Friday, April 09, 2004
Thursday, April 08, 2004
The article that got me rejected from Journalism class:
Administration to impose new “anti-everything” rule
Due to the recent rise in pointy/sharp/generally un-agreeable items on campus, administration has collectively decided to add a new “anti-everything” clause to its zero-tolerance policy.
“For far too long, irresponsible students have been allowed to jeopardize the security of this school with their flagrant use of objects.” One administrator had to say. “With this new rule we hope to finally free ourselves of any financial liability whatsoever…and safety…and stuff.”
The proposed clause reads: “While on school premises, no student is permitted to have in their possession a material object of any kind, including but not limited to: backpacks, compact-disc players, combs, shoes, handguns, automatic weapons, sub-automatic weapons, bullets, erasers, hollow-point bullets, clothes, knives, swimwear (top or bottom), double-edged knives with serrated edges, hats, etc.
Obviously, this new turn by the administration has many students concerned. “I am very concerned about the new rule,” Had one student to say. However, there is a growing base of support amongst some circles. “I think this is a step in the right direction. Finally, the school system is taking firm actions against things. If the rule passes, I will finally be able to feel safe at school, comforted by the knowledge that no longer will I ever be threatened by an object, ever again.”
Administrators feel confident that the rule will pass; they are met by virtually no opposition on any front, and quick proceedings are ensured.
“We feel Scripps Ranch is totally justified in their decision,” said an employee of the San Diego City Schools main office. “If our children are allowed to bring objects to school, the terrorists have truly won.”
Due to the recent rise in pointy/sharp/generally un-agreeable items on campus, administration has collectively decided to add a new “anti-everything” clause to its zero-tolerance policy.
“For far too long, irresponsible students have been allowed to jeopardize the security of this school with their flagrant use of objects.” One administrator had to say. “With this new rule we hope to finally free ourselves of any financial liability whatsoever…and safety…and stuff.”
The proposed clause reads: “While on school premises, no student is permitted to have in their possession a material object of any kind, including but not limited to: backpacks, compact-disc players, combs, shoes, handguns, automatic weapons, sub-automatic weapons, bullets, erasers, hollow-point bullets, clothes, knives, swimwear (top or bottom), double-edged knives with serrated edges, hats, etc.
Obviously, this new turn by the administration has many students concerned. “I am very concerned about the new rule,” Had one student to say. However, there is a growing base of support amongst some circles. “I think this is a step in the right direction. Finally, the school system is taking firm actions against things. If the rule passes, I will finally be able to feel safe at school, comforted by the knowledge that no longer will I ever be threatened by an object, ever again.”
Administrators feel confident that the rule will pass; they are met by virtually no opposition on any front, and quick proceedings are ensured.
“We feel Scripps Ranch is totally justified in their decision,” said an employee of the San Diego City Schools main office. “If our children are allowed to bring objects to school, the terrorists have truly won.”
Tuesday, April 06, 2004
Wednesday, March 31, 2004
This weekend I was consulting myself at a local pond. The sun was particularly angry. The fish were curious.
After half an hour, standing on the same shore upon which I've stood for eight years, I spotted a brown-haired little boy walking towards me, staring intensely. He stops a few feet away and inquires as to my opinion of Ninja Turtles.
"They're pretty cool." I was partially baffled, partially amused.
"This one's Raphael..." He trailed off, spotting an elderly woman walking her dog. He rushed off to display his action figure.
Later he stood by me and watched, asking questions and occasionally demanding to know why I wasn't catching anything. He had the affect of a first-grader; I wondered if he had mental handicaps or just the speech impediment.
"So you put the pretend fish on your line and bring it in and the real fish come up to it and they eat it?"
"Yeah."
"I have a fishing pole, but my mom, she won't let me fish."
"Why?"
"I dunno."
He attacked me with questions about everything from my rod and reel to the Redwing Blackbirds that were perched nearby. Eventually I hooked a little bass and raised it out of the water so he could see.
