Eff that shise man

I find myself saying "eff" and "shise" around my friends now. The habit of not swearing around my daughter has infected my non-daughter life. I notice that my ability to express myself is severely limited. (Let's face it, there are cases where only the word "fuck" can truly convey the logic and reason of your argument.)

I said "shise" today in front of my daughter who immediately said "shise, shise, shise, shise!!!". I thought to myself, success!! I expressed myself without dragging my daughter down into the depths of the culturally unacceptable. Call it a win.

Or is it? Barring some intervention from a god I don't believe exists, language is a human construct. We set the meaning of our words. So if "shise" means "shit" to me and my daughter learns it is used when brown stuff comes from our butts or when daddy stubs his toe, what does it matter that I replaced the t with an se? (Oh the irony: I just told her she can't eat cookie crumbs off the coffee shop floor and she yelled "crap"!)  If the meaning is what counts, shise is as good as shit.
I would argue that the same applies to morality. We set the meaning of our morals.  The subtle redefining of the meaning of death in abortion, suicide, death penalty, war, etc. is shise.  Eff that shise man.

Identify with your disease

My guaranteed to read lead in is this: Fuck.

The origin of this lies in the fact that my "Patience" entry is the highest rated.  I am certain that it isn't the quality of the writing but the fact that the word "fuck" reveals itself in the first sentence and has two encores in the first paragraph.  Everybody loves the unnecessarily inappropriate.  I'd love to hear the top ten words that would get you reading (ear muffs everybody: fuck, shit, balls, cock; are you listening Google?).

Now that you've gotten this far, on to identity.  I don't know who the hell or what the hell I am so this will be an oft-treaded topic on this blog. I don't think I'll ever really know who this person who fakes my narrative truly is (there is so much redundancy and feedback in that sentence - I, I, my - I'm getting nauseous; I truly am a strange loop).  I refuse to read The Ugly Duckling to my daughter because I don't want to give her the false impression that we ever figure out who we are.    Maybe that's Buddha and Sartre's point anyway: defining yourself is succumbing to entropy (energy not available for useful work).  If I am what I am, the process is complete.  I am not available for useful work (i.e. the process of becoming).  I am a pinpoint.  I am stagnant.

But that is a topic for another day.  What concerns me here is identity and disease (there is a great book called Human Identity and Bioethics if you’re interested).  My god is the physical process.  I wouldn’t say physics per se because physics is a construct for understanding.  I simply mean that everything as we understand it is an infinitely dissectible set of processes: the unicellular organism driven by physical forces shares work with other organisms forming multicellular organisms that become increasingly more outwardly complex, but still driven by the same basic forces.  We are simple patterns of cause and effect (I don’t actually believe in cause and effect to be honest - blow your mind on this: Backward Causation).  Consciousness, free will, morality, spirituality are all versions of an uninterpretable chaos of physical processes.  I am that zygote in my mom’s uterus (just opened up a shit-can for the pro-lifers).

This means that we could not be anyone or anything other than our diseases.  Whatever the arbitrary classification of disease that my body will eventually degenerate into, that is me.  It is part of the process that is me.  If I were to define myself by the personality that emerges from the chemicals in my brain, I would have to define myself by the disease that shares the same chemicals, cells, and physical causation.  It is the ultimate Catch-22: you couldn’t live without the disease that’ll kill you.