holding steady.™

thought of the day: you don’t always get what you want. but you almost always get screwed a little.

I HATE WHEN PEOPLE EMBED VIDEO CONTENT IN THEIR POSTS AND I GET THEM IN NETNEWSWIRE AND THEY ASK ME TO WATCH THEM. THIS ANNOYS ME. I AM GOING AGAINST MY TYPOLOGICAL ALL LOWERCASE POSTS, AS AN INDICATION OF MY ANNOYANCE.

I DON’T LIKE TO WATCH TV (UNLESS IT’S A DVD SEASON THAT I BOUGHT), SO I DISLIKE BEING ASKED TO PARTICIPATE IN THE YOUTUBE GENERATION’S TENDENCIES. NOR DO I APPRECIATE BEING REFERRED TO AS THE MYSPACE GENERATION (personally, i think that’s more the people who come about four years behind me, but whatever.)

THAT’S ALL. I’M DONE RANTING FOR NOW.

i am having kind of a weird week.

yesterday, it rained on my head. and by rained, i mean it poured about fifteen minutes after i had blow-dried my hair. i was about ten minutes late to class.

the day changed directions when i got home, as my guitar and amp (à la ebay) had arrived. dicking around with that had its setbacks, as i performed exactly ZERO tasks of substance. i did get to finally watch “across the universe” (four out of five stars in my book), and i had a much-needed chat (part 1 of at least 3) with the woman in my life.

but then, this morning…i was late AGAIN. and it was rainy. and i usually can catch a ride (rather than try to catch my perennially late bus) with this guy who lives by me and works at UM. but he was nowhere to be found by the time my bus rolled on through. and i fell asleep on the train (due to aforementioned conversation lasting until 2:30am) and missed my stop. so i had to get off on the next one, and go backwards, a step that ultimately cost me almost twenty minutes. i would have been exactly on time, instead i got to class a full half-hour after the lecture had begun. i also tripped into the class over the cord from my headphones.

i’m just tired already. it’s not even 12, i still have one and a half more classes to go (one of which is about 3 hours long), and i’m just already over it.

POL 586 EF, Monday/Wednesday, 12:20-13:35 - Conflicts in the Middle East & Africa

i’m actually a little scared. or maybe not scared, more like neurotically anticipatory. yeah, that sounds about right. this is the end of the first week of my last week as an undergrad. yeah, I have to take french in may, but whatever. doesn’t count. i’m gonna have to grow up at some point in the relatively near future. vomit.

REL 354 D, Tuesday/Thursday, 09:30-10:45 - Religion & Gender

i keep playing this game in my head, where I let myself get too far ahead, caught up in the future, concerned with “what’s coming next?!”

SOC 210 P, Tuesday/Thursday, 11:00-12:15 - Introduction to Social Research

this is the class I have currently checked out of to write this. so fucking dull. I maybe wrote like…five lines of notes. but I did check my email a lot.

GSC 103 R, Tuesday/Thursday, 14:00-15:15 - Evolution of the Modern Earth’s Environment

so in my geology class…it’s just like the greatest possible amalgamation of useless dregs. these are the scholars of the university of miami, and the half that don’t ooze stubborn pretentiousness/abercrombie-hollister-american eagle “vintage”-ness look decidedly homeless, complete with mildly dreaded hair and ratty clothing. read some more issues i’m having with that class here.

POL 500 SX, Tuesday, 15:30-18:10 - Ideals & Realities: Bioethics, Religion & Politics

I give up. I wanna fucking graduate already. only 112 days, 20 hours and 45 minutes to go…

sometimes, you know something. but it isn’t always easy to reconcile what you know and what you feel.

you can know what the temperature is outside because it’s in the paper in the morning. but when you step outside, it feels a bit chillier. maybe there’s a wind making it colder. or perhaps the sun is beating down particularly strong on you at that moment. but it screws with your perception.

sometimes you just get that feeling.

according to this, the world’s most influential languages are english, french, spanish, russian, arabic, chinese, german, japanese, portuguese, and hindi. maybe in that year that i’m taking off, i will learn a bit more of the first three and possible pick up another one of the bunch.

