I have added a Wiki to my site. If you don't know what a Wiki is, here is a good explanation. I intend to use the Wiki myself for the following purposes:
You are more than welcome to use it for any of these reasons:
I would prefer that you not use it for any of the following:
When I was in Maine to visit my sister, I bought four tower candles. I already had some votive candles, and I've been burning them lately—mostly the tower candles, but one time I had all of them going at once.
They smell nice and look pretty, but when lit, they take on a whole different dimension. They lend some sort of a feel to the room that is difficult to describe, but is almost…spiritual? I spend a lot of time cutting blocks of wax with my knife and pushing them closer to the wick to try to keep the candle burning evenly, and sometimes I will find that I've been staring for minutes on end into the flame. It's as if my mind can almost completely turn off while looking at one of these candles. But I know that something must be going on, at least at an unconscious level.
Anyway, I like candles. As long as you don't pick the ones that have unpleasant scents, they would make a good generic present for me, if ever you're called on to give me one and can't think of something better. I prefer the ones that are relatively thick and not in jars, if so.
I've realized that in a lot of discussions of philosophy, often as regards the interpretation of the Matrix series specifically, I tend to conflate the concepts of determinism and fatalism. But they actually are quite separate. Determinism states that given the total state of the universe at time A, one could in theory given sufficient computing power predict the exact state of the universe at all times subsequent to A. Fatalism is more nebulous; it states that certain human-level actions or conditions are “predestined” in the sense that even though there are many ways that other variables could go, they will all lead to that action or condition. For example, it could be fated that I will marry person X (for some person X—I don't claim to know who), in which case the claim is not that I will in fact marry X but that no matter what I do, I will marry person X.
Strictly speaking, I think that both determinism and fatalism are nonsense. Specifically, Hume demonstrated that there is no logical reason for induction to work, and the idea that certain things are fated to happen no matter what I choose seems to be made a mockery of by the fact that I could fairly easily choose to end my life at any point. However, I think that the interesting parts of this issue are to be found if we ignore these objections.
For the issue of determinism, we must ask what the nature of the laws of the universe are. For any set of facts, it is possible either to view them as brute facts unexplained by any set of laws or as subsumed under some set of laws. We humans are psychologically incapable of truly conceiving of the world as a raw set of brute facts (see Hume and Kant), but there is nothing in the world to select between these two viewpoints, only psychological factors. (Yes, materalists will object that psychological facts are a specific type of fact about the physical world. To me, this is nearly a reductio of materalism.) Thus, the question of whether determinism is true or false seems to be purely a matter of perspective; if two people have reasoned carefully through the arguments, there is no reason to expect that they will necessarily arrive at the same conclusion, nor that one will have rational grounds to criticize the other.
Fatalism, on the other hand, seems to be plain nonsense. Given that all physically possible universes “exist” in some weak sense, clearly for any human-level describable event there is some universe (in fact, an infinite number of universes, barring that event's being a total description of the relevant universe) in which it exists and (moreover) in which it does not exist. Assuming possibility to denote physical possibility, i.e., existence in some physically possible world, fatalism simply does not make sense.
Nevertheless, assuming that probability is defined by a rational-choice model (I judge event A to be 25% probable if I will take with indifference a bet which pays 3 utiles if A happens and -1 utiles if A does not happen), it is possible, of course, for an event to be overwhelmingly probable, perhaps even infinitely probable (if I will take with indifference a bet in which I lose any positive amount of utiles if A does not happen and have an unchanged quantity of utiles if A does happen). However, this does not seem to be what fatalism is getting at, either. Fatalism is not about probable events; fatalism tries to say that some events are certain before they happen. To which I respond: certain to whom? Certainty is not a property that inheres in a state of affairs; it is an attitude theretowards. Thus, if I am certain that A will happen, and A does happen, was A fated? Well, what would it mean if I were certain that A would happen, but A did not happen? There are two relevant possibilities: either this is impossible, because certainty implicates truth, but in this case the insertion of the word “certain” amounts to nothing more than begging the question; or else this is possible, in which case the event was not fated, since it might not have happened. Therefore, the concept of fate is logically flawed.
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I forget exactly when Charlie first mentioned this to me—many years ago, I think—but he pointed out that most really good works of fiction have three sides. Some or all of these sides can be manifested by only one character, but generally they are groups of characters—this theory refers more to the overall plot rather than a single relationship.
This idea occurred to me again while writing my novel (which does, indeed, have three basic groups). It is very obviously present in the Final Fantasy games. If you've ever played any of them, you know that they all have heroes (the characters you play), a “shadow villain”, and a real villain. This specific way of setting things up is the most common, perhaps even the meaning of the three-sided view: the good, the bad, and the ugly.
It's clear why having only a single force would not work: there would be no conflict. Without conflict, a story is pointless. If your response is that there can still be internal conflict, you are correct, but you have failed to realize that this merely means that the original view of the story as having only one force was flawed.
A story with only two forces does not work well, either, though. It does seem like the intuitively obvious way to do things, but the problem is that it's too obvious. All the characters on side X want to defeat the characters on side Y, and the ones on side Y want to defeat those on side X. This gives conflict, unlike the stasis of a one-force story, but the conflict itself becomes a static element. Fundamentally, in a two-force story, all the interactions are too predictable. Good characters can save this, but they generally do so by turning the story into a three-force story which is just a little harder to recognize as such.
Why not a four-force story, then? There is, of course, the practical problem that it starts to be hard to adequately depict too many forces in a work that is comprehensible to humans, but there seems to be a better argument. Charlie told me (and this makes a lot of sense) that in sociology, a three-person relationship is considered to be the least stable. With four forces, they would tend to pair off into alliances, and we'd be right back to the problems of the two-force story.
Of course, truly great stories almost always have multi-level plots. That is, though the three forces will exist, a given character (particularly an important one) will not always be acting solely as an organ of one of those forces. It is also possible to pull this down a level so that a single character embodies a force, but his multiple motivations effectively cause him to act in different rôles at different times. It is difficult to work in all three levels (multiply motivated characters, multiple characters, multiple forces) simultaneously, but possible and often worthwhile; to exceed a certain scope, it seems necessary. (Many movies do not need this complex of a plot, for example, but any thousand-page novel (there should be another word for a written work of fiction of that scope) had better have it.)
Ralah is a constructed language created by Charlie and me. In Ralah, each phoneme / “letter” has a meaning and a grammar. The meaning of a word is just the meaning of the letters that make it up, combined by the grammatical rules.
Click here for the Wiki page on Ralah, which will initially contain the same text as this journal entry.
A few simple rules that Ralah follows (or tries to):
The current (and likely permanent) meanings of the letters are as follows. Note that the descriptions are extremely telescoped; they are not intended to teach you what the letters mean, but to remind you, if you already know anyway. Please do not assume that this guide is adequate to a full understanding of Ralah starting from scratch, even if you are very intelligent.
(Since my way of transcribing phonetics may be slightly odd, I have included an English word for each letter that includes the relevant phoneme, with the letter(s) that comprise it italicized.)
Wiki page for this journal entry
On Saturday, I had planned to meet three other NaNoWriMo participants at Barnes and Noble. Since there was an enormous amount of snow falling at the time, I left at 17:30 or so, planning to arrive at 19:00. Of course, it had been cancelled, and no one else showed up. (Barnes and Noble wasn't even open, in fact.) It was not a total loss, however. I discovered that I really like driving in snow, even if I did have to go 45 on the Thruway, and sitting there, in the Barnes and Noble parking lot, I formulated a new plan.
I called Charlie on my cell phone and asked if he was doing anything. I said that it was about the same distance to his house or mine, and that although I hadn't planned on visiting, I had everything I would require with me. At about 20:00, I parked on the side of the road in Saratoga. (Charlie's driveway had not yet been plowed and was completely impossible to get into.)
While I was there, we mostly worked on Ralah. We also watched a good number of movies.
I've seen too many movies over the past few days to give a detailed review of each, so I'll summarize.
There are only two human virtues that really matter—competence and determination. Competence—“I can do it”—and determination—“I will do it”. Without these, all the rest—beauty, sex appeal, health, charisma, power, money, compassion—are meaningless, and with the will and the ability, they come when they are necessary and do not matter otherwise.
I have always been competent. I have always known that I was better than almost everyone around me at doing things—the kind of things I care about. But I have been short on determination.
I am determined now.
I have written Breakout. I could die happy, in this moment. But I will not die, because I have so much still left to do … so many things to say, people to meet, moments to share, stories to tell … The only thing that even dares stand in my way is illusionary failure whose only purpose is to remind me what my success means.
I can. And …
I will.
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“Why are they all running to Colorado?” he asked. “What have they got down there that we haven't got?”
The young man grinned. “Maybe it's something you've got that they haven't got.”
“What?” The young man did not answer. “I don't see it. It's a backward, primitive, unenlightened place. They don't even have a modern government. It's the worst government in any state. The laziest. It does nothing—outside of keeping law courts and a police department. It doesn't do anything for the people. It doesn't help anybody. I don't see why all our best companies want to run there.”
p. 254, Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand
Today's AWAD quote (search for “Fri Dec 12”) is this:
Do not pray for tasks equal to your powers; pray for powers equal to your tasks.
—Phillips Brooks, bishop and orator (1835-1893)
This is supposed to mean “you will face hard tasks; do not try to avoid them, try to rise to meet them”. But, initially, I did not realize this. Instead, I misread it as “do not pray for tasks hard enough to match your powers; pray for tasks exactly matched to your powers”, and wondered how it could make even the slightest bit of sense, as it seemed to be saying “do not pray for x; pray for x”. I.e., I assumed my powers to be great enough to meet the tasks that will be demanded of me. This misreading says something about my attitude at the moment.
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Ratha did not like Breakout.
If she rather than I were writing this journal entry, she would be more compromising. She would say “it was tightly put together, with good characterization, it kept me turning the pages, … I just didn't respond to it emotionally”, or something like that. But I have no taste for evasion of the main issue in this manner. (Ratha, if you feel I have unfairly characterized your opinion, please respond on the Wiki. Others, please check there if you wish to hear Ratha's side.)
Nor do I wish to evade my response to it—a degree of disappointment which it may be hard for me to express. That Ratha is a member of my proper audience—the people who deserve to read and to understand my book—is nearly as obvious to me as that I have fingers. I know that everything that happens, happens for a reason, but it is hard for me to understand what the reason for this could be. It seems an utterly senseless waste.
Nevertheless, I will endeavour not to evade the facts of the matter, either, but to face them without fear or resentment.
Over the weekend, I visited Charlie. We watched some movies and discussed Ralah (a large part of the results of that can be seen in the still very much in-progress Wiki section related thereto), but I find the most interesting aspect of the visit to be two situations related to my possession of a cell phone. The existence of these types of situations leads Charlie to believe that I should not have a cell phone, and while I do not concur (as I have already considered the pros and cons), I see how it is unpleasant to him.
The first is that late Saturday evening, I received a call from Ratha, who rather quickly handed the phone over to Laura. Having not spoken to Laura in months, and believing it unlikely that many more opportunities to do so would arise before my visit to Pittsburgh (see below), I made a snap judgment that Charlie would tolerate what I considered to be a slight amount of rudeness in taking a not unreasonably long phone call while visiting him.
Though I find myself unable to feel any guilt over my actions, it did turn out that I had underestimated how displeased (this isn't really the word for which I am looking, but I can't think of a word that simply means “emotion with negative valence” in exactly the same way as “joy” means “emotion with positive valence”—the word in Ralah would be “Dhemonav”, if that helps) Charlie would be. We discussed this at length, but didn't really seem to get anywhere, due to the fact that what we were trying to do was intersubjectively compare the magnitude of values, which I believe to be inherently impossible. I freely admit that I participated in this meaningless discussion as fully as did Charlie; even though I believe that the idea of comparing values across different people makes no sense, it still often seems like an awfully tempting thing to do.
The second incident was that my father had been trying to call me for quite some time, to warn me about the snow storm. I hadn't been paying attention to my phone anyway, but if I had been, all I would have seen is a bunch of phone calls that blocked caller ID, and I don't answer those. I have tried to figure out how my father can turn off caller ID blocking on a per-call basis, but so far those attempts have been unsuccessful.
What I was not able to make my father understand when I called him on Charlie's line is that calling me on a cell phone is a privilege of his, not a right. I could very easily choose not to have a cell phone. Given that I do choose to have one, I can also choose to reject calls for any reason I feel like. My father stated at one point in our conversation, in a sarcastic tone, “so, you just have a cell phone for your own convenience, and the rest of us can just forget it?” My reaction was incredulous, because it had not even occurred to me that it would logically make sense for me to have a cell phone for any reason other than my own convenience. Why else would I choose to have one?
Anyway, I am willing to allow my father to call me, in most circumstances; but in order to do that, I have to know who he is. I am not willing to accept random anonymous calls, particularly insofar as they cost me money. I could not get my father to understand that, if it is truly technically impossible for him to disable caller ID blocking, then it is acceptable to me that he be unable to call me. Without working from that as a basis, reasonable discussion of the issue becomes impossible.
I guess I see that cell phones have negative aspects, but they seem to be overwhelmingly due to other people's foolishness. Aside from the fact that I do not believe that level of foolishness to be high enough that I should not have a cell phone, it irks me at a gut level to change my own behavior to accomodate foolishness.
I have been re-reading Atlas Shrugged (as you no doubt gathered from my last journal entry). It is a Great book, but I have little to say about it that could not be better experienced by your reading it. So, if you haven't read it or haven't done so in a while, consider it.
My plans for my next visit to Pittsburgh are pretty much final at this point. I'll be leaving Albany most likely in the morning on January 24, although late January 23 is not impossible, arriving in Pittsburgh 8 or 9 hours after I leave. I expect to stay with Ratha, although if anyone else wants to offer me a place to sleep for a night or two, feel free. I will go back to Albany on February 1 at an as-yet indeterminate time.
I am looking forward to this visit a perhaps inordinate amount. It is things such as this that give my life the sparkle that enables me to consider things meaningful.
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Saturday was the Hamm family Christmas celebration. (We traditionally do this as an extended family on a Saturday some time near Christmas so that the actual day can be spent with one's nuclear family, and also to make travel plans easier.) It was held at my Aunt Susan and Uncle Ken's house, and in addition to them and their children Brian and Tasha, attendees included my paternal grandparents, my father, Nance, my Uncle Jim and Aunt Edith and their children Tara and James, my sister Betsy, and, of course, me.
In the past, as Charlie later expressed had been his expectation this time as well, these gatherings have been at best “good” and often merely “not painful”. However, this time I really enjoyed myself. The only thing marring the experience, really, was that I had not bought presents for anyone. I have resolved that next year, I will have to start shopping for Christmas presents earlier and come up with a paradigm for presents for people—such as my cousins, aunts and uncles—who I don't really know what to get.
One difference was that this year I was reading Atlas Shrugged, and had no qualms about retreating back into my book if there was a lull in conversation and activity. But that actually didn't become necessary very often. I discovered that Brian largely shares my political views on issues other than finance, so I said I would get him a copy of Atlas Shrugged, which I'm sure his parents will appreciate as well. (Actually, Susan read Atlas Shrugged when she was much younger, so she might still have at least some appreciation for it.) We came up with a list of classic works of fiction over 1,000 pages—Atlas Shrugged, The Count of Monte Cristo, War and Peace, Gone with the Wind, and one other I can't remember at the moment were all we were able to come up with. Though I don't doubt that there are more than we were able to list, still this means that if I ever write a work of that length and quality (which I intend to do), I will be joining a fairly small, élite class.
The rest of the cousins all play some sort of musical instrument, so they did that, while I sat out. There was good food and exchange of gifts. (Everyone appreciated my Amazon wishlist, as it seems that my problem with picking presents for someone with whom one does not often deal is near-universal, and the other cousins were informed that it would be good for them to have wishlists as well.) Finally, things began to wind down, so I took my sister back to her mother's house and headed up to Charlie's.
I arrived at Charlie's place around 20:00. Dan, who is both a friend of Charlie's and his former roommate, recently got back from a several-month visit to Italy, so we went out for food. We took my car to avoid having to bother with inflating Charlie's tire. We went to the Sushi Thai Garden, where we got the Sushi Boat for 3. The conversation mostly involved attitudes towards women. I don't feel that I was able to defend my viewpoints all that well, but then again, that may be because there isn't much to defend. Even though I normally think this kind of attitude is useless and destructive, I actually have an active aversion to having more experience with romance, as if somehow I will become jaded and no longer believe that any valuable romantic relationship is intrinsically possible. (I don't necessarily think this contrast is evidence of inconsistency on my part, since I have repeatedly stated that to me, romance is qualitatively different from every other sphere of human existence, and analogies between them inevitably fall flat for me. Still, it does give others grounds to criticize me and often seems to leave me helpless to defend myself.)
After dinner, we headed to Dan's place to pick up some stuff, then back to Charlie's. Charlie let Dan see his reading copy of Breakout, but Dan was unable to read it to enjoy it rather than being (to my mind) hypercritical even on the very first page, and decided that he would put it off for a while.
I was very tired by 1:00 or so, and crashed. I don't really remember where Sunday went, but eventually Charlie had to leave to have dinner with his parents in Greenfield, and I left around the same time.
It feels good to have somebody other than me who gets my book, though I am starting to doubt that anyone else will, at least in its current form. Less certain is that no one other than Charlie and me will ever get it at all, even after I have edited it, but I would not rule out that possibility. I am hopeful about Ed, though; I think he at least has a shot at it.
On Monday night I made fairly spontaneous plans to pick up Ed after work on Tuesday and “do something”. Absent a better paradigm, that ended up meaning that we meant to Crossgates. Naturally, it was very busy, it being two days before Christmas and all, but still acceptable. We bought tickets to The Last Samurai and walked around looking at things, then stopped for food at Sbarro's and talked about CMU. Eventually it was 18:25, and being that the movie started at 18:50, we decided to head into the theater.
I had fairly low expectations of the movie: although a friend of Charlie's, who Charlie says has very similar tastes in movies to his, had said it was the best movie he had seen in the last five years, I had thought that the previews looked stupid, like they were trying too hard. However, my final opinion of the movie is that although it's not really my kind of film (historical drama with plenty of violence), it was very well put together, with a good theme, and I was able to appreciate it for what it was.
Ed's and my conversation earlier had revolved around putting together a team of people to save the world (from some as-yet unknown disaster), and particularly the role that leadership might play. I had argued that in a team of “good people” (unfortunately, I still do not have an adequate definition or even description of that term, though I use it in my own head all the time), leadership essentially consisted in who got to wear the special hat—everyone should understand the situation well enough not to step on one another's toes.
This conversation continued as I drove Ed back home. Ed did not believe that it was even possible to have a team that would not step on one another's toes, but he thought that effective leadership could make it more or less as if that were the case. I argued from both sides—that in a team with no people who “got in the way”, there would be little toe-stepping for a leader to prevent, and in a team where there was a fair amount of toe-stepping going on, no leader could ever hope to fix the situation so well as to get the efficiency back to no-toe-stepping levels. I think that by the end, I got him to see what I had been trying to say all along, although perhaps not as articulately as I would like. I had never been talking about a particularly realistic situation in mundane life, but rather a once-in-a-lifetime mission. In this type of situation, stupid people would be worse than useless; they would actually hinder progress, and the best thing you could do with them is to get rid of them entirely.
Also, I think I managed to convince Ed to give up video games for a little while, since he's been spending a lot of time on them lately. He finds them enjoyable, but not productive; he expects to spend more time on reading if he gives them up, which, while still a “waste of time” in some senses, is nevertheless more useful.
Eventually I dropped Ed off and drove home. By the time I got back, I had been in near-darkness for most of the past 4 hours, and no alcohol was necessary to make me fall asleep almost immediately.
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“We are offering you a blank check on what is, as you realize, an unlimited account. What else can you want? Name your price.”
“The sale of the rights to Rearden Metal is not open to discussion. If you have anything else to say, please say it and leave.”
The man leaned back, looked at Rearden incredulously and asked, “What are you after?”
[...]
The man walked to the door, then stopped and looked at Rearden in a way which, for once, was simple human curiosity. Rearden stood motionless against the moving glow on the wall; he stood casually, his hands in his pockets.
“Would you tell me,” the man asked, “just between us, it's only my personal curiosity—why are you doing this?”
Rearden answered quietly, “I'll tell you. You won't understand. You see, it's because Rearden Metal is good.”
pp. 172-173, Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand
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I guess Christmas was okay. Actually, it was not all that enjoyable. The food was good, and the presents (both the giving and the receiving) were acceptable, but the way that my mother thinks is just something with which I cannot deal. It always catches me off guard, the seemingly intentional foggy-headedness, as if there is no way that a human being could possibly choose to act this way. I am not in the mood to attempt to illustrate this with specific examples. Suffice it to say that I find dealing with my mother such an unpleasant experience that I found myself with no choice but to tell her just how unpleasant I found it, and that I was leaving.
Her reaction to this, naturally, was tears. Yet I felt strangely unmoved by pity—strangely, I suppose, if only because pity, at least, has normally come so easily to me. She told me that she was not able to understand, but that she still loved me and was glad I had came. I followed her back into the kitchen and I said, in an unemotional tone, “Thank you”.
Looking back, there is a part of me that greatly regrets how I acted, and that even now is desperately looking for any excuse to attempt to undo the gesture, to any extent that that is possible. And, to be fair to it, it is true that the purpose of my action was not offense—that was simply its inevitable by-product. My purpose, in point of fact, was that I have become unable to tolerate the degree of evasion required for me to treat things at a purely abstract level—to consider only that this is Christmas, and not what exactly the this is. It is possible to look upon this as a failure on my part—a failure of tolerance. Yet it is not a failure of acceptance (a term I use in my own mind in a somewhat specialized sense which unfortunately is difficult to explain). I accept that things are the way they are, I accept that my mother will never change such that things are no longer this way, and I accept that the inevitable result of this is that it will be impossible for us to see fully eye-to-eye with one another. I desperately want this not to be true. I wish that I could change people by sheer force of will, but this is impossible. I can give them the key, but they have to unlock the door for themselves.
Overcome by some sort of strange nostalgia, when I left, I headed for New Street in Coxsackie rather than straight home. New Street is where I lived for the first 8 years of my life. I walked up and down the street, smiling at children and saying hi to one family. I thought they might be nervous to see someone with a full beard and long hair, wearing a black trenchcoat and black leather gloves, walking down the street in the dark, but no one seemed terribly disturbed. While I was there, I tried to call Ratha to have someone with whom to share the moment, but she did not answer, and soon, I took off.
As I drove back home, Ratha called me back. We ended up speaking for an hour and 20 minutes (much longer than it took me to get home). I explained why I had tried to call her, we talked a bit about Breakout so that she'll have a better chance to get it next time, we talked about how to deal with people and social situations (she has been spending time lately dealing with people in a sort of fuzzy manner, not worrying too much about what she's saying; I believe that my life is too short to waste it on such things when I also aspire to Great accomplishments), and a little about work. The luminous feeling of a mind that has some idea what I'm trying to say is difficult to explain; suffice it to say that it is one of the greatest experiences a person like me can have, and that it seems almost too good that the world has provided me with such people …
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I don't know how I managed not to write about this before—I guess it just slipped my mind, or that I really have gotten out of the habit of journalling (though the last few days would seem to indicate otherwise). Thus, this entry concerns events occuring on December 11th and 12th.
On the 11th, Laura posted a LiveJournal entry. Within a minute (probably a few seconds) of reading it, I decided to see Love Actually. I would have gone that night, but I had somehow managed to forget my wallet; I took this as an omen and decided to put it off until tomorrow.
So, after work on Friday (the 12th), I headed over to Crossgates. I bought my one ticket, having to push slightly past what I thought might seem like awkwardness to the cashier—I wondered if the thought “Why is a guy, and evidently sort of a tough guy, judging by the long beard and trenchcoat, buying one ticket to a chick flick?” might pass through his head—but buying the ticket just the same, feeling no tension, but only a joyous release. I walked around the mall for about an hour, picking out presents for my father and my sister, then went back to the theater.
I have a feeling that, sitting in the middle of the front row of the stadium seats with my shoes off and my feet up, I may have offended two young ladies who were sitting next to me but then decided to move one row up. Before the movie started, I wanted badly to ask them what their reason for moving was (this being, of course, an attempt to make the question “did you find me offensive” less of an affront in and of itself, though my purpose in asking it would have been simple curiosity—but this seems impossible to convey to someone I don't know). I resolved to ask after the movie was over, but through the course of the movie it came to seem totally irrelevant to me, and I did not end up asking.
Love Actually is Great. I will not attempt to defend this view. It was, in places, cheesy, that's for sure. In fact, that was part of its charm—the moments of contrivance, put forth for the purpose of being recognized as contrivance, were laugh-out-loud moments for me. Yet humor was only an inevitable side effect of the movie, not its fundamental purpose.
Ayn Rand once said something to the effect that while in life, one ignores the unimportant, in art, one omits it. She stated that it would be a hideous affront to æsthetic sensibility to include, say, a wart on a painting of a beautiful woman. Love Actually is the full, the absolute—the glowing—disproof of this statement, because it includes the irrelevant—precisely for the purpose of showing that it is irrelevant. It is an awkward movie through and through—but intentionally awkward, awkward for the purpose of showing, in a deep sense, just what is important and what is not.
If you are unsentimental or have strong objections to contrivance, you might not like Love Actually. Or if, on the other hand, you hold to a rigid standard of value that permits no accidents, as Ayn Rand did, you would not like it either. But if you can permit yourself to just let go—to enter, for a moment, a world where everything works out right—then I highly recommend Love Actually.
When the movie was over, as I sat in my car, I called Laura. She did not answer (and I found out the next day that she in fact now has a new cell number, and only occasionally checks the old one). When the voicemail came on, I did not realize for about ten or fifteen seconds that it was now time to leave a message. Then I said in a clear, calm voice (I hope I get the wording right, though the meaning will be the same):
Hi Laura, it's Kenn. I know you're probably not in the mood to hear this right now, so I want you to remember it for when you are. Everything is going to be all right.
Then I hung up. (Laura, if that's not exactly what I said, can you leave a comment with the exact wording on the Wiki?) I drove home, listening to Anthem by Ronan Hardiman, feeling completely at peace.
No one and nothing can take away from me what I now have. Pain and unhappiness are mere accidents. I have my whole life ahead of me.
Laura—thank you. I would not have seen Love Actually were it not for you.
Oh, one thing I forgot to mention is that my cousin Brian works in the movie theater. Now, I had seen him earlier and he had said how when he went into the theaters, Love Actually seemed to be an incredibly stupid movie. He has a general anti-love stance, so this is not entirely surprising.
When I was going into the theater, I saw Brian working at the concession stand. I walked over and talked with him pleasantly for a minute. I had an urge to tell him that I was going to see Love Actually—alone—but I did not. I suppose that I felt no need to shock. I like Brian, and I wish him well, but I am also curious whether his attitude towards romance will change, and if so, when and how.
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One particular moment in my conversation with Ratha last night is sticking out in my mind. Ratha had just said that she was worried about her current course of action; she feared that it was reckless to try to strike out on her own, rather than holding a traditional job; she feared she might fail. Now, the ordinary response to a statement of this type, that 99% of everyone will make, is “of course you can do it, I have confidence in you, you'll be fine”. While in this instance, that response would be true, it would also do nothing to address the issue. So, I was much bolder. I told Ratha, not that she would succeed, but that it's okay to fail. I asked her to consider what I was sure she would understand if she thought about it—that even if she does fail, the attempt would have been worthwhile, and that turning away from the challenge would simply mean walking by a door without opening it and always wondering what might have been inside.
Unfortunately, most people are unable to accept this kind of consolation. Most people want the faked reality given by a white lie, or at best the evasion given by a statement of confidence made without ever considering whether or not it is true. But, if I ever need to be consoled, that is how I want it to be done—as a direct clash with whatever it is that I fear, a clash that says “yes, even this”, not some fuzzy ball of cotton that collapses the instant one tries to lean on it.
“Now tell me, what is the Railroad Unification Plan?”
“It's … Oh, do you mind?—let Jim tell you. He will, soon enough. I just don't have the stomach—unless you want me to,” he added, with a conscientious effort at discipline.
“No, you don't have to. Just tell me whether I understood that Unificator correctly; he wants you to cancel the Comet for two days in order to give her engines to a grapefruit special in Arizona?”
“That's right.”
“And he's cancelled a coal train in order to get cars to lug grapefruit?”
“Yes.”
“Grapefruit?”
“That's right.”
“Why?”
“Dagny, ‘why’ is a word nobody uses any longer.”
pp. 771-772, Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand
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On Friday during lunch time, I called Charlie on the spur of the moment to see if he wanted to see Love Actually. It's still playing at the smaller cinema at Crossgates, but I figure it may be on its way out soon. It turned out, though, that he had prior plans to meet some friends for pool, so instead, I ended up going to Saratoga.
We (Charlie, Dan, Josh and I) played a few games, then went back to Charlie's place and played an extremely long game of Risk. I actually ended up writing a Perl script towards the end to do the battles for me, because some of them were taking many minutes. It was a very close game; Charlie and Dan annihilated one another, leaving Josh and me to play a drawn-out endgame, which I finally lost by the barest of threads. After that, Charlie went to bed, and I went out bar-hopping with Dan and Josh. I wouldn't exactly say that I was unhappy, but I definitely did feel “out of my element”, as Dan put it. They (Dan and Josh) met another guy, whose name I can no longer remember, and we all eventually went to one bar where we met Nicole, but I barely exchanged two words with her. As a matter of fact, I barely exchanged two words with anyone.
Partly responsible for this was the fact that my appearance, while not a negative to me, is significantly different from the norm, which acts as a barrier to communication. (I want to ignore this, but I'm pretty sure it's true—even Ratha told me she was put off by my appearance at Jammy Jam.) Also, I'm male, so I can't sit around waiting for girls to hit on me, as it'll never happen; and I barely knew any of the people out with whom I was going, so I didn't even have much of an option of dealing with them. Dan made conversation with me, which helped somewhat. It's not that I resent or feel at all bad about going, but I think this points to the conclusion that bar-hopping is not likely to be a useful activity to me, given my current way of being.
I got back to Charlie's around 2 and went right to sleep. On Saturday, Charlie showed me Final Fantasy X-2, which looks promising, although I'm still a little wary. Final Fantasy X will be a tough act to follow. Then Charlie had to meet someone for dinner, though just before we were both about to leave, I thought of something I'd wanted to discuss and that should have occurred to me several hours earlier: that I don't think my conception of “love” is non-emotional or mechanical at all (as Charlie referred to it on the Wiki page about Love). Next time, I guess.
Yesterday, I went to the mall after work. I've been going to the mall perhaps too often of late, but this time it was actually purposeful. I bought a new router, because my old one is an unreliable piece of shit. The new one is a Linksys WRT54G, and so far it seems to be working acceptably. The other large item I bought is an HP PSC 1350—a combination printer/scanner device.
Later, at home, I wiped Laura's system partition (leaving /home untouched) and installed Mandrake 9.2. I like to install the operating system completely from scratch every once in a while, to get rid of the cruft that somehow seems to accumulate. And now that I have a log of many of the actions I've performed as root (those mostly having the purpose of installing some piece of software that Mandrake didn't see fit to package or fixing some minor broken thing in their setup), getting things back up and running isn't so bad—Laura's probably already back to 90% of her previous function, ignoring any actual benefits the upgrade might have given.
The printer/scanner was detected and installed without a hitch (this is part of the reason I bought it, actually—I know that a lot of printers, in particular, use Windows-only proprietary drivers, so I researched it a bit beforehand, and it seems like HP has a very good record as far as Linux support). I haven't had a chance to test the printing part yet, but the scanner works fine. I'm not sure which part I'm more excited about, actually. People have always been a little surprised that I didn't have a printer. That decision was mostly because I disliked them on æsthetic grounds; now, aside from recognizing the fairly substantial practical value of a printer, I think that that æsthetic judgment has itself faded over time. On the other hand, with a scanner, I will have the ability to take any piece of paper for which only the information it contains—not the physical piece of wood pulp—is important, copy it onto the computer, and throw out the wood pulp or put it in a box somewhere and forget about it. Also, I probably have a good number of photos lying around that I've tended to consider “useless” because I can't get at them on the computer, which I will now be able to digitize.
So, that should be a cool piece of hardware.
I want to do something for New Year's, but I don't know what. It's not like I have any right to complain. My father asked me if he should buy me a ticket to Saratoga's First Night (to which he and Nance are going), but I told him no, even though I might have been able to see Charlie, too. I just didn't feel like it would be worthwhile or at all enjoyable. So, I told Ratha that I'd probably be at home sitting in front of my computer, but it's not as if I deserve any sympathy—that's what I've chosen to do.
I wish I were in Pittsburgh, so I could go to Laura's party, or whatever party it was that Laura was announcing on LiveJournal, anyway. But then again, what reason do I have to think that that would help? With the lone exception of Jammy Jam, parties have invariably left me feeling depressed, and even that one arguably ended badly. I can't ask anyone for help, not even myself, because I don't know what I want.
Thus, I am reduced to considering my loneliness as a brute fact, as something that just is the way it is, with no opportunity for debate or improvement. It seems strange and senseless, because I'm no more alone now than I have been for months, but it's been bothering me much more these last few days.
I finished Atlas Shrugged. It was a learning experience as well as an enjoyable one. Mostly, I learned that I don't want to be as verbose as Ayn Rand, nor hit people over the head as much. I'd rather push the envelope towards a little too subtle than towards a little too explicit. But, of course, this neglects all the attributes of Atlas Shrugged that I do want to emulate, such as a well-thought-out and coherent storyline with characters who embody the principles I want them to.
Now that I've finished Atlas Shrugged, it's time to start editing Breakout. I feel as though I've put enough distance between myself and the book that I can appraise its flaws as well as its strengths, and I have some good ideas as to where I want to go with it. I hope that I don't get stuck at the level between concepts and words-on-a-page; I'd really like to have the book done as soon as reasonably possible (but no sooner). If I throw myself into my projects, I can forget all about loneliness, right? And, in opposition to my lack of understanding what I even want in order to alleviate my loneliness, I know exactly what I want out of Breakout, out of Ralah, out of my font, out of my computers, out of work, and out of the numerous sub-projects and side-projects that overall make up the achievement-oriented side of my personality.
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Kenn Hamm
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Last modified: Mon Aug 4 19:38:40 2008