Is There Anybody Out There?

In a live version of "Stairway to Heaven," Robert Plant, somewhat obnoxiously, asks the audience, "Does anyone remember laughter?" (After the lyrical line, "....and the forests will echo with laughter....") I always thought it was an odd rhetorical question thrown in for effect, but I am actively wondering if people do actually remember engaging in physical laughter, exuded from an interaction with another human being.
This odd segue is a roundabout way of me saying to you, the reader, aren't you tired of just reading laughter - lol, lmfao, haha, jaja? Is anyone actually laughing when they type these things - let alone, "laughing their ass off," wherever they are? Maybe, but does it matter either? Our [virtual] lives take place in our minds, not our physical realities and though very real in one sense, these exchanges leave many confused about just how impactful they are.

Cyberbullying is common among teens. Malicious trolling and manipulation of others' online profiles have actually caused children to kill themselves. For adults, it is difficult to understand how typed words in a social media or even private context could lead to such tragic events - in their childhood, bullies beat you up or humiliated you publicly, causing the victim physical and emotional pain. Cyberbullies thrive on the emotional (or psychic) pain caused by their infiltration of someone else's carefully cultivated online presence, which is a reflection not only of that person's physical realities, but also their potential realities. Facebook has been cited as a source of emotional anguish for teens and adults alike. Users of the site may feel depressed when looking at the pictures and statuses posted by their cyber"friends." However, there is a level of dishonesty in anyone's online persona - the poster is crafting their personal image by adding the items they want you to see, possibly leaving out that they gained 5 lbs since Memorial Day or that they are underwater on their mortgage. For teens and the younger generation yet, the virtual persona is as much their reality as their physical one. The pressures of living up to standards in their physical world is only added to by the standards they set for themselves through their virtual profile as well.

Cyberlife has also led to a further individualization of our experience. The advertisements and pictures we see as sidebars and news stories that pop up in our Facebook or Yahoo homepage are tailored to our likes and reflect our past internet usage. Furthermore, the notion that power is vested in the internet user is common, yet absurd. CNN has an ireport feature, where the average Joe can send in stories and pictures that they find to be newsworthy. This is not necessarily a bad trend, the democratization of media, but the overarching ideology, that by commenting, posting or clicking, one can make a major difference, is silly. Many internet users take part in this whenever there is a political row or humanitarian crisis: we post our "opinion" or photos or a "solidarity" hash tag (#Kony2012), with ease and real purpose. However, to find people who actually dedicate time and effort to a cause is much rarer. The "power" inherent in choosing your own adventure anytime you engage with the internet is there, but it is of a much smaller scale than one imagines. The user-to-screen connection that blocks out the rest of the world does not represent the same level of engagement as actual interactions.

Occasionally, if you have been on a computer for longer than you needed to be and you have visited all of your normal stomping grounds, you get a feeling of real emptiness, of a loneliness you only get when you found yourself home alone as a kid, but there was no explanation as to where everyone had gone off to, with no idea of when they'd return. And that sense of loneliness is probably what got us to go on the internet in the first place. Comedian Louis CK has a poignant commentary on reaching out to text someone , anyone, while driving and feeling alone. He concludes that we'd rather get into a terrible car crash than be alone with our own thoughts for a few minutes.

I see this as a teacher all of the time; without the incentive to NOT stay wired, students will use their phones idly, so that they do not have to find something to occupy their minds - they can just view pictures and posts as they scroll through Facebook or Tumblr. This choice of passivity does not just stop with their "downtime" - it also creeps over into their interactions in class as well. The old, "what do I need to know for the test?" and "What do you want me to write," are even more pervasive. Open-ended, creative effort is further trampled on by continual focus on knowing certain facts - the standardization of education will be the death of us. The best way to get students to think for themselves is to provide them with crayons. For students who are not usually challenged in the school day to think, giving them an open-ended, but seemingly innocuous task like drawing helps to get their wheels turning.

But how about for young adults and older? How do we get people to challenge their lot? To go beyond particular conventions of convenience and comfort? When adults are OK with just perusing pictures on their phones for hours too, where does that leave us as a participatory democracy? Is there a need for such a system anymore? Should we even worry about anything beyond our own. private news-stream? Is all that is left to us the virtual persona? In The Matrix, Morpheus gives Neo the choice of going beyond the Matrix or to continue to live within it. What would the average person say to that choice? Would they want the knowledge of what is really going on? Is there a difference between the virtual and the physical reality?

