POWER DYNAMICS AND FLIRTING...

     I hate the lack of defined social etiquette when it comes to when it's okay and when it's not okay for men to flirt with women (and vice-versa). I say this somewhat ironically as I despise social conventions as unnecessarily restrictive but they have their purpose, especially in tense or otherwise in scenarios with too many variables. A defined social etiquette, or diplomacy if you will, helps take the edge off by allowing participants to follows established guidelines rather than risk accidental offense.

    I accept, however reluctantly as a coward, that it is generally accepted that men make the opening moves when attempting to woo women ("woo" is a terrible word, isn't it?) however, while it is also generally accepted that not all situations are appropriate for male-initiated flirting, there is no clear-cut set of rules establishing when and where such behavior is appropriate.

    I'm not sure I can define the scenarios mathematically but an obvious, all-too-cliché, example where it is perfectly acceptable to flirt is ye olde bar or a dance club. People, strangers, deliberately meeting up in a public place purveying in intoxication is the standard-bearer for male-initiated wooing via inviting female body language.
    I'm not actually one to believe that the men are ever in control here. I feel, like in nature, women are generally always the ones holding all the cards and just make it look like the men are the ones doing so.

    But I think it's also safe-to-say that people would agree that the supermarket or restaurant are not places where male-initiated flirting is acceptable. The difference being that the female cashier (and even customer) and waitress are not in positions of power like they are at a bar or club. They have to be nice to you. They can't get away. They can't tell you off. Etc.
    Yet, as anyone can attest, guys still shamelessly flirt with such women all the fucking time. Now I'm not saying it's wrong, in of itself, for such flirting to happen. I'm saying it's wrong when the man initiates flirting when the power-dynamic does not favor the woman.

     There is a way around this. If the female cashier, waitress, or customer initiates flirting with the guy, she is granting him permission to do so in a venue where his advances would otherwise (and should) be frowned upon. In this way, the power dynamic of the bar/club is preserved in places where it may not simply be assumed by the male.

     The trouble is, I don't see anything like this actually going on nor when I was in school (or from posts I read online) were we ever educated in such a manner of when are where flirting is appropriate. Feminist posts will occasionally broach this topic but I've only ever read complaints about creepy men, etc. taking advantage of the topsy-turvy power dynamic, not calls for social etiquette.

     Admittedly, this sucks for me as only very rarely has a female customer even kinda-sorta flirted with me. It sucks because some of my customers are very attractive and from the ones who do speak, sometimes immediately appealing too. But it only seems fair to apply.
     I think of sexual harassment videos and shit from school and work. They always told you what not to do, but never what to do leaving cautious folk like me without guidance.

     Additionally, I think of the rather unnatural world of online dating and how the power dynamic perhaps ought to play out there as well. I regularly read complaints about creepy guys or overly sexual guys bothering women on these sites, ruining the experience for everyone. Sites like Tinder which require a mutual match before contact may be made and Bumble which require girls to initiate contact with men might help somewhat but what of simply the overall etiquette? What should it be?

     My thoughts on this are that it's okay for men to initiate contact on sites like Plenty of Fish and OKCupid but that it is not okay for them to ask for the girl's phone number. I feel by asking for the phone number, the men are violating the power dynamic.
     Online dating isn't like real life dating as there is no face-to-face communication and all its attendant body language, eye contact, smells, etc. that both consciously and subconsciously go along with face-to-face meetings. As women will readily admit, they're kinda sussing the men out to determine if they are creeps, sexual perverts, or the ever classic, serial killers and they're denied this pass/fail opportunity when the man is demanding her private contact information before she is willing to give it.

      Unfortunately, like the cashier and waitress examples, there are no defined and socially accepted rules for these scenarios so they continue to go often violated by men, making dating that much harder for the rest of us. I wish there were a way to socially shun the power dynamic violating men, but as of now, there isn't and as of now, it's still very hard for me to get a date playing by rules that I've effectively made up and may ultimately be projecting an apparent lack of interest when nothing could be further from the truth.

      It makes me hate my life...

AVATAR: THE LEFT-HANDED AIRBENDER...

