to remedy a purposeful life

people to never trust

2005-05-22T18:16:00.000-06:00

so i'm a carsalesperson waiting to be assigned a group of vulnerable students to terrorize.

i've even gone through and done all the paperwork for one cardeal all on my own, well with a few phonecalls of help from my boss/brother. i did a pretty terrible job, and the mother of the girl buying the car used to work "in the business" i believe were her words, so felt inclined to question my every move and action as if i were intending to screw her over. truth was even if i had desired to cheat her i wouldn't have had any idea how, if i cared to do it. the other day my brother was busy and i was helping somebody look at a car, and i came in to ask tyler (brother/bossman) the price, he told me 1500, but we could take 1000. so i go out and tell the guy just that. when he came in and said that i said 1000 to tyler, both my brothers (my other brother who works managing a couple health food stores was visiting our office) quickly joined in on a lecture on how you never tell the low price first. my defence? i just do what i'm told.

which is actually fairly true when i work with my family, it's conditioning. and so for some reason when i am working with my dad or brother i have no ability to reason on my own. so i felt like i had to keep assuring the people buying the car that i am indeed NOT a complete moron. and then i had a vision of me trying to teach some college punks, as i mispelled the words ninty and totall.

hmmm.

well, carbuyers and students beware.

a little bit of info on st. geoge living

2005-04-28T01:16:00.000-06:00

so i came down on monday. on tuesday i went to the college where a collegue of my mom's was retiring, and my mom was throwing a party.

afterwards i went to visit an old professor of mine, she was in charge of the writing center tutors back when i did that in 2000, and still likes me. she wrote one of my letters of rec to apply to notre dame. so she asked me first off if i got in. said no. she asked me my plans. said stick around here, be graduated and get a job. she said, wait, you have a bachelors? yeah.

she leans forward, widens her eyes (maybe it's just from her glasses when she leans forward though)(maybe she doesn't even wear glasses, but it's a good comment), and half reaches out to me in her characteristic manner and asks

"do you want to teach for me?"

despite my shock and overwhelming glee I manage to not hesitate half a second in saying of course.

so anyway, i'm going to be teaching a freshman english class (Actually it's remidial english, i don't think you guys realize how dumb these kids are gonna be, it's like the dumb of the dumbs- but i will be their king) at dixie state college in the fall.

no big deal, i'll just be adjunct faculty at a state college is all. whoop-de-doo.

oh, and i'll probably be able to run the lab they have to go to, just sort of sit there and oversee/grade their worksheets and stuff. and if i still want more hours maybe i'll work as a writing tutor still. if i'm lucky i might even get a class over the summer.

yeah, so that was it, just thought somebody might think that was sorta kinda neat or something, but probably not, i mean who would really care right?

ps
while she was talking to me about what the class would be like i was giddy as a pubescent teen who just got accepted to the cheer squad and is having a panty party, goosebumps and all.

not that it is that cool or anything

sorry for not posting on 4/20

2005-04-22T20:44:00.000-06:00

i meant to dedicate a post to 4-20 for all you all, but i didn't get round to that.

anyway. happy day graduation to all, even if you are sarah and refuse to walk, congratulations. I didn't see aa in the gruaduation either, congratulations anyway, and also for being accepted to the poetry program.

i was suffering from a rush of repentance, reading through the ensign, on Packer's talk about the light of Christ.

"The Spirit of Christ can enlighten the inventor, the scientist, the painter, the sculptor, the composer, the performer, the architect, the author to produce great, even inspired things for the blessing and good of all mankind."

"A teacher of gospel truths is not planting something foreign or even new into an adult or child. Rather, the missionary or teacher is making contact with the Spirit of Christ already there. The gospel will have a familiar "ring" to them. Then the teaching will come "to the convincing of [those who will listen] that Jesus is the Christ, the Eternal God, manifesting himself unto all nations" 9Book of Mormon title page)."

"Marble will yeild to the hands of the sculptor so that others can see what he sees. In like manner, you can teach others to see intanglible, invisible stones of doctrine."

he talks some about the teaching by example, to give the concrete example to understand abstract concepts. And i think that this is what writing is doing, it is sculpting ideas, making clear the connections and ideas that are hidden.

I'm interested in the teaching idea, being platonic, the old "doctrine of recollection" idea. but that isn't what or why i'm really after.

we have talked a lot about what art is, what makes something beautiful etc.

Pres. Packer says art is touching of the Spirit of Christ. I remember reading "Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night" vs. hmmm, i've forgotten the other poem, but it was on death, likely by Robert Frost, on the peacefulness of death, and the need to embrace it. And even though the poems take diametrically opposed views on death, I couldn't help but feel that they were not opposed. They were saying the same things to me, even though in different contexts, different ways. My teacher, of course, disagreed. But maybe they were both tapping into the internal truth. eternal as well.

and if there is anything to that, cultivation of art is cultivation of light and truth. And if that what art is, well then not only is it not limited to any genre, form, or even actually being art, but it means that when it comes to art, we have more than just a leg up than just about anybody out there.

fish in a barrel

2005-04-12T09:14:00.000-06:00

ahh yes

9:15, and no more 8:00 am classes for me. i'm likely to get a relatvely bad grade in the class, but what with riding on kapka and k's coattails to an a in xena's class i should be okay.

what will the monumental development be for me? going home, working at the lot again, hanging out with paul and picking up some mechanic tricks, hopefully a few rockin scars as well.

i think off and on about being 23, and about the poets and writers we study in class. most of them had already put together significant portions of important work by 25, and at least the romantics had become well known to each other by our age. You can say it was a different time, but it makes me ask myself how long it's gonna take me.

there is a utah council of arts contest this summer, the deadline is around july 24 or something. it's a good contest to enter, probably not one anybody like us is going to win, but a good contest. i'm rather proud of us, i think we're all just super. i'll get the info on that contest to people interested on wednesday for fad or april or whatever. is wednesday fad? if so what is going on with it?

anyway, it is time to start killing off another class or two.

because kristen is the only reader/commenter

2005-03-29T20:59:00.000-07:00

my [i think] final revisions. revision. i like that word.

