my mind has come full circle in an attempt to think of a title so i must leave you with this, a lame excuse for a joke.

what am i supposed to do? you know, most people who look at things like this are either just lying when they say that they like it, or they're comparing it to hundreds of other things they've seen and therefore not really looking at the thing itself. art has to be accessible in *some* way. most would sneer at that statement, and my response to that sneer is, if it is not accessible, what am i supposed to do? you can have as much intent and emotion as you want when you're *making* something, but if you don't communicate to me what it is that you're feeling or saying, then you haven't really made art, you've made tissues. if you look at a used tissue, you can't tell what it is that the person was feeling when they cried into it. its just refuse. and you can make up perhaps what they were trying to say, but you could just as easily do that with any object in the universe. i guess that's not true. i guess the difference is that you know that the creator was trying to say something, as opposed to what the creator of say, a stop sign was trying to say. i think that's the reason that nature is, and always will be, more impressive to me than art. art is the spillover of someone's mind, or better yet, the mind itself. nature is not. nature does not seek to express a single thought or even a group of thoughts. it does not have a purpose. it was an accident. i guess that's the point of some kinds of art--to try to make something that didn't come out of your brain but that just happened. however, most art is just trying to express what it is that is going on in the artist's mind. and i don't think i'm interested in that unless it is expressed to me in a way that changes my point of view.

what is fair?

If everyone had the same opportunities and abilities, that would be fair. I don’t think that either ideal Capitalism or ideal Communism are the perfect fair world. I think that a fair world is one in which everyone is born with enough to be happy, and can get to a higher place without exploiting anyone along the way, but not too high. I think that a fair world would be one without inheritance, one where everyone starts in the same place and is given the same level of options.
In a fair world, no one could tell anything about you from looking at you except for what you had decided to make of yourself. In a fair world, everyone would be self-made. We would make everything ourselves or voluntarily for each other. There would be no need for charity, but we would give each other things out of natural generosity, not an attempt to be quote-unquote “virtuous”.
We would all naturally look basically the same, but we could alter our appearances however we wanted, and people would consider other people’s physical appearance the way they consider art in a museum; carefully, knowing that everything they see had been arranged to invoke thoughts and emotions in the viewer.
When I say that we would look the same, I do not mean that we would have the same features or skin or anything like that. People would look just as varied as they do now. But the difference would be that the body and face would be seen as a blank slate, not a collection of classifying traits that came with social baggage. I mean this in terms of gender as well as race.
People would travel all the time. We would not have this notion of “work” as a pointless task whose only purpose is to get money from an employer. Instead, our lives would function as a sort of tangible version of the Hindu and Buddhist idea of Karma, as I understand it. We would do something that helped another person, or moved foreword our human culture in some way, and, sooner or later, we would get something in return. No one would have one set employment. We would drift, volunteering to help whoever was nearby with whatever they were doing. For example, no one would stay on a farm for an entire lifetime. When you saw a farm, if you had nothing else to do, you would go and work there for a few hours, or maybe a few days, just to help. Maybe you would take some food with you.
Volunteerism and giving would be the rule. You help and work not because you are expecting to be compensated, but because you know the vibrations will come back to you sooner or later.
Our society would be much less clannish. We would be less attached to our families. Relationships needn’t go in stages; when you meet someone, you can talk to them just like you would talk to someone you had known your whole life. The main problem, I think, with our attitude towards others now is that we have a kind of “everyone is out to get me, better huddle close with the ones I’m not afraid of” attitude.
I said before that we would travel. This is true. We would be acquainted with many different cultures, not just our own. Cultures needn’t all be the same, but they needn’t be so segregated, either. If there were an element of some culture that we liked, we could adopt it. This would be the main advantage of a greater mixing of peoples.
The other reason that I say we would be less familial is that in a society where one associates with one’s parents, one is born with privilege, power, and an idea of where one is among the social hierarchy. In a world with no social hierarchy, one sees no reason to stay with one’s “own people”. If everyone is equal (different, but equal), then there is no reason not to be friends with everyone. People would not be afraid of each other as they are now.
The two main reasons that people are afraid of each other are this: we are afraid of what is different, and we rightfully know that there are dangerous people out there. Neither of these problems would exist.
People would not be afraid of differences for the reasons I have explained above; mixing of cultures, travel, an understanding that humans are different but equal, equality at birth, a looser familial structure, etc.
Also, there would be no need to be afraid of each other. Everyone in this world is born, like I said in the beginning, with equal opportunities and abilities. If we have equal opportunities and abilities, right off the bat there would be fewer people who hurt others and commit crimes, because they don’t need to. The other thing is that everyone would be intensely aware of that sort of manifest Karma that I mentioned above. We wouldn’t hurt each other because we would know that it was pointless; the bad vibrations would just bounce right back.

i have decided that the way to tell if someone has lost all of their childish funness is if they no longer are able to speak in gibberish. or if they are, but it's the common type of gibberish that is basically words, like "shabadabadadoodoodeeedeelalalfoofaa." it really bugs me when people call that gibberish, because it isn't.

when i was really little, i used to bang on the keyboard like sdklfsdfisdfksdfsdf49ewicnm,vnsa and print out whole pages of it and my dad read it to me. that was fun.

please read

this

parsley teardrops

what is it about human beings that looks at a pile of snow or sand or dirt or rocks or legos and decides to build something? we have this endless creative obsession--which is not to say that all of us are artistic, only that we want to create. we are endlessly prolific and we are never satisfied. and, to top this, everything we create creates problems that require us to create more stuff. in the myth of prometheus, epimethius gives all of the physical strengths to the rest of the animal kingdom. prometheus looks in the jar of good traits, and there is nothing left. so, prometheus gives the homosapiens this...thing. it's difficult to describe. i suppose it could be called curiosity. not pandora-type curiosity, but philosopher-type curiosity. have you ever seen the sculptures of early man at the natural history museum? we are so naked, so soft and vulnerable. we have no armor. we just have pointy sticks. but even in this, we are ahead.
there is another element as well, and this is the selfish one. human beings are selfish. there is no way to get around this. we may be idealists, but even the most hardcore communist is a little bit greedy. humans are naturally capitalists. we want to build stuff, get stuff, take stuff, get ahead, win, be the the alpha male, etc. this is why communism never works on a grand scale. people may agree with it theoretically, but instinctively they want to win.
this is why patriarchy won. from my small amount of knowledge of these things, matriarchy is a family-style society; everyone works for the greater good of the people. patriarchy is the opposite; if you can enslave people to build a really big house for you after you're dead, go ahead. good for you.
this is why i think that we still have problems. while our curious side is intrigued by the puzzle of human suffering and our matriarchal side wants to help, we don't want to give things up. we think that the idea of living significantly less luxurious lives for the good of abstract ideas or people we don't know is stupid. and i am not condemning us for that, i am simply stating that this attitude causes problems.

or perhaps this is just how we feel in america.