hmmm.....i've been neglecting you my legion of loyal fans, i apologize for not blogging lately as I either haven't had much to say, or haven't had time to say it, or frankly haven't felt like sharing it with the world.

i have some free time now since i'm waiting for 8am to roll around so i can go play basketball....i'm working my way through an entire 2litre bottle of coke [shameless plug] tonight, so i'm full of pep and ready to go.

where to begin....

it's the 31st now. happy halloween everybody. instead of scheming up ways to steal candy from children this year, i've spent the last little while surfing ebay for half amusement, half bargain hunting. i think i've decided to only buy clothes off ebay from now on and see how that goes. sure, everything will be either size XL or XXL, but hey - thats a small price to pay for getting an article as priceless and rare as a Josip Broz Tito shirt (everyone's favourite yugoslavian - outside of vlade divac, of course). or how about this dr. who shirt. it's EMO! i thought that was the funniest thing in the world. since when was being emo a sales point? what the hell does it even mean when a t-shirt is emo? oh well. buy this shirt and maybe you'll know when you put it on. perhaps you will be endowed with the powers of emo, and you can cry yourself to sleep every night in your tshirt and billions of pins while listening to dashboard and posting on the weezer message board about how lame these new albums are and how much you loved weezer way back when the sweater song first came out in grade school.....

ah yes, ebay. so much amusement from so modest a website.

actually, one positive thing does seem to have risen from all this pointless web surfing. i think i have the talent to make witty retorts that would fit on the front of a tshirt. perhaps i shall go ahead and make a tshirt or two in the near future if i have some free time. i have so many ideas it would be stupid for me not to make tshirts!

speaking of designing though, i really miss having photoshop. i think it's a sham that it costs like, $600 to purchase new. how the hell am i suppose to afford that? booruns. if someone can help me rationalize using the pirated version - please...please come convince me.

other random thoughts that have been floating around in my head lately...

do dreams really mean anything? sure, there's the whole theory that it's our subconcious revealing our inner truths.....is there anything to this whole dream interpretation thing? do most people honestly believe that dreams have meaning, and are significant in their symbolism? or is the general concensus that dreams are merely random thoughts thrown around in your head while your mind takes five.....

i think the most amazing thing i experienced this whole week was realizing that i'm living a daydream right now. i'm making memories.

it's so easy to be nostalgic....think back to the good old days of high school, junior high, grade school.....we have so many memories from our youth (relative youth at least...) that sometimes we take for granted that the years we're probably going to remember most.....the times that we very much will be most nostalgic, have the most vivid recollections about - are right now. we're never going to have this balance of freedom and youth again. ever. we're literally living one of the absolute best, most memorable and gratifying times of our lives right now. and it's at once an amazing realization, and an encouraging one.

sometimes i wake up at 3pm in the afternoon, do nothing, then go to bed.

i went to bed last night and i was like......man....i did NOTHING today. and on some levels, that's soooo cool. when am i ever gonna be able to get away with this again? hell, i'm pulling an all night just BECAUSE right now. to play stupid basketball in a few hours, haha
sure, at the same time i was like "i just totally wasted a day of my life. that's not cool...." but hey - you can't win 'em all.

sometimes i take for granted how great life is. how much God has blessed me and how much i have to be thankful for. sometimes this attitude leads me to not live my life to its fullest, and it's just kind of neat realizing that years from now, i'll be sitting around with old friends saying "remember back in university when....." and get the same feeling i now get when i say "remember back in high school when...."

i never had this kind of realization in high school. you're too young....to ignorant....to cocky to think that you might ever have to grow up. but now i have the experience and the wisdom to realize that i'm living a dream right now...everyday i wake up is a chance for a new memory to be made, for an experience to be imprinted into me that will last with me forever. sure, this applies through life, but i have to think moreso now than ever again. and it's cool....understanding your situation only makes it that much sweeter....

haven't updated in a while......thought i'd throw this up here for amusements sake.

the end of the world

The Globe and Mail

Geomagnetic Storm

the bad: it will disrupt electrical grids and satellite communications.

the good: it may make the northern lights visible tonight as far south as illinois.

i've never seen the northern lights....it'd be cool if they were around tonight.

