el Bug

I need to travel. If someone doesn't let me out of this USC bubble soon, I may explode.RIP, here lies Emily, the tragic victim of routine.

I just downed an ungodly amount of sugar and caffine and feel like I could Forrest Gump my way across the universe, on foot, with no particular destination.

Yet i remain seated--15 years of education has trained me well. I'm not that straight edge, I'm reclining. Reclining in a chair which looks luxerious and exudes the allusion of comfort but it's just another mirage in this collegiate desert of nice looking shiney things that actually suck. For instance, this Mac computer I'm musing on. It's a toy. iAnd as I am reading about early selective attention, I'm realizing that my attention is wafting up and away from my studies and floating amidst the strange concoction of smells that is oh-so characteristic of Commons.

Distracted--

Have you ever noticed how everything in commons is plastic? Most things are platsic imitations of what they should be ( example: plastic tables painted like wood and plastic plants) and everything else is prosessed chemicals made to be comsumed. Some have been picked, cooked, chemically modified and injected with an aroma and color, frozed, put into a vehicle or plane and flown with premium petrolum to a plant where it was packaged in more plastic. Then,it was boxed, taped, sealed in plastic, picked up driven even further before it was dropped of, unwrapped, put onto plastic shelves and either bought and noshed on before it was thrown away in a plastic garbage bin or 'expired' and thrown away into a plastic garbage bin, then taken to a dump and left to rot, which it never will. Plastic will never age. It is our fountain of youth. All hail plastic. Plastic is religous. Plastic is finite. What will happen first: the plastic apocolypse or the world actually being destroyed? Maybe the first will lead to the second. I don't think the second would lead to the first...ew, gross. Only plastic, cockroaches and the chemosynthesis of the blacksteamers in the Ocean survive the apocolypse, imagine. Or don't. Maybe turning a blind eye is the only way to get by today without letting the darkness of the world seep inside you and letting your mood become as black as the gurgeling petroleum being slurped out of the oil rigs. We rig our outlook to be sunny, they rig their oil, everyone wins.
win win win.

Application Proclamation

Aside from one chapter in The Textbook from Hell ( aka the principles of cognitive neuroscience), the extent of my work today was filling out two long applications. Done.I want a medal. No, a trophy. Better yet, a Medallion made of fools gold and the teethmarks of angry San Franscisco hopefuls. Is that so much to ask? I guess some Victory Advil will do. Alarm set. 8:30 a.m. And I quote Mr. Bubba Sparxxx when I say, " Ain't Life Grand."

flashback of the night

Look. I had a terrific, productive, relaxing day. It is now 2:30 am. I’ve surpassed tired, defeated depleted, curb stomped exhausted, and find myself buoyant, hovering over the water line dividing consciousness and unconsciousness. Every sheep I count is a buoy in disguise, every meditative thought is another set of water wings, compounding and weighting me up, up and away in a frustrated fit of levitated bliss. All I want is a gentle dissent back down to my restless body, harmonize and reconnect, warm up the ill-oiled joints and melt away the mental peaks and valleys. Redefine Mellow, a patient energetic yellow that I used to know before like my own reflection. My battery pack and my snooze button have run away, racing the The Cow and ET to the dark side of the moon made of a cobblestone conglomerate comprised of youthful and drug induced musing and misconceptions. They play up there because I had lost my confidence to do just that on earth, and so shoved them out with the earnest naivety of a curious child. And in days caught in a maze without Buzz Lightyear to lift me up and out and bring me home, I realize that Woody wouldn't have, couldn’t have, left my side and there was never a need to modify the wheel to begin with. Too late, so late, storm awaits as I lie awake now and know that I'll be failing at fighting sleep tomorrow.

Life is funny. I'm so happy, so sleepily giddy even at my own self-handicapping shortcomings.

Zodiac

I am a Gemini. If there is a difference between a horoscope and a vaugely cotoured proverb of the day, the distinction is lost on me. Zodiac as I see it has no inherent predictive value; however, its prescriptive nature primes a perfect situation for a self-fullfilling prophecy. Horoscope ingested--> introspective lens applys horoscope to self and life--> thoughts, feelings, and behaviors experianced are more likly to reflect horoscope. That being said, zodiac isn't a modern day, commercial, overprinted Nastradamas, but it isn't completly worthless and irrelevant either. Sexism and gender roles work in the same way; women and men are fed societal ideas of what it means to be masculine and feminine, and grow to embody those characteristics. Today I looked at my horoscope, which is sent to me everyday by the wise Junk E-Mail Gods of the Stars. Gemini's in general are the communicators and non-conformists of the zodiac. Most people assume we're fickle and have the jeckle-hyde Twin effect. I'm calling bullshit-show me one person who isn't multi-faceted and complex.

