So I'm thinking about going back to school.





I'M NOT EVEN KIDDING. WHAT IS MY LIFE.

Last night, my mom asked me if I'd removed my lip piercing... I've not had jewelry in my lip for over a year (except for that day or two that I tried to force jewelry back through... that didn't last long)! I do miss it, though, and regularly toy with the thought of repiercing it. Truth.

Tonight, I was super tempted to go to the drug store and buy red hair dye and do some peek-a-boo bangs, again. Maybe I'll do that tomorrow. Not sure.

In an effort to get out of the house and make more friends, I went to some puppet-making workshops for last weekend's All Soul's Procession. It was a neat experience, and while I'm not sure whether or not I made new friends, I did make new acquaintances who may become more friend-like, someday. Anyway, here's a little video somebody put together of pieces of the finale, which was pretty amazing. (This probably is not the best depiction of the event, but I like the video, so I'm sharing.)



And here's a picture of me with my face painted, and the "puppet" I made for the procession:

For those of you not familiar with the procession, it's Tucson's take on Mexico's "Dia De Los Muertos" (Day of the Dead) -- over 20,000 participants [gather] on the streets of downtown Tucson for a two-mile long human-powered procession that ends in the finalizing action of burning a large urn filled with the hopes, offerings and wishes of the public for those who have passed. Inside the event are myriads of installation art, altars, performers, and creatives of all kinds collaborating for almost half the year to prepare their offerings to this amazing event. The All Souls Procession, and now the entire All Souls Weekend, is a celebration and mourning of the lives of our loved ones who have passed.
Anyway, it was an amazing experience (this was my first year going to the parade, much less participating in it) and... yep. It's really bizarre to me that this happens in Tucson... I feel like Tucson's not cool enough, or big enough, maybe? I was in awe of Flam Chen, though, which is the group who did the firedancing during the finale, while hanging in the air from a crane like a human wind chime. I can't wrap my head around Tucson housing such a talented group. I don't know why it's so hard.
If the you want to see more pictures of the procession, here is the flickr pool.

Lastly, remind me not to straighten my hair. THX.

 Things:
I'm going to Minnesota (St. Paul) over Thanksgiving, this was decided last night, I purchased my tickets today.  YAAAAY.
This semester is almost over... about four weeks until finals, and I'll be out of town for one of those weeks.  AAUGHGHG.
I have these boots, they are grey and purple, a little.  HOW DO I WEAR BOOTS??

I just met my favorite living author, Jonathan Safran Foer, and I am extremely tired and incredibly happy.

He gave a lecture at a local temple to discuss his new book, Eating Animals, which, naturally, got me thinking about my own vegetarianism (a relic from a time when I still found occasions to shout). After eight years, it's become more habit than anything. Living by example is better than preaching, anyway. HOWEVER, tonight made me have feelings again, and it's so nice.

( Cut in case you don't give a fuck, but this is probably the only LJ entry of mine I will ever encourage you to read. )

K: whenever I see a commercial for Up I think of you and how sad we were after that movie
J: it was so sad. I'm glad I saw it with you.
K: why, because I'm a good sad companion? oh mister I wish I was hanging out with you right about now
J: me too




It's so easy to idealize him. Even with all the badness and the crazy. This is a stupid observation. But I don't know. After a while it just became so easy, even despite the fighting.



But my missing him is so closely linked to my missing other things. Mostly my apartment. And my whole life. My life right now is so stifled and sad and empty. I am getting some things done but not the important things. I look back at who I was just a few months ago and I can't believe how lucky I was. But at the same time I know I was mentally fucked and J. was a big part of that. Still, though. It was so easy. The routine I had for myself and the one I had with him.

This is selfish of me to think about right now. But the things I miss at night are the worst. And it wasn't as though we spent so many nights together--we did spend many nights together, but I spent more nights alone. But my nights alone were often spent thinking of him, so he was there one way or another. I miss his body so hard sometimes, and not even in a way that has anything to do with sex. Just his body there with me, being tall and long and awkward with mine. His warm back in the morning, his bad breath, his jeans on my bedroom floor. Getting dressed and the pit I'd feel whenever he got dressed because that meant he was leaving. Kissing my forehead when he said goodbye, laying on my back for hours and thinking about him. Touching my face with my own hands, pretending they were his hands. Having that body next to me in bed and on my couch and in his car and on the street walking home drunk from the Vid. That body I could do almost anything to because when I was with him I had unrestricted access: he was mine. I do wish I was wish him tonight. This hurts maybe more than it should or at least more than I want it to. I have too much evidence of him: photos, videos, a box he taped up and shipped to me. But he has even more of me. He has my furniture, my food, so much of my material life I gave to him before he left.

If I miss the life I had back there of course I miss him along with it. Not just because he was a part of it but because he's now in possession of it. God that's terrifying if I think about it too long.

at work today while sitting at a free company provided lunch, my co-workers and i got into a discussion about religion. not as much a debate, but an open discussion about our respective beliefs. which is interesting because i've been reflecting upon my own beliefs while reading richard dawkin's book.

they laughed that i was probably the typical godless california liberal and i had to agree ;) seriously though, on a sliding scale between theism and atheism, i'm between atheist and agnostic... mostly leaning towards atheist. don't get me wrong, i think everyone is entitled to their own beliefs, but personally i'm a "shit happens" kinda guy. the universes will be done!

seriously though, i know that there's a lot in the universe i will never begin to understand and i don't know WHY it is the way it is.

some people give me this look of complete disbelief that i could be void of any faith. but i think it's because nature and the universe makes too much sense to me! i mean, i'm 28 now... so who knows what i'll believe when i'm 38 :P

besides, if sleeping in on sunday is wrong, i don't want to be right!

as weird as it seems, having one of our best friends come all the way out here to texas and stay with us sorta makes this house our home. if that makes any sense. i think playing host drove it home that this is our hizzy. i think it's settling in more and more that we're in TEXAS!

on that note, MAGS came out to see us! it was nice to have he over and show her around our little corner of dallas :P i hope she had a good time and was just comfortable while she was out here, as she was the first person to try out the "guest room"(/office)

i don't post much about work, BUT, this time i'll make an exception. basically there's your generic office drama and inter-department arguing. it drives me up the wall when people won't put their pride aside and work towards the greater good. i'm working to try and bring the departments together and a VP in my department recognizes this and is working with me to try and build an "all for one" attitude in the MIS department. so here's hoping.

people seem too attached and possessive of their systems, so when i ask a question about configuration or performance it's treated as a personal slight. one of the DBA's even asked me why i was "attacking the database as the problem" when i was simply asking for the benchmarks. in the context of the project i'm working on (performance tuning and load testing).

in non-work news, we've signed up for gamefly a couple weeks ago and so far it's been alright. the new releases (just as with netflix) as a bit harder to get and you have to be a bit patient. BUT, it's only $20/mo and that means for every ONE xbox game i would buy at retail, i can pay for 3-months of gamefly. so it works out financially.

i've been reading richard dawkin's the greatest show on earth: the evidence for evolution and although it's initial attitude was a little confrontational, the information laid out in the book is very well structured and easy to read. i find the points and examples it brings up interesting because it makes creationists sound like absolute retards.

he gave the example of a creationism can also be explained as: the world came into existence five minutes ago with everyone and everything coming into creation with memories of experiences and life to date. we came into being with holes in our clothes and everything as you see it.

it's laughable.

anywho! gonna watch some monday night football! :D

Spring schedule kinda rules:

Monday:
1-2 Religion & Culture
3-4 Anthropology of Muslim Cultures & Politics

Tuesday:
12-1 Social Psychology Discussion
2-3:30 Social Psychology
3:30-5 Abnormal Psychology

Wednesday:
1-2 Religion & Culture
3-4 Anthropology of Muslim Cultures & Politics

Thursday:
2-3:30 Social Psychology
3:30-5 Abnormal Psychology

Friday:
12-1 Abnormal Psychology Discussion
1-2 Religion & Culture
3-4 Anthropology of Muslim Cultures & Politics

On a related note, should I minor in anthropology and major in psychology? Or minor in psychology and major in anthropology? It's okay to be mid-way through my junior year and not really know what my major is, right?

More and more, it seems like the Master of Arts in Counseling at St. Edward's is probably the best thing for me after BU. Then maybe a PhD at UT? I should probably look into schools in New York and San Francisco, too, though. I love those cities and Texas isn't the only good place in the whole world. Boston is great, but I want to live somewhere I've never lived before.

THE FUTURE IS SCARY.

Right now I'm reading the short story collection Girl Trouble by Holly Goddard Jones



So far I'm liking her sense of lightness and the promises made on the backcover re: victimhood, right and wrong, good and bad. I'm even dealing with my inherent dislike of "Southern Lit" pretty well. Why do I shy away from Southern literature, I wonder? I think so much about the South and its culture makes me uncomfortable and just plain weirded out.

What are you reading right now?

The story I mentioned in this entry was picked up by Fringe Magazine, an online publication that I thought would be a good fit for my little piece about a Maine Guide and a bunch of hunters from New Jersey and a young widow with three dogs living in the Maine woods. Turns out I was right!




Check out Fringe: http://www.fringemagazine.org/

Stories of my father and Vanessa Dahl had been circulating for months. While my mother spent her days administering vaccines in Afghani orphanages and I spent long nights laboring over Organic Chem, my father steadily gained the whispered reputation of being the sort of teacher who slept with at least one of his sixteen-year-old students. The stories started from the ground up: the classmates of Vanessa started talking, trading things they’d seen (“She into his room during lunch again”) and things they’d heard (“She wanted an A on a paper, he wanted sex”), the details embellished as they were repeated until my father was the villain of not just one outrageous story, but a dozen or more. He threatened to fail her if she didn’t have sex with him, he made her do things to him in the office behind his classroom, he took her out of school one day and drove her to a hotel where he told the staff that she was his daughter, that he raped her, that he raped her more than once, that he raped her every single afternoon when the school was empty and no one could hear her cry.






girl, the woods look dark and the trees, they seem so deadly
the girls around you are so frightened
you start, you start to panic
and your courage starts to vanish
and the world, it really is on fire
and it burns and it burns and it burns
[Vanessa], your life is told in nineteen thousand pages
in a world too unreal to behold, your innocence has faded
faded all your blues to gray
your skin has bruised through moving days
glue is peeling back away, curling, cracking, painted

you know you can't get out
but when you do, you swear you will run
you will run, you will run, you will run
no one will ever save you if no one can ever find you, lost girls

His name is Charlie.

Re: Question 1


There's a lot of dramatic stuff on my Facebook newsfeed. Folks crying out injustices, vowing to wear black today, throwing around words like homophobia and hate. I'm not disagreeing, but this whole process of opening up the legislation to a people's veto troubles me on a slightly deeper level, one with maybe a wider context.

This is the thing: I don't think social issues should be put up to a popular vote. If there is an injustice embedded in our country and our society, it's the job of the Supreme Court to right the wrong. If something is unconstitutional, it doesn't fucking matter what the majority wants. This morning I tried to imagine what might have happened if abortion had been put up to a popular vote state by state--can you imagine?

That Question 1 passed doesn't surprise me--it does upset me, but I don't think it upsets me the way that it seems to be upsetting many people I know. Maine has, I believe, the "oldest" population in the country. That is, our median age is at the highest end of the spectrum. We are old, white, and rural. I read articles from the Associated Press and from CNN describing Maine as "the heart of democratic New England." That is just plain not true. Maine is not Massachusetts and Maine is certainly not Vermont. There is a whole lot of Maine north of Portland and much of the people living up here, where I live, in the Bangor area, are socially conservative and are not going to change their minds when they have a chance to let their opinion matter.

I think the No on 1 campaign did everything right. Their message was community-based, beautifully local, focused on love and family and "live and let live." The Yes on 1 campaign was jumbled and wandering, their message based mostly on scare tactics and, to be blunt, rather vile claims. Hell, I saw some bigwig from the Yes on 1 campaign talking in an interview saying, "These things have happened in Massachusetts, right over the state line."

Geography lesson:



The only state line is the New Hampshire line. Needless to say, that bigwig was not local.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that I'm not sure anything could have been done differently, save the Yes on 1 campaign screwing up more than they already did. But even that might not have worked. The people of Maine, like the people of the 31 other states who have voted against gay marriage, are not "ready" (whatever that means) to vote for marriage equality. Okay...so now what? Do we just wait until they are ready? I guess that's all we can do--but, again, I just don't think this is a decision for the majority to make. This is a social injustice that needs to be righted for everyone. It's the classic move by politicians: something's a hot button issue? "That's a state issue." Bullshit. Bullshit, bullshit, bullshit. When are we going to have a government that takes a real stand on this? Hell, even Obama is against gay marriage, supporting instead civil unions in a sort of "isn't that good enough?" kind of way.

I just hope the people, especially young people, who were involved with the No on 1 campaign don't get so turned off by that terrible feeling of losing that they "give up." I think a lot of the folks came directly off the Obama High and this one is the first campaign they effectively lost. Anyway, this is pretty open ended; I've got no big closing remarks other than this is terrible and really, really, really disappointing but at the same time there are so many other battles going on right now and I must admit I do personally feel much more urgency towards health care reform than gay marriage, so...yeah. The end.

i miss that lake behind your house. the one that leads those trees into your moonlit eyes. i miss the sunlight cascading down your dimming heart. the smile that blends from one estate to another. i miss the universe that you stole from my mind and captured into your sky. i miss the shooting comets that bring me back to your hand that falls upon my cheek. i miss the clean mess your hair made next to my birds nest that devoured my head. i miss throwing my heart into the sea after yours, and you're after me.