A metal song about a broken heart

It's a good one. I'm taken the liberty of putting the lyrics below, so you won't have to look them up yourself.

Seek me, call me
I'll be waiting

This distance, this dissolution
I cling to memories while falling
Sleep brings release, and the hope of a new day
Waking the misery of being without you

Surrender, I give in
Another moment is another eternity

(Seek me) For comfort, (Call me) For solace
(I'll be waiting) For the end of my broken heart
(Seek me) Completion, (Call me) I'll be waiting
(I'll be waiting) For the end of my broken heart

You know me, you know me all too well
My only desire - to bridge our division

In sorrow I speak your name
And my voice mirrors my torment

(Seek me) For comfort, (Call me) For solace
(I'll be waiting) For the end of my broken heart
(Seek me) Completion, (Call me) I'll be waiting
(I'll be waiting) For the end of my broken heart

Am I breathing?
My strength fails me
Your picture, a bitter memory

For comfort, for solace
(Seek me) For comfort, (Call me) For solace
(I'll be waiting) For the end of my broken heart
(Seek me) Completion, (Call me) I'll be waiting
(I'll be waiting) For the end of my broken heart

Squirrels are crafty little rodents

Decided I was going to post some random things on here, just to get it out of the way.

My taste in music is varied. It's a good song. If you don't like it, don't listen to it.

Just because I can

Really like this song

On Statistics #5

If you're like me, you'll enjoy the massive contrast from the beginning to the end.

All this philosophical delving is making my brain hurt. Perhaps a lighter topic is in order. Hmmm. Education, education...juice box...mandarin orange....stepladder...stopwatch....homana homana homana homana what to write about...

Something I have always thought about but never thought to write down! Fuck yea! There are many different types of intelligence, and accordingly, there are different types of activities that speak to these different types of intelligence.

Here's my sweeping claim: Those who aren't as smart as others play sports. Those who are smart, in the traditional sense, that is academically intelligent, do not play sports, or to a much lesser degree. I realize that isn't true, you could probably think of a few people that seem to be equally adept at both things just described, but I think there is a correlation between the two. You may be in high school, or have gone though high school. There were groups weren't there? Cliques. Yea, they exist. It's a pretty common social phenomenon. Cliques generally form around shared characteristics, or traits. They tend to dress similarly, listen to the same types of music, enjoy the same activities etc. Is it so ridiculous then to think that these groups also form along the lines of intelligence present among its members? It may not be a conscious observance, such as that of hairstyle, makeup, and the like, but it's still readily noticed when you look just a little bit closer. I realize here too we are talking about humans, most of what I talk about is about humans. I know there are always going to be exceptions. This is soft science, that is, science without any hard and fast rules, only trends and things to suggest there is a correlation between x and y. Right, so we've explained that again.

Smart kids sit up in their rooms and read books. Jocks throw footballs around. Totally sweeping and easily defeated claim. Before you get hasty, a story. Okay so I don't have a story. This is more like a collection of observations that is being haphazardly mashed together for the purpose of this blog. Yay for writing things. Anyways, getting to the observations. (OMFG only 360 words!!!)

Observations about cliques, stereotypes and intelligence, which are connected in some way:

1) To be popular, don't be smart; if you are, don't talk about it, and be socially exclusive
2) To be a nerd, all you have to do is attempt to have an intellectually stimulating conversation, or even ask a question that can't be answered with yes or no
3) To be a dirty, subtract all common sense and understanding of society, refuse personal hygiene, and have sex with random strangers
4) To be a goth/emo/"scene" kid, wear dark clothes and black lipstick, listen to weird bands, get bad grades
5) To be a hipster, go against every social norm, which basically means following trends that aren't popular enough to be called popular o mainstream yet, but popular enough for all the hipsters to notice
6) To be a nobody, don't do anything extraordinary. Don't even talk. Not even to yourself
7) To be an annoying preacher's son/daughter, talk about the sin and filth that exists in the world, and force your religion on other people
8) To be a stupid bitch, lie and cheat your way into a group of friends, and then even though everyone else in the group doesn't like you, force yourself into the group, most often accomplished by more backstabbing/blackmailing/making people choose sides/generally being a shitty human being
9) To be a band geek, be in band
10) To be a jock, play a sport
11) To be a bully, notice all of the lesser stereotypes described, and generally be a dick
12) Couldn't
...   Think
..    Of
.     Any
20) More :/

Thinking of new things to talk about. Contentment, confidence in being an individual. Sounds good.

Where does happiness come from? Why are we happy? Should we be happy? How does one attain a state of happiness? Are success and happiness related? For that to be true one would have to define success, which varies greatly from person to person.

Being happy is often something I have ended for myself by thinking about how I got to be happy. If I'm driving in my car, I might be smiling for no reason. I notice this. Why am I smiling? I may think of what happened that day, if it was a good day, I'm happy about it being a good day, but that happiness has been drowned out, for the moment anyway, by me trying to figure out why exactly I am happy to begin with. The only things that make us happy are within our brains. Love doesn't make us happy, the feeling we experience as a result of certain neurotransmitters being released is what makes us happy. We don't enjoy activities, we enjoy the feelings we get from them, which again is a result of a chemical high we get from inside our own heads. This doesn't make sense! This may seem rash, but I'm hereby formally throwing caution to the wind and just going to spill out everything. Here we go.

As I've already said, we get happy from a series of reactions in our brains. This doesn't make sense. Why does the reaction occur? People get happy when they are physically strained past their limit. Why? What makes sense about that? Some say it's an evolutionary advantage, to negate pain (through happiness) helps one survive/outrun other animals that want to eat them. Why is there pain? Why is there evolution? Where the hell in the universe does it say? This happens because...[meaning of everything ever] Where the hell is that?! Where is the explanation to why? I feel like I'm three years old again, asking my mom or dad "Why?" every time they would explain something. The truth is though, there is no reason why. Doesn't matter what subject matter you start with, you end up at the origins of existence. You end up at consciousness. You end with one massive question mark staring you right in the face, laughing at your attempts to try and figure things out. Sure we have theories, guesses, hypotheses about things, but how accurate are they? A condition of the scientist is to doubt everything, even his own research, in the name of discovering and supporting the theory that is right, the equation that explains it correctly, etc. Even within our us studying ourselves, things like sociology, psychology, economics, we have thought we understood, then drafted again, revised, and published our understanding again, only to find more holes and exceptions in this newly found understanding. We don't know anything. We may think we know things, we may say that we are surely for sure about things, are you really? Do you love your wife? Most men, I hope anyway, would say, "Absolutely, I love her 'til the day I die." I've always thought this was stupid, because they say love is eternal, love transcends reality, is greater than this world, but as soon as the mortal body of one member of a loving partnership expires, that love ends. Stupid. Assuming both of you are alive, though, do you love that other person? Do you? Do you really love him or her? How do you express love? Sex? No, sex is continuing the species, sex is not love. Hearts? Hand-written sentiments? Nope, nope. They can be used to achieve the same end, that is, having sex with someone, presence of love completely subjective, optional, and case-specific. Can you think of anything that would cause you to lose that love? Most people that claim to be in love would say no. I call bullshit on that. You're telling me, that no matter what happens, no matter what that person does to you, no matter what someone else does to you, no matter how your thought process is affected, you're going to love that person? Say a better person comes along, a better match for you, a richer husband, a hotter wife, someone is generally better. Assume they possess exactly the same traits, same quirks, essentially being a clone, only an improved copy, of your current lover. Has that not happened before? Some would argue that if it's true love they will stay together. I say this type of love is not true, but comfortable. Yes, I will concede that two people who truly connect with each other on all the correct levels are probably comfortable with the love they share, they are happy together. However, when two people invest a good deal of time into a relationship, they move in together, what have you, they become attached. It doesn't have to be a loving attachment. It's a condition as humans to attach to things that we are familiar with, things we expose ourselves to. We like being around those things. People get together and they stay together, not always (and I fear much too often) because it's what social groups and peers recommend, what they expect, or because of financial security, because of familiarity. It's too much trouble to end a relationship, to grieve about it, and then find someone else, and repeat. It takes time. Time is something of which we have a finite amount. Even in this day and age when people are being promised 100 years of life, people want to be sure of things, they want their ducks in a row, right now. Back in the day when people lived to 50 (if they were lucky) people didn't wait for their "soulmate" to come along, there was no time! Child had to be born, food to be grown. Marriages were arranged based on practicality. Was there such a thing as divorce? Not any to speak of, that was taboo. People just sucked it up and made babies. There was no time for marital strife. Now, we have all this time. We have time to wait for soulmates. We have time to waffle and change our minds. Divorce is everywhere. People don't want to commit to anything, for fear of losing a better opportunity. I'm an offender, I'll admit it.

