What a horrible day.

I've come to the realization that while I love meeting new people and trying new things, I still cant stand some forms of change.

For example, when my daily routine changes. I cant stand it. It depresses me. It confuses me. It makes me tired.

Starting today I have to find new classroom friends. I need new people to walk with in the hallways. All of a sudden 10 of my friends have become miles away from me due to simple differences in schedule and classroom location, and there's nothing I can do about it but live with it.

The worst of it is that I dont have a zero period anymore, and I have a fifth. This effectively means that when I come to school it wont be dark and there will be traffic (one of the best things about my days up to now is my drive to school) and as a reward for this inconvienience I no longer get to meander around during fifth.

Jesus. All I could do today was try to think about last weekend. Try to imagine myself flying down those dunes and remember the insane exhilaration. *sigh*

The last day of finals, Thursday, was the perfect start to what could possibly be the most perfect finals weekend a person could have. I slept in because I had no classes, went to a motorcycle shop to get some parts, and went to school. Of course, I went there to hang out with friends, not for the esthetic appeal of class or whatever bullshit some of you can hang on me. I played basketball with a pretty big group of my friends and then traveled all the way over to a beautiful house in Huntington Beach that belongs to one of my good friends. Me and him and about four other guys I dont get alot of time to hang out with pretty much ate dinner, played alot of basketball and just talked. Although I am generally a silent person in groups like these (big ones, I mean), I do enjoy listening to people talk. I must say some of the respect I get from these guys I feel really undeserving of. Deserving or not, I love them for it, and when I came home I felt void of all the raw emotion that had been putting me through ordeals the preceding week.

I felt it was kind of funny when I drove a little out of my way coming home to make one of my friend's life a little easier that he said "sorry for the trouble". I smiled at his politeness, but I almost felt like smacking him. I'd do most anything for my true friends, I dont even grimace at the thought of wasting a little gas.

And then came my trip to Glamus with another good friend. It first must be understood that Glamus is nothing like the desert that I normally go out to. Despite their closeness in distance and resemblance, the riding that goes on in each desert is practically opposite.

Normally when I go to the northern deserts with my family, we end up in the middle of nowhere. There is no civilization for hundreds of miles and you rarely see other bikers or motorhomes. It is more of an individual experience, riding out there. You ride with yourself, your motorcycle, and the landscape, and other people only tend to disrupt your bonding with nature. They force you to go faster or slow down and basically leech your attention away from what is truly important - the bond with nature.

But the dunes is communal experience. There are tons of stores and people and motorcycles everywhere. You dont go into the dunes alone because there is such a great risk of breaking down or crashing, and you dont really pay attention to where you are, but you do pay alot of attention to what you're doing.

In the northern deserts, quite simply, the fun is in the journey, while in the dunes the fun is in the experience. You follow your friends up and down the faces of the dunes, rarely going faster that 40 (where its common to average 60 in the northern) and it's like child play - tag - with motorcycles. Then, it's also like one gigantic rollercoaster, because the dunes in some places are as tall as mountains with drops that are practically vertical that you shoot down and then shoot back up and that moment where you are in between the drop and the rise is indescribable, like your organs are shooting into the ground but your body is going up.

Anyhow, I had alot of fun out there, but in no way can it replace the northern desert trips I take with my family, because it just doesnt fill the romantic lust I have.

Well, once again I'm not feeling up to the journal. But I'll stick it out anyways.

Today was the last day of finals for me, but I'm still techinically going to "go to school" tommorow so I can catch up with a couple of friends who I'm going to partay (kinda) with. Although I dont think the end of the semester is anything to celebrate this year (because it was so friggin easy), it's a good excuse, so I wont explain.

Friday through Sunday I'm gonna try to go to Glamus with my friend again. Last time it rained like hell and we cancelled, but I dont think that'll happen again. Hopefully.

I got home today and finally got my CD "Mander Salis" from amazon. I decided to try buying from their certified used program and got this brand spankin new CD that I couldnt find anywhere else for $5 bucks including shipping (and new it was $13 not including). Suffice to say, I'm feeling pretty cool right now, although this album I got is really really indie. It's going to take some time to get used to.

Was it just me or was everybody alot nicer and more outgoing today? (well, almost everyone). I think it's maybe because they've all spent a weekend all couped up studying or whatever. First final was today. It was easy. If that's a sign for anything to come, it means alot of fun this week, and then a new goddamned schedule next week.

And I just got my life under control.

I traveled out to Irvine today to meet a friend I had never met before and go to one of those ultra-cool neo-churches. You know, the ones with the rock bands and colorful televisions and inspirational speakers and all that. I had quite a fun time, the guy that was preaching could have passed for a comedian at some times and when it was all over I was actually feeling guilty that I didnt put any money in the basket because the church had provided me with an hour of true entertainment.

