Brant, after weighing all other options, in

My story is not a sad one. My life has been pretty good for a while. I am in an obsessive, productive phase. I am totally absorbed with learning about money and gambling. I manic-depressively have been sucking up information trying to come up with new ideas. This was most likely turned on due to rejection. In the last couple of years a lot of my musings have been focused on the idea that anyone is capable of achieving anything they wish. When we are in grade school teachers tell us that we can be anything we want when we grow up, yet many people are envious of other people's situations. I don't get it. Where is the lapse? When does a person give up on his goals? More importantly, why do some people look at somethings as too daunting to begin. For example, it drives me fucking crazy when people make excuses as to why they are not good at something..."well, I'm just not good at math"...well the problem lies not within your ability to do arithmatic, it lies in your ability to try hard, to begin a daunting journey towards a goal, your lack of self-confidence. We all have the resources at our fingertips to become professional mathmaticians if we would like, you can take open-source MIT courses, learn on youtube, or read a friggin' book. Why are so many people overweight? I don't get it, why don't you have enough confidence in yourself to put down the cheeseburger and run? I postulate that all of our inner-selves should be arrogant, narcissistic monsters. Humility on the outside and a scorpion on the inside. My favorite movie right now is There Will be Blood. The guy is haunted by oil and money. I want to punch slow people in the face. If you want something handed to you, I'm going to hand you my excrement while I use your spine as launching pad to devour the top-rung. Get excited and destroy.

Anyway, that's what I have been thinking about lately. Of course I am unable to practice what I preach. I am trying to become more resilient to quiting when I study, when I exercise, resilient to laziness, but I have a long way to go. I waste many mornings with my mind still functioning half-assed. Also, I have not really achieved anything so I cannot preach with any credibility.

Rubb, on creativity: I think it was naive of myself when I used to think that I could get by on creativity alone. I think the more realistic pathway to a life well lived is become a master of your field( or hobby) first. Once you have achieved this then it is time to begin training your mind to wander (i.e. drugs, dreaming, depravation). You have to first stand upon the backs of your predecessors, then form new synapses. A suggestion: the sober mind is much more facile than the poisoned. I beleive that on occasion you need to go berserck and show your brain that your not afraid to punish it, but doing this is easy and mindless, one should not . Instead learn something new.

I'm bored of my own writing

Rubb: In

I was going to write something about how I too am hitting some lows. But Captain Ron? Jesus Kyle. There's not much lower than that.

CounsinFun: I've been planning on writing a blog for a while about coming up with some fun shit to do while we're all out there for the wedding. Jeremy's birthday is May 21, so we'll definitely get into something (bars or camping) that night. I'm around the week after the wedding, and suggest some backpacking. There has been some talk of traveling by river, specifically the Green River from southwest colorado to moab. I have been planning to research this possibility a bit more before writing about it, but oh well. Let me know if you think it would be a good idea. I know it's possible to rent rafts in Colorado and return them in Moab, but we have the problem of high water and not knowing shit about rafting.

My Life: I've been completely dominated by school for as long as I can remember. It's very mentally demanding so when I'm not doing it, I just want to watch stupid shit on television or get hammered. This belief that the time I spend not working should be a complete mental vacation is definitely problematic, and definitely the reason why I haven't blogged or done much of anything else worth doing for a while. 3 more weeks..

Research Findings: I've made two this year, which is strong. 1 is that people make inferences based on other people's memory. So if I hear about a bad restaurant experience from someone that took place a long time ago but they remember it very well, then I think it must have been really bad. Not soo surprising, but might be influential because it's the first to show that this occurs.
The other finding is about psychic numbing. When people are given a good thing and the opportunity to trade for another good thing, they generally don't trade, because they like their first thing, and this is called the endowment effect. When you give someone 8 good things and the opportunity to trade for 8 other things, trading rises to 50%, because when there's a bunch of them, people get less attached. However, it's different when these things are negative. When you give them 8 negative things and the opportunity to trade for 8 other negative things, they almost always stay with their original 8. It's a hrad decision and one they don't want to think about, so they just turn off and stay with the status-quo.
This was actually a quite amusing experiment to run. We needed something negative that we could give to experiment subjects, and we needed a lot of them. It's hard to get away with inflicting anything painful on them, and we didn't want to give them something that they would just throw away.
We decided to tell subjects that it was a taste-test for experimental flavors of yogurt. So we mixed 16 positive flavors of yogurt (cinnamon, mango), and 16 negative flavors of yogurt (horseradish, anise, chili, tarragon, celery salt, sage, mustard, onion, wasabi...) We actually made these yogurts, made packaging for them, and made over a hundred people eat them. Fun stuff. A few gagged, which made me gag.


