Read Cold Turkey by Kurt Vonnegut .

some excerpts (but really just read it all, it's purty darn good):

"Dr. Vonnegut <referring to his son Mark, author of Eden Express [inlink]terry,192[/inlink]> said this to his doddering old dad: 'Father, we are here to help each other get through this thing, whatever it is.' So I pass that on to you. Write it down, and put it in your computer, so you can forget it.

I have to say that's a pretty good sound bite, almost as good as, 'Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.' A lot of people think Jesus said that, because it is so much the sort of thing Jesus liked to say. But it was actually said by Confucius, a Chinese philosopher, 500 years before there was that greatest and most humane of human beings, named Jesus Christ.

The Chinese also gave us, via Marco Polo, pasta and the formula for gunpowder. The Chinese were so dumb they only used gunpowder for fireworks. And everybody was so dumb back then that nobody in either hemisphere even knew that there was another one."

"My government's got a war on drugs. But get this: The two most widely abused and addictive and destructive of all substances are both perfectly legal.

One, of course, is ethyl alcohol. And President George W. Bush, no less, and by his own admission, was smashed or tiddley-poo or four sheets to the wind a good deal of the time from when he was 16 until he was 41. When he was 41, he says, Jesus appeared to him and made him knock off the sauce, stop gargling nose paint.

Other drunks have seen pink elephants.

And do you know why I think he is so pissed off at Arabs? They invented algebra. Arabs also invented the numbers we use, including a symbol for nothing, which nobody else had ever had before. You think Arabs are dumb? Try doing long division with Roman numerals."

I'm thinking about accuracy and precision. Trying to find the defintions for myself without looking them up and I'm not sure I'm geting it right. Precision is maybe defining your objective to within a very small limit. And accuracy relates to the ability to get it right many times over? I don't know if that's right though. It's the best I can think of. If anyone has a better explanation that would be cool. I'm trying to resist getting it from the dictionary. I don't know why, but sometimes I have an aversion to my words being so accurately (ahem) defined. I like to come up with my own approximations. I think it comes from me learning to read really early. I think I read full novels in like 1st maximum 2nd grade (though Matt says this is very unlikely) and so I became used to reading words that I really didn't know specific definitions for. So I would just decide what they meant after I had read them enough. Sometimes I have been very wrong. Just like last year I had heard the word bellicose many times and my defintion of "something about being good" didn't pan out, and I finally looked it up and it means "warlike". Who wudda thunk it? Usually anything with 'bel' means good, beneficient, etc. I guess the double 'l' really changes things. So maybe I am just egoistic and hate learning things from others and should just read the fucking dictionary. This reading words without hearing and/or looking them up also means I am pretty bad at pronouncing some big words. I remember hearing the word inevitable in 7th grade and never connecting it with the written word which I had (this time correctly defined) read many many times, but always pronounced in-vite-able in my head. Whatever, I still don't like dictionaries too much. Foreign language ones are okay I guess. What the fuck? So anyway, if you wanna help me with accuracy and precision please do so, just don't give me the dictionary definitions. I wanna hear what you think.

i have just played strip poker, maybe for the first time in my life. I have played the game before, but never really to fruition. There are 8 people here. We are all naked, except Soyeon, of course. It is an educational experience. Girls are like boys are like girls are like... It is liberating. To see what people are without their deceptive clothes. And the verdict is that we are all the same. No matter me or you or them or whatever. When the clothes are gone you can't be anything but yourself. We see who is big and who is regular...who has a butt and who not. And the question is...does it matter? People are people and what does it mean? Genitals mean so much less when exposed. They're just parts. What do they matter? And so we grow closer hopefully. The baring of our bodies facilitates the baring of our souls. It's hard to dissemble when you're beared. I love it. Let's all be naked. I hate the pretensions that come when you can hide your body. We are all the same. Let's face it. We can pretend, but really... What does any of it mean? Get naked. You'll enjoy it. And you'll find you're not as different as you think.

