Friday, October 16, 2009

I've been acting like a douchey college guy lately. For one thing, I like Bob Marley now.

I meet a lot of people around here who are always smiling and never laughing. Those guys make me nervous. It's not a grin, or a smirk, or a leer. It isn't smug, or sheepish, or wry, or conspiratorial. It isn't anything. It's like a mask, like their faces are just shaped like that. I imagine them standing over a corpse, holding a smoking pistol, smiling like that.

So that's over the top. They're mostly just quiet math kids, harmless and humorless. But still, it's unnerving. When I say something funny, you laugh, dammit.

I got asked on a date this week, which was a first for me, as far as I can remember. It was fascinating to see the struggle from the outside. Not that she had a particularly hard time, but she phrased it very carefully, so as not to be misunderstood: "...was wondering if you would like to go with me to the such and such, as-my-date."

Of course, I would love to accompany you to the such and such on Friday at 7 pm as-your-date. I have never been conscious of being someone's date. She bought the tickets, she's going to pick me up and everything; I don't have to think about it at all until it happens. It's fantastic. More girls should ask me out.

I've got a couple date ideas now, but I haven't had opportunity to try them out. Submitted for your approval:

1. I liked the idea of a girl making up her story, so I think I want to build a date around that. We ask each other all those boring first-date questions, but we make up the answers. I think I could learn more about a girl from her fantasies than her reality. But it's a high-stakes game; there's the possibility that even her fantasies are boring, and then what can you do? Answer:

2. Stealth Kite. Buy a kite from the store, tear off the sail, and replace it with cellophane. Then you use some kind of thick, dark yarn instead of the line it comes with; the idea being that when you fly it, it looks like the string just goes up into the sky, not connected to anything. I'm not sure how hard it would be to make; maybe I should try it on my own first.

Alternately, you could buy those little thin glow sticks and tape them to the skeleton of the kite, and fly it at night. I wonder if they'd be bright enough.

Monday, October 12, 2009

Well I'm sorry but I'm not interested in gold mines, oil wells, shipping or real estate.

I really don't want to ask you what your major is. I don't care where you're from, or what you like to do for fun, or how many brothers and sisters you have, or what you want to be when you grow up. But I'm so accustomed to struggling through conversations with people with no discernible personality that I don't know what else to ask you.

We need some secret sign, to identify each other. Tell me you want to be a masked vigilante when you grow up. Tell me you were raised on a leper colony in the South Pacific. Tell me your life's ambition is to break the world record for tallest tower of Jenga blocks. It's okay if you're a nursing or elementary-education major just like every other girl in this school; just lie to me for a minute.

And when I tell you what I want to do with my life, don't look at me like I'm a jerk for wanting to do something real and then ask if I wouldn't be better off majoring in Business Management. I'm going to keep a list of the names of all those idiot girls, and in twenty years I will write them a letter from Mogadishu or Nepal that will make them loathe the balding, swelling, disgustingly practical marketing executives and middle-managers and accountants they married. They will watch them scream at the TV during Monday Night Football, and quietly contemplate murder.

And to the pretty blonde at the frozen yogurt shop: it's okay to be friendly while you ring me up. I'm sure you get lame passes from BYU guys all the time, and I can tell by your body language and demeanor that you really, really don't want anything to do with me--which is fine, I get that--but you can make eye contact with me, and I will smile and say thank you, and pay for the frozen yogurt, and that will be it.

--Kevin

Sunday, September 20, 2009

"A world without nuclear weapons" is a horror story.

I like President Obama. I've heard him say a few things with which I've disagreed, generally rooted in a spiritual perspective that I can't realistically expect him to share; but he seems like a moral and thoughtful man, the kind of person God can lead, whether he recognizes it or not. I have some interpretive differences with him on the Constitution, and the fundamental role of government; but I've only ever heard him say one thing that I thought was just pure foolishness.

In a speech in Prague last April, President Obama stated his commitment to "seek the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons". That would seem to be a rather inoffensive sound-byte, a typical safe thing for a politician to say; and I sincerely hope that's all it was, because peace and security are the very last things we would get from a world without nuclear weapons.

