MMMillington

It's a basic rule of life that you can learn from others.

Well, no, not a rule. Exactly.

Rules all are published in books, aren't they? And each and every one of those books is a textbook. Right? And each textbook is one you have had your nosed stuffed into in grade school. Of course.

Otherwise it isn't a rule. Because rules are important. So important that they are voted on by huge committees of sighing adults, whose entire lives are taken up by the process, and who regard their doings with the utmost respect. And so keep doing those doings until they fall over from either age or exhaustion. Or sometimes, perhaps, from lack of food. So important is the process.

And each item output from the committee is printed posthaste, in a list, in a book, and that book, those books, are distributed immediately. Because of the extreme importance.

These are the rules, after all, and need to be out there.

And one of these rules, near the top of the list, is the one that says you can learn from others. Mostly, I believe, if I've got it right, if I remember it right, is that each and every one of us is required to learn almost every single thing from our parents.

You know who they are.

That's the beauty of it. Parents are handy, and they get paid to bring up loads and loads of children. Messy, loud, vagrant children, sprawling every which way and running into things and making them sticky. Parents have to deal with all this because it is a requirement of the job. And to make up for that, and because of the high rate of pay among parents as well, they inculcate us with the rules.

Of course not all of them work well. Parents. Some parents are faulty, or behind the times. Some simply don't care, or have the right tools. This is true, and this is sad, but this is life. We all live it from time to time, life. And those who live learn. The two go together.

If not from our parents then, we must learn from others.

And that brings us to Mil Millington. And Margret. And "Things My Girlfriend and I Have Argued About". The only real guide any man would ever need in life. To be honest about it.

Sorry, parents. But this is done better than you can do.

It is one giant web page. If you define "giant" as being full of words. Ask me, it ain't half long enough. And no longer maintained. He had a mailing list, and though I joined it way late, I still got a couple of updates, but it appears that is over now.

Owell.

He has books. "A Certain Chemistry" is my only confirmed read so far. But I do have a copy of "Love and Other Near Death Experiences". The local library has been generous and has agreed to loan me the second one, now that I've returned the first. Or they didn't recognize that it was me again.

Doesn't matter as long as I have the book, and a working lock on my front door. It's mine for a couple of weeks and they won't get it back until I'm done.

And I mean that.

Meanwhile, if you can read, and if you can read with little pain and so on, try "Things My Girlfriend and I Have Argued About". There's a link at the end of this page. It will do you good. Your parents should rest easier knowing that you're getting honest instruction, especially if they're still alive. Because at minimum, if you are busy reading, you will have no idea which direction they took while sneaking away.

So, a sample:

What Margret and I have, essentially, is a Mexican stand-off with love instead of guns. OK, yes, sometimes there are guns too. The important thing is the mindset, though. Sure, people can argue about important issues, that's fine, good luck to them I say. But where, I ask you, are those people when you take away the meaningful sources of disagreement? Lost. Utterly lost. Let me illustrate the common mistakes amateurs might make using something that happened the other week. You will need:

Margret.

Me.

A roast chicken.

We're having tea and on the table are the plates, a selection of vegetables and a roast chicken in an incredibly hot metal baking tray. Getting this chicken to the table has been an heroic race that ended only fractions of a second short of a major skin graft. Due to this haste it is, however, not sitting precisely centrally on the coaster. Some kind of weird, hippie, neo-Buddhist couple might have failed even at this point and simply got on with eating the meal. Fortunately, Margret is there to become loudly agitated that radiant heat might creep past the edge of the coaster, through the table cloth, through the protective insulating sheet under the table cloth, and affect the second-hand table itself. She shouts and wails. I nudge the tray into the centre of the coaster, but, in doing so, about half a teaspoon of the gravy spills over the side onto the table cloth. Outside birds fall mute, mid-song. Inside, frozen in time, the camera swings around us sitting at the table, like in The Matrix.

'What the hell did you do that for? Quick, clean it up - quick,' insists Margret (where an amateur would have, say, shrugged).

'No,' I reply (at the moment when another amateur would have been returning from the kitchen with a cloth), 'I'm eating my tea. I'm going to sit here and eat my tea. Then I'll clean it up.'

'No, clean it up now.'

'No.'

'Yes.'

'No. I'm going to eat my tea first.'

'Clean it up now.'

A little knowledge is a dangerous thing, so a couple of semi-pros might have worked this up into a shouting match. But I am not about to stoop to childish name-calling. Instead I lift up the tray and pour some more gravy onto the table.

'OK?' I say, 'Now stop it. I'll clean it up after.'

'Clean it up now.'

I tip a little more gravy onto the table.

'I'm just going to keep doing it every time you say that. I'll clean it up later.'

'Do it now.'

More gravy.

'Now.'

More gravy.

This continues until we run out of gravy.

I must make it clear that my actions here seemed perfectly rational at the time. I've mulled them over since, of course, and am relieved to find that they still hold up to examination: it's pleasing to know I can make good decisions under pressure. Anyway, we eat the meal from a table awash with gravy. I am happy to have argued my point persuasively. Margret has a smile fixed to her face due to the belief (incorrect, yes, but it's only her enjoyment that matters) that I've clearly done something hugely stupid that she can bring up later in any number of arguments - possibly years from now. Everyone wins. We eat, united in contentment. I clean up the table.

Do you see? I want everyone to try this out at home and write me a report for next week.

References:

Things My Girlfriend and I Have Argued About web page.
Love and Other Near-Death Experiences: A Novel by Mil Millington
Things My Girlfriend and I Have Argued About: A Novel by Mil Millington

The Little Girl Giant

I'll never see her. Nor any other characters from "The Saga of The Giants".

They do not touch these shores, and I can guess that they never will.

The company producing the shows that Little Girl Giant and her associates appear in has been all over Europe, to Korea, China, Vietnam, Chile and Africa. They spent six months in Africa and three months in China, but they have never been to North America. It is likely that they are not interested in us. There is no telling what might happen here. We may be a too-volatile country for their strangeness to tempt.

Their first four productions were "The giant falls from the sky", "The giant falls from the sky, last voyage", "Return to Africa", "The giraffe hunters", and "The hidden rhinoceros". The latest in this loose series, the one in which Little Girl Giant appears as a traveler, is "The Sultan's Elephant".

Director Jean-Luc Courcoult said of his work, "I am very keen on the element of surprise. I distract the public's attention. I hypnotise them so that nobody, even when it is in the open, understands how an enormous machine could appear so suddenly. I believe that this almost childish desire to please people by surprising them is a deciding factor in my work. I have seen adults crying as the giant leaves. They have obviously lived other things, sometimes difficult, and yet this makes them cry."

The company behind this is is Royal de Luxe, located in Nantes, France, and is little known.

The 3quarksdaily blog has a stellar essay on the London production of "The Sultan's Elephant", which commemorated Jules Verne's hundredth birthday in 2005. From there: "The venue is simply the streets and open spaces of the city -- by the lake, by the harbor and in the city center. Admission is not only free, but accidental, since the show may begin anywhere, even in two places at once, and will overtake its audience bit by bit, for they shall not have known where to assemble and wait for it. Once it begins, it will keep moving, and people will follow it or even try to run a little ahead of it en route to the next corner it seems bound for, where others shall have started to hear things and look up. No member of that audience, not even the most avid, will see the show in its entirety -- like the London event, it will be structured to make that impossible. Courcoult has said only that a special story for Icelanders will be enacted, by Little Girl Giant and other familiar figures, that, on the morning of May 10, 'something unexpected will happen in Rekjavik.'"

