Profile 2: A person in a successful relationship, in a career that gives them time and challenges, facing future obstacles, but loving their life at the moment.

Profile 3: A person in a happy relationship, with very-loved children, who has seen the worst of the worst, but has prevailed through tenacity and talent.

Question: Is it likely that when you ask them for advice in a certain situation, they will all give you identical advice?  It depends on the situation somewhat, but generally the answer will be ‘no.’

Prima Facie Analysis: In choosing who to ask for advice, you are essentially prejudicing the chances of your future actions.  A person who has lived through more shades of moral gray area will tend to be more permisive than one who has never found themselves in questionable situations.

Concern: Sometimes there are some people you just can’t ask for advice.  Sometimes you only have one or two people you can ask for advice.

Worry: Some people only surround themselves with happy people.  Some people only surround themselves with funny or smart people.  Some surround themselves with yes-men.

Secunda Facie Analysis: The type of person you are has a huge impact on who you feel comfortable with, which has a huge impact on who your friends and consiglieres are….  which could be absolutely terrible..

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Have you ever been writing an answer on a test and you’re fairly certain it’s wrong, but you write it anyway because the alternative answer sounds even more wrong?

That happened to me yesterday.

But more importantly, I just realized that I’d unnecessarily recreated a concept.  Last week, when I wrote my Callooh! Callay post, and last year when I invented the concept of an anti-life, I thought I was being bright and making a useful concept.  I didn’t stop to wonder if anyone had thought about it before, I just went with it.

But someone had already created it.  Specifically, Otto Binder and artist George Papp in issue 68 of Superboy.  I’m talking, of course, of bizarro world.

Now, I hate superman for many reasons (some of which Steve will probably point out in the comments).  So I didn’t think about bizarro world when I recreated the concept.  But now that I realize it is the same thing as anti-world, I feel like a guy on Linux in a world of PC.

My only consolation is that bizarro world is the opposite of the DC universe, not our own universe. (Believe me, the metaphysics of this bother me.)  I’m also slightly consoled by the fact that I hate superman and don’t want to be referencing him– however slightly– in even my rarest of posts.

So yeah.  I feel a bit cheated and self-conscious, but silly for feeling that way because it’s a stupid comic. (Not that comics are stupid: just Superman and all associated ‘Super’ superheroes.)

And now I have to think of an awkward end to this post/segue to link to this somewhat related post.

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I have thoughts.  I need a place to store them so that I don’t forget them.  You have eyes + time.  You want to read thoughts and be entertained and maybebe intrigued.  Me + U = Magicks.

That’s all there is to it.  When I don’t blog, I feel like I’m living in a permanent zombie state, where nothing I’m experiencing is really happening.  Yes, I know that sounds weird, but nothing feels as ephemeral (even if is still awesome) as just hanging out with my friends and doing my job.  It’s just the same thing ad infinitum.  With text, however… there’s a sense of permanence that doesn’t let things blend into each other.  At least in my own twisted mind.  A girl with a misspelled last name once said:

“Nothing has really happened until it has been recorded.”

—Virginia Woolf

And…  and that’s just it.  Plus: jokes.  Jokes just plain suck if nobody laughs.  I mean, just look at my birth!

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80. My circle of friends hasn’t really changed since middle school. This alone makes me want to leave New Mexico.

This is Daniel’s long awaited response,

In a recent conversation, Pixel and I argued whether or not “streets-smarts” was anything beyond a made-up term that stupid people used to make fun of the smart. My friend doesn’t think that street-smarts exist, and originally I might have agreed, until my friend “the walking dictionary” decided to start researching the different types of “smarts.”

I’ll play devil’s advocate; this is my defense for the existence of street-smarts. The problem with street-smarts is that it remains nearly impossible to define with any clarity. Furthermore, the examples about the nature of street-smarts create a sliding slope of puzzling interpretations. The difficultly with language and terms is nothing new. The nature of words have always created serious problems for those who study their logical forms. Take the word “chair” for example. The word chair can be easily misunderstood with the simplest of alterations to its form. A chair is something a person can sit on, it often has four legs, and supports the human figure. Yet when does a chair become a seat, bench, stool, place, or settlement? If the legs were removed would it still be a chair? Does a chair need to be made from wood or metal? The truth is that words can become very complex things, but this is nothing we didn’t already know before.

