We Need A Change...

You know the saying; "When the diaper's full, change it?"

Of course not because it's gross.

But that's pretty much it. This blog is just full of crap at this point, and I'm moving in a new direction with my life, and feel my blog should represent that. And this one doesn't,

So rather than deleting it, I'm just going to change it.

My new blog is located at www.visinvox.com. It's got more political overtones with a more personal aura, though there will still be the occasional vague reference to whatever topic I feel a need to discuss but don't want to address on a public level. You know what I'm talkin about? Yeah...

So check me out there, and use the comment button more frequently when you do, because I like to debate, but people think I'm crazy when I argue with myself. Especially out loud...

Anyway. This blog will remain up for your eternal viewing pleasure, but mostly for my eternal viewing pleasure.




fin.

I've got a great ambition to die of exhaustion rather than boredom.”

Is this the life of a 23 year old? Walking in a dream-scape as though having passed through the mirror into a world where the sidewalks move beneath sleepy eyes and dangling feet? Often, I cannot verify that I'm doing anything intentionally. These movements are predictable, expected. My eyes are open but I can't make out a concise actuality.


Four a.m. and I'm awake counting the pathetic few hours I have left of precious sleep. The mornings are fast and the showers are probably too warm but my body is still asleep and doesn't notice. Cold cereal, sour milk; little registers until the early spring breeze hits my cheeks and I vaguely realize some part of me has left the building. The bus stop is thick with smokers and I ache for a long drag but hold my breath as I walk by and try to forget the gray fingers as they reach out and follow me before disintegrating into the surrounding breeze. Music fills the silence that lingers inside my little green Camry as I drown in the extreme vigilance required to prevent collisions and citations by various people who's existance I can't justify. Lost in exhaustion, I fear I may only meet reality at the moment of impact.


Occasionally I wonder why I even attend my classes after such inadequate rest, except perhaps as an attempt to revive the scattered residue of my once vigorous social life through vague text messages and Internet exchanges, or to affirm the appearance of propriety in the eyes of those who might be taking role. The wise voices get buried between financial woes and broken hearts and petty matters my thoughts refuse to release. It's seldom quiet upstairs and on days like this I can't even keep a medically induced concentration for very long.


I don't need sleep. I need a week-long coma and a fighting addiction to valiums.


I can hear them arguing about a Justice's interpretation of the Constitution just beyond the glaze that covers my eyeballs. Something about civil rights and implied liberties. I add my two cents and pray my voice is coherent and wise, then retreat back into oblivion until I hear the rustle of papers and drift into my next chair in the following classroom. This is where I want to be, albeit unconscious. Here, crushed between these walls and merging with a wealth of knowledge I have yet to hold. I am a wide-eyed child, wanting nothing more than to understand a world that can't understand or concieve a natural desire to learn; that preaches blue-sky adventures while demanding suffocation and structure. Oceania with a view. They can define the terms, but I don't want the rules I've been given. I want something else. I'll get it, too.


Back home I wander blindly amidst political summaries and paragraphs with highlighter and ball-point ink. The books I want to read sleep on the shelves in front of me, collecting dust as my interests expand into areas that will take years to finally reach. I will never understand as much as my whims demand and my desire to know more than there's time to learn is daunting and weights heavy on my motivation. But each dawn I wake up and continue the pursuit.


They say it's not what you know, it's who you know, but I don't like that, and I won't abide by it.


At 7 p.m. I live in an empty city, as though the apocalypse of evening strolled through and swept the people home, but there's little time to admire the tranquil lull. One day I attend work, the next day I attend class, rotating through the week between two obligations that both demand my reverence, time, and energy. Shifts end and I walk home in the dark, passing vagrants and gentlemen; the identities of neither individual distinguishable by appearance. Funny how that works. Then, a belated dinner if I've salvaged my appetite or perhaps I'll peck at some frozen blueberries while cracking open another folder and disposing of the twilight in a sea of words.


The invitations I turn down at this hour all sound the same, usually noting my frequent absence or lack of acceptable communication. But anymore I just don't have the will to forgo another night's sleep paired with another groggy morning of forgetting my keys and walking into lectures already in discussion. It'd be for what? Side-long glances down the bar and prying at the ears of unavailable souls, coyly soliciting their company, but unsure of what I would do with it if they ever obliged. I only participate in this sport when I've no real desire to the win prize. I don't have time for men who live in blissful ignorace. I'd rather my time be spent with one happy to suffer. Still, the vultures circle around me as though I'm out of water, each with look in their eyes makes me wonder if they know something I don't. The drinks they buy don't quench my thirst and each sip brings me closer to the cool, shady mirage, but further from the firm oasis.


