on ethan hawke and lost masculinity..

I watched 'before sunset' too. And I suppose it had the same sort of effect on me. But just in a less poetic way. It made me wonder about ex-girlfriends, and what they mean.. and as Celine said 'each person I loved left me with something, and perhaps a part of me will always love them'. (or words to that effect).. which seems to be a bit of a theme in my life recently. Doing the relationship dance with women when we both know nothing more can come of it.

There is a romantic intensity in the absence of time. I figured that a long time ago, and Mr Linklater figured out a much better way to express it than the above sentence.

But what I'm wondering now is this.. do I function best only in the twilight zone of the 'near relationship'? With ex-girlfriends from the past with whom I spent long perfect evenings.. of the sort that rarely happened in the last year we actually did go out. With attractive women I meet at parties and airports when we're both leaving the country. And people from the past who finally admit to wanting something between us only when its not really feasible..

Which brings me to the next, almost contradictory point.. Why complain about it? I have a dry spell, and then meet interesting women. In and of itself, that should be brilliant. Even my best friend says to me "fuck off and dont expect any sympathy from me". So whats the problem?

The problem is this maladaptive, healthy, wholesome, new-age male bollocks that I can only refer to as the 'post-coital emotional outburst'.. ie I meet someone, we both know it cant go anywhere serious, we enjoy it for what it is, I wake up the next morning and think "hmm... I dont know.. maybe we could make something of it", and spent the next few weeks in a vaguely depressed state of something resembling loss. That sucks. I'm supposed to be the emotionally distant male- incapable of knowing what I feel if it hit me over the head with a spanner. How then did I get transformed from being your average slacking, unemotional guy, to your average slacking guy with frequent PCEO's?

Most of the women I know are actually far more controlled about their emotional states than drivel like cosmo would have the rest of the world believe. And a lot of the guys I know actually suffer the PCEO too. And for all that crap about wanting "a nice guy, who's in touch with his emotions and all that", its the charm of the emotionally distant bastard version of the bloke that many women find strangely attractive. Hell, I've been transformed into an object of lust when I've acted like a bastard.

The moral of the story- the status quo- emotionally distant guys and women who actually like these guys but think otherwise following a short burst of cosmo reading works a lot better than two confused people suffering PCEOs! Go figure.

[Editor's note: the article lost any thread of continuity a long time ago. But seeing how he is a boy of little brain and only about three people read this anyway, we'll just let it slide.]

Celine...

i loved her before sunrise
i loved her before sunset
and then i let her go
so she could love someone else...

Large Corporations: Bad. But what are we going to do about them?

I just got back from seeing The Corporation. It’s a documentary that looks at the birth and growth of the corporation and its effect on society and the environment. Have to say that it is one of the best documentaries that I have ever seen and a very scary one at that. Couple of the scenes were very disturbing. Especially the one where a commodities trader said that the first thing that came to his mind on seeing the two towers fall was that the price of gold was going to go up….”Every devastation leads to profit”. Also the fact that Corporations were allowed to be viewed as a legal person came about due to the amendment in the constitution to help black slaves was mind boggling.

The movie got me thinking again about if big corporations are really bad, what can we do to fight them? Should I be even working for one? Many people say that we should start supporting the small corporations out there. But I am not sure that is the right solution. Take Microsoft for example. When they first started as a small company doing contract work for IBM, they poked them in the eye by getting IBM to license their OS rather than selling it to them. I am sure everybody was cheering little Microsoft on as they beat out Big Blue. And look what at Microsoft has become! In recent years there has been a swell of goodwill towards Linux. RedHat is one of the major Linux distributions out there and was once the apple in the eyes of Microsoft haters. Today they are slowly becoming the “Microsoft” in the Linux community.

The other thing is that if you are going to support anyone, it means that you are going to help them to grow. If they grow, there is a good chance that they will become another big bad corporate monster. Or are we going to tell them we will support you only if there is a cap to your growth. That means that you are stifling potential and giving incentive to people to not do their best.

Is there any solution to keeping big companies in check? In some scenarios like operating systems the removal of a monopoly will solve the problem. The companies will keep each other in line. But in others this will not be enough. I don't think that there is an all encompassing solution to this but the bottom line is that I don’t want corporations out there making decisions on what my life and environment should look like.

As I work for a big corporation I felt that it was imperative to ask myself the question because in many situations asking the question is more important than the answer itself.