December 5, 2002

horsekeeping

Cleaning, organizing, gutting out my room to make room for arson.

We reviewed our short stories in Fiction class today. No one spit and cawed about grammatical errors and verbation of nounage. No one broke down and wept when his work was criticized. No one leaped across their desk with a blade in his teeth.

Religion got raked over the coals today in Methods class when a student claimed that evidence of the resurrection of Jesus was basis enough to justify one’s faith in Christianity. David Hume won this round, with the argument that it is far, far more likely that the witnesses of the resurrection were mistaken than the laws of the universe were violated for that brief instant. Causality is a strong beast, and it takes something equally strong to bring it down.

Afterwards my professor loaded me down with a metric ton of criticism of Pinker. I’ve got Dupre’s book review of “How the Mind Works”, two papers on animal minds, an essay that hasn’t been published yet about how consciousness could have evolved, and a piece about biological adaptations and evolutionary epistemology. I’m trying to track down Jerry Fodor’s “The Mind Doesn’t Work That Way”, a piece that got published in a number of philosophical journals, but UMD hasn’t paid enough to access the full texts of pieces in WebSPIRS’s Philosopher’s Index.

Huh. Three seconds with Google and I’ve got whole dang thing, with hyperlinks to Fodor’s criticisms of evolutionary psychology. I love the internet. Both Pinker and I will be lucky if we come out of this one alive.

neon memories

As convenient as it would be for the sake of nostalgia… (“the sign of a dying culture,” said some guy whose parents never let him play with knives or mud or anything fun in his youth… one time I was building a walking robot dinosaur in my basement and cut my finger open with an x-acto knife. Gawd, those were the days, when I could stitch up my problems with the basement washtubs and a roll of toilet paper).

Ok. As convenient as it would be for nostalgia, my world of skiing did not start at Powder Ridge. When I was about two years old (the same year that my father was supposed to be watching me at the house, but somehow I ended up running around on the roof)… or three, or four, or whatever… my parents went out to Breckenridge and dumped me and my sister in their ski school/day care/kennel. Parents were able to cast off the shackles of their genetic inheritants and play on the Big Mountain (or mountains, as anyone who has been to Breck knows that it’s spread across a number of groovy peaks), as their squalling balls of frustration played on the insubstantial hill at the kennel.

I, of course, don’t remember any of this. As I creeped into my later elementary school years we made a habit of going out to Colorado every spring break to ski. We would always stop at a restaraunt called Casa Bonita in Denver, which was a slapdash arrangement of Mexican food and high-class entertainment. They had cowboy shoot-outs and cliff jumpers and waterfalls and caves and mariachi bands and a gorilla that kept escaping. It was the coolest place ever.

We usually went to Copper Mountain and Winter Park… or maybe we went to each one only once. I wasn’t blogging when I was nine so there’s really no way to look back and figure out what I did when how many times with who. One year we went out to Big Sky in Montana. One night as we were staying in a hotel in Winter Park we watched Jaws Two, and that pretty much ruined the ocean for me for a good portion of my youth. I think it was that same trip where we first got introduced to Twin Peaks, so that would put it around ’91. My mother and sister became obsessed with the show. I was too young to understand what was going on, but thanks to DVD technology I am able to relive the obsession I never had.

When I skiied it was never about form or posture. One time we went skiing with the Prestons (why the hell-?) and I remember Mrs. Preston talking about balancing a tray on her arms and then “prowling like a cat.” I thought she had gone crazy. I stole a rocky mountain rock on my way down that run. My family said I would get arrested by the forest service.

At Big Sky (I think) a photographer tracked our family down and offered to take our pictures. In an uncharacteristic mood (we usually viewed such things as unnecessary expenses) we agreed and shot a few family photos. This was the neon stage of the 80’s and I was decked out with matching head band, snow pants, gloves and jacket. By matching I mean neon green and pink. It was awesome.

Hmm. I think it was actually the early 90’s. We probably didn’t get over neon until ’92 or ’93. The move Encino Man has pure 80’s hair and style and color, but it wasn’t made until ’92. The decades aren’t nearly as distinct as you think they are. Damn.

My poles and skis matched too, and by matching I mean neon orange and yellow. After I got rid of the bondage skis back at Powder Ridge, I got some white Elans along with my sister. Given my record for losing things my father write my name and phone number in permanent marker across the tips of both skis. I felt like such a dork. I grew out of these skis as quickly as possible (or lost them) and got some K2 Rage skis. They were the envy of the 5th grade, hip and black with neon artwork and yellow bottoms.

They were also the last downhill skis I ever bought. In junior high we had something called Idea Day. Idea Days relieved our unappreciated teachers by letting kids go out and have fun in the real world while supposedly learning something. There were lots of options. You could go to the zoo. You could… uhh… go to the zoo. You could not skip Idea Days and were required to choose an activity. Either you go to the zoo… or… uhh… go skiing, I guess.

It was ’93 or ’94. We took a coach bus up to Spirit Mountain in Duluth. It was the last time I ever experienced the K2 Rage. It was also the last time I would downhill ski for seven years.

December 4, 2002

0rg4n1z4710n4l 5k1llz

Yesterday was crunch day. I turned in my short story that’s been brewing for the entire semester, and by the end was stained with blood draining from my eyes. It’s a nice piece about a road trip, but as with anything written it’s not finished yet. Not done. Never done. You don’t finish a work, you abandon it. Nevertheless, I may soon post a few excepts here for ya’ll.

In another class I gave an hour-long presentation on the current state of the Nature vs. Nurture debate according to Steven Pinker. Pinker is a psychology professor at MIT that does work in cognitive science. Pinker believes in an innate and universal human nature. Pinker is also a self-proclaimed expert in everything. EVERYTHING.

His new book, The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature., is topping out best-seller lists all over the place. His new book is also a mishmash of everything that Pinker is an expert in. Pinker is a fine writer, and the pages fly by fine as you read it, and you say, “Hey, here’s a scientist that speaks my language. This’um is a boy I can understand!” But when you step back from the seduction of the poet you realize that Pinker doesn’t follow through with any of his arguments. He tosses something out, “Parents have very little influence on the way their kids develop, while peer groups do,” and keeps citing the same circular evidence for the statement.

A few subjects that Pinker is an expert in:

Psychology, evolutionary psychology, family values, violence, rape, selfish gene theory, moral philosophy, egoism, utilitarianism, neoptism, epistemology, parenting, socialism, capitalism, the Left, the Right, anthropology, social constructivism, reductionism, religion, relativism, ethics, crime and punishment, society, culture, superorganisms, the individual, folk science, education…

The book topic is so grandiose that Pinker does justice to nothing, and may be doing science a huge disfavor with his rubbish selling like hotcakes. However, I would definitely recommend you read it. Just please don’t hold it like the Bible. Throw away the dust cover. Drag the book behind your car and tear out pages when you finish them. Always keep in mind that what this boy says is not legitimate science.

When I finished my presentation my professor paused, scratched his head and said, “Your paper’s going to be organized, right?”

I took the rest of the day off.

December 3, 2002

quiz time

“It illuminated the entire forest with a white light,” he added. “The object itself had a pulsing red light on top and a bank of blue lights underneath. The object was hovering, or on legs.”

This passage describes a…

a) Honda Civic

b) Wooch! Expedition

c) UFO

d) Jesus

Check your answer.

What are 16-year-old boys doing with axes these days?

a) killing pets

b) killing themselves

c) killing blind men

d) chopping wood.

Check your answer.

Where are we putting cameras?

a) in shopping malls

b) in your bedroom

c) in outer space

d) in our bowels

Check your answer.

What makes you impotent?

a) radiation

b) mountain biking

c) Austria

d) that guy’s hair

Check your answer.

December 2, 2002

half full/empty/baked

Lately I’ve been getting headaches from sitting in front of the computer six hours a day, five days a week. If I ever want to make it in the working world (which I’m not sure I do, and I’m currently entertaining dreams of being a windsurfing/snowboarding/rock climbing bum post-graduation) I need to remedy this maladie. After performing an amateurish eye exam at a Culver’s in Madison, we decided that I probably have a stigmatism. It sounds painful, what with Christ and nails and blood and everything, but really it’s just achy and annoying.

