stop dying, people who are cool

and could all the psychopaths please drop dead? but not before you put me in your wills?

so kurt vonnegut has died, i hear. this makes me sad. and needing to pick up a copy of his memoirs, which talks about the bs that's going on in america right now. you can read an excerpt published on my other blog here. his memoirs are entitled A Man Without a Country, re: living under Bush.

i have been lax in posting, mostly because mom has been home extra long this past weekend so any computer time i got (which was little) was devoted to WoW, not schoolwork or blogging or anything. on the plus side i am now level 23 and have my poisons, and my bro bought me a bunch of new gear, so now i can beat the crap out of things in style.

though tis usually not my way, i have engaged in comment wars on this YouTube video, which everyone who considers him/herself to be my friend or who claims to understand me at all should watch. no questions, just watch. now.

and i love alanis so much. and especially that she's canadian.

fergie just got owned by a canadian! apparently fergie loved it and sent alanis flowers...you know alanis has pwned you when you thank her for it.

that's about it, i suppose. i'm not really coherent enough to talk intelligently any more, so it will have to wait.

as a note on what i did today and yesterday, as that is what blogs are, glorified voyeurism:

yesterday i played WoW all day. not kidding.

today i planted two trees and a rhubarb plant and then went to school and did no schoolwork. then i came home and played wow.

yesterday i also proceeded to have a conversation with travis which, on my part, i am less than proud of. because i didn't need to come to any realizations, i was happy in my bubble, but because of my own stupid neediness i did. this makes no sense and it's not intended to. let stand that i'm pissed off at myself for going past the point of no return.

until the same bat-time, same bat-channel,
you stay classy, san diego
|j|

kurt vonnegut

Custodians of chaos

In this extract from his forthcoming memoirs, Kurt Vonnegut is horrified by the hypocrisy in contemporary US politics

By Kurt Vonnegut

06/17/06 "Information Clearing House" -- -- "Do unto others what you would have them do unto you." A lot of people think Jesus said that, because it is so much the sort of thing Jesus liked to say. But it was actually said by Confucius, a Chinese philosopher, five hundred years before there was that greatest and most humane of human beings, named Jesus Christ.

The Chinese also gave us, via Marco Polo, pasta and the formula for gunpowder. The Chinese were so dumb they only used gunpowder for fireworks. And everybody was so dumb back then that nobody in either hemisphere even knew that there was another one.

We've sure come a long way since then. Sometimes I wish we hadn't. I hate H-bombs and the Jerry Springer Show

But back to people like Confucius and Jesus and my son the doctor, Mark, each of whom have said in their own way how we could behave more humanely and maybe make the world a less painful place. One of my favourite humans is Eugene Debs, from Terre Haute in my native state of Indiana.

Get a load of this. Eugene Debs, who died back in 1926, when I was not yet four, ran five times as the Socialist party candidate for president, winning 900,000 votes, almost 6 percent of the popular vote, in 1912, if you can imagine such a ballot. He had this to say while campaigning:

"As long as there is a lower class, I am in it.

"As long as there is a criminal element, I am of it.

"As long as there is a soul in prison, I am not free."

Doesn't anything socialistic make you want to throw up? Like great public schools, or health insurance for all?

When you get out of bed each morning, with the roosters crowing, wouldn't you like to say. "As long as there is a lower class, I am in it. As long as there is a criminal element, I am of it. As long as there is a soul in prison, I am not free."

How about Jesus' Sermon on the Mount, the Beatitudes?

Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the Earth.

Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy.

Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called the children of God.

And so on.

Not exactly planks in a Republican platform. Not exactly George W Bush, Dick Cheney, or Donald Rumsfeld stuff.

For some reason, the most vocal Christians among us never mention the Beatitudes. But, often with tears in their eyes, they demand that the Ten Commandments be posted in public buildings. And of course that's Moses, not Jesus. I haven't heard one of them demand that the Sermon on the Mount, the Beatitudes, be posted anywhere.

"Blessed are the merciful" in a courtroom? "Blessed are the peacemakers" in the Pentagon? Give me a break!

It so happens that idealism enough for anyone is not made of perfumed pink clouds. It is the law! It is the US Constitution.

But I myself feel that our country, for whose Constitution I fought in a just war, might as well have been invaded by Martians and body snatchers. Sometimes I wish it had been. What has happened instead is that it was taken over by means of the sleaziest, low-comedy, Keystone Cops-style coup d'état imaginable.

I was once asked if I had any ideas for a really scary reality TV show. I have one reality show that would really make your hair stand on end: "C-Students from Yale".

George W Bush has gathered around him upper-crust C-students who know no history or geography, plus not-so-closeted white supremacists, aka Christians, and plus, most frighteningly, psychopathic personalities, or PPs, the medical term for smart, personable people who have no consciences.

To say somebody is a PP is to make a perfectly respectable diagnosis, like saying he or she has appendicitis or athlete's foot. The classic medical text on PPs is The Mask of Sanity by Dr Hervey Cleckley, a clinical professor of psychiatry at the Medical College of Georgia, published in 1941. Read it!

Some people are born deaf, some are born blind or whatever, and this book is about congenitally defective human beings of a sort that is making this whole country and many other parts of the planet go completely haywire nowadays. These were people born without consciences, and suddenly they are taking charge of everything.

PPs are presentable, they know full well the suffering their actions may cause others, but they do not care. They cannot care because they are nuts. They have a screw loose!

And what syndrome better describes so many executives at Enron and WorldCom and on and on, who have enriched themselves while ruining their employees and investors and country and who still feel as pure as the driven snow, no matter what anybody may say to or about them? And they are waging a war that is making billionaires out of millionaires, and trillionaires out of billionaires, and they own television, and they bankroll George Bush, and not because he's against gay marriage.

So many of these heartless PPs now hold big jobs in our federal government, as though they were leaders instead of sick. They have taken charge. They have taken charge of communications and the schools, so we might as well be Poland under occupation.

They might have felt that taking our country into an endless war was simply something decisive to do. What has allowed so many PPs to rise so high in corporations, and now in government, is that they are so decisive. They are going to do something every fuckin' day and they are not afraid. Unlike normal people, they are never filled with doubts, for the simple reason that they don't give a fuck what happens next. Simply can't. Do this! Do that! Mobilise the reserves! Privatise the public schools! Attack Iraq! Cut health care! Tap everybody's telephone! Cut taxes on the rich! Build a trillion-dollar missile shield! Fuck habeas corpus and the Sierra Club and In These Times, and kiss my ass!

There is a tragic flaw in our precious Constitution, and I don't know what can be done to fix it. This is it: only nut cases want to be president. This was true even in high school. Only clearly disturbed people ran for class president.

The title of Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 is a parody of the title of Ray Bradbury's great science-fiction novel Fahrenheit 451. Four hundred and fifty-one degrees Fahrenheit is the combustion point, incidentally, of paper, of which books are composed. The hero of Bradbury's novel is a municipal worker whose job is burning books.

While on the subject of burning books, I want to congratulate librarians, not famous for their physical strength, who, all over this country, have staunchly resisted anti-democratic bullies who have tried to remove certain books from their shelves, and destroyed records rather than have to reveal to thought police the names of persons who have checked out those titles.