Genealogy

Body from Body
like amoebas,
there is only one wise asexual parent
who’s regeneration preserved self
becoming first to rise after that early false night
turned dawn.

Body from body
one substance sole,
every life ripped off from the side,
incubating under an arm
stemming out of a hand
or foot.

Body from body
across generations—
membrane division of spirit—
pulling apart, becoming new.
A father, a mother,
all things collapse into one body;
mangled into a thousand parts,
blood strained from flesh.

Body from body
imbibing, engulfing the sacrificial carcass.
Cannibal transmission.
Piece by piece transcendence.
As birth is by breaking and blood
life is by breaking and blood:
a parental office.
Body from body
for one to rise one must fall.

another one where i'm not sure about the ending. i thought about either just striking the last line, or replacing it with something about death sustaining life.

when people say "i'll let you go now" is it just because they want to go but are putting the blame on you? because i always tell them not to go for me

2005-03-27T23:37:00.000-07:00

that is exactly to the character the longest title allowed by the blog.

i'm sorry that my blogs are always boring. but know that even if you only skim them halfheartedly, expecting a lack of entertainment, it is important to me to feel smart, so by giving me the impression of an audience you are affirming my existence.

Does the search for good in the world require overlooking the bad? i think that's where my dislike for optimism spawns from. i want the kind of optimism that says, we're all doomed while we're here, so let's go down jackin dudes and rockin like hell, cause that's the way to heaven. sure, it'll all work out okay, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't suffer plenty. sorry, i'm being dismal, but it's in the effort of constructing a new optimism.

anyway, i've already done poems for fall and winter. i'm not sure i like the winter one yet, but it's already spring, so here's this poem with two alternate endings. the second one isn't as good conceptually, but pay attention to the words, i tried to incorporate walcott's teachings on keats' vowel/consonant play.

Consensual Blindness

winter dies with the first day of muddy melting
and three days of March sunshine erase from memory three months of January gray.
So that when treacherous wind brings rain again
it falls on the unsuspecting and ignorant
as a new thing never known—
though they may have foretold
though they may have recalled.

As if by forgetting what was
they were learning something new

The chill of spring following
the snow’s swift thaw
will always be the year’s worst cold.

an expired request

2005-03-20T16:16:00.000-07:00

like a jukebox kicking in two hours after closing to play the song that was chosen by the teenager aching over a chocolate milkshake and thought his last quarter had been used in vain.

not quite tragic childishness

hair that every mother wants on her ten-year-old son
prim and uniform was the cut given to him.
college bachelor reformed from
shaggy beard and eye covering hangings.
spray mist cement
secured into place.
A face feels alien to itself with nothing for buffer
and even through the eyes are free
something still wants to flick hair aside.
A bachelor develops certain habits
that need not make sense.

A ten year old boy musses his hair
just to be fussed at by mom.

mind hygine-- clear away all thought

2005-03-17T22:12:00.000-07:00

i spent a few hours, or at least a few minutes, on wednesday trying to live without language.

in response to the latest subject in dr. foster's class, the contention that "language carves up reality." They say that we only see a leaf as a leaf, a branch as a branch, a berry as a berry and all of it together as a bush because of language. green is different from blue because we have been taught to refer to them with different words. so the idea is that language is what constructs our view on reality.

to me, however, this breaks down. when language was first constructed by cave men, how was it that their world-view was determined by the language they created? isn't that circular? I say yes. I say despite the influence of language on how we view things, the primary determinate is our relation. i'm starting to see that for me the basis of all things is how things are related. cavemen gave names to things in the way they could relate to. "little red thing i can eat" for berry, "thing that grows little red things i can eat" for bush. "house material" for wood or rock or dirt. "fast running edible hairy thing with horns" for celery. and we continue the same tradition today. languages might differ in the way words divide up words for colors (i hear chinese doesn't have a word for green, they don't really differentiate it from blue, or something like that, in any case the example holds up with dividing teal from blue or navy from blue), but they only do it when it is useful for some reason. or in other words, words are created to express relations, and by making relations expressable they change the nature of that relation, but they don't create the relations.

i'm writing this mainly because i've written nothing for a while, and it seems that as writers we care about language.

also, to inspire comments--

can there be writing without an audience? when you write a journal do you do it with no audience intended? is writing even possible if not directed towards anyone?

death to the blog

2005-03-02T22:12:00.000-07:00

so, in my rhetoric class we have been talking a lot about different kinds of arguments. One of the divisions we have made use of is between the ways of bringing out knowledge. the two terms we have used are epiphany and epidiectic (or epidiexis- as the author of our text has coined the phrase).

epiphany means an appearance, a kind of flash that brings something out all at once. epidiexis comes from "showing forth" like a sunrise that gradually adds more and more light until it is all clear.

the move of the author in working with the epidiectic knowledge is partly in response to thoughts on epiphany and literature, and some people who have outlined what exactly it means for a piece to be epiphany literature.

anyway, araby is kind of the posterchild of epiphany literature. an obviously epidiectic work would be more like what we see in frost's poetry, like fire and ice, or those kinds of poems where we see an obvious argument taking place, with contentions and reasons, to reach a conclusion.

my stance: all literature is necessarily epidiectic. because to convince a reader the writer must always take small steps, giving arguments all along the way, if the arguments go unnoticed all the better.

in doing this, i see that the turning points or climax of a piece (i think it is ironic to use the word "piece" to refer to the whole of a writing, even while i am speaking of parts of that writing) are the areas of clearing (or perhaps overlook peaks) where the epidiectic arguments come together. when we see a turning point in a poem we look at it and compare the before and after of the turning, we see where it has come from, and where it is going (to extend on the figure of speech used when speaking of "turning" points in a poem). At the climax we are able to see the most important parts of the story come together, it is the crux of the argument, the point where it is the least hidden, and the author is forced to unmask himself and his designs.