Elliott Smith, 1969-2003

Elliott Smith has committed suicide.

i.....am at a loss for words. his music was dark, haunting, intimate and revealing - yet at the same time beautiful and catchy, creative, original, intelligent and most of all shone of its creators artistic and musical talent. it was well written, a quality increasingly scarce in today's musical landscape, and every song - every album, alluded to the promise of future treasure from his talented mind, hands and heart.

his songs inspired me to learn, to improve, to play the guitar for all it was worth and to the best of my abilities. he was a huge influence on me musically.

he had a new album on the verge of coming out.
i regret not buying back any of his albums yet, they're just so damn hard to find. i used to have them all downloaded. even the obscure ep's and live stuff. i feel compelled to apologize.

the greatest tragedy is that he was desperate enough to take his own life. no one should ever have to feel that alone. ever.

the world has truly lost a great musician today.

Grosseries

Grosseries

i hope my pun is found to be witty.

today's rant will be about the whoring of public space.

they're turning maple leaf gardens into a loblaws. a supermarket. with like, a produce section, and a bakery, and probably one of those loblaws home areas where they sell lawn furniture and such.

i think only a person of supreme ignorance could feel the benefit of gaining a conveniently located supermarket outweighs the loss of a local, and even national shrine and treasure.

hockey is an undeniable part of canadian culture. even those who don't LIKE hockey must admit to it's association with our country - our identity. and to hockey, MLG is the mecca of it all. it's where memories where created, stars were born and the seeds of dreams and aspirations sown.

the leafs are a huge part of toronto's social and cultural fabric. to simply appropriate this legendary place for the a supermarket to have a novel and kitschy flagship GROCERY STORE for goodness sake.

i feel the city is in general pretty disgusted. i have to think the thought running through many torontonian heads this morning must be:

is nothing sacred?

on an unrelated note: i hope they find that little girl who was kidnapped.

how come it's such a big story though? kids are lost all the time. It's almost a sham how only the cute kids who come from upper-middle class homes are turned into news frenzies and unfortunately, media martyrs.

not to belittle her situation, but i think we simply need to take it into context. how many homeless 9 year olds has the city of toronto lost this past year? let die? let freeze? let get molested and abused? let live on the street? let starve?

regardless of the reality of the way our society functions and its obvious shortcomings, i really hope they find her though. no life is worth anymore than another.

boourns

my comments server killed my account because i didn't upgrade to a paying account.
boourns to squawkbox and their pee pee soaked heck hole of a website.

oh well. now i have "shout outs" instead of comments.

what the hell's a shoutout anyways?

enh. according to trey from south park, gay is the new black. and wigger's are out man.
it's wags now.

hehheh...wags...

idiots

"the monastic theory that not asceticism but the sexual act denotes the renunciation of attainable bliss receives negative confirmation in the gravity of the lover who with foreboding commits his life to the fleeting moment"

i hate academics.

why do they have to write like this? i mean, buddy. isn't that a run on sentence or something? at least include some punctuation, because if you did i could MAYBE pretend i knew what you're trying to say there. but as it is....um.......what?

i find myself having a little bit of pride in my posts. If i go an entire week with nothing but links and updates in my daily routine, i almost feel obliged to post something of merit to get the masses thinking and reward them for visiting my lowly and humble home in cyberspace.

what does it mean to be happy?
clearly being happy is not the same as being content. if it was, they would be synonyms of some sort. but they aren't. they're different words, with diferent definitions, and very diferent understandings.

so how many of us are truly happy?
in my experiences, i find it to be a general concensus that as you grow older, life will take its toll. as years fly by and memories grow distant, we all end up being a little more cynical, a little more jaded. kids are idealistic, romantic. we find kids who like to dream adorable - they're pure, untainted by reality and that's why they're so attractive to us. because as older folk, we know that they're living the impossible in their tiny little heads. after all - a hopelessly romantic idealistic chap would be considered naive as a 20 year old, laughed at and labeled foolish and immature by his peers. those qualities in a child though, are regarded as delightful reminders to better times - the beauty of being young. following that train of thought then, i've found that many an individual i have come upon, has decided that (appropriately) they are willing to settle for contentment. nay, they are not merely content with being content, but they seekit. happiness, they reason, is out of the question. a notion so laughable that they dare not say its name. so why bother? take what's more likely, take what you think is more achievable - take what you've got.

i suppose the logistics of it aren't totally non-sensical. i mean, that happiness 100% of the time is painfully optimistic and a difficult burden to bear is not lost on me. the problem i have with this type of thinking is that we seem to be fixated on the concept of happiness as an objective thing.

i want "A", but i can't have it. so i get "B". i'm not as happy with "B" than i would be with "A", but i'll take it since i can't have "A", and i'll be content with "B", all the while thinking how much happier i'd be if i had gotten "A".

