The Madness

Hey y’all, a picture paints a thousand words, so take a careful look at this picture. Click on it for the whole story.

Thought I’d surprise everyone and write a blog during the week. I’ll jump into some newsy material before I forget. I read on the BBC web site about the U.S. Marine Corps’ latest tattoo regulations: all large tattoos are now prohibited. Prison sentences will reward those who get or touch up large tattoos. I find this interesting because the Army just relaxed its tattoo requirements to help fulfill enlistment quotas. The Army is making things easier and the Marines are making things harder to get in. And stay in. Hmm.

Ah, yes- I knew I wanted to discuss (a term used loosely here- perhaps with some comments it will maintain its more common meaning) something else: sleeping. More specifically, sleeping with my eyes open. I have come to the conclusion that I’m pretty sure I’ve done this recently. About a month ago I had this dream in which I could see the outline of my door frame and out into the hall which is dimly lit from a small light in the kitchen. That small light is the ‘don’t kill yourself trying to go weewee in the middle of the night’ light. Fine, it’s a night light.

Anywho, everything in the dream is exactly the same as real life. And then I awoke, blinked a few times, and the view never changed. So I’m guessing I was sleeping with my eyes open. This relates back to a previous post wherein I stated my continual misgivings about spiritual beings. What I forgot to mention in that post was a dream I had on two separate occasions. Basically it goes like this: me looking through door frame, ball of light comes aggressively at me, I shout at it, it goes away, I hyperventilate for a few minutes and go back to sleep. If I slept with my eyes open, the explanations for these dreams are a bit more palatable. As a side note, they freaked me out. Pretty bad. I felt paralyzed and unable to shout. On the other hand, I awoke on another occasion after sleeping in a similar position and I felt paralyzed again, but with no angry balls of light to shout/slur at.

Speaking of household aggressors, my domestic policy is to let spiders be. If I see a spider in my house, I perform a visual examination to gauge its toxicity. If it looks happy enough and is a reasonable distance from any sedentary location (i.e. bed, couch, shoes, nostril) I will give them a warm welcome followed by a stern talking-to about the house rules and then move on. And I gotta tell you- my chakra levels are kickin’! That last sentence is a lie- I have no clue how my chakra levels are doing these days.

The surprising thing is that I’m still alive. Seriously folks- I’ll be here all night There’s only been once instance of an angry spider since I instituted that rule. He was stalking me; he with his wild color scheme and patiently sinister, no-web-necessary attitude. Just watching…and waiting…until my guard went down and he could pounce. That little guy, well, he had to go. Weird how a creature 1/60th my size could inspire such a large negative reaction. I wonder if elephants think that same thing about us. Or maybe whales.

And let me chat a little more about my last blog- the part where I worried that ’settling down’ would impair the free-loving, long-haired greasy hippie in me. I just want to make it clear I’m not a misogynist. I don’t think I’m the Die Hard/Rambo/Days of Thunder guy who’s women are incapable and unwilling to be adventurous and self-sufficient. There are plenty of shared adventures to be had, for starters. And for two, I’m not really that guy. Most of the time I just hang out in my quiet apartment and make up silly songs on my guitar. Or try to trick my computer into cooperating with my latest deviant plan. So it’s not like my life is filled with dangeresque activity anyways. I can be that introspective, commentary-on-the-world writer guy. I’m not all balls and no brains. Especially if those rumors about Mountain Dew are true.

Now I’m just getting crass. The point of all that was to say that once situated in the proper relational arrangement, I believe I will be part of something much greater than I could ever be on my own. And I will not regret it one bit.

P.S. If I forget to write about the church that  I have several complaints against, but still liked, please remind me.

…And that person would not be me. Actually, I was a few minutes early to my first class. Not much to talk about, so I’ll just make up random bits of life. Let’s start with postsecret.

If you’re not checking the postsecret web site once a week, you are wrong. fix yourself. this week there is a link to a radio show the creator of the postsecret project was on. It provides a well-rounded background on the whole thing and it, although quite long (approx. 42:48), is fascinating. You can find the link on his website or use this little buddy.

Deep breath… My ‘puter just about crashed just now. I think we’re safe.

