I was today introduced to a band called Pain of Salvation. At first they were just kind of background noise while I was playing Halo, but one of their songs hit me at a subconscious level. So today I downloaded it and....wow. I've never heard anything like this before in my entire friggin' life. (NOTE: I'd advise people sensitive to emotional songs not to read this. Although the final message of hope comes in at the end--it's a pretty intense read.) Things that really stuck out for me--the use of the words "un-dies" and "unblind," and the phrase "beautiful life"--there's an implied sense that she's seeing what she wasn't able to before she attempted suicide. My thoughts on this are convoluted--but I'm definitely sensing that there's a lot more to it than meets the eye at first glance. Read it and maybe you'll see why.


ROPE ENDS by Pain of Salvation [the band name is especially fitting in this case, I thought]

She is still young...
She is still young...
She is still young...

Another day of emptiness
This life is wearing her down
The room around her is a mess
Her children safe with her mom

She is still young but feeling old
Two children with different fathers
She sits on the bathroom floor alone
The shower chain broke
Her neck hurts

Then another night of emptiness to wear her down
Naked to the world she wraps her sadness in a gown
Her children fast asleep she sears the dark with glassy eyes
Choosing carefully among her husband's business ties

"Over!" she cries through rope ends and silk ties
But life holds her hand, refusing to let go
Beautiful life escaping her young blue eyes
Leaving her breathing on the floor

They're still asleep, don't hear her cry
And she's still obsessed with rope ends
This time she picks a stronger tie
With Winnie the Pooh and friends

She is still young but feeling old
A child dying to be a mother
Now she hangs from the ceiling all alone
All pressure is falling from her

Seeing guilt has taught her guilt, she's raised on disbelief
Merely twenty, beautiful, but with a taste for grief
She has learnt all that there is to know about hopelessness
Seeing that no effort in this world can stand her test

"Over!" she cries through rope ends and silk ties
And Winnie is strong, would never let her fall
Beautiful life escaping her young blue eyes
Prevents her from breathing till she's not there at all
"Over!" she cries through rope ends and silk ties
But life holds her hand, refusing to let go
Beautiful life escaping her young blue eyes
Leaving her breathing on the floor

Seeing guilt has taught her guilt, she's raised on disbelief
Merely twenty, beautiful, but with a taste for grief
She has learnt all that there is to know about helplessness
Seeing that no caring in this world can ease her stress

Helpless she lies in rope ends and un-dies
The ceiling let go, the old house let her fall
Unseeing eyes fixating Eeyore's smile
Dropping her breathing to the hard cold floor
"Over!" she cries as she's going unblind
Hitting her head, a broken china soul
Still in this life, still in this troubled mind
Red stains on porcelain and she's not there at all

Breathing she cries for rope ends and silk ties
Blackened and bruised, learning how to see
Beautiful eyes, Piglet stands shy behind
Staring at her tooth, crimsoned ivory
Broken she lies undead and unblind
Hours they pass, this broken china soul
Beautiful life, beautiful crying young eyes
Red stains on porcelain and she's not there at all...

Tonight saw one of the greatest things ever: Taliaferro TP-Fest 2004.
What happened was, Hank and Mike Nardone began throwing a roll of toilet paper back and forth between the couches downstairs in the lounge. As usually happens with adolescent males, things began to escalate, and soon Danny Wysong, Alan, Andy "Argentina," Ben, and eventually I joined in. We ended up using about four rolls, with our bodies almost completely mummified from the waist up and with a solid mass of criss-crossed rolls in the middle. In answer to your unasked question: Yes, we have pictures. We even have a fairly long (over a minute) video clip of us singing "Hava Nagila" as we rise, ghost-like, in our shrouds of white paper. Then we start throwing it at each other and things go their usual course--my favorite part was when Hank put a clump of ripped up toilet paper on his head and ran around bent over screaming "I AM THE BULL!" and ramming people.
The sad part is, very few people saw us doing this. And we didn't even get in trouble with an RA. Why we even bother, I don't know...*sigh*

Oh yeah, and a little side note: Let it be known that we did this without the influence of alcohol or drugs of any kind--unless you count chemical imbalances in the brain.

Drawn to the F.I.R.E.

