what?

Isn't it weird how you can choose to portray yourself? Even in saying, "let me tell you about point A but not point B." by mentioning point B, you've revealed something about yourself: the fact that you think of it, the fact that you're choosing not to share it is just as indicative of you as whatever point A was. but let's say you refrained from talking about point B, you didn't even indicate there ever was a point B. unknown unknowns. that sounds obvious and maybe that doesn't make sense. it's an argument that follows the brain-twisting that is "the concept of nothing is something."

...why did I write that paragraph? Oh, I think it was stream-of-consciousness spiel that came from me intending to write this blog post about guardedness.

(this post will probably get deleted in the future when I realize what I have done)

when I was reading other blog posts, I realized that I really appreciate those posts where people share about themselves. perhaps it's an artificial sense of closer (and ha but the irony gods would have a cackle at me feeling that sense when it's me who rants about hating facebook), but hey isn't that tied into the experiencing of (a nonexistent objective) reality? for it's how the feeling engenders a response in you, emotional or action-wise, that counts.

well I realize that my blog is mostly about what i've witnessed, or some interesting fact of life I've noticed, or some weird thought my brain has cooked up. I don't write about me, really. I think that the closest i've come to writing in here candidly about me was that one little bit about not believing in love and the archived post about Bloomability. maybe that's because I feel that many of the intrinsic things about me come from things I don't know how to start talking about, or if I can (this sentence being a perfect example of what I was getting at with points A and B). then again, maybe that's a false attribution to which I cling--how strongly after all are we shaped by our childhoods?

Sometimes I feel like a paradox because truly, I want to let people in and I do like to talk to others but I always, always maintain a distance. I'm not sure if this is apparent. But I'm very rarely unguarded. Sometimes I feel like I've got my walls up so good and high now even I don't know when they come down. The walls are forty feet thick and made of super extra strength unobtanium (where I'm taking its theoretical value to be in durability and not for example, in softest metal to make conducting blankets out of, or best original name/idea) yet sometimes strangely susceptible to letting painful things pass through. You'd think that with walls like that it'd never get hurt but maybe what i've done is just made it lonely. Poor heart.

And on the other hand, maybe I'm just in a dramatic mood.

oh

I shouldn't read the news in the morning. The no-positive-news phenomenon packs a big punch.

and it just makes me think AGAIN AND AGAIN, that so much of what's wrong comes from prioritizing free market economics over every fucking other thing in the world. we are buying and building and earning ourselves to death.

the thing about seeing

consecutive blog posts! it's probably the no facebook.

on my run today i saw: a beaver swimming through the creek, two sandhill cranes, and a great northern loon. i also saw ducks and geese and seagulls but those were the three animals that stood out. i stood on the docks by porter boathouse, looking around. i wish i took a picture because words will never describe it. i wish my brain could remember it still, it seems such a waste. then again, is it? because the feeling from the experience is what is important. i guess what i really wish is that i had some way of sharing what it looked like with others, or more than what it looked like, the experience.

it's funny that now oftentimes when i'm at my most solitary in nature, i wish another human was there to experience it as well.

oh it was so beautiful. i'm like a broken record and i know it possibly detracts from the significance of the statement if i'm always like "the sunset was amazing!" or "today is one of the prettiest days ever!" but actually i believe that nature offers one of those circumstances were you can say that and it can be true every single time. it can be the most beautiful sunset and so can tomorrow's. therefore, yes, maybe imperfect communication couldn't help but make such a statement less meaningful but whatever, that's how i feel.

i love looking around while running. there are so many things to see. i've noticed that whenever i run around 6, the redwing blackbirds all flock to the tops of the oak trees along lakeshore. in the wintertime, the ice made fantastical, clean shapes along the shore by the trees. once when the ice wasn't completely melted yet, the open water near the middle rushed underneath it with waves but the ice was porous and so it made a never-ending shushing sound. i guess that's not really looking around, that's hearing around. there was a huge bank of clouds towards the east today. sometimes i think the clouds look like whales breaching, like one time i was with charlie at the union, when it was picture perfectly a whale. i looked at hospital bay fields and thought they were dry but they weren't and so i mudded my way across while my brain went OH GOD WET FEET OH GOD. i saw three planes and the helicopter, and i saw the sunset's light like gold across the trees right by the concrete canoe launch, which i can't even describe.

