The "Earliest Memory Game"

I was tagged to do this from Fiery here.

THE RULES
1. Describe your earliest memory where the memory is clear enough to provide at least 3 details.
2. Give an estimate of your age at the time.
3. Tag some other bloggers with this thread.

Early memories. They are a bit of a minefield for me. But lets give it a shot.

I remember being in my living room with several giant people around and mom. I kept running around the room and back to mom. Mom kept telling me to get my hand out of my pants. I assume this is a really early memory based on the relative size of the adults, but I don't know how old I was. And it doesn't qualify as I don't remember details.

So, next I can remember sharing a bedroom with my brother. This was before we moved to the basement which was rented out at this time. What I remember about sharing a bedroom with my brother is laying there in my bed as quiet as I could be scared he would come over and hurt me if I was too loud. He was three years older than me. I don't remember him actually hurting me at any point but that is my earliest memory of sharing a room with him. I don't know the age here either. Though still pretty young. Still no good details.

I remember a young grade school memory. I went to a small grade school for christians. So I didn't have many classmates. There were like 9 or 10 other kids in the class. My hair was cut all through grade school by my dad who literally put a bowl over my head and cut my hair around it. He gave me and my brother one choice. Did we want our hair to cover our ears or not? We always chose to have it cover our ears. I don't know why as the old photos show that to be a hideous look. Though maybe we were worried about the safety of our ears. A possibility.

All the other kids in my grade school class liked to make fun of me to their delight. The most popular was to make fun of my hair. My hair is straight. It likes to stand up in the middle even if long. So the hair would kind of fan straight up with static electricity on the top of my head.

One of the kids decided to call me fern because of it. It stuck as a nickname for the next 6 or 7 years till I went to High School. I hated that nickname. This was in 1st or 2nd grade.

I try not to remember things from when I was young. The memories, even when they start out fun, do not remain that way when I dig a little deeper. Childhood sucked for me on many levels.

As for who I will tag... No one. I do not have many readers anyway and I would not inflict this assignment on any of them.

More Objectivist Humor!

Why don't Objectivists wear pocket protectors? So that people won't mistake them for accountants.

How many Objectivists does it take to change a light bulb? You second-hand, evading social metaphysician, Ayn Rand has already changed it. The world just hasn't noticed yet.

What's two plus two? Whatever Ayn Rand said it was.

What's two plus two? Ayn Rand said it was "four," but she never followed up on her own groundbreaking insight. Now, thanks to the work of David Kelley, we're finally able to verify her result independently and give it the attention it deserves.

Why was Ayn Rand so paranoid? Because of her psycho epistemology.

Why did the non-Objectivist chicken cross the road? To mooch off the productive achievements of the Objectivist chickens who had already shown the way to the other side. (Fortunately, since A is A, a tunnel collapsed on it and it died as it deserved.)

Even more humor

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More Humor

Ayn Rand’s A Selfish Christmas

In this hour-long radio drama, Santa struggles with the increasing demands of providing gifts for millions of spoiled, ungrateful brats across the world, until a single elf, in the engineering department of his workshop, convinces Santa to go on strike. The special ends with the entropic collapse of the civilization of takers and the spectacle of children trudging across the bitterly cold, dark tundra to offer Santa cash for his services, acknowledging at last that his genius makes the gifts — and therefore Christmas — possible. Prior to broadcast, Mutual Broadcast System executives raised objections to the radio play, noting that 56 minutes of the hour-long broadcast went to a philosophical manifesto by the elf and of the four remaining minutes, three went to a love scene between Santa and the cold, practical Mrs. Claus that was rendered into radio through the use of grunts and the shattering of several dozen whiskey tumblers. In later letters, Rand sneeringly described these executives as “anti-life.”

Some humor to get through the day!

The 25 Most Inappropriate Things An Objectivist Can Say During Sex

by Jason Roth

1. "Before we continue, there's something I have to ask you. Will you still accept the axiom that existence exists tomorrow?"

2. "I appreciate the thought, but I consider it an act of self sacrifice for you to swallow."

3. "I believe in the complete separation of the left leg from the right."

4. "Now that's what I call standing up for what you believe in."

5. "Emotions are the mind's near-instantaneous evaluation of a perceived fact or idea as either good or bad for the individual. Hence, my wet panties."

6. "You sure smell better down here than the collectivists I've slept with."

7. "To say 'Fuck me harder' one must first know how to say the 'me'."

8. "No, I don't always object to you sticking your finger there. But that's a borderline case."

