Christmas

Merry Christmas, everybody. This year we had a total of 8 or 9 presents under our tree. We decided about a month ago that we were going to have a small Christmas this year, and I am so glad that we did, because this has been the best Christmas I have ever had. We (and by 'we' I mean the extensive collection of my immediate family -- my mother, my brother, and I) decided to put a large part of the money we normally would have spent on presents that would go largely unappreciated towards a local or national charitable or non-profit group. I have decided to put my ~$100 towards the Sierra Club, an organization I have immense respect for, and a personal connection with given my parents extensive participation in the Club during their younger years.

In addition to that, I spent a wonderful day in New York City the day before Christmas Eve with my girlfriend, Sarah. I have not written about her yet, and am hesitant to, not because of some strange feeling of setting things in stone that may be only temporary, but because I feel I can not do justice to how amazing a person she is. Like a painter attempting to recreate or describe a perfect scene, I cannot hope to articulate how perfect she is -- not as a person, but for me, perfect in the way she fits who I am as a person. She is subtle and understated and largely quiet...things that I am not. She is strikingly intelligent, and yet is so personable and so approachable and so humble -- all things which I find trouble doing. And while she is in many ways the complete opposite of my extrovertive, overcompensating, and highly excitable personality I find myself irrevocably attracted to her. Best of all, I feel as if she appreciates the way that I complement her own personality.

And if that wasn't enough, I have a wonderful selection of books to read over this break including finishing up my second reading of my all-time favorite epic 100 Years of Solitude, War and Peace, and The World Without Us. To top it off, Sarah got me, for Christmas, A Moveable Feast my Ernest Hemingway. My love for Hemingway is rooted in the very core of my appreciation for and fascination with the English language and literature in general. That book is also featured in City of Angels, which is one of my favorite movies. I cannot imagine a more perfect gift.

Until next time (and with more updates from Oregon),

Andrew

Tales from Oregon Pt. 2

12/16/2008

My grandfather had me a captive audience. In spite of his wife’s persistent warnings stories began to trickle out of him like water from a leaking container, until the stories themselves took on a sort of self-persuasive force and combined they pushed into the open. With little regard for continuity and held together by the slightest of segues, stories begin to flow out of him at an accelerated and exhilarating pace.

He told me the story of his experiences in Hawaii in the months leading up to Pearl Harbor. He told me how he was 17 years old, and was ticketed for taking his dad’s Plymouth down the road at 90 miles an hour with 5 of his friends in the car. He told me how is license was taken away for 60 days, and how he went to the DMV on December 6, 1941 to get it back. He told me how he signed up for the National Guard the on December 8th. He told me how he got rose through the ranks to Staff Sergeant, before being demoted when they realized he was only 17 years old. He told me how, over the next two years he worked his way back up to Tech Sergeant from Private. He told me how, after his contract with the National Guard was up, he signed up for the U.S. Army as a cargo-specialist, routing supplies through Hawaii to the various armies fighting in the Pacific Theater.

Tales from Oregon Pt. 1

Right now I'm sitting in front of my gate at Eugene Airport in Eugene, Oregon. My plane leaves in about an hour and a half. It's a very clean, very small airport and they have free public Wi-Fi which is ridiculously fast, so all-in-all I'm pretty happy right now. I love traveling of course, but its always nice to have the experience go smoothly without hectic lines and crowded terminals with crying babies. Damn those babies.

Alright, to avoid going off on a tangent about babies, I'll get straight to the point. For the last week I've been staying in Oregon with my estranged grandfather. When I arrived in Eugene last Monday and walked up to his car, I got the chance to see him for the first time in my entire life. This trip (paid for by him) is sort of a last-ditch effort to meet each other before he dies. He's 84 years old and physically quite frail. I can talk about him like this for hours, about what I learned and what I didn't learn, and whether or not my perception of him as a cowardly and selfish person who did little to support my mother growing up, and who divorced my grandmother as she laying dying in a hospital in order to marry the woman he had been having an affair with for years, has changed at all. I can talk about whether or not I was personally changed by this trip. And I plan to. Over the course of the next few days, I'll post up the entries I made in a journal I kept this week. I wrote down some of my thoughts, some of the stories he told me, and a whole lot of rambling. I'll edit it as I put it up, possibly differentiating the old from the new with bold formatting or something to that effect. Anyway, without any further ado, here is my first entry in this short Tales from Oregon series...

12/15/2008 (Monday)

This is a really clean plane. I’m on Delta Airlines Flight 1003 from JFK to Salt Lake City where I’ll catch my connecting flight to Eugene, Oregon. I planned on keeping a journal of sorts for this trip (I bought this writing pad specifically for that purpose a few weeks ago). However, I was on a roll with some Sudokus and probably wouldn’t have started writing at all if it hadn’t been for this girl sitting across the aisle from me. I have an aisle seat, and there’s a really, really thin guy sitting at my window. He’s kept it shut and is currently reading something with a full page black and white photo of Clint Eastwood on it. There’s no one in the seat between us, which is nice. I can put my laptop bag there (I don’t know why I brought my laptop, I have no idea if my grandfather is even aware of the existence of the internet), and have room in front of my own seat to stretch my legs. Across the aisle from me is a clean-looking guy with dark rimmed glasses and business pants. Another empty seat, and then the girl. She’s listening to an iPod and committing a lot of herself to scribbling furiously in a notebook full of yellowish unlined paper. She’s on her second pen now. A lock of hair keeps falling in front of her face which I imagine must be rather frustrating.

Having said all of this, I believe it’s important to note that I am not some hyper-observant creepy guy. I just get bored on planes quite easily. I can’t sleep and I’m forced to read or write or pretend to work on expert-level Sudokus. I’ve got my iPod on, lasting emo-rock from five years ago at a low murmur. All-American Rejects, Dashboard confessional, and some newer Jack’s Mannequin pay at the same volume as the cycling air conditioning system and the muted engines. I should point out that I enjoy flying immensely. I enjoy travel, and the feeling that accompanies watching the ground below sink into indistinguishable flecks of color. I like the transient in-between feeling I get at airports. I like to watch the baggage checkers and the TSA screeners do their things, seemingly numbed to the awe-inspiring concept of such expedited global connection. Of course, I am numbed much in the same way. I have to sit down and think about it before I realize how large and awesome we as humans have become; where we can hop on a plane and be thousands of miles away in just a few hours. But that’s the way with things. We grow comfortable with new ideas. I suppose this is good. If it wasn’t for eventual complacency, if we were continually amazed at our own inventiveness, at our own capacity for engineering our own miracles, we would grow stagnant, we would lose our desire to replace and reinvent.

Everyone tells me I should write. That’s what they tell me. “Andrew,” they say, in a tone that conveys authoritative guidance (occasionally bordering on patronizing), “You really have a gift. You should write.” I should write. I should write. I should write…what? There are moments where I enjoy writing, moments where the exhilarating feeling of being able to articulate your thoughts and emotions in a way that makes them accessible to everyone and anyone sweeps over me and I fall prey to notion of Romantic or transcendental thought. This seldom happens when I am writing something for class, and I seldom write anything outside of class, so I seldom experience this feeling. I’m not sure if I feel it right now, but I do know that my hand is cramping up, so I’m going to stop for now.

Now I’m on my flight to Eugene. The plane from Salt Lake City to Eugene was apparently delayed and then its engines broke and then they had to reroute another plane from Reno. So it ended up being about two hours late. However, I don’t think the time was wasted, because I got the chance to try out a new Odwalla drink, which is always an exciting experience for me.

I am sitting next to the girl I mentioned earlier. She sat down next to me as we were both waiting for the plane. Apparently we’re both headed to Eugene. We started talking. We’re still talking.

The Radical Middle Pt. 2

The Radical Middle love their guns. Boy, oh boy, do they love their guns. The Radical Middle hold the 2nd Amendment up on a pedestal, a tribute to the radical liberties that our Revolutionary government pioneered in the face of overwhelming tyrannies. A government granting their citizens the right to own their own weapons was seen as the fortifying element of an American government run by the people of America and not by an elevated bureaucracy.

What has this resulted in? It's resulted in the Radical Middle's resentment in every limitation imposed by the Federal Government on gun ownership. They have resented the restriction of magazine sizes, the ban on assault weapons, and the limitation on where we as citizens can fire our guns. They believe that they have the right to use their guns to defend themselves, their property, and their loved ones. They believe that the Constitution grants them the right to own guns as a safeguard against the government, sort of a self-check system which, when it reaches critical mass will result in a complete overhaul and renovation. These people believe that our government, as it stands currently, is fast approaching this state, where they will be not only able to, but obligated to overthrow our government and replace it with one by the people.

