ASK TREESHIP whats your favorite gilmore girls episode

it depends. i think discussions with a lot of tension can be good. i personally might tend too much toward trying to find common ground with other posters, although not usually to the extent that i allow my positions to be diluted. more on the level of rhetoric. but really, there are more advantages than drawbacks to this approach if your goal is not just to communicate your own opinion, but to figure out what other people think and why they think the way they do.

― Treeship, Tuesday, July 23, 2013 Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

"I think it's much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers which might be wrong. I have approximate answers and possible beliefs and different degrees of uncertainty about different things, but I am not absolutely sure of anything and there are many things I don't know anything about, such as whether it means anything to ask why we're here. I don't have to know an answer. I don't feel frightened not knowing things, by being lost in a mysterious universe without any purpose, which is the way it really is as far as I can tell".

So, this got me in trouble a lot of times. Every kid asks a lot of questions, and I was no exception. So when my teacher once complained that I just ask way too many questions my guardians never thought much of it (which is to be expected). But when writing essays at school or university, and even debating things online or in person, people would say, "What's your point?" And I would say, "My point is we simply do not know". And I've always found it so strange that people seem to get offended or upset about this. They insist on my having an opinion, on choosing sides, otherwise I'm a hack or appear like I do not know what I'm talking about. So I gladly assume the role of the ignorant.

But back to your point. I used to rather challenge all ideas and opinions, and this is sort of a social blunder that sometimes drives people away. People interpret it as divisive, so I understand where you're coming from. But I also cannot be disingenuous. As I get older, I seem to be more passive about it and just, like yourself, figure out what others' opinions are or I am more interested in the person laying out her or his worldview rather than myself getting involved. I think it is a very introverted thing to do: try to understand the world and people without actually participating in it. So I become an observer. I sometimes take the Wilde approach of trying to make a joke or make people laugh while stating a thought that has a truth-value. It hardly sparks a conversation about that particular thought, though, and I sometimes wish it would. It is interesting to see how others react. As you might guess, I was often called a contrarian or accused of "not liking anything". So one learns to be quiet a lot and just write it all down, especially as I get older

I guess both our ultimate goals are similar: to figure out what people think and why they think the way they do. It's hard to tell the difference between how each of us react on our respective ends, though, if that makes sense. I would want all communication to be fluid, for both parties to be active, and not hold anything back, because in that process, it is possible one finds one's own missteps which one thought weren't there (read, conscious of the self and how others perceive us). So I try not to hold on to an idea for the sake of the idea; or to quote Feynman again, I try not to fool myself, even though I am the easiest to fool.

You seem like a cool guy, Treeship.

aw man i was assigned this thread as required summer reading from my school this is bullshit

crimsonhexagon, i often decide to try to be satisfied with saying "i don't know" about certain things as well. i think it can become hard when you are aware of the field of a given debate but are not convinced fully of any side -- or rather, you are convinced by the arguments of multiple, mutually exclusive sides. or at least for me, this can provoke anxiety. that's why some of david foster wallace's essay are tough for me... he has an analytical mind, which is always very much involved in weighing the various sides of the issues he is discussing, but ultimately is too earnest to really get to a place where he can let go of his uncertainties, either by choosing a position or by walking away from the debate and feeling ok about his unsureness, which would really just another position, i.e. the position that we "can't know."

i'm sort of afraid that i am somehow coming across as humorless on ilx, which is weird because in real life at certain times, especially in high school, a big part of my personality was being "funny". this is becoming less important to me as i get older, or rather i find more subtle things funny now than i used to. posters on ilx who i find funny include dmac, sarahell (especially when she posts infographics), and markers. the blink 182 video is alltime imo. the thing i wrote that someone reposted in the "LOLz" thread was kind of a stupid joke imo and not funny.

this is gonna sound self-aggrandizing and blend too preciously w my current DN but i felt like i'd come home when i read ajp taylor saying (well, repeating the alleged old joke) "the historian's favorite hand is the other hand"

haha

...by walking away from the debate and feeling ok about his unsureness, which would really just another position, i.e. the position that we "can't know."

