Back to the freewrite tavern. (fiction)

I wrote a short two-page fiction piece in my journal somewhat recently, so I felt like trying fiction again, especially when I recently came up with the idea, while I was shopping, of a freewrite Tavern. (the "f" shall not be capitalized in this name)

by the way this is only the first part not the whole story. that would be bad
I reserve the right to write the story in free-order fashion, though.

=====
I tapped in at around 7 PM, taking the shorter route from the department store to the Tavern. The night was illuminated so much by the moon that I could only stare upwards. So I bumped into a few people along the way. The girl who fell into the mud will probably never forgive me.

If you want to get drunk at the freewrite Tavern, you have to pregame. I pregamed at some other hour. They only sell one beer per night per customer (or per customer per night?) if they remember you've already had the first. I don't understand the policy. I don't understand the other policies either. If you're rowdy, they kick you out for two days. Who runs this place?

But I'll admit--I think it's the quirkiness that keeps me coming. You think the idea would get old after awhile, but it doesn't. You'd think that there's something in the air, but there isn't. Love hasn't come up, and perhaps that's because I've been burying it in unread freewrites, like the one I began to write after I came in.

"My wrist extending along this paper has been worn out lately. I am not reading this out loud. Extending along this paper? That doesn't even make sense. Who am" --

People read their freewrites out loud one at a time, and you can listen if you want to, settle in, write if you don't want to listen. Someone blurted out "And the filibuster is wrong," which caught my attention, and I stopped moving my pen. From the phrase I heard, you couldn't tell what his position was, and feeling that my own freewrite was more important than potentially being offended if I kept listening, I put my pen back on the paper again.

-- "Who am I to say that this doesn't make sense though if I don't even know what I'm talking about? New paragraph. Not. Has anyone noticed how often baseball shows are cancelled lately? Even the games' TV broadcasts themselves. I remember when that only happened to the Expos. But now...
I might as well stop here, since with my slow hand tonight this has been four minutes, and I like the four-minutes thing." I stopped.

I stopped but I wasn't listening, either. I was thinking, if you could call it that, but I couldn't seem to remember the last thought I'd have. The surrealists would probably hire me now, I thought, in my mild state of mindlessness. What was I doing here? What wasn't I doing here? Was there anything that I actually could've been doing that was better? At the moment, I couldn't think of anything, and I let it go as I was letting everything else go. Wait, did I pregame? Maybe it was inadequate.

Raising my head to the ceiling, I felt around the floor to test for smoothness. I'm never afraid of splinters. I'm irrational. I finished the test. No splinters, but no smoothness either. Check.

Then they stepped into the building.
=====

YES

IDIDIT IDIDIT IDIDIT IDIDIT IDIDIT IDID

THIS SEMESTER, I'M OVER YOU!!! DONE!! NO MORE NOTHING!!! HERE I AM!!!! 2008 (NEW YEAR) HERE I COME!!!!!

Let's celebrate by singing Daughtry!!!

Okay maybe let's not!!!

RIME ROWING ROME
ROO RA RACE RARE RAI RELONG

that's my scooby-doo Impression of Daughtry singing "home."

Well, I'm home now. Surf's up!!!

YES

IDIDIT IDIDIT IDIDIT IDIDIT IDIDIT IDID

THIS SEMESTER, I'M OVER YOU!!! DONE!! NO MORE NOTHING!!! HERE I AM!!!! 2008 (NEW YEAR) HERE I COME!!!!!

Let's celebrate by singing Daughtry!!!

Okay maybe let's not!!!

RIME ROWING ROME
ROO RA RACE RARE RAI RELONG

that's my scooby-doo Impression of Daughtry singing "home."

Well, I'm home now. Surf's up!!!

I RAN NQR AGAIN!

Two years in a row, baby! My hands are so numb I can barely type. My dick is not numb because we only ran two laps (that took about 1.5 minutes; seriously was nothing and I don't understand why they didn't want to run more!). I got the NQR 2007 T-shirt. My roommate didn't, as he didn't run: This year, justice is served. (As opposed to last year, where he got a shirt anyway.) Some people are rubbing something against the floor upstairs. Probably fucking. Yesss.

The shrinkage didn't hurt this year; the temperatures were awesome and fucking temperate. 1.5 minutes naked on 1.5 hours of sleep. Does it sound like it rocks? It does. And that's just a commonplace experience now.

Lesson: Even though it's commonplace, it's still very nice!!!

Kish-teen, it'skishmas

Hahaha, I've been listening to Christmas music on YouPlay.fm which is a wonderful site to find an actual awesome and thorough variety of Christmas music - oh my God is that Louis Armstrong??? - yes it is, "Zat You, Santa Claus?" - what an awesome title - and I've been looking at the playlist that they display on the site, and this is just an awesome, quintessentially Dimarchiish typo:

Rudolph, The Red-Noded Reindeer

Merry Chrisics! I mean Merry Christmas!!!

Actually,

Actually, for me, I feel like the semester has ended already. I'm not worried about my French essay (for once!) which I'm about to continue writing (middle of introduction. Yeah, yeah okay). I haven't had to do math since early Friday morning, and both finals will probably be pretty easy as far as those classes go. Japanese presentation looking good, looking sweet. 10-page Japanese Writers paper? Umm... I'll scrounge up something. That's due Wednesday, December 19. I was originally planning on going home Friday, but it's not looking good. This paper used to be due THIS Wednesday, and if it were still due this Wednesday, I'd be screwed or just pressed.

I don't know whether I'm going to run NQR this year. It's really fun, but I don't know what my status will be at 11 PM tomorrow night. I might have all-nightered by then, which would be very, very bad for my health combined with running naked in approximately 20º weather. Let me tell you, the shrinkage actually hurts.

I didn't accomplish what I thought I was going to accomplish, or what I thought I was going to try to accomplish. Good enough, though.

One thing I have noticed, though, is that a lot of people around me (and not me) are going through rough-ASS times. Wish I were there, wish I would go.

Wait-- in a tone non-sarcastic: that's what winter break is for!

I hate writing online because tone does not come out properly. Okay, I don't hate writing online, but you know what I mean. So much is lost in this pop-culture space. That's the benefit of things being written out in hand: they're more respected and more likely to be taken from multiple points of view at the same time by a single reader. And of course, the greatness of reading things out loud.

Faut qu'on y pense !

Well.

How the fuck did I not get anything done today? I tried; honest, I tried! I even got my TI-83 calculator stolen. Yes, the one you and you and YOU and I had from freshman year of prep school. Such a stupid, pointless day.

I'm not going to bother going over the list of shit I have to do. All I know is that I have to take real analysis II next semester if I want my senior year schedule to be easy. I had better have a good senior year. This class annoys the hell out of me. I guess I'll just deal with the fact that the problem sets break my balls, because the tests certainly don't, for whatever reason.

I can't pull an all-nighter from Sunday night to Monday morning. Because that's NQR day. The last thing I want is to faint from exhaustion while naked outdoors in the winter cold. Or to catch pneumonia from running naked after pulling an all-nighter. Shit. I better get my work done now.

This is so funny, and so not funny.

Let's see: what's beautiful, what's creative, what have I created recently? Nothing, really. It sucks. I feel like math is sucking the jizz out of my balls intravenously. Is that even possible? My real analysis class would tell me to disprove it. I don't want to have to disprove it, thanks.

In any case, I'm very aggravated at the lack of opportunity to be creative in my classes. Actually, I think it's ALL math's fault. Whatever. I want to take only 4 classes next semester. Let's see whether I do. Someone owes me back big time for this stupid semester. The last one looks godly in comparison; LORDly even.

Ugh; my room is so boring, undecorated and dreary, too. I forgot to get Christmas decorations over the weekend. I guess there goes that, for now.

Next Christmas. This dorm sucks so much. Can't wait to live off campus, no matter whether it's here or abroad. By the way, I'm thinking of cutting down to one semester only but there's no point in spending more time at Tufts than I have to, really. FUCK THIS

Oh no

Maybe it is a very good thing that sometime later in my life I will have to wake up early in the morning and work work everyday.

Because of this.

I resisted going to bed early tonight for some reason even though the past few days have been absolutely horrible thanks to my problem set. Maybe I'll think differently in the future.

Wow, writing this is impossible because Opera web browser makes typing so slow

my thoughts, my thoughts my thoughts my thoughts

Whatchu gon do with all that junk
All that junk inside that trunk?

Well, I had to clean it out.

I'm talking about the trunk of my car. I cleaned it out this summer, and in doing so managed to erase a great part of my personal history. Listen. Most of that junk had been accumulating in there since graduation; so naturally there were a lot of happy moments stuffed in there. Each object gave off the gas of memory (wow, bad writing), from happy cards I got at graduation (and especially one in particular) to stars from the prom with the glitter-drawn names almost fully faded to pages and pages of sheet music from duets and songs I had played at piano concerts. This is not the whole list; tennis rackets, which even for a month or two weren't all mine, textbooks that I had failed to sell back to the Prep or to Tufts, and a bunch of beautiful clutter that made it difficult to get the replacement tire out of the car, remember that? Yes, with all that junk, all that junk inside that trunk, I was ridin' dirty and rollin' for quite some time, but the time came to clean it out.

And so ended an era.

Happy Belated Daylight Savings Time Ends Day!

I think this is one of the best rap verses of all time.

"It's time to set your clock back 'bout as long as you can"
-Ludacris, from "One Minute Man" by Missy Elliott

We're all (I think) going through some roughness here, so wait for the ludacris situations to go away and the daylight to return. Rough it out; it'll only seem like a minute in future retrospect.

hee hee

AHOY

For the sake that we never separate...

...post some blog entries!!

