On Tuesday, November 7, Election Day, I’m holding a Nail-Biting Party to watch the results come in.

Invite your friends! We’ll have champagne to celebrate (and, if needed, something stronger to drown our sorrows), and good discussion throughout the night. This could be the most interesting election and the greatest change to the political arena in decades!

I live at 283 Washington St in Cambridge. Directions are at http://www.existencia.org/info/grey17.txt

RSVPs aren’t required, but they’d help me get a sense of the size of the group.

I haven’t really used LJ as an emotional outlet, but I’ve been twisted in emotions recently so I thought I’d try it as an experiment.

For the past few days, I keep getting into this stupid spiral around thoughts of her. Sure, she’s awfully pretty and nice, but she’s not some goddess. Yeah, she’s single, but that doesn’t mean that she should get bombarded with guys acting weird around her. I *think* she’s totally not interested in me, but I’m never quite sure. I *think* she’s starting to warm up to me again as a platonic friend, but I’m never quite sure. Do I disappoint her? Do I frustrate her? I care about it too much. And I don’t want to care. I don’t want to read things into her actions, or censor or design my own, or *think* about it so much. I hate to play this kind of game, and I have no idea why I’m doing it. If I knew it didn’t matter, I wouldn’t do it. But on some level, I want it to matter.

Why do I want it to matter so much? Because I want. So what– we usually don’t get what we want. Then, because we were close, and now we’re so far. How could she do this to me? But she didn’t want to hurt me. I was acting strangely toward her, and I drove her away. And then I think I stopped, but by then it wasn’t enough. And now she’s away, and it’s my fault.

So here I am. I am stretched, and twisted; I want and I don’t have. She is …, I don’t know. I have no idea if she has any kind of reciprocal experience. But that’s the way of human existence. She has her own concerns, and even if one of those is me, it’s different from anything I have in my head. And this whole situation may escalate or collapse in a day or in a decade, and I don’t know which would be better.

I want to want nothing but her friendship, and I very nearly do. I want all the bad parts to be taken as a mistake and forgotten, and I almost think they are. But I don’t know if they are, so I keep them alive in me, just in case they are in her. In case the wrong action could hurt her again, or the right one could make something more. And on some level, I know none of this is important, but I can’t seem to shake it. And most of the time, I think I don’t think about it. But there are always days like today.

These are on my mind, so I thought I’d pass them along.

Anyone want to take to the streets over the newest disregard of our civil liberties? Bush’s new law revokes the right of terrorist suspects to challenge their imprisonment, so we’ll never hear the heart-rending human interest stories that usually motivate us to protest. As best I understand it, suspects and interrogators will answer to a military commission, whose rules will be set wholely by the Bush administration. Protecting basic rights may be awfully inconvenient for the government, but they’re there for when that’s all we have. I recently heard of a bumper sticker: “The Democrats think the glass is half empty; The Republicans think the glass is theirs.”

Wonkette and conspiracy theorists everywhere are having a field day with Bush’s recent acquisition of 100,000 acres in Paraguay, and what it might have to do with recent secret meetings, and the nearby, previously-secret military base that was granted national and international criminal court immunity by the Paraguay senate. The going theory is that it’s a Bush family safe-haven for when the US government collapses.

Election day is coming up, followed by Election night, and for those of you not participating in a votergasm.org-style orgy, I want to hold a Election Night Nail-Biting Party. Details later.

And my crimson shag rug arrived today. I feel like I have a real bachelor pad now.

I find myself inundated with projects begging to be “Start-Upped”. These projects range from exciting stray ideas to wires-hanging-out-but-otherwise-finished products, and I can’t bring them to the world alone.

Of the projects I consider start-up-worthy, most are internet-based, most need time not capital, some are social-entrepreneury, some are computer-sciencey, and some are generally acknowledged to be impossible. A few examples are an ESG-style adult learning center, a Frienster-like travel blog site, and vision-to-audio glasses for the blind.

Do you want to be a co-conspirator? I expect to need additional engineers (web development, UIs, and back-ends, all languages), communicators (marketing, business), content people (writing, graphic design), creative types, and organized types. To start, we would be working in our free time, each to her ability. I don’t have any capital, but if that’s people’s most important concern, getting it can be our first task.

If you want to hear about what projects I have in mind, contact me. Which of my projects/ideas we work on depends on the interests of the people who reply. Our first meeting will consist of laying out the possible projects and their current states and choosing between them. Your projects and ideas are welcome too.

I emailed Gary about his speech on Saturday and talked to him further yesterday. That discussion both confirmed my concerns about Gary’s attitudes as director and balanced them. I’m looking forward to Gary’s dictatorship, but my long-term worries are no less. Below are my interpretations from that discussion– not fact– simplified (and perhaps made a little more extreme) for emphasis.

