Let FaceBook be damned!

Infuriated by the predatory, capitalist nature of what was once a website for college students, I finally looked around for an alternative to FaceBook for my rather meager online social networking needs.  I quickly stumbled across something that I was surprised I was unaware of:  Orkut.  It was bought a while ago by Google, who seem to be in no rush to get it polished for competition against FaceBook.  It’s mildly clunky, lacks some of the ease of multi-media posting, linking, etc., but it comes out very strong in one major category, which to me is vital, key, paramount, crucial and then others, this is of course, the category of information rights.

I combed patiently through the terms of conditions for using Orkut, and not only did I NOT find that Google reserves the right to lay full claim to anything you do, write or in any way create on their site, section 11 of the terms clearly speaks against it.

11.1 You retain copyright and any other rights you already hold in Content which you submit, post or display on or through, the Services. By submitting, posting or displaying the content you give Google a perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free, and non-exclusive license to reproduce, adapt, modify, translate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute any Content which you submit, post or display on or through, the Services. This license is for the sole purpose of enabling Google to display, distribute and promote the Services and may be revoked for certain Services as defined in the Additional Terms of those Services.

Now, the wording for the second half of this paragraph is obviously aimed at developers of applications.  Google has no interest in “publicly performing” anything I write on my Orkut page.  They’re just letting developers know that if they want to put their app out, they should expect some coding revisions and accept the fact that if they’re in any way harmful to the site or it’s users, it will be terminated.   If you’re not convinced, read on,

11.3 You understand that Google, in performing the required technical steps to provide the Services to our users, may (a) transmit or distribute your Content over various public networks and in various media; and (b) make such changes to your Content as are necessary to conform and adapt that Content to the technical requirements of connecting networks, devices, services or media. You agree that this license shall permit Google to take these actions.

The typical end-user was not even on the radar when these terms were being drafted by legal.  Essentially, you should read over them for yourself, but if you’re feeling lazy and want to take my word for it, I feel a great relief switching from FaceBook to Orkut, and only hope that enough of us in North America continue to join and help it improve.  With Google’s transparency, market vibrancy, and innovative approaches to streamlining the web’s functionality, we’re obviously in better hands in the long run for making the switch.

A lot of what doesn’t impress on Orkut are obvious, and simple fixes that Google would make immediately upon recognizing the migration taking place.  Some things I love: friend to friend promotion for whatever you like; seemless Picasa integration for photo uploading; incredibly simple platform (takes minutes to learn the basics); much more intuitive “status update” platform which allows you to talk to whomever, update to one or any or all of your friends and family easily with no messy organization needed; and finally integrated Gchat with audio and video.  Facebook can’t touch that.

An important note: you don’t have to have a gmail account to be on Orkut.  It just makes it that much better if you are, and why wouldn’t you want a gmail account anyway.  It’s tops!

While I’m not positive that Orkut is the best possible social networking site already in place today, I’m willing to bet it will be if we make a loud enough sound.

Come join me.   And to hell with predatory social networking.

Editor’s Note:  Also check out Diaspora.  I see a potential for a google buy-out on this one, but it’s a great idea.

UPDATE: After trying for months I could only get my wife, a fellow blogger, and my father to join Orkut.  While I am still using Fuckface to interact with my current social circle, I am still committed to bailing on it as soon as I get my Diaspora invite and check over the terms/protocol of that service.  If that’s a no-go… I may just be done with social “networks” and rely solely on my Droid and blogs to keep my connected.

Why You Should Take Mushrooms (especially if you are morally against them)

Wait a goddamned minute, you skittering scoundrel, before you get all excited and loose the lemmings that are your ignorant beliefs.  I want to be clear as Al Franken’s conscience when I say FIRST and FOREMOST that ANY drug you are not familiar with should be treated as a possible toxin.  However, I’ve only done mushrooms once, and I did not have visuals.  So it’s not like I’m some drug expert.  Quite the contrary, I’m terrified to the point of contentment in capping the whole affair at mushrooms and saying good-day to the more chaotic side of my consciousness.  I’m not a visual artist, and while a “trip” may be really neat, for me the benefit of Mushrooms is the high before the trip, and if you’re moderate about how much you take, you can simply have the best high of your life without any visuals at all.  That is exactly what I experienced, and I can truly say that, in the sense of feeling unified and at peace with where I fit in with this crazy ‘world’ we’re all trying to have identities and voices in… it was the best night of my entire mind’s life.

I will exclude org, food and nasal gasms from the contender’s list.

I do not need to know who you are, where you’re from, what you did in order to recommend a mushroom high.  Maybe you hate escapism?  My mushroom experience did not feel like an escape.  It felt like a road map that hugged me when I understood it.  It felt like constant positive reinforcement for learning.  It felt like I couldn’t have enough close friends or possibly stop doing good in my environment for anything.  It made good the only option, and there was nothing linguistic or ambiguous about it.  It was Nirvana.

So there you have it: I want everyone to experience Nirvana, and I don’t even have to start a cult about it.  Just try a small amount of mushrooms and report back to me.  I can’t wait to hear the wonderful experiences you had.

Cohabitation and personal change

I was talking with a co-worker this afternoon, and she mentioned how after so much time with her S.O. she was beginning to feel that “everything you do irritates me” feeling.  I know this feeling.  Fortunately, and thanks in no small part to my wife, I also know what it’s like when that feeling is conquered and begins to fade.  While my coworker and I talked, I suggested two sort-of rudimentary ways to approach the issue.  Now that I am home and have stepped away from the conversation I thought I would toss it out into the blogoshpere and see what comes back(even though I rarely get non-suspect comments from real readers on this blog, and that’s probably my own fault for being half insane).  The two approaches I suggested were fairly polar, and I realize that can be problematic, but a lot of relationship issues do tend to lack a wealth of approaches.  I will comment on that more later, for now I’ll recap:

In my opinion, she could A) Listen to her gut (meditate, force-conclusion, ego-mirror, etc) and decide whether or not the relationship she is in is one where the pressure to become a better person is not only there, but mutual.  Or, B) Pick something she does which irritates her S.O., catch a moment when she chooses NOT to engage that irritating behavior, and remark out loud about it.

In the first scenario, I am basically suggesting she decide whether or not the relationship is even worth the personal dissection.  If it is, then my second approach ought to be a good starting marker for how to recognize change in your partner.  This is really difficult without a plan of action because when you spend day in and day out with one person, you don’t see the ways they are changing.  You may notice if you go to a party where a large number of people are your S.O.’s friends, many people that your S.O. hasn’t seen in six months or a year may remark on how much your S.O. has matured, while you sit by scratching your head daring the old friend to go ahead and try dating your impossible S.O. for his or her self and see how they like.  This thought should be a red flag, because it indicates that you believe you are best suited to meet your damaged partner’s needs.  Maybe you are… but the no-no is finding yourself in a place of moral or behavioral superiority in a relationship that should be built on mutual respect and appreciation.

My wife and I use the method I mention above.  Even though we had some epic fights and misunderstandings at the get-go, we always have and always will talk about the things we are or are not satisfied with in the relationship in non-blaming(as possible) language, and then try to vocally express when we have acted alternatively to the problem behavior so that the other person knows, at the very least, that you are still thinking about it and still care.  For example, my wife really hated it when I used to “help” in the kitchen, because what usually occurred, and I admit it now, was my domination of the whole project.  She loves to cook as much as I do, and I was condescending her by jumping in too enthusiastically with my own ideas rather than getting a bearing on where she was headed first.  This has changed, but it took time and the effort to point out small milestones for the change to be recognized.  Now I ask her if she wants help, and if she does, I ask her specifically what she’d like me to do.  Sometimes she will have me just chop some shit up, other times she will actually want my own input.

Over simplified?  Sure.  But nonetheless applicably sound.

Or, for a different scenario, let’s say that one person in a committed relationship has a drinking “problem”, and I put that in quotes because not everyone said to have one does.  That can be somewhat subjective.  So let’s, for the sake of ease, say that one person drinks more than other.  The one who drinks less would like the other to do the same or at least work towards a middle ground (ok, fine, this is based on personal experience), so the one whose drinking is problematic in the context of the relationship should make it known EACH time they are intentionally curbing a desire for a given quantity or frequency of alcohol; mind you, not in a whining or punitive way.  And since I already admitted that I am just talking about my own life, I should also say that this approach has worked for my wife and I.  She has a much healthier relationship with day-to-day drinking than I do, and through communicating each effort to reduce my own drinking down to a level that was more acceptable, she began to see that, indeed, even though I still require some wine or what-have-you to get ready for bed, the amount has decreased more than significantly.  Of course, her insistence and my acceptance of the issue were key too, but there’s just no reason I can think of to avoid such changes unless the change in question is a “deal breaker”.

So as I savor my glass of wine over some blog writing tonight, I would encourage others in a similar spot to at least attempt this method, for even if it fails, you will have gained important knowledge either way: Possibly the knowledge that your connection wasn’t that strong after all, possibly the knowledge that it can only get stronger.

Take care.

i hate yourself

if you do not join me in revolutionary efforts to steer America straight you can go fuck yourself.  I am the other.

if i had the courage

I don’t think I’m not a chicken shit.  I won’t disrespect myself, either, by not admitting that through the years I have grown for the better in some measurable ways.  What or how it is measured will have to remain abstract I’m afraid, but I will whittle for this purpose and suggest that utilitarian ethics is most efficient and generically applicable: if I have “grown” within my own environment for the beautification of it rather than its degradation, I am a healthy growth.  I will note, though, that I have had to engage in some unhealthy events in order to correct my trajectory lest I block another’s sunlight.

To be fair, however, I am an exotic growth too.  There are two things when acting within my native environments that I love most, those two that drive my curiosity and passion for life.  They are holding up a proverbial mirror to show everyone what they look like from “here”, and purposely demonstrating anti-normal behavior to gauge reactions and examine the rationales behind them.  I’m highly limited in performing either function well, but it’s largely due to fear.  Some of that fear comes from instances where I caused another pain, however intentionally, and hated it.  Some of it comes from instances where another person incorrectly interpreted an action or statement (or simply lashed out unfairly from causes not mine), and spun the whole thing poisonous.

Pardon this dead horse’s carcass and my beating upon it, but it is frightening to assert your private self, but part of why it is so frightening is because our private self is so chaotic, and nobody talks about it, perpetuating the taboo.  Our innermost thoughts are likely referred to as such in reference to that very sense of a dark, chaotic mystery running behind all of our perceptible world’s events.  Sometimes our thoughts seem to come from nowhere, or are loud and provocative.  Sometimes, when spinning in idle, our minds seem to get bored and throw out something so bizarre it makes us look around to see if anyone else could tell what we were thinking.

Less tangentially, no matter how refined in behavior and social graces we become, we can expect to always experience nervousness or fear when acting in an uncontrolled environment, and this is because deep down we are all afraid of seeming wrong, unhealthy, or  weed-like.  Calling someone a leech is a delicately forceful insult because it gets to this same concern.  In order to sustain life and flourish, we must respect a natural balance between exploration and infrastructure, between strong communities and free radicals, between production, consumption and innovation.  A lot of us manage to accomplish this in maturity, and I suppose that is why reasonable adults tend to get a little quieter and more focused with age.

However, a lot of us do not manage this, and this creates a lot of room for misunderstanding.  This room for misunderstanding comes from fear of disproportionate reactions to ones actions.  Some of us are wired to leap out from the boxes we’re placed in, and in the coding of life this is to our benefit, because even when these leaps come in the form of deranged serial killers, these experiences help us to solidify certain moral principles across an array of life perspectives.

So, what is keeping me inside of my box right now is a fear of being labeled a heretic and being wildly misunderstood as an irreverent narcissist who does good now for the sake of a fan club later.  The box I’m wishing I could leap out of?  It’s the politically inactive introvert who gives public speeches in his head all day box.  I want desperately to come out yet holding the lid down myself.

get a job loser!

If your current take on the economic downturn and people who are having a hard time finding a job is that those people are simply not trying hard enough or being too picky… you are half right.

The half where you’re wrong, however, is a potentially devastating and supremely ugly half.  Mine goes like this:

For starters, I don’t like life.  It’s not that I think the cosmic miracle of it all is unimpressive, but that I have already done mental gymnastics around the entire affair and have come up with very little.  There are few things that make participation in a world gone so wrong tolerable.  For me, they are my wife, my future child(ren), and fighting for some semblance of goodness.  What makes these things more difficult to enjoy are all things that I had no say in.  It wasn’t my fucking idea to impose monetary value and structures of commerce on goods and services.  History has proved that this is unnecessary and I LOATHE that in order to maintain a relatively happy life with a family, one must either succumb to the whims of the Circus, or have the resources to start your own, or live in one of the few insane asylums referred to as communes.

Before I reached the age of 30, suicide was kept on hold, sometimes more successfully than others, as a viable opt-out.  Now I am married and have been repressing that option and trying to skew it into the ‘prohibited’ category of actions.  Things that typically led me to desire the assumed final peace of ending my life were hard to quantify at the time, but now I can see that they were seemingly insurmountable frustrations with the notion that I could not exist on the merits of my existence without money, a plan for more money, and a plan for a stash of money so that when I need 30 drugs to stay mobile at the age of 70 I can still go play a game of bingo or what have you.  What a fucking life, right?  The frustrations aren’t as simple as mere facts of love and money.  Frustrations in love can almost always be overcome with the right philosophical toolbox, but frustrations in money and practicality can only be overcome by money, and in my mind that is unacceptable.

Many of my friends have shown great aptitude for swallowing this particular pill.  I haven’t.  Each time in the past when faced with the options of either getting a job or killing myself, the latter seemed MUCH more appealing (turn off your sympathy generators please… I don’t think of suicide as a terrible travesty, even if it is sad for those who stay behind, those who may have loved you, I see it as a choice).  I know there are some of you who can relate, and to those of you who cannot, I am sorry, but there is likely no way of my conveying to you the truth of this matter with words.  If you haven’t lived in the crevices of humankind’s paradoxical enlightenment… you don’t understand how dire this feels.

I am writing this out right now because I am not sure of anything, including my own thoughts and feelings, and want to try and find some sort of workable middle road for myself whereby I can exist in this world and my own at the same time.  Maybe I am a fool for thinking this, but I have already made it further than others before me, and don’t plan on shirking what responsibility I now feel for staying alive and continuing the bonded relationships I have forged over the years.

An unexpected act of charity was just (minutes ago) bestowed on one of my house mates that completely flattened this post for now.

So I will summarize.  These things (jobs, money, capitalism, politics) are easy for most people.  Not me.  You may not care.  Goodnight.

a philosophy for us

When mucking through the shitpile means learning how to pole vault, you sharpen the end of your pole and stab the rich.  Stab them right in the taxes.

saying grace

control control control control control control is power control is power not you you are not the power you do not have the power you are in control of the power control is power control the power you are not the power you are not the power you are not the power the power is control you are in control of the power control the power control the power control the power control the power control the power control the power control the power control the power control the power the power is not in control the power is control power is control power is control you are not the power you are not the power you are not one with the power the power is control the power is the power the power is not in control the power is not one with control you are not one with the power you are not the power control the power the power is control you do not power control you control the power control the power control the power the power is control

Evolution and Filial Piety

Sometimes I dream of success.  Not of rock-star or oil executive success, but of real personal success.  The end of these dreams is always the same, though, which is me realizing that I haven’t paid my dues yet. 

I am currently leaning towards blaming my parents on this one.  I get a chuckle out of saying it too.  I don’t actually believe that we’re all just attempting to heal from our parents and grow our own way, but some of the learning you get as a child must be shed; and paying one’s dues is a lesson my parents had ALL WRONG.  I was taught as a child and young adult that it was not really one’s dedication and acquisition of skill that caused one to succeed, no, the version I got was that God would come down and turn you into a well hung virgin raping CIA agent who drove five racecars drunk on Dom as long as you just kept your faith long enough and were sure to tithe.  Loyal members always get perks I suppose.  And even though I am largely purged of this indoctrination, the idea that my good intentions or behavior would some day pay off like a loaded slot machine never left me.  I have been coasting by like a blind sailor completely oblivious to the nearing reef.  I was sure to sink, in the most dreadful and pathetic fashion.  At any rate, I let this belief stay for some reason.  I accepted credit card offers with the idea that some future reward for my good behavior would cover the costs.  I let women fall in love with me knowing the whole time that that is all I wanted from them; to see if I could get them to love me.  After I had their love I tossed it over my shoulder and walked on thinking that what I gave them was of such value that surely it was a net positive.  I hacked out music to roughly a third of its potential simply believing that people would be so impressed by the evoked emotions that someday I would profit enough from the sales to finally take recording seriously (like a record label jesus coming down to give me $5000 and an 8-ball).  On top of all that, I used my psychological intuition to land jobs I wasn’t qualified for, and with that boosted confidence I started quitting jobs at my leisure, only to grab another one in an industry I had no knowledge of.  Now I can’t get an interview to deliver pizzas.  I guess I thought that someday I’d simply charm my way into a financially secure job should it ever become necessary.  It has, and 300 plus applications later, I am unemployed.  Of course, I did get a wealth of real world knowledge you just can’t be taught from working so many different jobs for such a variety of organizations, but for what?  I can’t take writing seriously enough to even commit to an hour a day… because some day publishing jesus will come down and give me a cabin in the woods stocked with nothing but twelve year old scotch, chronic and typewriters waiting for my genius to ravage the ink ribbon.

Sorry folks, but this was a big one and I hope that less and less children are taught this.

We’re all selfish. That’s the bottom line.

hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha!