Lies We Tell to Children: Inspiration

You only know you had something when it's gone. I'm not talking about girls here, though I could be, given a couple more days of rain for 12 hours and sun for 3. I'm talking about inspiration. Just write, and it will come to you, my parents said.

I have learned, many times, at or around 1 a.m., that this is patently untrue. Especially this week, when I've been trying to type up something for this site in praticular, and finding my bag of tricks more or less empty. There hasn't been much to annoy me or rattle my cage that engenders a conversation in a public setting, so there wasn't much to write about.

But. If you have ever had inspiration, between cans of Red Bull and Jones soda, then you know, as I do, that you have to strike while the iron is hot, and not while it is lukewarm. This is hard to explain to Zach and company, who seem to be able to sit and come up with something without getting worked up and talking about it to whomever will listen. I see something. I get worked up. I write. Only after writing out the ideas in some terrible form, just getting them on the screen, as it were, can I refine them into the grade B garbage you see in front of you.

(As you might imagine, the grade A garbage derived from the garbage mentioned in the last paragraph goes to the campus newspaper.)

A slight biographical note. I have been sick for the last couple weeks, or ever since I returned to the snow belt, and like Jerry from Penny-Arcade: We've long canonized our respective lunacies, believing it is like some artistic sacrament that makes our bizarre endeavor possible. We have relied upon them. I use his words to say that for the most part I am comfortable in my semi-lucid, sickened, occasionally picking up books and vomiting in the trash can before class state, and it is that state, I believe, that gets me in the right mindset to write furiously and engage my "gift", as my professors and family members have put it.

I don't know what I would do if I lost it. I can't write normally, and I jumped off the ship of normal habits years ago. I need you to understand that the last time I got a bunch of guys together we ended up playing Starcraft for hours on end. I am very protective of my anxiety and neuroses, because so far as I can tell, it allows me to write well.

Though this might condemn you to insanity (As if anyone reads this anyway!), guard your neuroses carefully. Know, too, what they take out of you and weigh those two things against each other. I tell the people around me that I can hold it together, when more often than not, I know I can't, because I know that's where my inspiration comes from. If it kills me, I can take solace in the fact that I'm burning out and not fading away.

I was told by my parents sickness and neuroses aren't useful. Just by looking at the works of the painters they have me look at, they knew better.

Lies We Tell to Children: The Fairytale Chronicles

There are many things you can tell children that will completely alter the course of their lives and warp their perceptions of the world: there is a fat, jolly man who brings you gifts once a year, that on the day some guy died for your sins a large bunny will bring you candy, and that all dogs go to heaven. All of these things are a societally approved, mutual goal of most adults to preserve a child's innocence and to protect them from the harsh realities of the world. I mean, most parents don't feel that Mel Gibson's Passion of Christ is a suitable alternative to the myth of the easter bunny. "Now little Timmy, I know that your teacher says that Easter is about candy eggs and oversize rodents, but this movie will show you the true meaning of the holiday"(for those of you that haven't seen the movie, the true message of Easter seems to be Mel Gibson making money off of other people's religious fervor).

But a conversation with some friends sparked the interesting debate of how much illusion is too much, when do we start doing children a disservice with our lies? I have never felt particularly betrayed by the things my parents told me that didn't end up being true, but i know people who do. It seems that if your parents lied about "little things" like Santa Clause, then they could have been hiding the truth about other things too, like perhaps they don't love you. It might just be possible they have been caring for you, feeding you, and clothing you out of some sick desire to make you believe lies and watch with some perverted fascination when you discover that they were in fact the ones that bought you all those cool new toys. The ever feared revelation that one is adopted did not carry weight in my house, for some reason kids that know they are adopted don't find it so horrifying.

For me, I feel the worst lies to tell to kids are the ones that society ingrains in us, that give us false expectations for life. Things like the idea that the first person you fall in love with is going to be the person you marry, or that all of your problems can be solved in half hour to hour long time slots, and there will even be time for commercial breaks! However, I feel the worst lie we tell to children, both male and female, is the lie of Happily Ever After.

It is something that pervades everything in our entertainment industry. Books, movies, TV, they all perpetuate this idea that one day we will reach a magical point in our lives where we will have no more problems, and everything else we ever do will be easy.