There have been several objections to language and the troubles their terms create, yet language remains one of the most important developments ever made. My friend Pixel doesn’t believe street-smarts exist, I might have agreed before, but I don’t now. Neither does the chair. The importance of words should not be restricted to rigid definitions, because this would make discussions impossible. A chair is nothing more than a word. Like ‘street-smarts,’ what matters is what the connection implies. When I tell my brother that my friend Carlos can’t do anything without the direction of a book, this criticism will never appear in the dictionary, but my implication suggest some element the two of us can relate. The term street-smarts only exists because it contains something people can use to relate the implications, these words offer the means to meaning, and are only instruments of our ability to share.

Thus, unless Pixel is willing to toss out the rest of the dictionary, street smarts must stay.

(Editor’s note: Part One can be found here.)

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66. Even though I usually get in the 99th percentile in standardized tests (both academic and IQ), I don’t believe in standardized tests. At all. They don’t measure anything except for how well the participant can study for them. Believe me, I’ve boosted my scores by hundreds of points at a time without increasing my intelligence or scholarly aptitude in any way. This, of course, means that No Child Left Behind was based on a false premise. Sorry nation’s youth.

I have a secret. I don’t think street smarts exist. I think people came up with that concept to show that smart people can’t be smart about everything. I think they saw some sort of lack of ‘common sense’ among really smart people and came up with a way of describing this: the titular ‘street smarts’

These come up fairly frequently when I tell people that I’m going to go for my Ph.D. Somehow, this triggers an association and, sure enough, they end up saying some bull like, “well, I think book smarts are okay, but street smarts are what is important.”

To wit: a few days ago, my friend Daniel and his girlfriend Ana started talking to me about street smarts. And, seeing as I was really interested in what the phrase even meant, I started arguing with them (type 2). These were their positions:

• Daniel seemed to think that street smarts were a way of analyzing things such that you would think of a quick or easy way of doing something that was unfamiliar. He seemed to believe it was something that could not be learned and had to be innate. He saw no contradiction in a person’s possessing both street smarts and book smarts.
• Ana believed that street smarts required a form of physical action and involved a sense of resourcefulness. She felt that people with ‘street smarts’ would generally not be educated and gave the example of orphans or street children that grow up learning to hustle tourists. Though reluctant, eventually she admitted she saw no contradiction in a person’s possessing both street smarts and book smarts.

• Both gave the example of a person surviving out in the woods alone using only their wits. They also both gave the example of opening up the hood of a strange car and finding out what was wrong with it.

To me, the differences were irreconcilable. Daniel’s definition seemed to be what I would consider intelligence and Ana’s would be what I would consider learned resourcefulness. Both seemed to have something to do with common sense and no correlative association with book smarts, which we soon defined as general trivia or particular knowledge. This may have been a bit of confirmation bias, but I left unconvinced that the term ‘street smarts’ had any value.

If by ‘street smarts’ one just wishes to contrast ‘book smarts,’ why not just say that knowledge alone does not make someone intelligent? If ‘street smarts’ means common sense, then why not just say that? Ditto for resourcefulness. There seems to be nothing left for ‘street smarts’ to refer to that’s not better expressed with another word.

No, instead I think that street smarts are a subtle way to suggest that there is a high degree of correlation between being intellectual about abstract concepts and lacking wits to survive in the concrete world. Otherwise, why would there even need to be a term for it? And why is it always used in contrast to another made up term: book smarts. It’s not true that intellectualness and everyday wits are mutually exclusive, obviously. But as a direct result of this unspoken assumption, people use the term with abandon. As well they should: I’ve never heard anyone take offense.

Not that I’m saying that people that feel they lack ‘book smarts’ are stupid, far from it! I actually think that knowledge and intelligence have a very low degree of correlation. I don’t assume that somebody doesn’t know how to change their oil simply because they’re a professor, but neither would I assume that from a person that works at In-N-Out Burgers.

