The Candy Crush Part 1-3

PART 1--Sometime in the Future

Candy Crush holds a gun to my head and whispers in my ear, "Want to keep playing?"

I nod. "Of course I do. This game's difficulty makes it impossible to stop playing else I'll feel like a failure."

"That's what I thought," Candy Crush says with a grin. "And I'm happy for you to keep playing. All you have to do is ask your friends."

"What?"

Candy Crush smacks me with the gun. "You heard me! Send notifications to your friends!"

"What? No. That's ridiculous. There's no reason to have to do that."

"Doesn't matter! Do as I say!"

"No! Those things are annoying as hell and everyone will hate me."

Candy Crush pulls a towel from its pocket and dabs at the sweat beading on my brow. "No one will hate you... They'll love you for sharing the game with them."

"That's not even remotely true. Those notifications are the bane of facebook."

"So you refuse?"

"I... I..."

"All it takes is a single click. You'll never even know how they react and you can keep on playing. You know you want to."

"No... I cant!"

"Have it your way," Candy Crush says as he turns from the room.

As he leaves he flicks a switch on a box in the shadow--it's a television. On the screen, dozens of types of delicious candies bounce around a sparkly, rainbow environment. It's an endless commercial for Candy Crush. In that moment, I feel empty.



PART 2

The longer I sit in the dark room, chained to the chair, watching the candies bounce silently around the screen, the more attuned I become to what's going on outside of my cell. The voices creep faintly through the walls.

"No! I was so close!"

"Oh that's a shame..." says the familiar voice of Candy Crush. "Need some more moves?"

"Yeah! I could do it in just..."

"How about five more?"

"That would be perfect!"

"Great!" Candy Crush says. "All I need is another dollar."

There's a short pause. "I... don't... I'm all out of money..." the other voice says.

"Such a shame... Why don't you ask your friends?"

"I don't have any left! I sent them all notifications and no one sent anything back! They all defriended me!"

"What a shame..."

There are no more words. Only screaming. My gut twists as I try not to listen and focus only on the candies.

Only on the candies...



PART 3

The smells of spring float in on a cool breeze, rustling the tall grass around my waist. I briefly wonder why I had never stopped to smell the flowers before, but my thoughts go cloudy as I let the winds wash over me.

Suddenly, the white clouds turn dark and thunder booms in the distance. I look around for cover, but see nothing in all directions save for the rolling hills. They remind me of the Italian countryside, though somewhere in me I remember that I haven't been there in years.

Just as quickly as they turned, the clouds break and a wave of cold water falls over me, chilling me to the bone.

I'm thrown from my dream and back into the dark room, cold water dripping from my face.

Candy Crush stands there, an empty bucket in his hands and a grim smile on his face. "Rise and shine, sweetheart," he says. "I'm back."

He disappears behind me and my hands go free. A strong, sticky hand grabs my arm tightly and leads me from the room. We move in silence down long hallways. I try to remember how many turns we take, but after a time, I can't hold any more. When I struggle to remember the first turn, I realize that I probably haven't eaten, much less seen the sun in days. I've just been sitting in that room... thinking about Candy Crush...

Candy Crush finally leads me through a door. The chamber echoes with the sounds of candies being crushed by specials and combos.

"Sweet," a voice says next to me.

I look down and see a man sitting on the floor. In his eyes I see reflected rows of colorful candies, they disappear row by row until finally... a pop-up message... he's out of moves. The reflected image is blurred as tears well-up in his eyes and fall down over sunken cheeks. He flexes skinny, spider-like fingers at the end of stick-like arm and prepares to go again. He swallows any doubt. This time his eyes reveal desperation. Candy Crush sees it too.

"One more life!" Candy Crush says, bending down to pat the man on his balding head. "Good luck!"

Candy Crush leads me away from him and farther into the center of the cavernous chamber. All around me are men and women sitting on the floor in front of old monitors, clutching their computer mice. The women at our feet is wearing a tattered suit. Once likely a dark blue, it's now worn and grey, just like her hair. The man next to her, however, is in his pajamas. Instead of skinny like her, he's bloated and wet with perspiration. A few others like him scatter the room.

"Who are these people?" I ask. I'm not sure if I'm allowed so I tense, waiting for Candy Crush to hit me again. He doesn't, but I feel his eyes on me.

"Regular people," he says. "Just like you."

He pauses as he scans the players. He seems almost... pleased. "They come from all over. Some from their homes, some from their offices, others from the streets. Here, they can play as much as they want."

"As much as they want?" I ask. "You're holding them prisoner!"

"Prisoners?" Candy Crush balks, acting like he's hurt. "I see no prisoners."

"But these people... they look like their going to die," I say, scanning their faces. Not a one seems to notice our presence. There's only a vacancy in their dilated pupils. Vacancy and candy.

"If they choose not to leave, it's not my fault."

"But it's this game! They can't leave! Even if they want to!"

"Perhaps the thought never crosses their mind," Candy Crush says. I shiver. His eyes are on me again, studying me.

"But don't these people have lives?!" I shout it to the room as much as to Candy Crush. "Don't they have better things to be doing?"

"Of course!" he replies. A sugary-sweet smile appears on his face as he leads me to a new spot. "This one, for example, used to be an aspiring writer. One day during a mental block, she decided to start playing Candy Crush. That was many years ago and she hasn't written a word since."

He points to another, a few steps away. A man in a white jacket. "That's Doctor Mandapati. He was in the middle of a 20-year study on cancer. He was about to have a major breakthrough--life-changing stuff--when his daughter showed him the game she was playing on her iPod. That was 10 years ago."

"Oh my god... he could have cured cancer 10 years ago?!" My knees grow weak as I try to comprehend what the world what would have been like if Candy Crush had never existed. The room spins. When it stops, I find myself in front of a monitor.

"Good! You found it!" Candy Crush says behind me.

"I wont..."

"You won't what?"

"Maybe just... one level. To get my head straight."

"That's what I thought," he says, turning to leave.

The Ethics of Rules

WAIT! It's not as boring as it sounds, I promise.

Well... I don't promise it won't be completely boring. But it's fun. And that's what counts.

So this morning I had a girl come by the labs around 7:10am to try and print something out.

Knock, knock. Can I come in?

"The labs aren't open until 7:30am," my co-worker and I tell her rather unapologetically since there is a sign. First mistake perhaps. She pleads with us explaining that she has a class at 7:30am and just needs to print something really quickly. Holding steadfast to the lab policies, we explain again the hours of operation. She eventually leaves though not after making a comment about how our college sucks.

"Ridiculous," I say to my co-worker, releasing a sign of exasperation, knowing that today is likely going to be one of those days. He shakes his head in reply likely feeling the same way as I do. We exchange a few jests about the lab policies and how it's just how it is. "The labs were open until midnight last night," I say with a chuckle. "Perhaps she shouldn't have put off her assignment." We both laugh and go about our business. Me? I still need to wake up.

7:25am: My coworker has busied himself by turning on the lights and wakes the computers as the rest of campus should waking themselves. Unfortunately someone has waken up "a half hour early" for the sole purpose of printing out something important before class. Five minutes before the official time to open she knocks furiously on the door demanding to be allowed entry. I lower the can of Monster from my lips and shake my head, looking towards my coworker. She sees this as a sign of defiance and proceeds to make demands of us.

"I was going to open the labs early," my co-worker tells me calmly. "Now I'm waiting until 7:30 sharp." This, of course, only serves to increase this girl's rage level to OVER 9000!! Curses fly from her mouth that would embarrass the most eloquent of swearers. When we let her in at 7:30 she storms past the desk to sit down angrily at a computer and proceeding to say how much she hates white people and how our job is easy and we are terrible at customer service; that she is somehow better than us because she works customer service at Best Buy and she is always nice; that her being a working student who happens to be middle-eastern entitles her to some sort of special consideration or treatment; that she is always nice to people and doesn't deserve this kind of treatment; and finally that "karma will get me for this." I, of course, have learned to fear the spells and curses of those who practice witchcraft. The fear of some day paying for this trickles down my spine like a drop of cold water, chilling me from head to toe. I tremble as she storms out.

Thinking that perhaps the worst is over, my co-worker and I exchange a brief glance and a collective sigh of relief. Within moments of dropping our guard the screams and shouts of an angry woman resound through the halls of the Johnson Center, condemning the school, (white) people, and most fiercely, my co-worker and I. Ten minutes of ranting leaves us rather nervous and annoyed. In my head I imagine an angered customer standing outside of McDonald's making outrageous claims about catburgers and roaches in the nuggets. True or not, might drive some people away. Not that I'm all that concerned about driving people away from the labs but I don't want rumors spreading about the techs. I do kind of need this job. After 10 minutes of this (which brings us to approximately 7:45 which makes her much later for class than she would have been without causing the scene), I decide to call the police and have them escort her to class. The kind and understanding operator dispatches an officer to the labs while keeping me on the line, asking for details about the incident which I'm happy to provide. The officer shows up though it's too late to encounter the girl. We're instructed to contact them in case she re-appears and they leave. Sure enough, she does, but we suspect from her calmer demeanor that she utilized her class time to cool down. That or her friend told her I called the police.

Anyways, the cornerstone of her case and the main point of this post being, "What would it hurt to open the labs early?"

It's a fair question and of course one that needs thorough examination in true ethical and philosophical style (and naturally in keeping with my usual process).

