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irving_morrell
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Name: Brian
Location: San Diego, California, United States
Gender: Male
Interests: Becoming a better person. Not necessarily a good person, just better than what I was before.
Catan, Cycling, Ibsen, NPR, Newshour(Brooks and Shields!), This American Life, History, and Taoism
Expertise: Jack of all trades and master of none.
Stream of consciousness blogging.
Occupation: Technical Engineer
Industry: Aerospace Engineering
Message: message meEmail: email me
Website: visit my website
AIM:  Tao2Death
Yahoo:  irving_morrell
Member Since:
5/23/2003
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| I've been feeling exhausted these past few days. I'm not exactly sure what's the cause of this feeling, but I suspect that my body has just absorbed too much stress lately. It's gotten into this habit of building this tension deep within me that can only be removed by collapsing into a long slumber. Mental stress usually isn't the culprit, but my body is not very discriminatory in that regard. I suppose it's been a long year already for me trying to return to decent bike racing shape while also increasing my running mileage to return to some semblance of being able to go the distance.
Throughout all this I still feel like I could use a good fast. Something to give the sensation of purging my body of this accumulated physical stress. Hard to do when there's some run or ride to do the next day in preparation for something else a weekend or two away. But I think I just need to set some time aside to get in touch with this feeling of emptiness. In an almost spiritual sense of letting go of the ego and finding myself in some sort of sweat lodge. Just like a reset button washing away my sense of self.
Heat from the hot coals washing over me.
Sweat dripping off of me,
Draining me
Until I'm
Empty.
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| Some days I'm glad that I don't really spend much time around literati and people who know what's going on in the world. Most days I try to stay away from the uninformed people that bombast me with their third-hand opinions based on innuendo and hearsay. But it does become refreshing when an inflammatory piece that can inaccurately be reduced doesn't make it to the echo chamber. I do wonder at times how close we are to another conflict in the Middle East, but The Atlantic article calling for a pre-emptive strike on Iran laid out the case almost a little too well. Ultimately it's really a bit of literary brinksmanship, but the arguments are compelling enough to see this coming to a head in a few years.
So, while the gas is being thrown on the kindling, I find myself trying to drown out the world around me. It's nice that I found this new NPR blog/series called Alt.Latino which highlights and discusses Latin Alternative music, which I've slowly been coming to appreciate after all these years in San Diego. I'm still partial to the pop sounds of artists like Belanova and Aleks Syntek, but I love being introduced to others like the Mexican Institute of Sound and Carla Morrison. I wonder if I should try to find more mainstream interests since I really just seem to be moving from marginalized interest to marginalized interest.
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| There's a certain tendency to read too much into simple coincidences. The most recent episode of Mad Men was titled The Chrysanthemum and the Sword due to a reference of a book of the same title during the episode. In a reference reality outside of my own self, the episode was likely written many months ago and just happened to be on this past Sunday. On my parallel track, I had been reading the NPR summer book recommendations and decided to pick up a copy of I Hotel after reading a glowing review about it. It didn't hurt that I was preferential to this choice after also hearing about it on The California Report a few weeks earlier. A novel, set in the San Francisco Bay Area during the tumultuous 70s, focusing on a cast of Asian American characters influencing and being influenced by events of the day. Almost like Mad Men, except replacing the advertising world with the student and ethnic power movements of the era. Which in hindsight makes it entirely reasonable that I Hotel would also reference The Chrysanthemum and the Sword. I just find it a tad suspicious that I would get to that exact reference the same night I hear from Pete Campbell that he should be reading it too.
In a sense, this just came down to a matter of timing. What I find a little instructive is the different perspectives from which the book is viewed. On one hand there's a sense of trying to understand another culture. On the other there's a view of oppression and an outsider's interpretation. I'm a little curious about joining the footnote culture and delving deeper into the source material of a generation twice removed. But really, I already have too much on my plate.
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As the marketing machinery for the Twilight movie series ramps up, I had a conversation with my girlfriend concerning the series since I wasn't likely to read the books. Being the ever-present contrarian, I dwelt on the nature of how fans of the series have divided into "Teams" of whom they prefer as the romantic interest when the series has finished and the author has ultimately decided the "winner". Despite offering reasoned explanations concerning the plot devices of teen romance novels, I continued to play the devil's advocate and wondered why Bella couldn't just have it all; indulging in both love interests in a Bella sandwich of sorts. Certainly it would be unconventional, but if you're set in a world with sparkly vampires and werewolves why not just throw the rest of the rules out the window while you're at it.
The world is a rapidly changing place where centuries old conventions and social roles have been in upheaval for the past few decades. Sure, you lose the whole damsel-in-distress angle, but the gain of a feminist femme fatal that knows how to get what she wants would appear to have more upside. Well, at least in a critical literary sense, not so much in a trashy romance genre. True, you would probably still have the two guys fighting over her, but the social mores that dictated a female wanting a stable monogamous provider are slowly eroding. Heck, even Nightline did a piece on cougars (video) not too long ago, which definitely means it's moving closer to the mainstream.
Stuck on the other side of my brain was Marketplace's recent special coverage of China's One Child Policy. One of the things that struck me was the rate of male-to-female births. From a purely biological standpoint, this would lead to the exact type of behavior that would possibly foster polyandry. Limited resources and competition for females where females have an abundance of choices. With an aging population, the demographic shift relative to other countries is quite stark. Except no sparkly vampires. It is the most interesting aspect of the demographic changes going on because of the one child policy, though. Japan and most of Europe are already good examples of upside down populations where there are going to be fewer workers supporting more elderly retired persons. The USA provides a fairly good example of the class issues that China will be experiencing. And most of the fears about a population of "little emperors" appears to be overblown. So will the women of China be able to have it all? | | |
| So when I was listening to On The Media last month they mentioned this blog posting from a guy that ranted about how women need to become arrogant self-aggrandizing jerks to get ahead in the job force. While I agree that women could use a lot more equality in the workplace and this would be a good starting point, I wonder if I could use a good heaping dose of the advice too. Does it really take a type-A personality to get ahead? The hard sell is usually more effective than the soft sell.
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