My Old Blog

I am not bashful about the fact that I was a cute kid. I mean, come on….Macaulay Culkin ain’t got shit on that. I should’ve been Home Alone or something….Brady Bunch, Partridge Family, anything. I feel cheated. Why couldn’t I have had the psycho parents that turned me into a child star? Why couldn’t I have been a pre-teen alcoholic?

At least then I could have a career making fun of everything on VH1’s “I Love the 80s”. I wonder how much that pays? I am good at making fun of everthing. I bet I would be at the top of the pay scale. I might be able to get a gig on the Surreal Life too. I think that show is hilarious.

People think Macaulay Culkin grew up ugly. If you’ve seen him lately…maybe on Celebrity Poker since he certainly isn’t acting….he isn’t ugly. He turned out to be a fairly average looking adult….which is a far cry from the “cutest kid on the planet” mantle he bore in childhood. Macaulay Culkin maxed out his looks at around 12 years old. That sucks for him.

Maybe it is best that I wasn’t a child star? I would hate to think I peaked at 12….or maybe it wouldn’t be so bad. He is a gazillionare.

I remember in High School, and especially College, I didn’t really like Spring Break. Why?

I didn’t do shit for weeks after I got back. In High School I guess it didn’t make much of a difference since I didn’t do shit anyway, but in college it would end up hurting my grades right in the middle of the semester…then I’d have to study for my exams so I could bring my grades up to something respectable.

In fact, most vacations simply leave me wanting more. When I come back, after a week or so, or a long weekend, I am simply reminded how much my regular life sucks.

Vacations themselves might be fun, but most of them are not so relaxing since you try to cram as much as you can into your time-off….which isn’t really time-off at all if you are trying to cram everything you can into each day. I don’t need a vacation to feel hurried….I achieve that everyday regardless.

After you finish your vacation….that is the part that gets me. Let’s say you do achieve some trivial level of relaxation. You go back to work to find that relaxation does not serve you very well at the office.

You feel more rushed and stressed than usual since you have become unaccustomed to it. You notice how quickly people walk through the halls, and how tired everyone looks. Too much is always happenning at the same time.

You take a vacation to refresh your energy, to reprepare yourself for your life….but when you come back work seems worse, not better.

Go figure??

I did not write the following piece but I certainly have expressed these same sentiments many times. It is a clever way to put it though. I admit that.

What would the game of basketball look like if it followed the same rules as the “real world”?

First, I would charge an admission fee not only to watch the game but to play in it. And the more one pays, the longer one gets to stay in the game.

Second, there should be a price paid for each shot taken, and the easier the shot, the more it should cost.

Third, as for fouls, one should be able to pay the referees, so that they never call any fouls on you (or walking or double dribble violations for that matter).

Fourth – and maybe most important – there is no good reason that the baskets should be the same height for both teams. It should be possible for the team that pays more to have its basket lowered, and for double that amount to have the basket the other team is going for raised.

Under present rules, those players who are taller and better coordinated and can run faster and jump higher have all the advantages. My rules would exchange the advantages enjoyed by these people for other advantages that would benefit a different group, one that has been poorly served by basketball as now played. That group is the rich. With my rules, the rich would possess all the “talent” (what it takes to win) and – more in keeping with what occurs in the rest of society – never lose a game.

This illustrates pretty well the environment we’ve created in the US.

On the court in the real game of basketball, beside the fame and pay, the best TEAM wins. The best players are the ones that make the players around them better. That is why we love basketball. We are rewarded for what we know is the best in us.

We live in a world that rewards power and money, all the while preaching that the meek shall inherit the earth, that a camel shall pass through the eye of a needle before a rich man enters the kingdom of heaven, and what is done to the least of us is done to all of us.

Those values are in direct contradication.

That is my single biggest issue with Capitalism, the “profit motive”, and the “its just business” mentality. It somehow expects us to abandon our most dearly held values….so that we can buy and make more stuff.

For a lot of people that “stuff” is food….I understand that decision. There is no morality for a starving man. However, for alot of us…it isn’t food. We’re held hostage to a cycle that created the very spiritual bankruptcy we’re trying to escape.

