Ultimate Glory

When I told the cashier that my friend and I wanted the 911 challenge, she looked worried. Worried that we were just two chumps in over our heads, ready to quit after two wings. I asked her if the wings would be free, provided we both ate all 12. "You can take 'em home if you don't finish 'em" she tells us, because right now we're just skid marks to her. Rough spots in that gigantic underwear, covering the private parts of 911 challenge history. She doesn't think we'll be two more faces on the sacred wall of the Cluckyu Challenge Winners of Ultimate Glory.

Who would?

I woke up in the morning, nervous. "It's all mental," I tell myself, before I realize I'm talking to myself in the mirror. Mental. Somehow I find myself eating handfuls of M&M's in my parent's bedroom. Eating them like an Asian woman drives a car--that is to say, quickly, and without thinking. When I find Jon, he's more nervous than I am. I show him the tub of Vasoline and tell him that rubbing the stuff on the lips and cheeks will make the burning more bearable, and he sounds relieved. No one cracks the typical lubrication jokes that usually go hand-in-hand with the application of Vasoline. Shit is serious.

There's not much of a crowd at Cluckyu's during the day, so the food comes hard and fast. I don't know how food can come hard, but like hell it does. Before I know it, I have in front of me 12 of the hottest hot wings known to man, and I'm laying them all out on my tray, wings on the left, drumsticks on the right, all the while scraping off excess sauce. Seems like a waste of time to most people, but we both know it's necessary. It's gotta be done, so better do it when your mouth isn't burning. See, most people decide they'll try the challenge, and if it gets too crazy then maybe they'll stop. Most people quit.

The first three are a breeze, but after that I start to shake. I can't remember how I felt during the middle, so I can only assume I was in pain, and that my mind suppressed the memory. The last three or four just suck. By then Jon's already finished (amazingly), and I'm under pressure of running out of time. But then I stopped chewing so much, and held everything in long enough to finish! My face and fingers are numb, I'm crying, and I'm red all over. I would have looked like shit, but fortunately I was adorned with the unmistakable wings of victory.

In that restaurant, there's a wall that displays an array of polaroid pictures. Most of the people in them look like shit. Some of them still have sauce-beards. Others are holding up strange personal mementos, things that have helped them get through the tough times. But in each one is a smile. Now my mug is among these legends, smiling with the twinkle of accomplishment. A smile of a victory, hard-fought. That smile is tempered, because I know that (to put it in simple terms) passing the stool will suck.

Secrets And Truths

I have a confession to make. Whenever I'm involved in any sort of group hug, I secretly try my best to make everyone fall down in a tangle of limbs and love, often at risk of great personal harm and bonding.

Other truths I discovered today:

1) I try to say hi to everyone I know when I see them, and as a result I have a lot of relationships built solely on these short exchanges. Today I had a longer 'passing by' conversation, and I almost walked away proud of myself, until I realized I didn't know the person beyond what was going on immediately in their lives.
-------1.a) it's too bad this will never change, for the most part. Will it?
------------------1.a.I) In all honesty, no.

2) Speaking, when you do it right, is testifying. Not necessarily in the religious sense. Just that whenever words come from your mouth, they should be testament to some quality, some facet about you.

3) Undie-running in a viking hat will get you an ass-pinching, and rightly so.

I've Reached That Point Where Everything Sucks

I hate to say it, but these days sleeping is pointless, because you just get up and start studying again.
Eating also falls under this category.

I've gotten to the depressing part of Paradise Lost. Humanity has fallen, Adam just finished calling Eve a ho, and it's not like the rest of the book has been much fun anyway. It's not even the story that's getting me down, so much as I'm looking at it the from a 'post-religious' perspective (which just means I'm jaded), and it's not the interesting read I always thought it would be.

Now that I think about it, I got the same feeling from reading the apocrypha: one man trying hard to explain away the complexities of the Bible, but doing so from an age-old perspective, to an intended audience that's long dead. To me, it just seems like artifice. Actually, the fact that it's so political just makes it seem more political, but I don't think that makes as much sense to you right now as it does to me. In the end, it all translates to me not caring.

But I'm being unfair. That apathetic feeling I get reading the apocrypha only comes up once in a while with Milton, and that's really a tribute to the guy, considering that I'm starting to get that feeling more and more from reading the Bible. (Apathetic for lack of a better word; I'm not all sure how I feel about it yet).

If Milton read this he might die. I guess he's already dead, so he would have to die again. Or just not like me. Good thing Christianity isn't about reading the Bible all the time. I wonder what he'd think about that?

My roommates are asleep. I think I'll join them.

Blame, Or If You Prefer, Mike

The past few days have been rich. On Saturday I woke up at 4:30AM to drive to San Luis Obispo and watch Charissa graduate. She's my age, she's got her degree, and she'll soon be proposed to (and we're all sure of this). She also doesn't read my blog, which is a good thing, because it means she'll never know how boring her graduation was. I laughed while her brother made fun of the speaker's accent (battlecuruuzer operrrational), and then fell asleep.

