me...

A lot of brilliant people are Ricky Fitts-ing their way through life. They have taken that essential first step from Western to Eastern thought, from Beauty as an end to Beauty as a whole, but will only defy the system, not abandon it. Beauty as a whole embraces humanity, and therefore Beauty as an end. As with all enduring "conflicts", the glass is both half-full and half-empty. Still, the sirens cry in solitude and remain alone. Do not halt before Beauty, transcend it. Though i do not mean to underrate the difficulty of that second step, nor the isolation. The only communicable understanding i can offer is an analogue. When you exit a movie theater, especially by the "emergency" exits directly into sunlight, your pupils contract. Simultaneously, if it was a compelling film, your mind undergoes dilation. The reality that encapsulated the film becomes a minor fiction in the enormity of familiar reality. This experience may also occur as an emergency exit from familiar reality. posted by Arthur @ 6/21/2002 10:08:00 PM	Friday, June 21, 2002
In true Thursday form, i find myself in that existential purgatory between "There's nothing i want to do." and "i want to do everything." Though, of course, they're probly the same thing. And then i think "At least i'm not content!" posted by Arthur @ 6/20/2002 02:03:00 AM	Thursday, June 20, 2002
i've got a band-aid on my foot and a band-aid on my neck. These days bleeding feels productive. i wish Rebecca were here; i imagine she'd give me fun band-aids. i've been cleaning out my college accounts before the bureaucracy gets around to it. Check out these long "discussion" emails i wrote to a generic honors class my freshman year: hey there crazy people (and i mean crazy in the most affectionate way), i have not really been inspired to write to this thing before now, nor have i really been inspired to read most of the messages. in fact, i'm not sure i'm all that inspired now, but it's better than attempting to tackle the backlog of 3 papers i have to write in this class ;). (just kidding fh --- sort of) so enough with preface, let's get dirty. i want to defend the greaseman... listening now? WE LIVE IN A SOCIETY OF HYPOCRITES! we defend freedom of speech sooooo vehemently, but when someone says something we don't like, we sweep them under the rug as quickly as possible. racist thoughts and speech are not crimes nor should they be crimes. it is a weak society that supports censorship. and while we're on the subject, it's a weak society that employs jails or islands to isolate prisoners who then come up with great beer ads and a rugged image for the consumers of the most powerful nation in the world to try to mimic instead of being proud that they DON'T have to chop wood anymore and the power will only go out in occasional storms when the wood chops back and knocks over the sticks we have holding up the wires in this highly technological age. i feel myself drifting... somebody slap me. OW! thanks Vivian. see how i did that? i made a joke by slapsticking myself, added depth to it by choosing someone least likely to actually hit me, (damn it, 22!) and maybe creating humor by suggesting the image of quiet, pretty Vivian as a closet homicidal maniac. and we all know homicidal maniacs are HILARIOUS! take postal workers... please... OW! okay, i think i'm going to go now... Rain, Music, and Stuffed Animals, me P.S. i know... you never knew these 131 things could be so much fun... well, you just weren't talking to the right disappointed idealist... You bring up an excellent point of course, that though the greaseman has the right to say whatever he wants to, 94.7 has the right to fire him. And of course, since people might stop listening to him, it might have been a wise move. However, that doesn't talk me off of my idealistic high horse from which we are a society of hypocrites. i would also like to point out that the value of discussing the situation has very little to do with the greaseman himself (whom i am no fan of) and very much to do with the ideals this country prides itself on. i think this is a great example of how the wave of the future is Marxism. People are not perfect, and over the course of humanity we have given our authority away to religion and government. However, a new contender is rearing it's ugly head, and it is the head of corporations. Companies will never have the authority government once had, just as government can never have the authority religion once had. Nor am i saying that it is a bad thing; we took power from God and gave it to people appointed by God, then we gave it to people appointed by us via vote, and now we're giving it to people more directly chosen by us - people who own major companies that provide things we want/need. In this class we study the authority of the movie industry, though increasingly it is harder to discuss Hollywood as an independent, since movies are more often wrought with commercial spots. Now i am bored with this topic, but i don't wish to stop writing, because then i'd have to study for my Spanish test. i am a chronic procrastinator and i'm not sure why. i