What the fuck am I doing with my life? At the moment I'm kind of stuck here on my couch - stuck because I'm sick as fuck and can't move - and smelling, with a contorted face, with a wrinkly nose, the odor of cat shit that is creeping out of the bathroom. If it weren't enough that my sinuses are fully-pressured, feeling like what I'd imagine they would feel like if I were on a space station of some kind and suddenly got sucked out into the cold, airless environment around the space station, expanding in that moment right before death when all the nitrogen in my body inflates itself in spite of its owner's wish that it would, in fact, continue as normal, I have to smell cat shit.

I'm not getting work from the substitute job. No, that's a lie, I get called once a week (i'm only available to work Mon/Wed/Fri because I have school Tue/Thur) on average to go into to substitute. But when I get the call, which isn't a call at all, but a little window on a website that I check into at about 7AM in the morning that says "job available at South Hagerstown High School" or wherever, I stare at the text, hoping that someone else will take the job in the 30 seconds that I take to think about it. Usually, someone does. Granted, prior to about two weeks ago I was taking every job offered to me, but lately I'm unable to get myself out of bed. I sleep until 11am, grumpily roll out of bed at noon or after, having mindlessly checked facebook, cnn.com, msnbc.com, astronomy picture of the day, and maybe some lolcats, for an hour or more.

What the fucking fuck? I have work coming in and I'm not even taking it. I'm sure I owe at least two of my friends maybe 60 bucks between them, and instead of doing everything I can to pay them back immediately, i'm sitting around my house feeling like shit. Nothing works right now. On the days when I don't go to work, or sleep late, or both, i feel like shit. I feel like a big fucking pile of shit. My response lately has been to just avoid everything and watch TV on the internet. I feel scummy. I feel like scum. Ugh, I think part of this substitute teaching thing that is bad is that I don't HAVE to go to work if i don't want to. Granted, if i don't go to work, then I'll not be able to pay my rent and then i'll be out on the street (well probably not out on the street because i'm sure one of my friends would offer their couch up, or my mom would ask me to move back home, but i'd rather die than do either of those things), but that doesn't stop me. I think I need a job that requires me to be at work everyday. Or I just need to find a way to suck it up and do this substite thing right.

You know what's fucking silly. One of the reasons I get all full of anxiety about going in to sub is that I only have two pair of dress pants to wear and both of them are brown corderouy and neither of them fit me. I think i've put on 20 pounds over this winter and i have to unbutton the top button on both pairs of pants in order to get them to not squeeze my stomach and bladder out of my butt. They are also both too short, so I look awfully silly in them.

What the hell am I talking about?

I'm sick. I have the flu and my brain is all fucked and I probably sound like a lunatic. And a loser on top of that. I'm not a loser goddamnit, I've struggled through 8 years of college with a severe learning disability, taking the hardest classses from the hardest professors. But at the moment all i've got to show for it is a notice from the federal government that I will soon have to start paying them back 40,000 dollars, a notice from sallie mae that i will soon have to pay them back 20,000 dollars, 4 incomplete classes, and a worry-ridden mother who, and perhaps rightly so, thinks that her 30 year old, soon to be 31 year old son, may not be able to support himself.

I made 30,000 dollars a year working for verizon online 5 years ago. I hate my job, and it made me want to kill myself, literally, but all my bills were paid, i had health insurance, and didn't really have to worry every month about how the bills were going to get paid. now i'm 60,000 dollars in debt and broke and with this economy going the way it is, potentially unemployable.

what the fuck.

I miss you.

So very much.

...love is not a victory march, it's a cold and it's a broken hallelujah...

Pale Blue Dot

The Pale Blue Dot is a photograph of planet Earth taken by the Voyager 1 spacecraft. Seen from 6.4 billion kilometres away, Earth is a dot obscured in a beam of scattered sunlight.


"Consider again that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.

Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.

It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known."
-Dr. Carl Sagan [November 9, 1934 – December 20, 1996]

chickpea thing.

I didn't have much in the way of ingredients last night, except some chickpeas and a bowl of leftover yogurt/cucumber sauce from my falafel adventure. So, I decided to take some of the basic spices that went into the falafel recipe and try an experiment. This is how the experiment goes:

1 medium yellow onion, diced
3 cloves garlic, minced
2 tsp cumin
1 tsp coriander
1 tsp salt
1/2 cup parsley, minced (although I was lazy and just chopped)
vegetable oil
leftover yogurt/cucumber sauce

Cook onion and garlic in oil until onion is translucent. Stir in beans and cook for a couple minutes. Stir in cumin, coriander, and salt. Cook for a few more minutes and then add parsley. Throw everything on a plate and drizzle yogurt sauce on top with some extra fresh bits of parsley. It's yummy!

I made falafel.

In Northampton, the city in which I last resided, there was a Moroccan cafe called "Amanouz." They made the most amazing food for ridiculously cheap prices. They also made falafel for ridiculously cheap prices, er, price... singular. Anyway, I was missing their falafel tonight, and also feeling bored, and also feeling hungry. These three things, when combined, resulted in the subject of the photo you see near this text.


Also, here is where I got the recipe:

http://allrecipes.com/Recipe/Seans-Falafel-and-Cucumber-Sauce/Detail.aspx

Bob Dylan's "Visions of Johanna" excerpt.

In the empty lot where the ladies play blindman's bluff with the key chain
And the all-night girls they whisper of escapades out on the "D" train
We can hear the night watchman click his flashlight
Ask himself if it's him or them that's really insane
Louise, she's all right, she's just near
She's delicate and seems like the mirror
But she just makes it all too concise and too clear
That Johanna's not here
The ghost of 'lectricity howls in the bones of her face
Where these visions of Johanna have now taken my place

Now, little boy lost, he takes himself so seriously
He brags of his misery, he likes to live dangerously
And when bringing her name up
He speaks of a farewell kiss to me
He's sure got a lotta gall to be so useless and all
Muttering small talk at the wall while I'm in the hall
How can I explain?
Oh, it's so hard to get on
And these visions of Johanna, they kept me up past the dawn

(neither the image, nor the lyrics are mine)

good eatin'

The spider has spun her web
beneath the light on the front porch
and I think to myself
that's a good place for a spiderweb.