Most adults, whether down to earth or of the more whimsical variety, all look at the idea of Happily Ever After and scoff. No sane grown up would really believe in something like that. But then we all think, "if I just had a better job, everything would be great. If I just had a bigger house, then I would be happy. Once I get through this hard time, there will be no more problems." The fact is, there will always be problems, there will always be one more thing to own, always one more hurtle before everything is perfect. Its capitalism, plain and simple, we are raised to always want more.

Now you are probably thinking "Cathleen, this is depressing!" and on some level you would be right. It is depressing to think that there will always be something keeping you from reaching that perfect moment from whence forth you will never be troubled. But it is also reassuring in some ways. I mean, have you ever thought about how boring Happily Ever After would be? Think about it, there would be nothing left to work towards, no more challenges, nothing to look forward to. And if you are always looking to the future to find Happily Ever After, you might forget to enjoy the present.

Do you hear me? Go out and live people! Don't sit around waiting for the time to be right, or for everything to be perfect, those things will never happen, so don't let great opportunities pass you by. So do something crazy, go skydiving, ask out that person you have a crush on, dance in the fucking rain!

Life is too short to wait for a Happily Ever After that will probably never happen, so disregard what the fairytales say and live.

Lies We Tell To Children: Blasphemy.

My father was raised by Jesuits and fed on philosophy. His Catholicism was rich, historical, and dead. It was a tradition to be passed on, poetry and ideas, but, before he took ill at least, not a comfort, not something by which to be restricted. My mother was the youngest of five, the daughter of a Catholic and a Jew. She took her mother's Catholicism, but I'm not sure she ever felt as if she truly understood it until a few years ago, at which point she realised that the Church had few nice things to say about either of her children, and she left it. The knowledge that she chose us over a god is a gift so great I don't have the words to thank her for it.

When I was very young, I watched the Disney film Fantasia for the first time with my father. The final scene is an animated Christian afterlife which seemed, at the time, frightening and dull in succession. Before that, I was introduced to Olympus. There were creatures: horses with the torsos of bathing young women, dancing boys with the legs of goats. And there were gods! Funny drunken things, a bearded old man throwing lightning in his rages. And these chimeras were wonders, but stranger still was that my father knew every one of their names. The power of this knowledge seemed infinite. I learned the word pantheon at three.

My sister and I were both sent to a Jewish pre-school and kindergarten and spent a subsequent twelve years in Catholic schools. I was smart and obedient and shy, and so at first school was, like the afterlife I'd been promised, terrifying and boring in stages. The rituals and prayers, however, were mysterious, exacting. There were screaming prophets, strange pacts and sacrifices. I spent grade-school rushing through my work in order to have more time to read, and my favourite books were the lives of the saints, adventure tales of emperors and virgins and martyrs, and classical mythology, ancient songs of heroes and shape-shifting and rape.

Due to my parent's choice to condemn my sister and I to a youth of near constant religious training, we learned that these cosmologies, strict, contradictory, jealous, and all-encompassing though they were, were not exclusive. No culture, then, was stupid or dangerous or wrong. Everything was real. Everything was permitted. In religions and mythologies, then, there were no lies, only choices.

In Which Theme Week is Totally Abandoned for Politics lol

"Well I've got to do something to help these people."
"Don't tell me you're actually developing a conscience."
"God I hope not, it's gonna be a fuckin' nuisance in Congress"
-Eddie Murphy in The Distinguished Gentleman

Ron Paul, y'all.

Sure, the man is arguably crazy, as a bevy of sickeningly low quality Ze Frank imitators also like to point out. But dammit, I like to vote for crazy people. And it's not like we're electing a god-emperor here, just a president - his powers are checked by two other branches of government. Maybe now Congress will have something to do that doesn't involve lobbyists and mistresses and cocaine (sorry, couldn't find a link, but YOU JUST KNOW IT AMIRIGHT?) and secret societies. Or maybe it will give them more than ever before! It's an exciting time to be alive, if only because gross negligence or sexy new diseases may change that fact at any given moment.

Dance with me! Dance the dance of life!

Hey hey, and Mitt Romney just left the race for president. Which is good. He looks like someone's wholesome dad, the kind who jokes with you and slaps you on the back and has good teeth. America wants a nutjob for president, not the dad from 7th Heaven.

