Despertar

this song is going to own me now

1. Will you quit halfway through this?
It's possible. I've abandoned four other surveys in the last half hour.

2. Do you agree with the quote "It takes money to make money"?
I've never heard that quote, but it makes sense. I don't think there's really any such thing as a self-made millionaire. You have to invest something, be it actual money or time (which has a definite fiscal value, just ask any lawyer) or trust or all three, to develop marketable skills, which are necessary to earning money. Unless you're that girl who is auctioning off her virginity to earn money for grad school (successfully! Supposedly the top bid, right now, is something like five million dollars, which I find laughable--men are nuts).

3. Did dinosaurs and humans coexist?
If the paleontological evidence says they did not, I'll accept that they did not. And I don't know why some people are still so dissatisfied with that.

4. Do you think video games are bad for kids?
If by "kids" you mean people born in the early eighties or later, who were reared on video games and are now entering the workforce thoroughly crippled by their dependence on constant visual and manual stimulation, and who have two-second attention spans that literally offend people just a bit older, I would say, yes, they screwed us, releasing a new Nintendo console right when we were learning our way around things. Sometimes I put food in the microwave, set the timer for one minute and literally experience a little explosion of panic, trying to figure out how I'm going to occupy myself till it's time to eat.

5. Religiously speaking, homosexuality is a sin. Does that mean all homosexuals go to Hell?
If you believe in sin, and that homosexuality is one, and that there is a hell, and that sinners go to hell, and you don't believe that accepting Jesus Christ as one's personal savior absolves one from sin, then yes, you probably also believe that all homosexuals go to hell. I mean, that's the internal logic. I don't believe any of those things, so if you're asking me, the homosexuals will be fine.

6. Do you think it's a good idea that some cities have video cameras at every stop and corner of the city?
Probably for city revenue purposes, and maybe even for curbing accident statistics. But I will say, it is a major inconvenience, getting a ticket in the mail every damn week.

7. Is home-schooling a good idea?
I think it's a terrible idea for most kids, and I think it's pretty ballsy to believe state accreditation qualifies you to rob your child of necessary social and emotional experiences most of his peers are getting. I make an exception for parents who have exhausted all their other schooling options and determined that their specific children, for reasons having to do with learning styles or emotional issues, would benefit from being home-schooled. I do not make an exception for parents who decide, before their kids are even born, that they're going to home-school. Research different school districts, research magnet schools. Find a way to at least try to socialize your kid normally. Supplement what he learns at his crappy school with after-school activities and enrichment programs, if you want. There's definitely some truth to the stereotype that home-schooled kids turn out kind of freakish.

8. Is questioning God a sin?
Again, within the internal logic that guides religious doctrine, I'm pretty sure it's a sin to do anything but love God steadfastly and without doubt.

9. "People are afraid of offending other people. It's gotten to the point where their afraid of having a point." Do you agree?
I'm really sorry, even I get tired of making snide remarks about other people's bad grammar, but I seriously read this line three times and couldn't get past the egregious misspelling of the word they're. Who does that, still?

10. How would you punish? If you had kids?
I take it back, what I just said, because evidently this survey was written by someone who doesn't actually speak English.

11. Should kids be allowed to answer controversial questions in high school?
Under the supervision of qualified teachers, yes. High schoolers have a lot to say and are still pretty painfully inarticulate. Encouraging them to talk about their opinions, especially their strong opinions, helps them learn rhetorical skills.

12. Do you think there was some "good" in Hitler?
I don't know. I just finished reading Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of Being (nine thousand years after everyone else, I know, and even though I said I liked it toward the middle, by the end I completely hated it again and couldn't wait for it to be over), and Sabina's narrative raises a lot of questions about how we classify different extremes as positive or negative. If Hitler's charisma enabled him to talk an entire army of people into helping him perpetrate genocide, is incredible charisma good or bad? Mein Kampf goes into compelling, articulate detail about his justifications for wanting to cleanse the world of the cultures ruining it. If Hitler was compelling and articulate, but also evil, can we call those ostensibly positive traits "good"? Blah blah blah. But we don't really care, anyway, or at least I don't. It's like Marcus once said, one of the few things he ever said that actually made sense: "Every good person is capable of bad, and every bad person is capable of good." So it really doesn't matter. Which one you are.

13. Should people be required to dress modestly for church?
I guess it depends on which church. If you belong to a church that idealizes modesty and condemns flashy dressing, why go dressed as a slut? If you belong to a church, you should probably respect that church's code of conduct.

14. Is police brutality "race biased"?
Yes, like most things. It's less deliberate now than it was fifty years ago, in most cases, but Katwoman and Mighty Aphrodite did a really good job of articulating how even our accidental prejudices surface all the time. I don't know why people still retardedly pretend not to acknowledge that the police have those accidental prejudices too, and that they have every reason and ability to act on them.

15. Can virgins have babies?
What do you mean, "can" they? They can be artificially inseminated, yeah. Also, I remember a million sixth-grade horror stories about how, even during dry humping, some semen can creep in, because that's what semen is designed to do, overcome obstacles. (Except for the other kind of semen--I just learned this on TV the other day--whose purpose is to clump together and form blockades to deter the sperm of other men! Grosssss.)

16. Why is it that we use the term "African American" when most blacks in America are not from Africa?
I really don't know what to say about this one except that, by association, pretty much every other term is offensive to someone for some reason. I agree that African American is stupid for that reason, but there are a lot of people who like that it acknowledges a shared heritage and a homeland that was legitimately ours. Except that most of us have a big mix of white and other kinds of blood anyway, so. Whatever.

17. Should they cut funding to the space shuttle funding?
Don't care, don't care, don't care.

18. What do you think of 2012?
Nothing yet. Is that the year the world is supposed to end? Yeah, don't think that's going to happen.

19. Do you think the UN should send investigators to Area-51, just like they were sent to Iraq, and North Korea?
Wouldn't that be awesome? It would tickle my X-Phile heart, definitely, but whatever they found would be anticlimactic after the shapeshifting fantasy that was "Dreamland."

20. Are you afraid others will judge you from reading some of your answers?
Sure. But I wish people would actually say so, either in the comments section or in their own journals, rather than just muttering about it to themselves. I want to learn from you!

21. Why do most religious people assume everything they've been taught is flawless?
I'm pretty sure that's the definition of faith, and faith is necessary to living a truly religious life? If you go picking holes in this or that little thing that makes no sense, pretty soon all your pillars come crashing down.

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This is the best survey I've taken in probably a year, and I'm going to be really, truly disappointed if no one else takes it, too.

The song to which I refer in the title is Fleet Foxes' "Blue Ridge Mountains." After I heard it on Saturday Night Live (which, I know, isn't a legitimate way to find my way to an artist, sorry), I downloaded it immediately and haven't listened to anything else since. Except for a few of their other tracks, which I don't like much.