I Hate Titles

It's difficult to live up to one's own ideals, so I try not to hold it against people too much when I disapprove of their actions. After all, why should they have to follow my own arbitrary ideas about how one should conduct one's life? I don't follow theirs. And I know that everyone can be unpleasant sometimes, although hurting others is never their intention. Therefore, I try not to judge. Unfortunately, this too is an ideal, subject to the same weakness as all the others: emotions. Sometimes I do judge. I probably judge quite a lot, more than I realize. It's difficult to always live by one's principles, especially if they primarily focus on not hurting others, because whether we are helpful or burdensome to others at any given time is often based on our mood. Of all the things about ourselves we ought to control, mood is the hardest (at least for me).

Still, often it's OK that the people you love should have to deal with your moods--they signed up for it by loving you, and usually you deal with their moods, too. But it isn't right that the people I live with, whom I love, should have to deal with me judging them (even if some of them don't realize that I do). Honorability is a luxury, after all, and I'm far from perfect at it myself. I will make additional efforts to stop judging, since I realize I've been doing a lot of that lately. It's something I owe to everyone else.

Go Go Gadget Libertarian!

I really like Libertarians a lot, though I myself am not one. Just for clarification, I'm talking about the American kind, not the proponents of the general philosophy, hence the capital "L." As the title of this post suggests, I like them because, dammit, they're handy. Why? Because they they can chastise Republicans with impunity.

This isn't to say that Democrats don't chastise Republicans, because they do, a lot, in lieu of actually accomplishing anything. But Libertarians have the huge advantage of possessing the respect of conservatives, despite being only half-conservative themselves. Conservative Republicans just can't dredge up the hatred for Libertarians that they have for Democrats, putting the former in the interesting position of being able to walk all over them, revealing their flaws without reprisal. Not that this will save the world or anything, I just get a kick out of it whenever a Republican is scolded by a Libertarian and then feels too guilty to do anything but shuffle from foot to foot. See, I think Republicans all don't want to admit that Libertarians are REAL Republicans in the same way that the Green Party is the REAL Democrats. Nobody likes to be a fake. I love it when a Libertarian jumps in the fray and declares the Patriot Act unconstitutional, or criticizes the Iraq war as grossly interventionist, and instead of getting mad the Bushies just hem and haw--because they know that the Libertarians are everything they ought to be. It tickles me pink. Unlike the Democrats, who are large and obligated to get stuff done, the Libertarians are free to shake things up a little, just because they can. And sometimes, they point out something obvious that the whole reasonable population of the country knew but politicians didn't, because most of them suffer from a political disease that causes them to see the nation's issues in terms of money and boring. These moments are when I'm prompted to stand up and shout, "Go Go Gadget Libertarian!"

Now, you might be asking, "If you like Libertarians so much, why aren't you one yourself?" The answer is simple. Some of the things they propose are batshit insane. Therefore I don't think I'd become one myself, though I do respect their third-party-ish consistency. You can just trust them not to be fucking hypocrites, and that's enough for me to want more of them around. Just for fun.

Now I Feel Better

I swear it's provably true: talking things over with friends can make anything great again. Sorry for all the drama, back to your regularly scheduled nonsensical programming.

I've Felt So Stupid Lately

It seems the smarter I am the stupider I am. I've spent my whole life learning and trying to be intelligent, but it doesn't seem to work. Instead it's resulted in my knowing a lot of words and phrases (that I misapply), vague facts about situations (that I don't understand), and all sorts of weird assumptions (that I shouldn't have).

Now, I'm not stupid enough to think that I'm actually stupid. That would be nothing but pathetic self-pity and a spiteful slap in the face to anyone who's ever called me smart (which many people that I love have). It's just that I worry I'm not as intelligent as I think, or quite as intelligent as my friends are (or seem to be). I also worry that I'm getting less intelligent all the time. It seems like I remember less than I used to, or that I say insightful things less often (or the "insightful" things I say are just plain wrong). I just really, really remember feeling smarter.

My rational mind says that this is probably because I switched environments. In high school I was one of the brightest kids. I don't believe it's because I was smarter, necessarily, just more willing to apply myself than most of my peers. But now that I've moved up in the world, I'm no longer the big shark in the pond. I feel like telling everyone to tell me to shut up whenever I'm spouting nonsense, but I'm also afraid of how it will feel when they do.

I used to just not talk. When I was a preteen, I became aware of the fact that most of what I said was annoying to people (and if my friends are thinking "No, that can't be true," that's because they didn't know me as a preteen). I spent much of my teenage years consciously trying to teach myself to limit what came out of my mouth. I had a fair amount of success; most of what I said passed a sort of screening process in my head, and I began to feel under control. But I've felt like I'm slipping lately, maybe because I'm so comfortable around my friends that I've relaxed the screening mechanism. I feel silly just talking about it even here.

I can't bear to annoy people, I just can't!

Pretention

I realize it's been a month since I've posted anything here. I wonder if anyone will notice. Well, to test it out, how about some good old-fashioned ranting? Disclaimer: Since it's hard for me to be dishonest, I must say that much of the below is vicious hyperbole. But this is my place to complain about things in order to make myself feel better, so I'll take advantage of it, dammit.

I really don't like the people in my film class. Not that I hate them. Not that they're bad people. But they are artists, and this is a liberal arts college that caters to people who consider themselves to be "different." I suppose I shouldn't be surprised if they're all pretentious children.

It's the boys that are especially bad. Not that I enjoy the girls much more; they're flighty, ditzy even at times, and several of them are actresses, which they proclaim constantly as though it wasn't already obvious from their behavior (loud and self-centered). After watching a film, they always kick off the discussion by announcing how much they identified with a particular character, and how all the other characters are jerks to her. Much of their analysis of the film will then center around that character's perception of their situation. Clearly, actresses.

But the boys are far worse. They all sit casually in their chairs, wearing jeans and t-shirts with obscure alternative/punk rock references, their hair cut in whatever fashion they deemed would make them look most artistic and "out there." They believe that their most solemn duty in life is never to be impressed, unless that which impresses them is thoroughly ignored by everyone else, so that they can pretend to be the only person who really "understands" it. With all the wisdom of their barely two decades of life, they dissect every film put before them as, at worst, the work of a "hack," and at best, riddled with flaws. They measure a film's worth as directly proportional to how difficult to understand it is and indirectly proportional to its popularity. Movies, apparently, are not art unless they leave their audience in a confused daze. Now, this isn't to say that the most popular films aren't often among the worst, but I'm certain that their reasons for feeling this way are singular: they don't want to appear to like anything that doesn't make them feel special and knowledgeable. They treasure their disdain as though it were the only thing that could garner them a shred of respect in this world, rather than the things they make themselves.

Clearly, artists. This college is full of them, of all disciplines, both male and female. They should all grow a little self-respect instead of relying on other people's mistakes to create some for them. Rant over.

Sharks Need Heroes, Not Dumbasses

People are so fucking dumb. Whenever I read the comments on a shark-related news story (and I read a lot of them), there tend to be two kinds: idiots who literally, in their own words, "wish all sharks would disappear" or "think we should kill all of them", and idiots who spew out a great deal of misspelled words about how the other idiots are unworthy of life and "i thnk sarks are beutiful and u dont know about them maybe u shuld lern smthing lol!!!!" I despise all these people. The first group clearly doesn't understand how nature works and can't wrap their minds around the idea that sharks are simply powerful predators, like lions or bears. As for the second group, well, a nurse shark ineffectually mashing the keyboard with a pectoral fin could probably produce a better defense of itself.

