Holy crap I haven't blogged in a long time. I've been realizing lately that more than half of my writing is utter crap. All of the theories and papers are utter, utter crap. The only things worth reading are the journalistic pieces -- accounts of my actual experiences. Maybe one or two of the theoretical, philosophically bent papers are reasonably ok, and someone might enjoy reading them. But for the most part, they're ignored, and rightly so. For one thing, it's boring, stupid, self-indulgent and subjective. Another thing is that it's totally unreasearched and unreviewed. Except James did a little bit on "Your Religion is Wrong," which I've come to regret writing. I'd like to re-do it, and term it "monotheism is wrong," that is if I were going to write another philosophical screed, which I don't plan to do, unless something strikes me as really inspiring or cool. So, nevermind. Forget I said anything.
It stands that most of my non-journalistic writing is crappy and boring.
But I think at least now I can leave the writing section, and my entire website, untouched for a good while. I really don't know about this latest "Breadbox Gallery" project -- that, too, might be utterly lame. I don't know. At any rate, it has a lot of sentimental value. I put a huge amount of time and effort and energy, when I was a pre-teen, in making these elaborate monochrome images, pixel-by-pixel, and it's nice to publish them.
One disturbing thing: I haven't played guitar in a looooong time. It all seems incredibly boring, like there's nothing left to do on the instrument. I sold my amp. That was an incredibly stupid thing to do, and I wish, I wish, I wish I hadn't done it. I am incapable of making a good decision -- I think I should simply do the opposite of whatever my impulse is. That might work, I think.
So, I should go out and buy another guitar amplifier, and also invest in some lessons. Blah. Guitar can be an expensive hobby. Maybe I can forgo the lessons if I just muster the resolve to attack my fake-book with renewed resolve and learn more dumb standards. Another big part of the problem is that I have really ancient strings, and they're basically like rotten, crusty strands of spaghetti. But a HUGE part of the problem is my shitty, shitty, shitty amp. Amp. Amp. I can't believe I sold my amp. You know how they say "everything happens for a reason"? I think that in my case, that reason is to give me a very good idea of just what hell and horror looks like.
That thing in New Orleans is weird. It makes me realize what a big country this is. I remember a friend from Ireland and I were taking parallel geohraphy quizes: mine on Europe, and his on the States. I think I did a bit better than he did, and he was ashamed. He said "you know the states of Europe. I should know the states of America." Weird, eh? Odd how something in my own country can feel so distant. I hear about it on the news, and it's like I'm hearing about the Iraqis that jumped off that bridge. I sit around in comfort, going about my routine, and seeing these horrible stories on the news. We see horrible story after horrible story, and afer a while, they don't seem so horrible anymore. They're just more and more lines of text.
I think it's easy to become really jaded and desensitized via the media, but of course that's truism. But this brings me back to my first point: I'm not qualified to write anything about New Orleans, because I wasn't there, and I'm not there. I can sit here and pontificate about the sociopolitical ramifications all I want, but what I say isn't going to mean anything. I won't be talking about the Gulf Coast, tautologically, because I can't talk about the Gulf Coast. I've never been there.
Well, that's not entirely true. When I was seventeen or so, a friend, Mark, had a classmate who was, for his parents, selling airline tickets through some shady deal involving frequent flier moiles, or something. It was shady, anyway, and it involved really cheap tickets. I think Mark and I both got to New Orleans and back on something like $50 a piece, except we flew under the names "S" and "V. Reddy." S. Reddy, or Srinivas Reddy, was Mark's classmate, and was a stocky Indian (or Sri Lankan, or something) guy. I must have met him once.
So, Mark and I flew to New Orleans, and never really got outside of a two-mile radius of the airport. We found a hostel, and camped out there. About two blocks down the road was a little tavern, where we went every night and got semi-pissed (they served us unreluctantly at the age of seventeen, which was maybe the whole point of the trip). We did this for seven or so days, then ran out of money, slept in the airport for two nights in a row, and went home. On our last night, we bought this disgusting bucket of crayfish, and ate them. Mark wanted to spend our last $30 on a tattoo, but I wouldn't let him.
Oh, and at one point we gave a bum $20 so he would walk down the street and come back with some drugs for us. He left his bag of food, several cans of potted meat food product, with us as collateral. We waited on some concrete stairs for a long time before we realized he wasn't coming back. We saw some pretty cool cemetary, and of course walked around in the French Quarter or Bourbon Street or something. That must have been unremarkable, because I don't remember it at all.
My clearest memory of that trip was seeing macabre, enormous, carved-plastic faces on the wall of the airport, trying to sleep in the flourescent light on a row of airport seats, and hearing Louis Armstrong sing over the PA system: "Nobody knows.....the trouble I've seen......Nobody knows......but Jesus." They kept playing this, over and over, and I was really uncomfortable on that row of seats, so I sort of half-slept the entire night, and every once and a while I'd slip into full consciousness and open my eyes, and I'd see the huge grinning pop-eyed face in the yellow airport light, and hear "obody knows.....the trouble I've seen......Nobody knows......but Jesus." That was a long night. A long two nights.
I take a lot of miserable vacations. I'm not a very good traveler, I don't think. My tragic flaw is that I'm afraid to do stuff, because I'm afraid of running out of money (which we did) or missing my flight back (which we didn't) or not knowing where I am, or having to figure out crap that I won't be able to figure out and that will cause me mental pain even if I do figure it out, or something. I was talking to some youthful backpackers in my Paris youth hostel, during my horrible, ill-conceived, totally contrived and stupid Paris trip (summer 2002), and they sympathized. They told me that I just needed to "let go," or something. Apparently mine is a common phenomonon, and others experience it, except they've become enlightened and transcend it, while I stay in the same Paris hostel for 10 days, seeing stupid Paris sights (like the friggin Louvre). Anyway, I did New Orleans totally wrong, and I did Paris totally wrong. I'd like to hear some people whove had positive experiences' accounts of traveling.
I guess I had a positive experience travelling in Japan, but that sort of doesn't count. I just hung out with James the entire time, and didn't have to think for myself. I don't see life as a series of delightful puzzles to work out, as some sort of tricky game that's fun to play. I see it as a neverending swamp full of horror-pits.\
So, see, that's all I can say about New Orleans: crayfish and airports. My travel journals would be much better if I actually traveled with an adventurous spirit, which I'm not convinced I have anymore, or maybe ever had.
Oh, blah. I don't know what I'm talking about. Today I had a shitty day at work, and just now I had some grape nuts. That's all I'm qualified to say. I'm never doing a spell-check again. Nor am I going to go back and edit stuff. We've entered a new era of blogging, folks. I just don't have the energy for anything more than rambling. NO MORE QUALITY WRITING FOR YOU.
My server logs are pretty detailed these days, and my log-analyzer can do a fair amount with them (but not, regrettably, reverse-DNS look-ups). One of the things it can do is show me the terms people are searching on to arrive at my site. Here is a current list:
Bunnyranch
bunny ranch prices
steatopygia
art of body
rachel haircut
"borders books" "lawsuit"
bunny ranch brothel prices
seven locks detention center
mafia deaths*
pictures of bunnyranch
mice acronym "mutually inclusive"
montgomery county md detention center roster
nude corpse
nfl music
the rachel haircut
symptoms lymphosarcoma in elderly dogs
why religion is wrong
what novel does the word yahoo come from
shaving underpit without cream
seven locks prison in Maryland
writing on paris
sexy summer images
sexy japan
lee jisoo
"rachel haircut"
"psychological profile" porno actor
bunny ranch pricing
bra removal pictures
"molly carter"
"dan jenkins" .jpeg
"biggest fears" teenagers study "fitting in"
"megan glover"
"martha hodges"
bunny ranch,prices
Greyhound ticket center
friends finale "louis vuitton bag"
jerk off brothel
hammerhead shark "i make no sound"
female body generator
car drawings
bunnyranch costs
dowload big bang model "big bang" "cosmos"
cukoo waltz - sheet music
I hope people found what they were looking for, especially the person who searched on "bra removal pictures" (i know it was one of you).
