Scheduling: My Bane

Maybe it's the winter. I don't usually realize how much I get SAD until the summer hits and I wake up one morning thinking, "Life is good!" when the sun is shining and it's warm and green and the whole world seems open. I woke up this morning at seven and it was dark and cold. The sun was just rising around seven-thirty. And it's going to get worse and colder and darker. I tried to think of what one of those annoying optimists would say: "Well, now everyone gets to enjoy the sunrise because it's later in the day!"

Makes me want to throw a shoe at the nearest optimist.

But the winter depresses me. I start seeing a cold, gray world of continuing inevitability. The rat-race, people walking walking walking with umbrellas, the same roads they've walked every day and will continue to walk, seeing the same tired faces they've seen every day, eating the same lunch at the dingy diner or in stained Tupperware in a florescent-lit office break room.

Last winter I had a freak-out moment with the house. Like it was a ball on the end of the chain that held me here, down to earth. This winter, I have a job and in thinking of my schedule, see it repeating Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, Friday, over and over and over, living for the weekend just to have it end and start over again. Some people like schedules and reliability and predictability. I think I kind of hate it.

Back to that Myers Briggs personality test. I'm an ISTP. The P at the end means perceiver. One place asks, "would you rather things in your life to be decided and set, or do you like to stay open to whatever options might come along?" Truity defines it as "responsive, spontaneous, flexible, and active."

Oddly Developed Types says "Now that school is permanently out and the 8 to 5 workday is abolished for good, the Artisans will be free to roam the radioactive wastelands hunting mutants, fighting zombies, and generally having the time of their lives."

My fall wanderlust is kicking it and I want to throw off everything that's holding me down and go live the life I imagine!

Then reality kicks in and I don't know where I'd go. To the Halloween event at Worlds of Fun? Just kick off and go. England. South for the winter. But what sort of lifestyle supports my imagination?

David thinks it is writing, after I described my perfect job as having short-term events that I could do when I wanted and not take any more assignments when I didn't.

I don't know. Both of us are perceivers. We both live in the moment, procrastinate, and like the idea of just picking up and going somewhere spontaneously.

We need to get rich.

Post-Apocalyptic Thoughts

My current fad is post-apocalyptic fiction. Well, not even fiction. Maybe just more the idea of fiction. Unless someone has some good post-apocalyptic fiction they want to recommend?

Currently I'm making due with cyberpunk, defined by the Reddit page as, "High-tech, low-life." I describe it as the seedy criminal side of sci-fi. Reading the second book in William Gibson's Sprawl trilogy. So far, it doesn't flow as well and isn't as artistic as Neuromancer, the first book.

But anyway.

To get in the mood, here is a cover of Imagine Dragons' radioactive by Lindsey Stirling. In post-apocalyptic theme.

I can't ever decide if I like this better than the original or not. Original has bass drum. Cover has...well...awesome. And no weird puppet arena.

I have had Radioactive play in my head for the last three months. Still cool with it.

To continue on the theme, I got into the Myers-Briggs personality test. I like personality tests. I am an ISTP (introverted, sensing, thinking, perceiving). Which means I'm Harry Potter on the Harry Potter chart. And a cat on one of the animal ones (no, I did not try and manipulate the results to get a cat).

But the best thing I've found so far is called Oddly Developed Types. It starts off with the basics, not a whole lot more information than the Truity. Thing about the Myers Briggs is that they say people are better at understanding themselves than the test is, so you can probably figure out what you are by just reading about it. I match ISTP pretty well. However, Oddly Developed Types decides to have some fun and they come up with all these different scenarios for what happens to your type after the apocalypse.

