Prove Me Wrong Please.

People don't generally think this about me. They think I'm stubborn. They think I'll argue to the bitter end because I hate being wrong.

The truth is, I love being proven wrong. Its distinctly the reason I argue so heatedly about things I think. I love it when someone proves me wrong. When they fire back with a passion that equals mine, with a rationality that defeats my own. That is why I travel, it is why I live, it is why I talk to people. To prove what I think I know wrong. To always be learning. To think something new. To learn that my long-held idea that the earth is flat is ridiculous, that it is round, and then to learn that that isn't right either, the earth is an oblate spheroid, what will it be next?

It is the simplest form of pain in history; the pain of change. A change in what you thought was right, a change in the way you thought the universe worked, a change in how you liked your world to work. But the pain of change always leads to something different, a new adventure born. The day you know everything, you might as well stop.

Prove me wrong.
Teach me something new.
Show me a new way.
Start a new adventure.

Deep in the Heart of Texas

What I've learned about Texas in my short time here:

1. Texas drivers are infuriatingly awful. My number one pet peeve is that they all seem like they went to the same driving school and the instructor didn't know how to make a turn without coming to a full stop.

2. Texas has terrible pizza. Seriously, it isn't even passable. A Texan trying to make a pizza is like a Chinese person trying to pronounce the letter L.

3. Texas makes up for it by having outrageously good Hamburgers.

4. Texas is full of Stunningly beautiful tall blonde women (even if they aren't really blonde, they still count)

5. Texas' dating scene is ridiculously bourgeois.

6. Texas people have no idea how to handle snow, as can be seen through 2 people trying to clean their cars off with a spatula and a blanket, respectively.

7. Texas is really sprawled out. You can meet someone you work with and find out that they live an hour and a half drive away from you.

8. Dallas Cowboys fans hate Tony Romo as much if not more so than non-Cowboys fans.

9. 75 degree weather is apparently too cold for going to the pool.

10. Drinking and Driving is not driving while drunk. Driving while drunk isn't tolerated, but drinking a beer while driving is simply "road soda"

11. Drinking and Working are the two mainstays of life. If a Texan isn't doing one, he/she is doing both.

12. Lightning Storms are spectacular.

A Dream Within a Dream

Why do dreams have such a drastic effect on our waking life? One little dream skews your whole day. A good dream can make your whole day so much brighter, even if it happens to be the worst day you've had in a month. A bad dream casts a pall over a good day and makes it seem dreadful.

Dreams don't even really mean anything. The most random of thoughts congeal into chaotic ramblings your brain doesn't even have control over.

You dream about a friend of yours that screws you over and the next day you have an irrational distrust of them.

You dream about a girl you know and for the next week, you think you have a crush on her.

You dream about a girl you do have a crush on and you hate her for a week because you dreamt about her dating someone you dislike.

You dream about someone you haven't thought about for a decade and you can't get them out of your head for the next month.

You dream about your job, you dream about your home, you dream about the gym, you dream about that girl, you dream about a girl, you dream about some girl, you dream about snow, you dream about sun, you dream about trees, you dream about bees, you dream about wheels, you dream about seals, you dream about water, you dream about rain, you dream about dreams, you dream about yourself.

They don't mean anything.
But somehow they mean everything.

The Culture of Stupidity

There is a pervasive attitude I find infuriating about American culture: We herald stupidity.

More than any other country I've been to, America holds up stupidity in the highest regard. There are aspects I admire as well, such as the culture of heralding creativity more than any other culture I've been to as well, but I just can't get over how Americans seem to hold up stupidity as the golden standard.

It has nothing to do with actual intelligence. I have known plenty of smart, interesting people that just have no interest in being intellectual at all. It is completely the attitude that the country engenders. It transcends race, but it can sometimes be enhanced by it, as well. I've heard way too many stories of a black child who is intelligent being told his whole life that he isn't "black" and is acting "white" by being intelligent and getting good grades for me to think that this issue is immune to race, but white trash areas, hispanic, Italian, etc etc still ostracize children for being smarter than they are. So what happens is that smart people start acting stupid to fit in with their peers. They learn to appreciate stupid things, and revel in stupidity.

It goes back to British humour and why hardly any Americans understand it. British people seem to value intelligence. I think that's why Americans find them pompous. In addition to the "properness" of the British, but I think that is just outward appearance and the underlying attitude is that of a culture that values intelligence and critical thought. They aren't the only ones, but we grew out of Britain originally, so they incur our collective teenage angst backlash.

If you put the concept of absurdist British humour inside the frame of a culture that values intelligence and people who look for meaning in things, who think critically about what things mean, who actively participate in the thought of what is going on around them; all of a sudden, British humour starts to make sense, because if you take that culture and insert something that sort of makes sense a little bit, and throw in 10 things that make absolutely no sense at all, the psychology of British humor and its absurdity starts to become clear.

America will never get it though, because they are too busy paying football players to go to college and not go to class rather than pay for an inner city genius to get his degree and become the next Leonardo Da Vinci.

We'll just continue to sit on our couches until we are too stupid to remember how to grow food and start pouring Gatorade on the fields instead of water because they market it well and otherwise we would have to think logically. But hey, at least we are still the best in the world at throwing a ball.

Lumberjackitude

With this semi-new workout routine transforming my body in a way I've never seen before

in tandem with my impromptu decision to grow a beard like I've never had before.

I looked in the mirror today as I was washing my hands and realized I'm looking more and more like the lumberjack I've always wanted to be.

Might need to go buy some flannel shirts tomorrow.

Tears in Rain II

Sometimes I want to see you cry.


Maybe that

is because


the shimmer


those tears create
is the only thing


I can think

that might


make your eyes
even more beautiful


than the most beautiful thing I've ever seen.

Tears in Rain

The day eventually comes when you realize life is nothing more than the measurements of time between tears shed. The true despair in life is when the tears don't flow anymore. Then you realize nothing has made you happy enough to cry for its loss.

I'm Weird and I Like it

I call people Weird a decent amount. Most of the time, they take it as a mild insult, when in fact, I'm basically giving them the highest praise I have ever thought of. Weird to me means you are more different than most people in the world...more than one standard deviation away from the average person. And in the words of the immortal George Carlin, "Think about how stupid the average person is!" Weird, to me, means you are inherently interesting. Think about how boring the same thing is. Look at a row of black dots.



