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Posted: 2010-03-26 09:26:51
If you'll kindly refer back to a previous post of mine. Go ahead, take your time. Remember that one?
I told you Texas sucked. It's unbelievable the shit people can get away with. I mean, as they say "History is told by those who won". But does that means we've let them win?! God, I hope not.
Posted: 2010-03-23 20:22:30
Somewhere, on some dirty dusty road, there is a wagon. I have fallen off of it.
It's been well over a month since writing my last blog, but, like many times before, I've resolved to be better about writing regularly. Who knows? Maybe this time I will.
So, some big news. I got engaged! Many of you know the wonderful woman with whom I will be sharing the rest of my life. None other than @pandasneezes. I always wondered how I would know when I met the woman I was going to marry. Turns out it was the easiest decision I've ever made. We spent a great weekend out in Galena, IL (never go there if you don't like old things), and I proposed in front of a statue of Ulysses S Grant. Couldn't have been more romantic.
In other news, The Van Goghs have finally found a bassist! Phil has joined us and is a great fit. We've already got a show set up April 14 at The Beat Kitchen. I can't wait to get back to playing live music, it's been way too long.
I've recently found a new obsession with cycling. For my birthday, I bought myself a new bike and have been riding to work (when it's above freezing). Amber thinks I'm a bit too obsessed (which I am) but I really enjoy it, and it's a great way to stay in shape (or get in shape, if I'm feeling pessimistic).
So, that about catches things up. If I'm more on top of blogging, I'm sure the future updates will actually be interesting.
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*
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)
Leave a Comment || View Comments (3)
Dave said:
Aaaaaaand winner for of "Worst State In The Union" Indiana!
Dane! said:
Second.
(on Dave's post. Texas at least has SXSW and armadillos. Indiana has Gary. Let's weigh those out a bit.)
Chris said:
Whoa whoa whoa lets not forget our asshole neighbor to the north...Indiana and Wisconsin are in a pretty tight race for shittiest state in the union.
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.)
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.
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Bspar said:
Pretty sure thoughts similar to this, with a few others included, got me an F on a religion paper once....
Skovari said:
I think you were overanalyzing this too way much. I would assume Christians believe the soul is created at conception, not before. So if they a soul is eternal, that doesnt necessarily mean it had to exist at the beginning of time. But, the whole concept of Christianity doesnt add up, so I am not so sure its an interesting theory when you know souls and life after death dont exist in the first place.
theBEattitude said:
Hey Urgack. Followed your link from Twitter.
Very weird. I was thinking about this exact thing a couple hours ago and was planning to write my next post about it. You stole my thunder. ;)
In my youth, the idea of nothingness after death scared the crap out of me. Which might explain why I held on to faith in Christianity for the first 32 years of my life.
The thing that helped me move past the fear of nothingness after death was the nothingness before my birth. Exactly as Twain so cleverly described. Billions of years have past without my existence and I don't remember any of it. Did my "soul" exist in some other form or plane as you describe it? Maybe.
I had a major life change just over a year ago, and my perspective toward the unknowns in my life evolved dramatically. I think the unknowns are what make life exciting. I don't look to primitive storybooks to explain everything anymore. I look forward to learning and discovering new things and revel in the awe of things I will never understand.
Where will I go when I die? I have no idea and I just fine with that.
By the way, I'm super impressed by your Photoshop skills.
DrZ said:
This is nitpicky, but the Big Bang isn't necessarily the beginning of time, just the beginning of the Universe. There are a lot of hypotheses on what does or does not exist outside the observable universe, and personally, I lean more towards something rather than nothing. As a society, we've gone from thinking our planet was the center of the solar system, to our solar system is the center of the galaxy to our galaxy is the center of the universe to our universe is the only universe. The farther out we look, the more we realize we're not special, and until someone comes up with a theory that shows that our existence isn't remarkable, I won't be satisfied. If you're interested in that kind of stuff, I recommend reading "The Fabric of the Cosmos" by Brian Greene. It deals with current hypotheses on what space is, what time is, where it all comes from and where it's all going. It reaches a bit beyond what we know for sure, but as long as you don't take that stuff as fact, it's a very good read.
As for souls, I haven't seen any evidence of an immaterial, immortal soul. It seems rather unlikely. In refernce to my comments above, I'm less curious about what happens to me after I die than I am about what will happen to everything else!
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Jeff said:
http://www.statemaster.com/graph/edu_bes_edu_ind-education-best-educated-index
Guess they're going to forfeit their spot as #24.