Give it a shot

Because I'm bored and like puzzles, decode this to see exactly who the previous post was referring to. I could just tell you but this is more fun. Some people see a puzzle like this and just try and solve the damn thing for the sake of solving it, which I hope is the case because I really doubt anybody cares what the solution is.

Decoding it is not hard. Figuring out what you're looking at is the hard part. Maybe Ethan can figure it out? There is more than one step. 

Five-two five-seven three-one seven-four five-A 

five-eight six-C six-F six-five five-three four-two

four-B five-A five-seven three-one seven-four 

six-five five-one three-D three-D

Hint

Hint for part two

Hint for part three: Those weird nomadic dudes from FFX. You know the ones.

Spinning my wheels

In photo today, we watched a documentary about the senior class of a high school in Indiana, which was really just a whole year's worth of drama condensed into two hours. As I watched certain parts, I thought to myself that some of the people just let others make decisions for them. Those people were so immature. So shallow. But of course I, in all my infinite wisdom and life experience, was better than that, and always made decisions without regards to what others think.

That is obviously total bullshit. Something that's been buzzing around my head for a while kept getting swatted away because I thought other people wouldn't approve. This was almost all subconscious, automatic. I hardly realized I was doing it. But then some neuron decided to fire in a decidedly different direction and I became aware of this process from a different perspective. I saw it with new eyes and couldn't believe how much of a dumbass I was before (this seems to be a pretty common trend in epiphanies/sudden realizations).

Have you ever struggled with a math problem before- for hours, wracking your brain trying to analyze the porblem from every possible angle and with every possible approach? Only to realize that you just had to multiply the damn thing by two and the answer was forty two all along and WHY the hell didn't I see it before?

I'm now bringing that subconscious swatting up to full awareness, and saying would it kindly go fuck off? It's not entirely working, though. This isn't a total 180º "God spoke to me and I see the light" kind of thing. I still have doubts, plenty of them. But it's a step in the right direction.

As Nick, the man whose blog inspired me to want to hike the AT, said, "I'm just spinning my wheels, waiting for life to happen to me". That's how I felt for a while. A long while. And I still kind of do, but it seems like now I know the wheels are spinning, and I've gotten out of the car and grabbed a wrench.

P.S.  I apologize for the vagueness of this post. Like most everybody else, I'm leaving out personal details for obvious reasons and I know this would be OH SO more interesting to read with names attached. I always want other people to be specific in their blogs, but I'm just going to add this to my List of Hypocrisies. 

Ronald Jenkees is Basically the Coolest Guy Ever

Seriously. I bought his album last November but hardly listened to it, and today I just played through the whole thing. I was seriously doing double takes, doubting this was the same album I heard before.

Before you go and google this guy, he's not some deep indie rock god whose music like, speaks to you, maaaan. He's an autistic dude with giant glasses and mad keyboard skills. He remixes the Rocky theme songs and raps about 56K internet connections. 

And he is tremendously awesome. I mean this guy has more awesome in his pinkie finger than the state of North Dakota.

It Could Have Been Worse

I got home from cross-country today around 4, plopped down on the couch and turned on the TV. Five minutes later it was 6:30 PM.

In all my infinite wisdom I decided to skip lunch so I could make some prints in photography. I was really exited to see how my film came out and get it on paper. Turns out my last 3 or so pictures totally didn't make it and many others had gnarly brown chemical marks- maybe 40% of them are actually useable. 

But that's not the important part. Seven miles or so (I mapped this out) in the heat at a "get back into shape right now dammit" pace on an empty stomach is a bad idea. Tack on core afterwards and the fact that I was probably a bit dehydrated to make it even worse.

I'm pretty sure my blood sugar just took a nosedive and couldn't keep up with the exertion I was putting on my body- I remember my barely being able to keep my eyes open for a few minutes, then waking up 2.5 hours later. I ate roughly One Metric Shitload of food afterwards and feel much better now.

 All things considered it's good I at least eat breakfast or I swear I might have passed out on the run. Some of you reading this have probably run on an empty stomach before, but it was just the perfect storm: no lunch+long+hot+dehydrated+core+fast pace= lights out.

Moral of the story: Your body needs energy to run and it will be Bad if you don't have that energy.

Roller Coasters.

I decided to take my english "rough-rough draft" a step further and post it.

The human mind is a paradoxical thing. It is infinitely more complex than that of an animal in almost every way. Animals act mostly on instinct- every action they take serves to protect themselves, to find necessities like food or shelter, or to reproduce. The human mind, with all its wisdom and intellect, has become so advanced that it can not only stifle these primordial instincts but derive enjoyment from their contradictions. One of these contradictions is one of the most popular forms of recreation in America, an arcane contraption that extracts enjoyment from fear in methods beyond my comprehension. This device is known as a roller coaster, and I rode one for the first time in the sixth grade.

As we got off the bus, the exhaustion from our three-hour performance in triple-digit weather was erased by the sight of a theme park. A godforsaken theme park in the middle of Los Angeles, but to the preteen members of the Redwood Marching Band it was a welcome sight. Most theme parks, obviously, have some sort of theme- “Disney Movies”, perhaps, or “Beer Company with Inexplicable Amusement Park”. Although I cannot recall the name of this place, it may just as well have been called “Super Sketchy Adventureland: No Accidents in [5] days!”.

