Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in Jeff Hayman's LiveJournal:

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Wednesday, November 25th, 2009
3:03 am	Mountains I don't really understand mountains. When I think of the Sierra Nevada, I think of a completely different world than what surrounds it (i.e. Fresno and Vegas). It's the land of rock, bears, volatile weather, and trees taller than the imagination. The mountains can kill you. And yet, just a few miles away and a few thousand feet below to the west is CA-99, farming, meth labs, and country music. The only thing that will kill you is home foreclosure. And just a few thousand feet below to the east is US-395, and a whole lot of arid nothing. And yet between these two, flat, hot regions where nothing grows higher than the almond trees, and the animal size maxes out at human, there lies this different, inhospitable world of lush vegetation (and yet barren granite), of bears (and yet alpine bees), of torrential rivers, glacial lakes, and the great sequoias. Where does it all come from? In my recent trip to Kings Canyon, I realized the Sierra Nevada is not as large as I once thought when I was younger. Back when I was a boy scout, it was a giant and endless universe with infinite depths. Now, I feel as if I can sit on it and simultaneously touch both the Central Valley and the Great Basin. It's weird to me that I can be killed by a blizzard under a giant sequoia with a bear eating my food, and simultaneously a mere 40 miles away in the valley some farm worker could be cursing rush hour traffic and turning up the air conditioning in his car. 40 miles is the distance between San Jose and San Francisco. You can drive it in an hour. The same can be said about the San Gabriel and San Bernardino Mountains here down south. They pop out of the face of desert and provide you with an ecology, temperament, and people far different than anything surrounding it. Mountains are random. (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Tuesday, November 3rd, 2009
3:32 pm	I have no idea what I'm doing. It's that time of year again when I wonder to myself: what am I doing? This is really the first year of my life where I have no idea what I'm doing. Before, I always had dreams of becoming a famous self-sufficient concert composer out of college, but that's merely a pipe dream. Then I decided maybe I wanted to go into film music, but my small exposure to modern film composition, i.e. the studio music factory, left kind of a sour taste in my mouth. So maybe teaching? But then the teachers I know have been overwhelmed by the vast educational bureaucracy that jades them and chases them away. I was always in a hurry to succeed. It was once my goal to have a doctorate degree by the age of 28, married, making lots of money, etc. But why am I in a hurry? Who was I racing against? My own biological clock? And what is success anyway? Lots of money? Happiness? A wife that doesn't want to kill you in your sleep? There is always grad school, but time is running out to apply and I'm only lukewarm on the idea. On one hand, it would occupy me and keep me around valuable resources longer, but on the other it's expensive, and without a career motive, it's directionless. I can improve my craft on my own. I don't need to pay thousands upon thousands to do it. And since the musical academia already left a sour taste in my mouth, would it really be good for me to be exposed to it for two more years? The possibility of grad school will always be there anyway. And then maybe I was thinking about using my slowly developing Polish skills and going abroad to Poland for a year to teach English. However, while that sounds fun, I'd be afraid of getting homesick and alienating myself from my family, friends, and homeland here. And do I really want to teach English? Or is that, like grad school, just another way to keep me busy as my years of youth and wasted virility come to an end? And then maybe I should just suck it up and go into film music. Maybe I should brave this hierarchical world of egoists and new-age artistes who wear jeans and dress shoes and won't hesitate to fellate Hanz Zimmer. This world of endless loops and cues, synths, macs, protools, compressors, and all these frightening elements of studio music production, without which I'll forever drown in the world of 21st century music. Maybe I should suck it up and be a part of it. Yet, the idea of the Hollywood World has always frightened me a little. Maybe it's my innate conservative values, but to me its this arcane world of self-defined morality and hedonistic decadence, facades, and deceptions in which small-town city folk like me will never feel comfortable at home. But can I really blame Hollywood for their hedonism? I, myself, am not quite sure what else there is to trust but the pleasure of one's own senses. Or maybe I should just get a low-key unskilled job, like a waiter. One where I don't have to think about work when I'm not at work. Where I'll work my hours and leave both in body and mind, allowing me to relax at home and do what makes me happy: write my little compositions for the drawer, my little works of literature that never get finished. Then after a while, I'll discover or rediscover a dream and pursue a career. I'm just afraid that, if I did this, my little compositions and novellas would turn into watching TV and drinking beer, and soon I'll discover myself to be forty, fat, and lonely. Or maybe I'll take a year off and relax. Blow my savings on travel. Spend a year doing whatever the hell I feel like. Because of course being unemployed and homeless is a great way to pick up chicks. (11 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, October 29th, 2009