After that I didnt really want to go home. It was 11:00, I had half a tank of gas and I didnt have to be home until 1:00. Last night I was looking through maps and noticed a small mountain road leading into mission viejo from Orange, so I set out to find it. In the end I didnt find it, but I did have what can be described as a spiritual experience. Those who drive that havnt been back in the country of south Orange County really need to go back there. It's like mid-america without going 500 miles away - no traffic, no cops, no worries. It's just you, your car, and the wind rushing past you as fast as you like. Heck, the speed limits on some of the roads up there was 70. At one point I was laughing out loud singing along to my radio flying down a road called Portola at somewhere around 90. It was amazing.

I also saw mission viejo/aliso viejo for the first time. My parents have always told me its really nice over there, and having seen it I definitely agree. It's like YLx2, and those of you who know how much I love Yorba Linda know what kind of confession that is. I especially liked the huge Mission Viejo lake that I passed. It was magnificent and I really wished I had some swimming trunks because it was hot and I would have loved to go in there.

I got back home and checked the maps to see how close I had gotten to Santiago Canyon Road, and apparently at one point I was within 2 miles of it. What a bummer. I even remember having a feeling in the back of my head that it was down "El Toro Rd", but I didnt follow my intuition, though I should've. Bummer, I would have really enjoyed that road. (I wanted to see Irvine Lake, which is GIGANTIC) I think I pulled off something like 150 miles today. Pretty good for a time period of 2 hours. On mostly street roads. =D

I think one of the hardest things most people have to get around is the imperfection of life. I think that everyone expects perfection in at least something, when in reality perfection is an illusion. That $300,000 mercedes is just a little less likely to have problems with the window seals than my $5,000 accord, and there's really nothing you can do but work around it. But some people get really pissed off when they find flaws and obstacles in their life and they start giving up.

I think one of the many meanings of life is to get around the obstacles that imperfections cause us. You cant go into a store and expect to buy a TV and bring it home and install it without it not fitting or not turning on the first time or whatever any more than you can expect your cell phone to ring every time it's called. Alot of this world is run on Karma, and that's what makes it so interesting.

I guess it's not just accepting imperfection though, it's learning to work with it. I remember when I got my computer (rather, got the parts for it) it had alot wrong with it. Sometimes I'd push the power button and it would only boot half the way up and I couldnt use it. Sometimes it was really slow and it was really vulnerable to virus' at first. But I just kept at it, putting new parts in it from time to time and eventually all the flaws either disappeared or became the norm for me. My computer's flaws are it's personality, what makes it different from other computers. Just like I was talking about yesterday with my car, it has it's own little unique flaws, it has personality.

My glasses are scratched, my phone has dust behind the screen, my stereo system doesnt work in 5.1 mode, one of my sheets on my bed has three weird holes in it, my bath towel has this weird odor to it, my mp3 player doesnt always read playlists right, my little dicast rx-7 sitting in front of my has a broken wing, but these things are more routines of my life than annoyances. I can see, however, how I could get really pissed. But I have to options: I could take everything I get that has a flaw back to the store and live my life in a limbo of returning and recieving faulty items, or I can just live with the wrong things in my life.

Like everything, this can go into relationships. In fact, it furthers that little expose I wrote on how people have to want to be in a relationship for that to work, because the small imperfections will eat away at them if they dont want it to work. But I'll just leave anybody truly interested to ponder this on their own.

I was walking out of Wendy's today with frosty in hand (my new favorite snack fo' sho) and my car really caught my attention. It was sitting alone with two empty spaces on each side and it looked so great. I genuinely smiled because people are always making fun of my little beauty, but they dont laugh after they've been in it or have driven it. My car is so full of surprises, so ready to impress you, I just love it. Even if it didnt have it's own peculiar personality, I've had so many memories, so many people I've liked and not liked and not cared about either way, so many close calls and sweats, so many moments of complete relaxation after some of the toughest times in the last two years, that I couldnt possibly hate it.

I really feel sorry for my peers that dont have such a precious thing to call their own. My car is not a thing, it's a person, my little baby. Ironically enough as I was driving back to school today from Wendy I was thinking "You might not be the most beautiful thing on the block, but I'll always love you anyways." Ironic because that's the way I think about a girl.

N E How. Schools out for the weekend. Next week is finals and I really dont give a shit, but like I predicted, my friends do. So I'm left to mope around. I think I'll do some yardwork for my Grandma tommorow to make some money, but other than that I really dont know what the hell I'm gonna do to keep myself interested.

More than 9,000 students have applied for admission to the first undergraduate and graduate programs at UC Merced, which is scheduled to open in the fall. About 8,000 of those are applying for the freshman class, UC officials said Wednesday.

UC Merced Chancellor Carol Tomlinson-Keasey and other UC officials said they were pleased at student response to the new campus, which is expected to enroll about 1,000 students in its first year.

9,000 applicants? WTF? Dude, that drives their admittance rate (1000/9000) below 11.1%. That's insane. UCLA's admittance rate is (4727/10581) 10.5%. The world must have gone crazy.

If I wasnt so sure that bulge down there was a penis I'd swear I have periods. But since I cant use the PMS excuse I guess I gotta look a little closer at my raging fluctuations in mood. I think that about once a month I let something incredibly small and pointless get to me, and from there it just builds up. I start seeing only the bad and nothing good and all of a sudden I'm not smiling anymore and it takes a week to realize how ridiculous I'm being and I drag myself out of my own funk.

Is there any way to break the cycle?

Ravi convinced me to get a myspace, so ya know, if you're feeling friendly, you can befriend me

Everybody has gotta have something to look forward to. It's the reason the rich are so miserable: they have everything; nothing to look forward to. It's also the reason the poor are the same way: they have nothing to do and cant get out of their situation.

I'm in one of those situations right now. I sit with blank eyes because I cant find anything to look forward to. I cant make anything because my life is so nuetral right now and I get to feeling kinda helpless sometimes, somewhat like I'm drifting. So funny, I normally look forwards to hanging out with friends over the weekend. But my friends, the hippocrites they are, will be "studying for the finals" even though they said at the beginning of the year that they didnt care what grades they got. Even more ironic is that none of them will ever get any studying done, at least that's the way I'll hear it. I'll go back monday and ask how the studying went and all my friends will gush about how they "didnt get anything done" because such and such circumstances. I guess I dont really blame them for their hippocrisy, because anybody living with today's ideals has to be one.

But I really wish they'd see past the test. Maybe they could become a little more confident in themselves. This weekend is the same as any other for me because I dont need to study. I'll get the same grade on the test as I am in the class, and the only reason to study would be if I was really close to an A or B but that's not the case in any class.

It'd be cool if I saw my friends more often out of school. At the beginning of the year, sitting outside of class during 6th period was the shit. I loved having some time at school but not in school with my friends, but it's gotten kind of bland. The only thing I really enjoy now is having dinner or lunch with friends, or maybe a movie (but movies cost way too much).

Man, I really need some Serendipity. I need something random and great to happen to my life. It's been so long since something happened that I didnt want to happen.

So I went to the opera "The Marriage of Figaro" today. I didnt think it was as good as "Turandot", but I think the orchestra for this play was better. I wasnt awed or anything, so basically today was spent just hanging out with friends, getting to know people, remaking friends and whatever else. I got pictures, but none of them are me and I dont like publicly posting pictures of other people because some people dont like to be publicized.

Last night I was watching a South Park episode I didnt even know existed called "Cartman Joins NAMBLA". It's basically about a bunch of old guys forming a club that's all about having sex with little kids. What's really funny is at the end where the kids of Southpark always talk about what they learned one of the people from the club says "Why cant I practice my freedom of speech?" and a kid comes out and says "dude, you fuck little boys." in just a matter of fact, wtf is wrong with you tone.

Obviously the creators of South Park in their infinitely powerful ways of taking on social dogmas have made a statement about what they feel about gay people, at least this is how I see this episode. And I totally agree with them.

In terms of it, I've never been able to put myself completely anywhere on gay rights, I have just normally accepted gay people because that's they way most people at Troy are (accepting, not gay). But that's not completely how I feel. I think that men and women can definitely love members of their own sex. Heck, I love my dad and a couple of my closer friends. I also think that it's not really wrong to express that love in marriage, since marriage is nothing more than legal binding and has no true significance. However, at the point when one guy starts having sex with another guy I have to back up and say "What the fuck". Guys should not be physically attracted to other guys and the same with women. Whether you claim your born like that or not, it's just not natural. It's like fucking your mom or your sister or a young boy or anything else: it's been traditionally taboo because it's unnatural. Fortunately, I dont think this is what people support when they support "gay rights", but if you do, you're seriously fucked up.

Today was one of those typical weekend days for me: cleaning up after a week worth of taking everything for granted (car, room, dishes, food shopping, motorcycle) and then just sitting back. I finally finished doing all the crap I needed to do for my motorcycle, including changing the oil (see below). Then I got on my beast-machine and went 60 up and down my street to pump oil through the gearbox. Hehe, I'm sure the neighbor's werent pleased, but they've gotten used to it since me my brother and my dad do it so often. Man, I know I keep repeating myself, but I love love love my bike. It's so obnoxiously excessively loud and powerful and I love how it makes me hang on for dear life.