9. "So dear, shall it be the steel magnate position tonight, or the A is A? Oh, damn, we're all out of Cool Whip. So much for the A is A."

10. "I haven't had this much fun since I rejected the concept of God."

11. "There's no such thing as a collective orgasm. But let's try our best."

12. "Would you like me to concretize that for you?"

13. "Contradictions do not exist. You can't insert it there and there at the same time. Wait a second. Open up the top drawer of my nightstand."

14. "Good for you, you finally found my G-spot. Score one for goal-directed action."

15. "No, you're not my first. But you are the first man whose penis has made me understand the role of measurement omission in the act of concept formation."

16. "Don't you have any Tchaikovsky? Rachmaninoff is fine for 69s, but nothing beats Tchaikovsky when it comes to anal."

17. "What do you mean, it's 'possible' that you had an orgasm? Are you saying that you have some evidence that you had an orgasm, but not sufficient evidence?"

18. "No, I don't need Viagra. It's this damn non-objective pornography."

19. "You feel warm and fuzzy? Check your premises."

20. "It's time for me to teach you the difference between Platonic love and Aristotelian love."

21. "You selfish bitch! You greedy, selfish bitch! What? You don't like my pillow talk?"

22. "It doesn't really matter whether I come or not. I believe that man's tongue is an end in itself."

23. "Don't construe my liking that as an instance of the sanction of the victim. Now excuse me while I wipe off my face."

24. "There's nothing like grasping the objectivity of values. And what values they are."

25. "John? Who is John?"

Life change

My life mate wants to leave me for an internet lover and move half way around the world to be with him, taking one of our two children with her.

We have been together, though I admit not happy all the time, for 15 plus years.

I can’t sleep. My health is in the pisser. I am an emotional wreck.

For 15 years we have stuck it out through thick and thin. Through a lot of shit.

I always thought that we would somehow work it out. It would turn into what we both wanted if we tried hard enough, long enough.

I was wrong. Maybe I was silly. Or stupid.

All I know is that it is over now. All that time, all that effort, all that sweat and tears led to this. Failure.

I guess it was over years ago and I just didn’t know it.

I will admit that I have been miserable for many of the years we have been together. And so has she. I couldn’t give her what she wanted. I was inadequate. I was a fool.

I still don’t know how to emotionally deal with this. Because even though it is “over”, it isn’t.

We have tons of details to work out. If she stays until the plans are all ironed out, she will be with me in my house for months, or a year. Always there, causing pain just by being there.

But if she leaves immediately and goes to her parents until the big move, I lose my son that much sooner.

Do I get an attorney and fight in court for custody rights for both kids? I don’t have the money for the attorney and I am unsure of my abilities to single Dad two kids. Especially when I want them to continue to be home schooled. I have to keep working. I don’t know how to keep income coming in, raise and educate both kids by myself.

Life is hard. It just got harder.

How do I move on with my life? How do I get through this?

I don’t know what to do.

“What would you change in your life if you could go back in time and change it?”

Starhawk’s answer is that he wouldn’t change anything. “I would never give up those experiences. Good or bad, right or wrong, it’s those experiences that have made me who I am.”

In my life, though there have been lots of key decisions, there was one major turning point. There was a point where a different decision would have guaranteed a completely different life path. A path where I wouldn’t have ended up in the Midwest. One where I wouldn’t have kids. At least not kids by the same woman. My life would have been fundamentally different in every way. This turning point was about 17 years ago.

But that is as far as I can see. I can’t see down that path to see if it would have been a better choice. Many times in the past 17 years I have assumed it would have. But there is no real way to know.

The things I do know.

I would never have met my wife. Or my kids. I would never have held my babies in my arms. Or ended up home schooling them.

I would not have discovered Ayn Rand and Objectivism. Which led me down a philosophical path that completely changed me as a person.

My current life path is not perfect. There are many changes that need to be made to improve quality of life and create happiness.

But I have to agree with Starhawk. I couldn’t give up this path. I worked to hard on this path to throw it all away.

Now, the premise of this question is obviously flawed. Even if I would go back in time to change things, I obviously couldn’t. There is no time travel.

This is it. Whatever life path you are on is the only one you have. But you are not stuck with it. Peter McWilliams said that everything you have done in your life up till this moment is nothing but a prelude in the book of your life; your story begins now.

You can change your life path. You can change where it is going in the future. You can throw it all away and try a different path. You can change it radically or desperately. Or you can modify your life path and change it for the better incrementally. Keeping what you have already built that is good and adding elements to your life that you need to improve it.

