Life a joke.
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Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in the "Scott" journal:[<< Previous 20 entries]
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09:07 pm
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my saturday, may nineteen, two-thousand seven
A couple months ago I found the community on here ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/community.gif) adayinmylife, which is basically about people telling the story of a random day in their lives in pictures. I wanted to do one since I found it, so about a week ago I did! I'm cross posting this here just because.
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Chronicle of an aimless day of dilly-dallying, fiddle-faddling and lolly-gagging. Canoes, pancakes, pirates, indians, rednecks, shriners, furries, frigid swims, alligators, seagull chasing, funeral crashing, drinking, gambling... you get the whole nine! In retrospect I think I picked a pretty good day to do this!! :]
Current Music: Glis - Resolution
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03:44 pm
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a day with ray in leeds, alabama
Cold was the first thing I noticed when I woke up this morning. Cold and dark.
“Cold…what? Why’d you do that? Damn it, damn. Fuck. What the fucking weather fuck,” was the first thing I said. I do occasionally wake up with a flurry of effs, I have to admit. I pulled the covers over my head and went back to sleep.
The alarm went off about twenty minutes later. Why was it so cold? Had I really left the window open all night? Yeah. Yeah I did. I rolled off the mattress, put on some pants and shut the window.
I felt bad. Not in the physical sense, just a soft undertone of mingled morning lethargy, 52 degree cold in my bedroom, dismay at having to leave when there was still no light outside and reluctance to what I was up at 5 a.m. to do.
On today’s slate: drive an hour to the tiny town of Leeds, Alabama. Meet up with an old man, hear life story, take some artsy photos, write a profile piece on the guy and go home. Bing-bang-boom. All I knew was that this guy had been working for the natural gas company for 58 years. Oh boy. But I’ve done this a few times before and I knew it could usually turn out all right. Old people usually give you free food, right? That’s my experience. Well, I still was feeling less than enthused about having to do it. And quite frankly, I just woke up with a case of the blues. Just the down-and-outs. I felt like going back to bed and sleeping all day.
I had been on I-59 for half an hour before I realized I was supposed to be on I-20. Cue eff flurry number two. It was here that my case of the blues turned into a case of the miserables. What am I doing here? Why did I get out of bed? Should I just turn back around and go home? And I seriously considered doing that. ‘Better late than never’ has never done it for me, and I was contemplating the never.
But of course I decided against is. This is me, right? I don’t really do things like that.
Even though I was five minutes late when I got to the district natural gas office the guy worked at, I took a few minutes sitting in my car to get my mind in order before I started the interview. You can’t just burst in and do it like that, I mean. You have to know what you want. This isn’t, you know, any sort of scandal or expose, where your strategy is usually to piss the other person off, to get them riled so they spill their beans. This isn’t a heart-string-tugger, so don’t follow up if he talks about dead relatives -- redirect and press on. You want funny quotes. You want him comfortable enough to tell you great stories and light anecdotes. Laugh at everything he says, smile constantly. Keep your personality amorphous; acquiesce to his personality and make him think you’re his best friend. This is how it’s done. Let’s get this over with. Here we go.
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I could not stop laughing. This tiny man, with his Southern drawl and ridiculous stories, was keeping the entire room spellbound. The entire room, yes. The two of us had started talking two hours before and slowly, as employees filtered into the break room, they stayed and listened to Ray’s stories.
He rode horses to job sites before he got a truck. He brought his dogs with him to fend off other tiny dogs that used to bite his horse’s ankles. He told of numerous near misses of high-pressure natural gas pipes involving metal rivets, welding torches, candles and dynamite, among other things, any number of which could have ended in disaster. He schemed state troopers to convince them that improvised equipment and trailers were legal. He gave children rides to school on his backhoe when the town's only bus broke down. He set a fire along a crack hundreds of feet long in a mountain, letting it burn for days, camping there at night to tend it and pouring creek water along the line to shear off a huge section of rock just to lay some pipeline. He wooed and married the company’s first dispatch woman. He pronounced boulevard as ‘boo-luh-vurd’, motorcycle as ‘motor-sickle’, can’t as ‘caint’ and yellow as ‘yeller.’ He called flashlights ‘flame-bos,’ called his duffel bag a ‘toe-sack.’
"No regrets, no regrets, nope. I can’t look back to think of anything I ever done that I’m ashamed of. If it was gonna be something I was ashamed of I wouldn’t have done it."
By the time he was ready to start working, there were about twenty people in the break room, and my case of the miserables was totally gone. This man’s stories were the prescription and my smile was genuine.
