I took my Tamiflu today oh, boy
I was the sticky man who served you eggs
And though I scooped them from the trough
Well, I just had to cough
Which I uploaded as a photograph
I wiped my nose out in my palm
No one had notice if I washed my hands
A crowd dined indifferently and stared
That spoon should be cleaned before
Nobody was really sure
If the dishwasher was churning suds
Is this somehow a consequence of raising the emerging generation with too much praise and too little correction? I take the opportunity to counter youth-criticism with the observation how crucial the youth-vote was was in making Obama prominent and in electing him. But the criticism of that generation I hear is unexpectedly specific, like how shop-owners have begun the practice of teaching their student-hires how to push a broom. 60 Minutes even devoted a story to the topic. (And where's the sense of wearing your pants below your ass?)
Magenta Griffith @ #22:
Dammit, I just ordered a deep freezer from Home Depot because they have free delivery; Sears wanted $65 to deliver, and more to take away the old one.
I rarely go there, because it isn't near my house...
Your deal seems more like the figurative equivalent of leaving the toddler-mess, and moseying out the store slow and whistling.
Sneeze, sneeze, sneeze, sneeze me (You still have to blow)
Baby sneeze, baby sneeze, sneeze me (You still have to blow)
Baby sneeze, baby sneeze then blow (You still have to blow)
Then blow, I said baby, then blow
I love you so (You still have to blow)
Baby, you know you break my heart when you drip away (You still have to blow)
I said, I said, I said I'll wipe you some other day (You still have to blow)
I said, baby, baby, sneeze, then blow (You still have to blow)
Then blow, blow baby, blow baby
I love you so (You still have to blow)
I, I love the color the packaging wears
And the way the sunlight swirls in the syrup that it bears
I hear the sound of a gentle slurp
Fight the urge to lick inside the plastic cup
I'm pickin up my cold medications
It gives me expectorations
I'm pickin up my cold medications
It gives me expectorations
Good, good, good, good -- 'spectorations
When I think of fluorescent lights... bathroom lights
The curtains undrawn, whincing in the sunrise-glair
Prima donna lord you really should have stayed there
Instead of dragging yourself in to slump in your swivel chair
And its one more sneeze I don't want to hear from you anymore
We've all gone crazy lately
Co-worker stomachs rolling round the basement floor
"And someone wipe my nose tonight -- chicken soup"
You almost had your hooks in me didn't you dear
You nearly had me roped to drive you home
Bedside-bound, hypnotized
Sweet freedom whispered in my ear
"You're a butterfly
And butterflies get taken home by
Home by cab, tip the hack, bye-bye"
...
"Someone wipe, someone wipe, someone wipe my nose tonight
Someone wipe my nose tonight
Someone wipe, someone wipe, someone wipe my nose tonight
Someone wipe my nose tonight..."
$9,695? I can kill you for half that money.
Jacque @ #269: Nosey question: does this situation bear any resemblance to family-of-origin patterns?
My parents swam the pacific ocean with daggers in their teeth and 3 kids in their arms to raise them in the US. I was born 4 years after arrival, and it's no secret decisions had to be made after pregnancy, that weren't made before. My parents came from a culture where child-raising responsibilities were delegated down the birth-order. Practicing this outside the culture of origin with no other examples, I don't think my brothers would disagree receiving this kind of upbringing wasn't optimal.
I was fortunate in never evaluating myself by the harshness of my family. I was intuitively able to elicit laughs at school with perhaps a precursor of the kind of speak you see on John Allison's "Scary Go Round" webcomic, where I felt free to try to articulate common sense, but it's funny because trying to articulate common sense is itself against common sense (if you're familiar with the webcomic, you may know what I mean). I had a recent sunday with the nieces, and I was able to elicit some strong laughter without making any kind of sense to them whatsoever.
As a teen, I started listening to old recordings of Alan Watts aired on the old WNEW station early on Sunday mornings. There was a lot of shouting back-and-forth, but the parents weren't very effective arguing for conformity against something like "isn't divesting yourself of desires itself not a desire" and "if you distrust yourself, aren't you still trusting yourself to be untrustworthy" and "no, the reason you struggled and saved for me to finish me education was so that I could do what I want to do."