1:48 am	One of these days I'm gonna snap... I see it now... ...I'll be sitting in the warm comfort of my apartment trying to stream a South Park episode after a long day of work, when suddenly one minute through the episode... Buffering 20% ...22% ...playing... Then it will play for precisely two seconds. Buffering 25% ...37%... And again for two seconds. Buffering 17%... 17%... 17%... Connection Lost. Check Connection. And that will be it. My computer will be in tiny little pieces scattered below the dent in the wall where it impacted. The router will be in the street three stories below. The malfunctioning lever in the dishwasher that was supposed to get fixed will soon find itself stabbed into the electrical outlet that doesn't work. This is when I take the baseball bat out of the trunk of my car and destroy everything on campus that pisses me off. Every piece of electronics that inexplicably doesn't work. Every piece of machinery that breaks down more often than it should. Goodbye Delta Terrace elevators. Goodbye Rieber washing machines. Goodbye Schoenberg vending machines. The door of Covel by the bike racks? Gone. The traffic light on Gayley crossing into De Neve? Gone. That one elliptical machine at Wooden that is always Out of Order? Destroyed. The garbage truck that rolls by every morning at 8:00am? You better believe it. And then after I'm done with that, I'll stand at the bottom of the ramp from Sunset Blvd to northbound Sepulveda and smash the windshield of every car that stops in front of the sign that says "Do Not Stop." It will be glorious. (4 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, October 27th, 2009
12:21 pm	The Girl from Hanover As many of you might know, I have two facebook profiles: one for high school and one for present-day. I created the high school one purely for the purpose of being able to date myself on facebook. Lame, I know. But it's more than that: it's my way of expressing the complicated relationship between who I am now and who I was in high school. My high school self and current self have different interests, politics, and pictures, and constantly I find my current self going back to my high school self to find out who I really am (or some bull crap like that). Anyway, as it isn't my real profile, I rarely log in to my high school facebook. That is, until yesterday when I immediately realized a problem. For the first time in over a year, I logged in to my high school profile and found something like 25 friend requests and 15 unread messages dating back from over a year. Suddenly it hit me: people searching for my profile could stumble upon this one and think it's the real me. Important friends I've never accepted and messages to which I've never responded lay there waiting, I'm sure in agonizing anticipation, for my response. There is one such message that especially caught my interest: from: Gian Giezendanner subject: is it you? hy jeff remember me? we were in the same train to villnus, the two swiss guys and the german girl? how are you? How is your trip going on? hope it was the right decision to get off the train there you did :) goodbye Sent August 6, 2008. First of all, the obvious: he wants to make sure I'm okay (a year ago) and I never got back to him (a year ago). For all he knows, I could be dead, although I'm sure he stopped losing sleep over it by now. Second of all, and more importantly, he references the German Girl. This is the Girl from Hanover I referred to in an earlier entry of mine. To make the short story shorter, I met her on the train with the two Swiss guys referred to above in the facebook message. I connected with her on an unspoken level (or so I thought), but then I got off the train in Kazlu Ruta, and she continued on to Vilnius. The following day I went to Vilnius to look for her. I went all over Old Town: the main street, the main square, and the areas with hostels with a faint hope of running into her. I don't know why it was so important to me; we barely talked on the train. We just exchanged glances and smiled. I don't even remember her being amazingly attractive. But there seemed to be a mutual understanding of some deep personal nature, and this deep personal understanding of one another was something I craved. Regardless, the day went by, and she was gone forever. I had no name, no age, no school. I had nothing. I only knew she was from Hanover and that she was continuing