ItMightBeMiles's Xanga

eejanaika!

Tue, 13 May 2008 12:40:27 GMT

In a word: ouch. What a hell of a last couple weeks. I'd love to beg for future moderation of responsibilities and all, but right now all I can help but think is "To hell with it all!".
I'm almost done. Completely. With college. Thats crazy. I've never used so many short sentences in my life as I've done just now. Thats how crazy done I am with college.

Holy Expletive.
Who knows? Maybe I'll continue taking Chinese and go to grad school at KU to pick up what I originally wanted to major in. Maybe I'll write a novel or a comic book or something. Maybe I'll find my "true purpose" or some bullshit like that.
"What do ya do with a B.A. in Engrish?"

Whatever I end up doing, I'm out of this town in less than a month. No job, no security or confidence after the next two weeks, perhaps... but I'm out of here. That is somehow reassuring. I like the possibilities that starting over presents, I just wish economic conditions were better or that I could quite simply be paid to be myself.

"I can't pay the bills yet, 'cause I have no skills yet."
Sucks to be me, I suppose. Except it doesn't. I'm happy with the last four years. Extremely so at times. It just feels weird for it to be at such a looming precipice.
Change is good.

Sunday, March 09, 2008

Sun, 09 Mar 2008 23:32:41 GMT

Nothing I write here will manage to be free from the pretentiousness or hypocracy that generally accompanies thought like this in hindsight, but I feel the need to write it anyway.

No I don't. Nevermind.
I guess just let it be known that some fragment of me is still here, and that part sincerely wants to change things. Whether or not the willpower and the resources exist to make it manifest in the future is the question of the times, but I hope I can maintain at least the notion of clarity that I now write with. May it come to fruition.

Moron This Semester

Sun, 27 Jan 2008 20:30:34 GMT

My classes kick ass. I just glanced at my evening class' syllabus and I'm hugely enthusiastic. I'll have to be sufficiently more academic this semester than I have ever been- I'm trying to ration my slack-time in order to make the most of all this.

I suppose the biggest dilemmas in my life at the moment involve, as always, impending financial apocalypses, inducing self-change, and practicing self-appreciation. Those last two are especially hard to balance with each other.

I've been feeling the urge to write a lot recently. I've put down my pen many times in the last few years due to self-doubt and good judgement, and I'm beginning to believe that stewing all this time may have actually allowed me to come up with a few noteworthy ideas. They may not make best-sellers or even good blog posts, but they are enough to interest me in writing again, and I suppose that says something on its own. Perhaps I'll never actually get around to writing and I'll just have a lot of really good notes. I'm generally pretty good at notes.

Oh yeah. China.

This semester I'm feeling even more obligated to force myself into traveling abroad. One potential possibility includes throwing myself haphazardly at the whim of Princeton University, and the EALC program related thereto. Basically, I scrounge up a lot of money and they force me to commit to learning Chinese, in Beijing... the good way. I love the idea of it, but I don't know if I trust myself enough to pull it off. In any case, to even apply I have to throw together a lot of effort in the next two days, and I've been in the habit of being idle a lot recently. Breaking bad habits is a goal this semester... indulging in them is another. Discovering what I truly want to do with myself is probably on a back burner at this point. Narrowing my use of cliches is imperative to my self-appointing panel of self-improvement.

Finishing my homework, however, is the most urgent thing. First things first. Scratch that.

I'm going to read now.

Wednesday, January 16, 2008

Wed, 16 Jan 2008 00:06:56 GMT

I get to read Musashi for english credit, amongst a gratuitous load of other interesting materials. Not to mention picking up on my neglected Chinese.

This semester will probably kick (my) ass.

Tuesday, November 20, 2007

Tue, 20 Nov 2007 02:22:38 GMT

I keep thinking about posting here, but nothing seems to come out right. I suppose Xanga often lacks the dispositional sincerity I simultaneously strive for and wish to mock... Everything else has been deleted, for various (and often good) reasons, so I suppose I'll try to make mockery of this one in late eulogy to other blogs that felt... different... perhaps more private or surrounded by less accusations. Xanga does tend to be martyrdom territory, I'm afraid.
Truth: I'm at an impasse. The kind where I catch myself looking at things and either systematically disbelieving them or ignoring them until I can become distracted by something more prominent. This is the kind of impasse that is absolutely necessary, because its the kind that makes me awkwardly aware of my redundancy.

