Who do we blame?

Does anyone else think that pregnancy is the creepiest thing in the world? I cannot freaking wrap my brain around it. There are two girls in my office who've gone and gotten themselves some embryonic parasites, and all I can think about is how they've made a decision to undergo 9 months of discomfort, climaxing in the worst pain a human can be asked to endure.

I remember reading multiple times in my liberal arts college experience that one of the major criticisms of the Aristotlean theory of dramatic structure (rising action followed by climax and denouement) is its similarity to the male sexual experience. The idea is that, somehow, men managed to impose their idea of structure onto the art world, and that because all men can think about is sex, that was the framework they used.

You can call it unconscious or intentional, depending on how militant a feminist you are.

Well, I’m turning all that around with my statement that all women can think about is having babies. This makes equal sense, as men are programmed to copulate, and women to procreate. This is our DNA-imposed biological imperative. The following two charts should create an interesting side-by-side comparison, and show us why the Aristotlean dramatic structure applies equally to both genders.

As one can see, the rising and falling action of the standard three act play in ancient Greek times, which continues to be used today, is nothing more than an artifact of our silly mammalian brains. So, when you’re casting about for a monolithic evil to assign all your various complaints to, look no farther than your very own genetic encoding.

Or God. You can always blame god, if you’re a creationist, and don’t believe in adenine, thymine, guanine or cytosine.

Big brother is flipping your burgers.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/6683365.stm

You don’t really need to read the article. The gist is this: McDonalds UK is trying to convince the Oxford English Dictionary that it should change or eliminate the definition of “McJob.” Apparently it’s “insulting to the 67,000 people who work for” the company in Britain. Also, “82% of its workers would recommend working at the company to their friends.” Because, you know, they’d be fired if they answered differently.

The thing about the OED is that it’s descriptive, not proscriptive. It’s about how people do talk, not how they should talk. I can’t verify it right now, but I’m willing to bet that the good people at Oxford are publishing definitions for a great number of offensive and insulting words. This is what they do. It’s one of the vastest undertakings in the history of humanity to catalogue and continuously update the structure of the English language. These people take great pride in giving us a tool like that. Information

The intent, apparently, is to create democratically mandated language. Democracy, in this case, is a bad idea. That’s tyranny of the majority. If people invented the term McJob, it becomes a part of the language. No one can stop that. One day it may become a rarely used—or differently used—part of the language, but it never leaves the lexicon completely. And that’s what the OED is for.

Above and beyond that, the Oxford University Press is a private limited company, not beholden to any intrusion by the government, and regulated in a fashion similar to that of a charity. I can’t even begin to tell you how much that pleases me. They will suffer an absolute minimum from this kind of frivolity. No constituents to please, no shareholders to make wealthy.

I guess the point is something like “suck it, McDonalds.” Efforts to regulate the way people speak have been phenomenally unsuccessful in the past, George Orwell’s brilliant commentary on it aside. The true success stories are things like the queer movement and the immigrant culture of France, or the scholastic acceptance of Ebonics. Language has no interests. It’s the purest expression of memetics in action, and the best evidence that ideas do propagate in a viral, evolutionary process.

And in that way, I feel it would be a crime to suppress information in that fashion.

I don't know you yet

Whoever you are, I want to take high speed pictures of your brain and learn to read your thoughts.

Also, regular pictures. Because you're beautiful today, and you'll be beautiful tomorrow, but maybe not in the same way.

You need to be ok when I start to bleed alarmist scenarios of a future gone wild. It'll all work out. I get that. You get that. But it's fun to imagine.

Hopefully you keep an eye on what's going on around you. In the world. In the country. Science and philosophy. You like to talk about these things—we'll erode each other's eyes into blindness, forgetting to blink. It never stops being fun to talk to you.

I want to give you names no one else gets to hear.

You climb. Mentally, of course. Spiritually, every day. Physically, if you have discovered that all three kinds are connected. (Social climbing is fine, but never to the detriment of the important kinds.)

I'm sure you realize that metaphors are not butterflies escaping from the brain pan, making the world beautiful and giving everyone something new to see. Your awareness of this probably doesn't stop you from picturing it, though.

Challenge me. If I ever turn you down I'm not worth your time—or my own.

Whoever you are, you're the moon. I want to ride the waves in your tide, sailing across the force of your gravity. Gliding across the landscape you create, never knowing what you'll send me next.

And you want to do the same.