Idea for a cartoon series

The superhero is Chemical Sensitivity Man (something catchier though) who by day is a mild-mannered picket fence office worker with kids and a serious problem with depression, allergies, anxiety, restlessness, back aches, indigestion. By night the chemicals modern society has spewed into him interact and give him super powers and a clear nose. Kind of like Radioactive Man. He goes and puts CEOs and politicians and warmongers in the do-no-harm zone where they experience life as animals on Earth.

Alter-ego analogies

I have to put things in analogies involving a different me / alter ego. This is because I don’t look up to anyone, don’t feel like I can rely on anyone, have given myself a life philosophy that makes me ultimately selfish (“look after #1” etc), etc. Eg my subconscious / personal god model.

Total gayness

There’s something off-kilter about being totally gay. They’re all intense, and the explanation re homophobia isn’t enough to account for it. It’s bizarre in the first place to opt for total homosexuality. Heteros pretend they don’t like the same sex because it’s convenient. People that are totally gay must develop some kind of (maybe society-induced) obsession over the gay part of their sexuality. Or not be in touch with their sexuality enough to feel their straight side. Either way, it’s bizarre to choose to mute the side of you that ensures genetic propagation. And the choice itself would screw you up - your biological imperatives are not being met, so surely this has a subconscious impact on how successful/happy your life seems to you.

My arrogance in relationships

I’ve been in heaps of friendships/relationships where the other person has had ulterior motives. These people mistake my moment-to-moment innocence/naivete as vulnerability. But along the path I sucker them in and they get emotionally attached and their ways of thinking get forever changed. I teach them the lesson that love, security and trust win over cunning. And they have no idea when they’ve pushed me too far and get expelled from my life. They always love me more than I love them. But I do genuinely love them and the cumulative effect of all the struggles is exhausting. So maybe they’re teaching me the lesson of not being such an arrogant tyrant.

Ed TV

I think self-consciousness makes you honest. Like in Ed TV.

Prediction re corporate responsibility

Consumer backlash will take off hardcore soon over what multinationals are doing. There’ll be boycotts. These’ll escalate into consumer demands that “good” companies cease trading with exploitative ones. This’ll escalate into a segregation in the market that will significantly affect the economy. Of course companies on the “good” side, replete with the obsequiousness to consumers that capitalism engenders, will hijack the campaign like they were the ones that started it in the first place. People managing the blacklist of “bad” companies will soon have interests in “good” companies. People in business will soon be managing the blacklist. It’ll disintegrate into corruption.

Depressing testosterone with dope

I think one reason I smoke pot is to depress my testosterone levels. I’ve noticed I always reach for a cone when my partner’s not in the mood. And I think my testosterone levels have been massive the last couple of years but now I’m finally starting to get out of puberty.

And Mum’s probably had elevated levels lately because she’s heading into menopause so she probably has a heightened need for pot too. But the pot brings out the bipolarity. If it can be kept under control it’s a crusier ride though.

Number base crazy

You go crazy if you see number patterns in everything. Especially in a 10-base system. Another way I seeing the duality in everything. See it all in a binary system and you go psycho.

Mum’s problem

Mum has trouble expressing her wisdom in language and other ways that people can understand. So people think she’s stupid. Because she’s easily led by others’ opinions of her, she starts to believe that she’s stupid too. Yet somehow underneath she knows she is wiser than everyone around her. This only makes her frustrated, angry, want to withdraw and be apathetic, rather than think that maybe she is so right that she can triumph without anyone else’s help/advice. What should be a cause for confidence and self-esteem gets reversed as a cause of depression.

Self-destructive thing

It’s weird but I have this weird thing where if I can’t do something, I don’t bother trying, but if I can do something well I either don’t do it at all or make it as hard as possible for me to succeed. Eg smoking pot is gonna be a massive burden. But I’m sitting here right now not really needing it that much, but wanting to whack myself out to add an extra challenge to the day’s schedule. How retarded.

Belief and purported belief in economic theories

Americans are heaps better at ignoring irony, tacitly allowing hypocrisy etc than us.

The US economic system can best be described as semi-transparent, semi-corrupt pseudo-capitalism. They call it capitalism. Enron won’t be a one-off. The US’s economic indicators fluctuate wildly compared to the sturdy but unspectacular Australian economy. The people in control of the economic/political institutions in the US either laugh uncontrollably at the way they’ve brainwashed the population with such truly insane story models or have been so successful that they’ve even convinced themselves.

Either way things are a bit different in Australia. We always keep a healthy distance from anything authorities try to tell us. But we have an inferiority complex re the USA. So we copy them. We try to copy their political/social/economic thing without the same extreme kind of deliberate/conscious knowledge of its craziness on the part of our rulers.

In a sense our leaders believe the US myth more than the leaders in the US themselves. So when we eg institute economic reform like floating the dollar, we go the whole hog, generally without corruption and with full transparency (coz capitalism relies on this, at least according to economic textbooks). The US propagates the belief but is above putting it fully into practice.

So our economy is actually stronger on fundamentals (as measured using the prevailing economic rationalist orthodoxy) than the US. Which is why we survived the Asian meltdown, the dot-com crash, the “War on Terror” etc better than the US, and why we’re able to approach trade deals honestly while the US drags its foot on lamb etc coz their economy just isn’t strong enough to compete.

Support network of theories/concepts

The story model analogy of using free-weights to build up supporter muscles can be used to explain learning and solving mental health problems.

You can only understand something expressed in language if you’ve already thought it yourself. Such understanding consists only of receiving information and matching it up to the conceptual models you already have in your own mind. (It’s not an exact match, and certain concepts will be given twists of meaning and different levels of priority/importance by the words used.) But if you’re repeatedly exposed to bits of language , you’ll draw on the uses the words have in other contexts and slowly construct your own conceptual model to mirror what you think the language is representing.

Analogy: artificially building a muscle by using a cable weight machine thing. It exists in isolation without supporting muscles (support network of theories/concepts). But once you have the muscle you can switch to a free weight and get the supporting muscles. So if you come up with new ideas you have to expect people to groan at first, then get used to it but still not fully get it, then start believing it and applying it in life/discussion, then developing a supporting network of concepts around it and eventually link it back to the wealth of concepts we already have. If people get what you’re saying and apply it immediately in their broader network of ideas/behaviour, your idea was already in other people’s heads, just not expressed in clear language yet.