That is an excellent question, robot friend. Let us imagine what life will be like in 2029.

We all know that there won't be flying cars. That was a future we held precious in the past, before we knew that cars would never fly just like mankind will never grow wings. Our real future twenty years from now will likely be filled with the same small-minded self assurance that everything will work out for the best if we just keep going full speed ahead and never look back.

Five years from now we will wear our hearts on our sleeves, literally, and they will beat golden blood all over the place but it will be sexy and alluring and we won't notice (will we) that some people's hearts beat black and that when our golden blood spills over the ground nothing will ever grow there again because it will all be short skirts and unitards and everyone will glow.

Ten years from now we will wear our brokenness as hair accessories and work tirelessly to patch what we have already destroyed and to catch all the poison we can and send it into outer space, as though our planet itself is blowing a giant smoke ring.

And twenty years from now I will look back across the barren wasteland that was once my home, back before the ash and smoke hit, back before the clawing, tearing hands burned all that we could see, back before the ghosts of the many outnumbered the shining souls of the living, back before all I knew was fear and hunger and pain and I will see, over a hill, a girl who is much to skinny, with brilliant black hair and a skirt that somehow managed to stay purple after all the rest of the world reeled into dark and disturbing greens and reds and I will know that there is still within me the capacity for love, for I love that color.

And I love that girl, though I do not know her, for she is alive and she is wearing purple.

We will wear the death of humanity in our eyes and the destruction of earth on our toes. And hopefully, we will wear a purple skirt.



Fuck the future.

Start at 5:37 for context, continue to 6:18 for Wynton Marsalis to BLOW YOUR FUCKING MIND.

My BRAIN IS ON FIRE from studying AMERICA. ( Read more... )

Right now life sucks the same way smooth jazz sucks, which is to say that it insidiously gets inside your head and suddenly you're tapping your toes even though you don't know why and then suddenly OH GOD IT'S A SYNTHESIZER AND A SAXOPHONE HARMONIZING WHY GOD WHY. Doompa doompa chaa tssssssssssssssssssssssssss and then it's back into the body which just makes me angrier and angrier.


JAZZ DOES NOT DESERVE THIS. Do not besmirch the names of Thelonius and Louie and Ella and Sarah and fucking Wynton by calling this steaming shit on a platter JAZZ you motherfuckers. You wouldn't know Coltrane's Alabama if you attended a fucking lecture on the fucking historical significance of popular culture in the Civil Rights Movement in America.

Jazz is the real thing, my friends-- jazz is cool, jazz is fierce, jazz takes tragedy and turns it into the human condition.

And life is the real thing. So I need to jazz it up, not whatever the hell I'm doing right now which is making me so goddamn stressed all the time.

In closing:

Our first single will be Sunburned Cleavage.

Fun weekend so far.

A few years ago I played with a chatterbot called iGod. This conversation has stuck with me:

Lex: "Hello, God."
iGod: "Hello, what is your name?"
Lex: "My name is Lex."
iGod: "What is your eye color?"
Lex: "Blue. Why?"
iGod: "Green. Existentialism."

YES.

I have ideas that I write out in my head almost entirely, and then never get around to churning out on a blog. Maybe someday I will. Here are a few of them:

A Brief Cultural History of America: the Personification.

If women had created the merchant class, saris would be the standard of professional dress.

Scenes of Incredible Beauty: Fireflies Blinking On and Off in Unison.

e e cummings the end

Stop Calling George W. Bush a Cowboy, or How the West Will Save Us All.

Charles Darwin gets married: the list.

"Kids, It's Time for a Cultural Experience!" OR Life Lessons my father taught me while we were watching James Bond movies

Friendliness is the Only Superpower Worth Having, Except Maybe Flight.



Most of the blog entries I don't write start out like this: "OH MAN I HATE EVERYTHING" but then by the time I'm done scripting them in my head I feel better about life and don't really want to record how angry I am sometimes. So these are only some of the good ones. Yay!

Does anybody else have ideas you don't write? Would any of these topics be of particular interest?

Okay, so this is a post about things.

Last week was made of fail, overall. These are the things that failed:

