Resolution #14: Don't Die.

So I've always been kind of confused by the tradition of New Year's resolutions. I get that it's a new year, and maybe you want to do something differently, but why do it only once a year? And why don't we do it on our birthdays, since it's another year of your existence, or on Christmas, because Jesus died for your sins and you're probably correcting your sins with your resolutions anyway. (Dieting falls into this category, because gluttony is a sin. Yes, that means that all fat people are going to hell. Jesus hates fat people.)

I thought about making New Year's resolutions, but I didn't. I didn't make any resolutions because I know that I'll forget them in a couple months and continue doing things like I always do. This is the problem with society. We don't collectively remember things. People were like, "Oh my god, the Holocaust was terrible because the Nazis hated the Jews. We should all be nice to each other, so things like the Holocaust don't happen," then they forgot, and now people hate each other and there're genocides in Africa and people killing each other in the Middle East and everyone is acting like a bunch of d-bags. Everyone needs to chill out and love other people more. The United Nations should mandate that everyone needs to New Year's resolve to chill out and love people more so the problem people wouldn't listen to them and things wouldn't change very much.

I kind of vaguely remember being afraid of the world collapsing upon itself nine years ago, when we were all afraid that the entire technological infrastructure of the world would fall apart because none of it was prepared to increment 1999 to 2000. I was sitting in California, watching Dick Clark and his fake tan talk about how great Christina Aguilera is, genuinely afraid that the TV might blink out and I would be left in a technological void. Even though it was past midnight in pretty much every other time zone in the world, and the transition had gone without problems. People are stupid.

I watched Bucket List today, which is a pretty mediocre movie, but the premise is good. This doesn't have anything to do with the movie, but rather a question that Jack Nicholson's character asked. In the context of the Buddhist concept of reincarnation, he asked (something along the lines of), "What does a snail have to do to move up after it dies?" I think that Buddhism is a pretty good religion in terms of not causing any wars and having people be generally pretty nice to each other, but Jack Nicholson had a point. I don't think that a snail can lead a good or bad life. The same thing goes for most creatures that have no responsibility besides themselves. Snails don't have kids to feed. Snails don't have vices. They can't be drunks and beat up their wives, nor can they cure cancer or establish humanitarian institutes or help little old lady snails cross the street (partly because there's no way for a snail to effectively help another snail, but mostly because snails are hermaphrodites).

On another note, I don't understand the grammatical structure of New Year's Day. Am I wrong to think that it should be New Year Day? It's not like Veterans' Day, where it's a day for veterans (and thusly in their possession). It's more like Arbor Day, where but we're celebrating a new year instead of trees. Maybe it follows from New Year's Eve, which is the eve of the new year, which actually makes sense. Maybe I'm just blowing hot air. Or typing hot words. But by the same logic, Christmas day would become Christmas' day, because it's the day of Christmas.

Resolution #31: Stop nitpicking.

Stuff Like That

I don't have anything in particular to inspire this post. I just kind of feel like writing, and it's been a while since I've written anything. So here goes.

I really like pork ribs. They're amazing. They don't taste particularly good on their own, but with the proper seasoning and barbeque sauce and such, cooked for a long time, they end up being amazing. Ribs are also entertaining to eat, because there's a bone in the middle that you have to eat around. It requires skill and concentration to eat a rib efficiently. If you're not skillful, you end up with barbeque sauce on your face and rib on the bone; if you've been blessed with rib-eating talent, you can strip the bone clean in one swift stroke, leaving your face and hands free of rib residue.

Alliterated names are ridiculous. Peter Parker, Bruce Banner, Michael Madsen and Tony the Tiger come to mind. I don't know why they're so funny, but I can't seem to take them seriously. Sometimes they're fun to say, but that shouldn't give parents a reason to give their children a name fit for a dime novel character.

I love snickerdoodles. Snickerdoodles are amazing cookies. They're light and airy, and sugary and buttery, and cinnamon-y and delicious. The cinnamon sugar on the outside is the best part. Especially when all the cinnamon and sugar gets pushed towards the edges when the cookie expands when you're baking it. Yum.

Things come in sets of three too often. I believe that there should be more sets of other numbers. It could be the Father, Son and Holy Ghost and Ricardo the Luchador. Or lions, tigers, bears, llamas and killer whales--Oh my! Fork, knife, spoon and cowbell. Think about it.

"Easy as pie" is a terrible saying. Pie is not easy. It is delicious. There is no greater good than pie, as far as I'm concerned. However, it is not easy. The crust must be just right, and to achieve the proper flakiness and crispness and sweetness and amazingness and deliciousness and awesomeness and pieness, much effort and care is required. That doesn't even begin to describe the arduous process of making the filling. My proposed amendment to this statement would be, "Easy as sitting." Sitting is pretty easy. I don't think I know anyone who has a hard time sitting.

I've got some statements that I'm gonna throw out there that I don't really want to elaborate on, but want to write down. Humans are ridiculously strange animals. Feet are weird looking. Old cars are way cooler looking that new cars. Humans need to develop the ability to levitate. Evolution happens too slowly. People are generally too conservative. Fear paralyzes the world. Mustard is an ugly color. There is a lot of stuff in the world. Infinity is frustrating. So is finity (that's the opposite of infinity).

Poop is funny.

Knuckles and Puppies

Knuckles is a totally ridiculous word. I thought of that while I was eating lunch today. I don't even know why I think it's so strange. Maybe it's the two K's or the fact that knuckles are such weird looking body parts, but I really don't know. Just think about it a little bit, and I think you'll understand what I'm talking about. You just can't think about knuckles without thinking how strange they are. Also, if I'm not crazy, I think the sidekick in the Sonic the Hedgehog video game was called Knuckles. Random factoid for you. Learn something new every day. Or maybe that's not new.

While we're talking about puppies, (which we weren't before, but now that we actually are,) puppies cheat at life. Pretty much all babies of any species are way cuter than the adult versions. Anyway, puppies are particularly cuter than dogs (even though dogs can be pretty damn adorable), and I think it's unfair. No reasonable person is going to refuse a puppy. Darwinist theory dictates that that only the fittest members of a species should survive to procreate, but puppies don't care about Darwin. They all survive because they're all so damn cute and people adopt them and make sure they survive. However, humans have outsmarted the puppies, because humans are cruel and sadistic being that don't mind cutting off other animals' genitalia. This is how the world was saved from being conquered by puppies, which are actually an army of aliens that were sent here to take over the world.

But really, puppies are adorable. They have puppies from the Humane Society or something like that in the Macy's window in San Francisco, and they're really cute. If I could have anything for Christmas, it would be a few billion dollars so I would never have to work and I could buy a puppy and somebody to train it for me, and another person to clean up after it, and someone else to manage the rest of my money so I don't become poor and have to sell my puppy and fire my puppy trainer and puppy-clean-upper and crappy-money-manager.

I should convince the government that I need a bailout.

DUCK!

So my linguistics professor doesn't have very many examples, so he just reuses them. One of his four or five examples for lexical ambiguity is the sentence, "I saw her duck." It's ambiguous because duck can be a noun or a verb, and there're some other things too, but then it would get hairy and I don't really want to explain it. Anyway, I was thinking about this sentence a little bit and I couldn't figure out where the verb "duck" came from if it wasn't the animal. Then I though, "Hey, maybe there are other unexplored verb possibilities derived from other animals! I should write a blog post about this!" So now I'm writing a blog post about this.

Here's a scenario: You're walking down a side street of a large city with a couple of your friends, just after dusk, on your way to dinner. You need to cross the street to get to the restaurant, but it's directly across the street from you and there isn't a crosswalk. Because you're in a large city, the blocks are relatively long, but since there's not too much traffic, you decide it's going to be easier to jaywalk than to cross at a crosswalk like you're supposed to. As you begin to cross the street, your friend yells:

Option 1: "DEER!"
You turn around and find yourself facing a pair of bright lights, getting bigger very quickly. The lights are horrifying, yet fascinating, and you can't look away, let alone move; the lights have mesmerized you, and you're rooted to the spot. With a glorious "CRUNCH!" and an explosion of blood, bone and flesh, you disappear.

Option 2: "FROG!"
You turn around and find yourself facing a pair of bright lights, getting bigger very quickly. As they get nearer, you run a little farther across the street, only to see another set of headlights heading at you from the opposite direction. With the grace of a matador, you step out of the way of the second car, leaving mere inches between you and an untimely demise. Slowly weaving your way across traffic, two steps forward, one step back, you make it to the other side of the road.

Here's another scenario: It's fourteen and a half years in the future and we're on the brink of World War III. Iran, North Korea, Saudi Arabia, Lebanon, Tahiti, Lesotho and Djibouti all have nuclear capabilities now, and they all hate the US for letting China colonize the moon. One day, as you're hoverboarding along the sidefloats (since nobody walks on sidewalks anymore), you hear the air raid sirens go off. You start to head towards the nearest subway station, but it's too late. You hear the low rumble of the ballistic missile closing in on you, and suddenly there is a bright flash of white. Someone yells. "COCKROACH!!" and you continue about your business, miraculously surviving the radioactivity in the fallout.

Here's another scenario: You're a floor trader at the NYSE and the bottom is falling out of the economy. You hear someone yell, "CHIPMUNK!" Suddenly, you start scrambling around like a madman, selling all the stock you can and stuffing your cheeks full of cash for safekeeping. You can't trust the banks these days.

