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Originally this was going to be my away message, but then it got too long, so *shrug* this is a good a place as any to say what I have to say. If you stop reading midway through, atleast skip to the last full paragraph. That’s where the essential point I’m trying to make is.
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Hope you guys enjoyed your night out at the Starbucks parking lot. I never really had a problem with it, but recently I've come to despise that place. Don't get me wrong, I recognize its power as a central and convenient meeting point, and I don't have a problem with just standing around and doing nothing. It's just that I don't want to do stand around and do nothing there. Why? Because it's a dead end.
Turned out sketch-woods wasn't at all that sketchy. There were no wild drinking ready-to-rape-you frat boys. Neither was there a circle of druggies passing around a needle oozing with hepatitis and HIV. Hell, there wasn't even a fire. Those are all just stupid fantasies we dream up because what it comes down to is we're all imaginative and horribly sheltered little children.
Wanna know what there actually was there? Five guys in a dirt clearing all just sitting around their truck and hanging out. Sure, they talked more ghetto than we do and they smoked cigarettes instead of cloves, but what it comes down to is all they were doing was just hanging out like we do. They were friendly, too -- we easily struck up a conversation and tossed some shit around for 20 minutes or so.
Honestly, when I left I wasn't expecting to find anything back there. Why did I go? Because there was a CHANCE of something interesting -- no. Interesting is a bad word. Out of the ordinary. There was a CHANCE of something out of the ordinary happening. Even if nothing would have happened, I would have considered it better than a night in the 'lot. Why? Because that chance of something, anything, happening existed.
Whats the difference between the 'lot and anything else? Look at it this way: how many years have we spent at the lot? And out of that time, has anything interesting happened? Sure, every now and then we see a face we haven't talked to in a few days or a week or whatever, and yeah, its nice to talk for a little bit, but I mean anything worth remembering - anything a year or two from now where someone will start, "Hey, remember that one time at the diner we had that flagrantly-gay waiter and the old fat bald guy in the corner booth takes out a wad of $20s and whispers something to him and points..." and everyone starts cracking up? Whether or not something exciting happens doing anything else, the 'lot essentially guarantees nothing will come up.
It's a dead-end.
It'll get you nowhere.
I, for one, don't want to end up in two or four or whatever years still doing the same thing. I don't want to look at the next generation of high school kids when I'm 23 and complain how after our year, it all started to go downhill. Cause the reality of the situation will be that it was me who went downhill. Where those young high-school kids will have five years until they're 23 to do whatever, I don't want to realize that I spent five years in the same dead-end parking lot.
Anyways, the point I'm trying to get at is this: yeah, maybe checking out a sketch-party in the woods will be lame. But there's a chance it will be cool. There's a chance you'll end up talking to someone interesting. And you know what? Even if the person is a homie, or even if there's nothing going on at all, at least everything wasn't the same old lifeless routine. At least you had a tiny bit of an adventure. At least you had a chance of meeting and talking to someone new. At least there was a chance of it being a really good night, and regardless of whether that chance worked out or not, its the fact that the chance existed in the first place that DOES make it a good night. What I'm trying to get at is this:
Take a chance.
Do something that is out of what is comfortable; being comfortable will get you nowhere new.
See where that anything will take you.
Maybe you have no problem with staying comfortable. I do. I don't want to stay comfortable forever; you gain nothing if you do that. I want something. Maybe that something won't take me anywhere, but even if that something turns out to be a nothing, it's better than a guaranteed nothing, a dead end.
Because thats all Starbucks really is. A dead end.
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eh, replace the "Athletic" with "Gets Out and Does Shizznit" and I think its somewhat accurate.
Your dating personality profile:
Liberal - Politics matters to you, and you aren't afraid to share your left-leaning views. You would never be caught voting for a conservative candidate.
Athletic - Physical fitness is one of your priorities. You find the time to work athletic pursuits into your schedule. You enjoy being active.