Here is my horoSCope (...oh god..) today. Let's see if I actually make it a reality as this kernel of 'knowledge' about myself is planted into the back of my mind:
"Gemini-It's more important today to know what you want than it is to believe that you can get by with a spur of the moment decision. You really need a concrete plan, even if this isn't your typical style. Advanced preparations now can increase your success potential for the future. Ultimately, you can obtain freedom if you work with discipline from the beginning."

Right below clairvoyant message is a weight loss advertisment, i could lost 10 pounds in about 48 hours!!!! No thanks. And that sums up pretty well the agency and authenticity that I attribute to zodiac.

The Means, The Ends and Meaningless Meaning

One man's trash is another man's treasure. Perhaps--every stupid cliche and idiom is applicable in the right context.By simply amplifying that saying with some hyperbole, a scarey doctorine arises: one man's mindless musings is another man's emotional oxygen. Impossible situation? I think not. Ignore the highways this question could lead you to wander down and instead let us saunter this narrow alleyway under the Champagne Supernova in the Sky. What? Precisley.

Tonight, lounging and chatting around the assorted bohemia-meets-grandmothers attic-meets-lazy clutter of my appartment, an old cherished song of mine, Champagne Supernova, was exposed for the Fraud that it really is. It's a song of exclusivly pretty noises and whimsical, abstract lyrics, which together allude towards a hint of significance, but alas, none. According to Wikipedia (the latest and greatest Prophet, shhh don't tell jesus), the writer of the song, Noel, " claimed in a 2005 interview that he has still not made up his mind as to what the song actually is about, though he thinks it might be about reincarnation." Aren't you supposed to know what the song is about sometime before or during the whole writing process? Maybe? Perciever dictates meaning. Meaning is not fact, it's fluid. But usually the dissonance in the meaning sent and taken in of author and perciever differ in significance, not existance. This song used to move me, inspire me, make me feel. Nothing moved me, nothing made me feel. Nothing. Champagne Supernova, you are a tricky little son of a bitch.

Tired and Inspired Musings

Words are the most tireless toy mankind has created. Words are a mosaic of mirrors reflecting our thoughts, dynamic and distinct, distinguishing me from you from them. Words are as clever, potent and genuine as the individual crafts them to be, and therein lies the inherent flaw in the function of language: words are the middlemen of communication, and even the most sincere writen or spoken message is just a shadow of the sentiment and idea in it's original form.

The eye-to-eye conversation, naked and honest, shares in silence. Deaf to tone, translucent in intention and unable to mask it's motive, it reveals. Light and dark wrestleing and tumbling, ricoche off of your eye and onto theirs, illuminating brilliant hidden shades of gray obscured by the routine and simplifying effects of everyday language. Forced to absorb meaning and stumble into understanding, soujourning into a deep well, intimate cosmic empathy, superceeding borders and identities, connect. Efficient breath taking, breath saving, breathing palpating humanity. Translating novels of experiance and omitting the trial and error of words, clumsy and cluttered, a cacophany of desires detered by the wasted wishes and trivialities of assinine assumptions of the known and unknown. Stick figure conclusions rule supreme, silloueteing a full figured reality, gracefully dancing around truth and meaning and naieve to their brilliant preformance art of deception. Break Through. Penetrate through webs of words borrowed into a higher tier of looks owned, unmistaken and orginial, broadcasting at a frequency, too frequently too high to reach communal clairty through the bashful, blushing cheeks of the majority, small-talking, dog-walking over rehersed Schemas and Scripts ,under-estimating the purifying effects of panorama, hearing their neighbor without listening and writing a letter without revealing, reverting to a rubric set in society like a cookie cut out of a cut out, cloned and cemented, stained into the sky and sea by Outdated Traditions. Outdated Traditions, supported by tyranny,tears and tiers of transmitted Truths, unequivicoaly scribed and spoken in scripture and sermons, written and redacted, reinforcing rhyme and reason for rules and regulations and other ideas whose existance blossomed from and relys on language and litigation. And Numb to our senses we follow the leader, blindly bah'ing and babbeling, literature a luxury and limited to a lexicon of laymens lessons and never once do we dare look the librarian in the eye and demand more. Settle, we settle, we sink and we settle, quicksand society swirling and gurgleing, consuming, insatiable appitite.

Knock-offs are for purses and chemically altered no calorie sugar packets. Language, writen and spoken, negotiates the authenticy of meaning proposed with the meaning interpreted. Use the eyes more often--as I'm learning, they really are little portals...