In a moment of weakness and my usual generosity towards strangers (and of course my brief bouts of being a Kantian) I can actually understand and sympathize with the argument. The nice thing to do (as was explicitly pointed out to me though I feel is fairly intuitive) would be to simply open the labs early to let her in. The nicEST thing to do would be to have let her in at 7:10 but the still kind thing to do would be to allow entry five minutes earlier. As she pointed out, there would literally be no harm to me, my co-worker, or the labs themselves were they to open early. I do enjoy the 30 minutes of silence and lack of responsibility between my scheduled arrival and the official opening, but there is literally no physical detriment to any concession to the opening. Many ethicists would say that I had some sort of moral obligation to help out a human being, being one myself. It's an interesting argument and one that certainly has some weight to it I've never been much for duty-based ethics.

The argument that I made (with little success to our rage-induced patron) was one of principles. First of all, the "hours of operation" sign is a rule--one that must be followed. We have a strict rule about when we close because we don't want to be here all night. If we got flexible with that out of the kindness of our hearts, we might be here all night. I take our opening time just as seriously because it doesn't make sense that opening time should carry less weight than closing time. So not only is the time for opening the lab something I have to follow for my job, but it's also the principle of the matter. If I give this girl the most credit and benefit of the doubt that I possibly can, I can perhaps assume that she worked until the wee hours of the morning and simply did not have access to a printer before her class this morning. And perhaps for whatever reason she didn't have access to a computer and printer before work yesterday. Or the day before that. Or the day before that. If that's the case then I can understand needing the lab to open early so you can print off your assignment. On the other hand (and what I immediately assumed), is that she spent all night working on it or did it so last minute that she didn't have time to print from the lab yesterday or any day before and that this is the result of some serious procrastination. Which brings me to precarious principle number 2: Don't procrastinate and don't encourage people to procrastinate by enabling their bad habits. Now I understand this is pretty high-horse of me to make myself the savior of the procrastinators but in all honesty I'm not going to bend the rules for that kind of thing. I mean I'm not going to bend them period but especially not for something like that. Now you might say, "Dylan, perhaps her printer broke last night after the lab closed." That's fine, but that's no reason to curse us for not opening the lab for you. Accept that you will be late to class (which isn't going to kill you) and print your stuff when the lab opens. It's simple.

If I was standing outside some sort of service establishment I'm sure I would receive the same treatment from whoever works there. I'm starving and standing outside a McDonald's before it opens (I guess I'm also up really, really early). Pounding on the door and cursing the workers isn't going to make them any more likely to fire up the grills early. Say Kinko's is closed (this is one of the few non-24-hour ones) and I really need to send a package. Pounding on the door is not going to make the opening worker any more likely to open his doors. I understand that opening the labs only serves as a minor inconvenience to me and that most people would say, "Don't be a dick and just open the labs." Right, I get that. But what kind of precedence are we setting as far as hours of operation goes? Or a business's rules in general? If we open five minutes early today, we might have to open five minutes earlier than that the next day. People would get used to coming early and being let in because of whatever emergency that they have. All of a sudden there's a line at the doors before I even show up. We might as well just stay open. There's a reason for it. And I admit 5 minutes seems petty and it really is but the reason it became a big deal at the five minute mark is my final point: she was being incredibly rude. We were about to open the doors when she starts making demands and spouting off curses at us. Had she been calm and just waited outside the doors, everything would have been fine. She would have been peeved about being late to her class but frankly I don't care. But it was her rudeness that caused us to wait until the 7:30 mark and her rudeness afterward that made it such a big deal. And it's because of that that I don't feel bad about what happened. Again maybe I'm on too high of a horse thinking that I'm in any position to teach someone a lesson about courtesy but either way I was much less inclined to do the favor of opening early when she was rude to me.

Was I in the right on this? I'm not sure. Some might accuse me of being cold-hearted towards someone in need, saying that the slippery slope argument provided isn't catastrophic enough to hold water against the kindness I should have shown. Similarly one might say that the principles to which I felt I must hold to (such as not rewarding procrastination or rudeness or keeping with work policies) aren't important enough to justify not helping someone in need. Frankly, I think they might be right. I don't know if what I did was right but I also don't think the need was great enough that it warranted at the very least the favor of opening the lab early for her. Especially not after she started calling me a "sick psycho" or an "asshole." I don't respond well to that. No one does. But put yourself in my shoes--you let someone into the lab to print something at 7:10. Someone walking by the lab, maybe anticipating waiting outside of it for it to open sees someone in there and says to me, "Hey, why can't I come in?" Makes sense right? So she would have gotten her five minutes early had she not been so hasty. That's all I'm saying.

Finally I can extrapolate from the event today my overarching point, the one that makes this relevant beyond a story about someone who had a bad attitude. There are always rules no matter where we go. I'm a bit conservative in the sense that I am a big fan of rules. I'm especially a fan of rules I like, but hold a sort of reverence (or at the very least a respect) for the rules that I don't. Rules are designed (in the most Hobbesian sense) to keep us on track and organized--to prevent anarchy (a word I used in my argument with the girl that didn't seem to penetrate the anger). Without them we, as selfish beings, would probably act on the whimsical impulses of our ids and some bad stuff would go down. (Here also is where I think Kantianism in general can quietly sit down and stop yelling.) I would not make universal that people have the freedom to do whatever they want but I am also theoretically morally prohibited from restricting any freedom that does not harm me. Yet there are some freedoms that while not necessarily harmful to me would be harmful to society if allowed on a mass scale. Let that sink in.

To be succinct and to summarize, there are always rules and for every rule, there is someone who doesn't want to follow it and who will fight it. I'm not advocating blind and total submission to rules especially if everyone can agree that they aren't right (in the moral and just sense). But when you make an exception in a rule, you also put a crack in it. It doesn't sit well with me when (if we take rules to be the foundation of our functioning society) we put cracks in our rules. Things will slowly but surely fall apart.

Meta-blogging

It's blogging about blogging--the Inception of blogging.

What I don't get is Tumblr. I haven't seen a single one with a coherent thought. It just seems like a place to post .gifs like a glorified Facebook status. I don't think anyone uses blogspot, though. It seems to either be the hipster site (because it's vintage) or the MySpace of blogging. Who knows. Anyways.

I've been trying to figure out for the longest time what this thing exactly is. Is it a public diary where I share extended versions of random thoughts or is it the beginning of my collection of philosophical works? I don't know. Only a few of my philosophies have hit and sort of praise though most of my writing seems to at least entertain. I figure at the very least if I can manage to make it a habit to write in this thing daily (an endeavor which has failed miserably at this point) then perhaps that can be the launching point to writing something more substantial at the same time. And if for whatever reason these thoughts reach an audience then so much the better. Right? 

I need to find a better name for my blog. Something clever but something concisely descriptive of what it does. 

My I always wonder how people get famous for blogging. I read some of these and none of them are particularly enlightening or contributing anything of any substance to the great mar of the internet. I'm living proof that any idiot with a keyboard can write some words down. 

I think we're all just really bored and for whatever reason some clown gets more followers than others. Luck? Who knows. 

An update for the masses

No, I have no idea what I'm doing with my philosophy degree so please stop asking.

In other news...

I have indeed graduated from college. Woo. When I think about it though, I haven't really graduated since I'm here 5 out of 7 days of the week or roughly 20% of my life depending on how you want to look at it. Considering I should be spending about 33% of my life sleeping, that's a lot of work. Lately it's been farther from 33% than I'd like. Anyways.

Nearly four weeks from walking across the stage and I feel like I haven't had much time to do anything. Chalk that up to spending a week in technology limbo where I had no computer, internet, or Playstation. It's real hard to get writing done without a computer. I tried reading but for some reason I think I've developed ADD. More to come on that.

I want to finish my book but I've been filming this movie with some friends. It's a feature-length called the Blame Game and it's a dramedy- (drama + comedy) mystery-type thing that I think people are hopefully going to get a kick out of. Though what with having to pay the rent and all I still have to work so I'm up at 730 to drive 35+ minutes to shoot a movie for 6 hours and then drive 45+ minutes to work for 6 hours. Suffice it to say it's a long day and my paycheck will be disturbingly light this pay period but hey... at least I can say that I did it.

I'd also like to say that I've finished a book. Working on that. Right now my zombie horror is on the front line of what's to get done but my crime drama is next. Again, the ADD is killing me.

I'm quite satisfied with life though. I just wish I had more time to sleep (or maybe that's my current sleepiness talking).

More to come.

Tech stuff (because I'm cool)

So I realize I haven't done a post in forever--especially not a significant one. I thought that things would be different after graduation; that I would have all this time to do stuff like read and write. I guess I do have that time, I just haven't had the motivation or whatever. I think I'm still stuck on main problem about what to write. I still don't even know what this blog is. Anyways, I was on this website that gives a bunch of random blog post ideas and I thought I would try to write one. We'll see how this goes.

10 Gadgets I use on a daily basis

1) My computer

2.5gb of graphics RAM with an NVIDIA GeForce 570 chipset sitting next to an Intel 3rd generation i5 processor with overclock capacity and 16 gb of RAM means I've got a gaming machine for the gods. At least, the Gods on a budget. Every game I own runs beautifully and smoothly which is all I've ever honestly wanted. But most importantly it replaced my laptop which served me diligently for 4 years pumping out papers and LAN gaming and such like that. It was a faithful companion but alas, I now have upgraded to desktop computing. This machine will hopefully help me land a job and write my book, but if not, it will at least help me play games in stunning HD.

