Another depressingly green Christmas./I want a Tabasco holster.

Wanna hear a story I wrote when I was ten?
Monday June 29, '98

Once there was a boy who liked to play the drums. He liked drums so much that he didn't go to school and didn't learn to write. One day he was playing the drums really loud. He play[ed] louder and louder until everyone in the world was deaf except him because he was wearing earmuffs. He thought that this was great, so he ran around and shouted and sang in the street. Then he went home and asked his mom if she could make him dinner, but she couldn't hear. So the kid starved to death.

Moral: don't make people deaf.


Also, I just saw on TV a figure-skating routine (couples) done to that Jimmy Eat World song. It was bizarre.

Boring and proud./Snow, damnit.
BATCO newbie Short Matt called me boring last week. I have to admire how he just came out and said it. Usually people just try to ignore me and/or avoid me or something. It took me by surprise when he said it, a bit. I've told two people about this, and they've expressed indignation, etc. on my behalf. They told me that I should've kicked his ass and stuff, which I didn't do at the time because, well, it was just so out of the blue that the appropriate moment for ass-kicking came and went before I knew it. That, and I was carrying a heavy crate of cords at the time and my arms felt like jelly. I think I just laughed and said, "Yep. I try my best" or something like that. But upon further reflection, if it happened again, I probably still wouldn't have done a damn thing about it. Because I realize that I really AM boring! The more I think about it, the more that I find it's true: I'm an insanely boring individual. After that precise moment, I could practically feel the blandness oozing from every pore. I could always, you know, try to cut back on my staring mindlessly into space time, but I've also realized that I don't mind being boring. It's way better than say... having my head dunked into a bucket of chunky, radioactive dog-vomit-horse-shit mix. The part I think's a bit ironic is that I find Short Matt almost unbearably boring as well. It's like... what d'you call it... mutual distaste, yeah.

Getting back into some sort of groove.
Yep. Tried drawing some Timo. Found out that I'd sort of forgotten how.

Yay for people who humour me.
Sometime last week I was feeling ick, so I changed my msn name to "*needs a hug*". Five, count 'em, FIVE people gave me a hug: JonY, Jessica, Sally, Yell, and Ryan. These are the people who rock. I hadn't been expecting hugs from JonY and Jessica, though. Also, J told me to turn up the thermostat, then I wouldn't need a hug. Also last week, on Friday, I ended up staying after school for nothing. It was then that I met... Mike Turman! I wanna be just like him when I grow up! Except for the being a guy part! Apparently he graduated from BA last year, is going to U of W, and STILL HAS THE IMMATURITY TO SKIP WILDLY DOWN THE HALL WITH SEVERAL PEOPLE STARING! He is truly all that I strive to be. And yes, I strive to be immature. And crazy. Also, yesterday, I went to White Rose to buy styrofoam balls for the stupid chemistry project. And Andrei, who is on my bus and was in my religion class last year, was working the cash register. I didn't recognize him at first, but when I did, I was like, "D.d" The uniform made him look taller and more adult-type responsibility-having-a-job-ish. Yeah. Then I realized that, hey, lots of people my age work, and when we're all grown up, we'll all be in the workforce together. The weirdness of the thought that everyone I know now would be going to work someday hit me full on. It's not really that strange a thought, but at the time I got really freaked out somehow. Yar. And, I've sort of kind of probably given up on my NaNoWriMo novel. Yar. Damnit, I'm pathetic.

Not one, but TWO.
Yesterday, I bought not one, but TWO RCHP CDs! Yay! Today, while raking leaves in the backyard, I saw not one, but TWO piles of dog shat! Which is funny, because we don't have a dog.

Ouch./I've never thought of it that way before.
Time in its many disguises is part of the great debate over the just derivation of power. Who "owns" time? That is, who holds the ultimate right to negotiate its value--the worker or the boss? The tenant or the lord? The merchant or the priest? Elected officials or an inherited elite? Why are some born slaves to time, and others released entirely from its constraints?
...

In ancient China... time was a resource and, being a form of value, was the exclusive property of the emperor. Common citizens were even barred by curfew from sharing the night. Each new Chinese emperor was permitted to reset the calendar to his liking and, doubtless, for relief from his creditors. The priestly and imperial monopoly of time has certainly had its uses in any royal court. Thousands of workers could be mobilized for decades of uncompensated labor with magnificent results, whatever the social cost, and we'll never see such results again: the European cathedrals, Great Walls, Pyramids, and Taj Mahals. When time is not equally distributed throughout a society travelers are turned into nomads, workers into slaves...

...When Europeans were scratching the earth with crooked sticks, Chinese were using iron plows. When Europeans were using steel plows pulled by tractors... Chinese were using iron plows. "Without shared time," [Landes, Revolutions in Time] concludes, "there was no marketplace of ideas, no diffusion or exchange of knowledge, no continuing and growing pool of skills or information--hence a very uneven transmission of knowledge from one generation to the next."


Chinese peasants were using iron plows three thousand years after their invention simply because there was no reason for them not to. Social forces, artistic styles, food, and religious practices, like objects in Newtonian physics, persist in their behaviour until restrained or deflected. And it's not just China; it's the ineveitable result of "natural" thinking. When all behavior derives from a single, infallible source, anyone who would defy it, or alter it, is by definition mad, or a heretic... In 1999, in the United States, one state voted to exclude the teaching of evolution and the "big bang" in state schools on the basis that "no one was there to observe it."

...

The ultimate theft of time is slavery, to be permanently on another's time, never to rest (except by malingering), never to possess (except through charity or theft)...

Our sense of a decent civil society depends on the rule of law, but just laws, in turn, derive from... "shared time," the democratic apportionment of time. Wages, contracts and patents, terms of office and weighted sentences, permissions, warrants lapsing and renewing, rents, interest, schedules, penalties, bonds maturing and loans falling due--in all this, civil society recognizes the beneficial impermanence of political and economic activity. But not total impermanence. It seeks to preserve other institutions, and to render them time-resistant, as in the case of life-appointments, or tenure, of tax-free status of churches, schools, museums, and certain kinds of foundations. Democracy recognizes individual change as part of a greater continuity; change guarantees stability. Tyrannies shelter their institutions with permanence and resist all change as a threat to their legitimacy.

If time did not come directly from God, it came from the tsar, and later from the Communist Party. Young Cleveland Abbe... founder of the U.S. Weather Service, spent two post-doctoral years (1866-67) in Russia working under Otto Struve, director of the Pulkovo observatory near St. Petersburg. During those years, he had to instruct his mother to stop addressing her letters to him at "the National Observatory," because, he explained... everything was owned, named after, or donated by the tsar, like an indulgent father to his children. He was working in the tsar's astronomy, under direction of the tsar's astronomer... the tsar's authority had infantilized his people, turning their protests into futile acts of petty vandalism, their celebrations into drunken brawls...

--Clark Blaise, Time Lord

Damn. I really never thought of it that way before... That was the biggest blow to my ardent support of communism ever, even though technically I'd go for some sort of communist-capitalist hybrid or something. But damn! That hurt. It's like... having someone point out a huge gaping plot hole in your favourite novel ever.

You can't trust anyone these days.
Oh God. My mom just tricked me into drinking a papaya milkshake. Damn papayas... them and those mangos are plotting against me, I just know it.

Proof./Keep your nails short, you fools.
"At the wharf by the shore of Naastrand, a dreadful longship is being built. This is Nailfarer Naglfar, the dead men's nail ship, built through all time from the toe and finger nails of those who go to their death without having their nails trimmed. The captain of that vessel [Loki] will be the greatest sinner of all, unfaithful, disloyal and even indirectly the murderer of a god. He and his grisly crew will fight on the side of the frost giants at the Ragnarok--so all good men who wish to delay that day of doom should see to it that their nails are always neat and short."--Brian Branston, Gods & Heroes from Viking Mythology

Cheese buns from IGA are the shit.
Because I stupidly lost my (sort of) carefully drawn and inked Timo#7, I now present a crappily redrawn version of it: