With the recent advent of my obsession with my new cd player (yellow and as small as possible for a cd player, the perfect replacement for the ipod, which is now one of my most hated enemies...or apple is, at least), I have been thinking about something I read somewhere...that Americans have replaced individualism with consumerism--we've confused being an individual with buying things that we think show us as an individual.
And although I don't know if this theory really relates to, say, my mom, or your mom, I really think it defines a certain subset of people under the age of 25.

Something that relates to this, is that I've had multiple conversations with Aaron about how "our generation" doesn't seem to buy into the 9-5 bullshit that a lot of our parents did. After all, what did the 9-5 ever do to benefit the lives of our parents? A couple extra bucks, and a wasteland of all the hours they wasted away from the people they enjoyed, and the things they found interesting. Of course, this is coming from a fairly spoiled view of having enough money, or the knowledge of having enough ability to obtain money to live without putting 100% behind it.
These conversations were always self-congratulatory, and I really felt like a lot of the people I know have transcended the false belief that life must be 80% work, whatever's left is time to sleep, eat, and watch a bit of tv.
But today, when I was thinking about how awesome it would be to take a year off and actually come up with a novel that someone thought was worth something, or at least that I thought was worth something, or whatever--some accomplishment, I simultaneously thought how unlikely any of it was.
And that brought me to thinking about how a lot of people that have graduated with college degrees lately have just ended up doing random retail jobs (the same 9-5, though perhaps without the single-minded intensity that I saw my parents do it with) and trying to define themselves as individuals by "buying into" the newest indie band, the newest intellectual movie, or...a yellow cd player that makes everyday life feel different, even if just for a little while.
And it occurred to me how pointless it all was--our parents bought into the 9-5, believed that if they succeeded at that, it would make them successful at life. We (or some of us) don't. But what do we buy into? Do we believe in anything with as much intensity as all that? I don't think so...and I think we fill that void of belief and hope by trying to make ourselves into someone we can respect by defining ourselves through consumerism, veiled in some sort of feigned artistic sensibility.
Or maybe that's just how I am, and I'm making myself feel better by creating some companions in consumerism.

That said, I'm going to the Killers concert next week and you better respect my individualism for realizing the genius of Brandon Flowers.

My new favorite girl: chloe sevigny. Especially in Boys Don't Cry.

What has really been bothering me lately is this prejudice that certain people (usually boys) have about girlfriends and esp. wives (oh how i hate that word, it just sounds old and matronly...just like "husband" sounds quite daunting and overbearing), that they ruin guys' fun, prevent them from hanging out with their friends, and are generally ball and chains.
I'd just like to know when this idea came about. 'Cause in my experience, more often than not, it's the guys being ball & chains. I mean, what's the case against women: we ruin poker night?? And usually, it's the guy who's too lazy to go out and see their friends and because he's married, the friends assume it's the girl screwing them over.
And (much more convincingly) the case against men: I've seen countless examples of women giving up their careers, and bodies (pregnancy screws you over!) for their husbands. And you don't see women's friends making "dead woman walking" jokes when someone gets engaged.

I've never seen a guy who's trying to get a higher education degree give it up because "Suzy wants to have kids."

And I'm not saying it's wrong for people to do that, I'm just saying Ease Up on the chauvinistic bull. I don't like being seen as a ball and chain. I'm the same person I was before I got married, and that's not going to change.

Barf.

This is the cat that I own in an alternate universe, in which I am not allergic to cats...and haven't got Dwight.


His name is Warpaint. (in my alternate universe.)
Doesn't he just look like he belongs in my life?

Personality tests are rarely complimentary. This one is no exception. I wonder why I like them so much.

Scale (%) results:

Enneagram Test Results Type 1 Perfectionism |||||||||||| 42% Type 2 Helpfulness |||||||||| 38% Type 3 Image Focus |||||| 26% Type 4 Hypersensitivity |||||||||| 38% Type 5 Detachment |||||||||||||||| 70% Type 6 Anxiety |||||||||||| 46% Type 7 Adventurousness |||||||||||||| 54% Type 8 Aggressiveness |||||||||||| 50% Type 9 Calmness |||||||||||| 42% Your main type is 5 Your variant is self pres

Take Free Enneagram Personality Test

Main Type	Overall Self

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Two articles on MSN today seemed to apply to me almost exactly.
The first, Aaron says, describes the way I act about Dwight perfectly. I think it does too, except I don't have an asshole husband who hates dogs and thinks it's only okay to spay girl dogs and not to neuter boy dogs (GRRR!) because of his own misplaced masculinity. It also addresses the --will I love my kids as much as my dog-- question (which I thought only I was crazy enough to think).
The second article is about this new game on Nintendo DS that Japan has made to help people refine their smiles and make them more natural looking. My entire life, I've been looking for this game! I've always thought that my facial expressions seem unnatural and I walk around quite stoic most of the time. I think it's a very Asian thing to not be in the habit of showing very much emotion, despite feeling a normal range. There've been lots of times when I've been feeling just fine and other people ask me if I'm alright since I look quite suicidal.
I think it's also a very Asian thing to want to --practice and get better!!-- at showing emotion, so as to assimilate better into Western culture. How strange.

I have used a lot of random dashes, etc. in this post to try to explain what I mean...I don't know if they work, or whether they are just confusing and wierd.

The past three days have been really fun!

1. I won an ebay auction for the new Harry Potter book, so I finally get to read it! It was only $10. Also, I found an instructable that teaches you how to make a magic wand, so I'm doing that as I read the book, too. Instead of a dragon heartstring core, I have an Aaron-hair core in my wand.
2. Me and Aaron have gone on a chinese food kick, so I am learning to make all sorts of things I used to eat as a kid. We went to the grocery store to buy cabbage and ground pork to make dumplings (urg I hate that word) with, and we both realized we didn't know what a raw cabbage looked like. Ridiculous, right?
3. While taking Dwight on a walk, we found a red eared slider turtle, and had to go down to the creek in the dark to release it.

I am dreading school. I guess it's only fair since I looked forward to it so much from K-12-college. A person can only have so much of their share of good school days. I am making up for it all now. For every inch of misery that I didn't feel on the last day of summer in my first 22 years of life, I am feeling it now.
Though there may be a trip to Graceland before the summer is entirely over...though part of me just wants to lounge with my boy and my dog for as long as possible.