Bus ride

In order to determine exactly how much I can get for a piece of jewelry I plan on pawning, I take a bus to the mall in Lincoln. The walk to the bus stop is cold and dreary, a stark contrast to how the mall will feel, and I see faces outside of all kinds of people.

As I reach the bus stop, I hear a little girl screaming and crying. I would investigate the matter, but the mother's cursing and telling the girl not to cry as the mother puts the girl's earring in tells me all I need to know. I wonder for a time why the mother is forcing the piercing upon the child, but that too is made somewhat apparent by the fact that the girl had apparently taken the earrings out during school. At some point, the girl starts coughing and the mother warns her not to make herself sick. I laugh at the idea in my head that by coughing, one could somehow contract a disease.

I confirm my bus route and then go to sit down. A little boy is walking along one of the cement sides to a tree plot. The mother who was fighting with her daughter's ears tells Bubba to get himself down from thing. The child is barely three years old, blue-eyed, and svelt, and I wonder to myself what qualities the mother thought the child had that would deem him a Bubba, before I begin to wonder what Bubba might be short for.

There are no unoccupied seats near the front of the bus, so I take a side-facing seat near the back. A girl sits to my right and listens to her iPod as she gazes out the window. I gaze out my window, too, for a time, until an old lady nearer to the front of the bus offers me a cross engraved with the words "God loves you," and asks me to pass a similar cross to the girl behind us. It never hurts to be reminded of why Jesus died.

I get to the mall, and have my jewelry's value estimated. $120 isn't too bad a price, and if I start at a higher price at the pawn shop, I just might be able to get that for it.

As nice as it is to know that I can get some good money for this, it's more interesting to think about the people who ride the bus on a regular basis. In front of me right now is an older man in a fedora. A woman in the seat next to me has a plastic wristwatch clipped to her backpack.

What are their stories, outside of the bus, away from the bus stop? Will I eventually get mugged in my regular use of this on the bus?

Nobody knows but they.

I imagine...

That Marvin the Robot from "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" was so depressed because he was an economics major.

Mini-bio/main creed

I've been accused of not taking life seriously enough from time to time. The irony in this is that I've also been accused of taking life far too seriously. In the end, I guess we can blame my world views, since I try not to look at the global problems as much as I try to look at the domestic problems. In the end, this tends to make my experiences, and what I gain from my experiences, very personal. On occasion, I'll do what I can to spread a message that I find very important, but people might get upset at me for not having something as profound as "Save Darfur" on my tongue. On the other hand, I do hope that people end up taking my messages to heart when they find out what they mean in their own lives.

I know that it's never easy to take somebody's word on personal advice, because for whatever reason we feel that our cases are unique. Maybe it's all of that "You're special because there's only one of you" crap that we got fed in the '80s and '90s, but we as people almost never learn from each others' mistakes. Douglas Adams once said, "Human beings are unique in both their ability to learn from others' mistakes, and in their apparent disinclination to do so."

The point is that no matter how much somebody wishes to be an example from which somebody else can learn, a good number of lessons in life just refuse to go through our heads until we learn them the hard way. I certainly learn a good number of lessons through pain, but I'm not the first, nor will I be the last. Still, it's a shot of benevolent optimism that I might be a role model for somebody out there in the world, that they'll actually learn from my failures before they make the same mistakes themselves. Of course, they would be the person to celebrate, as opposed to me, because they would be the ones to actually learn their lesson.

Things that annoy me:

1: Crocs
2: Spam texts
3: Spam email
4: Chain mail
5: Chain blogs
6: Myspace
7: People who say that Facebook and Myspace are essentially the same
8: Emo bands such as Simple Plan and Fall Out Boy
9: Emo people
10: The emo things that emo people believe will help change the world
(eg: Sharpieing "love" on people's arms)
11: Family Guy
12: Movies that believe that referencing another movie means that
you're spoofing it
13: Movies that spoof things that society has already accepted as
ridiculous
14: People who spell "boy" with an i, "why" without the w or h, "you"
without the y or the o, any word with a number in place of letters,
and "definitely" with an a
15: People who don't use punctuation in their sentences
16: People who don't have a subject and a predicate in their sentences
17: People who neither punctuate nor have a subject and a predicate in
their sentences
18: Will Ferrel
19: People who will deliberately look away from you as you cross paths
with them, as if they're too busy to smile at you
20: People who will endlessly and deliberately lead you on in order to
make you doubt the worth of taking chances, and the worth of yourself
21: Movies with or by that Napoleon Dynamite kid
22: People who don't talk to you when they have a problem with you

Song Number Four

This Thing Called Love

I heard a line
In a children’s rhyme
That I had never heard before.
It was quite absurd,
Because it had a word
That I had never seen in my store.
I went up to my mom,
And told her my problem,
But it had only seemed to get her sore.
She said, “Get out of here, son.
Don’t try to bother me none,
‘Cause I don’t know what it means
anymore.”

(chorus)
Where is this thing called “love”?
Is it up above,
Or in a mother’s glove,
Or is it only for the doves?
Where is this thing called “love?”
‘Cause I’ve been looking around
For an eternity now,
And I still can’t find this thing called “love.”

I took a look
Into a chapter book
To see how it would read,
But lo and behold,
The simple story it told
Had the word that was strange to me.
A boy and a girl
Who went and took on the world
With this strange little mystery.
But I still didn’t know
This strange emotion, and so
I found it all really hard to believe.

(chorus)

I graduated
And then I celebrated
That I could start on my life, of course.
They said, “Make good in your life,
go on and find a wife
And understand that secret force.”
So I met a sweet girl,
And she had beautiful curls
We found a rev’rend who would endorse.
But then I came to find
That how it felt in my mind
Was like a carriage without a horse.

(chorus)

I stumbled toward
A big executive board,
And I made it in right on time.
Said a kid with bright eyes,
“This is the answer, you guys
To leave the competition far behind.”
Said, “We’ll let love be the key
To our triumphant story.”
And all the suits in the room did incline.
But it was then that I knew
That for my whole life through,
True love was never much more than a lie.

STEVE JOBS!!!

A press release was made regarding the state of applications on the iPhone. Five companies and a few freelance programmers have already made some frickin' sweet apps for the platform. Apple has the infrastructure for direct downloads and downloads via iTunes ready to go. That won't stop them from keeping the software from the end user for three months, though.

Anybody else happen to remember the good old days when Apple would say, "Oh yeah, and this technology is already available to consumers nationwide"?

Propagandifts

Propagandifts

Student Gocernment (which already sounds far less fun than StudCo) is having elections today. The three parties are All N, Bright, and Ignite. Setting aside their platforms for the sake of this post, they've essentially resorted to bribery to get people to vote. Here's what I've gotten today:

Bright: an Almond Joy,
Ignite: a Fireball,
All N: a two of diamonds from a deck if cards,
Bright: a water bottle,
Bright: three bubblegums, to apple, one sour cherry,
Bright: a regular bubblegums,
All N: a queen of diamonds.

Elections are pretty crazy here. Crazier are the implications of the two/queen of diamonds cards I received.  You know, if you believe in signs.

Exercise

I'm starting this thing where I try and work out three times a week (it's true. You can check my iCal), but since I don't have actual workout clothes on today I'm just walking around on the elevated track. Everyone here is running clockwise... I wonder if people in the southern hemisphere run counter-clockwise.