I just did about 45 minutes of work in 17 minutes while listening to Dragonforce. There’s nothing like insanely fast paced epic guitar playing to really motivate you!

Life’s good. Lotta work. Pretty tired.

My brother, Michael Carlquist, has shipped off to basic training at Fort Benning in Georgia.

Our plane takes off at 4:30 Wednesday morning. I will be gone for 3 weeks on probably the biggest adventure I’ve ever undertaken.

I’m nervous, I’m just realizing. Finals and leaving school (read: leaving the people at school) took up so much of mind-energy that I hadn’t a chance to think on it. But now, I’ve got the ‘flies.

I’m alive! Have been for a while, actually… just really busy!
I’ve been doing all sorts of fun stuff, like interviewing for the Peer Conduct Board, being inducted into Pi Sigma Alpha, going to Relay for life, standing ready for walk-in mediations, meeting with groups for projects… and that’s just this week. Also, finals are coming up, so busy with all that jazz too.

But really, I just want to brag about two things: I’m going to Honduras with Mike for a few weeks right after school, and I’ve secured a part-time summer job working here at school.

Damn, I love how life works out some times! Especially when a little effort is put into cultivating good relationships.

So I came to this realization a couple days ago and ran it by Tyler; he agrees with its merit.

If ever you are lacking inspiration or are simply desiring some motivation for some task, read a magazine regarding that task. This phenomenon has worked for me all my life, but only recently have I really become cognizant of it. I bought two guitar magazines, read them both, and was filled with an intense desire to play, which continues even days later. This same thing happened when I received a skateboarding magazine along with my skateboard (birthday present). I had a burning drive to be Tony Hawk. Other times in my life where this magazine inspiration hit me particularly hard were when I received my monthly LEGO magazine. Those were the best. I’d get one, and play with my LEGO blocks for three days straight.

Moral of the story is, if ever you wish to be motivated for a particular activity, read a magazine about it.

Time. It marches, no matter what we do. We try to control it, measure it and split it up into units, we know it’s silly, yet we do it all anyway. Ah, humanity.

I think I have a less-common way of overtly splitting my time. In all reality, it comes from my friend’s and mine harassment of each other during sleepovers of death:

“Man, I don’t wanna go to school tomorrow.”
“You mean today?”
“…”

I tend to refer to things in “wake-cycles.” “Tomorrow” has essentially been superseded by “the next wake-cycle.” This serves many useful roles. It saves my sanity from the midnight split, as I like to call it, of this wake-cycle into today and yesterday. It also solves the problem of what you say when it is 5 am and you don’t want to say “see you in the morning,” since quite obviously it is already morning. Due to this increase in precision, “wake-cycle” is actually a more accurate term than “tomorrow” as well. It also makes me sound really clever.

That’s it.

Yesterday, I woke up at 8:20 and hopped in the shower, like I do every morning. Except this morning was different: as I entered the shower, an idea popped into my head. It was a research idea, a question I could ask and possibly test experimentally. I vowed to myself, I will hold onto this.

Two and a half hours later, it struck me that I had forgotten the idea. I could remember everything surrounding the thought, I remembered getting in the shower, thinking to myself “Don’t forget this,” but I couldn’t remember what I was supposed to remember.

The loss really hit me hard. It really was a good idea, I know it. I came up with an idea. I went back to my room, took my shoes off, and stepped into the shower. “Please work, context-dependent memory,” I thought to myself.

It was to no avail. I was left standing in the exact place where a brilliant idea came into my head, but the idea was no more.

First, I’d like to offer up my first blog endorsement of the year: The Frontal Cortex by Jonah Lehrer, who is also an editor for Seed magazine (which is pretty cool). This blog is absolutely full of absolutely fascinating stuff regarding psychology, particularly cognitive neuroscience (and sometimes other things). He is focused, clear, and highly readable. I definitely recommend this blog if you’re interested in psychology.

Second, I’d like to reinforce the fact that I have that handy delicious bookmark thing over here on the left, which is constantly being updated! Even if I’m not writing posts, there will always be new links to look at, from a large variety of sources and interests.

I’ve been sick for about the past week. What I thought was a routine rhino virus turned into a nasty ear/sinus infection, featuring a terrible sore throat and now a racking cough. (Needless to say, I went to the health center and got me some amoxicillin.) During the worst of it (middle/end of this past week) I was popping a cocktail of ibuprofen and sudafed every four hours (antibiotics every twelve). But when I would sleep, these drugs would wear off and the symptoms they were helping alleviate would crop up, including a ridiculously bad fever. So I would get a fever in the middle of the night, every night, for about three days straight, which led to some absolutely bizarre dreams, the champion of which was this:

My memory of the dream is foggy… but I begin to recall something in the middle of it. I am currently (in the dream) being used as some sort of… hub, or conduit, through which people are communicating by way of telephone or something. So my body and mind are much like an operator’s switchboard, except I have no operator, or any control over the communication. The kicker is that these people using me are speaking Italian. My body had become “the Italian conduit” (as I like to call it now). This is very distressing. I wake up drenched in sweat, my mind racing. Why did these jerks have to use me now? I’m sick and miserable, and they’re just making it worse! I stumble into the bathroom, splash some cold water on myself, dry off and head back to bed. I think to myself, “Ugh, I really hope they find someone else tonight, I’m totally not up to this right now,” and fall back to sleep.

There was no question in my mind that I was the Italian conduit, that’s what freaks me out the most. Fevers suck.

So I try to be a pretty tolerant, considerate guy. I try to understand people, and allow for individuality and difference. I really really try to get into people’s shoes, ya know? But it never fails to astound me when people act completely, totally idiotic.

Case in point: There is a particular online game website that I like to frequent, which utilizes a simple type of chat. I tend to avoid partaking in this chat, because most people are dumb and I prefer not to engage in that. But one night, I was feeling frisky or something and jumped on some jackass’s comment that religion is to blame for all of the world’s ills. Yeah, I was really asking for it; I feel like a real doopshit now, but that that’s neither here nor there. We ended up talking about the Holocaust (what else? Geez) and I pretty much schooled his ass with my point that Nazi nationalism wasn’t fueled by religion, thus the Holocaust was pretty much a non-religious thing. The unschooled clowns I was discussing with wouldn’t hear it, and one of them must’ve been a moderator because I was pretty quickly banned.

All in all: Andrew, you’re a dumbass. Such is life. But my point here is that the other guys wouldn’t even hear my point. It pretty much appeared to me that they neither took in anything I said nor even attempted to process it in a meaningful manner, then went on to accuse me of the same closed-mindedness that they were brandishing.

It reminds me of that episode I wrote about that I had with a particular family member a while back.

It’s quite frustrating that my inability to quickly come up with witty retorts leads me to lose arguments, rather than my inability to actually argue a point. Pointing out strawmen (something I did in that discussion I just wrote about) does nothing for someone who doesn’t give a shit. What a shame.