just can't focus i guess. i am a big fan of donuts with rainbow sprinkles though. does anyone else receive energy from a gray, cloudy day? i know i'm odd, but the sun feels oppressive to me, i have to squint in even the mildest of sunshiny days. however, clouds rejuvenate me. and i know people laugh at me when i play in the rain, and sometimes i do feel spiteful of them, but i never do it to spite them. i'm not that weak. course, i'm not that strong either. nor would i want to be. i don't want to sound like Barbra Streisand here, but i think it would suck to not need people. right now there aren't many people that i like, and reaching out has been disappointing more often than not, but if i can't leave myself open to needing someone, i'm not sure there'd be any purpose to life. and though i'm not looking for my mother, i do have a bit of a peter pan complex, and i think we all want to be cared for. why it is so easy to write this to a faceless mass, i may never know. but my personality indicator indicates i need an outlet to express to, so maybe what you've just received was my own cheap form of therapy. Rain, Music, and Stuffed Animals, me My first reaction to these emails was, and i quote, "Yipes!" i mean, i knew the transition from TJ and emily was hard on me, but i had no idea i had said things like this. And then i started thinking about it. And i don't think i'm all that happy that i've changed. i mean, what we're talking about here is image, and i've clearly become more image-conscious. When we were lounging around the Red Sea, i was feeling adventurous, so i tried picking up a girl Dave-style. i walked right up to her and asked if she'd been watching me. She said no. Returning empty-handed, i admitted to Dave that i'd blown it. To my great surprise, Dave was surprised. He instructed me that now she and i had a strange encounter in common, and that it was, in fact, a great start. And that's the precise moment i realized that i could never be that guy - because i'd have to stay that guy. But maybe i've been headed there all along. So what do we find so frightening about the guy i was? i could also see calling it embarrassing or funny or sad, but these are all, in their own way, fear. In any case, it is completely irrational, since my emotional bursts weren't about to harm anyone. And so, i turn to a theory of Douglas Adams' on phobias. He suggests, and i'm rather inclined to believe him, that a fear of heights is not a fear of falling, but a fear of jumping. All of our primate instincts are screaming "Jump! Jump!" and we're afraid we'll listen. Well, much more recently than we were monkeys, we were children. Maybe David E. Kelley is right and we all still are. Maybe image is the game of pretend we've played so long we're afraid to stop. And if it's all right for me to be childishly lonely and honest, then maybe it'd be all right for you. And maybe you'd jump. posted by Arthur @ 6/18/2002 10:34:00 PM	Tuesday, June 18, 2002
New Feature Pop Monday: The new film Scooby-Doo was written with a lot of love for the show. The number of things done right makes it of solid matinée quality, though the highly under-seen Josie and the Pussycats retains my unexpected vote as the best cartoon-turned-verisimilar. The song "No Such Thing" by John Mayer has improved my quality of life, much as the return of an old friend. John Mayer sounds a bit like Edwin McCain and a bit like Dave Matthews. The song itself is of "Least Complicated" intent, with heavy nostalgia. But where the Indigo Girls were happily vague, John is daringly specific. He asks "Why do we acquiesce to the world's insistence that aging means submitting?" And i don't know. He makes me feel a bit like the children of the future in the 1960 version of The Time Machine, and that's a pretty hard sell. Though for the record, i both ran through the halls of my high school and screamed at the top of my lungs. And i have a five-year reunion next year. posted by Arthur @ 6/17/2002 10:57:00 PM	Monday, June 17, 2002
This morning was bright. As i laid extended across Dave's unfolded futon, i watched as small particles twirled in and out of my perception. Their essentially indeterminate, transitory motions reminded me much of people, and this entry i've been meaning to write since the Counting Crows post: "We live as we dream -- alone," wrote Joseph Conrad, and that's enough individuality, identity, and self for me. No matter how we struggle and pretend to understand each other, and thereby each other's worlds, our perspective is ultimately as impenetrable to another person as our R.E.M. consciousness. Given this inescapable isolation, it seems a strange combination of morbid and futile to seek more delineation from other people. i hear you citing Self in defense of introspection, but your "identity" is a paradox of distinction by comparison. The study of others is illuminating insofar as we are the same. Besides, i'm not saying people shouldn't be different; i'm saying we already are. i didn't win the poetry contest. i'm less devastated than i am broke. posted by Arthur @ 6/16/2002 06:42:00 PM	Sunday, June 16, 2002