And all too often I go willingly into the abyss.

Bad Neighbors GET MY WRATH

Today, I decided to stay home and study.

It's 12:15 in the afternoon and I'm sitting at home in bed with my American Governmnent test in the works. I have my math homework and my Political Theory books sprawled out across my bed. I'm really doing a good job of minding my own business these days, and doing my best to maintain good study habits in hopes of actually getting A's this semester. Now, I'm a quiet loft-dweller. I'm a mellow college student who doesn't throw parties or have loud groups of friends over to play horseshoes in the living room. I haven't assembled furniture using power tools or hung pictures on the wall using picture frames I crafted by hand using an electric saw at 11 o'clock at night. Not lately anyway. My kittens no longer meow loudly throught the bottom of my front door while I wait for the elevator in my hallway. I don't have singing frogs, and I'm not a rockstar. I'm a good neighbor.

Late last week at about 2am somebody decided to make TOAST, and managed to create enough smoke to signal a fire, causing the building fire alarms to go off at 2AM. For the record, this is when normal people sleep. This is not when normal people make TOAST. Now, in all fairness, I must admit that there have been times where I had consumed a little too much wine and attempted to cook a frozen pizza, only to discover a week later that I had never turned the oven on and the pizza had dethawed and sunk into the wire oven rack and begun to mold. Nobody's perfect. But, come on. It takes a talented douche bag to burn TOAST that bad at 2am.

Given this isn't the first time in the past month that the building's fire alarms have been sounded, the fire department decided not to waste their time coming out and the duty fell upon me and the rest of the tenants to call management and have them reset the alarm. Try falling asleep after standing outside for 20 minutes in short shorts, a sweatshirt with a kitten stuffed inside the front pouch, and bare feet, with a fever. Oh yeah. But I did it. And I didn't complain neither. Why? Because I'm a badass.

The point is, I'm a good tenant, but I'm no angel. And if you upset me, or don't respect the fact that we have very thin walls, I will seek revenge. Most of my neighbors are polite, respectful, and helpful in most cases. They smile in the elevator, hold the door open, and put the laundry detergent I left in the wash room outside my door when I forget to grab it. But the guy that lives on the other side of my bedroom wall? Well, I can tell we are going to have some conflicts.

First let me point out that, when I moved into my loft, I believed that he was a woman. I believed this because I don't know many men who choose to listen to Womanizer by Britney Spears on repeat until 11 o'clock at night. Looking back, I think he might have been masturbating to her music video, which makes for unsettling mental pictures while falling asleep now if I happen to hear music being played next door after I tuck myself in for the evening.

Currently, his music is so lound that I can clearly understand the lyrics to the crappy R&B music that he's singing along to. In retrospect, maybe my actions have made matters worse, but when this first started about an hour ago I got sick of listening to it and decided to fight back.

Rather than banging on the wall, or going and knocking on his door and politely asking him to turn down his music, I decided to play by my own rules which means: No Rules. Armed with only computer speakers, and a website (Pornotube.com) which provides free access to gay porn, I pushed my laptop and speakers up against the wall, turned the dial to provide for maximum volume, and began to play loud grunting hardcore homosexual intercourse through the wall shared by our apartments....

....which are thinner than I thought, because shortly after this began, with my head pressed up to the wall to listen for his reaction, I heard him turn down the music, let out a loud belch, pause a moment, then say, "What the fuck? Oh. My. God." before immediately turning his music up louder than it had been before. Still, I think I totally won that battle.

Lesson: When I play, I play to win.

Anyway. Today, I decided to go study at LatteLand.

Watchmen

"Furthermore, as ever-escalating amounts of money are poured into the pursuit of the specific weapon or conflict that will bring lasting peace, the drain on our economies creates a run-down urban landscape where crime flourishes and people are concerned less with national security than with the simple personal security needed to stop at the store late at night for a quart of milk without being mugged. The places we struggled so viciously to keep safe are becoming increasingly dangerous. The wars to end wars, the weapons to end weapons, these things have failed us."

It's sick how poignant an argument made in a piece of literature written over 20 years ago still is today. I'm starting to think the evolution of our species is a farce. Humans, despite the technological and industrial advances, still seem to roam the Earth as naked and barbaric as the beasts we supposedly matured from.

"I will give you bodies beyond your wildest imaginings."
We will never learn.

Here's a toast to love and sin in a world where nothing is your own except the few cubic centimeters inside your skull.

