Learning to Smile as I Kill

Sorry it's been such a long time, faithful readers. I've had to work a metric ton this weekend. Every day since Friday, and I'm not stopping until Wednesday. And I'm working 1 1/2 shifts Mon, Tues, and Wed. Fun, fun.

Anyway, I bought a car today. Test drove it yesterday. 1986 Subaru Loyale, black, four-door, recently rebuilt engine. 4WD. Needs a bit of work. Talked the guy down $400 to $800, got him to throw in a couple extra things. As I drove it home, it overheated just as we pulled into Provo. Mega suck. Took it to Frank's Lakeside Auto Repair. He called me while I was at work today, left a message saying it's a bad head gasket and the cost of fixing it wouldn't be worth it. Mega ultra premium suck. I was pissed at James, the bloke who sold me the car. I consulted with Bob, my adviser on all things auto, and I get to call James tomorrow and tell him that he can't cash my check. In return, I'll drop the car off with the title in the parking lot of the mall where the deal went down. Should he refuse, one quick call and $29.99 to Wells Fargo will stop that check, and he will get no money. That's what the fucker gets, selling me a car with a faulty head gasket. That's why he dropped the price. That's why he called me to tell me he dropped the price. Without any word concerning any sort of impending, imminent problems.

The only way out of this one, as I see it, is if Dante is willing and able to replace the head gasket for free, since apparently he has the know-how to do that sort of thing, and apparently it's easy on a Subaru. We'll see about that. I gotta do something, though, because there's no way I'm getting stiffed out of $800 of my grandfather's money.

I need to get back to grading these finals. They're due tomorrow at noon and I'm about halfway done. Ouch. Work starts at 6:45am tomorrow. No sleep tonight, I guess. Well, not that much. And then I have to wholly move out and clean up tomorrow so I can get my security deposit back before I go back to work at 2:45. Awesome!

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Daily Regimen

The awesome, multi-day fest that was Christmas 2008 has now come to a conclusion. It was so much fun. It wasn't like any other Christmas I've had before, but I don't know if I can say it was the best Christmas I've ever had. It was pretty dang good, though.

I've been falling into the trend lately of going to bed at about 4am and waking up around 11 or so. I know this isn't a huge deal, but it's still pretty messed up. I'm going to try to change that. Hopefully I can do it without having to set an alarm, because to be frank with you, waking up on your own time is so much better than waking up to an alarm. I have not had one bad start of a day yet this break, and I can link it directly to the lack of an alarm. It doesn't matter how much I actually sleep, because to my body, it is exactly what I need. Turns out I need a little less than 7 hours to have an awesome, drowsiness-free day. Mystery solved.

I've also decided that I need to be more productive during this off time. First order of business: I need to do at least 2 hours of final grading per day until it is finished. Also, I am going to read one issue of Sandman per day. I call this event "75 Days of Sandman." Because there are 75 issues. I might reread Preacher next. I also want to spend at least one hour reading a book per day. And shower every day. And maybe throw in some pushups or something daily as well. This is my new daily regimen until school once again starts up.

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Forces of Victory

Platoon was on Encore so I watched it as I ate my toaster strudel. Hadn't ever seen it before. War movies, especially Vietnam War movies, have this weird effect on me. After I finish them, I feel years younger, like I'm in high school, right after I saw Apocalypse Now for the first time. We watched it after school for AP US History, Steve Bettlach's class. It destroyed me. Rocked me to the core. I don't think I can say that one song or album changed my life as soon as I heard it--though I have heard many great ones that have deeply affected me--but that film did. I would have had to have been around 16 that year, early 2002 (already that seems so long ago). This was the formative point of my outlook on life and personal philosophies, I think. I don't remember being political or outspoken or having a desire to know what's going on around me without Apocalypse Now informing my opinion. I can't say why it happened that way, why the movie had such an effect on me (and certainly it wasn't responsible for everything, just the beginning points), but I'm glad it did. Especially when I consider what exists on the other hand. If the chips hadn't fallen as they did, I could have ended up like any other cookie-cutter mormon kid: Republican, patriotic, disinclined to organized rebellion, polite and respectful towards authority, not prone to profanity, with a mediocre-at-best taste in movies and music, uninspired, complacent, too wrapped up in my own insignificant shit to first notice the horrors of the world and second to do anything about them. I can go on, but I'll spare you.

The other day Buck and Ervin were talking about joining the armed forces. Ervin's already planning on going to boot camp in April. Buck just thinks it's a good idea for him since he doesn't know what he wants to do. Buck asked me if I would ever join. No. What if I were enlisted? I'd try my best to get out of it. So I would dodge the draft like Clinton? Yup. Why? would I not fight for my country? At this point I had to explain to Buck (and probably break his heart) my whole viewpoint on war, which is as follows: war is never a good thing. Never. War should never be 'necessary.' If things get to the point where you have to justify committing to killing hundreds, thousands, millions of people just to get your point across by calling war 'necessary' then you fucked things up a long time ago. Don't be greedy, don't take offense, let go of your ego and pride, compromise, coexist, try to make things work. But I'm not retarded, I know this isn't ever going to happen as long as humanity in its current state continues to exist. I know the ideal rarely ever becomes the real, but I don't think that is any reason at all to abandon the principles I stand behind. I have no problem dying for the people and things that I love, and I will even fight for them, but there is absolutely no possible way in all of God's green earth that I can be brought to the point where I could even consider taking someone else's life. Fuck that cockshit.

But if that's your thing, fine. I don't respect you any less if you're acting consistently with your beliefs. I'm all for supporting the troops, but that includes folk on both sides of the line.

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Airing of Grievances

Today is Festivus! Hooray! While I have no aluminum pole I can adorn with tinsel, I have drawn one, and that's just as good, if not better. And since it's Festivus, I am going to abuse this part of the interwebs to air my grievances. Normally I'm not a fan of pissing and moaning about everything, but boy am I glad we get this one day a year to do just that. Pictures of awesome Feats of Strength will follow.

• You better give me my security deposit back.
• A&W Cream Soda from the can always loses its flavor by the end of the can if I don't drink it fast.
• You are not the most important person around. It is not always about you. Don't take it personally. Tone your ego down a few notches.
  
• I am still kind of mad at your being a bitch.
• Not enough people here shovel their walks. I know you might be out of town, but seriously. I'm still walking on these streets.
• Answer your fucking phone and reply to my emails.
• Global warming is taking far too long. When I wake up and it's 18 degrees: that is totally unacceptable.
• Let me know one way or another. Don't do the whole "I'm not sure" thing. It gets old.
• Stop flaking out. If you say you're going to do something, DO IT. Contrary to popular belief, I'd rather you say you can't do something and not do it than to leave me hanging.
• What you did was reprehensible. Next time act like a goddamn adult and talk to me about whatever issues or problems you have instead of going behind my back and fucking everything up.
• Good riddance.
• When you leave town, take your dogs with you. Wait, why do you have dogs anyway? YOU'RE IN COLLEGE.

And now, Feats of Strength:

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But I Don't Want T-Shirts of My Face Until After I'm Dead

I went over to Artur and Inna's house. Just got back actually. Had a nice little chat; they filled me in on what Russian movies I need to catch up on (including Бумер, which I've wanted to see for a long time, Брат 1 и 2, and Ликвидация), old times, crazy breakdancing village kids, and how great it was to live in the Soviet Union. If you've never talked to an old person about what it was like back in the CCCP you can't really begin to grasp the validity of that statement. For all intents and purposes, they had it pretty good. Yeah, it was corrupt at the top: Stalin wasn't a very nice guy (especially when considering his manufactured famines that killed millions), but in reality, what government isn't corrupt and full of people who only have their self-interest at hand? Answer: there is none.

Back in the times of the Soviet Union, the people had the opportunity to travel across half of Asia without visa, reason, or exorbitant amounts of money. One woman I know was a nurse for the USSR's motocross team and she got to tour all over the world with them and got to see all kinds of neat, fascinating things. Everyone was taken care of: there were places to live, food to eat (see above exception), safety, security, jobs. Everything necessary to live comfortably and happy (here's a life tip: luxury isn't happiness). Now look at the situation. There are drunks littering the street, mixing with the homeless and street dogs. Under the old regime, none of these were allowed on the street. Drunks-in-public were taken to the tank for the night and fined. The streets were clean. Now, no one can afford to buy a car, let alone an apartment, God forbid a house. It's a good thing they still own the property rights from times past, otherwise greedy, private landlords would have evicted half of the former Union. Drug use and alcoholism run rampant. I don't know how most people are able to survive on an honest living. It takes everything out of them to make just enough to pay for hot water and food. There is no economic or political stability (at least in Ukraine) now. Say what you will about socialism, whether you like it or not, it's a stable government with a regulated economy. Perhaps not your preferred form of governance, but a valid one nonetheless.

