Light a Fire Under My Ass

Something I find really interesting about animals is their constant motivation. Yes, they don't have bills to pay, but when it comes to survival, they do anything and everything. It comes more easily to some animals than others, of course, but they always want to do whatever it is to live. Humans think they do, but movies like Saw are quick to point out that most humans only care about living when it is in immediate danger. Very basic actions like eating right and exercising just do not hold much importance for the average human, at least the average human in the United States. Even sedentary pets do what they can to jump around and stay agile, although being trapped indoors for years takes its toll on them at some point.

Where is it that humans go wrong? I know we learn behaviors from our parents and our environment and so forth, but honestly, how far does sheer laziness go back? Who was the first human that just did not want to get up and go to work, be it scanning items in a supermarket or clubbing a deer for food? I'd go on, but it's pretty clear where this is headed. Of course, I don't just have an outsider's interest. I think I suffer from a lack of motivation, ambition, and initiative.

I think I know where it may have started. When I was in grade school, I had a straight A average in school, was skinny, and liked to run outside and play. I was constantly recognized in school and by my parents for my achievements, and it was quite validating. Come high school, hours of studying (which I never had to do up to that point) paid off in a C grade, and I was very clearly not the best in my class anymore. I'm not sure if school was too easy beforehand, but I do know that as the challenge grew, I did not. Couple that with a rather horrific time coming out to my parents in the following year, and the recognition stopped completely.

I will not be petty and simply blame these things for my current situation. When it comes down to it, I clearly didn't feel motivated to work harder to achieve more (note that the coming out episode had little to do with achievement but just added more stress and broke initiative a lot). So here I am, more than 10 years later, and I'm overweight, out of shape, and underpaid at a job I really enjoy but does not utilize any of the skills I went to school for. This is not to say I'm not rewarded, but the rewards come for other things. I am rewarded with trophies when I play my PS3 games. I am rewarded with amazing taste when I eat tacos from Chipotle. I am rewarded with unwavering love from Francesco. As much as I love these things, in order to lead a completely fulfilling life, I need these rewards: a high salary appropriate for my age, a creative workspace, a healthy body, an organized lifestyle. Why I do not push myself completely befuddles me.

One of my favorite shows to watch on TV is The Biggest Loser. Here are people who have reached such a low point in their lives that they finally take it upon themselves to do something about it. Yes, there is a monetary reward on top of the life reward, but one must realize, these people are completely embarrassing themselves by putting it all out there. Until more than midway through, America is watching these people take off their shirt for the weigh-ins, revealing folds of fat, huge stretch-marks, and other unsightly features all in a disproportionately large body. These people are helping push lean turkey and filtered water while quite apparently not being poster children for such products - these are the people, after all, who we see in restaurants and think, "He shouldn't be eating anything at all!" And every week, these people cry, vomit, pass out, sweat, fall over, and lose their shit over a cupcake in the room, and the vast majority of them never see any money from the show, not the $250,000, the $100,000, nor other challenge prizes. Most reality shows are embarassing, but most of those contestants look good to the American public. I'm sure a poll would show that people would rather watch Snookie than Michael.

What does this all mean for me? I don't want to hit rock bottom. I don't want to embarrass myself in front of the nation. But these people are willing to do it because they know failure would only lead to more embarrassment. They basically have created a vicious cycle for themselves and upped the ante for achieving personal success in body and mind. I am currently not in a position to be embarrassed in such a manner, but do I want to get there? No. I stated that. So what's my problem? There are people who never get down and still manage to be motivated. My vomit rather than current contestant, hunch is that I need to feel, even taste, the rewards of living a good life, but since I'm not doing so now, and since it will involve hard work, I'm settling for smaller rewards to move me along.

It's not a way to live, but now it's all out there. So if I don't succeed, I'll suffer some modicum of embarrassment. For now, here are things for me to do in no particular order:

• Acquire Adobe Suite CS4 or CS5 somehow
• Reacquaint myself with Flash and learn ActionScript
• Redo my website entirely with the concept I've had for months now
• Buy, read, and learn HTML 5 as soon as O'Reilly releases their damn book
• Start regular exercise
• Join a gym or find a reasonably priced gym that I can afford
• Eat better
• Put myself on the graphic designer market again
• Find a good graphic design job
• Make money

And that's it.

Controlling the Weather And Looking Fabulous

I have this perpetual desire to be extraordinary and phenomenal. It borders on unreal, though, as oftentimes I imagine myself to have some hidden super power that nobody else on Earth could possibly have. Of course, I never came up with anything particularly original. I don't read comics, but anyone who has would recognize any of the machinations that pop into my mind. Given the opportunity to map my new powers to a character currently in existence, Storm from the X-Men has always been on the top of my list.

I enjoy her powers immensely, and part of the reason is they have the potential to be both destructive and constructive. I like the idea of balance, and control over the weather definitely provides opportunities to maintain such a structure. Of course, as much as I love Ororo Munroe for all the fierceness that she is, I don't want to embody all her characteristics, most notably her claustrophobia, which has little to do with her power, but it manages to incapacitate her at the most inopportune times.

That being said, I think there's a downside to her power possibly not discussed in the X-Men comic. I'm sure many people are aware, whether superficially or intensely, of chaos theory. More or less, it flows with the most metaphysical of ideas that every action has a consequence that cannot be instantly determined. Commonly, the example given is a butterfly flapping its wings has the potential to cause a tornado halfway across the globe. Maybe to some, it seems like nonsense, but we've all witnessed incredible domino effects in our lives, so I don't see why an example such as that should be so unusual. Of course, the theory doesn't imply that the tornado appears the instant a wing is flapped or that it has to happen at all. Either way, imagine the consequence that creating a tornado can have on a space across the globe. Hell, consider the consequence it could have on the next town over. In that respect, Storm's powers maybe inherently be more destructive than I ever previously credited her. We witness daily the continually changing weather conditions often to polar extents, and sometimes, meteorologists are just way off the mark. They are good at giving an idea, but honestly, they don't know anything until it happens. They may as well peer out the window and just let you know about that in case you haven't crawled out of bed yet.

So would I still want Storm's abilities granted that they could be fucking it up for everyone? Yes. It would certainly give me something to do, I imagine. Also, it would garner an incredible amount of attention. I guess that flows into themes of fiction through the ages, though, where super-powered persons are trapped by their governments and prodded. I don't wish to be prodded or studied. I just want to fly around and melt the snow when I see it. (Yes, that is ultimately more destructive, but I am allowed to be selfish in my imagination.)

I guess I am skirting over why I feel the need to imagine myself not just better but fantastical. I can't say I'm totally sure. I guess even at my peak, I've always felt there's someone better than me, but that's true for everyone. Nobody is literally the best ever at what he or she does, just the best recognized by the public. Recognition is something powerful. I have been recognized for various achievements, mostly through school, but who doesn't want the world to recognize their achievements? Not too long ago, I wondered if I had ever saved someone's life unintentionally. Bringing more chaos theory into the mix, I suppose I'll never know if some good decision on my part ultimately saved someone from dying or going down a dark path. That is neither here nor there, though, because I will never know and neither will the world.

Maybe I am just egomaniacal, or I have a complex. Either way, I enjoy my fantasies. At the very least, I know they'll never happen, so you won't see me jumping off a building in a foolhardy attempt to fly, nor will I go up against a group of thugs robbing the bank I visited on my lunch break. I'm a total sissy and I have such little muscle in my arms that when I flex, the space around them buckles inward. But it provides me some comfort to fantasize about what could happen if there just the smallest semblance of magic in the world. We all have to believe in magic and miracles sometimes. I don't care what religious background you come from, one way or another, you have to have wished for at least the sun peering through a dark cloud.

Even if it isn't overt, I think there's something to the friendships and relationships we build which seems almost magical. It's amazing how the people around you are such factors for change in your own self, how they influence everything you do and how they have the power to bring you up and break you down. When it comes down to it, though, love is an indiscernible thing, but it can heal you. It doesn't have to cure cancer, but imagine your ills without somebody there to smile at you sometimes. It isn't lasers out of my eyes, but if my love can save someone's life unknowingly, I have to learn to be thankful for just that.

The Internet Is Killing the English Language

I know it's never a good idea to make sweeping bold generalizations about anything. However, I think it is readily apparent to anyone who has browsed a social networking site that the English language is dying a slow death in terms of spelling, grammar, composition, and more. I'd say vocabulary, too, but I'm not sure the internet is killing that so much as the sheer apathy of this nation's citizens to learn more words.

What is clear to me is that our nation's youth (who grow or have grown into our nation's adults) feel that they are being let loose in their language when typing a message, a status update, or a treatise on weekend social inebriation. I don't know who is letting them do this, but it isn't I. The idea that Facebook or MySpace, for example, is not grading its users or preventing them from succeeding at a high level job creates this idea of great personal freedom to relax, for lack of a better word, their grammar. This, in and of itself, is a problem because many areas, exterior to Facebook and MySpace, are not as forgiving. I will note, though, that indeed, climbing the career ladder does not result in getting tagged in someone's photos of debauchery and will not get you three more pigs for your farm. Applying for welfare will not poke you back. And certainly, no matter how high your grade is on that English thesis paper, it will not like your status (not even in matters of irony).

The Internet has fueled an instant reward system that growing people value more than long-term rewards. Television is not helping, either. The Hills and Jersey Shore are more than exemplary in demonstrating that you can be dumb as dirt, one-dimensional, and embody all the poorer characteristics of being human and still succeed in life - success here is determined by fame or popularity and money. There's no major need to be smart. It may seem completely related, but I digress a little in that it does not require a great intelligence to have minimal mastery over the language you've been speaking since you were a child. It really doesn't.

That leads me to cell phones. I will not deny that it does require major effort to type entire words in a text message on a numeric keypad. I became a rampant texter myself when I still had a Motorola Razr, which does not have a full slide-out keyboard or a touch screen. But I persisted. I persisted because I could not fathom to send even my least-liked of friends a message stating, "LOL. I kno bcz she tot nds new bewbs." I'm not even entirely sure that's how someone would type an abbreviated text message, but it demonstrates a point if I have one at all. What I do hope I am conveying is somehow this need for brevity translated onto the Internet though the Internet itself predated the cell phone boom. I fail to understand that given a full keyboard and some minor typing skills why someone cannnot type full, clear English words nearly as quickly as it takes to type what I consider to be the brain's version of excrement.

Worse still is the majority response to my umbrage is "It doesn't matter. It's the internet. LOL." (I'll get to "LOL" later or in another post entirely.) Is that true? Does it really not matter solely because it is the internet? I can tell you it most certainly is not. A friend of mine, who is a teacher for the English department at a university, has vouched that he has received essays, entire essays, in "text speak." Maybe my brain is on another echelon, but I have enough trouble as it is reading the one to two sentences that people often type as their FaceBook statuses in text speak. To read an entire essay, which I should hope my friend does not, is another threat to my sanity entirely. This is where we delve into the slight possibility that schools and workplaces might even accept this drivel as standard.

If you are with me at all on this, you might think to yourself that that possibility is so slight it is practically non-existent. To that, I point out to you that a quick glance at the writings of our ancestors (or yours; I was born in a different country) will reveal that nobody wrote like we do during the time of the founding of our country. Admittedly, the most popular works were awfully romanticized in their English use, and there definitely were those who spoke like a scullery maid, but you have to realize the Constitution was written in what people then would consider English. As much as I love this language and all it has to offer, that document is Greek to me. Yes, I can grasp what is written, but it just does not read as easily to me as writings of contemporary society. I can read today's legal jargon with a lot less stumbling than I could read The Scarlet Letter (which is a verbose piece of garbage anyway).

More or less, English is changing, and the majority influences its direction. So my fear is that 100 years from now, text speak will become the norm. On top of that, I can't imagine what the literati will be speaking. I am only assuaged in that I am sure that form of "evolution," if you will, will not occur for quite some time and ideally after I'm dead. In the meantime, I attempt to correct and I metaphorically bring my red pen to every forum, but are my corrections followed by asterisks really making a difference? If all of us jumped on the grammar Nazi boat, do we have the power to change the flow of language? I am severely doubtful. Furthermore, I know the problem is present in other languages, too, though I do not know to what extent. At the very least, it is bad spelling.

As a little aside, I do wonder if the situation is poor at all in Hebrew, my birth country's language. Written Hebrew is comprised generally of consonants, and vowels are not placed unless there is a need for that sort of differentiation. Some consonants stand to represent possible vowel sounds, but that's it. For example, if we were to apply it to English, the sentence, "David cooks an omelette," would be written, "Dvd cuks an omlt," where vowels in that sentence demonstrate where there would be some indicator of the correct vowel sound for that word. The difference, which I cannot demonstrate well is that switching around letters in Hebrew, which would be just a typographical error in English resulting in a fairly recognizable word still, actually results in completely different words being written. Hebrew is dependent on the order in which the consonants are written, so I'd like to believe even an imbecile in Israel would notice that he just typed the wrong word entirely. I can't prove any of this without going and looking, but it is a curiosity.

Meanwhile, keep your red pen handy.

Let's Get Clean

This, my soon-to-be friends, is my first blog in a million years. I had a blog on a different site starting probably from before the term, "blog" came into fruition. So it begs the question: Why would I start a blog on a new service when I currently have one?

1. Just like shedding your fat pants when you lose a lot of weight, I choose to shed the weight of my previous blog. I just don't feel that the bulk of my life from 2001 until sometime last year is of any importance anymore, and I certainly don't want to read about it anymore. That being said, clearly if there's something relevant, I will mention it here. It goes without saying. I will make a firm effort not to be esoteric here. If there is something worth knowing, and it's not visible in the last few posts, I will refer to it specifically and clearly or link to the post.
2. Blogger is owned by Google. My new phone is a Droid. I only do web searches using Google. My email service is provided by GMail. If you're not noticing an obvious trend here, I don't know how I can explain it. There's a certain lifestyle, one that one is not born with, that I choose to completely immerse myself in.
3. I have different goals with this blog. Whether or not it becomes famous and I dye my hair pink and ask Carrie Prejean about her views on "opposite marriage," I would like a more accessible blog this time around. I want to write with careful consideration of the random reader. My previous blog was very personal and very emotional, and though it was completely public, it contains a lot of garbage that only my "friends" at the time could understand the extent of it. First of all, I will not blog if all I have to say can be summed up in a FaceBook status. I hope I will have a nice flow of things to say or mention from my life, but it will not devolve into an amalgum of posts that make me and everyone involved look like whiny teenagers. Note: I don't plan for every blog to be totally insightful, but if I don't have some sort of narrative to give, it's probably not worth mentioning.

I've reached the standard list size of three items, so I'll leave it at that. I won't go into explaining everything "about me" now. You will learn all there is to know simply by reading, which is another goal (ha, four). I will apologize if a lot of my philosophies will be inspired and/or exposed by talking about my job, but when you work full-time, I think it goes hand in hand. If anything, you may walk away learning why I find something that sounds incredibly boring on paper so fascinating in actuality.

This blog has become obnoxious enough. Enjoy my mission statement until something else of value is excreted.