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libertariantaoist · 4 years ago

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Ask not what you can do for your country; ask what your government is doing to you.

War is just one more big government program.

War has all the characteristics of socialism most conservatives hate: Centralized power, state planning, false rationalism, restricted liberties, foolish optimism about intended results, and blindness to unintended secondary results.

The most fundamental purpose of government is defense, not empire.

If you want government to intervene domestically, you're a liberal. If you want government to intervene overseas, you're a conservative. If you want government to intervene everywhere, you're a moderate. If you don't want government to intervene anywhere, you're an extremist.

Since outright slavery has been discredited, "democracy" is the only remaining rationale for state compulsion that most people will accept.

Democracy has proved only that the best way to gain power over people is to assure the people that they are ruling themselves. Once they believe that, they make wonderfully submissive slaves.

People who create things nowadays can expect to be prosecuted by highly moralistic people who are incapable of creating anything. There is no way to measure the chilling effect on innovation that results from the threats of taxation, regulation and prosecution against anything that succeeds. We'll never know how many ideas our government has aborted in the name protecting us.

The chances of your being harmed by terrorists are mathematically minute. The chance of your being robbed by your own government? That's easy: 100 per cent.

We have been living amidst one of the great revolutions of human history, and we hardly know it: the penetration of the State into every aspect of human life and society. Some people regard this as good and "progressive," others regard it as tyrannical; but either way, it's a fact, a transformation as great as, say, the Industrial Revolution. Absolutely nothing is now beyond the scope of State power.

"Need" now means wanting someone else's money. "Greed" means wanting to keep your own. "Compassion" is when a politician arranges the transfer.

The attempt to silence a man is the greatest honour you can bestow on him. It means that you recognise his superiority to yourself.

Tyranny seldom announces itself. ...In fact, a tyranny may exist without an individual tyrant. A whole government, even a democratically elected one, may be tyrannical.

The difference between a politician and a pickpocket is that the pickpocket doesn't get indignant when you tell him to keep his hands to himself.

So let me record my grateful acknowledgment that this government has never quartered a single soldier in my home. Whatever can be said about the rest of the Constitution, the Third Amendment is alive and well.

In 100 years we have gone from teaching Latin and Greek in high school to teaching Remedial English in college.

Most Americans aren't the sort of citizens the Founding Fathers expected; they are contented serfs. Far from being active critics of government, they assume that its might makes it right.

Can the real Constitution be restored? Probably not. Too many Americans depend on government money under programs the Constitution doesn't authorize, and money talks with an eloquence Shakespeare could only envy. Ignorant people don't understand The Federalist Papers, but they understand government checks with their names on them.

If Communism was liberalism in a hurry, liberalism is Communism in slow motion.

At the end of a century that has seen the evils of communism, Nazism and other modern tyrannies, the impulse to centralize power remains amazingly persistent.

All in all, the framers would probably agree that it's better to impeach too often than too seldom. If presidents can't be virtuous, they should at least be nervous.

Anything called a "program" is unconstitutional.

War nearly always serves as an occasion for serious expansions of state power and the destruction of legal protections

Freedom is coming to mean little more than the right to ask permission

If the welfare state is here to welcome them, the solution is to get rid of it, as should have been done long ago. Overpopulation is a problem for socialist systems, not for free societies. In fact, the welfare system may be more destructive [to] the immigrants' families than to the natives.

I find myself surrounded by teenagers with body-piercing and exposed navels, gabbing on cell phones and listening to hip-hop. Maybe I'm missing something here. But I just don't feel the least bit threatened by immigrants.

The measure of the state's success is that the word anarchy frightens people, while the word state does not.

Politics is the conspiracy of the unproductive but organized against the productive but unorganized.

The Constitution conferred only a few specific powers on the federal government, all others being denied to it (as the Tenth Amendment would make plain). Unfortunately, only a tiny fraction of the U.S. population today -- [according to liberals] -- can grasp such nuances. Too bad. The Constitution wasn't meant to be a brain-twister.

Altering the Constitution has become the daily business of the Federal Government which the document is supposed to guide and limit. Both Congress and the judiciary assume, and exercise, countless powers they aren't entitled to.