Notions of government overhaul are as old as time. History will tell how the cycle of revolution, development, prosperity, degradation, and, finally, revolution again, runs.

to be continued>>>

The Radical Middle

I, like many Americans, was both excited and relieved last Tuesday when Barack Obama was elected president over John McCain. I could tell you why, but I think that there is already enough rhetoric out there from both sides and there is little I can accomplish from adding to it. I will say that I appreciated both Obama's acceptance speech and John McCain's concession speech and feel that if America as a nation can accomplish this election peacefully its a testament to our strength as a nation and the merits of our democratic political system.

But I'm not here to talk about the election (Probably the most efficient way to grab attention in the blogosphere right now). I'm here to talk about The Radical Middle. When I say the Radical Middle I do not mean it in an oxymoronic fashion. I am not talking about moderates, or independents. I'm talking about people from America's middle. The mid West, the upper Great Lake Region, and of course, Texas. Anyone who has looked at that popular NYT graph showing democratic voting tendencies has observed what I am about to critique: the increased democratic leanings of America. From the West Coast to the East Coast states voted bluer in 2008 than ever before. You can read this evidence in several ways to make several conclusion based on several political stances. However, I was more concerned with the smudge of red in the middle. This election did not bring together the country in the way either candidate promised (although now Barack Obama is in a prime position to do so). It has had the effect of polarizing the voting base, 70% one way, and 30% the other.

After the election I made my weekly round of blogs and political sites. There were plenty of stories and entries detailing the democratic revolution or writing the GOP's obituary. I dismissed this as mere partisan adrenaline, venting excess excitement after the cataclysmic events of last week. What caught my attention was the blog of a friend I met online several years ago. I have known him (or her for all I know, although it should be noted that he doesn't strike me as the kind of person to lie about something like that) for over 7 years, and we were originally brought together my our mutual love of writing. He is committed to his anonymity, and maintains a blog which reveals little about himself or where he comes from. I, however, have come to learn several things about him in the many years I have known him, including the following: he is three or four years older than I and he lives somewhere in Northen-Central America, probably in the Western Great Lakes Region. For several years we shared our opinions on various things, ranging from music, to writing, to water guns and potato cannons. Two years ago, I started this blog and very soon after that, he provided me with the link to his. I saw this as a great opportunity to get to know him outside of web-forums (from which, at the point, I was slowly drifting away and now have completely detached myself). I have realized only within the span of the past year or so his political leanings, which can be best described as radical libertarianism. He is a staunch supporter of gun rights, freedom from taxes, and appears to me to be a stern believer in the destruction of all things Federal.

It is worthy to note that he is unlike any radical libertarian I ever met (which is interesting considering I have never met him). He is articulate to an extraordinary degree, and from what I have read of his work (consisting of several short novels, some short stories, and collections of essays) he is able to express himself through the written word in an aggressive, eloquent, and above all influential way. I would venture to say that if we as humans are destined for one thing, he would be compelled to be a writer of intense and inspiring condition.

So when he writes from a position of radical conservatism, it is not without a sense of eloquence and thought. His arguments take upon themselves a grace of movement; each portion of his work seamlessly integrating with the next. His work also seems to take upon itself a matter or prophetic self realization, setting ultimatums for America that must be broken in order to feed the fire of his work. In so doing he has created a portal into a rare and often ignored segment of the American populace; The Articulate Radical Middle.

Hearing this term would cause much anger among the radical middle blogosphere, although ironically it is their own actions that continue to perpetuate the stigma of an articulate radical front. I will here implement the tools of an anthropological researcher (which I believe may be good preparation for cognitive anthropological research I will be conducting within my major next semester) in the hopes of distinguishing the character of this section of the American populace and analyzing there place in the changing dynamic of American society that was, if not initiated by, than definitely alluded to in the last election. This assessment is not based on exhaustive observation and I hold no doubts that it will contain several elements of speculation. Often times this speculation will be conducted through the lens of a liberal mindset, although I will actively work to reduce the effect of this on my writing. My primary goal in conducting this assessment is to provide some foundation from which an explanation for the political stance and social motivations of such people as my friend from America (taken here in the most profound sense) can be based.

The Radical Middle exists without a time machine, something that they seem perpetually disturbed by. They appear to view time as a malignant agent, that the change that has been brought by ravishing forces of time has created an erosion of American values. They have seen the disastrous effects of war and governmental changes and wish now for nothing more than a return to the time of the American revolution, when the values of independence and personal freedoms were able to stand in the face of tyranny and overwhelming economic, political, and military might. When an army of slaves defeated an army of masters. They have taken this time period and assigned it a place in the psyche most normally reserved for matters of religious reverence. And why not? What did the term "manifest destiny" mean if not "by god"? Were we as a people not destined to expand to cover this continent from east to west, from forest to plain, from mountain to valley and in the process create a new land, free from the turmoils of Europe and free of the oppressions of traditional government? To forge a new government by the people and for the people? This is an idea that most anyone can identify with, it is this "American" idea of nationalism that has pervaded the very essence of our national being. This is what it means to be an American at the very core level. This is what the Radical Middle believes.

The Radical Middle believes that the forces of time and such evil institutions as globalization have weakened our ability to defend our rights domestically. We have stretched ourselves too thin, put our fingers into too many cookie jars and int he process have run into a dilemma. As our businesses opened in Moscow and Beijing and as our military defended South American airbases, we were no longer able to successfully maintain our traditional Revolutionary government. The government by the people and for the people ceased to be and in its place sprang up a new and terrifying replacement. Based on the ideals of old European imperialism, our new government sought hegemonic authority over personal liberty, sought international power over the stabilization and maintenance of the will of the people at home. As a result of this our government grew, bloated in on itself, would collapse under it's own weight if it wasn't held up by the struts of new taxes, new institutions, and larger more centralized authority. Drawing from the hardworking middle class, America transformed hard earned incomes into federal revenue and used this money not for domestic revitalization but to secure interests abroad. The American government of today is not the same government that existed during the revolutionary war. It now resembles the very same British Empire we strove to secure our freedom from back in the 1700s. Understanding and realizing this transformation is key to understanding the views of the Radical Middle. America is not the same now as it was before, and it is up to us as a people to make our government ours again.

It is important to note now how this mentality has effected the cultural and civil activity patterns of The Radical Middle. Fast becoming an anachronism, they strive to keep themselves as separate from the Federal government as they can. What does this result in? Lower faith in the effectiveness of government reduces voting rates among The Radical Middle. Lower faith in the effective implementation of tax programs increases tax evasion and other related crimes. Increased emphasis on personal protection results in increased firearms felonies. The general observable trend is decreased active participation in government in lieu of personal isolationist strategy coupled with increased criminal activity. However, it is important to note that The Radical Middle rarely conflicts with other members of society, because they often isolate themselves into population areas of shared interest.

At this point it becomes necessary to describe the revolutionary path of The Radical Middle. This program of social and political rehabilitation involves a dramatic reshaping of American politics, stripping away superfluous agencies and governmental organizations until the only thing that is left is that same revolutionary government that stood at the conclusion of the war for independence.

to be continued>>>

The Human

So, college is off to a pretty good start. I'm about a month and a half into it, and the semester is already halfway over. When I started taking midterms a few weeks ago I was a little freaked out. However, my distress was soon replaced by wonderful feeling of pride as I got an A+ on a political science exam. My classes are hard, but not so hard that I don't see a chance of making them harder for myself next semester. And I've found myself doing work at odd hours of the day. This is quite unusual for me who all through high school was accustomed to finishing projects and assignments the night before. I'm not sure if I've been swept up by the spirit of college level academia, but I do know that I'm learning things now that I really enjoy instead of learning things with a sort of resentment.

And my learning hasn't been restricted to the classroom. I've joined a number of clubs and activities. I was in the library the other day, putting the finishing touches on a project for one club when I stumbled upon a really old Anatomy textbook. It had been sitting on the table that I was working at and during periods of writer's block (roughyl every two minutes or so), I would flip open the book and learn something about some odd part of the body. I found it absolutely fascinating, to the point where I checked out the book on my way out. Due to some strange alignment of the planets I have gotten into the honors program here at my university. One of the strange advantages of being in this program is the ability to check out books for extended periods of time. So now I have an anatomy book until April.

