Cryptic Thoughts Followed by Odd Details

I have a pseudonymous personal blog. I posted something useful and academic related on Monday. Deal with Wednesday Weirdness!

I'm going to shoot for a round 10:

1. Even though I love my vegetarian roomie (and am now a de facto vegetarian because it's cheaper to share groceries), it is always nice to spend the day with someone who thinks (as I do) that pigs are delicious. And she agrees that cows are delicious. Mmmm. Cows and pigs. Also nice is the realization that blog friends do like spending real life time with you. I used to be paranoid about that. "Just how many hours do you want to spend with me?" I want to inquire. So far, I'm happy to say that I've survived 8, 10, and 30 hour stretches with different blog friends with great ease and enjoyment. Who says this space is only virtual?

2. While I like some performance art, I just think a lot of it is ridiculous and clumsy. WTF?! is a perfectly reasonable response to most of it. I've never had beef with the international law of the sea, have you? Also, my reaction causes me to conclude that damn, I really do think like a lawyer.

3. It is very nice to have friends old enough to know you by an alternate name that is not a pet name or nickname, but your actual birth name--and not just the Anglicized version of it. Still, it is jarring to hear them say your American, "professional" name out loud for the sake of your new friends. Still, it's nice to have old friends meet new friends, even if it sounds weird when they have to pause to remember your name.

4. French people are very dramatic. I say this with love. Well, just for one of them, a sort of exasperated love that will forever be slightly complicated in a non-romantic way. Isn't there an alerntative to love-hate? Can't you be love-exasperated? Also, is it wrong that any time I'm mad at one French person I'm down on the entire country and start making Francophobe jokes a la The Simpsons? Is it bad that a turbulent, dramatic LL.M year has made me if anything less cosmopolitan and more xenophobic/jingoistic?

5. After a rough and weird strict Asian upbringing and some Oprah-esque traumatic experiences, it is jarring to realize that I'm losing the drama competition. Some people you just can't beat! I thought I was inherently dramatic, but I have never used the words "passionately destructive love." And because I'm just so vanilla in my tastes now, I don't think I have really good cringe love or torrid love tales to compare to others, especially if they're told in a melange of accents and slightly archaic vocabulary.

6. Still, I'm more lively than some. The opposite end of the drama spectrum is no more appealing. Monktastic, Aspergery, Nietzchean ubermensch, everyman-is-an-island stuff: hmm, not my cup of tea! There has to be a happy medium of a healthy attitude towards social relations and love, and realistic and healthy expectations of what comes out of them. Again, odd to realize that after years of being a swoony lit major who actually recited Marvel's "come live with me and be my love and we shall all the pleasures prove" dating poets (who composed creepy poetry for me) and artists (who offered to paint me) followed by a few years of a self-imposed man-moratorium for work-related purposes, I am now the "normal" one. I'm neither monktastic nor hysterically dramatic.

7. I don't believe in the happiness equilibrium argument, much less the happiness disruption cost-benefit analysis. I get it, but I don't believe in it. But that's just me. If you want to stay at some equilibrium of "satisfied" or "moderately happy," then get on with your bland self.

8. I dislike banana bread. This is another epiphany after many years of liking other banana flavored things. At first I thought it was the pervasive smell that got me off: if you bake, you never want to eat what you've baked for a few days. But I never get around to eating the banana bread I bake, ever. I still like bananas a lot and have since I was a child--I fit my Chinese zodiac sign so well that my mother used to call me "Little Monkey" in Vietnamese as a nickname. But I've become aware that while I like fresh yellow-green bananas, banana ice cream/smoothies, or Asian dried banana candy, I really dislike bananas baked into things. And yet I hate overripe bananas so much that I end up baking banana bread way too often. Well, there is The Roomie, and there is the possibilty of giving this yucky stuff away.

9. I will always lose at Scrabble because I go for the big words that are fun to make with all of your letters. I almost got "rubicon," but I thought "rogue" and "imbue" were pretty good. So I will always lose to those gamers who do two-letter words and make plurals or past-tenses of my awesome words. Bastards. "Kill your children!", they say. "Fuck that!", I say. This goes back to my philosophical revulsion to #6 and #7: just as I can't imagine being completely happy alone or at some middling level of happiness, I will never be content with winning Scrabble by the cheap means of two-letter words or stealing someone else's word mojo. To me, cheap victories are as emptily victorious as the ubermensch overcoming nihilism and himself: what's the point? And the pleasure at such a victory is so paltry as to be just do do de do da bland.

10. If you don't read my blog (and I can check because I have so few readers) and you annoy me, then I use this space kind of passive aggressively (if cryptically and obliquely) to write about you. But it's at a high level of generality. Don't take it personally. Well, you wouldn't, since you're not reading this.