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08/11/2002 - 08/17/2002
08/18/2002 - 08/24/2002

Friday, August 30, 2002

Now with a fresh template. I get bored very fast.
Erin Finnegan @ 3:13 PM :: Comments []

Rick

So you think that discouraging people whose children will be born retarded or deformed and therefore preventing the existence of people who are doomed to suffer and be a burden to society is bad, but that selling sex and objectifying women is liberating. Fine, I'm the one with problems with morality.

And as for judging people, that is the stupidest thing I have ever heard. People should be judged for their thoughts and actions. If I were to say that people who kill and eat babies are bad, no one would tell me to stop being judgemental.
Stripers should be judged and the judgement passed should be 'guilty'.

Thu Aug 29 17:38:06 2002

RE: Rick

Normally, I wouldn't bother to try and argue with Rick. I realize the futility. Nevertheless, I feel the need for clarity here.

So you think that discouraging people whose
children will be born retarded or deformed and
therefore preventing the existence of people
who are doomed to suffer and be a burden to
society is bad,

OK, this is incorrect in two ways:

1. It is possible for anyone to have a child who may be retarded or deformed. It is much rarer for healthy people to bear such children than it is for people who are already retarded or deformed, but nevertheless, the possibility exist. Even eugenics and infertility programs could never completely stop such people from being born. In fact, in order for such a program to be 100% successful, one would have to abort all fetuses that show signs of retardation or deformity before they are actually born. Besides, you can't stop people from becoming retarded after they are born due to serious head trauma later in life. I'm not even going to get into how racism has supposedly played in the past of some eugenics programs, or how easily it could become part of any given eugenics program, thanks to a fascist government.

2. preventing the existence of people who are doomed to suffer and be a burden to society is bad, -- It turns out everyone suffers anyway. Suffering is part of life. No human being ever has lived a life that was free from suffering. It's just the human condition. I'll even go so far as venture that not all retarded people or deformed people suffer as much as some healthy people. Plus, you don't have to be deformed or retarded to be a burden to society. All you have to do is collect one unemployment check, and you're a huge burden to society. You can't stop people from somehow burdening society.

but that selling sex and objectifying women is
liberating. Fine, I'm the one with problems with
morality.

I think that in a late capitalist economy the selling of sex is unstoppable. There is a demand for sex, and sex-related products, and in a good capitalist country like ours there will always, always be people waiting in line to turn a profit by filling that demand.

Objectifying women is not usually liberating - I would say that Bruno is stripping out of a deep need for self-discovery and self-exploration. She's exploring objectification by objectifying herself, which is different than being objectified on a daily basis by society.

When Bruno strips, it's difficult, as a regular reader of the comic, to objectify her. We know so much about Bruno as an individual that it makes it impossible just to think of her as a naked body. The author is not objectifying Bruno for the readers, he is making a statement on objectivity. To that end, I am not going to censor him.

And as for judging people, that is the stupidest thing
I have ever heard. People should be judged for
their thoughts and actions. If I were to say that people
who kill and eat babies are bad, no one would tell me to
stop being judgmental.

I am not a religious person and Bruno is a hard-core atheist, so it's going to seem weird when I say here that the judgement thing is all about Jesus. If you actually read the Bible, I mean the Gospels, not just Revelations or something, you'll find that one of Jesus' main messages is, basically, never judge people. He says over and over and over again that the whole judging thing is up to God. The idea is that you can say "Doing X is bad," but what you can't say is, "People who do X are bad." In fact, Jesus' big deal is that you're supposed to love everybody, no matter what they do (or what they think).

A.K. is correct when she says you're damn lucky your friends don't judge you.

I may not be some huge Christian, and, in fact I don't think a lot of Christians really understand and/or try to practice the whole "no judgement" thing, and hell, most of the time I don't go around trying not to judge people... but then again, on some very deep level, I'd like to think that I just can't judge people that well.

If that's stupid, so be it.

Stripers should be judged and the judgement passed
should be 'guilty'.

With this sentence, I think you're putting undue amounts of blame on the stripper. If you're going to blame to strippers for being immoral, you've got to also blame the system that creates an environment where stripping is possible. This includes, but is not limited to:

- Owners and proprietors of strip clubs.
- Patrons of strip clubs.
- State laws that allow topless bars, and legislators who pass those laws.
- Voters who vote for said laws and said law-makers.
- People who discuss stripping as if it is OK, and thereby promote it to others (this includes me).
- People who are against stripping, but are too apathetic to take action to try and stop it (I think this category includes Rick himself).

