Bromide, Iodide, Facadesaside

Carl Jung said something to the effect that every human interaction is like a chemical one. People come out from the relationship changed, he said. We are bonded and alloyed.

When I was younger I was fascinated by cyborgs. Notable entries into this are Cyborg, the superhero, cyborg, the supervillain (both in the DC comics universe, one appearing on superfriends, and another appearing in the comic books to kill Green Lantern that one time); but also the Borg on TNG, Star Trek the Next Generation. The Borg were so crazy that they stole Captain Picard and made him into a cyborg!

When I was a kid we weren't allowed to watch rated R movies. One time, maybe when I was ten or eleven, I stayed up really late at night and watched the first terminator movie on television. In the movie, Arnold Schwarzeneggar takes one of his eyes out with a pen. There is no real reason for this in the movie. He just does it. He bleeds in the sink.

Of course, he wasn't a true cyborg. He was just a robot that looked like a human. This is sort of a cyborg, but I tend to think about a cyborg as a combination of a human and a robot. The Robin Williams' flop of "Bicentennial man" explores this, but only a little bit. There's a line between when something is a human and when something is a robot. Tie into that the fact that there is a ghost in the machine. Consider the movie "I, Robot" with Will Smith; where the villain is the robot. Incidentally, Smith plays a cyborg in the movie. The original arm that he lost in a car accident is replaced with a superstrong one.

The fun stuff happens when we slowly replace the parts of our bodies with machine parts. Are these parts better? Are they worse? Bicentennial man explored this a little bit. In the end of the movie the robot is sick of living and just chooses to die.

So the name of this post is -ides, and it's a commentary on the fact that facadesaside sounds like an ionic bond. The first two are ionic bonds, or salt bonds, because the atoms move in such a way that they polarize, and thus lock into little bricks. They look like lego blocks or link'n logs.

The more powerful bond, I think, is covalent bonding. This is because covalent bonds rip off electrons and everyone goes nuts. Those weaker protons who lost their electrons, now have to hold on to their dear lives to that giant proton cluster who snatched those electrons. It looks like tiny nano-microscopic bullriders on top of tiny nano-microscopic bulls.

Of course, the difference is that those sub-micro-nano-scopic bull riders are able to hold on really well. We humans always fall off of the bulls. Everyone knows the beginning, middle, and end to any bullriding story. What an exciting sport!

James Suroweicki commented, maybe last year or the year before, in the New Yorker Magazine, that the best acquisitions are like that of Disney's acquisition of Pixar. That is, just have each company do its thing and don't bother it. You take two successful companies, and let them keep being successful. Extreme corporate takeovers, I assume from Suroweicki's editorial, never work out.

My father says that divorce law is taught to everyone in law school because divorce is universal to business partnerships, too. Every time a business partnership breaks up, laws that are similar to divorce laws are used.

All of these, and I'll tag it this way on the bottom, seem to be questions of the philosophy of friendship. Bonding, acquisition, marriage, symbiosis: it all seems too connected (another facade?). I see that I'm jumping around quite a bit. Maybe I can sort all of this out at another time.

Some Shakespeare

Let me confess that we two must be twain,

Although our undivided loves are one,

So shall those blots that do with me remain,

Without thy help by me be borne alone,

In our two Loves, there is but one respect,

Though in our lives, a separable spite,

Which though it alter not Love's sole effect,

Yet doth it steal sweet hours from loves delight,

I may not evermore acknowledge thee,

Lest my bewailed guilt should do thee shame,

Nor thou with public kindness honor me,

Unless thou take that honor from thy name,

But do not so, I love thee in such sort,

As thou being mine, mine is thy good report.

Word Bank:

Twain:  separate, between

Blots:  Problems, think like spots on your shirt, but worse, in the metaphoric sense.

 No man is an island, Mr. Donne, but lots and lots of people are in cars;  where sometimes in spite of ourselves we get tired of listening to the radio and it's still just us.  

Connection can be a philosophical question because the issue of connection is not the connection itself.  Being in a connection, working in it and so on, is different from thinking about that connection.  

Aside from the connections between humans, there are also hundreds of connections that individuals have.  The fact that a connection is a possession in this language has significance, too;  because if it were otherwise, we might call it sharing, or giving.   One could think of a couple of other ways that a person could have a connection.  

So there's this idea that consciousness causes a connection because in the human mind it is the self that has connections.  

Therefore, one could conceivably have a relationship with oneself.  This sounds like the new age spirituality concept of loving oneself.  But you have to know what you are loving before you start loving that thing, right?  

Conceivably, a person could love the nothing.  But as soon as they are loving the nothing, that's something, isn't it?  Mmmmhmmm.   

Something that you think it is

People ask, "Am I who you thought I was?"  

Is there a more philosophical question?  

Professor Smythe of North Carolina College said that the most fundamental philosophical questions we can ask are, "Who am I?" and "What is this?"  He might have been quoting Martin Buber.  

Am I who you thought I was?  One time I was with my friend Nick and we were outrageous together.  He had this way of laughing at my jokes, sort of supporting me while I talked.  I thought that I supported him in that way, too.  Then one day, and I don't remember if he even marked the emotional occasion with any words, he just stopped laughing.  Conversations which had been really good before were just slow, and had various awkward silences.  

It was much more dramatic to me about a week afterward.  Now, seeing it written down, I realize that a story about how there's no drama isn't that interesting.

Am I who you thought I was?  I always think of the subjunctive when saying things that require the subjunctive.  I sort of feel the subjunctive dying out in the English language.  Sort of feels like there needs to be a 'were' there.  Am I who you thought I were doesn't feel right, either, though.  Are we who you thought we were?  But when do we ever ask that?  Why would any group need to prove themselves to an individual?  Or another group?

That is, being in a group is self-justifying.  The very act of being in there is a comforting process.  This scary stuff, when we put some cognitive dissonance theory to it:  if a group never thinks that it is unjust as a group, then there are not any checks and balances.   

Am I who you thought I was?   Posters cover my walls in my house.  Posters dot my dormitory in my room at the University and then disappear.  Am I who you thought I was?  Doesn't involve the present tense for the thought.  What an oblong sentence!  "Am I" is in present tense because we have the default sentiment that the self never changes.  We also think that we do not change how we are viewed by people.  

Am I who you thought I was?  Charles Dickens wrote 2 dimensional characters.  He wrote about people who simply have one act, one thing that they do.  He would write a character called, "Mrs. Washtub," who would take a bath every time she was in a scene (every time she were in a scene? The subjunctive is dying out).   But we don't want to be two dimensional characters.  It's a sin, in the United States, to be two-dimensional.  Call it the Denzel Washington problem:  we don't want to be cast in the same role over and over.   

E.B. White said something to the effect that it seems like people want to be considered evil rather than silly, a lot of times.  What I take home from this is that people want to be taken, perhaps not seriously, but honestly, and importantly.   

Now more than ever, we have stuff telling us who we are and what we do.  So there's mob mentality, there's facebook with our pictures on it, there's myspace with our pictures on it.  There's school identifications, there are thousands of people who "really know us".  Nine inch nails has a song "You know what you are?"  Coldplay has a song, "Lost!"  Millions are fascinated about Kanye West's struggles of identity (is he pompous or does he simply have very low self-esteem?).  The punchline to the joke is that the more that we are told who we are, the more we want to break out of that.  A friend told me that I'm a libertarian this past semester.  I was enraged.  Everyone has heard the phrase (at least everyone who has heard the Ludacris song)  "Get back, you don't know me like that."  The other punchline is that the more we do build the self, the more we want to build the self more;  in other words the more we build the self, the less we know ourselves.