It Lives!

I created this little Lego creation on a whim after being tired of having my iPod just lay around there all in the way and generally ignored while listening to it, so I created a little stand-up dock.

Behold!

You just put in the iPod and ignore the scribbled-on hands in an awkward position…

Then you lock it into place with a simple 3-piece… piece…

And Voila! No wait…

Much better!

Do drop a comment if you like it!

Perdition

I wrote this story for a homework assignment, originally in spanish. Some things may have been lost in translation, but the meaning is still there.
Tell me what you think. Drop a comment.

Perdition

It all started with the Australian. We called him The Australian because he had an odd accent. He was Australian, of course, but with a bit of Scottish in him. He had an air of young naivety, but in reality he was a mature and almost dangerous person. He was a kind lad, rarely angry, but known to go into fits of desperation. I mention him because he introduced me to Her.

She was a photographer, and everything that entailed. Like all professional and semi-professional photographers, she was quite bossy, but secure in herself. I myself am a photographer. A photographer with experience in the old ways and the new ways. We were both under the guidance of Jim.

Jim was a professional photographer who had been on every continent in the Earth. He took photos of the people and places wherever he went, and in his pictures he captured the essence of entire countries. When he wasn’t on a plane or on the streets in foreign places, he was a freelance photographer and a teacher. When we were working, he told us stories of his journeys and experiences, his opinions on countries, and a view of the world in general.

They both come into the story because they are the ones who taught me humility and discipline in photography. They also changed my life. I noticed things that previously went ignored. I opened my eyes to the world around me. I cast off those rose-coloured glasses. I had a purpose in life, and they awakened me to it. I knew what I had to do.

Life is a circle. Everything eventually comes back to the source. Things come and go like the flow of the tides. I remember the story of the puddle on the sidewalk, and how it thought that the world was made for it and it alone, always waiting for an eventuality that never came and ultimately ended in disappointment. It was all part of life. Evaporation was not the end of its short existence, merely the transition into a new one. It’s all part of the inevitable circle of life.

But all in all, these experiences prepared me for the essential point in my life. The Australian, The Photographer, Jim, my friends, my teachers, my colleagues. I hear their voices in my head.

The Australian asks “If you saw a grain of corruption, a malicious action, a fatal lie, would you go out of your place to correct it?”

The Photographer asks “If you could influence the world with your work, even if it meant gaining enemies, would you do it?”

Jim asks “If you could change the world for the better, even if it meant getting out of place and risking your life, would you do it, even knowing that your life would drastically change?

It all prepared me for this moment. This singular important moment that was the culmination and pinnacle of my life. I threw discretion away, and threw myself into the middle of the revolution. I launched myself through the streets, searching for that perfect angle and the correct moment. In it, I found the meaning of life, of love, of friendship, of charity, of humanity, and the meaning of life itself.

And I took the photo that changed the world.

Day One

I went into work at 9 AM. I wait around for 30 minutes. Eventually it’s decided that me and some other guy go to the other restaurant branch. The smaller one. We wait around for another hour.

We get onto a truck driven by an employee. He basically tells us his life story.
It turns out that he quit school after the first year of Junior High. Somehow, he ended up as a waiter in this restaurant, with a 19-year-old kid who basically followed in his footsteps (don’t get the wrong idea. The guy didn’t want his son to go down that path.) and a 9-year-old who he’s hoping does well at school.
His brother, 1 year younger than him, is the head of a school district, and earns about 100 times his salary. All because he went through high school. What a difference 5 years of school can make. He tells us this, and urges us to go to school. We are thankful for his advice and story. We get to the restaurant branch, and it is smaller than I anticipated. A good way to start the day, yes?

We got off to a good start. Good, rewarding manual work. The kind I like, that’s fair and honest. We washed windows, tables, chairs, walls, everything. Then we sorted out the staff room (not really a room), cleaned it, and about 4 hours later at 1, we got lunch. I bought a sandwich at a corner store, and we get free drinks twice a day. Afterwards, we washed more things, cleaned more things, and I got to squeeze the juice out of about 2 kilos of lemons.

Enter Ray Romano. He’s the manager. I shall call him Ray because he looks and talks exactly like Ray Romano, only without the funnyness. He’s your average asshole boss. He has slaved 20 years, and is finally a manager. After all this he still hungers for power. He’s worked so long and he’ll be damned if he doesn’t climb the ladder, even if crushing kids for the sake of glory is necessary. He acts all sincere, but is generally a grade-A asshole.

So we bust our asses cleaning the same things over again, only with him barking orders at our backs.

Right now I have 6 cuts on my left hand, and 3 bruises. I am not looking forward to another week of this.

Jubilations

I haven’t written a post in over a month, because I have been in a shitstorm of busy.

Okay, okay, I’ve been playing too much Halo 3 and Orange Box. Sue me.
But yes, I am currently very busy at school. I have 3 exams tomorrow. The French exam I’m worried about, but the I.T exam I’m ready for. I just need to remember to bring the correct book tomorrow. >_>

And my internets have been dying lately. They’ve been slower, irregular, and the router has been crapping out for no reason. I went 3 days without the interweb over the weekend. Now I’m fine.

And my blog has successfully made it through 6+ months of activity. That’s a lot. WordPress automatically raised the media storage space from 50MB to 3GB.

In celebration, pelicans.

Happy New Year!

Just wishing everyone a happy 2008. I know I didn’t really have a good 2007. I know that 2008 will be great, just as 2006 was. My luck always seems to turn into bad luck during odd years.

I had two surgeries, two recoveries, a missed boating trip with my friends, a move across countries, emotional and psychological trauma from leaving them behind, a new school, a new country, a new language. Constant bad news.

