World-Wide-Wal-Mart

I think i watch Scrubs too much.  too often i catch myself fantasizing just like J.D. does.

I follow this rule for all of my classes, on the first day i always sit front and center.  it makes it a lot harder to do anything but what i’m supposed to, and when it’s just a lecture it’s way easier to pay attention.  you know when i was in 9th grade i had this science teacher that put me in the back of the room- just because my name started with “W”- and i failed the marking period.  second marking period she took all the people with the lowest grades and put us right in the front row and i got an “A.”  So yeah.  i follow the rule.

Anyway, my biology lecture is in the big lecture hall with stadium seating and everything, and where do you think i sit but way down on the ground right in the center. 

Anyway, this is really beside the point.  because the other day my biology professor said something that made my mind go on this crazy tangent and it had little to do with biology.

he was trying to teach us about cell structure.  first of all, he said something along the lines of a cell is more complicated- or more things go on in a cell- then in a walmart.  it was a pretty wierd thing to say.  then whenever he was trying to teach us about the cell membrane (the outer wall of the cell) he said something like what if we had a walmart as big as the world.

this is what got me on this crazy tangent.  seriously imagine it, the whole world is a walmart.  even over the ocean and everything.  how crazy would that be!?

first i thought about what would keep the roof up.  what if there was a roof around the entire planet? would it stay up? what about gravity?  It’s mind boggling.  not in a profound way because it’s just a stupid hypothetical thing that would never happen.  but seriously.  a roof around the entire planet.

and then what about the departments? they would be the sizes of countries.  and then obviously there would be rooms in this walmart like rooms in a YMCA for people to live.  everyone would have to eat at either subway, auntie annie’s, or freshens- only these come to mind because those are the places i have in the walmart in my town.

The person who was in charge of the world would be the CEO of walmart.  he would be in control of everyone’s job- and almost everyone would have one wouldn’t they.

anyway…that’s what i thought about during most of my biology lecture.  jeez i didn’t even get past the cell membrane.

Not “second” chances.

There’s something about myself that i don’t like.

I never really get into anything.  like, whenever people are over here or if i’m at someone else’s house and everybody is getting crazy and having tickle fights or wrestling on the beds or having pillow fights, i’m usually just sitting still somewhere; for some reason i stop myself from getting involved. 

And it’s not even that i don’t want to join in.  i just stop myself.  And then i worry that when my freinds think about me they’ll think i’m no fun, or i’m a party pooper.  they might think that i’m not joining in because i don’t want to, or because i think i’m too good too or too cool too.  i don’t know.  they probably know that’s just the way i am cuz my freinds are awesome, but who really knows what they think.

If they did think those things about me, little would they know that it’s a problem that i know i have, and that i’m working on.  And it got me thinking about other people’s problems.

Like, say someone does something to me that i don’t like or that makes me want to stop hanging out with them.  it’s possible that they know they have this problem and that they’re working on it. 

My point is, I’m going to try to give people more of a chance.  Everytime i see someone again i’ll try to forget about whatever they said or did the last time i saw them that i didn’t like- because it’s possible that they regret doing or saying whatever it was.  forget about second chances.  I’ll give you a million chances- or i’ll try to.

Think back a few years…

I remember a few years ago when there was this guy on tv- or on the radio, i forget his name and his job and everything about him and i don’t care to know anything either.

Because i think his deal was that he said someting racist about these girls that were on this basketball team- something about their “nappy” hair.

I never heard of the guy before that, but right after that his name was everywhere.  There was people talking about him on Oprah and on Dr. Phil and news about what his punishment was gonna be for what he said.

And i remember the first time i saw something about him on tv i felt really sleezy. i remember thinking- this guy did something bad.  he shouldn’t get so much press.  I never heard of him before this and i don’t want to hear about him now.  And in that moment i turned the tv off and shut everything else out that mentioned his name, probably why i don’t remember it. 