The prospect of a government that treats all its citizens as criminal suspects is more terrifying than any terrorist. And even more frightening is a citizenry that can accept the surrender of its freedoms as the price of "freedom".

#joseph sobran #libertarian quotes

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braindamageforbeginners · 6 years ago

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A New Doctor

Cycle 9, Day 10

So, I now have at least a half-dozen physicians on my case. If you believe the BMJ stat that “medical misadvenure” (which is a broad category that includes, but is not limited to, doctor error, nursing error, pharmacy screw-ups, misdiagnosis, accidental overdose/drug interactions, opportunistic infections - the list goes on) is the third-leading cause of death in America (according to the same study, heart disease is #1 and cancer is #2). So, for those for those of you setting odds on my life expectancy (and, frankly, I’d be disappointed if you didn’t), it’s been an odd, extended game of “Clue,” except I’m Mr. Body, to see if disease, side-effects, or my possibly-insane physicians will get to me first. I hate to say it, but I think I’ve finally figured the odds-on favorite in this one: my GP.

This isn’t a plea for help, or even a serious medical development on my part, it’s a warning for you, the readership, as insurance enrollment comes around. First of all, if you can’t pay, hospitals or physicians can throw you out on the street (this is something able-bodied people are so disbelieving of that took a poor black woman freezing to death on-camera in Baltimore). They are only required to treat you if you in an emergency situation, thanks to some federal laws called “EMTALA.”If you have a disease that drives you to the emergency room, the prognosis gets worse. People tend believe that just because it’s the healthcare industry, the health insurance industry isn’t a corrosive force that has a vested interest in denying care and killing you. Which is odd to me; you don’t get this anywhere else (or I haven’t experienced this sort of self-delusional attitude); you don’t see people defending McDonald’s or Nabisco or RJ Reynolds or Exxon as having their best interests at heart (and, to my friends who think they’re bullet-proof because of their health insurance, read the fine print, very, very carefully; you don’t want to get a nasty shock as you’re being rolled into the OR). So, thanks to my parent’s generosity/desire not to see me die, I rolled in last year with a very expensive PPO (there are a lot of acronyms to keep track of, but PPOs allow the patient to see anyone in a preferred provider network, which tend to be large and give the patient lots of choices, so you can directly get a referral to a neurologist if you hit your head). Unfortunately, because I have pre-existing conditions (and to my bullet-proof friends, read through the list of pre-existing conditions that’ll disqualify you, your jaw will drop)(also, it’s telling that Congressmen and Senators have the option to buy into a separate, federal employee health insurance option that’s not available to us serfs)(it’s also telling that the ACA required Congresscritters, for the first time ever, to tough it out and find health insurance like their constituents)(which is why I assume all the GOP higher-ups had melt-downs over the ACA - a slight removal of privilege to help sick constituents isn’t a part of Congressional ethos, let alone job description), my premiums went from “expensive” to “leasing a sports car” within a few months. I’m extraordinarily grateful to them for providing that financial backing, because it allowed me to continue getting treatment during the crucial 6-10 week GBM post-diagnosis period that might turn this from “Guaranteed doom” to “far too close for comfort.” So, this did give me some time to do my homework (in writing about this, I’m realizing I really should consider applying to law school, because I’ll know more about medical and insurance law and ethics than some lawyers before this is up)(Hell, I probably know more than some of them right now). Anyway, I found that all the specialists I see for cancer, do take medicaid (even the specialized pharmacy I use at the cancer center). Which is good for me, especially since being on disability in California is an automatic qualification for Medicaid. Now for the bad news; although all the specialists there take medicaid, the GPs don’t. AND the specialists only take medicaid if it’s done through an HMO carrier that the state sub-contracts with.

Great Kraken’s Balls.

There are a number of documentaries and documents (including an “Adam Ruins Everything” segment) on why HMO’s are unnecessary and lethally incompetent (like many other aspects of a for-profit medical system), but here’s the most basic deal: They act as a gate-keeper for the entire medical-industrial system. You can get your care at any of a dozen pre-approved hospitals, and nowhere else. Now, if an HMO or their doctors can’t treat you (or refuse to treat you - which is still the case for a lot of GBM patients), they are required to send you to a specialist who can. The economic incentive is to give less care, and keep all the patients in the system for as long as possible.