Here's one last scenario (for now, at least): It's a balmy 73 degrees in June in Martha's Vineyard, and you're standing under a white tent just off the beach in your Sunday best. You're at a wedding reception. There's booze flowing freely, happy people surrounding you. Men are wearing their seersucker suits and pastel shirts and some of the women are wearing large straw hats with their silky, summery sun dresses and $400 heels. The band announces that they're going to start their last set; the party's slowing down. While you're embarrassing yourself on the dance floor, the frontman of the band walks up to the microphone and says, "Folks, it's about that time now. RABBIT!" In a flurry of hormones and champagne, the dance floor empties as couples make their ways to their cars and happy endings to a glorious evening of revelry.

If you've got other animal suggestions (and definitions), I'd love to hear them. That's all for now. Rabbit.

Acronyms

Acronyms are lots of fun. I'm not going to come up with any right now, but I'm just saying that they're fun. There should be more acronyms for innocuous things that end up being dirty words. Like that movie, Accepted, where he invents a school (South Harmon Institute of Technology) that acronyms to S.H.I.T. I think that's funny. And I just made acronym into a verb.

People are taking a lot of liberties with language. People are inventing words left and right. I do it too, but I think it's okay when I do it because they're usually useful words. The Internet was a terrible invention, because now stupid people have a way to share their stupidity with the rest of the world. There should be a Internet Test to make sure that people are intelligent enough to use the Internet. It'd be kind of like getting a Driver's License but it'd be for the Internet.

I probably shouldn't have written this post because I don't have anything else to write now. Lame. But I do think that I could get an Internet License.

I Have Nothing To Say

I'm writing because I feel like writing, but I have nothing to write about. I think this is probably just going to end up being a couple paragraphs without any substance, but I don't really care.

I don't really know what I want to write about right now. I just went to my blog and was like, "Hey, I think I should write something," so now I'm writing a blog post. It's pretty bad so far. That's the problem with my writing. It's stylistically pretty good, and it's usually easy to read and somewhat amusing, but it never has any substance. Or usually doesn't have any substance, because sometimes it actually does have substance. Anyway, I can write a lot, but for the most part it's just words and no meaning.

That's not true. Words inherently carry some sort of meaning with them. I mean meaning in the metaphorical, hit-you-with-a-ton-of-bricks sense. My writing is not like that. I wish that it were more like that, though. I think it would be cool if I could write with the same voice that I do now, but actually communicate something important with it. That would be nice.

I feel like a lot of what I write is about what I wish were the case, even though it isn't. Hypotheticals are fun and all, but they really don't do anything for me. Like I can wish that things will happen all I want to, but it probably isn't going to happen unless I put some effort into making it happen. I should make things happen instead of just writing about them. Although most of what I write about isn't actually possible, or at least very unlikely.

My hair is getting too long. When I wake up in the morning, there's this patch on the back right side of my head that sticks out, and it really bothers me. I want one of those hair-clippers that barbers use, so I can just cut my hair whenever I want to. I like having short hair.

On another note, we're nearing the holiday season. This is both good and bad. I enjoy the food and the merriment and the music and stuff, but I dislike how big a deal people make about the whole thing.

Here's part of my life philosophy: "Chill out."

If At First You Don't Succeed

So I don't know if this is going to be relevant to anything, but I'm going to write it anyway. I've been thinking about being a little more balls-out about life recently. This isn't to say that I'm walking around with my testicles hanging out of my pants, but rather that I'm going ahead and doing things instead of thinking about doing them and never getting around to it. What I've found is that when you try a lot of things, a fair number of them fail.

I hate losing. I hate failing. I hate outcomes that I am not satisfied with. Yet it seems that coming to terms with my recent results has been easier than other times. Why is this, you ask? Because I've lowered my expectations. This is probably not the best way to approach life, but when you're trying new things you can't expect everything to go your way all the time. It simply isn't possible. Or it is actually possible, but the likeliness of it is so low that it isn't possible in practical application. Anyway, I'm hoping my net yield from this will be better than all the lost opportunities that passed me by in my non-action.

So what if I fail? None of my failures have been confirmed yet, so I don't know if I'm actually a very successful individual who feels like I've failed. Whatever. If it was all for naught, should I try again? Or is it the kind of situation where you give up and change course, try more things and see what happens then? I mean, balls-out means that I should do what I want to do as long as the consequences are not too serious. Balls-out means I should go for the gold. Balls-out means that it's not important if it's hard to pick myself back up or get started, and I should just do it.

I just hope I don't end up screwing everything up for myself.

Well, How About That?

So I just realized that I got all the way through election season without writing a word about the election. I plan on keeping it that way but I just wanted to point that out. I didn't even realize it. Maybe it would've made for some interesting posts. Maybe it wouldn't. Anyway, here are some of my thoughts about politics.

Politics are stupid. I think that global society probably wouldn't run as smoothly as it does without them, but I generally don't like the idea of having a few people making big decisions about how the world works. I blame technology. Here's my explanation:

Imagine that there was no way to travel long distances in short periods of time, or communicate with people out of range of smoke signals. Yes, smoke signals. They're the longest distance form of communication I can think of that doesn't require some kind of wire or electricity or something like that. Firstly, society would be entirely different. We probably wouldn't have electricity, and life would pretty much suck, but what we wouldn't have to deal with would be elections. It would be like the middle ages, which, now that I think about it, would suck as much if not more than the current political system sucks right now. Anyway, the idea would be that we don't have to worry about international relations and dealing with other countries because that wouldn't exist. People should deal with things on a more local basis, and we shouldn't have to worry about other people's policies if they're far away from you and don't affect you.

I demand simplicity! (And I am very glad that the election is pretty much over and done with.)

Whether 'Tis Nobler...

To suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, or just suck it up and get on with your life. I'm not sure if that was a properly formed sentence, but I don't really want to figure it out. I'm sitting in the library now drinking my three-dollar chai latte and writing a blog post for the sake of not wanting to do my other work. Is it wrong for me to not like school? I mean, I've been in school for the last thirteen and some odd years. It's a pretty long time. This post really has nothing to do with Shakespeare, and hardly anything to do with being noble. But I'm writing it anyway.

I would really like to be more interested in school. I don't mean to say that I don't love college, because it's awesome. But the school part of college is not awesome. It's pretty much like this: I would like to live on a college campus and be eternally twenty years old, but not have to take classes because it would be the best of times. It would also be the worst of times, because you wouldn't do anything but have fun and you'd go broke and die of alcohol poisoning or something along those lines, but it would be a good time while it lasts.

In other news, school sucks because I have nine o'clock class. Waking up in the morning and dragging your butt to lecture is one of the worst things you can possibly have to do at nine in the morning. So I just looked up what a.m. stands for on Wikipedia because I didn't know, and I was thinking about it for a second and the only thing that I could think of relating to time with the letters a.m. was après midi, which means "afternoon" in French, but that didn't make any sense because a.m. refers to before noon. Anyway, it stands for ante meridiem, which means "before noon" in Latin. Learn something new every day.

Anyway, I need to figure out how to get interested in school again. Some people suggest taking a break, but I don't really want to stop out because I don't know what I'd do with myself and I don't really think that working would be much of a respite from school. Some people suggest a change of pace, and I agree, but I don't really know where I'm going to get a change of pace. We'll see what happens.

In the meantime, I'm going to sip on my three-dollar chai latte and write on my blog.

Grueling Pace

I have a lot of work to do. I'm not particularly keen on getting it done, but I have lots to do. If I were to be productive for an entire day, I think I would probably be able to get it all done, but I'm never productive for an entire day, much less an entire hour. What I need to do is sit down and do some work. But I'll write this post first.

A bunch of my friends have been playing Oregon Trail recently. The original Oregon Trail. Super old school. I don't really understand why they like Oregon Trail so much. I played in elementary school, but it was one of the newer versions that had proper animations and graphics and stuff like that. I think that some of their attraction to Oregon Train is the nostalgia for their childhoods.

I loved being a kid. There's pretty much no responsibility, and you just chill all the time. I worked at a summer camp this summer with a bunch of 6-12 year olds, and it was so much fun, and I'm not even a kid anymore. We just played games all day, and had popsicle breaks and went swimming and stuff. It was awesome. However, there are some things that I just don't understand about kids. Like why they find it so amusing to put beads on a string or glue sticks together. I think it's fun too, but it loses its novelty after a little while, unless you get super into it. But then it's kind of weird, because you're old and hanging out with a bunch of little kids and you're all super excited about some nonsense.

I'm going to get back to work. More later.

I Need Some Ginseng

It seems that I have been forgetting a lot of things lately. Forgetting to do things, forgetting to call people, forgetting to go places, forgetting that I already did something and no longer need to do but I do it again because I forgot that I already did it, forgetting what I want to say and why I want to say it--stuff along those lines. Anyway, it bothers me that I forget all these things. I feel like I would be a better person if I were to remember to do all the things I should be doing that I don't do, or if not a better person, at least a more satisfied one.

This morning I was late to class. This isn't atypical, but I was slightly later to class than usual. I was late to class because I had forgotten my bike and had to ride my scooter instead, which takes considerably longer than biking. In addition, I was (and still am) wearing these sandal-shoe hybrid things that are kind of like cloth clogs, which don't have anything to keep your foot in them except forward motion. This was problematic when riding a scooter, because a scooter is propelled by your foot pushing backwards, out of the sandal-shoe. I was quite worried about losing my shoe all the way to class.

