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.