Which one drew your eye? The WEIRD one, that's which one. The WEIRD dot is specifically red because this post turned out to be about a couple of red-heads; one i know and one I'd like to.

I weed people out based on this WEIRD criteria. You might call it judging or persecution, but we all do it, we discern people who make us feel happy about ourselves and we call them our friends. One of my favorite, usually unconscious, tactics for this is saying something off the wall when I first meet someone. If they run with it, they are probably a kindred spirit. If they look at me like I have 4 heads...we probably aren't going to get along. Speaking of that, wouldn't it be really cool if I had 4 heads?!

I met one of my favorite people in the world that way. She's an energetic little Red-headed actress who used to live next door to me. I sat next to her on the bus one day and tried to think about what to say to her. Give me a break, I get nervous about what I say to stunningly beautiful women. My friend, who happened to be her roommate as well, happened to have left me a voicemail I hadn't checked yet, and, as I listened to it, a thought occurred to me. (since the roommate herself was, shall we say, WEIRD)

I turned to her as the voicemail ended and blinked twice and promptly asked her "Is your roommate on crack?!" She burst out into a laugh that, although hearing it for the first time, I automatically knew I would grow to absolutely love hearing (at one point, I likened it to a dying hyena and it stuck) and that this girl was a kindred spirit in this world.

The other red-head is someone I want to know. We frequent the same gym. Being that we are both very intense when we work out, we haven't really talked at all even though we have been there at the same time probably over 20 times. Which also leads me to another issue...

Headphones are the death of conversation; especially at the gym! How are we supposed to have simple human interaction (with anyone, not just the opposite sex) when everyone at the gym has headphones stuffed in their ears?! It's enough to drive you crazy.

Anyway, while we've traded smiles, said hello, traded all that non-distinct human interaction that has replaced small talk in our culture of iPhones, iPads, iPods, iPlanes, iPranks, iPizza, and iPeople. But after my shoulders and legs workout this morning, my roommate and I added what I like to call Nightmare Cardio to the routine, which is a nightmarish combination of timed running, timed pushups, and timed abs. It kills you. I could barely stand after it. I was hoping I saw her leaving, because if I had, I would have been able to say one of my patented weirdo lines I thought of this morning.

"Do you, by any chance, have a katana I could borrow?" After gauging her reaction, I would have explained that I wanted to kill myself, but I always told myself that if I committed suicide, I'd have to do it in a flashy way, so that people could make fun of me and have a laugh after I'm dead. I figure if someone can't take that kind of oddity and run with the joke, they probably won't enjoy my company and vice versa. Alas, I didn't see her as I left. But there's always next week. And when it comes to me, always another weird, rambling, nonsensical thought to verbalize.

Backwards and Forwards...Everything You Know is Wrong

I never really claim to know anything. This might sound weird to anyone who knows me, because I speak very confidently, even on topics that I am just conjecturing about. It makes people think I am absolutely sure of what I am saying. In reality, I just speak extemporaneously with a great deal of vigor. I get excited when I philosophize. In any case, I actively try to refrain from being absolutely sure of anything.

There is a great reason for this and it ties in to one of my favorite pastimes: Thinking about the things we absolutely "know" at this point in history as a human race and guessing which ones our descendents will laugh hysterically at us for believing in such an obvious falsehood. What is the current equivalent of our ancestors believing that the Earth was flat? How about the equivalent of our ancestors believing disease passed from person to person by smell?

That is the Forward example of that kind of philosophy. What I'm currently thinking about is how it applies Backward. It makes me think about history and what we "know" about what happened in our past. We take the stories we've heard in books as gospel, but in all honesty, there is no way that any of that actually happened.

The way I think about it is simple: with the advent of the internet, we have a ridiculous amount of angles and media of events that happen live...and yet, we still can't figure out what actually happened! If you talk to five different people, that were all present at the event, then watched video coverage of the event, followed by 2 hours of analysis by experts and viewers' reactions...then asked them to recount what happened, guess how many variations of that simple event you would get.

Now picture 200 years ago, and history being written. Just try and tell me that what they wrote was anywhere near what actually happened. It makes me wonder what actually happened, and some of the funniest things I've ever thought of have been alternative realities to historically famous events.

A Battle with Nature

As I workout in the gym, I realize that there are machines that just don't let men win. It makes me understand the concept of "Curves" the gym only for women so that they don't feel like they are being stared at while working out. The worst part of it is when it is not an isolated incident either. I go to the gym at the same time every single weekday morning, so I see the exact same people every day. I don't want to be a creep; I try not to look. I generally succeed in this venture, I'm there to work out, not make women feel uncomfortable. But sometimes, the situation just isn't gonna let men win. As evidenced by the situation I found myself in as I ranted to my friend on the way back from the gym one morning.

"I try not to look! But man, when I finish the mason twists on the inclined bench, my eyes are pretty much rolling around inside my head and I walk (see: stagger) around to recover before the next set. My eyes fly around the gym in exhaustion. When they come across a girl that is doing certain exercises, they just naturally stop."

"C'mon! I'm trying not to look, but that is simply a war against nature! And man, a battle against nature is simply one I'm not going to win!"

Patience

There is an idea in this country that everything has to happen "Now".

"He who hesitates is lost."
"We are a puny folk. Avarice, hesitation and following are our diseases."
"Audacity augments courage; hesitation fear."
"On the plains of hesitation bleach the bones of countless millions, who, at the dawn of decision, sat down to wait, and waiting died."

Hesitation on the dawn of decision is never a good thing, but the lack of patience is quite another. The culture of humanity is speeding along on a runaway track of perpetual motion. Standing still is abhorred. If you aren't going forward, you are going backward. There is no time to just stop and appreciate anything.

There are ups and downs in life. The biggest thing is that there is nothing wrong with having a "flaccid moment in your personal history" as my favorite author outside of Joyce put it. It's a struggle especially if there were much more exciting parts of your life, to let things slow down around you.

Humans and Elitism

I think everyone needs to feel some sense of superiority over other human beings. In most ways, this manifests as a need to see the inferiority of others somehow. Putting others in an inferior position is something else entirely and shouldn't be tolerated. But I'm talking about observing people in inferior situations to remind us that we all are lowly human beings and no one is a perfect celestial being.

