Pilates for Dummies

I just did 30 minutes of Pilates for Dummies. Wow. My body feels different than anything I've ever felt. I might have to do this again.

Grilled Shark Loin

I am eventually going to blog about my new approach to food, but tonight I'm just going to tell what I cooked.

I found fresh shark loin in the seafood section at Safeway that said it was wild caught. (I don't know what other kind of shark meat is available, and I'm guessing it wouldn't work well to farm sharks, but I suppose we could find a way to make it happen if we really tried hard.) I marinated it in a mixture of olive oil, soy sauce, lemon juice, lime juice, garlic, salt, and pepper. That marinade wasn't from a recipe, it was just what was available in the kitchen and seemed like it might all work together. Then I grilled it.

It turned out ok. I think shark meat probably isn't my favorite, though I don't quite know how to describe it. It is almost bitter, and sort of musty. A few bites of it were very tasty though - the ones that were towards the center of the concentric circle patterns in the meat. They were the whitest in color and they tasted more like pork than anything else I could describe.

Even though I didn't especially like how it turned out, I'm glad I tried it. I used to be extremely averse to trying new food, but now I enjoy exploring.

everything in one link

President Bush and Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki often “talk about their faith in God” when they speak once every two weeks.

I would have thought they'd have better things to talk about than their imaginary friends. Actually, I wouldn't have thought that at all.

in which the world implodes

Every single day I get more and more pissed off. The people who make decisions that change the world are overwhelmingly bad people. One of our major political factions are deceptive selfish fascists and the other are (at best) sniveling stupid wimps or (at worst) willfully passive enablers. The vast majority of our population is taken in with silly fairy tales that they believe are absolute truth, and agree that anyone who speaks out against this is a raving lunatic. We ravage our environment, devastate nations who can't stop us, and tell the rest of the world to go fuck themselves because we have the right to do it, as bestowed by our favorite imaginary friend.

I have a lot of hope for the future though. Everything is going to get better!

billo the racist

http://dneiwert.blogspot.com/2007/07/normalizing-white-supremacy.html

Bill O'Reilly: But do you understand what the New York Times wants, and the far-left want? They want to break down the white, Christian, male power structure, which you're a part, and so am I, and they want to bring in millions of foreign nationals to basically break down the structure that we have. In that regard, Pat Buchanan is right.

blog... BLOG.... blog? blog.

Selling a house in a shitty market is nerve-wracking. Seems like things might be looking up for us, but we still have a long way to go.

I have a few things going on in my life that I would like to blog about, I just haven't made it a priority yet. Hopefully I'll get to that soon. As a teaser and placeholder, topics include:

1. drawing lines, in regards to evaluating the morality of various actions
2. religious weddings and funerals
3. food
4. slaves to convention

Topics 1 and 4 both arise as I try to figure out how to deal with 2 and 3. This is a poor numbering system.

stars aligned

I went bowling and rolled a 189 game today. I'm usually happy when I break 100. I'm not being modest or exaggerating.

WHAT THE FUCK ELSE DO YOU WANT, ASSHOLE

Look at this fucking idiot.

Novak sits around complaining about how mean we are and how nasty our words are.

His president is starting wars of aggression against countries that pose us no threat, torturing captives, suspending habeas corpus, spying on American people, pardoning felons on his own staff, and breaking American and international laws left and right, all with Novak's gleeful support, but woman and bloggers are just so fucking vitriolic. What a disgusting person he is.

What sane person responds to the madness of our government and the idiocy of our press with anything other than outrage? How the fuck else am I supposed to respond? Dick fucking Cheney says that he doesn't have to follow the rules of the executive branch because he's not in the executive branch and I'm supposed to treat that with something other than scorn? Every single fucking argument these people make is already filled with scorn. They scorn reality. They have contempt for laws. They don't give a fuck about anything but their own power, and yet all this fucking idiot can say is that the critics are just so mean. Fuck you, Bob Novak.

note to self

Stop calling the occupation of Iraq the Iraq "war."

RIP Mary

Friday July 13, 2007 would have been my great aunt Mary's 90th birthday. Instead it was the day of her funeral, so most of my family gathered in her home town of Providence, Rhode Island. A far as deaths go, Mary's was the good kind. Her body really should have stopped working 7 months ago, but she was a stubborn woman and hung on too long. Her death spared her further suffering. But her funeral was tragic.

When Mary's sister Agnes died in May, a few days before her memorial service, I wrote the following.

...religion tends to steal the deceased's thunder at the memorial service. I don't know what the plans are yet for Agnes' memorial, but she wasn't a religious person and I hope I don't have to sit through a bunch of Catholic crap just because her family is religious. She considered herself an agnostic ("I don't say there's no god. I just say that I don't know, because I don't."), but I would call her an atheist because she lived life without any belief in god. For a woman from her era, coming from her ultraconservative and ultraCatholic family, hers is a pretty impressive position by any name. The worst thing about religious funerals is how they manage to spend so much time talking about god and reciting ancient text passages instead of talking about the person that died. I don't want to be numbed into submission by boring chants and the empty consolation of "God's purpose." Agnes had an interesting life and I hope we take the opportunity to talk about her and not try to force the occasion into a belief system she rejected.

I got exactly what I hoped for for Agnes. Her family and friends gathered and talked about her, free of religious distraction. I realized that while Agnes and Mary had been around my whole life and I had gotten to know them in terms of their personalities, I really didn't know much about their lives. It was really special to hear people talk about what Agnes meant to them, and to learn about the work she had done. We shared memories for a couple hours, then shared a wonderful meal. I left it feeling very good about the occasion, with a tinge of sadness that it took her death to learn so much about her, and with a renewed general appreciation of life.

Mary's funeral was everything I hoped Agnes' wouldn't be, and worse. We sat through a Catholic funeral mass, then a brief blessing at the cemetery, then a reception. None of her friends or family stood to speak about her at any point. The only words delivered about her were in a homily delivered by a priest of whom Mary was quite fond. I found his message bizarre and despicable. As priorities go, remembering Mary was clearly a distant second behind bolstering Catholic dogma and tribalism. And his remembrances were tasteless by any standards, even in the context of his first priority. It was just really weird and sad.

He opened by reflecting on the gospel reading, which was from some letter of Paul to somebody, the Corinthians or Thessalonians or the Czechoslovakians maybe. The priest reflected fondly on how Paul's letter included an extended taunt towards some anthropomorphism of "death". You see, for "all of us believers," everything changed 2,000 years ago thanks to Jesus, and death could no longer end our lives. Thus, Mary's death was a happy occasion because she's passed on through the portal of death to a happy afterlife.

The priest was just getting warmed up. He moved on to a discussion of how important religion was to Mary. He spoke of how she came to him for confession (a Catholic ritual where people tell the priest their sins and the priest offers them forgiveness), but first she told him that her girl-friends giggled at the idea of going to confession. The priest proceeded to chide any of Mary's girl-friends who were in attendance for such crass impertinence. He then told how Mary's health problems started when she was hit by a car while walking to church. And he spoke about how in her last few months she voiced concerns that "she was in the wrong line," meaning that she was worried about going to go to hell when she died. He assured us that he has no doubts that Mary is in heaven and hoped that she was saving him a seat.

Here I'd like to take a moment here to tell the story of Mary's last few years as I understand them. Mary was walking across a street, and was hit by a car driven by an old woman. After that accident she never fully recovered, which isn't especially surprising for a woman in her late 80's even though she had been in fairly good health. She had a suffered a series of falls and other health setbacks until she ended up in an assisted living facility following several severe heart attacks. The last time I saw her she was in a bed, weighing probably 80 pounds, and too weak to lift her own arms. In spite of the rather severe physical trauma she endured, I never heard her, or heard of her, complain about bodily pain. But I know that she lived her last months in complete terror that she was going to hell. I watched her break down in tears at the certain doom that awaited her as my mother and aunt and uncle reassured her that she was bound for heaven.