Thoughts on Music

I've got two songs for you, my lovely readers, today. The first is one I hope you're very familiar with. By this time, I have probably mentioned Death Cab for Cutie a few hundred times. In case you missed those, let me tell you now that they are my favorite band, and quite possibly the second best thing in the world, after watching eating hot tomato soup while watching a Globe Trekker marathon while you stay home from school during the seventh grade. This song is Soul Meets Body, the first song I ever listened to by Death Cab. And while I may listen to Death Cab constantly during normal periods of my life, this song has particular resonance with me now, as next weekend I journey to another concert with my little brother. Needless to say, I'm pretty excited. The second song is one I've been listening to non-stop for the past week or so. It's titled "Sinnerman" by Nina Simone. There's a good chance that you've have heard some version of it by this point in your life. It's an older song, but one of the few I've ever listened to that has taken me back in time for the duration of the song. I find it simply terrific.

Red Eye

I want to take you where the sun shines in glistening waves
Where light from the sky mixes with the air
in new and enlightening ways

Far from here where the sounds of trains and cars
sound distant like a memory

This place despite judgements past and present
exists in a sense most real
for in my mind I can't help but sense
the glistening shimmering fields

Natural Selection

One week ago I found myself surfing the internet, doing a little bit of searching on Wikipedia. I think you know the kind I'm talking about. The kind where you start by searching something possibly related in some way to something in your life, perhaps an assignment in class or a subject brought up in conversation. As you read the article on this first topic you click a link to something else you find interesting. For example, I might be researching the Segway personal transporter (something I do far too often for my own good), as I might click a link to learn more about electric motors. From the page I'll link to something about the physics of electricity, and then onto a page describing the life and times of British scientist William Sturgeon and so on and so forth until I wind up at a page describing platform screen doors and learning how they prevent suicides. In this way I hop from one subject to another, never staying long enough to learn anything substantial but covering enough topics to get me past the first few rounds of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? Is that show even still around? Wait, yes it is. If you haven't already discovered this for yourself, you've no doubt discovered just how fun such a process can be, like six degrees from Kevin Bacon except with things that matter slightly more.

Thoughts on McCain/Palin

They're actually not my thoughts at all, but I thought that this NYT article summed it up pretty well. And while at that moment I may be slightly too tired to articulate my own opinions, it doesn't mean that my lovely constituent of readers should deny themselves access to an educated (if slightly partisan) opinions on the matter.

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/07/opinion/07rich.html?_r=2&ref=opinion&oref=slogin&oref=slogin
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Palin and McCain’s Shotgun Marriage

By FRANK RICH

Published: September 6, 2008

SARAH PALIN makes John McCain look even older than he is. And he seemed more than willing to play that part on Thursday night. By the time he slogged through his nearly 50-minute acceptance speech — longer even than Barack Obama’s — you half-expected some brazen younger Republican (Mitt Romney, perhaps?) to dash onstage to give him a gold watch and the bum’s rush.

Still, attention must be paid. McCain’s address, though largely a repetitive slew of stump-speech lines and worn G.O.P. orthodoxy, reminded us of what we once liked about the guy: his aspirations to bipartisanship, his heroic service in Vietnam, his twinkle. He took his (often inaccurate) swipes at Obama, but, in winning contrast to Palin and Rudy Giuliani, he wasn’t smug or nasty.

The only problem, of course, is that the entire thing was a sham.

As is nakedly evident, the speech’s central argument, that the 72-year-old McCain will magically morph into a powerful change agent as president, is a non sequitur. In his 26 years in Washington, most of it with a Republican in the White House and roughly half of it with Republicans in charge of Congress, he was better at lecturing his party about reform than leading a reform movement. G.O.P. corruption and governmental dysfunction only grew. So did his cynical flip-flops on the most destructive policies of the president who remained nameless Thursday night. (In the G.O.P., Bush love is now the second most popular love that dare not speak its name.)

Even more fraudulent, if that’s possible, is the contrast between McCain’s platonic presentation of his personal code of honor and the man he has become. He always puts his country first, he told us: “I’ve been called a maverick.” If there was any doubt that that McCain has fled, confirmation arrived with his last-minute embrace of Sarah Palin.

We still don’t know a lot about Palin except that she’s better at delivering a speech than McCain and that she defends her own pregnant daughter’s right to privacy even as she would have the government intrude to police the reproductive choices of all other women. Most of the rest of the biography supplied by her and the McCain camp is fiction.

She didn’t say “no thanks” to the “Bridge to Nowhere” until after Congress had already abandoned it but given Alaska a blank check for $223 million in taxpayers’ money anyway. Far from rejecting federal pork, she hired lobbyists to secure her town a disproportionate share of earmarks ($1,000 per resident in 2002, 20 times the per capita average in other states). Though McCain claimed “she has had national security as one of her primary responsibilities,” she has never issued a single command as head of the Alaska National Guard. As for her “executive experience” as mayor, she told her hometown paper in Wasilla, Alaska, in 1996, the year of her election: “It’s not rocket science. It’s $6 million and 53 employees.” Her much-advertised crusade against officials abusing their office is now compromised by a bipartisan ethics investigation into charges that she did the same.

How long before we learn she never shot a moose?

Given the actuarial odds that could make Palin our 45th president, it would be helpful to know who this mystery woman actually is. Meanwhile, two eternal axioms of our politics remain in place. Americans vote for the top of the ticket, not the bottom. And in judging the top of the ticket, voters look first at the candidates’ maiden executive decision, their selection of running mates. Whatever we do and don’t know about Palin’s character at this point, there is no ambiguity in what her ascent tells us about McCain’s character and potential presidency.

He wanted to choose the pro-abortion-rights Joe Lieberman as his vice president. If he were still a true maverick, he would have done so. But instead he chose partisanship and politics over country. “God only made one John McCain, and he is his own man,” said the shafted Lieberman in his own tedious convention speech last week. What a pathetic dupe. McCain is now the man of James Dobson and Tony Perkins. The “no surrender” warrior surrendered to the agents of intolerance not just by dumping his pal for Palin but by moving so far to the right on abortion that even Cindy McCain seemed unaware of his radical shift when being interviewed by Katie Couric last week.

That ideological sellout, unfortunately, was not the worst leadership trait the last-minute vice presidential pick revealed about McCain. His speed-dating of Palin reaffirmed a more dangerous personality tic that has dogged his entire career. His decision-making process is impetuous and, in its Bush-like preference for gut instinct over facts, potentially reckless.

As The New York Times reported last Tuesday, Palin was sloppily vetted, at best. McCain operatives and some of their press surrogates responded to this revelation by trying to discredit The Times article. After all, The Washington Post had cited McCain aides (including his campaign manager, Rick Davis) last weekend to assure us that Palin had a “full vetting process.” She had been subjected to “an F.B.I. background check,” we were told, and “the McCain camp had reviewed everything it could find on her.”

The Times had it right. The McCain campaign’s claims of a “full vetting process” for Palin were as much a lie as the biographical details they’ve invented for her. There was no F.B.I. background check. The Times found no evidence that a McCain representative spoke to anyone in the State Legislature or business community. Nor did anyone talk to the fired state public safety commissioner at the center of the Palin ethics investigation. No McCain researcher even bothered to consult the relevant back issues of the Wasilla paper. Apparently when McCain said in June that his vice presidential vetting process was basically “a Google,” he wasn’t joking.

This is a roll of the dice beyond even Bill Clinton’s imagination. “Often my haste is a mistake,” McCain conceded in his 2002 memoir, “but I live with the consequences without complaint.” Well, maybe it’s fine if he wants to live with the consequences, but what about his country? Should the unexamined Palin prove unfit to serve at the pinnacle of American power, it will be too late for the rest of us to complain.

We’ve already seen where such visceral decision-making by McCain can lead. In October 2001, he speculated that Saddam Hussein might have been behind the anthrax attacks in America. That same month he out-Cheneyed Cheney in his repeated public insistence that Iraq had a role in 9/11 — even after both American and foreign intelligence services found that unlikely. He was similarly rash in his reading of the supposed evidence of Saddam’s W.M.D. and in his estimate of the number of troops needed to occupy Iraq. (McCain told MSNBC in late 2001 that we could do with fewer than 100,000.) It wasn’t until months after “Mission Accomplished” that he called for more American forces to be tossed into the bloodbath. The whole fiasco might have been prevented had he listened to those like Gen. Eric Shinseki who faulted the Rumsfeld war plan from the start.

In other words, McCain’s hasty vetting of Palin was all too reminiscent of his grave dereliction of due diligence on the war. He has been no less hasty in implying that we might somehow ride to the military rescue of Georgia (“Today, we are all Georgians”) or in reaffirming as late as December 2007 that the crumbling anti-democratic regime of Pervez Musharraf deserved “the benefit of the doubt” even as it was enabling the resurgence of the Taliban and Al Qaeda. McCain’s blanket endorsement of Bush administration policy in Pakistan could have consequences for years to come.

