Andee from the internet.

So this morning in blackfolk (I swear, I get most of my daily news from there and from sydneycat, it's scary) someone posted an image they'd found lampooning both the events of yesterday and the actual plane bombing of the WTC. I'm too lazy to post a copy of it, but basically it was a photo of the burning apartment complex with "10/11/06 - NEVAR[sic] FORGET" superimposed on it in big block type.

I'm sure the person who created said image wasn't thinking about the greater satirical meaning of his quick photoshop job and was just going for a cheap laugh. I fully believe that 99.9 percent of stuff created on the internet is just on the fly humor and its creators never think about what's beyond the initial giggle. That would be giving people too much credit. But I did have to consider why I found it funny when I probably should have been offended, at least, on behalf of the people that died five years ago and those that died in the accident yesterday.

The conclusion I came to was that the humor value isn't coming at the expense of those who died in both tragedies. However it is a pretty effective lampoon of the media circus, soundbites, slogan-ism, jingoism and exploitation that erupted in the aftermath of September 11. Consider: how many of those "9-11 - Never Forget" ball caps, t-shirts, signs, flags, mugs and other useless crap did you see people using and wearing afterwards? I'm willing to bet a fraction of a percentage of that stuff went to charity. Of course, that means somewhere some seriously twisted folk profited upon a nation's shock and horror and probably used either sweatshop or maquiladora labor to do it with. Then there's what the news did to it. The phrase "Nine-eleven" practically has a registered trademark following it. It's become a buzzword, not an event. The date has been transformed into this big media and political juggernaut that is used repeatedly pretty much the same way sudden loud orchestral accents are in a horror movie score - that burst of swift, from the gut emotional response. Except when dealing with horror movies, emotional manipulation is part of the fun and expected. In terms of a tragedy, it's insensitive and inexcusable. Especially considering how that nationwide emotional manipulation was used by the Powers That Be.

Is that picture offensive? Sure. However, considering the greater context, it's also funny... in an I-have-to-laugh-or-I'll-punch-something sort of way.

I won't grow up
I don't want to go to school.
Just to learn to be a parrot,
And recite a silly rule:

If growing up means it would be
Beneath my dignity to climb a tree
I'll never grow up,
never grow up,
never grow up
Not me.

Which of course must be followed by this (sing if you know the words):

I don't wanna grow up, I'm a Toys R Us kid
There's a million toys at Toys R Us that I can play with
From bikes to trains to video games
It's the biggest toy store there is
I don't wanna grow up, because then if I did,
I wouldn't be a Toys R Us kid
More games more toys - oh boy!
I wanna be a Toys R Us kid

Somewhere in me is a rant about how identifying with either of these songs (well, the second one's a jingle) is a rejection of the traditional model of adulthood - a joyless, funless dog eat dog suit wearing stage of life with no room for things like creativity and imagination... and yes, play. I mean, the number from peter pan is a little more condemnatory, I think, especially later in the song, which is all very tongue in cheek considering it was written by adults for adults to sing on stage. And somewhere some adult had to come up with the Toys R Us jingle. And I'm sure both of these people had jobs, bills to pay, taxes, kids to feed what have you. So... what went through their minds as they were penning these songs? Did they want to climb trees or ride their new bike through a store with impunity? And there's another layer to it all when you think about it another way. My parents didn't really let me climb trees when I was little. That whole pesky possibility of falling out and breaking my neck kinda didn't appeal to them. I climb trees now. Rarely, admittedly, but I'm a lot better at it now considering that I can now actually reach and wiggle myself onto low lying branches far mre effectively now that I'm bigger. And going to Toys R Us when you're a kid quite frankly sucks ass, because you have to whine and bitch at your parents to buy you things there or allow you to have said things. When you're grown up you can walk in and buy everything in the store if you want to and have the money without running it by Mom first. It's just when you're the type of adult that these songs flagrantly object to, it wouldn't even occur to you that you have the kind of freedom and power to actually enjoy such things that most would consider childish, though I'm sure most people didn't get to have ice cream and pringles for dinner for three nights straight growing up unless they had parents with a very weak grasp of proper nutrition (Flintstones don't fix everything you know!)

Youth, maturity, and the true pursuit of happiness (which is different, but not entirely mutually exclusive from the pursuit of success) are all your head. And provided I'm still spry enough, I hope to occasionally be found in a tree when I'm all wrinkly and gray haired. Or in the Nintendo or LEGO aisle of Toys R Us, shopping for myself. Growing up, really, does not have to be awfuller of the awful things that ever were. You just have to think about it the right way... and occasionally have ice cream for dinner. Cause you CAN.

I am so goddamn tweaky right now. It's better than it was earlier when I had to leave to office for 45 minutes and read in Pinocchio's for a while, but my eyeball's gonna start twitching soon. I just gotta keep thinking... home awaits, with sweeties and episodes of Lost to look forward to.

