I haven't written about God, spirituality, Pantheism, or Atheism in a long while. I'll re-print here a letter to an internet acquaintance:
What do you see as the purpose of Unitarian Univeralism, since there's no creed or dogma? Might congregants be just as happy at the YMCA or some other community-based social/activity group? Or is this essentially what the UU church is?
I suppose that along with being a community center, the UU church might serve those seeking to expound upon some generalized "spiritual" feelings about humanity, the world, the cosmos, your socks, etc.
Someone who felt the need to express reverence and awe for a perceived part of or all of the universe, and wanted to share, discuss and develop this with others, might find UU useful and/or pleasant. Also, I understand that there's a big element of charity/social work/whatever within the church.
I don't mean to give you a study-group lecture here -- I'm sure you've had enough of that, if you were raised UU. I, myself, was raised Lutheran. I enjoyed the softball, my youth-group buddies, and church basement-food (All Hail Lemon Squares). I have affection for my ELC memories.
I never really bought into what "enlightened" people usually consider to be nonsense (the resurrection, immaculate conception, "believe or die," there's only one right way to do it, etc), from a very early age, but I had nagging quasi-fears of Hell for a while. Every so often fantasies of "what if it's true?" still come up -- Pascal's wager rears its ugly head.
In general, the community was great. I remember a song we sang in Sunday school: it went "The church is not a resting place, the church is not a steeple, the church is not a (something or other), the church is a people." That, along with "The peace of God which passes human understanding" were pretty much the only words coming out of that 16-year experience in the ELC that I remember.
A big problem, in my opinion, with religion and spirituality is that terms are so ill-defined. For instance, one can take "son of God," "afterlife" and even "spirituality" itself to mean anything one wants. Or, perhaps that's not a problem, but rather an asset. At any rate, it's certainly a feature.
I'm a Pantheist when I'm in a good mood (the whole of reality is worthy of reverence and awe), and an Atheist when I'm in a bad mood (it's all for shit, and nothing's out there). Usually, I'm an Atheist.
I suppose I'm technically an Agnostic in the monothestic sense -- I can't prove there is or is not a YHWH-like being floating around. But, even if there is, it's a part of the whole, and is therefore less than the whole. Something that is apart from Everything that also controls Everything seems odd to me.
There might be a YHWH-like being that controls our lives and created us, but similarly the moon might be made of green cheese (an extensive NASA cover-up). In other words, I don't see the existence of a pissed-off, all-powerful (anything it wants to do, it can do), bearded spirit of the desert to be very likely.
Re-opening old, stinky cans of worms.
I ordered a punching bag from overstock.com for $30. Because I am an idiot, I was expecting it to arrive stuffed. Of course, it was an empty canvas bag. I bought a suspending hook and 300lbs of sand at the hardware store, and now 200lbs of it stuffed into a sack is hanging in the basement. I'm resting my elbow on a frozen package of brocolli and cheese while I type, because I went a little bit too hard on the bag just now.
I'm refining my martial arts style. Hitting a heavy bag (especially one that isn't really all that soft) knocks some realism into one's striking technique, so to speak. My most powerful blows are delivered with my heels and elbows, followed by fists, knees and shins, roughly in that order. Head-butts would be good too, but those aren't really practicable with a bag, and would also look pretty stupid. Can you imagine walking in on someone repeatedly beating a heavy bag with their forehead?
I'm mildly worried that a side-kick is going to rip the bag's hook out of the rafter and send it into a shelf; a 200lb canvas bag full of play-sand is nothing to sneeze at.
I signed up with what's probably the only worthwhile dating service on the web: ok cupid. It's geeky, isn't over-designed, has a nice user interface, and is just as concerned with users having a good time as it is with producing good matches. It's probably just as effective as e-harmony.com at using a "sophisticated matching algorithm," but okcupid.com doesn't shit all over your face with marketing.
It's full of those web-tests that some people (not me) worship, and users can even create their own tests to inflict on others. The matching-questions are exhaustive and exhausting -- I stopped at 237 questions, and ended up with a familiarity-rating (how well they know me) of 93%. If a user reaches question #500, s/he can add his or her own question to the onslaught. It's easy to spend a while on okcupid, taking tests and sending messages to potential dates.
here's my profile.
While I'm at it, I'm going to do something I haven't done before (for the most part): provide links to sites that I like and/or find useful. The world wide web is a "web" because of its link-structure, even though I tend to forget this because of google, bookmarks and memorized URLs. Links and content are all there is to the web. One reads a page about something, and follows linked words to other pages -- web-surfing.
wikipedia. A great read; I used to a lot of editing, too. My suggestion is to look up broad topics, like "psychology," "america," or "science," and from those articles follow links to other related pages. Or, search on whatever comes to mind. Wikipedia might be a substitution for the information-based www, and indeed the top link in a disturbing number of google searches is a wikipedia article. After using wikipedia regularly for a while, things to look up started to occur to me as the day went on. Sources aren't cited, authors aren't fact-accountable, and the writing style is often bad and/or dull, but most contend that the good (multiple authors, breadth of topics, non-commercial) outweighs the bad.
google news. Current events from a variety of news sites around the world (including both "the guardian" and "fox news"), with powerful sorting, searching and filtering tools. All hail google.
science.slashdot.org. A subdomain of slashdot in which every other article isn't about SCO vs. IBM/linux. Slashdot is basically a blog, linking to interesting articles, posting a summary, and allowing users to post comments. The comments are the best part, and the summary is sufficient -- I usually don't read the linked article.
a practical guide to suicide. Fun to read IN AN ABSTRACT WAY. Sheesh. It's really long, and has, in large part, been harvested from usenet posts.
okcupid.com. A free (excepting advertisements) online dating service with other features, notably the ability to take and make quizes, the results of which can be compared to other users'. Okcupid seems to attract a geekier, more fun-loving, less-desperate crowd than e-harmony, match.com, etc.
weather.com. Useful. Also, looking up the weather in different cities (including canadian ones) is fun.
ishkur's guide to electronic music. A well-designed flash interface that elaborates on, in meticulous detail, categories and sub-categories of just about the whole of electronic music. It includes up to 30-second audio samples, which are very sufficient considering that most electronic music is repetitive.
worldsex.com. Good free porn -- a link farm, and as far as I know the best way to find free galleries. It links to movies, too, and offers listings by category. Some dutch guy named "pierre" runs it, and he apparently has a staff of five.
offical united states time. Useful, especially when one's computer isn't able to synchronize its clock with NIST, like it's supposed to do.
why work?. A nicely-organized screed and collection of links on re-evaluating the american work ethic; right up my alley.
altavista audio search. Search the web for mp3s! A surprising lot come up. Try searching on "metallica," who of course are notorious for their virulent opposition to file-sharing. This is a good way to avoid potential RIAA lawsuits; perhaps it's only a matter of time before altavista audio gets shut down.
tv guide. Shamefully, I sometimes like to see what's on. I like Star Trek, movies, some sitcoms, and adult cartoons (like "futurama," "sealab 2021," "aqua teen hunger force," "the family guy," some episodes of "the simpsons," and DEFINITELY NOT ANIME). Once you have your cookies set up, load it up as tvguide.com/listings/grid.asp, that way bypassing most of the advertisements and making everything easier to read.
mapquest.com. Mapquest is, of course, practically indispensable -- I find the most helpful component of their driving directions to be given milages for each road. I have come to rely on mapquest utterly for navigation to new places.
google maps. Fun (especially its satellite photos), but the search interface isn't so well-designed, making it a lot less practical than mapquest. There are sites that link to 15m-resolution aerial photos of things like the eiffel tower, the great pyramids, and burning oil fields in iraq. Looking at pyongyang, north korea, was enlightening -- it's not just comprised of a few shacks, but is a bona-fide city. The rest of north korea, however, is almost totally unpopulated.
There you have it.
I can't escape SDF; users keep emailing me with excerpts from com and bboard, which is ironic, in a terrible way. Apparently, there's a rumor circulating that I am/was the user "logo."
There's nothing I can do to disprove this rumor, if I cared (which for some reason I do) -- IP addresses have been removed from finger info. Being told this, and my ensuing upset, are precisely the things I am striving to avoid by severing my ties with the SDF community. I don't want the degree of emotional involvement in a bunch of letters on a screen that I had. It was debilitating. Electronic phantoms who know me fairly well have my AIM screenname, if they really can't bear to part with my text.
I realize that it might be considered selfish to excise myself from a place where some people enjoyed my company, just because I don't like a few of the "people" there. But, I was unhappy, and not just because of a few shits. I felt trapped by SDF -- like I didn't want to log in, but had to. I'm the kind of person who can't enjoy something if only a tiny part of it is bad or rotten. The presence of this rottenness is enough to make me want to avoid the thing in question. I'm an "all or nothing" kinda guy.
