Journal (or "ideas: pt.2")

So earlier today I was digging around the trunk of my car for a book when I came across a small notebook: a journal I decided to try to write in periodically a year or two ago. There are only a few entries in it, probably not even ten, but well....it got dammaged. My car isn't exactly high-end, and water leaks into the trunk when it's wet out. I hadn't realized it until now (apparently I haven't even opened the journal since last summer) but since I left the journal in my trunk for months, it has been accumulating water damage. I don't think anything has become readable, but for a book I invested some emotion into I'm pretty annoyed I let this happen.

There was another book in the trunk that picked up water damage, a small pocket size notebook similar to what I described I was looking for in the "Ideas" post from a few days ago. At first I thought it was a travel log from one of my road trips x-country. When I opened it, all but the first few pages were empty, and most of the horizontal lines had been washed from the pages. What bothers me is that it could still be a travel log, just with all my entries washed out. That's just no good. A few days ago I came across another such travel log from my road trip home this summer. It hadn't picked up water damage because it was in the passenger compartment, but waws still in very poor condition from being trampled. I've gotta take better care of my memories; I have enough trouble holding onto them in my head, I need to cherish them after I commit them to paper.

At least I have that notebook I was looking for.

Procrastination

Hello. My name is David Marx, and I'm a compuslive procrastinator.
It's been a 6 hours since I last procrastinated, i'm jsut glad I finally got some work done tonight. I have a long tradition of not doing homework in general, turning things in late if at all. I stay afloat based on test grades and the fact that when I do produce my work is always of high quality. I'm graduating this year, which means I have a few days to wrap stuff up or I don't get a diploma.

This is a bad situation for a compulsive procrastinator like me. I'll often find myself on youtube, telling myself, "This is the last video, just one more and that's it!" an hour after telling myself the same line. Tonight I decided i needed to get away from my room if I was going to get some work done (my typical last resort strategy, and it usually works. wokred tonight too). So, I went to one of my favorite sanctuaries: the closed writing center. I work there, so I can get in when it's closed, giving me access to what's effectively a private library, complete with couches, tables, writing supplies, computers printers, and even free coffee. But get this: I'm such a clever little procrastinator, I even made a facebook event out of it, and spent at least 20 minutes working out the kinks in publishing the event and inviting people I thought might be doing work instead of partying tonight. Crazy huh?

Earlier tonight, when I was procrastinating hardcore (which is why I retreated to the writing center), I googled myself. I occasionally google old friends just to see what I find, and I usualy find plenty; if you've ever played a sport, even just in high school or maybe even middle school, chances are googleing your name will atl east pull up some stats and maybe a picture or two. But damnit, "David Marx" appears to be an incredibly common, and nerdy name.

Here's what some of the other DM's are doing out there:
* Photography Instructor
* A few musicians, one I KNOW sucks and another who lives in Tokyo!
* An Emergency physician who lives ~50 miles from me (what are the chances a firefighter and ER-MD with the same name live w/in 50 miles of each other?)
* A Lawyer
* A couple engineers (/professors)
* A chemistry professor
* A psychology professor
* A cinematographer
* last but not least, one of these turds took the amazon account "david marx" and posted his nickname as "mingieboy"
>>and that's just from the first 2 pages of hits.

what's your favorite procrastination strategy? cleaning your room? facebook? I've gotta say i'm pretty fond of the online TV.

Allright, time for bed. Good luck getting your stuff done!

a busy news day

Here we go, in the order I heard:

1) Planet found roughly 20 light years away that could potentially support life

2) Boris Yeltisn died (fuck yeltsin. am I right?).

3) French fries give you cancer.

ok. so that was probably alot to handle, and I apologize if I shook your world a little there. Let's just focus on the last one for now.

Acoording to wikipedia, the reaction of asparagine (an amino acid) with reducing sugars under high heat creates acrylamide. acrylamide has long been known to be neurotoxic, which is why if you've ever done an SDS-PAGE in a bio class you wear gloves. apparently, it may also cause cancer.

Long story short, ANY FOOD that is browned during baking, overcooked or fried (and maybe even microwaved too) contains acrylamide. I guess fired potatoes are of particular concern because they are chock loaded with sugar.

Time for us all to make an important decision: what's more valuable to me? 50 years of eating fries and chips, or not going through 6 months of chemo.

Time for me to start saving up for the chemo.

