| What in the hell is happening to me? |
[21 Oct 2004|01:40am] |
I've come to that point: I no longer have anything to say. I have a case of verbal diarrhea because shit spews out of my mouth. I can't post anything creative or insightful, so I go for extensive instead of intensive interest. I blame my muse for all this after she left me like Gollum in the night and traded my creativity for a Dear John letter sometime a few years ago.
I'm about a week from deleting this whole thing. Hopefully I'll feel something move me before then because I do really like this thing, but right now I feel as though I'm just wasting my time going through motions of anachronicity: doing what I did when I was creative and when I had something to say -- but the rhythm has changed now, and now I don't have anything to say. This is probably about 25% my mercurial mood moaning and 75% my cold apathy monotonizing.
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[21 Oct 2004|01:25am] |
It was nice watching the Red Sox win.
Speaking of loserdom, when I'm not playing my life away in front of Civilization III I'm trying to actually two academic papers, both were the idea of a professor of mine, that I should write some of this garbage down. The basic idea of the first is how different nations attempt to meet political objectives based on their differing resources. I got the idea after reading Huntington's critique of realist political science and mixing it with some Ricardian ideas on international trade. The second one is based on the idea that zoning (the idea that city planners decide this land will be residential, this land will be industrial, this land will be agricultural, etc.) inherently is invisible theft. I can thank the Austrians for giving me the idea of that one.
Who am I kidding? It's back to nuking the Iroquois back to the stone age.
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[21 Oct 2004|12:56am] |
A Psychological Quiz created by Me
1. Imagine you are in a deep forest - perhaps even one from a memory of yours. Out of the corner of your eye you see an animal. You turn your head and it disappears - but, when your head returns to face forward, there it is, right in front of you. What animal is it?
2. You are having dinner with a person who is very special to you. It could be your spouse, your best friend, someone who has passed away or even someone you've never met who has had an influence on you. What is your glass filled with?
( Read more... )
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| Psychometry of Detritius |
[19 Oct 2004|11:22pm] |
I work at an old high school - so old that, on the entrance's wall, they commemorate their dead high school students lost in World War I. The room I work in is flanked with trophies, hundreds of them. The oldest one I've found, so far, is from 1941. One hundred years, all new people. I freeze with wonder when I find an old paper from third grade I've done. I can't imagine what kind of memories a trophy older than my parents would conjure to one of the few people alive to remember winning it.
The existence of love is the only reason I can possibly believe God exists.
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[19 Oct 2004|02:12am] |
Maybe I should buy a piece of the moon.
Seriously. It's legitimate.
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| Mood Swings |
[17 Oct 2004|02:19am] |
Kether sure doesn't last long. I feel like I'm already at Geburah and it's been like, 10 minutes.
"I don't understand -- what did I do to deserve this?"
"We don't deserve half the things we get in life. Ha ha ha HA HA HA HA - YOU'RE STUCK HERE!!"
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[17 Oct 2004|02:10am] |
I think I'd be a more enriched person if I could make Tuco first a real person, and then my friend.
"You want to know who you are? Huh? Huh? You don't, I do, everyone does... you're the son of a thousand fathers, all bastards like you."
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| Midnight in a Perfect World |
[17 Oct 2004|01:33am] |
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I think I'm feeling Kether right now. Things feel pretty okay.
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| Englischpolizei |
[16 Oct 2004|01:33am] |
I was just reading a story on a community and I couldn't finish. He asked for a critique and I couldn't give him one. From the portion I read the story was alright, it moved, except reading each additional line was like walking on glass.
Why? This is how my (truncated) gut told me to respond:
Guy On Right = The English Language
Guy On Left = You
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| Monopoly of Force, Polypsony of Assets |
[15 Oct 2004|05:42pm] |
Some people would say most teachers, for various reasons, are insane, but even within that generalization there's a cardinality. There are a few teachers who must obviously be utterly psycho, working against making more money because of their own belief systems. This is who I'm voting for for Illinois Senate, btw, and as my brother aptly pointed out, he didn't notice a Gush Beorge on the ballot.
What I'm about to say hurts teachers but I'm confident does not hurt education, and as a teacher I'm certainly not making a dime off it. It's sad to consider the phrase, "It will be a good day when the US Army has to have bake sales to buy new guns and schools get all they need." I believe the primary purpose of the government is to defend its people, and ecucation comes secondary.
There are nations where the military does not receive adequate funding and is given free reign to find ways of creating income. Indonesia, for example, receives only 25% of its funding from the government, so it finds it necessary to make money somehow and, unsurprisingly, they don't use bake sales to do it. In order to make more money. Sometimes it takes control of areas of Indonesia and subjects them to illegal income-maximization ventures, like strip-foresting entire islands for timber. (An aside: perhaps if the army was given truly free-reign it would maximize assets instead, helping out everyone.) Like other firms that seek revenue it has a vested interest in political power - and thus the Indonesian Military also pushed that at least 33 seats in the Indonesian parliament be given permanently to the military.
In fact there is some evidence that inadequate military funding while fixing its size is a major component of what undoes working democracies. The first example I can think of is the Roman Republic.
I think the reason I thought of this was that today Pakistan's president did not, after all, resign from his dual position as Generalissimo of the Pakistani Army. This is unsurprising, considering how he gave Abdul Qadeer Khan a slap on the wrist for providing nuclear weapons information to Libya, Iran, and North Korea. Pakistan seems to have this oscillation between fascism and corrupt democracy. From my experience in Russia, most civil servants (in Russia, the police are known cruelly as "werewolves") want to be treated with respect. Indonesian military members have voiced similar opinions, and by significantly increasing salries of civil servants seems to fix the problem.
Maybe we should keep school districts making the bake sales and not the army.
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| Practice Makes Perfect |
[14 Oct 2004|06:02pm] |
I'm still working on making a book list. That's hard to do, though, when you're trying to fight being lazy while practicing the piano.
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| Bizarro America |
[13 Oct 2004|10:37pm] |
So I've got an Englishwoman for my VP, a Belfaster (is this the correct term?) for my First Lady, and a Canadian and a Russian in my cabinet. And I'm a member of the "Liberatarian party". This must be the faction that broke away when Mario and Luigi went anarcho-capitalist.
It's a me, Mario! It's a time to privatize national defense!
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| Book Giveaway - Please Help! |
[12 Oct 2004|10:13pm] |
Because, someday, I may move out of my parents' house, and because my bookshelves are literally packed to the brim with books (some of which I've read, some of which ... well ... I meant to read) it's probably about time to liberate some books from the drudgery of their shelf (or, in too many cases, their floor) imprisonment.
Book Giveaway! I want to give away books!
I've got a lot of books and I'm willing to give them away to a gentle bibliophine I know will keep them warm and give them the love they deserve.
I'm ready to giveaway books in US History, World History, Religion, New Age, Philosophy, various Social Sciences (psychology, sociology, anthropology), old magazines (specifically old Buddhist ones ((Tricycle)) and a few others for musicians, history people, philosophy geeks ... whatever). I've got a shitload of reference books too. Please, help me help you, and help me help myself. I don't read much fiction (and I should start reading more) but I've even got a little of that too.
If you're looking for a book let me know, because I've got a fuckload of them. Seriously. And, honestly, I need to get rid of some of them big time. My room looks like DCFS may come around sometime, wondering if I have any abandoned children living amidst the piles of garbage, devouring rats passingby and sandwiches I may have lost once upon a time.
If you're interested post here or e-mail me at nwo_toofAThotmailDOTcom.
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[12 Oct 2004|07:57pm] |
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Does anyone have any good Sweetest Day ideas? I'm stupid and don't know how to plan fun evenings out that don't involve playing board games, watching DVDs, or going out to Chuck E. Cheese for a romantic dinner.