So the America I loved still exists, if not in the White House, the Supreme Court, the Senate, the House of Representatives, or the media. The America I loved still exists at the front desks of our public libraries.

And still on the subject of books: our daily news sources, newspapers and TV, are now so craven, so unvigilant on behalf of the American people, so uninformative, that only in books do we learn what's really going on.

I will cite an example: House of Bush, House of Saud by Craig Unger, published in early 2004, that humiliating, shameful, blood-soaked year.

In case you haven't noticed, as the result of a shamelessly rigged election in Florida, in which thousands of African-Americans were arbitrarily disenfranchised, we now present ourselves to the rest of the world as proud, grinning, jut-jawed, pitiless war-lovers with appallingly powerful weaponry - who stand unopposed.

In case you haven't noticed, we are now as feared and hated all over the world as Nazis once were.

And with good reason.

In case you haven't noticed, our unelected leaders have dehumanised millions and millions of human beings simply because of their religion and race. We wound 'em and kill 'em and torture 'em and imprison 'em all we want.

Piece of cake.

In case you haven't noticed, we also dehumanised our own soldiers, not because of their religion or race, but because of their low social class.

Send 'em anywhere. Make 'em do anything.

Piece of cake.

The O'Reilly Factor.

So I am a man without a country, except for the librarians and a Chicago paper called In These Times.

Before we attacked Iraq, the majestic New York Times guaranteed there were weapons of mass destruction there.

Albert Einstein and Mark Twain gave up on the human race at the end of their lives, even though Twain hadn't even seen the first world war. War is now a form of TV entertainment, and what made the first world war so particularly entertaining were two American inventions, barbed wire and the machine gun.

Shrapnel was invented by an Englishman of the same name. Don't you wish you could have something named after you?

Like my distinct betters Einstein and Twain, I now give up on people, too. I am a veteran of the second world war and I have to say this is not the first time I have surrendered to a pitiless war machine.

My last words? "Life is no way to treat an animal, not even a mouse."

Napalm came from Harvard. Veritas

Our president is a Christian? So was Adolf Hitler. What can be said to our young people, now that psychopathic personalities, which is to say persons without consciences, without senses of pity or shame, have taken all the money in the treasuries of our government and corporations, and made it all their own?

© 2005 Kurt Vonnegut Extracted from A Man Without a Country: : A Memoir of Life in George W Bush's America.

real emotion

so illustrator drove me up the wall today, like it has done every day since i started taking it. in frustration at the pencil tool and my shaky hand i ended up scrapping actually tracing the chick and gave her my own flourishes.



and that drawing effectively demonstrates how illustrator makes me feel.

shite day all around. nothing happened right or on time. back in agony all day. had nervous breakdown around 10pm. and have failed to get to bed by 12. because i am still waiting for major to return from his self-walk. i'm getting a bit worried.

while i was "doing class work" at school i found some stuff on cthulthu, including but not limited to these:


http://www.deviantart.com/deviation/22728499/?qo=23&q=cthulhu&qh=boost%3Apopular+age_sigma%3A24h+age_scale%3A5

they tickled me in a way that if loretta tickled me that way i'd be like oh, that's nice.

on the plus side--i may very well be going down to vancouver at the end of april/beginning of may. seattle and van. so voo! we shall hang out. and i may need a place to stay....*sheepish look*

oh fuck. enjoy the silence just came on. i must go into a corner and cry now.

things i wish:

• that i were rich
• that i had a job
• that said job was very flexible
• that i was independent, at least semi
• that i could see travis for either our year or 13-month anniversary. but i don't think that's going to happen.
  
• that i had more of this fabulous yarn, so i could finish this blanket.
  

and many others. that's it for now though.

remember kiddies:

Goodbye, Scotty

4 hours, 26 minutes ago

LAS CRUCES, N.M. (AP) - The ashes of James Doohan, the Canadian-born actor who played chief engineer Montgomery "Scotty" Scott on the original "Star Trek" TV series, have been loaded into a rocket that is set to launch in New Mexico later this month.

The remains of Doohan, Mercury astronaut Gordon Cooper and some 200 others were loaded into the rocket Friday by Charles Chafer, chief executive of Celestis, a Texas company that contracts with rocket firms to send cremated remains into space. "And we're ready to go," Chafer said after inserting the silver canister.

Jerry Larson, president of Connecticut-based UP Aerospace Inc., said the rocket will be launched April 28.

Families paid US$495 to have a few grams of their loved one's ashes placed on the rocket.

Chafer said he is aware of the dedication of "Star Trek" fans.

"There's no doubt that we'll find a way to accommodate fans who travel here and want to be part of that experience," he said.

Doohan died in July 2005 at age 85. He was born in Vancouver and raised in Sarnia, Ont.

The remains of "Star Trek" creator Gene Roddenberry were blasted into space in 1997.

Goodbye, Scotty. You will be sorely missed. Live long, and prosper.

this in the news today

Canada's East Coast seal hunt opens quietly in Gulf of St. Lawrence

2 hours, 10 minutes ago

CHARLOTTETOWN (CP) - The East Coast seal hunt quietly opened Monday in the southern Gulf of St. Lawrence, where ice conditions were described as the worst seen in a decade.

Fisheries officials said they expect only a few boats from the Maritime provinces will take part in the first phase of the centuries-old hunt. About 40 boats from Nova Scotia, New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island are eligible, with most of the early hunting focused on the Cape Breton coast, said Fisheries Department spokesman Roger Simon.

"There are a few seals scattered from Sydney towards Canso but they are very sparse and the ice is broken and deteriorated," he said.

"What seals were in that area may be swimming back north and we know a higher proportion drowned this year."

One fisheries observer said only two boats went out Monday.

Newborn seals cannot swim in the first weeks of life and need solid ice to survive.

The total quota for this year's seal hunt is 270,000 animals. That's 65,000 fewer seals than last year, a change that was made mainly because of the ice conditions.

Simon said the largest concentration of Gulf seals is in the more northerly Strait of Belle Isle, between Quebec and Newfoundland and Labrador.

That area of the northern Gulf will be open to hunters beginning Wednesday.

Animal welfare groups are condemning the Canadian government's decision to allow a hunt in the southern Gulf where poor ice conditions have caused unusually high pup mortality.

"I've witnessed the hunt for nine years, and I've never seen ice conditions this bad," said Rebecca Aldworth of the Humane Society of the United States, a leading opponent of the annual slaughter.

"Even Canadian government scientists are estimating up to 100 per cent of the pups born in the southern Gulf died because of the lack of ice. It is reprehensible that the Canadian government would allow sealers to kill the few surviving pups."

Most of the seals will be taken in a subsequent hunt off northern Newfoundland in an area called the Front. An opening date has yet to be announced for the start of that hunt.

Sheryl Fink of the International Fund for Animal Welfare flew over the southern Gulf on Monday and saw only one sealing boat.

"The hunters were shooting seals," Fink said.

"It's so depressing. There are so few seals out there and these hunters are cleaning out what's left."

