This guy speaking into the camera reminds me of the Life Aquatic, when Steve Zissou addresses the camera...

1. A bundle of Osama Bin Laden urinal targets
2. A defective billy club
3. A handful of Disney-flavored condoms
4. A Madonna pap smear
5. A 1982 head band

Humans have a short-term memory—that's a given. Society does as well. The current era is the gold standard by which we evaluate ourselves. The morals and norms of today seem to be it. Yet creeping beneath all current standards is an alternative set of rules. While every human attempts to come in sync with their current society, every human also has their own peculiar fascinations to hold onto regardless of popular opinion.

The mannerisms of an expression made for individuality have a common signature: a straightening of the posture, a placing of the palm on the chest, a raising of the eyebrows, a flaring of the nostrils. She says, "I love—love—Britain at the turn of the nineteenth century." This is not followed by any qualifications and any respect to whether the other person can relate. All that's communicated is "me likey this." For her, having crumpets and tea, and being dainty, are the central tenets at stake. In other words, if she were alive during that era, she would have willfully ignored the hypocrisies, excess prudishness, and class strife that marked the Victorian Era, simply because, dammit, "she likey this."

"But I love my SUV." "But I love to smoke at bars." "But I love to crack racist jokes every now and then."

"Me likey this."

Personally, I think it's unwise to wear a swastika armband, but apparently there are those of the black-boot sensibility that think it's okay, because hey, "it looks cool." Isn't the symbol, though, making a statement that Hitler was right about the Jews? "People who wear swastikas don't do it because they hate Jews."

Unfortunately, this darkly-clad death metal fan is right. Plenty of consumers of Nazi memorabilia aren't Hitler-sympathizers or Anti-Semites. They just love the symbol. The symbol, along with the implied aesthetics of pure cruelty, of a militant consciousness, of a steel-toed boot submission to authority, all is packaged in a tame BDSM chic.

Which is fine because there is currently no malevolent iskra (the Russian word for spark.) But the iskra requires the gun powder, and that gun powder is every human's passion for a particular costume. If enough people wear the uniform, the uniform becomes legitimate, allowing it to spread to the other eighty percent of the masses, the ciphers who feel neutral about the current costume party.

There are two strategies for dealing with culture snobs. One can try to refine their tastes through exposure to sophistication. Or one can cultivate a willful philistinism, like the Sloanes of Britain have done since the 1970s.

It wasn't until college that I knew of a cultural elite. I had no idea that there was a spectrum of critical music taste: some listen to the radio, then others listen to Radiohead, then there those who follow Pitchfork Media, then some only listen to discarded B-sides from the 70s, and then others only listen to Classical Music. Before this discovery, before I entered college, people I knew in High School just listened to whatever we liked, whether it was a rapper we saw on MTV or some Classic Rock our parents' liked. I didn't know you could walk into a crowd, mention that you liked Blink 182, and watch as the eyes rolled.

After enough eyes rolled at me, I kept my mouth shut until I found something more obscure to name-drop. Maybe Pink Floyd? But then eventually the eyes started to roll at that as well. I began finding myself on a maddening search to become beyond reproach. I ultimately landed on Brian Eno. He's a man who doesn't call himself a musician, who helped found ambient music, and who founded the culturally significant Roxy Music. Many people know his name, but few have heard his music, and those that have, respect him. Phew. There. I'm beyond reproach.

That is until I met a guy who only listens to Jazz because everything else to him is "dirty." His eyes roll, without a doubt, at almost any artist I mention. It was at this point that I gave up on playing this cultural spectrum climbing game.

Little did I know that other people had developed, at a much younger age, a "willful philistinism."

Back when I was culturally oblivious, I met an indie film actress from Hollywood, and she was proudly into pop music. She would, for example, be proudly into liking Eminem. I had always wondered why she was so "proud" of it, but then her pride started to appear like defensiveness. On some level it occurred to her that listening to Eminem was in bad taste, and yet somehow she was going to defy that standard. But what or who was she defying? I loved Eminem, so she wasn't trying to impress me. Then it made sense when I realized where she was from. In Hollywood she is probably fighting at parties against the same cultural climbing threat that I was only just recently exposed to at college. She learned early on that it's better to avoid the game altogether, and hence she stood defiant against critical music appreciation.

As you get older you experience more and more of the vicissitudes of subtle class snipping. You start to notice this phrase more and more common: "I may not know art, but I know what I like." It's always funny to hear people break out and spout that cliché, because it makes you ask yourself, "who the hell are they talking to?"

Unfortunately for these people, they haven't found a social group that encourages philistinism. The example that caught my attention are the Sloane Rangers, a group of wealthy Britons, as epitomized by Princess Diana, who are unembarrassed to admit the disliking of ballet, opera, modern art and James Joyce; most public intellectuals of the 70s/80s were left wing, and to align oneself with the cultural values of a left wing intelligentsia was anathema to (typically) staunchly Tory Sloanes.

