All right, well I’m making some organizational changes to the site to make it a little easier to navigate. The changes should have been relatively painless within iBlog, but as many of you probably know, “relatively painless” + “computer” = “everything deleted, system destroyed, havoc wreaked, etc. etc.”

So as you may or may not have noticed, all the entries are gone. I have them backed up, so I’ll be adding them back in as soon as I can, but iBlog is making it more of a pain in the ass then i had hoped.

In the meantime, keep checking back. I haven’t been writing rambling crap entries as often, but you’ll notice I’ve continued adding to the music section, and those blog entries are still intact, so head on over there and listen to some music. NOW DAMMIT!

Well, I tend to rant a lot about the internet and how amazing it is and how great it is that everyone can have a voice yadda yadda yadda blah blah blah. Etc. Sometimes though I wonder if it really is a good thing.

For instance, the other day I was really bored and I ran a search on Google for “who likes taco salad.” In quotes, because naturally I only wanted exact matches. And much to my bewilderment, it turned up a hit. Incidentally, the page it turned up was a message board for Atkins dieters, some thread about how to eat breakfast while still adhering to the diet (“This morning I had some leftover lard dumplings and a jar of mayonnaise”). I mean, I’ve read about the science behind it, and I grant you that it makes a certain degree of sense. But I still believe that it can be taken too far. Way, way too far. Like, lard dumplings far.

In any case, you have to admit that it’s pretty crazy that we live in an age where i can find out something as ridiculously insignificant as “who likes taco salad” with a simple Google query. What it has brought me to realize is that every second that the internet is in existence, we come nearer and nearer to recreating that once hypothetical “monkeys on typewriters” representation of infinity. Except we’re not just recreating all the great literary works (in fact, those probably already exist online somewhere), but we’re recreating every insipid string of random words that could conceivably be strung together in any semi-sensical fashion. In fact, it likely goes down to letter level as well. I bet you’d be hard pressed to find a 4-letter string that doesn’t exist on the web in some page of computer-generated bargle or other. I haven’t checked recently, but we might be running short on 5-letter strings too. And that number will only continue to increase.

Anyway, I survived my first day of classes, and I even lived through president Bush’s State of the Union address without muting it too many times. Just once I want to hear one of those speeches start with, “The state of our nation is weak. Very very weak. And feeble.” That would be great.

So what lessons did we learn today? Freedom of expression is nice but also kinda depressing. Also, I am tired and I am going to bed. So remember these things when someday you don’t know how you are going to finish a sentence and so you just ramble on for a while until eventually the sentence comes to a natural conclusion.

Ok so classes finally start tomorrow. I’ve just been bumming around waiting for this to happen, and it hasn’t yet.

In the meantime, I’ve been considering adding some new and exciting sections to the upper right-hand corner of the blog. In particular, I wish to create a section for a general hodge-podge of stuff that doesn’t fit under the category of “Music.” I have a wealth of such material, but the hard part has proved to be finding an acceptable title for the new section.

So for the time being, I’m calling it “Art?” This is because the term “Art” can be used to describe pretty much anything, depending on who you are talking to and how liberal their conception of the term might be. The question mark is very necessary, because most of the stuff that will be posted in that section can probably only be described as art in the very most loose sense of the word. In fact, I’m just wasting my time trying to rationalize my decision. The real reason I chose the word “Art” is because it is very short. Three letters. Plus a question mark. And I am a firm believer that category titles should be short, even if they are not indicative of what is inside of said categories.

In any case, hopefully there’ll be some fun new stuff going up that will be enjoyable to those of you who still come through here. Which, as far as I can tell, is Matt. And that’s all.

Hi again all you sexies.

Well I finished my studying for today, so I’m taking the extra time to do an update. Time has been a scarcity of late, but it happens this way every semester. You’d think I’d have gotten used to it by now, but it still seems to come as a surprise somehow. The good news is, I’m on the home stretch, with just three more weekdays of finals, papers, and portfolio madness, and than it’s home again for the holidays to decompress.

These last few days I’ve made an interesting discovery. For all of you folks out there are looking for a good exercise solution to tone your legs and glutes (tehe!), here’s a tip: go to your local ice rink or general public sheet of ice, and try walking around on it for an hour without falling down. If you’re wondering how I made this discovery, then wonder no more; this was my commute back and forth to school every day for the past week. And man, my legs kill right now. The pain is how you know it’s working.

In other news, I’m in grave danger of losing in the first round of fantasy playoffs this weekend, in which case my whole season would pretty much be ruined. Which sucks because I managed to finish in 2nd overall for the regular season. But them’s the breaks— just ask any pro football coach. I’m sorta glad I don’t have my reputation and livelihood riding on it. Much.