Ideas

I like to read. I don't read for myself as often as I'd like; hopefully now that i'm graduating i'll finally ahve some time to really dig into some books. Still, when I'm home i like to hang out at bookstores and jsut flip through what I find, often spending hours in the philosophy section

Winter junior year (winter before last) I had the great idea of keeping a small notebook on me as often as possible. If you know me, then you know that I have an incredibly shitty memory for certain things, so I decided that having a book on hand would be great for jotting down ideas, to do lists, phone numbers, appointments, whatever.

One day last winter I was wandering through some philosophy at the local Borders (Barnes & Noble?) when I came across a book by a philosopher of mind I like a lot, Douglas Hofstaedter, the guy who wrote Godel, Escher, Bach and The Mind's I. Flipping through the book, I found a snippet where he tried to develop an account of what creativity is. I wrote a little diatribe on what came to mind in my notebook. If it were shorter, I'd write the whole thing out for ya. maybe some other time.

Either way, I found the notebook the other day and have begun using it again for some brainstorming related to end-of-the-year projects i'm working on. It's so packed that I've flipped it upside down and now am writing on the backsides of empty pages.

I need a new notebook. I want to revive the "have it on me at all tiems" policy. I like reading my old ideas, they're not bad.

No Subject

So I'm kind of out of the loop at school. I don't watch tv so I don't see news briefs as the evening news is advertised. I don't really keep up with news online, although it's ony a click away. recently I started using firefox as my main browser, and i deliberately set the homepage in firefox to washingtonpost.com a while back(unlike the eMail homepage I have set for IE).

I'm going to try to keep up with the news more. yesterday morning a massacre occured at VA Tech, which is not far from my home outside DC. The shooter killed 33 people, making it the deadliest shooting by a single gunmen in US history and the worst school shotting as well.

To say the least I feel like the columbine post from a few days ago was in poor taste, although it did happen before the shooting. But in general I just feel terrible. I talked about being jaded before, but hearing about large amounts of people dying just strikes a nerve with me, and a school shooting in virginia feels almost personal.

Some of the vicitms are listed in the wikipedia article, and boy did it feel wierd looking through jsut to make sure i didn't know anyone.

I need to get some work done, i've been dwelling on this all morning. I feel like i'm disrespecting the dead by pushing my emotions away, like i'm giving them the cold shoulder or changing the channel mid-story. it doesn't matter, i have to TCB today; last night i ran into my professor/advisor at a bar, and i'd rather he not think i was unprepared for class because i was too busy partying.

maybe i'll watch elephant later tonight and really own my emotional reaction to this.

Weekend update followup

So awhile back I posted an entry titled "weekend update" that mentionted the blog palmsout. The reason I love this blog, as I mentioned, is their sample wednesday features. The way i was introduced to the blog was the post they made about Daft punk, which a friend sent me. After I checked out the blog, I went around to as many friends as I could disillusioning them about different songs/bands

well, someone else was as impressed as I was with the stuff on palmsout and made this tight little video out of the Daft Punk post:

Video Games as Art

So looking for literature for my ethnography of BF2, I ran across a couple of gaming blogs. One referenced this game: Super Columbine Massacre RPG! an RPG created by filmmaker Danny Ledonne.

"Welcome to Super Columbine Massacre RPG! You play as Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold on that fateful day in the Denver suburb of Littleton. How many people they kill is ultimately up to you."

To say the least, this game looks controversial as hell. Still, I think it is an incredibly interesting idea and social statement. Trivializing the events of Columbine to the narrative of a low bit, sidescrolling, cartoony RPG seems sort of appropriate when presenting the story from the perspectives of the shooters. Granted, I don't actually think their perspectives on their actions were as simple as that; they did kill themselves afterwards. But, if you want to be reminded of the gravity of the event, watch the film Elephant.

I remember columbine. I remember the insane fear that gripped the country afterwards; as students were expelled for making similar plans, wearing shirts with the anarchist A on them, or even playing cowboys and indians in school. I was scared too. After my first viewing, I have since refused to watch Elephant again because I did not want to relive the emotions I associated with columbine that the film forced me to remember.

Still, just the screenshot of this game sends a whole different kind of chill up my spine. The superficiality of it reminds me of the cold calm both of the shooters wore in the security camera videos from columbine as they moved from room to room murdering their classmates and teachers.