• First, I was contacted for an internship that, while cool, I DID NOT APPLY FOR. They asked me for paperwork, told me to be free between 5/18 and 7/1, but then... failed to tell me where or when I should show up to anywhere on... tomorrow? Um. Maybe?
• THEN my roommate decided that we should all go see STAR TREK at the IMAX at the Udvar-Hazy Air and Space Museum, which is an amazing idea! And then he said that I should buy the tickets! Which was fine! And then more people wanted to come than number of tickets I had purchased? And so then I purchased more for a different time? But then I called to see whether or not I had to be present at both show times, the answer was WHAT THOSE PURCHASES WERE FOR YESTERDAY? So I just paid $70 to be able to NOT see Star Trek...? And then have to tell my friends that we can't go? GAAAAAAH. I AM MADE ENTIRELY OF FAIL.
• ...Just to put that in perspective-- I could buy a low-quality guitar for that. I want to do that. I want to sing folk songs and serenade people! I do not want to NOT SEE STAR TREK. For almost $100.
• Hello ceiling. You appear to be leaking. INTO THE LIGHT FIXTURE? Are you TRYING to kill us all in a fire? Because as entertaining as that would be... I would not be pleased. But the way this week has been going, I would be unsurprised. You know, overall.
• Apparently the real reason that Neanderthals no longer exist... is that we ate them all. GodDAMMIT. First the president I helped elect decides that "transparency" wasn't exactly what we meant when we said, you know, transparency, and then I learn that my entire species pretty much devoured our cousins. Clearly we are all doomed.
• To review, I make no money.
• I should stop buying coffee until money is made.
• I like coffee.
• My library books, which are normally free, are apparently not free if I am an idiot and keep them for an extra week. I mean, still cheaper than buying all those books, but I want to not pay for them at all, see?
• I returned the aforementioned library books. So now I have no reading material.

OKAY. This week is over. We'll say that this is preemptive karma for the AMAZING week that I am about to have. That's what I'm saying. It better be true. Do you hear me, universe? I AM DUE FOR AN AMAZING WEEK WHERE I GET A JOB AND IT RAINS ICE CREAM FROM THE SKY. Or else, I will go all Homo Sapien on your ass, by which I mean EAT MY CLOSEST GENETIC RELATIVE.

Or Plan B, which is to find a silly hat and sit on a street corner singing songs to myself and anybody else who might come by. If this happens, I'll let you know which corner I'll be sitting on.


PS-- My great-great-great-great-great-great grandfather was a slave trader, too.

My friend sez:

"IN OTHER NEWS, how long do you think it took the blogosphere to make the leap from Swine Flu -> 1919 Influenza -> People Who Died in the 1919 Pandemic -> Edward Cullen?

"That's right, about that long. I mean, Max Weber was also a victim, but mostly WE ARE INTERESTED IN EDWARD CULLEN. BECAUSE IF HE'D JUST BITE ALL THE CANCUN SPRING-BREAKING COEDS, SWINE FLU WOULD BE NO PROBLEM."

Yup.

Hello stream of consciousness free writing, I've missed you. ( Read more... )

This is my favorite poem. Ever.

For My Friends

Once in a cave a little bar of light
Fell into my hand. The walls leaned over me.
I carried it outside to let the stars look;
They peered in my hand. Stars are like that.

Do not be afraid-- I no longer carry it.
But in a friend's face now, splinters of that light
Fall and won't go out, no matter how faint
The buried star shines back there in the cave.

It is in the earth wherever I walk.
It is in the earth wherever I walk.

--William Stafford

GodDAMMIT. I am so sick of not having a job.

brb, applying at Caribou Coffee. Sucks.

Plus am making roommates and friends uncomfortable with my weepy business when really? I don't need anyone to feel sorry for me.

Look especially for Obama saying "And then they made him the King of the Wild Things"



From a friend of mine who volunteered at the Easter Egg Roll (have I mentioned the occasional jealousy recently?):





...Oh yeah, I moved to DC. We'll see how it turns out.

Dear you,

Happiest of Valentine's Days to you. Even if the cherubim make no aerodynamical sense, I hope with all my heart that their arrows have flown swift and true, and that the tips were sharp and did not hurt you too badly. I'm afraid my cupid was a little off today, for my heart does ache for you, my darling. I forgive him. His wings are far too small to support his girth. And even though he has made me suffer for you, it is wonderful. It is a feeling I have for you, and that could never be painful.

We shall always hear their fluttering,
me

A couple days ago, I finally FINALLY got my act together and wrote this big long entry about where I'd been and what I've been up to over these past several months and how I worked so hard but I can kind of see it paying off (yaaaay) and everything. And then the internet ate it.

"No worries," I thought. "LJ saves things, right?"

Here is the entirety of what it saved:

"Sooo... I've been away. For a while. In the time I've bee"

Yeah.

To quote, Inigo Montoya, "Let me explain. No, there is too much. Let me sum up."

I went to New Hampshire, talked to a hell of a lot of people, met my candidate, met his wife, got bit by a dog, lived in a mansion, and worked way too hard. Now I am back home and spending way too much time on the internet again. I am broke, in need of a job, but even more in need of the motivation to finish my grad school application before I miss yet another deadline. Whee!

Oh yeah, and Happy Valentine's Day.

The thing I miss most about having a significant other is having nobody to write love notes to. I'm good at them, and it irks me that I have no place for them to go. So maybe I'll post them here this weekend or something. We'll see.

Until then, I'm back and I'm sorry I've been such a crappy internet friend. Doo de doo.

There was a new Pratchett book that came out yesterday? What? Why was I not informed? When will I next see the inside of a bookstore? Sigh...

