With Age Comes Wisdom: I am God!

For those of you who are new to Prodigy, this segment is a list of quotations selected by me and written by me, and also edited and published by me. Such blatant hubris would probably be unacceptable if ”With Age Comes Wisdom” were, say, a point of purchase book , but this is a blog so I am allowed to ignore formalities and professional conflicts of interest and get away with considering myself the smartest thinker who has ever lived (with this kind of freedom, why would anyone seek to ponder the various implications of blogging as if it were the bane of all future creativity or something?). The quotations included in this series, when removed from their original contexts, often read like truisms. I think it’s safe to say that these posts are lazy posts, and for lack of anything substantive and interesting to write I decided once on a whim to just pick the best parts from some half-assed things I was writing. Those bits and pieces of writing were slapped together in the form of quotations into a post, I gave it a title and – Viola! – the “With Age Comes Wisdom” series was born. I think of it as a way to salvage good writing from what can basically be considered bad writing. When you write two paragraphs of crap, and only one or two sentences from those paragraphs stand out, you want to find a way to preserve those one or two good sentences, because the sentences that stand out exemplify something in your writing that you hope will last forever.

So without further ado, here is the latest installment of “With Age Comes Wisdom”:

~Judge, Jury and Finger Pointer~

“Judgment comes from viewing others (especially strangers) objectively, whereas we see ourselves as intricately nuanced and complicated. Each one of us is our own glass onion, whereas most of the everyday acquaintances we come into contact with look like the outsides of onions with a layer or two peeled back.”

Tim Freeman

~Loneliness~

“The only person each of us will ever completely know and get to be best friends with in life is the one person who we can’t ever wish to be – ourselves.”

Tim Freeman

~Mind under matter~

“The biggest flaw with chasing after lofty ideals is that they are perfect conceptions of our brains, and these conceptions remain uncorrupted by the real world as long as they stay in our heads. Life, as all of us know, is far from perfect, and when pure notions are put to the test in the messiness of reality, they don’t always hold firm.”

Tim Freeman

With age comes wisdom redux (because this is just too damn)

On marriage: “Themed weddings can be quite cool. I have some friends who had a Star Trek themed wedding. After 10 years of knowing them I came to the conclusion that their life together and the way they face the world is just like an episode of Star Trek Next Generation. They also own one of the cleanest houses imaginable. Inside their home there is not a speck of dust, there are no smells and they breathe artificial air year round. In a lot of ways their house is like a big spaceship.”

With age comes wisdom: the last

On the philosophy and psychology of morals:

“Morals are just abstract thoughts, so technically they don’t exist (unless we argue that they exist as bundles of synapses and neurons in the brain).

But evidence of morals can be witnessed by what they do and don’t create. Morals act to motivate or inhibit our actions. If somebody commits a good deed out of the kindness of their heart, this is an example of a moral transforming into an existing, tangible action in nature.

In this way evidence of morals are all around us. How diseases are treated, how populations are herded together, war, pollution, books, speeches, everyday chit-chat…it is all morals.

Whether someone is religious or not is irrelevant to the makeup of their moral constitution. If a person litters, own a lot of weaponry or if they are emotionally or physically abusive towards strangers and loved ones, it is fairly easy to make an assessment of which way their moral compass points.

-the arsenal of personal weapons equals a distrust of others probably stemming from a latent tendency to want to inflict injury and steal.

-the litterbug habits betray disrespect for one’s natural and physical environments, and also suggest a fatalistic attitude toward the world in general. If a person litters it also means they have a problem with rules and authority.

-the mistreatment of others signifies an addiction to control and power and it is also an instance of taking their frustrations out on others.”

With age comes wisdom: chapter V (this is getting old)

On Jerry Falwell: “Attitudes, prejudices and traditions get passed on from generation to generation. Only by studying American history can we learn about ourselves and recognize why we react to certain things the way we do. Every generation is obviously unique, and some things from the past have been all but forgotten and buried. But a consistency in thinking traverses each decade. The late Jerry Falwell contributed greatly to the chorus of voices that inform this consistent way of thinking. His name may eventually fade away, but the mindset he helped perpetuate will continue to echo out in time, lapping against the consciouses of future Americans. That, more than anything, will ultimately be his legacy.”

With Age Comes Wisdom: Part III

On love: “Love born out of fear is dependency, but I do not reject love.”