I haven't updated NOT, as some of you might think, because I'm overburdened with work, and I don't have the time and/or energy for any sort of creative output. I haven't updated because I'm working on a truly, truly massive site revision on my domain. Bigger than the past one just a few days ago, and that one was pretty big.
In this one, I went through my blog, and pulled all of the interesting pieces of writing -- the stories, philosophizing, rants, and just weird stuff -- out of the self-important, bloggish babbling/whining that makes up probably 70% of my blog, tautologically.
There are...(I can count them at this point)...exactly fifty of them! How nice. Anyway, it was a huge amount of work, and I probably went about it really inefficiently. I don't even remember how I did it at this point. I had a browser, a text-editor, a few Dreamweaver windows, Microsoft Word, Photoshop, and a couple of directory windows open. I was pasting and copying and spell-checking and copying and editing and editing images and BLAH. It's a lot of work. I'm almost done, though -- I think I'm on essay number 47.
Anyway, that's why I haven't blogged -- I'm spending massive amounts of time and energy on overal site-revision. So poo on you. But I thought of my poor languishing blog today at work, and I just had to do something about it. So, I thought I'd 1) explain why I haven't been blogging, 2) tell a little bit about work, and 3) post some interesting lines from my server log. Whew. I give myself until 9pm, at which point, whether I've properly edited this or not, I will go over to Mrs. White's house and take care of the cats, and maybe watch some TV, and drink some raspberry selzer water.
Ok, that was 1).
2) Work! Yes, work. I work now. Work work work. I actually have a really nice cubicle -- it's an "end cubicle," analagous to an "end-house" on a townhouse row. This means that in effect I have two cubicles to myself, and two huge windows. I am well-concealed, utterly isolated in a spacious environemnt, and well-lit. The isolation and spaciousness have more to do with my workplace's weird, ghost town-like desertion. Apparently many (most?) employees there work from home, so the building looks abandoned.
When people aren't working from home, they're quietly ensconsed in their offices, attached larvaly to their computers. I guess this is the way it is now -- there's no need for a physical presence, running around an office, talking, giggling, getting coffee, running to the mailroon, shuffling papers, etc. Now, everyone is where they need to be to get work done -- the internet. People email each other files when they're two offices down the hall. It's creepy.
As far as my acutal job, I'm not really sure yet, because my boss left on a business trip after my first day of work. I don't know if I have the right materials to do what she sort of vaguely suggested I might do, or even how to do what she suggested. And, I can't seem to get ahold of her by phone. My email isn't set up yet. So, I'm basically alone in this abandoned office building, without a boss. The nice thing is it's given me time to adjust to the strange new environment, and to get all of the administrative nonsense (voice mail, intranet, email, parking, blah blah) set up by calling various people, including in-house tech support which is outsourced to India.
I actually have two bosses: one of my bosses is my temp agency boss, who bosses me with respect to all things related to my job itself (pay, hours, getting set up, supposedly parking, etc). My other boss bosses me with respect to the work content of my job (variously doing various things to various documents). The first boss is around, but he's sort of not too visible. The second boss is in some other state. The first boss sees my anguish, and gives me some things to do, occasionally. But most of the time, I just try to get myself set up administratively, and sit around.
Oh, there was also the rather huge issue of my computer. When I first got there, I took over a really computer-unsavvy temp who told me that she'd gotten a job elsewhere, but whom I found out was expelled for not being a good enough editor. Anyway, she was very stupid with computers, and hers was absolutely not working. The desktop was cluttered with crap, the system tray was loaded with crap, programs ran uncontrollably on startup (including the accursed Weatherbug), and it was clear that aboslutely no effort had been made for about a year to keep the operating system anywhere approaching clean.
But the worst part was that her, and now my, computer, was infected with a worm/virus/trojan, and was essentially nonfunctional. Every time an appliocation was opened, some strange error message about buffers being read into memory number 204uwe325, etc etc, and/or a notificatoin that the program had performed an illegal error and must now be shut down. This happened literally every time I tried to open a program. It took about three tries to get something to run in safe mode. The girl I replaced had been living with this for God knows how long, and attributed it to "The Mystery of Computers." "I think this machine might have a virus or something." She wasn't entirely sure something was wrong with it.