It's a total fabrication, really, to assume that any of the candidates are of sound mental health. The election is a grueling process for a thankless job where you are essentially a fulcrum of power between promises you made to get elected (thankfully growing less and less relevant as the years progress) and the promises that you made to massive, faceless corporations, as all the while detractors curse your name, and sometimes shoot you (with varying degrees of success).

Worst of all are celebrity endorsements. And there are plenty of them. Celebrities are not well known for even keeping their own lives in check - why then should we listen to them over anyone else? I'm certain that will.i.am feels really strongly or something about Barack Obama. Could he manifest this enthusiasm in a less embarrass ing format? Obviously not.

Really, I just can't handle someone who I have hope in. Give me the Ron Pauls and Mike Gravels and whoever else, anyone who promises to slash and burn the government, to vivisect it's infected organs, a chirurgeon to either fix it or kill it, but just change it already. To have hope in the government is more and more a fool's errand, and worst of all, to overpraise the hucksters who would abuse our need for change for their own advancement (not to imply Obama is a huckster - just that he might be). I cannot handle any more dishonesty in office (well, I can, but I just really really don't want to), but I (hope I) can handle all of the anarchy that actual change might bring.

Lies we Tell to Children: America is a Model Democracy

Welcome to Super Tuesday, what was supposed the be the season-defining superbowl moment of American politics, the middle turning point in the ongoing slow-motion car crash that is Fuckup 2008.

Dennis Kucinich and John Edwards have dropped out, leaving Mike Gravel as the self-proclaimed only real progressive left in the race. Regardless of whether or not Obama plans on honoring any of his promises to make a change for the better, Hillary Clinton is a preprogrammed robotic timebomb serving a cabal of military industrialists oil czars and hedge fund managers, or Mike Gravel is actually still in the race in any real sense, tonight has decided nothing.

In fact, it is appearing more and more likely that the race is going to be won by the most terrifyingly antidemocratic feature of our democratic system: superdelegates.

Superdelegates, unlike lake sharks, are not part of the lies we tell to children. Also unlike like sharks, they are things that do exist and should not. However, they are exactly like lake sharks in their supernatural ability to glide silently over the morning dew. Don't go down to the lake until the sun has been up long enough to dry up all the grass, or an ex-president will leap from the brush to tear open your jugular and elect a delegate you never voted for. (Thanks, Jeremy Hoople's father. Second best lie told to a child ever. The first may end up as another post.)

As you have probably not been able to glean from that extended whimsical comparison, superdelegates are members of the Democratic National Convention who, by virtue of having held positions of power in the past, hold a position of power in the present: they can participate in the selection process of the Democratic Nominee, voting just as other delegates do, and, unlike other delegates, they are not required to vote according to the votes of any group of normal citizens. This is why, of the 2,025 delegates needed for the nomination, Hillary Clinton had over a hundred before the first state primary had been held.

As of the time I'm writing this, the New York Times is displaying the A.P. delegate count for Clinton and Obama at 626 to 531. Of those, 204 and 99 are superdelegates. And while I'm sure those numbers will have changed by the time I finish this post, the deciding factor in the race right now is the fact that more cronyistic holdovers from bygone eras are supporting Hillary than Obama. As the state-by-state, county-by-county battle for supremacy continues, it seems more and more likely that the swing factor in the race to 2,025 will be the more than five hundred superdelegates who have yet to decide which factory-assembled candidate best represents their personal agendas.

I apologize for the dryness of this post, and the overproliferation of numbers. I apologize if you heard this somewhere else first.

You should still be angry. Somewhere, someone is making all this effort, all this organizing and arguing and aggregate motion of the human element, meaningless. The party will pick who best represents the party's interests, not the people's.

This, as Mike Gravel would say, is politics as usual.

In which I talk endlessly of my own novelty

I have a new hero. The website is simple and clean, the essays are informative (if a bit dry), and it is, first and foremost, about delicious meat. Meat is of particular interest to me, because today is (still) Mardi Gras or Carnival, two terms whose names almost literally mean "prepare to suffer" when translated. Which means that tomorrow is Ash Wednesday, and beyond that, forty days of self denial and contemplation and looking down my nose at people who ignore their Lenten vows on Sundays (even though they're technically fine for doing so).