So this is what i’m going to do now with Kanye West at the VMAs.  It was a really stupid thing that he did and he didn’t have any right to take the mic away from taylor swift (and i don’t even like taylor swift so you know i mean it).  So anytime i see his stupid story on tv i will change it right then and there.

I’m not going to listen to his songs or buy his music or watch his videos or folllow whatever he does, and hopefully eventually i will forget his name too.

so you may have seen the picture at the top of the page. it used to be this picture i took on my cell phone and then i colored over it in photoshop.

but even i noticed it was ugly.  it looked cool from far away…but no one reads their computer from away.  so i changed it.  my mom took that picture.  it’s me in nyc.  I changed the background in photoshop to make it longer so it looked good.  then i added that Dr. Suess quote that i like.

Also…I want to talk about capatalizing letters.  you may have noticed i don’t do it a lot.  that’s not because i don’t notice it or i don’t care…it’s because i’m seriously not good at it.  i mean with my fingers- holding the shift key and pressing the button…it seems like such an easy task for me to fail at…but whatever.

but for real- I’m going to work on it.

I guess it’s kind of like the destructors.

I had to read this story for intro to lit called “IND AFF” by Fay Weldon.  It connected the love story of the narrator and her married professer with the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife by the assassin Princip that initiated the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and is generally accepted as what started World War One

Anyways, i was thinking about the Kennedy assassination the whole time i was reading it, mostly because that’s what comes to mind when i read the word “assassination.”

What i believe about the assassination of Kennedy is that Lee HarveyOswald did it from that building right there and he was working by himself and it didn’t have anything to do with that grassy knowl and so what his head went back, they proved that could happen even when the shot came from behind. i don’t buy into any of those conspiracy theories.

It’s probably easy for me to think like that because i’m not emotionally connected to JFK at all and it doesn’t really affect me that much that he died.

But here’s the real reason it’s easy for me to accept that it was Lee harvey Oswald working by himself.

Remember what i wrote about Donnie Darko? well here’s a refresher.

In Donnie (Not Danny!) Darko, they read a story in class called “The Destructors” by Graham Greene that has a very profound meaning.  In the story, a bunch of children destroy an old man’s house while he’s away.  They bring the whole thing to the ground all in an afternoon.  They even find money and valuables, but they burn them.  Drew Barrymore (the English teacher) asks the class why the children would do such a thing.

Donnie quotes the line from the story that says “Destruction is a form of creation” and goes on to say that they just wanted to change things.  They wanted to shake things up.  Destruction is a form of creation because it creates change, and turmoil; after they destroyed that guy’s house none of those charecter’s lives were probably the same.

I can see how Lee Harvey Oswald might have thought the same thing when he killed Kennedy.  I know they say he was insane and he had this problem and he had that problem, but I don’t care about that.  I think he just wanted to turn the world upside down.

It’s kind of an interesting (and pretty attractive) idea- taking something huge and just destroying, with no agenda, just for the sake of destruction and change. 

I wonder if that was the assassin Princip’s goal when he killed the archduke and his wife.  I doubt if he knew what would happen to the world because of it (they say in the story that the war would have happened anyway, and that if it wasn’t this assassination of the archduke, it would have been something else that started the war sooner or later- but the narrator also pointed out that “sooner” or “later” could have been the differenc between a few million lives).  But if all these people want to do is change the world, then they are very successful people.

When my roommate’s away…

So today was pretty boring and uneventful.  It’s Saturday and most of my freinds went home for the weekend or else they had other plans.  That means I pretty much stayed in my dorm room all day and watched youtube videos and procrastinated on doing my homework that isn’t even due until Tuesday.

