Friday, March 6

RELOCATED

If anyone is still reading this blog, I moved.
http://busyatworkathome.wordpress.com/

Tuesday, March 3

my mom called me bean

me: ...so what's next up for chef maxine?
I'm hungry

omnom: jambalaya
black bean chili

me: i heart black bean chili

omnom: never made it
but i have a killer veg. cook book for all things good

me: yum yum yum
my mom called my Bean when I was a kid
ok, I'm rambling and you are probably working hard

omnom: no, i guess i better hear why you are called bean

me: dunno... Shelly Bean

omnom: ?
oh, like jelly bean

me: i think it's an actually bean

omnom: no way

me: or mix of beans

omnom: i think you can come up with a better story than that

me: hold on

omnom: i was going to suggest i could make one for you, but you're rather creative so you do it

me: no, really
http://forums.gardenweb.com/forums/load/legumes/msg092302501938.html

omnom: ok, but i still think you need another story
one with swords and maybe a dwarf

me: so like magic beans?

omnom: yeah yeah
i think that's the right track

me: so we had this garden right
and when I was really young, like three or something, I helped my mom plant the green pea seeds

omnom: where's the dwarf

me: but when they grew into plants, I called them beans because I hated peas

omnom: you're losing me

me: one day when I went out to check on the plants, there was this like garden gnome thing there digging out my plants and putting in other plants that looked the same
I had my dad's conan the barbarian sword with me
at the time
btw

omnom: haha

me: and um, I said, hey shorty. what are you doing

omnom: AWESOME. i like where this is going

me: and he said, I'm a dwarf dammit!
and I said, you said a bad word and I beaned (?) him on the head

omnom: no no, change the beaned part

me: i just meant I hit him on the head with the sword
no pun intended

omnom: i think those puns are beneath you

me: totally

omnom: that was much better
if anyone asks, tell them that story. plus, it's believable that you would have a conan sword

me: is it?
i don't even know when conan was made

omnom: how old are you?
you're my age aren't you

me: I was going to go with she-ra sword but I would have been like 8 or something
34... 35 in 28 days

omnom: it came out in the eraly 80's i think. very early

me: so I would have been 5 or 6
maybe it was a pie server and I just called it a sword, because I kicked ass as a 3 year old

omnom: i don't think i'd use pie server and kicked ass again in the same sentence
well,i wouldn't, but i guess you can pull it off

me: I was 3

omnom: ha

me: ok, so the shorty dwarf says OW! That was unnecessary!
So I said, you are a poopy-head. why are you taking my beans?

omnom: i think you can do better than that

me: I WAS 3!!

omnom: don't shoot the messenger

me: and he says, my people need green vegetables and we can't grow them, so I'm taking yours because your family is redneck and we don't like rednecks
so I ask what are you replacing them with?

omnom: oh shit, this is getting good

me: and he says, golden beans. and I said, shit, that's even better than beans. I don't even like beans!
green ones I mean
and I ask why is he giving up gold beans to rednecks if he doesn't like rednecks
and he says, they are only 12 carat
and I said, what? the carrots are on the other side of the garden, retard

omnom: ha
hahha
ha

me: so I go back inside and tell my mom that there are shorties in the garden that don't like carrots, so they are taking our beans and giving us gold beans because we are redneck!
and my mom says, Shelly, beans?? they are peas, honey! Shelly bean, Shelly bean
the end

omnom: that was weak

me: I WAS 3
ok, you give the ending

omnom: ok, your mom cracked open a pbr, chugged it, crumpled it on her forehead, and went outside in her motley crue shirt with the sleeves cut off

me: that is SO my mom

omnom: and she yelled 'where's the f*ing dwarf"
i thought so
so, the dwarf bowed up and was like 'are you looking for me?'
and your mom picked the dwarf up by it's funny pointed hat and drop kicked it to the trailer next door
then she let out a rebel yell and went back inside to make some grits
and then she said to you 'your name is now bean. because it is awesome'

me: that is awesome

omnom: thx

me: this is going to be even funnier if you ever meet my mom

Monday, September 29

quote of the day

"Maybe it wasn't your turn to give.
Maybe it was your turn to receive."

-Ethel West

Sunday, July 20

career-minded

"I want people to see me as a can do-professional-so-and-so"

-Will, freelance dynamo

Tuesday, July 1

a quote and a recommendation

"Why is free will wasted on a creature who has infinite choices but pretends there are only one or two?"

- from A Fraction of the Whole by Steve Toltz

I think you should read this book.

Some reviews...
"There are so many quote-of-the-day worthy passages in this book. It's the best novel I've read this year." - Me

"
This book is witty and intellectual, a physical comedy and literary rant all at once. The year is two months old. But this is the book of a two-month-old year. It may well carry the whole thing." - Tom Chiarella for Esquire

"
Steve Toltz's startling debut novel, is a nonstop, politically incorrect diatribe about — for and against — religion, politics, relationships, sex, marriage, work, play, children, sleep, friends, art, labyrinths, schemes and dreams... The real pleasure in reading this book is the pace and the language. While there is a narrative thread, what Toltz has done masterfully is have his way with every aspect of modern life. He racks 'em up and knocks 'em down with a laser wit, a fine turn of phrase and a devastatingly funny outlook on everything human." - Valerie Ryan for The Seattle Times

"
There are more than 500 pages in Steve Toltz' first novel, A Fraction of the Whole, and yet one can turn to nearly any of them and find something worth reading aloud. It has the weight and complexity of a life's masterpiece, but reads as if it was written in a stream of consciousness style. But what consciousness!" - Phillip Winn for BlogCritics Magazine

Thursday, June 26

On the Mindless Menance of Violence

On the Mindless Menace of Violence

Robert F. Kennedy
City Club of Cleveland, Cleveland, Ohio
April 5, 1968

This is a time of shame and sorrow. It is not a day for politics. I have saved this one opportunity, my only event of today, to speak briefly to you about the mindless menace of violence in America which again stains our land and every one of our lives.

It is not the concern of any one race. The victims of the violence are black and white, rich and poor, young and old, famous and unknown. They are, most important of all, human beings whom other human beings loved and needed. No one - no matter where he lives or what he does - can be certain who will suffer from some senseless act of bloodshed. And yet it goes on and on and on in this country of ours.

Why? What has violence ever accomplished? What has it ever created? No martyr's cause has ever been stilled by an assassin's bullet.

No wrongs have ever been righted by riots and civil disorders. A sniper is only a coward, not a hero; and an uncontrolled, uncontrollable mob is only the voice of madness, not the voice of reason.

Whenever any American's life is taken by another American unnecessarily - whether it is done in the name of the law or in the defiance of the law, by one man or a gang, in cold blood or in passion, in an attack of violence or in response to violence - whenever we tear at the fabric of the life which another man has painfully and clumsily woven for himself and his children, the whole nation is degraded.

"Among free men," said Abraham Lincoln, "there can be no successful appeal from the ballot to the bullet; and those who take such appeal are sure to lose their cause and pay the costs."

Yet we seemingly tolerate a rising level of violence that ignores our common humanity and our claims to civilization alike. We calmly accept newspaper reports of civilian slaughter in far-off lands. We glorify killing on movie and television screens and call it entertainment. We make it easy for men of all shades of sanity to acquire whatever weapons and ammunition they desire.

Too often we honor swagger and bluster and wielders of force; too often we excuse those who are willing to build their own lives on the shattered dreams of others. Some Americans who preach non-violence abroad fail to practice it here at home. Some who accuse others of inciting riots have by their own conduct invited them.

Some look for scapegoats, others look for conspiracies, but this much is clear: violence breeds violence, repression brings retaliation, and only a cleansing of our whole society can remove this sickness from our soul.

For there is another kind of violence, slower but just as deadly destructive as the shot or the bomb in the night. This is the violence of institutions; indifference and inaction and slow decay. This is the violence that afflicts the poor, that poisons relations between men because their skin has different colors. This is the slow destruction of a child by hunger, and schools without books and homes without heat in the winter.

This is the breaking of a man's spirit by denying him the chance to stand as a father and as a man among other men. And this too afflicts us all.

I have not come here to propose a set of specific remedies nor is there a single set. For a broad and adequate outline we know what must be done. When you teach a man to hate and fear his brother, when you teach that he is a lesser man because of his color or his beliefs or the policies he pursues, when you teach that those who differ from you threaten your freedom or your job or your family, then you also learn to confront others not as fellow citizens but as enemies, to be met not with cooperation but with conquest; to be subjugated and mastered.

We learn, at the last, to look at our brothers as aliens, men with whom we share a city, but not a community; men bound to us in common dwelling, but not in common effort. We learn to share only a common fear, only a common desire to retreat from each other, only a common impulse to meet disagreement with force. For all this, there are no final answers.

Yet we know what we must do. It is to achieve true justice among our fellow citizens. The question is not what programs we should seek to enact. The question is whether we can find in our own midst and in our own hearts that leadership of humane purpose that will recognize the terrible truths of our existence.

We must admit the vanity of our false distinctions among men and learn to find our own advancement in the search for the advancement of others. We must admit in ourselves that our own children's future cannot be built on the misfortunes of others. We must recognize that this short life can neither be ennobled or enriched by hatred or revenge.

Our lives on this planet are too short and the work to be done too great to let this spirit flourish any longer in our land. Of course we cannot vanquish it with a program, nor with a resolution.

But we can perhaps remember, if only for a time, that those who live with us are our brothers, that they share with us the same short moment of life; that they seek, as do we, nothing but the chance to live out their lives in purpose and in happiness, winning what satisfaction and fulfillment they can.

Surely, this bond of common faith, this bond of common goal, can begin to teach us something. Surely, we can learn, at least, to look at those around us as fellow men, and surely we can begin to work a little harder to bind up the wounds among us and to become in our own hearts brothers and countrymen once again.

Monday, May 19

quote of the day

"if i were an enzyme i'd be a DNA helicase so i could unzip your genes"
- random t-shirt