restless.

restless. restless. restless. restless. restless. restless. restless. restless. restless. restless. restless. restless. restless. restless. restless. restless. restless. restless. restless. restless. restless. restless. restless. restless. restless. restless. restless. restless. restless. restless. restless. restless. restless. restless. restless. restless. restless. restless. restless. restless. restless. restless. restless. restless. restless. restless.

checking in

it has been quite a while since i wrote here. long enough that i don't quite know where to start. i'm alive and still living in idaho. other than that, i've been spinning my wheels in my rut. they say that the only difference between a rut and a grave is the depth. i'm hoping that longevity is a factor as well.

still embarking on my reading jag. trying to teach myself latin. playing music once and a while. switched gyms. the gym i go to now has a way better pool that is always open during the times that i project i will be going there.

kind of an odd note. in one of my earlier blogs, i talked about being nervous about being in the locker room at the gym. apparently i was at the wrong gym. i noticed that one of the staff at my new gym is quite obviously gay. now that doesn't translate to the locker room being cruisy or anything, but for some bizaare reason that i can't explain, i feel a little more comfortable there knowing i'm not the only one.

i started the year as a hillary clinton supporter, but i have started to find myself leaning towards obama lately. his policies, or what he says are his policies, sound like something i can get behind, and more importantly, it sounds like what we need.

not much else going on. the earth still spins and everyday i fall away from the sun and wait for centrifugal force to bring my little portion of the globe back into light.

untitled

so it seems that i have been delinquent in updating my blog. there really hasn't been a lot going on. i mean, yeah, there is the daily job of clearing your way past whatever detritus gets thrown in your path, but my life has pretty much become fairly stagnant. i'm pretty sure that i'm going to be moving to spokane, WA in the near future. from there, who knows.

might as well face it.....

i read an amazing article yesterday. maybe it was a novella, not sure. it was called "addicted to hate" and written by a journalist named jon michael bell. the project is basically an expose about fred phelps and the westboro baptist church.

here's a really fun fact: according to the conservapedia, phelps is a democrat. i was shocked until i read the article and found that this due to the fact that there is a vast difference between the man he thinks he is and the man he actually is.

the article alleges that phelps is an emotionally disturbed man who has abused his position as a parent and pastor. with charges ranging from daily physical beatings to being the towering, domineering architect of a clan whose only mission in life is to terrorise his fellow citizens, phelps seems much like jim jones, but without the kool-aid or the charm.

i read a really interesting blog about phelps. in it, the blogger postulates that he believes that phelps is a kaufman-esque clown parading a focused mirror back onto the christian right. a sort of effort to out-right-wing the fundamentalists. the optimist in me wants to believe that the world is such a mad place that it is just possible, but after reading the article, i find there are more similarities to kafka than kaufman.

some great quotes

"My father says that almost the whole world is asleep. Everybody you know. Everybody you see. Everybody you talk to. He says that only a few people are awake and they live in a state of constant total amazement" - john patrick shanley

"evil is an act, not an appetite" - gregory maguire

"we are here to laugh at the odds and live our lives so well that Death will tremble to take us" - charles bukowski

"any scholar of the great ninja vs. pirate wars will immediately understand that pandas and cows are bitter enemies fighting for the affections of the zebra overlords" - unknown

"the world breaks everyone and afterwards many are strong in the broken places. but those that will not break it kills. it kills the very good and the very gentle and the brave impartially. if you are none of these you can be sure it will kill you too, but there will be no special hurry" - ernest hemmingway

"The fact that we live at the bottom of a deep gravity well, on the surface of a gas covered planet going around a nuclear fireball 90 million miles away and think this to be normal is obviously some indication of how skewed our perspective tends to be" - douglas adams

"it made you realize that you werent the only one who was more than discouraged with the world, you werent the only one moving toward madness - charles bukowski

"i do not believe in cinema verite. sometimes a really good lie is better than any truth - werner herzog

"seek freedom and become captive of your desires. seek discipline and find your liberty" - frank herbert