The trick is to not turn into a zombie and just stagger through your life unthinking. Letting the irreplaceable years drift by with no plan to improve your life. With no goals. That is the tragedy too easily seen all around. People who have given up.

I don’t believe acceptance is a virtue. It can have it’s time and place. But blanket acceptance is a cop out. It’s giving up.

Don’t give up. Never give up.

An Apology

I have been online for a total of 10 or 15 mins total for the last two or so weeks.

Thank you so much for continuing to check back.

I am finally back online!!!!! Yeah!!!!

Now if I can just stay healthy this blog should keep rolling and maybe even expand a bit.

That is my hope anyway.

Thank you again.

Crazyman

Four Years

My daughter is 14. In other words, she just started High School.

Now this means something a little different at our house than most because we are home schooling our kids.

The final four years of home school. Finally!

This is what I have been waiting for her whole life. For her to be mentally capable of learning all the stuff I want to teach her. And she is ready!

Now I can teach her all the science, philosophy, history, literature, writing, and logic courses I have been itching to teach her for all this time.

Here is where you might expect me to take a sharp turn in the direction of this post and say something like: Now that the time has come I am terrified or unsure what to teach or something to that effect.

Nope! I am just excited. Giddy even. I keep reworking the curriculum order. Tweaking it.

All the lectures I have waiting for her, all the books I can’t wait for her to read, all the great figures in history for her to discover. All the intellectual discussions waiting.

Now it begins.

At Worlds End

I started writing a review of the last Pirates of the Caribbean movie a while back. It was to be a rather negative review with nods to entertaining parts of the movie. A mostly thumbs down review.

Then something odd happened to me. I was at IMDB researching certain details about the film for my review: actual length of the film, correct spelling of actors names, that kind of thing. Then I got sidetracked by the various links that IMDB always has for movies: Trivia mainly, but also quotes, gaffs, references to other movies in this movie.

I started learning more about the film. The more I learned about the film and why they made various plot choices, the more I liked the film. This may seem obvious and I have noticed this about other films I have liked, but that’s my point really. I usually only research into the background of movies I like. Lord of the Rings, Star Wars, etc. I don’t usually waste any more time than the viewing for a film I don’t like.

And I didn’t like At Worlds End. Not at first.

What I found out was that this film, and Dead Man’s Chest before it, really delves into pirate lore. I thought of them before as just action comedy fluff movies. Not epic movies that have had a lot of thought put into them.

But these are Epics. This trilogy deserves to sit beside such great epics as the Star Wars saga and the Lord of the Rings movies.

I knew little to nothing about pirate lore before seeing these films you see. I still don’t know lots. But now I am aware that there is a rich mythology of pirates and this trilogy is a grand homage to that mythology.

Davy Jones, Calypso, The nine pirate lords, the pieces of eight, the east India trading company, and so much more.

I don’t know how true the movie makers of this trilogy were to the original mythology or how much they made up and added to it. All I know is I have come full circle and find myself giving these big thumbs up.

There be substance to these there movies, matey! Arrr!

But maybe you need to really like pirates to appreciate it. I am starting to.

Hospitals and Clinics

Starhawk made a comment a while back about near death experiences and how they can change the course of your life.

I have been thinking about that. Especially after my latest extended hospital stay.

During this ER – hospital visit (five days) I was told at one point that I had congestive heart failure and was bleeding into my lungs. That’s the kind of thing that can really scare a guy! At least it scared this crazyman.

I later found out that that statement was not accurate. (a kind way of saying that the doctor lied to me) But the shock and fear that this pronouncement produced in me is still with me.

I am no longer confident in my health. I have to admit that until now, I never truly believed I was vulnerable to major health problems. If I am to be honest, and honesty is important to me, I still don’t truly believe I will die. Not really.

But the possibility of living in a severely crippled miserable state close to death has come down on me like a ton of bricks.

I still distrust the methods and motives of the big pharmaceutical companies but I no longer feel I can avoid taking the pills from them to deal with my severely high blood pressure. I now feel the urgency of taking those pills day and night.

I still think they may be a slippery slope for the drug companies. Pills for original problem. Followed by more pills for the side effects caused by first pills. Followed by even more pills for side effects of second set of pills.

But I am now on that slope, twice a day. Alarms set so I don’t forget.

I don’t like seeing the doctor at the clinic regularly and modifying my doses. But I like the ER and the hospital even less. So to avoid more ER visits, I will visit the clinic regularly.

I don’t want to go the ER anymore. The novelty has worn off.