Since the biggest update has to do with what’s written directly below this one, I should get it out of the way first: My grandmother passed away on Tuesday morning. It was quite a shock to all of us, because she had been doing very well, only to aspirate on her breakfast Monday morning and go into cardiac arrest. The broken leg was healing so well that they had put a regular walking cast on it and expected that she was going to make a full recovery. She was in good spirits and was responding well in all areas. And then it all came crashing down. After a day on the ventilator, we made the decision that it was for the best if we take her off, and once we did, that was it. It’s for the best, really. It’s certainly a better situation than the alternative, with a decline from the Alzheimer’s reducing her to a person that couldn’t even recognize her own family. She went out with at least some of herself intact, which is good.

The rest of what I could say isn’t really much in comparison. Work is going great, life is pretty good (apart from the elephant in the room) and I happen to be going on vacation next week to see a friend get married in Key West. That’s going to be great: a friend and I are renting a convertible and driving down the Florida coast from Miami. I bought a brand new camera for the occasion and I plan to get a ton of good shots.

So yeah, that’s about it.

It’s 2:30 in the morning (Christmas morning, that is) and I can’t sleep. Many, many things contribute to this lack of somnolence, not the least of them being that OMG ISS CRSSMAS! followed closely by visions of me wrapping gift after gift as I was doing earlier today. Considering that I only bought a few gifts this year—yes, I was wrapping other people’s gifts—why was I wrapping?

Well. Saturday night, my 80-year-old grandmother fell and suffered a compound fracture to her right fibula and tibia. Not that she had much choice in the matter, but had she any, she couldn’t have picked a worse time to do it: she was home alone with my youngest brother, while my parents were 30 minutes away about to see a stage production of Beauty and the Beast, and my sister, my brother, my other parents and I were at my sister’s place celebrating Christmas with each other.

I think the round of phone calls from brother-to-mother-to-sister, followed by all of us (save my other parents) zooming in the nearest automobile to the house must have been no longer than fifteen minutes. We almost beat the ambulance to the house. Which is nothing, considering that my parents managed to make the 30+ minute drive from wherever they were to the hospital before the ambulance got there. Now that was some fast driving.

Long story short (too late), she’s got a bad break in her right leg just above the ankle. She’s badly osteoporotic and has Alzheimer’s, so any serious trauma invites with it some deeper potential problems. So far, not many of them have really surfaced, but the long-term effects are complete unknowns at this point and can only be looked at as possibilities. Unfortunately, one of those possibilities that needs to be kept open is that of amputation. But I’m going to try not to think about that and instead will stay positive.

So it’s been a busy few days. A trip to the emergency room (my first ambulance ride and damn, I didn’t even get to be tied to the stretcher), a trip up to Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center the next day to see her, two trips to church (once for mass last night, once for Christmas Mass tonight), and almost a complete afternoon and evening of wrapping gifts to make up for the fact that my parents couldn’t do it. And we haven’t even reached Christmas morning yet.

So if you want to ask me “Do you hear what I hear?” then what I’d better be hearing is the sound of Christmas writhing in pain from getting royally knocked in the jewels. It has not been very kind to me or my family this year.

For the comma-declined, that’s more than 211 trillion dollars.

The letter includes the clarification, “no cents.”

“I didn’t know what to think. Obviously $211 trillion is a little above what I put in my bank account,” said Martins.

So the next time you think you’ve got it bad, just remember that you aren’t the guy who owes more than 70 times the national budget to his bank.

(via Consumerist)

She looked at my stepfather and breathed, “They have them in stock.”

The thought that my mother would be interested in buying a video game system sent me practically into overload. Parents aren’t supposed to be this childlike, right? Truth be told, though, it was a pretty adorable sight. Almost as adorable as the later sight of my mother standing in front of a television with a wiimote in her hand, flailing her arms in the air while throwing a virtual bowling ball down the lane.

But I digress.

When we got to the checkout line, the woman at the checkout looked over the various pieces and asked us if this was a Christmas purchase. “No,” I said. “This is an impulse purchase.” I then remarked that my idea of an impulse purchase wasn’t something like this, though; my idea of an impulse buy is more like a new shirt at Target and wasn’t usually on par with a video game system.

