Objectives

Call these like really late new year's resolutions or something, although some of them I've been trying to do for much longer or shorter.

1. Operation: New Slangs

Another sort of yearly thing I do is try to, like, refresh my lexicon. Basically I have very strict internal policies about what words I will or won't use in conversation. It's silly. I've done this for about as long as I can remember. I still remember the first few times I used the word "cool" in like, second grade, and when I decided that was an OK word to throw around. Ditto for the first times I swore, which lead to the bizarre period of my childhood where I cursed like a sailor but only that tier of words that was allowed on the TV I was allowed to watch; stuff worse than that I knew of but was terrified of saying for some reason. Nowadays I hardly swear at all.

Nowadays a lot of the slang I use, especially words I use for generic intensifiers and exclamations and such, is either stuff I've just deemed "cool" based on the context in which I learned it or just things I plain made up. Things cycle out when I get tired of them. I think if I concentrated hard I could probably come up with a dictionary, complete with time period utilized, of all these words going back to grade school, but that's pretty ulillilliesque.

Here's one, though:

Ulillilliesque (don't know the syntax for these pronunciation guides)  
adjective
Describing a behavioral trait shared by or similar to ones shared by Internet-legend ulillillia. My ulillilliesque desire to get the maximum stats for all the characters in Final Fantasy VI was seen as a waste of time by many.

adverb
To do something in a manner befitting Internet-legend ulillillia. The way I adjusted and readjusted the heat settings of the stove-top while cooking was ulillilliesque.

Origins 
Early 2011; me; created on the fly to describe probably something to do with how I download things, can't remember now.

Status
In active lexicon as of 2011.

Actually that was p fun, maybe I will do more of those. Sometime later, though.

Anyways I'm dumping a bunch of old words. I don't think I'll say "awesome" anymore, it's just strained now. I think I'll downplay using "p" as an abbreviation of "pretty", although I'll have to keep that around in some regards. "pcg" as an abbreviation of "pretty cool guy" I think is gone, though, that one was just too cryptic, even if it was fun to say. Goes double for "ttku", for "try to keep up", which I really only used as a followup to "pcg" to people who didn't know what "pcg" meant and I "wanted to be a jerk to" (w2baj2).

The major campaign though is that I'm trying to get rid of a lot of the negative words I used to just sorta toss out with little provocation. The big one is "bun", which I've been saying at the drop of, well, anything for the last couple of years. And then one day I was like "bun that, what's the point in saying 'bun anything'? When was the last time this trifling dismissal actually contributed to a conversation in a meaningful way?" There's a few more that go out the window on this principle, namely "lame" and "eff that" and "screw that" etc etc. It's part of a larger campaign where I just decided to not be negative at all about anything. I really do not see the point in it anymore. Granted, ever since my early teens I've been more or less cheerful, but I realized the benefits I found in that could be amplified more by getting rid of all sarcasm and buzzkillism and meanness and such. I mean, what was it getting me?

All the words I'm really making a point of adding to the lexicon this year are, by this principle, positive or functional/neutral. The former includes a whole stable of generic positive adjectives I'm just itching to use and then probably overuse, like "SWATE" (from the Das Racist song) and "FLU" (born from a typo I made of "fly" and then friend recognized as being somewhat clever, playing of "ill" etc) and "CRUCIAL" (actually very old and probably lame for awhile, but they use it on "Rasta Mouse" and that's good enough for me). Same friend also introduced "itf" for "in the flesh", which I find very useful, despite my earlier beef with abbreviations.

2. Operation: Enjoy All Music

Keeping with my whole "positive" angle, I've decided I should no longer dislike any music. Recently I went on a whole rant about subjectivity versus objectivity, and how one can't help their tastes, and therefore should keep what they like and appreciate as overlapping but separate categories and shouldn't try to justify everything being in both. I still feel like that's true, but I also feel like I should have the ability to find something in any sort of music that I can enjoy. It's sort of tricky, because obviously I still want the ability to like some music more than other music, otherwise that list that I am still working that you should be hype for will be useless. And one might think that the very acknowledgement of things liked more or less indicates a thing liked least and then by most standards not liked at all, and that's definitely a legitimate argument I'm still wondering about. Basically I just want to lose the abrasion I have towards a shrinking subset of songs entirely; I want there to be no music someone can like, play at a party where I'd go like "ugh".

Part of reading Infinite Jest is that I've really started using "like" more and I don't know what to think of that.

3. Operation: Stop Looking at People

The name could be improved to be more accurate, but, I dunno, I also want it to be pretty dramatic.

Basically I want to stop considering what someone looks like entirely, beyond the most basic memory I need to have of their appearance to recognize them. I have given this a bunch of thought and I have come up with no downsides to this, and tons of benefits.

This is something I've considered for a long time now, and I've been operating under sort of these principles for awhile, but only recently did I decide taking it to these extremes was worth doing. There's a running joke on the Colbert Report where he claims he "can't see race", which is the sort of thing people trying to prove they aren't racist say, i.e. "When I consider you, your race does not factor in", and then Colbert takes it literally and claims "I don't know what race you are, people tell me I'm white and you're black and I'm okay with that". I figured like, hey, why not? Why should I bother recognizing race, weight, gender, "attractiveness" (quotes because that word has no meaning in this scenario)?

This recent thing was motivated by a post on Reddit by a blind girl. Someone asked about dating, whether it matters if the guy is attractive, etc, and she said "yeah". Her rationale was probably one of the more convincing arguments you can make against this line of thought: one's appearance can help you determine what they will feel like, or smell like for that matter, so you'd have to make similar nullifications to those senses. My response is that, well, you could start to disregard smell and touch, or you could just avoid the sort of relationships where those things are relevant. Piece of cake. What's more troubling is that this line of thought extends to "What about issues of trust, how can you trust anyone without the ability to judge their trustworthiness", and this is really more a criticism against my more vague and general plan of "not judging anyone ever" that "total disregard for everyone's appearance" is but a facet of. And it's something that I'll have to give some thought to. Although initially motivated by a desire to like everything and enjoy life, it seems like these principles can also be quick to make everything equally horrible.

On that line, the other thing I'm really worried about is my how my ability to judge a human as attractive might be tied in with my ability to view anything as aesthetically pleasing. I mean, how am I supposed to appreciate a painting of a beautiful woman if I now have no ability to view that woman as beautiful? And yeah, as a quick bush-cut-through, the main motivation behind this is to stop seeing people as beautiful or ugly entirely. And unlike music, where I still want to retain varying levels of enjoyment, I don't care if I view every human being on Earth as being a "5" or whatever on the scale, as unlike music, where the sensation of listening is everything, the sensation of looking at someone is the least interesting thing about any person. But this is really a can of worms to open when you consider how much people care about their appearances and such, and how it's tied up with someone's sense of identity, and how it's almost insensitive, like consider tattoos or funny t-shirts or ceremonial rings or other cases where their appearance might be symbolic of their personality or history, the interesting bits. I guess I could limit it pretty easily by saying "physical appearance", but it feels like going halfway on an issue that only gets interesting when I take it to extremes.

But I digress. Say I do lose the ability to judge appearances. Does it follow that I would lose my ability to love a painting where the appeal hangs on the beauty of its subject? What about a book - something I really liked in Infinite Jest was the way Wallace describes Joelle Van Dyne the P.G.O.A.T., letting users piece together what she looks like from various descriptions, but always allowing lots of room for the reader to pile in whatever qualities they considered beautiful. Would I lose my ability to do so? And what about like, angelic, Hellenistic beauty, the sort of legendary beauty I don't think I'll ever encounter but ought to be ready just in case? At once I feel like, sure, yeah, why should I find it interesting just that someone happened to look such a way, but why should I lose my ability to get caught up in that like, ship-launching aesthetic frenzy that seems like such an inspiring and powerful and wonderful emotion? And if I allow myself that, the scale slides way back to where I started from. Daaaaang. Whoops wasn't supposed to say things like that.

I don't think it's really possible to change these things that are so hardwired in my brain anyways, so it's all sort of pointless and hypothetical.

Speaking of that "aesthetic frenzy"

Awhile ago I made a blog post that touched on the idea of art that was forbidden due to the extreme emotional upheaval it could cause. Well, having read Infinite Jest, the concept is obviously BACK LIKE 8-TRACK in my mind and I'm still trying to get my head fully around what I think about it. Now I feel like there are two emotional states that represent the pinnacle of what art can inspire: sublimity and rapture, the former the feeling of the viewer overwhelming themselves with thought due to the art, and the latter the art overwhelming the user. I bolded that because I sort of feel like this is an essay or something and that's like the thesis. Gonna explain that more later but for now I'm going to try to sleep again. I'm having a hard time sleeping lately, my legs keep aching. IF ANYONE KNOWS A SOLUTION FOR THIS LEAVE IT ON MY WEBZONE, I AM TOO MANLY TO GOOGLE MY MEDICAL TROUBLES: REAL MEN SLEEP THEM OFF.