The Standoff

Yesterday I had a moment that was out of an old western movie. I was riding my bike down the damp sidewalk rather casually. I wasn't in a hurry; I had to get to the library to print off a paper. The bell tower tolled 2pm, and I looked up the sidewalk to see an old woman in walker moving her way down the sidewalk. This woman was the epitome of cute old grandma. Snow-white hair with a sweater the same color, large coke-bottle glasses with a golden chain attached to the ends that sagged over her hunched back. She even had the sliced tennis balls capping the ends of the walker for ease of movement. Then I looked into her face. I saw not sweetness, but determination. The bell had just tolled, and it suddenly dawned on me: "This old lady is going to try and race me!" You see, we were both approaching a turn in the sidewalk, and I was making a wide approach to make the turn. It must have been obvious to the old lady that my intention was to get to the turn before her, and I shit you not this woman sped up. Not casually or sweetly either, she hit the NoS and was off. I was surprised by this old woman's acceleration, which set me back a few tenths of a second that could have made me lose the standoff. Then I remembered that I was on a bike. What I had constructed in my head as an even match of wits was actually as unbalanced as a midget fighting a lawnmower. I just pumped the pedals a few times and easily beat grandma Hortense to the turn, and in the process I sprayed her nice white sweater with a nice brown stream of street water.

The Toll Time Takes

The other day while I was sitting in an ASWC meeting debating the finer points of club budgets I realized that all I had been doing (for the last year or so) was waiting for a lull in debate to personally insult someone who I knew well enough to get away with it. The larger point here is that I didn't care and in fact I have cared about very little for awhile now. This is a scary state of my union because for many many years I was incredibly over-motivated and gleefully involved myself in anything and everything. I wanted to make a difference; in what I did not know, but it didn't matter, I was to be an instrument of change. In mellow moods I sought to change the world through the words of my poetry, in angry moods I saw leading armed insurgency or massive protest to cure the ills of the world. Nowadays I don't feel any of that old motivation, I can't even change things at Whitman. I see freshman throwing themselves headlong into activities, causes, and classes, hoping that through their sheer existence and hard work they can accomplish somethign altogether new and wonderful. However, my utter failure to do any of this is not without its merits. Like a child star at age 18 anyone who accomplishes too much too early is bound to live the rest of their life in backward longing, washed up and burnt out. I feel like I'm just waiting for my moment to come at the perfect time in life, when I'm in my mid-60's I think would be ideal: an entire half century of buildup to something great followed by a short, graceful slide out. To prove I'm not the only one, Bob Dylan, the greatest rabble-rouser of all time, sings in his late 50's in the song "Not Dark Yet"

Shadows are falling and I've been here all day/It's too hot to sleep time is running away/Feel like my soul has turned into steel/I've still got the scars that the sun didn't heal/There's not even room enough to be anywhere/It's not dark yet, but it's getting there/I was born here and I'll die here against my will/I know it looks like I'm moving, but I'm standing still/Every nerve in my body is so vacant and numb/I can't even remember what it was I came here to get away from/Don't even hear a murmur of a prayer/It's not dark yet, but it's getting there.

I think now that I am nearing the end of college I want different things than I used to. I no longer want to move minds with poetry or influence the powerful. I don't want to change the world, get the coolest (or highest paying job) possible, but simply to be happy in what I do. Our dreams are certainly tempered by time. No 5-year-old kid when asked "what do you want to do when you grow up?" responds by saying they want to work mid-management but have a happy home life. They want to be astronauts, firefighters, or sports stars. When we get older we dream of changing the world in more abstract ways, because those still are possible. Now as reality sets in more and more with each day I want to do work that is bearable and allows me to see my good friends, be outside among beautiful earth we so often forget, and continue to exercise my mind in an intellectual way. No more astronauts. When we are 75 we will probably just want to be able to take a subsequent breath pain free, in a few years from now we will want to find lifelong companionship and be diligent family men, and I have said where I am now. And when I was 5? I could save the entire world from underneath my dad's chair with only the help of my two trusty stuffed animal sidekicks. Everything is real in its own time.

Goblins

A goblin woke me up this morning by making tea at my bedside and when I told him that was out of character he replied, "marrghghagrle" because he had a rare form of bird flu that my body was unable to fight against. As I neared the bitter bird flu end I had a choice, to join the goblin and live on and spread avian decimation or to go on to some great unknown. Then I really woke up from that dream and killed seven mice with a laser beam fashioned in my miracle of an eyeball. Then I woke up in the monstro, the power was out and then back on, the phone was doing its usual ringing at 8:00am, sewage piles of junk surrounded me, an empty fish bowl lay on my desk and I contemplated all the chances I had to make friends with goblins but decided not to because of social stigma surrounding non-human entities (discounting dogs and cats) that we consider friends. A lot of people might not understand my friendship with goblins, or might not understand what a goblin even is, as opposed to say an elf, a troll, a demon, or Bill Nye the Science Guy. However if you only look at that site, it explains everything, including the key passage stating, "Often portrayed as the vilains and troublemakers of faerie, Goblins are not truly completely evil. Though they seem to have no moral code of their own, they are happy to enforce the one of their human hosts. The miserly and lazy are apt to feel their pinch or find their rooms and possessions in disarray. Goblins are pranksters, and are known for rearranging items in the house, tangling horses, banging pots and pans, removing the clothes from sleeping humans, knocking on doors and walls and even digging up the graves to scatter the bones around." And there you have it.

Bad Advertising

I browse a few technology news pages every day as I catch up on the latest news in technology. (I have also been practicing with "palindromic" sentences.) I can see the latest gadgets to be released in Japan that I will NEVER want, much less need. Still, for some reason it fulfills some deep desire of mine to simply know of these products' existence. I think it's the same reason why some students at Whitman spend all their time reading Foucault "for fun." These type of people like to seem smart by quoting philosophy. While I enjoy philosophy, I think understanding the cusp of technology is much more beneficial because it is always changing. Foucault isn't going anywhere. I can go to the library now or 20 years from now and all of Foucault's books will be neatly organized alphabetically on the shelf. 20 years from now the technology of today won't mean shit to anyone but a few nerdy artifact collectors. I respect people who will sit down and memorize Foucault, but my deep understanding of the latest developments in technology is about living for tomorrow, not living for yesterday.

On to the point of my post. As I was browsing my tech news I saw an article about a new type of software being used on new cell phones. Blah blah blah. Its not interesting to me, and I browse these sites regularly, so I know nobody reading this would be interested. What I found interesting was the picture that came along with the article:



I am wondering what genius decided to grab the woman with caveman hands and ask her to hold the cell phone for the photograph. Even if I wanted a phone like that, I wouldn't buy that one simply because it looks so dwarfed against those mutant appendages. Perhaps my attention to detail is getting the best of me here, but the first thing I looked at when I saw that picture was the goddamn werewolf hands. The phone was an afterthought along the lines of "That tiny cellphone will soon be crushed by that troll's mighty grip!"

Things That Go Bump

Every night I hear a large *thump* above my room. Sometimes it can shake the ceiling and I can feel the reverberation throughout the room. Finally, I said enough is enough and sprinted upstairs right after I heard it happen.

No one was upstairs (except Gus). Olmstead wasn't there, and his room is right above mine. Until now, I had imagined he was dropping a bowling ball on his floor for some physics experiment. Gus was no help, telling me that the noise was probably "the seven prostitutes he'd just kicked out of his room."

That leaves only one solution. The mouse population had grown so large and complacent due to the abundance of leftover pizza and beer, and until recent environmental aberrations which were not under their control (Drew's clean-up of the 3rd floor), had lived an almost paradisiacal life in which the gods were benevolent, so that, after the leftover food's removal and without an agricultural infrastructure to reproduce its own, the mice fell into anarchy. Now, small factions of Monstro mice have promised a significant role to outside militant mouse communities in the future government's business for weapons of war. THAT is what I'm hearing every night, 1/2 ouncer mice mortars.

Will history teach these hungry mice nothing? Have the spoils of war ever been anything but death and strife?

Mouse Hunt

Remember the movie from the early 90's called Mouse Hunt? It was two crazy fools trying to catch a single mouse who is outsmarting them. There are ten guys in the Monstrosity, and we are unable to cure this mouse problem. I have sat up at night, a nice bait of cheese standing on a table, and waited for the mouse to emerge so I could destroy it. Instead, the mouse is nowhere to be seen. When I get bored and go to bed, I awake the next morning to my bait eaten, with small mouse droppings telling me that I am indeed the loser in this duel.

There has not been a mouse yet who could defy the mighty power of a simple mousetrap. This last semester we thought we had a particularly smart mouse on our hands, only to lay a mousetrap and find our intelligent friend trapped by a simple lever and spring mechanism. We had named the mouse Bob, and we all felt surprisingly sad at the news of his death. Soon after, Bob Jr. came poking around and the legacy of his father lived on.

I Don't Know

It is funny how much work is required to train one's mind to a new system of thinking. Since I have come to Whitman, bits and pieces of a new line of thought have slowly trickled into my mind, but I have yet to put the puzzle together because I am still missing so many of the pieces. I would have never thought this earlier in my life, but it requires practice to change the way you think. I have to make a conscious effort to think the way I believe I should be thinking, and it is tiring. To be honest, it is often a downer.

I have recently been exposed to a line of philosophy that has enlightened me to the truth (in my opinion) that the universe is a system of complete and infinite harmony. Everything in our universe and millions of others are simply on a constant mode of repeat. When this universe dies billions of years from now, another will be created billions of years from that, and billions more after that event I will again be posting this blog. When you believe something like this, there is hardly any motivation to adhere to the laws of society, let alone discipline yourself to pay taxes or work out regularly. I could possibly, at any moment, go run into the streets and begin overturning cars and robbing houses. But I won't, because in the harmony of infinity, I am a logical human being who spends his time contemplating infinity (sober) and experiencing infinity (stoned). What adds joy to this system of belief is actually what many of you may view as its downside: The utter insignificance of our universe adds so much complexity to it that I can barely contain myself. Our universe is most likely a speck of a particle making up one atom in another universe, which in turn is another speck. Every time you bite into a cheeseburger or have an orgasm, you are experiencing an event of ultimate complexity, because it contains infinite mulitverses within that single, solitary act. It is rather humbling to say the least.

My roommate has now abandoned me, while I am in the process of writing this post, to go satisfy his hunger for the infinite experience that is human touch. I, myself, have infinitely experienced french fries and beer just recently. I am sure today you have all infinitely experienced something remarkable. Maybe you ate a banana, or went for a walk, or got hit in the temple by a golf ball. All equally complex and remarkable.

A bastard (as some say I am) would take advantage of this philosophy to be a huge dick to everyone all around him, using the excuse "none of this matters in infinity." That excuse, upon examination, is absurd, because the complexity of infinity is essentially harmony, and anyone who is beating up grandmas or twirling babies around their heads is definitely not in harmony with their surroundings. Chilling on a log, as my good friend Aaron Mandel has been known to do, is perhaps the greatest form of universal oneness a human being can achieve without the assistance of hallucinogenic drugs.

I can no longer type anything interesting, which is not saying a lot.