neighbor.

This is an old one.  Like, one of the first.

I wish Jesus was my neighbor.  Pretty sure he wouldn’t complain about slip-and-slides at three o’clock in the morning.  Plus, the dude knows how to keep the alcohol flowing.  Garden hose, meet miracle maker!

Speaking of neighbors, though, those sirens from the previous entry came to claim one of them.  I don’t know if he died or not, he was a really old man.  I kinda wonder if I should stop by and check on things, or the good Samaritan in me wonders.  But isn’t that awkward, if you don’t really know a person?  To knock on their door basically to ensure that they still exist?

I think that’s awkward.

So I probably won’t.

dog.

Everyone in Bloomington, Indiana owns a dog.

It’s really odd.  And maybe it’s just my neighborhood.  No, actually, my neighborhood is much further off average than the rest of the city, I’m sure.  Because in my neighborhood, everyone owns two dogs.  And not two Yorkies.  Not two poodles.  But two big ass dogs.  What is an ass dog?  It’s whatever is still barking every night at 3am.

Miraculously, even though everyone owns two dogs, there is no dog shit to be found.  Anywhere.  On the street.  In the bike lanes.  On the park sidewalk.  At first, I thought this was because Bloomington is extremely environmentally-conscious.  But then I realized it’s just because nobody’s dogs poop in Bloomington.  Instead of pooping, they bark all night.  And form secret underground societies whose primary goal is to keep streetlights out of Bloomington, Ind.

Another fun fact about my neighborhood is that nobody actually has a job.  How do I know this?  Because whenever I leave for class – be that 8am, 11pm, 3pm or 6pm, everyone is always out walking their two dogs.  Sometimes they’re also jogging.  Sometimes they’re going with the trifecta – dog, jog, baby stroller.  But one thing they’re for sure not doing is working.  It doesn’t matter if they’re young or old.  They’re always outside not working.  Ever.  Unless you consider playing tennis to be working.  In fact, the only evidence of employment in my neighborhood is the daycare across the street.  Because really, it wasn’t enough for the dogs to be barking all night.  The toddlers have to be screaming all day to complete the 24-hour cycle of noise pollution.

Also, everyone rides a bicycle.  I’m not sure why, though.  As I’ve proven time and time again, my car trumps your bicycle every time.  Conveniently, my neighborhood has a nice, reed-lined ditch in the middle of two one-way streets where I can hide any and all evidence of this experiment.

 

drugs.

Don’t do them, children!

We had another crazy preacher stop by campus this week.  I don’t think the list of people going to Hell has changed, though.  By my count, we’ve still got: fornicators, drunkards, sodomites, lesbians, pagans, dope fiends, partiers, seducers, porn freaks, feminists, liars, hypocrites, music idolaters, socialists and all non-Christians!

According to Brother Jed Smock, anyway.

(Bro Jed actually has his own website, Bro Jed dot org.  Thumbs up for the concept, but dude went and hired the world’s shittiest web designer I think.)

The good news is, according to Bro Jed’s criteria, I think I’m going to heaven!

The bad news is there’s going to be nothing fun to do up there.  Pretty sure we can’t even play rugby.  You know, ‘cuz there aren’t any lesbians.

tolerance.

Like pterodactyls, I do not know how to draw crabs.  Again, vital curriculum that is completely lacking from our socialist education system.  I blame Obama.

The moral of this story, though, is that you can’t read any of the speech bubbles coming from the fish, seahorses and reef.  Whereas I can.  Because I created it.  I just chose to take a really crappy picture of it so you wouldn’t know.

Okay, fine, I give in.  From left to right:

Fish 1: Fag.
Fish 2 (to Fish 1): Homophobe!
Seahorse (to Fish 2): Gay fish lover!
Minnow (to Seahorse): Close-minded seahorse!
Reef (to Minnow): Queer minnow!
Rock (to Reef): Ignorant coral!

So basically this is like the aquatic Crash, but with a few notable differences.  For one, there is no fingerbanging.  Secondly, there are no Mexicans or Asians or crazy black people or pompous crackers.  There is only an emo octopus and a gay crab.  Odd that our emoctopus friend is somehow smoking a cigarette underwater.  No doubt a subconscious reference to one of my favorite films of all time (except Bill Murray didn’t quite pull it off.)

Oh, and yes, I still want emo hair.  Please don’t tell anyone.

dinosaurs.