Aldworth and Fink are angry that Canadian fisheries officials denied observer permits for the first two days of the commercial Gulf hunt.

"The commercial seal hunt occurs in public space and observation is a right guaranteed under the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, not a privilege to be arbitrarily granted by a government department," Aldworth said.

Phil Jenkins said the Fisheries Department is trying to strike a balance.

He said with so few sealing vessels in the southern Gulf and very little sealing activity, the department decided it would not be a good idea to hand out observer permits.

He said the decision to allow or prohibit observers is covered by marine mammal regulations. He said the permits are decided on a case-by-case basis.

Fuck, sometimes I hate being Canadian. Fuck you, Fisheries Department!

Of course, I feel a bit hypocritical for not donating when they asked. But then again, it's not like I had the money to donate in the first place.

So Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles has come to Powell River. I'm going to go see it tonight with my friend (can you believe I actually have friends up here? I'm like, WTF, mate?). I wanted to find a purple head band to go a cross my eyes, but... no money. So I'll just have to make do with wearing my TMNT hoodie.

I'm probably going to see it tomorrow night as well. We decided on tonight originally because I have Spoken Word on Tuesdays. Well, I just got a phone call from the place where I host spoken word saying it won't be going on for 3 weeks because they can't get anyone to volunteer shift for Tuesday nights.

This is the kind of resturant-ish place it is. People volunteer shifts.

IE nothing gets done. Nothing important to other people, at any rate.

I must admit I'm a little ticked. No, make that a lot.

First they make it not happen for 2 Tuesdays (tomorrow was supposed to be our first time back in 2 weeks), and now this. I'm thinking we should move locations.

But whatever. It's my mom's thing, not mine, and honestly the fact that it's off frees me up for school work or a social life. Or finishing those library books.

On that note, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress (Heinlein) is really quite good. So is Lady of Avalon, by the late Marion Zimmer Bradley.

My brother was telling me that he wanted to see a book out on Boudicca, the Iceni Queen who led one of the most successful revolts against the Romans. Her daughters were kidnapped, and she killed them with an arrow thru each neck so they wouldn't have to face being raped by Roman soldiers. I also would love to see a book out on Boudicca. She's one of my s/heroes.

There is more I have to say, but it's almost 2pm and I must a) shower b) walk the dog c) go to school d) go to my house and work on stuff. I don't really have enough time, as I said I'd be at my house by 3. Eh. I'll be late. Or something.

Ave atque vale
Jag

wow or something

april fools. i am a geek.

oh wait. you knew that.

here are some characters that belong to me. body and soul. *insert maniacal laugh*



that's my level 18 warlock on black dragonflight. he's my #1 alt.



zardria is my main on blk dragonflight. she's a lvl 22 rogue.



on shadowmoon i play alliance. this is plaavalaguna, my main hunter. draenei are soooo cute! in the background is her pet, crowley.

more later. maybe.

Resist: Fall in love.

Join the Resistance: Fall in Love

Falling in love is the ultimate act of revolution, of resistance to today's tedious, socially restrictive, culturally constrictive, humanly meaningless world.


Love transforms the world. Where the lover formerly felt boredom, he now feels passion. Where she once was complacent, she now is excited and compelled to self-asserting action. The world which once seemed empty and tiresome becomes filled with meaning, filled with risks and rewards, with majesty and danger. Life for the lover is a gift, an adventure with the highest possible stakes; every moment is memorable, heartbreaking in its fleeting beauty. When he falls in love, a man who once felt disoriented, alienated, and confused will know exactly what he wants. Suddenly his existence will make sense to him; suddenly it becomes valuable, even glorious and noble, to him. Burning passion is an antidote that will cure the worst cases of despair and resigned obedience.


Love makes it possible for individuals to connect to others in a meaningful way—it impels them to leave their shells and risk being honest and spontaneous together, to come to know each other in profound ways. Thus love makes it possible for them to care about each other genuinely, rather than at the end of the gun of Christian doctrine. But at the same time, it plucks the lover out of the routines of everyday life and separates her from other human beings. She will feel a million miles away from the herd of humanity, living as she is in a world entirely different from theirs.


In this sense love is subversive, because it poses a threat to the established order of our modern lives. The boring rituals of workday productivity and socialized etiquette will no longer mean anything to a man who has fallen in love, for there are more important forces guiding him than mere inertia and deference to tradition. Marketing strategies that depend upon apathy or insecurity to sell the products that keep the economy running as it does will have no effect upon him. Entertainment designed for passive consumption, which depends upon exhaustion or cynicism in the viewer, will not interest him.


There is no place for the passionate, romantic lover in today's world, business or private. For he can see that it might be more worthwhile to hitchhike to Alaska (or to sit in the park and watch the clouds sail by) with his sweetheart than to study for his calculus exam or sell real estate, and if he decides that it is, he will have the courage to do it rather than be tormented by unsatisfied longing. He knows that breaking into a cemetery and making love under the stars will make for a much more memorable night than watching television ever could. So love poses a threat to our consumer-driven economy, which depends upon consumption of (largely useless) products and the labor that this consumption necessitates to perpetuate itself.


Similarly, love poses a threat to our political system, for it is difficult to convince a man who has a lot to live for in his personal relationships to be willing to fight and die for an abstraction such as the state; for that matter, it may be difficult to convince him to even pay taxes. It poses a threat to cultures of all kinds, for when human beings are given wisdom and valor by true love they will not be held back by traditions or customs which are irrelevant to the feelings that guide them.


Love even poses a threat to our society itself. Passionate love is ignored and feared by the bourgeoisie, for it poses a great danger to the stability and pretense they covet. Love permits no lies, no falsehoods, not even any polite half-truths, but lays all emotions bare and reveals secrets which domesticated men and women cannot bear. You cannot lie with your emotional and sexual response; situations or ideas will excite or repel you whether you like it or not, whether it is polite or not, whether it is advisable or not. One cannot be a lover and a (dreadfully) responsible, (dreadfully) respectable member of today's society at the same time; for love will impel you to do things which are not "responsible" or "respectable." True love is irresponsible, irrepressible, rebellious, scornful of cowardice, dangerous to the lover and everyone around her, for it serves one master alone: the passion that makes the human heart beat faster.. It disdains anything else, be it self-preservation, obedience, or shame. Love urges men and women to heroism, and to antiheroism—to indefensible acts that need no defense for the one who loves.


For the lover speaks a different moral and emotional language than the typical bourgeois man does. The average bourgeois man has no overwhelming, smoldering desires. Sadly, all he knows is the silent despair that comes of spending his life pursuing goals set for him by his family, his educators, his employers, his nation, and his culture, without ever being able to even consider what needs and wants he might have of his own. Without the burning fire of desire to guide him, he has no criteria upon which to choose what is right and wrong for himself. Consequently he is forced to adopt some dogma or doctrine to direct him through his life. There are a wide variety of moralities to choose from in the marketplace of ideas, but which morality a man buys into is immaterial so long as he chooses one because he is at a loss otherwise as to what he should do with himself and his life. How many men and women, having never realized that they had the option to choose their own destinies, wander through life in a dull haze thinking and acting in accordance with the laws that have been taught to them, merely because they no longer have any other idea of what to do? But the lover needs no prefabricated principles to direct her; her desires identify what is right and wrong for her, for her heart guides her through life. She sees beauty and meaning in the world, because her desires paint the world in these colors. She has no need for dogmas, for moral systems, for commandments and imperatives, for she knows what to do without instructions.


