The dog's Buddha-nature.

I've been thinking a lot about Zen again lately. My mind continually comes back to it again and again. I've realized that I don't care much for the westernized-makes-you-a-better-bowler-or-actor-or-whatever zen. There is something real there. Deep down. Deep inside of ourselves, really. A lot of people seem to make Zen out to be about some kind of self-improvement. I feel that Zen is a much bigger mystery than that (as much of a beginner as I still am). Actual realization is something we come by so very rarely in life. Of course realization can make you a better person, but that self-improvement shouldn't be the main focus. Search for enlightenment. Crave it. Seek it out like nothing else. It may seem selfish to just care about your own enlightenment, but once it is achieved, think how much you'll be able to benefit others in their search! Maybe it is selfish at times, but even Buddha spoke of "skill-in-means", if you are to break the precepts, but it aids the path to enlightenment, all is for the best.

I've also been thinking about koans, those riddles that seem to frustrate people to no end. Personally, I love koans, I love farming that sense of cognitive dissonance. If you just sit back on the couch and think about it and focus on the koan, it doesn't make sense. Of course it doesn't make sense! It isn't supposed to make sense. It pulls your mind in so many different directions it almost snaps. And it should snap. That's what we're all going for, the snap. When you turn into an old bearded lunatic living alone in the mountains, speaking in riddles and laughing wildly at the sight of a butterfly.

I hate "designers", and the shit they make.

I hate the current "design" fad that seems to be going around. It seems like I can't stumble across more than four websites without some fucking blog about design shit. Be it furniture or product packaging, they always show up, and they always disappoint.

People seem to have this idea in their heads that "design" is the most important part of a product. Fucking no it isn't. Deliver a functional, well-made thing, and people will buy it anyways. This design boom seems to be a symptom of a larger disease. Companies make flimsy, useless junk and try to promote the hell out of it with "design", to try to attract consumers to buy their flimsy junk instead of their competitor's equally poorly made flimsy junk.

"Designers are artists", no, they're hacks. Using blocky letters and off-white backgrounds, and continuing to leach off of "indie" culture that isn't even relevant anymore. There are no more new ideas. I can assure you, if you do something, someone else has already done it.

I swear to god, if I don't die from the flu. (Or, The Benefits of the Influenza Virus on the Male Figure)

If I don't die from the flu before I procreate, my spawn are gonna be immune to damn near everything. And it will all be thanks to me, good old dad. Seriously, I've had this damn flu for like a week, I spent two days with a fever, then three and a half days where my throat hurt so much that I couldn't do anything even the least bit physically demanding without going into a disgusting coughing fit that generally resulted in me expelling a bunch of super gross green shit from my lungs all over anything nearby. Then my damn ears started to get plugged up with some damn weird stuff. The first time it hurt really bad and it made me super angry, but it went away after a few hours. Then the next day it started earlier in the day and lasted longer and it just barely went away by the time my friends came over to watch The Deer Hunter. Then it happened and hasn't gone away since. It doesn't hurt anymore, I think because my eardrum is probably stretching and expanding to make room for more fluid or whatever the hell is in there making it so I can't really hear shit.

This sucks. I hate life right now.

Also haven't eaten in like three days because I haven't had any appetite. Three whole days and I've put nothing into my body but water, tea, and Coke. I feel like I should eat because it might help me get better faster, but I really just don't feel like eating anything. Silver lining, though, it made me lose a few pounds and I look fucking goooood.

I'm a damn superhero. And I have a blogger!

You ever have one of those days where you feel like the best person in the world because you did something that normal people do every single day of their lives? But it's super special because YOU did it? I do. Guess what I did today? I went to the damn bank like a boss and deposited TWO checks. Then I went to MINET and paid my cable/internet bill. THE WHOLE THING. ALL AT ONCE. I even had to stand there for a couple minutes while the secretary chick ran my card and printed me a receipt. Now I'm back at home writing about it, ON A BLOG. I could just as easily have sit here and watched the news (something about letter bombs) and been humble and not write a word about how great I am because I went to the bank and paid my cable bill. Could have. Didn't.

Also on the topics of things I didn't do. New years resolutions. I hate them. Hate them with more passion than I hate a lot of things. I hate the idea that people think because a new year has started (an arbitrary date, by the way. We should really be using a lunar calendar.) that for some reason they make some half-hearted pledge to do some either overly ambitious or nearly insignificant thing to attempt to make themselves better people. That is god damned absurd. The fact is that they probably thought up this plan a few minutes before midnight while slugging down booze and trying to pick who to pork tonight out of a slovenly crowd of equally drunk people.

Yes I'm probably being overly critical. I'm fine with that. I have a clogged up ear so I can barely hear out of my left side and it is pissing me off. So I'm allowing myself to bitch and whine.

I'm still awesome, though. Because I was a responsible grown-up today.

Capstone notes

So I'm in capstone this term (basically a theatre thesis class) if anyone I know happens to read this, then please don't spoil the surprises for everyone else, I'm keeping some ideas here so they'll be easily accessible from multiple points e.g. any computer ever.

Art is a synthetic construct, entirely dependent upon the audience for existence. Art has no nature of it's own. It is the most difficult thing to define ever.

Is this art? (Van Gogh poster or something)

Is it still art? (rip poster in half)

How much of it has to be torn off and thrown away until it is no longer art?
You can't answer this because you cannot define art. No one can.

I can't define art, but I know the nature of it.

Art is nothing more than applied philosophy, thoughts about the nature of things put into some form or another. Now that may sounds dangerously close to a proposed definition, but it isn't (for reasons I will determine later, expound of the difference of nature and define)

Plato claims that art is almost as far as you can get from the form of something, as it is a representation of a representation of a form.

Gonna think more on this later.