     I wonder if the Air Nomads in the Avatar universe had a handedness to their airbending power?

source

     For instance, when I imagine generating a vortex of wind around me, it always develops in a counterclockwise motion. If I imagine shooting a blast of wind from my dominant hand, it also spins in a counterclockwise corkscrewing fashion (from my perspective...it would be clockwise from your viewpoint) and again, if I imagine shooting a blast of wind from my left hand, it is only a straight-up gust with no spin whatsoever.
     I asked Roommate about this, who is left-handed, and without leading on my part, he told me he imagined such vortices spinning clockwise when he thought of how they might spin.

     Makes me wonder if I might be on to something...

     In-Universe, the Air Nomads had all been killed prior to the start of the series and precious few glimpses are ever given to their way of life before the start of the Hundred Years War allowing for little exploration into the quirks of their culture.
     Still, might it possible that handedness determined the natural spin of one's vortices. It's not like it would be impossible to spin them the other way: it just wouldn't be your instinctual motion. After all, you can teach yourself to write and other tasks with your non-dominant hand. I can eat almost as comfortably left-handed as I do right-handed though with the latter I retain better control over the utensil.

     I wonder how clockwise benders might be viewed by counterclockwise benders? I choose clockwise as the minority because the emblem of the Air Nomads shows three swirls all moving in a counterclockwise rotation.

Emblem of the Air Nomads (source)

     Would their powers effectively cancel each other out when used against one and other (or at least lessen the severity of the attack or effectiveness of the defense)? Would they be embraced as an enhancing diversity or viewed with skepticism since they'd likely be a minority? Because they have the "opposite flow", would it affect the way they see the universe? Do they eat meat?
     If the latter, might they have been complicit in betraying the majority Air Nomads to the Fire Nation because they had wanted to rule only to have it backfire on them when Firelord Sozin chose to wipe all Air Nomads out?
     The non-canonical character Afiko was said to have hailed from the Southern Air Temple and betrayed his fellow Air Nomads. According to the card game where his character exists, he was said to have been envious of Aang, the new Avatar, and so revealed the secret location of the temple to the Fire Nation, allowing its soldiers to wipe out the monks who lived there. How did his vortices manifest?

Afiko: clockwise airbender?

     Stuff we'll never know...

HUMOR IS SUCH A SUBJECTIVE THING, DON'T YOU THINK, MOLLARI?

     Is there a name for the kind of humor where increasing the perspective progressively in steps keeps flipping the opinion of the observer back-and-forth from ire to empathy?

     I saw this post about a woman allegedly abusing her dog. You've likely seen the viral photo of the dog whose mouth has been muzzled with duct tape:

pictured: internet rage

    Now, because I'm me and am not in a hurry to rush to judgement, I found myself thinking strange things about the picture like, what if the rage the internet is showing with regard to this image was wrong...but also right...and then wrong again...and so forth?

    Like, what if everyone's mad because they see what appears to be an open-and-shut-case of animal abuse?

   But then you find out the reason the dog's mouth is muzzled shut is because the animal's jaw was broken and its owners couldn't afford the veterinarian's bill? Now you feel bad for misjudging. Maybe you even want to create a Kickstarter for the owner's vet bills.

   But then you find out the reason the dog's jaw is broken is because the owner kicked the dog in the face. Now you're angry again. How could she?! Arrest her!!!

   But then it's revealed the owner kicked the dog in the jaw, breaking it, in order to stop the dog from mauling the owner's small child. Now we feel bad again. She was only protecting her family and still wants to see the dog healed. Again, how we've misjudged...

   But it turns out the child was being mauled because it killed one of the dog's puppies. Now we're angry again. What kind of family teaches their kid to do these things?! Arrest her! Call the Child Protection Service!!!

   And I have to stop here because I can't think of anything absurd the puppy could have done to "deserve" being killed by the small child (which would, in turn, require another pullback of perspective to villainize that and so on and so forth)...

   But what is that kind of humor called? Surely it has a name...or at least a TVtrope associated with it.

    I wonder...

MOVIE RIDICULOUSNESS...

     I've been watching a few of the Friday the 13th movies on AMC this morning because, "Why not?" and aside from my usual complaints about cable television censorship, I'm continually amazed at how dumb these movies are.