Then I thought about what I’d said and realized something. “You know,” I said, “I must be getting older. My idea of an impulse buy used to be something like ‘Hey, look, a new CD.’ Now, I’ll walk into a store and go, ‘Ooh… boxers.’ ”

It was a joke that my friends thought was funny when I got back home, but I came to another realization today: I’m sitting in my living room right now and watching the Food Network. Before that? Golf.

When did I become old?

I used to watch cartoons on Saturday. Later, I might watch a bunch of movies over the weekend. Lately, though, I’ve found myself aligning my TV interests with interests from other areas of my life. I never once thought I’d get a kick out of cooking shows, but I found that the more interested I became in cooking good food, the more interesting these programs became. The same with golf: I used to think that golf was a great game to play, but not so much to watch. Isn’t it strange how our tastes change?

I listen to NPR, I read nonfiction books, and while I still love to bust out a game like Guitar Hero and heavy metal, I find it interesting that my idea of a fun night with friends usually involves some kind of food I’ve cooked rather than a six-pack of beer.

Then again, there’s no reason we can’t do both.

Well, not me so much as my car. I was turning into Taco Bell behind some guy who, at no notice, stopped his car, threw it into reverse and just… backed right into me. I barely had enough time to put my own car in reverse and try to back up while honking my horn.

Luckily, I got away with only a scraped bumper. I stopped, got out of the car, looked at the bumper… meanwhile, the guy in the other car leaned out of his window, asked if I was okay, and no sooner had the words “I’m fine” come out of my mouth (in a rather disgusted manner, no less) than he practically zoomed away in his green Subaru wagon. He just waved out the window and was gone. I didn’t have a chance to get insurance information or even a license plate number.

I was just so shocked by what had happened. And, later, I was just pissed off by what had happened.

When you think about under-pressure situations, you tend to think that you’ll do the right thing. That you’ll make that right decision at the crucial moment. And then, the moment happens and it just… passes you by. And the decision you thought you were going to make never even occurred to you.

Now that I’ve been through it, I should have seen the signs of risk when it came to this guy in the Subaru. The fact that he didn’t get out, that he seemed so eager to get out of the situation… these should have been signs to me that this person probably had no insurance.

It’s this delayed clarity that tells me that perhaps, if I hadn’t gone to Taco Bell for the junk food, I wouldn’t have gone through all of this. So, obviously, the moral of the story is that Taco Bell causes car accidents. Remember that, kids.

A couple of years ago, he started a new job as the HR director for a company, and when he joined them, they gave him a Blackberry. Apparently, all of the executives had them.

After a couple of weeks, he gave it back.

My father is the kind of person who doesn’t like to be available anywhere he goes. He didn’t even have Call Waiting until recently—and I’m pretty sure that he only did that because it came with a package deal. His point was simply that if somebody needed to get in touch with him and he was on the phone, they would call back. Simple. Straightforward.

I, on the other hand, am almost constantly reachable. At work, at home, in the car. I have email and the Internet at my hip. My laptop is wireless and if I really needed to, I could tether it to my cellphone and have a full Internet connection—anywhere there’s a cell signal.

The word tether is rather interesting. Lately I’ve been wondering if that’s not exactly what this constant stream of connectivity is doing just that: tethering. My father has sometimes referred to a cellphone as a leash. Oh, he has one, sure—but he rarely uses it and mostly, it’s just there in case of emergency. When he and my stepmother go away for a weekend, I don’t even think they take it with them, which is annoying if I need to talk to them when they aren’t at home. Sometimes I wonder what the point is, having it and leaving it on the kitchen counter.

And sometimes, I wonder if my dad doesn’t have the right idea.

Most times, I enjoy the universe that’s at my fingertips. If I want to talk to my friend Anna in Germany, the only thing I have to worry about is whether the six-hour time difference between us means that she’s asleep. If I want to bone up on a subject that’s caught my curiosity, a quick glance at Wikipedia can fill me in on everything about it I ever wanted to learn and more. Who was that guy who was in that movie with that other guy? In fifteen seconds, I can tell you.