Have you ever heard the term “business decision”? Why would a business decision be any different than any other decision? Does it need its own naming convention? Are “business decisions” some sort of justification for what would be considered immoral in private life??

It is unrealistic to expect people to be able to follow one set of values in private life and another in business. People are not so pluralistic. They break or become numb if there is no consistency between there values and their actions.

My point, and one that I have been thinking about for years, is that Capitalism is a value system….not an economic model.

Life looks like the game of Basketball described above, but we preach a game of Basketball much like the one we play, one that rewards teamwork and people who take care of each other…which is why it appeals to us so much.

If we leave the “free market” to do what it likes, we will continue to resemble the game of basketball described above. We must make it behave using laws and government….or it will make us immoral.

I haven’t posted anything in about two weeks, and I just noticed it. I can’t say there is a particular reason for that. I haven’t been any more or less busy than usual.

I guess I’ve just been distracted?? Not really. Maybe I haven’t thought anything good? Well, I can’t say I’ve reinvented the wheel in the past two weeks or anything, but my thoughts are about as good as usual. Take that for what its worth.

Actually, I know why. I went out of town last weekend, and I usually post on the weekend….I just haven’t gotten around to doing it during the week.

I played tennis tonight. I bowled yesterday. I played tennis on Tuesday. I think I did something Monday too….just can’t remember what.

I guess its a matter of priority. I can say for certain that right now my priority is sleep. It is past midnight, which is too late for the kid…or at least it will be tomorrow.

I should have some sort of update in the next few weeks on any number of items of import(ance). I am moving apartments. I am moving floors at work. I am switching roles at work. I may get a new job altogether. I am going to Peru for three weeks.

Change is very non-traumatic for me.

I went to Barnes & Noble today to look at travel guides. There is a sense of anticipation when you read about some far off place and know you’ll soon be there.

I’ve used every major budget travel guide in existence at one time or another. I favor Let’s Go because it is written by Americans and they rank their picks from best to worst. It is a judgmental travel guide, and that is useful most of the time since you often have no basis for your own judgement when you’re in a new place.

The problem with Let’s Go is that it doesn’t have the permanent staff that Lonely Planet does. Let’s Go is published by Harvard University Press…only Harvard degree seeking students are allowed to be contributors (I know this because I contacted them once about a job); they simply don’t have the manpower to cover every country.

Lonely Planet is a worldwide network of grizzled veterans who have managed to make their living in and around the travel industry. They are often expats, writers, and photographers that settled in a country or were raised there. Lonely Planet guides are not opinionated and are more like reference guides, meant to facilitate, not really recommend.

Because Lonely Planet is written largely by adult expats who no longer live in the US and probably haven’t for years, it has a very different feel than Let’s Go, penned by a bunch of over-achieving Harvard undergrads on an extended Spring Break. Travel veterans enjoy discovering, they do not like to be told where to stay or what to do. They want to stumble on great places, not be herded to them. Lonely Planet is terse and full of facts…not really a great read. Let’s Go is full of interesting stories and dinner table trivia. Let’s Go spoon feeds you. Lonely Planet treats you like an adult.

I still like Let’s Go, but even though they had a Let’s Go Peru (didn’t have one for Bolivia), I still chose the Lonely Planet. I have come to expect its dry delivery and extreme attention to detail (although on occasion I have found it to be wrong). Also, I know that the Let’s Go crowd is not even likely to GO to Peru. I wonder how successful that title is.

In this case, choosing Lonely Planet ensures a greater chance of running into other travelers. I figure mostly Australians and some S. Africans will travel to Peru and Bolivia. It is too far for Europeans and all the Americans will be at Panama City for Spring Break. Everyone outside the US uses Lonely Planet, and it is an Australian company.

Any American that happens to be down there will likely follow the same logic as me, so they’ll have Lonely Planet too. If I remember, I think I’ll keep track of how many Let’s Go guidebooks I see.

There is also the possibility of traveling without a guidebook at all, which I did one time. It still works out, but it is nice to know where the Internet Cafes are without having to search all over the city/town/village.

