Sometimes, no matter how hard you try, life just seems to conspire against you. When the big things all go wrong (and my life has, what, two big dimensions?), you try to enjoy the small ones. And when they start losing their luster…
It is a bittersweet symphony.
I can’t tell if I should laugh or cry at this.
http://www.cnn.com/2003/ALLPOLITICS/03/11/sprj.irq.fries/index.html
I tend to write in my LJ when I’m at my most introspective — when I’m not, I’d rather be doing something else than documenting my thoughts, after all. I even write about thinking, sheesh… although I’d love to trade in all that contemplation time to just be smarter (or smart enough) so that I’d reach conclusions faster and not have to think so much. Doh.
Anyway, I’m not introspective now. So there! Here’s a story, though:
Tonight at dinner I was talking with a friend when I happened to look up and see this dude at the ice cream station whom I recognized from one of my various musical activities in college several years ago. We both did double takes. He walked over, and the conversation went like this:
me: Hey! [blanking, but being honest] What’s your name again? Dave?
him: no, Aaron. AJ, right?
me: um… yeah. What are you doing out here? You study math, right?
him: no, music.
Ouch. But despite that impressive start, I managed to salvage the conversation somewhat. I did remember what instrument he played (clarinet) — don’t I get some props for that? ;)
A clarification of my last post, prompted by the comments:
Andrew mentioned that well-known problem, “paralysis by analysis”. (Btw, if I’ve ever had kindred spirits when it comes to thinking, one of them is Andrew. There are a few others I’ve discovered since…) The champion of P by A has got to be the protagonist of Dostoyevsky’s Notes from Underground: a man rendered immobile by his thoughts.
The good thing is that I’m aware of the phenomenon and try to stay away from it :). For the most part, I try to be conscious of all the stupid things my brain does when I make decisions.
So the doubts tend to be more annoyances than hindrances, like little flies buzzing in front of my face when I’m trying to think.
my brain: bzz bzzzzzz you suck bzzzz bzzzz
me: argh, shut the hell up!
Hehe. I gotta love myself sometimes.
I guess there’s a lot of things I could talk about: the Royksopp show, free drinks at the top of the Marriott, soccer today. But I just don’t want to. I’m feeling melancholy today and I’m not sure why.
Luckily, Symbion Project is just the perfect music for this mood.
So you know my whole thing about how relationships are really dependent on circumstance. I’m always kinda bummed out about this because, of course, who knows what might have been, in an ideal world? One in which jobs, distance, age, societal constraints, prior/current relationships, and so forth are never factors. It seems that circumstance is especially relevant when it comes to marriage: marriage necessitates a certain maturity and mindset (“Okay, I’m ready to settle down for the rest of my life…”), and how many relationships fail because the people involved just didn’t happen to develop that mindset yet? It seems like it’s totally independent of everything else that makes a great relationship, which leads me to feel that you get married to the person you happen to be dating when you finally acquire a proclivity for marriage itself.
All this aimless thinking has had a good effect, though; I realized the other day that I’d like to forego the foregone conclusion (har har) and fight circumstance… and end up marrying the right person, not just the “right now” person (to paraphrase the Nields). That is, I’d like to find marriage before it finds me.
Before everyone starts emailing me, no, I have no plans to get married soon! Just my usual rambling thoughts….
Here’s a meta-thought: I can’t decide if I think too much. Well, I think all the time, constantly; I just can’t figure out if that’s a good thing or a bad thing. I can’t help it, either way, but then again by extension I can’t help thinking about thinking either :). The positive thing about thinking all the time is that when I have a discussion with someone not only have I thought out my side of the argument to a ludicrous degree, but I’ve also thought out the opposing side of the argument (and my corresponding counter-arguments), often in greater detail than the person with whom I’m talking. So it’s easy to lay out my position and rebut just about every opposing point thrown at me, simply because I’ve thought of all of them already. The bad thing about thinking all the time is that it sometimes drives me nuts (twice, once in college and once here, I’ve bought a discman simply to drown out my thoughts on the way to and from class). The worst thing about thinking is that I have to fight doubt all the time.
Why doubt? Let’s say you’re trying to prove a theorem. It’s really hard to prove that it’s true, because you have to show that for every case, it works. But it’s really easy to show that it’s false: just come up with one counterexample that doesn’t fit the theorem. Same, for me, with matters of character and action. I can think of a lot of positive things, but they’re never conclusive, and that renders them ephemeral; but if you think long enough, you can come up with doubts, no matter how obscure, and doubts linger and accumulate and debilitate. Having doubts is bad, not only because there are things you are not sure of (“am I a good public speaker?”), but also because that uncertainty itself is paralyzing (“I can’t even convince myself that I’m a good public speaker; how could I convince anyone else?”). The person who thinks he’s good has a much better shot at actually being good than the person who doesn’t.
Consider the arrogant jock who is so sure of himself that he never stops to think — and therefore doesn’t doubt — and therefore has nothing to doubt about.
P.S. Andrew, welcome :).
… that everyone should read.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,906836,00.html
I really hope this article is leaving out some important details:
http://www.cnn.com/2003/US/Northeast/03/05/offbeat.peace.arrest.reut/index.html
Because otherwise it’s just pathetic.
I really want one of these for my cell phone. Think about how cool it would be!
This started out as a harmless comment on wittlebc‘s awesome entry, but it got so long that I figured I might as well wallow in my intellectual pretension and post it as a full-fledged entry.
Read hers first if you want mine to make any sense.
The problem with Americans is that we mystify sex: we ascribe to it all kinds of properties and implications that simply don’t follow. As Wendy pointed out, it all stems from our archaic, Puritanical codification of individual morality, which is totally bogus.
(An aside: imagine how funny it would be if we applied the same rules about sex to other things: I play soccer because I and the people with whom I play like it. “Oh my god, he’s such a slut! He plays soccer with like every person he meets!”)
The fact is that morality has absolutely nothing to do with how you act with respect to yourself. Morality is all about your responsibility to others. It really doesn’t matter how much (consensual) sex you have, or how many piercings you have, or how religious you are, or how much you drink or smoke. What’s important is whether you fail in your responsibility to other people: do you cheat or steal? are you negligent or abusive? manipulative? You get the idea. Of course, the tricky part is realizing when your private actions, while they might be innocuous in the abstract, are immoral in context. For instance, sex is okay but cheating with someone violates your responsibility to your partner; smoking is okay but not when you’re in public for the same reason; gambling is okay but not at the expense of your family’s fiscal security, etc. I know I’m doing a terrible job describing this (I’m a CS student; I should just code up a morality spec or something) but I hope you’ll give me the benefit of the doubt and actually think about it seriously before trying to poke holes in it :). It’s funny how I can be such a civil libertarian but at the same time be as liberal as I am. But it all fits together quite nicely, with very few contradictions — one day I’ll write everything down. In a sentence: it’s all about integrating rights and obligations. Consider that if you’re reading this LiveJournal, chances are you’ve been extremely lucky to be born (a) in the US (b) with enough money to get a good education (c) and (this is the kicker) with a good deal of intelligence and/or motivation. Yes, lucky. Time to be grateful, bitch!
(Yeah you moral relativists will hang me from the first words: “the fact is”… but I’ve gotta take a bold stand! Kant did, and we still read him today…)
I agree that there’s this ludicrous double standard for men and women when it comes to sex… but if you play by my morality rules, it’s easy to see that it will disappear: sex is cool for everyone. Gender has nothing to do with it. Simple!
And Wendy, I suggest that instead of feeling bad about your purported hypocrisy, you should enjoy it. No one has to hold the door open for you, but when someone does, be happy for it, right? Guys don’t have to buy you drinks or dinner (and you shouldn’t expect them to) but when they do, consider it a nice gesture (even if they have other motives), smile, and chug :).
Now that I’m on this massive ramble-fest (also inspired by several other conversations I’ve had this weekend), I might as well continue. Two things that annoy me:
1. Girls who expect a guy to buy them a drink or dinner. Nothing more annoying than that. I have no problem springing for a meal, but only if the girl would have been happy to chip in and is genuinely appreciative of the fact that I like her enough to want to pay myself. It’s like you find a wallet on the street and track down the owner, only to have him say, “Jeez, took you long enough…”.
2. It’s a well known phenomenon that girls say they like nice guys but really are attracted to assholes. The issue at hand is that girls like guys who aren’t pushovers, guys who can stand up for themselves, and since assholes generally have this characteristic, girls are attracted to them. Unfortunately they fail to realize that you don’t have to be an asshole to be able to stand up for yourself (the implication goes only one way, baby) and so there are guys out there who are nice and aren’t suckers.
My god, what a self-absorbed, snotty post! Maybe I really am just an asshole — in which case I have nothing to worry about, right? Sweet…