But when I came back from dinner- the first time i actually went by myself I might add (I didn’t hate it- i got to eat and leave without waiting for anyone and I got to sit and watch other people) I was going to just watch tv BUT! as soon as I sat down to do so i got that feeling of unproductivity and lack of accomplishment and once i start out on that road i know i won’t be able to change directions so i stood up and started pacing around the room. 

and that was when i picked up this magazine that my roommate left on the window sill.  We were talking before about mental disabilities (the subject comes up because we live on the handicapped floor) and he was telling me something about this guy that had this disease where he could only move his finger and nothing else, but he had this whole “rethinking the universe” thing going on and there was an article in that magazine about it and i thought it was pretty interesting so that’s why i picked it up.

but that’s not even the article i read.  i mean… i did read that one later but that’s not what this is about.

I read this article called “The Brain” and it was about when our mind wanders.  basically it says that anytime we try to focus on something, our mind is wandering about half the time.  It said “Each of us has a magnificent hive of billions of neurons in our head.  Yet we find it difficult to stay focused for more than a few minutes on even the easiest tasks, despite the fact that we make mistakes whenever de drift away.”

They did tests on people and came to the conclusion that sometimes we are aware that our minds are wondering, but far more often we are unaware of it.  They actually did tests of our brain activity on machines during times when our minds were wandering and they found that two important brain networks become active while our mind is wondering.

This means that when our minds wonder, we are actually solving problems in our head, usually while we’re not aware of it.  It further means that anytime we come across moments of profound enlightenment it was no cosmic raindrop of knowledge that landed on our forehead unexpectedly, but rather the conclusion to probably a long train of thought we didn’t even know existed.  how interesting.

why do i find this so interesting? because this afformentioned moment of profound enlightenment is exactly what i’ve been waiting for, and now i know what will bring it on and what it will mean when it comes.

It gets interestinger.  because once i got to college i knew right away that i didn’t want to be a communications major.  i actually knew before i even came here.  anyway, a few days in i remember saying, “how about psychology?”  It’s quite a strange thing to say, because i never took a psychology class when i was in high school (as if it would have done any good anyway) and i never studied it anywhere before ever. 

But i think brains are pretty interesting, i mean obviously… because i read that whole article and my mind hardly even wandered (i could say it didn’t wander at all but like i said how could i really know) and also consider i picked up the magazine in the first place to read an article about how a handicapped guy was rethinking the universe.

and now i know that this discovery- that i’m interested in psychology- was not just a coincidence;  my subconscious had actually been working on the problem for probably a while.

so i guess this is a start.  hmm…psychology…

 

ok so i guess i have to cite this article now…ok here it goes…

Zimmer, Carl.  “The Brain.”   Discover: Science, Technology, and The Future.  July/August 2009: 24,25.

i really hate it that my teachers were right when they said knowing how to do that would come in handy.  i really do.

Meiner Meinung nach, dieser Sprache ist “reich” genug.

My German teacher this year has done the same thing that every other foreign language teacher that i’ve ever had has done.  i’m not surprised having sat in his class four days a week for two weeks but it was still disappointing.

he makes comments about how the german language is superior to english.  the reasons he gave are because it’s richer.  that there are more ways to say things in german- for example there’s a distinction between the word that means “words” that you speak or read in a passage (wort) and words in a list (woerter).  and also because german has over ten different ways to say “the.”  he acts like this makes german superior.

i love german- studying the language and trying to understand it.  but i do not think it’s superior than english because it is “richer.” 

let’s try to figure out what makes a language rich- is it the way words are spelled? because in german words are spelled exactly as they are pronounced.  this makes it incredibly easy to pronounce german words that i’ve never seen or heard before.  in english we have silent letters- like silent e’s.  german’s pronounce their e’s on the ends of words (like if i said the german word for help when conjugated for the he/she/it pronoun i would say “hilfe” and i would pronounce it hilfa). 

