You an' me baby ain't nothin' but collections of culturally transmitted diseases

[kleenexwoman]

WARNING WARNING WARNING THIS IS AN OVERLY PEDANTIC RANT
Memes, memes, memes. Memes these are NOT. The word "meme" is a perfectly good word used to describe a viral idea, an intellectual teratogen, something that gets into your mind and stays there and changes your perception at least a little bit.
The idea of slash is a meme--diraskyria has mentioned a few times that I've infected her with it, and now she sees boy/boy pairings in her stories where she didn't before. Communism is a meme. A sudden craving for McDonald's that you get right after seeing a McDonald's commercial on TV is a meme. Getting together for dinner at Grandma's house every Monday is a very loose meme. Sumerian tablets that fritz up your neurons and make you babble glossolalia are bad-ass memes. Jung's theories are memes, and religions are all memes--actually, they're memeplexes, collections of little unrelated memes that make up a bigger meme. Even little things like "O RLY?" or "a thousend tigers apund ur head" are memes, if they're catchy enough to spawn icons and YTMNDs. Really lame, short-lived memes, but still memes.
The point is:
Surveys are not memes. Things you fill out and send around to people or post in your Livejournal are wonderful ways to pass the time when you don't have anything else you feel like talking about, or just want to inform everyone of your top ten favorite flavors of jellybean, but they are surveys, not memes. They pass into your head and then right out, leaving no trace behind. They are like a three-day flu. If these things are really memes for you, then I know a few cognitive psychologists who would like to take a look at your neural pathways.
The ideas or information contained within may be memes, if you look at someone else's filled-out survey and think, "Hey, I want that as my favorite flavor of jellybean too!" The things themselves? Only ways of organizing information. If memes are like genes, then surveys are like...wait, let me check my Bio textbook here...the ribosomes that translate the genes into usable protein. That's the best analogy I can come up with at the moment, I'm still memorizing the ways cells work, feel free to offer a better one if you know about this stuff.
It's not that this bugs me incessantly every time I see someone refer to a survey as a "meme" or anything, and I know I'm probably not going to convince anyone to start referring to them as just "surveys" if they don't already, but it sometimes grates just a little. I think there are about three people on the Internet who care about this, and one of them ain't Richard Dawkins, because he's too busy ignoring creationists on television.

That said, here are some surveys. I'm reading Bio while I'm doing these.


I got tagged for this one by two people. Wow.

YOUR IDEAL PARTNER
1. State whether your partner is male or female.
2. Write down 8 requirements for your partner.

1. Physically female, mostly because the thought of myself doing anything past little kissies with a biological male just doesn't seem right. With any other form of gender identity, everything across the board. Men are from Mars, and women are from Venus? Well, I'm from zarking Alpha Centauri, so y'all look the same to me.

2.
i. Doesn't care what I look like. I don't care what they look like, either. If I love you, you're beautiful to me anyway.
ii. Not religious, or at least not uber-religious, & willing to look at religions from an objective, anthropological point of view.
iii. Willing to exchange & mutually babble about interests--either I get them obsessed with things, or they get me obsessed with things, or we discover we like the same things and then just babble about them to each other. (This has happened with just about everyone I've ever even liked Platonically. I figure it's some kind of mind-to-mind thingy.)
v. Able to handle physical separation for fairly long periods of time. (This is slightly hypocritical; I can get kind of clingy with some people. It's how you handle clinginess, your own or someone else's, that's important.)
v. Willing to accept that my approach to "romance" is a little stunted, seeing as my favorite romantic movie is actually about zombies. ("Bride of Re-Animator." I just get so teary when she rips out her own heart...)
vi. Will recognize that relationships do not always work out, agree not to set future plans in stone right at the start, & that if we break up for whatever reason, it wasn't "wasting their time," it was great while it lasted & will cherish the memories etc. (Residual bitterness from Tammy, here. I'm not necessarily looking for someone to spend the rest of my life with, just someone to spend time with.)
vii. I don't have any other ones. Assuming this is some kind of "who do you want to spend the rest of your life with?" dealie, how about "is ok with cats, rats, or lizards." Because I want to have at least one of the above once I get settled into a permanent home-type place.
vii. Oh, wait, that was supposed to be eight? Shit, I can't think of any more. Howzabout: Will laugh at dead baby jokes.