Julian Crouch, an artist, told of his experience when the Little Girl Giant was first lifted from the time-traveling space ship found stuck nose down into the pavement of central London. "When they lifted her out of the rocket, the crowd just gasped. I tried to stifle my own gasp, but by the time she blinked and shook out her hair, I was absolutely and completely lost. She was beautiful. But really beautiful. In a deep way. And there was a little voice in my head that said, 'you could never, ever have made this.'"

Later, standing in line with his son, waiting, waiting to see if his boy would get his own short ride on the giant's arm, he was seized by fear that it would not happen, and wept, relieved, finally, when his son did get a turn.

There isn't much a person can say without having been there. I've seen videos on YouTube and elsewhere, and though they're mesmerizing they can't ever come close to spending four days in a dream world alive with giants. It must be like finding that your town has been overtaken silently by Burning Man and thousands of followers between the time you fell asleep and the time you again wakened the next morning.

The Little Girl Giant is 20 feet high, and the elephant who provides her morning shower bath stands 40 feet high and weighs 46 tons. They are attended and operated by a small army of technicians in red livery, seeming refugees from the 18th century.

Little Girl Giant's hair is made from the tails of 50 horses. Her breathing continues day and night, powered by an internal motor. Her eyes blink. She can lick sweets. She squats and pees in the street while her operators discreetly turn their heads. She naps frequently.

Although there have been books written on Royal de Luxe and their productions, and DVDs available, they don't seem to have made it to this country. We're stuck for now with a bunch of miserable-quality videos on the web. But they are still haunting me.



References:

YouTube Videos
A better quality video: Little girl giant plays in the park
The Sultan's Elephant (Has PDF downloads you might like, telling the story.)
Royal de Luxe theatre company
The Little Girl Giant
3quarksdaily Royal de Luxe: the saga of the giants, by Elatia Harris
Images: Royal de Luxe Central
Images: I, for one, welcome the Giant French Rocket Girl and her Elephant of Royal Luxury!
Images: au coin de la rue (Flash, in French)

Where's My Hike?

I'm going nuts here. This is not a good year.

Washed out roads. Snow all over.

Given that today is July 2, this might seem odd. That's OK. Life is odd, and odder in some corners than others. This is one of them.

Back in 1980 and 1981 when I first began backpacking I hit the Monte Cristo area a couple hours northeast of Seattle pretty hard. Glacier Basin to the north. Poodle Dog Pass, Silver Lake, and Twin Lakes to the south. And the stupendous Gothic Basin to the southwest. That area is served by a gravel loop drive called the "mountain loop road" by most, or the "Mountain Loop Scenic Highway" by the bureaucrats.

Anyway it gave access to several nice backpacks pretty close to Seattle, where I was living at the time. That didn't last long. After my first season we had a hard year and the road to the Monte Cristo resort washed out, but hiking a mile or two more was irrelevant.

Then we had another hard year and the main road was cut. I went back to college anyway and stopped backpacking for a long time. And there were other hard years besides. Time passed.

Here it is so much later and the National Forest Service has an announcement: "Mountain Loop Road Reopened: After a four-year effort to repair more than $10 million in damaged roads and bridges, Mountain Loop Scenic Highway reopened October 26, 2007 to give outdoor enthusiasts access to many of their favorite trails and roads Mt. Baker-Snoqualmie National Forest."

That's the way it goes in wet mountain country. About three years after I began exploring the Mt. St. Helens area we had huge winter rains. Six bridges went out. Not wobbly wooden ones nailed together over backcountry trickles but highway bridges. And the roads that went with them.

In November 2006 Mt. Rainier National Park was hit with 18 inches of rain in 24 hours. It had effects.

By last August (2007) the Wonderland Trail around the mountain had been reopened and I realized late but not too late that this was a great opportunity. Not all of the camp sites would have been reserved as they usually are. So I went, starting on Labor Day.

Seven terrific days of backpacking, including an interesting stretch the first day when I misread the detour sign and went down the part of the trail I was supposed to avoid. Not too bad though. Several years of bushwhacking at St. Helens had prepared me for most anything and I got through with only a small amount of fuss and swearing. And avoided six miles of road walking.

Now this year.

It is late, way late. I haven't been out yet.

We had a huge amount of snow over the winter, and lots of heavy rain again right ahead of that. Local flooding. Interstate 5 was under 10 feet for a week and a half, at least.

On my first big year at St. Helens the roads were so new and clean and black that they looked like a huge long tray of brownie dough lovingly laid down by a baker wielding a careful spatula. On April 30 of that year I was out there tramping around, fine as could be. The weather of subsequent years has ripped and clawed the landscape, the roads and bridges so that now many of the trails are not even approachable, and not hikeable anyway. Many trails are cut by deep aggressive arroyos, and bordered by soil that when dry is powder. It can't hold a boot. Life is tougher lately.

But still I got out some last year.

You can't fight snow though. When it falls deep over winter it is reluctant to leave again, and this is one of those years. Most trails are still many feet under, and many roads are still wounded by the floods of six months past.

In 2003 I started a 100-mile backpack on July 3. The second day I crossed my first pass, still under some snow. As I stepped over a small bent tree with its tip stuck in the soft snow it broke free. And caught me between the legs as it sprang skyward, lifting me and my pack into the air, and then dumping me on my head. Life can be interesting.

Conditions can make things so. This year things are more interesting than usual. This year I can't even get to the point where I started that trip five years ago. The news has been vague. A forest road out, and the stretch the national park owns after that. Just today I see that "The Staircase Road will reopen on July 3, 2008." OK by me. Now if I can afford gas to get there I'll be fine. When the snow goes.

But really that's the point. Not the snow but the distance. The drive is 55 miles. Out and back again for let's say three gallons, with a one or two week backpack in between each driving leg. That's why it's important to me. In 2003 I did 100 miles from there, out and back. In 2005 I did a 200 mile loop with only five miles of overlap. I like that kind of story.

Other places are too far to get to any more. Gas just costs too much, so it's important to use what's near, and the snow is making me itchy.

But that's why I like living here too.

During my last big trip in 1981, before leaving backpacking for 15 years, I drove that route north and east. From Seattle to Everett, through Granite Falls, and then hiking down that washed out road leading to Monte Cristo.

The next day I got up high and onto the snow, above 5000 feet. Fourth of July weekend then too. The sun was out, I was young and strong, and the day was cool and calm. I slathered myself with sunscreen, had a hat and sunglasses, and was sweating. So warm I had to remove my shirt. Overall it was a great three day trip. It was summer and I was in snow. That's the right way to have snow. When the weather is warm. You choose your day and location, then go tramp in it until you get tired. Back home again it's summer again.

It wasn't until I got home. That I realized. How sunburned I was.

Worst ever. Despite the sunscreen. Deadly. Evil. Intense pain.

It took a year for the skin of my chest and shoulders to become human again. I've decided not to do that again. Ever.

But I still want to go hiking and this year, so far, is all anticipation and waiting. The snow waits. I wait. Which one of us will win?