Oh, right, hey, did I mention I'm Catholic? I totally am! EW GROSS I KNOW RIGHT? And Lent? It is a crazy semi-pagan holiday (because there aren't a lot of those in Catholocism) where we Cat-a-holics give up something we enjoy to, uh, kind of mimic Jesus and also to kind of just live lives of quiet and dutiful self-denial, since we are all basically just piles of sparking, gooey ash anyway. But what really ends up happening (at least to me) is a weird mental hierarchy of suffering - I like to give up things for Lent that are more fantastic than just plain ol' desserts or coffee or swearing. This is because I view Lent as a competition, and it is also why I am a very bad Catholic.

I RLY RLY don't mean to bludgeon you over the head with this (because honestly, who really likes hearing about religion? YAWN), but bear with me (hee hee! Bear! With me! Send help!). Some years ago, I gave up all traces of sarcasm from what I did and what I said, vowing to remain completely genuine and true in my actions for the whole of lent, like some kind of monk or paladin or other suitable character class. It seemed like such a great idea, but in the end, I turned into an evil-minded troll of a man, because I had to just tell people that I thought their ideas were stupid and that they should be ashamed for having them. I didn't joke around, I didn't get invited to go along anywhere. I began to grow hunched and crooked and hateful and pale. Forty days of hardcore honesty almost ruined me, body and soul.

But it was still kind of enlightening. For starters, it reveals the necessity of polite lies or begrudging courtesies in dealing with other people. What are thank-you notes, after all, other than a way to just stay in someone's mind? The whole idea is that gifts themselves, humble or extravagant, (extravagancy being its own kettle of fish) are seldom delivered just for fun; more often they are tokens of courtier-like devotion to placate a host (I BROUGHT POTATO SALAD FUCK YEAH) or just to fulfill a grim duty. Christmas mornings everywhere seem to be hopelessly cluttered with hated duty gifts - we can't always get exactly what we want, after all. As children, we learn early on how to lie to our elders, how to put on fake smiles and tell some out-of-touch aunt or uncle how much we appreciate their once-yearly efforts to remind us of how much they really know nothing about us.

You thought I wasn't going anywhere near lies we tell to children with this, didn't you? HA HA JUST AS PLANNED.

The truth seems to be that Western society (okay, American society. On the East Coast. I acknowledge our foreign visitors! There, are you happy? NOW SUPPORT OUR SPONSORS) deception is necessary. Our social interactions and political systems all depend on lies to function at almost every level. I'm simply supposing that we learn the skill early on to placate our superiors - after all, why lie to an inferior - and that deception is not so much enacted out of self interest as it is out of respect. We shoulder the burdens of our friends and families, and try to lighten their load with a little fiction.

It's Only Okay to Hit Children in the Brain with Ideas

Did you see the theme week? It's lies that we tell to children! Come along, and allow me to elucidate.

We lie to children. I, personally, do it out of a mixture containing equal parts of a desire to preserve some sense of childlike wonder in our increasingly dull world (Hey kids, did you know that the moon is made out of cheese?) and because it is personally amusing to do so (You're also adopted!). The lines between generational abuse and affection become so blurred that we are often unable to stop ourselves from perpetuating these vicious not-truths. I'd love to not be responsible for fucking up notions of the world, but I realize that I'm going to end up doing it anyway. It's a psychotic compulsion I have, to spin fabulous tales and make up lies that children below a certain age aren't cagey enough to realize for what they are.

There is little doubt in my mind that if some kind of codex were to be assembled of everything I've told to children under the age of five, it would read very much like how I wish the world worked. Real Life Example Tiem: When I was a wee sprout, my mother (who is 100% Slovak) would tell me that if I misbehaved, Baba Yaga was going to come out of the woods, kidnap me, and then either eat me or turn me into a sheep. The specific form of punishment was never specified, but to me, the witch became a kind of elemental figure, whose inscrutable ways were bulletproofed against my critical thinking skills. Why would an old witch care if I hid in the clothes dryer, and didn't eat my yams? Did she really like yams? Maybe she really hated them! All I knew was that I didn't want to be eaten or transmuted, and so I best do as my mother says.