It’s downright addicting.

And that’s what I worry about. After all, Step One is admitting that you have a problem.

Lately, I’ve been toying with the idea of unplugging. Oh, I couldn’t do it completely—my job pretty much totally prevents me from doing that, given that I sit at a computer all day. But several of my coworkers—not so oddly, they tend to be the older ones who have families—tell me that when they get home they don’t even think about a computer until they get into the office the next day. Me? I get home and the first thing I do after closing the door and perhaps putting down whatever groceries I was carrying is to power up the laptop again. After all, since it doesn’t need to be plugged in all the time, I can have it in the kitchen with me while I’m cooking dinner. But am I missing out on something bigger by not being “out there?”

I mentioned to a friend today that I was thinking about disconnecting for a bit (knowing that he had done the same thing several months back) and he said, “It’s not that hard and it’s honestly pretty fun. Less intarweb, more real life.” And I thought about that for a second and realized that I don’t have much of a real life to speak of. Most of my friends are people that I work with, and sure, we socialize in varying degrees. But since moving to this city more than a year ago, I haven’t really developed a life and circle of friends that were my own. I tend to stay at home a lot and do my own thing, which is fine to an extent, but am I missing out?

I think that truly, the idea of removing myself from what has been a pretty major part of my life since I first went online in the early ’90s is downright terrifying. Back when I started, it was much easier to stay offline: you had to use a phone line to do it, and it cost money while you were online, so there was a limit to what you could do. Also, it was slow as molasses. But these days, the constant-on source of information flowing through the air is as ubiquitous as water, and it’s much more difficult to turn it off.

Is it something to worry about? Maybe, maybe not. But small as it may seem… I think I might have a problem here.

That’s what my right ring finger looks like right now after a trip to the Emergency Room.

I was making steak and went to clean the chef’s knife after I cut it up. And then boy, did I ever cut it up. My finger, that is.

I called my friends Steve and Nichole over because I had nothing to dress the wound with, and it wouldn’t stop with the bleeding. So after a call to my stepfather, I decided to head to the ER.

By the time they got to me (around 10, and I got there at 8), the bleeding had stopped and what was left was a fingertip that looked like it had been split with an ax. The doctor gave me a tetanus shot and put some Dermabond on the wound, which was the only option, since stitches wouldn’t have really worked there.

So now, I’m wondering how I’m supposed to shower with this thing on, let alone cook or clean or type (which is proving to be quite difficult at the moment).

Update 9/25/07: Check out the picture. Yes, that’s a Taco Bell quesadilla in the background. :)

Oh well.

I think that my audition went very well—as well as could be expected, given the relative inexperience of the teenage rather young accompanist. I sang quite well and felt quite good about the whole ordeal. They told me that I could come back and sing again tomorrow and there will be callbacks later in the week.

Here’s the thing that’ll most likely prevent me from getting the part, though: My looks. That’s not to say that I’m not good-looking enough. It’s simply that the character I’m auditioning for is, well… well, he’s Jewish. And I’m SO not. I don’t even remotely look Jewish, if you consider the traditional stereotypes. It’s not that there aren’t Jewish people who look like me, but the character’s name is Wellerstein, which would imply that it’s a German origin, and I definitely don’t look like that.

But if they can rationalize it enough, I think it’d be a really great opportunity and I know, I just know, that if I get it I’ll absolutely knock it out of the park.

Keep me in your thoughts. I could really use this thing right now.

I ran into an interesting problem today at work: after all of the reading I had done over the last few days (I spent hours at it nonstop over the weekend), I couldn’t see—in the sense that I simply couldn’t get my eyes to focus on my computer screen. Perhaps this was because it was further away than the books I’d been reading, or perhaps it was because the text on my laptop screen is generally smaller than the books I’d been reading, but whatever it was, nothing would come into focus. I finally decided that perhaps it was best if I head home and rest my eyes or take a nap or something (something that will be taking place as soon as I finish this post and eat lunch).