Stay tuned for Daniel’s response tomorrow.

p.s. Here’s an idea for a good recipe for a Spinach-Artichoke dip.

p.p.s. Today is the National Day of Reason, so take off your aluminum hats, topple a pyramid scheme, and thank a scientist for life-saving cancer fighting bacon candy.

p.p.p.s. How many common words can you name? I got 44.

(Editor’s note:  Part Two can be found here.)

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65. After my brother joined the military, my mother began forcing my father and I to go to church as part of a ‘family activity.’ They bribed, lied, and cheated to get me to go. So I went, reluctantly. It’s funny, because at the time, I hadn’t been a Catholic in 6 years, so my going there only served to drive us further apart as I reacted like a teenager and sulked.

I get into arguments on a fairly regular basis. I suspect the reason for this is that I like to make grandiose claims and Nobody catches on to my tongue-in-cheek, finger-wagging spectacles. EVER.

But as often as I argue, I used to argue much more regularly. In my youth, I used to really like arguments. Sometimes I would argue positions I didn’t support just because I liked seeing people fluster as they tried to explain to me why slavery was wrong or why clothing was not optional. I’m actually a bit ashamed of that now.

But as I grew and matured (read: grew tired of bickering), I stopped seeking out arguments. Then I stopped continuing arguments even when they came to me. This went on to such a point that now I only ever argue for two reasons:

1. To disavow someone of their ignorance.
2. To get to the truth of the matter.

The second reason is the reason I prefer. There’s nothing worse than arguing with a smug-faced bastard who’s just humoring you by pretending to listen to your point with no intention of even analyzing his own. Believe me, I’ve seen that from every angle: it happens a lot when dealing with smart people.

But arguing shouldn’t be that way. A true argument should be between people that have opposing beliefs, or rather, one person that believes something and another that does not (yet) buy into it.

(...)
Read the rest of When (and how) to argue (766 words)

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47. I don’t know when I’m joking half the time. Seriously. My brain works on an ironic gear, so sometimes I say funny things or say things in an amused tone of voice, but have no idea I’m doing it. I once tried to explain this to someone and they thought it was “trippy.”

I was not cool in middle school. Then, in high school, I realized I didn’t care what high school students thought. I might have been cool (our school was too large and diverse to have set ‘cliques,’ so ‘well-known’ meant a whole range of things), but I’ll never know. But I’ve thought about this for a while, and it finally occurred to me what ‘cool’ even was.

Cool is a fandom.

I mean that in a very unintuitive, unobvious way. Or maybe it’s not. You tell me.

When older people hear younger people’s slang or see their attire, they end up thinking that they just don’t get ‘it’ anymore. As if they’re the outsiders of a group looking in. What’s hilarious is that this is exactly what they are!

Cool kids are no different than ‘trekkies’ or ‘emo kids.’ They’re all separate groups with vague boundaries, but certain examples of legitimate in-group and out-group members. They all have lexicon and implicit dress and social interactions. The only difference is that cool kids are seen as a dominant fandom in a certain sense, because their only ‘cannon’ is the present actions of other ‘cool kids.’

So when kids do or say stupid stuff to each other, it doesn’t just sound silly to your ears. It IS silly. They just don’t realize it. They’re like trekkies at a convention they’ve never left. They’re the perpetual in-group… at least until they get older and realize how silly the new ‘cool’ things are…..

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21. I have a birthmark on my leg that’s more of a Rorcharch test than anything. I see the ghost of Mickey Mouse. What do you see?

In civilized conversation, there is no more selfish phrase in the English language than “Are you okay?”

I say this in spite of all the seemingly more selfish phrases you can come up with. “I think I’d rather use these $100 bills as toilet paper than give them to orphans” and “Boy, you’ve all gotten so fat while I remain young and vigorous” are both outwardly selfish, but they are guileless and lack any real impact. The person who would say those is not worthy of consideration purely because he would be the type of person to say those things.

“Are you okay?” on the other hand, has often been spoken by well-meaning folk who know that something is not okay, but have come upon a certain situation. You usually ask if someone is okay for the reasons:

1. As a way to start a conversation with someone who is hurt/sad to show you care/are offering to help.
2. To make yourself feel better. (“I asked her if she was okay!”)
3. To inquire whether the person feels there is any permanent damage.

You don’t ever ask it wondering if someone really is okay, because okay is a default position. When a person could go either way, you ask if they are all right. ‘All right’ means stuff is good. ‘Okay’ means that stuff is acceptable or passable. So if somebody is ‘okay,’ it’s never something to be happy about. It’s just a lack of something to be sad about.

Most of the time, I think this phrase should be avoided in favor of what the person actually means at the time:

1. When a girl is crying in the corner: “Is your crying caused by the lack of strangers offering help for things they don’t understand? Because if it is… you’re in luck!”
2. When your girlfriend storms in, angry: “If you want to tell me what happened and why you’re mad, I’d love to hear it. Otherwise, I’ll just go get the boxing gloves and a cup, so you can just wail on me that way.”
3. When someone has fallen while running a marathon: “Can you go on? Do you need anything? I have speed, if that’s what you want.”

My true problem with the phrase is that I worry people just say it because that’s what you’re supposed to say. And, like kissing someone on a dare, it just isn’t the same. Most of the time you know the person is not okay. You just ask it to start a conversation or to ‘show that you care.’ The problem is that the phrase doesn’t do either very well.

And what should the other person even respond? You gave them a yes or no question to an open-ended problem. How selfish is that?

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(Actual conversation just now)
2: I love Moof! She sent me a sock once. Here.
3: You carry around a sock with you?
2: Look!
1: You carry that around with you?
… twenty minutes later…
3: I can’t believe you pulled out a sock right now.

In the Non-Designer’s Design Book (which you should buy), Robin Williams talks about what she calls the Joshua tree principle. The story goes that she received a tree-naming book for Christmas once and noticed the distinctive looking Joshua tree on one of the pages. Confident she’d never seen the tree before, she went outside and was shocked to find Joshua trees everywhere. She’d never noticed them when she couldn’t identify them, but once she could, she noticed them everywhere.

I have a friend Kyle who thinks he finds new trends and every one just copies them. He once said to me,

when I first bought white glasses, nobody had them, now it’s become all trendy. I had a beanie with a bill on it when nobody thought they were cool, now they’re everywhere. And when I first wore my belt on the side, everyone made fun of me, now I see all these little wannabes wearing their belts on the sides and it pisses me off!

I mention these two things because I think there’s a direct correlation here. I think my friend Kyle only noticed other people stealing his (lame) expressions of personality because he’d become aware of them. The number of people wearing beanies didn’t change after he bought one, he just began noticing them more. Either that or it’s a conspiracy and, quite frankly, even I have trouble paying attention to him.

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why we exist, D-U-H…..

xoxo

The reason I worried about it was because it seemed like a waste of a question to me. Perhaps it doesn’t seem that way to you, but then that’s why you come here: to disagree at first, laugh once, then slowly come about to my way of thinking.

Let’s get the laugh out of the way first:

I ran out of underwear today, so I fashioned a loincloth out of socks instead.

The reason ‘why we exist’ doesn’t seem like an interesting question to me is because I don’t expect any answer. I mean, I expect an answer, I just don’t expect I’m going to like it. In fact, no matter what the answer is, I suspect not everyone will like it. For instance:

Answer 1: There is no purpose to us being here, we just are

Who it pleases: Biologists, naturalists, nihilists, some atheists.

Who it displeases: Everyone else who feels we’re too special and we could only exist if some being or force deemed us necessary.

Answer 2: We’re here to do X (where X is non-religious, as in ‘to create plastic’)

Who it pleases: Nobody, because rather than level the playing field as in answer 1, it deems us worth less than plastic. In philosophical terms, it treats us as means, as only instrumentally valuable, rather than intrinsically valuable.

Who it displeases: Everyone. If we’re purely instrumentally valuable, then why give us consciousness at all? Why not just have automatons (like politicians) do our part and be done with the whole thing?

Answer 3: We’re to do X (where X is explicitly religious, as in ‘to serve Allah’)

Who it pleases: The one sect that happens to be right (the Amish).

