3.15.2003

 

The last week has left me with that sour taste in your mouth when you feel like you simply cannot do anything right. I suppose one big reason why I feel this way is that I did do something horribly wrong this week (which I was going to write about earlier, but didn't because I wanted to spend my time trying to fix my screw-up, and now it feels like things have simply moved on enough that I wish not to bring it back up. Besides, this way I don't sincerely destroy the lofty opinion some of you erroneously have of me), but so much just seems to spin around every day that I don't quite know where to set my feet, and I therefore feel a profound sense of inconsistency haunting me right now.

I think it's mostly stress and a profound sense of dissatisfaction with the current status quo of life. For as much as I enjoyed last semester as a whole, this semester has sucked all my enthusiasm for law school. Classes are mostly procedural, and my schedule is much more skewed to early classes, resulting in less sleep and a diminished ability to confront what has become a three and half month exercise of working my way through tasks. My life outside of school has gone through relatively dramatic changes in the last few months. Unlike law school, I confess that I find myself pleased with these outside developments, but I won't pretend that these changes have changed my orientation to life and resulted in lots of time spent thinking instead of sitting mindlessly watching Beavis and Butthead.

But good things always abound. A nice email found its way into my inbox on Friday from A.J. It appears that he likes to browse web sites and write up little blurbs as to why he's decided to link them. HM recently made it onto the list, and A.J. writes:

Everything my writing could be, only better. I swear he grabbed [a] post about reader comments straight from my brain, then filtered out all the small words, sprinkled in some vocabulary and actually made a coherent & interesting blog entry. Of course, I had already decided to link him after reading this post [about idiotic people] and this one [about receiving a sobriety test].

Thanks for the nice review man. Welcome to the realm of the Hose Monster.

And since I'm thinking about this, I think I'll just write stream of consciousness style like my pal Alfred. Is my writing style too unnatural or pretentious. I suppose I realize that I tend to write in a manner using sentence constructions and diction that most people do not encounter in the everyday reading, but do I come off as some Dickensian writer trying to make money by the word? I tend to write the way I think (which might explain why I sometimes forget to type words and my sentences don't make sense or say what I clearly don't intend for them to say), and the words I use are the first words that come to my head. I don't sit around and try and plan for an opportunity to employ words like "ostentatious" and duplicity"; they just sort of happen. Hope that sort of thing doesn't bother any of you, because it's not going to change, just like I'm not going to suddenly start proofreading my posts for errors and clarity.

I think I'll write about George W. Bush and the impending action in Iraq tomorrow. It's been awhile since I've had a political rant. I figure I'm about due to say something interesting for a change.

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3.13.2003

 

Anyone with half an observant wit knows that I am a big fan of Victoria’s Secret. So you can imagine my excitement today when my lovely girlfriend told me that I should accompany her to Vicky’s today.

I still love Vicky’s. And I greatly enjoyed today’s trip. But for the love of good taste, what the hell is with all the damn pastels?



All of it still looks great. And the Vicky’s models and my girlfriend still look great in it. But honestly, even though the Spring lines are all rolling out, why the hell does that mean everything has to be pink? Sexy bras and underwear are supposed to be white, black, red, dark blues and purples and maybe even a forest green here and there. But lime green? Coral? A muted purple? Who makes these decisions?

I feel bad slandering Vicky’s here. And in truth, it’s not just them. Other stores I walked by suffered from the same phenomenon. It’s Spring. It’s not time for a My Little Pony fashion show.

Happy Spring everyone.

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Your friendly neighborhood Hose Monster: positively affecting your flow rate.

Special message to Dan the Goose: the walls of my apartment are bare. I will hang up a copy of your engineering project in which I am a variable if you will send a final copy to me. Promise.

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3.11.2003

 

GROAN.

Someone kill me.

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I'm still reeling from today's drive to St. Louis for a quickl little two-hour layover before returning to the Cornfield. I really need cruise control on my next car.

I'm also trying to keep a handle on the NHL after the record flurry of dealing today at the annual trade deadline. My team made two fairly big deals, not to strengthen their team (since they're effectively out of the playoffs) but to dump salary, get something for unrestricted free agents and build up the young talent base of the team. I still haven't arrived at a conclusion as to how I feel about it. I knew the Smolinski deal was coming, but I confess the Schneider deal caught me by surprise. No more hockey talk; I know it bores you.

Seen today on the interstate: a bumper sticker that said:
EAT MEAT
The West wasn't won with salad

And finally, I have to direct everyone to the outstanding comment left by new visitor Cory. His drawing of a distinction between a person and people struck me as very logical, and I wish the thought had come to me yesterday while writing. Anyway, welcome to the HM realm, good Cory.

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3.10.2003

 

I understand that the text below might sound a little arrogant. I hope you keep in mind while reading that I do not have an overly lofty opinion of myself, and I did not intend to come off as an elitist while writing this.

****

The people in law school disappoint me sometimes. I think I had high expectations when I started.

I had the same problem when I started college. I entered what was, at the time, a top-10 university as far as the U.S. News and World Report rankings go, and as such, I theorized that such a university setting would expose me to people my age thinking on a level I only occasionally reached, coming up with analyses that stayed with me for days and affected me as I thought my own way through the various complexities of higher education. I do concede that in many cases, the faculty of my university inspired me to just this reaction, but I lament that fact that vary rarely did a fellow student meet the hopes I had formed. And just to satisfy my lifelong quest for irony, the one student who did work on that intellectual plain to which I aspired also lived with me, so I had the great fortune to see him in his moments of profound idiocy as well, which perhaps tempers my ability to blow sunshine up his ass and more importantly makes him a more real person and a better person to call friend.

Most of the people with whom I went to school were not dumb. Most of them were legitimately intelligent people with very cogent capabilities and a general tendency to success. On the other hand, I often felt that my classes filled with people who formed this intelligence and developed successful capabilities through rote techniques. Robots finding the formula for mediocre success and following it.

I don't mean to overly criticize; my opinion of college admissions is not very high, and regardless of how counselors claim that look for the whole student, formulas do come into play, perhaps not established formulas, but formulas. Students understand that to get into the good colleges, they have to start constructing within the framework of the well-rounded student and as a consequence often subordinate their own personal interests and thoughts to the need to achieve certain leadership positions and take certain classes. I personally feel that this distracts young adults from exploring their own personally formed interests and fostering the foundations of an ability to think logically and intelligently independent of textbooks, lectures and other peoples' thoughts.

Ironically, however, I felt that high school provided me with the least annoying environment of any of my secondary schooling experience. Perhaps because I took nothing but honors classes and thus had to deal with people who had grown up with good motivation and experience around them. Perhaps because high school bored me almost to tears, and while I lament how bored I was in high school, I remember with fondness how much sleep I got during those years, particularly my senior year.

But I arrived at college, and more often than not, people had no clue what to say to inquiries directed at them. I did almost all my assigned work in college, read most of the stuff on the syllabus, always turned in my work on time and took everything as seriously as I needed to take it. I also have a remarkable ability to remember things when I want to remember them or decide I have to remember them, and I generally feel that my work ethic is strong. The possession of these qualities not doubt greatly facilitated my success in college.

But a possession of these traits makes no real impact, in my estimation, on general intelligence and ability to engage in discourse and answer questions posed to you with general logic and intuition.

I know people who never did an ounce of work and couldn't tell you a damn think about the material under discussion in class, and yet when they chose to or found themselves on the spot, could assess the situation with rapidity and articulate an intelligence comment. You don't have to go to an elite school, get good grades, do lots of work or read Kant to do this sort of thing. You simply have to possess the capability to perceive the world around you and the microcosm of the current discussion and have a little confidence. I have people in my elite law school classes who no doubt got straight A's last semester who cannot do this and I have known people working for minimum wage in customer service who could engage me for hours.

Just for the record, yes I do consider myself someone who can intelligently engage in discourse. Full disclosure complete.

Anyway, after my undergraduate disappointment, I probably should not have formed similar hopes for intellectual engagement with law school. But I did, and as a result, I find myself utterly dumbfounded now and again at the disconnect between concepts and the things people sometimes say around here. I understand that a lot of the time people in our classes are simply not paying attention, and that really is a legitimate excuse most of the time. Many of the topics under discussion are cumbersome and require a working knowledge, but I refuse to concede that this excuses blatantly confounded comments. I know these people are intelligent. They've gotten here. They've demonstrated an ability to achieve. But I sometimes feel that we lack mental agility.

I don't mean to criticize, and honestly, most of the people who would worry about falling into the group of people discussed above simply don't. A certain beautiful girl I know probably underestimates herself more than anyone I know, but one of the big reasons I'm dating her (again, full disclosure) is that she's very strongly attached to the real world around her and, regardless of her concerns about her working knowledge of the topic at hand, she proficiently engages in any and all topics and leaves me feeling like talking is more than just getting participation points. A huge reason why, after more than five months, I'm as interested, if not more so, in her and in talking with her, than I was the day of our first date.

Anyway, I know that I sound like a completely pretentious and arrogant bastard, and I know I am apt to make people think of me like that. It happens sometimes, and while I don't wish to convey an aura of superiority, I do sometimes wish things were a little different sometimes. Just something I was thinking about today. I'll get off my soapbox now.

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I'm done tinkering around with fonts. I guess I'll just go back to the old one.

I promise I will write something of actual interest later today.

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3.09.2003

 

I'm trying out new fonts for my posts.

I'd be much obliged if you would tell me whether you like or dislike this one.

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Strap yourselves in. Your friendly neighborhood Hose Monster is about to tell you why the gentleman depicted below has earned divine status.



This strapping, handsome sir holds the responsibility for the beauty of the new Hose Monster Blog which now greets, which replaced that god awful Blogger template under which I labored for so long.

I find myself reacting to people with such cynicism sometimes that when people make efforts to simply do nice things for me, it affects me to such an pleasant extent. Some months ago I engaged in my first Instant Messenger chat (IM me today for the hell of it: Lisandro15) with Tom of the venerable Orby Online. I'm not exactly sure how we stumbled onto the topic, I think it might have had to do with his somewhat recent redesign of his page that got me to complimenting his new layout, discussing how much I hated mine, lamenting the fact that I am program-language (and mathematically) retarded and joking how he could redesign my page any time he wanted.

My hero Tom more or less responded, "sounds good to me."

I didn't really take him seriously, mostly because I imagine, without any real experience, that designing a web page is a serious undertaking, especially for a college student taking Spanish at a highly-regarded educational institution. (At this point I'll not comment on how wasting time on projects, like N64's Goldeneye [dating myself in the eyes of current undergraduates], is often a much more popular exercise of energy for college students than doing their actual work.) Anyway, the conversation more or less ended and we went back to our separate pursuits.

A month or so passed with no contact between Tom and I, and I forgot about our conversation. Forgot about it until another IM window appeared on my screen with a URL directing me to the inital mock-up of what has become the new HM. Enter my astonishment. I'm glad I live alone, for had someone been with me at that point, they would have heard me squeal with delight like the little girl who finally gets a pony for Christmas. Rather embarrassing for a dude preparing to enter his mid 20s.

Anyway, over the last couple of weeks, Tom has sent me various modifications to the redesign, and I have added very little commentary. What few comments I did have Tom incorporated with flawless precision to my great pleasure. And when the layout was finally finished, my hero Tom even did the nitty gritty work of uploading the new site and making sure everything worked. He even surprised me last Friday when I opened my page to see if I had any comments and instead finally had a beautiful new site.

So I'm exuberant with my new Hose Monster, and I hope you find it visually more pleasing. In the next few weeks, as law school permits, I might make some little modifications myself like changing the font of the posts and the color of my links, easy stuff I know how to do. But allow me to take this opportunity one more time to kiss the ass of my pal Tom for kindly making this site a happier place for all of us.

Now all we need to do is learn the identity of that woman above who has kindly decided to arch her ass to the sky for all of us.

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