So… this was the title of a draft I wrote. Except I didn’t write a draft, I just had the title.

What the hell was I thinking about? One would guess that it had something to do with mortality/life/death or something, but with me you never really know… sometimes my titles only have tangential relations to a minor subject in my post. *shrug*

So what have I been up to… I had a job for a week, but I quit. So I’m currently unemployed. Been doing a lot of yard-work, video-games, guitar-playing… not enough real exercising and too much driving. I started a Facebook group to rebut the stupid “15 million for lower gas prices” and “THIS REALLY WORKS: LOWER GAS PRICES” groups, called “Smart people want gas prices raised.” Partially to snub my nose at idiot kids, and partially seriously. Gas prices will get higher, that is the way of the market, and it encourages alternate resources. Fine by me, though the temporary money crunch is painful… gotta love my tiny Neon.

Haven’t really been thinking heavily about epic stuff… I find other ways to occupy my time when I don’t have school, which tend to be less intellectually stimulating. Mainly, sleeping and gaming.

But one thing I have been thinking about is (un)Intelligent Design and such ideas, and mostly how idiotic they are. I’ve been doing some reading on the subject, following the news and learning about the various forces behind ID, and quite frankly, this research has only supported my views that ID is the worst kind of stagnant and moronic thinking. Under the guise of “critical thinking,” these people are casting doubt on a subject (Evolutionary Theory) where there should be none, and is none among the people who know better.

I will, however, address one thing. A common ID argument is the failure of Evolutionists (a common childish name designed to lower everyone else to the ID proponents’ level) to keep an open mind or think critically. This is a bullshit argument. It is like asking a mathematician to keep an open mind about pi being anything else but 3.14… It’s just idiotic. It’s like wondering “why is my toilet clogged?” when sixteen seconds earlier you stuffed a towel down and attempted to flush. Creating a cockamamy idea and then chastising anyone who rejects it as being closed-minded doesn’t address the fact that the idea is cockamamy… it’s an ad hominem logical fallacy; essentially name-calling to “prove” you’re right.

Some people more on the ball may reply to this last paragraph with “Well Galileo and Copernicus were dismissed as having “cockamamy” ideas, but they were right! This is the same type of persecution.” False. Galileo and Copernicus had serious supporting evidence behind their claims. Evolutionary theory has mounds and mounds of supporting evidence, a hundred years of data that all points to the current structure of evolutionary theory, which is almost infinitely more than Intelligent Design has, mostly because the “evidence” for Intelligent Design is not actually evidence but a purported lack of evidence perceived within evolutionary theory. Because there are some holes in evolutionary theory, it means the entire thing is crap, according to ID proponents.

This is intellectually lazy, and scientifically and intellectually dishonest.

I had this discussion with my dad. He called me closed-minded.

So yesterday was just “one of those days.” I spent the day doing yard work at my aunts’. Everything is going fine. It gets to be the end of the day, and I find myself dragging out the hose to water various things in the back yard. I screw the hose to the spigot, and turn the lever. Nothing. Hmm… so I suck it up and drag the hose back around the front, hook in, and then drag the spray end back around to the back. This took me about 5 minutes too long and cost too much effort and aggravation. So I’m spraying the yard, and Charlie, who is a subcontractor (or something) working on the basement, sticks his head out, sees my situation and asks, “Water not workin?”

“Nope,” I say.

So he says, “I could turn it on if you want,” and then gives me this shit-eating grin, so I grin back and say, “Haha, thanks!”

I finish with that and move to the front yard, dragging the hose along with me. It is then that I smell something… dog shit. So I check my shoes, and sure enough I have a nice patty on my left boot. So I use the hose to spray it off. Sometime during this set of events, whether through water force or shit-to-hose-to-body contact, I end up with shit in my pocket. But this is unbeknownst to me until I take off my boots, stick them in my trunk, and get in my car. I still smell that damn smell, so I examine myself again and find it on my hand, then on my pants around my pocket, then in my pocket.

Ugh.

I brave the drive home (about 40 mins), though with the windows wide open. I arrive at my house, run to my room and get clean clothes, grab my towel, and proceed to prepare for my shower. I turn the faucet… no water. Nothing. I check the sink… nope. I check virtually every sink in the house, to no avail. I check the water filter to make sure it’s clear, and it is. I check the circuit breaker: all clear.

