KraznorG

Just want to gather some thoughts on something I've thought about off and on over the last few months. So, I have an office job now. And it took me awhile, but I realized it was kind of familiar to me already despite only working retail beforehand because its very similar to a daily and weekly structure I'd more or less been programmed to be used to: school. Wake up, pack a lunch or ensure I have some money on-hand for the food truck, go to my desk, write, type and do some math, break for lunch, more math, more spreadsheets, etc and then I get to go home. A few important differences though that have just about broken my sanity after one year of this. No one cares about you or how you progress. No teachers are going to take an interest in how you're performing (even though they were paid to do so, some put a good face on it). No one is going to add any variety to things either. No incentive to do so, also, its a business. The same tasks are going to be expected. Every day. Forever. As long as you're willing to do it, you'll get money. If you can't handle it anymore, bye, we'll find someone else. Nothing changes after a year either. Each new school year there was some of the unexpected to look forward to. New teacher, new room, new classmates perhaps. Work has a stagnancy to it in comparison. That guy you can't stand over in the corner? Yeah, he's been here for ten years, get used to him. Don't like your boss? Well, that's a shame because he's been here for TWENTY years, best just get used to him too. Getting bored? Quit your whining. Don't like the jokes people tell when the boss isn't around? Well...that one I honestly don't know what to do with. I'm not one to look for conflict and I have a tendency to bottle things up so I foresee me eventually blowing up at someone or quitting and looking for a new job. I mentioned it to management but we're all adults now, don't rock the boat if you don't have to. Part of me feels embarrassed I'm still one to get offended by off-color humor but I think that stems from my association between work and school. Time and place for everything. Work is not the place for tomfoolery. But there are no disciplinary measures in place for such talk so it gets dispiriting. So, what to do? School is 12 years. Post-secondary was six for me and while structured differently, it still had feedback. Still had the semblance of people taking an interest in your destiny. Imparting knowledge to you, trying to keep you interested and invested in something. Now I'm facing 40 years of expected "work" and I'm feeling despair encroaching on every moment I spend here. School gives you weird expectations about what life has to offer. Enjoy it while you can kids, but know finishing it isn't the end and after its over things get less organized and, in my experience, less friendly. Thanks for reading for those who did. Um, coping mechanisms? Job recommendations? I don't know what I hope people want to share, but any thoughts on the matter would be appreciated.

Recent weekends involved watching films, walking to the local library to get more films, lighting some candles that slowly burn while I'm watching said films, and housework. During housework (laundry, primarily, though I finally organized a closet last week and tried a new recipe) I put on MLP as background, went through all of season 3 this past weekend and started season 4. I go through a lot of movies in a week, sometimes with commentary tracks on. This past week was Frances Ha, Cool Runnings (I live in the city its set), Breaking the Waves, The Hours and the original Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie.

Calgary is super inconsistent, I guess due to our proximity to a huge mountain range, but its definitely been getting nicer lately and I've been walking around my neighborhood more. Been fun. And that song has definitely been on the brain. Well, that and "Art of the Dress" but that's just because that song is so good. Applejack's duds MUST shine. They have to.

So, at Coachella a person was completely confused by my Daft Pon3 shirt, I bought a weird little Pinkie Pie slide projector thing (at Toys R Us) in hopes I could project Pinkie onto the ceiling of the dance tent but I was an idiot with no concept of how projectors work so it just ended up being the weirdest flashlight a grown man could have. Months later I got it signed by Andrea Libman who was reminded of the College Humor fleshlight video and I got super embarrassed as I hadn't even thought of the similar look. Justice was great but they only played half a set. Swedish House Mafia had fireworks and glowstick cannons, which was an amazing spectacle even though I'm not much of a fan of theirs (aren't they split up now anyway?) and I generally had a pretty great time but its the last music festival I've attended and I feel like it didn't take long for me to lose the plot where modern music is concerned.

Hey...me. This site is Burning Barrel now and I'm rarely involved anymore. Was on the most recent podcast though. Two and a half years and I'm just not fired up about games the same way anymore. I'm a bit of a split media enthusiast, alternating between film and games but I think film has won the battle. Games just seem like pointless time-wasters now, but that may just be the product of present game design philosophies. Anyway, the internet is weird the way it preserves a person's past,

Just an anonymous figure online but please go the peaceful professor or civil service route. Living a life of non-violence and spreading positivity is much more valuable to humanity in the grand sense than being another tool of violence. That's how I see it anyway. One cousin of mine is a firefighter and I consider him a great man. Another is a soldier and I haven't really spoken to him in a decade. So its personal bias for sure, but I see no honor in being a soldier knowing what we do now about the 20th century's vicious conflicts. I think mostly on film's with war and soldiers as the subjects, and while there are some I find very noble and relatable, I find that is an old-fashioned perception of warfare. There is no honor in it anymore. It is an activity for the most brutish, base humans. And I understand the inclination towards violence, but we must resist the temptation. It only circles back. And happens again and again. And I want the cycle to be broken but all generations need to move away from the valorization of war to make that happen.

Fantastic. Feel better about my reaction then. I have a tendency to be self-conscious, maybe to a fault.

I have a tendency to judge people by their taste in entertainment. And that doesn't boil down to if someone likes something I don't we're done. If you can't adequately explain why you like a thing, I start to suspect you're just doing that thing out of habit. If there is no personal drive in your entertainment decisions, if you are just killing time for the sake of killing time. If you are listless about it, I lose respect for you. So if someone is watching something just due to its popularity, and has no self-awareness about how much time they are spending on it or can't articulate what it is that keeps drawing them back, they are akin to junkies in my mind. Entertainment addicts. The habit got the best of them and they are no longer using their higher faculties effectively. YouTube has a lot of that. It feeds you short-attention-span requiring tripe and asks for nothing but your time, and maybe some willingness to watch some ads. I've grown very self-conscious about my net habits recently because it preys on this compulsion for being entertained at all times very insidiously.