(I'm referencing sp1.) Anyway, I spent today thinking about whether I'll major in Japanese or French, and the first four days of this week I was seeing all of the great sides of the Japanese major: overall better teaching, the professors are more motivated to try to court people over to the major so that means they care more about the students (in this case, it does, anyway), a culture so fascinatingly separate in appearance from our own, a language so undeniably different from ours, an AMAZINGLY beautiful country (upon visiting both France and Japan for 2 weeks each, it was by far the more beautiful country just speaking visually), a (allow me to use the word again) fascinating drive to constantly get more modern (what does that even mean?), and did I mention my homestay mother was crying when she said goodbye to us after just spending the weekend with her as my host for a homestay? And the Tufts program is in the prefecture right next to the one where she lives, so I'll definitely be able to visit!

But today, my mood was totally French major. Easier to fulfill the requirements, I can actually take and fully comprehend all the courses in the language (most Japanese culture courses are in English here as they are in the Tufts program in Kanazawa, and the couple that aren't I'd have to go to Kanazawa in order to take, and I wouldn't get to take those courses until senior year), I can read in the language (to be able to read a Japanese newspaper takes 10 semesters at least of study. Or was it 10 years?) and that means bury myself in some good literature at a Paris café, the abroad program forces immersion unlike the Japanese program which doesn't so much (they put all the foreign students in a foreign-students dorm), the social structure isn't so rigid, France doesn't have that drive I see in Japan to get constantly more modern (you see how that could be a bad thing in Japan if I ended up living there?)...

I really don't know. I'd go for the triple major, and that's also another option (actually, right now, dropping math as a major would be really cool, I think, but my parents wouldn't like that), but what I need the most is time.    time    To relax, to think, and to be human. That's what I had freshman year, and that's what lacks really badly right now. That's what undergrad is for.

Soothiness

What are the properties of a human body after 11 hours of sleep?

1) Refresh!
2) Feel warm
3) Feel love
4) Let's go happy!
5) Math is cute animal
6) Connect
7) Take time
8) Make time
9) No languid
10) Have an enjoy
11) Happy Thanksgiving!!!

This has been brought to you like a good eggplant brings comfort, happiness, and with java.

Fuel, desire, and ratings, stop, plug

This is a freewrite about epsilon as epsilon approaches nothing. Yet they still insist on it being about something, and that's why I hate real analysis.

My (this is funny--) grader for part of my problem set gave me a low grade and said something like the following: "I'm sorry to be so negative, but you should go see your professor about this, since he could tell you more than I could ever write down on a piece of paper." The funny part about this is that I HAVE DONE WELL ON THE PREVIOUS HOMEWORKS WHY ARE YOU SO SAD THAT I HAVE NOT HAPPENED TO DO SO HERE. That class is so stupid, I really don't want any more of it. But I'm stuck with 5.5 credits now (e.g. 6 classes, one of them being me basically getting credit for the programming work I did over the summer), so I'll just have to carry on.

I'm going to see Twelve Girls Band on Sunday with my family and hopefully some friends too. It should be fun; they're really good. My friends and the band. -- biatch!

My mind is spinning somewhat halfheartedly and I'm trying to get it to go the full 720. I think if I start doing more random shit I'll get that to happen. Stupid homework.

You know, I don't really like the fall, and I think it's because people have a harder time in the fall than in any other season, in my opinion. Me included? Yeah, probably, though it depends on the year sometimes (last winter was unbearable). This is obviously arguable, but arguments can cease like the shrillness of the abstractly bitchy, possibly gleeful autumn wind. (that's me trying to find a new way to describe the autumn wind) As in, don't accept it: let it flow?

Cease, ..., cease! Well, if you won't, that's what the winter's for.
And let the winter come.

Actually, no, don't. I'll fight the fall while it's here.

Soulja Boy wants YOU -- enlist today

It's strange. It was going by so slowly, and now it's going by so fast.

28, September. You won't have to wake me up when it ends. I read a bit of the Public Journal, which is a Tufts literary publication filled with, uh, writings from people who must've written them when they were feeling really insecure. Or really sexually devious. Yeah, that inspired me to freewrite.

I think my creativity is back. Fuck that, it is back; it has to be! Stupid hesitant semicoloned sentence. HEY, you just got coloned! Well, semicoloned anyway.

Speaking of colons, real anal(ysis) made me pull an all-nighter. There goes never pulling an all-nighter at Tufts. It sedated me, though, I think. It got me back to working, to being nice, and to being creative. That was Monday night to Tuesday morning. What a bad problem set--- and what a better problem set it would've been had I started this earlier.

I'm typing this with the keyboard in my lap, and I'm awfully tempted to write stream-of-consciousness-style. By the way, French surrealism is really, really cool and quite inspiring. Basically, French surrealists wanted to do things in an "automatiste" manner-- meaning automatic, but not so much the way you might be thinking about it. As in, they wanted to escape from, well, the rational, and the thinking process. I hope I've got this right, because it matters for the eight-page paper that I'll have to write and that he hasn't even talked about (and it's due in three weeks). But yeah, I'm pretty sure it's right. We get to read surrealist poetry, and basically it consists frequently of long, just barely, barely sensible connections of images. They are all connected, but only very slightly. Just the right amount for it to mirror the least rational thought process possible. And it's pretty cool. I've failed to explain why I think it's so cool, but here's why maybe?:

It's impossible to escape one's thought process completely, unless you are in a coma, or some non-coma really bad state of inebriation. But the surrealists didn't want to settle for the weekly get-away from rationality; they wanted to be away from it all the time and LIVE without thought. Wow, capital letters; I must be into it, right? Ehh. Anyway, that's what the surrealists wanted to do-- live "automatically," free from the constraints of thought and reason. You might say that this is impossible and find it foolish to bother, but I realized something: the idea of trying to completely escape from rationality and thought is completely irrational. Now isn't that clever? And so nice. Ah, but you could point out another paradox: I just resolved this paradox in a rational way. ANOTHER PARADOX! or a disproof. Whatever.

So a girl wrote an article in the Daily about a girl's duty (her opinion, absolutely not mine) to give head to a guy in certain situations, and uh, it was not received very well by pretty much anyone. One person I know pointed out (in a letter to the Daily) that the article did nothing to point out the possibility of getting STDs from oral (canker sores and all that). Another thought it was not appropriate for the newspaper but said that it was good advice for girls. STUPID; the latter, I mean, who also characterized the article as overly liberal (uh, I don't see what makes an article on oral sex with no mentions of political shit at all liberal, especially since it's the OTHER side that claims it's merely exerting its First Amendment rights whenever it's written something horribly stupid. It's like saying, "Yes, it's stupid and we're stupider, but you're the STUPIDEST because the First Amendment exists and you didn't praise us for doing what the Constitution allows us to do." ). Too many parentheses. The paper is so pissy, and I guess I just bought into it by ranting on it so much. Oh well.

I drew a car on my friend's dry-erase board, drew CADILLAC on the side of the car, and strew the letters D and d on top of the car. It was a play on the song "Throw Some D's" by Rich Boy. He's talking about throwing dubs on a car (and instead of "car" he says "bitch")...

Finally, Kanye West and 50 Cent had this competition to see who would get #1 on the Billboard albums chart in the first week, and Kanye won. The hype shot his single "Stronger" to #1 on the singles chart for that week, unseating "Crank That (Soulja Boy)," by you know who, which was up there for 2 weeks. Now, Crank That just unseated Stronger and is back on top again. Soulja Boy must be so happy now.

Too many, felly, too many

Now get buck in this ~
Get buck in this ~
Get buck in this ~
Get buck in this ~
Get CRUNK in this ~
Get CRUNK in this ~
Get CRUNK in this ~
HEY

Lately, there have been numerous situations in which I have felt quite hazukashii. Embarrass! I don't really feel like going into any of them, because, again, hazukashikatta. Yeah. One of them involved just now trying to think of how a song would be DDRed, by, uh, experimenting on my floor. And the guy downstairs heard it :(

I don't like the hall I live in at all, which sucks. Oh well.

By the way, I guess this is my last hurrah at Tufts in terms of trying new things, right? If I'm studying abroad my whole junior year (which is looking like it'll be the case), then senior year is the next time I get to try getting involved in a club. Um... that means I'm trying frisbee this year, since why not. I need something to keep me moving. I wouldn't be surprised if in two weeks you can look here and see that I'm not doing frisbee anymore, because of homework or piano or something. WHATEVER. Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics meets tomorrow; free lunch. Hopefully the lunch is good and hopefully it's not as boring as it sounds.

Also, I heard they recently made individual Facebook profiles searchable on Google? Is it possible to get around that? Because I'm thinking of actually getting one, you know.

Hmm, I'm really accomplishment-hungry right now. I want to accomplish something new, big and great. I don't know why this is. Maybe I should go running... at 8:52 at night.

Maybe not. Yeah.

At least I discovered something cool recently: want to find a new song in mp3 form? Search "[title] [artist] mp3 blog site:blogspot.com" on Google. Voilà! Wow, I tried to type à and instead typed α. Very good. All these fucking languages... I'm studying math (yes, it's gradually becoming a language of its own), French, Japanese, and C++. It's not a surprise when I mix them together sometimes. How often do I speak my own language anymore?

Not enough.

Boston- where I don't speak my tongue!

(I just downloaded a song called "Boston" by Augustana which was on the charts about 6 months ago. The lyric is really "where no one knows my name.")

Not what it a-pear-s to be

So I was drinking some Kool Aid Jammers Grape...drink... and it said "Artificially flavored" AND "Made from Real Fruit Juice!" So I was wondering what was going on. Then, when I found the box, the ingredients (not to be found on the individual Caprisun-style drink packages) included pear juice. And not grape juice.

It must really suck to be a pear.