Yesterday I experienced something I never had before. I lied, got caught, and was practically rewarded for it. This has mystified me. Does it perhaps symbolize that lying can, in fact, get a person ahead in life? Or is it just a fluke. Upon analyzing it I've come to the conclusion that the reason lying in this case helped me was that it showed that I cared about being punished. Maybe the person I lied to realized some sort of humanity she didnt see in me before or something because I lied to try to protect myself. Then again, I'm probably wrong. This is really disturbing for me, because I've always always respected honesty.


In all practical terms, a quality machine leaking it's oil is the equivalent of a person leaking his or her bladder. DONT LOOK!

Oil is cool because it looks like blood (I can use it to scare my mom), is warm and gooey and extremely toxic. Oh, and it smells really good. haha.

Since I have not posted an image for nearly 2 weeks, I've decided to go big time for you guys. Here are more than 15 images (real big: 1024x768) of all kinds of fun stuff.


Here's the little screen thingy at the entrance to Cyote hills. No it's not my parent's 60th anniversary. There are many betkers in this world, as you will soon see

Just a really cozy couch with some sexy candles.

The guestbook with pictures of Russel Betker and his wedding and Ginger Betker's wedding dress above them.

The beautifully set table I ate at.

In particular, where I ate.


Nearly all of these people are Betkers. And there are more, frighteningly enough.

This is my dinner: Filet Mignon in beef gravy (although it looked like salisbury steak it certainly was not). I really liked the small portions, they filled me perfectly.

The woman making a toast to Russel and Ginger (Rus and Gin) (for his anniversary) is someone I apparently knew all my life but also didnt know. See my big paragraph about this thing.

The cake (almost like a wedding cake) before it was cut.

And Rus and Gin cutting the cake.

Me and my brother. Bad picture, but good enough for here.

Me and my family. Again, bad picture. (my relatives like using the flash. I hate the flash, as you've probably noticed)


This is the couple having their 60th anniversary. I was honored that Rus remembered me.

This is a bunch of old people dancing. Sadly, there are not many young male Betkers. Me and my brother will probably be about one in 5 carrying on the family name.


Me dancing with my mom.

Ok, so before the party ended but not before I got bored, I decided to play with my camera's excessively long lens capture time.

This is just plain me with the flash on. (what a sin)

With this I exposed the lens while walking down the hall.

The same while spinning in circles.

Hehe, everybody at the party got a golden box. I think it was symbolic or something, but I didnt really get it.

Coming home I did some exposures of lights and stuff.

This is East Yorba Linda (<3<3) all blurred cool-like.

I just got home from a party up in Cyote Hills for my Great-Uncle's 60th Anniversary. Let me just mention that I never knew there were this many Betker's this close to me. You'd think we'd run into each other or something, but we dont. Maybe it's because most of them are old, but it's interesting nonetheless. Even more interesting is the extreme wealth my family possesses. Forgive me if I sound snotty. I've always considered my immediate nuclear family to be somewhat rich, or at least in the uppermiddle class, but these people I met tonight were filthy rich, and they are not that far from me on the family tree. Of course, technically my Grandpa and his Brother (Russel) technically planned and built every home in the city of Orange, and that's quite a feat. My grandpa was apparently the builder, whereas Rus was the businessman.

Anyhow, I havnt seen most of these people in several years (like 8+), and due to certain events in my recent life, alot of my older memories are completely gone. I had people come up to me and I had no clue who they were and I'm sure I insulted a couple of people in asking who the heck they were after they gushed all over me about how big and handsome I am. I did get to meet one couple personally, however, that I previously didnt remember. Lori and her husband live in West Diamond Bar and have a kid going to DBHS, but more surprisingly, both husband and wife attended Troy as the class of 1978. Needless to say, there were alot of laughs as we discussed old teachers like Garland and Sawaya and the Drama Teacher (all teachers at Troy). It was pretty funny because every time I mentioned that one of the teachers was still teaching, Lori would gasp "I'm surprised they're still alive!" and begin telling me experiences with those teachers. This was without a doubt a highlight of the night, as I got to know two really cool people.

Then dancing started, as you can see. Since the Betkers do not have many younguns, there was mostly waltzes and polkas playing, with some occasional classical rock. The old people danced mostly, and I went in from time to time. Unfortunately due to lack of young age, the youngest girl I danced with was 22 (a sophomore at UCSB, which was cool) and the oldest was probably around 80 something. hehehe. But yes, I learned tonight that rock is so much better dancing music than Rap for couples. With rap, all you can do is freak and freak and freak some more if you have a date (if you're single your options are alot wider), but with rock there are so many dances you can do with the right song. I really wish that we could get a good DJ for Winter Formal,but I doubt it's going to happen. Even cooler would be if they did jazz again, because that was really fun last year.

That's all I got. I wanted to make some speculations on a disturbing truth I discovered about lying today, but I'll save that for tommorow.