Recently saw Chappie and was once again reminded, the South African way of speaking English is...colorful? I'm already self-conscious about it being a racist thing to think it sounds funny, but Sharlto Copley SOUNDS funny to me. Is that bad? I'm Canadian, so I imagine I have speech affectations I don't notice and if someone else is amused by them, so be it. Even moreso than his robot voice in Chappie, when he was trying to be the "scary" bad guy in Elysium I found it even funnier. Like Rhys Darby from Flight of the Conchords but trying to be threatening and it just not working. Tickled the funny bone a bit though. So, apologies to South African folks with pronounced accents but I AM snickering at you and I feel self-conscious about it.

Kind of curious how other people's families handled home videos. Last week I started going through the backups of VHS tapes my Dad made and it is some of the most surreal stuff I've encountered. Seeing yourself as a baby, VAGUELY remembering toys you played with when you were ultra young, seeing them new with the tags on them at a Christmas you don't remember. My Uncle who passed away when I was 11, alive on the screen. Seeing his mannerisms, hearing his voice again. Recognizing a table that your parents subsequently gave you and is right next to the screen it just appeared on, 27 years ago. Did your parents take a lot of video? Do you ever think about how your kids are going to feel about old social media accounts you made, videos you uploaded, songs you sang, podcasts you were on? Recent generations are probably getting more and more accustomed to seeing themselves in media so it isn't odd or unfamiliar anymore. Seeing these tapes from the late 80s, a lot of people are still clearly nervous about there being a camera on, but now almost everywhere you go someone is recording something on their smartphone, or Face-Timing, or what have you. Commonplace. I guess seeing a big, VHS camera is a bit different. So much more pronounced and in-your-face. Anyway, rambling. Going to keep watching. Span nearly 20 years, maybe two dozen discs of video content? Did your parents do that or were mine weird? Ostensibly they were sending these to my cousins who lived across the country in Ontario at the time, so that was the justification.

Yes, took 25 years so don't lose hope. It could happen to YOU! Or if you'd rather it didn't, my record is 25 years, what's yours at?

A bowl of Sweet Potato Soup, a steak and cheese panini and a hot chocolate. The soup was the MVP of the meal, which was a pleasant thing as it wasn't actually my first choice, they were out of the Spicy Thai Chicken soup when I ordered and suggested alternatives. More permanent things, um, I can't say exactly. Target is closing in Canada and I know I've shopped around there some but I think we just bought a jar of curry sauce and some other grocery-like items.

Lately, social networking in general, smartphones and the general overabundance of media-related opinions (lists and so-forth) as though that would matter to someone else.

I presently have next to no footwear I actually enjoy wearing (seems I have wide feet), so no, I rid myself of their terrible bondage the minute I step through the door. At present I'm wearing large, clunky steel toe boots I need for my job (which is a bit silly as I'm primarily in the office and only on occasion enter the treacherous warehouse where safety foot wear is require, and I opt not to switch to normal footwear in here because I don't have anything super comfortable outside of Vibrams at home and I don't want the blue-collar chaps here to make fun of my fancy, schmancy toe-shoes like Tim Schafer did that one time).

Well, it is in a mall's best interest to attract customers so some marketing genius some time ago must have realized it was best to be amenable to portraying the mall as a place young people go and told Kevin Smith yes, he could shoot Mallrats at the local mall. As you know, Smith's films have basically reforged pop-culture since they debuted in the early 90s and Mallrats was fundamental to all that. So the generation following that film was told malls were cool because that skateboarding guy spent time there with his sarcastic buddies in that movie and thus, malls were misrepresented to a whole generation of people.

The utility of the internet vs...oh crap a customer.

Happier than I'd be a year ago? It is a relative thing, but one of my goals is writing. And I recently finished a year's worth of journal entries, in addition to a bunch of letters to family members. I've also conveyed a lot to my girlfriend, so even though we haven't had any kids (which we intend to), a part of my legacy will live on. Maybe. I guess that is what I'm striving for now. To make something that lasts longer than me. So if tomorrow I'm presented with death, I won't be thrilled about that, but I will know I started to leave some record of my existence in a somewhat creative way and maybe, just MAYBE, it will stir something in one of the people I've shared them with to do something, or live differently, or some such thing.

I would qualify, though I am not very zealous about it and am still processing how to operate as a person with this new realization there is no life after death, a lot of people in positions of power are basing how they make decisions on false information and feel like I'm starting to encounter depression more often. I was raised a Christian, went to Christian schools for my entire primary education, then "woke up" in college and now am an English Major with a tedious job and a growing sense of imminent doom and that I'm wasting my life because I now know this is the only one I get. Atheism also kind of split my parents up after a thirty year marriage, as my Dad chose atheism as his path and got way into reading philosophy and going to protests and my fundamental Christian Mother couldn't adapt to the shift. I dug out a bunch of family videos lately and plan to go through them all, but its already weird seeing my parents as they once were, when I was a baby, when they were both on the same page about life and what they wanted to do. Now that they've parted ways...I don't know. I feel like Dad is right and Mom is wrong but why fight about it? Just learn and move on. But I'm having trouble adapting to this new information too. So, I am atheist, but I'm depressed about it so I get why many buy the lie of religion so they can focus on other things.