By request.

It's writing essays while sick. Really boosts the writing skills and all that, and they don't turn out horrible at all. Not at all. I'm predicting a C, but I sure as hell don't want to rewrite it and I'm hoping the incompetence of the other students will make it look better by comparison.

More TF2 instead.

A 9:00 AM, 4 hour math class on Saturday?

HELL YEAH, SIGN ME UP!

I might as well get a bunch of facial piercings and tattoos of bats and demons while I'm at it. I can stand in a dimly lit room along with about seven or eight other people wearing dark clothing and staring at a man hanging by hooks from the ceiling, desperately awaiting my turn. I'll show those wimps just how much tensile strength my skin has.

I predict many mornings waking up and cursing every person who has ever lived. It'll be great.

Conclusion

So in the end, I'm led to believe that my major at the moment isn't terribly important. Very few people I'm in touch with have a clear-cut path to their future profession, so I don't see why I should worry about whether or not I'm going to end up filing papers in a cramped, poorly lit cubicle in the corner of an insurance firm HQ building. School has been largely uninspiring, but I chalk it up to not latching onto a specific interest yet. Everyone has the feeling that if they don't have a crystal clear view of the horizon everything will go horribly awry, so they panic and become business majors in the hope of becoming a regional assistant manager. I would become one of those gray, lifeless people you see slumping around the local K-Mart on a Saturday afternoon and halfheartedly checking something off on a clipboard while the supervisors gather round and suck up as much as possible in the hopes that I'll recommend them for a promotion. I'm less inclined to commit to something useless so soon. All my current classes are at least geared towards my interests, and I imagine that this relatively broad spectrum will narrow at some point in the near future and I'll be left with something more realistic. I'm one year removed from high school, and expecting someone to commit within a year seems forced. I'd rather plow through the mandatory classes right now while keeping a keen eye out for anything that sparkles amongst the monotony. A better alternative to the constant worry that plagues the collective student body on such a regular basis. At the very least, it's a load off my mind for the time being, and will stop me from doing anything hasty that I might regret later. Seacrest out.

Time for endless TF2.

My hard drive is kerfucked. 300 errors fixed so far, but the Seagate maintenance thing is pretty shitty and can only fix 100 at a time. This means that I get to run the diagnostic, wait about 30 minutes for it to get to the broken spot at which point the number of errors goes to 100, fix those, then start over again. Damned if I know how many there actually are.

So whatever, less computer time until I can fix it. Since the number of errors has gone up to about 2000 since yesterday, I just got a 300 GB hard drive from Fry's for $70 and am going to copy everything over to it using Linux. At least the spare time allowed me to get acquainted with Tekken 5 again.

Also, Windows is utterly fucking useless and I'm probably going to lose all of my shit and have to start over from scratch.

This is me without eyes.

Courtesy of g0t.

I recall a time when my aspirations in life consisted mainly of being a professional soccer player and making a billion dollars. I would buy a rocket ship and use it to fly through the stars on my incredible voyage through the universe, stopping occasionally to meet alien civilizations that had cities made of crystal that were powered by magic. Childish imagination things, all cheery and colorful. Exploration and boundless wonder. None of the hatred and bitterness that plagues me now, like a cancer eating away at my brain. A new-age Robin Hood with guns and blood lust was never the initial goal, so what happened along the way? At what point did I lose that optimism and become what I am now? Perhaps it was like the story of the restored historical artifact in the museum. Noah's Ark on display, the planks being replaced as they rot until it's no longer the same boat. My elements of reality were stripped away one by one, the delusions being replaced by something much darker. Rainbows for torture, exploration for war, and all I can do is look around and think about how much more enjoyable things used to be when I wasn't aware of it all.

Perhaps I'm partially to blame for it as well. Biologically I'm not much different than someone like Rudy Giuliani. I could be that fear mongering troglodyte standing up on the podium and telling the world how we should always be afraid of the enemies that I promise to protect them from. The only difference is in ideology, the chemicals stay the same. The same instincts exist, which create similar thought patterns, similar values, similar needs. The only important difference from person to person is that occasionally we come to a branch between thesis and antithesis and decide to go left or right. One person decides to be theistic, the other declines the offer. One is a lawyer, the other a musician. A pathway that begins with one fork, then there's another, and another, until we eventually end up at one of the billion ends. We stroll gallantly down the path since birth, engaging in our respective twists and turns, and constantly looking onwards at the sunset. If we run fast enough, we might finally be able to reach it.