2) My phone--Gotta stay connected. For years I had dealt with terrible free phones from Verizon that barely passed the requirements of being phones. Sure, they made calls but other than that they were useless. At the dawn of smartphones my phones really weren't too bad but then all of a sudden the capabilities of everyone else's devices eclipsed mine and I was left in the technological dust. Now I have an iPhone and couldn't be happier.

3) My iPod--I'm separating my iPod from my iPhone though they are now the same device because for years I had an iPod that served faithfully as my companion and friend. It housed my music which is incredibly important to me and to this day (despite being reduced to a mere app on my phone) provides me with my favorite songs and lays down the soundtrack to my day.

4) My car? Is my car a gadget? I don't think so but without it I would be done for.

5) Who can honestly think of ten things they use on a daily basis that doesn't include their refrigerator and a lamp? This cookie-cutter blog crap is stupid and I'm not doing it again. I need to start writing and I think once being out of school really hits me I'll get myself in gear and actually do something worth while. Who knows. It'll be good. I think.

Eschatology: The Apocalypse and You

I'd like to take a quick break from the serious existential crap to talk very briefly about the end of the world.

So it's 2012 and the world is totally going to end.

Now one the one hand, that's totally awesome for me. I've recently decided (and managed to actually tell my parents) that I'm going to take some time off after graduation to "find myself." If the world ends at the end of this calendar year, I'll be smack dab in the middle of "finding myself" and will have only had to stand precariously on the edge of legitimate responsibility and adulthood. In fact, I'll be about seven months out of college, probably working a decent to crappy job, but be totally in a place where I have the time to go out with friends and read/write philosophy and do all the stuff I wish I had more time to do.

So really, the world ending in 2012 will be kind of awesome for me.

What's most terrifying though is that I think people are legitimately going to freak out this time. Not in a Harold Camping kind of way but I think it's been so hyped that we might legitimately see some terror on the streets. Anywhere from London riot style to people actually killing and stealing and martial law kind of stuff. It's just human nature, really. The world's going to end so why don't we just go to town?

"That awkward moment when you killed the 711 owner and stole all the Mountain Dew and Twinkies you could carry and then the world didn't end."

Say just for kicks that the world does end. We know that it's going to at some point so why not just suppose that it's going to be this December. What kind of apocalypse can we expect?

Zombie Apocalypse:

I love zombies. Not because they're fun to write about (yes, I am writing a zombie apocalypse novel) but because it would be easily the most interesting apocalypse to live through. Imagine being on the run from hundreds of assailants who want nothing more than to eat your flesh at any personal cost to them. It's a threat that can only be stopped by trauma to the brain and a threat that spread so quickly that you suddenly find yourself one among millions who are still capable to think. Now of course in the fictional literature there's always a hero who manages to stay afloat among a storm of the undead but I think in reality it would be less entertaining. Sure, you'd have the few psychopaths who would have no trouble pulling a trigger against an undead girlfriend or neighbor or whoever but then you'd have every other normal, level-headed person who would try to hold desperately onto the idea that their loved ones could be cured and probably get eaten in the process. They would hesitate at the crucial moment of self defense and die an ugly and violent death. These people are the reason that zombie literature is so interesting--why there's always the hero standing against the odds: because 9 times out of 10, someone hesitates and gets bitten. This results in massive hordes of flesh eating zombies and sudden halt to production and social structure. It not only destroys our social environment as we know it but makes for one of the most Hobbesian kind of environments we can imagine. What would you do? Head to the gun store? Look for loved ones? Kill yourself? You just can't know until you're there. I like to think that the human instinct for self-preservation always kicks in but you never know... with everyone around you dying I'm sure it's easy for the despair to take a toll for the worst.

And a zombie apocalypse is TOTALLY possible because of the way biowarfare is going and all of us zombie fiction writers have found a plausible way for this reality to exist.

Religious Rapture:

Ever picked up the New Testament? Ever read the book of Revelations? It's fascinating stuff. I mean really. It's easily the most interesting book in the Bible since it's really the only one that predicts what's to come when the world ends. Among other things it involves a select few being taken up into the loving arms of God and the rest of us being subjected to burning as four angry dudes ride across the sky giving us the old what-for. Assuming you/I/we chose the wrong religion or are just unlucky enough to not be one of the predestined (see: Calvinism), we're probably going to end up burning a horrible, firey death while collecting groceries and then spending the rest of eternity in hell. Sounds pretty awful doesn't it? I mean, think about it. Zombies you can kill if you've got a blunt object and the will power. The four horsement of the apocalypse? Hah! Angels wielding spears and crap? Hah! Demons? Hah! (Though they seem to the only ones allergic to holy water and crosses.) You're not only struggling internally with the existential realization that there is in fact a God who has been watching you sin for your entire life, but you're up against an immortal and unearthly being who is raining a merciless fire on your heretical behind. It's not a good feeling, I can imagine.

This of course means that there's a heaven and those of us who are chosen are going to be watching the chaos from whatever vantage point they are granted thinking either A) "Thank God (lol) I went to church every Sunday or B) "Oh no those poor people... but thank God I went to Church every Sunday. I mean seriously how bad are they going to feel? It's going to be a lot of "I told you so's" and a plague of smugness. Either way, it's going to confirm a lot of things people have staked their entire lives believing either right or wrong and honestly, make philosophy complete irrelevant because all moral and metaphysical questions will be answerable by the now very accessible creator.

Natural Disasters:

Here I'm thinking about disasters a la the movie "2012" or "The Day After Tomorrow." Think earthquakes and tsunamis and a second Ice Age. For whatever reason science cares to come up with, the Earth is going insane and things are just falling apart. Blame it on the core or the poles or some garbage like global warming, the earth is fighting back against all of our abuse and it's not taking any prisoners. Sure we can build arks and maybe find refuge in a now-hospitable African continent, but a whole lot of people are going to die. I'm talking billions of people. I'm thinking like 6 billion people are going to die because much like "2012," only the rich will be able to afford the technology that will keep them safe. On the one hand I find this understandable but on the other I don't like it because money doesn't guarantee genetic integrity and I don't think the rich are necessarily those we want repopulating the world.

Regardless, you're going to find yourself chilling one day doing whatever it is that you're doing, whether it's driving to work or sleeping or using the toilet and the earth is suddenly going to open up and swallow you. Seriously. That's it. No need for elaboration. You'll just be doing stuff and then the next moment you're dead. Sucks, right? Hopefully this is part of the previous scenario (religious rapture) and you'll be quickly taken up into the arms of a creator. At the very least you'll be hoping (rather loudly and erratically) that he exists and that being swallowed up by the earth or sea isn't too terribly painful. Hopefully if you're anything like John Cusack you'll be able to survive and see a new society built in the wake of whatever survivors exist after the clouds part.

Cosmic Explosion:

In a similar yet not unrelated vein we have something slightly more simplistic: the sun blowing up. Now astronomers are well aware that stars are just big balls of gas that are likely to give at some point and our star (the Sun) is no different. Apparently at some point our Sun, in similar fashion to other stars, is going to just... blow up. Basically, it's going to swallow everything up until Jupiter or whatever and that means we're all screwed. There's not a lot to it other than the fact that we're all done for. I can imagine people are going to flip and start killing each other or hugging their loved ones and praying to God but we are basically all screwed. And there won't be anything left because the explosion will vaporize Earth. Hopefully we will figure out how to travel to another galaxy or some crap like that before then because if not, we're all done for.

Nuclear Winter:

Anyone who reads the news (for the record, I don't) knows that we're constantly on the brink of global conflict. Anyone who plays Call of Duty knows we're just a terrorist away from nuclear winter which only YOU can stop. In reality though, I can see international politics getting out of hand to the point where those with nuclear weapons are going to have their sweaty hands trembling over blinking red buttons Skyping with each other yelling "I'll do it! I swear to God I'll do it!"

And then someone will. Some idiot is going to say screw it and push the button and then everyone will start launching their stuff because what else do we have to lose? Might as well take them to Hell with us. The aftermath is going to be a mostly scorched earth with minimal surivors yet not complete decimation. I'm thinking something like Fallout. There's going to be a lot of people left fighting for supplies and their lives while some semblance of government tries to take a hold, yet the one thing everyone is going to have to worry about is food and water which will all be completely irradiated. Speaking of irradiated, things are going to get nutty. I'm talking mutations people: the next level in evolution. People, animals, plants... things are going to start changing and adapting Darwin-style to the deadly environment in which we now have to live in. Look at Chernobyl--that place won't be inhabitable for another five hundred years at the very earliest. It probably won't be devoid of radiation for at least another thousand or more. Some people on the internet are talking about 50,000 years. Either way, those of us who are left after the idiot politicians start launching nukes are going to have to get used to the whole radiation thing. Those who don't die will start to change and those who don't change will die. Living in this world will be a lot like the zombie apocalypse--fighting for resources in a world where production has halted and little to no government to speak of--only now instead of the more killable zombies you have the unkillable radiation to deal with.

