BASTARDS! COWARDS! BASTARDS!

I suppose the point could be argued that I have been lax in my duties to this record. To that I say, "Phooey Kablooey," I will write whenever it so pleases me to do just that. Which should be more often. And I'm sorry it's not.

The reason for my literary absence as of late has been the unsettling-if-not-mortifying scheduling done by Chapman in my particular case. I'm not going to trash the university, I'm not going to say they haven't been wonderful, I'm not even going to say that my instance is anything but probably the exception, but the fact remains that I have been left in a bit of a Vlassic here, and the fault lies squarely on the shoulders of Chapman figureheads.

The story thus far: When first I met with a Counselor from my particular school of study, he outlined the curricular necessities I would require to graduate, and how to read the special list they dole out to the students explaining, in the most confusing way possible, how far along they are and what they still need to complete. In doing this, and this being only weeks before the start of the semester, he painted for me a picture of the ideal classes to take, being so good as to even look up the class listings for me and drawing up a rough schedule to take to the Registrar. So I'd been attending these classes, which I had obediently signed up for, the first three weeks of class when I get two emails from the head of "Transfer Credits," or whatever the department is actually called, telling me that 2... TWO... of the classes I'm enrolled in have already been met through transfer. Two of the three-thousand dollar classes I'm taking are unnecessary.

Boo.

I have thus spent the last week or two running around trying to figure out my options, realizing the last day to drop or add was the previous Friday, coming to terms with the W's I will not recieve, attempting to petition replacement classes that will actually advance my career, attempting to catch up on three weeks of introductory sessions in said classes, while not dropping the two classes I don't need lest my petitions not go through. Weak.

On the plus side, this did put me in touch with the head of "No, that Don't Count," or whatever we choose to call it here, and in our communication (and, specifically, in my niggling) I've found a few other requirements I don't need from having completed them in transfer. Nothing I'm enrolled in now, of course, but stuff that will save me some time and drang later on in the ol' Chapman career. Still waiting to find out if the petitions went through, which shouldn't be a problem, hopefully.

So between work and school and, O hobby of hobbies, the SCA, I'm getting my fuckin' ass kicked here, guys! I'm not one to complain, nor am I one to get beat simply by exhaustion, nor am I one to take a schedule of any kind that would put me in the position of constantly working, but here I am, and here I go, and off we go together, you know?

I don't either.

Point is, I'm dying here. Every day I'm more tired, every day it's harder to get up. Not in any kind of "oh, life's not worth living" kind of way, but in an honest, "Man, my body does not want to listen to my head" kind of way. I find myself stumbling to the alarm clock more and more, and remembering the events prior to sitting down in class that get me to school less and less. I wonder, honestly, how much longer I can do this.

Find the door, and the way is clear. Look at the bunny, he'll spit in your ear.

Piensando

Thoughts upon attendance of and return from Estrella War XX:

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Come and visit scenic Riverside, CA! Land of dirt and meth!

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Pros and cons of Truck Stop Bathroom:
Pro: When you use the toilet right after a fat trucker got out of the stall (after being much too vocal inside the stall) the seat is nice and warm.
Con: When you pinch one off and it drops into the bowl and a little bit of the truck stop toilet water splashes up on your GODS DAMMIT THAT'S DISCONCERTING.

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The Against Me! album "Eternal Cowboy" (contextual accuracy set aside) saved my life. And I don't mean that in a "I was going to kill myself but another's music inspired me to get a job and stop wearing "The Cure" shirts. I mean it literally saved my life. Thank God for Against Me!. Thank God.

...

I get along better with most of the other houses I know, or at least get more respect there, than I do with my own house. Darksail, Templars... any other house I can think of... maybe not by a large degree, but I always feel a little better treated there than at my own. It's ideas like this that make me want to start my own house. Not to be ungrateful, but I get to a point where I'm tired of being treated as if I'm not something to be treated as if it was worth a damn.

...

Anyway...

War was really fun. The rain came only at night, and the damp offset the normal dryness and heat that prevail at this particular venue of carnage. Best Estrella ever.