In other words, for whatever the harshness of my childhood, I still managed to carve out and enforce a fairness there that I had hoped to build in my adulthood to my own tastes, but I instead wasted my youth trying to establish. For the situations now like I described above ("They weren't listening to me in the good times nor the bad"), I can either suspend all thinking that leads there (a new discipline, and one that I mostly have reason to believe is better than an addiction, but I'm discovering I'm neglecting inches-long ear-hair where I wasn't before), or I can watch my thoughts on the issue pulled into their natural resting place of my damnation.
LDR @ #206: The nice thing about neglect is that it leaves you free to think your own thoughts....
Well, if you call free being made responsible for securing work in a culture that denies any hypocrisy in explicitly reserving the privilege for itself of being indifferent to you -- except (not really,) to take every opportunity to infer offense from your behavior -- sure.
David Harmon #190: I don't think decompensation is what I'm referring to.
I specifically remember hearing Oliver Sacks in an interview commenting how the severest medical misconception is that the symptoms of sickness and illness are observable signs of the disintegration of our individuality. He said the symptoms of sickness and illness are instead observable signs our individuality is asserting itself in compensation to the damage to our systems. Sacks's explanation seemed to completely fit in with the common sense of the experience of life.
So going by this explanation, when the challenge to our health is the collapse of our immune systems itself, our symptoms actually quiet down until, say, the discoloration from the bruises or cancers overwhelm our display of ourselves. This seems to be the kind of thing the definitions of decompensation I'm finding are referring to.
A pure collapse of our defenses itself carried over to behavior seems to be more faithfully demonstrated by how the pirate comic was included in Watchmen to foreshadow a vulnerability Veidt didn't otherwise show (stupid movie). For someone exhibiting abusive behavior, the exhibition of dysfunction showing through to his or her victims still seems to be defensive behavior.
Sometimes, when everyone else around us has a flu or cold, we are so busy that our immune systems can't build any momentum to show any symptoms. Then when our responsibilities die down, our immune systems take advantage of the inactivity to knock us down, to force us into the physical inactivity that will allow it to repair our bodies.
I'm wondering if this isn't a plausible analogy to the exhibition of abusive behavior. The amicable pretense becomes an aspect of keeping sh*t together, but instead of knocking us down so that we can heal physically, our individuality (like the pale worm-like thing inside of the Darth Vader armor) is trying to articulate an urgency left unarticulated in the first place from the behavior-stifling.
Optimally, we learn to articulate the neglected urgent-issue, just like we heal physically from a cold. It's not sexy. But all the signs of healing are forms of discomfort, where all the pleasures take place afterward from being a healed individual.
Reserving for ourselves the privilege to abuse others then works much like perpetually aggravating a flu or cold. We don't get to heal, keeping sh*t together becomes part of the pathology, and the dysfunction is contagious all the while.
Insisting on forgiveness sounds a lot like trying to will your way out of a cold. How stubbornly we insist shows the limits of our experience. But holding onto a grudge too long sounds like Alan Watts's analogy to starving from eating dollar bills. What good is being right if trying to enforce fairness prevents you from healing? Maybe like Renatus's account #181, you heal, and the people who gave you so much grief can't stand your authenticity.
heresiarch @ #98:
One can act the complete bully while demanding that everyone admit that sky is blue and offering unimpeachable scientific evidence that it is true. Yet some people would then be loathe to admit that the sky is blue purely because the asserter is demanding undeserved respect for being right--and that is my point. Employing domineering social tactics makes people less willing to listen to you.
Please don't take this as a specific reaction to you, but instead as a reaction to the many occasions I've seen the behavior you are trying to rationalize: I don't know how to get from where I've ever been to a place where the behavior you're describing makes any kind of sense.
