Monday, August 28, 2006

Funny joke

A joke from "A Prarie Home Companion" on NPR:

- A woman wants one man to satisfy her every need. A man needs every woman to satisfy his one need.

Hyuk hyuk hyuk. Actually, I definitely got a good laugh out of it when I heard it on the radio.

Sunday, August 27, 2006

Story anyone?

Ok, so I've gotten some amusing responses to my story about the girl on the train. Let me clarify, that it is just a story =P I'm not some stalking, obsessive guy. I've had numerous people tell me it reminds them of that song "You're Beautiful" which I HATE with a passion. It was just something that popped into my head, honest, I swear. Anyways, I'm glad it illicited (sounds like the right word) such a response, I suppose that's what I was going after when I wrote it late one night.

I watched a blind man miss a scaffolding with his stick and walk face first into it the other day. I stopped and helped him out while he recovered and talked to him and then we went our separate ways. Well, a bible-thumper stopped me after seeing this and our conversation went something like this.

- "Jesus?"
- "Huh?"
- "Jesus?" (holds out a flier)
- "Oh, no thanks."
- "What, don't you believe?"
- "No." (stuck at the intersection because the light is red)
- "Cause what you did right there, helping out that guy, that was Jesus."
- "Uhhh.... ok."
- "I mean, what if you stabbed somebody?"
- "Huh? I'm not going to stab anybody"
- "Ugh, just listen. Ok ok, what if somebody were to stab you, would you like that?"
- "Clearly not"
- "Exactly! Jesus wouldn't stab people too." (starting to get in my face with his flier)
- "Alright, alright." (finding no escape, I take his flier to get him to shutup)
- "That's the spirit of Jesus my friend! Thank you, thank you."
(I take his flier without bothering to look at it, finally cross the street, and toss it into the trashcan)

Special huh?

Anyways, more coming tonight in my exciting and special life. =)

Thursday, August 24, 2006

Always hungry...


Here I am, 5' 10" and weighing barely 135 lbs. and I'm always hungry! And I eat too, just last night I had two dinners. At around ten o'clock, Josh and Ben made spaghetti, so I chipped in and made a whole bunch of cheesy garlic bread and then had my second dinner. And oh man was it goood. At the same time, I feel like my pants are sitting even more lose than usual on me, so maybe I need to start eating more. I have to really budget my food allowance well, but I think I'm doing a decent job of it.

So here's the garlic cheesy toast I made yesterday...

- 12 slices day old sourdough bread
- 12 thin pats of butter
- garlic powder
- black pepper
- salt
- red pepper flakes
- shredded cheddar cheese

1. Spread the butter on each piece of bread.
2. Top with garlic powder, pepper, salt, and as much red pepper as you like spiciness
3. Put under broiler in oven for a couple minutes until butter is melted, then cover with cheese
4. Remove from oven when cheese is slightly brown and bubbly. Enjoy! (be warned, its very hot)

Deeeeelish!

Wednesday, August 23, 2006

The girl on the train

The girl on the train

I finish my run for groceries and run down the stairs of the station, hurrying for I can hear the sound of a train and hope that it is approaching and not departing. Alas I am mistaken and will have to wait, but apparently so will the girl who is so engrossed in her book that she has also missed the train. I think the name of the book was “The Overachievers”, and suddenly I was very interested in it because she was also.

She is a pretty girl, but not in that revealing sort of show-lots-of-skin way. In fact, she looked like she has just gotten off work and is wearing a rather professional outfit. Without trying to be creepy and obnoxious, I catch a glance of her here and there as I pace back and forth waiting. She is tall, about my height and average weight. Short, straight, brown hair curling outwards at the tips rests atop her head, which is topped with large sunglasses. Around her neck lays one of those fake but simple pearl necklaces, not the gaudy sort, and yet it contributes greatly to her aura. Her big brown eyes complement her slightly dark skin and her lips are upturned at the corners in an ever so slight smile as she mouths the words of her book silently to herself while reading.

We get on the next train at the same car, and I sit next to her. “How’s your book?” I inquire. She replies with a wry smile showing her perfect white teeth, “Very interesting, do you like to read?” She has a slightly guilty look on her face as if she has just been caught posing, but her intriguing nature still pulls me in. Her voice has a hint of some South American accent, from where I can’t pinpoint. “I love to read, books stir my imagination,” I genuinely respond. From there, we continue with a witty, intelligent conversation and she is not bothered by my intrusion into her personal space for the ride home. For the fifteen minutes until my stop, we are both comfortable and chatty, and as I get off at my station she leaves me with a bewitching smile and her phone number. As the train pulls away with her on it and me left behind at the station, I take a deep breath and can’t help keep a big smile creep across my face. I walk home and my step is lighter than it has been in a while, all because of this alluring stranger I have just become acquainted with.