My mother was at once abusing the trust I have in her (WHY WOULD MY OWN MOTHER LIE TO ME LOL) and perpetuating some aspect of her own youth (specifically, that of child-eating witches. Not recipes or children's rhymes, but child eating witches), inculcating old world names into a new generation. Which is kind of neat. Here is normally where I'd post some tripe about being able to believe small lies (Witches, Santa, the awesomeness of running around naked all the time) before we're able to swallow the larger ones (that our parents will never be disappointed in us, that everyone is willing to give us a fair shake, the awesomeness of running around fully dressed all the time). But I don't really believe that.

The differentiation between large and small lies is basically the taxonomy of different breeds of griffin, that is, you are making arbitrary decisions about something that doesn't exist. All of the lies that we tell to children are our little subversions from what others would have them believe - we know that what we tell them is untrue, but to them it is real, and so the lies live on. Baba Yaga has basically been replaced by the police, in my mind, as the abstract entity that will fuck my shit up if I step out of line. There's no big or small about it - maybe some notion of maturity (witches are cop training wheels), but as a certain past theme week will remind us, we are still plenty superstitious about the world around us.

It can be disorienting too. As technology (and hated science, hsss!) progress blindly onward, our understanding of the world declines. Actual history slides into the realm of myth, borders fade, and soon, we realize that we've always just been the same cavemen as we were before, still just as petty and biased and driven onward by the chemical prods of all kinds of conquest, just put into a suit. It could be said that the lies we tell to children are the only things that really represent us as human beings, as we wrap our hopes and dreams (and fears) up in stories and give them to our younglings as we sit, huddled and picking the nits out of each other's hair as we watch the campfire embers. Or Celebrity (now there's a generous definition if I've ever heard one) Rehab. Or mind reading enviro-helms. Or maybe some kind of controlled hallucinogenic nano-spores. In the end, though, we want some whisper of the things we only half-remember as children to continue onward, to propel the dreamy parasites of our world on into the future, so that we can someday look back at them on the edge of our twilights, and see what is best in our nature being forever youthful and energetic, never quite realizing that the phantom hag that lurks in closets and beneath old trees is really the fondest token of affection they'll ever receive.

Also, that they are adopted.

Guest Post: Superbowl Coverage: Let's Do The Time Warp Again

Super Bowl Sunday is basically a Roman gladiatorial arena for the entire country. Nobody outside of our little hole in the planet actually gives a damn about what we call "Football", but here in the good ol US of A it is a time for male, and, I suppose if you are one of those rare women who likes football, female, bonding.

Which is why rather than sleep off the jet lag, the 3 weeks of constant company, and the glorious night of poor life choice and three hours of sleep (also known as Saturday), I embarked on a journey to the heart of Brooklyn. Not the tail-ass-end of it known as Park Heights were one of my more close compatriots nests his familial egg, but instead to a refined slum for artsy-fartsy types who can't afford Manhattan. (go go familial manse!) After all, it is vital and important to drink the beer, watch the game, laugh at the commercials and generally feel all-American for the first time since Captain America died.

Arriving, I am introduced to a man we will call “Beta” because he shares my name and I actively refuse to call another by it. My close friend had imbibed a single beer and was falling over drunk, which was to be expected. What was the true surprise was that they had set up a gigantic projector and the game was on the screen.

Let me repeat this for you. Beer and a projector on a large white wall in a Brooklyn slum for the fooooooootball. This should have been awesome time, and awesome town, and possibly even awesome nation. Instead it was a slow burning recipe for an episode of the twilight zone.

Perhaps our first clue should have been the text message “Best game ever”. We pondered the boring life of Adam’s friend Chance who was apparently getting off on the score of 7-3 while watching Tom Petty break the hearts of america’s fat older women. Then another friend received a call from his father, who needed to discuss the rent and wondered if he had seen the game.

In retrospect its all so clear.

But no, it wasn’t until 10 minutes before the end of the game, as the Patriots drove down the field, the Giants ahead by a mere 3 points… when out came the blue screen of death. Hovering in front of it “TiVO RECORDING OVER--AND SO ARE YOUR DREAMS!”

We had been watching the Superbowl prerecorded, an hour and a half behind, WHILE THE REST OF NEW YORK CITY WENT MAD WITH VICTORY. We caught the best moments of the game, the “highlights”, if you will, on the local news channels, watching in mute horror until somebody dropped the bag of chips.

