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Below are the 12 most recent journal entries recorded in
phnargamon's LiveJournal:
| Sunday, January 14th, 2007 | | 9:45 pm |
| | Saturday, April 15th, 2006 | | 10:07 pm |
some random thoughts
So lately i realized that I'm obsessed with being independent. Maybe this explains why I've been so unsuccessful at romance. If I only establish relationships based on desire rather than need, then the relationship falters when the desire retreats (which ineveitably occurs from time to time). On the contrary, the opposite of this would be an abusive relationship: entirely interdependent and thus very difficult to break apart. Of course a healthy mutual dependence and interest would be ideal, but for now, I'll stick with the independent kick. Besides that, I'm working on puzzling out how motivation figures into life, the universe, and everything. A lot of motivation produces a greater amount of work in a short period of time than a little motivation can produce in a much longer one. If last time in Hungary was about communication for me, this time is about time and motivation. Oh yeah, me and my mom were in budapest today and got reamed by a crooked taxi driver - he wanted us to pay 15000 ft ($75) for a 6 mile ride. I yelled a lot and got away with paying only $50. I wish I had kicked in a window, or at least his face. | | Thursday, March 23rd, 2006 | | 9:47 pm |
spring festival
for anyone who's wondering, Kecskemet, the city I'm now living in, now holds the guiness book world record for a sculpture made out of carved fruits and vegetables. pictures to come... | | Tuesday, February 28th, 2006 | | 12:17 am |
Hungary!!!
For those of you unaware - I am back in the land of slanted roof-tops and vegetarian options limited to fried cheese or a pickle. I'll be updating when it occurs to me. For those of you on facebook, I'm posting photos there. If anyone knows of a free forum to do this where anyone can see 'em, please share. Today I learned what it means to be “American.” On Saturday evening I heard the first reference to being American - referring to sappy endings like the one at the unfortunate end of the first Harry Potter movie. I was spared the dialogue since it was dubbed into Hungarian. Toady I got a longer explanation. In the Hungarian lexicon, for something to be “American” means that it has a happy ending where the good guy gets the girl and the bad guy gets what he deserves. The term also applies to books, specifically those that may be good and depressing all the way though as long everything ties up unrealistically happy at the end with a tidy moral as fitting as a bow on a brick. This whole definition of America and American movies was new to me. When I think “American” I think American History X, I think of House of Sand and Fog, Super-Size Me, Fight Club, Dancer in the Dark and Elephant and any movie that recognizes that something is terribly wrong and doesn’t try and sugar-coat the ending. Of course, silly me, I was thinking of America as I see it, not the shiny, gift-wrapped variety coming soon to a theater near you! One Hungarian told me that there are probably very few depressed Americans. I told them that the only reason this might be true is because every third person is medicated. To contrast this I learned what a “Hungarian” theme looks like: the hero is a loser who tries his or her best to get ahead using whatever tricks necessary and inevitably gets screwed in the end. All is for naught. True, deserved happiness is a foriegn concept. In Hungary, if you play by the rules you’ve already lost. With regards to salary and taxes, it is a common secret that none of the rich report their actual income. On paper they make minimum wage – about $300 a month. Of course, since the government expects this, the whole tax structure is based on the assumption that those who actually follow the rules are the exception. This hits agriculture hardest since for dealing with the EU they have to have complete fiscal transparency. But in general, the paper record in Hungary is enormously different from the reality. Because of all sorts of taxes and zoning issues, many landlords don’t actually rent their properties; they just have “friends” who happen to be living in them. Studios are even worse, requiring even more permits and monthly taxes and permissions and applications and kilometers of red tape. However, if you happen to be a studio artist and want to sell a piece but don’t have a legal studio, on any sale you must sell the service of making the piece, not the piece itself. More fun: for those of you that haven’t heard, they’ve found bird-flu in domesticated birds here in Hungary. And everyone around studio is sick or getting over something. I have yet to be stricken (and hope to be spared). And even yet more fun: Putin’s in Budapest and they’re shutting down the major part of the city periodically over the next few days. If one of the policemen now lining the streets there gets the call, all traffic in the area is immediately stopped – for a few hours. The communist/socialist party in control of the government is bringing in all the celebrity they can muster for next month’s election. Everyone I speak to from the older generation who lived through the 1956 Revolution are appalled that Russia’s back in the picture and the same politicos are back in power. In other parts of the country, whole villages are under a foot or so of water because canals haven’t been built to channel the waters. For those of you wondering, I doubt that I’ll be making Hungary my home anywhere in the foreseeable future. It may have affordable produce, but it also has an endemic instability so that salary is only measured by month, who knows what will happen by the end of the year? | | Friday, August 26th, 2005 | | 1:47 pm |
Crashed and Burning
Oh, and did I metion that my hard drive crashed and is now fubar? Anyone know how to circumvent an UNMOUNTABLE BOOT VOLUME error? I tried making a linux boot disk but seem to be inept. The Dell IT guy recommended a boot disk from the NTFS website. Since windows XP Professional uses NTFS he thought that linux might not be able to read it. Problem with that is that the NTFS program runs DOS, and I don't have a floppy drive for backup. Is there any way to burn cds from dos? Any way to ftp? does anyone have an ftp I can use? I backed up before I went to Hungary, so I've only lost 2 months of pics and music. It's somewhere around 5 gigs tops, most likely more like 2 gigs if I can pick out specific files. Please help soon! I need to return my old hard drive in 10 days or less! | | Sunday, July 31st, 2005 | | 12:14 pm |
Guns, Germs, and Steel
This book is amazing. The basic premise is an account of human history to explain the current state of affairs with European-origin dominance. The amazing thing about it is that the author, Jared Diamond, traces it back to a geographic determinism. It's not a hard read but is rather expansive on his proofs using historical as well as scientific data to support his thesis. For those with less time or interest for the subject I recommend the National Geographic series by the same title based on the book. Wow. My mind is racing too quickly to record all the thoughts that the book has provoked, and I'm only a third of the way through. One thought: Diamond's explanation of the difference between hunter-gather and food producer lifestyles suggests it as a question of production: "moderate but reliable returns are preferable to a fluctuating lifestyle with a high time-averaged rate of return but a substantial likelihood of starving to death"(108). This immediate made me think of my own quandary as an artist, do I try and get a low paying but salaried job or the ups and downs of being a gallery artist? Right now I'm thinking salary. I guess that plays in to my recent interest in slip casting and mold-making. Since it's usually considered an industrial process the discipline has fallen out of vogue in American ceramics, though it has been making a comeback. In any case it's interesting to think of artists and freelance workers as hunter-gatherers. Current Mood: inspired | | Tuesday, July 12th, 2005 | | 10:51 pm |
| | Tuesday, June 7th, 2005 | | 5:04 pm |
Kecskémet
Hőőráy for foriegn keyboards, they make life so much more interesting. In today's news: I went to the market today and spoke with the woman at the health food store who knows a good bit of english. I've been writing down words in Hungarian (Magyar) and she has been quite a help. Today's words include első (first), második (second), and harmodik (third). This was relevant and neccessary because a fodrasz bolrá és harmodik ház bolrá (the barbershop is to the left, the third house to the left). Igen, tenek hoj vágás csütörtök (Yes, I have haircut Thursday). One week into the program I am blazing my way through this language like a stroll in a tar pit. It's an interesting language. It's part of a language group with Finnish and Estonian making it both hard to learn and completely useless outside of Hungary. Why bother then? well, the vain and noble reasons for my linguistic gymnastics stack up like flapjacks on the ends of a cosmic see-saw. On the Vain side: looks great on a resume for a salaried position brown-nosing, it seems to impress both Hungarians and non-natives, I want to believe i'm different (read better) than other people, and I want to believe that I didn't miss out on the language gene which has manifested itself in my siblings . Noble side: Hungarians supposedly appreciate it greatly, it's an challenge, and it's fun to learn something new. Besides, I'm learning phrases that will help me the rest of my life: A szeme gyönyörü (you have beautiful eyes), van i barátja (do you have a boyfriend), and most importantly, Én nem szavaztam, és ő nem nyert (I didn't vote for him, and he didn't win). The weather is spectacular and the food is great... and the porcelain here is pink!! viszontlátásra (goodbye) | | Tuesday, May 31st, 2005 | | 10:32 pm |
Magyar bound
HEy all, I'm off to Hungary tomorrow! Next i write i will speak from the land of paprika, goulash, and ridiculous words like szukseghezet (soohkshayghayzet). It's an aggregative language so that longer sentences in english are the same number of words in Hungarian - each getting successively larger. iwillbebackintouch laterwhenigetback to acomputrwithinternetorinternetcafe. bye! | | Monday, May 9th, 2005 | | 10:13 pm |
done with darwin (for a while)
I have just completed the painful birthing of my paper on Social Darwinism, weighing in at 6.2 pages. Is there some appropriate term analagous to the 12 addition pages of text and 30-50 pages of notes which didn't quite make it to the final version? I need a drink. I've learned a great deal about social darwinism and darwinism in general which led me to the final conclusion that social Darwinism is well and good as long as it's used as a rentative means of analysis rather than any policy forming justification. Darwinism seems to continue to be a useful tool for describing both the natural and the social systems which we live in, if in fact there is any difference between them as far as governing mechanisms. I'll likely get back to this, but in the mean time I had one question regarding evolution and mutation that seems like it may have already been answered or atleast investigated. Are unhealthy organisms more prone to mutation than healthy ones? were this the case, perhaps it would explain a somewhat shorter timeline for evolution. I would attempt to rationalize this hypothesis based on the observation that, for one, bad things cause cancer, ie bad mutation. Perhaps this extends to lesser badnesses such that greater adaptive pressures would lead to greater variation. In one respect, this would be because unhealthy organisms tend to break down in their functioning and may produce unhealthy replications, but from an evolutionary perspective, this could possibly explain periods of increased adaptation, some proxy for the theory of punctuated equilibrium (which I neither understand, nor have researched enough to have any conception of it beyond its name). Cheers! Current Mood: needing release | | Wednesday, May 4th, 2005 | | 11:48 pm |
Social Darwinism
So now I'm in the process of writing my last paper for the semester on the topic of Social Darwinism. I'm suppose to give a case for or against it, but it's really much more complicated than that. As I read more I discover that there is no concrete definition for the term. One might think that Social Darwinism is obviously the application of Dariwinian principles observed in nature to human society. But no. Maybe some interpretations fit that description, but that is in no way comprehensive. One of the best things about Social Darwinism is that many Darwinians deny that Social Darwinism has anything to do with Darwin. So great. what is it then? Well. To answer that question is another indirect answer. Here's a couple different ways that the term has been used: 1. "survival of the fittest." sure, this sounds great, except that someone else came up with that term. Not Darwin. More like Herbert Spencer who argued for jettisonning the poor and cutting off all social welfare systems. 2. Social evolutionists. As i realized reading Origin of Species, Darwin doesn't ever use the term evolution for the connotation of progression toward an ideal form. Social evolutionists approach knowledge from a Darwinian perspective of revision and replacement of concepts toward an ever improving understanding of the world. I suppose this application of Darwin isn't so far from the mark with regards to the mechanism of selection. 3. Social Darwinism as eugenics and biology. Whew. This is by far the most obtuse and irrelevant use of Darwin which I've come across. It just goes on and on. So is it good? bad? It makes a lot of sense to me to attempt a Darwinian understanding of human society. If one assumes that Darwin is right, why should the human animal be so different as to entirely escape this otherwise universal model? Current Mood:  tired | | Tuesday, April 12th, 2005 | | 10:48 pm |
Lif e the universe and everything
Blew off studio and academics on Sunday to go see Sin City. Definitely worth it... So basically, I think I'll use this forum to test out my accumulating theories on life, the universe, and everything. That is, I'm in the process of trying to reconcile Man the animal as a product of nature as well as the destroyer of nature. Yes, i do have an eventual point and use to these proposed ramblings. My tentative thesis is that the human animal has finally achieved the goal of conquering nature, but having done so, has realized that humans aren't good at taking care of things. This sure sounds like smacking the pulp on the ground that was once a dead horse, but I think that there's more to be said on the subject. perhaps it will be just the same things, but in my words rather than anyone else's. I'm currently approaching the issue from a perspective of system building. Forgive me that i don't define my terms, i'm not quite sure what i mean yet myself. Nature creates systems over long periods of time through prolonged periods of adjustments. This has necessarily led to a system which, in comparison to the human system, is remarkable efficient and stable. Consider a tree. Trees never need to move anywhere, and all the energy needed to survive is available to them. This is almost a circular argument because if it didn't work, then it wouldn't be there. The next part of this is that trees are part of the system which successfully propogated itself over a long enough time that trees came to be. In some respects, the same things can be said of the constructions of human environments. but enough of this. I must return to studio. Current Mood: calmly stressed |
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