Thus she does indeed pose quite a threat to our society. What if everyone decided right and wrong for themselves, without any regard for conventional morality? What if everyone did whatever they wanted to, with the courage to face any consequences? What if everyone feared loveless, lifeless monotony more than they fear taking risks, more than they fear being hungry or cold or in danger? What if everyone set down their "responsibilities" and "common sense," and dared to pursue their wildest dreams, to set the stakes high and live each day as if it were the last? Think what a place the world would be! Certainly it would be different than it is now—and it is quite a truism that people from the "mainstream," the simultaneous keepers and victims of the status quo, fear change.


And so, despite the stereotyped images used in the media to sell toothpaste and honeymoon suites, genuine passionate love is discouraged in our culture. Being "carried away by your emotions" is frowned upon; instead we are raised to always be on our guard lest our hearts lead us astray. Rather than being encouraged to have the courage to face the consequences of risks taken in pursuit of our hearts' desires, we are counseled not to take risks at all, to be "responsible." And love itself is regulated. Men must not fall in love with other men, nor women with other women, nor individuals from different ethnic backgrounds with each other, or else the usual bigots who form the front-line offensive in the assault of modern Western culture upon the individual will step in. Men and women who have already entered into a legal/religious contract with each other are not to fall in love with anyone else, even if they no longer feel any passion for their marital partner. Love as most of us know it today is a carefully prescribed and preordained ritual, something that happens on Friday nights in expensive movie theaters and restaurants, something that fills the pockets of the shareholders in the entertainment industries without preventing workers from showing up to the office on time and ready to reroute phone calls all day long. This regulated, commercial "love" is nothing like the passionate, burning love that consumes the genuine lover. These restrictions, expectations, and regulations smother true love; for love is a wild flower that can never grow within the confines prepared for it but only appears where it is least expected.


We must fight against these cultural restraints that would cripple and smother our desires. For it is love that gives meaning to life, desire that makes it possible for us to make sense of our existence and find purpose in our lives. Without these, there is no way for us to determine how to live our lives, except to submit to some authority, to some god, master or doctrine that will tell us what to do and how to do it without ever giving us the satisfaction that self-determination does. So fall in love today, with men, with women, with music, with ambition, with yourself. . . with life!


One might say that it is ridiculous to implore others to fall in love—one either falls in love or one does not, it is not a choice that can be made consciously. Emotions do not follow the instructions of the rational mind. But the environment in which we must live out our lives has a great influence on our emotions, and we can make rational decisions that will affect this environment. It should be possible to work to change an environment that is hostile to love into an environment that will encourage it. Our task must be to engineer our world so that it is a world in which people can and do fall in love, and thus to reconstitute human beings so that we will be ready for the "revolution" spoken of in these pages—so that we will be able to find meaning and happiness in our lives.


What if everyone decided right and wrong for themselves, without any regard for conventional morality? What if everyone did whatever they wanted to, with the courage to face any consequences? What if everyone feared loveless, lifeless monotony more than they fear taking risks, more than they fear being hungry or cold or in danger? What if everyone set down their "responsibilities" and "common sense," and dared to pursue their wildest dreams, to set the stakes high and live each day as if it were the last? Think what a place the world would be!

fucking weak

Night Elf Druid Night Elves are the sexiest of the bunch.  They're the hot flower children of Warcraft: at one with nature, and dancing all the while. As a druid, you tend to be relaxed and accepting - though if there is something you don't want to do, then you won't do it - simple as that.  You're an easygoing and versatile person. Find out your real-life WoW race and class at QuizGalaxy.com

  that sucks. i fucking hate night elves.   Blood Elf Rogue ftw!

kissing in the rain

something tells me that unless i finish uploading the rest of my songs to this computer, i'm going to run out of blog entry titles very very soon.

anyway. on to other things.

several times in the near past i have signed petitions and such to stop the Canadian seal hunt. this is all i can do, really. i have no money for diesel, let alone a donation of 50 dollars to Oceana.

today they sent me two emails, the second within a few minutes of my deleting the first, saying won't you please help us and DONATE? DONATEDONATEDONATE!!!!

Oceana, LAY OFF. i have done what i can. i don't have any money. very very very literally. i feel just as bad about the seals as anyone else does, but when it comes to action donating money is just not on for me. i will gladly go up and tackle the seal hunters, bludgeoning them until the snow runs red, but i don't have any money! STOP ASKING!

so i have officially moved to Powell River, as much because i love it here as because i can't afford a plane ticket back to Maui, so it is here i stay. my last blog had to do a lot with my life on Maui; it didn't feel right continuing there after my move to PR.

Powell River is a small town, about 20,000 people. its community college is more dysfunctional than Maui's. (imagine THAT.)

still, it is fun here, and it has a nice small-town feel which is unbearable in the winter but quite pleasant in spring and summer. i have yet to spend autumn here; reports forthcoming.

i now live with my mom, but it is temporary, at least only lasting until i get electricity, plumbing, and floors into my own house down the street. my own house used to be a grow-op, and is therefore in bad shape. (for you Americans, a grow-op is a place where peope grow marijuana illegally. i know you're thinking "how else is there to grow it?", but up in Canada things are more lax. or they were a few years ago. i'm not sure if the law still says so long as you have under 50 plants it's ok, but it did last i heard.)

i spent december and january here (about half of each month) with my mom, dad, grandparents, and travis, though not all at the same time. while at my grandparents' place i was, for some reason, waking up extraordinarily early and got to see some nice winter sunrises (of course, it helps that in winter the sun doesn't rise until around 8:30).

after christmas (ugh) with the folks and solstice (yay!) with some local pagans, mom, travis and i headed up to PR for new year's and some r&r (no, Ashen, not THAT kind...).

being the only two men in the group, travis and major instantly bonded.

almost immediately afterwards, we headed on down to my dad's farm on hornby, where travis's skills proved numerous and my surliness endless.


i'm upset because my stepmom is a superficial, fake, german bitch. travis is happy because....well, i'm not sure what would lead someone to be happy at my father's place, but if anyone could do it, or at least fake it, it would be travis.

luckily while there we got to stay in the studio, so the never-ending sex we had and the chocolate binges i indulged in were hidden from my dad.

of course, we had to sleep on the mattress on the floor, because we were too fat for the bed. not actually said in so many words, but they didn't need to.

after the almost-good-but-hell-at-the-end visit, dad and margit drove us to the Comox ferry, which goes directly back to PR. below are pictures of the Hornby ferry terminal.

and my dad and margit, because hey--even the devil has pictures, right?

homecoming to mom was good, even if there is always tension no matter which family member i'm with. it snowed! yay! which is apparently really unusual for PR. we've had a lot of unusual this winter.

so we relaxed and vegged at mom's place, rescuing our tenant's cat from his negligence and changing his name from Meow-Meows to Crowley. not like he ever comes when called anyway.

snow was gorgeous, and after a few weeks of making sure i was super careful with my super fragile back, i threw it out on a walk and had to be carried home. luckily both mom and travis are strong like truck! no pictures of me writhing about in agony, but here's one from just before.

also got trav to go with to the live poets' meeting, which is hey--tonight! again--and very fun all around, if you do indeed like that sort of thing.


just as a side note, mom really loves major. who wouldn't?


playful wolffy.

so a short, picture summary of a chapter of my life. this may not happen as often as i'd like. i don't ever take enough pictures.


that would be me. a cat in a glass, going to the moon, brb.

actually, i'm a cat on the moon, going to class, brb.

jag

Iris

So I may have screwed things up…again.

