Ideas to Change the World

So I found a page near the back of this writing book I have which
I titled 'Ideas to Change the World'. It's actually a list of a few out
of context puns, some other things that don't make sense and a
picture of an anthropomorphic dog. I think I was incredibly drunk
when I wrote this because I really don't remember doing it. I barely
understand it. It looks like this:

Ideas to Change the World:

Jason Seagull

Harry Potter alcohol range:

• Harry Porter
• Ron Riesling

Shark Twain

Concert for Haiti   
Concert for Tahiti
A concert in Tahiti

Mr. Barkinfresh is disappointed in furniture

Feminine Eminem = Slim Shady Lady

Mr. Barkinfresh is told he has a degenerative disease

Pop

I go through stages of getting really annoyed when people play only
pop music at the parties. Part of the reason is that I don't know most
of it but also I have to be in a very specific mood to enjoy it. However,
I was listening to Rihanna before and man, that girl speaks from the heart.
I got absorbed in some song, it was about a big bed or something,
and I really feel like my deepest feelings of loneliness had been taken
from my brain, put into words, and produced by Timbaland. There
is that certain mood I get in where the lyrics of Like a Prayer start to
sound like lyrical a collaboration between Leonard Cohen and Jesus.
Man I could go for some Madonna right now
I also saw a new video from Chris brown playing in a bar the other day.
Isn't he in jail? Why not? How can domestic abusers be so quickly
accepted back into society and have no.1 songs? Granted, I don't
actually know what happened with that but i'm pretty sure he beat
up Rihanna.What the fuck, just learned they are collaborating in two
songs coming out this year? Fuck this, i'm out.

University

It is now my fourth year at university and I am really over it. Especially 

now that I am doing history honours, I feel like everything I am learning 

just seems so pointless in the scheme of things. All of the essay questions

for my Gender and Empire course have the same answer, 'no one gives

a fuck.' No one in their everyday routine thinks 'how can I go to the 

supermarket without knowing if there is a particular pattern of gender 

relations that arise on ‘resource frontiers’ rather than other kinds of 

‘colonial frontiers’?' Now you might be thinking that putting 'gender' into

an in depth and theoretical analysis of empire might be interesting. You

would be wrong. As I go on in honours, I keep thinking how academia

exists in it's own little bubble and for the most part, has little interaction

with the rest of the world. And so I come to the conclusion that I always

come to when I am unhappy with my life: I need to go and live on a farm,

listen to country music and hang with a border collie. I think I also want

to eat whitebait but i'm not sure. I like that they are small because that

means you are consuming more souls when you eat them. I can play

the Country Calender theme on guitar.

Facebook

This post is triggered by a picture I saw on Facebook of a guy in
my honors class. In it, he is shaking hands with Hillary Clinton. Or,
as you may know her, the most powerful woman in the world.
From some kind of student exchange thing (I don't really know)
he was allowed to meet her and then interview her. So, it's a pretty
amazing picture to have of yourself.
Then I saw  that down the bottom that the picture that it had 15 likes.
15 likes!? Really Facebook? Is that all that picture is worth to you?!
That doesn't impress you?! I could post a picture of a turd and get
more than 15 likes. Well, maybe not, but Von Klap probably could
and probably have.  To put this in perspective, I only had to go to the
last post of my flatmate Eamonn to see that he got 15 likes for a picture
of his face after having shaved while pictures of my flatmate Alice with
a cat can fetch over 40, especially if she adds a caption such as 'pat pat
da cat'. Now I know that there a more important things in life than
facebook likes but a lot of people think of it as a new measure of worth.
If pretty much everyone you know uses Facebook then 'liking' is like
democratically calculating what is better from a bunch of completely
unrelated things e.g.: (unfunny meme < annoucing you got a new job) or
(shaving = Hillary Clinton)

I don't like this.

Oh man, just found out he has almost 700 friends. Really, people on
facebook? Really?!

Friends

Often when I meet someone that I get along with really well 

there is a common formula that occurs. First, I meet the person 

and am infatuated by them. I will think they are the most 

perfect person ever because I will only look for the good things. 

My internal monologue is something like: 'Oh man, this person 

is so witty and intelligent. They like the Beatles? I like the 

Beatles! They have exactly the same music taste as me. 

They've read the Secret History? No f-ing way. They find 

Black Books funny? This is getting creepy now. How did 

I manage to find my future best friend here tonight?' The second 

stage is when the person doesn't live up to my unreasonably 

high expectations and I either start liking them slightly less or 

become annoyed by them. Internal monologue changes to:

'Your voice is louder than I remember. How do you not know 

about this obscure historical event that i'm studying? You led 

me to believe you knew everything. I understand all of the words

you are using right now but they don't really make sense in that

sentence. Yeah, you have Bright Eyes on your ipod but it's 

overshadowed by all the Jay-Z on there.' After a while I remember

that I'm not perfect and that everyone has faults and that the

person in question is probably a nice, interesting person and so start 

liking them again. I call this the Obama effect. In saying this, there 

are some people who don't fail my unrealistically high expectations 

and I continue to idolize. I just read this back and I sound pretty

judgmental. 

