survey stolen from gnat23, featuring no new information.

Reading: Baudolino (Eco) & Quicksilver (Stephenson) & Edison's Eve (Wood)
Listening to: trendy garage rock (yeah yeah yeahs, white stripes) and the mix from star_power
Playing: Age of Empires II - Scottish Campaign.
Researching: The usual (intensefragilty)
Writing: Zine articles, moving-diary-style.
Applying: Myself strenuously to sleeping.
Making: A sock from KPPPM, with the weird heel-flap pattern by Ann Norling.
Being: Impatient, busy, tired, asleep or sleepless.
Seeing: Um... bad tv? Too much of my dog's teeth?
Believing: I'll have a job in the next two weeks or so. i'll have some dates as of next weekend or so. i'll actually get myself together to go out on halloween night.
Planning: Painting a wall. Placing my furniture in The Lair. FITTING my furniture into The Lair. Where to put my posters. where to apply for jobs.
Deciding: Exactly how to paint that wall.
Pushing: my luck('s like a button, can't stop pushing it)
Wanting: Grey v-neck cashmere sweater, cute shoes, winter boots, haircut. Books and cds and games/programs, as always. a publishing contract. my bed and stuff out of storage. a larger bathroom!
Dreaming: Weird, occasionally distressing, but not bad.
Watching: Trigun, which I hate. What else is on?
Hoping: That I can get the new house together fairly quickly. That I can find decent bookshelves and not have to build.
Eating: Too much crappy fast food.
Studying: You know. The usual. Jacobethanstoration Hell. Construction of believable fantasy worlds & their demographics and geography.
Loving: My cats, dog, momster, niecelet, best friend, other friends, the usual suspects.
Drinking: I just finished a bottled mocha frappuccino.
Living: in a too-small hotel room with too many pets, but only for another eight hours or so. then, living on a freaking inflatable mattress, out of suitcases and a poorly-organized storage compartment. excuse me while i hum the queer eye theme ("all things just keep getting better!") and attempt to maintain a positive attitude.

the one where i pretend to be wise: us damned dirty apes.

Where is Boing Boing?

Moving over to the new place shortly, where I will crash for a few hours, and the landlord's kids will hopefully come over and cover the sump pump / cistern thingie and clean stuff and murder mr. centipede. (the landlord's kids are older than me; landlord lives in texas.)

Reading an article on white privilege & shaking my head. the problem for me isn't a question of whether white privilege exists: duh. the problem is at least twofold. as someone who has a lot of contact with radical communities and finds their ideas, usually, inspiring but not logically practicable, i think - i've said this a hundred times but i'll say it once more - human nature is usually left out of the equation, along with a historical perspective on it. people are capable of great kindness but in terms of survival we usually aren't inherently nice (and yeah, in the society i live in today, survival is considered at a much higher level than "getting by" - it's considered as thriving, it requires a heavy time investment and in most cases a large financial investment, vis a vis higher education). american society is not a vacuum, and so we need to consider a view of the world and a view of all of human history as parts of "what got us here."

i was telling my mom earlier that i have this crackpot, scientifically suspect anthropological theory that war is an ingrained device for human population control. yes, it causes humans enormous psychological pain, but that's probably beside the point, an unpleasant side effect insofar as its purpose. if the animals are allowed to kill each other off in disputes over resources of various kinds, in some cases it probably helps keep the resources from becoming as scarce as they might otherwise. perceived scarcity may touch off these disputes to begin with, but not always (sometimes it's just greed).

so yeah, privilege exists - not just white privilege, all kinds of privilege. and i can think of very few actual-not-imagined major societies where that hasn't been the case - actually, i can't think of any, but i'm not so educated that i'm going to rule them out. the world can change, but it changes slowly, and plenty of underlying patterns stay the same. remember that any given person at any given time has lived at what was, for them, the height of modernity (even if they didn't express it that way). of COURSE privilege isn't fair, but that's the other big thing: where on earth does the "life is fair" concept come from? Are there any bio/eco-logical systems that work that way? isn't it usually more of a food-chain situation? a creature living in a symbiotic relationship can still be another creature's prey. "fairness" is a human ideal that happens, in perspective, pretty rarely. overall we scrabble for advantage and in most cases tend to be out for #1. (there are ALWAYS exceptions to this, but they're statistically probably not a large percentage of the whole population, and i'd wager that it's not even consistent behavior for everyone who engages in it.) it's all depressing. maybe i'm just defeatist/pessimistic, but i think... i just look back and i see that, the clothes change and how hard it is to get food changes, but really, people don't change that much; if the way we interact with each other changes at all, it takes a long time. not a few years or decades but usually at least a century or two, and that's a fast change.

