confusion

I went to my first European rave last night. It was held in an old Tube station down by Trafalgar Square. The venue is actually a club called Heaven, but every month or so they have a big party that goes to 9 am. The music was really good, a DJ I have heard very little about played, his name is Andy Farley, and he was amazing. Good old hard house, the kind they don’t play anymore in the US. I had a nostalgia moment, I missed being 17 and raving all across Virginia with my insane raver friends. I had such a good time, the only thing that could have been better was if C██████ and the rest of my friends could have been here.

Well, there was one other little thing that could have been better; I wish I had a car! See the problem is I did not find out about the party till almost midnight, for a French guy who lives down the hall from me and his brother who was visiting him. They where going with some friends of theirs and the car was full. Problem is the Tube closes at midnight. Well I was really itching to go out, so I decide (along with two other guys who live on my floor) to walk to the party. Now we left her about ten till midnight. 40 minutes latter we got to Trafalgar and the club. I danced way too much and now every muscle in my body aches. We did not leave till almost nine am! I have forgotten how long eight hours of clubbing is! Anyway, I crawled into bed at ten am and got up at three-ish! Right now it’s three thirty in the morning and I just took my pants off the hook on the back of my door (where I hung them to dry) so I could throw them in my dirty clothing pile, and they are still damp!

As for the dirty clothing pile, I am afraid of it… I know that buried in there are at least three shirts from nights I went down to the pub, and my cloths from last night. And I know that if I disturb that pile then I will unleash a “London Smog Demon!” Because over here smoking is more endemic than in the US and they don’t have big air ventilators to keep the air circulating, so the smell is twice as bad in anything you ware out. Not to mention that I think that the cigarettes over here are different, either that or my reaction to them is getting worse. Every time I walk into the pubs or past someone who is smoking my eyes begin to physically hurt, like they are bruised, and they water like I am crying.)

Anyway some time tomorrow I will have to fight the London Smog Demon, so I can have something to ware next week.

Ok, you know you are spaced out when;

As you go to turn the page in Aristotle’s Ethics you suddenly realize that you have not retained any of what you read on the two pages that the book is open to. Somewhere in the second paragraph, as Aristotle was discoursing on the nature of ones friends and relatives impact upon ones happiness after one is dead, a strange thought suddenly burst into existence in your head; “why the hell the asteroid that hit the ship in the movie Black Hole was round, and if it had hit the ships big open room (that runs down the axis of the ship) while the main characters where running across a bridge in said big open room, why where they not suddenly sucked into space as the ship (or at least aforementioned big open room) experienced sudden explosive decompression? Of course this thought leads you to remember that that movie was made in 1981 by Disney (the same year they mad that other box office flop Something Wicked this Way Comes) and that the phenomenal lack of success experienced by these two movies seams to have put an end to Disney making live action movies. Now days Touchstone still makes live action and they are owned by Disney, but it’s not the same thing. Why? Because the old live action Disney movies (of which I must have owned well over 300 in the ’80’s, and that was not even half of them. They include such classics as; The Mask of Zoro, and Pollyanna not to mention Chitty Chitty Bang Bang (I have no idea if I spelled those right but I don’t feel like looking on the IMDB!) (do you still remember where we are in this sentence???) had Tinker Bell at the beginning with the picture of the castle at the Magic Kingdom (I think that one is sleeping beauty’s but I’m not positive.) or the really old ones had Mickey Mouse. Anyway, this leads you to wonder if it would be possible for the artist (animators) to paint the cartoons directly on the film. would they have to use a single haired brush, and look through a magnifying glass? Is it possible to do that well? And about this time you realize that none of this had any baring on anything that in anyway affects your life. (even chaos theory would have a hard time making this relevant to my life I think!) And the last lines that Aristotle wrote where “So much for our examination of that subject.”

What subject????

I think all this is due to my reading James Joyce’s Ulysses because he writes like that first paragraph of this entry! (and that book is 800 pages long) My mind has gotten very good at wondering off to frolic in it’s own inner playground because Joyce cannot tell a story.

Ulysses is without qualification the worst writing I have ever read. It could have been written in a language I cannot understand and reading it would have had the same effect on me. I would like to have one of the people who voted it the best work of literature in the english language in the past 100 years explain to me what type of crack/LSD/heroin/PCP/dope/insert appropriate mind altering drug here they where on when they cast that vote. Ulysses has no plot, not main character, no structure, and ABSOLUTELY no redeeming quality! Don’t ever read it.

I finally made it up to Oxford this weekend to see J███████. It is a much nicer place than the part of London I am in. Within a few minutes walk of Beaner’s house is the town center. Sunday night after I got to Oxford J███████ and I went to a really good restaurat and had dinner and a (whole) bottle of Shiraz. Then we dropped our bags at his house and went back to drink in the pubs. We went to one pub and had a beer (because when Beaner asked then if they could make a Mai Tai (sp?) they bartender looked at J███████ and said; “a what???”, so we had beer.) After drinking our beer we where subjected to the bad singing of a few very drunk Brits attempting karaoki. One of them even tried to sing “American Pie,” do any of you see anything wrong with that? I do. It’s like an American singing the British National Anthem. Doesen’t work. That bar(and most of the rest) closed at 10:30, so we wondered around and found a place called Maxwells. This was like an American bar, just like the Virginian at UVA, or that non-existant bar near Mason. They even knew how to make a Mai Tai. So we got a little tipsy and wandered back to J███████’s house at 2 am. There we sat up talking till about 4am and then crawled into bed.