I rode around with him for another few hours as he worked to get a better feel for what he did and to take more pictures for my article. He had lived in the town of Leeds his entire life, except for when he was fighting in World War II. He told me he was a marine and that he fought ‘on Iwo,’ but he didn’t seem to want to talk about that any more.
"I walked a lot of places... walked a lot with iron pipes on my back and with a toe-sack with my tools on my shoulder. Carrying some iron around never hurt nobody none."
He did his job and we talked. Almost everyone he passed on the street he seemed to know, and he would frequently stop and chat with people. It was just really neat.
"All the things I done and got away with, they should have fired me years ago... I’ve had more fun doing what I do than any other 80 year old gas man alive, and that’s better than sitting around doing nothing all day. Retirement day and funeral day, that’s gonna be the same day. Yep, I’ve had the best run here and I wouldn’t do it no other way."
I guess sometimes I start feeling down about life, about what I want to do, and I guess I get nervous about whether or not I will be ‘successful.’ But here’s someone who has had the exact same job for basically his entire life and he is the happiest, funniest guy in the world with more friends than you would believe. I can think of all the goals I’ve set for myself and I’ve always thought that the completion of these goals would make me happy, you know, but at the same time looking at this simple man with a simple life I could only think, ‘this man did it right.’ Working to age 79, digging ditches for 58 years is not something I would ever list as desirable, rewarding or noble, but Ray did just that and lived a happy life. A happy, simple life doing what he loved, raising a family and accumulating friends upon friends upon friends until essentially his entire town knows him and loves him. And seeing that, it's hard to argue any other way as superior. This man did it right. He did life right.
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11:26 am
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that just happened
So I just got pulled over and given a speeding ticket in Talladega, literally within sight of the SUPER SPEEDWAY. 87 in a 60, yikes! So what's the fine for going 27 mph over the speed limit in Talladega, Alabama? Ten dollars. Yeah, it doesn't make any sense to me either. Shake 'n' Bake.
Current Location: work
Current Music: Led Zeppelin - Travelling Riverside Blues
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01:22 pm
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day number 8,035
Yeah, I haven't been around here much lately. Work plus a lack of internet access at home will do that, though. It'll be back to normal in a month or so though, I promise. Anyway...
Every year on (or around) my birthday (today!) I do an LJ meme. I make a post in which I enable anonymous comments and say hey, you know what, in this post I want everyone to post comments anonymously. They can be about your life, a secret you have, your thoughts about someone or something, what you think of me through the limited and lately non-existant scope of my LJ posts, etc. Basically anything you want to say about anything without having your name attached to it.
So get on it! These are usually pretty interesting!
Current Location: work
Current Music: NPR
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08:23 pm
[Link] | I fear this may be my final post...
( from this 4 year old computer! )
Current Mood: ad mortem festinamus ! !
Current Music: Combichrist - Blut Royale
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06:20 pm
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oscar the grouch
I've been living in Birmingham in my new apartment for a couple weeks now. As I don't have any roommates, I don't produce a lot of trash, so I've only had to empty my trash once during my time here. Last Friday was that day.
Work had ended for me about an hour before, and after arriving home I had finished packing my bags because I was about to drive back to Auburn for the three day weekend. The trash was just about full and I didn't want it to stagnate for three days, so I tied up the bag and walked out my door with it in one hand and my travel bag in the other. I went out to my car, dropped off the travel bag and looked around.
Looked around, looked around. There was no dumpster in sight. I'll look for one!! So I began walking with trash bag in hand.
Down the parking lot I went. And down, and down. I haste-crab-trotted down a hill and into another parking lot looking for the dumpster. None in sight. So I circumnavigated the entire complex, searching parking lots, cutting through apartment access breezeways, through grassy hills separating those not separated by parking lots. It was getting awfully dark awfully fast, and I was getting more and more confused. I kept shifting which hand the bag was in because my arms would get tired.
For fifteen minutes I walked and walked around my (larger than I realized) apartment complex. Confusion turned to irritation, and I began getting more and more irritated. Certainly all these apartments produce trash, no? Certainly it must go somewhere, right? The creek behind the furthest building back is relatively free of refuse, so that can't be the common dumping ground. What is going on?!
As my irritation grew, so grew the desire in me to simply drop the garbage bag where I was standing and drive back to Auburn. When this idea first crept into my head I rejected it immediately -- it's littering, it's filthy, it's not how civilized people dispose of their garbage. But as irritation turned to frustration and then anger at the absurdity of the situation, the thought that I could just drop the bag and walk away gained appeal. I even made justifications: if they didn't want this to happen they should have designed this place better ... you drove me to this, you!!
At the point where it was almost completely dark and the first fifteen minute mark had been reached I had decided to do it. But I didn't. Just as I was about to, I saw that by the mailbox center there was a trash can. A trash can! Not the dumpster I was looking for, but it would do. I could put my trash there and be on my way in my car.
So I walked to it and opened the lid. What the -- it won't open? Wait, it's completely taped shut?! What is this?!! And that's when I saw, above the trash can, this sign:
Wait.... what? Okay, so I'll look for these 'compactors.' I mean, after all, they're mere SECONDS away from MY apartment!! Or is there only the one? If there is only one can it be seconds away from everyone's apartment who reads the sign? It must be pretty big!!
I'm sure you know what happened at this point. Yes, I, the meek oh-dear-I-didn't-step-on-your-shoes-did-I-eek-sorry-so-sorry type of person I am, spent another ten minutes walking around the apartment complex in the exact same way I had earlier, down parking lots and through alcoves and over little grassy hills. Only this time I didn't even really know what I was looking for. Compactors. No, just the one. A "compactor"... no, THE compactor, DEFINITE article... whatever it is and whatever it might look like. Seconds from my apartment. MY apartment. Just the one, THE compactor, MY apartment!! What convenience!! Only seconds!!
I wasn't confused anymore. I wasn't irritated, frustrated or angry anymore. I was beaten. I was defeated. They drove me to the edge once and lifted me up again, only to drop me harder and farther than simply not providing any way for me to dispose of my trash would have. They got in my head and stole 25 minutes of my life, 25 minutes of aimless walking and quicksand emotions and bicep fatigue. They made me their bitch. They made me their wandering garbage bitch.
This story ends with me hiding next to some bushes waiting for people to leave the mail-box area, me looking around like a bandit and quickly shuffling toward the garbage can, then brutally ripping off the taped-down lid and muscling my trash in the can before running -- literally running -- away under threat of a fine from an omniscient landlord.
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Oh, a denouement. So yeah, basically I still don't know what I am supposed to be doing with my trash. I produce less than a bag a week, but it's about two-thirds full so I guess I better figure something out!!
The thing that really gets me is that the presence of that sign necessarily implies that other people who live here have endured experiences like mine and similarly given up. I'm half convinced these compactors don't exist, and I'm wholly convinced the apartment complex is shirking their trash-collection duties to save money. If they don't have trash pick-up service they don't have to PAY for trash pick-up service, eh? Well, it never came up when I signed my lease, but I've always taken that sort of thing as granted. Ah well. There's a dumpster a couple blocks away behind a BP station.
Current Mood: wuack
Current Music: Tears for Fears - Everybody Wants to Rule the World
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06:14 pm
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hello livejournal
I wasn't exactly changing CDs. I was reaching for the case on the passenger seat, but I hadn't gotten to the stage where I sift through the pages, and so my eyes were still ardently on the road. Which was fortunate.
I couldn't tell you if the woman in the red car saw me at all, because without hesitation she pulled out -- slowly. It may have been the sound of my tires screeching or the smoke coming from the burning rubber that caused her to speed up, but I don't know. I know she looked at my face for a second and I looked at hers. She seemed scared so I know she must have seen me at that point. I'm sure I had a similar look on my face.
Immediately after that I found my car, with the back two wheels in the grass and front two on the road, going about fifty miles an hour sideways. Well, not completely sideways. Probably about a sixty degree angle maybe? Probably. The tires on the road were still screaching and smoking though. I turned them to the right not a lot, just a little. It was like being in a power slide in Gran Turismo or something. Ok, it was a power slide, but it was a lot scarier. I managed to compensate and stear out of it though, safe and sound. Whew.
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About four or five people have deleted me from their friend lists in the past month. I guess that's what lack of access to the internet coupled with slight apathy gets me. Anyway, I'll be moving here in a few days and I'll probably make a lot more entries because I'll have more free time (and probably no social life, meh). Here's what's been going on in the meanwhile:
Christmas and New Year's were real passe for me. It was nice seeing my folks, but living in their house got boring after a few weels. Days. So now I'm no longer a full-time college student but still enrolled as one, I'll be working in a press and public relations spot (internship) for a natural gas company in Birmingham, Alabama, until April, at which point I'll graduate. It's odd, but I'm neither really looking forward to it or dreading it. It seems kind of like just something I know I have to get done. Maybe a good mindset, maybe not. We'll see in short order.