A big part of me wants to fly to Ukraine and be that country's Che Guevara, especially after reading the Manifesto of the Middle Class (the link's to the original Russian. Run it through Google translator or something if you can't read it). That place has problems, and there is the potential in the young ones of that country to fix them. But, as Lenin realized with his revolution, the only way to supplant one government in totality is to kill every member of the former. Just as Yeltsin attacked the Russian Parliament building with tanks, the same thing and more needs to go down in Ukraine. A mass coup that would end up killing near every politician in the Рада would work great. Inna suggested public hangings: I think it's a great idea, old time revolution.

There are just too many problems around. Here, abroad, it doesn't matter. As overwhelming as it may seem, I think it's time. This next semester is going to see a lot of action on my part towards a total reformation of BYU's broken self. I'm not blowing smoke out of my ass either. If it fails, it fails, but at least I can have the satisfaction of knowing that I've tried. If I get kicked out, I get kicked out. Sure it'll suck, but I'm willing to take that risk if I can change things up. You've only got one life to live, right?, so you better make it as good as you can, and also for those around you.

I read this article today, which included this quote:

Is it better to accept that the world is the way it is and its constant awful tumult will never change, and thus either do your work to the best of your ability or drop out and do your own thing on the fringes; or should you refuse to accept the reality principle and hew to ethical absolutes with the purpose of making the world better than it is?

I definitely fall in with the latter. In the context of the article, which is about the always magical Sandman series, in such issues as these I am on the side of Dream and Delirium. Sorry Death and Destruction, but my compromises have changed me.

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The End of the Semester

This last week was finals week. You already know that. Here's a play-by-play (and if Jarom were over here right now I'd have him read this out loud into the microphone and let you hear it):

Monday
I hit the snooze to many times. I rush out of bed to get to my Pearl of Great Price final at 7am. I misread the instructions on the essay section and only do one of them, causing me to automatically miss 20 points, which is more than a full letter grade on the test. I check out a laptop from the LRC. I go to the final for the class I'm TA'ing for. At least I'm getting paid for this one. There's no wireless internet in the MARB basement, so I can't renew the three hour limit on the laptop. I take it to the LRC as fast as I can, but it four minutes late. I am charged one dollar. I eat cookies and drink milk because Cory brought some to the final. I meet Morgan for our study group. That lasts about a half hour. I go home and do not bother doing any homework. At 8:00 I go back up to campus to make our group presentation with Katie and Briana. It once again involves unicorns. I go to Robin's house to use Elise's printer so I can grade finals. Robin and I stop by Eric's party, drink some homemade eggnog (delicious), and then go to the Pennyroyal. I do an edit on her 490 paper. I chat with Justin and Ashley. I drive Robin home while it is snowing. I get home at 2.

Tuesday
I relish being able to hit the snooze button the exact amount of times before I must get up. The government final is at 8:30. We present first. There is a unicorn on the screen. I point at it with the laser for effect. Everyone else does their presentations. Most everyone else did the exact same thing for their final group project and thus almost all of the presentations are similar. I begin to edit my own 490 paper, but I really don't do a whole lot of work on it. I go to work. Bob comes to pick me up, but first we work out at Heritage's employee weight room for an hour. We get Del Taco on the way home. I don't do any studying.

Wednesday
I pretend that I get up at 9. It ends up being closer to 11. I start working on my bookbinding projects. I ask Brian to give me a ride up to B-67. I try in vain to finish my clamshell box. I drink strawberry kiwi Shasta and eat brownies, peanut brittle, and caramels. I cut up my remaining board (in preparation for binding Chris's engineering books) and paper to fit into a portfolio. I get a ride back home from John. Buck give me a ride to Bob's house. Bob is really sick. His house smells like it hasn't had any new air in it for days. Also like animals. I borrow Bob's car and drive to Kailey's house. Kailey has lost her keys. We wait for the AAA guy to open up her car to see if they are in there. They are not. We eat dinner at Saigon Noodle House. She orders veggie lo mein. I order sesame chicken and a Dr Pepper (but it's really a Mr Pibb). Kailey doesn't get lockjaw. We go back to her house. Still can't find the keys. I drive back to Bob's house and drop off the car. Bob is asleep. I walk home and don't do any homework.

Thursday
I again trick myself into thinking I'll get up in the 9:00 hour. I get up a few minutes before 11. I go to campus and eat an asiago cheese bagel and drink a strawberry Fanta in the Wilk. I read over my Plants study guide. I run into Kevin and Matt. Kevin is wearing a really cool shirt. I take my Plants final. It is too comprehensive. I score a 73% on the multiple choice section. I debate whether or not I'll have time to work on my 490 paper before I have to go to work. I don't. I go to work. I come home. I go to the Pennyroyal. It is empty. I am grading finals. Kailey, Brittni, and Erica show up. They leave. I leave. I get home at 2 something and do no studying.

