Fasteriskhead

Ah, this is always an interesting topic. I think you've pretty much nailed the cat thing, D.R., except I would correct you a little bit on one part of it. The infamous "Schrodinger's cat" thought experiment was specifically leveled at the [i]Copenhagen interpretation[/i] of quantum mechanics, and can really only be understood in that context. What makes the Copenhagen interpretation unique in terms of this problem, compared to later theories as to how all this stuff actually works, is that it's [i]non-deterministic[/i]. Determinism basically means that you can accurately predict what something's going to do from a certain starting time to a certain ending time; so, for example, if I throw a ball and I know the initial velocity and all other variables, I can know where that ball's going to be, say, two seconds later. Now, quantum mechanics is more complex because you've got these things called waveforms (I'll let folks look it up), but in certain other interpretations you can still work out all the possibilities for how a system will turn up at the close of the experiment. The Copenhagen interpretation nixes this: it's willing to rack up the [i]statistical results[/i] of a certain experimental setup, but it's [i]unwilling[/i] to say anything at all about objects in a system before the experiment is observed (this is a fairly strict reading of the Heisenberg uncertainty principle). For Bohr and the rest of the Copenhageners, although not for eveyone else, it is incorrect to ascribe [i]any existence or nonexistence at all[/i] to any element in a quantum system before it is measured. Thus the cat problem, which you illustrate nicely when you say, "...neither of the two possibilities open to the radioactive material, and therefore to the cat, has any reality unless it is observed." Obviously this strikes us as silly, which is the intent. But again, this problem only really happens with the Copenhagen interpretation (which you call "the pure version of quantum mechanics" [???]): another theory, e.g. the many worlds interpretation (I'll let folks look it up), would have no problem simply taking up the common sense view that the cat really is either alive or dead, even though we ourselves don't actually learn which way he turned up until we pop the door open. Although, I should note that ALL of these other interpretations have bitten their own kinds of bullets and end up completely weird in their own way. As a final note (I've talked enough about this, I think), it's worth saying that Schrodinger's cat is also part of a much larger problem which physics has been trying to work out for nearly a century. This is the question of how extremely small-scale events, which can only be treated by quantum theory and its various interpretations (i.e. according to probability), can be reconciled with larger-scale events which operate classically under general relativity (which can always be accurately predicted). Or, more simply: the rules which work so well for a particle start to break down and become useless once you get up to, say, a cat. Attempts to bring together QT and classical physics go anywhere from working out reality as having many more dimensions than we usually assume (string theory) to demonstrating that once a quantum system reaches a sufficiently dense point, it no longer really "works" as a quantum system (decoherence). If you end up a theoretical physicist, this stuff seems to be what everyone is getting headaches over. Anyways, though, that stuff is way over my head, so I leave it for someone more qualified to talk about it. Good topic, by the way! And to anyone reading this: no fair complaining that I've dropped too much that you don't know about, as you can probably wikipedia through all of this stuff in ten minutes.

[quote name='animeloyalist91']The thing is NGE was not junk :mad: It was just hard to understand[/quote]By [i]high octane junk[/i] I only meant, colloquially, that Evangelion is [i]totally serious hardcore ****[/i] and should not be tried without appropriate preparations. It'd be like Perfect Sarah Dogooder at Our Lady of Peace Private School suddenly deciding to mainline heroin. Seriously, I know NGE was probably a fairly [i]early[/i] show for most of us in our anime-watching careers (myself included), but trust me, you can get a lot more out of it if you do some research elsewhere first. Get yourself familiar what was going on in TV anime beforehand; set the pins up before you knock 'em down.

I think you're both [I]superficially[/I] right, in that the judgment of someone as sane or insane (or, more properly, mentally ill or not) is never an absolute one and is always to some degree conditioned by social norms and power structures. This is an obvious point that I doubt even most professional psychiatric workers would object to. However, I think you both miss the opportunity to think this through more carefully. Just because "mental illness" is always something relative, and so something always difficult to precisely diagnose, doesn't mean that it isn't real and doesn't matter. It does nothing to help a man suffering from auditory hallucinations when we tell him that no one's to say whether those sounds are "real" or not. It doesn't comfort a family watching their grandmother lose her memory and descend into wild mood swings when we say that they can't rightfully judge what's happening because they can't "experience" it. It doesn't say much to a student who wants to pay attention in class, but can't, when we suggest that "maybe he's just born that way." And it doesn't mean anything at all to a woman who's been bound to her house by fear, terrified of the panic attacks she gets when she leaves, when we tell her that she's just "special." Just try, in a real situation, to say that mental illness only exists as a point of view, and see how many friends you make among those whose disorders, left untreated, would make it difficult or impossible for them to live meaningful or fulfilling lives. Again, I do not disagree with saying that mental illness is always judged relatively, in relation to a specific situation. I [i]do[/i] disagree with the sudden leap which says that since mental illness is situation-dependent, it's something which we have no right to judge [i]at all[/i]. It's an old trick, and still a good one, for avoiding taking responsibility for actually doing anything. But, suppose we actually do want to show some concern for these people. Suppose we actually want to try to do them justice. Well, what do we have to consider? First, there's always some kind of normalization going on in any judgment and treatment of mental illness. The physician, the rest of society, and even the patient herself will always be comparing the patient against, and moving her towards, a (roughly defined) boundary for what's "normal" which may be extremely biased, unfair, and unrealistic. The danger is that this comparison may judge her ill based not on any actual ongoing disruption of her life as she wishes and ought to live it, but only because she has bent the "normal" too far, or because she conforms to some prewritten pathological dossier given support by "hard science." It is impossible to get rid of this danger without throwing out treatment along with it; the only method I can think of for dealing with it is to constantly emphasize that we are dealing with [i]human beings[/i], and as such we are always obligated to [i]pay attention[/i] to them. Paying attention, [i]not[/i] well-reasoned inaction driven by relativism, is the only thing that I see as a defense against misdiagnosis and unwarranted normalization. Second, extreme rigor is needed to make sure that the often very drastic treatment (powerful drugs, etc.) prescribed for mental illness doesn't end up being misused or doing irreversible harm to the patient. I assume everyone knows enough about lobotomies to see the risk here. Third, if mental illness is only described as a pathology when it begins to interfere with the patient's life (and this is usually how psychiatrists will make the call), then it might be asked whether or not that life can be changed in such a way that the "illness" no longer interferes with it. Or, along the same lines, it might sometimes be worth considering whether it's more suitable for [i]society and the normal[/i] to bend and adjust, rather than having the patient be the one to do so. This is just a brief and hastily-written overview, but I think it touches on the essential points. I'll just sum up by saying that judging someone's mental illness is always tied up with the question of how to do someone justice, and what may be doing them injustice (such as society or even their own mind). It's not an easy question and it lacks an absolute answer, but I think it's the first step on the road to actually being able to help others in a responsible (though never guaranteed) way. In contrast, forgive me if I'm not able to believe that this concern is also shown by saying, "What is it that separates 'regular' and 'abnormal'...? As far as I see, it's all just point-of-view."

It can't be said enough that Evangelion was a glitch. [i]No one[/i] could have expected the thing from the folks who brought the world the optimistic and bounce-happy Gunbuster and the self-referentially funny Otaku no Video. Everything I've read says it pretty much blindsided everyone. And as long as I'm on the topic, I should stress very very strongly that NGE is [i]high octane junk[/i], it's the absolute last show that anyone should be watching without having some idea of what they're getting into. I mean this in two ways. First, it really needs at least a basic understanding of '80s and early '90s anime, especially the old mecha classics, to know what exactly NGE is initially working with before it completely tears itself apart. Second, somewhere in the End of Eva theatrical program there's a quote about how "if you already know how to live and interact with others normally, Evangelion won't mean anything," which really needs to be taken to heart. NGE is about broken, grieving, incomplete people; if you watch it as an action/adventure without keeping this in mind, you'll be feeling tickled as hell by the first dozen episodes and completely pissed off and cheated by the closing act and the movies. Evangelion isn't trying to be "clever." Extraneous (but important-seeming!) religious symbolism and psychoanalysis references aside, what it's trying to express is something very simple, that something being understandibly easy to miss if you can't find yourself [i]seeing[/i] yourself in any of the neurotics in the cast. Okay but enough about Evangelion, which (I should stress again) is a glitch. I think the number of "complicated" anime has stayed pretty steady since the late '90s, actually, although there's certainly tons more of now than there was in the '80s and prior. Now, defining what a complicated anime is is a grey area, but you can [I]definitely[/I] say that something's complicated if, by the end of the first episode, you've had a few dozen plot points and latin/german terms dropped on you and you still have no idea what's going on. Complicated shows, at their worst, are blustery and make a big show of how important they are without actually saying anything outside of lukewarm pop philosophy ("What if [i]we're[/i] really the bad guys?" "What if reality is all a [i]big lie[/i]??" "What if I'm actually sexually attracted to my [i]mom[/i]???"). Some shows manage to reel this in, keeping themselves "deep" but still managing to be smart about it. Noein, one of my favorites of last season, is probably the best recent example of this. It manages to throw around all of its quantum mechanical jargon in a way that actually [i]supports[/i] what the show is trying to do, rather than just tickling the fancy of any moron who happens to know what the Copenhagen interpretation is. This is more rare than you'd think, and I wish there were more of it.l

A little bit of fact correction on the Dead Sea Scrolls question, if I can. Now, honestly, no one seems to be completely sure [i]exactly[/i] who it was holed up in Qumran keeping this huge library intact, except that it was a Jewish sect of some kind. Most evidence points to a bunch of Essenes, but more recently the theory that they were actually Sadducees has been gaining ground also (you can google these folks if you're curious). Anyways, it doesn't really matter for the discussion here. What's important is that these folks were [i]Jewish, not Christian[/i]. Yes, there's tons of stuff from the biblical books in the DSS library, but they're all from the [i]Jewish[/i] bible, the Tanakh (for Christians, the Old Testamant). There are no gospels, no epistles, no Revelation. So, while their discovery is extremely important for studies of the Tanakh/OT (they are, I think, the oldest extant copies of some books), it has nothing to do with the question of how Christian texts have or haven't been altered since the first century. With the possible exception of a very tiny fragment which may be from Mark (which, if valid, would effectively prove that Mark was the earliest gospel written), there's nothing Christian in the DSS library at all. As for Constantine changing up the bible to control the populace, it's frankly absurd. Where are you getting this from? It's true that Constantine was the one who convened the Council of Nicaea (they're the ones who came up with that "I believe in one god, the everlasting father..." thing), and I have no doubt that he must have done so for somewhat self-serving purposes and probably twisted a few arms to make sure things went how he wanted. Fair enough, although more than likely the purpose of the thing was just to lock a bunch of outspoken and increasingly violent bishops in a room together until they agreed on something. But the council's question was one of [i]doctrinal[/i] control, of deciding what interpretations should and should not be taught, which is completely different from rewriting the biblical texts themselves. Keep in mind that this was the fourth century: by then all the New Testament books we all know about (as well as any amount of other stuff that could've gone in but didn't) were already written, floating around in wide popular use, and often being interpreted in incredibly weird ways. "Editing" every copy of these things would have been impossible. Now, the church made a lot of headway eliminating alternative branches of Christianity (like Gnosticism, the best-known example), and it tried its best to get rid of some of the most "interesting" texts in use, but even so the results [i]still[/i] end up a mish-mash. Read Mark, follow it up with John, then hit Revelation, and just try to tell me that the whole thing's a masterpiece of uniformity designed to put the masses down. Keep in mind that a really strict biblical canon didn't start to truly form until the 400s, and I don't think the Catholic Church even reached its present bible until the Council of Trent in [i]1546[/i]. By then, obviously, it was out of Constantine's hands. Now, I'm not saying that there were never any attempts to change church doctrine for political whims, but the results were usually a lot messier than what the word "propaganda" implies (this is religion, remember, and people are picky about it). Welp, that's your lesson about church history for the day. There's probably more in the thread I could talk about, but I should probably shut up for now.

When I first started seriously reading and thinking about religion a couple of years ago, I wondered a lot if all the stuff I was studying was really mine to study (since I hadn't been brought up in those traditions or "converted" at all). I don't really worry about this anymore, although of course there's always the danger of doing violence to what I'm reading. For me religion speaks to [i]how the world is[/i], not just in the modern sense of what's factually true but as what the world [i]means[/i]. It speaks to how it is that human beings live in the world. As I study religion more and more, I always get the feeling that I'm increasingly uncovering what it fundamentally means to be human. And if that sounds too abstract, don't be fooled: it's not.

[quote name='Drix D'Zanth']Fasteriskhead, I think your intentions (however verbose) are good. But don?t get retribution wrong. He is right, issues like this are extremely rare (unlike menopause, which you mentioned in your second post as being a rarity? You know, every woman goes through it, right?). And gender confusion like this is far from normal. Most people are heterosexual and most people have no problem aligning with that sexual orientation. A lot of people take to that statement with some hostility. But is being different all that bad? There?s nothing wrong in pointing out someone is of the minority.[/quote]Err, I was kidding on the menopause thing. :D Thanks for the reply! And I should be more precise about what I'm saying, I think. My point, if I can sum up, is that in certain situations scientific definitions of male and female completely contradict the average, everyday sense that we have of those words. These situations are [i]rare[/i], yes, but they [i]still happen[/i], and saying that we shouldn't worry about them is a little bit like saying that we shouldn't bother with relativity because in most situations classical Newtonian physics works just as well. There's a difference between pointing out that someone is an extreme minority and saying, "Oh well, our current definition works pretty good [i]most[/i] of the time, so why change it?" The history of science is the history of paying attention to the exceptions. Now, don't mistake me, the last thing I'm saying here is that genes are a huge lie and that everything is socially constructed (which I've been accused of before; there are people who will actually argue this, though, and usually they're morons). In normal cases, certainly, the old definition of an XX genotype leading to a female phenotype and an XY genotype leading to a male has no problems. But, with my very longwinded other posts, haven't I shown that in very special cases the words "male" and "female," used in whatever biological sense, are stretched so far as to be nonsensical? Biologists sometimes like to make a distinction between gender (male and female in the social sense) and sex (male and female in the genetic sense). All well and good. But I suggest that we would make a huge leap forward in the careful use of language if, in determining and naming a genetic sex, we just totally dropped those words "male" and "female" altogether. They're too loaded, they're prone to abuse, and they're often inexact. What, exactly, does "male" say that isn't said more precisely by 46,XY? Ditto for all other karyotypes. And then you'd be able to talk about these irregular cases (47,XXY and 45,XO etc.) without having to go through the gymnastics of fitting them into an either/or, male-or-female model which, I think, does a completely crappy job of accommodating them. Unless, of course, we've gotten so used to using the words "male" and "female" in the genetic sense that it just seems like too much trouble to get rid of them (especially because of just a few thousand irregularities). There's not much I can say against convenience and force of habit, except that biology [I]has[/I] been able to kick that kind of thing before.