north. She only knew I was from San Francisco and continuing south. And to this day, that's all I've ever known about her. In fact, I'm not even certain she was from Hanover anymore. Time has filled my head with doubt - maybe the personal connection was an illusion. Maybe I just made up the fact she was from Hanover to fill her identity with something tangible. Maybe she didn't exist at all. But that's not important anymore. She stayed with me as a symbol. A symbol of the Romantic. A symbol of the Fantastic. She rekindled my belief in Ethereal Love. The Mystic and Metaphysical. The Divine Erotic. We live in a world where all too much is placed at surface value. We take things as we see and feel them, and as we get older, we get jaded with the material reality and get depressed as we come to discover nothing in life as being as spectacular and extraordinary as we had once thought in our dreamy youth. But I have the Girl from Hanover: the symbol onto which I can cling and thus cling onto the romantic and metaphysical notions that keep me grounded outside of reality. Ultimately the fact I know nothing about her allows me to make her into whatever I want her to be to me. But now, with this facebook message (which should have been answered 14 months ago), I suddenly have a glimmer of hope to connect with this symbolic myth from my past. What does Gian Giezendanner know? If he knew my name, does he know hers? Is he facebook friends with her? What happened to her? What are her interests and her desires? Where has she been and where is she going? I have the rare and elusive opportunity to turn an intangible fantasy into a name and a face. You can't communicate with a fantasy. You can't touch a fantasy. Sure, nothing will come of it. Even if I do find her on teh intrawebz, that will be the end of the story. I have my life, she has hers. There are real women on my mind now: women I can talk to and touch and hug, and maybe one day kiss. She will always only be the Fantastic Other. But regardless, the curiosity is killing me. Who is this that unknowingly stole my heart and mind from the depths of solitude? Do I even want to know? (12 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, October 21st, 2009
10:07 pm	The Adventures of Adam and Vaclav I was bored today, so I had an idea: I would write lame jokes based on the stereotypes of Central and Eastern Europeans and post them on Livejournal. This gradually evolved into an idea for crappy televised shorts aimed at teaching lessons on Central and Eastern European history through the lame adventures of Adam and Vaclav. So without another moment's wait... I present to you the first three installments of "The Adventures of Adam and Vaclav: the educational series" Written and produced by (and for) The S.H.C.I (Society of the Historically and Culturally Inept). Viewer discretion advised: this might actually make you more bored than you were before you started reading it. ( Lesson 1: The Beginnings of Solidarity: Adam and Vaclav go to the bar ) ( Lesson 2: 19th Century Romanticism: Adam and Vaclav go golfing ) ( Lesson 3: After The Second World War: Adam and Vaclav go to the pool ) I told you these were lame. (2 Comments |Comment on this)
2:33 am	Wealth and Happiness We all know money can't buy happiness. Why does it seem like our entire existence is focused on acquiring it? Twelve years of school and college: to enrich ourselves? Right... We all know college is to get us the "good" jobs, ie: the jobs that make a lot of money. But tell me: when your wife is cheating on you, your children loathe you, and you've alienated all your friends in your quest for capital, will your yacht really save you from yourself as you stand on the ledge of the Golden Gate Bridge, looking outward at the sun setting behind the mighty blue sea indifferent to your internal suffering? I don't know what I'm doing next year, but honestly I don't really care as long as I'm happy. There's no point in making an investment in a future of unhappiness, and it's truly a testament to our ills as a society that so many of us are willing to do so. Then again, I'm afraid with that mentality that I'll be poor, miserable, and homeless by the age of thirty. Maybe it's a worthy investment to make. (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, October 13th, 2009
2:49 am	Pedophilia, Incest, and Film-making I was wondering the other day... Do fathers ever get strangely attracted to their daughters because they remind them of how their wives used to look back when they fell in love and made babies? And then suddenly, I was inspired to make a film (if I actually made films). It would be about a father who has lost the enthusiasm for life and vivacity he once had. He has an estranged wife and daughter who lead independent existences. Slowly, as his daughter becomes an adult, he begins to notice the innate sensual qualities of the maturing teenage woman, and then also notices the similarities between his daughter and how his wife once was when she was young. He would grow infatuated with his daughter as a symbol of passion and