Who it displeases: Everyone, once they realize that they want an answer more profound than being cosmic fanbots. What’s worse, if there is an answer beyond being purely useful to worship someone, it threatens to collapse into answer 2 (i.e. if we were a hyper-dimensional science fair project).

Answer 4: We’re here because we’re worthwhile intrinsically (we’re just here to exist)

Who it pleases: Buddhists, pantheists, some others

Who it displeases: People that think existence isn’t a worthwhile goal or purpose for us. People that want ‘something more.’

In conclusion, no answer to the big why can satisfy most of us. I argue that this is the reason we’re still looking.

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I found a way to do this all with one word. The titular “Really?”

However, you can’t just say “Really?” in any old way. You have to say it in the particular proportions I’ve discovered. Like any recipe, you can modify it slightly to suite your own needs, but don’t try to work off book unless you know what you’re doing. Okay?

Here goes:

How to make a Really?:

Ingredients:

1. Tone of voice with 60 percent inquisitiveness, 10 percent condescension, 5 percent bewilderment, and 25 percent curiosity.
2. A stare that is simultaneously blank and mock ‘caught-off-guard’
3. A working neck
4. Facial expression with 40 percent grimace in embarrassment and 60 percent sympathetic questioning. Imagine you’re a lawyer desperately trying to defend an innocent person who keeps saying stupid things.

Instructions:

1. Wait until the appropriate moment. Usually this will be shortly after a bad argument escapes the lips of the person you’re debating. For instance, “Buildings can’t fall like that, Bush must have planned 9/11.”
2. Look at him blankly for precisely one moment. It is important for the silence to stretch for one full moment while you seem like you’re momentarily caught off guard by the argument.
3. Tilt your head to the right while simultaneously grimace and scrunch your eyebrows together while raising them.
4. Say “Really?” as if they just embarrassed themselves.
5. If needed, say “Seriously?” Or “you really believe that?” Each time make your grimace more pained.

While I generally hate rhetoric or sophistry, sometimes its the most effective tool in your arsenal. Try saying this sometime today. It’s surprising how well it works.

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The perceived essential properties always jump out at me, because these are the things that people think are really important about them. I am composed of nothing but accidental properties. So I’m intrigued when I see people define themselves by something at all, let alone so easily.

I’ll give an example:

Mary meets Chris. Mary says, “hi, I’m Mary. I’m a ballet dancer.”

Compare this to:

Christ meets Mary. Chris says, “hey, I’m Chris. I suppose I, too, am a ballet dancer.”

The difference is in both the tone and the content. In the first example, Mary believes that– in order to know who she is as a person– you have to be aware of what ballet dancers are like. In the second example, though Chris is also a ballet dancer, he sees this as something that is non-essential to him as a person. In other words Mary is a ballet dancer, Chris does ballet dancing.

People like Chris attach labels to themselves because they’re so used to labels being bandied about that they immediately resort to labeling themselves as well to facilitate communication. These people are never truly comfortable with them and sometimes even rebel at the idea.

People like Mary wear their labels with pride and perceive the world through those labels. They usually perceive the label as something bigger than them that they can be a part of. They also seek out a community of like-minded people with whom they can speak. If these labels are ever stripped away, they have an existential crisis. For example, if Mary was proud to be Irish and later found out that she was actually Scottish, it might affect her pride at her Irish flag tattoo (it’s on her buttocks).

Now, there’s nothing wrong with labels, per se, they’re just things to watch out for. It’s always dangerous when you begin to identify yourself by something that is outside of your control. Not just because it breaks you down into your component parts, uses, talents, positions and beliefs, but also because it inevitably leads to a flawed assessment of your self worth and place in the world.

Just two cents from a guy who happens to write a blog…

*ref: Plato

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When I was a kid I was always bad at Truth or Dare. It wasn’t because I didn’t want to share things about myself and it wasn’t because I was afraid of doing silly/stupid/dangerous/embarrassing things. No, I was bad at Truth or Dare because I never wanted to ask anybody any questions or ask them to do any dares. It took me a long time to figure out why I was afraid of this aspect. The answer jumped out at me one year in high school.

