12.19.2002

 

Ahhhhhhh... AAAAAAAAA
AAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH
EEEEEEEEEEEGGGGGGGG
GGGAAAAAAAAAAA
AAAADDDDDDDDDD!!!!!!!!!!!!!

So good to see you too Hose Monster.

Good grief Mr. Toilet Seat, what's the deal with being so damn cold?

It's the middle of the night!

And?

It's December!

And?

You're being prudent and following the energy company's guidelines of setting the thermostat at 68 degrees to stay comfortable while conserving energy!

And?

I'm made of porcelain!

So what are you saying?

That those four things don't go so well together!

Perhaps...

You're lucky that you only have to endure that cold shock for a few seconds. Once you get up and stop warming me up, I have to deal with being frigid all night and generally longer, seeing as most of the time you just come in here and stand above me doing your middle of the night peeing ritual. It's not fair...

No need to get your pipes in a knot...

Yup, you just stand up there, yawning and peeing, taunting me with the knowledge that if your body decided it wanted to work just a little bit differently in that moment, I could enjoy a few sweet moments of warmth stolen from your arse.

Be glad I give you those moments.

Be glad? Screw you buddy! To be completely frank, your ass is way too small anyway to do an adequate job of warming me up. Spend some time eating fast food and less time working out, will ya? The winter still has three months left to run!

Great, so in the middle of the night, when I'm only half awake until a freezing shock assaults my ass, my toilet starts talking to me about how sucky his life is. And then he goes on to tell me that I should try to get a fatter ass.

You could put words on it for everyone to read...

Can it. And honestly, you cannot be THAT cold all the time.

Well come to think of it, sometimes in the middle of the night, when you men are only half awake, your aim can be a little off, and the truth is that pee is warm.

See? It's not all that bad.

Hosey, let me ask you a question. Would you rather be cold but sanitary or warm but covered with someone's pee?

I'm going to assume that's a rhetorical question.

Regardless, I think you get my point. You wouldn't like it if I peed on you, even if it was thirty below in here.

I wouldn't like it if you peed on me because that would mean you might have a penis, and honestly, at three in the morning, I'm not really prepared to ponder the freakishness or the implications of that.

Honestly, I'm beginning to think you don't appreciate me and don't understand what I go through for you.

Aw, now don't get like that...

Every day I'm here for you. I give you relief, sometimes profound relief, every day. I'm bright and shiny. I give you a way to make the room stop spinning when you come home drunk, and I've even been your pillow for you on nights you've come home very drunk and reeking of cigarettes and ghetto perfume. And all I ask in return is to steal a little warmth from an ass that's not even big enough to give a good two-handed grab to, let alone adequately warm up a poor lonely toilet seat.

Wow, when you put it that way...

You're damn right "When you put it that way..."

I'll try and be a little more appreciative next time.

Hey where ya going?

I'm done here. Back to sleep. G'night.

Sigh... Brrr...

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For the first time in some while, I will not be sending holiday cards out this year, and I feel really guilty about it.

In past years I've made something of a herculian effort to get greeting cards out, each one sprinkled with a personal message amounting to more than just a few generic lines of "hoping you have a safe and wonderful holiday season and new year." I took pride in trying to treat each recipient of one of my cards as a distinct individual deserving of something special from me, because that's the way I felt about them, that whether I saw them every day or only once a year, I remembered them with fondness and thought about them more than just occasionally.

This year the grind of law school, preparing for finals and the distraction of having to travel 4,300 miles within 48 hours for my grandmother's memorial service amounted to just a little too much for me to find the time and the stamina to make a holiday card effort up to my own personal standards. I considered the merits of sending generic cards with little but a few lines of "Happy Holidays" or the like, but either I just decided that I was too lazy and stretched to do that or I decided that I wouldn't feel satisfied with a sub-par effort. Regardless of the reason, I simply did not have it in me this year, and as I have started to receive cards from friends, the guilt is gnawing at my sides.

