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06.30.05 canada legalizes gay marriage and california saves domestic partnerships. it's a pretty good day for gay rights. a sunny spot in a cloudy winter's day, really. # 06.28.05 when i was really young, i had this terrible nightmare about being attacked by zombie dogs. i woke up and told my parents (who may have been having sex at the time) about it. my mom baked me banana muffins to make me feel better. come to think of it, maybe they were just getting high. anyway, there's a creeeeeeeepy news story about zombie dogs filled with saline, and it's totally going to give me nightmares all over again. # 06.26.05 so i'm reading some blogs of people i don't know, and i discover that my life is utterly unlivable, because i've never been to a no-pants party. i need to throw one of those. # 06.25.05 new mp3 from # 06.24.05 kenyan grandfather kills leopard with his bare hands. he reached into the animal's mouth and ripped out it's tongue. because god told him that would be better than the machete he was carrying at the time. (thanks, jon) # 06.19.05 my new mp3 seems appropriate for this week. it's also one of the two best tracks on the new beck album. # i watched the godfather tonight, for the first time. most of it. the dvd, from netflix, had a small crack at the center. the movie locked up 20 minutes from the end, in the middle of don corleone's funeral. tragic! it was 5 till eleven when it happened; all of the locally owned video stores were closing in the next 5 minutes, and every one of the four blockbuster's i called around town didn't have the movie in stock. i feel so cheated! in other media, i'm still obsessively listening to the (still unreleased) sufjan steven's album. over and over again. noah suggested (why didn't i think of this?) that i turn off my audioscrobbler plugin when i feel the need to listen to it on repeat over and over again, sparing my profile some abuse. i'm sure you're getting tired of hearing me rave over this album, but it's honestly at the top of my list, certainly a contender for my pick for best album of the year. but never fear, the damn thing comes out on july 5, so i'll be able to buy it and stop hollering at you about it finally. # 06.17.05 friend and prosaic* family member dan has been blogging his ass off over at ex-gay watch as they expose more and more of the creepy, disturbing policies and practices of the gay-conversion-summer-camp-cult love in action which more or less seems to be willing to tell the gay kids in their clutches that they should get hetero or just off themselves. among other disturbing things. if you've got the stomach for some serious outrage, check it out. # oh, look, the 7 most powerful countries in the world can't stand up to George Bush. so, you know, if we don't die tomorrow in the Big One (see below), it'll be a slow poisoning from the air. happy friday. # hey, so i've kept my mouth shut this long, but now i really think that we're all gonna die. mark, i leave you my music. brent, you get my books. david, the tivo. if any of it survives, that is. # 06.16.05 there are two He-Man dolls. action figures, actually. if you aren't a boy who grew up in the 1980's, you might not know this. you see, He-Man, doer of good, avenger of the unavenged, led two lives. he was, for all appearances, an unassuming prince of some fantastic kingdom. but when the time came, he revealed his true identity as He-Man, a powerful, scantily clad neanderthal of a man, carrying a big sword and dressed in only a loincloth, a pair of big boots and leather wrist cuffs. who thought this stuff up? as a boy, somewhere between the ages of 3 and 5, i refused to play with the He-Man doll, insisting that any He-Man figures that i owned must be the prince action figure. the clothed one. the He-Man figure, that ripped, hyper-masculine hunk of plastic that he was, inspired in me some unidentified emotion, one that i felt certain should avoided at all costs. so it filled my heart with dread the day my mother sat me down to talk to me about my He-Man doll. why don't you like the other He-Man doll? she asked. i felt a rush that i might have later recognized as panic. at that moment, i only knew it as the feeling i got the time i shit my pants. my tiny brain scrambled for a logical explanation. "i just don't," i grumbled, staring at the floor. at which point i may as well have pulled out a rainbow flag and joined a parade. that was the moment, really, that i first knew. i wasn't articulate enough to know what i had just discovered about myself. but i knew, as i sat there staring at the carpet, nodding my way through my mother's series of increasingly probing questions about my feelings about the He-Man doll, that the strange feeling i felt when i played with the buffed out doll was not the same one that other boys my age were having. my mother stopped just short of asking the question, maybe even short of realizing what she was seeing. instead, she decided that it was some emerging body issue (close mom, but not quite) and called off the hounds. but from that moment on, more or less, i knew. and she did too. # i'm going to spare you all the righteous spamming that you're probably already getting. stop what you're doing and go sign moveon.org's petition to save NPR and PBS. do you want to make ira glass cry? because he will. don't let it happen. # 06.15.05 go take a quick survey on blogging (if you have your own blog). help cameron from blogdex finish his Ph.D. # 06.13.05 jessie and i spent the weekend in big basin camping with kate & jen and crew. it was jessie's first (and probably last) camping trip. pitching tents, lighting fires, scaling obstructions; it was a dirty, physical weekend. we did a seven mile hike, (which is pretty good considering our experience with such things) played badminton, told campfire stories and ate melanie's magic cookies. exhausting, bug-bitten fun for the whole family! # 06.05.05 when will i learn to wear sunscreen? jesus. the suffering. # 06.04.05 great, great, great ideas. transform treasure island into a dense, sustainable living laboratory. ratchet up the number of planned housing units significantly and suddenly you have a community large enough to sustain itself, instead of an alcove. completely losing cars wont work, especially on an island that sits in the middle of a bridge that connects two huge population centers; but built out a good ferry system and dump the cars into community lots just off the bridge and maybe you've got something people will sign on for. it's a pipe dream really, but i hope that someone starts pushing for it. [via] # jessie asked me to write a list of things i want to do before i die. my first though is, what the hell is he planning? my second, less rash response is to stare at him blankly. because really, i've never thought about this before. it seems odd, jessie tells me, because everyone has something that they want to accomplish in their lifetime. and it seems odd to me too, because i used to have these things. but when i'm pushed on the subject, i realize that i don't have anything left. when i was young, i spent a lot of time thinking about my future life. (that and masturbating, but that's really besides the point.) i was a very idealistic child, but i wasn't particularly focused. actually, i think i was concerned about boxing myself into a corner. i come from a very blue-collar family, a pair of very smart people who are admiring but also leery of lofty ambition, almost socialist in their appreciation of the working class. i grew up with the understanding that i could be anything i wanted to be in life; and if that happened to involve construction or furniture-making instead of medicine or law, nobody would be disappointed. it was a nice feeling, a kind of ambitious liberty. so my goals, formed at those tender moments of youth, remained fairly simple, fairly idealistic:
which, i suppose, misses the point. it can be a selfless kind of selfishness, but at the core, it's always going to feel like a selfish thing to do. wanting, that is. as i sit here staring out the window, i realize that the real problem is that i don't want to disappoint myself. because if i get hit by that bus tomorrow, what i really want to remember at the very last moment is that i really did do everything i wanted in life, if not for the duration i might have imagined. the last thing i want to be the last thing i want to think about is that i didn't do more. i'm afraid of articulating my own broader ambitions. i'm good if i was able to accomplish what i wanted in life, but i'll be lazy and inept if i can't do it. a failure. would i rather be an unambitious success than an ambitious failure? once, the answer was no. it seems silly to have forgotten that. # 06.03.05 ok, ok, ok, we've heard a thousand times how apple's going to switch to intel chips. but suddenly it's sounding more certain than it ever has. this will no doubt buzz around the internet until monday. update: rumor roundup. # « May 2005 | archive index | July 2005 » built with movabletype |
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