Nightmare Before Christmas

I hate musicals, they make me want to find a long pointy thing to pierce my eardrums and poke my eyes out. It's not the case with Tim Burton's Nightmare Before Christmas, a masterpiece of atmosphere and animation. What makes Nightmare Before Christmas so revealing to me is the way it shows people inside out, with the monsters outside and the goodness inside. While our society advertises good looking Botox® faces, big silicone boobs and perfect white teeth, what makes the news are the monsters inside, when they come out and commit weirdness or atrocities.

Being born with the social Kryptonite called "Sensitivity", I can tell it comes along with a special X-Ray vision allowing me to see the monster inside people - even inside myself, much like everyone can see them in Tim Burton's masterpiece. Some of these hideous selves, we soon will have to face them in crowds, either in malls, office parties or family gatherings, while trying to go through the most pressuring, expensive period of the year.

For sensitive people, Christmas is way more frightening than Halloween. During that Christmas rush, give people your best smile, give them a little bit of your time or even just some more breathing space, so they feel that even the most estranged freaks are worth of attention.

Euthanasium

From the all too real Japanese 'Seppuku' ritual to the futuristic 'Suicide Booth' Futurama fans learned about in the very first episode of the series, suicide always was a hot topic that leaves almost no one indifferent. Suicide is seen, after all, as murder's lil' sister.

The rituals surrounding someone's death are not news. We humans give the death of other beings significance. It is a way for us to express, to channel out our deepest when pitted at the hardest fact of life: it ends. Failing to grasp what it is to be no more, humans pictured it glorious and even made up stories and Gods, so we do not feel so bad about it. Dead people are most of the time way greater than they were when alive.

I, for one, chose a long time ago to focus on my life instead of my death. To the question "Is life worth it?", my answer is "Only if I can make it worth living.". It is my own responsibility to give my existence meanings. If I were to let others do that, I would be, I believe, powerless and living a lie. What if I cannot make my life worth living anymore?

Suffering happens. Inner agony. Detachment. The reasons for an individual to lose interest in the pursuit of life are too numerous and personal to start listing them here. Since it is my opinion that nobody should endure suffering they do not consent to, I consider suicide as a worthy and natural choice.

"Oh", some will say, "you have no heart, no soul! What about those left behind to mourn?". First, one day or the other, every human dies. If you happen to know them, chances are you will mourn them anyway. Also, if you love them and you have just a bit of common sense, how can you be so egoist, to rather have them living in pain for your own comfort?

What I do not agree with is, people committing suicide in their homes, where their family will have to cope with the gruesome sight and removal of the mortal remains. It is a cruel thing to do. It has potential life shattering consequences. Go ahead, people, end your own life if you think it is best for you. Please, help the others keep going. You feel like having a revenge? Write a mean letter to them, it will do more than enough.

What I do not agree with, also, is that so many people have not the means to commit suicide in a clean, sure way. Physicians and nurses are forbidden to assist suicide and many countries forbid it to all. Short of options, many suicides involve social costs statistics cannot cover. A policeman once told me that many accidents were in fact suicides. Car accident with no skid marks leading to frontal collision with either a solid landmark or an incoming truck is the most common plausible scenario.

The movie 'Soylent Green' features what I would call an Euthanasium, a place where a human being could end one's life with as much dignity and comfort as possible. What prevents us from offering such an option to everyone? Possible mistakes? Abuses? They happen anyway with everything else we have invented, including religion. The only reason I can see that prevents us to fully embrace death as a part of life is our own immaturity, our teenish dream to live forever.

The oldest game

Was life simpler when you were a child? Maybe it looked like it. I would be surprised if you told me that your life before and your life today look the same to you. What changed? Some say adulthood begins with the arrival of real responsibilities. There may be another explanation.

According to the Uncommon Knowledge psychology discussion forum, dissociation is

"the unconscious process of separating certain thoughts or behaviours from a person's identity or belief system."

What does that mean? In less complicated words, it means that the human mind is able to develop at sets of separate beliefs, memories and behaviours. Critical examples of that are split personalities.

In my search for greater understanding, many sources indicated that dissociation does not have to be unconscious or used as a mean of self defense against heavy traumas. Children are known to use dissociation freely through their creativity. Good actors, also, use dissociation to enter their characters' skin.

A way simpler word encompasses this phenomenon: pretend. What a wonderful tool pretending is! In fact, if kids allow themselves to pretend freely through their games (tea party with Teddy!), we adults also pretend on a daily basis, in a more covert fashion. Adults are just a bit pickier, is all, because they cling harder to their own and hard earned identity. Identity is a frame of reference that defines the relation of the me with reality.

Whenever you read a good book or enjoy watching a movie, even when you do the lightsaber's sound, a part of you is pretending. Dungeons & Dragons and other roleplaying games is also a superb example of adults pretending, though many find this antic extreme and childish. Extreme and less childish are the games of pretend some adults revel into, in relation with sex: bondage, domination/submission, cross dressing, erotic hypnosis, role playing (not the same as 'roleplaying'), etc.

Some also refer to this behavior as escape, as it allows individuals to retreat from the daily stress and enjoy life through a less rigid persona. Systematically escaping through an activity can itself become problematic, as it leaves the source of stress untouched, unsolved. Workaholics come to mind.

Use of recreational drugs procures a way to alter perceptions of self and the world around, becoming a great facilitator for dissociation. That facilitation is part of the psychological addiction to mind altering substances. Hardcore alcoholics and addicts who live their lives under effect may be in fact altering their personality, even splitting it from their unwanted sober self, in an attempt to find either confidence or shelter from life's duress, imaginary or real. Not that it brings happiness to anyone, usually.

Can dissociation help to reach happiness? As all parts of a whole individual, it can, given one was to understand it, exercise it and use it wisely. Go ahead, break the mold of your own identity, grow wings and fly! Dare to meditate, dream, create. Step aside of yourself and see the world differently, renewed, even if only for a short moment. The world is a stage where you have the power to write parts of your own script.

The Chokening

Are you a smoker? I mean tobacco, not any other species of herbage's smoke inhalation. Tobacco means many things for our society. Tobacco has a big part in the occidental history, as proof of discovering America. To some cultures, tobacco is (or was) part of their customs and religious beliefs. Tobacco is also seen more and more as an evil we must banish forever, for the sake of good health. I am glad we are mostly past holy inquisitions and exorcism rituals.

I agree some places are bad choices for smoking, like hospitals, restaurants, schools, supermarkets, malls, buses, etc. It was a good move to forbid smoking in these places. Other places, though, I remain uncertain. A bar owner, for instance, offers a place where to drink and have fun. He pays for an alcohol permit, if he chooses to sell alcoholic beverages. Restaurants also have this choice. Couldn't a owner be offered a choice whether he wants his place to allow cigarette smoking or not, even if it means paying for another permit?

On the other hand, it is totally legal to douse yourself in heady perfumes and stink as you go. There's no law against stinking. people will not even frown at you like they would at someone who just farted. May it be at a restaurant, in a crowded bus or an elevator, feel free to make others choke on your own choice of fragrant bodily fumes until all they can taste is YOU. Do that and be sure to make a very, very lasting impression. I, for one, will remember you for the remainder of the day with passionate hatred.

Smiley, my Sci-Fi hero

Congratulations to Mr. Obama and to everyone in the United States of America for another successful democratic exercise. Congratulations to Mr. Bush too, who survived being one of the most hated individuals on Earth all this time. You ol' tough bugger. Also, is Obama's victory speech a taste of the 44th United States of America's President going all Battlestar Galactica in the defense of the Promised Land from the mean al Qaeda drones? "So say we all!"