(in anti-rape rhetoric, there's the fantasy that twenty years or so of necessary reeducation of men has overwhelmed hundreds of years of training to the contrary: that no doesn't always mean no, that women "owe them" for buying dinner, etc. complicating this are anti-feminist women. i'm not saying that most men think this way, i'm saying that there ARE still men who think this way, who are being raised by fathers who think this way, who in turn were raised by fathers who think this way, and what they see as "the harping of those women's libbers" isn't making much of an impression in the face of contrary role models. it will take centuries for this to change, if it ever does at all. and it requires chains being broken.)

also, the human genome project recently confirmed that race is a political construct with no biological basis. (this kind of ties in with certain elements of what i was raised to believe, which is that the only races were black and white, the only reason they were races was specifically because black people are often victims of discrimination and prejudice, and all other races were "nationalities" or "cultures". i think this CAN be healthy, because it encourages a certain kind of equality - i never saw my asian or mexican or puerto rican friends as being of a different race than me - but it also allows white people to turn a blind eye to racism vs non-black people of color. i have relatives who would never in a million years be insensitive towards a black person, who are outrageously racist - nondiscriminatory, but completely culturally insensitive - towards asian-americans.) why then address "race" and not class? cos it's cheaper for governments to do so, and easier to identify the addressees. race should be addressed, but class is still a problem, along with cultural stuff and things like tribal affiliation. (case in point: hutus and tutsis in rwanda.) people will always find excuses to treat other people badly. this is human society. i think that the most important thing to do is live your life according to your own idealism, but you'll drive yourself crazy if you expect the world to fall in step with you. and if they did, even if you had the best intentions, that might be a creepy thing anyway. (see: dictators of the 20th century.)

and look at me, i'm so fucking smart, telling everyone what to think. think what you want, really. this is just my perspective. i think that to a great extent we live in a kill-or-be-killed situation, not on a daily basis but at least as national entities, then as communities, then sometimes in extreme circumstances on a person-to-person basis. it's depressing, and i don't think it's ethically justifiable, but ethics aren't really hard-wired on a biological level. a lot of things aren't. humans are frequently just overachieving apes, and thinking we're better (even tho we DO have the potential to be, i'm talking about the assumption that we're all always using that potential to the best of our capacity) is probably just suicidal. there is ALWAYS going to be a group designated as "the Other", as undesirable competition which the majority must dominate to insure its survival, set aside either by arbitrary borders or by variations in cultural practices. i hate that the world is that way; it hurts my heart. but i know that the majority of power brokers don't care about my feelings, or yours, nor did they in 60 BCE, nor did they in Sumer, etc.)

also, i fucking twisted my ankle when i took the wen outside a few minutes ago. how? fell off the ledge of a stupid nonslip mat at the hotel door. approximate height? like 1/4", just enough to turn my ankle when i overbalanced. but there doesn't seem to really be anything wrong with it so far, and i'll be nice to it for the next day or so!

also, i should watch my mouth. i'm really trying to swear less.

hallowmeme - zoloft wouldn't really do that, would she?

My LiveJournal Trick-or-Treat Haul
verbminx goes trick-or-treating, dressed up as Margot Tenenbaum.
amatrixangel gives you 18 purple coffee-flavoured gummy bears.
ana gives you 13 orange coconut-flavoured pieces of chewing gum.
banshee tricks you! You lose 14 pieces of candy!
buttrflyaisling tricks you! You get an old sock.
cydniey gives you 1 brown coffee-flavoured nuggets.
katesterbp gives you 19 light yellow banana-flavoured jelly beans.
mipplet gives you 1 blue apple-flavoured hard candies.
nadja tricks you! You lose 12 pieces of candy!
ragdoll tricks you! You get a pencil.
zoloft tricks you! You lose 24 pieces of candy!
verbminx ends up with 2 pieces of candy, an old sock, and a pencil.
Go trick-or-treating! Username:
Another fun meme brought to you by rfreebern.