We have experienced, since 1945, what may be the single most peaceful, stable era in human history, and it's precisely because of the atrocity embodied in nuclear weapons. Does anyone really believe that a Cold War without nukes would have stayed cold? Consider how close we still came, contemplating our extinction as a species, to going to war anyway. Without that looming horror to dissuade us, it would have been a practical certainty. It would have been a shorter war (let's hope), maybe a more decisive one; but America likely would have left her ascendancy behind on the Russian steppe, just like Napoleon or Hitler, along with a few million frozen corpses.

Or, consider how long we could have fought the Japanese if we hadn't horrified them into submission in 1945. Vietnam is our nation's current metaphor for insane Pyrrhic conflict; but imagine an enemy equally entrenched, equally zealous, and equally comfortable with suicidal guerrilla tactics, only with twice the population and three times the funding. And not trying to kill each other, too. It would have made Iraq look like Granada. (It was to be called Operation Downfall, read all about it; particularly the quote about a "fanatically hostile" indigenous population).

Then consider the broader implications. Buried in Japan through the end of the 1940s, it seems unlikely that the United States could have afforded the epic levels of foreign aid that constituted the Marshall Plan, rebuilding Western Europe and stifling Communist uprisings that were already brewing there. Seeing it all as prosperous and stable as it is today, it's hard to imagine what a desperate and precarious place Europe was in 1945, and how close it came to a disastrous experiment in Marxism.

The Soviet Union would then have succeeded where Hitler failed, creating a "Fortress Europe" and monopolizing the whole productive capacity of the continent; and the world would have spent 60 million lives to trade one insane dictatorship for an even stronger and more murderous one.

Often, similar "what-if" nightmare scenarios are concocted in books and film to illustrate the terrible consequences of nuclear war, and that's important; but it's also important to realize that war has always had terrible consequences, of which nuclear weapons are an indispensable reminder.

Since he gets quoted in fifteen-second sound clips and lacks the privilege of sitting down for a few hours and hammering out an essay, I can see why President Obama would stick to the socially-acceptable bumper-sticker rhetoric that "nuclear weapons are bad". Thankfully, in his actual policies, he seems to be much more nuanced. We don't need to be able to glass the entire planet three times over, and we don't need to piss off the Russians with a missile shield in Poland; 1,500 nuclear weapons is scary enough, and we need them pointed at actual 21st-century bad guys.

As long as this already is, I'll make a separate post on non-proliferation, which is the more philosophically interesting issue.

Thursday, September 17, 2009

This is why I don't sleep till 5 am

I'm reading "The Diversity of Life" by E. O. Wilson; it's a secular humanist's poetic, impassioned defense of the theory of evolution and its ramifications for human activity. It's not the sort of thing I expected to be assigned here at "The Lord's University", but that probably says more about my tendency to be self-deprecating on the Church's behalf than it actually says about the Church.

The book effectively neutralizes some common objections to the theory of evolution--the sort of folksy, common-sense arguments you find in email forwards from the sort of people who still send email forwards: i.e. "there's no way that random chance could have produced complex life"; "the existence of a watch implies the existence of a watch-maker"; "evolution is a theory, not a fact"; evolution's supposed contravention of the law of entropy, etc. And then there's usually like a .gif of a waving American flag or an eagle, or that twisted-steel cross in the wreckage of the WTC towers, or something.

I believe that God can create universes any way that suits Him, and He's told us repeatedly and emphatically that He's not going to give us all the details. So I am theologically and cosmologically cool with it. But I don't think that the theory of evolution as we currently understand it is the final stop; and it's unfortunate that scientists like this author have become so emotionally invested in defending the theory from these shallow criticisms, that they miss an opportunity to criticize and refine the theory themselves, intelligently.

It's a kind of siege mentality, a sense of shared persecution, which inevitably begets the sort of orthodox esprit de corps that is good for some professions, but not for scientists. We like our scientists wildly disunited and doing their best to disprove each other, because that's how good ideas get better (a cultural example of natural selection to which Wilson refers in the book). Still, it's an edifying read, and it raises some interesting questions.

For instance: we observe natural selection as it affects all sorts of individual, immediately-advantageous traits in a given population. The predators with the sharpest teeth, the most efficient digestive system, the keenest vision or hearing, survive to reproduce in greater numbers; and in the long run, that's how species are refined to fill their niche in the ecosystem.

But there are some traits that could only confer reproductive advantage if they were introduced as a system, out of whole cloth. Birds are the best example of this that I can think of. In order to fly under their own power, birds need all sorts of body adaptations that, by themselves, would be an extreme liability to any animal that can't fly. Porous, brittle bones to reduce weight; big, awkward forelimbs with a whole lot of unnecessary surface area; a hyperactive cardiovascular system with a correspondingly hyperactive metabolism, etc.