Think about it. Nobody can market you or your side products. You're indie, and even if the big guys find some way to make you popular, you have to say goodbye to those old fans who liked you for your esoteric charm. Plus, nobody's found a way to beautify a pear yet, at least not compared to how great those grapes looked on the Kool Aid thing. But... you know you have something beautiful inside you; I mean, there must be a reason why Kool Aid wants to use you and twist you into what it wants to be! Still, when people make it hard for you to see the Koolness within yourself, they'll tell you you're being haughty or narcissistic when you embrace it. So you think: what's wrong with being narcissistic? Well, you know you can't live without them. But, also!--to reach a satisfying conclusion, they can't live without you either.

That is the story of a pear
On the package of a drink
Long time ago, ladies and gentlemen.
*chord!*

Well. (other title: Inspiration)

I know Greg tried at one point to promote this blog (although there's a flaw in the way he did it--- he set the date of one of the blog posts ahead, so it would constantly be the newest blog post, but that's not how Blogger works. It displays the blogs that were just posted only, and then they're gone. So it wouldn't show up on the front page until that one split second it was posted, and then bye bye!), but somebody else (dunno who) set the blog to private again (this is the second time now). So evidently we have contradicting notions on who we want to be able to read this blog. Well, I set it back to public again, only because I don't want to log in every time I want to read the blog, and because I don't want to be constantly logged into Google on my computer (in case someone else uses my computer or something). So yeah. I can switch it back if you want, though, you mystery man you.

Well, look at you, mystery man! You made me freewrite. You were my inspiration to post something again. And inspiration's exactly what I've wanted recently. I've been around a lot of great people and a lot of great things this summer, but for some reason the inspiration has been slow in taking effect or just hasn't accessed the creative part of my brain. Excuse me as I switch from this Natasha Bedingfield song... no, sorry, Natasha, you're not as inspiring as you claim to be.

Rap from 1999? Hell yes.

This summer. Yes, this summer. That might as well be a complete sentence, because it was a rather complete summer. However, as you well know from AP English, that is NOT a complete sentence. Meaning something was missing. And I think this summer it was quite simple: playing outside. I didn't get enough of it! And remember... VERB. IT'S WHAT YOU DO. Ah, don't you miss that public-service commercial slogan? I do. Miss. It's what I do. That should be a new sentence form: [verb]. It's what [pronoun] do(es). Yes. Am genius. It's what I do.

The Pussycat Dolls? Not so much the inspiring type... There we go. QUEEN LATIFAH. That's right. "Ladies First"! One of the best old-school rap songs ever.

In fact, this song is almost 50% rapped by another female rapper, Monie Love, and she's really good too. "I'm conversatin' to the fools who have no whatsoever clue, so listen very carefully as I break it down for you." Again, new sentence structure. Songs like this are why I dig hip-hop so much; it's just so fun. Haha, she just said "And I'm first, 'cause I'm an L-A-D-I-E"... very good. And I'm spent.

Cheezu, in, in han-do, in cheezu, han-do, in

The air is hot, but stale now. I think even I'm tired of it, but the drive from home to work and work to home isn't an adequate amount of time to appreciate the heat.

The sky is black now, "this suit is black not," I haven't been up at night this late for awhile, and I haven't made a Borat joke in awhile. Well, I guess I have. NOT SO MUCH lately, though.

But this is summer. And I need to be more aware of it. Maybe I should go to Water Country. Yeah, right. The prices must be exorbitant there. "EXORBITANT" is the word used to describe a difficulty level of eight feet in old-school DDR games. Nine feet was "CATASTROPHIC," six feet was "GENUINE," five feet was "MARVELOUS," and so on.

I know I said I'd had too much computer, but I found myself right back here at my mom's computer (mine is off) with a need to write. Can't explain it. It supercedes the need for eye rest, even though I haven't really been using the computer nearly as much as I used to. I guess computers just depress me now.
My t-shirt from the Philippines (I only got two; I should've got more, since they cost about 8 bucks a shirt) that I'm wearing right now says "WESTFIELD ATHL. DEPT." Did you know Westfield retired this year? Yes, he did. No more gym teachers suggesting people take a shower after a gym class of relatively low intensity... anyway, that's why I got the shirt, yes.

Mark Bellhorn is in the majors again. He's hitting .333 (1 for 3, I think; probably not 2 for 6), and he pinch-hit, walked, and scored tonight for the Reds. Awesome!

