A commonplace but important and revealing fallacy.

Have you noticed that only in time of illness or disaster or death are people real? I remember at the time of the wreck—people were so kind and helpful and solid. Everyone pretended that our lives until that moment had been every bit as real as the moment itself and that the future must be real too, when the truth was that our reality had been purchased only by Lyell's death. In another hour or so we had all faded out again and gone our dim ways.

-Kate in The Moviegoer

Our culture does seem generally to take for granted that the qualities we reveal in times of crisis are "truer" than those that normally characterize us: the you you are under duress is "the real you." But does this make any sense?

Years ago (maybe around the time of Midnite Vultures?*) Beck gave some interview—I thought I had this written down somewhere, but it appears that I was mistaken—in which he said something to the effect that people assume that the crying you is "realer" than the laughing you, but that he didn't see why that ought to be true. And I'm with him 100%. Is the crying you, or the angry you, or the post-apocalyptic monster-battling you relevant? Sure. Is it revealing? Of course. But is it like pulling back a curtain and seeing the "actual" person you "secretly" "are"? No. An ex-girlfriend of mine was also instrumental in making me realize this: she was pretty smart in the head† and pointed out that what one might dismissively call the "mask" you wear is also very relevant to who you are. Think about it. How you choose to present yourself: is that not relevant to your personality?

the real you?

I've come around to thinking that the idea that you're being more yourself when you're unhappy or in some kind of danger is a fundamentally anti-humanist attitude—also maybe weirdly limited and myopic, not to mention fundamentally opposed to the notion of free will. Makes me think also of the idea of the whole human being (as opposed to something more like a Cartesian split) and the thing that I think I first realized when I was a "tween,"‡ that any division between "natural" and "human" requires turning a blind eye to the fact that human beings are animals and part of nature, such that whatever concrete and steel we erect is as much part of nature as an anthill...

But I'm getting distracted and confused (writing in an L.A. coffee shop, which is not the norm for me: I'm spoiled by silence). My whole point is actually pretty small: you are more than your behavior in any particular circumstance, and there's no good reason to trash or trivialize the way you behave when things are good and you're happy. That's you, too.

* Back when he was still good.

† You heard me: smart in the head.

‡ Back before the term tween existed (as far as I know).

a few misspelled words common to the Internet

woah

yea/ya/yah [for yeah]

ya'll

ect.

baited breath

f*ck, s#%t [etc.]

Axe

Did anybody else see this article in the New York Times about how boys are spraying foul Axe products all over themselves because they're morons (IQ: 51–70)?

Here's what I couldn't believe about this article: fairly early on we read, "The surge [in popularity among younger boys] is certainly due in large measure to new marketing strategies," and the reporter does acknowledge that this has to do with boys' attempts to "position themselves with their texting, titillating, brand-savvy female peers" but then focuses on tie-in deals and viral marketing; nowhere does the article explicitly acknowledge or bother to focus on the content of Axe's advertising campaign, which seems to me to be the entire story.

Axe's ads all focus on the claim—a lie that they get away with making by winking while making it—that Axe is a magical love potion, essentially a mind-control gas, that will make its user sexually irresistible to beautiful women. The closest this article comes to acknowledging that is the following passing (and dismissive!) note: "while men's colognes have been marketed since at least the last century for their irresistibility to women..."

People: Axe's ads may fit into a long tradition, but they aren't just another in a long series of essentially identical messages—even if there's nothing new in the concept, at the very least they up the ante. Observe:

Is the above video the same deal as this one, linked to by the Times article? Yes and no, innit?

Anyway, comparing it to other ads is not the point. The point is that boys' reason for choosing Axe in particular is that Axe is the brand that's currently telling them that Axe is directly linked to sexual attractiveness—that there is an "Axe effect"—a causal connection that the article weirdly seems to ignore. The focus on an increase in sexual insecurity among younger boys is reasonable—I mean, that is a story—but the failure to focus on this company's exploitation of that insecurity troubles me: it almost seems to endorse the idea that Axe's products actually do have some connection to sexual attraction beyond the, I'm sorry, lies in their advertisements.

What the article does not acknowledge is that these boys are just young enough that they are just stupid enough to consume these ads with a singular credulity, particularly in an ad-laden culture that discourages critical thinking—as perhaps is best demonstrated by a newspaper article adopting a kind of "How about that!" attitude toward Axe's popularity without stating plainly, clearly, and up front, "This product is best known for its ad campaign that basically asserts to boys that using it WILL GET THEM LAID." Treating that as irrelevant forgives and enables ad companies' tendency to pass lies off as jokes; our youngest (and dumbest) citizens pay the stinky price.