I called the subcontinent to place a service ticket, and IT came around and re-installed Windows on my machine. This was really exactly what it needed -- trying to patch, recover and clean up that OS would have been next to impossible. And now, I can build the thing up from the very beginning, and I have control over the whole process. Already, I'm starting to grow fond of and familiar with it, and think of it as my own. This is going to make my job a lot better, more pleasant, and easier.
I know that's the cliche of the office job: you just sit around, and don't do any work. But I think that's an unfair analysis, or at least I don't have the experience to make such an analysis. I'll let you know if I do any work after boss number two comes back from wherever she is, and maybe actually sort of explains what it is I'm supposed to be doing. I think she comes back on Friday.
So that's work. I described it as meaningless, but not unpleasant. The caffeteria is pretty good, and my office mates seem to be quite nice (the ones I see very occasionally wandering the mostly deserted halls), except for the IT department. Man. They're just rude.
I thought the day of the snide, rude, unhelpful, superior-acting information technologist went out with the dot com crash. Aside from their first re-installing (and apparently changing out a network card) on my machine, they have done nothing for me, and have been rude about doing this nothing. I heard that IT people were supposed to be grateful for earning $25k a year, and were incredibly over-helpful because of the very real fear of losing their jobs to hungry graduates willing to work for $10 an hour. But I guess not. What do I know? All I know is that this is an almost verbatim quote from the IT department at my workplace (notice how I don't tell you what it is):
It was like something out of "Dilbert.""I was looking at my machine, and I noticed that I don't have Microsoft Word."
"Oops. I forgot to install it. I'll get around to it sometime."
Ok, I'm not doing to well here in terms of time. When I spazz out writing, then I really do tend to go on forever. But let me move on to 3) (remember when I said, about 1034698 words back, that I had three things to discuss? Yeah).
Ahem. 3) My server logged my first malicious attacks! I'm so proud. Let me post:
69.140.80.254 - - [22/Aug/2005:09:32:49 -0400] "POST /_vti_bin/_vti_aut/fp30reg.dll HTTP/1.1" 302 0 "" ""
61.88.122.10 - - [19/Aug/2005:23:14:44 -0400] "GET /scripts/..%255c%255c../winnt/system32/cmd.exe?/c+ver HTTP/1.0" 302 0 "" ""
I googled parts of the log lines, and I came up with this tidbit from a forum:
This page shows real-time attacks on this web server, specifically attempts to exploit buffer overflow conditions in Microsoft (IIS) webservers. This is most likely the activity of a machine infected with the Ninda Worm (released September 18th 2001), see http://www.cert.org/advisories/CA-2001-26.html.
Heehee. I feel like I've just had my web server Bar Mitsvah, and am now a Man. I'm not using a Microsoft server, and these worm attacks tend to be old, especially because I'm pretty hyper-spastic about security patches and upgrades. But, there they are -- two bona fide server attacks. Ok, time to paragraph. But there is NO WAY I'm GOING TO SPELLCHECK OR EDIT. Here is a raw, unadulterated blog. This is how I sound before I have a chance to tweak my writing up. THIS IS THE RAW DEAL, BABY.
Ok, I will look JUST ONCE at a browser window to make sure I didn't make any gross formatting erros, like enclosing the entire blog within a blockquote (which I've done before). BUT THAT'S IT (snarl)
I go feed cats now.
I know everyone's been itching for a blog about my first few days of work. And I'll oblige, not to appease the drooling voyeurists, but just to get it all straight in my own mind. But isn't that how it always works?
In a minute. I'm revamping my stupid site again.
I'm really racking up the 404s, now that I've removed my writing section. Every once and a while, I feel a twinge of regret that I've taken my essays down. I still have them, of course -- they're just not on the web for all to see.
I really like my site's design and structure changes. Unfortunately, the only pages that were drawing in visitors in significant numbers were removed, mostly because they aren't pages that I necessarily want associated with me, but partly because my site was getting too sprawling.
