12.15.2007

Memory Lane: Ticket for one, please

The shuffle on iTunes has apparently been set to "nostalgia" which has been making me, redundantly enough, nostalgic. I've been thinking about days gone by, friends lost, good times had and pain felt.

I've been contacted occasionally by people from my high school, which is surprising. I can't seem to make the time to reply, though. So much has happened in the last eight-going-on-nine years that it would be impossible to explain in a concise manner without going on endlessly. Not to mention that I don't really have a pile of happy memories about high school. That person really bears no resemblance to me anymore. I don't even really remember him.

Through a little myspace link-surfing, I managed to track down some of the old whitewater crew. It doesn't look like much has changed, all things considered, with one tremendous exception: AK has a kid. Out of all of them, he was certainly the last one I expected to have a child at our age, but it's impossible to expect anything from AK, since he was always fairly enigmatic. It looks like Dorsch is back in school (at UWO) and otherwise the same as ever, and Box graduated from UWW and is gearing up to get his career underway and possibly move across country. From what I gather, they're still in touch with Jake and the others, though no mention of CJ can be found anywhere. Luckily by this point I'm over most of the shitty memories and when I do get nostalgic I remember all of the fun we used to have together.

Ah well, that's how life is anyways. People move into and out of each others' lives and that's just the way the human machine keeps working. I think I'll take some time while Kris works on her final to write back to Dara and Sarah and drop a note to Alea. Who knows, I might even see what Dorsch is up to for the fun of it, though I doubt he'd want anything to do with me anymore.
posted at 19:55

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1.24.2007

I finally got it!

The 1977 Franklin Library 100 Greatest Books of all Time edition of The Divine Comedy, Ciardi translation, with illustrations by Gustave Doré.







I am so fucking pleased. I've been after this book for quite a while. Actively and passively for a couple years, at least.
posted at 14:43

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1.13.2007

"One wonders just how vast and gratuitous a catastrophe would have to shake the world's faith. The Holocaust did not do it. Neither did the genocide in Rwanda, even with machete-wielding priests among the perpetrators. Five hundred million people died of smallpox in the twentieth century, many of them infants. God's ways are, indeed, inscrutable. It seems that any fact, no matter how infelicitous, can be rendered compatible with religious faith.

Of course, people of all faiths regularly assure one another that God is not responsible for human suffering. But how else can we understand the claim that God is both omnicient and omnipotent? This is the age-old problem of theodicy, of course, and we should consider it solved. If God exists, either He can do nothing to stop the most egregious calamities, or He does not care to. God, therefore, is either impotent or evil. You may now be tempted to execute the following pirouette: God cannot be judged by human standards of morality. But we have seen that human standards of morality are precisely what you use to establish God's goodness in the first place. And any God who could concern Himself with something as trivial as gay marriage, or the name by which He is addressed in prayer, is not as inscrutable as all that.

There is another possibility, of course, and it is both the most reasonable and least odious: the biblical God is a fiction, like Zeus and thousands of other dead gods whom most sane humans now ignore. Can you prove that Zeus does not exist? Of course not. And yet, just imagine if we lived in a society where people spent tens of billions of dollars of their personal income each year propitiating the gods of Mount Olympus, where the government spent billions more in tax dollars to support institutions devoted to these gods, where untold billions more in tax subsidies were given to pagan temples, where elected officials did their best to impede medical research out of deference to The Iliad and The Odyssey, and where every debate about public policy was subverted to the whims of ancient authors to wrote well, but who didn't know enough about the nature of reality to keep their own excrement out of their food. This would be a horrific misappropriation of our material, moral, and intellectual resources. And yet that is exactly the society we are living in. This is the woefully irrational world that you and your fellow Christians are working so tirelessly to create."
posted at 07:21

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1.01.2007

oh one/oh one/oh seven

Time to ring in a new year.

My first ponderance, as always seems to be the case when I evaluate my happiness (past or present) is Michelle. She seems happy enough, having completely written me out of her life. Eight years erased in less than six months, but I'm the one trivializing our previous relationship. At any rate, she's happy, so I can continue being happy and start putting the guilt aside. I owe her a lot, but I can't keep crippling my own happiness on an intangible guilt she'll never even know, realize or acknowledge I'm feeling.