"all governments suffer a recurring problem; power attracts pathological personalities. it is not that power corrupts, but that it is magnetic to the corruptible. such people become drunk on violence, a condition to which they are quickly addicted" - frank herbert

"happiness is a 'how'; not a what. a talent, not an object" - herman hesse

"it is a mistake to think you can solve any major problems just with potatoes" - douglas adams

"hmm..maybe gods can bleed....no, just ketchup." - me

"religious faith is (nothing)(sic) more sublime than a desperate marriage of ignorance and hope" - sam harris

"there is no snake so cruel, so worth your dread;
if anyone upon his tail should tread;
as woman is, when kindled once to ire;
vengence is then the whole of their desires" - geoffrey chaucer

"anger is the executor of pride" - chaucer

"there is only one thing in the world that i admit is not natural; a work of art. everything else, whether one likes it or not, belongs to the natural order" - andre gide

"eleanor roosevelt was a strong woman and a strong first lady, but it wasn't like we didn't know who was wearing the wheels in the family" - me

"The sky is pocked with stars. What eyes the wise men must have had to see a new one in so many" - james goldman

"Anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job" - douglas adams

I've snapped and plotted all my life. There's no other way to be alive, king, and fifty all at once. - james goldman

Of course he has a knife, he always has a knife, we all have knives! It's 1183 and we're barbarians! - james goldman, "the lion in winter"

"Flying is learning how to throw yourself at the ground and miss." - douglas adams

"There is a theory which states that if anybody ever discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable. There is another theory which states that this has already happened" - douglas adams

one of my favourite quotes from work

"i have scabies"
"you can't have scabies, you have to be on a ship"
"that's scurvy"
"oh"

jude the obscure- an unintended book report

**friday 30 november 07**
so, i finally got marcel proust's remembrance of things past from the library a week or two ago. it was right after my blog lamenting my philistine reading habits. i have to admit i liked what i read, but it was incredibly dense. i only got through the chapter called overture. it was like a medieval tapestry. it was well made and i could appreciate the weave of the material and i knew that if i followed the threads, they would lead me to the bigger picture of the rest of the tapestry, but i only had so much attention to give. so, i pulled through as much as i could and then put it down. i haven't really cracked it open in a few days. i went to the library yesterday and found that they had finally gotten a copy of jude the obscure by thomas hardy in. somewhere along the way, i got the idea that hardy was kind of the english proust, meaning that you had to plod through his work. i started reading and found myself pulled in. i read 120 pages last night. now, don't get me wrong, it's not a page-turner, but i get some vague satisfaction that i can at least make it through hardy.

**monday 3 december 07**
okay, so let's re-examine the story of jude the obscure. it's your basic story. poor boy dreams of going to college, though he is a peasant. boy meets girl that fakes pregnancy to get him to marry her. girls runs off to australia. boy moves to the city and meets another girl. this one is his cousin. so, of course, he falls madly in love with her despite the fact that he is still married to girl #1 technically. girl #2 makes him chase her like a wolf for the next 100 pages and then she marries his old school-teacher out of obligation(don't ask). after marrying the older man, she finds that she is repulsed by him and asks his leave to have an affair with jude, whom she loves in the unfettered smolder that only the victorian english can manage. turns out girl is a sociopath (though they don't have that term in 1896 when the book was published) and she keeps jude at a distance for a year or so and when his now ex-wife shows up at the door, girl #2 goes into a mad tantrum. to appease her, jude doesn't go out to see the ex. jude has been courting her for almost 200 pages at this point. finally, they decide to get married (after each has had their previous marriage annulled-confused yet?) but they decide that marriage is such an unhappy proposition that they will live together but not actually marry.

