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.

i haven't written a post this long in a while.

i was researching freeganism recently, because i find it interesting. so, i read the "why freegan?" page. and it said this:

Working Sucks - Where does the money you spend come from? You or your folks working long hours at a dehumanizing job, most likely. You don’t have to compromise yourself and your humanity to the evil demon of wage-slavery! Working sucks and if a little scavenging can keep you from needing a job than go jump in a dumpster! Even if you do need to work to pay your bills, think about how much less you would have to work if you didn’t have to buy food.

true, this does look a little too fanatical to take seriously. but i take everything seriously, so here is what i thought:
in a world where no one worked and everyone scavenged, pretty soon everything would run out. then, people would need to grow and make their own things, which is work in itself. this is originally what work was. however, as humanity got more and more complicated, all kinds of services began to be needed. thus, gradually, "work" became separate from taking care of oneself. actually, for most of history, people had to do both. no, let me rephrase that: men had to do one thing, women had to do the other. men would grow/buy food, make money, etc. women would cook the food, make the clothes, etc. however, quite recently, women (at least in some parts of the world) rejected this role and began to work as well. so now (in developed countries), everyone works. the cooking and clothes-making, and even some of the cleaning and childcare, is done by someone else as their work. everyone does one thing and one thing only. what if everyone, instead of "working" in the way that men used to, would "work" in the way women used to? actually, thinking about it, this is not possible. basic things like crops, cotton, etc. have to come from people working.
but what about recycling? what if we actually don't need that stuff, because we have so much junk lying around already that we could just use that? that still leaves food, though. although it is possible to do as the freegans do and eat recycled food, it wouldn't last for very long. thus, we would need farmers.
but, is it human to become more and more extravagant? to, gradually, think that we require all of these services and luxuries and advances? and i suppose, on a certain level, we do. we are weak. we cannot live just for ourselves--we must huddle together and move forwardforwardforward------->.
so this is my answer to the above paragraph by the freegans: work is human. the only negative work is that which undermines or does not progress society.

"i can't understand why people are frightened of new ideas. i'm frightened of the old ones."

the point of avant-garde art is almost always to challenge the idea of what it is (eg. is this a sculpture? is this a play? is this a song?). in other words, the point of it is to get people to ask, "is this art?"
so, people always doubt that avant-garde art is, in fact, art. but i think that the question is more, "is mainstream art art?" because, like, those paintings from the 18th century of lords and ladies who have paid the artist to make them look good, they're not really art. they're more a service. isn't the point of art to expand the viewer's consciousness?
therefore, if art follows all of the popular conventions of its medium of the day, but its only purpose is to entertain or to gain popularity for the artist, is it really art?