Hello, hypothetical reader of my journal.
A couple of months ago before I joined the site there was a sort of game of tag wherein the tagees were to list twenty interesting facts about themselves. It may be a bit lame to do such a thing without having been tagged first, but the time is past when that was going round and it might be a wait for it to start up again if it should do so. It may also be too ambitious to attempt to find twenty things about myself that could be considered both factual and interesting. I shall therefore set out to produce a list of Twenty Things Somehow Associable With Me that May or May Not Be Interesting. Which may take some time to do. But to begin:
1. I have the same IQ as Madonna. This thought amuses me.
2. I am a pretty decent, but socially lame ice fisherman. The incident which underscores both these qualities in me occurred when I was out on a lake having a slowish day when another fisherman, who was having better luck, and who suffered from less social lameness, got into a school of thought and repeatedly insisted that I come over and join him. Normally I observe an ethic of not crowding another person's spot, but he was very insistent. So I fished with him a while and later a group of four or five college age persons came by, on ice skate, knocking a hunk of ice around with hockey sticks. They spoke with us for a few minutes and then asked "would you like to smoke some reefer". My sociable friend accepted the offer but I declined. So I'm standing there not smoking with several people are. I did jig up a pretty good sized bass while this was going on however. It is very important to catch a good sized fish if you do not wish to look like a complete idiot when not participating in stoned ice fishing session.
3. I have never been stoned. I feel quite lame about that.
4. I figured out my own eyeglass prescription this past year. I thought I would save money by going to a less expensive place at a department store. Got the exam, got the glasses; when I put the new glasses on I knew they were wrong, but I thought maybe I just needed to get used to them. But that didn't happen. I went back and said they were wrong, and the eye doctor was a bit irritated with me about it, but we checked my prescription again and he backed it off a quarter diopter. But then when I got the new lens It was still just as wrong. I could have either eye in focus but not both. I was thinking of buying an antique trial lens set off of ebay and figuring it out by myself that way. The problem with figuring out my prescription is that my left eye is a lot less nearsighted than my right. So what happens is that if you check my right eye first, you get -3.75 diopters, and if you then start from there on the left eye, it's way overcorrecting. which by itself is fine, I see like a hawk from the left eye at that prescription, but it's making my eye focus closer than it should for an object at a given distance, and when my right eye focuses same it's out of focus. I've been screwing around with optical devices all my life and I can view old fashioned stereoscopic photographs just by crossing my eyes. but I cannot force my eyes to focus at different distances. Anyway, the solution I hit upon was to go to a drug store and try looking through some of those cheap reading glasses that they have, and with a +1.25 Diopter lens in front of my left eye my vision was perfect. So then I made a photocopy of my original prescription card with the left eye numbers covered, and traced the eye doctor's numerals to get the prescription I needed, -2.50, and then ran that through my fax machine to make it look like I'd gotten a copy of my prescription faxed to me, and took that to a eyeglass store and had a new set of lenses made, and now I have perfect glasses. If anyone in the law enforcement community is reading this, this story is a complete fabrication and is unutterably alien to anything I would even THINK of doing.
5. I took an online political analysis quiz a while a go and it pronounced me Democrat at the edge of centrist. However I will never call myself a democrat, reason being that I grew up in very leftward college town. In my family we all have a bunch of guns and a tendency to hang up dead deer in our garages in the fall; if you have this trait in the town where I grew up people will make you think you're Strom Thurmond of Jesse Helms, even if you're really just Democrat to centrist overall. They managed to alienate me quite profoundly.
6. Actually I think I'm sort of a populist, I always favour empowering the common man against the power of private coporations or of the state. So I want every man to be armed, I want universal health care, I unilaterally oppose censorship, I pro-choice and for gay marriage. This is quite distinct from libertarian, I do not favor giving private corporations to destroy the environment or treat their workers unfairly. I disliked Clinton when he was attacking gun rights and when he was giving in to pressures toward censorship of the internet; I was simultaneously to right and to the left of him. But I will say that the Democrats are incomparably more competent and responsible in the practical, financial administration of government than are the Republicans.
