Annoucement 1:
Looking waaay back to Entry 147, I've decided that the role of Adam should be played by Kevin Kline. I have yet to find a suitable Eve, but the quest continues.

Announcement 2:
My warm thanks go to the 5 people who sent me Topin Wagglegammon greetings. It probably constitutes the most feedback I've ever gotten on a single (or double, as the case may be) Entry. Particularly happy-making was the letter I received from 1 friend who doesn't even read this Journal or celebrate Topin Wagglegammon who but still cared enough to keep track of when Topin Wagglegammon was, just to wish me a nice day when it came around.

So anyway...

After a day like Topin Wagglegammon, it's understandably difficult to focus on any of the many lesser holidays. As wonderful as Topin Wagglegammon is, though, one must keep a sense of perspective and remember that there are other dates which require proper veneration and respect. Particularly at this time of year, failureto remember the lesser holidays puts us at risk of many possible horrible fates, such as failure to aquire free candy on the 31st (or the 29th, if that's when you have your party). Before we even reach Halloween, though, there is another holiday -- perhaps more accurately, another niftyday -- which we should make an effort to remember. In this case, 30: Wish We Hadn't Done That Day. Yes, this one is permissible to write as an acronym.

WWHDTD falls on today, October 30th. The day commemorates one of the most significant moments in human history: the original broadcast of War of the Worlds on the radio. This was not a holy event, or a momentous event, or even a very exciting event to people who aren't fond of H.G.Wells. That said, though, on this date, thousands, possibly hundreds of thousands of people were mistakenly persuaded that aliens had invaded and conquered Earth, leading to widespread panic, terror, and confusion. The radio broadcast was so convincing and so brilliantly carried out that huge numbers of people listened to it for hours without ever understanding that it was a story and failing to recognise that it was one of the most famous books of all time, and on this day, we all commemorate the things we've done which we know we really oughtn't have but which make us laugh anyway.

This brings us to my latest creative project, "Let's Call The Whole Thing Fish."

For several years now, I've been working, on and off, on a project. Clear historical records exist indicating that I have been attempting to complete this work at least since the year 2001, and I believe (although I cannot clearly recall) that I have been at it for even longer. Obviously, this is not something which I have been working on daily during that time, but rather, this is one of those projects which is always at the back of my mind and which I get around to working on for a few hours on a lazy afternoon about once every eight months or so. All in all, I've really only attempted to accomplish this project four or five times, but I've been dreaming of finishing it for far longer. Just recently, after playing around with some sound editing software, I finally figured out how to get around some of the technical problems which had been relatively insurmountable to me before given my resources, and have at last finished.

Most of you will be familiar with Louis Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald's rendition of "Let's Call the Whole Thing off." This is one of the great pieces of music in history, and one of the finest works of two great musicians. The song has gone down in history, been covered literally hundreds of times, and has been played at innumerable celebrations of the life and times of Armstrong himself. Many people don't know the song by name, of course, because the chorus never made it as famous as the first couple of verses. Armstrong sings, "you say potato, I say potahto, you say tomato, I say tomahto" and this continues on for quite some time. I can hardly count the number of times I've seen this song parodied or heard that one line recited. I have never enjoyed this piece enough to burn it to one of my CD's, but I can appreciate the genius of it, the perfect voice work of both performers, and the message within the lyrics of cooperation, understanding, compromise, and other stuff I prefer not to think about. It's truly one of the great songs of history and will probably be remembered far after I'm gone. So I thought to myself, wouldn't it be funny if somebody inserted the word "fish" into the song at the end of every line?

Most of you will be familiar with the Red Dwarf episode, "Balance of Power." This episode, in season 1, chronicles Lister's attempt to pass a chef's exam so that he will outrank Rimmer. More importantly, this is the episode in which the Cat learns to operate the food dispensers. The episode has two of my favourite lines from the entire series. First, this episode coins the phrase "food escape" which is a sufficiently nifty line that I don't think I need to expand upon it here. Second, this episode sees the Cat say the word "fish" seven times or so; the word itself isn't particularly amusing (although the word "fish" is, in my opinion, one of thoseinherently funny words, like "kiwi" and "abacus") but Danny John-Jules' delivery of the line is, for some reason which I have never understood, irrationally hilarious. It amazes me, in fact, how many people who have seen the series only in moderate amounts have such fond memories of the dramatic interplay between the Cat at the JMC food dispenser; it's right up there with the incomprehensible fascination fans have with Boba fett despite his having three lines in the entire Star Wars trilogy. So I thought to myself, wouldn't it be funny if somebody took his delivery of the word "fish" and inserted it into one of history's greatest songs?

You can all guess where this is going.

The first few times I tried to bring this project to life predated the current availability of Stuff on the internet; I could find no copies of the song despite easily finding sites where people had uploaded the sound file from Red Dwarf. The second time I looked, during the days of Napster, I was able to find both sound and sound file but didn't have accessto decent sound editing software. Later attempts allowed me to find the song but not the sound file (I never remembered to keep them between attempts) and had sound editing programs but just couldn't work them well enough to merge the files, due to a low quality editor, low quality sound files, differing bit rates in the files, and so forth. Finally, in my most recent attempt, I was able to get the song (six versions of it finished downloading eight minutes after I added them to my download list), I was able to find the Red Dwarf line (I've got that segment of the episode in DivX format) and i had finally learned how to use the sound editing program to make them equivalent bitrates and sound qualities *and* to edit the sound files well enough that the finished version didn't sound too terrible. This, ladies and gentlement, was the culmination in literally years of scheming and working.

Of course, the satisfaction of a job well done is all well and good, but the real pleasure of art is to share it with others so that they may experience your unique vision of the world. That's why I write this Journal. That's why I've uploaded the file to it.

I haven't bothered editing the full song (just the first 30 seconds, the first main verse) partly because I was lazy, partly because of bandwidth on this Journal, and partly because I think it's funnier if you only have Louis Armstrong rather than Ella Fitzgerald too. The lyrics are posted below, and to download the sound clip (which is less than 1 megabyte), you may click here.

Let's Call The Whole Thing Fish
By Eric Lis
October, 2005
With respect and apologies to the memory of Louis Armstrong and everybody else involved in the original song.

You say either, and I say, fish!
You say neither, and I say, fish!
Either, fish! Neither, Fish!
Let's call the whole thing fish!

Yes, you like potatoes, and I like fish!
You like tomatoes, and I like fish!
Potato, fish! Tomato, fish!
Let's call the whole thing fish!

Yesterday was Topin Wagglegammon, the Niftiest Day of the Year. Of course, if you needed me to tell you that, then this is either the first time you're ever reading my Journal (in which case, "HI!") or you haven't be paying attention (in which case, "Ha Ha, you fool"). In either case, I hope that your Topin Wagglegammon was nifty and that you shared the joy of the day with everybody around you.You don't share the joy of Topin Wagglegammon for the benefit of other people; you share Topin Wagglegammon for yourself and for the whole Universe! This, of course, begs the question: what the frell is Topin Wagglegammon? Ideally, most of you will be pretty far advanced in this deduction just from all the stuff I've written about it, but as we've already established, some of you out there haven't been paying any attention. We'll start at the basic, by which I mean uninformative, level.