That night I passed out around 8PM, only to wake up at 2AM. Gabe was asleep out on the couch. I got around to finishing Hamlet, then caught the sunrise for the second day in a row (not bad!). Gabe chipped in with his loud, angry sleep-talk, to my further enjoyment.



That morning I fought myself a little, like I always do (and like Hamlet did), then got down to Venice to look for homeless people. Actually, I went and wandered until someone asked me for a cigarette, but to be fair, everyone so far has been homeless.

"My name is Mike, but people call me Blame."
"Blame? Why Blame?"
"Because it's always my fault, and not anyone else's."
"That kinda sucks"
"Well, it's easier to blame myself than to blame other people."

There's a lot of philosophy that gets tossed around at Venice. The guy I met was a real-life Hamlet, sort of. He was "really confused spiritually" at the time, and he might've killed himself if he hadn't been scared of what was waiting for him on the other side. And I had just read that.

I learned that homeless people come to Venice because it's a convenient place to live. The cops back in Jersey will throw you in jail for sleeping on the streets, but not here. "Here you got alarm clocks with guns," he tells me. It all seems so easy. Even if you come come with nothing, like so many people do, you don't need to be slick; but odds are you won't leave with anything either.

All your dreams, everything you want is right here in front of you, but you can't have it. "That's why people go crazy," he says. "That's why you see people walking around talking to themselves."

The system makes it easy (in comparison) for the homeless at Venice, but it also makes it easier to control them. Even in Santa Monica, enforcement is stricter. It's like containment. You'd rather keep more people in one place.

This particular guy was sitting on his sleeping bag in front of a vision store. Upscale. He had passed out the night before and someone had stolen his glasses. Now he can't see very far, and unless his friend had picked them up, he's not going anywhere either.



...Who would fardels bear,
To grunt and sweat under a weary life,
But that the dread of something after death,
The undiscovered country, from whose bourn
No traveler returns, puzzles the will,
And makes us rather bear those ills we have,
Than fly to others that we know not of?

-Shakespeare, Hamlet III.1.76-82

Hello My Name is and I Have a Problem

At 9:50AM I leave, an hour and a half after I get up and thirty minutes before I walk into class, late.

Class ends at 3PM, but I have an hour in between. Gym, then the track in that time (dumb).

3:20PM I get to the office, (ran into a friend on the way and spent 20 minutes in real conversation). Production starts, it's suddenly 7PM and I cover the rally at 8. back to the office at 10:30PM, get everything in by around midnight and get home by 12:40AM. I've eaten two slices of toast, three bagels, an orange, a banana, and some hersheys kisses.


Some people feel good when they give. I get my euphoria when I create. Nate and I did a great job on the rally. Leaving the office, I think coverage is the best I've seen in my three years here. That's an accomplishment. We took something we enjoy and did it to the fullest, as good as we could imagine it. It doesn't make me less tired or hungry, just less cranky.

Then on the way home, I don't see a soul. There's no one walking around campus at 12:15AM on a Thursday night except.. me.

My photos will look great in the morning, but tonight I could have been home watching Weird Al music videos with my roommates. I need to catch up with old friends from the fellowship I stopped going to, but taking time is taking photos and I only have one. Tonight I'm alone. Walking home, I start to see people again. There's a group in front of the ZBT house, and a girl asks if anyone has a camera. That's rich.

I wanted that sense of accomplishment again, walking home. Bigger, longer lasting, enough so I can justify alienating myself from friends while I document the lives of strangers. It's a vicious cycle. That's cliched, but it's too late and I'm tired.







180 small circle
I got home and watched Weird Al music videos ("Eat It") with my roommates. We decided we'd all learn to dance like him (but not like Michael). Gabe made a meatball soup with fats and proteins and things besides starch, still warm when I got to it. They're both asleep now, but I waited until they went to sleep before I started writing. Thinking back now, that soup needs more salt. Still, it took the wind out of my complaints.

Space Invaders

My weekend flipped my life upside down and made a lot of things uncertain, but I won't share it.

Honestly, a lot of important stuff I don't blog, because you probably don't know me well enough and explaining all the background information can take too long. But today I still got up, showered, brushed my teeth, talked to the people I normally talk to and did the things I do (except showering, which I don't normally). Which brings me to my point: I'll do everything I normally do, but just go about it differently. And I think that'll work.

And I hate that "ask me about it in person and I'll tell you" bullshit, because if that's going to end your blog than you just made people read through however much you wrote, without learning much about you. For that I'm sorry, but look at the pretty picture!

-Not

Take Off Your Cool

I'm just a little boy, sitting in my apartment that finally feels like home, 5am and listening to my favorite Outkast song.

Two and a half down, four and a half until I'm outtaaaaaa here~

Note to Self: Don't Flash Self in Face

Today I worked with Bruin Harmony to take pictures for their website, which reminded me of when I did it last year, which reminded me of this:

..Which reminded me that some mistakes can hurt you, but a lot of mistakes are really cool. Happy Face.

Tell Me When We Don't Give a

I've gotta remember in about five years to call up all my college friends.