That's about it! I had a little adventure recently trying to get an apartment on short notice and for such a short duration, but I managed to resolve the issue. Unfortunately I'll have to keep paying for rent at my apartment in Auburn, but that's how it goes.
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I got back into Auburn yesterday, and I'll be moving on Friday. I got bored so I took a little walk around campus, sort of like a fare-thee-well to the places I've seen over and over and over again for the past three years. Oh, and sorry for the picture quality in advance, I accidentally had the camera on a lower resolution than I meant to.
Current Mood: cynical but i dunno why
Current Music: Monofader - Pointless Memories
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03:56 pm
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you burmese be warrior
About a month ago I got an e-mail account on the web site of the place I work at. Unfortunately for me, they must have listed my University e-mail address on my profile page or I dunno, but somehow instead of the one or two spam e-mails I used to get a month I now get about fifty a day. Were this a normal e-mail account it wouldn't be a problem, I would just create another one, but since this is my official University account I can't. And since it's the official communication medium for the school, any imprtant announcements about school go through the e-mail. So if I want to find out if class is canceled Wednesday or if my professor is allowing me to do a certain project, I have to sift through mountains of spam.
( there's a story and some pictures here or something )
Current Music: Belief - Pastlight
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11:55 pm
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my desktop isn't supposed to be solid black
umm....
uh oh
Current Mood: afraid to turn off comp
Current Music: Encephalon - Rise
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08:19 pm
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synth-air
When I woke up Tuesday morning it seemed hotter than usual in my apartment. I didn't pay it too much mind. I forgot to set the alarm clock, so I kind of had to hurry up and shower and run out the door so I wouldn't miss class and work.
I got home for lunch and it was noticeably warmer than it ought to have been. Thermostat reading: 85 degrees. So I went down to the apartment office and told them about it, and they said they would send someone out to fix it immediately. I cooked some lunch in the meantime and waited for the repairman to show up. Not that I was expecting one to arrive within the hour I had remaining before I had to leave, you know, and I was going to be there anyway. But as you can guess, he did not show up.
It was around 2 o'clock at this point and I had another class to go to (and then work), so I wrote a note for the repairman that I had left the door unlocked and that he could let himself in, which I taped to the exterior of the front door. Not the wisest move were I trying to thwart a would-be burglar, I know, but I really never worry about things like that. My apartment is sort of like a castle, with only one entrance under any circumstance. The one door outside is itself on a narrow stairwell and none of the windows are accessible save with the use of a ladder. Access to the majority of the open windows, being on the third floor, is right out. Not that any of this protects the place when there is a note on the door that explicitly states the door is unlocked and the occupant is going to be away for a defined period of time, but this neighborhood isn't especially crime-prone.
I get home around 7 o'clock for my dinner break from work hoping that the AC would be fixed but knowing that, as the apartment manager has no real incentive to be speedy about such repairs, the repairman probably never showed up. This turned out to be the case.
It is fortunate that this did not happen in the midst of the worst summer heat, as last night would have been miserable under that circumstance. Instead the temperature dipped down to the high 60s. I went all around the apartment, downstairs and upstairs, and opened all the windows. This, by the way, was my first real venture into the upstairs of my apartment in weeks. I have my bedroom, bathroom, living room and kitchen on the downstairs, so there's no real reason for me ever to go up the steps into the bonus rooms. At any rate once the windows were open I turned on all the fans and positioned the standing floor fans adjacent to the open windows so as to blow in the cool night air. Basic thermodynamics required me to position the standing fan on the first floor so it blew air inward and the one on the second floor so as to blow air outward. The overall effect, with three ceiling fans and two floor fans blowing at full-force, was comparable to standing outdoors before a storm. This done, I left and went back to work.
When I got home from work at 1 a.m., the place was actually cooler that outside, and the pleasant pre-storm atmosphere persisted. I read a bit (currently on a simultaneous Oscar Wilde and Stephen Crane kick; I can never just read one book at a time) and ended up falling asleep around 2 a.m. with the fan in my room noisily blowing outdoor night air over my covers.
The most comfortable and relaxed place in the world was in my grandparent's lakehouse in Florida. When I was a kid, they didn't yet have air conditioning installed in the 50 year-old whitewashed cinderblock cottage, so at night when it was time to sleep I would gather two or three floor-fans, open the windows, and set the fans to oscillate. The droning, doppler-shifting hum of the fans and the croaking of the frogs in the lake outside mixed, when I was a child, with the peace of mind I had knowing it was summer and I would have no responsibilities or cares for months and months.
