because Dark Night was so amazing...

I'm only mildly pissed off that I don't have a free zune in my hands.

So I'm interning at Microsoft this summer, and they were having this summer intern celebration at the zoo, to make up for the fact that we can't throw a party at Bill Gates' house this year. I received the invitation earlier this week, but I didn't RSVP because I was covered in Poison Sumac and I was pretty sure I wouldn't be up to doing anything on Friday night. So only after the RSVP date do people start spreading rumors about how it's actually a ZOOn celebration, and they're giving out free zunes to all the interns at the event.

So I went back through my email, found the event, and accepted the invitation, even though it said that if I don't RSVP by the designated date (earlier this week), I will be turned away from the event. Long story short, my brother invited me to go see Dark Night, and I decided that I didn't want to walk all the way to the buses just to be turned away, and I really wanted to see Dark Night anyway.

So I did...

And it was amazing...

And now both of my roommates have free zunes...

But I got to see Dark Night first...

So I think I might win...

Maybe I can still get a zune for free somehow.

it must have been the 60 second cold shower

It was really the perfect way to start off an awesome day.

I'm not going to lie. The last couple of days have been really tough. The physical stress that comes with having the worst case of Poison Sumac (it's like poison oak) I've ever had in my life (and I've had it bad before), combined with the emotional strain of being 1000 miles away from most of my friends and family, has made it pretty hard to actually get stuff done at work. Under this kind of stress, I find it pretty easy to acquire a sort of defeatist attitude. But today, it was different.

It was extra cold this morning, and the shower had to be cold because a hot shower would irritate severe rashes that are covering large portions of my body. It was hard enough to get in, and it was definitely hard to stay in long enough for me to get clean, but it was shockingly also hard to turn the water off and get out. Usually, it's understandable that in a warm shower, getting out means getting colder, but today I discovered that it works the same even with cold showers. There must be some strange property of physics, kinda like the wind chill factor except when there's no wind but you're sopping wet and fresh out of the water, like the sop-chill-factor or something. Anyway, by the time I was dried off and back in my clothes, I had come to the conclusion that nothing in the rest of my day could possibly be any harder than what I had already done.

Some days are just like that. There's this feeling that any challenge that comes at you is insignificant, like all your challenges are little goblins, but you have this huge broadsword strapped onto your back and there's nothing that you can't take down. Sometimes I feel like I could just reach back there and pull it out and start hacking away, not at living people or things, of course, but metaphorically at my challenges.

That's what today felt like.

jokes of this kind are not ok

I just read a news article at ABC News about Presidential Candidate John McCain making incredibly inappropriate jokes about the Middle East. The only thing that infuriated me more than his comments was the results of a poll on Aim News in which more than half of the viewers didn't think the joke was inappropriate at all.

I want to make it very clear that I am not a Democrat and I have nothing against Republicans. I happen to be fairly conservative myself. I'm just a guy who wants to live in a world of peace where our political leaders don't sing "bomb-bomb-Iran" to the the tune of Barbra Anne, sending the totally wrong message to a country we already don't see completely eye-to-eye with. We're not at war with them right now, and we have no need to make enemies of potential friends.

I don't think people in America understand the importance of good foreign relations. We think we can say whatever we want about whomever we want because we have freedom of speech, but that doesn't nullify the repercussions of our actions. Too many Americans think that the rest of the world isn't important, that we don't need them because we're "independent". Where the hell did we get that idea, when we import so much more than we export and we consume nearly a quarter of the Planet's goods? This topic brings me back to 10th grade history class (in 2003, not long after the September 11 attacks), when during a discussion about 9/11, a student in my class seriously asked, "Why don't we just nuke Iraq?" Are you kidding me? Not only did Iraq have absolutely nothing to do with the 9/11 attacks, but our country isn't wasn't even claiming to be at war with the people of Iraq but rather with the terrorists within the nation.

Seriously, it's times like these when I can't honestly say I'm proud to be an American.

masochistic alarm clock tactics

So, it having been the Fourth of July earlier today (or yesterday if you want to be picky), I was planning on writing about the movie I have all planned out in my head that I would definitely make in the future if my life were taking a different course, but I had this conversation today at a barbecue about alarm clocks that really got me thinking. We were all talking about what we do to get up in the morning, all the little alarm clock tactics, like placing them on the other side of the room so you have to run across the room to turn them off, perhaps combined with setting it as radio on the fuzziest channel at the highest volume so that you literally shoot out of your bed when the alarm goes off. For whatever reason, when my friend Tom phrased his sentence, "to help me wake up" something triggered in my head and I thought this thought: here we are, all talking about these somewhat painful things we subject ourselves to voluntarily, passing it off as "helping ourselves" in some obscure way. I know, I realize it's important to wake up and stuff, but if you'll follow me on my tangent for a moment, it seems like we (at least I) very willingly go to extra unnecessary (and notedly painful) measures voluntarily and call it good. Is that just some strange form of masochism in some way? After thinking about my "radio static" technique, it does seem to share a lot of qualities with good old-fashioned masochism. It does have that quality of "it's painful but I like it" or "it's bad, but it's actually really good in some way," in very much the same way that affinity for spicy foods (you know, the really spicy ones that hurt) works. This whole line of reasoning just brought me to wonder how many other painful things I voluntarily submit myself to in the name of its possibly unreasonably ascribed goodness, and go so far as to be blinded from its actual painfulness. If hot sauce and shocking static radio count, I'm sure there's others.

Then again, maybe I'm just thinking too hard and trying to find something profound in something that isn't profound.

On that note, I have observed about myself that I really really like profound ideas, so much that I'm biased towards wanting to find profound ideas as often as possible. This most likely causes me to consider many things profound that are, in fact, very ordinary. Ironically I find the realization of this fact quite profound.

I'm sleepy!

This guy just happened.

I like him