I read this article in the LA times today, and I thought it was probably one of the best newspaper articles I have read. (see links at bottom) It was basically about serendipity, or the random occurences that plague the closely regulated structure that we build up for our lives. Now, I could go into this really really far because it's philosophy, but for you guys' sake, I'll stay on the surface and you can check out some of my links if you're interested.

I remember two years ago listening to songs like "Drive" by Incubus and "Crawling" by LP and wondering what this "fear" that both songs were condemning was. I at first thought it was the fear that everyone feels, like the fear of death or small animals or whatever.

It was only recently that I saw how warped that view on these songs was. They are not about conventional fear, they are about the fear of the population to accept serendipity. They are about the fear people have of deviating from their everyday schedule and doing something random and different. I am often times asked about why I go different ways to school every once and awhile. What kind of question is that? I go different directions to add variety into my life, to see if something interesting will happen to me, or if I'll see something interesting. I'm not afraid of change, at least I try not to be.

Nevertheless, this is not the direction I wish this entry to take. I'd rather comment on the excellent journalism I found in the article I'm talking about. My school newspaper, as good as it is at raising social issues, is horrible at offering solutions. A majority of the articles in it disgust me nowadays because they are so blatantly hippocritical. The authors will write about, say, heavy backpacks, making an entire article about how bad they are for your back. The article will be chock full of facts and testimonies from doctors and maybe even have a fancy picture to illustrate the point, and then, at the end, there will be a measly paragraph suggesting a solution. With our current editors, this solution generally follows the template "to solve [insert problem here], students should [insert menial solution here]." and that's the end of the entire article.

I feel so left out when I finish these things. It's like reading one of those old goosebumps stories where the damn author just leaves you off halfway through the story. What's the point in writing an article on social change if you dont offer reasonable solutions to societies problems? If you dont, you're just being a hippocrite, acknowledging societies problems and then accepting them.

Of course that's how I view it. By no means am I the end of the road.

This is the article on Serendipity.
This is a website devoted to an entire philosophical following bent on solving alot of our everyday problems using the concept of serendipity.
While I was browsing the above site, I found this, and I literally laughed out loud. It's one of those eye-mind tricks, that proves you have blind spots in both eyes.

As we all know, people are really fun to mess with. It's not really the people themselves, but watching them let their instincts get the best of them. The easiest way to catch people off gaurd is to play some tricks on them on the road. One of the interesting phenomenons I encountered when I started riding motorcycles a long time ago is that a person can operate a vehicle and not pay any attention to what he or she is doing (aside from, of course, eye contact). This is the reason why people can talk on cell phones and listen to music and pretty much do anything that doesnt obstruct the vision of the road when they are driving.

So let's play with these people. The first thing you have to do is find a person who is driving on instincts. These people are not the ones going really fast or slow, they're traveling at the same rate as the rest of the traffic. They wont be talking on their cell phones and wont be singing along to songs or anything like that. They will look really bored and most likely wont have anybody in the passenger seat.

After you find one of these people, you can start having fun. When you're on the freeway, for example, you can slowly creep up beside one of these people and watch as they attempt to keep up with your pace (start at, say, 65, and SLOWLY speed up to around 90-95). Some people take a really long time to realize how fast they are going, and its really funny when they throw on their brakes in disbelief.

Or how about when you're lined up at a stop light. This is probably one of the more known tricks, but you can leave alot of space in front of you and then slowly inch forward, stopping and going several times and see how long it takes for the person behind you to realize what you are doing. Most of the time they wont.

Then there are some more annoying things you can do, like get somebody in your blind spot and then throw on your brakes. Even if there's no reason for you doing that, most people will throw on their brakes too.

Of course, understanding the "instinct-drive" that so many people resort to has more uses than just toying with people. For example, it teaches you what I call the "slingshot-manuever", which is essentially a way to get people to let you in their lane in front of them in moving traffic. Basically this works by driving just behind them and letting the car in front of you get distance. The person driving the car you want to pass most of the time will start slowing down because you are and will give you room up ahead to pass them in, provided you hit the gas.

This also gives you a reason to not use blinkers, because they just prompt people to speed up so you cant get in front of them. Instinctually, people never act unless they feel threatened, and when you use the blinker, you are in effect threatening to move in on their space and they will protect that space. Granted, blinkers are useful in some circumstances, like turning when there is no turn lane, but that's about it.

The rain has stopped, and today has been a very odd one for me. When I was going home I was reminded of hawaii: everything is so green, the sky is so blue, the air is so fresh. I've been wondering if everything really is different or if I'm just glad the rain is gone. The Santa Ana River, which flows just a couple hundred feet below my house was amazing this morning/afternoon. It has collected all the water of the Riverside county sewers and flows it out through Orange County to the ocean. It was so flooded that it swept away several trees in the riverbed (which is roughly a mile wide) and has become almost surely as wide as the mississippi.