How could these adaptations have survived for all those millions of years with no payoff? Introduced individually, in the slow, iterative process of natural selection, it's hard to imagine any of those traits even surviving one generation, much less conferring the sort of clear reproductive advantage that leads to speciation. But for some mutant strain of reptile to acquire one crippling mutation, and then another, and then another, and then another, and survive each step for millions of years before finally achieving flight, seems to defy reason.

It's just Bio 100, and I'm sure the question has been asked before, but I've never heard a decent answer. Any Biology majors in the house?

Sunday, September 13, 2009

Why Free-Market Health Care Doesn't Work (my dad would disown me if he knew how to use a computer)

Ever since coming home from the mission, I've pretty well lost my appetite for arguing, which is why I haven't done much with this thing lately. But I've had about all the stupid I can handle from the health care debate, so here goes.

Why Free-Market Health Care Doesn't Work

1. Emergency services do not respond normally to the law of demand which regulates free markets.

When one's house is burning down, consideration for the price of help is minimal. If a "freelance" fire truck were to drive up and offer to put the fire out, one's response would be the same whether their asking price was $50 or $5,000: "Fine, whatever, just put the fire out!" In economic terms, we call this a "perfectly inelastic" demand curve--one that is not meaningfully responsive to changes in price. The potential for extortion is obvious, and there's actually historical precedent for that very situation.

Marcus Licinius Crassus, a Roman politician, operated his own personal fire brigade on free-market principles: when he heard there was a fire in town, he would rush to the scene with a team of slaves, and offer to buy the home at an obscene discount. If the owner refused, the offered price would fall until he was forced to frantically accept, and Crassus would send in his team to put out the fire and salvage what they could.

There's a similar precedent for contract police forces: the Huns called it "tribute", and organized criminals call it "protection money". That's why we have "socialized" police and fire departments: because we want those industries kept as aloof from the profit motive as possible.

Normal commodities respond favorably to market forces; we get faster computers, more fuel-efficient automobiles, longer-lasting light bulbs, etc. because the consumer has the power to choose between commodities or to go without altogether. It's this power of choice that drives innovation, lowers costs, increases efficiency--which is almost nonexistent in emergency services.

When I had my appendix out last February, I couldn't choose a discount hospital, or a luxury hospital, or the one with the most efficient billing and coding system--I just had to drive as fast as possible to the nearest hospital and beg them to anesthetize me. And even if they had told me at the time that it would cost $12,000 (they send you the bill a couple weeks later), my response would have been no different. I needed to not die, at whatever the going rate for not dying happened to be.

2. True Free-market Health Care does not exist--and shouldn't.

As our system currently operates, free health care is already available to every individual within driving distance of an American hospital, provided that their need is life-threatening and immediate. Emergency rooms don't ask before they reattach your arm if you are a legal US citizen with valid health insurance--nor should they.

But if you want something close to a functional free-market system, at least one side (supplier or consumer) has to have the power to refuse the transaction. It is illegal in the United States for a hospital to refuse treatment to an ER patient on the basis of their ability to pay; so we don't have a truly free health care market, and the very idea of such a system ought to be repugnant anyway.

Still, someone has to foot the bill, and you can bet it won't be the hospitals. To cover the cost of all that free health care (which is huge, given the number of Americans who can't afford it but still need that bullet out), they inflate prices across the board; but the insurance companies don't want to eat it either, so they pass it on to you, enlightened consumer, in the form of higher monthly premiums.

In effect, then, American health care is already socialized; but instead of spreading the cost across the 70% of Americans who pay income tax, we spread it across the 60% of Americans who have health insurance--thus, as the Republicans love to say, "punishing the successful and rewarding the unsuccessful", just the same. The only difference is that--

3. Waiting for the ER Vastly Increases the Cost of Treatment

You could see this all over the place in Memphis: middle-aged, inner-city African Americans suffering from long-term, treatable illnesses for which they couldn't afford treatment until they could sell it as life-threatening to the ER. Obviously, sometimes these diseases were stupid, and manageable if the person had any sense. Obviously I'd rather not pay to pharmaceutically manage someone's diabetes, when the patient weighs 450 lbs. and puts away a 2-liter of soda with every meal--but that's not the choice we're presented with.