Mostly it's just work biting my ass. Some of it knowing I gotta work until close both tomorrow night and friday. Which leaves my Saturday and sunday free, which means I should obey my conscience and go visit Dad, since I did say if I could, I would. I suppose in my current state it's fine. It can't possibly get any _worse._ Right? ...right?

On a slightly positive note, one of the other reasons is that I was up until nearly 5am last night - at some point yesterday evening sundart anzovin and I had gone to the Jones Library, and out of curiousity I picked up a book called Threshold by Sara Douglass, and now I can't frigging put it down. I'm 3 quarters of the way through it already and that's no mean feat considering the size of the book. Other than one aspect that's annoying me to no end ( spoileriffic parenthetical mini rant ), the story and the world it's set in are fascinating. You do have to hand it to someone who can use mathematical sequences as a basis for magic.

As if we needed more proof that Hollywood is completely out of ideas, Disney is remaking Adventures in Babysitting

OMG. WTF. WHY?

Okay, please note that this has been one of my favorite movies since I was like 8. I could probably still dig out the Point Paperback novelization of it out from somewhere at The House. It's got that quintessential 80s charm, not to mention has Vincent D'Onofrio in a hilarious bit part that I'll bet he wished the world somehow missed.

But it's still a pretty blazingly awful movie (hence it now being a cult classic). Like a Chicago street gang would really be scared of lily white, pretty, young Elizabeth Shue just because she famously yells, "Don't fuck with the babysitter!" And now, they're remaking it. no. Disney is remaking it. IE, they're going to take the original, remove anything remotely threatening or messed up or fun about it, grind it up into bland G rated pablum and expect us to eat it. The original had kids swearing, reading Playboy, getting into trouble, and even getting into some scary situations that was a little more realistic than the bowdlerization that's inevitably going to result from this. I mean, gah. And even better, they have announced that filling Elisabeth Shue's big 80s hair shoes is Miss That's so Raven. Retch.

I'm really afraid I'm going to wake up one day and find that they're greenlighted a remake of The Goonies. Just imagine what sort of utter travesty THAT would be.

Dear Hollywood - stop eating the corpses of your forefathers in the hopes that grokking and cherishing them will magically rake in the money. It's not working. You are seriously insulting your target audience, which is blatently trying to tell you something with the fact that ticket sales have fallen drastically in the past couple of years. It's not because DVD is rendering the movie theater obsolete, you imbeciles, it's because you keep cranking out crap movies, 75% percent of which are pathetic remakes of or crap sequels to movies that in some way actually justify their weight in celluloid. For the love of all that's holy, hire some actual talent, go back to the drawing board and start making some MOVIES again. KThx. -- Andee

This rant/stream of consciousness/essaything/bit of me talking into the ether was partially inspired by a recent post of newblksusan's. Thanks for the bit of brain food!

So this afternoon in the shower (don't ask, I seem to usually do deep thinking in either the bath or the shower - something about the hot water) I found myself thinking about blogging and journalling and how the two could be classified as different. Back when I first started up with Livejournal I despised the word "blog." To quote Hugh Brown Shu, "That's not a word! That's a cartoon sound effect!" (Though admittedly he was actually talking about pronouncing "conch" as "conk," but it still works here.) I found the word to be dumb and simplistic, a geek hipster contraction of "Web log" that rubbed me as much the wrong way as shortening "carbohydrates" to "carbs" during the height of the Church of Eternal Atkins craze. Plus it sounded like one of those onomatopoetic words for "vomit."

Two or three years later and "carbs," thank the heavens, seems to be out of fashion. "Blog," however, is not. If anything, it's gotten more widespread. It used to just be geeks keeping online journals and mouthing off, now suddenly everyone has one. They're used as journalistic tools, kinda the Internet equivelant of weekly columns. (I have this image of some crazy person collecting all of the text of "I Hate It Here" and republishing it as the blog of Spider Jerusalem. Same basic format.) They're used to give human faces to businesses, allowing companies to "talk" to their customers. And it's starting to be a little scary how many celebrities have myspace and use that to reach their fans. (myspace still frightens me, even though I have an account. Though I mostly use it to harass my wannabe thug life nephew.) They've gotten legit. Dan Rather himself said something about leaving evening news to start regularly blogging, since apparently CBS doesn't allow its anchors to do both. Blogs, suddenly, are Important. So I was thinking about it more today... is the only difference between blogs and online journals what word you use or are there deeper differences that somehow make blogging more legitimate than journalling?