What is Topin Wagglegammon? Topin Wagglegammon is The Niftiest day of the Year. What makes it nifty? It's Topin Wagglegammon. But why is Topin Wagglegammon nifty? Because it's Topin Wagglegammon. If you can't be bothered to pay attention, I'm going to stop answering your questions. Look, what does Topin Wagglegammon mean? Topin Wagglegammon. But what's the special meaning of the day? Why is it a holiday? Why is the day any special? Because it's Topin Wagglegammon. Are you deliberately trying to drive me insane? That depends. Who's on first? I hate you. I get that a lot.

To many of you, the above dialogue will sound horiffically familiar. That makes me smile. However, you've all been great sports about Topin Wagglegammon this year, and many of you have informed me that either you plan to celebrate the day, you're currently ceebrating the day, or you did celebrate the day, and so you've earned an actual, helpful, and comprehensible explanation of Topin Wagglegammon, an explanation which doesn't require you to be a Silinist, a Discordian, a liar, or me for it to make sense. Don't get too comfortable with this, though... every time I bow to pressure and choose to make sense, it means I'm going to be that much more inexplicable the next several times.

The Origin of Topin Wagglegammon (I swear I'm not making this up): Topin Wagglegammon dates back, to the best of my knowledge, at least 7 years or so. Late in my time in high school, a very dear friend of mine (most of you have met Julie, who, as she has observed in her own journal, has been my good friend longer than anybody else who reads this) who shared with me my quest of corrupting the mundane population of my school began posting gag holidays, every day, where students would see them. This had no perceptible effect whatsoever on the student population, but it gave my clique a good laugh most days. More importantly, at this time I was actively engaged in building the Aerican Empire's calendar of holidays, and I used the same reference website as she did. The website no longer exists, to the best of my knowledge, and believe me, I've looked, but at the time it was a *huge* list of holidays, historical commemorations, and celebrity birth/deathdays. I went through this list exhaustively and the majority of my holiday list comes from that page. One of the holidays listed was Topin Wagglegammon, about which the page said absoltely nothing, and about which further research online yielded no information whatsoever. It was apparent that what we had found was a holiday which had no meaning, no sense, no depth, and no importance, but which was really fun to say. That was good enough for me, and Topin Wagglegammon became, in very little time, the most important day of the year on my calendar. Imperial records clearly indicate me celebrating Topin Wagglegammon as early as October of 1998, prior even to my last rebirth, making it a holiday older than I am. I have made an effort to celebrate Topin Wagglegammon with all my heart in the years since, sometimes with big elaborate ceremonies and sometiems with simple, subtle jokes, and last year Topin Wagglegammon was officially proclaimed the Niftiest Day of the Year by the Imperial government. Some people argue that because Topin Wagglegammon is not now and has never been holy, it ought not to be called a holiday, and is instead known as a niftyday.

Last year Topin Wagglegammon received a countdown and a huge Journal Entry, and this year... well, you've been reading it. Nowadays, you will find one and only one organization which venerates Topin Wagglegammon -- The Aerican Empire -- and a search for it on Google will yield only a handful of links, almost all of them directly to one of my webpages. I consider it my solemn duty to preserve Topin Wagglegammon, which was once a proud date known to many but which is today forgotten by all save only for myself and some of my more enlightened friends. I remain one of the last defenders and celebrants of the Niftiest Day of the Year, and with Forsteri as my witness, I shall continue to celebrate Topin Wagglegammon as long as I am able!

As a side note, there are records online of the existence of a holiday known as "Toping Wagglegammon" which is attributed, on various websites, as being a holiday of the fae. However, typing Wagglegammon into google will bring you to "Topin" Wagglegammon information before "Toping", and more importantly, Toping is less fun to say than Topin. Furthermore, Topin Wagglegammon is the superior niftyday because it isn't new age splatscratch. There is a possibility that Topin Wagglegammon is nothing more than a mispelling of Toping Wagglegammon from when we first copied it off of a list of holidays, but it's evolved far beyond whatever inferior holidays it was once associated with. Toping Wagglegammon is a holiday of the faeries but Topin Wagglegammon is MINE.

The Meaning of Topin Wagglegammon: To quote myself from last year: "Nobody knows! Yay!" You have to admire that kind of child-like enthusiasm. The truth is, Topin Wagglegammon has no meaning at all. Nothing important happened on Topin Wagglegammon, no earth-shaking events took place to my knowledge, and the day has no special significance. The only situation in which October 26th is special is if you *choose* to make ti special, and if you do, that's Topin Wagglegammon. There are no fat guys in red suits, giant egg-hiding bunnies or ritualistic candle-lighting... there's just a celebration of Niftiness the likes of which we see on no other day. Topin Wagglegammon's only meaning is that it's Topin Wagglegammon, and damn it, if that's not enough for you than you probably don't get much amusement from reading my Journal the rest of the year, either!

Anything else that ought to be said of Topin Wagglegammon: I am able to, and have in the past, spent literally hours talking about Topin Wagglegammon, but most of it is made up on the spot and I forget it all once the conversation's over. There are a few things, though. First of all, Topin Wagglegammon must never, ever be abbreviated to TW, no matter how tired you get of writing all those letters. This is because Topin Wagglegammon was first chosen as a niftyday based only on the fact that it's so much fun to say, and I, at least, also find it fun to write. It gets a bit hard to keep writing all 18 letters (counting the space) in the words Topin Wagglegammon, especially when you can all see how many times I've had to type it out in the last week, but each and every time I have gone to the effort to write it out in full, *and* make sure I capitalized the W, which I sometimes forget to do. When something is important enough for me to bother proof-reading, you know it's something significant.

As a side note, I've been celebrating this holiday for 7 years and I only just noticed that the word is 18 letters long. Many of you know of my interest in numerology in general and the number 18 in particular. A week ago I might have discounted this as coincidence but after our adventures with the word "gammon" earlier this week I'm far beyond believing in coincidence relating to Topin Wagglegammon.

Another thing that ought to be said is that despite appearing on my webpage, Topin Wagglegammon is not a day related to my faith or to lying. One does not need to lie to celebrate Topin Wagglegammon, although there's really no reason not to. The point of Topin Wagglegammon is that it is inherently nifty, and therefore should not require one to do anything which might be considered immoral or sacriligeous to celebrate it. Topin Wagglegammon is equally accessible to anyone I know who appreciates silliness, and the degree to which one's acceptance of humour and whimsy is similar or different from mine ought not to be a block to celebrating the Niftiest Day of the Year.

I'm actually pretty sure that I've explained all this pretty clearly and thouroughly now, which is rather impressive given that it's me. On the assumption that everybody who reads my little Journal is someone I like and who has beliefs and opinions fairly similar to mine about happiness and the spreading thereof, I wish you all a joyous, entertaining, and above all nifty Topin Wagglegammon. The fact that Topin Wagglegammon was yesterday shouldn't lessen that in any way.

An Erisian Prayer
Lady, protect my enemies. Let them remain strong enough to continue blocking my path whenever I might otherwise run into danger. Let them know they have helped me almost as much as my friends.
Lady, protect my enemies, locked inside their closed minds with the shades drawn tight and the doors barricaded against fresh thought, which might *poof* them like sunlight on the vampires they’re becoming.
Thank you for their sensitive kneejerk reactions. I enjoy making them dance when I’m bored. Don’t let me gloat when I scare them so easily. If I were small, and grey, and cold, I’d get scared too.
You might let them know how pathetic they look in their pointyheaded-bigot caps, hatred congealed on their faces like drool.
Should they ever become brave enough to abandon their brain’s musty attics, and come out to play in the sunshine, please make me big enough to not hold a grudge.
Amen.

The Apocrypha Discordia

In a horrible twist of fate, Topin Wagglegammon this year falls between two Journal Entries. Some might argue that if I wanted to, I could move the Entry schedule around so that it goes however i want, while other might suggest I could simply write a special extra Entry. The way I see it, though, this just lets me get two Entries for the price of one -- a pre-Topin Wagglegammon Entry and a post. Ideas are scarce and precious things, and should be squeezed for all they're worth until they flop, dessicated and exsanguinated, to the ground and collapse into horrid, drained dust.

Somewhere, somehow, a Muse is glaring angrily at a picture of me. I just know it. So anyway...

Prepatory to writing this, on a whim, I typed "gammon" into Webster's Dictionary, just to see what it meant, if anything. I expected nothing and, to my shock, got 5 distinct matches. Fortunately, there were no definitions for "Topin" or else I might have begun to think that someone had swapped my Universe for Folgers Crystals. Webster tells us that "gammon" means, among other things, ham, a side of bacon, victory in a game of backgammon without your opponent taking any of your pieces, and the act of winning a game of backgammon under said conditions. That's the first few meanings, but there are another two that Webster gives us, and these are the ones that are special. I didn't even know this before today when I looked it up, and knowing it now, my world is a warm, happy, joyous place... I'm sitting here typing and just *smiling* because it's moments like this that reaffirm that everything I know and believe about the Universe, the gods, and myself is good and true and, yes, even nifty.

4: Function: verb, intransitive senses. 1: to talk gammon; 2: pretend, feign. transitive senses: deceive, fool.
5: Function: noun. Etymology: obsolete, gammon (talk): talk intended to deceive.

None of this has anything to do with the rest of this Entry, though, which is: suggested ways to celebrate Topin Wagglegammon, The Niftiest Day of the Year, which is upon us in just two short days. One doesn't have to do all ten of these choices; the large number of options is there to increase the likelihood that one or more will be convenient for everyone. And then, if you're all good and tell me that you celebrated this Niftiest of Days, I might even tell you all what Topin Wagglegammon actually *is* on the 27th.

Ten Ways to Celebrate Topin Wagglegammon on October 26th, 2005
1) Wish everyone a happy Topin Wagglegammon. Everyone. Pass on your good wishes to your classmates. Stop random people in the halls or on the street. Send e-mails to people you don't know. Post in newsgroups and message boards. Do this only if you genuinely wish them a nice day, though; Topin Wagglegammon should not be despoiled by the petty bickering we enjoy on other days. People will ask you what Topin Wagglegammon is. Under no circumstances should you tell them. If they persist in asking what the day is and means, continue insisting that it is Topin Wagglegammon and means that it is Topin Wagglegammon. Act confused if they don't seem to understand. If they are truly persistent, tell them to just look up Topin Wagglegammon on the internet (you may need to help them with the spelling). This will most likely bring them to this page, ensuring they get no useful information whatsoever.

2: Eat a cookie. I cannot stress this enough. Unless you are diabetic or otherwise have a good reason for not eating a cookie, at least one cookie should be eaten on Topin Wagglegammon. This is because cookies, like Topin Wagglegammon, are inherently nifty. This fact may be empirically demonstrated through a simple experiment: say the word cookie to yourself over and over again as fast as possible until the word either makes you happy or you asphyxiate. To date, no experimenter has ever reported not being made happy by the word cookie, given enough time. Pies are nearly as nifty as cookies and so are an acceptable substitute, but cookies are favoured because 1) the word is more fun to say and 2) cookies are more portable and so better suited to celebrating Topin Wagglegammon on a weekday while running around at work or between classes.

3) Play something. Whether it's eight hours of D&D or fifteen seconds of Tic Tac Toe, at least one game should be played on Topin Wagglegammon. This is because games are fun and Topin Wagglegammon is fun.

4) Add sound effects to your day. Hum marching music while you walk down the street, and shout "wheee!" when you turn corners quickly. Make whooshing noises while you take notes, write, or draw, loud enough to be heard by someone next to you. When you sit down, do so with an audible thump. If you make frequent enough and strange enough noises, people will ask you why you are making them. In this eventuality, refer back to suggestion 1.

5) Make up new words. Then use them in conversation. Describe foods as being splasglious and tell people about the news story you saw in the paper discussing the new research done by scientists investigating worshkloopshes. If people ask you to define the words, use more made up words in your definitions. If they ask why you are making up words, angrily blame Lewis Carrol or William Shakespeare and change the subject, or tell them that it is Topin Wagglegammon and then refer back to suggestion 1.

6) See fnords. See fnords everywhere. If you cannot find them, add them yourself. If there are no fnords written on the walls where you are, put some there, then bring someone over and ask if they'd noticed it written there before. If you are particularly ambitious, see fnords where there aren't any; ask others if they can see them, and if they cannot, insist angrily that this indicates the degree to which they have fallen victim to the conspiracy. If pressed, do not explain that you only see fnords because it is Topin Wagglegammon; encourage the other person to read more to broaden their mind and escape their tragic and pathetic limits and suggest that they start by reading trilogies.

7) Watch cartoons. Time permitting, watch warner brothers cartoons or episodes of programs from your childhood. Select programs which rely on falling anvils for their humour as opposed to anatomical sound effects. Make an honest attempt to enjoy them. If you do not enjoy them, keep watching until you do. If you are unable to find suitable cartoons, watch Babylon 5 instead; this will not help you celebrate Topin Wagglegammon but will at least be entertaining.

8) Hail Eris. Mock those who do not. Eris has nothing at all do with Topin Wagglegammon, but she can be tempermental from time to time and if more people hail her she will be in a generally better mood.

9) Do something creative. And preferably, also destructive. Sculpt using a mallet; weld two toys together. Creativity and the joy of making Stuff is what Topin Wagglegammon is all about, as is taking pleasure in chaos and increasing the disorganization in the Universe.

10) Laugh at Fate. Publically and as loudly as possible. Openly curse Fate and call it names. Mock Fate and make fun of its accomplishments. Persuade other people to laugh at Fate. When they try to understand why, refer back to point 1.

