remain incompetent, poor and indigent, and want to be fed lots of tax money so I can buy packs of ho-hos at 7-11.
I admire liberals who aren't motivated out of self-interest or ego, but rather empathy, which is a kind of self-interest, I suppose -- feeling what other people feel (incidentally, this is probably why women tend to be more liberal and men more conservative). I accept the fact that I don't think this way, most of the time. I respect wealthy conservatives, because they have every reason to protect what is theirs, and wouldn't put it past myself to become extremely conservative, if I were to win the lottery or somehow otherwise miraculously acquire wealth.
I'm a bit suspicious of non-wealthy conservatives, and think they might be jumping on an ideological bandwagon just as rickety as the one wealthy, 'play the good guy' liberals jump on. In their defense, nonwealthy conservatives are probably conservative because they want to protect what they have, even if it's not very much, and want to preserve the possibility of becoming wealthy, someday, somehow. Wealthy liberals, on the other hand, confuse me a bit. They favor redistribution of wealth, but aren't really interested in redistributing any of their own. But some are real philanthropists who give a lot of their time and money away to house the homeless, feed the hungry, etc. However they still have a lot more than everyone else, and are 'part of the problem' in that they are part of the 5% who possess 95% of global wealth.
My being above politics could change -- I could start attending conventions and wearing a little elephant/donkey pinned to my chest at any given moment. I really don't think about politics that often. Most of the time, I'm making some food, taking a shit, playing the guitar, chatting on the internet, at work, or writing about some totally unrelated other topic.
I'll close by saying I'm confused about politics, which is the way I am about most things. I could be called 'confused', or I could be called 'unwilling to embrace unilateralism'. I prefer 'confused'. For instance, the other day I was unwilling to embrace the unilateralism of a scheduled appointment, and showed up at my doctor's office on entirely the wrong day.
Don't want to be a fat man People would think that I was Just good fun. Would rather be a thin man, I am so glad to go on being one. Too much to carry around with you, No chance of finding a woman who Will love you in the morning and all the night time too. Don't want to be a fat man, Have not the patience to ignore all that. Hate to admit to myself half of my problems Came from being fat. Won't waste my time feeling sorry for him, I seen the other side to being thin. Roll us both down a mountain And I'm sure the fat man would win.
I just had my cholesterol tested. Here it is:
CHOL: 228
TRY: 213
HDL: 45
VLDL: 43
LDL: 140
I forget which is the 'good' and which is the 'bad', but my overall score is the first -- CHOL. This is too high; it should be between 120 and 190. Although theoretically there's no lower limit, 120 is about as low as it ever goes. So, I'm supposed to eat low-fat, low-sugar, and exercise for 30 minutes every day. This last part isn't going to happen, especially while it's cold.
Some obesity researchers have recently begun focusing on what makes people thin rather than what makes them fat. I've been talking to a few slender friends, and I arrived at some hints: slender folks just don't like food as much -- they aren't consumed with debilitating epicureanism. They stop eating when they're full and don't eat when they're not hungry.
Of course, my sample size is too small, and self-report that requires some introspection is, I would think, especially unreliable; there might be more intake-restraint in maintaining a healthy weight than I tend to think. I wonder what percentage of thin people walking around are thin because of some effort. Perhaps a better question would be: 'do you put some effort into being thin?'
I wonder if there's a correlation between food-loving and other aesthetic appreciation; maybe the people who are less able to enjoy food are also less able to enjoy other sensory pleasures (music, art, sex, etc), other factors notwithstanding. I guess that's the problem with these behavioral analyses: there are just too many variables to control. With this in mind, I also wonder about a correlation between fatness and laziness. Certainly it's a cultural meme; whether it's true or not is a hard question to answer.
I'd like to take some kind of drug that made me unable to enjoy eating; it'd be worth it. Removing sensual pleasure from one's life is, I've found, sort of nice and freeing. I remember being on a freak diet and exercise program while I was in college. I ate 2 packets of peanuts and one can of progresso soup a day, and lifted free weights. I got down to about 210 pounds, and probably would have been even lighter if I didn't have so much muscle. I didn't miss eating and lazing around. I didn't even think about it.
But, I didn't keep this up -- during the summer I didn't have the resolve to go to campus just to use the gym, and working at pizza hut along with the promise of not having to buy groceries for 2 months in a row, because I could live on free pizza, was too tempting. So as a result, I got fat, and have never recovered.
Of course, when I think about my progress, it's been a gradual downslide to obesity from the age of 16 on up, with little breaks in between during which I freaked out and dieted and/or exercised, trimming down for a few months. But my weight has settled in: if I eat what I want to and do what I want to, I will weigh about 285 pounds.
My mom and I had a discussion the other night. I'll paraphrase it here:
me: if people have limited lifespans, doesn't it seem sort of stupid to worry about what you're eating and how much exercise you get?
mom: I guess the argument is that being sick in old age is so miserable that it's worth it.
me: that's why there's euthanasia.
mom: well, that's not generally accepted practice.
me: well, people are fucking idiots.