I always said

Fun Passover Facts

Fri, 10 Apr 2009 08:50:05 GMT

- No, I didn't make it back downstairs after that last Tweet.

- My parents' wineglasses are fucking huge and are not meant to be filled to the top. OH WELLS! I estimate I drank about a bottle and a half. I make my Four Cups COUNT.

- I don't really like to be drunk, but I do it when I have to. It's like, you know when people say, "I would rather stab out my own eyes than do <xxx>"? That's what the seder is like for me. My brain had two choices: beat itself in the face repeatedly with horrible (and delicious) toxins until I ceased to comprehend the agonizingly stupid discussion at the table, or crawl out my own ear and choke itself to death. I chose toxins, as any reasonable person would.

- I don't really enjoy the company of my extended family, no.

- Seriously. SERIOUSLY. "What do you think of the Mayan calendar coming to an end? The WORLD is going to end!" You're going to utter those words? Without a trace of irony? Before kiddush? Seriously? Seriously?

- "Every single war in history was caused by religion." Really? ALL of them? Are you really going to go there? I'm sorry I'm having trouble hearing because I'm drowning in candy-flavoured kosher wine. "It's the only reason for any war ever." Uh oh my brain is throttling itself better pour another glass. But before I go– what about communism? "Communism is a religion" OH NO I HAVE DIED

- Yeah, I definitely went upstairs, drunk dialed my boyfriend, sent a bunch of hilariously incoherent texts and Tweets, and passed out on my bed. I then slept through a phone call, four text messages and my mom coming in to turn off the light. I had managed to have about four bites of matzah ball soup before it was game over. Good thing I got an advance on my afikoman money last night.

- But now I'm awake and eating leftovers in glorious solitude at 4:45 AM, the way GOD MEANT IT.

The Scorn-o-meter

Sun, 22 Mar 2009 00:47:25 GMT

I have developed a quantitative method of evaluating how much scorn a given customer evokes in me. It's all really quite anthropological.

Scorn for comics customers
people who buy comics to read them	0% scorn
people who buy the crappy superhero crap	5% scorn
people who "wait for the trade"	10% scorn
people who spend a million years picking through back issues/examining each copy of a new comic because they think they'll be worth something someday	75% scorn
people who buy Spawn	90% scorn

Scorn for people who buy toys
Final Fantasy figures	0% scorn (they're pretty sweet-looking figures)
cool-looking superheroes	5% scorn
pretty much everything else	5-50% scorn
GI Joes	90% scorn
Kiss toys	99% scorn

Literacy in people who buy collectible card games (divergence from customer age provides an direct relation to amount of scorn elicited in Elana)
World of Warcraft	usually adults	college level literacy
Magic The Gathering	high school-> adult	usually age appropriate
Pokémon	younger children	grade five literacy (which is usually, but not always age appropriate)
Yu Gi Oh	all ages	functionally illiterate (at all ages)

For The Curious/self-pimping

Fri, 20 Mar 2009 20:04:34 GMT

It has occurred to me that people may want to know more about me As An Artist (heh) than a 140-character Twitter bio can provide. Or maybe I should just take an opportunity to pimp myself out.

I am a Naive Musician - much like Naive Art, I have only rudimentary training in technique, but I can't help myself and I need to make noises with my mouth and throat and skull and body.

I empathize with a punk, DIY ethos of music-making. In these glorious days of the Internet, there are no startup costs to syndicating music around the world, and I'll be DAMNED if I don't take advantage of that. It's much better than the distorted convolutions of the Mainstream path. But first, I must Become Ready.

I challenge myself by listening to difficult, experimental music and training my brain to understand it in intuitive ways.

I would like to become the vocalist whore of the indy music scene. Please collaborate with me. I want to be passed around and gain experience like infections.

Projects:

a cappella

- I am an alto (occasional mezzo-soprano) in a twenty-person collegiate a cappella choir that gigs at least a few times a month (proceeds go to charity/road trips/studio fees/t-shirts/booze). I have learned SO much from these generous, talented and knowledgeable people over the past three years, and I've gotten quite good at memorizing parts since I can't read music...! ^_^ I also sometimes join other local a cappella groups to learn different kinds of music and keep challenging my brain.

- I co-founded and I co-arrange songs for a five-person a cappella side project. This group has a focus on adapting unexpected pop/rock/electronica sounds with lots of delicious discordance. We're still polishing the arrangements we have but we're almost ready to start gigging.

collaborations in ambient music

- The Internet has been kind to me and I have connected with a couple DJs, local and long-distance, who are looking for someone to sing/make odd noises over their sweet beats and ambient textures. I'm really excited about these collabs and I would love to do more.

Future Ideas:

I am full of ideas in the areas of:
- performance art
- bands
- bloggery
- zines
- instructional videos
- webcomics
- stories
- essays
- learning to paint

They are too secret to be shared until they are made real, for the moment you hear of them you will steal my preciousssss (unless you want to help)

If you have any ideas that you think I might be helpful with, let me know! I am starving for more more more more more

Listen To Me:

I have a bunch of recordings posted on this page. They're at least a year old and very impromptu and I'm kind of embarrassed of them now.

Day Job:

I am the manager of a pretty successful comic book shop. This is why I am grumpy. I do love comics though.

Diversions:

I foster cats, I play with Tamagotchis (I even have a blog and social network about it, full of much juvenile cuteness and sentimentality <3 ), I love video games and following Warren Ellis around the Internet.

Languages Spoken:

First language is English.
Once fluent, now rusty, in Hebrew.
Functional in French.
Japanese is locked inside my brain from when I was three years old but is not terribly functional now.

First Line Of Defence Contact Info:

Yahoo IM: alienne4
ICQ (compatible with AIM): 174834019
MSN: alienne4@lycos.com
GoogleTalk: miss.elana
Jabber: alienne4@livejournal.com
Skype: alienne4
iChat/mobile me: elana.s
Twitter: elana_s
email: miss.elana@gmail.com

For SCIENCE (or market research)

Fri, 06 Mar 2009 19:59:42 GMT

If you read my reviews of the L'Oreal Double Extend Beauty Tubes mascara, Matchstick (the company that hooks me up with product to review) is looking for feedback about my post and my readers. Plus, for every completed survey, they are donating two dollars to Shelternet.ca, a web-based women and children crisis support centre which also provides financial support to women's shelters across Canada. It's a win-win situation! Their surveys usually aren't very long, either. So pop over here and fill out the survey please!

The following is copied and pasted from their email to me:

Matchstick is looking for feedback from anyone who may have seen my posting regardind L’Oreal Beauty Tubes. If you click on the link below and complete the survey, you will be helping them by donating $2.00 to Shelternet, so please Click Here to take their short feedback survey.

For every survey that is completed, Matchstick will make a $2 donation to Shelternet (shelternet.ca), which is a Web-based Women and Children’s Crisis Support Center that provides aid and financial support to locally based women’s shelters across Canada.

Your time and feedback is greatly appreciated

Morpheus on CSI

Fri, 23 Jan 2009 02:37:40 GMT

Clearly, everyone involved in CSI is sick of their jobs. They're behaving like girlfriends who are desperate to end the relationship but don't have the cojones to actually dump a guy, so they behave like utter twats and cheat and things just to drive away their partner. That's what CSI is doing to its audience. And we're all obviously a bunch of mad masochists.

Grissom set the tone for that show. He made it into a warm, cuddly, nerdy embrace where it was cool to like bugs and not get jokes right away. I loved that. Because of him, the bad puns were acceptable, nay, delicious.

When Grissom said it was his time to move on from CSI, I understood. I accepted that. That was a grown-up, mature breakup. So I don't hold it against Grissom.

But Morpheus. Poor Morpheus. As if he hasn't had enough experience with marvelous franchises being run into the ground.

I actually coughed up my peanut butter on pita when I saw that they had put Laurence Fishburne's name first on the credits, where William Petersen has been for so many seasons. Really? He's going to be the star of the show already? They're just going to swap out Grissom for a n00b? And we're supposed to choke down this replacement?

Wouldn't you rather see Catherine become the star? Isn't that the way chain of command works? Fuck, I'd rather watch the Paul Guilfoyle show (although that was pretty much always true).

Morpheus should have been at the end, which is also a special spot. But just slapping him on the front of the credits and expecting us not to blink? I still have peanut butter stuck in my throat.

I objected to the slapdash way they brought his character onto the team in the first place. This guy seems to be a pro at taking jobs that he's completely underqualified for. He's a medical doctor who just randomly became a professor of criminology — I bet people who spent their lives and careers earning their Ph.D.'s in criminology are slitting their wrists at the thought of having what few jobs there are, taken by some yahoo from a hospital whose claim to fame was fucking up on an autopsy. And then, as if it wasn't enough to be waltzing around lecturing at students about his new hobby, he decided, oh, I'm just going to become a forensic scientist now. That's like, what, a two-week diploma program, right? Can I like do it at a retreat in upstate New York or something?

So, I guess to compensate for this horrendous awkward chunk in the show's verisimilitude, the writers have spent this entire episode illustrating how badly Morpheus sucks at being a forensic scientist. The short list:

- he can't lift fingerprints
- he nearly barfs at the crime scene
- he breaks off bits of the corpse accidentally
- he lets his tie smear all over the dead guy and has to cut it off for trace
- he gets all up in a dude's face for smacking his son (who's a prick) and nearly blows the legality of their evidence processing
- he runs out of a car to chase down a suspect, leaving Catherine to her halfhearted cries for him to desist, and is useless anyway
- he is condescending to a juvenile person of interest and gets spat upon

I was just waiting for them to write in some sort of redemption for his character. The big redemption is that he solves the mystery by READING A FUCKING BOOK. Any of the characters could have done that. There is no special quality about this character that makes him suitable for this show in any way.

I just don't understand– is it so much to ask that the characters on a forensics show be competent forensic scientists??

This isn't the "Follow Along With Entry-Level Forensics Class" show. I want to watch people who are brilliant, being clever, doing unexpected, creative things. This is TV, after all. Maybe if the story this episode were more original or hilarious, something closer to the glories of the furries episode or the gender reassignment episode. But no, just the same tired old mixup of adultery and narcotics. Sigh.

Furthermore:
Laurence Fishburne needs to adjust his acting style for the small screen. He's too big for TV right now. His moves and his tone of voice are so deliberate and dramatic, as suits film, but not CSI. It does not gel well at all with the easy, naturalistic acting style of the rest of the cast, or the tone of the series as it has developed over the years.

But there is some optimism to be had for CSI.

I have recently discovered that I have a talent for inventing genius drinking games.

I think CSI is ripe for becoming a drinking game.

Here are the rules:

Every time Morpheus fucks up, take a drink.

Fucking up includes: screwing up the forensics, screwing up protocol, being clueless, or over-delivering a cheesy line.

This episode alone will make you pretty hammered.

Yes, I think I will tune in next week.

And I may or may not be in the Whitechapel chatroom while I do it.

Mascarablog part 3

Tue, 13 Jan 2009 00:29:42 GMT

My third, and, perhaps final endorsement of the L'Oreal Beauty Tooooooobz shall go like this.

Some of us lovely ladies have the need to shower in the middle of the day. Maybe you like to go to the gym mid-day. Maybe you're like me and you like to go to the local cat shelter to be covered in a fine mist of dander and the residue of thorough cat-lickings. But the dilemma is, do we go bare-faced for the first half of the day and only apply makeup once, post-shower? Or do we waste the effort of doing a full face, full wash, and full face again after the shower? Or do we do some sort of look that will smudge in a flattering way after being steamed?