I don't know how many of my readers are SDF users; it's sort of disquieting to think about. Anyway, one of my SDF acquaintances apparently posted, regarding the logo=barnacle rumor, that she "felt sort of sick about (her) friendship with barnacle." well, whatever. I'm tired of hearing these things via email relay.
One might think that time, along with my physically-damaged memory centers, will heal all wounds. Unfortunately that's not true. I'm still plagued by memories -- they're crystal-clear (even those attained post-injury) if there's some emotion attached to the event, which there almost always is; I'm a Man Who Feels Too Much.
Then, when something triggers a memory, all of the emotions associated with it come back. More often than not, they're bad emotions -- embarrassment and frustrated, impotent rage, mostly. This happens many, many times a day. It's almost as though I can't look a or think about anything without an attached memory surfacing.
I can't control my own mind, its thoughts or its emotions. It does things that I didn't ask it to do. The unwanted thoughts are known in psychiatric circles as "intrusive thoughts." not being able to control one's emotions is pervasive. Both, in my case, can be considered to be seizure activity, and are abated by anti-convulsant medication. I need some vulcan training.
I don't want any part of the SDF e-drama, or the e-soap opera. That's why I left. It's been very relaxing and nice not to obsessively start puTTY and log on to SDF. I never really wanted to, but it's like a drug -- I couldn't stay away. When I had nothing to do on the computer, but desperately wanted to keep on clicking the mouse and clacking the keys, I just logged onto SDF, where I'd chat and read the bbs.
I've felt like SDF had been controlling my relationship with it for a long time. But man -- I can ftp so fast it's amazing. It involves clicking the mouse three times, and hitting the [enter] key once. Once that's over with, my link-up with SDF is done.
Whenever I start back on the road to recovery, someone from SDF emails me. My SDF friends on the AIM network and I don't discuss my dark past at all, which is nice.
James is flying in tomorrow, and I'm picking him up at dulles. Nothing like a real social life to make all of this asinine computer socializing seem all the more trivial. Quitting the SDF community was an enormous step on the road to recovery from internet addiction; there's only so much wikipedia I can read.
In time, SDF will forget about me. Probably. If SDFers don't read my blog. SDFers don't have a good record for sticking around, though. In five, two or even one year, 99% of current community-users will either no longer be there or will have changed their identities. "strictly bbs" people, especially those who don't post, probably don't feel a need to switch personas. I don't know how many bbs lurkers there are -- probably many, many, many. Chat people tend not to hang around in one manifestation, maybe for the same reason I wanted to leave.
I don't know what the fuck I was doing there anyway -- I don't program, nor do I run unix, that antiquated pile of esoteric, non-functional, hobbyist, elitist, impractical, unusable garbage. I wish windows servers would run apache more often (more often than "never"). I guess I don't hate unix. It's free, and it doesn't hide bits of itself from you. Once you do get it configured, you can do more. Blah blah. I don't want to get into this again.
I downloaded several different versions of both "misty" and "autumn in new york," so I could hear different ideas of melodic phrasing. I'm ashamed to admit that I like the sinatra version of "misty," mainly because he plays (sings) it totally straight, and it's good to get a sense of a melody without having to deal with jazz-wankery; I was singing it while picking out movies at blockbuster.
Once I have the melody down, I can add my own wankery. However, I think sinatra does change the melody in one place. It's also possible that my lead sheet is wrong (it's been known to happen). At any rate, sinatra's interpretation of that particular phrase makes more aural sense to me, so I'll play it his way.
Did you know that I have both a myspace and a friendster account? Shocking, scandalous. When I was in san francisco, all of the presidio hipsters were talking about myspace and friendster as though this beast was something "in" and "new" and "cool" and "hip," as opposed to "idiotic" and "been around forever." it's always funny when a bit of internet culture breaks through into the other, and one can watch neophytes fumble at it.
I just checked myspace. One of the headers reads "who I'd like to meet." ahem. WHOM I'd like to meet. All evidence points to "whom" being abandoned by spoken english. Oh well. Change with the times, I suppose.
Fuck computers (except mp3s).
After something like five months of playing in DADGAD, I've almost completely forgotten all of the jazz standards I'd learned shortly before the switch. I've touched on this before, but noodling around in standard tuning isn't as much fun as it is in DADGAD.
When my guitar is tuned to the usual EADGBE, I tend take most of my playing from extant body of music literature. I can still make stuff up in standard tuning, but it's a lot harder than doing so in DADGAD, where pretty much everything I play sounds good without my having to think about it. It's possible that I need more improvising practice in standard tuning. It's also possible that I'm simply not a very good guitar player.
