favorite themes

loss of innocence
loss of sexual innocence
suffering
technology
people who have everything yet remain unfulfilled
voyeurism and exhibitionism
self-preservation
utopia
dystopian utopia
post apocalypse
addiction
fame
super intelligence
child prodigies
murder
torture
social upheaval/revolutions
shame
the obsolescence of intellectual property
undermining authority and power structures
magic
unity/ a shared sense of identity and experience
alternate universes

The Prince and The Pauper: Class Jumping and Gay Relationships

I'll admit to it, I'm ghetto. Growing up, food wasn't always something guaranteed. If that doesn't fit your definition of "ghetto" I don't know what does. Money is still an idea so intrinsic to being that we often don't take a step back to evaluate its role. It's not possible to survive without money in the complicated, modern world.

In spite of these valleys, I have at times lived vastly better than the aforementioned marginality. My life has been marked by monetary highs and lows so extreme I would have never expected in my wildest dreams to experience either side of the spectrum. I can only speak on what I've experienced, and I hope to document some valuable aspect to life with which people in similar situations can identify.

Would you second guess breathing? When something is so integral to life, it becomes almost biological, and hence somewhat less visible and communicable... at this point in time money is the last remaining division between people. My experiences glancing into different social classes, or class jumping, as I like to call it, have demonstrated that the largest differences in queer relationships are related to social class. In a way, these differences are more common in queer relationships, perhaps due to the dating pool being "somewhat more limited" than the dating pool for a straight counterparts.

In gay relationships nobody plays the man and the woman, so the role of breadwinner is blurred and often non-existent... although role playing remains a large aspect of gay relationships, the fact remains that it's still so removed from the mainstream, and values are more up for interpretation.


The Prince

With the prince, I was taken into a world of wealth and luxury of which I could have only dreamed.

When the time came for one of us to steal something, I was the one expected to do it. If it was time to hustle drugs it was my job.

He was clean in the sense that all of his stds were not a serious health risk to me, so doing sexual things with him was less risky. I'm sure he went to the doctor a lot growing up, and had nice teeth that had likely been maintained by a dentist twice a year.

Overall, in spite of being bipolar and for the most part, completely out of control, he still held a certain optimism about the future.

Because he'd never lived in the real world, he was able to deal with problems by not dealing with them at all, essentially leaving other people to deal with any sort of opposition.

I began to see that overall, he was satisfied with nothing, because with limitless resources, there was absolutely no pressure for success. All the passion was lost cause the material world existed only for him.


The Pauper

In many people, I find naivete somewhat charming, and in this case it came from never being anywhere truly posh.

When it came to money, this one in fact stole hundreds of dollars from me... not like it matters, but it does say something to the character of the person.

When one has never known the "brighter side of life" it's a lot harder to think positively about what lies ahead. In addition to being bipolar, and for the most part completely out of control, he also held a certain pessimism about the future.

When it comes to physicality and health, he was dirtier, carried no dental nor health insurance, and had more serious stds that made sexual contact with him more risky.

The pauper was not really too good at dealing with problems, such as ever increasing, inescapable debt. I began to see that overall, he was satisfied with nothing, cause he's never known better, and probably didn't think the world had too much to offer.



What I'm trying to assert is that an unbalanced relationship is doomed to failure. While dating the Prince, I was living off several hundred dollars a month, and although the Prince had several hundred in cash to spend each month, any expense was taken care of by the dad, so his buying power was essentially limitless. Obviously, the opposite was true with the Pauper, and if I take into account his debt, I was probably doing better than him in ways. Jealousy finds its way into relationships when there's no equality. If you want it to work, then you have to be in the same place as the other person. If you're lucky enough to come up, then you have to do it together.

This is the last I can ever speak on poverty. If I'm going to escape it, I dare not even speak its name.

Happily (N)ever After: Why children of divorce are more well adapted to deal with complicted modern lives...

As culture evolves and changes over time, old ideologies and institutions are forced to keep up to speed with newer younger generations. Older, less relevant people die off, and take their outdated, irrelevant world views with them.

In the 50s divorce was much less common, most likely due to the social stigma of admitting to failure when it comes to love. The 50s was overall a horrible time to be alive, full of repression, close mindedness, and hatred for minorities. As delusional puritanical norms fade away (albeit too slowly to make any real kind of social progress) and the years have gone by, divorce has gotten more and more common...

Throughout the 80s, divorce rates went up exponentially, and unless a child was living a blissfully naive life in a mostly white suburb, chances are that children born during those times came from divorced parents, which is to say they grew up with just a mom.

Is it bad to be missing a dad? Probably not... most people I knew who actually had a dad don't really have anything good to say about him. Out of my entire peer group, I can only think of 3 individuals who had a "good" dad.

What I'm trying most to assert is when your parents divorce at a young age you are forced to see love and life for what it truly is- constantly changing. When your basic archetype for a love relationship fails, you accept the fact that love could never be real. People don't stay together because they don't have to; moreover, it's impossible and unfair to demand a life time commitment from anybody. As these children because adults, they deal with prospective love interests more cautiously and less naively. Children of divorced parents see love for that it truly is- fleeting and intangible.

I personally did not come from a home with divorced parents, which means my parents lived in complete misery instead of choosing to make a break. Overall, I find this unhealthy, because the amount of couples I know who stayed together and still are in love happen to be so few that I can count them on one hand. We're not here to talk about my and my dysfunctional family life. From speaking to other people in my peer group who don't come from divorced parents, I've noticed overwhelming similarities to the way we view relationships and they are all unrealistic and unhealthy- for both people involved.

Where do I fit into this? Of course I dream about falling in love and making it last forever. Will it happen? Most likely not. Does it happen for anybody? Maybe... but probably not.

As I've gotten older, I've been forced to psychoanalyze why I feel the way I do, and from where do those feelings and notions come? It's obvious to me that almost everything that I think is real about love comes from Disney movies and television shows that were on TV when I was a little boy. Is this healthy? Perhaps. Is it delusional? Most assuredly. That's why love remains my one delusion.

les nouvelles

Ardi's place in human ancestry challenged

Today's College Students More Likely to Lack Empathy
'Generation Me' tends to be self-centered, competitive, U.S. research shows

99,000 Die Yearly From Preventable Hospital Infections
CDC Finally Gets Data as State Laws Force Hospitals to Count Infections

Wait before cutting the umbilical cord, say researchers: Cord blood contains many valuable stem cells, making this transfer of stem cells a process that might be considered the original stem cell transplant.

UC Irvine scientists make first complex tissue structure out of stem cells
Researchers have created an eight-layer, early-stage retina.

les nouvelles

ORLANDO, Fla., July 10 (UPI) -- Colleen Shipman and Billy Oefelein, victims in the kidnapping plot allegedly formed by former U.S. astronaut Lisa Nowak, say they are getting married.

Americans see science as lagging here

Though low-calorie diets have been found to have anti-aging effects on animals, human studies are still in the early stage.

-> I've known about caloric restriction and life extension since I was in high school... the first time I learned about it was on tv...

les nouvelles

Americans value science, but not all of it: survey

Q+A-Why is the spread of Ebola in the Philippines a concern?

Antibiotics, oral route cut "abortion pill" risks

les nouvelles

Shuttle Crew Prepares for Return Trip

NASA Scientists Find More Evidence of Water on Mars

900 babies a day are born with AIDS virus in the developing world: report

AP poll: Most students stressed, some depressed

Down Syndrome Yields Key Cancer Clue
Genes Overproduced in Down Syndrome Can Slow Tumor Growth

Massive asteroid bombardment may have helped life to THRIVE on Earth

Homo Sex in Colonial America

reality tv news

This is the true story of six homeless people picked to live on the streets, work together and have their lives taped. This is Homeless Real World.

p.s. I thought I was the first person to come up with this idea, but it's already been done a while ago! I love to watch reality tv evolve, and in a sense, escalate. It's only a matter of time before more and more extreme things become televised, and we're watching our neighbors get killed, tortured, or raped on tv every night.

Last night I started watching Solitary 1.0 on hulu. I had never seen the first one, but seen most if not all of the second season, and I recently watched the 3rd season in its entirety. I love it, and I find it to be one of the most intelligent and interesting reality tv competitions I've ever watched.

skinny does not = hot

Goodbye skinny metrosexuals, the beefcake is back: Metrosexual twigmen who admire your shoes are all very well in good times, but when the going gets tough, what you actually want is a REAL man...