So you can see where Bruno stripping is actually also your fault, Rick.




Erin Finnegan @ 1:35 PM :: Comments []

Status report:

The Weather

• Today the weather is extremely gloomy.


The Tunnel

• Traffic into the Holland tunnel has been backed up all day.


Erin

• Today I am... I'm... zzzzzzzzzzzz... What? No, I'm awake!


Bruno

• Bruno is busy stripping. Rick exist in some kind of antimatter-morality-space where eugenics is OK and strippers are the worst thing ever.


• Bruno is stripping as a test of her own morality. She doesn't like to judge people, but she feels like she judges strippers. Therefore, she is stripping to be on equal grounds with those she looks down upon.


• I support Bruno's decision. And if any of you guys became strippers, I would support that decision as well.

Tuesday

While I wait for one of my company's web servers to come back up, I guess I'll do my post for the day... yeesh, that's the server I need to work with right now. Bloody hell.

Here is my Top Ten List of Anxiety for the week, in the spirit of the Rachel Papers (see yesterday's post). I'm not actually that anxious about anything today, so don't read it and get all worried about me.

10. Menstruation (already more than you needed to know) in relation to laundry.
9. Not having time to write, watch anime, and work out.
8. Getting rejected for the credit card I just applied to.
7. Having to find a new doctor.
6. Refilling my prescription for stomach medication, and the inevitable battle with the pharmacist this will lead to.
5. Finding a dentist
4. N's job security
3. Sending my script to that producer.
2. Finishing my short story on time (today).
1. The pain in my left knee.

Tue Aug 27 12:04:47 2002

I forgot!

I forgot to share an incident that happened on Friday!

N and I were sitting on my couch, watching anime and drinking our second bottle of wine, when there was a knock on the door.

I look throught the peep-hole, and it was the police! Like a good citizen I opened the door to them. Apparently there was a noise complaint, although it was not specific to our apartment. The officers asked if we were having a "little party," to which I responded, no, it's just me and my boyfriend, watching TV. Then they left, satisfied that our apartment was not the source of noise. (Noise which N and I never actually heard.)

Now, it is only thanks to that second bottle of wine that I was able to act calm and collected in front of the police! Normally, the cops freak me out, even when I'm not doing anything wrong. Especially if I'm not doing anythign wrong. I'm really not sure why. Then again, I have never had the police come to my door.

Tue Aug 27 14:02:17 2002

Wednesday

OK, something really bothered me at Franco Club last night - and you'll be surprise to know that it was not the heated political debate, not the small religious debate, and not Dan's plea that we not debate aesthetics. It wasn't even the way that Rick continual insisted that the women in Japan have been trained since birth to exist as fetish objects and not actual people in front of my half-Japanese former roommate (although that did make me a little uneasy - I wasn't sure of her reaction).
The thing that bothered me the most was the severe mocking Maggie and I received for buying brown paper lunch sacks!!! I guess normally I might not care, were I a normal person, and had I not suffered the following adversities through my 2-year-failure to buy not only lunch sacks, but also plastic sandwich baggies. I also might not care if that particular mocking had not echoed oh-so-many equally unfair high school mockings by equally-close friends.

Every single weekday of my entire life beginning in fifth grade (when lunchboxes were no longer cool,) I always brought a sack lunch to school (there were only a few occasions when I took hot lunch - our school's cafeteria was disgusting. Even the pizza was the second worst pizza I have ever seen in my life), and I always carried it in a brown paper lunch bag. Anything more or less would be uncool, and I would surely risk being mocked by my classmates. Elementary school kids can be vicious; even one's own name, written on the front of the sack in marker can be grounds for ridicule. A note inside the bag from one's mother could be certain death (especially if anyone saw it)! Therefore, in order not to make a spectacle of myself, I made sure I always carried a brown paper bag of the correct size and appearance.

During my college years I often got a cafeteria lunch, or picked up something somewhere to eat. However, there were certain times of year when I was not on the meal plan and did, in fact, carry a lunch. As I rarely packed my lunch or indeed, bought groceries, I tended to forget to buy brown paper bags. In fact, I only remembered recently. The bags mocked by my friends last night are the first lot of paper bags that I have ever purchased!

Previous to this purchase I attempted, on occasion, to recycle paper bags. However, since I rarely buy deli food and rarely remember to save those bags - and the bags tend to have mysterious greasy stains on them that make sense as you eat your falafel, but make so much less sense three weeks later - saving such bags for nearly daily lunch use proved to be impossible.

On a handful of occasions I have crammed my lunches into a singular Tupperware container. This turns out to be a back idea, as inevitably, moisture from one's sandwich will permeate the pretzels and turn them soft and inedible. Then one must carry around the Tupperware container, not to mention wash it. Sometimes said Tupperware container might sit in one's desk for few weeks during a non-lunch-packing interval. Then, if one is like me, washing the dish, an already nearly-impossible, daunting task, is made even more loathsome. I paper bag is the obvious solution to this problem.

Next, I would like to extrapolate on the evils of trivially mocking one's friends. Some "joshing around" is appropriate, and to be expected. Most of the time it is all in good fun. However, other verbal lashings are unwarranted, and unfun. It's the kind of thing that doesn't make you grow stronger, it just wears down at your soul.

For example, once during my sophomore year of high school, I happened to make the off-handed comment that I had matched my jeans to my shirt that morning. My best friend at the time laughed uproariously, and began mocking me mercilessly, all for this seemingly trivial remark.

Jen: You WHAT?! NO ONE does that! HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH! Jeans match everything! I can't believe you do that! Do you do that every morning?! I bet you do! What a freak!!! HAHAHAH! (Etc.)

I was absolutely crushed. I had spent so much time growing up trying to seem normal. I was already paranoid about my appearance. Having my best friend laugh at my supposed "strange" habit and announcing it to the world did not help my already non-existent self-esteem. After about 5 minutes of heavy ridicule I asked another friend if she also "matched" her jeans to her shirts, and she said, very non-chalantly, that she did. I was very glad to find that I was not some kind of freak for thinking that certain pairs of jeans that I owned, as they were different shades of blue or black, and different fits and cuts, did, in fact, match better with various shirts and sweaters.

Jen's routine mocking, which I'm sure she no longer remembers and would probably deny, became one of many soul-crushing events in my backlog of high school traumas.

Now, the lunch-sack mocking last night was not nearly as severe, but I did think it crossed the line. Of course, it is also possible that I am a paranoid freak, but at least I can rest assured knowing that I am not the only paranoid freak in our group.

Wed Aug 28 15:25:27 2002
Erin Finnegan @ 1:31 PM :: Comments []

Monday, August 26, 2002

Tuesday, tuesday tuesday!!
Erin Finnegan @ 7:37 PM :: Comments []

Sunday, August 25, 2002

Monday

Since I don't really feel like sticking to one topic here, I'll just randomly mention some stuff:

- Hi, Maggie! The cable box reset itself before the cable guy got there and downloaded all the program data like usual. The cable guy was nice about the computer etc., etc. More on this later. When will my computer get hooked up?

- My attempts to start out a controversial, 22+ comments generating conversation on my own blog have failed miserably. I think this is largely because OGT may have quit reading here, and Dave probably doesn't read my blog, I'll openly admit I don't read their blogs. I only have time for so many blogs per day.

- There was a blurb of a story on NPR that caught my attention today. You can hear it here:
http://search.npr.org/cf/cmn/segment_display.cfm?segID=148970

- I am halfway through The Rachel Papers by Martin Amis, and although it is not a laugh riot, I did greatly enjoy the narrator's list of top ten things to worry about for the week. It features each worry's previous week's rating in brackets on the side, and his commentary at the bottom of the list, much Billboard-Music-style, "Watch out for boil on back!" has been climbing the charts steadily, it's up to number four from last week, when it was number seven! Perhaps I should start such a pessimistic anxiety list right here on my blog!

- My search for the perfect anime-wallpaper-suitable-for-my-computer-at-work continues. I need to get PhotoShop so I can design my own goddamn wallpaper. You wouldn't believe the crap that passes as wallpaper on some of these sites... yeesh!

- I wish to take a poll among our friends to find out arbitrary things, such as, "Which screen size setting is best?" I have a theory that near-sighted and boring people prefer 800 x 600, and cool people like larger screen sizes to fit in more stuff. Maggie! Steal a voting script from somewhere, and host this on your site! I don't feel like paying extra for php support on my site.

Mon Aug 26 16:24:58 2002

Erin Finnegan @ 2:55 PM :: Comments []