Probably not the triumphant return you had hoped for from me, and I swear up and down I’ll start writing again soon, but this photo of President Bush a the Olympics is just too much to pass by without some second thoughts. I’m generally tired of making fun of W, mostly because it became too easy, but I just wish I knew what was going on here.Discuss.
-Zanramonzanramon@addictedtowords.com
I swear I’m not dead, I’ve just been extremely busy pondering whether an NFL player or a bear would win in a foot race, and trying to sell babies on eBay. I will resurface one of these days.
-Zanramon
zanramon@addictedtowords.com
Conventional wisdom tells us that drinking alcohol is an activity solely for miscreants and rabble rousers. People that contribute nothing but pitchy renditions of “Danny Boy” to society, the veritable scum of the earth. Sometimes it seems that drinking is a worse crime than say, arson, or even public nudity (all three of which can go hand in hand in hand).
Well it’s currently 6:03 AM, and what I am about to tell you is going to fly in the face of everything you may think you know about imbibing freely and plentifully. I can say to you with reasonable certainty that your paradigm will be shifted.
As stated, it’s approximately 6 AM. I realize that this is not an unreasonable hour for many human beings to wake up and begin their day. My father has usually ran 5 miles, read a novel, cooked a turkey, and saved 8 orphans from almost certain death by 6 AM on most days. Even I have been through a multitude of phases in my life where I was consistently getting up at 6 AM. Be it voluntarily, such as when I would inexplicably show up for high school an hour early every day during my sophomore and junior years, or completely by force, such as when I worked* at a parking garage one summer.
However, as my life stands now, there is almost nothing that would cause me to get up at 6 AM. My earliest class is at 9, and that’s only once a week. My days are assuredly late-afternoon/evening heavy when it comes to activities that aren’t sleeping. So, to what do I attribute the fact that I am up, alert, and productive** so early this morning? I attribute it to alcohol. It may not make sense yet, but bear with me.
Last night, I attended a baby shower for a friend of mine, thrown by another friend of mine. Such as is often the case in situations like that, there are usually lots of friends of mine present. Needless to say, we all had a few drinks***, and a few laughs, and as most of us are 21 or 22 and graduating college in less than 2 weeks****, some of us had more than a few drinks. I was somewhere in between “a few drinks” and “more than a few drinks”.
It is assumed that waking up after a night of moderate to heavy drinking leads to a state often referred to as being “hung over”. This is absolutely true. As I’m sure many of you know, being “hung over” is brutal and incidentally is also the only time I’ve ever felt like my head had gotten stepped on by one of those morbidly obese Americans. I’m not sure if you’ve heard but they’re numbers are growing at an alarming rate. Possibly in preparation for an invasion. I digress.
But it’s not always true. There’s another phenomenon tied to drinking copious amounts of alcohol that occurs just as often as being “hung over”, often at the same very same time. This phenomenon doesn’t have a catchy title like “hung over” (although it clearly needs one). It’s non-catchy title that most people use, simply for the absence of anything else, is something like “waking up way too fucking early and not being able to fall back asleep despite the fact that I went to bed at about 4:45 in the morning”. Alcohol has a funny way of passing you out, and then far too soon afterwards; waking you up and keeping you up.
Common sense tells us that getting up “way too fucking early” gives you a few more hours during the day to get things done, or in my case, shift paradigms. I alluded to it in the previous paragraph, but this is almost never true due to the fact that those few more hours are almost invariably ruined by the fact that you are “hung over” and completely incapable of accomplishing anything other than eating greasy food or laying in bed staring at the ceiling trying to figure out how your shirt sleeve got ripped off the previous night, and who has it now.
This is not always the case though. Not everybody believes me, but there is a vaunted state in which you drink the precisely correct amount of alcohol, which activates the early hour of rising, but not the effects of being “hung over”. Suddenly you are wide awake at 6 AM and feeling great. This is extremely difficult to do, but today I managed to mix the chemicals right and achieve bliss.
In light of this new information, alcohol needs to stop being viewed as the root of all evil. When used properly it can be harnessed as an alarm clock that somehow eliminates all tiredness (until about 3:30 PM). From now on, each and every night I will drink the elusive perfect amount of alcohol to add hours of production to my day. I’ve done some admittedly exhaustive calculations to discover this perfect amount for me. Unfortunately, the perfect amount differs from person to person and also varies heavily depending on the type, color, and strength of the particular alcohol you are consuming.
(Pro tip: Mixing types of alcohol will unquestionably ruin any chances you may have had to find the perfect amount.)
