The Juicer Olympics

I have a marvelous idea for spicing up the Olympics. Aren't we all a little bored with regular ol' figure skating? Tired out marathon running? Same ol' gymnastics? Sure the athletes are amazing, a testimony to inborn grit and determination of Homo sapiens, where talent meets perserverence -- but what about an Olympics that celebrated the intelligence of humankind? One that showcased humanity's achievements in medical science as well as in sports?

I am talking about the All-Drug Olympics. You may have seen a brief clip of some pioneering training sessions on that news program, SNL. The time has come to make the All-Drug Olympics a reality.

Really, it's the only fair thing to do. As it is we have some athletes using and others dutifully abstaining. The righteous get fucked. If we stopped the charade of being au naturel and just took advantage of our hard-won achievements in medicine, we'd finally have a level playing field.

Stop lying to ourselves. Stop playing picky-choosy. We let people compete who are alive by the grace of medicine. We don't say, "Oy, looks like you were meant to die of appendicitis at age 8. No high-diving for you, cheater." We let them in. We let people take their antibiotics and antidysrhythmics and still ski for mother Russia. Now let them take hormones and amphetamines too! Oh the speeds we'd achieve! Oh the records we'd break!

Now if you'll excuse me, I have some phone calls to make.

Writing, like singing, comes from the heart, and has a propensity to be terrible.

Magic

This is the first flashmob video I've ever seen.

How magical is this? Amid the bad lighting, the Arby's, the giant illuminated photos of sesame chicken, the exultant, playful spirit of humanity explodes into song.

We are wonderful creatures.

I've sworn off smoking, drinking, and drugs; if I give up sweets, the only pleasure I'll be left with is self-righteousness.

meditate
–verb (used without object)
1.
to engage in thought or contemplation; reflect.
2.
to engage in transcendental meditation, devout religious contemplation, or quiescent spiritual introspection.

drivitate
to engage in above while in the car.

toobitate
to engage in same while gazing at the TV.

napitate
to engage in same while lying somewhere comfortable such that the effort results in sleep.

Garage Sales

Ah, how easy it is to turn money into stuff.

And how hard it is to turn it back.

Sewing Scissors and #8 on the Clippers

I have lowered my standards for haircuts. I no longer require or even desire an excellent haircut. No, these days, the haircut I purchase just has to be better than the one I would give myself.

For example, I would definitely let these gals cut my hair.

Beet Greens?

You might be living in Arcata if...

You go to your friend's house for dinner and you can't identify any of the things she puts in your taco.

My Next Book

Farting Into My Zafu: One Human's Journey Through the Trials and Miracles of Meditation

zafu: n a round, thick cushion used for sitting meditation

Writers are essentially just thinkers with pens.

Do These Pixels Make Me Look Fat?

The camera may add ten pounds, but Photoshop can remove hundreds.

Perfection

I was lying in bed, thinking about what a bad IV start I am and I wondered, what if I were perfect? Then I thought, how horrible would that be? What a freak of nature would a perfectly perfect person be?

What if there were a perfect doctor? What if every decision he made were right? Then I right away thought, well, that presumes some kind of cosmic "rightness." What if there is none?

What is this perfection we presume? This perfection we imagine? It is not reality. It is not the universe we actually live in. Why is it that we imagine some other universe?

The concept of some kind of cosmic rightness is a very Christian one. The idea of a God who knows exactly what the "right" thing to do is and it is our job to try to act and think and make decisions in as close concordance as possible with the will of this God. That God is our cosmic measuring stick against which we always fall short.

But what if there is no cosmic measuring stick? Instead of saying, "We are not perfect," we should be saying, "This is perfection." However it is that we are is perfection because it is existence. It is extant and it is real.

Why then the ubiquitous dissatisfaction? From whence the sense that we ought to be other than we are? C.S. Lewis used this sense of moral rectitude, the lurking sense of cosmic rightness which we are not, to infer the existence of a God. He thought the difference between what we are and what we thought we ought to be reflected a subconscious knowledge of the existence of God, of moral perfection, of pure Good, of a way before the Fall, as they say. That this sense of lack was placed in us by God.

Why? What the discrepancy? To give us something to ever strive for? To give us a way to develop our consciousnesses? Or, as he posited, to give us a method for developing separate identities, individual consciousnesses.

Let's theorize otherwise. Hypothesize that it is not the Cosmos that want us to be perfect, not God that wants us to be perfect, but we ourselves who want this. It's a sort of selfishness, a sort of solipsism, a sort of projection of our own desires onto the Cosmos. I.e., I want to be pain-free and well-fed, therefore everyone on Earth should be pain-free and well-fed and the fact that they are not means there's something wrong with the world. I want to be healthy and beautiful, therefore everyone should be healthy and beautiful and the fact that they are not means there's something wrong with the world. I think polar bears and rainforests are cool, therefore polar bears and rainforests should exist forever and the fact that they are disappearing means there's something horribly wrong with the world and we have to change it absolutely. I want to live forever and never change form and never not exist, therefore everyone should live as long as possible and we should do everything in our power to keep people living and not ever make death come sooner or surrender in any way to the impending inevitability of death. We must struggle against it always.

Don't Call the SPCA on Me

I have this theory that I can wash dishes in the washing machine. I mean, maybe not the stemware or the fine china, but the tupperware at least should be fine.

Really, you should be able to wash anything in the washing machine. That's why it's called a "washing machine." Not a "clothes-washing machine," or a "textile-washing machine." Just a washing machine. If it needs washed, put it in the machine.

90% of getting things clean is hot water, anyway. Let the Brownian motion do the work. How's that for better living through physics?

"Beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy." -- Benjamin Franklin

In the vitamin aisle of our local co-op is a supplement made from blue-green algae called BrainON, which purports to enhance one's mental acuity and function.