It's continually amazing to me how I manage to fall so easily back into old patterns, allowing my life to fuck up royally and for me to be a waste of space, yet again.

Ok, so I'm dramatizing. Leo: comes with the territory.

I'm in two courses at the community college in my town. They are both online, but I could not afford the software for them (Adobe Creative Suite 2 Premium and Macromedia Studio 8 – try over 300 bucks each, at student discount—they're a thousand each regularly). Ergo, I must go to campus everyday to work on my assignments.

So I go to campus everyday except yesterday, when I vegged out all day (stupid, I know). I get my Dreamweaver week 1 assignment in, no problem. I've been working on my Illustrator assignment, but I've never used anything like Illustrator before—it's completely new ground for me. Dreamweaver is easy—it's coding webpages, which I know, without the coding. What a breeze! Illustrator? The devil in software form. At least until I get to know the program a little better.

I've been working on this one assignment all week, and was going to finish it today. Like everyday, I get a late start—noon, which is earlier than the rest of this week—and immediately start doing what I've prioritized as the more urgent things. Namely, cleaning the house so mom doesn't freak when she comes home tonight (and she's still not home so I could've put that off) and walking the dog so he doesn't piss himself. Then I get diesel for my car, before it dies of thirst, return a few library books because I cannot afford late fees on top of everything else, and go to school.

It's 5:30 by this point.

I've forgotten that the office at school closes at 4:30 on Fridays, and stays closed all weekend.

My assignment is due on the 25th. Sunday.

Bloody Sunday.

Not even a week into my second foray into college and I've already fucked things up.

I'm not stressing about getting it done—I've explained things to my instructor, and I'm pretty sure she'll email me back saying yes, I can give you an extension. After all, it is the first week and it was as simple error in judgement, right?

However, I'm upset with myself, because once again I've done the same old JanaThing: procrastinate, don't get it done, and scramble to make deadlines, miss said deadlines, beg for extensions, and then probably miss those too.

*bangs head against nearby cement wall*

But hey. At least I got an hour of painting the kitchen in.

Now if only my internet would work better.

*EDIT* Followed my boyfriend's advice and what do ya know--internet is fixed. CHA-CHING.

i love Ashen sooooooooo much

i recently sent my sister some pictures, the above being one of them, to show her what i'd discovered i could do with pictureit! on my computer.

this is her summary of why they wouldn't load.

No need...I figured out why they didn't load the first time...it was being my Mom.

"Why aren't you loading the pictures? There's little boxes with Xs in them."

"I didn't let them load."

"Well, load them now, please."

"But if you download these pictures, something BAD might happen!"

"They're from my best friend!"

"Something could still happen."

"..."

"I'm just trying to protect you. Because I love you."

"They're just pictures!!!"

"Ahhh, but they could be pictures of anything, you know."

"But – wait, what??"

"You know...licentious things."

"....It's Jana sending me these, not some 40-year old male stranger!"

"It could be."

"WHAT?!"

"He could've stolen her identity. Identity theft is very popular right now."

"...Great, my computer is paranoid delusional..."

"Even if it is her, and I'm still not sure it is, what if the file's corrupt?"

"Her computer handled it fine. What are you, a pussy?"

"Don't call me names! I knew she was a bad influence on you! If Jana jumped off a bridge, would you do it too?"

"I'm from Hawaii. Everyone jumps off bridges there, it's like a major pastime."

"You know what I mean! Would you do anything she does?"

"Well, you better hope I don't – she's getting a NEW COMPUTER."

{Shocked silence}

"...I can see this relationship is one we're both going to have to work at."

enjoy the silence

i have been up for 12 hours, roughly, on 4 hours or less of sleep.

i'm very tired.

but regardless, i will push on in my plan to watch v for vendetta tonight for the 7th or 8th time. my plan to watch it on the year anniversary of its release (the 17th) was thwarted by mom's plan to use the computer and the forbid me from using it after her (at like 1 in the morning). thanks mom. way to be supportive of your daughter's never-ending obsession.

i'm not complaining. she's out of town for the week so i am free to do as i please.

and i please myself to watch v. again and again and again.....

and maybe get something done? school starts today; i must also find a job. and walk the dog every day, 2 or 3 times, and feed the dog and cat, and clean the house, and etc etc.

completely ironic that my classes start on the day everyone else's spring break starts. I HAVE NO SOCIAL LIFE LOLLERZ.

in other news: i got turned into a newt. but i got better.

over and out
jagged

precious things

"We learn from history that when good and evil struggle against each other, initially evil tends to take the upper hand until all of a sudden it disintegrates and collapses."

--Ghandi

perhaps right now is the time to take these words to heart. with such an utter despair gripping the world, the feeling like we can't change anything even if we did try, that it's all over so we should just try to survive every day--and indeed, that is all we can do--we need something to hold onto.

i for one don't want this world to end. because even if we are completely fucked up as a species, even if we are a cancer upon the planet, there are things worth saving. paintings. art. beautiful writing. love. yes, it sounds trite, but i would die if the world became a place where i didn't receive poetry from my boyfriend at odd hours of the night just because he was thinking about me. that sort of thing is worth saving. a mother's love for her child--the kind of love that makes death seem a small price to pay for the continued well-being of your son or daughter. good music. good food. laughter. good movies. even bad movies, because without the bad how would we know what good is?

evil is necessary for the proliferation of good. i do not subscribe to the secularized christian view of good always vanguishing evil for ever and always triumphing and that rewards come to those who wait. rewards come to those who work. the real reward of a good life is seeing the effects of your deeds, not some imaginary feast in the afterlife. i do not even believe in good or evil, per se, because those who we consider evil do not consider themselves evil. it is just a different perspective to them. how do we know we are not the evil ones?

we don't. we just feel in our hearts that things should be run differently, and we can see the effects of the current administration on the planet (not just the US--i'm referring to humanity's administration as a whole) as being generally bad for any other species here.

it could be said that this is supposed to happen--that we'll die out and the world will balance itself out again. even if that's true, how can someone, in good conscience, allow what's going on to happen?

