Well friends and family, seeing as that sums up the only ones who read my blogs, today finds me one year older. I am 22 now. I don't know what to say about it. I mean I'm a year older, a year wiser some would say, and a year closer to death. But my birthday doesn't really weigh that heavily on my mind right now. Actually my research paper is the biggest black cloud on my horizon, which I'm desparetly trying to ignore in a very Sam-like fashion. In the class I'm taking they handed out a sheet of paper with some high and mighty muckety-muck writing type people's analysis of the stages that students go through when writing research papers. In every stage there is fear and confusion. Funny isn't it? It takes some high powered writing authority to tell you that people writing a paper bigger than all the papers they wrote in their high school english courses combined would feel fear and confusion. Oh well, I mean I've made such good progress, read literally hundreds of pages of material, but I still feel so far away from pulling it all together into a cohesive arguement. I presever nevertheless.
I've been sharing my anime with my father lately, and he has professed to be enjoying it, as I have. I was browsing through a music/movie store in the mall a couple of weeks ago. They have their anime waaaay in the back, oddly right next to their adult section. It never ceases to amuse me, that people actually buy the "adult" entertainment they sell for a rediculous sum in those stores, when they could just very well get better material, I use the word "better" here loosely, for free given the right internet resources. Anyway, it is for this reason that after I had finished browsing the limited supply of their anime I browsed their adult entertainment section with no real intent to purchas anything, having already selected a dvd to purchase (Technolyze Vol. 1 on sale for $16). To my suprise I ran across a title I knew rather well Le Portrait de Petit Cossette. "What's this doing in the adult section?" I wondered to myself. I snagged it and after purchasing it asked the cashier the same question, and he said something to the effect of it containing nudity. Meh, it's excellent, weird, has good animation quality, and a positively glorious color pallet. I actually have a fansub of it burned onto a dvd as well but when I saw it I just had to have it. I watched it with my father once, and then again with him and my mother and her friend. It was in doing so that I come to a new revelation, one I was well aware of but have yet to really share with you my loving community. Both my father and I like to analysize, which is to say deconstruct, things we watch. I think I do it to a greater extent, which is part of the reason I can re-read and re-watch movies and books I've already enjoyed, because I just keep refining my analysis seeing new insights and postulating new theories. It's either that or because my memory is poor enough that I can't recall everything even after the fourth or fifth time through.
Anyway, the last thing I felt like sharing is something I just ran across a few minutes ago, well 20 minutes ago now, on the Dragonfable website:
The Paradoxical Commandments
Last night I had an extremely long "what is the meaning of life" style conversation with Oishii and Galanoth. Leave it to fate to recieve an appropriate email from my martial arts Master Instructor who just returned from one of his legendary journeys. He brought home and shared with us an inspirational piece that comes from the wall of Mother Teresa's children's home in Calcutta. It is called the Paradoxical Commandements, by Kent Keith.
- People are illogical, unreasonable, and self-centered.
Love them anyway.
- If you do good, people will accuse you of selfish ulterior motives.
Do good anyway.
- If you are successful, you will win false friends and true enemies.
Succeed anyway
- The good you to today will be forgotten tomorrow.
Do good anyway.
- Honesty and frankness make you vulnerable.
Be honest and frank anyway.
- The biggest men and women with the biggest ideas can be shot down by the smallest men and women with the smallest minds.
Think big anyway.
- People favor underdogs but follow only top dogs.
Fight for a few underdogs anyway.
- What you spend years building may be destroyed overnight.
Build anyway.
- People really need help but may attack you if you do help them.
Help people anyway.
- Give the world the best you have and you'll get kicked in the teeth.
Give the world the best you have anyway.
Signature,
Sam Moyer