Winter Break

You fuckers thought I wasn't going to post anything now that everyone is back in town, didn't you!
How wrong you will soon be. Observe the following transcriptions of my descent to madnesstown, population me, as I laid on a futon in my grandmothers house.

Hints From Heloise Kitty

How many people have killed themselves with a gun in horror after realizing they purchased a "magic bullet" blender from walmart?

When bedtime is at 9oclock, you save a lot of time. You putter about, drawing out the lastness of the day (this is a holiday, after all). At ten, you close the book/computer/mario game/bag of candy. By eleven, you've relived your top ten most horrifyingly petrifingly obscenely agonizing moments of unpleasantness over again in your head; assured yourself you've been cured of that now. By twelve, you could even be asleep.
Considering I used to work exclusively under the rule that no creative homework could be done before ten, I'm saving multiple hours off the day!
Get the sleep madness at 1, become cured by 2, and still get 7 full hours of sleep by 9 in the morning!
The downside, of course, is a 12 hour day.
One must, I admit, cut a few kitty-cat corners to make room for all one's doings, but one just may find that with a small amount of effort and common sense everything will slot into place. Right, One? For example: Now, I combine activities! I brush my teeth in the shower! I read the newspaper on the crapper! I systematically plot the elaborate untraceable murders of everyone I meet While eating my cheerios! I wave at the neighbors and rake my leaves as I imagine BLOOD BLOOD BLOOD BLOOD - just see how quick and simply and ordered my life is thanks to my new method!

The True Story of the Ugly Duckling Who Was An Asshole To Everyone*

This is what happens when you visit your past
thank you grandma no I am just stuffed no more ham thanks

I read a book many years ago called Artemis Fowl.
I read all four, there were only four when I was young and pluto was still a planet. The iPod was nonexistant and everyone played Snake on their Nokia phones.
In it, or one of them (the books) Artemis the Boy Genius is asked by his Psychiatrist if there is anyone he respects; looks up to.
He goes "Oh Sure, Einstein, Aristotle, the intellectual greats, etc."
"Anybody in your life? Anybody in this time period who you know personally?"
No, obviously.
I'm not sure what my young mind thought about that at the time, but what my 19 year old mind is thinking about is SEX SEX SEX SEX SEX SEX SEX SEX SEX SEX and what my answer would be to that question. The answer that springs to mind is No, nobody I can think of.
What a terrible thing.
I may admire, respect, possibly envy or at least like some people I know, and most surely historical figures. Walt Whitman had a fantastic beard. Che wore a beret, and he was hispanic! I even extend these feelings to fictional characters.
But what this boils down to is who do you turn to, who do you trust enough to talk with about your life?
Who do you go to when you need advice or guidance?
I am pulling a blank and that is a shit life lesson.

*He grows up to be the Ugly Duck who is an asshole to everyone**
**Or he grows up to be the Ugly Duck who is super nice to everyone, but it doesn't matter beacuse A. he's ugly and B. he was such an asshole
Keyboard. Darkness. Muscle Memory.

I write by light of cellphone, too lazy to reach up towards anything better.

You're as sexy as the sound of someone eating a potato chip.
A single crunch echoing inside sealed lips.
Unbearable.

My cellphone died. Well, it's battery has.
So goes all of my black angular shapes.
My wallet does not die, but merely wastes away.
My laptop has grown fat and complacent after a year of being tethered to the power.
My new hard drive will be silver. Black is the color of mourning.

I may be a reverse masochist. Or rather, a 90 degree masochist.
I only engage in pleasurable things that ultimately cause pain.
These sour li hing mui gummy apples are delicious, but I'm starting to think I can taste blood.
Why am I grinning?
I'm imagining baring my reddened, stained teeth at schoolchildren on career day.
Don't think too much on an empty stomach, They'll warn them, Or this just might be happen to you too!

I'm working on a really stellar pun.
Something about how doctors used to think they could cure patients by bleeding them, and then connecting that to this as a theraputic exercise and how my ink "bleeds" and how maybe I should write in blood. Who's blood?
My grandmother has a special surgical bleeder from the hospital 100 years ago. It is sharp and rusty. It was designed to cause a painless(ish) heavily bleeding wound. It is a little spring loaded blade.
Don't use your brain too much or you might grow up to be one, kiddos.

Assalamu Alaykum wa Rahmatullahi wa Barakatu

Naomi Shibah Nye, a Palestinian/American poet said that one night after giving a reading of her poems, a quite visibly upset woman came up and said Nye’s poem “The Art of Disappearing” was the worst poem she had ever heard and that Naomi should never read it to people again. A few years later, Bill Moyers, the television journalist, said that very poem had saved his life.

The Art of Disappearing
When they say Don't I know you? say no.
When they invite you to the party
remember what parties are like
before answering.
Someone telling you in a loud voice
they once wrote a poem.
Greasy sausage balls on a paper plate.
Then reply.
If they say we should get together.
say why? It's not that you don't love them any more.
You're trying to remember something
too important to forget.
Trees.
The monastery bell at twilight.
Tell them you have a new project.
It will never be finished. When someone recognizes you in a grocery store
nod briefly and become a cabbage.
When someone you haven't seen in ten years
appears at the door,
don't start singing him all your new songs.
You will never catch up.
Walk around feeling like a leaf. Know you could tumble any second. Then decide what to do with your time.

- By Naomi Shihab Nye


Oh, and this is one of the most perfectly syncing, simplistic, overall correct mashups I've ever heard.

Hot Off The Udder

Hot off the press at the food court of Queen Ka'ahumanu Shopping Center. From my gothic perch each weekday I hastily shovel greasy food down my insatiable maw, peering down at the passerby, waiting for the proper time to unleash my vengeance.

While I pass the time for that sweet vengeance upon those who would decry me as a "monster", I write with this fabulous new "Sharpie Pen" I got.

A transcription of this exciting "Real Life Blog" (Did you forget that Blog is a contraction of "Web Log"? I bet you did forget. I bet you had no idea. You should be ashamed.) is included below:

I forgot that Wednesday 1:30 English class was canceled, so I took my afternoon lunch constitutional an hour and a half early.
The long and short of it was I spent three hours in Mall Borders. The holiday music they rotate trhough has a pattern. Some of it is universal: Alvin and the Chipmunks, The Beach Boys, generic christmas songs...
These are bearable.
What is unbearable is the heartfelt, local, genuine holiday-themed music they pipe into our brains a good 80% of the time. I had to leave after three hours not because my head was awash with letters and words and a million stories, but because I was so appalled at....well, everything.
I bought this enchilada plate so I wouldn't be that brooding kid who sits in the mall with a notepad. Also because I had chinese food Monday and fish and chips Tuesday and I had the burrito (the other of the two items I buy from Maui Tacos) last week.
They are delicious, when I remember to eat them.
Walking out of a bookstore after 3 hours into a MALL is the culture shock equivalent of Plato's Allegory of the Batcave. I was in a daze, moving mechanically.
I always get a plastic knife, a plastic fork, and two napkins when I order my Special #2 Steak Enchilada Plate W/ Drink (Either root beer or sprite. Sprite, being clear, has a placebo effect.)
I never use the knife.
And I partition my chips with savage order.
I don't normally write with a pen and paper. This had to happen. You spend long enough in a place of words and stories and they worm their way into your head. I had to write something down, or go for the Mall Santa's jugular.
I'm considering doing both.
The Mall is a terrible place to be during the Holiday Season, which is a nice way of the suggesting all the fun of winter without any of the snow.
But, it's the only place that does lunch after 1:30, and my days are long.
Headphones dont work, for a number of reasons.
One, I come down here to read. To sit down in the childrens section and look attractive while surrounded by books about dragons. Can't read while listening to music, because I listen to music with 100% of my brain.
Secondly, It wouldn't make a difference. Once you've heard the melodies at least once, even the slightest hint of them makes your brain boil.
It's the same with snoring partners.
I've sat in Border's daily for the past two months.
Mall Santa takes his lunch break same time I do.
I guess I was hungry after all.