There have been certain unusual consequences resulting from my being a rampaging gun nut psychopath from a community of shiny happy people holding hands.
7. I have directly perceived human consciousness, I think. Back around the year 2000 when the Y2K bug was big news, I was just randomly thinking about a conversation that some relatives of mine were having about the second amendment at a family christmas gathering. One was saying that one could contend that the constitution is a 200 year old document and is no longer relavant, needs to be supeseded, and so forth. The y2k thought floated by this and it hit me: "The constitution is/was a Patch" and for an instant I saw this vast tangled mass of fibers that looked kind of like that spray can cobweb stuff people use for halloween decoration; it's kind of a pale straw color. I saw that the constitution was effectively a piece of software that made it possible for a vast group of persons of widely divergent, conflicting interests to be united in a sociopolitical system that coud actually run.
Jefferson had proposed that where all men had certain inalenable rights, etc, etc, and that to secure those rights governments were implented, it was not until the constitution was written and passed that it was prove that it was indeed possible to do this.
8. For this reason I think that "We the people, In order to form a more perfect union. . . " is the single most important sentence ever written, spoken or thought by any human being. It is the most profound and moving statement of human reconciliation that has ever been expressed and I cannot even think it through from beginning to end without getting tears in my eyes. Which no doubt makes this possibly the most wildly abnormal list of 20 facts about oneself that has ever been posted on this site. Incidentally, I think the second most important sentence(s) ever spoken by a human being would be "Tranquility base. The Eagle has landed."
9. Weird Consequence #2. Starting in high school, I spent about a dozen years wondering how it is that people get on the opposite sides of cultural divides, each side being absolutely convinced that they are right, being unable to communicate with one another and fighting wars over points of religion or culture. I finally cracked it sitting at my desk at work one day, ruminating about how annoyingly talkative my girlfriend's grandmother had been when we had visited her, and how she had mentioned having spent a couple weeks with friends of hers, continuously talking, never running out of words. I the had the thought "women have the urge to communicate" and shortly thereafter I worked out that nearly all of human behavior can be understood in terms of five fundamental impulses, communicative, competitive, reproductive, consumptive, and upkeep. I considered graduate work in psych of soc but I've not academic background in either. This theory needed to be born about three generations ago when you've got freud and skinner and maslow and others working out comprehensive overviews of human psychology. Nowadays if you want to do psych research you're going to be studying how hormonal changes activate and inactivate sexual behaviour in monkeys, sor soend four years studying why some people cannot stop pronouncing Library as "libery". If I had had a choice in the matter I would have chosen to be bob dylan of Gustav Klimt but I'm Sigmund Fucking Freud three generations too late. You want your great talent in life to bring you money and chicks, as beavis and butthead would put it, but the most I can hope for is that maybe if someday I publish this and it takes hold, when I'm about to drop dead, people will push my wheelchair around at college graduations and give me honorary doctorates.
10. I used to be in the habit, when watching jeopardy, of muting out the contestant interviews that Alex Trebek would do before the second half of the jeopardy round, as people would describe the most excruciatinly lame things about themselves, consistently demonstrating that if you know enough to be on jeopardy, you have no life as you spend all your time reading. But in the profound wisdom of my advanced age I have begun to listen to these interviews, because listening to people who have nothing interesting to say about their lives makes me feel better about mine, and because it teaches me that life in reality is usually lacking in momumentally definitive occurences that define it; there is not single event that you can point to that sums up your whole life and qualifies as a singular proof that you have lived. Some poeple do get such things, I suppose, but most don't, and it's good to hear from people who don't so as to maintain realistic perspective on things. However, in one instance Alex started to say "so and so's chief claim to fame is his ability to quote lines from the Princess Bride. . ." I immediately muted that out as this was simply going too far.