Well, really achy, really, and I need to do something about it. Since it ain’t something simple like far-sightedness or near-sightedness or eye-loss I need to get prescription glasses. And that’s where you can be helpful, dear reader. Is there any sort of eye place up here in the Twin Ports area that people absolutely adore? I have heard awful things about Pearle Vision, which has an establishment at Miller Hill, but besides that this is a completely foreign realm to me. Short of poking my eyes out with sticks and stumbling around with a cane, what other options does the Duluth/Superior area offer?

Yes, I’m fully aware this is a blatent shirking of responsibility on my part, but I’m a busy, busy man that needs to stay glued to this headache machine.

December 1, 2002

buzz

When I was a wee youngin’ and learning to ski, my family would always go out to Powder Ridge in Kimbal, Minnesota. The hill was an improbable nub of rock jutting out of an endless sea of farmland. It wasn’t a great ski hill by any means, but if you were a seven-year-old sprite with limited knowledge of gravity and muscles to burn, it was about as close to heaven as you could get.

We always went on weeknights, probably because it was less crowded and less expensive than a weekend jaunt would be. I never saw the place in daylight, but that’s just as well. It enhanced the mystery. Their floodlights worked to keep the darkness of winter at bay. I always hear their buzzing floodlights.

I had some old skis that were made before bindings came rigged with stopping mechanisms, so I had to wear leather straps that snaked around my legs. One time I got tired of carrying those skis and left them at the hill. I insist that I left them behind because I thought my parents would pick them up. My parents insist I left them behind because I hated those skis. We’re probably both right.

When we got cold we would go into the chalet for donuts with sprinkles and hot chocolate. They had two orange boot-warming machines that I found fascinating, but my dad would never give me quarters to try it out. They also had an arcade with Streets of Rage. You got to punch people a lot.

Once I became mildly competent at skiing (and I got some new skis) I would often run off on my own. I liked to ski through the trees and fly off jumps, and my dad liked to disapprove of these antics. Once when going up the chairlift alone I saw someone pull a 360 off a neat jump. When I got off the chair I waddled over to the chute, and after getting my nerves up I burned downhill and shot off the jump. It was after I got some serious air that I realized the jump sat a good ten feet above the landing. I flew about fifteen feet through the air and crumpled face first into the snow, losing my poles and skis to a full-on yard sale. Some kids on the chairlift howled encouragement. I smiled.

When I met back up with my parents they were talking about seeing this one kid bite it off a jump. I said that was me. They looked at me funny. People have looked at my funny ever since.

November 27, 2002

to enter the thanks

I am on Friday mode, which directs me to the Friday room for Modern Short Story, which is different from the Monday and Wednesday room. I find that class is already in session and they are watching a crazy video with puppets fighting to Indian music. I am perplexed until I realize that today is not Friday, that this is not my class, that we are not studying warring tribes of puppetry. I fear tardiness and hoof it to the real room, until I remember that on Wednesdays we don’t have class until 3:00. I should feel somewhat embarassed, but this is the Wednesday before break and no one is here to witness my follies.

Once again campus has become the belly of a ghost ship. Spectres drift through the timbers and a janitor stands guard at the clothing donation box. A bottle of Coke explodes upon the floor outside the photography room. I notice, for the first time, a faculty member that looks like a short and crinkled version of David Bowie. At least the network is fast when no one is here.

I desire an exit from these walls, a freedom of three tenths of a fortnight that will allow me time to finish writing my fifteen page short story and prepare an hour long presentation on Steven Pinker’s studies regarding innate faculties of the brain. Both are due on Tuesday.

November 26, 2002

something fishy in boom town

iraq inspectors don’t want journalists

The weapons inspectors say they don’t want reporters in tow because then they won’t be able to do their job properly. The weapon inspectors fear that journalists may jump the gun and report that no WMD’s have been found, even though off-site data analysis needs to be done before that can be known to be the case. Or known not to be the case, as the case may be.

Iraq is more than happy to let the geeks with notebooks crawl all over everything. Iraq usually has one of the most oppressive press policies known to man.

Figure that one out.