The increasingly connected and pervasive surveillance state under which we live is being exposed more and more to us daily through the confessions of Chelsea [formerly Bradley] Manning and Edward Snowden, as well as groups like Anonymous. Have people truly chosen security, safety and comfort over liberties? Do we know what is going on around us? Has the state become great at pretending there is no risk with what they're doing, and in fact, their actions are doing everyone a favor by gathering information (about everything, all of the time)?

Since not only Every home, but every person, is wired, now what do we do?

Why SCOTUS Is Taking the Wrong Stand

Well.....for one, they're implicitly taking a particular religious stance by allowing a group of conservative Catholic Christians to deny health coverage on particular items, like the "morning after pill" to their employees. While SCOTUS may not be explicitly stating, "Catholic Christian beliefs on the sanctity of life begin at conception," they ARE allowing for employers to impose these beliefs on the people who they employ. The following Supreme Court Justices are Catholic - Scalia, Kennedy, Thomas, Roberts, Alito and Sotomayor. The one with the vagina, Sotomayor, was the only Catholic to break rank on this one. Probably because SHE HAS A VAGINA and realizes that having a vagina basically means that your life as you know it, as you planned, as you can manage, can all come to a halt if you're not careful. And that doesn't really seem to matter here, which also, implicitly stated by the justices ruling in favor, is that women have to be more careful than men when it comes to their habits (especially of the sexual sort).

There might have been a stronger case if the employers, in this instance, Hobby Lobby, was not a craft store and was a religious institution, you know LIKE A CHURCH, but it is not. Simply because YOU, the employer, are Catholic with conservative beliefs does not mean that your employees are, unless these employees were severely vetted before being hired at a store that is open to the secular public and sells sequins and beads.

So now for SCOTUS, if there is another case of an employer barring their employees from receiving health coverage on particular medications or procedures that they do not believe in, it will be interesting to see if they, 1. are hypocritical and do not apply the same logic to other groups like Jehovah's Witnesses or Christian Scientists or Muslims, or if, 2. the rights of the religious in power (as in employer v. employed) continue to make headway, tightening the invisible noose religion holds over this country's Constitution over and over again.

Furthermore if my employer wanted to have a real discussion about my personal beliefs and my medical coverage beyond very general parameters, I would tell them to fuck off. If I were on Lipitor, a cholesterol-lowering drug, but I was eating egg salad sandwiches every day at lunch, would you deny me coverage? Probably not. 1. because it's none of your business what types of medicine I take and 2. this only happens when it comes to women's reproductive rights. Over and over again, the stuffing of your religious beliefs down everyone else's throats MAKES US RESENT your beliefs. I don't believe in a god at all, let alone YOUR god. If you're an employer and you're that insistent that everything needs to fit in line with your religious beliefs, go open a church or a religious charity with your ambition. Additionally, don't invest in contraceptive companies' stocks to diversify your retirement portfolios, idiots.

The US is NOT a Christian nation by any sort of decree; in fact, it was set up to be the opposite of a state where there was a centralized religion. The founding fathers were admittedly Deist, which means that they were not the good Christians people like Sarah Palin tout them to be. The Palins of the world (or their handlers) have the wherewithal to use religious beliefs to manipulate the masses of people into fearing that their way of life, their ritual is somehow in danger by the existence of others.

If we are going to go all Biblical on everything, I am going to sue my employer for serving cheeseburgers in the cafeteria, and for not providing a menstruation hut for not only myself, but for all of the unclean, menstruating women that are commingling with the general population any given day of the week. So if a religious game is going to be played - bring it. Let's go ALL OUT. Christian law shall reign supreme. Sharia law is so scary for many conservative Christians because it's the imposition of a foreign hegemony, and we would all agree that nothing feels as comfortable as our own cocoon of ignorance. But Sharia "law" and Conservative Christian "law" are both predicated on the same antiquated models of control, especially over women.

