Gut Sickness

There is a feeling I get when I feel particularly ashamed of being human. A great example of this is something I glimpsed on the Reuters website.

2nd most popular article: Iran required to give up most of it's enriched uranium
1st most popular article: Donald Trumps's daughter, Ivanka, tweets new pregnancy.

UGH! Doesn't that make you sick? In what crazy world is Ivanka's pregnancy more important than Iran releasing it's enriched uranium? This one. My stomach gets upset and my face contorts to disgust.

After seeing that on the computer screen I had to physically remove myself from the room. I walked to the kitchen to get some water. In the living room some show was on about wedding dresses. Even now my stomach feels queasy. Ugh.

I will have to come back to this.

Back.

The wedding dress show is a reality show about people who buy wedding dresses. Problem customers, easy sales, and lots of money and a warehouse full of super expensive white fabric body coverings. But when I hear them talk up the wedding day as the single most important day of a woman's life (thought: of course they would talk up that day, they sell wedding dresses). Then the women parade around in front of their friends and family and try on various wedding gowns, gasp at the $10,000 price tag (or triple this in some cases) and pay it anyway saying, "Well I only get married once, might as well make it count."

Now before you think to yourself, "well actually lady, you will probably get married twice as the divorce rate is going up," I have to tell you that the divorce rate is going down, and has been going downward since the 60's. The current rate of divorce is about 41%, which I admit is rather high. But it has been decreasing. It's a oft-perpetuated lie that says otherwise. But accurate figures are seen when surveyed by legitimate institutions like the Fertility and Family Statistics branch of the Census Bureau and the Pew research center. Now, back to what I was saying.

These women buying these dresses for the price of a car that they will wear for a day...

I got nothing.

My brain simply does not compute. It does not make sense to me and I can't even wrap my mind around the idea of another person making that kind of decision: "It's the cost of new Honda Civic and I'll wear it once... but it is the most important day of my life, might as well make it count. I'll take it!"

You want to know the best part? Sometimes this expensive dress BANKRUPTS the women. Yeah. I know right? Imagine that post coital honeymoon conversation: "Wow. That was great -- by the way we are now fourteen thousand dollars in debt." BAZINGA!

I think the part that gets me is the frivolous spending of dump-trucks full of money on A dress and A celebration for A day. I see all of this, this industry, this institution and I think to myself... what a messed up place we live in. I understand far more than I am able to express, so I see these people and listen to the things they say and understand what kind of person they are, what they think about, how they think, what it must be like to live with them and so on.

Sometimes all I see when I look at this show is bipedal mammals acquiring white fabric at great cost to themselves and wear it one day in front of other bipedal mammals wearing expensive fabric so everyone can stand around and wear expensive fabric. It not unlike chimpanzees putting a leaf on their head starting a trend that others follow and they start revolving teir lives around acquiring said leaf, or something approximate. The sad thing is that the chimps know it is a game and drop it eventually.

Another day another update

It's been a really long time and a lot has happened.

After I busted my butt to write all those essays, and not to mention working when not applying to all of those grad schools, I just wanted to vegg out and decided to relax for a change.

Oh, it was so nice to not have responsibilities for a change. All I had to do was go to work. That left a lot of other time to do some mindless activities. So for the first time in three months I turned on the XBOX and played Forza Motorsport 3 and raced around in it. I must have done that for hours. While I'm racing in video game land my mind can wander and often does.

I feel like a huge weight just fell off my shoulders and I want to enjoy my carefree moment (however brief, because I know when the schools start responding to my requests I will be going back to school for a couple years and be very busy again, if I get accepted. So this may be the last good goof-off time I have for awhile.)

It was much needed after applying to grad school. I played other games, read some books and I even participated in some heavy-nerd activities!

One of my room mates has a girl friend, just recently she moved in with us (quartering the rent, wahoo!) and asked if I wanted to join them in a vampire/werewolf role playing table top game called the world of darkness. My initial reaction was negative, but deep below the surface of my psyche, my inner nerd stirred. I said maybe and slept on it. The next day a premise was posited to me from nowhere, insisting that because I had no obligations I could join them in the game, and if it wasn't fun it could be just the once. So I joined the game as a cage fighting, dumb tough guy that would, some how, transform into a werewolf at some time. We were playing humans first, and role playing the transformation for dramatic effect. (side note, vampires don't do anything for me; Werewolves on the other hand interest me quite a bit. I like the monster lurking beneath the surface idea, and prefer ferocious beast-type monsters to uppity, aristocratic, humanoids with pointy teeth and pale skin. However Bram Stoker's Dracula is a favorite story of mine, and the only book to scare me)

Anyway the role playing table top game was a lot of fun, but it reminded me of all the years I spent playing Dungeons and Dragons and others with my friends growing up. It made me very nostalgic because it was a favored weekend activity, and on several occasions it prevented my other friends from partaking in illegal activities like drug dealing. Role Playing Games satisfy some deep level of the psyche, something that can override desires to make money illegally, or go to parties or get drunk or a bunch of other things. Anyway, after the world of darkness game I started talking about Rifts, a futuristic role playing games with magic, robots, supernatural and stuff. They seemed interested so on a whim I offered to lead a game of Rifts for all of them to play in. They happily agreed and we played it the other night. It went pretty well, but it was all new to them so I had to lead them by the hand, so to speak and let them get a feel for the game mechanics. So now that that has been done, session # 2 will be a lot better, and after that it will be character driven.

Wow, what a nerdy outburst. I have to watch what my inner nerd says sometimes, he will talk forever, just to talk--which reminds me:

I saw some episodes of a show called Big Bang Theory about a bunch of nerd geniuses and a hot blond girl. I think it makes the obvious mistake with the stereotype about geniuses being unable to function socially, or with basic things like tying shoes and the like. I know plenty of brilliant people, some of them geniuses, and they are not socially awkward, quite the contrary, they are often speaking at huge public forums or writing formal papers. I realize that some people are awkward socially, and when they see girls and stuff, but the writers seem to go out of their way to make simple things complicated simply by inflating the language to chemistry or physics jargon. Sometimes it's cute, and sometimes it's annoying. Mainly because I understand and follow what they are saying in their complicated science talk.

That reminds me, I been watching a lot of the show Bones, and there are times when Bones will say something really complicated and Boothe doesn't understand what she says and says something like, "She, must have known him?" And Bones says, "Yeah, I just said that." I was watching it with some of my roommates friends, and it occurred to me that they are with Boothe and his inability to follow the science talk, and they have to wait for Boothe to 'translate' the science talk so they can understand it. I'm not trying to say I'm smart to brag or something, just observing that the two world perspectives we must have are vastly different.

Rambling now, time to go.

Mozart and Snoop Dogg

I was riding in the car with two other people and listening to Howard Stern on Sirius/XM radio. I have been listening to Howard for seven years now, so I understand whats going on, but others in the car weren't that familiar with him and they suggested listening to music on one of the many music channels.

So we listened to The Pulse, a top 40 pop/rock music station. And they were doing a countdown of, what else, the top forty songs of 2010. We got there at the tenth most popular song. They all sound alike to me so I can't tell you what song it was, but this guy was singing and he had a warbling/underwater sound quality to his voice. I wondered what it was like to be in the room when that decision was made. Did they listen to his rice paper thin voice and think to themselves that something was missing? And then think that making him sound like he was singing underwater was the solution? Maybe that is the reason its number ten? (As a matter of interest song number one sounded like he was singing above water.)

I'm not a fan of pop music. I'm a metal head myself, but I listen to classical and a lot of others. See, the thing with me and music is that if I think it is difficult, technical or skillfully done I tend to like it, and if I feel like it doesn't require much skill, ability or technique than I am disinclined to like it. Rap for example, often times I feel like it doesn't require much skill, or isn't equivalent to say an opera singer or a violinist. The sounds in rap songs are usually computer generated and spaced and timed and layered in such a way that sounds like it was constructed by a person at a computer. In my mind it can not compare to the likes of a Yo Yo Ma playing the cello with his hands, which is what I'd rather watch and listen to.

At a concert all the sound is coming from his cello, if he makes any mistake we will hear it, and when we don't we can appreciate just how sharp his brain is, how much practice he had to reach this level. At a rap concert the computer will not make a mistake leaving my interest to fall on the rapper alone, and I'm usually disappointed in them because they don't sing well, and the rap, or poetry in some cases, isn't so hot either. Maybe I'm totally ignorant of rap and can't appreciate it, but I want you to think of Mozart and ask yourself the question, will anyone know Snoop Dogg 219 years from now?

I think I'll end there because my eyelids are getting heavy.