Just on a whim, because I think it would be scandalous and rude, how can I buy some Hamas merch?  I want some of those green hats. 

Motherfucker.

And I found this while searching for Hamas links in China!

There are certain places, things, ideas, dreams, and values which only apply to specific places and times in the world.  If it's understood that we're all temporal and have limited computing power, it's understandable.  The limitations on things that make them specific to time and place can vary broadly, and they can make things part of extremely different experiences.  One of the things specific to certain times and places is flourescent lights.  They're a product of efficiency.  People use words like "harsh" and "glare" to describe them.  They're in places cheap, cold, massive.  To find them in homes, where the comfort of incandescence and ambience is expected, is almost heartbreaking.  And they're primitive.  Technology and science, long predating the clank, roar, and stink of industrial adjustment, have begun realigning themselves with the tender intimacy of their progenitors.  And given the extremely irrational and variable circumstances under which things limited in purpose and time become intimate to us, it could easily be imagined that flourescent light, under the right perception, become a strong emotional memory tag in certain people's.. well, I hate to say it, but the word is "encoding". 

And the same could be said of gas stations, worldviews, lenses, science fiction, lanitate vocabulary; the language of surveys and science; and hesitant framing.  Symbolism, luckily, is one of the things that is universal, so the experience is universal and explaining it requires little effort.  But it's clumsy.  It's laughable to try to speak in symbolism if the goal is to connect, because symbolism is a self-contained system, with only limited types functional as connections between individuals.  Symbolism is by and large a system for talking to yourself.  And becoming fluent in this language, discovering and communicating with others who share bits and pieces of your symbolism (often because similar circumstances produce convergent evolution) takes unspeakable effort, and that's assuming barriers erected to protect the delicate survival of these languages and the systems producing them can be overcome.  It's almost impossible. 

And minding these things has made me realize that what I've come to regard as my own symbolism, which I've discovered is stronger and more self-aware and more militantly self-protective than most, is more and more disconnected with a changing world where others with vastly different triggers and less conservative personal languages are altering the source of the symbols that built my personality.  I'm left with a choice between tearing down and consciously reaffixing personality traits to new temporal things so I can speak to others and guarding what's been built as my own personal heritage, justifying its existence on the past alone, for its own sake.  The latter challenges what's been my primary justification for my own existence, for the hurt imposed in the past, for not giving up and letting doubts rule; that justification is that I do what I do every day for the eventual good of others.  Someday, I tell myself, I'll repay the damage I've done to the world by living in it.  It's a careful utilitarian tweezer that plucks the good from the disaster that's brought on by my own limitations every day.  My symbolism, my personal language, is beautiful and worthy of existence and will make the world a better place, or so I believe.  To sacrifice it to necessity is tragic, possibly unforgivable, because it ruins the potential I have to repay everyone for what I do when I live.  That personal language is visual, experiential, sensual.  Everything has uncountable layers of meaning, I've never been able to map it.  The vocabulary is systems, because I'm a logical learner and a very logical thinker.  It's beautiful.  In that sentence there's not just arrogance, there's shame and awareness of intrinsic value in the face of shame, and most of all understanding and acceptance of inadequacy and the decision to do something about it, to continue in spite of inadequacy and to attempt to improve it.  It's tentative, and I accept that it's disprovable.  In everything that's said and thought there's this essential understanding that my language, my talent, my time, my power, is never enough to do what's needed, and awareness that with inadequacy comes the contrasting understanding that it's necessary to do something, to somehow make it enough, and so definitions of what's necessary and what's possible will always have to be adjusted.  I try not to write like this very often because metaphor and silence and quiet effort are usually more effective than trying to explain away a deficiency (for example).  Yet in the case of something so universal as inadequacy, I'm left no other option but the other universality of particularity and honesty (so later, I can remember). 

The decay of the temporal world that created me means that I, and I expect nobody else, can ever cling to anything for long.  Things are created and destroyed, and this isn't new.  But with each bit of the world that's destroyed, pieces of things are lost, and each bit that's destroyed forces a decision among those affected by that bit whether to make the emotional adjustments necessary to preserve the affectation or to abandon the affectation and let what it symbolized exist in its own pure state for a time while it finds something new to attach itself to.  And this, while it's a necessary process, is what turns teenagers into adults, is what makes old people dress in drab colors, is what drives ostentation from making a particular individual statement to the ever-widening scope and ever-smaller number of generalities like Ralph Lauren, owning a car, worshipping an organized religion, and giving up playing guitar and learning Swahili, settling down, and living a "quiet" life.  It makes it impossible to tell a story, or to create a story.  It reduces people symbolism and personal understandings of the world to cliches.  So, I guess, what I'm trying to say, in my ugly (to those who can't experience it fully) system-vocabulary, is that I hope I'm strong enough to never give up the signs, the symbolism, until I'm strong enough to find new ones.  I never want to stop searching for them, and it looks like I'll never be able to if I want to stay relevant to anyone.  I'm afraid, and I'm vulnerable, and I cling to the things that represent those, and I'll have to let them go, and I'll have to replace them with more benign and less powerful representations if I want to save my ability to tell a story to myself.  And I'll have to learn new ways to symbolize things. 

It's time for a shower (which means I'm done, and also is abrupt and meta-aware and ironic (a regrettably receding style of expression that needs a certain level of arrogance to sustain itself, which I suppose was how it was before it became fashionable, which makes it in the long term is a good trait to retain, I guess)).

So I'll have to visit Hong Kong next week.  It'll be cheap if I take the hard seat, and apparently requirements aren't stringent.  Now I just need to corroborate, find a travel agency that can do the visa, and cowboy up enough to get down there.  I don't know why I didn't do this before.