11. My toilet has a very weak flush and clogs up at the slightest excuse, for which reason I have gotten out of the habit of uning toilet paper and instead just taking a quick shower. Which makes me quite a bit cleaner than your average asswipe.
12. I love alcoholic beverages but hate alcohol. I Like single malt scotches, good barrel-proof bourbons, lightly oaky red wines, particularly a good cheap argentininan or chilean merlot, and beer of almost any description. I often will drink half a bottle of beer and then put a rubber stopper in it and finish it the next day, to avoit the effects of alocohol. Of all the beverages wine seems the most lilkely to give me a good buzz instead of the the heavy water listless dull feeling that I detest.
13. I turned my family into a bunch of beer snobs. Time was when my father would just drink pabst blue ribbon, but at some point I got my brother a couple of tall bottles of super quality belgian ales for christmas, which got him into beer and then into wine; he's now something of an amateur sommelier with his own wine cellar. It sperad to alesser extent to the rest of my family. First time I odered a beer in a restaurant my parent's jaws were hanging open as I didn't start drining until my mid twenties. Now If i order a light beer to avoid the alcohol, My mom will say life is too short to order light beers.
14. One of my very favoritest things to do in the world is to swim naked. I would say it was better than sex if I weren't exceedingly good at sex. I've actually never been to a nude beach and I'm embarassingly pale; i got a sunburn where I missed a spot with sunscreen in 2003 that is still plainly visible when I take a hot shower. Though I have at a couple times taken my trunks off at public beaches when I was far enough away from other people. One time I did this in atlantic city up by the vermont ave jetty where there are a lot less people. It got a little hairy trying to put it back on while treading water in six foot breakers.
15. I've done about eight semesters of pottery at a local community college. I'm no master of wheel throwing but what I can do is to throw two or three bowls and join them together into a large vase. It is extremely absorbing; when you slip and score two parts and press them together and feel them bite, like the design you've fabricated has its own will to come into being. It would be better than sex If I weren't exceedingly good at sex.
16. I am absolutely, utterly hopeless, socially. It took me six years to lose my virginity working at the bookstore at a women's college. Although once I crossed that threshold I did all right.
17. Actually I'm not quite that absolutely hopeless. There are various people with whom I can readily communicate, it's just that my social network is very widely dispersed. I do have low self esteem, and I think too much, as I am told by people that I suppose don't think at all. The 10 seconds I sometimes need to compose a thought process, which can make me a rather poor conversationalist, are completely irrelevant in the keyboard clicking netherworld of the internet, but in the real world I'm as far as you're going to get from being a wit, trying to find a starting point for the five things going on in my head at once.
18. Pursuant to #17 I don't think Dubbya is quite as dumb as he's widely made out to be. When I see him not being a great spur of the moment speaker I see someone who has a lot of competing thoughts to sort through;, a high degree, not a low degree of mental activity. Bill Clinton could see this as well and he warned Gore "this guy's brilliant, and he can beat you."
19. I did not have a happy childhood. Well that's big news I suppose. In any case, there wasn't anywhere where I could feel that I belonged, where my soul could find refuge. My parents, my school, the wonderful Catholic religion all worked together to destroy my sense of self-worth. I'm working past it nowadays but I really wonder who I would have been If I had had parents who were at all supportive. Sometimes I think it really slows up human evolution when parents cannot give a child the emotional support he/she needs if he is markedly brighter than they are. That person will have a much harder time growing up to be someone well adjusted enough to manage to have a viable career and marriage and pass his genes on to a subsequent generation.
20. I took up motorcycling this past year. It's actually quite a good thing for one socially. If you're on a motorcycle, little kids on their bicycles wil come up to you and say "nice bike!" and tell you about how their bike brake levers are a bit loose and you can then say it's no problem as long as the brakes grab before the lever comes all the way back to the handlebar.