I thought about sending out one giant email to everyone today in place of an actually card, but I decided against it on the grounds that I wouldn't want to run the chance of offending anyone. Giant emails are never the best of things, and sending one to cover for a holiday card seems to me like a potential slap in the face. So this year, I'm hoping that silence really is golden.

I hope everyone understands.

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12.18.2002

 

Apparently Dan the Goose and his Internet bride-to-be beautiful Sarah have decided that they're not going to name their kid Hose Monster. This highly depresses me. I had hoped that someday someone would challenge me for the honor of one of the most popular Hose Monsters on Google or the most popular Hose Monster on Yahoo!. But I guess it's not to be. Maybe someone will name a band after me instead.

I've noticed today that there seems to be a bit of enmity jumping around through the blogosphere as a result of people linking other people and referring X to site Y or whatever. Ward Entertainment appears to have some beef with Tony Pierce for a number of reasons, today's prominent issue being Tony's apparent constant linking of Raymi. Evan Ames also makes comments on this matter.

I don't really understand any of this. In my opinion, who the hell cares to whom I link, or why I enjoy reading sites like Tony or Evan or Cooped-Up or Up Yours or whatever? Furthermore, who the cares why I write stuff in here, and why does everything I write or anything anyone else writes has to seem like a personal attack on you or your sister? I'm sure I offend people in here all the time, I know I say dumb things on here all the time, but I'm not really out here writing to piss you off or spin nothing but intelligence commentary. And if I do unintentionally offend you, why the hell do you care what I think anyway?

And even if I offend you or someone else does, why is the response a lashing back? Anger and attacks beget more anger and attacks, and to be honest, there are far too few good blogs out there for everyone to be bickering about silly things or comments someone left on a site or whatever. I don't see the point in all of this at all. I'm sure people out here hate me and think I do nothing but shoot out drivel day after day, or they think I'm some leftist piece of shit or pathetic Romeo or some schizo who talks to inanimate objects and obsesses about women way too much or whatever. I'm sure people think that, and it wouldn't surprise me to learn that some of these people come back here day after to day to chide my most recent crap-ass post. But I don't really give a shit about that one way or another, whether they comment on my idiocy or criticize me on their blogs. For all the excitement I feel when I see a new link to Hose Monster out there or for all the frequency with which I check my daily web stats, I'm not writing this blog for a single one of you. This thing here is all about me and it's all for me. The fact that some of you enjoy my doing so makes me feel extremely special, but if you all decide that I am the world's greatest asshole because of this post or something else, even then I'll still be doing this exactly the same way I've been doing this.

I like Ward Entertainment. I read it daily. I like Tony Pierce. I read him daily. Same for Evan Ames. I'm not criticizing anyone here personally. Anyone who has the balls and is willing to start a site and spill their guts for all the world to see every day has already earned my respect. I may disagree with them sometimes, and if I do disagree with any of you out there, I'll say so. I disagree with the enmity posts going on right now. I don't think it's necessary, I don't think it's good for anyone involved, and I don't think many people like to read the posts because they're not involved. I just think the blogosphere would be a slightly more pleasant if we kept the criticism constructive and left the personal attacks in our minds and out of our blogs.

Just a thought.

Pathetically written while humming "Give Peace a Chance"...

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For those of you who visit my page but have not added Tony Pierce's busblog to your reading list, do yourself a favor and read Tony's ongoing narrative of his fictional trip to heaven with Kurt Cobain, which currently has 7 installments (installment 1, installment 2, installment 3, installment 4, installment 5, installment 6, installment 7).

Even though Tony is something of a blogging hero to me, I do have my disgreements with some of the battles he fights in his blog occasionally and sometimes the things he writes don't interest me all that much. But work like the current series reminds me why Tony has sat atop my bookmarks list for well over a year and why I've read everything he's written in that time span.

Read the Kurt Cobain stories. You may not think they're art like I do, and you may not think he's branching out into thoughts you'd never contemplate like I do, but I think you'll have a hard time convincing yourself that the stories are not wildly entertaining like I do.