I don't ever plan on playing this game, but I think it makes a strong enough statement to be regarded with more respect than it seems to have recieved.

~~~~~~

So I thought I was done with this post, but today (the day after the bulk of this was written) I discovered what could be characterized as an ongoing performance art piece inside America's Army. This artist, 'playing' under the name "dead-in-iraq," goes into the game and does nothing with the character (i.e. he dies). After being killed, he types the name of a real soldier who died in Iraq and the day they died into the chat interface. as of 9/14/06 he'd enterred (unavoidable pun) 1,273 names. The fact that gamespaces can be appropriated for this purpose certainly speaks strongly for the metaphysical status of such media as legitimate "space" for mediating interactions http://www.salon.com/ent/feature/2006/09/16/americasarmy/

Rocky!

So last night I saw the Rocky Horror Show with some friends. I had to go; I'm graduating, had never been to the show before (only movies), and I knew like half the cast.

The show was fun to say the least, and we all went drunk as hell. But....well, facebook strikes again. Among other pictures that were posted from the pre-party is a picture of my friend (who is, well...a pretty big girl) doing what appears to be licking my nipple. She wasn't, but that doesn't matter. The point is that less than 12 hours after that picture was taken it's already causing me problems.

Facebook + incriminating pictures = rumor factory. light speed.

GO PLANET!

So last night I was up until 6am working on this powerpoint presentation for my biochem class. After I finished I knew I wasn't going to make it to class tomorrow anyway, so I decided to get high and watch some TV before bed. On a whim, I decided to watch the first episode o fthe second season of Captain Planet: mind pollution.

This episode is incredible. drop what you are doing, find some friends, get lit, and watch this NOW.

Assorted highlights:
- Leika becomes a crack whore
-a crackhead jumps through a glass window, lands face down on the floor and bleeds. pointlessness
- Kid ODs and instantly dies, accurate to reality
-Washington DC becomes overrun with crack heads. Also true to life.
-did I mention that drugs make people into zombies?
-"The drug made him do it!"
-"OK wheeler think: if you were a zombie, where would you be? The vice presiden't office!" (current vice president: Dan Quayle)
-"No! I've polluted MYSELF! No! NO! NOOOOOOOOOOO!"

Jaded

More than most people, I often worry that I'm jaded; desensitized. For example, I was recently on a date with a girl who my friend had told me got into a car accident on the freeway involving some friends of his. The account of the accident sounded pretty minor and no one was hurt, so on the date I jokingly brought it up. well, to say the least that openned a can of worms. As any normal person would've guessed, the car accident waws hardly minor in her eyes. In fact, she still complained of some minor shoulder pain from it, and was even still experiencing a high degree of what she described as post-traumatic anxiety (of course, she was heavily self-medicating on adderol, which she'd never done pre-accident, but we don't need to get into that).

the point is that I feel like many of my experiences that have taught me to instinctively dissociate myself from otherwise emotional situations (i.e. firefighting/EMS) may negatively effect the way I interact with people on a day to day basis. I don't think I'm incapable of empthay or sympathy or anything like that, I'm not sociopathic. But my sympathetic instincts probably don't kick in as often as they should. More than that, I feel like my emotiuons in general have been dulled (probably more from a years of depression growing up and a few romances gone rotten). It's gotten to the point where I tend to characterize myself as passionless. The fact that I'm kind of a loner and don't have many friends that i'm really close to (especially out here) doesn't help much.

consequently, I really enjoy those rare moments when I really feel human.

Tonight, instead of partying and all that jazz I went to the writing center and did some much needed HW. Mainly I didn't feel like partying; although there was a lot going on and my friends were practically begging me to come out, I just wasn't feeling social. But that's not the point. The point is, on my way over to the writing center, I saw a tiny little frog hoping around on the sidewalk, a pretty rare sight in SoCal. I tried to catch it and put it somewhere safer, seeing as there was a fairly large party going on about 50 feet south in front of the dining hall, but it kept escaping my grasp. I was on the phone with my friend at the time, and I mentinoed to him that I was worried someone would step on the frog.

Sure enough, as I returned to my room a little after 2 am I found the frog squished fairly close to where I'd found it earlier. I tapped it and tried to find a pulse to see if it was still alive; of course it wasn't. It kind of hurt a little knowing that I could've saved the frog if I had jsut tried harder to catch it, or at least chase it towards the grass. I decided no one else needed to know that a tiny little frog had been squished, so I picked it up by a hind leg and gave the little guy a fairly undignified trashcan-funeral.

As I continued back to my room, I was reminded of the only animal I've killed on the road (that I nkow of). Driving to school at the end of the summer, I hit a a crow in the midwest. I was going really fast on the freeway. it was flying across the freeway, then suddenly swept low and got sucked under my car. There was nothing I could've done about it, it happened way too fast. I was so struck at having killed the crow, I actually pulled off the freeway a few exits down, held a small memorial for it at a farm on the side of the road, and even erected a small monument of stones for the bird (I've even got a picure of the monument somewhere, it's apparently not on hand though or you'd bee looking at it).

I guess when I'm doing CPR on a soon-to-be-dead person, or cutting a screaming car accident victim away from their metal cage, i fell useful. My usefulness gives me focus, a goal towards which I can focus my energy, more easily putting my emotions aside. When I find myself in situations where I feel helpless or useless, emotions I would otherwise ignore or perhaps not even give my self opprotunity ofr come to the surface and dominate my experience. I suppose that means I feel most human when i'm in situations of distress. I sure hope that doesn't mean I feel pity stronger than I feel satisfaction or joy; i'm probably just making it seem that way because it's on my mind.

I mean, I am human after all.

Identity ownership

Today (yesterday?) I took a big step in taking ownership of my online identity: I posted a link to this blog as "my website" on my facebook profile. When I first started this blog, I thought i'd never had a blog before, but it's recently occured to me that facebook sort of is a blog, especially with those notes. But I've definitely never had a site I considered to be "my website" before.

For some reason though I still feel like leaving my name as "carvstree" on this blog. It's not as though I feel particularly vulnerable putting my real name up; it seems like plenty of people do it all the time and haven't been subject to identity theft or severe stalking or anything of the sort. I guess that for the time being, this is carvstree's blog, not David's. That probably sounds wierd, but I'm kinda wierd about it myself.

Next step will be personalizing this blog a little bit more, making it something I can be proud of and less of an assignment. The name bit will come later.

The Weekend Update

This past weekend was 3 days long courtesy of this wierd holiday that only SoCal schools recognize called "Cesar Chavez Day," and I either used the holiday really well or really poorly. I got almost no work done, despite the midterm I had on monday, and instead partied really really hard through the weekend and went snowboarding twice.

Brief follow-up on the Germany party. Suites around the world was a ton of fun, but was also pretty frustrating. Our budget was cut significantly, and the "more money than in previous years" became $75-85 for beer. I bought 6 5L kegs of 3 different german beers, and a ton of sausages and german cookies for snacks. The beers, it turned out, all had very foamy heads, meaning we had to have comitted pourers all night serving the beer. As soon as the other parties closed down, EVERYONE flooded into Germany. There were probly around 120 people packed into the tiny place I live in, so consequently the whole Discotheque theme failed because there wasn't enough room for anyone to dance. The beer only lasted 40 minutes, and the fact that someone jacked a whole keg from one of the fridges didn't help. Pretty much as soon as the beer got out, the entire party emptied to go see what was going on at the other party (mount olympus, who ran out of beer immediately after, or maybe were already out). Since everyone bailed on the party, I decided to shut it down for good: I locked the door, and left my suite empty. After the party I got trashed wandering around to different parties....well, I was kinda trashed already but I had a fun night.

Day after that (friday), I drove to Bear on my own and had a day of lone snowboarding, which was great and exactly what I needed to unwind throuhg some lingering frustrations from the night before. That evening, I got back to school, had a sausage barbecue with some friends (hey, we were all too busy serving beer to make most of the sausages), then got trashed playing beer pong.

Saturday I decided to just take it easy, so I mostly chilled on the mounds with some friends. My friend Laura and I decided to work on a mural together and are currently finalizing the design. That night I watched science of sleep which was fantastic and everyone should just drop what they're doing and go watch it now. Sunday I woke up early and took one of my roommates to Bear where we spent the day, then I went to work in the evening. It was a good weekend: I probably had more fun in the past 3 days then I did over the entire spring break.

Before I peace, let me share a few cool things I discovered over the past few days:

http://www.olpcnews.com - One Laptop Per Child. This company Quanta is working with an MIT techie to design and implement in mass production a laptop that costs only $100. The plan is to sell it for 200 in developed markets with the consumers understanding that they are buying a second laptop for a child in the Third World. Their current prototype only costs $150.

http://www.geekologie.com - Hard to describe...this website basically has a bunch of stuff on it that you'd think was especially cool if you were a nerd. Last I checked, they had a 1million dolalr laptop, high speed photography of a bullet, a foldable chair made out of ( i think) cardboard that you can twist into various cool designs, and a deep frier with a fish living in a water phase below the hot oil. Just cool, random stuff.

http://palmsout.blogspot.com - Palms Out Sounds, a music blog. Before my friend introduced me to this blog, I never really followed a blog. I feel like I defintiely would not mind keeping up with this one. Every wednesday they compile an album of songs sampled by a particular artist, every sunday they publish an album of remixes....all around an excellent find, especially if you are into hip hop.

And last but not least, there's a whole series of videos of this guy on Youtube. Yes, BlendTec is a real company, this is a real blender, and this is a real viral ad campaign. But, will it blend?