Allow me to rant here for a moment.

I read a story just a few minutes ago which infuriates me to a level like only political dumbassery could.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090813/ap_on_go_co/us_health_care_end_of_life_2

Blumenauer said the controversy [over the healthcare bill's "death panels"] was helping Democrats in a “perverse way.”

By continuing to spread a widely refuted claim, Republican critics are undercutting their own credibility, he said. The controversy has drawn more attention to the original proposal, which passed largely unnoticed when a health overhaul was approved by three House committees.

Blumenauer, if I may address you personally, I appreciate you and your views on political discourse. Some of my best friends are intelligent conservatives and I enjoy debating with them immensely. I believe that proper debate is the only way to arrive at the most equitable solution in almost any given situation.

However, republican critics are not interested in their own credibility. They’re not worried about the credibility of their statements; they’re not worried about the credibility of their political party; they’re not worried about the state of political discourse in this country. The only thing these conservative commentators (and by “these conservative commentators” I mean the legions of conservatives who march around bearing a banner for Fox News) are interested in is riling up the largest number of people they can possibly rile up.

Look at the place in the bill that has caused all this controversy. The following paragraphs describe the “advanced planning consultation” which the bill says it will cover every 5 years for citizens who qualify. Remember, these meetings are completely voluntary. Let’s see what these consultations will cover.

(A) An explanation by the practitioner of advance care planning, including key questions and considerations, important steps, and suggested people to talk to.

(B) An explanation by the practitioner of advance directives, including living wills and durable powers of attorney, and their uses.

(C) An explanation by the practitioner of the role and responsibilities of a health care proxy.

(D) The provision by the practitioner of a list of national and State-specific resources to assist consumers and their families with advance care planning, including the national toll-free hotline, the advance care planning clearinghouses, and State legal service organizations (including those funded through the Older Americans Act of 1965).

(E) An explanation by the practitioner of the continuum of end-of-life services and supports available, including palliative care and hospice, and benefits for such services and supports that are available under this title.

It seems as though the entire section on advanced care planning describes nothing but informational medical sessions for older citizens.

This has been pointed out time and time again. I would like to give conservatives credit enough to assume that the ones railing against the bill have actually read it. I can only then assume that the only reason Palin and her ilk are spreading such misinformation is malicious intent.

The reason I get so riled up about these things is because it completely floors me that organizations such as Fox News and Freedomworks have goals that involve nothing but whipping large numbers of blissfully ignorant Americans into a frenzy that tears our country further apart among party lines.

I’m disgusted.

Welp, I actually managed to get a decent amount of stuff done today.

I upgraded the linux install on my laptop to the 64-bit version of Ubuntu 9.04, and so far it’s working out really well. I’ve been playing with the keyboard layouts, and I’m enjoying the international layout quite a bit. For example, I didn’t know there was a need for a character ś. Or ḿ. Or ĺ (that’s an L with an accent, for those of you playing the home game). If someone forced me to guess which language used consonants with accents over the letters, I’d probably say Vietnamese. Maybe I should look it up.

Just did. Turns out it’s Polish. Among others. I fail hardcore.

I’m bored. Updating my blog when I have nothing of value to say makes me feel like this guy. Maybe I should just call it a night.

So, I’ve mentioned this to a few people over the past few weeks, but for those of you to whom I have not, I’ve been dealing with some depression-like symptoms.

I’m not saying I suffer from depression. Much of what I’m feeling right now, I’m sure, has to do with the fact that I’m stuck here at home, away from school and friends, with nothing to do and no car. I’m sure that contributes more than anything else, really.

I’ve seen a therapist about this situation, and his proposed solution is for me to get out more. To be sure, it’s something I need to do. It’s a problem I’ve always had, and he’s helped me realize that the problem I have isn’t necessarily that I’m too much into video games. It’s more that I use things like video games as an escape.

But that doesn’t change the fact that I have still had this overwhelming lethargy and inability to motivate myself to actually do anything. That doesn’t necessarily mean hang out with friends. I enjoy writing, and this blog is my only outlet for that. You can see by the calendar, then, that I really haven’t been writing that often. And when I do write, it’s really just to complain about something (like right now).

I love programming and writing and composing music. However, when I open an IDE or a word processing program or Sibelius, I just end up staring blankly at the screen. Not only do I have no motivation to do the things I love, but it seems that any semblance of inspiration has been chased out of my brain by this wave of indifference.