Yes, I like the rain, but I like it to be sporodic and short. I love it when it lightly rains after weeks of sun, not when it pours for two weeks straight.

When I look into my past, I realize something really weird: it seems that the further I go back, the more mature I become. When I was about 5, I used to go around and catch bees. When I was 7, I played tag with the neighborhood kids. At 8, I wanted to become a Geologist and studied every rock I could get my hands on. But all these things were normal, they were what I was supposed to do. But as I get older and older in my memory I start to loose grip. I'm no longer as mature as I'm expected to be. I'm 15, and I'm first experiencing love and looking like a total fool when I'm supposed to be suave and a love-master. I'm 16 and I'm racing my car against every friend that will accept a challenge, getting into several near misses.

I hate to say it, but maybe we're expected to grow up to fast. There's too much to learn in today's society, and although you cannot define "maturity", I think it has something to do with your first hand knowledge of how the world works. If that's the case, I'm pretty far from mature. Pretty damn. I'm still dealing with relationships. Havent even gotten to the world of professional jobs or family yet.

My friend brought my motorcycle back yesterday so that I could replace the decompression cable.

I remember two years ago when I used to resent motorcycle maintanence. I hated everything to do with the machines except riding them. Today, I go out with what is surely glee: I looked forward to working on my bike and now that I'm done, I'm really proud of myself. What can cause a person to change so much? Maybe it's understanding. The fact that I understand exactly how the engine and all it's respective components work definitely affords me a profound appreciation into the complexity of my bike (because it is, after all, a race bike). Maybe it's the fact that this bike represents everything I want in a car: huge power, moderate comfort, and nothing in between. And cars have become a really big part of my life, for some reason.

I guess it all serves to prove that people do change. Whether you can change another person is questionable, but it is clear that people change. Where I was once passionate about computers, I am now the same about automobiles, which exist in a completely different world. This is just as I was once quiet and withdrawn. Excuse me if it feels like I'm driving a point, but some people would have me believe that a person cannot change, and I strongly disagree.

So a friend comes over to drive with me to go watch some movies and I havnt finished dinner. I dont really care about dinners, I like having big breakfasts and lunches but not really big dinners. That being the case, I was finishing some fish sticks and frozen corn. Since my appetite can hardly be considered voracious, I was not able to finish all the fish sticks and left one on a plate for when I got back from the movie. I made a point of joking to my friend about how my cat would come and eat the fish stick before I got home.

So I come home now, 3 hours later, and guess what? The fish stick has moved from the counter about 30 feet into another room, where my little "darling" decided to finish half of it. Hehe, it's something you really have to see, because these are gigantic fishsticks. I think they're actually called "fish patties", but anyhow, they probably weigh about a quarter of my cat's own weight, so I can only imagine how she dragged it across the floor in her mouth. Just thinking about it makes me smile.

Yesterday at school I saw one of those things that I fear most: a girl who used to be extremely fine, who since getting a boyfriend has made a quick u-turn in the hot-ness scales. What is it about girls that makes them think that once they get boyfriends they no longer have to flaunt themselves? Personally, if I had a girlfriend, I'd want her to flaunt all the more because (duh) it turns me on, and no matter how sick it sounds, it gives me bragging rights. Because face it girls, behind your backs even the greatest boyfriend is going to brag to his friends. It's like bragging about the size of your dick, just an ego machine, and something of a gigantic joke that is the life of a guy. So jeese, let's look hot all the time. Not just when you're available.

Speaking of girls, I have a rant: why are all the hot girls at troy short? It's so not fair. It would make sense that as girls get taller, they get lankier or whatever, but that's not what happens at Troy. There's some kind of complex that makes tall-troy-girls far from beautiful (I'm speaking in generalities. There are some exceptions, just very few). I guess I dont mind too much hooking up with shorter women, I've gotten used to it, but you know.. it sucks being a white boy. =D

Sometimes, sitting here in this quiet house with no music or people to keep me company, I get overwhelmed with oneliness. True, over the past year my friends have gotten much closer to me, and true, I feel like I have a place in this orld, but loneliness comes in many forms. The lack of love seems to be the hole that I like to fall into, as my driving
force often has to do with starting up and maintaining a relationship with one girl or another. I really wish right now that I could back away from it, just stop wanting a relationship, and I thought I had succeeded until today, right now, when I have this gutted feeling in my heart. It'll go away, but it will be back again before the year ends.

Yes, I was supposed to go out to Glamus this weekend. I was really looking forward to it. But at 7:30 this morning I got a call from my friend which informed me that the trip had been canceled due to flash flood warning in the area. On the basis of how hard Orange County was hit with rain, I dont doubt those warnings, but it disturbs me that for the first time in my life, it looks like the rain is plotting against me.

