Amigos... Forever?

I have sixty-six friends. Or did, the last time I checked my new Facebook account. I signed on to it because someone told me I could use it to post unlimited pictures, but this whole "friend" list building thing has just got me captivated.

According to my little mini plastic-coated travel Oxford dictionary, a friend is a "n. 1 person (other than a relative or lover) with whom one is on terms of mutual affection". I've always figured a friend to be something more (or less) than that, but I understand that words derive meaning from use, so I should just be understanding. Even setting aside the misnomerisation / multiverse-destroying paradox that happened when I clicked to confirm my mom, brothers, sisters and wife as "friends", the fact remains that for most people the term is a loose one, a sort of porous nomenclatorial corral.

When I first went and signed myself a facebook account, it was because Flikr had only let me put one hundred pictures on before they started snaking their grubby little fingers towards my wallet. Facebook, I was told, had unlimited uploads, free, and I could do a bunch at a time (which is hands-down the most annoying thing about Flikr). So I went for it: sat down for an hour in front of my computer (which I don't like, cause it tends to give me vertigo) and answered all their insidious little questions, lying whenever possible in an effort to throw off Big Brother - or at least give Him a migraine.

Bang-o, prest-o, I had an account - which for some reason had three friend requests pending. Erk? How do I set something up one second, rife with lies, and the next have three people trying to be my friend? I didn't know, but these three were, indeed, my friends, so I clicked "confirm".

Then I paused. I thought about it. I looked over at one of these people's friend lists. There were over three hundred people on it! Now, to my mind, for a friendship to be real, real time has to be spent with that person. If not, the relationship leaves the friendship corral and gets lassoed by "acquaintance wranglers". I realize that friendships are in constant flux and that due to the transient nature of our modern, north american, suburbian selves they pretty much don't last as friends, but time still must (I assert loudly, stomping my foot) be spent. Or invested. Or wasted.

I think it's fair to say that friends must interact for at least enough time to allow that "mutual affection" a reason to exist. Let's figure this out: there are one hundred and sixty-eight hours in a week. Say fifty-six are spent sleeping and seven showering and excrementing - the sort of thing you don't want anyone (remember, according to Oxford, lovers can't be friends!) around for - which leaves one hundred and five hours of awake time. Allowing, for the sake of argument, that you'd be able to give quality time to your friends while at work or school, if you have three hundred friends, that gives you around twenty minutes per week, per friend - assuming you spend every waking, non-pooping minute interacting with them. This is a bit much, I think, so we'll cut you down by the forty work hours you're spending, which then leaves only twelve minutes, per friend, per week - and you're still talking to a lot of those folks with your mouth full. There are variables, of course (girls having potty parties), but you get my point.

I decided, upon reflection, that I'd be better off staying out of it. I would only click to confirm friendships with people I actually did maintain active friendships with in "real" life. This ideal ran into the problem of reality: What about other people clicking on me? People I once interacted with regularly, but from whom the current of time had drifted me far? Did I write them a little note, explaining that I would be unable to confirm their friendship because they now lived in Swahili and I had no time for Swahilialiens? Then there was the guy I saw, scrolling through someone elses friend list, from whom I needed something. Not really more than a distant acquaintance, ever, but someone who could hook me up. I couldn't contact him in facebook unless he was listed as my "friend". Was networking betraying my resolution?

What really bugged me, I guess, was the way building friend lists appealed to that dirty little part of myself that so easily denigrated into shameless competitiveness and score keeping. Could associating the word "friend" with this sort of ego-boosting commodification of relationships ultimately wreck it for me? I doubt it, but I'm pretty sure it would eventually subtly change the way I define "friendship" in my mind.

In my experience of North American people so far, few of them seem to know what it means to be a real friend. It could just be that they don't want to be a real friend to me, but nonetheless, since moving from my small community in Peru at the age of seventeen I have found most of my suburbanite acquaintances to treat friendship in the flippant way they treat most everything else.

Why is this?

Is it the consumer attitude that sees friends as commodities to be picked up and used for personal gratification until something better comes along to twitterpate the senses? Is it the post-Enlightenment primacy of the individual (that is, me) and his or her felt needs (read: whimsical desires)? Could it be the transitoriness of modern life, impelled by North American wealth, facility of transportation over long distances, and the glut of modern communication technology? Or perhaps its just raw, uncensored, old-fashioned human greed and selfishness, exacerbated and encouraged by basically everything in our great uncivilization?

Yes. No. Probably a bit of each.

