I’m out of breath– I just bought my tickets to visit South America in January. I fly into Santiago, Chile on January 14 and I have until February 4 to travel 1500 miles to San Paulo, Brazil. It seemed like every deal was sold out, but this really is my dream South America trip, at the perfect time of year, for a decent length of time, and I finally got it for $200 less than seemed possible an hour ago.

Aside from my big stop in Buenos Aires, and hitting up carnival in Brazil, I don’t have many plans. Suggestions? Amazon is sending my South America on a Shoestring travel guide soon! Sadly, the Amazon itself will be 1000 miles out of reach.

I’m also visiting my sister in Utah with my parents for Christmas! Probably the last time the family will be together for a while.

Take the Sexual Styles Quiz a friend of mine built. It’s for her academic work, for prosperity, short, and all about sex!

It seems a good day for revelations, so I’ll throw in my own, but they’re cheap. For the last few weeks, I’ve been taking life easy. I don’t have much to be concerned about– life is short, so I’m living to enjoy myself: to learn, to do projects, to spend pastimes in good company.

But to wank: I started thinking about the world while playing How Well Do You Know Your World, a very addictive game. It makes me realize how incredibly huge the world is. Every wiggle in the political and cultural boundaries of the world is a overflowing manifestation of the complexities of the whole of humanity, the rise of capitalism, the struggle of individual families, the ramifications of legends.

The universe is fractally complex. The closer you look, the more you see. From world, to city, to neighborhood, to house, to room, to bookshelf, to the grime in a screw head.

So too the body. The same politics that play out with the traveling American diplomat in a backwoods Near Eastern country happen between cells in every square inch of the human body. As I was giving someone a back massage tonight, I imagined that I was reading (in poor translation) the cultural history of the different cell colonies in her body. We are moldy outgrowths of walking spinal columns… but we’re also a billion billion individual histories, some defiantly protecting themselves from the encroaching central nervous government, some buying into its peculiar dream and finding their role in it.

Recently, I keep hearing people telling me (women mostly), “Well, it’s nice you been successful.” What is success supposed to mean any way, and what makes people think I have it? As a mind, I’m quite pleased with what I’ve got going, but I hope I don’t get very successful at it. As a body, I’m a repressive dictator. I praise what I want to hear, and if anyone steps out of line, I have them shot. But I’m resolved to be more democratic. I’m going to send diplomats and media agents to every community of my body and share my power with the local leaders they find.

Filesharing is paving the streets of a totally new cultural landscape. Just as the internet has made it possible for new social groups to flourish like never before, the ongoing revolution in music is doing the same for styles.

In cities, we use all sorts of symbols to identify (label) ourselves and associate with groups (class, urban tribe, counterculture, tastes). The symbols characterizing each style are far from simple, and no single symbol identifies a single style. Each style has a unique complex paradigm– a Weltanschauung– that governs the choice of symbols. And that world view has implications for every aspect of life. It’s no accident that emo, punk, goth, and other styles are simultaneously styles of dress, attitude, and music.

The language of style is music. Music puts emotion and expression– both universally shared meaningsand layered insider meanings– to the abstract symbols. With pervasive mp3 players, music provides a soundtrack to the lives of people who share a style. And music packages the abstract paradigms, and gives them the stickiness and motive power that memes need to grow.

In High Fidelity, Rob says, “What really matters is what you like, not what you are like.” “What you like” are the road signs to the paradigms that govern your life. What’s possible is largely what’s borrowed.

Since the advent of filesharing, what can be borrowed has multiplied a zillion-fold. If Reebee Garofalo’s genealogy of rocky music went 30 years further, I think it would have to list an order of magnitude more bands to represent the musical landscape listeners are exposed to today. Wikipedia lists 130 Goth bands, 618 punk bands, 940 “alternative” bands, and as a rule, those are just the ones that have achieved international fame. And each wave of music spreads the fragmentation further.

Of course, the differences between regional cultures a century ago dwarf that between preps and punks. The entirety of the contemporary western stylist world is built on post-modernism. Mass production, corporate media, and capitalism have done irreparable damage to the world’s cultural diversity.

But the landscape we’re exploring now is very exciting. Because of music, one culture can support so much more diversity. With the internet, we can be aware of so many more options. And above all, we can choose our styles like never before. Moreover, one person can support a greater diversity of styles. Most people are not goth, or punk, or emo– but they may emote goth, punk, or emo persona in different contexts.

And I don’t see a limit any time soon. Our capacity to accept and juggle and share diversity hasn’t started to be exhausted. I saw Planet Earth: The Jungle the other day, where 40 species of monkeys share the same fig tree. In the not-so-far fictional future of Transmetropolitan, subcultures too numerous to encyclopedize mix and clash constantly. That’s where we’re headed, and we’ll all be dancing there to a different tune.

I have a idea for a new kind of auction site. I want to use it, but I don’t have time to make it right now… but I think it could make decent money, if someone else wants to make it.