We can either pay for the treatment (and maybe some mandatory education and counseling) in the early stages, when it's relatively cheap, or we can pay for it when it's $50,000 to amputate an infected foot. We're not going to let them die of their stupidity; that's just not on the table. Our choice is how we will bear the cost of their stupidity.

And that is, of course, an extreme case. Even then, the moral imperative is clear, but there are thousands of other cases in which people get sick through no fault of their own, and we are presented with the same choice. We're going to have to pay for it either way, but prevention and management is cheaper than emergency care.

Right. Anyway.

What drives me crazy about this whole situation is that the quality of the debate is so unbelievably dim. Republicans have tried to sell it as a Communist conspiracy to overthrow the Constitution, which is about as anachronistic as blaming it on pirates. We won that war 20 years ago, guys... pick a new villain.

Meanwhile the liberals have phrased their entire defense in the lame language of complacent American entitlement... don't sell me health care reform by telling me what "everybody deserves". Everybody deserves to have a good family, and nobody should get picked on in school, and nobody's dog should ever die; but it happens. Life is hard. The state of the economy is enough to keep that important fact fresh in the American consciousness; so you're never going to sell this thing if you keep talking like a bunch of damn brainless hippies.

Love,
Kevin

Saturday, April 04, 2009

Zombie Reagan would have his purulent, decomposing foot up Kim Jong Il's butt right now

So, North Korea has been talking about launching this ICBM for a while now. Japan, still kind of nervous about having nuclear weapons up in their collective grill, made the fairly ballsy comment that if the missile entered their airspace, they would blow it out of the sky. So that was cool for them, I guess. But then Kim Jong Il did it anyway, and the Japanese decided they'd trust him that it was cool and probably not a nuke. (Yet.)

The missile stopped briefly in Tokyo to make like it was going to punch Japanese Prime Minister Taro Aso, and is reported to have laughed derisively as he flinched and wet himself, before establishing a stable orbit over the American West Coast. Upon re-entry, the Taepo-dong II missile is expected to move in with Mr. Aso's mom and boast loudly about their intimate relationship whenever Mr. Aso is in earshot.

President Obama issued a written statement promising to immediately talk about this some more, and possibly even petition the UN Security Council to issue another resolution. Mr. Obama is reported to be "not mad, just disappointed" and asked the North Korean President if he even wanted to be friends, or what. He vaguely alluded to the potential for economic sanctions if talking about it a whole lot more doesn't do the trick. Kim Jong Il texted the following response from his fortress of doom, 5 miles beneath Pyongyang:

"OMG NOT SANCTIONS! WE MIGHT BECOME THE ISOLATED, IMPOVERISHED, FAMINE-STRICKEN A**HOLE OF EAST ASIA--OH WAIT! LOL! GTG PLAY WITH MY NEW ORPHAN CANNON, L8R"

--Kevin

Sunday, March 22, 2009

I wish I could talk to Collin about this.

I went to the symphony this weekend with a friend, having bought the tickets a week ago on a manic spending binge from which I am now recovering. The theme of the evening was to imitate the style of the Boston Pops Orchestra, arranging orchestral versions of current music.

Well, "current" for the symphony-going set apparently means "Strawberry Fields Forever" and "Jeremiah Was a Bullfrog", but it was enjoyable. The conductor began with a narration of how the concept of a pops orchestra began in 18th and 19th century Vienna, when that city was essentially the cultural capital of Europe.

It interested me that the city through which practically all of Europe's leading philosophers, scientists, and artists passed for 200 years should now be so seldom heard about. It's certainly not a ruin or a backwater or anything, but it's not the intellectual engine of Western civilization, either.

They played several pieces from this Viennese golden age, followed immediately by a series of iconically American jazz and swing pieces from the 1930s, and I couldn't help wondering what will be remembered of our culture when the spotlight leaves, as it did for the Habsburgs.

Placed as it was, right alongside Mozart and Strauss, the American music seemed to epitomize what it means to be an American--or what it used to mean, or what it ought to mean, depending whom you ask--but it was bold, and brash, and living; the product of exuberant freedom and a unique convergence of cultures. I decided that if that's how we're remembered, it wouldn't be such a bad thing.

