| The Business of Being Irrational |
[16 Nov 2009|09:51am] |
I hate being irrational. I'm one of the most logic-driven people you will ever meet. Don't confuse that with being left-brained because I'm still very inept with matters of mathematics and hard science. I'm so bad that there's a math pun about rational numbers ready to be dropped, but since I can't remember what they are, out the window the pun goes.
I'm very rational in the sense that I believe each cause merits an effect, or action merits reaction. That's a Newton law, isn't it? That's something to think about, if Newton's Laws are my religion. I also don't have patience for quibbling. Quibbling is a word that my family is very fond of using, but it's a word that I hardly hear in my circles. I'll use "quibble" and some people will think it's a Harry Potter reference. To quibble means senselessly straying from the main point and having a really muddled reasoning for things.
In my house, my mom will sometimes ask you why you forgot to switch off the lights in your bedroom when you went out. You will be quibbling if you go through a long story of, "I had a big fight with my best friend and it has been bothering me the whole day because she's been taking it out on me..." or "I was in a hurry, and it was the last thing on my mind because I was already late in submitting my paper and then the beadle texted..." This will piss her off. I know so, not only because she's my mother, but also because I myself find it annoying and insulting to my intelligence.
The only correct answer is to say, "I'm sorry, I'll remember to do it next time." At an early age (and through a lot of fiery arguments), I've learned the significance of addressing the big picture. What was the problem? You forgetting. How do you remedy it? Do better. Simple!
The sob stories do factor in, but I've been raised to recognize its potential for being counterproductive. The real issue at hand is a problem, and with a problem, you're supposed to find a solution. This is how my mind works. You fuck up, then take action. Stop crying. When steps have been done to remedy a situation, then we can have ice cream and talk about feelings.
Sometimes I feel like we go down the road of sob stories because we are so afraid of admitting the truth and taking responsibility for what we do. In reality, when you just tell the truth, you leave with your integrity intact and the pain from it disappears after a while. When you drag out your feelings, hoping to gain sympathy, you drag on the drama. You drag out making solutions and healing, and it's bullshit.
Like you, Troy Dyer. Fucking stop acting out and go visit
"the land of the emotionally mature" sometime.
I've been accused of being cold and clinical, but it's strange how deep down inside, I'm the farthest thing from it. I may make the effort to handle the external battles with being rational, but everything I stand for on the inside is irrational. To define something as "irrational" simply means referring to things that cannot be explained. So in as much as I can be a robot, it's only because it's friendships, love, dreams, relationships that matter the most to me. I fall apart worse than most people I know when it's my heart that gets broken. It's not about material gain or personal achievement. I'm not saying they don't matter (they matter big time to me) but those mean shit when you can't experience having a quality life.
And to me a quality life is deriving joy and fulfillment from these unexplainables. I get down and dirty with systems and logic to milk the most from the unseen. I'm probably making things a lot more complicated than they should be, but then I never really knew how it feels to have an uncluttered mind.
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| Dreads |
[15 Nov 2009|04:26pm] |
Dreads
Originally uploaded by wring
Lookit this fucking hipster of last friday. Adalbertos taqueria.
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| November 16, 2009 Links and Plugs |
[16 Nov 2009|08:12am] |
There's three more The Apex Book of World SF interviews to be posted at SF Signal so stay tuned. In the meantime, here are the interviews from the previous week:
And those curious about the upcoming Lightspeed magazine should listen to the Sofanauts with editors John Joseph Adams and Andrea Kail. I also get plugged. =)
And currently getting a barrage of hits from a combination of Andrew Wheeler, James Nicoll, and Jay Lake. (Thanks guys!)
Interviews
Advice/Articles
News
And if you haven't bought it yet, buy yourself a copy now (with new art!):
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[15 Nov 2009|10:04pm] |
After the 9 teenagers from hell sat beside me on the train today, I now know the true meaning of the term 'bogan'.
I saw them today, up close and personal, in the wilderness, in their natural habitat. Such a magnificent variety of mullets and rat tails, bru. Such elegant Gucci baseballcaps.
But i don't really care what folks wear and wouldn't be poking fun at them if they weren't the biggest bunch of hooligans ever. Hooligans who shout, swear, throw bottles and accidentally hit other passengers, beat each other up, oggle and make wolf calls at women who walk by which is really kapalmuks because none of them look like they've even sprouted a full set of pubes yet. They were blowing spit bubbles (yes, I swear this is true), standing and jumping on the chairs, banging things, and basically just bouncing off the walls.
There should be an emergency bottle of cloroform on trains for crowds of obnoxious teenagers. Or maybe they just hadn't sniffed their rugby yet. Should have traded them my sharpie for money.
These kids were unreal. They were caricatures of what it means to be total losers. They were almost beyond offensive, they were a sociological case study for Small Penis Syndrome.
Ok, so they were young. But if those were my kids, I would sell them into slavery, or insist they were switched with other babies in the hospital nursery after being born. I wonder what the chances are of any of them becoming brilliant doctors or lawyers when they grow up (if they ever grow up). Yes, they were that idiotic.
Thank god they got off at Granville. Thought I'd have to endure them till Blacktown. The cops only came AFTER they had left. This started out as a Facebook status update, and has expanded to LJ entry length. I hope you enjoyed it.
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| A Dinnertime Story |
[12 Nov 2009|05:45pm] |
Mom and Dad sit across a young girl across the dinner table. Only the young girl isn't really that young anymore. She has reached an age where she's been calling the shots in her life and has been acting like she can do anything without anyone's advice or counsel. Mom and Dad take everything in. Her perpetual disgruntled look. The way she drops her bag to the floor when she gets home. The way she enters the house after a hazy night without making any eye contact, except for the quick, requisite kiss on the cheek.
Mom and Dad have chosen to believe their young daughter has got it all together. She got good grades, she graduated with distinction, she went on to work respectable jobs. She hardly ever spoke. When she chooses to talk, her eyes light up as she tells her stories, wanting to communicate to her parents light-hearted moments and the occasional pebble in the shoe. She exiled her other stories to a vast valley of gray, a purgatory, if you can call it that. These were the stories that Mom and Dad should never hear. They reside in the valley occasionally to be visited by their daughter's close confidants, and nothing more. It is a purgatory because much was needed to purge. Maybe those stories will go away over time, but in most cases, they were there because if they won't go away, then the young girl will pretend they never existed.
Sometimes, in the dinner table, the young girl's body will be slowly clinking her utensils to put food inside her mouth. Nodding her head, eating as fast as she can, so she can retreat to her room. No soul resides in that body, for there are times that her soul was up in purgatory. She is with her vault of stories and she is looking down to earth, to Mom and Dad. There are days she has to tend to those stories, to make sure they never come out, to make sure they always stay right where they are.
For these were stories no parent would ever want to hear. About the times their young girl would take to drink, about the times she'd let go and have some boy she trusted force himself on her. The stories of how they never had a clue of what would happen right under their noses. About frantic cries for help, for mercy. Or the more bearable episodes where she would just black out and only have the ghosts of the previous nights haunt her the next day, or the next months to come. There were also the stories of how boys would be crying to this young girl, with pitiful tears dotting their eyes, begging her for forgiveness, forgiveness for their cheating and lying.
More importantly, the young girl also couldn't believe how she let herself descend into such a black hole. Sometimes, she just wants to reach out of the valley of gray, and ask Mom and Dad, when or why did the world start being so cruel. Or why is it that people with empty chasms for hearts had to exist. How can parents bear it when they know of their children's secret worlds? Of their secret pains? Of how the same charming boy who would shake their hands in the daytime would actually yell at their daughter, kick her in the side, or feed her heart to the hounds when they weren't looking. Of how their daughter gets reduced into a screaming, hysterical, pitiful wreck at the end of each conflagration.
And that's the point. They cannot know. Dinner proceeds, with everyone chewing. With Mom, Dad, and daughter discussing the weather.
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| 638660 if it ain t rough it ain t right |
[11 Nov 2009|11:33am] |
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PETE ROCK & C.L. SMOOTH "If It Ain't Rough It Ain't Right" |
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men are not attractive. On 26 September 2009, a month's worth of rain landed on Metro Manila in a single day. @ least 464 people were reported dead, and th storm caused @ least $237 million in damages (according to Wikidpedia). I shrugged and attended two benefit concerts.
After three months of my living in Brooklyn, somebody finally broke into my car. I looked up my precinct's police's number on th Internet and called them.
"Hey, yes, my car got broken into last night, and I'm not sure if there's anything anyone can do. Is it even worth reporting?"
"I'm sorry to hear that. You have to call 911."
"911, really? Hmm hmm OK. It didn't seem like enough of an emergency. I just thought you guys might want to update yr stats or whatever."
"Yeah, if you call 911, they'll send an officer out there to take a statement from you and investigate the crime scene. Just stay with your car and don't move anything."
"I already moved it so as not to get a parking ticket. Couldn't we skip th crime scene investigation and go straight to rounding up some troubled Mexicans?"
Shattered safety glass looks like potted plant pebbles. I drove my wife to work w/ no passenger-side window, but it didn't matter due to global climate change. People are wearing short sleeves in November. Are you worried about th kind of Earth you're leaving yr children? Do you have faith in their intelligence and problem-solving abilities? Is suffering inevitable, anyhow, so who cares? Are you planning on having children? I called up Two Guys Auto Glass, and they said $195, and it would be ready tomorrow. And den I called up Joe's Auto Glass in Park Slope, and they said $120, and it would be ready today. Joe's son showed me how to break into a car w/o making a sound, using a screwdriver. Thanks, Joe!
When I think about Megatron's shiny new window, I hear "I Shall Be Released"'s first few lines --
They say ev'rything can be replaced,
Yet ev'ry distance is not near.
So I remember ev'ry face
Of ev'ry man who put me here.
-- and recall when my BFF Diego Muhlach's brother drowned. Diego was playing a mixtape I'd made for him that had "I Shall Be Released" on it, and when Diego's dad heard th song, he cried for his dead son and for everything that was left behind. Diego's dad gathered his remaining sons around him and took their faces in his hands and said, "Don't you dare die before me."
When I talk up my and Sascha's book, it makes our publisher happy, which in turn makes me happy because he's a cool guy, even though promoting my and Sascha's book does not in and of itself make me happy. I made a Facebook fan page for our book
44 Presidents | Order from Amazon.com
so that people would have somewhere to go to jizz all over it, and so when people saw that other people were jizzing all over our book, it would make them want to get out their jizz for our book, too. There is now a place for that.
Women are attractive, though. All men have to help them are jokes and guitars. Acrassicauda, Iraq's most famous metal band, fled to Syria, den Turkey, den New Jersey, den New York, to escape violence in Baghdad. Allegedly, their headbanging was mistaken for how Jews pray. On Monday, my roommate and BFF Rome hired me to work on th film crew for Acrassicauda's first music video -- 12 hours in a dark warehouse w/ nothing but men.
No metal band would write lyrics about how much they love to flee violence, yet here are Acrassicauda, face-to-face w/ their own inescapably newsworthy story. Th world is so doomed, we might as well try to squeeze every last bit of metal out of every day.
Th important part is, use yr whole heart, but never, ever be desperate. Don't be desperate for people to love you or give you money. Never be desperate to be understood. How can we act w/ our whole hearts and not be desperate? Especially when th heart -- it wants what it wants. I can't stand th word girlfriend. I told my wife,
"What if we got married just because I don't like how girlfriend sounds, but I love how wife sounds?"
People get married because they love each other more than any other two people in history have ever loved each other. Two, five, seven, or twelve years later, they get divorced because they hate each other more than any other two people in history have ever hated each other. I know what marriage is. It means one day, one person is going to have to bury th other. That's metal. If you're not metal enough, don't get married.
She said, "What if we get married for a normal reason such as we are the best people for each other, but you can call me your wife starting immediately if you want?"
Deal.
+ + +
TH COUNTDOWN:
( 33-24 )
23. PHYLLIS DILLON "Don't Stay Away" (3.7 MB) -- Ms Dillon creates a delusional narrator whom U can't feel sorry 4 because her voice is 2 strong, 2 sweet 2B defeated.
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[11 Nov 2009|11:59pm] |
I need discernment right now. Discernment, and grace, and wisdom.
Dear Lord, I pray, make me wildly successful. Financially, et al.
It's the only way.
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