There's also the ones related to the ever-contentious shark-fishing tournaments. In this case, both sides have a point, albeit poorly articulated in most cases. The argument basically goes something like this:

Tree-hugger: u tortyr sharks it has to stop when will ppl love the world lol

Redneck: killing sharks is awesom lol ur stupid

Better-educated Redneck: Youre argument is mis-understood becaus its not the anglers who are the reason sharks are in danger its the commercial trawlers maybe you tree-hugging hippies should be going after them insted of ppl who understand them better than you and want to show there kids live sharks dead and up close so they can learn about them

Tree-hugger: Shut up ur all redneks w/o any educashun sharks shud eat all ur children imo lol

Okay, I personally support catch-and-release tournaments and am against killing tournaments. While it is true that it's commercial fisheries, not sportsmen, who are responsible for the massive decline in shark stocks worldwide, that doesn't mean the sportsmen should be killing more, even only a few more, for their own macho enjoyment. The reason I support catch-and-release, while it is probably stressful for the animals, is because the sharks are usually tagged in this sort of competition, and any possibility that we can protect these creatures hinges on our knowledge of them, of which we have comparatively none.

Most of all, it is my fervent hope that some idiots will bother to learn that sharks are non-man-eating (generally), beautiful, powerful, vulnerable creatures doing their own thing in their own environment, and that other idiots will stop being so elitist, or at least learn how to spell. The need of sharks is too urgent for all this hen-pecking.

Long-Winded Rant

This should be fun. Blogs are for splattering your deepest, darkest opinions all over, so let's paste in a rant I wrote a while ago. There is no structure and no paragraphs, only indignation. Let's see what happens.

It's all been asked before. But there is still no satisfactory answer. Why? Why is their war? Famine, death and disease are different. They are natural. War is not--although it can be said that some animals, such as ants, have war. True, war is a manifestation of natural impulses. But, especially on the scale it exists today, there is not much natural about it. The solution is simple: we all have to get along. Why is it so difficult to produce this simple solution? Maybe the same reason it's so difficult for me to put down in words the stories that are so clearly etched in my imagination. Theorizing is easy, implementation difficult. It's like an unseen force. It's like that thing that happens when you try to press two magnets together at the wrong ends. Something that can't be defined. Maybe when we ask "why," we are really asking: "what is this thing that stands in the way of us doing what we know to be right and good?" Again, as happens so often when I get philosophical, I see why religion exists. Religion provides the unseen force with identity. Satan or some other demon holds us all back from attaining what we know we need. I would like to believe that, but I can't. I know (or I think, rather) that it is human limitation. It is my own mind keeping me from writing, and our collective minds keeping us from getting along. Why can so few other people grant any time to seeing things from others' points of view? Or to feeling what other people feel? When you think of another person as yourself, it becomes easy, even essential, not to hate them. Could this be the instinct for self-preservation? If that was all we were running on, why would empathy be an admirable trait? It would be an annoyance, preventing you from doing things that must be done for your own survival. I understand conservatives, or at least I think I do. I can also see why they feel the way they feel. But I know they are wrong. History shows that they have always been wrong. They can't see it. How could they? To realize, consciously, that your viewpoint, philosophy on life, and everything you believe in is wrong (or rather, too simple) would be destructive, devastating, to one's psyche. Why should we expect them to admit that? It would be death. How can we change them? Many, we can't. They'll die, their children will feel differently, and things will change despite their best efforts. But conservativism will never go away. Some things will simply be replaced with new things to feel conservative about. The old "earth is flat" argument and all that. Flat-earthers would never have dreamed about conflict over evolution, but it is their spiritual successors that carry on that debate. In their own way, conservatives are very modern. I also have no doubt that they are eternal. To be conservative is to be someone resisting change. They are frightened people. The rest of us are frightened too, of course, but unlike us they have found a symbolic solution to that fear: the familiar past. Let us not forget that we are all, in some ways, conservative. Most of us would think it unethical, or at the very least creepy, to remove the brain of a newborn and replace it with a computer that programmed in its designated societal role. But in a few centuries, perhaps people that believe that would be the conservatives, and the ones advocating it the progressives. Is there no limit to human morality and immorality? It seems to me like a continuum, with the progressives striving forward and the conservatives backward, onwards and onwards through time, with the old progressive opinion being the new conservative opinion. Where, in this, is real morality? Does such a thing exist? In the universe, or at least on Earth, is there a real "right" or "wrong?" And if morality does not exist, what does that mean? If it doesn't than everything almost everyone believes is wrong, because most of us possess a sense of morality. If there is no morality, it is money and power that are right. The capitalist, the individualist, the selfish one. If there is no morality, the only people who are right are the ones whose only function in life is to look out for themselves. Yet I feel that there is something fundamentally wrong with this way of thinking. I don't know, I feel. To look out for themselves is something animals do. Are humans actually greater than animals? I don't know about greater, but I think that humans are more than animals. The way we strive for knowledge, spirituality, fulfillment beyond our material needs is distinctly beyond the animal. But is it better? Who knows? We could use all our knowledge to destroy the planet. Yet we are also a fundamentally optimistic race. All of our science fiction depicts this. Even our post-apocalyptic scenarios assume that we as a race somehow survive the apocalypse. We believe we will always be present. But as C. S. Lewis has pointed out in Out of the Silent Planet, we have no way of knowing that our future selves will be "us." In fact, with the advent of genetic modification, it is likely that they won't be. Even with natural evolution, they wouldn't be. Our descendants will no more be "us" than we are the dinosaurs. We will not survive. What is left? I understand religion.