Sure, I am being irreverent and rude right now, but sometimes mockery is the best policy for getting through to people. In the 18th century, when the Irish were starving due to crop failures and British-imposed impoverishment, the ruling classes were shocked into facing this moral dilemma head-on by essayist Jonathan Swift. His satirical work, A Modest Proposal, suggested that the suffering Irish sell their children as food to the ruling classes so there were less mouths to feed and more money to go around to the survivors. My modest proposal to the owners of Hobby Lobby and their ilk is the same, go big and instate a Conservative Christian theocracy in the US. See how you like it, because I am guessing you won't (re: Oliver Cromwell was an aberration to the British system of constitutional monarchy, not a high point. His program of Puritan control was not well received and was not continued on after his death - it was an experiment and one that ended in failure).

Intellectualism part 2

Politics aside, I am not voting for Hillary Clinton. Shockingly, someone with a vagina is not voting for someone else with a vagina. When I vote for a female candidate for president, she will be a feminist. Not a woman elbowing into a man's world. Fuck that world. It's limiting. It's inauthentic for women to play that role. It's probably why many men viscerally dislike Hillary, although based on her past choices, they should really be desirous of her as a partner and leader. She stood by her husband through sex scandal after sex scandal. Maybe she henpecked him in private, but she stood by his side in public. Why? Was it for love? Or was it because she wanted an "in" on the political world that he had mastered? Hmm, I mean, I guess it's a toss-up, but since she's running for president, I am going with the latter.Well, good for her that she's getting it now, but she could have stood on her own merit. No need to ride the coattails of a lech.

But why are women as intellectuals, who stand on their own merit, so frightening that a woman who could, like Hillary, chose not to? She played it safe, waited it out, and alienated me, the feminist female voter  [Nice GOING, Hill. ONE VOTE DOWN THE DRAIN!]. So why am I so alienated? As a woman with a brain, I'm just tired of this shit ======> gender roles, hypersexualization of the female body (because now we've alternated between selling 'club-wear' to children and/or viewing anything they wear through a lens of sexiness),  being excluded because I'm a woman, being included because I am a woman, and the general perception that I am different because I am a woman. Essentially, it's hard out here for a pimp. But ain't nobody got time for complainers, so let's unpack this issue in relation to what I recently wrote about intellectualism.

There is a clear resistance to intelligence being expressed in the United States. This extends doubly so to women expressing intelligence. Domination over women cannot happen easily if they're articulate, informed and able to poke holes in one's argument. A clear indication of this being true actually comes from outside the US - Malala. The Taliban, a group of poorly educated militia-type shitheads from the backwoods of Pakistan and Afghanistan is run by religious fundamentalists and intellectuals with axes to grind and time to waste manipulating others. The leaders have so convinced the Billy-Bobs that do their dirty work that women must be suppressed and controlled that these morons shot a female child on a school bus in the face. I have 1 question for these asshats: If you are that threatened by a young girl, why are you even pretending to be capable of being in charge of a country? Sure, there is no one in the US that is shooting girls in the face because they're learning to read, but there are people like this who felt some sort of entitlement to be with particular women, or any woman because he was a man with needs. Sorry dude, but fuck your needs. I know he had mental health issues, and that is another tragedy for a different post, but at the same time, his ideas on women being submissive and at his beck and call is not as crazy or isolated as the media would have you think.

Sure, this dude was twisted, but reading parts of his manifesto makes me worried, because I bet there are "normal" men who agree and though they might never shoot women indiscriminately on a college campus, that sentiment is there and affects how they treat the women they encounter and god-forbid, the children they raise. His thoughts aren't as "out there" when you put them in the context of our society. Women exercising free will and intellect are dangerous because they don't have to listen to you. Women with the ability to express themselves don't need men to do it for them. Women with time on their hands to explore their own interests might find they don't want to watch your children, or maybe they do. But there is uncertainty in a society with equality because everyone's role hasn't already been predetermined by their skin color, sex organs, religion, etc. And that's really what it all comes down to, the predictability and security of a world that's been color-coded and labeled, like some sort of global three-ring binder. And of course, everyone loves a good, neat three-ring binder, but for papers and articles and shit, not people. Maybe that's why "a binder full of women" was so absurd.
But that represents where we are as a culture and a species now, at the precipice of throwing that stupid-ass binder into the ocean and starting fresh. All of the labels and cross-indexing and other sort of structural nonsense has blinded us into thinking that we have it all figured out. That it's all so neat and clean. But now we're lugging some giant, annoying binder with us everywhere. And we have to stop and look for answers to everything instead of ever intuiting anything from our experiences, or worse, stopping to THINK through a problem. And when something isn't easily answerable, or if our info isn't up-to-date, then we tend to freak. Whenever I ask students to research a question or topic, they immediately google the exact phrase or question. And when there isn't a clear answer, they get frustrated and call me over and say, "Is this the answer?" or "Is this what you're looking for?" to which I usually say, "What do you think?" which usually gets answered with a huff or a sigh because I am not answering in a clear way. On purpose. And now they have to think about whether the information they just looked up really fits in with the question. So that's where we are too, frustrated by our growing pains of becoming more egalitarian. But since we haven't found the answer on Google, let's put our heads together to solve it.