My outlet is reading sports forums. They annoy me to no end, but I get endless entertainment out of how stupid people can be. I have known people who are obsessed with celebrity gossip for just the same reason. Others compare themselves to everyone they see on the street. Others compare themselves to everyone they work with. Who knows what other options there are? I'd go so far as to say that everyone has some method of looking down their nose at someone just to pick themselves up a bit. The human ego seems to need it every once in a while.

I've toyed with posting in the forums themselves, but I tend to be too verbose and I always have the feeling I used to have when I tried to briefly join a debate club in my youth: argumentation with strict rules based on the media used is never about the content but about the method. Argument obfuscation rules the day rather than logic. So I've gone back to simply reading them. Even though I get astounded and frustrated at most of the content, I still get enjoyment out of the stupidity of the majority of people posting. I understand it is simply because I feel superior to stupid people writing meaningless forum posts. There might have been a time I felt guilty about that, but I simply accept it now as part of my humanity. It also helps me accept it when I see it in others as well.

Rusty Faucet: Part III

He reaches below his chair and feels for his pipe. He pulls the ancient-looking bowl from its hiding place and holds it in his lap. He turns it over in his hands, slowly inspecting its curves and crannies. He draws his fingers along the myriad of bumps and digs time has carved into the mahogany-colored wood As always, his gnarled knuckle finds its way to the only artificially made nooks for the finale of its tour. Niall’s eyes wince close as the wrinkled pad crosses over the inscribed lines. His bottom lip drops ever so slightly and quivers once before he opens his eyes and quickly reaches for his pouch of tobacco.

Niall methodically rocks back and forth as he packs the pipe full of dried tobacco leaf. He coughs twice before lighting the leaf with a long, wooden match. The tobacco draws a clear line of aromatic smoke and dances into the misty morning air.

Rusty Faucet: Part II

Niall crosses the room to the shower. He turns the spicket with a grunt. Brown water sputters out angrily for a few seconds before becoming a solid clear trickle. He stands under the ice cold water letting it run over his skin. Goosebumps pop sporadically from the pockets of his skin that still have the wherewithal. He doesn’t bother taking his glasses off. He hears the children from down the street laughing outside as they pass by on their way to the river. Niall turns off the water and pats himself dry with the rag next to the sink.

His eyes reluctantly roll over the turned down picture frame as he shuffles over to his closet. He pulls his white blazer out of the mothballs in the back. As he pulls his tie tight, he flicks his eyes to the mirror in the corner and looks away as quickly as a butterfly flaps its wings. He picks up the rotted coffee mug and pushes open the dilapidated screen door to his porch. The sun blazes with the early morning brilliance of a subdued fury.

Niall squints as he utters a low moan of irritation or grogginess. It doesn’t matter which it is anymore. He puts the mug down on the card table and sits in the rocking chair beside it. The rooster crows again. Niall draws in a long, slow breath and a nettled cough rattles out of his throat in lieu of an exhale.

Necessities of Dwelling

There is a certain understated luxury to living in an apartment or house with more than simply a bedroom, a bathroom, and a kitchen.

Rusty Faucet: Part I

The early morning sun sheds through the fraying curtains like a mole burrowing through tilled soil. The room is again lit by the sepia hue that the faded red of the curtains produces every morning. The cot in the corner of the room creaks as the man turns over restlessly at the new sunrise. His eyes open slowly allowing the light into his faded corneas. A sigh escapes his chapped lips and quickly turns into a nettled cough.

Niall rolls over and slides under the mosquito net hanging over his cot. As he rolls up the net, his eyes pass over the picture frame turned down on the nightstand. He brushes one gnarled finger over it and pulls it away with a fresh coating of dust. He blows it off his finger and picks up the pair of glasses next to the frame. The glasses settle unevenly on the bridge of his nose and he blinks the world back into semi-clarity.

A rooster crows down the street as Niall scrapes the last of the coffee grounds from the rusted can. The cabinet is empty without the pitted can inside it. The steam rises out from the coffee pot. He looks down into the pot and sees a couple flakes of rust swimming in the tepid tan liquid. His reflection drifts back at him through the ripples. He slides the coffee mug across the counter away from him.

R.I.P. My Computer

Blog updates have become few and far between. There is good reason for the scarcity of the literary ideas being published in this medium. My computer decided to die. Two weeks out of its warranty, my hard drive decided to take a metaphorical leap off a tall building with its prescribed destination being the hard pavement below it. I have much of my data backed up, but I'm sure I've lost quite a bit. The brighter side of this is that I'm not exactly sure what I've lost and I don't even particularly care. I'm loathe to buy a new computer. I have access to my roommate's when he isn't using it so I'm not completely devoid of a digital presence. I find that this restricted access is not only sufficient but I find myself extremely amenable to my current lack of a computer.

Every once in a while, I do actually walk around and think that I could use a computer at the moment to quell some boredom. To my pleasant surprise, these are the moments of spare time in which I decide to do something much more productive than surf the internet. I wasn't even spending an inordinate amount of time on my computer when it worked, but now that it's gone, I'm spending even less and I don't miss it. Instead, I'll pick up a book and read even more often than I did before. I'll solve some puzzles, be they crossword or logic. I'll work on an actual puzzle. I'll go sit at the pool and swim laps in the sun. My current favorite though is punishing my body at the gym with my workout buddies/roommate Joe and surrogate personal trainer Joey. (In answer to your question: yes, the names get confusing.) The latter promises to find some way of motivating me through pissing me off with his trash talk, but he has yet to do it without me laughing instead. What can I say? I can't take anything a Ginger says seriously.

I've come to the conclusion that computers sap the life out of life. That being said though, I think I'm going to make a concerted effort to transfer the writings that make it into my numerous composition notebooks floating around my apartment into Joe's computer and subsequently onto this blog more often. If not for any of you reading this, then for myself when my notebooks die as unexpectedly as my hard drive. Don't laugh, it's happened before. Ask the one with a couple of chapters of Memoria in it that looks like a blue and white Rorschach test from having a Jameson bottle spilled on it.

