THE PANIC OF HAPPINESS...

     I was rereading (after having been reminded of it) this Cracked article by John Cheese on the "5 Stupidest Habits You Develop Growing Up Poor" and the thought just occurred to me...I want to spend any and all happiness I acquire right goddamned now!

     In the article Mr. Cheese says:

When a windfall check is dropped in your lap, you don't know how to handle it. Instead of thinking, "This will cover our rent and bills for half a year," you immediately jump to all the things you've been meaning to get, but couldn't afford on your regular income. If you don't buy it right now, you know that the money will slowly bleed away to everyday life over the course of the next few months, leaving you with nothing to show for it. Don't misunderstand me here, it's never a "greed" thing. It's a panic thing. "We have to spend this before it disappears."

     I think that's how I've come to look at my happiness too. I'm usually feeling anywhere from neutral to lonely so when a windfall opportunity for happiness gets dropped on my figurative lap, I feel the same way about it. I don't want to ration it or save it for the future because even though I know that would be a good idea and that I will surely need this happiness then, I'm afraid it will be bled out by my life's everyday circumstances before I ever get a chance to properly experience it.

     What ends up happening is my normally patient self gets overwhelmed by this desire to spend my happiness right fucking now and that usually results in that opportunity being squandered. It sucks and I really don't know how to not do that.

      I've been fortunate these past two weeks. I've met a girl at work - a customer of mine. We've been talking. We've even met up already. I want to see her, like, all the time. I want to rush through the opening stages of this potential relationship to get to the middle part already: I want the foundation already laid. That part where we already know we like each other and already know we want to be together...that part where we're building on that foundation.

       I hate being this impatient and wanting to move things along even more rapidly than I am comfortable with. I hate what it reveals about me and what it suggests about me. But I also don't want to fuck it up, so I'm being patient...

SOMETHING OVERLOOKED BY EVOLUTION...

     There are certain kinds of pains I just don't understand and by not understanding I mean, why do they hurt so much when nothing can be done about them?

     Take tooth pain for example. Pretty much any pain involving the mouth, like abscesses, is dreadfully bad. We've only had anything resembling modern dentistry for, at best, a few hundred years. But we've been anatomically human for almost 200,000 years. Why should tooth pain be quite so exquisite? What's the purpose of it? Sure, something could be done about it now...but what about then?

     And then you have other types of pain that seem to serve no purpose as nothing can be done about it like kidney stones, splinters, broken bones, and giving birth.

     Pain should have a purpose. It should be there to remind you that what you're doing is damaging or potentially so. It's good that fire feels hot because you don't want to be exposed to it. It's good that ice feels cold for the same reason. The initial pain of a splinter is fine. It teaches you to be careful but the continued pain that is felt until you or your body can push it out is just overkill.
      Broken bone pain seems unnecessary too. Yes, nowadays we have casts and splints but what about when you broke your leg back in prehistoric times? You were tiger food now and all the while you're waiting to become a meal, it hurts like fuck. Your body and mind get to have one final, totally unnecessary conversation about how you shouldn't've done what you did à la Scrambles to Chopper: (body) "I told ya! I told ya!" (mind) "I know! I KNOW!!!"...but with pain instead of words.
      And like tooth pain, I don't even know the point of the pain associated with kidney stones. Whatever causes them to form in the first place certainly doesn't happen overnight so their being painful just seems so spiteful on the part of your body, doesn't it?
      Why is childbirth painful? One would think that giving birth, being vital for the continuation of a species, would be a most pleasant experience in order to encourage females to want to do it again. But nope, dorko body here has decided to trip all its pain sensors instead.

       I guess I'm referring to two major types of stupid pain here: inexplicable and fatal. Both are senseless but the latter is especially cruel. Unfortunately evolution could never set up a system to deal with fatal pain because, well...you need survivors to pass along traits. Still, you'd think some sort of mercy would exist for cases like this. At the very minimum such a system could be present in the bones and/or the nervous system.
      Breaking a leg in prehistory pretty much meant death. It means death for any animal today to lose its primary means for locomotion. The same is true for severing an artery. Wouldn't it be much more merciful to the animal (or human) if opiates or some other feel-good chemicals could be released from bone marrow if a bone broke or from the brain if reports of pain went above a certain threshold or if blood pressure dropped below a critical point?

      Let the inevitable end for the animal feel euphoric instead of horrifying. Why shouldn't being mauled by a tiger feel fantastic?

LINGERING RACISM...

     While walking to work the other night, I saw two high school aged girls run across what is normally a very busy street to seek shelter from the rain which had only just started. I noticed that they were both rather pretty and for a moment found myself wishing I were their age again if only to continue the fantasy that if I could be given a second chance that I (somehow) wouldn't make the same mistakes over and over again.

      The thought left me when I saw the group of four guys they had been with bicycling and skateboarding across the street to meet them. Three of these teenaged boys were black and the one on the skateboard, latino. I scoffed to myself wondering what these pretty white girls were doing hanging out with these black and latino kids.

      It was an automatic reaction. It caught me off guard. It had been a while since I had felt such a thought in me. I don't know where it comes from or how it got rooted. Is it something my parents had taught me subtly? I don't remember either of them ever being overtly racist.
      My father would drop the N-bomb every once in a while in conversation but I would describe his use of nigger more like the Black People vs. Niggaz bit Chris Rock did all those years ago. My Dad was not wanting for black friends throughout his life so I find his use of nigger puzzling, almost like he believed blacks ought to be better than the stereotypes attributed to them. I never heard him use the word in anger nor did I ever hear him direct the word at a black person.

