There are a lot of metaphors for Peni, right? And for testicles? You know, hotdogs and olives (as my friend S put it. I don't know who the fuck puts olives on hot dogs though), whatever.

But what the hell does a Vagina look like? Apart from a Georgia O'Keefe painting.

I've spent a lot of time recently feeling lazy and stupid and good for nothing. I told Suzanne about it and she's like "Yeah, that sounds like you."

That was sort of a reminder. She just resolutions....so I'm going to try to be honest. Really honest. Not lying about my emotions or making up stories or pretending my life has gone better than it has or pretending I know what I'm talking about when I don't. I figure the people who put up with me already are prepared for unnecessary bluntness. If I seem like a moron, well, it can't be worse than its already been at my last few jobs.

Alex: I give awful massages
barefoot: me too
barefoot: But I receive them well.

Had dinner with a small group including Tom Schelling, who won the Nobel Prize in Economics. Wow, I feel lucky - although in truth, he didn't say much,  his wife was much more interesting. Apparently they both voted Obama and are resolute Democrats. She will try to introduce me to a few people in Poland, I think, which would be awesome.

I love that Linux runs fast, has a lot of cool free  software, and isn't Windows. Its a little frustrating how many weird little things aren't supported or are only supported with a lot of work - installing Flex Builder took days, and it still lacks a couple of obvious features. My Creative iPod knock off doesn't work. My family's new printer doesn't work. You will be trying to get some random feature to work and it will become this big production, it is too unpredictable. So I'm not sure whether to try to do a Windows partition, or just figure someone will have a Windows box sitting around that I can use.

Back in Cali, hanging out with family. Nice to be back. Going to Poland soon - about which, more later.

[quote]HILLARY Clinton has been branded a "monster" by one of Barack Obama's top advisers, as the gloves come off in the race to win the Democrat nomination.

In an unguarded moment during an interview with The Scotsman, Samantha Power, his key foreign policy aide, let slip the camp's true feelings about the former First Lady....

Ms Power told The Scotsman Mrs Clinton was stopping at nothing to try to seize the lead from Mr Obama.

"We f***** up in Ohio," she admitted. "In Ohio, they are obsessed and Hillary is going to town on it, because she knows Ohio's the only place they can win.

"She is a monster, too -- that is off the record -- she is stooping to anything," Ms Power said, hastily trying to withdraw her remark.[/quote]

Looked at old picture, of myself with some friends in 2000, when I was graduating High School.

Wow. I'm struck by how the time since then has been basically a total waste. And also, by how little I like myself now.

I've been over this ground before, and tried to dismiss it because its not a productive way to think. But its still basically true.

I had this sense of tremendous possibility. Basically, I got to UChicago, and it became overwhelmed by other things going on in my life. It wasn't followed up by any hard work. Four years of pain in College, which was basically fine but extremely unpleasant, followed by three years of living at home doing nothing. Now I've been out in Chicago actually working, dating, and generally living. But I'm struck by the shallowness of my thoughts, the dishonesty of my character, the smallness of my ambitions. I want that sense of possibility back - I'm not too old, am I? What was it that got it in the first place?

Life in other news is not so bad. Just enjoying a little last time in the Midwest with my roommates really. They're all really tremendous people and its been an honor to know them. I sort of doubt they feel that way about me and I don't blame them.

Running Linux now. Its amazing and I can't imagine going back to Windows. It asorbs a helluva lot of time, though.

I'm half-assedly dating a girl named Rachel. She has Asberger's and a number of other psychological impairments. She is really an incredible mess. More about that later.

From today's New York Times:


February 17, 2008
Follow Me
The Charisma Mandate
By KATE ZERNIKE

TAKING office in 1933, Franklin D. Roosevelt confronted a country in crisis. Four in 10 working-age Americans were jobless. Banks were collapsing. There were long lines outside tellers’ windows as people rushed to withdraw their savings.