     Right now, it's up to Part VIII "Jason Takes Manhattan". It starts off with two teens, Jim and Suzy, sexing it up on a houseboat. The guy throws an anchor in the water which ends up dragging an electrical cable into the resting place of the hibernating (?) revenant, Jason Voorhees, resurrecting him for another round of mayhem.

     But before he bags his first two kills, Jim mentions that he doesn't like being so close to the campground where all those murders took place to which Suzy replies, "What murders?"

     I'm already taken out of the film. What do you mean, what murders? Like 70 people have died there in the first seven parts? And it's not like those murders happened over a hundred years ago and had fallen into local legend. No, they took place over the past ten years. There's no way you haven't heard of them.
     That's like when Han Solo from Star Wars says he'd never heard of the Jedi when they were keepers of the peace in the galaxy for over a thousand generations. They had only been made virtually extinct by the Galactic Empire and Darth Vader about thirty years ago but that wouldn't wipe out people's memories of them, even if it were just their name. Hitler's only been dead for seventy years and people have still heard of him.
     My point being that it's ridiculous for this girl to have never heard of the murder sprees that have taken place on Crystal Lake's campgrounds.

     The next thing that caught my attention was the cruise ship everyone was on to Manhattan is called "The Lazarus", AFTER Jason had already been resurrected. That should've been the name of the houseboat those doomed teens were on in the beginning. Instead it looks like it was called Lady Drifter.

     Movie, you're doing in-your-face symbolism wrong...

     I'm sure more awaits as this film goes on, but I'll post now instead of adding to this live...

THIS IS HALLOWEEN...

     See, I think what ultimately ruined Halloween as a festival of scary was business. It's hard to find genuinely terrifying things or provocations of unease or sources of existential dread throughout the month of October except in very niche environments. People like to say Halloween is "scary" but it's really not. There's talk of monsters like old-school vampires, werewolves, witches, and mummies and more modernly favored zombies, vengeance-fueled spirits, weapon-of-choice spree killers, and vampires but you get sanitized versions of them instead.

     I understand why. It's kinda hard to sell candy, costumes, and television specials to children while also giving them a real sense of mortal terror, challenging their faith in happy endings, and by enhancing our already natural fear of spiders, snakes, and the unknown. Brands can't really turn their mascots into genuinely frightening things. They have to make attractive the darkened Halloween palettes and present a kind of "fun" scary instead.

    I'm not sure in any real sense why Halloween needs to be scary but I suppose it's the age-old that's what we've been told kind of tradition. I just know that such celebrations are impossible in an atmosphere convincing consumers to buy shit.
    We get anthropological M&Ms as a cutesy vampire (watch out! fangs!), Frankenstein's monster (aah! bolts!), and a fashionable witch (help! she's wearing glasses!); Snap, Crackle, and Pop illuminated as if to tell a fun-scary story over a cauldron of Rice Krispies treats; coloring books of smiling friendly witches whose spells provoke delight rather than dread and dancing skeletons to entertain rather than warn of imminent danger; "scary" movies where the kids are always successful at pushing back the evil as though nothing had happened; it goes on...

    It's hard to deliver genuine scares, especially as one gets more sophisticated but I also don't think it unwise to use the holiday for public service. Movies which show how easily one can become enchanted by and to do service in the name of evil (think the masterminds behind the Hitler Youth), how peer pressure can override an overarching sense of what's right, how fear can make one complicit in wrongdoing, and so forth.


   I don't know what the solution is besides just sucking it up and not giving a shit about such trivialities. I think I look at the word "scary" in Halloween season much like the word "beautiful" in today's social media and how it's not only overused, but misused. Surrendering to the ever-changing tides of meaning is necessary lest one desire himself a linguistic Canute...

MISERY STREET...

     Sometimes I wonder if the reason I'm unhappy with working is not because I have to have a job in order to survive but that I'm largely constrained into having the same job in order to survive...

     I find that I get bored easily with both people and things. It is rare that I find a person or subject constantly interesting. I don't see why a job would be any different. Some people need constant novelty in their life experiences and I need constant novelty in my mental ones.

     The trouble is, while working multiple jobs is indeed possible, it would monumentally unwise to do so without a significant cash cushion as different jobs pay differently, if at all...and assuming you can even find one in a timely manner to begin with.

