As yet another thing that I have done that sounds impressive and yet is not, I was invited to judge Review Writing and Computer-aided Adveristing Design at the annual Journalism Education Association Write-Off. While I wanted to tell people about this, to assuage some of the anxiety of my underqualificaton, every time I would try to casually bring it up, I felt like I was bragging.

I wasn’t. I was just terrified to do it. Sure, it is only high school kids competing. Yeah, I have decent copy editing skills and a sense of what it takes to make good advertising and theater review. But, at every moment I felt like I was just one slip away from being exposed as a fraud.

My high school journalism teachers and mentors, the Sandys, did an admirable job building me up to myself, but their friendly inflated opinions of me only carried me so far.
(more…)

Caltrop:
Time to cut all my ties
Time to shed light on the lies
Time to leave this town behind

Freedom; it’s not freedom
Shouldn’t freedom feel more liberating?
Principles never make for happy days
and it it pride or is it justice
or just stupidity?

Am I weak-willed or a tyrant?

To not be stepped on, I have become a caltrop;
Small and hard and sharp everywhere.
But a caltrop can only keep company
with other caltrops.
And they never have much to say, living all in self,
keeping everyone else at bay.

—

Journal:
So where do I begin? It’s difficult to start and even more so to know where to start. After all, when you can’t see the end of something, how can you tell when it really began?

I suppose I’ll first expunge the contents of my mind at present. You see, much of my brain is occupied with tasks, vast lists of things still left to accomplish before I can relax. In reality, the list continues to grow in proportion to what is completed, so there is never really an acceptable time to relax.

I am left feeling like every free moment spent on something enjoyable is stolen from my responsibilites, and while that can often increase the thrill, my adult mind continues to peek its head into my fun and remind me that there is still much to do.

Occasionally, I gain perspective and realize the insignificance (bordering on futility) of my daily work. It is ethereal, working in marketing; sharply so when working on the web. And to have only the hobby of video games to relieve the mindless grind – a hobby which often itself is a mindless grind – only reminds me of my desire to create something of value, if not worth.

There is, of course, the opposite state of things where I am bored to actually seeking out the grind, rather than forcing that boredom to run crashing through the barriers of my writer’s block. But I find myself inspired only during times of war; not literal bloodshed, but those lengths of life where the spirit is wearied from its constant struggle against banality and greed and mediocrity.

I have no love for capitalism. A man’s work should reflect the man, not the general dreariness of the station at which he is trapped. I do not express myself for money, though I long for the time when I have no need of it and can concentrate on leaving my mark.

I know there is some hubris in that statement. I am not contented with small feats. I want to affect the multitude and die famous, or soon-to-be-famous. Revered. Studied. Honored.

It is no easy goal in this society. I haven’t the genetic favor that others have. While I am reasonably attractive, I am not likely to earn my place as an actor through my looks. Indeed, my baldness will likely pigeonhole me or worse, keep me from such work altogether.

This saddens me, that I should be so discriminated against. Not the worst sort of prejudice, certainly, but still prejudice. Could Macbeth not be bald? Or Neo?

* – I wrote these both under fairly extreme stress a few weeks ago.

You scored as Mermaid.

Mermaid: Mermaids are also known as Sirens. These creatures were beautiful women who tricked sailors into becoming completely entranced by their haunting voices and found death soon after. Not all stories of Mermaids are about gentle loving sea people. They are mystical, magical, and extremely dangerous. They have a way about them that brings anyone they are around to seem enchanted. They are very mysterious creatures and to meet one… Would mean certain Death. Let the song of the Sea fill your soul, for you are a Mermaid.

What Mythological Creature are you?

This is a conversation from Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, one I’d like to have with some of my clients. I have no will to create, only to spew forth pre-manufactured genius from my Xerox machine of a brain.

Nick the Greek: What else does it come with?

Tom: It comes with a gold-plated Rolls Royce, as long as you pay for it.

Nick the Greek: I thought it included the amp.

Tom: It doesn’t include the amp. It doesn’t include the speakers. And it’s not supposed to include me getting the hump with your questions. You want it, Nick, you buy it.

Nick the Greek: Dunno. Seems expensive.

Tom: Seems? Well, this seems to be a waste of my time. That, my friend, is 900 nicker in any store you’re lucky enough to find one in. And you’re haggling over 200 pound? What school of finance did you come from Nick? “It’s a deal, it’s a steal, it’s Sale of the fucking Century!” In fact, fuck it Nick. I think I’ll keep it!

Nick the Greek: Alright alright, keep your Alans on!

[Peels off notes from his wad]

Nick the Greek: Here’s a ton.

Tom, Eddie: Jesus Christ!

Eddie: You could choke a dozen donkeys on that! And you’re haggling over one hundred pound? What do you do when you’re not buying stereos Nick? Finance revolutions?

Nick the Greek: 100 pound is still 100 pound.

Tom: Not when the price is 200 pound it’s not. And certainly not when you’ve got Liberia’s deficit in your skyrocket. Tighter than a duck’s butt you are. Now, let me feel the fibre of your fabric.

(A vignette in media quotations.)

Let me e’splain… No. There is too much. Let me sum up:¹

My life happens to, on occasion, suck beyond the telling of it.² Now that’s a hard motherfucking fact of life.³

No, I’m pretty fucking far from “OK.”³ But when you can’t run anymore, you crawl. When you can’t do that, you find someone to carry you.⁴ You gotta have your true friends by your side.⁵

But no one seemed to understand. In his heart he knew the artist must be true, but the legend of the rent was way past due.⁶ And I need just a little more silence, and I just need a little more time, the courage to pull away. There will be hell to pay.⁷

But then, if we never _take_ time, how can we ever have time?⁸

(answers here)
(more…)

At first, the young soldier is conversing with the captain of the large starship about what sort of things change a man, how witnessing horrible things can change your perspective, your life, your morality, etc.

The ship is attacked and the captain and the young soldier deploy two fighters to intercept whatever hit them. After a brief battle, the only survivors are the two fighter ships and a strange automobile-like starship which attempts to escape.

The young soldier, emboldened by his victory so far, chases after the car and blows out the back “windshield.” A strange creature, like a leopard-spotted manta ray chimera with a face similar to the standard alien (large, dark almond eyes, no mouth) flies out into the vacuum, apparently unaffected, and soars over the young soldier’s ship, completely obscuring his vision for a moment.

The soldier maneuvers the ship to face the thing which is now behind him. It swirls until it becomes a hypnotic morass in front of a colorful void, a wormhole seemingly. For a moment the creature hovering in front of the wormhole resembles Michelangelo’s painting on the Sistine Chapel, as seen from the perspective of Adam in the painting, God’s hand reaching out to him.

The ship is pulled into the wormhole, where the soldier now stands — unprotected by ship or suit — in the vacuum, witnessing the galaxies around him as spiraling circles of flame, spinning in their orbits at an incredible rate. The true infintiessimal nature of space is overwhelming and his mind reels. He flinches, unable to tolerate the obscene size of it all. And he seems to be watching it all coalesce in extreme fast-forward, which only makes it more boggling.

He passes out. And wakes on a planet where there are people with their eyes torn from their sockets. He has not been driven mad enough to do the same so he sees their world in ways they cannot. They are peaceful, but ignorant of the problems around them do to their blindness. But he cannot be their savior. He has seen much of what they have seen and cannot forget, cannot blind himself to it.

He eventually wakes up on the ship and it was all a dream. My subconscious really needs to work on those endings.

Sorry for those of you who had to set your cookie to get in lately. I’m playing CYA with the number of high school students who might get here accidentally while trying to find the info for the fencing program. You’d think they’d teach subdomains and directories in high school, but I guess not. If you have issues, just comment and I’ll see what I can do to help you out.

More likely that you simply won’t come in anymore, but hey! at least I tried.

I updated the site for the fencing program that I direct at my high school alma mater. It still may be a little buggy, as it’s my first completed PHP/MySQL project that I coded from scratch. Also, a script resizes your window, which I normally would never do.

Still, feedback much appreciated, particularly in the browser discrepancy area.

Perhaps this has been obvious to everyone except me for the longest time, but after reading a list over at McSweeney’s I had a revelation. Although I’ve never much cared for the original Star Trek series — or any Trek for that matter — I was always aware of its barely clothed subtext regarding racial harmony and peace among the people of Earth.

Something that never clicked in my mind though was the purpose of the Klingons. Now, suddenly, I get it. The Klingons are animalistic and brutal-seeming in their glorification of battle, to the exclusion of most other personality traits. Duh, Chris. They are the id, the bestial nature of humanity’s war-like tendencies personified in a race against whom we constantly struggle. We must fight against our own ferocious natures to progress “where no man has gone before.”

And all this time I thought they were humanoid to save on costuming. I don’t watch enough of any Trek show to see similar man-vs.-himself struggles in the canon, though I do see a sort of opposite struggle going on in the Vulcan attitude toward logic.

I won’t mentally disagree next time I hear someone say that Gene Roddenberry was a genius.

I’ve been known to correct people’s grammar and spelling, particularly in typing. I correct my own when necessary (and sometimes when not) and blush at my mistakes. In the event that someone takes offense at my speaking up and argues that it is irrelevant because I (eventually) understood them, I get quite flustered.

You see, good communication to me is not irrelevant. Not ever. If language was misused in a conversation, but I immediately understood the intent, then the foul is on me when I chide the mistake. With the advent of email, IM, IRC, and in-game channels, however, it is all the more imperative that proper grammar, spelling, and usage prevail. Without inflection and the further context of facial expression, miscommunication is bound to occur. Thus, special care should be taken to express oneself without ambiguity.

Yet, the internet — to use a comprehensive, if generalized, term — is riddled with inaccurate statements and arguments made all the weaker by the issuer’s poor command of the language. Examples are everywhere, yet difficult to cite. It goes beyond the simple misplacement of punctuation or the dangling participle. It has evolved into a language of its own, perhaps for the worse. Try to explain to an anonymous soul on a forum the “cry-wolf” implications of an acronym like LOL and see how long it is before the argument degenerates into nothing resembling civil discourse.

Granted, there are times in friendly internet communication that I intentionally put on the airs of an English major; but, even when I politely point out the correction and a concise reasoning for its significance I am often met with resistance to the point of hostility.

I have chosen as my cause the reclamation of accurate communication. To me, it is no less worthy a cause than any political, personal or philosophical ideal. After all, could any one of us claim that they have never had a minor issue turn into a dilemma simply due to poor communication? I could not.