Morgan Wick

Addressing some potentially incendiary remarks

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Okay, I recently put up three rather… odd posts, out of my irritibility over the time span that I put them up.

There’s a part of me that resents the fact that I even have to apologize for them… that we’re not an open enough society that I can post things regardless of what people think about them and not have people bearing down on my ass. (Not that I’ve had people bearing down on my ass, but I could turn off potential readers if I attempt to grow Da Blog.)

Regardless, it was a mistake to post the “Confronting humanity with hard truths” post at this point in time, when I haven’t made posts building up the philosophical underpinning of that view. As a result, it sounds coldly cynical and even something that a serial killer would send to the newspaper; with the proper underpinning, you might have thought “right on!”. I don’t like Nazis and I don’t like what’s going on in Darfur. I’d like to think I’m not a potential killer that might run amok on the school campus or go hunting in Seattle households at night. I have no reason to do so and plenty of reason not to, and if I ever felt tempted to the process of trying to do so would take long enough and contain sufficient roadblocks to lure me back from the ledge. But sometimes I say and think things that rattle my own confidence in that statement and make me wonder just where my place on the news might be.

Hence the statement at the end of the webcomic post, “The only reason this sentence…”. I was bitter about the repeated tripping of the counter in archive browsing, at Bravenet for not making a half-decent counter, and at SiteMeter for not having its “SiteMeter 2.0” system up and running yesterday. That leads to me getting way more thoughts in my head than I can deal with, and that leads to the downward spiral mentioned in my third post.

I am going to use (as I have used) Da Blog as a place for me to vent from time to time, posting tidbits about me that might be useful for someone attempting to deal with me. I am not someone you generally want to meet in real life, but don’t hold everything I say against me for that. Even the stuff I write when I’m mad; I have a theory that it’s only then that the real truth comes out, unfiltered by civilization. Hence I don’t follow the advice of others who say take a step back after writing something out of anger. I’ve had people tell me (mostly my mom) that I try too hard to make people bend to my will and my way of acting rather than change myself to fit everyone else. Well, it’s everyone else who’s tried to change to fit everyone else and it hasn’t worked as well as “everyone else” would like. More to the point, I’m not like everyone else so I shouldn’t have to change to be like everyone else – to be something or someone I’m not.

So many of our values are contradictory when you get right down to it. I can easily invoke them in ways you may find repulsive. I may do or say things you may find repulsive, but ultimately, those are just quirks. I think that beneath my rough edges (and I don’t show them 99.9 percent of the time) lie some interesting and thought-provoking points. Da Blog will continue to be a home for uncensored, unfiltered commentary and thinking. If you don’t like it, just ignore it and focus on the stuff with substance.

I don’t think I made my points as well as I could have. What I’m getting at is that I’m not going to apologize for saying incendiary things out of anger, but that you shouldn’t hold it against me and you shouldn’t let it distract you from everything else. Even that doesn’t describe it well, so I’m open to people suggesting anything better to assuage your fears in the comments.

Because you need the COMPLETE ESPN EXPERIENCE!

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I have no words for this.

ESPN Consumer Products, in conjunction with tvCompass, a provider of digital media solutions, announced the release of ESPN The Ultimate Remote, an internet-connected Wi-Fi device that combines advanced home theater control and one-touch real-time access to sports, standings, team information and news.

They’re making an ESPN remote now. Pretty soon you could wake up from an ESPN bed, eat ESPN cereal, brush your teeth with an ESPN toothbrush and ESPN toothpaste, take a shower in your ESPN bathtub, get into your ESPN car, drive to work, do work on your ESPN computer, eat an ESPN lunch, go home, watch ESPN on your ESPN TV, have an ESPN dinner, and go back to the ESPN bed.

Are people really this desperate to never be far from a big glowing ESPN logo?

Strip will be a little late

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Several things going on at once and I’m agonizing over the one after this one. The strip may go up as soon as midnight PT, or as late as 10 AM PT.

UPDATE: Gah. Okay, it’s 11 AM PT and the strip is only now going up. Tomorrow’s strip will be in the morning as well, hopefully not this late, and Thursday’s strip might be a little later at night than normal. Just a reminder, have cookies on when browsing the archives. More posts forthcoming later today.

Confronting humanity with hard truths

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You may think what happened to the Jews in the Holocaust was awful. But if you were a German during that time or if you’re an anti-Semite, you might well relish it.

You may feel bad for the people in Darfur. But if you’re one of the northern oppressors you could care less and even feel good for the suffering.

If you’re a murderer, you probably don’t feel sorrow for the people you’re killing. If you’re a relative of a murder victim and the murderer is going to the electric chair, you probably don’t feel much remorse for him.

The mere fact that these things that we decry happen in the first place is evidence that it is not natural to decry them.

Upbringing plays a much bigger role in shaping the way we think than we care to think, and I’ve become convinced that we never really shake what we fundamentally are. Any system of morality that is not grounded in real, tangible reasoning is artificial and no one should be surprised when it is broken.

There’s no reason for us to be compassionate; morality tells us to. We play up compassion because people would like us to be compassionate towards them, but if we naturally liked to be compassionate we wouldn’t need to remind people to be compassionate – and there would be a lot more compassion in the world today. So it is with virtually all other moral standards.

Stripped of religious undertones and their imposition by people trying to dictate how they’d like to be treated, there is no reason to care about anyone but oneself. (Don’t add “and one’s family”. That doesn’t explain wife-beating, fracturous marriages, infanticide, and abandoned babies. Don’t then turn that reasoning on me and say suicide. Suicidal people are crazy and think they’re actually helping themselves by getting away from this world.) From that one proposition, all else follows. Even things that seem purely emotional, such as caring for family, ultimately resolve to caring about oneself, about one’s sense of self and their self-esteem.

This post has something to do with the Derby, but it isn’t about it. Well, maybe a little.

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Recently read:

NBC analyst Bob Neumeier correctly predicted favorite Big Brown would win. That
prompted NBC handicapper Mike Battaglia, citing confident Big Brown trainer
Richard Dutrow Jr., to say Neumeier “drank the Rick Dutrow Kool-Aid” — with
Neumeier adding “on the rocks.” Has everybody forgotten the origin of that
relatively young cliché?

Wait, I’m hardly an alcohol drinker (wouldn’t do it even if I was old enough), but aren’t “the rocks” just ice? It may be a bit of an off-color, mixed metaphor, and this probably wasn’t his intention, but it does seem to work…

(All I have to say about the death of Eight Belles is that, regardless of whether or not horse racing objectively needs to change anything, they need to do something or they could risk becoming absolutely dead, as people will see it as an insensitive sport where deaths of competitors are simply brushed off, even induced in some circumstances. At this point, Big Brown winning the Triple Crown, far from revitalizing horse racing’s popularity, could actually crush it, because a big reason for watching the Triple Crown – seeing a horse win it for the first time in 30 years – will be gone.)

So, how was your week?

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If it was anything like mine, I can’t blame you for wanting to go on the bottle. Just remember, you’ll only get a lot of weeks a lot worse.

It all started last Saturday night, when we got a universal remote to control a VCR my dad got from his family that didn’t come with a remote or a manual, only to find it didn’t completely work. Then, that night, I set my alarm to allow me to watch the second day of the NFL Draft. Twice. And both times, the alarm inexplicably snapped back off, so I woke up an hour late.

That was only the start of things. First, the second remote Dad got worked a bit better, but it took a while to figure out how to get it to work halfway decently, and we eventually figured out it used the play, stop, and rewind/fast-forward keys to move the cursor on the on-screen menu. We still couldn’t get it to consistently press “Enter” until this past weekend. Throw in leaning on something at the bottom of the fridge while looking for something that wasn’t there, and having it crack, and I was having a nervous breakdown because everything was falling apart.

Then during the week, my laptop stopped working yet again, only about a week and a half since the last time. Because my old USB drive has been pushing its limits and may be falling apart itself, I bought a new one. Well, the old one was briefly lost on Wednesday, and then on Thursday it became lost and I haven’t found it yet, which really curses me because I was getting so close to transferring everything on it to my desktop. Throw in the seeming randomness and vanishing into thin air and I just had it the day before and why do you hide from me and I should keep track of where I put AAAAGGGGHHHSMNJBGNDMFKMDGN!!!!!

The icing on all of this came yesterday, when we left for the Home Depot to see if we could get a replacement part on the fridge that we broke, and Dad wrote down its model number… and left it at home. Pretty important thing to leave at home, Dad!

So anyway, that was my week. In some sense it’s not done yet, because I have a hard drive to replace and I need to find out if the USB drive might have been recovered at either of the places I went to Thursday.

One of my many problems

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My name is Morgan Wick. As I finish this post, I am 20 years old. By almost any measure, I have reached the stage of life some term “adulthood”, that stage most people define by their jobs.

And I’m completely unqualified for any job.

It’s not that I wouldn’t bring something valuable to the table – I’m probably the smartest person I know. But I’ve been looking for a job, any job, on campus for a while now, and each quarter there’s never more than two or three jobs I’m even remotely qualified for. I’ve been completely unsuccessful in finding any job, the closest I’ve come being told that I would get called back for an interview for two jobs and never hearing from them again. Whether it’s my lack of communication skills, my lack of “experience”, my contribution to saving the environment by not having a driver’s licence, or simply my terrible handwriting, something always disqualifies me from most of the jobs available. There’s been a special sense of urgency here, since from what I have heard, I won’t have the ability to apply work-study funds to an on-campus job unless I already have one by the end of this year.

Even the jobs I might be qualified for are either soul-sucking jobs I would never want, wastes of my mental abilities, or in the case of the one job I have had (the exception that proves the rule), are really excuses for me to goof off.

I think that a lot of the things that disqualify me for far too many jobs are rather irrelevant to how well I might actually do in them. I’m probably fit in some way for a gazillion jobs even at the low level I’m at now with a high school diploma and a smattering of college classes. But many of them won’t let me in for reasons that in some cases have little actual bearing on the job itself.

More disturbingly, I can’t help but think this may become a trend in my life. I find it hard to focus sometimes, especially on things I don’t terribly enjoy, I don’t get along with others, and I don’t have a clue what I want to do with my life, in part because I have all sorts of things I keep oscillating between as an option and I can’t decide between them. I’d probably show up to a job interview in the same clothes I wear every day and perhaps even for work in them, because I don’t see what actual bearing wearing “work clothes” has on the actual job you’re supposed to do.

Okay, so I got the idea for this post a while back and I was originally going to completely tear into my would-be employers but I completely lost that train of thought. Probably should have started writing it when I first got the idea, but one of the jobs that was going to “schedule an interview” and didn’t was this quarter.