Friday
I hit the snooze until I feel able to get up. It's only 10 or so. I shower, go to campus, and begin work on my 490 paper. I finish it and submit it. It is 29 pages long. I email Cory to tell him the finals aren't going to be done by today like he wanted. I come home. I borrow Buck's car and go to work. It starts snowing harder the further I get towards the canyon. After work, there is ice on the windshield. There is no scraper. Gabe lets me use his. I drive to the Pennyroyal. Brandon's band Othello is playing. I chat with Justin and Ashley. I go to Ryan's house to bid farewell to Olivia. We hang out for a while. I go to Smith's and buy Texas Toast, Doritos, and ice cream. It costs $9.09. Or maybe $9.03. I eat a bowl of ice cream and some chips while Buck and Jeff play Mario Kart on the Wii against the internets. I play and get first place. I go to bed at about 3.

Saturday
I wake up quickly and jump out of bed. I throw on shorts and a sweatshirt and run up to campus. I turn in a paper I had forgotten to and run up the stairs to the 4th floor of the library. The LRC is closed. Access to typewriters is disallowed. I call Olivia to get her home address because now I won't be able to deliver her Christmas present in person. When I get home, I shower and then make french toast. I put the Eden Express on the XBOX 360 so I can listen as I cook. It is delicious. I do the dishes and clean up a bit. I make and drink hot cocoa with marshmallows. I call my grandpa. My grandma isn't home. I come upstairs and get on the internet. I write this.

This week felt really long. Like it was two or three weeks long all wrapped into a normal one. Boy am I ready to not have to deal with school for a good extended fortnight.

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Bookbinding Final

Behold! I have (almost) finished all my assignments for my bookbinding class. I spent almost the whole beginning part of the day working on it because I had to make 1 completely from scratch, finish another, and then scramble to get as far as possible on the last one. All of these pics are in ultra-high res, thanks to Jeff's camera and my unwillingness to shrink them (and consequently sit through many arduous upload times). Here are pictures of first the covers and then the spines of my books:





Lands and Peoples is a single-stitch coptic binding made from a sweet encyclopedia series I found at Pioneer Book. The text block is made out of graph paper pulled from eco-friendly notebooks I picked up at the Bookstore. The Brontosaurus is also a coptic, but it's the intense, four-needle version. The picture on the cover was made with nail polish. The Needlepoint Flatback is a traditional hardbound book. All of the fancy handiwork is hidden by the spine, so you'll have to take my word for it that it was the most time-consuming and involving out of the entire set. The needlepoint was given to me by Louis and Mel as a housewarming present back in May (when I had my protest party). Superheroes is supposed to be a sweet binding, but since I missed that day of class, it's more my interpretation of a sweet binding. The ribbons are made from an old pair of khakis, and they tuck into the cover. Closeups of each follow in small form. Click to embiggen them:

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Rivers of Blood

I just ate dinner at Nicolitalia. What a great eatery. And I had dinner with Cade and JR, which was also nice. So was the pizza. It was covered in every kind of meat possible. I bet the guy had to invent a meat to put on it just to make ridiculous claims like the one above.

You know what? I had a great time last night. Even though I had already done the whole lights-on-temple-square thing a couple weeks ago, it wasn't that big of a buzzkill (not like last time was) because of the company. Such a good group of folk. Especially Mel. You were the tops of the evening, madam, and I thank you kindly for the conversation.

Things, however, did only get better. After the wafflicious entr'acte, provided by Dr. Walker himself and his magic batter-proof pleated pants, came Act II, in which there was some light conversation, some exchanging of gifts, and the breaking loose of raucous fits of laughter. Details: Dan was the last to open his white elephant gift because the first album he ever bought for himself was the Space Jam soundtrack (since Various Artists was alphabetically after everyone else's first album artists). Inside of a bag, under tissue paper, as a long, thin cylinder wrapped about 46 times in aluminum foil (lest you be confused thinking it was some other type of foil). As Dan seductively unwrapped the mystery tube, which was Mel's gift given, both he and I had the exact same thought: Dan was getting a tampon for Christmas. To our disappointment, it was a kazoo. This is how the immediately following conversation went:

ME: Melanie, I think I am about to love you forever.
    (DAN unwraps his gift in full, revealing a kazoo)
SOMEONE: It's a kazoo!
ME: That's not what I thought it was going to be.
DAN: Me neither. What were you thinking?
ME: I was totally convinced it was a tampon.
DAN: Me too! I'm glad I'm not the only one who thought that.
MELANIE: A tampon? It was way too big! Nobody has a flow that heavy, except maybe King Kong's wife!
    (The entire group explodes into laughter for nigh onto seven minutes.)

My oh my. Let the record state that the supremely powerful and fountainous menstrual cycle of Ms. Kong continued to be debated, discussed, and and dissected for a few more minutes before an informal moratorium was issued. Let the record also show that we had little or no regard for said moratorium.

Epilogue: Wouldn't it be great if nineteenth century court fashions came back into vogue? I would love to wear purple velvet capes with gold edged embroidery and ostentatious crowns around all day long. If anyone more clothing-creating minded wanted to go in on this with me, I would hop on that boat in a heartbeat.

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A Prairie Home Depression

I've been having to borrow many things lately. I am sorry. I'm not sorry that I have to borrow things, but I'm sorry that I have the uncanny ability to accidentally break anything and everything that I borrow, especially if it's for an extended amount of time. If I haven't told you about it, I haven't seen you in person yet, but don't worry, I'm more or less responsible for my actions.

Last night, at the concert, I should have been having a blast. Great bands were playing, the Eden Express played over an hour's worth of music (their longest set ever), I was among friends, it hadn't stopped snowing yet. I don't know what it was. By a weird twist of fate, EDNX's lyrics picked me up a bit out of the depression, which--if you're familiar with the lyrics--shouldn't make a whole lot of sense. Today for the most part was pretty good: didn't wake up until after noon, didn't leave my house until almost 6, got my white elephant gift for tomorrow made, had a good chat with Pamela, helped ice Celia's cupcakes, stopped by Kailey's for a bit and made some fried okra, and shared some quality time with Ryan, etc. Part of that quality time was watching A Prairie Home Companion. Now, I love Garrison Keillor. I think he's an excellent writer and has a fantastic personality, both on the radio and off (and his voice: oh man). The movie, though--I am having some issues with it. To preface, the film is brilliant. I have never seen anything quite like it before, and I love the narrative structure, how the plot gently unfolds, but in that grace is revealed the quiet horror of what's actually going on. That part, and the aesthetic quality (including the sections of noir dialog), were astounding and I love them. Some of the characters, though, especially Merrill Streep's Yolanda: I just couldn't handle that. I don't know if it was just how and where I grew up, but I've known too many people exactly like that character, and most times I felt uncomfortable with her on screen. And that final scene, in the diner, years afterward: it was so poignantly tragic I couldn't help but weeping. As the film progressed, I found myself feeling more and more sad at what was happening on film to the point where it literally began affecting me, and it was really hard for me to handle it. I think it is a testament to the amazing talent of Garrison Keillor that his movie would be able to affect a person, me, as much as it did, and for that I will laud both the man and the film, but I think it will be a very long time before I will be able to watch this film again. That, however should not keep you from watching it.

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Los Dos Son No Bueno

I went on a date with Kailey last night. Jeff let me borrow his humongous truck. It is taller than I am. Getting in the thing was hard enough for me, and especially so for Kailey (I've got quite a few inches on her). She had to jump to get in.

First we went to my induction ceremony for Phi Alpha Theta. It was nice, a small affair, and I made the observation that of the 8-10 other students there, no less than two (2) had lazy eye. In the left eye. Which is the eye I usually look at when I talk to people (I don't know why, that's just what I do). Hodson's keynote address was great, about finding the mysteries and how historians are evil magicians. He told a story about trying to hunt down Charles Leblanc, who arrived in Philadelphia at age 7 as a recently exiled Achadean (a group of French speakers in a British Canadian colony that were more or less ethnically cleansed from the area and tossed about the western world), and in a footnote of a lame paper Hodson discovered that he ended up being a really rich guy by the end of his life. He went on this search to try to hunt Leblanc down, and why he didn't leave a will for his huge fortune. At his death, there was a huge court case where all of these Achadeans from all over the place descended upon the estate of Leblanc, trying to carve up his fortune, and what Hodson postulates is that Leblanc purposely died without a will knowing that at his death, all of these far-flung and estranged relatives of his--the Achadeans--would be reunited and be able to reconstruct their roots and get reconnected. Hodson tells it better than that; look for the paper on this when it gets published.

