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Chubby People Are Funding Dirty Energy!!

Posted: 2010-02-11 10:42:15

Chicago is a pretty cool city. Lots of things to do and see, places to eat and drink, and random-ass shit to find!

I'm going to start a new segment of this blog, filled with random, funny, and just plain odd stuff I find around the city. I need a name for this section, so let me know if you have any good ideas.

To start, we've got a contender from my morning bus stop and one from the bank in the downstairs of my work.

This was posted on the Chase Bank in the downstairs of my work. I'm not much of an activist (due to extreme laziness) but I thought this was pretty clever, and amusing.

This one I just don't even understand. I can only hope that it's a weight loss thing... but I have my doubts. I'll leave it to your imagination why someone might want to find this type of person *coughchubbyporncough*

Top 49 States

Posted: 2010-02-04 13:12:31

Bloggers these days seem to generate a lot of traffic by posting lists. Top 10 this, top 20 that. Well, I can jump on the wagon too! So here goes, let the hits start rollin' in.

TOP 49 STATES IN THE USA (in no particular order)

Alabama
Alaska
Arizona
Arkansas
California
Colorado
Connecticut
Delaware
Florida
Georgia
Hawaii
Idaho
Illinois
Indiana
Iowa
Kansas
Kentucky
Louisiana
Maine
Maryland
Massachusetts
Michigan
Minnesota
Mississippi
Missouri
Montana
Nebraska
Nevada
New Hampshire
New Jersey
New Mexico
New York
North Carolina
North Dakota
Ohio
Oklahoma
Oregon
Pennsylvania
Rhode Island
South Carolina
South Dakota
Tennessee
Utah
Vermont
Virginia
Washington
West Virginia
Wisconsin
Wyoming

Sorry Texas.

I'm New... and Yet Not

Posted: 2010-01-19 20:52:10

Today started the first day of my full-time employment at Arc Worldwide. It's funny going through orientation after having worked there for over 6 months already. I thought it was going to be boring as all hell, and even whined to my boss about having to go (to no avail). But it turns out there's still a lot to learn.

I got a lesson in the history of the company, finally found out where the mail room was, learned about some cool perks of being a Leo Burnett employee, and had a much more pleasant day than I had planned on having.

It's really a metaphor for life (soooo deeeeep). It's easy to become stagnant, to think that you know all there is to know. Or, if not to the extreme of complete pompousness, then to think that you have little left to learn. It seems to me quite a stupid move to cut yourself off from learning more about anything, be it your job, your friends, your home town, or the bacterial infections during the early stages of life in cold water fish.

I suppose any time you learn something, you get that much better. It doesn't really even need to be measurable. I won't be able to code better because I know where the mail room is, but I will be able to steal magazines that people don't pick up, which in turn may have information about coding better. Or something.

Point is, don't stop learning, and get off your damned high horse!

(I'm yelling at myself, not you, don't worry.)

I Got Soul but I'm Not a Soldier

Posted: 2010-01-06 11:47:08

"I do not fear death. I had been dead for billions and billions of years before I was born, and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it." -- Mark Twain
A few weeks back I finished reading Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion. It was an awesome book, and I highly recommend that anyone interested in theology, religious skepticism, atheism, or anything along those lines give it a read.

The book ends (well, near the end anyway) with the above quote from Mark Twain, and it really got me thinking about the soul. The soul seems to be a sticking point in a lot of religious discussions. Does the soul exist? Is it eternal? Is it cyclical (reincarnation) or linear (heaven/hell)?

Most religions would say there is a soul or a spirit or something of the type. Christianity in specific without a doubt grants the soul high priority. It is the soul that gets into heaven and is eternal, rather than an actual person.

If you ask me, there is no soul. I don't believe in one, nor do I think it's even plausible for there to exist such a thing. But Twain's quote brought up an interesting thought.

Most Christians believe that a person's soul is eternal. Whether you end up in heaven or hell is of no matter, but the soul persists after death. What isn't addressed very often (if at all) is where the soul is before a person's birth.