Yes, re-vamping was a good decision. Just like selling my guitar amp. Just like investing in the stock market. My life is one long chain of regret.
I have a tremendous headache. I just made a deadly marinade for some chicken quarters I bought today: olive oil, vinegar, pepper, salt, about 5 bay leaves, and two full bulbs of garlic. The quarters and their marinade are now locked in a plastic bag, which is in the fridge.
The bag is leaking, and I'm afraid the entire fridge is going to smell irreversably like garlic. As I write this, it occurs to me that it might perhaps be a more dire situation than I'd thought. Let me go tend to it.
I checked it out, and it doesn't seem to be that bad. What's really poisoning the atmosphere, I think, is the cut-up garlic residue all over the counter. I tried to sponge it off, but it's still absolutely permeating the air. It's like a chemical weapons plant in here.
The entire middle floor of the house reeks. Maybe it'd be better not to partake of my megagarlic chicken tomorrow, lest I offend my new employers.
One more day! Only one more day of freedom. I feel like a kid on summer break, about to start school again. Except that work is better, because school follows you around like a virus wherever you go -- you can always study more. But work doesn't have to -- once quitting time rolls around, one can forget about work until the next day.
I'll get to have real weekends, for the first time in three years. I do miss that -- the feeling of a Friday. To tell the truth, sitting around the house all day sort of sucks.
I've managed to keep myself entertained with a computer for the past three years, since I've ended up without a social life (friends married, careers, moved, houses, etc). Maybe after I start this job, I can embark on other steps towards a normal life, and at least try one out before I reject it as being a miserable affected contrivance.
I still suspect that there might just not be all that much out there, but you never know.
I wish I were better-read. Most of what I say is cribbed from discussions with others and their assertions. It's likely that most of the time, those others didn't know what they were talking about. I've only recently begun to catch myself when I echo some statement or position of an acquaintance to myself, and realize, "they were full of shit."
These sources contradict themselves a lot. I've been gradually rejecting these memories of snippets of conversation for only about a month now. The process is ongoing, and when it's over I'll be ready to re-experience the world. Either that, or I'll become such a cynic that I'll stop eating and die.
The web and the mumblings of others are no way to form a knowledge-base. I should have been reading from the get-go, but I really don't enjoy it, unless a piece is very well-written. And simple. No big sentences, no big words, and simple subject. I'm not a very good reader.
I'm dumb like that.
I moved downstairs into the basement, at least temporarily, while the heat is overpowering during these last two weeks of august, and likely the first two weeks of September. The basement is full of my aunt's crap, and covered in a dusting of bits of dried cat shit and kitty litter. I keep meaning to go down there and make things a little more feng shuei, but it's so much easier just to crawl into bed.
I'm starting to regret selling my amp. But, that's ok -- there are worse things in life, such as being alive in and of itself. That's pretty shitty. One of my almost neverending set of emotion-associated memories is of Peter in california, telling me that every moment of life is a miracle. I just sort of stood there, squinting at him. I didn't comprehend it.
Later, I asked him if he was kidding, as he's wont to do. He's also wont to ambiguously walk the line between kidding and being serious, so he can go either way when a crucial moment arrives.
But, he said rather seriously that he really believed this. Sorry, pete, but I just don't see it.
Man, it stinks in here. The chicken had better be good, to make up for this.
I ate ten kiwis (sale! Twenty-five cents each!) over the course of about an hour. I am subject to powerful fruit-cravings from time to time, which cause me to scuttle off to the food-mart at 11pm and buy $20 worth of fruit. This time, I got kiwis, gala apples and grapefruit juice.
It's five in the morning, and I'm enjoying my last few days of freedom from diurnal regulation before starting at a new job this Wednesday. I hope I'm there a good while.
The longer I work a job, the more I like it -- my favorite jobs have been those I stayed at the longest (makes sense). This is excepting the bike-repair job; I liked it, but had only been there a month before I was called to california, which turned out to be not exactly a disaster, but also didn't live up to my expectations of it being a glorious life-change. I can't believe I brought a suit to california -- that was just a low blow. I only did one interview where wearing it might have been appropriate, and I didn't wear it that day. So, it hung in my closet, dry-cleaned, and that's how I took it home to Maryland, still in a plastic bag.