Amen!

history is irrelevant

Nobody likes to learn about history, because it's meaningless, and doesn't apply to anything or anyone at the current time. Just think, did such things as ipods, global warming, hpv, or bird flu even exist just 10 years ago, in 1999? They didn't, but they are now something that everyone thinks about every day.

They exist now, but not in the past. Nothing exists in the past, because it's not the present. Time is so hard to define, and some physicists now define the space time continuum as infinite dimensions, but what everyone agrees on is that the past is just that, the past.

What purpose does it serve to know that european imperialism caused the genocide of all the native populations, while I sit back and watch all these groups or similar ones around the world facing genocide now, whether it be genetic, political, or economic? There is nothing I could do about it, and if there was something I could do, I'd still sit back and watch, because just like everyone else in the world, I take great pleasure in others' misfortunes.

If history were actually meaningful, then there would have only been one conflict. Essentially, there would have only been one war, one genocide, one case of discrimination, one disease, one orphan, one rape, one case of child abuse- one problem.

The fact that history does repeat does not make it worth knowing, nor make a difference in the choice humans make to repeat it.

Technology and science has forced humanity to change at such a rapid pace, that the very recent past is now the only reference point. The distant past is anything longer than 5 years ago, although the distant past will be redefined over time to be more and more recent. Nobody born in the 80s can even begin to identify with their parents; partially this generation gasp is due to accelerating change, which constantly updates reference points to more and more recent in the past.

Has anyone ever speculated that history should be completely ignored instead of all these negative truths about humanity being reinforced in developing childs minds? Perhaps the only way to actually break the cycle is to refute it, kind of in the way that I pay no attention whatsoever to conservative religious groups; essentially, even acknowledging their existances gives them too much power.

[SALT] Managing social collapse (Orlov talk)

With vintage Russian black humor, Orlov described the social collapse he witnessed in Russia in the 1990s and spelled out its practical lessons for the American social collapse he sees as inevitable. The American economy in the 1990s described itself as "Goldilocks"---just the right size---when in fact is was "Tinkerbelle," and one day the clapping stops. As in Russia, the US made itself vulnerable to the decline of crude oil, a trade deficit, military over-reach, and financial over-reach.

Russians were able to muddle through the collapse by finding ways to manage 1) food, 2) shelter, 3) transportation, and 4) security.

Russian agriculture had long been ruined by collectivization, so people had developed personal kitchen gardens, accessible by public transit. The state felt a time-honored obligation to provide bread, and no one starved. (Orlov noted that women in Russia handled collapse pragmatically, putting on their garden gloves, whereas middle-aged men dissolved into lonely drunks.) Americans are good at gardening and could shift easily to raising their own food, perhaps adopting the Cuban practice of gardens in parking lots and on roofs and balconies.

As for shelter, Russians live in apartments from which they cannot be evicted. The buildings are heat-efficient, and the communities are close enough to protect themselves from the increase in crime. Americans, Orlov said, have yet to realize there is no lower limit to real estate value, nor that suburban homes are expensive to maintain and get to. He predicts flight, not to remote log cabins, but to dense urban living. Office buildings, he suggests, can easily be converted to apartments, and college campuses could make instant communities, with all that grass turned into pasture or gardens. There are already plenty of empty buildings in America; the cheapest way to get one is to offer to caretake it.

The rule with transportation, he said, is not to strand people in nonsurvivable places. Fuel will be expensive and hoarded. He noted that the most efficient of all vehicles is an old pickup fully loaded with people, driving slowly. He suggested that freight trains be required to provide a few empty boxcars for hoboes. Donkeys, he advised, provide reliable transport, and they dine as comfortably on the Wall Street Journal as they did on Pravda.

Security has to take into account that prisons will be emptied (by stages, preferably), overseas troops will be repatriated and released, and cops will go corrupt. You will have a surplus of mentally unstable people skilled with weapons. There will be crime waves and mafias, but you can rent a policeman, hire a soldier. Security becomes a matter of local collaboration. When the formal legal structure breaks down, adaptive improvisation can be pretty efficient.

By way of readiness, Orlov urges all to prepare for life without a job, with near-zero burn rate. It takes practice to learn how to be poor well. Those who are already poor have an advantage.

--Stewart Brand

I'm very interested in social collapse...

a big news year for evolution

Four out of five Britons repudiate creationism

p.s. how did intelligent design ever come into thought- it's beyond ridiculous. Still, I am offended by creationism more, purely for the fact that I've observed evolution in my life.

It's impossible to say that science doesn't have an impact on sociology, because all of society and it's views depend on what science and technology provide for people. No wonder the bible belt and antiquated views are the only part of the current social collapse.

Anarcho-capitalism, economic slavery, and social collapse

I guess I want to document some of the "less important" news that has been going on lately.

The world economic situation is getting more and more dire. People all over the world are loosing everything, and nothing in this life is free. Unemployment is going up at a staggering pace. The economy continues to worsen, and it's not just in the united states but world wide. The government and economy of Iceland completely collapsed, and it seems like it was just the first of many more potential disastrous social collapses. The government is now trillions in debt, thanks to george w bush, it seems obvious that historians will place him rather unfavorably amongst the ranks of hitler, stalin, and chairman mao as one of the worst political actors in world history. The media has been covering the situation EXTENSIVELY, and now incredibly large sums of money are thrown out in terminology all the time. Trillions here, hundreds of billions there. The government is about to take over banks, and nationalize health care, hundreds of billions of dollars are now everyday conversation for the citizens of this fine country.

I guess I'm still proud to be an American. It was founded on such great principles, yet has still not operated in the right capacity.

Is the golden age of human development over? Looking over the skyline of cultural cities of the world, it seemed like there just had to be more, but perhaps that was the best is was going to get. I try to look towards more optimistic views, and pray that singularity will come to pass in my lifetime. It's just a matter of money being put into the right industries and institutions, who will use the money to evolve society- eliminate war, disease, famine, and every other problem human's frail and inefficient minds create for themselves as a species.

Corporations, in some ways, are changing as well. At first, when everything started to go bad, it seemed as though only the strongest and richest corporations would be able to survive in the current time, mostly from the governments giving them billions in spite of the obvious fact that a lot of them are about to fail and have 0 chance of success- essentially everyone knows that the money the government gives them will basically be wasted on CEO payoffs. It was scary to think that the only surviving institutions would be the most powerful of corporations, and along those lines it seems obvious that the only remaining power would be the only government left, and I don't want proctor and gamble, coca cola, and mcdonalds ruling over me.

These corporations already rule over everyone.

The reality, is that we are all slaves. Looking back at history, we think of slavery as so obviously negative, and obvious to the human eye. Historically, we had people in chains, being whipped, sexually assaulted, and forced into a whole life of servitude. Yet there are millions enslaved right now, in fact wikipedia says there are more people enslaved at this moment in time than at any other time throughout recorded history. If you want to be a part of everything modern society has to offer, then you have to work for a living, and you have become a slave to whomever or whatever profits off you and your work. Today, anarchists, socialists, and communists alike see existence as "wage slavery" or "economic slavery." The reality is that humans are forced to choose between selling their labour and facing starvation, poverty or social stigma and a lack of prosperity. This is related to the notion of economic coercion. If you don't play the game, you can't win- you'll be homeless in 2 months, and that's real. I've never met anyone who always gets to do exactly what they want (except the few people I knew in the past with millions of dollars, and they were miserable because there was nothing left to want or desire, which makes them passionless, but that's another story).

Again, we are all slaves.

I don't understand where all these hundreds of billions of dollars have gone. Somebody has to have it, or at least know where it is! How did all this money disappear. I know that money isn't real, and is in fact based on faith, at least in this country, but just as the government chants money into existence, money is too desirable to be chanted out of existence. Someone is skimming off the top. Someone has it. We should find them and kill them. I always see signs that say "eat the rich" and it sounds like a good idea, because I'm starving.

