Busy with school stuff

It's amazing how the time flies when you're just plain ole' busy. The end of the semester is around the corner, and I'm finding myself just trying to churn out everything that is due. Some of the assignments I've had due this semester seem somewhat irrelevant, but they're a requirement of the degree, so there's that.

Rewriting my paper for Rhetorical Criticism has been a lot of work. It's been a huge monumental task just changing it from APA style to Chicago Manual of Style. I've figured out my mechanism for analyzing the speech artifact for the counter-narrative, but just getting a moment to wrap my head around it is difficult. It doesn't help that I have this stupid stress about how I'm going to get through summer, but there's that, and there's not much I can do about that.

R. and I had a conversation at my place the other night. It was constructive. We haven't really had a chance to see each other that much, so we're taking a break for a bit and then going to see if there's anything to continue in a month or so.

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Nationals is over

Now that Nationals is finally over for speech, I will be winding down my regular routine. I'm exhausted right now, and it's not just one thing; it's a whole bunch of things, ranging from school to chaotic relationships to just not being able to figure it all out. I'm really not happy where I am in my life right now, and honestly, I don't see it getting any better. The end of school doesn't show me a happy ever after that. Continuing school just keeps continuing the trends that really aren't working for me.

R. was going to be coming out tomorrow to my place so we can talk as things haven't really been working out for our relationship to grow. She's never been in my place before, and she wanted me to make sure that I was able to get her a temporary parking pass so she can park at my place. I told her that parking here is somewhat dysfunctional, and that was treated as a "I'm coming all the way from my city to yours, so the least you can do is take care of this" issue. So, I went to the place where they give temporary parking passes, and the woman told me (kind of in the same manner an adult talks to a seven year old) that R. can come to the parking place herself when she shows up, that they don't give temporary parking passes to just anyone because they ask, and then threw it back at me as if my attempt at making this little process work a bit smoother was the most inconvenient situation anyone could possibly bring up to a university administration official.

And I don't really know how I'm going to survive the summer. I don't have enough money to make it all the way through the summer, and my attempts at actually finding a job have been completely unsuccessful. Most of the time, the places I apply don't even respond. I'm not sure if they're rejecting me because their application system is dysfunctional, I have too much education, they think I'm stupid, they hired the boss's son in law instead, or because I filled out my resume in crayon.

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Georgia in my mind

We're not actually in Atlanta. We just flew into Atlanta, but we're staying in Rome, Georgia. Yeah, I've already exhausted the "when in Rome" and "this place was not build in one day" jokes.

The tournament seems to be running smoothly. Not really much to say on that account. I do find it interesting that as we drive by very, very large plantations, people remark, "I would sure like to live there" without any actual thought to the actions that must have gone on at these places, especially before and during the Civil War. Some people can stare at a plantation manor in awe, while I stare at it with a bit of disgust.

We're somewhat removed from the population in this area. Living in a hotel, spending most of our time at a very expensive university (Berry College), we don't really have a lot of contact with what would be the locals. Therefore, I think the goal of these types of programs, that have forensics tournaments at universities across the country, don't always fill the purpose of exposing students to environments different from their normal experience. Then again, I'm not sure exposing these students to the reality that is Georgia (for the main population) is something that would be all that useful, as well as safe. Sometimes, ignorance has its advantages.

I traveled across the area a decade or so ago, and let's just say that I was exposed to a different environment than the one we get to experience here with our institutional blinders. Last time I came through here, I found myself face to face with the Klan, and while most people see this organization from a mainly intellectual and newspaper perspective, seeing them in person puts a whole different perspective in one's own cache of knowledge. Traveling through the state with an Hispanic and an African-American in the car probably gave us that perspective that people wouldn't normally get as well. What I did find interesting is that when in large groups of people, against a solitary individual, they talk a lot of smack. When in a group and facing a group of obviously combat trained soldiers who aren't scared of them in any way whatsoever, let's just say the experience is much different. That was the experience we faced back then. Our car was surrounded by ten Klan members who were out on the road intersection passing out anti-everybody sheets of paper, but when we showed up, there was a quick moment of gusto on their part, right before we stopped the car, got out and went to confront them. We expected an immediate show down. Instead, the whole group ran. Superior, my ass. We got back in our car and continued driving, not running into another problem until we were almost out of Nashville, but that's a completely different story.

