Copyrights, Copywrongs, and all the bullshite.

What set me off this time

I downloaded my first ever track from the iTunes Music Store today. I'm disappointed that it's AAC instead of Apple Lossless, but that's rather a side issue. I'm irritated by that somewhat, yes. I even sent a feature request to them for the option to download Apple Lossless files instead of AAC.

What set me off is the "DRM" features of the files you download. Now, I can't say I didn't know in advance, or that I don't expect copy protection as a matter of course in any for-pay downloadable music. I know that sort of shite is unavoidable these days.

What specifically set me off, however, was this:

posted by TBIproductions

Other than for cases of personal use - NOT for distribution, sale etc. I would sincerely hope we all have the moral integrity to avoid this sort of issue. Just think you are a content creator, you produce a piece, copywrite it and put it out for sale. A person of less character sees what a great job you did sees that it is selling like hotcakes and decides to make knockoffs cutting into your sales. How would you feel.

Now on the personal use scale, you don't need anything special to use iTunes music. You are by agreement allowed to burn as many copies of a song to your own CDs as you like. So what if you have to change the other songs on that CD after 7 times. Once you make the first audio CD and re-import the file back to your harddrive, FCP has no problems using that file. FCP doesn't count how many times that CD audio file has been played. The difference is that in case one you are distributing copywritten materials to others for personal gain. Case two is for personal use.

Step three: take the time to learn GarageBand, Soundtrack or buy royallty free music and use SonicFire, or gets Use rights authorization from the artist for the specific project. Cheep no, Free definitly not, Legal absolutely!

The response I posted was only to the middle paragraph. I said this:

posted by TBIproductions

Now on the personal use scale, you don't need anything special to use iTunes music. You are by agreement allowed to burn as many copies of a song to your own CDs as you like. So what if you have to change the other songs on that CD after 7 times. Once you make the first audio CD and re-import the file back to your harddrive, FCP has no problems using that file. FCP doesn't count how many times that CD audio file has been played.

reply by me

This is ridiculous. I don't have an iPod. Suppose I had one of the competing products because my aged aunt gave me one for christmas. I can't use the music I legally bought on this OTHER product without taking an extra step and burning the tracks to a cd first?

The fact is, you do need something special to listen to iTunes music: you need iTunes. And if you want to take it with you, you need an iPod.

Using Hymn appears to be a much more reasonable solution than burning a copy to a disc, or exporting to AIFF—we are talking about lossy compression here, after all.

It's not a matter of integrity to want to play, on the equipment I own, the music which I legally bought the right to use. This is equivalent to advocating a Sony music store from which you download files that can't be played on a Yamaha stereo. Or advocating Sony cds that won't play in a Yamaha cd player.

I realize, of course, that I can take my business elsewhere. I'm not obligated to buy from the iTunes store. I can just buy cds in the first place, and not worry about all this. Unfortunately, that's what I do. I wish the iTunes music store were more of an option. I guarantee, though, that if it were possible for the music industry to prevent me from importing my cds into iTunes without adding copy protection, they'd do it.

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What is copyright really for?

This is ultimately the heart of the problem. People now assume that copyright law is meant to protect the artist. While it sometimes has that effect, that is not the original intent. The original intent of copyright law was to protect the investment of book publishers in the books that they published.

Copyright law began—worldwide, as far as I'm aware—with the Statute of Anne. It is very easy to read into the opening paragraphs a notion that the artist is the one protected, but notice that they say, "artist or proprietor." Further notice that they say, "to the Ruin of them and their Families." So, in other words, whoever had—either through creative production or through licensing—the right to publish a book was the only one empowered to do so. Cui bono? Whoever has made an investment in publishing the work is the only one who directly benefits from this law. All intellectual property law, to this day, continues to protect investments, not people. This makes sense: after all, the problem they were trying to solve is that companies who took the risk of publishing a new book were not able to reap the benefits of having done so. Other companies would notice the popularity, and make their own edition, for their own profit. In that kind of economy, who wants to publish new books? (In actual fact, the Chinese seem to do just fine. Pirated cds are very readily available, despite being against the law, and new cds are still released every bit as often as they are here.)