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12.17.2002

 

One of my ex-girlfriends used to fondly refer to me as a "jack of all trades." But every time she did that, I could feel the sentence ending prematurely, as though she abbreviated herself and withheld from finishing the cliché with the requisite "master of none."

Now and again, when people find things out about me, they make comments like "jeez, you play guitar too?" or "you used to play hockey? Is there anything you don't do?" The comments generally strike me as rather strange, because I don't really feel like I am any different from any of the people I know, and it seems normal to me that people speak more than one language, can be really intelligent and fit in at a frat party at the same time, write stories or keep blogs, play an instrument, participate in athletics and perform respectably, enjoy cooking and have a respectable knowledge of wine or whatever else people seem to find strange about me. Most of the time I think that when people react to me like that, they simply don't themselves enough credit and don't recgonize the amount of diverse things they do in their lives and don't give much credence to the experiences and knowledge they too have collected. Most of the time I just shake my head and continue on like any other normal 23 year old guy.

I do have moments when I hear comments like that and I wonder if I really am that person who seems to do everything. For argument's sake, I suppose I am, and then maybe the "jack of all trades" comment does apply. I suppose I should feel flattered that I get this response from people, but most of the time all I can hear is the second half of the statement. Master of none.

I guess maybe I do a lot things, and on the whole, most of the things I enjoy are things I do reasonably well. But I often have a hard time contenting myself in this thought, that people respect me because of the diversity of my talents. They remark on the wide range of abilities, I lament the fact that while I do a lot of things reasonably well, I cannot think of a single thing at which I'm great.

I am a good skiier and snowboarding, but never the one that people will turn and watch. I play the guitar and sing passably, but I'd never have the ability to play coffee shops or make anyone want to come listen to me. I was an integral part of every hockey team I played on, but I was always a role player, never the guy opposing teams discussed and tried to shut down. I speak Spanish much better than most people would expect from me, but I'm far from bilingual or fully competant in an situation I could find myself. I've always been a good student, but was one of the few people I knew in undergrad who was not a valedictorian or salutatorian somewhere. I suppose I could go on, but doing so could seem like bragging, and that's not really my intent.

I want to be great at something. I want to be a master of something.

Don't get me wrong, 95% of the time I'm really quite happy with the person I am. I like myself, and I respect my own abilities and talents, and I'm glad I have them. But I do have days where I think I would love to be really good at something. Of course, if I were to become great at something, anything, I would probably cease to have the potential as a jack of all trades. I would have to pay an opportunity cost if I wanted to really be great at something.

Would it be worth it? If given the choice, would I give up the ability to do a wide variety of things passably in favor of the ability to do just one thing really well? Most of the time I'd answer that question with a "no," but I do wonder what it would be like if people stopped answering me with "you do X too?" and instead could watch me and feel the urge to respond "he's amazing."

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12.16.2002

 

Hi diabolical Contracts exam.

Hi Hose Monster.

What the hell do you want? You're not supposed to be bugging me until tomorrow morning.

Why aren't you studying for me anymore? You spent six hours in the library today and you maybe only studied for half that time. I'm very disappointed in you.

I don't care about you any more.

I don't believe you.

Maybe I would care about you if I felt like studying any more today would do me any good against you tomorrow.

But what are you going to do if you don't know all of my rules?

I do know all of your rules.

What are you going to do if you don't know all of my cases?

I do know all of your cases. Well, almost. Probably as many as anyone else.

Well if you know all of that, why aren't you confident that you're going to kick my sorry ass around tomorrow?

Because I'm not going to do so. Even if I study for another ten hours, I'll be at the exact same place tomorrow as I am right now.

What makes you think that?

Because you're the product of a professor who likes to write questions that no one can answer with confidence.

You're just saying that.

You're just trying to make me feel worse.

You're just trying to justify not studying for me anymore.

You're an asshole.