Today, I became fed up with it all. I began to look back through my life and to look for anything that could be considered a constant. The only thing I found was, of course, music. As long as I live, music will always be a huge part of my life. But how could I use that to get myself out of this slump?

I play trumpet, obviously. But after all these years, practicing has become a chore. I still enjoy playing with other people, especially jazz, but playing by myself is really just boring. The only reason I do it anymore is to keep my muscles in some semblance of shape.

Hmm. That reminds me. I need to practice today.

But if I can’t derive pleasure out of trumpet, and I have no motivation or inspiration to compose, and I don’t have access to a piano (or even a remote level of aptitude for the instrument), what could I do?

So I went on eBay and bought myself a ukulele.

It came after I realized a few simple truths.

1. Ukuleles are ridiculously cheap (versus other instruments, of course).
2. I have been informed that they are easy to learn (even easier, I would guess, for someone with an extensive music theory background).
3. It’s impossible to listen to a ukulele and not feel better about life.

Once I had bought it, I realized I couldn’t remember the last time it was that I bought something random just to make myself happy. I’m happier right now just having done it, and I’m bugging my friends to tell them about my impulse buy.

I’ll update with pictures when the instrument arrives!

I don’t really have anything of value to write, but I really feel like writing. So write I shall, even if it’s about something that I’m utterly sick of talking about!

I am referring to, of course, the apartment situation for next year. For those of you who don’t know about this clusterfuck of a situation, I’ll go ahead and give a brief synopsis. We had a four-person apartment last year, which worked out well, and then Ed graduated, leaving us with three people. The people we chose to be our fourth roommates all decided to do different things, but not until after we had signed a “renewal” form thing. The renewal form only really counts if we are extending the current lease, which we thought we were. But since we had to add someone else to the apartment, we actually just needed to sit down and sign a completely new lease for the same apartment.

We didn’t do that, of course, because by the time we realized we needed to make a new lease we knew we only had three people. Instead, we went to the office, explained the situation, and requested a three-person apartment.

Well, they refuse to rent us a three-person apartment until the four-person we were in last year is rented to other people. They have people interested, but they haven’t come in to sign the lease, so as of today, Thursday, June 25, we have no apartment next year.

My plan is thus: I’m going to have to go up to Slippery Rock eventually this summer to make appointments with my advisor and the head of the department and the dean concerning transferring these calculus credits to SRU, so when I do that I’m going to go to the office and explain that there is no way I will be able to afford living with only two other people in a four-person apartment; that I won’t be able to afford splitting rent for four people three ways. Therefore, I will not be living in a four-person apartment.

So their options are: 1) Rent us the three-person apartment and make money, or 2) We will rent another three-person apartment with a different company (we looked into it and there are some still available, though they are in a slightly less convenient location). We never signed a lease, and they told us that the renewal form we signed doesn’t even matter if we had to add someone to the lease. Legally, I don’t think they have any way to force us to pay rent for an empty apartment, as that would be utterly absurd.

I’m just sick of this treatment, and I’m going to go up and tell them so.

I just needed a reason to use the word “schism.”

I created another blog. I’m not going to be using it yet, and for all my current blogging needs (which… you know, don’t exist), this blog will be the target of my verbose rants. However, that blog is specifically targetted at my aims of international travel. As time draws nearer and nearer to the outset of my adventure into the Orient, I’m gonna be using that blog more and more until it becomes my new main blog.

However, I’m gonna try to keep depressing shit out of that one, so I’ll keep this one in the event that I need to rant about something that people don’t want to freaking hear about.

So if you are one of the poor souls who actually reads this blog, might want to keep your eye on that one too. I’ll be updating it with my progress of applying to the JET Programme over the coming school year.

In unrelated news, I’m considering doing NaNoWriMo again this year. But this year, you know.. actually finishing it.

I think I’m gonna go to bed.

…is awesome.

Seriously. A few weeks ago, we performed with a Mr. Kurt Elling, a jazz vocalist, philosopher, poet, and all-around incredible guy. It was one of the best performance experiences I’ve ever had. And then just today, we performed for a bunch of high schoolers in the big auditorium with none other than Michael Philip Mossman. You may not know who he is, but within the jazz community, he’s an icon. I’m sure everyone in any sort of big band has played at least one of his arrangements or compositions.