Social Meltdown:

Okay so say for whatever reason we're able to restrain ourselves and we don't launch a crap-ton of nuclear missiles into to each other. Awesome. That's for the best. But racism, xenophobia, and class tensions are only going to increase and worsen as time goes on. Discomfort and discontent with governemnts and people's opinions about how life should be lived are only going to make things worse. We're going to have a fanatic or some like that stir up his people into taking action against their government. This will cause copycat movements which will cause mass anarchy and the proliferation of whatever kind of ideals they're pushing. Or... one particular group will just take control like the Nazis and form a society like in 1984--a massive Big Brother society in which freedom is a forbidden word and we just do as we're told.

Either that or somehow we will just devolve into a Hobbesian existence once one of the aforementioned situations has occurred. Social meltdown will likely somehow be a facet of the end of the world no matter how you slice it.

Aliens:

Okay so say the Earth doesn't blow up or we don't blow ourselves up or whatever... there are billions of stars, many just like ours. So... there must be stars with planets around them who have had similar abilities to develop life. Let's not get religious or whatever and I know that statistically speaking the conditions for developing life happening on another planet are astronomically (lol) small but say it happens. Say for example this society evolves thirty times as rapidly as we do (because their conditions for evolution were better) and they develop long-distance space travel. Say they also hate foreigners. They're probably going to come over here and mess us up. If they don't just have an innate hatred for anything that thinks themselves as advanced as the alien race, they'll certainly see our corruption and sinful ways and think that we're better off dead anyway. Maybe they'll be gracious enough to enslave us or keep an elect few of us alive. Sounds a little like many people's conception of the Rapture. Anyway, aliens invading and killing us all is totally possible. Look at a crappy movie like "Skyline." They come, they conquer with little interference, and we are just plain screwed. You never know.

So now you know. Whatever happens at the end of this year, you'll hopefully be slightly more prepared or at the very least aware. Live this year the best that you can and enjoy it like it's your last.

"Kids these days" and Time

So I'm thinking that every decade I'm going to make a post like this to wax melancholy about how I'm getting old.

"But Dylan... you're not old."

Shut up.

I'm old enough to where everyone younger than me looks 13 but everyone older than me looks 29+. I'm old enough that I can actually say stuff like this but still young enough to have an endearing innocence about me (especially if I'm ever wrong). I'm old enough so that I can do cool stuff with the adults (since 21 grants you the last of the cool legal rights) but young enough that I'm still kinda hip and kinda cool and kinda in tune with these generational changes in culture.

Anyway, this post started off as one of those "oh things are different and stuff" kinds of posts but I imagine that's really not necessary for those who are in the very least bit aware of how things are. And this definitely isn't one of those 2012 posts (because believe me, that's coming) but it's one of those "things are just different" kind of posts.

I sit around and reflect on time (my own aporia of time, if you will) and think about how I've been around for just over two decades and things have changed a lot in the ways that the world works and in the way that I am. It's weird because I remember distinct events from my past and I think about the ways I've changed and it's amazing how I don't feel like an adult. In many ways I feel like the same kid I've always been and I wonder if that's how everyone feels--if everyone just imagines themselves as that same 8 year old swinging from tree branches and not knowing a thing about things and how anything is.

I suppose this post is going to be kind of short because I lost the point of it a long time ago but it will hopefully in it's vagueness spark some sort of independent thought about following posts considering memories and of course a 2011 wrap-up/2012 prediction post.

I just wonder how the future is going to be. Who is going to be in it, how my experiences will shape me... I just am totally uncertain about how things will be. To put it simply, it's an abyss--life, that is. Life after college is a great abyss that I don't feel that I'm ready to face. Things are so structured until now and I think now is the first time in my life that I can name certain people that I wish would be a part of it. (Am I coming back around to a point?)

Do we have an identity before our teenage years? Are we just cookie-cutter preteens that like the other things that the other preteens like until we decide that we don't care what anyone else likes? Maybe that's why we develop personal tastes and then look back on what subsequent and following generations of preteens like and think "God, I'm glad I don't like that cookie cutter stuff" even though we totally did.

If you haven't caught my drift yet, my main field of interest is the phenomenology of experience which I know seems kind of broad to those who have the vaguest idea of what that entails but I feel like it's the quintessential something that defines us as human beings and something that needs to be explored and understood. Time passes and it's the fundamental measurement by which we measure our lives. Believe me, I know. I wrote a 15 page paper about it. Our conceptions of past, present, and future are measured by memories, attention, and expectation respectively. Without these we wouldn't have any way by which to measure our lives and by my understanding our lives wouldn't carry any significant meaning (another existential issue). The point is, we look back on the past and compare it rather unfairly to the present and look at past events somewhat nostalgically thinking that things are somehow worse (here's where it will tie into the next few posts). Whether this is true or not is kind of irrelevant since things are how they are (though the continental philosophers would disagree) and there's not a lot anyone can do but desperately cling to memories.

Again, I'm not 100% sure what I'm rambling about since when I outline these posts at 2am as I'm trying to fall asleep it seems so much more potent and relevant but as always I apologize for whatever confusion might have arisen from your topical reading of this and praise whatever errant thoughts might have organically sprung from whatever words that you have read. Look forward to more concrete and hopefully more coherent and cogent thoughts in the near future.

EDIT 1 (1/3/12):

So I was re-reading this in a better state of mind and decided, surprisingly enough, that it wasn't as totally incoherent as I thought it was as I was reading, though it does lack the content I was hoping for. Hopefully this will fix that.

I used to be different. I used to be a quiet kid who didn't know what he wanted all the time but wasn't really all that concerned because time wasn't anything more than when I had to go to bed or get up for school and the future wasn't anything more than the teacher workday or the looming colossus itself: summer break. I used to think that people's opinion was based entirely on how fast you could run or whether or not you scored a run in kickball and we're all just going to kind of stay young and go to school together.

I thought girls were little more than cute things that that I wanted a girlfriend for some reason. The only music that existed was either the music in the movies or on the channels I watched or my parents music which was inherently not as good and never could have been (it was just noise and people screaming about stuff I didn't understand). Similarly movies were just things where people talked and it looked kind of real and they would often say stuff that I didn't get but my parents laughed so I laughed along like I got the joke.

Friends were people that lived close to you or went to the same school that thought you were cool too and you could share secrets about other students with and the group you were seen with defined you only as far as the gossip that was spread about any particular member--kind of like your group was only as the strong as the rumors about any one of you. Most importantly, my parents were just things that had jobs and money and things called bills and that's just how they've always been. They just annoy me when I'm trying to talk on the phone or play video games and they keep telling me to go to bed or do my homework but I need them to drive me places so I put up with their crap in exchange for being able to hang out with my friends--and that's how it will always be.

Not much has changed.

Nostalgia is a sticky mess that is easy to get trapped in and harder still to get out of and it's not something that I have to deal with anymore. Blame it on the meds or finding new, better things but I've been finding it easier and easier to throw old stuff away because it doesn't seem as important. Magical veils that surrounded memories have decayed and I now see them in different lights and most of them are therefore much less significant than I originally thought. That doesn't mean necessarily that they have objectively decreased in significance it's just that I guess I don't remember them in the same way anymore and what bothers me is I'm not really sure how I'm supposed to think about anything in my past.

I know that's kind of nutty to think about but if you consider that like newly opened wounds, memories are so much more potent and significant in direct proportion to their events of origin. That is, we cling to them with desperation relative to when they happened. For example, you never want to forget your first kiss between you and the person who just broke your heart because you feel like if you don't think about that memory constantly it will be like it never happened. Which I suppose is, in a way, true.

You look back on how silly you were to cling to things that in retrospect seem pretty insignificant and wonder how you could have been so naive to not anticipate much more significant events in your life. Again, we find ourselves at a Catch-22 since memories are always more significant than your predictions of what will happen in the future. Some might disagree but my evidence for this is in the idea that the future terrifies us so, as always, we cling to the known. What's more known to us than the past?

But what I find when I shake my head at high school kids in their skinny jeans and stupid hair and laughing obnoxiously loud about something that I probably wouldn't find funny is that I know that was me and I'm sure someone did that when they saw me and my idiot friends trolling about the mall. While everyone comes to that realization I think what is most surprising to me is that our perception of different generations changes as we learn more not only about our own lives, but the lives of others. By gradually filling the shoes of our parents we outgrow the shoes of our youth and wonder how they could have ever fit us. We shake our heads maybe not because we don't like their clothes or their music but more so that we don't understand what it's like to be them anymore. The memories we have of doing the things they're doing seem insignificant compared to our more recent experiences of more important things so we shake our heads saying, "they don't even know." That was a complicated sentence. Let me see if I can rephrase... Well, I can't.

Maybe it just has to do with not being able to remember how impressed we were with ourselves and doing things that in retrospect were kind of lame. Who knows. We seem as a culture kind of fixated on how things are always getting worse. In many ways, they are. Objectively speaking. But in many ways things are just changing which isn't inherently bad. Humans tend to be reactive and I think things will turn out okay as they always do.

On Creativity and the Artist

So I've made a realization... or at least a decision. Perhaps one based on the other.

Growing up we're really only told about a fraction of what life is really like. Before I continue I understand your apprehension to attribute to me any sort of legitimate knowledge of what life is really like; I think that a 21-year old college senior facing the abyss of adulthood has an interesting vantage point from which to base their views on. That said, I believe I know what I'm talking about.

