Last nights debate. Tom asked (reading from an e-mail by some chick from someplace I don’t know that must have been pretty damn excited (the chick, that is) that her question was actually getting on the air (I would be) but if she had any sense should also have known that the question was just asking (sorry, that’s a confusing use of that metaphor/personification) to be beat around (as in the bush) and obviously did get beat around (still as in the bush) by both Ob and Mc but ignoring the baseline phoniness I think Obama beat around (not as in the bush…. more as in a punching bag) poor old Mc) what the candidates don’t know and how they will learn it. Within McCain’s response was a single sentence that has not received enough attention in the media: “What I don’t know is the unexpected.” Hmmm…a zen-like answer for – as described by Tom Himself – a zen-like question.
How clever. Not only did McCain manage to directly answer the question (at least the first part), but his answer was unequivocally honest. Not knowing the unexpected! Brilliant! In fact, he was being so honest with that sentence that there is a name for sentences that true: tautologies. That means it is true necessarily or true by definition. Some other great tautologies are: “I am here,” and “I choose between options.” Interestingly enough, a tautological sentence is completely uninteresting (the word “uninteresting” here can be interpreted in both the typical sense (e.g. the show on C-SPAN was so uninteresting ) or defined more rigorously as non-ampliative, which basically means not transmitting any new information to the world/anyone) which is great because so is most poli-speak.
Here is why McCain’s statement is a tautology: you cannot know the unexpected; if you say “I know the unexpected” then the unexpected, definitionally speaking, is the expected (since you know it). Saying “I know the unexpected” is what we in The Business call a contradiction. A contradiction is the opposite of a tautology. It is when something is necessarily or definitionally false. Good thing McCain never used a contradiction…
So despite our partisan bickering and polarized contempt; despite our differences, disagreements, and irreconcilable beliefs; despite varying needs and wants and goals and lifestyles; despite fundamental chasms in our philosophies and motivations, there might be a shining ray of hope, something that can bridge partisanship, can overcome our differences, can unify or ideals, it is that we can all agree, republican or democrat black or white young or old, that McCain does not know the unexpected.
Wednesday, October 8, 2008
Meditations on Pain (I Think up This Crap (no surprise) at Work) by Yonza the Barbarian
People who complain more – are they more sensitive to pain than people who complain less? Are they just loud mouths? How can we make sense of being “sensitive to pain?” When we say we are “sensitive to X,” we usually fill in the variable X with an object. For example, we can say our eyes are sensitive to the sun. The sun is an object. Pain is not an object; pain is a sensation itself. So how could we be sensitive, or hypersensitive to the sense of something? Perhaps in these sorts of cases what people mean by pain is actually “pain stimulus.” This makes sense because a pain stimulus would be an object. For example, a thorn could be a pain stimulus and a thorn is an object. Then by saying “hypersensitive to pain” one might mean something like: “If some pain stimulus – a thorn for example – were to come into contact with your body there would be a higher frequency and/or magnitude of APs generated in your nociceptors.”
But is it also possible that two people can have the same frequency and/or magnitude of APs generated in their nociceptors and still one complains more than the other? The answer is a resounding “Yes.” So then we’re back to square one.
Some people are born w/o the ability to feel pain. This disorder is called congenital analgia.. The life of a congenital analgiac is characterized by frequent bone fractures, a biting off of one’s tongue, and young death. Is it fair to say people “suffer” from this disorder? Isn’t pain a key component of suffering? But maybe suffering only implies psychic pain? But isn’t psychic pain still pain? And isn’t all pain really psychic? After all, pain isn’t in the pain stimulus for the APs of the nociceptors; pain is in the mind. Then really psychic and non-psychic pain are the same thing just with different primary causes.
Something a little more interesting: some people acquire the disorder pain asymbolia (usually from a brain lesion) where the sufferer can still feel pain, but the pain doesn’t hurt. The pain has no hedonic negativity. Note: these people still describe the sensation as pain (remember this disorder is acquired not congenital, so the people that have it do know what pain is). This has heavy implications on the nature of language: our definitions tell us that part of being “pain” is hurting, but then if we can discover a posteriori that in fact pain is not essentially bound to hurting, then perhaps words are not so much defined as they are discovered. If the meaning of a word is to be discovered then words are separate from our creation of them, and so they are separate from us and exist in the universe independently of us. Such implications are reminiscent of Plato’s forms.
But questions about hurting can become thornier. Masochists enjoy pain. Does this imply that, like pain asymbolics, masochists do not feel the hedonic negativity of pain and in fact feel hedonic positivity of pain? But it seems that masochists partly get pleasure out of the hurting of the pain. In this case a masochist does not not feel pain, and does not not feel hurting (i.e. the negativity of pain), but in fact does not feel the negativity of hurt, for which there is no word. We can see then the relationship between pain, hurt, and negativity of hurt as they can be analogized to higher deritives of distance.
Pain:Hurt:Hedonic Negativity of Hurt (for which there is no name)
Congenital analgia:pain asymbolia:masochism
Distance:speed:acceleration
First derivitve : second derivative : third derivative
But is it also possible that two people can have the same frequency and/or magnitude of APs generated in their nociceptors and still one complains more than the other? The answer is a resounding “Yes.” So then we’re back to square one.
Some people are born w/o the ability to feel pain. This disorder is called congenital analgia.. The life of a congenital analgiac is characterized by frequent bone fractures, a biting off of one’s tongue, and young death. Is it fair to say people “suffer” from this disorder? Isn’t pain a key component of suffering? But maybe suffering only implies psychic pain? But isn’t psychic pain still pain? And isn’t all pain really psychic? After all, pain isn’t in the pain stimulus for the APs of the nociceptors; pain is in the mind. Then really psychic and non-psychic pain are the same thing just with different primary causes.
Something a little more interesting: some people acquire the disorder pain asymbolia (usually from a brain lesion) where the sufferer can still feel pain, but the pain doesn’t hurt. The pain has no hedonic negativity. Note: these people still describe the sensation as pain (remember this disorder is acquired not congenital, so the people that have it do know what pain is). This has heavy implications on the nature of language: our definitions tell us that part of being “pain” is hurting, but then if we can discover a posteriori that in fact pain is not essentially bound to hurting, then perhaps words are not so much defined as they are discovered. If the meaning of a word is to be discovered then words are separate from our creation of them, and so they are separate from us and exist in the universe independently of us. Such implications are reminiscent of Plato’s forms.
But questions about hurting can become thornier. Masochists enjoy pain. Does this imply that, like pain asymbolics, masochists do not feel the hedonic negativity of pain and in fact feel hedonic positivity of pain? But it seems that masochists partly get pleasure out of the hurting of the pain. In this case a masochist does not not feel pain, and does not not feel hurting (i.e. the negativity of pain), but in fact does not feel the negativity of hurt, for which there is no word. We can see then the relationship between pain, hurt, and negativity of hurt as they can be analogized to higher deritives of distance.
Pain:Hurt:Hedonic Negativity of Hurt (for which there is no name)
Congenital analgia:pain asymbolia:masochism
Distance:speed:acceleration
First derivitve : second derivative : third derivative
Sunday, October 5, 2008
I Should Moderate the Upcoming Prez Debate and Get Paid Lots of Money B/c I'd Have Better Questions Than Anyone By Yonza the B.
Did everyone see the Palin/Biden debate!? Who do you think won? Palin held her own did she not? And that Biden, he’s made of the same stuff presidents are made of, don’t ya think? As for what I think, well, I don’t give a shit. I think it sucked. It was trite, boring, rehearsed, platitudinous, oblique, uninformative, pointless, and basically a waste of time that I could have otherwise spent making funny faces in my mirror.
So what I’m getting at in my I’m-to-cool-for-politics (but not too-cool-for-making-funny-faces-in-my-mirror) sort of way is that there is a big a problem somewhere because the presidential debates are overwhelmingly unhelpful[1]. Now I don’t know if everyone agrees with me, so I’ll make an argument and you can take it or leave it I guess (but I’m right, so you’d be better off taking it), and my argument consists of two major conjectures: (1) The debates are unhelpful, and (2) the problem is the questions the candidates are asked.
Now let’s not kid ourselves into thinking any candidate is or has ever been more than a politician; it is both the fact-of-the-matter and the necessary condition, and no matter how swept away by a candidate you are, how new or groundbreaking their strategies might be, there are just some facts of the world, you might even call them “laws,” that cannot be transgressed, and one of them is that in a democracy you are elected into office, and to be elected you must please more people than any real person could please. And so as a politician (and this increases in importance the higher the office) you must also be an actor. You must act away your flaws and uncertainties[2] and you must rehearse A LOT. You have speechwriters (i.e. scriptwriters) who try to write you lines for all possible contingencies. And they don’t try to write informative lines necessarily, but lines that offend the fewest, lines that are quotable and lines that are deleteriously accessible (meaning that by making something more accessible you trade accuracy and full-pictureness). Where else but in politics do you hear people try and characterize themselves so much? Imagine having a friend who wouldn’t shut up about what a maverick he was; you’d think he was an idiot and you definitely wouldn’t think he was a maverick. That’s why politics is more like a movie than some sort of massive social relationship: politicians create a character for themselves and impose it on the public, whereas in true social relationships it is the public who characterizes the person in question (or at least there is more of an interplay).
Now this essay is not intended to be a criticism of politics; it is a criticism of the media. So this previous paragraph, as much as it might have seemed like a jeremiad, was (or I intended it to be, at any rate) actually just a canvassing of the less inspiring side of the hard-facts of our political system. And it is important because these hard facts, rather than being a thing to complain about, should be a thing to surpass; so the responsibility lies on us or the media. The fact is that, assuming much of what politicians do campaigning is rehearsed, it should be a major goal to cut to the core or sift through the acting. After all, what these politicians do in office, that isn’t acting. That is where the shit stops. There the decisions are real. There a decision isn’t good if it is made with a smile; it is good if the resultant outcome is good. So really we should be striving to find out what the politicians would do when it matters.
But this is no easy task. These guys are good. When you talk about the executive branch, you’re talking about some of the best rehearsed people in the world. Passivity is not going to cut it here. So let’s talk debates because a prez/vp debate is, in theory, the forum most conducive to extemporaneity. Allow me to assert the following as a premise: the prez/vp debates, as we have seen so far, have consisted almost entirely of the aforementioned “acting.[3]” And who can blame the candidates? The line they have to walk is very fine, and if they have the opportunity to prepare and if that makes it easier for them to walk that line, well then why not? But listening to these rehearsed answers and talking points is not helpful to the American people, especially in this day in age.
Why is it not helpful? Well for one thing, all the rehearsed lines are not original and so probably appear in multiple media. These are lines about specific policies and philosophies of the candidates. “Change” “Drill baby drill” etc.. The point is, we’ve all seen it on television a hundred times or read it in the paper. Not only that, but the candidates take on various issues are now very accessible thanks to the WWW. It is not helpful to hear candidates say the same thing they’ve been saying over and over again. How does that help us learn more about the candidate and how does it really help us learn how qualified someone is to be prez/vp? After all, things like economics, social issues like abortion, health care, etc. etc… I might be mistaken but isn’t most of that stuff more like legislative branchy? Yes the president has veto power, and they do appoint SCJs, but in reality many of the decisions the president makes (and these decisions, unlike passing various laws, fall squarely on the shoulders of the president) are more leadership-type decisions (e.g. what to do immediately after a plane smashes into a big building). My beef is that these abilities – which seem very relevant to the presidency – never, or rarely, are brought up or drawn out from the candidate before he enters office.
But how do we draw it out? What we should do is ask better questions at the presidential debates. Ask questions not about the policies; ask what presidents would do in novel, high-pressure situations. By doing this we can cut through the acting; we can get to the core of the matter; we can find out if the candidates have what it takes, if they can think on their feet, if they can make important decisions quickly and wisely even if they are not prepared for them. As it stands now, the candidates prepare for everything they are going to say, but one of the skills most important to be president is to deal with stuff you’re not prepared for; to deal with stuff that has not cleanly been divided into left and right yet, or stuff that cuts across party lines. We know how these guys stand on this issue or that, but how will they be able to deal? I feel like that is such a crucial question, and more than that it is something that the debates can reveal. But they (teh debates) don’t! They don’t reveal shit. And why? Because of the dumb questions the candidates are asked. I feel like the candidates, before the debate, slip the moderators a twenty and say, “go easy on me,” because that is exactly what is being done. The moderators are going easy on them. You know what, if these people are going to be president they have to deal with some hard shit. Really hard. Stuff I would never want to deal with.[4] We shouldn’t go easy on them or give them a break because the world won’t.
So the questions that I suggest we ask are hypothetical-situation type questions. Stuff like: “if there is a nuclear bomb detonated in the US what are the first three things you would do?” Presumably the candidates do not have prepared answers to these types of questions. They can’t; there are too many of them. And so to answer these questions the candidates need to exercise their on the fly judgment – something that I think would be good for the public to see. Also, these type of questions can be unrelated to any relevant policy, and so the candidates would not be able to give one of those tangential non-answers. I mean imagine if someone had asked something like this to W. before he entered office: “If terrorists unleash a huge attack on the USA what is the first thing you do.” Now if in answering this question he sat there dumbfounded, scratching his head for 7 minutes because nobody had prepared him, then maybe people would have been a little wiser in choosing a leader because they would be more informed about his abilities.
So why aren’t the candidates asked these sorts of questions? Well, I suppose many people think that the issues and policies are just overwhelmingly important. But, again, passing laws is only loosely related to the executive branch, and so the candidates take on the issues does not reveal if someone has what it takes to be p/vp. Another reason these questions aren’t asked might be because, despite repetition, some people might not have a chance to hear the candidates defend their views except for the debates. Well…maybe. It seems a little strange that people would use the debates as their sole source of information on the candidate’s views. But because that might be the case I’ll say this: the debate should be a mix of hypothetical-type and issue-type questions and that way people can be informed about the whole package.
I will leave off with three questions that get my point across. I haven’t taken the time to think too long[5] and hard about these, so let me say there are certainly better/smarter/more revealing questions out there. It might be good if the people who wrote the questions were former presidential advisors, so they know what kind of impromptu decision making goes on in the White House on a day to day basis. So take these as sort of boiler-plate hypotheticals. These are the types of questions that should be asked (not the quality of):
(1) Suppose intelligence came in that a small terrorist group got a hold of a nuclear bomb, but the reports are unclear on how where or when. What actions would you take? Be specific.
(2) An all-out war breaks out between India and Pakistan. What responsibilities does the United States have and what actions do we take?
