You know it takes a long long time...

So, here I am on thursday. I have just applied for my second job (as a supplement to the first) and that leaves me feeling not so great. I grew up with the idea that the Leave It To Beaver kinda life was a baseline. That things should improve with time, that progress would prevail. This has shown to not be the case. I have cut out all of my fun spending (the local comic book store is now $20 a week short thanks to the recession). What is one to do. I admit that in comparison to some I am a lucky SOB. My friend who works for Goldman Sachs lost his job a while ago and I cannot fathom what it is like to get laid off. The world works as such that hard work does not pay off. Do we create the world in our image? Do our ethos become the world through our will? I am beginning to doubt that.
Anywho, Bush Light courses through my veins because it is my only solace. We make do with what we have.

This is amazing or How William Spanos must right his books...

It is a text generator that produces papers of the "post-modern" persuasion. I think I shall write a paper using this. Chortle, chortle, chortle. How clever and (dare I say) post-modern of me.

http://www.elsewhere.org/pomo/

Cheers to Gun Fights in the House God.

It has been theorized better and before me that as we have moved further and further from "the land" that our context becomes more and more social. So much so that what we consider our "self" is merely an aggregate of these social connections and our reflections upon them. There is something to be said for this... Salud!

Self-Awareness....

I admit this is a phrase I hate but I find it far more palatable than self-consciousness. I was just talking with the therapist I work with (he is a neighbor) and we sorta spun-off into this discussion about self-medication. Well, a thinly veiled one. I had invited him in for a beer and he said he had to get home and have a protein shake (He was coming home from an Aikido class) and I said "which one of us will feel better in a half-hour? Me! Because I won't feel anything!" Now, what does it mean that I can identify this behaviour as both self-medication and that I am aware that it is a response to my mood and situation? This becomes an interesting question I feel. I find that notions of self-awareness (I think this encompasses notions of self-consciosusness without all that phenomenological shite) seem to manifest themselves more clearly in some types of people and not others. I would like to attribute it to education or some such nonsense but that does not hold (as simple as it would be). What does it say to know you are doing something anti-social and possibly unhealthy as opposed to just doing it? This is not so much a meditation but an actual question....

Ok, I cannot simply leave that question be. I think there is a profound "ethical" question here. What is it do something and know we are doing something as we do it. I find traditional (ie Sarte/Husserlian) phenomenological questions to be silly here(I find the ethical "dimension" far more interesting and pressing, ie what does Wittgenstein's later conceptions of meaning as use mean about responsibility?). I think this is also a question of responsibility and that a great deal of modern thought has been an evacuation of notions of responsibility (we can replace it with shitty notions of authenticity if we want to be I find this pre-cludes a intersubjective dimension). Oh well. Enough. The drugs are quick.
Enough!

Update from the frontlines of mental health...

Oh no! No medicaid! Drink yourself to stability!!!!!!!!!!

Well, so ends another day as a cog in the great machine of mental health servicing. I admit this is one of the most frustrating jobs that I have ever seen. I would almost rather push a boulder up a hill endlessly because at least there nothing is truly at stake.
I get the chance to see fascinating (depressing) phenomena manifest themselves everyday. An example if you please maestro! Have you ever had the chance to watch a child from the moment they take their medication up to and past the point where it takes hold? It is like watching the life drain out of someone! I am not kidding! The percentage of kids I see who are medicated is an amazingly round one (100% hooray). I admit I begin to wonder if taking add medications for study purposes (I of course do not actually KNOW anyone who does this) is simply a pyscho-somatic attempt to force oneself not be lazy! While most of the kids I know who take ADD meds do actually achieve more school work there is less of exhilarated sense of urgency as that of resignation. A light goes out in their eyes. I see the wisdome of thinkers (from Dewey on) who do not characterize the discharges of physical action in children as evil as just simply natural. The natural response to a boring/boorish situation. I am now surprised a the fact I do not defecate on my trig teacher for lack of something more interesting to do.
I am also begining to truly see the harm that notions that see the mind as distinct from the body has on the population at large. To fight over this fact with philosophers and neuroscientists is a moot point. It is like trying to argue FOR Lamarkian evolution these days. No one actually buys it but when you try to explain it to your average Joe on the Clapham Omnibus it makes perfect sense. And it is here, with this population that that people need to be disabused of the idea. I am reading a lot work about psychological trauma that expands our notions of how the traumatic experience and its manifestations in life are understood. One of the main contentions of this work is that not only do we still come up against stigmas of mental illness but the very way we conceptualize the symptoms of it are woefully inadequate. That we tend to ignore way in which this pain manifests itself in the corporeal body. That we tend to view natural discharges of emotion as signs of weakness, unintellible, not worth studying or even worse the product of an overactive imagination. The way we treat children stifles the ability to properly express our feelings this creating "cultural cages" which produce, promote, and sustain cognitive dissociation in a way that is ONLY found in captive animals. We assume that a lot of things we are do are in no way connected with our "mental state" because (unlike the weak Cartesian attempts to prove causality between the mental and physical) that the mental and the physical are simply discrete domains that are mutually exclusive. A problem in the mind is just that. Alas....
Then there is the part of this where the government gets involved. The amount of hoops, snares, paperwork, phonecalls, faxs, signatures, time, bullshit, redtape and hairpulling mental drainage required to get menial and necessary mental health services provided is one of the darker spectres of the "Welfare State." I have spent the last three weeks trying to get one kids medicaid turned back on (it expired because a simple form was turned in late) so that he can receive necessary therapy and medication (despite my moaning above some medication truly does contribute to an improvement in a great many people's quality of life). Of course, after days I did in fact get it back on line today but there are two kinds of medicaid for children in this state. If you are dirt poor you get type A: no copay. If you are not quite that poor you get B: a $10copay that would still bankrupt a lot of people when you consider that a school based therapist/para-professional will see a kid 5 days a week if such services are necessary. Of course my kid whose type was originally A got it turned back on and it is now B. The childs parent has of course lost his job due to having to leave so often to come up to school and see get his kid because he was out of control because he wasnt taking his meds because his medicaid had expired because a simple form was not turned in in a timely manner. This will of course result in the need for a "change form" which even if it was filled out and turned in tomorrow by hand (to avoid the lag time of mailing it) it woul still take a "minimum of 10 days maybe longer depending on the backlog" (quoteth the civil servant on the phone) to get fixed.
I of course believe in treatment with a guaranteed track record of therapuetic efficacy: Beer for me tonite!

I am tired of editing a Foucault paper and want to talk about something else...

I love ironing. I admit that there are few activities in my life that I find more soothing and constructive than the process of ironing out the creases of my shirts for work and then adding some spray starch. I love the smell of steam and that anti-septic smell of my lemon starch. It reminds me of when my mom used to starch her uniforms when I was much younger. The idea has a very strong (and relaxing) familial element to it that I enjoy. This is what I do: I iron. I iron therefore I am.
I love the smell of coming thunderstorms. There are those few moments before the rain comes when the wind blows away all of the local smells and I imagine that the scents on the wind are from some far flung locale. I believe I can smell western hemlock, burning mesquite and the delight of wildflowers from somewhere in middle of Oklahoma. It may not actually be the case but I simply don't care. I enjoy welcoming the idea to my home.
That will do for the moment.

Jay Z + Radiohead=Jaydiohead and Awesomeness...

Hopefully makes up for the post about talking balls.