Got No Direction

I'm happily sitting here with my glass of absinthe, playing solitaire on my computer and listening to my 1,788 favorite songs on iTunes through my headphones when this song comes on. I'd sing to it, buy my roommate is deathly tired and I have a terrible voice. Anyway, the song reminded me why I just can't accept the world as it is handed to me. Not that it's a bad place, just that it could be so much better. Rejection isn't cynical, at least it isn't inherently. The Tunisian and Egyptian protestors aren't pessimists. Well, they're pessimists in that they don't believe in the status quo. But they've rejected it and looked for something better. It's amazing why shit circumstances will bring you to do.

So, this is why I find more rebellion in Fats Domino than I do Motley Crue. Fats has more life and joy. Motley Crue is pure hedonism. Fine, but so is masturbation.

And, fuck it, I'm putting two spaces after my fucking sentences.

Enough!

I haven't experienced the 90+ degree days yet this summer, but it's been 80+ about 90% of the time.  I just don't like the heat.  I think my parents lied and I was actually born on the coldest day in January of 1974.  The best night's sleep I have have in a year is the night the heat breaks.  I sleep like a baby then.

Soon... so very soon.

Women With Women?

Hmmm... maybe the bible isn't so homophobic:

Ruth 1:15-18

15 Then she said, "Behold, your sister-in-law has gone back to her people and her gods; return after your sister-in-law."

16 But Ruth said, "Do not urge me to leave you or turn back from following you; for where you go, I will go, and where you lodge, I will lodge. Your people shall be my people, and your God, my God.

17 "Where you die, I will die, and there I will be buried. Thus may the LORD do to me, and worse, if anything but death parts you and me."

18 When she saw that she was determined to go with her, she said no more to her.

Life As It Is

It's kind of nice to finally use my laptop for the excuse I bought it for. Speaking of, is anyone looking for a kick-ass laptop? Anyway...

In the "What the Fuck!?! Oh yeah, it's just Pat", I finished the original Degrassi series. Yeah, it's hokie, but the characters were the same age that I was at the time. The look of things was familiar with lots of big hair and mullets. The only difference was instead of saying "ruht" and "fir", they said "aboot". The complete series of Daria arrived this last week, so I'll dig through that to pass time and remember why I hate humanity, mostly because I can relate to a cartoon than most people. On a more respectable note, I ordered the Modern Lovers album and Meat Puppets II on vinyl.

Louie has ennui and a black beard. He could have an impacted digestive system or maybe I need to get a new UV light. I'll take him into the vet this week. If I get the same vet as when I took Leopold in, she'll think I'm a terrible owner. Aaagghhh!

I'm tired, I'll post more tomorrow.

Muddling of the Titans

I caught the new "Clash of the Titans" film this weekend.  What a turd.  Here's what I liked and didn't.

What I Liked

Io:  Perseus had a fairy godmother of sorts.  She was cursed with agelessness when she refused the advances of a god. I guess she was kind of like Bubo, but a lot hotter.  She added a little bit of depth to a thin movie.  Being a turd, the movie didn't reveal who sent her, so I'm guessing Zeus.

Mads Mikkelsen:  He played the leader of the guards that set out with Perseus to find Medusa.  His character was one-dimensional by the script, but Mikkelsen was able to convey a jaded, yet dedicated soldier looking for something worth fighting for.

Medusa:  They made Medusa more menacing than in the original.  She was a woman twice wronged who took her frustration out on everyone.  She would giggle to taunt and her face was her birth one until she turned a man to stone.  The only thing I didn't like is that she went after Perseus like a woman possessed.  She's a stone cold killer, so that didn't work.

What I Wanted to Like, but Didn't

Polly Walker:  Polly Walker proved in Rome that beauty is more how you carry yourself than looking picture-perfect.  I admit it, I have a boner for her.  Unfortunately, she didn't have anything to work with.  If you took Junior to the bathroom near the beginning of the film, you would have missed her whole  performance.  Mikkelsen at least had a few scenes, but Walker was allowed to pontificate on man not needing gods for about 20 seconds before Hades turned her into an old woman.

The Special Effects:  I did like the looks of most of the special effects.  They didn't kill everything like in Star Wars or look a Happy Painter painting like Lord of the Rings.  Still, Ray Harryhausen's effects had a bit more elegance to them.