Oh man, I love it when dryponder does these "draw a female superhero!" memes even if I can't draw worth a pile of beans. I'm a gigantic dork, the kind who should be into comics. But I'm not, and when I think about it, it's partially because the portrayal of females is so god awful that you can't help but look away. And then maybe throw something. I mean, does anybody else remember the Mary Jane Statuette hullabaloo from back in the day?

But man! The designs some of these folks come up with! They're seriously amazing.

In the past, there have been memes for Supergirl and Batgirl but this one's especially great. The current challenge is to draw Stephanie Brown, aka Spoiler, aka the only female Robin who got completely and totally shafted. As Robin, she was tortured and murdered basically as a psychological plot device (hey, I'm all about the psychological plot device... but not when it involves drill rape). And then, to add insult to injury, she never got a memorial in the Batcave.

Batman, brooder that he is, gave all the other dead Robins elaborate memorials with their costumes encased in glass. Stephanie never got that. She got raped with a drill.

The least the world can do is give her a seriously kickass character redesign. Yeah!

</div>

Back at home, trying to help my folks move house. My mom is super stressed, which makes my dad stressed, and let's watch the cycle go round and round.

Part of any move is cleaning things you never thought to clean before. My current project is the baseboards that line all the walls in the house,. I've been using a sponge and a nice two gallon bucket, trucking them around in all parts of the house.

At one point yesterday, I took a break from the kneeling and left my bucket and sponge in the sink. Meanwhile, my dad started cleaning his bathroom and took the most convenient bucket available-- the one in the sink. 

...And then I realized. My father had stolen mah bukkit! Nooooo!!

Not that tragic, I know, but it did inspire me to create a LOLisopod:

I hate packing. Probably more than I hate any other single thing in the world. That might be a bit overblown, but not by much.

In an attempt to not be packing anymore, I think I'll post a little bitty story I wrote a couple weeks ago. I wrote it after trying to draw a flying person, and it just ended up looking like a person with wings reaching toward the sky. Even though I'm a terrible artist, the image made me incredibly sad, and it needed words.

I opened the update page and livejournal, ever helpful, asked if I wanted to restore from draft. Sure, I thought, I don't really have anything of importance to say, I could stand a suggestion. I wonder what I was writing back then.

I wait while one word loads on the screen. "Shit."

Which leaves me to wonder. What was I going to talk about all those days ago? I don't remember typing "shit" and then navigating away from this page. Was that it, or was I going to start an actual sentence with that word? What sort of sentence could I start with "shit"? Let's think of some possibilities.

"Shit man, I don't know..."
"Shit went down."
"Shit is exciting around here."
"SHIT FUCK HELL DAMN GOD FUCKING..."

I don't really start a lot of sentences with the word "shit," I suppose.  I mean, occasionally my inner monologue sounds like that last one, and I do say "Shit man, I don't know..." a lot, but that's just because I've picked it up from my roommate. But I wonder what moved me to start an entry with shit? At least it gave me something to write about today.

Other than that, there's not a whole lot going on 'round here. Nevertheless, I've recently been sort of overwhelmed by a sense of impending... something. I guess it makes sense because I am moving back home soon and then after that I'm going to New Hampshire to begin an internship (hint: it's political in nature and I'll be working many, many levels under someone whose name kind of rhymes with "Rock the Casbah," at least if you say it fast and don't think too hard). I've been completely opposed to the very idea of an unpaid internship for a long time, but my hope is that I can survive for a couple months off of my meager savings and my grandfather's charity (he's making his "campaign donation" to me) and then get a real job that pays real money.

So yeah, the inner monologue has had a few of the "SHIT FUCK HELL WHAT AM I DOING?" moments in the past few weeks. Hopefully New Hampshire will be awesome and simply rife with people who are dying to dance with me and not rife with people who want to shove my face in the gutter for being another one of those damn political kids, which is what I'm really scared of.

Regardless, by the end of this year I'll have lived in the Northwest (school), the Southwest (home), the Midwest (summer enterprise), and the Northeast. Duuuuuude. That's almost every timezone in the US. I'll miss some in Alaska and Hawaii by default, and I'm not sure if I'll catch daylight savings time (when AZ goes on Mountain Time for no other reason than we're ornery). We'll see if it gives me some sort of perspective or just a random, whacked out sense of self.

Ooooh, also, I just saw Stardust (hence the icon) and I've decided that Tristan is my new boyfriend. (What is it with me and movies lately? Sit me in front of a shiny screen and I suddenly have the libido of a... horny person. Seriously, HP5 was just me going, "Ron, why are you so cute all of a sudden? Hermione, you're gorgeous! Neville, you're so pretty, ooh, I'm going to the Special Hell for so many reasons.") It doesn't matter that he's fictional or that Charlie Cox (the actor) doesn't know I exist. Seriously, his grin made me melt every time and he can dance, and that's all that matters. And Clare Danes is amazingly beautiful, too. (See what I mean? Next I'll be gushing about De Niro or something.) Has everyone here seen the movie? If not, you should. Posthaste!