My lazy ass has been questing for that third option. Going barefaced in the morning is inadvisable because you never know who you'll run into on the bus etc. The kicker has always been the mascara. Everything I tried turned to full-on raccoon eyes in the shower, even sans rubbing, which required just as much work to fix afterwards as it would have taken to apply a whole new eye look. But this week, ah ha! I thought, maybe the toooobz will revolutionize it all.

My pre-cat look is usually some purple liquid liner and some lip balm. Not a big deal. But mascara is pretty integral to any look, no matter how natural.

I would just like to share with you how well the tooobz hold up after a shower. There was no smudging underneath my eyes. Not even any wiggly micro-worms. It was fantabulous. I applied some Urban Decay lipgloss and I was ready to put my face on the Internet.

And another, just before bed this time, just to prove long-lash-tingness (worn-off lipgloss provides a timeline):

Amazing.

TOOOOOOOOOOOOBZ

* way cooler in real life
** I still say "oh my god this is so cool" numerous times whenever I'm removing this mascara

Getting back to my roots

Fri, 09 Jan 2009 16:14:07 GMT

Remember what this blog was originally for?

You gotta remember your roots.

capallero

10:56 AM

Elana

10:56 AM

Who are you?

capallero

10:56 AM

i'm yacine from algeria

Elana

10:56 AM

Why did you call me?

capallero

10:57 AM

i like to have friends from canada and i tray to ontacte you

Elana

10:57 AM

I don't answer calls from strangers

capallero

10:57 AM

i hope that i don't derange you

Elana

10:57 AM

I was already deranged

capallero

10:58 AM

forgive me

Elana

10:58 AM

Don't do it again

capallero

10:58 AM

i can know you

Elana

10:58 AM

Can you?

capallero

10:58 AM

ok i presente me

i'm yacine from algeria i'm student in foreign languages

and you you?

Elana

10:59 AM

I'm Elana from Canada and I manage a comic book shop

capallero

10:59 AM

ok good

do you know people of algeria of never

Elana

11:00 AM

A couple have messaged me on Skype.

capallero

11:00 AM

do you have photo

Elana

11:01 AM

yes

capallero

11:01 AM

can i saw it

Elana

11:01 AM

capallero

11:01 AM

if you like itray to send you my photo

Elana

11:01 AM

Please don't.

capallero

11:02 AM

why

Elana

11:02 AM

Because you're probably very ugly

capallero

11:02 AM

what's ugly

Elana

11:02 AM

Use a dictionary

capallero

11:03 AM

ok i use it

do you seen me

Elana

11:05 AM

capallero

11:05 AM

but you say that i'm ugly

Elana

11:05 AM

I'm guessing that you're ugly.

capallero

11:05 AM

i tray to send you my photo

Elana

11:05 AM

capallero

11:06 AM

yes

i tray to czll you

cal you

ok?

Elana

11:07 AM

capallero

11:07 AM

why

Elana

11:08 AM

I told you no and you don't listen.

capallero

11:08 AM

explain me

Elana

11:08 AM

I say "no", you say "yes".

capallero

11:08 AM

you lie, i plied you

Elana

11:08 AM

You're the liar

capallero

11:09 AM

why

Elana

11:09 AM

Please fuck off

capallero

11:09 AM

wh y
i'm speaking to you

Elana

11:10 AM

Because you don't respect me when I say no

capallero

11:10 AM

it's is not about respect

Elana

11:10 AM

Then what is it about?

capallero

11:10 AM

i'm just like to know why you say me no

Elana

11:11 AM

I said I don't take calls from strangers, and I said I don't want to see your photo. You don't care, you said you were going to try to send me the photo and call me again. When I say no, I mean no.

capallero

11:12 AM

ok forgive me

Elana

11:12 AM

capallero

11:12 AM

ok???

Elana

11:12 AM

capallero

11:18 AM

are you ok to add you as friend

Elana

11:19 AM

capallero

11:19 AM

ok fuck you

EXEUNT heh heh heh

Mascarablog part 2

Thu, 08 Jan 2009 07:03:14 GMT

A new game has been introduced to my repertoire of nightly facewashing sports. Now, alongside the Blowing Nostril Bubbles In My Foaming Face Wash game, we have the...

Lash Or Tube game!!

My fascination with removing the L'Oreal Double Extend Beauty Tubes mascara continues.

To play Lash Or Tube:

Step 1: Wear L'Oreal Double Extend Beauty Tubes mascara. Enjoy the lengthening effect all day without worrying about the raccoon eye effect. Be impressed by this.
Step 2: Dampen a cotton pad with warm water. Hold it against your lashes for a few moments before gently swiping downwards to pull off the tubes.
Step 3: Examine the flecked tubular masterpiece on your cotton pad. Pick a little black dash on your cotton pad. Is it a fallen eyelash? Or is it just the perfectly preserved body of tubular mascara?? Make your best guess. You can even bend the cotton pad and lift it directly from the surface, intact.
Step 4: Poke at the dash with a fingernail and see if you can bisect it with a sawing motion. If it wriggles and separates, it's a tube. If a layer scrapes off but it maintains structural integrity, it's a lash.

SO MUCH FUN.

Don't forget to dab away all the wiggly mini-tentacles that may have accumulated on your cheekbones when swiping.

Oh, and as for actual useful information:

This mascara benefits hugely from two key steps in the application process.
- curling first with an eyelash curler
- waiting for at least thirty seconds or more before applying the top coat. I actually applied my cheek colour between base coat and top coat and got much better results than yesterday. I'm pretty sure this is going to replace my Almay Triple Effect as my go-to mascara from now on.

My friends' reactions (paraphrased):

Mary: "I like how your lashes sweep out at the sides, it's very sultry!"
JM: "Yes, they're... very lovely." <-- boy who didn't even know about the existence of eye makeup remover until I told him this mascara didn't require its use

L'Oreal Double Extend Beauty Tubes mascara

Wed, 07 Jan 2009 08:58:25 GMT

Beauty Tubes, or Beauty Cthulhubes???

Lash primer is not a new idea. I've used the Guerlain lash primer, which has been out for at least a few years now. The concept behind them, as far as I understand it, is that you first apply a layer of white goop to your lashes before applying the black (or coloured) goop. The white goop achieves two things: it coats and protects your lashes, and builds up a thick layer of goop to which the black (or coloured) goop can adhere. Two layers of goop = more mass, theoretically in both width and length, which is what mascara is kind of supposed to do to your lashes. I have had positive results with lash primers, but the effects haven't been startling enough to merit essentially paying for a redundant tube of mascara.

The drugstore response to department store lash primers is the dual-ended mascara. You pay for one tube, but you get the primer on one end and the black (or coloured) goop on the other. Also, not new.

But make no mistake with the unfortunately-dubbed L'Oreal Double Extend Beauty Tubes (toooooobz) mascara, because it's actually quite different.

The story with this product is that the Nourishing Base Coat is not just white goop that bonds to your lash, adding another layer of thickening/lengthening/curling to which you may further add thickening/lengthening/curling goop. It is, you see, a series of tubes. Seriously. As I am to understand their promotional material, it seems that the chemical bonds are different, creating a spiral formation around each hair. The spiral of Double Extend Beauty Tube extends past the edge of your lashes, looping outwards and upwards in an 80% lash extension! And then you brush on the black (or coloured) top coat, which spirals around the white spirals, and you're supposed to get results akin to salon lash extensions.

Getting your eyelashes extended at a salon is a very creepy idea, so it's kind of L'Oreal to offer us a less creepy alternative.

The best — best! — part of this product is that it comes off WITH WATER. Just water. You'd think, gee, all these spirals and loops and tubes, sounds chemically complicated. But water does it. That is the awesomest thing.

So there's the hype around this product before I had even tried it.

So, this is my mascara background:

As a compulsive overbuyer of cosmetics, I have numerous mascaras lying around for me to use at any time. They each have their own special use.

My everyday mascara is Almay Triple Effect. It's a reasonably priced drugstore mascara, with the two-sided brush (half long for upper lashes, half stubby for lower lashes). When I use my Almay, I go from looking sleepy and somewhat alien to looking like I have eyelashes. Not extraordinary eyelashes, but regular, pretty ones. It does the job, and it's cheap. But it is a BITCH to remove. Unless your eye makeup remover is Serious Business, it will take multiple cotton pads and much tugging and wiping to get that sucker off your lashes. If I mess with any eye makeup remover brand outside of MAC or Aveda, it becomes a huge ordeal. I sit there pinching the soaked cotton pad to my eye, waiting for thirty seconds, laboriously swiping downwards, gently but firmly, blah blah blah, and I still get those raccoon eyes of smeared mascara when I wash my face afterwards. Frustrating.

My most beloved mascara is my Guerlain Maxi Lash. It gives me beautiful long, full, fluttery lashes that curve just right on the outer corners. But.... it's like $30 a pop. And if you're serious about makeup hygiene, you'll know that you're supposed to toss mascara after three months. That's a huge expense. Me, I just risk eye infection and keep my Maxi Lash waaaaaaaaaaay past three months, because I'm superficial like that, but I wouldn't recommend it.

Today, I tried the Beauty Tubes without curling my lashes first, just to give it a tough time on its first day. I put on the white primer first and waited thirty seconds for it to dry before applying the top coat.

The primer is definitely the most fun part of application, because you can see the long flecks of white on the tips of your lashes that is alllll tubes. Unlike the Guerlain primer that I've used, it's not coating your entire lash and making it all white. You get these flecks where it's actually extending your lash past its existing length. That is way fun.

The top coat is alright, it bonds properly to the tubes which is, I guess, the important part. I think curling my lashes first when I put it on again tomorrow will help, because all of that extra length didn't really seem to know where to go. They really did look like lash extensions, and made my lashes almost look unfamiliar.

The texture when it dried was a little too crunchy for my preference. Guerlain always feels very soft and natural, which is why I love it. Chanel usually just feels dry, Cover Girl is itchy, and Almay feels kind of stiff but feathery. I'm not a fan of crunchy, though.

The smell is a little bit strong, too, when you open the tube. It's a plasticky chemical smell. I don't normally sniff my mascaras, so it had to be strong for me to notice — plus, I'm quite congested and getting over a bad cold, my nose is stuffed enough that I couldn't really taste my dinner, but I could smell this mascara.

But don't give up yet on L'Oreal Double Extend Beauty Tubes, because the best is yet to come.

It wears really well. I wore it all day, and then through a SERIOUS Wii Fit/Wii Sports workout with my friend Ella. Ella thought my lashes were lovely. And when I looked in the mirror before bed, I had no mascara shadows under my eyes (Almay is bad for that), and my lashes were still extended. It makes your lashes kind of stand up and contrast against your lids, kind of like a cartoon closeup. I might try to take some comparison photos over the next few days, but I make no promises because I think you need to be a pretty good photographer to capture eyelashes.

Anyway, after holding up all day and looking quite nice, it was time to remove it. I had serious doubts about the tube thing, the warm water thing, but I wanted to give it a chance. I wanted to try to remove it with just warm water, and if I didn't see any tubes, I was going to call it a gimmick.

I just took a cotton pad, wet it, pressed it against my lashes, and pulled down.

