Elitist Idiots

Archive for April, 2009

Decaffeination, Day 3

by xarexerax on Apr.29, 2009, under Elitist Idiots

As I said, I’m making this post to chronicle the effects of cutting off my normally high caffeine intake. So far, the results of the experiment are … unpleasant at best. The headaches come and go, but the key annoyance today has been an excrutiatingly painful bout of muscle tension in my legs. It feels like I went on a five-mile uphill run or something; it’s off-and-on throughout the day, but stretching and other such things seem not to help at all. Going for my daily walk made it worse. Such are the pains of ignoring one’s addictions, I suppose.

I’ll have a much lengthier and more thought-provoking post Friday. For now, a quick update on where the experiment has landed me. Enjoy my misery for the time being.
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Weddings

by Cerias on Apr.29, 2009, under Elitist Idiots

Really, I should have just gone to Vegas.

You ever try arranging a wedding without going through all the hoops tradition sets before you with a bride’s family who would much rather have all of the tradition present? That’s a lot of fun. Like drilling teeth is fun.

So, I’m getting married. My fiance and I wanted to keep it small, casual, informal. Realistically, we would rather just stand before the county clerk and have it done with. But then there’s family to consider, and they’d be upset on either side if they weren’t invited. Can’t have that.

“Well, we’ll just keep it small and casual.” We say to ourselves. This lasts about as long as it takes for me to go over the list of family members I have in the immediate area. Number of people we considered to be “enough” = 20. Number of family on my side alone within 20 miles = 24. Then we get to go about inviting her family as well. Now we’re looking at double our desired number.

But that’s fine. Just more people. Still doesn’t have to be too formal, right? So I call up all my family. “Hey, guess what?” and all that jazz. They’re happy, surprised when I tell them it’s in one month, and ask if I would be so kind as to send them some type of card with the time and place on it so as to combat bad memories. “Sure. That’s a fantastic idea.” I say to them.

Somewhere in all of this, it gets mentioned to the bride-to-be’s mother about the cards. She starts talking about invitations and such. “We called them. We invited them personally. Why would we want to do invitiations? I’m just going to design some reminder post cards and mail those out.” This was when she remembered that I do these things for a living, and happily agreed to purchase the card stock I would need. I play with a few designs and come up with one I like. Combines classical elements with a slight punk/pop culture edge that reflects the meshing of personalities in the wedding. It’s a fantastic design.

I’m told they look like ransom notes.

Then I get the paper. They gave me blank greeting cards, not card stock. So they have to be redesigned. The part that gets me, though, is that somewhere in all of this, they became formal invitations, with me researching the proper ettiquette involved in wedding invitations.

Seriously, the entire wedding ceremony is going to be less formal than the process required to properly send out invitations. It’s a little bit ridiculous.

In the end, I didn’t get to use my design. Wouldn’t sit well with her family or some such thing. But I couldn’t let it die. This entire story is a cheap justification to send you here.

Should you ever need one of your own. And if you’re really lucky, I’ll keep updating with random designs in the future. At least it will break up the rants about how people need to sit down, shut up, and stop worrying about the economy.

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(Experi)Mental Divergence

by xarexerax on Apr.27, 2009, under Elitist Idiots

For those of you who don’t know me, I’m an avid coffee drinker. Tea, too. I used to drink lots of sodas, energy drinks, and other sugar-caffeine concoctions, but at this point, I’m mostly down to the two main vices: straight black coffee (4-6 cups per day) and iced tea with a hint of lemon, no sugar (2-4 20oz. glasses per day). On a whim, though, today I’ve decided to launch an experiment. A test of my willpower, and a measurement of my ability to function without the benefits (and drawbacks) of caffeine in my system at all times, with more along the way as the day goes on.