Currently, I'm not bored, I'm just insecure. I feel like I'm missing something necessary but not necessarily obvious, and until I find what it is, it'll

~~~

My mom just asked me, "Why are you so dark?" because the light is off in the room. Very good, mom, excellent. --- uhh---

I do wish my skin were darker, and I guess I'm in the minority on that. It's pretty sad how even among people of the same relative skin color, having skin whiter than everyone else's helps you. Unless you're albino, and I can't say I've ever seen an albino person, so forget that.

---

I think I know what I'm missing now. People!

.
.
.
.


people people people people people
ippai
uhhh
mai ippai

my concluding simile is somewhat bull, but it sounds cool

Is July Alex Freewrite Month? Wow, that sentence is grammatically correct and has five capitalized words in it. Very good. Yeah... I'm just gonna leave this freewrite untitled until I get to the end, because I'm not quite sure what I'm going to talk about, but I know it'll be about the Philippines, and "the Philippines" is an unexciting title.

Yes, this is an obligatory freewrite about the Philippines. The other one was kind of inadequate; it was more of a list than something truly coherent or anything that required effort. Well, where to begin? How about a scene from the middle of the trip... We were coming back from Olangapo, a town next to the Subic Bay Freeport Zone, where they apparently have less business restrictions or something so that well-needed investing companies can treat workers like shit in order to have better profits. Something like that. Well, Subic is a nice place, at least if you're a tourist, and it's really not crowded at all compared to anywhere in the metropolitan Manila area, which was right next door (although I wish it were somewhat less than SEVEN hours next door, through rush-hour traffic). So yeah, Subic was nice and free; it kind of reminded me of America. Or was it even Subic where I saw this happen? It might've been Tagaytay (pronounced "ta guy tie"), I don't know. Whatever. Subic for now.

Yeah, it was Subic.

We were coming back from our less-than-24-hour vacation there. (I'm not kidding; seven hours in rush-hour traffic to get there was still worth it, though, regardless of the short-ass stay.) Rolling roads over rolling hills, Filipino men with the rolly-shaped arms (to steal the adjective Jennifer Lopez used to describe men's forearms), rolling down the mountain, down down down, roll roll roll, plop plop plop. More like BUMP BUMP BUMP. That's how shitty the car ride was, er, more like bus ride, with like 17 of my relatives in a van with inadequate air-conditioning (and this hilariously weak fan in the back; I've gotta put up a picture of that). Serene scenery, relatively speaking, even though you couldn't avoid seeing cars pull stupid maneuvers everywhere you looked. Serene as could be, with a relatively high elevation over who-knows-what? in the middle of the steamy Philippine rainy season.

It was about one in the afternoon. Most people had something to do, or someone to talk to. In the Philippines, that's generally expected and necessary; being anti-social is relatively uncommon there, or at least I'd think it is, compared to what I see in the US. Some of the kids, though; well, the kids are still growing up. They just tend to wander around, I've noticed. So, they get bored, and when they get bored, they wander, and when they wander, where do they go?

Why, atop somebody's tomb is where you'll see them!

Yeah, some kids were just bored, so they would sit on top of somebody's resting place (and clearly marked this was) and just kind of chill out. First of all, a cemetery is not generally the kind of place I would chill out. Secondly, I don't think what's-his-name (and clearly marked this was) would appreciate you sitting on his box. Finally, you must be wondering why this tomb is out in the open. Over there, the cemeteries are huge and elaborate, or at least that's true from what I've seen. I fear that how good your tomb looks depends on how rich you are;... ah, yes, so not even dead people have respect for each other. What an afterlife! Anyway, yeah, they do have these things just kind of not buried. They're just in this big concrete box grave constructions. Wow, I feel like an engineer after using four consecutive nouns to describe something. (That job...) So they're out in the open, and I guess in the Philippines, in the daytime at least, cemeteries are a good place to be alone. (There's no such thing as a good place to be alone at night in the Philippines.) They've really got no space elsewhere.

Speaking of death, they have funeral homes advertising on their signs that they're open 24 hours. WHY?

I've hit a bump in my creative road as of late. It's really weird, but I'm not as good anymore; maybe I'm not putting enough into my practice. I can't help feeling that the journal I wrote while I was in the Philippines was nothing more than a journalist's report. I'd prefer not to put the "journal" in "journalism," or something more clever than what I just said.

But then I realize that some of my stuff actually does work; I guess since I'm outside of an intense school environment I don't notice it anymore. Like, "I've hit a bump in my creative road" works well with my "BUMP BUMP BUMP [agh bad driving]" thing earlier! Maybe. It's not easy to be certain. It's tempting to wish that I was back in time, somewhere where I was creatively better, like at the Prep maybe, or even my freshman fall semester at Tufts, but...

It would feel like I'm kind of chilling out with a dead spirit. Just like that girl sitting over that unburied grave. Maybe on some occasions you stop and gain a lot from the dead, and sometimes you've gotta avoid them and learn from their mistakes, but sometimes you're just chilling out with them. And you don't know whether you should go any further back or how much you should care about the past. So, Mr. Alex of old creativity; where are you, and is there anything you've got to say?

Write about what you know about that.

There are some people who tell you to only write about what you know. It was brilliant of T.I. to turn that around and make it into the biggest rap song of the year last year.

Say hey hey!

I wonder if one of the results of religious enlightenment or self-fulfillment is a pervading sensation that you're always with someone, even if you don't know who's with you. Maybe that's what it means to never be alone.

Hmm. I squeezed that one out of me, like a self-contracting orange. I haven't believed lately that I'm still capable of deep thought and musings, but it's all still there, perhaps. I've just got to force myself to put it out.

Hmm, I wonder what it's like to be a self-contracting orange. You know, oranges have seeds in them, and that's how them orange trees make babies. Well, imagine the orange evolving into a species separate from its tree, as if the tree were giving birth to a new species! Then, the orange wouldn't want to get hurt. It wouldn't want to have to be eaten solely for the purpose of reproduction, but it would still want to reproduce. That's when it would try to self-contract and roll around and stuff so that it wouldn't get hurt, but it would still reproduce.

"It wouldn't want to have to be eaten solely for the purpose of reproduction, but it would still want to reproduce." A good sentence to apply to humans, too. If we do really want to get eaten, then we want it to be for something good. We don't just want to sacrifice ourselves so that the human race keeps going. We want it to keep going for a purpose.

I just realize that "self-contract" does not make sense as a verb. "Contract" would've sufficed. Well, whatever; it's all about the self.

Or is it? The English language tells me it isn't.

ところで, I'm not high.

4:55 AM

This is the time at which I have arisen for the past three days, today included. Today I got ten hours of sleep; do the math. Yeah, it's really weird.

I guess I'm off my jet lag now, because yesterday I was begging for sleep like you would beg for clothes if you were naked and in an ice box. Well, actually, only your feet would be in the ice box because ice boxes are small, so maybe you wouldn't be begging for clothes, I don't know!

So what happened those three weeks in the boonies?

One: I got tired of reading. I think I'm going to be physically unable to read a book for the next month or so. I read Hornby's The Long Way Down, Vonnegut's Timequake, and Murakami's Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman, but my mistake was trying to read Dostoevsky's 1045-pager The Brothers Karamazov. Don't try it. The dialogue is boring and way too long, which is a shame because when the narrator speaks it's pretty ingenious. I almost got halfway. Almost.

Two: Twenty-six people related to me were all there at one point. That's a lot of people, so it was basically a family reunion. I think I'm the only one who doesn't know how to play guitar among them. My great-aunt was there too, which was pretty cool. She's especially conversational for her age, a big contrast against any of my grandparents.

Three: I wrote a lot in my summer journal, but I don't remember writing anything particularly strong or particularly amusing. It was just an exercise. I think I've lost my mojo.

Four: Mark Bellhorn's average rose to about .260. In celebration, I changed my voicemail greeting.

Five: Iran and North Korea both sucked up to the US at the same time. I don't know why they suddenly decided to get obsequious like a kidnapped prostitute. I kinda only read the headlines.

LATER!

Fuck fuck fuck

I just forever erased 42 pictures of my trip to Wyoming last summer, because for some reason the stupid Kodak uploader didn't transfer them to my computer and I didn't realize it. That had the best part, too: the amazing Grand Teton National Park. Oh well; hopefully my mom took a few pictures with her camera. Yeah, unlikely, and she probably didn't take many... I know, a billion pictures of this park exist on the internet, but this is my history...

For those of you wondering where I'll be, I'm in the Philippines. See you in three weeks.

My conceptions of the world, 1

Well, at least it's one of them. Ahoy. All freewrites begin with "ahoy."

1

Somewhere, somewhere, was it Hills's blog?, somewhere, I saw something that remarked upon the suggestion that the term "best friend" isn't really used that often once you get older. That made me think about why that is.

Eventually, we all wonder how much our friends are friends to us and vice-versa. We wonder whether our friends are the same people we knew back when they first became our friends. We wonder whether we're still friends at times because, well, it was so long ago when we became friends, and they have become oddly unfamiliar to me because they've changed so much and we haven't been together enough recently for me to adapt to these changes. But if you think about it, maybe that's all it is: these changes driving us nuts. (SORRY FOR OBVIOUS PRONOUN CLARITY PROBLEMS)

Here's another thing. It's undeniable that we build up defenses, and that a lot of the defenses are just crap we put there to defend ourselves against other crap. So eventually you pile up this crap around you to defend yourself from being pilfered by people throwing crap at you, and this is the same for everyone else you know! Picture that this big pile of crap is an igloo. A selectively permeable igloo. There are certain people you let inside, and certain levels to which people can enter.

Look at it another way. Sometimes you pile up so much crap you lose the route back to yourself! In those times, you have to dig a route back to yourself again. Sometimes, you'll need other people's help. But you've got to be careful, because the people who help you also can follow the route back (that they've created) to get past your defenses. Your defenses of crap, albeit. But still. That's the problem with asking other people to find answers for you; well, one of them anyways. Still, sometimes, it's absolutely necessary. In any case, from there you can dig another route back through the crap to yourself (isn't this a weird dichotomy: the "real self" and the "fake self"?), just in case you need to close off the route that someone else helped you make.

But here's the kicker, or the real point, or whatever (isn't "here's the kicker" for humorous situations exclusively?): these piles of crap are what prevent us from sensing/understanding/interacting with/feeling/WHATEVER the people we thought we knew. You just gotta keep poking around. :)

I almost didn't feel like getting out of my warm bed to do this, so don't h8r8, appreci8.

I have to re-read Norwegian Wood by Murakami. It has absolutely some of the most intensely emotional characters a novel has ever introduced me to. So good.

Take it on the other side of the world to me

Hey, all you RHCP and KT Tunstall fans; see what I did there? Eh? If you don't, well, I just combined song lyrics. Nothing too special. Actually, what I came up with doesn't really make sense. Hey, but the words are all really short!