My Trip Home

Ok. So admittedly I wasn't the best student back in Elementary school. If I remember being classified as any one thing, it would be "unorganized." I don't think I am in posession of a single vintage report card that doesn't make note of this flaw. Sure, my dad always called me "creative." But what do dads know? The problem, I've always thought, with my education is that few of my teachers ever actually answered my questions. Most of them just told me the answers to the questions I was supposed to ask. Admittedly, at the time I was also entering into the formative years of my budding feminine sexuality and easily excited by the prepubescent little boys who irritated the hell out of me. I was taught at some point that if they picked on you it meant they liked you, and so I figured I'd let them know I liked them back, and ended up getting sent to the principal's office more than once for drop kicking some innocent 4th grader in the junk. The point is, I was distracted. And let's face it, some things never change.

Still, it's easy to see how the basics of US Geography were never fully grasped by my surprisingly inqisitive little mind. I remember, of course, memorizing the names and capitals of all 50 states. I was never an A student; I had better things to do. Don't get me wrong, I knew my shit.

Yet somehow the system failed me.

As many of you know, I recently made the long drive home to Kansas City from Los Angeles where I spent the past year observing the society and culture of the Damned. While my research was not funded by any scientific foundation, I feel I walked away from the experience better and more cultured person. Also, 5 pounds lighter, addicted to whole foods, and with sand in my shoes.

The drive home was longer than I had anticipated. This is probably due to the fact that I slept through the majority of the drive out there and thereofore had little experience to base my assumptions on. To my amazement we kept ending up in wierd states that were way off the route, or so I thought. For the majority of the trip I was certain I was in some sort of magic car, and I kept hitting my dad up on the walkie-talkies asking "Are you sure we're in Arizona? I thought we were just in Vegas?"

Unfortunatly, the cause was not a magic car. The cause was my inability to properly identify my location on a map, which in turn was caused by my not knowing the actual layout of the United States on a map.

In order to best explain this I have provided pictures as reference for those who learn best with visual aids. Below we have a map of the US, slightly adjusted to adequately display my ignorance, the route I thought we were taking based on the states we were going through (I didn't have a map or directions. I was following the mattress on the back of my Dad's truck), which corresponds with where I thought I was on the map at any given time.

As you can see, we started out in LA. I know this, because that's where I lived. From LA, we took a slight detour to Nevada, which for one reason or another I was positive did not border California. I was wrong. The first clue should have been that I didn't drive through any other states to get to Nevada. So from Las Vegas we drove a couple hours and passed through Arizona. I thought we were making great time because I thought Vegas was located in the middle of Nevada. It's not. Then we ended up in Utah a few hours later, which again confused me because I thought Utah bordered California (which sounds really stupid now...) and that we had driven through it on the way to Nevada. Then suddenly, we were in Colorado. The route from there to Kansas City needs no explination because it mostly looked like this...

Or like this.....

...for 15 hours straight. Which, dont' get me wrong, is really cool for the first ten minutes. And then you realize you just drank a gallon of Diet Pepsi and passed the last rest stop for 40 miles two minutes ago.

Now that I've throughouly confused you, below is the actual route we took home.

In my defense we were driving for periods of 7-10 hours at a time.

Yeah, well, of course it's easy when you have a map.

But considering the fact that 1/5th of American's can't locate the United States on a map, I think I deserve points for actually displaying pictures of the right country.

Corporate America Can Suck My Carrot

I'm currently reading Thus Spake Zarathustra right now in my Contemporary Political Thought class, and I'd like to mention a valid point that Nietzsche makes in one of the parables. There's an idea in the religious community, probably outside of it too, that if you don't participate in sinful deeds you are a virtuous person. Nietzsche points out that if you don't have any desire to commit said bad deeds, that not doing them doesn't make you virtuous. (Duh.) Virtue is having the desire to commit various sins and the will to not act on that desire. So, if you have no desire to steal, molest young boys, or covet thy neighbor's bangin' hot wife, then not doing those things doesn't make you a virtuous person.

Now, let me give you a more straightforward example.

Right now, I would really like to turn about 6000 pretty white ping-pong balls into cherry bombs. (I'm not skilled in the art of constructing explosives, so my options are limited, please bear with me.) Then, I would like to take those 6000 exploding ping-pong balls and systematically blow up the upper levels of management at the headquarters of Toyota or Apple, starting with the meatheads who wear their man blouses just a little too tight across their chesticles, and work my way down from there. Probably not do any real damage or cause any fatalities (not due to any lack of effort on my part), but at the very least cause a few of them to evacuate their bowels into those expensive Andrew Christian briefs they're probably wearing. Maybe take a butter knife to the throat of Steve Jobs or do something completely irrational and messy like that. I have the complete and unfettered desire to go postal on the big suits and piss-ant retail workers who royally sodomized my near-virgin bum today.

But, since I'm not acting on that desire, I'd like to point out that those people should thank their lucky fucking stars I'm such a virtuous person.

fin.

Nothing's Fair In Love And War..

He looks at me and says, "So who are you then? Really?"

And I take a moment to think about it as my eyes slide away from his caustic gaze. He's serious when he asks me this question and maybe it catches me a little off guard. Usually when people ask this question they want to know what you do, what you like, what you listen to. And most of the time they don't really care unless they're pursuing something like a romance. Even then it's just good small talk. Besides, who am I really? I don't think anybody's anybody, not really. Except for maybe if you're under the pretense that we truthfully are what we eat, in which case I'd be a Ritalin pill and two eggs, over easy.

Him and I, we're sitting in the corner of a bookstore off 5th and Baltimore in the Walldorf District, or what some call the French District, where nobody's really French but the cafe's sell baguettes and one of the boutiques has a cut-out of the Eiffle tower pasted to their front window. Nobody puts much effort into things these days. They don't have to.

I had told him I was 18. I wasn't. I told him I was Julia. It wasn't. I told him I loved him too. I couldn't tell you why. I didn't. I don't know. Maybe I did.

I tell him, I don't know. I tell him this because in all likelihood it's probably the only thing I know for sure is true. Anymore, when people ask me questions like this I just make something up to entertain them. I don't soul-search inside myself because I've never thought of myself as more than a composite of the rest of the world, a product of some sort. I figure, if they really knew themselves, they'd know me too. Anymore, it's easier to just make somebody up than to define the intricacies that comprise my whole and separate me from the masses. I'd have to know alot more about the world than just my perspective of it to determine anything for sure, and anyways, who's to say I'm who I say I am? People change, so nobody's ever really who they say they are. Not for long anyway. Besides, by the time I've figured myself out, somebody's fucked me up good and everything's changed.

And he tells me, "I think I deserve to know."

I don't think he does. I don't think he deserves anything.

I'm a liar, I say. It's the truth, which is funny when you think about it, and it feels weird saying it but his green eyes don't look hurt by any fallacy on my behalf and it bothers me so I tell him what he wants to hear so that maybe he'll shut up and leave, or so that maybe I can at least get some reaction. I don't know why he's here to begin with. I didn't invite him.

Then it dawns on me that maybe he likes the lies better. Reality's not a pretty place. People disappear under headlines and girls fall in love with other men. Maybe he needs the escape of spending the night inside somebody that doesn't really exist. Maybe he knew the truth all along.

Fuck. What is wrong with people these days?

"You're a bitch." And he says it like I should be offended, but he sat there moments ago asking who I am, and now he thinks telling me the answer solves the problem. Truth is, he's probably right. Lot of good it does the both of us now.

Me and him, we dated for about a month. It was fun at first, but only because it was wrong. I met him at a busy bar and grill on game night and had noticed he was married. I inquired about the ring and he said, "Yeah, what about it?"

So I asked him, "How married?"

Twenty minutes later we were fucking in the bathroom stall and the manager was knocking on the door telling us we needed to leave or he'd call the police. And it was supposed to be a one night thing. Nothing that lasted. Just, for one night in my life I wanted to be a whore like everyone else. It sounds silly now. Four weeks later he was talking about divorce and I was getting ready to graduate and didn't have time to deal with that shit. Half way through the fifth week he found a picture of me in the local paper with a couple of girls from the track team at a fundraiser for our school. The caption listed us by our first initial, last name, and age. The picture was of my profile, so it wouldn't have been a problem if I wasn't wearing the same thing in the picture as what I had left his house in the morning it was taken. His hoodie. With his last name. I could have tried to lie, say it wasn't me, but it would have been useless. I was caught, with red letters and scarlet hands.

Nobody's who they say they are. At least not for long.

And now he sat in front of me wanting to be able to distinguish fantasy from reality, facts from fiction. Unfortunately, that ship had sailed weeks ago. Somewhere along the lines I probably messed this man's life up something good. Down the road a while, maybe even tonight, when he looks at his wife he'll see a lie where truth used to be. Eventually he'll have to decide which realm he wants to exist in, and both are going to suck.

He says, "Just tell me your name. Tell me you're real name. Just, please?" And he pauses for a moment. "Tell me who you really are."

I felt bad then, for this guy. It was too easy for me to steal him from his world, and for no reason. "I'm Julia." And this time, when I told him who I was, I wasn't lying.