Do I solve the problem, though, by being stubborn on Facebook - or by not Facebooking at all. I doubt it... although... maybe. Sometimes, lately, I've been thinking that you have to throw out the baby with the bathwater. This could be because if its been there too long, you might no longer have a prayer of telling the difference between the two - or maybe because the baby has horns under his hair and is the antichrist. I don't know.

What I do know is that it sucks to feel used and unappreciated, devalued and discarded in lieu of the Next Best Thing. I guess the best thing is to get over myself, to cherish the folks who really do know what friendship means (and desire it with me), and to do my darndest to be that kind of person in return.

deferring to Juanito

If I were a tasty, crunchy (at its best) breakfast, I'd be a waffle. I just rode my crazy rebel-machine back from a summer working for the filthy oil-man and, after having read some nifty books, have found that I am flip-flop-fulminating on my life. Think, think, think.

Tumulted thought-times, oddly enough, are not good write-on-internet times - at least not when "tumultosity" reaches some sort of critical mass. And yet the internet lumbers on. So I will cut and paste in a post from the one blog that I read regularly, written by a man named Little John, who lived next door to me eighteen years ago in Peru, along with his crazy family and a howler monkey that liked to... er... howl.

His site is: http://ozerik.homeip.net/ , and I highly recommend it if you're into random interestingness. Without further ado...

---

...socialism is bad if you are a christian. and i don’t get why...
--Karla


Um... i am flattered to be consulted thus, and i hope to attract comments which will flesh out my nearly unintelligible response.

In the US, socialism and communism have been linked in the popular mind, and since the persecution of Christians by communist states like China and the USSR is widely known, socialism is seen by a great many Christians as one of those bad -isms. In more modern politics, socialism is the direction "liberals" lean toward, while conservatives prefer less regulated capitalism. Conservative politics also include such noble causes as not killing fetuses, and making gay people stop being gay. At least, that's how those issues seem to be understood by most Christians, and there's clear support for not killing fetuses and avoiding sexual impurity in scripture.

I think this is unique to US politics. I see nothing about either a progressive or conservative agenda to attract either end of the moral agenda. But i'm pretty sure a lot of what's going on has to do with the history of communist states being anti-Christian, and liberals being homosexual abortionists.

There's also the fact that the political right has done a fantastic job appealing to morally conservative Evangelicals. There's people (hopefully fewer and fewer of them) who seem to sincerely believe that if you vote non-Republican, then you literally can not be a Christian. It's impossible. Even intelligent people i love very much have said things like "You've got to be CRAZY or STUPID to vote Democrat!" Um...?

My personal quest in politics is to find what most closely matches the idea of the Kingdom of God as laid out by Jesus and the apostles, and try to support those kinds of things. Issues like abortion and gay rights are hot buttons in the conservative Christian community, and any politician who delivers a few key phrases can guarantee himself (or -- unlikely -- herself) a hefty amount of support based on those two issues. But how about the disadvantaged? Poor people are poor for a reason, and while Jesus says "the poor will always be among you", that doesn't mean "those lazy slackers are hopeless, let them help themselves and get successful like you did". Or how about the sick: Jesus spent tons of time and effort healing the sick. And American conservative politicians seem fairly happy with the system we've got going right now, with only the worthy taxpayer who has a full time job with benefits getting the healing they need. Let's talk about global poverty. I think it was famous "Christ-Worshipping Agnostic" Kurt Vonnegut who said something like "I see no justification for why I should have so much, while my neighbor should have so little." I completely agree. I complain to myself that gasoline costs three bucks and change per gallon. But i can afford it! I have two fricking cars! And a scooter! I spend more per day on gasoline than the world's poorest billions spend on their very nourishment! This is outrageous, and not least because i tolerate the outrageousness of it. And, um, social projects, socialized medicine, and friendly foreign relations have been policies of progressive Democrats.

Capitalism works (when it works) because people are greedy. Greed is, according to scripture bad. Socialism doesn't work (when it doesn't work) because people are greedy. One could say that capitalism "gives up" on human nature, and instead runs with it, letting people trample and back-stab their way to power and wealth. One could say that socialism is naively idealistic, and is doomed to failure because people will "work the system", and perhaps even immoral because when the richer portion of society provide for the poorer, the lesser will be humiliated and dehumanized.