In Araby, the turning point is the boy's epiphany, but the epiphany is not the argument that is being made, but is the subject of the argument (or the argument is about the epiphany, but the epiphany is not the argument). i contest that for "epiphany literature" to actually be based on epiphany (rather than only about an epiphany) it would require the reader to jump to the same conclusion that the author intends, without giving any argument that this is what was intended.

is that impossible? no. at least i don't think so.

how would it be done? well first off, the turning points would have to be eliminated.

a story with no turning point, which forces the reader to somehow synthesize all the elements at once into a realization, the author would "appear" even as the author's intent "appeared" in epiphany.

would it be good? dunno. i had an example in a flash fiction piece, well at least i thought it an example, but i don't think it is a very good one. maybe i'll post it later.

first i would like to know that people are still alive. an also i thought that i should make it explicit that i think this has direct ties back to the "suppositions necessary by writing" and "reader/writer contract" discussions from earlier.

bragging rights

2005-02-28T19:59:00.000-07:00

my levinas and li young lee paper got accepted to weber's national undergraduate literature conference.

one more proof that i am so smrt. s-m-r-t.

even if there won't be any vonegut there.

thank you ladies and gentlemen.

copyright jackin dudes incorporated

2005-02-22T20:58:00.000-07:00

a revision, posted here because it has already received it's fair share in april time. a little unsure about whether i should drop the very last line, other than that i'm thinking it's getting close.

Genealogy

Body from Body
like amoebas,
there is only one wise asexual parent
who preserved self through regeneration
while all others died at that early false night
in dawn.

Body from body
one substance sole,
and every life after ripped off from the side,
incubating under an arm
leaving a hand
or foot.

Body from body
across generations
this membrane division of spirit
pulling apart, becoming new.
A father, a mother,
all things collapse into one
mangled into a thousand parts,
blood strained from flesh.

Body from body
imbibing, engulfing the sacrificial carcass.
Cannibal transmission.
Piece by piece transcendence.
As birth is by breaking and blood
life is by breaking and blood:
a parental office.
Body from body
for one to rise one must fall.

that boring story i talked about while nobody listened

2005-02-19T19:01:00.000-07:00

i think that blogs always make things look longer than they are. in wordperfect this didn't look that long. or maybe just all of my blogs stacked on top of each other, each one at least a page, compared to the other people's which are a couple paragraphs a pop. maybe the piling up exacerbates the problem.

yeah, vascilation and exacerbation. makes me want to masticate. silly words.

Strange Feeling

Henry didn’t fell like a character in a story. Characters in stories had to vew interesting, exciting, or at least have some trait like a tragic flaw. Henry thought about himself. There are many interesting things about Henry, he thought about the way people paid attention when he explained things one on one, he was good at that. When he explained things people were interested, but that isn’t enough. For a character it isn’t enough to have the skill to interest someone, you have to be interesting.
The characters in the short stories he read were all about interesting people, people who, if they weren’t special for some great skill or talent, like being a genius or a great leader, they had some trait meant to symbolize something like the fat glutton in one story, or the revengeful husband or any of those characters that are not just people, but symbols.
Not just symbols, parts of a story. Henry though about the books he read, the stories and in a way even the poems, they are stories. A story doesn’t have room for a person, only a character.

Jack bought the magic beans and we know his story. His neighbor’s name was Phil. Phil woke up one morning and saw a giant beanstalk across the rutted dirt road that few merchant carts took anymore since craftsmen and farmers began taking all their wares to the next town for better selling prices. It had been a slow transition, but was now complete, except the few who were unable to take what had to sell to the next town. Phil’s dad had an aging mare that was still strong enough to pull a small cart every morning early, so early sometimes it was still dark when he left so maybe he hadn’t seen the beanstalk.
Phil couldn’t help but run to the base of the beanstalk as soon as he saw it, but of course he wasn’t the only one, and wasn’t the first, but the town was so small and spread out that there weren’t many people there. Phil, of course, hadn’t yet recognized the monstrosity as a beanstalk, he hadn’t bought the beans, and it didn’t really resemble any beanstalk he had ever seen. Determining that it was a giant beanstalk took some time, and hearty discussion among the gathered crowd. Giant was obvious, it took four people to encircle it holding hands, but the beans didn’t start growing until midday, and before that it was very hard to compare the huge leaves (the closest to the ground was about ten feet up) with small normal beanstalk leaves. So at midday, at the first spotting of the bean the discussion was finally put down.
Most of the men in town weren’t there, except old ones who couldn’t ride or walk the seven miles to town, all those strong enough for the trip had left had left before sunrise, like Phil’s dad. Phil didn’t dare climb the beanstalk, it would have been very difficult anyway, since it was now much larger than when Jack started climbing it. Phil gazed at the monstrosity in more or less the same amazement as the rest of the townsfolk, likely much the same as you too would gaze at such a sight. Someone posed the question of how much gold a bean the size of a water trough would sell for, people made estimates and got wide-eyed, but knew it was only a dream, even though it was huge it was still a bean, and nobody made much off of beans.
So Phil milled about with the others until the farmers came home in the evening, they marveled and stared, and nobody got to realizing that Jack was missing with all the commotion. Then they got hungry, and the crowd began fading, shrinking discreetly. When the widow Jack’s mother went home she saw Jack wasn’t there and thought he was off somewhere with a friend or still looking at the beanstalk. Phil wasn’t the last one to leave, but left after about half the families had already disappeared, and after his mother slipped her hand over his to lead him away.
So the beanstalk stayed, but Phil had to help his father with the mare and the cart.