I really like my shoes, though. They're comfortable, and offer most of the benefits of both sandals and shoes. They breath well (like sandals,) and keep your feet warm (like shoes). They're easy to put on, (like sandals,) and protect your toes from stubbing and chemical burns (like shoes). They're not the most stylish, but I usually don't worry too much about the stylishness of my shoes on a day-to-day basis.

However, on special occasions, shoe choice becomes a matter of life and death, or at least looking good and looking great. I totally believe that shoes are a critical part of an outfit. One example is as follows: I was at an event for the Stanford Graduate School of Business, and the founder or something of Nike (the really big, famous athletic goods company) shows up in a beautiful charcoal gray suit, looking almost dapper. What throws his outfit is the pair of black and white Nike sneakers he's wearing. Sure, he's wearing a suit that probably costs as much a used car. But it doesn't change the fact that he is wearing sneakers with a suit. Seriously, why don't you just custom order your China sweat shop to make you a pair of black leather loafers instead of your monogrammed Nike Frees.

There was something else that I wanted to write about after writing the paragraph preceding the preceding paragraph (that's two paragraphs before this--the one about benefits of shoes and sandals), but I forgot what it was in the course of writing the preceding paragraph (that's the one directly before this one). I really do need to be better at remembering things.

So there's this crazy picture of some bees (or some other flying insects that looks like bees) in front of me, but they're super magnified so they're like six inches long. That would freak me out, if there were suddenly monster bees flying around and killing people. I saw this movie on the SciFi channel once called Mosquito (quite creatively named) about giant mosquitos, and one of them violates a woman with its proboscis. It was bizarre.

I'll leave you with that thought.

My Decision to Receive Christ As My Personal Saviour

So I was biking to the library a few minutes ago and there was this guy standing in the middle of traffic (bike traffic, that is, since it's a university,) handing out little green books. Everybody was avoiding him, so I figured he was probably some religious fanatic.

Anyway, I decided that it would probably be worth a slight (meaning about 2 foot) detour from my route to procure one of these books, just to see what they're all about. I was entirely wrong, yet entirely right at the same time.

Here's a fun quote from The Book of Psalms (38:7)
For my loins are full of inflammation, and there is no soundness in my flesh.

This isn't true, by the way. My loins are quite normal and my flesh is mostly sound. I just thought it was a funny quote.

Back to the point, though, I decided that the back flap was the best part of the book. There's a line in the back to sign and date in order to affirm that you have accepted Jesus Christ as your "saviour." It says this:

My Decision to Receive Christ As My Personal Saviour
Confessing to God that I am a sinner, and believing that the Lord Jesus Christ died for my sins on the cross and was raised for my justification, I do now receive and confess Him as my personal Saviour.
_______________________________________
NAME
_______________________________________
DATE

I'm not going to sign or date this. In fact, I'm probably going to throw it into a fountain on my way to my next class. It's quite absurd to believe that anybody would change their most fundamental beliefs in response to a little green booklet. Or maybe I should leave it in a bathroom, for someone to use as toilet paper or some nice on-the-toilet reading. Or perhaps I could use it as very ineffective bludgeon, just to be sacrilegious.

Anyway, I still think that religious people are dumb.

And this is what I think of Jesus

Something I Wrote for Class

Once upon a now, a man walks through a door with a little glass display case next to it. In this display case is a sheet of paper with a bunch of words like, "Filet" and "Escarole" and "Sautéed," and numbers next to them. Just inside the door, next to a piece of mahogany furniture that resembles a lectern, stands a high school senior in her old prom dress. She asks the man, "Just one?" and he replies, "No, I'm waiting for someone."

He takes a seat in one of the several chairs by the door and waits. After some number of minutes, a woman in a white blouse walks into the frame of one of the full-wall windows in the front of the building. The man stands and opens the door; the woman walks through and kisses him on the cheek. The pair approaches the lectern and the man says, "Michaels, seven-thirty," whereupon the girl in the prom dress extracts two large leathery rectangles from the lectern and says, "If you'll please follow me," and leads them through a matrix of tables and chairs, some occupied and others empty.

The pair sits at a table in the back of the room, and the girl hands them the leather tablets and hurries away back to her post at the front. They sit near an alcove with two doors. Each has a simplistic little image of a man or a woman on it, and as they open the leather booklets, (revealing the same sheet of paper displayed outside the building,) a man goes through the appropriately labeled door, returning shortly after looking nonchalant. The man and woman scan the paper, sometimes making comments like, "The chicken sounds good," and "I wonder if I can get the gnocchi without mushrooms."

Just then, a recent college graduate approaches the table with two glasses of water and a pad of paper. He asks the couple, "Do you have any questions about the menu tonight?" and the man replies, "No, we're quite alright. I think we'll order now," and he turns to the woman across from him and adds, "if that's alright?"

The woman nods and tells the younger man that she'll have some items on the menu, then the man says he'll have some other items on the menu, then adds that they'd like a bottle of a kind of obscure French terminology. The man repeats everything they said and walks away, and the couple falls into the typical small talk about each other's respective days and how great it is that this restaurant has stayed in business with the economy being so poor and such.

The meal progresses.

(This following part should be considered separate from the previous one, but it's still from the same assignment.)

The Restaurant is a strange social phenomenon. People voluntarily give up the comfort and convenience of their own homes to travel some distance (which on some occasions can be very far) in order to pay to have a meal prepared by a group of dirty, drugged-up immigrants and consumed in the company of several loud, smelly strangers. Oftentimes, the food is something that the paying party could have prepared at home without too much trouble, and it always costs more than it would if you made it yourself. Somehow, people find it pleasurable to do this--to dine next to someone eavesdropping on your private conversations, or to unintentionally and regrettably hear about the recent developments of the gentleman-sitting-next-to-you's skin disease; to ask for your Cobb salad with dressing on the side, and end up with more than just dressing on the side; to find a cockroach on the table, and wonder how many more there are in your dinner. They are ready and willing to pay exorbitant amounts of money to have lazy college students drop their dinners on the floor, to wait for the cooks to finish snorting lines off in the walk-in-refrigerator, to drink out of cups that have the previous patron's lipstick glistening on the rim.

From this point on, what I'm writing is for my own reasons that I'm not really sure about. I don't actually feel this way about restaurants. I like going out to eat. Restaurants are pretty awesome. You get (typically) good food for some amount of money that may or may not correlate with the quality of the food, but you don't have to think that hard about what you're going to eat. That's what I don't like about cooking. If I were able to think of what I want to eat just by looking at the stuff in my fridge and thinking, "Hey, I could make a killer omelette with the stuff in my fridge," I would make a killer omelette with the stuff in my fridge. However, I don't think that, and instead I think, "Wow, there's nothing in my fridge to eat. Should I eat some eggs? Nah, eggs are gross plain. I guess I'll make a PB&J..."

Which brings me to my next point. The PB&J is not really a PB&J at all, since PB&J stands for peanut butter and jelly. What most people use to make their PB&Js is jam, not jelly. Therefore, a PB&J is actually a PB&J. Score, Me 1 - Abbreviations 0. Or would it be the other way around? I like it the way where I'm ahead.

Also, why is refrigerator spelled fridge when you shorten it to fridge? It should be frige. I guess it's because it would be pronounced "frige." That's totally unacceptable, especially when you don't know at all what I meant that pronunciation to sound like. Neither do I, for that matter.

I'm taking a linguistics class, so theoretically I could write out the phonetic pronunciation with all the weird symbols, but I don't know how to make them on the keyboard, so I'm just going to be vague.

By the way, I normally don't write like the first part of this blog. That was a kind of weird experiment in an attempt to please my teacher. I'm not sure what he'll think of it, but I get the feeling that you could give him anything and he could see it any way he wanted to see it, whether it was brilliant or totally idiotic. I hope mine isn't actually idiotic, and he thinks that it's brilliant even if it isn't.

Other than that, I think I should probably go work on this class some more, since what I've done for it is really insubstantial. Whatever. I like it.

Nothing In Particular

After a long period of activities that don't include writing, I'm going to attempt a new post with the hopes that it doesn't end up being too boring. It's been quite a while, if you haven't noticed, so forgive me if it's a little off. Anyway I don't have anything in particular in mind as I begin writing this, so I'm just going to ramble a little bit. I hope you don't mind.

This post comes as summer begins to come to a close. I'm not sure when the transition from summer vacation to back-to-school began, but I feel like it's here already. It's just arrived without me realizing it. Maybe it's like when you go to the bathroom at a restaurant, and when you get back, your food is already at the table. Or when you're driving to (or from) somewhere you're really familiar with, then you just go into autopilot. Before you realize it, you've already arrived at wherever you were going without consciously getting there.

On things that appear without you knowing how they got there, I recently found a very irregular shaped bruise on my thigh. I spent a good deal of time contemplating where it came from, (since I have nothing better to do in the summer,) and finally realized that it's where my keys sit in my jeans pocket. Although I deduced the probable cause of my bruise, I still have no idea how I bashed my keys into my leg hard enough to sustain a bruise. It's rather infuriating. The bruise itself is kind of strange because it's empty in the middle. It looks kind of like the Zelda triangle thing, if you know what I'm talking about.