References.

Flooding at Centralia and over I-5.

Monte Cristo: Visit to gold ghost town pans out for hikers, historians and families.

Olympic National Park Road Conditions and Closures.

Mount Rainier National Park Images of the Flood of 2006.

Hurricane Ridge web cam.

Mt. Rainier web cam.

Mt. Rainier time lapse web cam.

Kewtsi Pooing For Dollars

Once again I find myself behind the times. Hey, I could claim to be on top of things, then walk around like I had an ego up my butt, you know, sort of sniffing at some higher air, but I'd still be clueless. Just like most of us.

Out of curiosity yesterday or out of boredom I hunted for news of my high school class. They should have had a reunion last year. I'd like to wait until my 50th before actually attending a high school reunion. By then I'd finally have something worthwhile to talk about. No, I'm not working on my portable, safe, back yard fusion reactor which needs only a few more months, or a year, two or three years, tops, before it's ready, and will sell for $27.50, or no more than $57.75, worst case. I'm talking about surviving. Getting old, getting past all the early crap, and talking to anyone else who has made it. By then we won't care about trying to impress anyone.

There was a good quote that floated by a month or two back, but I let it go by without making a note. It was something like: When you are young you are obsessed about what people think of you. At middle age you are proud to show others that you are doing things your way. In later years you realize that no one ever even noticed you.

That's when I want to get there. When things have cooled down to a nice even glow.

I didn't locate anything about my class. I even hate to think of "my class". Buncha losers. But I did find a rudimentary web site devoted to an annual reunion of all classes at the high school I attended.

Right. They've taken to forming an annual herd in the gym for some reason. The photos were more depressing that the reality would have been. No life in them. In a real situation there is always at least one good looking woman, or some guy telling a joke. Some life. Not in the photo. They were all standing like zombies and most of them were old. Sure, lots of them were from classes even before mine, but I realized that a lot of the people there would look like my former classmates now look. Not like me.

I can still scare people occasionally. I used to pass for someone 15 to 20 years younger than I was. Not quite so much any more, but aside from some gray hairs in my beard and nose and a few more wrinkles around the eyes I don't look any older than some hard-ridden 35 year olds. Which in itself could be a good reason to attend a high school reunion. Be surrounded by people your own age who look old enough to be your parents. Who cares if you've never amounted to much. Get old enough and people stop caring how many toys they have, or how big the house is and start fearing death. So if you're youngish looking and in good health you've got them aced.

The main thing is, though, as dumb and slow as I am, these people were a lot worse off, the ones in the photo. They made a point of going and congealing into a puddle inside an old high school gym with other losers so they could stand and listen to the rancid old school fight song and feel like they still belonged to something. Mindless. Pointless. Like me, true, but more so.

I keep missing opportunities but yet I'm not quite as pathetic as they are. Just sort of pathetic.

You get an idea how dumb you are when you hear a really good comedian, or read a stellar novel, or sit through a movie so compelling that you forget to breathe. Especially the comedians, who can take something absolutely ordinary make it bizarre and alien. And make stuff shoot out your nose.

Try it sometime. Go grocery shopping and stop in front of the canned beets and come up with a five minute monologue that will make people go crazy. That is genius. It is not easy.

Sometimes you can be sort of bright and sort of creative and pay close attention and come up with something worthwhile, or at least grab it when it goes by. The really great ones, the masters, the geniuses among us, pull things out of blank, empty space. I don't think I'll do that even once. But maybe if I pay enough attention, maybe then, just once, please, I might be able to grab something when it swims by.

Like Eric Nakagawa, "a software developer in Hawaii, [who] posted a single photo of a fat, smiling cat he found on the Internet, with the caption, "I can has cheezburger?" in January, 2007, at a Web site he created. It was supposed to be a joke. Soon after he posted a few more images in the same vein: cute cats with funny captions written in a silly, invented hybrid of Internet shorthand and baby-talk. Then he turned the site into a blog, so that visitors could comment on the postings. What happened after that would have been hard for anyone to predict." So saith Business Week.

Now that can't be hard, can it? I mean, even I could do that. I hear that he was unemployed at the time and first hosted "I Can Has Cheezburger?" on a $6.95 per month site. And this was January, 2007. Not long ago. Very late in life for the internet. You would have expected this around 1993 maybe. But even by the late 1990s you normally didn't get much beyond Hampsterdance. Somehow. Things are speeding up.

The boys who did YouTube weren't the first to do web videos. They just got something right, or reintroduced the right idea at the right moment. Something. I, like you, am still clueless.

By July of 2007 "I Can Has Cheezburger?" was pulling in around $5,600 a month and made it to number 26 on the most-linked-to blogs list on Technorati.

I could handle that.

Maybe I'm not paying attention. In fact I'm sure of it, or I would be rolling in dough right at this moment.

So instead I listened to "Ben Huh Chief Cheezeburger On The ShoeMoney Show", an audio recording of an interview with the new cheez head. Eric Nakagawa and his partner sold out. The site now belongs to Ben Huh. He has eight staff: three moderators/posters, two full time developers, two part time developers, and one editor. The site gets 7000 submissions a day, of which about six see daylight. It gets around two million hits a day, and 80% of them are direct, coming from people who know where they are going, and go there directly, with great vigor. The staff is totally focused on making the site interesting and easy to use. This is smart since the visitors provide the content.

How about a great business model? It's spreading to all sorts of businesses. The average person gets a thrill when something they submit is used. Then the site owner gets the money. And then everyone is happy.

Now there are three sister sites as well: "Loldogs 'n' Cute Puppies" (dogs), "Pundit Kitchen" (politics), and "Graph Jam" (stories told through graphs).

One moral of the story I got from the ShoeMoney interview: have fun. Maybe you could call it a business plan.

I've heard this one before. A big problem, maybe the biggest, is to break out of one's own prison. Your thoughts keep you boxed in, and that's why most of us never start those new businesses or shock people with originality. Here's the rule: If you start out to have fun you will, and maybe make money too. If you set out only to make money you probably won't do that, or have fun either.

There is a reason why we go through life seeing only the ordinary, being only ordinary. Because we have to. No one can be creative every minute. You can't question every assumption, every social convention, every habit all the time. People blind since birth who have been given sight as adults can't handle it. Their nervous systems don't know what to ignore, so they get a lot of noise but can't pick out the signal.

The way to do something original is to destroy part of your life but not too much of it. You can't be either totally creative or totally mundane. Either way you will die. Explode from overload or expire from boredom. The right way seems to be to get to a level adequate to handle the mandatory needs of life, and then to engage in extraordinary play with the rest.

Now just let me go back in time about two years and see if I can get to this cheezburger thing first. Then I will be the one going home with the golden hairball.










References:

Bloggers Bring in the Big Bucks: How a personal obsession can turn into a popular favorite and maybe even a full-time job. (Business Week)
FatCatBlog.com
Graph Jam
Hampsterdance
I Can Has Cheezburger?
LOLTrek
Loldogs n Cute Puppies
Pundit Kitchen
The Definitive Lolcats Glossary
With 'LOLcats' Internet Fad, Anyone Can Get In on the Joke. (Wall Street Journal)

Miley in Greerland.

I saw a small kerfuffle last week about an entertainer I know nothing about and whom I do not care about. How cool is this? Just the same, it got me thinking again about some things that have been riding around in my head for a couple of decades.

The entertainer is Miley Cyrus, who portrays a character named Hannah Montana. That is really all I know. Catchy name. Better than "the Olsen twins". So what? More kid stuff.

Recently, as everyone knows (even me), Annie Leibovitz photographed Miley Cyrus, and the photographs (or a photograph) appeared in "Vanity Fair" magazine. And then everyone went nuts. I don't care about the photo. I saw it. Even now that my cable TV has gone away I've managed to run into this image all over. I still don't care.

I consider myself repulsive. Just so you know. I'm a piece of meat out wandering around, and obviously cannot, if repulsive, feel that I have the right to pass judgment on everyone else who is not as lovely as I am. I pass judgment humbly, always remembering that I am an ugly person.

OK, so I think that Miley Cyrus is only another piece of meat.

Meaning piece of meat as in piece of meat. As a package of wet organic chemicals. I don't care. Most people are like that, just anonymous humanoids, and she is one of them.

Every now and then I'll see a woman who shorts out all my circuits. This happens maybe a half percent of the time. Being a guy I tend to fall in love several times while walking down any two blocks anywhere, but the really stunning women are rare. I'll see one maybe once in every 10 blocks or so. She ain't one of them, this Miley.

I don't care how old she is. For me a woman isn't a woman unless she has lines in her face. The corollary is that if a woman started out uninteresting she won't get sexy by growing old. I am not sexually thrilled by children. I am not thrilled by children in any way at all. I was once a child and could not wait to stop being one. For me, that is the whole story.

Women have a totally different perspective on things. I have no idea what it is, but some of it bugs the hell out of me. Mostly because most of them hold mutually contradictory opinions and will argue any point from a minimum of two or three sides.

Germaine Greer, the Australian feminist, recently spouted off about the Miley Cyrus "incident". She illustrated several things that have been eating at me.

One thing she did not say explicitly, but still implied, continuing a line from way back in the 1970s if not earlier, is that women can't do stuff because they are oppressed, and they are oppressed by men, who should get with the program and give women what they deserve.

Screw that.

Here's why. If womankind (a group comprised of about 3.25 billion individual women) are somehow unable to do anything at all because men (a group comprised of about 3.25 billion individual men) are "holding them back" and "oppressing them", and the only way that women can rise above this is with the help of men, then there is no hope whatsoever for women, because they are incapable of doing anything on their own. Think it through and that's the only possible conclusion, and it's completely crap.

The truth is that almost 100% of the other people on earth see you (and me) as at best either a nuisance not particularly worth the trouble it would take to exterminate right now, or a resource to be exploited when convenient.

No one loves me, or you. If you want something or want to be something you have to find a way to make it happen, and if you get really lucky then no one will care what the hell you do and you will just go do it. Usually there will be at least dozens of people competing with you or trying to stop you for one reason or another. At a minimum they will be telling you that you are a worthless piece of crap and you can't do it, and don't deserve even to draw breath.

Depending on where you live, what you look like, and what group people think you "belong" to, someone else may try to stone you, blow you up, hang you, or get nasty and do something really unpleasant.

This is life. Not because someone is a woman, or not, but because it is the way it is for no particular reason that I know of, and the central fallacy of feminist thought is that women are a special case somehow, as noted above.

In the Guardian ("guardian.co.uk") Germaine Greer rants about this photo of Cyrus, if we may get back to the subject.

First Greer classifies the photo as art, but says that "in western art most of the women portrayed semi-clad or totally nude are children," something I have never particularly noticed. Children? Get real.

From an Amazon review of Greer's book "The Beautiful Boy", her aim was to "'to advance women's reclamation of their capacity for and right to visual pleasure' by encouraging women to gaze with desire at naked boys, mature enough for sex but too young to shave."

OK, so we've got the hypocrisy engine revving loudly right at the starting line. It's fine for women to feel lusty about boys but wrong for men to have feelings about young women? Do I have that right? Yep. And I still disagree with the contention about western art as child pornography.

"When Botticelli paints the yet-to-be-enjoyed goddess of love emerging from the sea," Greer says, "people come from all over the world to gape at her." Well wouldn't you? Botticelli painted this in 1482. That is 526 years ago, and people are still finding meaning it this painting. There must be more there than a naked girl or it would have been tossed out centuries ago. Anyway, photography produces much better pornography than oil paint on canvas.

Look at the picture and see if you can find any naked female children. I dare you.

Then Greer says that a young adult woman in a sexy pose is rare and weird, contrasting the now fully adult model Kate Moss with Miley Cyrus. How weird is that?

If this was true, then many marriages would end before they even began. My own grandparents were married over 60 years and neither one of them had a habit of sneaking out of the house to raid my grade school for fresh meat, even though it was only a block away. They were adults and acted like it, as almost everyone does. It's called growing up. Adults are attracted to and appreciate adults, and as you get older, the meaning of who is an adult ages with you.

Do the relatively young of our species have nicer bodies than us old farts? Duh, yeah. But even if you like to look at smooth skin or a tight butt every now and then, it's about as evil as taking a deep breath of fresh air on a spring morning. Nice, but....

Next Greer states that 15-year-old girls are full of sophisticated cooking sexual urges and way ahead of dim-witted adults, and then she says that these same girls have to be trained to be sexy and then can't be reformed again: "When the time comes she is likely to reject approaching womanhood, desperate to keep her thighs skinny, and nearly as desperate to acquire hard, high breasts." No comment other than to note that this is so convoluted and self-contradictory that I don't want to mess with it.

Following this Greer takes issue with the art of photography, claiming that posing is itself pornography, and that lighting and color evoke a "palette strongly redolent of the dirty postcards of yesteryear" which of course few of us have seen, so we obviously can't be nostalgic for them. And which, like all fashions in art (let's assume for a moment that even pornography is art), go stale. I think that H.L. Mencken was one screaming good writer, but he came from a different age. Even though I can appreciate his passion and envy his facility with words, I don't want to copy him. People don't do things that way now. It's not fun, it's not fresh, it's not real. It's boring.

If you want pornography you want something that looks real. Pornography has basically no meaning. It's a blunt instrument. To have meaning requires depth, and depth and nuance kill pornography. Dirty postcards from the 1850s are so stale as to be only baffling, so this argument is false.

OK, then. Greer goes even farther off the deep end by claiming that Miley Cyrus looks puffy, unclean and unkempt, and this means she looks like she's just had sex, which is sexy. Go back to square one for a second. Miley Cyrus is just an anonymous female biped. Someone or other may think otherwise, but probably not very many of us. Not me. Not in this photo. I've seen another photo or two of her and she's an ordinary looking little girl. Just an ordinary looking little girl. I do not fantasize about her as Greer does.

"The subject of Leibovitz's photo could be a child prostitute from Casablanca, vintage 1900, the camera in the hands of a sex tourist who is about to toss a few coins to the doorkeeper." Or she could be an accountant, or a bowling instructor, or just an anonymous female biped, or a college student playing around at posing, or a rich entertainer trying out something new to see how it feels, and making a few bucks besides.

