Saintly

One of my favorite scientists, Carl Sagan, and his wife Ann Druyan talk about an experiment done with Macaque monkeys that is very similar to the experiment Sutherland told us about.


Instead of offering money, the monkeys were offered a reward of food if they shocked a fellow Macaque monkey. About 87% of the Macaques refused, even when they had been starved of all other food for up to two weeks. This tells us...


"The argument that humans have some monopoly on ethical behavior, and all these other animals are just beasts and beneath contempt, is clearly human conceit. It's wrong. And how many other of the proported distinctions of humans are also wrong when we take a close look at how animals behave?"


So, we can eliminate the argument that a reward of money reduces us to "primal, brutish behavior," because clearly animals which we consider to be less ethical than ourselves have in fact, a better sense of what's moral.


I can't stand PETA, but I am very pro-animal rights. There is much we can do for this world by reducing the consumption and testing of animals.


Carl Sagan wanted for his Cosmos to help people understand the universe... The infinite potential of the human race, and its' gift of supreme intelligence. It is pretty black and white, our options. We can destroy ourselves or discover ourselves.


As said in the videos about Milgram's Authority experiment, violence is not some detached force, it's something that may very well become something we believe we can justify.


But violence, as I know, and as I hope everyone knows, is never justifiable. The thousands of nuclear weapons-a tiny fraction of which could bury or destroy the earth, are perhaps the most depressing evidence of human conceit, of the childish wish for dominance.

16th

22/2 is my birthday, every year. This year it was sunny. In the morning, Erin brought me teacakes when she dropped me off at school, which were delicious. I forgot most of my weekend homework on my bed. Somehow I was convinced to take the day off after lunch, and so I went home. I sat on the porch for 45 minutes until my dad came out and asked me why I was here and if I was skipping. I said I didn't know what I was doing, as usual. He returned and locked the door behind him.

It was a monday, and every monday I go to my therapist and we get sushi trays from the supermarket afterwards. This monday was no different, it was unremarkable. I didn't speak much. My sister gave me a CD, Vampire Weekend's Contra (which I recommend) and I spent the night listening.

Initially I think I might've wanted to have a party, but then I decided not to, kind of like last year. I think I stopped having the energy for it.

This is pretty boring!


This week I discovered Symphony of Science which I really liked. If you have free time and you like science, please check it out. It uses the great words of incredible minds in science to create a lovely music experience.

I'd kind of like to enjoy this week but I guess I'm just doomed to begrudgingly tolerate it. I had a fever this morning... I wonder if I'm becoming sick again. I hope not because as much as I begrudgingly tolerate school I don't want to miss it. Being in my house has been kind of awkward lately.

These past few days have been one big clusterfuck of depressive anxiety and I'm not sure when it will end, but I hope soon.

It's been a long time since I've struggled so hard to write as much as I did. This is one of my less interesting posts. Maybe I'll write another later.

a final draft

This is late! So late! I am to blame and accept the consequences.
I'm not sure if this meets the word requirement. The computer isn't letting me check. Well, I am satisfied with it anyway.

This topic is one I've mulled over, and rewritten several times without pleasing myself. But since it is something I think I know a lot about, at least in relation to myself, I'm going to write about it. Here goes...


A Crisis of Faith

In my life, there is a whirlpool of conflicting ideals. Faith is one, an especially interesting one because it gets less and less relevant as I age.

For most of my childhood, my parents were semi-active catholics. We attended church occasionally, and I was told to pray for my mother in her illness and to thank their god for my well being. The god figure was always hazy, I never really felt a strong connection to the rituals or the figures. The stories were archaic, even ancient, and the characters bland.

So I guess it was because I couldn't relate to the stories, characters, and vague ideals that first led me to question what my family believed in. I don't remember quite when-before I was in third grade, after I left Europe. What had mattered to me then? Why did a gullible child like myself refuse to believe in the "time-tested" faith of her ancestors?