In retrospect, I've always considered rain a good thing in observing the past. That is, I never seem to actually realize what a blessing rain is until it's passed and I can look back and say "Wow, I remember that day, that was great." Maybe this storm has some kind of deeper meaning like that for me.

At times motorcycle maintanence, like the maintanence of all technology, can become really frustrating. I get home today after buying oil and a new tire for my bike and spend an hour installing the tire and changing the oil and when I finish I pull the compression release to start the bike and guess what? The cable snaps.

So now I face a big problem: I'm going out to the desert tommorow and I dont have a compression release cable, which means I have to kill my fingers by pushing a huge metal spring to release the cylinder compression and be able to start my bike. My friend comes by to pick up my bike in ten minutes and it technically doesnt work.

Needless to say, I sent the bike off with him, and then spent a subsequent half hour calling up four motorcycle parts stores in my area and then driving out to the one that finally had the cable in 4:00 traffic. And I havnt even begun installing the damn thing, which is not going to be easy or fun, especially when I have to do it out in the desert.

Anyhow, I'm out of here. I'll talk to you all again on Monday.


Examination of Consciousness
Going with the trend I have thus-far established, I could quite simply define consciousness: it is the state of the human mind, which is really a trillion connections between neurons and countless ion gradients which determine where in our mind "consciousness" is and what we do with it.

But you and I know that below that level of scientific madness, there is a much more practical definition of our consciousness. It is really a sort of duality: a mixture between the instincts we are born with and the experienced gained throughout our lifetime through our senses. Since a person is defined by his consciousness, you can logically extend this idea to define a person by two things: his pre-installed instincts (which are coded by genes) and his experiences.

One of the more ominous topics of Consciousness arises upon looking into the fact that through every sensation that flows through our body, our consciousness and therefore our selves are changed the slightest bit. As sensations add up with days, weeks, months and years, so do the changes in our consciousness, until we see so great a change as to arise an entity called a "personality". But where exactly do we draw the line of consciousness-affecting sensations? At what point do we say that our consciousness is being radically changed to the point that we would not be the same person if a series of sensations did not occur to us?

How am I to say that the small amount of feelings that I have when meditating is any less important than the enormous amount of feelings I recieve when dancing? Is it possible that my personality is changed just as much when I meditate as when I dance? As illogical as it sounds, I have to say yes. Our consciousness isnt so much connected to reality as it is connected to time. As time passes, whether we like it or not our personality changes as well. Even when I'm meditating, the fact that my mind has been withdrawn from Conscious thought just makes my personality more withdrawn from wordly sensations. This is almost certainly what Buddha was searching for by meditating: to separate his mind so far from worldly sensations that worldly possessions no longer mattered to him.

But how about time frames? Is it logical to say that I am not the same person that I was a millisecond ago? It depends on how you define "same person". If you define it as "identical", then no. Even in the course of a millisecond I thought certain thoughts and felt cold and who knows? maybe my mind is adapting me for the weather. But if you define "same" as something more broad, like personality traights like what an individual says when greeted, then I am definitely the same person as I was a millisecond ago. LIke so many other things, this is relative.

So what sensation causes us a complete change in nature? It is a concept that is certainly possible, if not very hard to come by. I have seen many people change their entire outlook and life, and have convinced myself that I have made the very same change some time ago. But what was the stimulus that caused this change? I dont even think it was a sensation of any kind. I think it was actually my own contemplation.

And that can only mean one thing. Since consciousness is essentially defined by the senses, than we must add a sixth sense to the list: the mind.

I'll connect these two big blocks that I've written together sometime.

Without a doubt, the greatest album of all time is Matchbox 20's Mad Season:
Quality: 10
Originality: 10
Lyrics: 10
Replay Value: 11
Overall: 10

That album never ceases to amaze me. It was released in 2000 and now, five years later, it still holds a profundity in my mind. I come back to it about four times a year and listen to it straight through about ten times before putting it back. I bow down to the all time glory that Matchbox has achieved in their other albums (particularly their first), but nothing, nothing compares to the absolute greatness that is Mad Season.

Shoot. I've never found a person who dislikes it (provided they have heard it). Even my parents like it. Even my rap-monger friends like it. Shoot.

So I walk into my English class today all pacified and happy, since it's the first day of school after break and it's raining and everything seems a little more clear and crisp, and all of a sudden reality hits it's hard fist upon my head in the form of an entry on the daily schedule board for the class that tells me that a group presentation that we was supposed to be due on tuesday is, in fact, due today. Luckily, I had brought the written part that I was supposed to make, but the rest of the group wasnt so lucky. We were missing some of the visuals that we were supposed to have and nobody was really prepared. I wrote everything, and I got to cringe as my partners tore apart all that I had written because they had no preparation and no idea what they were saying.