TJ's Baseball Skills turned into Literary Heresy

I was talking to my friend T.J. today and he told me to check out the video of his baseball highlights that was posted to his facebook wall. As I laughed hysterically at the background music of Wind Beneath My Wings by Bette Midler, I noticed that he had taken a book challenge quiz called "BBC Book list challenge" and decided to take it. After I saw 2 JRR Tolkien titles, Life of Pi, and The Da Vinci Code on the list, I decided to boycott it.

I'm not saying that they aren't good books, but in a list of 100 books in the same vein as Ulysses and 100 Years of Solitude?! Please. Especially because there are much better books that may not be as popular but are much more deserving, such as anything by Tom Robbins, Cormac McCarthy, Virginia Woolfe, or Marcel Proust, to name a few. I would have said Mario Puzo except for the revelation forthcoming in the next paragraph.

So I looked into this list and found it has nothing to do with the BBC at all. In fact, the BBC took a poll based on nominations and came up with a list of 100 books based on the criteria of "Nation's best-loved novel" It is personally sad to me that Tolkien actually turned up to be number 1 on this list, but I understand most people don't generally like substance, just a good story. I can accept that. It was refreshing to know that the BBC never intended this list (it's not even the same list by the way, just 2/3 of the same books) to be the top 100 classic books of all time. (Mario Puzo's The Godfather is on the BBC list even though it is not on the Facebook version, hence why I did not include him in the aforementioned list)

I'd be irked at this facebook meme, but they did have one redeeming quality...they had the wherewithal to remove JK Rowling and all the Harry Potter books from the list before they posted it. I guess that's good enough for forgiveness in my book.

It's a Kind of Magic

There isn't enough magic left in this world. I think there is just too much understanding and not enough wonderment. There is just too much explanation and rationalizing for my taste.

Yes, this is clearly a response to my own propensity to try and explain and understand everything on this earth logically, even things that inherently cannot be. When I think about it, understanding can be rewarding and useful. I think it should be something to strive for. But there are just some things about which I wish I could simply turn my brain off and enjoy or accept without relentless analysis or blind faith in some tautology.

I think the human race could do with just accepting some things as they are without needing some reason for it. You might see this as an attack on science or an attack on religion or a defense of religion or an attack on philosophy. It is, in reality, none of those things. It is merely an attack on myself. It is simply a wish that sometimes I could sit back and accept things as they happen and act upon things in that way. I wish I could live by one of my all-time favorite song lyrics by the Doobie Brothers:

And I ain't got no worries, 'cause I ain't in no hurry at all.

I actually keep a mug that was made for me with this lyric inscribed on it next to my bathroom sink specifically to remind myself of it every morning as I brush my teeth. Unfortunately some days it just doesn't sink in. I think if I weren't in such a damn hurry to live, I'd be able to relax sometimes and stop analyzing everything to death. Maybe then I could smell the roses outside.

A Question Without an Answer

In Silence of the Lambs, (Incidentally one of my favorite movies of all time) Hannibal Lecter admonishes Clarice Starling to read Marcus Aurelius quoting "Of each particular thing ask; what is it in itself?" I think this is somewhat incomplete. Everything has two sides: what it is in and of itself and also what it is seen as.

Some time ago, in the middle of a long-term relationship with a girl, I was wrestling with breaking it off. I couldn't quite nail down my feelings about her one way or the other. A wise friend asked me a simple question after confiding in him about it: "Do you actually love her or do you just love the fact that she loves you?"

It is an important question. Though it is implying that it shouldn't matter as much how someone feels about you. It took me a while to realize, but I think that the question is actually of the utmost importance. Its weakness though lies in its unspoken emphasis. It implies that it is more important how you feel about someone than how they feel about you and your perception of that. I don't think either is more important. Both are equally necessary. Too often we are absorbed into how much we like or don't like someone without giving equal weight to how we feel about the way in which they like us.

Its a two-way street. Sometimes its tough to see. Sometimes its tough to judge. Sometimes its so much easier to look at the trees and forget the forest. But it all comes back to how people make us feel and how we feel about them. Two sides of the same coin.

I haven't thought of a way to ask the question without that unspoken emphasis. But I do find myself coming back to the question over and over again, mostly in matters of love, but not always. It is probably one of the wisest and most useful things anyone has ever said to me.

Bringing Beards Back

I've been clean shaven for the past month. I think it is the longest time that I have kept that going since I was 18 and still in a military high school that forced me to do so. I've had enough though. My beard is coming back. Why? I always told myself it was because I was lazy and couldn't hold to shaving on a regular basis. It turns out that long-held belief is untrue. It's actually just a self-image thing. I have visual and tactile blocks against allowing myself to be clean shaven.

First off, I hate how it feels when I'm clean shaven. I hate rubbing my hands over my chin and feeling nothing but skin; even stubble is better than just plain old smoothness. Nothing is better than rubbing my fingers through my beard when it is grown out enough to do so.

The other reason that I hate being clean shaven is one I didn't expect. It throws my identity off. I never thought about it, but I identify myself as having a beard. I mean, you would probably expect that after having one for the vast majority of a decade. I just didn't expect it to be as different as it was. Looking in the mirror everyday was always a shock. I didn't feel quite right the entire time that I didn't have my beard.

So, My beard is coming back. It won't take that long either. A couple days and I'll be past the stubble phase. By next week, I'll have a full blown beard again. One thing I definitively can do is grow a beard in the way all men should be able to; Fast and Full. Give a month and I could probably pass as a closer for the San Francisco Giants.

In any case, the beard is back in style!

Y cannot. persons' Use [good english,] more oftener?

People simply don't have enough respect for language. I'm not talking about its manipulation or the morphing of language. Language is alive and it should be malleable. I'm talking about the startling lack of knowledge regarding the simple rules that make language what it is: Vocabulary and Grammar. You could make an argument for adding syntax in that list as well, but I think those are the big two. Language is the foundation of society in many ways and it seems like many people don't care about language at all.

In talking to a friend today, I heard about a teacher who stated publicly that he used semi-colons to hunt out plagiarism. His first red flag for the fact that someone may have plagiarized their paper was the CORRECT usage of a semi-colon. The worst part about this is that I actually believe it. Not to mention, that I don't even blame the teacher. It seems like this is more of a reactionary measure than an expectation on his part. He's probably seen such horrendous grammatical blunders that it is actually hard to read papers. It is not even hard to believe that he might be shocked when a paper comes across his desk that is written well.