Humans, as a species, exist in a condition that tells us to love, (if not love, mate with) suitable members of the opposite sex. If you expose two people too each other for long enough, assuming there are no sharply conflicting personality traits, they will like each other. I speak out of experience. Doesn't what kind of girl I talk to, I can present myself in such a way that causes them to like me, which as you might have guessed, happens along the way to "love". I'm not a pickup artist. I'm not a womanizer. Getting girls to expose themselves to me is not my gig. I'm a philosopher. I know a bit about psychology. I know how to observe people and predict their behavior based on these observations. I'm also blessed with a general lack of ugliness. It does not take much more than cutesy little quips and a go-getter-type attitude to get a girl to type you a little <3, which I guess is my generation's way of expressing love for one and other. Girls can do the same thing. I don't mean to say that men are impervious of becoming infatuated, because we do, all the time. To have a guy drooling over you, sorry ladies but you have to be attractive. Attractive is a term that is not nearly as exclusive in this context as it is in the traditional sense. It varies from guy to guy, obviously, but attractive just means healthy, four limbs, head of hair, all that good stuff. No skin disease. No red-flag abnormalities. (Note: If you think I'm being inconsiderate, hurtful, offensive, or demeaning to those people not blessed with attractive features, you don't have to read this blog. If you're still reading, and you'd like to argue that I am in fact being grossly offensive and demeaning to ugly people, with such things as "beauty is in the eye of the beholder" and what not, I may concede that yes, beauty is a subjective matter, such is everything with humans. However, in this great thing we call society, among humans in general for that matter, biologically, and speaking with regard to evolutionary advantages, there exists things that are desirable and things that are undesirable. Being healthy is attractive. Having four limbs is attractive. Being physically fit, having a toned body. Even skin, healthy hair, etc. We are trained to notice these things. Men's eyes notice girls' boobs, get over it! We look all the time. Looking doesn't make you a pig, it means you're doing what nature intended. Big boobs = lots of milk. Lots of milk = more food for baby. Food for baby = survival of baby. More food = greater chance of survival. Survival = continuation of species. Continuation of species = goal of every living organism ever. You might argue that because we are as smart as we are, rather as we think we are, we should be able to control such things. Maybe, but to completely resist/avoid such things is impossible, and if by some chance someone were to never eyefuck someone of the opposite sex, they are leading a sad, sad, and very, very guarded existence. As my dad says, "We are a pretty horny bunch." We are! We just want to make all sorts of babies! As if there weren't enough of them alreeady! Feminists, shut up. Anyone else who would like to deny that, just shut up. I don't say shut up because I'm afraid you will destroy my argument; if you were to do that, I'd be very surprised, most notably, but I'd except whatever counterargument you had to substitute. I say shut up because in my experience people that generally want to argue such things just say I'm wrong, and then provide no other explanation. It's part of argument that if you are going to destroy someone's theory, you must provide your own to explain whatever it is you're arguing about. You can't just do away what we do know, or what we think we know, leaving it a mystery, and you can't just say God did it. That is why I say shut up. If you're someone reasonable and willing to discuss any topics covered, I welcome your input.)

I have strayed far from the path I thought I was on. This is the end.

Make your own connection

Prepare yourself

Yup, he's good

Better sit down for this..

On Statistics #4

What have we learned so far? The career field of actuarial science has been shattered with the view that statistics are worthless, the youth of today is without direction, the majority anyway. Also, the universe is an interesting specimen, coincidence or not, and also that being the best doesn't mean being perfect, it means being the one that people like and the one that does it successfully, without blatantly obvious vice or other unattractive qualities.

Where to go from here. Perhaps I shall use this time to circle back on previously dabbled-in topics to attempt to clear any confusion you may have, or perhaps to satisfy your appetite for more of my choppy, tangent, odd, lofty trains of thought.

One thing I'm going to note hear, which you may have thought of already, is a massive contradiction I have consciously, though not necessarily deliberately, created for myself. I say that Earth is nothing but a tiny, insignificant dust speck floating blissfully through time and space. I know the Earth revolves around the Sun, we aren't a rogue planet, but our galaxy is moving in a certain direction, don't know exactly which way though, and I believe (I could very well be mistaken) that our solar system is moving towards the center of The Milky Way, towards the black hole in the middle. With that cleared up, Earth doesn't matter. Anything we ever do or say or hear or create, experience, fathom, change or think about will be forgotten, dismissed, lost, destroyed, engulfed, utterly obliterated. We are dust in the wind. Nothing lasts forever, not even the earth and sky. However, I talk about how important it is for one to realize the full potential, their self-worth, to actualize themselves in the greatest and purest form that they can be. Well, if absolutely nothing matters at all, why worry about what to wear, to go to school, who your friends are, to put your seatbelt on? Why take the time to consider other people in your life, to learn, to laugh, to love. Why do it? It's all just too much trouble, isn't it? We're all going to die, eventually forgotten by everyone, and they too will eventually die, and any mention of them ever will also be lost forever, and ultimately a cataclysmic event of which we can only imagine will happen, and destroy everything. It's a conundrum really. We matter not, yet we take the time and energy and make things matter. We make things matter more than other species known to us. We make life an emergency! You have to be to school at 8 o' clock or else you will die in a fiery explosion years down the road after you're fired from another dead-end job because you failed such and such a class, which was probably the result of the teacher not liking you because you were always late, not that you weren't capable of learning anything! AAHHHH!!! Everything has to be on time, everything has to be this way or that, the answer to this question is this, the color to wear on Tuesday is blue, the correct term for popcorn is poppycock. We have within ourselves something that we have yet to discover in the universe, at least to the same severity of which we possess. Consciousness. That word carries such weight, the weight of which I can only begin to describe. It's such a simple concept, being aware of oneself. We are all aware in one form or other. When we are awake is when we generally think we are most aware of things. When we are awake, our brains are working. The brain is simply a fascinating thing. It is a ball of mush in your skull that gives you the ability to learn, expereience, feel, love, hate, experience any other emotion ever, it makes you aware of yourself, those around you. It allows you to smell, hear, taste, touch, see. It may allow to do more than the traditional five senses, which is also an interesting concept. The brain though, physically speaking, strictly looking at what the brain is made of, you find things that all occur other places in nature. If you look other places in nature you will find things that are in your brain in an inanimate state. In fact everything that is in your brain can be found in an inanimate state. So, we have substances, and they are inanimate, incapable of thought, feeling, or experience. We have these inanimate particles in our brain that have arranged themselves in such a way that causes them to be animate. WTF. How does that happen? If you take an assortment of car parts and throw them together, does it make a Transformer? Nope. I just don't get how this happens. If you go deeper into the matter that makes up our brains you end up, obviously, at the atom. Go deeper into the atom you end up with subatomic particles, and now with people at CERN finding different particles and smashing particles smaller than the proton or electron together......well, I just don't know. What the hell is happening? Quarks? What are those? Why are those? What about them constitutes their existence? And with such a lack of understanding it only further confounds us when we know that the stuff we observe such things with is the same stuff we are observing, the only difference being how it is arranged. We have gained consciousness, some more than others mind you, through a series of chemical reactions and electrical impulses. With these household reactions we form thoughts. What exactly is a thought? Why do we have them? We have billions and billions and billions of connections and cells, and somehow withing these cells we hear things in our head. I often think back to when I was a child, when I didn't know nearly as many things as I know now. What did I think in? I would say most often I thought in smells, tastes, feelings. I didn't often know what to think of things or how to describe them, so I just sort of catalogued them, and then pondered them later.

It is a strange condition we find ourselves in, the fact that we are anything at all.

Part #11

Last installment of Waiting for Superman :(

Part #10

Almost out of videos! E Gad!

On Statistics #3

Tell me, did the Wright Brothers go to the Air Force Academy? No, because it didn't exist yet, but that's beside the point. Did they take engineering classes? Nope. Did they have half of the resources that we have? The computers? Material processes? Welding? They did have welding, so that was a plus. The Wright Brothers were true pioneers, not the first to build a flying machine but the first to do it successfully. They had passion. They were carrying the fire. There fire was a fire that could not be tamed by anything other than attaining flight. True pioneers, like the Wright Brothers, are those who change the world. Bill Gates: computer software. Steve Jobs: same story. Mark Zuckerberg: Facebook. Thomas Edison: first to successfully construct AND patent the lightbulb. Einstein: all of our understanding of physics is based on his research. Lincoln: saved the Union. Gandhi: gave us some really great quotes. Obama: first black president. Susan B. Anthony: started the good fight to give women the vote. Tesla: gave us accessible electricity. Henry Ford: made the car a cornerstone of American society. Guinness family: made beer and gave us an authority on world records. Hannibal: rode around on elephants and did things in war that had never been done before. Elton John: made being gay mainstream and wrote some really great music. These people aren't nerds, they aren't know-it-alls, they aren't lofty and dreamy in their countenance. They aren't absent from the moment to worry about the future. They are raw and alive, fresh, original, and true. They fill the room when they walk in, they hold their head high no matter the circumstances, they are genuine in their character. I can't say that I know this for a fact, as I haven't met any of those listed above, but my point remains valid. This is the kind of person that the world cherishes, (often times only after they have died and what they were trying to tell the world is found by the world to be useful) and the type of person who advances most for himself as well as for others.

I often look to sky and think of my role in the grand scheme of things. I come to the same conclusion, much like Shakespeare's "All the world's a stage, and the men and women merely players, they have their exits and their entrances..." (There's more the quote, but I'm only listing the first three bits). My conclusion being different in that we aren't even players, we are but wary passersby in the cosmos, a speck of dust, bustling about in the background of such events we are completely and inadvertently oblivious to. Even within our own world, we are ignorant, turned-off, removed from reality, (reality being defined as a state of being the majority of people have agreed upon, something I often ponder and question) we are concerned for ourselves, those who are most like us, closest to us, and those who we loathe, but in a different way. We worry, lie to, cheat, kill, coerce, compete with, yell at, pressure, and disadvantage others, all in the intention to create a better life for ourselves and for those we love. We occupy ourselves with to do lists, with frivolous worries of everyday mishaps, with pointless baggage from a chance encounter with a rude stranger. We have created a society of goals and steps to get there, the end goal at the end of it all being a happy, fulfilled individual. We seemed to have derived a formula for happiness. Go to school, make friends, go to college, get a job. Die happy. What in the f*ck. Are you being serious? I always got this feeling I could never explain in the pit of my stomach, (when I was listening to a college representative or an Army recruiter, a sports "hero", people like that) one of poignant cynicism, to put it simply. I would say to myself, "This guy (or girl) is completely full of shit."

Only because they are. People tell you to do the predictable thing, the safe thing. Go to school, get good grades, get into a state school, get a degree. Get a job, get married. Live on a comfortable income, have 2.4 children, build white picket fence. Experience everything else that is stuffy and lighthearted American dream. I know I've talked about this before, but this still ties into the more specific thing I'm talking about now. People come to high school all around the country, people from institutions. Their goal is to get more people to join their institution. Military recruiters are common, as well as college reps. The most annoying type of this person, to me anyway, are those who represent an institution that masks the message, "You aren't doing anything with your life, you have no direction, so give us your money and your time and we will repeat your high school education, because you very well may need to be remediated, but this time you will get a near useless Associate's Degree! Yea!" This annoys the shit out of me. It's not that these people have the wrong intentions, or necessarily a fundamentally flawed method, though it is, as is most of education. The problem is the outcome. When kids graduate with an Associate's, they're closer to making something of themselves, but they are probably just as clueless as they were with what to do with themselves as they were in high school. Counselors, teachers, parents, administrators bombard students with questions about the future. The future represents the unknown, and it's part of our human condition to be afraid of the unknown. With that, you have teenagers being asked to think about, plan, and then begin to execute the rest of their lives. So you have these elements: 1) fear/anxiety of the future 2) no idea what the future will bring/what role you will have in it 3) you'd rather be partying or napping. Combine those things and you don't get progress. Most people my age, myself included, would rather not think about getting older, going to college, blah blah blah rest of your life and then dying.

You may be tearing apart my argument while reading this. You may be saying, "Well if our youth is totally clueless and without direction, what action do you propose we take to help facilitate the self-actualization of our young people, which will obviously produce happier, more productive, and simply better citizens?" I would contend to make an argument for young people going out and experiencing the world that they have been sheltered from by their loving families. Experience, learn, grow, mature, love, hate, empathize, swim, eat, repeat, kick, long jump, eat exotic food, participate in ritual ceremony of tribe in the rainforest, document, interact, communicate, write, reflect, ponder, dare to explore, adventure, inquire, persuade, finesse, try new things, push the limit, live! Many of these things one would have to travel for, which is fine. I think traveling has awesome benefits. People don't know what they want to do because they don't know what's out there! They have spent most of their time indoors, staring at a chalkboard, or a computer screen, learning largely theoretical concepts and theoretical problems of which to apply such concepts, they don't get to see the world as it is, what actually happens. I like those Discovery commercials, the ones that say "THE WORLD IS JUST AWESOME" at the end. Well, the world is awesome, and I can tell you from experience, what little I've had. However many people don't get much experience outside of their home, their school, their city, or even their state. If they take a school trip overseas they are constantly monitored and looked after by their teacher or other chaperone, which is necessary yes, but also subtracts from the experience. Berlin, London, New York, they all look the same from inside a tour bus, or out of an airplane window, or in a museum.

Just a note, you, the reader, may be wondering, where did the statistics go? Well think for a moment, how many kids are utterly or close to clueless about the world around them? Doesn't matter about specific numbers, it's too many. How many kids pick a state college or university that is within driving distance from home, for such reasons as their friends are going there too or it's close to home? Too many. How many kids close their eyes and throw a dart at a dartboard of majors, choosing the one they hit? Too many, even though that's a massive dramatization.