And I was gifted a fox fur. Beat it. Bitches.

Beat it... I DAARE YAA!

My Beard: A Life in Hirsuteness

The halcyon days of not-ever-shaving. The magical mornings scratching a thicket of nettles permanently affixed to your face. You cannot remove this accentuation. You cannot hide it, lest you hide yourself. The beard is a elaboration of the face, not an obfuscation. It is a boon, and not a hinderance. Too many scoff at facial magnificence. Too many lead lives of jealousy and influence.

Such was the case with myself and shaving my beard. I had grown Barbara, as I came to call it, for four months, starting with my trip to New York with my blood-nigga Mike, and ending just a few days before Fancy Dinner. Those four months, they would later prove clear, would be the happiest of my life.

The beard is not a fashion choice. The goatee, the sideburn, the handlebar mustache... these are fashion choices. The beard is a lifestyle. It is a conscious decision to be separate, to be ostracized and admired simultaneously, to be loved and de-loved often by the same person, often for the same reasons, often over a period of five minutes.

The thickness of the beard is inconsequential. Should you grow your facial protuberance into wispy, sparse strands or into a full chin-mane, it matters not. Every kind of beard, true beard, has its appeal. From the kung-fu, almost zen simplicity of the Asian spotted-speckle, to the flaxen, Nordic paint-remover and wife-abrasier. Mine, and each as individual as the human they sprout from, was a multi-hued intimidator. A wonderful block of character jumping off of me. I loved it. I loved... her.

I shaved my beard as so many do, under pressure. I had a formal affair coming and I thought, for reasons beyond me now, that a beard would be incongruous to the event. Only now do I see that not only would it have fit, hand-in-glove, but would have been the toast of the evening. Would have given rise to the evening. Would have been the evening. But I gave in, I admit that now, if only to atone for letting my one true cherished possession (if such a love can be considered possessed) slip through my sink.

I now don sideburns, and a goatee on my chin which no doubt I will one day be proud of, but never to the grand extent that I was of my prow. My introduction. My life. My beard.

When first I grew a hair upon my chin,

And little elsewhere did it seem to be,

I'd fashion for myself a foamy rim,

around my childish face, awash with glee,

The unkempt corners of my smile bedecked

With patchy fuzz, a peach's pitied sight.

I'd lather up the scruffle, burned and wrecked,

There on my barren face of plague and blight.

And, razor-happy, I would short their lives,

As I would short their lengths, in twos and threes.

Rushed, I, to rid my face of them, besides,

And render it succumb to bite and breeze.

Here trapped without, here lost in rhyme and stave,

I'd give no thought but one: to be unshaved.

A more fitting memorium I could not imagine.

Imbrolio

What level of dorketry is it when you talk to other people about web comics that you've read which they have not seen? Is any salvation I may have gained from finally getting off the "Peice Mail Dragon" negatively counterbalanced by the humor that I find in and constantly reference in daily life from these last-bastions of easily-consumed free speech?

Let me tell you this, though: Quitting D&D was tough. It's still tough, you have to wake up every morning and fight the urge to roll a D20. I keep my bag of dice on my shelf, as a reminder of my past, or perhaps to leave the option open, a secret hope that I'll someday relapse. Not only is the game a social interaction, something I got to do with a good number of friends, which facilitated the whole myth behind the ol' Dung an' Drag, but there's an irresistable allure to creating characters and following storylines, even bad ones, that exists, it seems, within my own mind. I seek these things out, and it's difficult to turn away from them.

My Gender in U.S. Politics professor was talking about the NWSA (the National Women's Suffrage Assn.) and saying how, apart from voting, they were also interested in temperance, equal rights, the rights of black women, etc. She said that, unlike the AWSA (the American samethingsamethingsamething), the NWSA had a very "broad agenda." She shot me a dirty look when I laughed.

