But then she had to walk through my door.

I've been listening to "Hard Boiled Detectives." CDs of old radio detective shows. They are so over the top and bizarre by todays standards. They left in some of the advertising, which makes it almost surreal to listen to. In every episode, and keep in mind these are a variety of different shows spanning a near twenty year period of time, the detective is standing right next to someone that is assassinated right as they are about to give up the information. There are so many femme fatals. And the detectives are either hard drinkers or British. And once, both, oh, it was quite a show.

I was writing something about something just now and I looked out my window and I saw this guy in a small leather coat with chains coming off, a tattered beard, 70's tight jeans (with more chains!) and a truckers hat. When I first looked I couldn't see his face since it was covered in a cloud of smoke he had just blown from his cigarette. I don't know why this was an important moment, and probably wouldn't have been if I hadn't been sitting here writing just as I saw it, but it completely derailed my line of thought. Suddenly I questioned everything I've ever done in my life. Suddenly I felt inadequate. And it wasn't that I thought I wanted to be that guy, or that I would want to be that guy, or that I think he's had a better life than I have. There was just something, like theres a whole world out there, and I can't seem to catch up to it ever. I've been on the road almost a full week and I can't think of anything I've done that really makes me feel like I'm doing something worthwhile. I question my motives for being out here. I question being out here. To many it may seem as though this is just some vacation I'm taking. I take big vacations all the time, so why is this one different? It's not, I suppose, but it is at the same time. I don't know where I'm going from day to day. I don't have anyone with me. I'm not having a series of wacky adventures like I suppose I assumed I was going to. It all seems so different from what I was expecting. And yet, like when you go see a movie that is completely different from what you thought it was going to be, yet its still good, I don't really want to walk out of the theater. I've thought about it, wanted to pack it in, turn around. But there could still be something out there. I feel like I'm missing something. I feel like there has got to be something somewhere. I think thats why I started. I can't expect to find what I was looking for on the first day, the first week, hell, maybe not within a month. But I know that there has to be something out there that I'm meant to find.

For a while I thought it was this girl thats working the front desk at the hotel I'm staying at. Maybe it was just that she was the first pretty face I'd seen in a few days, but I thought there might be something there. But after persistant bugging by me about everything I can think of as a reason to go to the front desk, I've gotten the two distinct impressions: 1) she's engaged, thus making the uphill battle of my ability to woo girls a vertical climb of about 2,500 feet, and 2) she does not seem the least bit interested. To others she may not look like much, shes about five six, maybe 150-160, noy fat just more full bodied. Like I like my women. And my coffee. If that is a fair description of coffee. Robust, thats better. Thick glasses (on her, not the coffee) and dark hair pulled into a bun. Today she was wearing a sports coat and a tie. If I were the type to get weak in the knees, there could have been a moment of that. Fortunately I keep my poker face as much as possible when dealing with people I don't know all that well. Or maybe thats a bad thing, makes me seem cold or something. Or just strange. Or something. I heard once that blonde people (such as myself) tend to favor brunettes. It's a genetic attraction, apparently the combination makes for good genes. I suppose that would explain, too, why I like a hippier woman. Thems' child bearin' hips, my subconcious points out as my eyes linger on the area in which come together to have a meeting with the back.

Forgetting this girl for a moment, I wonder a lot, and have wondered a lot as I drive, about my problem with women. It has to be just a lack of confidence, but then when I do work up confidence, or at least fake it well enough to pass for the moment, I still can't get anything working. Something I have noticed is that I tend to go after girls that are available, yet not really available. I don't go after girls in relationships, but I want girls in, say, Canada, when I'm just passing through. Or right before I'm going on vacation I'll try to get a girl. There are two conclusions that I've come to regarding this. One is that I'm a natural procrastinator and therefore won't bother to go after a girl till it is almost too late, just as I do everything at the last minute all the time. The second, and the one that seems more accurate, is that I don't really expect it to work and I'll have an out. A sort of natural time table for me to try, fail, and then run away. When I return things will be slightly different, and I'll be in the clear. This, of course, is a horrible way to go through life. Of course I've been trying to correct this, as much as possible. I just really got a clear idea of what I was doing to sabotage myself recently and so I've not been working on the correction for that long, but now that diagnosis is out of the way, I have the luxory of trying to fix the problem. It hasn't been going so well. In fact its been going fucking awful. The girl I was trying to go after has proven a formidable opponate, and I haven't been able to slip past her defenses. But I'm working on it. Still, I guess, even though I'm far away. I feel like I've been trapped in a chess game for months and neither one of us is a clear winner yet. Although, it does beg the question of what her definition of a win would be. Would it be for me to go away? Or would it be for me to break her defenses? I suppose either way it doesn't change my definition of a win. It just leads me to question my game plan. If I break the defenses, is it because I'm just playing better than her, because she wanted me to, or because its a trap? I could probably rule out the last option, really, since I doubt she's an evil genius, though I've been wrong about such things in the past. Also, I really suck at chess.

Part of it, too, though might be that I really just wanted a reason to stay in Reno. Right now I don't have one aside from people I know there. But I can maintain friendships over distance. And everyone is probably going to be going their own way pretty soon anyway. I was thought of something I knew when I first started college. It was that the only thing that would keep me in reno longer than it took me to graduate was a girlfriend. And maybe thats why I was so intent on getting into a relationship before I left. Because I knew that as soon as I got in my car and headed out of the state I was probably never going to really return to Reno. I mean, I'll be back, but I'll be there only as long as it takes to get set up with wherever else it is I'm going to want to move to. I don't know where that is yet, and maybe I'll stick it out in Reno a while longer when I get back, but I'm going to need a job soon and if I take one in Reno I'll probably resent it and quit after a month or so. I think reno's done with me. Or I with it. Its sad to think that a place I've lived for nearly a fourth of my life has nothing to hold me there. And sadder still to realize I'll probably never go back to the only other town I've lived in. I mean, aside from visits of course. I said before that I was a wandering soul. Now I just think I'm a lost one.

Road trip

First off, the blog for the trip is: matt-moore.blogspot.com. I sent out an email this morning to people only to discover that apparently I have not updated my email for a while since there were about five or six people that I had old addresses for. So if you are reading this here and didn't get a message I probably need your email address.

I'm leaving tomorrow for the trip. I was thinking about leaving today but I still have too many things to do to get out of here before this afternoon and I'd rather start off earlier than that.

I totally kicked ass at Risk last night. Only I didn't really, but we stopped playing, and I had the most places. Even though I had already executed game plan Alpha 14 - Wandering Hordes. It's damn near unbeatable. Sort of.

I'm not really sure what else I have to say right now. I've been in a strange mood all week. I think it's the anticipation of leaving, mixed with the anticipation of graduation, mixed with a general feeling of anticipation. Also I'm a bit anxious, and I'm a little anticipatory about that.

The movie "Next" with Nic Cage is actually, and completely surprisingly, a pretty decent movie. There are some bad scenes in it, and some of the acting is a little flat. And Jullian Moore's character gets a lot of build up for not much pay out, but I actually really enjoyed it. The special effects worked for the most part, and in the important parts. The bad hair was a bit annoying but it worked with the character. The ending was a bit of a cop out. I'm not saying this movie is a masterpiece, but it's not nearly as bad as people would have you believe.

I watched the movie "Jawbreaker" on demand last week and I enjoyed it quite a bit. It's an older movie now. It has Rose McGowen and the chick who played Kitty on Arrested Development. And some other less important people. The thing about this movie is that it is total camp. Snakes on a Plane camp. The critics fucking hated it, I looked it up later, but I think that if they went back round to it today after camp has started making its way back mainstream they'd have something better to say about it. The movie is full of all these cliches and stereotype characters and just really dumb characters, but if you believe, as I do, that the movie makers knew what they were doing, then the movie takes on a level of satire of all high school movies. In that way its like "Not Another Teen Movie" only its more subtle. You kind of have to accept that the movie is self-mocking in order to see it, I think, as JJ watched most of it with me and didn't think it was being self-mocking at all. But it was, I tell you! It was. It's really funny if you let it be funny, but you have to look deeper than the surface.

Also, while I'm on the subject, 12 Angry Men and Hollywoodland are both very good movies that I would suggest. 12 Angry Men seems almost trite in its subject matter and how the facts are presented in our modern 4 CSI, 3 Law and Order, 10 to the 10th power other criminal procedure shows. But as a film this is great. It keeps you in the jury room the entire time of the movie and really pushes you into the situation and into the spot. The reason I say it might be appear trite is because some of the things they discover about the case seem like they'd be pretty obvious. But I suppose it could be speaking to a lot of things why such obvious things as they discover aren't figured out by the lawyer. I won't go much more into it than that, but its a good movie. Hollywoodland isn't fantastic. It's good. And its fun, and its leaves you with a strange sense of wonder at the way of the world. But it doesn't work on a lot of levels. One level of which is Ben Affleck, who I am usually a fan of, but not so much here. I think the real problem, though, is that they treat the suicide/murder with more weight then they are actually able to get it to carry. Its just that the whole movie is starting at that point at leading back up to that point and figuring it out, but I guess I just never really got to a point were I cared how it happened or who was responsible. The weight of it is really only seen in the way the children react, and they fall short in that department because they don't seem to really want to deal with kids in the movie at all. This movie would have been great if they had said fuck the flashbacks and just started at the death and moved forward in a straight line instead of giving us all the Affleck scenes. They felt so forced, and they didn't always lead anywhere, which kind of makes the person watching the movie feel like maybe they are being tricked but in the end the only trick revealed is that the film makers are kind of jerks. And I don't even know if thats a trick, per se. But I do recommend seeing it, especially if you like detective fiction and noir film. It isn't noir, and it isn't detective fiction in the standard sense, but that makes for an interesting compination in the film. A sort of new American noir, maybe. I don't know. If you go in expecting to see a lot of intregue but know you aren't going to walk away with any clear answers it would be a fine movie for you to see.

Okay, I don't really know why I spent so much time doing film reviews right now, but whatever, there they are.

And I'm off.

For Official Use Only

Well, it is official. I graduated, so I suppose thats some sort of an achievment. Not only did I show up for the ceremony but I alos passed all of my classes. And my worst grade on the semester was a B-, which, figuring in that I wasn't sure I was going to pass that class, is pretty good.

Kaiser Chiefs, I will mention since I posted a video, have become my favorite band in the last seven days or so. I had heard a song of theirs on the radio ("Ruby") a couple of times and really dug it and so I got their albums and started watching the videos and interviews and whatever I could find. It took me a bit to get into some of their songs, but once I was in I was hooked. My ears have been ringing non-stop for three days now. My car stereo is probably begging for reprieve as I've been blasting it at top volume every where I go. And I'll be going pretty far in my car pretty soon.

I'm going on a road trip (nice segway, eh?). I have it written, in pen, on my calender that I'm leaving on the 30th of this month. I'm planning three and a half to four weeks of travel. That could change, and probably will one direction or the other. All I know for sure right now is that I want to see Montana and I want to see Maine. My uncle suggested going through Canada on my way to Maine, but I think I'm going to make this an American journey. I'll take my passport just in case I change my mind, but I've always had this romantisized image of the all-american road trip that I could take when I had some time. And I have some time, and a little money, so its a perfect time to go and I'm going to take advantage of it. I was going back and forth for a while if I was actually going, but now I'm sure I am. The 30th could change, I don't think I'll leave before the 28th, though. And unless something major comes up in the next week I won't be leaving any later than the 31st.

This isn't a pure vacation, though. It is also partially research. I'm going to be looking for a place to live while I'm on the road. Not just like an apartment, but a part of the country, a state, a city or town. I've told myself that I wasn't staying in Reno for a day longer than I really needed to to get out of college and I don't want to go back to fallon so I'm going to have to find somewhere to live. I don't know where yet. Part of the reason I want to go to Montana, however, is because I've always thought that would be a cool place to live for a while. But I've never actually been there. But I know its fucking beautiful. So, yeah, I'll be checking that out for sure.

I really don't know what I'm going to do with my life right now. I want to go to grad school. That is kind of my only solid goal right now. I have no idea what I'm going to be doing in the meantime (other then this trip), so I guess I'll just have to wait and see what comes up. I want to keep my options as open as possible for the time being. The only thing I know for sure is that I'm starting to go stir crazy in this town. In this state. It is just driving me mad. I've got a wandering soul I think, and I've left it in a relatively small area for 22 years, and its pulling me away.

This probably won't be my last blog here before I leave. I'm going to set up a travel blog (as I don't really want my parents and other family to go through all of these posts on this blog) and I'll throw a link up to it on this site. If anyone has any suggestions on places I might want to check out while I'm driving around, then let me know. I'm going to be on a pretty loose schedual, so I'll have room to check stuff out.

Kaiser Chiefs - Oh My God

Blockbustering

I just watched spider-man 3. A pirated version, on my computer. By now the movies made well over a $150 million dollars. That always makes me angry when movies make that amount of money. A year or two from now when most of the DVD and rental money has finished rolling in they will probably have cleared somewhere between $400-500 million. Maybe more, depending on how much more money it makes in the theater. Fuck, its just annoying to be reminded how much money is really being made by hollywood. I know most of that money would be going into other consumer goods if it wasn't being spent on the movie, but it still bugs me. How many problems could be solved this year if we were throwing that kind of money at them? We could have virtually every homeless person sleeping in some sort of shelter, with enough food, maybe some treatment for their mental problems or addictions or whatever it is thats gotten them to a point where they are living on the streets. Or we could have enough teachers to actually teach all the students. Or we could hire people to go into the prisons and rehabilitate people so they don't just keep coming back in after doing the same shit that got them there in the first place. There are a lot more things we could do with the money to help society. The point is, I know its not going to be going into these things if people aren't spending it on movies. Hell, I know my money isn't going into those programs if I don't go pay to see a movie. But I guess it still just bothers me. It feels like there is a lot of wasted money going into entertainment. I guess we need entertainment, but not as much as people need places to live and food to eat. I'm not trying to say everyone should stop seeing movies and give the money their saving on that to charity. I'm just saying that seeing things like how much money movies are making reminds me of how much our society values these things, and it reminds me how little we value other things.

I've got to go to school five more times before I graduate. Three times this week, twice next week, then I'm done. This semester feels like its barely gotten started and yet its so close to be over. Last semester seemed to drag on forever. I mean, I feel like there is a part of me somewhere out there that is still trapped in the blackhole that was last semester. Like I never made it out, that I only think I've made it almost all the way through this semester. God, if I wake up tommorow and find out that I've only dreamt this semester I wouldn't be surprised. Pissed off, but not surprised.


Shit, I have to figure out what I'm going to do when school gets out. I've been stressed out this whole year, knowing that I was going to graduate this semester seems to have taken its toll on me. I know everyone says that its stressful. I guess what I'm saying isn't anything new, really. But it is new. Since now its happening to me, as before it was happening to other people. I think what worries me the most is that I won't be able to find a job, or I'll get one and hate it and quite, and just not be able to get myself to be motivated to do anything for a few weeks and just kind of tumble in on myself, just sit and stare at a computer screen and maybe occasionally write and mostly just watch tv and feel sorry for myself.

I've been going to school for the vast majority of my life. I think I can honestly say that I'm scared shitless of the idea of not being in school anymore. No matter how badly I hated it, no matter how badly I wanted out throughout the years, its always been part of the landscape for me. I mean, I took a "semester" off once, but really I just dropped my classes a few days before the last day you could drop them, and so instead of taking a semester off I took half of a semester off, and I was working full time the whole time I was out of classes. It was really only about five months between dropping out and going back in, and that was because the summer was in there. Right now my school career feels like a bad relationship. Its falling apart, but, hey, we've had some good times? And we still love each other, I suppose. Its just that we are two very different people now. Fuck. I wanted out of school for so long and now that I'm less then two weeks from being done with it all I want to do is to cling to it. I have a plan to go back to school in the fall of 08. But thats kind of a long time from now. And I've got to get into a school in the meantime. But I have like a year and a half of free time coming up. The ultimate long weekend. And I have no idea what I'm going to do with myself.

It is late at night and I have a lot of homework due within the next two days. A lot of homework I haven't done yet. This is how I know I'm going to miss school, though. Because instead of being really stressed out about stuff thats due in about thirteen hours that I haven't even started I'm already kind of missing that feeling. That last minute scramble to put shit together and get it in and roll the dice of fate a little and see what sort of grade you can get out of it. Usually I'd be freaking out and trying to get shit done like mad right now. Instead I'm just soaking in that combination of fear and pressure and quiet optimism that I'll get it done in time that always rolls up on me when I have a lot of work to do in a very small amount of time.

banana phone

This has not been an especially great week for me. I could go into why it hasn't, but I won't. Suffice to say that I have been trying to deal with my life and that can be a giant pain in the ass. Really, the last few weeks have been like this.

Life isn't easy, so they say. I want it to be easy. I want all the pain and suffering to belong to characters in books and movies and be on tv and never interfer with my life. Unfortunately that isn't how it works. So that leaves me here. Trying to stave off sleep long enough to finish this. Not because I want to get it done, but because I feel like I should at least try and get something written in this blog. Even if it is just me being upset at myself. At least having something up here gives myself and others a sort of snapshot of my life at any given moment. A quick over view with various parts omitted for space and time and other restraints. But a realistic view of myself. And putting it online gets it away from me a little, if only for a while, and sometimes thats all I need.

I'm just disappointed in myself. And I think that maybe in a few weeks or months or years I'll be able to look back at myself at this time in my life and laugh and say 'man, those were some crazy times.' Only I'll probably say it like "craa-zy!" or something.

I'm sick of talking about myself. Really, really sick of it. I'm tired of thinking about myself, too. Though the only way to stop that is to turn on the tv. Since I can't even read right now without getting caught up in the tidal wave of crap inside my head. Do you ever read a novel thats written in first person and think "how can this person talk so much about there self?" I mean, the character, not the author. Anyway, I get to thinking about it sometimes and realize that thats all I do most of the time I'm thinking. Maybe its what most people do, just over think themselves. Maybe its not, I don't know, I can't speak for anyone else. All I know is that this constant refering back to myself makes me feel like I'm in the middle of a story and I'm reading it thinking "I wish this guy would just shut up and get on with it." Unfortunately if the character shuts up there isn't anyone left to tell the story anymore. So I guess thats why you have to take the good with the bad in those stories. and why I always write everything in third person.

I'm tired, and I'm anxious and I'm a little stressed out. I need to get up tommorow and go and take care of some things. And then I need to figure out what the hell I am supposed to do with myself from here on out. Hopefully I've hit the lowest point I'm going to hit. But I do tend to find a way to keep sinking lower. I'm struggling up out of a pit of mud right now, and everytime I get a handhold I lose my footing. But I think maybe the mud is caking to the walls, and it isn't as far down as I thought. Though that doesn't sound very optimistic, perhaps, it is the most optimistic I've been for a couple of days, so let me have that moment.

The world is a little bit different on a mac

I'm still adjusting to this new computer I got. Its strange, I'm sitting in the JTSU and writing this, on a shiny white computer. With a giant glowing apple on its back. I feel like a different person when I'm on this thing. Its all like "look at me. I have a mac. I probably drive a hybrid and like dancing in the rain and movies based on true stories and something else about the environment and EVERYONE LOOK HOW COOL I AM!" Fortunately I don't feel that way. Yet. Though I imagine its only a matter of time before I contribute to the perfect storm of smug (I'll have to keep my distance from George Clooney...)