On my way home, though, I decided to try something. I stopped in at Walgreens and bought my first-ever pair of—gulp—reading glasses. If it was simply that my eyes were overworked and tired, perhaps reading glasses would help me to relieve that strain. And sure enough, these things are awesome. Yes, it’s a little strange what happens when I take them off (having never really worn any kind of glasses, besides a short stint when I played baseball and the doctors thought that they’d help my depth perception—they didn’t), but for reading up close or working on my computer, I think these things are going to get a lot of use.

At the same time, though, I can’t shake the feeling that I’m just turning into some older, grayer version of myself. One that can’t party like he did in college and shouts at kids to get off his lawn. And it’s because of that guy that I ask the question:

Why are we so afraid of growing old?

Like I said before, these glasses are awesome. I don’t even have to work to focus my eyes on what I’m reading, and that’s saying a lot, given that I only have one eye that’s normal. But the fact remains that as I start to get older, and the gray in my hair—which started showing up around the age of seventeen—begins to become more and more noticeable by other people instead of just by myself, I start to, I dunno, resent myself for not being able to do the things I could do when I was younger, or at least not without help. Even that resentment started when I was relatively young, when I discovered that I had a congenital ankle condition that essentially prevented me from doing the same things that other kids did—running, for example, was something I could only do in small amounts, because any lengthy pressure on my heels caused immense pain later in the day. And it made me feel a little more useless inside.

I think that’s where this fear of aging comes from, too. As we get older, we realize that we aren’t as solid as we used to be, and that makes us feel more, well, mortal. Maybe it’s precisely because kids don’t feel those aches and pains and little quirks of age that they tend to feel invincible, whereas the wisdom of age comes from knowing that this isn’t the case.

Maybe it’s just that I think reading glasses are a crutch, and I don’t feel like I need it, when obviously, I do. Maybe someday I’ll need crutches for my ankles, too, and I’ll go through this all over again.

Anyway, I had the song stuck in my head all day Friday, and between getting home in the afternoon and leaving for our night of Harry Potter-related festivities (by the way: if I ever say again that I want to go to a release party at midnight for a children’s book, slap me very hard in the face), I sat down at the piano keyboard and the computer and put together my own cover of Gary Jules’ cover of Mad World. Over the weekend I’ve tweaked it a little bit and I liked it enough to show it to the five of you that read this blog all of you.

Comments and critiques are very welcome. :)

He asks what it is. I tell him it is a battery charger for my iPod. He asks if I made it myself, to which I reply that I purchased a kit over the internet. He says that he can’t let me on the plane with it. I explain to him that I have flown with it 4-6 times a month for a year now and nobody has questioned it. He says, “Not on my watch and not with my people.”

Now, I’m not an idiot, and I know that a device that looks like this is going to be suspicious at the least. But come on: it only takes a cursory glance at this thing to see that there’s no place to put any explosives! Let alone the fact that two D-cell batteries wouldn’t have the juice to blow up anything.

Kudos, though, to the Port Authority Police Department who were called to the scene who, upon investigating the device, they did a simple thing and plugged Damon Burke’s USB reading light into the charger and—surprise, surprise—the light lit up! At this point the security inspectors allowed him to board the plane, provided that he remove the evil, evil D-cell batteries from the charger.

Do we honestly think that things like this are making our flights safer? I think that Burke puts it best when he says:

They wouldn’t have grasped that the spare battery for my laptop was far more dangerous than the iPod charger. A dead short of the MintyBoost! would produce a little heat (maybe 4 watts total), a dead short of the laptop battery would likely cause an explosion of the battery…. and I had two of them fully charged. But these are the times we live in. A handful of people with no knowledge of physics, engineering, or pyrotechnics are responsible for determining what is and what is not safe to bring on a plane. They’re paid minimum wage and told to panic if they see something they don’t recognize. Does this make me feel safer? It doesn’t really matter.

I took Thursday and Friday off last week and went down to visit a friend in Philadelphia. Having never been to Philly, it was a very interesting trip. I’d never driven down the Jersey Turnpike before, so it was… educational, to say the least. It was actually much more fun than I thought it would be—the traffic on the Turnpike itself wasn’t bad at all. Hell, the traffic up to the George Washington Bridge was far worse than what came after it.

