I can't stand change or chest waxing

Well, but while I do want change despite its anxiety inducing components, I am not interested in chest waxing. I like my chest hair, it keeps me warm. But then again, if the right lady asked really nicely... But until then I think I'm going to keep my chest hair.

But with change, well, once again, I find I've got to change some problems in my life. Like of course, the fact I had another minor breakdown. Let me emphasize the fact that this matter was minor, it was simply one day. However, it did lead to me missing a day of classes, including several critical classes. So there will be an aftermath. But things can change, and will change for I AM RAND!

But it will not be easy. After all, I have a lot of crazy chemical stuff fiddling around in my head. Plus, etc., etc., etc.

Enough about that

Lets Dance!

Doo doo doo dee doo dee doo bop
Doo dee dee doo dee doo bop
Bop Bop Bop dee doo dee doo doo bop

(Not really dancing, actually sitting down, but dancing in spirit, dancing in spirit).

So anyways, take it to your head, take it to your heart and remember Rand rocks. Goodnight Folks!

In the Garden of Eden, baby

In the Garden of Eden, I'm sure I would post a session every day, in fact, I'd probably post multiple sessions a day, but... this ain't the Garden of Eden baby! And I don't have my own house, and I go home on the weekend, and therefore I have to deal with too many people, too few computers, and recently insane busy-ness on the weekends (due to the whole, now I'm picking up work for the Princeton Review and it's mostly on the weekends (I'm taking care of business and working overtime, WORK OUT!!!!! Doo doo diddi doo doo, doo doo doo doo dooo)).

Overall, just to summarize, really busy, screw you. But I do intend to try to do some better time management, what has bothered me a good deal more than oop (I like it better without the s) missed 2 days worth of sessions, is the fact that I missed going to Church on Sunday. It's been probably 5-7 months since I last missed Church, at least so as that I remember. Church has always been very important to me, so this was pretty disturbing for me. So I need to ask myself, is this a sign that my life has gotten so busy that it is pushing God out of my life, or is it just a mistake made one day that I will studiously avoid from now on? (The latter).

Ultimately, the incident reminded me of why I do everything I do even when it doesn't seem to have any purpose. I am in service of God.

In the Garden of Eden, baby

In the Garden of Eden, I'm sure I would post a session every day, in fact, I'd probably post multiple sessions a day, but... this ain't the Garden of Eden baby! And I don't have my own house, and I go home on the weekend, and therefore I have to deal with too many people, too few computers, and recently insane busy-ness on the weekends (due to the whole, now I'm picking up work for the Princeton Review and it's mostly on the weekends (I'm taking care of business and working overtime, WORK OUT!!!!! Doo doo diddi doo doo, doo doo doo doo dooo)).

Overall, just to summarize, really busy, screw you. But I do intend to try to do some better time management, what has bothered me a good deal more than oop (I like it better without the s) missed 2 days worth of sessions, is the fact that I missed going to Church on Sunday. It's been probably 5-7 months since I last missed Church, at least so as that I remember. Church has always been very important to me, so this was pretty disturbing for me. So I need to ask myself, is this a sign that my life has gotten so busy that it is pushing God out of my life, or is it just a mistake made one day that I will studiously avoid from now on? (The latter).

Ultimately, the incident reminded me of why I do everything I do even when it doesn't seem to have any purpose. I am in service of God.

Boatier or Quotier?

It's late and I've just been standing on my feet watching a Ghostface Killa and a Witchdoctor (not in that order, in another one, guess which one) rap it all up. And yet I'm not ditching you. Yes you're bums, but you're my bums, you lovable bummy mcbums. But I am feeling lazy, or perhaps just awesome. So I'm going to unleash on you something I've been planning for a while: More quotes. In fact, quotes that aren't even on my Facebook page (by the way if you invite me as a friend on Facebook (I'm simply a man of a relatively normal name there) and mention this webpost, I will definitely accept you as a friend, and then nothing will happen, unless you know you follow up with more detailed invitation to a movie or something, etc.), because Facebook says I can't fill my pages up with tons upon tons of quotes. But hey, I'm Rand, so here I'm just going to have to Rand it all up.

"Have mojo, will travel." - Rand

"Those who dance in darkness..." - Rand

"Well there's nothing to lose
And there's nothing to prove
I'll be dancing with myself." - Dancing by Myself, Billy Idol

' "It ended up alright in the end right?"

"In the end? It never ends." ' - Ozymandias and Doctor Manhattan, Watchmen

"Everybody hurts... sometimes." - Everybody Hurts, R.E.M.

"Look I'm not saying I said this, but it's attributed to me, and I did the attributing, so yeah basically I'm saying I said this." - Rand

' "I put out the fires."