(3) Scientists discover that global warming is occurring at a rate faster than expected. It is widely acknowledged that if nothing is done the US will be under water w/in twenty years. How do you deal with this?
[1] Let me make it clear why “unhelpful” is the crucial adjective here. The purpose of these debates, as I think would be universally acknowledged, is to help people decide on who is most fit to be president. If this is the major purpose of the debates, it follows that being “unhelpful” would be the worst thing a debate could be. Now granted, people may watch it to support a candidate, to hurl invectives at their TV, or even a twisted few to be entertained, but these must be ancillary purposes otherwise the debate breaks down into nothing more than a macrocosmic episode of Survivor.
[2] Some people might subsume “uncertainty” under “flaws” but I think that is bogus. It pains me that, in the bizarre world of politics, uncertainty has become such a pejorative. The reason why is clearly because it is conflated with abulia, when there is no necessary connection between the two. There is a correlation, perhaps, but w/o a necessary connection why can’t we separate and isolate the two conditions, and find an answer to the real important thing: can a politician make a wise decision about issue X when he needs to, even though he is openly uncertain of the consequences?
[3] I’m asserting this as a premise because developing an argument for it would be nearly impossible. When you’re talking about nuanced behavior that suggests “acting” vs. genuineness, we’re talking about a sense or intuition more than anything concrete. Sure we can cite the fact that they are “stiff” or “mechanical” but in truth these adjectives are not only debatable themselves (e.g. I say candidate X is stiff, you say he’s not – then we’ve reached an impasse) but are relatively ineffectual argument-wise since they can be explained by many other things (e.g. nervousness, personality, having been on the trail too long). In truth our sense of genuineness is gestalt. So until the glorious day when EEGs are strapped to candidates heads at the debates, we will have to just defend premises like the one in question citing our intuitions. And if you disagree with me, then, well…there’s nothing I can do.
[4] If for some bizarre reason I ever do decide to become president, make it known here that I don’t really mean what I just said. (That is a not very funny joke).
[5] Blogging leads to lazy writing.
So what I’m getting at in my I’m-to-cool-for-politics (but not too-cool-for-making-funny-faces-in-my-mirror) sort of way is that there is a big a problem somewhere because the presidential debates are overwhelmingly unhelpful[1]. Now I don’t know if everyone agrees with me, so I’ll make an argument and you can take it or leave it I guess (but I’m right, so you’d be better off taking it), and my argument consists of two major conjectures: (1) The debates are unhelpful, and (2) the problem is the questions the candidates are asked.
Now let’s not kid ourselves into thinking any candidate is or has ever been more than a politician; it is both the fact-of-the-matter and the necessary condition, and no matter how swept away by a candidate you are, how new or groundbreaking their strategies might be, there are just some facts of the world, you might even call them “laws,” that cannot be transgressed, and one of them is that in a democracy you are elected into office, and to be elected you must please more people than any real person could please. And so as a politician (and this increases in importance the higher the office) you must also be an actor. You must act away your flaws and uncertainties[2] and you must rehearse A LOT. You have speechwriters (i.e. scriptwriters) who try to write you lines for all possible contingencies. And they don’t try to write informative lines necessarily, but lines that offend the fewest, lines that are quotable and lines that are deleteriously accessible (meaning that by making something more accessible you trade accuracy and full-pictureness). Where else but in politics do you hear people try and characterize themselves so much? Imagine having a friend who wouldn’t shut up about what a maverick he was; you’d think he was an idiot and you definitely wouldn’t think he was a maverick. That’s why politics is more like a movie than some sort of massive social relationship: politicians create a character for themselves and impose it on the public, whereas in true social relationships it is the public who characterizes the person in question (or at least there is more of an interplay).
Now this essay is not intended to be a criticism of politics; it is a criticism of the media. So this previous paragraph, as much as it might have seemed like a jeremiad, was (or I intended it to be, at any rate) actually just a canvassing of the less inspiring side of the hard-facts of our political system. And it is important because these hard facts, rather than being a thing to complain about, should be a thing to surpass; so the responsibility lies on us or the media. The fact is that, assuming much of what politicians do campaigning is rehearsed, it should be a major goal to cut to the core or sift through the acting. After all, what these politicians do in office, that isn’t acting. That is where the shit stops. There the decisions are real. There a decision isn’t good if it is made with a smile; it is good if the resultant outcome is good. So really we should be striving to find out what the politicians would do when it matters.
But this is no easy task. These guys are good. When you talk about the executive branch, you’re talking about some of the best rehearsed people in the world. Passivity is not going to cut it here. So let’s talk debates because a prez/vp debate is, in theory, the forum most conducive to extemporaneity. Allow me to assert the following as a premise: the prez/vp debates, as we have seen so far, have consisted almost entirely of the aforementioned “acting.[3]” And who can blame the candidates? The line they have to walk is very fine, and if they have the opportunity to prepare and if that makes it easier for them to walk that line, well then why not? But listening to these rehearsed answers and talking points is not helpful to the American people, especially in this day in age.
Why is it not helpful? Well for one thing, all the rehearsed lines are not original and so probably appear in multiple media. These are lines about specific policies and philosophies of the candidates. “Change” “Drill baby drill” etc.. The point is, we’ve all seen it on television a hundred times or read it in the paper. Not only that, but the candidates take on various issues are now very accessible thanks to the WWW. It is not helpful to hear candidates say the same thing they’ve been saying over and over again. How does that help us learn more about the candidate and how does it really help us learn how qualified someone is to be prez/vp? After all, things like economics, social issues like abortion, health care, etc. etc… I might be mistaken but isn’t most of that stuff more like legislative branchy? Yes the president has veto power, and they do appoint SCJs, but in reality many of the decisions the president makes (and these decisions, unlike passing various laws, fall squarely on the shoulders of the president) are more leadership-type decisions (e.g. what to do immediately after a plane smashes into a big building). My beef is that these abilities – which seem very relevant to the presidency – never, or rarely, are brought up or drawn out from the candidate before he enters office.
But how do we draw it out? What we should do is ask better questions at the presidential debates. Ask questions not about the policies; ask what presidents would do in novel, high-pressure situations. By doing this we can cut through the acting; we can get to the core of the matter; we can find out if the candidates have what it takes, if they can think on their feet, if they can make important decisions quickly and wisely even if they are not prepared for them. As it stands now, the candidates prepare for everything they are going to say, but one of the skills most important to be president is to deal with stuff you’re not prepared for; to deal with stuff that has not cleanly been divided into left and right yet, or stuff that cuts across party lines. We know how these guys stand on this issue or that, but how will they be able to deal? I feel like that is such a crucial question, and more than that it is something that the debates can reveal. But they (teh debates) don’t! They don’t reveal shit. And why? Because of the dumb questions the candidates are asked. I feel like the candidates, before the debate, slip the moderators a twenty and say, “go easy on me,” because that is exactly what is being done. The moderators are going easy on them. You know what, if these people are going to be president they have to deal with some hard shit. Really hard. Stuff I would never want to deal with.[4] We shouldn’t go easy on them or give them a break because the world won’t.