Peter's idea was for me to get some decently-paying office temp job in san francisco. He told me that during his time at d&t, he saw a number of glassy-eyed 20-somethings dressed in shirts and ties, entering data or doing other humdrum computer tasks. I guess his idea was that I could find one or a few of these jobs. As it turned out, I commuted three hours every day to a retail job where I earned eight dollars an hour, and had to put up with managers much younger than i, and with multiple facial piercings, snapping at me to take my sunglasses off of my neck. I'd like to call them up and tell them I earn more money than they do.
I have to drive mrs. White to the airport on Tuesday, and take care of her cats for two weeks while she's at the world canal conference (really!) in sweden. I hate cats. Also, I have to mow her lawn, and the lawn of this other couple whose lawn she has, for some reason, agreed to mow for the rest of their lives. I think it's an old infirm couple.
Lawn care really pisses me off. It's one of those cultural rituals that would look utterly, utterly stupid to an alien, very much like wearing lip-plates or ties. I was trying to tie a windsor-knot the other day, and was failing. A four-in-hand is all i, and probably 90% of the population of the united states, know how to tie. It clenches silk ties into a painful-looking, tiny, cramped granny-knot, which squashes itself into the joint of one's collar, looking like a plumb-pit.
Culture might be defined as "anything people do that serves no purpose." and I mean real purpose, specifically in the food, shelter, and/or clothing department. Of course, this is assuming that our goal is to live.
Food and shelter (climate-regulation, keeping hail from perforating one's body) serve the ultimate end of keeping us alive long enough to reproduce. Reproduction is truly the "purpose of life." a species makes more if itself -- that's what species do, that's how they survive. This ties in with my favorite quote from my own blog:
"The whole of human culture is a footnote to fucking."
I really think that deserves a place next to all of the churchill one-liners. So, everything we do outside the ends of making babies = culture. Having children is the most important, signifcant event in most anyone's life.
It's ironic, perhaps the ultimate irony, that the purpose of life threatens life. I've theorized that on any planet, evolution will inevitably put forth a species so successful that it's killed off by the hand of this success -- reproducing to the point where environmental resources are taxed out of existence. Maybe a lot of 21st century existential angst, ennui, experience of the void, nameless empty feeling, nihilism, etc, is because there truly is no purpose of life, now that reproduction has become counterproductive.
Of course, the human race would die out in 80 or so years if it stopped producing new babies, but that's perhaps not terribly likely to happen. Breeding-instincts are mighty, and fighting them doesn't get anywhere. China's "one child policy" was (is?) more or less a disaster; couples ignored it, even though it meant financial consequences. Even though at this point it's not healthy to reproduce, simply because everyone else is doing more than enough of it, but reproduction is still the purpose of life, outside of which any and all activity can be deemed "culture."
Lawn care falls heavily, with a great dull "thud," into the category of "culture;" it has very, very little bearing on whether or not a pair is able to produce offspring. This is not to say that culture is a bad thing -- life would be pretty drab without it. But let's admit that pushing a gasoline-powered, wheeled thing around a piece of unused property to cut the foliage growing on it to a uniform length, while one could be frantically reproducing, or even spending that time on the couch watching cartoons and eating grape-nuts, is questionable.
Time to do a text-editor endorsement.
crimson editor is, without question, the best text editor I've ever used, on mac, windows or unix. None compare. I've devoted a lot of time and anxiety to finding the perfect text editor, to no avail. Then, one day, I happened upon CE, and my life was changed from that day forward.
It has: tabs, the ability to open an unlimited number of files, spell check with personalized dictionary, macros, lots of keyboard commands, multiple undos, syntax highlighting, search and replace with regular expressions, and one can use it without being nagged to register. It's great, it's great.
What a stupid entry.
One of my recurring themes is the perceived split between two world-views, often termed science and postmodernism, western and eastern thought, or what robert pirsig refers to as classicism and romanticism. I've been working at reconciling them, off and on, every few entries or so, for the past year or two. My new signifiers for the two paths to understanding are "the discreet approach" and "the continuity approach."