When I’m drinking each and every night throughout my life, I fully expect lesser people to call me such grating names as “bum”, “loser”, or “alcoholic”. Even without the “I’m rubber you’re glue” rhymes I plan on throwing back in the face of the naysayers, none of the labels pinned on me will be true. Because, despite the fact that I will be somehow surviving on an hour and fifteen minutes of sleep every night, each morning when these people are sleeping or lazily attending church or going to school or doing whatever petty activities they do, I will be fully awake and shifting paradigms.
Like I just did yours.
-Zanramon
*I mean this in the loosest sense of the word. One of my tasks was cleaning the garage and one fine day a few weeks into that job I discovered discarded needles and cotton balls in what I can only assume was a small lake of urine. After that I spent very little time cleaning and lots of time wandering up and down the parking garage looking at cars. I invented a game where I would stop on each side of the parking garage on each floor and look out over the side at the cars driving by until I spotted a BMW, a Lexus, and a Mercedes. Then I would proceed to the next side on the same floor, when all sides were completed I would proceed to the next floor down. It was really quite productive and fun.
**This is debatable. There’s a growing contingency of people who think that reading anything I’ve written is in no way productive, and may in fact be counterproductive. I know, I don’t understand it either.
***Although not the mother to be. Drinking while pregnant can lead to Fetal Alcohol Syndrome, which should not be confused with Fecal Alcohol Syndrome.
****Holy shit.
Just as a heads up, you are entering rant territory. Turn back now.
Yesterday, I strongly contemplated slapping my professor in the face. I came up with slapping over punching because that seems less assault-ish. I decided against it, which is probably for the best. This is a class, that I might add is costing me (or more appropriately, my parents) a significant amount of money. I haven’t loved every single class I’ve taken here, but I haven yet to experience anything like this. It is shocking how bad this teacher is. If he were a movie, he would be Norbit, he has no redeeming qualities whatsoever. He’s not even so bad that he is unintentionally good, like any Fast and the Furious movie. We can’t even upgrade him in the pantheon of awful Eddie Murphy movies, the next step up would be Haunted Mansion, and at least that is rooted in Disneyland lore. This professor has no redeeming qualities whatsoever, at least as far as professing goes.
(And no, I won’t say who the teacher is, or what he teaches, lest my faithful readers get involved in any arson or other illegal activities.)
I would like to say that I despise this man because I got in an argument with him. There’s another professor I had a few times that I don’t really like because we didn’t see eye to eye on many things and I called him out on it. THe thing is, he was a decent teacher and undeniably knew what he was doing. This teacher (and I use the term in the loosest sense possible, he hasn’t caused a single chemical reaction in my brain) seems like a decent human being.
It’s beyond me how he got hired at my University, or how he has stayed hired. Just to name a few of his better qualities:
1. He purposely obfuscates directions, like he gets some sinister pleasure out of confusing us. He won’t answer specific questions about directions on assignments, choosing instead to make us guess or use Ouija boards. He talks about his assignments like he is on the other end of a 24 hour psychic hotline, giving the most vague answers possible. And charging obscene amounts of money for it.
2. He acts like a child any time somebody questions the validity of anything. First of all, he takes it like a personal attack, and I’m not making this up, tosses insults back at you, even though you weren’t necessarily insulting him in the first place. I’m not shy about questioning whatever inane detail he has in every single assignment and I never get anywhere or get any of my questions answered. I’m more than happy to have a discussion about something but he doesn’t seem capable of it, or at least won’t let one commence. Calling him an overly self conscious Idi Amen would be fair.*
3. He is incompetent concerning his subject. I’ve kept it to myself, but there have been at least three times where he has said things that are completely and utterly false. And they weren’t throwaway details, they were rather important concepts.
4. I may be getting petty and mean here, but he has poor grammar. This man is paying what I’m sure is a decent salary to do what basically amounts to highway robbery, so I feel that I (my parents) have payed for the right to fling some shit at him. It will undeniably stick. Also, I guess I can take solace in the fact that, due to his poor grammar, this guy would bother my grandmother just as much as he bothers me.
Oddly enough, having this teacher makes me somewhat hopeful. Yes, on a class by class basis he makes me irrationally frustrated and angry, like a pre-2004 Red Sox fan but without all the hats and East Coast violence. But it gives me hope to know that, armed with this college degree I will earn next month, I can fake my way through most anything.I don’t plan on living my life like that. I’m still hoping I do something halfway cool, but it’s comforting to know that, if nothing else, I too can play tutorial videos to a class. And you know I would at least be more convincing in the stuff I make up.
-Zanramon
Note: I advise you not to do a Google image search for “bad teacher”. I just found that out the hard difficult way.
*To actually be fair, Idi Amen had a lot more um, genocide, than this teacher does. This is why you don’t write when you’re angry.
