Dear monkey that art in heaven

Please answer me my questions below. (Yeap, it’s been a while since I posed a few, so these are pretty deep):

1. Do I die when I sleep? Because, seriously, when I get up in the morning no portion of sheet is crinkled outside the exact outline of my body where I lay. I just don’t seem to move. Making the bed is just a matter of folding the corner of bedding back into place, where I’d slithered in and out.
2. Will I be mugged and / or raped and / or murdered overseas?
3. If so, will it add to or detract from the overall travel experience?
4. At what point does it occur to most human beings that humanity will never live to see the end of the earth, that we’ll probably not even make it through the next century, that long after we die, there will eventually be no planet Earth at all, that even if humanity lived so long and migrated to other planets, our entire galaxy would eventually cease to be, and that basically, in the infinitely beautiful course of ‘time’, we’re all fucked?
5. Why didn’t I branch out into other genres of music earlier?
6. When  grasses war, do elephants suffer?
7. Who is going to buy me the Moon Man Munny and when (seriously)?
8. When will I finally get around to reading The Idiot by Dostoevsky?
9. When will you finally get around to reading Crime and Punishment by Dostoevsky?
10. Why am I so uncertain about things I’m reasonably certain about – is it because the consequences are too difficult and I’m therefore never so uncertain at all, but only looking for excuses?

Water: fucking amazing

Excuse my ignorance, but the other day I wondered – just why is water essential to all forms of life? Its use in cell structures was of obvious significance; but then why not some other liquid for the same job? And why else might it be so important?

After asking Google (aka God), I was answered with this fascinating layman’s summary.

I recall having learnt some of these points during high school bio and chemistry – such as water’s top spot as the only chemical compound to exist naturally on Earth’s surface in all three physical states (solid, liquid, gas)…

Now I wonder, what other terrific facts have been filtered from my brain through the sieve of time?

I’m twenty-six. There are a lot of factoids – thousands, millions! – that I must have learned and unlearned; discovered and lost; collected and catalogued amongst an immense filing system to gather dust.

I want them all found and returned. I want my facts back.

These questions need dip

Ah yes, questions time.

A little flavourless and undercooked, these Qs certainly need some dip. (Preferably involving reduced cream, Maggi soup mix, and perhaps even a stir of real Answers).

1. Why not become an anonymous traveller in a foreign country?
2. What really is the measure of success and does it fluctuate?
3. If I had to, could I take up a job as a handy man, or a mechanic?
4. What is the average length of a pop group’s life these days (measured in either singles or weeks) – one either way?
5. What’s the difference between super-advanced technology and magic?
6. Do I need to put on weight, do I need to work out?
7. Will you judge me badly if I buy Batman slippers?
8. A Batman belt?
9. How much should my job define me, and is this disproportionately less than the amount of thought and time spent on it?
10. Really – suddenly, without warning, bare necessities only (including three essential books), somewhere else, anonymous, a new land?

Weird though familiar

I’ve motivated myself so much that I’ve lost my motivation.

I’ve planned my thoughts in such detail that I don’t know where to begin.

I’m so keen to get this done that I’m afraid to start.

Will a string of bulletted notes, hand-scrawled, suffice? What if I include my photocopied research with highlights and notations?

Why bother with a cohesively written piece, it’s just a sham.

Dirty, dirty fingernails

I tell you, Victor Creed has something to work on besides his attitude. His nails were the scariest thing in X-Men Origins: Wolverine.

Other reasons to see this film:

1. Liev Schreiber, as Victor Creed; Hugh Jackman, as Wolverine; and Danny Huston, as Stryker, are all excellent in their roles.
2. Gambit is hot (if not the best casting choice).
3. Lots of shit blows up (or is shredded, stabbed, crushed, etc).

No – there are no reasons to go that might be described as substantial.

And despite the numerous, large plot holes, two smaller questions stood out to me:

1. How come when his bones are still bones, Wolverine’s claws are these gross, knobbly stalactite formations; but when his skeleton is adamantium bonded, they become sleek shiny, well-sculpted blades? Not to say the blades aren’t necessary – because they are, due to extreme coolness alone.
2. Why do Victor and Logan age normally up until the early twentieth century, when they just stop aging all together? They should be about 150 by now.

Europe

Around about June 2010.

Sound good?

I think so.

Why bother?

It’s a good question, don’t you think?

What happens next?

Good question!

Brown trousers

So I busted the zipper in a pair of trousers the other day. And I really like these trousers. So, like a typical male, I’m finding it hard letting them go, to move on and think about a replacement option.

I will, hear me, be getting the zipper replaced so that I can continue to wear these trousers until they’re worn thin with value-for-money usage (as you can tell, I’m sometimes a bit cheap)…

But maybe I ought to splash out and diversify.

These trousers with the busted zip are sort of brown. Do I go more brown, as in chocolate? Do I go beige for some sort of Italian feel?

Do I abandon brown all together? God knows I’d hate to ever end up looking like this fine fellow:

Although I do already have the shirt and belt.

Top 10 questions

… of the immediate past (that’s the last few days):

1. How is your lecture so intimately tied to the film screening that, when technology fails and the film cannot be shown, the lecture must also be entirely binned along with it?

2. Why didn’t I listen to the whole of Automatic for the People a lot sooner?

3. What happens when free will isn’t predicated on the need to preserve rectitude of will for the sake of that rectitude, because that’s the way God (/His substitute) sets us up?

4. Is evolution really so clever?

5. Am I turning into a Christian?

6. What the fuck does ‘haptic’ mean?

7. Do I need to review my, admittedly fairly vague, timeline for having children, a married life, a home?

8. How soon is too soon  to get my ass over to Switzerland, where I can stay in Zurich for free rent (well, for donations toward food and expenses) with my brother as a base for wider European travels?

9. Just how bad a writer am I?

10. Why am I so distrusting and what should I do about that, if anything?

A limited number of answers:

1. Well, I guess the lecture would have only been a basic paraphrasing of the set readings anyway, as the other lectures have so far been.

3. See Anselm of Canterbury’s text on Free Will. I’ve been reading this at night, after long days, on the verge of the abyss, so it’s been a struggle to absorb and I feel I’ve misunderstood plenty of it.

5. Hell no.

6. Turns out it means ‘relating to the sense of touch’. That is, a synonym for ‘tactile’.

9. “You are such a terrible writer, I find myself reading you at work.” – Max Mansell

Note: ongoing edits will be made as any further answers come to light.