I beleive that one's personal style is a form of self-expression in the same sense that dance or language is. Humans have a fundamental urge to express themselves, to exteriorize the content of their minds, to connect with each other. No species is as advanced as humans are when it comes to the ability to communicate. Thus, clothes became not just a source of warmth, but a means by which one's personality can be bared to the outside world.

Style, however, is alot like language in that it is an imperfect means of expressing one's self. People who have poor language abilities find it difficult to share their thoughts and risk being misunderstood. It takes practice to be able to encode one's feelings effectively in language, in such a way that others can understand. Similarly, when it comes to style, many people have difficulty exspressing their true personality in clothes.

Oftentimes, people dress in standard 'uniforms' (ex businessmen in suits)because this is the easiest way to avoid embarassment, even though uniforms do no express much of anything. This can be compared to someone with poor language abilties who engages in standard conversations (ex hi, how are you, have a nice day) without trying to 'personalize' their language to achieve true self-expression.

People also establish their identity through peer groups, and use both style and language as a means of establishing themselves as a member of the peer group and excluding those who don't belong. Each subgroup develops both a unique style and a unique variation on language (ie slang) as a means of establishing a collective group identity, and exspressing the collective personality of the group to outsiders. People who see themselves as embodying the collective identify of the peer group express this to others by embodying the style and language of their chosen peer group. People who seek to belong to the peer group but are not accepted by others may nonetheless mimic the style and language of others, earning the term "wannabe" or "posuer".

I beleive that while conforming to a peer gourp's style is a means of collective expression, it is clearly not self-expression insofar as everyone has a distinct mind unique to a certain degree from the collective mind of the peer group.

Low self esteem is another barrier to self-expression through style. People with an unfavourable self-image may not want to express their true selves through their style, because they feel that revealing their true self will lead to rejection by others. In almost all cases, these people seek to create an outward image of themselves which is inconsistent their true personality. In other words, they express, through style, what they want other people to think their personality is, and not what their true personality is.

I beleive that brand-name clothing fulfills the role of allowing people with low self-esteem to express to others the image of themselves they want others to see. If you examine how clothing is advertised, what is emphasized more than the clothing itself is the favorable image which the marketer hopes to associate with the clothing. Thus, attractive people are used to model the clothing, and famous, desirable people are payed to appear wearing the clothing (ie product placement). A blatant example of this is the Nike commercial "Be like Mike". No attempt is made to hide the fact that an athletic shoe is being associated with a succesful basketball player.

In order for brands to be succesful, the general public must assoiciate a product with an image. This can be compared to language: a word only has purpose once people associate the mouth-sound with a certain meaning. Thus, marketers spend millions of dollars bombarding the public with images meant to give "meaning" to a particlar brand name.

Returning to the issue of low self-esteem, these people seek to express, through style, an image of themselves inconsistent with their inner self. Once a marketer establishes the link in the minds of the public between a product and an image, the consumer will buy that product if the image associated with the product reflects the image the consumer would like others to have of him/her.

In summary...

1.People have a desire to communicate to others either (a) their true identity, if they view that self highly or (b) some other self, if they would rather people see them as some other self.

2. Marketers associate brand names with images of identity in the minds of the public.

3. People who like the personality-image associated with a brand name will co-opt that personality as their own by buying the product.

looks like ravewave will be representin at this party. nice!

i went to a goodfellaz party last spring when i was in t.o

it was okay at best, overall i wasn't impressed

i'm going to go IV meth now and come back with mad witty comments!

if anyone has an extra spot in a car, i'm up for hitting o-town

okay i'm assuming that by drugs u mean illegal ones right?

so i started smoking weed when i was 17 (yah pretty late) and that was my first illegal drug

and no weed is not a gateway drug

that's not the only reason i'd suggest you run in a corner

balloons! we need to release a whole garbage bag full of balloons in the metro. and then get old ladies to dance to electronic music

bong

in my opinion saying people with a certain age difference shouldn't be together is just as superficial as saying people of different races, or religions shouldn't be together

^^^BAHAHAHA...i wanna get George W on E and videotape him getting rubbed down by Bin Laden and Saddam

Confessions of a middle-aged Ecstasy eater

He's a 50-year-old writer, buys drugs from his son and says they give him the best experiences of his life. By Anonymous

