...And I Worry About My Irrational Attitudes Towards Mice

I wrote this as more of an 'I'm so upset listen to me rant' thing for my xanga, but the ideas are the type of thing I would post here, although the style is different, because it was written for a different audience.  Also I haven't written a post in a long time.  So:


Now I'm going to talk about mice.  There are a lot of them in my house.  They also carry disease, and are getting into the food supply, and do things like chew on wires, which could be dangerous and set fire to our house, etc.  Therefore we need to get rid of them.  We could do this by using live traps, but they don't work very well.  (This does not make sense.  If I were a mouse, and I was going to get caught in a trap, would I pick the trap that would kill me?  Well no, I wouldn't.  So why do the actual mice do so?  I would make such a much better mouse than they do.)  So today my parents decided that we were going to use traps that would kill them.  And I completely broke down (honestly.  I have been known to emphasize--maybe that's not the right word.  I have a lot of control over my emotions.  I know what my reactions are, and I can suppress them easily, but often I choose not to so people will do what I want--my emotions slightly to try to manipulate people.  I was not doing so.  I had no idea that I was going to be this upset.  It was weird, because I do normally have so much control).  It wasn't even so much about the killing of the mice but dealing with having dead mice in our house.  I can't deal with dead things.  The end.  Period.  QED.  Whatever.  The only way I survive is by ignoring the existence of dead things and distancing myself from it.  I guess consciously I know that my house is full of dead bugs and there are probably also dead mice, but I do not think about it.  But if we're killing them, then I can't do that.  There must be dead things in our house, because we created them.  And I don't know what to do.

Then my father got home from the store (he was buying traps) and decided that we were going to try using live traps for a little while longer, and see if it helps at all.  So it's a little better.  But not a lot better.  Because we'll probably resort to using real traps, and if so I can't help wondering what right we have to do so.

When I was in the fifth grade, someone gave me a venus fly trap for my birthday.  And I didn't want to kill any flies, so I kept it under this plasic cup thing that came with it, so the flies couldn't get in, and it died.  There's probably an argument that there are a lot more flies than venus fly traps and venus fly traps are cooler and therefore I should have let it eat the flies.  But it would have killed so many of them, over the course of its existence.  And I guess I feel kind of the same way about the mice.  There are six of my family.  But how many mice will we kill to keep ourselves safe from whatever threat they pose to us?  How many animals will the boys consume over the course of their lives?  How many bugs trampled?  What gives us the right, except that we can?  Well, we can do a lot of things.  Our society is based on exploiting poor people from other countries (and to some extent our own) so we can support a well-off capitalist class who inherited fortunes from their parents who probably got them by displacing the tenant farmers in the great depression (we're reading The Grapes of Wrath.  It was an example.  Leave me alone).  And yeah, we can.  But how many people would sit around and say, Yeah, that's great, perfectly fine with me, I love exploitation?  We used to have slavery.  And we could have kept it.  But it would have been wrong.

My parents' arguments about the dangers of mice have left me scared, because I don't really want to die.  But I can't rationalize killing them except by placing a value on the lives of humans so far above that placed on mice that humans killing mice becomes a moral non-issue.  And I can't rationalize doing that.  So I just feel guilty.  Guilty because I can't stop my parents, and guilty because part of me cares enough about myself to not even want to, and is only worried about the process, and how there are going to be dead things in my house, which is not supposed to contain dead things.


Post a comment Tags: rant, mice, upset, irrational

And I Ponder Professional Relationships

So for some reason I am updating this blog instead of being productive.  Anyway, I was thinking about a musical I saw a while back, called The Pajama Game.  I do not know if any of you have seen it, but if not, I will briefly summarize.


This is a musical that centers mostly on the relationship between two people.  This is a romantic relationship.  It also involves a pajama factory.  One of the people (the female) is a worker at the factory, and she is the head of The Grievance Committee, and also heavily involved in the union.  Her name, for future reference, is Babe.

The other member of this romantic duo is named Sid, and he is some sort of manager.  He works for the owner of the factory and has to keep order.  Now, these two people kind of randomly fall in love and sing about it a lot because it is a musical.  However, the union wants a seven and a half cent raise, and there's no way the owner is going to give it to them.

So the workers strike (actually they just have a slowdown, I think).  And Sid comes in, very manly, and tells them to stop it.  And they all do, except Babe, who gets up and pulls the lever that shuts everything down.  Sid is quite angry, and he fires her.  Their relationship kind of goes downhill (by that I mean they are very angry and don't really talk anymore, I think) after that.

But at the end, Sid manages to get the union their seven and a half cent raise, and he and Babe are happy.

This musical bothered me a lot.  Mostly because their love was completely unsubstantiated.  (There's one pretty hilarious scene where Babe, after rejecting Sid several times, grabs him and kisses him as he is walking off-stage for apparently no reason).