I don't even care if you know what a gerund is or if you don't have an opinion on the Harvard comma. Those kinds of concerns are better reserved for people who actually have a vested interest in the written language. I do care that people know the differences between "there" "their" and "they're", the usage of a semi-colon, a basic comprehension of the purpose of the interplay between connotation and vocabulary, and a basic understanding of the subject-predicate composition of a simple sentence. It just seems to me that communication between human beings relies on these kinds of principles too heavily to not care about them at all.

I find it sad that so many people have such a vapid comprehension of simple language concepts that it results in a teacher being forced into suspicion of cheating as a result of someone using a simple grammatical device correctly.

Duck Season, Wabbit Season. Baseball SEASON!!

Do you smell that? It's a combination of beer, mustard, naugahyde, and HGH.

It's Baseball season! My favorite time of year. When the spring training games end and the games actually start to mean something. When grown men run onto a field and get paid millions of dollars to play the same exact game I grew up playing. When the records are all 0-0 and the Padres and Mariners have the same chance as the Yankees and Red Sox, for a weekend or two anyway.

In a year where there might be no football season, it makes the baseball season and its opener all the more exciting for me. Play ball!

Duck Rape Orgy, Apparently

I was sitting on my balcony when all of a sudden a Tasmanian Devil-esque cloud of feathers flew down to the grass right below me. I caught this out of the corner of my eye and walked to the edge of the balcony to see what the hell it was. It was three ducks. Two of the males were fighting over the one female while the female made repeated attempts to get away from both of them. I couldn't quite tell if one of the males was trying to fight the other off of the female or if he was trying to get him off of her so that he could rape her...It was a confusing, frenzied feather-filled five minutes.

The funniest part is that they all flew away in another cloud of feathers and five minutes later, the police walked by because there was a scheduled building inspection this afternoon and all I wanted to yell was, "Where were you five minutes ago?! There was a duck being raped and you could have stopped it!!"

Small Wonders

Sometimes it seems to me that the status quo is indestructible. I'm not sure if this is objective reality or just a matter of perception, but it always seems like when you take two steps forward here, you take two steps backward somewhere else.

In the grand scheme of things, it even seems like nothing revolutionary ever happens. In those moments when you seem to have an epiphany and sense that you are actually close to achieving something you have always wanted to, something brings you crashing back down to reality. I think it is just the idealistic expectation that causes this, because so many times, it turns out that it wasn't a debilitating crash because it was never an epiphany to begin with. We are always looking for these giant leaps rather than simply taking small steps to get somewhere. It always seems like we are unhappy when it actually takes time and work to achieve something and I'm one of the worst culprits of this.

I heard someone on the radio today say that "happiness is reality divided by expectations." I couldn't and didn't try to say it better myself.

Another quote comes to mind as a mantra that I might try to rid myself of this terrible little "silver pill" syndrome. I call it a "silver pill" syndrome because it seems like a lot of people, especially Americans want everything delivered to them in one easy to swallow pill that requires no time or skill or effort to achieve. I picture silver because it matches the hue of the platter it's carried in on in my caricature. I think it would be beneficial to pull away from this complex of huge leaps and concentrate on taking some smaller steps. To do that, I think I might turn to an old cliche from Lao Tzu as a mantra:

"A journey of a thousand miles must begin with a single step."

Irish I was Irish...Oh wait, I am!

The one thing I love about being Irish is that we don't care who claims to be Irish. I don't think I've ever heard someone call someone out for celebrating St. Patrick's because they aren't Irish. I love St. Patrick's Day because everyone is Irish today if you want to be. It's the closest I get to being proud of my ethnicity. I still can't be proud of something I had no control over and was just an accident of birth.

I love the inclusiveness though. A day that celebrates complete unity of nationality; a day when everyone is Irish if they want to be!

"What'd you say? You're Japanese? who cares?! Today you can be Irish too! What? you don't wanna be Irish? Eh, that's alright! You still drink alcohol, right?! Ok, then have a Guinness and be Japanese! Happy St. Patrick's Day!"

Apathy! (and other Addictive Oxymorons)

We're all addicts. Some addictions are more outright dangerous than others: Heroin, Cocaine, Crack...etc. But the way our brain works, we're all psychologically dependent on something. It all just depends on what that is that you are chasing. It doesn't even necessarily has to be a bad thing. There are so many things we are addicted to and everyone is slightly different.

sex addiction
love addiction
television addiction
puzzle addiction
music addiction
noise addiction
social addiction
isolation addiction
travel addiction
power addiction
money addiction
intimacy addiction
popularity addiction
relationship addiction
food addiction
clean addiction
work addiction

Pick your poison, but we need things psychologically. Personally, I'm an intimacy addict. It ties into relationship and love addiction. I always need to be around someone who I'm close to. If I'm not, I'm generally unhappy. That's the rub. These paragons of our lives dictate our happiness. If you are addicted to two different things, you are actually kind of lucky. You are less likely to be without two things than only one. Because, as an addict, being in the absence of your own little drug is when you become miserable. Although it is easier to be happy with only one addiction, because if it is present, everything else becomes simple. Everything else fades into the background.

The odd phenomenon is that the thing we are addicted to usually becomes the hardest thing to achieve. Detachment is the better part of achievement. It's why when you place so much importance on something you usually fail and watch someone who doesn't give a shit about it get exactly what you wanted. The best part of this is that normally you are achieving their heart's desire without even realizing it simply because you don't give a shit about it.

The word was "Good", not "God"

Sometimes I think the word "God" was a typo. Sometimes I wonder if all of religion and spirituality from the time of its birth was actually a gross misunderstanding; a bad accent or someone talking with their mouthful.

Especially when you consider that the whole concept of "God" revolves around goodness. In regard to the thought of good versus evil and the thought of God versus Devil, and the fact that God is supposed to be beneficent, the ultimate paragon of goodness and morality, just makes me think about this possibility further. Don't get me wrong, I get that the idea of deities was around before the idea of one God, but the idea that morality and good versus evil was embodied in one creator surfaced with monotheism. I think that the possibility lies in the origins of monotheistic tendencies.

Someone may have been sitting around one day. Maybe he was a writer, or a philosopher. He was thinking about the nature of good and evil, and waxing philosophic about it. Maybe his name was Brian or Jesus. He engaged in discussions with people around him about his ideas regarding the dichotomy between good and evil. The fact that the epitome of good was something we could never completely understand because of relative perspectives. One of his followers misheard the word but not the sentiment.

"Ahhh, so this 'God' is a mystery we will never understand. We can use that to explain things we don't understand and we won't have to think about them anymore! You, sir, are a genius, what was your name again? Jesus? Nah, Jesusians doesn't really have a great ring to it....what was your last name? Christ? Christians....that could work!"

And a discussion about good and evil transcends into God and religion's origins. Not saying it is true, I just think it's possible.

The Truth about False

The uncomfortable truth is that more people are hurt by people telling the truth than by people telling lies. Don't get all excited, you liars. I'm not taking your side, the sole reason this is true is that most lies never actually come to light. When they do, it's pretty much double the blow as it would have been had you just been honest in the first place. But since it is relatively rare, the sheer amount of people being hurt by the truth just easily surpasses those hurt by lies. It is an uncomfortable truth and one that I have never been able to stomach very easily or adapt to very well. I'm not good at those little white lies that keep people happy even though they themselves know it's not true. And trust me, I seem to hurt many more people than my friends to whom it comes like second nature to lie about little things.

Apocalypse

I think we all have our own apocalypses.

Zen and the Art of Fixing my Own Bicycle

There is a permeating mentality that I see more and more of lately: "Let someone else do it." I have it with certain things. But with most things, I like to think I take the punishment for what I get myself into, rather than try to weasel out of it. Probably wishful thinking, but there is at least one area in which I can say that I am to a stubborn extent.

If I want to buy the cheapest, crappiest bicycle possible, then I'm going to deal with it rather than bringing it back to the store and returning it. For the last week, my neighbors have seen me outside with the bike turned upside down, working on its brakes because they were installed wrong. Everybody keeps on telling me to just bring it back and return it. But you know what, I knew what I was getting into when I got the cheapest bicycle there was at the cheapest store there was. I'm gonna fix it myself. It's just the way I am.

Ever since college, one of my favorite stories is when I got home from class one day, my then roommate informed me in a decently distressed tone that the kitchen cupboard door had come loose and wouldn't close, just hang down from the hinge. He told me that he called building and grounds about it and said they weren't going to be able to get to it for a while.

I looked at him like he had 4 heads. I couldn't believe he called B&G for something as simple as a loose hinge. I promptly walked into my room, pulled out my cordless drill, walked into the kitchen and fixed the cupboard door in what amounted to a good 10 seconds of work. My roommate proceeded to look at me like I had 4 heads, astounded by my "aptitude for carpentry". I screwed in a loose screw....

So I've not been as successful with my bicycle, but I'm going to keep trying if it kills me...and if my brakes don't work while I'm riding it one day, it actually might kill me. But I don't care, right now it is sitting in the other room with a piece of gum MacGyver'd in between the cantilever brake system. I'm hoping when it dries, it will push the brake wire far enough to tighten the mechanism and pull the brake flush against the wheel. Probably won't work, but damn if I'll stop trying!

I Get Excited by Poking Fun at Scientology

I'm what many people have deemed "stoic". I don't get excited very much. It usually looks to the casual observer like I'm not paying attention or that I don't care about anything. I look, to say the least, apathetic. At one point, a doctor suggested the possibility of my being bi-polar (i think he lost his license for it, it was so far off) to which I seem to recall my sister saying something to the effect "Craig?! He's the most even-keeled person I know..."

This is not to say that I don't enjoy things and get excited about things, I guess I just don't show it. The flip side of this is that I genuinely do enjoy things. It isn't superficial. I may not gush all over something someone gives me. To the point, where people have actually taken offense that I haven't. But I'll still have what you gave me 8 years from then. It's just a matter of what you value more. If you value seeing someone fall over with unabashed embellishment, you are going to have to look elsewhere, but if you want someone who will actually appreciate a gift more as time passes rather than the moment its received, then you might look in my direction.

Although, there are rare occasions in which I do get excited. It is usually those moments when my friends are actually shocked at how excited I got. Take as an example; in college, I was chilling with my friends Jess and Van. I happened to see in the newspaper that there was a Church of Scientology down the road and I became inordinately excited at the prospect of going to the church and taunting them; pretending like I might join, etc. To which they thought they'd seen a ghost and reacted as such. I had no idea why they were so shocked until they explained that they had never seen me that animated before. It goes to show that you can know yourself but you can't always know how others see you.

British Humour Test

John Oliver: "If the Palestinians and the Jews have one thing in common, Andy, it's that they both struggle to summon up much of a Christmas spirit around this time of year. Now you could say that that's because neither of them celebrate Christmas. But you don't need to believe in Santa to want to dress up like him."

Andy Zaltzman: "Stop quoting Aristotle at this early stage of the podcast."

I think I've found the ultimate test for whether you find British humour....well, humorous. It is an excerpt from my favorite podcast named The Bugle: Audio Newspaper for a Visual World; produced by The Times Online. If you listen to this section of its episode 58: "Did you get Peace in the Middle East for Xmas?" and proceed to think its stupid and nonsensical with a facial expression close to bewilderment...you do not have any appreciation for British humour.

On the other hand, if you hear Andy deliver that deadpan line of and proceed to either fall out of your chair laughing if you happen to be sitting, run into a pole laughing if you are jogging, drive off the road into a ditch laughing if you are driving or drop the spoon back into your ice cream laughing hysterically if you happen to be eating a pint of Ben and Jerry's ice cream, then congratulations you have a keen appreciation of British Humour. Your prize is the ability to appreciate the brilliant comedic stylings of Monty Python. Now go watch the Life of Brian and remember to Always Look on the Bright Side of Life!

Killer Tofu!

I cooked in a wok for the first time in my life tonight. I took a shot at an old Chinese favorite called Mala Doufu, you might know it as marpo tofu. I didn't exactly have all the ingredients necessary. I used a little too much oyster sauce, far too much ground pork, and not enough tofu and no peanut oil at all. Considering I just took a stab at it with what was lying around, I'd say it came out pretty damn good though!

