jay_walk

im not going to lecture people on it, I'm going to try it.

I stopped meat about 7 years ago not counting fish, 5 years ago counting fish, but have been on and off about fish the last two years, and then I've been going towards vegan and no fish the last months.

I wrote earlier (or maybe I didnt post that) that heresy is certainly something everyone should do more often, and with that I don't at all mean heresy against God because that's meaningless if it doesn't matter to you, but any heresy which feels completely wrong, improper, immoral, etc. for no logical reason (that is, it doesn't actually harm anyone).
But I couldn't think of what I could do, probably because I was thinking too much in the direction of religion, where no amount of putting up or destroying symbols actually means much to me.

So I'm going to eat meat for a week.

Then I'll think about where that came from and be vegan for three weeks just to be safe I don't decide I like it? In penitence? That's how you can tell it is a habit that's gotten too established without logical reason, when you feel you must repent after breaking it, and is afraid to lose it.
I think everyone ought to find one and break it.
So obviously, no rules about what I do after that week.

One week = now ( friday evening ) to Saturday

First observation:
when you're vegetarian for five years you just plain don't see 70% of the food there is. It only just occurred to me that I haven't a clue what other types of sandwiches besides the three I've been eating offers or what's in them or how they taste. After a while you don't consider every food available, you just gloss over it.
Related: there's tons of food I don't know about. So apparently there exists (in Germany) something called mettwurst which as far as I can tell looks and tastes just like salami, not that I'm good at knowing how salami is supposed to be.

Could do with butter.
Really I am not having much of a reaction to this, mostly because I'm writing at the same time and it tastes more of salty than of meat and does not have conspicuous texture.

Observation # 3:
it is probably really easy to eat meat and never think about it if you're in the habit anyway and you're for example watching tv at the same time.

But I feel like I ought to be rebaptized, or even better debaptized, right now. When I rationally know it doesn't have much consequence, what people did to me as a baby, except in people's (and mostly mine, as nobody else knows about this) imagination.
Everyone's mind works on a lot of symbolism, sympathetic magic, tradition, especially those people who think they don't.
Really, how can I get dechristianed? (Not literally, it's not the christianity that bothers me). I don't like half belonging to a religion but mostly I don't like having been named, how do I get de-named?
Stupid superstitious mind that demands rites, and symmetry, my mind is a bit obsessive-compulsive about symmetry, if I step on a rock with one foot I have to step on a rock by accident with the other on to neutralize it or the feeling will stick, and if I get baptized by accident I have to get anti-baptized to neutralize it or the feeling will stick. Awful how irrational and spiritual and structure-making human minds are. Well at least it's possible to be aware of it.
Symmetry: the absolute value of x drives me crazy, because stuff just isn't going to add up to zero like that. The letter w makes me uncomfortable for having such an unbalanced name. Most two-syllable names feel like they slope. The word zero is irritating because it has a lot more substance than what it means does.
Minds don't quite work right because they've developed to be intuitive and create order quickly where there isn't any.
Everone's insane, just the majority of people are all insane in the same way.

Got the SATs back. I am suprised at how for example Harvard's average is lower. (Maybe some were not native english speakers?)
And I am not even anything like a really rare genius. If I really represent the top percentile in terms of bubble-coloring skills, what does that say for the rest of humanity? I am losing faith in humanity...
Then again... We figured out how to put a person in a capsule and put them to the bottom of the ocean. We figured out how to put a person in a capsule and get them to space and back. We build huge amazing-looking and functional things (then again so do termites and bees). We uphold huge complicated mental constructs (i.e. all of reality) in our (collective ?) minds.
So are we lucky and stupid? Have good intuition? Have some prodigies? Have a better hive mind than individual minds?
I just don't know how everyone is so stupid when on all evidence they oughtn't be. Or maybe it's a collective arrogant delusion to view what we do as the pinnacle of intelligence and achievement. Probably.

The rules that people think are so important. Spelling correctly etc. is supposed to be a measure of intelligence. It's a measure of educatedness and conformity, that's what. Of being able to be part of the collective in one's proper place. Maybe it's all about the collective. This spelling right here, and a lot of our grammar, is the epitome of unthinking adherence to tradition and to social expectations. If I'd implement a spelling reform and everyone would learn how to write everything phonetically and more efficiently, that would not solve the problem either, because the problem is people don't understand what they're doing and why. Maybe we all don't have the brain-space to think of everything for ourselves.

Oh, that's how we do spaceflight and stuff. By cutting everything and reducing to the relevant and practical. Everything's encoded extremely compressedly and might never get decoded the same way again.
Humanity is awfully boring and there's hardly any need or opportunity for thinking.

is a really really cool idea. Maybe it could be improved by also offering 3-minute or 10-minute versions, because I can't write anything (fiction) at all unless under direct pressure but I could write a lot of cool stuff given 10 minutes of it.

Here's where I write opinions that make me sound like a misanthropic arrogant jerk and expect too much of people:

So far I have written on "morals", I have written on "crush". What most people have written on "morals" disgusts me.
So given 60 seconds apparently what's in people's minds is:
- nobody has any morals anymore; society is awful and degenerate, there should be more morals
- a few odd America-centric christianity-centric variations of the above
- a sense of how useful, right, and holy morals are
- without morals= evil
- morals = idea of what's right and wrong
- different people can have different morals
- where morals do /ought to come from (parents, society, didactic stories)

I don't know, I'm surprised. It all seems awfully regurgitated and meaningless, what people are thinking. I am always shocked to see samples of what people think, or rather don't think. Yes, I take everything too seriously.
No original thinking? No completely bizarre opinions? No nihilists, skeptics, absurdists, artists, megalomaniacs, delusions, delusional despair, hopelessness, complete idealists, god-haters, religious fanatics,...? With so many different interesting things one could write, it ought to be possible for 80% of everyone to not say the normal stuff. But no. Well I knew that, that most of stuff most people have got to say is pretty much the same stuff a million times, but still, it's depressing.
I know if the task was to be deep, creative, surprising, and original in 60 seconds there's probably be more interesting thing. But still wouldn't it be cool if that kind of diversity of thought were in people's minds without specifically trying?

Not that I can do any better, I regurgitated some stuff I got from Dorian Gray probably:
"People who don't have morals are the more moral. Having morals is having defined rules. Life being short, they probably come from cultural background and assumptions. Morals are never true. Morals are all true; the less restricted, the better. "
and in sixty seconds I did not write anything that makes sense, and neither something so deliberately abstract that the lesson is that it makes no sense.

By the way, consider the difference between immoral and amoral. In The Collector, Clegg is not immoral but amoral: he doesn't defy his sense of morality, he just has no sense of morality. Amorality isn't inherently bad, if he'd just had some basic "don't infringe on other people's rights; let people make their own choices" nothing would have happened. Morals or empathy aren't necessary, just some basic leaving people their rights. (Egocentric, solipsistic, that's his problem- doesn't occur to him his plans aren't to everyone else's liking too.) Of course there's more to be said on that book, I wrote a research paper on it.

I loathe fables, for the reason that made-up stories are not proof, not a convincing argument to do anything. When someone wants to convince me to act a certain way, but gives the silliest justifications, I get frustrated. Frustrated like when I'm trying to have a debate with someone and they argue by goofing off. They apparently became popular in the era of enlightenment and independent reasoning. I laughed when I read that sentence, because letting fictional talking animals tell me what to do is exactly what independence and rationality ought to be. Well, maybe it's that at least people are thinking or reading anything at all. Or maybe I miss the point of fables completely.


On "crush", of course there's a lot of people talking about crushes in cliché ways. Boring, mind-numbing, but not that surprising. I wrote about the verb instead, it made me think of crushed ice and I still haven't thought of the word for that odd squeaking sound ice cubes make when they tear. Then there still had to be crushing in the story, so I put all the ice and snow on top of someone.
"The sound of ice cracking, tearing, sliding, sounds like in a glass of lemonade; a crushing weight of hard, sharp blocks digging into his arm, his torso, his face – suffocating - "