A Mini-Rant

One of my professors recently vindicated the East for their hatred of the West, and justified their hatreds for the class.  I understand that.  I think the actions of radical Islamists are abominable and stupid, but I understand why they hate us.  But I want to point out that there is another side of the story.  Perhaps we are the Great Satan, as they call us in the East (or at least as some people say they call us.  I personally have never heard myself called the Great Satan.)  But if we are the Great Satan, we are Milton’s Satan, not the Southern Baptist Satan.   We do not lambast the olde tymes of our ancestors without a certain sense of nostalgia, of yearning for what we have lost in gaining our modernity.  This is why photoshopped images of colorful upside-down wheelbarrows connect with us in a very unique and sappy way.  

We become adults who just want to be children, and we have children who never have a chance to be a child because their parents have never grown up.  We fly across the planet leaving behind trails of carbon emissions and Coke bottles.  We look to the always-positive future and we count it as a loss if we have zero economic growth.  We are perhaps Satan in our nightclubs, our stripclubs, our country clubs.  We are perhaps Satan in our golf-carts and our SUV’s and our tanks, but we are the Satan who never saw himself becoming who he is.  We are the man in the machine, and we have lost control of the wheel.  We may be screaming about our manifest destiny, and God Bless America's like our predecessors said their Ave Maria's, but if you catch us in a moment when we think we're by ourselves, you will probably hear us muttering, “Myself am Hell.”

Valentimes

Today is Valentine's Day at Houghton College.  Houghton is an incredibly romantic place because it is also an incredibly boring place, and there is not a lot for many people to do besides each other.

Some people here measure relationships in Houghton Years.  Houghton Years are to relationships what Dog Years are to dogs.  It's a lot faster than a usual year.  In fact, it generally follows the ratio of 1 month = 1 year of dating. Mathematical!  That means that by the time you graduate, your relationship is ready for one of you to die and the other one to carry on through the boredom of everyday life in the gray emptiness of the lonely void left by the other person.  At this twilight, we cast swimmy eyes towards a "ring by spring," and hope for a quick if not gruesome death for one of us because a person can only handle 32 years of living with someone else once.  

I like to do a thing that some people call cock blocking.  I'm pretty sure that the term began as a pointless rural sport like cow tipping when you find a rooster and don't let it go where it wants to go.  I think that's where the name comes from when it relates to people because a rooster is a boy and sometimes they want to go to the hens, which are ladies.  So you find a cock who is a boy and you block him from where he wants to go which is a girl.  When I do this, some people call me a Dick, which I know is a compliment because Richard was the first name of the greatest cock blocker of all time.  It's like if I was a gladiator and you called me a Russ, which of course would be short for Russell Crowe.

I will not get any Valentines today for two reasons.  The first is that my Valentine from my Grandma came early.  I got it last Friday.  It had five dollars in it.  She is a nice grandma.  The second is that I wore all my stanky workout clothes today in hopes that nobody would try to make me out.  I still came close twice but I pretended that I had diarrhea and had to go right away.  Then I spilled my hot coffee on their blouses.  But I still held the door for them because I am a gentleman.  

I do not know why people talk about Singles Awareness Day.  Valentines Day is more like Open Season on Single People.  They become an endangered species or target practice for people whose lips need sighting in.  I'm not saying it's awful.

Well that's all I've got for now.

Oecologia

I wrote this for something else entirely, but I thought other people might enjoy reading it than just the people I wrote it for.  So here's a bucket of thoughts for your Sunday afternoon or any other afternoon that you end up reading this post.

Some people say I have an ambidextrous brain because I am a biology and English double major.  This is not true.  My philosophy of learning is based on two ideas:  first, we are generally far smarter than we give ourselves credit for; second, the world is too big and wonderful not to want to know everything about it.  For me, English and biology are two sides of the same coin.  They both attempt to describe and make sense of the world in which we live.  The former does it subjectively, seeking to describe and explain the individual's inner thoughts and emotions and how these relate to the outside world.  The latter does it objectively, searching for general principles from the outside world and how they relate to every individual.  If biology asks "What is a rose?" English asks, "What is a rose by any other name?"