[quote name='Boo][size=1']Where is the point?[/size][/quote]That right there's the one question that we're probably never going to get beyond (or, if we do, it's likely not going to happen in my lifetime). Gun Preacher got to this before me. A resolution to that question of the "point" (or, at least, something that exposes the question as a silly one), now taken in the broadest sense, would be the thing I'd seek from the thread topic. [i]Why this? Why any of this? Why is this silly, terrible, beautiful world here at all? Why is there anything that exists rather than, instead, a totally unrealized nothing?[/i] I don't think this is a question that can be answered, at least in the usual sense of a "why" followed by its cause. This question has be thought about over and over again and worked through at its own pace.

Attempting to save this thread from an undeserved early death. Well, here I go, although there's almost too much to discuss here. HR - I don't really understand what you say about God having a place to move or the part about remembering. It's interesting that you mention [i]agape[/i], though, since Ratzinger/Benedict recently did an encyclical on the subject (which is worth reading, although it's unfortunately thin in many areas). The text usually cited for the term is 1 John 4:8, roughly, "One who does not love ([i]agapon[/i]) does not know God, for God is love ([i]agape[/i])." Now admittedly I am not a Christian, but [i]holy ****[/i] what a thing to say. Even after being used for nearly 2000 years this little statement remains overwhelmingly powerful; it seems to me to poetically name something at the fundament of human life. Now, this is not to say that I actually UNDERSTAND what the hell it's saying in anything more than a completely vague sense, and I can't believe I'm alone in this. The usual thoughtless translation of [i]agape[/i] as "God's love" (as opposed to "romantic love" or "civil love") seems to me just a convenient way of glossing over the fact that no one (or only very few) actually knows what that [i]means[/i]. Certainly this word [i]agape[/i] frequently appears next to discussions of the death of Jesus as a way of transforming humanity into what is "new" (cf especially II Corinthians 5). [i]Agape[/i], then, is clearly bound up with this transformation. But I have no clear sight of how; John and Paul lived in a world just too alien to me for the moment. Christians may have a better chance of understanding of this than me, although I worry a little that they might too easily fall back into thoughtless cliches without the question of [i]agape[/i] leading them to actually learn anything (which is the whole point). Retri/VK/Xeemo - You're all right to bring up the death question. It's an interesting question, because dying is the one thing every single one of us is going to do and yet almost everyone goes through most of their lives without being worried about it. Retri, you say: "...it's extremely hard to imagine what it would be like to just cease existing." That's because death, as this kind of just "stopping," is the one thing out there that no one can [i]ever experience[/i], in imagination or otherwise, because experience of any kind requires that we be alive. Of course, there's the obvious possibility of an afterlife, of reincarnation etc.... but this isn't really death, it's the continuation of life somewhere else (we can conceive of our uprooting, even if we have no idea what cessation would be) and, usually, the continuation of life indefinitely. In that case, thinking about death only means thinking about [i]where[/i] we're going to go after our body craps out, which is a very different kind of question. It's possible that it's the right question too (I'm not going to say that we might not all be immortal), but death as cessation seems to get completely shafted as far as topics for discussion go. Anyways, I don't even know if I have a point here, so let's move on. Xeemo - man, I don't even know where to start here. Well, begin with: "...a lot of people take for granted how amazing it is to be a living creature. I don't know about other people, but I'm in constant amazement of my consciousness, and my perception of reality." I think I understand what you mean, but I would actually flip this around on its head. My being a living being, my being here now [i]in[/i] this situation, my perceptual field collecting everything that I experience - isn't this exactly what [i]can't[/i] be amazing? I can be amazed at particular things, at my body, at the circumstances leading up to my being here, even at my feelings or my actions, but [I]not[/I] at my actual being and experiencing. My "consciousness" (if you want to call it that) is, rather, the [i]place where things gather[/i] in a way that may (or may not) be amazing. I'm not sure how to put this more clearly - anyways, this isn't anything like saying that my brain or my subconscious somehow "causes" something to seem amazing, because that's to completely step outside of the simple naive perception of the world (just try - in a real situation - to think of your joy, sadness, amazement, or whatever as being the way they are because of neurochemical reactions in your nervous system. It's possible to do, but it doesn't remotely keep those things from being joyful, sad, or amazing). Things gather themselves before me in a meaningful way; "perception" is a name for this kind of gathering. Perception is what allows a bringing-together of amazing things - in order for perception to allow such a unifying to happen, it itself has to be literally [i]beyond[/i] amazing. Does that make sense? It'd be like calling the ground we walk on "heavy," when the idea of heaviness itself [i]relies[/i] on having that ground as something pushing up on us. Perception, consciousness etc. can't be amazing because they are what [I]allow[/I] anything amazing to approach us in the first place. The language question... god, I'd never finish if I started on that. I'll just plug Wittgenstein and move on. Okay, I'll quit there, although the "I... [keep] in mind that the world is only as my brain perceives it to be" thing is bugging me for some reason. Hopefully someone else has something to add to this now that I've gone and totally drowned out the topic. :D

Japan seems to have taken up the same point I mistakenly accused Retri of making. Anyways, I won't repeat my previous post against the idea of "accepting" majority derision. I will say, though, that I don't think any of us are so far removed from the March On Washington that words like "justice," "brotherhood," and "freedom" (which MLK repeats to the point of nausea) don't still have some kind of meaning. However (as a side note), in the current political climate I think very few people get beyond mere empty sentimentality or dismissive cynicism to seriously try to understand what those words are saying. Too much political discussion today is just wrestling in the dark. GS - I agree with everything you've said, although I'm a little tempted to speak out for the (very few) decent people who also happen to be card-carrying republicans (I'm subletting from one, for example). I worry a little when you talk about getting "corrected," though: it's fair to talk about being born the way you were as being a "defect," but it's not a defect which is going to be simply "fixed" by reassignment therapy. You're a living being, not a Honda that can get its engine swapped for a new one. Even if science developed to the point where a [I]full[/I] genetic and physical transformation was possible (probably won't happen in our lifetimes), that still wouldn't go back and take away all of the years you spent living as a girl. Probably you're already thinking like this, but just to be clear: I don't think the question should be one of whether or not to get "fixed," but rather whether this treatment is going to give you a more meaningful and better realized life [I]as you are right now[/I]. Or, better: if you take a new direction on the path that you're already on (and have been all your life), do you think this direction will be a brighter one? My friends who've gone through reassignment haven't regretted it, but there are no guarantees and it's certainly not a quick fix. Know what's possible and what isn't before you decide. ;)

Thanks for responding and clarifying me :animesmil. And actually I don't think I misread you very badly, except in thinking that you were placing a division between yourself and everyone else. Thankfully you've withdrawn the major comment I was bristling at ("...people will diagnose you with mental illness/defects/what have you. You really can't blame them for doing so, either..." to "Perhaps the mental illness reference was a slightly off-kilter with what I was trying to say..."), so we are not really at odds here. Well, we are on the biology thing I guess, but we've covered that at length. Just one more thing, though. You say: "It is a human reflex to consider something different [i]painful[/i]." This isn't always true, as you know. I could, for example, be dragged to a restaurant I've never heard of, get served something I've never seen before, and truly enjoy it. Then, of course, there's the people we've all met who are always interested in chasing novelties. The [i]problem[/i] with all this is that whether a difference is a burden or a novelty, it's still not at the point where I can interact with it in a "normal" everyday way. You mention finding gays and the blind "different" - but, what if I was able to perceive them as something totally usual and routine? I don't think the problem is "subduing" a subconscious impulse to be shocked so much (or at least, I'm not sure I'd put it that way) as it's finding a way to expand the everyday of our lives to a point where what was once "abnormal" now barely catches our attention, and so integrates itself seamlessly into the way we live. Of course, we're already doing this every day without really knowing about it. And, if you're up for something more weird, I guess you could also maybe pull off the reverse (everything everyday becomes abnormal); I've heard some controlled substances are very good at this. EDIT: Oh, I was going to respond to the :3 part too! Thank you for putting up with me; it's always nice to have someone good to argue with.

