Things I overheard while talking to myself

Finals: One down, three to go.

Maybe it's just me, but I've never found them to be that stressful. It seems that if you just pay attention and do the assignments you have nothing to worry about and you should be able to breeze through the final. Then again I also only took 40 minutes to finish a final that was scheduled for an hour and a half, so I should talk. I just happen to write really fast, and that was one reason I loved college compared to high school since when you're done you can actually leave rather than have to wait for everyone else. That's why I sometimes felt like The Flash in high school (nerdy reference FTW).

Now if only I'd stop coughing up my lungs it would be hunky doory. I had intended to visit some friends at the State House the other day since I had the day off, but considering that I couldn't go five minutes without coughing up green ooze due to allergies I figured that wasn't the best idea, especially since everyone's all paranoid about this swine flu thing (to the point that Suffolk just sent us an email reassuring us that they've found no cases in Massachusetts or at Suffolk, though a quick glance at the news would tell you that too).

I've also started packing up my stuff so I can leave on Thursday, mostly cleaning out my desk. It looks like I'll be able to fit everything, though I had to grab a box from the recycling to hold the stuff from my desk.

Oh yeah, and I turned my books in the other day for money. And got 32 lousy dollars for them. 5 of which I then turned around and had to spend on "feminine products" thanks to my body's bad timing. *gah!* They also wouldn't take two of the books, so I have even more books now, but one of them is a book I'd actually considered keeping anyway since it's from that Philosophy of Race and Gender class and has some bits I wanted to read on my own. Still feels like a ripoff to get approximately one sixth of what I paid for those back. Better than nothing, but still infuriating.

Today Diversity Services invited a woman named Cathy Bao Bean, who gave a talk about being bi-cultural and how we have different "modes" because of our culture.

She was born in China and mostly raised in the US, she's married to a white artist who does stuff like paint the lawn and wear pick socks and sandals with a suit, has a bi-racial son, and is gut-bustingly hilarious while also being very deep and poignant while speaking. I also bought her book, The Chopsticks-Fork Principle, A Memoir and Manual since it includes quotes like this:

No father - especially an immigrant from China - says to his daughter, "Please, marry an artist."

Definitely have to read it. Just the intro is hilarious, I'll probably be quoting from it as I read. Diversity Services gets really good speakers at their events, though I always end up buying their books. ^_^;

And so the mighty book pile increases once again. I'll just put it after the John LeCarre that I'm only a few pages from the end of.

Oh yeah, because the book is literally sitting right in front of me on my desk, an excerpt from John LeCarre's book The Secret Pilgrim that I especially liked from the George Smiley character that seems very applicable to recent history:

"Sometimes I think the most vulgar thing about the Cold War was the way we learned to gobble up our own propaganda," he said, with the most benign of smiles. "I don't mean to sound didactic, and of course in a way we'd all done it all through our history. But in the Cold War, when our enemies lied, they lied to conceal the wretchedness of their system. Whereas when we lied, we concealed the very things that made us right. Our respect for the individual, our love of variety and argument, our belief that you can only govern fairly with the consent of the governed, our capacity to see the other fellow's view -- most notably in the countries we exploited, almost to death, for our own ends. In our supposed idealogical rectitude, we sacrificed our compassion to the great god of indifference. We protected the strong against the weak, and we perfected the art of the public lie. We made enemies of decent reformers and friends of the most disgusting potentates. And we scarcely paused to ask ourselves how much longer we could defend our society by these means and remain a society worth defending."

This book was published in 1990.

One news story I've been following lately is the one about that Madoff guy who's scammed people out of literally 50 billions dollars, and as keeps happening during this vacation I keep thinking of texts that I read last semester in various classes.