"You made them worse."

"Worse or better?" ' - Invader Zim and the Almighty Tallest, Invader Zim

"Everyone has the obligation to ponder well his own specific traits of character. He must also regulate them adequately and not wonder whether someone else's traits might suit him better. The more definitely his own a man's character is, the better it fits him." - Cicero

"Either you're with us or you're against us, or you're in a third party, or you know there could be a forth party, well, you'd have to be someplace, sometime, somewhere." - Rand

"Everyone lies." - Gregory House, House M.D.

"Oh no! I broke history!" - Hiro Nakamura, Heroes.

"What else can I say? Everyone is gay." - All Apologies, Nirvana

"Don't ever become a pessimist... a pessimist is correct oftener than an optimist, but an optimist has more fun, and neither can stop the march of events." - Robert A. Heinlein

"Don't ever tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody." - The Catcher in the Rye, J.D. Salinger

"Gun control? We need bullet control! I think every bullet should cost 5,000 dollars. Because if a bullet cost five thousand dollar, we wouldn't have any innocent bystanders." - Chris Rock

"Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light." - Do not go gentle into that good night, Dylan Thomas

"I may be drunk, Miss, but in the morning I will be sober and you will still be ugly." - Winston Churchill

"I object to violence because when it appears to do good, the good is only temporary; the evil it does is permanent." - Mahatma Gandhi

"A good constitution is infinitely better than the best despot." - Thomas B. Macaulay

So that's the quotes, you judge whether they are boatier or quotier.

Anyways, take it to your head, take it to your heart, and remember Rand rocks. Goodnight Folks!

We love big dreams, right? or my review of the Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya

I'm Rand the great and glorious, so come on, of course I love big dreams! But I got to say I love the Haruhi Suzumiya's SOS Brigade as well. Even if they don't match the biggest dreams of all.

Kyon is an ordinary high schooler who has just overcome his middle school obsession with the supernatural. Unfortunately he happens to be placed in the same class as Haruhi, who's obsession is still alive and well to the point of her scorning all activities outside the supernatural. Haruhi also unfortunately sits behind Kyon and Kyon has the unfortunate habit of talking to her. This eventually leads him to attempting to talk Haruhi out of her fixation in one of the stupidest let's be normal speeches I've ever heard. His main point is the majority of people learn to be satisfied in the world, and only a small minority stay dissatisfied and they change the world. Of course this backfires and prompts her to change her world by forming a club to seek out aliens, time-travelers and esper (ESP-ers). Of course, she makes Kyon her first member.

She steals the room of the Literary club as well as its sole member. She "voluntarily arrests" a beautiful second year student, because all good supernatural stories have some sex appeal. And she invites in a mysterious transfer student. Of course, these are in order, an alien, a time-traveler and an esper. If this all seems a bit too convenient, well, that's because Haruhi's real power is that she can alter reality to suit her whims. As well as to suit sometimes her terrible melancholy.

I can sympathize with Haruhi, I always wanted to start a club to find the extraordinary, I came close to it in high school with John Corp (a name that sounds awfully close to Spreading Excitement All Over the World with the Haruhi Suzumiya Brigade). And I was also infected by that most terrible of melancholies, the melancholy of having extraordinary desires in an ordinary world.

Perhaps that's why I can relate to Haruhi, even if she is sometimes a cruel character (an amazon reviewer was quite disturbed by this). But her cruelty makes sense in a way, it does not stem from a cruel personality, even if she treats people poorly at times she doesn't actually purposefully mean any harm, but rather it comes from an infinite sense of energy and purpose (even if that purpose is perpetually scatterbrained (a charming feature, although sometimes it goes a bit too far and creates some akward transitions in the middle of episodes). And the energy is in the end infectious. It calls to the audience and it's hard not to respond. It also serves to bend the fabric of the show, creating a bizarre episode order (although the general idea, which is to spit up the central arc of exposition over the entire season without using the traditional bit by bit along side event of the week method is pretty ingenious). The extremeness of the characters personalities also seem to fit with this. In the end the entire series projects an intense excitement, as well as the titular melancholy.

In its quieter moments, the show conveys the desperate longing for something extraordinary in the ordinary world. This too is conveyed in the fabric of the show, as the bursts of intense supernatural activities are interspliced with scenes of the characters facing intense boredom (although the viewer is rarely shown this long enough to actually provoke boredom in himself). The fact that Haruhi is always cheated out of the real strangeness of her life by the determined efforts of those around her, adds to a certain pity for her, as her life is defined by that tension between being surrounded by the mundane and wishing passionately for the supernatural. The central arc approaches this tension with the necessary seriousness, but without ever losing its sense of humor. That made me however, sympathize with Haruhi even more, and it almost made me wish that she (unconsciously) destroyed the world to get a taste of her extraordinary.

I can't say I haven't had similar desires, a bit not that extreme. A wish for something disastrous to happen so that I might have a chance to become a hero. A wish for the entire world to be revealed as a fraud. A wish that I could stumble through the looking glass into a world of magic and never look back. I think we all feel that way sometimes, although it is usually manifested in simply a desire to run away to some different place where something so strange that it's almost supernatural might happen. But in the end we rarely run away, because there are too many people we care about, and too many people they care about, and too little solid out there to be worth risking all those relationships. And in the end, we never really want to destroy the world, because all the people we love are here.

At times it reaches slow spots, at times it jumps from topic to topic too fast even for an avid viewer, at times it is too bizarre even for me (the elaboration of the identities of the aliens, time-travelers, and ESP-ers are completely and utterly insane and make my head hurt), but there is so much energy to this anime, so much sincere effort, and characters that while at times cruel, are immensely charming in their exaggerated insanity. And it conveys so much love for supernatural mysteries that seem just right around the corner that it's hard not to become infected by it. And then it's hard not to be struck by the lack of supernatural mysteries, and then it's easy to relate to the melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya.

All told, this anime gets an 8/10. So far at least, I hear they're coming out with a new season, which it's hard to imagine will be anything other than awesome.

So take it to your head, take it to your heart and remember Rand rocks. Goodnight Folks!

Come on, Let's Dance! Come on, Let's Dance! Baby!

I'd rather not start on a bad note because even if I am feeling rather crappy today, and let me be clear that I am feeling rather crappy today, it's better not to wallow in it, but rather to defy it, which makes me wonder why I decided to make clear that I was feeling crappy today, oh t'well.

Anyhow, on that note, let me relate this, I was originally going to title this session is Fucking A' (note that I'm using Fucking as an adjective, not as a verb, or as a gerund (as in an A' that is doing some fuking), and while A' here does refer to ass, it is ass in a figurative sense, and not to an a person in particular but to a general situation). This refers to my general frustration with life at the moment. But then, something must be considered. Is my frustration something that simply can be ignored or does it have a cause that must be dealt with.

Classically in TV and literature for that matter, if someone felt often a frustration and uneasiness with life they'd conclude that something was missing in their life. But I can't say that's the case for me, at least necessarily. Dissatisfaction is a natural part of depression and it craves ultimately self-destruction. And that's something I can't give it. And if these impulses exist within me, and I refuse them, well, then there will always be that restlessness within me. And I will have to live with it. And sometimes, when events or circumstances trigger it, or perhaps simply when my cycle of highs and lows hits a low, the feelings will intensify. Medication might help these problems, therapy might help, but barring a miracle (always a possibility), I find it unlikely that these feelings will go away. Thus if I conclude something is missing every time I feel dissatisfied, I will be endlessly searching for that something, and while I am searching, all my life will pass me by, and it will be a pass by full of dissatisfaction from unfulfilled searching for that matter.

I suppose this isn't necessarily something confined to the depressed or mentally ill. Dennis Leary once said something along the lines that happiness isn't a default state, it's just small moments. And I have heard similar sentiments expressed in songs. And yet, I have met people who seem naturally happy. I suppose it's just a degree of natural dissatisfaction, whether its a matter of biology (perhaps a stand-alone issue or related to other matters as in my case) or a matter of experience, is within the normal variation of people even without disorders. As is natural happiness. Some of us have an easier load, and some have a harder one, I try not to rank mine too precisely, but I'd say it's harder than most, at least most in this country, but easier than many.

On the other hand, even if it is painful and frustrating, a natural dissatisfaction does have its advantages. It prevents becoming complacent and lazy, it forces people forward, even if it sometimes leaves them forever running forward without a reason without a stop. I don't mind moving forward, but I'd like a reason, and I'd like a stop sometimes. So things must be managed.

Of course, it could be the dissatisfaction is perfectly legitimate and has roots in a real emotional issue that I have been avoiding. It's hard to tell. With false signals running through the head, it's hard to grip on the true warnings. But I am awesome and I am Rand so it's all good in the 'hood.

So anyways, take it to your head, take it to your heart, and remember Rand rocks. Goodnight Folks!

More, more, more (but that song's not here)

Ah, well, the music's a callin' and I'm a comin', also I'm chronically short on time, and while by no means short on ideas I am comically only able to access those ideas when I don't feel like writing them down. Or maybe scrap all that, and stick with Music=Awesome, Rand=Awesome, therefore Rand=Music.

1. Absolutely (Story of a Girl) by Nine Days - From the album The Madding Crowd - Although I'm not fond of that album name, I absolutely love this song (you get it, absolutely love, eh, never mind). I suppose it has something to do with the fact that guys love tragic girls, they bring out protection instincts, admiration instincts, sympathy instincts, etc. + it ends with her smiling, and a girl's smile always has a special charm for a heart of a guy.

Lyrics

Nine Day's video - An awesome video, but very odd if you think about it. I suppose it speaks to skill of the director to make the oddness of the video fit the song. Until the end, we may find the images strange, but they all tell the story of a girl.

Absolutely (A Story of a Girl) AMV - anime - His and Her Circumstances - Now, first of all, the fact that I like this anime does suggest that I am actually a girl, but no I'm not, I'm just a guy who likes shojo. But beyond that, what's nice about this AMV is how it takes just the weirdness and problems of the girl star of His and Her Circumstances and make it fit the song even though her story, even as depicted in the video doesn't objectively match the story of the song, still the video makes it feel like they match.

2. Bad Touch by The Bloodhound Gang - From the album Hooray for Boobies - Now I believe sex belongs in marriage and I believe this song, while not explicit on the matter, believes everything but that, still it rocks immensely.

Lyrics

The Bloodhound Gang's video - This video makes no sense on so many levels, for so many reasons.

Bad Touch AMV - anime - FLCL - Given that the title of this anime means "Grab the Boobies," it seems like a good fit. And the video does not disappoint since it keeps everything moving and moving insanely, with a dark undertone which fits perfectly with the song, after all it is a Bad Touch.

3. Clint Eastwood by Gorillaz - From the album Gorillaz - Are you questioning the awesomeness of this song? ARE YOU questioning the awesomeness of THIS SONG? For shame, for shame.

Lyrics - This is one of those great songs for rapping it yourself, again and again, till you have managed the lyrics to the extent that it has become a federal offense.

The Gorillaz music video - This was my first exposure to Gorillaz, and it taught me to love the band and always fear zombie ape attacks.

Clint Eastwood AMV - anime - Cowboy Bebop - It's hard to go wrong with a Cowboy Bebop AMV, although it is possible. But this nicely matches the soft parts of this song with some nice fight scenes of Spike, which work especially well, given the water-based fighting tactics of Spike (read a little about Bruce Lee to see what I mean), while matching the aggressive rapping with Ed, who's as funkier than any ghost could possibly be.

4. Meet Virginia by Train - From the album Train - I have never been fond of the use of a band's name as an album title, but let that not detract from this song. It's beauty is like the beauty it describes, a little bit off, a little bit confusing, a little bit less than it could be at times, but in the end, simply wonderful.

Lyrics

Train's video - a nice soft-moving, self-explanatory video, nothing wrong with that.

Meet Virginia AMV - anime - The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya - There are a couple missteps to this video, like starting out with the girl showing her bra in a video talking about an unconventional beauty (although that could be said to be unconventional, and the unconventionalness of the girl is established with most of the video). But this video is amazingly edited. It represents in some ways a different level of technical skill than is usually seen in AMVs, that said, technical skill cannot replace skillful matching of video and music (although it can enhance it), and fortunately this AMV does just that. It does it in fact well enough that I decided to check out the anime (I hadn't seen it before, but from the episodes I've seen it's pretty cool, and hilariously funny, Haruhi's got gumption, as another gumption-haver, how can I not love her?).

5. Closing Time by Semisonic - From the album Feeling Strangely Fine - The reason for picking this song to end with is not strange, because as this sentence itself suggests I am immensely corny. But the reason for using this song instead of not using it is a matter of quality, and of the resigned (or perhaps satisfied) longing of the song.

Lyrics

Semisonic's video - See, I told you! Longing.

Closing Time AMV - anime - Love Hina - What does this AMV have to do with closing time? Well, I suppose, it's you know end of the day, and there's that one scene, and... Well, it doesn't have to have anything to do with closing time, in fact given that closing time is only the song's literal meaning and just using that would be lame, it's good it doesn't have anything to do with closing time. Instead, it's about longing, the feeling of the video is matching the feeling of the song, and that's how it's supposed to be.

So gather up your jackets, move into the exits, I hope you have found a friend. You don't have to go home but you can't stay here. Actually you can, and since you're probably reading this from home, your trip home isn't going to take you very long, but anywho... Just remember, a little lyrical longing ain't a bad thing, just don't let it swallow you whole.

So anyways, take it to your head, take it to your heart, and remember Rand rocks. Goodnight Folks!