EDIT: you can read the bits in small font if you really want, but the important part is the bottom paragraph. [quote name='Retribution][size=1]However, the way you feel deviates from the norm of human development, and thusly, people [I]will[/I'] diagnose you with mental illness/defects/what have you. You really can't blame them for doing so, either -- if you deviate from the norm seen in billions of other people, one can only assume that there is something different in you causing that deviation.[/size][/quote] [SIZE=1]As bad an idea as it probably is for me to start up in this thread again: Retribution, I have to ask if you really mean what you seem to be saying here (that "you really can't blame them for [diagnosing you with mental illness]"). Are you really saying that a minority within a larger group has no right to "blame" anyone when they are treated as an inferior, or as damaged goods? Does this lack of blaming extend to make it improper to blame anything else (society in general, God, whatever)? What, are these "deviants" supposed to simply accept whatever is done to them? I don't think you mean to say this, but it's exactly the result if you follow your line of thought through. Now, obviously you're trying to talk about commonplace human behavior rather than what should really be happening, and as such you place yourself above the "normal people" who would be judging someone as ill. You [i]yourself[/i] say, correctly, that deviancy doesn't make someone "mentally insane or less of a person." But according to you, this is exactly how everyone else will act. Someone deviant, for normal people, is seen as something less than fully human. Stop me if I seem to be putting words in your mouth. On the one hand, you see in basic human nature the need to dehumanize someone different (and because it's basic I can't "blame" them for doing it), but on the other you see [i]yourself[/i] as being able to know that this person is actually still just that, a person. Now, I don't think this division makes sense. Do you think it isn't [I]possible[/I] for all the rest of these people to know what you know? Of course not. Obviously I think most people here would think it can happen, but just hasn't for various reasons. But: if it [i]can[/i] happen, if people [i]can[/i] change their minds, then why the heck shouldn't we blame them when they don't?[/SIZE] Big words aside, my point is simply that [i]human beings can learn[/i] (and I'm sure you agree with me on this). The past century in America, especially the civil rights movement, is evidence. We can't be so fatalistic about people not accepting things deviating from the norm when that norm itself can so obviously be changed and widened. In the case of transgendered folks, I don't know that that kind of widening ever WILL happen, but I do know that it CAN. Oh, and to GS: I wish you luck in whatever you, your family, and your doctors decide, but you really should think about this very carefully (you probably already are, I know). Reassignment therapy, including hormone treatment, is dicey and difficult even in the best cases. It's not going to completely change who you are, and much of it isn't going to be reversible. You're too smart to go into this completely uninformed, I know, but an extra note of caution never hurts.

Hopefully this is old news. If not, [link removed] and prepare to have your head blown clean off. Back in the heady days of 1981 the guys who would later become the grand old men of Gainax (creators of Evangelion, FLCL, Gunbuster, etc.), Hideaki Anno, Takami Akai, and Hiroyuki Yamaga, got together to make a short movie for the Japan Science Fiction Convention in Osaka (nicknamed Daicon). This movie was Daicon III, which you can view [link removed]. As good as Daicon III is, though, it's still obviously made by amateurs - two years later the proto-Gainax folks made a second run and produced Daicon IV, which I linked back in the first paragraph. Now, Daicon IV is one of my favorite pieces of animation [i]ever[/i]. First, it's unbelievably gorgeous (just check out the swords flying about like multicolored missiles during the piano solo), but even more than that it's pretty much THE expression of what it meant to be a geek back in 1983. The Daicon bunnygirl fights Darth Vader; the Macross shows up with Captain Harlock's ship and the Yamato for arms; Superman and Spiderman share a scene; bunnygirl gets attacked by a xenomorph weilding the Discovery from 2001. This isn't even mentioning the long crowd pan towards the end, where I spotted the robot from Metropolis (the Fritz Lang version), Masked Rider, and Ming the Merciless. Someone really put a lot of heart and a lot of crazed, caffeine-powered geeky enthusiasm into this thing. Read more of the history [url=http://www.cjas.org/~leng/daicon.htm]here[/url], if you're interested. Anyways, if there's justice in the world everyone has probably already seen this by now, but if not then here it is. Enjoy! [SIZE=1][INDENT][COLOR=DarkRed]Fasteriskhead, I removed two of the links in your post because distributing copyrighted material is not permitted at Otakuboards. Linking to sites that do this is also not permitted. To prevent your future posts from being moderated like this, please be sure to read the rules before continuing to post. -Arvi[/COLOR][/INDENT][/SIZE]

I'll try to be relatively brief with this (which can hopefully become a habit). First off I'll second Dagger's Freud rec - in summary, towards the end of his life (starting from Beyond the Pleasure Principle) Sigmund reasoned that the ultimate "goal" of life is to return to lifelessness. For him, this then explained violence, which was the self-destructive urge projected out onto other objects. Now, the death drive in higher organisms usually conflicts with the libido ("life" drive, i.e. urge to expand outwards), but in a VERY complex way, the libido is actually taken as an [i]aspect[/i] of the death drive helping the organism along on the way to death. If I understand him correctly, the urge to continuous growth coincides with the urge to spread oneself out into nothing - which, really, is a kind of immortality. In his later theories of the mind Freud has the death drive primarily taken up by the self-critical Superego, while the libido is held by the expansionist Id - this point is usually misunderstood (the Superego is seen as "good," the Id "evil"), and I only note it to keep myself honest. Ceath - I can't honestly say I fully understand your argument as you've laid it out, but I'm going to try to restate it as fairly as I can for my own benefit (please tell me if I'm misreading you). You think of love as the result of a basic human need for validation, i.e. for a "reason to be." Love, as living for a reason, then becomes a way to immortality by our contributing to something outside of ourselves. However, validation requires us to "submit" ourselves to this outside thing (e.g. our beloved, society, God), leading to the loss of our freedom and individuality - which you think of as control. That paragraph at the bottom suggests that immortality can also be taken as physical proof of existence as well, but I think it's fair to lump this in with immortality as contribution to something else. I have a couple of thoughts. First, you view freedom as contradicted by any restriction that is put on it - classically speaking, freedom as the absence of all other objects (think the last episode of Eva, which I believe you allude to). While this definition has a proud history, especially in the sciences, I disagree with it: this kind of absolute freedom requires the total absence of anything actual, a kind of perpetual indecision, which is [i]never[/i] how I use the word. Briefly, I take freedom as arising from the status of my always being [i]situated[/i] wherever and whenever I may happen to be, essentially free to [i]be myself[/i]. In other words: freedom is my freedom to be what I am. (I'm not sure how I can put this more clearly, but leave it alone for now) Second, when you speak about immortality you do so, I think, in the "chronological" sense, as something that exists for a very long (or infinite) period of time. The obvious problem with this is that it doesn't happen - my beloved dies, the photographs rot away, society collapses when someone finally drops the bomb. Immortality, if it's going to make sense, can't mean existing for an infinite amount of time - it has to mean going [i]outside[/i] of time altogether. "Eternity," in the sense that mathematicians talk about numbers and theologians about God, doesn't mean infinite time, it means [i]no[/i] time, [i]without[/i] time. And, to finally return to the question you posed in your first post, "eternity" happens to be what gets discussed in romance pretty much all the time. In my Saikano article I discussed the "love song" as the moment of depth which returns us to what is most essential. To apply this more generally: this "love song" [i]is itself[/i] eternal, outside time, and so a kind of immortality. Now, talking about an "eternal love" doesn't mean that any relationship's going to "last forever," as anyone who's broken up can tell you. But [i]in the depth of that moment[/i] when my beloved and I are together, it still [i]lasts[/i] in a way that can't be measured on a clock. Does that make sense? And yes, there's also the question of the soul (which Lix brings up, and which is a very good topic), but this is probably enough for now.