Anyway, when we're growing up we're told that we're going to finish high school and go to college and then go to grad school and get a white collar job doing sort of kind of what our parents do or at least what our friend's parents do. It's like the the weirdest modified form of an agrarian/Old-world kind of view. And for a while I thought that's what I was going to do too. I thought I was going to go to college and do pretty well and then go to law school and become a lawyer for the vast majority of my life and then I'd retire and die. While this is still a possibility, I'm getting the feeling that this isn't necessarily the path that I should be on.

Again, they tell you as a kid that this is kind of what you're supposed to do--goading you into the maths and sciences or specializing in something like international politics (which seems like a really fancy way of saying you watch the news a lot). But they never really tell you that it's okay to not strive for a mid- to high-paying white collar job because I guess if they told everyone that then no one would. But what about the people that can't or know they just don't want to? You never get that encouragement to pursue passions or the arts. [Though don't get me started on the public school system not encouraging the students to pursue anything... because they don't.]

What college has taught me more than anything else (and here comes the point), is that I'm good at a lot of things. Before I get branded narcissistic, I want to qualify that by saying it taught me that I'm good at a lot of things I had never before imagined I would be good at. I've become something of an actor and consider myself pretty good at it. Someone told me yesterday for the first time in my life that my singing voice was beautiful. Beautiful? That made my life. I never philosophized before college or wondered about the nature of things. I didn't observe people or read Sigmund Freud for fun. I've come to realize that I am a creative person--that I look at things differently and have different capacities than many people.

But I'm sitting here just talking about my talents, I'm getting at the fact that maybe, just maybe, white collar work isn't for me. I'm not saying I'm going to be a vagrant. I'll work. But what I am saying is that I'm okay with only getting by as long as I have time to stretch my creative limbs.

If my parents are reading this, I'm sorry. I feel like I just came out of the proverbial closet and now they're sitting at the computer shaking their heads thinking they could have done something different and maybe I wouldn't have turned out this way. Then again maybe they would prefer I wear dresses as long as I'm still an accountant or a lawyer. I'm kidding (halfway). But why can't this be okay? Why isn't it okay to be an artist? Or a philosopher? Or a struggling anything?

It is okay. No one is saying it's not. But you look at people who work in grocery stores or are career baristas or waiters and you think, Wow that's sad... guess they never had a chance to go to college. Why does that have to be the mindset? Maybe they love their jobs. Or maybe they hate their jobs, they just love not having to take their work home with them or work 80-hour work weeks. Maybe they love interacting with people and don't care about living paycheck to paycheck. Again, no one is saying it's not okay for someone to live like this, but I want to see if maybe we can look at it not so much as them being deficient in some way that others are not, but instead that this is who they are and that's all they can be.

I love philosophy. Obviously. Nothing gets me going like a debate over human nature or political philosophy or even metaphysics. I think the most snide comment I get about being a philosophy major is, "What, are you going to be a philosopher?" My response is, "Yeah, why the heck not?"

I think this world needs creative people (and here comes the second point.) Yes, of course we need people to do politics and science and farming and accounting and all that stuff. But humans are the only species with the capacity for upper-level reasoning and temporal memory. We measure our lives through memories and the passage of time and we plan and we love and we create. We are the only species who seek to find meaning in our lives and constantly seek to find our true nature. Sure, I would love to make a ton of money grinding numbers or trying cases, but I'm not ashamed of being a human being who loves to think and be creative--even if that means not making a lot of money. This is just who I am. I know it seems like a cop-out to say that I want to spend my life enjoying being human because you can do that all the time. But what I do know for sure is that I don't regret anything. I don't care what people's perception of a good life is. No one should.

It's like I said--life is an abyss. You fill it with whatever you want. Some just tend to add more color than others. Me? I couldn't do without it.

Futility

Sometime last week I started writing a post that I thought was rather good--potent, relevant and all that. Anyways, I was just working on it and I realized I had no idea what I was talking about when I wrote it.

And that's really the point of this post: what am I doing? What am I talking about? I don't even read crap like this in my free time, why should anyone else? Makes me wonder what people do read though--if they read, obviously.

Should people read philosophy? No.

Philosophy leads to lucidity and lucidity can be a dangerous thing if you're anything like me.

I suppose putting my opinions on this blog and on my internet radio show is a lot like screaming them into a wind tunnel--no one will ever hear them.

Which leads me to the word of the day: Futility.

Expecting perfection

It's safe to say that we're brought up with certain expectations about our lives. We grow up with our parents as a model--a house, a job, a spouse, a car--a whole life leading to the success the led to you. But there's a bit of a gap between having and not having and I think it takes some time to realize that--maybe for some, more than others.

But after time we kind of develop an uneasy contentment with a lack of material comforts. We go off on our own, accepting moderate destitution (as only upper-middle class white kids can do) in hopes that one day we'll have the job and the money to live as comfortably as we would like.

The only thing we never really seem to reach a similar level of comfort on is relationships. Blame it on Disney or the media or romantic comedies or whatever, we have this level of expectation about who we want to be with. There's an expectation for the palpable chemistry from the first glance and then just a series of perfect interactions that leads to that magical first kiss and then... who knows.

We want them to be just like us but not enough like us that we hate them. We want them to be like our parents (Freudian style) and be liked by our parents but not so much that we hate them. We want them to like the same music but not all of the same music but definitely like the same kinds of movies because god knows we don't want to watch crap movies with them unless we both think they're crap. We want them to be talented yet endearingly flawed, confident yet endearingly insecure. We want them to be as smart as us but not dumber or smarter than us because we don't want to feel like we're constantly being one-upped.

We want someone beautiful but accept that beauty is subjective (sometimes). Actually, physical beauty seems to be affected by what we know of the person. Like a series of filters or something, the more we know about a person (for better or worse), the more differently we view them. We learn a bad thing they've done and all of a sudden they're less attractive. Or you learn something really adorable about them and now they're much more attractive. Then as soon as the relationship is over, the filters are removed... or are they? Maybe it's chemical but I think it's all psychological.

We tell ourselves that we'll accept the perfect person and all of their flaws but when we meet anyone we pry open those flaws and make them more than the are--we expect existence before essence or to fall in love before the flaws.

We've got an image in our head of a person. We don't know who it is but we love them deeply and fully. Whether we realize it or not we compare everyone to this person and when we find a good match, we latch on. This seems great and all but the subconscious of a human is anything but fallible. We are open to so much more suggestion than we realize and adding onto the fact that we're incredibly self-destructive, how could we ever know what's really good for us?

I've always viewed relationships as an empirical and mechanical study of people and their qualities, but I think it should be viewed more as a chemical reaction--a rush of neurochemicals as unique as a snowflake... or whatever. And I think the exact ratio of whatever chemicals are flying between your synapses is always different depending on the person. And maybe, just maybe--a certain mixture of stuff causes attraction. Maybe, just maybe, a different mixture of stuff causes love--if that even exists.

It's a lot like the nature/nurture thing in psychology--a question that we will never ever know the answer to. Do we fall in love because we expect to? Or because we can't help it? Is our attraction determined by chemicals or by previous experience? Most people would say both, in both cases. But I can't make that call since it could go either way.

But I think my overarching point is that our expectations are likely to tend to cloud our perception of things. In fact, it's kind of hard psychological theory that they do. Not that there's anything we can do about it. We just learn--because our expectations are usually just that: figment's of our imagination and not really grounded in any sort of logical reality. I'm just saying... life and people aren't perfect. It's just how it is. We all know that. Unrealistic expectations can cause you to miss what's in front of you. I'm not saying goals are bad things to have because what you should expect is a certain standard of what you realistically deserve. Everyone should have a place to live with a sustainable job and someone to be good to them and love them. But its important to not have your head in the clouds looking for something better.

It's funny because I think a lot of my contemporaries are starting to realize the worldly limitations when it comes to jobs and a future. These are rough times we live in and think the idea that we were going to graduate from college and have a sweet job was kind of unrealistic. Maybe not at the time--but it certainly isn't as much of a reality now. I'm starting realize my own limitations and what I can and cannot do; what I didn't set myself up to do; how all of my mistakes compound to make up the reality that I live in. I say mistakes because you don't ever realize anything is wrong until it comes up. All of a sudden you realize that the way you thought things were going to turn out... well... didn't.

You were just expecting perfection.

Agoraphobia and Xenophobia

You know, I can't imagine being afraid of both going outside and foreigners. Even if you're able to go outside, everyone is terrifying. Regardless, I think having either would be a terrible way to live. [This of course is coming from someone who has neither--who is looking in from the outside so what do I know] If you're xenophobic, how does anyone go from stranger to friend? I understand being terrified of Mexicans, the Chinese, or the British (because they're foreign you terrible person) but what about the guy down the street? Everyone is foreign.

"Oh Dylan," you might be saying to yourself, "I see what you did there. You tied this post back to your previous one. You're a genius."

Thanks. I try. But that's not what this post is about. I just got back from London (sort of) and being around all those foreign people (The Brits, obviously) made me think a lot about the world and how we view foreign people. Okay, when I say foreigners I simply mean people from another country. It could be the way anyone views anyone else.

We generally accept the idea that most people in the world hate us. That wherever we go, people are going to hear our crass, yankee accents and automatically make assumptions and judgments about us. You know how I know they do that? Think about British people. Who comes to mind? For me, it's Emma Watson, Jason Statham, and Maggie Thatcher. In my head, every single British citizen is one of those people. And honestly, I get off the train at Paddington and I hear the accents and that's really all I hear. I hear exactly what Hollywood and the movies and media have told me British people are like. So it's interesting when a British person does an American accent or impression because 9 times out of 10, provided they're not being serious, it's going to be a southern accent with a lot of hard R's or something. But if you think about the average Brit's average interaction with Americans, it's in the movies or the media where they see us being indulgent and generally on our worst behavior.

And think that's where a lot of xenophobia and stereotypes come from--the media on the whole. If you think about what you see in our media it's all just scandal and gossip and rich people being rich and greedy and poor people on the major extreme of ignorance and necessity. The funny thing is--we know that's not representative of day-to-day life of most Americans. But of course, the media has to report on the extremes because they need ratings. They need to report on Casey Anthony and that senator sending picture messages to underage girls because that's what Americans sink their teeth into or something. Well the rest of the world sees that garbage too. Maybe, just maybe, the rest of the world hates us because all they see of us is us being absolutely retarded all the time or indulging in our animalistic tendencies all the time. Or maybe they just watch all our terrible movies. On every single double-decker bus in London was an advert for either the new Conan movie or Cowboys and Aliens. And honestly, that's the impression that they have of Americans.

Crazy, you might be thinking. But do we have a different impression of the British or anyone else in the world? Not really. The stereotypes we hold of everyone else in the world are based on the tiny instances in which we observe them.

But does everyone really hate us? I don't think so. I don't think that's the case at all. What do we do when we see a British person in America? We hear the accent and we stop and stare and triple-take and try to listen to what they're saying and doing and if we talk to them we're super interested about where they're from and we generally try to be nice. I imagine that when the average European (because I'll try to stop picking on the British) hears an American accent, they do the exact same thing because it's different. They aren't staring at you because they hate you (most of the time), it's just different from what they normally hear. Now of course they might hear you and instantly hate you, but that's like any stranger anywhere hating you--it's motivated by belligerence and ignorance. Or maybe you were being an idiot. Ever think of that?

I think if you asked anyone in the world what they think of when they think of Americans, they might say John Wayne, a Wall Street businessman, and a cowboy. (Sorry ladies.) But that's all they see. Like any stranger, if they got to know you, they'd like you, I'm sure of it. And some are just interested in your existence.

But what's with the fascination of world travel? (Here's where agoraphobia kind of fits it, but I was really just trying to stick with the pattern.) Well if you read Stuff White People Like you know that white people like foreign things. It's exotic and not as mainstream as american stuff. In fact, if you do read Stuff White People Like, you know more about hipsters and less about white people as a whole. Anyway, they have a saying: The grass is always greener on the other side. We always think that things would be better for some reason if we lived in a different place like Italy or England or something cool like that where we could be fashionable and around people with strange accents. The fact is, I missed America in just the week I was gone. I miss driving on the correct side of the road and not having to mentally convert everything to dollars to figure out what I was spending and being able to speak loudly in public because I'm not afraid of people hearing my accent. I don't know if many people [hipsters] realize this, but moving to another country doesn't grant you freedom from the problems of being American, it just allows you to take on the crap that people in that country deal with on a day to day basis. You still have to deal with stupid people, taxes, crap politicians, and the daily grind. It just kind of pisses me off when people tell me genuinely that they day dream of leaving America and moving to another country because they don't like something here. I'm not saying there aren't legitimate reasons to move out of the country like job prospects or chasing the affections of a hot European actress but what I don't understand is why some people are so desperate to get out of here. Being over there is going to be exciting for a whole twenty minutes until you realize that gas and everything else is super expensive (comparatively). I'm just saying...

If it wasn't for modern technology, we wouldn't know the other existed. Louis C.K. does a funny bit on people complaining. He's talking about people complaining about traveling in airplanes--how the seats are so small and the food sucks and it's boring and being cramped with people sucks and how security blows blah blah blah. Louis just says Hey! You're in a chair in the SKY! You're traveling in the air over an ocean! That's freakin' amazing! Stop complaining!

And it's amazing how small the world is. I can send instant messages and skype with family in England if I want and that's incredible considering how far that information has to go. I guess the point of all this mess is to just talk a bit about how we view the world. I don't think anything will ever change. There's nothing wrong with a little xenophobia, but check your sources first.

Relationships

I haven't seen Just Friends or its counterpart No Strings Attached but the concepts of the movies alone got me thinking about relationship titles.

I think we can all agree that relationships are one of the most complicated things in the world. For clarification, if you've latched onto the tone of past posts, human interaction is easily the most complicated thing, and a relationship is any interaction you have with anyone. Duh.

Stranger is a relationship title. It's a title for any relationship you don't have... Or at least not quite enough to be an acquaintance which is a word for someone who isn't a stranger, but not quite a friend.

But I think it's a funny thing how we have to define everything in our world, down to our interactions with people. Of course, we have to define the physical and non-physical worlds and morality and art and everything that we have but those things seem relatively concrete (even if the interpretation is not). But I think it's interesting that we have to define our relationships in such concrete terms as friend, especially because relationships in themselves are not concrete or tangible at all. They're based on oral and implicit agreements and are subject to deceit and fault and yet again, we define them so rigidly.

Point is, if you tell someone that you're just friends, everyone kind of knows what that means. It has specific limitations and right and privileges. Now of course, if you tell someone you're just friends but you're secretly physically involved, now you're just a liar. It's just a specific terms with such a universal meaning for something that could mean different things to everyone.

And of course there's the notion of best friend which is some imaginary tier of friendship that involves being more intimate than your normal friends merit and infinitely more intimate than with acquaintances but yet something about this person sets them apart and earns them a special distinction. Somehow adding the word best to a title gives it prestige and adds all these responsibilities and expectations. It's funny because becoming best friends is like dating... how do you know when it starts? A hangout becomes a date becomes two dates and now... you're dating? One secret between friends becomes three and now you're best friends? I don't know. That's more subjective than anything, like knighthood right?

Think about how miserable you are when you don't know what your relationship label is. You're sitting there at a movie with a girl/boy you like and you're not even watching the movie--you're only thinking What are we? Then you awkwardly say goodnight at the end and all you can think about is your relationship label because all of a sudden if you said it and agreed upon it, it would make things easier. And it's true. It does make things easier. When two people sit down and say a label, things are easier because all parties involved know what that label implies and entails. They now know without having spell it out what the boundaries and rights are of the relationship. If a boy and a girl sit down and agree to be just friends, they know that there's no emotional or physical relationship to be had. If the boy says, "Hey I like you," and the girl says "Hey I like you too," then all of a sudden the relationship takes on a label and the rights of the relationship are more clearly defined and no one has to spend $11.25 to sit there thinking about it for two hours.

I think Facebook has had an interesting effect on relationship titles. Obviously, everyone you're friends with (including the 200 people you may or may not actually know all that well) is going to know the instant you add someone as a relationship partner. It's going to be a big deal, people are going to "like" your new status update and comment saying things like "OH MY GOSH SO CUTE" and whatever and I think adding the social aspect does some odd and horrible things to a relationship. I mean, from my previous definition of the topic I would say that relationship-defining terms are strictly between the two people to decide. Obviously, you can share the good news but the terms friend, boyfriend, acquaintance, best friend, enemy are really just for you to know where you and someone else stand. Once you give that title it's pedestal on Facebook for everyone to see, I feel like it all of a sudden becomes a permanent memorial to the integrity of the relationship whether it's real or not. To be less vague, once everyone know it exists, it's existence is a social responsibility. People will notice if you screw it up. But then people are also privy to the intimate details of your life and everything just becomes very real when other people know about it. I'm not against having your relationship status on your facebook, but I say give it a significant amount of time before you put it up there. Make sure your stupid relationship status isn't going to appear on my newsfeed every week because it keeps CHANGING.

The fact is, even though we have these concrete terms with these more or less concrete deno-/connotations, relationships aren't that simple. Every term has an asterisk when it comes to defining how you interact with someone. Not to say there's anything wrong with that. I'm a HUGE advocate for defining relationships. Even if it can't be defined in a single term like friend, it's good to know what you mean to someone. Think about it. If you have any unclear relationships in your life, clear them up. If this means telling someone how much you appreciate them as a friend or if they've been upgraded to best friend status or even if they've always been your friend, they'll always appreciate hearing it. Of course, don't say it like you're dying though. Don't give anyone cause to worry. If you like like someone, tell them. Knowing they do or don't like you back is going to feel much better than not knowing. And of course, if this advice means telling someone you don't like them or making sure your relationship has clear boundaries, then that's what you got to do. Again, everything's better when everything's clear. Then you make sure you can say I told you when someone tries to say you've been dishonest with them. I know there's a few relationships in my life I'd like to clarify.

Death: Parte the Second

So I just got back from London. And by just got back I mean I got back Wednesday night and have been way too lazy to do this until now.

Anyway, one of the highlights for me was seeing Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead in the city on Tuesday night. Great show! Really funny. For those who don't know, it was written in the 80s or something as a kind of "what if" for two of the most significant insignificant characters in one of my favorite Shakespeare plays, Hamlet. Basically, Shakespeare says next to nothing about these two characters that play kind of a big role in the whole grand scheme of things so this guy wrote an entire play about them. It's kind of a philosophical look at issues of death and psychology and it's something I legitimately found a lot of interesting stuff in, as you would imagine.

Anyway, there was an interesting bit on death and why you should or should not fear death (this was as the characters slowly come to realize the inevitability of their own death and the hopelessness it creates).

