unbearable lightness of being

During my dinner break out by the lake, i was rereading a section in The Unbearable Lightness of Being where the doctor talks about his relationship with women and his wife, discussing the possible roles of a man in the pursuit of women. As the book is wont to make me do, my mind quickly wandered from the book to a state of internal discussion about the descriptions of relationships.

We are trained to label all of our relationships with people – daughter, friend, student, lover, etc. These labels provide roles and those roles come with expectations. When one fails to live up to the expectations, one is seen as a bad daughter/friend/student/lover. Even within these labels, we have to evaluate the magnitude of our role there. I hated the middle school negotiations between friend and best friend. The latter implied a large committment, a stronger bond, and a greater responsibility

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in da woods

i’ve runaway for a little bit, in order to work on my thesis. a dear friend of mine has lent me his little hideaway in the middle of the woods and i’m happily rejoicing, loving the beauty of nature while being productive. there’s something fun about having to choose to get online, through a very slow connection. it really does alter my relationship with the Internet when it’s not so very automatic. alas, it definitely alters my tendencies to babble incessently into this forum…

nitemares on the web

I have to admit that i find it more unbearable to deal with the Internet every day. Rather than being a utopian environment, it brings out the collective worst in humanity. And yet hides the abusers behind a digital curtain, allowing them to be unapologetic and invasively abusive without any form of regulation to stop them. I’ve noticed a trend in my mail lately…. It used to be the case that my email was filled with messages about crazy new ideas, potential, excitement, check this out, wow, yippee. Good conversations, engaging thought, people becoming aware of the digital realm and its possibilities. Lately, it’s become the same bitchy environment that i live in on a daily basis. The he-said she-said has gotten out of control and the abuses are horrifying. My email is no longer primarily positive, but primarily negative or concerned. And for good reason.

On today’s list of interesting additions:
spammers have stopped being apologetic ’cause the regulation just ain’t working, so they won’t suffer the consequences
– Microsoft is moving to a mandatory panopticon, with no user choice
video games reduce brain activity (and what about TVs?)
Carnivore continues to get more vicious
surveillance is not just a sci-fi idea

Ok.. that’s enough. At least there are still some things out there to make me smile:
a VW bug transformer!
mathematical/multi-dimensional legos!
Google’s mirror

deadlines

I despise deadlines. They make me anxious and confused and unproductive. So, Frank’s blog entry of the day put a huge smile on my face, as he quoted Douglas Adams:

love deadlines. I love the whooshing sound they make as they fly by.

Sadly, i don’t think that my readers appreciate this attitude as much as i do.

writing == buying

Some capitalist in the sky must jump up and down everytime that i have to write a paper because i spend more money when writing papers than i do at any other point in time. Of course, all of my money goes to exactly one place. Conversely, all of my friends must hate me when i write because year after year, they get suckered into the painful process of moving my consumerist acquisitions.

Today: 1 Lacan, 1 Foucault, 2 Kafka, 3 Calvino, 1 Goffman, 1 Aronson, 1 Jung… yeah, yeah, yeah, it’s a theoretical day.