I suspect that delaying tactic is why heart disease and cancer are considered so deadly - you can’t sit long on either of those.

So, based on the financial folks at the cancer center, I picked one, and promptly forgot about it; because I’m already in the system there (the receptionists and pharmacy staff recognize me on sight)(which is comforting, until you realize it’s a cancer center, and then the panic briefly cuts in until you remember you’ve gone eight months without regowth or metastastis). I only remembered it when I got a call from the medicaid HMO telling me I should schedule an appointment with one of their physicians. This isn’t a big deal, I just need them to sign-off on any further black magic-based treatments with the Warlocks or Radiation Oncologist.

Now, before I go further, let’s talk about the people who go into medicine. Like anything in healthcare, we tend to give assume that an entire industry is moral, and just; when people go in for a variety reasons (as recently as 20 years ago, the vast majority of medical students said it was for money), and it’s worth noting that cuts across a vast majority of demographics and motives. And, for better or worse, that cuts across vast swathes of competence - for far too many folks, it’s a job - a rewarding job, but just a job. My father recently inquired about board exams and recertification as a way of guaranteeing some basic level of competence from everyone. He’s right, but the key word there is “basic.” Again, “basic” is fine for first aid and most major medical issues; it’s unacceptable if you have a disease with a 90% fiver-year mortality rate.

I bring this up because I think I chronicled my first appointment with my insurance-appointed GP five or six weeks ago and seemed perfectly satisfactory to my ongoing addiction to experimental chemotherapy. I’m certain it was within that time frame, because I had schedule a six-week follow-up. Which, sadly lands on my “week off” chemo. So, yesterday, after infusion #2 for this cycle (for those of you wondering what I’m doing to stay busy during infusions these days, well, rewriting Christmas carols for cancer patients)(”On the first day of chemo, the nurses gave to me, zofran in an IV”). I also convinced dear old Dad to take me out to lunch, because, again, when the Marizomib side effects hit, you do not fee like eating. This was in the neighborhood of the latest addition to my collection of medical people, so I thought I’d reschedule then. And was told by the receptionist to wait for everyone behind me to check in lest they be late for appointments. That would be fine, but it seems a fundamental misunderstanding of how queus work. And, any time post five-ish hours on infusion day, even though zofran might keep me from puking, it does give me an odd, oily, queasy sensation. I think I deserve some sort of gold star for not puking on this woman right away (again, if you have unconventional problems, feel free to start with an unconventional approach)(my next writing project will be titled, “Life Lessons from Necromancers”). I eventually - using the traditional method of looking down the reception counter, noticed someone not otherwise occupied, and manage to get an appointment more amenable to my schedule. For a physical.

Again, I’d love to use some four-letter words here, but even Finnish fails to meet the requirement. Now, it should be noted that, even though I’m well-aware that I’m physically Adonis-like; I am in chemo and recovering from radiation treatment, Radiation Oncologist implied a few months ago that, even though my scan was clean and looked good for someone with brain cancer, anyone unfamiliar with my case would probably freak out about them. Same thing with my abnormal, uh, “lab sample” I wrote about recently - the nurses agreed, a single abnormal test is hardly unexpected toward the end of chemo, especially since I’m now on a diet consisting mostly of protein, fiber, cafeine, and dangerous, experimental substances. However, I’d prefer not to have to point all that out to a new medical person who has the power to yank the plug on me (sadly, my original GP will be on vacation that week. (I’ll also be on Temodar, so there’s a solid chance my brains will be thoroughly scrambled and incapable of comprehension).

ANYWAY… WEIGHT: 198 lb CONCENTRATION: Pretty good, APPETITE: Normal (but this is 24 hours post-infusion. ACTIVITY LEVEL: Not great; the fatigue side effect definitely caught up with me and chewed me up last night. SLEEP QUALITY: Okay. although I’ve noticed that I definitely thrash around on chemo days. COORDINATION/DEXTERITY: Lousy. Thank Gods I don’t need the walker, and I don’t even think I need my magic ankle support, but my left leg is definitely unreliable today. MEMORY: Not bad, although I did forget my sheets were in the wash earlier today (although I recall stripping the bed and tossing them into the washer). PHYSICAL: Tired and kind of wobbly, but still a lot better than this time a year ago.. EMOTIONAL: Okay. It might just be that I spent yesterday next to my zofran-and-CDB salt-lick, but I’m starting to think I might make it through all this somewhat intact. Hang on. Am I really starting to believe my own bullshit? SIDE EFFECTS: Tired, somewhat sore (either chemo or increasing the difficulty of that stupid elliptical), and in the wrong time-zone, but, other than that, not much. CURRENTLY READING (For Donna): Gonzo Girl, and The Explorer’s Guild (A Passage to Tshamballah)

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perspectivepodcast · 6 years ago

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[Transcript] Side A: Translation

To understand what a person means or says, it’s basically necessary to already know what that person means or is saying. So is every successful dialogue just an act of recognition? And is understanding not a path, but a condition?

Jenny Erpenbeck, Go, Went, Gone, translated by Susan Bernofsky

More than six months ago, Magda and I sat down on those comfy sofas of the only teashop in Nyíregyháza, to talk about what Perspective would become after her departure from Hungary. That teashop was one of the greatest sources of comfort during our time there, and I look back at that time feeling that so much has happened since then that it just couldn’t possibly be only six months ago. Was it one year ago? Ten years ago? It was a life ago.

Back then, Magda’s departure was a big bookmark at the chapter we were at with the podcast and with our respective lives. Right now, it’s my departure that’s going to bookmark this other chapter. In the time between her departure from Hungary, and my forthcoming one, I have often felt that life just isn’t willing to give us a chance to rest our head somewhere we’ll feel we can really build a life from, or at least not yet.

But I’m digressing.

On that day, when Magda and I sat on the comfy sofas of the only teashop in Nyíregyháza, I suggested that one of the topics we could do an episode of the podcast on could be translation. It seemed there was nothing more obvious than that. We both spoke more than one language, had lived in at least one country where they didn’t speak our native language. Plus, I have studied Languages and literatures, and have made attempts at translation myself.

At the time, I knew I would probably do something on puns and funny anecdotes related to the languages I know, if I felt like going for a more ironic podcast, or maybe I could make up a story about a couple speaking different languages… There were tons of possibilities. While I was in Hungary, by the way, I actually read a lovely book on the subject: it’s entitled Crossing Borders, and it’s a collection of essays and fiction works curated by Lynne Sharon Schwartz. I really recommend it if you’re interested in the subject, especially because I’m sure it’ll feed your curiosity a lot more than this podcast ever will.

Anyway, what happened is that when I actually started thinking of what I would talk about in a podcast about translation, I was suddenly not so sure any of the possibilities I had thought about before could fit anymore.

I had initially thought about doing a sort of commented list of instances of historical mistranslations that caused havoc in one way or another. For example, when the Italian astronomer Giovanni Virginio Schiaparelli began mapping Mars in 1877, he dubbed dark and light areas on the planet’s surface ‘seas’ and ‘continents’, labeling what he thought were channels with the Italian word ‘canali’. Unfortunately, however, his peers translated that as ‘canals’, implying large-scale artificial structures had been discovered on Mars, and therefore launching a theory that they had been created by intelligent lifeforms. Convinced that the canals were real, the US astronomer Percival Lowell mapped hundreds of them between 1894 and 1895. Over the following two decades he published three books on Mars with illustrations showing what he thought were artificial structures built to carry water by a brilliant race of engineers. One writer influenced by Lowell’s theories published his own book about intelligent Martians. In The War of the Worlds, which first appeared in serialized form in 1897, H. G. Wells described an invasion of Earth by deadly Martians and spawned a sci-fi subgenre. Amazing, right?

