signalnoise

YAY! I'm glad you guys will be at the burlesque show.

Thanks for all the support man, soory to hear there was no open bar

I just thought it might be your evil ploy to get her to not want kids!

Hey, no shame in that. Gotta love rollin' wit da homiez'n kickin' it old school.


Have fun!!!

hey, are you and wifey going to the burlesque show? slumberjackIL and i are going friday. you should go!

i usually judge a burrito shop by its bean, rice, and cheese burritos...then the sky's the limit.

the name "weight watchers" always makes me think of something like the old knight watching over the holy grail, "we are the watchers of the weight, we must keep it safe!"

why it's Mt.Doom of course.

It sounds like ryan is one of those closet liberals who flaggelates himself after watching Will and Grace.

When I first heard, I thought , oh wow, this guy is liberal, I mean sex clubs and all, maybe I should vote for him but then I realize that he's a closet freak that did more harm than good to his wife cuz he couldn't come out and be himself.

Thanks for the kind word on the Divorce tho.

hey, what's your course? (...been reading the who are you and what do you do chicago thread.)

hey, what's your course? (...been reading the who are you and what do you do chicago thread.)

until the world's motto really is "Community, Identity, Stability" and we're bred in tubes in batches of 16,000 or so...I will put little faith in bureaucracy.

my room is totally unpacked...there are. however, a shitload of boxes in my closet.

lucky you and your SUSHI!

the penguin

Thank you for your testimonial as well. I was glad to hear it, and to see that other people appreciate the random trivia that I write about.

As for your situation... yes, I've been there myself. My oldest friend (since we were around 3) came to visit me in New York maybe two years ago, and we had an absolutely awful time. Everything that I suggested we do was either too expensive, not "manly" enough (or some crap like that) or too pretentious. We ended up sitting around drinking, doing nothing, while he complained about the price of beer. After that I wondered if I wanted to be friends with him anymore, if we had grown too apart (our lives have taken very different paths) and it was time to end our friendship. I didn't talk to him for about 8 months afterwards, but when I did I was glad to hear from him.

A little perspective showed me that it was actually both of our faults - I had this weird need to show off how "cool" and "urban" I was to my friend, and he wanted to show how much he had stuck to his real roots by complaining about everything we did. Now that we've both gotten over that crap I find him much more fun to be around and we've resumed our friendship. Maybe all you need is a little break?

Maybe your buddy is having a hard time because he is following her. Uprooting yourself froma comfortable spot is not easy to do even when it's very obvious that it is time. Possibly his reaction against Chicago is because it's not his decision and he is not sure how he fits in. Sounds like he was preoccupired as hell that weekend.

That said, people o grow together and aprt over time. If you asked me in college who out of that group of people I would still be really close to and not, I would have guessed almost completetely wrong.

Oh, the Guiness was good.

hehe I dont know how i stumbled onto your journal, but it was a cool post so thought i'd comment :-)
Cookies & Cream Tea is ... weird. It's drinkable, but impossible to describe. Not a favourite. The honeycomb / vanilla etc are all much nicer, but maybe because they are more conceivable as tea flavours.
The TV ads have this girl sipping her tea and then taking a big bite out of the glass - ie. tastes good enough to eat. Kind of freaky.

The soundtrack of my life....I listened for the first time, I had to load my music, recharge the ipod, load some more. I was finally able to take my pod with me today...

The entire Electric 6 Fire album.

Lots of Metric - "Hustle Rose" over and over, I swear its about strip clubs.

Fila Brazillia - 6 ft Wasp, in the end a comedian is telling marketing people to kill themselves.

A lot of Scratch Bass by Lamb.

I think that "the spotlight", the media discourse, the collaborynth...is our enslaver and and our battleground. And women especially are the targets, even more than men. That comes out a little in my soundtrack.

Seduce the system back to humanity? Yes!

I'm a little scared....

EDIT: a little rum drunk = less clarity of expression

[Edited on Jun 15, 2004 8:47PM]

Yeah...I meditated myself well by focusing on well parts of my stomach. As best I could after that drink. Then went to the party. It was weird.

Nice, congratulations! Almost finished.

I don't know about your take on memory, I see it a little bit differently. In some ways distancing ourselves from events loses their focus and can make fine distinctions that may seem important at the time disappear. This probably isn't a great thing - but the fact that more and more media are being transferred into permanent, digital format means that it will not be as bad in the future. And what we gain by looking back at events over time is perspective - something that is almost never immediately apparent when things are happening.

It's easy to look back at something like the civil rights movement and see it for the great social force that it was. But that's because we have the luxury of historical perspective. What's truly amazing to me is that at the time of the civil rights movement in the early 1960's, many of those people who we hold in such high regard like Martin Luther King jr. and Stokely Carmichael were thought of as dangerous revolutionaries by a lot of people, not just fringe elements. People were afraid that if African-Americans had equal rights it would cause the entire system to come crashing down around them. Some people honestly thought that the civil rights movement, when it combined with the larger counter-culture movement, was going to be the end of the United States. And these views were taken seriously at the time! In retrospect they're absurd, but remembering both the events and the context help us keep in mind just how incredibly brave and visionary some of these people were, because they didn't have the luxury of knowing that things would (for the most part) work out well, they didn't even know if they were going to win.

As for whether it's better to forget.... I like to stick with Socrates: The only good is knowledge and the only evil is ignorance.

i'm happy/jealous you got to go to the bookfair. i just didn't have the time with all the birthday hoopla and my out of town friends. but some friends of mine saw dave eggers and chuck palahniuk read. fucking hell, i really would have loved to see both of them.

i'm glad school is over for you! are you working full-time this summer? i'm working 3 days a week, which is awesome.

(Caveat: I come from, as you know, a Philosophy rather than polisci background so I've read... er... none of your sources)

I wonder if something isn't maybe being missed by the dichotomy you're setting up between 'seeing like a state' and 'seeing ethically.'

What's been nagging at me is... well, states don't just pop out of thin air, do they? Even on the most ideologically-minded analysis, part of the reason that states do what they do is because of the desires of the people who make them up.

And so I wonder about *opposing* ethics to efficiency in this way. Presumably, a major part of what is ethically wrong with destroying spaces of public discourse is that this interferes with deliberative democratic governance, and so distorts the "will of the people" (at least as it's expressed through the state). But public discourse has a weird desirability structure - depriving people of it will tend to make them not want it. Surely at least part of why the state builds freeways is because people (think they) want them - my taxes get lower, my commute gets shorter, etc. (and I'm not willing to trade those in for a front stoop when I go to the polls). I'm not sure where I'm going with this... it just seems to me (coming from a committment to participatory democracy) that your model might just be replacing one top-down value-system (efficiency) with another ('ethics'), without really making much of an advance (elitist academics like you and I like public spaces of discourse, but that doesn't by itself make them good...)

Your thesis stuff reminds me a ton of my ex who was an architecture grad student... i broke up with him because he was so obsessed with reading about architecture theory that he never came home from his studio or called! Sucks because we were engaged! Oh well, poor him!

Anyway, awesome topic. I'm really into this kind of stuff, urban planning and stuff like that. Anyway... hope you have a kickass weekend.

I hope having the wife gone isn't bothering you too much. She'll be back soon enough though!

The Bourne Identity was surprisingly fun to read. I tend to mix up books that I'm reading - I like to alternate between light and heavy reading material, otherwise I feel unbalanced or something.

TY