I'd like to put it on the record that I have never played Zelda or Final Fantasy or World of Warcraft, and that I am, in fact, not what most people would consider a "gamer." My one video game vice would be Pokémon. Yes, I know the keyboard shortcut for the accent over the é, but that's only because I took French in high school and had to type some assignments. I'm using it now to have correct spelling. I thoroughly enjoyed Pokémon when I was nine, and I thoroughly enjoy it now. I think I mentioned this in another post.

This morning, as I huddled in bed in a state of semi-consciousness, I realized what a technological marvel the analogue clock is. They seem immensely complicated. I guess that it's just working out a bunch of gear ratios, but there're three hands to deal with and they all rotate from the same place at different rates. It's crazy. Or maybe it's just crazy when you're half asleep.

I'd really like to be a musical virtuoso. I'm just gonna throw that out there without an explanation or commentary. Think of it as a fun fact about the author.

I don't remember when the last time I wrote one of these posts was. It's been at least two and a half months, because I know that I haven't written one since before I started my summer job, and that was the last full week of June. Yeesh. I'm slacking too much. I don't even know what I've been doing with my time. I usually wrote on this blog when I had time to waste during the school year. I know I had tons of time to waste this summer, but this is the first time I've written anything. Weird, huh?

Anyway, I'm about done now, so I'll leave it at that. Happy living.

I Don't Like It One Bit!

So I've come to the conclusion that my writing has severely deteriorated over the last month or so. I'm not aware of the causes of this, but I simply don't enjoy my writing as much as I did before. It lacks the same character, the same enthusiasm, the same humor that it had back in the Golden Age of my blogging career. (When you do things for brief periods of time, you can talk about brief periods as ages and eras. More on that later.) Anyway, I've chosen to write a little about how much I dislike my writing right now.

I'm not funny. I do give it a little effort, but it just doesn't come to me as easily as it did before. This idea of not being able to be funny is depressing, which makes my writing even worse. It's a downward spiral, like if I were a pigeon and some delinquent kid threw a rock at me and broke my wing mid-flight and I started falling out of the sky. At this point I'm about to hit the ground. Or maybe I'm already on the ground, and the delinquent kid saw what happened and is trying to take care of me, but I'm freaked out because I'm a pigeon and pigeons are afraid of humans because of evolutionary traits to ensure survival, so I'm hopping away because pigeons don't really walk, and I'm trying to nurse my wing back to health but I don't have medical care because I'm a bird. Anyway it's a bad situation.

Metaphors are fun, but I don't really think that they're quite the same as what I started writing. If you go back to my other posts, towards the beginning, like "A Conversation," those posts were actually good, in my humble, totally non-biased opinion. I enjoyed writing them, and I mostly enjoy reading them. For the most part, I enjoy the ideas behind them. What I no longer enjoy is the ideas behind my newer posts. I think it's because I've been writing them in situations where I'm not just writing. I'm usually listening to a lecture, or trying to pass time, or waiting for something to happen. I'm not thinking about writing. It's a problem.

This post may turn out the same way. I'm not really doing anything else, but I'm also not fully devoted to writing this right now because it's pretty late at night and I kind of want to go to sleep. However, I started writing this and I feel like I should finish it because if I stop and leave it for tomorrow I think I'm going to lose my train of thought that I kind of have going right now and it will turn out even worse than if I finish it now.

I'm typing very poorly right now. You can't tell because I'm going back and fixing all my errors as I'm going, but I'm writing pretty slowly because I'm deleting every other word to fix it. It's like if I were trying to get somewhere, but each time I could only get halfway there, then I'd never actually get there, but for most intents and purposes I'll finish because it doesn't matter if I'm still half of a half of a half of a half of a half of a half of a half of a half of a half of the way away from being done because I'll be close enough that it doesn't matter anymore. That's like one five-hundred-twelfths away from being done. Totally did that math in my head. I'm smart like that. Kind of. Not really...

So I've lost something in the past month. I'm not really sure what it is. Maybe it's the dedication. Maybe it's the inspiration. Maybe it's the ability. Maybe it's topics. Maybe it isn't actually anything and I just don't like what I'm writing for some strange reason but I'm still writing just like I did before. Who knows? I don't think that I do, but it's very possible that I do, since I've come to accept that I don't know what reality is and I don't know who I am either, in some bizarre philosophical sense. 

Philosophy does that to you. It's kind of cool, but kind of annoying. Like before, I just accepted that I am myself; that I have a body and a life and I live and the world exists and all the people around me are real and the food I eat and the feelings I experience and the things I do are real, and that they have consequences and mass and stuff like that. All the normal things that we associate with life. Now, I have no idea what's real. I'm not sure if I exist, I'm not sure if I have a body if I do exist. I'm not sure that what I perceive is real, I'm not sure if what I'm actually doing what I think I'm doing.

I mean, for practicality's sake, I accept that I'm here, that I'm typing this, that I need to go to sleep, and eat and drink, go to school, talk to people, get out of the way of projectiles moving towards me in a fashion that could do my body physical harm, etc. It would be stupid for anyone to live his or her life going about his or her business as if he or she didn't actually exist and as if he or she had abilities like Neo in The Matrix. He or she would die. Rapidly.

I'm going to go to bed. I'm not sure if it's because I'm tired or because my writing is actually improving, but this post may be slightly better than my last few. I hope you liked it too. Actually, it really doesn't matter because I haven't totally accepted that you exist. So go share your opinion elsewhere, imaginary reader.

Retrospect

So the school year is pretty much over. I'm really happy that it's almost summer. I'm also kind of bummed, but I think that I'm more happy than bummed. It's nice that there's no more school to worry about, but all of my new friends are going home and I still don't have a job. Anyway, I'm gonna be a little retrospective now.

So I've learned a lot this year. Life lessons were selling at ten on the dollar. College is like that. It's a journey of self-discovery and stuff like that. Here are a few things I discovered this year.

The plot of the first season of the Pokémon television show is an epic journey. Ash Ketchum is the hero, and he faces obstacles and enemies and hardships and stuff on the way to becoming a Pokémon Master. Watch the show and you will be amazed by all the parallels that can be drawn between Pokémon and the Odyssey. Kind of. But Pokémon is a great video game and show.

Don't bike when groggy. You will eventually get in an accident. It is inevitable. The same goes for operating heavy machinery and driving and other activities that could possibly cause serious bodily harm. This is why early morning classes are a terrible idea.

The more time you spend with people, the less you like them. While not always true, I would say that it's usually correct. This is why we all hate annoying clingy people. People who latch-on to groups without contributing anything are particularly bothersome. I encountered this most often in high school when there were more stupid and annoying people, but they are inescapable because they are everywhere.

People do really stupid stuff when they are intoxicated, but most of the time it is pretty reflective of who they are. Girls who are normally slutty get sluttier and guys who are sleazy get sleazier. People who are annoying get more annoying, and people who are intelligent get stupid. What is most amusing and interesting is when quite, restrained people go crazy and do things that you would never expect. But drunk people are generally stupid, so don't drink.

Learn from your mistakes. If you didn't study in high school and think you can't study in college, try it out. But if you fail a midterm, start studying. If you don't fail your midterms and can manage to stay with the curve without studying too much, props to you. I wouldn't study either in that situation.

Email lists are both awesome and terrible. If anyone is getting together a list for a study group or making a study guide, get on that list. While you have to put up with all the nonsense that people post that isn't a study guide, and bothering you to contribute to the study guide, nobody is going to take you off that list. Then you get a free study guide. The bad part is that you have to filter through way too many emails to find the study guide, or anything else useful.

Get out of the dorm. Unless you're really antisocial and can't make friends, you should try to find people who aren't forced to be your "friend." While people in the dorm are conveniently located, there are way more people outside your dorm for you to meet than there are inside the dorm. When drawing from a larger pool, you're more likely to find people you'll like, especially if you look in groups/organizations/clubs that you're interested in, because that means they have similar interests.

Showering barefoot is really nice. Things you have at home and don't have at college are all pretty nice. Like a full-size refrigerator. And sleeping naked. And your own room. And pets. And space. And not having to share a bathroom with lots of other people.

Nudity is underrated. It is really nice to walk around in the nude, especially when it's really hot and you don't have air-conditioning. You also get a great tan.

I don't know what reality is anymore. Crazy thought, but college will do that to you. We learn a lot through our readings and our classes and our professors, but sometimes you just have to go and live a little, and you'll uncover things you never even thought about before. 

Think.

The Day Lasts as Long as You're Awake

It was my friend's birthday last weekend and we decided that a birthday starts at midnight of your birthday, then lasts as long as you're awake after the night of your birthday. For example, your twenty-first birthday starts at midnight (12:00 am), so you hit the bars right then. You fall asleep a few hours later (let's say 4:12 am) and wake up that afternoon (3:27 pm) still drunk (with a blood alcohol concentration of about 0.2%). You continue to drink, since it is almost happy hour and you can legally drink, and after several bottles of various energy drinks mixed with alcohol, you finally pass out at 8:43 am the day after your birthday. Although an unlikely situation, your birthday would theoretically have lasted until the following morning.

I love sleeping. There are a certain number of hours every day when there are not very many interesting things to do. These hours typically range from about 12 am to about 9 am, depending on where you are. Because there are so few amusing things to do between these hours, they are ideal times to sleep, when having amusing things to do is of no concern.

