Feeling meh right now. And not happy-meh, where you feel diffident but not perturbed by it. This is negative meh, or neg-meh, as nobody calls it.

It’s the meh where you are having trouble remembering why you do things. Perhaps that only happens to us sad depressives, I don’t know. But I know it will pass.

Today’s my long day, where I will be at school from 4 pm to 10 pm. Somehow, that seems a lot more depressing than being there from 1 pm to 7 pm. Same amount of time, different emotional affect entirely.

It certainly creates complications. Once more, I have the problem of when the heck I am going to eat. Last week, my ass got saved by a class ending early. But this week, there will be no such luck.

This is also the day when I will be picking up my textbooks. I tried to do it (or at least do part of it) yesterday, but I messed up. I thought I had a pre-existing order there, but I don’t. I misunderstood what I had been told on the phone. So I just ended up confusing the poor lady at the bookstore by asking for my order. She doesn’t do orders. She just hands you the books you ask for and charges you for them.

Whatever. I will have my book list with me today and it should be smooth sailing. The money for the books is sitting on my credit card, waiting to be used. There might even be a little left over when I am done. That would be nice. But probably not.

Especially if I can’t buy used at the bookstore, only online. My previous bill of $320 was an online bill, and I selected used versions for every text.

I have a sinking feeling that maybe that won’t be an option getting books RL, and that would easily add between $100 and $150 to my books bill.

And that would suuuck.

In that case, I might just go back to online ordering. That would further delay my getting my texts, which would be frustrating, but I would rather pay $36 in shipping than $150 in price difference.

And hell, I made it a whole semester with no books. I can stand to wait a little longer.

So I dunno. I will contemplate further and gather information before making my decision. No sense in rushing into it when I have time.

Not a lot of time. But time.

Right now, all I want is to crawl into bed and sleep. Hide from the world. Not have to deal with things. And who knows, maybe after this, I will take a short nap before it is time to go out and face that big old world. I don’t feel like I need the sleep physically – I got plenty of sleep last night – but I might need it psychologically, in order to be ready and alert for the day.

Had Intro to Ethics yesterday. It was okay. I like the prof. We chatted during the break and she took note of my Vcon t-shirt and said she was into science fiction as well. Wow, sci fi AND ethics? Awesome.

The class itself was frustrating, though. We spent three hours exhaustively (and exhaustingly) disproving cultural relativism (the idea that actions can only be judging good or bad according to the rules of the culture in which they take place).

It’s a notion which is easily proven to be major whacko bullshit and that nobody would really believe or defend in this day and age. She honestly could have gotten the idea across in like ten minutes and then we could move on to something more interesting and relevant. Plus I question the wisdom of starting with meta-ethics when we have yet to cover any actual ethics.

Plus, she kept polling us to see whether we were understanding her by saying things like “Is any of this making at least a little sense to you? ” and “It’s okay if you don’t understand yet… “. And that is very bad form for any kind of teacher. It undermines the necessary authority one needs to teach. The instructor must sounds like they know what they are talking about and that they are explaining it perfectly well and if anyone doesn’t understand something, they will raise their hand and ask.

Without this, we naked beach apes get nervous. Teaching is a leadership position, and therefore when the instructor is weak or lacks confidence, we the students become nervous and stressed out.

Were this a nature documentary, I would be waiting for the scene where a stronger and more confident teacher invades my ethics prof’s territory and challenges her for leadership, at which point the new prof takes over and the herd calms down.

It’s true that human beings need to be led. We are all happiest when we are led by someone strong, decisive, and confident, and can therefore stop worrying about what is going on outside our little world and concentrate instead on doing our jobs.

Thus the allure of fascism. The idea behind all those supposed fascist utopias is that with a single, strong, powerful leader to dominate everyone, everyone can just relax and do what they are told and stop worrying about little things like politics and freedom.

And that might work…. if that was, indeed, something fascism could deliver. If you had a nation where the people had their basic needs very well tended to, where everyone had work and food and electricity and were left enough alone to lead simple, happy lives, you might actually have a stable fascist state.

But power corrupts. The system becomes wildly inefficient in a very short time. Without a voice, the people can’t apply corrective pressure to the system, and soon, what you have is monarchy, only with even less accountability. The people, instead of being calmed, are nervous all the time because they never know what will happen next.

Some day, I will write a story about a highly successful fascist state just to explore the idea. I am sure that would make a lot of people uncomfortable.

