Are you fucking kidding me?! “What if no one were fat?” is the article brought to us today by msn.com. The author describes a vertiable u-fucking-topia.

Forgive my use of curse words twice in three sentences, but I’m a little irate. And by a little, I mean a whole friggin’ lot.

If no one were fat we would save money in medical, transportation, and personal expenses. We would all have $4,000 more dollars a year to spend on whatever our little heart desires. I can’t possibly see the flaw in this logic, can you? Because obviously, when money is saved in the economy (if in fact, any money would be saved) it always ends up directly in the pockets of the people, spread out equitably across the country. Doesn’t that sound a little like trickle-down economics? Didn’t those not work the first time (or any other time we’ve tried them)?

The medical industry, for example, wouldn’t have to spend all of its time and resources on treating fat people. What does that mean? Other people who need healthcare and aren’t getting it because they can’t push their way around the morbidly obese to be seen by the doctor will now be helped? Children, smothered by their fat mothers, will no longer be injured? We’ll finally be able to cure cancer and AIDS because no one will be wasting their time on strokes, or heartattacks or diabetes?

It’s a really good thing no one has mentioned what the education system might do if it no longer had to waste time on No Child Left Behind, or what our government might do if it weren’t fighting false wars. I’m glad we can instead point out how fat people are holding our country back. How fat people are making YOU more poor.

And, AND, fat people cause airlines to burn more fuel and cost themselves more in gasoline. Their clothes also cost more which in turn uses up more of the world’s resources. That’s fantatsic, because for a minute there I thought the aristocracy was wasteful in its owning of three or more houses, driving of hummers, and wasting of everything in a party lifestyle. It’s also good to point out that if my ass were smaller clothing makers would be able to make more varities of clothing which would, in turn, allow all women of the world to look more attractive. Who knew that I was keeping women ugly? Here I thought I was actually doing everyone a favor by serving as the obligatory fat girl. And I’m also really excited to realize that our lack of ability to clothe our women properly, charge reasonable prices or, oh I don’t know, see them as people, occurs not because we live in a patriarchal society that oppresses everyone (women and minorities chief among them) but because fat people are sucking up all the resources.

Do you see how informative this article is being? It works from the premises that a) fat people cost society x amount of money and it is only fat people contributing to these expenses and b) if fat people were done away with this money would go back to the people whose bank accounts have been squeezed by the magnificent weight of the obese.

I’ve got a premise for you: if there were no stupid people, I wouldn’t have to read this article. I would then save ten minutes of my life reading and responding, my blood pressure would go down and my stress level would reduce which would in turn save me on future medical bills. I wouldn’t overeat as I wouldn’t feel a rebellious need to flip my (fat) bird at society and I wouldn’t then die early after years of suffering from diabetes, heart attacks and my own worthlessness as a human being. This would in turn save everyone around me approximately half a lifetime of emotional strain in dealing with me being fat which would translate to an incalculable sum. No doubt they could probably get that big screen t.v. they’ve always wanted. In the end I conclude, therefore, that it isn’t my fault that I am fat, poor, and oppressed, but the people who write this article and others like it that destroy my self-esteem.

What? I can’t make that claim? Why on earth not? You mean to say that I am responsible for my life and my income, and the government will probably take my money regardless of everyone else in society? How can you say such a thing! You mean to say that we once talked of black people, native americans, and every other minority in terms of their economic value? You mean to say that people aren’t measurable as monetary figures?

I don’t believe you. Obviously my fatness is an immorality that must be addressed posthaste. After all, every second I exist I cost YOU money. I’m gonna get right on that. Right after I eat this cookie.

http://articles.moneycentral.msn.com/Insurance/Advice/WhatIfNoOneWereFat.aspx

I am unhappy with my previous post. I feel like if I'm only going to have the time and energy to write one post a week it should be worthwhile. That last one wasn't funny, it wasn't brilliant, it just...was. I apologize to you all. The problem is I'm too tired to be funny, and maybe even too tired to be angry.

That's not true. I just read several articles that made the case for treating my students like clients and I'm near to bursting with anger. The question is can I present it in some sort of helpful, constructive way? All signs point to no.

Perhaps instead I could provide a top ten list. It's been awhile and I feel I've neglected my duties as a list-creator. So it is I give you the most evil things of all time. I've left out all the obvious ones (Hitler, Medieval Catholic Church, etc) and tried avoid naming any names of politicians or political commentators. I'm interested in the true evil in the world; the evil that sneaks up on you and crawls into your subconscious, nesting there until you are defenseless. These aren't things you an fight against--they suck the fun out of life and leave you a mewling, broken heap on the floor.