As Phil led away the mare the world grew fuzzy around the edges, a black fray that grew to a mist encircling then encroaching and filling in the whole image, until all was a dark peaceful sleep. For Henry, in his wandering thoughts had slowly untethered his mind from what he was thinking, and so even though Phil had just started to come truly alive, Henry’s mind had drifted to sleep, and the ropes between the thoughts and the mind holding them hung frayed, limp like the straight brown hair on Henry’s nodding head.
Not that he had been bored by it, he simply hadn’t had any other reason to stop his imagination spy game than falling asleep, and no reason strong enough to continue it that kept him awake.

thoughts as i was asleep

2005-02-10T23:11:00.000-07:00

ummm

about the group we were talking about putting together for the expansion and opening up (de-incestuizing) of april. i think we decided to start inviting public meetings on wednesdays. i'm all for wednesdays. and though i don't recall a time being set, i think six or seven is the normal ideal time, it's when everything else is going on. i guess that turns into a possible conflict with inscape, maybe it should be before inscape.

anyway, this is something i want to get cranking on, i think it is important. i'd be willing to put together a coherent and comprehensible prospectus of my critical stance this weekend. I think that is what it should be too, less speaking of other people's theories, i'm fed up on other people's wrong theories, it's about time somebody started coming up with something right, or at least closer to right.

i'm willing to propagandize for acknowledgement, jump through hoops for arrangements, bust skulls for accomodations, and twist arms for attendence, or pretty much anything else.

i'm being haunted by that robert frost quote that we can touch in conversation what we can only approach in writing, i'm not sure if i agree, but i am sure that there is something to it.

in the time i should have been working out my salvation with fear and trembling

2005-02-01T21:21:00.000-07:00

so i showered. and shaved too.

and i realize that it can be a bad idea to post blogs one right after another, but i wanted to get these ideas put down.

philosophy of language and the construction of meaning. how do words refer to things? how do we mean things or understand others?

there are a number of theories, i suspect that they are all wrong, or at least partly so.

meaning is constructed by relations. sure, this doesn't mean that meaning is all in our head, that has been pretty well refuted. there are definitions between what an oak is and what an elm is, and if i mix up the two of them i am wrong.
BUT, what is it that caused the definitions to be drawn up in the first place? why distinguish between some trees and not others, what determines the grouping of trees which is made? it has been said that it is an act of intentionality, that is we intend it, we construct it according to what is useful. But this still is vauge, and doesn't help much. It seems more useful to say that we place definitions according to their relationships. if two trees meet a certain relationship, maybe being able to reproduce with each other, then they are considered the same, the more we deal with trees the more we need to specify between different kinds, but it will always be a distinguishment based on relationships.

but that is just the beginning. because this also explains the metamorphoses that language makes with time, and how it is that metaphors make sense, even though denotations are completely unrelated. a word has meaning because it has received a relationship placed upon it so that pig refers to the animal.

now this is interesting. i say pig. pig. no surrounding context. what is the first thing you think?

my roomate said charolette's web. for me it was mud. probably it isn't very likely that you actually imagine a picture of a pig that you have seen right off. rather you think of something related to the idea of pig.

why is it that "grill" can be used to refer to face and it makes sense to somebody that has never heard of such a use before? because of the relation that both have. don't think context, think relation. not as in relative, but as in relation to other things around it, i think the difference is slight but important.

relation relation relation.

all meaning derives there. sweeping huge generalization? yes. wrong? probably. but that's not the point anyway.

when i am in a room of people and speak to somebody it is my relation to that person that determines whether they will understand that i am speaking to them, and whether or not they understand what i am saying.

not grammar (although grammar is, perhaps, just another series of relations), not socially agreed upon definitions, not simply in the head.

meaning is a relation. it exists independently from our thoughts (at least those that aren't mentally constructed, of which there is an interesting and fairly large section of). i am comfortable in saying that this view could trump and repalce with simplification all the theories on language which i have so far read.

thank you i am a genius

even if i get dammed for pride

go read on aaron's immensity and eg's revisions

2005-02-01T18:23:00.000-07:00

how i weigh in on the aaron and eg debate.

with eg on the fact that the actual writing of a poem is individual and fundamentally different for each person. personally i don't think i can write a poem that isn't religious without it sucking horridly. maybe prose poems, but anything lyrical, anything with ambitions outside of academia or direct self commentary (such as speaking about literature) ends up religious somehow. seems like anyway.

ummm, that was a diversion.

so yeah, the writing of a poem is individual, i don't believe people should tell you how to write, only what good writing is or is not, and give some tips that have worked for them.

however, the act of writing, if not the same emotionally, requires some sort of thoughts, some presuppositions that require across the board similarities.

(speaking of hegelian dialectic (resolving tension between two ideas by introducing a third middle element that combines the two), i'm very middle term-ish, i think it'll either end up stopping me from becoming a famous wacky philosopher with an extremeist theory that gets famous...or maybe i'll be a great middle ground philosopher, but currently my idea is still that philosophy is a silly game of pointing out wrong, unhelpful answers and posing good questions)

so i maintain that the act of writing makes presuppositions that are fairly universal.

in defense of 2 and 5

2- i don't necessarily maintain that this is true, nevertheless, when i begin to write a poem i seem to have a need to differentiate the poem and act of writing a poem from writing a paper or a letter. even if it doensn't hold true for the editing.

5- defense of this is similar to 2. however, Poetry, and to a lesser extent fiction, seem to require metaphorical meaning. Usually for a poem to be considered of true quality it needs to have beauty of the words, and also have meaning (though it isn't always the case). the meaning, however, isn't like meaning in an essay where it is good to point to the meaning, rather it seems to be the goal to shadow the meaning, perhaps the meaning can't be clearly grasped by language and it is necessary to use metaphorical language, perhaps it is only part of the aesthetic.

point is i maintain that (with some reservations) creative writing is granted precedence over figurative speech.

so, it has been said that the poet is a warm fecund bed for seeds of inspiration. yes, but i hate seperating out the poet from anything else. if you ask me the auto mechanic is a fecund bed for seeds of inspiration as well.

and before responding to that last comment, everyone should know that if you diss on auto mechanics i'm gonna seriously bust skulls.

the croc pot of my brain

2005-01-20T20:40:00.000-07:00

or maybe it's just a pot of crock.