A parent quoted in the article might as well be speaking for the article itself: "Axe has commercials?"

funny or not funny?

(via) [q.v.]

I was realizing the other day that when I see something like the artwork above, I often just automatically ascribe some sort of self-awareness and ironic sophistication to the artist. That someone simply wanted to draw a penis on a wall hardly even occurs to me as a possibility. In general I tend to poo-poo the idea that authorial intent has any particular importance to our appreciation of a work, but when I imagine myself laughing along with an absurdist joke that is in fact not even the slightest absurdist—just plain absurd—it does make me a bit uncomfortable. Or how about this one:

My very first reaction is a kind of shock (I mean, in the context of whatever comic this was, it might make perfect narrative sense, but taken out of context it's pretty clearly supposed to be something you appreciate on its own) followed by amusement, and the amusement is the amusement of someone amused by, again, a certain kind of irony. I assume, right out of the gate, that whoever drew or at least "quoted" this image is not in fact in favor of violence against women; I assume that this is some kind of commentary—or at least a kind of reveling in inappropriateness. But is it? Is this image really just about getting a kick out some man punching some woman in the back of the head? Period?

Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, so to speak.

I do have a tendency to come up with elaborate apologies for things without hardly even realizing I'm doing it (see "9/11/01 ha ha ha" and the Star Wars prequels)—I know that. And I have a friend who for years I thought had this sort of complicated, self-referential, super-ironic running joke about laughing at fat people before I realized that, although he certainly has a sophisticated mind and a well-developed sense of the absurd, at the bottom he really does think obesity itself is hilarious. But so then, turning back to authorial intent, the question sort of maybe becomes—does it matter what the joker thinks the joke is about?

In fiction, in a comedy, the people saying the hilarious things usually don't realize they're being hilarious. (The characters Woody Allen and Groucho Marx play in their movies are important exceptions.) The reason why I insisted back in high school that it was stupid to think Beavis & Butt-head was stupid is that the characters are supposed to be stupid; if Beavis & Butt-head made a cartoon show it wouldn't be like that: it would be a bunch of explosions, basically, and maybe boobs and butts. (Or crude drawings of penises—see above, bringing us sort of full circle.)

Maybe the "answer" to this "question" is that I'm trying to wrestle out an "objective" perspective that just doesn't exist (another thing I have a tendency to do). Maybe the answer is: the person who drew that penis meant God knows what by it, and I get whatever the hell I get out of it out of it. A big part of my wanting to nail it down is not wanting to do anything wrong—like, I don't want to put up a picture of a dick being like, "Ha, ha, everybody, right?" and have everyone else be like, "Uh...that's a picture of a dick." Even more so with the violence-against-women issue, or 9/11. But maybe in the end avoiding misunderstanding and disagreement is a fool's errand. I think this tube-top song jokingly references immaturity, you think it's just immature..."and so it goes, and so it goes, and so it goes, and so it goes."*

Objectively hilarious.

* "But [yes] where it's going no one knows."

more subway douchebaggery

Here's a new one: this kid didn't splay his legs wide open like he had some kind of crotch rash, but instead sat diagonally in the seat—a creative new way to occupy two seats when you're not even morbidly obese. I applaud his creative thinking! Note: He was sitting this way when we pulled into Grand Central Station and people poured in, and somebody had to ask him to move—he didn't just do it automatically when it was clear that people wanted to sit. That's the spirit, kid! Fuck your fellow man! [See also.]

H-A-P-P-I! [crashes through window] [UPDATED]

(via)

I've done such a good job since New Year's of staying on top of things—such a good streak—and now look at me. It might just be that I'm fighting off some kind of cold. But it's an interesting phenomenon, these psychological things, a weird combination of totally in and totally out of your conscious control. I mean, there's that Psych 101 factoid that if you smile, even when you're unhappy, it triggers endorphins or something that actually can make you happy, such that the smile precedes the joy, and there are also studies suggesting that sitting up straight makes you feel better about yourself and that sort of thing...which in some ways is very good news but in others is arguably a little depressing insofar as it reflects on our, what do you want to call it, emotional sovereignty?

When I was a kid, or a teenager or something, it occurred to me that in a funny way nihilism ought to be sort of a comforting idea (I may have already written about this here, some time ago) because if there's no absolute value then you don't really have to worry about being wrong or—put it another way—unhappiness ought never to result from your sense that things aren't the way they should be because there's no should. Anyway, I told my dad about that when I thought of it and he said I was wrong.

my dad, c.1968 (via)

Certainly I'm a fan of paying attention to reality—not an ignorance-is-bliss sort of a guy—and generally believe in changing things in your life that make you unhappy rather than learning to live with them or pearling over them with psychopharmaceuticals*—and my point is not in fact that "nothing really matters" (as someone recently did a terrible job of singing at karaoke when I was visiting Chicago last weekend†); what I'm getting at, though, is that so often our emotional or psychological state is so much a question of attitude, the stance we choose to take. Not always, mind you—I'm not even sure I'd say most of the time—but often.

That's why I think I was right that a world without absolute value is, in a counterintuitive way, a more comforting world: not having to be anxious about doing everything wrong means the freedom to decide to make decisions based on what feels right to you. I guess I'm with Fromm and Emerson on this: there can be no more reliable judge than yourself. You might feel like you don't know what the hell you want, and you might be right, but no one knows any better about that than you do, that much at least is for sure.‡

Speaking of not knowing what the hell, I don't know what the hell I'm talking about. It seems I really am sick, sad to tell. But the advice I got a few months back—not actually phrased as advice, actually, if I remember correctly—was maybe the best advice anyone could give me at the moment: I might as well be cheerful.

Oh! And I just remembered the brilliant observation that someone else shared with me just the other day: the idea that, today, being positive is practically a subversive, countercultural choice. More on that later. In the meantime, I'll be sitting up straight and occasionally smiling for no reason like a crazy person. God bless America!

[LATER THAT NIGHT... I know how and why I got confused about what I was talking about: I was rushing at the end and forgot my original focus, which was that "might as well be cheerful" advice. Once happiness ceases to be tethered to good fortune—to the haps—once you see it as a choice or an attitude you can adopt, then it becomes something you are capable of doing. And why not do it, then? This is not to be confused with the frozen-smile-mask philosophy that pretends things are good when they are not and is falsely cheerful about bad situations: what I'm talking about is not dependent upon the goodness or badness of things or of situations.§]

Relax! The galaxy'll be fine. (via)

* To be clear, I have no problem with psychopharmaceuticals per se: I just think that they should be used only when it's clear that the problem they're treating is primarily chemical and not instead a normal emotional response to a real, external problem; in other words, my vote is always for treating the cause, not the symptom.

† That song—"Bohemian Rhapsody"—is effectively because of Wayne's World. Right? I mean, for my generation. People know it and love it because of Wayne's World. I would guess that even your average Queen fan today between age, I don't know, 27 and 37 got into Queen because of "Bohemian Rhapsody" in Wayne's World. Am I wrong?

‡ More or less. –ed.

§ And this is sound because studies are always reporting that happiness does not rely on what you'd think it does: to great misfortune we adjust and then level out, and indeed the real source of misery seems to be uncertainty, worrying not about your terminal illness but rather about your illness that may or may not be terminal. The latter situation is analogous to the state of the person who is always worrying about what's right or wrong, which is why simple-minded religious absolutists are reportedly happier than those who actually, you know, think about stuff: "knowing" without a shadow of a doubt what's wrong or right makes things simpler, but happier still would be a person who neither worries about justifying and comparing nor relies upon helpful fantasies and delusions of infallibility.

My voice is my passport. Verify me.

Here's a little bit of nothing for you:

The other day at the gym—I have been going to the gym regularly again, thanks for asking—I became briefly concerned when I noticed that the padlock I use for my locker seemed too often, when locked, to be resting on or near one of the three numbers making up the combination. When I lock it, I spin the little number wheel, and the idea that it would tend to land on one of the numbers was disturbing: wouldn't that mean that those numbers were "sticky" somehow—or that an unfortunate mix of unconscious thought and usually untapped dexterity resulted in my inadvertantly spinning the thing in a way that broadcast my special secret—and that someone could exploit that to open the lock (and get into my sweaty underwear)?

Then I realized, though, that this seems to be an instance of the kind of bad math we as human reportedly tend to do, particularly when odds and statistics are at play. Here's what I figured out:

There are 40 numbers, three of which are part of my secret combination. This means that there is a 3-in-4o chance (which, depending on how precise you want to be, you might actually round up to 10%) that a random spin will land on one of those three numbers. Then you have to factor in that usually what I was looking at wasn't actually one of the three numbers but rather something within a radius of one—that is, if one of my numbers were 26 and I saw that the thing was sitting there at 25, it would make me nervous because it seemed too close to be coincidence. Well, that brings the odds up to something more like 9-in-40 (almost 25%). The question, then, was whether I was seeing these numbers more often than a quarter of the time, and the answer, folks, was no.

So what's more absurd: that I worried about that, that I spent time working it out, or that I then decided to post the results on the Internet?

Whatever: we're all gonna die eventually anyway.

Safe-cracker.