Overall, people are getting more and more desperate. The social collapse of western civilization is imminent, and has been going on even though our society dwells in ignorance and escapism. Hopefully, now can be a good time to change some things for the positive, instead of pumping tax money into dying industries and institutions that are no longer relevant, and stand no chance of evolving in a free market system. Right now could have been a time of unparalleled prosperity, not just for the united states, but for the whole global community. They did it to themselves, it's not our fault, and we shouldn't feel bad about them failing. That is, essentially, the core idea of free market capitalism- only the strong will survive, ultimately their production becomes the most efficient, and serves the most amount of people the for the cheapest cost. In some ways, it's sad, because it seems like the basis of human achievement, the pinnacle of human development, was all due to corporations, because they were the only institutions with enough money (hence power) to actually create anything.

Humans, I have noticed, are a lot like piranhas in a feeding frenzy. Humans consume, until there's nothing left to consume. If you happen to be weak, or not be the best fit for the environment, the humans around you will feed off you until there's nothing left. It works the exact same way through natural selection in nature; humans are after all, animals. When you're in the middle of the street, screaming fire while being jacked and beaten up by 3 people, nobody will come to help.

Because this is how humans are.

homeless hot spot

This morning, I woke up at my boyfriend's house. As I left the building and walked outside, then walked diagonally through the famous Haight/Ashbury intersection, I realized just how many young travellers really are somewhat permanent residents of the haight. People still gravitate to San Francisco (specifically the epicenter of 60s hippy culture) even today. I saw about 30 or more, they all smelled terrible and had hella dogs, just chillin and sitting around on the streets. I'm not talking shit, I don't mind these people, and I do think space must be made for them in our society. I'm just not going to pretend like they're doing something important or relevant when they're just bums.

95% of the businesses on Haight street are only open from about 12-7pm, so in case you're ever in the area outside that specific limited block of time, you'll see a whole other side of haight street full of panhandlers, homeless runaways, drug addicts, and broke down hippies who are still living the dream. Basically, any time outside of peak shopping hours, when the most amount of tourists/shoppers are in the area, the haight looses its luster. Most of the time, walking down the street at night is tiresome for a beautiful, young, preppy gay guy like myself. I'll never understand why everyone thinks I have so much money to spare. To quote Miss New York, "Do I look like I give a fuck? Cause I don't!"

By travellers, I mean young homeless people who decide that the American dream doesn't apply to his or her life's vision. Jobless and without responsibility or conformity, they travel around the country together through various means and methods. Most of these people, if not squatting inside one of the actual thousands of already abandoned buildings throughout the area, squat in parks or even on the streets, basically anywhere they can set up a bed for the night. In many ways, I admire their ability to live so outside accepted norms and institutions, choosing to totally ignore the dominant capitalist ideology.

The thing about living that kind of lifestyle, especially if you're young, is that you're constantly travelling and moving through different places. It seems like an exciting opportunity to live life to its fullest, and do whatever you want whenever you want, which usually seems to be nothing. Nothing can still be a welcome release, especially if you have nothing to look forward to, don't want to go to college, and don't see working a bullshit minimum wage job as something you could handle doing. Some people may think it's glamorous, but it's nonetheless depressing. It seems like they're all on drugs (huge surprise) and stuck in a rut of some sort, that seems almost impossible to break once enacted. Obviously, if one has been unemployed for long periods of time, it will not be easy to find a new job as soon as you want to go legit again, cause sleeping on the street just got a little bit too uncomfortable.

For about 2 years, I lived about a 15 minute walk away from Hippy Hill. For those of you who don't know, it's the area across the street from the end of haight, and it's basically the place to go for drugs (weed, shrooms, LSD, DMT, + more, but those are what people usually go there for), and in fact many tourists come here on a daily basis expecting to buy these substances. Because I was out of a job for such a long period of time back then, and because I often don't want to really do anything aside from hang out and get as high as I can each day, I started hanging out there a lot! It was so close, and always offered some sort of entertainment, although I did see many sad things, such as fights all the time, arrests all the time, and even a case of abducted children living in the park (although it wasn't the only time I saw people living in the park with kids, and then of course get in trouble for it). I made friends with drug dealers and homeless people, who gave me valuable insight into other ways of life, and "flying below the radar."

