I’m paying my credit card bill tonight because paying it on April Fool’s day seems ill advised.
Sister is gone, but my absence here may extend a few more days. Graduating college can be hectic, I’m learning. Another stepping stone on this perpetual life pond I seem to be crossing. I feel like Donkey Kong bouncing off vultures to cross a ridiculously huge abyss that no gorilla should be attempting to cross anyway. And he has the roll bounce, I don’t.
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.
I keep hearing murmurs and hearsay about the Twilight books and the movie. It sounds like it has got the requisite fantasy elements I so desire in my stories, so I may delve deeper one of these days.
Point being, Cam Gigandet plays a vampire named James in Twilight. Cam Gigandet, being, of course Volchok, the Krang to Ryan’s Leonardo* of my beloved OC tv show. I know nothing about James the vampire, although I would guess he is an evil vampire because, well, Vampires are generally evil, and Volchok is a less than wholesome guy.
As stated, I know nothing about anything involving Twilight, save for the presence of vampires and a few tidbits Rita has tossed in my general direction, but something I do know is that Volchok is one of the most reactive elements on the planet. He’s all the way on the left side of the periodic table, an Alkali metal with one Valance electron, violently reactive.
And in case you can’t tell thus far, I’m delighted to see him showing up all over in this post-mortem OC era. Adam Brody has floundered around, lost somewhere in the Land of Women. That guy in Chuck, Zachary Levi, stole Brody’s Seth Cohen identity anyway. Benjamin McKenzie seems to have hung up the wrist cuff and clogs, as we haven’t heard a single thing from him. And I think Mischa Barton died.
Rachel Bilson has been lurking in our collective consciousness a little bit, but as I discussed before, it just seems misguided and contrite seeing her in anything other than the OC. Seeing Volchok run free in the wild though has had the opposite effect on me. He gallops beautifully like a gazelle.
I haven’t seen it (and admittedly, the trailers probably tell the whole story) but Volchok’s other current movie Never Back Down seems like it takes on some sort of weird 2 Fast 2 Furious car porn characteristic that means at the very least it will be entertaining to watch on TNT in 18 months, solely for the presence of Volchok.** He might bring down the Twilight movies as swiftly as he killed Marissa, and to a less talked about extent, Ryan’s new car***, but he also might, for lack of a better term, take Twilight and never back down.
Don’t ever underestimate Volchok, save Oliver, Ryan Atwood has never met a more formidable foe.
*Marissa Cooper would have been Raphael, Seth Cohen would be Donatello, and in a hotly contested decision, Summer Roberts would be Michaelangelo. Also, how Splinter was Sandy Cohen?
**That Blood Diamond guy Djimon Hounsou is pretty excellent too. So is the presence of a character called “Beatdown DJ Swagga”. I digress.
***Incidentally, that was the second Ryan helmed car Volchok ruined. He keyed “Lil’ Bitch” into the Range Rover.
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.
I tend to bristle at the trend of labeling everything as “extreme”, but this is the rare case of something actually earning it’s, admittedly watered-down at this point, title of extreme. If not simply for the prowess on the slide, then absolutely the wetsuits that almost certainly have been procured from 1989. A war was waged against the visible spectrum, the hues are dangerously close to tip-toeing into infrared range. Behold the brightest colors that our eyes are capable of registering, extreme by the letter of the law. How about trying out some helmets as well?
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.
Those who know me well know that I’m somewhat of a diet soda connoisseur. The title may be self given, but that does not imply that it is false. (You’d have to know my quite well, as I tend to be quite elusive during meals, retiring to my quarters to catch up on NBA news.) Quibbles aside, I drink more than my fair share of diet soda. I fear I may be in the midst of an ill fated ride towards some sort of heinous cancer, but someday we will all meet our demise. Fake sugar is my White Album. I consume it on stolen time.
For years, it was always Diet Coke or Diet Pepsi. They were the de facto standards for diet soda. There may have been the occasional Tab or Fresca or something else outrageous, but anything beyond Diet Coke or Diet Pepsi tended to be more rare than the company that birthed Donkey Kong Country. The lack of choices meant business was good, there was no reason to change. And they didn’t, for a long time.
In the last 2 or so years however, we’ve seen somewhat of an explosion of new choices in the diet soda category. Never has the industry seen this kind of breadth of choice. A veritable Dot Com boom of zero calorie drinks, if you will. Diet Dr. Pepper, Diet Mountain Dew, Sprite Zero, some variety of diet orange things. They all boldly claimed their moment in my refrigerator only to be one upped by new drinks that tended to be wordier than a Fall Out Boy song: Cherry Vanilla Diet Dr. Pepper, Code Red Cherry Diet Mountain Dew or Jazz Caramel Cream Diet Pepsi.