Really, the worst thing about this computer is how freaked out I am that its going to get stolen. My last laptop I never took to school because I was afraid it was going to get stolen (or damaged, by me). This one I take with me everywhere. I've had it for a week and I really feel like I can't go back to the way things were before. Of course I grow some serious attachment to every computer I have. I guess its because of all the time I spend on them.

And while I'm still on the topic of my computer, there is a counter in the corner telling me how long I've been conneted to the UNR network. Which is really freaking me out because I'll look up and say "this is costing me a fortune!" thinking that I'm paying by the minute (I'm not, but it makes me think I am) or I think "it really takes me that long to come up with a couple of lame jokes for my blog?" And yeah, thats annoying. I can turn off the counter if I want, before anyone points that out, but I haven't. Because I'm much happier complaining about something than doing anything about it.

Brain Damage Control

Sometimes I wonder if maybe I'm a little bit too impulsive. I woke up at three am one day and decided, for no apparent reason, that the hair I had been letting grow of its own free will for over two years had to go. Later that day, oh, it was gone. Sunday I thought about getting a new laptop computer. Today I brought home a macbook. Yeah, a macbook, my very own. Its so sleek and sexy and it makes me feel like a fool everytime I look at it. I'm not using it right now, its just sitting there, idly, right next to me. Not to say I haven't been using it, its just hard to surf the web since I'm too lazy to unplug my cat5 from this computer and plug it into that one. And because the only wireless network that isn't password protected that I can get onto from this apartment is insanely slow. Also I haven't got all the controls worked out. Macs are weird.

A while ago I suggested the idea of an online magazine that multiple people, including myself, could work on. The idea never went anywhere and I had all but forgotten about it until last friday, when it was brought up again. I think there is a good chance that something might actually come of it this time. Though who knows, in my mind the working title of it would be something like "lazy inc." and the tagline could be something like "yeah, we are too lazy to even capitalize the title, whatever." But that may be just me putting my own personal bias into the thing. Point being if your interested give me an email or a comment and I'll get back to you. I get really ambitious about stuff, but if nothing is really happening with it my interest will slowly decrease till there is nothing left.

I was working on a book of poems a little while back. I haven't done much with it in the last couple of weeks (i haven't done much of anything in the last couple of weeks, actually). I made a cover for the book, well, a tentative cover for it, while I was really into working on it. I have it up on my wall by my computer, with the vague hope that having it there would inspire me to want to finish it. A moment ago I looked up at it for the first time in a while. Its a picture of a train wreck. Just that and the title. Printed out on a black and white laser printer. It occurred to me that that may end up being the cover for the book of my life. "A train wreck?" You say, " what an original metaphor." Well I have one thing to say to you, mister. "Shut up. Jerk."

Really, though, I've sort of shut down lately. Maybe its the thought of graduating and not knowing what to do. I know I use that as an excuse a lot, but its on my mind a lot. I keep finding myself wishing for a relationship. Something more substantial than my relationship to smoking and drinking diet coke. You know, like, with a person, of a different gendered persuasion. Then I keep getting caught up in the idea that having a girlfriend in my life right now really wouldn't make all my problems go away. But it would help ease my worries, I think. Or at the very least give me this whole other field of worries to think about for a while. Sometimes I think that life is just a game of moving from one problem to the next before the original problem overtakes all common sense. Thats probably why I'm so unfocused when it comes to my life. I just move from problem to problem, leap frogging to avoid being in one spot to long. Like in old NES games that if you stood on a platform too long it would sink, but it would rise back up if it didn't crumple beneath you while you stood there. I can't think of what game exactly it is that I'm referencing here. The point being if you bounced back and forth too quickly the whole fucking floor would give out under you. I don't need to get away from all those platforms, I just need enough that I don't have the ground fall out. I just constantly need new different complications in my life. And lately I feel like I've been stuck on the same ones for way to long and that lava is getting ankle high.

I'd like to take a moment to point out how well that metaphor up there came together. That was a thing of beauty. At least by my standards, which are admittedly low.

I hung up a painting I found in my closet while I was cleaning it out today. The painting isn't good, well, I painted it so what do you expect? And it isn't finished, and I can't really remember what it was that I was going for in the first place with that thing. But I hung it up none the less. Partially to add some color to my room. Partially because the unfinished nature of it spoke so much to my habits. I never finish anything. I'm really bad at the follow through. I remember thinking I was going to whitewash it and start over, but now I'm glad I didn't. I have another blank canvas (I bought a two-pack!) and I think I'll use that to try again. I don't think I'll ever try to be a real painter, but I also think that everyone should paint from time to time. And take photographs. And sing. And write something creative. It doesn't really matter if your any good (I mean, unless you want to have a career in one of those fields) I just think that there is a lot of creativity inside everyone that needs to be released once in a while. But for me the fun comes in pretending to be an artist. And for some reason, even though I want to be a writer, when I think artist I still think painter. I suppose a lot of people do. Painting is art in the way we define it most of the time. Even though thats not the real definition, I don't think you can really be in any creative field if you haven't painted at least a couple of paintings. And I guess thats why I hung mine up. To remind me that, hey, at least I'm trying here.

News Cycle

I haven't really had the desire to update this blog in a while. I've tried a couple of times to put something up, but it just usually ends after a few sentences. Although I haven't really had the desire to do much of anything lately. Especially not school work. I really was thinking I needed some good grades this semester. Its not going to happen. Maybe in one or two classes I'll do alright. Not in all of them though. The problem is I really hate my classes this semester. Really, really, really hate them. All but one. But, shit, 1 out of 5. A 20% ratio of classes I like to classes I dislike. This semester is fucking killing me. And its going to kill any hopes at a decent GPA because when I don't like (or care about) a class I barely touch the text books. Which is exactly whats happening. I went in to take a test I hadn't studied for at all while I was hungover the other day. I'm sure that went well.

God, I just don't care anymore. I've just completely lost interest in almost everything. Everything but sleeping and eating. And watching Arrested Development. And playing WoW while listening to NPR and BBC, which seems like an odd combination but I find that if I think back to something I heard on one of the shows I'll remember it quite well, and also remember what I was doing in the game. I guess its like a memory cue. Like sometimes I'll be running along somewhere in WoW and all of a sudden start thinking about the Gospel of Judas or something because I was listening to something about it the last time I was in that place in the game. I forget what Bond movie it was, though I think it was Octopussy, and the first time I saw it I was looking through this stupid catalog full of novelty crap (I was like 10) and even now if I see that scene on TV or somewhere I'll remember looking through that catalog. And whenever I smell mildew I think of Pirates of the Caribbean. I guess that one makes more sense. I guess my point in this, other then that I've lost interest in anything other than the most mild of intellectual pursuits, is that if school had a way of linking information into my brain like these other things then I would probably be some sort of model student. I know there have been a lot of studies and such on the subject of how we remember stuff, I just wish people could apply it better.

One thing I do remember very clearly, and probably will remember for a while, from one of my classes this semester is the intense rage I get in my communications class. You know those people who have a false sense of how good they are at something plus have a really self-centered view of how things should work, plus have those really fake personalities? Yeah, shes one of those. And its a three hour class, so I'm supposed to get a break (they add in an extra 15 minutes in the once a week classes so that students can have a break halfway through) but most of the time she doesn't want to go till the time the class is completely over, so she plans on ending it like 45 minutes early, which is really only half an hour early when you calculate in the extra 15 minutes. This doesn't work for me at all. The room is stuffy and just so bland and she has this monotone that she doesn't think she has (shes a professor of speech communication, so she thinks whenever shes talking shes being fucking riveting) and she always tells us when were talking in front of people to make eye contact, which she does, but she never fucking looks my way because the once or twice she does after about an hour and a half of sitting there and really needing to pee and smoke and just get the hell out of a room that, if I really think about it, would be my idea of hell, if only for a few minutes before having to go back in for another hour and fifteen, she would see that my eyes were screaming. The last class she was talking and I was just smashing the back of my head against the wall. It wasn't really intentional, I just couldn't take it anymore, and the pain was a wonderful distraction. And I can tell that she knows that I would rather be sticking needles tipped with poison ivy into my ear drum than listen to her another second but I've been a good student so far so she hasn't been able to say shit. Fuck, I seriously dread going to that class. I mean, I hate most of my classes, but at least when I'm in the other classes I don't think about jumping out a second story window just to get some fucking air for a second.

I have this weird sordid love affair going on, mostly in my head, that's been driving me crazy. I guess that's a transition. My writing instructor told me he had noticed that I was really into the creation process in writing but that he (actually he said "we" and I'm not sure who else he was talking about, but whatever) noticed I wasn't too keen on revision. Which seems to be a side note, but I think it leads back into this. I build up all these relationships with girls that I barely know in my head. I do this all the time, not just right now, its a running theme in my head. And I was thinking that maybe the reason I'm so good at having these relationships that last months and go nowhere is because I just create in the spaces. I'm not with the girl, but in my head I think about her enough and 'write' the relationship for a few months till I have some interaction with her that really isn't that much of anything and then I just throw my hands in the air and say "that's it! I'm not pretending were going out anymore!" I suppose I should clarify so it doesn't sound like I'm that much of a crazy person. I know we don't have a relationship. I'm not following them around, I'm not going through their trash, I'm just sitting at home and thinking about how if I wasn't such a fucking fuck up I could actually be with them right now. An example, earlier tonight I was watching the discovery channel, something that really wasn't holding my attention all that much but enough that I was continuing watching it. And I all of a sudden had a desire for some ice cream, and I didn't have any in the house. And so I just imagined calling up my imaginary girlfriend and imagined her coming over with a pint of ice cream and watching the same crap I was watching. That is about the extent of the relationship I build up with these women in my head. Its not love, its not even really lust. Its just a desire for an attractive woman to pay attention to me and occasionally take care of my needs, ice cream and otherwise.