And oh my god there were tubes. TOOBZ

Little black squiggles on my cotton pad.

Beauty Cthulhubes.

It was so freaking awesome, I fully gasped.

Removing this mascara isn't just easy, it's actually HILARIOUS.

It even flecks off your lashes and down your cheeks in weird tentacular micro-wormy fallout.

It is so freaky and sci-fi.

For that reason alone, you should get this.

Seriously.

Tubes.

More on this story as it develops.

Please answer this survey if you'd like to give feedback to the marketing company about this review.

The Kitty Report

Mon, 05 Jan 2009 20:28:54 GMT

I volunteer at a cat rescue once a week and sometimes hourly Tweets just aren't enough to convey the abounding cuteness I witness while visiting the cats.

Some of my friends will already be familiar with some of these feline characters as I gush about them whenever given the opportunity.

So, today:

Vigilante Kitty was upgraded to Roam Free status, which gave me a moment of panic when I didn't see her in her regular cage. It's a weird contradiction that I want what's beat for these cats - namely, a good home - but when they're adopted out, I feel sad and I miss them. I guess it's only natural. But for some inconceivable reason, no one has adopted Vigilante Kitty yet, even though she is a tiny masked fox-squirrel who will actually Make Out With You.

A black and white cat kept jumping up on things when I was crouched and patting me on the head with his little forepaw. We took turns patting each other on the head.

And that's all in This Week In Kitties. Go get one.

Posted via LiveJournal.app.

Economics

Sun, 04 Jan 2009 19:35:16 GMT

Here are my major influences on my thoughts on economics.

- being a spoiled rich kid in a parliamentary democracy with socialist leanings
- Star Trek: The Next Generation

So, onwards then.

The Internet is turning all media into the "TV model", which I've heard Warren Ellis call it. (I'm going to join the drinking game that Nadya Lev started offhandedly on Coilhouse. Every time you hear the name "Warren Ellis" on the Internet, drink. Ideally, Springbank Campbeltown.) What he meant by the "TV model" as applied to the Freakangels webcomic is that it is free to watch, but you pay to buy the collection (the TV season on DVD, the paper collection of Freakangels). My brain understood it as applied to the entire Internet. The way the Internet works is that you pay a subscriber's fee (whatever your ISP charges) and you get unlimited access to the provided media. It's like paying for cable, only cable = Internet access, and TV = whatever's on the WWW at the time. And your DVR is your hard drive, etc. etc.

Now you can pay more if you want for TV (pay-per-view and all that), but only truly decadent people use pay-per-view, and likewise, only the uninitiated pay for things they can get for free online. By and large, TV programs pay for their work in other ways. I'm no expert, but I imagine it's a combination of advertising and DVD sales, and sometimes government grants.

Internet media is the same. No one wants to pay for more than their subscriber's fee, and it's very hard to keep media from circulating on the black market of free file transfers.

With TV, the startup costs necessitate a pretty big existing market to generate any new content. It's so expensive to create a show that you need to have found an angle already to generate revenue just to pay for the thing. A system needs to be in place.

But on the Internet, it is essentially free to create content. The only investment is your personal time and brainpower. Voilà, moi, I am now generating the written word at no cost to me. No publishing costs, none at all. And it's free to you, too. No money is changing hands at all between writer and reader. And it's kind of nice.

The philosophy of the entitled, spoiled human being of the Internet generation is that if something can be free, it ought to be free. Anything that can be packed up into torrents and fired to your friends at 80 KB/s, should be. Music, movies, books. Art can literally just be scanned and put up on a page. Many shows are just being streamed, embedded in pages, in HD for fuck's sake.

And now, to the tune of the chorus of "Viz" by Le Tigre, let's sing it together:

You call it stealing, I call it art democracy
You call it lawless, I call it art democracy
You call it un-sus-tain-a-ble, I call it finally free!!

As an archaeology student, I have a bad tendency to take the long view of things. When people freak out about economic collapse, I have a tendency to smile a bit and think, now's our chance to replace the system with something better.

Or, at least, to try something new.

When there's hardly any initial investment to creating art, then there is no strong imperative to make back your investment. It didn't cost me anything to write this, and I don't expect any of you to pay for it. I imagine a culture of people with day jobs that pay the bills, who go home and create astonishing paintings, totally original punk art, DIY projects, music produced on Garage Band, hundreds of thousands of words' worth of blog writing, digital photography from the heart. Everyone is a participant. Everyone is improved by it. Everyone is exposed to each other's work, and inspired, and encouraged. Global art community. No one feels entitled to make a buck off of it, because they themselves are benefitting from free consumption of others' art. But they don't need to put themselves down, call themselves "amateurs", "hobbyists", or bullshit like that. The dividing line is no longer about who makes money and career out of it. It's understood that everyone is just an artist with a day job.

But money circulates within the community, too.

There are always ways to indulge people's consumerist tendencies. I will scrape together my savings to buy art on Etsy, if it hits my heart hard enough. Suzi Blu had the ingenious idea of running online painting workshops for a fee, and even though I have no real faculty for visual art, I burned inside to enroll in her class. They are a big success, it would seem. For performance artists, the money could be in the live show. The Internet fosters such a strong cult of personality, such a strong sense of proximity, of knowing, of even being friends with a creator you admire, that you'd be far more dedicated to attending their live shows. It's like supporting a friend. Of course, for live shows, the trick is in cultivating a strong local audience.

And if you really love something, you'll buy the DVD box set, to return to the "TV model" metaphor. I don't know about you, but I take "art democracy" quite literally, and I use my money to vote for what I like. I buy things based on what I want to "support", ideologically and artistically, whether it's organic milk or Suzi Blu prints or startup local designer clothes. So whatever art you generate, give people an option to pay for it, and if they want to vote for you, they will.

But that's all gravy money. In this world, you'd have to be seriously huge to make the leap to quitting your day job.

I guess that's why I'm a good little middle-class socialist Canadian. I assume, not to worry. Your basic needs will be taken care of, no matter what. Just indulge your art, and the money will come if it comes.

I've recently realized how much I abide by the categorical imperative to guide my moral compass. The categorical imperative is basically, "do whatever would work if everyone did it". In other, more clichéd words, "be the change you want to see in the world". The idealistic, Star Trek economic model I kind of just described is how I think I'll try to live for 2009, and see how that goes.

Not panpsychism, not psychic monism - fuck, all the good terms are taken

Sun, 04 Jan 2009 05:55:57 GMT

It's become pretty much uncool to believe in parapsychological phenomena these days. People are reacting so hard against the intense religious crackpottery in this world, that anything that isn't consistent with currently accepted scientific/empirical data is reacted to with kneejerk laughter and mockery.

That, of course, is a sign of insecurity.

Now, I will laugh my ass off at anyone who claims they know that there are parapsychological phenomena, and that they know exactly how they work. That's just the same religious hubris that scared us all off in the first place.

But bearing all this in mind, here's a little flight of fantasy that I came up with years ago that might explain psychic phenomena, if they do exist. Because just because science hasn't explained or acknowledged it yet doesn't mean they might not approach it in the future.

To the other philosophy majors in the audience: this is about philosophy of mind, really. This is how I reconcile my temptation to central state materialism with a deep conviction of monism. Here it comes.

What if there's another dimension to the universe. I don't really care how we keep count, if time is the fourth dimension, if there are ten other spatial dimensions, I don't care. Just lay another one on top, or curled into, or folded in, or whatever the fuck metaphor you want, on the entire universe and everything in it.

So every object, including people, exists in space, time, and this other dimension too.

I guess we can call it the dimension of mind. But not mind in that introspective, mind-as-identity, locked-up, only I have access to it kind of mind. Sort of like a pan-psychic dimension.

Our brains — objects in space and time, little doubt about that — have this freaky connection, they're twinned with this non-physical phenomenon called a mind, and that seems to be in a one-to-one ratio. Or maybe it's kind of like an aggregate of mind-dimension anchored to this segment of space-time-object, or attached by a kite string, or something like that. Philosophers are still trying to figure out how mind and body associate, whether they're separate or together. Our brains are clearly doing most of the work, but it's still mysterious what consciousness is. Lots of things have brains, but the existence of consciousness is a lot more difficult to pin down. That's what I'm referring to here.

So, our eyes and hands and ears all have the power to detect and parse things in the space and time dimensions, and our brains have the power to detect and parse things in the mind dimension. Is that possible?

And what if the one-to-one ratio of brain to mind isn't so solid? What if that aggregate of mind-dimension, kite-strung to our brains, is actually swirling in a soup of lots of other mind-aggregates, which are mirroring other brains in this more familiar dimension?

Or maybe our brains can sometimes peer into the distance and detect some other part of mind-matter that wasn't previously accessible.

Or maybe somebody else's mind-aggregate sidles up really close and bumps up against ours, and an exchange occurs?

Or maybe two mind-aggregates twine together and little bits of themselves gain the ability to flash back and forth?

And what happens when a whole bunch of mind-aggregates are thinking about the same thing, constructing the same shape in that mind dimension? Maybe it's a wish, or a plan, or a fear, or a dead person. It becomes something huge in that dimension. What impact might that have on other minds in the vicinity? And what impact might that have on the people tethered to them in this world that we know?

Is this dimension expanding as the human population continues to grow?

Gooooood morning, good morning!

Fri, 02 Jan 2009 02:52:33 GMT

The real reason I haven't written here in three weeks is that the last event that occurred on LJ for me is Warren Ellis commenting on my last blog post and I didn't want to do anything that might knock that off the front page of notifications.

But I've taken all the screenshots and I was gearing up to get back into it, when I got an even more intense kick in the pants, which was the notification that he had added me as a friend.

I got that notification while groaning to myself with a fever in bed, so if I'm disjointed, blame that.

This is my declaration of intent.

Do you remember when I was writing about applying to grad school? I sure sounded committed and optimistic, didn't I.

David Mack has been known to say that you know what you're meant to be doing by grade five or so. You ask any kid of that age what they want to do, and that, or something in that vein, is what they're meant to be doing. They're old enough to have the beginnings of a real, permanent personality, but they're young enough that their decision isn't brutally deformed by societal prejudices and expectations.

In grade five, all I wanted to do was sing, and write, and act.

I went to Jewish private schools from kindergarten to grade twelve, as I may have mentioned here before. These schools are great for teaching Hebrew language skills and pumping out entire graduating classes of doctors/lawyers/dentists, but they were SHIT for the arts. We had no music program in high school, none at all. Drama class was kind of ridiculous; I remember having to beg and cry to be excused from drama class so that I could attend a Kiwanis Festival competition in Shakespearean monologue. I had been rehearsing that piece with a private teacher. I won a scholarship from that performance (the adjudicator praised me for the raw evilness of my Lady Macbeth), but my teacher still didn't cast me in any school musicals. She basically just didn't like me for whatever reason (and she was kind of a giant idiot), so I learned dick-all about theatre in school.

In grade five, the most musical thing we got to do at school was daily prayers. I was so hungry for opportunities to sing that my non-theological little child's mind adored prayer every day. It had nothing to do with god, and everything to do with singing my little heart out. I hated missing school when I was sick because it meant missing prayers. My teachers thought I was extraordinarily pious.

By grade seven — wretched year that is for all of us — I was a little goth/grunge hybrid. The only thing drawing me back from the brink of total nihilism was the belief that music, beauty, and art, were the only things that were worthwhile in this world. I honestly believed it. I was going to be a rock star. I had to, because there was nothing else good in the world.