Okay, well if you're going to be mean like that, then I'm not going to try and help you by inspiring you to work harder and do better.

I don't care.

I bet you don't.

See you tomorrow.

Bright and early.

Bite me.

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I've contemplated writing about the whole Trent Lott thing that the media have turned into their darling love child over the last week for a little while now, and as I finally sit down to throw an opinion out, it appears that a lot of what I wanted to say is now somewhat moot.

In the wake of the idiotic comments Lott made at Senator Strom "I'm not sleeping, just resting my eyes" Thurmond's 100th birthday celebration a little over a week ago that a few people jumped on as segregational in nature and caused the media to fall all over themselves with the scent of blood in the water, the pundits have been screaming for Lott's ouster from his position as the Senate Majority Leader. Interestingly enough, just about every story I have read regarding the matter makes a prominent point of mentioning that the Senate Republicans had just reconfirmed Lott as the Majority Leader only days before the whole incident.

Since the stories hit the paper, pundits and bloggers alike have been clammoring for Lott to step down. But I think the smartest response to the entire matter, and I'm shocked that I am going to say this, has come from the White House. W sharply rebuked Senator Lott for the comment and immediately distanced himself, and in his hopeful mind the Republicans, from the comments made my the Mississippi senator, but he did little more, and did not really address the issue of Lott's departure. [Sidebar: Eric McErlain seems to think the White House is leveraging a more subtle campaign to support the idea of Lott's ouster, and he may be right.]

I'm no Trent Lott fan (I wouldn't say I'm a detractor of his either, and in fact, I truly don't know enough about him or his politics and history to form a legitimate opinion of him at this time), but all of this screaming for him to go by anyone with a editorial position on a newspaper, a keyboard and a blog or a place in Congress and political power to gain strikes me as a little unfair and an example of the self-righteous quickness to judge that we as a collective seem to effect the moment any public figure makes a misstep. Working on the grounds that the implication of Lott's offensive comments was in fact an inadvertant potential meaning, it seems to me distinctly unfair to hold Lott to such a high standard such that his right to commit occasional errors and mistakes is divorced from his person.

From a common sense perspective, ask yourself when the last time was that you said something and someone else misunderstood you and took your statement the wrong way. Over the last few weeks, I've probably inadvertantly suggested that you're fat or she's stupid or that I hate Irish people or something dumbass like that when none of it would in fact be true. One of the great drawbacks to language is that, because we come to understand the meaning of words through different experiences, and we all attach subjective meanings to words and statements such that we simply cannot share them with others, and as a consequence we will always have to suffer through the occasional language hiccup because I will say something and you will hear something else, even though we both hear the same words, because those words mean something different to us. These bumps in the road are common occurrence, and I think the logic of this speaks for itself. We all make people understand things we don't intend sometimes, and the truth is that sometimes there simply is no way to control that. Based on this, I feel like each of us has the occasional right to say things we don't mean and apologize for that unintentional meaning.

However, this whole Trent Lott thing suggests to me that when we throw someone in the public eye, we require them to become less human and more robotic than Dick and Jane on the corner. We forget the fact that the senators and presidents and athletes and movie stars are ordinary people too, just ordinary people doing extraordinary things. But to infer from that they don't have the right to occasional mistakes and the right to apologize for, and where possible correct, those mistakes is an extremely self-righteous point of view. I occasionally get a little miffed when people take my statements the wrong way in the first place with, but when they refuse to let it go after I apologize for unintentionally upsetting them, I feel like they expect me to be more, or less perhaps, human than the next guy. It seems awfully unfair to me to expect that just because another is in the public eye that he or she should not receive the occasional benefit of the doubt when they too unfortunately cause a misunderstanding.

The irony of it is that we sit back and criticize the Al Gores and Tom Daschles and Trent Lotts for being robotic and always pandering to the camera or the paper by trying to say the right things or what certain groups want to hear, and we decry the fact that we don't have real people on the Hill or in the White House representing our interests, only a bunch of people following the little feet on the ground and refusing to try and create some dance steps of their own. Yet when one of those students suddenly misses a step or tries to improvise to the tune, we cry out that he or she veered off of the black footprints on the ground and we start hollering to throw them out of class.

