So, I've decided to talk again, even though the silence of the response is deafening. I just don't care.

Confession?
Alright.

(Jenny rummages through her big bag of deep dark confessions and pulls out a fresh one.)

Three or four nights ago as I sat alone in bed, I began to cry. The digital red of the clock glared 5:41 AM, and I sat clutching at the sheets staring at the slivers of dawn slithering through my window blinds. It's morning that gets to me most. Lonliness has a sharper point at sunrise as the birds begin their social noise. Attempts to drown their chatter out with a freshly baked Soul Coughing cookie were failing, and I was beginning to think (asI do nearly every other morning) that maybe I should just forego sleep altogether. And then Janine came on.

That ball of lonliness burrowing itself into the bottom of my stomach suddenly shot up the back of my throat and waged war on any sanity I had left, and I started to cry. With deep, gasping, tear-streaming sobs...

Why?
Because I'm not Janine. I'm no one's Janine.
Pathetic? Trivial? Self-absorbed?

Fuck it. I don't care. That's how I felt. And that's how I still feel most of the time.
Like an empty shell living out a mundane little life with barely any purpose and no real meaning.
Like I'll never inspire a song like Janine.

And before I fall into a restless, angry-at-the-sheets sleep...

(Jenny whips out the mind control.)
You will visit Zombo. Why? You don't need to ask why.
Anything is possible at Zombocom....

(Jenny giggles self-indulgently and scampers off to dream.)

My birthday approaches, and yet, I feel lacking in the excitement department. Maybe I'm getting too old to care that another year has passed - bitter because it reminds me yet again of my ever-nearing death. Yet, I don't think my reasons for not being excited are as morbid as all that. Problems with my birthday:

1) Being surrounded by family with whom I have little to nothing in common but blood.
2) Apocalypse looms with threats made about my city on the very same day.
3) I seem to be inspiring only thinly veiled bitterness in those I live with - growing with each passing year.

So... whatever. Let the fourth come as it will. All I care about are the fireworks, really (the literal and the emotional it seems)...

On a more important note...
Happy birthday, Tony! Much love...

I've had this feeling more times than I think is normal. I only wish I had articulated it like this.

If cats possess higher cognitive functions, I've probably done a traumatizing disservice to my cat by giving her her insect name. Tonight I found myself saying, "Bug, kill the bug. Get it." And I stopped with a "what the..." reaction and pondered my redundancy for a moment. How strange must that be. If she knows only that she is identified by "Bug," and indeed, like the intelligent specimen she is, comes to that name when called, then the command that she kill another "bug" must be a confusing task for her. Must she really take down one of her own? And how can she and this alien creature with six legs share a common name?

Or maybe, as I'm beginning to suspect, I've thought about this far more than she has...

Pledge of Allegiance ruled unconstitutional

    "Did you hear about the ninth court ruling that the Pledge Of Allegiance is unconstitutional?" my dad throws at me as he settles into the living room.
    Still fuzzy from sleeping into the wee hours of the afternoon, I respond with a barely coherent, "Uhhh, nope."
    "Well the ruling applies to nine states, and we're one of them," and then adding in a muttered, indignant tone, he said, "It's load of crap."

It's been... (Jenny does some quick math, and decides that it should suffice to say....) a while since I've had to recite the oath of loyalty to America, and I can't say that the constitutionality of the act has stumbled around in my mind for quite some time. In the later years of my public education, I did begin to wonder how a democratic state could socially demand that its children regurgitate a robotic oath to remain patriotic every morning of their scholastic lives. (I say socially demand, because for some time now, the Pledge of Allegiance has not been a required morning ritual. Students who do not wish to participate are not forced to by any law, but rather face only the social repercussions of acting as the unpatriotic outcast.) To be honest, however, I never gave the matter much more than a passing thought.

Today, with the arrival of what my father so eloquently calls a "load of crap," I'm left wondering how I actually feel. Does the Pledge Of Allegiance provide one of the last bits of social consciousness that children experience during the day? Or is it simply an archaic and unconstitutional vestige of a more ritualistic past?

My logic says, "Ooh ooh, pick me! It's the latter!" and yet that little girl I keep locked in the back of my mind, says in her small little voice that as long as no one is forced to recite it, having a little patriotic ritual in a kid's life isn't all that bad.

Logic vs. Inner Child - Round 1

Until the scuffle in my mind subsides, I suppose I'll have to ruminate over this one a little longer. I'm open to any thoughts on the subject that you might want to babble back at me.

------------
As a small addendum, it's interesting to note that the infamously well-known phrase "In God We Trust" that we find printed on our money is a clinging artifact from the inception of the Cold War in the 1950's. It served to underline the differences between America and "atheistic" Russia.
-------------

Forcing Kids To Pledge Allegiance To The State
Is The Pledge Of Allegiance Unconstitutional?

So at this point in my life, I think I might be getting just sick enough of hearing people say, "So an English degree... what do you plan to do with that?" that my mind is threatening to send my body on a "career" search. In reality, I'll probably continue on my self-destructive blindly fate-led path toward a mundane life of meaningless job after meaningless job. I've been thinking of a workaround to the problem though - it includes me going to the local newspaper office and asking if they have an open position for coffee runner. At least that way when people ask me what I've done with my degree, I can say, "I work for the newspaper." Check me out; I'm sly.

Time: Nearly an hour into the 24th day of the 6th month of the year we call 2002.
Currently playing with this foodlike substance: Strawberry pie.
Admitting to myself: I haven't had a single deep thought in my head all day.
Current ailment: Earache.
Receiving aural satisfaction from: Fountains Of Wayne - It Must Be Summer
Deep dark confession of the night: I once stayed up until 8 AM just to watch Oliver Twist on PBS.
Perplexing lyric: "Morphine city slippin' dues down to see."
Thought provoked by: T.S. Eliot's brilliance in "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock"

"I have measured out my life with coffee spoons," he says.
"Should I, after tea and cakes and ices,
Have the strength to force the moment to its crisis?" he asks.

Same here, and I don't think I ever will....

I passed by a church during my bout of solitary night driving tonight that had a perplexing little message on its propaganda sign. You know the kind? - They're the signs that churches put out in front that they gussy up with witty little slogans and cheap proverbs that are designed to either entice or guilt you into attending (one more tithe in the little contribution basket can't hurt).

Well, this particular witticism read, "The first step in making a dream come true is waking up." My immediate first thought was, "When you wake up, the dream ceases to exist." Either you're dreaming, or you're not, right? And yes, I realize that the church sign designer probably had the more grandiose kind of reach-for-the-stars "dream" in mind. Even if that's the case, it appears that we have a bit of a poorly constructed mixed metaphor on our hands. Tsk tsk, the church couldn't come up with anything more logically founded?

Unless of course, I have the entire dream system wrong. Is it possible for a dream to exist during our waking states? Or do we simply step out of them, as a traveler returning to his or her home dimension?

If you haven't read Brave New World, shame on you. Do it now! (And yes, I'll get around to reading 1984 as soon as I get my hands on it, heh.) I had just taken good old Aldous' book off the shelf to peruse through as a refresher, when I noticed that I had marked a single passage the first time through. In the foreword, Huxley writes:

"A really efficient totalitarian state would be one in which the all-powerful executive of political bosses and their army of managers control a population of slaves who do not have to be coerced, because they love their servitude."

Now go read Brave New World.

For additional reference, see "Schwa World Operations Manual", Actualize-Section 2: Dimensions B & Y: "Stickpeople must not only be persuaded to accept Schwa's total control, they should be conditioned to ask for it by name."

I dreamt last night that all of our most intimate relationships, whether they be romantic, plutonic, or familiar, stain us and mark us with each other's colors. All our lives we walk around in our skin, colored by the people we've known and loved and hated - all the reds, and pinks, and blacks, and blues of a life's worth of experience. We bounce off one another, leaving our mark, one person at a time, on the giant mural of humanity...

I suppose there are worse ways to die...
Apparently in 1919 Boston, 21 people experienced death by molasses when an overheated tank at a nearby molasses factory ruptured and spewed forth a 15 foot high wave of sweet, sticky goodness. The sugary flood rampaged through Boston streets at 35 miles per hour. "Four of the dead were not found for days, their bodies glazed with a delicious candy coating." (shudder)

At least it's better than suffocation by bull testicles.

Being sick is only worthwhile when you're young and can milk it for all it's worth.
I don't see anyone bringing me 7-up and chicken soup and patting my forehead with a cool wash cloth now...
Ahhh... to be seven years old again.

CDs Coming In Down In Price (But Still Far Too Expensive)

At $18 CDs are still a good entertainment value? No. It's pathetic to see these record executives fumbling about trying to make sense of the lack of pay raises in their million dollar salaries lately. "Why? I haven't been able to buy a new yacht for my three-year-old this year. (Pouty record exec face)" And so the technophobes turn to readily available mp3s and point a shaking, angry little finger.

What these people don't seem to realize is that the world is made up of many things, people, music, and factors. Shifting sales are influenced by much more than the ease of burning CDs. Let's start with the fact that over the past three years, music has been getting more and more disposable with every new manufactured teen sensation added to the "market." What sane-minded consumer is going to throw away hard earned cash on uninspired cheese pop (preteen MTV slaves excluded)? And let's not overlook the fact that even while CDs themselves are cheaper to make than the cost of a Big Mac, 16 to 17 more dollars are stapled to their price with the justification that marketing demands such exorbitant consumer-raping. Maybe if record companies spent less time developing Britney Spears video games and N*Sync sleeping bags, they could get around to the business of signing and selling the music of talented acts with music that people want marketed.

This is all a moot point though for those who believe that music, as an art, shouldn't be packaged and sold like cheap food. The entire system needs to change - cut out the middle man, release the studio work to the people for free, and just perform. Artists (and by this I mean the marginalized musicians who actually write and perform their own music) have the ability to earn a living by touring. The problem with this ideal equation, though, is that the acts that top the charts can't actually perform. Lip syncing, pyrotechnics, choreographed dance numbers - this is what they think musical performance is about. It's no wonder they have to rely on sales of their artistically void CDs for their million dollar mansions. And record executives refuse to give up a system that allows them to willing feed the public inferior "product" at inflated prices.

Who can blame the bastards though? They're working on a system that has served them well and kept their trophy wives in furs for years. As long as consumers continue to swallow this load, they're going to keep fighting to force it down our throats and wonder why we occasionally gag. Maybe we have only ourselves to blame.

Listen to good music, people. Bite the hand that feeds you bullshit.

{Said unapologetically} So yes, I know that I plugged another site in the last post, but I'm doing it again, damnit.

For one of the more truthful ideas I've read in a while, click here.

{Sigh} What we allow ourselves to consume.
{Head shaking... pause.... slow upward stare into the sky, hand curling into a white-knuckled fist and hurling it above head}
Why?? Why, damn you, why??

Okay enough melodrama.

It's Talk To A Stranger From Illinois For 2 Hours And Forget To Feed The Fish Before You Lock Up Day!

Even if they laugh at their own jokes (like the curious, "You'd have to take a grain of salt with it in this heat" kind of jokes ...whaaat?), because, afterall, if you're not talking to strangers at work, what else are you going to be doing? Working. Fuck that. You may as well listen to the chitchatter conversation of a 50 year old woman and learn a bit about another human being. Socialize? Say it isn't so, Jenny. Oh, it's so. Try it next time you're stapling numbers to strangers' clothes and you're in the proximity of a travelling Illinois native. You can tell her about your soon-to-end college career and how you survive the 115 degree desert heat by swimming whenever possible. She'll tell you about her dog and her kids and her annoying husband, and in time, you'll break down and actually enjoy the interplay between yourself and another strange human being standing in a stifling dry cleaners.

Oh, and after that, close up shop, but forget to feed the fish.


For better, more interesting instructions for life, consult Pretty Girl. You know you want to.

You're being spoon fed bite-sized morsels of lies.
The more you learn, the more incensed you'll necessarily become.

Put away the propaganda, the 99 cent slogans, and all that comfortable ignorance, and you discover that something's very wrong. Only the ignorant can be blissful when we live under a government that puts unelected presidents in office, creates "drug wars" for profit, and knowingly and willingly participates in the destruction of the only planet we have.

The latest "revelation" by the Bush administration - the ecological masterminds who have been fighting for and approving plans to destroy natural wildlife preserves across the country for big business oil - is that, yes, global warming is a problem. What do they plan to do about it? Nothing. In fact, on the heels of this news, comes the announcement that the U.S. will begin relaxing air pollution standards. Am I missing something here?

Excuse me while I choke on all this irony.

Meanwhile - listen to the conservatives (translated: upper class white men and those too rich or ignorant to care about thinking) talk and the EPA starts to sound like a group of anarchist hippies out to bring down the government. Rush Limbaugh babbles this sentiment best in a recent smattering on his website. "The leftists who use this issue are using it to advance a political agenda, which is anti-capitalism, anti-Western culture, anti-America, and pro-big government." That's right, Rush. People who would like to see the Earth remain liveable for another hundred years are out to destroy democracy. The only conservative cliche insult he didn't use was "commie," though roughly translated, that's what it adds up to. Empty words coming from an empty stance.

"And I fall into the sky..."
Colors End

Time: The beginning of a very long night.
Feeling: Like I'm holding a winning lottery ticket that's been torn to pieces.
Admiring: A quote from this page about staring into a mirror - "Hold your eyes directly ahead as if you're waiting for God to finish a joke."
Listening: To whatever Winamp and Fate decide I should be listening to.
Contemplating: All the little scraps of life in this room and everything I haven't done/can't do.
Watching: The penguin bob.... bob, float, bob, float....

I'm suffering from a wearying monotony. If I were intelligent or witty enough, I could fight my way out of this paper bag.

But I'm not.

So instead, all I can do is smile at the little things that give me a few seconds worth of glimpses at the outside. Like the penguin warehouse.

And then I get depressed when I realize... no, I can't order a penguin online.

From the bottom of a pool, the sky feels like a tangible jellyfish blanket.

"You are more awake than is possible."
M. Doughty

Your corduroy skin and mine whisper to the clock.
No no no. No need to go.
I've got so little time now.
You just need to stay here / hold me here / keep me here
- in my broken, pale, silver-scarred skin -
You know I'm too afraid to slip outside it.
I've got so little time now.

My head has emptied.
Time now is just a succession monotonous days.

I had a thought last night/this morning at 7:13AM as I tried to combat the dizziness and fall to sleep. Clinging to my sheets, I thought, "Eight hours of sleep is one third of a day." One third. That's a meaty slice of the pie. I don't want to think that we sleep a third of our lives away, buried in the traumas and elations of a free and stretching subconscious. Completely at the will of our own repressed brains, we live a third of our lives in bed.

In other news:
I woke up early today - 12:15PM. What a world.

Cat vs. Ferret - Round 1 (ding ding ding)

I understand how the concept of keeping rodents as pets could be completely confounding to cats. For the past two hours, Juno (AKA The Bird Decimator) has been staring at the new household addition like a seafood lover stares at a lobster in a restaurant aquarium. Of course, the fact that the ferret is being fed prime kitten food isn't helping either. She doesn't understand why we're feeding the food - especially with food that she loves. She's been trying for about an hour to grab and pull a 4 inch by 4 inch food bowl through a centimeter by centimeter square in the cage wall. It's pathetic really.

And the ferret remains unphased.
More news as the situation develops...

Before I drift off to another nightmare-seasoned bout of sleep....

Time: 4:44AM
Current Strongest Biological Need: Water
Craving: Chinese food eaten from the takeout box with chopsticks
Emotion: Ease
I Should Be...: Sleeping, like normal people
Recent Happy Moment: My degree progress advisor, a congenial round man with a sweet smile and soft voice, said to me as I sat down at his desk in the Wilson Advising Center, "Well Jennifer, I've been looking over your degree work here," as he slid a piece of paper riddled with grades from a folder bearing my name, "and it looks like you're right on track."
    I smiled and asked hestitantly about the English 101 course I had skipped years ago in my Freshman beginnings.
    "Oh no no," he chuckled, "You don't have to take that. Your SAT scores were phenomenal. You were right to not take it in the first place."
    I could have just hugged the man, had my composure not kicked in. And then he made things even better...
    "Yeah, so it looks like you only need that Chaucer course and one other - anything you want it to be: physics, art, underwater basket weaving - and you'll be done."
    Sweeter words I have yet to hear in a school setting. Two classes and I'm done. (Pause for heavenly chorus and shining halos of light.) The whole thing's almost too good to be true.

What scares me?
Close-minded people - especially of the Christian variety.

Now, before any Christians get their self-righteous little feathers ruffled, let me explain. In general, I have a hard time appreciating the intelligence of anyone who claims, with an unrivaled and stubborn conviction, that their viewpoint is right and that all other are wrong even without investigating both sides. Take the concept of evolution, for example. I was mistakenly under the impression that such Galileo inquisitions no longer took place in our modern world. Nevertheless, it appears that in some parts of the country, not limited to the proverbial "Bible belt," there are fundamentalist groups pushing for the abolishment of evolution as a theory taught in public schools. Schools that are, mind you, state funded and operated. Where these conservative Christians have lost hold on reality lies in the fact that the idea of creationism, which they propose needs to replace or at least supplement evolution in school curriculums, is not science. Science by definition is something that can be tested through experimentation and data collection - this does not include reading a book (and yes, the Bible is just a book - written by fallible men) and calling your interpretation of that literature "science."

I once heard a fundamentalist Christian say that people get into trouble when they try to interpret the Bible, and that he doesn't interpret it: he just reads it. This baffles my poor English major brain. Reading IS interpretation. (It appears that such Christians don't bother to learn the definitions of many things.) Words are abstract and malleable, and can signify and conjure different ideas depending on the time, place, and individual who hears them. The word "gay," for instance, had a nearly entirely different meaning in the 1940's and 50's than it does today. For a person to say that they don't interpret anything they read is a flat out lie. Every person brings to every piece of literature all of their individual and societal experience and knowledge and imparts meaning to the words before them based on that baggage of information. Therefore, Biblical interpretation, in all its individual subjectivity, is perhaps as far from actual objective science as you can get.

What confounds me even more is the demonization of anything that threatens the so-called credibility of the Bible, such as that evil scoundrel Darwin. The Bible threatens its own credibility. Examples? The first two chapters of Genesis, the beloved seat of creationism, categorically contradict each other. Later, the difference between Old Testament and New Testament teachings becomes so drastic that one feels like both can't possibly be held as truth by the same religion. Of course, here, some fundamentalists might throw a blame-soaked finger my way and say that this is only my interpretation. Okay. If it is, then what is the right interpretation? How can anything so subjective as this, where one has to choose a believed correct evaluation of the ideas involved, be considered scientific? It can't.

The literal creationist point of view is still being indoctrinated into countless children across the country. Don't mistake me: I believe that everyone has a right to believe in any god(s) or goddess(es) they choose. (I personally believe that God and evolution are supplementary concepts that can peacefully and quite easily coexist, but I'm not here to babble about my personal beliefs.) My problem is with the people who deem all other beliefs the tools of evil and refuse to even listen to the concepts supported by other people with differing ideas. I don't think a person has any right to participate in an argument who won't at least hear the other side. "That's not true, because that's not what I believe," is a kind of reasoning that would make any philosophy or logic professor shudder. It's simply laughable.

Close-mindedness still exists, it appears. It lurks most prevalently in the little minds of Bible thumpers and conservatives. And their ignorance seems to be spreading.

All I ask is that people be intelligent. Evaluate both sides of a controversy before stubbornly chaining yourself to one position. The following are two books that address the opposing sides of the evolution coin:
What Is Creation Science? by Morris and Parker
Abusing Science by Kitcher

And now, tonight's supercute image...


Courtesy Senza Capelli Cattery
You cannot deny how adorable that is.... (sigh) One day, a hairless cat will find me warm and inviting.

Sometimes your head just implodes. Don't worry - it's to be expected. Yes, I know it's unsettling, but it's happened to me so many times that now I just shrug it off carry on. You can't control it. There are physical laws working in ways you can't imagine, and no, you shouldn't try. I gave up a long time ago and found that my life is much better now because of that resignation.

-{poof}-

Well, there goes my head again. Time for sleep/death/sex/destruction, and we'll all be polite again tomorrow. Lawn croquet awaits.

You can add this to your list of things to buy for me.

(...drool)