More meme responses. Here goes.
I'm skipping Taichou's words, because they're super deep and I'm not done writing on them yet, but I feel like I should post pointlessly, so here's me pretending to have a point. :P don't judge.
Photography: a means of capturing the present and tucking it away for the future. Something I wish I did more often, because it’s hard to go wrong with photos, in my opinion. Unless they’re pictures of me, but hey! Who doesn’t hate pictures of themselves? All the cool kids are doing it. Ahem. Anyways, photography is one of those things that I have a hard time believing is a subject taught in school. It’s like music, you know? You can teach some one how to play an instrument, and how to read music, and you can get a bunch of musicians together to play, but you can’t teach somebody to make music. It’s something you do for yourself. Which is just like photography. Why would you need to be taught anything but how to use the camera? Of course, I’ve never taken a photography class, so I’ve not the foggiest what they’re like, and I’m sure I’ve got the wrong idea, but that’s my opinion on the matter, so. There you have it.
Money: something I’ve had a problem with since I was a little kid. What’s the point of it? And why would you build your entire culture on something that changes value day-to-day? An apple is an apple no matter what the stock market is like, and sure, there will be droughts and famines and all that, and some years you’ll have less apples and some years you’ll have more. But why on earth is it that one year, I won’t be able to get apples because the stock market is bad? There’s no drought, no plague, the apples are growing fine. But nobody can eat them because we have problems with this bizarre accounting system we came up with so many hundreds of years ago. I don’t get it. Okay, that’s a lie. I get it just fine. But that doesn’t mean I like it.
Monogamy: hoo boy. You hit a big one here, Charles. I dislike monogamy on a personal level, mostly because I don’t believe in love in the traditional sense. I love everyone I meet, and that is a fact. I love people for different reasons and in different ways, but I love everyone, and I believe with all my heart that that holds true for everyone else in the world. I’m sure this is me projecting, but maybe it’s just me using different words. You can say you love your sister, you can say you love your boyfriend, you can even say you love your best friend. But you don’t love your best friend, you just like them more than ‘like’. I don’t believe that. I love my sister more than some random stranger on the street, that’s true. But I love that stranger, too. In the very literal, very real sense of the word. And loving a stranger on the street doesn’t mean I love my sister any less. Love is not something you have in quantity, so me loving everyone I know doesn’t mean I love them less than somebody who only loves their family and their girlfriend/boyfriend/whatever. Thus, I can love - god, I don’t know - Keira, and want to be with her the rest of my life, get married, have babies, la-dee-dah, and still love - uh, god - Emily, but in the sense that I think she’s the sexiest being on the planet and I want to bang her every day of my life. I still love Keira, too, and I don’t see why I can’t bang Emily and marry Keira. I love both of them, and they’re both important to me. Does that make me a bad person? Does it mean I don’t really love Keira, or I’m using Emily? I don’t think so. I think so long as everyone understands each other, I should be free to marry whomever I want and have babies with somebody else and bang somebody else and take long walks on the beach and hold hands with somebody else. I love everyone, and that is that.
Religion: a concept I dislike. You seem to be getting a lot of those, Charles. Faith itself is a wonderful thing to have, and does amazing things for people (see studies on the effectiveness of prayer), but religion is not my favorite. Mostly because all modern incarnations of religion have some thing I disagree with. Like the practice of forcing itself on others, condemning others, doing both at the same time (coughcoughcrusades), or starting wars over silly things like differing translations. Seriously, the whole Catholic-Protestant thing drives me crazy. You know they worship the same god, right? Yet they kill each other in the hundreds every year over little spats. This is what the establishment of religion does. I know this is not always the case, but it seems to me that every time a faith turns into religion, you suddenly have protesters and fights and then holy wars. Why can’t people just believe? Do you really need to make other people believe, no matter what? Do you really need to rape and pillage and murder in the name of a god that you think will save you? But I guess I don’t know. Maybe I never will. You know, probably not.
Eclipses: surely have more meaning than I attribute to them. I know they’re important to a lot of people and their philosophies/religions/etc, but they’ve never been all that special to me. Probably because they’ve never had much to do with my life/existence. Go figure.
That's all for tonight. Hey Charles, what do you want for your birthday?
Photography: a means of capturing the present and tucking it away for the future. Something I wish I did more often, because it’s hard to go wrong with photos, in my opinion. Unless they’re pictures of me, but hey! Who doesn’t hate pictures of themselves? All the cool kids are doing it. Ahem. Anyways, photography is one of those things that I have a hard time believing is a subject taught in school. It’s like music, you know? You can teach some one how to play an instrument, and how to read music, and you can get a bunch of musicians together to play, but you can’t teach somebody to make music. It’s something you do for yourself. Which is just like photography. Why would you need to be taught anything but how to use the camera? Of course, I’ve never taken a photography class, so I’ve not the foggiest what they’re like, and I’m sure I’ve got the wrong idea, but that’s my opinion on the matter, so. There you have it.
Money: something I’ve had a problem with since I was a little kid. What’s the point of it? And why would you build your entire culture on something that changes value day-to-day? An apple is an apple no matter what the stock market is like, and sure, there will be droughts and famines and all that, and some years you’ll have less apples and some years you’ll have more. But why on earth is it that one year, I won’t be able to get apples because the stock market is bad? There’s no drought, no plague, the apples are growing fine. But nobody can eat them because we have problems with this bizarre accounting system we came up with so many hundreds of years ago. I don’t get it. Okay, that’s a lie. I get it just fine. But that doesn’t mean I like it.
Monogamy: hoo boy. You hit a big one here, Charles. I dislike monogamy on a personal level, mostly because I don’t believe in love in the traditional sense. I love everyone I meet, and that is a fact. I love people for different reasons and in different ways, but I love everyone, and I believe with all my heart that that holds true for everyone else in the world. I’m sure this is me projecting, but maybe it’s just me using different words. You can say you love your sister, you can say you love your boyfriend, you can even say you love your best friend. But you don’t love your best friend, you just like them more than ‘like’. I don’t believe that. I love my sister more than some random stranger on the street, that’s true. But I love that stranger, too. In the very literal, very real sense of the word. And loving a stranger on the street doesn’t mean I love my sister any less. Love is not something you have in quantity, so me loving everyone I know doesn’t mean I love them less than somebody who only loves their family and their girlfriend/boyfriend/whatever. Thus, I can love - god, I don’t know - Keira, and want to be with her the rest of my life, get married, have babies, la-dee-dah, and still love - uh, god - Emily, but in the sense that I think she’s the sexiest being on the planet and I want to bang her every day of my life. I still love Keira, too, and I don’t see why I can’t bang Emily and marry Keira. I love both of them, and they’re both important to me. Does that make me a bad person? Does it mean I don’t really love Keira, or I’m using Emily? I don’t think so. I think so long as everyone understands each other, I should be free to marry whomever I want and have babies with somebody else and bang somebody else and take long walks on the beach and hold hands with somebody else. I love everyone, and that is that.
Religion: a concept I dislike. You seem to be getting a lot of those, Charles. Faith itself is a wonderful thing to have, and does amazing things for people (see studies on the effectiveness of prayer), but religion is not my favorite. Mostly because all modern incarnations of religion have some thing I disagree with. Like the practice of forcing itself on others, condemning others, doing both at the same time (coughcoughcrusades), or starting wars over silly things like differing translations. Seriously, the whole Catholic-Protestant thing drives me crazy. You know they worship the same god, right? Yet they kill each other in the hundreds every year over little spats. This is what the establishment of religion does. I know this is not always the case, but it seems to me that every time a faith turns into religion, you suddenly have protesters and fights and then holy wars. Why can’t people just believe? Do you really need to make other people believe, no matter what? Do you really need to rape and pillage and murder in the name of a god that you think will save you? But I guess I don’t know. Maybe I never will. You know, probably not.
Eclipses: surely have more meaning than I attribute to them. I know they’re important to a lot of people and their philosophies/religions/etc, but they’ve never been all that special to me. Probably because they’ve never had much to do with my life/existence. Go figure.
That's all for tonight. Hey Charles, what do you want for your birthday?