Then I realized something, at this very moment.
School kept me going through all that. For the first half, I relied on my friends. On the second half, I did schoolwork to keep my mind off of the bad news. A week before my surgery, I wasn’t really thinking about it. I was thinking about the school exams.

So, thank you, school, for keeping me sane this year.

Let’s hope 2008 is better.

Commentaries on Laziness

Okay, I managed to write down an idea for a new blog entry in my mental sketchpad.
Sadly, I forgot my damned password. AGAIN.
Then I had to go around searching for which email adress I used to make this blog (As it won’t let me use my main one since I had a past blog on it…)
Okay, enough of that.

Surgery update: Recovery has been relatively amazing. The doctor is pretty much amazed that I’m healing fast. That’s nice to hear, and he’s pretty much given me orders to be lazy. How relaxing.

Okay, a bit of housekeeping first. Will all my friends from Calgary please email me at RPharazon [AT] gmail.com? Replace the [AT] with a @, and there’s no spaces between RPharazon, @, and gmail.com. Just trying to circumvent more web-crawling spamspiders. I get roughly 70 spam emails a day and I don’t want that number to increase. Also, I want to know if you guys are still reading this. Tell everyone I knew that you know, and point them to this site, please.
Or just drop a comment, but make it well-written with good grammar and spelling or else the spam filter eats it up.

Anyways. Commentaries.
I realized that for all the semester during I.T class (computers), we just wanked around playing games all the time. For the first few weeks, we played small internet games. I introduced them to N (THANK YOU, NATHAN), and they gobbled it up for two weeks.

Afterwards, my friends became more tech-savvy and found ways to break the school network. We got emulators and distributed them to everyone. We played games such as Megaman Soccer and Super Mario Bros 3 together using the online feature that ZSNES has.

Soon, we got bored of that and one of my friends brought a full game, Age of Empires, to the school network via a USB drive. That made its rounds across everyone’s accounts, and LAN parties in the library using the public computers were common after school.

Then everyone quieted down, the work got tougher, and the hours got longer…
So we played Liar’s Dice when we could, during all the classes, whenever possible. It was amazing to see one of my friends lose all the money he had while playing it.

All the time, we were being lazy and bored, circumventing the system to make the school hours shorter.

And I got a solid A (averaged) at the end of the semester…
Not bad for someone who [even today] can’t really speak the language.
Ah, yes. What days are these.

Anyways, friends, drop me a line at my email or comment on this post. Just make them well-written!

Puzzles?

I haven’t been interested in alcohol or recreational drugs. I probably never will be. Not only do I want a working liver and brain when I’m 25, but I’m simply not ‘wired’ to the Happy and Light-Headed scene. I prefer being Stoic and Alert.

That’s why I like Portal beyond every means imaginable. I think about how many ways I can get through something. I think how many ways I can do something. That’s why I’ve been playing Oblivion so much. There is so much open-endedness in there that it’s kept me addicted for 160+ hours.

Life is also a puzzle to me. I wonder how little work I can get away with while still having a good mark. It’s why I’m not actually learning anything at school, but worrying about the marks. I need to have an 83% average in order to stay in the school, and I spend most of my time wondering how all the marks from all the homeworks and all the subjects fit together to give me a 83+ mark.

It’s also why I like math. Give me a single gigantic question that takes 30 minutes to complete. I prefer that as a test rather than 30 questions that take one minute to complete. There’s some semblance of difficulty and such.

Anyways, enough ranting from me. WordPress seems to hate my style of writing lately. That, and I’m having trouble with pictures lately…

ENDUT! HOCH HECH!

Finished the homework. I had to do a thought map for Ethics (using Cmap Tools, an amazingly handy program), which was easy, and I spent more time making it look pretty and well-organized than the actual content, which is fine because it’s gotten me straight 10s before.

Then I did an essay or something on Violence for this dumb Language Arts class. I literally have no recollection of writing it. It reads like a bad blog post. It has all the aesthetic of a cardboard box drenched in semen. It is not pretty.

Finally I did a two-page essay for Ethics. About 3/4ths of it is just existential BS that’s semi tangential to the actual content at hand. You can call it Cosineal, if you want. That’s good, because it gets me extra marks for elaborating. I’m looking forward to tomorrow.

Pro-Cra

I’m sitting here, with about 3 pages of homework to do and a lot to finish, making this blog post. I figured it was about time for another blog post (being 6 days since my last post >_>) and am writing this instead of doing my homework.

Anyways, next week is a finals week, and I have on average 2 tests a day for 5 days. Hard.

And procrastination is my favorite thing to do, so these go like mayonnaise and candy beans.

I don’t really have anything, so here’s a quote and a picture.

“The illusion that you’re getting closer to your goal might make you feel like you’re not actually procrastinating. Just to doublecheck, stop everything you’re doing: you should start to feel a bit like utter crap.
No matter what, though, don’t forget that thing you’re trying to put off. If you do you’ll miss out on that feeling of wanting to throw up. After a while, you may find yourself doing things that are even more involved than the thing that you’re trying to avoid.”

And!

I took it when our electricity went out and we only had candles.

Parasites!

I had a bad case of parasites in Social Studies class today.

Basically, we had to do something about different sociopolitic ideologies, like Capitalism, Communism, Feudalism, and Slavery. I somehow got randomly picked into a group of blithering idiots. The kind where they make you think “If this school needs a 80% average total mark, how in the FUCK are they still here!?”.

Anyways.

I got way ahead of them, as usual, and I ignored their fucking annoying questions (OMG IGLOOS IN CANADAZ LULZ) and they started trying to copy off of me.

I basically told them to fuck off, and they left me alone.

I just hate these parasites. They’re much like mosquitoes or leeches.

They suck your blood and give you malaria.
You die.
They call that teamwork.

Rant over.