I've been through Georgia a few times in the past, and not every time has been a really confrontational story. There are some good people here, like everywhere else. Unfortunately, there are also one-tracked thinkers as well, and that often scares me. It is interesting to see the perspective while at an academic institution, something that allows one to experience life from a less hostile perspective.

Yesterday, the commencement speech was given for the speech tournament, and the NFA leader went through the usual types of things you here in a speech, and then he started talking about the shootings at Virginia Tech from earlier in the week. He then asked everyone for a few moments of silence to "honor the heroes" who died in that massacre. Now, I can understand the need and desire to commiserate with people who suffered during a tragic episode, but I'm getting a little sickened at the continued response of Americans for "a few moments of silence." I'm sorry, but the shootings at Virginia Tech should not be asking for a few moments of silence, but for a few moments of outrage, outrage that we continue to allow this sort of thing to happen and then try to pretend it never happened, until it happens again, only pausing if it was worse than the times before. We ignore way too much in this country, and we somehow think we're doing the victims a service by giving them our silence (which in my opinion is some kind of desire to get people to pray, but that's another issue). People should be talking about this incident, yelling about this incident, getting people to realize that business as usual is getting us victims as usual. There is something we're doing wrong here, and if we're never going to start talking about it, other than through preconceived talking points ("it's the violent computer games," "the administrators and the police didn't act fast enough," "educational environments are a petri dish of violence waiting to happen," and all sorts of other drivel), we're never going to get at the real causes of what makes violent situations by loners who feel left out of the rest of society happen.

And that brings me to the second point brought up in that speech, and that's the American desire to create heroes where there are none. The people who died in senseless deaths this last week by a crazy gunmen were not heroes. They were victims. The few people that the media have tried to make into heroes did pretty much what anyone else would do when someone is trying to kill them; they tried to survive. Survival is not heroism. Sacrifice of oneself for others is the start of heroism. We went through the rhetoric of trying to turn Jessica Lynch into a hero for being captured by the enemy. We even created a fiction of her "heroic" gun battle that never happened, because we so feel the need to create heroes, much as in Brecht's Galileo when one soldier says to the other: "Pity the nation that has no heroes" and his partner responds: "No, pity the nation that needs heroes." We are a country that sorely lacks real heroes, mainly because we try to manufacture them from people others reject as real heroes. Plus, we deconstruct any potential hero that truly does come along, leaving us with role models that are more along the lines of drug dealers and anti-social misfits because they already deconstructed themselves by the very nature of their being.

So there.

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Gone for a week in Atlanta

I'll be attending to the National Forensics Association tournament in Atlanta, Georgia for the next week. Not looking forward to getting up at 5am tomorrow morning to fly out.

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The academic disconnect

One of the problems I often encounter is the ability to translate academic work into conversation that those not in the discipline can understand. It's the kind of thing you notice when you're having a conversation with someone about politics, and that person brings up a stereotype that has been repeated over and over again by the media, like something as simple as "older people tend to vote more conservative" which is followed by the unconscious corollary of "as people get older they tend to become conservatives". Now, if you were just spouting off information that comes from the media, the two points seem pretty logical. The first one is generally correct. The second one is not caused by the first, and in actuality is incorrect. However, explaining this to people is very difficult because they've already made the connection from point A to point B. Therefore, as you try to explain that the people who were 20 years old in 1960 became 40 years old in 1980 and 60 years old in 2000, there is a disconnect between how one thing really feeds into another. The real argument is that people within certain generations tend to maintain their political affiliation, but as they get older, so does their generation, and thus, the political affiliation doesn't change, but the people just got older. Now, having read this, you can probably say, hey, that makes sense. But in conversation, you rarely get that opportunity because people aren't willing to listen and make those connections with you.

Which brings me to the subject at hand. I was having a conversation with some very highly educated friends of mine outside of the communication discipline about narratives and counter-narratives, and what I discovered was that no matter how much I tried to explain Fisher's logic, the conversation kept going back to preconceptions of what they already knew. New knowledge and new theories were irrelevant. A narrative was nothing more than a story, and thus, it made little sense in trying to explain the process of communication. What was important was the facts of the situation, not the story-driven interpretation. When I brought up Yeltsin, and the counter-narrative involved, I discovered that they had little recollection of the facts of what happened in August of 1991, and because of that, they couldn't understand any other interpretation than Yeltsin somehow responded to the people, was probably drunk, and tried to suppress the Russian people; none of which actually happened, by the way.

I guess this is part of what bothers me about politics in general. Everything is interpreted through someone's personal narrative before people discuss it. There's really no common story of what happens but what is interpreted, and thus, we end up manufacturing discontinuities that make little sense. Look at this whole Imus situation. We have people running off half cocked spouting how it's racism, it's a response to racism, it's really the fault of people like Al Sharpton who focus on racism, it's really the fault of the media, it's the fault of the people who imbibe in the media, it's no one's fault because it really isn't important, it shouldn't be an issue at all, etc.

I recently read a conservative's take on the stem cell controversy that by the time the argument was done (with multiple responders from all sides of the spectrum), it was hard to tell which party was for or against stem cells. There was a serious disconnect with the facts and the personal stories that people brought to the issue.

So what part does academia have in all of this? My experience has been that the outside world rarely listens to academics anyway. The issues are usually framed by a media with an agenda of some nature, regardless of what that agenda may be (keeping in mind that having an agenda does not necessarily mean that it is evil...that's such a red herring these days). Academics like to think that they are impartial and above the petty bickering, but if you think about the medical community's involvement with the Tuskegee syphilis experiments that lasted decades, claims of impartial and dispassionate behavior does not always translate to impartial and dispassionate actions. Doctors told themselves that they were focusing on the bigger picture, while doing more harm than they were doing good, kind of in somewhat of a bizarroworld sense of a Dr. Mengele HMO. It's only been a few decades since doctors cast off the horrible treatment of these patients with framing them as "Negro patients" rather than referring to them with some sort of humanization. One has to wonder how much we've really changed, or if we even have. I sometimes get the impression that we're one or two scandals away from exploding, and the only thing we have in our favor is the laziness of the American public to fill in the missing data connections. People get all paranoid about conspiracies, but I'm more worried about what is happening out in the open and the ramifications of framing all that activity as "for the betterment of humankind", which lasts only as long as no one starts filling in the data.

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It's query letter time again

Yes, it is that time of my writing process that I HATE the most. Unfortunately, my writing career cannot exist without it, but this is the time where I have to find agents to whom I can send my query letters for my novels. The novels being submitted this time around are:

1. Destiny (my science fiction/fantasy novel, and the start of my Tales of Reagul series)
2. Loser (my science fiction novel about a futuristic society that hunts Losers...yeah, that about sums it up)
3. Absent Without Leave (my suspense novel that involves CID agents in the US fighting corruption)
4. The Ameriad (my newest novel: the humorous Greek epic of the founding of America by Trojans)

Anyway, have to have all of these ready to send out for tomorrow morning. Whee!

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Teaching Practicuum

I had to teach a subject in my education class today, and even though I've probably taught in the hundreds of classes, I actually felt nervous this time around. I was teaching Miller & Steinberg's Developmental Model, which I integrated with the Johari Window, and it went really well. I had decided to integrate two separate subjects of interpersonal communication into one, using one to feed into the other, and even though it was not the way I had learned it, I thought the connection would be interesting for an audience to follow. It went well. I was very happy with it. Sure, I can improve on little things, like when I was explaining the cultural implications and integrating them into the M & S model; it could have been a bit more clear, but that's why we do these assignments, to learn how to improve our skill in teaching college courses.

All in all, I was pretty happy with it.

Later on in the evening, I worked with the individual events people who are going to NFA next week in Atlanta (where I'll be going for 8 days for nationals), and I'm happy with their progress. I've always been about the educational product of the discipline, and I'm seeing vast improvements and higher levels of confidence with my students. That, alone, makes it all worthwhile.

Not much more to say. Relationships are kind of stagnant for now, and I have a feeling they're about to become nonexistent again. Oh well.

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My 100 top books

I compiled my top 100 list of books. From this list, I've italicized the ones that have impacted and influenced my writing. I've bolded the ones that have caused a course correction in my life.

1. Cafe Europa by Slavenka Dvakulic
2. A Theory of Fun and Game Design by Raph Koster
3. Out by Natsuo Kirino
4. The Discourses by Niccolo Machiavelli
5. Participation and Democratic Theory by Carole Pateman
6. The Logic of Collective Action by Mancur Olson
7. Moby Dick by Herman Melville
8. Jester by James Patterson & Michael Gross
9. The Third Wave by Samuel P. Huntington
10. The Politics of Congressional Elections by Gary C. Jacobson
11. Considerations on Representative Government by John Stuart Mill
12. The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold
13. Naomi by Junichiro Tanizaki
14. The Box Man by Kobo Abe
15. A Child Called It by Dave Pelzer
16. The Trial and Death of Socrates by Plato
17. I, Robot by Isaac Asimov
18. Narcissus and Goldmund by Herman Hesse
19. Belgarath the Sorceror by David & Leigh Eddings
20. The Collector by John Fowler
21. Coin Locker Babies by Ryu Murakami
22. Crito by Plato
23. The Origin of Humankind by Richard Leakey
24. History of the Peloponnesian War by Thucydides
25. The Woman in the Dunes by Kobo Abe
26. The Celestine Prophecy by James Redfield
27. Steppenwolf by Herman Hesse
28. The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
29. Dark Mirror by Diane Duane
30. The White Plague by Frank Herbert
31. Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World by Haruki Murakami
32. Dance Dance Dance by Haruki Murakami
33. A Wild Sheep Chase by Haruki Murakami
34. Catapult: Harry and I Build a Siege Weapon by Jim Paul
35. Dragon Within the Gates by Stephen C. Joseph, MD
36. On the Road by Jack Kerouac
37. Death of a Russian Priest by Stuart M. Kaminsky
38. Booked to Die by John Dunning
39. The Musashi Series by Eija Yoshikawa
40. A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway
41. Another Roadside Attraction by Tom Robbins
42. The Annals of Imperial Rome by Tacitus
43. On the Duty of Civil Disobedience by Henry David Thoreau
44. The Cry for Myth by Rollo May
45. The Creators by Daniel L. Boorstin
46. The Lives of a Cell by Lewis Thomas
47. The Once and Future King by T. H. White
48. The Discoverers by Daniel L. Boorstin
49. Heroes and Villains by Angela Carter
50. When God Was a Woman by Merlin Stone
51. Asgard by Nigel Frith
52. Briefing for a Descent into Hell by Doris Lessing
53, Memoirs of a Survivor by Doris Lessing
54. If You Love This Planet by Helen Caldicott
55. Jurassic Park by Michael Crichton
56. The Teachings of Don Juan by Carlos Casteneda
57. The Belgariad Series by David Eddings
58. Travels by Michael Crichton
59. Life in a Medieval Castle by Joseph & Frances Gies
60. Red Storm Rising by Tom Clancy
61. You Can't Go Home Again by Thomas Wolfe
62. The Firm by John Grisham
63. Le Morte D'Arthur (both volumes) by Sir Thomas Malory
64. The Twelve Caesars by Suetonius
65. Gateway by Frederick Pohl
66. The Stand by Stephen King
67. The Merlin Series by Mary Stewart
68. The Foundation Series by Isaac Asimov
69. The Aeneid by Virgil
70. The Iliad by Homer
71. The Odyssey by Homer
72. Fearful Symmetry by A. Zee
73. The Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett
74. Eye of the Needle by Ken Follett
75. An Autobiographical Novel by Kenneth Rexroth
76. The Autobiography of Malcolm X As Told to Alex Haley
77. The Hero with a Thousand Faces by Joseph Campbell
78. Venus in Furs by Leopold Von Sacher-Masoch
79. Rendezvous with Rama by Arthur C. Clarke
80. The Bourne Identity by Robert Ludlum
81. The Bourne Supremacy by Robert Ludlum
82. The Wolfen by Whitley Strieber
83. The Great and Secret Show by Clive Barker
84. Kings of Cocaine by Guy Gugliotta & Jeff Leen
85. The Damnation Game by Clive Barker
86. Space by James A. Michener
87. Poland by James A. Michener
88. Contact by Carl Sagan
89. Teachers Have It Easy by Daniel Moulthrop, Nimive Clements Calegari & Dave Eggars
90. Polyarchy by Robert Dahl
91. The Icewind Dale Series by R. A. Salvatore
92. Breaking the News by James Fallows
93. Raise the Titanic by Clive Cussler
94. Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
95. A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking
96. It by Stephen King
97. Hamlet by William Shakespeare
98. Common Sense by Thomas Paine
99. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Series by Douglas Adams
100. The Tao of Pooh by Benjamin Hoff

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This is how my blog feels sometimes

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Thanks, but you're overqualified

Not even sure what to think about this, but I finally see why people get bothered about these sorts of things. Cisco had a job for someone to work in their international affairs division, specifically someone who understands international processes from a political perspective. This seemed something perfect for me. Well, I was contacted today to be told that I'm "overqualified" for the position. Apparently, they were looking for someone with little to no experience in international affairs to handle their international affairs. Okay, I'll bite. Does this make any sense to anyone? The pay was agreeable, and so was everything else.

Is this the universal code for "you're too old" or is there something else going on I don't understand?

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Books you've read, want to read and just don't care

I received this from another bloggers page. It's kind of a bizarre list, but what really strikes me about it is the amount of Harry Potter books. For the record, I have no desire to read a Harry Potter book.

I figure when I get a free moment, I'll post my own 100 greatest books, and see what people think of it.

Book meme
Look at the list of (100) books below. Bold the ones you’ve read. Italicize the ones you want to read. Leave blank the ones that you aren’t interested in. Movies don’t count.

1. The Da Vinci Code (Dan Brown)
2. Pride and Prejudice (Jane Austen)
3. To Kill A Mockingbird (Harper Lee)
4. Gone With The Wind (Margaret Mitchell)
5. The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King (Tolkien)
6. The Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring (Tolkien)
7. The Lord of the Rings: Two Towers (Tolkien)
8. Anne of Green Gables (L.M. Montgomery)
9. Outlander (Diana Gabaldon)
10. A Fine Balance (Rohinton Mistry)
11. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (Rowling)
12. Angels and Demons (Dan Brown)
13. Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (Rowling)
14. A Prayer for Owen Meany (John Irving)
15. Memoirs of a Geisha (Arthur Golden)
16. Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (Rowling)
17. Fall on Your Knees (Ann-Marie MacDonald)
18. The Stand (Stephen King)
19. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban(Rowling)
20. Jane Eyre (Charlotte Bronte)
21. The Hobbit (Tolkien)
22. The Catcher in the Rye (J.D. Salinger)
23. Little Women (Louisa May Alcott)
24. The Lovely Bones (Alice Sebold)
25. Life of Pi (Yann Martel)
26. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (Douglas Adams)
27. Wuthering Heights (Emily Bronte)
28. The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe (C. S. Lewis)
29. East of Eden (John Steinbeck)
30. Tuesdays with Morrie (Mitch Albom)
31. Dune (Frank Herbert)
32. The Notebook (Nicholas Sparks)
33. Atlas Shrugged (Ayn Rand)
34. 1984 (Orwell)
35. The Mists of Avalon (Marion Zimmer Bradley)
36. The Pillars of the Earth (Ken Follett)
37. The Power of One (Bryce Courtenay)
38. I Know This Much is True (Wally Lamb)
39. The Red Tent (Anita Diamant)
40. The Alchemist (Paulo Coelho)
41. The Clan of the Cave Bear (Jean M. Auel)
42. The Kite Runner (Khaled Hosseini)
43. Confessions of a Shopaholic (Sophie Kinsella)
44. The Five People You Meet In Heaven (Mitch Albom)
45. Bible - a lot of it but not all those begats!
46. Anna Karenina (Tolstoy)
47. The Count of Monte Cristo (Alexandre Dumas)
48. Angela’s Ashes (Frank McCourt)
49. The Grapes of Wrath (John Steinbeck)
50. She’s Come Undone (Wally Lamb)
51. The Poisonwood Bible (Barbara Kingsolver)
52. A Tale of Two Cities (Dickens)
53. Ender’s Game (Orson Scott Card)
54. Great Expectations (Dickens)
55. The Great Gatsby (Fitzgerald)
56. The Stone Angel (Margaret Laurence)
57. Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (Rowling)
58. The Thorn Birds (Colleen McCullough)
59. The Handmaid’s Tale (Margaret Atwood)
60. The Time Traveller’s Wife (Audrey Niffenegger)
61. Crime and Punishment (Fyodor Dostoyevsky)
62. The Fountainhead (Ayn Rand)
63. War and Peace (Tolstoy)
64. Interview With The Vampire (Anne Rice)
65. Fifth Business (Robertson Davis)
66. One Hundred Years Of Solitude (Gabriel Garcia Marquez)
67. The Sisterhood of the Travelling Pants (Ann Brashares)
68. Catch-22 (Joseph Heller)
69. Les Miserables (Hugo)
70. The Little Prince (Antoine de Saint-Exupery)
71. Bridget Jones’ Diary (Fielding)
72. Love in the Time of Cholera (Marquez)
73. Shogun (James Clavell)
74. The English Patient (Michael Ondaatje)
75. The Secret Garden (Frances Hodgson Burnett)
76. The Summer Tree (Guy Gavriel Kay)
77. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (Betty Smith)
78. The World According To Garp (John Irving)
79. The Diviners (Margaret Laurence)
80. Charlotte’s Web (E.B. White)
81. Not Wanted On The Voyage (Timothy Findley)
82. Of Mice And Men (Steinbeck)
83. Rebecca (Daphne DuMaurier)
84. Wizard’s First Rule (Terry Goodkind)
85. Emma (Jane Austen)
86. Watership Down (Richard Adams)
87. Brave New World (Aldous Huxley)
88. The Stone Diaries (Carol Shields)
89. Blindness (Jose Saramago)
90. Kane and Abel (Jeffrey Archer)
91. In The Skin Of A Lion (Ondaatje)
92. Lord of the Flies (Golding)
93. The Good Earth (Pearl S. Buck)
94. The Secret Life of Bees (Sue Monk Kidd)
95. The Bourne Identity (Robert Ludlum)
96. The Outsiders (S.E. Hinton)
97. White Oleander (Janet Fitch)
98. A Woman of Substance (Barbara Taylor Bradford)
99. The Celestine Prophecy (James Redfield)
100. Ulysses (James Joyce)