The next day (that would be Monday for all you temporally challanged) we walked around Oxford, talked about America, went to the Botanical Gardens (lots of great picture oppertunities for D&D!) and then wondered into Blackwells bookstore. That place is dangerous… Two miles of books! They have it all!

Anyway I eventualy wandered back to London and got back to work. It’s interesting I am not worried about any of my Computer classes or my philosophy class, but I worry about my German class. Ich spreche kein Deutch. Maybe it’s because I tried this whole German thing once before when I was a freshman, and the first day the class discovered that I was the only person who had not had atleast two years of German in high school… How did they all end up in the German 101 class!!! Anyway these people don’t speak anymore than I do so maybe I will do better. Oh yea, I dropped that first class after the first day.

Oh well, J███████ says hello to you all. I second it. But I have to say, your all lousy no one has posted any comments or any forum comments, I know you all cannot start new forum (it’s a flaw in the system…) but if you e-mail me I will open a new one on any subject you want.

Really I love you all…
-beggz

p.s. I found out that Beaner reads all the post, but does not reply, so we need to find a subject that we can rope him into replying to.. :)

I went out for the afternoon yesterday with J███████, it was a great afternoon. We walked across upper London, had all-you-can-eat Indian food for lunch in Islington, saw The Reduced Shakespeare Company in Piccadilly Circus, and stopped for a drink and desert in SoHo. All in all a great day.

The Reduced Shakespeare Co. was hilarious. They adlibed an amazing amount of the show. I could not stop laughing. Then when we where sitting at a crapearia in SoHo, that is situated on a small one-way street, we saw the paddy-wagon stop and pick up a man from a Chinese restaurant across the street. This whole process took around 10 minutes and there where three cars stopped behind them. When the police finally pulled off the guy driving the last car in the line was asleep and sat there dreaming away for a few minutes before a noise woke him and he drove off.

Anyway, I am going to go to Oxford tomorrow for the evening and stay the night. So I will see if it is really as beautiful as they say it is. Beaner says hello to all of you and wonders why you don’t write more personal emails (as opposed to forwards)? I was wondering the same thing. Also no-one has posted any thoughts on the forums on my sight. If you would like a new forum opened just email me and I will do it.

Last thing: the foul fowl has been removed.

I talked to a girl today who is from America, (up-state NY to be precise) and she is a staunch anti-Americana. She bases her hatred of America on the fact that she had a hard time getting into collage because she divorced her mother and her father so received no financial help from them. The federal government does not care about this because she is not an emancipated minor (she says that NY is the only state where there is no such thing) so she could not get financial aid because her mother has a half million dollar trust fund which she cannot get into till she is 55.

I can understand angst and even being pissed off at the government over this. When I said something about trying to talk to the education department about a workaround for this she said that there was not one. I asked how she was sure, she said her grandfather worked for the justice department as a judge and that he had looked into it for her. (so if he is a FEDERAL JUDGE maybe she should ask him for financial help?????)

Anyway the hypocrisy came as my friend Oliver, who is Croatian living in England on a refugees visa he got during the civil war (during which time he spent 3 whole months in a make shift bomb shelter with his family and did not see the sky for the whole time!), asked her about life in America and why she wanted to leave it so badly. She said it was because in western Europe the people had more freedoms than in the USA. (?) And she said that the government of the US was just bad, that the US was no longer “the land of the free.” She said that the US had failed to live up to it’s ideal (OK, get ready here it comes…) As an example of this she cited the restrictions and virtual ban on Jewish immigration in the years leading up to the second world war.

OK, so I said that this was not a strictly US problem, that many nations had harsh restrictions on Jews before WWII, much of the world was anti-Semitic. Then remembering something she had said earlier in another conversation I asked her what kind of car she drove before she came to England. A Ford Torus she said. So I asked her why she drove a Torus. Looking at me with a questioning expression she said because she liked Fords so she got it over the other used cars in her price range at the time. (My turn, my turn!) OK I said, so you have finished the classes for a minor in history focusing on WWII, right? (she mentioned this earlier too To which she said yes. So I said; OK, you have used something America did before WWII as a justification for hating it. But you drive a Torus, a car built by a company founded by the only American mentioned by name in Mien Kompfe. Mentioned because of a paper he wrote about the threat to the world that the “international Jew” posed. A man who funneled more lobbying money into anti-Semitic legislation than anyone else. How can you justify that?

She did not even try, she soon left.

I hate people who pretend to have a moral or ethical problem with something but cannot seam to practice what they spout off about. If she is going to hold a grudge against America for it’s anti-Semitics but drive a car produced by the guy who lobbied for those laws is that not hypocritical?

It’s not easy to stand up and practice your ethics/morals, I don’t know anyone who can do it 100% of the time, most of us can manage to try thought. I have a moral issue with China, so I go out of my way to try to avoid products produces in China, which is not always passable. For example, my laptop on which I am typing this contains many parts made in China, but it contains less than several other laptops I looked at. It is depressing to see how many people find one thing wrong with something and complain about it, but don’t try to do anything about it; instead of going to college, getting a degree and trying to change the system (either the financial aid, or the problems with America) this girl had decided to do a degree in engineering because that field paid well and she hoped to get a job in some other country. She decided to escape rather than fact the problems and try to fix them.