What I Hated

 Where to start?

Sam Worthington: How he gets all of these rolls is beyond me.  The guy makes Kate Beckinsale seem like Judy Garland.  He went through the movie with a "Kick Me" sign on his back and his costars seemed to be laughing at him, but the "Deus ex Machina" of the script made everyone help him anyway.  Parsley is more compelling than this guy.

Revenge Instead of Love:  Perseus's family gets killed by Hades for being in the wrong place at the wrong time.  His motivation is thus revenge versus love.  Not very true to Greek Mythology and a much less compelling reason to cheer for Robo-Douche as he fumbles around.

Argos:  Ok, so I'm being OCD here, but how does a city survive surrounded by unscalable mountains and a small harbor?  Not one inch of arable land.

Hippie Jesus Freak:  The movie had an anti-religion edge, which was fine by me, but to express it the director created a tripping (from organic mushrooms no doubt) hippie with rat-nest hair.  He warned all of the townsfolk to pray to the gods for forgiveness and drug Andromeda onto the platform to be sacrificed to the Kraken.  Nope, no dignity in her sacrifice.  I think I've seen this guy on Willy Street.

The Ending:  When Perseus finally arrives on Pegasus to turn the Kraken to stone, I met it with a yawn.  Ok, creature dead, douchebag is a reluctant hero (versus heroism as its own goal in mythology) who doesn't even get Andromeda.

The Very Ending:  So to make sure everyone knows that Perseus is, um, straight, Zeus revives Io for him to enjoy.  And give the prospect of a sequel.

Say what you will about Steven Sommers, but he has a bit of joy in his junk.

One Into the Other

Sometimes I think and Cynic is nothing but a broken hearted romantic.

New Picture

I put up a new picture because I still miss Melvyn, even seven and half years later.

Wither Obama

I never did believe the overarching "Change" hype of the Obama campaign. By record, he was fairly cautious and moderate, which is what attracted me to him. After the recklessness of the Bush years and the closing of the American Era (1945-2008), I thought he'd be a good person to get the nation to take a deep breath and reassess what we were doing.

I was wrong, so let the buyer's remorse set in.

I do acknowledge that he inherited a terrible situation, one that will take time to fix. Yet the state of the economy isn't the source of my disappointment, but his solutions are. The stimulus was a waste of money that cost over $300,000 per supposed job saved. The cash for clunkers was useless and providing a huge tax break to buy houses when the real problem is that there are too many houses and too much debt. Fighting the crash of a bubble by trying to inflate another one was a main cause of the crash in the first place.

I've also changed my view of some things in the last few months. I think we can only make the problems in Iraq and Afghanistan worse just by our presence. I thought maybe we could do some good in Afghanistan, but my mind has been changed by this book. We've done the damage and we're not the solution. Even if I believed we had the best of intentions, and I don't believe we did, the road to hell is paved with them.

He's not all to blame as we have a joke of a Congress and too many people dreaming up death panels and the like, but I refuse to choose between Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum.

With that note, I do appreciate the more dialogue driven foreign policy of late and I do admire his biography. But the problem is 70,000 soldiers in Germany 64 years after the end of World War II, trillion-dollar deficits funding nothing useful, and a rotting infrastructure both tangible and not. And that's only part of it.

We'll be forced to deal with all of this, but I'd rather do it now before my country is bankrupt fiscally and morally.

Wither all of it.

Up Next

So I've.... AAAAHHHHHHHHHHH "Love Me Do" popped up on my iTunes. I can't say I like the Beatles, but it's even worse as it is done by the Brady Bunch. Karma is a bitch. Anyway I'm in a new mode for Winter: cooking and exercising. I need to eat better. Actually, I don't, but I want to, so I'll finally learn to really cook. It's going.... sort of. I also need to start training for the rugby tournament next June. Um, there.

Under the Virtual Radar

So I deleted all of my legitimate and dummy Twitter, Facebook, etc. accounts.

Now I'm just a virtual apparition on the internet, so I guess that means I'm real. Sorry, I have no use for collective noise.