The combination of English and biology interests me because both disciplines develop depth and meaning for the world around us.  A person may look at a tree and see leaves, a trunk, branches, and have a vague conception that beneath it all lies a root system.  This he probably understands in turn because he has eaten carrots.  What he will not understand is that nitrogen fixation is accomplished by bacteria living in the roots, that photosynthesis tames raw sunlight energy and packages it into sugar, NADPH, and ATP, and that without these two processes, our world would die.  All of life depends on that tree and every other tree doing its job every day.  This person can appreciate the beauty of the tree, but they cannot understand what this tree means.  Some call this ecosystem dynamics.  When people rely so heavily on each other's existence that without one the other would die, we call it love.  This is to me a rose by another name.

I love knowledge because it excites in me a sense of wonder.  Some prominent physicists such as Dr. Kinney from the University of Buffalo claim that all the elements came from the bellies of stars where the rapid heating and cooling of unimaginably huge quantities of hydrogen caused subatomic mutations in the nucleus of the world's most basic element.  If this is the case, God chose to make us from the dust of the ground, and he chose to make the dust of the ground from the dust of the stars.  So here we are:  walking clouds of cosmic dust floating on the cooled egg shell of a molten metallic sphere that spins at thousands of miles an hour around a massive, self-contained burning ball of nuclear fire.  The elements we are made of are held together by magnetic charges associated with the attraction and repulsion of electrons, which spin at millions of miles an hour around tiny nuclei, which for all we know are more little clouds of cosmic dust that are coordinated systems of galaxies extending infinitely into the cosmos of the subatomic.  Galileo looked up and saw infinity.  Van Leeuwehnoek looked down and saw the same thing.

And then we find that there exist Fibonacci Sequences, Mandelbrot Sequences, and Golden Means.  Movement is governed by swirls and swirls are governed by pi, which happens to extend infinitely into eternity.  And then to top it all off, we realize that we are the only creatures on the planet that can understand any of what is happening.  We are composed of elements and we describe elements.  Our minds are composed of thoughts and feelings that we can communicate.  Synapses sparking electricity through cortices leap our tongues and mouths into poetry or song.  Vocal cords create vibrations in the air and are received by apparatuses we each have attached to the sides of our heads.  From here they are translated into electrical signals that are received by the brain. This electricity shoots through the insides of our skulls and the location that these interpersonal jolts of lightning happen to strike governs how we physically respond.  Perhaps the product of all of this is a single tear.

I desire to know the world that by knowing the world, I will know myself, and by knowing myself I may make myself known.  I think this--to know and be known--this is the greatest pursuit of humankind.  Seek to understand God, seek to understand others, and seek to understand ourselves.  I believe this is love, and that this is the fulfillment of the Greatest Commandment.

Karl Marx Hates You.

America's pastime is no longer baseball.  It is self-hate.  Our self-hatred comes from our arrogance, and our arrogance comes from our self-consciousness, and our self-consciousness comes from our deep insecurity about how different we are, like a kid on the playground who hit puberty before everybody else.  You see, it works like this:  we think we are so unbelievably awesome that we feel self-conscious for being awesome-er than everyone else (which we actually think is true!), and everyone else hates us and tells us we are ignorant bull-headed Westerners who think themselves better than anyone.  This is a self-fulfilling prophecy; the more we feel bad the more patronizing we appear.  (Operation:  Christmas Child anyone?)  Then we get whacked in the black hole where our souls used to be (before we sold them to the gods of wealth) with our own super-ego because our Oedipus Complex is for Great Britain (RULE AMERICANA, AMERICANA RULES THE WAVES!).

Whammo! next thing you know we're grapefruit dieting ourselves to sleep at night and feeling like the scum of the earth because we can afford to sip lattes and buy new clothes while the rest of the world (whom we ennoble as the all-suffering, persecuted real scum of the earth)  is in a GAP sweatshop working to produce our commodities for us.  Worse yet, are the starry-eyed youth group kids who come back from a short-term missions trip digging church basements in a third-world country and say,

"You know, we just take like so much for granted, you know?  They are so happy, and they have like literally nothing." 

First of all, how many church basements does Guatemala need?  Isn't it high time we actually built some churches?

Second, they have some stuff so don't say "literally nothing" because it makes you look like an idiot.