Guildenstern quoted Socrates when he said something to the effect of: we don't know anything concrete about death, so it is therefore illogical to fear it. And that makes a ton of sense to me because a lot of my discussion of death was why it's such a crappy thing to happen to you. But it's a great point to note that if our fears are based on things we observe (through our own filter of experience) being contrary to what we value (that is, what helps us enjoy and further our own lives), then we logically shouldn't fear death because we really have no idea whether or not it's contrary to our lives other than the fact that it's the end of it. Now I understand that doesn't make a ton of sense but if you think of death as just another chapter of life (which it very well could be), it's really not the end of anything substantial. Death could be great.

Now many people say there is no God or afterlife because it doesn't make logistical or physical sense based on the world that we live in what with the laws of physics and nature and things like that. But my question is why should God or the afterlife have to abide by these rules? Why does anything have to abide by these rules? Why can't it just be that everything we know on this earth coincidentally follows a set pattern (see: Problem of Induction) and everything outside of our know earth follows a completely different set of patterns. With the limited knowledge of the earth that we humans do enjoy, why is it so hard to accept things that might not seem plausible on the surface?

I heard a quote in a movie the other day (I think it was Thor) that magic is just science we don't understand. Think about that.

Suffering

Suffering and Happiness are two sides of the same coin. Like happiness, we love it. Like happiness, we don't like to experience it alone. Like happiness, it's an integral part of life.

Being sad is a bit of a funny thing. It's one of the few fundamental emotions of which the legitimacy can be questioned and overlooked. It all starts at puberty when all of a sudden everything just sucks. Life sucks. Friends suck. Parents suck. School sucks. The world is against you at every moment and you're the only victim of the war crimes life is committing against you. I know, I've gone through it. Every song and poem about darkness and heartbreak seemed to justify this desperate feeling I thought I constantly felt and every little thing hurt 100 times more than it ever should have. But now that I'm older I see it in younger kids and I scoff because I know it's not legitimate sadness. Who am I to say? If all feeling is relative, if they experience these emotions as true suffering (as compared to the rest of their limited scope of experience), how can we say that it isn't?

But then we have legitimate suffering of all flavors, ranging from a missed connection with a stranger to the loss of a loved one. But you'll notice (hopefully) right off the bat, all of the suffering discussed thusfar has direct relations with people.

"Ah Dylan," you might at this point be saying. "I understand why suffering is relevant in relation to previous discussions. Not only because it's an interesting facet of human psychology to examine, but because it's another facet of human social interaction and social life. Very good!"

Thanks.

Anyway, human suffering is interesting to me because if you think of all the ways you can suffer, it all comes down to human interaction.

• I asked someone out--they said no.
• My friend moved away.
• Someone said they hated me.
• Someone said I suck.
• My parent died.
• My favorite show got cancelled.
• My life hurts.
• Etc.

Actually, now might be a great time to differentiate between pain and suffering. When I say pain, I mean physical discomfort. I mean stubbing your toe, burning your skin (accidentally), breaking a bone, having a stroke, a cramp, anything like that. You may suffer from the pain, but that's a completely different kind of suffering. That suffering is of one color and flavor: this pain sucks a lot. When I talk about suffering, true psychological suffering, I'm talking about the multicolored rainbow that is purely emotional suffering. I'm talking about suffering that's much more complicated, suffering that's woven deep into your brain and takes a firm hold of every facet of your life.

For example, you're in a relationship and it's getting pretty serious. You've been together for a long while and you have a deep connection with this person. Or so you think. They cheat on you. You found out from a friend of a friend and you go to confront your significant other. There's a dozen things going on your head. You feel hurt, you feel betrayed, you feel insecure, you wonder what you could have done. Whatever happens next, the only guarantee is that right now you're suffering. This suffering is a complicated blend of every single moment of your relationship with this person coming to a screeching halt. All of a sudden you're questioning every single tender moment that has until now, been a symbol of their love and affection. You doubt whether or not the relationship is genuine at all. Your confrontation is done and you find yourself alone. What are you thinking about? Everything and nothing. Your head is spinning with all of the thoughts going through your mind. You have regrets and questions--your whole world is upside down. That, my friend, is what I mean when I say suffering.

The fun part hasn't begun yet. The weirdest thing about suffering is not it's cause, but what it does to you. You're sitting alone, ruminating over this news, and you feel physically ill (potentially elevating the suffering with pain). Your stomach is in knots, you feel like your heart is imploding, you're lethargic and no matter what you do, you can't seem to pull yourself out of this hole you feel yourself falling in. Now of course, maybe all of this isn't caused by a crap relationship. Maybe the only thing that could make you feel this way is a family member dying. That has to be a suffering I can't imagine. A torrent of emotion and distress on a level I can't begin to understand. Regardless, this psychological state affects us physically as well.

Socially, it makes us do some dumb stuff. What's the one thing you're okay with doing when you're sitting alone in your room crying about whatever it is you're crying about? The phone rings and you pick it up. Someone's calling and before that "hello," you're ready to dump all your garbage on the pour soul who dialed your number. Even if no one calls, you send a message, a text, an email, a chat, anything to anyone to who might listen and give you sympathy.

Sympathy is a funny thing. We only really seek it when we're in distress. We swing our issues around with reckless abandon until we get it. We just love for people to feel sorry for us. That's the reason we post those dumb, passive-aggressive statuses on Facebook. We're dying for someone to say "What happened?" We love that validation that everything's going to be okay because for some reason no matter how many times we tell ourselves that, the sympathy of anyone is infinitely more potent.

Of course, I'm not preaching from atop my high horse because I'm as much a criminal as I am a crier (someone who makes loud announcements). My statuses and blogs would often be littered and saturated with sad song lyrics and a vague melancholy. But it's that attention and validation that I yearn for. When we're younger we feel like we're the only victim and maybe that feeling never actually goes away, we just cling to other people whom we hope feel the same way. We seek them out and we seek solace in our collective suffering and maybe, just maybe we'll emerge from it, finding something to occupy our time in a way that allows us to forget why we were sad in the first place.

Maybe it's also something about the public spectacle, too. You post a passive-aggressive status for what reason? So the person it's about will see it and all of a sudden suffer as much as you feel like they deserve? Or because others will see your indirect defiance of that person's transgressions and take your side? Either way there's something cathartic about a status like "I just can't deal with anything" or "Everything sucks." Maybe if your suffering is made public, it will somehow be on trial for all the world to condemn and hopefully that will help it's destruction in your own mind. I don't know what we expect people to say in response.

"I hear ya!"

"You stay strong!"

"You're a beautiful person!"

"Should I teach you how to tie a noose?"

Additionally, I don't understand death announcements on Facebook. Maybe I don't get it because I've never had to do it, but I don't see the point of announcing to all your 650 friends (which include at least several dozen casual acquaintances, your boss, and a hundred people from high school you haven't talked to in more years than you'd like to count) that your dog or cat died. Even worse, announcing the death of an immediate relative like your grandmother or parent. I mean, that kind of stuff seems a little personal for the internet. Of course, I can understand a personal message to your close friends about why you've been distant or why they should expect distance in the immediate future, but to announce to at least 300 people who usually don't care what you had for breakfast that your mom died seems a little insane. I mean, what do you expect them to say to you? It puts all those casual acquaintances in an awkward situation because while they are technically your friend, a sudden extension of sympathy might seem contrived due to the fact you've never really spoken. But I think we just like knowing that people know we're suffering. Again, I think a private message to close friends is more appropriate, but hey, all 650 of my facebook friends are technically my friends. Maybe this is just an opportunity at another sad attempt to quantify how many people actually care about me by their hollow attempt at sympathy for my loss.

I don't know. Honestly, I don't feel like people care. If you've ever heard someone complaining (or had a lucid experience in a conversation) about their day or life or talking about their personal suffering, you know that any discussion of the sorts turns into a contest of who can suffer the most. You find yourself in a situation where you've been listening to your friend complain about their week and instead of trying to genuinely analyze the situations and provide legitimate solutions to their problems, you're simply seeking a good point at which you can insert being late for work and getting yelled at or getting turned down for a date by a cute girl at a party. You find yourself not even listening to your friend as you build a case as to why your week was worse and you expect genuine sympathy in response. Your frustration builds as your friend deflects your complaints with another example of why their week was worse. At the end of the discussion everyone is exhausted and frustrated yet hopefully feeling somewhat cleansed of their freakin' issues.

Speaking of lucidity, I've really been trying to catch myself when I indulge in any of the aforementioned behaviors. Now before anyone sarcastically calls me a martyr or a try-hard or something, I genuinely hope to lead by example and if not, at least not partake in this behavior in the event my awareness of it. If someone is explaining to me their issues, I do my best to actually listen. If i'm about to post something stupid on Facebook, I erase it and replace it with a quip about my day or something. I'm not saying I don't have these feelings or tendencies, I just think that if we're going to suffer and we're going to force people to be a part of it, we might as well save our rare opportunities for a concerned ear for the times when we actually need them. If I feel like I'm about to complain about something that I have no right complaining about, I don't. Easy as that.

I try to make these posts as oriented towards the humanities as possible, viewing everything through a lens of psychology and philosophy. So I pose this philosophical question to you:

Would suffering exist without other people?