The first thing I came up with is that blogs are kinda like online columns - ways of telling the world your thoughts and views on (insert subject here). Whether the world actually cares or not, well, that's a different story. Journals are more for recording day to day existence, or important events, or yes, even what the hell you scored on that "what sort of fairy am I" test from Quizilla. (...That could be read wrong.) It's more sharing the internal, personal stuff. But then, again... that's not really different from blogging really, cause you're still expressing yourself and what you think and feel about given subjects, even in a day to day journal - what you note down, even if it reads like the most inane bit of garbage, still says that it was important to you enough to be recorded somewhere. It might not be deep or profound or change the universe or win a Pulitzer or anything, but it's still an expression of yourself - it's just that unlike a paper journal, usually other people can see your thought processes as well.

So the next tack my brain took, which made more sense, was that blogs seem to be more centered about one specific topic. A blog could just convey news and information about said topic, or opinions, or political statements. They also seem to be more edited for public consumption than online journals are; blog entries seem to be more polished, more essay-like, than your average journal entry, which is often just a stream of consciousness or a list of unrelated paragraphs representing different points in a day, or different thoughts in an hour. Blogs usually are pretty cohesive in staying on-topic, though the topics themselves can be as narrow as matchstick buildings or as broad as "pop culture." Journal entries wander all over the place topic wise.

Of course, then my brain pointed out that online journals do follow one specific topic or theme - that is the life and times of the writer. And with that in mind, they carry their own sense of legitimacy. It occurred to me that an online journal, though it may be harder to read and unpolished, is in a way more legitimate. Blogs imply polish, distillation, finding the sentence to capture a thought in such a way that it gains x reaction from the readers, while a journal entry is just put out there, raw. This is what is, this is what happened to me, here's my shopping list, my annoyance with my kids, that horrible bitch I work with screwed me over once again, god this world blows goats, don't it? and by the way, that boy I have a crush on totally asked me out OMGWTFBBQ!!! Seriously though... a journal is not just a sequence of carefully worded essays, it tells a story of someone's life from date A to date B. Sometimes it is a superficial story, never going deeper than the surface of a person. Sometimes the stories are deeply personal, sharing to a level not unlike retyping a private paper journal and posting it to the internet. All of these stories can be silly, profound, sad, ecstatic, romantic, twisted, depressing, or haunting. Sometimes within the same journal. That's life though. No matter what sort of journal it is, by writing in it, that person is saying to the world, "this is my life, this is my story, and I want you to read it. The public entries, anyway."

It's funny... on and off since I was ten, I've kept journals, wrote letters, obsessively kept some sort of record of the time passing in my life. Almost 20 years, committed to paper or disk. That's a long time. There are times I think that I've not begun living yet, that I concentrate on the things I haven't experienced, but all of that paper and disk space put the lie to that. There are times I stomp about and complain that I'm not writing anything, but once again, that's not true, I write, compulsively, every single day of my life, in here, in my other two livejournals, in the myriad notebooks I schlep around with me at all times. That's a lot of living right there, a lot of emotion, silliness, deepness, fear, love, loathing, fun, laughing, hope, despair, pain and joy, recorded in my own words. I sometimes wonder why I do it, who I'm writing it for. Mostly myself, I think, but who knows, someone might pick up a notebook I've scrawled in, or pass by my website and decide to peruse my livejournal on their way through the web, and think what I had to say on (insert date here) interesting. *chuckle* It reminds me of when a few weeks ago I mentioned to sydneycat that I had decided to read her livejournal from the beginning, and she was horrified that I saw what sort of things she was writing back then, but I thought that was silly. We are all made older and wiser with time, and of course what we write in the past may look silly and stupid to us now, but it was important enough then to write down, wasn't it? And it still you and your story, no matter how naive or juvenile or just young you were at some point in it. I mean, think about it. Anne Frank's diary was pretty much the giggly mooning over boys you'd expect from a girl her age before the whole hide-from-the-Nazis-in-the-attic thing, but that doesn't detract from the power of the document. If anything it adds to it - it shows that she was real, not just a face they trot out to when they talk about WWII and the Holocaust in middle school history class. The same goes for any diary that's hit print. Anais Nin's and Zlata's come to mind. Somehow reading what these folks have to say in their own words, their experiences as they lived them... it gives whatever event or time period contextualized by their writing more of a voice than a paragraph or two in any history book.

Maybe only time and history will tell whether blogging or journalling will become the more legitimate medium. All I know is that what I do is write. For myself, for the amusement and the informing of my friends, for the entertainment of the random visitor. My little way of saying, I'm here, my name is Andee, I'm a real person with graces (maybe a few) and flaws (plenty), and this is my story as I'm living it.

I just recieved an email forward from a member of my family that basically has Ben Stein preaching in true Jerry Falwell fashion about how the world is going to shit because some folk happen to think that force feeding all American children King James New Testament Scripture in public school is wrong.