Now you are prepared to celebrate Topin Wagglegammon the way it is meant to be celebrated: confusedly! Go forth and spread the joy of Topin Wagglegammon to everyone around you, whether they want it or not. Laugh! Dance! Sing! Confuse! Gammon! Because October 26th is Topin Wagglegammon, the Niftiest Day of the Year, and there is no other day quite like it, nor should there be.

I've always had something of an obsession with masks, both real and metaphorical.

I follow the online journals of about 10 people, depending on the day and my mood. Through theirs, I casually follow the adventures of a few others, simply because I tend to browse the Friends pages of livejournals I'm reading. It tends to become apparent very quickly that most of these journals have some recurring themes in their entries; people quickly fall into certain patterns based on their writing style, the audience they want to have, their general mood, their propensity for melodrama, and so forth. Take, for example, my own humble Journal. This page tends to be less of a "what I did today" kind of journal and more of a "rant about whatever's on my mind, usually gaming related." This is because 1) I tend to have a very positive, gamer-centric viewpoint of the world, I'm quite self-centered and so I enjoy spreading my point of view to others, and 3) I live to write, create, amuse, and deceive. Given those facts, it's easy to understand why my Journal is more likely to have absolute fiction rather than absolute truth on any given day. Similarly, the journals of other people tend to reflect, not their whole personalities, but rather certain parts of their personality that they choose to show under those circumstances. I'm not half as arrogant to my classmates as I am in this Journal, and so too other people may not be, in "real life", precisely what they appear to be online. The trick is in deducing what parts of their life are reflected in their journals, and possibly, are their journals a more real verison of them than their own lives.

Consider my own Journal. When writing for this page, I tend to let my whimsical side get the better of me, even in the more serious and introspective Entries. I'm usually listening to music my CD collection being named "music to scheme by" for good reason. If you compared my persona in this Journal to my persona when, for example, I'm at a family gathering or when I'm with classmates. One might reasonably say, then, that all but one of those identities is a mask of sorts. I don't believe that's true, of course, but most people lack my capacity to accept two mutually exclusive statements as being equally valid... more on that later. *most* people would tend to think of themselves as having only one real identity and thus, by default, wear a number of masks. I postulate that people who are seeking their identity (singular) or who believe they have found their identity (singular) and then encounter situations in which they do not behave like themselves are constantly changing masks.

This all begs the question, as asked: is the journal of the average person one of their masks, or their true identity?

Consider, once again, my own less-than-humble Journal. You are, after all, reading it. Compare the speech patterns, beliefs, characters, and even topics espoused within these pages, and it ought to be obvious that I don't tend to talk about my moral leanings to my classmates, I don't tell my parents how much I enjoy torturing humans, and I don't tell my grandparents that I lie to people for fun and profit. These are all things they could learn about me as easily as typing my name into google, of course (I am, I confess with shame, only the second match, and you have to go down several hundred matches to actually find this Journal, but still) but they're not tthings I openly bring up in casual conversation. That said, with a very few exceptions, i'm more comfortable typing at people than talking to them, and I feel more like myself when I'm at the computer than when I'm in class. To put it unecessarily simply: I'm truer to myself on this page than I am when 4 out of 5 people meet me in "real life." This whole thought has to be qualified in so far as that 1) most people are a lot less technophilic than me, 2) most people are more social than me, and 3) most people I know talk about their real lives in their journals, whereas I talk about going to ar with the universe and accidentally destroying facets of my own mind. Even controlling for those three facts, however, there are subtle but perceptible differences between the identities most people present in their journals and in real life. For my part, this Journal is truer to my soul than my real world presence is, and that makes one wonder who else that must be true (or, just as interestingly, false) for.

Better than half the people whose journals I read (or even just skim) write as though they suffered from clinical depression. In my professional opinion, most of them don't, although some come closer than others. In real life, most of these people present as happy and functional, but going solely by their journals, I'd be informing the local health care facilities in case they became suicide risks. On the other hand, I can count two people who I think are truer to themselves online than off, because their journals are the only place they actually do any introspection. I can count one other person whose journal seems to be precisely as true to themselves as their real life, because the two are almost identical. And finally, I know of one person whose journal I don't read because they only maintain it so that they have "friends" level access to other journals on Livejournal, and this is an oddly poetic expression of their soul, because it's a person who has absolutely no idea who they are in real life.

There is one other possibility, of course, which is where people like myself fit in. One of the central tenets of the Path of Forsteri is that the Follower must be capable of accepting that two conflciting facts are both partly true and partly false at the same time. The Path teaches that there is no such thing as a paradox because the universe lacks the kind of internal sense and consistency necessary for a thing to be paradoxical. By that token, when I consider my personality, I argue that I never wear any masks at all... that I am always precisely what I appear to be. The fact that who I appear to be may be two utterly conflicting things in two circumstances doesn't change it; in all situations, I am exactly who and what I appear to be. Part of that is that I enthusiastically accept that who and what I am is a complex and self-contradictory fragzmult. The other half of that is that who and what I am is an architect and a deceiver, and when I don't act like my Journal-self, I'm just deceiving somebody, and thus being exactly what I appear to be (if you know what you're looking for). As the Goddess says, one will find the number 5 everywhere if one looks hard enough. One's logic doesn't have to be as convulted as mine, sadly; a person would also be quite justified in arguing that behaving differently in different crowds is part of who they are because they have a complex and multifaceted identity. It's less fun if one doesn't twist the whole thing into a meaningless and incomprehensible mass, but it's just as accurate.

So... This Journal is closer to being a nice and accurate portrait of my soul than most people's personal interactions with me, though I dare say that most of the people who read this get a pretty true version of my soul in person too, just because it's so similar to what they'd read in this Journal. I'll leave you all with that question, since I know the majority of my readers do have their own journals. Are you truer to Who You Are on or offline? Is there a difference between the two? Does it matter at all? And what the heck is a fragzmult, anyway? These are the questions which drive our existences.

My little existential crisis is now over. It took about 3 days for me to return to full normalcy after everything. For better or worse, my personality has returned to its previous state, and I am once more taking all the pleasure that I did before in the pain of others, in silly humour, and in greed, deception, and hate. It's a mixed blessing, but at the very least, at least I'm me. I chalk up the whole situation to just one more adventure in my life, "adventure" meaning "the kind of stuff that just doesn't seem to happen to other people."

After years of seeing myself as someone who enjoyed the pain of others just a little too much, it was quite a change to simply stop taking pleasure in such things. In many ways, I was a better person for those three days. I made conversation more easily with the students around me. I cared more about the things they talked to me about. I read the news with greater interest and followed human interest stories. For three days I told almost no lies, didn't laugh when bad things happened to people, failed to see humour in Zucker Brothers movies, and felt no hate for anyone around me, even those I've hated since way back or stupid drivers who risked their own lives and the lives of others to get one car length farther ahead on the highways. For three days, I was a kinder, gentler creature who didn't contribute any unpleasantness to the lives of those around him.

That is, of course, only one side of things. The full truth of a situation is rarely so simple or devoid of balance.