Further, it is worth observing that the music industry takes out as much as possible of the risk on the artist. You can, in fact, be quite successful as a band, touring, selling a lot of records, and owe the record company money. Copyright law certainly isn't protecting people like that.

Back to the idiot

posted by TBIproductions

Other than for cases of personal use - NOT for distribution, sale etc. I would sincerely hope we all have the moral integrity to avoid this sort of issue. Just think you are a content creator, you produce a piece, copywrite it and put it out for sale. A person of less character sees what a great job you did sees that it is selling like hotcakes and decides to make knockoffs cutting into your sales. How would you feel.

Now, please take a moment and consider for me how exactly you'd make money selling copied music. I can't think of one. It's too easy to get it free.

I can't think of anything else to say about this: it's just foolish.

What we are missing

Copyright law still retains a fairly broad set of "fair-use" rights to the end-user. As I understand it, the core of the standard is "whether your use will deprive the copyright owner of income." It's extremely complex to determine what constitutes fair use and what does not, because the relevant bits of law are very subjective. Basically, it's down to whether you a judge will agree with you or not.

It has been long said that fair use allows one to make a backup copy of copyrighted material. If this is actually true, (I am not a lawyer) it is an implied right. It is implied by the fact that a portion of a copyrighted material may be reproduced to replace or repair an original that was damaged. With this in mind, consider this: if I have the right to reproduce a work so as to repair the damaged original, I have to have a copy of the original to work from. Therefore, I am presumably empowered to make a copy from which to reproduce material to repair the original. It is implied that this copy must be archived, and cannot under any circumstances be made publicly available—even in ways in which it would be legal to display the original.

The DMCA

I don't presume to know what other rights are implied by the fair-use portion of our copyright laws. I do know, however, that there is certainly no violation of copyright law itself in transforming a music file so that I can play it on a different machine from that provided by the distributor of the music. What this violates is the DMCA, which disallows one from circumventing electronic copy-protection schemes.

The DMCA essentially makes it illegal to do anything with copyrighted material other than what the copyright holder intends. The fact that the iPod is the only portable you can legally use to play music from the iTunes music store is disturbing. It really is tantamount to what I suggested above: buy a Sony music cd and you can only play it in Sony devices. Is your computer's optical drive a Sony? Do you even know? Mine isn't. I also don't own a Sony cd player. I do own a lot of Sony cds.

Where does it all end? Obviously there are practical limits to what they can do. The market will not now put up with certain things, and the music industry is losing market share because they can't possibly enforce their rights. But the situation is out of hand, and it isn't helped by people who refuse to take a realistic look at the problems we currently face.

I think too much, especially about things I can't change.

I need to stop reading news articles. I end up writing something about them, when I really don't feel like sitting up. This one was interesting, in that it described in very real terms the plight of a particular group. The strong feeling that drove me to write was sympathy. But, as always, I think the issue is much more complex than such an article can express.

That article (I refuse to link it for a third time) laid out in a pretty clear, historical way the difficulties that Asian-American actors have faced since the dawn of the movie industry. It's really hard to argue with the facts that they present, and certainly those facts point to a systematically institutionalized racism that continues today. Now, before you drop food out of your mouth at the notion of institutionalized racism among one of the most liberal populations in the country—or clench your jaw at discovering yet another form of it—I want to specify what I mean by "racism" here. Specifically, something is racist if it presents a judgment made through a stereotype based on race, rather than on an individual basis. For example, my grandmother absolutely adored my ex. This is fairly remarkable since my grandmother is from the WW2 generation, and my ex is Japanese. Nevertheless, she did. In my experience of people from that generation, they universally hate Japanese people. Now, my grandmother, having overcome the usual sentiments of her generation, thinks the Japanese to be extremely clever, industrious, intelligent, and capable people. While there are generalizations that can be made, obviously, I cannot think of any other conclusion than that my grandmother's sentiment is racist, though in the opposite way from what is usual for her generation.

The racism of hollywood—and in fact, as the article briefly mentions at the end, of the whole nation—is a racism of ignorance. We don't understand Asian people, any more than we understand the bushmen of the kalihari. The fact that, by now, we've most of us been to school with them, or grown up with them next door makes this a very perplexing problem.

"American cinema is a reflection of its society," said Chung. "When I taught a course on 'Asians in American Film' at the University of Michigan this past winter, many of my students of Asian descent — all American-born — complained of how strangers — white Americans — would approach them and ask where they were born and how they say 'Hello' in their native tongue. In other words, many people in the United States still don't have a concept of Asian-Americans and treat them as foreigners."

To add to it, I remember a discussion that I believe I saw on tv once, in which an Asian-American actress or comedian—I can't remember which, but it's been a long time—expressed disgust at the treatment she got from a large number of guys who were evidently only interested in her because she was Asian. This is pervasive, and serves to further separate the population of this country along racial lines.

Racism perpetuates racism. This is pretty straightforward. If one holds a rigidly stereotypical view of any racial group, then the cause of the racism—either hate or ignorance—will perpetuate itself. How are we to bridge this?

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The root of the racism problem, of course, is stereotypes. The stereotypes of Asian actors are too narrow, too rigid, and really do reflect the ignorance of the general population about Being Asian. But those aren't the only problematic stereotypes.

Once, in high school, a hispanic classmate of mine said—when I said that I thought racism essentially extinct—that it was still there, I just hadn't experienced it. I have now, though. Primarily in Japan, as it happens, but here too—once in helping a friend to move, her boyfriend totally snubbed me and my roommate. He essentially refused to talk to us. Now, one might say that he was concerned that one or the other of us might have intended to move in on his girlfriend, or that he was just shy, or any number of things. I can't prove that he was judging us on being white. But he was certainly judging both of us. In another occasion, I was in an Asian history class. I don't recall what I was trying to say—in response to something that the professor had said—but I didn't get to finish it because I was interrupted, insulted, and generally verbally flayed by an Asian girl in the class whose primary thesis was that I couldn't understand her culture properly because I hadn't grown up in it. I dropped the class after that, and because of it, and still when I think about it, it makes me angry. In fact, until that moment, I had even considered a career in Sinology. That's definitely racism, and if you try to excuse it, then I will desperately want to hit you as well, because that bitch had no call to do that.

It goes beyond this kind of personal experience, though. The one and only good movie I can think of starring a real martial artist of European ethnicity is Six-String Samurai, and he had to write it himself. Oh, sure, there have been lots of others, even starring Rutger Hauer and that kind of thing. Steven Seagal, too. But those movies, and the martial arts displayed in them, are really crap. Well... I can't say that every Chuck Norris movie was bad. Or that Chuck Norris is a bad martial artist. But however interesting and accomplished a person he is, "Walker, Texas Ranger" is not exactly a showcase of spectacular fighting stunts. Which is not to say that there aren't good martial artists who are white guys. I can't say I know if they are trying to get into movies or not. Jeffrey Falcon appeared in lots of movies from Hong Kong—almost universally, it seems, as a bad guy—before he ever made a movie in the U.S.

Most cases we see of white people performing martial arts in starring roles are ridiculous. However much one may respect Uma Thurman as an actress, and think her graceful, she looked absurd in Kill Bill, especially in volume 2 when she was shown in silhouette alongside Gordon Liu performing a series of moves. She has such long arms and legs, she could—with real training—develop a spectacular look while performing something like that on screen. But I couldn't help but think that she learned each bit the day it was shot, and practiced it a maximum of five times.

Don't even get me started on David Carradine. After decades apparently following in Bruce Lee's shadow—after reportedly getting the "Kung Fu" tv series role that should have gone to Bruce Lee, and even producing a Taiji video—he still looks ridiculous doing martial arts on screen.

It is probably bad form for me, a white guy, to complain about a minority being racist. In fact I'm not really saying only that: the institutionalized racism that prevents Asian guys from being anything other than martial artists also prevents real martial artists who aren't Asian from playing lead roles. As a society, we do it to ourselves. White people who refuse to make friends with Asian people or Black people, or anyone else cause this problem every bit as much as the Asian and Black people who refuse to hang out with anyone who isn't the same as them. Immature guys who drool over Sung-hi Lee and think that they can impress an Asian-American girl by knowing how to use chopsticks, or having once visited chinatown, cause the problem every bit as much as Asian-American girls who refuse to date white guys. And the two sides reflexively help to entrench the other side.

Doom! Doooooooom!!

Let me first say that I don't really like writing about political things. But, otoh, I tend to write about things that I have a strong opinion about, and I just happened to be sitting here when I suddenly had this strong opinion...

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I just read an article about problems with the alternative energy question. As is extremely common for me with issues like this, I'm for alternative energy, but against most of the other people who are also for alternative energy sources. The article was interesting, primarily because it didn't address the problem: merely discussed how the pro-alternative side was lying. I don't care if they're lying—I think they are probably all bastards anyway—but the article showed some of the complexity of the whole issue. Their primary point was that the pro-alternative lobbyists were oversimplifying, and glossing over the whole thing. To me, it was interesting to see the complexity of the problem as a function of interconnectedness. For example, if you had a fully electric car, as a matter of a national average—since i assume the figure varies from market to market—60% of the electricity you'd be pumping into that car would come from the burning of coal. Coal reportedly pollutes more than gasoline. Since I can't say how that particular factoid was derived, I can't say if that actually means that the amount of coal required to produce enough electricity to charge an electric car battery by 60% pollutes more than the amount of gasoline that would completely fill a gasoline-powered car of similar weight, range, etc. Nevertheless, the coal does pollute, and possibly more than the gasoline.

Alternative energy sources are problematic, too, though. For example, wind farms—in addition to killing birds—reportedly cause a significant change in the temperature of areas where they are located: they warm the area up. I have no idea if coal-burning power plants do this too. I wouldn't be surprised if they do. Nevertheless, wind farms are far from being a zero-impact source of energy.

Suppose, however, that we had a perfect alternative. There are, for example, prototype versions of hydrogen-based fuel cells that use one method or another of utilizing the heat to produce more electricity. These get a fuel/energy efficiency of 90%, compared with about 20% for a fully gasoline engine. (Note that a hybrid that was designed to recapture the heat and convert it to electricity would be significantly more than 20% efficient.) Further, suppose that the hydrogen fuel was readily available, cheap to produce, blah, blah, blah.

We could have fuel cells like that at home, in our cars, in our laptops, and just about everywhere. There'd be no need for power lines, except, perhaps, as a backup, and we could even theoretically transmit power out from our homes to help a friend out or sell back to the power company—as if they'd need it if we were all selling. So what would that be like? Well, for starters, if 60% percent of our current electricity, nationally, is produced from coal, that means there are tons of coal miners, people who work in coal-burning power plants, not to mention their bosses, and all the regular employees of the power companies. If we were all producing our own electricity, perhaps as many as 90% of them would have to find new jobs. Somehow, I don't see coal miners turning over a new leaf and becoming hydrogen miners. It would take more than simple job-training to turn all the coal miners into male-model/assassins.

This is the real problem, in the long run, and it applies to everything that needs to be changed in this country. If we had comprehensive, fast, and efficient public transportation that everyone used, where would the people who are now in the auto-industry work?

This is also why direct democracy is impossible and representative democracy is problematic. Here in Texas, a number of years ago there were perhaps as many as three separate referenda about putting a high-speed rail connection between Houston, Austin, and Dallas. Every time it came up, it was voted down. Considering that there are people in Japan who live on the west coast (of Japan) and work on the east coast—thanks to their high-speed rail system. I don't think it's unrealistic to imagine living in Austin and working in Dallas. However, what the majority wants, the majority ultimately gets—even if it's stupid to want that.