I found a copy of The Remnant downstairs. Picked it up--in the front was printed ..."[our first goal] is to advance a positive vision of a conservative philosophy and a convincing rebuttalt to the dangers and fallacies of radical western thought on campus."
YAY! Right?
A conservative newspaper, on campus? Geez, I've gotta join this. And Will Coggin's on it--he lives next door to me! He can put in the good word and...
Flip to the last article, a defense of General Anthony Zinni.
"It is conceivable that neoconservatives like Douglas Feith, Wolfowitz, and Perle were the major backers of the War and were able to persuade people like Cheney (who hasn't had a single original thought since assuming office) and our dimwitted president to attack Iraq."
The bad sentence structure aside--where am I supposed to turn? Is it now a postulate that George Bush is a drooling moron? That the War was the fault of those dastardly Zionist Neocon Jooz? Where the hell am I supposed to go for reasoned debate?

http://news.myway.com/top/article/id/256517|top|02-21-2004::17:05|reuters.html

As long as we let the Red Cross visit deposed genocidal maniacs in their prison cells, the world has no business taking us to task for what we're doing in Iraq. That's all I'm saying.

All right, that's it. I'm going on record as saying I'm sick and friggin' tired of hearing people say "BUSH LIED!" Get it straight, people. Use your Webster...it's there for a reason. For Bush to lie, he would have had to have known that Sadaam had no WMD's. This in itself would be really strange; if Saddam didn't have any WMD's, why wouldn't have he had made this clear to the UN instead of acting like a belligerent warlord? At any rate...if Bush KNEW that Saddam had no WMD's, then it would make no sense for him to base the invasion of Iraq on that one issue alone. It would immediately become apparent that there had been no WMD's and his reasoning would be revealed as faulty. This is beyond the scope of even the horrible kind of president Bush has been made out to be by the Angry Left.
Therefore, it is reasonable to assume that Bush didn't know that there would be no IMMEDIATE evidence of weapons of mass destruction. This does not mean that he lied; it means that he made a mistake. I know, I hear you laughing...a BIG mistake. Perhaps. I haven't given up yet. At any rate...remember, it's the eponymy, stupid.

So tonight I finished working on my English paper which I actually started early, quelle surprise. I'm feeling a little anxious about it...I may come back to it later on tonight, since I usually do my best work in the late evening. We shall see. At any rate, at least I'll get to know how my professor grades papers and get a feel for what I should do next time.


I also helped Danny Wysong "assassinate" a guy for this International Relations Club activity that he's doing. We managed to set off a door alarm over in Reeves in the process but he successfully "got" the guy and now has a new assignment. The things we do in our spare time....

Ten waltzes, one slow dance, four-part harmony...
Wait, let me start over. So I got to Waltz Ball and found out that you had to sign up for waltzes, just like the days of yore (as in, "yore all idiots for having me sign up for waltzes"). Turns out there are more girls than guys, which benefits me no end. I was running into girls with 8 or 9 empty out of 10 waltz "slots." My date, Carolyn, from Pleasants (where Tex lives), and I decided to take the first and last dances with each other. Eventually, my dance card looked like this:

1 - Carolyn
2 - Carrie
3 - Diana
4 - Hilary
5 - Susan
6 - Megan
7 - Mary Catherine
8 - Sidney
9 - Cheryl
10 - Carolyn

Waltzes of note: Hillary was by far the best dancer I had the pleasure of waltzing with, although Carolyn had had prior experience. The only thing about it was that the fourth waltz was at a reasonable speed, wheras I had trouble figuring out the beat of the first and tenth (among others...the beat of the sixth defies description, i.e., it changed tempo as often as a Hollywood starlet changes hair colors.) At any rate, it was the only one on which any of the Princess Turns we attempted went smoothly. I'd have to say the pleasure of the fourth outdid the aggravation or frustration of fast/unintelligible tempos on the parts of the other songs.
After the Waltz, PMA sang in four-part harmony to our new fraternity sweetheart. (For the record, she's Heather Ligman, and is the president of NKE, the music sorority.) After giving her the flowers we concluded with a perfunctory "Hail Sinfonia." Some music guy whose name I never caught said some stuff I didn't understand and presented awards which had no meaning to me, so I kind of toned that out.
Finally, at the end, there was the obligatory Bubblegum slow dance song. After which Carolyn and I proceeded back to Pleasants, where I dropped her off. I then came back here to explain where I'd been to the people of my dorm who have, apparently, never seen me in a suit. Their loss.