In high school, I met Thom Gill. He was the first person I'd ever known of, whether in person or in the media, who utterly kicked my ass at music. He is so packed with talent, I was gobsmacked. At age fifteen, he was improv-ing little silly songs with us at camp, turning jokes into actual, beautiful songs, with seemingly hardly a moment of effort.

I suddenly realized, if he's not famous yet, with far better natural gifts than I have — then I'm fucked. I have no chance.

That ruined me for the next eight years.

I gave up. I threw myself into academics, and my school was all too pleased to oblige. But let's face it, my heart wasn't really in it.

I love the Minoan civilization of the Aegean Bronze Age. They're the reason why I went into archaeology. Thinking of them makes my heart race with excitement. I think I love archaeology too. But what I love about it is the imaginative aspect; recreating a society with such limited evidence. I don't get along with other archaeologists for whatever reason. We don't seem to see eye-to-eye. I think it's because I am actually just not the type...

While trying to articulate these thoughts to my friend Danny, I said, "I think I have it backwards... I think the things I thought were hobbies, are meant to be my career... and the things I thought were to be my career, should be my hobby."

I love archaeology and I want to keep learning about it, but the thought of struggling my whole life with the petty politics and insular culture of academic life — not to mention dragging my ass deeper into debt for grad school, only to emerge about as equally unemployable, and merely older and more super-specialized — it just depressed the hell out of me.

But if I can just play one good show, in a small club, in front of my friends, and with my friends... then I'll know that I am worthwhile.

I remember my grade seven self, joking about living and dying as a starving artist. It's too late for me; my mind was made up at such a young age. I spent all these years trying to cast off those silly, childish notions, but my heart is set. My eyes are full of tears as I write this, and I'm sure most of it is from the fever I'm fighting. But some of it is from the raw truth of these words. I always cry when I'm confronted by things that are intensely, intensely true. And re-reading this paragraph again, and again while editing this piece, I'm getting the same reaction from myself each time.

The marvelous thing... the thing that makes me suddenly think, I am tremendously lucky, I have wonderful timing... is this Internet we all have. It takes almost no investment to put music, writing, art, photography, online, and suddenly the whole world can see it.

It only takes one influential benefactor to propel your work into the minds of thousands.

This realization is simultaneously obvious and astonishing, when the implications sink in. The invitation is irresistible!

My conviction was sealed with the second key realization, equally as obvious but somehow eluded my heart for years: you don't have to be BEST at something, but you MUST contribute.

After meeting Thom, I gave up on music because I realized I would never be best at it. Yes, I was that egotistical.

I thought academia was a better choice because in that world, being adequate is sufficient...

But the more I get exposed to fascinating people in this world — thanks in large part to, yes, Warren Ellis — the more I am able to appreciate the worth of their achievements, the uniqueness of their achievements rather than some arbitrary hierarchical standpoint of "best", "most famous", "most successful", "most important", "most original" or not...

I have to contribute.

The only important thing is to be not crap.

I believe in myself...

I believe that what I do is not crap.

I am a harsh, harsh critic, and I can read my writing and listen to my recordings and smile, and want to listen more.

(That's new, by the way, and a function of what I believe to be actual improvement. I've puked on hundreds of recordings of myself and beaten myself to shreds for years, but suddenly in the past month or so, I have good days that are good enough that I actually like how I turn out.)

I have a bunch of musical/writing/artistic project ideas, many new, many old, and this year of 2009, I'm not going to shut them down and give up.

The Elana I see now is an Elana that I don't hate.

It's been a long time since I felt that way.

This is actually the first time in my life that I have actually said "I believe in myself".

I can go to grad school when I'm old and decrepit.

It's time to be fabulous, full-time.

On being a popsicle head

Mon, 08 Dec 2008 00:01:04 GMT

A week ago, Matthew put the colours into my hair. I went into the salon as Leeloo, and emerged...

... a flower fairy princess.

Some may say this hair is crazy, but I feel more like myself than ever before. Dark brown hair is very pretty and everything, but it's also quite plain. It also carries a bit of racial baggage, in combination with my skin and eyes; I was often called "exotic-looking", which made me feel fetishized, or made me feel like I was in the wrong body, because I certainly didn't feel exotic.

I sure as hell feel like a flower fairy princess, though.

Alternatively, in the midst of a flow of enthusiasm about how much he liked my hair, my friend Jordan gushed that it reminds him of those tri-colour popsicles that he loves so very much.

I like sweets, so I'm cool with being a popsicle head too.

Another upshot of having unnaturally-coloured hair is that my face can take a lot more colour. There's no longer any pretense of "natural beauty", so I can fucken slap on the eyeshadow and it only makes me look more kickass. I used to be totally unable to wear dark contour colours during the day, because I'd look like I was trying too hard. Now, it just makes my look more complete.

In fact... the only time I actually look semi-ridiculous is when I don't wear any makeup at all. Then I'm just that weird chick with the weird hair. You know what I'm talking about... the girl in high school who dyed her hair crazy colours in a last-ditch effort to be noticed, but was otherwise unremarkable. No one wants to be that girl. But if you have a complete look, with sweet makeup and interesting fashion, you're in the gold. Crazy hair mustn't ever be the only interesting thing you've got going on.

My new fashion role model is Zoetica Ebb, photographer/painter/model/fashion columnist/designer. I know of her via Warren Ellis' Internet hardons. He seems to have a taste for extraordinary-looking women. The blog post I linked to is representative, to me, of his idea of beauty, which is to say, beauty is about getting past looking human. "Too beautiful to be human" tells me, to be really beautiful is to transcend humanity. Zoetica isn't really about "natural beauty" in the barefaced-hippie kind of way. She's gorgeous in an exaggerated way. I'm actually burning to know how long her morning beauty routine is.

My exboyfriend was all about natural beauty. "Natural beauty, smooth lines", that was his mantra. He didn't even like the lace embellishments on my dresses. If it were up to him, I'd wear monochromatic satin all day, and no makeup at all. When we went to movies, I'd pick out the hot girl in the film and whisper naughty things to him about her — and he'd turn around and say, "I don't like her, I like (x girl)" where (x girl) is the plainest, most boring chick in the film. It got to the point where, every time he'd tell me I was beautiful, I'd feel an internal clench of horror, thinking, maybe if he thinks I'm beautiful, that means I'm actually FUGLY!!

Now that I'm single, I can be the kind of beautiful that I want to be. Luke and I actually got into fights when I would talk about cutting my hair short (SERIOUSLY), so I could never have considered wild hair like this if we were still together. No, now I can put my preference into attracting men like Warren Ellis, which involves making myself look as alien as possible.

Right now, I'm wearing red and black eyeshadow, with possibly too much black. I'm also wearing a shade of lipstick that I can't say I have ever been able to wear to my satisfaction: MAC Mocha. It's very matte, and browny-red. It always used to look too serious, too severe and grown-up for my style. But with popsicle hair, it makes my lips look defined and hot. The hair does a lot of the work in giving my face "punk legitimacy", so now I can wear conservative lipstick, even high-collared tops and long skirts, and it just makes the whole look a little more sophisticated or self-aware.

People I admire, real and fictional

Fri, 28 Nov 2008 07:00:53 GMT

There are two people in this world, the thought of whom I find deeply inspiring. When I'm down, or lazy, or overwhelmed, these people inhabit my mental arsenal. I think of them, and I am filled with the desire to be more like them. I become guided by the "what would she do?" line of advice. Somehow decisions become easier that way.

The first person is my friend Rachel. She is such an enormously capable person. She is a talented problem solver, of both logistical and interpersonal problems. She is a diplomat, a mover of things, an out-of-the-box visionary. She smoothes things over so quickly that you don't even notice it until it's over. I am amazed by her every day.

She is the manager of my choir, and without her we would become a milling mass of chitchatting singers who don't accomplish anything or make any decisions. She steers us around, organizes our opinions, presents options and collects data. She manages people around to keep us happy and mostly drama-free. Really, we're like a bunch of baby chickens and she's like a big fluffy broom that sweeps us around where we need to go.

I've known her for a few years now, and in that space of time she graduated from university and got an amazing job in the administration of the Toronto Symphony Orchestra. Now she steers around professional absent-minded classical artists. That's how fucking good she is at logistics and people management.

I also happen to know that her bedroom is exceedingly messy. This keeps her real and makes her an aspirational figure to me. My bedroom is messy too, but having a messy bedroom doesn't stop Rachel from being drop-dead awesome. So maybe I can be awesome as well.

So when I'm confronted with a tricky problem, I think, what would Rachel do? Rachel would apply all her cunning and sweetness. And I try to do that too.

---

The other person is fictional, and is really just an archetype. But these days, I think of Sakura from Cardcaptor Sakura. She, along with most female characters in anime worlds, is filled with a special indefatigable cheer and optimism, combined with pristine Japanese politeness and adherence to duty.

I've written in my paper diary and my Blogagotchi many times about this word, but I don't think I've mentioned it here: ganbatte. Ganbaru. It's a rich point in Japanese: one word that combines all the spirit of "go for it!" with the strength and sympathy of "be resolute and endure!" as well as the motivation and encouragement of "try your hardest!". If I had a robot that did only one thing, I would ask it to say, "ganbatte kudasai! Ganbatte ne!" at key points of my melancholy or distress, or whenever I was starting a difficult task.

Sakura, along with many anime characters, embodies the ganbatte! attitude. In her particular silly show that I watch when trying to unwind, she juggles working hard in school, being social with her friends, numerous household chores, and also saving the city from magical attacks using her special secret powers.

What I love about anime is that they don't neglect the everydayness of life. The premise of a show will be fantastical, but a certain amount of plot will be dedicated to regular tasks: cleaning house, paying rent, taking care of friends and loved ones. I love those scenes best of all, because they are relatable and inspiring. I spend so much time living inside my head, thinking about abstract things, that I am woefully neglectful of my physical environment. Food is just fuel, my room (as mentioned) is a mess — all I'm concerned with is being plugged in to the World Thought Machine and musing away. The everyday scenes of anime make the physical world seem much lovelier, much more invitingly tangible. Chores are transformed into tasks that are done while humming, while upbeat instrumental soundtrack music plays, while chatting easily with your flying magical familiar. I want that life. Laundry looks like so much fun in that life.

Sakura is supposed to be eleven years old, and she's already more useful around the house than I am. She cooks — cooks!! And I don't just mean "cooks", I mean she makes really yummy, balanced meals that I totally want to eat, cooked from scratch. She bakes, she keeps a spotless household, and when friends come over she makes tea and prepares a tray of sweets, sometimes homemade. She splits the chores evenly with her father and brother, and they all do them right. She's more of a phys-ed kind of student, but she still does her best on her shukudai (homework). And when she's confronted with the injustices of being constantly targeted by magical attacks, she retains bright optimism, a big smile, willingness to try anything, and of course an incredibly adorable high-pitched voice done by a professional Japanese voice actor. I love that shit.

Sakura lets her mind focus on small, trivial problems — boy troubles, having her adorable flying magical companion be seen by a bystander, kitchen spills — and maintains a vague but positive outlook on longer term problems. In fact, her most powerful magical spell is: "zettai daijoubu!!" which means, "it'll be okay, for sure!!".