Blink

Dear Emily of the future weekend,
This is Emily, from Tuesday. Well, technically it's Wednesday i suppose but the smog has yet to illuminate a hazy rosy fingered dawn creeping over the downtown high-rises and skyskrapers. I don't have much time to fill you in ( this is an all-nighter for a reason) but to gist of it is this: variability is exciting because it makes you appriciate stability. Will the scantron spit out the test im about to take, offended by the taste of idiocracy? Perhaps. Life wouldn't end, I'm well aware. And if it did end, if the apocolypse came and I was the sole catalyst, there is no way i could feel poorly about that. There is no way I could feel at all--i'd be dead...or reincarnated into a turtle ( shoutout to my buddhist friends...and when you break it down, a turtles life is grand. When i was at the long beach aquarium on saturday, similar thoughts teeter-tottered in my mental playground. A jellyfish's life is grand. They have no self concept of being a distinct entitiy from the jelly next to them. Their was just something so pure and perfectly balanced about their lives, unconciously existing, maintaining homeostasis, aroused and challenged by survival and reproduction. Nothing is convoluting they way they are programmed to function as animals. They have no fashion schemas or personality schemas that affect their behavior and inter-jellyfish relations. They just be.

I gotta get me a Jelly man. Learn from the invertebrea kings of the sea.

elapsed

It's been a while.

First order of business: someone recently left an anonymous comment on an older post telling me to learn to spell. Valid point, I would like to learn if I could. But willpower is only so useful when I'm batteling genetics and long history of phoneme-inept habits. Unlike homework, I don't re-read or spell check what i type in this blog. If i put any more effort than letting the words flow from my rambling inner monolouge onto the keyboard and push 'publish', i doubt i'd still be into this. If i felt like structured writing, I'd start a class essay early. I get that grammer, spelling and punctuation slip ups infuriate some people, and you, Brave Anonymous Commenteer, could be one of those people. So my advice to you, in response to your unsolicited advice to me, is if you don't like it, don't read it. I'm not really following the logic in you harrassing me into changing something which annoys you, when you can master your own destiny and rid the annoyance by not reading my blog.

white rabbit

I feel like watching Moulin Rouge.

So much to sayyyyyy. So little time. The percent of time i have to say it is about 5% of my waking hours left, or X5= Xl+(((.o5)(N)-cfl)/fi)(i) .

I know this because it just took me a half hour to start getting this formula to calculate correctly. Stats midterm is in T-11 hours. I'm late!

Best Paragraph of the Day

The start of my weekday routine usually follows this generic ruberic. I pre-game the folly of my early afternoon classes with the fun of a late morning class. Exciting, right? But oh, I have a secret: the real magic happens between the lectures during Turbo Get Shit Done Time. I drown myself in the days caffine of choice and get into the zone. Today, during that very time-out from reality, I took a minute to lift my nose out of my law book and just laugh out loud, right in the middle of commons. This is, emperically, the best paragraph of the week:

Backstory: I was reading about the constitutional parameters of parental authority in the case Mozert v. Hawkins County Board of Education. Essentially, an Angry Christfearing PTA Mother challenged that her child school was breaking the free execize clause in the first amendment with optional family planning sexual education, evolution, the works.The supreme court held in favor of the school district, duh, because exposure is different than endoctrination yada yada, and the case goes on to explain the details in detail, including...
" Mrs. Frost testified that many politicalissues have theological toors and that there would be "no way" certain themes could e pressented without violating her religous beliefs. she identified such themes as EVOLUTION, FALSE SUPERNATURALISM, FEMINISM, TELEPATHY, AND MAGIC as matters that could not be presented in any way without offending her beliefs."

Awesome.

By the way...I decided. I'm voting tomorrow, at the Cathlioc Center, with my eyes wide open, hand steady, and without the intelligence of eenie-meenie-minie-moe. I'll break it down. The united states is removed from my imaginary utopian democracy. Thomas Jefferson wanted me ( or a white, land owning male version of me) to be educated so I could make the best informed and thought out decisions I knew how when submitting a ballot. Tommy boy, that was a nice idea, but it wasn't even until the industrial revolution in the early 20th century when an influx of blue collared immigrants unionized got angry that snot-nosed children were snatching their jobs for lower wages that the federal government mandated all kids up to 16 have to go to school. So much for Jefferson's romantic means towards the same ends. I spent 11 years in compulsory education, decived by the false motivation of heroism through informed citizenship. Now I know I wasn't even required to go to school to learn how to be a good cog in the machine, it just took me off the job market. Moreover, schools are even more of a facade than I previously imagined; they lawfully have no obligation to teach me anything and their sole duety and purpose is to be a physically safe space. Essentially, what I thought were the points of rationale behind my schooling--a base education for the sake of satisfying human curisoity, getting a diverse groups of peoples on the same page, preparing a young demographic to become the best cogs in the societal machine they could be, and enabling a basic democracy--all pale in comparrison to the threat of me as cheap labor. Keep me off the job market, keep me safe, and school can keep their funding. I find myself in a laughable position. My most informed vote, based on all of my logic, reasoning, educational background and research, is still a vote of consessions and naievity. School until now only taught me what school wanted me to know, basically the western world through the whitewashed lens of a judeo-christian wealthy man. At least I was safe...save Springfeild, Columbine, and the rest of the scattered school massacres. Knowing that I don't have the proper skills, knowledge or resources to make an informed vote, I'm forced to vote for rhetoric, voting records and proposed stances on hot-topic issues.Basically, voting for a campaign. Which is lame. Hence, my domino effect of consessions.I should be voting Green Party because i agree with their principles they develop policies off of, but I am not due to this (anti-grassroots) bipartisian system; I shoud be voting for the dem who is not going to win but who i agree with most, but i'm not; who i'm voting for is the pretty good candidate from the party of which im a fair-wheater fan. A compromise. At least not all of Jefferson's ideals were lost...