In what thread of reason or causality does refusing to "admit the sky is blue" in such a circumstance discourage bullying behavior, rather than simply make the bully the hero of his world? The first actionable rule of the Art of War roughly translates that you must follow moral law. How do events even unfold to where such a person is standing up for the plain observation of reality, if he isn't challenging authentic bullying him- or herself in the first place? Why should the supposed bully think anything else?
heresiarch @ #57: I could be wrong, but that's not what I think I'm doing. Can you point out where I [put the entire responsibility of comprehension on the presenter]?
From what Teresa cites you saying, your position on bullying text-relationships depends on analogies to inaudibility. If this is the attitude confronting bullies, then bullies may feel justified in their behavior by simply making some kind of sense, may they not?
Evan @ #61: [re:] Mike @53
Well, yeah, some part of me feels that the whole power structure of any human society is founded upon bullying, and that there are these pockets where it isn't about dominance: moments of religious awakening, bohemias, some kinds of love, literature, but that most of the time human interactions are about naked displays of power.
geekosaur @ #65: [re:] Mike Leung @53:
Employment is a voluntarily entered contract (otherwise it's arguably slavery of some form), and in cases such as management, parenting, wardens, etc. the distinction is between the right to administer (create and/or enforce) rules and the choice to play dominance head games. Even when the latter is used to enforce the former, it's bullying behavior (and arguably weakens the position of the administrator in question in some sense, although sadly it doesn't often in practice).
[Bolding mine]
With all of these conditions to allow for bullying, it kind of makes it a wonder what anyone should do with the accusation, or even the implication, they're a bully, doesn't it? Especially if the implication is taken as some kind of challege to simply make sense, like it still seems reasonable to infer from heresiarch's thread of reason.
Evan @ #28: I define a bully simply: somebody who subverts any chance for cooperative growth into an opportunity for dominance.
Isn't that also most employment situations? Because you accept payment from someone, and you literally do what he or she says. They dominate your time. Also, if some child insists his or her parent is being unfair, it may be completely at the parent's discretion to be unfair, because children can't say yes to everything at their own discretion. Are bosses and parents bullies if they aren't the friends of their employees or children.
Early in Scott McCloud's "Understanding Comics," he's on a stage trying to nail down a definition of comics as a medium. A heckler shouts out that it's comics if it has Batman, and that comics means Batman appears in it. Imagine if the heckler had left his dissent at a declaration he simply didn't understand what was being presented to him.
heresiarch seems to be putting the entire responsibility of comprehension on the presenter. This is distressing -- especially when incomprehension is the foundation of an accusation of bullying -- because the recipient claiming incomprehension may be holding onto a misconception as wrong as "Comics=Batman". You can't count on your entitlement to understanding if you protect your misconceptions with a nondescript declaration, "I don't understand you."
Constance @ 396: I didn't read / hear the Princeton experience that way. He comes under the influence of one different sort of classmate after another -- he challenges, he changes, as far as his privileged condition allows. But they all are privileged, the bespoke legacy inheritors of the earth.
Phrases like "Having decided to be one of the gods of the class..." were typical of Amory's attitude of his stay as Princeton. Practically the first thing he did after setting his bag down was to people-watch and size up the Princeton social-personas. Socializing came first for Amory. The reason Amory marveled at becoming acquainted with Burne in their last year was specifically because Burne was the schollar you're crediting Amory for being, and Amory became completely indifferent to him socially immediately in their first year.
http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/This_Side_of_Paradise/Book_One/Chapter_2
Constance @ 396: What most changes Amory is the end of the family money, not the loss of the girl. He finds a new girl. He's always found a new girl.
Unless I missed it, the book does not show Amory recover from the one occasion his heart is broken. And I think the book ends with him refusing to liquidate the house he grew up in in St Paul for purely sentimental reasons.
Constance @ 396: He, in company iwth Joseph Campbell's hero's journey have done a great deal to create a great number of meaningless cookie-cutter boring scripts.
I only brought up McKee because Fitzgerald's cookies seem to fit his cutter. Blaming Campbell and McKee for bad writing seems to make as much sense as blaming words for bad writing. The standardization of language as embodied by the dictionary seems very much like the principles of archetypal representation. You don't have to use every word in the dictionary to write a book, either. You can say someone should come up with a better pantheon, or a better way to present a pantheon, of archetypal representation. But, until someone does, they are the only games of their kind in town.
dlbowman76 @ 345: That's a powerful statement...but it could also be argued to be inherently selfish. I know I'm banging on this "utility" drum relentlessly, but hear me out. Being deeply emotionally touched is *valuable*, I certainly wouldn't argue that. But does it do good? Does it improve me as a person? You're right that reading does have a deep personal benefit and makes us feel good, but someone of a less sympathetic bent might say - so does alcohol.
Unless someone can provide a better definition, the baseline for respect seems to be validating someone's account of what they're going through. But, experience being the contrast to reason, and reason being the contrast to experience (this contrast perhaps forming the foundation of the observation "you can't possess your cake and eat it, too"), the most super-incisive tools for articulating our experiences, which seems to be Jungian analysis, is beyond the access of 99.44% of the population of what we consider the industrialized world (if you don't include the people who have gotten it wrong). The most accessible tools are art. And somewhere in the middle of super-incisive and accessible is written fiction. It is the conventional means by which we fulfill to the best of our ability the principle that you are qualified to call things what they are when you know what you are. You may as well observe that words are not interchangeable with the things they represent, and wonder what *their* utility is.
dlbowman76 @ 342: Perhaps the deeper question is *why do we read* when it is not necessary to our personal or professional survival?
Well, when black ink-marks on layers of cellulose can reach into your chest and show you your own beating heart, how many things are better *than* reading?
Constance @ 332: I don't read that as a plot or a conclusion.
Amory has a long discussion with a capitalist as he makes his broke way back to his cradle of discussion and debate, Princeton, the very bastion of legacy privilege in this country. This is just one of many long discussions that fill the book, about anything from fast girls to the value of Princeton's eating clubs, the deep, eternal significance of Amory & his friends' existence in the world, to the value of the artist.
Amory treated Princeton as an opportunity to develop a pretense with which to socialize, and as far as he devoted his time to its practice rather than reasoning it through, I don't think it can be said he debated much of anything at all.
This Side of Paradise seems to provide all the events that constitute a plot on even the Robert McKee scale:
- the main character was driven from his comfort-zone (when he moved from enjoying the romantic attention of a classmate to actually kissing her),
- he proceeds to dismiss the 19th century as dead and an unsuitable foundation for existence,
- he loses the girl he's set on, and,
- like some kind of socialist-Ayn-Rand, he frames selfishness as a virtue by demonstrating how it can serve as the infrastructure that supports everything.
It's act followed by tiny act, etc. Raiders of the Lost Ark is also act followed by act followed by act, etc, but I've yet to hear anyone argue it had no plot.
Constance @ 36: [This Side of Paradise] is cut-up, without conventional chapters or breaks. It quotes in full the popular songs of the day, as well as mention other popular culture practices and products. This was the first fiction to do so, whereas now these have become signatures of either careful historical research or lessons from Bill Gibson, or product placement to offset production costs. Nor is there any real plot or conclusion.
This Side of Paradise seemed to have a defined plot: Amory Blaine was a narcissistic Princeton alum whose experiences, romantic then martial, couldn't be reconciled with the -ism-movements of the previous century. His being rejected by the Zelda stand-in caused him to realize his own narcissism had its own denying himself a cake by keeping it quality to it, and reconciled Humanity's narcissism with funding everything from a cap on ownership.
But Amory wasn't able to gain any traction because his capitalist-foils were, as we might say today, not reality-based. As a carry-over from the -ism-movement in question. And as far as I know, Fitzgerald was right. I think if you can stick $5M -10M in the bank and earn enough to fly first class every day for the rest of your life from the interest, you categorically have "enough," and you can "keep score" from the taxes above that you pay. And if you instead feel the need to let Bernie Madoff grow your $5M without a solid understanding what he's doing, I'm not really sure of your basis for my sympathy if you discover your $5M gone.
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| 2007 | 13 |
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