A few aisles over is a much more popular supplement made from plant matter and fungi which ought to be called BrainOFF, and which is scientifically proven to do just the opposite.

Child Labor Laws Have Ruined this Country

I let the neighbor girls wash my car today. They came to my door with their little business proposal, and I said yes.

They didn't do a very good job, but it was only 5 bucks* and it's rare that one gets to enjoy both supporting child labor and paying someone less than minimum wage.


*I gave them $6, actually, so they could easily split it evenly between the three of them. So perhaps I did pay them minimum wage after all, if they worked for 15 minutes or less. I wasn't really keeping track.

Not Just Moving the Stickers Around

My husband, who can solve the Rubik's Cube, noted that you can tell by the Cube sitting on the shelf whether there's someone in the house who can solve it or not. If there isn't, the Cube will sit in perpetual chaos. In contrast, if there is someone in the household who can solve the Cube, they invariably find that disarray unbearable and thus the Cube in such a house will always be found with its sides six uninterrupted solids.

The results of my repeated experiments, albeit on a very small sample of solvers, have shown this to be true; the unsolved Cube is something the solver can tolerate for no more than a few hours.

Gifted Actors

We are, most of us, acting all the time. Socially, so much of what we say and do and how we say and do it is false and contrived. This is by no means a bad thing. This is what allows most social transactions to go smoothly and uneventfully.

Some are better at this acting than others.

What does it mean to be a good actor?

It means that one's will dictates the emotions one shows. Feelings do not have to actually be felt to be expressed; they can be chosen. Actions, expressions, inflections that are considered to be unintentional are, for the natural actor, all quite intentional. And the actor can be left wondering what of what they say and do is genuine and what isn't.

Thought

Nothing makes your thoughts seem important like writing them down.

A Fitting Chaser

Rational arguments don't usually work on religious people. Otherwise, there wouldn't be religious people.
- Doris Egan

"Little girls are cute and small only to adults. To one another they are not cute. They are life-sized." - Margaret Atwood

I love this quote. I love the idea that little girls, or big girls, or anyone, for that matter, are more than just their beauty or cuteness or charm. They are not what we make them out to be by the way we relate to them. People are not the roles they play. They are individuals who happen to be in a certain role.

People are not pets. Even pets are not pets. Pets are animals. They are only pets insofar as we treat them like pets. The word "pet" refers not to a person or animal, but to the way a person or animal is related to by a human being. In other words, "pet" refers to the role a being plays, not the being itself.

I am not a nurse or a daughter or a wife. I am a packet of existence enclosed in a human body who plays the role of nurse, wife, daughter, or even woman.

Or am I?

Is it in fact the other way around and I am created by my body, female, and my roles of woman, wife, daughter, nurse? And do these then generate the sensation of raw awareness and existence?

Which is the real I?

I think there are two schools of thought here, the spiritualist, which believes the former, and the materialist, which believes the latter.

Does the truth lie in a middle way? A sort of cooperative, symbiotic creation wherein the spiritual creates the material, which in turns generates the spiritual? A sort of positive feedback loop?

I rather like that idea.


PS: Pass the doobie.

Blog

It's a strange word, "blog." Kind of a cross between "blob" and "slog," characterizing perfectly the drivel we put on these things.

Does This Sell in Japan?

My hetero lifemate and I tried out our new WiiFit last night. I was stoked to play WiiSki and WiiYoga (though I cannot for the life of me imagine how WiiYoga works). However, before WiiFit would allow me to play any games or even work out, it had a few questions for me. It wanted to know my height and date of birth, which I innocently and honestly entered (you don't want to lie to these new video game consoles -- they're smarter than we are). Once my WiiFit had these two pieces of fairly innocuous, emotionally uninvolved data it proceeded weigh me, yes weigh me. Weigh me against my will. There was no way I could see to get around this step and just start playing the games.

(Note: I am kind of a spaz about being weighed. I don't like it. I've played the numbers game in very unhealthy ways before and I am not into it anymore. I find it's best if I just avoid the scale altogether.)

My S.O. and I tried to trick the WiiFit. We tried to have him lift me partially, to make it look like I weighed 45 pounds. We tried to have him just lean on the WiiFit with his hands, but WiiFit was having none of it. It kept saying, "I can't find you..." In retrospect we should have had him lean ON me with an unknown amount of weight to make me look heavy. That would have been fine. Or I could have held a giant stack of textbooks -- we have plenty of those in our house.

But we were impatient to WiiSki at this point, so I decided to just close my eyes and have S.O. page through the screens until the weighing process was all done and hopefully I'd never know.

Unfortunately I opened my eyes to soon. WiiFit had calculated my BMI as 24.1. Great! Within "normal." Healthy, right? But this was not good enough for WiiFit. WiiFit felt my BMI should be 22. It tried to tell me that a good weight for me would be 132 pounds. I tried to tell WiiFit that I practiced healthy eating and exercise habits and body-positive self-talk, but there was no button for that on the Wii. No, WiiFit demanded to know how much weight I was going to commit to lose. I told it 0.4 pounds, just to make it shut up and let me WiiSki. WiiFit wanted to know how soon I would lose those 0.4 pounds. I told it I'd do it in a month, just to make it shut up and let me frickin WiiSki already.

So what happens if I don't lose 0.4 pounds in a month? Will WiiFit berate me? Will it call me a big fat American pig? Will it freeze my accounts so I can't buy any more food? Wii is connected to the Internet, you know.

The only solution is to log in as a new Wii character, or Mii, and tell it that I am 7 feet tall and 100 years old. This way Wii will not only beg me to eat, but it will hopefully congratulate me for simply being alive.