I Really Only Believe What I Have to Say

It always seemed to be a good thing to try and understand other people's perspectives on everything that happens. Like, you're always supposed to think about the other side and consider their opinion along with your own. I guess the intended effect of this is that everyone makes logical decisions while keeping in mind everyone else's thoughts.
But, I can't help feeling lately that even when you do understand someone else's perspective, and take it into account along with your own, what can you do about that? You're probably nine times out of ten not going to change your mind in their favor just because you realized the reasoning behind their choices. Is it just the awareness that counts? If so, who really cares? What good is it to anyone to say "Oh, I considered your opinion, and I understand it but I'm still choosing me every time"?
I guess the most you could hope for is for people to be more sympathetic, and not get angry when an idea opposes their own. Even though they may not turn around and stand behind it, they won't be actively attacking it, I suppose. Tolerance, maybe.
But doesn't that just sound unremarkable and insufficient? The human race, yeah, they tolerate each other. That sort of sucks.
But maybe that's all we can manage.

Ode To the South Mall

I booked a ticket to Germany today.
Oh my.

It's ridiculous how excited I am. I've been tearing up all day today for no reason.

When I was lying on the quad outside between classes, I realized a couple of things. Here I will bestow on you the infinite wisdom of the quad-revelations.
One, when I was thinking about how I really just wanted to leave and fly away and go to Europe and be in all these different cities (I picture myself walking through streets alone, looking vaguely wistful and a bit awed) rather than be here, sitting on a grassy quad in Austin, Texas, where I've been practically my whole life. How my life would basically start again from page one. Or so it would seem in my brain. I started to feel sort of bitter about the whole societal dictate that everyone needs to go to college to be successful when I really thought about it and the fragile networks of friends, familiar places, and emotions that I have set up here. That has been nineteen years in the making. And suddenly I felt like maybe it was a good thing to be in college. I don't think a lot of people at my age could handle their life suddenly being a blank slate, including me. Although I might complain, I still need to use a booster seat (thanks guys) or I won't be able to reach the table. And we all know how scary being under the table is. Everything is alien, all legs and feet and floor. Hmmm...

Two, when I was lying on the ground, I had one of those special nature moments when I was looking at the grass and thinking about the ground underneath it and the shape of the earth. Then I watched the people walking by and wondered how long it had been since they'd looked at the world from ground level. How often do I even lie down and look at things between blades of grass? I sometimes forget that you can do that I guess. Me, who is supposedly all about different perspectives.... But I've never liked self-imposed labels. They're not tasteful. Or classy.

Don't They Know? (It's not Sexual)

Speaking of cake,
mine is very especially thick I think. My cake is something like the layers in a raspberry indulgence cake. That white very thick consistency, rich, for white cake anyway. But it's just the cake layer right now. No raspberry in between. Or that rich creamy icing. Just a slab of thick white cake. Plain. But filling.
People seem to be satisfied with my cake, though. Sometimes I wonder if they know that it's missing the icing. And the raspberry. For christ's sake the cake is named after the raspberry but no one seems to care.
What's that about? It's frustrating, having a cake in progress that people eat anyway, telling you it's good when you know it could be SO much better, it could be complete, a perfect confection.
But if I didn't let people eat the cake until it was finished, well, maybe it won't ever be finished. Maybe it'll be a raspberry indulgence cake in progress until finally someone eats the last slice and the plate is left with a handful of crumbs.
Well, I'll keep working on it and go ahead you can eat it. I guess that's okay.

Of Mice and Men

There is a mouse in my apartment.

I tried to catch it as it snuck out from behind the refrigerator, but it was too fast, and it ran somewhere behind the dishwasher.

I don't want to kill it.

It's funny how much I don't want to kill this mouse, which will probably start eating through my cereal boxes and pooping and having dirty mouse babies in my kitchen, and yet I'm dead set on killing any cockroach that crosses my path.
Where, in my brain, is the line between "okay to kill" and "not okay to kill"? Is it some sort of spectrum? Maybe, since sometimes I don't want to kill a bug but then I have to and don't really feel bad about it.
But maybe it's just certain things. Like how ranchers think it's okay to kill coyotes, and I think it's okay to kill cockroaches.

What sort of chemical is it that makes one person fine with reptiles and another want to scream? It can't all be previous experience or long-buried trauma. Sometimes, our fears or distastes are totally inexplicable.
Like people who don't like broccoli. I'm sure nothing traumatic involving broccoli ever happened to these people, and yet they refuse to eat it. What is that?

It seems like such a strange, subtle distinction. So unnecessary in the natural selection - evolution scheme of things.

Furthermore, what makes certain people like indie rock and others like industrial? Or like Bukowski instead of Murakami?

These things seem like evolutionary after-thoughts. Once human evolution ran its physical course, mostly, the only thing left for it to do was to fantasize and diverge and come up with all these random digressions called personality and thought.

And yet, these afterthoughts are what people seem to value most. Personality: the most important thing. I suppose.

Strange, how nature works. And how humans look so little like their birth-mother.

Could You Point Me in the Direction of the Nearest Difibrilator?

My heart has literally been pounding all day, and I'm really starting to wonder whether hearts can die from exhaustion.
Maybe I drink too much coffee.
Or maybe it's just my extraordinary ability to magnify mental stress and translate it into physical symptoms. It runs in the family.
Either way, I'm a little worried about the old ticker, and I'm considering eating a steak or something tomorrow in an attempt to appease it.

The Food Channel In My Brain

So apparently, I failed to properly "Do It Myself" and now my kitchen table from IKEA is wobbly. It's really driving me crazy.
In other news, I'm figuring out how to make breakfast tacos that are somewhere near half-savory. The potatoes are always the defining factor. (I've decided to start out basic with the classic potato egg and cheese). Somehow the brilliant idea (I'm not sure why this never occurred to me before...) came to me of getting those frozen home fries and then cooking them to put in the tacos. So hopefully that works out.
Also, I've recently discovered that pepperocinis are ridiculously delicious and add flavorful pizazz to any meal. Another good one is garlic salt. Or diced white onions.
Come to think of it, I used to stage cooking shows when I was probably about eight. I would sit on my parents' bed with a bunch of imaginary pots and pans and conjure a full course meal out of thin air. My favorite part was cracking eggs and stirring. And those tiny glass dishes that conveniently have each ingredient already perfectly measured out.
I also used to bake (unfortunately, real) "inventions." They always had some sort of creative name and basically all tasted the same. Most of the time they were muffins. Puffy muffins, fluffy muffins, fushy muffins... and then there were cookies. I distinctly remember the "yum yums" which, true enough to their name, were actually pretty tasty. Those were my only real success since I had this strange affinity for using every flavor of extract we had available (except never lemon). Everything ended up tasting like a strange conglomeration of almond, vanilla, and mint.

Overexposure

There's always something going down at my friendly neighborhood 24hr Wallgreens. I've been in there quite frequently as of late, since I've been trying to figure out the inner workings of my friend's cameras and how exactly they apply to the stupid dark, blurry photos that I keep picking up after the requited one hour.
It's actually sort of embarrassing because there's this one guy who's always there when I drop off or pick up film and he always asks about the camera and generally seems to want to help me, but I'm having a hard time conveying that I'm really just fucking around and don't want to read the manual, and seriously don't worry about my underexposed negatives. But he's just one of those nice guys.
Then there always seems to be one or more older and perhaps senile fat men there, having inappropriately loud conversations. The first time the two were shouting at each other, ten feet apart, about how they had doubts about McCain's vice president being able to run the country in case of his death.
It was sort of interesting watching the two, who seemed more to be yelling into the open air than at each other, with a sort of vacant look in their eyes. I guess you have to be a little bit outside the mainstream consciousness to start a heated political debate in Wallgreens.
On that same occasion, as I was walking through the parking lot to my van, I overheard a girl who was sobbing as she talked to a guy, who I'm assuming was her boyfriend. She was wailing about how some guy cut her off in traffic and was swerving between the lanes and she was so scared and (then her cell phone rang...) And in a perfectly normal voice, she answered, "Hey what's up?"
I can hardly wait to pick up my next roll of foggy, black pictures from there and see what sort of drama Wallgreens has to offer me.

I Love Food and Tubes You Can Dance In

While sitting in Which Wich today, well, just typing that now, may I point out what a horrible name for anything that is? Maybe one person every couple of days reads that restaurant's sign and guffaws, but other than that it's just a really annoying name that's hard to say and frankly is completely verbally unappetizing.
When I say verbally appetizing, I mean like how maybe a name like "Thai Noodle House" or "Dolce Vita" makes you think of deliciousness and furthermore sounds pretty and rolls off the tongue. "Which Wich," on the other hand, sounds to me like having a mouthful of sand, and that doesn't exactly get my mouth watering. Not to say that some really awesome eateries don't have questionable names like "Food Heads" or Dirty's. But their tantalizing meals redeem them from any shame. Something I cannot say for "Which Wich." And yet I ate there today...
Well, my point was, while I was sitting in the aforementioned unfortunately named place of mediocre sandwiches, I was looking at the shape of the building and I suddenly was overcome with a burning desire to refurbish it and turn it into a nightclub.
This thought was almost immediately banished because of the location, which wouldn't be good for night life. But, something about the shape of the interior to me screamed dark light and pounding techno. Good techno, mind you, more like electronica and dance and whatever. It reminded me, I suppose, of a number of designs for bars I've seen that are housed in tubes or those big railroad cargo boxes.
There is something appealing about there being an entire night's worth of dancing, drinking, and general l-i-v-i-n all packed into the confines of a box. A unit, as I am fond of saying. And during the day, this box would close, the garage door would roll down, and maybe the iron grating in front of it would close, and it'd just be part of the daytime facade. Just a fence you walk by, no hints of the mystical fog that its nighttime socialites attribute to it. The club you went to the other day is really just a cement yard with a fence around it. But when you were there, it was your goddamn prom. But probably with a lot more drinking, less clothes, and hopefully a better DJ.
So maybe it's not just people willing an awesome time into existence, I think DJ's definitely have something to do with it. If not everything. Shit. There goes my point. But whatever, I'm really horrible at making points anyhow.
Well, here's what I've learned: get a badass DJ when I open my club (after Which Wich's stock plummets before they can realize the benefits of a delicious name. Or sandwich for that matter).

Mise-en-scene: Let's Talk About It

First of all, I'd like to note that I was very impressed about a month or two ago (I'm maybe not so much now) at the sign outside of Taco Bell on Guadalupe which read "Need a Job? Let's Taco Bout It!"
I got a serious kick out of that one, and was suddenly filled with pride for my country's attempt at recreating Mexican food in bulk across a nation that (in majority) doesn't even know what they're eating half of the time anyway. At least they try to be clever.
And yet, I think it might just be that one, lonely location. Maybe there's a blossoming stand-up act working there part time until they can finally afford that unicycle they need for the pun in their third act. And that sign is their cry for help. Or for creative freedom to rise above the mindless stupor brought on by having to repeatedly try and sell people an extra choco-taco for half the price of the first one they already didn't want.
Getting back to mise-en-scene, I feel like I should probably be lying on my stomach with my laptop on my bed while fervently composing my blog post, if this were a proper sort of teenage girl drama on the WB. Channel 54, baby.
But seriously, I don't think I'd mind selling my life, or the parts of it that I could juice up enough to make digestible for TV's protein enhanced audiences. If it came down to it, I think I would definitely use everything I might have cared about in my life to fuel a wrenching, passionate memoir revealing at last the untold story of a middle class white girl growing up in America.
Everyone would see it.
I personally believe that you can retain your soul but also sell it. Perhaps the more appropriate word would be to lease it. Or sublet it.
Yes. Soul for sublet. One bedroom, one bath. Spacious living room and kitchen. Stone cold floors. Asking price is a flight to New York and three months of promotional tours.
I apologize for not addressing the topic of mise-en-scene in its full glory, the error is noted and will be resolved at a later date.