Very fucked up indeed. The law is only aimed at women not men, and makes no consideration for consenting adults. It is punishable from 2-20 years.

After allowing their subsidiary Miramax to make Michael Moore's new film, Farenheit 9/11, Disney has decided to stop its release in theaters . Fucking Disney. Stupid mouse.

And they've finally created "custom-made" babies . An American lab used fertility treatment and in vitro fertilization to select fetuses that matched critical DNA components of their siblings. It is for a good cause in that all the siblings are suffering from chronic illnesses (anemia, leukemia, etc) that can dramatically benefit from the stem cells of their new siblings' umbilical cords. But who knows what's next...?

The recent decision by the Mass. Supreme court ruled that beginning on May 20th same-sex couples will be allowed to marry. A great victory, but... the governor has ordered that only MA state residents shall be allowed to take advantage of this. Apparently there has been a law on the books since 1913 stating that MA may not perform a marriage that will not be recognized in the state of the applicants. Originally it was enacted to prevent mixed couples from marrying in MA in defiance of southern states' anti-miscegenation laws. The catch is that for the last half-century town clerks have been ordered not to ask for applicants' state of habitation. This sudden reversal just in time for gay-marriage is a bit suspect. Also suspect is that the Republican governor has asked each state to take a stance on the issue and report back to him. There may be hope yet though, as some states (including NY-in a statement from our Attorney General) have tentatively claimed that there constitutions do not forbid marriage between members of the same sex. I suppose we can only hope and wait, and urge our state's legislature to take a tolerant stance until full rights are granted.

I am hanging out outside with Bridgette and Paul and a couple others, we're in California. Suddenly Bridgette says, "watch out, it's coming." No one really knows what to think at her random outburst, then the ground begins to shake. A small earthquake. No one is hurt. I don't even wonder that Bridgette seemed to be able to predict it before it came. A little while later we're somewhere not too far from there, we can see the ocean. Again Bridgette says, "it's coming." This time I know what to expect, and my heart starts beating a triple beat. I throw myself on the ground and try to brace myself. The whole world begins to move. The sound is deafening. This one is much different from the other which had lasted ten seconds and only rumbled beneath my feet. As I try to keep still and braced, a great tearing crash seems to erupt from directly underneath me. I am moving now, sliding. I look to where I am headed and see a massive cleft in the world. Like in the cartoons, I am scrabbling wildly to find a handhold. Another crash behind me and the world tilits once more. I am still sliding but in a different direction. When I turn my gaze to my new destination I realize that I am trapped completely and will soon end up spiralling away to the center of the earth. And then I start awake. My heart is truly pounding in my chest. I am totally freaked out and have to intentionally calm myself to find my way to slumber again. And I wonder, can Bridgette really do that?

This one's a "classic" and everything. Whoo-hoo. The Immoralist by Andre Gide is a tale of a wealthy young intellectual who experiences a near-fatal illness and then begins to see life from a much altered perception. He questions subjects such as morals, culture, and art and begins to wonder if what he has been taught to understand about life has any bearing on actually living. Despite it's "classic" status it was an enjoyable short (only about 100 pgs.) read. Instead of rambling more, I will offer a few of the passages that struck me as especially prescient. The work is presented in first person as the narrator, Michel, describes the adventures of the last couple years of his life to old friends, therefore unless indicated these are the musings of his mind as he progresses on his journey.

-on poets, philosophers, and such:

"At first I hoped to find a somewhat more direct understanding of life in some novelists and some poets; but, if they possessed that understanding, I must confess they hardly showed it; it seemed to me as if most of them weren't living at all, but were contented with seeming to live, and almost considered life as an annoying obstacle to living. And I couldn't blame them for it; and I won't affirm that the mistake wasn't on my side.... Anyway, what did I mean by "living"? That is exactly what I would have liked someone to tell me. This group and that spoke deftly, about the various happenings of life, never about what motivates those happenings.
As for the few philosophers, whose role it would have been to instruct me, I had known for some time what I could expect from them; whether mathematicians or Neo-Kantians, they kept as far away as possible from reality, which might disturb them, and were no more concerned with it than the algebraist is with the real existence of the quantities that he measures."