Well, to address the question to anime in general rather than one specific show: [i]less mixing of hand-drawn and CG[/i]. ESPECIALLY in mecha shows. Seriously folks, one of the reasons why I love Eureka Seven so much is that they actually go through the trouble of hand-drawing their giant surfing robots - and as a result, they look loads better than the ugly, over-shiny computer generated messes in Gankutsuou or Karas. I'm not saying this because I'm a crotchety old fan who liked how his cartoons looked back in the old days (although I am), I'm saying it because this mix of art styles looks genuinely awful. You've even got terrible visual discrepancies between the 2d and 3d stuff in the well-funded anime feature films (Ghost in the Shell 2, I'm looking at you); the TV shows that try to pull it off just don't have a prayer. At best you get a few fakey-looking scenes that throw you off, at worst you have the 2d and 3d aspects just totally jarring against one another throughout the entire series. I'm open to someone changing my mind about this, and I will officially cry uncle once someone pulls off a 3d itano circus as beautiful as the hand-drawn ones. However, my instinct at the moment says: good god, folks, give the technology a few years to catch up.

[quote name='Retribution][size=1']Fasteriskhead, you can say what you're trying to say in fewer words. It's a horror to slog through your posts and pick thorugh your points. Simplify your words and sentences -- we're not writing term papers here.[/size][/quote] I would, if I thought I could keep my arguments sufficiently nuanced (if I believed this was a simple question I could have dispensed with it in three or four sentences). I admit to the difficulty of my writing, and I apologize for being wordy - part of my reason for being here at all is to try to refine my writing for a public forum. Hopefully you can bear with me a little. [quote name='Retribution][size=1] I think that you're observing the physical aspect of "male sexual characteristics" too much, and that by doing so, you're neglecting the importance of the mental aspect. I believe this would accurately apply to the Klinefelter cases, as they have the same sexual drive as the next guy, but their body is slightly more feminine.[/size'] [/quote] I'm afraid I don't know anything about the psychological states of Klinefelter cases, so I can say nothing specific on this. On the other hand, when exactly did "mental aspects" come in? While [i]I[/i] think they're extremely important, I don't believe you're helping your own case at all by broaching this. While I can't speak to Klinefelter cases directly, obviously there are any number of XY males who [i]mentally[/i] identify as female, and XX females who identify as males. Unless you're going to say that karyotypes are trumped by mental status, I'm not sure why you bring it up. [quote name='Retribution][size=1']You even said that the Klinefelter cases are more masculine than feminine, and if they have a Y chromosome to top it off, what does that make them? Male, of course.... They have male sexual characteristics. They have a female frame, but that's not a sexual characteristic.[/size][/quote] I know of several biologists who would debate you on the frame question. Assuming we are taking XY males as the model, under normal conditions they develop in ways [i]characteristic of their sex[/i], and in ways which often differ sharply from cases with abnormal keryotypes. I admitted that Klinefelter cases are "closer" to the classic male appearance than the female one, but I also said that their exceptions are so extreme that I don't think they can sensibily be rolled into the rest of the males out there. Unless we can somehow pare down the list of "male sexual characteristics" to include every single case, no matter how extreme, that has ever had a Y chromosome (which seems to be what you're doing, at least insofar as you're saying that testes, virility, body hair, and frame don't matter), I don't think we're ever going to get a common agreement on what exactly a Y chromosome produces. And once all of that has been pared down, does it really even mean anything anymore? [quote name='Retribution][size=1]However, most importantly is that the Klinefelter cases [i]have a Y chromosome and therefore are male.[/i'][/size][/quote] Argument by assertion. And the website you linked earlier does not in any way make your assertion, which I think can be fairly states as: "Any human being that that has a Y chromosome is a male; Klinefelter cases have Y chromosomes, therefore they are male" (in other words, a male is defined by the presence or absence of a Y). What's said on that website, on the other hand (if I read fairly), amounts to the claim that males are defined by male sexual characteristics, and that the presence or absence of a Y contributes to those characteristics arising. This is a [i]different argument[/i], and it's the one I tried to debunk in my last post. On the other hand, if you [I]directly[/I] equate "male" and "human being with a y-chromosome" (as you seem to be doing here), then there's nothing I can say to it. I would simply note that this means, [i]by definition[/i], that we will arrive at situations where we may meet people who look completely different from what we would usually call "male," and yet [i]are[/i] male only because they have a Y. And, conversely, we may meet people who look completely male and yet can't be considered as such because they lack a Y, such as the XX-male syndrome cases (Dagger: thanks for the link, by the way!). If you're okay with this situation, then even though I can point out over and over again how artificial it seems, there's really nothing else I can argue against. [quote name='Retribution][size=1']I'm not going to revoke my stance to accomodate extremely rare and obscure cases of chromosome mutation/deformation....I think biology has done and is doing a fair job at determining man and woman. Sure, you can cite your rare cases left and right... but I still stand on my XX, XY opinion.[/size][/quote] Then talking about this any further is nonsense.

I also admit some confusion as to what the question is asking. I read your blog post - it's obvious (and admirable) that you've been thinking about this a lot, but I'm not sure if you've yet begun to clarify what exactly you're asking into here. This is not to say that your question necessarily has an answer, but for right now maybe bringing some light onto what's being asked is enough. What, more exactly, do you mean by love, since this word has lately become totally confused (I talk about this a little in that overlong Saikano article [but then again, everything I've written here is overlong])? What, more exactly, do you mean by immortality, control, and individuality? But before that: [quote name='D. Resurrected]Love it self can not be put into words it can only be expressed. :animesmil[/QUOTE][QUOTE=Renate']...love is not something that can be put into words. 'I love you' simply does not fit this huuuuge feeling you're feeling, it's too simple. Love is reflected in your actions, your thoughts and your eyes. I personally think you shouldn't always be told that your partner loves you, you see it.[/quote] I agree with this to a degree, but I also think it's to give language too little credit. True, we may not be able to confine what love is to a simple collection of words. True, the words themselves are often totally inadequate. But doesn't this [i]itself[/i] give us a clue as to what love is? Along this same line of thinking, I must disagree with both of you regarding the fact that, though you doubt speaking's capacity to say "love," you believe that instead it can be put out through "expression" or "actions, thoughts, and eyes." Aren't these inadequate as well? Think of what happens when, for example, one goes out birthday shopping for one's beloved. Perhaps you can't afford that really nice (let's say) flatscreen moniter they've been wanting for the past month, so you end up buying something else... but even if you COULD buy that moniter, [i]would it be enough?[/i] Isn't there always something else one could do for them that is just beyond one's reach? One may console oneself by saying "it's the thought that counts," but here too one has trouble. Even our [i]thinking[/i] of our beloved is frequently inadequate to our love for them: we don't think of them enough, or do so in the wrong way. The same for our eyes, our glances: they cannot hold on to what our love is. We could just stop here, disheartened, and say that we're always unable to express love in the right way. But I say again: isn't all this talk about inadequacy, the failure of signification, "not ... enough," giving us a [i]clue[/i] as to what love is? In Aeschylus' Prometheus Bound the title character is made to say: "Look at myself chained, a wretched god hated by Zeus, despised by all the gods in the court of Zeus, because of my overwhelming love of mortal humans." Doesn't this one word, "overwhelming," attached to love as it is, tell us precisely what we've been looking for? Love [I]overwhelms[/I]. It constantly refuses to contain itself in our expression of it, it constantly overflows our words and actions so that, as [I]containers[/I] of our love, they are too small, petty, and inadequate. Has language failed us? Not at all: saying that "love is not something that can be put into words" perfectly expresses what love is. Love is overwhelming, it defeats our ability to fully express it, and so (as in Aeschylus) it causes us to be chained, although perhaps not unhappy as such. I have to go to lunch, so I'll see if I can dig into the main topic a little later. Think carefully about all of this!

[QUOTE=Retribution][size=1]For such a roundabout, long-winded post, you missed my line when I said "I prefer the XX, XY definition." [url]http://www.people.virginia.edu/~rjh9u/sexdet.html[/url] Read up on what I meant. I really could care less as far as your genatalia is concerned -- that can physically change. Your chromosomes cannot (at least to my knowledge). Therefore, I prefer that definition. And for the record, my post wasn't meant as a "challenge," only a statement of my views.[/size][/QUOTE] By "challenge" I refer to your saying, "look up the definition of 'male' and 'female.'" I did this at a readily available public source, and then spoke about at probably too great a length. Now, you did add that you preferred the definition based on sex chromosomes, and while my previous post would probably have applied more precisely had I worked with that definition rather than the one at Dictionary.com (my mistake, I took your request too literally), I don't think it defeats my point (which is to point out the rolling-up of very diverse personal/biological states into simplistic definitions which cannot account for them). You said before that you prefer the XX, XY position, which I had already made questionable by way of mentioning the presence of karyotypes with irregular numbers of chromosomes (Turner, Klinefelter, XYY etc.). The website you link quite swiftly sidesteps this difficulty by proposing that the [i]final number[/i] of chromosomes does not matter for the determination of sex, only the presence or absence of a Y. So this definition of sex is simply: "A human being is male if it has a Y chromosome, and female if it does not." It is admittedly difficult for me to think of a good situation to parallel to the sterile male of my last post: it would require us to have a masculine person, a person who could not be mistaken for anything other than male, and yet lacking a Y chromosome. While I think this situation [i]could happen[/i], and in particular I'm thinking of XX-male Syndrome (which is VERY rare), I lack a way to illustrate it in a good manner. I may return to this in a few days if I come up with anything, but for the moment I need to make my argument in a different way. The website you link to says: "It is clear that the presence of a Y chromosome is necessary for male sexual characteristics to develop." The table above happily proves this by listing Turner (XO) cases as female and Klinefelter (XXY) cases as male. After this it's just plug and chug: the males on the list are the ones with Ys, therefore the presence or lack of the Y chromosome designates sexual status. The argument (for right now excluding females, again), is: "A male is a human being with male sexual characteristics. XY and XXY cases have male sexual characteristics, and are therefore male. XX and XO cases do not have male sexual characteristics, and are therefore not male. The difference between these two sets is that the first has a Y chromosome. Therefore, having a Y chromosome causes the development of male sexual characteristics, and thus being a male is determined by the presence of a Y." If I have stated this fairly, then it first begs the question: what in the world do we mean by "male sexual characteristics"? We should have all learned this one in sex ed class: the presence of testes and a penis, comparatively low voices, a large degree of muscle mass, comparatively less body fat, a large skeletal frame, and facial and body hair. Who would argue with this? And yet the [i]problem[/i] is: Klinefelter cases, though they vary widely in terms of how their genes are expressed, frequently have characteristics strongly differing from the "male norm." Everything in the argument above depends on our being able to say that Klinefelter cases have male sexual characteristics. But I don't think this is true, at least not without considerable qualification. I'm going by memory here, so someone correct me if I'm in error: Klinefelter cases are [i]always[/i] sterile, they have underdeveloped testes, and they often have little to no facial or body hair. Their bodies often are unusually shaped for "males," with more of a classic feminine "hourglass" figure and heightened breast development (I will not touch on other symptoms, such as learning disorders, as while these are important they do not directly impact my argument). While admittedly falling closer to a "masculine" appearance than a "feminine" one, taking in all of this it strikes me as totally irresponsible to say without qualification that the sexual characteristics of Klinefelter cases are the same as those of XY males. If they are not the same (and I think they aren't) then the argument fails, at least in its form as stated above. I hope this has addressed your own definition more carefully than my previous post, and I apologize for the confusion. P.S. I forgot to address this: you say, "Your chromosomes cannot [change]." Actually, research is being done in precisely this area. Gene therapy in its current form (which is still in its infancy) plans to just target genetic diseases and that kind of thing for right now , but I see no reason why I couldn't one day be able to use an engineered retrovirus to switch a Y to an X or vice versa. I fully admit to being quite ignorant about all of this, especially the technics of it, but the possibility for a genetic "sex change" seems to be there.