My cousin the guitar guru suggested that I think of the guitar contrapuntally; as several voices moving independently and simultaneously. He suggested playing no more than two, or possibly three, lines at a time. But most important is to think of chords not as certain hand-configurations that the player plops down on the fingerboard, but rather as the incidental conjunction of multiple melodies.
I don't quite do this, but at least I can name the intervals in a chord when I look at it or hear it. However, I don't keep track of every contrapuntal line. One could write arrangements for pop and jazz tunes consisting of only two or three melody lines, but I find it much easier to use the familiar method: look at the chord on the lead sheet, find a known version of this chord (rooted on the tonic), and squeeze the melody in on top.
The exercise of playing a chord and then a note on top of it produces a familiar set of chord-shapes that tend to get used over and over. Once I re-learn a few more tunes, I'll be able to keep these re-occurring hand-configurations in mind, and learning more tunes will be made easier. I'm not too interested in re-learning "all of me", really. "autumm leaves" and my amateurish version of "green dolphin street" will, unfortunately, be with me forever.
So, I've just got to learn "a foggy day" and "yesterday", and then I'll be where I want to be. I remember the melodies perfectly, even though I've not practiced them in six or whatever months. But I've totally forgotten those chords that sound right, but that I really don't "hear" in the sense that I do melody lines. Melody sticks to memory, while harmony doesn't.
This lends a heck of a lot of credence to my guitar-playing cousin's guitar concepts/method: that instead of plunking the hand down into a pre-configured shape, one should think of the chord as being made up of notes (duh), each sequence of which is moving along with the others.
This is this is practically impossible to do with complex 5 and 6 voice jazz chords. Perhaps it would sound better if jazz tunes followed the "conceptual counterpoint" rule as well, and were thusly expressed; just two or three moving lines producing both chord and melody, and necessarily a bassline (although not necessarily mirroring the tonic of each chord).
Ultimately, the way I'm playing the guitar is how I want to be playing it, and I shouldn't contrive some other method because it's what I think I should be doing. I'll make whatever sound on the thing I please, and think about it any way I please.
This is one of those "limited audience" blogs; the only other time I do it is when I talk about computer stuff. I'm less embarrassed to talk about guitar and music stuff, just because I know it a lot better than I know computers, and it's more socially acceptable to get excited, obsessive and nerdy about music details than it is to get excited, obsessive and nerdy about computer details.
Of course this is a cultural contrivance, which I should want no part of. But I've spent so much time jerking around on the computer for the past few years (ugh), time which I'm loathe to call productive, that feelings of antagonism towards computer geekery tend to come up. This is not to say that computer geekery isn't a bi-product of some excellent and creative computer programming. But I don't do that -- instead I configure system settings, read web pages and chat. Of course I blog too, which is a bit more acceptable, because it's more clearly a creative product.
I'm an essayist, a reader of shallow, simple texts, and a textual social butterfly. These things lead to or or follow from sitting at a computer all day. If it weren't plugged into the net, of course I would almost never use it. The internet is addictive because it's a practically unlimited source of things to do. Socialize, read, write, download. Socialize, read, write, download. What's missing is exercise.
When I worked out some DADGAD theory a while back (i blogged it -- find it with "google my blog" if you want). I realized two things: almost all of the chords were inversions, and 2) 90% of guitar pedagogy consists of intellectual masturbation material for the teacher, and is totally unhelpful to the student.
I fell into this trap when I drew up my white-paper on DADGAD. It was a mental exercise for me, and it's doubtful that anyone found or would find it helpful. When I think back to the way I learned guitar, I didn't apply theory to practicum, but rather first learned the practicum -- the teacher said "here, make this shape" or "play this note," and I listened to the pretty sound that ensued. After this practicum, theory can be developed.
I remember being frustrated with the theory-first approach in math class; in a particular teacher's class, I didn't learn how to "do" a single thing. Learning was sometimes interesting and fun, but it didn't translate into making the proper marks on my paper.
I can only speak for myself, but I'm inclined to think that not many respond well to learning theory before practice, and that the best way to teach someone is to first show them how to make the marks or where to put their fingers. Then, when they have this rote down, explain the meaning behind it, which will be a hell of a lot more interesting than it would have been had it come first.
I just had a weird sense of computers being utterly pervasive. I just now finished an audio-visual chat with peter. After talking for a bit, I plugged my guitar into the microphone jack, and serenaded his children. They seemed to enjoy it. Then, I turned it all off, and felt sort of sad because my approximation of company was gone.
