Ah, CalTech...even before I started applying to colleges, I knew I loved CalTech. Glorious, independent, snarky people, fascinating and erudite, go to CalTech. I don't go there, though, because 1. I didn't apply there and 2. I'm not a math/science/engineering geek, however much I love the breed and like to pretend I'm one of them. "Why didn't I apply there anyway, if I love it so much?" you ask. Well, I didn't apply there for the same reason I didn't apply anywhere else of merit—it's out-of-state, and there are certain restrictions that I had to go by when choosing a university to attend. I'll leave it at that—it's not a fascinating story.
But the place, ah, it's wondrous. They have tradition, mystique, silliness, erudition...spring Ditch Day is one of the coolest things one could ever partake in, the house system is just as cool as that at Princeton, only lacking the upper-crust snobbery. These places, CalTech, Princeton, Amherst, etc., are places I need to find excuses to visit.
Does my list of colleges I would've applied to, had I the chance, make you think new things about me? Does it confirm anything? I'm curious. For the record, here's where I would've applied, had I thought it'd make a difference:
-CalTech
-Princeton
-Amherst
-Chicago
-Stanford
You see, when they say to take the decision seriously, they mean take it seriously. I can't do it all over again now, but oh, grad school—my salvation. I look at the sites these people have up at other schools, I look at the things they have to offer, and I'm interested, I feel alive. I've the potential to do all that, if only given enough free time and people I enjoy being around and a flexible administration and a nice place to live, and perhaps a nice long break beforehand.
In any case, the university's website needs a nice directory of student pages and coherent instructions regarding how to assemble and post one. Look at Caltech's list. It's fantastic! Most of them actually bother to get something up online, and in a lot of cases it's quite skilled! Look at the house websites! They look like someone takes care of them, as opposed to the university's stamped-out-of-a-mold-in-1998 set of pages. I emailed them about that awhile back, receiving only a standard form reply, i.e. "Thank you for your concern. We're very busy...blah blah". The thing is, even if they don't give a shit about how the main site comes off to visitors, they could at least bother to help students out a bit with the hosting.
My roommate and I have come up with an idea, this one a bit more feasible than the one A. and I came up with awhile back about starting a marching band here—we should just go ahead and start an All-Student symphonic band/orchestra. That's what it could be called, too: All-Student Orchestra (ASO), much like the current All-Student Theatre (AST). Why not?
Students here need a group to play music with that doesn't freely invite professional players or deprecate those who lack funds to take private lessons. They need a leader who won't browbeat them for missing a note, who'll be patient yet firm when necessary. More problematic, we need a practice space that isn't subject to the whims of the music department, yet has the necessary equipment (esp. percussion instruments) to field a band. Perhaps we could work out a deal with the imddle school across the street. Who wouldn't want the prestige that comes from having university students practicing there? We could rent the space, or tutor students on their instruments as payment, or any number of things. It'd be just like the way the community band inhabits my high school's band room once a week.
News: Jablog will officially be out of beta on December 27, 2003, meaning all the bugs will be fixed, you half-users will be able to use your accounts for something, and the service will really start to pick up. Spread the word.
Last night I dreamed about vampires and ponies. Ditto the night before. That's what reading Anne Rice and waiting for a pony to come in the mail will do to you. [shakes head] Do I sound like someone who shops at Hot Topic or what? (I don't. Thanks for your concern.) Vampires and ponies...
If everyone in his ensembles quit, perhaps then there'd be some improvement. We could form a veritable union and demand our rights as musicians. As it is now...
There's a whole group of guys sitting around the tables outside the dorm, talking loudly out in the cold. I guess the cold air carries their voices well, or they're just damned loud, but in any case, I can hear quite clearly every unimportant word they're saying, and I'm really not impressed. I'd like it a lot if they'd just pack up and go inside somewhere to have their boring frat guy conversations about "Oh my God, the music was up so loud, you could, like, hear it through the floor and everything, and these guys were like..." [puts headphones back on, drowns them in A.F.I.]
[Remembers grinning across the backseat of the car at being roped into listening to this glorious newfound A.F.I. music, highway swishing by in the afternoon sunlight out the windows, clickety-clacking the keys of the laptop to admit my defeat at the hands of this luscious music]
Too bad there's no way to put into words the lush, deep guitar I'm listening to, I'd quote it onto the end of my posts any day.
