Internet saves the day!!

My first quote

I could just put a link here but seems quoting the whole thing is more appropriate. For those who know me: you could call me Giacometti.

"On this bridge," Lorca warns, "life is not a dream. Beware. And beware. And beware." And so many think because Then happened, Now isn't. But didn't I mention the ongoing "wow" is happening right now? We are all co-authors of this dancing exuberance where even our inabilities are having a roast. We are the authors of ourselves, co-authoring a gigantic Dostoevsky novel, starring clowns. This entire thing we're involved with called the world, is an opportunity to exhibit how exciting alienation can be. Life is a matter of a miracle that is collected over time by moments, flabbergasted to be in each other's presence. The world is an exam to see if we can rise into direct experience. Our eyesight is here as a test to see if we can see beyond it. Matter is here as a test for our curiosity. Doubt is here as an exam for our vitality. Thomas Mann wrote that he would rather participate in life than write 100 stories. Giacometti was once run down by a car, and he recalled falling into a lucid faint, a sudden exhilaration, as he realized that at last something was happening to him. An assumption develops that you cannot understand life and live life simultaneously. I do not agree entirely. Which is to say I do not exactly disagree. I would say that life understood is life lived. But the paradoxes bug me, and I can learn to love and make love to the paradoxes that bug me. And on really romantic evenings of self, I go salsa dancing with my confusion. Before you drift off, don't forget. Which is to say, remember. Because remembering is so much more a psychotic activity than forgetting. Lorca, in that same poem said that the iguana will bite those who do not dream. And as one realizes that one is a dream figure in another person's dream, that is self awareness.

Taken from Waking Life.

Not being hypocritical on Pleasure Delaying

OTOH, pleasure delaying can be seen mostly as a virtue of the lazy or of the cowards.

But still, from time to time, one should afford to get lazy (or even coward) for some time.

"Slow down"

Pleasure Delaying Principles

Most humans believe they could achieve happiness with the achievement of some simple, fixed, goals. How it really works in fact is that evolution made them all:

1. Believe happiness exists
2. Always find something wrong, bad or, at least, unfinished in their lives (which makes them all, unhappy in some way)
3. Always find a way, at least theoretical, to solve those problems.

This simple characteristics work concurrently in a fashion that humans won't stop until they die. Exceptions to that can always be seen as a malfunction of this three vectors such that they are unbalanced.
What stems from all this is that we're condemned to be unhappy unless we recognize and start understanding how those vectors work; from that point on, you become a Pleasure Delayer. You start to get happy before the actual achievement of one of those "happiness goals"; you start to realize that what really makes a human happy is the process of getting something not the result at all. We are just like a running bicycle; equilibrium is only sustained as long as you keep it running. We're just orbiting around the happy place: always falling towards it but never getting there.

The nice thing about becoming a "Pleasure Delayer" is that it becomes totally addictive. See this way: one wants event "A" to happen and knows how to accomplish that but at the same time he knows that as soon as "A" happens he will move on to worship event "B" and since this whole happiness chase is time-consuming, costs money, demands hard work etc, he decides not to let "A" happen at all! Since he knows how to make "A" happen or, and THIS IS VERY TRICKY, at least BELIEVES he knows, he enjoys happiness in the "pleasure delaying" fashion. It is true that he will eventually get to "A" (or try to accomplish it and then discovering that he was, since the beginning, unable to) but through the whole extended time span he was indeed happy.

Other important factor that boosts Pleasure Delaying is that "Nothing is as good as you can imagine". After 99% of the accomplishments or you'll find that it was not as good as you expected or you'll get used to it and thus lowering its "value".

Pilot Heroes

Greatest profession of all:
Jet plane pilot!

Now I realize why most geek kids want to grow up into pilots: you always get to be a hero!

If you crash a commercial plane and everybody dies, they consider you a hero because the plane didn't hit any schools in the ground (even if it is during the night).

Cliché Post?

The idea of writing a thought driven post here started to reoccur a lot lately. Some of the environmental inputs that levered this idea are things like watching a couple of great, thought inciting, movies, some relationship problems, constant alcohol abuse and a foot massage.

"Nothing is as good as you can imagine"
Lemmas of this kind, common on the book "Choke" (by Chuck Palahniuk), keep bouncing inside my mind like metal balls in a pinball game; "what would Jesus not do".

Maybe it all started with this speech from Douglas Adams. At that time, since I was deep in studies, work and the relationship thing, I left heavy thoughts aside for some time. The day I found the speech I had the proper time to read it. From then, my mind has been laughing out loud for most of the things that happen around me. A simple talk with some catholic freak makes me laugh (inside) for hours. Plenty of my beliefs from before the speech and now are exactly the same. What changed is that, for me, those belief had become common place after some time. After the reading, I just re-realized how different I am.

Last day 12/31, I was drunk (or, at least, not sober) with a friend watching TV (white trash style) and it presented us with "The Bicentennial Man" (inspired by a novel from Isaac Asimov which I had not read till the time of this writing). I agree with all of you who might say that the movie carries heavy emotion appealing scenes. But the thing is, I bet that, if this movie is shown to a thousand ordinary catholics (including or not kids), plenty of them will think, at the end of the movie, that Andrew must be considered human. How could that be?
Douglas Adams' discussed several times, in the previously linked speech, how extremely complex beings or phenomenons can arise from, as extremely, simple organisms, laws or machine code instructions. What I see in the referred movie is a somewhat dumb and simple (maybe not that simple but you get the idea) household item becomes a human, without the help of any "god" or something like that. I recall that the movie points that Andrew "has something special" and things like that, but what I see is a simple malfunction that induces random things/thoughts that, together with good judgment, resembles creativity and human behavior (it is almost a "Montecarlo Method for Artificial Creativity Implementation", I should claim a patent on that!). But, indeed, followers of the "humans have something special" lemma (catholics), are not insulted by the movie at all. Would it simply be that they didn't get the idea of the movie at first place?

I've been spotting ironies like that for a while now. The real truth running on this people's mind is that (exactly as described at the speech), regarding religion, you don't think at all!

fucked up people!

*I'm leaving on a jet plane.
**This post shall be finished later. (Maybe getting to the foot-massage thing.. lol)
***I'm alive and well, I'm sure of that much!

Well, here I am drinking heinekens, having great snacks and listening to random musics.
Anyone who really knows me is pretty sure I am a NOFX huge fan, but here goes a surprise:
I never really payed attention to the WHOLE "The idiots are taking over" lyric. Of course I always got the meaning coz it is one one the things I believe MOST!

Ever since I heard about Darwin's Theory I've been terrified by this situation: the dumber you are the more you reproduce. The worse the music, literature or culture is, the most popular it is.
I could say a lot more here about this but the fact is: I am, like you, dying and fortunately I won't be here when idiots DO fuck it all (or is this an ilusion?).
Summing up, I'll keep myself on the heinekens + snacks + great music....

here goes the lyric:

Its not the right time to be sober
Now the idiots have taken over
Spreading like a social cancer, is there an answer?

Mensa membership exceeding
Tell me why and how are all the stupid people breeding
Watson, its really elementary
The industrial revolution
Has flipped the bitch on evolution
The benevolent and wise are being cornered, ostracized, what a bummer
The world keeps getting dumber
Insensitivity is standard and faith is being fancied over reason

Darwins rollin over in his coffin
The fittest are surviving much less often
Now everything seems to be reversing, and its worsening
Someone flopped a steamer in the gene pool
Now angry mob mentalitys no longer the exception, its the rule
And Im startin to feel a lot like charlton heston
Stranded on a primate planet
Apes and orangutans that ran it to the ground
With generals and the armies that obeyed them
Followers following fables
Philosophies that enable them to rule without regard

Theres no point for democracy when ignorance is celebrated
Political scientists think the same one vote that some monkeys are inbred
Majority rule, dont work in mental institutions
Sometimes the smallest softest voice carries the grand biggest solutions

What are we left with?
A nation of god-fearing pregnant nationalists
Who feel its their duty to populate the homeland
Pass on traditions
How to get ahead religions
And prosperity be a symbol to culture

Well the only good thing about this is that, being they dumber, they are a lot easier to be conquered (by one of us!) but the question keeps itself blinking: Does it really worth it?

LOL: back to heinekens!