I think this is very funny.

I can feel my brain gradually deteriorating, dissolving like something...dissolvable. Dissolvable is a word, though some spell checks would say otherwise, adding to the feeling. Memory is my greatest weakness - if I could just effortlessly remember half of what I thought about or wanted to do, I'd be golden. At least silver. One of the scariest moments I've experienced was having this one epiphany, then a couple days later reading something I'd written years earlier about having the exact same epiphany.

Entropy's a bitch!

(red|pill) I

http://listverse.com/entertainment/top-15-film-misquotes/

[[Among the hardest to believe:

"Mirror, mirror on the wall" was never said in Snow White.

"Play it again, Sam" was never said in Casablanca.

"Beam me up, Scotty" was never said in Star Trek.]]


"Most of the things we do, we do for no better reason than that our
fathers have done them or our neighbors do them, and the same is
true of a larger part than what we suspect of what we think."
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

I am in Their Debt

So, I got a little overzealous in paying off my smaller-balance credit card, to the point that I had to deposit every dollar bill I could find (one, to be precise, along with a ten) to make my minimum payment on the •other• card and have 8 cents left to my name. Of course, this ended up dipping below thanks to shady banking practices, but hey, let them have their $35 fee, again. I'll be free of their clutches before long. Provided I continue to ignore any and all health problems until I (most likely) get health care toward the end of March.

My progress will slow considerably now, since I used almost all of my tax return, birthday/christmas money, and that month's worth of 80-hour-a-week paychecks to get this far.

I don't know why I think that focusing so much on eliminating this debt will free me from slavery to money, but I do.

"How Long? Not Long.

Cause what you reap
is what you sow."

To the commenters, again

Laurie - yes, I was [a very committed] Adams, and no, I've not heard of Phil! So I guess I'll go look him up.

Chu - Happy year of the rat to you, too! I just found out I'm a pig instead =(

Rich - Still Alive is my new favorite song

Silver Lining, vol. 2

I still love guacamole.

The clouds:
On Saturday, I met a friend at Chipotle.
We had different meals, but both partook in the Chips con guacamole, or as it is called on their menu, "Chips with Guacamole."
Much later that night, we would both become quite vehemently ill - if you object to my word choice, I will be happy to explain to you how I "showed strong feeling; was forceful, passionate, intense" - and remained ill for the following two days.

The silver lining:
My friend had just been saying on Saturday that she had a Chipotle adddiction that was costing her dearly, and while she meant monetarily, I might have added calorically (not that she's plus-sized, but any one of those burritos could feed a busload of starving teenagers).
So she is obviously cured of that affliction, at least for a while!

I'm still considering what my own silver lining might be in this situation, but so far I can only assume that if I had been able to get out of bed on Sunday, some terrible fate would have befallen me. Soooo....cool, still alive!

Before and After, pt. 1

Boston Massacre

Before paying any attention to what it was, despite having heard it explained to me several times in life and even walking the ground where it happened:
Thought a whole bunch of awesome revolutionary colonials were mercilessly gunned down by ruthless (have to be ruthless to do things mercilessly, I feel) Redcoats.

After paying attention:
Five - 5 - dudes were killed. Five out of an angry mob of hundreds that surrounded like 8 soldiers and clubbed one to the ground. So yeah, less of a massacre and more of a "surround, terrify, and club some guys with guns and you gon' get shot, son."
A jury even acquitted all but two of the soldiers, the ones who shot directly into the crowd.

So?
Soldiers in the city is a bad idea - check.
Oh, and someone please please remind me that I want to go watch the re-enactment on March 5th!!
Seriously.
It's only a $30 bus ride, round trip.
Just send me an email or a text on March 3rd.
I'll take a picture?

Something to Consider

I impulse-bought the Pulitzer-winning* John Adams biography the other day, which is rare for me (buying something, that is, not being impulsive).

*not one of those other crappy bios that those other crappy authors probably spent their whole lives working on - pfeh, who needs em?

I never know where to put my asterisked comments.

Anyway, I've been struck by a few interesting things, but here's Adams himself talking about how cool being a lawyer is:

Now to what higher object, to what greater character, can any mortal aspire than to be possessed of all this knowledge, well digested and ready at command, to assist the feeble and friendless, to discountenance the haughty and the lawless, to procure redress to wrongs, the advancement of right, to assert and maintain liberty and virtue, to discourage and abolish tyranny and vice?

Wow! He kinda makes it sound like being a superhero, I dig it. Too bad lawyers today (not counting those on Law and Order) don't act this way. I imagine future biographers of current lawyers will have less admirable passages to cite:

Now to what higher object, what greater character, can any mortal aspire than to be possessed of all this mahogany furniture, well polished and ready to hold customized pens, to assist the feeble and friendless while charging hundreds an hour, to discounten...to drive supersweet sports cars, to procure red dresses and thongs for the advancement of a night, to assert and maintain [personal] liberty at the cost of [societal] virtue, to discourage and abolish [everyone else's] tyranny and vice?

Also, three cool images [x]

Not for sale?

For some reason, I deeply resent being asked if I "really get paid" for these writings. I guess it's mostly the implications I imagine are behind the question, some of which I'm sure are real!

For one thing, please know that I do not write here for money.
I write if/when I feel like it, as should be evidenced by my long history of sporadicity.
That's also why I've avoided writing as a career up to this point - I don't want to write on someone else's schedule, or pay schedule, or for someone else's purpose.

Seems to me that you always have to sacrifice some part of a creative activity to get paid for it, unless you're somehow lucky enough to be sponsored or discovered, or if you're already famous or something (please stop writing children's books, celebrities with no talent for the craft). The purpose of this blog is, without question, so that I can write without any restrictions other than my own. If/when I receive any money for anything I write, I will definitely consider it luck...and gladly accept it.

Maybe instead of asking "are you really getting paid," you should be asking, "where can I send my contribution?"

This concludes another free post. =)



"Money is not a thing, it is not even a process. It is a kind of shared dream. We dream that a small disc of common metal is worth the price of a substantial meal. Once you wake up from that dream, you can swim in a sea of money." - Terry Pratchett (paid to write)

"Interestingly, the US nickel coin contains 0.04 oz (1.25 g) of nickel, which at this new price is worth 6.5 cents, along with 3.75 grams of copper worth about 3 cents, making the metal value over 9 cents." - Wikipedia author(s) (not paid to write)