So my mom has a phone book open on her desk. The heading on page 224 is "GARBAGE, RUBBISH & TRASH." I wonder why the author didn't realize that these three words mean the same thing. Maybe it's his or her sense of humor forming a sliver of light escaping the doldrums of a phone-book-writing job. That was badly written, but you can rearrange it in your head to form a better sentence. I hate it when math textbook writers get lazy and state things like, "We leave it to you to show that blah blah blah is true." Ass; we're paying $85 for this book, so why can't you at least print the proof of that statement? If you know it's true, you obviously have the math to prove it. The harder the math courses, the more you get textbooks like this. So it goes.

In any case, I didn't get to what I intended to say in the first place. On that page, there's a random line of medium-sized text that says, "SAY NO TO DRUGS." First of all, did this really have to be on the page whose heading is "GARBAGE, RUBBISH & TRASH"? I think they just put the message there in order to make everything in the phonebook (all the advertisements and so on) line up nicely. Secondly, is this thing targeted at any specific audience? I wonder if there's some old law from 1983 or something that states that every phonebook must use the phrase "SAY NO TO DRUGS" every 105 pages or something.

I also find it odd that page 225 has the heading "GENETIC TESTING"...

Good losses

In case you haven't been overly patriotic to La Nation des Red Sox as of late, I'll tell you that the last two games have been close, close losses. My 2007 Cy Young Award winner, Hideki Okajima, blew a save, and Jonathan Papelbon came in only to lose the game on Sunday. On Monday (well, it was still Monday on the west coast), the Red Sox came back to tie the Oakland A's, only to lose in the bottom of the eleventh inning due to Eric Chavez and his ridiculous ability to pull an outside fastball over a right-field fence. Kyle Snyder gave that up, despite that he made Chavez look silly on the previous pitch, a change-up in the dirt that Chavez went around on. Taihen na loss. (Tough loss.)

Still, I've watched these last two games and I think the Red Sox have been playing like they have all this year. Wily Mo Peña single-handedly helped Mark Ellis not once, not twice, BUT THRICE to hit for the cycle. Okay, that doesn't prove my point, but I find it amusing. Anyway, honestly, the other two teams were on, and so were the Red Sox. The failures weren't overly grand, especially not with a bazillion-game lead in the American League East, and it's 10 oh-five PM EST tomorrow for another late-night fiesta.

Fiesta. Fiesta, fiesta.

This stuff doesn't really matter. In other news, I'm in the midst of reading Kurt Vonnegut's Breakfast of Champions (AND I HAVE TO REMEMBER TO GO TO THE HAMILTON-WENHAM PUBLIC LIBRARY IN THE MORNING TO PICK UP MY COPY OF AFTER DARK BY MURAKAMI)... Vonnegut's fun. I'm surprised that all these critics lost interest with him after what are generally perceived to be as his four masterpieces (Slaughterhouse-Five, God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, Cat's Cradle, The Sirens of Titan), because although he gets more and more radical in his viewpoints (or just more blatant?!), he remains a maker of really thought-provoking points. I thought I'd put up this passage...

Never mind; I don't find the passage as amazing as I thought it was at first; either that or I just don't remember what it is. Either way, the book is animated in a deranged way.

And if I don't find the passage as provoking anymore, then that's a good loss.
(But that line's not a good ending to this freewrite.)

IT'S A MADHOUSE

Or so I'll claim!

So when I'm bored I go to minorleaguebaseball.com and look at box scores, particularly at Pawtucket's and at Louisville's (e.g. Bellhorn's team). And when I recognize former MLB players I'll be like "snap!" and click on their names and voilà! I remember!!! Okay, so how many sentences is that? It's either one or two. Anyway, I find some neat things sometimes. Today's discovery is that Raul Casanova was an American League all-star... even before he was born! Congratulations, Raul Casanova!

But yeah, I read another email from the Tufts disc team elist or newsgroup or whatever and these people are ridiculously masculine; it scares me. IT'S A MADHOUSE...

The song I'm referencing is by Anthrax. Someone stepped it, meaning it's on my DDR computer setup, and I heard it not once but twice today while I was at Best Buy figuring out how to spend my exorbitant amount of gift card moo-lah. Yes, that's Guitar Hero's fault. I don't really like that game for soundtrack reasons. I can't actually say I've ever played it--have I? I can't remember. But the gameplay is simple enough, so I definitely know how it would be like. There are other games like this by the same company that made DDR, and I'm not interested in any of them (there are like 8)... I'll stick with what I've got, thanks.

Can you still buy airline tickets with smoking allowed on the flight? My mom's ticket for a business conference in July says "Seating Preference: Non smoking window seat," which is missing a hyphen, but in any case seems repetitive. I have to remember to go over to the Hamilton-Wenham public library today to pick up Haruki Murakami's latest novel, After Dark. It's received criticism from people who are overly anal about what they read, and stuff. The good thing about Murakami's stories is that they're always very, very readable and attention-grabbing. And they're always on something random, which is great. You can pretty much predict what the story's going to be about for too many writers, or at least too many writers of books I haven't read yet. Wait, is that statement logical? To borrow an Ashishism, no..........

I will actually probably be working later this summer, and the job will involve math. I don't know much about it yet but there is some intrigue in the matter for me. Il y a un je ne sais quoi qui m'intrigue...

Oops, I should be writing in my summer journal. Tskity tskity tsk...

Last Dance, again!

Okay, I was really unfair tonight. I won Monopoly on a forfeit against Greg, Jon, and Ashish.

Back to utility, back to usefulness... you know, utilitarianism is the best-sounding philosophy for which it's hard to puzzle out why it's not as good as it sounds. Well, actually, like I know shit about utilitarianism! Forget it.

The edges of my whitest frisbee are sharp and decaying. Sharply decaying. Well, actually, not really decaying!

I wonder how much the poorest of the poor think of philosophy and get driven crazy by nihilism. Apparently, not many. Are they lucky? Don't ever say they are. In fact, the best approach is to eschew luck from the discussion and contest that talking about people being lucky is pointless. Or is it? Now that's just being nihilistic!

Whatever; I haven't thought about philosophy for awhile, but I did when I read Hills's second-latest blog post. But my interest towards philosophical and religious discussions has greatly declined; unlike my friends I don't plan to ever take Intro to Philosophy. I was never much into peering into the great philosophers' writings or anything like that...

You know, when people say that your classes don't need to be entertaining, I never buy it. I guess the majority of college students compensate for academic boredom with intense partydom? Seriously. Sorry, but I go to ratemyprofessors.com every time, orient my schedule so that I'm awake during the classes (after what happened this semester, ugh), and submit reviews so that other people don't have to sit through mundanity (is that a word?). Also, if a class doesn't entertain me and I have to take it, well, I'ma make it entertain me. (Sorry if you think that word looks badly used, but I think it's a better emphasis than italics here and denotes the mood/tone better. SORRY I don't remember the difference between mood and tone!!!) People shouldn't relegate all their sociability to the non-academic world once they enter college, either. Er, better phrased, they should be more social in class. Class should not be a battlefield. That's what the tests are for. That's another thing that's annoyed me about college too. People might/probably think I'm showing off by participating so much, but I can only listen to the professor speak for so long without feeling like he's an alien and I'm a human. That's not being humane to the professor!

Well, you get the point. Also, use semicolons. They're pretty musical.

Did I mention that my last post was the 69th post?

Chyea. Beat that.

I really need to vacuum my room and change the bedsheets. I forgot that leaving the window open allows pollen and other miniscule things to enter my room. All of that might be affecting my sleep negatively.

Today bored me, which was expected since I kinda set aside the day to rest. Yesterday we had a barbecue, and there were a lot of random kids running around in the backyard. I have no idea who the majority of them were, and the same goes for their parents. They played a baseball game in a small amount of space. I wasn't very impressed with their ability to work the count. Come on; none of you kids make Kevin Youkilis your idol?

Right now I'm reading a book by Lily Tuck called Interviewing Matisse, or, The Woman Who Died Standing Up and it's really hard to get through because it consists entirely of a conversation between two women. And yes, it's realistic. That is a problem... It looked fun to me when I picked it up. Maybe the wave of my attention span has subsided again, and evaporated, leaving a really big, sandy beach of I CAN'T READ THIS RIGHT NOW. Maybe I'm just tired somehow.

I wrote the sentence "Whatever." at the end of the first two paragraphs (that one-line one doesn't count) of this entry, and I think that's Avril Lavigne's fault, although I say the word a lot anyway. Yes, I really do like "Girlfriend," which is I think currently #3 on the US charts. Did you know that she recorded the chorus in 9 or so different languages, and not the rest of the song?

Holla at me; I'm around.

Keane and summer writing projects

Wow. I love summer. I LOVE summer.

Choice listening:

· india.arie - Summer (feat. Rascal Flatts on guitar) [I know it annoys Greg if her name has the period in it, but I prefer it with the period and with the lowercase so PBTHHH)
· The Offspring - Hit That
· T-Pain featuring YUNG JOC - Buy U a Drank (Shawty Snappin') [HIP-HOP HIT OF THE SPRING BABY YEAHHHHHH]
· モーニング娘。- 愛の種
· The Killers - Uncle Jonny
· Barenaked Ladies - It's All Been Done
· Passion Fruit - Sun Fun Baby (Looky Looky)
· Annie - Chewing Gum [They played this randomly in between acts at the Keane concert and I couldn't believe it. This song is pretty hilarious.]
· Lil' Mama - Lip Gloss
· Lil' Bow Wow featuring Fabolous, Fundisha, and Jermaine Dupri - Basketball [Even though it's the worst summer sport.]

I love summer humidity. My left leg wasn't humidity-caused-sticky today but my right leg was humidity-caused-sticky and that was cool! Plus, I love summer temperatures. You can just give your body right up to the climate. How great is that?

Forgive me for being really elated now. I wrote a brief freewrite in my summer journal about the greatness of the Keane concert I just went to... holy shit, holy shit.

They're playin' bas-ket-ball...
We love that bas-ket-ball.

I plan to put that song on my DDR/Stepmania/whatever setup here at home.

Oh yeah, summer writing projects. I'm doing a summer journal this year too, but I started a short story in it. It's about a guy who keeps both the ticket stub and, uh, the other ticket stub after he goes to events. What do you call the thing that you don't get to keep?

I am shameless...

I'm sure you've heard the old addage, "Hollywood is shameless." You may ask yourself "what is the origin of such a phrase?" Surprisingly enough, it's not because Hollywood is a God-less void of un-Christian values where amoral heathans go to share their dangerous, libel and progressive ideas! Someone gave Hollywood that label because in encapsulates the manner in which they promote their art; shamelessly. The Paris Hilton sex tape, the Spider-man logos on bases in Major League Baseball stadiums, and Shrek advocating exercise to kids while his face is slapped on dozens of sugary confections are all prominent examples of how shameless Hollywood can be when it comes to promotion.
Therefore, if I am ever to become part of Hollywood, I must become shameless in my promotion as well. Now, you may ask yourself "Greg, you have a college education. Why on Earth would you ever want to become part of Hollywood?" The answer is simple. I require two things that I can never get enough of in my lifetime; attention and money. And Hollywood is able to provide me with a hundred lifetimes of fame and fortune (or so I hope.)
So, without too much further ado, I submit to you a few short films I have made using "The Movies" game produced by Lionhead Studios. In your unlimited inquiries, you must be asking "Greg, you fool, why would you need such a game to make movies?" The answer is simple. This game rocks, and reality sucks. In this game, I can control every aspect of my art. In reality, it is hard as my erert dick to make a movie (which is very hard, I assure you.) Of course, making movies using this game isn't like having sex with a drunk fat girl, but it's easier than trying to score with Alizée, which is what it's like trying a make a film in real life.
Our first film is a dark exploration of the human condition. It's a mystery with more twists and turns than the Autobon. It will elevate the craft of filmmaking to a level you've never seen! It's...

"CASE CLOSED"


Now, if you consider "Cased Closed" original, you've obviously never heard of "The Usual Suspects." And if you haven't, I envy your ignorance.
Next is a hilarious romp where one man must choose between his hectic life and home, and his more interesting one out on the town. It's...

"ISLAND IN THE SUN"


After seeing it, my brother pined that it was "just one big cross-dressing joke", to which I responded, "Right. You're absolutely right."
And finally, we have a fusion of genres that has never been explored to such an offensive degree. Yes, the kung fu/blaxploitation movie has never been touched by Hollywood, until now. If you hate racial slurs, excessive violence, explicit sex, and foul language, you haven't seen anything yet. It's...

"N**** POW!"


I'm sure I could get away with the previous film if I had something to say about racism, violence, or language. Unfortunatly, I don't.
So there you have it. Three prime examples of why I'll never set foot within ten miles of Hollywood. But I'll be damned if I'm not going to try.

I would like to call attention to BASEBALL HISTORY!

Nobody noticed THIS HISTORIC GAME between the Buffalo Bisons and the Pawtucket Red Sox. Because it's a minor league game. But it's still pretty funny.

So the PawSox scored 5 runs in the top of the 9th to increase their lead to 14-6 over the Bisons. Sounds pretty safe, right? No. The PawSox lost the game 15-14 after the Bisons scored 9 runs in the bottom of the 9th to win it.

Here's the thing. The Bisons put out Trent Durrington (a hitter who was once in the majors with the Devil Rays) to pitch part of the top of the 9th; they had basically given up the game. He ended up getting the win.

Who gave it up for the PawSox? Craig Hansen and Manny Delcarmen. Craig Hansen couldn't even get an out. It's too bad because he's pretty good-looking. But that's why you may not see either of these guys with the Red Sox for a looooong time.

Gardening the Earth

The evolution of humans towards highly cognitive creatures who domesticate animals and farm crops produced a philosophical schism between mankind and nature. Once humanity fully harnessed these skills of agriculture, it sought to dominate nature and separate itself from the very thing it evolved from. Presently, society considers itself fundamentally opposed to nature. Leaders speak about “natural disasters” and blame a personified nature as though it willfully caused destruction. A large portion of the history of the United States pitted man against the elements in remote frontiers which urged to be settled and conquered. While some believe mankind should control nature, others, who still view humanity as uniquely different from nature, believe nature should be left to its own devices. According to this group, nature knows best and large sections of land should be dedicated towards natural preserves where nature can be allowed to flourish without intervention from humans. While these two viewpoints might have been valid during a time of relatively unlimited resources, a new philosophy must be formed in order to cope with the depletion of natural resources and the severe impact humanity's wantonness has had on the environment. With virtually every place on the Earth already put to use supporting a rapidly increasing population of over six billion, mankind must form a more symbiotic relationship with nature. In order to continue existing without an enormous decrease in the quality of life or population, humans must accept the role of a conservative steward of the Earth very similar to a gardener.

Advocates of strict conservation of nature and of complete exploitation of land both hold potentially dangerously and inaccurate views of nature. Author Michael Pollan, in his book Second Nature: A Gardener's Education about gardening and its philosophy, advocates a middle path between the two extremes society leans towards. From his experience as a gardener, Pollan concludes that a philosophy of nature rooted in ethics a gardener would develop is preferential to the view points adopted by naturalists and capitalists. After discussing the differences between routinely trimmed lawns and wild growth forests, Pollan claims that:

Gardens also teach the necessary if un-American lesson that nature and culture can be compromised, that there might be some middle ground between the lawn and the forest – between those who would complete the conquest of the planet in the name of progress, and those who believe it's time we abdicated our rule and left the earth in the care of its more innocent species. The garden suggests there might be a place where we can meet nature halfway. (Pollan 64)

When compared to an advocate of strict conservation or of laissez-faire, a gardener develops a unique relationship with nature that allows the gardener to simultaneously take care of and exploit nature.

Like Michael Pollan, Henry David Thoreau also experimented with gardening as a way to develop a philosophy about man's relationship with Nature. During his stay at his small settlement on Walden Pond, Thoreau decided to grow beans in a controlled garden which he fought daily to protect from intrusive weeds. According to Thoreau, nature represented a place for spiritual development and a way to cleanse one's soul after mucking it up dealing with the hassles of an ever growing industrial society. At the end of the bean growing season, Thoreau reflected upon his garden management policies:

These beans have results which are not harvested by me. Do they not grow for woodchucks partly? The ear of wheat (in Latin spica, obsoletely speca, from spe, hope) should not be the only hope of the husbandman; its kernel or grain (granum from gerendo, bearing) is not all that it bears. How, then, can our harvest fail? Shall I not rejoice also at the abundance of the weeds whose seeds are the granary of the birds? It matters little comparatively whether the fields fill the farmer's barns. (Thoreau 120)

After making around $9 from his bean growing experience, Thoreau claims that gardeners and growers should not concern themselves with the products of their labors. The beans, according to Thoreau, grew mostly from nature, taking only minor aid from his persistent hoeing, and as such other elements of nature, such as woodchucks and birds, should delight in their growth just as he should. Michael Pollan reacts to a similar thought from Thoreau's friend and mentor, Ralph Waldo Emerson: “When one summer I came across Emerson's argument that 'weeds' (just then strangling my annuals) were nothing more than a defect of my perception, I felt a certain cognitive dissonance” (Pollan 3). Weeds, in actuality, are as much a member of the plant family of life as more pretty growths such as daisies or oak trees. However, they are quite validly named for their ability to become pests which counteract the efforts of gardeners, farmers, and the every day suburban homeowner who maintains a tidy lawn. The label weed is not so much a defect in perception, but stems from a disagreement between man and nature over usage of land.

Thoreau and Emerson argue too idealistically for the isolation and preservation of nature as something which humans have neither the right nor the capability to properly interact with. Thoreau even believed that one could absorb “higher laws” from nature and evolve the spirit through interaction with nature. While Thoreau is somewhat accurate in these claims, his theories on nature should not and physically cannot be implemented. The world's population cannot simply decide to stop growing crops due to a moral dilemma of pest control as he did with his beans. Furthermore, farmers and gardeners, by combating pests and making as efficient use of the land that they have as possible, ensure that mankind has as little an environmental impact as possible. For example, if corn growers in the Mid-West did not employ some kind of pest control, similar to but not necessarily biological weapons through the form of insecticides, then more land than is used now would need to be used to reach the needed food supply for the United States. With a need to create new corn fields, an increasing number of acres of land would be clear-cut in order to create room for crops. In effect, the relatively pure and untouched nature that Thoreau argued for would eventually disappear due to inefficient land usage. A gardener, unlike a pure naturalist, would believe that “it is possible to make distinctions between kinds and degrees of human intervention in nature” and, unlike a capitalist, “is not likely to conclude from the fact that some intervention in nature is unavoidable, therefore 'anything goes'” (Pollan 194). Following the example of the Mid-Western farmer, a gardener might suggest limiting the effects of pests but prefer an organic method involving using nature against itself through the use of thousands of inexpensive ladybugs or praying mantises (Pollan 51). The gardener, in the spirit of a naturalist, holds nature as a mentor and hopes to learn from the advice millions of years of evolution has produced. This philosophy aims to produce the greatest amount of happiness for both man and nature. A farm using organic pesticides would be beneficial for humans who consume the unaltered produce, the ladybugs and other insects involved in negating pests and the general ecosystem because harmful chemicals with potentially unknown side effects are not introduced into the environment.

Although gardens are usually small, preset, enclosed environments, the ethic developed from working with one applies everywhere in nature. For example, the stewardship view of nature would have been appropriate in dealing with the overpopulation of deer in the Quabbin Reservoir located in western Massachusetts. In 1991, the Metropolitan District Commission (MDC), after encountering harsh resistance by environmentalist groups, allowed a large number of hunters to enter the reservoir area and shoot deer in order to deal with the population problem. The creation of the Quabbin Reservoir formed a paradise for deer in which they flourished and eventually posed a threat to the quality of the reservoir water by eating too many tree seedlings and eventually decreasing the ability for the ecosystem to naturally filter the water. When viewed through a gardener's perspective, it is evident that man, at least in this situation, belongs in nature. Historian Jan E. Dizard wrote about the complex relationship man has with the Quabbin Reservoir:

We are, after all, part of nature too. We can no more stand aside than can the wolf or the goose. Each of us acts and interacts with the others – there is no possibility of being innocuous. This doesn't mean that we should be noxious. Being ineluctably part of nature doesn’t give us free reign to do whatever we want. Rather, it obliges us to think about what we do in the context of the system as a whole... We should behave as if there were a tomorrow. (Dizard 22-23)

Instead of advocating a complete removal of human interaction, the gardener recognizes, accepts, and acts based on his/her effect on nature. Historian Roderick Frazier Nash summarizes the sentiments the early environmentalist George Perkins Marsh holds about nature: “Anticipating the ecological perspective of the twentieth century, Marsh warned that the interrelatedness of 'animal and vegetable life is too complicated a problem for human intelligence to solve, and we can never know how wide a circle of disturbance we produce in the harmonies of nature when we throw the smallest pebble in the ocean of organic life” (Nash 38). Marsh's claim is valid in that ecosystems are extremely interconnected and difficult to understand. For example, whalers neglecting the trophic level whales occupy have in the past unintentionally severely harmed seemingly unconnected species of fish far away from where they whale. However, in most cases, the past actions of humans, including the vast expanse of humanity and its damage to the global environment, demand intervention from mankind. Dizard concludes that, given all of the beneficial and negative affects humans caused, humanity has an obligation to become responsible stewards: “For better or worse, we are in charge. If we abdicate, we are likely to hand over to the generations to come a much less richly diverse planet than the one we now have. We'd be fools to put the fate of the environment, at this late date, in the lap of nature” (Dizard 211). Unlike naturalists who prefer to ignore the constant impact humanity has on nature, gardeners have the ability to accept both the shortcomings and accomplishments of man and then acts upon these affects hoping to produce a mutually agreeable and beneficial outcome.

