The All-Pretend World of Adulthood

I was thinking about something I heard about a year ago about the nature of maturity. We aren't really all that mature, but we think we are when we emulate people we percive to be mature. So this whole Adulthood and age of maturity thing is a self-referencing system that twists and turns upon itsself. There doesn't seem to be a definite base, it's just that we know somebody that seems to have everything together on a financial, mental, and social level and we decide that they must be a mature adult. Little may we know that this same person is going down to Tunica (for those who don't know about Tunica, it's a really poor county in Mississippi that has gotten a leg up from the riverboat gambling industry) every weekend and completely blows his paycheck. His finances are in complete shambles as a result and he's had to put a mortgage on his house 5 times already to get himself out of gambling debt. These are things you'd never suspect about an upstanding citizen, but you may expect from a bum on the street. What if that bum has had a series of bad luck deals in which he was screwed out of every penny to his name? I know, it's unlikely, but then again, so is Mr. Perfect's situation.

I don't think I could live in a perfect world. I'm not a pessimist (quite the opposite, actually), but I don't know if I could live in a world where there wasn't a problem to solve or a puzzle to figure out. I think that inquisitive nature of humanity is what keeps us striving to find out more about our world and ourselves. I also think that's why a lot of scientists and philosophers have a problem with extreme fundementalist religions. In these strictly absolute contexts all of the problems have been solved, so all you have to do is look in a rule book for an answer and then apply the answer to the given situation. That doesn't sell very well with a nuclear physiscist who's trying to understand the nature of the universe. Then again, on the opposite end of the spectrum, it doesn't satisfy the scientist to say the universe simply started with the Big Bang. People have been postulating and philosophising about this for quite sometime, often with very messy and bloody results. Ironic, isn't it, that we have to kill eachother to understand the nature of our creation.

The wheel keeps turning...

Modern Sacrifices...

So I was at Wal-Mart the other day (yes, I know, boo hiss, but it's amazing how they can get so much shit under one roof. I mean, the last time I saw that much shit under one roof was when my cousin turned on the manure spreader inside the barn back home. We couldn't go near the barn for a month without a gas mask), and as I was checking out I noticed that there was a self checkout line. It got me to thinking about what all we sacrifice in the name of our modern life.

It seems that we miss out on the little things in life that keep us human when we artificially speed up our lives. If you're doing your own check out, for instance, you don't have time to see who Kobe fucked this week or who J.Lo's gonna fuck next week. You don't have time to make friends with the people behind you as you discuss how in the world a 94 lb. man will ever be able to inpregnate a 960 lb. woman. No more time for the tabloids, we have them online after all, and they don't have to involve people we even know are famous. All you have to do is read someone's weblog and bam here's some dirt I never thought we'd find on June Marie down the block. Turns out she really does have the hots for Rusty. Better not let Buddy know about that. Yes, I participate in this phenomenon as well, but the small bit of consolation that I can take with me is that this is not my whole existence. I find it somewhat odd that some folks can sum up their lives in less than a megabyte, it must be a simple life.

We have to be at our destinations faster, but we miss out on all those little unique tourist traps. We give up so many of our civil liberties in the name of safety. If you say that you want the simple life and fight to keep your freedom, you're labeled as a traitor or as the newest soundbyte to enter our vocabulary: a terrorist! Heaven forbid that you think differently than the establishment, cause they'll come in and bomb ya.

In light of the 40th anniversary of the JFK assassination, a question was posed: Do you think people would react differently if the shrub was assassinated? Even though the man is an idiot, I don't think anyone wants him dead, and those that do just haven't considered all of the equation. For conservatives, Bush is the great white hope (no pun intended). For liberals, we don't want him dead because if he did die, then Cheany would take his place! You thought corporate corruption was bad before, look out if that ever happened. Best case scenerio for the good guys is not to kill Bush, but rather beat him fairly and squarely in 2004. Regime change begins at home; Regime change in '04!

I speak English, Spanish, and Freedom...

Just walking to the Union (oops, I mean Memorial Student Center 'cause union is still quite a radical concept here) here at A&M, one gets the sense of how brute force conservative this place is. The heavy right hand of judgement is out there in full force protesting against abortion today. As I was trying to weave through the people handing out flyers, I got caught right before I hit the door of the Union. To remain civil, I simply stated to the woman handing out the flyers with a rotting corpse of a 7 week old aborted fetus on the front and who had thought it fit to pull her 5 school aged kids out of class today to protest the right to opress her reproductive freedom that I was pro-choice.

If you want to convince me to change sides, this is not, I repeat, NOT the way to do so. Don't tell me you love children when you deny the right of an education to your own children so they can be token representatives of your ideals. Don't tell me you love children and feel ok with displaying aborted fetuses. That's like me saying that I'm against the ivory trade that allowed you to have all that exquisite jewelry around your neck and me carrying around a poster of a freshly de-tusked elephant carcass. Doesn't work that way.

