Monday roundup and roundup and response to comments

Ecuador's nasty oil spill will hit Brazil.

These women at the forefront of Turkey's protests bring up an interesting question: why are women so angry? Why can't we just smile and look pretty? That "Everyday Sexism" project is giving women the deranged idea that they don't have to put up with what they'd accepted as the status quo level of bull$hit that comes with being female in this world.

This retrospective on European history as it pertains to the EU is interesting but I'm not convinced of its conclusions.

Sigh. Why must a common-sense issue like prison reform be made partisan?

Know your farm programs and pork producers. And stay the f* away from Krispy Kreme Sloppy Joes. The good news is, you'll have healthier options at national parks.

@vegan was on a roll today:

RT @bongoshoes if you had a list of 5 [vegan] essentials what would they be? >> fruit, veggies, grains, beans, CHOCOLATE ;)
— Vegan (@vegan) June 9, 2013

A big shout out to every 3rd rate writer who spent more energy trashing their vegan experience than figuring out how to make it work.
— Vegan (@vegan) June 10, 2013

All I can say to you if you're confused about sunscreen is that you're kind of f*ed either way. And for f*'s sake, you're an idiot if you buy designer water.

So much wisdom about life in general in Carolyn's advice to an expecting mom.

Why haven't we borrowed more from Chinese?

I love gargoyles and shapely asses, but there's something to be said for taste.

This time last year (well, tomorrow by date but it was a Monday night) I was on my way to Budapest. I'm glad that was last year and not this year.

Metro SUCKS.

Mark O'Connell beautifully articulates what I've been trying to say. First of all, really, people?

When Richard Dawkins was named the world’s “Top Thinker” in a poll recently published by Prospect magazine, it was hard to avoid the suspicion that the world—or at least that part of it that votes in such polls—must have an impoverished sense of what constitutes a vital or transformative intellectual figure. Any list of “thinkers” that doesn’t feature one woman in its top 10 (Arundhati Roy opened the scoring for the gals at No. 15) probably shouldn’t be taken completely seriously anyway, but the fact that it was the result of public voting does offer an insight into the kinds of ideas contemporary Anglo-American culture values most highly.

More to the point,

White is a nonbeliever, but like a lot of nonbelievers—me included—he’s frustrated with the so-called New Atheism’s refusal to engage with anything but the narrowest and most reductive understanding of religious experience, and its insistence on the scientific method as the only legitimate approach to truth.

and

You don’t have to devalue empiricism to believe that there are kinds of understanding that can’t be accessed in a controlled, peer-reviewed experiment. The problem, obviously, isn’t science; it’s the arrogance with which many scientists, and popularizers of science, dismiss the value of other ways of thinking about questions of meaning, about the world and our place in it.

and, so beautifully stated:

Scientism is essentially the belief, the faith, that all problems and questions are potentially soluble by empirical investigation (and that if they’re not, they’re somehow not real questions, not real problems). But there are large areas of human experience for which science has no convincing or compelling means of accounting. I am, I suppose, more or less an atheist, but when I read the Book of Genesis, I find that there is something profoundly true about the picture of human nature in those verses—a picture of our perversity and self-alienation that neuroscience, for instance, has no way of getting at or talking about. Schopenhauer, Freud, and Heidegger all give us comparable forms of truth—truths that aren’t verifiable or measurable in the same way as those of science, but that are no less valuable. The most important truths are often untranslatable into the language of fact.

I really feel that this is what turned me off of science (and onto literature) as early as college.

***
I didn't like "Black Swan." I see so much theater that close-ups strike me as overreach: who does the director think he/she is to tell me where to focus my attention? I did like that you couldn't tell what was real and what she was hallucinating; that was the best part, or the only thing that made the movie worthwhile: how those who want to destroy us can only do it if we let them in.


***
I think I will keep the speakers (in case they come in handy) and toss the CD. I really don't care about those photos anymore. It's funny--that was a relationship that dragged on three times as long as I was actually happy in it, and the bf's photographic skill and artistry was a factor in my convincing myself to stay in, even when it should have been clear that it was a dead-end. That (doomed) relationship influenced my dating behavior for years to come: it was a lesson in de-emphasizing shared interests (the man loved to hike, bike, and travel--what else could one want? A soul, for starters). In a way, the relationship that ended a year ago was a reversal of the overcorrection brought on by the former relationship: yes, it's okay to want to date someone who likes hiking and traveling. It does matter. It's not the only thing that matters, but it matters. I'm not compatible with someone who doesn't like that stuff, and he's not compatible with me. It hit me not too long ago how wrong I was to think I was the one doing the bulk of the "settling"--not in a binary way, but in consenting to a life without adventure--but it's so clear now that the same reasons that the (more recent) ex didn't care for camping were the same reasons he'd never be quite comfortable with me in general. He was obsessed with order; I valued the natural disorder that you let in because it's worth it. I'm not comfortable with sterility--with hospital-white walls, plastic decor, etc.; I prefer the warmth of outdoorsy things, even when they come with some mess.


All of this made me think about how everyone I've seriously dated has taught me how I am who I am by choice. I tend to go into the relationship thinking, "this person has figured out something I haven't," and I always leave thinking, "no, I've got that right." A few years ago I dated this hipster social worker--at the time, I was wondering whether I'd sold-out, career-wise, and I really admired that he hadn't--but after a few weeks, I saw how simplistic and pathetic he was. [Note: that conclusion is not to be extrapolated to all hipster social workers; I stayed with a lovely one in Prague last year (he was gay).] But this one was just a prick with a worldview unchallenged by interactions with anyone different.


None of these dudes was a waste of my time, even though they were all spectacularly wrong for me. I learned a lot from all of them; each of them--or at least my reaction and eventual rejection of each of them--is a part of who I am, for the better--and not just in ways that inform whom I would want to date. Although, arguably, anything that makes you who you are, informs who you want to date. But they've also taught me a lot about dating--particularly, to heed Maya Angelou's advice about believing you when someone shows you who they are. About not making excuses for them, or idealizing them. And about hanging back and letting the guy do the work early on in the relationship, because that really weeds out those who are either not into you or not into any work. So, that's what I've learned. As my boss would say, "onward."