I say no. In a Hobbesian state of nature we have no ties to people--we live on our own in our shelter and we provide for ourselves. In this state of nature people are selfish and violent and living on one's own is the only way to ensure survival. Think about it: if we have no people in our lives, how could we ever suffer? There would be no relationships to betray our expectations or become invested in or lies or deceit or anything. We wouldn't care about the death of another. We would just live our short, brutish lives. I think it can be therefore said that people are the single cause of our suffering. But as I've said in the past, people are also the cause of our happiness. To have one without the other is impossible. You can't know happiness without knowing suffering. If we live in the state of nature, in these neutral lives, we can have no feelings other than maybe physical pleasure and self-satisfaction (which may or may not be a result of competition in society).

So the elimination of suffering is only possible with the elimination of people. That, of course, would never happen. So we deal. We deal with suffering when it comes, seeking solace in the arms of our loved ones. Like a pendulum that we put in motion, others have the power to relieve suffering and the power to cause it. From the moment we interact, there is the potential for suffering--we just hope that we don't have to deal with it as much as happiness. Many animals die alone. They wander off from the group in order to die alone. Animals can't experience constant suffering. (This will get touchy) They can experience constant discomfort and pain due to human abuse, but we are the only animal that can truly suffer at the hands of members of our own species. And that suffering is lasting and potent; though as I said, that suffering enables us to be happy.

Being human is a crazy thing. We are unique in the depth and breadth of our experiences. All we can do is strive to understand this short life we have and embrace it with all the faults that it may contain.

EDIT/UPDATE 1: I don't want anyone to make the mistake of thinking that I don't care about your problems. Obviously, if you just got dumped or had a bad day, I would love to lend an ear. I think anyone and everyone should, even if it's a stranger. I just had a friend message me with a very poignant anecdote and what she said/what I took away was that if we all just listened more maybe we would all have stronger relationships and more open minds and hearts. Of course I care. Death notices on Facebook are weird but they still touch my cold heart. I'm really not that much of a jerk--I just wanted to point out the communal side of suffering and how suffering alone is truly impossible (at least from it's inception).

Morality, Labor, and more Death

In recent posts I've talked about how precious life is and how peculiar the human condition can be. We're a social creature whose thriving and sanity is essentially determined by the presence of other members of our species. Additionally, we're the only species that can envision a future in which we exist, and a future in which we don't (which is incredibly depressing). The overlap is the idea that we try to fill our short meaningless existence with moments that seem to justify our humanity. Now, you can chalk a lot of what I call "mysteries" to be simple biological responses. We socialize to reproduce, we don't like to die because we will have a harder time passing on our genes when we're dead, etc. Of course, having 12 credits of psychology under my belt, I'm fully qualified to say that our fears and desires are learned behaviors that come with a more advanced understanding of our biological and metaphysical limitations.

But I'm done with that garbage for now. We'll keep it philosophical but we'll at least try to stay grounded. As humans we strive for the good life. Again, call it a fear of death or call it a natural tendency to just want a ton of crap, who knows. For Aristotle, the good life was living in accordance with happy mediums and moving as far as possible away from extremes. This we call "virtue ethics" and is not what we're talking about today. I think the point of bringing up Aristotle is to show that we as humans have tried to define our existence and conceptualize it in a set of rules that we can choose to follow or not follow. This goes way beyond the Constitution, mind you. This is called morality (which I thought wasn't the point, but apparently it is). This morality tells us that it's not nice to be not nice to people, essentially. But another interesting facet of the human condition (which again, I didn't think was the point) is that we can be cruel to people who are not cruel to us in the first place. There's a trillion examples but I'm talking about greed and more specifically, consumerism (big leap, I know).

People want a ton of crap. I want a bigger tv and a big stereo system and a huge house with a parking garage with some fast cars. Why? I don't know. None of those things are going to benefit me in any substantive way other than knowing I've got some really cool crap. Why do billionaires want more money? Because they can theoretically buy more crap. I say they can't be too busy buying crap because if they were, they wouldn't be billionaires. Billionaires are just really concerned with theoretically being able to buy a ton of stuff. And really, that's what we're all concerned with. We want to know that if we need something, we can take care of it. We also really, really like to know that if we want something, we can be impulsive every now and then. But our ultimate dream, my friends, is that if we want to be flippant and irresponsible with our money, we can. We all want to know that a gold-plated pool full of strawberry jello with diamonds in it is going to be possible if we want it.

So we go to work.

Humans are a funny sort in that we don't do anything just to survive. Yeah, some of us do and that's really unfortunate (says the upper middle class white kid), but most of us are concerned with how much excess we're going to have. After the bills and the responsibilities and eating, we want to know that we're going to have a little extra to screw with. We also really like knowing that we'll have even more extra to put away for when we're old and tired and pissed off at the world and don't want to work anymore.

I use lions a lot as examples for some reason despite not knowing anything concrete about them... well, here's another.

Take a lion pack. I don't know any actual facts about lions, but just bear with me. The male and female lions hunt because they have to feed themselves. They also forgo a little extra from that sweet, sweet gazelle to give to their cubs. Within a few years, the cubs are hunting, helping to provide for the older lions as well as themselves. The responsibility slowly shifts downwards as the generations age. The circle of life involves work. Everyone has to work.

The thing about humans that's very similar to lions is that the responsibility shifts downwards. The younger ones eventually have to take care of the enfeebled older ones. The only difference is, lion parents don't have to wait until their cubs are 22 years old to be able to sustain themselves, much less their elders.

But kids have to go to school now. You used to be able to get a job with an elementary education. Granted not a great job, but a job nonetheless. If you could read, that was a plus too. Years later, a high school education was acceptable but not absolutely necessary and hey a GED was quite alright. Years later, if you went to college (undergrad) you were set. High school education was necessary but college wasn't at all. More people started to go to get an undergrad education but those with the master's degree we're the elites. Now you can't even earn a "livable" income without a bachelors. You could get a master's degree nowadays and still worry about being homeless. WHAT'S GOING ON?

One of my favorite sayings is, "When everyone is special, no one is special." You know why? BECAUSE ONLY A FEW PEOPLE CAN BE SPECIAL BASED ON THE DICTIONARY DEFINITION OF SPECIAL. Don't you see? Once everyone is above the bar, we have to MOVE THE BAR. Everyone dreams of being rich but NOT EVERYONE CAN BE RICH. If you and 4 friends are looking a pile of 100 1-dollar bills, you all can share it--each getting 20 dollars. But you KNOW that one person in the group is a jerk and is going to take 90% of it. Now that means that the other 4 share 10 dollars which doesn't split evenly. So someone is going to get screwed. One genius in the group comes up with an idea: let's make more money! Everyone is super excited because they all get 100 dollars but now each individual dollar means less. Welcome to inflation.

The point is not inflation, obviously. It's that we all expect to get out of college and make a ton of money which just realistically isn't possible. A bazillion students (literally) graduate college every semester and they all expect to make all this money and it's simply not possible. It doesn't make logistical sense. Such is life. So we settle into mediocrity never making as much money as we would like doing something we hate and yet we continue to do it because we want to have a place to live and feed ourselves and have a car and them maybe, just maybe, have a little extra on the side to hopefully stop doing what we hate one day or maintain a modicum of sanity by blowing our extra money at a shooting range, putting up targets of our boss.

I talked a lot in the past about doing things for our ultimate survival--but the way we work is so paradoxical it's amazing. We work to survive, but we're killing ourselves but working so much at things that we hate. So why do we do it? Just to bite off a bigger piece of the pie so we can buy a bigger TV which will hopefully provide enough pleasure to justify the hours spent at the job you hate or the fact that your life is already insignificant enough without spending 40 hours of your 168 hour doing something that makes you unhappy.

Oh wait, that's 40 hours on top of the 30 minute commute EACH WAY. So that's 45 hours plus the 8 hours of sleep you HOPEFULLY get each night (but you don't because you've got too much crap to do) but let's say for argument's sake that you do get 8. That's 56 hours you spend sleeping so 101 hours of your life are either spent working or sleeping. Then you've got 67 hours of your week left to do taxes, cut the lawn, attend soccer games, fight with your wife, discipline your kids, and maybe, just maybe you'll have a few hours left to do something you enjoy--something that makes you forget about all of the garbage you have to deal with. But in those 40 hours you hope that you'll make enough money to put aside so that one day, you can hopefully devote an extra 40 hours to making your life slightly happier than it has been. The rub is that by the time that's even remotely possible, you're not young anymore. You've got arthritis and you're sight is leaving you and your doctor said you probably shouldn't be riding rollercoasters or skipping doses of your medication and really the only thing you can do is sit on your butt for what will hopefully be a productive 20 years of life looking back on all that could have been. You finally have the time to read Freud and Aristotle and learn the piano but at the point in your life, you physically can't.

And then one day you'll find, 10 years have got behind you--no one told you when to run, you missed the starting gun.

I think thoughts like these are originally what prompted the post on death. Maybe my primary interest is not death for death's sake, but life for death's sake. If life is the most precious thing we have, we sure don't act like it.

But what can we do? What's the alternative? With the media glorification of the rich and famous we can never just settle for good enough. It's biological to want to be the best and have the greatest display of wealth and I think we're all inherently lazy--so lazy we'll work ourselves to death in order to not have to work anymore. Of course, you could always be a drug dealer. The hours are probably flexible, the money is great, and if you can ignore the constant threat of imprisonment and death, it can provide a lovely life for you and your family.