Distraction: Its been a good couple o months for games. I don't remember being anywhere near this enthusiastic for things my computer can run. A new graphics card helps; A slacker attitude promotes.
Meanwhile, it dawns on me occasionally that I'm in the process of learning a language. A big, fucking complex language. This fact is starting to excite me again; something that hasn't happened since the trip to China was waylaid. The time I have that isn't spent debating on whether or not I should write a Xanga entry, or whether I should play Portal or Company of Heroes is spent debating whether or not I should work on my ever-increasing load of Chinese homework.

Thought: What should I do with all this time?
Perhaps, given the right amount of strength of will, something worthwhile.

The Possibility of Toast (Observations)

Sun, 07 Oct 2007 20:20:46 GMT

One of these days I'm going to burn this mutha down....

...because I keep forgetting that I made toast.

Okay, thats not what some would call entirely accurate; some would call it a "lie". One of my offenses was recent, in fact just a few hours ago, and the aforementioned "toast" was in fact a bagel, if you want to be specific. However, the bagel does compare quite well to a previous indiscretion of mine, where I was actually making toast, and then completely forgot about the whole thing. Megan caught me then, but not this time around. I suppose if she had the interaction between the two of us would be similar nonetheless:

Megan: (Confused) Hey, did you make toast?
Me: Oh yeaah....

I realize that my sudden elaborations of misplaced and toasty thoughts are indeed, erm, sudden, especially after a hiatus like the one this "blog" (to use a despised term) has taken recently. But, I had to get myself writing again somehow, and.... well toast is hard to stay negative about for long. So, in the interest of the continuation of writing here, I will... uh, continue writing about toast.

I forget about it a lot. Toast, that is. Not that I forget that I made it like I'd like to exaggerate about, but I often forget about its advent, or even the possibility of toast. Toast is also one of those things that has a predetermined natural status; one that is often somehow ironic and funny without any context whatsoever- similar to words like "banana". Come to think of it, food is usually some fairly funny shit. That said, I'm done with it. No more toast.

I've been up to a lot lately. None of it is exciting, naturally, but I'll do my best to try and make it exciting without involving forgotten food. There's actually very little forgotten food in my recent history; I'm pretty damn good at remembering it. Perhaps that is a sufficient way to say "I've been cooking more" without using an ill-placed reference to my roleplaying habits like "Miles' Cooking Skill has increased by 1!".... Noticed I've included one anyway. I have that power.

Chinese is hard. Well, not extremely hard, but hard in a "has nothing to do with my habitual way of thinking" kind of way. I love it. Tsui Laoshi is a good teacher, and I find I have a hard time convincing myself not to go to the class, which is a much easier endeavor with all of my other current classes. This brings me back to the fact that it is "hard". See also: "interesting" and "likely to get me somewhere if I pursue it".

I could comment on the various and frugal aspects of how I'd like to live recently, but I have an inkling that pursuing thoughts on things such as work will lead me to an angry disposition. An angry at Wal-mart disposition, to be precise, in which the word "Fascist" would be thrown around carelessly and certainly more frequently than the words "Democratic", "Fair", "Fun" and "Peachy". I'd like to think that keeping the first word out of my vocabulary with a fresh abundance of the latter ones will keep everyone all sorts of happy, if not in a state of blissful denial... though to be honest, I don't know if I ever really have used the word "peachy" before, and I doubt I'll develop a habit of using it in the feature, so don't expect to hear it. "Peachy" just reminded me of "Toast", so I included it to keep the "positive vibe" and to keep the fascist thoughts at bay.

I suppose an impending birthday is worthy of mention. I'll be 22 on two'sday, and I'll be heading to the Topeka area sometime Friday afternoon. Feel free to buy me stuff, thats always cool with me. Don't take that as a demand or even a request. You have the right to bring me stuff, and I'd be down with that. Either way, call me and we'll eat some sort of food that can't be eaten in Emporia without a helluva grocery budget and a much higher cooking skill, and we'll talk about our youthful things and do whatever the hell we decide to do... I just want to be around good people again, if only for a while. It'd be cool if you'd help me pay for it. I'm down with help, too.

Appreciation

Wed, 15 Aug 2007 17:49:46 GMT

Here is where I declare my current festering anger towards the general education requirements collectively grouped together and referred to as "fine arts".
Poetry is not about where the line break is or what rhyme scheme it uses.
Theatre is not about the stage the actors use.
Art is not about what level of realism it has or what type of brush the painter uses.
Music is not about notes on a page or the instruments that play them.

Or at least they shouldn't be exclusively. I personally think that the specifics of the humanities and the "fine arts" are best used by those that use them. I am not going to learn to appreciate art more if I know the name for every kind of line in such and such painting, nor will I be any happier looking at art I already enjoy if I could precisely explain why it is a perfect example of surrealism. I don't love a book for what kind of viewpoint it has.
Granted, devotion and pure appreciation of any art can be deepened by understanding the intricacies of that particular art. A play is often much more entertaining when one recognizes just what kind of work goes into one and the sort of difficulties that surround it. A musical solo is all the more impressive when you recognize how difficult it is to play within whatever time signature or key. I can recognize the reasons that I like authors for the way they form sentences, but that doesn't mean I love grammar or think that knowledge of parallelism is required to enjoy a book; To fully understand it maybe, but often I find that the more I understand something, the less I'm inclined to like it if I'm not otherwise already inclined to appreciate it.

Leave the technicalities and the terminology for the connoisseurs. What I want from an art appreciation class is an opportunity to look at art. I want an excuse to be able to take a class to look at the stuff that not everybody already knows. Yes, Leonardo DaVinci was remarkable, Yes that painting is extremely expressive; but it doesnt change the fact that it is piss on a canvas or that it looks like the floor of a hardware store's paint department if an extremely impatient six year old had been left there for an hour with a hammer glued to his hand. Yes, I should be able to explain why that I like something, but I don't think that i need to know how to explain the way lines were painted to express it. I don't want cave paintings, murals, or flung paint cans. I want thought provocation. I want the art that isn't famous or stuffy. I want the artist down the street, and to appreciate whatever he or she is doing to try and stand out from Klimt and Cassatt.

Fundamentally, it comes down to me not wanting to see art as objects. I don't want to classify and compartmentalize what I see because I'd like to think that anything worthy of my appreciation was either created with the intent to transcend simple aestheticism, or was done with such finesse and talent that I can't help but stand agape at how cool it is. Thus, I find the movements in art to be fascinating, but often find little interest in the art itself unless there is something outright disturbing or memorable about it, and then my art-relevant vocabulary will be worthless anyway.

I suppose this is simply more whining in the form of "but I dont wannaaaa!", but I think it is still completely relevant and I'm extremely pissed off at the way these classes continually go for me. Perhaps I'm snooty and elitist for assuming that I already know something about the fine arts- excuse me for growing up surrounded by them. I know what I like, and I don't think that making me take tests on who painted what is going to change that. I think making me try it for myself would.

Needless to say, it might be a chore for me to stick around for my art appreciation class. I tried to avoid this rant by trying to get a different class this time around, but I ended up with the same thing I dropped for fear of ending up hating art a few semesters ago.

Narcissus' Mirror

Sat, 14 Jul 2007 20:56:19 GMT

If you don't want thought. Don't read.

After a somewhat shorter-seeming shift at work today I settled down in my apartment after modifying the atmosphere quite a bit- I have this unnerving tendency to be uncomfortable in the humidity my apartment seems to generate. This is a long-winded way for me to say I turned the AC way the hell up, and it is also an exercise in futility; a means for me to avoid having to elaborate on my actual thoughts. I expect a lot of this... You probably should too.

A possibly long story short; I sat down and opened the email my sister sent me quite a while ago. I tend to take things that involve links that I consider to involve some form of truth extremely seriously, so I had delayed viewing the site she showed me, for fear that viewing it before I'd allow it my full attention would cheapen or force me to disregard its content. I wont bother butchering the link by attempting to make it easy, though I assure you it is worth the few seconds to type out the title and re-type it after noticing that German is flipping hard to spell. http://zeitgeistmovie.com/
Take the time to watch it. It's about 2 hours long. Perhaps you have other things to do, but I doubt anything is worth wishing you had done instead of watching. Certainly your time would be better spent watching this film instead of reading my thoughts. Comparatively, I'm extremely insignificant.

Many people I know will probably dismiss it immediately. Oh well. Most of those people probably wont read this anyway. So I suppose I'm Preaching to the Choir.

After watching this film, I've basically become uncomfortable with myself. I realize that much of my time is wasted on fruitless endeavors probably involving a flavor or a fantasy. I'm sick of being aware of the fact that I am susceptible to the opinions and actions of others. I'm tired of vulnerability.

I've asked myself relatively few questions comparable to the ones that I'd like to answer for myself. I'll live with that. Whatever the case is, I've allowed my feelings to be controlled by some lingering piece of false logic that tells me I cannot accomplish what I attempt, no matter the conditioning. I'm beset upon all sides by my internal antagonism, my skeptic cynicism, and my blatant hedonism. I cheapen my own words by using boisterous and empowering language that must seem contrived, selfish, mislead, and pompous to anyone outside my moment.

Perhaps I defend my own self-enslavement, for joy of the paradoxical concept of finding freedom within slavery. I bask in duality, and I preach singularity. I risk losing the attention I crave by elaborating beyond simple plots that entertain others, falling once again into the bait of being self-absorbed... but it is worth it for the possibility that somebody out there is with me. I cringe at the possibility that something so unknown to me could be possible, but I hope that somewhere within my expanding thoughts before they become irretrievable, another thought can intersect and create truth. I hope that at some point I'll surpass my selfishness and find some cause worthy of my devoted attention before I become too lax to notice that I've fallen back into a pattern.

For those that wanted to skip the thought part this is for you:

I'm extremely pissed off. and I'm going to do something about it.

...eventually.

Wrongdoing

Sat, 07 Jul 2007 21:23:36 GMT

I'm supposed to hate research... right? It seems so unfair that for once I'm researching a topic that I could find myself reading every page of every resource I use, to the extent that I'm delaying writing the actual paper in a sort of pity for my previous unproductivity.

I've been far separated from the rest of the world it seems. I feel like a hermit who secretly is involved with a sort of "have to work at wal-mart" counter-culture inbetween writing overrated nature poetry, growing out a mangy beard, and staring at the world outside my window. It's been an exciting couple o' weeks, lemme tell ya. And no, I don't have any nature poetry. I hate that shit.

Off to work, I suppose.

Compromises

Thu, 31 May 2007 04:37:03 GMT

I have nothing intelligent left to say, still, I feel I need to write. I don't write enough these days. Call that a disclaimer if you must.

My passport arrived in the mail yesterday. Needless to say it was a little bit late, not that it matters now. I suppose I could view it as an ironic jab of karma; a personification of my actions intent on seeing me never accomplish professional or long-range personal goals without truly working for them... but instead I like to think that the universe is out to get me in general. There aren't a lot of underdogs in karmic retribution.

Perhaps if things had gone differently I wouldn't feel as if I was losing my Chinese so quickly. I can't seem to muster up the willpower to blatantly study it right now- being in China would have kinda forced me to do that.

That's it! The ultimate solution to all of my problems is just to force uncompromisable circumstances into effect. Now if I could just get an assload of frequent flier miles and a taste for spelunking, I'd never feel inadequate again.
If I'm allowed to compromise, I'll setter for the lesser. That is, instead of diving into caves halfway across the world and learning new languages, I'll lurk around my apartment and draw stick figures on the fridge.
Not that my fridge is worthy of commentary, but I've got to talk about something, right?

I've been doing very little other than work recently. I apologize if anyone was intent on seeing anything interesting in this paragraph. It isn't going to happen.
The most interesting thing I've done recently probably involves the sudden infestation of gnats my kitchen seems to have. There's no fruit, no houseplant, and no dishes to attract them, and my attempts at genocide seem to be in vain. Tomorrow if they are still there, I will ask them politely to leave, and if that doesn't work, I'll... think of something else. I know, how awfully cunning of me.

Friday and part of tomorrow night, I'll be back home to do some housecleaning while I have the opportunity. If you are around and want to hang out, or if you want any of my stuff that I probably couldn't sell, call me... I'll be around.