Fiah undah my seat!

I can't believe I managed to drag my ass out of bed at 8am and to 4 classes today. Very tired and with little regard for any academic pursuit, I entered the rooms and took the stupid-ass quizzes and handed in the assignments like I was supposed to. Chatting the lunch away about clone high or old friends.

But I've also been in a super odd mood today. I feel so mundane for some reason, like something earth-shattering should happen. I want to climb up the outside of a building or break into some secret campus location to drink tea or run screaming through schenley park and just lay on the grass and look at the stars. Why do I feel so unfullfilled / adventurous / ready to scream in the day to day existence of a college student??

Public cry for assisstance.

Let's be frank folks, I have bad posture. You may have noticed me standing straight looks more like Shaggy standing straight. My big lanky body can't support the weight of my head and so it all just slumps around. When I sit anywhere, I always have my legs propped up and usually in a way that contorts my back into a big C.

I've always know this was a problem, but when my mother and grandmother would correct my posture and tell me I would grow up to be a hunchback, I laughed it off and went right back to my slouchy lifestyle.

But lately it's been getting progressively worse. I have now had a pain in my lower back (I thought I felt old before) for 3 days. It's so painful. I am finally getting to a point that I always thought Alex was unbelieveable for, namely that my back sometimes hurts unless it's curved. That's bad news bears. Spines shouldn't want to be curved. They should want to be straight.

So please. I beg of you. Help me. I have tried to keep my back straight but it is nearly impossible to remember to straighten your back all the time when you've lived 20 years of your life in a state of perpetual curvature. So if I am sitting or standing near you, go ahead. Do that thing where you put one hand on my shoulder and the other on the apex of my spinal curve and bring your hands together on the horizontal plane. Or just tell me to stand straight. Seriously.

I don't want to be a hunchback.

Falling in line.

Have you ever been so overwhelmed with love and care that you don't know how you could have ever lived a moment in your life without a smile on your face? I realized tonight that I really don't need a girlfriend to be happy or stable. I just need to open my eyes and see how great things are already. Love, support, companionship, lunch dates, they are all in my reach already.

On a related note, I really miss my family. I don't think that in my 2 and a half years here, I have ever been this excited to go home.

W00ter

I was sitting doing homework last night when I realized what an unbelievable day had been winding to a close. Let me give you some highlights, fine blog readers:

1. 2 letters from people at home, both long enough to be wonderful and make me wish I had time before I see these people in a week to write back.

2. A random encounter with someone who always makes me smile.

3. Watching spongebob and eating ice cream.

4. A wild 2 hour shopping spree which included chick-fil-A, me learning how expensive formal dresses can be (not for me, or was it? no it wasn't), and me buying a hat that people told me makes me look like a 60 year old golfer and gay. I love it.

5. My first ever venture into Victoria's Secret (also a store I didn't go into for my own purposes). I had never actually been in one before. There is underwear everywhere. I would try to lean on a table and my hand would just encounter a big pile of barely enough cloth to cover a young lady's happy place. That place is SCANDALOUS. Though I did leave with a bit of regret, it was altogether an eye-opening experience.

6. Suddenly teaching improv. So it was a PG rehearsal for regular workshop people. I didn't expect it to happen, but I kind of liked it. I don't think people really learn that way, because it doesn't teach them to make these choices without a 3rd party watching from the outside and helping, but maybe it shows them something that can help when evaluating future decisions.

7. Postering. Though it was likely too late to much matter and it was one of the few times I've postered alone this semester, I secretly kind of enjoy postering the buildings I like. I never have time for it, but I really don't mind.

8. Getting a most unexpected answering machine message from a friend from high school. She described for me her dissappointment with being at a theatre school 30 min outside of NYC and while I feel like I would switch places with her in a heartbeat, I felt really bad that she has been overwhelmed thinking that her college is not the place for her (both academically and socially). The good part of course was not the somber nature, but the fact that I hadn't talked to her since the summer and it made me miss her like a banchee because I suddenly realized how long it's been since we've spoken. We made some plans and now I am even more excited for the good food, family, and hanging out with random high school people (also including one of my guy friends from high school who is now burly, shaggy and facebook messaged me the other day).

9. Nina being the giddiest I have ever seen her probably since the first week of freshman year when we would pass Visor Boy on the cut. My god. The girl was spewing out nonsensical syllables all the night long. It was fantastic. Girl likes boy, boy likes girl (in my opinion), what more can you ask for?

10. Finishing the coding portion of my 272 assignment (which is most of it), finishing my part of my databases group project part 1, and reading over my 272 assignment.

Wow. That's 10 things of awesome. So much awesome that it far overshadows the most awkward 90 min of my life that also happened today. I would tell y'all about that, but in mentioning it yesterday, I realized it would take another 14 pages of mindless rambling to describe all of the circumstances that led to the exessive awkwardness, so I won't.

The damn NPP stopwatch beeped like every 15 min last night so I didn't get a lot of sleep. Now it's noon and I've done nothing. Off to work!

Darwin sucks.

So as I was driving down Liberty the other day, a horrible thought occured to me. The fact is that natural selection only works in a very primitive environment. Such an environment include a number of animals. Some are intelligent and can find food, others are stupid and cannot. The stupid die.

Fast forward to present day. This is an environment far from the one previously described. Food comes not from intelligence but from financial means, two very independent descriptors. In fact, natural selection (if it truly models human survival) is doing nothing but hurting us. Bear with me for a bit, as I make a number of stark stereotypical generalizations. I assure you it's only to argue a point.

At present, there are intellectuals in our country and the world at large. They are reasonable people who often procreate or adopt but usually not in obscene numbers. If we assume that a large number of them are progressive or liberal, then many of them are arguably more likely to be in same-sex relationships (than what? we'll see later). While adoption is an option, again this is likely to spawn less children overall than the alternative. I could go on and on here, but the point is they don't have excessive numbers of children.

There are also the less intellectual (read: red states 2k4). These people (and I can say this as I often use it to describe my dad's side of my family) often have little to do but work and procreate. They do a lot of the latter. When you think of your typical southern hick (i.e. Cletus the Slack-Jawed Yokel), you see a guy with a wife-beater and 14 children. Further, they are much more likely to raise their children on, as my sister's boyfriend from Dallas could attest to, "Texas values" or other value systems that include ideals like "them gays are sinners and will burn in hell eventually" and "we shoulda turned iraq into a parking lot on 9/12."

Now I realize I am making harsh generalizations, but this thought was sparked by a trinket of discussion on NPR. Namely that the number of new children born to registered Republicans each year is much greater than the corresponding proportion of Democrats. And in fact the Republican number is growing at a much greater rate than the Democrat number.

What is the answer? NPR guy said that the Democrats need to acknowledge this and start to solve the problem somehow. I say to the Democrats of the world, get naked! (when of course you have found someone you will always love and are prepared to bring children into the world). Make some more reasonable intelligent people.

So true.

I'm sure it's no big surprise to you that your
romance is The Princess Bride. A heartwarming
tale of "Twue Wuve" that has giants,
Spainards and swashbuckling. You really do
think that love can overcome anything. You may
be a touch naive but your heart is certainly in
the right place. You've probably got one of
those relationships where proper nouns have
been replaced with "Snookums" and
"Pookie Pie". Eww. Beware a cuteness
overload.


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Temporary insomnia

It has been a long time since I've been unable to sleep. I guess it's also been a long time since I've gone to sleep before 2am. But for some reason tonight reminds me so much of high school. Not being able to sleep because the thoughts racing through my head. Getting out of bed as quietly as possible to write an entry in the journal I hadn't seen since a few months ago (the last time I couldn't sleep).

I thought of a lot of particular things, but here are the higher level trends.

I would rather have no job and die of starvation than design payroll systems.

I love a lot of what I do in CS classes, but I don't want to code Database Management Systems or write web applets. I want to affect the artistic discourse. I want to be in a rock 'n' roll band whose music is catchy but whose lyrics have meanings on two or even three levels. I want to relate my personal experiences through metaphor or allegory in song or film. I want to undertake exiting and interesting directing projects, where the conceptual style or meaning seeps through every movement and every shot in the film. I want to be John McCrea or Tim Burton or something. I want to be in an improv troupe after I graduate.

Unfortunately, I am not a good enough drummer (or singer/songwriter) to be in such a band, nor am I at all experienced in directing enough to want to do it. Further, I am nowhere near good enough an improvisor. I try to do a lot of things and end up mediocre at all of them. I am at least better than many at database applications, I can draw a slew of meaningless IS charts and diagrams. But I don't give a fuck. That's the problem. I've lost all interest and I haven't even completed one semester of actual IS classes.

In other news, I had some ideas for the video I actually plan to shoot this winter. Hopefully it won't suck. I also came up with some new ideas for sns stuff I want to be a part of before I graduate. Why do I do those things instead of looking for an internship?

The funny part is, despite being hopelessly confused, I am the happiest I have been in a while. I am back to worrying about things that matter to some degree. I am strangely content to be concerned about these things, because I still feel like I have time to change my life somehow.

Well, back to laying awake in bed.

And the overweight Americans wear their patriotic jump suits.

So I guess it's all over. GW 2k4. 4 more years.

At the end of the day, I have just been inspired by a number of people. There's nothing anyone can do now but hope for a brighter future. Hope that the Democrats will take this as an opportunity to build a stronger party. Hope the liberal thinkers can continue to try to affect the minds of others.

To be honest, though, the part that honestly surprised me most was not GW. I mean, I wanted to Kerry to win and I thought he campaigned as well as anyone could have and had a serious shot. But I've seen the blind, ignorance-driven Bush support. The part that surprised me was the number of states that voted (all with relatively significant margins) to ban same-sex marriages. In a time where we all look back and find it unfathomable to believe that skin color once affected how much of a person you were considered, here we are saying one person should have this right but another should not because of who these people are.

But isn't learning from it's past what America's best at?

Cold.

I was walking to campus today and I saw this guy jogging. It took me a second to realize that he was wearing socks on his hands. I turned to look after he past me and sure enough there were no socks on his feet. Apparently he thought it was going to be all warm like yesterday, but in fact it was all cold like today.

It's surprising how much some sleep and some sun can make you feel better. And also how much less sleep and some rain and cold can do the opposite.

I would post about my thoughts on the elections, but I don't really understand the counting part so I will wait until I have some more conclusive evidence that the closed-minded rednecks managed to outnumber the diverse, intellectual, and not stupid parts of the country.