I must had recreated this scenerio to a degree with the fans and the open window and the lack of air conditioning. I usually get about 5 hours of sleep a night (yeah I know), but the night after the AC went out I got double that. While I usually wake up around 7 in the morning regardless of what time the alarm is set for, I slept until midday, solidly.
The repairman did not show up again today, but I wasn't concerned. I like this new system. There's a sort of romance present in a house when it breathes with the day, when you don't simply set a switch to a temperature but when you actively scamper about the place twice a day removing and hanging the drapes, opening and closing windows, setting fans, and occasionally evicting moths. I can't explain it, but I sort of like it; it makes this place feel less like simply the fifth apartment I've occupied in three years and more like a home.
Current Music: Boccherini - Sonata no. 17 in C
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05:32 pm
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rubbernecking
It was last weekend, last Saturday night. There was a football game that had just ended, so the streets were now rivers of ex-spectators flowing away from the stadium, from the top to the bottom and out the arches formed from the building's legs. All involved were temporarily caught by the flow of one of the larger rivers before breaking off into a smaller stream, which then necessarilly broke into smaller and smaller channels. Within each river and within each stream were currents of varying speed, the faster current within the stream overtaking the slower.
In one spot in particular in one stream, the faster current passed an elderly woman and her husband walking together alongside a middle-aged couple. At this spot in the river there was a sound. It was a shrill and terse exclamation of fright that had begun to form but hadn't had time to escape in full before the fright's source impacted it in the literal sense and cut it short. There was another sound then, a thud and a crack all at once, the thud as the woman's body hit the pavement and the crack as her chin followed suit. She didn't yell, but her family did.
The initial reaction from her family, after their own frightened yells, was to try to pick her up and continue as nothing happened. Once it became clear she had no intention of getting up, however, they let her back down to lay on the pavement, content then with scrambling around her and frantically asking her if she was ok.
This wasn't enough to stop the river, although it did form a drop-shaped island in the middle of it, splitting the river in two for some yards before the two branches reformed into a single torrent. As the woman continued to flounder on the asphault and as the panic of her family intensified, the island began to grow, catching passers-by and holding them in place around the woman. Some even reversed their progress and fought upstream to join the island, whose growth had caused the two branches to narrow. The island's drop-shaped wake grew by some yards more and the two channels became more clogged. This was relieved when the banks began to overflow to the sides of the island, however, 90 degrees from the straight flow of the river.
Some of the islanders on the fringe tried to compact the island. Their eyes wanted to see the center, the writhing, moaning, unfortunate cause of the island's existance. Their efforts to compact the island were thwarted by the island's original inhabitant's, the family of the cause, who occasionally called for more room for the old woman on the ground. In this way the island pulsed, inward from the new immigrants' curious eyes and outward as the indigenous occupants became angry at the immigration.
The island's fringes were being eroded, were being pulled away and swept downstream. Those closest to the two branches and the buildup and the spillover, being closest to the fast-moving river, were most susceptible, and islanders were getting caught by the river's pull and joining it.
In this way I was caught and pulled away by the river's flow, and in this way I turned my back on the island I was a part of and continued downstream.
Current Mood: gotta go to work now
Current Music: Covenant - Brave New World
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08:35 pm
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fox news + microsoft + sports coverage = best mug shot ever
Current Mood: bahaha yes
Current Music: Edge of Dawn - Descent
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10:26 pm
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you tube
So after a whole bunch of people e-mailing me and IMing me and all that, I finally got an account on YouTube to host my videos. Yeah, there are a few that are missing, but they are scattered all over my hard drive and I am too lazy to track them down!
Oddly, even though I only uploaded movies started a few hours ago and have thus far announced it NOWEHERE, I already have like twenty views. Ho-hum!
Current Mood: scale the agro-crag
Current Music: Clan of Xymox - Under the Wire
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05:42 pm
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eww children
Hey, let's begin with an anecdote, that's a technique that has never been done, right?
Standing at the self-checkout at Wal-Mart, twelve-pack of Dos Equis Amber slinged beneath my arm and a couple limes dangling from the other. Today was the last day of classes for the first half-semester of the summer, and I only got two hours of sleep last night because I was studying and writing a paper.
(None of this is of any consequence for the topic, however; this information is only included because the weight of school has been lifted from me for a few days and I want to ruminate. Ruminating!! And, oh yeah, I only got two hours of sleep last night. Continuing my anecdotal prelude to the post presently.)