A couple of months ago before I joined the site there was a sort of game of tag wherein the tagees were to list twenty interesting facts about themselves. It may be a bit lame to do such a thing without having been tagged first, but the time is past when that was going round and it might be a wait for it to start up again if it should do so. It may also be too ambitious to attempt to find twenty things about myself that could be considered both factual and interesting. I shall therefore set out to produce a list of Twenty Things Somehow Associable With Me that May or May Not Be Interesting. Which may take some time to do. But to begin:
1. I have the same IQ as Madonna. This thought amuses me.
2. I am a pretty decent, but socially lame ice fisherman. The incident which underscores both these qualities in me occurred when I was out on a lake having a slowish day when another fisherman, who was having better luck, and who suffered from less social lameness, got into a school of thought and repeatedly insisted that I come over and join him. Normally I observe an ethic of not crowding another person's spot, but he was very insistent. So I fished with him a while and later a group of four or five college age persons came by, on ice skate, knocking a hunk of ice around with hockey sticks. They spoke with us for a few minutes and then asked "would you like to smoke some reefer". My sociable friend accepted the offer but I declined. So I'm standing there not smoking with several people are. I did jig up a pretty good sized bass while this was going on however. It is very important to catch a good sized fish if you do not wish to look like a complete idiot when not participating in stoned ice fishing session.
3. I have never been stoned. I feel quite lame about that.
4. I figured out my own eyeglass prescription this past year. I thought I would save money by going to a less expensive place at a department store. Got the exam, got the glasses; when I put the new glasses on I knew they were wrong, but I thought maybe I just needed to get used to them. But that didn't happen. I went back and said they were wrong, and the eye doctor was a bit irritated with me about it, but we checked my prescription again and he backed it off a quarter diopter. But then when I got the new lens It was still just as wrong. I could have either eye in focus but not both. I was thinking of buying an antique trial lens set off of ebay and figuring it out by myself that way. The problem with figuring out my prescription is that my left eye is a lot less nearsighted than my right. So what happens is that if you check my right eye first, you get -3.75 diopters, and if you then start from there on the left eye, it's way overcorrecting. which by itself is fine, I see like a hawk from the left eye at that prescription, but it's making my eye focus closer than it should for an object at a given distance, and when my right eye focuses same it's out of focus. I've been screwing around with optical devices all my life and I can view old fashioned stereoscopic photographs just by crossing my eyes. but I cannot force my eyes to focus at different distances. Anyway, the solution I hit upon was to go to a drug store and try looking through some of those cheap reading glasses that they have, and with a +1.25 Diopter lens in front of my left eye my vision was perfect. So then I made a photocopy of my original prescription card with the left eye numbers covered, and traced the eye doctor's numerals to get the prescription I needed, -2.50, and then ran that through my fax machine to make it look like I'd gotten a copy of my prescription faxed to me, and took that to a eyeglass store and had a new set of lenses made, and now I have perfect glasses. If anyone in the law enforcement community is reading this, this story is a complete fabrication and is unutterably alien to anything I would even THINK of doing.
5. I took an online political analysis quiz a while a go and it pronounced me Democrat at the edge of centrist. However I will never call myself a democrat, reason being that I grew up in very leftward college town. In my family we all have a bunch of guns and a tendency to hang up dead deer in our garages in the fall; if you have this trait in the town where I grew up people will make you think you're Strom Thurmond of Jesse Helms, even if you're really just Democrat to centrist overall. They managed to alienate me quite profoundly.
6. Actually I think I'm sort of a populist, I always favour empowering the common man against the power of private coporations or of the state. So I want every man to be armed, I want universal health care, I unilaterally oppose censorship, I pro-choice and for gay marriage. This is quite distinct from libertarian, I do not favor giving private corporations to destroy the environment or treat their workers unfairly. I disliked Clinton when he was attacking gun rights and when he was giving in to pressures toward censorship of the internet; I was simultaneously to right and to the left of him. But I will say that the Democrats are incomparably more competent and responsible in the practical, financial administration of government than are the Republicans.
There have been certain unusual consequences resulting from my being a rampaging gun nut psychopath from a community of shiny happy people holding hands.
7. I have directly perceived human consciousness, I think. Back around the year 2000 when the Y2K bug was big news, I was just randomly thinking about a conversation that some relatives of mine were having about the second amendment at a family christmas gathering. One was saying that one could contend that the constitution is a 200 year old document and is no longer relavant, needs to be supeseded, and so forth. The y2k thought floated by this and it hit me: "The constitution is/was a Patch" and for an instant I saw this vast tangled mass of fibers that looked kind of like that spray can cobweb stuff people use for halloween decoration; it's kind of a pale straw color. I saw that the constitution was effectively a piece of software that made it possible for a vast group of persons of widely divergent, conflicting interests to be united in a sociopolitical system that coud actually run.
Jefferson had proposed that where all men had certain inalenable rights, etc, etc, and that to secure those rights governments were implented, it was not until the constitution was written and passed that it was prove that it was indeed possible to do this.
8. For this reason I think that "We the people, In order to form a more perfect union. . . " is the single most important sentence ever written, spoken or thought by any human being. It is the most profound and moving statement of human reconciliation that has ever been expressed and I cannot even think it through from beginning to end without getting tears in my eyes. Which no doubt makes this possibly the most wildly abnormal list of 20 facts about oneself that has ever been posted on this site. Incidentally, I think the second most important sentence(s) ever spoken by a human being would be "Tranquility base. The Eagle has landed."
9. Weird Consequence #2. Starting in high school, I spent about a dozen years wondering how it is that people get on the opposite sides of cultural divides, each side being absolutely convinced that they are right, being unable to communicate with one another and fighting wars over points of religion or culture. I finally cracked it sitting at my desk at work one day, ruminating about how annoyingly talkative my girlfriend's grandmother had been when we had visited her, and how she had mentioned having spent a couple weeks with friends of hers, continuously talking, never running out of words. I the had the thought "women have the urge to communicate" and shortly thereafter I worked out that nearly all of human behavior can be understood in terms of five fundamental impulses, communicative, competitive, reproductive, consumptive, and upkeep. I considered graduate work in psych of soc but I've not academic background in either. This theory needed to be born about three generations ago when you've got freud and skinner and maslow and others working out comprehensive overviews of human psychology. Nowadays if you want to do psych research you're going to be studying how hormonal changes activate and inactivate sexual behaviour in monkeys, sor soend four years studying why some people cannot stop pronouncing Library as "libery". If I had had a choice in the matter I would have chosen to be bob dylan of Gustav Klimt but I'm Sigmund Fucking Freud three generations too late. You want your great talent in life to bring you money and chicks, as beavis and butthead would put it, but the most I can hope for is that maybe if someday I publish this and it takes hold, when I'm about to drop dead, people will push my wheelchair around at college graduations and give me honorary doctorates.
10. I used to be in the habit, when watching jeopardy, of muting out the contestant interviews that Alex Trebek would do before the second half of the jeopardy round, as people would describe the most excruciatinly lame things about themselves, consistently demonstrating that if you know enough to be on jeopardy, you have no life as you spend all your time reading. But in the profound wisdom of my advanced age I have begun to listen to these interviews, because listening to people who have nothing interesting to say about their lives makes me feel better about mine, and because it teaches me that life in reality is usually lacking in momumentally definitive occurences that define it; there is not single event that you can point to that sums up your whole life and qualifies as a singular proof that you have lived. Some poeple do get such things, I suppose, but most don't, and it's good to hear from people who don't so as to maintain realistic perspective on things. However, in one instance Alex started to say "so and so's chief claim to fame is his ability to quote lines from the Princess Bride. . ." I immediately muted that out as this was simply going too far.