What I find mildly ironic is that these are the same people who carry around their Bibles and wear "What Would Jesus Do" t-shirts. I don't remember that many times that Jesus used scare tactics to try to get people to join him. Rather, he showed compassion to people. You know, let them know that someone gives a good goddamn about them? That's how Jesus won the crowd. People who protest like this are no better than the lawyers who sought to kill Jesus because he represented a threat to thier rule. In short, ultra conservatives are the modern day equivilant of the people who killed Jesus.

I had a friend once explain his view on abortion to me as a passing part of some longer conversation. It's been a while back but the basic gist was that if the kid was not wanted, then it would feel nothing but pain and rejection all of its life. There would always be some underlying notion that this kid was a mistake. If the kid can't get unconditional love and understanding at home, then how is he going to learn to express it to people in the outside world. Let's just say it would take several well-positioned miracles for something like that to happen. It might happen for a few, but for the vast majority of these unwanted kids, these kind of opportunites don't happen.

But that's not what I'm here to talk about...

As I said, College Station is a very conservative place. There was no way to tell how the students felt about this issue. I get the sense that a majority agree with it, though. The next generation of gun-toting, SUV driving, war mongering, pious Christian conservative right wingers were just the silent supporters of this threat to their freedom. It amazes me how many folks are silently taking it up the ass and smiling all the time. I think that if they ever heard news to the contrary, that they would probably kill the messenger out of embarrassment of their sheepish error.

Before the 'war' started, people had a new label for French fries, calling them instead Freedom fries in protest of France's stance on the need to go to war in the first place. People were calling the French cowards when it was the French that played a pivotal role in the victory over the British in the Revolutary War, and who also gave us the king's portion of the lower 48 states for an incredible price. So if the prize for cowardice is an independent nation and free land, how much more bountiful is the reward for courage?

It's really unfortunate that all points of view can't be adequately expressed in an environment such as a university campus, but in a way, I think it's cool. It's like a scavenger hunt to find the people you can trust. I've learned over the years that freedom of speech is not a blanket freedom. There are places in this nation where you can speak your mind more freely than others. That's what makes the internet a beautiful thing. If I want to express my views on the tell-tale world of lesbian barbeque sauce contests, I'm free to do so at my leisure. It's a way for us to talk with people of the same opinion who might live thousands of miles away. Now, even that is being limited by the self-rightous. These are the same kind of folks who tell people they can't smoke in a bar in New York. Smoke and bars are just as compatible as bars and drinking. I don't smoke myself, but a bar loses a little bit of it's flavor if you take smoking out of it, especially if someone's smoking a menthol. If you don't like it, you can go down to the liquor store, set up your own house bar and have all your lushy, non-smoking friends join you for a drink after scouring the town for a bar where there wasn't anyone lighting up.

So, I guess this either makes me a patriot that speaks Freedom, or a terrorist that speaks French. Call me what you may, but don't come crying to me when the last of our civil liberties gets swallowed up in the name of safety and xenophobia.

I've got a webcam...

I'm sitting in my office, minding my own business when I get this messege from a Julie 314159 on the AOL messenger. I know what this is, but I entertain it anyway. All it says is...

Julie 314159: Hi Damnedtreehugger!
Julie 314159: I've got a webcam...

All of this followed by a link to go to some naked chick fingering herself and making some face that's supposed to convince me that she's enjoys pandering to anything with a cock.

Like I said, I know it was a sexbot trying to get me to sign up for some monthly rate porno site, but if you're gonna try to convince me to spend my scant cash pool on this, at least make it real, ya know? I promply blocked the address, and continued on to the rant you see before you. In this modern age, we're expected to do everything faster, more efficiently, for longer duration, and for less pay. It got me to thinking how so many jobs that were around 50 years ago are now gone thanks to automation.

There are some good things about automation though. I don't have to wait a month or sell my firstborn son to own a copy of the Closing of the Winterland DVD thanks to automation. That goes for a number of products in our world now, but sometimes you want something that's hand-made. You know, like a Cuban cigar or a Chicago deep dish pizza. Something that you know the person who made this object took a lot of care and time into making it. This is probably one reason prints are so cheap but original artwork is priceless. There's some part of a person that goes into an original painting, but there's some part of a machine that goes into a print.

Call me old fashioned, but I still like people for the most part. I like mankind's ability to think for themselves and make decisions based on those opinions. I think that's why I'm so bothered by a majority of Americans today. They are willing to be spoonfed the shit Fox News and the Bush Administration tell them and eat it like chocolate ice cream. It's really disgusting. The Democrats aren't much better, but they are our one great hope of ousting George II next November. Next November...man, is it that close already? I'm going to dance like a madman when this regime falls. Me and every forward-minded person in this failing republic will be like pygmys who just brought down a raging elephant with poison darts.