On relationships: “Men are the more impulsive sex. We start things abruptly, change our minds and then change them back again. Have you ever seen how we watch TV? Two minutes into a show we think we know everything. It may seem as if we have very short attention spans, but hindsight for us is always 20/20. This is the reason why we will frequently call females at 3 in the morning to try and restore a relationship that has been on hiatus for 2 months. All of our erratic impatience is really just indecision camouflaged as impulsivity.

Females seem to think things through more carefully. They don’t normally start and get involved in relationships and then suddenly stop and restart them again. They slowly feel their way all the while trying to decide if something is right for them or not.”

On American obsessions: “America’s obsession with octo-moms might just pave the way for a new genre in porn: octo-penetration.”

On virgin birth: “I personally think the Virgin Mary is overrated. The Virgin Barry was a much more spectacular and iconic historical figure.”

Men are from Mars, Women shop at Frederick’s of Hollywood

Hidden in between all of the cologne ads and half-naked, oily (and airbrushed) models of magazines like Vougue and GQ is the pabulum that instructs us how to think. It fleshes out the copious images of people too beautiful for this world, people who should only exist in the fantasy realm of TV. People whose job it should be to serve as vicarious and ideal mirrors for everybody else. Could my reality possibly be warped by this surreal and perfect representation of our world?

I couldn’t stand to hear Ariel Levy criticize modern standards of beauty on You Tube recently. To hear her expound on the sinfulness of smooth pubises, fake breasts and “unnatural” appearances struck a nerve with me. An audience of her admirers who did nothing but validate her observations in the comment section only infuriated me further, and I felt emboldened to leave several replies. I struck up an argument with a person who called herself regressuer, and being facetious I wrote that, in deference to decorum, women are not allowed to look “too slutty or too plain,” their “areolas can’t be too big,” they can’t wear their hair too frizzy or too short and they, “can’t be too fat or too skinny.” Taking it even further I mentioned other style no-no’s such as g-strings should not be worn by “flat” women, no freckles, wrinkles, long hair after 40 (except bobs) or shiny white bras worn underneath sweaters. Obviously this was to get a laugh, but after reading back this jeremiad of style faux pas imposed on today’s females, I realized that the guidelines for inclusion into the It crowd are insanely tight and leave no room for error.

My jokingness was immature but there was a lot of truth to it. So many females today are fashion victims, forced to compete with goddesses like Paris Hilton and Tina Fey. Men can also live in fear of the fashion police just as much as women (believe me, I know), but more often than not a man with a paunch will be seen linking arms with a hottie at an outlet mall and never vice versa.

Attacking my shallow-mindedness regresseur wrote, “Sophistication doesn’t necessarily equate to being more attractive or more ‘right’ and ‘just’.” She then went on to call my reasoning “fallacious” and my style rules “a tangent.” Perhaps realizing that my snarky sense of humor obscured my good intentions, I told the story of a man in ancient Greece who had seen the statues of goddesses when he was coming of age and how he didn’t know what pubic hair was when he finally lost his virginity. Sure, he knew about his own, but he didn’t know what it was doing on a female. This didn’t go far enough in the end at making me look sympathetic, and regressuer walked away assured she was the victor of our short-lived little argument.

But her certainty that she is right denies a serious problem: that an entire generation of males and females is coming of age having no appreciation for the beauty of an actual, natural woman’s naked body.

With Age Comes Wisdom: Part II

On politics and the media: Here is what I think: conservative and liberal minded individuals are hyper-sensitive to every bit of reportage that contradicts their respective party’s agenda. If a liberal is driving in his car and he hears an outspoken radio personality ripping apart the latest stimulus bill as an example of Obama’s lack of political experience, the man automatically jumps to the conclusion that the entire spectrum of talk radio is dominated by bloviating Rush proteges. Conversely, when a republican watches Jay Leno make a joke on the Tonight Show about the Palin family’s extraordinary fertility, she boils about the unfairness of liberal Hollywood and the headlock it has on our nation’s collective conscious.

On self defense: It’s only taken me 32 years, but I finally went out today and bought one of those cute little 2-foot long golf clubs made for 6 year olds.

On humor: Conservative women don’t have abortions. Catholics, evangelicals, army wives–they all hate abortion because they know only liberated hippie women with hairy pits power vac their uteruses to infuriate them.