The mini-vacation was pretty laid-back, which was nice. My friend Mike and his girlfriend Meg were consummate hosts and they made me feel completely at home. Even their pets did a great job at that: their cat, Charlie, spent the night with me the whole time I was there, and both dogs (Ralphie, a beagle/something mix, and Stella, a full-blooded beagle) spent a good amount of time on the bed with me as well. We went out to dinner on Thursday night, then Meg had to go to bed because she had to work on Friday. Mike and I stayed up and I showed him the wonders of Guitar Hero, which he’d never seen.

Friday was somewhat of a lazy day; while Meg was at work, Mike and I went out to lunch, then came back and put on the Porcupine Tree DVD, at which point I fell asleep on the couch (with the cat lying on top of me). Waking refreshed, we took the train out to Mike’s friend’s apartment; said friend was holding a “Bro-BQ” (i.e. no girls allowed). Several hours of food and beer later found Mike and I waiting for the last bus on the route to take us back, and an extremely grumpy but very nice bus driver allowed me to ride even after I, idiot that I was, hadn’t realized that I would need exact change for the bus fare and only had a $10 bill.

Saturday saw the three of us all sleeping late—I was up the earliest at 9:30, at which point I showered and then headed downstairs so as not to disturb the others, started reading (On Writing, by Stephen King, which is an awesome book), and after about twenty minutes promptly fell asleep on the couch (with—you guessed it—the cat lying on top). Once the others got up I joined them and they made us a big home-cooked breakfast (did I mention what awesome hosts these people were?). The idea was brought up to me after lunch of going to an amusement park—a water park-slash-amusement park, to be more precise, and given that it was going to be around 90 degrees that day, it sounded like a wonderful idea. A trip to Target later for a swimsuit and we were off. We got to Dorney Park around 4:30 and waited 15 minutes before entering the park, because we got in at half price and lots of people were leaving, which was nice. What wasn’t nice, however, was my not thinking about what was on my feet. I had worn my shoes to the park, because I knew that we’d be riding roller coasters and stuff later on, and I had just assumed that I would walk barefoot around the water park, but what I hadn’t planned was that the cement would be textured like the rough side of Mount Everest. It wasn’t but ten minutes before my feet had holes in them so large you’d have thought I had the stigmata. I went on one water ride and couldn’t deal with it anymore, so I went to the first aid station to get bandaged up—they gave me bandages and waterproof tape and asked me why I hadn’t bothered to get “aqua socks”, which had been on sale at the front of the park. I stated simply that if I’d known they sold them I would have bought them but I hadn’t seen any signs (and sure enough, the only signs for them that I could see were visible only when looking toward the exit of the park). Long story short, I’m wearing giant band-aids on the soles of my feet and they hurt. :( But it was made up for with many, many rides on some really, really awesome roller coasters (there were something like seven of them in the park).

Sunday was another sleep-in day for us. Mike and I had made plans to play a round of golf in the morning, but that was squashed the night before, given the situation with my feet and the fact that the roller coasters had pretty much made us all extremely sore. It was essentially a morning to recover and prepare for what turned out to be the most surprising and pleasing part of my trip:

On Thursday, while I was driving down, I had stopped to get gas and my phone rang. It was my friend Melissa, calling to wish me a happy birthday. Melissa moved with her fiance to Tampa a few years ago and I hadn’t seen her since the going-away party, and over the last while we haven’t talked as much as we would like, so it was a real treat to hear from her. She asked if I was at work, so I told her what my plans for the weekend were, and when she heard that I was going to be in Philly, she excitedly told me, “I’ll be there too! I’m coming up on Sunday for a conference. We should have lunch when I get in!” So I agreed to meet her at the airport and we would go to lunch. So when I got to the airport, I had no idea where we could go—she suggested that we just start heading north on the highway, since that was the direction she was headed toward her hotel, too. I had no clue as to where we would eat, so we kind of kept an eye on the sides of the highway for a decent place to eat, and then Melissa spotted a sign pointing to an area of town that she thought her hotel was in, so I pulled off that exit. We found a pizza place to eat, caught up for an hour or so, and then I took her to her hotel, which luckily only happened to be about a mile and a half from where we were (thank you, Melissa’s quick eyes and Google Maps on my phone!), said our goodbyes and I headed back to the highway.

A long, long drive later, including about an hour and a half waiting for the GW bridge and I-95 past it again, and I finally got home last night at around 8:30. I was exhausted and not altogether ready to come back to work today, but after all that it was good to be home, even though there are no pets coming to keep me company this evening.

Thanks again to Mike & Meg, and to those of you who remembered my birthday. :)

Despite the fact that I wasn’t moving more than a couple miles per hour, I thought it best to take a look. Getting out of my car, I looked at my bumper and saw a smudge of dust from the other car’s bumper, but when I turned and looked at the other car (an Explorer), I was amazed to see a bunch of damage on the liftgate: it was dented right in, the bumper was out of place, and there was a piece of plastic chipped out of the bumper.

It was a moment before I realized that all that damage had already been there, and that I had most likely done absolutely nothing to this car to damage it. Being the good person that I am, however, I left my insurance card and a note that explained what had happened with my phone number on it. I then headed off to my golf game.

During the course of the day, I started thinking about whether I had actually done the right thing by leaving my information. It would be quite easy for a person to take advantage of a small bump like that; far too easy to claim that I had done more damage than I actually had. On the other hand, isn’t that what insurance claim adjusters are for? They would take one look at my unhurt automobile and, knowing that there’s no way I could have damaged that Explorer like that, they would have closed the claim immediately. At least, that’s what I’d have liked to think. But there was still that nagging doubt in the back of my mind.

Throughout the whole of our golf game, I didn’t get any calls. Nor did I get any while out to dinner with my friends. I called my insurance company to open a claim, just in case, and then ate dinner and came home.

The note was still there on the windshield of the car. Part of me seriously considered taking it. But in the end, I left it there for whomever to take it.

In the morning when I left for work, the note was still there, and it was there all day today. When I finally got home, there were some people out in the parking lot and I asked them if they knew whose car it was. One of the ladies piped up, stating that it was hers.

“Oh,” I said. “I bumped into it yesterday. I saw the damage on it and wanted to make sure that I wasn’t the cause of any of it.”

“Pff,” she said. “God no, my ex got into a nasty accident with this thing. You couldn’t have done anything to it. You didn’t call your insurance about it, did you?”

I informed her that I had, but that if she decided not to file a claim, after thirty days they would simply close it. She simply shrugged it off.

Since she didn’t seem to care at all, I took the note and my insurance card, just to make sure. Can’t be too safe.

I thanked her and started heading up to my apartment and she said, “Hell, you can crash into that thing any time you want.”

I felt much better about having done the right thing after that.

But the thing is, it wasn’t eleven months ago. Or at least, it didn’t feel like that long. I mentioned to my friend Lynsey that it felt like it was more like six weeks, and her reply was “What are you, a dog?” (Ruff, baby, ruff.)

I remember being told that when you’re little, the years fly by, but when you get old, time drags on and on and on. This doesn’t really seem to jibe with my own observations: It seems to me that time sped by when we were little but still continues to go at pretty much the same rate, or maybe even faster. I was at my parents’ this weekend and my brother Chris made a remark about how time seems to speed up as we get older (he’s all of 19, bless his heart). I joked that the reason was because as we get older, a year takes up a smaller and smaller percentage of our entire lives, making everything seem shorter.

Everything moves too quickly. I can’t remember the last time I just sat and enjoyed silence, or some other equally enjoyable task that doesn’t involve sitting or lying on a couch. Probably the closest I get to that kind of activity is when I play golf. Hell, at least now I’m getting outside. But what is with this American necessity to always be doing something?

Speaking of doing things. Something I did instead of updating this site: Creating a site for my sister (the why part I’ll get into in another post—I don’t want to deal with typing all that up tonight and hey, it’ll give me a reason to write something else of substance). She makes a video on YouTube called High Society that is essentially a short soap opera created entirely from using The SIMS2. Heck, she probably has more people watching her videos than I do reading this blog. Anyway, you should really go check it out. The videos are quite impressive.

Ciao for now.

Husky Vs Cat - video powered by Metacafe

I only hope that I can find a dog someday that has the strength of intuition that this one has. I would love to own a Husky.

I found nothing, until I was sitting on the couch tonight and glanced at my left sleeve. And there it was: A red and white sticker with the number 9 on it.

And suddenly, and even though all that was to my rear was my living room wall, I could hear people snickering behind me. I’m expecting a boot to the butt any moment.

But I have to say something about the press and their incessant need to find the underlying cause of things. They’ve been interviewing the roommates of this shooter, people who knew him, trying to find a link between thirty-two people dying and violent video games, but mostly, they’re trying to find meaning behind why the shooting happened.

Well, news outlets, I’m going to share a little secret with you: You’ll never find meaning behind this. You know why? There isn’t any. Why isn’t there any?

Because the guy was fucking crazy.

That’s all there is to it. You can try all you want to find out why the guy was fucking crazy, but in the end, he was fucking crazy and that’s all you’ll ever get out of it.

Now I know that the news outlets would never listen to the voice of reason, but in the interest of satisfying my own need to, well, be the voice of reason: Please, for the love of God, stop dwelling on this and let the poor distraught families of the victims grieve for the loss of their children.

If people tomorrow were told, Americans were told, that you can solve global warming if you just don’t use the remote to your television, what do you think they would say if they had to go back to getting their ass off the couch? Do you think they would solve global warming by throwing the remote in the garbage or do you think they would go, Aw, fuck it?

Like everything else nowadays, the important issues only seem to remain important to the general public as long as it isn’t too, well, inconvenient. The crux of the issue is, as Maher stated, that ultimately we aren’t willing to give up our creature comforts.

And really, how more right could he have been? If we could end world hunger by not ever having another latté from Starbucks, how many people would be willing to do that? Hell, if it were something like that, even I would give pause.

When it really boils down to it, saving the world is going to rely on us sacrificing certain things. But how can we do any of it when we can’t even do the trivial stuff—let alone the monumental stuff?

This isn’t much of a stretch to figure out, really. It’s quite obvious that this is why the character of House is so appealing. It’s not his looks or his limp that does it (well, maybe, for a select few), and it’s not his caustic personality. It’s simply that he knows he doesn’t have to worry about whether people are going to be offended by what he says, and while I personally think that the character acts the way he does to intentionally get those reactions out of people, the end result is the same: always to the point and intensely direct.

Part of me thinks that the world would be better off if we were all a little more like House. We would always speak our minds and be direct, and nobody would have to read into subtext anymore. But the other part of me knows that this is Real Life and that people in Real Life are wimps and have skins that are far too thin. I think that the funny thing about it is the fact that even if people were being truly direct, other people would still try to read between the lines to see what they really meant.

But is diplomacy really any better? What benefit is there in delicately tailoring every word so as to remain PC at all times? I’m reminded of George Carlin’s bit called “Euphemisms,” in which he makes a comment about how the direct and up-front title “shell shock” turned into the pansy-ass PC illness called “Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.” All of the emotion gets taken out of it:

There’s a condition in combat. Most people know about it. It’s when a fighting person’s nervous system has been stressed to it’s absolute peak and maximum. Can’t take anymore input. The nervous system has either *click* snapped or is about to snap. In the first world war, that condition was called shell shock. Simple, honest, direct language. Two syllables, shell shock. Almost sounds like the guns themselves. That was seventy years ago.

Then a whole generation went by and the second world war came along and very same combat condition was called battle fatigue. Four syllables now. Takes a little longer to say. Doesn’t seem to hurt as much. Fatigue is a nicer word than shock. Shell shock! Battle fatigue.

Then we had the war in Korea, 1950. Madison avenue was riding high by that time, and the very same combat condition was called operational exhaustion. Hey, were up to eight syllables now! And the humanity has been squeezed completely out of the phrase. It’s totally sterile now. Operational exhaustion. Sounds like something that might happen to your car.

Then of course, came the war in Vietnam, which has only been over for about sixteen or seventeen years, and thanks to the lies and deceits surrounding that war, I guess it’s no surprise that the very same condition was called post-traumatic stress disorder. Still eight syllables, but we’ve added a hyphen! And the pain is completely buried under jargon. Post-traumatic stress disorder.

I’ll bet you if we’d have still been calling it shell shock, some of those Vietnam veterans might have gotten the attention they needed at the time.

Probably not a huge surprise here, but I think he’s right. At what point do we stop being direct in order to sound, well, nicer? And isn’t it not okay that we do this?

Maybe we don’t all need to be like House, but maybe a step or two in that direction wouldn’t be so bad, either.

I know that some people have absolutely debilitating migraines. I don’t happen to be one of those people, so I consider myself lucky. I had a friend who a couple weeks ago woke up one morning and was half blind in his left eye; after trucking himself to the Emergency Room he was told that he had an “ocular migraine”, which meant that it was affecting his vision without giving him a headache. I, personally, never experienced a headache that was affected by vision.

Until last week, that is.

I had a fairly standard headache, sitting somewhere around my left temple, and apart from the throbbing, it was something that I could fight through. I took some Advil when it got worse, but didn’t really think much of it, until I went to the kitchen to get a drink of water.

The blinds in the office windows were all open because it was a gorgeous day out, and the sun happened to be at just the right angle to reflect off all the cars in the parking lot. Right into the window. And into my eyes.

And I swear to all that is holy, the inside of my head screamed. Actually screamed. I’m not kidding, I actually heard a noise. My headache flared up so quickly that I almost had to sit down for a minute.

Here’s hoping that I never have to go through that again. I’d take a hundred mild headaches in a row in comparison to that one flare-up.

Saving Private Ryan was just on one of the movie channels, and I have to say, when I watch the end of that movie, that’s one of those times. That movie never ceases to provide an opportunity to turn on the waterworks.

I know that this is just a bullshit post, and I do have the intention on writing some meaningful stuff in the near future, but lately I just haven’t felt very motivated.

The second happened today, via the same feed: It’s Copernicus’ birthday today. The very man whom Galileo was defending in that trial, and his birthday falls in the same week. I found that to be fairly interesting, for some reason.

That, coupled with a link that a friend posted today about a book on Harry Potter for Christians, started getting me thinking about self-reliant thinking.

As in, there seems to be absolutely none of it going on nowadays.

We’re a race of beings with the capacity for the most incredible feats of intelligence, yet we still cling to the age-old instincts that informed our decisions back before we could even be called humans. We routinely fall back to herd mentality, especially when the comfortable things in our lives become threatened. Independence is a virtue best left to the animals that fall behind during the chase. It’s definitely a defense mechanism, but it runs completely counter to the ideals of being human.

Thinking about that Harry Potter book, I can’t help but want to scream at the top of my lungs: If you aren’t sure about whether your children should read the Harry Potter novels, don’t buy a book that tells you whether you should or not. READ THE HARRY POTTER NOVELS YOURSELF AND MAKE YOUR DECISION THAT WAY.

Why do we constantly have to rely on others’ opinions when we can form our own perfectly well?

On an unrelated note: You may have noticed that I haven’t written anything in a couple weeks. Essentially it’s because I try to sit down and collect my thoughts on any given topic and end up thinking of about five more topics to write about, at which point I go on sensory overload and decide not to write anything at all. The funny thing is, if I wrote about everything I’d like to write about, I’d never get any work done. And since I’ll never make it as a professional blogger, I figure it’s probably better to go to my job rather than write.

Or maybe I’m just one hell of a procrastinator. But hey, as the wise woman once said:

Procrastinate now. Don’t put it off. — Ellen DeGeneres

Which means that when I reached the bottom of the stairs, I was not expecting ice.

Yeah, that’s right, you know where this is going.

Needless to say, I ended up flat on my ass, my keys skitting across the ice and coming to rest alongside my car. At least they managed to make it there without coming to any harm. So in short, yeah, I’m a little bit sore.