Big-Hearted - You are a kind and caring person. Your warmth is inviting, and your heart is a wellspring of love. | Your date match profile:
Adventurous - You are looking for someone who is willing to try new things and experience life to its fullest. You need a companion who encourages you to take risks and do exciting things.
Funny - You consider a good sense of humor a major necessity in a date. If her jokes make you laugh, she has won your heart.
Athletic - You aren't looking for a couch potato. You seek someone who is active and who keeps her body in top shape. | Your Top Ten Traits
1. Liberal
2. Athletic
3. Big-Hearted
4. Sensual
5. Funny
6. Adventurous
7. Wealthy/Ambitious
8. Intellectual
9. Shy
10. Stylish
| Your Top Ten Match Traits
1. Adventurous
2. Funny
3. Athletic
4. Practical
5. Sensual
6. Liberal
7. Big-Hearted
8. Outgoing
9. Wealthy/Ambitious
10. Intellectual
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Take the Dating Profile Quiz - Relationship Jokes - Relationship Advice
Now if only I could stop this fucking song from slicing its way into my brain-nerves all day long ARRRRRRGBeatboxing To: modest mouse - bukowski |
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Mar. 4th, 2005 @ 06:18 am
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 | You scored as Upper middle Class. Your determination have soared you this high, yet not high enough to enjoy the luxuries of the upper class. Your most valued posession is your country club membership which is kept framed in the office.
Upper middle Class | | 75% | Middle Class | | 63% | alternative | | 46% | Lower Class | | 46% | Luxurious Upper Class | | 42% | </td>
What Social Status are you?
created with QuizFarm.com |
Anyone else have it happen to you that when you tell people you're from a town called "Smithtown" they've told you, "'Smithtown'? You might as well have just named it 'Generic White Suburbia'"? |
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Feb. 17th, 2005 @ 06:47 am
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its 6:48am and for the last hour I've been in my programming lab staring at three empty cans of soda and watching the sky turn from black to grey to a greyish tint of light blue. |
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with the smell of a dynasty in the air tonight, I'd like to take a moment and casually remind everyone what happened the last time boston celebrated.
origional b&w photography
;)
Feb. 6th, 2005 @ 05:09 pm
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| » HEY MEG!1!!!11!1!!! |
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because Alaskans are cool.
Jan. 25th, 2005 @ 09:08 pm
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mit:
Jan. 23rd, 2005 @ 03:11 pm
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alright, now that livejournal is back up after a long and painful 24 hours of no lj fix, I have this to say:
George Foreman, I'm sorry to have ever doubted the ability of your grills. I will never cook chicken another way again.
Jan. 16th, 2005 @ 01:56 am
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woo, 6am, go team-working-on-final-project-all-through-the-night! Thoughts/suggestions much appreciated.
( betcha your parties aren't as fun as this one was. celebrate, mothafuckas. )
Dec. 9th, 2004 @ 05:59 am
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woo! best commie party eva. The berlin-wall-pinata came down, people took the candy and money inside, and the whole thing turned into an 80's dance party that lasted till 3am.
Nov. 21st, 2004 @ 03:23 am
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As once promised... tear gas!
more if I ever again find time to, you know, do stuff.
Nov. 18th, 2004 @ 10:42 pm
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Following Weinberg's post on divorce rates and a good point that was brought up concerning divorce rates and marriage rates on a mit post, I decided to analyze this whole marriage/divorce rate thing myself. And so, I present:
(Heterosexual) Marriage and the 2004 Presidential Election: Are We a Bunch of Hypocrites?
The gist of it the whole thing is that the ratio of marriage rates to the ratio of divorce rates is just over 2:1, meaning there are half as many divorces every year as there are marriages. The point of the whole thing was brought up by Lewis Black last weekend: what right does 51% of America have to vote on the "sanctity of marraige" and deny basic legal rights to people because America is full of homophobic bigots when America can't even keep the sanctity of its own marriage?