I fed a fifty dollar bill into the automated bill-eater in the self-checkout. I don't know how it is elsewhere, but here at the Wal-Mart self-checkouts change in the form of bills is dispensed not from the same place as the coin change but from an entirely mal-designed slit in the aparatus at about knee-level.
The machine spit out my change, about thirty five bucks, from the slit. But right as I was about to take it, some little kid (maybe 5? 10? I am notoriously terrible at gauging children's ages) waiting in line behind me with his dad beat me to it. It really is ingenious now that I think about it, the change slot being at the perfect height for a child's tiny little mitts. ANYWAY...
Little kid SNAGS my CASH and is all like, "my money!! Free money!!" And just like that I had been BURGLED. I kind of just looked at him with a sad, pitiful frown on my face while he was walking away. It was kind of like this:
Fortunately his father saw him and immediately GRABBED him really quite ferociously and said rather loudly and forcefully "You little thief! What do you think you are doing?!" Badda-bing, Dad gives me my money back and scolds the kid, apologizes to me, makes the KID apologize to me and scolds the kid even more while I am walking away. Lovely, really!!
That's my anecdote, now to the post...
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I don't understand why people have kids. No one, ever. I just don't get it. I really am mulling over the motivations for it, but aside from the biological need some may feel to have kids, I can't imagine any other reason.
A lot of it seems to be that recently-married couples are expected, generally, to have kids. If they don't, they are asked why not, but if they choose to have kids they are seldom asked why. 'Mom wants grandkids' seems to be the nail in the coffin. Well, some people want a family. That's fine, I can see that. Personally I would rather just have a wife and a few dogs or something, but it's a valid reason. Totally not worth it to me, but again that's my opinion. Any other reason is crap though.
I've heard some say they want to raise kids so that the kid will have an easier life they have or what-have-you. This, though, seems to imply that the parents have already given up on trying to make something worthwhile of their lives. Sort of a 'well my life is shit but maybe if my kid is successful, I will win' deal, which is either terribly depressing or terribly selfish. Depressing in that the parents have already quit at life, selfish in that the motivation for having the kid is to salvage meaning in a life already deemed unsatisfactory by the parent. Eww!!
'Well I don't want to be alone when I am old!' You will be. Unless you die before your spouse, you will be. That's just how it is. Kids don't live with you when they become adults, and though you may get visits and enjoy holidays with them, you'll still be alone. Kids will not and cannot remedy that, ever.
'They will take care of me when I am old!' Nah. It costs on average almost $200,000 to raise a kid to the graduation of college. Each one! You'd be better off putting that in a 401(k). Even if they have the means to help you, many won't, and even if they have the want, most don't have the means. Besides, if you are looking at kids as a financial investment in your retirement, your motives for having kids are, again, very selfish.
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Most of this stems from my own personal dislike for kids, I admit. I've never liked them. But I can actually pinpoint why:
Children, people, are born purely materialistic and selfish. The younger a child is, the more he or she only thinks of himself or herself. They always want something, and if they do not get it they scream and shout and make a scene until they do. A religious holiday becomes a spectacle of a child accumulating loot, birthdays become big-time scores for milking relatives for cash. This is pure materialism, pure egotism, and children are pure manifestations of the personality traits in adults I loathe the most. We call people who behave this way childish, an insult, and yet we think the very children for which this behavior is named are adorable. Irony!! But I don't ever want any kids, so I don't think I have to worry about it.
The only thing that really leaves a foul taste in my mouth is the fact that we are all born purely materialistic and egotistical. When I was a kid, I cried when I didn't get exactly what I wanted when I wanted, like everyone else. I pushed classmates in the mud, I threw rocks at smaller kids and laughed at them when they cried like every child does. It can be supposed, then, that that is the default state of humanity: greedy, narcissistic, conceited, cruel... infantile. We're all born with severe vices, we are all rotten by default. A depressing thought.
But I don't want to leave you with a foul taste in your mouth, so here is an adorable picture of a seal pup:
Current Mood: three days off from school!!
Current Music: Assemblage 23 - King of Insects
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10:20 pm
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but they can at least be good stories
It's difficult for me to consider written language as an art. It can come close, it can be beautiful, but its artistic facet can't overshadow its function as our primary conveyor of information. I don't think so.
That's an argument I got into with one of my professors today, anyway. She, being of a literary background and with the doctoral qualifier prefixing her name, was perfectly rigid in her defense of language-as-art. Not just language-as-art; language as the supreme art. Language as the original art, language as the root of art by which more complicated concepts are characterized and rationalized; the sieve of artistic gumption, then, and thereby Master over it. Yeah, I didn't buy it either.