“This election is not about issues” so much as the candidates’ images, said the McCain campaign manager, Davis, in one of the season’s most notable pronouncements. Going into the Republican convention, we thought we knew what he meant: the McCain strategy is about tearing down Obama. But last week made clear that the McCain campaign will be equally ruthless about deflecting attention from its own candidate’s deterioration.

What was most striking about McCain’s acceptance speech is that it had almost nothing in common with the strident right-wing convention that preceded it. We were pointedly given a rerun of McCain 2000 — cobbled together from scraps of the old Straight Talk repertory. The ensuing tedium was in all likelihood intentional. It’s in the campaign’s interest that we nod off and assume McCain is unchanged in 2008.

That’s why the Palin choice was brilliant politics — not because it rallied the G.O.P.’s shrinking religious-right base. America loves nothing more than a new celebrity face, and the talking heads marched in lock step last week to proclaim her a star. Palin is a high-energy distraction from the top of the ticket, even if the provenance of her stardom is in itself a reflection of exactly what’s frightening about the top of the ticket.

By hurling charges of sexism and elitism at any easily cowed journalist who raises a question about Palin, McCain operatives are hoping to ensure that whatever happened in Alaska with Sarah Palin stays in Alaska. Given how little vetting McCain himself has received this year — and that only 58 days remain until Nov. 4 — they just might pull it off.

Unusual Findings Pt.1

Hey folks. I know updates have been a bit sparse, but fear not. I've got a post coming up (hopefully by the end of next week), that I've put quite a deal of thought into. And by "quite a bit", I of course mean very little at all. But I am proud of myself for the little bit of mental energy that I did invest. I think you might be pleasantly surprised as well.

In other news, college is going great.

My College Life Pt. 1

You guessed it. Yesterday marked the first day of my exciting college career as I packed my life into my dad's Jeep and made the two hour trip up to my favorite state university. And contrary to what the image above might suggest, I've actually found my college experience so far to be fairly enjoyable. My room turned out to be a bit larger than I thought it would be, by roommate Hank is neither a psychopath or a recluse, but instead is a really smart and fun guy, and I've yet to suffer alcohol poisoning. But Andrew, you might say, isn't it a bit early to be making these conclusions? Yes, I suppose, none of the things above may remain true for very long, but for the time being they are and I'm enjoying it.

My IMAX Experience

As my summer winds down, a startling fact has made itself evident: my employment at the aquarium is close to over. In two weeks I will pack my life into a variety of brightly colored bags and embark upon the next step of my collegiate experience. While this job has provided its share of stress, it has also helped me to figure out some things about myself. Some examples include:

1) Dealing with people is easier when you don't have to deal with like 10 billion of them.
2) Chaperones are utterly incompetent. It's just their nature.
3) When dealing with money, its best to feel absolutely paranoid and insecure at all times, to save yourself the trouble at the end of the day.

However, I think amongst all of the things I learned, one stands above all the rest:

Call of Duty 4 is a hella fun on IMAX.

That's right folks, yours truly got the chance to battle it out in an epic showdown with four of his compatriots after work one quiet Wednesday a week ago. This experience was without a doubt, the most awe-inspiring thing I have seen since the Grand Canyon (and even that seemed to lack something in the masculinity department). The person who got all of this started was our fun loving projectionist Dave who, between sky diving trips, managed to convince the aquarium administration to let him hook up an Xbox 360 to the smaller projector in the IMAX theater. When I say smaller, I mean in the sense that it does not fill up the entire screen. Rest assured however, that when I calculated the square footage of the screen we were playing on, I found it to be comfortably larger than, say, any of the Baltic states.

A minor problem with this setup is that the game is also wired through the theater's 10 channel sound system that sounds as if its powered by that big glowy thing that Han Solo blew up inside the Death Star in Return of the Jedi. However, and I think any guy between the ages of 12 and 30 will agree with me, punctured ear drums is a small price to pay for such an ridiculously fun experience.

We hope to play again this week, maybe I can get some video. Updates to come.

Prelude

I'm aware of the lack of updates to this blog this summer, and while I might try to explain them away by citing my increased work schedule or college preparation, the only real reason I can think of is a distinct lack of creative will. I've had plenty of inspiration, perhaps even more so than I experienced during the school year. Everyday at work, or on the train commuting to and from work, I have been witness to some of the most astounding examples of humanity. I mean that in the least profoundly stereotypical sense. I mean real people, people who I otherwise would have looked right through. Sitting on the 8:29 local train to New York every morning has forced me to take into consideration the people around me, if even on the most superfluous of levels. When I'm not lost in a book, or attempting to shake of the wispy fog of sleep, I have found creative refuge in the people around me, forcing my imagination to make the time pass. It's shown me that, despite what I may have thought, it's been awhile since I have really used my imagination that way. I'm talking about the old school, looking-at-people-and-inventing-their-life-stories-in-your-mind kind of way. And it's captivating, and darkly comic; providing what would normally be considered prime material with which to write about. So why haven't I taken such great inspiration and transposed it here?

I suppose the answer to that question would be found in the same place I'd find the answer to a lot of questions I've been asking myself lately, like: Why am I not as prone to argument anymore? Why am I not as sarcastic as I used to be? And, perhaps most disturbing: When was the last time I had a really good conversation?

Sitting here and thinking about those questions has provide me with a jolt of sorts, awaking in me a refreshed need to express myself.

Memoirs of a Human Looking at the Sky Pt. 2

When the boy woke up the following morning, the first thing he did was pull on a pair of pants, pull the medal out from underneath his pillow where he hid it last night, and drop it deep into his pocket. He thought for a second. The ninjas hadn’t snuck in last night and stolen his medal. He fished it out of his pocket and studied it. It looked real; it’s sleek silver finish reflecting the yellow early morning light. The child ruled out the possibility that they had replaced the medal with a duplicate. In fact, he was beginning to doubt that he had seen any ninjas last night at all. He returned the medal to his pocket, ate breakfast, got his drawing pad, and left for the hill.

School had let out a while ago, and it was an exceptionally beautiful summer. By far the most beautiful the boy and ever seen. Although he was young, he was not too young to appreciate the golden sun, radiant warmth, and the blue sky. The sky was what interested this boy the most, and he spent a lot of his time each day fascinated by it. When he got to the hill, he smiled. There was no one else around. The hill was secluded, separated from the park by a stretch of tall, thick pine trees. The hill overlooked the river, a wide powerful current, which separated the land that the boy was familiar with, from the Beyond.

The Beyond had always fascinated the boy. He had flown over it in large planes with his family. He knew that other people lived in the Beyond. In fact, the Beyond had an actual name, the boy just chose to think of it the way he thought of it. The Beyond was fairly vast, a huge expanse of hills and valleys. Smatters of forest spread throughout the Beyond, and in the far distance lay the Mountains. They were grand jagged peaks of dark rock. At their base giant forest of trees covered the ground, however at this distance it just looked like smudges of green. At their peaks, snow gave the allusion of a white blanket covering the ground.

He loved the Beyond, he loved the Mountains, but, as I explained earlier, he loved the sky the most. Blue beyond comprehension, it baffled the child. Looking at it on a cloudless day it almost seemed like an optical illusion. It seemed two-dimensional as if a giant can of impossibly blue paint had been spilled across an expanse of paper. However, when clouds dotted the sky, there was no mistaking the depth of it. It seemed to go on forever, a vast expanse of blue. The clouds were enormous, humongous and white. They curved in and out, stretched thin in some places, and bunched up as thick as a mountain in other places. The boy’s father has explained to him the nature of clouds. How they are formed, and the different types. The boy’s first plane ride had been a bit of a killjoy. Despite the obvious excitement of being in a flying piece of metal, the boy was disappointed to see that the sky was still above you, and that when you flew through a cloud, you could hardly notice the thin wisps of fog comprising it.

However, the boy had long since decided that above where the planes flew lay the sky as he observed it. A great expanse of blue with giant mountains of clouds. An endless expanse.

<>
>I read your book, Mr. Shwang.
>You did?
>Yes. Dreams of Our World, Our Perspective, Our Fellow Humans, and Our Imagination.
>How did you like the section on tax evasion?
>I found it enjoyable and quite insightful. However, that wasn’t the section that interested me the most.
>Took me months of research.
>What?
>The section on tax evasion.
>Oh yes. Listen, I was more interested in the section you wrote on the creative development of children. How children learnt to see the world.
>Yes?
>Well, a recent series of events in the government has led to the creation of a sub-division inside of the SAFE. It’s called the DCC, or Department of Creative Control.
>Okay…
>Although I’m technically a secret agent, I think it’s right to be truthful with people, so I’m going to be frank with you. The purpose of the DCC is to attempt to control the creative processes of our nation’s children in hopes of making all of our citizens obedient and law abiding, whilst at the same time repressing any notion of individuality to create a conformist streamlined population of human drones.
>Sounds good.
>Wait, what? You’re okay with this plan? Most people object completely.
>Sounds okay to me. Law abiding, obedient citizens. Sounds like a swell plan.
>Oh…okay. Okay then. Great! Fantastic! I’m so glad that you’re okay with it.
>Where do I come in?
>Well, this is where we need you…
<>

Thoughts on Beautiful Mornings

You can always tell that a day is going to go well when you start it off with a great morning. Now, I should clarify something: I am definitely a morning person, at least compared to both people my age. What I mean by that is that I am capable of not only waking up before 12 o'clock on a weekday, but I am also capably of doing other things within minutes of waking up including, but not limited to: getting out of bed, getting dressed, and feeding myself. These are things that would ordinarily consume roughly an hour or so of a normal teenagers immediate post-wake up time. However, I'm able to do it all in almost half that time.

Now, I don't mean to brag, although by this point I'm not going to make any excuses for my superiority complex. For me, mornings are extremely special. Because I tend to get up a bit earlier than most people (to walk my dog, Killer), mornings tend to be a very quiet and relaxing time. Occasionally I will find myself engaging in some serious reflection which is good. I think our modern society discourages taking time out to reflect and relax and while I am in no way advocating a nomadic, vagabond(ic?), hemp-filled lifestyle, I definitely believe that taking a few minutes off each day to do absolutely nothing but think is extremely important.

An important thing to realize at this point in my story is that I live in the Northeast. When most people think of the Northeast, they tend to think of really cold winters, rough fishermen, or (and this one if the most ridiculous of all for some very obvious reasons) New York City. However, what many people don't know is that during the summer, the lovely region of New England turns into Hell. The temperatures goes through the roof and accompanying the temperature is something that many people in the West are acquainted with: humidity. The humidity in my quaint New England town during the summer will occasionally reach levels that render most brain functions completely useless, and you start to perform the mental equivalent of a fish flopping around on dry land. The humidity is, in my humble opinion, quite a bit worse than the temperature.

Now normally, the morning provides something of a respite from the scorching heat and humidity. Often though, rolling out of bed from an air conditioned room and going outside to walk Killer is a pretty terrible experience and I have to prepare myself for it with rigorous and methodical mental training.

This morning however, proved different. When I opened our door and allowed Killer to perform her daily attempt to rip my arm from its socket via strenuous pulling on the leash, I realized that not only was the morning cool and clear with temperatures in the low 60's, but that there was virtually no humidity. Feeling my skin dry against the air was quite possibly the best feeling I've had since summer began (which isn't to say that my summer has been bad, just that I really enjoyed the weather this morning). There was a slight breeze, and bright sunshine. To top off this truly fantastic morning, the bugs that usually swarm around anything living were nowhere to be found. As a special treat to both myself and my dog, I embarked on an extra long walk this morning. I think we both deserved it.

Memoirs of a Human Looking at the Sky Pt. 1

I said I wouldn't post anything today, but I felt like a small piece of writing would be a good way to end June and provide a transition to July. This is very old, from a few years ago. I thought up the general plot on my way home from school one day and never got around to fleshing out more than a few pages. I'll post the short story in segments, probably three or four total. Who knows, this might even motivate me to write up a rough ending for it.

Memoirs of a Human Looking at the Sky
Written by Andrew DeCoster
3/8/2006

The ninjas first attacked the boy the night he won his regional car design contest. Perhaps “attack” is not the correct word. “Observed” or “encountered” might be more suitable. They were obviously ninjas, what else could they be? There were four of them in all, clothed in black ninja suits, with billowing pants tucked into small black boots. They had their faces wrapped in back cloth, with only a slit of an opening for their eyes to peer out. On their backs, they carried ninja swords, short and sharp little one-handed swords used for stabbing mostly. The boy noticed them the moment he got out of the back seat of his mother’s car. They were there, waiting on the roof of his house, a bit hard to spot against the pitch-black night. However the boy saw them right away. They were not very good ninjas.

The boy had just returned from a design contest. He had won second place, a very reasonable spot among almost fifty other kids his age. Being young, his design wasn’t extraordinary. It did however possess a certain style to it, and his drawing skill helped to fill the gaps where his imagination left off. The car was a boxy little four-seater. He drew it using some brand new pencils fresh from the box. He had actually just drawn it that afternoon, although he had applied to the contest almost a week earlier. The small silver medal he had won was tucked deep inside of his jacket pocket, so no one would see it, and perhaps in a fit of jealousy take it. The boy was going to wait until after he was safe inside of his bed before examining his new object. However, now that the ninja’s had shown up, he began to panic. They were obviously there to take the medal from him. Any reasonable person would try to, the boy reasoned. It was shiny.

However the ninjas didn’t attempt to take his medal. In fact they didn’t move at all. They just watched him and fidgeted around on the roof. His mother, for some reason, didn’t notice the ninjas on top of the roof, and ushered the child inside before he could alert her to their presence. However, once he was inside he decided that she didn’t need to know. The ninjas didn’t seem to be attacking. Perhaps they were just taking a break on a cross-country roof-to-roof journey. The boy laughed quietly to himself. He wasn’t truly afraid of the ninjas. In fact, seeing them up there, fidgeting around, looking uncomfortable, and looking at each other, he sensed that they were the one’s afraid of him. He drank some water, took a shower, and went to bed.

<>
>>TO: NormShwang576@united.net
>>FROM: UltraSecretMan22@government.gov
>>RE: Job Opportunity

>Mr. Shwang?
>That’s me.
>Hello, this is Mr. Blank.
>Oh. That’s a nice name.
>Thanks, although it is not my real name.
>What do you mean?
>I work for the SAFE, a branch of the government.
>SAFE?
>It stands for Secret Agent Intelligence Force.
>Wouldn’t that spell SAIF?
>Well…yes, but SAIF is not a word.
>Yeah, you’re right.
>I have a proposal for you, Mr. Shwang. A job proposal.
>I’m all ears.
>Fantastic, listen carefully…
<>

Thoughts on Les Pauls/City of Angels/End of June

Alright people, prepare yourselves. This is a triple feature post, containing my thoughts (in varying degrees of linguistic competence; it is 11:00 at night) on three distinct topics of conversation, blended with a requisite amount of useless banter and sarcastic rhetoric. First off I'd like to formally bid adieu to the month of June. Tonight is not the last night but I do not plan on posting anything tomorrow, so I'll say it now. Goodbye June. Thank you for all the memories. Thank you for delivering me safely from the clutches of high school. Thank you for showering me with moist air and really ill-scheduled thunderstorms. Most of all, thank you for giving me some time to breath during this big transition. I'd also like to note that during June I was successful in evading many of the nostalgia laden emotional roller coasters that I witnessed many of my fellow friends and classmates embark upon without much in the way of grace or poise.

June has also proven itself to be a time of strengthening friendships. I've found myself growing closer to some people than I would have expected. I've also found myself finding new potential friendships amongst my future classmates in college. More than anything, I've found myself struggling with how to describe the aforementioned experiences without coming across as effeminate.

Image is something I have worried about quite in my life, to an extent that I am now realizing may have been excessive. This is something that I have been pleasantly surprised to find has changed. As I go into the summer before my first year of college I have not worried much at all about how people will perceive me. Instead, I've found myself focusing almost exclusively on the academic and personal ramifications of the decisions I will be making, and how they will affect my future. If I can say one thing about high school, I suppose it would be that it has taught me that the social circles we run in can be laughably obscure and that the only thing we have control over truly is the kind of people we associate with. I can honestly say that I am quite content with my circle of friends, and I wouldn't have it any other way.

Alright, onto a plane of discussion that is hopefully more ripe for sarcasm...


Two days ago my mother and brother left for California, on a trip to visit friends and family. I stayed behind, in order to continue working. The end result is that I have the house to myself, along with the car, and a significant amount of food. While this may strike you as the essentials for any teenager, I have found myself quite baffled at the lack of something I can now attribute solely to the presence of my family. The human element, though quite imperceptible while in abundance, has, in its absence, left my house in a slightly disoriented state. Everything is quiet. The house seems at least twice as large as it usually does. And while I have not spent much time here over the past two days, due to work, I can't help but expect my mother or brother to burst through the door at any point, home from work or school. I can't say that I'm not enjoying my time alone. It has given me room to decompress, and push the envelope of my independence. It just feels strange not having people to live with.

I'd like to clarify the previous statement. There is another occupant in my house besides myself. Loyal readers of my blog, you should know her well by know: that's right, its Killer, my loyal canine and occasional pal. She is steadfast and noble, holding the house securely until I arrive in the evening from work at which point she demands to be taken out, played with, petted, and sung to. That is, unless there is a thunderstorm afoot, in which case her usual stoic and attentive demeanor is reduced to a shivering, whimpering pile of fur curled at my feet. Quite pathetic.

However, nothing helps you get through bad weather like a good movie. Being a man, I opted for something that would inspire feelings of testosterone and male initiative. I opted for City of Angels, everyone's favorite epic romance from 1998. I wish I could tell you I was joking right now, but the truth is I love that movie. I usually end up watching it only once a year, and I guess I filled my quota for 2008 (along with my quota for crying during the climax).

If you've never seen City of Angels go rent it right now. Watch it by yourself, and comment in reply to this thread with your thoughts. I think you'll agree with me that is really quite fantastic.

In addition to watching sad romance movies, there is one other thing I like to do when I'm feeling lonely or disjointed: music. If you don't know, I play both guitar and piano and sing when no one else is around. Music is a very important part of my life, up there with waffles and the battery life of my laptop. I play mostly acoustic guitar because it fits the kind of music I listen to, and I can play it by myself with minimal fuss or cables/amps. However, today I went to a local Guitar Center with my dad. In the process of explaining to him how guitars work, I stumbled across a used Epiphone Les Paul. Anyone who knows anything about guitars knows that the Les Paul is a model of electric guitar made by Gibson. It is quite possibly the most renowned model of guitar along with the Fender Stratocaster. Epiphone makes extremely good replicas of Gibson guitars, because they are a subsidiary of Gibson.

The guitar was a little worse for wear. Some of the frets had been sanded for a rough finish. There were some nicks and scratches on the back, and one of the pickups seemed suspiciously loose. However, for the price, I couldn't ask for anything better. It was coated in a beautiful cherry sunburst varnish and seemed to glow from the rack. I picked it up and it felt simply amazing. After plugging it in and playing with the tuning I decided I was going to buy it and share it with my mom (who is lacking a good guitar at the moment). After bringing it home, cleaning it, re-tuning it, and adjusting the action, I couldn't be happier. The guitar has an awesome, clean tone that comes across great even on my tiny amp. It's perfect for the same riffs I'd play on my acoustic, and also more aggressive chord patterns. All in all, I'd say buying a guitar is a good way to end any day, and it hardly put a dent in my wallet. The picture is of my new Les Paul along with my keyboard and speaker set up. I'm planning on taking all of this to college with me. Needless to say, I'm investing in a few locks.

Fishing for Funkmaster Flex at the Aquarium...

..because sometime the truth is so much better than fiction.

Alright, so my day is winding down at the Aquarium. I made a good number of sales at my cashier station, considering it was a relatively quiet day (good weather=people have better things to do with their time than patronize the local aqaurium). I go to my boss' office where I hope to be cashed out for the day and go home. In the middle of counting my twenty dollar bills my boss gets a call. It's from a nice guy who works in Imax named Davi (we take the train together occasionally). The phone conversation went something like this:

Davi: "Kent?"
Kent: "Yeah?"
Davi: "I'd just like to tell you that Funkmaster Flex is in the building."
Kent: "WHAAAAT?!?"

I'd like to note at this point that I had no idea, I mean absolutely no idea who Funkmaster Flex is. now, this might be because of the fact that I'm a white man. I mean really white. Caucasian.

What followed was perhaps the most ridiculous game of hide and seek I have ever played in my entire life. I can honestly say, with the most sincere conviction, that I will never again spend 30 minutes with my bos running through an aquarium looking for a famous DJ. I mean, it might happen, but I really don't think so.

Now, I chose the above picture (for all of my culturally unaware readers, that's a picture of Funkmaster Flex, not my boss. That said, I kind of wish my boss was Funkmaster Flex), specifically because it made Funkmaster Flex look like a magician. There was undoubtedly a bit of magic involved in this little accident, and I can't help but believe that Funkmaster Flex might be a magician, or at least a wizard. You see, my boss and I scoured the aquarium from front to back 3 times. That's THREE times, with the Funkmaster never to be found. Everyone at the Imax entrance, which is on the opposite side of the building from where I was working, said they had seen him just moments before, and the excitement was palpable. You could smell it in the air. It might have just been the seals, though. They do smell Funky.

Thoughts on Gun Control/The Constitution

I'd like to make one thing perfectly clear: I am a firm believer in the virtues of restricted gun control. I do not see that there is a necessity for guns in any avenue of civilian life. There are a few distinct reasons that staunch supporters of the 2nd amendment cite whenever a conversation about gun control comes up.

1) The right to bear arms is outlined quite clearly in the Constitution.
This one is big. This argument is taken by every conceivable demographic, including those who in most other circumstances would declare such a literal, narrow-minded, and antiquated interpretation of the Constitution to be fundamentally insane. To see such people turn a blind eye to the blatant discrepancies that exist as a result of (and largely compounded by), in such a restricted view of the Constitution is not only disappointing, but also frightening.

My view: The Constitution was written in 1787 (Wikipedia corrected my earlier assumption of 1781), during a time of tremendous political and social change. The actions of our founding fathers were heroic when taken into the context of the world they lived in. However, we cannot possibly hope to plug their decisions and views into our modern America without some degree of incompatibility. And yes, these were the views and opinions of a select few individuals, not the wishes of the country as a whole. The Constitution was written during a time before telegraph or telephone or the internet. These select few people did not represent constituents in any dramatic or romantically traditional sense. Instead, many of these people were business men or politicians that relied heavily upon tied business to stay in power. This is a facet of government that has not changed. The firearm industry was very large int he economically powerful region of New England. Without the continued support of such a large industry, who is to say how much actual power the fledgling American government would have wielded. In light of this, how can we possibly hope to taken the Constitution and apply with literal force the things outlined in it.

"Flexibility" has become in the world of conservative politics almost a swear word. "Flexibility" is seen as the weak alternative to a strong and strict operating procedure. "Flexibility" is seen as the undermining force in the quest for a more stable and morally secure America. However, it seems to me as if a flexible interpretation of the Constitution would be the more challenging and ultimately rewarding route. A flexible interpretation of the Constitution would challenge American politicians to find the better alternative instead of relying upon a set of antiquated guidelines. It would challenge American politicians to find a way to fit American policy (which is still bloated and weighed down by a Cold War mentality) into an increasingly efficient and globalized international community.

This post started out about gun control, and I still aim to outline my concerns on the matter in a future post. However, gun control (among a few other topics) inevitably leads me to the same conclusion: there are a few extremely profound deficiencies in not only the manner in which the American government conducts itself, but also in the mentality that surrounds the seemingly accepted interpretation of the Constitution by many conservatives. And although I'm well aware that many people have voiced similar concerns in forums much more visible than this and in a vernacular much more eloquent, I can't help but feel as if its my civic duty to express these concerns as my own as well.

Life

Life is
and
without a clear purpose
we assign value

Life is
and
despite misgivings
we quietly concede defeat

Life is
and
in the face of the unknown
we desperately crawl to comfort

Life is
and
without recollection
we silently smother ourselves

Thoughts on Graduation

Today I am graduating from high school. The profound importance of this occasion is not in any sense marred by the fact that it is being held indoors due to weather (although this might be the opinion of many of my classmates). I suppose that I should note here, with requisite nostalgia-dripped detail, how this represents an end to a section of my life that I will hold in my heart forever with fond memories. Now, I'd like to make it quite clear that I am not bitter about high school, however much so it may seem. In fact I've quite enjoyed my time spent in high school. I've made a number of good friends, found myself drawn intellectually and personally in a variety of unique of interesting directions, and found my perception of the world around me profoundly altered, for the better. Something I've always been concerned about is the manner in which knowledge seems to pass through our mind like water through a sieve, and how we so often forget what we learn soon after we have learned it. However right now that doesn't strike me as absolutely true. I cannot remember many of the equations that I learned in Chemistry AP right now. I can't remember the important principles involved in the rhetorical criticism of literature, nor can I remember the subjunctive tense in Spanish. But these are things I have learned, and the fact that I have learned these things, that at one point these things were stuck in the foremost and most prominent edge of my consciousness seems to be unalterable evidence of the importance of learning. I have learned something and because I learned something, I now see the world through a different lens. And now I may not remember exactly what I have learned, but my changed perspective is evidence of this learning, this enlightenment. And that, in my opinion is the most important aspect of education.

I don't feel that I'm writing as good as I usually do, but I felt like I needed to make a note of my thoughts on the day of my graduation.

While on Holiday...

