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.