Guys, I fucked up in academia.
Really bad.
I have to get back to doing my best again.
I'll see you on December 16.

Winter break bucket list

1. See all three other members of my quad from high school
2. See Jessica in person and have some arbitrary form of heartfelt conversation with her
3. Modify the words to the opening theme to "The Fresh Prince of Bel-air" so it applies to my own life, and recite it
4. Finish learning to play my version of "The Walk" by Imogen Heap on the piano
5. Travel to a state that does not border Illinois (cannot be Wisconsin, Iowa, Missouri, Kentucky, Indiana, or Michigan). (This one is the most ambitious)
6. Finish my drawing of "BlogTV Town"
7. Write a song for Jackie about mowing the lawn
8. Throw a snowball at a female (weather permitting)
9. Make a youtube video every Wednesday and release one each Thursday.
10. Organize and list every legitimately completed song I've written.
11. Make Japanese food.
12. Get a N64 controller and a copy of Super Smash Bros.

Maybe I'm not gay. Maybe I'm just a nice person. Assholes.

There are a few people on the internet who thought I was gay at first. I'm trying to figure out why.
Maybe it's because I write "<3" to girls who give me the same sentiment.
Maybe it's because a lot of people on the internet I associate with are gay.
Maybe it's because I'm not a complete tool of a male.

Any ideas?

I had a weird-ass dream last night revolving around a certain musician named Imogen Heap.

I found myself in a strange and very large and spacious building. The building had floors that were twenty feet high or taller, and the hallways all had open ceilings, like at a shopping mall or something. The rooms all had glass walls forming a plane of windows between the rooms and their adjacent hallways. Some of these rooms were offices of professors, so I was apparently at some educational institution for music. For some reason or another, I was required to work on a musical project to turn in to Ms. Heap, as were many other people in the building. I had a partner I worked with in a room on the second floor, but my partner refused to be cooperative. We had until the beginning of her performance in the great hall on the second floor to finish our projects, and time was quickly running out. After a while, I gave up working with this douchebag and I ran down stairs and up other stairs to get to the concert hall to see the performance. At this point is when I woke up.

Possible real-life origins of the elements of this dream:
1. A couple days ago (in reality) I was trying to figure out the notes to "The Walk" by Imogen Heap, and I found out that the song was actually in Eb minor, the most obscure and confusing key signature of all 24 major and minor key signatures, instead of F minor, in which I was trying to originally figure out the song. I found this immensely frustrating, just like the douchebag partner I had in my dream.
2. Imogen Heap was just in Chicago earlier this week, and I resented that I didn't make any effort to go to the performance.
3. "The Walk" has been stuck in my mind for the past few weeks.

If I were a Dog

I'll TELL YOU how my fucking Thanksgiving went.

I live four separate lives right now. One is at college, one is at home, and one is with my high school friends, and one is on the internet. The one I live at home is a sick, twisted bastardization of what I expected it would be as a child. The few friends I had remained in contact with made wrong turns in their lives. This made me expect Thanksgiving at home to be awkward.

We had our family friends from across the street come to our house, since my relatives are people we don't keep in contact with. But I like it better this way anyway.

I expected it to be awkward, but it turned out all right. We laughed about our experiences in school, and everyone got along great, as we always do.

We finished dinner at about 5PM. We gave our three dogs a little bit of everything that was on the dining room table, because we love them and spoil them. After this, we were joking around when my dog Mophie (originally named "Sophie") started yowling in pain. We rushed over to the family room, where she lay moaning.

Both families gathered around her petting her and trying to comfort her. We scrambled to try and find out what was wrong, but about 40 seconds later I was comforted to find that she stopped grieving. Little did I know that I was supposed to be the one grieving at that point.

Her tongue hung out of her mouth.

She stopped breathing.

The two dads and I rolled her onto a beach blanket, and she was carried out.

My mom, an avid animal lover, took it the hardest by far.

It ruined the rest of out night. But I started thinking--if I were a dog, what would I want as the last thing I do before I die?
I would want food. GOOD food. Like a Thanksgiving dinner.
Well, that's exactly what happened. So I guess if she had to go, this was a good time for her to do it: right after eating a Thanksgiving meal.

RIP Mophie 11/26/09 5:12 PM

They're there.
Everywhere I go.
The people who don't matter.
The people who both A) have no confidence in their own ability to judge what is socially acceptable or not, and B) don't know that the best thing is to just be accepting of people who are different, and that there are no criteria people have to fall in line with to be accepted. These are the people who follow. They don't feel like they know what's cool and what's not cool. And it's not because they're bad judges. It's because they don't know that they shouldn't be judges at all.

I was going to room with these guys I made friends with at school. I didn't really have many other friends other than them. So I clung to them. But as I clung and I hung out with them, I grew continually more wary. I was beginning to learn that they...were people who didn't matter.

Most of them were followers. But a couple of them were leaders, or rather, misleaders. Every exclusive clique has them--the people who make the judgments of who is acceptable or not, with their own sets of fictitious criteria upon which they evaluate outsiders.

