The Walnut Creek Theater

Today the Walnut Creek Theater showcased one of the masterpieces of French existentialism; namely "the hackneyed butterfly ascent" (or was it a descent?). The only creative component of the play was the overwhelming dramatization of the scene by spectators, who interpreted the extreme apathy of the antihero as a butterfly ascend (or was it a descent?). It turns out a more thru interpretation of the play may result in a butterfly effect that was not the original intent of the screenwriter.

Games of social life

Observations pertaining to an anthropological case-study:

This game is called "who looks better". This particular game turns out to be a dangerous game; since in the real life it actually matters "who looks better". Here is a typical strategy people use:

1) Players A and B start by standing face-to-face, and telling each other anything they can think-of that can make the other person look bad. This can happen in a park or over a kitchen table.

2) Then they depart from each other and start advertising to others that they "look better" than their opponent. As such, the objective is to convince as many spectators as possible that your opponent is uglier than what they think he or she is:

3) Player A proceed by coming-up with fictitious stories (may originate from reality, but is sufficiently distorted to qualify as fiction) and propagates them among his acquaintances.

4) Player B replies by trying to discredit player A calling him crazy. The idea is that if player A is discredited then all of his statements will be interpreted by others as false.

A funny consequence of this move by player B is that for her to win the game, it has to become a self-fulfilling prophesy, i.e., player A has to become crazy.

5) Once in a while, one of the spectators decides to believe player B over player A. In such cases, player B seizes the opportunity by calling player A and bringing that to his attention. She also calls the acquaintances of Player A at 2:00am in their local time to win their votes. And there are those spectators who mediate the game through public media, the worse of them being smart aleck theorist and e-mailers!

You might wonder why spectators bother to take a side. It's because any spectator automatically becomes part of the game "who looks better". Among the many ways a spectator can look better is by making right judgments. After all, if you can call-out the guilty party you're smarter than both player A and B, and consequently, you look better than both of them. Furthermore, certain spectators seize the opportunity to compensate for their “old losses” on the game of "who looks better". After all, this game can go on for lifetimes! As you might have guessed, spectators are an essential part of this game. Without them the game is simply absurd!

6) Rules regarding types of money accepted by the dealer (the devil) for purchasing your chips are very flexible:

Your respect, your honor, your honesty, your genuine concerns, your quiet evening times, your emotions, your tears, your health, your sanity, your rationality, your family ties ... you name it.

7) There is no shame in changing strategy or using the same strategy as that of your opponent. Even though, from time to time you might find certain strategies of your opponents very hurtful, reducing the pain is not one of the objectives of the game. The only objective is "who looks better" at the end of the day.

8) Players and spectators can take breaks from the game and return back as many times as they wish; the only requirement being that the game must go on. In fact, certain players get sick of the game and decide to quite.

As such, the game of "who looks better" can be a very painful experience. But, the sweet taste of wining, au contraire, makes the game worthy of eternal recurrence. In practice, the overall number of the players and spectators remains steady throughout the game, and there are always plenty of exchangeable goods to purchase your chips with.

9) It turns out you do not need to make time for playing this game. You don’t even need to learn the rules of the game. It comes naturally to almost everybody. And you’re most likely so good at this game that you don’t even notice you’re playing it.


Happy playing kids!

Pandora!

He placed all his memories in a box, sealed it tightly, and buried it in the most unreachable recesses of his mind. The Pandora radio reached deep into his psych and astounded him by the Golden autumn (Fariborz Lachini) and Instrumental imagery (Mehdi).

East, East, East

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Order_of_the_Star_in_the_East

Sounds familiar!

William James -> Annie Besant-> Krishnamurti -> David Bohm -> Karl Pribram:

"You may remember the story of how the devil and a friend of his were walking down the street, when they saw ahead of them a man stoop down and pick up something from the ground, look at it, and put it away in his pocket. The friend said to the devil, 'What did that man pick up?' 'He picked up a piece of the truth,' said the devil. 'That is a very bad business for you, then,' said his friend. 'Oh, not at all,' the devil replied, 'I am going to help him organize it.' I maintain that truth is a pathless land, and you cannot approach it by any path whatsoever, by any religion, by any sect. That is my point of view, and I adhere to that absolutely and unconditionally. Truth, being limitless, unconditioned, unapproachable by any path whatsoever, cannot be organized; nor should any organization be formed to lead or coerce people along a particular path."