Top Ten Most Evil Things of All Time:

10. Rubber Snakes
There is no point to rubber snakes. It isn't a fun toy. It isn't a cuddlely toy. No, it exists purely as a weapon of torture for those of us that can never tell if it is rubber or real and are too paralyzed by our fear to check it out. This toy was invented by the wicked to punish the good, and I want them to know that I'm on to their little game.

9. Deep Fried Oreos/Twinkies
Whatever nutritional value (which isn't much) are present in Oreos and Twinkies to begin with is demolished through the process of deep frying them. Not only do they become unhealthy, but a veritable heart attack on a stick. You can't even enjoy them as you eat them because your throat closes up as it might when introduced to arsenic. And if you do manage to force the thing down, then the true evil begins. It's nature becomes very apparent around forty minutes later when your digestive track purges it as quickly as possible. Fire in the hole baby. Hellfire.

8. The Notebook
You might be wondering what The Notebook is doing on this list. It makes it precisely because of it's insinuating nature. There are any number of movies that might stand as pure evil--sugary goodness that you are powerless to resist--but I think The Notebook stands as king among them. At least with August Rush we knew we were supposed to hate it. The Notebook just leaves you morose, wondering how you can be so sad when they've lived a full and happy life in love. That's the work of the Devil, and Nicholas Sparks is its master.

7. Emperor Palpatine
More than Darth Vader, more than Hannibal Lector, Emperor Palpatine is the truly evil villain. He is, in fact, so evil that he embodies the dark side. So evil that even the good guys can't pick up on the fact that he's TRAINING SITH LORDS. Obviously he was sneaky. Or the Jedi were kinda dumb. I might vote for both.

6. Self-Help Books
You've seen 'em in the store. You've felt the pull as you walk by. Do you know what that pull is? Have you recognized it? It's the lure of evil, tugging at your soul. These books promise answers, solutions, easy steps to follow to cease your existence as a worthless human being. Once you start down the dark path you're forever one more book away from finding the answer. If you walk this road, pretty soon you wake up one morning wearing all black and a scuba mask wondering why you're more machine now than man, twisted and evil...

5. Memory (Cats)
Grisabella the glamour cat. A.K.A. Grisabella the prostitute cat. Don't say you didn't know it. This song has been butchered by mothers and daughters at talents shows for over two decades now. It's been the single cause of more melodramatic moments than Beaches. But knowing this, knowing full well its true nature, it still pulls at your memory. People who say they don't react to this song just don't want to admit their inability to stand strong in the face of evil. It's okay; you don't really have an option. If this song doesn't get at least a twinge you're dead inside anyway.

4. Tim Curry
He was a f&*(ing scary clown. He was a disturbingly hot Lord of Darkness. He was a lecherous Cardinal. But most importantly, he was a sweet transvestite. If evil had a name, it would be Tim Curry.

3. Spandex
Created by the demons of the world to attack the unknowing. First there were the 80's and as we passed into the 90's we thought we had won the war. Now, as the fashion trends have turned we've realized it was but a battle. Don't give up people. Remain vigilant. If you lower your guard for even a second you might walk outside and realize that you put spandex on that day and thought it was a good idea.

2. No Child Left Behind
I had to. How could I not? Children/Students as products? Commodities? Teach to the test not to knowledge? Discouraging of imagination and creativity? This is how democracies turn into dictatorships. The only surprise is that it isn't number 1, but then how could anything beat...

1. Skinny Decaf Latte
It has watered down milk, no caffeine, and no taste. In our thrill to look like we enjoy life so that no one knows we read self-help books, wear spandex, binge on deep-fried oreos and twinkies, watch The Notebook, work out to Memory, and secretly crush on Tim Curry, we order the Skinny Decaf Latte and pretend to be a "lover of life." When one drinks this so-called drink, however, one is not a lover a life. One is, in fact, a black hole of fun. As these people approach I run away so as not to cross their event horizon and be sucked into their lightless, dark abyss for all eternity. It's possible they are wormholes, but I think the only place they transport you to is hell.

Between the semester and the lack of internet connection I'm down to a post a week.

I've had two epiphanies today: the first is that I'm no longer calculable by internet quizzes and the second is that you cannot take for granted anything learned in the classroom.

The first, the internet quizzes, came as a surprise and maybe even with a smidge of sadness. Obviously internet quizzes don't actually tell you anything about your life, but taking one for fun today led me to realize that I no longer think like a normal human being. What I mean by that is, schooling has robbed me of the ability to respond to social prompts the way others do. Does that make sense? I don't mean it in a boastful, proud sort of way, but perhaps I do mean to imply some loss of innocence. I've known for awhile that I see things in ads and rhetoric that goes unnoticed, or at last uncommented, by most people--series of objectifications, hidden messages, and what not, but up until now I've always been able to take silly little internet quizzes and have a laugh at the results. Today, however, I took one of those "Buddhist" quizzes--one of those this tells you what your true personality is things--and it was more than just wrong; with my answers it didn't even make sense. I'm slightly bummed. I feel like school has finally beat any remaining normality out of me and I've lost my last connection to childhood ignorance. Keep in mind it was simply this quiz that prompted this awareness, but I would never say the quiz was anything but a vehicle for inspiring the discussion. I don't know that this is of any more value than my inability to read popular magazines or watch shows like E! Entertainment; I've lost the willingness to play along with all of those things, but since I never really enjoyed any of them in the first place it never seemed worth commenting on. The loss of internet personality quizzes, though; I might now be one of those people that others ask, why can't you just play along? I find it disturbing to fall into that category since I've built a life around "playing along."

The second realization is of much more consequence. I had assumed that there was significantly more retention in my classroom than there was. I was proven wrong by the most recent batch of rough drafts I graded and now only was I disheartened by what I saw, I was angry. Real, true anger; that's not something I've felt in awhile. What made me angry was the type of mistakes made: typos, formatting errors, sentences that don't say anything. These were all things we went over, at length, in class, and yet there they were, staring at me from the pages of forty papers. I'll accept my responsibility as their teacher; I should have talked more about these things even if the topic is boring, but nothing is quite so frustrating as realizing that what you thought was learned was not. I've heard other teachers complain of this and in retrospect it was only a matter of time before I experienced the same situation, but that doesn't make it much easier to handle.

I'm beginning to think I should have been a Math teacher. Now, I can't accomplish anything past calculus, and even that is sketchy, so the reality of me being a math teacher is pretty farfetched, but at least in math you have obvious, quantifiable data. There is a problem, there is a formula, and there is an answer. Some people might argue the same is true of English, but I'm inclined to disagree. I would place writing somewhere between art and science, much like philosophy and all the other "soft" sciences. This means that there are few "tricks" or shortcuts I can offer to my students. Even with music it always seems easier to explain why one must do something a certain way. Even if in music theory it is "just because" the answer rests on what we have been trained to hear. But in English...how does one teach another to think about their thinking? That is, of course, the question any number of composition theorists have asked and while I have read some excellent strategies I find the complications of the classroom, department requirements, and different student bodies has made it much more difficult to achieve than I naively thought before.

I wonder how many of these questions philosophy teachers ask, and what could be gained by appropriating techniques of teaching philosophy? No doubt that idea would anger both Philosophy and English departments, but it just seems much more connected to me than the hierarchies of school allows for.

Oh what am I saying? Even I don't know. I'm too tired to sleep. What does that say about my mental state at the moment? I'm also reading Atlas Shrugged which is incredibly interesting and I plan to talk about that sometime in the near future. Some day, when I have a real job and tenure I'm going to teach a composition class that's based around a novel we read in class. Teaching writing through reading--what a concept! It works for creative writing workshops and yet we don't pursue it in composition. Heaven forbid we recognize the similarities in all types of writing.

Oh well, none of it matters. I'm just going to be a nihilist. We don't believe in anything Lebowski!

This was written last Saturday night, but is only getting posted now. If you're lucky you might get a twofer today--I don't think I'm done ranting about The Mist.

Absinth. Cockroaches. The Mist. These are the things of the last 24 hours. These are the causes of my pain.

First, I suppose I should begin with the story of my drunkenness. My roommate and I threw a party. It seemed to go over well. But I began the night by drinking vodka and somewhere along the way I did a shot of Absinth. I ended the night quite drunk, but there is a positive side. I didn't throw up; I didn't molest anyone. And, to the best of my knowledge, I didn't even offer any blowjobs. These are all very good things.

Today has consisted of nursing my hangover, staring at my homework and deciding against completing any of it. But tonight I returned from a spoiled Bingo adventure, used my rest room, went to wash my hands...and saw the biggest, baddest, meannest, ugliest cockroach in the desert. That's right. He was two point one inches of ugly just hanging out in my sink. I screamed, and he ran around. Mocking me from the safety of the water basin. Thankfully there was someone here willing to kill him.