Been a while, I suppose.  But like Abraham Lincoln said: you musn’t rush a good doodle.  Or a bad one.  Or any of the ones in the basement of bad that belong to my assortment of notebooks.

This probably would have been more amusing if I knew how to draw a pterodactyl.  I’ve learned several things in my 16 years of formal education.  How to draw pterodactyls, unfortunately, was not one of them.

(No, they had to teach me about derivatives!  Like I’ll ever need to retain that chunk of knowledge!  Oh, help me sir, my car broke down just outside Stabbington City!  You fix the fuel pump, I’ll fend off the converging army of denim-clad serial rapists with my knowledge of derivatives!)

You know what’s kind of cool about dinosaurs, though, is that they didn’t have to take no guff from no one!  Like, if someone told them that the previous sentence was grammatically incorrect, they would just stomp that know-it-all’s colon until it exploded partially-digested Blackjack Taco.  The only natural predator that dinosaurs seemed to have, besides each other, was the asteroid.  And to be fair, there are very few things in the natural world that stand strong through the nuclear winter following a ten-ton atomic blast.

Al Davis is one of them.

inappropriate.

Wow, I’ve been negligent.  My bad.

This one always reminds me of that one guy who makes the uncomfortably inappropriate joke for every occasion, though.  Like, it’s socially acceptable to make some jokes in some settings, but then that one guy comes along and he doesn’t even care!  To hell with the conventions!  It could be a total group of strangers, he’s still giving you everything he’s got on the subject of racial slurs.  Not holding back one bit.  No sir.

I’m thinking specifically of this one kid in high school who used to make rape jokes.  Like, a lot of rape jokes.  So many rape jokes, I began to wonder if in fact he was a rapist and that was his way of telling us.  At a certain point (mainly after the first one) they just became uncomfortable.  And there is something tremendously creepy about someone giggling and promising to crawl under a table with one of their peers.  Then rape them.

So inappropriate!

lifespan.

Is that what velociraptors look like.  Really?

Well, like I always* say: people should not be afraid of their dinosaurs.  Dinosaurs should be afraid of their people.

*never

But I would like to say that more often.

I was going to write something about my very dumb dog, but as he is curled up against my ankle at the moment, I just can’t muster the ability to clown on him.  Cuteness.  Is.  Overpowering.  Even though he totally pissed himself 10 minutes ago (yeah, right, I’ll be throwing out that excuse for urine-soaked bedsheets for the next 80 years!)

Speaking of 80 years (well, more like 90), I was up at my grandparents’ place in Fort Wayne today.  My grandma has Parkinson’s Disease – late stages, what Mike J. Fox has minus the bankroll and TV specials – so taking care of her is quite a massive endeavor on behalf of the family.  But she’s such an incredibly sweet soul.  She has major problems articulating her thoughts, there is a definite disconnect between thought and speech, and a good portion of her memory has eroded.  Yet she’ll still come up with an incredibly sharp observation from time to time, or find a word in Boggle before anyone else, or unleash a razor-sharp crack on my grandpa.  She’ll always ask, every time, what grade I’m in (sixteenth?)  Today she asked what grade my mom was in, which I thought was really cute.  I told her we’d lost count.  Quote the mom: ha-ha.

It’s interesting – always is – hanging out with “old people.”  They say you learn a lot, and I’m sure that’s true, but it always blows my mind to imagine that these people have been alive for 90 years.  And they have the photographs and stories and laughs and tears and scars to prove it.  Being around my grandparents always seems to put life in context for me.

Today, I brought up an interesting fact that I’d heard from a friend.  Most babies born in the United States this century (2000s) will live to be 100 years old.  On average.  To qualify that, my dad is in Ohio celebrating my great-grandmother’s 100th birthday today.  One hundred.  An entire century.  With my great-grandma, that’s an accomplish.  Something highly unusual, something that makes local headlines.  But a century from now, it will be the standard.  Nobody will think much of living to 100 years old.  Those erring on the plus side of that range might see 110, 120.  The oldest person in the world might push 130 years old.  That’s incredible.

Can you imagine what all you see in a century’s time?  To put that in my great-grandma’s perspective, she was born in 1909.  Things that happened in 1909: the US exited the Spanish-American War, William Howard Taft is elected President, the Indianapolis Motor Speedway opens for its first event, Orville Wright tests the first military plane and the NAACP is established.  Average life expectancy of a white female born in 1909?  53 years old.