The resulting blame game eventually turned to threats of shitting in pillows, a turned over Settlers of Cataan game (We are nerds and play even during our manly time), three spilled beers and a weeping Forbes sports writer who can never, ever, express the sorrow he feels to anyone.

And so gentle readers I am breaking the pact I made not even two hours ago to lie like a lying liar who has never smelt the truth, in order to share my pain with you. But if you come up to me on the street and say, “So how about them Giants?” I will never admit this.

And as you walk away I will weep into my sleeve.

-Samwise Kantrowitz

ALL MONDAYS ARE FRIDAYS THANKS TO CHI POWER

Did you notice that there were no chat logs on Friday? It's because I was blind drunk! Here is a taste of what you missed.

Thomas: I BLINKED
Zachery: THE INTERNET WILL CRASH THOMAS
Thomas: IT TOOK TWENTY SECONDS
Zachery: YOU WILL DRIVE IT OFF A BRIDGE
Thomas: AND MADE A RASPY NOISE
Zachery: That is frightening.
Thomas: JABBER JABBER JABBER JABBER JABBERJAWWW

Cathleen: My senior thesis is now 2 pages long
Cathleen: weee!
Thomas: It's like a tamogotchi.
Thomas: REMEMBER THOSE?
Cathleen: how is it like that at all?
Thomas: It's tiny and you are responsible for feeding and raising it until it is big and healthy.
Thomas: Or, like mine, bloated and hateful. (both thesis and tamogotchi)

James: sigh. science brings us new bombs and new tvs.
Thomas: And tells us to wash our hands, and to brush our teeth.
Thomas: It is our fiery mother.
James: science is many things.
Thomas: At least four of them are our fiery mothers.
James: If my life was left to science, I'd have been left for dead.
James: Wait.
James: Did I type that?
James: I have no idea what the fuck that means.

Thomas: I think we should make a disco helmet.
James: Why?
Thomas: Because we don't have one!

Cathleen: what, he even says that he never really got along with his father
Cathleen: and then your like, well if he never liked his dad, why is he so fucking upset
Cathleen: Oh! thats right, he wants to sleep with his mommy
Cathleen: and once she lets him down he gets pissed at all women and starts, you know, becoming Earnest Hemingway
Thomas: It's the dream of all men, secretly.
Thomas: The importance of being Earnest. Hemingway.


Context is none of your concern, but Cathleen and I were talking about Hamlet. I mean. In case you were wondering.

SCIENCE TIME: EMOTIV

The internet has just informed me that, in the imminent future, I will be able to put on a helmet which will read my mind and use the data it gathers to enhance my ability to interact with immersive virtual environments. We are now living in a world where direct mind-machine interface is possible without any kind of invasive surgeries or bulky scientific equipment.

This is a prospect which excites me a fair bit more than it worries me. Considering that we can now build heads-up displays that fit inside contact lenses, I was wondering when someone would come up with a good user interface device for such. It appears we have to wait no longer than March 2008 for such devices to be in the hands of game developers, which means that if the wiimote is any indication, the Mobb will be hacking them and using them to control their fresh-built lego robot arms by May at the latest. Whether these arms will be capable of doing anything more nuanced than flailing when the users are happy remains to be seen.

The (clearly-anime-inspired) look of the device may need some work, but as I never travel anywhere without a hat already (and I ask you: what gentleman does?), I suspect that a slightly redesigned version of the hardware can be integrated into my normal streetwear.

It should be noted that this is not a Gibsonian device that allows one to 'jack in to the Net'. It allows our minds to interact with machinespace, not machinespace to interact with our minds. And while the press coverage for the device does promise many things, it sounds like the state of the technology is likely only about as progressed as reading emotions and maybe (I hope) responding to certain kinds of broad, easily interpreted mental cues. The website doesn't have too much in the way of concrete details. However, I think that even the possibility of, say, an MP3 player that changes your playlist based on your moods, or a character in a game that knows when you're smiling at them is more than enough to label this an outbreak of the future.

It's important to remember, as we wrap ourselves in the clothes of old empires and study the instability of our own, that there are new things under the sun. Incredible things are being created every day. I am tempted to say, as I suspect every generation has been tempted, that there has never been a time in human history more exciting, dangerous or filled with possibility, than right now, this moment, this place.

Way to be, Planet Earth. Keep it up.