Next is family. I can't count the number of times I've heard how much happier I seem now. For the first time in a few years, it didn't feel like a chore to be around my family. It was something I wanted to do. Sitting around, drinking coffee, talking to everyone rather than condescending to them or making esoteric geeky quips that I knew nobody would get but I still found hilarious. I never realized exactly how it had been before, but my mother said a few times while I was home that it was like she had her "old son" back. I guess I was someone else for a while.

Relationship wise, I couldn't be happier. I went on a whole post about that, so it's not like I need to cover the same ground again, but it suffices to say that I'm happier now than I ever knew I could be. I've got someone with whom I can be open and honest, can speak my mind and am rarely left scratching my head saying "what the hell is she thinking?"

Life in general was also discussed in a recent entry. The truncated version is that now I have loyal friends who care about me. I thought I had those before, but was proven wrong in spades over the last six months. Two people that I knew before I moved out here actually made an attempt to get in touch with me, and the one person who I attempted to stay in contact with ignored me. C'est la vie, right? I'm not egomaniacal enough to say "well, their loss, right?" but I'm done losing sleep over the idea.

In short, 2006 ended on an upswing, and 2007 promises to be the best year on record.
posted at 09:24

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12.17.2006

Less than a week now. In the captain obvious department, I've decided that this trip home may be just the cure for the last bout of homesickness I've been feeling.
posted at 06:45

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12.13.2006

"I got a very nice e-mail from Kris's mom. You seem to have found a very nice family. You know that we couldn't be happier for you. Of course we think that they are pretty lucky to have you."

I love my mother
posted at 05:14

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11.30.2006

This is literally playing to a party of nobody, but at this point I don't care. Here's my quantified life update:

In short, everything is perfect. Naturally not everything in life is ever perfect, but I'm a lot closer than I've ever been. I've got a life that's arranged precisely the way I've always wanted it.

I'm in love with an amazing woman who loves me as much as I love her. A woman with whom I can connect in a way that I never realized was possible. Michelle and I had a great thing, and I don't know if even she realizes how much I loved her, but what I have now is so much better in so many different ways. I've said on a couple occasions since I moved, and it's still true, that finding a mate isn't about finding someone who is perfect, or about trying to attain perfection yourself. Finding the perfect person for you simply means finding the person with whom all of your flaws line up. Someone to whom you can relate in every aspect, good and bad. I've found that person who on more occasions than I can count, has had the exact same random thought at the exact same time. Not through practice or repetition, but sheer connection. I love it.

I work a zero-glamor manual labor job that I enjoy more than anything I've ever done. I get to be on the oceanside at least once a day, get exercise and fresh air, and do a simple task for which I'm paid a reasonable wage. No corporate bullshit, no managerial mouthpiece chewing on my ear for not following some mandate laid down by people thousands of miles away. Simply me, doing work, getting paid. If I do my job, everyone's happy. That's something I haven't had since I stopped working with my father.

As if these two bits of happiness weren't enough, this is what I get to see every time I look up from the computer. That's the ocean folks. A body of water to which I've dreamt of moving for a tremendously long time. If, for some reason, that view isn't satisfying at some point, I can take a less than five minute trip here, and in the summer I can go here and spend as much time as I want simply staring at the waves, eating lobster and relaxing with the ocean right at my doorstep.

I don't know if being unhappy for a very long time causes ones happiness quotient to go down or up. Perhaps swallowing shit and enjoying it for a long time makes the good things seem all the sweeter. On the other hand, perhaps it causes such a negative level of enjoyment that you need even more to become happy. Regardless of which is true, I do know that I'm tremendously happy right now. I only had to give up the best thing I had ever known, all of my friends (that's an entirely different rant altogether), some of my stuff, and risk everything that was making me remotely happy to take a leap of faith to the east coast. When I'm sleeping next to Kristina, or stacking hogs with the person who I can easily now call my best friend, the alienation doesn't sting anymore. I get homesick, and I miss some people who were my friends until I left, but the good far outweighs the bad now.