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| Yours Truly |
[12 Oct 2004|07:32pm] |
I thought I'd post a picture of myself, since a lot of people don't know what I look like (and I haven't posted a picture in a long time). Here's me (with what Max Brooks calls the best zombie-killing rifle available) with my poor trigger control:
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| "All men are enamored of decorations . . . they positively hunger for them." |
[12 Oct 2004|06:46pm] |
I haven't written in a few days. In that time I've taken two midterms (and I think they both went well) the past two nights, bled my mental vitality in class all weekend, thought I saw someone in Mongolian Barbecue on my day off that I needed to have a good talking to - and perhaps an ass-kicking later, if I could ever bring myself to do that -
A few things of note in the last few days:
George W. Bush is getting even more stupid .. if that is possible. Then again, I'm convinced that the bulk of the human race is far less intelligent than for which I have given them credit because I hear them cheer, and I see it in the polls, that they like being treated like retards. The "race to the bottom" (by the way, don't click that -- it's a webpage for anti-sweatshop poopoo) sometimes seems more apropos in terms of estimating voters' intellect and ability to grasp complex, Pareto-inefficient matrices than to discuss international capital migration. Today I heard Bush criticize Kerry for remarks that he would like to have "minimal" terrorist attacks; Bush said that we would not until we have no terrorism ever, as if some nebulous, borderless, blurry "war on terror" could ever meet conditions of victory ... as if the death of fathers, the creation of a more tangible antithesis, and the destruction of homes could convince people America is not worth being terrorized.
I'm not going to be so naïve as to suggest that we should illegalize war or anything like that. Operating at the margin would be far better. War, everywhere and anywhere, is a racket. No war, ever, has been fought over subjective moral considerations -- not World War II, not the American Civil War American War of Southern Independence, and not the American War of Independence. Wars are fought over power, and the struggle for power. That's all, ever.
I hear about these on the radio every day on the way to and from work (or school) - Interest-Only Mortgages. If anyone I ever meet gets one of these, I swear on my honor as a Christmas Day Santa Claus I will shit on you with my colostomy bag. This I swear. Loans of any sort are made up of two portions, interest payments and principal payments. If you don't pay off your principal you will be paying for that property until the day you die and you'll have nothing to show for it.
If you ever have to bribe someone, you need to find what kind of food they like and bring it to them. Seriously; it's better than handing them a wad of twenties. If you ever need to bribe me roast beef sandwiches are the way to go.
It looks like I'm betting on the losing horse. That's alright, though. Illinois will carry the lesser of two evils without my vote, much in the same way as Barack Obama will carry Illinois without my vote. By the way, anyone that's voting for Nader ... do me a favor and don't tell me you did, because if I find out I'll dump my colostomy bag on you, too. I swear on my honor as a Crimean War veteran. I don't like the Green Party, nor the Socialists, nor the goofball Constitution Party but you can vote for them without me pooing on you. I don't agree with any of the aforementioned parties in any way, shape, or form, but I can agree to disagree with them. At least they're building something, instead of that Defiler Mage Ralph Nader.
Nader won't debate with anyone - not even other third party candidates, who have held their own debates since they can't get into the big two. This, while he blasts Kerry and Bush for not letting him in their debates. Fuck Nader with Carrot Top's fist, I says. All his VP candidate Camejo has done has been to trash the Green Party. All this while Nader's being a fraud.
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[08 Oct 2004|09:45pm] |
The 1% happened. The car was appraised as needing at least $6100 worth of repairs ... but a comparable car is worth $7700. They're going to fix it; maybe some of the repairs I have been making counted for something?
It's going to take at least three weeks so I'll be bumming a ride until then - like tomorrow, when I've got to get my ass up at 6:30 am to get to DePaul so I can sit in Abstract Algebra until 5:00 pm. Tomorrow complex roots are win.
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[07 Oct 2004|09:34pm] |
My piano exam went fine today (well, at least I think) with a caveat. I really just wanted to get it over with. I've played the piece probably 150 times and I was beginning to get really sloppy from over exercise - playing it at double the tempo and staccatoing the hell out of the entire thing.
No such luck: the instructor examined us one by one while we waited, and waited ... anyways, while I was getting examined my cell phone started ringing. I stopped, pulled it out (in front of everyone) and turned it off and began the piece again (surprisingly, feeling a little more relaxed than I had been before). I started playing and, about 30 seconds later, it happened again.
By this point it was really just a joke. I started over (again) from the beginning and it went fine. I have a feeling that, had the calls not happened, I would have choked somewhere along the line. I just hope the instructor doesn't mark me down for the calls - and from her kind of draconian demeanor I wouldn't put it past her.
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