Now, I'm listening to mp3s of my own recorded guitar-playing. I just set my playlist to play random tracks, and queued the next one to play once this one is over. I'm typing this page up on a local text editor, and will ftp it to the server when I'm finished. I can find any bit of textual information I can possibly conceive of on the web.
I've been doing this all for a while, but it suddenly struck me as remarkable. Haile (peter's daughter) responded to my image on the screen, and showed me her drawing when I asked to see it. She's growing up in a time when computers are everywhere, integrated into everything. She didn't find anything strange or remarkable about the webcam-microphone interaction -- she accepted some pixels configured to look roughly like my image on the monitor to be "me."
I'm sure one could get a webcam chat working under UNIX, but it'd take about a week of configuring, programming and tweaking. The UNIX enthusiast would enjoy this, and once it was accomplished, the capabilities of the hardware/software synthesis might be greater or more flexible. But for those who don't program and don't mind a more limited pallette of options, mac and windows offer the potential for functionality and productivity without much effort put into getting the thing to actually work.
Once you turn off the extraneous graphics and disable ms messenger, windows xp is pretty much set to go. Other effort might go into using your own virus checker, firewall, browser and email client. The only piece of ms software I use (other than the os) is microsoft word. Most of the time, I'm in a text editor.
I used to over-tweak windows, and I did it so harshly that some parts stopped working (blocking system processes from accessing the network causing problems with software updates, for instance). Now that I've learned to back off a bit and let microsoft do its thing, the os runs a lot more smoothly. It doesn't interfere with my use of other software, and is happy limited to being an operating system, which is all it should be.
Microsoft focused too much on branching out (search, media, software, etc), and sort of forgot about their os. So, we had a lot of not-so-good software (internet explorer, outlook, ms office, media player, messenger, etc), and a semi-broken operating system. However, ms 2000/nt/xp seem to work pretty well as operating systems (i have NEVER had xp crash or freeze). So, one is free to run whatever one wants on top of the os without incident.
In terms of tweaking, it's also nice to configure software to show light text on a dark background, so your eyes don't start to hurt from absorbing all of that white monitor light, and to save the monitor wear and tear. That's not always possible, though. People prefer white backgrounds even though they hurt the eyes.
If I don't blog regularly, the end result is a colossal entry like this. The only reason I'm stopping now is so 0081.html won't be too enormous; I could probably go on indefinitely. Not blogging, for me, is analogous to accumulating a sleep-deficit during the week. On weekends, one just about sleeps all day to make up for the red-eyed work-week.
Offline blogging is faster, easier and safer. I don't know why I didn't do it before, except that editing an html document directly on its server excited and fascinated me -- it felt like I was editing the www, which I was. I haven't felt like writing for the past few days, and I can't help but think it has something to do with my divorcing the SDF community, and my refusal to log on via ssh.
Another possible cause is my windows text-editor issue; I can't find a really good one for windows. I was happy with vim and ispell at SDF -- I'll miss that configuration, sort of. I downloaded vim for windows, but configuring ispell for windows (let alone integrating it with vim) is either impossible, too hard, or too much trouble. My quest for a decent windows text-editor has led me to three: cse html validator, notetab, and crimson editor.
Cse and crimson editor include a spell-checker, but crimson editor does weird things with the indentation. Neither crimson editor nor cse justifies text. Notetab doesn't have a spell check, or multiple undos. Cse hits you with nagware messages from time to time. Notetab starts up more quickly. If I can learn to live with the weird indentation behavior and lack of justifying powers, then I think crimson editor is my choice. You know what they say: life is a series of trade-offs. What better example than selecting a text-editor?
Also contributory to infrequent writing is a problem inherent to offline blogging: a document can easily sit on a local machine for all eternity. Editing html docs directly on the server applies pressure to the author; he's never sure if and when the machine will crash, so he saves often. In saving, the document becomes public. Then, there's motivation to finish it quickly, before too many people read the unfinished version. Offline, it's easy to get lazy, since there's literally no rush.
Do you see the pressing issues that dominate my life? A warning sign that one is stagnating is pride in trivial accomplishments. For instance, admiring for a few minutes a remote control in which one has just changed the batteries.
0081.html has been sitting here on my local machine for a while. I really don't have a whole lot to say today, as is pretty apparent. I think I'll get it out, though, just so people know I'm still alive. Maybe some brilliant philosophical insights will hit me tomorrow.
Motherfucker! SDF is down again. I'll have to wait until I come back from socializing (yes, you heard correctly) before I post.