means of bringing himself back to his own youth, when he had a purpose, dreams, and could fall in love. Then, by falling in love with his daughter as the symbol of his wife from the past, he would then have a rebirth of affection for his wife, and the two would live happily ever after. Just kidding. Because we're all secretly perverted and addicted to tragedy, the movie would be a much better hit if he develops some sort of sexual relationship with his daughter, and then gets either killed by his wife or sent to prison at the end. Now, I understand this sounds almost exactly like American Beauty (we all know the daughter's cheerleader friend is really a symbol of the daughter, or at least feminine youthful sensuality in any case), so we need to change it around a bit. Perhaps we could turn this into a psychological thriller two-fold. On one hand, it explores the father's deep, dark descent into the perverse world of incest and pedophilia. On the other hand, the daughter's psychological element could also be developed. Perhaps she was given a Christian upbringing, and then as she got older she began to lose faith. As a result, her life would feel empty and vapid. Then, as a result of a desire to reconnect herself with something metaphysical and greater than herself, she starts to see her father as not only her father, but her creator, and by extension God. Then, in order to realize her own sense of worth, she would start to have delusions of herself as a Mary figure, and would begin to believe her role in life is to bring about a son through conception with her creator/father. Thus, she would willingly enter into a “divine” sexual relationship with the man she worships as her powerful creator, who himself is set on worshipping the pinnacle of feminine sexuality through his daughter. Maybe to make this even more dysfunctional, she could find out she's pregnant after he's been convicted of child rape and incest. And hell! Why not just make it a two-hour pseudo-porno with only one sex scene at the end. The trick is to make it a giant sensual crescendo from the relatively flaccid and depressed beginning to the end where all of our own deep, dark perverse desires are thrown out onto the screen in the greatest sex scene to happen since The Watchmen. Now here's the trick as a film maker: in spite of the evident psychoses in the characters, it has to be a genuine love story. This is a huge challenge because no morally conservative American is going to condone a love story about incest and pedophilia. Yet I would want it to be beautiful and convincing. I want the father to be a tragic and inspirational hero, not a morally bankrupt molester. The father is a good man, lost in a world of unjust and arcane moral standards. Why shouldn't he be able to have sex with his daughter? Why shouldn't he be able to have sex with an underaged woman? I mean, clearly she loves him back in that way... who defined incest as incest and pedophilia as pedophilia anyway, and why are they bad? Now, of course I'm not seriously asking these questions. But that's the thing! I would want the movie done in such a way that audience members, leaving the theater, are asking themselves these very questions while feeling sympathy for the father and indignation for his fate, and only when they're a hundred yards from the parking lot do they slam on their breaks and yell, “What the fuck did I just watch?! Holy God!” Only then would I know that I have truly made it as an artist. (11 Comments |Comment on this)
Sunday, October 4th, 2009
12:28 am	Incomplete Failures After looking through all my unfinished pieces, half-written livejournal entries stashed away in the depths of my computer, first pages to novels, language books never opened past Chapter 2, friendships that could've been, women I've wanted and never gave myself a chance to have, places I've almost visited... I've determined the key to greatness is finishing what you start. Just because you can swim doesn't mean you stay above the water. Only those that do swim make it out of the lake. Ability is only worth something when applied. Money only has value when spent. (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Tuesday, September 22nd, 2009
12:33 pm	Things I should do daily this quarter 1. Go to the gym, 1.5 hours 2. Practice piano, 1 hour 3. Practice guitar, 0.5 hours 4. Practice Polish, 1 hour 5. Review Lithuanian/French/German, 1 hour 6. Write music, 2 hours 7. Read for school, 2 hours 8. Read for pleasure, 1 hour 9. Write prose, 1 hour 10. Clean, 0.5 hours That totals 11.5 hours. If I sleep 8 hours per day, that makes 19.5 hours. If I work 4 hours a day, that's 23.5 hours. I average about 1.5 hours of class per day (light load, I know). So that totals 25 hours per day. Damn. Things I probably will do daily this quarter: 1. ... (5 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, September 10th, 2009
1:01 pm	New Couch Sexytime Bygone is the era of getting cockblocked by my own lack of furniture. No longer must women and I sit in separate parts of my living room to drink and regale each other with stories of old. Finally I have a medium from which one thing can lead to another. Naive innocence can flow naturally into burning passion. Now I'll invite all the ladies over. Sexytime will ensue. I see it now: We'll be sitting there, watching the TV I don't have. We'll inch closer and closer together, ever so slowly, ever so discreetly. She'll look at me... I'll look at her... and finally she'll say... "Why are we staring at your wall? This is lame. I'm going home." Then I'll get two glasses of wine... and drink both of them. Truly a beautiful vision of the future. I just narrated that vision to someone I had recently been romantically involved with (a brief and flopped venture). She responded, "I feel like that might have already happened." sad face (6 Comments |Comment on this)
Friday, September 4th, 2009
2:58 pm	Conservative America is batshit crazy I don't usually make political entries, but Good God. In light of the latest outrage over Obama's planned message to schoolchildren, it has become clear that Conservative America really has gone off the deep end. I thought the "Birthers" and the Muslim xenophobia was a bit off, if not laughable, but I shrugged them off as statistical outliers. However now amidst all the Hitler comparisons, 1984 references, and mock communist propaganda I've seen on teh intrawebz in reaction to this future broadcast, there is now no doubt in my mind: Conservative America is batshit crazy. Seriously guys, you really think Obama is an evil Hitlerian madman bent on destroying American Society from within? Because I'm pretty sure telling kids to stay in school and work hard is exactly the same thing as systematically exterminating the Jews. (10 Comments |Comment on this)
Sunday, August 9th, 2009
11:28 pm	Summer is... ...walking in the Santa Cruz Mountains by moonlight, with two close friends. ...buying a plane ticket to Australia for a week, just because you can. ...drinking an ice cold Samuel Adams outside by the pool. ...lying with your sleeping dog. ...going to Denny's drunk at midnight. ...spraying your family with a fire hose. ...playing volleyball with strangers. ...BBQ. ...learning guitar. ...stopping by a fruit stand on the way from the beach. ...sitting on your balcony in the shade, drinking beer, people watching. ...driving with the windows down. ...walking around your apartment naked. ...picking fruit off the tree in your backyard and eating it. ...waking up at 5am to jog to the beach and watch the sunrise. ...missing your friends who have gone away. ...feeling idle and unproductive. ...incessantly dwelling on the one that got away. ...tossing and turning above the covers. ...dreaming of the possibilities that will never happen. ...starting the novel that will never be finished. ...buying the cookbook that will never be opened. ...pacing in your apartment. ...lying in bed writing a livejournal entry. (Comment on this)
Friday, July 31st, 2009
2:32 am	Sentimentality and Adulthood A good friend of mine had his last shift at work today. I asked him if he was sad. He told me he wasn't, and that, like many phases of his life, ie: CSO Programs and UCLA, things just kind of come and go without much of anyone noticing. This particularly cavalier attitude struck me in an odd way. This job was something that consumed so much of his life and time. It means a lot to me. It has given me almost all the friends I have at UCLA. It resurrected in me a purpose when I didn't have one, and I've met a lot of people I intend on knowing deep into the future, including him. But to him, it's a job, and a job is just a job. Another friend of mine moved out of her apartment a month ago. I asked her if she was sad. She told me she wasn't, and that she wasn't particularly fond of her apartment and was glad to get out of there and move away. She lived there for two years. I didn't particularly like my first apartment either, but it was a part of who I was, and regardless I was sad to leave it. The sum total of joy and suffering I experienced in that apartment made me who I am, and ultimately, all suffering becomes joy when enough time passes to make it a good story. But to her, it's an apartment, and an apartment is just an apartment. I'm a sentimental guy to the point of being a flaw. I don't move on easily. I have a hard time throwing things away. Even little To-Do lists I make for myself stick around longer than they need to. They're not just outdated To-Do lists. They're glimpses into a specific moment in my past when these things were important to me to accomplish. In a way, everything I come across is some reflection of myself at some period in the past or present. Everything I touch becomes an exhibit in the Egocentric Museum of Me. Useless trinkets from my childhood still clutter my room. I'm afraid to throw them away because I'm afraid of forgetting. In a way, I constantly live in the past. I think of sentimentality as the attribution of emotional value on things or events that don't otherwise have much apparent value. It's a habit of children. A toy car isn't just a toy car, but an individual