Oops. We're getting close. Greer keeps building on this prostitution idea. She thinks that the Disney corporation is the real pimp. Disney could have prevented all this. Maybe Disney even wanted this fuss: "the brouhaha has been timed for the very day the magazine appeared on the newsstands" instead of, say, a year before, or eight weeks after, or never, in case no one cared. So when would a fuss arise if not when the magazine is published? One wonders. Sounds like a conspiracy to me, kids.

But it gets even worse. "Her parents and minders were present and apparently saw nothing amiss in the offending photograph." So how evil is that one? Dang. Not even her parents cared. So I should get even more worked up then?

Then Greer gets totally wound up and basically claims that all schoolgirls are sluts, and all entertainers, and that every kind of job is prostitution and therefore bad for everyone, and on and on, and then there is a final period on the end of the final sentence and that's about it.

According to the always-correct Wikipedia "In December 2007, [Miley Cyrus] was ranked #17 in the list of Forbes Top twenty earners under 25 with an annual earning of US$3.5 million. In April 2008, Parade and Us Weekly reported that Cyrus earned $18.2 million in 2007." Sounds like she's in it for the money. Anyone want to burn her at the stake as an evil prostitute?

What I still don't understand is what the issue is. Why do some women begin foaming at the mouth when someone else gets a job and makes a lot of money? Do I respect Miley Cyrus? No. I don't even know who the hell she is. I don't respect Britney Spears or Madonna either, but then who the hell am I? They are all in business and doing pretty well.

Are they crazy? Probably, by some measure. Are they bent? Probably, by some measure. Are they happy? None of my business. Are they successful business women? Yes, all of them. If they don't like what they do they can change. All of them have enough money. It's not like any or all of them or any of the hundreds of thousands of female entertainers in just this one country are being held in cages and fed raw meat every now and then, and taken out for display whenever their handlers feel like it.

I personally have no respect or disrespect for any of them. My opinion is completely irrelevant and I am a total nonentity. Someone like Germaine Greer knows better. She used to be a celebrity. She knows how far below Miley Cyrus she ranks. Greer can't even sing or dance or tell jokes, or act.

Showbiz is a tough line of work. You have to be insanely good and insanely lucky. No one, not any one at all just stands up and holds out a basket for people to throw money into. Showbiz is a killer field. It's much tougher than it looks, which is partly why the pay can be so good. But most people work hard for a whole lifetime and never manage to make a living at it. So why does Germaine Greer have a problem?

I think she may hate women, and hate her own life too. And I think that maybe she's found a niche, and that niche is the whiney one. It's easy for someone like her to sit at a keyboard and complain instead of running an auto repair shop or driving a truck or being a doctor or an actress, or even a porn star. She just never wanted to get serious herself, so now she's found a vein of ore she can burrow along, following one bogus idea after another and pretending to string them together into a finely-fashioned argument.

I don't know a lot of people. Never have. But of the people I've met I've found that just as many women as men are complete buttheads. Nothing is more delicious to me than discovering a person who thinks clearly, thinks well, thinks deeply, and thinks often. I don't give a flying rat's ass if I agree with them or not, as long as they are honest enough to keep looking for the truth, and to keep accepting it when they find it, no matter what it looks like, and I try to do that too.

So everyone. Shape up already. Who cares if some twit sits for a damn photo session?

Footnote: I don't know about you, but I always thought that Germaine Greer was kind of a babe herself. Of course she's a lot older now, but still not all that bad. Heh.

References:

Germaine Greer: "The Beautiful Boy".
Guardian.co.uk: "We like our Venuses young".
Botticelli's Venus.
Miley Cyrus at Wikipedia.

Dreaming Of Socks

This is going to sound strange, but pay attention. There are lessons here.

A few days back I discovered a new web site. Well whoop-de-do, you say. Who hasn’t? At least one a day. Or more. True. One point to you, but who’s keeping score? That wasn’t the main idea anyway, just the intro.

Here’s the deal. This site has a lot going for it, a lot of things everyone can learn from, and it’s worth investigating, especially so if you are a woman or know one. (How universal is that?) So if you want to stop reading here and do your own looking and thinking, go right now to Sock Dreams. Whether or not you come back is your decision, as they all are.

Here’s what I see that makes an impression on me.

First, the site is distinct, unusual. In a good way. You won’t accidentally mistake this site for another, although its basic structure is pretty average. There is a big banner at the top with a navigation bar just under it. Main content is placed vertically along the left side. On the right is access to the shopping cart, to a search option, and a menu listing more specific product categories.

There is nothing unusual about this, but the graphic designer made it look special. The colors on the navigation bar don’t quite “match” in a way we’ve all gotten used to. They aren’t all the same, or shades of one color marching in a steady procession from one end to the other but they work together to make a person curious about where they lead.

The type flows. The home page is full of curves, inviting. There is white space. No crowding. What you see first is “Welcome Sock Lovers & Dreamers!”, and then some clues about what kind of place you have found: “Female owned & operated in Portland Oregon since 2000. We’re not your usual sock shoppe, nor do we intend to be.”

There is a large logo under the introductory text. For me this is a little too big and a little too flashy, but it is distinct, and helps establish the site as a non-corporate sort of place.

Overall the site works, and well. It is quirky, unusual, unique even. And that is good. The site is colorful and well organized. There is a good use of Flash, normally the bane of web sites. Usually Flash is applied with a shovel by inexperienced designers gone amok, eager to show cleverness and ignorant of business needs, but here, in one small pane on the home page, it works, simply and unobtrusively. This one little view displays a few rotating product shots without either locking up the whole site or driving visitors away, screaming.

So right up front this site establishes what it is about and what you can expect. It looks simple but isn’t. There nooks and hidey-holes, surprise turns, several ways of getting to products and information about the products. Come in through the main menu and peruse general products. Then click on an image somewhere and pop up inside a whole line of similar products, or a line of products from one manufacturer, or somewhere else again. It’s all good.

Exploring here is like being in a funhouse, a friendly one. You don’t care about getting lost or being abandoned at some dead end, and you aren’t. This is rare.

Images, images everywhere. Though I can’t find it now, I believe I saw a statement that the owner, Niqkita, does most of the photography. Whoever does it, it is stunning. These are not standard catalog shots. They are not socks pinned to the wall. Each image is unique. Each one is interesting. The models and sets vary. Many are outdoors. Each color of a sock has its own image, with the model in a fresh pose. Nothing stale here at all.

I know exactly how a guy sees the product shots, and I can understand why the name of this business was once “Fetishize Me”. I can almost guess how women see them. Almost. It must be fun. But not kinky. This isn’t a sex shop, but more like a playground. Or a party.

There is a lot for young spicy women, but also for every other woman, and for every girl you can imagine. That is made clear. The owners and staff are obsessed with socks and things (anklets, arm warmers, foot care products, footie socks, garter belts, gloves, half socks, knee highs, leg warmers, leggings, midcalves, over the knee, petticoats, scarves, sock garters, t-shirts, thigh highs, toe socks, washing supplies, wrist bands...and more).

The “About” page is personable and interesting. It is clear. It is easy to read. It was not written by a software program, a lawyer, or a corporate drone. The story begins with “Years ago there was a girl whose feet were always cold”, and goes on from there to tell the story of the business and the sock faeries who work there. You end up dead certain that you will be dealing with real people.

Want to know about shipping and payment policies? Just go to the pages that deal with them. There is no need to enter into a transaction just to get to the buried shipping options page, only to find that they can’t deliver to you anyway. Many, many other sites get this wrong. Many of those sites belong to large businesses, and they all deserve to close.

Not Sock Dreams, which also has a simple and interesting FAQ page, with photos, and easy links to more information. Again, it’s all up front, well written, sprightly, and easy to get to.

One feature I stumbled on, one that isn’t openly linked to, is a weblog (the “Sock Journal”). This illustrates two more good aspects of this site. First, it is focused. The blog does not have long rambling stories about vacations, or recipes, or politics, or relatives. It’s about socks, and illustrated. Every post leads back to the store somehow, but with a soft sell. It is all lighthearted and full of photos. Once again, the quality of the photos is fantastic and they help breathe more life into the products.

Second, there is an ongoing dialog between the owner and her customers. They share their experiences and their exuberance for socks. Sounds silly, but the customers go nuts for it. They love socks and the shop. The owner loves socks and loves helping her customers. And it keeps the store thriving.

The overall approach of this site is humble and playful. It represents a business but one with heart. Each part of the site is focused. The owner makes it clear that she does not and will not carry every product, and gives her reasons. You understand. It’s about socks and she wants to keep it that way. And you end up agreeing.

References:

Sock Dreams
Sock Journal

Playing With The Dead

I have finally succeeded in finding someone weirder than I am.

I am not weird. I am unique. I am special. I am fun, and inquisitive, though I have secrets. Very special secrets that I will not tell you about because that would make me just like you. And maybe I don't want to either like you or to be like you, and maybe not have you like me either. Also, being honest here, just why would you be interested in any of my secrets anyway?

Are they really secrets or am I just being private? Is that allowed anymore?

Maybe that's enough, the just wanting privacy thing. People think that if you like being anonymous and quiet and sort of staying over there at the edge where things are calm and no one asks you to do things you don't want to, that you have a disability, a "secret", and then they want to "know" it, and bug you about it. Which ruins all the fun of either being private or having secrets, or of both having secrets and keeping your own thoughts in a carefully tended garden where they can play without being loudly hooted at by boors with bad breath and sticky fingers.

Maybe it was my friend Arnie who first clued me in to this. It is my first memory of the difference between me and normal people. I was still in grade school, the lower grades, and hence very young in today's terms, since today is several decades farther on. Arnie was over at my place one day. Come to think of it now, we moved out of that place around the time I was 10, and I don't recall my sister, who was born when I was eight, so we're looking back through a long time tunnel.

Arnie and I were playing Chinese checkers and eating candy. I think I noticed that some of the marbles were sticky. Arnie did it.

Right there, that was it. He had sticky fingers. This is something that I have strenuously avoided my whole life, even then. I could not believe that he would let his fingers get sticky, or put up with it once it happened. He said it didn't bother him, so I tried it. I got so sticky that I could hardly spread my fingers. You could almost hear the velcro rip as I pulled the fingers apart, then allowed them to magnetically back together again, and then repeated the cycle.

I think that Arnie did wash his hands before he went home, but I did it almost immediately, after 15 minutes or so of trying on stickiness for size. It didn't work for me then and doesn't now.

I don't like getting stuck in things, especially the thoughts of others. Don't like ceremony or routine. My most hated word is "should", most hated phrase is "supposed to". I like taking a clean look at things and coming to my own conclusions, which is one reason I didn't do any research papers in college.

Luckily I was able to get by. No one really demanded any, but it was an option. I preferred to go the other way, to do my own reading directly from original sources, do my own thinking, and then write down my thoughts. Good thing that I was in literature instead of sociology or history. Not like today, when teachers demand research, and students then pay others halfway around the world to whip up something, or cut and paste from Wikipedia. There was cheating way back when, but I never saw the point. I was paying for the pain, might as well attain the gain. No one ever came close to pretending that I ever, ever could have stolen words elsewhere. Because they were original. That was obvious.

Because they were weird.

That's another word I hate. Weird. My sister gets a pass. She can say it. She has paid her dues, and I owe her apologies for many things, so she gets in free. If you say it you might go home with a bloody mouth and swollen lips. Just because. Just because you're an idiot. At least say something that requires a few seconds of thought. Please. It will be easier all around. And I won't have to go to jail to get my point across succinctly.

So there I am, being original in my own sort of way, a legend in my own mind, which is not too bad considering that people will get all freaky if you tell them you have enough clothes to do laundry once a month. How stupid are they?

And this one wasn't my idea, it came from a friend who once confided that he'd bought enough socks and underwear to go two weeks. A month is a whole lot better, so I customized his method. Sometimes I can stretch to five or six weeks with a bit of judicious hand laundering. Once you've stopped spending two hours every week doing laundry you gain a new perspective. One month's laundry takes maybe two and a half hours. Compare that to about nine hours the old way.

But an idiot will say, of course, "That's weird". Which is equivalent to saying, "I'm a total idiot and I've never had a thought or emotion unique to me. All I know is what I see on TV, so I'll go ahead and bray now", or of just standing there and drooling while staring at the wall, waiting for instructions.

So if you (yes even you) go off half cocked, fully cocked or otherwise and do something not even remotely original but only uncommon or even unexpected, then you will see the whole flock pivot to face you and quack and gabble in unison, "That's weird", and then stand there, waiting for you to burst into flame and quit annoying them by being not what they all are.

Which is a good reason to keep to yourself. Which will inspire more unique thinking. Which will trigger more idiots to gabble and drool.

Which is tolerable in a way, but they can be dangerous in groups, if challenged, or if simply startled too suddenly by originality.

This is the story of my life. But now we have the internet, so now it's possible to run across things that force you to admit that there are people out there more original and more creative, harder working, odder, stranger, more wonderful and scary than you could ever be. And they even provide (1) photos, and (2) stepwise instructions.

Right now, I can honestly say that I have no idea how I found the mouse mouse. Maybe it was a couple of weeks ago when I was searching for video clips of how to make and use lightweight backpacking stoves for my other blog. Somehow I can't quite remember the connection, but bing! there was a picture of a mouse with a mouse inside it.

This was the interface of electronics and taxidermy, of computing and biology, of irony and butchery. Someone stuffed a dead mouse with a computer mouse, and posted the results for the world to see.

I wouldn't have done that, probably, but I sent it to my sister. She needed to see it.

Hey lookee, kid, I didn't do this, but someone did, and they're weirder than I am. I'm not weird if you'll recall but in case you need proof again, here it is, kid.

I haven't heard from her. I'm sure she liked it in her own way. I didn't dig through the details but only looked at the photos and she probably never visited the Instructables web site, but she had proof. One or two photos included with the email would have been enough. Remember now, I'm not weird, right? I know I'm your brother and I spook you every now and then, but lookee here, this is really weird, right? I mean. Look, eegh.

For good measure, and in the interests of providing balanced coverage, and also to prove that compared to the rest of the world, even to little girls, I'm pretty harmless after all, I sent another URL and another photo or two on mouse taxidermy (amateur, home-style, kitchen table hacking) showing a young girl holding up two dead and dried mice in costume.

She seems pretty happy about it. The girl in the pictures, not my sister, who still hasn't responded. She seems to think it's normal and fun, the girl.

This could be true where she comes from. Who can say?

I myself, having thought it through have decided not to call it weird. (What in hell is that word even supposed to mean anyway?) But to think of it as possibly gruesome and perverse (which can be a fun way to label other people), or maybe only as unnecessarily strange. I say "strange" as in unfathomable.

I like little things. I especially like rodents, and kept hamsters for years. But live, playful, healthy and happy hamsters, and respectfully buried them when they wore out. Given that keeping a pet often involves imprisonment, especially for small animals, I always regarded keeping a pet as involving a sacred contract. In turn for imprisoning a hamster, who would gladly have run off to be suddenly eaten if given the chance, it was my responsibility to give it the best and most solicitous care that I could, first to make up for the evil that I did by keeping it in a cage and then because it deserved the most interesting life I could imagine for it in payment for depriving it of its natural entertainment by running free and dying young.

None of this, in my book, involves killing an animal, hacking it up, and stitching it back together around a miniature computer mouse. Or stuffing if full of LEDs and batteries. Or dressing its tiny dead body in tiny crude costumes and playing house.

So OK, there they are, playing with their dead things. I hope my sister is happy now.

References:

Mouse mouse.

Mousy dressup.

Tumbling For The Tiny, I

I don't know about you, but I'm small. Relatively speaking. Not that I care, or compare myself to others all day, but just in case you were wondering.

Not that I care, or compare myself to others, but I've always been a tad smug about this. Totally without reason. We are what we are and that's it. No reason to feel good or bad about it, but I like being this way all the same. I guess that works for me.

I first had this feeling in a really strong way while in the rafters of a garage. My family was renting a house from someone, and the owner had a bunch of stuff in the garage, up top, on plywood sheets in the rafters. I went up there a few times. Pretty rickety but fun. I felt good to be small enough to wiggle around and snoop in the boxes, and light enough not to bring it all down.

So what the hey. That's just who I am, and as I said, I can't help it.

But somehow, for some reason, I've always been attracted to small things. I don't feel small unless I compare myself to someone else. Usually it's not feeling small but a form of amazement at how big the other people all are. Giant shoes. Basket-sized hats. How do they do it?

OK, 'nuff of that. It ain't the other people that are fascinating, it's the small stuff around me. Hamsters have been on my list for a long time. Cats are smaller than dogs, and maybe that's one reason I've always preferred them too. And when you see a dog smaller than your cat, it's still bigger in another way, the way some people are bigger than their physical size. Dogs are loud and jumpy and intrusive, and cats aren't. Smallness can manifest as silence and sleekness and efficiency and not only as tininess

Tiny-perfect is a phrase I've heard. Maybe it's a bit to precious, but there is a sort of perfection in many small things. Babies are special in a way not only because they're part of you (part of all of us) but because they're so physically tiny and helpless (another form of smallitude) but yet they have a kind of perfection about them that could not be replicated at a greater size.

Find stillness and calm, a quiet moment, and you find smallness and perfection. It all goes together.

So a day or two back I stumbled on a new web site. Now ain't that a revelation. For several years I've been pursuing ultralight backpacking, as in rolling around in the ideal and getting myself covered with its scent, and then backing off a notch or two to find the right blend of practicality and ecstasy. I even built a web site around the idea, and took to making my own backpacks, stoves, and shelters. Some clothing too.

One of my favorite places has been BackpackingLight. Following up on one of the forum threads by a guy who made his own ounce and a half backpack and seven ounce backpacking hammock, I saw a reference to UltraLight Living: "Ultralight: backpacking, clothing, homes, innovation, lifestyles, technology, transportation. Everything ultralight."

The idea is to take backpacking ideas and apply them to the rest of life.

This is right in line with the Green movement, the conservation ethic, and our new fear of the evil Dr. Carbon von Dioxide, Menace to the World.

The most interesting thing to me right off was the "UltraLight Homes" page. I like this stuff. Several years I stumbled on Tumbleweed Tiny Houses, and then a little over a year ago I found a piece in the New York Times on small houses. Some of these things are barely over a hundred square feet. Time to bang your head against the wall and howl, friends.

The Tumbleweed Tiny House Company is the one I'm most familiar with. You can get a feel from this quote: "My name is Jay Shafer and since 1997 I have been living in a house smaller than some people's closets. I call the first of my little hand built houses Tumbleweed. My decision to inhabit just 100 square feet arose from some concerns I had about the impact a larger house would have on the environment, and because I do not want to maintain a lot of unused or unusable space. My houses have met all of my domestic needs without demanding much in return. The simple, slower lifestyle my homes have afforded is a luxury for which I am continually grateful."

The idea: a small house can be thought out thoroughly and built well with good materials, be sturdy enough to stand up to delivery across public roads, and have wiring, plumbing, and appliances built in. Then it can be slid off the trailer, connected, and moved into.

"Most of our houses on wheels include a two-burner stove, an under-counter refrigerator, a bar sink, an RV on demand hot water heater, and a propane boat heater. We can certainly work with you if you have specific needs for built-in appliances."

Sounds good. I've always wanted a sleeping loft. Every kid has. Some lovers too. A place of many fascinations.

These pre-built houses are relatively expensive, relatively speaking, but they are built with good materials, and if you'd rather you can purchase plans and do the building yourself.

There are other outfits too, like Global Portable Buildings, Inc., which makes things from cargo containers (in either 8'x 20' or 8' x 40' sizes). They have 10 year structural warranties and can be delivered by container ship, plane, helicopter, truck or rail. Yow.

There is a lot more at UltraLight Living, and other places too, like the stray reference I bumped into at Nicaragua Living, about converting cargo containers in more of a do-it-yourself sort of way. I'm getting all tingly here.

The expats in Nicaragua tend to think of things in eccentric terms (compared to the rest of us). A lot of them are trying to get by with less, or with smaller things, or with simpler but sometimes more sophisticated things, so this general topic appeals to them too.

Make your life small and it's easier to handle. Check out the "UltraLight Homes" page at Ultralight Living sometime.

References:

Alchemy Architects and the WeeHouse

BackpackingLight

Global Portable Buildings, Inc.

Nicaragua Living

Cargo container house

Think Small: New York Times on small houses

Tumbleweed Tiny Houses

UltraLight Living

Ultralight Living's UltraLight Homes page

Do You Know Who You Are?

I mean really. Do you?

Are you smart? Funny? Ethical and principled? Do you grab whatever opportunity floats by and let the consequences fall where they may?

Would you pocket a wallet you saw someone drop? If so would you keep it if the person came back looking for it? Would you lie if asked about it? What would you say now, and what would you say if someone asked next week, or next year?

Do you really know who you are? Maybe, but I bet you're like everyone else and keep changing to fit your environment. Try this sometime.

Meet your friends for pizza and beer. Change the situation around to match your own life. If you don't like pizza and beer, then make it a picnic, or a birthday party for someone's eight year old daughter. Whatever works for you.

Be yourself. Don't try to do anything unusual or out of character. Just remember what happens, how you feel, and what you do. Store the memories away somewhere. Keep them handy.

That's easy enough.

Now walk into your boss's office. If you don't have a boss, then use your bank, your church, or some place that gives you the same kind of feeling, like a dentist's office.

Let's say that it's your boss and today is your performance review. What happens will vary from place to place, from boss to boss and from individual to individual. But it won't be anything like having pizza and beer with your friends.

