[ Note: Gonna be gone from June 2 to June 9. ]

[ Please note that this post contains a very frank sexual discussion. ]

I discovered this article the other day on Tomato Nation and I'm just as pissed as the author, I think.

Basically, that article talks about something the author saw on television about some kinds of parties that young teenagers attend where they girls are required to perform oral sex on the boys. The author is upset because the girls get nothing in return, and they are labelled sluts, whereas the guys gain status and a blowjob. It really pisses me off. What the crap kind of guys are these, anyway?

I'm pissed off for a few reasons: a) the double standard between the boys and the girls, b) the way the guys are such pricks about the whole thing, and c) the current attitude towards cunnilingus, both from male and female perspective.

First, however, I need to point something out in case you didn't read the article. (Please do, though: I'm only offering perspective on it, and it's tough to understand all of what I'm talking about without having read it.) The teens who are playing this "game" are young. Very young. Like, 14 years old. That's a little disturbing to me. What fourteen year old has the sense to be engaging in something so intimate? It just blows my mind (no pun intended). I think a part of this is the fact that parents are so reluctant to allow frank sexual education in the schools: they think that if they don't learn in school, they just won't know, they won't be curious, and, not knowing about the forbidden, they won't have the temptation to engage in it. That's a load of BS in my opinion: they're still gonna learn, and they're still gonna be really freakin' horny. Remember when you were 14? So, not knowing the consequences, they're just gonna do all sorts of stuff. Foolish, foolish, foolish.

But that's not the point of my rant. The prominent attitude in America is that it is okay for males to be very sexually active, but it's not okay for females. They're called sluts. (I don't think there's even a word for a male who engages in too much sexual activity, let alone one that's popularly in use.) What's the deal with that? Why on earth should females who engage in sexual activity be frowned upon, whereas the guys who do it are "studs" or whatever you want to call them. Sexuality is one of the benefits of being human that we should all be able to enjoy. If we like to have a lot of partners, great! Go for it! But why should it matter if we're male or female? We're human. We all have genitalia. We all get horny. We all like to engage in sexual activity. Why on earth should it be okay for one gender and not the other? Especially considering the fact that homosexuality is also frowned upon in this culture! It's a self-contradiction! Men can be sexual, but women can't. At the same time, men can only be sexual with women. Grow up. And in addition to this, the guys think that it's normal for them to always be on the receiving end of the pleasure. What's that all about?? Women should give and not receive, and then be punished for it????? C'mon!!!! I'm a guy, I love sexual activity, but if I'm going to be receiving, you had better believe that I'm going to be reciprocating! The world ain't fair, but this sure should be.

This leads into the last part of my rant. In our culture, fellatio is not only acceptable, but it's considered normal and it's encouraged to some degree. Cunnilingus, on the other hand, is frowned upon and considered gross or dirty or something absurd like that. And what is even more absurd is that it's not just men saying that, it's women, too. Women who obviously are not comfortable with their sexuality, and really need to get over their hangups if they want to have a healthy sexual relationship with someone. If they can't, then leave the sex out and just have fun talking or going to parks or something else fun. Part of the problem is the fact that this stigma exists, which keeps few people from trying it. This means that relatively few people know how great it actually is. Hey guys: cunnilingus is fun. As. Hell. And hey girls: most girls go absolutely insane with it. I don't know many girls who actually enjoy fellatio. But of the guys who have tried cunnilingus, I don't know many who don't enjoy it. This stigmatic wall against it really needs to be broken down: girls need to realize that they are not gross--personally, if she has good hygiene, I rather enjoy the taste--and guys need to realize that it is a lot of fun, and that you will drive her absolutely crazy. So have fun.

To summarize: men and women should not have different standards of acceptable sexuality, guys should not be pricks about only receiving and never giving, and cunnilingus is good fun.

I have finished.

(For now.)

So today at Blowing Rock was just awesome. My friend and I were able to go up there and just hang out and have fun. A totally random trip that we decided on at 11:00 the night before: the best kind. The person I was with was an ideal person for a random daytrip like this, too: she and I agree on next to nothing, but nevertheless, we're able to have great discussions on every topic, in addition to being able to talk about just silly, random, not-so-very-weighty topics too. (On top of which, she's damn cute ;-)). She's really quite awesome and I love her lots! Hee hee! Sucks, though, 'cuz she's working at some camp this summer, and I gotta work at Elon M-F 8-5, and all of my other friends are out of town, so this is gonna be one lonely summer. At least I've got a lot of projects to work on. Blah. Don't know why I'm putting this on my blog; who cares about my personal life. Well, it's my blog and I can do with it what I want, so pthbpthbpthbpthb.

Well fantastic. Just got back from Blowing Rock a few hours ago, and it was quite a fantastic day! We brought our journals with us, and I noticed an interesting comment that I had made in mine in October of 2000: "Truth is the entropic evaluation of reality; imagination is order."

What if it's true? What if imagination is where order comes from, and reality produces only entropy? We know the latter; what of the former? Is imagination a subset of reality? Does it share its properties? Which is stronger: entropy or order? Will reality one day cease and imagination is what is left? Maybe that's what death is. Bunches of questions I don't have an answer to.

Whoo hoo! Tomorrow I'm going up to Blowing Rock with a friend of mine, just 'cuz. Yay for random day trips out of the blue, one day before a real vacation. I can dig it. :-)

At first this sounds just plain bizarre. It's a fascinating new genre of electronic music, dubbed "lowercase", and it's basically just digitally morphed samples of everday sounds, such as "a bubbling symphony of boiling tea kettles, the gentle hiss of blank tapes being played through a stereo and the soft bumps of helium balloons hitting the ceiling." I was skeptical at first, but I gave it a thorough listen with headphones and my eyes closed. It's definitely not Aphex Twin, but I admit that I'm hooked. This stuff is just plain brilliant.

Alright, I generally don't like to refer to other people's research, but this is just too fantastic not to share. The Skeptic's Annotated Bible--which is also available offline in Windows Help format, just scroll down to SAB.exe--is a fantastic resource that is full of information that supports my personal belief that the Bible is nothing more than historical fiction.

This is just as random as it seems, but if you haven't "read" Maze, you are really missing out. It's not like a conventional maze, it's an intellectual maze. You still have to find your way in and out of an unnecessarily complicated labyrinthine structure, but you find your way not by spatial guesses, but by connecting intellectual and intuitive clues that you find in the various rooms you wander through. I _highly_ recommend it.

Here's a corollary theory to go along with my last post: the complexity necessary to understand any system is greater than the complexity of the system being studied. Therefore, we will never be able to know everything about the universe, because, as subsets of the universe, we are exactly as complex as, or simpler than, the universe.

Alright, now here's an idea: given a perfect understanding of the nature of the universe, and a knowledge of the exact properties of one of the fundamental components of the universe at any given time, we know absolutely everything.

I claim that the perfect understanding of the nature of the universe and a knowledge of the exact properties of one of the fundamental components of the universe gives us a knowledge of that component's immediate neighbors, which, in turn, gives us all of its neighbors neighbors, and so on, until we know about every single component in the universe at that point in time; call this the State of the universe. And I believe that everything that happens is a result of what happened before it, so our perfect understanding of the nature of the universe, of course, includes the rules--the algorithm, if you will. Therefore, we can put the State through the algorithm, and get everything that happens in the future. I also claim that the algorithm can be changed to give us what happened in the prior moment, and thus, we can get everything in the past.

And note that this includes life. Human life, too. Yep, I'm claiming that if this is true, there's no such thing as free will.

Whaddaya think of them apples?

Mmm.... Panera Bread Co.'s chocolate chip bagels are to die for. If you've got one near you, get off your computer right this minute and go get some. That is all.

I'm really becoming exasperated with everyone being so obsessed with making sure people feel as guilty as possible about September 11. It's over. It happened. Now just deal with it, and make whatever changes you think you have to make for the future. People have learned their lessons. NOTHING is to be gained by going back and pointing fingers at people who supposedly knew about the terrorists ahead of time. So just give it up, and look towards the future instead.

What does it mean to exist?

To exist, one must have some substantial meaning in the greater scheme of the universe. I claim that no human being exists. We are all just biological entities roaming our tiny, insignificant planet, accomplishing nothing that really matters to anyone but us. We have no souls, we have no effect elsewhere in the universe. We just don't matter: we exist no more than the asphalt on I-40 exists.