This is not to say that I am opposed to thinking or worrying about serious problems, but there are so many problems that simply don't benefit from constant fretting. I have a lot of multi-step problems in my life, long-term goals, and it does me harm to panic about long-term or future troubles that I cannot yet reach. I do that too much, too.

Sakura's manner with other people is also something to be admired, although this could just be a Japanese cultural thing that I am striving to adopt. She is always bright and cheerful, even if she is sad inside or feeling under the weather. She gives each person 100% of her attention. Her greetings are positively marvelous: bright "good morning!"s and cheery "take care!"s. She tries to be early to all her appointments. She thinks of ways to go the extra distance to make someone happy on a special occasion, like handmade gifts.

These strengths are all my most woeful weaknesses. I am perennially late to everything, I'm selfish, moody, domestically useless, grumpy, generally unfriendly, critical, loudly opinionated, frequently rude and sometimes reclusive. But I know I'd be a happier person if I adapted some of Sakura's traits. At the very least, I'd love myself more. My world would be brighter, certainly cleaner, and would probably have a more upbeat instrumental soundtrack with lots of strings.

When I'm at work, feeling very sorry for myself and hateful towards the many idiotic customers, I try to think, "what would Sakura do?" The answer is usually that she would greet the next customer with a big smile, and help them to the best of her ability. She would bring a little more sunshine and civility into the store. Everyone leaves happy, including me.

Fake smiles start fake, but they trigger endorphins, and soon, at the very least, the urge to sulk will dissipate.

Zettai daijoubu!

Thoughts on being a blonde

Wed, 26 Nov 2008 06:07:01 GMT

I succeeded in working my way down to washing my hair only once a week, as per Matthew's instructions. This meant I was ready for phase two of his long-term plans with my hair. He wants to colour my hair crazy colours. The first step in that process was bleaching my hair, stripping it of its natural pigments so that the dye would show up.

Because Matthew is so conscious of hair and scalp health (hence making me reduce my wash frequency before the colouring could even begin), he decided it was necessary to wait a week between bleaching and dyeing, so that my scalp could recover.

So for seven days, I am somewhat blonde. Ish.

First, I want to talk about the bleaching process. I've never bleached my hair before. I hadn't washed my hair for a week when we put in the bleach; Matthew fondled my head and seemed pleased with the condition of my hair. I am personally proud that I can now go a week without washing my hair and let my hair be fondled. In fact, it feels nice and not disgusting. It's truly amazing.

Since there was so much delicious scalpy buildup (the healthy kind) on my head and hair, I hardly felt a tingle when the bleach went in. Matthew assured me that a regular girl (without my superstrength hair sebum distribution prowess) would be in agony right now. I was expecting quite a bit of pain, and was surprised when there was nothing.

Since we did it in his house instead of the salon, we didn't have access to those fancy heater head-enclosure thingies, which I think reduced the efficacy of the bleach. The hair closest to the warmth of my head is a gorgeous Marilyn Monroe white blonde, but two inches down, it is quite orange. I was shocked when I saw it, and a little horrified. My dad still can't really look at me, but he's an excessively judgmental bastard really.

I got over the orange thing after Googling some pictures of Milla Jovovich in The Fifth Element.

Anyway, this is my funkadelic hair for the next seven days. I'm still a little insecure, but not overly so, since I am capable of being simultaneously vain and able to see the utter irrelevance of it all. Making a modelly face, hee hee:

And doing my best blonde impression:

He left a bit of my natural colour on the left and in the back, because I think he's going to go for some kind of chiaroscuro effect, or otherwise make me look like Two-Face, I don't know.

I blow-dried it myself and I was forbidden to use my flatiron on the freshly bleached hair, so it will not only be orange for the next week, but it will also be a godawful mess. Truly, a formidable first impression I shall make.

I would also like to make some preliminary observations about how interactions with people have changed since I modified the variable of hair colour:

1) Men talk to me more. A LOT MORE. Customers who would previously just come in and browse and go on their merry way, suddenly they have all kinds of questions and small talk for me. I think being somewhat blonde is compromising the potency of my Withering Glance, aka the Don't Talk To Me stare. My early hypothesis is that it's harder to fall back onto the Antisocial Bookworm archetype when you're not a brunette anymore.

2) Women think I'm a dyke. I bought some tinsel and glitter for the store's Non-Denominational Festival of Lights Gift Ideas Display, and I chose a purple colour palette, because I don't think purple is associated with any seasonal holiday. The checkout lady was like, "Purple! Is that your favourite colour?" I said, "No, I just tried to pick the most non-denominational colour you had." She then said, "Non-denominational, or non.... gender... thingie...?"
"Uh, no, just... non-denominational. ..."

More on this as it progresses.

Wii Fit

Wed, 29 Oct 2008 05:03:12 GMT

I've been single for seven months now, and we're coasting right on time into that delicious period of feeling ready to start dating but being terrified of being intimate with someone new. It's awesome. Right on cue, I'm developing some wicked body image issues.

But the gods have chosen to deliver a Wii Fit into my life, which will either be a focal point to spur on an unhealthy obsession, or redirect my preoccupation into a better direction. I'm hoping for the latter.

I did my first Wii Fit-guided workout tonight.

I fucking hate exercise. I'm bad at it. I treat my body like a shoddy goat-drawn cart; I feed it crap and expect nothing more than to be transported where I want to be. I eat irregularly, and when I do, I subsist on junk food; food is either a sensual luxury (i.e. give me whatever is most delicious) or just raw fuel (i.e. give me whatever's cheapest and will make me stop feeling hungry).

To rights, I should be about five hundred gazillion pounds overweight by now, according to the way I treat myself, and the only reason why I don't have to lug my ass around in a separate motor vehicle is because of some SOLID genes from my mom.

That being said, I LOVE video games.

And I love anthropomorphized cartoons of inanimate objects.

The second the Wii Fit balance board made a cute noise and had a talk bubble on my TV, I was sold.

It's messed up. I need someone to tell me to exercise, or I will not do it. I used to have a personal trainer before I moved, and that worked for a while, but was WAY expensive. Also, she was a bit flaky, and was not a cartoon character with a cute voice.

I obey video games. I obey screens and cute cartoon voices. And in my basement, I can just laugh instead of feeling intensely ashamed at letting other people at the gym see me huff and puff after just a few lunges.

Also, the Wii Fit makes a pretty CHART for me! Yayyyy! I love charts and graphs!! God I'm such a nerdy archaeology student.

So I'm actually kind of excited about this.

When you set up your Mii in Wii Fit, it asks you to set up fitness goals. I chose to max out the amount of weight it would let me try to lose in a duration of six months. I don't know what effect that has on the exercises it chooses for you. I noticed that I wasn't allowed to change the number of repetitions for my strength training exercises, or the duration of my run, or anything like that. And it gave me stars and confetti when I reached thirty minutes of exercise time. But maybe that's just standard? I don't know.

I like the positive feedback it gives me. I KNOW it's not judging me, which is nice. And it's fun to play with the little 'balance dot' that appears during a yoga pose. The graphics are cute and exciting and make me laugh instead of being worried and taking myself too seriously and putting myself down. And I don't care what anyone says, it is WAY more fun to pretend jog in a cartoon world than to actually jog outside where it's cold and there are cars and annoying people.

Maybe once I reach my Wii Fit goal, I'll be brave enough to do real exercise, maybe even with real people at a real gym. Because I was really working hard at times tonight. It made me do pushups (!!), and jogging in place is still an aerobic exercise no matter how silly it looks. So reaching my Wii Fit goal won't be a joke, no matter how questionable their BMI calculations might be. And when I weigh that amount, I will surely feel very confident with myself.

It comes with a calendar, and you press A to stamp the calendar, and you can unlock different stamps. So it's really just more positive calendar reinforcement. I am very very into that.

Today's CSI

Fri, 24 Oct 2008 04:36:38 GMT

I hate to be a fangirl bitching about "oooh they're changing this and that about xyz beloved television show", but here are the reasons why I am dubious of this week's CSI and how it could exemplify a change in tone for the entire season.

Firstly, the mood of the season is so sombre. I understand that they're letting Warrick's death set the mood, okay, fair enough. Last season was very upbeat and full of jokes, and maybe they got some guff from that, but I like TV that makes me laugh. My favourite episodes of CSI are the ones that really explore the limits of the absurdity of Las Vegas. They can't take themselves too seriously and be successful with me.

But the biggest problem for me while watching this episode was that I was pretty much unable to suspend my disbelief. There were so many things that drew my awareness.

First, the story was really predictable. Maybe this reflects that I am a sick, sick individual, but the second they revealed the first crime scene, I knew it was a staged art installation by some art perv. Maybe I'm an art perv myself and I recognize it immediately. (Well, really, I'm just an everything perv.) So every reveal in the episode was just me throwing up my hands and being like, "Yes of course, welcome to ten minutes ago".

Speaking of art pervs, the visual team seems to be slacking a bit. The dead bodies looked really fake, so I couldn't suspend my disbelief for any scene that contained a corpse (and this is a forensics show…). And the costumers are out to lunch, I think, because hot chicks like the fingerprint lady and Catherine for crying out loud, looked fat in their outfits! They put gorgeous Catherine in a tucked-in t-shirt with a big stripe of weird ruched fabric or something right down the belly to achieve the impossible and make Catherine Willows look fat. I was appalled and really distracted by it.

They introduced TWO new characters in one episode. Is too much. I protest very much. CSI is a story-driven show. In the tried-and-true seasons, they stuck to a formula: fifty minutes of story, ten minutes of character, usually at the end in the form of a few clever quips or something. Just one obligatory "character moment" per episode. Over the course of many episodes, the cumulative effect of all those little "character moments", those snippets, built into well-rounded, interesting characters that we all love. Extended "character scenes" or "character storyarcs" just draw too much attention to themselves as very un-CSI-like. It was much more masterful when they would sneak character-building into mannerisms, and brief interactions in scenes that were primarily about moving the story forward. That was always what I loved about CSI. Those were the CSI writer skillz.

I'm willing to wait on judging the new CSI girl. She is very cute, and funny and snarky, but the writing just felt like it was pushing too hard. "Look, this is a new character, and this is what she is like!" It felt kind of forced, and quite different from the way other characters just plunge into the stories and develop over time.

That therapist, though, god. What a stereotype. The stereotype of the TV therapist, which is nothing at all like a real therapist. My dad's a psychiatrist, my mom's a MBCT therapist, I myself am crazy and have been to therapists, I know therapists. I know therapy. And the most annoying rookie mistake therapists make is to make a big deal out of everything. Some people grieve by not talking about stuff. They don't want to think about it. Rookie therapists (and/or TV therapists) make it sound like it's unhealthy to be like that. But it could actually be doing more damage by forcing them to dwell unnaturally, by encouraging or forcing them to sulk by threatening it will damage them if they don't, by effectively extending their suffering.

It's like, if something bad happens to someone, you shouldn't say, "You're going to get post-traumatic stress disorder!!!! You can talk to me ANYTIME!!" That is basically putting the idea in their heads that this event has made them sick — has made them damaged. They might have actually gotten better on their own, using their natural coping mechanisms. I've heard of clinical trials that noticed that rates of PTSD actually increased in groups that were provided sessions about PTSD, compared to groups who were given access to therapists who didn't mention PTSD. It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

But really, does she have to spout all that nonsense about how you HAVE TO TALK ABOUT YOUR FEELINGS nah nah nah, in a British accent??