anyway, some of you might be familiar with an idea to crystalize the assumptions that are inherent in writing. if you ever want to rework something you gotta start at the basisis. you don't build a plane until you know a lot about the physics of air and you don't shake up the world of writing until you know a lot about the mindset and presuppositions.

anyway, it's related to the thought recently expressed on aaron's blog. but rather than the reader/writer contract, we are talking about something more like a contract the writers set with themselves, or they unkowningly enter. there are so many different suppositions that we make without realizing it, and not ever questioning those suppositions will block expansion. every corner must be searched, ever stone turned until the assumptions we make are all brought into the light.

so i was looking to set you all about thinking on this subject too. i have a list of some that i have written down over the last few weeks, they aren't well defined yet, i'm just looking for a rough sample of what we think we are doing when we write.

assumptions made in creative writing

1-there is an objective in writing --something is can be/is meant to be communicated
2-artistic writing, or writing for art's sake, is inherently different than other writing styles (critical, informative, historical...)
3-there is an audience
4-manner of expression matters (diction, rhyme, meter...)
5-language of literature is different than ordinary language (figurative language and metaphors, literature seems to claim soverignty over metaphors etc)

consider this a pier, from where we may depart into the abyss

sheer randominity

2005-01-12T17:58:00.000-07:00

i bruised two of my fingertips. my middle and pointer on the left hand, just the very tips, it's kinda funky. maybe not so much bruise as just injure, they feel numb like they are sleeping or something. from trying to break into a car that had its keys locked inside. turns out the girl did it for herself anyway, proving again that i can do no mechanical work successfully if it will be to impress a girl.

my finger was sprained almost a month ago now and it still is a little sore. either it was a lot worse than i thought, or my body is healing slow for some reason. my body doesn't heal slow. i am no normal human.

i'm the head maintenance student at helaman halls. the other two that were senior to me both stopped working there, and now there are two others, one is a girl, and i'm training them both. i also am working almost twenty hours a week. every day one more hair springs up someplace on my body.

i found out today from a bud that sits next to me in class two things- he is starting an asian studies journal (he is a chinese major, with a second in english)and i might be able to get published in it with a paper i wrote a while ago, but much cooler than that--he told me of a chinese philosophy course that is being taught this semester.

ever since i came to byu i have wanted to take a class in non western philosophy, finally i will be able to at least sit in on one. and i was thinking how cool it would be to study comparative philosophies, along with comparative religion too i guess, but focusing on the actual difference in world views between different regions of the world caused by dominate philosophies.

i know this is all boring, but you are just looking for something to distract yourself for a little while anyway. maybe i'll do something beautiful later.

tudo e dor, e todo dor vem do desejo de nao sentir mais dor
-legiao urbana

sleep fast

2005-01-06T09:57:00.000-07:00

back in highschool we went through a phase of theme weeks. i remember one was no food week (it couldn't be on a fast sunday, it had to be for the sheer self torment of it), seems like there was a pee on stuff week (football field, highschool front doors, teacher's(that is to say a coach who was assigned a class to screw up) truck) there were probably others, but the main one i remember was no sleep week.

i think the goal was three nights, i didn't go sleepless, but i think i had under six hours or so for the three nights. sheridan used the time to read the good earth, i mainly sat from what i remember.

i don't know how long i slept for last night, but i remember that after getting home and starting my remaining twenty pages of boring reading i finally finished well after three, and after having come in and out of naps that ambushed me i tried walking into my room, and my leg must have been asleep because i stumbled into the breakfast bar countertop thing in my kitchen, then managed to drag myself into my room, set my alarm for seven...no seven fifteen so i can sleep in, and pretend to make my prayer before blacking out. my alarm must have been set for pm, not am. i did wake up with a start at 8:20, and after checking every available time piece to see if it was right i slapped clothes on and got to class in the jkhb ten to nine. that's walking, i almost beat the bus that swung by the stop closest to my house just a bit after i passed it. the bus beat me by about a minute, but i'm not sure it would have improved my time to have ridden it anyway.

point is that it sucks way bad to kill yourself to at least pretend to finish an assignment only to oversleep and miss the class, and then get docked for the absence. so i didn't let it happen. happy ending is that i totally pulled it off, signed the roll and got points for the reading, even made a few comments in class that demanded a response.

maybe that's all i want in life, to demand a response for my self inflicted pain and thoughts.

so i thought i'd not sleep tonight, just because i got a good streak of last night and the night before. how long before i can know i'm crazy?

Answers...

2004-12-26T14:19:00.000-07:00

so there might be a certain hampster able to agree a little more with me (and thus become more right) now that during church (which was very good today by the way, making up for the worst meetings i've ever attended last week) it occured to me how to ammend my thought so as to clarify and simplify themselves. when speaking of answers not existing i ran into problems with having any certainty. a small adjustment in language hit me today, in that answers might exist, but not conclusions. this seems to cut out the difficulties i was having in explaining the existance of some answers being only questions in disguise. it might be just quibbling over language, but i don't think any of us consider quibbling with language to be unimportant quibbling. so conclusions, not answers, are the focus of my holocaust.

right before christmas

2004-12-24T19:05:00.000-07:00

merry christmas to the world.

i've had a few things on my mind, and i like to write about what's there.

my cousin married a woman from brasil, she was out at our place helping out, and i gave her a ride home. we got to speak the lingua de meu coracao together for a while, it made me heartsick. i seriously almost cried after i dropped her off, so much nostalgia.

terminal nostalgia.

that thought was a combo. k told me a story about nostalgia being viewed as a possibly fatal disease. terminal also made me think about bus or plane terminals, which aren't terminal at all, they're intermidary, they are travelling waypoints. and i'm homesick for brasil, if i were in brasil i'd get homesick for st. george, homesick for provo, homesick for alaska. when i move away and live somewhere else i'll leave there and get homesick for that too. it's terminal to my life because no matter what terminal i'm in i'll have it. it seemed like there is something poetic in that.

