I'm too scared to write anything. See you when semester 1 starts.

On history. (sober)

I am secretly in love with history. I have never studied history, and I think I don't want to. I'll let you know why. But first, what is history? Where do you draw the line between what we were and what we are now. Family anecdotes are not historical, but someone, for example, the queen, her family anecdotes would be considered historical. So do we discount things that seem un-momentous? That would require that it was known what would end up being important. We don't. Document everything? Nothing, then rely on what we can find out after the fact? What would the Kennedy Assassination have been if Lee Harvey Oswald had twitter?

So I think a lot about history. And what history we'll have left over. And what will be considered historical. I mean shit, what are we doing over-creating and over-depicting. I never understood what it meant for the universe to be really infinite until I looked into peoples words and ideas, and saw it all there. Even unconscious animals and plants are capable of creation and recreation, the molten earth rocks and rivers all change the world. That's infinite.

That means we're changing everything, and making history by doing nothing, something, anything we have to. Does that make evolution historical, or our life, or is history just documenting evolution? Aaron would tell me I was over-dramatizing, being hysterical, or just looking for something that isn't there. But I feel like things just bleed into each other. Sometimes I do something and feel like it's historical, for me, when I learned this, or when I knew I felt something for the first time. That's enough for me. And sometimes I'll learn something about world history and think "this is my history too, I wouldn't know what I know, be where I am without this".

I hope there's nothing truly inconsequential. When this global warming things really starts to make people feel uncomfortable (what Aaron once told me was what most people feared most) they'll realize that nothing you do can be without consequence. I'm quite vindictive. I hope there will be retribution, unlikely but I'm impassioned by the idea of it. Sadistic, really. Anyway, I want to think about history. I want to be immersed in history, but I'm too attached to my own history-in-the-making. My interest in history is tactile and there's no part of my mind that knows "history" but it is there alongside everything I know. History makes the world vast and wonderful. And I guess that's all I know.

On milk.

When I was house-sitting in Ixelles the one thing that really struck me is how difficult it was to get fresh milk. Cafes, restaurants and supermarkets all had exclusively UHT milk. If you don't know the scale of milk/quality I'll lay it out for you: milk -fresh- is "unhomogenized" in Australia you need a special certificate to supply milk unhomogenized because it's supposed to be more stable when homogenized, which is just blending the milk with the cream. There's also pasteurization, which is mandatory here, which is an interesting process, developed by a frenchman to preserve wine (duh).

The scale is pretty simple, the more you do to milk (except chill it) the worse it will likely taste. And there on the far end of the scale, verging on spoiled milk, is UHT. Ultra heat-treated milk has an undefinable taste almost as though someone made milk from entirely non-milk-based parts and just hoped for the best. Anyway, it was worth it when I got to Scotland and unhomogenized fresh milk was standard.

In Australia I think it's a point of heavy contention. Our environment can't really support cattle on such a huge scale, and I can see that even countries like Belgium with rolling greens hills find it more economical to produce UHT. Always an avid futurist I think a lot about what we will have to sacrifice and change to make it through the storm we've brought upon outselves. I think I can handle whatever comes up, and make the right choices environmentally but; where am I going to get my milk?

On topic. (a paragraph)

I've realized reading my last post that despite almost knowing how to comfortably write a paragraph, definitely a necessity in professional writing, I still have no grasp of solitary topics. This is glaringly obvious if you read some of my essays from college and highschool. It is difficult, perhaps impossible for me to write any amount on a single topic without; changing tack somewhere, pointless theoretical referencing or complicated metaphorical ramblings. This is something I hope to overcome in the next few weeks, when I will commences a series of writings on a single literal subject (as I attempted to do some weeks ago with my paragraph on swans, a disaster) and start tonight with a short on my own inability to stay on-topic.

My initial response to the subject of "topic" is to examine my older writings intended to be "on topic". I'm reading through my Dramatic comedy essay. Simple enough in theory but my first paragraph is cloudy and pointless padded with irrelevant points and expressions. It's almost stream of consciousness, using rhythmatic sequences of beats and offbeats, rhymes and tone to create the sound of a paragraph without any of the necessary points. I'm actually having problems finding a better piece to use as an example but I seem to have written two essays in the last eighteen months, and they both blow. I must've written most of my essays the morning before they were due, printed them in the school library and then destroyed them permanently. Which seems a little extreme. I think I had really forgotten how un-academic I was.

(It took me so long to write that, and I think it might all be gibberish AND I'm also reading three things at the moment, proof that I can't focus on one thing for more than three minutes (or equivalent local value))

I meant to write another paragraph about "topic', but then I read Johnny Cashs' wikipedia article.