I am a Vigilante. I spend the first year of nuclear winter in a basement playing video games that hone my reflexes so I can kick mutant and zombie butt once I get out. Then me and the other Artisans (SPs) wander merrily about doing our own thing, like we've always wanted to. The SJs (Guardians) have bunkers, cities, and caves. The NFs (Idealists) mostly become self-actualized and turn into beings of radiant light and go to another plane, where they will fight shadowy beings of darkness. And the NTs (Rationals) will mostly abandon the planet before it happens, but you know they probably caused it too. I read my page. And then the page for the Artisans. And then David's page (ENFP). And then the page for all the Idealists. And then all the main group pages. And then I started at the top and read all of it. It was like reading a story in second person. It was funny and clever and makes me wish I thought of it first.

I'm still trying to figure out what I want from this phase, which is really an extension of the zombie phase (which I partially abandoned after finding the first two episodes of Walking Dead to be more gory than I liked). And maybe it's because so many people talk doom and gloom with all the Syria and government shutdown and so on, it starts to feel a little bit like the end of the world. And I cope with things by making fun of them.

And I'd be a monster hunter. How cool is that?

I am a Jedi, like my father before me...

Jedi's just happen to get their hoods from Aeropostale these days.

Notes

I came home today to discover this on my kitchen counter:

It basically says,
To whom it may concern:
Ames Fire Department responded to this address around 10:30 am for an audible smoke detector going off. We found no smoke or fire and gained entry.

We walked through quickly and found no problems. We attempted to silence the audible detector and change the battery, but the detector continued to go off... so here it sits for you. It is most likely in need of replacement.

We closed the home up as we found it.

If you have any questions, please call fire station #3.

Thank you.
-Firefighters Bleeker and Doyle

I found it interesting. I called David and read it to him. It actually probably corresponded to the alarms I heard earlier in the day. We have a fire station just down the street.

Also, my kitchen was a mess from breakfast, as I hadn't had time to clean before work. So I wanted to make excuses for it. And thank the firefighters for coming in for a false alarm. And maybe leave them a note as well.

So I did. I wrote them a note saying just that. And bought two packets of dark chocolate M&Ms (in lieu of buying drinks). And I bound it up with a rubberband and walked over to the fire station and gave it to a man with a nice smile who said he'd get it to them.

I'm sorry they came out for nothing. But then, I'd rather it be nothing.

Interventionism and Helping

I wrote last time about Syria. The whole issue actually makes me want to throw my hands up in the air and scream and yell, "How do you think a missile strike will be an isolated event? How do you think the rebels are any better than the government? How do you think this incident is the one that deserves your wrath but have let so many other killings and abuses pass unnoticed? Why do you think you have the authority to draw 'red lines' without Congress and that you can order strikes without Congress?"

I have never hated Obama. I never liked him, but I don't hate him. I do not like Obamacare, but this, this thing with Syria, really really bugs me. It's the first time that I've been like, "It's only 2013? We have a ways to go."

That said, I'd like to talk a little bit about interventionism, which is our foreign policy. Oh, not the the discussion between if we should sanction or not, invade or not, police the world or not. I'm solidly on the "or not" bit. We shouldn't be the police. Nobody appointed America is governor of the world and I don't think God said, "This is my country, they are the bestest and get to say what's what." Americans are a little on the self-centered side. We see only Americans as being important when it comes to world matters, like everyone else is somehow less of a human than we are. Doesn't really matter to us if others die unless Americans die, in which case it's a tragedy. I'm not saying it isn't, just that our standards of tragedy don't tend to involve anybody else's death, and then it's only a tragedy if we have to look at it or the government tells us so. Like these chemical weapon deaths.

I read this morning by Ron Paul, "I agree that any chemical attack, particularly one that kills civilians, is horrible and horrendous. All deaths in war and violence are terrible and should be condemned. But why are a few hundred killed by chemical attack any worse or more deserving of US bombs than the 100,000 already killed in the conflict? Why do these few hundred allegedly killed by Assad count any more than the estimated 1,000 Christians in Syria killed by US allies on the other side? Why is it any worse to be killed by poison gas than to have your head chopped off by the US allied radical Islamists, as has happened to a number of Christian priests and bishops in Syria? For that matter, why are the few hundred civilians killed in Syria by a chemical weapon any worse than the 2000-3000 who have been killed by Obama’s drone strikes in Pakistan? Does it really make a difference whether a civilian is killed by poison gas or by drone missile or dull knife?"

