Author: cheerfulchaotic

So, I managed to arrange to do something with and Ro this evening. We went to the gaming night at the Endgame in Oakland. Games were played, fun was had. I appear to have a knack for transportation network games. Transamerica and streetcar I won both on my first playing. Hmmmm…. When I win settlers (which is happening with decreasing frequency), I generally have longest road.

Another funky game which was another tile placing game, but very different, I lost, but not by so huge a margin as I expected. Basically, by picking the layout of forest, plains, rivers, etc, you have to get maximal fish, deer, aurochs, mammoths, mushrooms, whatever, for your tribe of hunter gatherers. (I was very amused by that. =)

I did notice and appreciate the eye candy there as well. I think I may have been hit on while I was browsing the used role playing game books (they have earthdawn 2nd ed. I didn’t know that even existed. $15. Neat). Really attractive guy, only other person in store portion of establishment. Walks over, browsing with me for a moment, makes some comment about one of the games that I just checked out. Brief friendly conversation ensues. I hope he was hitting on me, but I have insufficient evidence to say either way. Not sure what to do/say. Shy nerd syndrome kicks in. I wander off to people playing games. Want guidebook for such circumstances. Also want an am-I-being-hit-on-o-meter. Then there were the 2 or 3 cute guys (out of about 20 people assembled, not including the gentlemen I came with)

Have convinced Rohan to give LJ a try. We shall see what comes of it. Soon, soon, I shall hook him up with an account.

In yet another of these metaphysical discussions with Aaron, Simon and others (Ryan, Andrew, and Patrick, in this case), another point that caught my attention was raised. Agriculture, monarchy, communism, corporations, what have you. I regard these concepts as a social technology, while Aaron was arguing that these are emergent properties of a system. That is, under a certain set of circumstances, people will organize themselves in democracies, monarchies, or oligarchies.

That there isn’t so much a choice that is made between capitalism, socialism, or feudalism, but that these things just happen as a natural consequence of the circumstances. Further, that any individual’s action or understanding is irrelevant over the long run (say, a couple of centuries). That, fundamentally, the individual cannot make lasting change in the world.

I don’t see a contradiction between his ideas and mine, and I do admit to finding his fatalistic view both repellent and appealing.

hmmmm.

So, Rohan took me to the YMCA for a workout this evening. He’s offering to shoulder half the cost of a membership, should I be interested. (Have I mentioned that Ro’s really cool? Worthy of note). I did some whirlwind lifting (shoulders, biceps, quads, triceps, pecs, traps), followed by twenty minutes of drippy aerobic goodness. Well, I wasn’t dripping for the entire 20, but I made up for it later. It was lower intensity than I usually go for in a workout of this form, but I was surprised to find out that I was exceeding my recommended max heart rate for a cardio zone by about 10%. I still wanted a cold shower afterwards, but not quite so much as usual.

First time in a gym since before I moved to the bay area. It felt goooood. I need more income.

Saturday evening (which rapidly became sunday morning), Rohan, Josh and I sat around discussing. Eventually, Aaron, and finally Simon, became entangled in the conversation.

We spanned several topics including homelessness, intentional living, inequality, and military intervention in Iraq. But one especially vigorous topic was the quality of life in hunter/gatherer societies. The debate continued in a post in Josh’s livejournal.

There are some interesting points here, so I thought I’d bring it back here. Josh apparently thinks that Rohan and I believe h/g’s to be living in utopia, despite our protestations to the contrary. We each claimed that there were many desireable elements of h/g society in contrast to modern society. Neither of us argued that the converse was not also true. (I’ve certainly benefited from modern medicine, directly and indirectly, as the most trivial example).

We did claim that modern Americans had lots of bad stuff going on. Isolation from our fellow human being perhaps the most significant of these problems. I would also cite the host of diet and habit related diseases related to excessive, inappropriate consumption, as well as inadequate physical activity. These particular problems are not present in the conditions under which homo sapiens have spent the most time evolving, hunter-gatherer society.

Bone and dental records indicate that agricultural societies tended to have significantly worse nutrition than hunter-gatherer societies. What made agricultural societies work was the ability to mass produce humans, and stick them in a more compact than ideal setup. Hard to move to the next hunting ground if the women are constantly pregnant. There are also suspicions that that is when the gender equity gap really took off, for related reasons.

For references regarding the dietary consequences inherent in the switch to agriculture, I point you towards:
http://www.public.iastate.edu/~cfford/342WorstMistake.htm
http://anthro.fullerton.edu/sjohnson/anth315/Lecture%205%20Outline.htm
as well as Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond.

So, great, it rocks to be a hunter gatherer*, so what?. Do I want to become a hunter-gatherer? Not really. I’m pretty used to living here and now. I could probably adapt to living in such a society, given a few years. Primarily I use it to provide hope and ideas regarding the problems facing me as a less than fully satisfied member of modern American society. My perspective on that factor in another post.

* at least, until you’re overrun by a more populous civilization with better tools, which wants your hunting grounds for farmland, factories, or mini-malls.

For those who worry (or get exhasperated), I’d like to say that often I put the negative foo of my life here to work it out and examine it. This does not mean that because I put 5 icky entries in a row that’s all there is to my life. It serves a constructive purpose.

That having been said…

So, today was my verbal mock appointment. I ran through an appointment, in theory not doing any of the tests (throat swab, physical exam, testicular exam, blood draw, etc), with one of the people who’s been with the clinic since it began (before I was born). In practice, I did the throat swab & the blood draw. He prompted me numerous times, though I got the hint every time. I didn’t do a very good job on the history taking or the charting, but when it was all over he said I’d done well. I told him I disagreed.

Maybe one day I’ll be a good medic, but at present, I’m still quite wet behind the ears.

Spent the entire shift in lab. Mostly by myself, spinning urine, and examining sediment, staining and rinsing slides, counting blood cells and looking for bacteria. I have a mega headache. I’m not sure if it’s lack of sleep, dehydration, lack of social contact, or spending hours looking through a microscope. Maybe a combo. I was pretty antisocial after shift was over, despite high desire for affection. Oh well. bleh.

Next week is my last weekend of classes. If they aren’t having a training completed partay the weekend after, I want to run away to sacramento. I guess we’ll see what works out. It’ll be strange, and possibly good to have weekends free again.

In my continual quest for something enjoyable to get me out of the house I ran across this (on craigslist, actually). It’s a scrabble club that meets in berkeley on thursday evenings. Hmmmm….

http://solarmuri.ssl.berkeley.edu/~welsch/brian/bsclub.html

Also found
Serious writing group forming, but it may be a little too serious/political for me at the moment.
A running group in the making, might point it out to Rohan.

Sadly, berkeley’s sca does not have an active group of dancers.

Foo.

I made a commitment a couple months ago to get off, and stay off, gay.com and other cruisy chat net sites. I didn’t set a terminating time for this commitment. But I’d kept to it fairly well, until I went back to pittsburgh. While there, I filled much time just fooling around on gay.com, planetout, yahoo, and salon personals. I never went into chat rooms, but I checked out ads, and did use the planetout and gay.com im-style stuff.

So, the reason I quit this whole thing was that it was not returning to me anything worth what I was putting into it. And I felt I had fucked up my relationship with the GMHC, through a relationship that went fucked up places as a result of chat foo (though only a little, and the damage has been totally repaired from what I can tell). And I hold to the former point.

In fact, though, until tonight’s GMHC stuff, I found myself doing the same thing, even after getting back into town. Now, I’m feeling totally uninterested. Yay, gmhc.

the Return of the Ro

Grrr. I left the ac adapter to my laptop in pittsburgh, and Ro’s laptop won’t start for what I suspect are battery reasons. So I will be less netful than usual. Not to mention, incapable of actually coding, and thereby testing, my hypothesis regarding constant velocity observations of a constant, but unknown, velocity target, on a course skew to the observer. Basically, that it falls apart, and you can’t tell dick about it. Hopefully if I let it charge for today, it’ll become happy. If not, I’ll look into replacing the battery and seeing if goodness then happens.

Fortunately, seems to realize the extremity of my plight, and said he’d have my adapter in the mail by now, along with a few other things. Yay, Tom.