Special report: drugs in Britain
Saturday July 14, 2001

The Guardian

[ www.guardian.co.uk ]

I am not Thomas de Quincey (or Coleridge, Baudelaire, Cocteau, Huxley, Paul Bowles, Carlos Castenada, William Burroughs, Ken Kesey or Hunter Thompson), and the harm that revealing my identity would inflict, not only upon my professional reputation but upon those whom I love, is not commensurate with the likely benefits. I am fast approaching my 50th year, and most of my adult life has been lived comfortably on the right side of the law, first as a journalist, then as a novelist, prose-poet and essayist. I am at present what I so long ago explicitly aspired to become - a man of letters.
Nothing surpasses the life of the mind. And so, if eating Ecstasy be chiefly a sensual, and so a mindless pleasure, and if I have indulged in it to excess, no less true is that I have struggled to understand my habit, if not yet with the religious zeal required properly to get shed of it. But then, perhaps I do not wish to get shed of it.

I have occasionally been asked how I became a regular Ecstasy-eater. I was aware of its reputation as the "love drug", had heard it described as a "four-hour, full-body orgasm" and I found this intriguing, alluring and worthy of further investigation.

Which is odd, because ordinarily I would not have condescended to pay it the slightest heed. Even at university, the high times of those heady years - in my case 1969 to 1976 - I was not a user, chronic, casual or otherwise. Despite an environment in which smoking grass and dropping acid (if not yet snorting coke or shooting smack) was not only benignly accepted, but benevolently smiled upon, I deliberately chose not to indulge. Everyone - including my friends, and most of my professors - was doing it. Except me. This had nothing to do with feelings of superiority or intolerance. It had to do solely with fear. Not only was I afraid of "fucking with my mind", I was petrified of irreparably fucking it up. I steadfastly refused to buy into the druggie/head trip/ stoner agitprop of the day. Reading The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test or Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas, listening to Hendrix or the Doors, Cream or the Airplane was more than enough for me. Not that I was, despite my midwestern Calvinist upbringing, narrow-minded or uncurious, nor was I unhip. Simply, I was scared. Small wonder, then, how often those select few with knowledge of my current habit have remarked upon my being the "least likely person in the world" to have fallen prey to it.

Well, yes. And likewise, no. For I believe that my coming to Ecstasy goes further than mere thrill-seeking. I believe it goes to the centre of my life at the time. It was a period of personal devastation. It began with my only child, a son - he was then my best friend, from time to time still is - and I did not see it coming and it culminated in Ecstasy, and to that I see no end. He was beautiful and sensitive and extraordinarily talented, talented enough that at 13 his poetry had won the notice of university professors and New York book editors alike. So when he undertook to destroy himself, he took his mother and father with him. That was not, nor is it, his fault.

He was 13 and had neither the capacity nor context to grasp what he was doing. He attempted suicide. He ran away, serially. He purchased a handgun from a schoolfriend. He stole, sometimes from stores, more often from his parents, typically in the middle of the night. He got drunk, and when he got drunk he got violent. He verbally and physically abused his mother. He attempted to set her hair on fire. He dismantled furniture, broke china, smashed crystal and, unprovoked, punched out windows and kicked in walls. He shredded his wardrobe with scissors, every stitch of his clothing, and when he had finished, started in on his mother's. He trashed his bedroom and graffitied what remained with every racial and sexual epithet imaginable. He slept on the floor amid rotting food, curdled milk, the mouse droppings that appeared in their wake and a rubble of plaster, drywall and broken glass.

He refused to bathe. He defecated in the yard and urinated in Coke cans which he deployed about his bedroom in pentagrams. He carved his arms with the filed-down ends of paper clips. He discovered marijuana, then cocaine. Then PCP. Then "Special K" (an animal tranquilliser he called "cat food"). He disappeared for days at a time, often into New York City where he slept in storefronts and abandoned buildings and on park benches. He was consigned first to lockdown in a private psychiatric ward, then to a special school out of state. He was counselled. He was diagnosed with a variety of acronyms: AD, ADD, ODD, ICD, possible BP. He was prescribed medication. He was now dealing as well as using drugs. His lifestyle was redolent of a vampire's, for he lived upside-down, sleeping all day, drugging all night.

