Category: Thoughts

I’ve been thinking about the way that people use humor to deal with tragedy. Like the jokes about dead babies that began to appear around the time of Vietnam reports of massacres of innocents. Or the jokes about shuttle disasters (Had dandruff? Really? Oh yeah, they found his head and shoulders on the beach).

I love funny things. I think humor is the best way to cope with insoluble problems or tragedies or misfortune, or just the difficulty of life. Sometimes it’s not related to anything in particular, and sometimes it’s topical. Best recently: Guardian article about Saddam and Bush having body doubles, and two different LiveJournals purporting to be by Saddam Hussein, and best of all, the Kim Jong Il LiveJournal, detailing how painful it is to be ignored by Bush, like some cross between international terror and Bridget Jones.

Therefore, I hereby resolve to be funnier and enjoy life more. I resolve to be a funny, charming gentleman who is always ready with a joke to lighten the mood on any appropriate occasion. In other words, I am a single man in my twenties aspiring to be a swingin’ bachelor of years gone by.

This does imply certain obligations, however. I must always keep on hand the following items: eggs, cream, oranges, (or at the very least, orange juice), and champagne (by which I mean inexpensive California sparkling wine). This will enable me to produce a fantastic breakfast at a moment’s notice for anyone who cares to drop by of a weekend morning, or to stay the night. Like maybe my parents or my brother visiting from out of town.

Sleeping around like a two-bit whore isn’t really a productive reaction to any of this, and it’s not even funny, but it beats lying around feeling sorry for myself and freaking out about the war. Besides, I’ve already priced out the work it would require to turn a barely-insulated fourth-floor studio into a bomb shelter or airtight panic room, and it’s way out of my price range.

People who believe sincerely in something can be blind to the facts. Sometimes, it’s funny, like the guy demanding a cervical exam because he’s convinced he’s actually a woman.

Sometimes it’s harmful, as in the case of Dick Cheney’s energy task-force which more or less created and exacerbated the California energy crisis.

Sometimes, it’s both laughable and fatal. Just look: Congress has voted us a day of prayer and fasting, while the radicals worry about the religious right and the religious right gears up for a mass conversion campaign. To try and deflect terrorism and criticism, US students abroad are pretending to be Canadian.

It all begins to make sense when you see headlines like this: Price of Darkness Quits Bush Team. Conflict of interest rules, apparently.

Achievable goals. Sane list of tasks. Pressure is exciting but not overwhelming. Going home for lunch. Corner pharmacy open on weekends. Meetings with my boss Carlos that always help organize and focus. Taking my summer pants out of storage. Knowing how to salvage the shirt I spilled bleach on. A bar crawl for peace. Waking up to sunlight and then going back to sleep and still making it to work on time. Chocolate. Trail mix. Frank Black. Flirting over IM with people I have never met. Learning to enjoy singleness. Trying to persuade Helen to use the Darth Vader march as her wedding theme.

Someone told me today that he reads my site with morbid fascination. I think that might be a compliment but I’m not sure.

I myself am morbidly fascinated by the world around me. I read all the news I can stomach.
The Motley Fool news summary grabbed my eye today: Halliburton has a $1B contract rebuilding Iraq (again.) The article doesn’t mention any conflicts of interest. Maybe because that’s obvious?

The Fool does come through with this little pearl of wisdom:

“I don’t read no papers, and I don’t listen to the radio, either. I know the world’s been shaved by a drunken barber, and I don’t need to read about it.” — Walter Brennan (1894-1974), actor.

Good point. One of my co-workers would agree. He gets annoyed by everyone else’s morbid war-obsession.

But I’m obsessed. I know I am. I can’t stop reading and spinning and thinking. There’s a great take on neologisms and slogans over at Carol Lay’s Story Minute. An interview with a British reporter who’s seen it all before, and apologizes for making comparisons to WWII. An unapologetic editorial about Stalingrad and morass. And meta-coverage of Iraqi TV.

I don’t even read whole articles any more. Once I’ve loaded the page I’m on to the next. Sometimes I bookmark them as I go, and then come back later to find a dozen or so unread outdated articles. It’s the sort of thing that can inspire morbid fascination: Google News is my only friend.

AKMA points me to the fact that today is the anniversary of the murder of Archbishop Oscar Romero, a tireless advocate for peace in El Salvador who was gunned down while giving mass. The day before his muder, he gave a sermon that included the statement

In the name of God, in the name of this suffering people whose cry rises to heaven more loudly each day, I implore you, I beg you, I order you: stop the repression.