The British accent is like a cheap cop-out to represent "person of authority and wisdom". Can I cash in that British accent and exchange it for some good, real acting please? Thanks.

Also, I noticed that they made a big deal out of using this newfangled Intermanets to help find the victim. Oooh catchphrase "BLOG", oooh gratuitous use of Google Maps, are we hip now? Are we cool with the intertubes? I am so over that. It's a forensics show, not "remedial cool stuff that might impress your dad". Show forensics please.

Ranting aside, this episode had some glorious performances by the two suspects: the painter and the killer. Amazing. Loved them both.

And I know the main cast has it in them to deliver wicked acting. They just need some scripts that call for something other than "dour and sombre". Please? Thank you.

In conclusion:

I'm too big a pervert to be surprised by CSI anymore, please find us more of the weird thank you.
Also, more Jerry Stahl, less Evan Dunsky (although I did enjoy "Ending Happy", that was a pretty awesome episode). But more Jerry Stahl please. Thanks. He rocks.

Reinforcing the belief that every day is special

Mon, 20 Oct 2008 05:02:12 GMT

Twitter says: every moment is special
LiveJournal says: every thought is special

Who says every day is special? -> CALENDARRRSSSS

I love calendars.

I have a lot of stationery fetishes.

I buy notebooks compulsively. Moleskines are like tactile sex.

My mom buys pens compulsively so I've had to force that one under control. With the two of us buying every nice pen on sight, we'd be swimming in them here.

Agendas, oh my. Love agendas. I'm one of those weirdos fondling the paper organizers in boutique bookstores.

In fact, my love of agendas transcends the tactile fetish. I have so many calendars, and they all have a special purpose. My iPhone syncs with Mobile Me, but I manually sync a Google Calendar so that I can share my availability with friends while being selective about what they see (i.e. one custom recurring event called "shedding my endometrium" is of interest to no one but myself in my currently celibate state. I'm okay with this. I AM OKAY WITH THIS). I set up a Yahoo calendar for everyone who works at my store. I have one Moleskine for all the events and things I get invited to but am undecided about attending, so that they don't clutter my iPhone with events that I'm not sure I want to go to. I still use the calendar on my old Palm Treo for planning chores in the future. I used to have a separate paper calendar for that before I got my iPhone and my Treo was my main organizer.

But it's still NOT ENOUGHHHHH

Wall calendars are helpful in a different way. It's a more visual experience. In one eyeballfull, you can scope out what's coming up in the distance. Reminders of events that you planned way in advance. And don't forget the juicy countdowns to exciting trips and parties!

In this month's issue of Glow, they were really pushing the Harajuku Lovers perfumes that inspired me to start writing this blog for realsies. One advertising insert was a tear-out calendar, replete with stickers!!!!!!!!!

If it was ever a question what the Harajuku Lovers target demographic is, let me tell you what the stickers say:

"TEST!" "EXAM!" "DATE!" "PROJECT DUE!" "PARTY!"

Oh my. Those are not the concerns that are highest on my priorities in this stage of my life. But that's fine, I wouldn't expect a sticker that says "INITIAL DIAMOND ORDERS DUE!", ha ha ha. (Diamond, if you're reading this, WINK WINK stickersss.)

So, fine, whatever. "TEST!" = gig with the choir, "DATE!" = gaming marathon with Angelo, "PROJECT DUE!" = road trip, "PARTY!" = uhhhh parties, and "EXAM!" = Angelina Jolie movie comes out (Changeling comes out on Friday, who wants to go with me?)

I mean, Angelina Jolie movies really are kind of like an exam. An exam of SEXINESS.

I tore out the calendar, affixed it to the corkboard in my room, and gleefully festooned it with stickers.

Stepping back from my work, what this does is make me feel like my life is full of excitement and change.

I replaced the weird advert photo in the top left corner with a print I got from Eliza Gauger. In her description of this print, she seems ashamed of having to draw a winged kitty for this illustration job (for some kind of RPG). Well, Eliza, I bought this print because of the winged kitty. And I have impeccable taste.

Take note of the Hamtaro head that I am using to indicate which date is, in fact, today. I cut that Hamtaro head out of the side of a box of curry that my mom got for me in Japan, largely because there were Hamtaro stickers inside. The Hamtaro head is re-stick-able via the blue Sticky Stuff that is native to many elementary school classrooms. The ritual of moving the little Hamtaro head incrementally day by day marks the passage of time in a very real, yet really fun way.

I ordered a whole whack of freaking awesome calendars from the catalogue last month. The Walking Dead calendar that I ordered for Mary has arrived; I'm expecting a Red vs. Blue one, and every Studio Ghibli calendar offering that they have. I may have to buy one of each and hang one on each wall. So excited.

Until that time, my free Harajuku Lovers calendar will do me juuuuuuuust fine. ^_^

This week's comics

Thu, 16 Oct 2008 04:36:45 GMT

Today was a great Wednesday! Not only did many of our most amusing customers all come in at the same time, producing a veritable laugh party, but I came home with three excellent books.

This week I bought Ex Machina vol 7, Fables #77, and Astonishing X-Men #27.

Ex Machina is so freaking good, I can't believe it. I love Brian K. Vaughan and I want to be his friend. Seriously. Y the Last Man blew my mind every month, Pride of Baghdad was a masterpiece, I really enjoyed his run on Ultimate X-Men, and now Ex Machina is filling the void that Y left when it ended.

It was never my favourite Vaughan book while Y was still going. I've been buying it in trade because the first bunch of issues kept selling out before I could get my hands on them. (This was before I became full-time.) But now that I've taken over the order numbers, I hope I've been stocking enough to provide for back issues, so that I can catch up on the single issues that I've missed between the end of this trade and the current issue. I am psyched about this book, maybe because the mourning period after Y ended has finally elapsed.

One of my favourite things about Vaughan is the way he can walk the line between science and supernatural. He manipulates our expectations and the characters' expectations with events that could be explained both ways. He did that in Y, and now I see him doing it again. Hundred's "vision" when he met the Pope made me laugh out loud, it was such a brilliant trick on the audience. I love you, Bee Kay Vee.

And I've just finished reading Fables. I am so excited about that book. It's just building momentum for me. The war storyarc was utterly thrilling, a marvelous escapist fantasy. Righteous wars powered by magic — I've been having little fantasies like that while drifting off to sleep almost my entire life.

But I'm mostly a good girl, so watching the plot become about peacetime is actually making me more excited. The righteous war is won, my heart is dancing, and now all the marvelous adventures of exploration and – oh, I am so excited, I am wiggling!

I opened Astonishing X-Men (which I left for last because Warren Ellis is my brain's boyfriend), but I couldn't read it yet. I wasn't ready. I was still too happy from reading Fables. I needed to let that settle before I could switch to hearing Warren's voice in my head. It's just too different.

So the break I took was writing to you.

I have impeccable taste, so if you want to use this blog post as a shopping list, I do encourage you to do so.

- Fables
- Ex Machina
- Y the Last Man
- Pride of Baghdad
- anything, really, ANYTHING with the name "Warren Ellis" on it

Have fun!

PS, is it true that Warren was a writer for Dead Space, the video game? I've been hyping about it for months and months, I think partly from his posts on his blog, and largely from videos at Achievement Hunter. When I saw that cinematic interface (no HUD!! at all!!!!), I was sold. And I'm a wuss for scary video games. There is no way I will be able to play that game, but I will definitely kidnap my friend Angelo and force him to play it through for me. I picked it up today, but don't tell anyone because I really can't afford it. But....... it looks so gooooooooood....

ANTM S11: recap episode

Thu, 16 Oct 2008 03:03:07 GMT

I am pleased that so many of my favourites this cycle are still in the running to becoming America's next top model (freaky Tyra smile here). Almost all the annoying bitches are gone (still have Samantha though). I was getting myself ready for the happy rainbows and unicorns that would make up the rest of the cycle once Samantha is eventually eliminated. But no, this week we had the obligatory recap episode. Siiiiigh.

I still watch recap episodes because sometimes they can be quite illuminating. In the regular episodes, they only have time to show brief moments of personality from each contestant. Anything that depicts too much personal complexity is edited out to keep the story simple. The recap episode is the only time that surprising moments are aired. Even then, of course, I'm sure most of what makes the girls interesting can never be accurately captured by television.

Elina and Sheena got in a fight in this week's recap episode. I was mortified. I love both of them, and I am a consummate side-taker, so I knew this meant that I would have to break someone's heart.

----

Dear Elina,

As you and I both know,

You are blazing hot.

Blazing.

Blaaayyyyy-zinggggggg.

Hot.

I would do you in a second.

Well, I'd take my time, baby.

It'd be nice.

But unfortunately,

I have a problem with the way things went down in that fifteen second clip portraying your conflict with Sheena in the limo re: vegetarianism.

I myself am chocovorous, but I don't hold anyone's dietary decisions against them.

I do, however, hold it against them when they have poorly thought-out arguments and then stick to them with a snotty attitude. This applies to any argument, not just about nutrition and ethics.

Sheena offered you an interesting intellectual challenge when she said, "Aren't vegetables and fruits alive too?"

It is true. If your problem with eating meat is that you feel guilty about taking life to sustain your own, your only option is to starve yourself to death. As heterotrophs, humans are forced to consume the energy stored in other organisms' bodies because we cannot convert sunlight into nutrients on our own. As omnivores, we are able to consume and digest a wide range of organisms. The most efficient source of energy is the flesh of other heterotrophs, since they have already done the work of converting larger volumes of other organisms' energy into a smaller and quite tasty meat package.

Some anthropological work suggests that it was only when our evolutionary ancestors began to eat meat that we were able to produce the energy surplus necessary to grow the enormous brains that we now possess. Some of us use these brains to ponder questions of the ethics of eating other organisms. But we wouldn't even be asking those questions if we hadn't been eating them already.

Sheena's real question was, how do you select which organisms to feel guilty about? She was implying that you are being highly selective in a manner that is not philosophically consistent — essentially, that you are being cute-ist. Discriminating based on cuteness. Do you apply your moral imperative only to things that are cute and have eyes that look up at you balefully as you electrocute them and butcher them and process and package them? Isn't lettuce kind of cute too? How do you feel about committing genocide on vast fields of defenceless lettuce, carelessly putting them in cruel and inhumane slashing machines, and then eating them with their corpses barely recognizable from their original shapes? Or do you not care about their rights because they are not fluffy enough??

Speaking of which, how do you feel about the smallpox virus? Do you feel bad about wiping them off the face of the earth? Just because you can't see their cuteness with the naked eye, you don't care about their right to live?

Do you realize that every time you have ever taken antibiotics, you have turned your gut into a mass grave for poor innocent bacteria? Millions upon millions of lives, senselessly slaughtered!

I love animals, myself. I am morally opposed to maltreating them. I buy organic, free-range whatever it is whenever I can. And then I eat them. These chickens were born and raised — indeed, their species was bred, domesticated, and morphologically changed by the process of artificial selection — for the sole purpose of filling my tummy. I want them to have had a more or less happy life before they are humanely slaughtered, but I don't want to be hungry or anemic or protein deficient. There's simply no way around it; we have to eat other beings. It's a cruel world. It doesn't have to be chicken-kicking cruel, but it still involves cutting short that chicken's frolicking so that I can have dinner, wake up tomorrow and go about my important world-changing human business.