You (by firstcomet)

You are just like
that orange blossom-scented breath
I so ravenously want to hold on to,
while I know ...
Soon, I'll have to let go of!


Being with you is just like indulging in chocolate; you just can't have enough of it. Even though chocolates are not the most nutritional food items, they are undoubtedly some of the sweetest and most addictive ones. The rest is like spending time at a salad bar and having to have lots of asparagus and broccolis. So is being with you; it might distract me from enriching my mind with all that society and history cares for. And I also care for them in the same logical basis that I consume asparagus and broccolis. But chocolate ... I ravenously desire chocolate!

"Every man who is not a monster, mathematician or a mad philosopher, is the slave of some woman or other." --George Eliot, Scenes of Clerical Life

Privilege of Being

Robert Hass

Many are making love. Up above, the angels in the unshaken ether and crystal of human longing are braiding one another's hair, which is strawberry blond and the texture of cold rivers. They glance down from time to time at the awkward ecstasy--it must look to them like featherless birds splashing in the spring puddle of a bed--and then one woman, she is about to come, peelsback the man's shut eyelids and says, look at me, and he does. Or is it the man tugging the curtain rope in that dark theater? Anyway, they do, they look at each other; two beings with evolved eyes, rapacious, startled, connected at the belly in an unbelievably sweet lubricious glue, stare at each other, and the angels are desolate. They hate it. They shudder pathetically like lithographs of Victorian beggars with perfect features and alabaster skin hawking rags in the lewd alleys of the novel.All of creation is offended by this distress. It is like the keening sound the moon makes sometimes, rising. The lovers especially cannot bear it, it fills them with unspeakable sadness, so that they close their eyes again and hold each other, each feeling the mortal singularity of the body they have enchanted out of death for an hour so, and one day, running at sunset, the woman says to the man, I woke up feeling so sad this morning because I realized that you could not, as much as I love you, dear heart, cure my loneliness, wherewith she touched his cheek to reassure him that she did not mean to hurt him with this truth. And the man is not hurt exactly,he understands that life has limits, that people die young, fail at love, fail of their ambitions. He runs beside her, he thinks of the sadness they have gasped and crooned their way out of coming, clutching each other with old invented forms of grace and clumsy gratitude, ready to be alone again, or dissatisfied, or merely companionable like the couples on the summer beach reading magazine articles about intimacy between the sexes to themselves, and to each other, and to the immense, illiterate, consoling angels.

http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/19035

Sons of the Monkeys

Men need money to impress women. Women look for rich men to secure their babies' survival.
"Yesterday we were, and today we are! This is the will of the goddess among the sons of the goddess; what is your will, oh sons of the monkeys?"

The economy of action

"Plenty of people wish well to any good cause, but very few care to exert themselves to help it, and still fewer will risk anything in its support. 'Someone ought to do it, but why should I?' is the ever reechoed phrase of the weak-kneed amiability. 'Someone ought to do it, so why not I?' is the cry of some earnest servants of man, eagerly forward springing to face some perilous duty. Between these two sentences lie whole centuries of moral evolution." -- Annie Besant

"weak-kneed amiability" or economical thinking? Doesn't it all come down to cost benefit analysis. How does the economy of "risking everything" work?

what makes a trst

http://www.american.com/archive/2007/november-december-magazine-contents/what-makes-a-terrorist

Chocolate Rain!

“There are few enough people with sufficient independence to see the weakness and follies of their contemporaries and remain themselves untouched by them. And these isolated few usually soon lose their zeal for putting things to rights when they have come face to face with human obduracy. Only to a tiny minority is it given to fascinate their generation by subtle humor and grace and to hold the mirror up to it by impersonal agency of art." –The World As I See It, Albert Einstein.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EwTZ2xpQwpA

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chocolate_Rain

The impersonator (a poem by firstcomet):

Divided by a fine line to the left and right,
Right and wrong; caught in a fierce fight,
Fight to the end of time; the time was tight,
Tight and tense, in his fist he held the light,
Light in hand, he marched like a knight,
Knight he might, but on the side of the night,
Night, confused, when the devil is your guide,
Night, the imposer of the eternal plight,
Plight, the pestilent snare, hard to decide,
Decide to resist and to endure or to abide,
Abide by the rules or to sail against the tide,
Tide so wide, hopeless to ride or to push aside
The night had changed the rules of the fight,
Right was wrong; his mission was to hide,
To hide, the secret collusion of the night!