Faith didn't make sense for the same reason my life didn't make sense. I was told this god loved all his creations, even the "misguided" unfaithful like myself. I could only ever see this god as power hungry, however-one who considered himself above mankind, yet allowed mankind to make the myriad of mistakes that it did (and most especially, does.) So when I was told to pray, it was more like begging, kneeling before what gave me life and would most certainly take it away, hopefully in exchange for eternal peace.

Eternal peace, heaven, and her sister hell never made sense. Heaven was no sort of comfort with hell being around, and nobody to tell you if you were right or wrong. Where was heaven for the lingering ghosts my sisters and I saw in the night? Why did an equal and almighty being like this god become selective when it came to accepting his daughters and sons?

If everyone had god in them, if everyone could listen to god's voice guiding them, then why wasn't everyone Catholic? It was this early train of thought that led me to question what people told me was the truth. Those mundane hours spent in church doing nothing and preferring to mock the people who called themselves messengers of god was perhaps well-spent. I can never shake that god never was and never will be, not after the gifts of knowledge science and logic has given me. And this awe-inspiring science has been with me since that early childhood, the days spent with my microscope and the infinitely inconceivable theory of molecules, atoms, cells, the cosmos, and so much more that I found in my father's books.

Was it my mother's illness that inspired my skepticism? Was it sincerely the words of the scientists in the documentaries I cherished? It's hard for me to tell, but I think it's both. I don't doubt that it's a perfectly normal, even preferable to believe in god. What really baffles me is why people use religions like this, based on love and tolerance, to justify the persecution of so many.

I couldn't possibly associate myself with a religion of such power. It's not my place to act like their god is within me, and that I owe my good decisions to him and my bad decisions to myself. I am who I make myself, and it's never going to be who that god seems to say I am (through the imperfect voices of other humans who are presumably below him.)

a voice

Let me talk about something that I do know, or perhaps don't know.
Let me talk about something that most people agree would be impossible for me to know, since I haven't experienced it.


That something is age, and not numbers, but the fickle and undefined "boundaries" we draw as fractions of a lifetime. I consider them meaningless... I see no difference in person between myself now and myself as a "child," we are the same, I will always be the same. Many adults have shrugged this attitude off as immature, though not blaming me for it (since I am inexperienced with life) and not attempting to define it the way it's "supposed" to be defined.

When does one cease to be a child? When does one begin adulthood? Different cultures see these things differently. In our culture, we even embrace the in-between time, adolescence, as being neither adult nor child. (Which, in my opinion, is quite stupid considering we expect our adolescents to carry large responsibilities and make great decisions, yet forbid them from joining adults until they've reached the landmark of 18 years.)

As we know, if you treat someone like something and tell them that they are that something, they become that something. This effect was seen in the genocides we read about, as well as a study conducted on young students. If people treat you badly, you become as bad as they believe you to be.

And is this a bad thing? Certainly not. It is our job to fit in, to pay the same taxes and to slide into a functioning part of society. If everyone was treated well from start to finish, they would do none but admirable things, correct? I'm not sure, since it's impossible to avoid people and things that we consider to be destructive. Impossible, even for the richest and most privileged child.

Not that most or all of us are doomed to malevolence, just that some, the unlucky, feel that being so is the best choice. The easiest choice, or the most fun. It is a matter of opinion, also a matter of treatment. Do we chose to do bad things? Are we left without a choice? Do we believe we can get away with them, or do we simply believe that any punishment would be worth it? Or do we feel the natural and absurdly strong tug of revenge..? Who, indeed, is to refuse that which plagues him even in idle thought?

I don't mean to get into a lengthy, philosophical rant. I'm not capable of proving bad and good, strong and weak, young and old, and so I'll just talk about myself as usual.

The point of me saying this, as roundabout as I am, is that nobody can prove to me that I've been a child, I am a teenager, I will be an adult, and then a senior, etc. I will not speak about my childhood as a separate page. It is all on one page, as far as I'm concerned. I will take none of this childhood bullshit. As mature or immature as I am, I will never shake this mentality.

The same questions I had as a child still pool in my conscience, only I have answered some of them. I have strengthened the meaning of my years as I add on more years, and that is all... That is about all I can say about that, the way my childhood lives in me, the way my future mind will look to my present mind for important questions and answers.

I've been told by one that I come across as always thinking I am right. I do not think so about myself, and it is hard to believe that I come across as that willful and haughty. But one thing I can be sure about is my mind. Nobody can tell me otherwise or convince me otherwise about my mind...

hope; a fruitless endeavor

In my entire life, I cannot think of a time where hope has satisfied me. I've never reduced myself to hope with the reward of a favorable conclusion. What does hope mean to you?

Many people have told me that hope is as important as faith, as important as love. But, I find that hope is a sort of catalyst for disappointment, rarely such a catalyst for blessing.

We take these time-rounded words, faith and love, and give them simple definitions. But I couldn't define them for you. I can't use the word love without feeling the bite of dishonesty in the back of my head, and faith suffers similarly.

Faith and love, to me, are delusions, perhaps more real than hope. Love is probably the strongest. From love can bloom all kinds of faith and hope, or perhaps love is the fulfillment of faith and hope. Certainly the terms tie together.

But I've had enough of contemplating the meaning of the three, or perhaps meanings. The more I talk about them, the less they mean. For who can correctly describe a meaning? A general wish like hope? We can hope and love anything and everything. We can call them whatever we like, and yet not really call them at all.

From the dull glow of the morning moon came hope, a deep and triumphant wave of passion lifting me from behind; with the deity-like skyscraper-clouds and the pounding of the strengthening sun came hope for the best. I have hope for spring, and the following summer, when people's moods will lift like the petals of annual flora.

Lately, my dad's girlfriend has been capturing me mid-stride to drive me the rest of the way to school. It's a pleasant surprise, an unlikely and welcome disturbance of my daily trek from Grand St. to Alameda High. We are similar, or she is agreeable. I appreciate her sacrifice, and, as for my father, his decision. I know I've probably talked about my resentment for this coupling before, but, as it is, I have hope. Hope for fate, a saccharine delusion.

moth

I'm going to start posting art again, so here is something I drew on friday.

I can't beleive I forget to do my blog this week... after all the discussing we did I had so many ideas and somehow still forgot! I'll do my best not to let it happen again.

I really did have a lot to think about after last week. I could phrase it all explicity, but I'd prefer to just talk about something that happened this week instead.

So this week, I'm going to write about an unremarkable incident in my bathroom involving myself and a moth.

I had entered the bathroom, turned on the vent and the hot water, and while waiting to enter the shower I noticed a moth on the mirror. Silent, small, shaken by the current of the vent. I left him where he was and carried on.

It wasn't long before he, errant and grasping, made his way to the inside of the shower wall and began struggling to free his quickly saturating body from the dank grasp of condensation.

Before I realized it, I was speaking aloud. I told him not to stay, to go back to the light that had goaded him to enter the small room. I told him that he'd die if he stayed close to the stream of water. But he stayed, determined. Every time he managed to peel himself off the glass he went right back and tried to land again, leaving admirable kicking patterns in his wake.

He stayed in the same spot for a long time, hardly moving, occasionally slipping and groping to regain his posture. I moved close to him, the water still running. He was licking the glass.

Not soon after, he was bombarded by a stray droplet and fell to the bottom of the shower. I shut off the water.

He landed on his back, and his comparatively thick, white legs were grasping. But his powdered wings were moistened and plastered to the shower floor. He couldn't fly, or even flip himself over.

I offered him a finger, which he graciously accepted. He stood on my finger, morose, worldly, calm. I placed him on the windowsill to dry. He scrambled, finding another difficulty in the slick paint, but he found his way.

I finished my shower. On my way out, I noticed the moth on the windowsill, staring at me.

That's the end of my story. I normally don't like writing about what happens to me, but there was something about this moth. I thought of the moth a lot over the past week and although I can't put my finger on it, something about him was haunting. I love moths. I don't like to hurt them, because they enter my room only for my light and my shelter and ask not for anything of me. My only regret is that once entering, the lights intoxicate them and become their demise.