i was talking to sara the other day about neil gaiman. she said he got advice on how to become a famous writer which went as follows: write lots and lots of short stories and put them away in a drawer somewhere. a year later, take them out and read them; throw out the ones that don't seem good anymore. the ones that do seem good send to lots of magazines to be published, and get used to hearing the word 'no'. repeat this over and over until you start getting published. after that's happened a few times, they'll come to you.
and thinking about it made me want to write some short stories. probably here. maybe i'll finally create a new myspace page and do it there. regardless, i feel like i should, but you know i could be doing it right now, but for some reason couldn't motivate myself to. i have plenty of shitty ideas that i'm sure i could stretch into a few pages of tedium to drive away all my dedicated readers that i've cultivated over the past few months of not posting anything.
i don't think i'm a very good writer. the only thing i've written that i've ever been very happy with is that one small section of "doug's exodus" formerly "doug's apotheosis" where he's having dry sex with the girl in the truck. some of my old short prose had some merit, i guess, but it was all really short and i don't really know what to do with it. i have all these ideas, but i just can't get them down in forms that i like.
anyway, since i last posted i discovered that i have strange abilities and went on to try to save the cheerleader and the world until i got stranded on an island riddled with mysteries where my facial hair never grew even though i never shaved until i got home where i discovered my mom had taken to selling pot which made me really angsty especially when i got my deaf girlfriend pregnant and her dad took her away from me. in short i've been watching a lot of tv.
i'd like to say that shit like this is why i wish i were back in high school sometimes. i'm only jealous that that kid managed to do it much bigger than i ever did, and it makes me mad that they're punishing him under the guise of trying to "control gangs, stop school shootings" and that sort of thing. if you look at his motivations, it's the sort of thing that ought to be encouraged; he was making a statement about freedom of speech. makes me kinda mad.
our rabbit fee died yesterday. she wasn't dead when we woke up, but she wasn't moving or reacting to anything, just sitting there breathing. we took her immediately to a vet and he ran through a list of things that could have put her in that condition: electrocution, drinking chemical cleaners, eating something noxious; but no wires were chewed and her mouth didn't show electric burn, we don't use any chemical cleaners, and we feed her timothy hay and rabbit pellet food. the vet said he'd run some tests and get her on an iv, so we left and an hour later he called and said that she was gone.
i've had pets die lots of times before. i've almost always had two pets around growing up because my mom has gone through lots of dogs looking for a good breed for showing until she found swissies, which she breeds and shows now. none of those really hit me the way fee dying did though; i guess because ashley had a way of incorporating fee into our daily life and talking about her (a bit like how tim talks about punkymo, for those of you familiar with that) that makes it seem like something big is missing now. so i spent most of yesterday morning crying with ashley and then felt like i was in a total funk during work in the evening. i feel a lot more stable today, but ashley's still really sad; she just called me from work, crying because someone had asked about her rabbit, which i guess she talked about a lot at work.
anyway you all probably aren't interested in my feelings regarding a rabbit, so i'll stop there. writing about it is kinda making me sad again, anyway. maybe i've just gotten more sensitive and emotional; it doesn't seem like something like this would've affected me much before.
oh glorious cockaigne, where the wretched, weak, and ugly mock the strong and good where penitent ascetics gorge themselves on sweet meats and whiskey where every nun prostitutes her body and delights in its indulgences
and through some diabolical mystery even unrepentant saints arrive they think themselves in hell, and they aren't far off since satyrs (such as myself) delight in their unending torture
yes, in cockaigne every hierarchy, right or not, is upended and we live out our villainous dreams of infinite viciousness for years we shall consume all the sins of nature until passed out unconscious in its argentine streets.
so i just discovered this list of predictions made in the year 1900 for what life would be like in the year 2000. some of them have come true (telephones worldwide and symphonic music in the home), some are hilarious (peas as large as beets, strawberries as large as apples, roses as large as cabbage, what is with the obsession with making plants very big?), and some make me think people were kinda stupid (no more wild animals, rats, mice, mosquitoes, and other pests will be extinct). regardless, since i do like sci-fi and daydreaming, it made me decide to make my own predictions for the year 2100.
1. functions performed by the mp3 player, dvd player, cell phone, pc, and video game system will be incorporated into one portable device. hard drives will be obsolete, as nearly all digital media will be accessible instantly and remotely.
2. eating in the home will be less common than eating out.
3. skirts will be worn regularly by both sexes.
4. university education up to the doctorate level will be free and much more common than it currently is, but it will mean way less.
5. people will have chips implanted for easy commerce, identification, and other uses. these will not be forced by the government but will be bought voluntarily from credit card companies. no one will be required to have one, but it will be basically impossible to fully function in society without one.
6. cold fusion. space flights to other planets in our system will be commercially available for very rich people, primarily as a source of funding for more scientific space flights and technology.
7. the most successful comedians will have a style of humor so dry that most people from our time would not understand why their jokes were supposed to be funny.
8. all multimedia will be much, much shorter. movies will be replaced by short shows, video games will be more analogous to modern flash games, books will be replaced by short stories, popular songs will be about the same length though only god knows what they'll sound like. the only remaining entertainment that would require any sort of attention span will be live theater which will be slightly more popular than it is now.
9. bocce and croquet will be much more popular than they are right now, thanks to a resurgence of outdoor activities but a retaining of the desire to not get much exercise. i mean come on, if you can watch/play/listen to anything you want all the time you'll want to go outside and see real people once in a while, but you'll also be very lazy. people will probably start inventing new yard games.
10. the gambling industry will be almost entirely state run and will be the primary source of government funding. gambling will mostly be done from home.
11. visible wires will be phased out. electricity will be generated in a few cold fusion plants and transmitted without wires.
12. there will finally be flying cars. personal vehicles of all sorts will be electric and have no need to recharge (see above).
13. people will frequently live to the age of 150, but it will be almost universally agreed that people that old are assholes who need to stop complaining and get a freaking chip installed so we don't have to wait while they insist on paying with cash just to pretend they still live in the good old days.
that's all i can think of right now. some are obviously more tongue in cheek than others, but i think all of these will come true or have something very similar come true.
so i just got back from my first day as a substitute teacher. it. was. bad. well, i mean, i liked the kids a lot, but what i discovered about myself is that i am an absolutely horrible disciplinarian. i don't know what to discipline for or what the appropriate discipline is, and as a result i'm afraid i was horribly inconsistent which is the worst thing you can be, i'm sure. so i was stuck in this room with these 19 kids that were probably all born in the 21st century (first graders) for hours, and no matter what i did, they insisted on jumping up and writing shit on the board and grabbing stuff from each other and so on. meanwhile i'm trying to explain what a prefix is and they're just not having it.
i think my problem largely is that i just don't have much of an internal distinction between kids and adults, so i reacted exactly how i would have reacted to an adult, for example, coming up to me and saying, "teacher! emma said she doesn't like me!" which is the simple response, "what?" and a complete blank on what i'm supposed to do next. similarly my response to any question of the form "can i x?" was "it's fine with me" which is both true and apparently the worst response you can possibly give because then every other student decides that they want to x also and usually that results in a huge competition to see who can x the most vociferously that everyone loses, especially me.
so there was more than one moment when my thoughts were "why did i ever agree to this?" and one time i very nearly walked out, told another teacher i couldn't handle it, and left. the worst part is, i'm totally sure this was a group of good kids; i just suck. anyway, i'm not gonna quit, but i'm definitely taking tomorrow off. i think i'll try a group of older kids next time, too. if i keep sucking i guess i'll quit, but i'm not throwing in the towel yet. anyway i don't think that school will be asking for me back, since the kids broke or lost a bunch of the teacher's stuff under my supervision. at least i've got a pittance coming via direct deposit soon.
so kurt vonnegut died and it didn't make me as sad as i thought it would, even though he was my super-favorite author for a long time. he was 84 though, which is a good time to go.
i'm officially a substitute teacher now, i guess. i'm gonna call in for an assignment on monday. i tried it this past week and got an answering machine and they never called me back. *shrug*
i'm thinking of rewriting some of the prose stuff i wrote back in high school. i think i still have all of them saved, so i'm going to put them up here. i'm not sure if this is all of them or not, but it's a lot of them. some of them are pretty angsty, which is part of why i want to rewrite them and flesh them out a little. maybe start with the "no truth" narrative. maybe even make some kind of coherent story. i don't know. anyway, here are all the originals i have.
but i think this presents a pretty good example of how naive atheists can be sometimes about religion. i mean, by richard dawkins' definition, i am an atheist, because for him, not being an atheist pretty much means believing in the nice old bearded gentleman in the sky, and i don't think anyone really buys that anymore. when jesus said that denying the holy spirit is unforgivable, he didn't mean that any old jackass who stands up and says they deny the holy spirit is damned forever. he said that to people who had just seen him cure someone with the power of the holy spirit and still denied it, so he was really saying anyone who experiences the holy spirit first hand and still denies it is damned. i agree, in a metaphorical sense. a lot of people experience something deeply spiritual and just write it off later. doing that does damn you, in a sense, to a life dedicated to reductionism. that attitude leaves people missing a whole lot, if you ask me. atheists though don't seem interested in those kinds of explanations. they seem to take the bible more literally than anyone else on earth.
anyway, it's still funny, and you can get a free dvd of a pretty good indie documentary which makes the case that jesus never existed in any historical sense, which is not something i had ever heard argued prior to that. definitely worth watching.
so i was just reading through imdb.com's list of upcoming movies 2007-2010. some stuff to look forward to...
- fraggle rock: the movie - the smurfs - halo - splinter cell - tekken - prince of persia: sands of time - warcraft (big surprise there) - castlevania - bridge to teribithia (misspelled, but not butchered as badly as disney is hoping to do, judging by the trailer) - atlas shrugged (starring angelina jolie as dagny taggart) - on the road - cat's cradle - the hobbit - the jetsons - adventures in babysitting (who's idea was it to remake that gem?) - arrested development - aqua teen hunger force - bat boy (based on the musical) - dante's inferno - farenheit 451 - the giver (with jeff bridges as the giver) - hairspray (probably the musical, not just a remake)
so i go to my first class today, but i get there a little late due to bike trouble. the class proceeds normally, but then at the end of class, the teacher says, "anyone who came in late can turn in their papers now."
the guy sitting next to me gets out his four or five or six or whatever page paper and puts it on top of the pile i didn't notice throughout class.
i calmly panic. make sure it's not one of those anxiety dreams. ok, it's not. i really did forget that we had a paper due today and didn't do one. in fact, come to think of it, we were supposed to email paper topics to our instructor weeks in advance, which i don't think i did either. i promptly book it out of the class room.
so i attend the rest of my classes (i got a perfect 100 on my robots paper, which i did the morning it was due, as usual), and then go home to do the paper that was due today. i check to make sure my instructor didn't email me wondering where my paper was, and discover an email saying that i was late turning in some form and i might not graduate if i don't turn it in in time.
i calmly panic again.
realizing i won't get any work done in this state, i decide to relax somewhat. i drink a couple glasses of wine and watch some regina spektor videos, and it gets me nowhere.
"Your Honor, years ago I recognized my kinship with all living beings, and I made up my mind that I was not one bit better than the meanest on earth. I said then, and I say now, that while there is a lower class, I am in it, and while there is a criminal element I am of it, and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free." - Eugene V. Debs, upon receiving a 10 year prison sentence and lifetime disenfranchisement for speaking out against World War I.
i was sure glad to see that south dakota did away with the abortion ban. several cities, including minneapolis, adopted either instant runoff voting or proportional representation, which is awesome. arizona did way better than i expected in regards to the ballot measures; we decided not to ban domestic partnerships, we banned smoking in bars, we raised the minimum wage to 6.75 and indexed it to inflation, and we decided that pigs and calves ought to have enough room in their cages to turn around. unfortunately every proposition whose purpose was to make life more humiliating for immigrants passed, as expected. still, results were better than i expected.
as for the national candidates, it's nice to see that we kicked out a lot of assholes, but unfortunately we largely replaced them with other assholes, except these ones have d's next to their names. now i know how congressional politics works and that they'll be able to caucus and get some stuff passed or at least block republican stuff, but i still see this as the game's winners changing hands when the rules to the game are what really need to change. until i see some path towards the dominant institutions shifting from the corporations and governments to the communities where the power belongs i can't really celebrate the new faces. don't get caught up in playing the game folks; stay grounded. politics should be about people and not abstractions.
some good news is that arizona elected its first green candidate to the prestigious office of riverside elementary school board. i don't know what his predecessors were like or what the other school board candidates are like, but at least i know those kids have at least one advocate for them in office now.
so i was reading about greek democracy on wikipedia and discovered a couple interesting bits of linguistic history.
i'd always kind of wondered where the word 'democracy' had come from, since it does not contain the greek publica (as in republic) meaning people or the word achae (as in monarchy) meaning government. apparently democracy comes from demos, which i guess also means people, and kratos, which does not mean government but does mean force or power. apparently there's evidence to suggest that the term democracy was one coined by the concepts' opponents to characterize it as mob barbarism. its proponents accepted the term anyway, and now we're stuck with it, instead of the more civilized sounding demarchy.
also the word idiot comes from a greek term meaning 'private person' which here should be interpreted as one who doesn't care about politics or social issues in general and only cares about her own life.
anyway, now i'm gonna go on about greek democracy and how it could be applied today, so i'll put it behind an lj cut so you all have the option of not just ignoring my inane drivel, but not even having to scroll down very far to get past it. you're welcome.
i just discovered this company called "semco" in brazil. i can't believe i haven't heard of this before; this is exactly the kind of workplace i've imagined being the replacement for the current corporate model, and big surprise, it functions just fine and is very competitive. so everyone who thinks democracy in the workplace is inefficient and could never work should really read about this place.
check out http://semco.locaweb.com.br/ingles/ and click on "the SEMCO management model" and then click through the little triangles at the bottom to read about their principles.
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