Time travel journal

Things I saw yesterday:

* the church where NWPAC, the old Atari 8-bit user group, used to meet. (jecook's brother had the wedding rehearsal there.)
* the DeVry campus. The rec room was replaced with another lab. In fact, there seem to be many more labs there now, most of which have flat-screen displays. The cafeteria looks exactly the same.
* My old elementary school, from the outside. I couldn't see much, but I could tell that they bulit another ugly portable building over where the kindergarten playground used to be.
* The Sheraton Crescent where my parents stayed, while our house was being rebuilt from a microburst attack. It felt like a childhood vacation, being in that well-lit hotel parking lot, even though I could see the 76 station where I used to hang out, across the street.
* Castles & Coasters. We went golfing. It was going to be jecook's "bachelor party" except he ducked out at the last minute.
* The Marie Callender's where I never ate, but was close to some places I did eat a few times.

(no subject)

A metafilter post about the old Winston Churchill "whore" joke led me on a deeper philosophical tangent.

What we are is largely dependent on our circumstances, and some might argue, entirely. If I were born to factory workers in Laos, I certainly wouldn't be a video game collector turned world traveler who works for Ticketmaster and loves peanut butter. If I were born in Saudi Arabia, I might be less likely to sleep with someone on the third date, but more likely to have multiple wives. I might be a completely different person today even if just one thing changed, like if I weren't born with albinism, or I had more siblings, or were an only child, or we never moved to that apartment complex on 15th Avenue, or if I were gay, or if I tried marijuana at that graduation party.

So I've admitted to being a product of my enviroment, and now I'm just haggling over the price.

At some point, I picked up the principle that trading sex for money is wrong. I can't really make it more specific than the adjective "wrong", like with many other taboos, but it's there as something I must not do, either as a client or a provider. The closest I can come to explaining it is, I feel that sex has to be earned, and in a different way than money is earned. Sex and money may not be directly exchanged. Certainly, you can spend money to get sex, but you're still earning it with something besides money, since you have to select something of value to her, and not, say, a bowling ball with your name etched onto it.

Of course, that could change. If someone whom I wouldn't have sex with otherwise, approached me with a suitcase full of hundreds, I'm not certain I wouldn't bend the rules. Who's to say it wouldn't become the first step to a long life as a high-class whore? I'd like to think it wouldn't, but it hasn't happened, so I can't predict the true outcome.

On the john side of the equation, suppose some woman I've had a crush on came up to me and said, "for $200, you can have me for one night." Or, "for $1000, I'll be your girlfriend for one month." Unusual circumstances, yes, which is why I can't readily predict my reaction. I know I'd at least try to flesh out the details of the offer, i.e. priveleges extended versus priveleges denied, but probably more out of curiosity than of negotiation.

Perhaps some other life-changing event might knock that taboo right out of my system, and from that point on I'd be happy to shell out the occasional $400 to some escort delivery service. And like I said before, if I'd grown up differently in the first place, any aspect of my life could be negotiable.

So the phrase, "they're only doing what I would do in the same circumstances," is universally applicable. Even for quite horrible things. No one soul is imbued with some sense that would give him one principle, when everything around him is pointing to another. We are like machines: garbage in, garbage out.