So why, then, is it such a mess? Why are we so inclined to stick to one route and never deviate? One path leads to a green meadow, the other to a black and ominous forest, but we've gone to the right the entire time and wouldn't want to break the routine. All our friends chose the forest, and we wouldn't want to be excluded. The choice between sunshine and total darkness is a complicated one, there's so many factors that weigh in. We've accumulated distractions along the path which blind our reason and make us unable to choose correctly. The path of business has the prospect of money somewhere down the line, and you're willing to ignore the grey for a few years in hopes that it will change to green. Willing to become dull and lifeless, just another wallflower growing in the unnatural soil that's so abundant. Not even questioning what may have happened had you chosen the path that seemed more full of life at the time, since looking back would deny the future. The eyes are locked forward with a hope that's slowly fading.

I prefer the more inviting path. A lot of people seem to be more focused on the long run. The feeling that if they focus on the horizon, they'll have more control over where they end up, and that it will inevitably bring about greater good than those who are more impulsive. The people enjoying life are foolish, even. Thoughtless thrill-seekers. Blinded by the light, with no sense of priority. Uncivilized men and women headed down the road to destruction and not paying attention to the warning shouts from other travelers. Delirious enough that they make a conscious effort to shut out all the death and despair that everyone else is trying to wade through for the sake of a brighter future. The accountant doesn't approve of the reckless youth mentality, she's too busy working out the annual figures.

However, from the viewpoint of that same fool, things are radically different. He's focusing on the future as well, just on a different one than most. While most fix their gaze upon the glowing dollar sign, he looks elsewhere and sees something more faint. Something that requires a bit more hope than the usual goal. A genuine feeling that if he keeps following these appealing paths despite the warnings, it will ultimately end with something more glorious than anything the realistic masses could ever dream of. That the same childish pipe dreams that he thought of as a kid are actually the true path, and that there's no need for compromise. The infantile fantasy is the reality, and it's actually the rest of humanity that is blinded. He looks around at his fellow man staring vacantly into what he sees as the void, and feels concerned. They're headed for a false end, following a series of progressively worse turns in the road that will lead them into the mouth of Hell. It is now his cries of warning that are drowned out and ignored.

It is only now that he sees the true struggle of sadness. His friends and family marching fearfully into oblivion. Along the way they grow tired, miserable, dreading each step but still clinging to that hopeful hopelessness. Already dead, the only remaining factor is time. All those choices that were seen as being beneficial in the long run now come to naught, as the tragedy unfolds before the eyes of the enlightened one. Clinging to life without joy, dreaming only in nightmares. Silenced in the meadow, the cheerful surroundings lose their value once the knowledge of the helpless prehumous becomes readily apparent.

What is to be done then? There must be a way out. Drag everyone kicking and screaming out of the offices and into the field, but they've adopted a difference in opinion during their voyage and won't enjoy it. There will be no point, as they'll return to the previous setting once they're no longer being detained. Separate meanings for enjoyment have been developed over a long period of time, and there's no solution to the problem. They have the big bank account, the fast car, the mansion, the trophy wife, and that's all they will ever need to be happy. You have the art, the music, the poetry, and can feel the touch of God as you focus inwards, and figure this is the true essence of joy. The other kind seems fake, nothing but a construction of man to cope with the inadequacy that is self-created. They should be shown the truth, and it is your duty to do so.

This, I think, is the real cause of struggle. Some place their value on monetary things, others choose to appreciate the more basic pleasures of life. Polar opposites, the golden mean being achieved only on the most rare of occasions. One side is right, and the other side is fundamentally wrong on every imaginable and unimaginable level. The other side needs to be brought to yours for their own good, and it is only by their own whimsical hallucinations that they persist in their acquired manner. The only problem is that both sides look at each other in this same way, and each side is naturally right. Perhaps it should be left to those in a position of absolute neutrality to be the ultimate decision maker. Too bad such a person doesn't exist.

Edit: Upon rereading this, I'm actually satisfied with it.

Jingle Bells is playing throughout the mall, it must be time to consume. The mad rush is on, millions of parents are lining up to buy Highschool Musical dolls for their horrible little children, and I'm the one to shuffle them through the register while trying to sell them insurance on socks. By all means, tell me the story about how you only spent $5000 on gifts last year and felt cheap so this year you're doubling it. You seem to have several hundred people in your family that are somehow all important enough to receive gifts, so why not? Be sure to break it up into several purchases, pay only with checks, and stare at the register with your vacant expressions while saying "I thought that was supposed to be on sale" for every second item. Half of you look at me with a face like your alarm just went off five seconds ago and you're still in a state of being both angry and asleep at the same time, but I'll keep a look of absolute neutrality while I balance being expected to smile and being pissed off that I had to wake up at 5 AM so you can buy things you don't need.

There's something special about being misanthropic and working closely with the public in a job that illuminates every negative aspect of humanity while keeping anything positive out of sight. I'm expected to meet quotas of buyer protection plans and batteries sold, and it's my fault for not being suggestive enough if they decline. After that leather-skinned beach blonde has spent five minutes bitching about the manager not giving her enough priority, I have to find a way to insult her that will bring me satisfaction while still being subtle enough that she won't pick up on it. It's a delicate balance, but I find the best way is to reassure her about her purchase using sentences that would normally require blatant sarcasm, but I say it in a completely nonchalant and sincere way. You'll think I'm being polite and making small conversation while you wait, and I get to be condescending and relieve boredom.

