Friday, April 29, 2005

Oi, My Bleeding

The end is near. My year-long stint as morning show sucker is nearly complete.

I feel like I've been distracted for the entire year, as though I should be doing somethiing, but I never get around to it. Now, I'm willing to attribute this to my natural shirking and putting-off-for-tommorrrow-what-I-can-dooo-today, but it's more than me avoiding that twelve page paper, it's like I'm really avoiding something.

I do notice I tend to forget people I don't interact with often. case and point: I called my friend last night and left a message along the lines of, "Um, hey, I realized I hadn't talked to you in about a month after I said I would call you back."

Maybe it's just that I'm always tired, drifting off in class, dozing at parties, being that sleeping guy on the bus. I ramble a lot, I mumble more often than I care to admit, and don't I wish this post had some direction.

But. today, I'm cranky and tired, so I don't really give a fuck. Finals approaching is making me more surly than usual. Trucker hats, bad mainstream country, conservatives, zealots, hemp paper, and corn ethanol...

-Thomas

Sunday, April 24, 2005

If You Want a System to Handle What You Want, Yeah, You Need the Bass

I return alive and thankfully unscathed. I considered baking soda over eyelids, but we all decided against it.

I am blessed and / or cursed - depending on your view - with a low-powered liver when it comes to mister happy booze face. On one hand: this rules; no alcoholism for Thomas, ever. Bam! Then there's that, "no drunkenness for Thomas, ever," thing that makes me not so much.

So, with all the vomitting that is in my fate if alcohol goes down, I don't really drink at all. Yeah, a little, but it's usually something very small and good and then I'm done if I drink anything. The problem is that the older I get the more parties I go to where drinking is going down and people are getting trashed and as you all may or may not know being sober at a drunk party can be entertaining, but usually I just want to push people out of windows.

I guess I'm just bemoaning the gradual descent of my socialization into drinking and more drinking.

-Thomas

Monday, April 18, 2005

Come On Down (Duh, Dun, Dun, Dun, Duh, Duh)

Name anyone person who hates to sing along to "Death Valley '69" and I'll laugh in their face and call them a loser. That way they'll have another person telling them they're stupid.

I'm currently overwhelmed with fundrasing and road trips this weekend and therefore will not be posting until next Monday. Not that there's a lot of traffic, but I feel obligated to make note of my laziness.

-Thomas

Tuesday, April 12, 2005

Keep It in Motion, Free Flowing

I've been playing a lot of capture the flag these days; well, not a lot, but once every two weeks for the past month is more than I have grown accustomed to.

Capture the flag is one of those seminal games that will never grow old for me. Something about running around like an idiot to steal a piece of cloth tied to a stick and run it across some imaginary boundary makes this king. The game isn't very structured, there's no real boundaries or restrictions other than the middle line; buses, cars, bikes, sneaking around for miles: it's all legal. There are no jails, just freeze tag style liberation (you stay where you are until someone goes through your legs), flags are kept in the same location - no hiding, and the teams are huge. I don't like to think of it as nostalgia as much as reclaiming an activity that I had allowed to fall to the wayside.

I can't really explain my fixation with this game. I played it as often as possible when I was little and on through my high school years when I could manage it, but at one point I just ran out of people to play with and got to busy to organize it. The nerdy feel-good reason is that playing a game that is based on luck and team work as much as it is on skill for hours on end with fairly cool people helps me form better communication skills while keeping me active. But really, endorphins aside, it's something far more basic, something more than the sweet pleasure of forgetting all my responsibilities, my projects, my work, and my obligations for a few hours.

In the end, it's running like a madman, howling at the top of my lungs, and the rush of pure reckless abandon. That is serenity in its truest form.

-Thomas

Monday, April 11, 2005

WAAAHHH!!!

I hate people so fucking much.

-Thomas

Saturday, April 09, 2005

No, He's Real, Your Parents Just Feel Sorry That You're Not Getting Christmas Gifts

I had the most devious set of friends when I was in elelmentary school. Pranks - stealing of pudding cups, sand down the pants, whoopee cushions, snap gum packs, snakes in cans, jumping out into an empty hallway and scaring the shit out of people, tripping, and bike seat thefts to name a few - and terrible comments like the above were common. The thing is: none of really thought anything of it. Everytime someone would say something that would have been fairly horrible if it had been serious, we'd all burst into peals of childish glee and go back to our choclate milk.

Warping nature of the hallway thing aside (I still look over my shoulder a lot), this was all normal and benign. Yet, everytime I tell people the Santa Claus line, something I still think is hilarious, I get horrified looks and, "You guys were what? Six? Seven?"

I'm not that crazy, right?

-Thomas

Monday, April 04, 2005

Wumps-Wha? With Colons?

Recent deaths have made a little irritated about our all-consuming drive to deify the dead. Not that this is a new criticism, but I will never understand the point of not speaking ill of the dead. If someone did terrible or bad things I’m not going to just let it slide because they're dead. Well, for most people you can generally forgive it. Like if that neighbor that always borrows stuff from you and never returns it suddenly became worm food, you're probably going to let it go (especially since you're more likely to get it back). But I'm not talking about Old Man Wilburson from up the block, I'm talking about people like Regan or Paul Wellstone.

I'm not saying that they both didn't do good things in their lives, simply that we let those good deeds overshadow their mistakes and, moreover, it becomes a spew of hypocrisy for their detractors ("Well, I didn't really mean he was an idiot all those times I called him an idiot all those times," blech). Everyone fucks up, so let's stop invoking the name of these newly created saints and move on with our lives. Why talk about how great someone without mentioning their weaknesses, their fallibility? Wouldn't want to make them real people, now would we?

I'm also peeved because I couldn't sleep for two hours due to the sound of mice running around in my ceiling. Nothing I love more then the sound of rodents scampering around above my head.

-Thomas

Saturday, April 02, 2005

Spitfire

Yesterday, I gave tickets to a guy with the name, "Boes," (pronounced: bOws, like bow and arrow). However, it turns out its really pronounced bAse, as in the guitar or location not the fish, and means, "evil," in German. This is the single greatest name ever; next band, seriously.

Triviality aside: I've come to talk to you about Catholicism.

I'm not going to rant off my grievances against the religion, those are not relevant and you've all heard them before from other people, but suffice to say I have never gotten along with the epitome of organized religion. Given my general distaste for said religion's politics and its figurehead / spokesman / policy-maker, Popey McPopesalot, I find myself in the moral bind of wanting the pope to die and yes I know that they just get a replacement, but that's like two to five years of a pope-less world, two to five years!

Obviously that's not the most progressive thing to be feeling. Virulent disgust for a person and the views they proselytize is not a good reason to wish them death. At the same time I think of a world without a well respected figure giving the usual rants against family planning (which leads to lower female independence, higher poverty rates, and more world hunger, among other things), homosexual rights ("I'm not homophobic, I just don't think they should have the same rights I do,"), and the right to die and I get just feel better about them kicking the bucket
///Okay, can anyone explain how, "kick the bucket," came to mean dying?.///
Yeah, I know that there are other people that espouse the same views, but those people don't have a billion people hanging on every word.

Long story short (aren't all blog posts long stories short?): I despise the pope, but I feel bad about hoping he dies. I suppose I'm looking for rationalizations because I can't think of any good ones.

-Thomas