• First, Gary didn’t mean that people can’t write anything in their blogs. Just that he isn’t responsible for noticing (which, he says, was a problem in the past).
• Gary will be a tyrant, but he’s also concerned with our well-being. He believes that his role is to be FBC-incarnate, and that he has responsibility and authority over all decisions and effort. At the same time, he wants the body for which he’s the head to be well-functioning throughout, and that means maintaining good relations with all its members. And I have no reason to believe that he intends to micro-manage or even regularly exercise either his authority or responsibility, only that in any situation where his “directorship” is called-for, it will be of that kind.
• Decisions will be made based on largely Gary’s values and to reflect his ideas. The major forms of communication with Gary-as-director will be “feedback” and “explaining”. Presented with a problem, we can expect solutions to burst full-grown and armored from Gary’s head, and to be largely conclusive before most of us hear about them. The most effective feedback will probably be factual points, extensions that fit his paradigm, and overwhelming dissent. We can expect after-the-fact explanations usually, but probably not before-the-fact ones.
• Gary does believe that fear is a useful motivator, properly balanced with appreciation. He intends to oscillate between these poles, and considers fear to be useful for change and appreciation to reinforce complacency. At the same time, he considers it his fatherly-duty to be philanthropic and just in his use of the switch.
• When I pointed out that many people don’t consider Gary approachable, and that his point-by-point-confrontation approach can be intimidating, he claimed that since his speech all kinds of people had talked to him, and that he’s careful to respond in ways that work for whomever he’s talking to. Only more perspectives will tell.

We also talked about some of Gary’s near-future intentions, but in such confidence that I can’t air them on a public forum.

The panopticon was Foucault’s ultimate structure of modern control, drawing off the inherent power that comes with being aware of others’ actions. Recent technological (camera phones) and socio-technological advances (generally Web 2.0) have led to what worldchanging.com co-founder Jamais Cascio calls the “participatory panopticon”: the first steps into a world of endless self-recording. From worldchanging.com:

The participatory panopticon has been a frequent theme here. Ally RU Sirius (with whom I did an interview a few months back [download here]) talks with Jamais Cascio about the concept here (MP3). It’s a good listen.

I have partly-written musings on drugs in America, cowardice, intention and passion, the oil crash, and web paradigms… but none ready for public consumption, so here’s the mundane update.

The back massage basics class goes well– although I had mixed feelings at one point when I had three guys working on me at once, which was awfully intense and testosteroneful.

Tuesday’s Salon was excellent, with impassioned discussion of drugs, education, poetry, and race, and a good group of people. I feel like I should continue to grow the group, though, until we can support multiple discussions, because I feel like a lot of people’s interests aren’t being addressed.

A Wednesday work meeting got distracted by discussion of theories of the impending fall of civilization from the market run on scarce oil. Later, at the halloween Rocky preshow meeting, my preshow pitch was put in a “RHPS Con Shows” pile I hadn’t known existed.

I took a Beginner Waltz class Thursday, where happened to be the Rocky people who brought me to the studio in the first place and where the other unpaired dancer was one I most danced with at that first activity. On the way back to my apartment, I crossed paths with Jon C. from Olin, now running his own business and who heard about my trip to Europe through his sister’s fiance’s housemate’s friend, who I met over there.

For Friday I decided I had been waking up unhappy too many mornings from over-sleeping my alarm, and left it off– and naturally got up earlier than I would have planned. I’ve also come to terms with work time: even though I only have 6 hours of contracting expected a day, I need to plan an 8 hour work day, plus a little extra on weekends and in crunch. My break for lunch, stops for email and house-stuff, and if go somewhere for a change of scene, all extend my day, and even if it’s not quite an 8-hours-plus-commute-job, it’s pretty close.

Saturday I saw Linklater’s new A Scanner Darkly, which I much enjoyed, but which frustrated my companion for [she believed] propagating untruths about psychedelics. That night, friends of mine (mostly Rocky-virgins) came to Rocky, and two stayed for the after party, and had a blast. The party was *packed*, strangely low-energy, and full and satisfying.

The nature of modern philosophy is hugely changed by the existence of psychology– both by the concept of the psyche, and the existence of a distinct study of the mind. Two of the original functions of philosophy, to explore ideas and cultivate sound minds, are better dealt with by a kind of psychology shrouded in philosophical-like discussion. Although as far as I know, Western Civilization has not yet cut specialties for these out of the liberal arts, philosophers recognize that it is not the concern of their study. That said, it’s not clear whether that distinction comes out of the existence of psychology by being revealed by it, or by being created by it.

All philosophical problems are recognized as mental constructs that fall out of the civilized mind. The tools of philosophy, ideas, are psycho-social products, and as such are almost philosophically bankrupt. The followers of Hegel tried to fix it by creating new tools from whole-cloth: assigning creating names to ideas which are at once universally huge and intricately distinct. Many contemporary philosophers stick to the tools of logic and formal languages, ultimately, I think, because it’s the only perfect safe haven. Modern philosophy loves to shroud itself in it’s own vocabulary because it’s the best chance of getting at something beyond the constructs. We don’t spend all our time talking about ontology and epistemology because that’s what most interests us, but because that’s all we’ve been able to disentangle so far from the world of the psyche.

But psyche is just another concept: a metaphor that structures our thinking. Just as “objective fact” is based on an abstraction on subjective experience designed to remove a point of view, philosophical truth is the product of an abstraction on ideology designed to remove the psyche. It too is a construct, and worthy of scrutiny. On some level, we don’t have a psyche, as we understand it, and like all studies, psychology is manipulating artificial symbols of a self-consistent universe, self-fulfilled by our belief in it.

What if there’s something of the psyche that is necessarily and properly core to the great questions of philosophy, in addition to the part of the psyche that is properly distinct from it. I’m not sure what the consequences of such a paradigm shift would be, but I have some ideas. Our different understandings of psychological ideas, rather than being obstacles to philosophical discussion, would be vehicles for progress. “Philosophical progress” would become personal progress; the function of the discipline of philosophy, rather than to be a reservoir of accepted best arguments, would be a reservoir of stepping stones, to help people from one philosophical conception of their universe to another. It likely also makes it impossible to answer questions of universality, but I doubt we can answer those anyway.