TOP FIVE THINGS


from lily_lemony: "Top Five Signs You're Slowly Going Insane But Don't Quite Realize It Yet"
5. APOPHENIA: You begin to see patterns where none exist, particularly between completely unrelated events, and when you mention them to other people, they give you funny looks and say "Sure, Dib, the truth is out there" instead of "Oh, I hadn't thought of that! It makes so much sense!" Actually, this doesn't mean you're going crazy, it just means that they're all really being telepathically controlled by the evil race of lizard people who control the government, global warming, and the price of cauliflower in Zanzibar.
4. WORD SALAD: Your sentences stop making grammatical rebendible sausage mountain and you can't really nickelodeon biomag mini-golf, because it all sounds OK to you.
3. CTHULHU CALLING: You have horrible dreams about a realm where the geometry is non-Euclidean, and when you wake up, you realize that you've just sculpted a freaky fish-demon-tentacle monster out of your mashed potatoes. Take your gravy-covered Cthonian to your local Professor of Batshit Cultology and see what he says; if he takes a big skin-covered book down from the shelf and goes, "Ohh, shit, roll a d20 for sanity check" then you may be OK once the planets stop aligning.
2. REALITY SANDWICH: Your keyboard has turned into a giant bug. If you are William S. Burroughs, this is pretty much par for the course; if you aren't him, or any other drug-addled Beat writer with a fondness for guns (I'm looking at you, Hunter, don't pretend you never tasted that sweet sweet Mugwump jizm), then you should be worried.
1. TIME IS OUT OF JOINT: Things around you start turning into little pieces of paper that have the names of the things they once were written on them. This actually means that you're in a Philip K. Dick book, so you're probably not really crazy, just enlightened.




from josephwaldman: "Five (or more) Cultural Inputs That Keep Me Going From Day To Day"
5. Music: Oingo Boingo's cheery fatalism, the smooth subtle weirdness of Steely Dan, Led Zeppelin's virtuoso cock-rock, the soothing sadness of Nick Drake, the psychological regression of "Tommy"...I could go on and on. Point is, there's nothing more rejuvenating (& bad for the eardrums) than clamping a pair of headphones to your ears, turning it on full blast, and letting your soul free with sound.
4. The written word: The freaky monsterous nihilism of H.P. Lovecraft, Kelly Link's pretty little surreal poems in story form, Allen Ginsberg's ohgodyes gimme more a' that visual imagery an' innovative form, baby, Neal Stephenson's fast-paced whirlpool of ideas, ghostgecko and drworm's pr0n for the mind, Ray Bradbury's melanges of beauty, diraskyria's one-shots and serials on aryneth (say, is that a new chapter I see up? Why yes, it is!), Philip K. Dick's broken-backed prose and staggering ideas, josephwaldman's witty, rambling letters (new one in the ol' college inbox today, heck yeah)...have I left out anyone? It's inevitable; the list goes on forever.
3. Humor: P.J. O'Rourke's "subtle? Subtle is for Commies, let's just go for fucking funny" satire, Dave Barry's booger jokes that somehow never, ever get old, SomethingAwful.com ('specially Zack Parsons and David Thorpe), the exchange of dead baby jokes with the so inclined, the combined forces of Douglas Adams and Terry Pratchett (shame they never actually collaborated, it'd have been sublime), the empire of Matt Groening ("Simpsons" is LOL funny, "Life In Hell" is only a little depressing, "Futurama" is vastly underrated and I love it), & the occasional snark (what do you mean, it's been pre-empted by "American Idol" again? Fuck!).
2. Coffee: I don't always get enough sleep, I can't make tea in my dorm, and pop just makes me sleepy. The iced coffee at the Java City in the library is strong and tasty enough for my purposes. Food? What's that? That's just to soak up excess coffee.
1. Friends: LARPers that invite me over for dinner and tabletop, writing workshop buddies who put up with my caustic and amateurish criticism (I'm working on it), assorted geeky ex-boyfriends from high school that still think I'm worth hanging out with, all of y'all...even if we don't talk on YIM every night, I still love you, and the fact that there are so many people who can stand and even enjoy my company, real-life or online or somewhere in between, makes me happy and warm and grateful and...just all sorts of wonderful. 'scuse me, I'm tearing up. :sniff:



ahh, there we go. Now for something a little more frivolous.
from drowningxfate: "top 5 ice-cream flavours that are yet to exist"
5. Chipotle pepper. Really hot peppers like habanero and jalapeno are just there for the Scoville units, and would be nothing more than a gimmick. The milk in the ice cream would soften the natural heat of the pepper, bringing the sweet, savory flavor out.
4. Luminol. It glows in the dark! Someone call Willy Wonka, please. I'm so brilliant.
3. Red Rose tea with lemon and honey. Good for when you have a cold.
2. Music flavor. Only people wired kinda like this would be able to taste it.
1. Long pig. I DON'T HAFTA JUSTIFY MYSELF.



from rocktits: "Top 5 Ways to Defend Yourself if Attacked by Goblins."
5. Do not look at goblin men, do not buy their fruits. If your sister is stupid and does, make sure you go back down to the market and demand your money back.
4. Stand on a chair and kick them. Goblins are pretty small, and you can probably get most of them in the head if you have steel-tipped boots.
3. Don't wish for them to take your little brother away in the first place, you silly girl. That's just asking for trouble.
2. BOOMSTICK! If it worked for the Deadites, it should work for goblins. They're much smaller.
1. If it's the Goblin King, why would you try to fight him off? He is the Naz, with God-given ass. ("Naz" is Martian spider-language for "man with one of the top five most mesmerizing crotches in the universe.")

Comments

[kleenexwoman.livejournal.com]

Memememememememe...you're right!

In high school, we had a piece of graffiti that read "Nemenemeneme" and on and on. Everyone wrote it all over the place. Never figured out why.