So, adieu to all of my center friends and all of my Janesville friends. After five months of grieving for lost friendships, I realized I have Kristina, Maine, new friends and a job I love, and I'm not going to lose anymore happiness on your accounts.

fin.
posted at 22:09

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10.20.2006

"Footfalls echo in the memory
Down the passage we did not take
Towards the door we never opened
Into the rose garden"
posted at 06:52

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7.31.2006

"I need to hear things over and over before they sink in, that is true. Maybe it's because I never believe anything the first time I hear it. I believe that the first time I hear it, it has been offered as a kind of experiment, potentially riddled with problems and holes in its logic, a piece of Swiss cheese: Here. Here is some food. Except it has some holes in it. But around the holes, you'll find food, something that might sustain you."
posted at 18:50

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7.28.2006

"It is difficult to explain the limitations I impose on myself, and it's only later that I will find a way to describe how the possibility of infinite possibility frightens the daylights out of me. I picture myself in a hot air balloon just floating off somewhere, higher and higher into the cold, dark air. Eventually that balloon is going to pop. My family, and this place--Minnesota, this silly place with its terribly cold winters and emotionally repressed Scandinavians--are like the sandbags that weigh the balloon down, the stakes and the ropes that tether it to the ground. Without them I'd be frightened to death of where I might wind up."
posted at 07:13

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7.20.2006

I think the best part about my new job is that I didn't have to even LOOK at a job application to get it. I hate job applications. They're generally a black and white compilation of how my life didn't turn out the way I would've wanted it to.
posted at 05:17

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7.17.2006

"Relationships are like bathwater shared by a family, she says. Who knows whose dirt is whose? The water is just brown."
posted at 10:04

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7.16.2006

"Later, when things are more clear, I will understand that being depressed is a little like being an alcoholic: you're always displacing and misplacing things, like a character in a bad made-for-television movie, shouting "I can quit anytime I want!" or "That's not mine!" when an empty vodka bottle is held up--you're always forgetting your own promises to yourself or stepping around them like sleeping giants--tiptoeing around life's great, rumbling energy, wishing it would just stay still."
posted at 14:41

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7.08.2006

"When we were small, Flo labeled everything with masking tape and a black permanent marker. She says this was so we would learn to read early. So we would know what things were, where they were supposed to go.

I ask her now, does anyone really know this? What to call things? Does everything really have a place?

The places on the wall of the garage where the gardening tools went were all marked: HOE, BROOM, RAKE, FAN RAKE, CLIPPERS, DIRT SHOVEL, SNOW SHOVEL. We knew exactly what was expected of us: "Go get me the dirt shovel, please," our mother would say. We knew which one this was. We knew where it would be.

The floor of the garage was divided up like a parking lot: RED BIKE, GREEN BIKE, WAGON, WHEEL BARROW, TRICYCLE. Our spots were up near the door, at the front of the garage.

I tell Flo now that it was the only time in my life when I've had such a fabulous parking spot.

Flo says she did it so she wouldn't have to move our damn bikes every time she wanted to park her car. She didn't want to be the kind of mother who spent all of her time nagging the children to pick up their things. And it worked. We felt important, pulling into our special parking spots, putting the kickstand down with authority.

I tell Flo now, that in some ways, I wish she hadn't done this.

I expected the world to be so much more organized. I expected to know what to call things. I expected there to be a place already marked for me."
posted at 09:53

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3.22.2006

Decided to whip out a blog post before blogger got a wild hair up their ass and got rid of my account or something.
posted at 09:48

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11.02.2005

The banal and the boring

That’s what most blogs are about anyways, so if I’m going to write consistently in this thing, I’ll need to get over my detest for the banal and the boring.

So, news in my little life:  I haven’t been in #dbzcenter chat since Friday; partly because I don’t want to, partly because I’m still pissed off about some stuff, mostly because I don’t care enough to bother.  I’ve instead started occupying my time with stuff that needs to get done around here, and I’ve also started a pen and paper journal.  It’s a very strange experience writing something that you know nobody will ever see.  It’s the marked difference along the evolutionary path that started with the journal and ended with the blog.

I finally picked up some batteries for my camera, so I can snap pictures when I go on my little walks at night.  Last night was particularly nice.  It was chilly outside, cloudy and just really fit with my mood and where I was walking.  It helped cheer me up on what was otherwise a generally depressing night.
posted at 09:27

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10.28.2005

Mesdames, Monsieurs, Bonsoir

In celebration of ordering the first Gankutsuou DVD, I am going to post a new post in my Gankutsuou themed blog for the first time in forever. This may or may not be the last post of the day, since there are several things going on right now that I would like to comment on, but I doubt I'll have the motivation to field the criticism which will be attached by onlookers.
posted at 13:55

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6.22.2005

It's a big shit sandwich

and we're all gonna have to take a bite.

There's nothing specifically wrong, just a general pain in the ass feeling of angst and anger that would probably be better suited for a livejournal. Work sucks a lot, but at least it's a constant level of suck and not a wildly vacillating level of suck. It's not like there's anything available around here anyways, even if I were genuinely interested in finding a different or another job. We just need to get a batch of our extra bills paid down, then we'd have extra money every week instead of barely scraping by like we are now.

Yup, money is apparently everything. Maybe if everyone realized it's just paper, the world would get back to something resembling sanity.
posted at 11:47

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4.12.2005

Mesdames, Monsieurs, Adieu

Possibly the best 'new' anime I've seen in a while has finished its run, with a US license announcement coming almost immediately after the final episode aired in Japan. Geneon will be your stateside distributor for Gankutsuou, which means you'll more than likely hear a few recycled Hellsing voice actors, which isn't bad since Hellsing was a decent dub, but they kinda dropped the ball on Alucard's voice, and I'm sure they will drop the ball with Hakushaku's voice, too, and as a few people have mentioned in various forums, the Japanese accented French that is spoken in the recap in the beginning of each episode is very quirky and enjoyable, and it'll more than likely be done away with entirely. Still, I advise everyone to check it out once it's released in the US.
posted at 14:02

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4.09.2005

Well, combining the fact that Ma's computer busted with his known income of zero dollars and zero cents, I think it's going to be 2 days past forever before I have anyone to play cards with online. Maybe someone will drop out of the sky and want to play.

*starts looking up*
posted at 15:22

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4.06.2005

Behold Chococat

Gaze in awe at the simplest banner I've ever made. :) The table width of my blog requires that you only get links:
avatar
banner

My penchant for pink practically requires that I make a matching Hello Kitty banner.
posted at 13:40

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4.05.2005

Self Realization

If self-improvement really is masturbation, I'll be going blind before the month is out.

Chelle and I are both kicking off the summer with the goal of knocking off the first layer of our ultra-fatness, and it looks like we're going to stick with it. The diet is phase 1, which we've just started. I'm calling it the 'eat what Chelle tells me' diet since that's all I know about it. I just eat breakfast in the morning (ugh) and when I get home from work there's a little note telling me what to eat for lunch, then Chelle's home for dinner. I don't know what the plan is, or anything, really. I suppose that's so it's more difficult for me to cheat.

This whole plan will come full circle when next summer rolls around and, looking fit and trim after a year of diet and exercise, we take all the money we've saved and move out to Racine to live on the beach. Hooray!
posted at 12:08

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4.04.2005

*sigh*

First day back at work after a nice weekend of lazing around and enjoying Chelle's company. It sucked, but at least Monday's are ungodly easy. Dustmop, clean the bathrooms, clean the breakroom, find a way to make all of these things take up 3 hours.

We went out to the lake yesterday. It was still pretty chilly, but we couldn't wait any longer. It's going to be a long year of saving and skimping in order to move out to Racine next summer, but a couple trips out will make it easier. We took some pictures to use as desktop backgrounds, I've got mine up and going.

CLICKSTAH!
posted at 13:51

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4.02.2005

Well, all of my fears about Queen of the Damned were assuaged very handily. The book picked up marvelously once the loose ends had been tied up and the plot began in earnest. Another Vampire Chronicles book devoured in three sessions. This mythology is starting to take up a substantially large portion of my brain, so I think I'm going to take a break from the Vampire Chronicles and let it fade a bit in my memory before moving on with the two books I just bought. I guess I'll give in to Chelle's pressure and start the Hitch Hiker's series, since we bought the last three books for her today.
posted at 14:18

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4.01.2005

I've been devouring Anne Rice novels at a rate of approximately one per week in a concerted attempt to delete the section of my brain that thinks that modern writing is automatically inferior. The first two books were enthralling, but Queen of the Damned is beginning to lose my interest because it's so bloody episodic. Hopefully it turns out to be worth it once the story actually progresses beyond the end of The Vampire Lestat. Hopefully at that point it'll be less fragmented and more continuous with Lestat doing the main narration. I am in love with the Brat Prince.

Chelle has become enthralled (synonyms be damned) with the Hitchhiker's series, finishing a book often in one or two sittings. Granted they're not that long, but that's still a lot of reading in one spell. I still haven't started the first book in earnest, but I've been busy with my beautiful vampires.

Work has been sucking in varying degrees lately. Some days it's particularly shitty, other days it's almost fun. Either way, my schedule is a cake walk and I generally enjoy playing janitor.

So, other than Anne Rice and Douglas Adams, are there any other modern authors that I should be paying particular attention to during this literary reform I'm subjecting myself to?
posted at 12:40

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