why why WHY do we all seem to have that mindset? "i'm pretty happy....BUT, i could be MORE happy IF...."

maybe what we all need to do as a society is to start seeing happiness as a subjective concept. i mean think about it a sec - if we all stopped looking at the other pasture and thinking it's greener on the other side, if we all just stopped looking for happiness on top of what we're already happy about, then maybe we wouldn't be so darn hard to please.....we seem to have insatiable appetites for happiness. we never have enough. i suppose that begs the question "is being content with how happy you are really being happy? or being content?" and to that i would say....that's being content. because i think that mindset is still what i mentioned originally. i would think we'd all be more chipper in the morning when we woke up, if we instead thought to ourselves "i'm happy". not that we're happy ENOUGH, but just that..... we're happy. simple.

but why is it so darn hard? why are we constantly second guessing ourselves? trying to reach that one bar higher on our self-satisfaction ladders? why are we so.....greedy? it's something i've always wondered in my own life. i believe deep down i truly have found joy in my faith, in the peace of mind that God loves me. i think happiness in many senses of the word is fleeting. that's why i think so many people are wandering around in life aimless searching for it. because it can never be held captive, there's nothing anyone can do to keep themselves happy all the time.

happiness won't keep you going in life, because it will leave you. but joy - joy will always be there. if i've learned anything recently, it's that being joyful and being happy are two different things, and it's been encouraging in that even when there are things in my life that make me decidedly unhappy, i have joy to cling to. i know that regardless of what happens in my life, i'll still be joyful, and that in turn sort of makes me happy. i believe that we should be happy so we can live our lives, and not living our lives so we can be happy.

on that note, i've decided to define what we seek (plato's ideal if you will) as"true happiness" as joy, and real life happiness as just....an emotion. a moment, a smile, a laugh. but regardless, happiness is temporal, not something i dare to seek. because it's pointless! life hasn't jaded me (ok, it has. but not that much), but experience has shown me the truth. even kids can't be happy all the time....it's not that it's wrong to be romantic and idealistic, but ironically it's ultimately much more happy (emotionally) to be joyful, than it is to either be content and full of resentment and regret, or to be crushed seeking the thrill of happiness in all your lifes endeavers.

so yup. go seek joy, this whole happiness thing is so passe.

it'll put a smile on your face.

for some reason i find i'm averse to using caps. i like the aesthetic appearance of all lower case letters. something about caps just seems so....cold. so sterile.

so i think everyone at some time or another has read a poem and thought to themselves, "huh? i could write that. it makes no sense"

and yet, those simple words we could have written (but didn't) are considered poetry, yet the crap most of us vandalize our notebooks with in lectures is considered doodling. i'd like to study poetry in-depth i think.....get a better understanding of it. i mean, do poets labour of each word as they write to infuse the poem with the maximum amount of meaning? or do they just write what's on their hearts, then critics infuse the words with meaning FOR them?

are the words based on emotion? the abstract art of creation and the state of mind that understands one is making art? or more a precise calculation - an exercise in vocabulary and stylistic paradigms?

i'm fascinated.

i'll try and randomly write a poem. see if anyone can analyze it and explain what it means....what i'm trying to say, all that stuff.

Memorandum

it burns ever brighter
attracting eyes, through the dust
reconciling, giving life to the dead
water on a moonlit flower petal
new life's first exaltation of existence
the insignificance is lost for a moment
radiance is subjective
there are no constants
fan the hot, heat the cold
no reason to be found
yet time stops - stopped
if only it were true

we welcome Cammie to the culture of the blogged.

may your days be full of ranting and satisfying procrastination.

blog!

thats a funny word to say if you actually yell it outloud. so i was bored and decided to surf around the national geographic website. it's really cool. tons of awesome picture galleries. thats where i snatched this background from.

also, for those who use the links on the right, i've added an option to open links in new windows so you can close them

also i ripped joel's christopher oriley cd. he's a pianist who covers 15 radiohead tracks, all using nothing but a grand piano. no vocals, no other instruments, just the piano.

it's an AMAZING cd. really a must get for radiohead fans, and people who generally like awesome music on piano. i was particularly impressed by his stellar rendition of 'black star', but far and away what blew me away was his cover of 'bulletproof'. I mean, that song is pretty cool in and of itself, but man. this guy takes it and really makes it his own. it makes you want to cry its so good.

simply INCREDIBLE. i recommend you get this cd now.