Is it how many exceptions to rules a language has? because english has just as many as german.  in fact if we do have fewer exceptions, it’s only because we have fewer rules.  they conjugate every verb for every pronoun, and we only have a few verbs that need conjugated. 

but in my opinion what makes a language rich is not how many words it has or how many grammer rules their are or what distinctions exist between words.  what really makes a language rich is the speaker, not the language.  i’ve been writing on here for a couple of years and  their have been times when i sat for long periods trying to think of the right words to say- and perhaps if our language was “richer” by my professor’s definition i would be able to think of words easilier.  but i wouldn’t have challanged myself at all and i wouldn’t excercise my brain, would i?

i would also like to inquire as to how the simplicity or richness of a language has anything to do with it’s superiority? a language might be “richer” for having more rules and more ways to say things, but it would be a lot harder to learn.  he mentioned that the only people who really say english is one of the hardest language to learn are the native speakers of it, and that’s probably true, because english is probably not that hard to learn compared to a lot of other languages.

but since it’s still pretty easy to chose words in a conversation, i would say that’s a point for us.

what i’m really trying to say is, languages don’t have the option to be better or worse then each other, and there is no point in arguing for or against a language.  it’s ridiculous.  obviously your native language will be the easiest for you to learn and a foreign language will be hard.  but how hard or easy doesn’t mean anything about it.

it’s also worth mentioning that english is a germanic language- that means german and english used to be the same language.

 

 

(in my opinion, this language is “rich” enough.)

i have learned so far…

that high school was quite useless.

i can say with absolutely no reservations that the high school system failed me.  or perhaps i failed the high school system… in any case David+high school= Fail.

honestly, i’m having trouble remembering anything useful that i learned in high school.* i can probably count ten times a day that i go to class and say to myself, “we studied that in high school, but i didn’t learn it until now.”

like with biology.  i took biology when i was a sophomore, but in the three classes i’ve had of it so far i already know more then i learned in that class.  i remember studying the table of elements, but i couldn’t have told you what any of it means until now.  it goes for other classes too.  like in liesure and wellness, where we study the philosophy of liesure, now i can understand why gym class was required and if i had that information in high school perhaps i would have taken class more seriously. 

it’s possible that it’s just me.  but i can’t be expected to plan out my life the way i would have had to at the age i would have had to do it.  i remember in high school, i never did homework.  i never even took home my bookbag or any books.  my senior year i probably only visited my locker once or twice a week, and that was for english- the one core class i needed for graduation, and german. 

But here i sit at college having done all my homework (i resolved not to write here unless my homework was done).  i’ve never done all my homework before.  i said before that i’m doing all kinds of things that i never thought i would do- i just joined scuba diving club and outing club.  this is just more proof that succes or failure in high school is not an indication of anything.  I didn’t do any good in high school, but looking back it doesn’t seem to matter anymore.  even though i dont have a major and i’m just taking gen eds, i already feel like what goes on here in my classes is way more important, and i manage to do all my homework even though there’s no one standing over me telling me to. 

My dad told me once that you can’t teach someone something they didn’t want to learn, and that’s probably why i didn’t do any good in high school and didn’t do any homework, there was absolutely no motivation, none.  but here i’ve done all my assignments, without anyone having to tell me to beside for my teachers- who aren’t in the room with me.  what’s my motivation here? i don’t know.  I guess i’m looking at high school differently now then i did when i was in it, but i know for sure,  high school was not the last word on me.

 

*Besides german.  for german i had awesome teachers and i  actually cared to study for some reason so that was pretty useful.  but it’s all pointless now that i’m in college and they’re making me take german 1 again anyways.

A new initiative.

You might have noticed that before the latest post it was over a month since i wrote anything on here.

I didn’t forget about it.  in fact almost everyday i thought about getting on here to write something.  but the honest truth is there was nothing to write.  i did little more then sit in one spot on the couch and watch scrubs for that entire month.  when i made it through all the seasons on dvd, i would try to find something to watch on tv, fail, and then start with season one again.  true story. 

And honestly i couldn’t really figure out where the blog was going, or what i was doing when i came on here.  i had already determined that i wasn’t going to get on here and rant, and i didn’t want to just get on here and tell stories about things that happened to me in my life that had no point to them and that no body would read.

when i watched Julie Vs. Julia i thought, maybe i need something like that.  something like doing 500 recipes in a year to blog about.  i mean, not something so serious, just something where my progress could be charted by reading the updates.   i may have found it.

since i declared my major over a year ago, i never wanted to me a communications major.  never.  i wanted to go to film school.  somehow my dad talked my into thinking that being a communications major was close enough, and it isn’t.  I discovered (actually i already knew) on my first day of “intro to communications” that i had no interest in intro to communications.  i had given it enough of a chance.  i went to another class.  i attended the department meating and i already went to the open house and orientation.  there was no chance that i was going to stick with that major.

so i was going to switch majors.  the problem was i went on the computer to look at a list of all the other majors, and there were absolutely none that i was interested in.  What kind of person has no interests? This kind!

what made it harder was that ever since i was in junior high my teachers always told me, make sure you can get a job in whatever feild you major in.  they always told me to think about my major in terms of what job i could get after i graduate.

But then i went to McDonalds the other day with my roommate and two of my freinds from band and they were telling us that they’ve learned that you should really just take classes that you like.  they said not to worry about what kind of job you can get but to learn as much as you can about something you really enjoy. 

Their advice makes more sense to me, because if i just look at what job i want, well i don’t know what job i want, i don’t even have a foggy clue or anything.  and honestly if i don’t take a class that i like then the motivation to do the work is all superficial, it’s all “do the work so you get the grade,” it would never be “do the work so you learn something,” and that’s not what i want.

This just puts me between a rock and a hard place because i don’t know what job i want and ok i’m interested in taking art and in learning german and literature but i would never want to do any of those for a job.  and i know, i don’t have to know what i want to be when i grow up.  but that’s what everyone else is telling me, that’s not what i’m telling myself.  some people in my predicament are probably satisfied with the notion that some day they’ll discover their calling and know what they want to do when they grow up and they’re fine with waiting for the day to come.  well i’m not that guy.  i can’t just wait patiently while my future is a blur. 

so that’s sort of the progress that i’ll be charting.  the ultimate goal of finding out what i want to do with my life.  not quite as interesting as making 500 recipes in a year, and i doubt the movie version will have as catchy a title.

Chapter 2

So.  I’m in College now.

i call my dad a few times a week, and we send text messages back and forth a lot too.  He usually asks me what i’m doing or what i’m up to, and then he acts surprised when the answer isn’t “nothing.”

Since i got to college i started learning all kinds of things about myself, but most importantly i’m starting to discover that being happy and enjoying yourself is not environmental, it doesn’t happen because you get what you want or because you got to where you want to be, but that it’s actually a conscious decision.  All in your attitude.

like, i never thought i would like rock climbing, but me and my roommate and some other freinds went twice already and i actually liked it.  it turns out i’m pretty good at it too.  and then yesturday we went to knoebles, and everyone was like, “let’s play lazer tag.” even though i never thought i would like lazer tag i wasn’t gonna be the one that’s like “this is lame,” i was gonna try to have fun.  and i did.

This goes for classes too.  since i  dropped my major and switched to “undeclared,’ i had to take another GenEd, and the only one that fit into my schedual was biology.  i took biology in high school, but of coarse i was too cool to learn anything in it.  I’m definately not going to pull that crap here.  i don’t care about biology and i’ll most likely never use it in my life (of coarse how do i know, i don’t even have a major) but i’m still going to try to learn something in it.

i can even try to learn something from German 1. They put me in it because i’m minoring in German, i could have tested out of it and taken German 3 but german 3 didn’t fit into my schedual so i would have to wait until next year to take it and that would mean going a whole year without any german at all so i decided to stick it out.  Anyways, just because i already know all the german doesn’t mean i’m gonna blow it off like i would have in high school.  i’m still going to try to learn something.

the whole time im was in high school i was so bored with my life.  in fact i remember thinking right after graduation, “that was it? that was high school?”  i’m set on NOT saying that after i graduate college, and i realise now that i have the ability to control that.  which is pretty cool.