So the questions that I suggest we ask are hypothetical-situation type questions. Stuff like: “if there is a nuclear bomb detonated in the US what are the first three things you would do?” Presumably the candidates do not have prepared answers to these types of questions. They can’t; there are too many of them. And so to answer these questions the candidates need to exercise their on the fly judgment – something that I think would be good for the public to see. Also, these type of questions can be unrelated to any relevant policy, and so the candidates would not be able to give one of those tangential non-answers. I mean imagine if someone had asked something like this to W. before he entered office: “If terrorists unleash a huge attack on the USA what is the first thing you do.” Now if in answering this question he sat there dumbfounded, scratching his head for 7 minutes because nobody had prepared him, then maybe people would have been a little wiser in choosing a leader because they would be more informed about his abilities.
So why aren’t the candidates asked these sorts of questions? Well, I suppose many people think that the issues and policies are just overwhelmingly important. But, again, passing laws is only loosely related to the executive branch, and so the candidates take on the issues does not reveal if someone has what it takes to be p/vp. Another reason these questions aren’t asked might be because, despite repetition, some people might not have a chance to hear the candidates defend their views except for the debates. Well…maybe. It seems a little strange that people would use the debates as their sole source of information on the candidate’s views. But because that might be the case I’ll say this: the debate should be a mix of hypothetical-type and issue-type questions and that way people can be informed about the whole package.
I will leave off with three questions that get my point across. I haven’t taken the time to think too long[5] and hard about these, so let me say there are certainly better/smarter/more revealing questions out there. It might be good if the people who wrote the questions were former presidential advisors, so they know what kind of impromptu decision making goes on in the White House on a day to day basis. So take these as sort of boiler-plate hypotheticals. These are the types of questions that should be asked (not the quality of):
(1) Suppose intelligence came in that a small terrorist group got a hold of a nuclear bomb, but the reports are unclear on how where or when. What actions would you take? Be specific.
(2) An all-out war breaks out between India and Pakistan. What responsibilities does the United States have and what actions do we take?
(3) Scientists discover that global warming is occurring at a rate faster than expected. It is widely acknowledged that if nothing is done the US will be under water w/in twenty years. How do you deal with this?
[1] Let me make it clear why “unhelpful” is the crucial adjective here. The purpose of these debates, as I think would be universally acknowledged, is to help people decide on who is most fit to be president. If this is the major purpose of the debates, it follows that being “unhelpful” would be the worst thing a debate could be. Now granted, people may watch it to support a candidate, to hurl invectives at their TV, or even a twisted few to be entertained, but these must be ancillary purposes otherwise the debate breaks down into nothing more than a macrocosmic episode of Survivor.
[2] Some people might subsume “uncertainty” under “flaws” but I think that is bogus. It pains me that, in the bizarre world of politics, uncertainty has become such a pejorative. The reason why is clearly because it is conflated with abulia, when there is no necessary connection between the two. There is a correlation, perhaps, but w/o a necessary connection why can’t we separate and isolate the two conditions, and find an answer to the real important thing: can a politician make a wise decision about issue X when he needs to, even though he is openly uncertain of the consequences?
[3] I’m asserting this as a premise because developing an argument for it would be nearly impossible. When you’re talking about nuanced behavior that suggests “acting” vs. genuineness, we’re talking about a sense or intuition more than anything concrete. Sure we can cite the fact that they are “stiff” or “mechanical” but in truth these adjectives are not only debatable themselves (e.g. I say candidate X is stiff, you say he’s not – then we’ve reached an impasse) but are relatively ineffectual argument-wise since they can be explained by many other things (e.g. nervousness, personality, having been on the trail too long). In truth our sense of genuineness is gestalt. So until the glorious day when EEGs are strapped to candidates heads at the debates, we will have to just defend premises like the one in question citing our intuitions. And if you disagree with me, then, well…there’s nothing I can do.
[4] If for some bizarre reason I ever do decide to become president, make it known here that I don’t really mean what I just said. (That is a not very funny joke).
[5] Blogging leads to lazy writing.
Tuesday, September 30, 2008
The Jordan Complex, by Danny Boy
As sure as I am of the identity of my biological father (that is, pretty sure - the other day a girl told me I looked like a boy who had gone missing at her college, never to turn up again), I am equally confident that I can establish the identity(/-ies) of my spiritual father(s). And just as my biological father (if, after all, he is who he claims to be [and I do not suffer a form of selective amnesia]) has endowed me with genetic, practical, and financial nourishment, my spiritual fathers have guided my dreams and kindled a spiritual incandescence within me, glowing whitehot in the ill-lit caverns of my consciousness.
Michael Jordan is one such spiritual sire, perhaps even the earliest one chronologically. It was impossibly clear to me - from a very early age - that just as I was my father's heir apparent, I was Jordan's air apparent. I am aware that it is not the conviction of many slightly-above-average-height Jewish boys from Suburbia, U.S.A. that they will one day succeed the greatest player in the history of basketball (or is it?), but what can I say? I was a brash little boy, and for several ambitious years during elementary school, it seemed to me that I was on track to supplant His Airness.
Jordan was - to put it simply - the most breathtaking athlete I had, and still have, ever seen. His physical abilities were simply transcendent, even in a league that boasted some of the world's greatest athletes and at a time when the league's talent was particularly concentrated. He was blessed with skills and capabilities at which his peers marveled and the rest of us could only watch, awestruck, as he displayed - in person and on television - abstract qualities us common-folk normally associate with the gods. Jordan was, as David Foster Wallace so eloquently and skillfully describes a great athlete, "profundity in motion."
But beyond his on-court guts and grace (please excuse the graininess of the footage, but as a longtime Jordan fanatic - one who has seen reams upon reams of highlight clips - this compilation contains some of the most jaw-dropping, eyebrow-raising, sit-back-and-rewind gems I've ever seen. Not to mention a great Indio-techno beat) and his indefatigable work ethic off it, Michael Jordan was outstanding for his sheer will to win, and this - more so than any of his aerodynamic basketball gymnastics, was what truly inspired me, what made me really want to Be Like Mike.
Not only did he garner all the significant individual hardware the NBA had to offer, but he won. Not always though; it took Jordan seven agonizing seasons to reach the climactic realm of being a champion, a painfully lengthy odyssey for a man who lustily thirsted for, needed to win, as a dehydrated desert wanderer needs water. Jordan was singularly compelled and borderline prurient about satisfying his hunger. And once he reached the summit, he refused to relinquish even an inch of that precious and hallowed ground.
Perhaps I can attribute it to my then-boyish naivete or the youthful male tendency for hero-worship that I drew my immature conclusion from Jordan's body of work, his career. That conclusion was this: resolute perfectionism. There had to be a secret, I surmised, to his success. How could this man be so dominant, so conquering? I deduced that it must have been his lionhearted will that enabled him to do the things he did - make the off-balance and in-the-air and buzzer-beating shots that he did. That his confidence in himself was so great that it overwhelmed any doubt. That the only route to such success was by a rigid standard of perfection and overflowing confidence. Few things, after all, are more repellent in a young man than a dearth of self-confidence. My conclusion was not wrong or improperly drawn so much as it was unhelpful.
"Why would I worry about missing a shot I hadn't taken yet?" This was Michael Jordan's response to a question about his mentality after nailing the buzzer-beater in Game 6 of the '98 NBA Finals that reined in another championship season, and (or so I thought) spread the fairy tale icing over the cake of his career. It sounds arrogant, perhaps, or almost inane and frustratingly simple in its reasoning. But Jordan's Zen-ish response actually reveals what is so terribly essential about Michael Jordan and other athletic geniuses.
