Giraffes are pretty cool though I'm not sure why. I think it's because they bring a whole new meaning to deep throat.

This is a subject very close to my heart. For some reason I feel a profound connection. I'm not sure exactly why, it's just the way I'm designed. But I'd like to see your thoughts regarding the subject and perhaps learn more about what makes my fellow DVers tick.

You see the thread title is not accurately explaining what I want to talk about. It's purposely misleading. The reason for this and for the strange way I'm filling the introduction with excessive, inaccessibly vague filler is in the hopes many people will skip the introduction and just randomly answer the thread topic without reading the body of text. That's right, the thread title and opening sentence is a farce to catch the impatient, as well as the particular way in which I am describing what the topic is really about. It's a purposefully convoluted and agonizingly impenetrable mess of concise verbosity. And this is for good reason. There are, of course, so many different tricks that show us the way we read impetuously and presumptuously assume our way through life. And the making of the assholes from this or that, from the You and the Me, creates a charade of headbutting for the sake of pontificating because even if we agree we certainly don't agree in the same way and we certainly are original enough in our thoughts that they have value purely from their originality. But of course if something has value it must prove its value. We are perfectly willing to presume we're right about everything but completely unwilling to presume that any one else's thoughts have value. Worse yet we're positive we've heard it and learned it before, and the most they'll do is bore you out of sheer repetition. Even in cases where we do presume value, such as when we read the works of certain respected members of society, the authors of textbooks, the ordained preachers of our particular dogma, the role-models we keep until we realize just how bad their shit really stunk this whole time, we still take it in once, and that is enough. We presume the mind we had when we first read the words of Hume or Nietzsche is the same mind we have now, and reading it once means we've got it. We already understand it. We presume we absorbed the information, and that surely the shape of our mind had no effect on how we perceived the information. It becomes a very rare gift in the world to learn something, we grow accustomed to putting people's ideas into boxes, and these two boxes are most often labeled either irrational or unoriginal. We figure it's either not worth listening to because it's silly, or we already heard it before and therefore not worth listening to. We forget the transactional relationship between the mind and information.

Teachability is a strange thing. It's almost as though the more you conceive of yourself as an open-minded individual, the less teachable you really are. Indeed, the moment it strikes your mind that you're an intelligent fellow respectful of any idea, the moment you close yourself off to a whole range of possibilities. After all, you're already open minded, so for what purpose must you now listen? It seems to work much like the moral teeter-totter where as the bad stuff piles up, we gain a need to be more moral, but if we give to charity and preach endlessly about how to be good and spend a couple hours every week listening to someone tell us about how good we are, then suddenly our chances of supplying nickels to street bums drops considerably. In fact even supplying nickels drops the chances of supplying nickels. We've given enough, today, so we'll ignore that bum. After all we can't give to everyone. That one before, he deserves it but this one needs to get a fucking job. But we know that's bullshit, don't we? We know we can't tell the difference between a good ant and a bad ant, so we just smite them all. And we feel good about it. After all, no matter how little your dick is if your profession is to whack off hamsters you're sure to gain the attitude that only a six foot throat could possibly handle your load.

And that is why I like giraffes.