'Murican Anti-Intellectualism, Cause Knowledge = Power

We live in a world full of morons. Is that even a questionable statement? Actually, yes. What it should read is "we live in a world full of unthinking people." But why? Well, "why" is the real issue here. As a history teacher, why and how are always the most difficult questions posed to students. They avoid answering it - telling me who, what, where and when with ease, like any good little history buff. But why and its partner, how, really trip students (and all people, really) up. Why and how are deeper questions that cannot just be satisfied with a memorized factoid. These involve interpretation, grey areas and potential for failure if they're completely off base. Students shouldn't be blamed for not wanting to answer though, because they're not taught the skills they need to respond adequately. Thinking is a skill that needs to be cultivated. This is not necessarily the case in public education. Surprisingly, this is not due to teachers being shitheads, but more due to curricula in all subjects leaving little room for such skills to be taught. Whaaa? Yeah, it's designed that way, stupid, wait, I mean, unthinking person.

So yea, I am going to go all Foucault on y'all now. You see, knowledge does actually equal power. When you have a lot of information about the world, about others, you can potentially use it to control them. And so, I am sure that this opinion of mine is being monitored by the NSA or some shit,.because then it could be used to hurt the Huntress in the future. But this NSA shit isn't anything new. It's been going on for....oh, all of human society's existence I am sure. For our purposes, it starts with the Enlightenment. Those intellectual bad boys really inspired some smart bourgeoisie types in France, who used those ideas to stage a revolution. And then they had all the power. And it wasn't necessarily used for good. Robespierre, bless his heart, had some plans. And they made so.much.sense. Yet, it was a terrible plan when executed because people don't like to be told what to do by a guy in wig (true story). OK, so maybe not exactly, but his singular vision for France's future wasn't everyone's and the only way to make that fly was to make heads roll. Which is exactly what predecessors, like Louis XIV did. And what successors (in other environments), like Stalin did. Through intimidation and surveillance of others at all times, absolute knowledge is achieved. And sometimes having ALL the knowledge leads to bad decisions because it's still a hegemonic overlord. Sure, maybe yesterday you gleaned information that I bought a Girondist newspaper, but tomorrow, I might actually be swayed by my Jacobin neighbor to join your cause, only it's too late because you already cut off my head for being your opponent. 

When you look at who Robespierre killed by the thousands, it was still the uninformed - the peasantry. But imagine if they were more in the know. Would their fates have been different? Could a madman abusing his power have continued? Probably not. And that's exactly what is going on in our own country right now. The elite, the 1%, the ruling class, the whatever you want to call them, their power is predicated on keeping you out of the know. By defunding public schooling, by painting teachers and intellectuals as the enemy, by pretending like there are only two political parties of any worth in this country. All of that is bullshit. And we're scared to speak up. But think about who is always targeted when a restrictive government comes to power -the teachers, the college professors, the intellectuals. Why? Because they're the only people asking why, that's why! Why! WHY?! The intellectuals see the writing on the wall well before others do. And they need to be silenced if those in power want to maintain their position. Chris Christie, though not transparent in reality, should be pretty fucking transparent to those paying attention to history and politics. His tricks are so old, even elderly whores are tired of them. Teachers are leeches, teachers are the enemy, the public sector is bad. Blah, blah. His kids are in private schools that cost thousands of dollars a year, which means he values education, but only one that sets his children apart as an elite and puts your kids down as the wage-slaves they will be for the rest of their lives - too scared to quit their shitty jobs because then where will they be in this culture of oppression and fear? 

Take a hint from V and wake the fuck up. Don't vote for Hillary. Don't vote for cookie-cutter Repub 2016. Vote 3rd party. Campaign for Vermin Supreme. Let's change something. I need it if I am going to be able to continue to live in this country. 