He’s also, though,  a fantastic trumpet player, and gave the brass players from SRU a great masterclass on brass playing that was incredibly insightful. I generally don’t get much out of masterclass-style presentations; they annoy and bore me more than anything, because they’re always about “use more air” and “listen to music more” and “think about articulation.” Don’t get me wrong, those are all incredibly important subjects, but I think that, especially at a college level, people know these things already. Subjects like those seem to me like cop-outs and I find that I really hate masterclasses like that.

Michael’s masterclass covered some of the basics, but he did it in a way that really made sense to me. His concept of things like practice and tone production really struck a chord (ha ha) with me. And I know now that whenever I play from now on I’ll be thinking about the things he said today. He then moved on to more “high-level” subjects like motivation for playing and creating energy with the way that you play.

I guess it wouldn’t have been so impressive to me if he hadn’t demonstrated these things to us himself. Many times when someone gives a masterclass when they play, they demonstrate the dumbest stuff that really doesn’t inspire us. For example, they’ll talk about using air, and then demonstrate this by playing a note using a tiny pinched embouchre, and then the same note with a huge sound and lots of air, and then say “see the difference?” Well, yeah, we see the difference, but it doesn’t mean anything. It’s an obvious difference and we’ve all heard it a million times before.

But the thing that set Mossman apart from others was that he was actually able to use less air and sound good, as a demonstration. That’s a lot of people’s problem, myself included. We use less air than we should and rely more on chops, which works until you have to play higher and louder and end up cramming the horn into your face and potentially doing damage to yourself. He demonstrated the difference in these two playing styles most expertly and I found it to be a great help in my quest to not suck at trumpet fundamentals so much.

The concert tonight really drove it home, too. He soloed a lot and sounded like no less than one million U.S. dollars. I wish I could sound like that someday. And from the way he was talking to us, I start to believe… that maybe I can.

Everyone ready to get wild and crazy for spring break?

Yeah, me neither.

I can’t talk for long. I’m in bed and it’s totally lights out. I just haven’t written in a while and I felt it was my duty to write a small entry to let all zero of you know that I am indeed still alive.

Also, I heard some very interesting eternal-damnation-related news! Apparently the Vatican has announced seven additional deadly sins, these being of a more “social” variety. They are as follows:

1. “Bioethical” violations such as birth control
2. “Morally dubious” experiments such as stem cell research
3. Drug abuse
4. Polluting the environment
5. Contributing to widening the divide between rich and poor
6. Excessive wealth
7. Creating poverty

First of all, it looks like they ran out of ideas after sin 5. You could list 6 and 7 under 5 and no one would really bat an eyelash. I guess they just wanted to set up a sequel to that Se7en movie. Four14en perhaps?

“Bioethical” violations such as birth control? That’s a difficult one to touch. Obviously the church is against the whole premarital sex thing, but if these new-and-improved sins are meant for a more “modern” world, is it really necessary to go so far as to turn the use of birth control–including the pill which many women use to regulate their cycles–into one of the social deadly sins? It seems to me that if people take this seriously (which we all know that they won’t) this would effect a sharp increase in the numbers of unplanned teenage pregnancies, leading to situations where either children are shuffled through the foster system or simply saddled with a life of incredible hardship with parents who are incapable of parenting. But maybe I just lack the bishop credentials that allow one to see the inherent evil in trying to reduce the occurrences of situations like these.

“Morally dubious” is such a subjective phrase that it’s almost humorous. My favorite part about this particular social sin is the quote from the Bloomberg link above, from Bishop Gianfranco Giratti:

“You offend God not only by stealing, taking the Lord’s name in vain or coveting your neighbor’s wife, but also by wrecking the environment, carrying out morally debatable experiments that manipulate DNA or harm embryos.”

Right. That’s a very good point. If God wanted us to debate morals, he would have given us brains and minds capable of comprehending abstract concepts like morality.

Drug abuse and polluting the environment, huh. I guess I can’t say anything about these. I’m not against most drugs but if the Vatican is, I guess that’s they’re perogative. I don’t really see the point of making these official damnation-worthy sins, but hey, what do I know?

Finally, the Vatican is putting everyone on Earth who happens to live in a capitalist society in a very awkward situation. Working hard and earning money violates sins 5, 6, AND 7 on the social-sin-o-meter. Really, I can only parse this two ways: first, perhaps it’s the fact that the church is telling us it’s a sin to make money, which I find to be unlikely, or secondly, perhaps the church is telling us that God finds it offensive that we don’t give all of our hard-earned cash to the poor. I guess that would mean that God’s a commie. Interesting.