Eventually, in the course of one five-day spree, he totalled two automobiles, one his father's, pulverising his ankle so badly in the process that it required 26 staples, 10 screws and two stainless-steel plates to reconstruct. I would not swear to the precise chronology of any of this, but to this I would: he strewed wreckage every where. In the meantime his parents' marriage, all 20 years of it, was collapsing. My wife was and remains a beautiful, caring, generous, gifted woman. I would not hesitate to give my life for her, and though we have not lived together for years, I admire and, on some level, love her still, as I know I always shall. But sometimes that is not enough. The marriage had its long-standing problems, its rifts and fractures, and when it came under siege and then assault, the stress was too much. We lost our way, then ran aground, and then, at last, we broke.

I left. Not straight away - the break was anything but clean; it was tortured - and I never went far. I was back in and back out for years. I was at a loss as to how I could properly leave and unsure if I wished to find out. Eventually I found a place just bleak enough to mirror the way I felt, and I felt dreadful, wretched, unsalvageable. I stopped shaving, bathing, sleeping. In time, I stopped eating. (Over one three-month period I shed 40 lb.) The place was a single, windowless room scarcely larger than a tool shed, a cellar space attached to the back of an abandoned garage, and I wallowed in it, in its cobwebs and filth - alone. I began to disintegrate. I continued to write, frantically, because writing was the only way I knew to stay afloat, though looking back I cannot say whether I was writing myself out of what I sensed was an approaching madness, or writing myself more deeply into it.

The nightmares arrived on cue. Not images of hell and its hounds but waterfalls and rivers of words. No images, no meanings, just words, disconnected, decontextualised, foaming, alone. I was haemorrhaging rhymes and the metre of verbs, and each morning, 4am, 5am, I awoke unbuoyed and drenched to the bone.
Somehow, I completed the 500-page draft of a novel about, of all things, Lizzie Borden, but when I submitted it to my agent he deemed it "one of the most brilliant pieces of insanity" he had ever read, declared it utterly unmarketable, and declined to take it on. We parted company, on the heels of which my editor quit his job at a prominent New York publishing house. My marriage was dead - though I still insisted upon thinking of it as merely semi-comatose - my son still very much alive, I was agentless, editorless, apparently unpublishable, was living like a tramp and a recluse, my income close to nil, and I was going mad.

And then the unthinkable happened, or rather, two things happened. I met someone, a woman, and while I in my recalcitrant fashion followed up on that meeting so that she might eventually save me (as she eventually did), my son was becoming what is called, in the parlance, a "raver". And he seemed for the first time in years - he was 17 by then - happy. Not giddy or euphoric, but content, at peace with himself. I do not mean to invoke images of Zen and Buddha - my son is roughly as Zen-like as Eminem - but the transformation was as striking as it was palpable. It seemed so definitive that I could not help asking him about it, and when I did, he smiled and said simply, "Uh-huh. I am." And when I asked him why, what had happened, he smiled again and said, "Aw, you wouldn't understand. But it's my whole life now. I know why I'm alive."

I remember my response. And perhaps had I responded in some other way or simply not responded at all, what was about to happen would never have happened. What I said was, "Congratulations. I'm happy for you. Really. I wish I did." And so he turned to me and said, "Seriously?" And when I answered not only in the affirmative, but the declarative, he told me a story and made me an offer, and so was hatched yet another aspect of our relationship, an aspect that is as wholly illicit as it is morally unsavoury, and one that continues to this day.

We both know it is wrong, the arrangement, the dilemma it poses, wrong in the most intimate and unholy of ways, as we both know that neither of us cares enough about the fact to do anything about it. It is a shared shame now, and it has become, like the abiding commonness of our blood, a large and integral part of what bonds us. My son supplies me with drugs, with Ecstasy.
And so the first time I ate E - or X, or EX, or XTC, or MDMA (methylenedioxymethamphetamine) - it was having given my son permission to sell it to me. I became his customer, a buyer, a reliable and steady client, the lowest link on the food chain of the multibillion-dollar commerce that proceeds unabated every day, every hour, in every large city and small town in every state in this union, in what is called by those paid to "war" against them "controlled substances".