Privilege and Power

The condition of possibility of power… should not be sought in the primary existence of a central point, in a unique space of sovereignty whence would radiate derivative and descendent forms; it is the moving base of relations of force that incessantly induce, by their inequality, states of power, but always local and unstable. Omnipresence of power: not at all because it regroups everything under its invincible unity, but because it is produced at every instant, at every point, or moreover in every relation between one point and another. Power is everywhere: not that it engulfs everything, but that it comes from everywhere. - Michel Foucault
I have had some interesting conversations recently on power and privilege. As Foucault notes, power is everywhere, seeping from the recesses of every societal institution and present in the connections linking every human relationship. And if that is the case, it's inescapable nature defines nearly everything that we do.

And what about privilege? Privilege is often defined by whitness or maleness or heterosexuality or westernness. But privilege is inherently defined by power. Coincidentally, in the US and Europe, white heterosexual men have held power for a long time. The intent of their structures initially were not necessarily conspiratorial in nature -they did serve a purpose. And in some cases, their purpose was a reaction to abuses of power in other people. However, the structure began to drive the actions of the people within it.

Some white, heterosexual men in the US may act privileged due to the conditioning they are receiving from society, while others may not. What's the difference here? Some are thinking about their place in society and how they got there. Others are acting as though their existence was just destined to be. So is privilege something that should be apologized for? Should it be acknowledged? I think probably it should be acknowledged so that it can be discussed. But maybe an apology is too far since being born white and male and straight is as much of a random occurrence as being born black and female and gay. I am not sure though. In college, I went to a lecture by a female, white, middle class teacher who said that all of the female, white, middle class teachers in the audience who wanted to "help" children were fooling themselves. That they were privileged little naive Michelle-Pfeiffer-in-Dangerous-Minds-wanna-bes and they should get over themselves. It made me mad. Really mad. Here was this female, white, middle class teacher telling us WE had it all wrong. But weren't you ALSO a teacher? Weren't you ALSO wrong for all these years? No? Well, bullshit. If you want us to recognize where our own privilege got us, well fucking recognize your own privilege too. So if we're going to go around calling kettles black, and we're a kettle too, then own it. And do something about it. And maybe that's why I wanted to be a teacher. Wow. Revelatory. Be aware of your "power" and reflect on it. Use it to change something about the current structure that is privileging you over others.

Let's start easy if we're going to discuss pure power - a dog does something wrong, you slap its muzzle. It stops. Dog now bows to you as alpha dog. A 4 year old child does something wrong. You slap him. He stops. But what does he learn? Does he bow to you as alpha human? Does he learn to not do said act again to avoid punishment? Does he learn to not do said act because the act itself was wrong? Or maybe he just learned to not do the act when you're around. Or even better yet, he'll do the act when you're not around and then feel bad about himself.

So what is the outcome of corporal punishment is in the end? Well, just like pretty much everything else involving humans, which are animals with an ability to reflect, we'll have to wait and see, which is a pretty shitty determinant of whether a course of action to right wrongs is working when you think about it.

I do have a problem with Foucault sometimes. There's only so far I will take him before I feel like I'm in an inception-type scenario only regarding power instead of dream layers. He himself questioned the conspiratorial nature of some of his writings in later interviews and letters. However, another aspect of power, which I think he was right about, and which I think various groups (running the gamut of left to right wing groups) oftentimes brush under the rug, is that concessions are made for power structures within their own groups or for the groups as a whole. Power, on all scales, corrupts the original intent.

If we take on the idea of gender roles and their power, for example, children raised in a gender "neutral" environment will not necessarily NOT exhibit male or female characteristics, but they will benefit from the leeway to explore (and let us separate deciding not to swath your child in pink or blue from that Canadian family who won't reveal the sex of their child to the world, cause you can be more neutral about gender without being extreme). Children raised in a family adhering to stereotypical gender roles will be influenced by the attitudes of others toward them from the time they are born as much as they are by their own biological desires and in fact, their own desires may come as secondary to their outside pressures.

Continuing with gender and power, using an example from the French Revolution, the Parisian Peasant women, tired of seeing their children starve, and of hearing their leaders (on all sides) tell them to wait it out, marched on Versailles, whittling down their demands to just bread (aka stability). Their march was a success due to the overwhelming numbers that joined their cause. Ultimately, the King had to accept the Declaration of the Rights of Man before everyone got off his front lawn. And in so doing, accepted the end to his autocracy (don't worry, he wasn't really doing that great a job at it). But it took moms with hungry kids to really get the ball rolling. And in that case, I would argue that power worked toward a positive change. But it was shared power. And not power concentrated into the hands of one or a few. No one "knew what was best" for everyone else. Nor did they really claim that.

Another example, also from the FR, on the function of power: Olympe de Gouges was beheaded for her ideas on equality extending beyond class structure. A Declaration on the Rights of Women? In a time of revolution? Questioning the goals of the revolutionaries as being....too myopic? In the time of revolution? Mama, get back in the kitchen or get your head cut off! But seriously, why was she beheaded? Because she chose to question not only the prevailing system of political power, but also the motives of the revolutionaries. Furthermore, she attempted to shed light on the inconsistencies of how women (and slaves) were being treated despite all of the talk of egalitarianism and justice. These inquiries did not jive with people who were vying for power. Sure, their goals were good -to overthrow the ancien regime and provide a new playing field for society as a whole, but at the same time, their way was going to supplant the existing structure and was their way the best way for the time? Did it explore all options? Take into consideration the needs and opinions of just their peers or of society as a whole?

When it comes to power and privilege, it's the system that must be changed, challenged or crushed, not the people within it. Don't hate the player, hate the game is a pretty simplistic way of summing it up.

Every creature on this Earth dies alone.

Donnie: Well, life isn't that simple. I mean, who cares if Ling Ling returns the wallet and keeps the money? It has nothing to do with either fear or love.

Kitty Farmer: Fear and love are the deepest of human emotions.

Donnie: Okay. But you're not listening to me. There are other things that need to be taken into account here, like the whole spectrum of human emotion. You can't just lump everything into these two categories and then just deny everything else.

More personal-preferences-cum-objective-statement-about-life going on in this post. I promise it will have some sort of point that can be more generalizable though - promise. But who the fuck am I kidding? It's all just some bullshit, right?

One of my favorite movies is Donnie Darko. I guess at face value, a viewer might say that it is about time travel: by anticipating a horrible end for various people, Donnie sacrifices his own life to save those of ones he loves. For those who haven't seen it, throughout the movie, it is alluded to that Donnie has "issues" and that his perceptions of the world are warped (and wrong). Maybe he does, but like the point he's making above, does that really matter as much as we think? We'd like to think that issues that exist in this world would be more easily resolved if everyone thought the way that we did - “If this were a dictatorship it would be a heck of a lot easier... as long as I'm the dictator. Hehehe.” - GWB - I mean, really, that's true, but totally a boring, old, cop-out answer. Instead of learning to compromise with people, I'll just let them cower in fear of my power! Ha. Ridiculous.

Donnie represents an anti-hero - irascible, misanthropic and altogether misunderstood. Furthermore, the saliency of his insights into human society make others shy away from him. No one wants to be around someone that reminds them of their own worst fears. Death, instability, anger, fear, loneliness. Why would we want to be around that when we can compartmentalize and categorize our experiences to make them more livable as a whole? Well, I'll tell you why, and Donnie did too, to actually experience life, which isn't always about happiness and security ("Sometimes you’re supposed to be sad. It’s OK, it’s the flip side. And it’s actually good." - Louis CK). We make mistakes, we fuck up royally, but we can still get back out  there to retry, to experience again.

I face this sort of dilemma on a daily basis though, as it's not always a life-and-death, save-your-girlfriend-from-a-horrible-end sort of day. From Facebook arguments to workplace woes, there is a stuckness to the way that people approach life; a closing off of their experiences. I was recently told, during an all -important Facebook debate, that the argument I was trying to make, by analogous thinking on my part, was irrelevant because it was bringing in examples that were tangental or analogous, but not directly on topic. So? Is there a standard format for argumentation that always must be followed? If so, our politicians are fucked because they're doing it wrong all.the.time. It seemed to me to be more of a situation in which one party was trying to control for an outcome. This is a common skin for some - controlling everything that happens, from who they talk to, to how they talk to them, to where they're seen and who they're seen with, blah blah, so...Plastics. But don't forget....control is an illusion. The mirage is strong and some people will go quite far to deny they're vying for control. They'll readily admit to having no free will or their fate is in God's hands or science is the answer, et al. But challenge whatever their roulette wheel has randomly (*cough*bullshit*cough*) stopped on and BAM: now you're their enemy because you chose to question. And maybe my disdain at control is just another form of control - oh gods, the horror! So why continue to discuss and press? To challenge people. To determine whether there is more to learn and to potentially change (One day, observing a child drinking out of his hands, he cast away the cup from his wallet with the words, "A child has beaten me in plainness of living."- Diogenes the Cynic [WWDD -  What Would Diogenes Do?]) So this is where I would say that identifying that control (which is really just another way of saying "desiring" a certain outcome, so I am ripping off the Buddha big time here) is a problem and attempting to go more with the flow is not the same type of stuckness.

