Coda

As inquiring individuals may or may not have discovered, I've decided to move on with my blogging - in a metaphorical sense, after a prolonged period of time as a pupa, the larvae has transformed into the moth; and knowing the luck that most Lepidoptera seem to have in my experience, this moth will most likely end up gassed to death in an overly eager Entomology student's Kill Jar. Yes, friends, I have moved on, from my undergraduate degree at the University of Toronto to a Masters program at the University of New Brunswick.

Certain people will no doubt be thrilled to see me flailing about in a wholly new cultural context, far removed from the epicenter of Canada that I usually call "Toronto". Others (and I can actually name names here) will be quite disappointed to know that my posts will be, and have been, just as much focused on relationships, religion, and my nose-diving (yet valiant) attempts to do a good job at both, as they were before...to which I have to respond, in sterotypical, selfish, yet defiant emo-laden fashion, with middle-fingers eagerly flipped and invectives eagerly spewed.

As I've posted to my earlier haunt on LiveJournal, interested parties will know how to find me.

It's the end of the world as we know it.

One of the unexpected benefits of being a youth of the Internet Age is the ability to look at how time and again the corporate suits seem to think that the Internet is something which can be co-opted, controlled, coralled, and otherwise bent to suit their whims. The popular media seems to be replete with examples of how there's this apparent perception that all a company needs to do is to sprout a website with pastel colours and fancy designs to be "cool", or failing that, some cryptic ad campaign with a URL composed of nothing but oddly oblique symbols or sentences or phrases which may or may not have anything to do with the product or service that they're selling. We're jaded to things like that now. We lived through the hype and promise of the Dot-Com Bubble, and we're living right now in the hype and promise of "Web 2.0".

But of course once in a while a company throws us jaded netizens a curveball by doing that is so completely and ludicrously over the top that it's simply hard to believe it's true.

Right now, that company is Wal-Mart.


It's the end of the world as we know it.

Wal-Mart just recently launched a new website known as The HUB, and ostensibly, it's a "social networking" site (which is incidentally light on the "social" and completely non-existant on the "networking"). It's supposed to ape MySpace, apparently.

Take a look at one such user's account and then gauge the reaction by one young girl who was polled about this: "Some of the kids looked like they were trying to be supercool, but they weren't at all, and they were just being kind of weird," she said. "Are these real kids?"

And check out the video of the perky Asian "tween" linked on the front page:

Shopping will be my number ONE hobby this fall. I am going to be the most fashionable teen at school! I'll be on the lookout for the latest fashions. From leggings to layers, to boots and flats, big belts, and headbands! I'll be looking for it all! Layering is SO IN right now. Hobo bags are also in style. OH! And big sunglasses! WHOO!! I don't know where to stop! With all of the new clothes I'll be getting, the kids at school will be begging me for fashion tips!

And I feel fine

At the same time I can't help but wonder if today's marketing wizards and boardroom executives just haven't learned the number one rule of marketing: understand your target market. Understanding your target market isn't about setting up some false veneer of a social blogging website with a me-too façade. It means actually getting involved with them and understanding why they make the choices they make. And all of the hip and trendy websites with blog posts of questionable veracity and obviously scripted "reality videos" isn't going to change that.

But at the same time, I think about what I see in today's youth when I'm out there, and I can't help but wonder if in fact that's what they've done. Are today's kids really that shallow and materialistic? I've seen middle schoolers toting around iPods, PSPs and cell phones. Parents are now buying these kids thousand-dollar laptops for school when I'm sure it should be plain as day that an old fashioned notebook and pencil would do. For every youth I've seen who chooses to fight the establishment there seem to be a veritable legion of them who flee to the comfort of the things they buy. And yet, there they are. And I suspect, there are more of them than there were when I was their age. I can find some comfort in that, that despite all of the noise there are people out there who get the message. I think that as long as at least someone out there recognizes the monumental shame at the heart of marketing campaigns like Wal-Mart's, there is still something left for me to believe in amongst our youth.

Can't Get There From Here

In Evolutionary Biology, distinctions can be made between traits that are plastic (i.e. have the capacity for short-term, reversible change) and traits that are fixed (i.e. do not change, or if they do change, do so in an irreversible fashion). Plants for instance, may be able to change their growth habit in very different ways depending on where and/or when they germinate and grow. And yet, biologically speaking, they may be the same species, or genetically even the same individual. A plant grown in shade may change its growth form to maximize available light absorption (by increasing leaf surface area), and when transplanted into open sun may change in the opposite way, reducing surface area to avoid damage from overexcitation of its photosynthetic machinery.