In three days, I don't think I had a single creative thought. I was able to write an Entry about what I was going through, but I couldn't write about anything else. A three day period of my notebook is unusually devoid of margin doodles and pictures, and what's there lacks much of the artistic merit my work usually has. In three days, I don't think I told a joke and I didn't go out of my way to lie to anyone a single time. All sensation seemed somehow dull and boring; colours weren't any less bright and tastes weren't bland, but I felt unable to appreciate them. Small things that people did annoyed me, or worse, made me feel unhappy. I didn't enjoy pain, but I also didn't enjoy much of anything else.

Devoid of a monster, there wasn't much left. I can look back on thsoe three days and the only label that seems accurate for them is "empty." I held a human heart in my hands, cut freshly from a human chest by my own knife, and didn't feel so much as a flicker of satisfaction at having acheived something I'd always wanted to do. I did manage to attach a joke to the situation (I turned to my lab-partner and said "if I knew more about the Aztec gods right now, I could probably prevent the winter") but my heart just wasn't in it.

Now, of course, I'm back to normal. Ragon finished regenerating late last night and we communed before I fell asleep. We discussed briefly how and why I had destroyed him, and he failed to learn any kind of lesson from the situation. It's the nature of the monster to never learn from a defeat, but fortunately, I'm better than that. I've learned a lot. For one thing, I've learned that my monster is more important to me than I'd have guessed. I shudder to think of what it might have been like had Ragon not had the capacity to regenerate. Certainly, another of my more powerful Avatars might have eventually grown to fill the gap, but even in the small chance that this did restore my lost motivation and pleasure, it would probably have resulted in perceptible changes in my behaviour; I do not think that many of my friends would react positively if the dominant Avatar in me became my Hero, or worse, my Villain.

Losing my monster meant losing most of my socially negative impulses, but it also meant losing most of my positive behaviours as well. Without the monster's childlike amusement in so many things, there was just too little amusement left in them for me to take any real pleasure. I don't exactly feel my monster has more importance to me now than before... I always knew how vital Ragon was to my daily functioning... but I do now have a greater sense of the simple breadth of situations in which having a monster's view of life facilitates my own happiness. This isn't really a shock, logically, since the monster's existence is all about the simplest and fastest source of happiness in any situation. So thank you, Ragon, for remaining with me and for making my life more pleasurable and more interesting. Welcome back to my head. Now shut up.

It's good to be me. Weird, but good.

Speaking of holidays, I'm surprised by the number of people who've had to ask me what I'm counting down to. There are very few dates I ever count down towards publically, and only 1 day in the entire year I think is worth going to that kind fo effort for. In addition, I completly forgot that I'd intended to write an Entry about International Moment of Frustration Day, which fell this past Wednesday. Just goes to show.

So anyway...

Yesterday, I killed Ragon. I'll give the reader a moment for that to sink in, even though only one, perhaps two people who read this will really understand the statement's significance.

One of the biggest changes which accompanied my last rebirth was the subdiviion of my personality into Avatars, anthropomorphic representations of the major parts of my own mind. Pretty much without exception, these Avatars took the form of characters I'd played in games who I had felt the most strongly for. The Avatars I started with were ones I'd played, primarily in online freeform games, in the latter days of Eric 3.0, and so those of them still with me today are, given my current terminology, older than I am. The Avatars have, since the days of my rebirth, been little voices in my head over which I've always had implicit unconcious control but which, due to the rather impressive powers of my imagination, have existed pretty well autonomously from my concious control for a long time. Some of them didn't like me, and some of them I didn't like. Some of them quite honestly sickened me in one way or another (though often for an excess of goodness as for an excess of mostrousness). Having the Avatars allowed me to look at the world through a multitude of viewpoints, to have vast internal debates with myself about complex issues, and to rationalize odd or unpleasant behaviour on my own part as being, to an extent, the actions of somebody else.

I don't suffer from multiple personality disorder, but I can do a good impression of someone who does.

Records disagree as to exactly how many Avatars I started my existence with, but the general consensus is that the initial number was about 6. Of these, the very second to take form... and easily the single most vocal of all of them over the last six years... was Ragon, my Monster. Everyone has a monster inside them, the little part that takes what it wants to feed whatever hungers it has at a given time, heedless of good, eveil, mercy, concsience, and so forth. Some people I've spoken to have called this part of themselves Set, or Desperate Guy, or Little Evil, but of the fifteen or so people I've found who actively visualize themselves as a collection of characters, every single one of them had a Monster. Mine was never any bigger or more horrible than anyone else's; it was just nearer to the surface and more accepted. As I have remarked on more than one occasion, the moral behaviour and self-restraint that I show which so few people understand comes, not from burying my monsters, but from having them so close to the surface that they can never sneak up on me.

Ragon comes from my time in the Utopia roleplaying forums and, later, was ressurected as the chief villain of my Dungeons and Bandersnatches game world. In Utopia, Ragon was an annoyance to other characters, more of a figure of mischief than of evil (for the most part). By the time I started running D&B, though, I'd already undergone my rebirth and Ragon had been a part of my personality for about a year. During the mini-Crisis-on-Infinite-Earths in which characters from my various games in the past were reconciled with their alternate versions, Ragon had evolved from an angry spirit to the embodiement of every horror I could imagine. When my players met him in D&B, they mistook for first for a mere annoyance but eventually grew to hate and fear him to such a degree that I was told that some of the players, out of character, had come to fear him. On the one hand, this is the kind of thing a storyteller lives to hear from players. On the other hand, this wasn't just a character I'd created; this was just me roleplaying a part of myself in the game, and here my friends were telling me they were genuinely upset by what their characters had seen and gone through. Even at my most passionate playing of them, Naglfr, Beelzebubbles, Wyvern, and my other villains (with the sole exception of Virrar) were merely characters I'd created, but Ragon was something else.

And then, yesterday, I killed him.

I'm not entirely sure how it happened. I was lying in bed and had been for about an hour, exhausted but unable to sleep. This is an ideal time for one to commune with the personalities inside them, as it's when the imagination is at its most free and uncontrolled. I wish I could recall the sequence of events leading up to it better, but as near as I can recall, Ragon had been taunting me about not being able to sleep, thoughts and deeds I'd done in the past week (nothing I'm ashamed of, but stuff that, as with so many of the things I do in my life, I know I shouldn't enjo as much as I do). Normally, I'm able to silence Ragon as easily as mentally building a cage around him or dropping him through a trap door or something, tricks you learn early on when you spend as much time inside your own head as I do. This time, nothing I created seemed able to hold him. Eventually, I just got sufficiently angry that I willed him destroyed... and with a rather loud explosion, Rgon was gone from the scene and little charred green bits were scattered across the floor. And, for the first time in six years, I couldn't hear his voice.

Oddly, I've been feeling inexplicably empty ever since.