It's a good question.

Anyway.

Basically, I came to say that I think we are very single-minded when it comes to intervention. Is there any way we can help people in other countries without initiating an unprovoked attack? Can we help people peacefully? I've read, and I don't have the links for this, that Jordan is taking in refugees from Syria. They are helping, probably more than we ever will in this situation.

And I think America should do that. Not necessarily Syrian refugees, but be that open place we used to be.

My dad has an interesting take on immigration. No guns, no fences, no border police. Let 'em come in. But we're not going to give them anything. No free schooling, no Social Security, no welfare, nothing. And end law of the land. So the people who want to come would just be coming for what they get of freedom, not for any handouts. You want to make it here, you have to earn it. And that's kind of cool. Rather historic-sounding.

For example, we should be open to allowing in people leaving their own countries for lack of freedom. Take the case of Germans who want to homeschool their children. Homeschooling was banned in 1938 by Hitler, "all the better to indoctrinate you, my dear." And, oddly, that rule is still in effect and still being enforced. We've had a case where a German family is asking for asylum to homeschool their children as they want to raise them Christian. Makes sense to me. However, so far, our government has said, "You don't face religious persecution because the law applies to everyone, not just Christians." Which seems to be a somewhat silly way to defend that.

Also, in Germany, a family's house was stormed by police and social workers wielding a battering ram, who then took their children away by force.

I think we should let these people come into America. And if people in other countries need help, let our private, non-government aid groups could go and help them. Not our shooting missiles into their country with the chance that it will spread the targeted chemical weapons. That doesn't seem like much help.

Of course, America isn't as much the bastion of freedom that people used to immigrate to. Maybe we'll be looking for somewhere to claim asylum.

Syria

This week, that's been the main thing I've been thinking about. And from what I read, the consequences range from "We're not even sure we're going in yet," to the destruction of the world in the form of a nuclear World War III. I read some writers who may be overly dramatic. Or, maybe not.

And the thing with Syria has been going on a while now. I remember something mentioning it on the Daily Show back during the presidential election. I remember John McCain calling for intervention in Syria. I was just discovering my more libertarian views and I remember asking Dad, "what do we do when a country is committing crimes against its own people? Should we still remain non-interventionist?"

Dad wrote back, "I'm not 100% sure what the trigger is. The US is certainly inconsistent. This is a very dangerous road to go down because it isn't always clear who the good guys are and who the rebels are. Often these kinds of things come back and bite us and also our going in to kill people who are killing people doesn't sound like it is necessarily the most moral thing to do."

That is far more clear to me today than it was then. In fact, the more we learn how muddy the whole situation is, the more clear it is that going in is a bad idea. And that none of the "news" we've been delivered is necessarily accurate.

The way America puts it is that we are on the side of rebels against a regime who is willing to slaughter their own citizens and use chemical weapons on them. And because of the chemical weapon use, we will send warships with cruise missiles to take out their stockpiles of chemical weapons (If war was declared... or whatever we do to start it these days), along with considering sanctions, no-fly zones, and a lot of other war-like things without necessarily putting troops on the ground. Britain, France, Turkey, and numerous other countries back intervention.

In reality, we don't even have proof that the regime was the one using chemical weapons. UN inspectors only just decided that chemical weapons were actually used. It seems stupid to think that the regime, which was winning against the rebels, would use chemical weapons when UN inspectors were in the area, just in time to call down a mass of countries to interfere on the rebels' behalf. The rebels say the regime did it, the regime says the rebels did it, and both sides point fingers at each other. Also, the rebels have strong Islamist and terrorist links, and we are talking about aiding them and giving them weapons? Even the conflict in general isn't so clear. The rebels also kill people. It's not just a civil war made up of a distressed country against their government, but of two factions, neither having been reported as giving a care for civilian life.