After so many years, here finally I received the lesson I was meant to learn from Michael Jordan. Like so many other mere mortals, I have suffered from pangs of doubt in important moments. Indeed, at times of great importance it sometimes seems damned impossible to not consider the consequences of a negative outcome. I had fought this in either of two ways: 1) bravely talking myself into confidence (sometimes) or 2) avoiding or bailing on an uncertain situation, like a coward (more often).
It wasn't that Jordan had allowed his confidence to triumph eternally over his doubt - to swallow it whole like that Great White devouring a seal on Planet Earth - it was that he hadn't even thought to think about doubting himself. Yes, it was his ardent will that had fueled the hours of practice and passion for competition and delivered him to the moment, but in that moment - the moment that Jordan lived for - he could free himself from doubt or confidence or even thought. He simply waited for the moment, and then did what came naturally.
Returning to DFW, he articulates in his essay "How Tracy Austin Broke My Heart" (an inspiration for this piece) precisely what Jordan's comment suggests; that in this moment - when the typical person, you or I, could crumble under the crushing weight of doubt and/or fear of negative consequence - these athletic geniuses (surely they are geniuses) can simply think nothing at all. For DFW, this "thinking nothing" business helps to explain the dichotomy of the great athlete - that one can be transcendent and godly on the court or field but inarticulate and laconic when a thousand microphones and cameras are shoved at one's face. I am neither insightful (or old) enough to have made this observation originally, nor bold enough to plagiarize it as my own. For me, though, despite my new insight into Michael Jordan, I'm still left wanting. Are our attitudes so fundamentally different that the difference begins at the root? Were we born this way - with this capacity for thinking or non-thinking - or was it acquired developmentally? Is there any way I can reconcile the differences of his spirit with mine?
Michael Jordan is one such spiritual sire, perhaps even the earliest one chronologically. It was impossibly clear to me - from a very early age - that just as I was my father's heir apparent, I was Jordan's air apparent. I am aware that it is not the conviction of many slightly-above-average-height Jewish boys from Suburbia, U.S.A. that they will one day succeed the greatest player in the history of basketball (or is it?), but what can I say? I was a brash little boy, and for several ambitious years during elementary school, it seemed to me that I was on track to supplant His Airness.
Jordan was - to put it simply - the most breathtaking athlete I had, and still have, ever seen. His physical abilities were simply transcendent, even in a league that boasted some of the world's greatest athletes and at a time when the league's talent was particularly concentrated. He was blessed with skills and capabilities at which his peers marveled and the rest of us could only watch, awestruck, as he displayed - in person and on television - abstract qualities us common-folk normally associate with the gods. Jordan was, as David Foster Wallace so eloquently and skillfully describes a great athlete, "profundity in motion."
But beyond his on-court guts and grace (please excuse the graininess of the footage, but as a longtime Jordan fanatic - one who has seen reams upon reams of highlight clips - this compilation contains some of the most jaw-dropping, eyebrow-raising, sit-back-and-rewind gems I've ever seen. Not to mention a great Indio-techno beat) and his indefatigable work ethic off it, Michael Jordan was outstanding for his sheer will to win, and this - more so than any of his aerodynamic basketball gymnastics, was what truly inspired me, what made me really want to Be Like Mike.
Not only did he garner all the significant individual hardware the NBA had to offer, but he won. Not always though; it took Jordan seven agonizing seasons to reach the climactic realm of being a champion, a painfully lengthy odyssey for a man who lustily thirsted for, needed to win, as a dehydrated desert wanderer needs water. Jordan was singularly compelled and borderline prurient about satisfying his hunger. And once he reached the summit, he refused to relinquish even an inch of that precious and hallowed ground.
Perhaps I can attribute it to my then-boyish naivete or the youthful male tendency for hero-worship that I drew my immature conclusion from Jordan's body of work, his career. That conclusion was this: resolute perfectionism. There had to be a secret, I surmised, to his success. How could this man be so dominant, so conquering? I deduced that it must have been his lionhearted will that enabled him to do the things he did - make the off-balance and in-the-air and buzzer-beating shots that he did. That his confidence in himself was so great that it overwhelmed any doubt. That the only route to such success was by a rigid standard of perfection and overflowing confidence. Few things, after all, are more repellent in a young man than a dearth of self-confidence. My conclusion was not wrong or improperly drawn so much as it was unhelpful.
"Why would I worry about missing a shot I hadn't taken yet?" This was Michael Jordan's response to a question about his mentality after nailing the buzzer-beater in Game 6 of the '98 NBA Finals that reined in another championship season, and (or so I thought) spread the fairy tale icing over the cake of his career. It sounds arrogant, perhaps, or almost inane and frustratingly simple in its reasoning. But Jordan's Zen-ish response actually reveals what is so terribly essential about Michael Jordan and other athletic geniuses.
After so many years, here finally I received the lesson I was meant to learn from Michael Jordan. Like so many other mere mortals, I have suffered from pangs of doubt in important moments. Indeed, at times of great importance it sometimes seems damned impossible to not consider the consequences of a negative outcome. I had fought this in either of two ways: 1) bravely talking myself into confidence (sometimes) or 2) avoiding or bailing on an uncertain situation, like a coward (more often).
It wasn't that Jordan had allowed his confidence to triumph eternally over his doubt - to swallow it whole like that Great White devouring a seal on Planet Earth - it was that he hadn't even thought to think about doubting himself. Yes, it was his ardent will that had fueled the hours of practice and passion for competition and delivered him to the moment, but in that moment - the moment that Jordan lived for - he could free himself from doubt or confidence or even thought. He simply waited for the moment, and then did what came naturally.
Returning to DFW, he articulates in his essay "How Tracy Austin Broke My Heart" (an inspiration for this piece) precisely what Jordan's comment suggests; that in this moment - when the typical person, you or I, could crumble under the crushing weight of doubt and/or fear of negative consequence - these athletic geniuses (surely they are geniuses) can simply think nothing at all. For DFW, this "thinking nothing" business helps to explain the dichotomy of the great athlete - that one can be transcendent and godly on the court or field but inarticulate and laconic when a thousand microphones and cameras are shoved at one's face. I am neither insightful (or old) enough to have made this observation originally, nor bold enough to plagiarize it as my own. For me, though, despite my new insight into Michael Jordan, I'm still left wanting. Are our attitudes so fundamentally different that the difference begins at the root? Were we born this way - with this capacity for thinking or non-thinking - or was it acquired developmentally? Is there any way I can reconcile the differences of his spirit with mine?
The First Barbarian Part VI: The Time of the Barbarian by Yonza the Barbarian
The Vice Roy ordered his cadre to secure the Barbarians and bring them to the house of the main Roy, Roy the Immortal. Barba son of Ryan made a last-ditch effort to defend himself and the quartet, but he was still pretty wasted from the night before and he just ended up making an ass of himself by trying to take a punch at one of the Vice Roy’s men and totally missing and letting out a little fart as he contracted his obliques for the punch, and then he just said “fuck it” and dozed off.