i was im-ing with a bud from brasil the other day, he's about to get engaged, and has been super busy lately taking a bunch of courses and stuff so that he can get a good government job, and some of them are on sunday i guess, so he hasn't been to church for a long time. his soon-to-be-fiance told him "i'd rather be with a janitor than an inactive" and so he went to church, missed the class, and told me that the same week something else came up, so that he could learn the material without going to the class.

a little testimony to us all. you know testimony comes from witness? witness implies an experience, not necessarily a knowledge.

i know...i know i'm a little sentimental right now. merry christmas. spread love and cheer.

even the love that eats you up from the inside because you are never with it forever.

like...like i dunno.

terminal nostaliga. hope. faith. love.

christmas

coming home, i love my papa

2004-12-18T21:05:00.000-07:00

so i got home today. hooray.

ate lasagna, good stuff. though everytime i eat it i think of brazillian lasagna, and i get a little nostalgic.

i love my dad. on the mission i was always the last one to finish lunch when we were being fed, cause i would eat slow, i also ate a lot, but i ate it slow. and it is because my dad eats slow. we eat and talk, and when everybody else has already left the table we are still around dipping out another plate and talking. man i love my dad.

just for the record, there is nobody, bar none, that has more walking around sense than my dad. if this were a different time, say a few hundred years back my dad would live on top of a hill where everyone would go to get advice. so we were just talking, it might be hard for some to believe that i would do more listening than talking in a conversation, with my dad i listen.

he talked about the new set of controversy about old joe smith, and about belief. the irony about listening to somebody tell you that another person can't be trusted because of things they have done, without proof that the accuser hasn't done worse things, or with subjective sources as the basis of history (journals and first person accounts).

so anyway he started talking about how the point is that (besides most of these kinds of accusations being besides the point of faith) we simply can't really know most stuff. and about how there simply isn't end all knowledge about these things, so why listen to somebody who has a vested interest rather than a person who dedicated their life to a cause for faith.

if you've been subscribing to my philosophical journal lately you might hear something familiar, namely--no answers.

we talked about that for a little while, that truth, as an eternal entity escapes our mortal grasp, and any eternal truths which we are able to grasp are very rare. he mentioned his curiosity over the scripture in d&c (110 i think, i'm not sure) that any knowledge gained here in life will benefit us that much in the resurrection. because what knowledge can be gained here that isn't already had from life before mortal existance? nothing about God is learned here, the only things we learn are about ourselves, and what it is like to have a body. that was more of an interesting side-track maybe...

anyway, we talked about how everything we come to know is actually a question, there are no terminal answers. from philosophy there is only an act of questioning, an empowerment by shedding false assumptions. from religion we are granted glimpses of truth via revelation that provide anchors (as ether put it) or points of hope, but themselves are also not terminal. knowledge that God lives means i can have hope of the resurrection, but it by no means is knowledge of everything that the statement "God lives" implies.

perhaps i've gone on too long in characteristic philosophical (perhaps egotisical) ramblings, but like i've said, i love my dad, and nothing makes me happier than knowing he's proud of me. so i was super happy that i reached independently a conclusion that my father also holds.

it's now accepted johnson doctrine that no philosophical answer exists, only philosophical questions. and religious answers are a more complicated issue. but when we get up and bear testimony of what we know, let's realize how much we don't know and be grateful for that too, because all hope we have is based on our lack of knowledge being illuminated by the infinite.

happy visits with your own family this merry holiday.

making life bare-able

2004-12-16T23:28:00.000-07:00

running tandem in speedos, down 9th east. yes. it does more than give the tired satisfaction that hasn't come to the old body since i haven't run for months- not since the busted shoulder. it also filled me with a new joy. it was true selfless service. lightening the night for hundreds of drivers, pedestrians and even a few relatives/roommates of eg.

"yeah dude that was one of the greatest things we've ever done, i have to admit" quoth rob- speedo brother.

man i love speedos. i regret the many years of my life i didn't appreciate them. to all men out there- get yourself one, if you have reservations you can try mine on, you will be converted. i wouldn't run a marathon any other way, and there is nothing so beautiful in this world as a pair of blazing white hairy man thighs.

yes yes yes.

make like a tree and apathetic

2004-12-13T12:39:00.000-07:00

i just realized that nothing i have posted is very personal.

at least not compared to eg & k.

maybe i need to spill my heart juice a little more liberally, maybe i just need to tell them to get over old boyfriends.

but then again i have become increasingly apathetic since birth. kind of a pattern of my life to switch in everything. when i was a kid i couldn't even control myself, my emotions escaped me at every breeze. a bit ago my older bros were talking about how they would start teasing me and always knew when i'd lost control, and there was nothing but fire and red.
i cried in fourth grade when i didn't make it to the spelling bee, even though i wasn't a good speller, and in fifth grade when i wasn't accepted into the school "gifted student program."

i guess the one consistent thing is that i'm still a nerd, but about seven months ago now i hardly cared that i broke up with a girl that i really liked, and more recently when the girl that had (kind of) waited for me on my mission, and who i had (kind of) waited for during her mission came back and snubbed me pretty hard. i wasn't expecting a whole lot, but there was nothing. but it didn't bother me, like not just that i could keep control of my emotions, but we talked it over and i was genuinely indifferent, and only afterwards realized what happened, and even then wasn't too bothered.

maybe eventually i'll just turn into a tree. not so bad, i can amuse myself, enjoy silence and privacy, and really envy the mountains that can lie still for so long, unperturbed by whatever happens.

unperturbed.

baby got back

2004-12-13T12:31:00.000-07:00

indeed.

one more multiple choice final, and a couple essay tests away from christmas. and thinking about money as i unclogged a sink in the freshman girls' dorms a few minutes ago i realized i'll be selling books back, and with that money i can probably afford to buy some gifts. that with the paycheck just before christmas and i'll be pretty well set.