I don't know why we need to sleep. I may be wrong, but I don't think that biology has even explained why we need to sleep. I mean, it gives us something to do when there isn't anything else to do, but it also is a huge waste of time. I've probably slept away more than a third of my life. That's almost seven years. I have spent seven years sleeping. If I had been doing something productive with my time, like reading or practicing music or learning how to scuba dive or something, I could probably be a really accomplished person. Stupid biology.

I actually don't have too much to say about sleep. I thought I did, but I don't. I need to start writing posts without a topic in mind as much. More next time.

The Bristol Stool Scale

Yes, that's right. I'm writing about poop. Feces. Shit. Dung. Guano. Turds. Droppings. Caca. Manure. Poo. Doodie. Crap. Number two. We all do it and I think that it's something we all should enjoy. Usually. More on that later.

Poop is produced as your body digests the nutrients it ingests. It is what you ate for dinner, after some number of hours in your digestive tract. It is usually brown, and it usually smells pretty lousy. My guess is that the reason for this foul smell is an evolutionary development to deter us from eating our poop and getting sick. Gross, but logical. Things that taste, smell or feel bad are usually bad for you. Like poop. And boiling oil. And rotten eggs. And spoilt milk. And poop mixed with rotten eggs and spoilt milk, which was then deep fried. I've never tried it but I can almost guarantee that you won't like it.

The Bristol Stool Scale is used to classify your poop into levels of density and firmness. It ranges from one to seven, one being small, hard lumps and seven being entirely liquid. The ideal range is from three to four. You can Wiki it if you really want to. There's a chart with diagrams and stuff.

A gold toilet would be pretty cool. It would not, however, be comfortable to sit on, since gold is a good conductor and it would be very cold. Therefore, a gold-plated toilet would be even better, because it looks just as good as a gold toilet and it weighs less so it's easier to install and it costs less so you could actually afford it and it wouldn't be as cold when you sat down on it. Although if you could afford a solid gold toilet I'm pretty sure you could also afford a built-in toilet seat heater or a person to sit on the toilet to keep the toilet seat warm for you.

Before you die, you should go poop somewhere with a beautiful vista in front of you. This requires being outside, and most likely without a toilet. But I can tell you from experience, it's pretty sweet. I saw a beaver once when I was taking a dump on a rafting trip. It was interesting. My suggestions would be places like the Grand Canyon or on top of a cliff somewhere. Rivers and lakes are usually nice too but you have to be far enough from the water so that you won't contaminate it with your excrement.

I enjoy reading while sitting on the toilet, but it usually results in me sitting on the toilet for a considerably longer period than what is necessary for me to take care of business. I don't know if it's because I'm a slow reader or a fast pooper, but it is truly an art to finish a piece of reading and a poo at the same time. It's a shame, it is.

By the way I hope none of this is weirding you out.  If it is, I didn't mean any harm. You can stop reading any time you please.

Spicy foods are not pleasant after digestion. Apparently capsaicin isn't digested or processed very well.

I don't know if this is true, but I have heard that girls from the age of twelve to twenty-five will spontaneously combust if they go to the bathroom by themselves in a social situation. From what I have observed, it is entirely true, because I have never seen a girl go to the bathroom by herself. I've also never heard about anybody spontaneously combusting but fear of spontaneous combustion seems like a good reason to always go to the bathroom with other girls.

I don't know if it's just me, but when I produce a particularly long turd I am proud of it. It's not something I can show off or anything, but it's a good feeling. Sometimes it merits a moment of admiration before it is flushed away.

This is getting a little weird, even for me, so I think I'm done. Happy pooping!

On Foreign Things

So I am going to study in Paris next year. Hooray! I'm excited.

I smoked a cigar last night to celebrate. Cigars make you classy, no matter what. Even if you're a woman, you are automatically more classy if you smoke a cigar. Only super classy people smoked cigars, like William Churchill and Fidel Castro and Groucho Marx and Tony Soprano, so you can be just like them if you smoke cigars. Cigarettes can also make you cool, but only if you're a beatnik or a musician or Miles Davis or some kind of artsy person who can pull of smoking cigarettes. Unlike cigars, cigarettes smell bad, which lowers their classy quotient. Both are improved by smoking them while holding a cup of an appropriately classy beverage, such a cup of port or a forty in a paper bag.

Anyway, smoking and drinking are bad habits. They are bad for your health and you will die sooner than is natural if you do either one in excess. So don't smoke and don't drink. You will be a better person, unless you're just naturally a unhealthy and bad person, in which case smoking and drinking won't do anything.

So if you'll bear with me for a moment, I'd like to talk about our perceptions of reality. I think that reality is entirely subjective. How should you know what is real when your perception of life can be so easily altered by your situation or foreign substances such as alcohol? I know I said that I dislike "What if..." situations before, but what if what we perceive as our normal lives is not what life is actually like? It's kind of bizarre and conspiracy theorist, but it's an interesting idea.

I've been feeling kind of philosophical recently. There're lots of "What if..." situations that I'd like to have answers to, but I know that there is no answer for most of them because the world doesn't work that way, and even if I had an answer I would have no way to know if it was actually correct because they're hypothetical situations that never played out. They're questions about my life that could only be answered by understanding the nature of the universe. It's pretty intense, I know.

So here's my idea of the universe. Time had a starting point. I know it's hard to imagine that time actually started some time, but I think that there probably was some time when it actually started. Anyway, from that starting point, there were many possible events that could have happened, depending on the some preexisting conditions. There're actually an infinite number of universes in a big tree kind of shape that resulted from all of these universes. It doesn't really make that much sense when I'm writing it down but it made sense when I was thinking about it.

Poop is a funny word. It's also a palindrome. 

There're Monsters Under My Bed

Not in a literal sense. Or maybe in a literal sense, but then they're invisible and silent and don't actually do anything bad and move out of the way when I put things under my bed. There're very polite, invisible, silent monsters under my bed who don't really try to scare me. Kind ninja monsters.

Anyway in a metaphorical sense, I'm not really sure what I mean. I started writing this with some kind of idea of what I meant about monsters, but I forgot what my metaphorical monsters were. So, I don't have any anymore. Or if I do, they're also polite, invisible, silent ninja monsters.

Ninjas are awesome. Except that they kill people. I would generally consider killing people to be wrong, or at least something that you shouldn't do on a regular basis. Ninjas kill people on a fairly regular basis, since most of them (I would assume) are assassins, and assassins kill people. Using the logical reasoning skills that I've learned this year, I can reason that since killing people is wrong, and ninjas kill people, killing is ninjas. It's called modus ponens or something like that.

Your parents tell you to do awful things as a child because they "build character." It's a cliché we've all seen on television and in comic strips (Calvin and Hobbes comes to mind). It's also a huge lie. You know those things that are supposed to build character? Yeah? Well they turn harmless children into jaded, sociopathic adults liable to jaywalk and commit homicides. By the way I just realized that Calvin and Hobbes were named after famous thinkers, which makes sense because Calvin and Hobbes is a surprisingly deep comic, in addition to being hilarious.

So right about now I'm not too motivated to write about philosophy. It's also pretty windy. Those two thoughts don't really have anything to do with each other. I'm kind of hungry. Yeah, it's really windy. Yeah anyway I'm kind of off topic at this point.

So the monsters under my bed are those nagging thoughts in the back of my head telling me to do work, and to do all those other things that I should probably do. They're the things I should do but don't want to do, or don't know how to do, or am afraid to do. They're my nervousness and my hesitation. And they're not under my bed. They on my pillow, whispering in my ear when I'm trying to sleep.

You have more nostrils than noses. So do I. What a novel idea.

A Brief Summary of Extracurriculars

Extracurricular activities. They are activities that you do extracurricularly--that is, in addition to your normal curricular (scholarly) activities. Common examples of extracurricular activities include participation in student government, community service, sports teams (school or club), dance and music (solo or in groups). I think that we can pretty much lump all extracurricular activities into four major categories: arts, athletics, activism and academics.

First of all, the value colleges put on extracurricular activity is overhyped. You can totally get into a good school without doing being excessively active outside of school. Yes, most of the people I meet were active in their high school communities, and yes, many of them are active in the student community now. However, a lot of them are (and were) only participating very superficially. Many people participate in extracurriculars only because they think that the colleges will like them better if they do, and not because they are truly interested in the activity. Colleges then start looking for people with more and better extracurriculars because there are so many people with extracurriculars, then the students start doing more and more extracurriculars, then the colleges raise their standards and it creates this vicious cycle. I'm not complaining because I'm already in college, but I still think it's stupid.

So back to my summary. We have four categories of extracurriculars, all of which conveniently start with the same sound and make for some nice alliteration (or whatever the proper term is). 

By the way, this being totally off topic, but I learned somewhere that when you have multiple things to list off, it sounds better when you put the shorter words (in terms of syllables) first. If I wrote "activism, academics, athletics and arts," it totally wouldn't sound as good (in your head, because you read out loud in your head most of the time). It also explains why people say, "Ladies and gentlemen" instead of "Gentlemen and ladies," which would go along with the traditional societal views of men before women. But I digress.

Once again, the four categories of extracurriculars (in order of increasing syllable length) are arts, athletics, activism and academics. If you think of all the extracurriculars you did (or are doing), you can probably lump them into one of these categories. Anything leadership-related goes into activism, since they're pretty much politics. Community service also belongs in activism, since you're advocating social change, one bowl of soup at a time. Charity and church stuff is also activism, for similar reasons. 

