The Utility of Prices

Okay so I'm back at Uni, and after what feels like months and months of not thinking about economics and finance at all, my brain is reengaging. Anyway this semester is actually looking pretty good subject wise. I only have one economics subject 'Pricing Theory' and it looks like it is taught 'well' by my definition unlike my Macro subject last semester which oversold its difficulty and employed too much coercion.

So Utility one of the central concepts of economics, it pretty much underpins all the decisions we make and all economic policies. Most often utility is taught as basically meaning 'happiness' which whilst I'm all for avoiding big technical language Orwell style I make an exception when lecturers simplify utility to 'satisfaction' or more painfully 'happiness'.

I'm fairly certain that they (John Stuart Mill and the classicists) employed utility because to suggest their models could explain or satisfy 'happiness' would be an outright lie. But similar to the behavioural management school - which manages behaviour because behaviour can be seen as opposed to 'attitude' which we can only infer.

Thus similarly I kind of assume that we use 'utility' because we can see people using shit, but can only infer whether it makes them happy.

So anyway, the past two weeks have been spent (not) drawing indifference curves. (I don't take notes in classes unless I absolutely can't avoid it) which are basically a two axis graph of X and Y (which can be anything) and a bunch of non intersecting curves that bow towards the origin. If you can't imagine it click this link.

And they kind of work well. Particularly when you add budget constraints, you get a nice neat world where people try to maximise their utility by maximising their consumption as far as their budget allows. Thusly thuserson you can even suggest that good X represents savings while good Y represents consumption and so forth.

People aspire to the 'highest' indifference curve. Are you following?

Now they've introduced three types of goods. A 'normal' good is a good that as your income increases or its price decreases you increase your consumption of it. Then you have 'inferior' goods which as your income increases you consume less of it (in favor of some substitute - eg. public transport, the richer you get the less you use it) then there are 'giffen' goods, these are goods that get cheaper but people consume less of them. They are treated as strictly hypothetical...

And this is where I always get interested in a lecture. The oddities, or when people see fit to introduce something that is only hypothetical - because this is perhaps my favorite half-baked theory of why economics is fucked yet.

See budget constraints, indifference curves and utility are all well and good if you keep utility and price away from eachother. But you get a quasi goedellien self-reference when you suggest that people derive utility from a price itself rather than the good it is affixed to. Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmahuhuh?

Imagine you got a pen right? right. You can use it to write right? right. So typically you would say the utility of a pen is its ability to write. But suppose you had a magic kind of pen that you could use or not use and it went up in price. All you had to do was hang onto it and it would go up in price. Now I guess we could call the appreciation of its price an indirect kind of utility, you can sell it and then use the proceeds to buy goods that have their own utility. This is kind of an opportunity cost or something, indeed money itself is worth only all the various things it can purchase if you want an on hand example.

But magic pens that go up in price regardless of how used don't exist right? wrong. This pretty much describes any speculative behaviour and it's corresponding wealth effect. Whether it is tulips, tech stocks or 'houses' speculation describes people deriving utility from price itself, rather than 'real' utility of the underlying asset. And these behave like giffen goods.

If people are consuming for price reasons, that is they buy a house anticipating further price rises and don't bother to live in it or rent it out (and worse, renovate it) then they are buying for the utility of the price and not the utility of the actual accomodation/location/infrastructure.

Now, this is another paradox I intend to deal with the 'risk averse' designation of consumers that inevitably drives them to risky speculative behaviour, but basically when people derive their utility, their pleasure through the 'wealth effect' which is the feeling one gets when sitting on an asset that is going up in price and then it drops in price - people consume less of it.

Which is all well and good, but whats exciting to me is the self-referential nature of goods that can impart utility from their price, or prices driving utility which makes it hard to ever fully explain consumer behaviour, rational prices etc.

Will ponder more... I need to get back onto Naive investor too.

Small Australia

As I write this Julia Gillard is telling me 'not a big Australia, but a sustainable Australia' new approach to population all that shit.

As somebody who has attended multiple Sustainable Living Festivals, I always thought sustainable population Australia were a bit of a joke. I still do, but unlike Prosper Australia which got a nod from the Henry Review and the fiasco that became the Resources Super Profits Tax, 'Sustainable Population' seems to have gained traction not just with the conservative side of government but the supposedly liberal side too.

I hate these population capping advocates, why? well they range from bigotted to vacuous. People who talk about keeping the human population down always, always lack any real vision - their arguments always hinge around some silent status quo ideal. Few ever articulate it.

All I'd ask is some guiding principal eg. 'Our objective should be to maintain the largest biodiversity the planet can sustain.' I like that, I don't think population controls are the solution, but it would certainly help somebody build a case.

Instead nothing is mentioned thus 'Little Australia' or 'Small Australia' arguments come across as bigotted and fail to acknowledge the myriad issue of 'who' who gets culled. I thought I'd look at some of the woeful oversights of population arguments because its starting to piss me off and get personal.

Resources

Basically the 'non-racist' stance comes from the simple observation that resources are finite. The planet earth simply cant yeild the resources necessary to satiate everyones material desires, therefore you can presumably cut back the population and needs will be sated.

We already have a methodology for dealing with allocating resources, it isn't perfect but its called the market.

When I say it isn't perfect, that's reflected by the fact that some 10% of the worlds population control upwards of 80% of the worlds resources. Infact I suspect 1% of the population controls 80% of that 80%.

Then there's water, land etc. all of these have markets in which immigrants have to compete. They have to compete against people who own 3-5 'investment' properties, they have to compete against coca-cola, aluminium manufacturers etc. for water.

Amartya Sen points out in 'Development As Freedom' that almost no famine in history has been the result of inadequate food supply. It is typically characterised by inadequate food access. What's the difference? Well one is where there is no food. The other is where people are priced out of the food market.

Even in Ireland, during the great potatoe famine, Ireland was exporting food to England. Famines are generally a failure of government to intervene in market prices in an economy where most of the population can only trade on its low skilled labour.

The point being that most resources problems are a question of how they are distributed amongst a population, and these issues are rarely related to the size of the population itself. Fact is you could try to 'stop the boats' by I don't know spreading peace and prosperity throughout the world, or you could say tax rent seeking mining companies on their super profits and redistribute that income to the community and achieve a better resource distribution outcome much more easily, effectively and morally than offshore processing.

Economic Arguements

Generally fall down, lets break it into two groups though - skilled and unskilled migration. The easy one is skilled. Australia's academic institutions are not world class, we can't compete with Ivy League Universities in the US or their equivalents in Europe. What we can offer is a lifestyle that many wealthy nations can't compete with.

US we have healthcare, UK and Europe - space. Same goes for Japan, China etc. Take Japan, last time I was in Japan I thought that it would cost close to $20 to recreate a typical Australian home lifestyle in Japan. Why? First you have to buy all the property, then all the adjacent property, then pay to have the powerlines buried, trees planted, roads widened even then you don't have access to the acid free rain or any way to stop right wing propoganda trucks cruising round your hood playing 'yuki ya kon kon' over and over again.

Skilled migration is cheap, people who have paid all their education et to come to Australia, help business and pay taxes for the community. So cutting back on skilled migration is not much of an argument at all.

As for unskilled immigration, that's trickier. Generally though, business like high levels of immigration because they feel it undermines workers salary bargaining position. But having a larger population does provide more labor for new industries when times are good, stimulates construction, etc. Plus they send their kids to schools and those kids can be anything. Their kids can be anything...

Allthough unskilled migration is tricky, it brings me to my next point -

Morality

Countries don't exist, not in the way water exists, dark matter (doesn't) exist, stars exist, continents exist etc. They are artificial constructs acknowledged only by humans that are trained to see them there. Fancy sounding?

Well yeah, but what I mean is that nationalism is ultimately transitory and illusory. Those ANZAC diggers we (supposedly) go out and support for example were fighting for Queen and Country, a COuntry where an Aboriginal Woman couldn't own her own home, where employers could discriminate against homosexuals and any number of pre-reform characteristics of our society. My Grandfather presuming he didn't diddle Japanese girls himself when stationed in Hiroshima would probably have had a hard time predicting that his grandson would date a Japanese girl one day.

'Nations' characters evolve and shift between generations and are essentially indefensible, you can't stop the children of tomorrow from valuing different things not without severely hampering their education by excluding what is constantly being discovered about life the universe and everything.

One thing remains relatively constant though, a nation is a social agreement to command exclusively some resources, most notably land.

Any resource on earth imparts some usefulness, some utility. Many called 'natural' resources are not created through human endeavor, they are a natural bounty.

The decision as to who has access to these resources (and community created ones like health, education and infrastructure) is relatively arbitrary. It is decided principally through the 'Ovarian lottery' that is, where you are born.

You have a 1/4 chance of being born CHinese for example, which means a quarter of the worlds children are born without any basic freedoms, you have a less than 1% chance of being born in Australia and if you want to enjoy the 7.2 hectares of resources in an Australian's average carbon footprint (sustainable consumption is 1.2) free health care, civil liberties, public education, wide open planes, fresh air etc. you have to move here.

People don't choose to be born, and they don't choose where to be born. But what fucks me off is that people who talk about immigration and sustainable population never have there hands up to leave these shores.

There's a suggestion of 'we were here first' of which I'm all like 'who's we?' well this quote from an excellent crikey article explains:

"‎Nearly all Australians are the children or descendants of immigrants. To demand a slashing of immigration is a staggering example of inter-generational opportunism on our part, in effect denying to future immigrants and their children the advantages that we ourselves have accrued as the result of the generosity of generations past."

Then there's NEVER any question of emmigration. These people want to suggest that living in Australia is a privelege not a right yet they don't then go on to say that we should pack low skilled Australians on a boat to make room for greater immigration from high skilled migrants. That we shouldn't Cuba style send all our convicts to the shores of Florida. Nor that we should send our poorest to countries where their meagre savings make them incredibly rich and take on some of the worlds poorest to provide them with the opportunity to become relatively rich.

Now, I know these arguments are untennable as forced emmigration obviously creates some obligation on the destinations. In the question of refugees we do have a moral obligation, as one decent human being to another we should offer shelter. Refugees don't 'want' to be here, they aren't like 'oh great war has broken out, I can leave my community, my ancestral home, my livelihood have fun in an offshore processing centre, and finally move to Australia!' that's not how shit goes down. People are never glad that war gives them a 'queue jumping' excuse to emmigrate somewhere. The loss of a homeland is devastating, so devastating we should as gracious hosts try to make them feel as at home as possible.

But more broadly, people should be able to move around the world, unharrassed and unmolested as the world is our common heritage and our ward. All this cordoning off into fences and divides is nothing but in-group/out-group gang mentality. If somebody is dangerous it is up to their immediate community to reject them, somebody on a permanent protection visa really has the same opporunity to do harm to the community as a backbacker on a 30 day visa does.

Why punish somebody just because they weren't born on the same patch of land as you? Why reward somebody because they were? This nationalism masquerading as environmental/economic concern is so sickening I turn to Bill Hicks:

I was over in Australia and everyone's like "Are you proud to be an American?" And I was like, "Um, I don't know, I didn't have a lot to do with it. You know, my parents fucked there, that's about all. You know, I was in the spirit realm at that time, going 'FUCK IN PARIS! FUCK IN PARIS!' but they couldn't hear me, because I didn't have a mouth. I was a spirit without lungs or a mouth, or vocal cords. They fucked here. Okay, I'm proud.'"

You can't pick your parents, your family, in many places you can't pick your government, or who your government works for, but people can and should be able to pick their country and be unharrassed by people who don't even bother to check whether the arguments they raise have any factual basis.

My Heart

I remember on warm September nights riding to Napier St in Fitzroy and thinking I'd entered some kind of fairy land. It's an old suburb with quaint little houses and oldschool hotels on the corners. It was different from Brunswick, this is probably no real news at all to people who lived in Melbourne all their lives, but when you move here from Ballarat to go to Uni you don't really take time to explore all the hoods.

Plus my normal cocktail of brain chemicals was ascue because I'd just really got a handle on my grieving process. At that time I felt like a worthless bug just waiting to be crushed. I remember listening to 'Smaller and Smaller' by Faith No More over and over again. On top of that when you spent 9-5 in a drab office under flourescent lighting McDonalds upholstery is going to seem like Disneyland.

I spent every Thursday night with a group of cool people learning how to tutor refugees with the Fitzroy Learning Networks 'Community Networker' program. I think it was like 6 weeks of 3 hour training, police checks etc.

We learned how people deal with the trauma of being tortured, about how men are often too old to get work in Australia when they bring their families here and the problems of having the wife become the major bread winner while the man just stayed at home becoming chronically depressed.

We had a Sudanese lady from the community come and speak to us, and I was blown away when she talked about the jobs her and her friends got 'cleaning, driving taxis...' pretty much every bottom rung ladder job you could name - I realised unlike my parents 'sacrifices' to give me a good education, these refugees were working to give their kids a chance at a shitty education so they could get better jobs so that their grandchildren may have a chance at a decent education. These people were looking forward to their grandkids, it blew me away.

Also the vegetarian pizza they ordered was amazingly delicious.

So training was great and eye opening. And then I got assigned to Zaman, I had assumed my student would be somebody close to my age. I was informed by Sara the coordinator an amazing person that as far as anyone could guess Zaman was between 50 and 60, he had no idea of his age but his papers said he was 40. At any rate I was immediately terrified of having to teach somebody twice my age.

Zaman was somewhat of a local celebrity at the network so they showed me his picture before I met him in the flesh. I remember at our first meeting he cleared space on the seat by flicking this cat really hard in the ear that was sitting there. I had instantly forgotten every single lesson plan I'd prepared in case he wanted to know something and he pulled out a Fork Lift Drivers instruction manual as part of his scheme to get a better job and hopefully get off the cursed Temporary Protection Visa.

I met Zaman when most of the hard work had been done, he had been detained on Nauru as part of Howards' Pacific solution, where the only way to call his anxious family was via Telstra phone cards that cost about $7 per minute. It was brutal and inhumane, and fortunately there are wonderful people in the world that care enough to help out complete strangers like Zaman by writing them letters and sending them phone cards.

Apparantly he'd been suicidal when he first came to Fitzroy and found out he was on a temporary protection visa which meant he was stuck in Limbo for 5 years before he could be reunited with his family who were moved constantly between Jordanian and Pakistani refugee camps. When he got work and could send money to his family he improved dramatically.

So Zaman ironically put me at ease really quickly, he turned out to be quite hilarious and describes everything as 'beautiful' even when I write a word out for him like 'accelerator'. From the get go he pretty much runs all our lessons. I just turn up, listen and try to explain how english works, often discovering that I don't really know.

Saying bye to Zaman when I went travelling was the only farewell that moved me to tears. I'd just discovered he'd never actually met his youngest daughter, and had attempted to cook me dinner, we ended up drinking tea and eating mandarins.

Yet beautiful as Zaman is, he is but one of thousands upon thousands of refugees created each year by discrimination and neglect the world over. The whole of Fitzroy plays host to a community that has become my heart.

Nowadays Zaman and I meet up in the library and walk home to his place in the Atherton Gardens housing complex. We often run into his kids, and thats the amazing thing about this corner of Melbourne. Kids are everywhere, outdoors in winter playing in the parks. Indoors at Fitzroy Learning Network playing on the computers until the teacher turns the lights out and pushes them out the door.

The community is vibrant, not without problems which happens when you've been raised to believe the police are only there to beat and brutalise you and that nobody looks out for you but yourself. But to be honest, I never see these. I feel safe wandering those streets at night and I feel welcome in refugees homes.

I admire these people like no others, because they are nobodies and they are everybody. They have nothing I don't possess in my basic humanity, a will to survive, infinite capacity to love. They are put in positions so horrible I can't concieve of them and survive. So many have walked away from their family homes, the towns their ancestors lived in for generations to escape persecution and deprevation. They have done it not for themselves but for their children and their childrens children.

They have given everything they own to people smugglers for a dangerous and inhumane journey by boat to the shores of Australia. Australia's 'Boatpeople' policy under Howard was condemned by the UN. Temporary protection visa's are a nightmare, holding people in limbo in one of the worst situations of their life and prevent them from becoming settled and constructive members of the community. Mandatory detention is frowned upon, and mandatory detention of children was a direct breach of UN conventions. It is a sad indictment of the Australian community that these policies lasted so long.

Yet these people stood it all, in pursuit of a dream. They made the kind of sacrifices the world requires right now, above and beyond what needs doing in fact. Reducing our carbon footprint is a breeze compared to the depravity with which a safe and civilized country treats 'boat people'.

They take it, stand firm and do what they can. Study english, work shitty jobs and cope with hours and hours of loneliness and depression. Beautiful people like those at FLN help them, and I guess frauds like me and you can see the result walking through the towers of the Atherton Gardens, my heart, you see kids being just kids running and playing and getting in fight and backchatting old clowns like Zaman and me. I saw a kid pick a fight with a chicken, a literal chicken.

And sure they can be annoying and demanding in the library, but these kids man, its like they are oblivious to what their parents have been through. And they are, I remember fondly Zaman complaining that his kids 'have been to Zoo, have been to Aquarium, have been to Farm... nobody takes me anywhere.' Which is true, I never managed to get him to the Parliament house tour for his citizenship test preparation, not that that is as fun as the zoo.

And then there's stories that break my heart too. Like his friend who was sent to Perth whose kid dived off a bridge into a river and broke his neck becoming a quadraplegic right when he'd just gotten safe to Australia. Or his old housemate that gambled away his earnings and never spoke to his wife or bothered to apply for citizenship.

But there's nothing really dangerous about refugees, I don't even understand how its a fucking issue. The only problems to me stem from the lack of resources available to help new Australians feel welcome and integrate into our evolving community. Its when a refugee is isolated, socially, financially and by language barriers that they are going to do what any person would do, try and survive by whatever means necessary.

By contrast, the temporary protection Visas meant Zaman's eldest daughter had to recieve chemotherapy in Pakistan in the poor quality healthcare available to refugees, she has suffered complications as a result and been in and out of hospital almost constantly. The delay in bringing her to Australia was unneccessary and inhumane, and I sincerely hope it doesn't cost her her life.

But seeing fucking twerps and cunts like Abbott and Gillard working ignorant and irrelevant members of the general public into a frenzy to 'stop the boats' and subsequently make these human beings suffer more. I mean what are they fucking talking about? less than one percent of refugees arrive by boats with the vast majority flying in. Those that do arrive by boats are overwhelmingly found to have legitimate claims to seeking refuge. The 'queue' they are supposedly jumping doesn't really exist, furthermore the queues that do exist, like Australia's interview process and the UN refugee charter process less than 10% of the demand. The vast majority of Refugees are offered refuge by the worlds poorest countries. Why is this an issue? Why do people fucking care? Why do we have to be so distrustful and uncharitable to some of the neediest people in the world?

These people are capable of building a beautiful community. I see it every week, its my fucking heart and its one I really don't want broken.

Give and Take

Okay I'm a little late to the party but Lebron and Bosh are now members of the Miami Heat along with Dwayne Wade. That's a motherfucken powerhouse and promises several of the most worthless and meaningless chamionship rings the game has ever produced.

Pretty much the sole exception to that scenario is that for anybody who beats the Miami Heat in the next 5 years will hold some of the most hard earned championship rings the game has ever produced, similar I guess to the Detroit Pistons 2004 rings against Shaq-Kobe lead lakers.

But where the Lakers had Shaq and Kobe the were padded out with fading champions like Karl Malone and Gary Payton, Miami is a whole other story.

Wade, Lebron and Bosh are all more or less in their prime, they are all franchise players, that is to say any one of them can hold together a franchise on their own.

Whilst admittedly Shaq and Jordan couldn't win their championships alone, nor could Kobe, this is another kettle of fish. This is a cartel, this is a decision not to compete and simply share the rings.

I've never really liked Lebron, he can play basketball, he has an impressive physique, but his mental game is not there. I just see an infant, and I guess like Wayne Carey in AFL one of his least attractive qualities is that he's been given everything since he was 16 (possibly earlier).

For me Lebron's move to Miami ends the Kobe-Lebron argument. Kobe wins, hands down. Lebron thinks he is making the right move for his legacy but infact has killed it in the womb. He'll never be a champion. Even if he scores 100 points a game.

As Jordan himself said 'when they put the triple-team on you night after night, that's when you've reached that level' which will never happen on a team with Wade and Bosh on it. Wade and Bosh are each worthy of a double team, It's going to be numerically impossible to triple team Lebron and have any outcome on the outcome of the game.

I've always felt Wade had more 'Jordanness' in him, and I guess the one upside for Lebron in moving to Miami is that he won't be wearing another man's number anymore. That's about it. This move isn't about getting help, this isn't about getting a Pippen & Rodman, this isn't getting a Pau Gasol, this isn't in Shaq's case getting a Kobe or Wade. This is getting some ruby red slippers and a Yellow Brick road paved all the way to the finals.

I don't blame Lebron for leaving Cleveland, I'd probably think he was a bigger moron for staying. The fact that they have to play crowd chants over a PA system would be enough to make any super star leave it's a big achievement that the Cavs had such a good home game record in such a horrific stadium.

But I do blame Lebron for copping out. Words like 'undeniable' won't apply to anything Lebron does while playing with Dwade and Bosh unless Dwade takes over and he is described as 'undeniably better than Lebron'. Lebrons legacy is now very deniable, that he is great as a player is undeniable but he simply wont be comparable to Kobe or MJ because he isn't playing in the same league. He's playing in the under 12s now.

If I wanted to be 'like Mike' like Kobe did (before he started to just be Kobe) and Lebron so clearly does I would look for the strongest competitors to play AGAINST and jump over them, that's being like Mike, not trading yourself to their team.

Lebron is Give, or perhaps 'gimme, gimme, gimme.' which isn't to say he comes across as a spoilt brat or immature. He's been treated like royalty by pretty much everyone for pretty much his whole adult life, courted and pampered and what not. He probably can't concieve of a world where you have to take something for yourself.

By contrast you have Kobe, who played in Italy then skipped from highschool to the NBA refused to play for the Charlotte Hornets (or whoever) got himself traded to the Lakers and sat on a bench for a year.

Kobe has had to take everything for himself, that's the difference. As Jack Nicholson said in the Departed 'nobody gives it to you, you have to take it.' Kobe has taken all his rings, his 5 delicious Champion-chip cookies. Because he was truly hungry. To my knowledge Lebron has only ever shown the hunger once, and that was in the Eastern Conference finals against Detroit where he scored the last 35 consecutive points to win the game and go to the finals against the spurs where the Cavs were swept in one of the least watched and least entertaining series in history.

What I'm waiting for is Kobe's take on the Wade-Bosh-James triumvirate trade, I hope he's feeling hungry, I hope he sees the opportunity to cement himself once and for all as the greatest player of his era. I hope its like a rag to a bull, he can smell Lebron's weakness/immaturity and know he owns him now.

I hope Phil Jackson recognises that winning a championship against this heat team will be one of the few opportunities to actually top one of the greatest finals series ever.

I hope every team in the league can see the anti-competitive behaviour and go out hard to crush the Heat. NBA doesn't need a Real Madrid, it doesn't need a Manchester United. It needs a champion, and Lebron probably won't ever be one, and it'll be his own damn fault.

People I would swap lives with

I think my self esteem is pretty solid, if not remarkably high, and whilst I am annoying even to myself like the 2nd season of true blood I can't bring myself to stop watching how things will turn out.

I'd never trade youth for experience (particularly since I'm now in the best shape I've been since I was 18) I never send food back at a restaurant and there are very, very, very few people I would actually trade lives with. Here's both of them:

1: Les Claypool.

Sure he's got a big nose, but so do I. Why swap with Les? It's a no brainer. He lives on a property called 'Rancho Relaxo' has put out like 10 albums of some of the most awesome and out there (and admittedly an aquired taste) music of all time. Happily married, owns a boat and oh yeah! He's the greatest bass player ever. He has to be seen to be believed, but the way he moves conveys a real joy in music. Over the years he's got real tight at performance too but I can tell* he still loves it.

Here's some awesomeness from Les:


Plus he is able to get away with wearing whatever the fuck he wants. I love people that have reached that plane of existence. I spend too much time explaining my clothing choices lately.

2: Cheeks Galloway.

Fucken log onto his blog and see if you don't agree with me instantaneously. http://gotcheeks.blogspot.com/ He can draw, colour and design. He works like a workhorse or something, his style of speek is endearing and funny and he has a smoking hot wife.
I'd be surprised if cheeks had any haters really (though mathematically given all the douchebags in the world who think anything different from Jack Kirby's style is not good drawing, I assume they must).

Now sure, Micheal Jordan, Mike Patton etc. are tempting to say 'I'd swap lives if...' (I'd probably swap my entire life just to be able to dunk once from the free throw line (don't hold me to that!)) there are plenty of awesome people out there, but something about the above two. There's a kindness and generosity of spirit, a kindness, a 'I'm happy being me and fuck the rest' That ironically is what makes me happy to be them.

Hopefully that reflects that the key quality I'm trading for is one I already possess, therefore this was all pretty pointless. Including this pointless post.

Enjoy baby.

*percieve that...

Orientalism

I'm currently reading the Puffin 'modern classic' "Orientalism" by Edward W. Said. It sounded really interesting, like how it might contain answers to questions I have about why Asia (and in times past the 'Orient' now generally seperated into Asia and the Middle-East) is so fucking fetishised.

I read ti though and am wholeheartedly confused. The book seems academical managing to say very simple things in thousands of words with heaps of supporting references. Arguably my preferred manner of simply proferring conjecture to be weighed up by a reasoning mind based on it's intrinsic likelihood or 'well-formedness' is how the Orient came to be and all the modern day headaches with it.

So currently the book stands at having declared 'by giving name to such a vast region as the Orient (encompassing the Levant to China) Europeans (westerners) created an us & them mentality.

Which took 72 pages. Sure there are supporting examples, but to an anarchist its like 'big woop - nations don't really exist except in the minds of folks. Tell me something new.'

But you see, I still have questions. See I don't think I'm a racist, but now I'm not so sure.

Here basically encompasses my view:

If in 100 years there are only 250 people left alive, I will be glad because that means the human race has survived.

I don't give a shit if those 250 people are all black, or asian, or jewish. I don't care if the european-caucasion is extinct in 50 years, I will simply be glad in this interconnected world that somebody survived.

That's honestly how I feel.

End - my encompassing view of race.

Now - I find generalisations about races useful. There are observable, cummulative effects of race... or are there?

That in essence is what I'm hoping to find out from Orientalism. See I have been to Japan 3 times, I speak Japanese and have travelled fairly extensively up and down Japan setting foot on 2 of it's 4 main islands, which is more than I can say for Australia (I have spent less time in Australia but outside of Victoria than I have in Japan).

So the idea is this (has anyone else noticed how inarticulate I've become lately? I must have reached a critical mass of anti-knowledge) Say I go to Japan, do I experience Japan? OR do I experience my idea of Japan?

For example, if you accept some generalised premise of Japaneseness eg. 'The Japanese people have a deep love of nature.' it's pretty easy to go find corroborating evidence in Japan. Just visit one of the Edo period Gardens, or Meiji Jingu or any of the Shinto temples, or look in the museums and galleries and read haiku for their nature based themes.

But alternatively you could accept another generalisation 'The Japanese love of concrete' and again if you are looking for it you will see all the evidence (and there's a lot), like people remarking that autumn leaves are 'kitanai' whereas parks constructed of concrete are 'kireii' (dirty and pretty respectively) the bamboo railings that on closer inspection are infact fabricated out of concrete and painted bamboo colour...

So I've always scratched my head at people's ability to go to Japan and wander through it like it's a utopian fantasy land. And in many ways it is, it's hard to beat for comfort, cuisine, convenience and security. But people seem to overlook the glaringly horrible shit - like the retail staff that work 14 hour days 7 days a week. That's brutal. All the homeless dudes in the park, the omnipresence of pornography and the fact that everybody is tired all the time.

Same same with China, people rave about 50c beers and $4 banquets and all the DVDs you can eat. Most people can completely overlook the complete absence of basic human freedoms and basic human dignity.

I thought it was maybe a function of time, people who haven't spent enough time in Japan haven't had all the small suspicious things irk them, and maybe that's true. People who haven't spent enough time abroad don't stop to think about the impact of government on people's lives. They don't think 'rich' and 'poor' just 'expensive' and 'cheap'.

Maybe, or maybe we experience the narrative that we've been sold. I've lived in international house, which was a great opportunity. It never really worked, no rainbow gang as such... I also travelled and my experience is that the more time you spend with people the more conclusive it is that they are just people.

Like my ex Misaki, just a person, a person from Japan. Same emotional spectrum, same emotional triggers. Her nationality formed a part of her identity, but as a functioning human being it had little to do with it.

For example, she spoke Japanese - that's a product of being raised in Japanese society. She had other memetic imprints from being Japanese (eg. she was offended by sharing food via chopsticks, it is however okay to feed somebody else directly with your chopsticks, but you cant accept the morsel with your own).

Anyway, these aspects of race are not say genetic so much as they are cultural. I believe that the beliefs shared by people that can be deliniated by national boundaries are generally what I dub 'reinforced' beliefs. What do I mean by that?

Well take gravity, okay so if you have a new born child, that child doesn't need any real reinforcement of the idea of gravity. Gravity reinforces itself, every moment of everyday. That kid NEVER needs a concept of gravity or its specific explanations to understand why the fuck it shouldn't jump off a cliff.

Now take a kid and give him to a Morrocan family to raise and observe whether that kid spontaneously turns into a Japanese person just as it spontaneously understands gravity. Provided the Morrocan family aren't migrants from Japan, that kid won't even be able to speak Japanese, let alone all the subtle and complex cultural nuances of what it is to be 'japanese'. Why? Because these (I surmise) are reinforced beliefs that require considerable energy expenditure to put in a kids head that they stick there. You basically need everything in their community to reinforce the memes through conscious effort. Teachers, postmen, talkback radio DJs etc.

Thus its clear to me that race is an idea invented like religion and countries in general. People have tree-mendous investments in these ideas but it doesn't make them any less invented.

But! Why do some/(most) people fetishise other cultures and a few are just like 'Oh they are people just the same, except they wear different hats?' and can other exogenous cultures invent 'what you are' in the same manner adults thrust Catcher in the Rye on unsuspecting teenagers and say 'here, understand yourself'???

Guess I'll just have to keep reading.

'I'm a Poet and I don't even know that I am one'

[As an aside I'd like to apologize on my tardiness lately, even though I've been on facebook for years now it seems recently I've become addicted to blasting status updates instead of writing blog posts and my attention span has shrunk considerably. I'm trying to get back to more substantial posting.]

Last night I went to the launch of the 'New Poets 2010' it may have even been a society, though it didn't strike me as such. The event was free, it was packed, there was standing room only. An old acquaintance from my TNS call center days was one of the New Poets and in fact the closing act.

I had a chance to read through her poems this morning. The evening wasn't all great for example some of the more natural-world inspired poems were hard to concentrate on and visualise what was being talked about because my vocabularity wasn't up to it.

Plus at random times I kept thinking of Mr. Show's 'Monsters of Megaphone' skit which I had watched earlier that day. But those are my personal failings not the poets themselves.

The poems generally smacked of work, but in a good way. Sure the creative process is mysterious, but at some point work must be done to push anything even the humble poem to elite new heights.

See I was expecting some kind of cringe-fest like Def-poetry,with pretentious people nodding to pretentious orations by otherwise cool rappers.

Alas, (thankfully) it was not. It was a beautiful event aside from what i feel was unnecessary Masterchef Judge George bashing.

Anyway I don't really know what to say about poetry. It's poetry, and probably best captures the indefinable nature of art. I can say it was high quality poetry, but I wouldn't know how to convey the quality to you.

I bought a book of poems of one of the performers, got it signed and all. But I don't think it would be cool to reproduce her material here.

ONe thing I can talk about though is the heirarchy of crowds.

It is my intention to one day do standup comedy...again. My first experience was pretty brutal and mercifully failure is met with forgetfulness. Comedy crowds are tough, particularly when they are made up of other aspiring comedians and or people who are there just to drink or have some kind of corporate function.

You need to entertain or shut the fuck up.

Contrast this with public speaking crowds, whenever you are making a formal address the crowd is there through some sense of duty or simply a desire to kill time. They don't expect to be entertained they expect to be bored. Thus any jokes you crack have ten times the currency than they would if you were presented as a stand up comic. People shouldn't fear public speaking, its like shooting fish in a barrel.

The 'home crowd' is the friends in the school yard, work colleagues in your cubicle, thats your safe secure environment where you can experiment and fail to little consequence. You can go volume not quality and so forth. It is still probably not the ideal place to test material but it is the most forgiving crowd you'll ever have.

Then there's the poetry crowd, aside from doing strange things to people's haircuts, it's like the public speaking crowd times 10. Because if the rest of the audience is like me their mental energy is totally preoccupied trying to visualise the subject matter of the prose as it works its way into our brain through its artful coding.
Thus thusly, jokes here have ten times the currency they do in public speaking. It's like completely deleveraged from the gold standard (stand-up) or even some kind of reserve ratio (public speaking) this is SOuth America people!

So whilst I've been once bitten and twice shy of standup, I may long term ease into it via the poetry scene, I may even wind up doing poetry rap.

Also to reiterate, supporting people is really easy, If I can rearrange my roster to go see a poetry reading, you 9-5ers can just turn up and support. Do it!

Reconciling Marketing and Economics

Okay let's be clear we are talking about competition, and to some extent recently I've been caught up in the fancy that perhaps even economics needs reconciling with itself.

Namely, economics says people are 'rational utility maximisers' which I don't believe, not entirely it all depends I guess on your definition of utility. I generally accept the 'our world has evolved much faster than our brains' thesis and lean towards 'people are irrational utility maximisers' or as Robert Schiller and other-guy said in 'Animal Spirits': If people want snake oil, the market is remarkably efficient at producing it.

But for todays sermon, I'm going to have to drop the irrational utility maximisers and instead look at utility.

The General-Story: We can't measure utility, so we assume it to be a function of consumption and consumption to be a function of wealth. This assumption is what makes GDP the be-all-and-end-all of economic management comparisons, and a large reason as to why so much in this world is so fucked up.

I'm going to 'cheat' as I have accused others and reconcile into this definition/assumption of utility marketing know-how, that is intangibles that people also consume. Namely 'Goodwill' and 'Brand Equity' things rational people shouldn't pay for but do.

Okay, I think I've got enough pieces now to start putting this puzzle together.

Let's start on the Economists' side of the fence (assuming Finance is a subset of economics) over here people are rational utility maximisers, thus consumers should LOVE competition. Competition of perfectly substitutable goods drives down marginal revenue (the prices paid) to the point the marginal revenue = marginal cost = price. That's the ideal Economists call perfect competition. It basically means there's no excess gain on the part of producers that redistributes wealth.

Economists as such encourage competition (well at least they say they do) because the cheaper goods are they more consumers can consume and thus thusly increase their utility, the broad aim of economics. You also achieve efficient allocation of resources.

This is all very slapdash, but there's an Economist and his accompanying school that deserves mentioning - Keynes and the Keynesians. They observed that prices were not perfectly flexible but rigid downwards, as were wages. The implications of which I don't wish to go into, but this was based on the observation that most industry is not characterised by perfect competition or even competition but monopolies.

This means most firms don't look at supply and demand factors to set their prices, but take a 'cost + markup' approach. They can only do this if there is a lack of competition to force their prices to market equilibrium.

Here finally we have a hole in the fence to the marketers side.

Al Ries and Jack Trout in their seminal work 'positioning: the battle for your mind' make numerous allusions to the 'first, second or exit' theory of industries. This thoery/maxim/folk-wisdom isn't marketing per se, but it is an observed reality.

Generally the market leader for a given market category get's about 60% of the revenue. The number two get's 30% of the revenue. The number three 3% and so on in ever diminishing slices of the revenue pie.

This bears out across all industries where generally the race for number 1 is a two-brand race, and not a particularly fair one at that. Nike and Adidas, Coke and Pepsi, Fuji and Kodak, Hertz and Avis, Qantas and Virgin, Lakers and Celtics, Ford and Holden (Australia only) etc.

Which tells us people like some competition, but not heaps. And sure take an example like footware you can ad in Puma, Reebok, Aasics, New Balance blah blah blah.

The fact is the marketers, who perplexingly study markets, believe that people increase their utility by consuming more brand equity or good will.

That is, whilst we can characterise the market as monopolistic and thus prices don't really behave in lockstep with supply and demand equilibriums, we can't really explain it. Sure we like to imagine that Mr Coke walks into Pheonix Cola's bottling factory one day and has some goomba's rough up the management and send them packing out of town, but generally market leaders aren't elected through anti-competitive behaviour per se, but acclamation.

Is this your experience: You go to a restaurant in town, and you order something, and you like it. After a suitable interval you decide to eat out in town again, you go to the same restaurant and order the same dish. You do so without really shopping around for alternatives. Been there, done that?

Fuck, do you usually get Hawaiin pizza? Meat lovers? BBQ chicken? Chances are there are products and brands you just buy, you don't constantly test empirically whether they are the best option or not.

Generally people enjoy choice up until they have picked a winner. After that choice becomes annoying.

That is the marketers experience and if I take license, philosophy. Build brand equity, build goodwill. If it's a product or service you want people consuming it as often as possible with little deviation.

This seems to contradict the Economists, and Finance peeps over the fence. How to reconcile?

Well, Economists believe peeps to be risk-averse. Risk generally involves fluctuation, deviation etc. this is how we measure risk. Thus it is understandable to hypothesise that people don't like the idea of their wages being renegotiated every day. Why? Well because rent is typically fixed, and other expenses. Uncertainty creates stress, will we be able to pay rent? etc. It should be mother fucking obvious! Why am I explaining this to you!

Okay, now here I get controversial, would you eat at a restaurant that changed its prices every day? Probably not, you'd never know whether your plate of spaghetti al ragu was going to clean out your wallet or be a steal. You'd rather eat somewhere where you know you are going to pay 9 clams.

So prices are typically stable in the short run, and consumers love it. Why because consumers are peeps and they are risk averse. Producers, firms also comprise of peeps and are risk averse. So in some ways having prices change everyday for the people that produce those goods is like having your wages renegotiated every day.

Now let's go to Thailand, this was my experience in Thailand. I hated the barter system, I would much prefer having a clear and unambiguous price that I may simply pay it than to waste 15 minutes trying to negotiate 30 baht off the price of a pair of thongs (flip flops). I fucken hated bartering, particularly when I had to do it for almost everything all day. Now the thing is that the advertised price would be $25 for a shitty t-shirt. You knew you could barter them down, and you ostensibly 'wanted' to, because you wouldn't pay $25 for the same shitty shirt in Australia. But how far down could you go and get them for $11, $10, $8... what is a reasonable price? When do you give up on the investment time wise of bartering to go start the whole process again with somebody else down the road?

It's fucking annoying, competition is annoying and the costs of finding the best deal are routinely underplayed by economists.

Here then I change the narrative, the market generally weeds out competition itself. This would be supported by the research Psychologists like Dan Gilbert go into, which show that people who are given opportunities to change their mind, switch products etc experience less satisfaction/less utility than those who don't.

People actually dislike competition, because as economists have pointed out - they are risk averse.

The cost of competition is opportunity cost, and you only experience opportunity cost when you have an opportunity. Now this sounds terribly like a 'Chinese people aren't ready for democracy' a falsifiable claim that ironically could be tested with a vote.

But marketers know that people don't just consume a computer, they consume the Mac brand as well. They don't just use footwear, they use the streetcred of nike. They don't just read the time off a clockface, they let everybody else know they have a Rolex. People get currency out of the lack of competition, and they enjoy it surprisingly much.

It may be a departure from the traditional concept of utility - people buy watches to read the time. But if we are capable of learning from experience, we realise that people don't just want to buy things to make their lives easier, they want to be recognised for it too.

This isn't a blanket statement either. Generally people want choice to begin with, and thus competition for any solution that is new to them. So in the 80's 90's they may have wanted multiple OS software packages. But eventually people settled on Microsoft not because it was the best, or whatever, but because it was the lingua franca, and then rightly they rejected competition because it would have been a pain in the arse to try and conduct business via the internet with people who were constantly switching their OS.

Likewise a runner doesn't want to train in different brands and fits of running shoes every day. Fans of athletes don't want their favorite NBA player switching shoe company sponsorship 3 times a season. All because people are risk averse, and whilst on the surface competition should make things cheaper for risk averse consumers, it introduces opportunity costs, and they don't like it. It increases the costs of the goods they consume.

And of course you have people like my mother Janice, who's risk aversion takes another form, in some regards competition is her worst enemy, she won't buy anything until she is certain she has it at the best price. This makes shopping with her stressful, and I try to avoid being roped into it but will concede once per decade.

So even for her, her life would be less stressful and more time abundant if she wasn't kept awake at night by the prospect of MYER having a sale on a particular item in 2 weeks time. Thank god she doesn't really understand inflation or the time value of money.

What's the point of all this?

Well there's a school of economists that tout lassez-faire economics, that is Governments and regulatory bodies do as little as possible to intervene in the market. They believe the market is powerfully efficient.

To me this school of thought is directly comparable to politicians who think civilians should have no individual rights in a democracy though. It sort of suggests that people's natural and popular inclinations are infallable.

As Schiller said, the market is powerfully effecient, and if people want snake oil, it will produce snake oil. But it is the rare individual who is risk-aggressive and thus can actually appreciate and exploit the benefits of competition. These people should be the regulators on account of their rarity that can make up for the short comings of the risk averse masses.

If left to its own devices the market would probably eradicate competition all together, as risk averse consumers seek to increase their utility by eliminating all sources of uncertainty.

I hold that the role of economics is not to assume people are 'rational utility maximisers' and build a system on that assumption. I believe it should assume people to be 'irrational risk-averse utility maximisers' BUT build an economic system where 'rational risk-taking utility maximisers win'.

We have to accept that the human mind is messy (but surprisingly consistent) and that it is our job to overcome it, by encouraging the behaviours that will profit society in every possible way.

The Apocalypse in Retrospect

So I ran the 800 against John on Saturday evening. I won the race, but I'm not sure if I imparted to anyone just how unique the 800m is through the whole ordeal. I remain convinced it is a very special distance worthy of study by psychologists, physiotherapists and moral philosophers.

Furthermore, now that it is all over I can appreciate how truly strange this whole process has been. I thought I'd elaborate a final time.

Uncertainty Squared

In hindsight I can't help but compare our race to Musashi vs. Ganryu, because I'm a massive loser. John is tall like Ganryu and he had to wait for me to turn up like Ganryu, and he had all the spectators like Ganryu and it was in hindsight all over before it began, just like Musashi vs. Ganryu.

But I didn't feel any of the certainty Musashi was said to have had when he declared himself the victor before the duel began. So I am Dan Quayle to Musashi's John F Kennedy. I was late because I stupidly bashed my knee and the toilet roll covers in QV bathrooms changing and didn't want to cycle up and risk aggrevating the injury. So it wasn't exactly planned (nor was I going to let on I'd bashed my knee putting pants on to John before the race).

Saturday was one of the least pleasant experiences I had all year, I spent the day anticipating the race, trying to make a concerted effort not to anticipate the race. it's been a long time since I cared about winning anything, It's been a long time since I've actively cared about myself. So it was a strange place for me to be in.

When you care about something, and that something is uncertain then you get anticipatory stress. Win or lose, you can move on with your life, but until then you hang in limbo.

As it turned out, John's brave stance that he was fit enough to beat me in the 800 without training was stupid. Brave, but stupid. But let me say this, if John and I had both put in say 3 months of dedicated training and he was running 2.18 and I was running 2.20 regularly the uncertainty of the outcome would not decay.

Because this is what makes the 800m unique. On top of the uncertainty that accompanies any win-lose situation you DO NOT KNOW HOW THE FUCKING 800M will go DOWN. If John was running 2.18 regularly, and I was running 2.20 you couldn't say who would win when we raced eachother.

If I run 2.20 by going out hard and running a fairly consistent but slower second lap, this could totally fuck up John's cruisy 1.15 first lap and 1.03 second lap. Similarly if I were to relax my hard pace and just tail John, who's to say I couldn't stick with him the entire second lap? Or burn out and only run 2.40, or John burns out on the first and DNF's?

That is, you can train but as Napolean or Eisenhower or somebody said 'Plans are nothing but planning is everything.' You can have a gameplan, but then you need a gameplan for when that gameplan falls apart. John and my race was somewhat luxurious because it was a field of 2. Even so, the sheer uniqueness of the distance doubles the stress (for me at least).

I thus spent the day combating two things, the first of which was the temptation to formulate a strategy or game plan. I had to exert the mental discipline to go in and 'see' what happened. Make my decisions from there. The key thing was to listen to my body. Any effort I exerted as to whether I should run fast first or fast last was wasted effort, because to me John was a complete unknown. The 800m is a complete unknown. It is unknowable.

Why did I talk about Samurai's? Well in retrospect I can kind of see how addictive the 'life or death' uncertainty of conflict is. It is an all together different mental space... which brings me to the second thing I had to exert mental discipline over.

Loser Talk

In the past month and a bit I have shrugged off 7kgs, I'm the fittest I've been since highschool (excluding when I cycled Europe where I was fit, and malnourished) and the preparation of the mental and physical game has taught me self-discipline and humility.

Win or lose the 800m training has been a good experience for me.

Sound familiar - it's loser-talk. 'I'll just go out and do my best, if I do that I can hold my head high!' etc. The great temptation of loser-talk is to downplay the risk of losing, and furthermore all loser-talk is usually true and valid. There is more to be learned from istakes than successes, there are benefits to just showing up and competing etc.

I believe everything in the first paragraph of this section and would stand by it. The 800m is a naturally humiliating event, with or without spectators. One can easily feel ashamed of yourself in a field alone. Even I discovered in the non-judgemental presence of a Golden Labrador. Such humble pie is invaluable to me.

But we are talking about winning and losing here. I was surprised at how mentally taxing it is to accept the possibility of defeat, and show a respectful fear for it, without succumbing to internal (or external) loser-talk. When you diminish the risks you diminish your sheer survivalist drive for losing not to occur.

but projecting is hard, and it's a razor fine line in the 800m because there are so many opportunities to lose. Run like a mother-fucker and your legs simply give out. Run to slow and find you can't reel the leader back in. Mistime your break and get overtaken in the last 20m. Anybody, nomatter how the fitness cards are stacked in their favor can fuck up an 800m.

Thus it makes sense to do a little-pre consoling, to be forgiving to yourself and look for the silver lining.

I had to crush and strangle these thoughts and just focus, focus on getting to the starting line and then having the presence of mind to see what happens.

Don't Jump off a tall building

When I was I don't know, 14 a recieved some sage advice from one of my 14 year old peers that you don't commit suicide by jumping off the empire state building. The reason: the decision has been made and it's final, but you have time to contemplate your fate.

In the post match dinner, with John and his housemates we briefly talked about other athletic distances, 100m, 200m, 400m etc. In all those races there are no decisions to be made. There's no time, you just run as hard as you fucking can. Thus the uncertainty is uncertainty squared.

When I actually ran this 800m, I was struck by having the time to think. It was creepy to say the least. For the first bend I was unconscious, coming out onto the first straight I only thought 'I'm in front' (not typically an advantageous place to be), on the 3rd straight (the second last) it occured to me I was in a race and I had to make a bunch of decisions.

My only info on John was sound, I could hear his footfalls and his breathing. I remember judging him to be about 4 meters behind me by the footfalls and then listening to his breathing for hints that he was uncomfortable.

At that time (500m mark) I knew if John stuck with me till the 600m I was in trouble, I listened to my own breathing and decided it was regular and decided to break. John simply dissappeared from my auditory register but that strange space was something akin I feel (resembling, not copying) the sensation of plummeting to your death. It is very rare for me to have a window of consciousness in a footrace. A subjective experience of it.

In shorter events as I have stated, you simply run as fast as your body will carry you and you don't think at all. In longer races I find I generally get distracted with either a song in my head or thoughts of sexual frustration. (did I just write that?).

But in the 800m, you get to contemplate your own race like you contemplate your life (I imagine) plunging to your death*. You can reflect briefly whether you've had a good race or a poor race. You can be tortured by self doubt, or you can just accept the run for what it is and carry on through to the inevitable conclusion. But short of your calf muscle tearing in half or hamstring tearing off your thighbone, when you start an 800m you are going to finish it. Unlike a 3km run where if you realise you have lost you may just quit the field.

*I have one friend who is in the fairly fortuitous and unique position of having jumped off the West-gate bridge and lived spinal-damage-free to tell the tale. The way he tells it I got the impression he just watched the whole way down and didn't contemplate his fate at all.

There is no soundtrack to the 800m

It remains a strange mental space, running the 800m, and I don't think my obsession with this evetn will diminish based on my recent experience. I posted a facebook status in the week leading up to the race to the effect of 'I cannot find music that is explosive enough to go with my new found explosiveness. NIN Broken... no good. Sepultura Chaos AD... no dice. Somebody help me please.'

What many fail to realise is that this was serious. I attribute it to the 800m and the strange space-time distortion of the event.

I have come to the conclusion that the 800m cannot be explained, it must be experienced, which would invalidate this post and all labelled 800m on the blog.

There are explosive songs, like 'Refuse-resist' by Sepultura, 'Wish' by Nine Inch Nails, 'Around the Fur' by Deftones. Some of the bands recommended by friends in response to my post like Testament, American Nightmare, Parkway Drive and McClusky were indeed explosive. But they are not explosive enough.

I ended up thinking that if you combined Deftones and Sepultura you might get to the explosiveness required by the 800m and then remembered Headup on Around the Fur featured Max Cavalera then of Soulfly formally of Sepultura. This song was explosive enough to work as a stop-gap, but honestly in any other period of my life these songs are too much for me to listen to for prolonged periods.

I often think of them as overdone to the point of being quite dull. I prefer the subtle nuances of Prince Paul producing or Faith No More for sheer style. They certainly have their place, but such explosive music is OTT. But whilst I was in prep mode for the 800m, they were way, way under.

I offer this as a wayward explanation of how special/unnatural the 800m is. Even in Thrash Metal or Hardcore punk, you can have a pretty hard hitting song running 2.40 which is fairly short song wise, but within the song you will have on and off moments. The thrash riff is 'on' for up to 12 seconds at a time. Chino only screams for max 40% of the song length. The 800m demands a track that screams for 100% of 2 minutes 40. Such songs do not exist, yet I craved them and contemplated trying to mix my own out of Tool, Nine Inch Nails, Deftones, White Zombie and Sepultura.

It also felt like a genuine affliction/addiction. Today thankfully I am calm enough to listen to Stevie Wonders greatest hits and enjoy them because it's a Stevie Wonder kind of day, but last week I couldn't scratch my itch and it was driving me insane. 'Headup' was a woefully inadequate drop of methodone when I needed the hardcore junk. Like an entirely sprinted 800m though, I don't think a soundtrack to the 800m is even physically possible.

Weight Off My Mind/We Define the Context of Our Own Existence

Had I been certain I could simply outlast John by controlling the pace on the first lap, I probably wouldn't have had my breakdown in the last fortnight. But such certainty is not the province of a race. Just like there would be no vindication if I beat a morbidly obese 40 year old in the 800m when they previously could not walk 300m without going into cardiac arrest. I don't wish to compare John unfavorably to an obese 40 year old, (even though he compared me unfavorably to Morley), but rather a race is not a race without uncertainty.

John remarked how 'basketball fitness' for lack of a better word, even 'soccer fitness' or 'ultimate frisbee' fitness doesn't translate to an 800m run. In soccer for example (John's example) a 60m run would be considered huge and out of the ordinary. Basketballers and Soccer Players, AFL players and Ultimate Frisbee Players may cover 10km or more in a typical game, but it's stop start.

What's this got to do with anything? Not much but I thought I'd share it anyway, anyway, basketball players. You watch them on tv and they make it look so easy. So easy you don't appreciate how easy it is.

You have people sprinting down the lane and doing a two-handed overhead dunk and you are like 'woah' that guy must be fit. Which is a stupid thing to say, we are so used to people running up and down court though that it isn't until you try a full court game of basketball yourself that you get truly impressed.

Fact is, it takes an abnormal level of fitness to be even able to raise your arms after 20 minutes of running up and down a basketball court. A basketball is pretty light, it has to be for people to lob in three pointers. But after enough time it becomes incredibly heavy. It is superhuman to be able to keep lifting that lightweight ball and send it gracefully arcing towards the rim.

Similarly the mental burden of uncertainty-squared that is the knowledge you have to run an 800m is seemingly light weight but infact mentally taxing. The day after the race I was struck by how empty and lightweight my head was, sure I'm a fucking clown and what not, but I am capable of injecting meaning into almost anything and taking it seriously. Otherwise I wouldn't have lost the 7kgs that has been hanging around for most of the last preceding years.

But this small inconsequential thing became quite heavy to me. I suspect my experience again is akin (if not actually the same) as to what brought tears to Michael Jordans eyes when he embraced the cold lump of metal that is a championship NBA trophy for the first time.

Perhaps (in fact definitely) I will never be a world class 800m runner, and this isn't my calling. But I cared because I chose to care and I can do that for anything I wish to apply myself to. I draw hope from this, so I'm raising myself up a notch, because I've run through some barrier and taken myself to a higher plane. I don't think it can be taken away either. This weight I've shed recently wasn't a dead weight, but some mental resistence training weight. I carried it around and now I'm stronger for it.

Only

In 'Stumbling on Happiness' by Dan Gilbert, he alludes to a bit of psychiatrist humour where two psychiatrists pass eachother one morning and one says 'You're fine, how am I?'

Arguably there should be no humour in this joke because if the profession is valid a person should be able to accurately deduce the state of mind of another human being. Except we know it's not the case, at least partially, somebody can't know about anothers state of wellbeing without information to inform our conclusion. Thus we normally ask 'How are you?' and respond 'I'm fine, how are you?'.

Infact if you go see a counsellor they will usually ask you how you are, if they are particularly deductive/assertive they may ask 'what's wrong'

The artform of being a human being is knowing what information actually is. That is every day after school in my highschool days my dad and I had the following conversation:

Dad: 'How was school?'
Me: 'Good.'

Now obviously, I had good days and bad days not a consistent stream of good days. In turn, it's entirely possible that somebody who tells you they are fine are in fact not. There are also a whole heap of valid reasons to lie about your state of mind.

In fact* erecting a facade is the norm, in a constantly changing environment this facade allows some consistency that makes life functional. Similar to the efficiency wage theorem that explains why wages are not perfectly negotiable, employers AND employees like to fix wages into contracts so they have some degree of certainty and can thus plan for all the other uncertanties rather than expending time and energy renegotiating the market equilibrium wage rate every day...

Lost? I have lost my ability to percieve what is common economic literacy so I might drop the analogy. I like most people have ups and downs. Generally the worst thing is when there's a high degree of variation. I'd prefer long alternating low periods with long high periods than a week where I feel up and down 7 times a day.

The variation is typically disruptive of my facade that is forming the identity of the moment. I feel most people can see through whatever facade I have, eg. if I'm acting particularly obnoxious or arrogant they can tell I'm pretty insecure etc. I don't mind that so much as I'm happiest when I forget there IS a facade and thus have a strong sense of identity.

I can get away with the facade because it's very rare for anybody to ask anyone as direct a question as 'what do you think of you?' and seldom do we have to confront the illusion.

Some days though I kind of crave being asked this question, not just as an opportunity to narcissistically talk about me, but just so I can admit to somebody that I have no idea who I am or what I am supposed to do.

I think on that front though, I've managed to pass the critical point of no return on my lonesome. The revelation that I don't have any intrinsic meaning or purpose and that I have to define myself. That part was really difficult, going to the effort and doing the work is much much harder than that. But I know I have to do it.

But I kind of hope that people can look at me and say 'you're not fine.' or at the least 'you're not there yet. How am I?' because I certaintly don't believe my own facade.

Surprisingly the 800m training has been good for this. I tried to invent an alter ego to run it for me. One that wasn't scared, just obsessed with winning. This perplexingly lead to frequent mood swings and an eventual breakdown. Where I was confronted by the fact that nobody was going to run this foot race except me, only me. I don't really know who that is or what he's capable of, but it's what I have to work with. I can't just make me up.

*I have not actually checked my facts.

Masculinity

I'm a fan of masculiniy, but I suspect that masculinity is one of those words that means different things to different people. One of those topics that if debated will be constantly prone to definitional retreats: 'Yes but you must understand when I say masculinity I don't mean misogeny and homophobia, I mean chivalry and loyalty...' etc.

It's an undefined term. So when my facebook buddy friend Ben (the 2nd most ethical guy I know) posted a link to this article. I find myself both agreeing and disagreeing.

Why? Because its complicated, and I probably can't give you a better reason than that.

For example, the author of that post doesn't formally define the phenomena of masculinity, thus the implicit definition is a pretty misogenistic and negative one, which doesn't make the definition invalid. And accepting that definition I'd agree with just about everything he wrote.

The thing is, that like Michelangelo I see a lot of beauty and merit in the performance that is masculinity, as well as a lot of problems. Generally my attitude to the problems is ascribed to the artlessness of the performance of this masculine role.

I'd be curious to know what the standard taught theory on gender-roles is in most university's gender-studies courses. That is how much of gender is ascribed to nature and how much to nurture?

I'm inclined to think its both, and would probably lean towards some arbitrary split like 40:60 nature:nurture. Like for example, the brain's developmental exposure to testosterone results in 'thought patterns' (whatever they are) that are more literal than abstract. Hence you find disproportionate representation of men in engineering courses etc. I probably haven't explained that well, I'm just trying to say that quite aside from the right for women to become engineers, there are genetically/hormone coded preferences for certain things that has nothing to do with how we are raised that contribute to gender roles.

So forget it, lets talk about the 'nurture' component of masculinity, those masculine ideals - toughness, resilience blah blah blah as well as those negative aspects like 'not being a sissy' or 'not acting like a girl'.

My position is, you can be born male but that doesn't necessarily make you a 'man'. A purely psychological ideal, that like our shifting moral zeitgeist should be put through a total-quality-management aspect.

Allow me to demonstrate what that means. Say we come out with a prototype man, man 1.0.

Man 1.0 is brave, doesn't show fear, doubt, or any visable signs of weakness. Hides his emotions and this is what allows him to step up, take responsibility for a group and assume the risks.

Useful? Anthorpologically speaking yes. Perfect? far from it. So over time this ideal of manhood is upgraded to Man 2.0.

Man 2.0 understands his emotions, acknowledges them and takes risks when necessary in spite of them. This mindset allows him to step up, take responsibility for a group and assume the risks.

Man 2.0 we can see is streamlined. We have reduced the internal conflict by acknowledging that a man will probably have all these weaknesses, and acts 'manly' inspite of them. But he doesn't spend significant psychological, emotional energy trying to combat useful emotional responses. Man 2.0 feels the fear and does it anyway, instead of maintaining a facade.

Can it get better? yes. Am I going to push through the iterations here? no.

I as a 'man' aspirant do feel threatened by the suggestion that men should be 'more feminine' insofar as these suggestions tend to come from people using definitions of gender roles that lump all the positives and negatives together, and ascribe a 'male oppressor' role to masculinity and I feel raise femininity as an ideal.

I've never once believed a suggestion that men are 'less emotional than women' for example. And the convenient definition of masculinity I like doesn't include that premis either. This masculine role is about using reason to override your intuitive emotional response when there is a pay-off for the reasoned behaviour.

Furthermore, as this masculine role is a performance - a philosophy of behaviour if you will - I see no reason to ascribe it particularly to women or men.

That's right, I think if you are going to say 'men should be more feminine' then in turn 'women should be more masculine' which is to say: 'people should be effective.'

What I see though is a condemnation of toughness as being bad in all situations. I would agree in an ideal world, but the world is not ideal. Toughness is one of those great buffers that can promote greater equality when used right. For example toughness is great for confronting bullies.

To say that 'bullies shouldn't act tough in the first place, then good people wouldn't need to be tough' is true, but it is disempowering (is that a word). If faced with a bully the only thing you can control is yourself. So if toughness pays dividends, be tough.

If you find being tough draining, and the demands of putting on a brave face and puffing yourself up in front of a potential threat, by all means go home, throw up and have a cry. Nothing wrong with that either.

I like to call myself a feminist, I enjoy Black Sheep a lot though, so I'm not sure if I can. Anyway, part of calling myself a feminist is acknowledging that women have been thrust unjustly into an inferior and wretched place in society.

That in turn supports the argument in the original article of the misogenistic nature of terms like 'being a pussy' 'sissy' or 'faggot'. It's really indefensible, but my marketing training suggests to me that over the course of time, rather than these terms losing their negative connotations, they will be more likely defeated by losing all resemblance to their original context.

Like Southpark episode 'The F Word' where the southpark kids have no idea that 'faggot' has any association with being gay. To me 'a cunt' is a particularly unsavory guy, I don't naturally associate it with vaginas because I almost never use it in that context. If it is offensive to women, then I acknowledge it shouldn't be used.

My point is though that if the 'feminine' gender role is this wretched and degraded position, then why is that the solution for men escaping the cage of masculinity? To me it strikes me as akin to saying 'slave owners should be slaves' it is no solution to the gender divide. You get free by raising up.

Again the old joke is 'Why do women wear make-up, why do they wear perfume?' answer 'because they are ugly and they stink' is the old sexist joke that I feel encapsulates the role of 'femininity' as it is used to oppress. Being feminine I feel means feeling ugly, insecure and vulnerable all the time. This femininity is what progress is being made on in encouraging men to drop their masculine facade.

Put simply it is designed to sell make-up and perfume to men who in past lives would have been too self assured to buy them.

Acknowledging emotions - yes! Feeling ugly and old and fat - No! that's where women have to act more like men, not vice versa.

It is my hope that in 50 years when one girlfriend tells her girlfriend to 'man up' they will not find it funny or ironic in any way. They will be completely ignorant that men used to be male only.

Not my best argument to be sure. But as I said, its complicated.

A Little Less Symbolism, A Little More Action

So Julia Gillard is PM, and I'm surprised but I guess shouldn't be at the strength of reactions from people on facebook.

I'm going to struggle to articulate this... ugh... to me Julia Gillard running the country is like having my Alfredton Primary school principal running the country. It's like any fucken moron can be Prime Minister. This would be the same if Joe Hockey had won the Liberal Leadership and gone on to win the Federal Election. I'm not convinced that Joe Hockey is even smart enough to be leader of a Lawn Bowls team.

Democracy it seems suffers from Prole-drift, just like Louis Vitton and Burberry. I guess what I'm getting at is while I'm not blown away by K-Rudd, and I've always felt that he was the PM we had to vote in, in order to vote out Howard - I felt he was at least politically competent. Like when the insulation workers drove down to Canberra in protest, Krudd went out to talk to them directly infront of the media, address their concerns and then school the rest of his party in 'how to be a politician'. Again Rudd doesn't look brilliant, everybody else looks like a fucken moron.

If you hadn't noticed, I'm still trying to articulate... Julia's status as 'First Female PM' to me is not particularly exciting, because there is little more to be said than that she is Female. If improbably Joe Hockey had deposed Rudd and become PM in much the same manner, there would be no basis for historical excitement, it would simply be 'man replaces other man'.

So there's symbolic value I guess in Gillard's coup. It disproves the hypothesis that 'A woman cannot be Prime Minister of Australia'. What surprises me is how much anybody cares that this hypothesis has now been disproved.

I mean it's 2010 people. England has had a female Prime Minister - Margeret Thatcher - one of the worst leaders in history, because she employed monetarist economic policy same as Reagan and anti-human brand capitalism. It had nothing to do with her gender, just as, I'm sure Julia Gillard's performance won't.

I had assumed that everybody simply assumed that a woman could become Prime Minister. It surely was always a matter of time. I had been excited by the prospect that the waiting game would be one where a female of sufficient quality would take charge. One where the hypothesis really being tested was 'Can a woman be a great prime minister?' that is more exciting. The most exciting hypothesis of all though is:

'Can Australian's elect a great prime minister?'

In stead of revelling in the mediocrity that is Australia's political leadership vacuum. Let's face it, K-Rudd was merely competent, Julia Gillard the same. Wayne Swan is a no goer and from there for leadership it is all downhill. Both parties lack anybody that can arouse the meerest inkling of excitement. None, not Greens, Democrats or Family First have any tangible evidence their party contains somebody who is a 'born leader'

So a symbolic victory for women, competent politician gets promotion - weakens party. I can't empathise with women on what this day means, and that might be my human failing, but lets face it - the notion of A man assuming a traditionally female role that would be exciting/inspiring to any man, anywhere is incredibly hard to imagine.

How to illustrate that, and the more general problem/hype-backlash of symbolic victories. Imagine if the US Presidency had traditionally always been held by a woman. The most 'powerful' person in the world was always a woman. Then one day in 2001 George W Bush does the unthinkable and becomes the 43rd, and 1st male President of the United States. Could I as a man be excited? Possibly. Should I be? Unequivocally NO.

Which is perhaps neither a flattering or fair comparison to the Gillard situation, we are talking about one of the worst, most incompetent and damaging presidents in history afterall.

To maintain perspective, Gillard now has an opportunity, this coup may have been unprecedentedly politically savy - the incumbent will always suffer when there is economic downturn which (particularly in Australia) has very little to do with the ruling parties economic management but the state of the Global Economy, over which an incumbent party has little control. THUS what normally happens is the electorate demands somebody be punished and inevitably turns upon the only leader there to blame, and like Donald Trump to his apprentices punishes those who take responsibility. This causes a change in government whose fortunes then ride on the fate of the economy. By preempting the voter backlash, the electorate get their change in government and punish the messenger without having to vote in another party.

Considering the other party is lead by a cunt like Tony Abbott, lets hope this savvy strategy works.

Gillard has won the symbolic victory and that's greeeeeaaaaaaat it's really greeeeeeeeeeaaaaat* but now it's time for action. She's been on the interchange bench and Kobe has been switched to Shannon Brown**. She can just hold the line and hope the team survives until Kobe can bet back on the floorboards, or she can step up and try and build the lead. She can try and leap over Garnett and do a tomahawk dunk in his face get the bench on their feet and Audience on their knees.

But basketball is not particularly illustrative of what a brilliant political... nay a brilliant leadership performance is. It reminds me of way back in the Obama vs. McCain presidential run of possibly the best piece of political analysis I have ever read. It was talking about how a Broken US needed its next Abraham Lincoln to stitch it back together again. The writers conclusion was - neither candidate were that man. I think history will prove that prophecy correct.

The author highlighted a bunch of qualities in good political (or any context of) leadership that are lacking in the modern day. The first I recall is intelligence, and I can relate. Obama is not intelligent in the way that say Thomas Jefferson was intelligent, which is a hard standard for anybody alive to live up to, but he's also not intelligent in the way that Abraham Lincoln was intelligent, that Theodore Roosevelt was intelligent, that Franklin D Roosevelt or even Truman was intelligent.

This is probably the result of prole drift, whilst people like people much better than them at basketball running the floor of their basketball team, when it comes to who they want running the country they seem to not want somebody who is smarter than them.

This is a relatively recent phenomena, in the same way that Sunrise won the ratings war against Today (with Steve Leiberman) and thus Today switched up its formula to be similarly a news show for morons. It was not so long ago that you had politicians like Kim Beasley, Paul Keating, John Howard, Peter Costello, Natasha Stot Despoja that I could believe actually knew what the fuck they were talking about. Now all I see is trained monkeys working as mouth pieces for their corporate financers.

Which brings me to the articles next quality: Astringency. which if you look it up on dictionary.com you may wonder what the fuck politics has to do with wine. But what it means is the sharp incisive ability to tell people what they need to hear, not what they want to hear.

What frustrates me the most about politics in Australia, and anywhere in the free world is that I'm tired. I'm FUCKING EXHAUSTED from being spoken to like a child who needs constant reassurance that everything is going to be alright. The only fucken thing wrong with 'Baby-Boomers' is the word 'Boomer' and I guess the age bracket as the moniker 'Babies' applies equally to all Australians.

The leader I crave is the one that says 'Okay the deal was you got super-annuation and then you got to choose how to invest it, and this was to provide for your retirement and lifestyle aspirations. You chose to sink all your money into property, and didn't understand it and took on risks you blinded YOURSELF to and lost everything. So you had your chance and you blew it, and you blew it because you didn't care enough to get it right, so don't come crying for a pension increase now!' and say things like 'Look BHP don't create the minerals in the ground, and they don't create the demand for mineral exports. If they don't want to pay the tax to the Australian community, they can just fuck off and die and somebody else will. We are not obliged to roll over on a fair and equitable tax just because you chose to include BHP in your share portfolio. You can sell those shares right now.'

That would be leadership. I'd prefer a monkey as a PM that would act that way for 20 days, than a symbollically female mouthpiece that is going to go on treating me and everybody else like a child while taking orders from business.

The human race is going to perish or face a degree of suffering unexperienced since the ice-age if climate change isn't tackled. That challange requires intelligence and integrity and courage in our leaders. I don't see any of those qualities anywhere.

*this is my first attempt at putting apathy into words.

**No offence intended to Kobe Bryant or Shannon Brown who are actually brilliant at their jobs and thus not a fair comparison to any politician in Australia.

"I Want To Thank My Psychiatrist"

In perhaps the greatest post-match interview ever, Ron Artest said the above words. This isn't exactly hot off the press but it occured to me its worth paying attention to.

I hope one day the world will advance to a point in social consciousness where we drop the pretence and admit that everybody has problems and nobody has answers. Not universal answers anyway. Our emotions and even reasoning are complex. Our motivations often opaque.

Consider Basketball, objectively meaningless. 10 guys running around on a court obsessed with putting a rubber ball through a hoop with a net attached. Why can Ron Artest get stressed out about games of no consequence? Kim Jong Il is not going to live or die based on whether Ron Artest can sink a 3 late in Game 7. Chinese Democracy is not going to be achieved when Yao Ming makes it past the first playoff round.

It's just a game, that becomes a career, that is picked apart with fine toothed combs by legions of journalists who have a career based on said game and feel obligated to offer opinions about other peoples mental resilience, talent dedication etc.

And its so easy to lose sight of the fact that its just a game.

So to me Ron Artest is a hero, not for treating the NBA Finals like any other game, but for being man enough to admit the media was getting to him, that he was losing his mental resolve and seeking help. He's doubly a hero for being so publicly open about it, joyous even. And he should be, he did some good shit.

I don't know how many people I've met on the basketball court that are in need of some serious head doctoring, but it may be as high as one in twenty have completely lost sight of the love of the game. I'm talking about shitty Iverson wannabe point guards that get inordinately angry that myself or pretty much any fat jerk can block their way to the rim every time and patently refuse to pass first to one of their teammates. These guys need their head checked, and we are talking the lowest incarnation of Basketball.

Peeps everywhere need their headchecked, not just in extreme cases, but because there is a long list of things that effect our moods and wellbeing we have been subconsciously trained not to talk about.

So I want to thank Ron Artests psychiatrist too.

Positive Resonance

Yesterday I lost this post completely, so this is a rewrite and I can't remember how it went. It did I'm 90% sure begin with loneliness:



That should get you in the mood. Now why is loneliness so unbarable? Why is it some days (and hopefully not most days) that we just can't face ourselves in the mirror? Why do we need the door open when as a child we first move into our own bedroom?

I remember when Claire left me, I was confronted more by my own presence and it's sudden apparantness than I was by her absence. I couldn't stand my own company. I remember amidst all the grief I just wanted a new partner (or the old one) in my life as soon as possible to try and alleviate the life sentence of being with myself.

And now I remember! I wrote about a bridge! Yeah, so for me that whole episode was my opportunity that some of us (that I would call the fortunate ones) are presented with this opportunity to cross a rickety bridge extending over a huge chasm.

On the other side it's like awesome, but it's also empty of any people. That bridge you can choose to cross is the gap between being emotionally dependant on others and being emotionally independant. Being your own wellspring or whatever.

And it's hard and its scary and its terrifying. And you just know that bridge is going to collapse behind you and there will be no turning back. But that's a good thing.

For me 90% of crossing that bridge I owe to my counsellor at the time, Joe. He stopped me from obsessing over how to get Claire back or find some new girlfriend and he gave me shit to do.

Training to be a tutor at FLN and meeting Zaman too went a long way, in making me my own source of reassurance and a wellspring of loving love stuff.

But a lesser acknowledged pivotal moment was this profound and profoundly simple exercise. It was at RYLA camp (don't ask) and me and like 200 other people or whatever were all sitting ina circle and we had to throw this tennis ball or something from one to another. The rule was whoever threw it had to say something nice about the person they threw it to and everybody got a turn.

Mine was 'X is a genuinely loving person.' which was easy.

You know its so easy to let other people know you appreciate them, sincerely and shit that you wonder why the opportunities seem so rare.

The thing was, the facilitator (once everybody had said something nice and had something nice said about them) went back around the circle, and we had to remember what we said and change X's name to 'I'm' or whatever the grammar demanded.

So I had to say 'I'm a genuinely loving person' and the facilitator, I don't remember who the guy was - looked at me and said 'Yeah.' and it was something I would otherwise have not acknowledged in myself.

See that's the truly baffling part, surely it is even easier to think well of ourselves and tell ourselves nice things than it is other people? Yet (I at least) do it less. I have little positive to say about myself, even these days.

But I remember walking through the backroads of brunswick near the upfield line and in the absence of anybody else to tell me so, I said 'well, I'm proud of you tohm.' and that was a turning point in my emotional development.

But I get ahead of myself. The reason the simple exercise works so well is that it's based on circular logic. We look for positives in others that we call our friends, to find them we have to recognise them, to recognise them we have to possess them to some extent ourselves. That's why just about anything good you have to say of other people, is most likely true of yourself. It's just so hard to acknowledge it, we percieve a lack because we experience the whole of ourselves whereas we just see one side of our peers.

In this regard attraction IS reciprocal, as far as we can percieve. And whilst saying we are attracted to ourselves in others sounds arrogant and not a little crippy, on a fundamental level it is true. Opposites don't attract, they just seem more pronounced.

So imagine your physical experience is a hotel for the soul. And every day a new soul is wandering into your life and looking out through your eyes, thinking your thoughts, listening at your earholes and taking meals through your mouthhole.

What does today's guest think about their room? Do they want to prolong their stay? Do they find you interesting, do they want to hang about and see how it all turns out?

In short: who would you really rather be? Even if you feel alone, aren't you curious as to how its going to turn out?

And this is cliche, but seriously if you can't love yourself, how can you really sustain loving somebody else. If love is a machine, it isn't going to last if one or both of the components are faulty. You gotta cross that bridge, I'm torturing metaphores...

Anyway, you have to wait for the last question, but to me it is all summed up by Chris Farley's interview with Paul McCartney. Stop being down on yourself, and make some love.