We then went to the mall, which is a place I usually never visit, but this time I had to, because that's the closest See's Candy vendor. We cashed in my golden ticket of a Christmas bonus, collected the pound of chocolates, and headed off to Red Lobster, where neither Julie nor Madison were working that night, ate some food, then went back to Kailey's place where we got roped into helping one roommate make baked goods for her birthday party and in harassing the other roommate. It was a pretty good time.

(Epilogue: thanks, once again, to Nycholle. You are great. As are Chris and his group of friends. And Bob, because you also contributed. I wish my back didn't hurt as much as it does right now.)

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I Love You

Here are some quick snippets from the week:

Grading tests takes awhile.

Some, in an attempt to be noble about their lack of preparation, declined to answer some questions on the tests I was grading. One even wrote a note saying something like, "I'm sorry I didn't prepare. I'm sparing you the BS and just leaving the ones I don't know blank. I'll come talk to you later." Stupid, stupid, stupid. If you would have even attempted to answer, I would have given you some points.

I was once again surprised by a LP-sized package yesterday. Inside it contained the Decemberists' latest singles series, three records' worth, all on colored vinyl. Ace. Can't wait to get my record player.

There are some really sick people in the world. This doesn't really sink in until you talk to kids in a treatment center and have them tell their stories.

The class I am most behind in is still bookbinding, but the class with the potentially lowest grade: Living with Plants. I realized the other day I totally did not do any of the research paper.

Remember when I mentioned that photography exhibit that got taken down in the Arts building? It got put back up. The official word was there was some "misunderstanding" of the nature of the exhibit on the part of the Administration. I love this school.

I would love to have me as a TA.

At work, my Christmas bonus was a gift certificate for a pound of See's Candy. Awesome.

I had to tangle with the Provo Justice Court today. It is as lame as it sounds. But the good news is, if I can produce the necessary documents, I won't have to ever talk to a judge.

God bless Justin Morin. I hope everything goes well for you, man.

I got a Christmas card from Tracy! Also included was the third installment of Tracy's Christmas Favorites CD. I would have imported it already, but the track titles aren't in the CDDB. Lame!

I am stoked for Sunday.

I am stoked to go back to Minneapolis in January (it won't be much more than a weekend).

Huge thanks to Robin. You rule.

I told Gheybin she was a peach for switching shifts with me, but when she replied with an "oh, okay..." answer, I asked if she'd rather I'd called her by a different fruit, or a vegetable, or even mineral. She replied, "Avacado! No, cantaloupe! Asparagus!" I combined them all into Avacaloupegus, which is a pretty great dinosaur name. Also for a name of a volcano.

I've been painting my used soda bottles with nail polish.

I cleaned my room today. It looks nice, and now there really isn't anything on the floor.

Classes are over!

The literary critic circle JR and I brain-sired is now official. Now all we have to do is write down the rules and start emailing the folk and spreading the word. Check it out at the Pennyroyal (~150 N University Ave) every other Tuesday at 9pm starting on the 22nd.

Eden Express show tomorrow. It will be fabulous. Come. 8pm. 315 N University Ave. Free. Be there or be [].

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Amanda Fucking Palmer

For the record, she came up with that name by herself, I didn't need to help at all. Steven, the director of the Brisbane-based Danger Ensemble (which was touring with Ms. Palmer for tips), even introduced her as such.

A word about the opener: The Builders and the Butchers are pretty awesome. The bass they use totally looks like a guitar, all wide-body and four-stringed. The banjo/mandolin player was the most imposing member of the band. He looked like a hard-core, death-metal version of Rory. Their sound was awesome as well. Check them out.

Amanda's set was fantastic. It was like a crazy-cool theater piece, some staged performance art. So cool. The Danger Ensemble really added something great to the music, especially during "Coin-Operated Boy," in which the two guys in the DE went through the audience and kissing people for tips while the girls made a huge scene onstage, "Guitar Hero," which was totally awesome and full of death and bad air guitarring, and a cover version of "Umbrella," which featured umbrellas, water, a lack of corset (Amanda took it off for the song), and a pink ukelele. At the very beginning Neil Gaiman introduced the show, his disembodied voice narrating the phenomenon of the death of Amanda Palmer. If the concert did nothing else, it cemented my love for Neil Gaiman even more than I thought possible.

She was very chatty and very funny, and her stage manner was the right mix of imposing and intimate. All said, the show was magnificent.

There was this one super nut-job in the audience, though. Page nicknamed her Cruella de Ville. She had scary black hair, a ridiculous fur coat, and thrift-store, high-class accessories. I'm sure she had a diamond-topped cane that was also a switchblade stashed away in her Model T.

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5 Awesome Things - 8 December Edition

As a preface, today I am going to attend the Amanda Palmer concert, which is awesome. Not awesome: it's snowing.


Awesome Thing #21: Awesome National Anthems
If you think about it, the Star Spangled Banner isn't that great. Especially when you compare any of Key's lyrics with words like:

O Fatherland, ere your children, defenseless
bend their neck beneath the yoke,
may your fields be watered with blood,
may they leave their footprints in blood.
And may your temples, palaces and towers
collapse with horrid clamor,
and their ruins continue on, saying:
Of a thousand heroes, this Fatherland was.

And Mexico didn't even make the cut.

Awesome Thing #22: Photojournalism Essay on Odessa's Homeless Kids
Here, 'awesome' doesn't mean 'totally sweet' or 'all kinds of hilarious' but rather 'my soul is wrenched by a thousand pricks of poisonous needles from the injustice cactus.' Most of the places that are listed in the descriptions of these pictures are familiar to me; I was literally meters from where these kids were dying but I couldn't see any of it. But now that I can see, it is such a horrible thing to watch kids that I lived with trying to find veins on each other so they can get their homemade meth hit and stop their uncontrollable weeping.

Awesome Thing #23: Bond Villain Watches
From the brilliant wrist-sized clockmakers at Swatch. They really run the gamut here, from overly elaborate to chintzy to just the right amount of classy. And at different prices, too. This sounds too much like a commercial. In a recent interview, Daniel Craig said that Quantum of Solace was not the second in a trilogy, and that in the next movie he wants to spend the first half hour laying on the beach, sipping martinis. There. Not a commercial.

Awesome Thing #24: In-Home Guinness Pub
This is plain ridiculous. For $250,000 the guys that Neiman Marcus contract with will  turn your living room/dining area/kitchen into an authentic Guinness pub, complete with real Guinness paraphernalia and a years supply of the beer on tap. In your house. First of all, if you have the kind of expendable income to drop on a quarter-million dollar Christmas present, I already have issues with you, but if you actually do this, I will hate you for your money (yet still secretly desire to live in your house).

Awesome Thing #25: The Mario Kart Love Song
I'm going to embed it here, but the you should check out the link anyway of you have time, because the commentary after the video adds an extra measure of pleasure.

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Daylight Robbery

Today is December 7th. An infamous date to say the least. The attack on Pearl Harbor was an event that triggered the deaths of millions, yet it was also the impetus of the creation of the modern world in the emergence of America as a superpower and the creation of Japan as we now know it. It's weird that a heinous act that ends the lives of so many people is a necessary step in the forward progress of history. There's always some rosy in the black, I guess, even if it takes decades for it to come out.

I know I touched on this in church today, but there are a lot of horrible things going on/that have happened these past four months both in the world and in my life. Because the normal American remains blissfully unaware of what is happening around him, here are some things that totally suck:

• A group of Pakistani paramilitary Islamic fundamentalist terrorists raised hell in Mumbai 
• A cholera epidemic in Mugabe's dying Zimbabwe has infected 10,000 and already killed hundreds if not thousands, but the government is too poor and weak to do anything about it
• The world's carbon sinks are approaching their limit, raising world temperatures and threatening to drastically alter the earth's ecology
• Pirates off Somalia are wreaking havoc on international trade waters
• We're in the middle of a recession, the Treasury's Magic Bailout Trick(R) failed, 500,000+ people have been laid off in November alone, and the US auto industry is desperately trying to stay afloat
• The governments and/or economies of Russia, Ukraine, Belgium, Thailand, Zimbabwe, and Iceland (to name a few) are in various stages of collapse and bankruptcy
• Proposition 8 was passed (except you should already know about that one)

I'm sure if you look in your personal lives, there's a whole bunch of crap going on too. There is in mine, which means there is in yours, too. But you know what?

I'm not doing that bad.

In the face of everything else around--including the increasing bastardry of the BYU Administration (and really everything involved in the whole BYU system)*--I can't help but focus on all of the great things, the triumphs that are being made all around. Take, for example, the election of Barack Obama, and everything that brings with it, like hope, a Newer Deal, and a new chapter of American history where we try to loose ourselves from the shackles of our own bigoted, intolerant past. None of my friends are dead. I have two jobs. I graduate in August. I have a large group of people around me that I love and that love me. I've grown a lot this semester and forged relationships that I wouldn't have been able to in India. *: the most recent incident I am referring to here is the quiet removal of a photography exhibit of gay BYU males and their supporters (only 8 portraits, and of a totally innocuous nature) that is no longer on display in the Fine Arts building. This, when I heard about the details surrounding it, unnerved the hell out of me.

Maybe all of those things, especially when stacked against that huge bulleted list of global shit, don't seem like they can outweigh all of the negative, but I think they do. Because what really matters is that you are taking care of yourself as best as you can, and you're caring for the people in your immediate vicinity. Any lasting melancholy or malaise that you may be going through (or that I kind of am right now) is wholly a product of yourself (and I can vouch for that). I don't think you're going to bed crying about fossil fuel depletion or the Congo civil war. No, it's always something personal, and something that lies completely within your power to change and/or get over and move on.

I don't know what it is, what magical combination of experiences I've had in my life, but there's something in me that always refocuses on the good, keeping my head above the river of garbage so I can at the very least enjoy myself and hopefully be productive, too. Does this make me an optimist? Not really. I don't and can't realistically expect much from the human race, as much as I would like to. But it does help me get through the day, the night, the week, the year.

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Announcement:

I AM CONSUMED WITH THE FURY OF A THOUSAND ANGRY SUNS

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Four in One Day! A New Record!

This deserves its own post.

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Urinals

(If you don't read my blog on a reader, don't miss the previous poem-post)

Something that has always baffled me: there is no universal standard on height or placement of toilets. This can cause some definite inconveniences, which I'll get to later. If you haven't noticed, it seems that while the toilets in the JFSB are pretty high up--my feet can touch the floor, but only barely, and then sometimes it's only my toes, and that just doesn't cut it--the ones in the old part of the library and SWKT are pretty low, which is admittedly nice. Do the construction folk (both toilet-makers and toilet-installers) really believe that the average height of the human race has increased so much in the past 30 years that they felt the uncontrollable urge to use higher-sitting toilets?

The most egregious offense in the realm of on-campus bathroom furniture is the urinal in the men's room of B-67. Most of you have never been in this building. It's where the basketweaving, bookbinding, and typography classes are, up on 2230 N and University. Really out of the way, I know. Anyway, the urinal: IT IS UNCOMFORTABLY HIGH. I don't have really long legs. They're of average length. My torso is longer/taller than average. And I'm only 5'11". I don't tower over my peers by any means, but it seems that this piece of porcelain was created specifically for Andre the Giant. It is ridiculous. I LITERALLY HAD TO STAND ON MY TOES TO PEE IN THIS THING. I should have just moved to the standard toilet, the squatter. But I couldn't let a urinal beat me. That is unheard of. I've lost plenty of battles to inanimate objects before (doors, glass, paper, the internet, boiling water, etc.) but I will not concede defeat to the instrument of liquid bodily waste disposal.

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Club & Cheddar

This is a tale about Monday night
When I began and finished an epic fight
With a 20-page term paper
I could not put off till later.

I started it after my 10 o'clock class--
I wish I could say I finished it fast
--And labored in writing for far too long:
I did not stop until way past dawn.

Planning ahead, I went to the store,
Picked up some candy, an orange Rockstar,
And a box of crackers (Club & Cheddar)
To compliment the fruit leather.

For twenty hours I researched and wrote,
Shoving that unhealthy down my throat,
Until I could say "It is finished,"
My will to live greatly diminished.

I got no sleep that whole next day;
Muscles twitched, my brain far away,
But I could still revel in the fact
I got it done (until I get it back).

See, the last 8 pages aren't that great,
I got those done when it was late,
And after my presentation and peer reviews,
A major revision then final grade blues.

But I'm not too worried about the whole thing.
Cooper grades easy and thinks that I bring
Something fresh to the table of scholarship.
And honestly, doing the math, if I get a C on both that first draft and the final, then the lowest grade I can get in the class is a B. Not to wallow too deep in self-aggrandizement (try rhyming that, by the way [actually, it's not that hard to do]), if I get a C or lower on either drafts of this paper, I am going to be totally surprised.
Here's the last sentence: it ends in "trip."

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Back from the Dead

Troops, it's been awhile. Sorry. This weekbeginning's been redonkulous. Especially the Monday-Tuesday one-two punch. Today was actually pretty nice, but in the interest of me needing to get some sleep (490 is meeting again [ugh] which means class at 8, and then I have my new TA class at 9:30 [ugh]) (but I will take a nap tomorrow I promise), this is deliberately short and has a singular purpose: I am alive, and I shall return with a fiery vengeance tomorrow. Oh, and Left 4 Dead is awesome.

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