Slightly related to all this is that I found out my cell phone would work in both Bolivia and Peru wherever coverage is available. I thought for about half a second to bring it; maybe get a picture phone or something. Then I realized people might actually call. That isn’t really a vacation if you’re available 24/7. As always though, I will be available by mental telepathy.

Also, I think I will put together a very simple weblog for my trip separate from this one. I will base the interface on one of two pictures.

Which do you like the best??

 

Work, sofa, beer, tennis, work, sleep, food.

That pretty much sums up my life. It is much less exciting to be “settled”. Maturity seems to me to be largely the inability to break away from one’s routine. That isn’t really mature at all….it is just inflexible.

The routine isn’t always bad though. I like work sometimes. They certainly need me, so I feel a certain responsibility to make sure it doesn’t all go to hell in a handbasket. I like tennis. I like to sleep.

So am I complaining? I don’t know. I enjoy parts of the frantic, endless achievement of work. I enjoy my distractions that keep me sane.

I’ve partly crossed this bridge before. When I was younger I had a self-reinforcing need to examine the significance of what I did. Every answer I found, I asked another question. It was intellectual quicksand. The more I asked, the deeper I sank.

Because at some point, many questions away from the original reality, you come up empty. Every line of logic, no matter how elegant, ends at vanishing point where reality meets the great unknown.

Everything is made of the 4 earth elements: Earth, Wind, Fire, and Water. No, it is all made of Atoms. No, Protons, Neutrons, and Electrons. True, but all of that is made of Quarks spinning in different directions. But Quarks are made of Cosmic Strings vibrating at different frequencies……keep asking the questions and one day we’ll make a telescope that can reach so far out into space you’ll see the back of your own freaking head!!

And then we’ll back to the original question: Would someone remind me what the hell we are supposed to be doing here??

I got a lot happier overall when I starting policing how many questions away from reality I would allow myself to venture. If you can answer the first few with any satisifaction….I say that is enough.

When I started work last March I imposed on myself a one year question moratorium: No questions for a year. Whether or not I “like X” or if “Y is meaningful” was only allowed as a means to pass time. I could ask just a few questions, and I was not allowed to take action on anything I thought.

I think this has been a sound policy and largely successful. However, I don’t want to be ostrich and my year is about up.

I wonder if I will continue my question cease-fire?

Is a drug-induced sense of well-being the same as “real” happiness?

I think the likelihood of something like this happening is quite high. I also think it might be sooner, rather than later.

If you could take a pill that would make you feel happy, would you really be happy? Would you care? Is there really a difference?

What a great question!! Actually there are already a wide variety of measures that can get you close to the happiness pill: Sleep, exercise, beer, leisure, and sex to name a few.

But with a cool pill, even in the absense of all those things, even if everyone on the planet hated your freaking guts….you could still be happy.

That is bad news….for civilization. If people could be happy doing anything, then they would do everything. Cause and effect could be decoupled. You would no longer have to take prudent action to make yourself happy…you could do anything under the sun and it wouldn’t make any difference….you’d have a smile on your face all the way to the end of the world.

Or maybe if everyone got happy, they’d all want to do good things?? When we are happy we feel nicer, and more inclined to treat people with respect. Maybe the world would be a better place if we all got drugged up on happiness. Imagine being stuck in a traffic jam all morning yet showing up to work with a wink and a smile! Maybe it would be like one big Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood.

And productivity?? Economic output would plummet. People use money as a surrogate for happiness. They buy stuff to make them feel better temporarily, to alleviate the anxiety of life….but that is only if life makes us anxious. No need to buy our happiness when we can swallow it in pill form….although I bet the pills would be expensive.

Or maybe productivity would go up? Recent business research shows that happy, positive people are more engaged and creative in their work. Maybe we’d all get rich? Although I’m unsure what we’d need all that money for if not to divert outselves from our unhappiness.

I think we’d spend it on video games….and in these video games people would be really unhappy. It would be novel and entertaining to us. Regardless, if we were all happy weekly status meetings at the office would be alot easier to sit through.

