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.
Monday, 25 June 2007
Saturday, 16 June 2007
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.
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.
Tuesday, 12 June 2007
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"...
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"...
Tuesday, 5 June 2007
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.)
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.)
Saturday, 2 June 2007
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...
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...
Friday, 1 June 2007
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.
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.
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