Your friends are extensions of you.

So there is simply too much wonderful stuff to do in life, and not enough me to do it. That is why I have started internalizing the accomplishments of my friends. I have found, with two cases in particular, that on seeing the exciting accomplishments of friends, my own longing and sense of unfulfillment to do whatever they did decreases. Two examples:

I've read a bit and been curious about California Central Valley migrant labor life. My friend Ghe was looking into someway to do premed work outside the making-money-off-of-premeds industry. After a good brainstorm, he is planning to go deep into California and see how he can help. And now, strangely, I can internalize his accomplishments and feel like I don't need to do anything like that. Almost like 'it's taken care of'.

Second. I was a late bloomer to computer culture and would love to have learned to cause a little trouble and get into the deep deep underbelly of how nets work. But, even though it's never too late to do anything, I feel like it is probably awfully late. But now that I have hooked my 11 year old brother in the Philippines with a Linux laptop and lots of tutorials, I feel like I can raise hell vicariously through his own significantly less regulated exploits.

You can't do it all, unless you do it all through your friends. It is a great alternative to being jealous about their accomplishments (admit it happens) and you get a lot more done. I have to admit that there both of these examples have a trait which makes it much easier to identify with the accomplishment. In both cases I planted the seed and passed it on. I can see that it gets harder to feel a part of other's accomplishments the more indirect your influence over it. But if you are going to live a life of air ball self delusions, you may as well pick exciting ones. Why stop at friends? Imagine taking everything that happens as your fault/accomplishment. Maybe it isn't true, but it is more true than its opposite.

Stalking your parents

So I was having this dream. In it, I first ran into an old friend from the highschool I went to in the South Bay of CA, and it turned out that he was living in my neighborhood in Cambridge. The way he was avoiding my questions implied some baggage, that he knew I was around and had intentionally not contacted me, and I couldn't figure out why he wasn't being straight with me, I couldn't think of anything that I had done.

Then I ran into two other people from high school, these two twins. I was too distracted trying to remember which one was Maryan, (the one with glasses or the other one) so I didn't notice at first that something more was going on: One was asking friendly catching-up type questions: 'How is your family?', 'How is your mom?', but the other one kept shhhushing her, as if it was bad form to ask things like that. So the first one asks her 'What's the matter' and she answers in a whisper "I heard that he stalks his parents".

What does that even mean? That is the most abstract gossip you could ever fabricate about someone. I'm still pissed about it. But that's the kicker with dreams, you can only be pissed at yourself for coming up with it.

Oh, Pervy you're simply darling!

I gained something of a new insight In talking to a South Asia friend of mine recently: Musharraf isn't such a bad cookie in the grand scheme in the politics of the region.

Yes, he's served as nothing less than a dictator of one of the most politically volatile countries in the region in wearing both the uniform of head of state and chief military officer.

Ay to the fact that nuclear materials passed through his borders via the likes of AQ Khan and his associates, making the world a far more dangerous place.

Indeed, he's been ineffective in holding together a federal state fraught with all sorts of sectarian divisions. If anybody has doubts about this you're more than welcome to read Pamela Constable's pieces in the Washington Post, or better yet schedule your holidays in North-West Frontier Province or Balochistan.

Then there's the Red Mosque incident, his mishandling of the Supreme Court, and on and on.

And he's only 4 feet tall. That won't do.

Well, this pal of mine was insistent that Musharraf was at least less corrupt than the twin kleptocrats of Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif. He maintained that the country hasn't fallen prey to the sort of perennial religious revolution that existed in the subcontinent starting in the mid-19th century and leading up to the disastrous rule of Ayub Khan.

His most compelling argument was one of alternatives, though. If Musharraf doesn't survive the country's state of emergency, it is almost certain that another military cadre will assume the helm. Elections may usher in enough Bhutto cronies to make the government appear to have the vestments of civilian rule, but that's about it.

Basically the best forecasts are for a sick and twisted version of the power-sharing arrangement that exists in a place like India, where in place of Sonia you have Benazir, and in the place of Manmohan Singh you'll have some Joe Kahn that rose just sufficiently enough through the ISI or the army that he knows where to attach his epaulets.

Clearly the situation south of the Khyber Pass is not tenable in its present form, but I'm not sold that there aren't better alternatives. True, few in the West want the next Mullah Muhammad Omar to be calling the shots in Islamabad, but a one-eye tribal chieftain who's not hellbent on suicide bombings isn't all bad either.

In fact, I suggest that a presidential exploratory committee be launched for Imran Sharif, a 90 year-old baker, specializing in unleavened bread, from Nok Kundi. He's pleasant, wise, and would at the worst be accused of negligence when gun-running jihadists reigned over the countryside. Hell, when bombs started raining down on Bombay he could honestly say he was sorry. And his state dinners would serve actual comfort food, and not the chez crap that made Bush the First vomit.

Perhaps not. It is a tragedy when somebody like Musharraf represents the last, best hope for your country.

Why to not do bad things

Being nontheistic and awfully relativistic used to cause me to jump through all kinds of hoops to justify moral behavior. I have only casually come across an approach that, for me, skirts these issues nicely:
I've found that when I do things that I think are wrong I cause damage to myself, and that this damage is enough of a reason to stop such behavior (or reevaluate the violated moral).

By paying attention to my thought patterns (What are the things that you are thinking about when you don't realize that you are thinking? Where does you mind wander after this or that happens that you didn't realize it wandered?) has brought a striking idea to mind. I won't call it a hypothesis, because I know it works for me, the question is can it help you?

I'll start with an example: I bike recklessly. If you drive, I am one of those people you can't stand. I noticed that often, after running a light, I would, without thinking about it, start running through my head the imaginary conversation I would have with the cop who will one day, eventually, pull me over. I noticed that this coversation was little more than me weakly justifying the action to myself, and I was, in a sense, lying to myself. I recognized this as a form of damage that I was inflicting and that there were only two things I could do to stop the damage:
I could stop breaking the law.
I could stop accepting that its wrong to break the law.

The second sounds absurd, and in this case I don't feel that it was appropriate, but there are cases where it is more sensible. For example, people who are fat and depressed about it have only two things they can do to stop damaging themselves in this way:
Lose weight.
Stop thinking they should lose weight.

This isn't the full story, and I'm still experimenting and paying attention (and running lights and damaging myself and learning). But even in this state, it is useful perspective in my day-to-day self monitoring.

Here is a sketch of the process. When you do something that you think is bad (so, you see, I'm not talking about morality so much as social training) you enter self-critical thought patterns. These patterns are healthy if they lead to changes in behavior or policy (what you think is wrong). But if they don't lead to either, then constantly rehearsing these patterns strengthens them and ultimately affects mood and physical health. I've observed this. So: by doing things that you've agreed are bad, you are damaging yourself.

I'm not really a fan of the current gametheory/evolution/economics thinking that all cooperation and altruism is selfish, and this only incidentally fits in with that. Much of it comes from experience with Vipassana thought and meditation.

Is it true

I've found that if I'm not happy, and I smile, I become happier. I feel it. If I'm grumbly and I catch myself, I will force a smile that will settle into a genuine one. Of course, experiments on onesself, and on one's moods, are sketchy, but I suspect its true that:
1: You can control your mood and, by extension.
2: You can choose to always be happy (try to convince me that that is a bad thing).

So; turn away from the internet for just a second. Concentrate and determine your current mood. Then smile and see if you feel any difference. Try forcing it, even for a few minutes. If you stifle a giggle at any point, even if that giggle is "Man, I must look ridiculous", than I submit that it worked.

So why not?

Kerik subject to the Peter Principle

Regarding Giuliani's associate's trouble in the NYTimes article "A Defiant Kerik Vows to Battle U.S. Indictment", I thought of the Peter Principle:
"In a hierarchy every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence."

According to the article, the highest he got in his career was being nominated for Dept of Homeland Security. It was then that his undocumented nanny got discovered, which in turn led to all the other dirt getting dug up. I've never seen such a clear illustration of the principle.

Ink Blot

Pestilence has hit the shores of our fair land galloping only slightly faster than War. He brings with him not the usual assortment of genital warts, feline leukemia, and African Trypanosomiasis, but rather a wondrous new disease perfect for a daytime television audience: the staph infection.

While high schools are spraying down their locker rooms, gym rats are being told to let up on their mixed martial arts. At its worst the disease could kill off rafts of people, and at its best it will leave cable news outlets grasping for the next superpandemic to stir up a viewing audience.

But I'm convinced that if you can come away with tattoos like this, not only will Staphylococcus aureus become the next big thing, it will be controlled and commodified at your nearest storefront grunge parlor--indentifiable by strong death metal symbolism.

I have envisioned this all throughout the day after viewing the above images and others, including this one and even this one (the latter is part of a wonderful catalog put together by the Centers for Disease Controld) that would make your neighborhood inker weep.

There is clearly room for the symptoms of disease in art, or body modification if you will. Syphilis never took off in part because it made you deaf (OK, Beethoven, we know it was lead poisoning, but I'm not so sure about this bacterium before us. I have high hopes that finally a new pox will knock off henna from the hallow steps of body beautification.

Heil Nation von Alligatoren!

The bellicism of the University of Florida is becoming something of a slight concern for me. Orange and blue regalia are nothing new in the 352, but the ubiquity of this color, and any alligator-related iconography, brings to the fore scenes from Triumph of the Will or perhaps Victory of Faith. Neither Bernie Machen or Urban Meyer can assume the mantle of Die Fuhrer, now matter how many good ol' boys show up to UF football games.

Today I had the misfortune of walking by a stadium while the Christians have been eaten (in this case the Vanderbilt University football team) and seeing how this indoctrination takes place firsthand. Young children seem to be taught the various gesticulations necessary to be a true Gator before they've even acquired basic motor skills. The disabled appear to be wrapped in blue and orange adornments despite their garbled protestations. Even the elderly accompany their progeniture clad in Mardi Gras beads and war paint because they understand full well that their sons and daughters will place them in a nursing home otherwise.

I have researched the matter and discovered that though this phenomena is not exclusive to the South, that they are exacerbated by the isolation of Gainesville, and places like it, from larger urban populations, and decided ability to find nothing meaningful in life than a game of excess.

There is no more serious a time for the dispensation of energies than at this moment, what with war, global warming, and staph infection conspiring to bring us crashing through our Victorian porches to the shifting sands below. Yet the Gator Nation is more concerned with whether Tim Tebow will throw an interception, or whether one's peroxide blonde hair should be tied with a blue bow or an orange bow.

I fear that I will be forced to meld my mind to the color saturation and mascot omnipresence of the community at some point in my life. I mean after all, how did millions of Germans fall in line with Hitler and his timeless message if not because of constant exposure? One can only trust one's will to triumph.