Control

For the next 30 seconds, DO NOT think about a White Bear. Think about ANYTHING, anything in this vast, complicated universe--just not that White Bear.
Go.






Any luck?



Didn't think so. Most people take solace in the fact that although the world spins and shit happens, we can control ourselves. But can we? If control is the ability to filter, thoughts, actions, beliefs/prejudices, and we can't even really do that, then what are we? Not the ego-inflated individual human being which we construct ourselves to be. More like...just another sine-wave entity waving through the ecosystem with the leaves and the White Bears.To me, that is comforting.

Stranger, Weirder, Eerier.

I've been sleeping through most social events lately, and I think my dreams are making up for any and all lost fun.

Strange Dream #2: Literally, Getting High

I was back in Portland, where the grass is green without the mechanical nurturing of sprinklers and the air has a greater percentage of oxyen than CFC's. There was a dude who was inflating balloons, and he forced everyone at the park to grab one and experiance his magical journey. Relectantly, I did, and immidiately shot up into the sky above the trees, the clouds, the planes, my life depending on the strength of my grip to the tail of the balloon. I closed my eyes almost the entire time going up, and most of the time going down becuase my Dream Self was still scared of heights, so when I landed I had no idea where i was. Thankfully, or not so thankfully, one of the middle school bullies made a cameo apperance, so i asked her where the hell I was. She told me Gabriel Park, a park right next to my house...and then another strange thing happened...my brother landed from his balloon jounrey right next to me. So, naturally, we hopped into a van together with a bunch of random people ( some of who i know in real life and some who i didn't) and went to korea town to get some drugs. There were police patroling the streets, so to divert their attention we had the rest of the women in the car get out wearing muslim hijabs around their heads and loiter the corner. As planned, the police saw this and about 4 of them with ak-47's rushed over to deal with those 'barbaric, lawless hussies.' Which left my brother and I free to sneak into this shady-ass crack house. The person who knocked on one of the aparment doors inside before us was a woman russian-looking immigrant who got the shit slapped out of her by the palest chinese man I've ever seen , who anwsered the door. The pale chinese guy took a liking to my brother and I, let us in, and led us downstairs....where he already had company. David Schwimmer. That's Ross from Friends. Sittingon the Crack Couch, chillin out. So the rest of the dream was David and I hanging out on the couch, him telling me his self-esteem woes, but generally having a good time.

Sleep is great.

Eerie.

Last night, I had a dream. I was Pregnant. The dream took me from about month 3 up till I was ready to drop .It was horrific, suffocating, painful and really the episode was much more like a nightmare than a dream. I spent most of my time in pain and in this huge, steril auditorium waiting room with hundreds of other women, their friends, and their families. My support system was there the entire time too: my mom, my cousin who was my age when she gave birth to Emoney ( my littlest cuz), and some faces which were always present but I didn't recognize. I remember abortion crossing my mind, but unlike reality, it moarlly wasn't option for me. Verbatum, my Dream Mom said: " so you let the baby grow inside of you, it's only 9 months, and then you can do whatever you want with it." I go, " well what AM i going to do with it?"...and we all look at eachother....and then i got called into the Labor Room. It was almost time.

I woke up disoriented and in excrutiating pain, the kind that takes your breath away like jumping into frigid water. It felt like there were 10,000 splinters lining my stomach and hundreds of rusty knives lodged into the spaces between my hips and my torso. My first thought was that I had had a miscarriage, which i truely believed until I figured out my dream had been a dream about 10 minutes later when talking to my roomate.

The pain has waxed and wanned throughout the day, but the errie aftertaste of that dream has stayed. What a fucking strange way to start out a friday.