go.


hurry, get it. stop dawdling.

there are some things we take for granted that when you pause to consider are just.....totally astounding.

take for instance airplanes. especially the giant army ones. that those things were engineered, and built, and that they WORK, it's nuts. they're little buildings just flying through the air, built of nothing but sheets of metal, screws, bolts and computers.

amazing.

i remember i was suppose to do a gifted ISP on airplanes in like grade 6 or something, but then i didn't do it, and i got yelled at, so then i did it like a week late, and even then all i did was read out of a book i borrowed from the library. my teacher was none too impressed. but i didn't fail. because you couldn't fail gifted. which was something i still don't understand. i suppose if they failed you, it would sort of be the school board admitting they had screwed up by letting you into the program in the first place.....

whudaya know, i'm a product of bureaucratic pride. interesting.

anyways, i wonder if it's better to sleep for like, 1 hour, or if it's better for you to just stay awake. is sleeping then prematurely waking up bad for you? sort of like starting and shutting of a car engine repeatedly? hm....right now i typically go by the no-sleep method, and i think it's starting to catch up to me as i have a long day ahead of me and i'm desperately trying to think of a time to squeeze in a nap.

on a totally unrelated note, i must say i'm relatively pleased with the school year so far. i think the key is i have no morning classes, and i live really close in a big cushy apartment. mmmm.....the lap of luxury......

an old camping picture. i'm running out of pictures.....i really think i'm not making efficient use of my camera. which is kind of shame. it just feels so stupid sometimes to bring a camera along when you know that of the 10 people you're going with 7 other will have digicam's and will be taking pictures every 4 steps you take. then everyone has the exact same pictures posted on various websites around the internet.

i think i have an obsession with being unique. kind of ironic - me being chinese and all....it's hard to be unique when you know at any given time there's about 300,000 people walking the earth with your exact name and another 100,000 that probably look exactly like you...but i really think that when something becomes popular, or overdone, or too mainstream, it really really puts me off. if everyone's doing something, i prefer not to do it just for the sake of not doing what everyone else is doing. sweet, i'm a snob!

conversely, i hate to consider myself part of the counter-culture, trend dissemenating generation that prides itself on being "indie". i don't pride myself on being unique. i just don't like being maintstream. does that make any sense? as in, i have nothing AGAINST what's popular, i just don't like it as much as stuff that isn't popular. not to say i don't like popular things.

i went to a backstreet boys concert once. it was amusing.

anyways, i added steph's page to the links on the right (per wendy's request). hopefully she'll keep updating often, it's providing me with precious many moments of amusement thusfar.

also, cammie seems to think my posts are getting boring. apparently my pages sole purpose is to amuse her, so i'll just make up something exciting that happened. then i'll make it contraversial.

i killed a man.
then he came back from the dead, and he came up to me and he was all like "hey - your socks don't match" so i said, "yea, that's a good point, but what would marx say about it?" and he said "i don't know. but never let anyone touch you in your bathing suit areas" and then i said "yea, unless it's some sort of exhibitionist art project, then it can't be classified as porn really because it's art" then the guy said "i don't believe public funding should be used for those sketchy art projects" then i said "as long as my laundry still gets done before 8, because i want to watch game 1 of the new york - boston ALCS" and the dead guy was totally like "did you know arnold is the new gov. of California?" and i said in shock "as long as you list all your emergency contacts in case anything happens".

discuss.

for some reason when i transfer files through my network/router, drag and click goes at about 30kbps. however....if i use ICQ instead, i for some mysterious reason can hit speeds of up to almost 2MEGS per second. me and herb were so amused by this ridiculous transfer speed i took a picture. we're such nerds.....but honestly, it's kind of neat being able to send 100 megs in less than 2 minutes.

on an unrelated note, blogger has given us lowly folk new features like spellcheck, draft blogging and other functions only available to bloggerpro users. what can i say? mmmm.....free stuff......

if anyone is curious about what to get me for Christmas, i'm going to go ahead and show you what i think would be awesome.

www.ghettopoly.com/

my favourite touch is how the "bank" is called the "loan shark tray".
it's the little details that show they're dedicated.

i'm laughing so hard i think i pulled something.....

today is the first of october.

what does that mean? it marks the first day of Universal Music's 30% price slash in CD prices.

i'm unbelievably excited about this price cut. it'll give me a chance to more rapidly buy back a lot of the albums i've missed but haven't been able to buy due to financial restraints.

mmm....cds....