Haven't Been Having Any Serious Thoughts Lately...

So I haven't been posting here.

I have been extremely worried about Mexican drug cartels, in the vague and nebulous way I worry about things I don't feel like I have any control over.

I go to a college which is pretty liberal in terms of illegal substance usage, and I worry that because of the people in my philosophy class some kid in Mexico will be missing an arm tomorrow. And the country adjacent to us collapses, we'll have no one to blame but ourselves.

Thoughts very vague. Someone needs to start a massive PR campaign. This person isn't me.

More later, possibly.

Quite Possibly the Most Wonderful Thing I Have Ever Seen in my Life

This.

It looks harmless enough...

So I finally decided to try some of that Arizona Green Tea. It took me a while to get into it, but it was drinkable. I could see myself keeping a couple in the fridge, if it was healthy.

But that's the question. Is it healthy?

To find out, I turned to Wikipedia, which helpfully informed me that the Arizona Beverage Company sold green tea drinks and provided me with a list of their other products. For once, Wikipedia has failed me. Are there not enough beverage enthusiasts for this green tea drink to have its own page?

Of course I know green tea is healthy. But how much high fructose corn syrup can you add before your green tea starts to hurt you?

So I asked google... again, nothing. Plenty of websites reassured me that Arizona Green Tea actually made testers lose weight, blah, blah, blah, but weight loss isn't really my primary objective, and anyway I don't trust any random site I come across. I could not find a reputable source (meaning: a site I've heard of) discussing the benefits of said tea.

17g of sugar. But how much is that? It's better than the 45g you'd find in Pepsi, but that's not really saying much.

And how do I know the antioxidants are even working for me? Green tea is listed as the primary ingredient. Does that mean the benefits of the antioxidants outweighs the cost of the sugar? Why, oh, why don't they list antioxidants under Nutrition Facts? And omega acids, ect.? Aren't these useful things to know when you're stressing over your beverage choice?

Obviously I've got a go-to alternative to coca-cola. And I suppose some sweet relief for my caffeine headaches. But should I keep one in my fridge, or only drink them when I'm out and about?

Any one have any ideas? I'm totally mystified.

You may not have heard about this...

But the Saints won the superbowl.

I am overjoyed, not least because in the pre- and post-game coverage my city got a few much-needed hours under the nation's spotlight. Since we have a tourist economy and badly need economic stimulus, we need to remain on everyman's mental map of the USA.

Everything that can be said about the Saints has already been said. I would have taken pictures when I went to the Quarter Sunday night, but I don't have a camera and the camera I do have doesn't work at night. I would have brought my friend the photographer, but she's two years younger than me and living at home and I doubt her parents would approve.

What I can say, which to my knowledge no one has said before, is this:

All fairy tales come from China. Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, you name it. Chinese stories.

And how do I know? Simple! What do all of these men have in common?

All of these men are with a Disney princess, which, one would assume, makes them Disney princes. However. ALL OF THESE PRINCES ARE NAMED CHARMING.

What does this tell us? Well, either they're all the same person-- check out the pictures above and you'll see they obviously aren't-- or they're all related. They're a dynasty of Charmings... Or should I say Char Mings?

The Char Ming dynasty, which unfortunately has never appeared in any book I've read and so must be a part of Chinese prehistory, was obviously in the habit of marrying poor peasant girls on the spur of the moment. Not that Sleeping Beauty was a peasant girl. Neither was Snow White, but she might as well have been-- she was just lying in a casket surrounded by tiny men. How on earth would you know about her heritage?

Anyway, I have a French test tomorrow and I don't really have time to look into this important discovery, but if any anthropologist or historians want to take up where I left off, they can go right ahead.

The Difference between Flannery O'Connor and Gertrude Stein

To me, Flannery O'Connor and Gertrude Stein both have a lot in common. I don't care about their characters. Their plots are for the most part mundane-- even when exciting things happen, they're coated with a veneer of mundanity. And I read both of them in a way completely devoid of empathy for any characters involved.

But I will seek out a Flannery O'Connor story, and I will not seek out a Gertrude Stein story. In fact, I will go to great lengths to NOT have to read Gertrude Stein. And this is why:

Flannery O'Connor filters her stories through a narrative structure. Gertrude Stein does not.

Take, for example, Gertrude Stein's Three Lives. I feel like Three Lives was concocted in a laboratory by someone who's never been human. Just for a sample:

‘“I certainly never did see no man like you, Jeff. You always wanting to have it all clear out in words always, what everybody is always feeling. I certainly don’t see a reason, why I should always be explaining to you what I mean by what I am just saying. And you ain’t got no feeling ever for me, to ask me what I meant, by what I was saying when I was so tired, that night. I never know anything right I was saying.” “But you don’t ever tell me now, Melanctha, so I really hear you say it, you don’t mean it the same way, the way you said it to me.” “Oh Jeff, you so stupid always to me and always just bothering with your always asking to me. And I don’t never any way remember ever anything I been saying to you, and I am always my head, so it hurts me it half kills me, and my heart jumps so, sometimes I think I die so when it hurts me, and I am so blue always, I think sometimes I take something just to kill me, and I got so much to bother thinking always and doing, and I got so much to worry, and all that, and then you come and ask me by what I mean by what I was just saying to you. I certainly don’t know, Jeff, when you ask me. Seems to me, Jeff, sometimes you might have some kind of a right feeling to be careful to me.”

This is less than third of the paragraph, by the way.

I just can't read it without getting a massive headache. And the stories are put together in the same way-- with absolutely no regard for convention. Details describing characters seem chosen at random. Descriptions are clinical, exact, and uninteresting. The pace of the story seems at once painfully slow and entirely arbitrary-- it isn't filtered by interest to the reader or by anything else. Time itself seems arbitrary-- Gertrude Stein leaps back and forth without blinking an eye. And of course she abuses punctuation horribly.

But Flannery O'Connor is something easy to swallow, something... storylike. In the film industry, where convention is generally considered a lot more important, the rule is introduce your villain in the first twenty pages. In "A Good Man is Hard to Find", we are introduced to our villain on the first page without knowing he is, in fact, our villain. Also, the story occurs in three locations: the family's home, the roadside restaurant, and the eventual car accident (the road is a device to get us from one plotpoint to the other). In all of these locations our villain is (re)introduced to us in various forms, whether it be through hearsay or in person. When the villain finally shows up, there's a sort of inevitability to it, a comfortable inevitability. "Oh, of course," you think. "This must be our villain."

Also, the story begins where it begins and ends where it ends. There's an element of closure.

I don't know whether this is good or bad. I don't know if I've been brainwashed into being uncomfortable with the avant-garde. But I know what I like, and for the most part I can't help that. I don't like Gertrude Stein. I like Flannery O'Connor. I think in narratives and she writes in narratives. It's almost like a more direct form of communication.

New, Sexy Desktop

My friend Avery came over today and using this program called Rainmeter she coolified my desktop. What you see here is a screenshot of my actual desktop. No lie. It's got a cute little dock with icons for all the programs I normally use and a built in clock and a hidden taskbar which only shows up when I mouse over it. She did the same for my laptop. I was going to post the results here, but my laptop is pitching a fit, probably because of its new layout. I need to do one of those file consolidating things, whatever they are.

I'm not sure my laptop can handle this Rainmeter business. It's getting pretty old. Hopefully it'll last me a couple more years but break before I am financially independent and have to pay for my own.

I kind of want my next computer to be a Mac.

Up in the Air

So I saw Up in the Air. Without giving anything away, the acting was spectacular, the characters were interesting, and the ending was wondrously unexpected. What struck me most about this movie was that everyone in it was sensible, except for the silly twenty-year-old who was, in fact, a silly twenty-year-old. When the forty-year-old woman saw the forty-year-old man with a twenty-year-old girl crying on his shoulder, I thought there would be drama, but they all sat down and talked about the twenty-year-old girl’s relationship problems without jumping to conclusions, which was nice. And I’m always in favor of less sappy endings.

It was a courageous piece with a sort of an indie feel to it, the sort of movie that screams I AM A SERIOUS MOVIE, and I recommend that anyone with an interest in movies see it because while Avatar is the most visually stunning movie I’ve seen this year, Up in the Air is the most meaningful, in that it effectively explored a theme. Admittedly, I’ve only seen three movies this year. But I think Up in the Air will remain the most meaningful movie of the year for a few months, at least.