By the way, yes, that is part of the orgy couch in the background

An Orgy Couch

Our couch is awesome. It's weird to say that about a piece of furniture. But it freakin' rules. It's called a Poole couch. It comes in three huge pieces and an ottoman. It's Tan and Brown and each piece fits with each other. You can have one piece and an ottoman and two pieces for a regular length couch and a chaise. Or you can put the entire thing together and make a huge circular behemoth that our friend Lacey termed the "Orgy Couch" Yes that many people can fit in it comfortably. The sides and back are low and the real backs are made of pillows. This means you can run across the room and vault into the circle of cushions.

I find myself judging people on their couches now. I was flipping through the channels yesterday after watching Watson absolutely crush the mere human champions surrounding him on Jeopardy! and came across Two and a Half Men. Charlie Sheen plays a ridiculously successful jingle writer with a beach house in LA, but I found myself looking at his couch and scoffing thinking, "You'd think he'd be portrayed with a couch at least as awesome as ours."

Movie Time Capsule

A friend once asked me: "If all of the movies on the planet were going to be destroyed; past, present and future included, but you were given the chance to seal 10 movies into a time capsule and preserve them and no others from destruction and for your own viewing pleasure, which would they be?"

It is a lot tougher than it sounds and I almost want to take the question and transpose it to books, but I fear I might go insane by that proposition. Anywho, here's the list I came up with (in no particular order).

Shawshank Redemption
Robin Hood: Men in Tights
Silence of the Lambs
Monty Python and the Holy Grail
Good Will Hunting
Big Fish
Hot Shots: Part Deux
Moulin Rouge
Se7en
Waking Life

Both The Truman Show & American History X were ridiculously close.

Other considerations were

Kill Bill if vols. 1 & 2 were to be considered as 1 movie.
Blade Runner
American Psycho
Twelve Monkeys
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
Batman
The Dark Knight
Star Wars (but only if the original trilogy were considered 1 movie)
Monty Python's The Meaning of Life
Monty Python's Life of Brian
History of the World Part 1

I'll get back to you if I ever decide to one of these for books. It'll be ready by 2020.

Wandering

Sometimes I wonder why I wander. I think it is a quest for identity. I'm not very sure who I am, but what is more poignant is that I'm not really sure who I want to be. I always have a tough time making decisions, but its not because I don't want to progress, it's because I never want to close a door. This might come from the fact that when I do close a door, I tend to slam it, tie explosives to it, douse it in kerosene, light it, blow it to pieces, and then proceed to dance around the ashes in a ritual manner reminiscent of stereotypical voodoo practitioners.

I always fight between settling down somewhere and putting some kind of roots down and then uprooting everything and starting over again at least 1000 miles away. I wouldn't be who I am today if I hadn't done that so many times in my life. But that's just the point. Who am I? I don't generally attach meaning to anything. I have general ideas. I like to write. I like to read. I like puzzles and games. I like intellectualism. I like conversation. I like people. But I don't identify with any of these things. I wouldn't kill for any of them. I wouldn't die for any of them.

I wouldn't even kill or die for my name. I don't especially identify with Craig Fennelly either. I like it, it's probably the most grounding thing I have, but I am a child of detachment and meditation, I would be the same person if I were named differently. There is a being that is me, and I'm trying to find out what that is. The only issue is, I don't really want to find it, because if I ever did, I have a hunch I would become extremely bored with this world, which couldn't be further from my penchant for life.

Poltergeistrionics

Walking the ground with a ghost at my hip,
A shade that matches me stride for stride.
Invisible but felt by everyone unseen,
They used to be real, flesh and bone coincide.

A shadow of a glimmer once gleamed in a flash
Of glinting glammer drafting in my wake,
Yet always stretching out in front of my senses,
A spectating specter surrounds ev'ry route I take.

A ghoul that haunts every waking moment
'fore the spirit takes over my dream world at night.
An empty husk of a man dragging soles across pavement,
A golem of melancholy pulling a soul across plight.

This phantom that cannot be purged from my world
Dances 'round with delight when mere misery strikes.
A fantastic phantasm with its seductive hand curled
'Round my neck, used to please but now reveals its cold spikes.

Hey Y'all, I need a Drawl!

It's time for me to work on my Southern Drawl.
I'm definitely not gonna break into a Bawl,
Just hafta make a concerted effort to say "Y'all"
If not for any other reason but to fit in at the Mall.

E'en if I can't speak like y'all, I'm gonna have a Ball
Living somewhere the sun ain't held in a Pall
For half the year where Winter starts in the Fall,
And snow ne'er melts, just piles up into a Wall.

I would never ever even feign to have the Gall
To say I ain't gonna miss anyone back there at All.
If I did, I'd probably eventually get into a Brawl.
So if Y'all miss me as much as I miss Y'all,
Run, don't Crawl if you wanna give me a Call.

Traveling Again

I missed traveling. For some reason, outlandish crap always happens to you, but it never gets to you. In other times when you are living in one place, you get irked and irritating by the most trivial things. While traveling, odd things that actually should annoy just don't seem to.

For example, I was on the road last week, driving through Mississippi after leaving Alabama at 4 AM. I needed some coffee so I punched that into my gps: It told me there was a starbucks 2 miles off the highway in Jackson or the next coffee shop was 85 miles down the highway west. Needless to say, I chose to get off the highway at Jackson. 2 miles down the road, what do I find? The Jackson, Mississippi airport! The starbucks my gps found was inside the International Airport of Mississippi. So I decide to go anyway, I park in the lot (paying $2.00 for parking less than an hour) and get out to start walking.

I forget to put my fleece on because it was almost 60 in Birmingham the previous day. Apparently, temperature fluctuates daily in the south. I froze my ass off on the way to the terminal. I neglected to turn around and get a sweater from my car figuring that the terminal is a quick walk from the parking lot. It turns out to be a 5-10 minute walk. I finally reach the Starbucks in the terminal and choose to get 2 coffees seeing as how Mississippi apparently doesn't drink coffee.