Distillation: Not for the faint of eyes
Another Thursday--which means another three to four hours in the lab over at Rogers. This evening we were distilling a solution of cyclohexane and toluene, first using just a simple distilling technique, and then using this method where you pack a bunch of little glass beads into a vertical tube. Apparently when the solution filters through the beads it makes the distillation process much more effecient. But it takes a hell of a lot longer, especially when you have to measure the temperature of the damn thing for every two milliliter increment.
This is related to our study of how crude oil is refined. All the seperate components--kerosene, gasoline, jet fuel, engine oil, etc.--have different boiling points, vapor pressures, and so forth, so if you have a really tall distilling tower with plates set up to catch the various solutions as they vaporize and condense, you eventually get a tower that has seperated solutions of gas, oil, and so on.
So yeah, you learn a lot in lab. The biggest lesson is, never take the evening one. Dinner is much more important than learning.

In which a young man's thoughts turn to Lunch
...Er, that is, waltzing. Yes, it's true; I now know how to waltz. However, said knowledge does not imply skill or enthusiasm--although I admit it is an adrenaline-rush sort of activity. However, it would be much more enjoyable if I could guarantee a lack of mistakes. So now I'm ready for Waltz Ball, hopefully. Though it remains to be seen if I can carry this off wearing a suit with my partner wearing a dress...hmm...let's just say a ripping sound is not hoped for but is expected.
Also, we have now determined that Tyler is the Savior of Mankind. We have discussed establishing The First Church of Tyler merely because he is The Man. We have seen him making the lame see, the blind hear, and the deaf walk. Danny Wysong's chronic leprosy was cured after Tyler laid his hands upon him. There was a weeping girl sitting outside the Wren Building; Tyler touched her cheek and said, "Be at peace," and now that girl is the president of General Motors.
And thank God for midnight coffee runs. That's all I'm saying.

In lieu of any political screed, I'm going to just say this: READ JAMES LILEKS! Scroll down past the part about a song he downloaded from the 'Net and start reading when he mentions Clinton's plan for a pre-emptive strike. Yes, that's right: Ole Slick Willie had a plan for invading Iraq just based on the fact that Sadaam could be RE-building his weapons supply. I think it's time a few people opened up a nice bag of SHHH and dug in.
In other news...am currently acing Calculus. Orgo continues to be Chemistry 666: Handiwork of Satan, and I'm in dire straits as far as the homework goes. Andy, Chrissy, and I tend to agonize over it in the two or three days before it's due. Psych is all notes and no homework, and English is all reading and very little notes. Supposedly we have a paper due the 20th; guess when I'm going to be starting that? Whatever you guessed, it's probably about right (if you know me at all).

Nothing much going on here now...last night we had some sort of drinking bust in which most people blew unhumanly high numbers on the breathalyzer. Not surprising; a lot of these guys have been drinking so long there's significant amounts of blood in their alcohol.
I saw Reservoir Dogs over at Amy's room as well, while everyone else was singing songs of sobriety to the cops. Not one that I would recommend to anyone except guys who enjoy gratuitous violence. Personally, I prefer my bad action movies laced with explosions so at least I can get my pyro pleasures fulfilled.
And I've finally discovered the fun of a midnight coffee run. Mike, Joe, Alan, Christine, Liz, Hank, and I all went down to the Daily Grind the other night at around 12:30 and had all kinds of fun making obscene jokes, almost getting into fights with stoned people, and basically being 18. College rocks so much...

It seems that life as a teenager is a series of idealistic viewpoints tainted by disillusionment, or, put another way, real life blessed by flights of fancy. People are never as good as you want them to be and never as bad as you think they are, and eventually you get to see to see them for real. In any case, after being riocheted between both extremes, I realized that to be a conservative in today's time means you have to be quiet or angry. By angry, I don't necessarily mean vitriolic; I just mean the people whose beef with whatever Leftist agenda overrides their need not to be screamed at and demonized. Me, I can only take so many people getting in my face, telling me my views are "bullshit," and telling me to "shut [my] fucking mouth." It really isn't worth being a conservative for that. I got a lot of laughs when I said that, but I was serious; since I don't have a rage problem with anything going on in today's world, there's really no point in fighting about it with anyone.
Which I why I have this blog. There's a reason I don't keep my email posted or have a comments system up. For one thing, not too many people read this, so it would be redundant to post my email. Second, I don't want to argue. I'm tired of it. If I wanted to argue I'd post in a public forum. This is not a public forum; this is my house. So therefore, the only method of displaying your displeasure with my views on this site is the BACK button. For once in my experience I will not have my views discounted.