The Survival Instinct

As much as I don't like to get my views from pop culture, one movie I pleasantly enjoyed was Saw 2. During the movie, the serial killer spouts philosophical nonsense about how humans have lost their Survival Instinct. The very things we do when we know death is imminent are different than the things we do when we have the luxury of not knowing when we will die. Thus, we go from day to day eating but not tasting, seeing but not adoring, hearing but not understanding... If evolution does stand as a theory, it has lost its value through the birth of man: a being that lives on as the top of food chain yet does not have the "edge" to be there. We throw away our lives with gluttony, sloth, and indifference. The very ones we are suppose to love (family, friends) we push away in selfishness and stubbornness on a regular basis.

While this may very well be true, I don't have cancer nor do I have knowledge of my death. Yet I see the complacency sink in as my goals are or are not accomplished in life. Call it being a guy, but when I don't meet the par I fight hard to get there; and when I finally do I sink back in inactivity and dullness.

We see this everywhere. Girls dress up and put on makeup, and when they finally score the guy they want- they cut their hair and put on weight. Guys improve their character and work hard to impress the girl they like, but when they finally get what they want they sink back to their gaming chairs and computer screens. And it doesn't just apply to sexual relations- careers, hobbies, knowledge... Gov't workers are slow because they can never really lose their jobs, and so any type of work that they do will take much longer (ever been to the DMV?). But these are all in the context of marginal survival. If you want to be accepted socially, you need a spouse, a job, and an interesting personality. None of this relates to actual life and death.

We live in a world that has removed conflict from our lives, and that confuses us. Civilization has removed all danger of death from us, and so we turn to society to give us answers on how to get that "edge" to survive. Boys fight and play with guns for the first 5 years of their lives, and then the next 10 years they are taught that guns and fighting is bad. Now I'm not making any judgement calls on parenting or how things "should be", but I think that we are wired in some way that is evident in how our lives should have been lived. After all, we are definitely different from the other animals and so maybe our challenge is figuring out what exactly we are to do with that difference.

I'm boring myself and losing track of what I originally wanted to post.

I don't want to be complacent. In 20 years I don't want to lose my push, my edge, my focus in any of the hobbies or aims that I have in life. I look at so many of the older people I know and they are quite simply lethargic and single minded corporate robots. Now, raising a family probably had quite a bit to do with that, but what role models would we be if we don't start pushing ourselves now? It should never stop, I think. We should always strive to be better. And I just realized this is the speech that landed me a job.

Maybe I'll continue this post later. Happy thanksgiving.

Profanity

I've been watching South Park very recently. After running out of interesting shows to watch, I decided to pick up something that everyone I know watches but I really never cared for. It started about two months ago, when the boredom of unemployment really caught up to me.

That show is FUNNY. And each episode (usually) actually has a point. They used to be just random stories crafted to entertain for 20 or so minutes, but lately it's gotten very political and current events driven. In fact, I'd say half of my current events knowledge stems from watching that show haha. If you haven't watched the show, watch the current season and work your way back. Don't watch the first 3 seasons.

My favorite characters are definitely Kenny, Butters, and Kyle. Kenny is just super cute with his hoodie always covering his face and obscuring his speech. The fact that he's a very passive character and yet I immediately miss him in the episodes he's not in means that he is placed VERY strategically in the show. Butters is just adorable, and that song he always sings gets to me. As much as they bash his character on the show, butters is there in all my favorite episodes. Kyle is the Jewish boy of the show and I like him because his character is 90% anger and yet he makes me laugh regardless. That is a well defined character. I think out of all the characters in the show I identify with Kyle the most because he is always bashing Cartman for being racist, insensitive, and just fat. Without Kyle, Cartman would not be half as funny as he is on the show.

But the title of my post is profanity. Why? They curse on that show a LOT. I think the fact that they say the f-word uncensored in later seasons is a good indication that they push for linguistic freedom. In fact, if you've ever seen the movie, they have an entire song dedicated to the f-bomb. Yet the show is still hilarious... more hilarious than any show that has extreme censorship. I think it has to do with freedom of speech's affect on the writers. They don't believe in censorship, so the genius of their scriptwriting shines through in its true nature. They have more tools, and because of that they can cross all sorts of borders that other scriptwriters can't. You can express anger and shock ten times better with swear words.

I haven't cursed since middle school. I can't say it's been a good decision, but it was a conscious one. I made it a rule to not even use "substitutional" words such as 'freak' or 'heck'. Nothing. Looking back, I think this was a stupid decision. Sure, it saved my hide and people respect what I say... but what good is that? In the end my personality remains as evident as those censored cartoons ended up, dull and bland. Even when I'm angry, I can't express it properly and so it becomes unfamiliar territory for me to express anger through words. And yeah, I started using substitutionary words anyway. So what's the difference?

I started cursing again in my mind in mid high school. It became a habit and sometimes I would habitually think it when something terrible happened. Sometimes I would utter partial curse words and stop myself after the first two letters. But I think that the fact that we have these words is evident that our friends are invaluable to us. After all, if you were alone and had no one to talk to, could you hold in the feelings of anger, joy, or shock without saying a word? Words aren't there just to implant an message into those around us, words are there for us to express ourselves. Profanity is just a small part of those words, and if we ignore those we live in denial of our frustrations and angers... and if we live in denial long enough we may lose that part of our personality when we actually rightly need it.

We should always filter the words we say but we should never filter who we are and how we feel.

Hello World

This is my first blog post. Just testing it.

I'm just psyched to try out Google wave.
I don't think anyone will really read this, at least not anyone I know.
But, I will try to share my honest opinions in these posts...
I'm known for being blunt, so actually I hope no one I know reads this.
Just trying to practice being honest I guess... something I think a lot of people have abandoned to reap numerous perks in life; and you only really pay for it with people's trust.