On March 4, Roosevelt gave his now famous inaugural address, promising that “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” Within days he had secured legislation guaranteeing the banks, and on March 12, he took to the radio for the first of his fireside chats. “When the people find out that they can get their money — that they can get it when they want it — the phantom of fear will soon be laid,” he soothed an anxious nation. “I can assure you, it is safer to keep your money in a re-opened bank than under your mattress.”

When banks re-opened the next morning, the lines were gone, as Robert A. Caro recounted in the first volume of his biography of Lyndon Johnson, “The Path to Power.” People put money back in, so much that on the first day after the chat, deposits outweighed withdrawals by $10 million.

It was the legislation, but mostly, Mr. Caro writes: “Their confidence was restored by his confidence. When he smiled on the crisis, it seemed to vanish.”

Would we call this a cult of personality?

Today that term is all around Barack Obama — perhaps because there seems so little other way to explain how a first-term senator has managed to dazzle his way to front-runner in the race for the presidency, how he walks on water for so many supporters, and how the mere suggestion that he is, say, mortal, risks vehement objection, or at least exposing the skeptic as deeply uncool.
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I find the "Cult of Personality" meme sort of pernicious. The logic seems to be that there is is no good reason why someone might like Obama, so it must be a "cult of personality". The implication is that Obama doesn't have the skills, experience, or ruthlessness to be President. The reality is that Obama's supporters simply express their support in more enthuastic ways, possibly because Obama's supporters tend to be younger. Beyond that, the idea that Obama is all smoke and mirrors simply doesn't make sense. He's built an immensly impressive organization and run a much smarter campaign than Hillary. He's been willing to go negative when necessary, he showed a lot of shrewdness in Illinois United States Senates. He taught at the University of Chicago law school while also pursuing his political career. He's got pages of pages of stances on the issues and policy specifics. Nor is there any evidence that Hillary is a particularly experienced or skilled politician. The media has created a dialogue of experience vs. rhetorical power because its a cool storyline - the old ruthless statesman vs. the young idealist. In fact, Obama is more ruthless than many would admit and Hillary is less experienced than she likes to project.

Take a look at the following articles:

A New, Global Oil Quandry"
Is this the end of cheap food?

Food powers humans. Fossil fuels powers just about everything humans do - manufacturing, transportation, agriculture, everything. Agriculture in particular takes up a ton of energy, meaning you're basically converting fossil fuel into food. You can also turn food back into energy by burning it, or converting it into ethanol (or biodiesel or whatever) and then burning it. The latter is a serious issue, UN spokesman on famine recently made headlines by calling ethanol a "crime against humanity". Now that ethanol plants are buying corn, people in developing countries can't afford to, and are starving.

We got through the 20th century without all of this being a problem. A relatively small number of people (ie, Europe, Japan, the US) had vast amounts of money and used it to monopolize the world's energy supply. The rest of the world was poor, and they had just barely enough food to get by. Now, the rest of the world is developing a middle class, and like the middle class in the US, they want to have cars, refrigerators, air conditioning, and meat for dinner every night. New industries in these countries are also using a ton of energy.

The bottom line is that there basically isn't enough energy to go around. There therefore isn't enough prosperity to go around.

One, a lot of really poor people in a lot of really poor places in the world are going to starve.

Societies based on massive amounts of prosperity are going to have to contract. The US, for example, is largely based on the assumption that everyone can afford a car, that everyone can afford private health insurance, that everyone can afford a single family home. These assumptions are going to be challenged in a very ugly way. The problem is that the smart, capable people who could remake society to cope with the loss of resources are all going to continue to have resources because they'll have good jobs. The people who need society to change are going to be the powerless. From what I know about Japan, its also in a bad spot.

One smart thing to do here is to create more renewable energy. This can happen quickly or it can happen slowly and painfully. Congress seems to prefer the latter.

The easiest change to our society to make would be free public health insurance. This would be a humane response to the loss of steady middle class jobs which we've seen in America.

I'd like to see a political candidate talk about these issues - or the national debt, or a serious plan to deal with our wretched educational system. No candidates really get into these issues. So I tend to vote on personality - who do I trust the most? - and values - basically always the Democrat. But I'd vote for an awful prolife Republican who had a serious plan for the issues I actually care about.