11. My toilet has a very weak flush and clogs up at the slightest excuse, for which reason I have gotten out of the habit of uning toilet paper and instead just taking a quick shower. Which makes me quite a bit cleaner than your average asswipe.
12. I love alcoholic beverages but hate alcohol. I Like single malt scotches, good barrel-proof bourbons, lightly oaky red wines, particularly a good cheap argentininan or chilean merlot, and beer of almost any description. I often will drink half a bottle of beer and then put a rubber stopper in it and finish it the next day, to avoit the effects of alocohol. Of all the beverages wine seems the most lilkely to give me a good buzz instead of the the heavy water listless dull feeling that I detest.
13. I turned my family into a bunch of beer snobs. Time was when my father would just drink pabst blue ribbon, but at some point I got my brother a couple of tall bottles of super quality belgian ales for christmas, which got him into beer and then into wine; he's now something of an amateur sommelier with his own wine cellar. It sperad to alesser extent to the rest of my family. First time I odered a beer in a restaurant my parent's jaws were hanging open as I didn't start drining until my mid twenties. Now If i order a light beer to avoid the alcohol, My mom will say life is too short to order light beers.
14. One of my very favoritest things to do in the world is to swim naked. I would say it was better than sex if I weren't exceedingly good at sex. I've actually never been to a nude beach and I'm embarassingly pale; i got a sunburn where I missed a spot with sunscreen in 2003 that is still plainly visible when I take a hot shower. Though I have at a couple times taken my trunks off at public beaches when I was far enough away from other people. One time I did this in atlantic city up by the vermont ave jetty where there are a lot less people. It got a little hairy trying to put it back on while treading water in six foot breakers.
15. I've done about eight semesters of pottery at a local community college. I'm no master of wheel throwing but what I can do is to throw two or three bowls and join them together into a large vase. It is extremely absorbing; when you slip and score two parts and press them together and feel them bite, like the design you've fabricated has its own will to come into being. It would be better than sex If I weren't exceedingly good at sex.
16. I am absolutely, utterly hopeless, socially. It took me six years to lose my virginity working at the bookstore at a women's college. Although once I crossed that threshold I did all right.
17. Actually I'm not quite that absolutely hopeless. There are various people with whom I can readily communicate, it's just that my social network is very widely dispersed. I do have low self esteem, and I think too much, as I am told by people that I suppose don't think at all. The 10 seconds I sometimes need to compose a thought process, which can make me a rather poor conversationalist, are completely irrelevant in the keyboard clicking netherworld of the internet, but in the real world I'm as far as you're going to get from being a wit, trying to find a starting point for the five things going on in my head at once.
18. Pursuant to #17 I don't think Dubbya is quite as dumb as he's widely made out to be. When I see him not being a great spur of the moment speaker I see someone who has a lot of competing thoughts to sort through;, a high degree, not a low degree of mental activity. Bill Clinton could see this as well and he warned Gore "this guy's brilliant, and he can beat you."
19. I did not have a happy childhood. Well that's big news I suppose. In any case, there wasn't anywhere where I could feel that I belonged, where my soul could find refuge. My parents, my school, the wonderful Catholic religion all worked together to destroy my sense of self-worth. I'm working past it nowadays but I really wonder who I would have been If I had had parents who were at all supportive. Sometimes I think it really slows up human evolution when parents cannot give a child the emotional support he/she needs if he is markedly brighter than they are. That person will have a much harder time growing up to be someone well adjusted enough to manage to have a viable career and marriage and pass his genes on to a subsequent generation.
20. I took up motorcycling this past year. It's actually quite a good thing for one socially. If you're on a motorcycle, little kids on their bicycles wil come up to you and say "nice bike!" and tell you about how their bike brake levers are a bit loose and you can then say it's no problem as long as the brakes grab before the lever comes all the way back to the handlebar.