And then there’s the other side of the discussion – would you even want to live that long?

I suppose a lot of that depends on your health.  But I can’t imagine being widowed for 30 years at the end of my life.  And at the same time, I couldn’t ever reconcile death either.  What is our life in the scheme of things, anyway?  A flash, barely noticeable, in the galactic pan.  A microscopic section of a millennial tapestry.  Weird to think about, huh?

If I do live long, though, I’d like to be half-robot and capable of smashing worthless humans.  I want a flamethrower on one shoulder and a missile launcher on the other.  Maybe that’s redundant.  Okay, I’ll take a chaingun.  Much more practical than a missile launcher anyway.  I would like to be able to bounce between my moon condo and any earth city that still has a Culver’s and an overly elaborate mini-golf course.  Beautiful woman would be nice too, I guess, but I’m trying to be realistic about human-robot relations in the year 2070.  I think we still have a long way to go.

Mostly, in the end, I just will have wanted to leave something for the next generation.  Preferably the generation after that as well.  Commit something to history.  I don’t know what.  Maybe an acoustic cover of “Poker Face.”

learning.

Because the Hundred Years War is clearly Ancient History.

Seriously, I posted this because for some reason someone commented on it on my Photobucket account. The comment? I quote: “haha.” That makes me feel good inside. One, because I didn’t even know Photobucket had comments, or anyone outside of this blog could see these DRAWRings. Two, because the last comment I got, on Mostly Junkfood, called me a “fagot.” And I would rather be considered comical than a “fagot” (though it’s probably a combination of both, right?)

Also, higher learning. Yeah.

I feel like I’ve received very little in terms of enlightenment out of my collegiate experience. Yeah, I still have a semester left to go. Yeah, it’s just my Bachelor’s Degree. Yeah, Joni loves Chachi. But my point remains.

I probably owe it to my high school experience. Almost everything I needed to know for college, I learned by, if not in, high school. Hell, some of it I learned in middle school. Arguably even grade school. I was absolutely shocked to arrive at college as a wide-eyed, clueless little freshman and discover that some people still didn’t understand the concept of writing in essay form. And that, in college, professors actually spent part of lecture discussing how to write in essay form.

Um, isn’t that a skill you pick up in, oh I don’t know, fourth grade? At least sixth or seventh?

Point is, I realize in retrospect that my high school education was quintessential to my collegiate success. I aced college without trying. Sometimes, I actively challenged myself to see how much I could bullshit and still get an A. The answer: a lot.

I don’t mean to sound cocky, or as if I beat the system. It’s just, in my experience, undergrad really doesn’t amount to shit. I guess it will satisfy some employers. Or I hope. But academically, it was an absolute cakewalk, and I think that’s a combination of my experience going into college being on the high end and the average student’s experience being on the low end. Calculate the formula, and I’ve got a lot of low expectations that aren’t at all difficult to surpass.

(And I mean seriously, you think I’d have notebooks full of doodles if any of this were not true?)

ALL THAT SAID, my secondary point is that I still don’t know shit. Academically, sure. But mostly about life. I realize that now more than ever. I don’t think a lot of other undergrads do, yet, but I’m sure they will after graduation. Anything I can do to take in advice or wisdom from people who do, I’m open to that. It hasn’t been until the last few years where I’ve started to really listen to my parents. I suppose that’s cliche, but I find it true anyway. They know a lot. Too much, sometimes, especially about hardships. And the more I can absorb from them, the better I figure my chances are.

So in honor of these revelations, I think I’ll skip my afternoon class and enjoy an afternoon at the park. Maybe I’ll draw or write. I don’t know. I’m feeling SAUCY!

(And I wonder why anonymous people call me a “fagot”!)

soccer.

Wow, awkward doodle.  The child has a giant hole in his groin.

(It also has to be apparent at this point in my doodleography that these doodles were inspired by Michael Showalter’s doodles, which were probably inspired by Pablo Picasso’s doodles.  My point being, while other peoples’ imitation may perhaps be considered “unoriginal”, mine are instead “high art.”)

But what I really want to talk about is the fact that no one in America is talking about Charlie Davies!

Well, okay, the vast majority of America is not.  And if that’s not indication of the state of our national soccer culture, I don’t know what is.