I doubt Benny Goodman or Count Basie thought of themselves as the voice of any big ideas; but maybe that's why it's believable. The best artistic expression is hardly aware of itself. The orchestra played "The Stars and Stripes Forever", for which I had no special feelings--but "Sing, Sing, Sing" made me love my country.

Interesting that a nation that thinks of itself as more open, free, and liberal than it used to be, should now have so much to say about angst, frustration, alienation, and fatalism (and that's the good music)--to say nothing of the maudlin pop ballads and commercial jingles we churn out daily.

Maybe in the long run, we'll find that there were some "greats" operating today, and we just have to wait for history to kill all the noise around them. Or maybe our ridiculous pop icons will become enshrined in our consciousness like the Beatles, and in 2040 bearded college professors will hold classes discussing the political significance and artistic merit of Pink and the Jonas Brothers.

(And yes, I do think it's a fair comparison. Have you listened to the Beatles?)

--Kevin

Thursday, March 19, 2009

Looks like I'm tougher than Batman's dad.

I had my first experience with the opera last night: "The Marriage of Figaro" at the Capitol Theatre. I was late, and walked briskly across downtown to the theatre in my suit and sunglasses, and a Hispanic girl said, "You look like you FBI!"

I smiled and said, "Maybe I am," and her boyfriend said, "Keep on walkin'!" Which reminded me pleasantly of being a missionary.

I arrived just as the overture ended and the curtain rose, and I squeezed in between two elderly ladies near the middle of the theater. I was hot from the long walk and uncomfortable in my jacket, but I felt like I wasn't allowed to take it off.

Behind me were two heavily painted overweight women in their late twenties who were apparently writing a review of the performance, and kept talking about whether or not the farce was over-done. They seemed to know what they were talking about, so I tilted my head as if to look across the audience, to hear their conversation better. I wanted to talk to them during the intermissions, but I got the impression that they would have been very impatient with novice questions.

Speaking of which: I didn't know this, and maybe you don't either, but The Marriage of Figaro is three hours long, with three intermissions; and with each one, the audience thinned out perceptibly. Most of the deserters seemed to be middle-aged couples who appeared to be there partly out of a desire to dress up fancy, and partly out of a sense of duty. Interestingly, all the young hipsters and klieg-light homosexuals seemed to be there for art's sake, and endured the whole thing.

It wasn't something that entertained me in its own right. I didn't have to speak Italian to know that the subtitles were seriously deficient--at best a synopsis of what was being said, and with none of the poetry. The language barrier, combined with an extraordinarily convoluted plot, made it a bit like watching a Japanese cartoon: which either implies that opera is really lousy, or that I need to revise my assessment of Japanese cartoons. And I was inclined to agree with the big ladies behind me that it was a little over-acted; although if you're not going to explain what is being said, the actors have to be a little more demonstrative.

So it's conceivable that I might have enjoyed it more under different circumstances. But what interested me most was the audience; a bizarre package of incongruous cliches, literally elbow-to-elbow. Seemingly at home in this sea of wilting elderly faces was the spray-tanned homosexual with the ironically loose necktie and ironically tousled hair, and the "artist", with (seriously) a beret, and a scarf, and a beard, and square glasses. There's nothing better to me than seeing a non-conformist in uniform.

Then there were the once-attractive middle-aged women in expensive dresses meant for younger bodies, for whom "showing some skin" is like airing an open wound, ravaged by ultraviolet radiation and cellulite. And their men, who had so obviously bought opera tickets only under extreme duress; who wore exactly the same petulant grimace as the nine-year-olds who had been brought by their grandmothers.

But in the midst of this darkly amusing human train wreck were a few remarkably beautiful women a few years older than me, having adult conversations with remarkably tall and well-dressed men. Their faces were so bright and expressive and interested--a real conversation--and I wondered where I was going to find that kind of woman; or even just a woman, in general. I have dealt with so many girls who don't know who they are, or what they want, or even what they like, and conversation feels a lot like playing tennis with a brick wall. Just overhearing a real conversation gave me some hope that it could be different.

Needless to say I felt a little out of my element, but I made friends with the two old ladies who sat next to me, and they asked me very kindly about my school and my plans, and gave me a little education (having seen a lot of opera in their time, apparently); which was a pleasant distraction from my admittedly cynical people-watching.