     Maybe it was the lack of interracial relationships in my life? I cannot think of any except on TV and whenever those relationships did appear the couples always had to justify their being together. That alone presses the idea that such relationships are unnatural and ought not be pursued. Perhaps it plays into the mind over the years?

     My personal thoughts upon seeing a pretty white girl - and it's only when it's a pretty white girl: I could care less if it were an unattractive white girl or a white boy with a black girl - my thought is that of disgust but not disgust in that I find a black guy with a white girl disgusting, but a jealous disgust that derives from my loneliness. This idea that there are plenty of white men for you to be with and you chose a black man? This idea that white girls shouldn't go for other races until all the white men in their local group have been taken.
     The jealousy is still there if the guy with the pretty white girl is white. Perhaps since jealousy comes from an ugly place, it is only natural that racism will follow when presented with the opportunity?

     It is the only racism that lingers on inside me. Personally I think I hide it well. No one I know has ever suspected it in me. It is something I intend to die with and do my damnedest not to pass along to the next generation should I actually have kids of my own.

LINE OF THE DAY, part XXXV

     This is from a recent post on Snopes. It very clearly states why nothing you do will ever make a difference in anything:

"...I tell them that I don't really believe our site (Snopes) makes much of a difference in the greater scheme of things; that the responses we get tend to indicate a good many people are determined to believe whatever they want to believe, and no collection of contradictory factual information, no matter how large or authoritative or impressive it might be, is ever going to dissuade them from their beliefs."    

You said it Homer. You sure said it.

     Remember that quote the next time you try convincing anyone of anything, especially if it's a subject dear to you, and also that you are vulnerable to it too.

9/11: WE WILL NEVER FORGET...BUT WE WILL MOVE ON

     For the twelfth time now, media has officially gone somber for the occasion. Bringing out its sad music and mourning wear, especially for its normally flirty hostesses. A day to pay homage before going back into their normal stupid shit. I'll admit, this September 11th like last year's (for me at least) just came and went without acknowledgement.

     I can't be bothered with it anymore. This "national day of mourning" I feel has long since crossed the line from a genuine expression of emotion to exploitative. It's one thing to acknowledge sadness but it's quite another to use it to drum up business or an agenda and that's what I feel the "holiday" of September 11th has become. It's officially called "Patriot Day" and while no one calls it that, I think just like the other day of infamy in this country, "Pearl Harbor Day" (December 7th), it too will just fade away but not before the big anniversaries - the 20th and 25th (and so forth) - into little blurbs in the headlines becoming less and less acknowledged with each passing year.

     But for me, it's just exploitative. There are enough survivors from that heinous attack. It's their day now, not the nation's. Leave them alone, stop reading the names of those who died that day, and quit it with the phony jingoism and easy patriotism the day affords. Stop using them as symbols to unite us in supporting wars that don't need to be fought.

      I think back to the opposite expression: the end of a trying war. V-J Day was on September 2, 1945 and we've seen the pictures...it was a hell of a celebration (for the United States at least). World War II was finally over. And I imagine there were similar, albeit smaller, parties through what remained of the 1940s on that day. But how long can one keep celebrating victory over one's enemy before it slips from a meaningful celebration over the end of a great war to what amounts to "rubbing it in"?

      And that's what brings me back to September 11th. Yes, the first anniversary was meaningful and it probably should've stopped there as we had taken our pound of flesh from Afghanistan. But before even the second anniversary it had been used as a backdrop to justify an invasion of Iraq and to maintain the growing "security" state apparatus. By the tenth anniversary, one of the big anniversaries, the failure of our "War on Terror" was more than apparent and I remember acknowledging it as such (I'm certainly using that word a lot, aren't I?) but being introspective about what we as a nation had done to others and ourselves in response to that terrorist attack was not fashionable to say the least of it. I'm not when it will ever be fashionable to criticize our responses in the mainstream.

     I'm not sure where I'm going with all this so I'll end it here. September 11th is just another day...as it should be.

WELL THAT WAS ANNOYING...

     I had gotten used to my blog looking the way it had. I don't what I did while trying to edit the blog description but it fucked up my header and I couldn't get it back the way it had been so yay (?) new template and color scheme. Get used to it because I don't have a choice now either. This is why you don't muck with things that ain't broke kids...

     I'll remind you from a previous post that I do in fact suffer from a common form of colorblindness so if the colors clash or are otherwise ridiculous, feel free to suggest new colors. Just be sure to use web color values  (because I have no idea what mauve or bone is - let's be realistic here) and I'll get right on it.

A TOTALLY GRATUITOUS SWIPE AT THE KARDASHIANS...

     I saw this posted on Facebook the other day and it annoyed me. I should probably make this clear that autistic people don't annoy me. To me they're no different than anyone else who's retarded. They get passes for their behavior (within reason) because you know they know not what they do. No, I get mad at their caregivers/parents because they, more often than not, come across with rather unrealistic assessments of their child's present and future capabilities.

     I get it. You've been saddled with a burden you never asked for but stop pretending that your burden must now also be our burden. Just as you wouldn't bring a child into a go-go bar or a deaf person to a music concert, you have to be aware that not all venues are appropriate for retarded/developmentally disabled children and adults.

     Anyways, I see this post and my assholish thoughts immediately surface. I'll post my thoughts in blue italics and not bother to proofread them to make it easier for you to attack me in the comments' section. Also, the original post had "thou shall" rather than the properly conjugated "thou shalt". This has been corrected.

TEN COMMANDMENTS FOR INTERACTING WITH KIDS ON THE AUTISM SPECTRUM: