Throw one of those small pumpkins

“If you’re in a war, instead of throwing a hand grenade at the enemy, throw one of those small pumpkins. Maybe it’ll make everyone think how stupid war is, and while they are thinking, you can throw a real grenade at them.” — Jack Handy

This, in all its stupidity, really represents a lot of truth in the way people think.  Humans are, by nature, narcissists.  They like to pretend that they are better than everyone else (and most truly think they are, when you get right down to it).  The rich ones put so much of their resources into Humanitarian efforts, but not because they feel bad for those people, but because giving them something proves to themselves that they have more than those people and are, therefore, better than them.  Humanitarians are the biggest hypocrites in the world, yet they are the most admired, which just furthers their narcissistic impressions of themselves.  Yeah, it’s great that people in third-world countries can benefit from the stupidity of such people, but every mission trip I go on, there is a big point made of the idea that we are there to learn from the people perhaps even more so than we are there to help them.  We are not better than them.  They are, overall, more content with less.  We are “improving” their quality of life by conforming it to our standards.  How much sense does that make?

Industrialized nations foster a dog-eat-dog environment and there’s this notion that manipulating your way out of earning something is the only worthy method of attaining it.  It makes no sense.  It’s like high society New York.  You get a bunch of bored people sitting around all day whose idea of fun becomes ostracizing someone because, come on, what else is there to do?  The fastest way to corrupt a nation’s values is to pump the economy.  People start developing multiple personalities (and according to the diagram on the chalkboard when I walked into English the other day, multiple personalities -> neurosis -> psychosis -> anti-social behavior (which is where all college students currently are) -> suicide.  See what I meant by misinformation?) because they feel they have to trick everyone else to get to the top.  If you can sleep with someone’s wife without them knowing, you’ve won.  So you have to put on your game-face in front of them and another game-face for their wife (because God only knows it isn’t even about her, it’s about you winning) and then there’s the inner you.  The inner core.  Not corrupted by society and still free to do as you wish.  That is where morals live and thrive.  Your conscience.  Yet, even though you know what you’re doing is wrong on some level, you have now created so many levels, there is no way you’re ever going to find your way out of the mess.  There is the realist plot of decline, which corresponds to the naturalist plot of ascent.  Most people try to look at it the other way, but they’re just being optimistic, and that little cat hasn’t shown up at my door just yet (i.e. I’m still fundamentally not an optimist).

War is stupid.  Backstabbing other people to get ahead is stupid.  We think we won because we fooled the enemy into trusting us.  So then we go ahead and kill them anyway.  What the hell?  Then we win because the enemy is dead.  But then the favor is reciprocated and we get shot in the back.  Who’s winning now?  It’s a vicious cycle of death that does no one any good, yet we are all pushed into it through plain and simple hegemony.  We just either refuse to acknowledge it or are too ignorant to see it.  Either way, we fail at exactly the point at which we think we’ve won.  Some culture it is we’re imposing on others.

What if the light at the end of the tunnel is just a guy with a match who’s spent his whole life trying to find it?

This is a question I posed to my friend a few years back when he was tossing about the idea of suicide. I don’t think it really hit me what I had actually said until a year or so later. There are times in our lives when we make decisions based on faulty information. Sometimes the consequences are greater than others.

I’ve never really understood the whole “light at the end of the tunnel” concept.  What is it really saying?  Life is a tunnel, dark and dank, the light at the end is bold and frank?  I think I heard that somewhere once, but perhaps I made it up just now, I don’t quite know.  All I remember is the conversation that ensued from my best friend sitting in front of me telling me he was knockin’ on heaven’s door and the light at the end of the tunnel was overwhelming all the sadness in his life.  I didn’t mean to completely shoot down all his hopes when I asked him this, it just kind of came out.  I mean, really, no one knows what happens when you die.  Catholics claim suicide is the unforgivable sin, but heck, they also claim we will all be judged.  So at that point I couldn’t ask God to forgive me?  I know, something about the revelation of the “Glory of God” and it’s too late.  Not that I’m suicidal…or an atheist.  I just have to wonder sometimes.  It has been said that to believe with certainty we must begin with doubting.