What else. I had "the talk" with my girlfriend fairly recently. She accused me of having a fear of commitment. My response was that my fear of commitment is like my fear of snakes. It's not something I want to get over.

I haven't been grocery shopping in months and I eat either jimmy johns or subway every single day.

I saw The Slackers a few nights ago. Awesome band. Ska. Check it. Seeing Soulive saturday probably.

I'm a complete beer snob.

I plan to get my adventure on in late july / early august. might be as small as a few weeks in colorado or as big as a month in katmandu. compromise of 3 weeks in south america is probably the most likely. Anyone interested? Dates are flexible, and I know the possibility of some Jake-back mountain rises the later I can push it back.

I've vowed to be more artistic. To make something with my hands. 3 more weeks... Also more passionate, expressive, adventurous, spontaneous, etc.

I'm here

I'm here, Cheese. Hi. I've too been busy hitting new lows to blog. Broken electrode problems, speech deadlines and stress, terribly sore feet from indoor soccer after a 7 year non-exercising hiatus, and a nasty gash on my head from slamming into a door frame after too much wine. I really hit rock bottom when, flipping through tv stations, I found the best thing to watch was Captain Ron...and then grew upset when it was delayed due to a basketball game. Man oh man.

Am I the only one left in the cuzzin blog?

2 things that are just as much fun as I remember them being long ago.

Computer Paint

I made this awesome cartoon yesterday while I was bored at work.

Fuckin Legos

I found a huge box of my old legos at my parents house. Grace and i have been playing the hell out of them. I'll even build lego shit while she's sleeping(and yes I know how big of a loser I am now). Every bit as fun as I remember.

Yelling at the wind.

Sometimes I wish I could yell at entities that couldn't possibly hear me, much less respond to me. Sometimes these entities are inanimate objects, sometimes they are large corporations, and sometimes they are just figments of my imagination. Examples:


The Yellow Pages

Hey Yellow Pages, don't you know that nobody uses you anymore? Don't you know that there's this thing called the interweb where you can get any bit of information you need in seconds? Like phone numbers.....and addresses? You fucking idiot. So stop showing up on my doorstep every six months all new and stupid. I don't care about you anymore. Dick.


Wind

Oh you're a sneaky fucker. Why is that its so painfully obvious when you're working against me but I can never tell if you're actually helping me along the way? I hate you because you're in my face and yet I still can't see you. Oh, and thanks for blowing dirt in my eyes the other day. And I really appreciate it when you flip my umbrella inside out. Nobody likes you except maybe people who sail and no one with any self respect sails.


Zits

What the hell is your purpose?? Seriously, I can't think of any reason why a painful, red, exploding demon on my goddamn face would help me, but thats just me. And by the way, I'm fucking 32 years old! Leave me the fuck alone already! I could make a case against the existence of god purely based on pimples.

Marijuana

I don't remember why I'm mad at you.

The TV

I know you can't hear me but I'm gonna yell at you anyway you fucking sell out. What happened to good wholesome programs like the Dukes of Hazzard(minus the implied racism), Knight Rider(guy talks to a car, love it), Thunder Cats(kinda gay but cool anyway), and Three's Company(awesome 80s guy living with two bimbos)?


Now my choices are shows like: Desperate Housewives(sounds great), The Real Housewives(as if the "fake" ones weren't bad enough), Keeping Up With The Kardashians(apparently the only requirement for celebrity today is a "leaked" sex tape), Pokemon(you're better off puching your kid in the face than letting them watch this shit), and American Idol(this show just proves how stupid human beings are). And this is just the tip of the iceberg on the crap out there.

So fuck you TV, everyone is retarded now because of you.