Here are some thoughts about dating.
- First of all, what is dating? It's a sloppy term applied equally to people who enjoy each others company and do activities together as well as to exclusive couples who are practically engaged. The term "friending" or "courting" has been suggested for that phase of dating prior to exclusivity. Sort of like a civil union for dating.
- "People take dating too seriously [comma 'these days' is sometimes added]." Maybe some who say this mean it only because of the uncertainty over the definition of dating, but this is not necessarily so. A boy is afraid to call a girl or spend too much time with her because maybe he will "give the girl the wrong idea" and vice versa. While people try to be careful not to be too serious too soon, sometimes it's unclear what is to be taken seriously, which brings me to my next point . . .
- A boy or girl looks for signals. But signs of affection like kissing have widely been co-opted as forms of entertainment. This can easily confuse a person: A girl expects to be kissed by a boy to show her his feelings. She might just as rationally disregard a kiss from him as meaningless, because she's kissed more than one person she didn't care at all about at the time. Is paying for a meal supposed to be a signal? People expect signals to tell them how "serious" it is, since they are taking dating very seriously.
- There is significant pressure to determine whether it's serious with someone. After all your time is valuable, and your youth is disappearing, and people won't like you when you have wrinkles. Let's say you've decided it's serious. Now you can allocate more time to this person. But by deciding it's serious you've practically committed to this person, since you take dating seriously. But you're not sure if you really want to commit to this person because you haven't spent that much time with them . . .
- Okay, so far what I've said is of little interest to the people in or approaching the exclusive dating relationships. Let's say you happen to survive the all the danger and uncertainty of the beginning and you want to be exclusive. You need an exit strategy. There's no sense in getting into a relationship, finding out it doesn't work, and then being bogged down in it until you can find a way out. The specifics of your exit strategy depend largely on your situation. Whether it's a mutally agreed upon contract like a prenup or a personal limit like cashing in your chips at the casino.
- Marriage statistics for the U.S. are depressing. I propose that a poor dating system is a significant factor in causing this.
Mohammed my friend
it's time to tell the world
we both know it was a girl
back in Bethlehem
When an astronomy class goes out to set up telescopes to do observations for the lab, a homogeneous mixture of people condenses into discrete lab groups. The lab groups aren't assigned, so this is sort of a natural, somewhat stochastic process. This is what one of the instructors calls the collapse of the wavefunction. So for people who don't have background in physics, the concept here is taken from quantum mechanics. In quantum, you can't say what the outcome of an event will be, you can only assign probabilities to the possible outcomes of an event. So if you want to measure the energy of a particle, you can't say anything for sure about the energy state of the particle until after you've made the measurement. Then you know it is in energy state N. You collapsed the wavefunction by the making the measurement. Before you made the measurement you can't say what energy state it was in. So when the lab group goes out to set up the telescopes and they condense into groups, it's like taking a measurement. You trapped the random fluctuations of the social interactions of the people in the moment that they went to set up the telescopes in the field. This is an irreversible process. You can't really make the condensed groups go back into their truly random state. Hence the term "collapse".
Okay, so what does this have to do with Christmas? Well, I think anyone reading this has a clue as to what Christianity is about. God the creator who's outside of time became incarnated in time in order to become the perfect sacrifice. Humans experience only outcomes of events, we don't experience the full range of possibilities each with its own probability. We basically collapse wavefunctions everywhere we go. The event of salvation is a collapsed wavefunction that we memorialize by the day of Christmas in the calendar. Try to follow this logic:
1) Could it have been a girl back in Bethlehem?
2) Physics theory focuses on predicting the wavefunction itself, but humans only experience collapsed wavefunctions which have effectively lost all the information that the full wavefunction once contained. Maybe this says something about the importance of absolute truths versus many possible truths.
3) The fact that the salvation event occurred through a man instead of a woman is significant, and points to an absolute truth.
You probably know by now that there's finally new Fiona Apple. Unfortunately, it seems like this album might end up being too little too late. We'll see. When the Pawn . . . calls for a major follow-up effort, and Extraordinary Machine had so many entanglements with its creation that it may be hard for it to fulfill its potential.
Anyway, it got me thinking about my penchant for chick music (once discussed on Andy Morrisson's site, but I don't have the link presently). There's something about female songwriters that makes them stand out from their peers. Or to be fair, maybe its something about music, rock, or musicians as a whole that's makes an average female artist seem extreme in some way. In any case, there seem to be fewer of these women emerging anywhere near the main stream (where I can find out about them) in recent years. In the last decade we had Tori and Ani, Fiona, Bjork, Aimee, and even Poe, but while these people are still around they're getting old (not saying they're getting stale). Where are the new artists now? The only person I can think of who comes close is Kathleen Edwards, and maybe you could make a case for Alicia Keys. But what about the songwriters that defy genre (the opposite of Ms. Keys)? I guess all these thoughts were running in the background, escaping articulation, but they were suddenly brought to the surface when I noticed myself unconsciously associating some of these good qualities with Avril Lavigne. Avril! I think I pretend that she apologized for "Complicated" and "Sk8er Boi" and maybe the rest of that album which I've never listened to, and that I forgave her, and that she draws from some uniqueness for her songs. Maybe I've lost my edge.