Another common thing is to think about whether or not death would be preferable to going to work, and logic usually concludes that the former is a better alternative. I look at it as I do with most things in life, as a spectrum that goes from left to right, with left being bad and right being good. The day naturally starts out in the center, as it does with everyone. After the first few seconds of delirium, the spectrum makes a strong and sudden shift towards bad as you realize that your day is going to consist of work, followed by school, followed by studying, followed by sleep. It steadily moves further towards the left as you lay in bed after hitting the snooze alarm, knowing that in a few minutes you'll have to force yourself to actually get up. You get up and put on your uniform, the entire time thinking about how unnatural and dehumanizing the whole process is, and just how pointless your life is right now. You arrive at work and your boss says that you're going to be working at the register all day, and the needle moves another notch to the left. For the next five or so hours, it will be a constant journey towards bad. The line will never become shorter, everyone will complain, the manager will delay your lunch break, and as soon as you finally leave you have an exam to look forward to. Your free time comes at around 10:00 PM, at which point your meter is dangerously in the red, and you begin to study for tomorrow's test. Repeat this every day with one free day a week that gets wasted because all your friends are working and can't do anything interesting.

People are far too afraid of death, which has always struck me as contrary to the religion most people seem so devoted to. Being alive is fine, and according to religion they have eternal bliss to look forward to as long as they didn't have any fun while they were alive, but nobody actually wants to die. That one moment has a primitive fear attached to it, which is strong enough to procrastinate on their suicide. This is based on the assumption of an afterlife, and theorizing that it doesn't exist would make our entire system seem hopeless. That one shimmering speck on the horizon dies out and all that's left is a life of work with no reward at the end. Perhaps if everyone wasn't so devoted to the idea we could structure ourselves in a way that allowed for enjoyment without death as the gateway.

So say there is no afterlife, just for the sake of argument. Once you die, that's it. The electrical signal in your brain fades, and all you experience for the rest of eternity is a void. You don't get bored of it because you can no longer think, and your very consciousness ceases to exist. You have become nothing, which I would look at as the ultimate neutrality. No possibility of good or evil for an infinite amount of time. Logically, this is a step up from being constantly in a negative state. By leaving behind all the burdens you have moved towards the right of the spectrum, and have actually improved your life by ending it. No more waking up or falling asleep. No more meaningless expectations or things to pester you. An eternity of peace that you're not quite experiencing.

This is still horribly depressing, but only if you assume that there's a chance that things would have become better had you stayed alive longer. Given the general trend of the world, I can assume that everything is going to get progressively worse as time goes on in just about every aspect of life. Unless you happen to be rich from the start, you'll get poorer and poorer as you age. Inflation will increase, you'll keep getting denied the raise, gas prices will go up, and eventually you'll be at the point where you run out of the money you need for basic survival. At this point you take out loans to pay your bills, so you get charged interest by the bank. They eventually seize everything you own and either send you to jail or you become homeless. You starve to death out on the street behind a dumpster and are found two months later by two children that strayed from their parents, and the police are unable to identify your corpse. Dead and forgotten by the world, let's move on.

Option two relies on a deontological perspective which says that you can't predict the future under any circumstances. If you shoot someone in the face, you have no way of knowing if they'll die or not. It's kind of a stretch, but works well as the antithesis. Say you do get that raise and everything works out fine. You climb the ladder and become president of the company, where you make billions of dollars for doing nothing, sleep until noon every day, and spend your free time buying sports cars to show off to your other rich friends. This is much less probable than the other possibility, to the point where it can safely be discarded as mathematically insignificant. The sort of thing a five year old kid says while he's fantasizing about being an astronaut or professional football player.

So taking both sides into account, death looks like a pretty decent option as far as things go. You could finally leave all those horrible things behind and there's either something interesting waiting for you or nothing at all. Either one will be a plus for the steady worker, I would advise going out with a bang by suicide bombing a Giuliani rally, but that's just a personal preference. Quit your job and spend all your remaining money on all sorts of fun illegal things before you go. Do all the things you wanted to do, and maybe once you're done with it you'll be enjoying yourself so much that you decide not to kill yourself anyway. Either one is good, and probably won't matter too much in the grand scheme of things, but this is about you.

I'll stick around a while longer because I have shit to do, I just need to take enough time off to actually do it. Endless nothing is boring anyway, I'll just have to compensate for my spectrum being continuously in the red by giving it a huge jolt towards the right on the days off. Enjoy the holiday season, there's garbage that needs buying and you're the one to do it.