Some traits however, are not so easily mutable. Take pentadactyly, for example. As long as 360 million years ago, the earliest tetrapods (animals with four limbs) had as many as eight "fingers" (or toes). We now known that the five-finger/toe arrangement we see throughout the animal kingdom first appeared 340 million years ago. For 340 million years we've seen tetrapods with, more or less, five fingers and toes. Some traits are so deeply ingrained into the developmental plan that any evolutionary change which doesn't have an immediate penalty or may have a positive effect is fixed.

I've been there I know the way

When I was young, my dad yelled at my mother and I a great deal. There's a great deal of psychology and history behind it all but to make a long story short, he was frustrated with the turns his life had taken, and that left him with an exceedingly short fuse. He had little time, patience, or tolerance for people or things that didn't agree with him or go his way.

I didn't have any means to fight back - any uprising was seen as an immediate excuse to increase the severity with which my father would try to enforce his will. He demanded that I show only happiness around him - anything less was forbidden. The fact that he used it to feed his Martyrdom Complex was the icing on the cake. So I trained myself to completely internalize all of the hatred, and anger and frustration and animosity I built up for myself over the years. I pushed it down, compacted it, distilled it, poured into a little botttle and left it in a dusty corner of my subconscious where I'd hopefully forget about it. Of course, the bottles would pile up, cracks in the glass from the contents inside would occur and an explosion would result, necessitating a release. But better to do it in all in one shot, I thought, than to continually subject myself and those around me to a continual, prolonged misery.

I don't remember when I started doing this - I must have been maybe 8 or 9 or so, sometime between the point where I vomited all over the dining table when I force fed myself in terror over what my parents would do to me if I didn't finish my supper and when I first started cutting myself (only very occasionally mind you, but it was still nevertheless deliberate). But somewhere long long ago in the past, I adopted this strategy to deal with the times I was sad and angry with my friends. In a way, it wasn't very different. Like my dad, some of my friends had ended up developing an idea that I could only be happy around them and never be anything less. Or, they had an image of who I was and looked down on me for not living up to that ideal. And so I further refused to talk about whatever it was that bothered me about someone or something someone had said or done.

Around 15 years later I still find myself stuck in old habits. The silent building up of an acute sense of rage and anger to the point where I would explode in momentary bursts of omnidirectional vitriol. It isn't a sustainable strategy - some day I'll have to make that evolutionary leap to something that works better. But like many evolutionary changes, that leap is really only a series of very small baby steps aggregated together over a very long period of time. As in biological evolution, in the course of human experience, that kind of change doesn't happen in the blink of an eye. The change is ongoing, unceasing. Like that open source project you may have read about on slashdot, our version numbers seem to be increasing in ever smaller steps - from version 0.98 to 0.98.1, to 0.98.2. Looking at how human personalities grown and change with time, human beings are always perpetually works in progress. And I realize now, I'm no different.

Got to find a reason/A reason things went wrong...

Never start no static/I just get it off my chest

Things are starting to get to a point where the pool of people I know with whom I can spend more than five minutes without getting grossly pissed off by them is growing smaller and smaller by the day; in the meantime, the block function in Adium is getting a serious workout. Unfortunately, Adium doesn't neatly organize all of my contacts who are blocked into a separate list the way Fire does. I've heard that Adium's upcoming 1.0 release is supposed to fix that though.

I've always been a stickler for classification and organization - chalk it up to being indoctrinated trained in the biological sciences. From my training and through my astute observations, I've been able to group the people in my life into various categories. Taxonomically speaking, I've used personality traits as my characters; maybe when I get around to it, I'll draw up a suitable tree.


It all comes back to you you're gonna get what you deserve/Try and test that you're bound to get served

Hence, this little running tally that I've made up in my head, in the hopes that maybe I'll learn from this little Rogue's Gallery I've assembled in my life - maybe I'll learn to avoid more people like these in the future, and keep them from getting their hooks into my life before it's too late. And so, here I present the first edition of the Ctenuchid's Personal Catalogue of Obnoxious People:

1) Arrogantus maximus - yes, dear, you have an opinion, and yes dear, you're entitled to it. But no, you're not entitled to berate and beat down people who disagree with you. And no, you're not entitled to yell and scream at me as if you seem to be right and I seem to be wrong without any regard whatsoever for what I have to say. Believe it or not, you don't know everything about everything, and while I'm sure you enjoy seeing me entertain your endless screeds with the nodding of my head...deep down inside, I'm not laughing with you, I'm laughing at you.