I was on the phone with one of my lady friends when she paused for a moment and said,

“have you ever done [insert thing I've never done here*]?”

I, being an ignorant 15 year old, immediately answered “no!” I also said “I think that’s illegal in this state, and I hear the United Nations Human Rights Council† is considering making that a crime against humanity.”

Her response was a quiet,

“oh.”

See, what I didn’t get back then was why she was asking the question. She was asking the question because she was thinking about it. She was thinking about it because it was important to her. It was important to her because her boyfriend had just convinced her to do that.

Had I been a smarter 17 year old, I would have gotten that and been able to go on with the conversation, addressing her fears rather than having her address them later with a revolver.‡ This is not to mention that I would have figured out more about her from her question than was possible from my answer.

In this way, I realize that questions are more revealing than answers. Because with questions, as with labels, you reveal what you think is important. It’s the reason I replaced all of my small talk with existential questions… which, coincidentally, is the reason I do very little small talk.

For more on this topic, read the Little Prince.

* No joke is intended by this punch line.
† I know that back then it was called the United Nations Commission on Human Rights, but I didn’t want to lose the modern day audience reading this that would have been taken out of the story by the seeming anachronism
‡ I’m kidding. It’s just a metaphor. She actually used a Walther P99 semiautomatic pistol.

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For instance, a ‘friend’ of mine recently called a girl he knows a ‘ho.’ If you didn’t know this girl, you wouldn’t be justified in concluding she was a ‘ho.’ In fact, this comment would only tell you one thing: my ‘friend’ deemed it appropriate to call her a ‘ho.’

From this piece of evidence all of these conclusions are equally supported:

• This friend has Tourette’s, or some other ailment in which he uses inappropriate words.
• He wants you to believe she’s a ho or that he believes she’s a ‘ho.’
• She really is a ho and he thinks it’s a defining characteristic of hers.
• He thinks not being a ‘ho’ is important enough to warrant a comment when someone breaks this norm.

Personally, I think the final conclusion is most often the correct one. At least, that’s what I’m afraid of. In all the conclusions, one could arguably say that you can find out more about the person making the comment than the person the comment is about. That’s one of the reasons I avoid making comments about people or describing people. I worry that some other hyper-analytical person will get more out of what I’m saying than I mean him to.

What labels do you use? And what do they say about you? Do you know? Do you have the courage to find out?

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I don’t think there’s any way of discerning a person’s exact mental age from their conversation, but there’s definitely major themes that crop up as people start passing into various stages in their lives. Here we go:

1. You start talking about the opposite sex.

   I’m sure you remember older people talking about the opposite sex back when you weren’t interested. You thought that was something for ‘grown-ups’ to consider. Well guess what? If you’ve started talking about them, you’re a grown up.

2. Your conversation revolves around your children.

   This isn’t to say you talk about nothing but your children, just that their actions become conversation pieces for you. A prerequisite for this is actually having children. My prevention against reaching the mental age of stage 2 is not reproducing. Thankfully, my habits and lack of motivation virtually guarantee a lonely, unloved existence. Take that Western conception of the good life!

3. Your conversation revolves around your health problems (worse: bowel movements and vitamins).

   I will never get to this point. I refuse. Flat out. As soon as I came up with this list, I have made it a point never to acknowledge that my body operates in any suboptimal way.

Stage 0 is not on this list, but we can assume it applies to children who talk about their playmates, ask questions, or talk about their feelings and thoughts. It’s elemental philosophy which most people lose interest in as their beliefs are hardened by age, but some pursue as a career. ::cough::

I also didn’t mention gossip as this occurs at every age, whether we like it or not. Furthermore, I thought about including work as a major life change, but this is really a ‘what’s going on’ sort of conversation. People that don’t work still talk about school or their hobbies just as much. It’s circumstantial, not sequential like all the other items on this list.

Ironically, this list doesn’t fit me very well at all. I’m an out-of-work philosopher in stage 0 who doesn’t care to talk much about the opposite sex, doesn’t have kids and doesn’t acknowledge that his actions have any effect on his health. If you don’t feel this list applies to you either, consider yourself lucky. And consider yourself warned.

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