tsunami

I made the mistake of watching this four days ago
and I've had dreams of swirling vortexes every night since. They're not exactly malicious. One night, from a safe and high vantage point I watched as an ice and snow vortex gently carried away a ship. Last night it was a pretty vortex in a pond at night filled with flowers and magical colored lights. I'm sure this is just my unconscious mind trying to cope with and soften terrifying images that I should have never willingly exposed myself to.

But this is real life stuff. This was something a lot of people had to live through and will deal with for the rest of their lives. As an atheist, when bad things happen to me or ones I love, I see it as random bad luck or one of those things that just happens from time to time in everyone's life since no one can completely be free from sadness or loss. I think it takes much more determination to be a theist and experience something like the 2004 tsunami. Most theists try to take into account a loving God when something bad or even terrible happens to them and they end up viewing it as a trial of sorts. But to lose everything you own and everyone you love in a matter of hours seems like too much to bear.

The Blood Brothers - Laser Life

I've given up on trying not to force my musical taste upon strangers. Music is a big part of what makes me happy, so I've decided to finally succumb to the urge on my blog. You've been warned.

The band The Blood Brothers does not fit the genre of music I tend to listen to. When I first heard this song almost six years ago, I didn't like it. I didn't like the high pitched vocals of the one singer and what sounded like total chaos towards the end of the song complete with unintelligible screaming.

However, a day later I found myself listening to it again. Two weeks later I had bought the album and I was in love. I still am.

It's hard for me to pinpoint what it is about any band that I like. With The Blood Brothers I would try to explain it as their controlled chaos and how dense their songs are. Most of their tracks have a beat or a shift that they could probably make into a whole other song, to the point where what could have been half an album for some bands becomes a three minute song for The Blood Brothers.

pride and prejudice

Yesterday I almost had a legitimate argument about artificial intelligence.

My boyfriend mentioned that I should finish playing Mass Effect 3. I got about 3/4th of the way through it and stopped when all of the spoilers about the ending leaked out. I told him I didn't feel the need to finish it since I already knew what option I would pick at the end - destroy all inorganic life forms. My boyfriend is very pro inorganic life in Mass Effect and thinks all sentient machines are our friends and we'll create a better universe together. I'm very anti inorganics because I think they will inevitably become more intelligent than us and then all bets are off. With our lesser developed human brains we can't predict how they'll act. However, I have a strong feeling they'll just kill us off. I accused him of anthropomorphizing machines, he accused me of inorganic intolerance. It had to be one of my silliest and nerdiest moments to date. At 30. Come on.

I was able to cool down enough to tell him that we could stay together for now, but if the inevitable robotic uprising happens during our lifetime, we are to be sworn enemies.

do not be deceived; sexy robots will destroy us all

a terrible "get out and vote" pep talk

I voted early in the presidential election this year. A voting location is only a mile away from my house, so it was really convenient. And I went in the afternoon, so there wasn't any line. Early voting is great.

You know who else loves early voting? Old white folks. They were the only other people there. As a half Hispanic 30 year old, I felt a little out of place. While I was at a touch screen voting booth contraption, I could hear a woman being told by one of the voter-monitor-volunteer type people that she couldn't "help" her friend vote.  The woman explained that her friend had dementia so he needed her help. That was something I've never thought about before.

If I'm going to be cynical and...realistic, I'd say that unless you're voting for a Republican presidential candidate, your vote doesn't really matter in Texas and hasn't mattered since about 1980. And I could say that a two party system doesn't really give anyone much of a choice. And I could just say my vote is pointless. It probably is. However, it took literally ten minutes out of my day to do. I've spent a lot more time and energy doing things that were much more of a waste (like seeing Taken 2) so there's no way I'm not going to vote.

an evening with my brother

Tonight's purchases:

4 Bavarian creams from Dunkin Donuts.
2 tickets to Taken 2.
2 burgers and a bag of fries from Mooyah.

Save me from myself.

time waste

Life. Life is beautiful. Life is an awesome responsibility. We are given such a finite amount of time to experience what can only be experienced as a human with human thoughts and emotions. We are given such freedom and such beauty to behold. And this self awareness, this knowledge is such a burden. It is so terrifying. How are we to fill our time? What are we to do with ourselves? How do we make this one life, these few moments which are our existence matter? Please, someone just tell us what to do! We are so connected and yet so alone in the universe. Just give me a distraction from my insignificance, from my inevitable demise, so I can ignore the howling void of eternity and nothingness that surrounds me!

Are you suffering from this human affliction also? Well, just buy a house. It will eat up most of your weekends so you won't have time to sit around thinking and having existential crises.

This weekend I painted a side of the house. That's right, just one side. It's an unpleasant and labor intensive job, so every year for the past three years I've painted one side of the house in the fall. It was three years ago that I noticed that the paint around certain areas of the house was peeling badly, so I had a house-painter stop buy to give me a quote to do the job. He said it would be five thousand dollars. I thanked him for his time and told him I'd think about it. After he drove away I laughed and laughed and laughed. $5,000. If a mechanic or plumber quoted me $5,000 I would probably meekly nod my head and sign a check. But to have my house painted? No. My car wasn't going to blow or up my house wasn't going to flood if I did it wrong. The worst that was going to happen was that my house's paint job would look wrecktastic. And it already did, so what was holding me back?

I bought an extension ladder and some paint supplies a few months later and got to it. My father had warned me about buying a house with wood siding. And in defense of myself and houses with wood siding, I don't think repainting a side of a house every year is that big of a burden. In general. In my case, the guy who renovated the house reused old, old, old wood boards in certain areas.  In order to make them match the smooth new wood boards, he just iced a quarter inch layer of spackle on top of them and painted it. Apparently this is a bad idea. I'm sure spackle has its uses, but this doesn't seem to be one of them. I can tell exactly which boards are the old spackle laden ones, because they are the ones with paint peeling off of them terribly.

Ideally, these old boards should be replaced, but I don't have the money for that. So, I just hack away as much of the spackle as I can, smooth it out, and repaint it. I have a dream of re-siding the house with the no-rot fake wood that some of the neighbors have. What am I doing to obtain this dream? Absolutely nothing. That kind of job will cost about $15,000 so I should be saving up some money starting three years ago.

Anyway, the side of the house I did this weekend wasn't that hard since it was the side of the house with the carport attached to it. In order to reach the tallest part of the house, all I had to do was climb onto the carport roof. I do have that extension ladder, but I also have a fear of heights, so I try to stay off of it as much as possible.

Here's an example of what I was dealing with.

And here's a section after a lot of mind numbing scraping.

At this point I sand the boards to make them a bit less bumpy and caulk and prime. Spackle is not invited. I probably should have included an after photo...

pumpkin carving

I went to my parent's house today and we had a spontaneous pumpkin carving party. My father bought a ridiculously large pumpkin, which resulted in a 30 minute photo session where my sister stuck her infant inside the excavated gourd. It seemed traumatic, but my niece took it well until about the last ten minutes. It bothers me when people treat babies like accessories. Was it cute? I don't know, maybe after you photo shop the pumpkin slime off the baby. I feel like I'm getting off track here.

My six year old nephew cleaned out and drew a face on his first Halloween pumpkin. Everyone seemed a lot more excited about this than he did.

As usual, it was the grownups who had the best time. Here's my brother.

He was pretty proud of his pumpkin for about 15 minutes. Then my father finished carving his.

My dad liked a design on the back of a pumpkin carving kit he bought, so I drew it for him and he carved it out. We're the freaking jack-o-lantern dream team.