Wednesday, October 02, 2002

Current Musical Selection: GnR - Civil War

one of the great songs of the early 90's, that wasnt grunge, and that wasnt pop... heavy with guitars and feeling, but in a different way than the grunge movement registered with people; unfortunately it never really did register with people. instead it proves to be one of the gems of the Use Your Illusions project; coupled with Estranged, 'Rain, and Breakdown [among any that i could have listed], it shows the power that the band could play with, still within the limits of the softer 'ballad'esqe lyrical content...

" look at the shoes your filling // look at the blood were spilling // look at the world were killing, // the way weve always done before... // look at the doubt weve wallowed // look at the leaders weve followed // look at the lives weve swallowed // and i dont want to hear no more // my hands are tied // for all ive seen has changed my mind // but still the wars go on and the years go by // with no love for God or human rights // and all these dreams are swept aside // by the bloodied hands of the hypnotized // to carry the cross of homocide // and then history bears the scars of our civil wars.. "

40 days until GnR roughly. maybe on that day ill be happy. at this point, ill be going by myself, and i couldnt think of a better way to enjoy myself. no one i know appreciates the music for what it is; hell no one i know even listens to it. so what if its been 10 years since theyve toured, and so what if its a totally new band; its about finding happiness in a void. ive actually asked a few people to go. no Yes's yet. a couple Maybe's. several blanket No's. its ok, id have to sit and teach them all the lyrics to every song so they dont look out of place... and thats alot of work. in the next few weeks im actually going to have to familiarize myself with some songs better... rumor is axl is playing alot of old, old material from Appetite... ; even though i like the Illusions albums better. well see in 40 days...
------

so i missed classes today. yeah, it was wednesday. not anything that makes me overly sad about it. maybe thats what im scared of. missing classes means nothing to me anymore. only in some classes where the work piles up from it, do i ever feel any sense of remorse for it... but skipping classes isnt something to be proud of. at the price tag im paying to go here, missing isnt a smart thing to do....buuuut what do i miss? just random teachers reading from the text books; random kids snoring in class; maybe one or two paragraphs of notes about something that doesnt particularly concern me or my future well-being. i guess more importantly, its just another cold seat in some lecture hall somewhere on campus. in the end it costs the University X amount of dollars to heat the room that my body would be warming; and so they see that in the end.... but nothing for me. nothing that says, gee Scott, we missed you in class... gee Scott, were sorry to hear that our whiny leftist lectures dont interest you, well do something that will interest you. nothing like that. just the same bs.

walking to and from class isnt much better. i wear darksunglasses. not only do they shield my eyes from the sunlight, but it shields them metaphorically from the kids and sluts around me. everyone around here is similar in what they want, even the ones that deny it. categorically; some people i know, will deny everything of the lifestyle thats so repitiously indulged upon around here; yet they too find themselves in the same lot. i shield my eyes from it. i dont want what everyone else gets around here. i dont want to get plastered 4 of 7 nights a week; i dont want a random girl in my bed; and i dont want to do the bare minimum. but thats what they are handing out around here.... the bare minimum; with a double of 'to get you through' sprinkled in every other round.

i used to think college would be about so much more than all this. but now all i do; is find myself playing mind-numbing videogames, and hiding in my room or office.... away from other people. someone once laughed at me for being a sociology major, that hates people; but its correct. id much rather find myself alone in my room than with the gross population around me. i find strikingly few things in common with them anymore, and thats discouraging. it means i find myself sitting here, ranting about nothing in particular, to no one in particular. funny isnt it? my release from dealing with people [of which i hate dealing with] is to mindlessly jabber at other people [ie - all of you]... not so much funny as it is ironic i suppose... but then again, i probably missed that day of class on grammer and parts of speech.