I find it ironic. Because I cannot think of a single commodity in our country that is less controlled than such substances, nor a single "war" that is as pathetically futile, vaingloriously chimeric and long-ago-lost as is this one. Wrestle as you will, you cannot reform or arrest human appetite. Ecstasy is as illegal as heroin. This is just the sort of run-amok governmental lunacy guaranteed to ensure that those like myself - and more importantly, our children - will write off that same government and those who enforce its drug laws as out of touch, coercive, morally bankrupt and, yes, un-American. Because America is not, or did not used to be, about throwing 16-year-old kids in jail for - all in the spirit of free-market capitalism and entrepreneurial enterprise - home-growing a little cannabis, even as the rest of us chain-smoke our Camels, sip our Absoluts with a twist, and devour our Prozac.

Visit a rehab centre some time. You will learn two things inside that first hour. One, that there are people in this world who are more susceptible to addiction than others; there always have been, always will be, addicts. And two, that the "gateway" argument is as simplistic as it is spurious. We are not losing our kids to drugs. We have lost our kids because we haven't the time, inclination, strength of character or political will to do the right thing in their name: to eliminate the black market that so mercilessly exploits them - and the runaway violence it spawns - by legalising, taxing and regulating the trade.
I pretend to no monopoly of wisdom on the subject. But I know something of Ecstasy. And what I know I know because I have eaten and continue to eat so much of it. I am an experienced eater of E and it is a fact of which I am neither proud nor mortified.

So here, in a word, a most sober, solemn, even a sombre word, is what I know: yum. Ecstasy is delicious. Or, put it another way, Ecstasy is delicious and I recommend highly, loudly and long that everyone whose health does not contraindicate or preclude its ingestion, ought to ingest it. Go out, I admonish you, all of you, hit the streets or collar that neighbourhood kid, drum up a contact, do a deal, repair thyselves home, soften the lights, put on some music - the best stuff - pour yourself a pitcher of ice water, perhaps two, keep a tin of Altoids handy, as well as a tube of Vicks inhalant and a couple of packs of mineral ice, make yourself comfortable, lie back and... swallow. An hour from now, perhaps less, you are going to experience something that shall forever change such time as remains to you on this earth. You are going to experience something that is, every second of it, delicious - deliciously, positively, unprecedentedly w-o-n-d-e-r-f-u-l.

It is your self-anointing, and I envy you that first time. So relish it, savour it, languish it, treasure it, that sacred four hours. You have just swallowed wonder, ambrosia and mead, you have partaken of lustre and grace. Just make certain that before you swallow you know that the pill is authentic, and not some rip-off. Do that, and the rest is a piece of cake, a piece of cake that is like no other you have ever tasted. Think of the best day of your life, or recall the sweetest, purest, most special thing along the way - person, place, moment, experience, accomplishment. Now multiply that tenfold. That does not begin to describe how impossibly delicious E is.

I am not unaware of how redolent this is of Timothy Leary's often loopy proselytising for LSD, and its "quasi-religious" associations, but this has nothing to do with that. Ecstasy is a clarifier. It enables one to see, feel and think, if not more deeply, then certainly more clearly. The high subsides, but the lucidity lingers. In that sense, not to mention in its chemical composition, it is quite the opposite of LSD.

Ecstasy is a clarifier, but it is a personal clarifier. It is not - despite all the peace/love/unity/respect hype surrounding it - a universal one. Its lessons may be universal in their implications, but they are intended to be applied to oneself. Which is not to say that the drug does not have its social dimensions or that one ought not to do E in the company of others. Indeed I would not find it congenial to do, nor have I ever done it, alone. (As close as I ever came was on an unpeopled, night-time sidestreet in London, and it was raining, and it was one of the memorable experiences of my life - neon, glistening, menthol, veneered in layer after thickening layer of thick honey. Lovely streets, London, and lovely, so lovely, its rain.)
But better by far to do it with those one loves, and best of all with one's one-and-only lover. And if what one takes in the broadest sense is all about human connection and empathy - E has proven highly effective in certain kinds of couples therapy - it is all the more about connecting with and feeling empathy for oneself. It is, contrary to its image as the current drug of choice among teenagers and the prevalence of its use at their "raves", the most intimate of drugs.