Saw a series of videos from a female comedian (comedienne? comedy person? person with comedic intent?) for the oh! oxygen network. you can find her body of work at shedidwhat.tv. And I did indeed exclaim, on several occasions, say ‘unnnnnnnngggghhhhhhhhh’. That’s pretty much equivalent to ’she did what!?’

For something a bit more personal and solid… I just had dinner with a couple I’ve known for a long time through church. To be accurate, it was a another person’s house with other folks in attendance. But I digress. This family’s father is a gung-ho military type who just talks in a way that indicates the impossibility of error. Fine. Actually, that has little to do with this rant, so I’ll try to get to what I wanted to whine about: family cultures.

I’d like my kids to have a decent understanding of life, love, death,sex,taxes and farts from an early age. If not understanding, then at least trust in their ability to communicate anything with their parents. But it still struck me odd the aforementioned man was talking with me (more like talking at me) about war. I mean, yeah, I was in Iraq. It was hot; people shot at me every so often. But this guy is talking about how his wife had to make him promise not to volunteer himself for wars. And it could be that he, being in a guard unit, feels the need to prove himself. fine. But there’s a family that would really do well with him in it. So two trains of thought evolve from this: challenge/accomplishment and family culture, which I’m still getting around to. I’ll try to keep going on that. It just threw me off to hear his sixth-grade kid jumping into the conversation to ask if any of the pictures of military members his dad was looking at showed people who had been killed. Is that normal? Is that healthy? I dunno. Seemed a little callous. Their family has always been very strict and militaristic. They all seem to do pretty well like that - better than my family would have. One important thing is that both parents agree on how things are done. I think I would create a different culture in my family. One a little more fitting to my laid-back, So. Cal, ‘hang-ten’ kind of lifestyle.

The other part, the bit about accomplishment, is that guys are challenge based. A buddy of mine recently felt a little weak on his picking up of ‘da ladies’ abilities. Also, he felt lonely. Also, he looked at his friends and family and saw they were all computer nerds who are anti-social and doomed to a life of lonely nerd-dom. Yes, that includes me. So before it was just a passing sorrow, but now it became a challenge and he really did some research on the subtle art of attracting women. He became quite passionate on the subject and really quite successful, the degree to which would vary in the observer’s eye.

And it was straightforward to gauge success: if a girl caught his eye and he then caught her digits, all was well. Likewise, when I was running around a desert with a semi-automatic rifle, it was much easier to feel like something was being accomplished. Nowadays it’s hard for me to feel like I’m doing something of worth despite the fact I’m exactly where I want to be.

So I can see it being difficult to, as a father, find a job field that’s challenging and rewarding yet still place priority on the family and work just as hard at being an excellent lover/teacher/zerberter vice workaholic. And not getting killed.

Did that make sense? The jobs I want are not conducive to my ideal of a proper family environment. Is my future family then to be expected to put up with my long, unexpected absences? Am I to choose a job field that ensures we all get dragged into harm’s way but stay together? Or will I just ’settle down’ and feel like a caged lion? Or will I just ’settle down’ and have no regrets?

The hot Latino lover I was talking about before recently left work to pick up food for himself and another guy. The order had been written on a sticky note, which was then shoved into his pocket and subsequently retrieved upon ordering. As he pulled out the sticky note with its barely-there adhesive, he became aware that it still had had enough glue to grab a condom on the way out. So there he stood, in line, with a post-it note and a condom. Awkward…

I know, I know. You’re already sick of my incessant references to facts and figures about the world around us. I’m writing just to talk about another bit o’ news, so if you don’t like this, please stop reading. Now.

I mentioned culture differences earlier. If one felt compelled, I think some interesting comments would arise from other’s experiences in foreign cultures. ‘Frisco counts.

So here’s my confession: I subscribe to the RSS feeds of not only BBC news, but also (that’s my favorite correlative conjunction, just so you know) to the Al Jazeera English news feeds. Often their stories are similar. The other day there was an interesting twist: March 10th is one of two possible birth dates for Mr. Osama bin Laden and Al Jazeera had an article aboot how he would be living if he is alive. It’s great propaganda. I would encourage you to read it here: Al Ja Effing Zeera, beech.