It's amazing how groups of people can form enclaves within which an alternative reality of ideals exist. It's not that being a Sloane will make you just feel good for having base taste, they will actually make you a good person. You won't feel anything, because to feel means to be aware that it's just the felt qualities that are being perceived. You will be a good person among that crowd for being disgusted at those with critical taste.

And the flip side is true too. If you have a refined cultural sensibility and roll among Bohemians, then you've achieved something for yourself in life. People respect you, invite you over to their parties, and offer you the most beautiful mates.

I find willful philistinism interesting because you're not just a snob, but a snob of snobbery. The snobs reject mainstream taste, while as willful Philistines reject those that have to strive so hard to distance themselves from the mainstream.

As a structure, I find this interesting. Instead of cultural taste being laid on a spectrum, it almost appears like a ring. These spectrum-to-ring transformations occur when the spectrum is actually a ladder, and those who seek to maintain their power, reject the whole hierarchy itself.

Look at the Republicans, the party of the wealthy elite, also identifying with anti-intellectualism and the countryside. The countryside connotates many negative qualities, such as illiteracy, destitution, backwardness, and naiveté. And yet somehow, the farmer's life is romantic. On a related note, Sloanes also support pro-hunting legislation.

I've read people talk about anti-intellectualism like it was some sort of noble maturity. The most notorious is Peggy Noonan, columnist for the Wall Street Journal. I've never read a good argument for why I shouldn't listen to what professors think about politics. Is it because all they have is theory? I'd rather trust people who have thought things through rather than those who shoot from the gut, as if that's some sort of talent.

The typical consumer believes that by doubling his hard drive capacity today, he will have more than enough space for tomorrow. 18 months later, he is at maximum capacity.

I've had many periods in my life where I've become markedly silent. The one that sticks out in my mind the most was when I determined myself to rid myself of logical fallacies. Logical fallacies are frequent human failings of logic, such as the tendency to see correlation as causation—I kept a rabbit's foot in my pocket during Sunday's winning game, therefore the rabbit's foot caused me to win. I discovered various lists, such as this one that's 42 points long, and spent a month monitoring my speech for logical fallacies.

After I was through with the exercise, I developed, at least for a couple months, a speaker's block. People even asked me questions, such as "why are you so quiet?", and I'd have to keep my lips sealed to make sure I didn't respond fallaciously.

I was reminded of this process when I stumbled upon the term aposiopesis, a poetic device whereby the speaker or writer deliberately stops and leaves something unexpressed. The traditional example of aposiopesis is the threat of Neptune in Virgil's Aeneid 1.135: Quos ego—!. Aposiopesis is also used in hip-hop, such as in Eminem's "Hi My Name Is—" or in Sisqo's expression, "She had thighs like what" (where what is a placeholder for the aposiopesis).

Aposiopesis blankets my life after periods of intense learning. For the past two months, for example, I've been researching the issue of "identity crisis," and I've been exploring the concept of being yourself. In the previous post How am I not myself?, I touched on the topic of being simultaneously natural and uncomfortable; just how does one resolve the infamous paradoxical imperative to "act naturally?" (A theater director teased some ideas out from the Stanislavsky method when I posed that question to Ask MetaFilter)

More importantly, I'm also concerned with how can one conduct self-improvement while still being themselves? And what to do in cases where being natural with some traits interferes with being natural in other traits? I often have the fear that my naturalness also justifies being lazy and taking the easy-route socially.

I feel like I'm on the tail-end of a deep period of researching and introspection, and so perhaps I'll be entering a renewed period of—

There is this archetype of a person, most epitomized by Gatsby in The Great Gatsby. And this person is me, and this person is about six people I've known, all of whom I met at Stanford.

We're not fake, or maybe we are. If you're involuntarily fake, can you really be fake? I don't think we're fake as in the connotation given to snobbish, manipulative, condescending socialites. Rather, we put on a smile because anything else feels awkward. To others, it may seem awkward to smile when you don't mean it, but to me I feel more awkward if I don't smile when someone tells me a joke that I find only partially funny.

And my relationships aren't fake—I will bail you out at 4am from prison. Maybe fake is not the right way to describe a lot of my relationships. How about estranged? I want to connect with others, but there's too much of an extra-sensory discourse going on in my head, a superfluous backstory that interferes with intimacy.

How can I expect to have a normal heart-to-heart with someone who I spent the last hour analyzing?

Burden, duty, honor, obligation, and primal needs keep me connected. But honestly, I feel better when I'm alone in a room in Japan. I prefer being at a distance from my social sphere thousands of miles away.

