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Something that always puts a smile on my face is seeing other people walking and smiling to themselves.

Oh is it brilliant!

Pornography

The following is an entry that I never posted over the summer, here it is for you now:

Main Entry: por·nog·ra·phy

Pronunciation: \-fē\

Function: noun

Etymology: Greek pornographos, adjective, writing about prostitutes, from pornē prostitute + graphein to write; akin to Greek pernanai to sell, poros journey —

Date: 1858

1 : the depiction of erotic behavior (as in pictures or writing) intended to cause sexual excitement

2 : material (as books or a photograph) that depicts erotic behavior and is intended to cause sexual excitement

3 : the depiction of acts in a sensational manner so as to arouse a quick intense emotional reaction

There are perks to having attended a college where the students have continuously voted down the instillation of cable hookups on campus, such as the inability to channel surf. I watch TV, but because I have to do so online I only watch shows that are important to me and follow consistently. The problem is my parent's have cable and since returning home for the summer my propensity towards mindless station flipping has increased by 100%, (which also means that my IQ has also gone down by about 100 points too).

While mindlessly flipping through the stations it's happened that I've settled on a show called "The Hills" (feel free to judge), it's a show about nothing really, just some privileged people's drama. Well, while walking by my dad stopped short in the doorway, paused and exclaimed "This shit is worse than pornography! At least with porno you know what you're watching!" He then promptly walked away and I was left feeling dirty and disgusted with myself; he was right. I'm not defending porn here, I could have a separate diatribe on the need for feminist porn, but what's of importance here is that we are all being exposed to the same sort of misogyny in disguise!

These television producers appeal to our natural voyeuristic tendencies and using them to exploit women, (isn't it so often that voyeurism is directed towards women in particular?) In these shows women are portrayed as vapid, petty, Barbie-like beings - and you know the worst part? These shows are marketed towards women! They are not even committing these myths about "the female" to men... "ohh and ahh at the female, the mysterious other, how different she is than me!" They are dispelling these troubling falsities about women to women.

'll leave you with this question, how are we ever going to be able to transcend gender when this anti-feminist propaganda has permeated so much into our culture that we don't even realize that the show we are watching on cable T.V at 8:00 p.m on a Monday night, is actually pornography?

A Blog About Nothing

There is always something. We can't project nothingness, consciousness is always presupposed, always negating that very negative we wish to affirm! Affirmation is something.

I feel nauseous, which isn't always a bad feeling because it reminds me of certain things I have a tendency to forget when I'm swept up the daily hustle of routine and monotony, namely that I exist in a situation. (It's so easy to forget about these things!) It also reminds me of that which I am too often aware off, the future. I have only anxiety with regards to the future. I find myself breaking in the present only to smirk at my successful passage through time - a future conquered!

I wish I could remember more days of my life.

I wish I could do so and keep them inside.

These are things to work on.

Work, the measure of movement!

Intimacy

"Why must we have bodies?"

Embodiment is a nasty business, there's no way around it. We're beautifully complex machines, but we also fall apart and are subject to various grossities and pains - basically, there's never any dignity in death, messy always messy. We are the sorts of beings who want to be more than what we are; we want the experience of being to transcend being itself! But our existence entails an existent and we can't help but stay subject to those physical whims. And honestly having a body can be fun. There are certain moments in pleasure (like feeling the sun on your skin) or even pain (like ritual fasting) that although we are reaffirming our being chained to a body, we somehow also feel like we are exactly as we should be; more aware, more alive.

I feel like intimacy is a great example of this tango between body and spirit (by spirit I mean the part of us that feels like we are more than our body). Generally speaking one possesses emotional intimacy and physical intimacy. The dance between the two is a delicate process, with one subsuming the other frequently, what Sartre terms "bad faith." Yet, what is so moving about intimacy itself is not just the fact that it occurs on both phenomenal and nuemenal realms, but that it requires the presence of an other. It is as if somehow through the mediation of another person who appears to me as the absolute mystery that I can still confide and find comfort in, that I am finally wholly myself - in spirit and in body

So, paradoxically we must have bodies so that we can reach beyond ourselves. To discover what is otherwise in a moment of alterity and have it ground us in being in return.