2046

I just finished watching 2046. Best movie I've watched in a long time. It walks a fine line. It lost its way often, without ever losing meaning. It was full of sex, but it was never obscene. It had science fiction, but only ever as a metaphor. It was hard to watch, but in the same frame compelling. It was beautiful and artistic, full of drawn out pauses and avant-garde cinematography, but it never alienates the viewer. I would recommend it, but unfortunately I don't think a lot of people would appreciate it, to be honest I'm not sure why I did. Not for the faint of heart or those with a short attention span.
I had a great test this morning. I only studied for it while I was driving to school, but I had taken surprisingly good notes so i think I did pretty good on the test. Next up is a whole slew of papers and approximately two poems that need doing. I could be doing the poems right now, but unfortunately I need to do the papers at the library and I haven't really had much time on campus now that I'm on the scc. And now that I'm acting director I probably will have even less time. I truly am fortunate that Kari is there to take the majority of the responsibility and show me how it all works.

fool sitting here typing

Vesuvius

This wasn't one of the rejected poems, but it was given a terrible mark because apparently it didn't follow the criteria close enough. I'm okay with that. (it's also pretty bleak and almost verging on nihilism).

pipesmokingprofessor

Vesuvius
I'm raked over the hot loud mouth of Vesuvius
old man spewing words of senile wisdom
"The world is going to end tommorow Pompeii"
"Punk music is cyanide filling your veins"
as I turn around to protest, he holds high his sign
telling me I'm sinking this ship, but i feel different
and yell back "don't bring me down old man"
he rubs a gumstain with his toe
and becomes melted down into the pavement
walked on by a thousand feet, after being spat out
and after all, i'm just another one of these

Where I'm going is a place of seizure lights
people screaming on a low stage
closer now than ever before, it seems
we will jostle and mosh, fighting for a piece of them
rats trying to escape a flooding sewer
weeds fighting for sunlight in a crowded pond

The old man will not dissuade me
I will have my fix
inject my poison in full knowledge
his drugs are his homemade clean white signs
he's a little child clutching his blanket or favorite toy
at least I know who I am

All the Wrong Reasons

listening to Rolling Stones: Can't Always Get What You Want

We sit on a sofa our whole lives. Getting worked up over our soap opera girlfriends. The monologue is our vehicle of choice. We don't want to speak, but we'd rather us than anyone else. On the backs of napkins there are half thought phrases. Boxes litter this room, left from warranty deals or just moving your things. you came, you sat, you've never done much since. I think it's called a burn out, but it sure feels like I'm fading away. You don't sleep enough to stay in tense or in person, blackouts if you try to go somewhere. It becomes a prison that you have a key to. You grasp what you need to do, but there is so much of it that you don't sleep. You still wont do it though.

listening to The Clash: London Calling

I finally understand why I get so little sleep. knowledge of self is important, but I often can't understand how I feel or why I do things until I write them out. I would say the reason I get so little sleep is that, although I know it's important in order to function properly, there are so many things that I could be doing with my time that somehow in my mind I lessen its importance. Case in point is what I'm doing right now. On one hand I haven't slept for quite a while now, but on the other hand I've finally been able to articulate why that is, so I'm going to finish typing before I go to bed. Part of it is certainly conditioning. I pull all nighters so often that my sleep meter doesn't register as loud in my mind, kind of like a concience. I will hereby refer to it as my sleep concience (even though it really has no moral significance).

pipe smoking professor

Child of the Trumpeter

This is one of the rejected poems, due to the fact that it's an extended metaphor rather than multiple metaphors. May be a bit disturbing.
pipesmokingprofessor


You are the egg of a regal swan
Laid with care upon a feather nest
Your mother watching over you
With jealous guardianship
Entrusted to her faithfulness

Not much swayed her eye upon that day
A ripple or a summer breeze
She moved to guard her charge
And from the reeds a hungry hand
Lunged and held its daily bread

Entrenched within a woolen satchel
He brought you to his country home
Where you were prodded poked and pierced
your lifeblood spilled and from you stolen
Sucked dry by old men and little boys

Now you sit upon a kitchen shelf
No natural beauty to attract
You're painted bold and clear
The blue and white of August sky
The red of prostituted pouting lips

A Mildly Interesting Diversion and a Frustrated Monologue

What I'm listening to today is what the soundtrack would be if my life was a movie. I was reminded earlier today of this gimmicky list that made the rounds a couple of years back, where you would put your itunes on shuffle and the order in which they played would correspond to parts of the soundtrack to the movie of your life. Pretty inane, but I just finished burning all my music onto my computer so I've pulled it up and here's the list.