Tune in later this week for: More Than A Paragraph About Something!

I think I need to have a joint then work on writing a decent post here. I would like to write about Christmas, but I don't really know anything about it. I only vaguely even know why Jesus being born is a big deal. Well, scratch that. What I don't know is why people insist that the BIRTH of person is worthy of a celebration. It seems like accomplishment should be celebrated. Birth is only an accomplishment. So maybe Christmas should be a celebration of a virgin giving birth in a barn with of a horde of useless men and saints and shi surrounding her. THAT'S a christmas miracle.

Let me go get that joint... I was talking to Aaron about this. It seems we smoke too much. I don't doubt it.

I want it to be that every time I want to go one facebook I accidentally get redirected here. Nothing interesting has happened since Lindsay and I had a disussion about Apocalypse now and T.S. Eliot (what?!).

Dear America, does it make you cringe to know that every state law overrides and undermines your precious fucking constitution? Because, right now, you might as well not even have one. It's like a debating point or something, but you would have to go to the Supreme Court to have it count towards anything.

I found out the other day that part of the New Order involved rights of the consumer as a seperate entity from the citizen. I never considered this but theoretically you could have people that contribute nothing to society beside money. And with such a huge population it's inconceivable that everyone actually has something useful to do with their life besides buy shit. Oh wait, that might have already happened. I have such outmoded ideas about society (Socialism! ahahahahahhaha) that I'm constantly being outraged about the possibility of things happening that have already happened. Bright side? I never get bored of politics.

I voted the other day for the guy who wrote Affluenza, if you can find it I suggest you read it. By Dr. Clive Hamilton.

Anyway, the results aren't back yet but my sources (Crickey!) (that's a news source here (yeah it sounds bad, but it's damn good journalism)) suggest preferential voting might tip it in favour of the Greens. Do you have preferential voting in America? The system of "democracy" America subscribes to seems to suggest if the party you vote for doesn't get elected yoiu are a LOSER and have to suffer with a perty you (and most other people) hate. I think America has an alternate ssytem where you also get to vote in the "primaries"(?) on the person in the party you DON'T support but you would hate to see running the show the LEAST. What the fuck kind of democracy is that?

When I'm president I'm to shake all that shit up. And I want to be. I just gotta get me into Harvard...

One step at a time (cackling)...

This is more of the same.

When I had to write essays regularly (almost a year ago now) I would write out a skeletal winding mess of ideas, then come back to it every day to try and make some of these ideas coherent. What I usually ended up with would be much like yesterday's post, several seemingly unrelated ideas, and I would have to pull them together. Sometimes it worked and sometimes it didn't.

I've been thinking about the computer thing a lot. But the biggest problem I had writing essays for school was that I really hated writing a polished piece all in a little two dimensional box. Before I had my blogs I would write everything on unlined scrap paper, draw diagrams and pictures to sort things out. I'm hardly proficient enough at programming (or proficient at all) to write on a computer how I write by hand. So I figured all I needed to do was learn to write "my way" on a computer, something that's always alluded me. And so I have "Write Now" so I can write whatever I'm pondering, on a computer and try to learn how to make my online research, my live research and my useless ideas come together on a screen.

The problem for me though may in fact be the screen, the low resolution, the slight delay, trying to type as fast as I think, though I'm getting there. Also I write a lot at night, and the glow off my computer screen burns my eyes at about two or three in the morning when I should be sleeping. I could never write, watch movies, talk to people so easily in bed, and I think it's a huge problem. Like most of my mothers side of the family, especially the women, I enjoy being in bed. We've got a bed culture thing happening that I'm continuing the grand tradition of. I also hate chairs and tables, so it all points in one direction: I hate to learn to love and live with my lap-top.

What I was saying the other day about 2D and low res is probably most applicable to my generation. Used to watching bad quality subs and dubs of movies and tv. I have internet TV primarily as my aerial is in some sort of trade embargo with my TV so I've been watching everything on my laptop (impossibly light half kilo or so).

I am a sci-fi junkie. I love speculation and cynicism. Bot of which are served with a heavy hand in science and speculative fiction. Not to mention my love of robots and space. I'm plagued with the late eighties dream that we could have entire virtual worlds a la Lain or to a greater extent The Matrix (which I must've seen before I was ten). i just google searched an noticed that The Matrix has actually sunken into obscurity.

In thisty years we'll understand that The Matrix was to technology what Plan 9 was to space exploration.

More later.