So who are these girls in my sordid love affair right now? God, its hard to say. I've gotten all tangled up lately. I just thought of "Teen Girl Squad," and the Ugly Ones "I have a Crush on every Boy!" Change boy to girl and that's about how I feel right now. I really only feel an urgency to have a relationship, rather than my normal lethargic deep sighing desire to have someone but an inability to really act on it, when something big is going to be coming up in my life. Like now its graduation. And when I graduated high school it was the same thing. And there is been a lot of times in college when I thought I was going to do something big soon and I started working harder and faster to try to actually act on my feeling (yeah, harder and faster, uhh!). I think of myself as being cursed with an over abundance of optimism on the subject of relationships. I just always think something will happen, and soon. I'm like the guy who plays the lottery every week for years and every time thinks he's going to win this time. I really have no better prospects now than I ever do. And the odds are still the same against me. And they are just god awful odds. And yet I keep buying the tickets. And I constantly think I'm going to win. Even though, really, I know that what I constantly hope for is just never going to come true. It gets back to my optimism. Like a girl that is into me is going to just walk up to me and write "I'm totally into you" on my forehead, and I'll have to go to the bathroom to read it, and then get another mirror to get a reflection of the reflection so I can actually read it, and then walk back out there and ask her out, looking like an idiot because she had written in sharpie and it just won't come off. I had a point somewhere in there. Ah, yes, that's what I would like to happen, for girls I like to make it clear that they would be willing to go out with me. Because its not the rejection of asking a girl that I'm afraid of, its me asking a girl out that really isn't into me out and she saying yes (for whatever reason, maybe shes kind of sort of into me, or she just likes me as a person but not really as a date and doesn't want to hurt my feelings, anyway) and me taking her out and thinking its going well and then I end up making myself feel like crap in the weeks that follow as I try to get a second date and her continuing to blow me off. So instead of a fear of failure in the initial round I'm afraid of that second round. Because that's where I always fuck up. And that's what really screws with my head.

God, I am so fucking tired of talking about this right now. You know, I don't know how many people sit there and read through every word in my posts but just imagine this long monologue going on in your head every waking hour of the day. I figure my post probably would take around ten minutes to read, give or take, if you read it all the way through. And since I can think a lot faster than I can type, I figure this whole thing counts for around two minutes of thought. And it just goes on in this infinite loop until I finally fall asleep and then sometimes it continues into my dreams, and then when I wake up its right back into it. Usually, sometimes I wake up with a song stuck in my head. And so I listen to that playing and don't really think at all about anything for a while. But then its right into it as soon as I wake up enough to start thinking. My days are just a daze of this crap. I think its why I like playing WoW and listening to NPR. Because WoW is just such a menial task. Repeat the same tasks over and over and over and over. That's all you ever really do. So that engages my brain that controls, fuck I don't know, actions I guess. And then listening to smart people talk about books and musics and news and politics gets the other part of my mind that, I guess just the part that thinks in a rational way. So with those two parts of my brain engaged I don't have to think about myself at all. I'm completely shut off. Its like watching TV, but even TV doesn't shut off my brain as completely as this combination. It used to be WoW and loveline when Adam was still on it. Then when he left I stopped playing Wow, because, what was the point? But now with podcasts I'm back on! Haha. This also relates to my blogs, because when I really get into a blog it kind of has that same affect on my brain. I mean, I've thought about what I'm typing so many times that I don't really have to think about what I'm saying at all, and I listen to music and I don't feel the weight of all my emotions on me anymore. I think that's why they go on for so long. About, really, absolutely nothing in a lot of parts. And I feel kind of bad about that but I figure, hey, its my thing to have the really, obnoxiously, long blogs. Its not like I make people read them. And it makes me look like I really have a lot to say when you click on my page because of all those words on the page. Like these words. Okay, now I'm just wasting time, because I've really run out of things to complain about. At least publicly. Good lord, could you imagine how long this thing could be? I mean, I self edit out a lot of topics that I just won't touch in this blog. If I brought all of those in, man, this thing would never end. I would have to work on my blog, like, eight hours a day, and I still wouldn't get it all out. Actually, that sounds like a kind of fun adventure. For like a week sometime. Just work on writing stuff for my blog for eight hours a day for a week (a work week, so five days). Good lord, I guess I'd have to talk news and politics if I did that. Yeah, I would. And entertainment. And probably a lot of other things. It be like a real blog! And then I'd probably get lazy and take an hour or two off and just post some half written story I wrote a couple of months ago. Well, it could be fun, I don't know. I wouldn't have time to do it for at least a month and a half, so yeah, I'll think about doing that. Mostly as a way to just keep myself occupied for a while after school is out. And also as a way to force myself into doing more writing that isn't just self serving like this blog.

Okay, so that last paragraph was supposed to be my last paragraph. And it seems to have turned into some sort of other tangent of thought that I couldn't stop once I got rolling on. But here, this is the last paragraph. And it is, as it should be, the most important paragraph ever. So I'll just summarize what I think I remember writing about: Eskimo Pie has gained sentience, I for one welcome our new Frozen Overlords.

Calling it in

I really don't think I'm going to go to school tommorow. Today, I guess, whatever, wednesday. I only have classes three days a week so I feel kind of bad about not going, which is probaby why I havn't missed any class yet, but its starting to get to a point where I feel that if I keep showing up every class I'm going to go nuts. I don't really know why that is. I want to blame it on laziness, but I don't really think thats it. Its just stress, I think, getting there and participating in discussions and trying to take part in something that I don't really feel a part of. I was thinking about why they give us a month off in the winter and three months in the summer and why professors take a year off every seven years and I realized that there is a lot more stress involved in the academic world than it seems like there should be. I wonder what that is. Maybe its just all the time you have to spend working away from the school, and then just being there around a lot of other people that are getting progressively more and more stressed as time goes on. Spring break is when were supposed to take a moment to relax. I used to think it was almost silly since I would rather have just gotten out of school a week earlier, but now it makes more sense. I think thats why so many people in the business world have to change professions every ten years or so, and why they have tendancies to just sort of freak out after a while. Its the same thing really, your at work or your at home working on work stuff or thinking about it and you stress yourself out and then you go to work where everyone else is in the same mindset. Of course they don't get all the time off that college students get. Really I'm surprised there aren't more office shot outs, it seems like a lot of people would get to that point. Not that I think its a good thing or anything, but I'm just saying that it seems like it would happen. But maybe the world of business is less stressful than study. I mean, in business its the same thing over and over everyday, so its more boring but at the same time less taxing since you know exactly what is expected of you and you know how long everything takes, etc. So maybe thats why people can deal with those types of jobs a lot. but there is the stress, i don't know. I'm just talking in circles now, trying to figure it all out.

I've been a little freaked out lately about this whole graduation thing. I really have no idea what I'm going to do. I want to move, go somewhere new and exciting. Or at least new. I have this vision of myself in a little house just outside a small town somewhere. I don't know what I'd do for work in this situation, but it sounds nice. Small and cozy and comfortable. I could just get a cheap place and work in a diner or something and focus my real attention on getting something written and published. I was looking at job postings for college grads and there wasn't a single thing that I could find that really appealed to me. Maybe I was just looking in the wrong spot, but I've spent a couple of years thinking about what I was going to do once out of college and I've come to the conclusion that there really isn't any job out there that I know of that I'd actually be willing to do. I say I could work in a diner because if I'm not going to like what I'm doing I want to have the least amount of responsibility. Also, I like the idea of me being in a little small town diner, just being part of the background in a little community. I don't know why that appeals to me so much. I've also thought about moving to England to do the same thing, just with more british accents. I'm not sure if thats going to work out, but, hell, i could call the whole thing a cultural experience if I did it that way.

Fuck, I don't know. graduating, its a thorn in my side. I've never really made a big life decision before. I mean, not really. In high school I always took for granted I was going to college. I took for granted I was going to UNR, I didn't even apply anywhere else. I don't know what my GPA from high school was, or my ACT or SAT scores, those numbers were never important to me because I didn't have any real significance. They were just things that I did without thinking about it that lead me into reno to go to school at unr. I chose my major, but a major isn't really that big of a deal, I don't think. It can make a difference if you have a real solid idea of where you are going, but if you dont than almost anything will do, all thats important is the degree, the type is negligable. So now suddenly I'm realizing that I have to make a choice that is really going to affect where I go from here. And I have no idea what the fuck I'm supposed to do with that sort of responsibility. And I am tempted to think that my idea of going to a small town and taking a job with no responsibility is a non-choice. But then I think, hey, I'll have a college degree, and I'll be going to paupers way, I'll be living life close to the bottom in order to reach for the stars, as it were. I think if I choose to go with a more career oriented job type then I am going to get stuck in it and before long I'll be middle-aged and wondering what the hell ever happened to my hopes from when I was my age. I really don't want to look back in thirty years with a lot of regret. And even if I do end up with that business career model at some point in my life, a few years to figure shit out is just what I need. Hell, its what most people do when they get out of college, another one of those little cliches. The decision is a lot harder from the first person. From an outside perception it seems so easy, I've guess I always assumed I'd go on a little soul-searching journey after college, but actually getting ready for such an adventure is driving me nuts. But I suppose I really did make this choice a long time ago, now I'm just freaking out because I'm realizing that I'm going to have to go down a road that I'm not familiar with at all. But it will work out, I'll be just fine.

There are a lot of odd little moments in your day that make you wonder about the nature of yourself. Not in a spiritual way, but just as a self that other people perceive, more accuratly, how they perceive you. I've had several moments in the last couple of days that have called into question who I am in other peoples minds, what type of person they see me as. I don't know if my brain is just reading into everything, and strangly at that, but I'm getting a lot of weird readings lately. A level of, dare I say, respect, from people I didn't really expect it from. I don't know, I'm starting to feel a little more confident in myself, which is a strange feeling, and I like it.