Today is day one. I promised some folks that I’d try to post the results of my first day; so, without further ado …
I notice first and foremost that I make more typoes that I have to correct as I go along. My fingers are slower to react, my brain just a little bit more behind itself, making it more difficult to get everything down the way I’d like it. Not too impairing, really, but a little annoying. I also feel pretty tired, but I suppose that’s how you’re supposed to feel after 10 hours at the office. On the whole, my body feels pretty good; to replace my normal coffee-and-tea regimen, I’ve been drinking water all day, and I expect this is going to help clean me out a bit, get my body more “in tune” with the way that it’s supposed to be according to nature and/or hippies, whichever is more correct. While my mind is a bit dulled, it’s also pretty focused; I’m finding it easier to focus on a single task, though more difficult to process that task efficiently. Overall effect on my efficiency in regards to work is minimal to nonpresent. More on that as the week drags on.
So, why would I put this up here, post about how I’m cutting some certain beverages from my life for a short period? Because I use this digital soapbox as a means to chronicle my endeavors, as discussed before, and to push myself to do it. I don’t care if anyone’s reading this, the fact is that the chance that there are people who might be means that I’ve got some obligation, self-invented though it may be, to stick to my game plan, if only so that I can accurately and truthfully report the results to whoever might be interested. Most people who know me haven’t seen me after I’ve gone a week — or, in many cases, even a day — without caffeine. It’s an exploration of myself in a way that is generally unseen and unknowable even to me.
The other reason is that because this record of my thoughts and journies is, in fact, another similar test. I’ve historically been a pretty closed-down person, keeping most things to myself and sharing only when I felt it was truly necessary. Now, though, it seems that more and more people expect, or desire, me to share more, to put thoughts into words, to put words into blogs, to put blogs into cyberspace, and so on. It’s not just me, either; it’s a whole global cultural revolution. Watching the page-view analysis of these few pages over the course of the last several months has been an interesting look into just how that works. The way that I “advertise” my blog is purely social; I don’t pay for endorsements or advertisements, I just spread the word to my family, my friends, my coworkers, and urge them to do the same. The more I push that, the more I see an increased number of viewers; I know I’ve gone well above the relatively small number that I first informed about my encroaching endeavor to write.
So, experiments in mind, we travel into a new week. I will chronicle the progress of my decaffeination as they arise, probably two more posts this week to analyze and finally form some conclusions before diving back into the energetic (and delicious) pool of caffeinated beverages.
I’m thirsty already.
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Expiration and Inspiration

by xarexerax on Apr.23, 2009, under Elitist Idiots

Sometimes, the most cathartic events can be the most unassuming everyday occurences.

I use this blog as a means to forge some silent legacy of myself, I think, and yet deny such accusations when pressed, because it seems to me an act of vanity; that said, I think it’s time I admit to myself than even vanity is not, within its own confines, an evil thing — my most recent recurrent revelation was the ageless bit of wisdom, “All things in moderation”. This does not apply only to vices based in tangible things, nor in indulgences of those things which are supposed to be good, but it is meant to be truly all-encompassing. A bit of vanity, after all, merely manifests as an unshakable self-confidence without the requisite venomous pride so often attributed to those who truly see an inflated version of themselves infused with a greatness not truly their own.
And so, this purification of the concept of vanity as a deserved self-assurance brings me to a new pathway, one by which I can approach my corner of internet pseudofame with a renewed — or perhaps wholly new — sense of purpose and a dedication to the words that I choose and the people to whom I expose them. Whether I ever intend it or not, people will read the things that I write, and they will take from them lessons that are partially of my contrivance and largely of their own interpretation and manifest these subliminal lessons into their lives; I may as well admit that to myself, and to those who allow my attempts at self-expression to imprint a view upon their minds, that I may truly understand myself in the (likely misguided) hope that in so doing, I can agree to do my part in the mutual production that is our world, whatever kind of bit part it may be. Perhaps I’ll cameo in the afterlife as well.
What gets me, then, is that I feel as if I have more concrete responsibility to write things that may be meaningful; that I must explore the boundaries of my own psyche to encourage thought and action in my readers — wherein lies the pitfall of playing to one’s audience, selecting a specific group, subgroup, or individual and attempting to tailor my voice to suit their needs, which I certainly wish to avoid. That said, the most important thing that I can offer to any man (or, for you equality-preaching types, woman) is the capacity to drive thought and through that thought drive action and through that action drive growth; personal development, revelation, the hunger to be something greater — or to realize the greatness of what one has already become, to explore the limits of the human experience and drink from the well of shared-mind life.
Everyone has problems, has issues, has barriers which prevent their further evolution along their own mental landscape. This is the force which drives our struggles, and struggle is the only means by which we can seek to better ourselves. So, to best serve the greatest number of persons with my words (and/or supposed wisdom), the only thing I can hope to do is to analyse my own struggles and, from the lessons and growth I achieve, spread seeds of insight that can, on their own and in due time, find places to root and thereby drive a greater global consciousness.
Too often of late it seems to me that the primary reaction to tragedy, to struggle, is escapism; to avoid those issues which make us uncomfortable. This is the most toxic attitude present in humans today — that we feel that if we shirk our problems for a long enough expanse, they will dissolve or self-correct, and we will have been able to achieve some sense of satisfactory growth through the simple act of having seen the troubles, rather than having faced them. We feel that by turning to things which alleviate our pains, we solve the things that harm us; too often, though, we turn to things even more harming to our minds and bodies to achieve these things, and we grab onto habits which, in their own time, will become the demons we must face if we expect to experience any sense of growth or personal revelation, or they become that which robs us of our life — metaphorically at best, but often literally. The struggle, then, comes full circle; that all things must be in moderation. If you push too hard against all troubles, you will be broken; nobody is capable of taking on the world in a single battle. At the same time, to avoid the conflict altogether prevents the ability of one to ever achieve a greater self. And so we go on, escaping some battles, fighting others, and generally swinging blind on the battlefield of our existence.
What is most important to remember in this is that a battle need not be won in order for it to have been well-fought. Even the greatest among humans has had moments of defeat; it is what we do with that defeat which defines our legacy.
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Conformist Nonconformity

by xarexerax on Apr.15, 2009, under Elitist Idiots

“Well, why do you go out of your way to look like a bum?