Have you noticed a difference between Mr. Bush's and Mr. Obama's smiles? Though to me they look as hungry, I cannot help myself to find Obama's smile a lot more congenial. Bush's smile became more and more sour with time, like if his simplicity of mind was slowly replaced by a more mature sense of self (or was it he cared less and less about mere mortals, this chosen prophet of God). This is my own perceptions and we will never know the whole truth.

It is a great example of how body language is important in communication. In fact, 90% of what we try to communicate is achieved through body language, may we know it or not. The art of reading body language, A.K.A. cold reading, is a skill many professional use in their profession, from F.B.I. interrogators to mediums. People who call themselves socially intuitive may have a knack at understanding others' postures and voice stress. Fortunately, we don't need academic knowledge or innate talent to notice incongruities in a peer's message, which usually are hints for inner struggle, shyness or plain lie.

One seemingly widespread incongruity I have noticed in my area is one of the many double messages I get from women. Through the media funnels, I keep hearing some of their feminine emissaries claim they are more open to dating, that many of them willing women even have troubles finding a male mate. You would think that an average male in his thirties, traveling using bus and working with the public, he would be in a vantage position to notice seduction attempts? That male would be me, making next to none (unless these girls in the back are acting like ecstatic groupies around that feminized gay boy). Conflicting message: "We women need real males!" and "We women don't like real males so much.".

Then, this gum commercial hit me square between the eyes: with but a simple smile and a square of bubblegum (and the help of an electronic imagery wizard or two), these women fold space between themselves and their male preys like they were Spaceing Guild's Navigators out of Frank Herbert's Dune. Could that bubblegum brand be the fabled Spice us Sci-Fi geekoids have been dreaming for all this time?

The secret is not in the chewing gum, you pathetic dreamers! The secret is the smile. The smile is what made Obama look humane to me, the smile is what makes me want to cuddle and kiss with one of them gum chewing actresses. You women out there, who want to find either a sperm donnor, a fuck friend or a boyfriend: SMILE! It might hurt a bit in the begining, since I don't see you do often, yet you may find it is worth the effort. Next step is to say yes when I invite one of you girls for a chat around a cup of coffee.

Back to Earth, it is no secret in the field of seduction that it is a die hard tradition for the males to do the first steps. You will not see me use one of them widespread emoticons on this blog. Instead, I offer a kind litterary smile to one of my on-line roleplaying buddy, a good looking woman who was honest enough to tell me I should chill out a bit more on my blog.

I beam to you, hottie.

The Good Ol' Times

Was life better before our time? Will the future make life better? Are we at the pinnacle of the humane society's potential right now? In all eras of our history, there was someone to promote the yes or the no answers to each of these fundamental questions. As for this very year of 2008, the echoes I hear seem to be three big 'NO' for each question. Let us have a view at the past, the present and the future so we can understand better how meaningful these 'NOES' are.

Evaluating how good was life in the good ol' days is practically impossible on a happiness scale, simply because happiness is a state relative to individuals in situations that will make them feel their needs fulfilled. I also automatically push aside any statement that has to do with happiness fluctuations within the same lifetime, A.K.A "In my youth...", because this kind of evaluation can never be objective enough. What we can do is compare how we are living nowadays with how we believe our ancestors did, if we trust our historians. I do not believe politics alone should be considered, as we know today democratic countries which offer less possibilities of well-being to their citizens than some kingdom or empires of the ancient past. The only sure way, I believe, to compare our contemporary well-being to the one of an ancestor is through an economic and health evaluation. So far, through my disscusions else places over the internet, the best comparison I was offered is the one between our North American lifestyle and the one people experienced in the Roman Empire. Using the United States of America for this comparison, it seems to me that only technicalities changed since then, like the average lifespan or the currencies in usage. So to the first question, my answer would be: Life today is about the same as before, only that we now live somehow longer and with more tools and techniques available to reach our individual goals.

Futurists in the middle of the twentieth century predicted that by Y2K, we would be driving flying cars, cancer would be cured for good and computers would have eliminated our need for paper (maybe one day we might print ourselves out of trees, as it is). That, and other wishful claims which today seem hilarious or simply dumb. Yes, each year, each generation, each century we reach further, faster, with growing ease in scientific knowledge. Sanitation, food preservation, mechanical information processing (computers) and means of transportations are our greatest achievements. It makes, for our North American civilization, life easier at first sight. If I take a step back and look at the greater picture, it is no great deal: to keep living in that bubble of comfort, through war and econmics we exploit countries we consider less civilized or do not care about, while at the same time we dillute the purity of Earth's primary resources in industrial trash. Ecologists, humanists, economists and scientists are siding to alert us about these facts. All this complex problem will either be solved or (most probably) will provide the cure by itself, leaving our childrens a world with new challenges to overcome. We may be inventive, cooperative and adaptative but also dumber in number, egotist and lazy. Some may say, what about improvements in the social aspect of the human life? It's a flavor. People keep fighting to get the largest greenest piece of land with the greatest house and so on, at the same time talking to babies and youngsters on the same tone they use for pets. That is when they are not using them for punching bags or sex toys. Let's not ignore that some criminal rings abduct people to sell them whole as slaves or in parts for surgical replacements. On top of that, we wouldn't start to agree on religious, sportive or political topics here, where there is little possibility for us to start an idealistic bloodsheding brawl. To the second question, I say: No, not as long as the human beings remain that limited in the empathic department.

To assess if we are near or even past the best of the human potential as a society appears even harder than comparing our society with past ones. Happiness scale remains as subjective. Also, how do we know without a possible comparison? I am about to make really simple: genetics and demographics. Not that I have all the answers, especially in the genetics area. Please, those who know, tell us if the human species is getting better or worse! Is it possible that our general repulsion for eugenics (a taboo we do not extend to cattle) has already prevented us to go beyond our genetical deffects? Right now, I do not believe enough of us know how to breed healthy humans so we can be sure the human species will prevail on the very long run. Every minute, more and more humans are born on a planet that does not grow. That means less human ready habitat, less primary resources for each individual and more trash and shit to deal with. The the philosophers that keep saying that an increasing number of humans grow poorer and a decreasing number of humans get richer, I say you are right. If Earth was a big supper on a table, there would be less and less space around the table for the fat ones who had the biggest shares to start with and at the same time, more and more people to fight for the crumbs that fall, with the same remaining number of bathrooms and trashcans. Can a society be great, if the well fed are too fed, the others starve and everyone is swimming in a pollution soup? To the final question, my own answer has to be: Yes and I have had no proof so far that we, as a species, are smart enough to trim our numbers for the better.

Premise: New to blogging

I enter the blogging community with little if no experience of this Y2K era phenomenon. This is more to me than just a new experience, it is also an experimentation. It is about two characters: Me the Writer and You the Reader. It is for me to learn about how I do facing the big open white page and how you react to the trail of ASCII characters I leave behind. How far will this trail go? How far will you follow it?

My intent is to publish my opinions, my thoughts, my concerns and most probably other material of more entertaining nature. I choose to do it here for one simple reason: it allows You the Reader to interact with Me the Writer. Let alone, the human being is left to simmer in its basic daily simplicity, where its personal improvements are dictated by the availability of comfort in its immediate environment. Cooperation and competition in a group, on the other hand, provides a never ending ground for synergistic accomplishments.

Welcome to my blog. Feel free to comment, elaborate, argue, discuss. The rules are simple: I am the moderator of this intellectual territory and I let you garden a share of it as long as I feel it improves it. If you do in a respectful and constructive manner, your efforts will be displayed. Topics and posts that I find offensive or that I am uneasy with will be dismissed, with or without explanation. I have confidence that many of you will enjoy my mild dictatorship and come back to read more, as the garden expands into a luxurious jungle of creativity.