So, since i am utterly cynical about the government and the political process, i want earnestly for our American leadership to present a face to the world which is utterly different than the face the world has come to know and fear. With that in mind, i fully support Barack Obama, even though he's one of the mainstream candidates, and is a polished, professional politician. Yech. With Obama's face as the face of America, maybe the poverty stricken masses will think "Hey, there's hope!!!" So, like the Evangelical who will vote based on the pro-life, anti-gay-rights boxes ticked on their card, i will vote for Obama because he's a black man whose middle name is Hussein. Black; CHECK! Middle name Hussein; CHECK!

this just in

I wanted to leave that "paintings for sale" post right up at the top there forever and ever, for to be seen a lot, but then something happened so absolutely heinous that I just had to write it down. I found out (you'd better sit down - this could come as quite a shock) that people actually pay good money to buy ring tones for their cell phones!

Do the phones come without ring tones, so that the owners of said brain-wave-scrambling-devices cannot use them without this purchase - I should say not! In fact, these phones come with a whole panoply of ring tones to choose from. Nonetheless, some people (who shall remain nameless - Jason C.), actually shell out real money to hear some ridiculous schniblet midi-style-file clip of some putrescent pop hit-you-in-the-face-with-a-rotten salmon. Like, try seven dollars!

Let me just repeat, my friends - I am NOT pulling your leg. This is the real deal. It is actually going on right now EVEN AS WE SPEAK. I thought you should know.

blue steel

At the risk of offending Christy Turlington, Derek Zoolander, and all those people out there with "Hollister" plastered across their chestal regions, I would like to take this opportunity to thrust my right forefinger dramatically to the sky and declare that fashion as it is practiced today is pretty much the new stupid.

The old stupid was easy to identify and laugh at, as it included such things as ridiculously starched ruffles choking the neck, pantyhose for men, and possibly a fake bottom or two in the form of a bustle. Or the slightly less old stupid, which had to do with lots of hairspray, pump-up high-tops and neon spandex shorts. We can all agree that the idiot ways our forbears chose to blow their money in an effort to like like large groups of other people as wastefully rich as themselves were, well, idiot (unlike, of course, today. which is different. and cooler).

Ah, today. I'm talking Dolce and Gabanana sunglasses, pre-ripped and soiled jeans and paying someone else (but not their slave-labour, third-world employees) exorbitant sums of money for the priviledge to plaster their corporate logos all over our respective backs, buttocks, thighs and chestals. I'm talking about drawers stuffed with twenty-two t-shirts, thirty-five pairs of pants and closets with one hundred and seventy-nine pairs of skate shoes (I poo you not, I just met someone who boasted this accoutrement accomplishment!). And don't even let me get started on the money, time and effort that gets frittered away in an effort to shape, condition and batter the mass of dead keratin strands that is our hair - the tons and tons of eco-malevolent, carcinogenic hair products that get absorbed through skin and washed into the groundwater.

I'm not saying I think everyone should wear flour-sack guru-suits and let their hair go wandering where it will... not necessarily... but what I am saying is that I'm sick to death of the sentiment that oozes from the walls that to be "stylish" (whatever the effstance that is) is ridiculously important, and perhaps even a moral virtue. I probably like creativity as much as the next effimate-looking guy, and figure it ought to extend to the garment industry, but I hate the idea that fashionable (read: expensive) clothing is an important part of the goodness of self I ought to be trying to maintain.

I know, I know - THEY (that is, the ruthless critics that demonaically possess the popidiot word) would claim to only hold me responsible to dress to the absolute best I can afford - but they certainly don't mean the best I can afford conscienably as a human being aware of the cyclical poverty in which billions of the world's inhabitants live. They understand, these perpetrators of perpetual poverty, that for the runaway stagecoach of our economy to stay upright, the horses (that's us) have to be whipped into an ever-greater frenzy of needless consumption.

The problem is that it is everywhere, as though the north american consumer-machine coach is careening madly through a forest full of pepe-le'pew style skunks - skunks are flying left and right, and the stench infects everything. It is in movies and TV and suchlike and so on and on and on until it has become a part of the attitudes of the populace - so much so that KINDERGARTEN kids who don't dress "right" get valued less as human beings by their peers AND teachers (seriously, it's true. I saw it on TV).

When I get depressed about all this, though, or find myself hopping on the bandwagon of skewed belief that would have me thinking that the clothes actually DO make the man (what brilliant advertising executive came up with THAT one?), I just remember that most of the world's population is NOT a victim of this idiocy, and NOT, as a popidiot would be quick to claim, just because they're too poor to afford it. Some people, believe it or not, happen to have their heads screwed on in approximately the right direction. And maybe, if I try, I can become more like them.

the meaning of life

Out in the pristine air of the mountains of British Columbia things could, from time to time, become quite clear.

A voice shot through the air from a cut block ten kilometers away and out of my radio. "OK, fine. Well here's a really tough one... In the scene where Princess Buttercup confronts Prince Humperdink with the fact that he hasn't sent his four fastest ships after Wesley... what is the color of her dress?" I paused, momentarily stumped and not willing to admit it - The Princess Bride being, truth be told, a bit of a specialty for me. "I'm waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaiting..." Craig's voice blared out.

"Let me answer your question with another question, Craig", I shot back, "How about you just shut the fork up? No, no wait, that's not it. The real question is... what is the meaning of life?"

A pause, though much shorter than my own. "Oh, that's easy", he replied, "the meaning of life is... YES."

Then, silence. A long pause.

"Oh, so like, meaning is a function of affirmation, discovered in a positive response to the perpetual question or questions asked by existence?" I replied, eventually. More silence. "Craig?"

Craig wasn't there. Craig was off on the cut block, planting trees.

Later in the eating tent I asked Trevor what he thought was the meaning or motive force of his life. Trevor was and is a big, friendly giant, nicknamed "Moose". He gave a slightly dopey impression, but was actually very intelligent. He started to respond and I interrupted to say no, no - just think about it. I don't want to know a flippant answer or what you think ought to be the answer, I want to know the truth around which you organize your life.

He grinned that big Trevor grin, munched some salad and grinned some more and at last said, "Fun. Yeah, fun. That's it. I guess the criteria I'm most likely to judge things by is fun - if something is fun, then I guess I see that as good."

Now, an eating tent at chow time is tight quarters, so our conversation provoked some bysitters to get involved. One self-involved person made a disparaging comment of some sort, another chap defended Trevor's honesty and soon the tent was sparking with "meaning of life" conversations. Tree planters, alone with their thoughts all day, make excellent armchair philosophers. Or would, if they had any armchairs.

It got livelier - crescendoed a few times. There was no consensus - just the arbitrariness of an impromptu discussion of experts without the streamlining benefit of a qualified facilitator (that would have been me, of course, having read Albert Camus' The Plague twice and taken at least two separate undergraduate philosophy courses). I just sat there, enjoying the rabble that had been roused.

It seemed to me, though, that most of the more honest people agreed with Trevor. We are, it would seem, a society of hedonists, who have been taught (surprise, surprise) by a pop education to demand constant titillation, stimulation, and novel experience. We follow our emotions, experiential minions enslaved to whatever it is that can make us feel, that day, as though we are having fun.

This is stupid. Emotions are an important part of human experience, and provide excellent clues to how we're really doing, inside. As a guiding light, however, they're fairly... er... shady, and more likely to lead us over a cliff than anything.

Craig, I think, had a slightly better bead on it. Saying YES to life does not mean being led around by the emotive nose, but rather standing on the side of a mountain and accepting the way things really are. It needs to go further though, I think. It is not enough (although possibly further along than most folks will get) to simply affirm Reality, becoming a veritable "yes man" to the Universe. I reckon the Universe does not need or want Yes Men. It needs men who say "yes, sir", accepting in humility the Truth of Reality and then boldly moving forward in that knowledge, marching in the Right direction.

"Yes" is only a transitional moment. The real question is what you do with that yes. The hedonist (and we are, all of us, hedonists) says, "yes", and then proceeds to do whatever is necessary to avoid any of the unpleasantries which he or she has just affirmed. But what good, really, is a life spent pursuing pleasure, fleeing ugliness? Pleasure is a fickle god who does not care, sending us hither and yon at a whim and then flouting us, again and again, when we least expect it.

Pleasure is good, of course, but as a result of a life spent acquiescing to Reality, not as a framework for approaching life itself. The titillation we see as real pleasure when we spend our lives in service of Fun is really, I'd guess, a lazy person's alternative to what we really want out of life, which is Joy. Joy, which has an objective status apart from the circumstances of personal experience, reflects the smile that is plastered all over the face of Reality itself - a pleasure that exists both because and in spite of all aspects of truth, both pleasant and unpleasant.

Is this too vague or paradoxical or romantic a vision? Possibly, yes, but I am of the school (Josh's Institute for Kids Who Don't Think Good... and Stuff) that thinks that vagueness, paradox, mystery and romance are not the end of the world - possibly only the start. Truth and the meaning of life are perhaps best appreciated and apprehended vaguely, by feel - not, as the Hypocrisy Police will have immediately noted, by pure emotion, but rather in a more holistic sense by the Spirit, which is a broader and less quantifiable notion.

Maybe truth is less felt or understood than it is guessed at and lived. Perhaps that is why Craig thought it best, when he had just been pestered into revealing the Meaning of Life, to turn off his radio and go back to planting trees.