2000-10-06 :: 03:30:05

in 30 minutes or less (or more)

Soundtrack: Foo Fighters, "Foo Fighters"; Space, "Spiders"

A return to my rock roots for a return to my ... journal.

I keep this file on my server that is a giant mess of URLs and thought bits. It's where most of my diary entries and aborted attempts at such live and die, my digital sketchbook, if you would. Almost all are undated but entries come in blog style, newest first. Like a blog, they tend to not stand up so well after time has passed. Here's a recent one:

to envy or not to envy
http://chicagotribune.com/news/printedition/article/0,2669,SAV-0010010268,FF.html

I read that and think to myself: Now who is great? And is he happier than I am? And does he see what I will never see, and vice versa (or does he get it all?), and which is better? What I hate most -- more than asking these Great Unanswerable Questions -- is finding out that no one is any better at giving me answers most of the time. I am in a class called History and Theory: A Metahistorical Inquiry (you didn't think I could resist a class with "meta" in the name, did you) and it sounds like it could be interesting (i.e. "How much truth is there in history?", an idea particularly appealing to the writers among us, I would think) but it always ends up mired in the same old same old. Everything is relative to the culture in which you grew up and for which you write, language is a prison, question your assumptions. Great. Gray. I am guilty of not doing the reading (this is a bad trend of mine, I notice), but I have a feeling I could drop the class, keep the books, read them one day(s), and get more out of whatever Haydn White or Georg Iggers has to say then what my classmates put forth.

I go to a pretty good school (now is that false modesty or not?) and whenever I have a small class that doesn't enlighten me I get smug and depressed. I wonder if whenever I open my mouth in Metahistory everyone else feels smug and depressed, or smug and happy, or just bored. Because it's usually a mix of those for me. Everyone seems to lay the bullshit on thick and fast; I think half the time we're all just hiding the fact that we've barely cracked the books. And if they have and I haven't and I'm slinging away with the best of them, what does that say? I'm supposed to be writing a paper for that class now but I just can't bother. I am not putting care into it. I am eating Sno-Balls instead.

If someone would make a case that really argued well against relativism it could get interesting. Naturally, no one does. And is that our fault or Just The Way It Is (relatively speaking, of course). Here's a pretty recent entry:

[my polysci prof] on his summer: "reasonable"

That is funny. Why? Because that's one of the most abused words in all of legal linguistic acrobatics, and that's what this very professor taught me -- but he didn't realize the irony until I pointed it out to him. Reasonable. It's a giant elastic-waisted pair of sweatpants, the kind without ankle-biters. A Religious Studies major tried to tell me relativism makes for a "might makes right" argument. That it was stolen away from the people it was meant to empower. And since bullets silence ideas, this is inherently wrong, because some ideas better than those of the people with the bullets could be silenced. Now it seems to me that the world is a "might makes right" kind of place, and always has been, so you best hope that your leaders have backbone and will follow their beliefs, which you also have to hope will be in tune with yours. (Now of course that's rather idealistic too, isn't it. One look at our Presidential elections proves that. But between my wishful thinking and his, who's more right is what I'd like to know.) He wants to believe you can invoke the name of God and stop these wrongs, and then you will be able to sway back and watch the bullets fly by Matrix-style. When he said that (he just said he wished you could stop bullets with the force of ideas and discussed the power of invoking God separately; I just knitted it together, to be honest), I actually thought of a different Matrix: the one that Rodimus Prime wielded against Unicron (haha). Anyway (ever notice how that word nicely cuts off anything and all preceding it? 'Alright' works well too, when ending a conversation), he is always talking about how ancient words and practices hold the real answers, he says geomagnetic forces are more powerful than proper eating, and he believes another Renaissance is coming (this last one I can maybe agree on). He carries a tape recorder to document phenomena (such as the voices he heard climbing some mountain in ... Morocco, I think) and what I gather he believes to be epiphanies.

I would like to believe him -- a lot of what he says is appealing in its way -- but it all feels like a coping mechanism for growing up privileged in New York whenever he says it to me. A lot of it is in how he says it, and in his eyes and his minor amount of chin fuzz. (And also that he will follow all of that talk up with a comment about how the girls that look the most untouchable are the ones that have been touched the most, especially all those Manhattan ones.) He claims it's not an ideology but I don't see how it isn't. Perhaps, if he is right, his view unites and transcends cultures and systems. He likes to say that he is appealing to the level of values, which he claims is above the level of ideologies. But it seems to me he just believes in a doctrine of Higher Law, which seems to me an ideology, just one with a holiness complex. Problem: We always poke holes in higher law whenever we try to wrap words around it. Says he: It's like the search for the Grand Unified Theory, we are closer than we think, we just need someone who isn't an expert to look at it and see it in a new light. Maybe I'm too cynical, but I don't think we've made that much progress as humans in this area; it all seems much more cyclical. I don't see anyone figuring this one out. Not that this is something to get dejected over or anything, or something to stop striving for, or a negation to anything that says "Go, live!" Now is all of this a coping mechanism for me growing up privileged in a nice little suburb of my own (and then, really, who am I kidding about needing to cope with anything). Well.

I'm done with the Sno-Balls. This "caring" business continues to be trouble. And this meta-caring business, too.

Here is something I deleted from an email a little while ago (with a spelling correction) when I realized I was no longer directing my words to just the recepient:

I don't think the net teaches goodbye very well. It's too uneven on here -- too easy to get rid of someone and too difficult to sort it out afterwards if you've been left. Block him (or her, let's be fair) on AIM, ignore the email, move your website, password your diary, go invisible on ICQ, and you've pretty much left the person to pick up the pieces or try to out-tech you (and how very ugly that gets). When I first began communicating with you -- and more generally, online diarists -- I was quite hesitant to offer guarantees regarding the communication's continuity. In a way, I still am. The email vs. phonecall problem demonstrates the flaws; I think people are still happier picking up and calling someone they haven't gotten a call back from than they are emailing someone who hasn't replied.

Someone proposed to me that you cannot truly be friends with someone without knowing all of the little things (do you like San Rio, what are you favorite shoes, what are your current obsessions, knowledge of your mannerisms, and so on).* This seems particularly bad for net friendships, which really don't have the time to share all of these everyday details the way people in real life do simply by living. It takes effort to inform you that I had a lovely dinner of pork chops and apple/cranberry relish with redskin mashed potatoes. If you were eating with my family, you'd know it without me having to push the possibility of carpal tunnel further into reality. Someone else proposed that those are 20th century issues that most people don't/shouldn't really care about in the 21st century, that smalltalk is a byproduct of mediumtalk and then deeptalk that initiates your caring about a person to the point that minutia about him or her matter to you (as opposed to the reverse smalltalk->deeptalk process, I suppose). How does this all reconcile. When should someone begin to care?

Look at real life. It's a bit easier to measure when you care about someone. It's more discrete, which is rather ironic considering the extremely discrete foundation of the digital medium that is breaking that notion apart. Offline, you meet up on specified days and occasional happy coincidences. Phones ring, carry a conversation, and click off. But instant message programs can easily stake a permanent claim to a tenth of your screen. maybe more. It's painful enough to go through with the everyday mailroom chitchat. How many times do you want to retype it to all of your Buddies?

Now I feel I've rambled on dangerously to the point where I'm fooling myself.

Okay.

A girl a couple of doors down from me went to school with the Melissa I mentioned seeing The Croupier with. She confirmed my assessment (crazy -- it was the summer, that's my excuse). What's funny is that Melissa left her watch in my car and since she didn't really seem to be interested in going out again it's sitting around, homeless. But it's a $30 watch (according to my sister) so I don't feel so blackened by negligence. In other small world news, one of my best friends unwittingly hooked up with the ex-girlfriend of another of my best friends in what I can only term a Great Coincidence. Only this friend forgot to tell me that this girl had gone to my high school until after he'd gone through all of the details and then I realized what had happened and oh boy. Well, I cracked right up, and the congratulations were really flying both ways at that point.

Despite my typical over-serious tone, I've remained pretty happy lately. Even if I can't find the right way to describe it, I've been caring about the right things in the proper amounts most of the time. I'll have a lot of work to catch up on this weekend, but so be it. Life's been good to me lately.

P.S. -- Did anyone notice I spelled "glamor" with a pretentiously faux-English "u" in 082300.html? Neither did I, apparently.

P.P.S. -- Life has imitated art again.

* I do not think I am friends with this person anymore. It is the first net friendship I've had that didn't just [typically] drift but instead exploded. Or rather, it was drifting until I brought it up, and then it blew up.