-and on what they were/should be (this one comes from a man who has already "learned" of real life as Michel now understands it to be:

"'Do you know what makes dead letters of poetry and especially philosophy today? It's because they're detached from life. Greece created idealism directly out of living reality; so that an artist's life was already a poetic accomplishemt in itself; a philosopher's life was an activation of his philosophy; so that, in addition, mingling with life instead of being unaware of one another, philosophy nourished poetry, poetry expressed philosophy, and they had remarkable powers of persuasion. Today beauty no longer acts, action is no longer concerned with being beautiful; and wisdom operates on its own.'"

and more about the same topic (ie: intellectuals in general):

"...most of them think they can't derive anything good from themselves except by restraint; they're only satisfied with themselves when they're disguised. Each one strives to resemble himself least of all. Each one chooses a pattern, then imitates it; in fact, they don't even choose the pattern they imitate, they accept one that's already chosen. And yet, I think, other things can be read in man. No one dares to. They don't dare to turn the page. Laws of imitation; I call them laws of fear. People are afraid of finding themselves alone, and they don't find themselves at all. This moral agoraphobia is hateful to me; it's the worst kind of cowardice. And yet it is only when alone that people are inventive. But who here is trying to be inventive? Whatever a man feels to be different in himself is precisely the rare thing he possesses, the thing that constitutes each man's wotrh - and it's that very thing they try to eradicate. They imitate. And they claim to love life!'"

-on culture:

"'...I depicted artistic culture as an emanation from a given people, like a secretion that at first is diagnostic of a plethora, a superabundance of health, then immediately co
ng
eals and hardens, cutting off all direct contact between the mind and nature, hiding the diminution of life beneath the persistent semblance of life, an unyielding sheath in which the confined spirit languishes and soon withers, then dies. Finally, carrying my train of thought to the extreme, I stated that culture, which is born of life, becomes the killer of life."

-this can't be the first time it was said, but:

"'A man thinks he owns things, and it's he who is owned..."

In all, this book is much more than a description of Michel's attempt to rid himself of morals. The word "morality" is used to express everything made by man and constrained by man's rules. Michel constantly bumps into these rules and by breaking them reaches a state of being he never expected to encounter. Alas, once there he finds that living without the rules is, while more pleasureable at times, more difficult by far than conforming. Where does the purpose of living come from if not from society? Searching for one's own answer to that question is perhaps the end in itself. I automatically distrust those who claim they've already found it (or at least more than partial bits of truth), isn't there always more? And I exit with a nod to Michel as he utters this last query to his listeners, a pessimistic ending if ever, but one that reveals that for all of Michel's so-called immorality, he still bears some burden, if not quite guilt, for his knowledge.

"What frightens me, I confess, is that I'm still very young. I sometimes feel as if my real life hasn't begun yet. Rescue me from this place now and give me reasons for living. I can no longer find any. I've won freedom, possibly, but what for? I'm suffering from this freedom that has no purpose. Believe me, it's not because I'm worn out by my crime, if you wish to call it that - but I must prove to myself that I didn't claim more than what was due to me."

Let's rock out!

I will admit this comes from an Artvoice cover story so is maybe less than creative journalism on my part, but it is still worth mentioning. A US official in Iraq wrote this memo to his superior officer, outlining some of the critical flaws in US policy before and after our so-called victory: . It is definately a good read. The summary article by Jason Vest does an excellent job of summing everything up: . Basically it reveals just how precarious our position in Iraq is today, and perhaps more tellingly, how many high-ranking officials within and outside of the Bush Administration accurately predicted the many shortfalls of our plans. We have fucked up big time, and unfortunately it is the Iraqis (and our enlisted men and women) who are to ultimately pay the price. I can only hope, though without much optimism, that the omens of Vietnam we see and hear everyday don't become reality.