Today

The dining halls are open now, and so I ate with a guy on my floor and his female friends. I'm reminded of my modestly awesome people skills at breakfast when I am able to get along with all of them fairly easily. Corey, Devin, Mindy, and Megan all seem like good people, and I've remembered all of their names, so I'm likely to be in the clear with them, friendwise. Mindy especially reminds me of somebody I know from Doane, if only because I talked to her while she had half a voice.

Anyway, I'm sitting in my first, umm, building as I write this. Unfortunately, the only wireless points within range won't accept my iPod and so I can't post this right now. Class starts in roughly twenty minutes, followed promptly (and efficiently) by German, which is pretty close to the student union, two blocks down. I made the walk from the outside of this building to the outside of that building in seven and a half minutes, but I don't know exactly where to find the all-important classROOM. In any case, this is all very exciting for me.

But I still need to find a way to my appointment at 1:00 today...

Which was a bust. I had to call and cancel because there was no way I would make the bus (which would have only taken me within a mile). Then I went ahead and made sure my current class was where I thought it was, based on events which I partially vlogged, and am currently sitting in the lab during break, which is now over.

So my classes don't seem too bad overall, but I still have two new ones to go to on Tuesday. So far, German is the only class that scares me, which is good, because I feel like there's enough for me to be scared about. My room is ice cold... hypothermia.

Tomorrow (written last night)

I've been moved in for a day now, and I find myself thinking about two things more than anything else:

1) the friends I left behind at Doane, and

2) the crippling loneliness I've felt ever since September of 2006.

The first, obviously, is the standard separation anxiety that everyone faces when they're in an unfamiliar place. Still, I did write "I miss you" on well over two dozen Facebook walls tonight. I can only imagine what my friends are doing over interterm. Likely drinking (except for Benjamin, of course), playing copious amounts of Smash Brothers, and generally having an awesome time. I get the insatiable urge to buy a car thinking about them. Sure, there are guys here who play Melee, but they use items. Enough said.

Classes are starting soon, though, and I'm hoping that that'll make it easier to meet some new people and make friends with them, granted they appreciate my style of humor... If somebody only ever acts socially inept around people, does that mean that he's effectively socially inept?

As for the loneliness, I continue to reflect on the whole matter, and, well... will I ever love again?

Only God knows what tomorrow brings, but I wish he'd give me a hint.

Oh. Right.

The appointment on Friday saw me hospitalized for jaundice. I got better on Tuesday. Life goes on.

Offline, mobile, awesome.

The apps that I added from the iPhone have a lot of interoperability with the apps that were on my iPod originally. Maps can interface with my contacts list to give me (fancy this) a map of the surrounding area, and I can get directions to or from that address... Maps rock.

Mail also works closely with my contacts list: if I have an email address, it automatically recognizes that and I can just mail to somebody's name, as opposed to their web address.

URLs in either Mail or Maps will open in Safari, unless they're Youtube URLs, in which case they open in the special Youtube app. Like witchcraft. When I added Mail, I also got a new button in Safari that lets me email links to people directly from Safari.

It gets especially fun when I open Notes. Why? Because it has a button that exports your note to Mail. Why is this exciting? Because I'm writing this blog in Notes and, with the address I added to my Contacts list, can send this directly to Blogger through Mail.

Ka-bam.

And then Apple filed a lawsuit...

I was, for the longest time, one of the larger nay-sayers when it came to, well, everything to do with Apple. I didn't like their file system, I didn't like their computer design, I didn't like their iPods, or even their name. How dare they sour the good word "apple." And what is the deal with e-ver-y-thing being prefixed with a lowercase I?

Then, I started actually using an eMac (the downscaled, economy, eggshell-shaped style of desktop introduced after OS X came out) for my high school journalism class, and found out that Apple wasn't the red-eyed demon I had always thought it was. As a matter of fact, it was more than just usable. It was, dare I say it, intuitive.

And so college rolled around, and I found myself in possession of a pretty large sum of money, which I used to buy a replacement for my laptop. It was deathly slow, you see. Having dealt with both PCs and Macs, and with the advent of the Intel processor under the hood of every new Mac, which allowed for the installation of Windows on Macs, I decided that I could get a Mac and then have the best of both operating systems (which is to say, I could have intuitive stuff on the Mac side, and computer games on the Windows side).

And for a while, I was a fan of Mac. Apple made some darn fine computers, even if their iPod was nowhere near as useful or fully-featured as other MP3 players on the market. And sure, my Zen Vision:M couldn't exactly interface with my new computer, but I had ways of working around that as long as I was near people with a Windows computer.

Then Apple announced the iPhone, and it was sweet, but it was highly unaffordable, and came with a mandatory plan with AT&T, which makes the whole thing even more unaffordable.

Then Apple came out with the iPod Touch, which was like the iPhone, only stripped of the phone plan and, for some reason, several of the really handy applications that weren't phone-centric, like email, Google Maps, and Notes.

Still, I bought an iPod Touch on the grounds that it finally had something that no other MP3 player could replicate: Internet. And it was a good buy, especially because it interfaced with my iMac. But it still couldn't do everything I wanted it to as easily as I wanted it to. Case in point: email, Google Maps, and Notes.

Enter the countless number of people who have worked to hack the iPhone (and concordantly, the iPod Touch), which brings us to this point...



This will only last until Apple releases their first-party SDK and people can install Apple-approved applications on their iPhones/Pod Touches, but I love it. I'm quite giddy at this point, but soon that should evaporate into recognizing the usefulness of these applications for everything they're worth.

The votes have been tallied: I'm dying.

I was feeling particularly optimistic for the new year until about 8:30 yesterday morning when I spent nearly two hours in the bathroom with the threesies. This was before I had anything to eat.

So far, the new year has seen me going to the toilet on almost if not on an hourly basis, and I am glad to say that I have somehow remained hydrated through it all. Still, the sheer volume of diarrhea I've had since the beginning of the week weighed against the amount of food that I've ingested leads me to believe that I have one of two things. The first option is that I'm infected with malaria, and the second is that my intestines are failing.

Whatever the case may be, I've decided that enough is enough. I'm tired of it actually requiring effort to press the keys on this keyboard, I'm tired of my stomach constantly being in pain, I'm tired of the way my threesies are completely barreling through my family's supply of toilet paper AND moistened wipes, and I'm tired of the way this new Imodium tastes.

I'm setting up an appointment with a doctor on base tomorrow. If God loves me, that doctor will immediately refer me to a better hospital for a same-day appointment.

Just add water

The holidays are almost over, with only about nine hours left until it's 2008. Christmas presents were mostly DVDs: I now have the complete Matrix trilogy, Scrubs up to season six, the fifth Harry Potter movie, and Ratatouille. I got the two games I wanted: Super Mario Galaxy and Zack & Wiki. And then I played those video games and watched the two newer seasons of Scrubs.

Not really a very exciting time after Christmas, I know, but there's nothing like a sudden punch of something I want to call the flu. I don't feel up for eating because of my inCREDIBLE threesies that come upon me like the Great Flood, but what was really fun was the horrible bout of dehydration I faced this morning, which I felt I could put off taking care of until I finished my shower. Steam doesn't help with nausea.

And in spite of this feeling of creeping death coming upon me, I can't help but think about the year that I have ahead of me. I don't really consider the new year to be MY new year. My new year begins on my birthday. Of course, this is the time when everybody goes on and makes their resolutions. I've only got a few this year, but I think they're better than those that I've had in years past (stay sane):

1) Keep my grades above the level required for the Regent's scholarship.
2) Stay true to my heart.

I don't know how well I can keep to the first resolution, but having dealt with a year and a half of college already, and I feel like my classes will be easy enough this semester that I won't have to strain too much for A's in these classes. As for staying true to my heart, I've struggled with what it means to be in love for a long time now. I've also worried about how I might stray from what my heart tells me to do. I know how it can sometimes seem like there isn't any chance for my heart to escape the darkness. A video game I played recently posed the question "Why are you afraid of the darkness?" and it answered itself, "Because of the people who are lurking in the darkness." I know that my heart has spent some time in the darkness. It's vern in the light for longer, but now it has a pretty hard task ahead of it: it has to bring another heart out of the darkness.

Was this blog inspired more by exhaustion or dehydration? You decide!

Home

It's been almost a week since I came back home for Christmas, and I think I've been overall less stressed... than I thought I would be. With all of the extra time I have, I've been playing a lot of Kingdom Hearts II (although I admit that I was playing a lot of that game during finals week, as well) and hefty amounts of Pokémon. My mom accuses me of spending all of my time on the computer, but this is only a half-truth. I merely spend most of my time in front of the computer. And it tends to be on during that time, but it's hardly ever the center of it attention like my PS2 or DS.

I realize some very important facts about the being home as well. For instance, my bed is hopelessly uncomfortable. I have no understanding as to why this is so, but the fact remains. I have a foam cushion, and a second cushion on top of my mattress, and it does no good whatsoever. My bed, in fact, is like a black hole, in its ability to suck the comfy properties out of nearly anything you might find to throw on it. I've sometimes considered just sleeping on the floor. Of course, that's cluttered with stuff from college, and so it's out of the running (or rather, laying). Another important discovery is that my house doesn't warm up very well. My hands seem unreasonably cold more often than not, and if I didn't have socks I'm sure that my feet might have fallen off by now.

I'm incredibly glad that I have my own computer. I wouldn't dare try to interface with the family machine outside of my room. This has nothing to do with Mac snobbery; our computer has managed to get itself into a worse condition than many of Doabe's laptops. I attribute this to the outdated processor, the seven anti-spyware programs, the five anti-virus programs, the three weekly system restores, and a partridge in a pear tree.

My room is incredibly green. I've know this for some time now, but it's disturbing to me nonetheless. I have also noticed that ever since the repainting of the bathroom, I've had much fewer suicidal thoughts while brushing my teeth and showering.

Tomorrow, I take on the task of wrapping five Christmas presents. There will likely be a vlog about this, because it is comedic gold. Maybe I'll find some of that British chase sequence music and do the whole scene in fast-forward... Yeah.

Political lollerskates

I need a solid...

In registering for my classes next semester, I was told to take certain classes over others, and that other classes that are prerequisites would be carried over via the magic of transferred credits.

Enter JOUR-102: The Art of Writing. A little while back, I got an email from the supreme overlord of eloquence and syntax at UNL's journalism department saying that in order to qualify for this class, I would need to take a grammar comprehension exam to prove that I can, in fact, write good.

I need to get a pass from Andersen Hall in order to take the exam at all, and then I need to go to Burnett Hall some time between 9:00 AM to 9:00 PM on Monday through Thursday, 9:00 AM to 5:00 PM on Friday, and 1:00pm to 9:00 pm on Sunday. I'm guessing that this should get done before the end of UNL's semester, or before the beginning of their next semester...

HALP.

Four ideas for today.

1) Avatar season 3 should DEFINITELY warrant people wanting to come visit me in my room.
2) If I'm ever immortalized in mural form, I want to be depicted holding a sword shaped like a lightning bolt.
3) "No doubt" is synonymous with "no kidding" when you're from Oregon.
4) I think that "Porn" is a funny name for a hard drive.

Blogging from bed, again.

Okay, one of the inherent perks to a laptop is this: being able to use a full, ten-finger keyboard to blog.

Thanksgiving went off without a hitch. We left the house only a half-hour behind schedule, which is unheard of in my family; we had Burger King for lunch, and they've brought back the Italian Chicken Sandwich (formerly the mediterranean chicken sandwich, but still so delicious); the Packers beat the Lions; and the turkey wasn't dry.

So all in all, plans for the family went well. It's really good to know that things can work out better than you'd hoped sometimes.

Mall of America tomorrow, of course, might prove tricky. I've only got $125 to spend between about five relatives' gifts.

I'm always so caught up in hilarious misadventures, sometimes I think my plans will never go off smoothly. I guess only time will tell if the best laid plans can't still go awry. Maybe there's hope for haphazard ones, though.

Mac vs. Cheese

I had to check out a laptop from the library in order to be able to do my homework over the weekend, due to the fact that I can't really haul my iMac around very well. Twenty pounds of raw computing power fixed on an anodized aluminum stand that are required to be plugged into an outlet don't really transfer well to the idea of "the road."

So I have this lappy at the ready for when I need to punch out my pages of the group project on The United States of Europe for my macroeconomics class. I took on the task of writing about how the unification of Europe tackles economic principles number 5 and 8. What are economic principles 5 and 8, you ask? I don't have a clue. We just knew that there were eight principles to be divvied up, and so I took 5 and 8. To balance this out, I'm also spearheading the presentation on one of the principles, which finally justifies my owning of Apple's alternative to Powerpoint: Keynote.

With the rough five variations of laptops to be checked out from the library, it's a mixed bag whether or not you'll get a laptop that's actually usable. In this sense, I lucked out, getting an HP something-or-other with an AMD Turion dual-core, 64-bit processor, and a little sticker ensuring me that this sucker is Windows Vista Capable. In other words, it's better than the Pentium 3s that I could have been stuck with.

But now that I'm finally using a computer other than my Mac for a prolonged period for the first time in a year, it's time to make the brutal comparisons.

First of which is that I'm relegated to Meebo for talking to my friends. This is by no means a bad thing. Meebo rocks. But the fact that I can't install any of my preferred IM applications on this machine is a bit of a downer. What if I like AIM? Of course, this isn't a problem relevant to Windows, it's just the cold, hard fact of being on a computer I checked out from a library.

This, however, isn't: the colors of Blogger are horrendously muddled. To the point where the normally tan interface is a disgustingly drab gray. It may or may not be a good thing that the color reminds me of Doane's food...

My other big gripe with this laptop is that good lord, the speakers are absolutely terrible. I never realized just how good Apple is at tuning their speakers, or maybe just selecting speakers that don't suck, but these speakers, and the ones in the monitor of my family's computer (which is also an HP) leave a veritable ear load to be desired.

But other than that, this will get me through the weekend swimmingly. Now the question becomes one of "will I actually do any of my homework?"

Refocused

og. That's just how scatterbrained I am. My train of thought goes from one thing to another without necessarily finishing one thought. When I was a kid, I wanted to be in the video game industry, and then I got sidetracked with theatre for four years. Granted, it was a very fun four years and I hope to get sidetracked with it again, but it did distract me from my video games for a very, very long time.

This blog was to be finished last night, but distraction kept that from happening, too. Getting sidetracked is just a part of life, I think. Given the number of things that we all take in and do over the span of a day, it's impossible not to become distracted to the point of actually forgetting what you were doing in the first place.

Take rehearsal tonight, for example. It was supposed to be a complete run of the first act of Arabian Nights. The first act begins with a dance number, though, and we ended up rehearsing that for the first two hours of tonight. Then we only got through roughly the first hour of what we were supposed to get through.

We had a specific goal in mind coming into this thing, yes, but we ended up diverting from that for an insane amount of time. And it upset me a bit, and it tired me a lot, but the fact of the matter is that the dance is probably going to be better because of it, and the first act can be finessed later. It takes less practice than a very intricate dance scene.

So it was a good thing that Robin got sidetracked tonight, and decided to work on the dance. Even if it was crap to do it there, it will pay off later.

But getting sidetracked isn't always a good thing. Sometimes it can lead you to stay up for about an hour or four more than you wanted to one night. It can even lead you to break a promise you made to a friend, or cause you not to see that something in front of you is better than something in your peripheral. It can cause us to get distracted from the bigger picture, from what you've got.

Sometimes getting sidetracked will take you to heights you wouldn't normally achieve, but more often it's a negative thing, and all you can do is hope that you can get back on your original track before too much of an impact is made.

Sidetracked.

I tend to have a ton of stuff on my mind at the same time. Right now, I'm making conversation with six people, listening to music, and writing this blog. Less than an hour ago, I remembered that I had some German to do. It didn't take very long at all, but it was still annoying to remember.

I'm having a little trouble getting this blog done, admittedly, because I'm having conversations with people online. See, I get sidetracked easily. All today, I knew I had to shave, but then I had to get a muffin and coffee, and then I had to read my book for econ, and then I had to practice music for juries, and then I had other stuff, and other stuff, and then I had dinner, followed sharply by rehearsal. Long story short, I never ended up shaving.

This happens to me a lot. I'll know that I have something important to do, like email my accompanist, and I end up putting it off for way too long because I simply let other things override my thought process, even though the action is pertinent, or something.

And in my spare time, I'm trying to write a fictional blog on here, but it takes a lot of concentration and time, which is being interspersed over the course of many nights' worth of rehearsals, but no afternoons of laziness, or any other such time slot. Why not, I don't know. It's not that I don't want to write the thing, or that I find it boring, or that I even find it to be difficult. I just have other things that I'm doing.

And I don't think there's really anybody who can say whether one thing that I do is more important than something else that I do. But it wouldn't surprise me if this trend causes me to suddenly stop writing this bl

Bad fries, questionable rings, and a pretty good chicken sandwich

The title doesn't have much to do with the topic of this blog, I don't think. It's just the product of Tiger Inn, where I got some bad fries, saw one of the workers pick onion rings out of a deep fryer bare-handed, and got a pretty good grilled chicken sandwich.

In the past week, I've had my American government professor tell me that I seem more depressed recently not once, but twice. I don't know what he bases this notion on. At all. I can't feel any noticeable change in my behavior now compared to when I started his class, other than the fact that I've learned since starting his class that it is far less about American government as it is about the War on Terror, which he regards as the defining issue of our generation (in spite of the fact that nobody in class feels the same way), but as far as my overall attitude goes, I don't think that he could logically base his view of my mental health on three fifty-minute windows of time during which he sees me. Still, I'm not one to take somebody's observation of how I've been acting and just throw it out the window.

I went to my director Robin midday on Friday and asked him if I seemed like I've been depressed lately. He said that he wouldn't call it "depressed," but that I've been acting somewhat different lately. More introverted, perhaps, but not really depressed. This still surprised me, because I don't really think that I've been more introverted this year, especially compared to last year.

And my friends Caitie and Kathryn have also talked to me about how I tend to say things that are really depressing. Even people that I talk to online say that I've been acting withdrawn lately.

Still, I don't notice what everyone is talking about. I'm starting to wonder if I'm wearing my heart on my back and I just can't tell that I'm dumping all of these negative feelings out, or if this is like when you have something embarrassing written on your forehead, and people tell you, but you can't see what it says for yourself, because you're too close to yourself to see it.

In those instances, you always have to find a mirror in order to see what's going on.

I took an online screening for depression today because I was curious as to whether I would test yes to that. My results told me that I was more likely to have bipolar disorder than depression, so I took the online test for that. Three minutes later, I was told that I don't likely have bipolar disorder, and I was out the door and into the coffee shop just in time to get a muffin and a chai latté just before the lunch period started. Still, so many people are telling me I don't seem like myself lately.

Can anybody hand me a mirror?

Lunacy and lunarcy

It is often a practice of mine to do things that I have absolutely no intention of revisiting, even though they're incredibly funny or poignant at the time that I do them. A very recent example of this -- now invalidated by my talking about it on my blog -- is the night of Arabian Nights rehearsal during which I spread water on my butt while I was offstage because my character ran into the scene complaining about diarrhea. It was a stroke of genius brought on by my visit to the water fountain and my incredibly random nature.

Sitting in work-study today, I watched a few episodes of Scrubs, listened to a podcast from IGN Wii-k in Review (while I sat in reverie at the games coming out this and next year. We are looking at another shot at the gaming Golden Age right now), and tried many times to get my iPod to connect to the internet. Being that I'm sitting at the front desk's workstation right now, it's safe to say that my attempts failed.

The failure did, however, allow one of my iPod's more interesting features to shine through. The feature, you ask? My calendar.

While wholly spectacular inventions in and of themselves, calendars have been mostly overlooked by the general populous as simple chotchkies to be hung on the kitchen wall and ignored until you need to know what day or year it is for the check that you're writing. But the idea of extensible calendars, which allow for much more information than can fit in a 1 1/2 square-inch box, is bringing the practicality and -- let's face it -- fun back into having places to be at certain times of the day.

Perhaps one of the most interesting calendars of the non-extensible form, however, is the giant stone one located in Latin America, cradled in a Mayan ruin. The calendar gives proof that the Mayans were at least dilligent timekeepers, as it has on it the dates of lunar eclipses and other celestial happenings. But unfortunately for anybody visiting the Mayan ruins and wondering what the stars will be doing in 2011, the Mayan calendar only keeps up on such information until December 12, 2010: the day which the Mayans playfully describe as "the end of the world."

Having heard of this back in my junior or senior year of high school from a member of Bellevue East's forensics team, and having been exposed to stories of the calendar before then, I made, in a stroke of random whimsy, a schedule of events for December 12, 2010. I bring this up now, because the very same schedule somehow migrated from Google Calendar, where I first wrote it out, to my iPod's calendar, for me to stumble upon this afternoon. Here's what I've got myself doing:

12 AM - Panic
2:30 AM - Panic some more
6 AM - Spongebob Squarepants
9 AM - Eat breakfast at McDonalds
10 AM - Panic
1 PM - Late lunch
2 PM - Prayer
3 PM - Prayer
4 PM - Prayer
5 PM - The Simpsons
6 PM - Prayer
7 PM - Prayer
8 PM - Work on forensics piece
9 PM - Buy a hammer
10 PM - Build sculpture of Campbell (my forensics coach)
10:30 PM - Destroy sculpture of Campbell
11 PM - Panic and pray

In my exceptional genius, I planned out this schedule and excluded an hour for eating dinner. I'm sure I had a reason at the time for why I don't eat any kind of final meal, maybe in reverence to all of the foods that I should have tried by this point but hadn't, maybe in a kind of observance to God that I'm not full unless I have Him dwelling inside me, or maybe it was just because I knew that I probably wouldn't be hungry that night. In any case, why would it take me an hour to find and buy a hammer?

In the sun

On the top shelf of my minifridge, right next to my most recent acquisition of orange soda, is a single can of grape-flavored Tropicana Twister brand soda.

The story behind this can is a simple one: Tiger Inn used to sell cans of grape soda at the beginning of the year. That's where the can comes from. The reason it's the only one in my fridge is because I realized shortly after getting it that it was actually one of the last cans of grape soda that Tiger Inn would stock. Not being one to simply consume something that suddenly becomes almost unique in a torrent of immediacy, I decided that I wouldn't drink the grape soda just because I wanted to.

I decided that the grape soda would be for a special occasion, like a very cheap and nonalcoholic imitation of champagne. The grape soda would be celebratory.

But since the scarcity of the can is so high, this is quite possibly the most special can of grape soda I have ever owned. It doesn't deserve to be taken after something as mundane as getting a paycheck, or something as common as writing a paper. This takes something that could be deemed a cornerstone of my life.

Arguably, there was a case for drinking it when I turned 20. You only enter a new decade of your life, like, every five to seven years. But I don't really regard an age as a cornerstone. Certainly, it's a milestone, by which I can measure how far I've come up to this point, but as far as achievements go... It just doesn't seem like something to cheer about.

I would say that that's the only real mile/cornerstone that I've hit since I got the can. There's the purchase of this iPod, but that just means that I had $300 at some point recently. Material goods, unless they're monumental, shouldn't really count for much. If this had been an iPod that I won in a contest, or if it had been a purchase made because I won a good sum of money in a contest, then I'd drink the grape soda.

I guess that some people would argue that I am putting too much thought into what I would consider to be a cornerstone. I'm sure that others still would think that it's just a stupid can of grape soda and that I should get over it. It's my belief that these latter people do not have grape soda of their own, and are therefore rationalizing that it's probably a can of sour grape soda, anyway.

And to the former group, I would have to say that I am confident in my ability to discern a cornerstone in my life from the mundane and the routine.

So until I find that cornerstone, I know I'll have that grape soda waiting for me on the top shelf of my minifridge.

Tangled in a web of blogs!

First, there was myspace. And for a time, it was good. Then I realized that myspace was mostly tailored for kids who were too young to actually access the site but wanted to because all of their other emo friends were on it and adding Simple Plan to their glorified HTML tables. How could this happen to me, indeed.

Then, there was Facebook, which for the longest time, didn't allow for blog posts, until a little before they started opening up their platform and came up with a little app known as "notes." These were, for all accounts and purposes, blogs. The advantage, however, was that you could tag your friends and let them know that you mentioned them or were thinking of them when you wrote that little "some people who just need to die" post one drunken evening.

Then came Blogger. And at first, it was mostly overlooked. Then they added the ability to include Google ads in your posts, and writing crap about your life became a feasible way to make money. Plus, you could import your blog from Blogger to Myspace through the RSS feed. And so there became a clean way to keep your friends close and your random blog-crawling strangers closer.

Now enter Wordpress: a blog with a number of clean layouts, and traffic viewers (really handy for seeing if anybody really does visit your blog or if you're just writing to a vacuum). It seems to have all of the advantages of Blogger, plus it can be searched on sites like Google and... Sphere? What?

But so comes the incredibly weird series of questions one must ask himself: is this worth the hassle? Is the hassle worth the knowing? Will the knowing possibly make me not want to do this anymore? Will this post upload to Wordpress? Will Facebook then pick up the post off of Wordpress? Will the emo kids ever shake loose of the grasp of Myspace and its stupidly simple design that even one of the many pubescent emo kids on it could have thought up and then created? Should I make that LOLyrics site?

None of these have easy answers. The real irony is that I'm tangling myself in a web of blogs, and that "blog" is a shortening of "web log," which makes redundant my sentence, but nobody would say that it's proper syntax to say "I'm tangling myself up in a blogs," so here we are.

Why I didn't write a blog today.

“A Modern Proposal”

The medical world of today has a wealth of tools at its disposal for treating sick people: Vaccines prevent people from getting seriously ill; medications help fight bacteria, ward off infection, and bolster the capabilities of various functions of the body; there are now cameras and tools small enough to fit through incisions less than an inch large for operations that would otherwise be highly invasive; methods of analyzing a person’s body with high-powered magnets have made otherwise invisible causes of illness visible.

But for all of the advances medicine has made in treating people, there is still no way to save a vital organ once it has failed. At that point, it becomes necessary to find a replacement organ in order to prevent the patient from dying. This requires either a deceased person to have been an organ donor, or in the case of certain organs, a live person who is willing to give the organ. Unfortunately, these circumstances don’t occur frequently enough as to keep the ratio of sick people to healthy donors balanced (or, preferably, in favor of the healthy donors). With this in mind, the question arises as to whether or not there should be incentives put into place for people who would decide to give an organ to somebody in need. To answer that question, we should first look at the current allocation of healthy organs that could be easily given, then we will look at how the allocation of those organs would change if we created a legal market for them, and then we will analyze the moral and ethical implications of each of these decisions.

As of 2000, the number of people in Western Europe awaiting a kidney transplant was estimated at 40,000 people, and only a quarter of those people received a transplant (Cooper DKC). This condition relies on people who were otherwise healthy when they died, and on living people who are willing to part with one of their kidneys because of altruistic motivations. Since it has been medically proven that humans can live comfortably with only one kidney, the rationing of kidneys shows a surplus in a vast majority of the population, and a death-inducing shortage among some people.

There is, however, heavy debate on whether or not it would be possible for the organ-transferring process to involve what L. D. de Castro calls “monetary compensation” to the person from whom the organ originates. The overall consensus of those in favor of a system such as this is that the market would be overseen by a public entity, to whom the organs would be sold and then from whom the organs would be distributed (Erin, Charles A.; Harris, John). In the system, Erin and Harris say, “There would be no direct sales or purchases, no exploitation of low income countries and their populations (no buying in Turkey... to sell in [England]). The organs would be tested for HIV, etc., their provenance known, and there would be strict controls and penalties to prevent abuse.” Erin and Harris admit that there would need to be a high enough price point on organs to actually attract people to sell their organs, but maintain that the altruistic nature of donating an organ would not be diminished if people only sold organs in seeking compensation for the act. However, if this method did work to make more people willing to give one of their organs, it would indeed help to greatly diminish the number of people dying for lack of precious organs.
The questions that arise in this hypothetical situation pertaining to the safety and security of opening a market for organs are mostly answered with the notions of careful screening and assigning priority to people according to their need, as opposed to how much they are willing to pay for the organ (this safeguard is an automatic installment of having a public entity through which all transactions are made).

But the questions actually pertaining to the idea that this would become a market are left roughly unanswered, and would be where the moral battleground exists. How would the price point of an organ be decided? Would it be a case-by-case basis, where the quality of the organ is weighed against the demand for it at the time? Would organs being donated by people of rarer blood types be valued at a higher price? Or would an organ be sold for a uniform price, so long as it passed a set of requirements according to the type of organ it is? If people still refused to sell their organs, would the price point shift upward? If the price point continued to shift upward until it reached an exorbitant price, could the government have a solid legal case in being able to have those people who still refused to donate as legally insane, send them to an asylum, and then take the organ on the grounds that they aren’t of a sound mind to decide to donate it on their own?

At the same time, there are severe moral implications on the part of those who currently aren’t donating organs and who physically could without seeing severe side-effects in their daily routine. Proponents of a market for organs argue that the loss of life in the current system is clearly unacceptable, and that “[p]eople have a right to make a decision to sell a body part. If we should be allowed to sell our labour, why not sell the means to do that labour?” (Savulescu).

While there aren’t any easy answers to the questions pertaining to this idea, it is apparent that something needs to be done for those people who have failing organs. However, it is also difficult to reach a conclusion on how a market, and will likely leave the problem unresolved until a modern-day Jonathan Swift comes forth with a modest proposal.

Works Cited

de Castro, L. D. “Commodification and Exploitation: Arguments in Favour of Compensated Organ Donation.” Journal of Medical Ethics. 29 (2003): 142-146.

Cooper, DKC; Lanza, RP. Xeno - the Promise of Transplanting Animal Organs Into Humans. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000: 7-17.

Erin, Charles A. and John Harris. “An Ethical Market in Human Organs.” Journal of Medical Ethics. 29 (2003): 137-138.

Savulescu, J. “Is the Sale of Body Parts Wrong?” Journal of Medical Ethics. 29 (2003): 138-139.