Rambling man

Sometimes I feel like I'm not really living right now. Like I'm just looking back on this moment from some time in the future, but its so vivid. And so dull at times. Why would I be remembering this? I don't know. Sometimes I feel like I'm in a sitcom. Weird little things that I can easily overreact to happen. Then the rest of my time is down time. If you condense everything down to part of a half hour show half the weeks out of the year its more than enough. Maybe I'm really only alive for a few minutes every week. Maybe the rest of my life is just filler. Maybe I'm sitting somewhere right now watching the clips of my life. Maybe I'm just remembering what supposedly happened inbetween. How do I know that any of the rest of it really happened? How do I know when I am on camera? How can I tell when I am only alive in my mind?

I'm not trying to be philosophical, really. I'm not trying to get at a higher truth, really, anymore than I am trying to understand my existence as it is right at this moment. I suppose that really is a higher truth than anything else I could be thinking or writing about. How do I know that I didn't already write this? I feel like I am writing it, yet in a few minutes I will only have the memory of writing it. How do I know I'm not just remembering it right now? Maybe I am philosophisizing, I suppose I am, theres really no other word for it. What if this is the first moment of existence? A little out of what I was just speaking of, but it relates, since then everything that I am remembering now about my life is a false construct, and so this familiar feeling of typing is actually a completely new experience for me. But what if existence hasn't even started yet? What if this is only part of my backstory. Sometimes I think of myself as a character in a book. We think we understand this character and we sometimes get a lot of their past, but did that past every happen? Would the character remember all those little events that get left out of the book, would they just fill those in? Is that what I am doing? Or have I already done that, maybe my story has started already, and I am only thinking what the author told me to think? Or what they think I should be thinking? Why am I thinking philosophically right now? Is it because someone in some meta-dimension is telling me to think about it, or they think I am thinking about it? Maybe I am only thinking this because someone else is thinking it. When I write characters I sometimes wonder how they would feel about it. I guess this was the plot of that Will Ferral movie from last year. What was that called? Whatever, its still an interesting question. I suppose I should watch it and get their take on it. Stranger Than Fiction. Thats what it was called.

I remember when I was around ten or so and almost falling completly apart in the shower one day as I contemplated my own existence. I had to talk myself into believing I still existed. I didn't really mention it to anyone at the time, but thinking back on it, if in fact it actually happened, it occurs to me that it was the one of the first in how I perceive the world. I was thinking today about when I found out there was no Santa. Sometimes I think of that as a critical point in my life. I think it was the first time when I was a kid that I had to figure out what was real and what was not. I had to figure out how to prove to myself what was there and what wasn't. I don't think I ever really figured out how to do that. I don't really study philosophy though. I'm in a class right now and I don't even really like it all that much. I've never been that great of a student. I think too abstractly for scholastic studies. And I have a tendancy towards laziness that has prevented me from really getting into studies that I should have been doing for a long time. This is somewhat off topic. I think its the way my brain works, how I think, that keeps me from being able to interact that well in this world. I have a tendancy to disbelieve in almost anything, anything that I believe could be santa. It could all come crumbling down around me. But at the same time I have a strong feeling that I'm doing something that relates more to fate, that there is some sort of guiding principle in my life. I think in stereotypes. I am a stereotype in a lot of ways. Its a strange way to live. No matter what I do I can ask myself "why am I doing this? Would my stereotype have done that?" and I often realize that the answer is yes. Why do I have long hair? I grew it out because I wanted to, but the more time I spend thinking about it I realize I didn't really have a reason to do it, and that having it puts more closer to that comic-book-guy stereotype I have put myself into. So I was thinking I could move away from the comics and into other things, literature and what have ye. Of course, there are people living in the world of literature that were at points just like me. I am a cliche. I mentioned my life was a novelty act in my last post, or did I? Maybe I wrote that somewhere else, I can't remember, but I said it, wrote it down. Well its not true. Because novelty implies something new, something slightly different, but it also implies a sense of unimportance, of purposelessness. Maybe in that way I am a novelty act, but in the other sense I am not, I am not new and different, but my experience is different, however slightly. So it is a novelty for me.

Sometimes I wonder if I havn't lived in a world of stereotypes before. I often feel like I've just left this world and come back in different forms. Something akin to reincarnation. I've lived the life of every stereotype. I'm scrapping the bottom of the barrel of possibilities now, perhaps. In my version time is not so static, I can come back at any time, I could have lived through these times a hundred times before. With no memory it might as well have never happened. What about false memory? Does it matter if it happened if I think it happened? Does it really not matter if I don't think something happened? I suppose on both sides it matters if it happened or not. But on both sides the real things that matter are what I feel happened. Truthiness. If I can't perceive it it may be real but does it matter? There are too many questions here. I want to provide myself with answers, but there are none to be had, at least not yet. I feel like if I completely accept myself from an outside viewpoint, see myself for the wholeness that I am, then I can break my mold, go outside what I would normally be compelled to do. So far I am simply following the instincts inside of me, moving blindly towards a destination I'm not sure of. I can see the future, at least my future, if I only understand where I am right now in relation to it. If I could see how every particle is moving and where it is going then I could see the future. Humans are predictable creatures. I am predictable, I am following a mold that was set out long before I got here. There has to be a way to break it, but in order to do that I must discover how I got into it in the first place. And to fully break it I must fully accept that it is there, I must no longer feel that I am acting as an independant person but rather as an organism that is following prescribed instincts. All animals have something that tells them how to act, how to survive. But what when you don't think that just surviving is enough? What happens when you want to make something of life that transcends everything that you ever thought you could do? Maybe I just need to stop and to think more often. Maybe I just need to take action. And maybe I have already started to break free of my mold, simply by acknowledging that it is there.

V.D. (The Good Kind?)

Its official. I'm 22 and never have I had a date on valentines day. Its a little past midnight, making it the fifteenth, though I wasn't holding out much real hope since around the eighth. Well, fuck it. The only real reason that this upsets me is because valentines day (or V.D. Day, which is great not only because it repeats "day" but also because it sounds like V.E. Day. Also, Venereal Disease Day, which is also hilarious, in a really stupid sort of way) is the one day out of the year that I would really have a chance to be able to pull off the whole romantic persona thing. I know that I will never be the type of guy that is all fruity and emotional and can really get the women swooning. But on just this one day out of the year every guy is given a chance. Every cliche in the book works wonderfully today. Start out with some flowers and chocolate, move on to the candle lit dinner, champaign, maybe a gift of some sort of jewlery. We tend to think of valentines day as a day created by card companies for women. But I believe that secretly it was created in some darkened basement by a group of men, who knew, knew it through and through, that they had absolutely no idea how to romance women. So for one day, 24 short hours, they conspired to make every lame idea a man has ever had to win a girl over a reality. Its sort of a mystical day in that. Even the most socially inept men out there can't help but succeed on this one day. Well, maybe not the most socially inept, i.e. me, since I am sitting here writing this when the rest of the world is ...in bed.

I bought some easter candy today. You know, shake it up a bit.

Normally on Wednesdays cheb and I go out for dinner, but today I got out of one of my classes and went to the store and ate earlier. I thought at the time that I was only eating because I was insanely hungery. But, upon reflection, something about going out with cheb to dinner on V.D. Day didn't sound like the best of ideas. No offense to cheb, I just don't think I could handle making a lot of stupid jokes whilst couples around us were all romantic. I think it would have put me into some sort of shame spiral. Or I would have punched some jerk out. It would have been funny, but wrong!

I don't know, V.D. Day isn't really getting to me that much. I don't really feel like I am missing out on too much on days like this, a lot of work and spending of money to impress someone that is either supposed to be already impressed by me or someone that I no longer should have to impress. But still, it gets my brain thinking, is this how its going to be next year? And the next? Fuck it, no sense worring about it now, after all, I have a whole other year to work that shit out.

Uncomfortable conversations with strangers

This semester is already starting to take its toll. And if we don't get no tolls we don't get no rolls. See what I mean? I can't even keep a coherat thought together for longer than a sentance. I do like spring rolls.

I am a fucking idiot. There, I said it. Paul was right all along. I finally had an opening and got to talking to a girl I've been angling for a reason to talk to for the last couple of weeks and suddenly I found myself standing in an elevator realizing I had blown my chance. Fuck, I've never been very good at flirting, and she was probably out of my leauge. Hopefully when the next oppurtunity like that comes up I won't make the same mistake. Knowing me I probably will.

Right now I should be writing something other than this. I'm working on this story that I think is going well but it is taking forever. I have no idea where to go in the story now. I was planing on turning it in tommorow, but now it looks like I'm going to have to turn something else in. The problem is that I feel that my writing has become something of a novelty act. What I'm working on has more substance, but its not ready! If only I had another week. So of course now I have to turn in another novelty act. My life is a novelty act.

I'm getting tired of getting shaken out of sleep by explosions. The fucking construction crew is still blowing rocks right outside our apartment. This morning the first thought that went through my mind as I woke up was "that was a big one." Then, in my tiredness, I thought "this is like living in a war zone," of course I corrected myself since there was virtually no chance of the explosion coming for me here. But I thought about what it would be like to be woken to explosions, much bigger ones, in a war zone. Then I sort of drifted back to sleep but I realized that that would really suck. I was wearing my WAR t-shirt (its a band shirt) the other day and was asked why I was supporting war. Its a good shirt, like someone that supports any war is just going to wear a shirt that says WAR. Thats right. War. I fucking love it. Why else would I wear this shirt. I don't even care what war. 1812, Civil War, Spanish-American, fuck it, bring it on mother-fucker. Its all good.

I wonder if mother-fucker really is a hyphenate or if it should be just one word, probably two seperate words. I'm not going to look it up though.

My mind is completely blank when I try to think of anything else to say. So the end, I guess.

Career Day

I awoke from a series of strange dreams to find myself thinking about Alan Moore and a new Leauge of Extrodanary Gentlemen. Not the movie, the comics, which were fantastic, though highly disturbing. Much like the dream. Sometimes I get good ideas that would require me to steal concepts from much more talented writers in order to achieve. Maybe I'll just find a way to write him with my idea.

