\o/ !

So earlier today I was on my way back to the car from campus, when I saw this little squirrel hanging out in the middle of a pretty busy student walkway, and he was nibbling on an oreo. When he finished, he looked around for some more food, and then he did this:



Right click and view image for full size.

It was pretty much amazing. Snarks tells me it's worth a journal entry, as it made her chortle.

He ran around for a little more and hung out by some people, then it ran off near some bushes, then back around the walkway again. I kind of wished I had some food to give it =x

I probably shouldn't admit this but...





I do this too.. =x

AKA Låt den rätte komma in ...




OMG, amaaaaazing movie.

I pretty much disdain almost anything to do with vampires, but this is so original and so well done that not liking it would feel like a crime. There is nothing not to like about this movie. I really don't have anything to criticize about it. So good. See iiiiit!

Most of what's left after the snow from earlier. I froze some because someone asked me to. =)

"I want to see this men’s movement make a commitment to ending rape because that is the only meaningful commitment to equality. It is astonishing that in all our worlds of feminism and antisexism we never talk seriously about ending rape. Ending it. Stopping it. No more. No more rape. In the back of our minds, are we holding on to its inevitability as the last preserve of the biological? Do we think that it is always going to exist no matter what we do? All of our political actions are lies if we don’t make a commitment to ending the practice of rape. This commitment has to be political. It has to be serious. It has to be systematic. It has to be public. It can’t be self-indulgent." - Andrea Dworkin

The entire speech

I had a very strange dream last night. I was for some reason looking at a new apartment in the same complex, and my old roommate was there looking at it with me. He *really* wanted me to get it, and it was somehow cheaper and bigger than the one I'm currently living in. These 2 girls wanted it too, and I remember asking if I could sublet one of the rooms in it to them.

The guy got this pained expression and said "Yeah" but that he could convince these people in ANOTHER apartment to leave and trick the two girls into paying me for living in THAT apartment. This seemed kinda shady to me, and so I backed out.

And then I was spending Thanksgiving with my brother and a bunch of his friends, but no one was helping this one guy cook. This guy had an ex-wife in.. Whatever was the other room of the place I was in, and she was like "Well what do you expect?" blah blah.

Then I was back in the apartment complex, and my old roommate was talking to me about going back home. When he left, things got really weird. Some person started telling me about all this weird magical stuff that was going on, and there were Mouseguard-style talking mice and whatnot, and I could only see them if I activated some strange spell that let me see them. Apparently I was supposed to dodge some underboss and some big boss.

There was some lady who gave me like a pixie as a guide.. Legend of Zelda style, to prove she was on my side but I didn't trust her at all. She wound up being on my side, but the guy who was my original guide got captured and I never saw him again. Eventually in some odd outdoors place the boss-type guy came out again, and he had blue and red yarn thrown at him and wrapped around him, and that somehow sealed him in some prison. Everyone was celebrating but I had this feeling of foreboding.

I had stolen the under-boss guy's staff and I was saluting with it, and I kind of knew that we weren't done yet, and then I woke up thinking of The Looking Glass Wars.

Very weird.. I don't normally have dreams that remotely follow any of these paths.

I was walking to my car from class the other day, and I was thinking about all of the talks I had with my sister over Thanksgiving break. She's a humanist, and thus a feminist, and pretty easily converted me over to her way of thinking when I was younger, because it's just straight up logical.

I was thinking about the attitudes that some people have, and I remember I used to be one of those people back in junior high who would tell feminazis things like "Hey so I should be allowed to punch a girl out if she pisses me off, 'cause guys do that to each other if you want equality! Ha ha ha.." it pains me to think that I ever said something like that, but I was a pretty unenlightened kid.

At any rate, I got to saying to myself that that line of thinking is so horrifically flawed. I mean I've known that, but I've never really codified why. I'm pretty sure the overwhelming majority of guys don't rape or sexually harass their male friends, meanwhile the overwhelming majority of female rape victims are raped by people they knew or considered 'friends'.

I remember my dad once told me that "Your mom and I have done the gender role thing and everything turned out fine", but even growing up, I could see situations where the workload wasn't fairly shared, and how my mom was basically trained since she was little to suppress her aspirations. And that to me, the suppression aspect, is the most imprisoning aspect of the whole way that women are raised.