There is something appealing about being out late, downtown, in a suit. Walking back to my car I was simultaneously enjoying that sensation, and thinking about how Batman's parents got whacked, walking home late from the opera downtown. Salt Lake City is no Gotham, but I did have to walk past Pioneer Park, where they keep a port-a-john because of all the vagrants who would otherwise do their business in the alleyways. Nobody else parked that far away, so it was awfully quiet, and I looked over my shoulder once or twice.

--Kevin

Saturday, February 21, 2009

I've made a lot of mistakes in my mind

The writers of Ghost in the Shell really could have skipped all the animated robot nudity and phoned-in plot, and boiled that film down to a very thought-provoking introductory philosophy lecture.

It got me thinking, though, that's the point. If you replace every constituent part of a human being one by one, do you still have a human being? And is it the same human being? You don't need cybernetic implants to face that paradox, though; all the cells in my body die and regenerate at regular intervals, and even they are composed of circulating molecules that are broken, reordered, replaced, recirculated constantly within and among the cells.

As far as anyone can prove, I am a chemical process between trillions of organic molecules, regulated by a self-replicating chemical "program". Under an electron microscope, you can't see the forest for the trees; but that's because a forest is just a word we use to describe a whole lot of trees all together.

If I am only the sum of my constituent parts, then the oldest part of me is seven years old; and what am I, if not a thief, a usurper? My infant body has been dead for fifteen years, flushed out piece-by-piece and excreted by a different sort of body, which was gradually rejected and destroyed by another, and another, and then I killed that one and here I am.

My memories of being fifteen, or eleven, or five, then, are just the ghosts of those dethroned kings, haunting me on the periphery of my thoughts. I didn't do any of that; I stole it from the old and dying neurons I replaced. And when this body dies, you won't notice; but will I? And will I haunt the new possessor of my identity with vague memories of "his" ill-spent twenties?

I reject all these suppositions, but it's a good thing to scare yourself with before bed. A scientist from the 1700s, knowing nothing about radio waves or satellites, might empirically examine a cellular phone in the middle of a call and determine it to be a sentient thing, as he could find no external source for its intelligence. The only evidence he would have against this hypothesis would be the voice's own insistence. Likewise, I believe I am more than just an elaborate, self-amplifying chemical reaction; but my own insistence is all I have to go on.

--Kevin

Wednesday, February 11, 2009

When the world ends, you and me, we'd just be beginning

For the last six months, my life has been a slow crescendo of dissonance, until last week I could hardly stand to be inside my own head. But everything is quiet now--I had almost forgotten it could be so quiet. All my fear, doubt, guilt, uncertainty, jealousy... it's all over. I was lying in bed when it happened, and I actually said it out loud. It's over.

Tonight, my cousin Becky opened her mission call, and she's going to Kaohsiung, Taiwan. I wished I could communicate to her what she was about to be given, but the Lord reserves the right to surprise us with these things. She's going to be on the other side of the planet--it's 2 pm tomorrow over there, how cool is that--learning things for which nothing here could possibly prepare her, of which she has only the vaguest idea. But she's so on fire, and I felt it spread into me. We are a blessed people, to be given this kind of adventure.

I feel simultaneously envious of her, and more excited about my own mission. For the first time in my life, I feel like there isn't enough time in the day to accomplish everything I want, and it doesn't feel stressful at all. I can never get my money's worth out of the buffet either, but it's still nice to know that it's all-you-can-eat.

--Kevin

Saturday, February 07, 2009

Tem-per-ance (n.) : moderation or restraint in action, expression, etc.; self control.

I threw out all my video games today. There's about $1,000 worth of aluminum-coated polycarbonate plastic in my wastebasket right now (at least, that's what it was worth when I bought it). Most of them are at least a decade old and don't work anymore, but I didn't like it.

I did it because I couldn't think of any good thing I was getting from them. But it was sentimental; if I had had a wholesome traditional childhood I might have a Red Ryder BB gun or a catcher's mitt left over from those days; but instead I have memories of spending Christmas "Knee-Deep in the Dead" with my 32-bit chainsaw, or playing Ultima 7 at Grandma's house until 5 AM (because you can do what you want at Grandma's house).

So it was a little sentimental. But I just finished reading The Road by Cormac McCarthy, and I feel a new sense of urgency about my life. After all, I may someday find myself wandering a blighted, sunless hellscape, trying not to get raped and eaten. So I've resolved to take advantage of the biosphere while I've got one, and just make better use of my time in general. It's a little ridiculous, but I'm only about 30% joking. That book scared me out of my mind.

--Kevin