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.