The other part of my question implies something I wasn’t even going for in that conversation: the quest for salvation.  Not necessarily in the Christian sense of the word, but just in general.  A quest for salvation implies a need for salvation from something.  So what is it that everyone seems so desperate to escape?  Sure, life holds a lot of pain, but is it really just simplistic optimism that the unknown must be better than whatever we know now?  I, personally, do not put much stock in optimism.  I don’t consider myself a pessimist, just a realist.  That’s what personal experience has taught me, I guess: Screw me once, shame on you; screw me twice, shame on me.  It’s better to expect to fail and then succeed than to expect to succeed and then fail.  Have I worn you out on the cliches yet?

I just have to wonder more and more what it was that guy was looking for.  A light at the end of the tunnel.  What does that do to anyone?  It gives us hope to carry on, but at the same time, it just tells us that we have to wait to be rewarded.  Saying things will get better is in many ways just a reminder that things suck now.  Doesn’t it make more sense to play up the way things are now?  Not in a patronizing manner.  Obviously, the fact that I’m failing math is bad, but saying to me, “Well, at least your EAI (Engineering Admissions Index) can’t go down,” is pretty backhanded.  Rubbing it in that I suck at math will in no way help me do better or feel better.  So what purpose does it serve?  Telling me there’s a light at the end of the tunnel is really just saying, “Your stupid self got lost in a tunnel…but it’s okay, you’ll make it out in the end.”  So I take the pessimistic approach and tell myself that there is no real light at the end of the tunnel, just a bunch of fools (like me) meandering around a tunnel looking for a way out when we could just be assimilating to the tunnel people and making the best of it.  That still didn’t turn into a very bright situation.  The fact of the matter is, I’m stuck in a tunnel.  Period.

But it also implies that there is nothing to be gained from the tunnel and I would have to disagree.  Saying there’s a light at the end of the tunnel highlights that things won’t get better until you get out of the tunnel.  But what’s so bad about the tunnel?  We’re making a lot of assumptions here.  Every tunnel I’ve ever been in has been very well lit, and rather comfortable.  As a kid, a tunnel meant adventure.  Where I’m from, we build tunnels or skyways between every building.  It’s cold in the winter and the tunnel is warm.  I can take the tunnel from the mall to the bank to avoid going outside.  Or from the mall to the heated parking garage.  I love tunnels.  So why the hell am I trying to get out of it?  As a kid, before I moved to the Yukon, tunnels were cool for the sole fact that they had all this connotation similar to that of caves.  I don’t how many of you have seen The Goonies (great American classic), but really, that’s every kid’s dream.  Huck Finn on the Walter Scott.  One big adventure.  And a tunnel embodies that adventure for any kid under the age of twelve.  The only plus I see to there being a light at the end of the tunnel is that it illuminated the freaking tunnel so that I don’t stub my toe on a rattlesnake or something.  You guys probably think I’m taking this too far, but if these were close to the last words you ever said to someone, you’d spend a lot of time meditating on them too.  I don’t know.  Drop me a line, tell me what you think.

Keep the inmost Me behind it’s veil

Despite my loathing of this book (The Scarlet Letter), I have succumbed to the immeasurable charm of this certain “quotable quote”. If only Hawthorne could apply his obvious adeptness at writing to a somewhat tolerable plot line…

As a member of a generation that screams its personal business to the world in the futile hope that someone will actually take the time to stop and listen, I find a small gasp of fresh air in the 19th century common sense expressed by Nathaniel Hawthorne. He opens the book making it clear that he wants someone to pay attention to what he’s saying, but not to scrutinize his every word looking for the next juicy bit of speculation gained from ill-trained psycho-analysis. I feel as if my generation has developed a sort of superiority complex in relation to the previous and thinks the best remedy is to simply blabber nonsense until someone remarks that the BS is actually very profound. At this point, my generation has been subjected to positive reinforcement that has lowered them to the status of Pavlov’s dog. It is almost as if my generation is just another social experiment to expose the self-perceived superiority of the Baby Boomers. Consciously or not, the 55+ citizens of America are the indirect sustenance of the misguided progressions of a lost generation. They encourage our stupidity probably out of the sadistic pleasure that comes with making oneself look better than another. Seriously, is Britney Spears really any worse of a role model than Twiggy was? It is the edification of the Jessica Simpson/Lindsay Lohan image that has corrupted the value system for my entire generation.