Before in the power-outage thing I kept thinking about Robert Putnam's idea of social capital as illustrated in Bowling Alone and how crisis situations like this are arguably the reason communities exist, since if you try to completely go it alone you'll be completely screwed and despite what modern people like to think we are not completely independent or able to take care of ourselves, which of course flies in the face of Emerson's "self reliant man" ideal. But when you really think about it, the self reliant man would probably be a total jerk who didn't feel the need to help anyone else because he didn't need anyone and had no sense of reciprocity, and then you'd just have a bunch of self-interested people who only occasionally bump into each other and have to keep asserting their own independence (referred to as atomism in philosophy and obviously created by a guy who'd never read a sociology textbook in his life). This does not a productive society make, as any sociologist can tell you.

So now that was have a measure of independence back I'm thinking about a book called The Rich Get Richer and the Poor Get Prison by Jeffrey Reiman and how it applies to this douchebag Madoff in terms of corporate crime vs "crimes of the poor". Reiman's main sticking point was that here in the States (and the Western world in general) don't think of corporate or white collar crime as being as damaging as murder or robbery, even though the net effects of embezzling 2 million dollars or turning a blind eye to safety regulations that result in the deaths of several workers might be exactly the same if not worse. And when you think about it corporate crime is morally even worse since it's cold and calculated, it's not like they do just it on a whim, they plan every step of it despite knowing the consequences. The law already makes a distinction and punishes more for calculated crime than stuff that's done in the spur of the moment, and these guys are real criminals doing the equivalent of 1st degree murder on massive scale when you take the net damage into account.

So now this Madoff guy has basically pulled the biggest Ponzi scheme in history, and what I hope happen is that they treat him like the massive criminal he is. I mean, really, he's taken money from charities, pension funds, non-profits, state and local organizations and kept it for himself. You can't tell me that this is less damaging than breaking into someone's house and stealing their stuff. The sheer scale of this should have people in an uproar. Think about how many people are going to lose their livelihoods or their pensions because of this prick. I say throw him in prison for life and make him give his entire fortune back. Even if we have to take care of him in prison it'll cost far less than all he's stolen, and considering how precarious the world economy is right now this greedy bastard made it a lot worse on his own.

In short: throw the damn book at him, put him away for life and toss away the key, and I'm sorry that something this big might be what it takes to make people really start to think about this.

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My parents never specifically forbade me from reading anything (being cool like that and likely trusting me to make decisions like that on my own) but I do recall one thing with an aunt of mine who was talking about the book Running With Scissors. I probably would have been about 15 at the time and asked if I could have a look at the back cover. She actually took the book out of its paper cover-thing (I have a bit of a fever so forgive me for not remembering the right word) and just handed me that to look at, since apparently she thought that even letting me hold the actual book was equivalent to handing me a machete. Granted in retrospect that book apparently is sort of very messed up, but I remember being pretty baffled that she actually did that.

At this point I'm wondering if maybe I should do a minor in philosophy, or at least explore that department a little more.

I had my first class today, Ethics 123, and I think I'm very much going to enjoy it. We did an exercise where we wrote down what our definition of "The Good Life" is, and then we got into groups based on the "8 Minute Dating" concept and briefly shared our ideas. It become obvious pretty quickly that I was approaching the question from a much more Eastern perspective than many of the other students, since I was one of the few who didn't mention anything about material wealth and approached it on a larger scale than just the individual me.

My version basically had to do with Karma and how I believe that you come into the world with neutral Karma (and I don't believe in Original Sin -- yeah, that's my UU background showing) but you can effect whether you have a negative influence on the world or a positive one. I think that a good life is one that adds to the positive, so you don't leave with any debt and have bettered the world with your existence, even (or should I say especially) if it's in a small indiscernible way. You don't have to be Mother Theresa or the Dalai Lama, but as long as you didn't make the world worse by your existence I think you lived a good life.

It was pretty obvious that I came at it from a different angle, since most of the other answers had to do with the individual self and self fulfillment, while the way I look at it is that the self and the universe are interconnected and ultimately the same thing, so what you do to help others ultimately comes back to you (once again the UU showing along with some Buddhism, Taoism, and a smidgen of Shinto for good measure). I also ended up quoting Emily Dickinson's "If I can stop one heart from breaking, I shall not live in vain" since that more or less sums up what I think.

This will certainly be an interesting class, and they apparently have an Eastern Philosophy section as well. This'll be fun. :D

Amazon.com just sent me an email saying they've processed the return for the disastrous video card incident, so I should be getting my money back within a few days. That's good, and Amazon's been very helpful throughout this entire thing.

Now if only my Kino no Tabi volume 2 would show up already. I finally resorted to pre-ordering the thing after it was delayed so many times, though that's TokyoPop's fault, not Amazon's.

Also, it looks like Jesse-cat got himself into another fight. When I picked him up earlier he made a very displeased sound like he was in pain, and when I took a look at him (while trying not to get bitten) I determined that it looks like he did something to his right rear leg, since he doesn't want me to touch it. Apparently he got into a fight earlier this morning, so that probably accounts for it. Other than the leg his mood's okay (he was begging as usual earlier) but I'll keep an eye on him before I go to work. As of right now he's migrated over from Dad's chair to sit on my while I do my PoliSci homework.

Speaking of work, I can apparently go in at 1:30 instead of 11 like I was scheduled to because we were shut down by inspectors. Um, okay. My boss told me I can come in for a few hours anyway just to get some money, but I'm wondering what prompted this.

It's likely the kerosene heater we have (which we're not technically supposed to use indoors, though the tunnel is not what one would call all the way indoors with two big doors to outside on either end) though the Evil Corporate Overlords haven't given us much choice but to use it since they're notoriously cheap pricks who won't install a decent heating system, instead buying the illegal kerosene heaters to supplement the shoddy system. *sigh* Oh well, I'll just have to make due and hope that they resolve whatever's going on before I lose too much money.

*Excuse to use blatantly fanservicey book icon*

I've been reading Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Life in Iraq's Green Zone for a little while now, and while it's a very good book that raises a lot of good points about what went wrong over there I have one advisory for future readers:

Don't read it in any place close to something you can bang your head against. Because while reading this book you'll want to bang your head against the wall because of the sheer stupidity of the people who were put in charge post-invasion. Ugh!

I was reading book that during lunch, and it was actually pretty funny when I saw one of the waitresses tilting her head to try and get a look at what I was reading. We gabbed about that for a bit, and how the author certainly knows his stuff and could get into a lot of places the other reporters couldn't since he's Indian, and apparently there are a lot of Indians in Iraq (something I didn't know until reading this book).

It's certainly an interesting book, and almost feels like Catch-22 at times, except for the fact that this story is (unfortunately) true and still happening.

You can tell that the merchandising people have latched onto The Golden Compass.

They made a Iorek Byrneson plushie.

Or, even sillier, that page has a picture of Mrs. Coulter's golden monkey as a stuffed animal. Like you'd really want that little bastard in your bed all night. I'd be afraid that it would kill me in my sleep.

At least Iorek is fairly cuddly for a giant armored ice bear who rips another bear's jaw off during a fight. But still... WTFFFFFFF?

Despite what the subject line says, no one's actually trying to kill me. It's just a lyric from The Police that made me laugh. Among other things, my Dad got me that yesterday along with some other things from both parents (mostly books, always good), nicely summed up in this photograph:

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The Triela figurine is from Jonathan. ^_^ That photo was actually mostly an accident, since I'd just put that stuff there to get it out of the way and looked over at one point and said "Hey! That's a funny picture!" And yes, that's a tiny Sig in her hand. The Rico version was even less subtle with her holding a giant Dragunov that's almost as big as she is. So yeah. ^_^

In other news, I think I might be getting a bit sick. The fact that I had 120 cars at work today by myself did a number on my throat, but luckily I strong-armed my way into a day off tomorrow. I also really need to get my hair cut hopefully before Friday, when I'm thinking of going to a Lazer 99.3 (a local radio station's) "Holiday Hangover" concert in Northampton. Tickets are only 20 dollars and hey, I'm 18! I can (theoretically) do whatever I want as long as it doesn't involve alcohol/and or is illegal. Plus it would be a new experience, and those are almost always good in some form or another. ^_^