I did it my first time with the woman who saved me. It was her first time as well. We were, as zero hour approached, visibly apprehensive, an attitude, I think, that is only sane. We had cleared our schedules, switched off the phones, and we were in her home, just the two of us, in our bathrobes, in the living room, on the couch. Van was on the stereo, Astral Weeks, Moondance, Common One, The Best of: Volume One. A fire was roaring in the fireplace. The lamp was turned down low. It was mid-evening, and we had ready, as my son had taken care to instruct us, our pair of tumblers and pitchers of iced-down spring water. E increases body temperature and heart rate and elevates blood pressure, so drinking water - not beer, not liquor - is pro forma as one rolls along. And one wishes to drink, because E causes dehydration - one of its most immediate side-effects is a dry mouth. With much mutually nervous, serio-comic, ceremonial chit-chat, then, we each popped our pill, swallowed, waited, and - nothing.

We locked eyes. We still were alive. I think we were only half-amazed. I know we were relieved. Van was still belting as only Van can. It takes a while for Ecstasy to kick in - and then the world around you billows open like an eye and you are lifted and taken - coronaed, crowned, spangled and lantern-lit, your smiling face flambeaued as by a thousand chandeliers.
One of the most discernible early effects - it happened that first time, though often it does not - is what I have heard described as "fluttery" vision. This phenomenon is as close to an hallucinatory quality as E produces, and it is so mild - and weirdly pleasant - that to label it as such is frankly inaccurate. When it happened to us, we looked at one another, smiled, and virtually in unison commented on it. Cool. Images remain intact, they just move a little, as if jagged were a verb, within the texture of their own lines. These striations are very unthreatening, and very, well, cool. And then suddenly Van was singing waaaaay over there, and then waaaaay inside the very pith of my brain, yet way outside and all around as well. And that also was. Cool.

What happened next was that everything and all at once, while clearly remaining itself, was transfigured, transmogrified, a new self, a simultaneously deeper and higher, older and newer self - smoother and softer and rounder. The world was suddenly guilt- and worry- and wrinkle-free, palpably, beautifully buoyant - visually, texturally, aurally - transcendently right and glorious and divine. Whatever beautiful thing one can imagine, it is that much more beautiful on E. And so we looked at one another and felt one another, with our fingers and our lips and our tongues, indeed with the whole of our new-found faces, this plumbing of the new map of our bodies - new softer hair, new smoother flesh, new pinker, fresher, more fragrant, shimmering, altogether fluffier genitalia - and we smelled and tasted one another - she smelled of burst peaches and tasted as the recent salts of pearls - because sense of smell and taste is no less honed and heightened than the other senses.

We bathed in one another, each of our five senses, 10 in all, because that commingling is what had taken place, its rhapsody, and humanity, and caress. And we looked to one another exactly as we felt and smelled and tasted: rapturous, heavenly, transcendent, numinous, aglow. She a resplendent, bejewelled goddess, I a radiant god. Later, I got up, walked to the bathroom - walking on E is no more difficult than walking on water or floating on air - and looked in the mirror. I wanted to see what I looked like - I am just vain enough that the thought occurred to me even in the midst of the roll - though I already had seen reflected in my lover's eyes that I looked sufficiently, there is no other word, gorgeous. (If I looked half as gorgeous as she did to me I reckoned I was in for a treat.) And the person I saw looking back at me was gorgeous, but gorgeous in a way that floored almost as much as it thrilled me.

Here, now, as I stared grinning in astonishment, I looked 28. And not some 50-year-old version of myself at 28, but me the way I was back then. I moved closer, peered harder. I could scarcely believe it. I had recaptured myself. Dorian Gray. Fountain of Youth. Spontaneous regeneration. Somehow I had been restored, and I felt what I can only describe as an all-consuming nostalgia for the present.
And then, after helping each other off with our bathrobes, our old, nubby, cotton-twill bathrobes - suddenly spun of the finest cashmere and angelica, these clouds of talcum and down - we embraced, and kissed, and she whispered in my ear: "We've found fucking gold."
It distinctly was not an out-of-the-body experience, as it was not a mind-expanding one. It distinctly was a further-into-the-body experience, and a mind- clarifying one. An excavation of the self. An exhumation of the other.