"I've never caught a real fish, only tadpoles. What kind of fish is that? It's bigger than tadpoles."
"It's a bass."
Tommy ran to his house to retrieve his two-foot-long purple Scooby-Doo rod and reel which he had never used before.
"I've never fished, so you have to show me how to fish, can you show me?"
After ten minutes of casting instruction he was still sword-slashing with his rod and making "ninja attack" noises every time he slammed his lure into the water by his feet. I figured he was content just to be talking to someone and wasn't very concerned about catching fish. I resumed fishing and left him to his own devices.
"My dad, he got sick from smoking cigarettes."
"Oh...I'm sorry."
" 'Sokay. I want to be with him, but I can't when he's in the hospital."
He looked at me in his bewildered, uncomprehending way and I understood why he had been talking to a stranger for two hours. He asked me more questions, and I answered.
After half an hour, standing on the same shore upon which I've stood for eight years, I spotted a brown-haired little boy walking towards me, staring intensely. He stops a few feet away and inquires as to my opinion of Ninja Turtles.
"They're pretty cool." I was partially baffled, partially amused.
"This one's Raphael..." He trailed off, spotting an elderly woman walking her dog. He rushed off to display his action figure.
Later he stood by me and watched, asking questions and occasionally demanding to know why I wasn't catching anything. He had the affect of a first-grader; I wondered if he had mental handicaps or just the speech impediment.
"So you put the pretend fish on your line and bring it in and the real fish come up to it and they eat it?"
"Yeah."
"I have a fishing pole, but my mom, she won't let me fish."
"Why?"
"I dunno."
He attacked me with questions about everything from my rod and reel to the Redwing Blackbirds that were perched nearby. Eventually I hooked a little bass and raised it out of the water so he could see.
"I've never caught a real fish, only tadpoles. What kind of fish is that? It's bigger than tadpoles."
"It's a bass."
Tommy ran to his house to retrieve his two-foot-long purple Scooby-Doo rod and reel which he had never used before.
"I've never fished, so you have to show me how to fish, can you show me?"
After ten minutes of casting instruction he was still sword-slashing with his rod and making "ninja attack" noises every time he slammed his lure into the water by his feet. I figured he was content just to be talking to someone and wasn't very concerned about catching fish. I resumed fishing and left him to his own devices.
"My dad, he got sick from smoking cigarettes."
"Oh...I'm sorry."
" 'Sokay. I want to be with him, but I can't when he's in the hospital."
He looked at me in his bewildered, uncomprehending way and I understood why he had been talking to a stranger for two hours. He asked me more questions, and I answered.
Monday, March 29, 2004
Saturday, March 27, 2004
Surprise, I'm not "totally self-sufficient and confident" as I told myself in eigth grade. In fact, I find myself wracked with an entirely new set of doubts almost weekly. It only gets more confusing as I start learning more and being confronted with new problems. It only gets worse, but it's good. That's the strange thing, I think I'm a little in love with the pain that life brings.
There is no guidance anywhere. It seems like nothing is applicable. Everyone's busy climbing their own ladder. Everything means something different to every person. It's all one giant, ineffable web that makes me feel like vomiting whenever I think about it too hard. And I've seen maybe one inch of one strand while the rest of it spans out forever, and ever, and ever.
I know I couldn't say any of this in person. We're all too embarassed by the fact that we're not just composed of jokes and flowers and rock music. It's been so long since I could look someone in the eye.
There is no guidance anywhere. It seems like nothing is applicable. Everyone's busy climbing their own ladder. Everything means something different to every person. It's all one giant, ineffable web that makes me feel like vomiting whenever I think about it too hard. And I've seen maybe one inch of one strand while the rest of it spans out forever, and ever, and ever.
I know I couldn't say any of this in person. We're all too embarassed by the fact that we're not just composed of jokes and flowers and rock music. It's been so long since I could look someone in the eye.
