LiveJournal Project - September 2004

Uh oh, looks like the blackbird is falling off the gym wagon and there's a shoulder surgery around the corner. BOHICA!

Date: 2004-09-01 15:08
Subject: TRAINING: phase 3, workout 11
well, i talked to one of the trainers at my gym and he said that most likely the shoulder pain i'm having is rotator-cuff related - so that's not good. i've got an appointment a week from today to see the doctor - hopefully he'll either give me a cortisone shot or some exercises i can do and not tell me that i have to take 6 weeks off from lifting. in the meantime...

Date: 2004-09-07 18:02
Subject: stuff and shit
i'm starting to think that maybe i'm getting a little too old for weekend-long bouts of chemical insanity, as today i feel absolutely brain-dead. anyway, weekend recap. went to vegas. lost $10,000. saw robin williams do a stand-up routine which was really funny - he made fun of everything from deaf people to the olympics to aborignal tribes in africa. indeed, nothing is sacred. won all my money back plus a profit of $90 (woo). that about covers it. cory and i hung out with mike and jason and heather for part of the time, but they were staying at the rio and we were at the mgm grand and after the first night when we trekked over to the rio we didn't really feel like going back. anyway, next weekend is TI's blackjack tournament, with a first place prize of $75,000. here's hoping for a shitload of good hands and a bunch of shit for everyone else.

Date: 2004-09-09 17:55
Subject: would you like some cheese with that? reality check needed on aisle 3
attn re_aug: in response to the following entry, for which you so conveniently disabled comments (hey, i can do that, too):

"a simple fucking request for an opinion that would help me with my paper [due friday] and only one person cared enough to indulge me [thanks ~cel~]. and that's what i love about this fucking city and the people in it. [/sarcasm] fuck off"

since you've already passed summary judgement and apparently sentenced all of us, save one, to fuck off, it's likely that this won't matter to you all that much, but i would be remiss in my duties if i failed to tell you that the above-quoted statement is the most puerile and asinine thing i've seen in a long time. somehow you've managed to display a complete absence of basic understanding as you illogically equate lack of response to your earlier query with lack of care, failing to recognize that people out there have other things to do (such as job, school, family, or some/all of the above) which take up large chunks of their time, thus preventing them from offering a timely reply. perhaps if you had bothered to inform us in the first post that your paper was due on friday, we might've put responding to your query a little higher on the priority list. perhaps if you had emailed people directly, rather than basing your grade foolishly on the hope that while scanning our friends' lists, we'd take notice of your request, you'd have gotten more replies. instead, by acting like an immature, tactless buffoon, you've taken the odds that you might've still gotten some assistance from reasonably likely to less than zero, and all you can see fit to do now is piss and moan.

i will happily be fucking off now.

Date: 2004-09-12 17:47
Subject: vegas recap.
didn't win the blackjack tournament, lost a bunch of money, but other than that, it was a fun time. i now have a vampire rabbit (named bunnicula, of course) from build-a-bear. too bad he didn't bring me any luck at the tables. no trips (to anywhere) planned at the moment for the near future, so it looks like it's time to concentrate on getting through the semester and all sorts of other things that i've been slacking off on a little too much lately.

Date: 2004-09-15 11:08
Subject: shouldering the burden...
just got back from el doctor, and the diagnosis is that i have rotator cuff tendonitis in my left shoulder. should be 10-14 days for it to heal. that's all well and good, but he also told me that i should never do bench press again - that even if i wait until this heals and start benching again, i'll most likely continue to re-injure it and eventually that will lead to a rotator cuff tear. i'm having a hard time accepting that one - not so much that i believe he's wrong, but that, well, i like benching, and i can't really see myself never doing it again. we'll see what happens....

Date: 2004-09-16 19:33
Subject: anyone interested in going? ryanjamieson, perhaps?
The Marshall Lecture
featuring Paul Krugman
Wednesday, Sept. 22, 2004
Gammage Auditorium
7:30 PM

Paul Krugman is one of the world's preeminent economists and an insightful, outspoken Op-Ed columnist for the New York Times. In his new book, The Great Unraveling, Professor Krugman describes how the United States lost its way, economically and politically, and recommends a road map for getting the country back on track. He is a passionate and articulate speaker, with a gift for relating global economic events to his audiences, and committed to speaking the truth as he sees it in the most compelling terms. Paul Krugman is a professor of economics at Princeton University.