Here’s some new words to add to my List Of Words That Have Struck Me As Silly At Some Time Or Other: smart, next. Does anyone else do this? Where suddenly some common-usage word strikes you as being really dumb or weird? Maybe I’m the only one.

Anyway, I could ramble on like this for months, but I have to go play with Mr. Picassohead some more. It has me transfixed. Here’s my first masterpiece. And don’t ask me what the S stands for, because I don’t freakin know.

Now everyone: go forth and do excellently on your finals! If you have them! Otherwise do excellently at other things! I shall see some of you soon…. mwahaha… mwahahahha…. MWAHAHAHAHAHHAHHAAHHAAHA!!!

I need therapy.

Yeah yeah yeah.. I know. I’ve been slacking. Luckily, nobody really cares that much.

I started off with so much momentum, started the blog, was writing a whole bunch of tunes, keeping up on schoolwork, taking care of myself and my apartment, studying at the library, submitting stuff, just generally trying to make myself useful. And now I’m reeeeally starting to drag again. It happens every semester. Not just during the semester, during the summers too.

So anyway, I’ve just kind of felt like I don’t have anything interesting to write about. Which is stupid, because I can write a blog entry on anything, like that pungent rotting fruit that I have to trudge through on the way to class, or the fact that I woke up this morning and the water had been shut off, or that I just got another invoice from my realtor and have to go back over there again to straighten out more stupid crap, or even my projects that I’ve been working on, or the weather which is getting all cold again.

It’s kind of funny that all of the things I just listed are things that are out of the ordinary, or things that are in a state of flux. Things that aren’t new and exciting kind of fade into the background. I wouldn’t probably write about that stretch of Boylston I walk down every day, unless they were doing construction, or shooting a movie or something. I probably wouldn’t mention anything about my apartment that I’ve been living in for several months, unless I had gotten something new to put in it, or if it had burned down or something.

It’s just the way we are wired as people. Our brain has this amazing ability to focus, to ignore everything but what has changed. Otherwise our senses would be completely overloaded constantly. Imagine always being aware of the soundscape at the same time that you feel every current of air passing over your skin, taste the inside of your mouth, smell your own deodorant, and see every object within your field of vision equally well. Just imagining it is enough to make me want to lie down and pass out.

And so nature has given us this ability, in order to avoid overstimulation, to filter out that to which we are accustomed, to acclimate ourselves to the surrounding environment. It is a revolutionary talent, it is one of the things that man has yet to understand or reproduce in his own creations. It’s what allows us to perceive the world, and still have some brain power left over to interpret what we are perceiving. It’s what allows us to understand.

Yet however revolutionary and incredible the benefits are, as with everything, that’s how tragic the downside is. Whatever it was that made you happy a month ago, has faded into the background. We are not allowed to forge a perfect, happy world for ourselves and then sit back and relax and enjoy the rest of life in a state of unadulterated bliss. It just doesn’t work that way, because soon we would find ourselves craving something new and exciting. We were meant to struggle to be happy. Because without unhappy, there would be no happy.

I don’t necessarily mean to imply that it is all related to our brain chemistry. Part of it may very well be societal. I think about how tribal people who lived on the same patch of land their entire lives and were never exposed to the rest of the world must have lived. They didn’t know that they had the option to change their lives. Maybe they were perfectly content since they didn’t even see a choice there. Maybe I simply feel worthless at times because I see the opportunities and possibilities around me every day, ones that I choose not to take. If I decided one day to take all of those opportunities, my life would be completely different at the time I go to bed from how it was when I woke up. And then, boy, I would have a lot to write about. For a couple weeks.

In any case, maybe we do have a sort of innate need for some sort of constancy after all. Because the farther I go, the more I realize that there is nothing I can count on to be a permanent fixture in life, and it’s scary as hell. Leaving everything behind, well that can be a revolution too. And, as I mentioned, there is an upside and a downside to everything. New stuff to write about, yet no one left to read and understand it.

I guess my point is, you can’t count too much on things to be constant. Not even *gasp* this blog. Because it just may let you down someday.

Anyhoo, I discovered the wonderful world of blogging, which makes it nice and easy for me to make updates and changes and stuff, which, by the way, is a good thing, since no one likes things that are difficult. No one.

So I’ll be trying to post up things periodically that may be of some interest to somebody, and maybe that somebody will turn out to be only me. Which is ok, because hey, I count. Sometimes. And at the very least  I’ll post random thoughts and events on this main page from time to time, and if someone reads them, well then so much the better!

Cool, so, enjoy and stuff.
Jared