I’m covered in grime and shit, all I want to do is take a shower, and there’s no water. AWESOME!

Then my mom arrives. Turns out the popular hypothesis is that the water pump is broken in my house. ><

I immediately take action: whipping out the cell phone, I call up Tyler.

“Yo, this is gonna sound weird… can I come over and take a shower?”

He was a sport and let me. What a pal.

I return home some time later, clean and refreshed. Fifteen minutes later…

“God damn… I have to use the bathroom.”

On a sort of unrelated note, I have acknowledged that “what’s crappenin’?” has become one my most favorite phrases to use now.

So I’m a fan of tongues firmly placed into cheeks. Here is a classic example:

During the course of the Spring ‘08 semester, my roommate (Matt) and I were both enrolled in the same honors class, for which a period of time was spent studying fairy tales.

During this time, he recanted to me a slight motor vehicle mishap that occurred to him, which happened to shatter his front passenger blinker cover… and the conversation proceeded thusly:

Matt: …yeah, and now the blinker is really bright.
Me: All the better to see you with.

I read PostSecret because of stuff like this:

I don’t think I’ve officially endorsed it yet, so here it is… from the website:

PostSecret is an ongoing community art project where people mail
in their secrets anonymously on one side of a homemade postcard.

Basically, you’re going to read some of the most painful things you can imagine on there, and also some of the most uplifting. I take many things from this website, but my favorite is its nature to push me to “seek first to understand.”

I wrote part of this essay (up until “That said…”) in response to the Ignatian Residential College question “Whose Am I?” We were given three questions (”Who am I? Whose aAm I? Who am I called to be?”) to ponder and explore over the course of the program (all of sophomore year), for the purpose of self-exploration and growth. I liked it, so here it is:

Our lives are made of concentric rings of context. All that we do, think, say, and hope is within some sort of context: our families, friends, community, nation, world, geographic location, socio-economic class, faith, culture, race, age… the list goes on. Life is an interconnected, dynamic web where everything is linked to everything else in a way that is unique to each individual. Many strands are weak, some are strong, but they all connect to something, tying us together.

What does it mean “Whose am I?” The word “whose” implies possession, but clearly it isn’t a literal meaning. Think of all the cases where our words convey a non-material type of owning: we sign letters “Yours truly” and “Your humble servant;” we give ourselves to our spouses in marriage; to leaders we say “I am yours to command.” In all these instances, there is a common thread: placing others’ needs above ours, volunteering our wills to the people we are connected to. Asking “Whose am I?” leads us to those connections that we offer ourselves to, willingly, automatically, and without hesitation. Again, the answers to this question… depend on context: Whose is your loyalty? Your bodily efforts? Your heart? Your soul? What connections in our lives do we submit ourselves to? What is so important, what has such a strong bond to us, that we fully invest our passions to it?

Find this ultimate passion, and you will know the meaning of your life, and be truly happy.

In the web of life, what we do sends waves of effect throughout, spreading away from us in comparably concentric rings. These waves interfere constructively and destructively with the waves of other people, reflecting back to us in ways we couldn’t fathom. Our waves become amplified along those lines that we consider tightest, to whom we belong in heart and soul. This is why the question “Whose am I?” is important. To understand our connections, strong and weak, is to better understand how we can affect our world, to the benefit of all.

Ultimately, we are ours. We own our deeds, and that is all we own. We are the masters of our ripples, and only we can make sure that our interferences are constructive, adding energy to the waves, the actions, of others, and that what reflects back to us doesn’t harm our own energy. Some would call this karma, others the golden rule. I call it fact; it is a fact that we are connected, and it is a fact that our actions affect others and ultimately ourselves. By ignoring this fact, we ultimately deny our humanity and our potential as individuals.

To quote a great man: “It is every person’s obligation to put back into the world at least the equivalent of what he takes out of it.” Put energy back into the web of life.

That said, who we are, and more importantly what we know and believe, is a product of our context, of our environment. We learn our language from the people around us: look at the creation and centralization of accents… they are learned through the environment, not inborn. How we think–the way we analyze and attribute causes to situations and effects–is also a product of our environment. Remember those concentric rings I talked about above? They also act as a filter; the closest rings interfere with distant signals, and twist them. Our closest environments skew our world view, and the tighter we keep to our close environment, the more and more cemented that skewing becomes.

Sometimes, this skew is readily apparent, or can be easily isolated and recognized, even embraced, by ourselves: dietary needs, speech patterns, traditions, religion, the list goes on. But more often, this skew is not apparent, and could even be characterized as negative. These are the unconscious, implicit biases and prejudices we hold, ways of viewing and classifying people or events, the way we attribute cause to effect. No one thinks “clearly and objectively;” we all have a lens created by the skewing of our environment.

Some have a clearer, more focused lens than others, and we can learn to do that ourselves through experience, travel, and education. But it takes realizing that our lenses are cloudy. Good ol’ Willy Spearshaker has a saying, “The fool thinks himself to be wise, but the wise man knows himself to be a fool,” and I don’t believe it to be any more applicable.

Ever do something really stupid?

Don’t lie, I know you have.

Well, I just did. Whilst changing the strings on my electric guitar, I went and broke the high E string (the littlest one).

Brand new string, broken. Great job Andrew!

Also, whilst moving out of my dorm room and cutting zip ties, I went and stabbed myself in the arm (the left one).

Brand new arm, stabbed. Great job Andrew!

Err… yeah.

Give me options, or give me death!

Social Psych this semester: 78 MC in 12 minutes
Intro Psych freshman year: 120 MC in 22 minutes
BBB: 75 MC and more short answers: 24 minutes

I take tests inordinately fast, and it makes me feel awesome. Students and teachers alike are left in awe, their faces pricelessly aghast when shortly after receiving the test, I hand it back in.

Ah…

In the fourth grade musical production at my elementary school, I starred as Peter Pan, singing the song “I Won’t Grow Up.”

I’m pretty sure I have internalized that more than should be reasonable or rational. In some ways, this is good. Grow old, but not up, ya know?

But I think this has also plagued my thinking, in regards to my work ethic. I pretty much always find legitimate reasons to put off my work, whether it’s doing things for or with friends/family, playing guitar, or experiencing life, I almost always sacrifice my work, saying “I’ll have plenty of time for work later, I need to live life now.”

This attitude shows no sign of stopping, and while I’m hanging on by the skin of my teeth now, I don’t foresee things getting any less work-like. In fact, I expect it all to increase. But I can’t seem to shake the attitude. Everything else has become so much more important to me… much more important than music papers and article reviews and busy-work bullshit. But I know that it’s all important… I just don’t consider it to be that important in comparison to the other things in my life.

Growing up sucks… so I won’t do it.

While “writing” this paper I’d really rather not be writing, I was instead thinking on the apparent injustice of doing things we don’t want to do. One, that this feeling is extremely childish, and I hate myself for considering it, for being so foolish. Two, because everyone has to do it, many much more than others. Most in this world have to work the asses off for little reward, just to survive. This is more unjust, I think, than me having to do a stupid paper. I hate myself for this as well.

But I was also thinking a lot about religion, again. This past Sunday I attended a black Baptist service, and I have to tell you, it was extremely interesting. There are somethings that one simply can not understand without experiencing them, and the black experience in America is one of them. I got a tiny taste of it in this church service… incredible. Essentially, faith is used as an energy source, a point of security that African-Americans can hold on to in their lives, much more so than other groups, I think. Anyway, back to the point I’m trying to make…

We work for our paychecks, we work for our grades, we work for any accomplishment. But when you have to work just for your life, for the lives of dependents, what is the reward? Survival itself is no reward, and neither is just living. We are thinking and feeling creatures, capable of great cooperation and success, capable of seeking out a “Why?” So when life is so harsh, so difficult that it’s all many can do just to earn a meal to eat and a place to sleep, never mind such things for their families, I get confused and frustrated.

An afterlife makes the toil of this life mean something, it’s the ultimate goal. In a way, this belief makes it easier to make it through life. I think this is another meaning for what Marx meant by religion being the opiate of the masses…

I struggle to find this kind of personal meaning, especially when life is often so tough. We work, time ticks on, then it’s the end. And for what? I wish I felt the reason why. I can think it… I can come up with dozens of reasons. But I don’t always feel them, can’t always know.

So yeah, there you go, retro-Andrew style post, instigated by an ending of another semester in college. I hate the end, even of middle-of-my-life things, because they’re all foreshadowing the ultimate end, and I hate that.

I needed to get some of that out of my system.

This is one of my most favorite comic strips ever, mostly because I feel the exact same way.