the lake was so still but rippled like dense silk. oddly enough, there was a fire burning way across the lake and in the darkening landscape it lit up brilliantly. it looked so small from far away but up close, it must have been this huge roaring thing--i hope it was a controlled burn on some hills, not an unplanned fire. it made me think about scale, and zooming in and out on aspects of life. scale is so important. everything needs scalar context. (but not vector! a ha ha ha)

can't believe i just verbal hemorrhaged a paragraph of "and then i saw this and then i saw this and this and this!"

aaaaand instead of doing my physics homework due in 59 minutes, i wrote a post. the prioritize function is broken.

authenticity

every single blog entry or journal entry, or self-reflective piece of writing falls into what i'd like to characterize as the self-distancing loop. that's the same problem as the one psychologists encounter when testing emotion: say you wanted to test how emotionally affecting some stimulus was (cute bunny vs giant japanese water salamander). you have only a few ways to go about testing this, one of which involves directly asking the subject what emotion they experienced upon perceiving the stimulus. however, this is a subject-dependent test and comes from within the experiencer. in some ways it's very accurate since there's no degree of separation between experience and report, but on the exact flip side of that comes the fact that the experiencer can't see any implicit or out-of-consciousness information about their own experience. they can't even think of it. or maybe they can, because they're meta-cognitively active. but even then the act of bringing a thought into conscious awareness changes it. i'm thinking along the lines of someone who doesn't realize they straighten up whenever they see a blue piece of chalk because that stimulus associates itself with a positive emotion, but if they were told they did so, the action might become pointed, aware, and lose the truthful original connection.

i was thinking about truth. it had to do specifically with what if one day, after we'd cut down all our forests except for the marketably useful ones, and biodiversity on earth plummeted, we created a virtual experience of entering a forest so strong that it was exactly the same as visiting a forest today. setting aside the ecological and environmental consequences of no forests or biodiversity (ha, that's a big setting aside. let's forget about all biological reality for a moment), speaking simply in social terms, what differentiates the experience of a perfectly constructed and virtual forest from going to a real one? i'm talking there's sunlight dappling the trunks, decomposing leaves from last fall carpeting the ground, a squirrel running up some tree thinking it's so clever at avoiding you on the other side of the trunk, there's a small breeze that smells like moss and a bug just bit you. you experience it all as if it were true (speaking of which--when you mentally picture something, the exactly same neuron populations fire as if you were seeing them. exactly the same).

anyway, so you have your good-as-real virtual experience. you are gaining the same refreshment of the soul, appreciation, whatever it is that you get from the wild. yet, at least for me there'd be a nagging feeling of "this isn't true." It wouldn't be truly a squirrel scampering for dear life, it'd be a code in a program, and that knowledge would taint the experience. why though? that's what i wonder. why do we value truth? it may seem silly to ask, because telling the truth is one of the earliest and widespread moral lessons, and thus it has probably been engrained very effectively into our collective societal mind--but why? disregarding the ethics of truth when interacting with people, what is the motivation behind authenticity? that may be a better way of saying what i'm trying to say. oh, and i wanted to also say that these well-obviously, engrained, widespread feelings or thoughts are oftentimes the ones that should be questioned the most, if solely because it hasn't been done very much.just to escape the danger of passively accepting.


i'm by no means arguing for a virtual world. my god i already vacillate between appreciation for technology and utter disgust/loathing of it. i'm just questioning something that popped into my brain.

periodically, i try to go on these facebook fasts. i was a lot better about not using facebook the beginning of this year...then i got sucked back in. and i know facebook has a lot of good qualities but personally, my rate-meter for facebook gets stuck over on the extreme dislike side most of the time. for sheer sadistic pleasure i will quickly say why i hate facebook. at least for me. i feel like this entry, like most of my blog entries, needs disclaimers halfway through every paragraph. yeah, not even one disclaimer. multiple.