As for automation, I guess this works for the porno industry as well, no wonder Julie was able to offer a 7 day free trial to her webcam...ah automation.

Random Thoughts and Leaps of Logic

So I was sitting in stats yesterday, and was getting exactly what Laura (stats prof.) was talking about. Thanks to countless hours of listening to the Grateful Dead and other various and saundry jam bands, I tend to hear tunes in my head when I start getting concepts. Since this was Monday, I didn't have anything energetic on, just a really heavy, Phil Lesh bass bombed version of Dark Star running through my head. So that got me to thinking about philzone a little bit, and about a knock-knock joke I saw on there...goes like this...

Knock, knock
Who's there?
Banana
Banana who?
Banana na Banana na...(opening notes to Dark Star)

So, as with all knock knock jokes, I thought it was lame, but still novel, you know like those gift catalogues from Radio Shack that you get just because you bought a 1/8" headphone jack splitter from them back in 1986. Gotta love those guys, but seriously, it's getting a little old...I don't even know if there is a Radio Shack in College Station. I guess there has to be though. Anyway back to the joke. I started thinking about how kids around 7 to 9 take things to their absurd end. Like how a kid can make 500 iterations of some knock knock joke and absolutely none of them are funny or even make that much sense.

It was at that point that I started snickering in class. I sit toward the front of the class, and at this point, Laura's back was to me. I think she thought I was laughing at her; she's paranoid like that. I assured her that it had nothing to do with the class or her but rather that I was laughing about, "kids and knock knock jokes".

It got me to thinking though, How do we come up with this stuff. Why do some people's minds wander this way. It doesn't necessarily mean that we were bored because I was totally into the stats lesson for the day, but I just think it's cool how loose connections can create some of the most bizzare situations. It's something I'd like to investigate more as I get deeper into this psychology game.

The first post on this, the current condition of the human mind machine, is going to be interesting to all I hope. I'd just like to outline what this is going to be about I guess and start in on some of the subjects I'd like to come back to. I guess the first thing some people might ask is who the hell is this guy? I mean, why would you be interested in listening to the babblings of some ivory towered grad student in the middle of Texas? Well, for one thing, the tower may be ivory, but it's not surrounded by a shining city. On the contrary, it's a barren wasteland of obedient serfs out there. It's hard for a forward thinking guy to find any kind of support around here. There are some places, the Psychology Department is one of them. (I'm a grad student in Psychology if ya haven't put that together already.) The radio station, KEOS, and a couple of bars are progressive friendly, but the rest of this burg is very conservative. I guess having the George Bush Sr. Presidential Library in town doesn't help.

Not many good acts pass through College Station, so I have to head down to Austin to catch good shows. There's a good local band here called Floodgate, but beyond that, it's mostly cover bands and Dave Matthews Sound-a-likes. Good for the undergrad population I guess. I guess it's good that I'm here, because if I were in Austin, I'd never get any work done. I love my live music though, there's no doubt about that. My list of shows I have is outdated, but here it is anyway....

So what else is there...music, politics, oh yeah school. I'm in the Cognitive Psychology area here in the department. It's probably the best one to be in, but then again, I'm biased. I was talking with a few fellow CogHeads and we came to the conclusion that we are probably the most laid back people in the department. The Behavioral Neuroscience kids are cool, but the things they do to rats...well I'd never be able to do to another living being knowingly, the Industrial Psych. people are always too busy to stop and smell the roses, the Social Psych. people are just plain wierd, the Clinical people are aloof. It's a wonder that people get treatment at all with the way these people act. All snobbish and all...well I guess I shouldn't generalize. There are a couple of them that would do well over with us. The Cognitive folks are in this for a career mostly I think. We all see ourselves as teachers and researchers, not as some corporate lapdogs or practicioners. Some people might say, "They're doctors all right, but not ones that help people." It's a acerbic comment, but it gets to the point. I mean, I know my intentions are purely selfish. I study lingusitics because I want to know more about why I didn't start talking till I was 3, and I study creative thought because I want to know more about why I can come up with a witty remark and why I enjoy creative activities more than just sitting and watching sports.

So yeah, I guess this Weblog thing is a selfish thing as well. I guess I have to be a little selfish to balance the giving in my life. I tip heavily, give money to bums, tutor anyone who asks for help. I like to give away shows as well. People see me with a handful of bubble-wrap packages and know that I'm heading to the post office to get some more music out to my peeps on . I've always believed that people who achieve a balance are the happiest. That's why I think bums are content being bums and not getting off the street like everyone thinks they should. They found balance on the streets. Others find their balance by fucking over other people...I guess it's because everyone's so nice to them. Who knows?

I'm sure I've left something out, but that's about all I can think of for right now...