Bad policy: Writing shit that doesn’t really make sense. (See Chupacabra-Ryan Atwood essay, as well as about 20 things I’ve written in the past month that were so utterly painful I just never posted them here. This is not a soapbox for trash!) I’m not sure if my new moniker has gotten to me or what, but I’ve been having a serious identity crisis/lack of motivation/quarter life crisis on here. Naturally, I feel that my writing has suffered, even though I have been able to bang out something half decent here and there. I need to stop trying to make this something that it isn’t. ATW needs to become comfortable with itself again. Naturally, I’m overflowing with confidence as usual.
Good Policy: Get back to writing about my irreverent theories and musings on life. Start linking to cool stuff again. Write more news stories about things that never really happened. I do like the adventure of finding the most obscure possible references for post titles though, and weirdly relating images. Figure out a better way to categorize things.
I’m not promising a turnaround in a matter of days, but know I’m working on it. I’m like the Prince of Persia, I never die, I just have a time limit. I need some of those potions for more time. I think they were green.
Your loyalty will be rewarded when I crank the awesome meter back up to high soon.
-Zanramon
Dark, dark times at Addicted to Words.
I got an email today from my web host telling me that their prices are going the way of gas prices. Due to my current status of joblessness these new prices are prohibitive. Which means, if ATW is to survive, it has to move, to evolve. It needs to take advice from Kanye West via Daft Punk. And in less than two weeks, natch.
I’ve already attempted to move it to a free wordpress.com account, and that works ok, but it occurred to me that all of my images that I have hosted on my site would be gone too. Due to this coinciding with my graduation, I have neither the time nor the energy to do this. So the archives would be become ruins, a sad torn down reminder of the past.
As well, the ATW aesthetic is absolutely killed, as I can only choose between the generic design themes on wordpress.com. I can’t use the one I designed, which as petty as it seems, I like to think is important to the whole ATW experience. I’m not sure if this is because I don’t feel like my writing can stand on it’s own, or if it’s some sort of home court advantage situation.
Bottom line, ATW didn’t look right on somebody else’s design. I plan on experimenting with Blogger and seeing what I can procure from that, but for whatever reason I have a feeling of dread in my head.
I’ve been toying with the idea of becoming more focused in my writing. As in, picking a single topic and using my writing style to pontificate about that. As of now, I have a few saplings of ideas, but nothing has become a multi-celled organism yet. I realize it’s not wise to just up and disappear for awhile while I search my soul and find my topic, but I’m wondering if I should take this as a sign that I should do that.
Basically, I’m very frustrated and don’t know where to go from here. Input would be appreciated.
And I haven’t even begun to wrap my head around my photo site.
UPDATE: Just to clarify, I still own the domain Addictedtowords.com for some time, so that’s not the issue, I can point that anywhere. I’m talking about where the actual files and thoughts reside.
UPDATE 2: As far as I can tell, Blogger doesn’t let you import stuff from another blog, so that’s out the window.
-Zanramon
First, I just want to plead forgiveness for my absence in the last few days as well as this upcoming week. My sister is coming to visit and although she is a scratch writer, I highly doubt her list of preferred activities during her fleeting visit to warm temperatures will be to enjoy the finer points of me writing on my blog.
As well, excuse and ignore the rant quality of what is about to come, if that sort of thing bothers you.
The lock to my front door broke again (and I was locked out again), for the second time in as many weeks. Needless to say, it has interrupted my perpetual state of zen I try so hard to maintain. Last time the lock broke, the locksmith told my landlord that said lock is far beyond it’s glory years and while they did some tinkering and adjusting, it all added up to nothing more than a veritable cortisone shot, masking the symptoms but fixing nothing. I need a new lock! Yes, my rent is (relatively) affordable so I turn my perpetual blind eye to things such as the PVC piping in my house, but please, to paraphrase Bruce Willis, “cowboy the fuck up” and replace this ancient lock. The lock and handleset may be a treasure from Victorian era (more likely it just appears so), but any perceived elegance it may have is rendered completely irrelevant by the fact that it does not serve it’s purpose. I fear no bandits or holdups because I can use a chain and padlock with the best of them (or at least my own personal version of it), but it is beyond cumbersome.
In my enlightened state of more recent days, I try and complain as little as possible but as I said this has jolted me out of my state of zen. I’m up on my high horse and I demand changes. The corrupt dictator in me has become unleashed. My kingdom has fallen into an unacceptable state of disrepair. No longer will I languish as a leader. The peasants no longer fear me, and thus have become lazy. Changes are afoot.
-Prime Leader Zanramon
Today begs the question of how do you celebrate a holiday in which there is seemingly no proper way to do it? Today honors Pi, but doing math problems is a terrible way to celebrate anything. Writing out the actual number would be exhausting, if not probably impossible. (Sometimes I like to think infinite is attainable.) 
Baking a pie is just an obvious play on words, and is fairly irrelevant anyway to Pi, homonyms aside. Letting it spiral into the college “drink to celebrate everything and anything” mentality is just lazy, especially with St. Patrick’s day on Monday. How does one lay out and bask in the rays of Pi Day? I don’t know what to do.
This rarely happens, holidays almost always have an obvious way to celebrate them. Even the lesser celebrated ones tend to easier decisions. Boxing Day is self explanatory. I give all my friends of the fairer sex high fives on Women’s Day. Even the variously flavored presidential celebrations give us a chance to bust out the powdered wigs and use feathers for pens to write down our revolutionary ideas.
It’s not for lack of caring either. I want to celebrate Pi Day, I promise you I am trying. I’m passionate about holidays, Christmas and Thanksgiving help me temporarily become one with the world. Pi Day though, has failed to captivate my attention, which should never happen on a holiday.
Pi Day options exhausted, I suppose it’s time to go play the Donkey Kong Country drinking game where we drink every time an alligator is killed by a monkey. Yes, we invented it. Yes, it’s juvenile, violent, and irresponsible. No, it’s not in celebration of Pi Day. Complex holidays lead to simple diversions I suppose. I blame this day, based on the most complicated number of all time. An ill-advised holiday indeed. Lament.
-Prime Leader Zanramon
I studied, and it worked. Allotropes, isotopes, gamma rays! I studied for 8 hours yesterday, and it seems to have paid off on the chemistry test I took today. I realize there is about a 80,000% chance of me jinxing any perceived good grade I may have had, but if you think that will stop me, you are wrong.*
I can’t remember the last time I studied like that. Generally, I just pay good attention in class and let any smarts I have carry me through the course, this worked in high school, and in college most things I am evaluated on are project or actual performance, not arcane test taking. Which is exactly why I am majoring in what I am majoring in. That said, my grades in some things absolutely could be better if I studied more. The Charles Darwin class I took comes to mind. I’ve generally been content with whatever grade I ended up with. C’s are rare, glossed over disfigured letters on my transcript. My cup runneth over with A’s and B’s and thus were taken for granted.
But studying with a graceful violence like I did stirred something in my consciousness that had long been dormant, and that was the love of learning. Not honing skills, and being psuedo-trained for a job, which is what much of my college class experience has been. No, a love of filling my skull with new information and seeing myself become more enlightened in the higher plane of learning. If not love yet, it is undeniably lust. I felt my brain smile.
Perhaps it is age, perhaps it is laziness, or simply being too content, but I’ve lost the math wizardry of my youth. It wasn’t necessarily because I was thinking on previously unforeseen genius levels, but simply because I loved it. I put in countless extra hours just doing math because it was fun for me. The spirit of learning burnt bright in my heart and mind. I was learning just to learn. Lusting after knowledge. The spirit was deprived it’s oxygen though, and the flame dwindled. A wizard of math is something I am absolutely not close to anymore.
Years of forced trigonometry and calculus took away my aforementioned self-given, yet coveted, title. I simply ceased to enjoy it, and that overflowed into most of my schooling. Which is why I was so pleasantly surprised by my enjoyment of studying last night. I don’t particularly enjoy chemistry either, but it took me back to a simpler time in life when learning meant not working for grades, but for becoming all that much closer to being enlightened.
Of course, as these things tend to happen, I come across this sea change just as I am reaching the summit of my educational mountain. A pessimist would say I’m late in my realization that learning is pure and good. An optimist would say that this is an appropriate time, as hopefully I’ll be motivated to learn and obtain more knowledge simply for the love of it. I hope to be obnoxiously well read and articulate. To remember the joy simply of discovering something new. And such and such.
I’m going to go ahead and proclaim that the glass is half full. I know this because I just filled it.
-Zanramon
*I can only hope by pointing out this jinx and facing it with such bravado, I can effectively create a reverse-jinx.
A changing of the guard has come about. Addicted to Words has undergone a hostile takeover. John no longer lives here. I, Prime Leader Zanramon, am your new voice of guidance and reason. I eat hot sauce straight. Pastries do not interest me.
John still has access and will respond to his email, but contact me about any posts in the past, future, or present, as well as any larger questions about the site.
Henceforth, my words are law.
-Zanramon
"It has come to my attention that your site and it's very existence is putting a strain on all that is good in our universe."
-Unspecified James
And when we inevitably break all that is good in the universe, sorry.
Pay the piper.
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