Make me one with the music

Someone once asked me, "If you were to get an mp3 player, what would you want on it?" I replied, "Just make me one with music." So, I got a Zen. This is what it looks like.

Corny. Well, technically, it's a "Zen Stone Plus", because it doesn't have a f'real screen or anything like that. But it's real nice. Allow me to elaborate.

First of all, 2 GB of space. This allows me more than enough songs to which I may rock/dance/air guitar/ embarrass myself entirely. On shuffle, it can go from "Du Hast" to "The Rockafeller Skank", and that is strictly quite awesome. And it's so little! I would never have expected this tiny little thing to hold so much music, but it do. This moves me to my next point.

This thing is about the third the size of my cell phone. As I'm working, I don't have to worry about it being in the way, or becoming uncomfortable, or feeling bulky. It's just there. Heck, I forget it's there most of the time. But there's one thing that always reminds me of its presence...

That'd be the built-in speaker. And it's not really a crappy speaker, either. Being built by Creative, it pretty much has everything that I would be looking for. So, when I feel the rockitude reaching critical mass, I just switch on the speaker and continue to rock. It's a beautiful thing.

By the way, that switch is just a simple press of a button. Everything on this beast is simple. I don't have to bother with lame iTunes or Windows Media Player (sorry guys), it comes with some software. And it's easy, too. Just select the songs you want, and poof. They're in. You can even put them in folders to organize them (into, say, "running", or "painting", or even, "rocking"), and select playlists.

All you iPodders don't know what you've missed out on. =P

Finally-- I made this post because Brian asked me to do so. Brian is the stuff, for real. You should check out his blog (and new haircut) if you haven't already...

<--- over there.

I've got a river of life flowing out of me

Well, I did. Funny story:

At phlebotomy class tonight, we all did our usual rounds poking each other with needles. Much to my dismay, I seem to be the only Y chromosome left in the bunch-- which means veins are gonna be harder to find on the whole. Tonight, we were instructed on how to use winged infusion sets. See?

They're a smaller needle diameter, and they're supposed to be easier to use. Must be why it took me three times to get it right... whatever. It looks really cool when the tube fills up, and turns all red and such. So, our hands are all poked to bits with these things, and we go back to regular arm venipuncture. This is what I'm good at. I've never missed. I tell one of my classmates that if she lets me poke her, I will let her poke me. She agrees, and goes first.

Let me be the first to tell you that one could probably see my veins from twenty feet away. That was not the problem, and let me first applaud her for being the first of my classmates to strike oil on me (after six previous dry attempts by others). While reaching for a new cotton swab to plug my arm, she releases the multisample device... and the needle. I watch, in oh-dang-that-car-is-about-to-break-my-legs-slow-motion, as the needle slowly succumbs to the inescapable persuasion of Earth's gravity and falls out of my arm. This would not have been a big deal, had the vacuum tube drawing my blood not been engaged: just as luck would have it, the tube was engaged. The powerful sucking force of the vacuum pulls venous blood out of my arm like this:


Just, you know, red. Without a doubt, one of the weirdest things that's ever happened to me. After the mess was taken care of, and she apologized profusely, I go ahead and poke her...

Money in the bank. Maybe I should go pro.

"I love you."

If you have not read 1984 by George Orwell, and don't want to have part of the plot blown for you, I suggest you disregard my post and go READ THE DANG BOOK.

The novel 1984, by George Orwell, has given me a lot to think about lately. The subplot between the main character, Winston, and his fellow party member, Julia, has been the most interesting (also the only one I've really read yet). Early on, Winston believes Julia-- though he doesn't know her name yet-- is a spy from the dreaded Thought Police. He is absolutely convinced that Julia will wait for the right moment to turn him over for various thoughtcrimes he commits while he searches, philosophically, through the rubble of London to anchor his life to something concrete.

He has thoughts of killing her to escape punishment. The dread of facing the ramifications of rejecting the truth fed to him by the Party consumes him, but does not stop him. It is not anger, but despair that drives him. His empty life would be ended without any meaning or memory if she turns him into the Thought Police. He would be "vaporized", removed from the books completely-- in the vocabulary of the Party, unpersoned.

One day, at work in the so-called Ministry of Truth, she falls in the hallway in front of Winston. As he goes to help her up, she cunningly slips a note into his hand. Of course, he is stunned. Fearing the worst, he disregards the note as he heads back to his desk. After finishing his work, he decides to end the suspense and read the note.

"He flattened it out. On it was written, in a large unformed handwriting:

I love you.

For several seconds he was too stunned to even throw the incriminating thing into the memory hole [trash incinerator]. When he did so, although he knew very well the danger of showing too much interest, he could not resist reading it once again, just to make sure that the words were really there."

I have to admit that I responded vocally to this passage, much to the surprise of everyone around me. Sometimes, it feels like the one thing I desire, as Winston desired Julia, is the thing I fear. My judge. My jury. My execution. As it seems, the object of my desire has intentionally pursued me, and delivered the written life of "I love you" straight to me; which disarms my plots and despair in exchange for the freedom of true intimacy. And suddenly, life is no longer empty.

They don't want to talk talk talk talk talk about it

Title = Anti-Flag is stuck in my head. According to the rest of the paint crew, I'm just a few feet from the cliff of anarchy. All right.

"The Press Corpse" > Anti-Flag (with lyrics)

I emailed my parents, because I've been pretty MIA lately. It basically summarizes a lot of what I've been dealing with lately: 1) my first successful blood draw! 2) Montana was GORGEOUS...

3) I've been making moves in the integrity department: people who know are the people who need to know. Messy stuff, that is. Things are going well for my parents, too-- my mom's last day of work is Friday, and my dad has already started his new job for Dow Corning. All right.

Below is a snippet of a synoptic video for the Montana trip. Enjoy...

Brave new blog

For whatever reason, I felt this to be completely necessary. I needed a new blog. So, some explanations:

<>, the URL, translates to "my life is my voice" from French. I like this phrase a lot, and it seems to be a motto that I adopted not too long ago.

"Son of Thunder" is an obvious biblical reference, but it has a little more meaning for me. I feel like I was made to shake things up, to cause trouble, to refuse to settle. And my dad is the same way. It just makes sense, right?

Finally, all of my friends seem to have blogger accounts, and this makes it easy to link to them. LiveJournal is a little tricky, and only let me link to other LJ accounts and one other blog. Worth a face-slap, no doubt.


It only seems right that I link to my two dead blogs from this one, so here they are:

Stick It To The Man (an anthology of my moody, sarcastic high school experience from the beginning of junior year to the end of senior year [oct 2003-apr 2005])

The James Chronicles (the labor-intensive record of my transition to the real world up to this point, revealing most of my significant changes along the way [apr 2005-jun 2008])

Cool.