I'll be on the ferry to Van Town tomorrow, and plan to stay until Monday; call or text me if you care for some face time. I'll be at Organix Friday night. I know, I've complained about paying for admission to places, but I already know I'll have enough friends there to make it worthwhile.

Look a hippie up!

So I'm participating in a discussion thread on Facebook about what "Web 2.0" means. I typed in a comment about how web services are free-as-in-beer:

Well, not quite. You don't actually charge them cash. Note the absurdity of the elevator pitch: "It's like Twitter, only we charge people to use it."

Instead, you commodify users into their attentions, and sell that to advertisers. Yes, that involves obstructing users from one another.

The moment I hit the submit button, I could not have asked for a better example of exactly the phenomenon I was discussing. A window pops up:

Warning: This Message Contains Blocked Content
Some content in this message has been reported as abusive by Facebook users.

Wow, Facehook. You know exactly when and how hard to suck.

Why the iPhone sucks:

7.3 No Other Distribution Authorized Under this Agreement
Except for the distribution of freely available Licensed Applications and the distribution of Applications for use on Registered Devices as set forth in Sections 7.1 and 7.2 above, no other distribution of programs or applications developed using the Apple Software is authorized or permitted hereunder. In the absence of a separate agreement with Apple, You agree not to distribute Your Application to third parties via other distribution methods or to enable or permit others to do so.

Open source licensing is hereby prohibited.

I reviewed my February posts for the last three years. I was not particularly unhappy in any of them. Last year, I was prepping for a move to Portland that was dashed at month's end. In another year, I had so many things happening at once, I couldn't afford winter blues. Others were pretty thinky, and blissful.

I wish I could say for certain what was behind the sporadic two-month blues that started this year. I wish there was something I could cling to that could reliably bring me back to peace from there. It could be Vitamin D, sunshine, serotonin, sleep. The thing I remember bringing me the most joy, that set my endocrine system in motion the best, was the touch of a friend.

Whether this lever was something that would always lift my spirits, or whether my slump was decisively from being deprived of sustained, physical human contact, I would have to be insane to think that I should do anything to divide myself further from opportunities like that.

People are not irrational; reason is simply inadequate.

I am toying with the idea of visiting Vancouver this weekend. What's hot? Who's good for hanging? Gotta couch?

The grocery budget has snapped shut. I am adjusting.

I just discovered that, gram-for-gram, croutons from the bulk section are half the price of potato chips.

Tonight, I bought a kilo of cheese (for someone else's dish), a bottle of mango-tangerine juice from the center aisle (tango-margarine? EW!), and the rest of my diet consists of produce and bulk stuff. I'm pretty happy about this. I still pick up a fresh roast chicken, or raid the dairy section for milk or cottage cheese on occasion (that is to say, occasions I can justify the expense), but I am steadily learning how to shop and cook eat my way away from industrially produced and processed food, and into something healthier, older, and better known.

This is not hard when I don't do it all at once, and just check out one or two interesting ingredients at a time. I'm still experimenting, and still making errors (a little too much seasoning on this, cooking the rice a little to long on that), but I am evolving some pretty yummy dishes that are easy to make. And weird as hell.

Pablo Picasso once said "Computers are useless. They can only give you answers."

I'm a smart guy. I'm "cerebral", or "thinky". People compliment me that way. I have tons of fun thinking and reading and talking about philosophy, politics, tech, biology, the works. But in recent years, intelligence alone has seemed like less and less an asset, and more like an entertainment; like an occupation that I merely prefer to drooling in front of the TV with cable or an Xbox. It's certainly scared off more than a few dates over the years.

I'm finding that real satisfaction comes from executing the simpler mental processes, rather than the more complicated ones. I wonder if there's a trend here, intimating that the dumber I get, the happier I'll be. Were it true, I would have to admit it would make for a tempting proposal.

I hesitate to say that I feel like society has wasted its own chance to harness my intelligence by making it so damn hard to pay for University in the US (to say nothing of homes, children, etc.), only because that sounds too much like the victimhood pity party blame game that it really isn't. As I see it, I'm actually grateful the system didn't catch me and swallow me up, despite the fact that it has lead me to a mode of realization that will keep me relatively impoverished and disenfranchised for life. I did choose this path, you know.

Intelligence can only make life interesting, not worthwhile. You have to decide what you want with something else. I've been doing that anyway. It's just that being smart hasn't helped.

I went to the harbor today. I felt a lot of peace. I'm thankful for how well I've done so far in life, both for my decisions and for the results.

This town is really beautiful. Both the sun and the flowers feel even better than they look. I hope I don't end up too far from the water when I move.