And if that’s too offensive, you can just read about it here.

Before I forget, remind to kill my keyboard because it’s making me very angry. You don’t want to see me angry.

Now that I’ve got that off me chest, I will record my original thought as weakly foreshadowed in the title. I was asked in a conversation tonight why Iraq hasn’t been the ’success’ everyone wanted. One part of the problem is that we’re trying to sell our ideals, morals, precepts to people group who at best don’t want them and at worst fight against them. Do Iraqis really want democracy? I believe you’d be surprised at the heartfelt responses you’d get from asking them that question. To over simplify: Just ’cause [some of them] didn’t want Hussein doesn’t mean they want Bush.
The culture I really wanted to talk about is those crazy Frenchies. There is a deal between the French culture ministry and Abu Dhabi (the capital of the United Arab Emirates) to show Louvre art collections in a U.A.E-based museum. They will pay $524 million just to use the name, let alone for the art and French architect. And here’s where the French culture differs from the American- the French are pissed that there is money involved. They feel that it is unethical to charge money for art and that moving it to Abu Dhabi for a year or two at a time is too great a risk, esp. for the “unscientific” showing it will receive. Read about it here.
Can you imagine Americans mad at our government for making money off of another government?

Begin Life Lesson: If you have a beer, but no beer opener, never worry. There are multiple ways to open a beer. If you have a corked bottle of wine… make sure you have more than a electric drill and a multitool. End Life Lesson

So there aren’t that many things for me to talk about. Well, there are but only some that are pressing to be recorded for eternity. Let’s start with the Web 2.0. You’ll likely have noticed tags being used at sites like flickr, last.fm, youtube, wikipedia, etc. The basic idea is that for an object (song, photo, video), users associate a tag to it. Multiple tags are eventually placed by users. For example, a photo of a hairy ass could be tagged as: gross, hairy, body part, gluteus maximus, what_happens_at_the_carnival_stays_at_the_carnival, etc. Then what happens is that if a user is searching for gross pictures, this particular picture will come up in the search. The humans are teaching the machine.

So how does this apply to your life? It likely doesn’t. But, (and that’s a big but) if you’ve ever been using a music streaming service and were playing music similar to a certain band or a particular music genre, you may have noticed some discrepancies in the expected output. In my case, I was playing music similar to Ben Harper. Then this unwanted music infiltrates my speakers, and I start checkin’ why. Turns out he was tagged under ‘bands heard live’ which means that now there’s a chance any band tagged similarly could be included. So the web benefits from the collectivism of the whole tagging activity, but the individual suffers. Another term for tags would be ‘meta information’ which is what Windows products utilize.

On a different note, I had the absolute worst experience at Subway the other day. Longest wait, worst service, worst interactions, worst customer-in-front-of-me. The sandwich was pretty good, though.

Ok, maybe I should’ve waited longer before blogging. Not sure that edified anyone. But comment if you got the title.

i’ve been staying up late again- got to bed around 2 last night. got up in time to miss class. although the shower felt great. i’ve been doing that thing where one wakes up in the morning, does a quick review of planned activities, and is totally unexcited by any of them. before i get further into the depressive blather, let me speak on a subject that excites me:

Alirags.com! Our friend Ali has started a web site to promote her bag making business. She has some great designs and always adds those unique details that make each bag an investment slash heirloom instead of a gimmicky mass produced product. In short, her bags rock. Like basalt. And here’s my own promotional spin on the whole deal: If you buy a bag or get someone else to buy a bag from Ali, I will pay you 10 percent or 5 bucks for each bag- whichever is more. Just drop my name to Ali when ordering and I’ll get some money to you. So you could make some sweet cash this way if you got that smooth sales persona going on. Start your holiday shopping early this year.

I found two very interesting articles I would like to share with you. The first is by a black lady who has some very good reasons for disliking Black History Month. It’s very compelling. Read it here. The other is an article about the marriage of a jewish israeli and palestinian muslim. there are some profound statements to be found in this short news clip, especially from the female. Read it here.

Hope you enjoy those. Both more on the humanistic bent than technology. That that- that’s all folks.