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Babel

Let's just say that I haven't been a fan of too many recent movies. It's like the industry has gotten stupid and thinks all we want is trash-like drivel. So I had this in my Netflix que and decided to finally get around to watching it.

To begin with, it reminded me of the movie Lonestar, which is a brilliant collage of images that create a whole movie. This movie does the same thing, in a really powerful, yet touching way. I've watched a couple of other recent movies lately, and I have to say this is one of the few that makes my list of decent, really good movies. I just wish more movies would take chances like this one. There wasn't a scene that didn't belong or that didn't make you sit back and go, "wow."

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Some old pictures I took while in Germany

It seems that people are adding pictures to their blogs, so I thought I would do the same. I took a couple of pictures during my time in Germany (back when it used to be called West Germany, and I was doing some "interesting" things in that country). I used to want to be a photographer, and the first picture I've always liked. It was of the Schwetzingen (or something like that) Schloss, or actually the house BEHIND the Schloss. An interesting story is that when I was driving to this place (during my "let's visit a castle a day on strange dates with my German girlfriend" days), I didn't understand the road signs very well, so I ended up seeing what in the US would be a "turn right" sign and I ended up driving onto the lawn of the Schloss itself. Let's just say some very friendly German Politzei were not very friendly at that particular moment.


This photo was of a castle I found while driving down the side of the river. It reminded me of those old King Arthur movies where the leader would send one of his vassals to defend a far away outpost. Well, I found a tiny path to the back of this place and hiked up what seemed like Mount Everest. Well, when I finally got there, I realized there was a road in back because as I stepped out of the forest and onto that road, I nearly got run over by the Mercedes Benz of the guy who seems to own this old fort. Laughs were had by all, as he kindly asked, "why are you standing in my driveway" in that way that friendly people often ask why there's a strange foreigner taking pictures of their house in the middle of nowhere.

The point of this post is that for the longest time I wanted to be a photographer. And then when I got out of the service, I started taking what I thought were professional photos, and a friend of mine came back from a trip to Italy and showed me her pictures. They were brilliantly captured and gave off a sense of complete ownership of the scene. I immediately realized she was a real photographer, and I was some flunky who pointed a camera and prayed my thumb wasn't in the shot. So I became a writer instead.

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KFC just reinforced my theory as to why Americans are always going to be fat

I went to KFC this evening cause I didn't feel like making anything myself for dinner. Yes, it was too hard. I would have had to either boil water (still haven't mastered that skill yet) or put a frozen pizza into the oven (THAT thing gets HOT).

Well, I wanted some chicken and two pieces of corn on the cob. Simple. Well, in order to buy one corn on the cob, it costs 99 cents. So, using my advanced math skills, it would have cost me...um...(thinks a while)...(pulls out a calculator)...um, about 2 bucks. Well, on the cash register is a sign that states: "4 corn on the cob for $2". So, I could buy 2 corn on the cob for $2, or I can buy 4 corn on the cob for $2. Let's do that math...um, well, you get the point.

So, I order 4 because it's "a bargain". That's the problem right there. We Americans don't think right. Instead of, hey, 4 corn on the cob are too much for me to eat, and I'm certainly not going to save it for another day (see my description on the whole boiling the water thing mentioned previously). So, I have to eat 4 corn instead of 2 corn, because to do otherwise is to waste food, and because someone's mother once said that there are poor children starving in Africa, Americans are supposed to eat all of their food. Yeah, I haven't figured out the logic of that one even to this day.

So, rather than lower the price of EACH corn on the cob, they get you to buy more than you need. And we all just got a little bigger at the prospect.

Of course, you can be of a couple, but couples don't go to KFC. It's dorky single guys like me, so there.

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The Stockton Arts Commission

Okay, that was strange. The awards ceremony was today, at 2pm. I didn't know anyone in the audience, but what made it really strange was that the announcer actually read sections of the first place winners of the genre winners. To remind everyone, I won first place in the fiction category for adults.

Let's just say that I now have a GREAT appreciation for forensics people reading my stuff rather than total strangers who have never done interpretation in forensics. I kept wanting to stop him and say, "no, what are you feeling right now" as he was reading the passage.

Anyhoos. I'm now $200 richer, and chicks definitely now dig me. Okay, at least I'm $200 richer.

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"Just talk to them"

I was reading an analysis of Iraq/Iran by a government-tied writer in one of the U.S.'s largest newspapers. There seemed to be a concern that we're leading to further problems in Iraq and possibly war with Iran (or at least further problems than we already have), and there's nothing we can do about it.

I was reminded of when I was a counterintelligence agent in South Korea. At the time, the dictatorship policies of South Korea were being replaced with a more open government that came at the cost of major demonstrations and major sacrifices being made by citizens of that country. Yeah, I know. We generally don't talk about South Korea as a dictatorship, because we see it as a "good" country because it was the opposer of North Korea, an "evil" country. But South Korea was no bed of roses. It was just on our side.

Anyway, I was working near the demilitarized zone (DMZ), and the city where we worked was an interesting area because there were no maps of the area. We could find topographical maps from the military, but you couldn't find local maps that showed what was where. They didn't sell Rand McNally maps in the stores. You just couldn't get information. Our field office often remarked that it would make our job so much easier if we could get a map of downtown. So, I asked why we didn't just go to the local authorities, like the police department, and ask them. I was told that we couldn't do that because our relations with the local police were not good.

So, being a foolish agent I was, I drove to the police department with my assistant, set up a meeting with the police chief. In the waiting room area, I spoke with a police lieutenant, and I noticed there was this huge situation map on the wall that detailed every business establishment in our area. I was sent into see the police chief. He told me during our meeting that he was not authorized to give me a map. So, I was about to leave with the expectation of my colleagues made real, but I was stopped at the door by a police lieutenant from the department. He asked if we could meet for lunch one day soon. So, I set up a lunch time meeting with him.

During our lunch, he told me that he was fascinated that I was an American who had taken the time to learn Korean so that I could speak in their language rather than force them to speak in my language. I said it was common courtesy; I was in HIS country. He then handed me a Manila folder and told me to open it when I got back to my office. When I returned to my office, I found a map of the area where we were located. Several days later, a special delivery came to my office from the police chief; it was the situation map (a huge map that showed where every local establishment was, a virtual copy of the main map they had on their wall, the one they used to monitor the local area). He thanked me for coming to his office to ask, something our people refused to do in the past (they used to "summon" him to our office instead).

So, I wonder how much of this is about what we can't do or what we won't do.

Stumble It!