Today, I was talking to some students about the Weather Underground, and how some of the people involved went on to become active members of society after their years of destruction. We debated whether that was "unusual" and some of the students were adamant about the possibility of second chances. One student insisted that we are too harsh on each other, that people can change not only physically, but mentally and spiritually. It was an interesting discussion that helped some of them consider the role of judgment in American society's nature. This is especially prevalent when it comes to failures, mistakes and missteps (mighty and otherwise). Maybe there isn't enough leeway given for people who commit wrongs in their pasts. That would also hold true for Donnie, who, being maligned as a weirdo, was outcasted even though he was on the threshold of making amazing connections about our own existence to anyone who was listening. Unfortunately, since most of his interactions were erased by time travel to save others, it turns out that no one but himself would be privy to his newfound understanding of the world. But maybe that's why he's laughing, because he's letting go of control finally and it's so easy. He let go of the fact that he can't actually teach anyone anything and that he's now dying, alone. He's reached enlightenment in a way that was so easy in the end. A complete acceptance of death.


And of course, a relatable song! New Machine, part 1, Pink Floyd:

I have always been here
I have always looked out from behind the eyes
It feels like more than a lifetime
Feels like more than a lifetime
Sometimes I get tired of the waiting
Sometimes I get tired of being in here
Is this the way it has always been?
Could it ever have been different?
Do you ever get tired of the waiting?
Do you ever get tired of being in there?
Don't worry, nobody lives forever,
Nobody lives forever

“Don't ever tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody.”

It's beautiful outside, but as I sit here, moping, I realize still rotten on the inside. Not rotten as in evil, but just a miserable fuck at the core. I don't want to be, it's just my nature to be "the misery chick" or whatever that means. Some of these feelings have already been expounded in previous posts. My internal sufferings are not always apparent to the outside world, nor do I usually allow it to affect how I treat others. My misery is my own to bear, not for others to deal with.

When I first read The Catcher in the Rye in high school, I fell in love with it. The book definitely has its detractors. "Holden is so annoying! Stop complaining!" Sure, it's true...Holden is a complainer, but you're also privy to his inner monologue. Pay attention to all the shit you think about all day - your first impressions, your endless judgments of everyone. You're just as annoying and you're probably an adult. At least Holden was a teenager, so suck on that.. Holden's experiences in the world around him are pretty standard except that he really notices how fucked up everyone and everything around him is. Everyone is wrapped up in keeping the system going, trying to maintain a level of normalcy for their own narrative. And here is Holden to tell us it's all bullshit. I definitely agreed with that in high school and it only got more real as I got older.

Also like me, Holden learned a lot about the world from being an introvert. He and I both seem to prefer to be on the outside, an observer of the world. Holden has respect for a few people in his life - his sister, his brothers, and two of his teachers. One of his former teachers, Mr. Antolini, drops THIS on the reader (before we find out he might be a creepjob): “Among other things, you'll find that you're not the first person who was ever confused and frightened and even sickened by human behavior. You're by no means alone on that score, you'll be excited and stimulated to know. Many, many men have been just as troubled morally and spiritually as you are right now. Happily, some of them kept records of their troubles. You'll learn from them—if you want to. Just as someday, if you have something to offer, someone will learn something from you. It's a beautiful reciprocal arrangement. And it isn't education. It's history. It's poetry.”  Gorgeous.  And hopeful.  And seemingly influential because Holden does try to "do the right thing" throughout the book. He's a misanthrope, sure, but he's also principled enough to treat people with respect, even the people he dislikes. He doesn't even seem to dislike most of them THAT much. Holden just gets depressed that people can't see beyond their own nose. 

So that is where I am at right now. A Holden for the 21st century.