The first clear memory any of the Barbarians have of that whole debacle is being dropped in front of the throne of Roy the Immortal. They all tried to listen, but Dipsi the Maniac was having trouble because he desperately had to take a beer shit, but they wouldn’t let him. Douche bags. Roy the Immortal spoke: “Didn’t Vice Roy tell you never to return to Lazation? Have you no sense of honor, or propriety or civility? Have you no matters, or temperance, or self-restraint? What have you done to the modest city of Lazation? Neaderthals and women, women and men, men and mandrills are copulating in the streets, they are drunk and bloated, and all the barber shops are going out of business because the “hairy look” is the new vogue. What should I do with you five, bringers of anarchy, disrupters of the order.” Dipsi the Maniac totally shit his pants. Roy the Immortal snapped his finger and the quartet was dragged out of the room. “I wanted to speak to you alone,” Roy the Immortal spoke smugly, “Do you know who I am, Barba son of Ryan?” Barba looked at Roy with disdain, and let out a little hiccup. “Did your father ever tell you about his father, your grandpappy?”
“I never spoke to my father. He died in a camel accident when I was young. The only time I’ve ever had an exchange with him was when he was a demi-god and he inhabited the body of Kemba the Lion.”
“Well that’s too bad. Your grandpappy was a great man. He was a leader of men. A man with vision and propriety. I helped him lead, did you not know that? I was his viceroy. It was the time before the war with the separatists, when the city of Kavil, named for your grandpappy, was one with the city of Lazation: it was Kavil-Lazation. Your grandpappy assigned me rule over the western frontier, now Lazation proper. He exercised his rule in the East, the area which now holds the Ruins of Kavil. For many years his rule was great. He stuck to the codes passed down from the four titans of Kavil-Lazation: Nispair the Titan, Bigol the Titan, DeKup the Titan and Sookan the Titan.
"But weakness set in. Kavil the Immortal started talking of reforms; talk of allowing improper acts of gluttony and mandrill-sex. The people of the East took interest in his ideas and they praised him for it. I saw it for what it was: not reform but weakness. I saw that he was doing dishonor to Kavil-Lazation and to his immortal status. I knew I had the vision that he had so impetuously left behind. And, dear Barba son of Ryan, I was his brother and was thus next in line for his position. So I did it, during the plague of Lotus of 100,026 BC, when Kavil the Immortal was busy dealing with various issues. It is not easy to kill an immortal. You must use the tooth of a saber-tooth tiger and stick it in the immortal’s navel. Then you must reach inside his stomach and get the Talisman of Immortality out of his duodenum. In the midst of a cloud of locusts your grandpappy fell by my hand. I took the Talisman out of the duodenum and swallowed it, thus securing my status as immortal. Later, when the Eastern provinces began accusing me of regicide and rumors of rebellion circulated, I preemptively attacked and battle broke—it was the Kavil War. As you must know, the Eastern provinces were crushed and left in ruins. Your father, Ryan son of Kavil, was just a child at the time. I let him live, and gave him to a peasant family to raise, hoping he would never learn of his past and so would never be able to take vengeance upon me for killing his father. Unfortunately, your father seemed to have the spirit of reform in him that your grandpappy bore so tempestuously. In your infancy, your father’s rebellious instincts began to flower. He started to piece together the story of his father and me and the murder. Something had to be done.”
“You didn’t!”
“I most certainly did. The camel collision was no accident… it was a setup. And so my problem was nearly solved…except for that little issue of you. And I thought that the issue of you would be done with, after the Vice Roy sent you away, and then again after you wandered off in the desert with your quartet. But here you are. Making a mess of things the same way your father did and the same way your grandfather did, and accordingly I shall fashion you the same fate.”
Roy the Immortal took a saber tooth tiger’s tooth with a little brownish-red caked on the end of it out from one of the many pockets on his cargo pants. Barba son of Ryan struggled to break free of the antelope-hide knots around his feet and hands, but it was no use. He was gutted and killed right then and there. The quartet was also killed by the Vice Roy’s cadre in an outer room of the palace.
And Roy the Immortal thought his struggle with Barbarism was over and the Lazation would live in stability and propriety under his rule forever. But what Roy the Immortal forgot was a crucial fact about the four tenets of barbarism as opposed to the tenets of the four titans of Kavil-Lazation. While the civilized men had only one or two children in their lifetime for reasons of propriety, the Barbarians, on that one night of partying alone knocked up like 1000 babes (plus 7 mandrills somehow got pregaz). And each of the 1000 babes gave birth to a child that had the barbarian spirit in him. Yes, spreading thy seed prevailed. And as the new generation carried the seed of barbarianism in them, so did the next until mere numbers of barbarians allowed for an abandonment of the restrictive policies of Kavil, and a taking of the Talisman of Immortality from the duodenum of Roy the Immortal. And so began the Time of The Barbarian.
The first clear memory any of the Barbarians have of that whole debacle is being dropped in front of the throne of Roy the Immortal. They all tried to listen, but Dipsi the Maniac was having trouble because he desperately had to take a beer shit, but they wouldn’t let him. Douche bags. Roy the Immortal spoke: “Didn’t Vice Roy tell you never to return to Lazation? Have you no sense of honor, or propriety or civility? Have you no matters, or temperance, or self-restraint? What have you done to the modest city of Lazation? Neaderthals and women, women and men, men and mandrills are copulating in the streets, they are drunk and bloated, and all the barber shops are going out of business because the “hairy look” is the new vogue. What should I do with you five, bringers of anarchy, disrupters of the order.” Dipsi the Maniac totally shit his pants. Roy the Immortal snapped his finger and the quartet was dragged out of the room. “I wanted to speak to you alone,” Roy the Immortal spoke smugly, “Do you know who I am, Barba son of Ryan?” Barba looked at Roy with disdain, and let out a little hiccup. “Did your father ever tell you about his father, your grandpappy?”
“I never spoke to my father. He died in a camel accident when I was young. The only time I’ve ever had an exchange with him was when he was a demi-god and he inhabited the body of Kemba the Lion.”
“Well that’s too bad. Your grandpappy was a great man. He was a leader of men. A man with vision and propriety. I helped him lead, did you not know that? I was his viceroy. It was the time before the war with the separatists, when the city of Kavil, named for your grandpappy, was one with the city of Lazation: it was Kavil-Lazation. Your grandpappy assigned me rule over the western frontier, now Lazation proper. He exercised his rule in the East, the area which now holds the Ruins of Kavil. For many years his rule was great. He stuck to the codes passed down from the four titans of Kavil-Lazation: Nispair the Titan, Bigol the Titan, DeKup the Titan and Sookan the Titan.
"But weakness set in. Kavil the Immortal started talking of reforms; talk of allowing improper acts of gluttony and mandrill-sex. The people of the East took interest in his ideas and they praised him for it. I saw it for what it was: not reform but weakness. I saw that he was doing dishonor to Kavil-Lazation and to his immortal status. I knew I had the vision that he had so impetuously left behind. And, dear Barba son of Ryan, I was his brother and was thus next in line for his position. So I did it, during the plague of Lotus of 100,026 BC, when Kavil the Immortal was busy dealing with various issues. It is not easy to kill an immortal. You must use the tooth of a saber-tooth tiger and stick it in the immortal’s navel. Then you must reach inside his stomach and get the Talisman of Immortality out of his duodenum. In the midst of a cloud of locusts your grandpappy fell by my hand. I took the Talisman out of the duodenum and swallowed it, thus securing my status as immortal. Later, when the Eastern provinces began accusing me of regicide and rumors of rebellion circulated, I preemptively attacked and battle broke—it was the Kavil War. As you must know, the Eastern provinces were crushed and left in ruins. Your father, Ryan son of Kavil, was just a child at the time. I let him live, and gave him to a peasant family to raise, hoping he would never learn of his past and so would never be able to take vengeance upon me for killing his father. Unfortunately, your father seemed to have the spirit of reform in him that your grandpappy bore so tempestuously. In your infancy, your father’s rebellious instincts began to flower. He started to piece together the story of his father and me and the murder. Something had to be done.”
“You didn’t!”
“I most certainly did. The camel collision was no accident… it was a setup. And so my problem was nearly solved…except for that little issue of you. And I thought that the issue of you would be done with, after the Vice Roy sent you away, and then again after you wandered off in the desert with your quartet. But here you are. Making a mess of things the same way your father did and the same way your grandfather did, and accordingly I shall fashion you the same fate.”
Roy the Immortal took a saber tooth tiger’s tooth with a little brownish-red caked on the end of it out from one of the many pockets on his cargo pants. Barba son of Ryan struggled to break free of the antelope-hide knots around his feet and hands, but it was no use. He was gutted and killed right then and there. The quartet was also killed by the Vice Roy’s cadre in an outer room of the palace.
And Roy the Immortal thought his struggle with Barbarism was over and the Lazation would live in stability and propriety under his rule forever. But what Roy the Immortal forgot was a crucial fact about the four tenets of barbarism as opposed to the tenets of the four titans of Kavil-Lazation. While the civilized men had only one or two children in their lifetime for reasons of propriety, the Barbarians, on that one night of partying alone knocked up like 1000 babes (plus 7 mandrills somehow got pregaz). And each of the 1000 babes gave birth to a child that had the barbarian spirit in him. Yes, spreading thy seed prevailed. And as the new generation carried the seed of barbarianism in them, so did the next until mere numbers of barbarians allowed for an abandonment of the restrictive policies of Kavil, and a taking of the Talisman of Immortality from the duodenum of Roy the Immortal. And so began the Time of The Barbarian.
Sunday, September 28, 2008
Lactation Without Representation by Yonza the Barbarian
So I was at a conference in DC and there was a buffet for lunch. Of the thirty or so people at the conference I was the first in the hall so the whole setup of salad/tortellini/assorted meats was untouched and preserved in their de novo symmetry. In the hall there were about six round tables, each with about eight chairs on them. My plan was this: since I didn’t know anyone I figured I would get my food and be the first one to sit down and that way, rather than having to choose an arbitrary clique to sit with (the cliques: surgeons, who happened to be the most casually dressed at the conference, which at first you might thing exudes a refreshing down-to-earthiness, but which actually is a fuck-you-I’m-important-enough-that-I-don’t-have-to-dress-upiness. Then there are the coordinators – I am a coordinator, but a sort of second tier coordinator, so this really isn’t my clique. Finally there are the statisticians – Midwestern mamas of mediocrity, full with [what any NYer would see as a] drawl and an irritating niceness) I will have the clique choose me, thus relieving me of any risk of sitting in a socially inappropriate spot (God forbid I sit between two quarreling surgeons, and have to duck below their shouts on whether or not hypotension is ever “planned” during a surgery or if it is merely the “undesired, but foreseen result of certain surgical techniques”).
As it turns out, the Midwestern mamas chose me. If you care how this came to be the case: one of the MWMs was an alum from my alma mater, a similarity we had acknowledged during an exchange of e-mails between my NY office and her AA office, and that and that fact that I was new, and the sad site of me sitting at an empty table picking at tepid tortellini, gave her the (perhaps unwanted) obligation of joining me. When she sat, she made sure to leave a one seat buffer. She was a typical MWM: pink, bloated and blonde. I asked her when she graduated school, and she answered: “he [sic.] graduated in ’04.” I later pieced together that she was talking about her husband; she must have misheard me for some reason.
Directly in tow was the 2nd MWM, who chose to sit directly on my left (leaving two seats between her and the 1st MWM, one of the seats having me in it). She started talking to MWM no. 1 w/o acknowledging me, which made it a little awkward since not only was I right next to her but I was 2/3s of the way between their line of conversation (that’s why, folks, when in doubt, always leave a buffer zone!). Finally I unnaturally interjected an introduction. What I found out was that MWM no. 2 was born in Kansas, and through a bunch of boring twists and turns somehow ended up with her husband in Philli. Her features were not as typically MWMish as no. 1’s: while her skin was pale, it wasn’t pink, and her hair was brunette and a little less than shoulder length ( basically, the length of hair that, when a girl lets it down from ponytail position, it is not long enough to produce any sexy bounce or swing, not that any MWM has ever possessed any sexy bounce or swing in any shape or form with their hair or otherwise) and she wasn’t fat, but to be fair she certainly wasn’t toned.
Then came the final MWM. The mama of the mamas. It was like in the movie Independence Day, when at first you think that the ships hovering over NYC and DC are the Mother-ships to the little fighter spacecrafts that Will Smith commandeers, but then you later found out that actually, the real mother ship is in outer space and it’s like ten times as big. There she was, draped in a cloth that fell off the max r of her distended belly to form what looked like a hoop skirt. She was an amorphous monster, the product of a lipophagic lifestyle characterized by chicken mcnuggets and bacon and salads smothered in ranch dressing. She was that degree of obese when the obesity is what defines you. Where, when anyone looks at you, whether it is a colleague or a teller at the bank, no matter what the purpose for looking at you, when they look at you, what they are thinking is, “Jesus Christ what the hell did she do to herself?” Your fatness, is and always will be, for you my dear MWM no. 3, your defining characteristic, no matter your IQ or ambition or creativity, no one will think of that, it is (here comes the double entendre) the enduring elephant in the room.
When she sat down at the table, a feeling somewhere between sadness and disgust ripped through me. To think that somewhere under the layers of fat, perhaps in a nice warm spot next to her diseased and struggling heart, there is some semblance of a soul, a soul whose machine has be abused into terrible forms. In retrospect, the overwhelming sadness produced by her enormity was not only sad because her life was clearly defined by it, but because it represented something horrible about humanity: that, despite what we think, self-control can slip away and when it does it can produce some twisted things. It made me think of an article I read a few days ago about child prostitution, and how when I read it I wondered how there can exist people who are not only incomprehensibly cruel, but incomprehensibly cruel for not that good a reason, incomprehensibly cruel just to collect a little commission, which is a little puzzling to me b/c by undercutting any ethical obligation (i.e. by forcing prepubescent girls into the sex business) it seems to strip away any value you could get from the world anyway and so would be a self-defeating enterprise (I realize that, as I’ve couched it thus far, this idea of mine is a little abstract, but in order to completely unpack it, it would take a while and I’m already going on a tangent and I don’t want to convolute the essay even more so just bear with me here, okay ya bastards?). My point is that after seeing that No. 3 could walk around and go about her life with such a perverse and festering corporeal condition, it makes me understand how child sex slavery is something that exists.
No. 3 sat down to the right of No. 1, leaving a one seat buffer between them (the buffer between them, though, was a geometric necessity) leaving her three seats to my right and about a 90 degree arc between us. Now I don’t remember exactly how the conversation came to this, but all of a sudden the MWMs started talking about their (eponymous) motherhood, first more benign topics but finally came a conversation on breastfeeding.
