sheer potentiality

Today was the first time the realization actually struck me that I’m back in school, taking classes and incurring the associated obligations of being a student. A lot has changed over the course of the past couple weeks.

I’ll start where I left off: Christmas. Many people complain about the commercialism of Christmas and how that threatens its spirituality. As I explained earlier, these people are morons, and contrary to their whinings, the Jews and trial lawyers didn’t stop me from having a rather joyous celebration of family and prosperity. I love Christmas, and I had a pretty good one at home with my parents.

Upon returning to Pullman last Thursday, on the fifth, I faced a number of daunting tasks I had to complete before classes started anew. I had to finish moving into my apartment and make the place habitable. It still requires some severe cleaning, but in the past few days I’ve accomplished the important parts; there’s now a clear walking path through my bedroom, I have internet access, and my door can be safely and reliably locked. Unfortunately, some of the items I’d foolishly left in the apartment over break were stolen by the previous tenants, so I have taken the liberty to do as I please with the items they’ve left behind and neglected to retrieve. Among these items is some sort of fish in a bowl. My roommates and I are debating what to do with it: Jeff leans toward experimentation while Greg and I are leaning toward disposal. They also left some rapidly-decomposing food products in the fridge, which we are all leaning towards disposing.

There was also a situation where one of the previous tenants had a boyfriend who had a key to the place. I managed to retrieve the key with no loss of life and limb, although there is still another key out there. I’m going to suggest to my roommates that we put in a work order to change the lock on the front door entirely just in case.

On Monday, I went to class for the first time. Since I’m living off-campus this was my first time on Pullman’s marvelous bus system, which I’ve recently discovered is quite crowded at certain peak hours. It interests me how people on buses and elevators will ordinary go out of their way to sit a distance away from everyone else given the chance, but as soon as that’s no longer feasible, they have no problem cramming in together with complete strangers. It’s even more apparent on elevators—while bus passengers seem to accept their fate, elevator passengers relish it. Invariably, when I look with uncertainty into a crowded elevator, the passengers welcome me and insist that there’s room. It’s not friendliness that fuels this—people aren’t mean around here, but they aren’t particularly friendly either, like they are in the South, for instance. I think people secretly enjoy cramming together in small spaces.

Lots of animals like to crowd together physically. Puppies will pile atop each other to sleep and penguins will huddle together for warmth in the antarctic cold, but humans don’t usually engage in mass physical contact without some excuse or pretext. Public transit allows us to fulfill this need in a socially acceptable way, as do elevators. (I suppose that, in its time, the fad of cramming as many people as possible into a telephone booth or Volkswagen, was another way to fulfill this need.)

Anyway, onto class. Here’s a summary of my classes:
MIS 271: Programming in C#. Seems interesting. Seems like real programming. Seems like fun.
MIS 322: Systems Analysis and Design. What is systems analysis, you ask? Good question. It’s what systems analysts do, and since I want to be a systems analyst, maybe I should take this class. (I don’t have choice since I’m an MIS major anyway.)
MIS 375: E-commerce or somesuch. Another MIS requirement. Seems moderately interesting, and it’s in the Boeing Wireless Classroom of the Future, which I’ll explain more about in a future blog.
UH 350: An Honors requirement, UH 350 classes are about non-Western civilizations (we study Western civilization in UH 330). My particular section is about East Asia, which is a very interesting and important region of the world.
MgtOp 340: Operations management—a wicked sweet class. If I wasn’t an MIS geek I’d definitely consider it as a major, because operations management is a pretty geeky job in and of itself. It involves using statistics and statistical analysis to figure out, for instance, the most efficient way to manufacture goods, or how to empty and refill an airplane in 12 minutes, or things like that.
Phil 490: INPC Seminar. It’s about free will and ethics and shit. I’ll explain more in a later post.

Overall I’m pretty enthusiastic about this coming semester. I’ve got more to write about but not enough time, so…if I don’t post again tonight, you all better harass me until I do.

In the pluralistic society that is the United States, where people of differing cultures and religions can all celebrate—and share—their traditions, it is perhaps natural that specific references to any one religion are scaled back. My prospective employer, who I’m interviewing with in March, sent me a card wishing “every happiness this holiday season”. My view, for what it’s worth, is that this is natural and to be expected. Wishing someone “happy holidays” is not a threat to those person’s beliefs. For all they know, I’m Jewish—wishing me a “merry Christmas” might be a faux pas to avoid. Or perhaps I’m a practicing Muslim. As it stands, I’m an atheist, but I figure that Christmas is a secular holiday anyway. I treat Christmas as a celebration of capitalism, not a celebration of Christ. We buy gifts for one another to celebrate our ability, as people living in a wealthy capitalist society, to expend economic resources not only on unneeded items, but on unneeded items for other people.