So to recap the priest's homily:

• Death is so powerless to defeat us.
• It is one thing to use the mythology of an afterlife to offer comfort to the bereaved (I don't approve of making up lies, but I at least understand it), but to go on and on about what an impotent loser "death" is was just pathetic. Actually pathetic isn't the right word. It would have been pathetic if he was right - if "death" actually had been vanquished and he was going off on his defeated foe. But death had very clearly just won a battle, so I don't even know what word to for someone talking shit after they get their ass kicked . Insane? Delusional? (...Catholic.) Thanks asshole, but the abstract concept you're taunting just pwned this nice old lady. He's in ur base killin ur d00dz.
• And by the way, only believers don't have to worry about death. (The rest of you can rot in hell!)
• I'm sure it was wonderful for those in my family who know that I'm an atheist to be forcefully reminded that all the victories over death and happy eternal life don't apply to me. The only possible positive aspect (and I'm pretty sure it isn't a good thing, but for now I'll just concede that it could be) of their baseless belief system is that it might offer some deluded comfort at a time of death. The priest made sure to neutralize that positive aspect by emphasizing that all the happy heavenly flowers and kittens are only for people made eligible by their uncritical acceptance of preposterous fairy tales as complete truth. Did it never occur to him that there might be non-Catholics at Mary's funeral? If not, he's a thoughtless rube. If so, he's an insensitive prick. I don't see any other options.
  
• Trying to get to church is what killed Mary.
• I'm not saying Mary died because of religion (yet). I realize she could just as easily have been walking to the store or to a library or whatever. But the way I see it, she had no business walking around alone. Everyone talks about how the driver who hit her was to blame (and she certainly bears plenty of blame), but there's a reason why people help old ladies cross the street. An able and alert person might have been able to avoid getting hit. Mary was a stubborn woman and cared passionately about her Church, and it was that pride that was her tragic downfall. She needed to get to Church and she was going to go. From my point of view, it was pretty tasteless of the priest to mention this the way he did. Given that he was addressing a congregation of Mary's family and friends, he might not have proudly mentioned that she was recklessly risking life and limb to go see him. And given that his unstated but obvious top priority was to put more asses in the pews on Sundays, I'm not sure that this was a great selling point. "Come to Church and get blindsided by moving vehicles!"
  
• And what's with Mary's jackass friends who didn't encourage her to go tell her darkest secrets to a wonderful man like me!? Aren't they a bunch of losers! Oh and if you're here, make sure you start coming to see me too!
  
• Again, this is just totally classless both from a perspective of common decency in a time of loss, and from the perspective of someone trying to take advantage of a cynical recruitment opportunity. What on earth was wrong with this guy?

Needless to say everyone at the funeral sat there mouth-agape as this deranged lunatic delivered his diatribe. At the reception afterwards, we clustered around the more sensitive people, consoling them, all of us mutually assuring each other that he was a lunatic to be ignored. Some angrily denounced him and threatened to boycott his services.

Oh wait, it was the exact opposite of that. Everyone loved it. They all thought he was wonderful (with my baby sister the only exception I'm aware of) and "definitely understood now why Mary loved that priest!" I'm left to assume that within the rickety mental framework of the Catholic mindset, that kind of unfounded, insufferable condescension is inspirational.

As reception was winding down, my grandfather (Mary's brother) told us that "Mary certainly enjoyed this day." Setting aside my quibble over verb tense, the reality is that Mary (just like Agnes) planned her own services ahead of time, so that was the way she wanted it to happen. She must have requested that mean old priest specifically. She might have even specified that she didn't want anyone to deliver a eulogy, perhaps because she was so convinced she was going to hell that she didn't think anyone had anything good to say about her. So, maybe everyone thought the day was so wonderful because it was what Mary really would have wanted. But that it was Mary's wishes doesn't make me think more highly of the homily or the whole affair; it makes me sad that she would have wanted such an awful memorial.

So this is where I say that religion might well have ruined Mary's life. She was a wonderful, thoughtful and caring lady who was completely taken in by religion. Despite being a very attractive in her youth and very sociable, she never married. There's nothing at all wrong with being single, but in her case I strongly suspect that misplaced notions of Catholic virtue kept her from a more happy life. And maybe she had various personality characteristics that would have manifested themselves in other negative ways if not for the prodding from religion. Maybe something other than confession would have alienated her from her friends. Maybe some other cause would have given her stubborn reason to cross the street on her own. Maybe something other than Catholic mythology rendered abusive tirades from celibate old men an irresistible point of attraction. Maybe or maybe not. I can't firmly conclude that religion ruined her life. But it certainly ruined her death. Her last months were filled with needless anguish, and her funeral was a lifeless train wreck of her own design. Given her intense fear of the end, it is ironic that only death finally offered her relief from the religious madness driving that fear.