The problem here is the normal grasp of time. Scientifically, the beginning of time was the Big Bang. In the Christian belief the beginning of time is when God created the earth (some say as recently as 6,000 years ago). Whenever it began, we know two things (both because of the law of conservation of mass): something had to be there before, and everything that is currently in the universe was there on that day of creation.

So, if that is the case, then all of these souls must have been in existence as well. After all, we can't have something from nothing (as most of the Creationists would claim the Big Bang is, despite the fact that their God would have created something from nothing, and would himself have to have been created from something...). Which brings me back to Twain's quote.

People always worry about what happens after they're dead, but no one seems concerned with what happened before they were born. If you have an eternal soul, it would have to have existed before you were born. And where were these souls then? Certainly not in heaven, as you can't get there without Jesus, and you can't have Jesus if you've never been born.

So as I was thinking about this, I came up with an interesting theory. Picture, if you will, that every soul is a string, and every string is laid out in a straight line (time) all parallel to each other, all on the same three dimensional plane.

Now there is another plane just above the one where all the soul-strings are, parallel to that plane as well. That upper plane is the division between earthly life and um, non-earthly life (be it death, or pre-birth).

So you got that visualized? Maybe I'll try and photoshop something to assist.

There, be impressed with my photoshop skills. Does this make it more clear? You've got your two planes, bottom is non-existence, top is existence. The lines are the souls that exist forever in time, and for a brief moment, each soul pops up into existence and then disappears again into the plane of non-existence.

Wow, I am mentally exhausted from trying to explain that. It seemed so simple when I was sitting in a coffee shop, wired on caffeine at 7:30 in the morning.

So what am I getting at? Nothing really. It's just a thought. If you think the soul exists and is eternal, then what do you think of this? It had to be somewhere before you were born, so where?

I'm with Twain on this one. Being dead for billions of years didn't bother me before, so I probably won't feel much different about it when it happens again.

The Many Ways to Greet and Respond

Posted: 2009-12-21 13:31:18

In today's world, you run into a lot of people. Some might even say "a metric fuckton". I'm not one of those people, because I don't use fowl language.

It got me thinking about all the different ways you can greet someone, and what the appropriate response is. It really is a bit of an art, and some people (read: most people in the IT world) don't seem to understand how this works. You immediately know something is not quite right with someone based on how they respond to your greeting, or sometimes, how they greet you. So here's my take on 5 normal types of greets, and how you should, and should not respond to them.

Type 1: The "I've never met you and am being introduced by a mutual acquaintance" greeting.
This is the type of thing where you might shake hands, say "Nice to meet you," and then spend the rest of the night trying really hard to remember their name. What you don't do is go for the handshake/hug combo and hold that embrace for the longest 6 seconds of your life. Bad form.

Type 2: The "It's been a while since we last saw each other, how are you?" greeting.
There's a good chance that you genuinely like this person, otherwise you would have avoided eye contact and walked into the spare bedroom to hide in a closet. So you're off to a good start, and given the amiable hello, you're probably expecting something like a "Great to see you again! I've been great, Karen is doing well, and I just got a promotion!" When you see someone after a longer than normal absence, you fill them in with a few key high points that occurred in your time apart. It's warm and friendly and opens the doors to talk about more things that are warm and friendly.

What you don't say is "How am I? Like you don't know! Everyone has heard that Karen left me, I got fired, and my appendix are actually bursting right now, jagoff." This opens no doors that should be opened, and in fact makes me want to go find that spare bedroom closet.

Type 3: The "Hello, co-worker, I acknowledge that I'm walking past you in the hall" greeting.
Typically, this is taken care of with the concise "Sup?" It lets them know that you're not oblivious to their presence, but certainly doesn't imply the need for any further communication. A simple "Hey", mutual "Sup?" or even a head nod (up or down) will do.

What won't do is "Oh not much. I'm totally swamped right now though. Can you believe that Alan actually put me on this project. OMG, he must think I like punishment. Oh wait, do you think that means he doesn't like me? Anyway, I can see you were on your way to the bathroom, and by the way your arching your back, I'd say your holding in a big turd, so I'll keep talking a little longer just to see if you'll shit yourself because the only person that gets hated more than the long-talker is the guy who shits himself at work". I think I'd still hate the long-talker more.