It's not as though Senator Lott lied straight-faced to the camera, recalling shades of Clinton during the Lewinsky festival of fun. It's not that he purposefully breached a trust and then tried to either cover it up or distance himself from that mistake. He possibly made an error of judgment and suggested something he meant not to suggest. To hold him to a higher standard because of that belittles some of the fundamental principles of democracy on which our political system was theoretically established. To hold him to an impossible standard belies the idea that any man can represent his fellow men, that our government is (very theoretically) not composed of elites and elitists, but of people just like you and me, people who have answered a call to service of people just like themselves. Hose Monster's Note: I don't really believe any of this crap is actually true, but I do think it's still a fantasy principle of our nation, and at the very least, it makes for a good argument.

These thoughts came filtering through my head throughout the last week as I listened to the pundits scream for Lott to step down from his position, and I nodded a silent nod of approval when I heard Lott say that he would not step down and would continue to pursue the interests of the privileged by whom he was elected. I did agree, and continue to agree that Lott jeopardized his leadership effectiveness and put the Republican Party in something of a bind, but I figured that if the GOP continued to back the Senator, as it seemed they did during the last week, then that support should stand. I thought that if everyone was so enraged as to want Lott out, then either the Republicans in the Senate or the voters of Mississippi should have the responsibility of removing Lott from his leadership position, not the pundits and the editorial staffs around the country who seem to forget that they too make errors, just like everyone else does.

Today however, I see that Republicans in the Senate are starting to build around a position of meeting to determine whether Lott stays or goes as the Majority Leader. If his party wants to remove him because they feel he has jeopardized the party and weakened their political position, that's their prerogative. Same goes for the voters of Mississippi. If they are that upset, they can throw Lott out (not that this would ever happen, see Strom Thurmond).

On the other hand, if the Republicans throw him out, it will likely be more to pander to the audience and quiet the scandal than anything else, so in that sense, maybe it does not make a difference whether Lott abandons the position or the Republicans throw him out of it. I suppose that when, which seems to be the case now rather than if, the GOP tosses him, then the ouster will at least have a stronger air of legitimacy.

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Not that many of you will understand the wonderfulness of this or anything, but Eric McErlain blogged about Baja Fresh yesterday.

Damn, I just ate breakfast and now I'm hungry again.

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12.15.2002

 

My first semester of law school finals is sucking the life out of me.

I may exaggerate on this a little but, but honestly, it would only be a slight use of hyperbole, but I think I've spent, on an average, betwen 6 and hours at the library each day over the last week. And that got me through only the first week of finals. I have my most difficult final on Tuesday and then my last one on Friday. I want to complain about this, but in all honesty, the material through which I'm going interests me on the whole, and knowing the rules that I have learned only the last week or so is kind of exciting. And yes, I'm a huge geek.

But there is just so much, and my endurance is falling apart. I have done very little over the last ten days but study (save going to a Dave Matthews concert last night, but in the back of my mind, I felt a little guilty for taking seven hours out of the day to kick back), eat, sleep and take exams, and at this point, I am losing my ability to stare at rules and I'm losing the ability to spend hours on end going through work, doing practice tests and reading 60-page outlines. I spent two hours studying today and I absolutely had to leave the library to come watch football. I keep telling myself that after the 49ers game is over that I am going to return to the library and dig in for the night, but at this point I'm a little unsure that I will have the ability to stay there tonight long enough to get through the amount of work I know I need to do tonight to prepare myself for Tuesday.

I'm starting to cease to care whether I do well anymore. I just want to finish this week, have a beer or twelve, and take a month off. I guess I just need to let blow off some steam. Sorry for doing it here. Hope the picture at least made you laugh, because I sure as hell ain't getting that done right now.

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