I had also a very cute example: in the ‘50s, in fact, an executive at the chocolate company Morozoff decided to bring Valentine’s Day to Japan. It had been a success in the States, but the executive had misunderstood that these chocolates were intended for women. Because of the company’s mistranslation and subsequent ad campaign, the Japanese thought women were supposed to give men chocolates instead. And that's what they do to this day. On February 14th, the women of Japan shower their men with chocolate hearts and truffles, and on March 14th the men return the favor. Which was an inadvertent all around win for the chocolate companies, of course.

There are thousands of historical mistranslations one could talk about, most of them a lot less cute than this one. But the conclusion I wanted to get to, in the end, is, in the words of my friend Amruta: “knowing two languages doesn’t make you a translator any more than having ten fingers makes you a pianist.”

And yet, as I sat down thinking what I would talk about, if I had to talk about translation, I realized this wasn’t the conclusion at all.

And the truth is that I really don’t know if I’ll be able to explain this. Or rather, to translate into words into this language.

During the past months, I just couldn’t help going on thinking about two things. First, time. Always, time. Second, communicability. And I’ll explain. Or rather, translate.

What if, in order to really, fully understand what another person in saying (verbally or non-verbally), one had to first be in the condition to feel what the other person is feeling? Meaning, what if understanding, real, full understanding, were something you could achieve only if you were in the conditions of feeling empathy towards the other? What if talking were useless, unless you had empathy, empathy being a condition and not a choice? What if understanding were an individual biological ability and not a process, something that can be built together? What if there were walls within us that just couldn’t be overcome?

And if we go even further, isn’t it possible that misunderstanding is inescapable because of the limits of our forms of expression? So, without adducing the ‘fault’, so to say, to the receiver of the information that is to be understood, wouldn’t it be possible that the provider of the information that is to be understood is structurally incapable of providing information that isn’t distorted by the means of expression they choose to employ?

Isn’t it possible that whenever we try to express something, we are always translating?

Is what I feel, what I think, or what lies between feeling and thinking, or what lies below and far deeper than any thought, ever really, transparently, delivered into the world, through any means? When I want to say I love somebody, in English I would use the verb ‘to love’, which is the same verb I would use for my cat, for my lover, for ice cream, or for my brother. How does the fact that this verb is an umbrella term for so many different kinds of, well, what the English-speakers would call love, affect the nature of the love I am expressing? Is the love that I am feeling really a feeling I would categorize together with my love for ice-cream? Does my feeling reflect the way my feeling is embodied through language? No, of course not. What I feel, what I think, becomes something else when I translate it to words. So even speaking in your native tongue is translation. Imagine what happens when you speak in a language that isn’t your native tongue.

But all forms of expression are translation. Choreography is translation. Painting is translation. Tears are translation. Photography is translation. Dreams are translation. Music is translation. Gestures are translation.

Translations of what? Of that something that is at the heart of us, that fundamental, irreducible and yet changeable something that for some reason wants us to reach out.

I wish I could tell you what it is that I really feel. What it is that I really think. I wish I could let you see, or feel, or hear, or touch, or smell, or taste, what it is that moves me, deep inside. I wish I could make you understand. Perhaps, you wouldn’t be able to understand anyway, even if I were able to tell you what it was to be understood. Perhaps, if you really wanted, you would understand.

All I know, is that right now, everybody appears to me to be lost in translation. Whether politically, existentially, epistemologically. We’re all lost in translation.

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junker-town · 7 years ago

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My awkward, long-lost Geocities page about Michigan football makes me feel 13 forever

The internet was a much simpler place in 2001. It was also WAY more embarrassing.

Welcome to the Geocities website I made about Michigan football when I was 13. Click the link; it’s important. Here is a wavy flag:

Geocities gave you the chance to run your own internet boom town. Anyone could start a website using its platform, and it let you do a lot. Geocities could handle a broad spectrum of colors, sounds, clip art, animation, and pages layered behind pages of content about whatever you wanted to present to the world. A lot of it was gibberish that rarely appealed to anyone, but that gibberish was made with love. Anyone who started a Geocities website felt like a pioneer, magician, and tech god all in one. They created something where there was nothing, and they did it using computers.

This is how I chose to introduce myself to the world:

Welcome everybody to my homepage. My name is Louis, and I'm a 13 year old 8th grader in Ann Arbor Michigan. I am a diehard fan and follow football very religiously, including recruiting, the draft, and coaching. Also, It is a dream of mine to become a football coach when I grow up, so if you could e-mail me at [email protected] with some tips, I would be ever most greatful. In this website I will post links to some of my favorite sites, plus articles by moi discussing thing going on in Michigan football. Plus the occasional article on hockey or basketball, plus updated links on articles by ESPN, Sports Illustrated etc.

I wrote that in 2001. They’re my first words ever as a sports writer and quite possibly the most earnest words I’ve ever published on the internet, too. Back then it was cool just to let people know who you are. Someone in China could stumble on my homepage and go, “Oh shit, there’s a kid across the world who’s into sports,” and that extant possibility was gratifying on its own — someone I don’t know knows me. There was less understanding — or at least, I didn’t understand it then — that you were whispering into a chasm or that you couldn’t stand out on your basic facts alone. But then, I really was what I said I was: a 13-year-old dork looking for coaching tips to a sport I could never dream of playing.

On Oct. 26, 2009, Yahoo! shuttered Geocities for good. There were approximately 38 million Geocities pages at the time, according to Wired, mine among them — all gone. Let’s call this day The Darkness.

On the day The Darkness came, a lot of love left this world. Granted, a lot of those sites had been abandoned and broken already. The people who let those pages wither never wanted to see them die, however. As Geocities went down, a number of web collectives started saving every page they could.

Don’t click any of these links, they’re probably malware.

If you really want to relive those halcyon days, you can download a 652-gigabyte torrent from a “loose collective of rogue archivists, programmers, writers and loudmouths” called Archive Team and rummage through the detritus yourself. I found my old page years ago when the memory of it (I don’t know from where) entered my head and I began to google. Maybe on the fifth page of results, I landed on the Wayback Machine.

Unfortunately, most of the links on my website don’t work anymore. Just three of the Features on the left-hand side are clickable — recent articles, schedules, and an “About Me” section.

No good Geocities site didn’t have an “About Me” section. Note: It’s not an “About” section. Websites then were treated like virtual mountain tops where plain people could tell the world how plain they were. Geocities sites nominally provided a service — back then, I believe 80 percent was dedicated to GoldenEye cheat codes — but behind those services was somebody who really just wanted you to know who he was and be proud of his work.

In my “About Me” section, I revealed that I was the clinical definition of a goober.

Backround- I was born Nov. 22nd 1987 in Ann Arbor Michigan. I have lived here my entire life. I stand at 4 feet 11 inches, and am the shortest person in my 8th grade class. My favorite color is blue(of course), and my second favorite is green. My favorite food is couscous. My shoe size is a 7 mens. My favorite movie is Any Given Sunday. And my favorite book is Pet Semetary by Stephen King, my second favorite is the 2000 Michigan football media guide.

Music- I am very ranged in my tastes of music, I like from Garth Brooks (long neck bottle) to Limp Bizkit (Keep Rollin' Rollin' Rollin' Rollin'). My favorite group is the Beastie Boys who play my favorite song called Paul Revere. My favorite person from the Beastie Boys is Adrock. We were both born A cusp of November (He was born on Oct. 30th, the cusp beween November and October, I was Born on Nov. 22nd the cusp between Scorpio and Sagitarrius).

These may be the most mortifying words that exist about anyone on Earth. I’ve struggled to write this section because I have to look away from the screen repeatedly due to debilitating embarrassment:

The counter still works, and is now counting AWAY from the Michigan vs. Washington game.

The shame is two-fold: 1) Because everything up there is true — I remember that media guide as one my favorite Christmas gifts ever, and God help me that’s what I thought music was then, and 2) because I remember how much care I put into writing that.

As a small, exceedingly shy, anxiety-ridden kid, I really cared about that website. Whoever archived it found it at its inception. The counter shows 21 visitors. I had more than that over the course of the probably year-and-change I kept it up. I got traffic from family and from the members of the Michigan message board that I lurked on. Any time I updated the site — with either fresh links, or a new game recap — I’d post it to the message board, and would receive a lot of mostly friendly feedback about what I thought Lloyd Carr should have done (throw the ball) and not done (run the ball).

I considered these exchanges “conversations.” I had trouble making words come from my mouth. People call that “talking,” but talking was a stretch goal for me. In school, anytime I thought I ought to speak my heart thumped so hard that it suppressed the air from lungs and stopped the words at my chest. If I said anything out loud it was in a whisper, at the floor, several beats later than I wanted. But in writing, words don’t have volume. That’s why I got into sportswriting then and largely why I’m still in it now. Writing is still best way I know how to speak.

[A brief interlude] Hahahahaha eat it Corso:

"Michigan has no chance to have a great football season, in my opinion. They play too many good teams that are as good or better than they are, and a lot of them are away from home. That makes it more difficult. They can stumble and be a really fine football team, losing three games at least."-ESPN analyst Lee Corso on Michigan the summer before Michigan's 12-0 record and national championship season.

[OK, back] The schedule section is easily my favorite part of all this.

First, there’s the internal logic. You can tell the importance of each game by the font size: Michigan State is a marginally more important game than the rest, but it’s nothing compared to Notre Lame or OHIO STATE!!!!

Second: “Notre Lame” is such a satisfying thing to say or type in bold font, and it pains me that I can never use it unironically ever again. At some point in your life, you come to realize that your team isn’t intrinsically better or worse than any other and that sports tribalism is petty and arbitrary. I know that, but I still don’t feel it to be true.

I want to yell “Notre Lame” from my roof into the night. I wouldn’t, because I know that I would feel like a goofus afterward. But the fact that “Dame” rhymes with “Lame” is immutable. It is truth; as true as night turning into day or that Notre Dame went 4-8 last season.

This is my second favorite part:

Forgot to mention in my profile that I'm a master at fooseball. Let me put it this way, my sister beats all the Frat brothers at the University of Wisconsin, and I beat her 10 to 6. Plus I can beat my dad, who is better than my sister. Here's a link to fooseball.com.

When you’re a largely incapable adolescent person, you glom onto what few skills you have. I could have put Mario Kart up here, but I was all about foosball at the time. The day I beat my dad was one of my proudest, and I mean that. Being better than your dad at something is maybe the first sign in a young man’s life that, someday, he won’t suck. I went to fooseball.com a lot. It outlined a lot of techniques that I practiced on my own. I think the site was based in the United Kingdom. It doesn’t exist as it did then.

Here were my hobbies.

My Hobbies- Sports and hangin' around are my hobbies. When I'm with friends we always play basketball, or football, or soccer, or some sort of sport. Following all sports is fun to. It's like watching a masculine soap opera. Hanging around is always fun, I'm a pretty lazy guy so that's what I do most of the time. It's always fun to go the mall or downtown and talk to people, just random people. I have made many friends that way, and enemies.

For the most part, these are still my hobbies. My life has centered on sports and hangin’ around since I was born. They’re still maybe my two favorite things. Sixteen years later, I’ve learned that adding 1) alcohol, and 2) pals to sports and hangin’ around often makes both things better, but otherwise I’m not a fundamentally different person than I was then. I still think I’m a lazy guy, only now I feel obligated to deal with the complex question of why that is.

The last two sentences of that excerpted paragraph are lies. I liked to wander the mall and downtown with my friends, but I didn’t spend much time talking to anyone. At most, I might yell something dumb my friends told me to yell at a stranger; a product of being into Jackass. I made no friends that way and haven’t had an honest-to-god enemy in my life. I was the most innocuous kid on the planet. I wrote those words to add intrigue to what I may have felt even then was a fraught and boring but otherwise happy existence.

Unfortunately, we only have one snapshot of that paragraph. I’d like to see how it evolved over time and what other activities I invented. Geocities let me create, mold, and catalog an image of myself as I saw it. Geocities illuminated that image. For a while, it was my claim in a world that was so much smaller then.

If you, too, have an embarrassing old Geocities/Angelfire/Blogspot/Xanga/LiveJournal/SB Nation page, PLEASE share it in the comments below.

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libertariantaoist · 5 years ago