Type 4: The "Hey, I don't know you and we're in an elevator alone but I like your shoes" greeting.
Elevators are weird places, man. You never know who you'll meet in them, and you never know how long you're gonna be in there. Sometimes you hit every one of the 15 floors on your way up. Other times it's just you and the mail guy rocketing down 13 floors only to be disappointed by stopping at 2 instead of the lobby because you were too busy keeping on eye on the ~~serial killer~~ mail guy to push your own button.

Actually, I guess most of the time you just shut up when you get in the elevator. Unless you're a girl, then you tell someone you like their shoes. If I like another man's shoes, he knows it by the respect I show him. I don't have to say anything.

Type 5: The "Oh, hey, you're hot and I want to talk to you, but I'm bad at those things so, uh.. hi" greeting.
Naturally, I have never suffered this type of greeting, both because I A) have a hot girlfriend already, and B) am incredibly suave. But for those of you who have had to brave this kind of greeting, my heart goes out to you. Typically, you'd expect a "Not interested" or "Fuck off" or even "I don't do guys" response. That's probably about what you should be getting, because if you're really cool enough, they women will come to you. Just make eye contact, hold your breath to make your chest look bigger, and hope that you don't already have a hard-on.

In conclusion (that's how I ended every paper I ever wrote in grade school) the moral of the story here is to make sure you're greeting and responding appropriately, or you will fail at life.

On Time and In a Hurry

Posted: 2009-12-18 14:13:39

The other morning, Ethan had a field trip to get to by 8am, or the bus would leave without him. Amber usually doesn't get him to school until after 9 on most days, so 8am was an endeavor beyond anything we'd attempted before. As luck would have it, this was also one of the rare occasions that Ethan decided to sleep past 6:30... all the way to 7:15. Though normally this would be glorious, this day of all days it was frustrating.

So, we get him up, actually physically shaking him to get him out of his abnormally deep sleep, into some clothes while he was probably still dreaming, and plopped down at the table for some breakfast. All the while we were urging him along, telling him we didn't want to be late, that the bus would leave without him. Ethan was blissfully oblivious to the whole thing, not comprehending the meaning of "hurry" or what "being late" even was. As far as he was concerned, this morning was like any other, and school would star whenever he got there.

This is what really got me thinking, which I often have time to do on my .6 mile walk to the blue line in the mornings. Time is a very two-sided concept: On one hand, it has always been here, passing in linear fashion since the beginning of the world, universe, and beyond. On the other hand, time in a modern sense is a very man-made concept. We've taken an abstract thing and placed upon it a measurement created to suit the cycles of the earth (more or less). We've dreamed of altering time, but generally viewed it as unalterable. And yet, despite being man-made, it is something that has to be taught to children.

For a 3-year-old, sometimes it's light out, sometimes dark; sometimes you take a nap, but other times you go to bed; and occasionally you don't have to go to school, but most of the time you do. I don't think he really relates the happenings of his life to a normal cyclical occurrence, because sometimes he gets confused about which is taking a nap in the middle of the day as opposed to going to bed at night. He sometimes thinks that it's time to go to bed just because it's an overcast day and dark out by 2pm.

This whole thing got me thinking of how much pressure we feel every day because we do understand time. We can be late for something, we can miss an appointment, or show up so early that we have to play iPhone games for 45 minutes. But the greatest burden we face because of our understanding of time is that things are happening everywhere even when we are not present.

The whole basis of remorse, regret, anxiety, etc. is that an event is happening with or without us. It is inevitable, and we can't do anything to stop it or make it happen sooner. Once in a lifetime things happen only because we know that they have happened and cannot happen again, because we cannot experience something the same time twice. To a three-year-old, the only thing happening is what his worldview is, but to us, we have to constantly know that everyone else out there is experiencing something different than us all the time.

So, I pose a question for discussion: Which would you prefer? Is it easier to understand only the present, or is it more fulfilling to know the past and future?