Anyway, I've done dodgy things in computer labs, but that very well takes the cake.
My life has been extraordinary, blessed and cursed and won. Time heals, but I am forever broken by and by the way...Have you ever heard the words I'm singin' in these songs? It's for the girl I loved all along. Can a taste of love be so wrong?! As all things must surely have to end—the great loves will one day have to part—I know I...am meant for this world...
And in my mind as I was floating far above the clouds, some children laughed I'd fall for certain for thinking that I'd last forever, but I knew exactly where I was...
And I knew the meaning of it all...and I knew the distance to the sun...and I knew the echo that is love...and I knew the secrets in your spires...and I knew the emptiness of youth...and I knew the solitude of heart...and I knew the murmurs of the soul...and the world is drawn into your hands...and the world is etched upon your heart...and the world so hard to understand is the world you can't live without...and I knew the silence of the...world..."
I don't need no one to tell me 'bout heaven—I look at my daughter and I believe. I don't need no proof when it comes to God and truth—I can see the sunset, and I perceive...
You sit with them all night, everything they say is right, but in the mornin' they were wrong...He'll be right by your side come hell or water high, down any road you choose to run. I believe it when I see it for myself!"
I started out with this mainly because it's an endeavor of Austin's. Austin endeavors often bring power, among other things, and besides that, it's good to work with someone who respects me enough to grant me such power. I also happen to like doing things with Austin—anyone who'll rip my papers to shreds and challenge my ripping apart of his own papers, then get into a mock argument with me in the lunch line is definitely deserving of my attention. Austin's one of the few people I know who can not only make sense of my ideas, but who also provide useful criticism of those ideas.
About the power-seeking thing, though, I've mentioned it before, and I'll say it again: I do like power. In all honesty, who doesn't? A lot of people will villify those who make it obvious that they're seeking power, claiming that everything they do henceforth has a "shady" motivation. I don't think that one thing necessarily follows from the other. A lot of times, you've only got to look to those who cry the loudest against the acquisition of power to find the ones who either already have power themselves and are pretending not to or who don't have power at all and really want it—else why yell about it so loudly? My enjoyment of personal freedom and power doesn't preclude my having virtues and following a code of morality, nor does it preclude my having something interesting to say or being good enough at what I do to warrant holding a position of power.
Anyway, you're probably not going to find every word I say fascinating. And whether you love me or you hate me, you may find yourself wondering at times why I'm so, as Nate puts it, angsty. Unfortunately, a blog gives me a place to write down whatever I deem relevant to my continued existence, so a lot of times the words you're reading are the result of a short-term burst of thought. As happens online, I sometimes write strong, judgmental opinions that I'd probably never bring up in face-to-face conversation.
While I'd like to claim that I don't do this blogging bit for the audience, entries on here have to be, to a certain extent, geared toward the idea that I do have one. Those who know me pretty well will generally understand where I'm coming from on things, but I'd suggest taking the things you read here in context. Think before you react.
If you're not having a good time reading some of the things I say or if you just stumbled upon this without knowing who I was, you might not look at it that way, but what I'm getting at is that I don't have to let anyone know what I think about things. Pretty much everyone I know is on a need-to-know basis, as they say in The Rock, because I like having personal space and privacy and the freedom to keep my own counsel. That might seem paradoxical, given that I keep a public blog, but I don't "tell all" or spill my guts here. Basically, it's not necessary that anyone read this, so if you see something you don't like, remember that no one forced you to read it.
I also understand that not everything I write about in here will seem relevant or interesting to everyone that reads it. An idea I garnered from fiction writing is that even if a certain subset of things go together by virtue of their being collected around a given person, those items don't necessarily make for a good story. In this case, though, I'm not so much telling or making up a story as narrating what happens, purposefully only including things in this blog that are representative of 1. who I am, 2. what I'm really interested in on a level a bit above the superficial, and 3. what my tendencies and predilections are. I'm trying to gradually build up a cohesive picture of who I am and why I do things, partly as a self-realization exercise, partly to let some relevant people know how my life is, and partly to entertain you silly people reading this.
Then there's the fact that I've become highly curious about and invested in the future of Jablog—so I stick around and keep writing so I can keep in touch with Jablog's current members while attracting new ones.
So that's why the blog is here and why you're reading it. The blog is not here so that you can take my words out of context, twisting them into something I didn't mean. The things said here are generally said here, rather than in the opinion section of the newspaper, because they're works-in-progress. Preemptive conclusiveness is a hallmark of ideas that I'm actually not so certain about, as some of you may have noticed. This is kind of an online testing ground for my theories and generalizations about the way certain things work. When I'm wrong about something, people usually let me know, which has become useful to me.
This blog also isn't here so you can assume things about me from reading it and use those things against me. I might sound paranoid on that count, but the fact is that people have on several occasions tried to use my words against me, taking things I've said out of context and inflating my already inflated positions to ludicrous proportions. xj and benmazer come to mind as users who've fallen out with me to a certain extent over positions I've decided to argue out and defend. I can't fault them for that, as it's their choice as to who they talk to and socialize with, but it's still a shame that they've lost interest in what I have to say because of my positions on certain issues and/or my caustic sarcasm.
Then there are legal issues. Certain students, for instance, tried to use the university's judicial system against me, figuring they'd play a little trick on me by citing statements of mine out of context in dual complaints to the judicial administrator. [shrugs] These things happen, but I'd just like to make it clear that having a difference of opinion with me (or anyone else, for that matter) does not constitute due cause to bring charges against me or sue me. Why not just talk to me about it if you don't like something I've said? For the record, my reporting what I've seen with my own eyes or heard with my own ears on this campus can never constitute a breach of medical confidentiality, as I'm not a licensed medical practitioner. Similarly, my opinions about someone else's actions do not constitute libel, as they are simply my opinion, not statements meant to be taken as fact. My opinions about other people also don't constitute harrassment, as I'm not putting forth such ideas with the intent to harm another person. I'm simply calling it as I see it.
Further, I don't believe that my use of a university-provided Internet connection should necessarily make my updates to this blog subject to the university's jurisdiction, as there's no sure way, short of obtaining my Jablog logs via subpoena, to determine what connection I'm using to update the blog. (Perhaps the probability that I'm using my connection for Jablog purposes is high enough that it's really a moot point. But I don't think anyone knows that for sure.)
Anyway, these legal disclaimers surely don't apply to everyone, but I wanted to make my positions on such issues known. There's no reason why anyone should feel like they can't talk to me about stuff I write in my blog. If you talk to me like I'm a human being before calling upon some higher authority, at very least I'll have more respect for you.
While I often seem blunt, I do know how to be subtle. My bluntness often hides a subtlety that only certain people will pick up on. Even good friends of mine don't necessarily know as much about me as they think they do. This is probably as close to a statement of purpose as I'm going to get. I definitely reserve the right to revise it in the future. I reserve and frequently employ the right to revise everything—hence why links often appear after a given post is entered into the record of my existence. This blog isn't a democracy—while in a given situation it might prove either cowardly or noble to remove or change something, I view this as a bit like the world of 1984—anything featured in this blog could go down a memory hole at any time.
I also make no guarantees that every post will be scintillating, especially considering my penchant for making lists.
Have I disclaimed enough yet?
Here's something now—do you like this, the way I irreverently mix Shakespeare and Michelle Branch? How thoroughly a product of the times I am.
...or how before leaving now, I contemplate bringing a pony along with me and have to consciously tell myself, "That's dumb. Don't bring a pony with you."
Heh. Someone on my buddy list apparently has some friends orchestrating an ongoing quest to get her laid. I'm not sure what the deal is with that, but this has been in her profile for a long time:
"an excerpt from the best email ever :-D
'I hope to God that you're putting out. Tonight at church, I'm praying to Saint Dymphna, patron saint for chastity, to abandon a certain native-american-esque blonde jew girl.' ~ Kait"
Now a friend of hers has made a site about it. It's mildly entertaining, if only because it highlights the dumb things that university students and their friends do.
According to darkmachina, Jablog's resident CSS template artist, the U.S. might be gearing up to launch some manned lunar missions. If you read my post a while back about that, you'll know I think it's an interesting, if not wonderful, idea. Yeah, to some it might seem idiotic to doubt the validity of the original lunar missions...but who knows?
I'd like my speakers to work right. I'd like that a lot.
I should've mentioned sooner this article [link lost to time] mocking the opinion editor's proposal that the university reimburse students for driving fuel-efficient cars. It's great. It's about time someone else got around to mocking his oft-pretentious suggestions. And that news reporter's article about the Campus Girl Scouts, while too short to have too many misconceptions, was still pretty mediocre—it's really too bad I took Tuesday night off from the paper, 'cause I could've fixed the few problems that there were. Ah well, it's always like that.
Ack. Parents are like a force of nature...they call, and no matter what you're doing, if it's not schoolwork or leaving, you're pretty much stuck, listening to all their talk about plants and chemicals and bikes and school and fundraising and all these things. Augh.
Sigh. A brief news interlude: The Absurdists were mentioned in today's issue of the local alt-weekly.
Anyway, the thing is, you've gotta know that I really don't care if I do all that well in any one of these classes in and of itself. The time has passed for being that concerned—I probably stopped being that concerned when I decided that forces beyond my control, like the whims of the director of bands, were going to decide certain things for me, like whether I have a future in music. Sure, it's great to know things, but I simply don't feel motivated. I'm really not interested. All I want is a big, long break. Whether I get to see anyone over break is really immaterial—I just need some time to get away. Once I've gotten over the shell shock of being here almost 24/7 for the past year, of this constant blamming, crashing torrent of people trying to get me to do things and people living around me and people giving me assignments, yeah, maybe then I'll take time to miss people and try to do things. At the moment, I only worry about these classes because I'd really like to spend my break in quiet repose without hearing about what a screw-up I am at every meal. Sure, people are losing their respect for me. Hell, I'm losing respect for myself. You can think what you want. I still have standards, I'm just not meeting them. So it goes, to my way of thinking. There are certain limits to my endurance, and beyond that point I quit.
Y'all probably think things about me similar to what my ex's suitemates think about him for dropping all his classes and starting over next semester. Yes, it's loathsome. I know, intelligent students with such promise as we've shown shouldn't be throwing their lives away. But what're you gonna do? I'd be more concerned, but few are doing that well right now. Look where another ex is now (regardless of whether the immoral deserve such things)—he's in Fargo, North Dakota, working at a Chinese food place. Ex No. 1's taken a leave of absence for the rest of the semester and starting over again after break. He's still going to get done in four years. Austin's on a leave of absence. So it goes, neh? Perhaps we're not living up to our potential, but we're still alive. We still exist, we're not dead yet, and it's not the end of the world if we're not perfect.
As unfortunate as all this is, it seems unavoidable that we're each going to experience a bit of letdown, a bit of the old need to compromise and muddle through. Each of us will most likely be a "disappointment" (à la John) in some respect. I think about this a lot, and it always comes back to the fact that although the business-speak ideal of the being in some mythical peak performance "zone" territory has a strong allure, these things won't magically happen just yet. There will be decades more muddling through and failure and rebuilding before anything is accomplished—such is youth, for most of us, and this is how we spend it.
I had a dream this morning that I had to go back here to the university for something I'd left behind on my way home, and called my mother to come get me 'cause I'd left my purse in my boyfriend's sister's friend's truck, and many muddled, unfortunate things occurred, but the end is what really matters. I was climbing up this huge hill of a parking lot to get to where the fairgrounds were so I could get through them to wherever it was that I'd left my card and key, and all I wanted to do was get away from there, as I knew this Joker-esque/Green Goblin-type guy was going to unleash a fireworks bomb that might look pretty, but carry some neurotoxin and/or radioactive substances that would kill everyone present. It was a big joke for him, to see us panic, as no one knew whether the bomb would be a fake or actually full of the toxin.
By the time I got to the top of the hill, it was too late. I caught up to my mother, only to see the fireworks bomb shot off. I saw it rise into the sky almost in slow motion, and I prayed that m'darlin' was somewhere far away enough that it wouldn't kill him, that he wasn't heading here to find me. I crossed myself, then watched as the fireworks unfurled a huge couple of pirate flags, undulating in the wind, then shot off a rocket that landed in a tent nearby. The fireworks finally went off, releasing this purple mist that drifted phenolphthalein-like, blowing towards us and spreading, caught by the slight wind. The rocket in the tent gave off a white dusty fog that spread much like the purple mist, and all I could think about was that I might die without seeing m'love again.
Then I woke up.
Good post here mentioning Spires, the campus literary magazine. Relevant passage:
"i've also realized that half of the people on the spires staff are complete poetry snobs and really have no idea what they're talking about. if they don't like one word choice in a submission, it's out. GET OVER YOURSELVES."
Amen.
In other news, I should stop getting into meaningless tiffs with people I don't respect. I always seem to need a steady stream of enemies to vanquish with words...