A lot of people I know are crying, or gnawing at their fingernails, or drinking heavily. But I’m laughing. Laughing at Rumsfeld and thinking, maybe he should get a sitcom like Seinfeld. I’m laughing at the fact that there’s an Autobot in the Army. In other words, I’m as terrified as everyone else, and dealing with it by making really ugly jokes.

One time playing Scattergories with some friends, everyone was asked to think of a bad habit beginning with the letter J. Most of the group picked the obivous (and not actually bad) habit. The winner said “jingoism.”

So when you start to say you support that war because it’s in America’s interest, stop and think. First off, America includes more than just the United States. Second, go-it-alone is not in anyone’s interest. And third, consider yourself and your nation in context.

I don’t always think religions have the moral high ground, but most of them are opposed to this war. The WTO, a natural US policy ally if there ever was one, thinks we’re charging off a cliff, economically. Meanwhile, we’re changing the names of food in the congressional cafeterias. Administration experts are joining the chorus of journalists who decry the monomanaical focus on killing Saddam.

This isn’t some fifth column, outside-agitated, dirty longhair hippie crowd. The diminishing, increasingly strident group known as “middle America” needs to wake up and notice that manifest destiny went out with the free-ranging buffalo and the smallpox-laden blanket. They’ll figure it out, eventually. The question is, are you going to think about it, and learn it on your own, or are we all going to be suffer for your self-abuse?

More Ready.gov parodies: via email, via mailing lists.

I’m not so much interested in the Department of Homeland Security any more though. I’d rather look into the Department of Cryptogramic Botany, or maybe Invertebrate Zoology. The Senate Department of Urban Development (Berlin) has a wonderful walking-tour page. Maybe I should just go to the Complaints Department.

In the art department, I’m fond of the Dirty Wallpaper site, which has some nifty graffiti and so forth, and Davegraphics. But if you spend too much time in that department, you’ll get an art degree and be poor.

Speaking of poor, my dear friend’s younger sister arrived in town this week, in the company of a gentleman who goes by the name of Dolores. I think it was Dolores, I may have misheard, but it sounded something like that. An odd name for anyone, especially a boy. May be a nome de guerre, or perhaps a mere alias. The two are quite the merry pranksters, though, and their vigor has filled my friend’s week with awkward, silent reproach. You see, the youngsters are youthful swashbucklers for justice and street credibility, and they disapprove of my friend’s lifestyle and line of work as though she were a sodomite. In other words, she’s working for the man and they’re fucking hippies.

“Danger, war, prison disaster, a tide of heartbreak and human misery…”

This past summer there was a nationwide abduction scare. Before that it was sharks. Remember satanic cults and daycare child molestors? This week we’re all about the Elizabeth Smart hubub in the news. (Thought it was Jessica at first…) Before that, the Columbia and Challenger tragedies. Do you remember Heaven’s Gate, the suicidal cult of web developers from the 90s? It’s true that there are very real dangers and very real tragedies, but many of the items that fill the news these days aren’t. And
it’s often hard to tell the difference.

An anonymous reader sent me an essay he wrote shortly after the Heaven’s Gate suicides, addressing differences between real tragedies, from which we can learn, and faux tragedies, which are mere spectacle. It is included, in its entirety, below.
Continue reading “Fearmongering Hysteria”

What’s with my current focus on eating disorders? I guess I’ve always been fascinated by the way people treat their bodies violently, especially the advocates of that behavior. In the past I spent a lot of time researching body modification and drug abuse. But recently it’s been diet and eating disorders.

I’m finding that exercise and diet occupy more of my time recently: I choose my food more carefully than the days when I subsisted on pizza and soda, and I’m a regular gym-goer. My gym membership includes a subscription to Men’s Fitness, and I’ve read that beauty mags are correlated with eating disorders. But it’s not unhealthy, I don’t think, at least not yet. I can feel that pull though. It’s the same one that makes me wonder if my morning OJ would go better with vodka, or if I should just call my ex girlfriend again, and again, and again.

I’m at 158 pounds now, and my goal weight is 160, at which point I’m going to focus on bringing my body fat back down to around 10%, from the approximately 12 percent that it’s at now. I’m muscular now, and it looks good. My shoulders are bigger. I’ve lost an inch from my waist and gained a half-inch at the neck and one in the shoulders. But maybe I’d be better at 165, you know? I see guys with much larger, much better defined shoulders who are about my height, and I think, hey, I could do that. There’s a lot of room to improve my workouts just by actually planning and scheduling them instead of doing whatever I feel like.

I think I can still can distinguish between the guys who are unreasonably large, especially the ones who are juicing, and the guys who are merely bigger and stronger than I am. But at what point does my view of my body begin to diverge from reality? I’ve asked women what they think is “too muscular” and they respond that they aren’t sure, but I’m not it.

To me, it sounds like a challenge.