However, after a while, the glamor of the alternative began to fade rather quickly when I began to realize how sad that kind of lifestyle really is. There's no opportunity for improvement, without playing into capitalism, your life can not possibly evolve. The thing about doing nothing is you never know when you're done doing it. It makes me really sad to watch people destroy their lives, day after day through alcohol, drugs, depression, and undiagnosed mental disorders. At the same time, I can understand their unwillingness to conform to capitalism standards which are in and of themselves, evil and exploitative. What can the government do? The money has to come from somewhere.

Hippy Hill and Haight street's homeless populations are very different from the kinds of homeless in other districts of the city. For example, the tenderloin homeless are the closest to death, and usually on hard drugs such as heroin, speed, crack and ocs. You can go to Pill Hill at any time and be offered OCs from homeless on the streets, usually the OC dealers do it out of a wheelchair. Next time you're in the tenderloin, take a look at one of the omnipresent wheelchairs, guaranteed within the next few minutes the drug dealer and addict will exchange white pills for cash. The homeless in haight ashbury are usually younger, and doing mainly psychedelics. I love how different kinds of homeless can be found throughout different areas of San Francisco. It just gives San Francisco so much more personality!

I guess I was inspired by Tales of Young Urban Squatters, by Claire Bursch.

degradation/ breakdown/ inefficiency/ antiquity of the family unit

It seems like for most of recorded history, people lived in small
bands of people, who over time, came together to form micro cultures,
probably do to commonalities those "individuals" had at the time. I'm
trying to pinpoint a time when a family type structure became the most
efficient way for humans to pass on their genes to the next
generation. I guess it's not really possible, and it doesn't even
matter because the family unit is already a thing of the past.

The perfect family is what everyone wants...but that fantasy of
perfection is far from reality. The notion that other people will love
and support you in spite of everything are comforting, yet not
reality.

These ideals of functioning nuclear families seem mostly constructed
thanks to disney and 50s "pop ethics," when christianity started to
get forced on people through new media at the time, mainly movies and
the invention of the television. Although they are fun and interesting
from an anthropological perspective, they are now a thing of the past.
It's not the 90s anymore, and people know that the nuclear family
model isn't reality. Forever never existed, and "for the rest of our
lives" was uttered in tongue in cheek way in the first place.

Couples today rarely stay together because they don't have to. That is
to say people are getting more real about love and accepting the fact
that the fantasy of pure real love was not only a lie our parents told
us, it's not even humanly possible. Obviously everyone wants to meet
the perfect person, fall in love, and then spend the rest of their
lives together, but nobody does it, I guess people have their reasons.
There's all those studies that say humans are by nature not
monogamous, and and since no family looks like the culturally
constructed paradigm, the family structure is hence becoming a thing
of the past. It seems like when the parents stay together, they're
miserable and dysfunctional, and they always stop having sex, which is
what brought 2 people together in the first place. With the absence of
passion, intimacy falls by the way side and it makes sense. "Why
should I give a shit about someone if the newness has worn off and I'm
no longer attracted/ want to fuck them anymore?"

It seems like families only cause problems. The older generation, no
longer able to contribute anything to the world, starts to drain more
and more resources. I often wonder why we choose to "respect" the
elderly cause I think they're fucking disgusting. After all, they're
the generation that INVENTED homophobia, created the evil empire of
american capitalism that holds so many people in bondage, resisted
progress, ruined the environment... do you really want to go on? I
guess I'm one of those people who only respects other if they're worth
it.

Besides, western culture worships youth as the most important source
of power nowadays, so it seems like veneration for the elderly will
soon be replaced with contempt and disrespect. There's nothing they
can do for us any longer... just let them die, and bury the dead hand
of the past with them. Does everyone really want to relive trivial
histories and struggles from the past? One can't argue history is
relevant, if it were there would have been only one conflict, one
problem, one genocide, one indiscretion.

In families, the older becomes dependent on the younger, who are
expected to take care of them. If anyone thinks I'm going to take care
of my parents, especially in monetary terms, they're fucking crazy. I
could give a fuck less what happens to them. It's weird when money
comes into play, because it just makes people's motivations more
transparent. Perhaps the reason would be pure self-interest, but then
again I never got a fair shot at success, which is why I'm
unsuccessful, and I know money does not have to be shared among family
members.