What does this have to do with the cry for help that has been all but explicitly enunciated? It is the background, the foundation. So why do we continue on a path that we know leads through the wide gate? For the same reason we go to college: it is the default state. Even Newton figured out way back when that an object in motion remains in motion until another force acts upon it. So when my generation says that they are progressing society, they aren’t wrong. But it is the misguided implication in that statement that forward motion is change that sets us on the wrong course. The world was set in motion a long time ago, it is the stopping of that motion that would be the epically drastic change that every generation at some point seems to think it has already enacted.

So why do I want to keep my inner core hidden? Why does it bother me that my generation pours out their every waking (and occasionally otherwise conjectured) thought to every living soul? First of all, it is a constant reminder of the pain and hurt that is suffered by the entire race. Such a measure can only be taken out of desperation. Second of all, it is the conservation of privacy that entitles one to respect. The air of mystery shrouds the wrongs and amplifies the rights. The lack of it exposes all that is deficient about the basic human nature that is at the root of everything we do. Leaving something for another to infer also is the only way to act as a society. The conclusions people draw from given information tells you how they think and a lot about them. Without knowing about them, you can’t conform. So why can’t we all just talk about our feelings and get along? Because the lack of that knowledge is what allows people to believe the best about others and without that, there is little room for forgiveness. We all screw up and need a clean(er) slate once in a while, but if we put everything we have on the table from the get-go, we have nothing left to wager. If you go all-in too soon, you could win big, but gambling is an addiction and the stakes are high; statistically the house always wins and you will be left stone-dry with nothing but burned bridges behind you. We, as a generation, need to slow down a little and stop for a breather. You’d think the generation with the highest asthma rates could grasp that concept.

Colleges are like old-age homes, except for the fact that more people die in colleges.

Continuing thinking of Bob Dylan, this quote left me somewhat puzzled. I haven’t spent a great deal of time in old-age homes, and not a whole lot in college, however I think I can see a semblance of correlation. Both are just groups of people who are there for a lack of somewhere else to be, really. College is the end of the beginning and an old-age home is the beginning of the end, so between the two is life. People, at least here in the United States, seem to measure their worth in terms of how assimilated they are to the propagandized image of the American leader (and I don’t mean the president, closer to Britney Spears, really). So if college is portrayed by media giants and others of influence as “in”, it is “impossible” to progress in life without first crossing that threshold. There is an adage growing in popularity that advises being nice to your kids because they’re the ones who choose your retirement home. Translation : One day you will be old and helpless (as opposed to your current state of young and helpless). Both cultures are just representations of what everyone has to be and no one wants to be. They are the catalysts of the next stage of your life and thus foster a wide range of “do-it-while-you-still-can” motives that really serve no purpose excepting the expulsion of socially taboo urges in a socially acceptable construct. There is a sense of uselessness and forfeiture of goals throughout the experience in either setting. College is where you go to learn that sometimes you fail and to get the inevitable nervous break-down out of the way before your “life” starts. No one really looks for a college graduate who is amazing at whatever field they graduated in, without evidence that the person has matured and learned about themselves and the “real” world. Not the MTV version. I don’t think a lot of people realize upon entering college that they are going for reasons outside of a standard book education or a societal expectation. When people ask me what I learned in school today, the first thing that occurs to me rarely has anything to do with science or math. I learn who I can trust and who I can’t and how to tell the difference. I learn what kind of response each of my actions will elicit from other people. I go to college to learn the cultural codes of a society that I managed to live in without fully experiencing or understanding for the first 18 years of my life so that I can continue to impose the laws of “nature” on future generations until I get old and die. My question is why? What good does it do to continue a system that exists because America runs on autopilot? But on the other hand, what would the change be and what good would it be? It would simply lead to the next generation enforcing their own cultural codes (which really happens anyway). College is when you realize the absolute hypocrisy you have accepted as normal for the last 18 years and are given four years to basically acclimate or die. It’s like a black hole. You leave college and you remember that you learned something and that it was important, but hell if you remember how it made you feel and what it made you think of yourself and your peers and thus you don’t really ingest the education. You have fully acclimated. Mission accomplished. Now what? (You inhale and exhale and repeat until one day you can’t and that’s really are there is to it.)

