Pie Jesu Domine, dona eis requiem. -Wednesday, June 22, 2005 -1:25 pm-
Domine Jesu Christe, Rex gloriae, libera animas omnium fidelium defunctorum de poenis inferni, et de profundo lacu: libera eas de ore leonis, ne absorbeat eas tartarus, ne cadant in obscurum: sed signifer sanctus Michael repraesentet eas in lucem sanctam.
After I gave up on reading the blogs of people I know, I began to read the blogs of people who actually have a decent command of the english language. Waiter Rant has been an amusing read for the few months I've been following it. However, today he transcended amusing and wrote something moving. Read Nunc Dimittis
Getting It Right -Wednesday, November 17, 2004 -7:08 pm-
I've realized that leaving OSU and, eventually, coming to work at McAlister has been a bad thing for me. When I was at OSU, I was, at least occasionally, exposed to works of beauty. By this I mean art, or something like it, that was truly beautiful. Photographs, paintings, whatever. Mainly photography because that's what I was doing. Leaving OSU, I saw only circuits at DeVry. Coming to McAlister, I am awash in photographic mediocrity. The photos of just random people don't matter to me at all, but looking at the work of people who make their living through photography is slowly killing the part of me that loves beauty. I didn't realize this until a wedding photographer by the name of Roland Millington came in to have us run some prints. I used to work for Roland, back in '99 and '00. I did his behind the scenes work, cataloging negatives, filling print orders, etc. Then, I was impressed with how much he charged people. Now, I'm impressed with his photography. Roland is the only one I've seen in quite a while who uses light. I mean really uses light. Uses it so that, even in the print, the light is still moving, wrapping around the subject, shining out of the frame. This is what I'm trying for when I shoot, what stops me in my tracks when I'm walking around. Honestly, Roland doesn't hit much more often that I did when I was shooting all the time, but at least he's trying. At least I was trying. Just looking at his prints of a cake, a couple, a bouquet make me hurt inside, makes me want to get the hell out of here and move on to something that matters. Too often in the store, one of the pros comes in and is talking about a new lens, camera body, workflow, or lab and I think about the work of theirs that I have seen. No equipment can save them.
It's the light, dumbass
The Stepford Village -Saturday, May 29, 2004 -12:20 am-
Disney created Celebration, an entire community for people who don't live there. Celebration is at the junction of I-4 ad FL-192. It's composed entirely of buildings so individual they all look exactly alike. It has exactly one of everything. One bank, one movie theatre, one Japanese restaurant, one ice cream parlor, one relator, one fire station, one dry goods store, and everyone drives eggs. So really there's a lot of eggs, but everyone has one. The eggs are to golf carts what a Segway is to the scooter you had as a kid. I don't think anyone really lives in Celebration. It would spoil the perfection of the image. Even the people who stay there year-round just kind of have their stuff in long term storage in their attic. Driving through it is a very odd experience. It's a kind of horrific post-modern performance art piece writ large. It feels exactly like any one of Disney's other rides (It's a Small World, Pirates of the Caribbean, or The Energy Pavilion) and somehow a fake version of life is the theme. If you'd like to enjoy the Celebration experience without travelling all the way to Florida, just watch any 1950's anti-Communist propaganda film. Remember, the milkman always knocks twice.
My First Intro to Drawing Grade -Tuesday, May 18, 2004 -12:46 am-
Ty -
There has been minimal improvement and you are still having problems of proportion, perspective, and value relationships. Also, your drawings fall short of their full potential. -Spaces are indistinguishable forms and volumes are not fleshed-out.
C- Insufficient!
And you wonder why I didn't like the art program at OSU!
Perfidy -Saturday, April 24, 2004 -3:05 am-
I am betrayed. By what, I do not know, by whom I can not name.
Today, I spoke to several more people, was processed through several more offices. Then the math was done. It is worse than I had imagined. I am in debt. Massively so. Instead of buying a house, I will spend 30 years working to pay off the debt I incurred before I even got started. I will have to make better than $10 an hour working a minimum of 40 hours a week to hold even. No vacation, no days off. Not to get ahead, not to pay things off, not to move forward, but simply to not make it worse. Twenty thousand dollars a year that get me nothing more than stasis.
I want to know how this happened. I did what I was supposed to do, what, in America, means you did your part and will be rewarded with a white picket fence and 2.4 kids. I stayed in school, I got good grades. I went to college. I stumbled there, but I tried to keep moving forward. I don't drink heavily, smoke, or do drugs. I don't gamble, cheat, or steal. Now I am told that all I have achieved is to disadvantage myself, to increase my coming poverty. I did what I was supposed to and am rewarded by a future without hope. I do not believe that if I work hard I will get ahead. I do not believe that I will do honest work for a living wage. I do not believe I will attain what my birthright alleged to promise. I do not believe that I have a future that is desirable. I want my American Dream. When did I say it could be sold to someone in India?
I want my American Dream...
Tune In, Turn On, and Drop Out -Friday, April 23, 2004 -3:52 am-
I am soon to have a conversation with my parents that I ought to think about first. As a way of thinking through things, I am going to write about it here. I am strongly considering dropping out of school. This is not to say that I intend not to get a degree I am, instead, saying that the time is not now and the place is not here. First of all, DeVry is very expensive. Far more expensive than OSU. Base fees start at $48,065 for the degree I'm in. Add to this about $8,000 in books and required electronic supplies. Before even considering housing, food, and transportation, as well as other consumables, I will be about $60,000 in debt when I graduate from DeVry alone. I'm also carrying about $10,000 in loans from my 4 years at OSU. All of this is gathering interest. Obviously, my earning potential would have to be quite significant to pay this back in a reasonable amount of time. Keep in mind that most house loans for $70,000 are financed over 30 years.
Were I to make the amount of money the DeVry recruiters implied that I would, this would not be such a large problem. The recruiters claim that the average starting salary for a DeVry graduate in EET in the state of Ohio is $45,000 a year. Inspecting this statement more closely leads to some concern. This average is not, as one might reasonably expect, the figure for the most recent graduating class, or at the very least, a graduating class from the last year. It is the highest average from the last five years. Incidentally, it happens to be from 5 years ago. The average has gone down every term since. I think the reason for this is the loss of jobs in the tech sector. The US Dept. of whoever the hell studies these things (in other words I can't find the bookmark now) predicts that the US will loose 3.3 million Tech Sector jobs (mostly programmers and EEs) in the next decade. In an absolutely amazing coincidence, the same US Dept. predicts that within the next decade, US companies will employ 3.3 million Indians in Tech Sector jobs. The average pay rate of a programmer in America is $40/hr. The average pay rate of a programmer in India is $10/hr. Can we guess what the autocrats in office think about this problem? Put it all together, and I don't see a job in EE for me by the time I graduate, let alone long enough to pay off my debt. Even if the Tech Sector in America isn't killed completely, it will be gutted so severely that the glut of unemployed programmers and engineers will allow companies to pay minimum wage for what used to be considered skilled labor. If has the choice of paying me $6/hr or paying someone with 10 years of experience $6/hr, whom do you think they're going to hire? I just don't believe that with a collapsing Tech Sector I'll ever work myself out of debt.
On another government site, I found an interesting study on job stability. It is predicted that a person of my age will have 15 jobs spanning 8 careers by the time they cease working (I found it ominous that the study did not call this retirement). That's just insane. It mean, implicitly, that whatever you get your degree in is not what you will spend the majority of your life doing. Getting a degree from DeVry worries me for this reason as well. DeVry happens to be a well respected school for technical degrees. However, when I'm looking for my second or fifth career and it happens to be in the wombat facilitation, how well will the HR director respect a degree from "just a tech school"?
Finally, I'm not sure a college degree in any major is going to pay for itself (note, I mean BS/BA/BFA here, I think jobs requiring a Masters of Ph.D. will still hold their own). Of all the people I know around my age that have Bachelors only, one of them is working in a job where a college name was even looked for on the resume. In America there's this idea that you can't get a good job without a college degree. I think this was true 10 years ago, 5 years ago, but I'm not sure it will be true in 5 years. I think you might not be able to get a good job even with a college degree. If that's true, then people who go to college are starting themselves in a $60,000 dollar hole.