I have no idea what I am going to do with my life. Everyonce in a while it occurs to me that this is my last semester at school and I have no idea what I am doing later. In a way it seems like its a good thing. I compare it here to marrying your high school sweetheart. You may fall in love and then move in together and a few years later you are laying in a bed with a woman you know better than she knows herself and yet you just aren't feeling the attraction there anymore as you realize that the boy that fell in love with her in high school is very different from the man you have become in the years since. And the two of you just aren't right for each other anymore. Thats how I feel about trying to decide what to do with my life. How do I know I am going to want to be doing anything I might want to be doing now in a couple of years? I often think about what type of person I am going to be at 30, I imagine that this 22 year old version of me and the 30 year old version are going to be very different people, as I already feel a lot of disconnect from who I was in high school, and that wasn't even 5 years ago. A constant in all of this is that I still want to write, but unfortunately that just isn't a career I can jump right into. I have to be good, and I have to get a little lucky, and even if I got to be fairly well known I may still not be making enough straight off the writing to only do that. I guess thats what I'm trying to figure out. What do I want my backup career to be while I work on my "real" career?

For a while I thought that I would probably just put on a suit and tie and go in for some interviews and get an office job. There is a level of office work that I don't really mind doing, that sort of mindless pushing of buttons. But then I had to take this Information Systems class and I have to work with all of these Microsoft Office programs and, although some of you may not believe it, I really don't get really angry all that much more anymore. I used to get pissed off at almost everything, but now, now I'm a lot calmer, choosing snide remarks and sarcasm about things I don't like rather than anger. Yet those fucking office programs had me wanting to punch out my monitor and storm out of the house. And I've only spent a couple of hours using them so far. If I had to deal with those things, and phone calls, and other employees, and all that other office related crap, I think I would turn into one of those guys that was always just shaking with anger and everyone in the office was sure I was walking through that front door one day with a machine gun. Do they even still make machine guns? I mean, I call a machine gun anything that shots a lot of bullets rapidly, but I think they only make, like, asault rifles now a days. Machine gun sounds a lot cooler, and scarier, yeah, just walk in there with a tommy gun, now thats a weapon. What was I talking about? Yeah, I don't think I would be actually any threat to my coworkers, but I would think now that I could last maybe a week before I just stood up and walked out and never came back. Not to mention I am developing an affinity for quitting. I almost want to take a job just so that I can quit.

So I have no idea what I am going to do. I was thinking about that Comic Book shop but I have a problem with commiting myself to one store, one town, for at least ten years right out of college. I think I might want to move around a little, find a town or a city somewhere that I really like being in and then set up shop there. Reno and I have had a good long run, its time for me to be hittin' that dusty trail.

I wouldn't mind working on movies. But I don't want to live in LA. Thats problamatic. I mean, I wouldn't mind being a peon in the movie business for a while and trying to work my way up, but I don't think that I could handle doing it in LA. Just not worth it to me. Or I could be an astronaut. No, actually I couldn't. It kind of sucks wanting to have a career in the creative fields because you have to be realistic and know that you aren't going to just get right in on it. It takes some time, you need those other jobs. I'm restating this for some reason I havn't thought out. You know, there are really only three types of jobs that I would probably be qualified for, White Collar (low-level), Blue Collar (low-level), and Retail (low-level). Maybe I'll get a job as a waiter in a fancy resturant. You have less tables to worry about and since the food is more expensive the tips even out to really busy resturants, and sometimes could be a lot better. I'd have to be really nice to people, that could be a problem. I think I could pull it off, I'm usually nice to people, even people I don't like, not really because I think I should treat everyone the way I want to be treated or some crap like that but rather because I discovered that it is a hell of a lot easier to be nice to annoying, strange people and then polietly excuse yourself from their company. If you try to get rid of them by being a dick it just makes them angry and the whole situation gets out of control. So I just exchange a few words, ask them a question or two, and then pretend to get a phone call or something. So, point being, I could probably get a job as a waiter, I think I've got the attitude down. But that isn't something that I would want to do for more than a year or maybe two at the most anyway, so that is problamatic. I don't know, I just don't know. It seems like there should be some sort of field that I wouldn't mind working in and that I would be willing to go into for a while after college, but I really just keep coming up blank. I think I just don't want to work. I need to work out a way to do that. Maybe I'll get an online job, sell adspace or something. Well, thats sort of an office job. Son of a bitch.

I've got nothing. I'm going to go now.

Do you remember when we used to dance?

This week was kicking my ass. Seriously, you'd think three days of school wouldn't be that bad, but it was really getting to me. It could be because it is my last semester here and I am unsure of what to do next. Really I think it is because that I can't deal with this fucking school anymore. I'm ready to move on, even though I don't know what to do next. I just have to get through one more fucking semester. I reached a point this year that I felt that I had the college level of education already, and everything else was just a technicalities till I got my degree. I still feel that way. I'm going to learn more this semester, sure, but its not really stuff thats going to open up my mind anymore, its not going to help me in the rest of my life all that much more than if I just was done already with the classes I have already taken. But, fuck it, I'll just give it all I've got, fat bottom girls, you make the rockin' world go round.

I just watched the 40-year-old virgin again tonight. I saw it a while back and wasn't a huge fan, but after watching the Office and Little Miss Sunshine I was willing to give Steve C. (however you spell his last name) another go. I really enjoyed it this time out. I think it was just a mood I was in that made me dislike it last time. I think I saw it as making fun of us nerdy types, but watching it again I realized that it was all about accepting us nerdy types and realizing what we have to offer. But more than all that it just really made me laugh. Hard, and loudly. And it got me thinking about my own life and what I've been thinking about for a while.

Sometimes I just really want to be miserable. Sometimes I want to inject suffering into my life. And its not because I enjoy it, because I don't, but rather because I've always wanted to be the disturbed artist, the genius trapped in a world of pain of his own making. And I know it sounds strange, but really, I've been all about punishing myself in various ways for a long time, trying to make myself unhappy, mostly on a subconcious level but I can tell I'm doing it when I reflect on my life. I worry that if I don't have enough pain in my life then I won't ever be any good at writing. Something about the locked away loner maverick writer idea got in my system and made me want to slowly destroy myself. And I've been doing that. But that isn't who I am, not by a long shot. I may have the ability to write, but I am not one of those people that must suffer for their art. I was watching that movie and laughing and it occurs to me that I don't want to write something that is an amazing, moving piece of literature about pain and death and loss, but rather, I want to write something like the 40-year-old virgin. I want to write stupid comedies. I'd much rather make someone laugh for a couple of hours than make them think for a couple of hours. Last night I was thinking about trying a tactic, which I may still try, which was to write literary steak (i.e. really meaty plot, big things happening, all sorts of emotions and what have you and big life shattering things) covered in literary frosting (i.e. silly, goofy, slapstick comedy). I have no idea how to go about this, but I did write a few things that dealt with really big issues that were an infusion of the melodramatic and the comedy. People told me they hated the tonal shifts in the stories, going from something serious to something silly. But I think with what they were saying about the things from before I can bridge the two much closer together, get the two conflicting types of stories working together. It will take some time, but it will be fun. And of course now with my realization that I much rather be happy and make others happy then try to prove myself as an artist I'll go for an all out comedy if the other part isn't working out. I think I can do it. I kind of want to start right now, but I think I'll wait for till tommorow. Maybe right out a few ideas and maybe a bit of an outline tonight. I don't normally use outlines, but I think for something like this I'll need one.

I had a dream last night about me making certain choices in my life. For once in my life a dream actually made sense to me. I was making a stupid choice in the dream and regreting it as soon as I did it, and although I won't get into the specifics of the dream since it was long and complicated and mostly dull, I think it was what helped me to come to this conclusion tonight. That and a perfeclty delightful afternoon/evening with cheb and food and cheesy movies. I'm tired of being in a bad mood all the time, its time to kick up the endorphines.

Its Two A.M., The Fear is Gone

So I'm back. For good, yo. At least for a while. Three weeks is the longest I've been out of Reno pretty much since I moved here. I always think that I really hate it in Reno but when I come back from being gone it feels so good to be home that I think I'll never leave again. Not seriously, though, I know I want to live somewhere else after college. Which, if things go well, should be after this semester. I just don't know where yet. But I'll find a place I suppose.

Its getting late. But Hawaii time is two hours earlier than it is here, so I'm still awake. Well, obviously I'm still awake. Or at least I would hope that I was still awake.

The last two weeks were fairly illuminating for me. I got some insight into myself. Which was frightning but probably good to know. One thing I will share was that I thought that I got kind of the short end of the stick when it came to relating to other people in my family because my sister always has had a lot of friends and seems really socialable and I've never really been that way. But I found out that her relationships are just as, if not more so, screwed up than mine. She just is more open about how she is feeling and thus why she has so many people that she can talk to. I'm a lot more inward than she is. But neither one of us has any real understanding of what it means to be in a relationship, and if we really care for someone we can never really let them in. It all goes back to parenting, if you ask me, which you didn't but if you are reading this then it is implied that you would be interested in what I think.