I had to stop in at a local coffee shop near school last night while out with the Mrs. because. after eating Caribbean-style filet mignon, my bowels were arguing my taste for the dish. After having the service bell not answered for the longest time, we walked outside,only to see the owner of the establishment (I can only assume) looking through the window after us. We walked back in, I asked to use the bathroom, and the man bruskly pointed out the bathroom key while cleaning a mug he held between us. Once I was gone, the G-friend tells me, he asked, "Whaddaya want?" and, intimidated, she ordered a coke. On our way out, I left the guy a couple of bucks on the counter, as he seemed really put out by someone coming through and using his fucking bathroom without paying two fucking dollars for a fucking coke.

I am less tolerant of unjustified unfriendliness than most people you'd hope to meet in the world, and am less polite when confronted with it. And the guy is running a college-town coffee shop, not a saloon in a Gary Cooper western. Dick.

There are... swine... at my place of employ. Pigs... that perform. Harold is a piglet. Petunia and Nellie are older, the former much younger than the latter, but both adults. All are adorable. All jump over hurdles. Among other things.

I bought a new guitar last night, one that I've been thinking of buying for a good long while now. Through the Mrs.' logic and the Bro.'s nagging, I finally bit the pickguard and bought it. Neat thing was that they had a deal where if you bought any guitar, you get a crappy twleve-string for FREE. I AM NOT ONE TO PASS UP ON A FREE GUITAR!

I've been playing the twelve string more, in the single day that I've owned them, than the guitar I meant to purchase lo these many months. It's pretty nifty and, not to pigeonhole myself or the b-b-b-band too much, I think it matches nicely with our sound. Definitely some of the stuff I've written, at least, sounds better played on the thing. Free guitar people! FREE!

I'll feel better about spending so much money... again... once I've been reimbursed for my textbooks and have been paid for some video-editing work I did and am currently getting retroactively stiffed on.

War is coming. Next weekend, and I'll be there. This pig-place has scheduled me for the Saturday in concern, but I shant be attending. I made my obligations clear to them, it should come as no surprise that I am unable to fulfill their unreasonable requests. A shift lead wants a month off during a huge show we have running, the guy gets it. I'm a better worker than any of these people. Any of them.

I'm making a sword, which I don't normally fight with, so I think, in order to have it reaady for today's practice, I'll go outside and work on it before the time to battle is come. Ought to be a pretty cool war.

Ought to.

El Platano Macho... THE MANANA!

Leatherhead

Thoughts for the (yester)day:

The more I think about it, the more I want a girl in glittering armor, grabbing men by their face grills and screaming them into a boiling battlelust, shoving them into the front lines as she looks on, grinning in dark appreciation. I don't want a fighter, I want a leader.

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How could the "highest form of human achievement" possibly be so fucking boring?

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Possible names for my kids: Willy, Random, King, Red, Atticus... and the new addition... Cid.

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I am secretly delighted when the snobbish girl in class drops all her books on the ground while trying to sit down in a haughty, holier-smarter-prettier-than-thou-art way. Why it's secret, I still haven't reckoned.

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Hanged or Kranged? In light of the possibility of a drawn-out death being slowly eaten by a hand-held, psuedo-anthropomorphic brain or beaten savagely by his burly, lumbering, android transport, I choose the relatively pleasant option of public lynching.

Spike Jonze doth make unto himself some raucous videos.

Enraged

I don't consider myself much of a dissenter, as much as I'd like to be in my secret heart, but I can't help but think that a few of the notions held by my professors are outmoded, if not completely without base.

The first came to light last night during Science: The Sciencing. My professor there is cool in a dry sort of way, was the first of his family to graduate any kind of school (elementary all the way up to college) and was the first Native American to ever recieve a PhD in Biology. So bully for him.

Holding a doctorate in biology, however, I would expect him to think his little theorums through to the final step, rather than just cling to obsolete notions of duty. For example:

He mentioned that he had three kids and that, were he to die, it would be okay, simply because he had already passed on his genes. His words were, "No tears." However, were one of us to die, then would be the time for tears, as we had not yet had the opportunity to pass on our genetic inheritance.

First off, that's pretty presumptuous. I myself have had plenty of opporunities to pass along my genes. Some that were actually too close for comfort, but steps were taken to PREVENT the passage of genetic material. So fie on you, o great spewer of lies!

Second, and infinitely more important than the previous japing, the idea of procreation as a duty to one's lineage, one's genetic material, or to one's species is ridiculous. The point is moot, and became so once humans effectively "defeated" evolution. The spread or termination of our particular bloodline is no longer important, as the continuation of our species does not rely on any one bloodline surviving.

There is no "fittest" anymore, as the idiotic and lame alike are protected and continue to breed within the gene pool. Complete morons can still have kids, the weak and crippled can still have kids, in fact the only people who can't have kids nowadays are the people who have some sort of condition where literally, physically, they can't have kids. And there's even hope for them on the horizon.

We beat evolution. We keep the weak and infirm alive, help them survive in our unending compassion, and weaken the gene pool. After so long doing so, left to the wild without our technology, the whole species could very well go extinct within a few hundred years, if that. We have back problems because we're not done figuring out how to walk straight. We have stomach problems because we're eating things we're not genetically used to, simply because we have to eat everything in sight, lest there not be enough food for us all. We have defeated evolution, and were created from such. Figure it out.

Also, he said that the universe was made out of two things; living and non-living things. I think this is an unnecessary classification if not outrightly incorrect, cimply because, as a scientist, he should be able to see the lack of a difference between these two things, especially when compared on a universal scale.

All matter in the universe started out as hydrogen, floating around in space, until enough of it gathered together to form a large area of mass which continued to collapse until it formed a star. There, in the superheated and super-pressurized heart of the star, hydrogen was basically squeezed together until it formed helium, then carbon, etc. Eventually, the thing would go supernova, spreading the elements to the far reaches of space. Stars are element factories, and all the elements, all matter, in the universe was manufactured by them.

Wherever you have "stuff" in the universe, it was made by a star. Subsequently, wherever you have living creatures made of "stuff," at some point, all those little peices that make up a person or animal or plant or whatever started out in the heart of a star. Such is the intimate connection between "living" humans on this planet (as well as animals, etc.), and "inanimate," gigantic, blazing balls of brilliant gas in the inconcievably vast vacuum of space.

So what's the difference? At what point does non-living become living? All living things are are a series of chemical reactions, from their start to their everyday operations. We began as a series of molecules, which combines to form amino acids, which combined to form proteins, which combined with other proteins and eventually made unicellular organisms, and up and up the evolutionary ladder we go until we end up with me playing Grand Theft Auto day in and day out.

So the matter isn't different. You can't call muscle more alive than dirt, it's all just elements. Chemicals.

So what about the beings? Physics tells us, simply, that inertia dictates a certain object will stay in motion unless something else acts upon it to make it move; say a ball on a table being pushed. We know, through the understanding of the rules governing the world around the ball, what the ball is going to do, because of the information we observe and of the rules we know to be true, there's only one logical outcome.

Were we capable of seeing all the angles, and had we the mental processing power, it would be just as easy to plot and pinpoint the motions and reactions of "living" creatures. True, to an extent we already can, if we scare a deer it will run away, if you confront a certain person, maybe you know they'll shrink away unless you mention their mother, then they'll tear your face off. Point being, all that living things are, needing to feed themselves, etc., is all a product of chemical messages in their minds, which are derived from observation, which through learning and understanding, and past experiences, are set off in predictable series. If we could figure out all the different things affecting one mind at one time, we could figure out exactly what the mind's going to do, simply because there's nothing else in there but what the chemical relays mandate there to be.

Really, there's no difference between living things and non-living things. They're just different structures of the same stuff, unless you want to get into a discussion about the soul, but that's not the issue here. You can argue the difference theologically, but not scientifically.

And, finally, my Gender in U.S. Politics professor said this today, "Politics is the highest human achievement. We practice self-government, animals don't."

There isn't one animal on this damn planet that doesn't practice self-government. Every living thing gets up in the morning and decides. That's all that self-government is, decision. Simply expanding that to include everyone else around you following the same decision at once is conformity and authority. There's nothing impressive about that. Sheep follow the herd. Wolves follow the largest member of their pack. It's the easiest thing in the world to point to something bigger than you, stronger than you, and say, "I'll follow that."

Insects have government, for God's sake! Bees and ants have whole societies! Politics is the lowest form of human achievement, solely existing to exert power over others. Period. Even democracy, in its purest form, is still a mandate for others to act like most do. It's a sad state to live in, but one we have to put up with now that the world's been divided up into its controllers. Thomas Paine said that government was, "at best, a necessary evil."

What about Art, madame? What about film? Point out the bear who can paint me a masterpeice. Point out the reticulated python that can conduct a symphony.

The center of human achievement lies in the frontal lobes. In speech, in art, in writing, in all the things that have formed our civilization and our cultures. The desire to push others to the bottom of your respective piles, or at least push them closer to the bottom than yourself, is the medulla oblongata. The primitive brain.

There's no great achievement in that.

There's hardly any thought to it.

State of the Union tonight. Veiled commentary?!? WHO KNOWS???

Scholasticism

Chapman University: Day One

Intro to Visual Storytelling - Thoughts thus far: There are all of 8 seats in this classroom. Jesus Christ. This guy's playing "London Calling" as people enter, which is awesome, and it took me the whole time I've been here so far (all of 15 minutes, probably) to figure out how these damn chair-desks fold out. I sat in my car for a while when I got here, just trying to prepare myself. I'm not a nervous person by nature, and I'm sure I'll fall into it soon enough, but as it is right now I'm just a little flustered. I texted the Mrs. as much before I left the sanctity of the Nona's beamer, which I won't have for much longer, as my truck is waiting for me in the street at home (awesome).

The professor seems nice enough, extremely friendly, almost aggresively so. I need to put my important Chapman-related documents in my bag, which I continually forget to do, so maybe I'll have the information where I need it for once.

So yeah, little nervous. I hesitate to use the word intimidated, I also hesitate to admit that I'm just writing all this so as to avoid simply being in this room out of context, but there you go. I think I'll stop writing, see how it goes.

Pre-Calculus - As I said in my introduction to the class today, "I like math, but math doesn't like me," and while my brother will be angry I didn't exploint the opportunity to scream, "there's some HO'S in this house," the point holds true. I dislike math when I don't understand it, and the promise of pre-calculus intimidates me. That being said, and sadly, I had a better time in Math today than I did in Film. Something about the idea of having to make these video projects and show them to these people bothers me, while simply sitting and soaking in Dr. Ortiz and his, I quote, "weapons of math instruction," is oddly calming. The guy made me laugh, I gotta tell ya.

Anyway, he seems like a lot of fun, definitely not your average socially crippled math professor, but also not your kick back "I don't give a shit" math-wizard-cum-lackadaisical-paraquat either. I just hope I can keep up as the semester wans.

Gender in U.S. Politics - As I suspected, this seems like it'll become my least stimulating course.

Intro to Film Aesthetics - was a little disappointing, in that there was no class held today.

I'm not one of those little kids who reminds the teacher is she forgets to give out homework, but I at least expect my professors to hold a first-day class meeting. I went home in the interim of 5 hours (I would have anyway, this just made my break a little earlier) and I played GTA for 3 hours. The other two, I watched TV and looked at porn. The harsh juxtapositioning of eventful scholastic effort over a relative short amount of time against a vast expenditure of time for little effort and less-to-no ghain maked me re-think what I'm doing with myself.

Of course, I am on the course to higher education... so there is that to feel good about. One more class, then we'll see.

Science - A wristwatch, a belt buckle, and a bolo tie, all bedazzled with turquoise, festooning a canary-yellow shirted professor here in Science 100, or, as I call it, SCIENCE!

If nothing else, being back in the college atmosphere, being given so much information, even having so many ideas presented to me, puts me in a mindset of creativity and contemplation, and it makes me happy to know I'm having thoughts like I'm having. Science, in particular, has inspired a few thoughts in my head, based off of my continuing philosophy of life, as well as something so commonplace as one of the manner commemorative plaques that litter the campus.

I'm happier when I'm thinking a lot, and I'm thinking a lot now.

School rules.

Nona is Hungarian for "Grandmother," in case there was any confusion. Which there wasn't.