gre subject this past weekend: not nearly as humiliating as it was the first time i took it with no significant preparation. i feel good about my performance, i figure that 75% of the questions right will get me in the top ten percentile range, and i got a decent answer put on about 200 of the 230 questions. i should make the top twenty.

got to hand out with the fam, the three bros together like doesn't happen much at all anymore. we made lots of fun of each other, played lord of the rings risk (which is at least ten times the nerdy satisfaction of regular risk) and ate too much. it was great times.

and i even already did the worst part of my finals-- waking up at six thirty to do my 7 am logic final. really--you'd think it'd be clear that not signing up for any classs before 9 means i didn't want to wake up that early for school. thank you byu for always making your hate clear.

end.

as promised

2004-12-09T17:45:00.000-07:00

this poem is by the sufi (muslim mystic) master Hafiz, who lived around 1200 ad

we have not come to take prisoners

we have not come here to take prisoners,
but to surrender ever more deeply
to freedom and joy.

we have not come into this equisite world
to hold ourselves hostage from love.

run my dear,
from anything
that may not strengthen
your precious budding wings.

run like hell my dear,
from anyone likely
to put a sharp knife
into the sacred, tender vision
of your beautiful heart.

we have a duty to befriend
those aspects of obedience
that stand outside of our house
and shout to our reason
"O please, O please,
come out and play."

for we hvae not come here to take prisoners
or to confine our wondrous spirits,

but to experience ever and ever more deeply
our divine courage, freedom, and
light!

the burning joy

2004-12-09T15:16:00.000-07:00

i'm so happy i could smash a vase. just break anything out of sheer joy.

funny, i feel like that when i'm angry or depressed as well.

but now i'm happy. i just finished the old man and the sea, and it is great. great great.
i aced, absolutely missed zero points on my big levinas paper, my prof loved it despite some writing flaws.

april was last night, and is always enjoyable, i don't think i even pissed anyone off last night, which despite being a goal to which i spend a large portion of my time does make me feel bad.

yes i do have a conscience.

also, school is done. now i just need to get ready for the gre lit test (which actually will be this week, so i won't be driving down to cedar through the middle of the night for nothing again).

wow, life is happy.

roses and butterflies that beat their wings into typhoons in china.
you guys are good friends.

to aaron--when you read this, i want to send out a big sensitive manly hug. with pats on the back and all.

i think we should all do something terribly destructive to celebrate.

look at me jealous

2004-12-07T15:52:00.000-07:00

why is it that eg always gets to start all the big debates and i never get to?

so i have this theory on people, that generally speaking they fall into answer people or question people. there was a third too, but i seem to always forget that one. it may have been describe or listen or something along those lines.

anyway, much as i hate binaries, that is a thought i've had. i'm an answer person, so if somebody says something i immediately begin to think of correcting, answering, responding etc. and it usually ends up in debate.

a question person would think about it and ask a question to understand what was said better, see it from a new viewpoint, what was meant, what if this yada yada.
seems like good questions are normally more productive than answers.

and i think i've already said that i'm in process of doubting whether answers exist, except about a few things that seem to have answers. which means my answers are all drummed up.

surprise surprise.

apparently it also means that nobody has anything to say about anything i say.

but i do talk a lot, so i guess it could be that i just dominate something until it doesn't seem worth talking about anymore.

i always have a hard time shutting up about something

i almost hit no to the "allow new comments" option. i thought that would have been funny

because i have been given much

2004-12-05T20:34:00.000-07:00

homework that is. and because i can't focus on any of the papers to be written.
here is a poem fresh written, as fresh faced as i, i've written it less than an hour ago, because i couldn't stand to think of the papers due tomorrow.

A Cure Too Slow As Poison
Peel this flesh off away from me
dividing with knife as if for Moses.
Break these bones apart like a cage
to face the dark beast clenching and writhing below
gone mad from the digging pricks of injury
like shrapnel glowing red from secret pain.
Can you dig it out in one triumphant surgical slash,
a great searing wave of pain to freedom?
Could that be it?
If I grit my teeth and pray for mercy wildly enough
will that let me go free again?

This cut on my chin
from shaving to an outline in the dark where I don’t dare turn on the light.

detours of futility

2004-12-05T17:24:00.000-07:00

it's no worry. just a practice flit down to cedar at 1 am and 7:30 rising to trudge through snow and discover you are a week off on your measuring.

sure, if you're on earth time.

i'll guess i'll reset my watch and go take my gre next week.

divine comedy- a surprisingly good time. i was entertained enough to not yell obscenities (mcuh to editor girl's relief, and to mine since it turns out i was sitting just across the aisle from kapka's parents and my teacher), i didn't dare raise a birdy finger or feel the need to throw my glowstick at the stage during performance.

i was on best behavior.

come talk to me about blis-tech front. i have cds for you all, the revolution begins now.

deathpile

catching bullets with my brain

2004-12-03T21:34:00.000-07:00

hello.

i decided today that i hate cars. and i think that hate extends to all technology. for that matter everything.

yep that settles it, i hate everything.

if anybody wants to rip a car bolt from bolt tomorrow after i take a big stupid standardized test, the one test in my life that has ever made me feel completely stupid and which i failed even worse than i thought i was going to--oh yeah, and i hate it-- i got the one to be ripped, and i just may be doing it by meself if you don't join in.

on a positive note--my paper on persimmons and levinas rocks.

pray for my soul

gloria sanctus deio

amen.

my turn to speel

2004-11-30T22:44:00.000-07:00

my own compartments kind of hit a kink on the ol' mishmo. all of a sudden i realized that all of the cool stories that i had ever told anybody about my life were completely inapporpriate (i wasn't comfortable talking about how i got kicked out of school for yelling at the principle in front of the entire student body, or how i used to love going on debate trips and yelling the f word all night long on the bus, or other stuff i still don't bring up without prompting, like drinking piss). in overcompensation i ended up becoming a double serious missionary nazi, and it took me some months to loosen up and have any personality at all. since then i've only kept loosening up. loosy goosy

i think i'm going to start trying to write badly so as to explain my badness of writteningness

anyway, it hit a point that my compartments didn't work anymore, and when i tried locking myself up in just one of them, it all ended up kind of busting down.

