yep

I love cats. I love every kind of cat.

The Cycle

You know how people are always apologizing for poorly-drawn internet artworks because they did it in MS Paint? Well, I don't even have MS Paint. (Thanks a lot, Steve!!! (I figure if I curse Steve Jobs enough, he'll come haunt me, which would be awesome.)) What I do have is a word processing program called "Pages" that allows you to insert shapes. So in that artistic medium, I present to you the story of my life:

With apologies to Henri Matisse:

Here is my life:

So, you know how it goes. By the end of any given writing/problem set marathon my body has blended entirely into the shape of my chair and I'm saying things like this:

And then, due to sheer force of will combined with luck, I finish everything on time, but barely. And of course, that leads to thoughts like this:

So then...

And then because of all the time I wasted "rewarding" myself...

...yep.

A Missive from the Past

This was hidden between the pages of my secondhand thirdhand copy of Anna Karenina. Who is Sam Braverman? Was he brave enough to defend 'it' from the destructive force called 'Dusty'? Did Sam take this opportunity for growth?

The world may never know.

<3

The Archetype or Heavenly Pattern of the Human Body

So there I was, scanning the endless shelves of the history section(s) for a quick read. Then I noticed an odd grouping of books nested amongst the world history topics. Titles like "100 Affirmations of Self" and "Worship of Osiris" caught my eye. 


Ah, the esoterics, the occultists of the turn of the century. How amusing you are now. I began flipping through a few of the books to sample them. "Okay," I thought, "you had me at 'The Philosopher's Stone and the mystic Elixir Vitae have a real existence and may be discovered by those who diligently search.'"


So if I haven't been updating as often, it's because I've been searching for the Elixir Vitae.

Eventually, the book claims, humans will reach a higher form where we all have flowers for heads. I am not joking.

The book I read from this section, "The Archetype or Heavenly Pattern of the Human Body", published 1937, was filled with such jollities as:

-Claiming that human civilization had been around for centuries before the central nervous system was invented.  

-Alignments of archangels, planets, and Zodiac signs.

-Reincarnation blended with pantheism blended with Christianity.

-The superior race, the Aryans.

-Claiming that each cell of the human body is composed of just Earth, Air, Fire, and Water. (Geez, molecular bio people, you claim it's"hard"? Seriously, memorizing four things? Give me a break.)

-Humans began as a gaseous form and coalesced as they evolved.

-The nucleus of each cell is visible as a glowing spark of immortal fire.

The slanted form of this list is representative of the Etherealized Form with influences of Ares and the Archangel Gabriel.


Until my existence concentrates in this Astral Plane again! (Catch ya later!)

Bollywood Screenshots

I might make Bollywood Screenshot Tuesday a thing. I might not. We'll see. The movie Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge is a 90's movie starring Shahrukh Khan and Kajol. The title means:

As per Bollywood law, a lead character must say or sing the title of the movie, possibly repeatedly.

What happens after you carry the bride away.

Hide yo kids, hide yo wife and hide yo maidens too.

Ew, Shahrukh, get away from me!

Kajol the hay demon. As per Bollywood law, the leads have to get extremely sloshed for important events to happen. Notice the bottle of rum she's holding.

This image is pretty much self-explanatory.

Also starring: a murderous Indian John Cleese. He kept this face for over 10 minutes.

The Epic (Fail) of Gilgamesh

Stop and think for a second about the title. There. Now don't you feel boilingly mad about how teh Internetz co-opted a powerful word and made it as weak as a pewling kitten? (Pewling: variant on mewling: it's valid.) Wait, wait, before you decry the downfall of "epic", think of what the 80's did to the word "awesome". The words "appalling", "awful", "terrific" (used to mean "terror-inspiring"), "glorified", "deplorable", "desperate", "cordially" (used to mean "from the heart"), "pass out" (used to mean "to die"), "marvelous", "dreadful", "divine", "horrible", "adorable", "blighter", "enchant", "heavenly", "also" (weakened from "similarly" to "in addition to"),  "admire", "encounter" (used to mean "meeting in battle", "to counter") have all met the fate of being weakened by colloquial use to some degree.

This weakening is not an internet-specific phenomenon; it's a slang-specific one. And slang has been around since, well, before the Epic of Gilgamesh. So with that linguistic tangent unrelated to the actual epic poem at hand through with, I would like to say that, yes, I read the Epic of Gilgamesh and I found it surprising and yet not at all surprising that what humanity counts as "success" hasn't changed a whit. Gilgamesh is the eponymous hero, Mr. Success himself, considering he's established himself King, is richer than rich, has beaten every challenge, and has dibs on every wedding-night virgin before he passes her on to her husband. (If you think that's scandalous, you should read the passage where Enkidu lays with a harlot for six days and seven nights.) What the Hammurabi, Mesopotamians?

You know, considering how wimpy the lion looks, is it really all that impressive that Gilgamesh slew a bunch of them?

The Mespotamians, to make a sweeping generalization based on scant anthropological/archaeological evidence, were not a very cheery lot when it came to worldview and religion. This is evident in the story; Gilgamesh goes dashing off to save his friend/brotha from anotha goddess Enkidu from the slavery of the afterlife, but is kicked out because it's impossible to rescue people from death. Then Gilgamesh returns to life only to kick the bucket a page later.

...and that about sums up my foray into 4000 year-old literature.

Bookses

Finals week. So do not have time for this. But I have to return books to the library, so I guess I'd better mention I read:

"500 Handmade Books": My only complaint about this book is that it itself was not handmade.

"Santería": I would like to say that I respect all religions. But animal sacrifices and worshipping gods with venereal disease? Umm... okay.

"The Alloy of Law": The "this is a stand-alone" statements had all better be BOLD-FACED LIES. C'mon.

"Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance": Enough has been written about this book over the years. Two comments: 1) Paranoid schizophrenia is not kind to its sufferers (Or... their families). 2) As I shut this book, I looked out the window and I saw a sign for Quality Inn.

...

Yeah, I don't know either.