Because naturalists and capitalists view themselves as opposed to nature, they create a situation in which only one party can win. The Quabbin Reservoir owes much of its amiability to its ability to provide the greater Boston area with superb, naturally filtered, drinking water and foster an environment in which many species of animals, even ones on the endangered species list, can thrive and live without constant interactions with humans. When presented with both of these goods, a naturalist would prefer to allow the fauna to interrupt the reason their beloved environment exists in the first place – to provide water. Meanwhile, a capitalist would ignore the endangered species in favor of a much more aggressive logging policy. Both parties, due to their limited ability to perceive the potential of man's interactions with nature, end up upset with the conditions of the Quabbin. Michael Pollan argues that a gardener can support both viewpoints: “The gardener doesn't take it for granted that man's impact on nature will always be negative. Perhaps he's observed how his own garden has made this patch of land a better place, even by nature's own standards. His gardening has greatly increased the diversity and abundance of life in this place” (Pollan 193). Dizard acknowledges the increase of wild nature in the artificial and exploited Quabbin through the increase of populations of bald eagles, peregrine falcons, and rare fish, along with increases in the quality of air and water (Dizard 208). Because gardeners are not obsessed with and stuck on absolute ideals of nature, they have the ability to create and appreciate actual positive environmental change alongside positive human growth.

Modern day society needs to adopt the stance of a gardener in relation to the planet as a whole in order to survive. If humanity continues with its current trend of excessive polluting, unsustainable and irresponsible use of resources, and an ever rising demand for these natural resources, the Earth will no longer be able to sustain mankind. Fortunately for the Earth, humans are ultimately completely reliant on having favorable and stable conditions. Even if these environmental problems continue, Earth will, over a great deal of time, overcome the problems humans have caused and return to the uninterrupted wilderness that Thoreau and many other naturalists idealized. While hope remains for the survival of the planet, humans continue racing towards a point in time when the environment will no longer support such a large population consuming with such excess. As a whole, humanity resembles an irresponsible gardener who continues rapidly sowing and harvesting nutrient intensive plants into a plot of soil which only contains so much. Over time, the gardener's plants will no longer grow as the land used will become depleted and the gardener will die or move onto another bit of land. Humanity needs to learn to be a responsible gardener and care for the land because if the Earth becomes barren, it is much more probable that humans will become extinct than move to another plot of land located somewhere else in our solar system or beyond.

Works Cited

Dizard, Jan E. Going Wild: Hunting, Animal Rights, and the Contested Meaning of Nature. Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press. 1999.

Nash, Roderick Frazier. The Right of Nature: A History of Environmental Ethics. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. 1991.

Pollan, Michael. Second Nature; A Gardener's Education. New York: Atlantic Monthly Press. 1991.

Thoreau, Henry David. Walden and Civil Disobedience. Ann Arbor, MI: Borders Classics. 2004.

Okay, 100% free speech assignment. JUST KIDDING

This is fucking ridiculous. Never mind the fact that this is a blatant copout by the English teacher who assigned this. If these are emotions or thoughts that come up as a result of the Virginia Tech tragedy, then you ought to acknowledge the fact that they exist. Read Underground by Haruki Murakami (lol, 3235235th time I've mentioned him), which is a book about the 1995 (?) poison gas terror attack on the Tokyo subway. Basically, Murakami interviewed different people and asked for their personal accounts of the tragedy, what they felt, and so forth; but most importantly, he asked them how they lived their lives afterwards. And you have some pretty odd reactions. One guy divorced his wife the day after he got caught up in the attack. Another person feels sorry for the people who committed the attack. And so forth. One of the most important aspects of a tragedy like this is the psychological effect it has on people; it should be explored.

Of course, the emotions expressed in the essay might not be serious at all, or might not be a reaction to the VT tragedy. But they came from somewhere.

On a less serious note --

T.I. is performing at Tufts tomorrow! And I might not be going. Dammit. My little group of friends didn't get tickets... putains du millenium

Excerpt from my 2K6 summer journal

Friday, July 21, 2006
...
    There's this sign we just passed that says "Idaho is too great to litter." I know the message is intended for when you're in Idaho, but that's a great slogan to take elsewhere. The next time you're at home wherever you are and you go out thinking about just throwing your juice box away on the road because there's no trash can, remember that Idaho is too great to litter. Even in Massachusetts, Idaho is too great to litter. Man, Idaho. It's just so great, I don't litter anymore!

Shameless Advertisement

http://carbonleaf.blogspot.com/2007/04/she-sells-sanctuary.html

I didn't feel like copying it because now you might be tempted to read my other bullshit. This one just happened to be more explicitly philosophical. Also, you might achieve a slightly higher understanding of this nonsense if you read Heinlein's "Starship Troopers", which should be universally required reading anyways. Your library has a copy, and it's worth the two hours it'll take you to read. Hell, go to church twice and read it.

Let's take a trip back to the Progressive Era!

Dennis Kucinich for President '08.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kucinich#2008_Presidential_campaign

I agree pretty much 100% with all of his views. And he's vegan. Too bad he looks like the Kebler elf.

Vote for the only progressive running by voting for Dennis Kucinich for President in '08.

Yeah.

Boring, shitty semester

Okay, I'm done with my policy of general vagueness towards my second semester at college. It was shit.

What I hoped to accomplish did not and will not happen. The heart I put into my work is tantamount to, I dunno, nothing? I failed to reestablish the lovely college balance that existed last semester. My relationship with French is tenuous again--and again, the question: do I like these things just because I'm good at them and because of the teachers I get? Shit, give me an English class where I don't have to write essays. Give me an English class where all I have to do is put my all into class participation. I can't even count how many Tufts students ought to fail at class participation! Ugh. Let me learn from comedy and don't depress me with nihilism-inducing stories where not much happens. Baudelaire's a douche. Where's the organization in Linear Algebra? If this course is so common, why do I have so little faith in the idea that everyone's learning the same thing? And then Japanese, which has also become dry.

Understand this; oui, understand this,
but don't take me back to the Prep.
Me writing that makes me smile.
Good night.

Fish

Ahoy! All freewrites start with "Ahoy!"

It's a fish, that problem: life. But Frankl's got it; Victor Emil Frankl knows what's cookin'. What's cookin' is fish. Fish is cookin'. But in terms of philosophy, I think this Frankl character has discovered the meaning of life, although he failed to quantify it (anyone could have told him it was 42). He's got all the answers, this character.

But read some of his books: his logic is strangely mathematical, or at least that's the way I saw it, because that's the way I think, and that man connected. He reeled me right in. I'm done with these horrific puns. What the WTF? That's a new phrase I learned.

In any case, I would like to analyze my reasons for failing to write. I haven't written since my blog post in mid-February; I've written no papers, no freewrites, no nothing, although, get this: my English teacher from last semester has kept in contact with me (she's kinda cute too, but that's another story for another day, and another day I will tell another story), and she loves my writing, and she keeps bugging me to write, so I'm going to. But I haven't needed writing until this point. Life was great, life was fine, and one of two situations was the case; either my head increased its capacity to organize thoughts internally, or my thoughts were simple enough to be organized within my current capacity. I understood the universe, in the same way Zaphod thought he did. I suggest a combination. After learning much about the nature of Reality in my Fundamentals of Math Concepts course, I started seeing patterns in everything, and I could sort of store data post-analysis in my head, so it required less organization because of a good front-end for transfer, to put it in programming terms. I suggest, however, that my thoughts must still have been simpler than normal, because now things are increasingly complex—it increases with time, but it's not linear, hell no—try cubic—and I need space to organize.

Long paragraphs have few readers; did you know that FUCK YOU BOB Chris Hedges is one of the worst writers of all time? He's a reporter, and you can tell, because not only does he have no fucking clue how to use commas, he writes all sporadically like he's writing an article, and his information is all scattered about with no organization. English majors love it because they're all liberal pussies; mathematicians hate it because there's no pattern except the man's stupidity. The "FUCK YOU BOB" is something I picked up from a course called America at War. The teacher's name is Bob Dow; the teacher's game is playing connect-the-dots in a dictionary and calling it a fucking class. I wish it was a fucking class, because of the two girls, one of them is actually very attractive. He would make Furlong cry with his analysis of poems and novels. The only good thing to come of the class is the book list: it has three good books. We read "A Farewell to Arms", "Slaughterhouse-Five", and "Man's Search for Meaning". Other than that, FUCK YOU BOB we just spend two and a half hours trying not to fall asleep every Wednesday afternoon, and two to three hours watching a horrible movie, except we'll get to see Full Metal Jacket soon.

In other news, I've finalized my schedule for the rest of my four-year career; I'm going to have a Computer Systems Engineering major, a Mathematics major, and a Computer Science minor.

Peace out.

Happy 4/20!

Good morning my fellow freewriting adepts.

Today is 4/20. This means it's time for EARTH DAY CELEBRATIONS AT BOSTON UNIVERSITY! Oh and smoking pot. But not for me, because I have a wicked hot date that I don't want to forget about. Yeaaah.

Currently I am encoding some Captain Planet episodes I downloaded into a format which can be put onto DVD and read. The purpose of this is so we can play Captain Planet (aka the best cartoon ever) at our booth today along with documentaries about organic living and genetically modified organisms. Not only will the Captain (no not the spiced rum making one) teach environmental messages, but entertain those of us who will be baked out of our minds (everyone minus me). I see no fault in this plan.

So next year I'm taking multivariate calculus (finally), physics II (review), engineering mechanics (not sure what this is), linear algebra, and INTRODUCTION TO ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCE! I have five fucking classes. Bad. Bad 30ish hours of school a week. Bad. Plus work.

When I die I would like to be buried in the earth without a coffin or preservatives in my body. I would then request that a tree, preferably some type of maple tree, be planted over my corpse. Of course, my burial site should be guaranteed to be protected from demolition/etc. for the next hundred years or more so the tree which grows from my essence can prosper and perhaps even propagate.

Other plans: when/if I ever have children, I want to plant a tree the day they're born. This involves abandoning my future wife at the hospital the moment the child enters this world to start digging. My mother did something similar to this for me, except it was purchased when I was maybe three. However, I believe the tree was planted the year I was born so it's all good. We even had it harvested from our old home in Peabody to be planted at my Aunt's in Beverly when we moved to New Jersey. My uncle and aunt have taken good care of it but unfortunately have stunted it's growth by planting it around bushes and other plants in a small area of land so the root system can't expand. It may be only about as tall as I am, and thinner than my... you get the idea, but it has the most beautiful leaves in the autumn.