     I find I'm happiest when I am free to pursue my interests at will and without outside constraint on the speed and manner in which I tackle it. Life largely does not afford such opportunities to me, if it does at all. I'm so introverted that going to work counts as going out/socializing so my time off each day and on weekends is largely spent indoors not talking to anybody in order to simply recharge.
     And it's never quite enough. I only just start feeling recharged on the day I have to go back to work. I haven't quite gotten there yet but I suppose it's the mental equivalent of using duct tape to mend a broken pipe: serviceable, but hardly a true fix.
     It is only when I'm on vacation for an entire week that I actually have a few days (three, to be precise) where I'm fully recharged and more like myself again. I've been working so long at my place of employment that I have maxed out on my vacations. I get four weeks which means I get a total of twelve days a year where I feel like myself again. That's all I get. As you can imagine, I guard those days jealously.

     I remember when I first started doing my job that it was actually enjoyable. So long as I still had new things to learn and new routines to figure out, I didn't mind going. It also didn't feel like work. My time off was all I needed to recharge so I still got to feel like myself two days a week. As I maxed out in my experience though, it fell to only one day then only the aforementioned vacation days. My job ceased to challenge me but there was nowhere else I could go which would pay me enough to survive on, let alone live on.
    I was stuck. I've been stuck.

    It made me wonder though, if money wasn't an issue, would I be happier at work? I would be free to quit my job when either I've maxed out what it could teach me or if I were made to feel worthless as a human being...another thing I have to swallow, my need for dignity, because I am still in need of a reliable source of income to survive.

    But I think about that. What if I were free to satisfy my mind's desire for mental novelty? I could work anywhere that would take me for whatever they wished to pay me, if at all as I could just as easily do volunteer work at soup kitchens or animal shelters. Might I encounter new, constantly fascinating subjects that I could explore in great depth? Might I meet new, constantly interesting people to interact with...even love?

    I just hate knowing that I'll never know the answers to those questions...and that I only get four groups of three days to be myself a year. I just finished up my last three days for the year. I don't get to be myself again for another 4½ months. The time in-between vacations feels so long already...not that this weekend has done me any good.
    Four hours to go before I have to get ready to keep doing it all over again.

    No way out...

WANTING RESPECT MEANS YOU'VE GOT NOTHING WORTH HAVING...

     Last Monday, the superintendent came to the door to tell me he had switched my parking space again because he knows I don't have a car and someone else wanted my previous spot because it was closer to their apartment. Fine, whatever. However...

     He also told me that this new spot was still being used by someone else who didn't even rent here because we still have vacant apartments and the super told him he could use the space in the meantime (or some bullshit like that). This is what I get for being honest...

     When I moved here, the lease states we each get an assigned parking space. I filled out the parking space form and indicated (truthfully) that I did not have a car. What I saw my parking space as was both a place I could use to set up my telescope if I wanted to do some late-night observing and as a place I could offer to family and friends (and God-willing, girlfriends). In fact, it seemed to be the only kinda-sorta perk I could offer a girl willing to look past my inability to drive while she dates me: hey, I've got a place for you to park...

     I should've just lied when signing my initial lease and claimed my Best Friend's car to be my own for my space. No one would have checked up on it to verify that I had a license or registration for the vehicle...maybe I would have saved myself these frustrations and disrespect...

     This is also what I get for being nice. It's always a punishment. Sure, I could make a point and have the guy who's (still) parking there towed. But what will that accomplish? The truth is, I rarely do need the spot and there are common areas I can use to set up my telescope if I really insist on using it. Towing anyone who parks there would only make me out as a bad guy regardless of how (technically) in the right I would be to do so.
     It makes me think of when poor folks kill one and other over respect. Respect is pretty much the least valuable thing a person can have. If you've reached a point in your life when you find yourself desiring respect from people, it's a sure sign that you've got nothing else going for you. A person who's got a nice job, a spouse who loves them, children to take care of, a decent house, savings, and so on...that person could give less than a shit about getting respect or even having it because they already have so much more worth having.

     And here I am, entertaining tow fantasies; seething over my honesty getting me abused once again. Have I really reached a point in my life where I have so little?