For those who don’t know, US Men’s National Team striker Charlie Davies was seriously injured in a car crash on Oct. 13.  The accident killed the driver and injured the other two passengers, one of whom was Davies, riding in the backseat.  Davies suffered a broken femur and tibia, lacerated bladder and facial injuries.  And while you hate to speculate on career implications – you’d just hope for his return to good health first – the injuries are considered possibly career-threatening.  It’s a virtual certainty that he’ll miss the 2010 World Cup in South Africa.

Yet nobody really seems to know about this.  Or, beyond the immediate human angle, care.  And that’s really disappointing to me.  Especially after so much interest was stirred by the Yanks in the 2009 Confederations Cup, where they lost 3-2 to Brazil in the final game.

I guess it just points to our love-hate relationship with soccer in this country, though.  We love it when it’s cool to love it, when the team is winning and ESPN is hyping their performance.  We don’t love it when a World Cup qualifier is only available on closed-circuit television at select bars or, worse, Telemundo.  We love it when everyone at the water cooler is talking about Clint Dempsey’s diving header to spark a win over Egypt.  We don’t love it when the team loses or draws, because that’s inherently un-American!

What puzzles me, though, is that we seem to have raised a soccer generation.  I know mine is.  We grew up playing the sport, it’s widely encouraged to follow international club teams, particularly in the English Premier League.  People can rattle off the names of players from Chelsea, ManU, Madrid, Tottenham, Milan, etc.  But they shrug their shoulders at a rising star who had been dominating at French club Sochaux and was probably the Yanks’ best scoring threat looking forward to next year’s Cup?

Incredible.

I’m not trying to make this too much about soccer because of the respect I have for Davies and well-wishes for his recovery first-and-foremost, to enjoy a regular life, or whatever variation of it one could have after an accident as violent as the one on Oct. 13.  But this really does paint a larger picture of soccer culture in the United States, and I don’t think it’s a particularly good one.  Not at a time when soccer culture seemed to be gaining momentum, fans seemed to be tuning into the men’s national team and there seemed to be an extremely bright future for the Yanks.

Now, their 2010 World Cup hopes are at least dampened – if not altogether destroyed – by the loss of their star striker.  And so, too, might be our hopes for culminating a cohesive national soccer culture.

I guess I wonder what would happen if the world held something like a basketball World Cup.  Yeah, there’s Olympic basketball, but that always should be a one-sided event with the US taking home gold every year.  But if the talent base were more spread out internationally – and the talent base is spreading – and more nations cared about the results, if there was some sort of international tournament with the type of prestige associated with a World Cup.

I guess I would wonder how America would react if, say, Kobe Bryant were to be in the same situation Charlie Davies was in.  Not that I wish that on him or anything, knock on wood it doesn’t happen.  But how would America react then?  Very strongly.  Hell, they’d react strongly even now, without the existence of such a tournament.  The Lakers’ title hopes would go down the drain and an overwhelming number of bandwagon fans would be searching for the next jersey to buy.  Losing Kobe would have a tremendous impact on America.  As would losing Tom Brady if there were some sort of international football tournament held every four years.

You get the idea.

But Davies finds himself in a career-threatening situation, and it’s news for a day on ESPN.  Then America brushes it off.  I have wonder, why?  Especially if we claim to be fostering a growing soccer culture.  Because if we really cared about soccer in this country, we would care more about the Davies story.

The United States just lost perhaps their best striker.  That, in my book, is very big news in the national sporting community.

emo.

I hate being reductive, but…

Oh, just kidding. I love reducing everyone in a cultural subset into a single caricature. It’s pretty much the basis of my creative existence.

I don’t really have anything against the emos, though. I actually want emo hair I think. Not like full-blown, red-streaked, please-call-me-queer hair, but just like straightened hair. I want to enroll myself in that emo experiment. See what path it takes me down.

The problem, of course, is that my hair doesn’t really grow out. It just kinda mounds up. So I would have to pay someone to style it. And I’m way too embarrassed to admit my end-goal to actually engage in this type of transaction. And it’s a safe bet, due to this procession of events, that I won’t.

But back to the point, I think it would be fun to have an emo president. Some presidents don’t care about the poor, others don’t care about the rich. Some don’t care about national security, others soldiers, others foreign relations, other infrastructure.

Well, emos don’t care about anything at all! So beat that! Equal opportunity representation.