Adam Smith, Joe Average, Azathoth, and How My Batchelor's Will Be Like A Swiss Army Knife
Random updates on many things. Because I'm too lazy to make nine different blog posts.
1. Acutally, I'm overworked. Midterms are coming up and I'm going to have my first essay test in semesters tomorrow. The good news is that it's on Adam Smith (and some nobodies like Plato and Aristotle, but I know who's important here ^_^). The more I read Smith's first chapter, the more I think his concept of the division of labor is...well, let's put it thus: Smith doesn't believe people have natural talents. Rather, they chose a profession, and the more they work at it the better they get. As they gain experience, you might say. On the other hand, they're not very good at things they don't train at.
And just like that, Adam Smith explains why my Runescape character is horribly underpowered. The costs of being a Jack-of-all-trades.
2. Trailor music is awesome. I have loads of it on my youtube playlist. City of the Fallen is now warring with Two Steps from Hell as my favorite group--the criteria being which is the most HEART-POUNDINGLY AWESOME.
Also, some of the music played during the Olympics (here in the US, at any rate) or at least while news media were discussing athletes and such, was TSFH. My family got quite puzzled when I kept screaming something with 'Hell' in it with an expression of delight.
And one of the figure skating teams used 'Requiem For a Dream' as their music. I thought it wasn't possible to skate to such a thing. But it was. Oh, it was.
3. You know who else is awesome? The artist Joe Average. I want to do a more complete blog post on him, if I ever get the time and fluency. I don't think I could do him justice. It's not the art so much (though it's cool, and there's not enough 'happy' bright art in the world) as his life story. When he was diagnosed with HIV, he quit his crappy job and decided to support himself entirely through his art, because life was too short to do anything else (there's a message in there for all of us). And so far, he's managed to do exactly that.
That's why he's awesome.
4. Another piece of awesome I keep wishing I could do a blog post on but don't have the *oomph* for is H.P. Lovecraft's beginning-of-a-novel Azathoth. The first paragraph especially. Normally Lovecraft's lush prose tends towards purple and lurid, but in this case it has a lyrical quality. Every time I reread it I come closer to tears. Not least of all because the story of Azathoth was never finished--but in a way, maybe that's best.
5. Thanks to AP tests and retro credits for taking a high-level Spanish test, I'm about a year ahead of myself in college. Which means I should be able to graduate about a year early. With that in mind, I decided to add a minor--Business Marketing. So I'll have a liberal arts degree, with a major called "Integrated Philosophy, Politics, & Economics," and then I'll have a minor in "How to Sell Stuff." It's like the Swiss Army Knife of education. It's got to be good for something, right?
Right?
6. I've decided that I live in my head too much. My head agrees with me (um, almost literally...let's just say I take 'talking to oneself' to a whole new level). So I'm trying to do more stuff, talk with other people, hang out with family and friends, etc. This would be much more workable it if wasn't winter in Wisconsin. But I'm s-l-o-w-l-y getting to know more people in my classes this semester, and I was really lucky in that I'm able to meet up with some people I met last semester in between classes. As a commuter, I'm still pretty solitary, but I'm not completely alone. And Facebook is a livesaver for connecting to old G-town classmates.
7. The shelf-crawl continues, but slowly. I'm still on As in Science Fiction, partly because I backtracked to read the anthology Alien Sex. Some stories were good, but overall it wasn't what I'd been expecting (heteronormative, and lots of battle-between-the-sexes, which has never gone over well with me). Westerns are going by faster, partly because they're shorter and with a faster pace. I've discovered Terrence Bowers, who writes short n' sweet Westerns that are classic but not too...how shall I say? Cliche. The protagonist of The Fighting Peacemaker is a travelling Colt salesman. Which I, with my Business Marketing Minor in the offing, find mildly awesome.
I'm currently taking a break on genre fiction to read the likes of Steinbeck and Alexander McCall Smith. And these dudes named Adam Smith and Aristotle and Plato. And Amartya Sen's Development as Freedom, which almost inspired me to take a Global Studies minor but, let's face it, not nearly as much to be done with that as with marketing. I'll just read a lot of books.
8. I've started using ^_^ the lol bishie emote a lot. Perhaps too much. But it's very cute. At least I don't use it in official email.
9. Lastly, I'm beginning to think I should link to more of my fiction here. Let's start with Drown or Die at The Future Fire and The Twilight People at Tower of Light.