Happy 10th Fight Club

10 already:

Counting Down

Not much is going on today, which isn't a bad thing as I was overly busy before. I'm just waiting for the end of the day so I can go to Toronto and play rugby.

Simple wish, really.

Stagnation?

The last six months have been ecstasy for my muddle mind. I've gained a clarity where the world is not longer intimidating and my anxiety doesn't shut me down. I'm busy with playing rugby, volunteering at WORT, learning to cook, and planning to find a cheap flight to Amsterdam in February. Yes, Amsterdam is cold in February but a downright Caribbean heatwave compared to here.

Which reminds me a my favorite quote: "If you ever feel a sense of great of contentment, don't fret; it will pass." I don't know where it comes from, but it fits. I'm 35, so I'm creeping towards middle-age. Would I be happy married with kids? Sure. Would I be happy married without kids? Maybe. Would I be happy not being married? I don't know. Right now I'm perfectly happy on my own but the last five years have flown by, so whose to say the next five won't.

I definitely won't do anything for the hell of it, but sitting around my my thumb up my butt would make the choice for me. God knows I won't be a middle-age white guy sitting in front of his tv in the suburbs, watching the latest crap fest. But will I be happy by myself?

I don't know.

Sixty-Four Years

Sixty-four years ago, my country unleashed a new weapon upon Hiroshima. This was in addition to the fire bombing of Japan that the army had carried forth. There's a reason that all Japanese cities are made of new buildings. The fire bombing caused more carnage and disaster than the two hydrogen bombs did.

The difference is that the development of nuclear weapons changed the nature of what Theodore Roosevelt called "the big stick". With North Korea, Iran, Pakistan, Burma, and India all getting or developing nuclear weapons and many more having large stock piles, the world has an uneasy truce.

So I hope what Obama and the Hiroshima mayor wants, does happen.

Facebook Stalking

So I've had some weird dreams lately full of people I've known from my past. It got me to thinking what I could have done if I wasn't consumed with anxiety while growing up.

Enter Facebook Stalking.

Although I'm not openly on Facebook, I created a profile for just these occasions. So I looked the pictures off all of those people from my past and realized that my life has ended up ok as I'm not 400 pounds, putting Sears Photo Studio pictures of my kids online, and generally looking like I'm waiting around until my kids graduate so I can get back to my life in the suburbs.

Yes, Virginia, there are fates worse than death.

The 5th Wheel

I was a bit extraneous tonight. That shit gets old

You Fail!

So I'm supposed to be doing my project for class. It's due Monday and the professor said two months ago "If you haven't started it, get going." Not that it's that hard, I just don't care. The only ramification to me is if I wanted to keep going, I'd have an "F". And I'd be a bit disappointed in myself. Then again, with all of the anxiety and obsessive/compulsive thoughts at bay, I kind of don't care. This could be one of those decisions that bites me in the ass later on. I can afford that as I have very few of those. I even took high school seriously when I was there. Then again, that got me into Macalester.

Someday, I have to make it to Tórshavn. Just do.

Speaking of, I am going to make it to Saint Louis early this summer to catch the botanical gardens. Plus Saint Louis is a fun town. Extended weekend, me thinks.


Rifftrax is amazing!

I am taking time off from school this summer, maybe never to return. I'm not that challenged by it and I want to catch up on personal projects. Projects such as reading the stack of books that I've accumulated, making that damn website of articles that I like, family history, etc., and just enjoying the summer. To be honest, I like winter the best, but with rugby I have a much better reason to like Summer more.

I'm tinkering the idea of going to Disneyland this January. When I visited Michael and Shari in January 2000, I really had a blast with them and Adam going through the mostly empty park. And if I can get a good group of friends together, it would be a blast even if we were camping at Chernobyl.

I'm half-thinking of joining the Republican Party to cause trouble from the inside. Why preach to the converted?

Ah, that's all I have to say, but it's more than I've said on here in a while.

P.S. I think I may have broken a rib. Still playing this weekend, though.

P.P.S or P.S.S. Um, I forgot.

As It Is

It's about time I actually wrote something so when I'm old and gray I can read this and wonder what I was thinking. So...

Rugby is starting up. Not practices, but the board is meeting more often and I'm doing the whole Monkey Bar training so I can hit the ground running when practice starts. We have a few things to work on, mainly recruitment but we have some good ideas. My rugby goal this year is NOT to break a bone.

Work is fine. I'm plenty busy and we're still open despite the beautiful economic crisis. Then again commercial construction has dropped badly yet. That will probably change.

I started up my MBA again. This semester I'm taking Corporate Finance and it's been pretty good. I chose Autodesk from the professor's list mostly because I used AutoCAD at work. I think it'll be good but now have tuition payments again.

Um, not much else is new. I've been nostalgic for the 90's, so I put together a mix. You can find it here. When I have a little more time, I'll make some artwork for it. I have it all put together in my head so it shouldn't take me long.

That's as it is.

My Life

This is very much how I see the world, or at least my world:

We Finally Win One

The fifth presidential election of my voting life proved to be the charm. Granted, the first three votes I cast were never going to win (Paul Tsongas, my brother-in-law, Ralph Nader) but I was sure that the Shrub's mistakes would cost him the 2004 election. Unfortunately John Kerry had to be an überweiner and run a lousy campaign. That one really stung.

So it was with a jaded eye that I went to the Majestic (the old vaudeville theater) in downtown Madison to watch the election returns with like-minded citizens. They projected MSNBC onto a large screen and when my roommate, his girlfriend, another friend, his girlfriend, and I arrived, the anchors were pretty much just chattering as only a handful of states were called. We took our position near the back, got some drinks, and waited. Not many people were there, but slowly the crowd filled in.

As usual, we engaged in our sarcastic jokes and and whitless banter.

Then more results came in: Kentucky, New Jersey, Delaware. None of those were surprises. The surprise was the how close both Virginia and North Carolina were. I never suspected that North Carolina would ever go blue this election and of this writing it is still up in the air. Yet my roommate was sweating just the same. I knew how this election was going to end, but I couldn't quite sense it given the last few years.

Then Michigan went blue and the growing crowd cheered loudly at the news. While I was in line for a second round, the engineer brought down the music that was playing during the commercial break and put up the broadcast volume. The crowd went silent knowing that's when the talking heads called states. A face came on the screen and said "We have another state went for Obama ... Ohio. The dead silent crowd erupted. No Republican has ever been elected president without taking Ohio and its 20 electoral votes. That was the clincher for Obama and the death knell for McCain. Still, my lingering doubt was still napping on the sofa.

An hour later, when the West Coast polls closed, they called some state, maybe Colorado, for Obama, and then obligingly covered California in blue. We had elected Obama the 44th president of the United States. None of us in my group could quite believe it, even though the result was pretty clear for the past couple of weeks. The crowd went crazy and the cheer didn't die down for another half hour when McCain walked out to give his concession speech.

About half the crowd started booing. I yelled "SHUT UP!" as loudly as I could. The election was over. Even Grant let the soldiers of the Army of North Virginia keep their rifles, swords and horses after four bitter years of fighting. Now was the time to bury the hatchet and appreciate that democracy had worked once again. McCain gave a beautiful speech that made all of us recall the McCain of 2000 that each of us would have voted for had he made it out of the primaries. He was gracious and uplifting. It gave the feeling that maybe the old McCain would return as an elder statesman in the Senate, one that would be blessed to have him.

We waited a while for Obama to get to Grant Park for his victory speech. The screen showed images from around the country. One black woman was curled up in the fetal position crying, not believing the country whose Constitution once would have counted her as three-fifths of a person would elect an African-American as President. There were lots of cheering faces of all colors. The one that struck me the most was of a crying Jesse Jackson. Here is a man who marched with Martin Luther King Jr. for civil rights in 60's watching all he worked for bear fruit.

Barrack Obama's speech is one for the annals of the United States. He said all of the right things and he said them with sincerity. For the first time in my life, I not just felt, but actually sensed that the country was moving forward. I'm no idealist nor am I prone to fanciful thinking. I’m an optimist by nature, realist by nurture and pessimist by experience. It’s just feels like the world is new, like Christmas day when I was a kid. The anticipation is gone and the presents are open so I can just enjoy. I’m giving myself a couple of days of that before I let the reality back in.

Now if only that fucking Proposition 8 had gone down in flames....

Oh, sorry. Old habits die hard, if at all.