Ragon isn't truly dead, of course. The parts of my brain which cause agression, hunger, greed, and all those fun feelings are still very much intact inside my head, and a little psychic violence won't change that. More importantly, Ragon can't die. This isn't because he's a mental construct or an anthropomorphic expression of a cosmic principlkeor even because he's a beloved character, but simply because when I conceived of him, he couldn't die. A golem who had transcended physical form, a minor thing like being blown up and/or destroyed couldn't possibly be enough to keep Ragon from returning, any more than such minor trivialities would keep down any of the great villains we all know and love. I have no doubt that he will reintegrate himself, though it'll probably take him a few days Realtime, and after that he'll be weak for a while as he recovers, regains his strength, and pulls together the last scattered parts of his essence. In the meantime, though, I feel quite odd... bored, in fact, and quiet, as though I've sat in a dull room meditating for an hour and now I'm just feeling too lazy to get up and go read comics or something. I feel as though everything which Ragon represented is, for the moment, simply not a part of me. No doubt, this is laregly due to imagination, but then again, our psychology and self-perception plays a *huge* role in everything from how we think and feel right up to how our body's most basic principles work, and I wouldn't be the first person in history to have found, even accidentally, that they have this kind of control over not only their thinking, but also their physiology.

And I have, after all, always been something of a slave to my imagination.

I don't think I could have done this on purpose... the whole point of the Avatar system is that I allow them functional indepednce, and they grew beyond my ability to conciously create or destroy them a long time ago. This is only the second time one of my Avatars has "died" (the first being my Driver, the part of myself which had the potential to grow proficient at and enjoy driving a car, who died of injuries sustained in my first car accident; I'll write an Entry with that story if people are interested) and I think it's the sort of thing only capable of happening by fluke and not by choice. I've been unable to imprisson Ragon in the past when he wanted something particularly strongly, when he was feeling particularly powerful, or when I was feeling particularly weak, but this whole situation is basically unprecedented in six years, and probably won't happen again in the near future. In the mean time, I'm recording my altered thoughts and feelings as a briefly monster-less entity. Unsurprisingly, I quite miss having Ragon in my head, no matter how peaceful it is without the sensation of his clawing at the inside of my mind, trying to get out.

As always, I'd like to just take a moment and stress to people that I do have a larger number of socially-positive Avatars than I do socially-negative ones, but as we all know, it's the monsters and the villains who tend to be more interesting.

Tangled webs? You have no idea.

From The Book of Contrivance, chapter 36, verse 18, Critiques of the Poets

Just over a week ago, a friend of mine informed me that a Toronto newspaper had reported research from the University of Southern California's psychology department which demonstrated that habitual liars have a greater amount of white matter in their prefrontal cortexes. This is an incredibly nifty finding -- sufficiently so that I'm going to take the time to explain some neurology, acurately, for non-scientist readers before getting into the implications of the study itself.

Basically, there are two "colours" of neurons (which are the tiny bits that make up nerves) in the body, based on whether a particular type of cell is wrapped around it or not. The bulk of the brain is composed of grey neurons (hence the phrase "grey matter"), which can reasonably be called "normal" neurons. Then there are the white neurons, which are more abundant in nerves running to important areas of the body but much less common in the brain. All neurons are wrapped up in oligodendrocytes (in the brain and spinal cord) or Schwann cells (everywhere else). Grey cells have one of these support cells attaching to many separate neurons, and various important stuff, like keeping the neuron alive, is facilitated. White matter, on the other hand, is composed of neurons which have only one oligodendrocyte or Shwann cell per neuron part, and the support cells wrap the neuron in myelin. I won't go into how myelin works, but the point of myelin is that nerve cells with it conduct impulses much faster. Myelin makes a nerve much more efficient and reduces signal conduction time to a fraction of what it would be normally. One might reasonably ask, then, why not all neurons in the body have myelin, but that's basically due to 1) evolutionary randomness, 2) a lot of things are able to go wrong with myelin so it's better not to have it where it isn't needed and 3) it adds quite a bit to neuron diameter and having it through the brain wouldn't leave enough room for all the other neurons you need. Take home message: myelinated neurons transfer information faster, allowing faster processing of information.

Yes, there *is* an interesting bit. I'm getting to that.

Towards the end of September, University of Southern California researchers demonstrated that habitual liars, people who admitted to lying freely, frequently, and to get what they want, have more neural activity in their prefrontal cortexes and more white matter in that area. "Prefrontal cortext" is a fancy way of saying "right behind your forehead" and this area of the brain is the area which is the source of those brain functions which sentient beings are so proud of: personality, logic, higher thought, strategy, and so forth. Normal people are obviously capable of perfectly good amounts of all of these functions, and so obviously they function just fine without the extra myelination (even if some people do seem to lack personality). However, the presence of extra myelin and electrical activity in the brains of liars here shows that there is an actual structural difference in the brains of normal people and deceivers. To put it colloquially: liars biologically think faster.

That's a slight exageration, of course, since more signal conduction doesn't necessarily mean faster (or better) thought, but it's the implication. Lying is an incredibly complex task which behavioural ecologists believe is seen in only a handful of organisms, and when we see signs of lying, we can't prove if they are actually conciously lying (knowing the difference between truth and falsehood and choosing which to relate) or acting according to some sort of preprogrammed biological drive. Animals who use camouflage in nature aren't generally believed to think to themselves about how to make their hide checks -- their brains are believed to be programmed to make them stop moving when they detect signs of a predator, and natural selection has ensured that those who are least visible when they sit still are the ones who reproduce. using this disctinction, only a tiny fraction of animnals are thought to be capable of lying.

Consider the penguin. Penguins are basically defenseless creatures who get their food by swimming and catching fish. However, the animals which prey on penguins are sea creatures who "know" that if they hang around the fish, sooner or later the penguins have to come to them. The first penguins who jump into the water have a near 100% chance of being the ones eaten, after which any sucessive penguins have a near 100% chance of survival. The penguins will all walk right up to the water's edge and get ready to jump in. The important bit is that some of the penguins will pretend to be about to jump and then stop at the last moment, leaving their hapless fellows in mid-air and swearing loudly. We can't prove that the lying penguins are actually conciously lying, because natural selection would naturally favour the behaviour of "don't jump until Fred's been eaten by the sea lion," but there is some evidence (preliminary and unconvincing, but evidence) that the penguins understand when it is and is not safe to be the first in the water and deliberately try to be the ones who don't get eaten. Similar evidence exists for various species of ape and, of course, weasels. Only highly advanced (evolutionarily), intelligent animals with well developped prefrontal cortexeshave even come close to demonstrating the ability to truly lie, and in fact, the ability to deceive is considered by some to be a hallmark of sentience.