And so we did. For four hours we dug, sinking further into each other, as likewise into ourselves, and eventually, after four hours of mutually synchronised digging, that felt exactly like 40 minutes, we found it. Only it wasn't gold. It was something far better. It was sex, the very EX in sex- and the climb and climax of sex- as revelation. And as soul.
So maybe Ecstasy does have something to do with religion, although the word spirit seems to me a more felicitous fit, because the peace one feels, and the insights one gains - epiphanies may be a better word - are no less than oceanic. You know, that you contain oceans and that those oceans are filled with beauty and grace and light and love and that they are yours to share as it may please and del

If you are feeling very sick and would like help purging, click on the link below.

[ www.clubthings.com ]

Because recreational drugs are so stigmatized in our society, taking drugs becomes a lifestyle rather then just a chemical. You don't just take drugs, you BECOME what they embody.

i am there!

rip'r

what will happen when my new roommate will move in about 2 weeks

i just noticed that the poster in the background of this picture is for "Spirited Away". its an amazing film! one of my favorites, i actually was thinking of buying this exact poster

Not many people are aware of this, but ketamine is still used as an anaesthetic on humans in hospitals around the world. Of course they can't call it ketamine, they have to brand it, so they call it KETALAR.

"Description
KETALAR (ketamine hydrochloride) (CAS number 1867-66-9) is a non-barbiturate anaesthetic chemically designated dl-2-(o-chloro-phenyl)-2-(methylamino) cyclohexanone hydrochloride. Ketamine is a racemic mixture. The molecular weight is 274.2 and the empirical formula is C13H16ClNO.HCl."

This is where it gets really funny:

"Psychological

TREATMENT-EMERGENT ADVERSE REACTIONS HAVE OCCURRED IN APPROXIMATELY 12% OF PATIENTS. THE PSYCHOLOGICAL MANIFESTATIONS VARY IN SEVERITY BETWEEN PLEASANT DREAM-LIKE STATES, VIVID IMAGERY, HALLUCINATIONS AND DELIRIUM. IN SOME CASES, THESE STATES HAVE BEEN ACCOMPANIED BY CONFUSION, EXCITEMENT AND IRRATIONAL BEHAVIOUR WHICH A FEW PATIENTS RECALL AS AN UNPLEASANT EXPERIENCE. THE DURATION ORDINARILY LASTS NO MORE THAN A FEW HOURS; IN A FEW CASES, HOWEVER, RECURRENCES HAVE TAKEN PLACE UP TO 24 HOURS POST-OPERATIVELY. NO RESIDUAL PSYCHOLOGICAL EFFECTS ARE KNOWN TO HAVE RESULTED FROM USE OF KETALAR.

THE INCIDENCE OF THESE TREATMENT-EMERGENT ADVERSE EVENTS IS LEAST IN THE YOUNG (15 YEARS OF AGE OR LESS) AND ELDERLY (OVER 65 YEARS OF AGE) PATIENT. ALSO THEY ARE LESS FREQUENT WHEN THE DRUG IS GIVEN INTRAMUSCULARLY. THESE REACTIONS MAY BE REDUCED IF VERBAL, TACTILE AND VISUAL STIMULATION OF THE PATIENT IS MINIMISED DURING THE RECOVERY PERIOD. THIS DOES NOT PRECLUDE THE MONITORING OF VITAL SIGNS. IN ADDITION, THE USE OF A SMALL HYPNOTIC DOSE OF A SHORT-ACTING OR ULTRA-SHORT-ACTING BARBITURATE MAY BE REQUIRED TO TERMINATE A SEVERE TREATMENT-EMERGENT ADVERSE REACTION. THE INCIDENCE OF EMERGENCE REACTIONS IS REDUCED AS EXPERIENCE WITH THE DRUG IS GAINED. WHEN KETALAR IS USED ON AN OUT-PATIENT BASIS, THE PATIENT SHOULD NOT BE RELEASED UNTIL RECOVERY OF ANAESTHESIA IS COMPLETE AND SHOULD BE ACCOMPANIED BY A RESPONSIBLE ADULT AT DISCHARGE."

So not only do they give you ketamine, but they give you other drugs (barbiturates) just so you won't enjoy the effects!

-quotes are taken from "Information for Health Proffesionals - Data Sheet"
[ www.medsafe.govt.nz ]

BAHAHA...pure evil!

bump

happy birthday Pat!

Have a verry merry unbirthday! To me? To you! Its great to drink to someone, and I guess that you will do! a very merry unbirthday, to youuuu!!!

pissing in toilets is sooo passe

haha that would be awesome

Bowling for World Trade Centers!

if you can knock down all 5 with only one hijacked plane, then its a strike

happy birthday!

ian likes fat women with big boobs!

we should have a RAVEWAVE reality TV show. follow ravewavers around with cameras, edit all the boring stuff out, then put it on prime time. it would be kinda like e-drama except it would be REALITY TV drama

trance in da pants!

vince, will you be playing psytrance or tek? cuz i heard one of your psytrance mixes and if its anything like that, i know where i will be from 7-9am

Yeah, I mean last time I was in a strip club I didn't even notice the strippers. I was just enjoying my beer when all of a sudden someone pointed out to me that there were naked coked-up girls dancing around on stage. And I was like, "waaait a minute your right! and here i thought i was just in any other bar or coffee shop"

so in conclusion, strip clubs ARE just like any other bar or coffee shop, cuz what difference do naked coked-up girls really make anyways?

does anybody know WHY they want everybody to dress in white? is this supposed to be bal en blanc?

i will probably not be in montreal during this time *tear* but I will raise a shot of tequila on this day in celebration of your birthday!

Its very important to distinguish between correlation and causality. I have no doubt whatsoever that if you compare a drug-using group to a control group, the drug-using group will have a higher incidence of depression. So yes, drug use and depression are correlated. But does that prove that drug use causes depression? Not neccesarily.

Let's take a hypothetical example: body piercings and teenage sex. If you compare teenage girls that have piercings to those who don't, you'll probably find that those who have piercings have sex at an earlier age than those who don't. So, once again, body piercings and teenage sex are correlated. But is it the piercing that is CAUSING the girl to have sex? Of course not.

Getting back to the issue of drug use and depression, there are a number of hypothetical explanations for why they are correlated:

1. Drugs affect the brain chemistry in such a way that raises the risk of depression. Hence, drug use cause depression.

2. People who are depressed are more likely to do whatever it takes to feel better, including taking drugs. Hence, depression causes drug use.

3. Since drug use is not accepted by most of society, most drug users tend to be noncomformists to various degrees. Noncomformists are shunned by society, thus resulting in depression. Hence, being a noncomformist causes BOTH drug use AND depression.

What I am trying to express here is that just because two variables (in this case, drug use and depression) co-relate does not indicate which variable causes the other, or whether both are a result of a third variable. In order to establish if drug use actually causes depression, we have to understand the process by which drugs affect the brain and whether these changes are likely to lead in depression.

Speaking of which, this is very strong evidence that MDMA in particular can cause depression when it is abused. That is because MDMA causes the release of large amounts of serontonin, and it takes the brain a long time to produce more serontonin. Since serontonin is the chemical which regulates happiness, and since too much MDMA can result in lower than normal levels of serontonin in the brain (in addition to the downgrade of serontonin receptors), there is ample reason to beleive too much MDMA can cause depression. (If you want to learn more about this, check out the slideshow at [ www.dancesafe.org ]

However MDMA users can take simple steps to reduce the risk of depression:

1. Wait a reasonable period of time (2-6 weeks) between MDMA doses to allow your brain to recover its serontonin levels, and

2. Supplement your diet with 5-htp (available in pharmacies and health food stores) which is the chemical precursor to serontonin. In other words, taking 5-htp allows your brain to recover to its normal level of serontonin much faster after taking MDMA.

its a good thing they'll be ambulances, cuz we all know how slippery the floors of raves can be! quite dangerious imo

booyah

when u buy a label, in addition to the piece of clothing you are paying for the lifestyle image associated with the brand

i think vegetarianism can be described as an aversion to eating that which is similar in various degress to the eater. you can take it to various degrees:

- eating everything including humans of one's own tribe

- eating humans that belong to other tribes

- not eating humans but eating all other animals

- not eating mammals but eating birds and/or fish

- not eating animal life, but eating plant life

- not eating any form of life

Obviously the first two options are illegal and the last option results in death. So people choose among the remaining options.

what's god spelled backwards? DOG!!