I also plan on growing trees in the bonsai art manner. I heavily dislike bonsai which shows man's dominance over nature - trees which have been clipped, bent, and generally abused into an unnatural shape - but I do love ones which simulate nature. One of my favorites that I've ever seen was some type of maple which was planted on a rock but had its root system going down the sides of the rock into the soil below. It, to me and probably the gardener, is a symbol of perseverance and determination. I really would like to grow Redwoods as I think they are beautiful in every shape and form. I believe the oldest recorded has over 3,200 rings. This means it is older than 3,200 years. Wow. Touching it is the closest thing to touching an immortal being. The amount of accumulated biological knowledge and experience it must have might approach the spiritual. I also wish to grow bonsai pines and maples among others. On my property, I also hope to grow several sugar maple trees and be able to perfect making several maple products such as maple syrup, maple butter, maple toffee, and maple cream. Furthermore, I'll probably set aside a large part of my dream house's property aside for a garden. It's been my dream for a number of years, especially after reading Thoreau, even though I think he's a shortsighted and foolish nutjob at times, to be self sustaining. That's what the future is. Once we can't use oil anymore due to shortages, global warming, or whatever, all of our food must be able to come from local sources. No more importing cheap corn and meat from the Mid-West or fruits from South America. It all must be grown on local, hopefully organic, farms. I figure I'll happy if I can at least grow my own food and provide my own energy through solar power for my house and car, or not have a car at all.

Time for bed,

Chris

Bad news, Greg.

So it turns out that the PawSox lost tonight's game, 6-2. However, only 2 of the runs that the PawSox' opponents scored were earned. This is due to an error by, say it ain't so, but it is--- JOE MCEWING.

Actually, in baseball, say you're pitching and you already have 2 outs. If someone makes an error when a 3rd out could've been made, any further runs scored in the inning are unearned. So a shitty pitcher could give up about 8 runs afterwards and none of them would be earned at all! Well, ex-Royal Runelvys Hernandez was the pitcher who gave up 4 unearned runs after this happened. Yeah, his ERA is 1.59. Lookin' good. I hope they don't call him up.

Haha, I totally forgot to look at the Red Sox score tonight, I was so interested in catching up on minor league baseball. It's always interesting to see where all these random players have gone -- did you know Ron Villone is in the minor leagues? Mark Bellhorn, by the way, is hitting .250 with 2 HR and 7 RBI right now, so I guess he has a chance of getting called up to the Reds sometime. Oh, wait, I didn't forget to look at the Sox game results tonight; I just forgot.

Wow, it's late.

Goals, desires, problems, and the antithesis of Buddhism

Hello,

Springboarding off the idea of listing stuff to do that Alex and Ashish had, here's mine. Any comments would be appreciated.

TODO:
1) Find stuff to do
2) Descend lower into the rungs of hippie-land.
3) Decide upon a major: over the past 3 months, I've become thoroughly disenchanted with computers. They just don't fucking do anything. At least they're more productive than being some sort of accountant - i.e. they BARELY generate new wealth. Accountants, lawyers, etc. just work with the system to help transfer money from the proletariat to the upper class. It's really fucked up that our nation is churning out people who produce no real increase in wealth while engineering and manufacturing dwindles. Computers just organize data. Meh. Go do something productive like save the planet or people.

I'm pretty much stuck at BU, unless I want to go to UMass _____ because after seeing all the girls and social people here, there is no way I'm going to an engineering geek only college. It's a pity BU only offers Computer, Electrical, Mechanical, Aerospace, Manufacturing, and Biomedical Engineering. We need Environmental / Civil Engineering because I so want to do these two. I'm almost decided that I'll switch from Computer Engineering to Mechanical and get a minor (or major, if possible) in Environmental Sciences. This would hopefully help me if/when I go to graduate school for Environmental engineering / something similar or get into a company which has a department based on this. For example, I could help both the American economy and the environment by working for (insert American car company) in their research and development department developing fuel efficient transportation. HOW THE FUCK DOESN'T AMERICA HAVE A HYBRID YET? HOW DID WE LET OTHER COUNTRIES BE THE LEADERS IN TECHNOLOGY?

4) Join and help fully form Engineers Without Borders at BU. Changing my major to Mechanical would help me more thoroughly participate in this (see rant above).
5) Garden a lot more. This includes becoming a leader in the Organic Gardening Club I'm in and also growing a San Pedro cactus to make peyote from.
6) Stay vegan.
7) Be able to climb a V6 or 5.13 by the end of senior year at least. This involves keeping up my climbing and working out over the summer and during the school year.
8) Get an apartment with like minded people.
9) Join more radical organizations to help BU once again become known as the Berkeley of the East Coast (like it was before a president in the 70's created the BU police and bashed all of our hippie's skulls in).
10) Kayak, hike, ice climb, bike, and enjoy life.
11) Get a tan.

Peace, love and happiness. Dig yourselves thoroughly.

Chris

This site explodes in freewrites, and then Kurt Vonnegut dies. It figures.

Er, I mean, so it goes. It's been awhile since I last read a Vonnegut novel; actually, no, I think I read The Sirens of Titan over the summer, which was an amazing ride, but from which I remember almost nothing. Still, I know it's shaped my mind in some way that I deeply appreciate from one of the authors that makes me proud to be an American. Does that sentence make sense? I kinda switched thoughts in the middle of it. So it goes.

In any case, Kurt Vonnegut is dead. The man, the myth, the legend, the cat, the cradle. SEE THE CAT? SEE THE CRADLE? God, I hope they don't invent that ice particle that turns everything into ice. He came to speak at Tufts; I was kinda hoping he'd show up again. Whatever, maybe in my dreams. That'd be scary. Actually, this is one man's funeral I'd go to. I'd go there, and sit there with one of his books in hand, and hope that the book I chose isn't ironic with respect to the fact that I'm at his funeral. That'd suck. What I mean is, well, imagine me going to Dante's funeral with a copy of The Inferno, not knowing what it's about and only reading it for the first time. That'd make me look bad.

Why don't I remember anything from Sirens of Titan? I should investigate it on Wikipedia.

Oh, yes, I remember the ending: that shit was positive.

Holy Tits, Batman!

In last 10 seconds, I have conceived and trademarked the phrase that entitles this post. It is now my goal to make it the hip catchphrase of 2007. If I accomplish that goal, I will simitaneously become famous, popular, and laid (three states that somehow elluded me in high school.) I also uttered the phrase when I came to my attention that I have a serious enigma in my life. An enigma that seems to have captured the minds of millions upon billions of other people on this planet. An enigma and that some people fear is a flaw and should be wiped out of existence.

I believe in God.

Something is askewww (as I make hand gestures like the great Lewis Black). At this point, my education at an institution of higher learning should have negated my belief in an omnipotent deity. If not that, the rebelliousness brought upon by my teenage years should have definitely caused a denial of the ridculous notion that a god could exist. What about the unimaginable stupidity shown by some people of faith in these times? Without question, that should push me away from following any religious doctrine. And "Are We Done Yet" was not only made, but made $10 million! Clearly, there can be no god.

And yet, here I am. Praying to a unseen deity every evening. Going to a Bible study every Monday so that I gain a better understanding of a mysterious series of sixty-six books. Going to church every Sunday to meet with people who appear to be as delusional as I am. And yet, I can't stop. And I probably won't stop for the rest of my life. And now, I have to find out why.

Maybe it's because of my Christian upbringing. Maybe I've been hardwired from birth to believe that God is an all-powerful heavenly figure, even though in reality He may be nothing more than an imaginary friend that some people created long ago and that some people use to obtain money. But almost everyday (yes, everyday), I hear that people's upbringing (whether it be Catholic, Islamic, or Pastafanistic) is the direct result of their current atheism. They claim that an education and common sense has turned them away from believing in God. And they appear angry and full of disdain for being misled. But I have an education. I have common sense. I am trying to apply these things to religion. And I'm not angry! Well maybe a little bit. But this notion in God and his power persist. This clearly isn't it. There has to be another reason.

Okay, surely the idiocy shown by other people of faith in the political realm would turn me away. Hell, some people in power follow their faith so blindly that will willingly destroy all life on this planet (all 7 billion people) as we know it because they believe in some form of the apocalypse that will bring some form of salvation to humanity. Hell, people in the Christian faith (my faith) will oppress a substatial portion of the population because they read something as a sin out of context that is mentioned twice (yes, twice) in the entire Bible. Hell, many people of the Christian faith are turning this country backward as we speak. But I still believe. Maybe it's because almost every Christian I've known in my life has expressed more love than hate. Obviously, there are more than a few types of Christians out there. There are obviously more than a few types of people out there. Oddly enough, my Christian faith has just prevented me from falling to the unintelligent black hole that is generalizations. Okay, whatever associations religion has with politics won't turn me away either.

Maybe I'm not being as drawn towards Christianity as I am being drawn away from atheism. Now, all my free time at college has afforded me the opportunity to find an exobinant amount of useless information on the Web. Oddly enough, much of the information that has attracted me has been of the atheistic persuasion. However, of all I know about how bad people of faith can be, I can safely say that atheists can be just as bad. Can be! Can be. I know not all atheists are as bad as the ones I am about to mention. For instance, Richard Dawkins is an extremely intelligent man of science, but not even he is immune to logical fallacies and almost unbearable conviction that he is, and always will be, right. I've seen atheists pervert the messages and themes of the Bible so badly on YouTube and the Internet Movie Database that I want to live in a monastery. Hell, I'll even put them in the same category as the Religious Right (or whatever that stupid blanket term entails.) Not only that, but the anger, smugness, and overwhelmingly disdainful ways in which some atheists present their arguments make me want to staple my eyes shut and glue pencils in my ears. However, I don't want to abide by the Christian faith because it is the lesser of two evils (it's an expression, I don't mean it literally.) There has to be something else that keeps me in my Christian ways.

I don't know...wait that's it! I don't know! I don't know what compels me to be a Christian. Maybe it's that's nice soft safety blanket that Christian provides that gives me the answers that others can't.

Oh, but others can! We didn't plop down out of the sky 6,000 years ago like the Bible said. The whole world wasn't flooded like the story of Noah said. How could God just crap all over Job just to settle a wager with the Devil. Outside of 33 Gospels and ambiguous Roman records, we have no proof that Jesus ever existed. So how can you know that God exists?

Exactly. I don't know. Do you?

(And don't think for a second that Christianity gives me a safety blanket. If anything, being a Christian has given me far more excrutiating questions than easy answers.) Despite the complexity of religion, it's very simple. I don't know. You don't know. I quote one of my favorite writers when I say, "We don't know anything". I don't where life begins, and I don't know where life ends. I don't know why the planet Earth ended up the in perfect place in the galaxy and in the perfect distance from the sun to support creatures intelligent enough to question their own existence. And you know what, those are the only questions that matter.

But why Christianity? What makes those answers more satisfactory than another of the other ones?

Look back at all the things I mentioned. People are angry. People are vengeful. People are ready, willing, and stupid enough kill themselves and others just to get what they want. People can't respect each others differences. And I didn't even mention hunger, povert, war, and the rest of the things in this world of shit we inhabit. And as much as I want and need to help, I'm just one person. And I can't stop them all. And it feels like no one will stop them all. And I just want to get out of this shit, but I can't. And I can't take it anymore! And...

And there's God. He never goes away. He's still piquing my brain. Despite everything that tells me I'm a fucking lunatic for believing in a supposed, unseen big man in the sky, God is there. And He keeps me at peace. And if God can do that, I'm pretty sure God can do anything, even in these trying times.

Holy tits, indeed...