Maybe it’s the fact that I’m not Catholic, but I just don’t understand why Catholics even listen to this stuff anymore. What happened to the days when the ten commandments and the original 7 deadly sins were enough? Honestly, they’re timeless. Plus, a lot of these social sins fall into these predefined categories already. Off the top of my head:

• The Sin of Making Money and Not Giving It All to Poor People could fall into gluttony or the “you shall have no other gods before me” commandment
• The Sin of Snorting Crack and Other Fun Activities That God Hates Apparently is also a prime candidate for gluttony
• The Sin of Making Sure Children are Brought Up in a Properly Planned Environment is dicey, but I’m sure you can spin it to sound bad enough to be included with “thou shalt not kill”
• The Sin of Tossing Your Twinkie Wrappers Out the Car Window on the Interstate definitely falls into the “sloth” category

I’m just making these up as I go, but I just can’t see why we need seven additional one-way tickets to hell when we’ve had dozens of them sitting right here in front of us being ignored for so long. Do we really need seven more rules to feel guilty about completely ignoring?

Catholic church, stop trying so hard. Please.

So, I haven’t been writing very often in this blog. And it’s not really like anyone cares, so I don’t feel too badly about it, but I miss having something to update every once in a while. So I’ll just write a bunch in this entry and hope I cover everything.

How’s the summer been so far? Well, I guess the first order of business is… well… business. I’ve been working every day, every meal, for almost the entire summer. I’ve made a decent bit of money and put it all into a savings account I opened with ING Direct because of their not-bad APY. So while I have some decent interest being earned in a savings account, I’m still pretty much broke on an everyday basis, which is nothing new for me.

The job itself isn’t so bad. I take my Japanese study materials along for the ride (particularly An Integrated Approach to Intermediate Japanese and my newest purchase, A Guide to Remembering Japanese Characters, both of which I love dearly) so I’ve been studying pretty much every day. I can’t see very much improvement in myself, but I’m hoping that’s simply because it’s too gradual for me to notice.

And speaking of jobs, I think I might have a job for the upcoming school year. I went in and talked to the lady in charge of the Language Lab on campus, and she was very impressed with me. I’d really enjoy a job in the LL, because it’s usually pretty quiet there and they have some decent language-learning materials that will help me out on my totally awesome never-ending quest of awesome.

I’m such a nerd. Oh, and speaking of, she was also very happy that I am a Comp Sci major because she and her staff always need help with figuring out these newfangled computer things. I assume it’s problems like “Where’s the start menu?” and “Where is the power button?” and “Does it really need to be plugged in the whole time I’m using it?” but hey, if I’m getting paid I’m getting paid. I’ll have to email her about that soon to see if I have the job or not. Because if not I’m gonna have to find a job elsewhere like Giant Eagle.

What else? Nothing much I reckon. This summer has been possibly one of the most boring I’ve had, since almost everyone I even know is off making something of their lives in Spain and England and Colorado and on a bus traveling around the States. And here I am, like a dumbshit, making money. What a sap I am.

I’ve started swearing more. I mean, I’ve always had a filthy mouth but now I’m beginning to realize that it’s less of a big deal than I had previously thought. I’ve always maintained that people need to stop being so easy to offend all the time and have made it another one of my self-righteous crusades against society as a whole. Fun stuff.

Tired.

It may be a little early for an official State of the Summer, but I had no idea what else to call this entry because really it’s just going to be one of my patented rambling entries wherein I say nothing even remotely interesting. I think I need to start naming the entries after I write them, but when I do that I tend to forget to name entries. Oh well.

Okay, first thing’s first. My job has been going well so far. I’m working as a delivery boy (because Fry made it look so glamorous) for a small catering-like service in the area. It’s pretty easy work and it pays pretty well too. It’s minimum wage, but I get to keep all my tips and I get a buck per delivery to help out with gas. The way I look at it is that I’m being paid more than someone waiting tables would, but at the same time, I have to pay for my own gas. Still, unless I have a delivery up in Zelie (like I did on Thursday) the job doesn’t require really long trips. It makes it better that I have Franklin road that allows me to avoid Route 19 and all its stoplights and traffic.

Thursday was the first day where I was driving all by myself (technically my first day of actual work was Tuesday but I had someone in the car with me to help me out and explain the general ways of doing stuff to me, which, looking back, was a really good thing, because Tuesday was the busiest day the company ever had, and had I been by myself I would have probably driven myself off a cliff rather than deal with all that stress; though I think I could probably handle it myself at this point–just at that point it was a little much for me). Also, that was a huge parenthetical note. I like it, though, so it’ll probably stay.

