Hey all! Hope you're doing well. Things are really crappy on my end -- far more so than usual. Without going into too many details, I may be out on the streets as soon as November, so I've got a lot to do in the next couple of months. Among other things, tomorrow I'm planning to trek to the dollar store to buy a few hundred plastic baggies so that I can start sealing up my action figures and their accessories and preparing to post them on ebay. If you've read Scary-Crayon, you know how much that's going to kill me. My toys are pretty much my only tangible links to a time of my life that wasn't thoroughly and unrelentingly miserable, and I imagine that ridding myself of these mneumonic aids is only going to multiply my sorrows. There have been times when the only thing stopping me from taking my life at a given moment was glancing over and seeing Michaelangelo's head poking out from the heap of his brethren, sticking his red-and-green (because some of the paint has rubbed off) tongue at me as if to say, "Mellow out, dude!" I often pick up the figures and cradle them as if they were alive, because, in a sense, they are to me: they've been my constant companions throughout my life and have never betrayed me or responded to me with hatred and malice. On the plus side, with them and those attendant memories gone, I'll have no reason to stick around or maintain any sort of contact with my family members, which will make saying goodbye -- whatever that entails -- all that much easier.

I've been thinking about my memoir lately and why I seem unable to write it -- and now I think that it's because my experiences are such that they don't even seem remotely believable. A lot of the things that have happened to me are positively unreal, and even though people are familiar with the actions of terrorists and criminals and "Jerry Springer" guests and whatnot, nobody wants to believe that ordinary, well-adjusted and even well-to-do individuals would go out of their way to intentionally hurt others by (for example) making exaggerated police reports. Nobody wants to believe that that nice assistant teacher at work holds thoroughly racist views. Nobody wants to believe that their inspiring and dedicated physician thinks exceedingly little of his son, partly because the boy isn't out having all kinds of sex like he was at the kid's age. Nobody wants to believe that these kinds of people are regarded as heroes and role models. And nobody wants to believe the person telling them this information, especially when -- by that indivudual's own admission -- he has been decried as a murderer and a rapist and a violent psycho and a monster and worse. One of the interesting things about my life is that many of the people who have thought it ridiculous that I have been so falsely accused have later gone on to make the very same accusations.

But I do want to write about my life. So as I bag and label my beloved action figures in preparation for our final goodbye, I'm going to chronicle our good times together. I'm going to write about the crazes that led me to seek them out in the first place, what I thought when I first saw them (insofar as I can remember, anyway), and how the happy events that unfolded during our association relate to the later, less positive events in my life. I don't imagine that many people would be interested in reading that kind of book, so it'll likely end up being the last thing I post on SC -- at least for a while -- since I won't exactly have Internet access wherever I end up.

I should still be around and available at least during the next month or so, but I'll go ahead and thank you all for reading now. Fondest wishes and best of luck to you in the future.

Okay, so I kinda wanted to play along, but I quite dislike Stephen Colbert and did not want to post his picture on Wesoteric in any manner that remotely suggests otherwise. Now, I've always hated his show. I don't even like "The Daily Show" (I think the clips Stewart airs generally speak for themselves, such that his his comments and funny faces afterwards are totally unnecessary and kind of insulting, as if I'm supposed to think that what is essentially scrunching up one's nose after someone else lets a really rancid fart constitutes intelligent comedy), but Colbert's show just fucking sucks. What put him "on notice" in my opinion, though, was encouraging people to vandalize Wikipedia. I'll go on record and say that I think Wikipedia is probably one of the greatest things I've seen in years -- an online encyclopedia to which anyone can contribute his/her knowledge about any subject, resulting in a potentially limitless source of information about a wealth of topics. But it only works insofar as people are including information that is true. (Or at least what they believe to be true. Frex, this "Pee-wee's Playhouse" entry refers to Roger as a memorable one-off, whereas I know for a fact that Roger was in at least one other episode. It's an honest mistake, though.) So I really don't think it's funny that Colbert encouraged people to intentionally falsify entries on the site (about elephants of all things; I love elephants). To someone who strongly values the sharing of knowledge and information, that's like encouraging others to sabotage the construction of a spiral staircase leading to Heaven.

But also -- while Stephen Colbert would've been at the top of my list, at least at the moment -- I couldn't come up with seven others. I mean, I could've filled it with largely trivial stuff -- Colin Baker probably would've made it (I really dislike the sixth Doctor; dissing Peri's weight is not cool), and I was also going to give a slot to people who break ninja bobbleheads and seem determined to avoid watching Grave of the Fireflies at all costs. More serious inclusions would've included President Bush (duh) and conservative Christians. I might've thrown BET in for good measure too.

But I'm really tired and didn't feel up to explaining each of my choices -- which is undoubtedly what I would have felt compelled to do. And I still dislike Stephen Colbert. So instead I made this:

I think that works nicely, yes. (And since the Dalek covers up the text, the meme is available here.) Until next time, then!

Several days ago, seemingly out of nowhere, my mother asked me if I had been the victim of racial discrimination.

I blinked at her, ignoring the question and continuing to go about my business without saying so much as a word. When she persisted in asking, however, I finally replied, "What a ridiculous question."

She said, "So, yes?"

"Of course." I was disgusted.

But I didn't quite mean it in the way one would generally take the remark. Yes, I have been accused of all manner of terrible crimes on multiple occasions -- and while I don't think that the situations were entirely racially motivated, I do think that many of these situations might have been different if my skin were a different hue. I was detained a number of times during my undergraduate career so that campus police could verify that I was a student at the school. I understand that they were doing their job, and the police were generally friendly and even apologetic. Still, during those cold evenings in late autumn when I stood shivering outside the Morse gate while the cops read my student ID number into their walkie talkies and my fellow classmates passed through without incident, I was well aware that, if not for certain physical attributes, I might have been turning on reruns of "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" on the FX Channel in the comfort of my warm dorm room at the same moment in time.

On the whole, though, my experiences in this capacity haven't been nearly as overtly negative or memorable as the ones that have taken place in my own house. (more...)

So I had a somewhat interesting dialogue with my sister last night. I don't remember exactly how it began, but it quickly became a discussion of racism. I'm fairly certain that I brought up the term, whereupon my sister objected to its usage -- "racism", she said, entails by definition a pronounced hatred for the object of one's racist feelings, whereas she felt that "stereotyping" more properly corresponded to the position that I was describing. She admitted that in most cases racism is a consequence of stereotyping -- for example, Person A believes a certain stereotype about a group and therefore hates that group -- but that stereotypes are not necessary to justify racist beliefs because the primary criterion for racism is hated -- and hatred can occur without justification.

In my view, however, all stereotypes concerning "race", insofar as people largely believe them to obtain in all cases, constitute racism. For example, even if Person B believes that all persons of Asian descent are fantastic at math and harbors no ill will towards Asians as a result (Person B may even enthusiastically seek out an Asian tutor for his multivariable calculus course), I would maintain that Person B holds a racist belief because Person B believes that "race" is a necessary determinant of certain personality traits and individual strengths, thereby alleging that attention to the color of a person's skin or his/her apparent ethnic background is an effective way of learning more about him/her. (In most modern cases, the emphasis is placed on "culture" rather than "race" -- but given that most people who make these arguments appear to believe that "race" and "culture" are necessarily linked, that does not resolve the difficulty.)

So much like a fundamentalist believes in the value and worth of various fundamental tenets, I use the term "racist" to describe someone who believes in the value and worth of "race" as a means of categorizing individuals. For example, I would argue that even a relatively empty statement like "I hate all black people" -- even if this hatred is unjustified even in the mind of the speaker -- is racist, not because it voices hatred but because it asserts that the color of a person's skin is sufficient motivation for responding to that individual in any predetermined fashion. And though hateful attitudes and harmful effects are not necessary criteria for racist statements, I maintain that all such statements are necessarily damaging because they devalue the worth of individuals and preclude the possibility of a great many personal relationships that rely upon mutual understanding between individuals. But I've said this before, yes? (more...)

Have you ever had a dialogue, experience -- et cetera -- that left you wholly convinced that you are not long for this world: and that this is not such a bad thing, because there is not and never will be any place where you will ever be welcome, that you never have and never will belong among any lands or people anywhere in this life?

I believe the entirety of my time here has been comprised of such incidents.