2) Expectus toomuchus - God knows I try to be a good person. I really do. But for some reason which I can't for the life of me ascertain and/or fathom, you seem to hold me to some insanely high standard of perfection to which I can't possibly live up to. And I think you know it. Newsflash: I make mistakes just like everyone else. Just like you. I tried to be patient with you when you did things I didn't like - I think it's only fair I be treated the same way.


3) Hypocritica doublestandardia - "This uniquely pernicious class of individual is usually characterized by a highly defensive reaction which appears to be evolutionarily optimized to deal maximum damage to individuals of the genus Ctenucha. The reason for this is unknown. The defensive reaction is known to be grossly disproportionately large compared to a stimulus which may be relatively benign in nature..."

- of course, you know I saved the best for last. What else can I say about someone who routinely twists my own words against me to mean the exact opposite of what I intended to say in the first place? And this of course, conveniently feeds your Martyrdom Complex which consistently puts you in the position of innocent victim and me in the position of vile evildoer. Go ahead, ask me another question, when you know that whatever I say, it'll be the wrong answer in your book, and I'll be in the wrong for answering it no matter what my answer is. If I give you the answer x you'll chastise me for it not being y. And when I give the answer y you'll say how I'm wrong for it because it's too much like x. Since when is friendship all about being part of an ego-stroking circle-jerk? That's more than just unfair. It's greedy and selfish.


3.1) subspecies Preferentia againstmeitia - this unique beast (the result of a potential hybridization event between the above and E. toomuchus) thinks it's perfectly fine for their friends to behave as badly as they want to, as poorly as they want to, and, yet, when presented with a hint of human imperfection from me, immediately leap down my throat telling me what an awful of horrible person I am, shoving my own mistakes down my throat like so much vomit at the dinner table. Never mind how badly their other friends have treated them. Do I get the benefit of the doubt like they do? How about a "Get Out of Jail Free" pass? Oh no. Naturally no. Of course, no.

And so gentle reader, thus endeth the lesson. Tune in next time when I update the Personal Catalogue to include university administration and faculty...

Requiem for an Entomologist

Lake Opeongo, Summer 2005

I spent a lot of time ruminating on this. I was going to type out this long philosophical post on the glories and wonder of field work, and how Mike was someone who showed me that, and gave me so much because of it. But it's all just...well. Right now it just feels so fake and plastic, and it wouldn't be fair to him.

So all I'll say is this: God bless you Mike. And thank you, for everything.


Fishgut Bay, searching for water scorpions, Summer 2005

EDIT: I apologize if I lost anyone with this post - Mike Spironello was my TA for the third year entomology course which I took late last summer in 2005. Not only did I get to go back to Harkness (see the link in the sidebar) - but I got to experience more of Algonquin Park. Really one of the high points of the year.

What always just blew me away about Mike was how he fit my ideal image of a grad student to a "T" - someone who just breezed through life in a wholly nonchalant way, and yet in the snap of a finger could look at an insect and recite on command an almost encyclopedic amount of knowledge about it. A razor sharp mind whose sense of fun and enjoyment of life was something I'd never seen before.

More information on what happened can be gleaned by going to the link in the title, and I suggest you at least take a small glance to get to know him better.

The pictures are from the Flickr page of my friend and fellow entomological colleague, Yasser Habib (Later resized on Photobucket to fit the window).

Christian Video Games!

(Crossposted to SNOG!, but I just couldn't pass up an opportunity to post it here too.)

Original story here...

Imagine: you are a foot soldier in a paramilitary group whose purpose is to remake America as a Christian theocracy, and establish its worldly vision of the dominion of Christ over all aspects of life. You are issued high-tech military weaponry, and instructed to engage the infidel on the streets of New York City. You are on a mission - both a religious mission and a military mission -- to convert or kill Catholics, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, gays, and anyone who advocates the separation of church and state - especially moderate, mainstream Christians. Your mission is "to conduct physical and spiritual warfare"; all who resist must be taken out with extreme prejudice...