Interpolation: I (i.e. the author) am a twenty-something, post-collegiate, angst-ridden, undersexed male, with little plan and high aspirations, living with my parents, working at a job I don’t like with people I don’t get, with a crippling morning-misanthropy, an afternoon anhedonia and a severe distaste for the over-courteous. My point: fatherhood, motherhood, marriage, family, or anything thereof is a decidedly fantastical concept to me, one which I know little about and which I understand not-at-all.
What the hell was I supposed to say? How could I contribute to a conversation about breast feeding – what a foreign concept. I slowly picked at my tepid tortellini as the MWMs shot back and forth anecdotes. I was visibly uncomfortable and at one point No. 3 asked: “I hope you don’t mind that we’re talking about this?” and I laughed back, “Not at all.” (but I was really thinking “Jesus Christ…”). The conversation continued and I did the only thing I could do, which was remain silent and act busy eating my food. Once I scooped up the last twisted circle of tortellini I was put in a quandary: I had no food left with which to focus my attention. I resorted to scraping the bottom of my plate for residual sauces/debris from the food so as to remain busy-looking and thus not conversationally challenged. Then came the horrifying reality that No. 3 is talking about breastfeeding, and that entails that she has breast fed. First of all, when you are as fat as she is, breasts cease to take on any real meaning besides as yet another fat-filled lump on a torso full of ‘em. If she didn’t have nipples, I bet her baby wouldn’t know her tits from her tummy. Second, to have a child, coitus presumably had taken place at some point in her pathologically distended past. For a while I tried to calculate the mechanics and kinematics of it, but I had little success. You would need an experienced engineer in order to draw a blue print of how that would work.
In the end, my boss, a first-tier coordinator, came over to the table and saved me from my awkward position amongst the lacto-babbling MWMs. That gave me the chance to abruptly and fully divert the topic of conversation and so I was home free. I then left the MWM table ASAP (I could have said, “I need to use the restroom” or “Would you excuse me” but I just got the hell out of that ring spitfire without saying anything) walked outside and shook the heebie-jeebies out of me.
Friday, September 26, 2008
So? It's Only The Future of The Country, or Mashed Potatoes - by Danny Boy
Despite my obvious fondness for good grub, the first presidential debate of the year was the last program from which I expected a culinary lesson might be derived. Yet, to my surprise, I received an important one: how to peel a potato. You simply apply the blade to the pinkish skin, incise, and strip away the skin - the external, the excess, that is - blemishes and all. Now it's ready for mashing, a less delicate but more gratifying experience. It is, of course, best served piping hot.
Tonight - and on many other nights, I suspect - Barack Obama was simply the sharpest instrument, the one doing all the slicing. Just as he called on the Republicans and the Bushies for shredding regulation practices, Obama shredded McCain, prompting an irritating series of phrases and attitudes from the Methuselan senator that reflect not only his developing senility, but also his inability to participate in true, interactive debate.
From the very beginning, I suppose, we were lucky to be graced with McCain's presence. It was so very bold and thoughtful of him to decide that enough progress had been made on the emergency government bailout (even though Washington Mutual crashed yesterday) that he could fulfill his duty to the American public by appearing in Oxford and, you know, give us even the most rudimentary explication and outline of his would-be policies, were he to be elected president.
And from the very beginning, he looked, shall we say, like a vegetable (a potato, perhaps?). One that Obama peeled and mashed as expertly as any chef or professional potato peeler. In response to Obama's superior confidence and command of the material, McCain could only resort to political parlor tricks unbecoming even of a shriveled statesman at his stage of advanced organic decay. His nervous laugh and microphone battering hands, his embarrassing condescension, his increasingly bowed and hunched posture all suggested a beaten and beleaguered man. His failure to meet anyone's eye but the moderator's and his emphasis on his Record - the omnipotent, inalienable Record - were the tactics of a boxer beaten back into his corner. Unlike Ali playing dead on the ropes in Zaire, this one was not just biding his time waiting to deliver the knockout punch.
McCain just looked old. His posture and the slope of his shoulders suggested the presence of a hanger where there was none. Whereas Obama was competitive and disciplined, McCain was patronizing and ponderous. Obama's speech was quick, deliberate, and energized; McCain's uneasy and labored. His fallback phrases ("my record," "cut spending," "where am I?") stopped working after their first utterance, yet he maintained the arrogance and self-righteousness of an uncompromising elder. His repeated questioning of Obama's "understanding" evinced an attitude that serves only to underscore, reflexively, McCain's fundamental disconnect with the current state of affairs. To label Obama's articulate, worldly, and frankly more accurate estimations of America and its place in global markets and relations as either a misunderstanding or a lack of understanding is to look through a cycloptic lens and to ignore a mound of mounting evidence to the contrary.
It was heartening to check the polls after and see that Obama has a lead, albeit a frighteningly tenuous one. When the opposition ticket consists of Mr. Potatohead and a total psychopath witchhunter, it becomes unclear why Obama has not already have unanimously declared imperial ruler of the universe by default.
On a related note, Matt Damon is the man.
Tonight - and on many other nights, I suspect - Barack Obama was simply the sharpest instrument, the one doing all the slicing. Just as he called on the Republicans and the Bushies for shredding regulation practices, Obama shredded McCain, prompting an irritating series of phrases and attitudes from the Methuselan senator that reflect not only his developing senility, but also his inability to participate in true, interactive debate.
From the very beginning, I suppose, we were lucky to be graced with McCain's presence. It was so very bold and thoughtful of him to decide that enough progress had been made on the emergency government bailout (even though Washington Mutual crashed yesterday) that he could fulfill his duty to the American public by appearing in Oxford and, you know, give us even the most rudimentary explication and outline of his would-be policies, were he to be elected president.
And from the very beginning, he looked, shall we say, like a vegetable (a potato, perhaps?). One that Obama peeled and mashed as expertly as any chef or professional potato peeler. In response to Obama's superior confidence and command of the material, McCain could only resort to political parlor tricks unbecoming even of a shriveled statesman at his stage of advanced organic decay. His nervous laugh and microphone battering hands, his embarrassing condescension, his increasingly bowed and hunched posture all suggested a beaten and beleaguered man. His failure to meet anyone's eye but the moderator's and his emphasis on his Record - the omnipotent, inalienable Record - were the tactics of a boxer beaten back into his corner. Unlike Ali playing dead on the ropes in Zaire, this one was not just biding his time waiting to deliver the knockout punch.
McCain just looked old. His posture and the slope of his shoulders suggested the presence of a hanger where there was none. Whereas Obama was competitive and disciplined, McCain was patronizing and ponderous. Obama's speech was quick, deliberate, and energized; McCain's uneasy and labored. His fallback phrases ("my record," "cut spending," "where am I?") stopped working after their first utterance, yet he maintained the arrogance and self-righteousness of an uncompromising elder. His repeated questioning of Obama's "understanding" evinced an attitude that serves only to underscore, reflexively, McCain's fundamental disconnect with the current state of affairs. To label Obama's articulate, worldly, and frankly more accurate estimations of America and its place in global markets and relations as either a misunderstanding or a lack of understanding is to look through a cycloptic lens and to ignore a mound of mounting evidence to the contrary.
It was heartening to check the polls after and see that Obama has a lead, albeit a frighteningly tenuous one. When the opposition ticket consists of Mr. Potatohead and a total psychopath witchhunter, it becomes unclear why Obama has not already have unanimously declared imperial ruler of the universe by default.
On a related note, Matt Damon is the man.
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