Is this what fantasy has come to?

I have been playing on and off with the idea of starting a blog, but watching Stardust cinched it. I will not stand for my favorite genre being exploited so.

Mind you, Stardust is not a horrible movie. It's no Eragon or Dungeons & Dragons. But it is mediocre, and it's this reckless mediocrity that crushes my soul. You see, fantasy these days seems to inevitably fall into two categories: making a sad attempt at originality or riding the coattails of Tolkien or C. S. Lewis. The former is sad precisely because it relies on the latter more than it knows. Gone are the days of Conan the Barbarian and The Princess Bride; these are now relegated to the same stagnant "inspirational" pool as the great British epics (well, not Conan--the gutless worms of Hollywood possess not the courage). Stardust chose The Princess Bride to be its muse, despite having a perfectly good Neil Gaiman story that it mostly ignored in the pursuit of its own goals. Being unable to lie, I will not pretend to have read that story myself, but the film had the stink of Hollywood "adaptation" all over it, and my investigations on the Internet confirmed that the mood of the book and all but mere traces of its originality were missed in the movie.

However, I am a paladin, not a professional film reviewer. I am here to preach. I see this film and others like it, and I fear for fantasy. This genre, which along with sci-fi holds the greatest potential for mold-breaking, is being relegated to a standard. The beauty of fantasy is the freedom it grants to the storyteller, who can use metaphor to send messages with the ability to pierce to the heart of the human experience. Fantasy is nothing if not pure, unadulterated metaphor. Why would we be interested in looking at a world completely unlike our own unless it meant something to us, in the same way as a dream or myth? Few of us have dreams that make much sense, and most are inconsequential, but we all have had a handful of dreams that, while bizarre like the rest, meant a great deal to us. You all know the ones I'm talking about. The ones that cause you to wake up thinking hard about your life and your situation, but are still too weird to explain easily. You just know, without quantification, that they were meaningful. Ideally, fantasy should reflect a similar feeling. Fantasy, like the myths and fairy tales that spawned it, is a dream of society. A genre that ought to be unfettered by the banality of real life, that has the ultimate freedom to say whatever it wishes, should never become so typecast as it has now. I want to see movies that no longer throw away the magic of a fantastical story for a few pop-culture ribs and video games that can pull off a fantasy world without putting orcs or elves in it. I want to see exemplary acting, intelligent dialogue, exciting fight scenes and lots, lots more grubby peasants. Give us a different reality, not our own force-fed through a glitter machine. And make that new reality say the things about our real world that we could never say except in dreams.