Rest in peace, Mary.

not sure if I get it, but I like it

Our Glorious Leader

It never ceases to blow my mind what a terrible person and incompetent president George Bush is. He says the Iraq disaster was Iraq's choice and can't even show the slightest bit of remorse over the shameful Valerie Plame outing. But he can dismiss America's rejection of his miserable and immoral failure of a war as some psychological defect and lecture how Congress simply needs to fund that war and shut the fuck up. This guy is insane (and not in the good way like IOZ).

Who Is IOZ?

I can't stop reading this blog. I'm convinced that this guy is some kind of insane genius. Check this out:

This plays nicely into my disunified field theory for understanding the present, apotheotic moment in the history of our empire. So much dissident effort is squandered in the search for a master narrative that accounts for the consolidation of executive power, or the so-called outsourcing of government work to private contractors, the invasions, the subversions, the lies, the repressions, the gutting of agencies, the parliamentary hijinks of the unlamented Republic majority, the martial fervor of war supporters, the Kafkaesque absurdities of the Terror War, and on and on down the list to such minor farces as the faithless, loveless, useless boondoggling of the the Office of Faith-Based Initiatives. And there is a lesson here, which is that plots don't necessarily have plots.

While everyone searches for a puppeteer, the more mundane reality takes its course. No one is actually in charge. There are greater and lesser influences surely, but at the end of the day a lot of bad men are doing bad things all on their own. That is not to say that there is no collective endeavor on the part of the current junta to wreck the world. It's to say, rather, that they are wrecking the world in the manner of an exquisite corpse.

Are you fucking kidding me? Who 1) sees this clearly AND 2) writes like this?

Or look at this brilliant nothing. What do you call it? A paw? A Hoof. Hoof!

UPDATE:

Unreal -

The image of Jim Morrison screeching "Mother! I want to fuck you . . . whaaaaa-all night looo-onnng!" while flapping his cock at that crowd in Florida appears before me. Yes indeed. From the Sermon on the Mount to Johannite moral asceticism to the Manhattan Project, Christianity leads the way.

This project to lump the whole span of history from the pre-Charmlemagnian dark years in Europe right up to the present moment into one perpetual, Christological Gemeinschaft is nothing if not audacious. Fortunately for those of us in the mocking arts, audacity is no antidote to idiocy, and is often its attendent. This argument was written with the intent to sound learned, and the natural result is that it sounds like a crackpot's pamphlet. This way to the center of our hollow Earth, ladies and gentlemen. I hold no brief for Western Civ, which is largely predicated on making trouble for everyone else, but it deserves better defenders than these.

Who the hell is this guy? This is amazing.

Fidel Castro

Castro is an interesting dude.

O'Reilly Fears the Pink Pistol Lesbians!

hahahahahahaha

"Well, you know, there is this national underground network, if you will, Bill, of women that's lesbians and also some men groups that's actually recruiting kids as young as 10 years old in a lot of the schools in the communities all across the country," he reported. "And they actually carry a number of weapons. And they commit a number of crimes."

"Now, the other thing, too, that our viewers are going to find very, very interesting, is the fact that they actually carry—some of these groups carry pink pistols," Wheeler said. "They call themselves the pink-pistol-packing group. And these are lesbians that actually carry pistols. That's 9-millimeter Glocks. They use these. They commit crimes, and they cause a lot of hurt to a lot of people."

interesting

Here's a professor that fits very well with my interests. All of these sound very cool to me:

"Evolutionary psychology, environments that support (or undermine) reasonable behavior, cognitive maps and the structure of knowledge; adaptive connectionist models; attention and mental fatigue; expertise and public participation."

I'll have to browse through their Personality and Social Context area to see if they have people filling the other side of my interests.

I wonder if I could get accepted there.

My interests

I've been trying to write this more eloquently, but end up getting nowhere, so I'm just going to force it out.

I want to apply to grad school by the end of 2007, to start a full time PhD program in fall of 2008. I've settled on Psychology as my subject, after seriously considering Economics, Anthropology, and Philosophy (and less seriously considering Biology and History). Clearly my interests don't fit into a neat container, but I think Psychology is the best match for me.

The broadest way to describe my interests is that I want to understand what the hell is wrong with everyone. That's really what is comes down to. Is that a bad way to approach this? It doesn't mean I don't think there are lots of things right with everyone, and I see that there is good in the world, but I look around and see a lot of weird shit going on and I want to make sense of it. The last few years I've been trying to figure it out on my own, but now I want to make it more formal.

I think there are two areas that I most want to pursue, both of which I think I can find in the right Psychology program. Before I get to that let's highlight some of the things I think are so fucked up. We'll go to bullet format, and I won't elaborate on them all, I'll just list items.

• Political system
  
• Religion
• Mass Media
• Environmental destruction
• Tribalism
• Addiction
• Corporations
• Unhealthy lifestyles
• Education system
  

Most of those are America-centric, and it certainly isn't meant to be a comprehensive list. That's just off the top of my head and not fully explained. I've written about many of those topics to some extent already and will surely continue to do so.

But getting back to the two main areas of study that I want to pursue, I think that all of those topic above are related by a theme: the human mind operating in a foreign environment. And the two areas of study are the human mind and the environment. I don't know if that makes sense to anyone but me. None of this is especially profound. My categories are poorly formed and everything is interrelated. But I just wanted to get my thoughts out there in a raw form.

I imagine that if I have a long academic career, it will involve digging into the way that evolved features of our mind manifest themselves in strange ways in a modern first-world environment, especially in regards to some of the bullet points mentioned. What I mean by evolved features is that humans are biological entities, evolved from earlier entities just like every other living thing on this planet. So some understanding of human behavior has to come from a biological perspective, and what is crucial is that life evolved to survive and reproduce in its environment.

If you take life out of its native environment, strange things can happen. Humans didn't evolve to live the way I live - in a suburb with cars and supermarkets and television and air conditioning and handguns and Internet pornography. And so strange things happen, like those bullet points above. To understand those strange things requires understanding how the mind works, and how the environment effects it.

I've touched on this before, but two examples of specific realms of study that interest me are personality psychology and evolutionary psychology. I think understanding personality types and how they respond to group settings is hugely helpful to understanding lots of those bullet points, which is why I've mentioned that Robert Altemeyer's work on authoritarianism has been of such interest to me. That's the part about how the mind works. And then evolutionary psychology is about understanding how we evolved, the challenges we faced, the psychological mechanisms we developed to survive and reproduce. Understanding the differences between where we've come from and where we are now is another crucial piece of making sense of those bullet points.

Pulling it back to what I want in grad school, I think it is more realistic for me to initially focus on the social/personality psychology, given my academic and career background. I've studied economics and done a lot of marketing research, and so I have a bit of experience with some of the research methodology used in that area. I maintain a keen interest in the evolutionary side, but my biology background isn't strong, and I'm not sure if I want to do anthropological type field work. So I'd like to be in a program with a few professors who are doing social/personality psychology research that I can get involved with, and also with a few professors doing evolutionary psychology work that I can watch closely.

Questions for anyone who can answer them:

• Do the ideas I've described above make sense as a decent way to approach going back to school?
• Can I, with a lot of refinement, use these ideas in essays and interviews to explain my research/career interests?
• What is the best way to identify schools that would be a good fit? I've just been looking at some program rankings, starting in kind of the 2nd tier because I don't think I have a top tier resume, and reading about the faculty at each school, with some geography considerations thrown in.

House for Sale

My house is for sale.

8714 Drexel Hill Place
Montgomery Village, Maryland 20886

Take the online tour!

Come by and visit, and then make me an offer and buy it.

Here's how my Realtor describes it:

SPECTACULAR SIDE ENTRY END UNIT, BRICK, RESERVED PARKING, NEW BERBER CARPET, FRESH PAINT, RECENT HEATING AND COOLING, 2 STORY FOYER, CERAMIC COUNTERS, BREAKFAST BAR AND NATURAL LIGHT, SEPARATE DINING ROOM, COZY FIREPLACE, TONS OF WINDOWS AND , FANTASTIC LOCATION OVERLOOKS OPEN SPACE, AMPLE PARKING, FENCED PATIO, SUPER PRISTINE CONDITION, MINUTES TO SHOPPING AND METRO, SELLERS HATE TO LEAVE !!!!

Note the caps and exclamation points. That means it's good.

Can I take credit for this?

Yay!