I don't know how to solve this. It's all very complex. The ultimate problem, of course, is the complexity. Any change we make to anything will likely hurt as many people as it will benefit.

I'm just having a weird day. Maybe it's the fever.

kolferstwc (7:17:19 PM): i like thoper thoughts

ThoperSought (7:58:26 PM): what, as a name?

ThoperSought (7:58:27 PM): or?

kolferstwc (8:00:13 PM): as a name

ThoperSought (8:02:27 PM): ah

kolferstwc (8:03:12 PM): yeah

kolferstwc (8:04:07 PM): i am not mentioned enough in them though

ThoperSought (8:04:49 PM): lol

kolferstwc (8:06:53 PM): i need more ego stroking

Well, so...

Keith, Keith, Keith, Keith, Keith, Keith, Keith, Keith, Keith, Keith, Keith, Keith, Keith, Keith, Keith, Keith, Keith, Keith, Keith, Keith, Keith, Keith, Keith, Keith, Keith, Keith, Keith, Keith, Keith, Keith, Keith, Keith, Keith, Keith, Keith, Keith, Keith, Keith, Keith, Keith, Keith, Keith, Keith, Keith, Keith, Keith, Keith, Keith, Keith, Keith, Keith, Keith, Keith, Keith, Keith, Keith, Keith, Keith, Keith, Keith, Keith, Keith, Keith, Keith, Keith, Keith, Keith, Keith, Keith, Keith, Keith, Keith, Keith, Keith, Keith, Keith, Keith, Keith, Keith, Keith, Keith, Keith, Keith, Keith, Keith, Keith, Keith, Keith, Keith, Keith, Keith, Keith, Keith, Keith, Keith, Keith, Keith, Keith, Keith, Keith.

Happy now?

2005 meets 1984?

There is a bill that has now passed both houses of congress, that I have yet to hear anything about in any news anywhere. Someone told me about it, and I've since found further information on the internet, but I haven't seen it anywhere else.

This bill, called the 'real-id act,' amounts to the institution of a rigorously controlled national ID card. My first thought was, 'so what?' Well, consider this: the bill calls for a universally standardized electronic method for reading information directly from the card. It fails to specify the nature of this system, instead leaving it up to the Dept. of Homeland Security. Thus, all of your personal information would be directly stored in a machine-readable format on the card itself. Apparently explicit in the bill itself is that the card would have to be scanned to board a plane, get a bank account, or make use of any government service, presumably among other things. It is essentially certain that any place requiring age verification would invest in the equipment necessary to scan these IDs so as to protect themselves against lawsuits. Further, it is at least likely that—"to prevent fraud"—you'd be required to scan the ID anytime you used a credit card, wrote a check, or possibly even executed a large cash transaction.

In other words, you'd be required to scan this ID all the time, everywhere. That starts to be a little scary. However, when you think about it, it's even worse: this information will have value to marketers. So, every time you scan the ID, that information is going to be sold. Which means not only that all the information on the card itself—including a verified physical home address, as required in the bill—will be available to anyone for a small fee, but also your spending habits. In other words, if you spend $100 per month at 7-11, that information will be in there. Or if you go to a strip club ever, that information will be in there.

But wait, there's more: the Dept. of Homeland Security, as I said above, gets to decide what format of machine-readable data storage the cards use. This could take the form of a magnetic strip, a bar code, or something essentially innocuous like that. But it won't. Homeland Security has apparently expressed a desire to use RFID technology. RFID is wirelessly scannable, something like those security tags in department stores. Proponents of the technology have apparently said that it's only scannable from a maximum distance of a few inches. If that's true, why bother?

Section excerpted, see below.

The obvious implication is that RFID scanners, operable to at least a few feet, will be put in the doors of federal buildings—for starters—so that law enforcement can keep track of who is going in and out of places they are already working to guard. The next step is to require those scanners at the doors of, for example, liquor stores—especially here in Texas, where minors are not allowed to enter. Then shops that sell or rent pornography, then bars.

To take it one step further, suppose they put these scanners at the entrances of hotels—for security reasons, or whatever. Now, consider again that this information is going to go into a big private database. Suppose someone wants to find out about you. So they cross-check where you are with where anyone else is. Suppose you always go to a hotel—perhaps the same hotel, perhaps different hotels—within one hour of another person, and then leave within one hour of that same person. If you're not actually having an affair, this information could still be used to imply that you are. And that's just a small potential use of it in the private sector.

This bill is the next best thing to putting a tracking chip on each and every person in the country.

Incidentally, RFID is absolutely about to be put into all new passports.

The rationale for all this, of course, is that it will make it harder for terrorists to do their thing. Considering that the people who crashed planes into stuff in 2001 were all not only in the country legally, but had legal driver's licenses and never entered a restricted area prior to breaking into the cockpits of those planes, it's really absurd to assume that real-id will make much difference for terrorists.

When I first heard about this, I wondered if I was being paranoid and that maybe there were significant law-enforcements benefits to it that I hadn't thought of. So I asked my friend's father. He (the father) was a high-ranking police officer, as well as having been in some branch of the military before. He has good credentials for having a valuable perspective on this. I expected to get a very different perspective, but we agreed on every point.

I don't know what to say about this, but that it's very dangerous.

If you want to look into it further, here is the last article I read. This is the first site I saw relating to it. Finally, here is a pretty good editorial about it.

Finally, let's review what exactly is going to be publicly available after your ID is scanned: your name, birth date, gender, an ID number, your real and verified physical home address, and your picture. In addition collateral information relating to the transaction that caused the ID to be scanned: where you are, what you're buying, etc. However, it is likely also that your social security number could be put in there. Since your citizenship or visa status must be verified in order to get the card, that will probably go on there. Further, Homeland Security is empowered to require pretty much anything they want be stored there—right down to a fingerprint and retinal scan, if they deem it necessary.

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I previously wrote that "according to a 2003 supreme court ruling, the police are empowered to ask anyone for their ID at any time, for no reason at all." I was paraphrasing an article linked above. I've now read the actual decision, from beginning to end, and it's really not that at all. Thus we see the dangers of referring to your source's source.

The decision in question actually concerns whether it can be a crime not to identify yourself to a police officer. Specifically, in a case in Nevada, a man was fined $240 for refusing to identify himself to an officer investigating a domestic disturbance. He wasn't randomly selected, and the officer wasn't even asking to see ID: he was a reasonable suspect in suspicious circumstances refusing to verbally respond by telling the officer his name. The officer asked him 11 times before arresting him, according to the above-linked supreme court document. While I agree with the second dissenting opinion, I can't see that this case has a whole lot of bearing on the real-id issue.

I don't think that the highly specific nature of this ruling has any bearing, in particular, on the use of RFID as the data storage for real-id compliant cards. However, I don't think that it's an impediment either. I think we can expect RFID scanning of real-id compliant cards to become ubiquitous, and, further, I think that even if they somehow are barred from using RFID, having to physically take the card from your wallet to scan it will still become ubiquitous.

Sick again...

Yesterday, around 3pm, I started to get a fever again. I'd had a headache, on and off, since the night before. I started to feel weak first, then my forehead began to get hot and I started to feel chilled.

This sequence of things is very familiar, because this winter it happened sometimes more than twice a week.

I hope whomever may read this will, rather than as a complaint, take this as reflection on the condition I've been in. Physical weakness on this order, and danger of death, are things that most people don't have to seriously consider until they are in their fifties, at least. I don't know how close to death I've been, but I must have been close at least one of the times I was in the hospital.

I know that this must have changed my view of the world, but it's hard for me to identify how my view has changed. Certainly, I have a very direct and powerful sympathy for people who have some kind of infirmity. I also know that my own problems with disease could be much worse—I've avoided surgery and most of the problems associated with the chronic illness that I have. I wouldn't say that my position is enviable, but compared to some people I'm doing extremely well. I also know that the suffering I've experienced is minimal compared to what many people have been through. And I've had a lot of support from friends and family during these years.

