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A hundred small conversations
I got some things wrong yesterday.
Lisa, of course, is in Colorado, not California. But you all knew that, right? And her journal is now snugly situated in its new location. (Memo to self: Change Nibelung list.)
What she doesn't know is that the Georgia O'Keefe image on her top page gave me an interesting deja-vu sort of experience. It is one of Nonelvis' favorites, and a print of it is on the wall of the office behind me. I see it every day. It probably shows up in some of the QuickCam photos I've taken.
(Were O'Keefe's flower paintings consciously sexual, or is it an accident of our dirty minds?)
Jette tells me that the mysterious Scott Frank
wrote Dead Again, Little Man Tate, adaptations of two Elmore Leonard novels that I'm too stressed to remember, and is currently adapting Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. He rocks.
And Kristina, my expert on all things Japanese that come on videotapes, notes that the pattern on Iron Chef (hey, it is www.ironchef.com after all) is actually: Subtitles when Kaga is speaking, dubbing for everyone else. Kaga, the only professional actor on the show, refuses to allow himself to be dubbed. Given that I suspect Kaga's a bit vain, I'm not surprised.
I can no longer find the other theory I offered anywhere. Obviously my memory was not serving me correctly.
I am trying to wade through Susan Faludi's Stiffed for tonight's mouth organ column and it is eating my brain by slow stages, so perhaps it's time to try a change of pace.
Al says that his survey on 21 October wasn't intended to be taken seriously, and he was surprised at the response. I don't say I'm going to take it entirely seriously. But I am going to take it.
1. Have you stopped beating your wife/husband/lover/sheep?
I happen to have a lover who can't be beat.
I can be beaten, but only when I specifically request it.
2. Do you fantasize about anyone else when having sex with your partner? Who?
Um, yes and no. Without causing me to blush too much, I often fantasize that I am someone else when having sex. My partner is apparently acceptable to my fantasies as is. Okay, maybe sometimes I tinker with her personality a little bit.
3. What's the wildest, most unusual thing you have ever done sexually - the thing you would hesitate to even tell your partner or your psychiatrist?
Well, I wouldn't tell a psychiatrist anything, not even the time of day. That's a matter of principle. And I wouldn't keep anything from my partner - also on principle. So those distinctions don't really work for me.
Meanwhile, I'm trying to think of something really unusual that I've done, and having a difficult time. Either I have a very mundane sex life or I spend so much time around deviants that my scale of "unusual" is skewed, but I can't come up with anything.
4. Looking at yourself naked in a mirror, who or what are you reminded of?
Looking at myself naked in a mirror is a bad idea. It brings on sharp attacks of body hatred and gender dysphoria. So I avoid it.
5. What wouldn't you do - sexually? What are your taboos?
No blood, pain, or excreta. Non-consent only in a fantasy environment pre-agreed upon by all parties involved, with safewords. If you want me to put my mouth on it, wash it first.
6. Is there a God, gods, or not?
Yes.
(Sorry - couldn't help going for the punch line there.)
I like the theory whereby gods exist as long as they continue to have believers, and the more believers a god has, the more powerful It is. I admit this leaves open questions of schism - for example, whether the Christian god and the Muslim god are the same thing, or even whether the Catholic god and the Lutheran god are.
Note this says nothing about afterlife. If you follow this theory to its logical conclusion, you get the afterlife you believe in - and if you believe in none, like Piers Anthony's atheist in the Death novel, your soul just crumbles away when you die. But I'm not sure I want to carry it that far - since I also favor the No Exit idea that Hell is a self-service cafeteria, that we unconsciously construct our own rewards and punishments.
And then there are the various reincarnation/resurrection schemes, which have their appeal. But my general policy is to live as if there is no afterlife at all of any kind, while simultaneously hoping there will be one. Both halves of this policy stem from my intense fear of mortality.
7. If there is a God, can He (choose the pronoun that suits you - She, whatever) create a mass so large He Himself cannot lift it? Why not, if God's omnipotent?
Sure, but why bother? Don't you think a god can see right past your silly little thought exercises?
8. If there isn't a god, then everyone is the sum total of their experiences and genetics; so can they be held responsible for their actions? (And why bother to send them to prison, or execute them?)
Oooh, good one. But does it matter? Let's be cruelly practical here for a moment.
A man commits a string of gruesome murders without any signs of repentance whatsoever. He defies all regular correctional measures. He sees no problem with what he has done and will happily do it again.
Now, either this man has made the decision to commit these murders on his own (i.e. he is a volitional creature) or these decisions have essentially been made for him, by his history and genetic makeup (i.e. he is wholly a product of his environment, with no volition).
Either way, the man needs to die (or be permanently isolated from humanity, for those of you against the death penalty - it doesn't matter which).
No, really. It doesn't matter whether he's spreading bad genes or bad ideas. It doesn't matter whether it was "his fault" or not, not if the damage to his thought process is permanent. If he could be cured of those ideas somehow, then that would be great, but if he can't, then we must get those ideas out of the environment before they spread, like a virus.
Ooops! I'm arguing in favor of eugenics - get those bad influences out of the gene/meme pool! Well, so I am, but there's a difference between this and having rich people be able to buy smarter babies than the rest of us, which is what I was ranting about the other day.
9. If there is a God, then He (choose the pronoun, etc.) is responsible for everything existing, including the evil. So can people be held responsible for their actions? (Same question about prisons.)
Same answer. We have to live in the world and react to the world as we see it, even if a higher puppeteer is actually pulling the strings of predestiny.
Thinking about predestiny is the road to madness. Maybe the universe is all running on clockwork and we have no real free will ... but you can't live life as if that's the case - the ultimate result of that is everyone sinking into apathy and doing nothing, because, after all, nothing can be done.
10. Don't you - deep down - feel people are responsible for their actions? That you are responsible for your own actions? How do you justify that?
I act on the assumption that everyone is responsible for their own actions unless proven otherwise. I don't see a need to justify that; it's really the only way to do things that works well.
The flip side of that is that I feel the collective trend toward avoidance of personal responsibility is one of the things that's grinding our society into the dust.
11. Coke or Pepsi?
Pepsi is not even permitted in the house. Near the house. Within 500 feet of the house. Pepsi is vile.
12. Mac or PC?
There's a right tool for every job. I am not system-centric. However, with that said, I admit that I only use my PC for games.
13. Liberal or conservative?
I don't think those terms have meaning anymore, and I was playing hopscotch with them before they denatured. I am liberal on some things and conservative on others. And I don't trust anyone. Maybe I should check "paranoid" under the affiliation box.
14. Did you love THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT or hate it? (There seems to be no middle ground on that movie....nobody says, "Ehhhh, it was okay.")
I didn't see it. Hand-held cameras for an hour and a half would make me sick. Besides, it was obviously all sizzle and no steak.
15. Half-empty or half-full? (i.e., optimist or pessimist?)
"Still half-empty. But the half that's there looks deliciously refreshing ...."
- Daria
16. What's the last meal you had that was so good, so delicious, it made you want to lick the plate afterwards?
I would never lick a plate. But the last time we went to Brasserie Jo, Marc used bread to clean up every bit of sauce or debris from each course he ate. Of course, he hadn't eaten all day.
A few months ago, Nonelvis and I went to a movie and got caught in the rain. We hadn't had any food, we were both cranky, and we were wet besides. A restaurant in walking distance, The Blue Room, has amazing food but was pricy enough that we'd normally only go there on special occasions. Well, we went, and the night suddenly became a special occasion.
The Blue Room's food is often not for novices. It's food that rewards people who know how to, say, read a wine list or pick a good cheese. It's food for people who like food a lot. You tear the bread apart with your hands, butter it, bite into it with a crunch and leave crumbs all over the table.
I had a fish stew filled with large whole shellfish. It was, again, very hands-on. I had to reach in and pull out shrimp almost too hot to touch, peel them carefully ... extract huge black mussels just barely opened, pull loose the tender meat ... alternating with generous sips of the peppery, tomatoey liquid in the bowl. When I finished, red stains from the soup were all over the white tablecloth; there were so many shells and leavings that the plate under the bowl couldn't hold them all and they fell out onto the table.
I am generally not a fan of messy, eat-by-hand food (I avoid fried chicken, for example), but I believe it was the by-hand aspect of that meal that made it so deeply satisfying. Well, that, and feeling the wine and stew warming my inside, mitigating the effect of my dripping-wet clothes, as I listened to the gentle roar of the storm outside.
17. What was the last book you've read knocked you sideways, that you'd recommend?
Most recently? Anything by Iain Pears - one of his art-history mysteries or An Instance of the Fingerpost.
18. What was the last movie you've seen that you raved about, that you'd recommend?
I can't say I'd recommend either American Beauty or Fight Club unequivocally. And I forget what order I've seen movies in. I think before that was Better Than Chocolate, which I'd recommend to just about anybody who doesn't have a problem with a little sex.
I think both American Pie and Ten Things I Hate About You are really good movies that step beyond the limits of their genres and are fun for a wide variety of audiences and age ranges.
Oh, and I wish more people had seen Dick. It was a really good movie; the problem is, it was marketed as a teen movie, when it was really a movie for grown-ups, especially grown-ups who had lived through Watergate.
19. What TV shows do you watch, if any, that you really like? If you don't watch TV, what TV shows did you use to watch?
I never did watch much TV, so I can't recommend anything.
20. What's the last song you heard that you had to hear again, that you had to immediately get the CD or haunted the airwaves to hear again, you thought it was so good?
"Sin Wagon" by the Dixie Chicks. Before that, "The Rockafella Skank" by Fatboy Slim (and if I hadn't bought the CD back then, I would have when either "Gangster Tripping" or "Praise You" made it big later).
I don't listen to the radio - period, at all - these are songs I heard elsewhere. More often I hear a description of someone's style that seems to match my tastes, and take a risk on the CD. I have played the CD Oh, the Grandeur from Andrew Bird's Bowl of Fire about once a day for approximately the last three weeks, and I got it via a review in Entertainment Weekly.
Oh, and when I saw Dick I had to buy the soundtrack, because it was so excellent. That's been in heavy rotation on my CD player too.
21. If you write an on-line journal or email to newsgroups or chatrooms under a pseudonym - what's your real name, your address, and your phone number? If you use your real name, what would you say or talk about that you don't talk about now - if you used a pseudonym? What are you busting to tell that you can't now, because you use your real name?
I try to avoid giving my real name. As I said yesterday, that doesn't seem to deter people from finding it, so I'm sure anyone who's interested already knows it. And it wouldn't change what I talk about here one whit. The subjects I already avoid, I'd still avoid, and so forth.
There are a few things I'm "busting to tell" which I can't, because they'd cause needless friction with friends, or violate other people's privacy without their approval (notably Nonelvis'). That's unfortunate for my confessions, but I can usually just leave a little hint to myself here, so that twenty years from now I can see the reference and remember, "Oh, yes, I was really pissed off at ____ that day."
22. What's the silliest flamewar you were ever involved in? Weren't you at fault also?
Oh, there have been so many! I am always at least partially at fault, since the instant you reply to a flame war, you are contributing to the problem. The only way to make them go away is to ignore them.
But the temptation is sometimes so strong ....
23. Where were you on the night of October 27th, 1990, at two o'clock in the morning?
Do you know, I actually got out my perpetual calendar for this? It was a Saturday ... so the odds were I was driving back from New Orleans, half-asleep, after the Hallowe'en performance of the Rocky Horror Picture Show.
24. Hmmm. And you're sure that's where you were?
You must be kidding. I have problems remembering where I was last week.
Why do you ask?
25. Aren't you sick of journal surveys yet?
Of course not! They're like conversation starters. You answer a question and suddenly you're writing about eugenics or Rocky Horror or fish stew. How can I resist?
© Columbine
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