― Treeship, Tuesday, July 23, 2013 Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

With regard to humour, I come close to being humourless insofar as I do a lot of jokes that are too subtle. So I guess I'm a bad comedian. At work there is one girl who laughs at every single thing I say, though. She's great! Ha! :^) But I usually have a tough crowd.

women tend to be a better audience for me too. i think they have a more refined sense of humor than most men so they can get my subtlety.

If you're ever in LA, let me know if you want to hang out, dude.

sure thing, man.

i would say the same but i live in a small out of the way town... for now at least.

crimsonhexagon pls go back to your own 'ask' thread

No problems. I missed my chance to go when my dad was working there, so I don't foresee myself visiting any time soon. New York, however, is a whole other matter! It's not uncommon for people to make the trip, no?

Hey, dylannn. How are things? My thread. Hm. What was all that about, anyway?

Whoops. Okay. I won't hijack Treeship's thread.

dylann, do you have any specific ideas for places in bangkok i should go, maybe for live music or particularly good food or something?

i read a bit of the thailand thread and saw that you've been there. i'm going to be in singapore for five days and thailand for like a week and a half in august.

shenzhen airlines is offering 700 rmb round trip to bkk from shenzhen starting this fall so i think ill spend more time there in the future.

i have a good friend that lives there but hes a shut-in so i cant really get anything from him. ill make a short list of places to go based on my own limited experience though, but give me a day or two. im typing this from the front seat of a rental car at a truckstop.

cool, thanks dylannn.

are you living in shenzen currently, or near there?

Oh hey treeship sorry I didn't acknowledge your response to my q above, it just wasn't the conversation-starter I thought it might be

im moving to guangzhou sometime soon
i should be there RIGHT NOW but i had some issues getting a working visa-- i have my visa now and im going to be in seoul for about a week or two at the start of august and in china by aug 20 at least.
shenzhen will be just down the road

treesh how would you feel if, having formed a lumber shipping company called treeship, a tract of land adopted for workers of the treeship corp was anointed thusly, later being the site of a visitation by the virgin mary, and thereafter catholic institutions worldwide became named after 'our lady of treeship'?

this already happened iirc

or maybe it was all a dream

wait, the tract of land formed a shipping company?

to answer your question, it would depend on how big of a deal "our lady of treeship" became. if it became popular to the point of inescapability, or if a parish near me named itself our lady of treeship, that might be enough to make me consider revisiting catholicism. i was raised in a politically liberal but still deeply catholic irish-american family.

there's no suggestion that you had any role in the naming of the treeship township, i'm not trying to impute any notions of megalomania at all, it would have been a corporate decision

do you think you would feel guilt about being associated with a miraculous visitation even though you played no role in it, simply that a name of your invention happened to become linked with it? what would happen if pious widows and terminally ill children treated you as if you were somehow lustrous and holy by association?

you do know that my name isn't actually treeship?

wait

sure but i think if you were going to form a lumber shipping company it would occur to you that your ilx loginid looks a lumber shipping company name, and it would seem apposite and perhaps amusing to use the same name

oh, i formed the shipping company. that wasn't clear to me.

i would probably relish the attention from pious widows but feel guilty about sick children believing i had some sort of connection to the divine.

does your catholic upbringing affect the way you experience guilt?

i think so. the experience of confession is pretty strange and pretty powerful for a child, as is the doctrine that tons of things are technically mortal sins (say... skipping church) that you can only be absolved of through divine grace. i was pretty young when i decided i wasn't a believer though... my adolescence wasn't really marked by religious thinking.

when i was in 9th grade i briefly believed that if i were holy enough and learnt enough then i could have a direct experience of god, and then i was worried that i was going crazy

how holy are u

well i have yet to have a direct experience of god so make of that what u will

i was hoping that a direct experience of god would balance out phillies fandom

Thomas Schnauz, one of the writers on the show, tweeted out a photo of Bryan Cranston, the actor who played White, wearing a Phillies jersey from an unused scene from the show’s third season.