Okay, challenge accepted; for the moment I'll stick to just males, but I'll assume much the same results will hold for females. Dictionary.com offers the following definition of "male (n)": "1. A member of the sex that begets young by fertilizing ova. 2. A man or boy." (I should note that am omitting the botanical definition) (I'll get to the first definition in a minute, but I'll note before that that Dictionary.com goes on to define a "man (n)" first as "an adult male human" and a "boy (n)" first as "a male child." So being male means that I am a man or, if I am young, a boy, which means I am a male. Does any of this circularity seem remotely suspicious?) If we follow this biological textbook definition of what a male is (the class of human being that fertilizes ova), then we run into an immense problem when we consider that everywhere in the world we meet human beings whom we would, in any perfectly normal conversation, think of as anything other than "male," and yet who have never in their lives fertilized an ovum or, perhaps, may even lack the capacity to. I myself have never done this, and yet no one would ever call me non-male. But perhaps this example is too easily defeated, as even if I haven't ever fertilized an ovum, I (hopefully!) still could [i]one day[/i]. But consider someone who is (for one reason or another) simply sterile, who could [i]never[/i] fertilize any ovum anywhere, and yet still maintains every outward appearance of "masculinity." By Dictionary.com's definition we [i]could not[/i] call this person a male, even if every notion of common sense says that we should. Would it make the slightest sense for a person like this to, for example, go and use his office's men's room every day, but then be barred from it once someone finds out that he can't fertilize ova? Not at all. But if we were to say that he [i]should[/i] still be able to use the men's room, then what [i]criteria[/i] for it would we then be applying to him? Allow me to digress a little (well, more than I have been already). As children, do any of us learn what men are by being told about gametes and fertilization? I doubt it. More likely, we will have someone willing to teach us point to a certain human being and tell us, "[i]that's[/i] a man," and then point to another human being and say, "that's [i]not[/i] a man, that's a woman." If we're clever enough, we'll soon pick up the patterns. It's likely only later that we might begin to augment what we know about males by saying that they're "the sex that begets young by fertilizing ova," but that in turn leads to the kinds of absurdities I just outlined above. Ditto for any number of other definitions with counterexamples. In the end we might just end up justifying our judgments of maleness by simply saying, "Either that person (pointing) is a male, or I'm completely crazy." This is not right or wrong - but it [i]is[/i] just bare assertion. You note that I only point out "the extreme exceptions to the rule." This is fair enough, except that these exceptions [i]happen every day[/i] and, unless I have severely misread something, [i]cannot[/i] be accounted for while keeping the "rule" and common sense in any kind of harmony. There is a difference between a definition (as a statement of what something HAS TO BE) and a rule of thumb with a statistically high degree of applicability, and we make a grave error when we take the latter for the former; just the same when we assume that those marginal exceptions, those little glitches which keep popping up, can be thrown out because they don't jibe with the rest of the data. Rather than simply saying "well, this rule works [i]most[/i] of the time" and stopping there, shouldn't these "extreme exceptions" be exactly what deserves a hard look? I recall reading a study from a few years back (I'm too lazy to look it up) stating that [i]one in 100[/i] children are born with some deviation, however slight, from "normal" male and female anatomies. Have you met 100 people in your life? Then the odds are good that you've met someone born sexually abnormal. I don't even have any stats on sterility, but they've got to be even more common. And yet we still have the cojones to write stuff like "a male is a member of the sex that begets young by fertilizing ova" in our dictionaries? At what point do the exceptions finally get significant enough to warrant a looking-at?

[quote name='White][color=#555555][FONT=Tahoma] Anyways, let me put this to you simply. If you can produce ova or bear young, than you are female. If you have organs that produce spermatozoa for fertilizing ova, than you are male.[/FONT'][/COLOR][/quote] ...Oh. Well, that was easy. Thanks to biology, the mystery has been solved! W-well, I guess except for those males who've undergone a vasectomy or (yeee) been castrated, or those females who've had something similar happen (or who've gone through that rarity of rarities, menopause), or anyone with applicable birth abnormalities. I guess they maybe don't count as either sex, since their junk don't work. Wait, wait! M-maybe genetic definitions will work! See, XY is always male, and XX is always female, and it's just always kept that simple. E-except maybe for like those people with Klinefelter Syndrome, Turner Syndrome, or other abnormal chromosomal sets. T-they don't really get to be a sex either, maybe. But that can't be right, can it? Man, this is giving me a headache! Wait, give me ten more minutes and I'll have surely figured out how to reduce the male-female distinction to biological determinism. It's gotta be something simple! Bust size, maybe? Neural configuration? I've just g-gotta be missing something! (etc.)

I'm not sure if the thread is limited just to the question of how God (taken as a "creator") relates to causality, but in any case there's been a lively debate on this question going on for the past, oh, two-two and a half millenia or so. If you're up for some reading, [url=http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/cosmological-argument/]click here[/url] for a fairly in-depth summary of how various folks have written for or against the existence of a "first cause" generally named God, writings which have now been mostly grouped together around something called the "cosmological argument." Have fun! (is anyone even reading me at all when I post this kind of crap?)

[quote name='Sara][color=#b0000b][size=1]Japan [i]didn't[/i] say "You'll grow out being transgendered."[/color'][/size][/quote] I never accused her of such, nor did ever I interpret her in that way. Reread my first post, right after the part where you cut me off in your quote; I do not at all mean "normal" in the sense that you seem to think I do (and which I would then be accosting Japan with), and I explicitly say that I am using the word in a somewhat odd way. What I protest here isn't the marginalization of TG/TS and other forms of "abnormality," although certainly I would be the first to say that outside of these boards most of the human world would at best find it totally unacceptable, and would at worst force a correction. For the moment, though, I actually protest the marginalization of [i]confusion[/i]. I don't think I'm saying anything that is really unusual here (although I admit I'm straying from the topic a little). I'm not saying that we should take confusion as something good, or even something to be unashamed of (there will never be a Confusion Pride parade) - however, we ought to at least take it [i]seriously[/i]. Taking the issue in only the sense of sexuality: is it at all strange for me to say, at any given moment, that I'm never quite sure why it is that I'm attracted to the beings that I am (i.e. what "quality" about them attracts me), or that I occasionally have a flash of interest in something that I "normally" wouldn't consider as in my range? Not at all, this has happened to many of us (enough so that I shouldn't need to provide examples). You say: "Eventually, someone will make up a label that describes you perfectly." This will be wonderful, unless 20 minutes later I find myself attracted to something outside of that label's bounds, in which case I would have to throw my hands up and start over. This kind of thing isn't common, perhaps, but it's enough that it should prompt us to seriously begin to reconsider how we think about sexuality. Currently we see sexual attraction to another being as "arising" out of a fundamental state of preference, e.g. male heterosexuality or whatever. Even more recent developments, e.g. the very popular "everyone is a little bit bi," has in mind this kind of stable sexual ground: even though it may be a mixed bag, the important thing is that it is fixed in our natures and just waiting to be found out by us, possibly by way of an online test or something. I don't think it works this way; it just sounds [i]wrong[/i]. I'm not at all saying that the traditional demarcations of homosexuality etc. don't have any value (at the very least you can make a statistical judgment), but as Hegel was one of the first to note, by drawing a boundary you've already gone beyond it. Rather than my sexual orientation determining the manner of my sexual attraction, it's possible that the [i]reverse[/i] is closer to the truth. I will of course be accused of saying that sexuality is then completely arbitrary and totally relative: "But if orientation doesn't create sexuality, then what does? If orientation, even a very complex form with lots of percentages and statistics, is mostly conventional, then why am I ever attracted to anything at all?" The answer that can be pulled out of the air is "nothing," and everyone will then conclude that I'm a nihilist or saying that everything's socially determined or some other nonsense. Probably this is impossible to avoid. But the question remains: why are we sexual at all? Could it perhaps be something as simple and trite as [i]the beauty of another being?[/i] Indeed, in our carefully marking off categories for attraction (male, female, blonde, brunette, asian, black, butch, femme, etc.) and figuring out where we fall into, might we have totally forgotten that [i]other beings[/i] are what is attractive? Or (to put it another way) that it is the experience of others which throws us into a state of sexuality? And if it's the beauty of others that leads us to sexuality, then how can we so easily nail down our sexual status? I'm worried that I'm not being as clear on this as I'd like to be, but I'm not sure what else to say. In particular the word "sexuality" is falling dead as I write it. As a coincedence, I'm actually currently working an article touching on these kinds of questions, and hopefully I'll better understand what I'm talking about by the time I finish it. (and sorry, I never got into the gender identity question) [quote name='Sara][color=#b0000b][size=1]There's nothing magical that will make you figure out who you are and who you are meant to be. It's something you learn--by living your life, and being yourself.[/color'][/size][/quote] In this I think we are in agreement, although that's not to say that the point (that we learn about ourselves by living with ourselves) is completely clear. For surely we learn nothing about ourselves by just going through the motions day after day - we've all known people who do this and who don't have the first idea of who they are. So we must think about ourselves, study ourselves - "know thyself" as the Socratic command goes. But how do we go about learning about ourselves? Do we simply pay attention for awhile, and then after we've catalogued ourselves enough we can say that we "know who we are"? I somehow doubt this is how it usually works. Do we really achieve some kind of full, closed system of who we are? Or is life something more like [i]leprosy[/i], and so "knowing thyself" would be the constant checking and rechecking our extremities for anything changed? (I admit this is a horrible analogy, but hopefully it is at least vivid) Is "knowing who we are" something that we suddenly arrive at after we've gathered enough data, or is it something we must keep doing day after day? I believe I've talked for long enough here, and while barely even touching on the main topic to boot. I will keep thinking on this; there's more to it than what I've been able to get out.

[QUOTE=EevilJ] 03/24 [b][url=http://www.top2.jp/]Top o Nerae2! Vol.5[/url][/b] / GAINAX[/QUOTE] God yes, now we're talking. Diebuster episode 4 was probably pound for pound the most stunning set of 30 minutes I've seen in an anime for a good year or two. Plus it gave us the quote that should rightly be sitting in the sigs of every message board denizen who's ever even [i]heard[/i] of anime: "A true nonogiri has a buster machine in her heart!" I don't know if episode 5 can even begin to improve on something like that, but I'm eager for them to try. I'm also waiting for the new [URL=http://www.gokigenyou.com/index.htm]Marimite OVA[/URL] to hit, although they haven't set a date yet. I've been salivating for more Marimite since I watched the end of spring a few months ago. (also: gratuitous [url=http://www.youtube.com/watch?search=maria+rap&v=_NTFgkAsVaU]Maria Rap link[/url], gratuitous [url=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=772OJd0ieG8]Avemarian link[/url]) As for the rest of this, ehhh, given that I'm too lazy to do research I'll probably just grab every episode 1 I can find and keep watching the ones that strike my fancy. I expect the rest of you bunch to keep me informed if I miss any good ones, though.

[quote name='Aaryanna][COLOR=DarkSlateBlue']Ah, that makes more sense. ^_^ You were talking more about the exploring spirit vs only going there to make it serve us in some fashion, right? ^_^ [/COLOR][/quote] This is fair, yes ("spirit" in particular is a good word), but only taken in a very particular sense of what the word "exploration" means (and yes, here I go again). We usually take exploring to mean "going to the farthest corners" of the world or the universe, or "mapping things out" by carefully placing things on a grid so that they can be properly utilized in the future. This kind of exploring constantly challenges everything, looks under every nook and cranny in order to precisely determine and make use of everything that's there. Exploring in this fashion is fundamentally something technological (see my first post), and isn't what I'm getting at. There's another kind of exploring, though, and we still think it sometimes when we talk, for example, about children exploring their own back yards. What could be more familiar than a back yard? And yet the act (or, better: the state) of exploring immediately makes it mysterious and wonderous. We may spot, all of a sudden, a line of ants going up a tree, or a spider web refracting the sunlight in just such a way. These are [i]discoveries[/i]. And yet we do not appropriate these things to our use, nor do we stand in some kind of aesthetic awe of them (as some of the more vapid "nature lovers" would have you believe). In reality, we are more likely to just find those ants [i]cool[/i]. The fundamental feeling here isn't one of desire or will to use or "appreciation," but rather: the surprise and delight that these ants, in all their uniqueness, have been [i]living with us[/i] mere feet away from our home this whole time. The delight of discovery is the joy in having what was always there suddenly be shown to us (dis-covered). This kind of exploring, exploring what has been most close to us for all of our lives, goes hand in hand with what is usually termed "living a good life." The question for me, then, is whether it may one day be possible to divert the extraordinary power and rigor of technology (which again, is itself no particular tool or kind of technology) to this manner of exploration, which is currently only vague and half-forgotten. My etymological dictionary suggests that "explore" may relate back to the Latin [i]ex-[/i], "outwards," [i]pluere[/i], "to flow." This would mean that exploring might be properly thought of as the everyday flowing out of discovery, in the places that are most familiar to us (the places that we live in every day). If space is to be where we will live one day, our "back yard," it may be easy to simply totally forget about "exploring" it (in my sense) in favor of simply spreading out everywhere in search of the useful. And yet this kind of "back yard," that which is already totally familiar, is precisely what's most worth exploring.

[QUOTE=Ryli][COLOR=DarkRed]Now, I will assume that you are in the adolesent [sic] stage in life. That stage is the stage where people such as yourself are confused, or somewhat unsure of their sexual orientation...usually. ... Just give it time. I'm pretty sure what you are experiencing is just normal behavior[/COLOR].[/QUOTE] Forgive me if I sound too harsh here. Ryli, if I read you fairly, are you seriously suggesting that GS here should just "grow out of it"? Then you have just made this entire situation trivial. You need not even offer any solution, because you take the issue to not even be a problem. Transsexuality and all the rest is taken as just part of the "confusion" that "everyone goes through" in the process of growing up, which eventually just solves itself as the person in question simply becomes "normal." (by what's "normal" I do not necessarily mean heterosexuality and traditional gender roles, but instead the wider sense of the resolution of ALL this confusion as the person takes up a single well-defined sexuality - in other words, they and everyone else comes to know what they are and what category they fall into, gay or straight, top or bottom) Saying "just give it time" completely does away with the problem; we're not even obligated to take it seriously anymore, we're only expected to [i]wait[/i]. It amounts to pretty much the same as when John Cleese asks Mike Palin about his dead bird, and Palin replies, "He's not dead, he's resting!" I don't presume to speak for GoldScorpion on this, but what help is it to tell me that the problem I am having [i]now[/i], the confusion I am feeling [i]now[/i], will "probably" go away soon? That does nothing to tell me what the problem means, and what the problem says about me. And, moreover, what if it [i]doesn't[/i] go away? What if I can [i]never[/i] begin to unambiguously refer to myself as male or female, straight, gay, or bi, tomboy or queen (etc.)? Even if I am able to "grow out of it," which I fairly admit the possibility of, it seems a wiser course to confront the problem on its own terms rather than just wait for it to go away. To GoldScorpion: somewhat hypocritically, I'm afraid I don't have much advice to give you either. Certainly I don't have any easy answers, at least. In any case, there's plenty of literature out there on the internet and elsewhere on transgender phenomena (although as always, some of it is better than others), and plenty of people who have gone through their own sexual "confusion" have been willing to share their stories. The only suggestion I have, then, which certainly isn't a useful one, is studying hard and thinking even harder. Find ways to describe how you live and think and feel in particular situations without resorting to obvious definitions (think poetically). Avoid, if at all possible, the temptation to jump to an easy conclusion (even if it offers the comfort of a simple, easily-defined term for you to use when people ask). Coming to grips with who you are should not at all be limited to deciding which label comes closest, thus instantly killing off all the confusion - fundamentally it is never as easy as that.