I felt quite fulfilled, however, because in my own boring lecture on a chapter of Dante's Inferno I managed to bore even the teacher. It's not too hard to get dull stares from my classmates, but to induce more than two yawns in an instructor that is supposed to be grading me makes me feel enormously happy. This is why I never ever ever talk philosophically, because I cant do it without being incredibly dry.

Well, it's close to new years. Yes I have a resolution, but I also thought of something else last night: I should've written down a list of things I want to do before my senior year comes to an end. Not being too much of a hippocrite, I actually completed the list:
- Become more than just casual aquaintances with 10 new people --COMPLETE--
- Leave an impression in my best friendships with which to be remembered by.
- Take part in something extra-curricular that doesnt involve testing (in process)
- Complete College Applications --COMPLETE--
- Get accepted into a UC school (not Merced)
- Catch up with those who have been really important these four years
- Get a date for Homecoming --COMPLETE--
- Get a date for Winter Formal
- Get asked to Sadies
- (guess) Get a date for Prom
- Go to at least three Concerts (one more to go)
- Get enough money together to pay for my first year of insurance for a new car
- Become more suave around girls, particularly ones I like
- Get above a 1400 on the SATs --COMPLETE--
- Pull through high school with a GPA>3.3 senior year
- Set up a semi-rigid schedule to follow over the summer, involving most of my friends

You know, I've always had this uncanny pride with how I have always hidden the side of my life that involves the desert and motorcycles. Every time I tell a person that I ride bikes (who doesnt already know, of course) is always surprised. The revelation I bestow comes with less surprise as of late, which I attribute to the fact that I'm a whiteboy in a see of asians and we whites must be associated with motorcycles. But back in Middle School, I had a couple of kids who never believed I rode at all. I dont really know why it pleases me so, but it really does. Perhaps it's one of those things that adds mystery to my life, where most people dont even get to experience the desert, not only do I experience it by sleeping and eating and living in it for weeks on end, I also fly through the most remote regions at 50 MPH.

Ahh. A shower.

Well, actually, I dont really mind so much. As nasty as it sounds, 5 days without a shower isnt too bad. You think I smell? Yeah, I do; like the campfire I was standing by all of last night. The truth about BO is that it's one of those temporary things, like an itch, that you just have to live down. It comes and goes and is never bad enough to necessitate anything. To not have a shower for so long is in some vague way asthetically appealing to me. It makes me feel a little more connected with, well, everything out in the desert.

But I'll leave that at that. The desert this week was interesting: frigid cold, but a cold that is bearable. This is a high contrast to what the desert normally is: below 30 degree weather with 60 MPH winds that just dig that cold right into your bones. This weekend it was just cold. The winds didnt really get us. The rain did, but not the winds; and without the wind, rain is pussy-work. Of course, sitting cold has strange effects on me, particularly on my sleep.

For some reason the past 4 days I have went to sleep around 10, woken up around 3am, stayed awake for 3 hours trying to get back to sleep, and then slept in until noon. And with the weird sleeping schedules came equally weird dreams. It was always about girls this weekend, and not once was one of those dreams about girls good. It seems like every girl I've ever liked, every girl I've ever been with visited me this weekend. And in every one of those dreams every one of those girls turned their backs on me again. I got a chance to relive the end of all my personal relationships, and guess what? It was as pathetic, if not more pathetic than it was before. I guess this might have to do with the way my thoughts have been drifting as of late: away from everything love, but I'll attribute it to the cold, because if anything that sounds more romantic.

This weekend my hatred for the news really manefested itself. I was driven to the edge of paranoia Sunday, Monday and Tuesday (the days after the Tsunami but before I left for the desert) because everytime I walked downstairs the TV was blaring something about how many people had died and how it's so tragic and there was crying and expressive pain and all that fun stuff and the only thing I really could do was worry about Krista. But all was forgotten in the desert. Away from the news, I didnt give it much thought at all. Sure, news is informative and all, but I can really see how it causes the "fear" or whatever: it's living paranoia.

About Krista. I'm being paranoid. Let's get that straight. She's probably somewhere inland, in fact I'm almost certain. But I dont have alot of experience with dealing with friends in harms way, and I'm really really bad with death. It doesnt cause sadness in me like most people, no, it causes severe depression. I dont like being reminded that life is temporary and everytime someone important in my life dies, I turn into a stone. Let's just leave it at that.

Man, I'm writing really bad. I've been reading alot lately, and interestingly enough one of the books I'm deciphering mentioned an adage "Reading is the enemy of writing", referring to the fact that a writer who reads at the same time as writing inherently tries to instill what he reads in his writing, both stylistically and conceptually, which is an obvious path to disaster. Hopefully I'll get back on the horse in the coming days.

Happy New Year's to you all. Make resolutions. They're good. Dont share them, that's the first step in breaking them.