But it also got me thinking.  Was Babe wrong to stop the machinery, because it hurt him?  (Probably not)  Was he wrong to fire her?  (Probably not)  Did he only fire her because they were in love and he felt betrayed? (Possibly)  If this was the case, was he wrong?  (Probably)  Was it bad that this affected their relationship? (Maybe?)  Was is bad that they got together again only after he got her her raise?  (Probably)

And I just didn't have any answers to these questions, so I thought I'd type up a blog post.

It also occurred to me that this could be related to Beatrice's demands on Benedick in Much Ado about Nothing.

Post a comment Tags: relationships, unions, professional relationships, the pajama game, people named babe

And I Hate the Two-Party System

I seem to have stopped writing posts here, because I don't have time to think very much any more.  However, I may start again, since it is break and I have nothing to do except think.  Unfortunately, most of this thinking does seem to get done in the middle of the night when I am slightly less than coherent, but I shall make the attempt.


It occurred to me, several weeks ago, as I was trying to fall asleep and did not have the time to write any thing, much less a lengthy blog post, that I hate the current two-party system with a particularly fierce passion.

This is aside from the general very good arguments that two-party systems are inherently flawed in general.  While I think this is true, ours seems worse than it could be.  No two-party system could possibly represent all view points, considering that there are far more than two view points in existence, but the two parties that we have in the United States (I know very little about the internal politics of any other country and will not attempt to address that here) seem inconsistent within themselves, making it very hard for me to agree with any one of them completely.

While my own views are not completely consistent, I try to make them so as much as possible, and the division between the democrats and the republicans is just entirely not helpful to this goal.  When I was little, and not expected to  know which positions and issues were considered 'liberal' 'left-wing' or 'democratic' and which were 'conservative' 'right-wing' or 'rebublican', people explained the differences to me.  The general impression I received was that the left was more supportive of government interference with the people when that interference was for the general good of the common man (welfare, breaking up monopolies) and that the right felt that the people should be left to their own devices and that big business was good for the economy and therefore for everyone, and should be let to function on its own.

And all that makes sense for a while.  When dealing with economic issues, it's fairly consistent.  But why is it that half the country feels that it's inappropriate for the government to interefere with a monopoly but it's perfectly okay for that same government to tell people who they can marry and what they can do with their bodies?  And the other half of the country feels that it's completely impermissible for two consenting adults to enter into a marriage if they happen to be of the same sex but thinks that it's horrible to stop big business from doing whatever they please?

How did we manage to come up with two internally inconsistent parties, and why isn't anyone doing anything about it?  I have a few thoughts on this, which aren't particularly coherent, but I will present them as best I can:

People tend not to think for themselves.  This is based mostly on personal experience with my own opinions.  I have often been presented with two well-supported sides to an issue and been completely unable to decide.  And in this situation, on of the factors I consider is how closely each of the arguer's positions on other subjects fit with my own.  I make the assumption that someone who agrees with me on the majority of issues is working from a moral standpoint reasonably close to my own, and if that person has considered an issue I have not and arrived at what looks like a sound conclusion about it, I am likely to go along, assuming that we will have the same viewpoints on everything.  But this is not a good assumption, because what if that is the one issue where this person and I actually would strongly disagree, if I had taken the time to come up with my own position?  Thus I am no longer really true to myself on an issue.

Then again, it's incredibly hard to research and come up with the background necessary to make well thought out political decisions on everything that could possibly come up.  It does make a certain amount of sense to say something that's essentially, "I agree with person X on just about everything, and I will trust this person to make all my political decisions for me."  But it doesn't make sense to choose between two people, or two parties, for this purpose.  Because two just isn't enough to find a person or party that matched your opinion even somewhat closely.

Post a comment Tags: inconsistency, politcs, political parties, two-party system

And I Complain about The Scarlet Letter (Or Really Just Dimmesdale)

If you haven't read The Scarlet Letter, you should stop reading now.  Seriously.  It will completely spoil everything.

I just finished The Scarlet Letter the other day.  I really liked the book.  I mean, quite a lot.  But I felt like I didn't have the same connections with the characters as I was supposed to.  I started out with Chillingworth as my favorite character.  I could understand his feelings quite a bit, expecially after that first conversation with Hester.  She was all right too, I guess.  But Dimmesdale?  He starts out with this incredibly hypocritical speech where he's trying to get her to tell the father, but not really, because that's him.  So already he's a hyprocrite, and kind of a jerk for letting Hester take all of the pain for him.  And throughout the book, he never has an original thought.  He just gives eloquent speeches on demand, spends a lot of time being angsty because he violated a code of morality he has no cause to believe in, and says silly things like, "Hester, you're strong.  You should think for me." (That was paraphased a little, but he said something very similar.)

One of the kids in my American Lit class made a really good point about this being kind of a feminist thing to do, since it contradicts the stereotype of the incredibly weak woman who lets her man do all the thinking for her, but still.

And then he dies.  Now, I have this theory that all deaths should be significant.  When an author kills a character, it should be for one of three reasons:

  1. The character's death was necessary to the development of the plot.
  2. The character was much hated, and his/her death was necessary to the reader's sense of fulfillment.
  3. The character was much-loved, and his/her death gave emotion to the book.
But I just didn't care about Dimmesdale, or Chilligworth really.  The only one I cared about was Hester.  Therefore she was the only one he should have killed.  But he didn't.  So I was very frustrated.  But at the same time, I felt as though if I had formed the emotional attachments to Dimmesdale and Chillingworth that Hawthorne expected me to, I would have found the ending more fulfilling. So now I feel cheated.

Post a comment Tags: characters, relationships, morality, adultery, the scarlet letter

And I Think about Secrecy

When someone confides in you a secret, are you morally obligated to lie to defend the secrecy of that secret?  You could, of course, just sit there and refuse to answer questions without saying if you are aware of the information asked for or what that information is.  But if you feel that even that will give something away, are you obligated to lie, to say you don't know, or even that you do know, but to give false information?  Does the situation change if the information you are withholding is pertains directly to the person you are withholding it from?  In what direction?

Post a comment Tags: lying, morality, secrecy

And I Am Happy with Vox and Can Use Html

So Vox finally started allowing people to write in html.  This makes me happy.  Perhaps this is strange of me, but I find having to stop and press a bunch of buttons and go through windows and the like very frustrating when I want to link to something.  I also was having a lot of trouble getting my posts to format correctly.  When I want to make one word bold, or italicized, and the button misinterprets that and starts doing all sorts of wacky things, I, being a perfectionist, have to spend enormous amounts of time going through and editing, and trying to convince it that it is not doing what I want and it needs to change that.  Html is so simple.  If it's not doing what I want, it's because I made a mistake.  If I want exactly one word to be bold, I just need to make sure that my tags enclose that one word.  And now I can.

2 comments Tags: html, vox, happiness

And I Ask a Question about Polygamy

So I copied this from my Xanga. Normally I support the principle of writing separate blog entries for separate blogs, but in this case I really want an answer to this question:

Some of you may remember a conversation I had with Benjy a while ago (well, not the conversation itself, but my description of it). The one about polygamy. Anyway, it came up again recently.

So I have a question:

If you were in a relationship with someone (assuming that they were of the opposite gender and that all parties involved were straight--I realize that for several of you this assumption is inaccurate, but I am asking you to pretend) and they wanted to add another person to the relationship of your gender (therefore they would have two sexual partners and you would only have one), and you disapproved of this person, would you be able to say no, even though you knew it would cause your partner unhappiness? And the same question, if you were worried about them leaving you?

Sorry I ask such weird things, by the way, but I am very curious.
Post a comment Tags: love, questions, jealousy, sacrifice, polygamy

And I Dislike the Present

This has been something I've been meaning to write about for a while now, but never feel I can express correctly.  I don't think I can express it this time either, I just got annoyed with myself for not writing things enough.  So bear with me.

Anyway, I've been thinking about time.  Specifically the present.  It has begun to seem to me recently that there's no reason why we should put up with it.  Perhaps that's not exactly what I mean.  But at any moment we seem fixed in a particular moment--there's no way to switch moments, except by waiting, and no way to go back.  The particular moment we're stuck in is the only moment we can change.  This makes sense, as the past is fixed and, assuming free will, the future is not relevant until the present has been lived.  My problem is that the present is the only moment that feels real.  There isn't any way to opt out of whatever's going on and relive the past.

And for some reason, this has begun to bug me.

Post a comment Tags: future, present, time, past

And I Am Bad at Making Decisions and Ask for Help

Favorite Shakespearean monologues anyone?  I have to prepare one for my King Lear audition Monday (it should be about one minute long, and the speaker should probably be female, although they don't have to be).

Post a comment Tags: shakespeare, king lear, auditions, monologues

And I Present to You Advice from The Elements of Style

Some advice from The Elements of Style:

The Elements of Style, Fourth Edition
The Elements of Style, Fourth Edition

Gerunds usually take the possessive case.

Use the active voice.

Use the word not as a means of denial or antithesis, never as a means of evasion.

Omit needless words.

Do not attempt to emphasize simple statements by using a mark of exclamation.


Rather, very, little, pretty — these are the leeches that infest the pond of prose, sucking the blood of words.


Never call a stomach a tummy without good reason.


Don't start by calling something a swordfish and end by calling it an hourglass.


You will also, in all probability, want to try writing that way, [the way of advertising,] using that language. You do so at your peril, for it is the language of mutilation.


Notes on specific words as taken from The Elements of Style:

Contact.  As a transitive verb, the word is vague and self-important.  Do not contact people, get in touch with them, look them up, phone them, find them, or meet them.

Finalize.  A pompous, ambiguous verb.

Importantly.  Avoid by rephrasing.

Meaningful.  A bankrupt adjective.  Choose another, or rephrase.

Personalize.  A pretentious word, often carrying bad advice.

Prestigious.  Often an adjective of last resort.  It's in the dictionary, but that doesn't mean you have to use it.


If I wanted to sound pretentious, I would start going around quoting from The Elements of Style.  I may do this anyway, but I think I will try not to.
4 comments Tags: writing, grammar, advice, the elements of style, pretentiousness, strunk and white, finalize …

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