11.29.2001
Songs to add to the master list: (in autobiographical order, of course, from recent to less recent - they're all within the past two weeks)
Chemical Brothers (w/ Beth Orton - Where Do I Begin - This song is my new anthem. I love this song. I don't know, something about it is extremely comforting to me. Electronic music rarely does that for me.
Nina Simone - Since I Fell for You Dilated Peoples - Worst Comes to Worst
Cat Power - Colors and the Kids
11.28.2001
Never let it be said that I don't make good on my promises. Now, after so much waiting and anticipation, I bring you.....CoalCam: A Webcam Fixed On A Ton of Coal.
11.27.2001
Not to knock my large, dedicated fan base, but I just checked up on the traffic to my site, and a webcam fixed on a ton of coal would probably draw a larger crowd.
Every time I sign on to AIM, this fucking window for "Instant Messenger News" pops up. So when it popped up earlier today, Alex told me to click on AIM's joke of the day.
Please, if you can, someone tell me what the hell is going on in this joke:
"The teacher gave her fifth grade class an assignment: Get their parents to tell them a story with a moral at the end of it.
The next day the kids came back, and one by one, began to tell their stories. Ashley said, "My father's a farmer and we have a lot of egg-laying hens. One time we were taking our eggs to market in a basket on the front seat of the pickup, and when we hit a bump in the road, and all the eggs went flying and broke and made a mess."
"And what's the moral of the story?" asked the teacher.
"Don't put all your eggs in one basket!"
(This is not the end of the joke as might be expected, it goes on for like eight more minutes in a seemingly nonsensical stream, like your uncle's vietnam stories. But we continue...)
"Very good," said the teacher.
Next little Sarah raised her hand and said, "Our family are farmers, too. But we raise chickens for the meat market. We had a dozen eggs one time, but when they hatched, we only got ten live chicks."
"And what's the moral of the story?" asked the teacher.
"Don't count your chickens before they're hatched."
(This joke is still going. Who would tell this joke? It's not funny or coherent enough to be an adult's joke, but it's just a little too fucked up to be a kids joke. This joke was not written by a rational human being)
"That's a fine story Sarah."
"Michael, do you have a story to share?"
"Yes ma'am, my daddy told me this story about my Aunt Barbara. Aunt Barbara was a flight engineer in Desert Storm, and her plane got hit. She had to bail out over enemy territory, and all she had was a bottle of whiskey, a machine gun, and a machete. She drank the whiskey on the way down so it wouldn't break, and then she landed right in the middle of 100 enemy troops. She killed seventy of them with the machine gun until she ran out of bullets, then she killed twenty more with the machete till the blade broke, and then she killed the last ten with her bare hands."
"Good heavens," said the horrified teacher, "What kind of moral did your daddy tell you from that horrible story?"
"Stay the hell away from Aunt Barbara when she's been drinking!"
11.26.2001
I think it's time for a four square website. God knows someone needs to inform the masses. Soon. Think December.
9:03 PM
Let's say it's 7:04 in the morning, Eastern standard time, of course, and you decide you want to search porn +"bard college." You'd be pretty damn disappointed when you got my website, right? Well thanks to Google, which has, until today, completely denied me (protected me from) all sorts of friends (pedophiles and perverts) that all of the rest of you webloggers (pedophiles and perverts with some knowledge of HTML) have been hoarding for god-knows how long, and to the the pervert keyword game, I am officially the number one source of Bard College pornography.
I will therefore suppose that, not a true God, who is the supreme source of truth, but a certain evil spirit, not less clever and deceitful than powerful, has bent all his efforts to deceiving me. I will suppose that the sky, the air, the earth, colors, shapes, sounds, and all other objective things [that we see] are nothing but illusions and dreams that he has used to trick my credulity.
- Descartes, First Meditation: Concerning Things That Can Be Doubted
As our senses deceive us at times, I was ready to suppose that nothing was at all the way our senses represented them to be. As there are men who make mistakes in reasoning even on the simplest topics in geometry. I judged thta I was as liable to error as any other, and rejected as flase all the reasoning which I had previously accepted as valid demonstration. I decided to suppose that nothing that had ever entered my mind was more real than the illusions of my dreams. But I soon noticed that while I thus wished to think everything false, it was necessarily true that I who thought so was something.
- Descartes, Proofs of the Existence of God and of the Human Soul
11.20.2001
I stole this from Pupster. Totally seriously, and for a long minute I definitely thought this was some sort of well-designed joke, now you can "Show [your loved-ones] you care by leaving them each an e-mail to be delivered after you pass on." There's nothing not creepy about that. And even if I could find a letter from beyond the grave appealing, why an e-mail? "Show your loved one's you care, but that you don't care all that much."
7:26 PM
I'm going home tomorrow for Thanksgiving and my birthday, which share a day this year. Birthdays never excite me that much. We have a mixed history, birthdays and I.
Back home, a lot of the people who used to consider me their friend, and have since forgetten me, actually have November birthdays. My friend Dan's birthday is only four days before mine. One birthday, my junior year of high school, our friends threw a party, arguably for the both of us. They brought out the cake, which had written in frosting "Happy Birthday Dan," and then they had carved a sloppy "and Ben," with a plastic knife into the slim band of cake remaining below the frosting. I'm not sure if that was my breaking point or not, but it's certainly one of my most memorable birthdays.
11.18.2001
My teeth can never be clean enough. I'm sure that's crazy. No matter how many times a day I brush my teeth, they are never clean enough. This is a new thing. And I'm talking three times a day. Am I losing it? What the hell is going on? You always hear about someone's uncle who showers five times a day, and you think, "Man, that's crazy." You can never imagine how something like that starts, you can't orient yourself to this mad uncle's reality. It starts gradually. One day, you just decide, "my teeth just don't feel clean," and then the next thing you know, your nieces and nephews are telling other kids about you.
11.17.2001
I'm going to try to install a lot of new features today. Like last time, this could very well be the last time I ever post, because I know for a fact that I have the destructive power to end this webpage accidentally. Wish me luck!
Later addition: Yeah, that never happened. I tried converting over to greymatter because andrea is always raving about it, but my server just won't have it.
12:57 PM
11.16.2001
I feel like I'm dividing myself too many ways right now. It's a terrible feeling, naturally accompanied (cause or effect) by a sense of inadequacy in the majority of the things im involved in. That may or may not be what drove me to post at all today. Sickening.
11.15.2001
Now that I'm a little more well-rested, I'll try to explain the nature of my hangover. My friend Jon and I started a four square club here at Bard. Four square, for those of you who grew up in disadvantaged caves, literally feeding from the waste of those around you, is an "elementary school game." I played it every day of recess for six years, and now that I'm playing it again, after having taken a ten year break, I realize that there is no game on this earth that I enjoy more.
To start a club at Bard, or at least a funded club, you have to make a presentation to a budget committee. Our club, the BFAMCIFSL (Bard's First Annual Mens' Coed Intramural Four Square League), requested $250 fo a game that costs roughly four dollars to play. So, accordingly, we went into the meeting wearing four square t-shirts, we gave all of the committee members pens that read "I (heart) giving money to four square," we made overheads illustrating the design of the court, personal business cards of our club, complete with our corporate logo (which may or may not be the default corporate logo on the business card template in microsoft publisher), and last but not least, a 3' by 5' board, complete with both a pie chart and a bar graph, illustrating what various things are "sport" was superior to. They only gave us $50 (they couldn't figure out what we needed the money for).
A lot has happened since then, but to make a long story short, we've played something like six games now, we play on a weekly basis. We've moved to our indoor court for the winter. Basically, (there really is no good way to explain any of this, it really has to be experienced) 25-50 people stand in line, often "inebriated" or "intoxicated," and play four square. It's really ridiculous, and it's a lot of fun. People come in costumes, people play music, we have fun. Games start at 10 PM, and never stop before 2 AM. It's intense, it's ridiculous, and it's just incredibly fun.
11.13.2001
So I came home to the dorm one day to find a white kitten asleep in the hallway. Apparently, this cat wandered in at some point, and refused to leave. It's a kitten, white with brown spots, cute as all hell, and it has no collar. So of course we kept it.
I cannot emphasize enough how cute this cat is. It's one of those cats that's interested in what you're doing, but not to the degree where it has to get in the way of anything. And it's a kitten, it's about the size of my shoe.
I tried to let him go, I opened and propped the back door of our dorm and let her out, but she followed me right back in. I went upstairs to take a shower, and she followed me, sleeping on the radiator until I was out of the shower. I cannot emphasize enough how cute this cat is.
Almost everyone has a different name for her....let's see, there was Penny, Chunky, Monkey, Brownhead, Cecil DeFeline, and my favorite, Catface. You would be surprised how much joy twenty-five college kids can get out of three pounds of cute and fur.
Long story short, a few of the girls in the dorm argued for days over who would be the "real owner" of the cat (why does anyone have to own this cat again? It sleeps everywhere, everyone feeds it, god knows everyone loves it). The girls decided (wrongly) that our building was a poor home for a cat (which is a damn lie), which was really, at least in my opinion, a perversion of the reality that the cat was causing them too much distress.
Imagine waking up one morning to find that your newborn was gone. Imagine waking up and looking around your house for your toddler, only to learn that your husband had given her away without consulting you or anyone else in the family. Now some guy named "Tom" has our locked up in some tiny apartment in Kingston, and he's calling her something ridiculous.
What now? Breaking and entering, possibly. I'll keep you posted.
11:40 AM
11.12.2001
Music is a huge part of my life. I will often listen to the same song on repeat for days at a time, just because it represents (or induces) some relevant emotion. I've been meaning to write down what songs are central to me at a given time, that way I will better be able to map out my life (it makes sense to me, I don't give a damn what you think - epecially if I know you. I know a lot of people, and by some odd coincidence they're all mean bastards). I used to write everything on the back of receipts and things that I'd find in my pocket, and then immediately throw them out. So, I'll just start posting them here.
Songs that have affected me (that I can think of) recently (going remotely chronologically, backwards):
Cat Power - I Found A Reason Beta Band - The Hard One Elliott Smith - Better Be Quiet
Elliott Smith - I Didn't Understand Elliott Smith - Oh Well, Okay
Pink Floyd - Astronomy Domine Elliott Smith - Everything Reminds Me of Her
Elliott Smith - Clementine
Medeski Martin and Wood - Everyday People
Coldplay - Sparks
Thomas Newman - Wasted Air Thomas Newman - Shawshank Redemption Nina Simone - I Got It Bad (and That Ain't Good) Thomas Newman - Any Other Name (an old favorite)
Miles Davis - In A Silent Way
I'm sure there are many more, but my memory is going with my age (I turn 20 on Thanksgiving). Check out a few of those if you haven't heard them. A lot of them are "less than happy," but it seems arbitrary, and, at least to me, annoying, to appreciate only happy songs.
Also, if you want to try something, and I really think you should, make a CD with the above Thomas Newman songs. If you walk around listening to those songs, your life will have an orchestral soundtrack, and everything you do will have meaning.
I finally have the two main graphics up and running. There was a point last night when I made a mistake and this page just stopped existing, but after enough swearing it worked itself out. I might add more later, it depends on what work I have to try to not do.
10:26 AM
11.11.2001
Alright, because I have a lot of work to do tonight, I'm going to spend the night rearranging my webpage. If you are around for the next few minutes, and you reload, I may very well have deleted some significant portion of the page. I have a lot of philosophy reading to do. I already installed the title graphic, I think I might add something down the side column tonight. I'm pretty sure I have a big exam this week. And I certainly don't own any orange, or especially like the color orange, so why should it occupy the majority of the page? Oh, college.
"Old people don't need companionship. They need to be isolated and studied so it can be determined what nutrients they have that might be extracted for our personal use."
- The Simpsons (Major points to Dan for being both one of my childhood heroes and a stockpile of worthwhile quotes.)
11.09.2001
Once, as a child, when I was probably about six or so, I told the neighbors that "after my grandpa got in a big motorcycle accident, he had to have his leg artificially inseminated." They laughed for god knows how long, at least an hour. It was terribly embarrassing, even for a six year-old.
There have been so many days like yesterday where too many truths about my own life become instantly apparent without warning. I found myself screaming about the concept of marriage across a courtyard. Those days are really the most interesting and most tranquilizing ones. They're not really enjoyable, don't get me wrong, I just like the added perspective on life, no matter how harsh and honest.
The day after, though, today for example, is useless. So much of yesterday was spent deep in thought, really wishing I wasn't, and now that emotional suppression has kicked in. I'm not sure if the best comparison is to shock or a hangover, but the day after any set of major revelations is always blurry. The mental peace I sought yesterday kicked in at some point in the night, but not quite the way that I would have hoped. I think I was hoping for something a little more along the lines of existential peace, possibly through a higher tier of understanding that might all of a sudden make itself obvious to me, but I really just feel more numb and sedated than anything else. I hate feeling sedated. Fuck The Ramones.
But, on the upside, I ordered Akira Kurosawa's Rashomon, which is his masterpiece of masterpieces about reality being a falsehood, and it ironically showed up in the mail yesterday.
11.08.2001
I feel like sleeping for a period of months. I'm not tired for any lack of rest, today I just feel tired of life. I want a vacation from existence; I want the blurred, the consequenceless, the surreal - the fleeting subreality that only a dream could provide. Most of all, I just want to awaken and have my life be new to me again.
I love re-discovering things that once brought me joy, things that I've forgotten about. Every once in a while I'll smell something which screams of my childhood, rarely do I figure out what once occupied that emotion. Sometimes I can pinpoint it. Often the mention of some toy will excite my memory to an entire chapter of my life that I'd completely forgotten. That's a beautiful sensation. I want that now. I want to forget about all the circumstances of my life, and awaken. Because the beauty is there. And because I'm not seeing it.
It's one of those mornings that's just quiet enough that I can hear the storm brewing. Things have been pretty serene lately, and they're certainly no different this morning, but something makes me feel as if a lot of falling apart is going to happen soon. That's not based on anything, and maybe it's just the combination of a minor hangover with the Cat Power - Covers album, but this morning is too eerily calm.