Those baby carrots aren't going to grow up either.

There's just no way to win.

So when you said to Sheena, "That's the stupidest thing I've ever heard"—

I was appalled.

She had given you, quite succinctly, a very provocative philosophical argument. She was giving you an opportunity to restate your position to show that you have thought out your vegetarianism, and that it is philosophically consistent. That was your chance to say, "I am not vegetarian because I am disgusted by eating all dead things. I am vegetarian because…" blah blah blah.

But instead you were insulting, and you made it clear to me that you just hadn't thought about what Sheena was saying.

This can't be the first time anyone has ever posited this argument to you.

If it is, you need to start making friends outside of your activist circle.

It's not good to get too insular and not be exposed to other ways of thought.

That would make you philosophically stagnant.

I'm sorry baby, but I just can't be with someone who's philosophically underdeveloped.

All my love,
Elana

PS if you need a booty call I am still down

----

Dear Sheena,

Call me.

xoxo
Elana

----

Of course if the scene was just gratuitously edited — oh what am I saying, I know the scene was gratuitously edited. But anyway, if I'm wrong, and Elina is actually a well-read intellectual who can talk Plato to me, then I'm just going to have to sleep with them both.

At the same time.

Then we'll alllll be friends.

Grad school ganbatte part 1

Wed, 15 Oct 2008 05:21:26 GMT

My demographic seems plagued by paralyzing doubt and indecision about what to do with our lives.

At least, I know I am plagued by paralyzing doubt and indecision.

It just seems like an overwhelming choice. What will be the axis around which I will structure the rest of my life? How do I recognize the one that is optimally suitable for me? How do I avoid the abject misery and regret that seems pandemic among people between 40 and 55? There are just too many options, and no clear standard of how to judge which one is best.

Is it happiness? Personal satisfaction? But isn't that more about attitude than the hard facts of your career?

I've been arguing in this blog that misery is related to the disparity between what you perceive you have and what you perceive you deserve. The distance between expectation and possession. Likewise, contentment comes from satisfaction with what you have, and deriving pleasure from each moment of existence, with an absence of judgment. Being happy with your life. Avoiding comparing it to all the "what if?"s of your imagination. I feel like that's a pretty common position to take. I feel like it's Buddhist or something, or at least something that North Americans who claim to be Buddhist like to say.

I like to try my best to live as if each moment is my last. I like to try to live with no expectations.

There is definitely a flip side to that. I could easily rephrase it as, living as if I could die at any second. Really, it's more like that version. Really, I've just been living my life, waiting to die, coaching to myself that this is as good as it gets.

That attitude really doesn't encourage long-term planning.

The nice voices in my head say, "Elana, we know you're a good person. You're doing a great job managing that comic book shop, and volunteering at a no-kill cat shelter scooping kitty poop. We believe that someday you'll get around to singing in a band, or doing some painting, or whatever small low-pressure self-betterment activities you fancy. You are a highly ethical person and we really appreciate that. You're being the best Elana you can be. We couldn't possibly ask for more." And then I can derive satisfaction from the simple, small successes of my life.

But there is enormous pressure expecting *more*. It comes from all around me. The nice voices are only this loud because they've been competing with all that other noise for so long.

I'm not fully settled on why I'm taking steps to go to graduate school. Part of me thinks it's all I'm good at. My life and education have failed to make me into a well-rounded person; I lurch around with overdeveloped analytical skills and hardly any knowledge of anything practical. Graduate school is where they put people like me. It's kind of like a mental hospital for people who are too nerdy to live in real society.

Maybe grad school will make me an even better thinker. Maybe then I'll be smart enough to contribute some really good ideas to this world. That's the hope, really.

Part of me just says, "Well you might as well shoot for as much prestige as you can get."

And part of me — this part likes to hide and pretend it doesn't exist, but I know it's there — just wants to stop feeling like my parents are ashamed of me.

This time last year, the thought of grad school applications made me sick to my stomach. But tonight I met with a former instructor who is really guiding me back from that precipice of anxiety. Graduate school now looks like something that I can do, something that could be fun. I can actually hear the "why not?", now that the bloodcurdling screams of terror have hushed somewhat.

They're all very far away from home, my prospective schools. That in itself is an exciting motivator for me. I love to travel. And the three countries where my top schools are located — England, Ireland and Japan — are all places I have, at some time in my life, wanted to move to.

Well really the only reason Japan is on that list is because of how badly I want to move there right now— oh god I'll take any excuse any excuse at all—

But England and Ireland have suitable schools and they're cool places to live. ^_^

So I shall play this game, and see if anyone wants me to come paddle in their nerd pool. If I can let go of my fears, my expectations, my terror that the entire worth of my life is balanced on these horrible little applications oh my god aasgdgsahhglgsdhdlkhs—

No.

No.

I can find satisfaction in any number of careers.

I'm just giving grad school a shot.

Just making optimal use of my position in life as someone who could potentially go to grad school. Not many people have this option.

elysesewell (my role model) once said, "It takes an ass to cover every seat."

(Well, the full quotation is, "It takes an ass to cover every seat, shitslice." And it was in the confessional booth of America's Next Top Model. But anyway.)

My ass seems suitably contoured to fit the "read-y, think-y, write-y" seat. So I'll go snuggle up and see how it feels.

No pressure.

No pressure.

No presssssssssssss

Liberal radio ads

Sun, 12 Oct 2008 19:07:49 GMT

I listen to Edge 102 at work because of my humungous crush on Barry Taylor. Unfortunately this means I also have to listen to some unbelievably stupid radio ads. The latest batch includes some of the campaign bullshit from the Liberal party. I shall paraphrase them below.

1. "I was going to vote NDP, but this time I'm too worried that it will split the vote and we'll end up with Harper again! Oh noes! I will vote Liberal instead, to keep Harper out of office!"
Awesome campaign, Liberals. Way to emphasize the values of your policies. "Instead of voting for what I believe in, I will vote for this monstrous party that will be hopefully non-offensive so that I can strategically oust a prime minister!" Honestly, I have no fucking clue what the Liberal party stands for.

2. "Our economy is in real trouble!" "It sure is!" "But Harper just seems so calm!" "Does he even get it?" "He just seems SO CALM!"
For reals, they repeated "he seems so calm" twice in the radio ad.
Because what Canada needs is a leader who'll panic.

Awesome, Liberal Party of Canada. Your radio campaign has assured me that a vote for you is a vote for moronic douchebags who don't stand for anything. Except maybe fearmongering.

Go Green Party yay

On Being Lucky

Thu, 09 Oct 2008 04:51:58 GMT

Most everyone is about equally miserable, I figure. Or at least, it balances out to the null hypothesis. Money, no money, married, not married, fat, skinny, young, old, healthy or disabled. I imagine that rates of actual happiness are pretty much random across all those variables. That's because I figure satisfaction has more to do with the mental landscape: the question of how their perceived life differs from what they think they deserve. The further away people feel they are from what they expect of their lives, the more miserable they are — no matter how their quality of life measures up on an objective scale.

With the exception, of course, of truly fucked up, war-torn parts of the world, where you cross some kind of misery threshold, everyone's about equally miserable. Or should I say, the distribution of happiness is not statistically varied across outwardly visible attributes. It's just the null hypothesis.

Because really, if you take the optimistic view and imagine that humanity's progress will continue into the future, even the poshest lifestyles of today could seem barbaric and bestial compared to unknown future luxuries. And parts of the world considered "Third" to the average Canadian still have access to unimaginable burden-relieving technologies compared to most peoples of the past, even the ones who were living really well for their time.

But would you say that people are, on average, happier than they were in history? Even if you remove the element of war, could you really back up that hypothesis?

It's not a difficult argument to make. Physical amenities, strengths and weaknesses, all come with their own bundles of sadness, disappointment, frustration.

The problem arises when you add the element of being lucky.

I am really. Fucking. Lucky.

- I am alive.
- Not only was I born free of any physical deformities, but my body can endure punishing abuse — irregular diet, irregular sleep, irregular levels of physical activity — without completely falling apart the way it could reasonably be expected to.
- I was born at the end of the 20th century, a time of tremendous prosperity, a time when technological advances have begun to occur so quickly that we take change for granted and even complain when it doesn't happen quickly enough.
- I was born in Canada at the end of the 20th century, a place so peaceful that I have absolutely no concept of living at risk or living in fear. A place so incredibly tolerant that most of the -isms (racism, sexism, etc.) simply don't arise in my generation's brains.
- I was born into a hardworking, middle class family that values education and travel, is willing to spend money on me for both, and also splurge on everyday luxuries and technology.
- My parents are still together, don't abuse me or each other, are both alive and healthy.
- I haven't experienced any random brute misfortunes or accidents that have harmed me or anyone I know.
- I have reasonably developed social skills and am able to get along with whomever I like and push away whomever I don't.
- My life has been quiet, has gone as expected, and my available choices for what to pursue in my future are almost limitless.

However, I am still about as miserable as everyone else.

How?? How????

What kills me, what really kills me, is when something upsets me, I can't tolerate it. I am disgusted with myself for being upset with something. Everything seems so petty, so tiny in the face of all this accumulated good luck that I've had. How dare I feel sad when there are people living in refugee camps etc. etc. And that feeling of disgust, of self-loathing, fills me with so much violent misery, you'd think something had actually happened to me.

Whatever it is that upset me, the mental struggle quickly becomes a battle to legitimize that sadness. It's a real problem because of x y and z, people would take it seriously if I told them. But no, not really. No sadness of mine could ever measure up to true suffering. I just lack perspective. I'm just a brat crying about nothing.

Well, then I become a brat crying about realizing that she's a brat, which is pretty horrible I suppose, but really, even that's not horrible enough to compete in the Most Horrible Things-lympics.

However, as I'm writing this, I realize that I am confronted with the same issues when contemplating success.

Because anything you do in life won't measure up to being, say, Sir Isaac Newton or Socrates or Mozart. At this point in history, the competition is so unbearably vast, in every single field of human pursuit.

Here, in the 2000's, the depth and breadth of human achievement and suffering is not only mindbogglingly huge, but information about it is universally accessible.

I'm sure medieval Europeans could feel pretty fucking happy with themselves for doing whatever the hell they did all day, because they didn't have access to the greatness of Rome or China to realize that they're really pretty pathetic.

In exactly the same way, any non-deformed person in an isolated Saxon village could probably feel pretty good about their looks. A girl could conceivably be called "the most beautiful girl I've ever seen" by a boy in such a village. That would be because there's only about 500 people to choose from, and they don't have a TV and have never seen Angelina Jolie.

The scale is set way too high, now. We're not just competing with our local population, or even just our media personalities. We're educated enough that "putting things in perspective" — anything — includes taking the long view of all of human history, across the entire planet.

When that is the context that we use to compare ourselves, nothing is good enough. No suffering is legitimate. The span of mediocrity is no longer a visible, median band that we can realistically strive to escape — but an enormous asteroid field from which "greatness" and "truly wretched" are distant planetary bodies.

So maybe my problem is that when I put myself into the context of all of human history — when I compare my standard of living to all humans living in all places in all times — I see what an enormously tiny upper percentile I am a part of. The luckiest of the luckiest of the luckiest.

If most misery comes from people's reality having a disparity from their expectations–
"I'm not rich enough" "I'm not successful enough" "I should have this or that"

Then perhaps my problem is being caught between disparities in both directions.

