Procrastination

It happens to the best of us. My particular foible is funny webcomics, and I just stumbled across an adorable political commentary written by a Danish man. Funny but not conducive to productivity.

http://satwcomic.com/

Happy Rapture Day!

Hey, guess what? Harold Camping says the world is supposed to end! ...again!
Yup, so today was supposed to be the Rapture, just like May 21 and that date in the 1990's. Funnily, I haven't yet witnessed any true believers being lifted up to heaven sans their clothes (thank goodness. That would be traumatizing), nor has brimstone been rained upon me. And again, I've been denied the chance to have a several month long party with all of the rational people before the End of Days. *sigh* You think Mr. Camping would get the hint after the first time he cried wolf, but those fundamentalist types, well, they really like believing in things. Generally to the point of complete denial of reality.
Oh, well, maybe we can have an Apocalypse in 2012.
Then and again, as Lauren pointed out in AP Biology, maybe the Rapture has already happened, and we're in Hell and just didn't notice. It seemed awfully plausible at the time, as our singularly incompetent teacher decided to spend the whole hour and a half going over a fairly straightforward lab, which was probably as bad as being boiled in brimstone for eternity. ...It certainly felt like eternity.
Well, hey, there's still three hours left in the day. You know, I'm sure that's plenty of time for the Rapture to still happen. I'm giving you the benefit of the doubt here, Harold. Why don't you talk to God some more and see if you can get a better time estimate. I'll just wait right here and continue making my tailcoat. Tell me how that goes.

Tailcoats

So, I'm a senior. And because I'm a senior, that means I get to dress up for Halloween and parade around the school. It's awfully exciting, especially since I adore Halloween. In a vote, I would undoubtedly put it down for the best holiday. I mean, Christmas is happy and family-oriented and there are lots of presents (oh, come on. Who doesn't like presents? Except for those non-materialists. Pff! Un-American, I say), and Thanksgiving is full of yum, but Halloween. You get to dress up. For one night a year, you can pretend to be someone completely different. It's fun. I'd even argue that it's healthy, getting a chance to get out of your own skin.
Anyway, since the seniors like to do things in groups, we often have themes. And I, somehow, bizarrely, got roped into the Rocky Horror Picture Show group. ...Yes. You heard right. The one where everyone wears fishnets, and runs around being terribly promiscuous. And, somehow, I'm Columbia.
This is Columbia, for reference:

Yep. Not sure how that happened.
So, I went costume shopping today, since Halloween is in a mere two weeks, and there is a Halloween party in a mere one. I found fishnets and a gold top hat pretty easily, because apparently lots of people need top hats and fishnets, I don't know. But, for the life of me (and we scoured the store), I could not find a gold sparkly tail coat. And, clearly, that's rather imperative.
I was about to give in to despair, when I had a brilliant idea. (Okay, that was a bit of a dramatization).  I had found a gold, sparkly muumuu. And, lately, I've taken up many clothy crafts (most notably, making stuffed animals. I'm most proud of my purple pegasus that I gave to Ashley). So - why not make one myself?
I can hear you gasping in horror, and mouthing "noooo!" I'll keep you updated. ;)
(I'll probably end up making the bowtie, too...)

I'm too nice

For some reason I'm Facebook friends with people I don't actually like. I hear this is a common problem. I guess it happened around the beginning of the account creation, when I was afraid to deny friend requests out of fear of being rude. I've since learned, of course, that it's much simpler just to ignore them until they go away, and you've got to do that because otherwise you'd be friends with every Tom, Dick, and Harry and your newsfeed would be essentially atomized by all the Farmville updates.

Anyway, I still have some of these annoying people on there that I haven't gotten around to deleting yet (I'm waiting until I go off to college and won't see them on a regular basis), and they still, of course, put stupid stuff up that it kills me not to reply to with liberal doses of sarcasm. 

Except I'm nice. Or concerned about my reputation as a nice girl. One of those two, pick the one that seems less Machiavellian. Anyway, since I don't have the guts to be nasty on Facebook, here's the one comment today that irked me.

Some person wrote: "I live this life everyday I make my share of mistakes

and every lesson I learned i've learned the hard way."

Well, that's a very heuristic approach to life, but don't you think it would cause you less hardship and heartbreak to pay more attention to the lessons other people teach you? 

(And there's some lessons I really hope you haven't learned the hard way. Like, 'death is bad'. Or 'do not eat arsenic.')

There's your dose of snark for today. I'm sure there will be more to come.

Thoughts

Today I sat down on the porch and told myself that I wouldn't get up until I had written something fricking beautiful. The impetus was that I kept wasting obscene amounts of time on the internet instead of doing homework. This wasn't strictly homework, of course, but it was better than reading webcomics for hours on end. Certainly it was more conducive to mental function, at any rate.
Anyway, here's some of the fricking beautiful writing I came up with (Ha, ha, ha):


I wonder if we would all get along better if we all admitted that we have no idea what we're doing and stop being so presumptuous. But, no, we would still get jerks because they would have to be all like, "I don't know what I'm doing MORE than you." ...

The more I thought
The more it degraded
Aren't these metaphors, now
Just like the ones I so hated?

So much irony: misspelling misspell. And of course people do it all the time.

The setting sun was shining through the leaves like through a cathedral window, bathing everything in a fiery light.

There is a lot to be said about autumn, especially the deciduous kind. We write that it is the summer's final blaze of glory before death, a fire burning in the leaves, a melancholy time of inevitable defeat.  We like to make it a metaphor for our lives, or all our lives. It stirs an emotion in us. It reminds us of our own mortality.
What a shame for people in tropical climes. They have no seasonal mechanism to remind them of their own mortality. That must be why they're so fricking happy.

If I were a spider, I'd write words in my web like Charlotte, like, "Do not remove this web. Will result in prosecution." Or, "I don't bite." or "I don't weave in your house. Don't walk into my web." or "I surf the web."
If I were a spider, I would be very unhappy because I would be unable to proceed past the first level of Maslow's hierarchy of needs. I would be unable to achieve self-actualization. Also spiders don't live very long. And they eat bugs. And they can't go to college.


Then I wrote a short story about a character of mine who gives a demon teddy bear to an annoying child on the bus. She's not very nice, but neither was the kid. I have a long abiding hatred for children on buses.

How's that for some quality writing?!

Shall I Try Again?

Facebook, though certainly a curious and ingenious apparatus, does not provide the correct medium nor environment for me to discuss the things I am interested in. No one really wants to hear about philosophy or linguistics or whatever on such a youthful, social device. Even I have to admit that I dislike it whenever anyone posts those chain statuses that promote awareness for an issue (though part of that negative reaction may be in part caused by their accusatory nature - "if you don't post this, then you're cowardly/mean/apathetic"). Besides, I can hardly hold a proper discourse on such things in a small space. We're a sound byte culture, after all. And the status boxes have a character limit, it turns out.
So, here's the new layout. The picture in the background is Storm, by Edvard Munch, a Norwegian Expressionist whom I mistook for an Impressionist in last year's French class. I changed the name, as well, and the layout. Clearly I'm distancing myself from my ninth and tenth grade self, without going through the hassle of developing a whole new blog. Being terribly introspective and self-analytical, I can't stand my past self. Even if she did get me to where I am today.

So. The real reason I finally got around to dusting off the old blog and giving it a shiny new coat of paint was because of the topic currently on my mind. It's a short thing, because I just realized it's actually late, and I have to get up tomorrow. Alas. But, in brief, here's some of the things I couldn't say on Facebook recently:

I used to understand what the question of the meaning of life meant - or, I thought I did, because it was not something I closely examined. The more I think about it, the more unclear the phrasing seems. Is it asking, "Why are we here, what is the grand purpose of the universe, what divine scheme is there that we fit into?" Or is it asking, "What should we do while we're here?"  I feel like most people think it's the former, which is a shame because the answer is easy. (It's no, in case you were wondering. There is no plan.) It's the second question which actually raises some legitimate questions and answers and controversies.

I need to stop reading the news. Somewhere since I started to try to become less desensitized to horrors and suffering, I became a gigantic pansy who despairs every evening as I read about how horrible, ignorant, and resistant to understanding and goodness some people are. I don't understand how people live with themselves.

I need to go to sleep now, so I can get up in the morning, be miserable for a few hours, and then work on homework incessantly. Lovely, I'm so excited.