I’ve been thinking about (and studying of course) foreign languages recently. I know I want to be one of those insane people who know a bunch of languages, and from what I’ve read online and from people like Barry Farber who wrote a very entertaining book called “How to Learn Any Language,” learning languages gets progressively easier as you learn more of them. So I’ve been thinking and compiling mental lists of the languages that I’d really like to learn. Obviously I’m not going to try them all at once, but I have a good number of years ahead of me so I might as well get an idea of what my linguistic plan should be.

• Japanese – Obviously. At the moment and for the foreseeable future it’s my top priority, for reasons I’ve already gone over in this blog. I’m planning on going to Japan, I want to become a translator (or possibly an interpreter if I get good enough; who knows?), and possibly work in the game industry. I’ve decided that it’s my prerogative whether or not I want to become a stuffy adult or just a big ol’ kid, and I’ve firmly settled on the latter. I’m going to be playing video games forever, and watching cartoons forever, and reading comics forever, and not knowing Japanese is going to shut out much of those genres as a possibility. So I guess the real reason I want to learn Japanese is a rather selfish one. Other than the fact, of course, that I find it to just be my favorite language: the writing system is beautiful, the pronunciation is not hard, it sounds pretty cool when spoken, and when you either speak or write it in front of people who don’t know the language, it sounds completely arcane and super impressive.
• Spanish – Spanish is spoken by a very large number of people in Europe, so if I ever live there (which I’d certainly like to do if the opportunity ever presents itself) it would be a very useful language to know. Not to mention that Spanish is being spoken more and more in the United States, what with Mexico being right there and all, and it just seems extremely useful. I like it as an actual language as well, though. Like Japanese, it’s pretty easy to pronounce, and for the most part the whole language is almost phonetically spelled. There are hard and fast rules for pronunciation and if a word violates them then it’s notated with an accent. The downsides to this language include the fact that there are a large quantity of irregular verbs (which is very much unlike Japanese) which just makes for a lot of stuff to memorize. Still, it seems doable and a lot easier to learn than Japanese due to the fact that the grammar is a lot more similar to English.
• Dutch – I… don’t really have a good reason for wanting to learn this language. I think every single word of this language looks hilarious and awesome while written, and the spoken language sounds exactly the same. The language isn’t spoken by as many people as, say, German, but if it becomes an issue, knowing Dutch will help me out a LOT in the event that I need to learn German.
• Arabic – This one is on my list because of the writing system. I think it looks absolutely beautiful. Arabic script has to be my favorite script that I’ve ever seen. I bought a book a long time ago on the Arabic alphabet, because even though I had no intention of learning the language, I really wanted to be able to write it. I learned it but then quickly forgot the majority of it. Maybe I should brush up at some point. I remember seeing the book at college before I came home but it’s probably lost somewhere now. In any case, a huge upside to this language is that it’s spoken by a bunch of people and that it has huge cultural (or, well, political I guess) value in today’s time. If I do end up becoming one of “those types” that learn a bunch of languages, knowing Arabic will open up opportunities to really make the most of an interpreting gig. Maybe working for the government, I don’t know.

Those are the main ones that I can think of. I know those aren’t a lot, but there are a bunch of languages that are very similar to the ones listed that would probably be facilitated by knowledge of these, such as Italian, German, and French.

Honestly though, even though I desperately want to be one of those types, I really doubt my ability to teach myself those languages. I really need another method of learning languages. Obviously, I’d love to just go to these countries and work the “total immersion” method, like I’ll be doing for Japanese. But for the other ones, particularly Arabic, that seems slightly less than feasible. Money-wise for the European countries, and… I don’t even know for Arabic. I don’t really have an interest in actually going to a place like Egypt or Saudi Arabia. Maybe for about a year or so, but I certainly wouldn’t want to live there.

In any case, those are the ones that I’d eventually like to learn. If I can get work translating that doesn’t include going to an office every day (i.e. contract work) then I think it might be possible to live over in Europe and just absorb a bunch of languages, and as I do, pick up translation work for those languages as well.

But that’s looking pretty far into the future. At the moment I’m still going to focus on Japanese (and Spanish, now, I guess) and do the Japan thing. After that, I’ll figure it out as it comes!