There are as many categories ("this is a book." "this is a plant." "this is a gas." "this is a quark." etc) to describe reality as we choose to make: one, quite a few, uncountably many, infinite -- they're purely an invention, and we can create as many or as few as we'd like.
All that is isn't the universe, but rather space, time, consciousness, energy, matter, dark energy and gravity (i dunno). Matter isn't just matter, but liquid, solid and gas. It isn't just gas, but hydrogen, helium, oxygen, etc. It isn't just oxygen, but electrons, protons, and neutrons.
It isn't just these subatomic particles, but rather various elementary particles I don't know the names of and don't feel like looking up. Some scientists are confident that they've found the most elementary particles, and that the macrocosmic model will simply end there. I don't agree; intuition (i avoid "faith" or "spirituality" here) tells me that the components branch out indefinitely.
The pattern seems to be that the smaller you get, the weirder things get. For instance, quantum physics illuminates all kinds of seemingly illogical assertions, like something being a particle and a wave at the same time. It'd stand to reason that as more elementary components (ie, "parts of quarks") are discovered, things will get weirder still. Eventually, you find god. I digress.
The discreet approach is a way of looking at things such that everything is analyzed as a discreet entity, with a name, designation, or unwavering description. In the discreet approach, there are many "things," and each is distinct from the other.
The continuity approach states that these boundaries are imaginary, and of no consequence. There aren't any discreet packages or data, substance, thought or energy, since it's everything is all just one "thing."
The discreet approach sometimes isn't given credit for appreciating the arbitrary nature of created categories, but I think it often does. Science can keep dividing perceived entities into more and more categories, but they divide each into only as many as are useful, and keep dividing only as many times as is useful. By "useful" I mean "produces observable results." I'm inclined to believe some scientists note this, and note that categories are created rather than exist a priori.
Categories can be thought of as templates -- ideals to which we set up our understanding of things in the world, and too which we compare objects, to see if they fit onto the template/into the category. The problem is when templates become too firm, or taken as absolute/inflexible. An unchanging, fixed view of the universe is a view sometimes associated with newtonian, narrow-minded, or bad science. Sometimes, it's associated with science on the whole, but I don't think this is fair or accurate. I just think the people who make this association failed math, and want revenge.
The platonic world view of the existence of templates -- ie, a realm of ideas -- is contradicted by both science and spirituality as I'm defining them -- "the two components of the world-view split."
The simpleton is concerned with simple and rigid categories -- he likes to tell us what a thing "is" and "is not." something not conforming to a template, and therefore being un-namable, and therefore unable to "Be" anything is met with confusion and frustration, and then crammed into a created category, which our simpleton views as absolute and pre-existing.
Here is the reconciliation of postmodernism and science, eastern thought and western thought, romanticism and clacissism, intuition and logic, or spirituality and science: both weltanschauungs are aware of the arbitrary nature of categories.
A difference is that science is able to measure its in a consistent and useful way. However, spirituality is concerned with the "big picture" -- while science is at the point of quarks and leptons and is thinking that these are the smallest things get, because it's getting progressively harder to divide any further, spiritualists know intuitively that it just goes on forever.
I guess it's clear which path I take, eh? I've never taken a science class in my life. My only experiments are sociology experiments in which I behave weirdly around people and then think about their reactions.
The key to approaching understanding accurately, scientifically or spiritually, is observing with an open mind and without prejudice, of always taking a closer look, and of always rejecting pre-defined categories in favor of examination of properties, and properties within properties. In order to get a clearer picture, person "x" would look at every "thing," and say "what is this thing unto itself?" perspn "x" doesn't confidently name that thing, or fit it to a template. If s/he does create it for temporary, useful convenience, s/he realizes the power that naming, words and memory have to create these categories.
The trick to being a good postmodernist (continuity) or a good scientist (discreet) is to avoid stereotyping, generalizations, categories and templates. These categories are necessarily expressed in language, and this is why postmodernism is obsessed with "text" -- text is language, and language is naming. Language is incredibly powerful, because it sets up our categories for us, and draws our boundaries between categories.