I had two hours to roam the park, and though the park’s single roller coaster loomed behind me like a 80-year-old wooden Sword of Damocles, I decided to get something to eat first. The problem was, the man at the hot-dog stand only spoke in some bizarre language of mumbling and hand-gestures. Forgoing my change, I handed him a ten-dollar bill in exchange for a hot-dog-on-a-stick. Ten seconds and one bite later I deemed the previous transaction “the worst ten dollars I ever spent”. I hastily threw the rest in a trash can, and looked up to see the roller coaster car careening over my head.  For some reason, the sounds of people screaming combining with the screeching of the coaster’s ancient brakes compelled me to stand in line to get on it.

I don’t remember why I got on the damned thing in the first place. I was probably in an altered state of mind due to a combination of heat exhaustion and trace amounts of psychotropic drugs present in USDA D-Grade carnival hot dogs. Combine that with the rationality of an eleven year old, and all of a sudden I was hundreds of feet in the air.  I didn’t so much mind being hundreds of feet in the air; it was obvious that I would soon be considerably closer to the ground. It was the process of getting there that really worried me. By the end of the ride, you’d have needed a crowbar or three to pry my hands off the safety bar.

You see, there seems to be a flowchart of roller coaster enjoyment. It is as follows: Get on the roller coaster -> Become terrified, nauseated, and forget which way is up-> Enjoy oneself. I never can make it past the second step.

Blarg

I feeling a bit burnt out right now.

Before winter break I spent a great deal of time planning on, and sometimes actually asking out ridiculously beautiful girls that invariably already had a boyfriend- and some of them kept that fact a damn good secret. And every time this happens I feel like I've missed some sort of cosmic memo. On the other hand, I've learned a valuable lesson: never (ever) trust facebook when it says "Relationship status: Single".

 One day as I was approaching a sophomore girl from my spanish class, seconds before I was about to open my mouth, some guy walks up and gives her a kiss. How's that for a motivation killer. 

And this was nothing new- last year I was roughly in the same situation, but with a girl so astoundingly gorgeous that I really knew in the back of my head that I didn't have a snowball's chance in hell. But when does that ever stop me... Anyway, same thing, about to open my mouth aaaannd...

"Why does it feel like there's an elephant on my chest and why I am floating two feet off the ground?" A certain Hans Molitor decided to run up to me and give me a rib-cracking bear hug for no reason. After I claw him off me, she's gone. Probably for the best, since it turns out she was dating somebody else and nobody seemed to know about it. I saw the dude one day outside of school. He looked like he was 25.

Alright, whatever. How about that cute sophomore from cross country? I think I'll go and- oh wait where'd she go? Transferred to sprints? When? Today? Christ.

Homecoming rolls around and I am waay behind. I didn't plan on going until about a week before, so by then most everyone had a date- but I gave it a shot several shots, but no dice. 

The frustrating part is it's never rejection- just either hilariously timed misfortunes or they aren't even single to begin with. 

At this point I've pretty much decided "fuck it, I'll wait until prom".

Life and Music

In keeping with the spirit of the title, this blog will be less about my personal life (which, being devoid of most kinds of drama and scandal, I'm sure you would find a bit boring) and more about philosophical musings and the like. 

Actually never mind that last bit.

What follows is a transcript of a recording by Alan Watts, a British philosopher, writer, speaker, and student of comparative religion. It is entitled, "Life and Music".

"In music, one doesn't make the END of the composition the POINT of the composition. If that were so, the best conductors would be those who play fastest, and there would be composers who wrote only finales. People would go to concerts just to hear the one crashing chord, and that's the end!

But we don't see that as something brought by our education into everyday conduct. We've got a system of schooling that gives a completely different impression. It's all graded. And what we do, is we put the child out into the corridor of this grade system with a kind of, "Come on, kitty kitty kitty kitty!" 

And now you go to kindergarten. And that's a great thing, because once you finish that you get into first grade! And then, "Come on!", first grade leads to second grade and so on and then you get out of grade school and you go to high school. And it's revving up, the Thing is coming! Then you gotta go to college, and by jove then you get into graduate school, and when you're through with graduate school you go out to join the world.

And then you get into some racket. Where you're selling insurance. And you've got that quota to make. And you're gonna make that. And all the time, the Thing is coming! It's coming! It's coming! That great Thing, that success you've been working for. Then when you wake up one day about forty years old, and you say,

"My God, I've arrived! I'm there!"

And you don't feel any different from what you always felt. And there's a slight letdown because you feel there's a hoax. And there was a hoax! A dreadful hoax! They made you miss everything! 

If we thought of life by analogy with a journey, with a pilgrimage, which had a serious purpose at the end, and the Thing was to get to that end, success or whatever it is, or maybe Heaven, after you're dead. But. We miss the point the whole way along. It was a musical thing and you were supposed to sing, or dance, while the music was being played."

-- Alan Watts

This is an idea I try to incorporate into my life all the time. Everybody has some kind of long-term goal. Move out. Go to college. Travel the world. And most people are quite unhappy with themselves at the moment and are convinced that once they accomplish that Thing everything will be hunky-dory.

There are people studying furiously through high school, college, and law school, giving up the prime years of one's life in order to achieve...what? Nirvana? Heaven? No, a godforsaken corner office at some posh law firm in New York. Just so you can make truckloads of money and retire with ease. It's just not fucking WORTH IT.

These years and the years soon to come are the prime of life. Don't throw them away to fund a mindless obsession over your personal concept of "success".