And that’s fine by me.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

(I’m not going to talk about Bowie tonight. I need time to process the news.)

I had my music collection on random, and this gem from a lost era popped up^[1] :

Yup, that relic of the 90’s is 20 years now. And hearing it made me think back not just to the era where they first started banning indoor smoking in public places and the phrase “politically correct” was tossed around by everyone (but mostly conservatives), but to my entire life experience with smoking.

When I was a little kid in the Seventies, everybody smoked. My parents, my neighbors, my teachers, my aunts and uncles, my babysitter… virtually every adult I know smoked.

It was ubiquitous. There were ashtrays everywhere in public in a vain attempt to keep smokers from flicking ash and grinding out butts wherever they happened to be, as if they were wild horses taking a shit. “What brand do you smoke? ” was a safe conversation starter. The people on TV smoked and so did the people in the movies. Smoking was as much of a given as having a cell phone is now. ^[2]

And I hated it, because it meant that poor little me ended up sandwiched between my two parents, them both smoking like chimneys in cold weather, and me trying to get clean air by slouching down in my seat until I was below the danger zone.

Thank goodness hot air rises.

Then as I got older, peer pressure came into play. I had eventually made friends with some of the heavy metal kids in 6th grade via being a fan of KISS due to my sister being (way)into them, I made sort-of friends with two guys named Kevin and Trevor, and through them got to know some other metal-head types, and that led to the classic peer pressure scene from every after-school special happening to me.

I remember it like it was the day before yesterday. I was hanging out with these bad seed types outside the YMCA that was across the street from my school. They were all smoking, and the point came where they offered a cigarette to me, and told me I would like it, and didn’t I want to be cool?

And I really considered it. I wanted to fit in, I wanted to be cool, I wanted to be cool, I wanted the acceptance of this new group of friends that had introduced me to the glories of Iron Maiden, Judas Priest, and Metallica. And I loved how they dressed. I wanted to be like them.

But I just couldn’t do it. Instead, I left and went home.

This was a great embarrassment to Trevor and Kevin, who had vouched for me. If I had stayed around, I honestly probably could have talked my way out of the awkwardness. But the whole situation suddenly disgusting me and I just wanted to go home.

Later on, in junior high, when I was sort-of friends with Jason Heisler and Michael Foucault, I kinda sounded them out on the subject, and Jason agreed that smoking was stupid. Michael smoked, but he respected our opinions on the matter.

So it never really became an issue again in my life except for the usual smoke-dodging at home. But that wasn’t a big deal, because my parents didn’t smoke at the table, so even when my sister Anne and brother David started smoking (making the population of the home 2/3 smoker), the number of situations where I was forced to endure smoke dropped drastically.

In fact, all through high school, my only brush was that was outside the “smoking door” (the only place where students were allowed to smoke), which is where all the heavy metal kids hung out.

But I hated it out there. It was so gross. So once more, cigarettes came between me and being a part of the heavy metal community.

No wonder I hate them. (The cigarettes, not the heavy metal community. They rock!)

Then I went off to university, and made the best friends I had ever had. All of us nerdy as hell, we got together in the student cafeteria known as The Pit, so we called ourselves the Pit Crew.

And only one of us smoked, and even he eventually stopped due to the passive peer pressure of being the only smoker amongst, frankly, people too nerdy to smoke. Like me.

And that was the end of it, until my mom got bronchitis.

Up until that point, I didn’t hate tobacco. I thought it was disgusting and I was glad I wasn’t saddled with the addiction, and I wished my relatives did not smoke, but I didn’t hate it.

But one night, I was lying on my bed reading, and I heard my mother start to cough. And cough. On and on, And the longer it went, the more worried and anxious I was, and the angrier I got as a result. And by the time she finally stopped, I knew I fucking hated the tobacco industry in all its manifestations, and that’s still how I feel to this day. I will feel that way till the day I die.

Because tobacco attacked my mother. There’s no coming back from that.

So by the time that song came out, I was all for this new policy of keeping smoking away from us non-smokers as much as possible. Smoke all you want, but keep your filthy fucking smoke away from my lungs, damn it.

And what really amazes me is that the entire culture changed as a result. Now nobody smokes indoors any more. Not even in their own homes. And the number of smokers in North America is dwindling rapidly.

So my hope is that, at least in this culture, smoking just kind of dies off on its own.

Wouldn’t that be something?

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.