" i dont need your civil war // it feeds the rich while it buries the poor // your power hungry, sell souls in a human grocery store // aint that fresh? // i dont need your civil war // no i dont need your civil war... "

someone was talking to me late last night about relationships. for whatever reason we started talking about our expectations for the future. it kinda floored him when i said i didnt have any. infact his comment was, "that sounds like a pretty sad and lonely life" and maybe it does. i dont know; i guess when it comes to expecting things you cant count on, it seems more futile to me than counting stars. do i ever EXPECT to be married? -- no. do i ever EXPECT to actually have a relationship with someone again? -- no. but would i LIKE to get married --- yes, would i LIKE to have a relationship with someone again?-- yes. two different questions that i guess, i seem to keep separate, while everyone else around seems to mince together. the expectation revolves around the occurance; and in the end, we all want that occurance, right? but what happens when that falls short? i guess no one expects to get divorced 5 times; or no one expects to have their heartbroken; but that doesnt mean it doesnt happen... and that doesnt mean i dont want it to happen; it just means i dont want to incurr those types of things anymore. i think ive spent my time in hell rather well; ive learned alot; ive learned how to be treated, and how to treat. but that doesnt mean that anyone else has. besides... lets hit the reality button here; im not going to win a beauty pagent... lets just stipulate to that... so then if im equal to anyone else who has paid their dues and learned; why would some girl pick me over the cute guy? they wouldnt. i wouldnt ask them to, and i wouldnt expect them to. i guess thats the earthshattering reality people never want to admit to. i didnt find it so hard. all those years seem to make alot more sense now when i think of it all that way. sure, being stoodup to a dance doesnt seem so out of place when you can go with a cute guy. and yeah, setting up some cruel jokes on or sending the overly attractive girls in school to fuck with this guy's head, doesnt seem so out of place. in a way i guess its their way of re-inforcing it all home again... which again is ironic, isnt it? we spend so much of our lives not believing what everyone is telling us. all those times when they left notes about me being creepy and a looser, that was just the truth, wasnt it? and all those times i got dumped on by girls, that was just to prove the point, right? my only question is how would anyone ever expect something from nothing. magic and act of God aside, it just doesnt happen. i suppose my view of it all is skewed because i guess ive finally heard what everyone has been telling me for quite some time.

back to the meaning of it all; the discussion put me squarely back in the crosshairs.... "that sounds like a pretty sad and lonely life" it does. but atleast im not getting my hopes up. when it rains shit, you buy a raincoat. i guess should some unsuspecting, half-blind supermodel with no standards and overly zealous ideas towards committment, should litteraly fall in my grasp... its not appropriate to count cards. counting cards just lets you know what your odds are going to be in the next hand... the dealer shows 2 ace's... that means theres only 2 left, and in the next hand youve got one; that helps. but when the game takes out the ace's and just throws in duces.... its kinda hard to see where its all going to play out. thats why i prefer not to make any wager. more aptly, ive decided to cash in and wait till my luck and odds better coincide. besides, whats my alternative? to keep playing a game that im not going to win at? just loose more money and morale in the process? get branded a looser more often? thats not my style. "so what, even minor wins are something," somone else said to me; but who expects to walk into a card game to win the pot, and walk out happy with a $5 chip? see, i dont expect to have this wonderfully blissfull marriage to some overly gorgeous model, because i know its not going to happen.. what is likely to happen, is me finding someone who just gets the job done... nothing more, maybe less; adequate at best. so then someday, when i find myself divorced and with 3 kids i never see; i should still be happy with that $5 chip? i hope not. my parents were raised without divorce, i was raised without divorce, and i dont intend to raise my chilren in divorce. so thats going to eliminate some of those small wins of momentary happiness. coupled with that freightrain; id never raise children outside of marriage. thats going to shoot down some other options. yeah, i guess that is going to leave me somewhere this side of a booze habit and a burger-king addiction when im old. whats so sad about that? i knew what i was getting into. i knew what the option were. and i know exactly how the cards are dealt. to me its more sad that everyone else keeps playing to loose, despite all the signals, dispite all the losses, and dispite all the effort, they loose. at the end of the day, i walk out with my ass intact, nothing ahead, nothing down... just dead even. and they keep taking hits on those tables i walked out on. whats so sad about that?

your right, Scott, maybe your being to hard on everyone else; Scott thats not what they all meant. |||| maybe. maybe they just thing the isolation is sad. i guess i dont understand that either. its by choice, but its not. i readily move in groups and social benefactors; its not that im against social interaction as a blanket policy... just nothing appeals to me. there are some people around that i do like spending time with and around. some of them doing like spending time with me; and some i dont like spending time around. now what makes that sad? maybe whats sad to them is, im looking for something that none of them are looking for. the old, mines bigger than yours, that makes it better argument. since my goals are equal to theirs, but i dont expect to fullfill them, maybe thats supposed to make me sad. i think whats sad is i have to sit and defend myself to it all. id much rather not. id much rather just have what i want to have out of life, and be done with it. but im not going to get it. and thats the point of all this i suppose. some people spend all their lives praying night, after night, for God to give them someone. i honestly dont do that anymore. God's got better things to do than listen to me whine... God's got a world full of strife, anger and despair to deal with; and my requests seem pretty damned meager in comparison. yes i suppose, that God does answer your prayers, all of them. but the answer is no sometimes. the answer is no alot of the time. people never understand that. God probably gave me something else worthwhile to do; and gave me some sort of direction to take; why should i feel inclined to complain to Him about his decision? and who the hell says hes even going to do anything about it? He doesnt have to. Sure, hes benevolent, but that doenst mean he cant be a hardass; ask the Jews! so that even if i dont want to deal with what life's given to me, its not going to matter one bit to argue my case.

i guess that doesnt mean i never did. there were times when id sit and think; gee God, couldnt you just off Ben Affleck and Vin Diesel? not to make me anything better, just drop off some of my competition? there were some times when i used to think it wasnt fair to deal with everything that happened to me. sure, its not fair to get turned down, everytime, you ask to your prom. likewise, its not fair to get reamed out for sending flowers to a girl. lifes not about fair. if it was all supposed to be fair, id still be in that card game; because i know my odds are going to be fair. but they arent, and i dont play. and appearantly that makes it all sad. that i refuse to play the game. the games got rules you can never expect to beat. its always set up in the house's favor. if you dont keep loosing, you wont keep playing, right? if you dont find mr. right, you just keep going out there and dating scumbags till you find him? sooner or later, youll just get tired, and settle out for that measley $5 chip. youll lie to yourself and say its mr. right! and your friends will be happy for you, and youll just keep on living it that way. so maybe thats why its sad... maybe its sad because i just dont want to play this game. maybe its just sad because i dont want to find my saturday morning surprise in my bed. besides, thats how everyone else is going to play the game, isnt it? they are just going to keep screwing everything with two legs and a hole, and hope some day they pull it out clean; because thats going to be mr/mrs Right. i know im not going to get any wins on that table. so maybe its sad that i just calculate my odds. maybe its just sad they havent calculated theirs.

ain't it fun~
s.

Monday, September 30, 2002

Current Musical Selection: Stevie Ray Vaughn - Life By the Drop

"hello there, my old friend. not so long ago it was still the end; late outside in the pouring rain, on our way up the road, we started all over again. living a dream, as though youre on top. my mind is aching, and lord it wonts stop; thats how it happened living life by the drop"

long day again. seems like they never end... i wake up late, tired and stressed out from the day before, to start, late, into the new day; only so that everything else can compound again by days end. the reward is a few hours of sleep sometime after 3am. today started off with the 8am wake up call of ITS. which shuttled with doing latin homework while on the phone, makes for a poor, poor way to study, and a poorer way to deal with a phone call. class... such a pain in my ass, then 3 hours of dealing with Residence Services and ITS. magically, no one can answer any of my questions... [not surprised] wonderful. 'I say fuck authority... no silent majority, raised by the system, now its time to rise against them' [Pennywise - Fuck Authority]

sooooo bored. homework is really getting old. if youd have asked me 10 years ago, if i thought id still be doing nightly homework for points... id have laughed at you. i mean, upper level education isnt supposed to subsist of the same bullshit that 3rd grade did. but no. pages of workbook shit, pages of sentences to write. stuipd busy work assignments, like creating a hypothesis.... utter bullshit.. its rediculous. 3rd graders are getting the same education i am, and im paying nearly 10 grand a year for what they get with a free public education. some days i really sit and think to myself what im going to do with this ultra useless 4year degree.... todays college world requires you to take more hours of a foreign language than of english; more hours of 'cultural diversity' than of american history; and more hours of bullshit elective classes than your major. in fact, your hours logged in for. lang. alone are enough to credit you with a minor in some departments... how sad is that? my college degree cost me 40,000 dollars or so, and with it i spent a small fraction [30 hours or less of 120] in what i want to do in this world.

college isnt about learning anymore i dont think. its more about testing you in time management. college education is nothing with out it. its about me logging X number of hours in bullshit courses, and to carry with me 200 dollar books that the instructors rarely teach from. its about looking your best in class, not doing your best. its about making the friends and social 'hook ups' not making the grade. im the first to admit that my gradepoint sucks. i stopped carring along time ago. all of these classes are not important to what im going to do with my life, why take them serious? why not let me dedicate my time on what im going to need to know, and let me out of it all sooner. i guess its supposed to be good for me. thats what the administrators tell me. but i doubt my employer will think that way. i wouldnt. would you rather have an employee who knows every thing there is to know about his job, or just someone who knows a little bit about their job, and a little bit about everything else in the world? hands down, i want that job-focused person to work for me. isnt that the way it should be? who cares what your employees do in their off-clock time; what you want in this cut-throat world is top notch workers, who are damn good at what they do... why divert their time from that to learn about the African AIDS ''crisis'' or the pheasability of the speed of light being wrong. what i want as an employer is the best man for making widgets i can get. if he can make me widgets in half the time of a normal man, i can either work him half a day [and keep half that money] or work him the full day and get twice the productivity out of him. i want people that can sell my widgets to anyone, and guarantee me a sale the minute they start their sales pitch. i want to pay and IT department that i never see; i want them to fix problems before they arise, and to have everything up and running before the normal work shift starts. i dont want to hear about poetry interpretations from my workers, i couldnt give a shit less if they can read the warnings printed on the side of the widget packaging in German to me; and i sure as hell dont want Widget Makers telling me about how they think they know more about my companies financial practice, because of their 3 hours spent in microecon.

unfortunately for me, the death of the true worker has come. now, instead of speacialists, we think its better to have someone specialize in nothing, and tinker with everything. now we have people with 4 year degrees that can spend as little as a semester's worth of hours on their major, and still take 6 years to get said 4year degree. whats wrong with making kids experts in what they want to do? they chose that major as their lifes work, lets give them the knowledge to make it so, lets stop pussy-footing around with bullshit progression based courses and electives: you take every class your major has to offer in three years, and spend a year doing some independent work or interning in the real world. get some experience handling what you will with your life. get me out of these god damned rhetoric classes and psych 100, and let me, scott alvarado, play with criminal behavior theory, let me do some work in a quasi court-room environment. get the chains removed, that bind my hands to pathetic lecutres of 1400 kids and high school level work, get me prepared for the real world.

besides which, if im here to become prepared for life ever after; then lets start shaping these lumps of highschool shit into real individuals. lets start by making them recognize that they are now adults. lets drop all these kid like expectations, and let them progress beyond hoops and hurdles... after all thats what high school was. how about we start taking college students seriously, and lets see if they will take the world seriously. how can we expect, as a society, to have kids emerge from 4 years of binge drinking, socially acceptable piercings and tattooings, and rampant sex; and expect them to have formed an accurate and sensible view of the world. all we give them to go on, is what our classrooms have taught; and if thats any sign, its no wonder why our kids are confused about the world. everything we teach them in class today is the direct opposite of what our parents [who now controll the world] are running with. kids today dont have a sense of money, dont have a sense of self, and sure as hell dont have a sense of stable family relations or a sense of genuine culture thats all their own. weve spent our lectures on the glories of the worlds unruly ways and how its all 'equally valid as our own''; which is all well and good, as long as you give them something to measure it with. kids today have no sense of american history. yorktown is just a peppermint patty; kennedy is just an airport; the Union is nothing more than uncle don's trade faternity; and we had a war with Mexico?!?!?! we took our time, trying to engrain an asinine sense of worldly guilt towards being american; and now when our country is attacked on the basis of our culture; our children cant even tell you why everyone hates us... appearantly the world isnt all holding hands and telling native folktales in harmony like my college lectures have told me. prehaps there still is some eveil in this world, and prehaps those perpretrating have been placed closer to our children than wed ever want to know. besides, its only education; there can never be harm in educating people, so my instructors have tried to convince me.

ain't it fun~
s.