Oh, man... Arafat's got his own potato chip now. I think that I'm gonna make Mathematichips in honor of my personal hero, Math. Yummm..... Tastes like pi! ::ducks for cover::

Hmm... So yeah, I'm really quite a pessimistic person, but I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing. I mean, think about it: as an optimist, everything turns out as good as or worse than you expected. You can't win. Pessimists, however, have it made: everything always turns out as good as or better than they expect.

Then again, if I had a choice, I'd be a realist.

I think I'm really a rather horrible person. I must be. I've alienated every single best friend I've ever had, and I continue to do so. What is it between people that kills what was once there? I've never quite understood that. Really, to begin with, what is it that brings people together in the first place. Sure, some claim that it's common ground of some sort, but why care? Why do we have the need to interact with other people? I don't see any reason for it, except, of course, for reproduction. What would we lose if we all went our own separate ways and interacted with one another as little as possible. Personally, the idea doesn't appeal to me at all, but that's because I'm used to social interaction and I've grown to enjoy it. But if we all started off separate, and came together for the sole purpose of reproducing, what would we lose? I think a lot, but nothing that matters. We'd lose a lot of the intellectual achievements that mankind has made. We'd lose a lot of the cultural and artistic achievements. But what do they really matter in the long run? Wouldn't we, as individuals, be quite content? We wouldn't know what it was like otherwise, so we wouldn't be missing anything, and I think that we could still function just fine. I even think that there would be some sort of a fear of interacting with other people. I dunno.

This is supposed to be a personal web journal, right? So I'm gonna put something a little more personal and a little less philosophical. This is just plain hilarious. Enjoy.

Is there any meaning to life? Is there anything more than just a bunch of biological entities running around superficially interacting with one another, even though they think they're being deep and meaningful. I don't think so. There's no such thing as soul. There is no God. There are just gods. Man invented God because the idea that we are alone is entirely too terrifying: we needed something to keep us company. Theists argue that there must be a God because most cultures on earth, even those who developed seperately from one another, have the concept of God somewhere in their culture, and usually it's front-and-center. But I claim that's simply because they're all human and they all feel a need to find something to fill the emptiness. Because there is no God, there is no spirituality, no soul, no afterlife, and therefore, nothing is universal, not even morality.

So what of the concept of sin? Is it right to go against one's self? If I believe that it is wrong to kill someone, and I do, am I committing a sin? What if John Doe believes that it is right for him to kill a particular person, and he does so, is he committing a sin? Well, I guess it all comes down to what a sin really is. Most people think that it's a transgression against God. I think it's a transgression against one's self. Therefore, anything that one does that is concordance with their own beliefs, is not a sin. However, society has rules, and if one wishes to exist in society, one must obey those rules. Therefore, one can simultaneously commit a sin and be an upstanding citizen for it, _or_, one can be true to themselves and be locked in prison forever.

This raises the question: what is more important, to follow one's own beliefs, or to follow the rules of society. I believe that it is more _important_ to follow one's own beliefs, but that despite that, it is _necessary_ to suspend those beliefs in order to follow the rules of society. If one truly wishes to follow their beliefs without the confines of society, then they should detach themselves from society: it's a simple issue of priorities. I wish to exist in society, so I follow the rules before I follow my heart.

I contend that both hope and prayer are futile, especially prayer. The purpose of praying is either to convince a divine entity to enact some sort of change, either in the world or within one's self. (I'm not taking into account prayers of gratitude, because they have no particular aim.) Consider the idea that there is such a thing as free will. The only way that God can interact with the world is either through making changes that do not comply with conventional physics--we call these miracles--or by changing someone's mindset. If the prayer seeks the former, then God must be changing the environment, and, because, as organic beings, we react to external stimuli, God is thereby indirectly enacting the latter, which is effectively manipulation of us. This is in direct contradiction to free will, which implicitly mandates that all of our actions are determined by internal motivation: if God is manipulating us, then our actions are determined by external motivations. Therefore, if there exists free will, then prayer cannot have any effect. If free will does not exist, then none of our efforts towards any goal are of any consequence anyway, let alone something as subtle as prayer. Hope is futile as well because hope is, in its raw essence, undirected prayer. Give it up, there's no hope.