The positive (my reality surpasses my expectations): "I have it too easy" "I don't deserve this"
The negative (my reality falls short of my expectations): "I haven't composed a symphony yet and I'm already 24." "Socrates… Mozart… Ozymandias. At this point in history, it's almost impossible to be 'first' at anything… and yet even if I surpassed those people, the sun will eventually explode and no mark will be left behind."

What disgusts me still more about Being Lucky is that the people I admire most, whether historical or personal friends, are people who've suffered terribly. They persevered through tremendous hardship, took it into themselves and became stronger, resilient, capable. Or maybe they experienced horrible suffering, took it into themselves, went batshit crazy, and made amazing art before killing themselves.

There isn't a lot of art to be made about being pretty much safe, warm, content, fed, living in the suburbs, never seeing a dead body, experiencing only normalcy and calm. Not a lot to say about it. Not a lot of emotional material to draw from — especially when you delegitimize your own emotional experiences as just being bratty tantrums.

This more-or-less even-toned blog post is about the most creative thing I could generate from this feeling. Last night I was a wreck, leaking kohl eyeliner all over my pillow. It was interesting, the powder creates a little black nucleus in the centre of the tearstain. I observed that with the detached part of my mind that never lets go of the context of my suffering, the part of me that is always ready to say, "Are you done yet? This is all just so trivial."

Fucking bitch. But she's right.

Religulous

Mon, 06 Oct 2008 06:41:15 GMT

After a 25-hour gaming marathon with my friend Angelo (we beat Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory and Megaman 9 on Saturday night and Zack & Wiki and Portal today), I was invited out to see Religulous with two other friends, Danny and Jack. Danny is a big Bill Maher fan and we would have gone to see the movie's opening at the Toronto Film Festival, but he accidentally slept in and missed the opportunity to buy tickets — oops!

So I thought today might be a good day to talk about religion.

Bill Maher refers to religion as a neurological disorder. I think that's an interesting idea, but I don't know if I personally agree. It's so universal to believe, or want to believe, in certain irrational things, that I think it's just an attribute of the human mind. It's a natural shortcoming that we all share.

I was trying to think of what the root of such an attribute could be. I'm sure it's many things. Fear of losing control, fear of the unexplained, desire for conformity, desire for community, intellectual triage on unsolvable questions…

I am a flaming atheist, myself. Worse, I'm an atheist who took philosophy in university. This puts me in the category of "exceedingly maddening atheists".

But there isn't really just one kind of atheist. "Atheist" just means "doesn't believe in god", which isn't really that descriptive, especially when you consider all the non-god possibilities for people to spend their brain cells on. Not only that, but almost no one is raised atheist, but are rather "born again" as atheists (ha ha ha), and the type of atheist you become is influenced by the culture that you spent your childhood in.

I was raised in a Jewish home. We keep kosher. I went to Jewish private schools from kindergarten through high school. I was bilingual with Japanese as a small child, but it was decided that the family would drop the Japanese as I got older, because my dad doesn't speak it, and because my schools were starting to introduce us to Hebrew as well as French. They thought four languages would be too hard for me. (biggest regret ever cough cough)

There were three factors that doomed my potential as a good little frum girl:
1. My dad's omnipresent skepticism.
2. I don't look like all those homogeneous curly-haired white chicks who went to my schools.
3. Mr. Bagola.

(1) When I was one, and we had our first Passover seder, my parents tore up the city looking for a hagaddah that didn't mention god. Getting god-talk from one parent and cautious silence from the other is not really sufficient reinforcement.

(2) I used to look in the mirror as a child, and actually feel surprised, because I looked so different from how I imagined myself.

The draw of religion in large part, I believe, is the sense of community. People can come together and know that they share a certain set of fundamental beliefs, a certain series of values. They share a vocabulary of ideas. They can manufacture an identity for themselves based on this.

Neither of those things are effective or useful to me. I just don't do community. I have "hybrid syndrome" or whatever, the deeply entrenched belief that I will never 'belong' anywhere. To Japanese people, I'm a Westerner. To Jewish kids, I'm "that Asian chick". My first strong sense of identity, at adolescence, was also my favourite word at the time: "non-conformist". I see this now as the way I tried to own my own difference. I sensed that it was hopeless to try to fit in at my school, and I responded by screaming, "well I never wanted to fit in anyway, because fitting in is for STUPIDHEADS!" It's a strong philosophy, and a tough one to shake, really.

I was already a precocious kid, and feeling like an outsider made me more willing to consider alternative possibilities than the one being presented by…

(3) Mr. Bagola. This douchebag — and I hope you're reading this, ya douchebag, because you're a douchebag — taught me basically "religious studies" in grade seven. He remains to this day the ugliest person I have ever fucking seen in my life. Imagine an enormously corpulent brown toad, with deep black circles under each eye, wearing the same white striped dress shirt every day, replete with yellow pit stains. Then put theatrical makeup on that toad to really bring out the sinking, leathery quality of his skin, the enlarged pores, the bulbous nose. And then imagine an overpowering chemical smell, like someone poured expired aftershave into running sewage and melted human fat in an effort to conceal their combined stink.

To our young minds, we imagined that Mr. Bagola was in fact unable to pass through the doorway of his classroom, since we never saw him outside of it, and no other teacher taught in that room. Probably because it fucking stank so badly.

Physical repugnance aside, the man's brain was made of rot.

When I first arrived in Mr. Bagola's classroom, I was newly transferred from my much smaller school to this seemingly huge branch. I was out of my wits with terror at meeting all these tough new kids. For real, I used to sit in class and suddenly realize that my nostrils were flared, like an animal on the savannah. In such conditions, I fervently believed in god. I was ripe for some serious fundamentalizing.

Mr. Bagola single-handedly showed me the light. Of atheism. By being a fucknugget. At that age, I had nothing but disdain for almost every teacher I met, but Bagola said more painfully obviously retarded things for me to raise my hand and argue about than any other teacher. Part of me wishes I could remember examples for you, but I'm sure the memories are blocked out for a reason.

Oh, and he hated me too, hated me very much. At parent-teacher interviews, he had only nasty things to say about me. He said that I was a "rotten apple" ruining the whole classroom. My parents were enraged by the way he talked to them, and the way he talked about me.

It was during his class that we would do our daily prayers. We each had cute little siddurim, and we'd been doing it all our lives. I used to love tfila time, because in the younger grades we would sing the prayers all together. I always loved to sing. It was the highlight of my day.

By grade seven, we were doing the silent amidah on our own, aka Note Passing Time or Giggling Time or Making Faces Time. For Elana, it was Stare At The Wall And Think About Stuff time. I'd ponder questions like: "Mr. Bagola is so repulsive and stupid, but he's teaching us about religion. This means that anyone can teach anyone anything and call it religion. This is dubious." Or: "Jewish people are so very confident that they Have It Right. But so is everybody in every religion. How are we supposed to know which of us is right? They're all based on faith, not evidence, so it essentially becomes a problem of probability. Even if you only count the three biggest monotheisms, that's only a one-in-three chance that Judaism is right." Or: "Even within Judaism, there are disagreements about how to practise, or what is true and what is false. It's like every individual has a slightly different religion. That means that it's not even a one-in-three chance of getting it right. The probability is incalculably low! And then what about all the possible explanations that aren't a religion? Good god, there's no way anybody has it right!"

And as I'm thinking about this, Mr. Bagola would catch me with my eyes not in the siddur and reprimand me for not praying hard enough. And then I'd fix him with my most scornful thirteen-year-old look and say, "How do you know how hard I'm praying?" And then he'd send me to the office. And I'd march out of the classroom as though I were the one victorious. And I'd show up in the office and say, "Mr. Bagola sent me to the office because I wasn't praying hard enough." "Were you talking?" "No." "Were you passing notes?" "No." The secretary would be exasperated, and I would be delighted to sit in the office in a more comfortable chair and not standing in that oppressive silence.

The absolute kicker, the turning point, the singular moment that made me realize there was no fucking way that there was a god, was when Mr. Bagola came into class and explained to us that the Bible instructs us that all homosexual people should be stoned to death.

That was it. There's really no arguing with that. Nothing can be omniscient and good AND write something that fucking retarded. I was out. For good.

So that was my Born Again experience. I am an atheist, not out of rebellion from Judaism. I love Jewish culture. I almost wish I could undo the revelation I had and re-immerse myself in the blissful believing ignorance. It just got to the point where the evidence was overwhelmingly against any organized religion. It just doesn't make any sense that any of them should be more plausible than the other. They're all equally bullshitty. Occam's Razor is my new god, and he is a jealous god, and he thinks all the other gods are stupid and he beheads them.

It's hard being an atheist. Existential crisis is really shitty. Some very old posts in this LJ mention my struggle with existentialism, and the way I often turn to non-rational beliefs as a sort of "brain vacation" when the pressure gets to be too much. I've always had a soft spot for witchcraft, because it asserts that we can always gain some kind of control over our circumstances, even the things that seem completely impossible to control. And Wicca is of course among the crowned princes of crackpottery.

So I'm sympathetic to believers, I really am.

I also know that there are numerous ways to be religious without being stupid. There are lots of people who find ways to reconcile various holy books with the observations of science. Science and religion are not really mutually exclusive, not at the heart of them.

However, what I really can't stand — what really rocks me on my feet — is anti-intellectualism. And that, at the core, was what Bill Maher was attacking in his film. It doesn't have to be unique to religion; anti-intellectualism is the state of cleaving to one belief, dogmatically, and being closed to discourse that disagrees with it. It's often associated with a sense of entitlement to live in a society where there are no other people who could possibly disagree with you.

Basically, the evil fuckers who give all religions a bad rap.

Fortunately, Judaism has been around for too long and has seen too much to be very anti-science or anti-intellectualism. So Judaism and I have a truce. But some of these newfangled monotheisms — you know who I'm talking to — are still in their infancies (or maybe their raging adolescence) and have a lot of very, very unfortunate representatives, from the embarrassing to the violent.

In Religulous, Bill Maher speaks to a few absolutely godly (mind the pun) representatives from the Catholic church. I'll always have a weird fondness for the Catholic church, because when given a choice I'll always prefer whatever is oldest. As an archaeology student, the Catholic church just has a lot more objects and buildings of interest. They also tend to behave more like Jews in many respects, in their hierarchies and formal approach to answering theological questions. I really think this has to do with being an older religion. You have to know how to change with the times, how to be flexible without giving up too much. You have to have a much more subtle understanding of people and history.

Maher interviews the head astronomer for the Vatican (who knew?), and some random but awesome priest on the street in Vatican City. They were both brilliant, with a capacity to appreciate that the strength of Catholicism (or any religion) is the messages derived when they are interpreted non-literally. Reading the books literally, as a history book or as a science textbook, is just being an idiot. You miss all the good points and hang on to the nonsense trappings. "Literalism and fundamentalism are really a plague," the astronomer said. ("I love that guy," Elana said thereafter.) Those guys know how to rock the faith without being a fucking braindead douchebag. I admire that the way I admire any well-held convictions.

The problem with faith, really, is that it is synonymous with "not thinking", and not thinking disgusts me. Thinking is my highest value. It's really all I do of consequence. I think really hard, as much as I can. I try to know things, whatever I can know, I try. But the most I can really claim to sure of, is that I know nothing.

If you think you know significantly more than that–

I'm sorry, we can't be friends.