A central idea is to have auction bids be paid both to the original seller and to the other buyers who lost the auction. The seller sets a flat price for each item they’re selling. If multiple bidders raise that price, the extra is distributed amongst the other bidders as follows:

The winning bidder pays the bid of the second-highest bidder. After the original price goes to the seller, the remaining is paid by paypal to the other bidders, with the second-highest bidder gets the amount they bid above the third-highest bidder, and so on, all the way down. If the lowest bidder originally bid more than the original price, they get that difference.

This way, losing bidders can price how much trying and failing to get the item in question cost them. The winner bidder is paying the other bidders to not have the item, just as they’re paying the original seller. There is no concept of “market price” involved here.

The site could take a flat percentage of the winning bid, but it would have to be tiny. The seller can also set a percent of winning bid to take away (also not too large), sweetening the deal a bit for them.

The other central idea is organizing the site as a garage sale, rather than an auction, in that people can post items and expect to leave them up for a long time. When someone bids on an item, a countdown starts, and items with active bids are featured on the site. Combined, these ideas make it possible to have an auction site that serves a much smaller population than eBay: items could be published only within a group of friends, or just the people who live close enough that shipping isn’t necessary.

Gakked from various Rockies.

Me, 8 years ago (my MIT ID photo):

Me, 16 years ago (another school ID– I don’t keep many pictures of me around):

Sometimes my mental image is still of me 8ish years ago. This whole short-hair kick seems so new. Life was much simpler then– no concerns for convention, women, or social ethics, among other things. And I remember what it was to be in that guy’s head; I’m just an mixing-up of him.

I didn’t want to write about my fainting. It’s such a silly thing, and it’s so harmless. But those present deserve an explanation, and it’s an event, and events are good for philosophizing about.

First, thank you all so much for caring, and I’m sorry to worry anyone. Thank you truered for the part of the party I was there for!

So, doctors have a name for my fainting which I always forget, but it’s the same thing as a breath holding spell in babies. Under weird circumstances (it used to be when I got badly hurt), I’ll forget to breathe. My vision goes tunnelly, then I faint and have a short seizure (which scares people, but I’m just aware of lots of cool visuals), and I wake up feeling relaxed and a little weak.

It only happens when I know I’m safe: I was alone both times I’ve broken bones, and I knew I had to get myself back to my friends/family, and I didn’t come close to blacking out. The last time it happened, two years ago, I did it voluntarily on some good drugs. I’ve done it less than ten times in my life.

I’ve never had an ambulance called on me, but I had fun schmoozing with the EMTs afterwards and getting them to tell me about their other calls (a big evacuation, three crazies, two drunks, one of whom they hinted was someone famous).

I explained it to them as a condition because that’s what I’ve been told. But for me, it’s much simpler: this is a consequence of what I am, down to my core. Some people’s unconsciousness when it comes out to play makes them wear lampshades or hit people or cry or rant. Mine has something funny in it. My unconscious desperately wants to make itself heard, and my conscious mind knows it has what I want, and yet what it has to say cuts so close to what I cannot conceive of that I won’t let it speak or act. No matter how much I try to pry my mental fingers open, they hold tighter. I’m might hold on for the rest of my life, but I’m going to dedicate some indispensable part of my whole life to letting go.

The first thing I said when I suddenly woke up to Ted asking me if I was okay was, “Yeah, that was wonderful.” I know I shouldn’t, but I not-so-secretly love the fainting. It’s when the struggle between conscious and unconscious consumes me, and my consciousness loses, I’m in my own world for that little while while I writhe on the floor. It’s a natural consequence of the struggle I live to excuse myself from.

That’s all. I’m chilling right after, drinking some tea, half considering party hopping, still plenty high, the night is young, and I have so many things to work on.

We’ve been having problems finding places to hold after-parties since a bunch of really nice houses have become less available (Jon’s, Stina’s, Cassie and Kelly’s, MMM’s, Morgan’s). I still can’t host more than once ever couple months, but here’s what I can offer: any week we don’t have a party, you can come over to my place and watch movies with me.

I’ll make sure I always have a couple of interesting options (something sexy, something cultish), and all the popcorn you can drink. This is an open-invitation, but not to be publicized, per se. I’m not going to announce what movies I’ll have (but I’ll know by each Friday evening, if you want to ask), because I’d much rather party, if possible.

And if want to watch something tonight, give me a call.

[Addendum: Have any movie suggestions or movies you’d like to see? Tell me!]

Come to The Full Body Cast’s Halloween Rocky Horror Show!!!

SEE our massive lineup of sexy and disturbing preshows–
SEE the FBC’s fantastic cast of up-and-coming stars and some old pros–
SEE a theatre packed with the best crackpots in Boston on the biggest night of the year–
SEE me play a minor role–

Tonight, 10 pm, at the Church Street AMC Theatre, in Harvard Square!

Come early and be in the costume contest and win actually good prizes.

Gakked from : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1qiGyxPplAw

Exquisite!