with a personality and meaning. Each individual Lego man has unseen human characteristics. Kids race two leaves down the street gutter. But they aren't just leaves. In the imagination of children, they develop back stories and dreams. The winner leaf is the king of the world. The kid thinks about the leaf long after the leaf disappears. The leaf never had real meaning to begin with, but to the child, it was everything for that moment. You look up into the clouds. They're just clouds. But that cloud looks like a dinosaur. It's no longer a cloud, it's a dinosaur. Its name is Mike. Mike the Dinosaur is happy. Mike the Dinosaur is king of the Skynosaurs. But then the jet stream comes and blows off Mike's head. Mike is dead. You are sad. But why are you sad? It's a cloud. But it's not a cloud. It's Mike, and Mike is dead. When I was younger, everything had value. My siblings like to tell a story of when I poked holes into a head of cabbage to make it look like a face. I carried around the head of cabbage all day. It was important to me. I don't know why, but it had value. I kept a toothpaste box once. It didn't have any use, but it was important. It was too valuable to throw away. Sentimentality is a thing of children. They do it for everything. I still do it for everything: my job, my apartment, my To-Do lists. While talking to my now former coworker today, I realized that adulthood is the state where you are no longer a sentimental person. You no longer attribute emotional value to solely tangible or meaningless things. This is not to say adults don't experience sentimentality, but rather, when they do, they are no longer adults. The old man isn't an adult when he holds his autographed football. The mother is no longer an adult when she is unable to throw away her kid's crappy painting, or that ripped t-shirt with the cats on it. It's just a crappy painting. It's just a t-shirt. It's just a football. Adulthood is the ability to emotionally detach yourself from things. It's the ability to throw away old notes. It's the ability to look at a cloud and only see a cloud. It's being able to leave your apartment for the last time without running your fingers across the kitchen counter, or standing in your bedroom one last time for five minutes staring at where your bed used to be and thinking of all the good times that did or didn't happen. It's clocking out of your last shift and leaving station without so much as a glance back. I am unable to do this, and that is why I am still a child. God help me if I grow up. (5 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, July 28th, 2009
8:22 am	LA vs. LA Today I returned back to California from Sydney, Australia. This is the first time after traveling internationally that I have returned to Los Angeles, not Los Altos. Instead of getting picked up from SFO by my parents, I got picked up from LAX by a friend. It's a different feeling, and made me realize how much Los Altos is still home to me. When I return to Los Altos, it means leftovers in the fridge upon entry, a grand piano, a sunny vegetable garden in which to stroll around, a warm meal in the evening, a loving dog that greets you, and a clean set bed to fall asleep in at night and to wake up from in the morning to the chirps of birds. For some reason, the house is always just the right temperature. But I returned to my apartment, alone with no food and work in 5 hours. When I wake up tomorrow, it'll be from the garbage trucks rolling down Kelton and redundant leaf blowers. Sure I can buy food and see my college friends, but after a long plane flight, there's no place like home. It will always be there waiting for me, always letting me call it what it is. (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, July 13th, 2009
2:49 pm	More Waffles Please "More waffles please! More more waffles waffles please waffles please!" So went the Los Altos High School Marching Band chant. They are words I hadn't even thought of for years, and yet when a close friend of mine spoke them last week, I realized how important those words are to me. With their single utterance, I was brought back to the countless chilly Saturday nights, huddled close together for warmth with friends who might as well have been family, wrapped in blankets while sitting in the back stands of a Valley California football field. We weren't that great, but it didn't matter. It wasn't about the hardware, it was about the experience. It was about the cheers in the stands and the bus ride home. It was about hating James Logan High and Valley Christian. But it wasn't just this iconic moment in time. Life was great then. We had a home and we had a family. Our friends had history, and our dreams had a future. I knew who I was and who I wanted to be, before the ugly head of adulthood poked itself through the soft smooth skin of life and told me "No. Dreams are for children." This was a time before college told me I was homeless. I could drive down San Antonio Road and see the Santa Cruz Mountains to the south, knowing that's where I belonged. I could sit in the Delphi house