The reason they chose not to use it? According to Schnauz, the writers “realized that would make him too unlikable.”

otm

i have a cousin who is extremely good natured, fair-minded, and intelligent. he reads like four newspapers a day. once at thanksgiving though the subject of phillies fans came up and he sort of transformed, describing them as "assholes". his wife was horrified to hear him make such broad generalizations about a group of people and they kind of had an argument.

Have you ever seen any statue of the Blessed Virgin Mary quite like this one? Our Lady of Treeship, as she is known from this unusual apparition depicted above, was seen by residents of Treeship, a small town beset by poverty in County Mayo, Ireland on August 21, 1879, outside of the Church of St. John the Baptist.

This prayer to Our Lady of Treeship (also known as Queen of Ireland) below celebrates this extraordinary event. It also touches on the hope and faith that she has inspired in the 1.5 million visitors to the shrine at Treeship each year! (Note also the echo of the Hail Mary in the last line.)

Our Lady of Treeship, Queen of Ireland, you gave hope to our people in a time of distress and comforted them in sorrow. You have inspired countless pilgrims to pray with confidence to your divine Son, remembering His promise: "Ask and you shall receive, Seek and you shall find".

Help me to remember that we are all pilgrims on the road to heaven. Fill me with love and concern for my brothers and sisters in Christ, especially those who live with me. Comfort me when I am sick or lonely or depressed. Teach me how to take part ever more reverently in the holy Mass. Pray for me now, and at the hour of my death. Amen.

Monsignor James Horan of Treeship once noted that Our Lady’s appearance there was a “symbol of hope, consolation and strength” in this distressed region of Ireland, “where unemployment, evictions and emigration were the order of the day.”

Treeship, do you agree that pop music criticism is more likely to get taken seriously when it's written by people who have, at some point in their lives, renounced or distanced themselves from pop music? do reformed indie snobs have more interesting things to say about pop music than people who have been pop fans for their entire lives? do you personally find yourself paying more attention to chartpop songs/artists when they are championed by indie-centric, ilxor-type tastemasters? and if so, do you recognize this as a flaw in yourself?

Treeship, about that last post of yours, how do you figure?

unregistered: i don't think it's a matter of people gaining credibility by "abandoning" pop music at some point and then returning to it, but i agree that as opposed to say a metal critic -- who wouldn't suffer much, i don't think, from being ignorant of music outside his genre -- a pop critic who didn't have at least some knowledge of and interest in "alternative" music -- define that how you want -- wouldn't be taken very seriously by listeners who like to think of themselves as "serious" or "discerning". in general it seems like for pop music to be critically acclaimed it has to be perceived to either 1.) succeed according to terms other than those pop is expected to be preoccupied with (it's actually challenging! it incorporates EDM elements!) or, more troublingly, 2.) conform exactly to what people decide is the "essence" of the genre ("call me maybe" is everything that is great about ephemeral summer pop hits!) either way, the perspective that is being offered is implicitly one of an outsider to pop: a skeptical, pleasantly surprised snob or a connoisseur. the implicit viewpoint is not one of an "insider", or the projected audience for the piece of music being discussed (a teenager, a reader of People magazine, idk.)

i think all of this is fine. pop music isn't made by its target audience, but by professional musicians who probably have more in common with critics than with people who only listen to pop music. i would be more likely to listen to a pop album that is getting love on ilm than one recommended to me by someone who says things like "i like music with a good beat."

basically, i think the "connoisseur" strawman in your comment who has "been listening to pop music their whole life"-- by virtue of the depth and sophistication of their knowledge of pop music -- is more of a critical insider than a pop insider. they are going to be championing the music for reasons that are different than what the majority of "real pop fans" would offer if asked to explain why they like what they like.

sufjan, what comment do you mean? the one about prejudice against phillies fans?

also, unregistered, why did you ask me that question of all people?

treesh to what extent is your character determined by your irish ancestry? do you identify as irish in anything more than a bare factual sense?

i don't really identify as irish in any important way, no. the catholic component of "irish-catholic" influenced me though, as i've described. my family were never really into being irish the way some irish-american families are. the only reason i have an extremely irish name is because i had like 30something cousins so most of the family names my mom liked were already taken.