also, "people" really means "me." your secret guide to interpreting this paragraph.

i hate facebook because it makes people focus on petty things between other people (that one was not a "me"). who gives a flying fuck about annie mcgenericfriend's location or mood as interpreted by ambiguous song lyric? sadly, everyone, that's who. it's voyeuristic and that's why facebook is a thrill. why do we need to know that? WHY?! believe me, i do my share of the facebookstalk (TM) but i'd like to think it's still less than most--but i'm guilty nonetheless. getting off my high horse here. it's just gonna graze on the grass of my discontent while i shout these things off this metaphorical soapbox. my roommate last year used to check facebook within probably twenty minutes of getting up. i could not believe that it was real. but it's surprisingly easy to fall into: the habit of getting up and technologically connecting yourself right away. more about that some other time. technology rant. but back to facebook. facebook is creepy of itself, and thinks it has a right to recommend who i should talk to/interact with ("reconnect with girl-from-kindergarten-who-bit-you-for-a-scooter!"). or, "your friends have found other friends through Friends Connect, our technology that promises to make your life sparkly with magical unicorn happiness just like your other more evolved and Connected friends!). that annoys me so much, and makes me so disgusted. especially that last one, since it's predicated on the cleverly subtle thought of more (facebook) friends = better. oh, and i hate how facebook pops up everywhere on other random websites, next to the tweet button or whatever.

ah, there's more reasons why facebook pisses me off and fascinates me. but it's almost 3. whyyyyyy? why do i do this to myself?? i've been so ridculously tired all day that my hands were shaking.

http://gawker.com/#!5787290/female-you-probably-hate-your-facebook-friends

someday i'll make a less bitter post about technology, because i was thinking about that too today.

here we go again (i kinda wanna be more than a pissed off left-leaning-but-mostly-disgusted-with-either-direction-insomniac

One major flaw with libertarianism is that it's short-sighted. If you're going to argue rational self-interest, you must acknowledge that what you perceive as the best course of action may incur harm down the road. Key example: the environment. It was in the rational self-interest of companies to dump PCBs into the rivers because it cut down disposal costs thus allowing them to make more profit. However, only later did science catch up to these actions and prove that PCBs are carcinogenic. You have to correct for imperfect knowledge, and to do so requires a government that isn't solely existent for the purposes of protecting rights--the three so-defined essential rights of life, liberty, and the amorphous pursuit of happiness. That one was always a cloudy one, Founding Fathers. Way to be all concrete and then end vaguely, well, everyone can kind of do shit that makes them happy.

Anyway, in a libertarian society, the government only accounts for immediate short-term grievances--BigStupidCorp dumped acid in my water, it has infringed upon my right to property. Oh, and life because now all my skin is gone. Govt! But in the case of pcbs, all of society simply did not have the knowledge. It wasn't a socially constructed problem like a marginalized few having no voice, or big companies kept it on the hush, there simply was no information. Only after extensive research was conducted did it become apparent that pcbs are sometimes like little gifts of love from cancer. Therefore, in order to prevent such fuckups happening again, government was equipped to preemptively place restrictions, guide action, establish guidelines. In a libertarian view, this is not only illogical, it is immoral. The argument relies upon the system being able to absorb enough trial before individuals remedy error, for whatever reason--an advocacy group paying for a water body's protection perhaps--but that STILL doesn't correct for lack of knowledge.

Furthermore, those with the appropriate knowledge often have very little market/bargaining power, so to assume that everything will reach equilibrium under large market economics is bullshit.

...too late. I need to sleep. i was going to make some other point about how there's a reason the statements of rights always fall in the order of right to 1) life, 2) liberty, 3) and pursuit of happiness but right now i don't think i can think anymore. suffice to say that there's a reason why libertarians remain a relatively small portion of thinkers in this country, who disproportionately own the national quota of assbaggery, douchedom, and outspokenness.

it pisses me off how pissed off libertarianism makes me and how i find myself writing/thinking about it so often.

i liked talking a lot, even if it is now 3:48 AM. late night talks always establish so much more meaning and rapport, at least until the brain goes. if you can stay up that late talking to someone, it means something.