If my wife registers to vote as a Democrat

...does that mean we have to listen to NPR and spout centrist platitudes during breakfast every morning?

And for the record, I am so tired of these idiot PUMAs reinforcing stereotypes about "hysterical, irrational women". Now John McCain has given them cannon fodder by picking the hottest woman in politics as his veep. Imagine the visual juxtaposition at the VP debates. Joe Biden might as well show up in a wife-beater with a beer in his hand.

I'm also so sick of Clinton narcissism I could punch someone. But What Would Barack Do?

The characteristic of rambliness

"The characteristic of meaning is that not everything has it."
-Jean Baudrillard, The Lucidity Pact

I've been thinking about this for about a year and a half, and I'm still not sure whether it's true. There are three possibilities: everything is meaningful, nothing is meaningful, or some things are meaningful. Baudrillard dismisses the first two. My worldview dismisses the second (disciples of Richard Dawkins can stop reading here). It's not a question of whether meaning is intrinsic or constructed (or both). The question is, when interpreting the basic events of our daily lives, which is more burdensome: a knowledge that Everything is meaningful, or the task of determining what is and isn't?

Take, for example, our obsession with self-knowledge:

This is the Wordle visualization of the content of this site for the last year. Is there meaning in the fact that the largest word is "people," seemingly incongruous because of my extreme introversion? If I knew that it was meaningful, but could have no grasp of that meaning, would that be worse? And that's only considering one word in the hierarchy...

This is where you call me a loser for thinking about this.

Ideal living is often summed up in trite phrases, like "live every day like it was your last," or, "look for the diamond in the rough," but these don't work in practice because they amount to veiled propositions about meaning. The propositions themselves usually remained obscured and unexamined, so we can never really accept or definitively reject the aphorisms. Of course, now that I've criticized the conventional wisdom, I'm supposed to offer a different spin on the same "truth." But I don't have one.

The reality is that everyone has a set of presuppositions about whether events and things are meaningful, and 90% of the time these presuppositions are not examined --- because to do so nearly guarantees unresolvable internal dissonance and paranoia.

I think this emergent self-examination is what happens to many academics somewhere between their 2nd and 4th years of graduate school. Like groundhogs, most of them see their shadow and run back into the hole (the hole is called "the tenure track"). It usually arises because of a question about whether their epic thesis on a clay pot from a 2nd century Welsh town is truly significant labor.

Yet we can't dismiss significance and meaning out of hand, because we all crave transcendence on some level. Everyone has reached momentary heights of blissful interconnectedness and holistic epiphany --- maybe while listening to a moving piece of music, or experiencing genuine intimacy with another person for the first time --- which tell us that either there is or ought to be Meaning beyond survival. Whatever it is, we want it.