turns out that in victorian england, this is the equivalent to being gay. before they even admitted that homosexuals existed, they had to treat someone like shite, so i guess it was unwed couples. they have 3 children and are fabulously happy until they run into trouble finding a place to lodge because it seems to be imposable to find a place that will let out to a couple with children. in a moment of despair and depression, girl #2(the cousin) tells the eldest child that the world sucks and the kid (already a manic depressive child) takes it upon himself to hang himself and his 2 siblings while his mother is out so that the parents would have an easier life.
the girl, now a woman (named sue, btw) is so distraught that she becomes uber-religious and goes back and re-marries the old schoolteacher(she believes that the death of the children was G-d's way of getting her to toe the line). jude is heartbroken and goes on a bender. during which, his ex-wife appears a widow with plans to get jude back because he is a stone-mason and makes a decent wage that she can live off of. she gets jude so wasted that he is easily tricked into marrying her again. like monday morning in Vegas, he sobers up and finds that he was duped. dramatically, jude loses the will to live.
in that spectacular victorian way, he wastes away in depression. eventually, he walks through the rain to the village where sue lives, and says goodbye. he upbraids her for being a twit and a coward. she covers her ears and he walks away into the rain and to his death.

to review, boy meets girl, she's an emasculating bitch. boy meets the love of his life and she loses her mind and becomes a hard-core christian. boy dies in poverty of a broken heart or broken spirit.

not exactly uplifting stuff.

i turns out that i mis-understood the characterization of hardy. it's not that the book is hard. it's written in a fairly free flowing form of prose that isn't hard to understand. what is hard about the book is the wading through the abject suffering of the main characters. the story in the novel is very much like the story of job. only in the story of Job, Job will eventually win out. it's a story about faith. if Job has faith, he will be rewarded.

that's the beauty of the bible for people of limited intellect. there really are no grays. there is good and then there is bad. the good are rewarded and the bad are punish-ed. unless the good are punished to see if they will stay good or turn wicked. then there's the good who turn wicked and stuff happens to them so that they see the error of their ways and become good again. that's it. any ambiguity that may have been there in the gospels is cleaned out in the homogenizing process that translation has become.

i guess the whole point of the book is that because of his poverty, jude was never given the proper opportunities to rise above his dismal circumstances. this is before the scholarship was thought of apparently. in the first few chapters of the book, jude is an incredibly smart and precocious child that teaches himself greek and latin from second-hand books. the idea is that he is more than intellectually capable. of course, he meets a girl and it all starts to turn from there.

i think one of the main differences betwixt "literature" and more modern reading is their approach to the audience. like most abstract expressionist, "literature" expects that you their point is so important that you will suffer through quite a lot to decipher their meaning. the book i started reading directly after jude the obscure is a book called "the sparrow" by mary doria russell. i 've read it before and found it to be a good story written rather well. the author goes to pains to make you like and respect the main character in the first few chapters. even though the main character is a priest, we are told how charming and sexy he is, as if the author was imagining a cleaned-up father karas from exorcist.

you're really supposed to like father sandoz. and then there is jude. jude is supposed to be irrepressibly bright and precocious. the whole point of the book is that his life has been a waste. he is lamentably intelligent in his studies but amazingly naive when it comes to sexual politics. i certainly do not have much room to speak on that matter, but through a greater part of the book, you feel like yelling out "don't do it, you fool!!!"
he meets a girl who has him wrapped around her finger in a few pages and keeps him dangling for pretty much the rest of the book. she is a completely unsympathetic character that utters things like "you musn't love me jude. i am wicked." to which he replies,"but i adore you , my darling. i am the wicked one."

the whole book is like that.

i'm not sure if thomas hardy was a misogynist, the victim of a similar jerking of the heart, or just trying to make a point about courtship in victorian england. by modern standards, jude puts up with her insanity with the patience of a saint. he is rewarded with misery.

am i glad i read the book? yeah. i actually learned a few things. if you approach the book as a document of english society at the turn of the previous century, it's intriguing to notice the difference in cultures and times.

the goal was to start reading literature to learn more about the human condition.

that's one down.....

from spring awakening to purple summer

i recently discovered a broadway show called "spring awakening". i regularly read this blog called deus ex malcontent that is really pretty good. he lives in new york and he raved about seeing the show on broadway. i hadn't heard of the show, so i wanted to try it out and see if it was any good.

i remember the first time that i heard the soundtrack for "wicked". here's how i prove what a homosexual i am and admit that the first time i heard "defying gravity", i got shivers. actual shivers. there is something magical about discovering musicals. you know what i'm talking about if you own a "phantom of the opera" cassette tape or cd sitting somewhere.

i "discovered" wicked and then i found "rent. it's been a while, but i finally found something new. if you get the chance, i highly recommend legally finding a copy of the music and give it a listen.

life is a highway

so, yesterday was thanksgiving, as i'm sure you are aware. if you didn't know, sorry for spoiling the surprise.

justin went to his aunt's house in wallace and i didn't go. when i came back from CA, justin's father & stepmom made it clear that they don't want me in their house. i was 'dis-invited' if that is the correct phrase. i'll admit, it actually hurt. i felt i had gone out of my way to be incredibly civil and to try and adjust to their vastly different way of life. if there was any friction, it was mostly due to the idea that i was fairly offended by their need to indulge in the fairly tale of "close friendship" that made my relationship palatable to them. in fact, one of the most divisive issues happened when i made a joke that got taken the wrong way and the crux of the issue was that i had inadvertently addressed the fact/reality that justin and i were physically intimate with each other.

i love telling this story in person, but maybe it's time that i write it down before i forget it. there is this cozy little shack in a small town called Osbourn that is called "the snake pit". if you've ever seen dante's peak (the pierce brosnan epic), then you have seen this restaurant. it's like an old west TGI Friday's. there are old saws on the walls and various nick-nacks. it's kind of charming in it's way.

well, justin's folks used to always make dinner when we came over, but this one time, we decided to go out. i ended up footing the bill for everyone's dinner, i'd like to add before we start. it turns out that the specialty at this particular venue is called "rocky mountain oysters". RMO is the polite way of saying bull testicles. it's fried and breaded bulls balls. i was feeling particularly adventurous and i decided to try them out. everyone else ordered standard fare and it wasnt too long before we had our food in front of us.

now, for some reason, justin's dad had left the table. maybe to wash his hands, get something from the bartender...who knows. so it's just justin, myself and his step-mother, heidi. she turns to me and says,"i can't believe you ordered that."

without thinking, i blurt out, "well, i know what they taste like normally, but i wanted to see what they tasted like fried."

now, i though it was funny. turns out she was mortified. she's one of those people that plays her cards so close to her chest. i never knew when i'd gone too far until justin told me a few days later about a conversation that he'd had with her. to add insult to injury, when justin's father found out about it later he was super-pissed and it became a thing.

it was always like that with them. we would hang out and then go home. two days later, i would find out from justin that i had said or done something to offend and no one said boo while i was there. i got tired of that and so i was hurt, but not surprised when justin told me that they no longer wanted me around them.

now, the rest of his family, i got along with just fine. i like both of his aunts and pretty much everyone else. either way, everyone involved thought it would be a good idea if i stayed home. no worries.

i spent most of my time on the couch being lazy and watching tv. i watched a few movies and just kind of relaxed. i found my roommate's copy of disney/pixar's "cars" and watched that to start out with. i genuinely forgot how good that movie is. i have a great deal of respect for pixar in general, but i am in awe of the amount of talent that they employ. there hasn't been a pixar flop yet. i just saw ratatouille a week or two ago and it was outstanding.

stay with me, this all has a point. i'm going somewhere with this, i promise.

anyway..."cars" (if you don't know) is about a young rookie race car having an amazing year at the track and is on the cusp of winning the piston cup, the end-all-be-all of the animated racing world. he is on his way to california for a tie-breaking race and along the way he gets stranded in this backwards town on route 66 that got was abandoned when the interstate re-directed traffic away from them. while he is there, he falls in love with a porsche (who wouldn't) who loves the town for the idyllic stop that it once was. he also befriends an old rusty tow-truck name mater that is low on brains and big on heart. ( i feel like i'm writing the back of the DVD, lol). the race-car learns in the end (he makes it to the race) that there are more important things than winning.

it's an old maxim. one i've heard before. a young man in a leopard print jacket once told me as a child "life moves pretty fast, and if you don't stop and look around once in a while, you just might miss it". this was after singing danke shoen(sp?) on a parade float in the middle of downtown chicago.

as i always do, i watched the behind-the-scenes doc on the inspiration behind cars and it had a great interview with john lassiter. over the course of the 16 or so minutes, lassiter spells out the lessons to be learned from cars, or rather the lessons that he had in mind when he started. the whole character arc is this guy living alone in the fast lane that is forced to slow down for a minute and learns to enjoy life.

"life is what happens while you're making plans" -j.lennon

lately, i've been lamenting to myself silent reproaches about living in idaho and the choices that got me here. when i was a kid, i hated living in the midwest, because it always seemed to me that life was happening "out there". in europe, in NY, in LA, anywhere that wasn't home. i've always had that mind-set. i've always felt trapped by it. if i'm not in the middle of it, i feel like i am wasting my time.

i feel helpless.

if i'm honest with myself, i feel very trapped here. i feel like the rest of the world is just kind of passing me by...again. it's not really cabin fever. i think it's just wanderlust. i miss waking up in the morning and being excited about my work.

film is the only thing that got me up at 5 in the morning, excited about the day. i'm tired of wasting my life at this dead-end job.

however.....

yesterday, sitting on the couch in my pjs, i got this sudden burst of "maybe this is all happening for a reason". maybe there is some fatal flaw in my personality that i need to salve before moving on to the next part of my life. i learned a lot about my experiences with justin's folks. maybe there's some lesson there that i need to figure out.

as always, i'm trying to change my perspective and the way that i think. i have to, if not just for pure survival reasons. if i keep feeling like i'm missing out, then i guess i won't see all of the wonderful things around me. unfortunately, the grass will always seem greener somewhere else.

i know i spend a lot of time whining lately. i can't help it. the whole point of writing this blog has been a personal assignment in catharsis. there's all of this stuff that i need to get out one way or another. all of these thought that i need to organize. i'm probably harping on about the same things, but i really hope that there is some kind of character arc.

a story without any kind of character arc is just boring.

it's just too much

i must be a masochist.
i keep looking at the presidential race and i always end up finding something that scares me. the presidential election period (especially when there is no incumbent) is an amazing time. all of the vast differing viewpoints come together and we find out
what it is that is important to other parts of the country. for example, i am relieved to find that the vast majority of my countrymen aren't so blood-thirsty anymore and that there is a possible chance that there might be some kind of end in site for the bush manifest destiny franchise being built in the middle-east.

i'm still not sure if i'm for hillary or obama. i'm honestly not. however, i find that i am watching with rapt attention the republican race. as of the time of this writing, it seems that Giuliani is leading just over fred thompson. when fred thompson became a serious contender, i don't know. i assumed he would end up falling off like bill brady.

what fascinates me is the writhing in the fundamentalist right to try and find someone as crazy as they are. i don't pretend to be a journalist, and i am certainly not impartial. i have a very clear and personal stake in Giuliani for the republican ticket. like bush he has used the momentum of 9/11 to his benefit, but he also has some credit for cleaning up NY. i still haven't forgotten the chris offili/saatchi show incident, though.

anyway, i found this article and it had some interesting points. here's my favourite quote:

"There are now more Mormons that used to be Southern Baptist than any other denomination," said Dr. Richard Land, president of the Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention, a 16-million strong group."

"As a consequence, Southern Baptists and other evangelicals have taught their people what Mormons believe and why it's beyond the boundaries of the Christian faith, to inoculate them against those Mormon missionaries," he told Reuters.

and then there is this one:

"There are a lot of conservative Christians who are going to look at the Mormon thing and say, 'Wait a minute, he may be conservative but he's a Mormon,' and they're not going to go there," said Steve Swofford, a pastor in the city of Rockwall, near Dallas, and former president of the Southern Baptists of Texas Convention."

lately, the recurring theme in this blog has been how insane the mormons are. when the southern baptist have to stop and say "whoa", you have to ask yourself "what is wrong with this picture".

what is lamentably more amusing is the fact that there are some people who have said, "you know what, southern baptists are crazy enough for me. bat-shit crazy mormonism, now that's the way to go."