.to continue

What I learned my first semester at MIT

1) Being humble; there are always smarter people around.
2) Not being ashamed of doing psets all weekend long.
3) I'm not granted anything; I have to earn it.

How do you know how much your worth is?

Why do I even bother to know anything at all? I know things because I need those information to survive. So, I like to think that I worth more than all that I know. And that I need to know more, to protect that essence that I consider worth the effort of knowing more.

So, I cannot think I worth any less than the highest worth I can associate with any object. Since otherwise, that piece of knowledge won't serve the purpose that my knowledge is supposed to serve.

Thus, knowing my worth is contrary to the whole purpose of knowing! It follows from the fact "the concept of quantitative worth is relative" that I have to grant infinite worth to others, as well.

Low!

Low, high, it doesn't matter, I don't know why?

Good points!

http://www.eharmony.com/singles/servlet/partner-articles?id=1

http://www.eharmony.com/singles/servlet/partner-articles?id=2

Emotional Bankruptcy and Beyond!

This conversation spawned as a result of a Facebook status:

A: "Emotional bankruptcy" is not as bad as it sounds: Shared memories + oxytocin result in attachment and fondness, which is typically followed by copulation and excess secretion of dopamine (good stuff) in the frontal cortex. Now, in females oxytocin has to be combined with estrogen to function properly. Josephine in Fitzgerald’s novel was probably going through a period of estrogen deficiency and consequently when the guy (I forgot his name) kissed her she couldn’t form a pair-bond. There is no need to panic! A period of rest and proper dieting will bring her back to the stage and she can go on with her egotist lifestyle. Meanwhile, she can invest in her other assets and potentials. And as for the spectators, they should put on their favorite music:“Softly, deftly, music shall caress you, hear it, feel, it, secretly posess you …”

B: (4-month later) First "love" is undefined, but given that, I still don't know if chemicals are all that account for a feeling of love. However, I don't doubt if they are the main reason for attachment.

A: I’m no longer a big fan of iconoclasts! Mainly because, they strike me as unimaginative and unconstructive. So, me not a fan of me!

Secondly, ideas that have practical utility in a laboratory setting are not necessarily useful for the “social life”. For example, “reductionism” and “analysis” may not be the best approach to understanding/enjoying a good poetry, a good company, or a tasty meal for that matter!

Third, the second point makes sense in the light of the following fundamental contradiction of human life: “before becoming a good human, one has to learn what it takes to be a good animal.” In particular, the older one grows the more this point becomes obvious.

Finally, saying “love is undefined” is like saying “air is undefined”, which is both true and false. It really depends on your “mode of description”:

It turns out that air roughly (by molar content/volume) contains 78% nitrogen, 20.95% oxygen, 0.93% argon, 0.038% carbon dioxide, trace amounts of other gases, and a variable amount (average around 1%) of water vapor.

On the other hand, air is a medium in which birds fly, butterflies hover, willow trees dance, the falling yellow leaves roam, and the winter storm scourge the gentle skin of Sharbat (the national geography Afghan girl [1]). It cannot be grasped (literally), nor can it be seen!

I’m sure you heard this joke about the similarity of air and sex:

"Why is air a lot like sex?
Because it's no big deal unless you're not getting any!"

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sharbat_Gula

"There is nothing new in the world except the history you do not know." --
Harry Truman

Halloween!

It seems like the bitter taste of the past encourages victims to victimize others, so that the world of humanity will never be deprived of bitterness. Bitterness breeds vulgarity the same manner that love breeds beauty and the cycle continues indefinitely.

It reminds me of the vampire stories where the victims of the vampire bites are metamorphosed to vampires. The story invariably concludes with a bloody battle between the hero of the story and the vampire-head who defiantly blasts towards the outer space, not to be seen till his next encounter with a feeble soul....

Yet another cycle! Where is the hero in man?

A tribute to a lonely butterfly (a poem by firstcomet):

Here I am all alone by myself;
With only the quiet now by my side
And it makes me feel alright!

Those back and shoulders that were so tight
Start to relax and grow wide
And my worries begin to subside

The city framed by the window sash
The distance portrait of a forgotten brash
The dance of the curtain on the wall
And my response: a spontaneous sprawl!

Suddenly I see a little fly who came by to say Hi
I can tell she was flying for a while
I would say for at least a quarter of a mile

But then quickly she turns around and says good-by!
I wonder why she bothered to stop-by?
In a blink of an eye I jump and grab her by the thigh
Out of the window, the garden flowers and the blue sky
Good-bye my friend, the lonely butterfly!