But I don't want to do that. I don't like being estranged. Hell, I don't think it's healthy to be so alone. This sociality, an unpleasant mix of social skills and alienation, characterizes this archetype.

When I first arrived at the London School of Economics student housing, we met a group of other university bright eyes, hanging out in the lounge, drinking their newfound London pints, and generally relishing their good times and good looks. It was hard to look ugly there, underneath the dim colored lights, drunk with excitement and jet lag, and pleasant with a comfort that you were in the company of those that can also take summer sojourns to London.

2am, and the Harvard filipina with curls was strewn over the Duke dude with short hair, and they were sick. Everybody was sick, sick of the alcohol, sick of the jet lag, sick of the excitement. And yet, they were discussing plans for their entire week: a trip to Stonehenge, a tour bus to Edinburgh, a trip to Oxford, etc. Between the group, there were about 120 hours of scheduled sight-seeing discussed when only about 30 hours was actually available.

Maybe I've become jaded with travel. Or perhaps I've developed a dullness where the simple things in life don't excite me. But what they were doing was not "The Way." A 6 week trip to London, to them, was an "opportunity-of-a-lifetime" to get pictures of themselves at various famous spots, and subsequently collect them into a photo album.

I knocked on the filipina's door a week later, and said "hey, we're going to check out Trafalgar Square tonight, have you been there before?" She was underneath her covers, actually sick with some sort of cold or something. And she lit up with hurried excitement, ready to jump right up and go for it. But then I assured her, "Oh, sorry, I didn't know you were sick, never mind. It's cool." And she relaxed a bit, relieved of having the responsibility of gathering a new ornament to place in her memory bag.

I love the romance of travel. I hate the tourism of travel. To me, when I go to a new place, my goal is not to do sight-seeing. My goal is to really feel present there. To take a bite out of a creme brule on the busy streets of Paris. To play video games at 5am around harajuku girls in Tokyo. To dance with the goths and other crazies at an underground club in San Francisco.

Tom Wolfe urges budding writers to become journalists. He believes that it's important to learn how to observe the human condition and record it. To me, he is right, and not just when it comes to writing, but when it comes to a philosophy of life. Socrates once said, "the unexamined life is not worth living."

It seems those university bright eyes had the right intentions at least. They were in search of peak experiences. However, I think they just had the the wrong education and believed erroneously that somehow traveling somewhere else is a gold mine for such experiences. You can save up your entire year for your two-week vacation, take it, and then not remember a single thing from it. Or you can be with your buddies, playing video games, late into the night at some shanty apartment, eating overly doughy pizza, playing as if the world is going to end tomorrow, and that moment will last a lifetime.

One way of thinking is "travel for travel's sake." There are people who are naturally wired to "love traveling." I don't use the word "love" lightly anymore, especially because it prejudices me into thinking I have a passion for something that I don't. I know people who have a genuine love of traveling, and they believe in traveling on a spiritual level. Movement is meaningful. The goodness in life is in the trapezing from one part of the world to the next.

By a principle of a distribution of labor when it comes to passions, there's no way that so many people can say authentically that they love travel. I can't say I love travel myself. I know I love the romance of travel—don't we all—but there is nothing really pleasant about a crowded airplane.

I love in Richard Linklater's Slacker where this boy and girl talk about travel.

Girl: Do you ever just want to get the hell out of this country?
Boy: And go where?
Girl: I dunno, anywhere, doesn't matter.
Boy: I dunno. I've traveled. And all it is is bad water, bad food, get sick, gotta deal with strange people. And when you get back, you can't tell whether it really happened to you or you just saw it on TV.

The film An Inconvenient Truth is so self-assured in its psychological impact that at the end of the film, it has a series of one-line imperatives to help the environment. It says, for example, in small white text, "ride a bike," and then it fades away. Then it says, "e-mail your congressman," and then it fades away. This part became like a mini-rally, and people waited around for it. This is surprising, because normally people get up when they hear the sprightly music and see the small white text at the end of a movie. Then the credits started to roll, and finally people got up.

The theater we were in happened to be right by the main parking lot, so everybody kind of moved together as a school of fish. One by one, they filtered from the sidewalk, over the curb, onto the asphalt, and on their way to their cars. However, I noticed an awkward yet somber silence. Apparently, I'm used to the concomitant wave of "doot-doot" sounds and headlights flashing. Here, though, nobody was pulling out their car keys to remotely unlock their vehicles.

We continued to filter through the parking lot, negotiating through the cars already there, still in total silence. There were couples walking together, and they weren't talking either. I became a bit nervous and walked swiftly to my car, only unlocking it right when I was up against the side door. Then I slipped in and drove off.

The film, at least for a moment, made it really uncool to own a car.