In particular, this group had one ringleader, who so happens to be one of the most judgmental people I've ever met. He seemed to be confident in his idea of what was socially acceptable or not. This confidence was only stupidity, though, not only because of his high standards, but because he HAD ANY standards. When he set forth the name "Club 10" to our group, I should have known how exclusive he was based on the usage of the word "club." But now I get it.

Other than this ringleader, the others were all mostly followers. Since they didn't have any confidence in their own judgment of what is cool and uncool, they relied on the ringleader's judgment. It's not because they were assholes that they decided to be as exclusive as the ringleader. It was just because they were weaklings. Since they felt that they didn't have the capacity to judge people properly, they relied on Mr. Ringleader to do it for them. In fact, some of them are actually nice guys. But they're weak on the inside, so they listen to the ringleader.

I never thought that I would see behavior like this after junior high, but I sure do. In fact, it's horrendously common, and rampant even. It's ridiculous. There are so many people who just follow. They follow because they don't trust their own judgment about what's cool and what's uncool, and they don't realize that THEY SHOULDN'T EVEN BE CHOOSING TO EXCLUDE PEOPLE AT ALL. Some people say "don't judge me," but what they really mean is, "I know you're going to judge me, but don't hold a grudge against me based on any of your judgments." That's akin to racism, sexism, and other "isms" of the sort, even though it may be on a smaller scale. Don't hate people based on their character traits. Hate them based on their bad dispositions.

I think that maybe people follow others like this because THEY aren't socially aware enough themselves. They don't realize that they shouldn't be closing themselves off to people just because they're "uncool," because they're the very same people who do the same. They exclude people, and then wonder why other people won't talk to them for a certain trait they have. DON'T THEY REALIZE WHAT THEY'RE DOING?

This activity goes on on the internet too. There's a character, and he's upbeat and the life of the party. Other people begin to cling to the character. These people together form a group. The character makes a lot of judgments based on who is cool and who is not. The other people follow his judgment. But then the character starts hating on someone that one of the followers actually values as a friend. Is the follower strong enough as a person to stand up for his friend? Chances are, no, he's not. Who would you rather be friends with, in this case? The character, or that guy who is your friend that Mr. Character was hating on?

I actually got into a situation like this in college, and the choice was clear to me at the beginning of this year. I chose the obvious choice. I picked the people who were being hated on. I rarely talk to anyone from the group anymore, because I realize how they function now. They may not realize it, but I do. And it's stupid, like the semi-geeky table of guys at my junior high school who never branches out to any new friends. But they talk about their video games, and make the same tact-less jokes over and over until you get sick of them. I mean, sure, inside jokes are fun, but at some point YOU NEED TO TALK ABOUT SOMETHING ELSE. SOMETHING RELATABLE. Whether they notice it or not, they reflect a social failure. They fail at connecting with other people outside the group. They fail at realizing that judging people is wrong. They fail at recognizing that they are being followers, led by someone with a worldview that is greatly flawed and needlessly exclusive. And they fail at being their own individuals.

The internet is also full of people like this. People who use the internet for socializing are often people who fail at meeting people face-to-face. And these are typically the same people who are too weak to take action in the case of being individuals and renouncing other people's judgments to determine who their friends are independently. And these are the people who don't know not to judge people and exclude them. And these are the people who create bullshit criteria of "what's cool" and "what's not cool" to judge whether or not to accept them as people. And so they call each other out on each other's character flaws, which aren't really flaws at all, and then they start fighting with each other. As this happens, the people like me who know not to judge people so harshly sit back chuckling with our metaphorical buckets of popcorn watching them tear each other apart. Either that, or you know, they just awkwardly cease to talk to each other. Actually, the last thing I just said is a lot more common. If people are too wimpy to make decisions independent of one another's, they're also too wimpy to tell each other off.

People on the internet act very strangely. Cowards have an extreme advantage on the internet, because the interaction isn't face-to-face. You know, cowards. People who never let their true character shine because they're too afraid of other people's judgments. And they're afraid of other people's judgments either because they're just timid, or because their true character SUCKS and they know it. The people who's true character SUCKS and they know it include people who troll on the internet, people who drive aggressively, and people who go to sports games just to scream at and irritate the opposing team and its fans.

The internet provides all sorts of opportunities for cowards. They can hide behind alternate identities, or even remain anonymous if they want. With this anonymity or false identity, they can do any manner of annoying, belligerent, and denigrating things to people without being recognized. There are people who LIVE to watch other people get pissed off. The internet is a harbor for people like that. We like to call them "trolls." But what we're really talking about is people who are cowards and who are looking to be detrimental in small ways to people so they can derive some sort of sick fucked-up satisfaction from it. It can be from poor treatment as a child, or from a lack of parenting, among other things. But no matter what the reason for this psychological malfunction, it's fucked up, it needs to stop, the people involved need to grow up, and it pisses me off.

The people I was friends with in college included many people like this. It's kind of funny how all of these psychological immaturities come together in the same people. It's like they're all correlated.
Well, I'm going to bed. Let me know your thoughts on this, too.

Greetings, oh people who matter.