...This game immerses children in present-day New York City -- 500 square blocks, stretching from Wall Street to Chinatown, Greenwich Village, the United Nations headquarters, and Harlem. The game rewards children for how effectively they role play the killing of those who resist becoming a born again Christian. The game also offers players the opportunity to switch sides and fight for the army of the AntiChrist, releasing cloven-hoofed demons who feast on conservative Christians and their panicked proselytes (who taste a lot like Christian).

Is this paramilitary mission simulator for children anything other than prejudice and bigotry using religion as an organizing tool to get people in a violent frame of mind? The dialogue includes people saying, "Praise the Lord," as they blow infidels away.

Boo-yah, time to give those goddam Catholics their just deserts! Yeah, I can't wait to load up this game and...

...oh wait...

The Blogger's Dilemma

Come out of things unsaid, shoot an apple off my head

There once was a time when the term "blog" hadn't yet entered into the lexicon of the Internet. There were sites like Diary-X, Digital Expressions, xanga, and of course, LiveJournal. You couldn't really define what these places were in as much as they weren't places you could think of in terms of broad, sweeping generalizations. Some of them were just places where people would just keep a diary of the ordinary events of their everyday lives; some mundane ("...went to the mall with such-and-such today, and saw a really nice [insert item here]"), some...not so mundane ("I found out today that I'm pregnant. How will I tell my parents?"). But regardless of the gravity of what they were saying, there was a total lacking of any general formality with these things. People just posted up whatever they felt like posting, whether it was a random rambling about a boy they met, brooding reflections about dismal romantic prospects (or the total lack thereof), or, in the words of Kurt Vonnegut, was an act of "opening up your window and making love to the world".


Confusion that never stops, the closing walls and the ticking clocks

Now of course, things are much different. People now talk about the "Blogosphere" in much the same way that people talked about the World Wide Web itself more than ten years ago: a vast network of people, directly or directly connected, all expressing disparate opinions, thoughts, feelings, words, ideas, and yet united by this common thread such that a resonating event would cascade throughout its members. The "what" of the reaction would be different, but the "how" and the "why" would be the same, regardless of who you were, were you were, or why you were there. It's commonality on an unprecedented scale.

And among it all, we now have bloggers who are professional bloggers...bloggers who are corporate shills...bloggers who need nothing but a soapbox to stand on. Amongst all of the new functions that a blog has come to fulfill, there seems to be a general black hole in the middle of it all, a black hole which I think has been growing ever since the explosion of the blogging phenomenon: what is the meaning of a blog?


Gonna come back and take you home/I could not stop, that you now know

A late night discussion with Renee reinforced a point she made in passing with a comment she left a while ago. Among all of the things I write about: science, religion, society...why don't I write about myself? As if somehow, I'd lost all of the meaning of what the spirit of a blog should be, that amongst my musings, I'd lost sight of the proper gestalt of blogging.

If you go back to my original place on LiveJournal, which I'll unabashedly say I still leave up only for the sake of accessing the blogs of Jennie, Renee, Karen, Naomi and LFyda, you'll see a lot of posts where I did focus on myself. And just what did I focus on?

1) Problems with girls
2) Problems with girls
3) Problems with girls

Now of course, the nature and context of those problems don't really matter; what does matter is that I'd almost invariably whine about what X said or did to Y. And it would get to a point where it was somewhat formulaic. I'd have an issue with someone, it would really sadden me, depress me, or otherwise, piss the hell out of me, I'd blog about it, there'd be some fallout from it, and I'd end up apologizing profusely. This routine wasn't so clear in some posts, but it was definitely explicit in others. And I couldn't stop. It was what I knew, and I didn't know it could be any other way. I needed an outlet, and my creative writing was stagnating, and it wasn't like I could call up Katherine and bitch and moan about my life to her for the umpteenth time.

Which leads me to my fundamental question, which I asked Renee herself the other night. At what point does a blog turn from a means of self-expression to a means of self-indulgence?


Singing come out upon my seas/Cursed missed opportunities

I've come to know and learn a lot about blogging in my time on the Internet. I've learned that no matter how anonymous or cryptic you think you are, there's always someone watching you who will almost invariably take offence at whatever you have to say, be it something political or something personal. And it should be self-evident, I know, but like my earlier little rant on labelling people, sometimes things are so painfully obvious that we don't know it's there until reality decides to ultimately clue us in.

