Ice-nine

"If everything that happens is miraculous, then nothing is miraculous." That is a very true statement. I need some form of yardstick to asess quality, otherwise I'm lost to not being able to make reasonable judgements of what is worth recording or recounting and what should remain in my endless head. That said, I think people are really fooling themselves when they talk about taste and our ability to discriminate. Everyone agrees that we should withhold judgement until we have sufficient evidence for our claim that "this is good" or "this is fun" or "this is not very interesting". Unfortunately in the bewilderingly vast majority of cases, we don't have that evidence or expertise, whatever that means. So stop silently judging everyone; I can practically guarantee you don't have the means to do so effectively; I certainly don't, but I don't hold myself up as the ideal. It seems to me every time someone makes a sweeping generalization or makes their personal preferences based on some untenable metaphysical construct ("art", "truth", etc.) they are in essence sticking out their noses to be smacked by whoever is listening; the smackage is too rare an occurrence, sadly. We ought to give up the whole sordid mess. For example: my music is just a bunch of notes in a musician's repertiore of mechanical movements, my literature is just a bunch of words, my so-called sophistication is on the same level as a couple going around a neighbourhood nervously introducing themselves, my ideals essentially the same as the dreams that everyone else has (except theirs are sensibly contained to their bedrooms and bathrooms). I'm willing to make this one generalization: that no-one is as unique as they think they are. I will not even start on the hypocrisy of individualistic countercultures; that's a train wreck that's been gawked at by enough people. Not that I think I'm not repeateing what has already been thought enough times to put a student hyped in Red Bull and espresso beans to sleep; I'm just lazy and tired.

What prompted this storm of bile and pity was an article I was reading for my Women's Studies. This was the first truly stupid article I read; the author was making pretty lame arguments on a subject with which she seemed only marginally acquainted; this subject just happened to be my specialty, so I felt insulted. It boiled down to saying, "but you see, this sentence only talked about MEN and not WOMEN!! Therefore it is iased and sexist and [insert scary looking big word that is essentially meaningless]". This set the whole Women's Studies project in doubt; I've been accepting a lot of questionable stuff on faith, but can I? Is liberal propaganda any easier to swallow than any other kind? I may not be special, but I'm certainly not mindless.

Notice how the two paragraphs contradict each other? Good.

Consider: "if you're running into contradictions everywhere, it means you're clinging too hard to the empty nutshell of the "meanings" and 'definitions" of your (or someone else's) words. Take a fun little linguistic romp, and the whole mess will make a little more sense. But just a little."