So, I have a lot to be grateful for. And, at the same time, I have a pretty good idea just how bad it could have been.

Painting, Ugh.

So we're building this house for me. That's a little bit strange; I guess most people don't build their own houses. My dad was looking for something useful to do to in the evenings, so he started building me a house. I guess that's even stranger. There was already a little storage shack there, and since it was an eyesore, he wanted to do something about it.

He started by cementing posts to the ground, with the intention of making a garage of it. Some months later, he finally started building something with those posts, instead using the posts as support for a new room, adding floor joists between the existing building and the posts.

Now we've put siding up on one wall, and one other wall is half-done, with two of four windows in place and the tar paper tacked up on that same half. The siding that's up already has survived two rainstorms without too much damage, only a little warping that dad ironed out today. But it would be bad to let it get rained on again, and so today, finally, I'm putting the primer on it.

I hate painting.

Busy, Busy, Busy

Having spent the past three days moving things from one storage unit to another, today I've been at work in a dental office, helping to install Satellite Radio into the existing stereo system. It's quite a change.

My dad's business storage was formerly spread through 360 sq. feet in three separate units in the same self-store complex. He just rented a single 560 sq. foot unit—in the same complex—that was designed as an R.V. garage. It works out to an extra 200 sq. feet for $20 per month.

The problem, of course, is that we had 3 weeks to vacate the original 3 units. So far we're on track—having finished clearing the first of them out yesterday. However, day by day it's getting hotter here as we lead up into summer. Next weekend may not be so forgiving as this one was.

In other news, that essay I was working on is still delayed. I just haven't been able to sit at the computer for any real length of time lately. Maybe this week.

debilitation

I don't think most people understand illness. Moreover, I don't think most people understand pain. I don't know what it looks like from the outside, but a lot of people certainly don't understand it, even after living with someone who's chronically ill for months.

Today, for some reason, I want to explain about it. Perhaps someone will read this—big leap, I know—and realize that perhaps the person they thought was whiny may actually be suffering.

First, let me disclaim a few things: hypochondria is hard to rule out. Hypochondria is, in itself a real mental problem that would indicate a totally different type of suffering; further, the things a hypochondriac experiences feel real to them. In a way, I'd like to tell them to snap out of it, but I know it's not that simple. More importantly, failing to exercise and keep one's body in reasonable shape can result in a sort of general lousy feeling that a lazy person may exploit to pretend to chronic illness. What I'm aiming to talk about here is something else.

A small amount of constant pain can be debilitating. I don't think people who've never experienced that realize it. But, imagine if flexing your stomach muscles turned a constant low, dull pain into a sharp, intense pain. Consider when you need to flex your stomach muscles: getting up from a bed or chair, for example.

Today, for the first time in five or six days, I woke up suddenly free of the kind of pain I just described. During that time, I could barely do anything—even a slow walk on a level surface tired me out in less than a quarter of a mile.

I can't—and don't want to—imagine what a serious chronic pain, constant over a period of years, must be like.

---

That last link seems to have broken. I hope it'll be back, but I can't help but wonder if it was removed intentionally. The topic is the death of that author's brother-in-law, Brad. Brad suffered from tremendous, constant pain, for twelve years before a new treatment solved the pain. Exactly one month later, he died. A complication from one of the many operations he'd had caused a stroke.

Aaaaaaaaaaargh

I didn't get a single word written on the essay I started yesterday.

Today was just that kind of day. From what I've heard, it was for everyone. My once-and-future roommate, who works at TimeWarner, says that all the customers were ruder than usual today, and all his co-workers were grumpy. I wondered, of course, what it is that causes these sorts of things. He suggested the weather.

I'm not really convinced. I think the weather takes a little longer to start bringing people down. People do start to get depressed on the second rainy day, and moreso on the third. But today seemed to be an angry day, not a depressed day.

I could probably make some speculations on that, but I won't. Today just needs to be over.

Once, and again

For the third time today, I'm sitting down writing on this thing. I don't have anything to say right now; I'm just in the mood to jabber, and no one's on any IM.

The second time I sat down to this today is turning into a longish essay. I hope I'll finish it tomorrow, post it then.

We just had mother's day festivities, here. I feel a little strange about that, and I'm not sure why. Everything was very nice, with my mother and her mother both here. I guess I feel sort of distant from things today.

I'm going to be moving my dad's storage this month. He's currently got three separate storage units, for a total of 360 sq. feet of storage. For some reason, no one ever checked the availability of alternative units at that storage place. They have a number of 560 sq. foot units available, renting for just about the same price as dad's paying for 360 sq. feet.

The situation has been ridiculous, since the work on my house is somewhat hampered by the fact that the pre-existing core of it that we're building around was storage before, and we haven't been able to remove all the stuff that's in there. I mean, I could actually be living in part of my house already if we could shift that stuff.

The construction is coming along. Slowly, of course, but it's coming along. I'll have a good place to practice in a couple of weeks. Finally.

In other news, I think I need a haircut again.

What am I doing this for? (Here I go again...)

For a while, now, I've been meaning to write something about the nature of writing these things.

In particular, as a writer—since that's how I think of myself—why should I bother? There are books and books and books in libraries, bookstores, landfills, bookshelves, and closets. The newspaper and magazine industries are constantly producing material that probably amounts to megatons of waste paper—waste writing—ever year. In that cacophony, is there any purpose in my bothering to write a single word?

Obviously, I think so. I'm not under any illusions that what I'm writing here, today, is anything more than staring at a wall talking to myself. Nevertheless, I write it. I suppose that means that I'm essentially writing for myself.

If I'm writing for myself, why bother publishing it? I have lots of hard drive space, and there's a printer in the same room. If I want to write something for myself, I can write it on my own hard drive and print it out on that printer over there. I can stick it in a box and take it out again when I want to stroke my ego and call myself a writer.

But, I put it here.

Publishing is essential to being a writer, rather than being someone who writes. Even this form of throwaway publishing. So, in order that I can write more effectively for myself, I have to consider the existence of an audience, even a generic one, and write to have some impact on them—on you. Part of this is so I can have an impact on myself, if I ever reread this. Part of this is because I want to justify to myself that there's a point in doing this. But perhaps someone will read this and decide that writing is important to them, and work to publish their work. I may be adding more to the cacophony, and even indirectly causing more to be added, but there's always a chance that it'll mean something to someone.

Reasoned Discourse?

I just spent perhaps 2 hours laying forth a consistent line of reasoning in favor of something I don't really believe in.

Why do I end up doing this? It's happened before; when I took a world philosophy class, I ended up defending Confucius to my discussion section. It got to where the jackass TA wouldn't call on me, because I was taking up too much class time.

I HATE Confucius. I think his ideas—however well intentioned—have been used to perpetrate generations of injustice on people.

However, if you're going to criticize a philosophy, you must understand it first. My discussion section didn't. They had no clue at all.

I guess it's really down to wanting the criticisms to be meaningful. I mean, if someone argues for four hours against something I dislike, but they don't say a single word that actually makes sense against it, it's just a big waste of time, right?

But then, why do I really bother if it's not my time they're wasting?

wth is this, then?

I thought I'd try this blogspot thing out, seeing as my own website is down pending renovation. Since it's down, I kinda don't write in it. I can. I just don't, usually. If I had a laptop I probably would more often.

There's always something going on, but I can't think of anything, really. I know I don't write enough, but there's lots of stuff I don't do enough.

In other news, I miss Japan a lot, lately. I've been thinking about all the places I haven't been to in a couple of years, and it frustrates me. So I wonder, "what's the deal with that?" I mean, I'm from Texas. I shouldn't really feel more at home in a country where they build the doors six inches too short for me. Aren't we supposed to like things big?

I believe it's not any one, single thing. But the principle behind it is pretty straightforward: ever since childhood, I've been looking for some place that had roots. Japan is old. I have no idea why, but I've always wanted that. Maybe I'd respond the same way to Europe, or to China. No idea.