My plan, at the moment (we'll see if this plan survives first contact with the enemy), is to leave DeVry and to try to find work, any work. In the short term, I'd like to pay off the large amount of credit card debt I have, then pay down the school loans I have. After that, I'd like to become financially independent and maybe even be able to buy a car so my parents don't have to keep fixing mine. Someday, when I'm not standing in a hole deeper than I can see out of, I'll go back to school and get a degree to take that next step in job advancement.
Sigh... we'll see how this plays
Solitude Equals Trouble -Tuesday, March 23, 2004 -2:14 am-
Saturday night, a bunch of people were sitting around at Michele's place talking. The discussion eventually became an argument about atheism versus faith. Michele was adamant that atheism was a more logically and scientifically defendable position than faith. At first, I was going to agree with her because, after all, I do tend to lean towards science not faith myself. After thinking about it for a while, I have decided that I disagree with her. I think both are equally valid because they are both, at heart, hanging on the same issue. For the purposes of typing less, by faith I mean the belief in a god or gods and by meeting god, I mean actually meeting god or obtaining concrete proof of the existence of same (whatever that may constitute).
Consider the position of atheism. The major premise, hypothesis, of atheism would be God does not exist. The null hypothesis of atheism would be God exists. If one were to meet god, the null hypothesis would be proven, thereby disproving the hypothesis. If god were never to be met, neither the hypothesis not the null hypothesis would be confirmed or denied. Seeing an infinite number of white sheep does not disprove the existence of black sheep.
Considering the position of faith, one finds the hypothesis to be God exists, making the null hypothesis God does not exist. Meeting god would disprove the null hypothesis and prove the hypothesis. Never meeting god would neither prove nor disprove the hypothesis or null hypothesis.
Both views are waiting on the same data. For either one to be proven or disproven, god must be met. Both views have a either a hypothesis or null hypothesis that is testable. Neither is more more rational than the other.
In other dangerous thinking, I have arrived at the conclusion that both faith and science are belief-based systems. Faith, largely, comes down to taking someone else's word for it. The overwhelming majority of humanity will never meet god. Almost all people will learn of god through the words of others. It is possible, however, that any one person or group of people might meet god. Science is much the same. It is possible for any one person or group of people to preform experiments that confirm a particular theory or concept. However, it is not possible for any one person or group to preform all experiments to confirm every theory and concept. At some point, knowledge of scientific concepts comes from believing what someone else has to say about the nature of our universe. You just have to have faith that quarks exist.
1. Offend the Religious Right ... 3. Profit!!!!! -Thursday, February 19, 2004 -4:12 am-
One of the very few non-infomercials on in the middle of the night is Wild On. I have no idea what the alleged topic was (does it really matter?). The thing that I was struck by is how amazingly rich porn publishers are. It didn't really strike me until I realized that most of these publishers only have one, or at most two, products in the market (i.e. a magazine, or a magazine and a website, or a line of videos). Most of the big time mainstream publishers have dozens of publications in markets all over the world. Yet the porn magnates are still raking in big dollars. This rather implies that A LOT of porn is being sold somewhere. In America, at least, everyone claims not to have bought porn (yes, I know some of you reading this are exceptions). Obviously, a huge percentage of people are buying porn. Or one rich, lonely man is going crazy. Somewhere between our nationally professed morality and our economic reality, there's a huge disparity. Why don't people grow up, join the 21st century, and get the hell over it?