Wouldn’t it be more of an act of rebellion if you didn’t spend so much time buying blue hair dye and going out to get punky clothes? It seems so petty. You wanna be an individual, right? You look like you’re wearing a uniform. You look like a punk.”
 – “Brandy”, SLC Punk!

The above quote, I think, defines the very reason I’ve failed to ever truly identify with any subsect of society; there are so many subcultures, each concerned only with their capacity to differentiate between themselves and “those people” (whoever “they” may be) that we forget that to seek individualism requires an effort of the mind, of a free-thinking self embodied not within a certain fashion, a certain musical taste, a certain communal passtime. We become so very caught up with making sure that we’re not something we wouldn’t want to be that we forget what it is we do want to be; we cast aside the true flavor of ourselves, replacing it with shock-value driven adherence to something that marks us as being something else — forgoing any sense of satisfaction that should be gained from that same self-expression. We engage ourselves in efforts to identify with a group of people that we feel are, on some level, like us, either physically, emotionally, mentally, or through whatever shared trait we can cling onto in the hopes that we’re not alone in the world, in the universe, that we have this connection with people as forged through the chains that bind each of us to our own personal indulgences.

The most famous expression of this desperate irony comes in the phrase, “I want to be different, just like everyone else” — something I first encountered in the 1990s when the cynical mood of the grunge era took hold. This became a motif amongst those disenfranchised youths who sought to leave their mark not on the world, but on themselves; they recognized the futility of the other subcultures around them adopting their own uniform, and they developed a uniform of their own based on noncompliance with the existing templates; in so doing, though, they found themselves trapped by the same lack of identity-crisis as all the rest, and this seemingly-inescapable truth brought with it the ennui that has afflicted the formative years of each subsequent class of fresh young faces waiting to find their place in the not-so-hallowed halls of our education system, spurring the resurgence in more recent days of the shock-heavy, overdone uniforms of the new social strata — the neo-punk, the emo, the nerdcore, etc — now reliant upon not a sense of individualism, but an intense dedication to the masses, to the culture with which one finds oneself identifying.

Each generation of humans (okay, I’ll admit it, I’m mostly talking Americans here) seems to identify itself most strongly by adopting something which defines itself as separate from the generation before it; that is, rather than adopting a unique culture to themselves, they attempt to focus on forming a counter-culture, a contrast to the existing structure meant to stand stark against that structure so as to grasp at a lack of structure entirely; this is evidenced in the Mods of the late 1950s-1960s, the Hippies of the 60s and 70s, the punks of the 80s, and so on; each seeking to find a self-expression through being an entity wholly separate from that which came before it. Even so, these subcultures often find themselves fight for — or against — the same ideals as their predecessors, in some grand attempt to overthrow the same system that seemed to oppress the younger years of their forefathers who sought to rebel against their parents, and so on.

Thus, we become an entire culture devoted to nothing more than embracing the taboos of our forebears, eventually assimilating those taboos into the same corporate structure so that we can have the capacity to build a legacy of this “new ideal”, bringing about an oppressive structure which will, of course, be the bane of our own progeny as they grow into a world where the system keeps them from expressing themselves as individuals by clinging to outdated mores and archaic customs built on the refusal to succumb to the wisdom of our fathers.

But what else is there? Our only method of distinguishing ourselves is to reject the identities which came before us; we find ourselves becoming that same thing we fought to reject, all the while failing to recognize that at the very core, this system can be nothing but self-replicating. The entire culture of counterculture relies on the principle of breaking new ground when comapred against existent models. We attempt to hash out new ideas by breaking apart ideas that were present before any of us, before any of our progenitors, before any of their parents even knew what ideas could come to be in any given direction, but we can only find frame of reference in the systems that we seek to overthrow; is this cycle the only way we have of experiencing any form of individuality and uniqueness in the world? If the advent of any new era is only capable of rising from the ashes of the prior era, then how could we ever hope to become something other than the same socioeconomic phoenix rebirthed through our own desire to self-terminate, rebuild, and then preserve? We, today, are the suicide of the hippies; not the death of them, but the voluntary compliance of their ideals to the realities of our culturo-economic significance, adherence to which constitutes our only known means of survival.

How long before we can truly find a new way to exist, to survive, to thrive?

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