Hey, Jealousy

They fault people for jealousy; they say we shouldn’t be jealous. Well, I think being jealous is just fine, and the more we’re in touch with our jealousy the less hateful and passive-aggressive we’ll be.

Of course this is all leading up to: tonight I’m jealous of Chayes. Vaughan went all the way to Wesleyan (farther than Yale, and I’ve invited him to all of my shows!) to see her directorial debut of House of Blue Leaves. So I am completely and sincerely jealous. I’ve wanted Vaughan to go out of his way for me forever, but he hasn’t, and he went out of his way for Chayes. Jealousy ensues.

And I’ll claim this jealousy so it stays exactly what it is. If I don’t, I’ll wind up feeling bitter towards Chayes, or somehow otherwise negative, and I don’t want that at all. She has no fault in this; she’s not competing with me. She just got something I want. Not to mention that she has a passion in life.

On that: I want a passion and all of my passions are gone. Over the past three and a half years, a combination of Yale and my own slowly growing depression has drained me of everything I loved coming into college. I loved theater; I no longer love theater. I loved math and physics; I no longer have hardly a passing interest in either. I loved sex (in the broad sense); I now find sexuality repulsive. I loved people; I no longer think everyone is basically good, rather I think everyone thinks they’re basically good, but they’re really just self-centered and therefore self-righteous.

I’m jealous of anyone who loves anything. I have no love. I dislike many (not all) of my friends. I no longer appreciate any art (visual, theatrical, poetic…I’ll take some music, but that’s because the response is involuntary). I’m irritated when I’m around people and I’m depressed when I’m alone. Even my favorites of friends have started to piss me off in the smallest of ways, and that’s not good at all. I don’t feel like anyone really likes me, but I don’t like me, so what do I expect? I’ve lost my skill for performance, because I don’t think the audience is worthy of me or I’m worthy of an audience. I’ve lost much of my humor because nothing seems funny anymore, everything seems forced and self-conscious. Eye contact just seems silly.

People are dirty, smelly, noisy, greasy, ugly, self-centered, insecure assholes. Nobody’s internally consistent and we all blame other people for being hypocritical. Sure, I’ll take the label hypocrite, if you give it to me. I try to maintain some sort of consistency, but my personality won’t allow for it. My mind won’t allow for it. The politicians who painfully try to pretend they have a brilliant and simple logic are doomed to lie. We’re all hypocrites; there is no way we’re made to be rigorously consistent.

The First Post

There is naught to say in the first post. It is only special because it is first. The post is novel by its nature.

An old, ill-fated proof goes:

Theorem: All natural numbers are interesting

Proof: Assume there exist uninteresting natural numbers.
These numbers can be well-ordered.
Therefore, there exists a first uninteresting number.
This number, being the first uninteresting number, is therefore interesting.
So there can be no first uninteresting number.
Our assumption must be false.
RAA: There exist no uninteresting numbers; all numbers are interesting.

I think this post is interesting.

On Misogyny and Logic

I was a misogynist until very recently. I’ve always identified more with men than with women and so had a bit of self-loathing for my sex. It has always appeared to me that women are substantially less rational than men, have much more of a permanent need for games and unspoken communication, whereas men are upfront about what they want and thus (despite women’s urges for them to articulate their feelings) are actually much more honest, in general.

Lately, however, I’ve begun to despise this feature of men, because it strikes me as far from a simple love for the rational and an ultimate truth in logic and straightforwardness. Rather, what I observe is an overwhelming passion for being correct, or, possibly, a passion for being accepted as correct by others. The logical process is not what they love, nor the philosophy behind the process, but rather its ability to give them accurate results that they can state with confidence.

Of course, I generalize. Not all men are exactly like this, certainly my good friend Brad acts as a strong counter example, but three of the men with whom I converse most often seem to have this obsession with correctness.

Furthermore, I doubt they would deny it. In a very simple logical way, correctness is a perfectly good aim. Logic is an internally consistent system, and ultimately the world operates on answers, not processes. However, I’ve gained much more appreciation for the humanness of the thought process and the impossibility of actually getting answers from any system besides straightforward logic. Considering that a person has to incorporate many factors other than logic into an argument or thought process, there is an ultimate intrigue to the method they will use, and there is no reason to suspect that what seems like the closest approximation to logic necessarily accounts for the randomness of the problem presented, i.e., that it actually is the closest approximation to logic.

I realize that an “appreciation for the humanness” is hardly a logical reason to like something. But transitioning between systems is difficult. I’ll let you know when I find a logical reason, supplemented by reality, why I should move away from logic and into a more abstract system of thought.