I'm sitting on my ottoman, which is fairly uncomfortable, because JJ and Cheb are having a little bible study something or another thing here tonight and are using my chair. Its not a bible studie, just intervarsity kids doing a team building thing. Or something. I havn't really been paying attention. My brains been going nuts playing songs lately because I havn't had a chance to listen to my music for the last few weeks so now I'm chillin' with some Allman Bros. and I think some of The Who is up next. I actually heard a bit of Baba O'Riley (some people know it as "Teenage Wasteland") today and I really wanted to hear it. Oh, its so pleasing. There are so many small things I miss about home when I'm gone. Not least of all is being autonomus. My god, take my advice and only go on week long trips with your family after you turn 20 or so. I mean, okay, most people probably like being with their families more than I do, but still, two weeks is a lifetime, even when its warm and you can go swimming in a non-heated pool at 10pm and not feel cold at all. In the middle of january. Yeah, its nice, but I'm used to seeing my family for somewhere around four-six hours at a time four or five times a year. Okay, I see them more than that, but really, in small doses I don't mind. Two weeks was way too much for me to handle. I had to opt out of several adventures because I couldn't handle sitting in the car with them for a couple of hours then going on a hike with them then lying on a beach with them then hiking back with them and then getting in the car for a couple of hours to drive back with them and then get home and be with them at the end of the day. I don't think I could spend that much time with my friends all at once. In fact, I'm fairly certain I couldn't. And my friends don't bother me nearly as much as my family. It was also a little awkward because my dads girlfriend was there for half the time.

My headphones aren't working right.

We went to the Green Sand Beach, which is pretty much what it sounds like. Green Sand, believe it or not, crazy. Its about a 2 1/2 mile hike to get to it if you don't have 4-wheel drive (which we didn't) and the walk feels at least twice as long because the whole way there you are right on a very unprotected shore of the ocean and you get serious winds in your face the whole way. Even when you aren't going up hill it feels like you are. And when you are going uphill, well, it sucks. Anyway, we got there and it was this little beach and there was enough people there to make it seem crowded and I was kind of annoyed. Then we had to make a freaky journey down a cliff side to get to the actually beach, which was harder because I was fairly wiped from the walk there. But we got on the beach, I took off my shoes, threw down my towel and fell asleep in the warm sun and woke up about a half hour later when I heard a big group of people set up camp right next to my head. Some girls started singing the Indiana Jones theme song and I opened my eyes to see who was singing and suddenly nakedness filled my eyes. I sat up and the group was about twenty-thirty people, over half girls, and all of them were very attractive and completely naked. They were running around, frolicking in the surf, rolling in the sand and rubbing that green sand on their naked thighs, well, that was only one of them, but still. I've always dreamed of waking up surronded by beautiful naked women, I just never thought it would actually happen. So that was a good day.

Its just, the right side of my headphones isn't coming through at all anymore, I wish I knew were my other pair was.

We didn't go to the volcano. Last time I was there we went but we didn't get to where the lava was actaully pouring in. There was that Deep Thought that went "If you ever drop your keys in molten lava, let them go. Because, man, their gone." So I've kind of always wanted to drop some keys in lava since then. Perferably keys I didn't need. But we didn't go because it was about a four hour drive there and a four mile hike over increadibly uneven and pointy lava rock. We found a quintessential Hawaiin beach. Only about a half mile hike over lava rocks. You get there and there is perfectly white sand and only a couple of other people (also some naked girls, but not nearly as many and not nearly as frolicky) And you can swim in the waves which are big enough to be fun to jump into but not so big they try to drag you down.

I could deal with the headphones if I had a chair with a back on it, I like to lean back as I type, and if I can't do that I slouch, which hurts after a while.

We went snorkeling a lot. At a beach and we went on a snorkle boat which takes you out and lets you go swim around in a part of the ocean with no waves and a lot of visibility. Its fun to look at the fish but they kind of freak me out. All ocean life freaks me out a little, its not that I'm really scared of it for any real reason, its just that I think fish have it out for me or something, and some of them have mean looking faces, and they swim along by you and glare. Really, my favorite part of going is just to look at the girls swimming around looking at the fish. Seeing girls underwater is pretty cool. Because their hot and their swimming around and look all graceful. But the big thing they just look different then they do on land, which is really why I like to watch them underwater. I also like to watch them on land walking around in bikinis. I always care a dozen times more about the girls on the beach then I do about the beach.

I don't have anything new to complain about after that paragraph. So, uh, don't you hate pants?!

I just had the weirdest sudden memory spark up, but its really hazy. I think I was drunk and talking to someone, I think the song I'm listening to now must have been playing, which is kind of weird because the song is "Twilight Zone" not the theme song, the Golden Earwig version.

I had a bit of an awakening one day on the island. Theres something that I think I've got to do. Its really weird because I don't really know if its a good idea or a really bad, really, really bad idea. But I've thought long and hard about it and I'm going to do it. No matter how insane or retarted it sounds at times, I think its the right thing to do. Sorry I'm not being more specific, but its possible that some people read this blog that I don't know about that if I were more specific then it could maybe cause a problem and more than that I just don't feel comfortable talking about it in such an open forum. So why mention it at all? Lets call it a baby step towards being able to open up about what I'm thinking and feeling a little more often. But not to everyone, and not about everything. I think I've mentioned I use this blog to practice being comfortable letting other people get to know me better than I have been letting them in the past, so this is just another part of it.

That was the end of this post. I've been writting for almost an hour. And to be honest I wrote for about a half an hour before I started over on this post. I mention this for two reasons, the first is that because you havn't been reading for an hour, it may have just felt that long. The second is that it takes me a while to update sometimes and the reason is because it takes me so long to write a single post sometimes, and sometimes I'll write for a couple of hours and end up not posting anything at all. So there is a process that goes on. So just keep that in mind if I don't post a new blog anytime soon.

If you play this blog backwards, it says "Make me a sandwich"

Oh, ethical dilemma, how I loath thee. Okay, so its not really an ethical dilemma, more of a spiritual one. Or something. Right now its a quarter to 11 and I need, really, really need, to go to my eight o'clock class. But I so want a diet coke right now. Really, really want diet coke. But if I drink it then I'll be up till 1 or 2 and then I'll either sleep through my class or show up and not remember a damn word that he was saying the whole time I was there. Man, this is annoying. I havn't been to that class in over a week. What the hell was I thinking when I signed up for such an early class? I know what I was thinking, but still, it doesn't change the hurt. It wouldn't have been as much of a problem if I just was able to get used to a schedual of getting up early, but when you have five days a week that the earliest you really have to get up by is one in the afternoon and only two that you have to be up early, it throws you off. I am literally on the verge of failing that class, which by all accounts should be a no-brainer of a class, because I havn't been able to get there very often. And when I do show up I'm usually still asleep, basically. Its like having a dream about being in class, only I'm fully clothed and the girl sitting next to me never actually turns into a giant spider that knits me a scarf. Although I can tell she's thinking about it.

So I'm drinking a diet coke now. And you can all just shut the hell up about it. I've run into a problem in my personal life that I can't quite seem to get perspective on. And its not my out of control cafine addiction, that I have plenty of perspective on. No, it just something that I've tried talking to several people about and I guess I havn't been able to get any leverage on it. I shouldn't bring it up since I really don't want to talk about it here, where it can be read by all, but I do bring it up because I want to talk about it a little bit, and at least talking about talking about it is something. Usually when I'm in a situation like this I can just go with a gut instinct and even if it turned out to be wrong I can feel confident that at least I tried something that didn't work out, but this time I'm just having a hard time figuring out exactly what my gut is telling me. I'm so conflicted. Its like theres a spiderweb of potential problems. Like if I remove the wrong strand the whole thing will come down. Then I think, wait, thats not how spiderwebs work, you can take out a strand and the rest of it is intact still, thats why the designed the internet around spiderwebs. So then that confuses me further. I don't know, I was trying to do some soul searching on last night and I don't really think I came to any answers. I took a shower and was thought "its been a really long time since I sung in the shower." And then thought "that is the saddest thing I've ever said." And I know I thought it and didn't say it, but thats my thought quote. Then I was sitting with my head hanging over my arms and thinking and wishing there was some sort of a sign that would lead me to an answer and I looked down, and I swear to god, the dripping water from my hair had made a perfect little frowning face on my forearm. Four smaller dots of water for the mouth with two bigger ones for the eyes. And then I moved my arm and the left "eye" ran down my arm and I watched this sad little face on my arm shed a single tear. I don't know if that was a sign, and it certainly didn't shed much light on the situation, and I know it didn't help anything.

Fuck, good lord, I was getting pissy today, and yesterday. I've just kind of been in a bad mood for the last couple of days and I think it has a lot to do with not being able to get my life moving forward. I also think it has a lot to do with finals. I hear people say how hard finals are being on them, and usually I think I hold up pretty well comparitively, but this year I've just kind of hit a wall. But I'm getting there, I've got work left to do, but I have till next monday for a big project, so that will be enough time. But good lord, I just looked at my final schedule and it came to my attention that three out of the four I still have to take are at 7:30 in the fucking morning. Three of them. Three of those mother fuckers at 7:30. And two of them are this week. Oh, that makes me feel so good, right now. Fuck. I don't have to do anything but show up for one of them, but shit, I still have to show up. The other one I have a fucking test. And a portfolio due. Such rubbish. At least I don't have to worry about the third early one till next week. That doesn't really help me all that much. But at least that one is for my 8am class, at least that one makes sense. I have to show up at 7:30 for a class that doesn't normally start till 11. Lame! God, it will be so nice to be out of this semester, it has been a pisser. It feels like its been going on forever. And ever. And ever. And ever.

And ever.

I really want to be done. Maybe I'll just start staying up all night so that I can make all my early finals and I'll be wide awake since I've been up all night drinking coffee and playing video games and everyone will be all like "oh, I'm so tired" and I'll be all ready to go and I'll laugh at them for not being as cool as me. Of course, the last twenty times I've tried to pull an all-nighter I end up getting bored and tired around 3:30 then I fall asleep and sleep through my classes. So maybe that isn't the best idea. But it could work, I could start tonight, and then just go for a week on a really weird schedule and then I'd be done and it wouldn't involve me dragging my sorry ass out of bed at the break of fucking dawn. Maybe I should put some more thought into this.

We've once again come to the end of my blog. Another long rambling post. That really accomplished nothing. And pretty much just bitched about a couple of things that no one but me would ever care about. So another successful posting for me.

This thing must be

I hate the near end of the semester. Usually by this time I've been mentally checked out for over a month and I have more crap that I have to get done than at any other point in the semester. The real pisser is when you get to that point at the end and look at everything you have left to do and you remember that you have had many of the assignments since the beginning of the semester, and the putting of them off has finally caught up with you. Like a bastard child, it always seems to find you at the worst point in your life.

Josh recommended Trans-Siberian Orchastra to me after my last post, and I'm listening to them now, and I have to say, I really am enjoying them, especailly "Mephistopheles' Return," which I am listening to now. They sort of remind me of Tenacious D, just because of that bravado and passion for something that you can tell they are just having a really good time with. It makes me smile.

I've been thinking about why I havn't had a girlfriend for so long and I got to thinking about the nature of myself and of relationships. I've become such a loner since I've gone to college, and really the seeds of lonerdom where there long before college, going back even to elementary school. But now I just don't see people as often as I used to and it makes me notice how much more time I am spending by myself. It occured to me that the reason I may not have a girlfriend was, well, the obvious not sociallizing with people, but more than that it has more to do with me never really being properly socialized. I'm kind of like a dog that was raised on the streets for the first couple years of its life then sent to live with a nice family. Even though I can adapt to the nice home environment, I still shy away from people and hide when company comes over. The dog in me still senses danger when there isn't any. I don't know, my family is a bit strange, I don't think any of us really knows any of the others. Were all isolated, and I think I picked up on that at a young age and just stayed away from lots of people, learned to be comfortable around myself. It creates problems for me when I do have problems because even though I've been trying to work on asking people to help me with my problems, I still have a very closed off nature to my emotions. I see another dog running around the neighborhood and instead of running and playing with it I hide in a closet because it might kill me over some kibble. It sounds ridiculous, and people would probably just say get over it, but its hard to fight your nature. Ironically, the reason that whenever I post a blog I'm always talking about my emotional states is because I'm trying to get more comfortable with putting myself out there. I think I've mentioned it before on here, but these blogs are more for theoropy than they are for entertainment. I hope they can be enjoyable to read, but I understand that they probably seem a little dull and repedative most of the time. Whatever, it makes me feel better about myself and more comfortable around other people so a little bit of a dull post is just something you'll have to suffer through.


I was talking to my mom yesterday and she knows I hate wal-mart and she confesses to me when she shops at wal-mart. I'm slowly getting her to stop shopping there, and tell her all my anti-wal-mart facts whenever I have a chance. But last sunday I was up in Truckee for a dinner and a study group and the lady that lived there was talking about how hard the town has fought corporate interests trying to come into the town. and how successful they have been. They had all the business people in town fighting banded together against the places coming in and they have been winning and keeping Truckee unique and local. And I realized how much I really miss independant towns. Going to fallon the first thing you see now is the wal-mart, then you pass fast food resturants and walgreens and all that other crap, and the quant little town that was fallon is now just like every other town in the world, taken over by the same shops as every other town. It makes me really sad to not see the diversity that I once could have seen going from town to town. I try to shop independant whenever I can, but my main purchases are gas, groceries, and the books. I get the books at Sundance, but where can I get groceries thats independant in reno, I ask you? And gas? there are probably independant gas stations, but even then they are just selling corporate gas. I don't know, its frusterating. Its already at a point where every town looks almost identical, and pretty soon we are just going to have one uniform city, and everywhere we go it will be exactly the same. I need to start a coallation to retake the US in the name of independance and individuality.

Christmas at Ground Zero

Right now I am listening to metal versions of christmas songs. Including such classics as "Silent Night (Rocks!)" and "Another Rock and Roll Christmas." Normally I stay away from christmas. I was really planning on doing the same thing this year, but I don't know. Last year I remember I took my last final of the semester and as I walked back to my car I felt a little light headed. By the time I got up the stairs to my apartment I was so dizzy I could barely stand up. It was about five pm and I walked in my room, fell onto my bed and slept for the next fourteen hours. I awoke feeling refreshed, not entirely, but enough to drive to fallon, where I was attending my mothers cancer surgery the next morning. We got her home after the surgery and I slept for another ten hours, waking up and trying to help my sister with my mom other things that had to be done. I was driving around town smoking as fast as I could and blasting "All Around the World" by ATC and pretending not to be sick since my mom was really the one that was sick. And she had to go back in for another surgery and I sat in the waiting room playing rummy with my dad and sister. As soon as the surgeon came in, who, by the way, looks and acts a helluva lot like The Todd on Scrubs, and let us know my mom was okay I went in and visited, then my sister went in to say hi and I got in my car and drove home, where I ended up in bed for the next week. I don't really remember christmas last year. I remember sitting by a tree and handing presents that to my family that I had unceromoniously drapped wrapping paper on since I was too tired to wrap them. I remember that as my family ate traditional christmas foods I stuggled to get down a couple of swedish fish, which by the way are not that tasty when you have to swallow them without chewing because when they get stuck to your teeth you don't have the energy to get them off. And then I slept. And I slept. And somewhere around the 29th I got up and walked downstairs and saw my mom up and around and gave her a hug and told her I was going out for a couple of hours. And I drove around listening to ATC and smoking as fast as I could and thanking christ that christmas was only once a year.

So I suppose the reason I'm not really dreading christmas this year is because I did miss it last year. But I don't know. When I was battling with the forces of christians and trying desperately to seperate myself from them I saw christmas not only as something I didn't want any part of because of the religious conotations, but I also used it as a focul point for what I saw as everything that was wrong with their religion. The pure marketing, the shop till you drop, the only time in the year when people are nice to poor people. I remember reading an article around that time that said that people were actually bitching at soup kitchens because the kitchens wouldn't let them volunteer on thanksgiving because they had too many people signed up already, and the kitchens suggestion that they come by almost any other day of the year to help out. People didn't like that idea. The point is, there is a lot wrong with the religious part of the holiday, but according to some people jesus was born in july and the only reason we celebrate it in december is because it was the big pagen, or whatever they were called, druids maybe, celebration time. So they just changed the name and said it was about christ now and to deal with it. Now I suppose thats what I'm doing. I'm just going to celebrate it and forget about the reasons other people are celebrating it and they can deal with it and I can deal with it and everyone can deal with everyhing.

This Metal Christmas album isn't very good. I was browsing around the torrents today and I came across an album called "Impeach My Bush" and the band name sounded familiar to me and I knew I had at least one or two of their songs and I downloaded it and forgot about it till it was done then threw it on and in the first song this fake gangster-rapping female voice is talking about how sex is awesome and if they don't like it they can "Impeach My Bush." Well, the genius of this, and believe me, you have no way of seeing this coming, the amazing thing was that at one point near the end of the 49 second song, they cut out the "My" so she was saying "Impeach Bush!" I tell you, I never saw that coming, no sir. Of course, after that 49 seconds of confusion I looked down the list to see what other songs of theirs I had and I remembered suddenly why the band Peaches sounded so familiar. "Suckin' on my titties like you wanted me, calling me all the time... What else is in the Teaches of Peaches? Huh? What?"

You know, its pretty popular to dis the president these days, and I'm all for that, but at the same time I'm wondering what the fuck is wrong with people? Honestly, he's doing the exact same thing now that he's been doing since the beginning and its only now that its getting popular to not like him? Right after 9/11 I checked some of my favorite Bush bashing sites and most of them said "this site has been taken down out of respect for blahdeeblah." I don't know how those sentances ended, I stopped reading after took down. But I was telling the computer not to do that to me. I was telling it "this is the time when we need to be most mocking Bush!" Because I knew, and I was 17 and I hadn't been paying any attention to politics for more than a year at that point, but I knew that it was going to be more important to keep the government in check back then than it would be later. Shit, if people were as pissed off at him for not preventing it instead of stanind behind him then we wouldn't be in the mess were in now, and with any luck neither kerry nor bush would be in the white house right now. But I'm as much to blame as anyone else, I suppose. I didn't start an anti-bush campaign at the time. Of course, had I done it it wouldn't have matter because no one would have been paying attention to it. Unless I really pissed people off with it and then it became a big controversy. Okay, so I should have done something back then, and it may have made a difference. And it may not, but I won't know now so all I can do is bitch. Of course, if I as a high school student with no real background in politics or journalism, and no national forum (other than the internet) to go after the leader of the most powerful nation in the world, had little chance of doing anything. But if CNN, if NBC, if all those other fuckers had been questioning him then like they were supposed to be because the media is supposed to act as a watchdog for the government then we could have stopped the Iraq invasion before it began. Fuck, on bush's watch thousands of people are killed in two of the nations biggest financial symbols and everyone lines up behind him? What is with that? Seriously, what is with that? Because it doesn't make a lot of sense. Listen, if I were in charge of graveyard security at a mall and someone drilled a whole through the wall and walked into Macy's and stole thousands of dollars worth of jewels or something people wouldn't be saying "we need to stand behind this security guard in these confusing times." Yeah, I'd be fired, or suspended, or otherwise penalized. I certainly wouldn't have the highest approval rating of my career right after it happened. God, sometimes I wonder if we humans even understand the concept of democracy. Maybe we are just followers. Something bad happens and we hide behind the guy who has the most guns. Makes sense, but it doesn't really help to create a good society.

Thinking back on where this blog started and where that last paragraph ended I realize that I'm only a few cliches away from having an Ultimate Blog. Lets see, I've already got a holiday story (which also counts as current events right now), a family sickness, a personal sickness, a political rant, and a discussion of new music. What am I missing?

So there is this girl... okay, I'm too tired to go much further with this blog joke right now to really go for the whole "girl lamenting" section. Plus, I can't really have the Ultimate Blog without talking about suicide and how I was totally snubbed at the movies by Beccy even though she was with my ex and, oh my god, did you see what she was wearing? I could have died! Oh, I know, bleh! etc. Also I need to add more :)'s. Or maybe some *<8-} (clown!). Okay, thats enough.