Lying, you see, is an unbelievably complex and demanding behaviour. We tend to think of lying as being easy, but remember that for every person who lies easily, there is 99 other people who will almost always blurt out the truth if you ask them something. If you are going to tell a lie, you must meet several prerequesities. First, you must understand the difference between truth and untruth... this is simple for us, but look at a young child and see how old they have to become before they even learn there is such a thing as lying, let alone that they are capable of it. Second, one has to understand that two individuals do not all possess the same knowledge... again, consider young children and most animals, who behave as though anything that they know is known by all individuals. Thirdly, one must have a sense of oneself as a distinct life form; this is tied to the second prerequisite for obvious reasons, but actually demonstrates an incredibly advanced mental task which most animals that have been tested seem to be incapable of. Fourthly, one must be able to formulate a lie; we know the truth already, but a lie requires a creative effort. Fifth and lastly, one must learn to lie effectively, which means learning what kinds of things are and are not plausible, what kind of things a given individual is likely to fall for, how to hide the common tell-tale signs that a person is lying, and so forth. These are the most complex tasks because they require not only that one understands the difference between two individuals, but also demonstrates the capacity to get inside another individual's head and work from first principles how they think. A liar isn't just someone who doesn't tell the truth... a liar is someone who habitually reads the minds of those around them, and that's not being as figurative as one might think.

This last point ties in well to another areaof neuropsychology, mirror neurons. Current technology allows you to look at someone's brain and see what neurons fire when they perform a given action. The same areas of the brain will basically always light up: the areas that control motor function, for example. However, humans have been proven to also have mirror neurons associated with some of their motor neurons. Mirror neurons are special neurons tied to both the motor systems and the sensory systems; they light up both when someone performs a specific action and also when they see the same action being performed by somebody else. These neurons have been suggested as being a mechanism of learning... a part of your brain fires when you see a novel action and is intrisically bound to the part of your brain you need to active to make the same action. These neurons have also been suggested to be part of the mind reading system, by which I don't mean telepathy, but just simple empathy, body-language reading, and so forth. It's been suggested that mirror neurons may play a part in the ability to lie, or at least, learning to lie, because a part of your brain and a part of the "target's" brain fire the same way at basically the same time, putting two brains in synch to some small degree. Mirror neurons are another brain part which has been shown to exist only in very high animals, like certain apes and, of course, humans.

What all this means is that lying is one of the most cognitively intense actions a person can perform. It requires an incredibly advcanced and powerful mind to lie well. Now, we have evidence that it may even require a compltely different form of brain wiring, an ability to process a vast amount of information faster than a non-liar could possibly hope to do. After all, when you tell a lie, you not only have to make it good, you have to make it consistent, and that means having the ability to not only keep all the details of the truth straight in your mind (which most people have a hard enough time with) but also keep all the details of your lie (or lies) straight in your mind. To tell a simple, meaningless lie may right off the bat require two or three times the mental ability as telling the truth, and so faster brain processing may be not just useful, but necessary.

Of course, the research findings don't tell us anything about causality. The brain has remarkable powers of change. It's a scientific fact, for example, that people who drive taxis for a few years will demonstrate enlargement of the parts of their brain invokved in spatial nvigation, route memory, and so forth; we can look at their brains when they're hired and a few years later and see that their brains have adapted to the unique challenges they face. On the other hand, the finding about liars is new and doesn't tell us anything about change over time; we can't argue that liars are born with deceptive brains or that people who lie, through practice, develop faster information processing. I refuse to weigh in on a nature/nurture debate since I choose to believe that any extreme is poor science and generally stupid; in all probability, some people are born with a genetic tendency towards more white matter in their prefrontal cortexes and, becaue they're the ones who find it easy to learn to lie, they do it more and so develop even more white matter. People without that predisposition find as children that they don't lie well and so they stop practicing, and so don't develop even more of the extra white matter. As in everything else, it's probably a balance of your ability scores and your skill ranks, your attributes and your abilities/talents/skills.

The important thing is, my brain's faster (and, perhaps, better) than the brains of most of the people around me, and I've got scientific evidence for it. It also tellsme that, if I keep lying, I can keep becoming, so to speak, stronger, faster, and better. It's enough to make a guy get an MRI done just to see...

Have you ever stood in front the mirror and looked at yourself when your lungs, pleural cavities, major ribs, major muscles, and heart have been drawn on your torso? It's very strange, almost surreal... like looking into an anatomy textbook and seeing your face on the picture. It really helps put into perspective the way the body is built out of a thousand yucky bits to get one massive, inefficient whole. I quite recommend trying it.

I say this of course, not because I sat down recently and drew on myself, but because of yet another Adventure in Medical School, specifically, a living anatomy excercise. As anyone who has gone to a checkup knows, doctors poke, prod, knock on, and do all sorts of weird things from which they are apparently able to gague health, and to teach us things like this... how to tell if someone has pneumonia by knocking on their chest, for example... we need to work on living bodies. Research materials being somewhat scarce, students practice on each other, and the bulk of the excercise involves studnets drawing on each other in non-toxic, semi-washable Crayola markers, marking out particular intercostal spaces and muscles, drawing a line around the area filled by the lungs, drawing circles around all the thoraxic vertebra, and so forth. To be fair, I learned quite a bit during that lab period. Some of it is even relevant to my studies.

In brief: the 200 student class is divided into 3, and this group of about 60 is then split into 2 groups of about thirty. Because the excercise involves everyone taking off their shirts, the teachers split up the men from the women and use two separate rooms (statistically, of course, each group should have at least three gay and three bisexual individuals, but what the hell, we don't begrudge them a little fun during class time). A single professor of the appropriate gender shows each group of students important parts of the torso and draws on a volunteer student in marker; in groups of 2, the students then do the same to each other, and in this way try to memorize anatomical facts. It's more educational than it sounds, and it's a lot of fun watching other students shiver uncomfortably in a room which is, to me, overly warm.

I'm not generally a shy person, but as those close to me know, I tend to be a bit shy about uncovering my body. The exact phrase "his clothes are glued to his body" has been used to describe me by no less than three people, and I can clearly recall the look of shock on the face of one of my very dear friends the first time she saw me wearing short sleeves (she had known me for about a year by that time). I freely admit that I see my clothes as nothing less than armour; if I had my way, I'd never leave the house if anything less than a full battle mech, or at least an inch of powered steel between myself and the world. I even wear a t-shirt when I go swimming. Part of all this is simple paranoia... this Journal has previously addressed the topic of my being afraid of, quite literally, everything. Another part of it is my very real sense of physical inferiority, standing as I do at 60 inches and weighing less than 125 pounds fully dressed. Finally, in the case of swimming for example, my childhood surgeries left me with some unsightly scars on my stomach which I am, to this day, quite self-concious about. All these factors and some others conspire to keep me, more often than not, fully dressed. Obviously, there are times when I can't (or choose not to) remain fully armoured, but they're rare. Such times include, among various situations which don't need to be brought up in a PG-13 Journal, living anatomy classes, where every student strips down to the waist and pokes, prods, and massages each other for two hours.

The truth is, I actually look pretty damn good shirtless, and this is one of those rare situations where I don't have a tendency exagerate my strengths.

The McGill medical school class is mostly filled by people who are in good shape and health, unsurprisingly. The bookish, geeky types tend to end up in engineering or mathematics... nowadays, the students who get into medicine tend to have a strong appreciation for physical health, and it shows in their habits and physiques. There are no shortage of exceptions, since I'm pretty sure the admissions comitee doesn't factor waist circumfrence into their criteria, but students who get accepted, more often than not, already have knowledge of what is and isn't healthy and they tend to be healthy themselves. What sort of struck me during the exercise, though, was that I'm easily in the top half of the class in terms of body shape, flat stomach, muscle definition, and so forth. Being in the top 15 of 30 may not be much of an accomplishment to sports-playing, testosterone-laden human males, but I'm a sedentary gamer with health problems that perceptibly limit my endurance and with a pathological hatred of most forms of exercise. Despite that, I've got a better looking stomach and chest than a good sized chunk of my class... and what's more, my unsightly scars actually provide natural definition to my abs if one doesn't look too closely. Not a single person in the class even came close to approximating my beautiful ash-gray pallor (though this may be a difference of esthetics). On the negative side, I probably had the smallest arm muscles in the class, but I'm not greedy.

As I observed already, of course, most people who make it into medicine tend to have a good sense of how to be healthy, and I'm no exception. I do about 40 situps a day, not out of vanity but because keeping my stomach in good shape gives me greater control over the pain I deal with every day (a fact I wish I'd discovered back in high school). I do about half an hour of cardiovascular excercise each week (not much, but better than nothing) in addition to walking up and down the Mountain for ten minutes most days getting from one campus building to another and taking the stairs rather than the elevator when I feel up to it. Even my weapons training helps keep me in shape -- anyone who's looked at me closely may notice that my right arm is more heavily muscled than my left because I hold the Windblade in my right hand more than my left while practicing. So what if I'm not the best built creature in my program... most gamers would kill to be in the kind of shape I'm in.

The theory does weaken a bit when you consider that with my strength of 6 nearly every person on the planet who's in worse shape than me can still lift more than I can, but we have to focus on the positives and not the negatives, or else we go crazy(er). I don't feel the need to outweigh as long as I can still outthink.

Now to go shower again. "Washable marker" indeed.

It’s a perfectly terrible joke, but it’s worthy of us.
Jim Henson

It would please me to relate that I went to my fate with quiet dignity. However, I would be remiss if I did not mention that there was a certain level of kicking and shrieking involved.
Sinbad the Porter

I'm a very dangerous fellow when I don't know what I'm doing.
Doctor Who

If I were creating the world I wouldn't mess about with butterflies and daffodils. I would have started with lasers, eight o'clock, Day One!
Evil

I did not cheat. I expanded the context of the game.
G’Kar

Sometimes, I have to remind myself that I wasn't born with the capacity to compare and contrast Socrates with Aristotle.

The vast majority of my friends are people who have a deep and personal understanding of philohophy and the great thinkers. I once sat down and calculated that just over 1 in 4 of all of my friends (including "people I geuninely like but don't see often" right up to "close confidants") is currently studying either history or literature at the university level, is actively trying to get into such a program, or has already graduated and possibly is even doing graduate studies on it. Another 1 in 2 are people who aren't currently formally studying such stuff, but who took a few philosophy classes while doing another degree or who have read extensively enough in their spare time that they can out-argue somebody almost finished a bachelor's degree. I've been blessed to be surrounded with friends who read a lot, analyze a lot, think a lot, and, sometimes, understand a lot. It is one of my genuine pleasures in life to be able to turn to the majority of those close to me and engage in a debate on moral theory as easily as I could discuss Star Wars.

That said, this leaves approximatly 1 in every 4 of my good and true friends who haven't studied ethical theory, who don't have any background in political science, who know Descartes only in the context of linear algebra, or who just plain haven't studied much. I don't think of these people as being any less my friends... in at least two cases, these people represent people I care for very deeply... but I often find myself saying something to one of them and being met by a blank stare which I'd expect to see when I start talking about advanced neurophysiology and not introductory ethics.

I take it for granted that all of my friends are as well educated as I am, even when this is patently false. I tend to also tend to take it for granted that I've always known this stuff, which is also patently false. Both of these are actually rather absurb errors to be making when I stop to consider just how little of my life has actually been spent knowing anything at all about philosophy in general.

For all intents and purposes, I never studied philosophy until my first year of CEGEP. I had a religious education which studied a great deal of ethical theory and contemplations upon the nature of the universe, but for the most part we only studied the bible and a handful of scholars who had commented upon the bible but who habitually agreed with it; because the great thinkers of history weren't Jewish, they pretty much didn't get covered in my classes. I learned the *capacity* to think philosophically but not the theories expounded by the scholars who shaped current thinking. When I finished high school, everything I knew about Plato had been learned from Babylon 5, and everything I knew about Socrates came from Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure. Knowledge which is today inherent to my very existence -- why Kant is a moron, for example -- is knowledge which I only truly began to study in my third semester at John Abbott; I was 18 already, and it could reasonably be said that none of my incarnations prior to my last rebirth had studied any of this stuff. Even then, I had only a very basic introduction to philosophy before entering university, where I took, in my first semester, an introductory ethics course (within the actual philosophy department, with philosophy students in most of the chairs) and a political science course, Introduction to Western Political Theory, which was basically introduction to Socrates and Aristotle and which finally firmly set me upon my current "the Greeks were right" outlook.

Now, even looking back on all this, even having just written all this myself in the last few minutes, I still have trouble remembering a time when it wasn't second nature to me to think of things in philosophical terms. I've really only been quite this sophistic for the last 3 years, but it feels like it's been for the whole of my existence. This is why, when I talk to people who are four or five years younger than me, still early in their time out of high school, I sometimes (and quite stupidly) appear to be surprised when they can't do a simple thing like shoot down the categorical imperative in twenty words or less. It always takes me a minute to remember that, at their age and, more importantly, their stage of education, I couldn't have done it either.

I reluctantly confess that, at times, I have looked down upon people because they did not know some of the things I feel they ought to have. This shames me because, after even a cursory amount of thought, I easily concluded that there isn't any reason in the world why they would know these things. I've fixated once or twice about how some of the people in my life who, by all rights, ought to be the ones most capable of discussing things philosophically with me, can't do so, and I confess I'd looked down upon them for it, but when I look at it sensibly, they have no reason to have learned all the stuff I have. In fact, in the case of one notable person, she's actually father along the path of learning this stuff than I was when I had finished only 1 year of CEGEP, and what's more, she's learning it on her own time, and not having to take mandatory classes on the subject to get started.

I resolve henceforth to be more patient with people who know less philosophy than me. I don't judge peopel hasrhly for knowing less about medicine or computers or even gamer culture than I do, so I should certainly be able to learn to forgive a lack of philosophical knowledge. Those who have proven themselves worthy of my attention deserve my help in learning and not my negative assessments, and as long as they still want to learn about the stuff I consider valuable, they certainly don't deserve my ill will just because they currently know a bit less of it than I do at the current moment. If you've ever felt that I judge you harshly just because you don't know the difference between William James and William Osler, you sincerely apologise, and I pledge to try to be more patient and more understanding in the future. I will try to be more informative and less pedantic. In exchange, I charge those of you who don't yet know these things to keep learning and keep sharing with me the things you learn, because nowadays, that's how I'm continuining my education, too.