If you have a chance, download Cat Powers - "I Found A Reason." It's a cover of a Velvet Underground song, and it's beautiful. And, additionally, if you listen to it, the likelyhood is that we'll be listening to the same song, simultaneously (I'm going to listen to it all day, I'm sure). That's one of the best ways to learn about a person, what music they repeat.
P.S. I uploaded the Cat Power song, you really have no excuse not to download it now.
11.07.2001
My father has always had this policy of "You want to try drugs? You want to try alcohol? Well, then you try them with me." I understand the argument, but it's an absurd proposition, and I certainly never had anything to do with it.
But a couple of years ago, my brother, who was then fourteen, when given the same speech, tells my father that he wants to try smoking pipe tobacco. So my father, who has been bold in his "you try it with me" stance on drugs for years, has to go out and buy pipe tobacco for my fourteen year-old little brother. And the ridiculous part was that my brother wanted to try other things, all of which my father had to buy for him, my brother being half-a-decade away from being able to legally purchase such things for himself.
So I'd come down to the kitchen for a snack, and sure enough, my little brother would be walking around the back yard smoking a cigar! (You really have to consider how young fourteen is and how truly large a cigar is in relation to the head of a fourteen year-old.) This happened almost every day for a period of weeks. My father had to eventually change his rule and stop buying my brother cigars. That was a weird couple of weeks.
Well, it seems that the "comment" option I installed yesterday is gone. It was there last night, and I haven't changed anything, and it's gone. So I'm going to stop viewing it as a permanent installment on the page, and more as a friend who stops by now and then. "Hey! It's the Comment Bar!"
11.06.2001
I just added a "comment" option to my posts. Now, you can tell me, without even having to pick up the phone, how disappointed you are with my webpage.
11.05.2001
I'm going home in a few weeks for my birthday. The best part of going home is the conversation I've had, and imagine will continue to have, with all of my parents' friends, my dentist, the vet, you name it.
"So, Ben, where are you going to school?" "Bard College."
"Oh.....where is that?" "It's in New York."
"Oh, the city?!" "No, a couple hours from the city. Near Poughkeepsie. Near Vassar."
"Oh, Vassar! Wow, that's a great school!" "Well, yes, but I don't go to Vassar. It's near Vassar."
11.04.2001
I took a reader's poll today on my IM account, of:
Which is more flammable: a baby or a wet goose?
The final count is: Baby, 8; Goose, 3; and "dude, i bet youre a shitty babysitter," 1.
3:14 PM
11.02.2001
I thought I'd check up on my readership, as this is my first week playing the whole weblog game. And sure enough, the graph of my readership is beautiful. Excusing the expected standard error (Wed.-Thurs.), I have an almost linear decline in hits from one day to the next. Check out today: two visitors! As a former science major, I can make a few inferences on my own from this data. First of all, I'm talking to myself. Second of all, it looks like I'll only have one reader tomorrow, if any at all. So, now that's it's just the two of us, tell me about yourself. Let's get to know each other. Me and you. I think we're compatible. And if you leave me, this site will become a diary.
Oh, and you'll have to excuse the black bar above the readership graph, that's the graph of my self-esteem. Reader, remind me to thank Adam for giving me another outlet for failure.
11.01.2001
Every time we drive up Route 9G, someone points out the fact that just before Bard, you enter a "drug-free school zone." Disregarding the ironic absurdity of a "drug-free zone" in a nation where drugs are illegal everywhere by federal law, they must be refering to a Red Hook public school, even DARE is more realistic than calling Bard a "drug-free school."
I grew up in California, and we definitely had DARE. Our DARE (Drug Abuse Resistance Education) sessions consisted of a local cop coming to our fourth grade classroom, once a week for a period of months, and showing us what various drugs looked like (this, like little else in DARE, would in fact prove useful later in life). Most of us had a decade before we would discover drugs, and were accordingly much more fascinated by the gun our "teacher" had tied to his belt.
The most fascinating part about DARE was the way that our teacher-in-uniform made drugs sound. It definitely wasn't so much educational as it was horrifying. He brought in fucking pictures! "Kids, do any of you know what a junkie is? Because that's what you'll be if you even think about trying drugs or alcohol." Cue picture.
"How about cigarettes? How many of your parents smoke cigarettes? Well kids, did you know that cigarettes can kill you?" Cue picture.
This was our first introduction to drugs.
Later, our DARE "teacher" told a racist joke over his walkie-talking (cops must have a cooler name for them than "walking talkies") in the back of our classroom, and that was pretty much the end of our drug-abuse resistance education. Fuckin' cops.
4:29 PM