Opening credits: "These Stones Will Shout" - Raconteurs
Waking up: "A Rush of Blood to the Head" - Coldplay
First day of school: "Symbol in my Driveway" - Jack Johnson
Falling in love: "Pork and Beans" - Weezer
Fight song: "Mother Nature's Son" - The Beatles
Breaking up: "Love is a Miracle" - Delirious
Prom: "One After 909" - The Beatles
Life: "Michelle" - The Beatles
Mental breakdown: "Trip Through Your Wires" - U2
Driving: "God Put a Smile Upon Your Face" - Coldplay
Flashback: "King of Fools" - Delirious
Getting back together: "August 30th" - Delirious
Wedding: "Waking the Dead" - Sam Roberts
Birth of a child: "Quiet Storm" - Toby Mac
Final battle: "Consolacao" - Smokey and Miho
Death scene: "November Has Come" - Gorillaz
Funeral song: "Everything I Said" - The Cranberries
End credits: "All Star" - Smash Mouth

Overall it didn't work near as well as the first time I did it. There were quite a few repeat artists (although I do have 150 Beatles songs on my itunes) and there was some music that I simply don't listen to anymore (Smash Mouth, Toby Mac). There also some pretty bad fits like Pork and Beans for falling in love, Mother Natures Son for the fight song, Love is a Miracle for the breakup song, and... Actually almost the whole thing didn't fit. That's really dissapointing. Y'all should give it a shot anyways, it's a mildly interesting diversion.

I had a tough time with my crwr prof today. Throughout the semester we've had to write a number of poems, but they were always pretty specific as to what we could write about, so today when she gave us an assignment to do some freewriting I was pretty happy. Unfortunately I read further and I realized that the catch was I had to pick a specific color and write it on that. There are two reasons why I would be pretty choked about this. Firstly, having done quite a lot of freewriting previously, I've found that when you start freewriting, your thoughts will be generally be pretty jumbled. It's only after you've got that initial confusion out of the way that you eventually settle on what you're writing about. If I started freewriting with a color, I would almost certainly not end with the color. I voiced this concern and stayed after class to discuss it with her, but only minor concessions were made. It wasn't until later, on my way home, that I realized the real reason it jarred with me so much. The real reason I don't like it is that I won't be able to write anything meaningful. The scope of my poem has been confined to someone else's purely physical topic. When I write poetry, I like it to be meaningful, to be able to impact somebody. There is a big difference between poetry written just for the sounds, images, etc. and political poetry. I try to write the latter. There is certainly something to be said for simply practicing your technique, but in this class we have to put a lot of work into our poems, editing multiple times, and I would like to have something to show for that. So I will definately overstep my boundaries on this (I have on all my other poems) and accept the bad mark. All I need in the class to advance is a 60% and it's not worth sacrificing your academic standards just for better marks. So that's that for that.

zen master

Morning Dreams

listening to Matthew Good - Champions of Nothing

I had a dream last night. I dreamt that I had a pregnant girlfriend. At the same time I had to go to China to visit my family. the baby was going to be born while I was back in China, something to do with my grandfather. I looked at my girlfriend and I told her "Have you ever had a conversation where you miss one little word, just one single word and all of a sudden the conversation doesn't make sense anymore. You have no context to place what's being said." and then I paused and was going to tell her that that's how I felt about my life, but I woke up. I don't know why I dreamt that, and I don't know why it felt so important, but i can't get it out of my head because sometimes I feel that way. It's as though I'm living in a dream and I all of a sudden wake up, take a step backwards, and look at my life, wondering "how did I get here". I had a word given me when I left Glenmore to move back to the coast. It might have been Bob who gave it, but it was about a compass pointing True North. He said I was going true north, that the direction I was going was where God wanted me to go. Sometimes I look at where I am and that's all I have to go on... God wants me here...

zen master

Dealers vs. Dealers

listening to Neil Young - On The Beach

I had a discussion today about drugs, about dealers. Everybody was pretty animated, everybody had their piece to say. I was reminded of a Bob Doede class at Trinity. There was a few classes in which we discussed the problem of evil. It was heavy, we were discussing how a loving and omnipotent God can allow people to suffer. How can he allow little children to be raped and pregnant women to step on mines?

listening to Neil Young - Vampire Blues

How can he allow natural disaster to wipe out thousands of "innocent" people? There are a number of answers and the discussion became heated. Especially as Christians we all had our views on the problem of evil, it's something we had probably all had to think about. At the end of the section on the problem of evil, Doede said something that will stick with me. He said that we were welcome to our theories and that we should think about it, that we should try to reason out how a loving and omnipotent God can let these things happen, but there was one thing we had to be able to do. We had to be able to bring our theories forward and present them to the little child and his family, to the pregnant mother and her family, and to the victims of the natural disaster. If we can not do that, if our theories are divorced from the actual suffering, then we should not hold them.

listening to Neil Young - Revolution Blues

So we were talking about drugs. And we were talking about dealers. And it occured to me that we can talk about throwing them in jail, we can talk about shooting them, we can talk about giving the addict his drugs for free, but we have to be able to see these people when we pass judgement. We have to be able to know these people before we can say a word or pass a law. If you know someone, and love them, then you can condemn them to death. But not before. We have a real problem in our society, drugs are an enormous problem. And I want to find a solution, I'm sure most of us do. But before we do, we have to get to know the people who are on drugs and who are dealing drugs. We can't pass by on the other side of the street any longer.

fool sitting here typing