While I have your attention, Janet Jackson everybody! Who doesn't like driven hip hop dance music ending the '08 season, especially when it's accompanied by sexy robot dancers on tiny planetoids and weird...milk...volcanoes? Also the hook for this song is one of the best Janet has ever cranked out. Say what you want.

P.S. I now have a big mirror in my room which means whenever I'm bored I can just go look at myself. When was the last time you took at good hard look at yourself in the middle of the day? Not when your brain was expecting it, like in the bathroom in the morning. Do it when you least expect it.
The reason this came to mind because I just stared at my own handwriting on my monitor for ten minutes. God, I love my handwriting. Look at those lowercase g's. Look at that 80% symbol.

太平普度皇靈中天至聖仁義古佛玉皇大天尊

Having been lulled into a false sense of security by those Bahá'í folk, I immediately planned my final foray out into the wilderness. Oh, and it had to be Eastern, and since our resident Lama was off island I couldn’t just traipse down to the Dharma Center. Oh no, it was hard Japanese Buddhism for me.
Which piqued my curiosity. What exactly did Buddhists do when they gathered Sunday morning? What was there to do? So, for the first time, I did a little research before blindly crashing through the church’s skylight (batman style), grabbing the pastor’s shirt in two fists, and gruffly demanding information (again, batman style). This was to prove to be a smart move on my part.
The Makawao Hongwanji Mission is actually the Hongan-ji temple, which falls under the Jōdo Shinshū school, which falls under the Pure Land branch of Mahayana Buddhism, which is in fact the most widely practiced Buddhism in Japan and a devotional religion.
I had never gone into the building itself, which is surprising considering I passed it daily for several years. I’ve always been off-island when the Bon-Odori happens, and the legendary rummage sales occur before the sun is up (so they might as well happen on Mars). We pulled in to the parking lot and instantly realized we were, in fact, “in for it”. My mother and I assumed our polite-and-respectful-yet-alert faces and barely remembered to bow in time after we crossed the threshold. Completely unsure of ourselves in every way, we quickly crossed and sat in the back section of the pews.
The altar in front of us was very, very gold. It was fabulous, it took up a fourth of the entire building, floor to ceiling. “Don’t leave anything up to chance,” the builders had said, “Make it extraordinarily clear that whoever gets the good fortune to look at this thing knows exactly what it’s for”. There were hanging things, and ornately carved things, and candles, and incense, and anything that wasn’t gold was red or bronze or wood and it wasn’t garish or tacky at all. I was both impressed and very aware that I was out of my natural habitat. This awareness was immediately doubled when I realized I was A. The only white person and B. The only person under 20, out of a good 40+ people.
The ratio of Old Japanese Ladies to Anyone Else was honestly about 10:1. They all had ornate sashes around their necks with stiff creases suggesting they stayed tightly folded in a drawer the rest of the week, and they were all talking quietly among themselves. My mother and I were just about to crack when we discovered our first mistake. A kindly old lady notified us we had failed to sign the guest book, and if we could just write down our names and our addresses and our phone numbers please, we could begin.
Then we realized everyone else was digging around their massive purses and pulling out important looking books. I had to shamble back and ask for two spares, which they were happily lending out. Thus laden with two marks of shame, we rose from our seats as a young man in robes took his position on the altar and hit a gong. I listened with half an ear as yet another old lady at the front spoke about what pages we were to bookmark for today’s sermon. The books turned out to be Buddhist chant hymnals, and we were to turn to page 192, and incidentally there were two newcomers among us, wouldn’t they please stand up now, Griffin Weston and aaaargggh aaaarrgh arrgh the embarrassment was stupefying. A girl walked up and presented us both with woven ribbon versions of the embroidered sashes everyone was wearing (which crossed the language barrier effortlessly, identifying us clearly at “white belt” level Buddhism)

And so, the service began. Jōdo Shinshū Buddhists are devotional to Amitābha Buddha, and they praise him with a nembutsu chant. It was a songbook, a hymnal, but why there were musical notes I cannot say, because they were all the same. The rock band of Hope Chapel doesn’t begin to approach the level of dozens of old ladies chanting Namu Amida Butsu repeatedly. My voice was distinctly out of place, and not just because I’m not a natural chanter. This was,(very politely and with no bad feelings, of course) not my world. The only strong voice in the house was the young man leading us.
After a few more chants focusing on the meat of Buddhism (work really really hard to be as compassionate and benevolent and charitable as possible), he rose to speak. And it was strikingly similar to all the other sermons going on around the world. He spoke (earnestly, in a heavy HEAVY Japanese accent) of the difficulty of really living out the tenants we just outlined. How hard it was to really be benevolent, how even a nice word or a charitable act was important. As he spoke of donations, a queue formed up the aisles. Everyone had a plain white envelope covered in their hand. My mother and I scrambled to locate one and stuff it with polite money. I was the last in the line, towering over these hunched women. Some were bent near double, but they approached the altar, somehow managed to bow, toss a pinch of something from a bowl into another bowl oh god is that incense is that what I should do why is there no instructive poster on the wall telling me actually there probably is but it’s in Japanese damn damn damn and then, suddenly, it was my turn. I remembered at the last second to bow, placed my offering in the bowl, and looked up at the altar. It was even more gold close up. I didn’t dare try anything with the bowl of incense.
Safe back in my seat, I listened to the young man pause in the middle of talking about how these donations would go towards a general catastrophe relief fund. “Isn’t that just a wonderful thing? How nice it is, to know that we help!”, he exclaimed. It was such a genuine smile I felt myself smiling too.
He closed with a lovely allusion to a special wind that blows in Japan around this time, and drew poetical reference to the literal meaning of the words, and how they wake flowers up and tell them it’s time to grow. It was all very nicely said, and if I had taken notes I would be able to do it justice but I feel quite definitively that if I had dared take notes I would have spontaneously combusted out of chagrin.
The spokeswoman then declared refreshments were available outside, and did anyone have anything else to say? I looked quizzically around, expecting someone to run up and give Sermoning a go. Instead, an old lady behind me dug out a 409 spray bottle from her purse and proceeded to calmly describe how you can make your own bleach solution once you run out, and what you can sanitize with such a mixture. Another one told people that it was somebody else’s birthday.
I returned the prayer books, half shook hands and half bowed at the earnest young man, and remembered to turn and bow again a split second before I crossed the threshold. All this in less than an hour. A man caught us outside the door to remind my mother that the annual garage sale was in fact now bi-annual, and was tomorrow. We thanked him again, and drove home.
As comically as I treated my experience at the Honganji, it made me think just as hard as my previous events. The most prevalent feeling I came away with was a greater understanding of why you asked us to attend at least one Western and one Eastern religion. The differences are so great, so apparent, you have to see for yourself. The division of the sects of Buddhism also gave me pause. Can there be a faith-based Buddhist religion? Apparently yes, and the overall ideas were still the same: It’s nice to be nice. And they were nice. At no point was I given a frosty glare or a look of disapproving tolerance. And I’m really good at getting those looks from old ladies. Instead, I got a ribbon lei and some refreshments.

