Please please please don't make fun of me, but after seeing The Dark Knight, I couldn't sleep without the aid of that grown-up version of a night light, which was my computer screen playing lots of music. Something got inside my head. I sat there in the movie theatre, folding and wrenching my ticket stub, and I thought too much and it got to me. I identified with the madness and the twisted logic behind the madness. Every sneering theory about mob mentality, what large groups of people will do when they're panicked. And so insomnia and then uneasy, lucid dreaming prevailed.
As a comic book kid and Batman fanatic practically from birth (fun fact: while most kids wanted to be Superman, I put on my dad's hunting vest and pretended I was Robin), I have noticed a trend in how superheroes are being treated. Before, something bad would happen to a superhero, but in the Hollywood-formulated last fraction of a second the day would be saved. But it's profoundly different somethow. In the aforementioned movie, Batman basically became a pariah in Gotham City, and not the usual invincible masked crusader he usually is. This movie, nor the movie Batman Begins that came before it, is not a comic book anymore. Nothing is neatly packaged or overly glossy. I was pissed when DC came out with 52, where in the first issue they systematically killed off several of their older, more obscure characters (especially when Booster Gold, that moneygrubbing bastard, called this the "End of the Age of Heroes"). You don't kill superheroes, even for shock value. This puts a wrench in the cooky universal yin/yang system, and the balance of good to evil is disrupted in the collective consciousness. Or so I've been told. But I'm beginning to wonder whether it's a bad thing or just a... thing. I hate this new campaign of generalized hopelessness everyone seems to be buying, but I can't help but think that we still need heroes, maybe not the invincible type with the tights and the cheesy symbolism, but someone and someones to save and protect.

"The world's population in our century did not explode because human beings suddenly started breeding like rabbits. The world's population exploded because humanity finally stopped dying like flies".

This was a thought I had in church one Sunday. Debate this if you must, but this is not an intrinsic spiritual belief I uphold.

"Hell does not go up in flames. I believe doomed eternity is a fate much worse. If Hell is seperation from God, if it's punishment for not accepting Him, then God takes his fire away with Him. Hell is not hell for sheer punishement, but a separation from the source. Warmth, light, fire are all products of one source, and so absense of this is coldness. Evil is cold, calculated, but good is warm. And so I have to think that Hell is frozen over. And not just frozen, but so unbearably cold that you can't block it out or numb yourself from the pain. So it's not just pain but the emptiness as well. that's a worse torture than fire can ever produce. God is always being described as fire, and being in the Spirit means being on fire. Coldness burns, but is not quenched. Warmth is fluid, constantly moving. Cold immobilizes you, sticks to you, holds you prisoner in its icy grip. Without the corporal body with its chemical processes of homeostasis and heat producion, a spirit can freeze forever. Hear burns for a while, but it doesn't rob you of breath the same way cold can. But that's just my opinion."

This evening I could have told the story of what I did with my time two ways: I could have either talked about the fight with my sister, making and eating amazing food with roommates & company, helping Kristen look for her wallet and journeying to Hastings for Tarot cards and Final Fantasy figurines, or, I could say that the most productive thing I did this evening was to sharpen my colored pencils. Both things would have been accurate, although the first story would have been a more exciting read.

Maybe I'm just a nerd and a sucker for psychology and science, but I don't understand why a person would take a class and then rely on others to get the work done. But if I were in that class, I would have been eating up the material, no doubt.

I slept in a library yesterday for the first time in years. It was kind of surreal, as I napped in the middle for an hour with this month's issue of "The New Republic" in my lap, and when I woke up absolutely nothing changed. Or maybe everything changed all at once and then settled back into equilibrium before I awoke. I'm still not sure.

Somehow I became one of those odd people who can analyze a kiss, even in a movie, by technique and physiology to judge whether it was a good kiss or not. Which I don't understand, because a good kiss is not about physiology but emotion and passion in the first place. This makes me wonder what else I look at from the base level only without digging deeper.

Figured out what I want the low low low budget film studio to be called: Nzumbe Productions. Nzumbe is the Kimbundu word for Zombie. I don't really believe in Zombies, except for the actual human ones that society creates, but the name just sounds awesome. So, I have all that done, except for actually working on some movies.That'll happen eventually.