Now, it's possible, what with me being all pro nature and whatnot, that I should accept the existence of cockroaches (and giant spiders) in my apartment as natural and non-threatening. It's possible. If I were a better person I would even say necessary. But the fact of the matter is, I friggin' hate cockroaches. Maybe not as much as snakes, but hate nonetheless. They scurry. They scurry inside my walls; they probably scurry over me in the dead of the night, and I don't want them in my abode. If they could talk we would have a conversation that would go something like this:

Cockroach: Hey
Me: What'ya doing in my bathroom?!
Cockroach: Just hanging out.
Me: Well you need to go away.
Cockroach: Really? Me and my buddies're just chillin'
Me: You need to chill where I can never see you or I will kill you and everyone you've ever known.
Cockroach: Cool. Later.

Then he would go away and we could live in peace. But we can't have that conversation, so I'm going to keep on killing them until they are dead. I may be a crazy hippie, but I'm a crazy hippie with a can of Raid.

I have ended my night with watching The Mist. If you haven't seen it I don't recommend it. In fact, run away. Run far, far away. And don't look back. I thought, as we considered what we would do tonight, that if my friends and I watched The Mist, Thomas Jane's hotness would make palatable whatever horror this horror movie offered unintentionally by being bad. I was, unfortunately, wrong. It's just good enough to piss me off and make itself even worse in the process. Too good to be enjoyably bad and too bad to be anything but awful.

The screenplay writer seems to revel in the grotesque side of humanity. In fact, if the movie moralized anymore about the basic inhumanity of human nature I might very well have thrown up--something vodka couldn't even make me do. I don't want to give away the ending just in case you do find yourself in the unfortunate situation of watching this movie one day, but let me say this: if you believe people are inherently bad, then you must offer something that is inherently good. Otherwise nature is all unbalanced and either we're dealing with Hell (such as it is) or nothing being inherently anything, amorality which is something else all together. This is just one of the many ways this story fails so miserably.

I hate to beat a dead horse (though I wouldn't mind at all beating a dead cockroach since you can rarely tell if they are actually dead) so I will move on from my rant about this silly, silly movie. It isn't that I expected it to be good, you understand, but, much like Dragon Wars, I feel that if you are going to give me a B-rate film with a hot lead actor, the least you can do is require him to be shirtless for the vast majority of the movie. It is truly amazing what this will do for the quality of one's film. They've been doing it with topless girls for decades--why does no one realize it works with men as well?

Yes objectification is bad, no I'm not advocating it. But where's the morality in making bad movies hmm? This is a quandary.

Alright. I'm going to go check for cockroaches. Listen for the scream. That's always a dead giveaway I've found one.

Stupid desert.

There is a lot of talk about the possible execution of a child rapist in Pennsylvania. Here is one link http://www.newsweek.com/id/131773 but my favorite is this one http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/24115142/

I was incredibly angry when I read these two articles. Still am. Not because child rape isn't an absolutely horrible crime--it is, but because the way it is talked about, the logic behind this move to execute these child rapists completely devalues the horror of rape committed against adults. Observe one of my favorite quotes, "It is so evil. There is no justification for it," he said. "This isn't a heat-of-passion killing. It's not about money." What does that mean, there is no justification for it? That there is justification for raping an adult? Why do serial rapists not receive the same punishment as serial murderers?

I am not actually pro death penalty. I don't think we are careful enough in our justice system to justify killing people. I'm also not pro letting pedophiles and child rapists go free...ever. Mostly because in the case of repeat offenders it seems that rehabilitation isn't possible. So as I remark that these articles make me angry it isn't because I find the crime less than heinous or because I think we should kill everyone; it is because as I read these articles it felt like a slap in the face. Yes, raping an adult is different because an adult is better equipped to deal with it, but rape is still akin to torture. I would argue that to the death. I would also ask, in the instance of the second article, would people have cared as much if he were raping little girls instead of little boys? I can't help but wonder...

It is the rhetoric here I take issue with, along with the blood thirsty attitude of the people interviewed. That they were seriously considering castrating him bothers me significantly. I don't believe the place of the country is to wreak revenge--I don't think that is justice. My good friend once said something to me I find particularly applicable as I think about this, "sometimes you have to be worthy of what you are fighting for" or something like that. What that means is, if we commit an atrocity to revenge an atrocity, are we really morally superior? Is it ethically right to take an eye for an eye?