More than the things they're doing now, jobs they hold, kids and that, I want to ask them about the conversations we had five years ago. "I'd like to know what you were thinking when I told you about this or that," I'd say, and they'd tell me the face they were thinking of, or which girl's name, or just that I was full of shit. "I've always wanted to ask, but I couldn't at the time. Tension, didn't want to ruin a moment, whatever it was, but I figure it's a good time to bring it up now that it's not important."

People are welcome to ask me these questions too, and I have a pretty good memory for this stuff. I you don't, I'd recommend writing it down, because when I call you and you can't recall, then there's a great moment you'd have ruined.

(I don't think there's a better way to stop, so I will) Goodnight!

Yellowstone is for lovers

This week our humble family started a new tradition: camp out in a beautiful place while demonstrating a complete lack of camping knowledge, getting on each other's nerves, making bad jokes, then getting back tired and ready to face the metropolis again. We started with Yellowstone Nat'l Park. In case you, like me, didn't know, the park is a 2 million acre rectangle mostly in Wyoming, but also touching Montana and Idaho. If case you, like me, still don't know where that is, shame shame (cheat code: from CA, go right into Nevada, up into Idaho, then right again into Wyoming). It was my first time in all those states, and my favorite by far is Idaho. Lots of quaint farmland, punctuated by snappy roadsigns like "Idaho is too great to litter." Tell'em Idaho! I was less impressed by Nevada's huge deserts, but found out that it's got a bigger population (2.5mil vs 1.5mil), as well as a slyly-named Deeth Starr Valley, which is certainly something.


Anticipation. Yellowstone is laced with geysers and hot springs, and Old Faithful is the most predictable, going off every 30-90 minutes. It draws a big crowd.


There's gotta be a great pick-up line here. Hey baby, I go off consistently every 30-90 minutes, hundreds of feet in the air. Lemme buy you a drink.


Chinese Spring. As you can see, it is not sexy.


There are a lot of geysers and hot springs near Yellowstone. We didn't get to go to this one, but I'm pretty sure I know what it looks like already.


The wild, dangerous fauna of Yellowstone Park. Must've caught em on an off day.


Maybe I'm just a horrible wildlife photographer.


Snotty herds of Buffalo. An ongoing traffic problem in Yellowstone.


Valley. We came across this on the third day, after a hard 5-mile hike. I have a confession to make here: I didn't hike my parents up here to enjoy the view. We don't have electric lights, and we're too cheap to build big campfires, so the first few nights after dark we went into the tent and played Chinese Big 2. This would be fine, except my mom is scary good at the game, and a guy can only lose to his mother in cards so many times. With the daunting prospect of losing again that night daunting my already-daunted mind, I chose the hike to tire my parents out, in hopes they would sleep early. It worked!


Hot Spring. I woke up the next day smelling something horrible. Unable to figure out what it was, I made the logical assumption that it was me. Confidence: low. My mom tells me it's not me, it's the sulfur. Confidence: sexy time! Thanks mom! The yellow around this spring is all sulfur. The heat of the spring melts it underground, then carries it up to the surface where it crystallizes. Smart, huh?


Puddle. We got rained on two out of the four nights we camped out, and being giant wusses, we went to bed at 9 on both nights. The rain made a nice plitter platter on the tent, and I stayed awake listening and thinking about relationships, God, UCLA football, and possible photo essay ideas. Thanks Daily Bruin (by the way, I came up with one: clowns. The life of clowns. The life of a UCLA clown. Don't cop it, I might use it). I woke up too early that morning and couldn't go back to sleep, no thanks to the forest critters that seem to have happy hour at around 6am. Pretended to be asleep when my parents woke up, but they saw through it and made me do stuff.


bitch


Our fabulous tent, with the ghetto-fab tarp we rigged over it. Do I look like a girl in this picture? ...Is my mom manlier than I am? ...I guess that wouldn't be so bad.


Family shot. The best one I have, out of a very small pool, from this week. Familys aren't perfect, and mine isn't close, but on the way back we stayed at a motel and watched Die Hard 2: With a Vengeance, and man... do we all enjoy a bad white cop with an edgy black dude in a movie together. The week had ups and downs that I don't remember right now, but I'll leave you with what it left me.

Samuel L Jackson: now, where you goin'?
Kid 1: school
Samuel L Jackson: why?
Kid 2: to get educated
Samuel L Jackson: WHY?
Kid 1: so we can go to college
Samuel L Jackson: and why is that important?
Kid 1: to get es-pect.
Samuel L Jackson: RE-spect. Now, who's the bad guys?
Kid 1: guys who sell drugs.
Kid 2: guys who have guns.
Samuel L Jackson: and whos the good guys?
Kid 1: we're the good guys.
Samuel L Jackson: who's gonna help you?
Kid 2: nobody.
Samuel L Jackson: *SO who's gonna help you*?
Kid 1: we're gonna help ourselves.
Samuel L Jackson: And who do we not want to help us?
Kid 1, Kid 2: white people.
Samuel L Jackson: that's right. Now get on outta here. Go to school.