As I'm reading "The Catcher in the Rye", and finding out that the author finally gets to the point in the last four chapters, I realize how much is influenced by this novel. One direct product of Salinger's words in particular is an anime that comes on Adult Swim called "Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex". I was on the first few chapters when I watched the episode where they discovered what the images on the Laughing Man logo meant and where they came from. I read that very line just a few hours ago in the middle of Holden's breakdown of reality.

Sometimes all I need is chapstick and a good pencil sharpener.

 - Blackberries always warrant sacrifice of some sort, even if it is the itchy kind.
 - It's super rare to go to a pharmacy late at night to fill a prescription, especially if it's not an emergency.
 - I get infatuated with men far too easily for someone who always runs away from potential relationships. Although it would have been awesome if that pirate-ish looking guy in Walmart would have taken us on a ride on the pallette jack.
 - Reality-Dating shows are like a huge car crash: lots of screaming, confusion, and girls in short dresses hunched over. (The last comparison was for irony's sake only, I promise.)
 - Disappointment in something that used to inspire you is even sadder when you hear someone else complain about it.
 - Cell phone companies distract customers with shiny new products wayyyyy too often.
 - We're all going to die... someday.

I've never been patriotic. Call me crazy, and I believe that loyalty to one's country is fine, but patriotism to the level of undying whatever is a tool used by governments to control their citizens. Plus I understand that our basic unalienable rights were never in any danger and have never actually been fought for. The entire Revolutionary War was about taxes and general founding father pissedoffedness. I do, however, enjoy fireworks and other explosives. Almost too much. That you can call me crazy for. And I just ended that sentence in a preposition.

I have nothing to be sad about, but I keep having brain hiccups and the sluggishness that accompanies the typical bout with depression that seems to plague my life. But I'm not depressed. Maybe I'm just at a standstill and I have too much junk in my system. I am going to try to remedy this by lots of exercise. I tried remedying it with sex this week, but it only made it worse somehow.

Getting a B in Ethics = feeling slightly more qualified to be an introspective mess.

Catholic mass was amazing, but the parishioners kept looking at us funny because we weren't doing the readings and songs and kneeling stuff. And we weren't doing any of that because Marinda was basically shocked and disgusted by the whole service, and I wasn't about to let her look foolish by herself. But I have to wonder if all these super-churches that protestants boast would survive if the guests had to get down on one knee before they could slide into their pews, and if they had to stand up and sit down and kneel through the service, if the atmosphere were somber yet uplifting instead of aggressively energetic, and if every part of the service had some sort of parishioner participation, like response readings, and if everything had to be sanctified by smoke and prayers before it could be used. And, especially, if the pastor were not some loud man in a suit with an overly made-up wife, but a team of priests and monks who had devoted their lives to poverty and chastity. The answer to this is no. Maybe that's why I liked it so much. It was sacred and everything was deliberate and raised up to God.

The choice is simple: Virgins are better at chess.

In an oddly girly move for me, I am retiring my old rock-concert standby of cute jeans and radio station t-shirt for something decidedly sexier. If all goes according to plan, I will be the owner of a red-and-black 50's prom dress from stylefeeder.com. It will cost more than any single piece of clothing I've ever owned, besides maybe my letterman jacket from high school, but it will be worth it.

I am going to Catholic mass Sunday with a Baptist. This should prove interesting.

I now officially own most of the components of a low-budget movie studio. In one evening I have aquired a camera, two different tripods (stationary and one that has flexible arms and will hang on to things most cameras should not be attatched to) and all the accessories that come with them. I already had a digital voice recorder and a computer that has movie-editing software, I just used it to make weird stoner slideshows with multicolor fractals and Jimi Hendrix music. All I need are some lights, a crew, and a few actors. So yeah, Hollywood here I come?

Incredibly hot movie: Plot and dialogue carried out by people who should be wearing clothes, but the camera is supposedly in "x-ray vision", so all the actors are really naked with the outline of clothes redigitized around them.
Incredibly frustrating movie: Plot and dialogue carried out by actors who are really shot in x-ray vision, so all emoting and action is performed by a bunch of walking skeletal systems.

I had an odd thought this afternoon, as I was going on a walk earlier and the first four lines from Robert Frost's poem "Stopping by Woods on A Snowy Evening" were playing themselves over and over in my head. This poem in its original form is great and moving and speaks of reverence for death and accepting old age, but if it were redone in Villanelle form, would just sound like some guy lost in the woods completely disoriented. And now Dylan Thomas is sulking in the corner.