And do we think that bombing chemical weapon stockpiles we not affect civilians at all? Somehow nobody will be hurt?

Unlike a few of our past wars, I think we are getting more and more disillusioned. We know this wouldn't be a fight for our freedom, and even the claims that we are going in because they were behaving badly, because we need to spread freedom and democracy by force, are not just being taken for granted.

Twitter has a trending hashtag called #NameObamasNewWar. A popular one is "Operation Nobel Peace Prize." Others pun on the name of Syria with "Operation Joker: Why So Syrias?" and "Operation Syriasly?" The Twitter account claiming to be the press account of hacktivist group Anonymous is calling people out for just tweeting, saying, "Operation American's are going to tweet and not much more." Other tweets they posted talk about how it would be better to aid the refugees and actually take action... instead of just exploding social networks, like we are.

Goodreads and Mistaken Identity

I must apologize. I did not know.

Apparently, that link on the side of my blog I had labeled "Goodreads" did not go to my Goodreads page; it went to the page of someone else named Linsey.

Apparently, my brother clicked over from my blog and was astounded by the content of my Goodreads page. "Linsey read the 50 Shades of Grey series?" he asked Mom. Mom did not think so, but confronted by evidence like a Goodreads page in my name was not sure.

Andrew told me I had read 50 Shades of Grey, as evidenced by my Goodreads page. I denied it and asked, "Are we even friends on Goodreads?" He laughs, says no, and I think it's a joke. My cousin Tyler says, "Really, I thought that was the sort of thing you'd be in to?" Apparently, my cousin and I are not close.

Later, Mom asks me if I've read 50 Shades of Grey. I deny it again. "It's on your Goodreads," she says. "Andrew found it. It says you gave them five stars." I get out my phone app and go through all 122 books I've bothered adding to Goodreads. No 50 Shades of Grey. "They aren't here," I tell her.

She pulls up my blog, clicks the link, and it goes to a page under the name of Linsey. There is no photo. And even though the spelling is the same, I have not read a single book under the "Read" list. "This isn't me," I tell her, also noting the lists have a different number of books on them than my lists.

But it links from my blog. Odd, that.

I have not read 50 Shades of Grey. I actually first heard of the book on Goodreads where a friend (read: someone I might have never actually met) had ranked it five stars. I was interested in good books, so I clicked on the link to read reviews. People had it recommended for people who enjoy "erotica." Wait a minute, I thought. I don't enjoy erotica. If the book has sex, I'd rather it fade to black in an insinuating manner. If it starts listing the name of parts, I'm done. I read the first Sookie Stackhouse (True Blood) book. I finished it and resolved to not read another. I only read reviews on 50 Shades of Grey... mostly to be able to make fun of it better. Not only is it "erotica," but it is supposedly poorly written. And I cannot forgive that either. You defend it on claims that somehow erotica is a good thing? I attack on the Grammar Police front! Defend against that!

But no, I have not read it. I have no desire to read it. Unless to make fun of it in better detail. But from what I've heard of it, it's not even worth that.

I think I fixed my link now. You can tell it's me if I have a picture of me. The other Linsey didn't have a picture at all. Also, I have a decent amount of Steampunk books on my list. My favorite books include Neromancer, Calvin and Hobbes, The Scarlet Pimpernel, The Chronicles of Narnia, Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. I've read Star Wars books. And Steampunk books. And Fantasy books. Not erotica books.

It's also a shame because I stopped book reviews on my blog because Goodreads was a better platform for them. I haven't done a whole lot recently, but the book "In, but Not Of," was one of my most recent.

Really weird thing is that I test all my links. So if I was being consistent Linsey, I would have tested it back when I added it. And the idea that it links to another Linsey that I do not know seems suspect. Sad that someone sharing my name could have such a poor taste in books.

Link should work now. Please, let me know if it doesn't!