Brane phartz

Okay. About April 2007: fastest month *ever*. Has anybody else noticed how time isn't what it used to be? I'm really starting to suspect that some evil supervillain has somehow succeeded in making the second ever slightly shorter, resulting in a net loss of maybe a few hours by the end of the day. Since I have absolutely no idea how that could even happen, I'm not going to try and do anything about it, I guess I'll just have to roll with the punches.

What?

It's funny how the two things that we feel most constrained by, time and money, are both just human inventions and exist only via social consensus. Time might be real in string theory, but just as a sort of dimensional space. Other than that its pretty much just a way of explaining sequences, right? Money, of course, used to be worth the gold that was backing it up, but now that's not even really true anymore as most of the world's money is imaginary. It's nothing more than perceived value. Let's consider the humor of this for a bit. Every time you make a purchase, you are basically ripping somebody off by giving them something mostly imaginary in exchange for some real quantity. The flipside is that every time you get your paycheck, you are receiving an imaginary quantity in exchange for the very real effort you gave to the man who keeps us down.

And yet still as I sit and write this, I'm starting to develop my own plans for maximizing things within my own time and money boundaries today.


Maybe I should live as a free man and only worry about *real* problems. Like the boogeyman for instance.

Or, after reading everything that I've come up with in this post, maybe a better option would be just taking 6 benadryl tablets and sleeping until finals blow over. The tests and interviews I had last week left me nicely insane for this weekend. I have this theory that the human brain will compensate for long periods of maintaining focus on study and attempt to "balance out" by producing complete nonsense thoughts in the wake of said times. I need a name for this effect and I'm in no state to come up with anything decent at this point.

Freakin' stat theory. Get out of my head.

Goods and services

Postulate #6
I look like someone you know.

People tell me this an awful lot. They obviously don't realize how much I want to crank the sarcasm up to dangerous levels and say something like "Nooooo! Seriously? You know a guy that's 5'10" with an average build and brown hair? That's sooooo crazy!"

Postulate #7
People who abide by the five-second rule are actually healthier people than those who don't.

The five-second rule, though lacking any scientific basis for preventing fallen comidables from becoming contaminated, may be good for you because it provides great target practice for your immune system. In present day America, when we get sick, it's usually because we've inhaled an aerosol droplet of saliva from someone carrying a cold. It has nothing to do with whether or not we throw away food as soon as it hits the floor. Furthermore, people who won't eat any food of any kind at any degree of floor contact other than "none" are often uptight anyway, and being uptight is associated with higher levels of stress, which is associated with poorer health in general.

I'd like to see a cohort study done on this.

Postulate #8
The Twins would win more often if they brought Matt Garza up from AAA.

Duh. Obviously.

Beware of falling cheese

Hey, blessed Easter to all in netland. I'm once again stranded in Texas for a weekend, being forced to relax, and by extension also blog. Indubitably, it's just downright swell outside, maybe 13° on a good temperture scale or 55° on a bad one. Thus, I have the window in the computer room open until my one of my parents finds out and complains, and they probably will pretty soon, as they've totally become southern panzies when it comes to temperatures. Funny.

So, we just got back from one of the weirder Easter services I've ever gone to. I woke up this morning honestly feeling joy about the resurrection, because hey, "If it's only for this life we have hope in Christ, we are above all men to be pitied." But then upon getting to church I started feeling something different entirely. I was greeted by hordes of well-dressed people with ridiculous smiles that were all trying as hard as possible to make sure I was completely comfortable as a visitor. And they were really failing at it pretty miserably. Invariably, people would say something like "Happy Easter!", and then we would introduce ourselves, and then we would realize that we didn't really want to hold a conversation with each other and awkwardly part ways. I was really happy when the service started.

For about 10 seconds that is. Then, the production started; the colored spotlights hit the stage, and like 6 different singers, which were all probably relatives of the guy from Office Space (the one with over thirty pieces of flair), unleashed a massive barrage of corny music on us. There was a severely mulleted band behind them, with more members than pre-plane crash Skynyrd. How could I possibly take them seriously? So, instead of clapping my hands nervously with the people around me, I ended up just crossing my arms and silently convicting them of lip service and insincerity. Anybody else see the irony here?

I, for one, have loved the movement toward authenticity, and it seems like more than a few churches have been trying to achieve that lately. How cool! But, woe is me if I come to take my own modus operandi of worship as the only right way to do it. Is it more effective to have a more mellow production that encourages reflection than to put on a show like you'd see inside the Magic Kingdom? Probably... but as the adage goes, form follows function, with regards to worship just like pretty much everything else. It all comes back to the gospel, and the good news is this, Christ died so that I can go and judge no more and worship him with my offensively cheesy Texan brothers and sisters for eternity. Amen.