and not feel idle and restless, because that's where I belonged and that's where I could grow. But now I go home, and I no longer grow. I stagnate. But then as I go south, and I see the Santa Monica Mountains open up into the LA Basin, I experience no greater peace, for I know my home isn't there either. Home isn't just a place. It's a place and time. A state of mind. It was a time before someone I once loved told me I wasn't Christian. I never was the greatest of faith, but it was something I had, and something she convinced me I didn't have, sending me into a downward spiral of inhibiting doubt and identity issues, purposelessness and spiritual emptiness. But I have since learned something: she's not a true Christian either. In fact, most of you self-proclaimed Christians are full of snot. Christianity isn't just about the faith. It's not about purity. It's about embracing and interacting with the ills of society. All of you who go about life alienating yourself from things you find unpleasant are cowards. Greet the lepers and the prostitutes with open arms and accept them as your own. 90% of "Christians" I know are afraid of moral impurity and hold themselves in an ivory tower of righteousness. But how can you deal with the ills of society if you don't allow yourself to be surrounded in it to better understand it? You can't! Acceptance and forgiveness. My mom is the greatest Christian I know. Does she go to church regularly? No. Does she hold herself to some great moral superego? No. She drinks. She swears occasionally. She even laughs at crude jokes. But she accepts everyone into her home as if they were her own. No one is unwelcome. Guests never leave hungry, and she inspires everyone to be better people than they already are. Maybe if you Christians took your heads out of your asses, stopped criticizing people and then hypocritically stating that you leave judgment for God, maybe then you'd actually begin to understand what you preach. Anyway, most importantly, it was a time I knew what I wanted to do in life. I wanted to be a self-sustaining composer of the concert scene: a 21st century Beethoven. But then life told me that was impossible. There was only one Beethoven, and no one can achieve that level ever again. Society is not conducive for it, and art has already spoiled itself. My dreams are worthless. For the past couple years, I've felt this ideal image slipping from my fingers as I start to loose joy in music and forget why I got into this in the first place. Damn you, Babbit! Damn you, Stockhausen! Damn you, German idealism! Actually, damn you all -isms of any sort! But today, and coupled with the memory of waffles, I saw a glimpse into the spirit I once had long ago. I listened to Overture to Candide and Festive Overture, and remembered back when I played them in high school, back when I wanted more waffles. It brought me back to those times where I'd lock myself away in my room and listen to these fun little masterpieces, conducting them and moving to them. The energy would enrich me from within. It was my private time with bliss. I would dance around like a lunatic, just me and the music. And today, I did just that in my apartment. I felt the music like I once did. It aroused my spirit, and allowed me once again to remember what it is about music that made me want to dedicate my life to it. I jumped, laughed, and thumbed my nose at no one and everyone. To homelessness, to bigots, to those I trusted all too easily with my heart, and to you, Music Academia. Yes, you. To you I say: Fuck you, Music Academia! Not even you can extinguish the fiery spirit within me! It has burned its flame once again, and I will dance around your rotting corpse as I rise to greatness in your wake! You may have won the battle against my decrepit soul, but you can never win the battle against memory and childhood dreams! As I grasp the hands of my forefathers, D. Shostakovich, L. Bernstein, A. Dvorak, as they pull me out of the dark pit of worthless agony into which you have once cast me, I can assure you, I will prevail! I will win the war, and it will be good. Oh, will it be good. HA HA HA HE He ha hoo hoo ...he... ha...heh... *snort* I want more waffles. Please. Current Mood: manic (7 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, July 9th, 2009
6:42 pm	I went to the Wetzel's Pretzels on campus today. My old roommate from second year was working. I hadn't really talked to him since we lived together. He gave me a cheese dog on him. There's still good in the universe. (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Monday, June 29th, 2009
10:38 am	Whoring out my music again. Download and listen to the performance of my string quartet. http://drop.io/doktorkwack It's downloadable in two formats: mp3 and m4a (whatever the hell that is) Be sure to listen to them in the proper movement order. They're listed in opposite direction in the download menu. DO IT Performed live May 15, 2009 Ivana Jasova, Violin I Luke Santonastaso, Violin II Paula Karolak, Viola Bryan West, Cello (11 Comments |Comment on this)
