I am far too busy. Far too busy.

Speaking of, however, there will be a new site shortly. Wait for it. And because of this, there probably won’t be too many more entries on this one. This has been today’s fluff.

“I quit. I give up. Nothing’s good enough for anybody else, it seems.”

Now on stage four: watch a cynical, average man self-destruct in a puff of smoke and bitterness. Buzz, buzz, buzz, did you hear the buzz? You must have, we’ve paid for it. Handsomely.

Not good. Not good. Not good. Not good. I am not good.

By the way…

Father Jack says: “DRRRRRINK!”

Someone has e-mailed me a shorter version of the political test I linked to earlier, so if you are a particularly impatient person or read so slowly that six pages of questions are simply too much to bear, you can instead visit The World’s Smallest Political Quiz for a similar examination of what you really think. The result produced looks like this:

I have to admit that I like this one rather less because the questions seem a little more biased toward labeling a person to be an “authoritarian” but it should still get you in the ballpark.

I’ve linked to this before but I’m going to link to it again, more prominently this time. There are a lot of people out there who think they know where their political affiliation lies. You may think so as well. But are you correct, or have you been voting for the wrong party for years?

The Political Compass, a neutral measurement of your social and economic political tendencies, can tell you. After answering a few questions anonymously, you’ll get a graph like this one:

The point? The old left-right dichotomous scale that the media likes to use for political issues is practically worthless because it leads to mistaken assumptions — for example, that all union members are also environmentalists and gay-rights supporters (not true), or that all free-market advocates are also pro-lifers (also not true). These misconceptions are likely the result of a simplistic public forum acting in a two-party state. (Your authoritarian/libertarian score will not necessarily be 0.00 like mine was; apparently I got lucky…)

Find out where your beliefs put you and let’s get rid of this Republican vs. Democrat shit that no one really believes in any longer.

Ever have one of those moments when patience for all things is at an incredible premium and your actions throughout the day are little more than a way of rationalizing about the so-called “big picture” and what it really means for you in the end, if anything at all?

And you keep making ungrammatical run-on sentences everywhere and leaving dependent clauses floating in midair, entire paragraphs malformed as part of some unfunny copy editor’s joke?

Well, at least the Utah Morality Police have been defunded. If nothing else, it’s a step in the right direction for someone-or-other.

I just read a book review which slammed Cornel West for being out of touch with modern life. The reviewer is from San Francisco, and said that his day-to-day experiences do not jive with West’s descriptions. As someone living in Utah who is very familiar with San Francisco as well, I find the reviewer’s comments to be absurd and obviously uninformed.

East-coast and west-coast dwellers have no idea just how racist, how isolated, and how quaint even major metropolitan areas can be away from the diversity of the coastal cities. I live in a place where it isn’t uncommon to hear about “the sex-crazed communists in San Francisco and New York” when referring to the general population of these cities. For anyone from these areas who hasn’t bothered to visit our “middle America,” you might be surprised at the degree to which you are hated, even as an average Joe, in the states in which black people are still at times referred to as “Negroes” and “foreigners.”

I also read a review of the Dalai Lama’s Ethics for the New Millennium in which the reviewer called the Dalai Lama a naive buffoon for failing to understand the degree to which America’s nuclear arsenal has been responsible for and will continue to be responsible for both world peace and feeding the poor through decades past and for decades to come.

I am shocked that someone exists who could actually write such things, though given what I’ve said in paragraphs which precede this one immediately I suppose I shouldn’t be…

There is relatively little room for idealism in this world of ours. The more wealthy your society, the more happy they will be to watch you starve to death if and when you won’t cooperate. Naturally, at some point you put pragmatism ahead of belief and begin to play in the interest of survival, anticipating that at some point in the far future, you will be able to act purely upon belief, purely from noble desires…

But by the time you have fed yourself, you cannot help but realize that you have bought a seat in the program and are strapped soundly to it. Welcome to your life.

Only rarely do I realize just how unbalanced western society likely believes me to be. At such moments, I am filled with both joy and kind of creeping terror…

This sucks… the place is a dump again. I don’t know how it happens. You’re doing paperwork, then doing more paperwork, then doing still more paperwork and then suddenly it’s a federal disaster case all around you and you have to clear some space before you can do any more paperwork.

Speaking of, where the hell does all of this damn paperwork come from? I’m secretly hoping for a fire…

Just got off the phone with Embark, who handles admissions from Rackham at Michigan. It is official: the applications to the “big five” schools on my list — Columbia, Michigan, Chicago, NYU and Berkeley — have been submitted, paid for (*sob*) and received. That leaves a series of four (or maybe five, I haven’t yet decided on that one) “less big” schools to be completed.

Meanwhile, the push is now on to get funding. One set of applications and essays and other miscellaneous crap down, one much larger set of same to go.

Also working on getting some employment so that I don’t run out of money before summer. Time to pound the pavement with NWU and a couple of other organizations to land some freelance work.

I guess it’s always one thing after another in life… I’ve been working on preparing for and then finally submitting the grad school applications for so long that I sort of had that pegged as the “big thing” in my life, after which would come nirvana. Not the case! Now that the school applications are nearing completion, other stuff is looming large. As a teenager I never anticipated I’d be one of the “busy people” in life, but it seems that’s what it’s come to.

Sorry to everyone who has called or left me a message yesterday or today. I’m not taking any calls right now and I haven’t listened to any of my voice mail… I’m busy doing my taxes for 2002 (yes, already) for the FAFSA application. What a pain in the ass!