Until today, if you’d asked me how retrieving a password might be embarrassing I couldn’t have told you

Earlier I went to access a bank account I hadn’t accessed on the internet for a while, and I had forgotten my password and even my user name. I called the bank to see if they could help me with it, and the conversation went something like this:

Alright, so I’ve forgotten my password. I went to retrieve it but then realised I had forgotten my user name as well.

OK, well, your username is [blah blah], and then you’ll have to answer your secret question; do you remember what your secret question was?

No, but I’m sure I’ll know the answer when I see it. Ummm…

I can find it here.

Oh okay, what was it then?

…um…who was the first person you had sex with?

WHAT? Did I write that or did I choose it from a list?

You wrote it; people think we can’t see the questions, but we can. So who was the lucky contestant?

Okay I’m writing it but it isn’t working.

Can’t you remember who it was? It starts with a K.

Oh THAT first person. I’d forgotten about her, ha ha. Alright. Thanks for your help.

I made sure to record my new password and put it in a safe place.

Ciorans Vision for the Future

How I would love one day to see all people, young and old, sad or happy, men and women, married or not, serious or superficial, leave their homes and their work places, relinquish their duties and responsibilities, gather in the streets and refuse to do anything anymore.

- E. M. Cioran, “Apocalypse,” On the Heights of Despair

People are Noisy

Yes they are.

Does anybody Remember the band Battles?

A couple of years ago a friend played me the album Mirrored by Battles. I thought it sounded like random noises and not music. Of course, there is good music which sounds like random noises – Venetian Snares, for example – but there is no such thing as noise which sounds like music, and that is exactly what Battles are, for the most part. Of course, Pitchfork gave the album a glowing review; they could not resist endorsing a band some of their peers still hadn’t heard of.

But does anybody still listen to Battles? Does anybody still care about them? Does anybody still dig through their pile of music in search of that to load their car stereo with?

Why am I thinking about this? I was just reading a typical pretentious Pitchfork review – you know the ones, with the generally applicable insults and critiques which are crafted to sound specific, kind of like a horoscope – and I thought, “man these guys [guys] suck…ha, I remember how they gave Battles a good review, idiots.”

Loneliness

Rising every morning with fresh enthusiasm; preparing for the daily interaction we are born to expect; I do my best to prepare. I can smile, I can be polite. My politeness is genuine, and I am proud of that.

I am here for the people who like me, not for people who don’t like me. This is why I can be uncompromising; it is not unexamined obstinateness, please do not get me wrong on that. It is very much examined; I would hate to let down those who I share a world with, even though they are sparse.

They are sparse and they are transient. They are like a full moon on a still but steadily stirring ocean. They shimmer in front of you, you reach out, but you only grab a dark wave and eventually the cloud cover takes them away entirely. But forever when you close your eyes you can see the glimmer, and you hope you’ve reflected as much back at them; something allowing them to know they are not alone.

The enthusiasm I wake with has usually died by the time I’m asleep again. Every day, I go out to greet the people I love only to find that most of them don’t exist. I go to bed again, and fortunately I have forgotten about it all by the time I rise; my feathers have dried and I can search once again, expecting, as every day, to fly through the clouds and greet the moon like we all live to do.

Notes

1. My blog is getting nearly enough comments these days to warrant a ‘recent comments’ widget.

2. According to my referral logs, a lot of people are curious about why women date douchebags.

3. Something I’m sure other bloggers – or indeed writers in general (I don’t think bloggers are allowed to call themselves writers) – have experienced is that your throwaway pieces tend to be the most popular. In fact now that I think of it, it is common to any creative enterprise.

That’s really kind of depressing, along with just about everything else. That reminds me of a quote of Steven Pinker’s which I only noticed yesterday upon my fifth or so reading of How the Mind Works:

The passions are no vestige of an animal past, no wellspring of creativity, no enemy of the intellect. The intellect is designed to relinquish control of the passions so that they may serve of guarantors of its offers, promises, and threats against suspicions that they are lowballs, double-crosses, and bluffs. The apparent firewall between passion and reason is not an ineluctable part of the architecture of the brain; it has been programmed in deliberately, because only if the passions are in control can they be credible guarantors.

It has always seemed natural to think of humans as being defined by reason with the passions just adding colour. Of course the colour is important; a monochromatic life would not be worth living. But we talk and interact, at least on the surface, as though we are the rational animal. But we are not. We do not colour inside the lines; we draw lines around the colour, even pretending the lines came first.

We convince ourselves of our sanity by giving reason a glimpse when nothing is at stake. We pay it lip-service. Sometimes talking to people is like being clapped at by a trained seal.

4. I have an unequivocally uplifting and affirming post in the works. It might even be a series of posts, because nobody wants to read long blog posts. That’s fair enough too, I think; reading from a computer screen sucks all kinds of cock.

Flutter Flutter Flutter

I have butterflies. I’m not sure why; I have my last exam tomorrow morning, but my last three exams didn’t give me butterflies so I don’t know. Unless it’s because it’s my last one and I’ll be freeeee…for three weeks. I wonder if writing about my butterflies will get rid of them like I unconsciously, until this moment, thought it would.

I feel so nervous, but I don’t know what it’s aimed at! If you happen to be my secret admirer then contact me; you might be the reason but I don’t realise it yet because I don’t know you exist. If I reject you I’ll be really really pleasant about it. Although if I have butterflies about you already then your prospects are looking pretty good.

(I tagged this post ‘navel gazing’ – ha!)

Stuck

Too high to concentrate on reading what I want to read, too drunk to stop worrying about the dude who told me to “get a haircut” and started getting aggressive when I replied that he ought to grow his hair out, and too loaded to get a fucking hardon. And there’s no way I’m getting to sleep.

Occasionally I’ll attempt to “go out.” I’ll figure that because everyone does it, there must be something to it and this time around I’ll finally understand what it is. But no, there isn’t. It’s just like how everyone watches TV. There’s nothing to it. People are just too boring to have any interests or passions of their own, so they just do what everyone else does; but unfortunately the people they copy are equally uncreative and incapable of any sort of passion, so they all end up just watching television and going to clubs where over the abrasively repetitive music they shout small talk in each others’ ears about their boring jobs and their stagnant, inert relationships; the relationships which are ultimately the impetus of their club dwelling.

Steve works for his dad. We still haven’t finished our house, but we have money left over from the loan and we’re gonna use it to go on a six week holiday. We can’t afford it, but I don’t care. I need it.

Today I briefly wondered, “is there anything that I would die for?,” and I couldn’t think of a strong example; but I think I’ve found one: I would happily die as a member of the human race if someone had the means of exterminating our pathetic, irrationally status driven, tribalistic, hedonistic (for the most part), incorrigible, meaningless, meaningless, meaningless shit of a species.

Rainbows

Many of us would honestly rather be satisfied pigs than dissatisfied humans. I always thought the later was evidently superior; I believed there was absolutely no contest. But perhaps there does come a point…

Did I climb in to the hole and unweave the rope out?

Who is weaker? Those who live beneath the rainbow, or those who reach in only to pull out a cold, wet hand and regret it?

Do I regret it? I don’t know. Probably not. I’m far too proud for that. Better to be the one saying “Ha-haha-ha, look how insightful I am; how was the fall? Did it…pffffthahaha, did it hurt?,” than the disappointed one left nowhere when the wind dies down.

Or is hope a virtue? But surely there is unreasonable hope. Isn’t subjecting anything to critical reflection even more hopeful than faith? It is truly giving it its day in court; how do we know it won’t stand up? We are taking a risk, tapping it with a hammer in hopes that it won’t sound back at us. Faith is not a virtue, and we should not conflate it with hope. Faith is cowardice on the same level as default scepticism. Hope is bold. But with boldness comes the threat of a hard and heavy crash. The faithful never really fall…

To live in hope and optimism we need to accept the threat of despair.

If You’re Teaching a Class on International Security and Conflict…

…don’t prescribe Joseph Nye’s Understanding International Conflicts as the text. Here are some sporadic and incomplete reasons for this recommendation – in homage to Joseph Nye:

It’s historical contextualisation of issues is superficial. I keep finding myself asking, “but how?” He just asserts things.

It feels biased towards to US, although not always.

It is slightly philosophically inept, although it might just be me being pedantic.

It says things like this:

…the multinationals inadvertently transfer resources to the poor countries… [the] locals…learn how to run oil fields, pumping stations, and loading docks. Locals develop expertise in marketing and so forth.

So forth indeed, professor.

In short, you read it and end up having to do further research if you want to understand anything in depth. I would rather the extra information was just included in the text. And my lecturer mentioned that it is widely prescribed for graduate courses too. Goodness.