What's with all of my female friends wanting to fuck girls? Its not that fucking hard. You go on OkCupid, you message 50 girls, 45 of them reject you, you go on 3 crappy dates and you get laid twice. What could be easier?

Actually, I think the ratio would be better than that. I know a lot of bi girls just don't want to make the first move...if you're willing to do so you should be fine.

If you get laid with this method, you owe me pictures.

Fascinating article on Star Wars and the state of American Civilization. I basically agree with this.

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"History always repeats itself twice - first as tragedy, second as farce." - Karl Marx

Tom Paxton is one of the most powerful songs writers I know of. (For less satirical example of his work, listen to Rambling Boy or "Whose Garden Was This?") Even the satirical songs are pretty powerful. Of course, my Dad sung me Tom Paxton to me as a kid, and my mind is really built around Paxton's melancholy longing. So you may not like it as much, but take a listen.

I got pretty pissed with Suzanne* because I told her I found listening to Tom Paxton to be a spiritual experience and she couldn't take it seriously. Or did I tell her I had a spiritual experience while masturbating? I can't blame her from taking a step back when I made that statement. But I don't think there's anything about Christianity which is incompatible with the idea of finding God in places other than a Church - Jesus strikes me as the type of figure who would let you find God while listening to songs of peace, or while getting off, or when you think about your children, or whatever. He seems like such a fucking hippy. I mean, he's got a beard and long hair.

Speaking of people with beards, I really like this editorial on Star Wars and Geek culture generally by Neal Stephenson. I actually have never seen Star Wars and it sounds like a pretty lame little universe.

"Concentrate on the moment. Feel, don't think. Trust your instincts," says a Jedi to the young Anakin in Episode I, immediately before a pod race in which Anakin is likely to get killed. It is distinctly odd counsel coming from a member of the Jedi order, the geekiest people in the universe: they have beards and ponytails, they dress in army blankets, they are expert fighter pilots, they build their own laser swords from scratch.

And (as is made clear in the "Clone Wars" novels) the masses and the elites both claim to admire them, but actually fear and loathe them because they hate being dependent upon their powers.

Anakin wins that race by repairing his crippled racer in an ecstasy of switch-flipping that looks about as intuitive as starting up a nuclear submarine. Clearly the boy is destined to be adopted into the Jedi order, where he will develop his geek talents - not by studying calculus but by meditating a lot and learning to trust his feelings. I lap this stuff up along with millions, maybe billions, of others. Why? Because every single one of us is as dependent on science and technology - and, by extension, on the geeks who make it work - as a patient in intensive care. Yet we much prefer to think otherwise.

Full story below the cut. Really makes me wish I took more math. I was so good at it, I just got lazy. Well, time to start geeking out hard and make up for lost time.



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*Please don't take this post as a personal attack Suzanne, its not intended that way.

Woah, I was being giant asshole Areks last night....sorry guys. Thanks for putting up with my shit. I generalized way too much. Thanks to all of my wonderful friends for being sensitive and putting up with my shit. I'm trying to process some stuff here before I go to Poland.

The broader point, which I think does hold, is that most men can't understand women's emotions - and so tend to be either dismiss them or be stressed out by them. This can be true even with women who are pretty awesome and men who are pretty sensitive, although maybe its not true for everyone. I'm not saying that this is bad or you shouldn't have emotions or whatever, but if you want to take anything out of my rant here, that would be the lesson.

As regards the last entry, it should be mentioned that my family doesn't really resemble the stereotypical American family.

My Mom was a great Mom, generally. She worked as a Poli Sci professor, which I don't really respect because, well, it seemed like the books she wrote were pretty unimportant. She also works from home and generally seemed to have a pretty easy existence, relative to most people. I know she was stressed all the time though. She's sort of all over the place. She'll come up with new initiatives out of no where and announce it with great authority, then forget about it later. She'll attack you if you talk about anything which is sensitive for you. She wants to talk about my emotions all the time, and she has a lot invested in what I tell her about my emotions. She's honestly unhappy if I don't feel the way she wants me to feel. I certainly resent her for making us live in fear of her emotions and generally being such a nut. Which doesn't mean she wasn't a good Mom who tried hard, just she's very painful to be around.

My Dad worked his ass off and spent a ton of time taking care of us. He's pretty unhappy. He's really an A+ Dad for the most part. He has some emotional problems from his childhood, I guess, but he's worked hard to deal with them, and they don't come out with anyone but my Mom. I kinda feel like he can't deal with her shit and I don't blame him because I can't deal with her shit either. My Mom regards him as just one more Man Who Yells, which isn't fair.

I definitely got the idea at a pretty young age that navigating emotions and understanding relationships was going to be important. I spend a lot of time trying to understand women's emotions because this skill was going to save my ass. I have sort of a neurotic reaction to my friend's relationships. I have a hard time relating to main stream Americans because they just grew up in an environment nothing like my own and we've just got a wildly different set of assumptions internalized.

This has become pretty fucking obvious as I talk to more women and see how many of them seem to have a problem with too much acceptance, or who grew up in baldly sexist circumstances, or who deal with their problems by crying, or are just utterly fucking powerless. Even very strong women absorb a lot of sexism in our society. I get it.

But I grew up in the shadow of a strong, confident women, and I think strong confident women are a great idea. But I also grew up with a pretty terrifying women. Is it possible for a women to be strong, confident, and in touch with her emotions, without being a total bitch? I'm still looking for the proof of concept.

I don't talk about this normally because its fucking whiny as hell. I'm an upper middle class kid, I've had a great life, I'm spoiled silly, fine. I've still got problems.

I want to talk about my Dad for a second, since he's been hugely influential in my life.

My Dad is, by most reasonable male definitions, very successful. He's the President of his company, he makes a lot of money, he drives a big car. He has a shitty marriage and he doesn't really have any buddies, but that's not that unusual. The marriage is OK in that at least my Mom isn't blatantly abusive or absentee or anything. He derives a lot of happiness from his kids and his family life anyway, probably more than a lot of men. But he's really pretty miserable. He had sort of a midlife crises years back. He didn't cheat on my Mom (which would have been suicidal), he just quit his job for a few years and went back to school.

The article below suggests men who are having mid life crises are "narcissistic jerks". Maybe.

Its always seemed to me like being a man meant being chained to a desk and chained to a wife. (I know there's a lot of divorce out there and a lot of men cheat. But not in my family.) And the alternative to being chained to a great job is to be chained to a shitty job. The alternative to being loyal to your wife is....what? Cheating? Polyamory? (aka cheating). Never having kids? Thus, men tend to be pretty miserable. Women, on the other hand, basically seem pretty happy as long as the family is together. Not that any of this is women's fault. I just think its hard for a man to be happy, which women are unlikely to acknowledge.

Stuff like this is part of why I can turn into a raving fucking misogynist when it comes to middle aged women. Young women are fine. Its easy to sympathize with young women because they've obviously got a hard and confusing time of things. I don't think I know a single young women who isn't totally confused. Even my female friends who are basically confident and articulate are doing something really stupid, such as dating my male friends. But its very hard for me to get along with older women.

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More than anything else, my problem is just laziness. I think I've got some of the confidence and woman issues under control, at least theoretically. I just gotta work.

There's this vast web of communities - forums, blogs, wikis, corporate sites, et cetera. But these communities are without context.  Who am I really writing to when I write here? Do I have to be me? It makes you think about how easy it would be to reinvent yourself.

Here's an exercise. Get 5 sheets of paper. Imagine 5 alternate yous. The person you would have been, if things had just worked out a little differently. What your personality might be like, how you might act. Write up their different life, write up their different personality. And then act out your alterego.