Richard P. Feynman Would be a Great Blogger

Hey all. School is so close to being over, it's ridiculous. Allow me to impress upon you the degree to which many of my teachers have forsaken all countenance of traditional educational structure, instead opting for long games of Jeopardy and...Mel Gibson? Anyway, I attended my senior prom last night with my good friend Zak. We had fun there, although we were not overly impressed by the significance of the event which seemed, to put it delicately, like "every-other-dance-I-have-ever-attended-in-high -school". So, no I was not awestruck by a sudden influx of maturity and poise on the part of my fellow class. Such graceful tendencies were found only in a captivating (and what I found to be intellectually stimulating) conversation I had about the subject of God and the importance of faith in everyday life. It should be noted that said conversation was conducted overall waffles with ice cream at 1 o'clock in the morning. Thank God for 24/7 diners.

Last week I attended a two day over-night Orientation program at UCONN, where I will be going in the fall. the program involved activities that were designed to be two fold in nature: Attempt to explain to us the differences between high school and college (with a particular emphasis placed on the dangers of drugs, alcohol, and rape. The orientation leaders did a surprisingly good job of conveying their message without losing the attention of the majority of the group. If you understood the maturity level of many of these kids, you'd find the previous statement easier to appreciate.) The second goal of these activities was to foster intense bonds of fellowship between the students that would be attending school, living, and smoking pot together next year. I can't say how well that worked out, but what I can say is that I met some really great people while I was there, and that the volleyball team that I fell into dominated completely.

In other news, work is going well for me. This is the first Saturday since March that I have had off. I spent the day sleeping, eating, and playing video games, and I would not have had it any other way.

With the end of 4 years of high school English I am cautiously wading into the waters of personal reading. I recently finished reading this, and was completely exhilarated by both the profound genius behind the book, and the fact that I read something I wasn't assigned in English. My current reads for the summer are this and this. I find both to be quite interesting.

Explanations and Imaginations

The month is almost over and it seems like it never began. That's not to say I don't remember anything from it. I remember the middle quite clearly and with a bit of affection. The first week where I thought that I might end up someplace completely different from where I had resigned myself to. The few weeks in the middle where a set of exams took my breath away and where I finally understood the privilege I had been afforded by studying with the students that I have been. Quite spectacular. These are, of course, the AP exams which will determine what, if any freshman courses I will have to take during my first year of college. Knocking these out of the way means less money in tuition, fees, and books, and hopefully a quicker graduation. Knocking these out of the way means less loans which is very good.

On May 11 I headed from my Chemistry AP exam with a good friend over to a local Best Buy and picked up Narrow Stairs, the latest CD by Death Cab for Cutie. I do not know if I have impressed upon you my love for this band in earlier posts (and am, at the moment, too lazy to wade through the clutter and check). However, allow me to do that now. This band is pure genius, and I fell in love with them the first time listening to Soul Meets Body off of their 2005 album plans. Needless to say, this album does not disappoint. It's full of the same thought provoking lyrics, playful melodies, and subtle overtones that affect me (and I hope most listeners) in a truly profound way. This album is slightly different from their earlier work. It's more rough and loose with less emphasis placed on the sort of glossy sheen that was applied so vigorously to Plans. It is, in many ways, a throwback to their earlier work, even before Translatlanticism (a 2003 album that put them on the map in the popular music world). However, in many ways it's completely different from that as well. This new sort of music has the chance of alienating many of their die hard fans, but I have found myself enthralled by it.

The Final Seconds

Wow. The last day has been hard. The last week has been hard, but yesterday might have been one of the most stressful days of my life. I'm talking about truly profound stress, the kind that reached deep inside you and twists something and you don't feel right for a long time after. Yesterday afternoon I had a call from an admissions official at Brandeis University, one of the institutions that I applied to in the spring. In March I found that I had been placed on the waiting list. I resigned myself to the fact that I would not make it into such a prestigious institution (don't feel bad if you've never heard of it, apparently no one has, but I encourage you to research it, it's actually quite a great school, with conspicuously high rankings among other competitive schools in the Boston area). Well, this guy named David calls up and informs me that I've been admitted to the class of 2012. The entire conversation felt slightly surreal. I had resigned myself to a future at my state's respectable university, an experience that, while I thought might prove itself to be surprisingly fulfilling. Now, in the final seconds of the game I've been told that there is another choice. An entirely new option. I got very excited.

They offered me $28,000 in aid. Seconds ago, I got off the phone, having left an extremely bewildered message on David's voice mail detailing why I could not attend Brandeis in the fall. The long and the short of it (as I frantically attempt to explain it to myself right now) is that, despite the copious amount of money they were prepared to offer me, at the end of my four years there, I would still graduate with close to $40,000 in debt. This, while perhaps negligible compared to some people's debt, was too much for me, especially when held in comparison to the parsley $14,000 in debt I would incur at my state school.

So I turned them down. My dream school, the school that had the potential to open for me doors to places I had never before imagined, lucrative careers, and a nurturing profoundly ingenious teaching rationale that encouraged introspection and understanding; tolerance over ignorance, with an emphasis on knowledge as the key to success. I place that, I feel, I would have fit right in.

But in the end, I have to think realistically. And the reality is that at this state school I would still relieve a stellar education at quite a reduced price. And right now, that's something I can't say no to.

Isn't it funny how supposedly win/win situations suddenly become lose/lose? I suppose we'll see how this all plays out.

My Exciting New Career

It's been awhile since my last post, and there are a wide array of reasons for this that I can supply you with in order to satisfy your curiosity (with a varying degree of honesty). However, in this case truth proves quite stranger than fiction. For, it is with a solemn tone that I relinquish from this cruel the world the last iota of my dignity and surrender upon you the tale of how I spent last weekend providing hoards of young children with the joy of meeting one of the most jaundiced role models to accumulate massive wealth via intensively pervasive cross-media advertising.

If you're still following, I applaud your dedication. You must be as bored as I am.

If you're not, and I can completely understand if you're not, allow me to provide a visual aid:



That's right folks, our good friend and (let's admit it) blatant media whore SpongeBob Squarepants.

Through lengthy and difficult means I was able to secure an interview at the Maritime Aquarium, a prestigious center for recreation and education strategically located near a section of Long Island Sound that was named in a recent issue of North Eastern Living, the "smelliest accumulation of sea gunk this reporter has ever witnessed". Hahaha. All jokes aside though, this place smells. I think there used to be a beach here, but it is hard to be 100% sure because of the intensive layer of sea life that piles under the old docks in varying degrees of decomposition. Needless to say, Long Island Sound doesn't make for the most attractive draw for tourists, and this constant struggle that the Connecticut coast maintains with prevailing standards of aesthetics maintained by American society has resulted in one awkward aquarium. This is not to say that the Aquarium does not try hard. For example, they proudly proclaim via brochures and pamphlets that they exhibit only specimens that reside naturally in Long Island Sound. In fact, they go out of their way to make a point of this during tours and informative sessions. The only thing that troubles me is the otters display. I'm not sure that we have otters in the sound. But I'll be damned if they're not the cutest things you've ever seen.

Anyway, I aced the interview and got a ob as a cashier/usher. This is a pretty wild job in which I rotate around 4 stations that are equally montonous. One of the essential tenets of any good Aquarium employee is proficiency with the SpongeBob Squarepants 4-D Adventure Ride. This ride combines two things that children love: spine-damaging herky jerky motion and bright and loud cartoon characters acting out inane and often morally perplexing plots. Nothing beats the exhilirating feeling that accompanies a distorted image of SpongeBob Squarepants constructing a "Crabby-Patty" as your "one-size-fits-no-one" 4-D glasses slip slowly down your nose. Wait, I lied. Pretty much everything beats that feeling.

However, I am getting paid above minimum wage, so that has to count for something.

Updates

So, I know I have been a little flaky with the updates lately, sorry about that. Things have been sorta hectic around here lately. My senior year is winding down and it looks like I'll be attending my local public university in the fall. I was a bit disappointed a month ago when I realized that it was probably the best option. Since then, I've felt like I've been living outside of myself to a certain extent, like an outside observer peeking into the goings-on in my own life. I was admitted to several prestigious private universities, my first pick among them, but in the end money trumps all, and you can't beat a practically free education. Besides, I was admitted to an select "honors program" within the university which will give me access to smaller specialty classes along with some other convenient perks. All in all, it won't be terrible. But there is a certain exhilarating feeling that accompanies resignation, a feeling of losing control and surrendering to forces completely outside of your control. I've tried hard in school, not as hard as I could have, but hard enough to sneak into a select group of students who have obviously tried much harder than I have to achieve not that much more. In this way, I feel like I've maintained a certain degree of academic excellence without sacrificing my last bit of personality or creativity.

Plus, my uncle sent me a new laptop as an early graduation present, and my shallow love for technology has provided with a means for temporary escape from any subtle wallowing that might plague most kids in my situation. The other day my mother told me though that I had handled this entire decision making process with a lot of maturity and logic but I couldn't help but admit on the inside that it simply felt out of my control. I told her that I was just making the best choices for the long term. And that's true too, I suppose.

Today I took my dog, Killer, for a walk in the park. I brought along a few tennis balls to entertain myself with. And when I say "entertain myself", I do mean, quite literally, "myself". You see, for my dog, a game of fetch is not a game at all but simply practice for the day when I once again allow her to roam the streets of our town hunting down squirrels to feed her illegitimate puppies, which is what she did as a stray. So for her, its not fun and games. However, for me the story is quite different. I must confess, there are few things I find more sincerely gratifying than watching my dog practically explode with canine excitement at the mere glimpse of a fuzzy yellow ball. It is during these moments of mindless, instinctual activity that I really do question both he sanity and intelligence of my dog. I've never been on to subscribe to the romantic notion of dog as man's best friend, with keen insight and loyalty to humans. No, instead I'm forced to accept the fact that my dog's intelligence would be more aptly compared to that of a dumb fish or even a plant. I can't decide whether or not her lack of intelligence helps her to lead a more enjoyable life.

Quantum Theory

There is a trickle of particulate
articulating a decline in truth
Uncouth and with a sheen most malignant
to feel slow silk sliding over you

Soaker Season

Today hit close to 70 degrees which is a remarkable accomplishment considering a month ago we were still fearing snow. All of this warm weather, combined with the impending end of my high school career in the form of the formal parade of pomp and academic glory of graduation, has gotten me very excited. So excited that I've taken up yard work. Planting flowers, edging, mulching, these are sides of myself than I never knew existed. Andrew the florist doesn't exactly fulfill my ideal career goal, however I'd be lying if I said I didn't think it had a nice ring to it.

With the warm weather comes some other interests, namely: soaking. Water warfare has been a serious hobby of mine for close to six years now, and while my interest in it has waned of late, I'm not about to let the last summer I have before college go without a single water fight. Currently, things are falling into place for a graduation party for both me, and by best friend Sean. I've been best friends with Sean for about as long as I've been soaking, so it would stand to reason that in addition to lots of grilling, football, and cake, there were also be a few large-scale water fights.

School is going good, but I am definitely beginning to succumb to senioritis. They say its bad, but I disagree. It feels great knowing that in a few months I will not be subject to the same obligations and academic commitments that have tied me down for the past four years. And while college holds the promise of an entirely new set of challenges, far greater in scale and diversity than anything I have encountered before, I cannot help but be grateful for the alleviation of all that I have come to despise. I recently learned of my class rank, 28 in a class of 360 or so students. Needless to say, I was pretty happy. I've think that I've really improved myself this year, however these improvements do not come with a feeling of guilt, as if I'm leaving it all behind. And while the concept of a large and dramatic departure from this place come graduation held quite a bit of appeal at the beginning of the year, I like to think that I've matured enough to understand and appreciate the reasons why I'm staying. I'm a little scared that I'll find myself continuing to tell myself that I will leave eventually and that these desires will never come to fruition. But the truth is that I've come to realize what the best next step for my future is financially. I just hope that I haven't become complacent to the point of denial.

Momma's Boys Are Drug Addicts, According to Science

...or at least that's what I gleaned from watching this video after linking from Gizmodo. Truer words have never been spoken. This is like Christmas for us judgmental jerks.

Dear Apple Computer Lords

Dear Apple Computer Lords,

During a recent session on my computer I was once again troubled by the persistent failing of the AIM program. Granted, AIM is a pretty flaky program to begin with. However, it seems as if the success of the program running on my Powerbook is based more on luck than any design of computer programming or other equally technical facet of engineering. For example, the other day, upon engaging the program I fervently prayed for several minutes and it worked perfectly. This evening I forgot to take the time necessary to recite the proper incantations and light the incense, and what happens? This troublesome digital charlatan decides to once again rear its ugly head and plunge my laptop into senseless disarray and confusion. This is obviously quite worrisome for me and has been a persistent problem for some time now. I am more than willing to make any and all amends with the gods that are required in order to grant my computer continued well being and operational success. Should I sacrifice an XBox on a pedestal of marble? Just say the word. What about an Unlimited Version of Vista? Your wish is my command.

Regards,
Andrew "Flapjack" Thomas

Crazy Dream (Part 1)

Last night I had, perhaps, the craziest dream I have ever had. It involved copyrighted video game characters, strange rooms, Halo 3, and my father. The dream started roughly around 12 o'clock and seemed to last for several weeks, although in hindsight, it probably only lasted a few seconds. The dream combined vivid imagery with intense and profound symbolism, leading me to question the true meaning of the dream. But not before I took some time to recreate one of the characters of my dream in Microsoft Paint.

That's right folks. I dream I was Mario last night. The moustachioed, overall wearing, Italian plumber with a predilection for strange tubes and mushrooms (that last bit would sound really weird if Mario was a less known video game figure). I dreamt I was Mario last night, in Mario's 2D world, jumping from box to box, battling those strange blob shaped enemies and gaining a lot of strength from mushrooms and crazy glowing flowers. If you thought that Mario was intense to begin with, imagine living in a world where everything is flat. And I mean everything. No exceptions. Those Japanese video game creators were sticklers for that. But you know what? I didn't mind it that much. I'm not sure if it was because I was Mario or just because I was dreaming in general, but the world being flat was not high on my list of things to worry about. Death by turtles was. That is, until I stumbled upon the magic 3D room.

Alright, imagine this. You're calmly eating breakfast on a weekday morning before going off to work or school or any of your daily activities. You turn on the TV to watch the weather forecast for that day. But when the weather forecast comes on, instead of a map of the United States there's simply a large image of a cantaloupe on the green screen behind the meteorologist. And HE'S talking in Cantonese. And you look down and suddenly your plate is full of pancakes when seconds ago it was full of toast and eggs. Imagine all of this, and then imagine how much you would freak out. Well, if you took all of that and multiplied it by 5 times you would have some idea of the sort of manner in which my mind was blown by this. 3 dimensions? I think I may have said, "What the f*ck?" out loud, while I was sleeping. That was how amazed I was.

Anyway, it was a tiny room, hidden inside the back of one of the many little boxes that you have to jump to and from to get coins, shrooms, etc. in the game. It wasn't very big, but certainly bigger on the inside than one of those boxes was on the outside, which led me to believe that a certain degree of magic was involved in its design. When I got inside the box, a little message appeared to me. "Press X every 30 seconds for a 20,000 point bonus." Now, this struck me as a little odd. I'm not sure if original Nintendo controllers had X as a button, I haven't used one in a long time, but the strange thing about the message was that it was written in the same font/color/style that is used to tell you in Halo 2 when to pick up a new weapon. I was slightly bemused, to say the least.

By this time, the wonder of finding this strange new 3D box started to wear off. Suddenly the entire world was 3D, and if that was so, quick math revealed there was a lot more of the world to discover, so it felt dumb to stay for 30 seconds in some stupid box. Plus, at that point I think I realized that I wasn't playing the game anymore and the points didn't matter. I did notice one interesting thing before I left the box, and that was the names carved on the inside walls. I can't remember any of the names now, but I remember thinking it was funny.

This is turning out much longer than I expected so I will break into sections and post the next installment later. Don't worry, I won't forget how th dream went, as soon as I woke up this morning I told my brother all about it (with embellishments of course), so I've remembered it pretty well.

The Vicious Vernacular

This is my life, and this is the way I write.

This is a way for me to express everything:

Everything I feel

Everything I think

Everything from the most shallow tendency to the most profound insight.

And I promise I will not be humble, I will not apologize, except when I feel so inclined, I will not forgive or forget except when I think I should and above all things I will not submit to the unwritten rule, just the unspoken agreement.

This is the Vicious Vernacular and from here on out I will try to tag every bit of creative writing, whether it be prose, poetry or some strange combination of the two with this lovely alliteration, this titanic and terrifying tower of a tongue twister, twisted and mangled to suit my own needs and with a design beautiful in it's singular nature and singular in its beauty: to, above all things, cause you to disagree, agree, laugh, or maybe just maybe, change your perception.

I am leaving for college in less than six months. I have never been more scared or excited in my entire life and yet it still feels underwhelming, my life whipping past me with such ferocity and speed that I fear I am not aware of some very important things, losing them in the blurry motion of people, places, and thoughtful conversations. If there is one thing that I have an ultimate faith in, it is the strength that comes from the written word and this is something I do not plan on abandoning anytime soon.

Until next time,
Andrew