Love doesn't mean all your problems will all of a sudden disappear, in
fact the opposite is true, and the people you love have problems that
all of a sudden become your additional problems piled on top of the
previously existing ones. Love between family members is an emotion
automatically assumed to be true in society, but as we can observe
both in our own lives, as well as in the lives of those humans living
in other cultures in other places around the world, the love may or
may not be real. Often, love is twisted and used for dubious means,
like covering up sexual abuse, or to support people's addictions to
hard drugs such as speed or crack.

It makes me sad to everyone around me coming from fractured families.
The only modern comfort comes from money. Is money the only real
factor as to what will decided people's happiness and success, or dark
feelings and perpetual failure? I guess living in a metropolitan city,
I can observe the new ways people choose to make families. It's weird
how people find their other family members, but since it was
self-determined, it's the only thing that's real...

classism is the new racism

I'm not sure if classism is even a word. When I run spell check, it tells me that the word is unrecognizable, so since I like my readers to be on the same page, I'm going to define it as discrimination against a person or peoples due to their class. As in monetary value. As in how much money do you have? I wish these deep seeded problems that are entrenched in our culture would have disappeared from education and/or exposure, offering people the chance to discuss these problems openly in the hopes that talking about it will raise awareness and hopefully mean the end to social ills. However, it's stupid, and more importantly unrealistic to think that homophobia, transphobia, racism, sexism, discrimination, etc no longer exist, but they do and they're still really common. I just saw a pin yesterday from a republican convention saying "will it still be the white house if we have a black president?" There's not really anything more racist than that. Times are changing, it's easy to see, and it seems like eventually, classism will replace racism as the most common form of discrimination.

One of my friends thinks that it's impossible to talk about class without talking about gender and race- initially as I thought about it, the thought seemed unfocused until I realized I was being overly optimistic, because the truth is that class really is inherently linked to race and gender (although I'd like to pretend like they're unrelated). The cold hard fact remains- life is much more difficult if you're queer, a woman, poor, a person of color, a person of size, disabled, etc. The sad thing is that the list really can go on and on. It's almost the start of a new decade, I'm ashamed to say that humans have hardly evolved. I guess people are trying to pretend like it's still the 90s, because I catch myself doing it too. It was just such an optimistic time, it seems like the Clinton years were the golden age for America. Everything is now falling apart, it's hard to say whether the united states will remain united.

My supposition is that in the future, with all other antiquated distinctions between people being commonly agreed to be left behind along with slavery and torture (oh wait, Bush brought torture back) money will still remain the biggest concern on all humans' minds, so all social ills will only be created and reinforced if they surround money. Money is almost the only form of power left, hopefully marginalized peoples will find a way to come into some before anyone who is less than a millionaire is totally fucked. It seems like people will always find a reason to hate one another, and we're almost out of reasons as funny as that sounds. So what will be left when the law finally says you can't hate other people? I already find myself being classist, and I'm lower class, which is the most ironic part about it.

my opinion

I originally saw this video years ago, and I was immediately struck by the intense realness of the lyrics, I've never really heard a song like this before. As a matter of fact, I was so inspired, I wrote a few sentences about my interpretation. This song is an instant classic?

TEAIRRA MARI- No Daddy

I didn't have a father, so I'm fucked uo. My beauty belies my true nature. I've been through serious shit, I can't believe I'm still alive, I've had near death experiences, but I'm here now, alive looking at you. I'm a non-conformist type because of my childhood on the streets, so I've had to learn to survive in spite of everything. I know some hot girls like me who have been through hell, you should listen to your mamas. Don't let cheat or deceit defeat you, girl). You're hot and you have a voice, don't let anybody fuck with you cause you're ghetto and beautiful. Tell them my pants are sexy, don't let my cute face fool you. I'm not a stripper or a ho, but I'm friends with sex workers, so girls get money any way you can, I don't give a fuck and I've got your backs. Still, that's totally not me, but I empathize for sure. Nobody's going to take care of your shit except yourself. And all the girls in a similar situation, and you feel down you can call me :)

This says _______________________ about our culture.



Today I feel __________________ with my "contribution to the general consciousness via exchanging information through the internet?