Self-aware angst is the best kind

What's the point of having an a planet-destroying piece of communication technology in my pocket, (a position from which, incidentally, it's probably making me infertile — not that I particularly mourn the loss, though brain cancer later in life will probably suck), if I can't talk to someone when I really need it?

How can I rant about how I'm sick of texting and phones and the goddamn internet, and how I just want to sit in the same room as someone I care about and be with them, if I can't get a hold of anyone via texting and phones and the goddamn internet in order to give said rant?

Best. Video. Ever.

Best Dinosaur Comics mouseover text ever!

"Let's count up the number of brain cells across every living thing worldwide dedicated to Facebook. Then let's slice them out, create a Facebook brain, and ignore what it says forever."

(It's from this comic).

Guests of the Sheik

Elizabeth Warnock Fernea went 'behind the veil' when she and her anthropologist husband spent 2 years (1956-58) living in an Iraqi village. The real pay-off of the book she wrote about the experience comes — at least for me — on the last few pages:

"I suppose I was flattered, for I had apparently shown, by my restrained conduct in El Nahra, that all Western women were not, per se, wanton, but I had done this by generally observing Hamid's own customs towards women. How many years would it have taken, I wondered to convince Sheik Hamid that I was a respectable woman if I had not worn the abayah in El Nahra, if I had sat with the men in the mudhif, ridden horseback in blue jeans and wandered through the suq and village as I pleased?

"How many years would it take, I wondered, before the two worlds began to understand each other's attitudes towards women? For the West, too, had a blind spot in this area. I could tell my friends in America again and again that the veiling and seclusion of Eastern women did not mean necessarily that they were forced against their will to live lives of submission and near-serfdom. I could tell Haji again and again that the low-cut gowns and brandished freedom of Western women did not necessarily mean that these women were promiscuous and cared nothing for home and family. Neither would have understood, for each group, in its turn, was bound by custom and background to misinterpret appearance in its own way.

"... We [she and her husband] talked until very late that night. The dinner party had dramatized, a little more effectively than we might have wished, the difference between the sheik's world and ours. It had also made us realize that our presence in El Nahra had done little to resolve those differences. We admitted to each other that we had both somewhat irrational and idealistic notions of being examples, of bridging the gap between one set of attitudes and another. Now, of course, we knew we had not basically changed anyone's attitude, except perhaps our own. With our friends in El Nahra we had established personal ties, as individual human beings. This was all we should have hoped for, and perhaps it was enough."
-p.312-13, 314 in Guests of the Sheik: An Ethnography of an Iraqi Village. Anchor: 1965/1989.

"What do you mean the store is closed?!"

What's the point in living in a capitalist society if I can't have instant gratification when I have money to spend?!

"when they swear their love is real, they mean I like the way you make me feel"

So is it possible to love someone for who they are, not what you want them to be for you?

It's heartening to see people finally standing up against the unlimited greed and power of corporations. This is especially so since it seemed initially that, in the wake of the recent Credit Crunch and Bailout Bonanza, the public was just going to roll over — with only some minor grumbling — and take it in the ass again.

But what I find most exciting about the 'Occupy' movement is not the message. It is large groups of people figuring how to make decisions and live together — not just protest, let me assert that again, but live together — in genuinely democratic, consensual, and egalitarian ways. The challenge to activits and radicals, I think, is to prove it is possible to construct communities and ways of life that are actually of free of hierarchy, coercion, exploitation. Otherwise, how can our criticism that society and its institutions are riddled and dependent on these things be valid?

And there's the 'Occupy' folks doing it, right there in public. And having fun doing it too!

(Zombie walks, acrobatics, occupy. Who says you can't have it all? The Occupy Ottawa folks are sure doing something right — and enduring even as the weather keeps getting colder).