Download it, read it, and pass it on to your friends.
Nov. 5th, 2004 @ 07:57 pm
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yeah, so we used up all of our send-the-underdog-to-a-sweet-glorious-victory mojo making the Sox the world champs... world's gonna end, etc. etc. We can't change it now, but we can be bitter about it. Someone on my hall sent this to the hall and encouraged all of us to print it out and put it on our doors.
so c'mon, show off your bitterness!
[edit] and in another e-mail, I was given today's word of the day:
kakistocracy
Government by the least qualified or most unprincipled citizens.
Nov. 4th, 2004 @ 12:56 am
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I was flipping through some Time's from 1928 today for a paper I'm doing about advertising in that era... every 5th ad or so was for some big investment/stock/wall street firm. I couldn't help but think, "in less than a year, you're all so fux0red. lol."
Ads and articles from Red-Scare 1950's were also quite entertaining.
Nov. 2nd, 2004 @ 09:24 pm
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| » First hand account of a warzone - police in full riot gear, tear gas, batons, bang-grenades - all |
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I love this town. We lose, and we riot. We win, and we riot harder.
The Sox win with that cocky easy-half-walk-toss to first and the hall goes crazy. Three floors above, the Ultrabuster is being dropped and dropped and dropped again, reverberating through the entire dorm and into its foundations. A buncha people and I walk out and to the bridge into Boston. The excitement is not at all at the level of last week’s victory over the Yankees – that was fucking winning the American Revolution all over for this town. Where last week we crossed the bridge at full sprint, this evening we just walked it at a calm pace, taking time to look past the dimmed Citgo sign into the air. With the cold breeze off the water was the rapid thump-thump-thump-thump-thump-thump of choppers. Four of them were over the skyline past the Citgo sign. One of them was circling the Fenway area with a spotlight pointing down into the city, the others just motionless lights in the air with blinking dim rotor lights a bit off to the side.
People were still filing into Kenmore Square as we arrived. The Turnpike bridge leading to Fenway was nothing more than a sea of people packed shoulder-to-shoulder spanning the entire width - a sea whose current was pushing straight into Kenmore Square. Anyways, the square filled up, and much celebration was had. The distinctive four-syllable “Lets Go, Red Sox!” chant was taken up countless times with many variations (the most common of which was the never-dying “Yan-kees suu-uuck”), people were dousing each other in beer, girls were sitting on shoulders flashing the entire under-25 male population of Boston, etc. You know, the usual.
When the crazy shit began happening, though, the Boston PD was far more alert than last week. A person climbed the light that was taken down in the Yankees celebration with hopes of repeating the action – less than three minutes later five BPD’s in full riot gear sprint through the crowd, pull the kid down, grab his arms and legs, and pull him back towards the police line. A larger group of BPD’s stormed another lamppost being scaled, and as they surrounded it, the distinctive four-syllable “Lets Go, Red Sox!” turned into a mocking and jeering, “Please don’t shoot us!” and a shortened two-drawn-out-syllable, “aaaaaasss-hoooooles!” The BPD’s apprehended the person they were chasing and went back to the police line on the east end of the square. Once they were gone, all hell broke loose.
The crowd was getting rowdy and pissed off, so of course they get some newspapers and set them on fire in the middle of the street. People begin climbing the street light the BPD’s had just surrounded, getting on top of the crosswalk symbol and then jumping down into the crowd. One person climbed the utility pole all the way up and onto the metal brace that holds up the streetlight and crawled his way towards the light hanging 15 feet above the middle of the street. The crowd goes wild and cheers him on. He decides to jump down, and when he did, it was one of those things that slows time for a moment. The kid put his arms and legs out like DaVinci’s sketch of the human proportions man, only he was rotated a few degrees counterclockwise. The crowd blocked my view of how he landed, but you could see it wasn’t correctly. The crowd immediately stopped its cheering and hushed and crowded around their fallen martyr… a few seconds later, the inside circle begins to cheer signaling he’s okay and the entire crowd breaks its silence. A minute later, BPD riot police riding gigantic horses rush through the crowd from the other end of the square. They surround the fire and sidestep their mounts, eventually settling in a straight line between the mob and the fire. Footmen follow the horses, put out the fire with a fire extinguisher, and form a second line behind the horses. By this time, its easy to see they had cleared out Kenmore and were forming lines around the perimeter, shoving all of the crowds into the sidestreets. The horses retreat behind the footmen line (all of which is now holding their meter-long wooden batons), and canisters of tear gas are launched into the crowd. Thick goblin-green-tinted smoke comes up, and the crowds stop their taunting yells and rush backwards. The gas clears and we run back towards the police line, but this time the line has begun to march forward. When the batons begin swinging at the stranglers, people begin to notice the party is over.
Last week during the Yankees riots, I made the mistake of not bringing my SLR. This evening, on the otherhand, I was prepared. In my Intro to Media Studies class, we watched a documentary the other week about some war photojournalist who said something along the lines of, “If you’re photos aren’t good enough, you’re not close enough.” With this thought in the back of my head, I became one of the stranglers. I retreated, but just enough to stay out of range of the batons. The BPD line was pushing us west on Commonwealth – a street that has no sidestreets and is caged in by traditional Boston brickstone mansions for the blocks around Kenmore Square, so there was no where for us to go except backwards. The entire time, the BPD was using effective fear tactics. As they’d march along, they’d shoot shells forwards that rolled along the ground and exploded. As far as I could tell, they didn’t do anything but explode with a loud band – M80’s on steroids, their sole purpose to scare and confuse the crowd. They launched canisters of gas forward, but no one was coughing, so my guess was these were only smoke bombs. Nevertheless, in the confusion of the retreat, people all around me were yelling tear gas. The police line would jog forward and stop… the jog lasted long enough to cause people to run backwards, but once the police stopped, the people only walked. Midway over the narrow, crowded overpass over the turnpike, the police line stops and stands still for an unusually long break. We begin to think they reached the end of their push when suddenly police motorcycles that nobody saw break through the footmen and turn on their sirens and lights. The police break into a full sprint behind the motorcycles, batons still waving and beating down on the stranglers. At this point, everyone in the mob turns around and runs at full sprint. Up to this, people were either walking backwards or kinda jogging as the police line marched forwards. Once the line began to sprint, everyone just lost it and completely ran. I’m running on the sidewalk when I look over and see the police motorcycles drive past me, the drivers wearing full-face gas masks. At this point I abandon the idea of taking more pictures and just continue running, the police line still at full sprint behind me, batons coming down, and gas and bang-grenades being fired into the crowd. The crowd reaches the end of the overpass and the road opens up into many side streets which the crowd finally uses to disperse. I catch my breath with a few others and listen to a few of the stranglers yell slurs at the now-stopped police for using “unnecessary force” and yell about how they were beaten up. The last few pictures are snapped away, the film is rolled up, and I finally decide to call it a night. All in all, I got about five rolls from this evening – many close enough to the riot police that I could see the whites of their eyes reflecting off their polished batons. This weekend I’m going to start developing them, and the better shots will make their way up here. And with that, I bid you goodnight.
Oct. 28th, 2004 @ 04:02 am
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Alright, so today my hall decided on our fall hall party. The theme - Communism: 2 Centuries of Unity.
The idea is one end of the hall is the begining, and as you walk down, its like a walk through the ages. Our two lounges are gonna be dedicated to Soviet Russia and Castro's Cuba. Mao propaganda will be thrown in there somewhere too. Planned attractions:
- red gels over the hall florescant lighting
- an iron curtain (tinfoil, most likely)
- bread line
- mass executions / gulags
- russian roulette vodka (seven shot glasses filled with water, one with vodka, you get the idea)
and, in a moment of sheer brilliance, I suggested
- the building of a giant pinata the width of the hall, tall as man, and shaped like the Berlin Wall. Planned knocking down towards the end of the night - you get the symbolism.
anyways, we got enough knowledge on the hall to cover Russia pretty well, but we need some help on Cuba. I already ordered the obligatory che flag off e-bay, but we need more ideas. For you alcohol-fanatics out there, we want to create something we can call the Cuban Missle, but what kind of liquor is Cuba known for? Also, cigars are out of the question because last year they set off the smoke alarms. Any other ideas?
Also, we need ideas for Cold War-era songs. We have:
99 Red Balloons
Still Fingers - The Night the Wall Came Down
Beatles - Back in the USSR
Any other ideas?
Oct. 26th, 2004 @ 12:10 am
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yeah, so I just got kicked out of Kenmore Square.
...by the Boston Police.
...clad in full riot gear and armed with tear gas.
lewl at Boston celebrating their victory by destroying a small part of it! On the way over, every other car was honking. Then once we got there, oh boy oh boy, the entire square and streets around it were packed shoulder to shoulder with every single college kid in Boston and every drunkass fan coming out bars. Everyone was cheering - the noise was deafening. All of Kenmore Square was filled completely shoulder to shoulder before long. I saw people climb up to the street lights AND PULL THE ENTIRE STREET LIGHTS DOWN (it disappeared into the crowd a full three seconds later). There were people swinging trees back and forth trying to make them snap and climbing up onto the mcdonalds overhangs knocking down the M's. The vast majority, though, were just milling around the square and chanting anti-Yankees slur. And flashing people. There was definately some flashing. On the way back, the harvard bridge was backed up more than half-way, completely not moving, and people hanging out their windows and slapping our hands as we walked back. All in all, I'd call the night a rather uneventful study break.
Oct. 21st, 2004 @ 01:45 am
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So highlights of the day:
Yesterday at frisbee I went for a layout and landed wrong on my arm. Much pain was had, but thanks to drugs, the pain was numbed and I played on (after all, it wasn't my throwing arm, so whatever). Woke up two or three times in the night because the arm ended up at a bad angle and Mr. Pain was like, "WAKE UP! LOLOLOL!!!1!" So I went to Medical today and had it checked out. After the doctor examined me for a bit (without my shirt on. obviously.), she told me to hold on a sec and left for about 15 minutes. She comes back and says, "sorry about the wait, one of the other patients, wooo!" but the medical textbook photocopies labeled "Rotator Cuff Injury" that she began to read off make me think otherwise. Fuck it, next time I'm going to Harvard.
And then during the game, around the 12th inning there was a comment about what the pine sap on some of the guys helmets is for and a countercomment that said it was for making the ball go further and then a countercountercomment about how thats bullshit. The room then went into a 20-minute discussion about the fluid dynamics behind putting pine sap on your bat. Eventually it was proved (with the appropriate formulas) that the pine sap acts much like dimples on a golf ball and decreases the turbulance in the wake of the bat during the swing.
Oct. 18th, 2004 @ 11:23 pm
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Last night the hall was introduced to the Game of Pokey. Only this was hardcore Pokey. As I was battling one kid, we were swinging and rolling and pinning ourselves all over the hall... I forget who won, but when he looked at his Pokey knuckle afterwards, it was rugburned off and replaced with a bit bare bloody underskin. In the obligatory rematch, one of the girls standing to the side watching suddenly found her head between our Pokey grip and the wall I was trying to my opponent up against - a humorous blood smear from the above-mentioned rugburn was found across her forehead in the aftermath. Many other matches continued. As the clocked moved towards around 1:30am, I challenged this one kid to a match... I think after he did some kung-fu-like jumps at me and pinned and poked me in about seven seconds, I realized that one was probably a mistake. By the end of the night we had decided Pokey will be brought to the other halls in the near future and an EastCampus IM Pokey Team will be formed.
Oct. 16th, 2004 @ 03:10 pm
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phyrosfire's journal