…and back to reality…

Actually, I didn’t say a thing to her. I didn’t catch a glance of her teeth, I don’t know what her voice sounded like, and I definitely didn’t get her phone number. For all I know, she could have been a total nutcase with really bad breath and a laugh that could get the rust of a car bumper. So the extent of my relationship with her was eight minutes of a train ride we shared and an occasional glance in her direction. It was fun to imagine though.

Monday, August 21, 2006

A reflection

Reflection

I believe that love can make a difference. Yea, I know it sounds real cliché, but I believe it to be true. I would rather live in a world where people’s actions were dominated by feelings of love and compassion rather than what appears to be a world of hate and violence

When I was nineteen, I wanted to get married. Not necessarily right then, but at the time I was dating a wonderful girl who I had been friends with since I was twelve years old. Everything felt so right, it was my first serious relationship, and there was a lot of love there. We had even talked about it between us, late one night standing outside in the street during a cold drizzle holding one another in our arms talking about the future. Together we spoke of the small house, the big yard, the dog (or more than one even), and growing gray and wrinkled together while the breeze shifted the wet pine needles above us. It all seemed so right and we didn’t doubt it at the time.

Then a few months later, thanksgiving came around and she broke up with me. What was it that I had done? Was I not accepting enough of her? Was I not accepting enough of her feelings? Bingo. Apart from my father, I was the only other male in my family; no male cousins, uncles, or grandfathers. Even the family friends I grew up with had, you guessed it, only daughters! Combined with having only sisters and numerous female friends growing up, I thought that surely I understood women and what went through their head. Wow, was I ever a naïve college youth. Will I ever be able to realize women completely and truthfully? I hope so.

So we went our separate ways across the country and moved on with our lives, met and dated other people, and matured and progressed within ourselves. Reflecting now on those days, it would have been a mistake to get married so young with hardly any life experiences under the belt I wore to keep pants on my wiry waist. Dealing with problems within the relationships of my family and still trying to find my calling and my future, a limited metamorphosis was occurring within me and I didn’t even know it was occurring. Yet even now as I write this, I recognize it was for good. In the following years, I changed to become a different person than I was when I graduated high school and am grateful for that and the things I accomplished, as well as being grateful for the failures I experienced for the lessons I learned from them.

What is it then that I ultimately seek when I look for a woman? I look for love and compassion, kindness and respect, a sort of emotional capacity that often times I find I lack myself and hope through a companion can be gained in my life. There is a desire within me to have somebody to be there to tell me both when I’ve done right or wrong, been equitable or unfair, been honest or immoral. Often times it’s very difficult to have self-improvement when one doesn’t have a moral coach outside of the self.

Mostly, what I desire is to be able to have a true form of altruism within myself, a desire to live for somebody else with a slow burning passion. I want the desire to improve myself so that I can make somebody else’s life more clear and beautiful. What could be a greater form of humanity than to dedicate one’s life to somebody else?

(inspired by “This I Believe”)

Sunday, August 20, 2006

Thoughts on War

This afternoon I spent my time watching the performances at the Chicago Air show. It was a fun even with lots of incredible stunts performed ranging from antique World War II fighter planes to the Blue Angels. One thing struck me though and stuck in my mind. At one point, the announcers were saying, nearly boasting, about how the C-5 cost about $400,000 dollars just to refuel. What is the role of the C-5? To transport military material to war zones to use in causing mass destruction. How could $400,000 be better used for the people of this country? I can think of a myriad of ways.

I am a pacifist, and damn proud of it. I believe that war is a terrible thing and should be avoided at all costs and that rarely is there such a thing as a just war. I read in one of Kurt Vonnegut’s books (don’t remember which) that he believed that there has been no just American war since World War II, a war which he himself proudly fought in. Thinking about it further, this is a sentiment that I believe as well. Now this country has betrayed the very foundation of its democratic ideals by starting a preemptive war against a nation and its people that faced no danger to us.

War is a terrible, dirty, destructive event. It destroys lives and tears apart families. It kills young men, women, and children and physically destroys their communities. It poisons the environment beyond repair and leaves behind a scar that can take generations to heal over. And all for what? To show which nation’s men have bigger penises? It appears to me no mystery why all or our guns, bombs, planes, rockets, and missiles are all shaped like penises. How is a soldier shown to be more important? By having more penises on his uniform.

There has never been a “clean” war where civilians weren’t affected. A “precision” bomb may take out its intended target, but why do we need 2000 kg. of explosives to do so? An artillery piece may help keep our soldiers on the ground safe by taking out the enemy from afar, but can we say indiscriminate shelling is an honest, clean way of fighting? I’d like to think that we fight cleaner wars than they did hundreds and thousands of years ago when they used to burn down entire cities and wipe out entire populations, but we’re not really. Cities in Vietnam and Iraq with nearly their entire populations had been decimated and destroyed in our unclear efforts against an unclear enemy.

Chicken hawks control our country and send our young men and women off to die for purposes that are not clear to the very citizens they are supposed to represent. These people have not been in war and seen its traumatic and destructive results, and yet they so easily push for armed conflict around the world in their own interests. Rarely do you find an experienced combat veteran of a prior war (Iraq I, Vietnam, Korea, and WWII) lead its people so enthusiastically to conflict. A warrior is not an offensive or deplorable person to be, but the noblest kind of warrior is one who understands his power and is reluctant to use it. He understands his responsibilities and the results of his actions and therefore strives to use his power to bring peace and understanding between conflicting parties. The easy path for a warrior to take, the one that lacks courage, is to resort to violence as a first solution or to decide ahead of time that violent action will be the ultimate answer to a crisis.

Dwight Eisenhower was a great warrior for our country during World War II and later became president. He said the following:

"I hate war as only a soldier who has lived it can, only as one who has seen its brutality, its stupidity."

and...

"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children."

And...

"All of us have heard this term 'preventative war' since the earliest days of Hitler. I recall that is about the first time I heard it. In this day and time... I don't believe there is such a thing; and, frankly, I wouldn't even listen to anyone seriously that came in and talked about such a thing."

AND...

“We must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.”

Its saddens me to see how clairvoyant he was. Half of our current budget goes towards “Defense” while people starve, lose their jobs, and remain sick without any hope. Is this what our great country has become?

I will say that I have an exception to what I said above, and that is concerning the war in the Balkans. It may have been too late, but by fighting that war as part of an international community, we probably saved thousands of lives in the ethnic cleansing that was already occurring. This should have been done in Rwanda, it should be done in Darfur, and it should be done in any other country where genocide and wholesale slaughter of civilians is happening. Especially as a Jew, I find it troubling when good people stand by and do nothing as thousands upon thousands of people are murdered when their only “transgression” was being born onto this earth.

Friday, August 18, 2006

Wow

Ok, so its been like a month since I last updated my blog. Bad me, oh well. So much to tell...

First, I moved to Chicago and am living in a nice place in a decent neighborhood. I have some cool neighbors and some plain dumbass ones as well. I've explored Chicago quite a bit and its a cool city, I especially love the free concerts in Millenium park, going to be sad when those end. Just last night I went to a South African Jazz concert for over two hours, it was some great music.

I spent about ten days at home in California for personal reasons and to be with my family. That was cool since I hadn't seen them since January, although my mom did come and visit me in Urbana for a couple days before I moved to Chicago. Tula is getting fat! It doesn't help that she's one of the laziest dogs I know and that hardly any of them goes on walks with her. Oh well... I also want to get some sort of small pet. I'm thinking a rodent or snake of some sort. Something with fur that won't have a hard time during the winter months here in Chicago. Reptiles might not fare so well now that I think about it (i.e. snakes, lizards). A hedgehog would be pretty neat.

Last week I was at Camp Quality Illinois. It was a camp for kids who either had cancer or were going through treatment for it (chemo, drugs, surgery, etc.). It was AMAZING. I could go on and on about it so I think I will save that for another post, maybe even next time I update my blog (hmmmmm, now you know you're interested).

By the way, is anybody reading this? =P

In other news, my first roommate moved in and he's cool, although a bit eccentric (in a good way mind you). Its much better than a normal old boring roommate. His name is Josh and he's eighteen years old, just having graduated from high school. He's taking some time off and spending the year doing CityYear.

As I sit here in the library, using the internet which I don't yet have at home, there's a guy accross from me who keeps snarking up the nastiest loogies and spitting them at range into the trashcan that's a good few feet away from him. It's DISGUSTING. Just last week I sat next to a guy at another computer who spent his alloted hour looking at porn. And security didn't do anything about it! I probably should have gone up to them and said something, meh...

Alright folks, that's all I can think of right now.