I can't remember why I've been so unhappy these last two months. Is there really anything for a broken spirit but the changing of the seasons?

I dare anyone to make my life even better.

Your high IQ will kill your startup.

This piece, about how work trumps intelligence, described me very well. I was exactly one of those kids that was bright enough to breeze through school. I realized early that the only difference between an A and a B average was ten hours a week, so my GPA hovered around 3.0 all the way through University. The only reason I don't have a degree is that I was American, where they expect you to pay for these things, and neither my family nor I could afford it.

I'm lazy when it comes to that stuff. I know it. I admit it. But more than that, I'm not ashamed of it. I want it. I covet slack. In my experience of life, indolence, peace, and spontaneous liberty are not character flaws or the seeds of tragedy; they're values. This is how I have decided to live my life. I changed my mind only once. True to form, I failed, and went back to the things I could depend on. There is something to be said for knowing when to quit.

Let's lay aside, for the moment, criticisms of rags-to-riches 'success' rhetoric as naively buying into the Horatio Alger Myth, where the roles of luck, uncontrollable circumstance, and inheritance are banished from the scene and everyone in poverty or misery has only themselves to blame. One could easily attack the veneration of work on these terms, but I find it unnecessary. It might also be a straw man attack, depending on what claim is being rebutted. I wouldn't go so far as to say hard work isn't required to succeed as a general principle - just that it is somehow magically sufficient on it's own.

When someone says, yet again, that "success", as they conceive of it, requires hard work, I don't doubt it. But when the normativity begins creeping into their language, I grow suspicious of their arguments. When someone's conception of things one can be 'successful' at is so narrow that it always requires effort, I tend to think they are using brute force to compensate for a lack of imagination.

For every Edmund Burke who says "All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.", there's a Blaise Pascal who says "The sole cause of man's unhappiness is that he does not know how to stay quietly in his room." Take into account that Burke never actually said the former in print, and things can get a bit sticky.

I know I'll never be confused for a Buddhist, but I have learned something about the value of being mindful of your choice of goals. I can believe that all suffering has an underlying desire, just not that every desire leads to suffering. Somehow, so far, I have managed to let go of a few things here and there that I used to want, and the things that are left are that much more reliable and satisfying. You could say I've learned to be happy with less, but the fact is that it's not less at all, by virtue of the fact that there is now more room in my life for the other things that are rock-solid pleasers.

When 'working' less is how you define success, effort itself is failure.

I want people to know that my choice of valuing slack is both deliberate and legitimate. I don't want people to frown upon that as some kind of immoral vice. If you want to change my mind, scolding or coercion aren't going to work. In fact, negative reinforcement is part of why I made the decision I did. If you want me to work, it's not hard; just make me an offer that's reliable and worthwhile.

Women are just human beings cleverly disguised as exactly what men want.

"Have you heard their new album?"

"No, is it any good?"

"Good? Let's just say people cure cancer listening to it."

"Wow! I've heard of miraculous healings before, but that's pretty intense."

"But when I say 'cure cancer', I'm not talking about their cancer. I'm talking Nobel Prize-winning medical research, baby."

Angel helped me connect the dots (thanks!) between that "cheezy" flavor I once tasted in couscous with nutritional yeast (not to be confused with baking yeast), which is something I looked for and failed to find at the local supermarket several months ago (on recommendations from some other friends). This time, I went in and asked a stocker, who sent me to the pharmacy section, which I hadn't considered ("It's probablyin with the whey and protein powders and stuff."). Even then, after scanning the shelves, I asked a pharmacist, and bingo. I found some.

They only have big bags ($15.99/400g), so I 'll have to come back for it, but I'll check it out.

-

"What are you eating?"

"I don't know, but it's good."

"What's it taste like."

"I... don't know. It doesn't taste like anything else. it's just tastes... good. It's like some kind of strange Manichean cuisine, where it just either tastes good, or bad."

"So what happens when you throw Manichean good in with something that tastes terrible in a non-manichean way? Can it redeem other bland foods?"

"What, you mean like MSG?"

"Oh! Yeah, I guess that's it."

I am way back to happy. I have an idea why, because I remember that I got here this way once before.

Or, perhaps, it's merely correlation.

There are yet weeks to go before I'd consider this any more than a peak on the mood swing wave, though. In the meantime, I am enjoying spring.

Sunset tonight was ravishing.

The spiritual or sacred, as it's been tossed about in various conversations, is an attitude of reverence, respect, of all things. It's a recognition of universal profundity. It's a hunch that everything, from a booty-commanding bassline to the unfolding of slow-motion tragedies in the lives of family, and friends, and complete strangers in another hemisphere, has it place, its rightness, or can at least be redeemed as such, simply by having happened. I have that feeling again.

The sacred does not accept facts; it demands them. All true and false things have varying talents and strengths, but motivations are always their masters.

-

Typically, people rebel at the possibility that they may be deterministic automatons, however complex, because they find it disempowering, even depressing, to think that the decisions they make were pre-destined, even though they, whatever they are, still caused them to be made, and even though the knowledge of deterministic predestination informs their decisionmaking process of absolutely nothing.

But, on the other hand, it is the accumulation of technique, understanding, and knowledge in medicine and biology that is rendering our bodies and minds into objective mechanisms that can be observed, understood, manipulated, and re-made. It is the understanding of our deterministic structure, not our so-called "free will", that is making us powerful. Self-knowledge is power, not ambiguity or mysticism.

The simpler we are as "mere" machines, the more god-like our ability to recast ourselves and our lives as we choose. Because no matter how simple we are in terms of atoms and proteins and tissues, its what we're made of. It all adds up to the wondrous glory of consciousness, emotion, and life as a human being on Earth. The simpler we and more deterministic we are, the easier all that beauty will be to understand, and the easier it will be to grow and build on it.

"Weep not for me, for I am machine, and no mere machine at that."

How can that be depressing?

This winter, since the new year, has been a little rough. There are days, sometimes weeks, where dull listlessness of varying intensities has made life joyless, and I think that living with friends so far out of reach has something to do with it.

But on other days, like yesterday, I wouldn't give up charting my own course for the world. I have a few principles that I want to live by that don't seem shared with people I know and care about. There must be people out there who share them, but I don't feel I have the heart to exclude the friends I have in order to go find them. Whatever love I have, I think it should go to whomever comes across me, no matter who they are. That's because, well, isn't that the kind of place we all want to live?

The result seems to be some facade of independence. To love, I seem to be a fair weather friend, only a beggar in desperate circumstances, but otherwise cloistered away.

I have a new candidate for what people are for. It's a startling realization that there might be something wrong with trying to frame the question in terms of my own utility - what people are for to me.

People are for them. The point is simply, solely to think of how to love others.

-

I feel like I have a split personality. By necessity, my public postings can only reveal one of them, because that is the man that necessarily speaks to others. My intentionally private journal is where I take significantly more enormous risks.

Only surprises of human contact bowl me completely over, activating all my better emotions, and covering me in my own gratitude. It's always someone else who has to push your buttons. Bafflingly, you can never seem to reach your own.

Why the hell is that?

If somebody sends me this book, I will read it. It may be challenging to what I've been thinking, or it might reinforce it, or it might just bring to light a false dichotomy.

I've written rants before on "irrationality", on how rationality slips from being descriptive into being normative. The nutshell is that if a person's behavior doesn't match your "rational" model of it, the person is not being "irrational"; your model is flawed.

The very title of "Predictably Irrational", by Dan Ariely, sounds like it's moving in just that direction, even if it fails to go to my extreme of abandoning the term outright.

I'm adding couscous to my cooking.

I seem to recall couscous reminded me vaguely of cheese, a few times, but that didn't happen this time I wonder what it takes to make that work. It just seems like smaller bits of rice. While acceptable in a pinch as a filler, rice strikes me as entirely lacking in nutritional or culinary value. It tastes like water - that is to say, nothing. It was also about as cheap and easy to cook, as well.

Meh. *shrug*

Is there any way to get any flavor out of it?

Some days, you need a hug.
Some days, the hug needs you.

My mom took out a mortgage on a condo about ten years ago. Like a lot of people, the bursting of the housing bubble landed her with a place that's now worth less than the amount she owes on her mortgage.

They call it being "underwater".

If you look at this phenomenon from a strictly business perspective, the proper thing to do is just walk away from the property, hand the keys to the bank, and default on the loan, because it's not worth what you're eventually going to pay for it. In fact, the accompanying crisis in the commercial real estate market is most often resolving in just that way.

But if you're a human, rather than a business, you can't deny the fact that, if you keep paying the loan, you WILL have a place to live when you're done, regardless of whether you paid more than market price for it. If you don't consider your home an investment, sticking with it can make sense to you. Unfortunately, the banks are the ones scoring an enormous windfall from this thinking.

That is exactly what my mom did. But now, there appear to be water leaks appearing from the condo upstairs, which are causing a lot of damage. It's so bad, in fact, that the current tenants (my brother and pregnant sister-in-law) are being forced to move out. It's a real American disaster.

"Underwater", indeed.