Philosophy is the Talk on a Cereal Box -Monday, February 16, 2004 -6:05 pm-
Beth and I were, as usual, arguing today. This time it was based on The Political Compass thing I blogged about earlier. As usual, we didn't get anywhere with it and failed to do anything other than, well, nothing. She blogged the text of our IM conversation, so I'm not going to repeat it. It amazes me what the two of us get into. I start taking up astoundingly hard line positions that, while actually reflecting what I do believe in, are more extreme than I am (which is hard to do, mind you). I do believe that your morality and your attempts to follow it are what make you a good or bad person. However, I'm not going to personally condemn someone for having an idea I don't like. If they started enforcing that idea on others, well, then we're gonna have a rumble. I also think I stated my position on charity wrong. I don't think people should feel obligated to give to others, I think that the desire to give should be intrinsic.
I keep flipping back and forth on what the source of morality is. I definitely believe that a moral system stems from something other than a god. A moral system can be derived in the absence of religion and because the god/insert-random-holy-book-foo says so is not a valid basis for a moral system. I also totally disagree with Absolute Moral Relativism because it can be used to justify things such a slavery and genocide. I think this leads me to the conclusion that there is some absolute moral standard. Saying that makes me very uncomfortable because it means there's a possibility for condemning other people and restricting their freedom. At the same time, there has to be something that clearly says, "Bad despot! No biscuit!" when someone starts killing all the people who butter the toast on the top. I'm left with the desire to come down hard on those who infringe upon the rights of others and not knowing if thinking that way make me one of them. This is definitely, for me, an unsettled, and unsettling, issue.
Let the Wine of Friendship Never Run Dry -Thursday, February 12, 2004 -4:33 am-
Talking to one of my friends tonight reaffirmed my conviction that I am more than a little odd. The specific dimension of my oddness is, tonight, friendship. For most of my life, I didn't have friends, and certainly I didn't associate with anyone less than 2 decades older than myself. This changed, abruptly, at the end of my Sophomore year of High School when I became mired in Theatre. My Theatre troupe at South was my first experience with having people care about me who weren't obligated to. That is to say, it was the first time I encountered people who liked me for some other reason than that they were family. Theses people that came so suddenly crashing into my life cared deeply about their friends. The environment in which I learned to socialize loved each other more strongly than most families. This love was given without hesitation and reciprocated without obligation. Acceptance was instant and persisted until overwhelming reason to retract it was given. Because of this, I had no concept of friendship without unconditional love and no concept of not becoming instant comrades. Eventually, I moved on to college where I found... nothing (Mich is a special case and not counted amongst the ranks of normal friends). This didn't seem odd to me, after all, for the first 16 years of my life, I hadn't had friends. Then, at the end of my Junior year at OSU, Mich introduced me to the Rennies. At first, it seemed I was home again. Everyone acted open, talked the same talk, had the same flamboyant characters that I knew from Theatre. The rules of friendship I had previously learned in high school came back. As time passed, I came to realize that, for the most part, this similarity was totally superficial. The was the impression of openness, the act of caring, but behind the facade, the was nothing. Again, this is for the most part, there are several exceptions. I became confused, here was a social group who were outwardly similar, who professed to be the same as, the people I had known before, but the soul of the thing wasn't there. Adapting to the new rules, I shed my expectance of true familiarity with anyone. I now had a class friends, and a class acquaintances. I was saddened (and still am) at how small the first class is and how large the second. In the time since then, thankfully, a few people have turned out to be as I first thought they should have been.
Tonight, I was talking with one of those few who are as they should be. Today, she went through something I have far too much familiarity with. I told her that I had been through this too and talked a little about how I had felt, and how I had dealt with it. She told me she appreciated the effort, but that it wasn't the same because it was family. My thought was, "You're right, it wouldn't have been so bad if it had been family." It was in that thought that I realized my difference from other people with respect to friendship. I value the family I earn much more than the family I was born too, and I expect others to do the same. When I am teasing my friends and they claim to be fed up with me, I often say "hey, you love me" and actually expect that they do. This caused much confusion on my part when I did this to another one of my friends and her reply was "no, I don't." At first I thought she was joking, then I realized she meant it. I was hurt and very confused at the time. Now, I get it. Not everyone thinks that having many people whom you love, and whom love you in return, is the greatest aspiration in this life. My friends get this from me until... well, I haven't found an until yet.