Kids Are Evil

Following on the theme of children being evil. Although much less
extreme:
As I have made clear before, I don't really like kids. As cute as they
can be, they are hyperactive and have no sense of reason. Today I
walked through a primary school where some kids were playing
sports and I remembered something else about children, they are
savages.

One of the many conversations I picked up on was between
three boys playing cricket who were approximately 10 years
of age. One said said to another "Christian said he could smash you"
to which the third boy said "Whatever we smash him all the time.
The other we smashed him at morning tea and lunch". Maybe I'm
naive, but I don't think they smashed Christian at all. Although I don't
know how tough the kids from Mt. Victoria Primary are. At my school,
everyone was just talk and the way kids won fights was by bragging
about how much money their parents had (like sutpid Bailey Whiley
who made fun of how much money I had made at the school fair
selling candy apples by saying "I brought more money than that to
spend at the fair!") Yet maybe they did smash Christian all the time.
It would fit with my hypothesis that children are all evil.

Another child, much younger, had a ball and wouldn't give it to his
brother. This might not seem like a big deal but I was getting really
annoyed by it. Little Calum was hogging the ball despite his mother
telling him to give it to his brother. Calum had a stupid dweeby
expression on his stupid dweeby face like he was really pleased with
himself. Why didn't he just give his brother the ball?! He wasn't even
using it! He looked like he was showing off but no one was impressed.

No one thinks you are cool Calum!

Killer Children and Conservatism

I was studying at the National Archives today and decided to issue
out the original police report from the Parker-Hulme case. For those
not familiar, that is the case around which Heavenly Creatures is
based where two Christchurch girls killed one of the girls' mothers.
It was pretty creepy reading the actual report which had direct quotes
from the girls because you realise how crazy these girls really were
and that it wasn't just Peter Jackson's poetic licence. There were
heaps of interesting things in it including:

• A transcript of the detective interviewing Pauline Parker. It is pretty creepy because she keeps referring to Juliet as 'Deborah'. There are also strange parts where she attempts to lie to the detective like in this part:

      "When asked how she knew that her mother was dead she said “The blood, the blood, there was a lot of it.” When asked about the stockings she hesitated and said “We didn’t take mother’s stockings off.” Then she said after another hesitation, “I wasn’t wearing stockings, I was wearing sockettes.” After a further hesitation she said, “I did have a stocking. I had an old one in my bag. We used it to wipe up the blood”."

• References to Christchurch making it way more creepy. Just normal things like the fact that Pauline lived at 31 Gloucester Street.
• A part about Pauline writing an admission to her diary on a piece of paper and when asked about it at the police station, throwing it into the fire. A policewoman quickly got it out but all that could be made out was the line "They have questioned Deborah but I am taking the blame"

However the strangest bit to me was a report by the caretaker
of Victoria park who saw the two girls in the tea rooms covered
in blood and was taken to the body. In this account he tells of
how he saw the body, covered in bruises and blood and saw
that from the position she was lying in, her skirt had ridden up
past her knee. So he adjusts it and pulls it below her knee so
that she is decent. Never mind that she has been brutally
murdered, she must be terribly embarrassed that her knee is
showing. Good to see that people back then had their priorities
in order.

Manic Pixie Dream Girl

For those of you who aren't familiar with the manic pixie dream girl, they are pretty, whimsical, alternative 'free spirits' who haunt the dreams of any straight male who even remotely enjoys The Pixies. They have been depicted in movies like Garden State, Almost Famous and 500 Days of Summer as sweet and advetureous girls who like cool things and make boys that watch these movies wish there was such a girl in real life. I used to fall into this trap too but then I realised there are people like this in real life and they are really annoying. Pretty, wears nice clothes, listens to good music, neurotic. I've met plenty of people like that, yet if in real life someone said "Ringo is the most important member of The Beatles", I wouldn't be thinking about how quirky and different they were because life doesn't have the ability to alter your mood by playing The Shins in the background. I would be thinking, 'no, that is an incredibly stupid thing to say because he his quite obviously not'. Yet when this is said on 500 Days of Summer the viewer is thinking what it would be like to live with her in a cottage on a hill with horses and old things and pretty dresses and she would have a face. So don't worry if you can't get a girl like this because if you could, you would grow to hate her. Imagine every attempt at a normal conversation changing into 'but what if the red I see isn't the same as the red you see?'. Oh my you are so thoughtful, you should write philosophy, and tell me again about how we are spiritually connected to the lettuce that grows in my garden. Fuck you, Zooey Deschanel.