Do not mistake me for saying we shouldn't put people in jail or punish them for their crimes. One of my many irritations with right-wing fanatics (other than their existence as fanatics) is that they claim every argument for mercy is simply the weak-willed idiocy of liberals. We aren't capable of demanding justice. We aren't capable of "doing what needs to be done." I'm capable of a lot of things. Many of them would surprise most people, and many of them would qualify as horrific. Do not assume to know what I am and am not capable of. The point here is what we, as a country/society/culture, should do. We have a constitutional protection against cruel and unusual punishment, obviously castration (for the moment) falls under that, but what does our willingness to torture a prisoner, not because he contains information or some other utilitarian need but, only because we hate him and take pleasure in his pain, say? If you take pleasure in someone else's pain willfully, calmly, and gleefully--is that okay?

Finally, while I would agree that crimes against children are more heinous, I would not agree it is because their status as children makes them somehow more precious. I don't buy into the "possibilities" argument in regards to human life. I find crimes against children more heinous because it is a more egregious abuse of power by those committing the crime; I also find them horrible because there is rarely (I say rarely because Damian from the Omen might be running around somewhere) a situation where violence of any sort, sexual or otherwise, is justified. In that regard the quote above is correct.

But I will refuse to diminish the atrociousness of rape itself, committed against a person of any gender an age, by saying that some rapes are more evil than others. There are rapes that arise out of miscommunication and rapes that arise out of violence. There are rapes that happen in the "heat of the moment" and those that are planned out. I would say there are as many variations of rape as there are murder. But a serial rapist, one who observes, plans, and attacks systematically time and time again, does not become more horrific and deserving of the death penalty, in my opinion, because he is attacking children instead of adults.

Both crimes are horrific and inexcusable; doesn't it seem odd to argue that one is more evil than the other?

I'm in the middle of doing homework, but I have this thought and I'm going to lose it if I don't discuss it right now. I still haven't decided if that is a good or bad thing when it happens.

My thought is this, when dealing with a particular belief structure, the church for example, and you fundamentally disagree with one or two tenets of the faith, should you take that as a sign that the whole structure is wrong or just that it is wrong in very particular instances? And knowing that beliefs can change over time--as many churches have changed church doctrine over the years--do you ride it out and follow what you feel to be true, or go with what you're told to be true by the belief structure?

Before I continue I just used "belief structure" and "church/faith" interchangeably above. I think for the purposes of this thought process I'm going to stick with church/faith since it was in thinking about the church that I specifically asked these questions.

Obviously this doesn't apply as much to me since I don't belong to any church nor am I Christian. But I do have a spirituality which could be described as faith and there have been times I thought I disagreed with it. There is significantly more wiggle room in my personal spirituality than most church doctrines, of course, but I think it has ended up working out in the end each time. And perhaps that is the answer for someone belonging to a specific church. My friends who are very active in their respective churches have told me countless times that often when they had questions or issues it was revealed that they actually agreed with the church satisfactorily after some investigating. But what about something fundamental like sex or homosexuality?

People argue heatedly over these issues obviously, but what happens when one knows beyond a shadow of a doubt that having sex with someone they love (or having sex with someone of the same gender) is morally right and true, but their church disagrees? In many churches there is no way around it. They are explicit in their instructions regarding sex before marriage or engaging in homosexual activity. The most obvious answer is, of course, they pray and things work themselves out--there can't be two "right" answers there. But what if you're church is wrong? Or, rather what I mean to say, you think your church is wrong? Do you abandon the church or do you live a hidden lifestyle?

I ask this not because I am ranting about churches or morality, but because as I sat here reading composition theory (don't ask) I suddenly began to think on this. You can tell this particular comp theory has me riveted. But nothing is quite so morally ambiguous as sex and homosexuality. People feel fervently that it is right and people feel fervently that it is wrong. I am, of course, speaking specifically of sex outside marriage--people who just think sex is wrong have obviously never had good sex.

Joking aside, I am curious at what point a difference of belief is cause for a break. And how do you know if you should break or just wait it out? Many people still attend Mass, for example, while sleeping with their significant other outside of wedlock. There is little to no guilt now-a-days about that. But if you feel that the church is wrong and that you know better, how can you trust the church at all? Or am I drawing to fine a point a on it? Certainly churches have been mixed up in politics since their inception, and sex has been mixed up in both. One could argue, therefore, that while most (if not all) churches are confused about sex, it is only because of the world we live in, and they have the rest of it more or less right. That is, no doubt, supported by society's discourse on the topic.

I am not attempting to debate sex here because, like religion, it is a debate that cannot be won. Those who believe sex before marriage is immoral have scripture on their side, I have other texts on mine. We can both agree, I think, that there is good sex and bad sex, healthy and unhealthy. But I have no interest in convincing anyone of the morality one way or the other. I am wondering very specifically, what you do when what you believe in tells you you're wrong.

Assuming for a minute you are unwilling or incapable of accepting that you are wrong underlies this whole thought process, of course. But, probably, since I am often incapable of accepting that I am wrong I have no trouble imagining other people with the same issue. And why I then ask the question when do you subvert the system and when do you abandon it?

We've got a fantastic dialogue going here and rather than keep it all in the comments I thought I would go ahead and branch out a bit. The question is, why worry about the establishment at all? The idea being here (and I am hopefully interpreting this correctly) that since we cannot change the establishment (meaning society/culture etc.) and replacing the current establishment with one of our own creating would simply make us the oppressors instead of the oppressed it is best to focus solely on the individual and individual existence.

The reason I must disagree with that idea is a fundamental difference in ideology. As some sort of post-modernist/feminist/naturally argumentative being that I am I subscribe wholly to the Bakhtinian belief that we are half ourselves and half someone else's. Bakhtin uses this idea in relation to discourse, but taking it one step further brings you to the debate on whether language creates knowledge or knowledge creates language and, hence, how much this connects to language/knowledge creating/shaping reality. Or, at least, perception. Hopefully I am making sense here.

Now, that conflicts with the idea that focusing on myself and ignoring the establishment allows me to distance and separate myself from the establishment. The reason for this is because I cannot separate myself from the establishment--there is no sane part of me that is not influenced by what is around me, or, there might be a sane part of me, but it is impossible to separate out from the rest and any tools I use to do so are also infected by society (the establishment). Thus I find myself in a position of having to acknowledge my own relative powerlessness--that seems odd because here I am, harping away via text about all I believe and wish would change, but it is precisely in that harping that I find what little power I have.

I have to comment on the establishment, not necessarily to replace it with anything I create, but because every time I recognize another piece that in some way affects me (such as cultural ideals of beauty) I am able to name it, and in so doing overrule society's affect with my own language. This all serves the purpose of shaping my reality and allowing me the chance to stand outside society to whatever degree I am able on individual topics and do what I think is ultimately being urged with the idea of "focusing on me."

I've never attempted to actually articulate my own ideology or belief system via writing in a context such as this blog, so I apologize to everyone if this is confusing nonsensical or if I have totally misunderstood the comments providing the context for this discussion.

This is an uncomfortable ideology. I state that with absolute belief in what I'm saying here. I would never return any of the ideas or theories I have garnered in the past few years, but once one enters into a Foucaultdian post-modernist structure you cease to possess all the power needed within yourself to shape yourself (or the world around you). The reason for this is that all the world's structures don't exist on a linear continuum. I can't simply seek knowledge until I achieve some ultimate truth. Instead I must work within the grid of varying discourses/structures which are constantly affecting me as I affect them. Finding one answer does not mean finding all answers, therefore, and what was the answer at one point might change in the future as new knowledge is acquired. (For anyone who knows all of this already please don't think I am attempting to educate. I am simply providing explanation for those who don't.)

I cannot focus on myself then, because all that is me has been shaped by society. Unless I recognize the ways society has shaped me, is shaping me, or trying to shape me, I am unable to recognize where my self-awareness and own personal knowledge has come from. Hence my need to discuss the establishment and dive into the craziness that is society/culture.

No doubt there is a better way to go about all of this. I have never in my life done things the easy way. But as of yet I know not a way that allows me to name structures in society, recognize their affect on me and my personal beliefs, and struggle with that accordingly without using language--hence the majority of posts in this blog. My aims are often political, but outside the American realm of democratic vs. republican, liberal vs. conservative. My aims are actually to share whatever language I create in the hopes that it might spark more language (as it did in this case) which in turn might lead to what Nietzsche calls "unheard of combinations and metaphors." Gotta love Nietzsche.

So that's why I do what I do, and that is the ideology that drives me. The question I am still asking myself, though, is am I thinking things through or just enjoying my ability to think?

Ain't that one always the kicker.

And this all seems appropriate for the 200th post. Woo!