But not everyone sees things as I do. An irritatingly large number of right-wing Christians—and make no mistake: the religious right, for all their ranting about “Judeo-Christian values”, have no concern for the Jews or their values—have decided that there is only room for one culture and one religious tradition in our society. This is the reason for all the whining about “happy holidays”. These people want to exterminate every competing holiday just so they can feel more comfortable wishing everyone a “merry Christmas”. And it’s not enough that it’s the happy secular Christmas that most of us celebrate. No, it has to be a consciously religious Christmas that’s focused not on our society’s prosperity, not on family and friends, not on bringing people together in celebration during the darkest days of winter, but rather on the birth of a mythical god-man who was not even born in late December to begin with. (As an aside: why celebrate it in late December then? The pagans always had celebrations in late December, so the Christians decided to co-opt these celebrations during their rise as the predominant religion in Europe, and in this fashion, they succeeded in destroying every other cultural and religious tradition.)

The most popular right-wing Christian tactic by far is to cloak their attempts at cultural domination in a flurry of complaints that they, themselves, are being persecuted. True, these people do control the entire federal government, a large number of mostly Southern states, and the Kansas State Board of Education, but let’s set that aside for now. I’m going to quote one of these simpletons so we can see who these paranoid schizophrenics think they’re being oppressed by. This is a quote by John Gibson, of Fox News Channel, in his book The War on Christmas: How the Liberal Plot to Ban the Sacred Christian Holiday Is Worse Than You Thought. Allow me to clarify this: this following quote is something that John Gibson didn’t just say off the cuff, he wrote it down, probably keeping it on his PC for weeks, even months, before submitting it to a publisher so hundreds of thousands of books could be printed with this statement. So let’s presume, for a moment, that the following exact quote expresses the genuine sentiments of John Gibson:

The wagers of this war on Christmas are a cabal of secularists, so-called humanists, trial lawyers, cultural relativists, and liberal, guilt-wracked Christians - not just Jewish people.

Source

Most of us can plainly see what’s wrong with this statement, but since it’s a well-established fact that right-wing Christians are idiots (exhibit A: “intelligent design”), let me point it more clearly. According to Gibson, it’s pretty well established that the Jews are after you, so you don’t even have to accuse them directly. To John Gibson, there is no honest disagreement or difference of opinion here. Contrary to popular belief, Jewish people don’t want you to wish them a “merry Christmas” because they don’t celebrate it—it’s because they’re just going out of their way to wage a war on it! This is a rather stunning claim, but the scary thing is that Gibson doesn’t just make this claim. He makes it as an aside, devoting the main thrust of his argument to attacking other groups. These groups, similarly, don’t have an honest difference of opinion about the issue. Nope, all these secularists and trial lawyers are in a “cabal” with the Jews to persecute the god-fearing Christians out there!

If it doesn’t scare the shit out of you that views like this are popular in this country, you need to read some more history.

Well, I got some cool stuff for the holidays (and it’s just now all come in). Shown below:

The Ultimate Matrix Collection, the Star Wars Trilogy, Knights of the Old Republic, Dilbert calendars, a US Bank gift card, and Dr. Strangelove.

It’s going to happen anyway, so I might as well announce it officially just to maintain the illusion that I do control my life: I am hereby devoting myself entirely to the completion of “Knights of the Old Republic”.

EDIT: Oh, yeah, I also got “Anarchy, State, and Utopia”, but forgot to put it in the picture. Sorry.

Well, the computer’s back. If you’re a Mac user in Western Washington, go to Micro Center in Lynnwood for repairs. They’re an Apple Specialist, and you can even buy iPods there.

Today, I’m going to give short commentaries on the news.

Bethlehem Christmas: The Israelis lifted the curfew on Bethlehem and allowed people to do stuff, like celebrate Christmas. Good for them. The Palestinians are gonna whine about the Israelis even being there, but it’s Israeli land anyway, antd the Palestinians need to realize that a homeland’s already been set aside for them: Jordan.

North Korea: THEY JUST BROKE AN AGREEMENT, for God’s sake! Why trust them again? No negotiations.

Frist v. Trent Lott: Trent Lott said something stupid and had to be replaced. But not with an anti-gun abortionist.

Storm Blamed for 13 Deaths Heads Northeast: How the hell do you “blame” a storm? I think it’s easy to tell whether or not a storm killed someone or not, no? “Blamed” implies we don’t know, WHEN IN FACT WE DO!

At least it isn’t, “Strom Blamed for 13 Deaths”. If he got the death sentence for that, then we’d have to get Trent Lott to give his eulogy.

Merry Christmas everyone, and have a great holiday season!