Sunday, June 21st, 2009
5:02 pm	Jealousy I have jealousy issues. Only instead of being jealous of people, I'm jealous of grand intangibles and abstractions, like God, the United States, Engineering as a subject of study, and fantasy. The thing is, people I care about have these things that are bigger than themselves that they devote themselves to and care about. Being a selfish prick, I naturally want all the attention. Me. Mine. Gimme. Or maybe I just need to find something bigger than myself to be a part of. (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Wednesday, June 17th, 2009
6:53 pm	The Military and Insanity Through my job in the police department, I've become friends with a lot of military types. Everyone in my closest friend circle right now at UCLA is affiliated in some way with Air Force ROTC. Except me. The Military Type is something I've never had exposure to before now, and it confuses me. Being the Pinko Commie Leftist Hippie Flag-burner I am, I have often gotten into moderately antagonistic discussions with my friends. On one occasion, I told one of my friends that I thought people who willingly enter the military as their first choice of career are crazy. Not crazy in the sense that they are wacky, but I meant actually clinically ill in the head. It was kind of a Catch-22 idea. My reasoning was this: when you sign up for the military, you're indicating that you are willing to go to war. If you're willing to go to war, then you're willing to kill people you've never met. You're also willingly risking your life without question, often times to preserve an intangible psychological entity like "freedom" or "liberty." If you're willing to kill someone you don't know, you are a lunatic. If you're willing to die for a cause, you are also a lunatic. It is our nature as creatures to want to live. That is what we do. It's like anything else we're programed to do as creatures. Being willing to die is not what we do. I was also arguing that "patriotism," more specifically the willingness to die for your country, is a virus of the mind. Like a real virus, which takes its code and travels from organism to organism injecting it into its host to create more of itself probably rendering the host incapacitated, patriotism travels from person to person and makes them willing to sacrifice themselves. Hence, patriotism is a virus of the mind that can kill you. This is not to say I don't understand the necessity of having a military. It's something we need, and the men and women who risk their lives to fight are honorable. But just because they're honorable doesn't mean they're not crazy. However, in the midst of this argument, my friend said something that affected me a lot. She said, "Is it crazy to want a path in life? Is it crazy to want a future and a job? Is it crazy to have goals? Is it crazy to want your family to be very well cared for if you die?" And there it is: she has a dream, a path, and a future. I don't. Here I am having no clue what I want out of life with degrees I don't know how to use. I don't have any career in sight. I don't have any goals right now. I'm just living a day-to-day stagnating existence earning and spending money from a student job pretending to be some sort of law-enforcing character. If I had loved ones right now, I wouldn't even begin to be able to take care of them, let alone if I died. And here we have my friend becoming an officer in the Air Force in a couple days, pulling in a rather large sum of money with a comfortable retirement in sight in 20 years. Another friend is contemplating getting married. The military job will make him financially secure and he and his prospective wife would be well taken care of by whatever base they'll be working around. Who cares if they might be blowing people up? You have to think about the people you love first before you think about some stranger you've never met. All I'm doing is thinking about myself, and even then I'm failing at taking care of my basic psychological needs. Maybe I'm the crazy one. (5 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, June 3rd, 2009
1:38 am	Lofty Summer Goals Books to reread because my understanding of them probably sucked the first time: "Death and the Dervish" by Mesa Selimovic "Catch 22" by Joseph Heller "All Quiet on the Western Front" by Eric Maria Remarque "Great Gatsby" by F. Scott Fitzgerald "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" by Ken Kesey "The Master and Margarita" by Mikhael Bulgakov "Catcher in the Rye" by J.D. Salinger Books to read for the first time: "1984" by George Orwell "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" by Douglas Adams "The Da Vinci Code" by Dan Brown "Grapes of Wrath" by John Steinbeck Any others I should read? Movies to watch: Fargo Raising Arizona One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest A Clockwork Orange The Godfather Chinatown On the Waterfront Pulp Fiction Little Miss Sunishine Places to see: High Sierra a beach Big Sur Mono Lake Antelope Valley (I know, weird) Tennessee (for the UCLA game) (8 Comments |Comment on this)