I'm hungover right now and it sucks. I hate hangovers mostly because they depress your brain and force you to endure a day full of wishing that day was a different day. And yet, if we didn't have hangovers many of us would die a lot younger. So they are in a sense a sort of built-in preserving buffer. A harassing one. (Or is it an harassing one?)

I'm pro-inflation so the current economic depression is a good thing for me. Helps my debt. Also helps my argument that the penny should be done away with. 1 cent is simply useless. I throw all of my pennies away as if they were the trash that they actually are. Which helps inflation because it forces the government to print more, which only makes the penny even more useless, driving the senseless closer to their senses, and sooner to the discontinuation of this laughable metal mixture. We should align taxes and sales to nickel increments, facilitating the assumption of the penny to its rightful place in the annals of history.

Intellectualization is a Freudian defense mechanism, rated "neurotic" and Level III by George Vaillant (Level IV is optimal or mature), that many people use to rationalize or justify emotionally distressing events in their lives. I actually think I can cite a specific example of the use of intellectualization in almost every single person I know. How then can it be labelled neurotic? Certainly we are all "neurotic" to a certain extent and in certain circumstances, but if most people rationalize then why not label it "normal"?

Y.E. Yang won the PGA championship today, the first man to defeat Tiger Woods in 15 tries when Tiger has led going into Sunday and, more importantly, the first Asian-born man to win a major golf championship. After China's successful bid to host the Olympics last year and the resounding success of the games themselves (minus the pollution biz), China's burgeoning world economy, Japan's monopoly on visual entertainment of many kinds (seriously, especially with younger people), are we seeing the milestones and harbingers of the Eastern rise and consequently the Western fall? Should we prepare for an invasion of Calilfornia in the 2060s? Should I learn Chinese?

Various people, fields in general, and employed strategies share a method of categorizing and classifying in life. Psychiatrists diagnose, taxonomists create detailed trees, and astrologists demarcate a fixed number of types of people. Why do we do this when we know that life is too complicated to fix into a particular shape? Surely to craft meanings but should we embrace a methodology we know is somewhat futile?

Central to the question is the value of derived generalizations. Should we impose generalized lessons backed by empirical evidence knowing very will the limitations of both generalizations themselves and study parameters? Or should we rely on ourselves individually, taking more of a figure life out for yourself approach? As yet I don't have a position on this question, I just know that social scientists prefer the former and Emerson and Thoreau the latter.

Another drought in the blog, this time because of a road trip out West.

At Bryce and Zion foreign tourists swamped the place like Americans swamp Europe. In fact, it felt more like a European destination than any place in America. Most of the people at the major centers were not speaking English (mostly French, out to see the wild wild west). It makes me think that, contrary to what some people say, Americanization is not synonymous with globalization. This is an example in microcosm of what you actually find in the world.