Third--and I think this is the beating heart of the Western self-hate complex--wouldn't it be so much worse if we actually thought that our iPods and iPads and AE and A&F and H&M and FYI and SUV's and PS3's actually made us better people?  Ask any self-respecting teenager today and what will they say is the most important factor in their personal growth and development?  Odds are, they will not say their parents, and nobody will reply "My Mac because it's so intuitive."

Nay fellow countrymen.  They will say "My friends."  I know this because I have asked a lot of teenagers, and they said, "My friends."  Although I did get one little weirdo who said proper nutrition.

The point is that maybe it is normal and healthy to take these material things for granted.  At my school everybody seems to be playing "fruit ninja" on their iPod touch.  Sweeeet.  After a while, though, they will go to the next thing--the next game, the next iPod, or the next something else to distract them for another day or two.  Then they will develop boredom or carpal tunnel and they will go on to the next thing.  Confuscius say:  "Always it is the next thing."

"Well isn't that a bad thing?" you ask.  "Aren't we worse people now than we were two hundred years ago because we have shorter attention spans and we have more stuff and we pollute the environment?" you quander as you anxiously suck down half a Double Shot Caramel White Chocolate Swirl.  NO.

Let me explain.  What is the legendary loyalty of the Italians?  Family.  What is most important to poor families in Cleveland?  Each other.  Even psychologically troubled and hormone-crazed tweenies love their friends in between vampire romance flicks.  We live in a digital, material age, but we are organic creatures that find fulfillment in the warmth of others, and not in the cold, hard silicone that we buy with our cold, hard cash  (really, we buy it with our cold, hard lines of credit but let's not complicate things).

Of course there are problems today.  I think that culture as a whole is on the downgrade in America and much of the world.

I also think, though, that it is part of a cycle that we saw in ancient Israel, Babylon, Rome, and yes even Puritanical England.  I hate to break it to you but Shakespeare wrote a lot about sex.  Oh wait I forgot that's one of the reasons you hate yourself, isn't it?  You're an uneducated, culturally ignorant Westerner.  First off, no you're not.  Second, watch an episode of Spartacus:  Gods of the Arena and you'll see what I'm talking about.  We love sex and violence, and we give into our sexual and aggressive impulses.  But that's not any worse than what everyone everywhere has struggled with for all of recorded history.  In fact, that's the whole point of Virgil's Aeneid.  Guess when the Aeneid was written?  OVER 2000 years ago.  Don't be STUPID.

"Don't hate yourself because you're rich" is not the same as saying "Don't hate me because I'm beautiful."  The fact that we can have these things and not care about them is also a sign that we can do without them and not be much put off.  If this decade's earlier economic downturn has taught us anything, it's definitely that we can go from top of the heap to bootlicker with a twist of Allen Greenspan's little finger.  We are a generation that gets its kicks out of shopping at Goodwill and wearing old wool sweaters.  Why?  BECAUSE WE DON'T CARE ABOUT STUFF.  The only difference between us and the penurious happy street children of Guatemala is that we have stuff and they don't.  As far as it changes our level of happiness, there is no difference.  We are unhappy because we are spoon-fed self-hate from mass media execs.

So get a "heart" for the hard-working, indigenous people of...somewhere or read a book to a child or build yourself one of these:

But for Pete's sake, don't hate yourself.  If you have stuff, take it for granted.  Please for the love of God take it for granted.  

Anti-London Blog

It has been approximately 6 months since I last posted, which means of course that all the people who weren't following this blog in the first place have double stopped following it, so I'm in the red ink for viewership. As a shameless gimmick to recover my lost dignity and meet some Hot Local Singles who might help me in my quest to find the Diet Tricks That Really Works! and get a FREE Laptop! given away by a third-world-based global marketing conglomerate...I mean Apple, I am going to re-gear, re-furbish, and re-vamp this entire blog.

Well sort of.  I just want to compare how much better it is here at Houghton, NY

than it is in London.  And I don't mean London Ontario:  population twelve Canadians and a hockey puck.  I mean this London: 

And I don't have a whole lot of choice about the whole thing because of this guy.  Jimmy Jim James Vitale. 

He's going to keep a blog about his cool and exciting international life as an honors student, which is why I have to make a blog about my even cooler and more exciting life here at Houghton. 

So that's what's going down.  Check out his blog here.