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Sep 14, 2002

I'm so powerfully confused today. My brain is going dribble dribble dribble out my ears. I wrote a lot. I'm gonna write a lot tomorrow. I finished off Breakfast of Champions. It was cool near the beginning and end, but felt a little stretched in the middle. Speaking of which, I bought two pairs of boxers and a belt today. I hate shopping for underwear. Why do Jockey and Hanes and Calvin Klein feel compelled to trap us between so many assorted pictures of packages? Do they think that guys are going to give the little cards to their girlfriends? Do they believe that we think things like, "Say, that guy is hung like a horse! I'd better pick up his brand of underwear!"? And why, oh why, do department stores put up mannequins with genitalia!? Belts are much better. Nice racks emanating that pleasant new-cowhide smell and a plethora of little numbers to choose from. I've never seen a belt display in which half-naked men played a key role. Except possibly at Abercrombie & Fitch. Their lunatic advertising department probably put up a picture of a pile of men wrestling in a muddy field, clothed only in stylishly rough-hewn belts.

This whole splatter of concepts inspired me to someday build a gender-segregated mall. The lower two levels would be for women only, and be decked out in bright fluorescent lighting, with dazzling pictures of models and that funny perfume/cosmetics smell you get in department stores. The third level would be for the guys. It would be somber and comfortably well-lit without being blinding. The clothes would be in very simple racks, like a library; everything neatly sorted and easy to find in a minimum of time. Models and mannequins would not feature largely. Foul-smelling places like Bath & Body Works and the Yankee Candle Company would be strictly forbidden. There'd be large, comfortable sitting rooms for guys dumb enough to share transportation with females but smart enough not to actually shop with them. I've got a whole other pile of design ideas, but I think you get the gist. I designed this mall because I hate shopping. Life's funny, innit?
Nick ::: 11:08 PM ::: 0 comments

Sep 12, 2002

Hmm...my blog seems to have missed September 11th entirely. Sorry about that.

I had a conversation with Bethany that I can only describe as troubling. While we were on some other topic, I happened to mention that one of the good things people will be able to do as technology advances is to spread life to other planets. I thought this was the sort of thing she'd be interested in, as an environmentalist; sort of a way to make up for the ecological errors of the industrial revolution. Must to my surprise and somewhat to my chagrin, she feels that humans should not leave the planet until we are perfect, i.e. never.

Now, I personally feel that it's a bit ridiculous for anyone to stay perpetually inactive because he or she is afraid of making a mistake, but I'd like to hear what the rest of you think. Should humanity stay on this planet forever, allowing it to become more and more overcrowded and polluted, until it is totally incapable of sustaining life? Or should we try to spread life to other planets, and risk messing up one of our own creations and returning the other planet to a lifeless state?
Nick ::: 8:53 PM ::: 0 comments

Sep 9, 2002

I apologize for the atrocious formatting on that last post, and the even worse art.
Nick ::: 9:45 PM ::: 0 comments

Today I got bored in French class and started jotting down whatever leapt into my head, complete with little drawings, in the style of Kurt Vonnegut. This is the result, with images scanned in. Keep in mind that I kept the pad with me all day, and had plenty of opportunities to scribble in it.

I just bombed my French idioms quiz because I didn't know I had the idioms sheet to study. Ashleigh is annotating Siddhartha next to me. Fuck. I should do that. Every year I decide that I won't be my same slacker self, and every year I slip. It's depressing, in a way. Now we're bludgeoning ourselves to death with the invincible club of French tense-play. Sauriez! Conditionnel if-clauses with a deadly force!

This is a plane. We are talking about planes in French. In france, they call planes avions. Avions also means "we had" in French. I'll be buggered if I ever had a plane.

In Britain, "bugger" means "buttfuck."

My MP3 player is an amazing thing. When I plug it into my PDA, it lights up with LEDs and a playlist pops up and I can use it to listen to all kinds of music. But when they are separate, my MP3 player is just a fairly ugly plastic paperweight.

With buttons. I like pushing buttons. Even if they don't do buggerall.

I just took a Stats test. I was really panicked about time the whole way through. Then I finished ahead of time.

I am tearing a page out of Kurt Vonnegut's book with all this sketching nonsense.
This is Kurt Vonnegut's book:

This is the page:

This is the page on drugs:

This is the page on fire:

Any questions?

I can't fit my senior quote on three lines, but I refuse to change it now that I have decided. This is my senior quote: "God does not play dice with the univers; he plays an ineffable game of his own devising, which might be compared, from the perspective of any of the other players, to being involved in an obscure and complex version of poker in a pitch-dark room, with blank cards, for infinite stakes, with a dealer who won't tell you the rules, and who smiles all the time." I'm thinking of dropping the "perspective" clause. This is my picture of the game God plays:


I'm in Economics now. This is my picture of the Economics room:



That bright thing is a TV. That dark thing is a bunch of sleeping people. The sleeping people are supposed to be learning about the Dow-Jones Industrial Average. The TV is supposed to be teaching them.

I am Carl.
Nick ::: 9:36 PM ::: 0 comments