Are you relaxed? No. Do you feel like all the pressure is off? No. Are you sure that you can say absolutely anything at all and they will get it? No. Do you just walk in and expect things to unfold perfectly? No. Are you sure that whatever happens, you will leave happy and satisfied? No. Are you behaving differently? Yes.

You are a completely different person right now. Who you are depends on where you are and what is expected of you. You may think that you are one distinct person and you just do different things at different times in different places, but that isn't true.

Not at all.

You are a collection of roles and behaviors. You think different thoughts, say different things, experience different perceptions, produce a distinct physical presence depending on where you are and what is expected of you. It isn't so much that you are an actor pulling on a different costume as you are a consciousness waking up inside different stories.

This is a subtle process, a delicate realization, a revelation that may take some thought, but it isn't really too far out. Once you get used to the idea that there is really no one home inside you, no real you, it's pretty simple. You are a bunch of learned responses and some little-used potentials.

That's why you surprise yourself from time to time. Something in "you" comes bubbling to the surface every now and then and you learn a little more about who "you" are and what "you" are capable of. It can be nice, or not.

It can be that you like avocados after all, though you never did before. Or maybe you say something that makes everyone laugh until wine squirts out their nostrils, something that never before crossed your consciousness, or theirs. But there it is, all over the table.

If you're married, would you ever have guessed it would be to THAT person? Really? Or did things unfold, and then one day you finally realized what was going on, and admitted it, and that was OK?

If you're still not too sure about all this, that you're not really in control because you're not really here, then try a few things.

Try regulating your heartbeat. Consciously. You can't.

Lying down and staying very still is allowed, but won't work, nor will running up and down the stairs.

Unless you want to make it really clear. If so, then go ahead and run up and down those stairs for a while, and in the middle of it go ahead and change your heart rate to one beat per minute. Or 10, or 50. All the same. You can't, because you aren't home. "You" are only a visitor.

You are not in charge here. You never have been.

The part of you that you think of as you is only an occasional guest. Your consciousness wakes up from time to time when it's handy, and swirls its fingers around in the soup of thoughts, images, smells, sounds, and emotions that is always cooking, and pretends that it has something to do with them.

Well, it does, but not much.

If you sneeze and shoot goop all over, it's nice to have a hanky already out and in place. You sneeze into it, no one sees the goop, the goop stays in the hanky, you fold the hanky, discretely wipe your nose a couple of times, and put it away. Handy but not a big deal. A tool.

Like consciousness. Or rationality if you prefer. It's handy but not a big deal. It's a small part of you, whomever "you" are anyway.

Still not sure?

You can try some things. You'll probably get bored and give up pretty soon, but that is proof too.

Ready?

OK. Be rational then. Pick a vegetable or fruit you've never eaten. Read up on it. Make lists. Take notes. Learn everything you can about it, and then decide if it's a good thing to eat.

It will be of course. It's not like they just throw random objects into the bins at supermarkets. Any food you pick will be a good thing to eat, so that's what your conclusion will be. You are allowed to look at photos too, but not to smell, touch or taste your target food ahead of time.

Now for the test.

Because once you've reached your rational conclusion, you have to go eat the food. Let's be generous here, and add a time dimension. A fudge factor. Let's say that you have to eat this new food at every meal for a week, and then once a day for the next month, and then decide.

You won't be able to do it. Probably not. But even if you do, what happens will not be based on your research and your decision. What happens will be based on the animal you inhabit.

It will taste the food, and feel it and smell it, and it will let you know if it wants to take the first bite, finish that, and have so much as one more. There is a really good chance that you won't even get through the second day of your plan. Food is like that. Especially food. Even if you think you like it.

You can eat a new food and gag every time you try it. No thought required. Then one day you have to have it. The same food. It tastes the same but now it's good. Huh. No thought required, and any thought you might have had would not have helped anyway. Your animal decided, along the lines of ancient animal principles, and you go along for the ride.

You like that, do you?

It's even better. What's going on is not "along the lines of ancient animal principles" because there aren't any. Protoplasm and slime and squirming blind things do not have principles. They have something or other but we can't fathom what it is. Not really. It happens. It works. We live with it. We have to.

Still not sure about all this? Try another idea: your body is dark inside. Every thing a millimeter or so beneath the outermost layer of your skin is living in the dark, and has no eyes. It doesn't think, or go for a walk. It has never been to school. You don't know it, yet you are made of it. And it is in charge.

Dark meat.

So you don't want to screw around with strange vegetables or your internals. That's OK. Try something else. Things taken by mouth are especially good since they go straight to the mindless snuffling animal part of us. We relate immediately to taste and smell. We have to. We are exquisitely tuned to accept or reject anything entering the mouth because of billions of years of practice which has taught our blind selves to make snap decisions about what works and what does not.

Or else they die. In ugly ways.

So beer is good to experiment with. Try a Guinness. Better yet, a bottle of Theakston's Old Peculier, "The beer that made Masham famous! A dark, strong beer Old Peculier is justifiably famous for its rich and complete character, its sheer strength. Brewed using the traditional Fuggle hop."

Bet you haven't tried either on of them yet. Bet you won't like either. It took me a dozen or so tries at Guinness until it became tolerable. This was a rare case of rationality working, sort of. It was history what done it.

My boss at one time was an expert on Colonel Custer, and on his post, Fort Abraham Lincoln, south of what is now Mandan, North Dakota. (This is the same guy who is always called General Custer, but he wasn't. That was a brevet rank, in effect for only a few days. He went back to being a colonel very soon, and stayed that way until he died. You know the rest of the story.)

The soldiers at the fort were especially fond of tinned oysters and Guinness, which in the 1870s came to them in clay bottles, and my boss had made a specialty of finding them. The soldiers drank, and then threw the empties over the river bank and a hundred years later Norman dug them up. He even wrote to the Guinness company to identify exact years they had made specific bottles with specific imprints stamped into them.

So I thought I had to like it. Didn't. Like drinking strange yeasty molasses. But if they had liked it so much in the 1870s there must be something there, I thought, and kept at it. After enough effort I started liking it.

So you might say that this invalidates my whole premise here, but it doesn't. The forced drinking was a rational act, but the dislike wasn't, nor was the liking that followed. My animal got used to it and decided to keep it up. All I did was to supply the stuff. If "I" had never acquired a taste for it, "I" would have given up on it. It's pretty nasty after all. Old Peculier is nastier yet but does have a great name. Tastes something like Guinness but more so. More peculiar. The Fuggle hops and all.

Don't like vegetables or beer, go ahead and buy some shoes, or take up mud wrestling. Do something you know "you" won't "like" and see what happens. Either you won't be able to change the thing you think of as your mind or you'll find yourself surprised by what happens, and your mind will go along for the ride.

Either way it will not be the result of dividing a sheet of paper into two columns, labeling one "Pro", the other "Con", and listing ideas. Toting up a score does not make anything work out. Only the animal decides, and it can't count.

You aren't home and there is nothing you can do about it. Other than waking up into a conscious state every now and then and enjoying whatever show is playing on your retinas.

Life is so weird innit?

person: c.1225, from O.Fr. persone "human being" (12c., Fr. personne), from L. persona "human being," originally "character in a drama, mask," possibly borrowed from Etruscan phersu "mask."