I tried my hand at self-expression, and plainly speaking, I realized that self-expression all too easily leads to self-indulgence. Perhaps ranting on and on about the failings of my personal life doesn't mean much in the grand scheme of things, but it presents a bad face, of myself not only to the people I know but to the people I don't know. Better to offend someone based on an insightful and semi-intelligent view on politics, religion and society than to offend someone by making them think I'm Yet Another Emo Kid.


Am I part of the cure, or am I part of the disease?

And that's what I mean by "self-indulgence". The realization that you could all too easily turn a post asking for advice on a personal problem into an emotional and verbal Vomitorium. I don't like people who emotionally barf all over others at the slightest chance as much as the next guy (and admittedly, I realize I've been guilty of that particular sin more times than I can count), so it's only fair to expect myself to not do that. In fact, it's only fair to hold myself to a higher standard - a standard that states that there's more to me than the sum total of my depression, bitterness and loneliness, and the disappointment I have in myself. That there actually is something of value swimming around in the thick soup of grey matter in my head. Because ultimately, who really cares about that? in the greater scheme of things, I've seen that my own problems are really quite petty compared to those of others. And compared to the problems out in the world in general, they're infinitesimally insignificant.

And that ultimately may be the point. Perhaps the meaning of the blog has changed to the point where it no longer means what it was thought to mean. It has for me at least. Perhaps it signals more of a regression on my part through a renewed focus on the internalization of my problems; a harmful strategy, to be sure. But this much I know for sure: it's nothing that I know that anyone else around me can complain about. I think that having one less thing in my life to have my friends complain about counts for something, at least.

Backpedalling (Or: The Trouble with Labels)

I've come to realize lately how problematic (and yet how easy it is) to label people. And that sort of thing is something you'd think would be terribly self-evident, and yet it's something so patently obvious that you never really see or understand it even though it frequently stares you right in the face. It's embarassing that way, but doubly so because to face it means that you have to face a very unpleasant reality evident not only in other people, but in yourself as well.


When Stereotypes Attack

What better example to draw from but the Evolution/Creationism issue? Here you see labels tossed at people from both sides. "Darwinians" and "Materialists" and "Atheists" versus the "Fundies", et al. All in all, it's a lot of polemics being flung about. An awful lot of rhetoric and ego. So much so that it's easy to lose sight of the fact that at the end of the day, there actually is someone over there on the other side, an actual human being, not some sort of amorphous persona manifested on a website, or a caricaturized incarnation of evil.

In my travels in life, I've made some good friends who've held a lot of differing ideas from me whenever it came to social issues, religion, philosophy, politics, or science, and in talking to all of them I've all come to invariably realize that there's a great deal more to their attitudes and beliefs beyond what a simple label could ever convey. Like, take for example, the term "Creationist". Are all people who don't accept modern biology "Creationists"? Hardly: a lot of times, they reflect a lack of understanding or comprehension of biology, which isn't surprising - as I've said before, this stuff really is rocket science. It's not something you can easily compress into 15 minute sound bites.

But the point I'm trying to make is that not all "Creationists" are actually Creationists. Not all of them actually subscribe to the general mindset and belief system commonly associated with actual Creationists (and I'll leave it to you to decide for yourself what that mindset and belief system are). Some of them actually have...well, good intentions. Some may even be well meaning people, and it does them a tremendous disservice to slap a label on them for disagreeing with what you have to say. For some people it's well deserved, sure, but surely everyone you meet who won't agree with you can't be the evil inhumane monster that's only well represented by the minority.

"Conservative". There's another one. It's easy to correlate it with people like Fred Phelps, or Jerry Falwell or Pat Robertson, but it personally stretches my sense of credulity that all "Conservatively-minded" people could be like that. I'm sure that Conservatism, much like Liberalism, is in fact a broad spectrum of idealologies leading to a stunning array of diversity. I'm willing to bet in fact that there are more than a few "Conservatives" out there with views not that far removed from people of more left-leaning ideals.

Doing away with labels is the first step, (and by extension the most hardest and crucial step) for any kind of meaningful dialogue and resolution of conflict between both sides of any issue.

The trouble now is, how do we deal with those for whom the labels (as we have now come to define them) are well deserved?