You know what I really think would happen?? I think the brain would revolt. It wasn’t made to be happy all the time.

And I know this is an imaginary drug. You could make it non-addictive…and non-damaging, right? Wrong. I don’t think we have the wiring for that. If a pill makes us happy, then two pills would make us happier. Sound familiar? We already have happiness pills….most of them are illegal and come from Amsterdam or Colombia.

If we were happy all the time, the part of the brain that makes us happy would get tired and unable to sustain the effort of all those endless days of smiles, candy canes, and bunny rabbits.

And in some sense happy is just the absense of negative emotions anyway. If you were always happy, I imagine you wouldn’t be quite so happy about it. Happy is a better than average mood. How can we be better than average all the time?

And besides, being happy all the time isn’t all its cracked up to be. Who doesn’t enjoy waking up in a shitty mood and drinking oneself into a stupor of self-pity?? I know I do!!!

I’ve spoken in the past about the quest for happiness. I admit it amuses me to think about. At the risk of appearing narcissistic, I will quote myself on this matter:

This brings us to today, where it is assumed that happiness is a birthright. It is no coincidence that unhappiness has increased as a result. As I have found through experience, thinking you must always be happy can itself become a source of unhappiness when you find it is impossible to attain, thus believing that it is some defect in yourself or unfairness of the world that is impeding your eternal inner peace.

As far as the question of whether or not I would care that my happiness was fake: Although I have no experience in this matter and it is purely a mental exercise…I would say it wouldn’t much matter to me.

I could sit peacefully on the hillside enjoying the view (which might be of a trash dump for all I cared) while the non-pill-users could get together an angry support group to protest the “reality cheaters”. Misery loves company. Thats why people keep telling me to get married I figure.

As far as whether or not there is a difference between “real” happiness and pill-form happiness: I think not. Only the unhappy would be troubled by such a question.

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What do you think? What would happen if they came out with a happiness pill? Would you take it?

Not many people can review their own thoughts like I can. I have nearly a decade of personal journals and saved emails.

My first saved email at my Yahoo account is from 1998 to mezmrin@aol.com:

i got this new e-mail address that i can access from anywhere, so I don’t have to have my own computer. you can write me here when I’m in taiwan, or even when i’m travelling if i happen to stop by an internet cafe. call me a fool; i’ve got some news about myself and some young girl that i work with that might interest you. alright, i’m out,

dude

Hey, in 1998 webmail was still pretty new. I seem pretty amazed by it. I have no idea who the “young girl that i work with” is. My memory isn’t what it used to be….and it was never that good.

I remember Billy Joel was talking about playing his old songs live and needing the sheet music. Sometimes he’d read words he’d written and think, “Man, that’s pretty good. I forgot I’d written that.”

That’s the way I feel. I forget some of the stuff I said altogether and with other stuff I think, “I couldn’t have said it better myself…” But I guess I did say it myself.

Here is an excerpt from an email a year later, when I was about to leave Taiwan. I must’ve had a fever or something. I seem sort of frantic.

phewwww..
i am really sick now….the phone went out today and i have spent all morning trying to get it fixed so i can make calls about my tickets and such….the apartment is empty….the flowers are dead in the corner…my eyes water all the time…i think i’m still going into work just because i figure i don’t care and it can’t get any worse…emily asked me some questions about the apartment today when i went to dropped off the homework in Tanshui…the guards want the money for March (fat chance they get that..hehehehe)and she said something about my chinese roommates needed to call about when the lease ends…i don’t care anymore…i think its gonna be ok. maybe she is suspicious…i hope it keeps her up at night…..i’ve taken care of the major things except keeping my bags somewhere. India may be off again because the taj mahal is fucking far from katmandu…maybe i’ll fly..or i’m thinking about going to angor wat in cambodia, but there is civil war..and its hard to cross overland….I spent all day yesterday running around taipei looking at travel books, and cameras…only to buy nothing, all sick, raining….i drank some Starbucks and i think it threw my brain into delirium…i was walking around reminiscing about when i first got here…fuck…..i’ve been here too long..

Man….those were the days…sort of. I was very sick, but somehow I’d worked myself up into a mad pulse of energy….sickness be damned. I had my eye on the goal: Escape. Like the Millenium Falcon from the exploding Death Star.

Fast forward about two years and I wrote this email from Spain. This one is a little different. I not only remember it, but reading the words now makes me remember how I felt, where I wrote it, the day, and what happened after I left.

What an incredibly brief and wonderful focal point this was. It takes the sum of a person’s life to occasionally make one feel that at that moment you are better at being you that you’ve ever been before.

my life just changed again forever…i love it…its quite a long story, i´ll tell you when i get home, but this place has been every bit as good as groningen as far as just having fun, and the life and mood, of course everything from now till forever will far short of holland as far as personal growth and just being at that age, but all the people here are at the age we were then and i saw it happening, the way it is changing their lives, the way they will always remember salamanca, its a beautiful thing…i haven´t been this happy in…..a long time….i´m the funniest i´ve ever been…i laugh all day every day, and there are all these people that laugh with me…..i met a girl even…that is too long to give account of now, but for me to really like a girl after so so long just seeing them as the opposite sex suprised even me, i didn´t know i was still capable. Unfortunately i didn´t meet a friend like good ol´ Pete, but i feel blessed for what i have had. I made A´s and B´s in my
classes..which suprised me too, because i haven´t studied any, unless you count speaking bad spanish, wasted, to some girl at a club at 5 in the morning as practice. I got in at 7am last night, 8 the night
before….i´ve been partying like a rock star, and its been such fun. I´m going to shave my head and catch a bus to morocco tonight at midnight…me, the journal, a few books, and the thought that I´ve done the best i could here…I´m content…I´m younger than I´ve ever
been. For me to say I´ve been lucky is almost blasphemy because i know little of it has been luck, but I´ve been lucky still. Its so hard to recover from the time of your life. the years keep rolling
by, and there is so much for me to miss, because there has been so much for me to love.

elliott

It took only a few minutes to write that, but in a hundred tries and a year of revisions I’d never get even close to saying it again quite as perfectly.

My life has come together like that so well only a handful of times. It is the hope that one day I can revisit that feeling that wakes me in the morning.

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I always find it really interesting to go back and look at what I was thinking at a certain time. I wouldn’t guess anyone else would though.

I’ve already written my next entry, but I always promise myself not to post after I’ve been drinking.

I always end up rambling about nothing and it makes no sense. I’ll clean it up and it’ll be online by this evening.

On another note, I’ve decided to move out of my apartment complex and move in with someone I know that has a house nearby. I’ll end up saving about 300 bucks a month. Thats a lot of money.

I could say a bunch of crap about the history of Peru, the Inca ruins of Machu Picchu, the mines of Potosi, or the jungles of Bolivia…I’m great at looking up all that information….but I don’t feel like it.

I haven’t the slightest idea why I picked Peru. I also thought about Ecuador, Panama, Nicaragua….I also wanted to go back to Eastern Europe…but decided at least I want to go somewhere I can brush up on my Spanish a bit.

Although that is largely wishful thinking. I’m sure spend most of my time talking to English speaking travelers and use my Spanish to say things like, “Cuanto cuesta?” “Donde esta el bano?” and “Otra cerveza por favor”…..and perhaps a few less well known phrases like “Quieres acostarse conmigo?” “Creo que me voy a desmayar. El cuarto esta girando.” and “Come mi culo”. Learning a foreign language in the United States is largely a waste of time…at least as far as practicality is concerned.

Another thing that is largely useless in the United States is knowledge of geography. Where is Iraq? It is in the Middle East. Where is the Middle East? Just left of the Far East. It doesn’t matter anyway. It is just some far off place where people make our Gap jeans and drill oil from the desert to fuel our traffic jams.

That last comment was brought on by the large number of people that have responded, “Where is that?” when I told them where I was going.

Here is a map of Peru in relation to the rest of S. America. If you don’t know where S. America is, it is just south of Central America, which is not coincidentally located Centrally between North and South America. If you don’t know where North America is…..then it is unlikely you have the intelligence to read what I am writing.

You can look at the pictures though: