Temper, temper.

Lunch yesterday was disturbing. I’m putting off going to lunch today for that reason. (It wasn’t the Café Bethany food, for once.)

I was sitting with some acquaintances. I don’t have a lot of friends on this campus; that’s a deliberate choice on my part because I’m very particular about who I consider friends. It may surprise a lot of these acquaintances to know that I don’t think of them as friends, but that’s because they have a very superficial idea of what “friend” means. But I don’t mean to get into a mini-Rant.

Anyway. I was trying to eat my lunch—I’m attempting to feed a cold here—when someone I will refer to as Y sat beside me and began flirting with me. She’s done this before, which is a lot more tolerable when it comes from the other side of the table. It’s considerably more annoying when Y is sitting right next to me, because her practice is to do what I call “smack ’em if you like ’em.” I’ve ranted many times about how sad I find a lot of the junior high variety of flirting that I see on this campus. If there’s anything you want to do to make me completely uninterested in you, do what Y did.

She started a little friendly teasing, and then she decided to respond to one of my comments with a smack. I was not expecting to get hit when I’m in the middle of a chicken sandwich. I wound up with Heinz 57 sauce on my shirt.

“Oh, I’m sorry,” she said, when she clearly was more amused than sorry.

“Just don’t do that again,” I said, figuring I could let this slide.

Except, later in the conversation, something I said caused me to get hit again. Fortunately, not while I was eating anything.

Now, she didn’t realize that while she was hitting me, she was pressing one of my more significant buttons. I do NOT appreciate getting hit. I don’t care if you’re teasing, joking, or whatever. I got hit throughout my childhood, and I watched my dad beat my mom unconscious once or twice, so this is not something I consider “fun” or “flirty.” In fact, it provokes me to hit back. Hard. And maybe break a nose. But I swore to myself I would never do that to anyone (any more, I have to admit), so instead of breaking her nose I simply took my unfinished meal, left the table, left the café, and prayed a lot until I was in a better mood.

I didn’t see Y again at dinner. Which is probably best. She has no chance with me, and is quite lucky that I’m not the same person I was 10 years ago. The disturbing part is that this person nearly came out of me.

My temper, which I had assumed was mostly gone, isn’t. There was always that little bit that was just waiting to come back up and surprise me. Guess it’s not dead yet. Great, more introspection.

Under the weather.

Recovering from a cold today.

I’m hesitant to bring this up because it invariably provokes sympathy responses: “Hope you feel better!” and crap like that. Forget that. I will feel better, of course. That’s only a matter of time, and I recover quickly.

But I suppose I’m not that hesitant.

Mainly it’s because I want to rant about this: Somehow or other, men have developed a reputation for being big, whiny babies when we’re sick. So people inevitably expect that I’m gonna turn into a big wimp whenever I catch a virus, and are surprised when I don’t… and are sometimes horrified when I refuse to go home and rest. (I’ve rested already. Why do you think I’m at work?)

When I’m sick, I’m going to sleep a lot more often; but if I’ve got stuff to do, I’d better be physically unable to get out of bed before I stop fulfilling my obligations. The only time I call in sick is when I’m too sick to stand up. (That, fortunately, seldom happens.) I will go home and rest eventually. Until then, bugger off.

What the [bleep] do these people know?

Seriously though: What the bleep?

I finally finished watching What the [Bleep] Do We Know? which is a bizarre little movie.

It’s a documentary, but half of it consists of Marlee Matlin as a manic-depressive photographer. Her unhappy life is occasionally interrupted by philosophers commenting about what the universe consists of and how that affects us. A lot of their statements sound like profundity. Only a lot of the things they say are self-negating statements—like, “I don’t know how to define God, but I have a real sense that he exists.” (So how do you know if you can't define him?) Or, “There is no good and bad; there’s only things that cause us to evolve and things that don’t.” (Which implies evolution is good… yet there’s no such thing as good?)

The philosophers begin with quantum physics. (Many of them claim to actually be quantum physicists.) They are rather fascinated by it, and what it means when we look at how it affects the structure of the universe. Except—and here's their biggest problem—the universe we live in doesn’t work that way.

Our universe is made of matter, and physics analyzes the way that matter interacts. When we deal with things other than matter—namely the quantum particles, i.e. quanta, which matter is made of—we’re no longer dealing with matter. We’re dealing with quanta. Quanta doesn’t follow the same rules as matter, because it’s not matter. So we have a new, largely theoretical science—quantum physics—that studies the way quanta behaves and interacts. And while that’s neat (and a little bizarre) we don't live in a quantum universe. We live in a physical one.

No, it actually doesn’t matter that matter is made of quanta. The only quanta we ever have to deal with is light, electrons, and the neutrinos which harmlessly pass right through us. (And in the physical universe, these particular quanta function predictably by the rules of regular physics). To say that our experiences are based on quantum mechanics is like saying that human behavior is dictated by the proteins produced by our cells.

Which, amusingly, the movie then attempts to prove.

Their conclusions are that we create our own universe based on our personal perceptions of reality. But they don’t mean it in a subjective way, like I do; they mean it in an objective way. Things might literally cease to exist—not just cease to exist from my perspective—when we stop looking at them. Why? Because it’s how quantum physics supposedly works.

It’s a lot like saying that white blood cells kill bacteria… so this is why humans commit murder.

In the end, Matlin’s character chooses to love herself… and chuck her meds. (Apparently she hit the manic part of her manic-depressive cycle, when most bipolar people choose go off their medication because they figure they’re “happy,” and therefore “cured.”)

And in the end, the talking heads’ names are given—and their actual credentials. One of ’em happens to be a 35,000-year-old spirit from Atlantis channeled by a medium. And they’re not talking about their field of expertise. They’re just manipulating the data to fit their theology. Christians (like “creation scientists”) pull this crap all the time. The only difference between one and the other is that this movie is produced by New Agers.

What the bleep do they know? They admit they don’t know very much at all. But that won’t stop them from coming to conclusions, given with absolute certainty, about how we should therefore live our lives.

Ignoring the Emmys.

Last night I watched 60 Minutes and The Simpsons, as usual, and was interrupted regularly by footballaters who wanted to know the scores, and why on earth a red-blooded American male would not be watching one of the several games played that Sunday. You want to know the freakin’ score? Get on the internet. The TV takes too long.

While the men were focused on football, the women were focused on the Emmys. This is not because anyone actually watches the shows that were nominated; who has time? Mainly it’s for the fashions, to make fun of who wore what. I didn’t watch any of it. After The Simpsons I watched a few minutes of The Mummy Returns, then decided I had more than enough TV for one evening. Even though Shaft was on later. (Shaft’s a bad mothershutyourmouth.)

I have no patience for award shows. All of them take too long, and all we really want to know is who won. If we even want to know that. I don’t care who won so much as I care about whether the shows I like are going to stay on the air, and winning awards doesn’t necessarily help or hurt a show’s ratings. And the award shows usually pre-empt the halfway decent shows that are usually on in that time slot; but fortunately this year the Emmys show was on CBS, and only pre-empted another godawful made-for-TV movie, featuring Ted Danson and Mary Steenburgen playing married actors who so desperately want to work together that they’ll make godawful made-for-TV movies.

I have no patience for the fashions either. Much too much is made of the fortysomething actresses who are—let’s be honest—actresses, and are too busy acting to know jack squat about fashion. Yet the people who clothe them convince them to push their boobs together, squeeze into unflattering, untelegenic outfits that don’t match their skin tones, yet the designers are convinced that they’re “daring” enough to get the actresses (and thus the designers) noticed; get their hair coifed into something that no sane human being would want to wear since the fall of the French Monarchy; and look like this throughout a widely televised and photographed ceremony. And, as a result, Joan Rivers continues to have a career bad-mouthing the stupid, when she should have been lobotomized during her last facelift.

And then there are the useless shows, which are popularity contests where you vote for your favorite. There are several of them—some even produced by Dick Clark—and while the MTV awards are still the most amusing, they’re still extremely useless. But the celebrities gotta show up for them or they’ll look like self-centered bastards; and to put these pseudo-awards on your resumé makes you look even more pathetic (“Winner, Teen Choice award for ‘Most Bootylicious,’ 2003, 2004”); and even though the shows’ ratings sometimes suck they get enough viewers to break even.

As you can tell, I really don’t like award shows.

But I did enjoy my own awards. Back at Sac State the staff members would have an end-of-the-semester award presentation, where the editors would award their staff for best article, best editorial work, etc. I had a staff of seven, but I didn’t see any of them as standouts, so I replaced the usual stupid awards with the “Dementia Awards.” These were not traditional categories; these were awards for “Biggest whiner,” “Scariest look when unshowered,” “Most reckless driver,” “Biggest pothead,” and so forth. These were all inside jokes, so they were more appreciated than the knock-off versions created by other editors in the following semesters.

I actually had one guy complain when he didn’t win the “Biggest pothead” award, though. True, he was a pretty big stoner, but the winner traded his entire summer job earnings for three Hefty leaf bags full of weed. He’s now a college professor, of all things.

Those awards were fun. The others are just obnoxious.

A poem about the sucky starfish story.

My take on an overdone sermon illustration.

I was listening to a radio show, and it had the stupid starfish illustration, which I’ve heard way too many times. And when I get tired of things, in order to deal with them, I begin to parody them. So now you have to put up with more of my poetry.

Update, 11/23/2024: Well… not here. I ported it to Christ Almighty.

What’s with all the N-words?

MIKE. “Why do they keep saying that word?”

ME. “What word?”

MIKE. “The N-word. The N-bomb. N----r.”

ME. “I don't know. But I’d like to get some angry militant black man into this hall at some point and have him beat the crap out of them every time they say it.”

There is only one black man living in my hall. Most of us are of Mexican ancestry; I’m one of the few exceptions. Yet for some reason, the brown people insist on using the N-word as a form of endearment.

My ancestors fought in the Civil War in order to free the slaves and bring them up from that evil condition; yet for some reason these idiots think it's okay to keep using a word that puts them back down. Because it makes them “cool.” When in fact it makes them look like the biggest racists outside of a Klan meeting.

So if any angry militant pipe-wielding black men wish to volunteer to hang out in my hall for a while and teach these ignorant fools a thing or two about American history, race relations, and the consequences of too much free speech, feel free. I’ll unlock the outside doors for you.

Coffee and me.

You know, I actually don’t remember specifically when I switched to decaf. It was nearing the end of last semester, and I was making about a pot of coffee a day, and determining that if I was going to drink the whole pot it ought to be decaf. And then I started ordering decaf at coffeehouses (and getting annoyed that there’s no such thing as a decaf Frappuccino). And then we ran out of regular coffee and I just wound up buying more decaf. It wasn’t a resolution; I just grew into it over the summer.

Not that there’s anything wrong with caffeine per se, but it neither wakes me up in the morning, nor keeps me awake at night. All it does is make me twitchy; and when I sleep on caffeine I get what the medievals called “waking dreams,” where all my dream-actions would be repetitive things I dislike doing anyway: Raking leaves, grading papers, washing dishes, or even (flashing all the way back to my teen years) delivering newspapers and assembling Whoppers. I realized that caffeine was doing me no good, and this was only after going off the stuff.

It’s strange when you realize you became mature for no good reason.

But the coffee habit is still around. Just everything’s decaf now. I was brewing some Antiguan coffee last night and sampling the stuff—good stuff, by the way; Gevalia sells it—and ranting at Mike about what the big deal was.

I actually grew up disliking coffee. This is not strange considering what Dad considered coffee. When it comes to food, Dad insists on buying the very cheapest. This means that the crap that Dad used for coffee was the two-dollar cans of Canea canephora, otherwise known as robusta coffee, a species of coffee that grows just about anywhere, is dirt-cheap, is full of caffeine, and when brewed tastes like ash and acid. Most cheap coffees are at least 50 percent robusta. Folgers used to make their coffee out of robusta and “flavor crystals,” which I believe was MSG. They don’t do that anymore, but they’re still big on robusta, and since it’s grown in Columbia they can say it’s “100 percent Columbian.” So is Columbian toilet paper, but… nah, nevermind.