The Starbucks turned out to not have any cup sleeves to protect my hands from the scalding hot coffee contained therein. I picked up napkins to help prevent the heat from penetrating my palms, but the heat burned through that in 5 seconds flat. So I walk back to my car with the odd combination of burning hands and freezing body.

The best part of this entire story is that i wasn't even annoyed, I was laughing like a jackass the entire way back to my car and a good 5 miles further down the road. That is, laughing in between rapping to The Sugarhill Gang. I took the long drive as an opportunity to learn the words to Rapper's Delight! It's like a can of beer that's sweeter than honey.

Leaving is My Thing

This is my last post from New York. As anyone who speaks to me knows, I've always hated New York. But it isn't actually New York I hate, it's just standing still. As my friend Becca pointed out to me this past Tuesday when I said goodbye to her, everyone has a thing that characterizes them. Mine is that I leave. I leave places. I swoop in somewhere, stay for a bit, get restless and then leave. Today is the day I leave again. This time I am actually leaving something behind in New York. The people that I have met here this time around are unforgettable. I have met so many more people than I have in over 4 years prior. They are incredible and I will miss them, but I can't ever go against my nature. Death, Taxes, and Craig leaving.

So long New York. Hopefully I won't see you soon. Hopefully I will see the people I met here sooner than I see New York!

Calcification of Life

It's odd how we become numb sometimes. It makes you feel like a sociopath; the fact that at some points in your life, nothing can make you care. Not only can nothing make you happy, but nothing can make you sad or angry either. Sometimes it may last for a week, sometimes a month, and sometimes a couple seconds or a minute, but each time it does, it makes you pine for depression or rage. So often we forget that there is always something worse than depression, and that is not feeling anything at all.

Retrograde calcification of your feelings is almost worse than strictly numbness in the present. It makes you feel like a waste of life sometimes even though logically you know better. To think that looking back on your fondest of memories in a period of numbness and feeling that same numbness rather than the nostalgia you were looking for. It is enough to make you think that you never felt anything at all.

On the other hand, this kind of calcification of the heart makes everything that much more intense when the feelings come rushing back to the surface.

Drowning in a Canoe

eMedicinehealth.com tips for drowning prevention and tips for self-care for drowning. I am not making this up.


Drowning tips for self-care

Self-care for saving a drowning victim at home: Use a long stick to reach the victim, if no stick is available, bring a canoe alongside the victim and tow the victim to shore. Whose house has a shore?! And where did the canoe come from?! And how do you perform self-care on another drowning victim other than. . .yourself?!

To prevent drowning: if in doubt, stay out of the water. WOW! why didn't I think of that? IF i absolutely need water to survive though, what can I do to prevent drowning?

Cover or empty all large containers of water to prevent a small child from falling in. I usually like to keep my shark tank open and available for my 3-year old nephew. Phew, disaster averted!

Best Website ever. I came across this while actually curious as to what happens to a drowning victim and inadvertently ran into hilarity.

Different Strokes

"Nobody realizes that some people expend tremendous energy merely to be normal"
~Albert Camus

I've never been a very big proponent of being normal. To be fair, though, normalcy is generally overrated by the normal and underrated by the abnormal. A certain amount of normalcy must be present in social interactions simply to put people at ease and be comfortable. The problem with this for abnormal people like me is that it takes a large amount of effort to appear normal with people who don't know me well. Most people generally don't understand this energy and why it takes effort to meet someone for the first time or even hang out with someone I just met. Sometimes I actually have to remind myself to get over it and go hang out with someone that I want to see but am nervous about its awkwardness.

I simultaneously wish I would get over it and that others could see the energy that some have to expend simply to not appear strange.

Universal Language

There is always a delicate balance between letting go of history for progress and keeping traditions that ground you. I've been to countries, specifically China, that were forced to destroy their history and traditions in favor of progress by the order of Mao Zedong. The only good by-product of the atrocity of the cultural revolution is that it achieved its desired effect. China has advanced; rapidly, in many ways because of it.

Keeping in mind that I have seen the devastation of something as brutal as the remnants of the Cultural Revolution, I have actually been thinking lately of the efficacy and the benefits of a universal language. I keep on coming to the same conclusion.

While there would be a ridiculous amount of tradition and diversity lost in the world as a result, I just keep on seeing the benefits of a universal language outweighing the costs. When the benefits are such intangibles as better understanding by infinite magnitudes, efficiencies beyond your wildest dreams, or tangible things such as costs and lack of translation needs, I can't quite think of many drawbacks that really trounce these kinds of benefits.

The only drawback that I really put stock in is that it would make the world marginally less interesting.

Metamorphosis

Welcome to your life. There's no turning back.

There's always looking forward. Too often we let our past dictate who we become.

Our lives are not a confluence of the events that we have already performed. Our story is interactive.

Too often we forget that we have a choice. Too often we treat our lives like a freight train; on a single track trucking toward inevitability.

Now is the time to decide that today is not just another day.

Now is the moment to do something you are afraid of.

Now is the second to change your routine.

Choose to have a choice. Partake in your destiny. Act in your play.

Coffee Beeswax

I'm sitting in a coffee shop with half a bagel and a full cup of coffee. I'm sitting at the bar facing the front window looking out at a gorgeous sun-filled day and the sun is glaring back in at me. The coffee is steaming right underneath my chin and it is so fresh that there is still a plethora of oxidizing bubbles surfing on the surface.

I look down into my coffee and see to my surprise, myself looking back at me. The sun is just right and the angle is just so. I see a thousand versions of myself in the reflection of each and every bubble. A honeycomb of me that moves in unison. With the black of the coffee as a background and my black sweater's collar creeping into the field, I feel like I'm in a music video of the 1980's but one thousand times over. It's like a series of parallel universes in which I am performing the beginning scene of Bohemian Rhapsody. Or at the very least, a Peter Gabriel video.

And of course, being who I am, I feel the need to start making funny faces in the reflections.

Now the bubbles have migrated to the sides of the cup. You'd think that would ruin it, but it only makes it better. Now there is a huge reflection of myself in the pool of coffee in the middle surrounded by a multitude of bubbles hugging the lip of the mug still reflecting a thousand versions of myself. Of course at this point, I start singing the beginning of Bohemian Rhapsody into my coffee cup. The people here must think I'm insane...and they'd be right!