last night, I went to a strip club. or, as I explained to my girlfriend, a “gentlemen’s club.” being the kind of person who takes very little very seriously, it’s interesting that, due to my whereabouts yesterday evening, I ended up in a complicated bout of existential understanding. 

first of all, there isn’t really any kind of clearly defined understanding of what makes art art. I know that doesn’t seem particularly relevant, but there is something there in terms of a parallel thought process.

why do we have such profound respect for this thing we call art?

even more important, how can we define art?

we have these very rigid rules in mind that make us think that this that and the other thing is art, but that thing over there is not.

where does that come from? a friend of mine recently received a book about jackson pollock. in talking about it, I was reminded of the movie “mona lisa smile,” in which his work is reviled by the art establishment, those who teach art.

given our tendency to manipulate meanings and values via the passage of time, how we can we ever say that anything doesn’t qualify?

we label all works of originality with this label, “creativity.” if a poem is emblematic of creativity, then what stops a rap song (resplendent with terminology depicting hoes and whips) from being a poem, and therefore art?

what makes pornography not art? for it actually is more impressive than most understandings of art, for it encompasses multiple mediums.

what makes my little sister’s crayon drawings from age three not art?

what is art?

the idea of there being some purpose (unable to be restricted to any set of intentions, due to the sheer complexity of variety) is feasible. there is also expected to be some sort of sensory impact (visuals, noise of some sort). beyond that…what can reasonably be said…?

the question remains: what is art?

wikipedia, that all-encompassing directive of modern comprehenson, defines it as “human activity (or a product thereof), made with the intention of stimulating the human senses as well as the human mind; by transmitting emotions and/or ideas.”

but I remain unsatisfied.

been doing some major rehauling.

since i’m on winter break, i figured now is as good a time as any to get around to finally updating my website. once i get all the pages assembled and uploaded, i’ll probably next tackle changing the theme of this blog. in the meantime, this is working out well.

also, on my little break from writing-code-slash-creating-images-in-fireworks today, i made this avatar from the simpsons movie website. i know, i know, people have been doing this forever. but i just decided to, and i like it. i feel like it actually looks like me, too.

i also wanted to take the time to mention that i’ll probably be a lot better about updating this blog every day. it’s time i stopped being a lazy ass. hopefully i can get it together to make another list in the next week or so.

it’s been kind of a week. lately, it seems that i have been forced to spend a precipitous amount of time thinking about the state of humanity, and how we understand sorrow…and really, i suppose, what that can even mean.

in my international studies class on wednesday of last week, we watched a documentary on the rwandan genocide of 1994. it dealt largely with the events that occurred with regards to the civil war, but also featured pretty graphic visuals of mass killings of Tutsis by the Hutus and spent a large amount of time profiling the individuals who were resistant to foreign governments’ inaction (particularly with regard to the united states).

later that day, i went to international terrorism. that day, we were discussing the new left movement and its manifestation in germany. the raf’s leaders and followers went through a variety of disruptive actions, it would seem, with an initial intent to simply overthrow the system, but somewhere along the way they completely fell off the tracks and went completely mad. the leaders of the group, including andreas baader and gudrun ensslin, wound up in prison and and most died soon thereafter, though it is still contested whether they were suicides (as concluded by the german government) or political murders (as stipulated by the remnants of the raf). either way, couched in the powerpoint were multiple pictures (unaltered and then artistically blurred) of the dead terrorists. something about the entire display truly unsettled me.

and then, that afternoon, i had to read night, by elie wiesel, one of the more familiar accounts of a survivor of the holocaust. reading that book puts me in a state where food doesn’t enter my body.

given all that, i then had a kinda shitty weekend.

so i have spent some serious time thinking about what it is, for humanity to feel sorrow, and how that differs from my own sorrow, or yours.

more on this when it’s less depressing.

i’m pretending to be so bad-ass right now. by not sleeping.

sometimes, my body will get out of whack and stay sleeping for to long. which really screws with my internal clock, and then i can’t go to sleep at all. hence the posting of a no-purpose post at 3:15am.

anyways, i have nothing to say, so here’s a couple of pictures instead.