I asked her how many words there were in the English language, to which she replied her estimate of however many hundreds of thousands there are. My response of, "a finite number, then?" produced a response of "yes, point?" by her.
I monologued for a while, then. Gist:
Any system (language) with a finite number of possible components (words, which can again be subdivided into letters for the particular case of English) cannot have an infinite output. This is not to say that art can be judged quantitatively, you know, but it is saying that the possibilities for art can be limited by the artist's medium of expression, i.e. language. And really, a self-censoring (or at very least finite) medium for art, of all things, is counter to what I believe the purpose of art is. Well, not that anyone should be haughty enough to suppose they know the end-all purpose of art, but I should think a lack of constraints on output would at least be an important part of it, you know?!
So given the poet's limited retinue, the only constituent of the 'artform' that can be drawn out forever is, literally, that was can be drawn... out..... forever........ the length of the piece of writing itself. As most contemporary poets believe conciseness and clarity to be some of the most endearing qualities of their poetry, wordiness (and greater depth) goes against their poetic doctrine. Heh, I'm sure this adds to ambiguity and adds much for the reader trying to divine personal interpretations from the piece, but 'cryptic' and 'profound' don't mean the same thing -- read some Eliot if you don't believe that, ha. OR THE BIBLE OMG.
Contrast this to the infinite colors available to the painter, the infinite range and combinations of sound available to the musician, the infinite choices of shape and size and material available to the sculptor.
"Don't get me wrong," I told my professor, "language is wonderful for telling stories. It's the best thing we have for telling each other what happened where, when and why. But really in the end language is about telling stories, and telling stories is where language ends."
Current Mood: hurrrrrrrrr
Current Music: Opeth - Harlequin Forest
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07:33 pm
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the only meme i have ever liked
I usually do this once a year around my birthday, but I totally forgot this year so it's a bit late. That and I'm a tad bored. TURNING TO LJ FOR ENTERTAINMENT.
The old anonymous comments thread. Leave an anonymous comment, of anything. A confession, a story, a secret, a random musing. Tell me how much you secretly hate me or how much you overtly love life. Whatever's on your chest, get it off. And if nothing is, make something up. There's no way to tell if you're lying, you crafty bastards.
And yeah, IP logging is off, as always, so no worries.
READY GO ENTERTAIN ME
Current Mood: content in comments i hope?!
Current Music: Opeth - Atonement
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05:39 pm
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'ass' as an adjective
"Yeah I got a long way to go. My brother has a big-ass chest though."
Which was all it took to make me crack up and make a couple folks give me the wtf-eye. See, I was in a gym a little while ago and I overheard a random dude say that phrase, and it rekindled a hilarious (and ongoing) conversation I had with a few folks a few months ago about the absurdity of profane words as adjectives, which eventually shifted to the more particular case of the word 'ass'. In a nutshell, the word 'ass' should never, ever be used as an adjective because when the emphasis is redirected and intentionally placed on the word itself, it always becomes absurd.
When I heard 'my brother has a big-ass chest,' I immediately thought 'yeah more like your brother has a big ASS-chest' along with the obligatory mental image of some guy running around with a bum for a chest.
'She has a tiny-ass dog' ... more like she has a tiny ASS-dog. Wow, I have never seen an ass-dog. I imagine a wooly tail-end with four legs and a tail running around her house, which is slightly disturbing.
'He lives in a big-ass house' ... more like he lives in a big ASS-house. I have heard of the architectural advantages of geodesic domes, but I don't know if I would like to live in a house that looks like a butt. Careful where you put the door and windows, eh?!
'This is some good-ass shit' ... ahahahahaHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA WHAT STFU YOU SICKO.
And so I always laugh when I hear the word 'ass' used as an adjective.
Current Mood: E-L-O rocks my socks
Current Music: Electric Light Orchestra - Telephone Line
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05:01 pm
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repeating yesterday every tomorrow
My brother is moving out of town pretty soon and I won't be able to see him too much anymore, so I thought it would be a good idea if we hung out for a while today and took a walk down some old train tracks and about-town. It was fun until the sun came out and it got oppressively hot! Anyway, some pics:
Current Mood: OMG NEW TOOL ALBUM
Current Music: Tool - Vicarious
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02:19 pm
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un-haunting the house
So I was watching this show on the History Channel. It was about old houses with ghost infestations and how people were scared to live in them and had gotten chased out by malicious spectres. It was talking about how some of them had spent thousands of dollars to hire psychics and priests and and psychic priests with safari hats to try to rid their spooky house of the spooks. The show talked about how the priests had failed, the psychic had failed, and the safari priest-psychic fled in terror.