we carry this false belief that accumulating wealth is the ultimate goal of life--or that being the most beautiful is, or the smartest, or the life of the party. these are high school ideas that we carry into life. they come from a culture of estrangement, the culture we were born into. we see ourselves as separate from everything and one else, and therefore we don't see our actions as affecting anyone else. the culture of estrangement, of power-over, of hierarchy, makes teenagers of adults. we've got a bunch of self-centered (admittedly not always knowingly) people running around doing things to accumulate whatever they can until they die, at which point none of this stuff matters anyway.

what matters is not being better than every one else. what matters is to be the best you can be, you, yourself, your individual self, while retaining the knowledge that you are not alone. you are brother or sister to everyone else in the whole world, to every tree, flower, bush, bee, bird, and wolf--you are a strand in a great web that stretches beyond this planet and out into the universe, that is the universe, and energy is what you are made of. the force does not flow thru us, because then it is seen as separate from us. the force is us. and how we choose to be, what kind of people we choose to be determines the 'light' or 'darkness' of it.

the point is not to do good.

the point is to do better.

and to remember, that at the end of the day, you are not alone. you may feel alone. especially if you are disconnected from friends, family, or just like-minded acquantiances.

and to remember, that no matter how futile it all seems, that no matter how much you want to give up for lack of any visible change, that despite all this, your actions will matter. because whether you are directly or indirectly a factor, things will change. they always do. and doing something, whether or not it works, empowers you.

this should not be about guilt.

this should be about feeling good about picking up the litter on your daily walk, even if it's back twofold the next day, because you made a difference in the world's fabric of energy, if only for a second. seeing litter is a depressing sight for most people. by picking it up, you are improving a small corner of the world, for a little bit, allowing some light to shine there, which will touch other people in their busy lives for a while, and reach out to touch the others they see or deal with, and so on around the world.

and the same goes for any little bit of activism. whether it be hugathon, chaining yourself to a fence to protest a nuclear reactor being built, standing on a corner with a sandwich board sign, or blowing up parliament to prove a point, to break down old structures so that new ones may be born out of the rubble.

this evolutionary stage we're on has grown stagnant. we cannot allow ourselves to live in fear. we must switch to a system of power-from-within, of acknowledging everything as sacred--sacred being whatever we value for being itself. our bodies are sacred, and what comes out of our bodies--here i speak of shit--is sacred, because it composts, and out of compost comes new life. life is a cycle. water-based sewage systems are probably one of the stupidest ideas we've had as humans. they disrupt that cycle.

so do the burial systems of our dead. cremation is more sensible than being put in your best clothing into a wooden box that will take longer to decompose than you will to be lowered into the ground where you will take up space that can be used by the living, but it's still pretty useless. my father wants to be composted when he dies. he can't, because it's illegal. the law says that instead of being useful when dead, he must rot where he will feed worms who will make the cemetary dirt very rich in nutrients, but it's being used as a cemetary so that's a moot point.

these systems we have in place prevent us from being the best we can be, as humans, and as mammals. we forget this alot, but we are mammals, so far as we can tell. we are apes, so far as we know. we must accept our place in the animal kingdom outside of biology class and work on making our place more of a niche than a gouged-out hold in the ecosystem's wall. we obviously have some purpose on this planet. let's develop it.

maybe it's art, of all kinds. music, words, paintings, textiles, the list goes on. maybe it's our mental capacities. we are capable of great things. but while we are officially secular, we are still ruled by fear-based, monotheistic, patriarchal thought-forms that teach us different is bad, rule by many is heretical, and female is dark and dirty.

newsflash: we are all dark and dirty. women bleed. men poop. humans eat, piss, fuck, shit, sleep, fart, and burp our way thru our lives, and try to hide it all because it's so 'shameful'. the ones who embrace all these natural bodily functions and the natural state of nudity are 'deviants' who must be 'locked-up'.

if we're so fucking secular, then why are we so illogical about the simplest things?

these beliefs are based on fear. fear from a triad of patriarchal abrahamic religions that still rule the world, like it or not. we claim to be secularized, but the truth is that men are valued over women, white over black/other colors, and the One over the Many.

i hate the terms white or black magick used so frequently by new followers of the craft. it emphasizes the belief that white = pure good righteous virtuous pure perfect ruling class and black = dirty bad immoral lewd impure slave class. the very usage in a power-from-within religion of hierarchial terms comes from the fact that almost all of us are raised in the culture of estrangement, and must come to the culture of connectivity, of immanence, from that place, and so must shed those old ideas. it's easier to fall back into old systems than to actively work at creating new ones.

this world is full of horrible things.

this world is full of precious and wonderful things.

what do you want to be humanity's last legacy?

left us so brittle

a new life, a new blog. this is so silly of me. i should be sleeping. instead i am sitting and wasting the hours of the night, the good hours when the right hormones get manufactured.

maybe mom's right. i just to want to shoot myself in the foot. no matter what. if i can prove to the world and myself that i really am that fucked up, maybe everyone will leave me alone.

stupid.

i've lost my feeling of wanting to post in my old blog. the magic is gone. so i'm searching for new magic. as if there is such a thing. i just need a change.

before i sign off, some notes.

i do not always obey the english language. i know its rules very well, but at 4:22 am pacific standard time the will to capitalize escapes me. correct my english and face my wrath.

i don't really care what you think, unless you're a friend. and even then, i care minimally. i'm me. i post a blog for no reason except my own. so if you're here to say 'ur a fukin twat 4 thinking that stupid', save your breath. go do something appropriately rednecked. what are you doing near a computer anyway?

feelings are intense. words are trivial. i'm a writer. i understand my words are crap, because of the language to which they are limited. when english becomes a noun-less language and we are able to abandon the language of estrangement, to embrace holistic thinking and realize that we are of the source which does not exist because we are the source and the source is us and we are all connected so thoroughly that we are one, then what i write will be real. until then i try to make small changes. success is not my aim. i aim to do it, regardless of consequences.

that is it, for now.

jagged over and out.

fire the grid: be defined

my resolution to publish only newsworthy things in this blog is ridiculous. to assume that my life does not hold seeds of rants that change minds was silly of me. which is not to say that i will be posting highly personal and frivolous things anytime soon, but i will no longer be ignoring this blog.

i've been doing some soul-searching the past...few hours. well, weeks, really. i haven't been at an inspired place for a while now; i feel like i've lost my connection to all that is real--energy, the earth, the goddess. i can't feel those things like the thrumming in my blood like they once were. that is either an indication of my getting stronger and needing surges of the energy to note it, or that i've been cut off.

i think it's the latter. i feel empty inside, and devoid of any energy. i keep on telling myself i need to get energized and start to change my life, but in reality i just don't care right now.

so i need to redeem my callousness. here i will speak. i doubt i'll be read. but at least i'll make the attempt.

i have recently discovered i am an indigo-crystal child (now adult). i think my powers were muted by the fucked-up-edness of my childhood. i'm going to be meditating to recover those lost powers. well, not lost. just....smothered.

i have also learned that maui is a point on earth that holds the essence of lemuria, the first continent (or pangaea for you scientist types out there). so if i could just get over the stress of 8 years of living there, then when i return i can do some earth/healing work. but it explains the attraction new agey/pagany people feel for the place. i used to down talk that attraction, saying they wouldn't feel it for alaska cause it's so cold up there and isn't "paradise". they probably wouldn't. i wonder how many people (like me) moved to powell river because they prefer the cold? not many, but that's cause pr is the warmest place in bc.

so, on to the title of this entry and how it relates. fire the grid is a website that explains it all. the long and short of it is this: on july 17, THIS year, at 11:11 GMT (3:11 am PST; 1:11 am HST), is when we need to 'fire the grid'. the grid of the planet. we need to send our loving energies into it for an hour at that time. we will "reset mother earth with a bioelectric surge of love from humanity". i know i'll be up at 3 am to do it. so will my mom.

you may not believe it, you may think it's a bunch of baloney, which is fine--i'm not trying to convince anyone. but if it's true? can you imagine the change? we could heal the earth. we could fix the problems we started. is an hour really too much time to try that? is it not worth your time?

it's been proven that humanity working together can accomplish miracles. covens probably get more magick done than solitaries. if every person on earth just stopped for this one hour on this one day and focused their love into the earth, i can't even imagine the good we'd accomplish. hell, if every person in one hemisphere did it it would make a difference.

whether or not you believe me or this or anything relating to this 'airy-fairy bullshit', give it some thought. what have you got to lose? an hour, that could be spent playing video games, or stuck in meetings, or rush-hour traffic, or being reprimanded by someone, or playing computer games instead of working. i think you get my point.

free hugs for peace

An important part of working towards a culture of peace is learning to connect compassionately with our relatives, human and non.

Juan Mann started the Free Hugs Campaign in Sydney, Australia, and it grew to a worldwide phenomenon. Coming home from London, he was standing in the airport feeling alone and needing a hug, and decided to stand on the busiest corner in town with a huge sign that said "FREE HUGS". He continued to do this, persistently, and started connecting with many people. The movement gained fame and momentum, and was consequently banned by the government. Not to be discouraged, Juan started a petition to un-ban it, and got the required 10,000 signatures.

Free Hugs is now an international phenomenon, with people worldwide holding their own hugathons.

Sometimes in our activism and passion we forget that at the basis of each relationship is connection, that at the basis of what makes us human is that moment in which we are one with another human being. Hugs are the physical expression of that oneness. And it is only by realizing that oneness can we truly start on the road to peace.

It's not always easy. Hugathons can and will be met with resistance, great or small. But in making the effort, and continuing to do so, come wind or rain or storm, we can make a difference. And that is true of all activism.

you can sleep when you're dead

SLEEP THERAPIST DR. RUBIN NAIMAN EXPLAINS THE TRUE CAUSES OF SLEEP DISORDERS, CAFFEINE CRAVINGS AND SLEEP HORMONE IMBALANCES
By Dani Veracity
News Target
Monday, January 16, 2006

http://www.newstarget.com/016768.html

Seventy-six percent of Americans are lacking something right now. No, it's
not the latest fad fashion, electronic device or even money in the bank.
It's sleep. Thomas Edison invented the light bulb so that people could work
at night, and there are now 25 million night shift workers in U.S.-occupied
territory. Thanks to the light bulb and the later invention of television,
sleep quantity (per person) has decreased by about 20 percent since 1900.
Furthermore, 76 percent of Americans have a sleeping disorder at least a few
days per week, contributing to our society's epidemic of daytime sleepiness,
depression and adrenal fatigue, sleep therapist Dr. Rubin Naiman said in his
November lecture at the 2005 Complementary and Alternative Medicine
Conference (CAMCON) in Tucson, Ariz.

Modern Western society doesn't comply with our natural biorhythms. Humans
are built to nap, according to Dr. Naiman. When we override our natural
desire for midday rest, the conflict carries over to sleep disturbances at
night. Furthermore, similar to the problem of our junk food-laden diets,
we're overfed yet undernourished when it comes to light. During the day, we
receive dampened light from fluorescent bulbs rather than the vitamin D-rich
sunlight that our bodies need. Then, during the night when we need the dark
to trigger essential melatonin production, excessive light at night (LAN)
erodes our "lunar consciousness" and throws our body rhythms out of balance.
In short, we have too much light when we don't need it (at night) and too
little when we do (during the day).

Melatonin, a neurochemical released from the pineal gland, is as essential
to the human body today as it was during our evolution. Accordingly, Dr.
Naiman talks in great detail about this product of serotonin, even looking
back into the ancient Greco-Roman perspective of it and sleep in general.

From a purely biological standpoint, melatonin, which is produced during
absence of light, communicates the fact that it is night to our bodies,
triggering the release of GABA, our bodies' natural tranquilizer. LAN
suppresses melatonin production, hindering this entire process and setting
the stage for a phenomenon many of us know all too well: Daytime sleepiness.

Even though we're tired during the day, rest is somewhat of a taboo topic in
modern society. We tend to associate it with laziness and, as Dr. Naiman
points out, "When we rest, we experience the opportunistic emergence of our
shadow issues." In other words, resting often gives us time to think about
everything we'd rather forget, which is one of the reasons why many people
don't like to rest. It's the common "I-don't-have-time-to-think" phenomenon.
Unfortunately, as adrenal fatigue expert Dr. James Wilson explains in his
November lecture at the 2005 First Arizona Choices Exposition in Tucson,
Ariz., "Our lifestyles have changed, but our bodies haven't." We may not
like to rest, or perhaps have time for it, but our bodies still desire it.

In fact, napping can provide amazing health benefits. It lowers diastolic
blood pressure, improves mood, improves work and school performance (bosses
and educators take note) and helps readjust our nighttime sleep patterns
back to the way our ancestors slept before the Industrial Age and, according
to some experts, the way our bodies were designed to sleep at night.
Historian A. Roger Ekirch of the Virginia Polytechnic Institute found that,
before the Industrial Age changed everything, people slept in two phases:
"First sleep," a period of being awake shortly after midnight, and "second
sleep."

Using this historical data as his guide, National Institute of Mental Health
(NIMH) psychiatrist Dr. Thomas A. Wehr set out to learn if the human body
would revert back to this segmented sleep pattern, given natural,
pre-Industrial conditions. In Dr. Wehr's study, 15 healthy adults were
prohibited from using any artificial light from dusk to dawn and given 14
hours (6 p.m. to 8 a.m.) for sleep. They slept 11 hours each the first few
nights to presumably catch up on lost sleep, but then eventually settled
into a pattern beginning with a few hours of nighttime rest.

This nighttime rest is "an essential bridge to night consciousness,"
according to Dr. Naiman. We have to slow down before we can fall asleep and
experience hypnagogia, a sleep-onset dream. Unfortunately, many of us don't
take the time to pursue nighttime rest for psychological and sociological
reasons.

After a few hours of nighttime rest, Dr. Wehr's volunteers then fell into
REM asleep for three to five hours ("first sleep") before awakening. During
REM sleep, the brain is as active as when it is awake. Due to this alertness
without daytime constraints, regularly awakening from REM sleep is
significant in itself, as it allows people to remember and reflect on their
dreams in a semiconscious state, according to Dr. Wehr. In fact, he
attributes modern society's disconnection with dreams, myths and fantasies
to our lack of midnight reflection.

Following this hour or so of quiet time, the volunteers then slept for about
four more hours before finally awakening. In conclusion, the NIMH study
reinforced Ekirch's historical data, making it seem likely that the human
body would naturally like to sleep as it did before artificial lighting, and
that waking up midway through the night is innate, rather than a disease
meant to be treated with sleeping pills.

Given that most of us are not getting the quality or quantity of sleep our
bodies require, and that our schedules often don't allow time for naps, what
are we supposed to do about our daytime sleepiness? Many of us turn to
high-glycemic carbohydrates like white flour or refined sugar as the answer,
putting our bodies at risk for obesity and type 2 diabetes. We also mask our
sleepiness with caffeine, making it what Dr. Naiman calls the "fuel of
industrialized culture."

Three hundred million cups of coffee are consumed in the United States each
day and it is the second-most commonly traded commodity in the world.
Unfortunately, our misguided "solution" to daytime sleepiness only adds to
the sleep disorders we experience at night, as caffeine's half-life is 7.5
hours, meaning that you still have half the amount of caffeine in your
bloodstream more than seven hours after you drink or eat a caffeinated
product. No wonder we can't fall asleep at night, or even get a "good
night's sleep" when we do.

Lack of sleep eventually leads to fatigue, which is much more serious than
everyday drowsiness. By Dr. Naiman's definition, fatigue is a "sustained
state of exhaustion, a lack of physical or mental energy." As you might
imagine, fatigue is all too common today, accounting for 10 million
outpatient physician visits in the United States per year, mostly associated
with depression. Ironically, Big Pharma's answers to depression, SSRI drugs,
actually worsen the sleep-related problems they were designed to relieve.
Pharmaceuticals like Prozac cause reduced REM latency, which actually
promotes depression, Dr. Naiman explains.

The real solution to fatigue is easy enough: Make time to rest. Taking a
break from time to time doesn't mean that you're lazy; it means that you
want to be healthy. Plus, keep in mind that attaining healthy sleep will
actually increase your overall productivity and your enjoyment of life.

The above is proof that being tired is not laziness--it's an indicator of an unhealthy lifestyle.

Right now it's 4am and I'm up, in flourescent light, doing stuff when I should be sleeping so I can call bill collectors early in the morning. Living example of the above. And the living dead.

breastfeeding bothers conservative america

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/15720339/ MSNBC.com Woman kicked off plane for breast-feeding Files complaint saying she was being discreet, airline disagrees The Associated Press Updated: 2:07 p.m. HT Nov 16, 2006 BURLINGTON, Vt. - A woman who claims she was kicked off an airplane because she was breast-feeding her baby has filed a complaint against two airlines, her attorney said. Emily Gillette, 27, of Santa Fe, N.M., filed the complaint with the Vermont Human Rights Commission late last week against Delta Air Lines and Freedom Airlines, said her attorney, Elizabeth Boepple. Freedom was operating the Delta flight between Burlington and New York City. Gillette said she was discreetly breast-feeding her 22-month-old daughter on Oct. 13 as their flight prepared to leave Burlington International Airport. She said she was seated by the window in the next-to-last row, her husband was seated between her and the aisle and no part of her breast was showing. A flight attendant tried to hand her a blanket and told her to cover up, Gillette said. She declined, telling the flight attendant she had a legal right to breast-feed her baby. Moments later, a Delta ticket agent approached and said the flight attendant had asked that the family be removed from the flight, Gillette said. She said she didn't want to make a scene and complied. "It embarrassed me. That was my first reaction, which is a weird reaction for doing something so good for a child," Gillette said Monday. A Freedom spokesman said Gillette was asked to leave the flight after she declined the blanket. "A breast-feeding mother is perfectly acceptable on an aircraft, providing she is feeding the child in a discreet way," that doesn't bother others, said Paul Skellon, spokesman for Phoenix-based Freedom. "She was asked to use a blanket just to provide a little more discretion, she was given a blanket, and she refused to use it, and that's all I know." A complaint against two airlines was filed with the Vermont Human Rights Commission, although Executive Director Robert Appel said he was barred by state law from confirming the complaint. He said state law allows a mother to breast-feed in public. The Vermont Human Rights Commission investigates complaints and determines whether discrimination may have occurred. The parties to a complaint are given six months to reach a settlement. If none is reached, the commission then decides whether to go to court. A complainant can file a separate suit in state court at any time. © 2006 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This sounds rather ridiculous to me. First off, it's a legal right for a woman to feed her child, whether in public or private, regardless of it bothering anyone. Second off, if it bothers anyone those people should be killed right now, because they obviously don't appreciate the gift of life their mothers gave them in birthing them and then breast-feeding them. Unless they're the non-breastfed type. Which would explain this sort of psychotic, anti-social reaction.

love is the answer

rereading entries whilst deleting them has made me re-realize how deeply i feel for blue...and how attached i was to her. and that may explain my clinginess with my boyfriend....emotionally, he's just blue's replacement.

i'm really fucked up.

remember, remember

so today is november 5th and the full moon, as well as my friend's 'expecting' date. i find it to be full of good omen...a remembrance of pagan traditions (burning man) as well as a celebration of revolution against tyranny. of course, i live in a place where it is illegal to set off fireworks on any day except new years or july fourth, so i will have to make due with a small beach fire tonight. because that's not illegal.

it's actually quite fitting...with the celtic new years just past, and the re-evolution that this day symbolizes, my plan to do a fire in which i burn all the negative things i don't want in my life, in order to make room for the positive things i do want. maybe a purely selfish way to spend such a day, but if i don't start with myself where should i start? besides, i could use more energy to do the things that are not selfish.

or perhaps just the strength of will to refuse the things i know i should--ie social life and fun--in order to do what's important--ie homework, writing, and activism. but it again boils down to that question of what's more important: personal happiness and a willful ignorance, or impassioned activism and absolute self-misery. they are both important--it's finding the ever-escaping-me gay psychic, it's achieving balance. it's having enough energy to do so.

and i find that i don't. and i end up swinging mostly to personal happiness, because it really is near-impossible to say no to my boyfriend. i'm not saying he's a bad influence--indeed, personal happiness can be a good thing to focus on if you're used to pushing it aside to make everyone else comfortable--i'm just saying i'm having trouble controlling myself.

and my emotions. i haven't taken my pills because mostly i don't need them, but then i have these wild mood swings every week or so, and they always catch me by surprise. so i take the pills and feel dulled down but not any happier. sr doesn't work as well as xl did for me. so i desperately try to stay happy, to stay afloat, at all costs, because i am happy. i am. this is not denial. i've just fallien into a 'used-to-it' happy that allows me to become upset at other things. the novelty has worn off; i've fallen back into old habits.

i feel too much, but the alternative is too scary. pure logic is pure evil. emotions dictate morals. that is why psychopaths are so scary.

but i do want to tone it down. to feel as much as i do but not show as much as i do.

i am tired of being a heart-on-my-sleeve girl.

hence this ceremony. hence the need for a change.

hence so much.