I recently got a job at Toys R Us, which is an excellent choice of employment on my part because I don't like children once they advance beyond the age where they learn to speak. I chose the job because at least half of the employees happen to be close friends and insisted that I apply. Now I get paid for standing around and doing what I would do in my spare time anyway, with the addition of the occasional soccer mom buying her three year old daughter Baby Bratz dolls. It's important to train them to be whores from an early age, after all. If our infants were crawling around without being coated in a thin layer of eyeshadow and red lipstick, I would feel like our values were being compromised. There has been a single instant during work that has been thought provoking, the rest of the time being filled by trying to sell buyer protection plans to customers in an attempt to make them pay more money to insure items they don't need insured. I have yet to figure out why it's necessary to ask someone if they want a fifteen month policy to cover their Rubik's cube, and don't want to interact with anyone that would agree to it in the first place.

This moment was fleeting, five seconds at most. While I was at the service desk asking one of the managers to perform some menial task, a woman walked by with her child in a stroller. The child could not have been more than a year old, but seemed somehow out of place. The look in her eyes was not the familiar one of excitement and wonder, but a complete lack of comprehension. The surrounding environment was completely foreign and unnatural, there was no genetic programming to prepare her for these sights. As she looked around with wide, confused eyes at the colorful devices it struck me how unnatural the whole process was. This infant did not want toys. She didn't know what a Barbie doll was. She wasn't craving the newest play set from Fischer Price. She had not yet learned to need these things like so many others have.

So based on that moment my job is quite clearly worthless and does nothing more than spread the materialistic and selfish mentality of humanity as a whole, but I already knew that from the beginning. I could approach that mother, who is oblivious to just how important that moment was, and insist that she not contaminate her offspring with advertising tactics and forced gender roles. That she maintain that confusion for as long as possible, because the store I work in shouldn't be allowed to make sense. I work as a purveyor of philosophical blindness, my sole purpose is to drag people as far away from Nirvana as possible. You need the new Hannah Montana CD, and yes I think she's a very talented singer. Your daughter would love the new My Little Pony doll, they're very popular with other girls her age. I strongly advise that you sign up for our credit card so that we may take over your life. The check is fine, we'll just need all your personal information so that the company can sell it to advertisers who will flood your mailbox with sales catalogs. If we send enough, you'll see another item that you need and you'll come back and give us more of your precious money. I am here to destroy the innocence of children and make your life even worse than it already is, but I do it with a smile. You get a wooden train just so that it's a fair trade, so enjoy it.

I imagine an exemplary cashier at a major retail outlet would do well in politics. We both hope that if we grin wide enough you won't notice the sodomy. I'm trained to look at you as a tool for making the company owners richer, so I'll sit through the orientation, say how customer service should be the number one priority, then get hired because it seems like I'll be a good employee. I leave out the details about how I only applied so I can work with Sam and joke around all day. Collect carts with Jason and treat it as a fifteen minute break while we stand around and laugh. Work in the games department with Nick and discuss the new games that are coming out. Customer service is just a secondary part of the job to me, but I put on the facade of caring about my work. My only goal is to get the customer away from me as fast as possible so that I can go back to doing something important.

Upon review, I end up as a decent employee who gets along great with his coworkers. I get paid for giving people the short-lived and meaningless satisfaction of knowing that there's one less thing they need to buy for their Christmas shopping. I would never dream of buying any of the items in the store for anyone, but if the customer insists I won't verbally question it. Inanimate objects are an important part of their existence, and they're willing to waste their lives away in an office so that they can return home and give their kid another thing he was complaining about so that he'll shut up for a few days. Children are just another obstacle, and I'm someone to help them overcome it. What a brilliant way of looking at the family unit.

That's all fine, and I could justify it by using misanthropy if I really wanted to, but that child in the stroller shakes the foundation. The mask slips off for a second and for a few minutes I think of myself as having been assimilated as part of the evil entity. I think to myself "Maybe there is something inherently wrong with what I'm doing, how can I rectify this situation?" Somehow, I have to balance out my version of good with their version of good. It may be a few minor things, but I can feel like I'm making a change in the end. If a mother asks if she should buy an item that complements another item, I'll use the opposite of suggestive selling techniques and insist that she not do so. One less item to occupy her toddler, maybe she'll have to use actual human interaction now. Whereas others would look at taking toys away from children as a bad thing, I look at it as a removal of distractions and an opportunity to glance at something real.

No more damned illusions, your money will never buy happiness so stop trying. Teach your child to read rather than relying on Dora The Explorer. Give your child some real music rather than this Disney bullshit. Reject false evolution and advance the path of primitive behavior rather than trying to cover it up. There's no point in being creative if it's handed to you in tangible form, use some imagination instead. A five year old doesn't need a $150 electronic space shuttle, just give him a cardboard box and tell him to figure it out. Stop buying my shit, I have no faith in it and you shouldn't either.