But the show also outlined what seemed to work. Curiously and oddly, after the creep-manor owner had spent all that money and time trying to get other people to get the ghosts out, she took matters into her own hands, and all it took was her getting pissed off and venting some anti-ghost RAGE. She waited until the ghost showed itself again and immediately charged it, yelling 'I'm not afraid of you' and 'This is my house, get out of my house now!'. Well APPARENTLY after a few times doing that, it scared the ghost so bad that he never came back and now the woman lives in a DE-HAUNTED HOUSE.
Now I know that if I ever come into posession of a haunted house, all I have to do is scare the hell out of the ghosts in it and they will leave. So here's the Plan:
Step 1) I'm going to search around for a haunted house. You can get them really cheap, you know, because, umm, no one wants to sleep in a house with ghosts. So I will buy it.
Step 2) IMMEDIATELY renovate the entire thing. Whatever it looked like, make it look totally different. Paint the walls neon green, fill the rooms with 70s art-deco furniture. Put in a pinball machine, a huge stereo, tear up the flooring, replace doors with hanging beads, ANYTHING so that it looks completely different.
Step 3) Now this is where the real solution starts. Spend a little time in the house alone. When that ghost shows itself THE VERY FIRST TIME, you get FIERCE. Jump around like a monkey and charge it. Chase after it and yell things like 'WHERE'D YOU FUCKING GO?! I WILL END YOU!! I'M GOING TO RAPE YOU!!'
After your terrifying outburst/reign of terror is over, pretend to calm down but still be semi-riled and yell this: 'Aww ghost, hell naw, you messed up, I feel sorry for you now. You have to endure a week of discotheque.' Leave for the night. Leave in a HUFF. HUFF-PUFF-PUFF.
Step 4) Now the ghost, while still slightly scared from your reign of terror and moderately confused from your final remark, thinks he won. You left right? The house is his, no? But what the ghost doesn't know is that you spend the entire next day advertising for a huge party you are going to throw in your manor the following night. Make posters and hang them at all the teen hangouts. Go to the damn high school and plaster up your posters everywhere. Call every last one of your friends, tell them to bring all their friends, tell their friends to bring all their friends. Now buy a few kegs.
Step 5) Get about fifty people to come with you when you bust back into your haunted house. Get a HUGE 80s boombox and, upon opening the door, start playing the theme from Ghostbusters as loud as you possibly can. Bring in the booze, tell people to mingle, and keep the Ghostbusters theme on a loop for about an hour.
Step 6) Have a huge party! Hundreds of people. When people get tired of the Ghostbusters theme, start playing the most ridiculous dance music you can, but bring Ghostbusters back occasionally. Make sure there are people in every room at all times so the ghost has nowhere to hide. And every so often get everyone to start chanting 'I ain't afraid of no ghost.' Do this EVERY SINGLE NIGHT for an entire week. Mix it up with theme parties. Remember that Halloween parties confuse ghosts especially well.
Step 7) After a week of non-stop noise and merry-making, go back and try to spend a night alone in the house. If the ghost makes the SLIGHTEST move that night, start back at Step 3 and repeat the entire process again. You have to make sure he knows why you are doing it though. Ghosts are like puppy dogs; you can punish them but if they don't know why they are being punished they will do it again. Yell at him and explain to him that the ghostbuster parties aren't for your fun, they are his punishment for his disobedience. Only then will you be able to train him not to bother you.
He might eventually associate the Ghostbusters theme with being scared, too, so it may become enough just to blast that song for a little while to make him leave you alone. Ghosts are trainable. At any rate I am pretty sure this would work and I really want to try it now.
Current Mood: spectral safari
Current Music: Assemblage 23 - Human
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07:38 pm
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my day, act IV + prologue
I ended My Day by going on a walk. Well, a rather long walk; probably the longest of my life. I decided to bring along a camera and be a tourist, a hometown tourist. At first I tried to view the landmarks and scenery I see every day from a new set of eyes and take pictures of what I saw, but eventually I sort of wandered off campus, into the woods, out of the woods, and through some neighborhoods.
The original plan was to walk back from where I was and take pictures along the way, but I cut that short. My Day ended not with a bang but with a wimper.
Anyway, pictures, captions, stories:
Current Mood: a beautiful day
Current Music: John Adams - Harmonielehre
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scottem's journal