Everybody Move To The Back Of The Bus

WoW gone.
Account hacked, or retrieved, or stolen.
Irrevocably gone, impossible to get back.
That's...4 lvl 70's, including a freshly-ground deathknight. Oh, and 12,000 gold. Full banks on everyone.
To those of you who do play WoW, you know. To those who don't, you don't know.
Oh, and I owe Bank of America 40 dollars for overdraft fees. Thanks Paypal!

As of 8:15 PM this Tuesday, I officially Don't Give A Shit About Anything.
So here's some 10 year old Outkast. Check out them space-futuristic type thangs.

Kalakka lakka lakka pulakka lakka lakka lakka lakkalakka.....

Update: I would appreciate it if the world would stop shitting all over me. Anytime you're ready to call it quits, World.

- My toaster oven, after turning into a fireball of greasy potato rage and subsequently being thrown out the god damn door and doused with baking powder. Go fuck yourself. Those things would have been delicious. It was a bitch to clean.

Weekend Update: Once we, you know, actually start being a Cool Country again, I'd just like to declare that I'm totally for a mandatory service period in the military.
Does that sound retarded? It sounded retarded to me.
Then I looked at these pictures.
Israel has a mandatory military service of 2 years. Once you're out of school at 18, you're in the military until you're 20. Every single person.
That's the cool part of mandatory service. Everybody. It's just another two years of high school, only with guns. Nothing is bad if everybody has to go through it together.
Then you can go do whatever you want.
But should the shit actually hit the fan, and I don't mean "We need to go invade somebody" I mean "Uh guys there is like a real life war going on we are going to die"....at least you know some shit to stay alive. It seems like a good all around thing.
Of course it would never ever ever work in America. We're just too god. damned. stupid.

Edit 3: Hey guys I'm sorry I realized I only put one piece of music in this post that is far from adequate.



If any of you (three) can find out the horn sample for this that starts at 1:42, I swear to La Ilaha Illa Allah I'll give you a million billion dollars.

THOOMP THOOMP THOOMP

At 11:34 at night when you have a splitting headache and a major take-home test for Religion 150 due at the stroke of midnight, please remember the following:
The proper medication for a headache is typically some generic analgesic. These include aspirin, NSAIDs like ibuprofen, or acetaminophen.
Notice that the list does not include Putting Your Headphones At Full Volume To Drive The Demons Out.
This method does not work. I repeat, this method does not work, especially when your headphones are capable of going to eleven.
This especially does not work when you pick a single song and declare For The Next Three Hours I Shall Listen Exclusively To Remixes Of This Theme.
However, since I know you are all sciency types who prefer to obtain empirical evidence by yourself, the next time you have a headache....

DON'T DO THIS

OR THIS

(P.S. Earlier today, as I caught the bus back home, my gazing into the depths of my immortal soul out the window was interrupted by half a dozen new passengers boarding. The minute they got on I could tell they were special. For a start, they were all a few years older than me. Three girls, three boys, gorgeously rugged yet fashionable all of them. No two seats were empty next to each other so they claimed various side outlets and formed a rough U shape. One of the girls took residence up next to me and plugged herself into her iPod. I observed her via reflection of the window.* The boys took out folded newspapers and began to read.
Then one of them shouted to the other, total wild excitement and disregard for Bus Propriety of Noise Regulations. It was so pretty I blinked and took my headphones off.
Oh they spoke Portuguese Oh they were Brazilian Oh they were beautiful people.
It was like when the main character of a fantasy novel first encounters Elves, the tall beautiful alien kind that have that sort of unobtainable perfection that just makes you vaguely ashamed and elated at the same time.
Portuguese is now my all time favorite language. Fuck French. I've studied French for five years and it is actually fairly okay, I mean, I still like it. The ladies, you know, they love me didn't do shit all. You want to be knee deep in bitches, learn Portuguese. (Knee-deep is a term of volume, not depth. Along the lines of "waist deep", not "balls deep". Keep this in mind when converting to metric, Euro readers.)
Then they left and with them went the oxygen and optimism of the bus. Sure was neat.
Oh, but then a new girl in a stripy shirt got on in Pukalani! Sure, she spent the entire ride looking at her reflection and touching up her lip gloss in the window, but I mean....I do that too. I just plain love mirrors.

[*Footnote! Speaking of viewing people from afar, two more things just sprang to mind!
1. A friend of mine kindly gave me this law, which is now my personal motto: Gregory Benford's Law of Controversy: Passion is inversely proportional to the amount of real information available. Isn't that just the shit truth?
2. What do I love the most in this world I will give you three guesses it is MYSELF I love myself. Which means that in my current situation I find myself loving the private investigator character on House more and more.

Bahá'í The Way (Or, Oh Bahá'í Guyz)

Research Report #1 Griffin Weston
Sunday Meeting at Bahai Faith Center, Makawao.

Still reeling from the Hope Chapel thunder, I allowed several Sundays to pass lazily by until my mother showed me a calendar of remaining weeks left, thus putting the fear of Religion (150) back in my heart. After warily eying the long list of churches downtown, I randomly selected the Bahá'í Faith. They held regular Sunday services in Makawao at 8:00 am. Google Maps confirmed my suspicion that it was probably held in some guys home. My outlook at 7:30 on a rainy Sunday morning was somewhat pessimistic.
I decided to arrive slightly early, which resulted in me being the only one there for a good 10 minutes. The Bahá'í Center was a long, white building squeezed into the neighborhood surrounding Makawao Elementary. I was greeted at the door by a surprised woman holding a vacuum cleaner. I explained my situation, she explained hers, and she continued to clean up while I took off my shoes and sat quietly. The interior was also low and long, with roughly 15 cushioned chairs arranged in an oval. Old books sat in old bookshelves. A black and white photograph of an old (evidently Persian) man was on one wall, while various symbols from major world religions were on the others. A functional kitchen took up the far wall. My introspection was broken by a newcomer. It was his first time as well; a middle aged man with a knapsack from Chicago looking for a place to go Sunday mornings. We exchanged words until the arrival of our first real Bahá'í, a friendly fellow with an orchid farm shirt and muddy boots. He immediately bustled around, making coffee, turning on the lights, and learning our names. He happily launched into a brief overview of the Bahá'í Faith: Relatively new (founded in 19th century Persia) and practiced by 5 or so million followers, the Bahá'í Faith essentially agrees with all the major world religions, claiming they are all connected by the single unifying God. Spiritual and social unity, peace, and a continual forward momentum for humanity. It sounded pretty good. Every few minutes a new person would enter, adding a few words and introducing themselves to us with handshakes and smiles. People would get up for coffee, someone brought a small cake to the center table. This was not a sermon (although I was assured that some readings by Bahá'u'lláh [the founder of the Faith] would eventually occur), it was a discussion, a forum. On several occasions I was surprised to find myself the recipient of several people’s attention. They asked me questions after they answered my own.
The turning point came when the final arrivals made their entrance. An old man wearing what can only be described as “spectacles”, a loud Hawaiian shirt and knee high socks walked over to me and offered me a hug, stating “Bet you didn’t know you had a grandpa from outer space, did you!” . Apparently, I did now. If this man had a title along the lines of “pastor” or “teacher”, I didn’t hear it that day. He had written a book on the sacred writings of Bahá'u'lláh, which lay on the table among prayers. Now that Jenobe had arrived, the conversation circled back to the two initiates: myself, and the earnest traveler. Grandpa Jenobe explained the finer points of the Bahá'í Faith with grand gesticulations and energy. Unity, Unity, and more Unity could not be stressed enough. A set of principles he drew up included the drive for the elimination of all prejudice (racial, sexual, economic, intellectual, everything!), the need for a universal language (in complete concurrence with maintaining cultural ties), and the importance of reconciling science and religion. Included in the discussion were the posters along the walls containing excerpts from the main religious texts of several religions stating the exact same things.

I was continually (and pleasantly) surprised by the sheer amount of logical sense contained in the conversation. The metaphors were fitting, the explanations made sense. Working under the belief that there is a single God who has been revered and named by a multitude of different religions, followers of Bahá'í then (are logically compelled to) accept all religions equally. Various religious figures such as Muhammad and Jesus and Buddha are all seen as messengers of God, suited specifically to their era. The correlation offered was that of a school. Students are progressed from 1st to 12th grade. 1st graders are taught by the 1st grade teacher, who teaches them all that the children are able to learn at that level, and so on up the ladder. No teacher is more or less important than the other, because each one builds on the foundation set by the previous.
Emphasis was put on how easy it is to gather every Sunday and say these things and then put them aside the rest of the week. After some time, in a lull among the multiple conversations going on, I focused again on Jenobe. I do not remember exactly how he arrived at the specific allegory, but he was going over the statement in the New Testament stating “Love your enemies”. The word “terrorists” caught my ear and I sighed inwardly at the use of such a cliché. Boy, was I wrong.
After asking him to start at the beginning, Jenobe told the group his story. My details may not be exact, but roughly: In the 70’s he was attending a Bahá'í Faith conference in Indonesia and contracted malaria. He arranged a plane flight to the next leg of his journey where he was going to sweat it out in his hotel room. Before his plane had taken off, it was hijacked by fundamentalist terrorists and held hostage for multiple days on the tarmac. The conditions he described were horrifying, but the point he drew was that, coming from an exposition on his faith, he viewed it as a test. A test that, as he told us, he failed. He tried to love these enemies and boy, I can’t blame him, found he could not. He remembered what Martin Luther King had said, “Discover the element of good in your enemy.”, and tried to focus on a single thing worth loving about these people, and he failed.
We were left to draw our own personal meaning out of this event, but Jenobe did close with the statement that “Well, since I think I failed that one….God’s probably going to do it again some time until we get it right. So don’t fly with me.”

I left after an hour and a half of conversation. They never got around to reading out of any book, and I later found out that the unsmiling Persian on the wall was not Bahá'u'lláh as I had first assumed. In fact, they’d like to avoid using his physical likeness in order to dissuade preconceived notions.
As a whole, I was pleasantly surprised. Continually. I can see why the Bahá'í Faith is the second fastest growing religion. The level of detail, of understanding and logic involved, the stress for education and compassion and unity made a whole heck of a lot of sense to me. As a religion, I have yet to see a negative aspect of it. As a way of life, as an ethical and philosophical and social system, I can get behind it and cheer wildly. Yes to worldwide education, yes to a universal auxiliary language, yes to every single person being “anxiously concerned with the needs of society”. The people at the Bahá'í Faith center are earnest, interesting and energetic. If they weren’t so godawful early in the morning I would be sore tempted to return.
I sure hope it doesn’t get twisted and misinterpreted by fundamentalists like every single other religion ever out there. But then again, honestly, what would a Bahá'í fundamentalist do? Force you to learn a second language at gunpoint? Brusquely encourage your independent investigation of the truth? Oh NO!

Hey team, I'll come back to this and put some links and youtube embeds later. I'm a little behind on work. And by work I mean Warcraft. And by Warcraft I mean sleep.

To All The Girl's I've Loved Before (In A Subterannean Mole-Man Way)

I've realized that my day to day life is primarily marked by chance occurrences with attractive ladies. Within the course of a single day I typically fall completely in love with at least three women, who invariably devastate my heart just seconds afterwards.
Not a single one of them knows who I am, probably because I've never spoken to any of them. I have smiled on occasion, and have sometimes gotten a smile back (which instantly elevates my day to a "Glorious" level, and never fails to elicit [once out of sight of said lady] something I like to call a "Shit-Eating Grin").
So this one goes out to all those girls who would without a doubt be thoroughly creeped the hell out should they ever discover that some dude is writing about them.
In no particular order, as I remember them in my own time.
1. Bus Girl #1 - You take the bus down to the mall on school days, which probably means you're my age. I've tried in vain to see what book you're reading. I like to think it's something really neat. It's probably about vampires. Your fashion sense is lovely. Please don't tell me it came from Hot Topic. Where have you been lately?
2. Bus Girl #2 - It is rare for someone to pull off violet and teal streaked hair, so you get points for that. However, you are vapid and your boyfriend is probably going to grow up and kill his entire cubicle one day. Get out now.
3. Jamba Girl #1 - You are adorable. Had you been born in the country of your ethnicity, you'd probably be forced to join the circus and be one of those creepy contortionist girls. I'm sorry I never want to try an Acai cup sample. I'm also sorry you're probably dull as a dead hen. Still cute though. Thank you for comping me that one time I forgot a penny for exact change.
4. Jamba Girl #2 - You actually came around the counter and delivered my Caribbean Passion directly into my hand. I've seen you arrive to work on a skateboard. You wear baggy pants. I am madly in love with you please be perfect in every single way. We can have 10 kids and start a family band.
5. Chemistry Girl #1 - You are as cute and minx-y as you are airheaded. Your boyfriend is possibly the most retarded person I've ever met. I cannot pronounce his Hawaiian name. Please stop coming to class half an hour late and then fucking your lab up. Please be less dissapointing, because you're really pretty.Yes, all of my shirts are clever and awesome. GOD, you're dumb as toast.
6. Chemistry Girl #2 - It must be hard being the only tall, skinny white girl in a class/group full of efficient Japanese robots. I make sure that your station has a hotplate that actually, you know, functions properly. Soon I will start hiding dead rats in your purse. Inside will be a fortune that says "YOU COMPLETE ME". I'm still working on it. You look good in goggles, a rare accomplishment.

7. English Girl #1 - Jesus, you're elegant. You spoil it with whore earrings and skintight velour tracksuit-pant-whatever those things with the Letters Over Your Butt are called. I also wish you weren't a total dumbshit idiot. Stop looking at me when I'm looking at you.Yes, my wrist cuff is made of a necktie. Aren't I fucking fashionable? Your essays are predictable and boring. I can basically see your bra like EVERY DAY do you even look in a mirror?

8. Archaeology Girl #1 - I sit right in front of you, so I only get to actually look at you like once a day. This probably greatly magnifies any actual mystery or allure you possess. I commend you on your choice of truly stunning eyeshadow. I am biased, though. There is no such thing as too much eyeshadow.
9. Archaeology Girl #2 - You seem intelligent and enthusiastic! Your tattoo of a fairy is quite large! You seem like the kind of girl who would read Twilight and like it, and read Harry Potter and not. Yes, the pyramids aligned with the North Star. Hah, indeed.
10. Religion Girl #1 - You're Canadian, you wear glasses, and you obviously have a good head on your shapely shoulders. These are all points in your favor. You have a heart tattoo between your boobs, you are actually like 26, and you've made friends with the godawful corn-husk of a hippy woman who sits next to you. These are all points against you. I could honestly swing either way with you.
11. Panda Express Girl #1 - You and I have quite the rapport going. This is probably because I eat there like twice a goddamn week.[welcometoPanda] Half and Half, [heretogo?]for here, [first chooooooice?] orange chicken, [second chooooooice?] thai cashew chicken, [wouldyouliiii-]no third choice thank you, [todriiiink?] a small root beer, please [thankyougoodday]. Today you dropped my change and blushed. For an instant I saw the real you.
12. Crosswalk Girl #1 - Somehow, through incredible fate, I have left Borders and you have walked from god knows where and we've ended up standing next to each other at the crosswalk waiting for the light to change. Multiple times over multiple days. Upon you I unleash my most rueful and apologetic smiles. You are pitiless. I am torn, because you could've totally crossed the street just there, there were no cars, what the hell, are you honestly going to wait for the actual White Man symbol? Is it because you would rather stand next to MEEEEE? And yet, once it does turn Go, you walk with such speed I quickly fall behind. I hope you don't think I'm creepy cause I'm walking behind you. You're just possess too much alacrity for this simpleton to understand. As my most recent occurrence, you are freshest in my memory.
13. Food Court Girl #1 - You actually reached out and poked my head when you told me you liked my hair. This alone would've made my day, but the week later you did it again while your friend madly giggled behind you. You had honestly totally forgotten about me but your bitch friend hadn't, and let you make a fool out of yourself. A pity you're so giggly. I'm sorry, I cut my hair.
The list goes on, but it would only get consecutively creepier. The less I actually see of any one girl, the more backstory I have to imagine, and the more my heart leaps. And, of course, any girl I actually manage to talk to or interact with will, in accordance with Dalton's law, vanish off the face of the earth. I'm talking about YOU, girl with crutches trying to get up the stairs. You started to try and move out of my way, but I assured you this would not be necessary as I am in fact a badass capable of sliding down the outside of a staircase bannister. It took all my strength to resist looking back as I walked away.
I'm talking about all of you girls who brighten and then instantly darken my day. Please, please stop it.
Just kidding. Never ever stop god don't leave me aloooooone. Keep doing what you're doing.
And these are just the girls in REAL LIFE. At any one time I am also enamored with half a dozen musicians/actresses/just plain interesting internet girls.
(Case In Point: ALICIA KEYS IS ATTRACTIVE AS ALL HELL. )
Look, if any of this comes off as horribly horribly shallow and superficial, A) Well....yeah, it is. But unless you're wearing cool clothes, a shirt with an intelligent design on it, or I overhear your stimulating (hurrrf duuuurf) conversation, I am FORCED to appraise you at least primarily by your looks. If you'd prefer it a different way, carry around a megaphone and constantly shout stuff about music, science, video games, and literature. I swear on my haystack I will throw myself at your feet.
In other news, Kanye's albums has either dropped or leaked, but the several songs that were sent to me were so disappointing. Great job perpetrating the slow, bland,boring autotuner vocoder effect that T-Pain "invented" like a year ago....on EVERY SONG. I'm not even going to link to this shit. Search if out for yourself, or just punch yourself in the crotch. Same effect.
Here is something that IS good!

Boy that Jack White can go, when he's got a real band. I want him and Johnny Depp to fight in top hats.
(Oh. P.S.,Death Knight Lvl 66, Days Since Start, 3.Holy SHIT.)

Hiatus

Attention Readers. I Play World Of Warcraft.
Oh hi guys. Sorry, I've gotta run. My boss is really getting on my case this week, double shift.


Update: /played on new Death Knight? Seven and a half hours. Levels? Five. Amount of awesome contained? About twice the lethal dose.

Almost as awesome as this guy. Do you want your day brightened? Do you want your brain blown off? Are you just plain feeling down in the dumps?
I have five words for you: This Guy Is Self Taught.

I BET YOU WERENT EXPECTING THAT SHIT. HAH. This one is even more face melting.

Keith Olbermann Doesn't Dick Around

In case you think this is the first time my boy Keith has had anything to say about anything, may I point out this tidbit of manliness.

In a special comment on May 14, 2008, Olbermann criticized Bush for announcing that he had stopped playing golf in honor of American soldiers who died in the Iraq war. Stating that Bush never should have started the war in the first place and accusing him of dishonesty and war crimes, Olbermann snapped,
"It is not, Mr. Bush, about your golf game! And, sir, if you have any hopes that next January 20 will not be celebrated as a day of soul-wrenching, heartfelt thanksgiving, because your faithless stewardship of this presidency will have finally come to a merciful end, this last piece of advice . . . when somebody asks you, sir, about your gallant, noble, self-abnegating sacrifice of your golf game so as to soothe the families of the war dead. This advice, Mr. Bush: Shut the hell up!"

Asked by MSNBC senior vice-president Phil Griffin if it was really necessary to tell the President of the United States to "shut the hell up," Olbermann replied that it was, because he couldn't say "fuck" on television.

(P.S. The second expansion to the MMORPG World of Warcraft, "Wrath of the Lich King" dropped on midnight tonight. Do not worry if you do not see your interesting male friends for the next two weeks. They are currently on The Internet.
The last time around, I didn't actually get to upgrade my account until a week later. This time...
Yeah, it's no different. I'm busy. I'll get around to it sometime.)
This doesn't actually count as a digivolution because all they did was speed it up and add a drum track, but it's actually REALLY GOOD.
Before

After

So maybe I'm biased because I love J Dilla. You, too, should love J Dilla. He died two years ago from thrombotic thrombocytopenic purpura.
Since that's sad, here is Me in the Videogame world.Since I can't go embody the forces of death and frost just yet, I'm killing time assembling stupid costumes.

P.P.S. Look, I've probably linked to this before but Lupe Fiasco is actually really sweet.

His beats are solid (mainly cause they've got the Midas Touch Neptunes touch), his lyrics are CLEVER, his flow is pro-fessional, and he doesn't take himself seriously.
Other pluses are the fact that he mainly raps about skateboarding, videogames, robots, and how intellectual he is. He obviously either doesn't take himself seriously or doesn't give a shit about anything, and I'm willing to bet it's a little bit of both. Plus his backup dancers have great outfits.

P.P.P.S OKAY YOU KNOW WHAT FINE ANOTHER EDIT.
New challenge is to find the similarities between these videos.
˙sbuos ɹnoɟ oʇ buıuǝʇsıl ɹoɟ sʞuɐɥʇ 'ɥbnoɹoɥʇ ɹo ʇuǝıʇɐd ʎɹǝʌ oslɐ ˙ʇɥbıɹ ǝɹɐ noʎ uǝɥʇ "spuɐq ʞɔoɹ ǝʇıɥʍ buıɹnʇɐǝɟ sʇsıʇɹɐ doɥ dıɥ llɐ ǝɹɐ ʎǝɥʇ" pǝɹǝʍsuɐ noʎ ɟı

Do You See What You Get When You Mess With The Warrior

A colleague of mine informed me that I had been published.
This came as news to me, since the last time I submitted a paper to an accredited institution they actually called me in and burned it before my very eyes.
Later I was to find out that if I had showed no emotion they would have published me, but at the time I can only recall taking their secretary out with a chair before fading to red.
But, thanks to a quickly snapped camera shot, I was informed I had made the cover of the University of Washington Bio 100 (Intro to Psychotropics Drugs) Lab Manual. And yes, it's okay to Want A Piece. Look at how cool I am. I'm obviously too cool to waft my own beaker, or to remove my headphones from around my neck while in the lab. Those headphones are now broke, by the way. Apparently being in continual contact with me is detrimental to electronics (which makes sense, I do emit faint gamma radiation).
Anyway, What. What do you imaginary, clamoring masses demand of me today.
For a start, you can convince me not to buy one of these:

Or one of these:

Or one of these:

For your music needs, here is some Mos Def. Don't you wish you lived in Brooklyn?

Ceci N'est Pas Une Pipe

When in doubt, bored and tired, if you have the choice of going to sleep or re-reading the emails sent by your distant cousin when he spent the year 2003 living in Cairo studying Islam and the Arabic language...choose the latter. (Females in my life, you'd go out of your mind for my boy Timur here.)
I am afraid, best beloved reader. I am personally worried that our (read: my) vocabulary is shrinking as a whole.
I am a verbose individual. At least, I imagine myself to be someone with a decent command over the language; over words. I read a lot of books as a kid. Fantasy books. I still do. I can write an essay that gets me into college, or passes the AP exam (not that that means anything). More importantly, as the clock trundles into the single digit hours of the morning, I can shoot lightning from my fingers and weave tapestries of bleary-eyed joy and rage in word-thought-feeling clusters that are unintelligible the morning after. I can't write poetry, but I can read it. I can understand it but not speak it.

The internet started as a joke but I think we are taking it seriously now.
I learned to type because we started using MSN to stay in touch between school each day. Mario Teaches Typing doesn't have shit on Instant Messenger.
It could have easily gone the other way, only I don't like using the phone because people can hear you. (Plus, when you're on The Internet, you have the worlds information at your fingertips. You can be an expert on anything in five seconds. This makes for more fluid discourse. Now, instead of pretending to know about art while hanging around in a coffee shop, we can rapidly read the wikipedia article and seduce the woman of our dreams. Pretentiousness is replaced by Autodidacticism. I just made that word up.)

Did our generation ever use LOL or ROFLGAMMARAYOGMG? It seemed we are always in the middle. The younger siblings actually use it, the older generations unknowingly commit cringe-worthy faux pas with them, and we stay in the middle using them ironically.
I am afraid, America, that what we originally thought was ironic has become accepted. Commonplace. What I mean to say is this:
I believe we've gotten so used to saying "MAN FAUST? FUCK THAT SHITBAG. FUCKER SHOULD'VE KNOWN NOT TO BE ALL LIEK 'WHATUP BEELZEBUB, HOOK A PLAYA PLAYA FROM THE HIMALAYAS UP WITH THAT KNOWLEDGE BIZZLE.'"
in an ironic fashion
That we have come to actually think that way. The joke was we would simultaneously prove our intellectual and ironic depths by talking about high-level academic subjects using low-level internet slang/banalities.
It was more complex than that, but I am paraphrasing for when they put my blog in the library of congress because it was culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant.
I want to break free of this.
Not for any interesting reason, I just don't want to sound like a moron. I want the ladies to be all "Damn boy you fine as all hell OH GOD LOOK I'M DOING IT RIGHT NOW. IT IS INESCAPABLE.
Bigger words are not the answer. They help when used sparingly, but anybody can use a thesaurus. No, instead, I have to be a genuinely more interesting and original person.
Which, in this day and age, mainly consists of finding cool ideas on the internet that my peers have not stumbled upon yet, and claiming them for my own.
Hey guys, lets go build a catapult I swear I drew up these blueprints on my own.
Hey, lets fill a hundred balloons with LEDS and release them into the sky.
Lets go spraypaint a billboard. Lets go out for icecream. Lets be interesting and original for the chicks hell of it. Lets play Xbox. Lets run around the city in the middle of the night and scare ourselves to death. Lets play twister loudly in a sleazy motel on the edge of town to give the staff a hilarious story to tell. Lets put our own fresh new stamp on todays fashion while still staying within it's borders and looking good. Lets unite the pretty nerdy kids and the interesting cool kids and start a party. Or a gang war.
Lets act with reckless abandon like old people did; like old people think we do. Lets be immature and boring like the less-old-but-still-older people are; like they think we are. Lets be incredibly cool and risque and exciting like the younger generation thinks we are; hopes they will be.
Lets blow up the fucking world and then put it back together upside down just to fuck with New Zealand.
Lets do anything anything anything but sit here and waste everyone's time.

P.S. I like this song!

Bad Hunters Use Their Pets In Instances...

I believe you all know where I stand on this issue. However, in case there is any doubt:HEY REST OF THE WORLD. REMEMBER EIGHT YEARS AGO WHEN THE SMART HALF OF AMERICA APOLOGIZED FOR BEING RETARDED?
NOT HAPPENING THIS TIME. INSTEAD, LETS HIGH FIVE.
Look, it's been an exciting and arduous day for all of us I am sure. So how about we unwind by listening to me talk about how a youtube video a minute and a half long singlehandedly convinced me we were living in the future.
Tawny, you were right.
But fuck all that science shit.
We're in the goddamn future because we can create videogames that are capable of making me lose my goddamn mind in wonder.

Now, it may have been because it was late at night. It may have been the tropical skittles I ingested. But by gum, when I clicked this, I exhaled.
Mirror's Edge is going to be one of the coolest fucking videogames the world has ever seen. I am seriously considering purchasing an xbox just to play this game. That is how impressed this game's DEMO has made me.

Look at this! THIS IS THE GAME. No HUD, no health bar, no powerups, no minimap. No grey colors, no blurry bloom effects. I want to melt this down and inject it into my aorta.
This game is bright and shiny and amazing. Dreamlike. Flowing. Effortless. Downright Beautiful.
Mirror's Edge takes place in a bright, clean city of the future, where everything is monitored and managed. In this world, if you want to keep any information secret, you basically have to get it delivered in hard copy....in person. And to accomplish this, people enlist the services of Runners: Crazy-ass outlaws who use the upper levels and rooftops of the city to evade security or prying eyes, and carry parcels from Point A to Point B in as badass a way possible.
Go. Go research this game. Go beg your friends with a PS3 or a 360 to buy it next Tuesday. Fuck, I just might.


(And Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Uh, youtube links...I'm sorry. Are you tired of hiphop? It's kind of my thing currently. Anything else I give you is going to seem forced...Uhhhh, here, here is the theme song to our new Presidency.


Also, BAWWWWWWW AWWWWWWW)

Anything Is A Job If You Get Paid For It

You may be familiar with the dry ice by-product of my bitch-ass job but today on Electionday Eve I am going to wax poetic about how truly ridiculously lucky I was fucking awesome it is.
This comes as a spin off from my original idea for todays entry; I was going to make a Top Five of dream jobs and try and come up with an actual available Major that would be the first step.
Initial results were depressing: There is no major currently taught in any of my prospective schools that would imbue me with super powers, I'm too damn dumb/unmotivated to be an astronaut, and too interesting to be a patent lawyer.
Then I realized the last dream job I listed was in fact (surprise surprise) my current occupation.
I work as the more active of two lab techs at Maui Community College.
To start off, how bad ass does that shit sound? It immediately conjures up images of lab coats and goggles and the kick is you're goddamn right I wear goggles and a lab coat sometimes.
It's my job to do whatever my boss, his boss, or their boss tells me/him/them to do. I show up at like 10:30, take my headphones off, toss my Jamba Juice in the biohazard trash, and immediately start fiddling with shit.
It is my job to fiddle with shit. We need to set up the labs for Bio, Microbio, and two Chem classes. Every time you've come into a science class and the lab stations were set up? The Benedicts solution has been put into eight individual dropper bottles? There was a restriction enzyme sitting on ice waiting to be pipetted? Some lab tech had to set that shit up.
I don't think I can stress this enough. My pain-in-the-ass job is to build, tune, and perform experiments without having to know why or how it works.
I can wax poetical about this all god damned day. In fact, today, I was instructed to test Wednesday's lab: Some sort of basic intro to calorimetry involving burning peanuts and heating water.
So, I had to dig out a ring stand. And when I say dig, I mean actual scrabbling around in our madhouse of a stockroom. That place is amazing. I should take pictures.
Then, since regular, you know, scientific crucibles don't transfer heat fast enough, I had to dig around in our recycling box for a Full Throttle energy drink can, and construct a little dish and bucket out of it. It was a brilliant piece of expedient labware-slash-avant garde art, built out of flanged aluminum can bits, test tube clamps, and wire-gauze.
Then I had to find, test, and clean all the bunsen burners because, oh yeah, my next job was to test which nut burned the best. (Out of our current selection, hazelnut!)

After we finished, the waves were apparently good, so my boss went surfing, and I went to class.

Sometimes there's about half an hour of work to be done, and I play with dry ice for two hours.
(I now have something really really cool to show you with dry ice. Bring it up in conversation some time)
Then again, there are days when microbio asks for 250 assorted glucose/sucrose/MRI/peptone-iron semi solid deeps, and we have to innoculate a few fungi plates. It's still fucking awesome.
And, apparently, I get paid for it.


(P.S. I got a haircut. Here is a recent photo of me, bein' a baller)

If you can't tell by the genre of youtube links I sling you, the reader,on a daily basis, I've been revisiting the roots of hip hop lately. Expect this to spiral wildly out of control until I rock a flat-top and blast Planet Rock 24/7 out of a gigantic analogue ghetto blaster.













(P.P.S. In case you didn't catch all the goods yesterday here they are in order
1. Raw instrumental beat by MF Doom
2. Kanye innovating? Or simply flipping a track YOU DECIDE (P.P.P.S. He is innovating)
3. Madvillain is a collaboration between MF Doom and Madlib. Shit be ob-scurrr.
4. Pharrell Williams, 1/2 of the Neptunes, produces the beat AND writes the lyrics for this ungrateful bitch, who later goes on to desecrate this Hit on a fucking Platter handed to her.
5. N.E.R.D is the personal project of the Neptunes + Shay Haley. I like this song.
6. Yeah Okay I Couldn't Help It.
7. Or This Time, Either.
8. Common is from Chicago. He's vegan, has a kid daughter, wears tight collared shirts, and has won two Grammys. What the fuck have you done lately? (He was the Gunsmith in Wanted too)
9. Oh yeah, I also linked to a little gif of Miguel from El Dorado. What the fuck, man.
10. JUST AS FUNNY THE THIRD TIME GOD I LAUGH EVEN NOW.
11. LILLY ALLEN!
12. The man holding the camera is Questlove, producer and drummer extraordinaire. The man playing bass is *fucking sweet*. The song is for Pharrell's unreleased project, The Yessirs.
13. CURVEBALL, SUCKAS. Tired of hip hop? Guess which one of these girls is a lesbian.

WALL OF TEXT

P.S. IF THE BELOW IS BORING TO YOU I EMBEDDED CERTAIN WORDS WITH LINKS TO VARIOUS YOUTUBE VIDEOS I STUMBLED UPON TODAY. CATCH THEM ALL (Srsly theres like a good half hour of content in there don't feel obligated to watch it. I'll talk about it in the next post.)

Sunday Service at Hope Chapel

I assume several people chose to attend Hope Chapel as their first field research, for a variety of reasons. I happened to know a friend of mine attended regularly, and her parents were willing to let me tag along (and ferry me to and fro in the process). Being that I hadn’t so much as touched a bible/torah/qu’ran/horseshoe in the last 19 years I thought Hope Chapel would be a relatively calm entry point. Considering it was the only church who’s name I knew, it was a good idea to bring guides.
Hope Chapel is large. My initial impressions upon pulling into the parking lot revolved around the sheer size of this establishment. It was very professional (if I had to sum it up with a word). We meandered into the courtyard filled with people of all sorts. I’d like to say I was hit with a wall of sound and color, but to be honest it was just people going about their business. This was their Sunday morning every week. Nor did I feel out of place; I announced I was new and they directed me to a poster board full of pamphlets and fliers. I took one. Later, they handed me another.
The actual chapel was already 3/4ths full when we entered. A band was playing on stage (the Youth band, I was informed) and it was decent rock. Definitely Christian rock, I knew, because the words were projected on two gargantuan screens on either side. Various imagery flowed behind the words; pictures of clouds and green hills and a few crosses. We found our seats but did not immediately sit. The majority of the attendees were singing along, my cohorts included. Which was news to me, I had never heard any of them so much as hum. I followed suit with some enthusiasm (the music was okay!). Whenever the lyrics got a little too intense I gently let my voice fade and felt guilty for it. Looking around during a lull I observed with interest area where the projectors were run, the pens that were tucked into the back of each cushioned chair, and the few hands stretched out towards the source of the music. The songs were praise set to music, full of love and happiness and…not devotion, not obedience, but of a sort of complete absorption of one’s self into a higher power. I was unsure, exactly.
Eventually the musicians put down their instruments and a thankful prayer was said. We were informed our pastor would be Jan Apo, an enthusiastic local fellow with a headset mic. He, in turn, informed us that he was glad to see us here and today we would be focusing on A Message on Life and Death from Psalm 23, which was about sheep. Sheep, as it turns out, are a fantastic source of metaphors and connections to Christianity. Even I was familiar with fragments of Psalm 23, or at least the imagery of the valley of the shadow of death and the cup runneth-ing over. But, as I was to find out, the rest of it primarily concerns sheep. We who raised our hands were given cheat sheets with the psalm and fragments of the sermon printed on them, complete with blanks to be filled in with the pens attached to our seats.
Jan’s words were projected on the clouds and green hills (now with additional lambs) while he spoke. He drew from various other biblical sources as well as factual facets of practical shepherding while he worked his way through the Psalm. Many times he broke off to reiterate the general gist of what he was saying. He very obviously wanted everyone to understand exactly what he meant.
1. The Lord Is My Shepherd; I Shall Not Want. This was a big point. I initially glanced around in a concerned manner when it was directly implied that humanity were Sheep, but I realized that there were none of the generally held negative connotations concerning sheep involved in this sermon. Being a sheep meant we had a shepherd to take care of us which, as Jan elucidated, was a pretty sweet deal for the sheep.
Taking care of sheep is a real hassle. Sheep are problematic at best, and downright picky most of the time. Apparently shepherding is a raw deal compared to chicken-, goose-, or cow-herding. Sure, the Lord maketh me lie down in green pastures and leadeth me to still waters but for sheep that isn’t nearly enough. The methodical and concise way Jan went down the list of requirements and connected them directly with specific sections of the bible had me downright impressed. This guy knew his stuff, knew what it meant, and knew how to help other people learn it. Sheep get scared, get afraid. To deal with fear, 1 John 4:18. Bam. Cure your fear of death, your fear of loss, your fear of impermanence in all things, with the one true eternal unending love that is god’s love for us, and that will push the fear out. BAM. Problem solved.
After a lesson in sheep, Jan tied it all together. Masterfully. He went back and gathered up all the threads of the sermon: the dedication of the shepherd, the sheer amount of work sheep turned out to be, how the solution to these problems can be found outlined in the bible, and why we read this thing at funerals all the time anyway. The point of Psalm 23 is, as he put it, that we’re all going to die. And that isn’t that bad, because Jesus the Good Shepherd is going to guide you , just like he had to do all that other stuff to take care of you before. There is a pattern here.
The sermon concluded with some humorous anecdotes and the call to put this to heart; to spread it and not leave it here each week. I raised my hand when he asked if there was anyone new in the audience, fearing the worst. He thanked us and carried on. Once again I was reminded that people do this every Sunday. The band came back, and we went outside. I was informed more about the actual mechanics of the “Campus”, as they called it, while we ate delicious seafood quesadillas. Cooked and sold on-site. I was blown away.
Later I was told that that was a pretty good sermon even by their standards, and that I couldn’t have picked a better day to attend and try to glean some concept of the whole scheme of things over at Hope Chapel. And I can see why. As the sermon ended, I found myself following up the thought of “They do this every Sunday!?” with its’ direct descendant: “What the hell else is there to talk about? He just covered it!”.
I can see why Hope Chapel is packed each week. It’s a good time, all things considered. The music and food are decent, the atmosphere is friendly to all, and the message has all the good sides of Christianity (Primarily that god loves everyone. Which is a big deal, when you think about it.) I wasn’t really uncomfortable at any time, nor did I feel out of place or pressured. I didn’t agree with the congregation at all times, but I didn’t want to run screaming out of the room either. A fully formulated Decision about Christianity can’t possibly be made after a single visit, but let’s call this one “pleasantly surprising while confirming some of my suspicions”.
Oh, and my skin didn’t fester and boil once I crossed the threshold of the chapel, which was a big relief.

I Am Excited Are You Excited

Guys. Politics. Tuesday.
I swear to god if you are able to register/vote and don't on Tuesday I will never fucking speak to you again.
I don't need to fill this blog with idle threats chitchat.

While this video is hilarious, I consider it a point of pride that my primary reaction was "I want to know what songs they used."

(P.S. If you can tell me? Honestly?)

I REALIZE THIS BLOG IS RAPIDLY DEVOLVING INTO A SPACE FOR ME TO DUMP YOUTUBE VIDEOS.
I HAVE COME TO TERMS WITH THIS.
MY OPTIONS ARE TO START A SECOND BLOG DEVOTED ENTIRELY TO DIGIVOLUTIONS AND TO KEEP THIS ONE PRISTINE AND INTELLECTUAL
or
I could just keep doin' what I doin', because in about a week this blog will be empty empty empty as I find something else to do.

IN THE MEAN TIME
This Digivoltion is so good, all I'm going to do is give you links for both. If you commit to one, I expect you to fully watch and listen to both of them. Honestly, this one deserves your undying admiration.okaysomaybeIjustloveMarkRonson
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jufT3v1roaU
DIGIVOLVE TO
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ZKbsrcA92I

(P.P.S. Yeah Mark Ronson produced and played each instrument except for the horns)
(P.P.P.S. The guy singing is Alex Greenwald from Phantom Planet. You Have Heard Their Songs Without Knowing It Probably)

Update!

P.S. Turns out I missed all the action back in Chief Seattle huh?
I walked through this place twice a day for a year!


(P.P.S. That entire above sentence is a LINK. I realize later that a post consisting entirely of "a man set himself on FIRE for NO REASON" was kind of depressing. SO.)

DIGIVOLVE TO
OH
WHAT EMBEDDING DISABLED BY REQUEST FEATURES CONTENT BY RCA RECORDS.
I am defeated at each turn obviously some secretary has made the youtube rounds. I hope you are up for clicking a link because that is what you are going to have to do to see this digivolution.

Maybe I Can Discuss It Over A Dance With You

Today I have decided to tell my story with MOVING PICTURES.
I have taken this blog to the streets. I stepped up. Twice. I went up two steps.
This video has color commentary provided in lieu of a brilliant blog entry.


NOTHING DIGIVOLVED TODAY. INSTEAD, ENJOY THESE CHOICE PICKS I HAD THRUST AT ME FROM DARK ALLEYS.
1.AHHHHHHH PLAY THIS LOUDLY AHHHHHH

2. IT IS A RULE FOR INTELLIGENT HIP HOP THAT YOU MUST MENTION A PHILOSOPHER IN YOUR RHYMES

3. LOOK DO YOU GUYS EVEN CARE ABOUT A THIRD VIDEO YOU ARE PROBABLY REALLY SICK OF THEM ALREADY

Guess Who Isn't Writing An Essay

It is me it is always me I could never trick you guys.
Do you know what that means? It means I do not have time for blogs to-day. However, after the unexpectedly positive response to yesterdays digivolving delving into the world of finding music and doing things to it, I present this! (Look guys I don't expect you to listen to three or more songs that are like multiple minutes long I know I would get tired of that pretty fast I don't have 15 minutes to spare per blog but if you could just listen to like the first minute of each,the drift you'd get it)
BLACK SABBATH

DIGIVOLVE TO

ALSO NOT REALLY A DIGIVOLUTION, BUT MORE LIKE A RARE B-SIDE THAT I ACTUALLY FOUND FIRST AND LIKED BETTER (Ignore the 20 second intro)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jSHLO_Mppec
Do not expect these to be a permanent underlying motif for this blog. This blog is so much more! Indeed, I sometimes partake in the Music, but you will also see me chat about the Girls, the Politics, the Webcomics, the Sciences, the Ladies, and Various Sundry Articles.