Athletics is super obvious. I mean, it's pretty well defined as is, and if you don't know if something qualifies as athletics or not, you've got serious problems. Of course, there are more esoteric activities like backpacking and car racing, but for simplicity's sake, these are also athletic activities. Chess players are still not athletes, no matter how much their brains are exercised. Neither are mathletes.

If you're a dancer, then you don't count as athletics. Dance goes into the art category. Yes, it may be difficult and all, but not all athletics are physically stressful either (think golf). Other arts are like music (a very noble pursuit), painting, sculpture, drawing, acting, writing, etc. Writing goes to arts (rather than academics) because I think that most people who write stuff extracurricularly are writing creatively, rather than deep philosophical discourses and meditations. If they do happen to be writing such academic material, then it should be lumped into academics.

Anybody who is participating in academic extracurriculars is dumb. Actually they're probably pretty smart, but I just think that the fact that they're doing it is dumb.

So anyway, my philosophy with extracurriculars is not to do everything you possibly can, but to chose one or two things that you actually like and be really involved in them. They don't have to be related, and they don't have to be different, but they should be interesting. It also helps if they look good on a college (or job) application.

So my message is this: Go be a productive part of society, but only if it pleases you to do so. Otherwise you can go crawl in a corner and die, and stop wasting the world's rapidly diminishing resources.

Sighs

Sighs piss me off. If you sigh around me, you can expect me to become rather irritated with you.

I don't sigh a lot. Even if I'm exasperated, I tend to express myself in ways that don't involve an exaggerated exhale. It's typically more of an explicit statement like, "God dammit!" or "GAAAAAHHHH!" I don't believe in any sort of god, by the way. I just picked up phrases involving gods from years of exposure to people who use the same (or similar) expressions.

I don't deny the existence of a greater being. I'm in this philosophy class and it turns out that about half of philosophy ends up being about the supernatural at some point. There is also a lot of completely hypothetical discussion, and some of it is really creepy. For example, whenever we talk about inherent right and wrong, the example of eating babies for fun is used as the example. I don't know if it was just the course's professor, but it really weirded me out.

Anyway, sighing is dumb. So is expressing physical expressions, such as sighs and hugs, through instant messaging, email, text messaging or other written communication. It bothers me when people type "*sigh*" or "*hug*" or "*[thing you can't do when you're far away from the other person]*" to communicate the idea that they're doing the thing that they can't really be doing. Just save it till you see the person. Jeez.

So I'm listening to You Can't Always Get What You Want right now by The Rolling Stones (which is one of the greatest bands of all time) and I think that the chorus is a pretty good maxim for life in general. 

I'm in between classes right now so I'm just wasting time. I really don't have anything particularly interesting to say right now. I feel like the quality of my writing has dropped significantly since I started writing this. I don't know why.

I enjoy thinly veiled politically incorrect innuendos. These include (but are by no means limited to) sex and drug references. I watched the first disc of the second season of Weeds (which is an excellent show) last night and in the special features there is a thing on hydroponic gardening. It's quite amusing, and possibly useful, but it includes lots of these references.

There are a lot of really good shows that not very many people see because they're on HBO or Showtime or something like that. Flight of the Conchords and Entourage are some of those shows. It's not like Flight of the Conchords couldn't air on broadcast television. I'm pretty sure it would be really popular. Entourage and Weeds probably should stay on those channels with limited viewership, because they do include "adult themes." Americans are prudes.

The US is pretty lame. It's because our Forefathers were all crazy religious people who would probably instantly orgasm if they saw a girl dressed like they do now.

I'm listening to Ray Charles now. He was a huge baller. I can't play the piano remotely as well as he can, and I can see. He also had a biopic made about him. The whole drug thing kind of sucked but he was still a killer musician.

I have no idea who writes songs anymore. I think that a lot of the time the pop stuff has absolutely nothing to do with the performing artist. I'm also pretty sure that there aren't any hugely popular writers like George Gershwin or whoever else like there was back in the day.

Rhapsody in Blue is an awesome song. I've used "awesome" in this case to mean that I am in awe whenever I hear that song because it is such an impressive composition. And when I say whenever I hear that song, I mean when I hear Rhapsody in Blue performed well. Flight of the Bumblebees is another one of those songs, but I'm more impressed by the musicianship of the performer than the composition of the song.

Many words have grossly distorted meanings in the contemporary vernacular. Awesome is one of those words. Hot and cool are others.

Southern California slang bothers me. The two slang terms I hate most are "gnarly" and "dank." Gnarly is particularly irritating when it is abbreviated to "gnar." It just sounds dumb. It is also an ugly word. Dank bothers me because the actual meaning completely opposes the implied meaning (which is good).

Acronyms are fun. I like taking a word and making an acronym for it. Usually the words are somewhat inappropriate. I'm mature like that.

Recursion is a cool idea. I like it when you stand between two mirrors and see lots and lots and lots of reflections of yourself. Theoretically there could be infinite reflections of you, but the world tends towards chaos so you probably won't ever see infinite reflections unless they come up with a completely ideal situation, which will probably never happen.

Science is based on a bunch of formulas that describe ideal situations, but the situation is pretty much never ideal. Science, therefore, is a load of feces.

Reason is overrated. I like gut instinct. I'm pretty sure that the cavemen survived bear attacks from gut instinct better than by reasoning with the bear. I'm not sure if that last sentence was grammatically correct.

Alcohol is a drug. So is nicotine. So is caffeine. People who drink alcohol say they don't do drugs but they really do. Liars. You should acknowledge the fact that you're probably doing more damage to your body by binge drinking than people tell you.

People are stupid. I'll leave you with that thought.

Woosh

Woosh is the sound that things make when they go flying over my head. Not too many things fly over my head, but when they do, that's the sound they make. Things that do fly over my head include frisbees, airplanes, and physics lectures.

I've come to the conclusion that I really don't care about electricity or magnetism. Equations that describe the charge flowing through a closed circuit don't have any practical application in my normal life. Being lectured about them is not amusing.

People are troublesome. They are troublesome because they think, and you can't know what they're thinking. The world would be a much simpler place if people could tell what other people were thinking. Omniscience would be pretty nice, in that way.

Omnipotence would be so much fun. You could do whatever you wanted. Literally. I would make a really good pie and eat it. Pie is wonderful. There are many wonderful things. Puppies are one of them. Rainbows are also nice. Sex is pretty good too. Pie and sex is a combination I have yet to try, but it's going pretty high on my list of Things To Do Once I'm Omnipotent.

Confusion can be fun. But only in extremes and when it doesn't really matter if you know what's going on. I haven't been that confused in a long time.

Performance art is underrated. I think there should be more performance artists. Like mimes. People make fun of mimes, but they're actually really awesome. They seem to congregate in large cities and tourist traps. It is rather unfortunate, because I think that I would enjoy seeing a person dancing like a robot on a side street in a small town.

Clothing is too complicated. There are lots of variations on four basic things, and people fail to see that. These four basic things are: shoes, pants, shirts and hats. There is no reason to make it more complicated than that. Dresses are long shirts. Skirts are one-legged pants. Hoodies are shirts with hats attached to them. By combining forces, these four clothing items can for the ultimate garment. The Footy Pajama (with a hood, of course).

I want a narrator for my life. An omniscient third person observer. And I want them to narrate my life in my head, so I know what's going on. It'd be even crazier if when I was doing something boring, he would launch into another dialogue like, "Meanwhile, a storm was brewing in the dormitory..."

Cut-off jeans should make a comeback. That's not just my personal opinion. That's a fact.

My Foot Is Asleep

I thought you might like to know.

In other news: Lectures are still pretty uninteresting. I'm tired. Someone just walked in the door. Pokémon are still cool. Another person just walked in the door. There are NO food or drinks allowed in this lecture hall. I am eating a granola bar. I don't have anything to drink. Beanies are funny. Potato has three vowels. I'm still hungry. Another person walked in the door. You can't walk in a door. You can walk through a doorway. Three people have walked through the doorway since I started writing this. I don't feel very creative. Short sentences are fun. I like pie.

Things There Are

There are thirty-seven tic-tacs in a container of tic-tacs. Should you care? Of course not. Why did I tell you? I don't know. I just thought you should know.

There are things I want to do that probably will never happen. Like climb Mt. Everest. And go to Antarctica. And fly (superhero-style, not in an airplane or something). And win an Oscar. And win the lottery. And be struck by lightning (which would probably suck, but would also be an awesome story to tell if I survived).

There are more people on the planet than need to be here. People who aren't doing anything with their lives or being productive or interesting should just go crawl into a cave and die. It would ease the strain on our planet's diminishing resources.

There are twenty-six letters in the alphabet and seventy-eight keys on my keyboard.

There are bugs outside. And inside for that matter, but there are more bugs outside than there are bugs inside.

There are things that I haven't talked about yet that I won't ever talk about, and I would provide examples of them here but then I would actually be talking about them and then they wouldn't be good examples anymore. What a crazy paradox.

There are too many applications on Facebook. It's almost becoming like MySpace. I hated it when I would go to somebody's MySpace page and annoying music would start playing and I had to go find where the button was to stop it but there was too much other stuff cluttering their page and I couldn't find the music player, then there would be too much stuff to load and my browser would crash, then I'd have to quit and remember not to go to that person's page anymore because it would make my browser crash, then I would stop talking to that person as much because their MySpace page was bad, then I got so fed up with Myspace that I deleted it and started using Facebook exclusively, then Facebook started reorganizing and I didn't like it when they added the news-feed and mini-feed features because it was really creepy, then they added gifts, and I was like, "Wow, Facebook is turning into MySpace," and people started tons of groups for anti-news-feed petitions and then people got used to it, then the Facebook people started adding applications that people could put on their pages and then I was like, "Wow, Facebook is totally turning into MySpace all over again, only more so," and other people were like, "Yeah dude, I totally agree," and we had a party except it wasn't a party but more like a little gathering where people stood around and talked about how Facebook was starting to resemble MySpace, except we didn't actually ever do this and now I'm pretty much just rambling on in one really, really long sentence that doesn't have too much of a point.

There are lots of words in that sentence.

There are seventeen syllables in a haiku.

There are things that I could write about that I'm not going to write about right now because I don't feel like writing anymore.

Life's a Bitch, Then You Die

Some people believe in God. Some people don't. Some people believe in the afterlife, and some people don't. Some people believe in truth, and some people don't. Some people believe that they exist, and some people don't. Some people believe that there is good and evil, and some people don't. I don't care what some people think. I believe that life's a bitch, then you die.

Yeah, maybe it's a little pessimistic. But as far as I'm concerned, that's what's going to happen. It's going to happen to everybody, including me and you and those Bible-toting, pro-life, you'll-go-to-hell-for-your-sins Christians and those crazy, dope-smoking, tree-hugging, Volkswagen-bus-driving hippies and your parents and those philosophers and cancer patients and small dogs and world leaders and your ex-girlfriend/boyfriend and the lone hermit in the woods and famous celebrities. And that's what happened to Jesus too, if he actually did exist.

Why am I writing this? I don't know. Mortality sucks. I probably wouldn't want to live forever, but living as long as you wanted to would be pretty sweet. It could be useful because you could do whatever it is you wanted to accomplish, provided you didn't die in a gruesome accident beforehand, then you die a fulfilled life, and not worry about dying unsatisfied.

This is depressing. I'm done.

On Convenience

How much of what we do is decided by how convenient it is to do at the moment you think of doing it? For example, I would probably go to the bathroom right now if I didn't have to stand up, walk to the bathroom, and pull down my pants in order to go pee. Instead, I am continuing to write about what is convenient, because it is more convenient to sit and write than get up and relive my bladder.

I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that everybody is lazy. The extent to which people are lazy is different, but I doubt that there is a single person who wouldn't be in some variation of the same conundrum as I am right now. I don't have to pee that badly, and in order to pee (in a toilet), I'd have to walk well over a hundred feet, simply to get to the bathroom. The case can be extended to other situations where peeing is not a high priority, but still a need/desire. 

For example, imagine you are in a movie theater, watching a new, thrilling, engaging movie. It seems like it's going to end soon, and you need to pee relatively badly, but not to the extent where you're going to pee in your pants. What do you do? If the movie is interesting enough, you wait it out and pee on the way out, when it's convenient. You're not disturbing the movie, the bathroom is more or less on the way out of the theater, etc. These examples are relevant only to establish that everybody is lazy and does things that are convenient.

What are things that we do only when they are convenient? As I've already mentioned, peeing (as well as pooping and other bathroom activities) are things of that nature. Another thing is eating. People eat meals at the 'proper' time because it's convenient. Yes, most people get hungry around mealtimes, but people without food also get hungry in the middle of the desert at mealtimes, but they don't eat then. Why not? It's not convenient to eat if you don't have access to food.

Communication is something people only participate in if it's convenient. If you were camping out on a mountain peak and your friend was on a nearby mountain peak, but the only way for you to communicate with him (or her) was to build a big fire and send smoke signals, my guess is that you wouldn't talk to him (or her) all that much. Conversely, if you're sitting in the same room as your friend, you'll probably have a conversation with them, simply because it's so convenient (and you like the person). 

So what is convenience? First, it is a noun. It has eleven letters; five of them are vowels, while the other six are consonants. It is closely related to 'convenient,' which is the adjective form. Other related words are 'conveniently' and 'convene' (not really, but whatever). It means that you don't have to go too far out of your way to do whatever it is that happens to be convenient. It's easy. Not a problem. Can do. All that kind of stuff. 

Where am I going with this? I don't really know. I'm guessing that you didn't just actually go looking for this blog, since that would not be the most convenient way for somebody to find it. I think it's more likely that you found a conveniently located link from another webpage to this one. You bum. You're hella lazy.

Why We Write (Part 2)

Why am I here? What does college mean to me? I know it’s supposed to educate me more, I know it’s necessary for me to get a high-paying job in the future, I know it’s something my parents want me to do. But why? It wasn’t always like that. A long time ago (not really that long ago), it wasn’t necessary to go to college, but rather most people didn’t have more than a high school education. They worked in businesses and ran companies and shops without the higher education that is so standard today. So why is there so much pressure on teenagers now to go to college, rather than a vocational school or apprenticeship or carry on the family business? What has changed so drastically in the last hundred or so years? What makes higher education not only necessary, but even the standard? Will this perpetuate in the future? Will everybody be expected to go to graduate schools, and obtain Masters and Doctorates before they can get a decent job? Or will the cycle reverse itself, and higher education will become something elitist, only for the children of the rich?

I can’t say that much historically, since I really don’t know that much about all of this. Unless I’m mistaken, at the beginning of the twentieth century, the percentage of working Americans with a college degree was significantly lower than it is today (maybe under 50%). Sometime in the course of the century, probably after the Great Depression and WWII, or maybe during Korea and Vietnam, when the draftees could get deferment by enrolling in college, higher education became more and more standard. Anyway, something changed. Standards were raised and more people began applying and going to college. Was it the same then as it is now? Was it as expected as it is now? College seems to be the new high school--just as obligatory as high school is after middle school. So what happened? Quite honestly I have no idea.

So what makes a college education necessary in modern society? I know that high school just got that much worse, and now we’re learning all the stuff they used to learn in high school in college. I’m also pretty sure that there haven’t been so many new discoveries in the last century that it requires another four years to learn them (and just the ones pertinent to your major). I don’t think that jobs or economics have changed so drastically that it requires an entirely new skills set to execute them to a satisfactory degree. Let’s see what I think about college, from my brief experiences at the prestigious university I fondly call Stanford.

College is the transition between childhood and adulthood. It’s about learning new things, not necessarily academic, and not necessarily that important, but things one should know. It’s like learning the ropes of living on your own, separated from parents, more responsible than ever before for your own choices, actions, and their results. It’s not the real world, but it’s not the mother’s nest you knew and loved for the eighteen-ish years prior. You meet new people, you learn new things, and you go about the metamorphosis from caterpillar to a functioning part of society. In our oh-so-dangerous world, it has become a necessary step to be a functioning individual, educated in the ways things work and how to go about your daily business without encountering any major pitfalls or committing any major errors. That’s totally not true, but I’m going to go with that until I come up with a better explanation for the phenomena we call higher education.

On Dorm Living

Dormitories are awesome. It’s like an apartment, but with you live with a bunch your friends and everybody’s pretty chill. And you don’t have to cook, which is kind of nice sometimes but also a major pain in the ass when the food is lousy. Also the rooms are kind of small and you have to share a bathroom with hella other people. So maybe what I want is to live in an apartment complex with a bunch of other friends where I can go somewhere and there’ll be food already made. Paying for all of this becomes an issue, but it’s okay because right now my parents are paying for it and they think it’s valuable for me. Anyway I’m generally enjoying it.

On Writing This

So I’m trying to figure out what I’m writing about. I had some decent thoughts about college educations, I think, but I’ve kind of left that path and am now wandering aimlessly through the musings of my nineteen year old brain. Where is this leading me? I’m looking for something that I can write a significant amount, but it has to be focused on a relatively narrow aspect of it. Ideally it’s going to be something I’m really interested in and passionate about, and something that’s fun to research, or if it’s not fun, at least easy to research.

The thought that just popped into my head would be my writing process as an example of the epic journey. It sounds pretty cheesy, and I must admit, I don’t think it would fly, but I feel like I could probably get a reasonable amount of work done on it. Passing over the threshold and overcoming obstacles seems pretty typical of my writing process. On epic journeys, I feel like there could be a strong argument made for the Pokémon games as an epic journey. Ash has somewhat comparable experiences to Odysseus, faced with hardships and such.

What am I writing about? Just for me to write it, it has to be not a totally dry subject. I’m not going to write about body image or the political ramifications of homosexuality or something that has been thoroughly explored. I want something cool. Something fun. Something that isn’t what you expect. I want to write about something that doesn’t strike you (or me) as something academic. It should come off as almost spontaneous, but incorporate academic research to help its case. That part sucks. I could totally write about why research sucks, or why PWR is a stupid idea, but it would not work. Any argument I would come up with that would be super subjective, and thus be invalid. I could write about writing, but what aspect of that is hard for me to come up with. There’s just so much to write about. Damn.

On Writing on Writing

How does one come up with something to write about writing? There are so many aspects. I had the entire argument on why we write. I like that. But how do I make fifteen pages out of it? And what do you research? I could write about argumentative writing as a form of creative writing, and structuring an argument as another form of fiction. I could write about fiction as argumentative writing, arguing for the validity of alternate realities, or moral lessons. I could write about something totally unrelated that I haven’t thought of yet. We’ll see what happens.

Why We Write

I’m writing this because right now I don’t know what else to write about. A lot of the time I write because I feel particularly inspired, other times I write because I don’t feel particularly inspired at all, and I just need to waste some time. Sometimes I only write because it needs to get done. But why do we really write? How can I answer this? Let’s explore.

People write because it’s a really good way to share ideas. With the information age, it is ridiculously easy to share information, over the internet, emailing, blogging, Facebooking, IMing or whatever else they may do. To a very large extent, it is all just more junk clogging the information highway, with my own blog posts included in that aggregation of inane musings of the empowered people. So maybe people write because they feel entitled to share their ideas. Maybe people think other people care about what they have to say. Are they right? Who knows. Not me, for sure, but I enjoy logging my thoughts for posterity, whether or not other people read them.

Fiction is not exactly what you find on the internet. It’s not to share the most recent restaurant that you tried or muse about the awesomeness we call carpeting, but something else, something less concrete. It’s about telling a story, whatever that may mean. Fiction is our alternative to reality. What we can’t have, but what we wish we had. If I was writing a fiction piece about my life, it would not include writing essays, but in a sense, this is an essay.

How do I justify what I write as not being argumentative when I have a pretty definite purpose? I guess I don’t see my writing as being constrained to the forms of typical academic writing. Papers that I read in the course of school and homework and research seem to be pretty dry. Most of the time they don’t have too much voice. They sound like they’re trying to educate you, to force you to see the point they want to make. I write, but without a very definite argument. I have a question, and I explore the journey towards the answer, but for myself, and if the reader catches on to my train of thought, they can join my journey towards some minor step closer to enlightenment (or perhaps become slightly stupider and more confused.)

Can I write something that explores a question with no real direction? I feel like I need a concrete place to jump off of, and that is what I lack as of now. What can I do to find a subject? I know I have to be writing about something that I am very much interested in to be able to conduct any sort of research without wanting to kill myself. Still, just finding that subject is very, very, very difficult. Why must I not be able to think of something that I can write a lot about? It needs to be a relatively simple subject, otherwise I will get lost in the depths of the wilderness that could otherwise be described as other ideas. Simple subjects that are interesting. Hummmmm I’m having problems already. I will come back to that.

Writing comes easily to me. I don’t have problems logging my thoughts, but only forming the thoughts in the first place. Somehow I have a command of the English language without having much of a sense for forming ideas with it. Kind of sucks sometimes. Now I just need to figure out what I want to write about. More later.

You're Not The Boss Of Me!

Are we fated to make the decisions we do? Or do we actually have some sort of free-will? Is there a higher being that predetermines the course of our lives and we just haven't realized it? Even though we can never know the answers to these questions, I will discuss them with myself in a textual form to be recorded on the interweb. Here goes.

Suppose that we are fated to make all of our decisions, with no real choice involved. Suppose that I was fated to type this blog, and that you were fated to read it. Suppose that all the movements we make in our daily lives were mapped out for us beforehand, and we just didn't know it. How are we to tell that this is not the case? We find ourselves contemplating difficult decisions--whether or not to brush our teeth, how long to wait before starting our work, whether or not to call that person, how much you tell your parents about your weekend--but how do we know whether what we decide was not predetermined before hand? How can we know that our decision has not already been made, and that our contemplations are just a part of  the process?

Maybe free-will exists. Maybe it was my own choice to write this blog at this point in time rather than write my paper. Perhaps you were going to meet somebody but instead you opened your web browser and navigated your way to my blog. It was your choice to waste your time with my waste of time. Maybe some sense of reasoning led you to the conclusion that having that bowl of ice cream could possibly not go to your butt but instead could be compensated for by running for some too-large number of minutes. Maybe you have the ultimate decision over your actions, regardless of other people.

How can we know? There isn't a little angel or devil version of me who appears on my shoulders when I try to make decisions. However, I can't say that there isn't some kind of influence that permeates my subconscious without me knowing. How can I say that it wasn't by the force of an outside being that I chose to wear my sunglasses at night? How can I think that something beyond my control caused me to write exactly what I'm writing right now? Are these truly my thoughts? Or are they merely a sick joke of some greater being, delivered through a carbon-based vessel to confuse other readers? How am I to know? How are you to know?

The answer is simple. You cannot. Isn't that infuriating?

Time: Does It Really fly?

So I read this book called Einstein's Dreams, which is really interesting. It's a fictional piece about all these theories that Einstein came up with about time before he settled on the Theory of Relativity. Some of them are really cool, and some of them are stupid, but it's really well written and I recommend reading it. However, that is not what inspired this post. I will now discuss some of my views on time and its passage.

First of all, how do we perceive time? We have some idea that we are moving through time, or that time is moving past us, but we cannot really know whether or not it exists. I think. Maybe we should ask some physicists or philosophers. Anyway, why do we have this idea? Why do we need time? Do we rely on our past experiences to define ourselves? Do we decide our actions by our past experiences and future consequences? And if we do, should we? Why not just live in the present? Here lies my disquietude.

Living in the moment. Living by your whims and passing fancies. What would happen? People would die young. Without regard to the future, people would no longer judge their actions by their consequences. People would have more sex, use more drugs, eat more trans-fatty and carbohydrated foods, drive fast, stay up late, and do whatever else they please, as the consequences would be, ironically, of no consequence. Nobody would work, or go to school, because nobody would care about learning new things or making money. Hooray for unproductive societies!

Why do we believe time? We were all raised to believe that time exists, but does it? How do we know that the past actually happened? Could we not simply have notions of something we call the past? Our bodies are not proof. We remember our childhood, our parents, growing up, and all of that, but who or what is to say that our minds have not simply created our oh-so-fond memories of our experience? Disbelieve is fun! Perhaps you think that the scar on your knee is from the time you fell off your bike when you were seven. Maybe it is just an abnormal skin pigmentation, and you actually never were seven. Creepy, huh?

On another note, white chocolate is not chocolate, nor should it be called chocolate, nor should anybody prefer it to dark chocolate because it contains no cocoa solids and generally isn't as good.

Time does not exist. You live in a single moment. Right now. No, wait... 

Now.

Or maybe it's now.

Anyway, it could be that you and everything else has been created at this exact moment in time. Who's to say that you weren't? If you call your friend on your cell phone, and they tell you, "Don't be stupid. Of course you existed before right now," how can you know that they existed before as well? Maybe they were created just now, complete with memories of your previous existence, along with your cell phone, their cell phone and the computer you're reading this on.

What should we believe? Can you rely on your experiences? How do you know it's not all a dream? Maybe we all live in our minds and we just don't know it. Who's to tell you otherwise?

Believe nothing.

Rain Rain Go Away

It's raining really hard. Or it was, and it has temporarily let up for the moment. Anyway, the following post is my thoughts on rain and other things.

I like the rain. It makes things smell good. It also provides us (you, the reader, and myself, in addition to pretty much everybody else) with water that we use to drink, bathe, and more. Actually let me rephrase that. I like the idea of rain, rather than rain itself. If we could have the end effects of rain without the physical action and undesirable results I would be much happier. Alas, nature does not abide by the musings of most college students.

I have realized that the weather has a great influence on my actions. When it rains, I tend to stay indoors, (though I generally tend to stay indoors in the winter whether or not it's raining,) and when it's sunny I enjoy basking in the glorious thing we call ultra-violet radiation. And for all of you who don't like the sun, you're wrong. Sun is one of the greatest things that ever happened to me, and you for that matter, whether you like it or not. It one of the very few things that we could actually not survive without. So suck it up, and go enjoy the sun.

On a completely different subject, women with really squeaky voices really, really, really, really bother me. I used "really" four times right there, just to emphasize how much I dislike it. There is just this certain way that some girls speak, whether it's their inflections or tone or something along those lines that rubs me exactly the wrong way. Honestly, it makes me want to strangle them. If I know you, pray that you aren't one of these girls because it pretty much means I hate you.

New Year's Eve (and New Year's Day as well, for that matter) is a stupid holiday. There is nothing significant to celebrate, except that you get to use a new calendar. This does not even occur if you use one of those calendars that go by the school year instead of the calendar year. So, people should not make such a big deal about a change in the calendar, but wait until the end of their school calendars and celebrate then, and there could be a second kind of Christmas (or whatever religious holiday or secular observation you do in the winter time) where everybody gets new calendars and there's good food to eat and stuff like that.

Meatloaf, though delicious, should only be eaten when you observe its preparation. You don't know what they (they being the people in the back of the restaurant; conniving cooks, plotting ways to give you hepatitis and such) could put in it. It is essentially ground up mystery meat, because honestly, it could be totally different from whatever they tell you it is. Actually, just avoid things made from ground meat, because you never know what's getting ground up.

Women's underwear totally lacks any sort of practical function. There is not enough substance to provide any sort of normal underwear functionality. The only reason I suspect it exists is to be aesthetically pleasing. It typically achieves that goal (at least in most cases). Also, (this applies to other items of women's clothing as well,) for the amount of fabric you get, you should just buy men's clothing and make multiple articles of women's clothing out of each men's garment you buy. Honestly I think there's at least five thongs' worth of fabric in each pair of my boxers (which are way cheaper than thongs).

Premises is a good word, which does not receive the amount of  appreciation it deserves.

Haikus are by far the best form of poetry. There is no reasoning necessary. It is simply the best. Better than all the rest. I will present to you a haiku about haikus:

First, five syllables.

Then, seven more; five to end.

A simple poem.

How elegant is that? I think that's an appropriate place to end. More to come.