Krugman's work in economics has won him several awards and broad acclaim from the economic press. He has been named as one of the top international economists by The Economist. In recognition of his work in international trade and finance, the American Economic Association has awarded him its John Bates Clark award.

Date: 2004-09-22 18:01
Subject: politicking...
from an associated press article: "Gore lost to Bush by five electoral votes, 271-267." hmm. last i checked, 271-267 = 4.

from the same article, it says that kerry is pulling his ads from arizona and three other states, as he "bows to political reality" - y'know, i have to wonder about the wisdom of that decision. the vote is going to be close in november, potentially even closer than it was in 2000, and here we see kerry basically giving up on four states because he doesn't think he can win them. unless the kerry campaign is seriously hurting for cash, which i doubt, the idea of giving up states, particularly those that are hotly contested, seems rather ludicrous.

the more i learn about kerry, the less i like him - which is pretty bad considering that i never liked him all that much in the first place. this isn't all that great of a mistake, but the one that continues to bother me is that he's gone on record as saying that even knowing now that there are no WMD in iraq, he still would've voted to authorize bush to use force. i see something intellectually dishonest in continually lambasting someone for a piss poor decision and its various consequences, yet turning right around and saying that you'd still support the decision. bush fucked up in iraq, kerry says, but i'd still vote to send people over there, even though the whole WMD scare turned out to be based on faulty information. in other words, what you're telling me, mr. kerry, is that as president, you'd have been no different from dubya, and we'd still have gotten stuck in this desert quagmire.

fuck both of them. i'm voting for badnarik. it's not going to matter anyway.

Date: 2004-09-24 16:13
Subject: a roadblock to opportunity
http://www.cnn.com/2004/EDUCATION/09/24/uc.admissions.ap/index.html

today, university of california officials voted to raise the minimum GPA for admission from 2.8 to 3.0. rather than looking at this as a way to ensure that talented and capable students will be admitted into the schools, instead we see people complaining that this move will hurt minority students. one regent claimed "it's another roadblock to opportunity." what the hell is wrong with these people?! suddenly it's become unconscionable to demand higher performance out of students? opponents of this measure say that it's going to disproportionately affect black and hispanic students. what, suddenly because you're black and/or hispanic, you're too stupid to earn a 3.0, when a 2.8 was well within your reach? come on, assholes. being black / hispanic doesn't make you stupid. it might make you poor, compared to your average white kid, but being poor doesn't make you stupid, either. besides, there are alternatives. if your GPA isn't high enough, go to community college first. take some non-degree classes.

and really, when you think about it, college degrees (at least undergraduate degrees) are so watered-down and worthless these days that it doesn't matter all that much anyway. everybody is going to college - including a lot of people who really don't belong there - to the point where now if you have a bachelor's degree, it really isn't all that much different than having a high school diploma was 15 years ago. and for what? do you really need a four-year college degree to be a secretary? to flip burgers? there are a lot of jobs out there which simply do not require an advanced education, and as a result of the continual growth in college enrollment, we end up with a whole buttload of people who have college degrees that either a: get stuck in jobs where they aren't using anything that they learned, thus feeling that their time and money spent were simply wasted, or b: think that as a result of their additional piece of paper that now they are magically above various classes of job. whatever. the reality of this world is that not everybody can be king, and most people can't even make it into the royal court, yet we persist in our beliefs that through continual self-improvement, eventually we'll be knighted.

y'know, marx was right. it's all a big lie perpetrated by the capitalists to keep the rest of us imbued with some sense of false hope that if we bust our asses long and hard enough, we can join their hallowed ranks, when in fact we'll be forever stuck in servitude. kinda like the lie that we continually believe that eventually we'll be able to vote FOR someone as opposed to merely voting AGAINST someone else.