since then i started trying to take down some of the cubicle walls. it was good for me because in highschool it was an extreme dichotomy of violently cynical, pessimistic, angry cussing cocky bastard at school, and happy go lucky, cheecky, religious good son at home.
it was a bad situation for me.

so now i try to be...singular. of course when in some situations you need to adapt, like talking with a boss you want to hire you. but i still get a thourough enjoyment from: swearing in letters to missionaries, offending mormos with mild apostasy, and butts (i love butts-- espeically big white ones). that is probably the clearest explanation for the joy in neckhair etc, i mean i like shocking people, but i kind of got hooked on mixing up private and public me-s, and i wanted to start looking like the nasty me that wakes up on saturday morning that nobody sees but me. perhaps that's part of it, maybe not, i've said before i don't trust my own analysis of me.

anyway, the point is that it is kind of a fun shock to people when you expose out of compartment characteristics, but that is the main appeal.
no, wait, that isn't the point at all, that is my diversion.

the point was that compartments are good and useful, but the reason i think this whole dialog started is that they can lead to severe depression and confusion.

e.g.- if you had gone home with me you would have seen me teasing my little sister and wrestling with my dad, but not much wrestling because i had long hair and he pulls mercilessly.
in compartmentalizing i've learned it helps to keep it rather low, or one day you'll have a rough day and the pissed off cynic comes home from highschool and blows up in profanity at mom and dad, and it can be screwy.

i guess that's cause i was hiding behind the petitions.
maybe that is the key, no hiding behind different selves

looking at myself closely i've learned to throw out everything about me casually, it doesn't hurt me anymore. and maybe that is why i don't make new friends, i stick with the ones i already trust and have been around to see different things, and i know won't kick me too hard, unless i ask.

and then i have things, beyond the freaky wet dreams that the boys all know, beyond the poetry that i don't mind showing people anymore, i keep part of me very close, and don't let it really come out at all.

and maybe that is why i'm detached from other people in a lot of ways, i draw away from compliments, throw out insults casually, seek to be shunned, because if you cut me off i don't have to cut you off.

long enough. especially since none of it is to be completely trusted.
the first time i read gatsby i identified with nick, the quiet narrator who thought he was honest, and i believed him. when i read it last time i realized he wasn't honest with himself either.

you notice that the blog info says the time but not the day?
that is annoying to me.

end

sticks to men, scissors to women

2004-11-30T17:19:00.000-07:00

so, for everybody that's been getting tickets--take heart in my victory.

today i went to court for the ticket i got a month or two ago, went to the court and had the option of paying the min $50 (down from about 100) or fighting. you can imagine how short a breath it was before i was setting the court date.

oh yeah, the ticket was for driving on a dealer's plate for personal use. eat me copper, just eat me alright?

so today i ducked out of class a bit early, walk down to court, sit around for fourty minutes, talked to the court appointed lawyer who checked out the law, saw that it was vauge, retarded and basicly unprosecuteable, so the case was dismissed, trentone pays jack squat.

bite me law and order.

but before getting to stick it to the man today there was another exciting event in the life of the jerkface formerly known as trent.

you can all call me t-bone now, leading member of "boy band aid"--the hottest new music group soon to be idolized by all sorts of hot babes from everywhere.

kristen and co. gave me a sexed up hairdo, and with my bradpitt jaw i'm off to woo the world of byu. even my bible as lit teacher this morning commented that i look like a member of a boy band without any prompting.

i guess that's what happens when you unleash a set of babes to style the hair of their pet man.

i feel emasculated, but potent.
handsome, but ashamed.
sexy, but pansy.

if it weren't for the strength and deep satisfaction from a symbolic flip off to the entire police force i might lose my inner anarchist completely.

as it is i think my life is being taken over by bizzaro trent, the one that showers and dates girls and has a constant fear of regular trent popping around a corner and beating the crap out of him.

but the haircut does look good. good job kristen. you could totally pass the paul mitchell school of hair.

come and get it babes, it might not last long.

end

logically dissected

2004-11-23T20:23:00.000-07:00

i just spend two and a half hours doing a logic test. don't get me wrong, the test wasn't long, twenty questions, 19 of which were done in a half hour's time.

i know my logic backwards and forwards, can do most of the exercises as fast as i can write them down. and i don't not see the right way to do a problem, especially after staring at, puzzling over, and manipulating a set of three premises for two hours.

my teacher wrote the damn thing wrong on the test, and i'm gonna bust some skulls.

a late night revision (is there a pun in there?)

2004-11-23T02:27:00.000-07:00

hmmm, often revisions get longer for me. but i cut a lot out after promptings, changed a bit, it might be misleadingly about a relationship, but i might like that too.

Stranded
An iris—what it is to not touch
not like cheek or neck for stroking
not like those meaningless intimacies.
A hand in the air uncovered,
growing stiff and thick in the November darkness of 7 o’clock.
Smoke a charmed snake swaying from chimney, chimney
cloud roof bulging downward, but not to embrace, only obscure.
A vision, a thing never touched for all the gazing.
Is it enough?
A hand alone in the night, refusing the tightly held warmth of soft lined pockets
that false closeness.

2004-11-23T01:18:00.000-07:00

no comment

2004-11-23T01:17:00.000-07:00

this comes from last winter

2004-11-23T01:06:00.000-07:00

glory days

2004-11-23T01:05:00.001-07:00

ready for work.

2004-11-23T01:05:00.000-07:00

make your own pun about bones.

this is it

2004-11-23T00:39:00.000-07:00

really. this is it. trentone johnsao's own little place now. i kind of got pressured into this. and i also resorted to it because my pet portfolio at byufacebook lost its appeal when the site went national.

anyway. i hope you are all happy with what you've created.