If you are trained to basically suppress your goals and attach yourself to someone who can support you, then what happens when you become dependent on that person and remove them from the equation? Sometimes the male has to pay to maintain the woman's lifestyle (and I understand that can be abused, but it wouldn't be the case if it weren't promoted to begin with!) but even that doesn't work most of the time.

A lot of domestic violence just goes unreported and unnoticed, because there's no real alternative. I'm glad I'm part of a generation that is relying less on gender roles, and that women in the workplace and in college is on the rise, but this is only addressing half of the problem. It's not enough to just let women in, you have to remove these preconceived notions from men.

*We* are the crux of the problem, and my sister told me about this female feminist who gives demonstrations to male feminists, and the first thing she asks is along the lines of "So what do you do to help solve the problem?" And I really thought about that, and I had no good answer. All *I* do is not abuse the women in my life, but that's not enough, because all that does is stagnate things, and perpetuate them. I have to go out there, and I have to convince at *least* one other person who previously didn't have equal-opportunity and equal-right views, and even then it's just the beginning.

I'm probably going to get some hate for writing this, but I'm going to put a disclaimer at the end right here.

Disclaimer: If you're a guy, and you think that what I'm saying here is wacky and that women should be confined to gender roles and you are completely unrepentant and unwilling to be convinced.. Fuck. You.

That is my response to any comment your sort leaves in here.

Let me tell you something, these last two days, I've been on a waffle frenzy. I've wanted waffles like all freaking day. I woke up in the morning, I wanted waffles. I couldn't get waffles out of my head. Waffles waffles waffles.

I went to class and all I could think about were waffles. During my critique for creative writing class, during the break, I closed my eyes for a bit and all I saw were amazing unadorned waffles!

I get home, and I'm thinking "Man do I ever want waffles." I took a nap and I even *dreamt* of waffles. They are seriously amazing, and anyone who says otherwise is clearly doing it wrong. Waffles are great by yourself, but they are best when you're with another person, that is for sure.

I could've had waffles 6.. 7 times on Wednesday and 4 or 5 times on Thursday. I think I might finally be coming down from waffle fever, but it's hard to tell. It may just be a hiatus.

Spanish class was winding down today, and I was speaking with one of my classmates about his having to apply to the Creative Writing program. I asked him what he wrote, and he said poetry. The girl next to me let out a sort of disgusted sigh and said

"Ew."

I think that sums up how ~49% of people feel about poetry these days. The other ~49% fawn over it insidiously and think all of it is amazing and sacred. And then you have the minimal number left that actually understand what it is they're doing, and have a solid output and a good ability to critique it.

I think this is just part of a bigger problem though. We're a generation of people who are completely wasting our potential. We have before us the entirety of mistakes and successes that have been made in all of the creative arts, from fiction to music, and we're wasting it creating meaningless angsty poems, art abstracted to the n'th degree and teeny bopper music.

I'm frustrated with our generation, because we have such a unique perspective and such a capacity for fusion. Some people are getting it, there's a lot of really good music that fuses styles, there's graf art and fusion styles that are becoming popular, and the short story is experiencing a small revival, but there is still so much bad to sort through, and no concentration on getting the 'good' stuff out there.

And that's the problem, this word 'good' that people seem to argue over constantly. We're such an entitled generation that we seem to think we're allowed to have opinions on what's good and what's not without sampling any part of the population. Look at some of the music you listened to when you were 14. Do you still have the same opinions about it that you did back then? If you say 'Yes' about all of your music, then you *really* need to expand your horizons and listen to more.

That above example is a simple matter of having been exposed to more as you grow older, but think about the things you're not by necessity exposed to more of: literature, poetry, art, etc. These are things you have to make an *effort* to educate yourself about, so that your opinion on what's good really matters, and that the stuff that we purport and say "This is us. This is our generation" about isn't just meaningless tripe, and is something really worth attaching value to.

Do you want people to remember 2000-2020 for the nifty stuff like postsecret and Julian Beever:



Or do you want them to remember it for stuff like this:



I implore you to educate yourself about the huge variety of creativity out there, so that we can really celebrate the good stuff, and put this ridiculous notion that 'everything is good art' to bed.