There is nothing so stable as change.

Bob Dylan said that. I remember once in my junior year of high school when my mom lost her job and I thought we might have to move again, I was talking to one of my teachers and he asked me if I ever felt as if a part of me was being left behind every time I moved. That didn’t really make sense to me then, and still doesn’t on many levels, but I guess I can see how he would have concocted such a notion. For me, change is just a fact of life. I moved around a lot as a kid and I never really expected to be anywhere for more than a couple years or so. It didn’t really bother me, I just saw it as the way things went. I get antsy staying in one place for too long. It’s the inner American in me, I guess. They say America invented the con man, in that manifest destiny kind of provided for it. Everyone is moving trying to conquer the span of an entire continent and so you get somewhere and no one knows who you are. There was no social security database, no satellite television broadcasting images of the King of England. You knew these people existed, but hell if you could recognize them on the street. So if you moved to an area and no one knew who you were, who were they to shoot down your claim that you were the heir to the throne of Brazilico. It didn’t even have to be a real place. You could be whoever you wanted (which brings about a whole separate discussion I will go into another time). It’s just like the Duke and the King in Huck Finn.

This does, however, present a problem. It allows far too easy an out in escaping your problems. Running away is never the answer, or at least that’s what we all grow up being told. Today it isn’t as easy to just leave and start over. It has become a small, small world in which we live and society has become more and more nosy, though in a less conspicuous manner. This calls for a more intuitive way of starting over. The majority of us do not have the resources of the Witness Relocation Program. We cannot just forge new identities on a whim.  We have to be creative.  To lie successfully, you have to make it believable.  Take a general idea and add a lot of unverifiable detail.  Pick a theme and go with it.  Now that I know I am fostering your increasing impression that I am a pathological liar, let us return to the original topic.

I don’t know really why this quote struck me so. Perhaps just because I have never met anyone who agreed with me so totally on that front.  Some people have a lot of trouble dealing with change, but I have always had trouble dealing with consistency.  People tell me that they have hesitations about co-op because they don’t want to commit five years of their lives to education (versus four…), but for me a co-op would be ideal just because it means that there is change implemented every semester.  The prospect of spending the next 5 1/2 years of my life in one place is more than daunting.  It will take a substantial amount of summer planning on my part, but this isn’t about me.  It’s about the fact that the only thing that seems to remain consistent throughout history is change.

Bob Dylan is also well-known for the line “The times, they are a-changing”.  This also has always stood out to me because I, personally, would find it much more incredible if the times, for once, were not “a-changing”.  And that isn’t just from personal experience, that’s the societal norm.  They say history repeats itself, but in order to do so, the structure must first change.  You cannot repeat a part of a cycle which is not complete.  There is a notable assassination every twenty years or so in America.  We cycle through each generation having its war.  What is not considered in this is that for all the change, nothing is actually any different.  Perhaps we have progressed in regard to the civil rights of African-Americans, and we certainly do not find slavery socially acceptable, yet there are more complex forms of segregation today that bring the attitudes of Americans to about the same point.  It is true that there are no Japanese Internment Camps today, but how do you justify the circumstances under which people are being held at Guantanamo Bay?  It is the same, yet different.

Change is, however, stable.  It is predictable.  But I ask you this: if change is so predictable, does it actually constitute change?  Or would, then, a lack of change actually be the epitome of change?  I will leave you to dwell on that for, oh, 24 hours or so.

Fiction reveals truth that reality obscures. (All the truth in the world adds up to one big lie.)

In continuation of my previous discussion of what constitutes truth, I offer this:

I normally don’t make assumptions, but I feel pretty comfortable in saying that everyone lies at some point in their lives. But what is the reason we lie? Again, I feel fairly safe thinking that we all have very diverse reasons. Sometimes we are afraid of the consequences of truth, whether self-inflicted or otherwise. However, sometimes it’s just the human laziness factor. Something that took a decade to affect us could be explained in a hypothetical event that would take all of an hour to unfold (or two minutes to explain).

Tim O’Brien, in his book, The Things They Carried, expresses this through a concept of “story” truth versus a concept of “happening” truth. Sometimes the story truth holds a lot more value than the happening truth does. It is better at explaining the feeling of the situation and the effect it has than the actual play-by-play ever could be. This returns us to the concept of what exactly truth is.

If truth cannot be defined as the explicit record of a sequence of events, how then can we define it? Of the 13 results that dictionary.com returned for me, the only one I actually like is “ideal or fundamental reality apart from and transcending perceived experience”. An event we learn from is something that cannot be expressed in a few simple words and because everyone perceives things differently, the material one person gains from an experience is very likely completely different from what someone else would gain from the same experience. To ensure everyone starts on common ground, it is often useful to to adjust one’s version of the event to more general (or specific, depending on the parameters of the situation) terms. For example, certain words have taken on a new connotation for me throughout the course of this year due to the eccentricity of my ENGR 117 professor, and the attitude that is elicited in me from their very utterance passes most people completely by. I’d hedge my bets on the presumption that the sentence, “We were completely gobsmacked by the convoluted idiocy of our prof in thinking that Robolab was robost enough to better facilitate nominal punchulation of the big bug-a-boo (or shinola)” probably does not even make sense to any and/or all of you (or really even those who know what it refers to), but to me it is an extremely vivid reminder of the utter frustration that was my freshman year of college. While you’re undoubtedly still trying to figure out if half of that sentence even consists of real English words, it has the power to induce shuddering almost to the point of all-out seizing in approximately 200 people with the common experience of the First-Year Engineering Honors Program at Purdue University that one fateful year. If that’s not enough for you, try figuring out why that same group of people gets distracted in chemistry class by very fundamental equilibrium equations such as pH = pK_a + log[A^-]/[HA] . These snippets of seemingly nonsensical rambling can be used within that group of people to discuss the attitudes associated with a plethora of situations not even remotely related to said honors program because of the connotation it has taken on within the local scope.

If I were to walk into a room with a cast on my hand to be asked the question of how I injured it, my response would vary according to a great many factors. If I was trying to cry out for help because I felt threatened at home, I might tell someone that I broke it in a fistfight with my stepfather. Or if I was just overly stressed out and wanted some attention from somebody, I may decide to say that I was mad and hit a wall. If I wanted to portray myself as a jock, I may say I was injured in a game of basketball. Any of these situations are perfectly plausible. Perhaps I really do get into fistfights with my stepfather every night, but I never had the injuries to prove it. Maybe I went home every night and cried and cried because my life sucked and then I’d throw up and hit a wall to release all the pent-up anger, but I never actually broke anything. The implications of the fabricated situation are obviously true, but the situation itself just hasn’t materialized–yet. Self-preservation tells me to do something to prevent the impending situation, so if I have the “proof”, I might as well use it, right? It may as well have been true.

Truth is an amazing concept. The CIA (and the Bible, I suppose) claim that it will set us free. It is more complex that almost any other idea known to man. I just hope I haven’t managed to convince you all that I am a pathological liar.

The pure and simple truth is rarely pure and never simple.

In class, Bob was talking about the concept of truth. He brought up the example of a man helping an old lady to cross the street and a bystander thinks the man is molesting the old lady. He claims that just because the bystander saw the situation in that manner, it is not necessarily true that his view is the way it happened. The police officer who comes to write up the incident report when the bystander calls 911 will not arrest the man just because the bystander insists that the man was molesting the old lady, if he was really just being nice and helping her across the street. Conclusion: truth is absolute and completely independent of an individual’s perception. I beg to differ. The fallacy in his logic comes in defining the standard by which the truth of the situation is judged as the officer’s perception of the situation. He made the officer the absolute authority on what actually happened. The thing is, the officer wasn’t even there. His entire knowledge of the situation is formed by bits and pieces he gathers from the perceptions of others. In Bob’s example, the officer hears from the bystander that man molested the old lady and from the old lady and (presumably) the man that he was just helping her to cross the street. The officer, then, is left to make the executive decision as to who is telling the truth. Just as, in the simplest of cases, it can be established that truth is relative through the fact that there are multiple conflicting accounts of the situation. Even though the officer ultimately decides that the man is in no way guilty of sexual assault, the bystander may very well leave the scene completely convinced of the reality and truth of what he originally believed himself to have seen. From that point on, the man is viewed as a molester in the eyes of the bystander and to the bystander, that is the truth. This brings about a sort of “branched” truth in that the man, in relation to the bystander is a molester (even if he did nothing), yet remains a fine, upstanding citizen to the remainder of the world population. Both “branches” are truth in their own local scope. It is only once you move between the two that the truth becomes muddled. But this, you say, is unfair! The man never molested her! In rebuttal, I have two points: (1) Who or what defines “molestation”? Society and government, right? Do you accept all things laid out by society and government to be absolute truth? If not, you cannot use that as justification for the standard. Thus, to the bystander, the way in which the man touched the old lady in assisting her in her trek across the street may have constituted molestation in his mind. (2) It does not matter what the man actually did or did not do. He was perceived to have molested her and will be judged accordingly. Truth is very relative and is even dynamic to some extent. If the bystander ever encountered a situation which led him to believe that the man was, in fact, not a molester, it could very easily change his perception of what happened that one fateful day when the man decided to help a little old lady across the street. Hopefully you have come to one of two conclusions from this nice little anecdote: either (1) truth is relative and dynamic, or (2) absolute truth is nearly impossible to determine and for all intents and purposes completely useless in whole scheme of life.

Due to circumstances beyond your control, you are master of your fate and captain of your soul.

I’ve been thinking a lot of late (somewhat facilitated by my ENGL 250H prof) about the whole concept of naturalist characters and realist characters. There seems to be this notion I keep encountering that the reality represented in literature is somehow very different from the reality we encounter on a daily basis that I have heard referred to as the “waking world”. I don’t really buy into this concept myself, as I don’t see where the author would gather the basis for the reality reflected in his literature if not from the world around him. This whole “inner struggle” that intellectuals seem to perceive the average individual going through of whether they have “agency” or not, and if so, to what extent, is mostly a complete load of BS. Hegemony being at the root of all of one’s problems is simply not feasible, because hegemony defines your problems. I am not saying that no one has the ability to make decisions outside of what society wants for them. What I am saying, is that no one has the ability to make decisions completely isolated from the expectations of society in the same way that no human can imitate true randomness. Every decision made by an individual is the result of a choice to either conform to or rebel against society. The same is true in literature. We are not capable of creating a world complete unlike the one in which we live. The way in which we interpret a link between ideas is not by a measure of similarity, but rather by a measure of dissimilarity. If one world is completely opposite the one in which we live, they must be linked, for it cannot be by random chance that this came about. It came about by direct and binary opposition to the world with which it is proclaimed to be “unlinked.” For this reason, the whole distinction between realism and naturalism is hypothetical at best. We are victims of societal pressure, yet we have the ability to rebel against society’s norms. We simply will choose not to unless it meshes with our society-driven preconceptions of what we do and do not want others to think of us.