Everything I write is completely contrived and cliche'd, I feel like I have no voice and nothing to say. Every idea I have turns into the same "I am very afraid of big-bad world so hold me" story. I'm starting to doubt that expressing myself is really a priority in my life. Constantly feeling like I should be gathering my experiences into some product that I can sell; what is that?
Friday, March 26, 2004
Thursday, March 25, 2004
Monday, March 22, 2004
Humility. Me oh my, humility.
So first the 48-hour movie bombs spectacularly and rubs my own pretentiousness into my eyes until they bleed. That was good.
So then I find out I got rejected for Journalism. I'm in too bad a mood to actually feel superior to anything so I won't go into just how bad the writing in that newspaper is, but needless to say I could run circles around them. Oh well, oh well. I guess I had somehow hoped never to have to confront the fact that I'm horrible at expressing myself in any kind of creative medium.
So I was sitting in front of Vons with Mikey and the whole situation gradually revealed itself to me. I have become one of those young, angsty, aimless suburban white male do-no-rights that we've all been taught to believe are the scourge of the earth. I have no aim, no focus; I am no longer excited by nearly anything; I'm jaded and cynical; I wear black clothes and sit around watching movies all day. Fuck. FUCK. Oh well, so is the way of things.
I know this weblog has been rather dreary, and I apologize to you, dear reader(s), and promise that as soon as I get a sense of humor and a goal, I'll start posting pictures of people in funny clothes again.
So first the 48-hour movie bombs spectacularly and rubs my own pretentiousness into my eyes until they bleed. That was good.
So then I find out I got rejected for Journalism. I'm in too bad a mood to actually feel superior to anything so I won't go into just how bad the writing in that newspaper is, but needless to say I could run circles around them. Oh well, oh well. I guess I had somehow hoped never to have to confront the fact that I'm horrible at expressing myself in any kind of creative medium.
So I was sitting in front of Vons with Mikey and the whole situation gradually revealed itself to me. I have become one of those young, angsty, aimless suburban white male do-no-rights that we've all been taught to believe are the scourge of the earth. I have no aim, no focus; I am no longer excited by nearly anything; I'm jaded and cynical; I wear black clothes and sit around watching movies all day. Fuck. FUCK. Oh well, so is the way of things.
I know this weblog has been rather dreary, and I apologize to you, dear reader(s), and promise that as soon as I get a sense of humor and a goal, I'll start posting pictures of people in funny clothes again.
Saturday, March 13, 2004
Like this. Just like this the world changes. I ran into Joe Caudillo today. He was one of my best friends for seven years, haven't talked to him in a long time. Suddenly he's a total stranger; this kid who was a permanent installment in my life is now completely different, changed. Don't we all want to go back.
Tuesday, March 09, 2004
Sleep will chew you up and spit out beautiful, I swear. Somehow the most banal details of life get re-processed through the dream machine into something completely, earth-shakingly amazing.
There's one dream that's stuck with me for over a month now. I was somehow wrapped up in the spiritual manifestation of New York city; a spiraling, twisting crazy place of rusted beams and concrete. Riding in a dilapidated subway car, I see on a wall next to the entrance to a dark tunnel an image etched in spraypaint: the girl from the Les Miserables poster clutching a neon-green Uzi in an expression of strange nobility. I looked up through the pavement to see massive, contorted spires of buildings and an incredible dance of strife, perservearance and death.
And then I was carried into the tunnel, looked at the trash strewn around the car's dilapidated interior and thought "This is where it happens. This is it. This is the city."
I wake up and a month later I'm thinking the coin may have two sides.
There's one dream that's stuck with me for over a month now. I was somehow wrapped up in the spiritual manifestation of New York city; a spiraling, twisting crazy place of rusted beams and concrete. Riding in a dilapidated subway car, I see on a wall next to the entrance to a dark tunnel an image etched in spraypaint: the girl from the Les Miserables poster clutching a neon-green Uzi in an expression of strange nobility. I looked up through the pavement to see massive, contorted spires of buildings and an incredible dance of strife, perservearance and death.
And then I was carried into the tunnel, looked at the trash strewn around the car's dilapidated interior and thought "This is where it happens. This is it. This is the city."
I wake up and a month later I'm thinking the coin may have two sides.
Friday, February 27, 2004
Sunday, February 22, 2004
1) Spend hours playing computer games. Briefly look out window disparagingly, continue playing computer games.
2) Fantasize about Ben Affleck.
3) Cower in existentialist dread, gripped with all-consuming fear of your inevitable demise. Then make a hot-pocket.
4)
5) Tony Danza.
Monday, February 16, 2004
Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech translated into German and back into English with the Google translator:
... legend I to you today, to my friends, to despite the difficulties and to frustrations of the moment, which I still another dream have. It is a dream, which verwurzelt deeply in the American dream becomes. I have a dream that one day this nation rises above and lives from the applicable meaning its Kredos: "we hold these truths, in order to be natural; that all men are caused on an equal footing "..., I do not have a dream that my four small children become one day phases in a nation, in that it judged by the color of its skin however by means of the contents of their letter..., This is the day, if all children of the God are in that to sing with new meaning "tis my country ' of thee sweet country of the liberty, of thee, which I sing. If you land where my fathers died, country of the pride of the Pilgrims, from each mountain side, liberty ring left."... If we leave liberty ring, if we are it of each village and of each Doerfchen, of each condition and of each city clips to leave, we able to accelerate this day if all children of the God, men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and catholic one to blacken, in whom, hands are to connect and in the words of the old affairs of black sing, "freely finally! Finally release! Thank Gottalmighty, we freely finally are!",
"Dream, for to I am have plankton."
... legend I to you today, to my friends, to despite the difficulties and to frustrations of the moment, which I still another dream have. It is a dream, which verwurzelt deeply in the American dream becomes. I have a dream that one day this nation rises above and lives from the applicable meaning its Kredos: "we hold these truths, in order to be natural; that all men are caused on an equal footing "..., I do not have a dream that my four small children become one day phases in a nation, in that it judged by the color of its skin however by means of the contents of their letter..., This is the day, if all children of the God are in that to sing with new meaning "tis my country ' of thee sweet country of the liberty, of thee, which I sing. If you land where my fathers died, country of the pride of the Pilgrims, from each mountain side, liberty ring left."... If we leave liberty ring, if we are it of each village and of each Doerfchen, of each condition and of each city clips to leave, we able to accelerate this day if all children of the God, men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and catholic one to blacken, in whom, hands are to connect and in the words of the old affairs of black sing, "freely finally! Finally release! Thank Gottalmighty, we freely finally are!",
"Dream, for to I am have plankton."
Tuesday, February 10, 2004
Tom Scharpling is the host of a New Jersey-based radio show called "The Best Show on WFMU," to which I listen on a weekly basis. Tuesdays from five to eight, channel WFMU. It's possibly the greatest thing ever to be broadcast on the radio, and the guy accepted my friendster.com request to be his friend.
I wrote him an email asking him to add Heimbourge to his list of "Factory Wrapped Douches," i.e. people he disapproves of for one reason or another. Here's what he had to say:
Dear The Cool -
Thanks for the kind words. The show has its ups and downs sometimes, and you just have to ride them out.
That's some gym teacher you've got. You should call up and talk about him on the air sometime. But one thing you CANT do is give his name.
Talk to you soon!
Tom
I wrote him an email asking him to add Heimbourge to his list of "Factory Wrapped Douches," i.e. people he disapproves of for one reason or another. Here's what he had to say:
Dear The Cool -
Thanks for the kind words. The show has its ups and downs sometimes, and you just have to ride them out.
That's some gym teacher you've got. You should call up and talk about him on the air sometime. But one thing you CANT do is give his name.
Talk to you soon!
Tom
