Ex Ex Ex

Oh sweet porn,
I love the sweatiness of you, the sound of your flapping flesh
your moaning, your grunts, your guttural groans
they scream out the look of liquid shock
purring pleasure, panting pain.
My boyfriend once walked in on my time with you
and declared that all my feminist arguments were false
because I indulged in your furious fantasy.
He also announced that I haven’t really had sex
with my ex girl-lovers
because girl on girl
can’t really be considered fucking
Now Can It?
I laughed and told him he wasn’t there
so I couldn’t really prove him wrong
Nor did I want to
I got rid of him, but I kept you
Dear, sweet, sexist porn
Because I like sexist hardcore
so much more than sexist vanilla love.

Written May 2006 by Yours Truly

A Failed Soliloquy

Gynephobia- an abnormal fear of women

Implying that a subtle fear of women is normal…

I carry birds and monkeys but am accompanied by a cat.

I have an

Excellent view of the floor from my ankles

And will never forget that.

I cry for the profound distance of the sky, its stars and bodies

They are much too close for comfort

I live in a box in the downtown core. The box is expensive

But I like it.

I listen to a box

I watch a box

I work in a box

I even carry things in boxes

Sometimes my cat is put in a box and transferred from box to box

Boxes are the Bain of my existence.

I have learned not to notice. I call them cubes now

The monkeys and birds entertain me when I’m bored

They come in cubes too

And I have learned to forgive them for it

?????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????

Two songs to live by

Half Man Half Machine by GLC:

And It’s a Rave Dave:

Visual Stoicism

After struggling through the better half of Diogenes Laertius’ account of the Stoic  Logic and Theory of Knowledge, I decided I should post some of my better attempts at amateur photograohy.

Drumroll please…

From Portugal, 2006:

                        

                                                                                            

                                      

                                                                                        

                                                         

  

This summer:

                                                                                          

                       

                                                          

         

                                                          

Random favourites:

                                                                       

              

                                                      

    

And for good measure, things found in a bathroom, and on a menu:

         

                                                      

Boy, am I Glad I Don’t Have a Brudder…

The Scientific American has recently put forward the destructive effects of “mommy’s little boys”:

“[Virpi Lummaa of the University of Sheffield in England] found that those who bore sons had shorter life spans than those who gave birth to daughters. This discrepancy has to do with birth weight—male babies are typically larger—as well as testosterone. “Testosterone can compromise your immune system; it can affect your health,” Lummaa says, and the mothers of sons proved especially susceptible to endemic infectious disease, such as tuberculosis. “Boys are a little bit more costly” to raise than girls as well, because they drain more physical resources from their mothers, she adds, as has been seen in other mammals, such as the red deer. Sons also are not as likely as daughters to stick around to help their mothers out later in life.

More recently, Lummaa and her colleagues have been studying how sons are not just tough on their mothers but also hard on their siblings. Those born after a son were physically slighter, had smaller families and generally had a greater chance of dying from an infectious disease. The effects held up whether the elder brother died in childhood or not, suggesting that the negative outcome is not a result of some direct sibling interaction, such as competition for food, regular beatings or the practice of primogeniture, in which the eldest brother inherits everything. “Big brothers are bad for you,” Lummaa explains. “If the fifth-born was a male, then the sixth-born is doing worse.”

This phenomenon is particularly evident in twins where one is male and the other is female. Of 754 twins born between 1734 and 1888 in five towns in rural Finland, girls from mixed-gender pairs proved 25 percent less likely to have children, had at least two fewer children, and were about 15 percent less likely to marry than those born with a sister. This brotherly influence remained the same regardless of social class or other cultural factors and even endured if the male twin died within three months of birth, leaving the female twin to be reared as an only child.”

Could this be just another extension of the imperitive to make one sex better or worse than the other? The old “one sex is weaker” argument? Or is it scientific proof that the patriarchy is bad for women?

Reason, Truth and the Spider’s Web

 ”Reason is to humans what the web is to a spider,” remarked Hutter, that endearing Plato-phile. (BTW, Hutter, you have stolen my heart.) He managed to coalesce all the things that had been itching my neurons ceaselessly for the last couple of weeks. Reason and logic are indispensable to the systems that govern human society. Without reason and logic, no transaction, agreement nor understanding could be reached. But what happens when reason and logic break down?

Reason and logic are touted to be universal. Case in point: common sense. Most Hollywood movies offer up some protagonist or another that the majority of plebs can relate to and identify with. We watch with bated breath as they make the decisions most reasonable, the ones we could not dispute, cannot deny- the ones we believe we, ourselves, would make. We cry out against injustice together (re: Myanmar), but ONLY when the injustice becomes obvious enough. It must glaringly defy ethical reason in order to elicit a choral dissonance.

 Is it all just faith? Any political system, just like organized religion, is self-referential. It’s own justifications are found within itself. Reason would falter if the system were deconstructed and blown apart. Just like Descartes’ ‘proof’ of the existence of god hinges on the religious concept of the almighty, benevolent being itself. Descartes questioned god, and posed the question: what if god is just some trickster demon, that has placed us in a world of illusion, and maliciously left us to our own devices? Of course, Descartes quickly assuaged the doubt he had conjured, (lest he get written into the Inquisitors’ black books) and answered (roughly, in a Cole’s Notes sort of rundown) thus: Humans cannot conceive of things that do not exist.  A unicorn is simply a horn placed on a horse. Our conception of god must be based on the existence of god. Our concept of god clearly states that god is the most benevolent being, so much so that we cannot even imagine the extent of his goodness. Therefore, god must exist, and god must be good. In other words:

  =  

Descartes’ argument is clearly self-referential. So are most of our ideas and beliefs. Yet we continue to seek out this thing called truth, and become outraged when it is denied!

“Truth is the kind of error without which a certain species of life could not live.” says Nietzsche. He may be right, but how can we full-heartily agree with him? Without truth, reason and logic are useless. Without reason and logic, all human contracts (social, economic, and political) break down.  My sixteen-year-old self has just whined in my ear “then what’s the point?”, as if I were arguing with my mother over the efficiency of making the bed in the morning when I’m just going to be unmaking it at night.

It just scares me that what I consider to be obvious unreasonableness is becoming more and more common (or perhaps more apparent) among the number of people I’ve met. Including those cops down below, my roommate who refuses to do her dishes for weeks, and then says it’s ‘retarded’ that someone has done them for her (since she was JUST about to do them herself), cell phone company employees that don’t see a problem with continuing to charge you after you’ve cut off your line, and a myriad of other daily annoyances. (and let’s not even mention matters of the heart here.)

Then again, maybe I’m confusing reasonableness with reason itself. What do I know? My socks smell like cat pee, how do you like them apples?