Unfortunately, the inevitable happened and the super-saturated point was reached. The choices couldn’t continue to be good forever. It all came crashing down with Cherry Chocolate Diet Dr. Pepper. (Henceforth referred to as CCDDP. That title is just begging to dole out carpal tunnel.) Which sounds pretty great, if not fucking fantastic. The sad reality though: it’s terrible.
Somehow in my OCD riddled mind I’ve come to the point where I must smuggle provisions into any movie I see at the cinema. Generally you can count me in for my flavor of the week diet soda and some delicious beef jerky. Before I went to see the excellent Be Kind Rewind I partook in a quest to find this new drink. My hopes were unrealistic in retrospect. (And possibly skewed by the limited-edition status of CCDDP.) I wanted the ultimate experience in zero calorie freedom. A sense of nirvana about my cola. I had visions of myself stockpiling the drink, making the already regulated supplies of CCDDP even more difficult to obtain. I would sit in my ivory tower and laugh at the rabble as they frantically tried to locate this resonant drink. I planned to possibly store my stores in an underground bunker.
As previously stated, it wasn’t to be. Cherry Chocolate Diet Dr. Pepper is a false prophet. The faint taste of some sort of poor excuse for chocolate is deeply masked by whatever Dr. Pepper actually tastes like. The cherry flavor is nonexistent, an afterthought. It is a mismatched jigsaw puzzle, one where you’ve dropped the last puzzle piece down the heater vent. It will never be retrieved.
CCDDP falls apart all together with the odd, medicine like aftertaste. The tragedy of this drink is unrivaled in, not just the diet soda, but flavored drink world all together. Yes, including the unrealized genius of Orbitz. CCDDP had tremendous upside. There was no ceiling for it, none whatsoever. Unfortunately, it turned out to be more Qyntel Woods than Josh Smith.
The hope is that CCDDP fades away quietly, slipping out of our minds in the peaceful ebb and flow of our conscience coast. A poor effort is disappointing, but wasted potential is simply sad.
A friend of mine recently upgraded her cell phone. Now, admittedly I have never seen this new phone, but the powers it has given her are immense and impressive. She’s omnipresent on AIM. Her email is always accessible, as is the internet, and thus, pretty much anything in the world. People tend to refer to this as a digital leash, as if it somehow holds you back or restrains you. In reality, this gives people powers previously unforeseen in humans. It’s a Godlike manipulation of the internet and communications.
It’s certainly a lot of responsibility. Most of the population can’t handle this power. People gridlock interstates and Starbucks lines as they text message. They annoy their co-workers with their breakroom phone use. A society of people incorrectly using their powers is dangerously close.
I pine after iPhone’s and the power they hold and will give me, yet I know I’m not ready yet.* My life’s biggest regret thus far is the lack of any superhuman powers or abilities. I’m fascinated by the NBA, as it’s top performers seem to have higher power level athletic abilities, moreso than any other sport. Football size can be gained, without steroids baseball is an everyman sport, Hockey is Canada. A phone with the internet would appear to be my best chance at anything resembling super powers. Steve Jobs has placed these abilities within my reach. Yet I know I’m not ready yet. I would abuse the power, endlessly browsing the tangled world wide web. A fly caught within it, not the Brown Recluse that rules with a graceful iron fist over his domain.
Perhaps I will be ready when I no longer care for Facebook or fantasy basketball. My uses will be stripped down and streamlined. I will return email with frightening precision. I will spin and weave the world wide web with a clarity and accuracy previously unforeseen. I will reach that God level of communication. One fine day.
As time goes on and technology advances, the human race will inch closer to the Godlike status so many of us secretly desire. Today, the internet on our phones and the ability to communicate with all beings. Tomorrow, the power to teleport? Invisibility? They sound absurd right now, but we have to assume they will come about. Eventually they will become commonplace, as will the power of current phones. Superpowers will fall back into the echelon of a properly and averagely functioning person. It’s a less-than-vicious cycle. The true superheroes are the ones that not only adopt available powers early on, but also complete the phrase and use them heroically. They will adapt to new powers. They will hope from lilly pad to lilly pad on the pond of earth, always staying one step ahead of the rabble they rouse.
I don’t want to be God, I don’t want to play God. I have no knowledge of whether or not a God exists. But when powers comparable to one surface, they must be used properly and thoughtfully.
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.
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.
Unfortunately, the inevitable happened and the super-saturated point was reached. The choices couldn’t continue to be good forever. It all came crashing down with Cherry Chocolate Diet Dr. Pepper. (Henceforth referred to as CCDDP. That title is just begging to dole out carpal tunnel.) Which sounds pretty great, if not fucking fantastic. The sad reality though: it’s terrible.