Of course, Ben Stein never said any such thing. The preachy bit was tacked onto a grossly misquoted broadcast of the CBS Morning News aired a week before last Christmas commenting on the department store Happy Holidays vs Merry Christmas debacle that was going on. (Which I agree, was pretty stupid - Christmas has pretty much devolved into a Hallmark holiday at this point anyway and the use of the word in store decorations really shouldn't twist anyone's panties). But that's beside the point.

I don't care who you are, if you send me an email forward preaching smugly about some hot button issue of the day, if I check it and find it to be either false or grossly modified to fit whatever agenda you are, by forwarding this message, trying to sell me on, I WILL rip you a new one in front of your entire contact list. ESPECIALLY if I think you're smart enough to know better. Which the email enabled members of my family are - this is not the first time I've sent out a "FOR THE LOVE OF GOD GO TO SNOPES.COM BEFORE FORWARDING SUCH GLURGE TO EVERYONE IN YOUR CONTACT LIST" message to them, but apparently it takes less effort and even less brainpower to hit "Forward" without thinking than to actually research what you're helping to broadcast to the world. There is a part of me that would like to see people that start and forward this crap around being charged one count of libel for every person they send it to, but the time and money spent prosecuting such things would be sort of pointless. Still... I swear some people need a wake-up call that not everything that lands in their inbox, in fact significantly less than 1% of it, is gospel truth.

Of course, that would lead into a rant about interpreting the gospels, and, again, I don't want to get into that right now, it's beside the point. Which is that I get enough spam in my email box. Don't send me more. KTHXBYE.

1) Reason #265 to be glad to have moved out of Northampton: B-Side Records and Gypsy Heart are closing/have closed. Two more in the long list of casualties that pretty much changed the face of downtown into serious yuppie paradise - you know it's bad when old standards like the Army Navy store, LaSalle Florists (hell, they survived the fucking building burning down at one point!), Beyond Words, Space Crime and Whalens have jumped ship for cheaper climes or early retirement. *sigh* I know times change and all that, but barely anything is left of downtown from when I first got here almost a decade ago. What next? Taipei and Tokyo?

2) I find it amusing that when purchasing something potentially embarrassing (for some people anyway) like condoms or yeast infection creme or tampons or pregnancy tests or adult diapers or enemas or diet pills or something else the compulsion is to also buy something else reasonably innocuous as if that cancels out the other purchase. Like diet pills and christmas candy. Or Depends and a soda. Or tampons with the latest issue of Motor Trend. (I saw a guy purchase that combination not to long ago; me and the checkout girl had a vast gigglefit afterwards). I mean... what's the mentality behind that? when all is said and done and the purchase has been made, are we really going to care what the clerk or the people behind you in line are going to think about the fact that you purchased an enema? And do you honestly think the dinky bottle of water or the face cream you got with it are really going to hide the fact that you purchased a box of Fleet? I mean really, if we're going to be embarrassed about our drugstore shopping list, how about finding something to balance that gigantic animatronic reindeer you just bought? That right there is embarrassing...

I hate losing my wallet. Especially upon realizing, after the running around, backtracking to the last place you think you saw it, calling every person with a car/store along the backtrack route, making contingency plans around the fact that you don't have it, and finally leaving to where you're going in a state of high aggravation, that the last place you saw it was actually the one place in your house you DIDN'T look and therefore it's probably still sitting right there. For all the good it's doing you now.

It's moments like this that convinces me that the gods didn't create us out of some need to make things in their own image, to benefit the world, or some noble purpose like that. No, we exist as playthings, to be fucked with for their amusement. *shakes fist at sky* You bastards.

yes I heard about the yahoo news celebrity racism circus. Yes that is some fucked up shit right there, and I'm annoyed (but not surprised). But if another person posts this shit without using an LJ cut, I'm going to shoot them. Your righteous indignation does not overrule basic rules of consideration for other people and their possible lack of broadband connections. Once was fine, but if you're going to repost this issue in your own LJ, either link to one of the comms from whence it came (it's a public post in blackfolk) or cut it - I'm sure if you put "THIS IS RACIST" in your cut text, everyone who would be pissed off about it would click the link anyway.

Seriously people, I got five uncut copies of that on my flist this morning.

Right now I'm pissed off at something I can't articulate very clearly. And I have to go to work. bah.

http://www.cnn.com/2005/WORLD/europe/07/07/london.tube/index.html

the sad part is, other than the news coverage, the vast majority of Americans aren't really going to give a shit cause it didn't happen here. Which bites considering the world runs to pick our asses up everytime we get knocked down or fall on it and everything shuts down cause America got bitch slapped. Anywhere else? Collective "oh... whatever." Stupid isolationist mentality.

*sigh* well since a London bombing is not nearly enough to stop the motor of the world, I'm going to go to work now. I have to wonder what it would take - nuclear annihillation of somewhere? even so, if it was far enough away, would we not care even then?