I never feel more masculine and heterosexual than when reading about feminism and queer theory. I don’t say that to brag (because what kind of thing is that to brag about? and how seriously can you take someone who’s bragging about being masculine on his blog while baking vegan banana bread in the background anyway?) even though it may come off that way. What I mean is just that I don’t find any sympathy in myself for what people write about under those headings.

The final assignment in one of my philosophy class asks me if feminism is dead, so naturally I go look up some papers on the topic and start reading. Feminism is something that a lot of people have concerned themselves with quite a bit for decades, yet nothing in any of the papers I looked through was in the least bit interesting. There were no poignant philosophical debates. No ethical dilemma to ponder. No greater meaning to comprehend. Sure, sexism is bad, but does that necessitate an entire philosophical framework to believe?

At many points it bordered on what I have heard termed “queer theory”, by talking about social constructions of gender, etc. From my earlier post on hetero-normativity, it’s probably pretty clear that I don’t have much sympathy for these questions either. It’s not that they don’t deserve to be answered, it’s just that the answers aren’t very interesting.

Yet reading these articles make me feel not only that a prerequisite to being feminine or queer (neither of which describes me) is to believe that these issues are, in fact, issues at all, but that if I don’t think these things are important then I must be misogynist and homophobic (queerphobic?). I’m inclined to think that the South Park quote on that same earlier post applies to these topics as well. Regardless, I find it disturbing to think that in order to identify with, say, the queer community, I must identify their causes with my own, even when they border on being militant phobias in their own right.

I’m sure in most cases it isn’t as antagonistic as that. It’s quite likely that the vast majority of people who write about feminism or queer theory, certainly in academia at least, do so because they are interested in these topics. It is the same reason that I would tend to write about religion and cosmology and study astronomy, even though I’m certain many people out there don’t care about the particular features of the big bang might be. The difference is that to be an astronomer you must learn about astronomy, but you need not learn about feminism to be female.

In the end I’m faced with the same dilemma of writing about feminism in a moral context where I believe that it not only has nothing to do with morality but also nothing to do with philosophy at all. At best it is mere cultural studies, as is queer theory. Attempts to define either of them and give them some context are lost on me. I can only hope it’s more for the same reasons Stan and his friends didn’t find the South Park flag racist than the alternative.

It’s funny how a song I don’t particularly like, and whose lyrics I can’t hear or follow, can suddenly feel so appropriate for the moment without any explanation.

I have a backlog of books I’ve been meaning to write something about. The library keeps sending me emails saying they’re due back in a few days, and I can no longer renew them. Several have already gone back but I made some notes about them—passages I liked, particularly poignant themes, that sort of thing—so one of these days I’ll write a review or reaction. There’s also a pile of chocolate bar wrappers that I want to make notes on. (Sneak preview: Ghirardelli Intense Dark tastes like purple, and is one of my top three favourites now.)

For today, for those interested, the play I described two weeks ago turned out to be Romanoff and Juliet, by Peter Ustinov. It’s a comedic clash between East and West (cold war style) in a fictitious country of Europe:

You will find us only onthe very best atlases, because we are the smallest country left in Europe—and when I say country, I don’t mean principality or grand duchy. I don’t mean a haven for gambing or income tax evasion—I mean self-respecting country which deserves, and sometimes achieves, a colour of its own on the map—usually a dyspeptic mint green, which misses the outline of the frontier by a fraction of an inch, so that one can almost hear the printer saying damn.

– The General, Act I

Unfortunately, complimentary to the mediocre song that suddenly sounds perfect, this favourite play of mine didn’t quite live up to its memory. I suppose that’s to be expected—one’s tastes change. We see things where there was nothing before, and we see nothing where we once thought there was something.

I know why spring is mating season in the animal kingdon. It’s because people are better looking in spring.

I noticed this as I was walking across campus today, with my jacket unzipped and toque tucked away in my bookbag. With the temperature flirting with double digits (above zero, for once) I was finally able to be comfortable outside.

There was a day last week when it seemed like rue University, a busy downtown street sloping up the mountain, was much longer than usual. How could a street, one I had walked along almost every day for years, suddenly gain a few hundred metres in length? It was an optical illusion—it just happened to be warm enough that day that I could look up the hill and not have my eyes freeze.

Come spring, no longer do we have to cover ourselves in five layers, each one thicker than the last. We can bust out our favourite jacket if that’s what we want. In this perfect median termperature one person can be wearing a t-shirt and another a full ecclectic ensemble, but nobody is hunched over in a speed walk from point A to point B, trying to race the cold.

It’s not that people are scantily clad that catches my eye—its not that warm yet—its just that they can finally be comfortable and wear what you want. In the winter when someone tries to dress stylish, they look foolish. It doesn’t matter if you want to wear a short skirt to the club, nobody thinks that looks good outside at -20 degrees. It looks painful. In the spring you can dress as you will and not worry about losing an appendage to frostbite.

A person’s style shows through, and whether cutting edge, mainstream, offbeat, or unique, a person who looks like they feel good, like they feel confident and happy, no matter what they’re wearing, looks damn good in spring.

What the hell does “hetero-normative” mean anyway?

I get the feeling that there should be some negative connotations associated with the term “talking heads”, but I can’t figure out why. What else should heads do? What else should be talking?

I had to write a paper on feminism last Friday. I couldn’t do it. All I could think of were those stereotypical types, “nazi-feminists” as a friend of mine called them. The kind of people who use words like “hetero-normative”. I can’t stand it.

I just read a novel, published online, called Lockpick Pornography. It’s fast, dirty, and angry. Full of what can only be described as “nazi-homosexuals”; the main character at least is militant and wild in his hatred of anything “normal”. It is a rant about gender issues, and though I do agree with some of the points, I could barely stand reading it. How can a person be angry at the heterosexual beauty myth? What does that even mean? I survived through it with the help of Mrs. Hubert and Michelle.

“Tough like set theory, but easy like Home Economics.” I’ve heard that line before. In different words, from a different author, but it’s the same line.

I sometimes think that I need to be a black transgendered woman in order to understand what people get so upset about sometimes. I am a middle class white male; such people have no clout in matters of discrimination. How are people offended by words? By actions, even? The things that offend me most are people trying too hard to be politically correct or non discriminatory. Sexism for the sake of sexism is probably wrong in most reasonable moral theories, like racism and homophobia, but these discriminatory “isms” can be only a consequence of some incidental correlation.

I’m reminded of Stephen Colbert. He claims on his show that he doesn’t see race, and in doing so, sounds racist. That’s the beauty of it. I think it’s completely realistic. Ignorance of your own racism and not being racist at all, at times, converge to the same thing. That’s not to say that racism (sexism, etc) is right or justifiable, it’s just that people often perceive things as racist when they’re nothing of the kind.

South Park. Episode 4×08. Chef Goes Nanners.

Chef: Whoa, whoa, whoa. You just missed the point entirely.

Children: Huh?

Chef: I’m not mad because the flag shows somebody getting killed. It’s because it’s racist!

Children: Racist?

Chef: Children, don’t you even know what this argument is about? That flag is racist because a black man is being hung by white people.

Children: Ooooh

Chef: Oh?!

Children: We didn’t really see it that way.

Chef: But that’s a black man up there.

Children: Yeah but, colour of someone’s skin doesn’t matter.

Chef: But of course it matters when… oh my god.

I’m definitely aware that I might be accused of just being ignorant of the subtleties of the issue—of racism, feminism, the social construct of gender, all of it. But I think it’s equally possible that it’s all the subtleties that are social constructions. Something for us to direct our anger at. Social construction as a social construction. It’s not something I’d be able to argue for if someone assaulted me on the street accusing me of conforming to hetero-normative expectations as they do in Lockpick Pornography, so I reserve the right to change my mind about the whole thing, but my intuition tells me that it’s a philosophy that could be developed further.

How does one communicate with a song?

How can I put down in words the same sense that a simple tune played on only a piano convey. It is a simpler language but completely different. Sentences become phrases, a few bars at a time or held together with a long legato. Your voice becomes the instrument’s, your tone in the dynamics and tempo.

Dotted half notes move slowly in the right hand, telling their story, while the left hand plays the beat of a mournful waltz. The tempo itself flows like water. The upper octave joins and the feeling increases. Smooth arpeggios contrast the slow melody. The notes remain the same, repeating, but something in them changes to say what needs to be said.

Words themselves are something all their own, different from the language we speak and the meanings we understand. People can use words like music even in prose, or like colours in a painting.

Pianissimo. Ad lib. Cords play like chimes. Piano, a tempo. Base notes cross over the melody to meet their mates octaves above. Crescendo, mezzoforte. There is no voice but somebody is speaking.

There are not enough English sentences to describe everything which is true. Consult your nearest philosopher or mathematician. (They may not know it, but one should always be the other.) The proof talks about cardinality of the subsets of natural numbers. It’s a game of infinities that I don’t quite believe, but I guess it’s not as hard as I thought to find things which cannot be said.

Decrescendo, ralentir, pianissimo once more.

Yes, I admit, I googled “skeet ulrich shirtless” last night. But no, it was not to satisfy some latent homoerotic desires for the star of Jericho. It started as a completely innocent conversation about movies and television and just progressed from there.

Somewhere along the way I read that Skeet Ulrich had open heart surgery when he was young, which means he had a sternotomy, which means he has the same scar on his chest that I do. Unfortunately his seems to have healed much nicer than mine did, which isn’t a surprise since I know mine didn’t do as well as the doctors expected. You can barely see it in that photo but its the only one I could find. And no, I will not post a photo of mine to compare.

I know plenty of seniors have sternotomies, but finding another young person who has had one is a bit like Amalthea finding a second unicorn. The nurses always said it was refreshing to give needles to someone with firm flesh on their arm. I saw someone in the university gym locker room last semester with the same distinctive scar and I had a strong instinct to say hi, but it probably would have been weird so I said nothing.

It’s definitely a small detail of a person’s life, that they have a scar on their chest. It is at most a story to tell, but one that is worn forever like a tattoo whether its an interesting one or not. But as inconsequential as that detail may be, it’s still nice to know that I’m not the only one who has it.

I feel like a norn with a lazy decision lobe. Stimulus from around me raises and lowers various meters in my head, and when one hits a maximum value I’m motivated enough to do that action. Norns have a very limit scope of things they can do compared to a person — move, eat, talk, sleep, etc — but the concept is the same. Today, despite having lots of vague ideas in my head about what I might do, even just what I might write about here, I don’t have much of a push to do any one thing in particular.

I have a lot of notes on some books I’ve read that I should put together and post in the compendium. Each book I read ends up with a dozen little bookdarts marking various pages. Words I want to look up, words I want to remember. A clever sentence or an inspiring quote. Where my brother uses only one to mark his place, moving it from book to book as he reads, I ordered 250 three years ago and am now in desperate need for more.

Then again, I have books still waiting to be read at all. I don’t need to revisit the ones I’ve already taken in quite yet. Then there is the mundane, from doing dishes and laundry to going up to the gym. Yes, these things need to be done, but none so urgently as to max out their little meter in my head.

Instead I sit around, snacking (lacking the inspiration of a good meal to cook), watching television or movies. I might yet watch another, but to appreciate them I need to be in the mood. I think about how I might make a moral argument for ageism, for a debate in one of my upcoming classes. The Truman Show pushes me to wonder if a perfect simulation is as good as the real thing. Seahaven Island was not perfect, of course, since it failed to deceive its only real inhabitant completely. If a perfect simulation of a world is not worth living in, doesn’t God’s having created this universe make it worthless? A poor excuse for the real universe where God himself lives and plays.

I was standing in the shower and looked down at the scar on my chest. I wondered what it would have looked like in the few hours between when I didn’t have the scar and when it started healing together. The doctors know. This thought is only half-formed for a reason, and I can bet most people can guess at what it is. Very few relish picturing their sternum being sawed apart.

But as far as I know, for as much as I care, it may never have happened. All is ephemeral, one moment passing to the next. From a sunny summer afternoon to a hospital ICU and back again to the outdoors, nothing changed but a bit of epidermis. Photons that have flowed through space for 14 billion years meet their end in a simple man-made detector asking simple questions about the world. Even energy is not conserved.

Why would we want it to be anyway? Not much happens in flat spacetime. There are no snacks to be eaten, no movies to watch, no people to meet and have conversations with. Just a gedanken and a dream. This all sounds a bit nihilistic, I know, but with the right mindset even nihilism can be the motivation we need.

JERRY: I still can’t believe, you’re going out on a blind date.

ELAINE: I’m not worried. It sounds like he’s really good looking.

JERRY: You’re going by sound? What are we? Whales?

ELAINE: I think I can tell.

JERRY: Elaine, what percentage of people would you say are good looking?

ELAINE: Twenty-five percent.

JERRY: Twenty-five percent, you say? No way! It’s like 4 to 6 percent. It’s a twenty to one shot.

ELAINE: You’re way off.

JERRY: Way off? Have you been to the motor vehicle bureau? It’s like a leper colony down there.

ELAINE: So what you are saying is that 90 to 95 percent of the population is undateable?

JERRY: UNDATEABLE!

ELAINE: Then how are all these people getting together?

JERRY: Alcohol.

– Seinfeld, s7e4: “The Wink“

Yes, it’s true, the characters on Seinfeld are terrible people, but that’s why we love them. I’ve had this exchange in my head for the last couple weeks and I’ve been trying to think about whose side I’m on through rigorous scientific study. That is, judging people in my classes superficially. I think Jerry’s probably got it right, although everybody’s 4 to 6 percent will be different people, so you don’t have to rely on alcohol as much. Hopefully, everybody’s dateable to somebody.

This is my last maple tea bag.

In my mind this time had already been signed away for other things, but things get postponed. The typical attractions have worn out for the moment, which is fine by me since they aren’t really that attractive to begin with. Instead here I am.

Tourist trinket though it may be, it’s hard to otherwise find a good ceylon blend. This maple tea from its little wooden box, Earl Grey with lemon, and peach green are the staples of my winter diet. I’m much more comfortable wrapped up in layers upon layers with tea in hand than coaxing a few more kelvin out of my heaters. It’s only kinetic energy, and I hardly need that burrowed down in the depths of my couch.

All the books lying around have been read, so the afternoon has passed with pictures, both still and otherwise. A picture can’t be worth a thousand words, since there’s no way I could describe everything in them with words at all. They’re just little coloured pixels, right? Laughter on the street, feet in the sand of a tropical beach, a kiss above Nagasaki. Pixels on a computer screen, neurons firing, molecules reacting, electrons moving.

There’s kinetic energy in my tea, too.

There’s a word for it, I think, but it makes it sound like I have some kind of medical condition. I see everything in colour.

Letters have colours. Numbers have colours. Words have colours, but not necessarily based on the letters that make them up. Even things like electricity, momentum, and ethics have colours, but not necessarily based on the colour of the word that describes them.

I’m starting to suspect that it’s affecting my regular life. I always get confused when equations in class only use “p” and “q”, since they have the same colour and that makes it hard to tell them apart. Even worse, sometimes I’d rather get a fifty on an assignment than a seventy, because “50″ is bright red but “70″ is gross lime green, and who wants a lime green grade?

For some words the colours are debatable, but for others they’re definitely not. Anybody who says electricity is anything other than bright blue, for example, is colourblind. So, to avoid any irrational arguments in the future, here’s a crash course to the world of colour:

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