One way to do this is to literally buy different clothes, go to a neighborhood you wouldn't normally hang out, and pretend to be the person. Bring the sort of friends your alterego would have (you probably know more than a few people who would play along.) Here's an easy on to enact: You're Jennifer, a girl who takes her Christianity very seriously, but today she is going on short, whistful dates with single Christian boys, and wondering - are they good enough?  What kind of relationship  will you have with them? What kind of a husband would they make? At the end, when you take off your conservative turtleneck and put away your Bible, will you wish you could have had her life? Men can do this too. Its an easy exercise, but it takes discipline to really go through with it and do the method acting.

Another way to do it is to pretend that your body has suddenly been posessed by a version of you which has wildly different personality traits. Play it for all its worth and see how it goes. If your alterego is confident and trying to move up the corporate ladder, go for it - do all the  things you would do to excel at your job, even if its a shit job. See how it feels.  Might not be much difference. Then go out and hit on woman like a confident guy. Or be a confident girl and go for precisely the guy you want. You may fuck it up because you're not actually the go-getter you're pretending to be, and that's fine. It will be interesting.

Or get a friend of yours, and pretend they're much  closer than they are. Tell them everything, make plans to go hiking to together, trust them totally, try and get them laid. Or take some girl, and pretend that you and she were lovers two years ago, and hurt each other in   some difficult way. Confide what they did to you - and in turn, go through your day with  the knowledge of what you did to them.

Growing up, I often had the sense of being from a different country, with a different set of values than most of my neighbors. I feel like a lot of this is the influence of Christian culture - most Americans, even if they don't go to Church, are basically culturally Christian, in the same way that lapsed Jews are still "culturally Jewish." Even people who are violently anti-Church are basically coming from a world view in which your stance towards Church is important. To me, the whole thing tends to just look weird and sort of embarrassing. Its much easier to appreciate Christianity when you  read the early Christians. They were basically culturally Greek. They were Greeks who believed in all this crazy shit about people coming back to life and drinking the blood of god, but dammit, they were still Greeks. I particularly like this quote from Tertullian, who is actually a Roman, which is to say, a Greek made ridiculous through excess:

[quote]The Son of God was crucified: I am not ashamed--because it is shameful.
The Son of God died: it is immediately credible--because it is silly. 
He was buried, and rose again: it is certain--because it is impossible.[/quote]


Isn't that cool? I mean, its stupid, but its cool. Here's another one:

[quote]How beautiful, then, the marriage of two Christians, two who are one in hope, one in desire, one in the way of life they follow, one in the religion they practice. They are as brother and sister, both servants of the same Master. Nothing divides them, either in flesh or in spirit. They are, in very truth, two in one flesh; and where there is but one flesh there is also but one spirit. They pray together, they worship together, they fast together; instructing one another, encouraging one another, strengthening one another. Side by side they visit God's church and partake of God's Banquet; side by side they face difficulties and persecution, share their consolations. They have no secrets from one another; they never shun each other's company; they never bring sorrow to each other's hearts. [/quote]

Isn't that beautiful? I mean, it doesn't sound anything like a marriage, right, and if someone seriously talked as thought that were what marriage were like, you would assume that they were very stupid. (or 18 and in love, which is the same thing.) But doesn't it make you want to find a girl and love her forever and ever?

I suppose I must be at least a bit of a Christian though, because I do kind of like saying mean thinks about Jesus-people. Its just so easy. I particularly like HL Mencken's bit about Christianity:

[quote][389] Man's limitations are also visible in his gods. Yahveh seems to have had His hands full with the Devil from the start. His plans for Adam and Eve went to pot, and He failed again with Noah. His worst failure came when He sent His only-begotten Son into the world to rescue man from sin. It would be hard to imagine any scheme falling further from success.
[/quote]

You should read HL Mencken. It will make you smarter and teach you more about America. Here are some passages that are a bit longer than the usual quips:

http://www.lhup.edu/~dsimanek/mencken.htm

I don't normally do memes, but this one, via caesarsalad77, is pretty funny:

Instructions:
1. The first article title on this page is the name of your band:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/special:random

2. The last four words of the very last quotation is the title of your album: