most of the time, I hate living in America

but not all the time...From International Herald Tribune:

"China encourages Internet use for business and education, but tries to block access to material deemed obscene or politically dangerous.

It has the world's second-biggest Internet user population after the United States, with 111 million people online.

China launched a campaign in February to "purify the environment" of the Internet and mobile communications, Xinhua said.

The government will step up research on monitoring technology and issue "admittance standards" for blogs, the report said, without giving details."


I'm sure we'll be here someday, but for now at least, it's nice. Mock-democracy beats no-democracy, i suppose...

i hope this is random

graph of searched for coordinates yields images...

makes me think of lain

car

the boredom was so thick last night we ended up watching a cat bat around a mouse in the middle of lagrange avenue.

a speeding car came at them both with no signs of slowing; we all gasped; the mouse suddenly ran into the other lane and the cat, of course, leaped after it to claw at it, thus escaping the car by a fraction of a second.

the mouse saved the cat.

ha.

if (school==over){dance();}

I'm free

a college freshman now

only took 13 years

food for thought

I killed myself yesterday. He's dead, lying in a lumpy ziploc bag on the washstand, asking to be sent to balding cancer patients.

I cut all my hair off, my head is shaved, and I feel reborn. I'm not stuck to some pseudo hippie ideal any longer, I've entered the halls of pure anonymity and am more free than I've ever been. Nonconformity is a delusion. Conformity is freedom. To be part of a faceless mass enables one to be anything in both thought and action. To strive to be different, one becomes a slave to an ideal. To a reaction. I have a perfectly average body, now something i've never had before. I blend in. My mind can take any shape it pleases since its physical companion is now, essentially, a nonentity. I don't have to live up to my look. I don't have to live up to anything. I am free to be me; who is me will never be determined, as it will be consistently fluctuating. I have ended the static Me and invented the dynamic Me. Fitting, since high school is nearly dead. I am a blank slate. I want to grin, open my eyes, and simply exist.

I think i'm taking this a little too seriously (i guess i needed philosophical justification for cutting all my hair off)...i actually cut it off because i didn't want an inch of thick dark hair on the back of my neck when i'm hiking for three weeks straight...

flickr

i have the flickr recent photos feed on my google personalized homepage. i tend to look past landscapes and objects and almost always notice pictures of people close to my age.

I stare at them and go through entire albums drinking up pictures of people at school/uni, at parties, on vacation. Doing little day to day things, enjoying themselves, talking, drinking. They might be from Europe or somewhere in the U.S., it never matters. But I pore over each one until I hit the end of an album.

These people probably put albums up for friends/family and don't expect strangers to be peering at them. I guess that's why I like them, they're honest. I live vicariously through every pictured social interaction, feel the love, the inebriation. there's no stage setting, i'm not an audience when i become some kind of flickr pseudo-voyeur. i'm just a fly on the wall.

i love pictures of banal, small things. grand images full of poise and theatrics bore me. they're sterile, they can only approximate spontaneity.

i crave the insipid and hungrily snatch it up whenever it graces my recent-photo stream like an addict scrambling for pills...

composure

I was walking to my car, from the coffehouse, down towards the corner of raymond & lagrange. I saw this tiny, familiar figure walking briskly out from behind the bank across the street. I use the word briskly loosely; he did not have the "pep" I'd typically associate with the word, but his legs were moving quickly. He was short, considerably shorter than me, and had a small thin frame. This was magnified by the oversized suit he wore, which he must have found second hand somewhere. It was pure white (or looked to be from my vantage point) and fit him poorly. He looked like a mouse peeking out from under a t-shirt before being stomped on by something or other.

He always had this timid look about him, yet every accesory he sported seemed to try and contradict this. The suit, for one. For two, the cigarette that he clenched firmly in the center of his mouth. It looked out of place, there, a tiny gray stub poking out like a whisker.

He's screaming silently for attention. I see him frequently at the coffehouse...He always wants conversation, but when he gets it, he just backs off with fear in his eyes. Every inch of him cries loneliness, and the second it might be dissipated, he eagerly grasps it again. It's the only thing making him solid.

His nearness to people is the nearness of planets (cred. H.M.).

back

i dropped the raft, watched it float away

donno which side i'm on

sleep