Tuesday, August 14, 2012

sick and sleepless

I got sick last Friday with some mucuzoid creature that has traveled, from my throat, to my sinuses, to my brain, to my stomach and back to my throat again.  It's been a wonderful parade of coughing, sneezing, dripping, fever, nausea and mucous.  But that's neither here nor there.  The weirdest symptom has been the insomnia.  I'll feel exhausted or wiped out from being sick, ready to sleep and just end up laying in the dark feeling perversely fidgety.  Last night was no better, even though I went to bed relatively early.  I just lay there thrashing until I eventually feel asleep sometime after dawn and then woke up with a bizarre crick in my neck that's taken me hours to stretch out.

In short, being sick has funked with my sleep, which was already funked enough thank-you-very-much and I'm cranky about it.  And that is the end of my story.

Thursday, August 09, 2012

The Fantastic Adventures of Parallel Me

It's a strange feeling, trying to break out of my old habits.  Every night I go to bed with a clear idea of how I want tomorrow to go, with a long list of things that would make me feel good and satisfied to accomplish.  And every day I wake up and do the same stupid things, on the same stupid schedule, in the same stupid way.  And through my pan-dimensional port hole, I can see parallel me doing those other things, and achieving the goals I laid out the night before, in ways that I seem reluctant to, and I think, "why can't I make the decisions that that guy makes?  What's so special about him that he just gets up and does all those things?"

It is a common and popular fact that people rarely change their personalities on a whim, or a dime or a bet.  Past a certain age, changing your behavior, plowing new ruts into the grey matter of your brain, just becomes more difficult.  Or at least, this is true for me.  And I'm basically offended every day that I can't just flip a switch and go from apathetic, depressed under-achiever to the fantastic adventures of hyper-productive, enthusiastically happy, casually cool parallel me.

I am desperate to converge these timelines (as is everyone tired of me talking about them).  I gaze at my doppleganger across the infinite/microscopic void of parallel time-space  with envious eyes and imagine how I can merge my world with his without destroying all of reality.  Which is perhaps what is holding me back, this irrational feeling that, should I start to change and merge with parallel me, my world will somehow explode.  And I suppose it might.  But maybe sometimes, in the name of science, truth and progress, you just have to push the blinking red button just below the letters "collide worlds" and see what happens.*

*Recovered from the notes of notorious scientist Soylent H, Age 36.**

**(this post brought to you by the Time Cube and the letter Pi)***

***Yes, sometimes I work out my issues in strange ways.

Monday, August 06, 2012

Forever Futurama

Are the new futurama shows not that funny?  Or have I just lost my sense of humor?  Or grown out of it?  These are the weighty questions that pre-occupy my tremendous intellect.

Thursday, August 02, 2012

Prick-fil-a

Do I really want to say something about Chik-fil-a?  I guess.

First, how hypocritical is it of people who were calling for boycotts of Oreos because of their support for gay rights to be falling dramatically onto fainting couches now that Chik-fil-a is getting boycott calls for opposing gay rights?  The mental gymastics it takes to justify this opinion is kind of mind-boggling.  They basically have to assume their opinion is privileged because it comes from the bible.  It isn't.  If it's okay that you boycott gay rights supporters, it's okay if other people boycott gay rights opposers.  It's not discrimination of your beliefs that other people don't like your beliefs and tell you so.

Second, it was stupid of democratic mayors to try and interfere with chick-fil-a.  Absent active discrimination of employees or customers, there's no reason for the government to get involved (and I know some would argue, even then).  They actually do have a right to sell chicken and be run by a bigot without government interference.

Third, seriously?  You want to be known as "that guy who lined up for a bucket of chicken to make sure everyone knew how much he hated gays?"  Good luck with that.

Fourth,  I look forward to reading about this in the history books.  That moving, and emotional moment in history when a bunch of people bought chicken to make sure gay people knew their shallowly examined religious beliefs prevent them from considering gay people full members of society.  I would say, "our cultural conversations could not get any stupider," but I know I'll be proved wrong in the next 3 months.

Fifth, this is not a both sides do it kind of thing.  Gay people want the right to marry and they want religious bigots to get out of the way.  Yes, both sides need to understand the other side doesn't have to celebrate them for their beliefs or lifestyles.  Certain evangelicals are acting like it's a tremendous intrusion on their rights to have a civic government recognize the marriage rights of consenting adults in monogamous, committed relationships, and then have to live with those people in the same society.  This is so patently and obviously untrue I'm not sure how grown-ass adults make this argument.  It's a big world, and we all have to interact with people who don't live their lives in the way we would choose to.  They might still be good people even so.  It will be okay.  Jesus.