Category Archives: life

For when I get philosophical about my apartment, job, boyfriend, etc. Big picture stuff.

goodness, life

I < 3 Ancient Warfare Technology

I know I’m a couple millenia late coming to this party, but trebuchets are awesome. I enjoy the simple, yet elegant design. I love the use of various materials (cloth, leather, metal, wood) and distinguished concepts (slingshot, lever, gravity) that makes them work, and I love watching them hurl shit farther than should be humanly possible. I’m just such a fan.

Leave it to the Japanese to turn it into a gameshow of some kind involving a picture-in-picture reaction to the chaos unfolding. How many Gs do you think those people experience? Having poked fun at the Japanese, I seriously doubt that the French (or the Greeks or Chinese for that matter) never did this way back in the day. How brutal would that be? Take a prisoner, then hurl them back into their own camp. Wow. Color me enthused.

[I just looked it up on Wikipedia and found this gem: “Occasionally, disease-infected corpses were flung into cities in an attempt to infect and terrorize the people under siege, a medieval form of biological warfare.” I know I should be horrified by this but OH MY GOD that is such a great idea. Remember in Lord of the Rings when the Urukhai hurl the heads of the fallen men of Gondor back into their base? I was all, “Eeeew, that’s gross, hahaha, cool!” Anyway…]

Which brings me to the topic of the French. My slight dislike of them (based on some extremely stereotypically snooty–and downright mean–experiences I had in Paris over a decade ago, and my Australian family’s inherent, if harmless and often funny prejudices) is rapidly diminishing due in large part by their health care system (generous), their education system (boisterous), and the growing secularism of their government (awesome). And let’s not forget the most important part: trebuchets. Any culture that uses something that awesome deserves a second chance at my adoration.

So ok, French people. You’re got your second chance. Thrill me.

Standard
life, uncategorized

Event Horizon: Daydream

I used to daydream all the time; in the shower, in every class, in front of my computer at home, lying in bed at night, eyes wide open, thinking, concocting, creating. I knew it wasn’t constructive. At one point, I realized that I was using my daydreams like currency, paying myself one or two units of imaginings as a reward for studying, completing a spreadsheet, reading a chapter, returning a few calls. Rarely was anything as attractive or satisfying as my own imagination. I was addicted to the waking dream.

What was it all about? Most daydreams played on my desire for an identity switch; I would be powerful and generous, or poor yet heroic. Sometimes I was the villain (fierce retribution against those who had wronged me or my family), sometimes I was the rescuer (always the quiet type to start), sometimes I was the rescued (rarely). Often I had some fantastic ability, physical or otherwise (psychic ninja!). But it was never perfect in the sense that I was flawless, or without remorse or regret. To some extent, my fantasy self was always broken. And, like all heroes, that’s what made her strong.

I was re-reading one of my favorite mangas, Mail by Housui Yamazaki, tonight. In the first issue, a brief origin of the protagonist’s special powers is told slowly and thoughtfully, urging the reader into a sense of empathy and anxiety, until his curse becomes a boon. This is how I imagined my alternate self to be, and how we demand our heroes to be built: the rough road leads to a fair-minded, soft-hearted, human weapon. How many heroes have we lauded for their struggles in such a fashion? Superman, loved and pitied for his strength and inevitable, eternal solitude; Spiderman for his durability and agility with the heart-on-his-sleeve personality; and the ultimate: Batman for his broken innocence and brutally dark rebound onto the offensive, occasionally blurring the line of justice to satisfy his own fantasy of what justice should be.

What fueled my insatiable hunger to daydream? I submit that I was, like most of us, an innocent victim of my own humanity. The desire to be special, the drive to procreate, the rush that comes with great risk, the need to re-experience the enormous euphoria after a brush with death; what combination of these shared experiences created the perfect cocktail for this sharp reflex to recoil into my own head? Maybe any combination would have done that. I can’t claim to know for sure. How strange, the mind. How unique, how common.

Standard
badness, life

Dissolving the Hero Complex


So apparently I have panic attacks. I just found out about a month ago that when I go to bed and my heart starts to pound as I’m lying motionless in the dark, that’s a panic attack. And thank god, because I thought it was a symptom of some mysterious condition, or my heart was going to explode or something.

I was lying in bed tonight, and it happened; my heart started beating hard and slow. I was lying on my right side like I usually do, and I turned my head into the pillow until one half of my face was pressed into it. My head slid down the pillow until it touched the bed. My left eye batted open and shut, and suddenly I was 15 again. I can’t count the number of times I did that growing up, striking that position while my heart thundered in my chest and my left eye I stared at my mattress in the dark. How long has this been going on? Why would a 15-year-old have panic attacks? (hint: Read previous entries.)

Albeit I was thinking of something somewhat panic-inducing tonight as I laid there (in some police show I saw a while back, some officer saved some woman being attacked by some guy, blahblahblah, violence and hysteria). But it doesn’t take that kind of thought to make my heart go nuts.

So why does it happen?
I have a theory: I can’t do it all. I can’t save everyone, and I hate that.

I realized recently that my perfect world would be to have everyone just go limp to cut back on resistance while I try to move us all forward. I’m just realizing how crazy that sounds, but for a long time, that was the way I would have preferred things. Accepting the fact that I can’t control everyone, that there isn’t some magical combination of words and good looks that will place everyone I encounter firmly under my control is something I’m very slowly coming to terms with. I need to let people get away with the harmless little stuff people (and kids) do now and then. I think it’ll make me a better teacher, and an easier person to be around in the long run if I can keep making progress in this direction. I thought I was pretty laid back before, but I was content in my sense of control, however false.

So I’m learning to loosen-up. It’ll take a while, but I’m working on it. I’ve recognized the problem, and I feel good about that.

Standard
badness, life

Spoiled Brats

When it comes to religious scandal, I like to think that the heart of the issue is usually communication (or its breakdown). If people had known straight away that priests were abusing kids, that shit would have been shut down immediately. Children don’t talk about what makes them uncomfortable, and parents didn’t know that they should be asking prying questions about their pastor’s sexual preferences. People wanted retribution, and the Church thought they heard “divine” retribution, and tried to deal with it internally. Again, the problem is communication.

And this crap isn’t localized to the Christian community. When the Islamic community freaks out because an image of Muhammad surfaces somewhere, the conversation seems to go like this:

Islam: “That’s not allowed in our religion!”
Cartoonist: “I’m not Islamic, so the law does not apply to me.”
Islam: “Take it down or we’ll kill you!”
Cartoonist: “Never! Freedom of expression! Freedom of speech!”
Publicist: “We apologize to all the crazy people who sent death threats. You win for now.”

What the hell is this? It’s a communication FAIL. It’s the crazy guy on the bus demanding that you not sit on his imaginary friend in the next seat. But not only that, it’s the sense of entitlement that makes my blood boil. The argument against displaying images of Muhammad all comes down to “Because I said so,” and when adults use that kind of “logic” with other adults, someone has to call foul.

Wake up, Comedy Central. At the end of the day, these terrorists are just a bunch of children throwing a world-class tantrum about something the majority of your viewership don’t believe exists. You can’t poke fun at every other group, then make an exception for Islam just because they’re the scariest. Don’t be afraid. Make us laugh.

Standard
goodness, life

The history of humor

The next bunch of posts will be a window into what my inbox looked like a few years ago. Like most people, I save the important, life-altering emails. I also save random crap that makes me laugh.

My friends are very smart people. They circulate National Geographic articles about how the universe is expanding. So it cracks me up when someone sends around something like this, and everyone jumps on board. Priceless…

This is one of the pieces of evidence I would put forth in defense of the existence of the internet. If talk radio was anything like this, I’d seriously consider listening to NPR.

Standard
life

Blogs are dumb

I’ve been using Facebook as a blog. It’s not the best site for that kind of thing, so here we are.

This will be a place to collect random, cool articles, videos, photos, etc. that I come across. I think I just want a place where I can look back in a year and say, “Oh yeah, that was weird.”

This will also be a place to just jot down thoughts as they come. Nothing fancy, just random stuff stated clearly and concisely. I hope.

My objective is not to gain public recognition, or to be discovered and turn this blog into a movie someday. I’m not sure why I’m putting all this down on the interwebz, I just want to keep some kind of journal, and I won’t do that without some kind of accountability, and this is will hopefully help me maintain a regular schedule of entries. I promise to have fewer run-on sentences in my future posts.

Standard