But the reason I’m posting is that one particular passage really seems to resonate with me.  I’m leaving a lot out because I honestly don’t have the patience to type it all.  I suggest you read the book anyway, but hopefully this gives a sense of this particular passage:

“All kinds of things are happening to me,” I begin.  ”Some I chose, some I didn’t.  I don’t know how to tell one from the other anymore.”

…

“Listen, Kafka.  What you’re experiencing now is the motif of many Greek Tragedies.  Man doesn’t chose fate. Fate choses man.

…

And the sense of tragedy- according to Aristotle- comes, ironically enough, not from the protagonist’s weak points but from his good qualities.

…

People are drawn deeper into tragedy not by their defects but by their virtues.  Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex being a great example.  Oedipus is drawn into tragedy not because of laziness or stupidity, but because of his courage and honesty.  So an inevitable irony exists.

My life isn’t tragic or anything, but a lot of times it feels like I have no control over certain aspects, like situations chose me.  Call it fate if you must.  But the fact that I feel I have no control over situations is because I feel bound by my own sense of duty and responsibility.  Maybe if I didn’t have those “virtues” I’d be able to just do what truly makes me happy. It’s just an interesting concept to ponder.

Heather hasn’t been able to find a full time job, but she sporadically gets substituting jobs (which don’t really pay much.)  Money is tight.  I’m basically paycheck to paycheck.  It sucks working all the time and not having cash for hobbies or travel. (Not that I have the time for travel either).  I guess I should be happy that I have a job at all, considering where I live.  There are about to be a bunch of changes at the new company, so my hope is that somewhere in that commotion, I can come out ahead of where I am.

I haven’t been updating the blog like I’d like to.  I’ve been staying off of the internet at the new job, so I get my “fix” when I get home now.  I get home and kind of just “veg” out on the laptop, and haven’t really been inspired to update.  I never transitioned my little “idea” booklet over to this new job, but I plan on doing so starting tomorrow.  I had a couple of random ideas in there, but nothing worth noting.  My “commute” is much shorter now, so I’m not doing the Pimsleur Spanish on my way to work anymore.  I need to focus on the language learning if I want to ever make any real progress.

I just finished the Autobiography of Malcom X as told to Alex Haley.  It’s interesting and definitely worth the read.  I find people who can inspire change like that incredibly captivating.  I never knew much about Malcom X before reading the book. (To be honest, I kind of just knew him as a more militant Martin Luther King Jr., which was incredibly naive.)  I see why so many black Americans were drawn to him, and although stark and shocking, a lot of what he had to say was truthful.  The book has me rethinking some of my thoughts on religion.

I don’t believe in any organized religion.  I don’t think anything about them are literally true. (For example, I think Jesus existed, but I don’t think he had super powers.)  But at the same time I recognize how powerful a united belief can be in transforming a people.  I think unity in any form can be powerful, but when people are united on subjects such as eternal life or right and wrong, it seems to be a more powerful bond.  It can also instill positive habits and can genuinely benefit people, true or not.  Of course, religion can also be used for nefarious reasons as well: crusades, suicide bombings, imperialism in the name of savior, etc.  But I’m not so sure that those things wouldn’t happen without religion anyway.  If religion weren’t there to co-opt, those things would still happen, but just via plain old vanilla  nationalism (which can almost be religious in and of itself.)

The religion issue is something I’d like to explore more. There has to be a way to organize people to achieve the same benefits of religion while at the same time recognizing the fact that God likely doesn’t exist.  I guess there has to be some sort of thing to “believe” in for it to be unifying.  Maybe a group of people who just believe that living life in a certain manner will lead to a better life.  I guess that’s kind of what Buddhism is all about in a way.  I guess what I’m looking for is a group of people who believe in unity and positive actions for the sake of unity and positive actions – not because they believe they are being watched and judged by some supreme being.  Maybe this will be a subject of a future post when I gain some more perspective.

To change gears a little, I just discovered some new music that I absolutely love.  I was listening to my Black Keys station on Pandora and a song called “Stroker Ace” by Lovage came on.  I liked it enough to email myself the name of the song and group.  It’s from 2001, so I was in either 10th or 11th grade when it came out.   (It’s a shame I never knew music like this existed back then.)

I went and downloaded the entire album: Music to Make Love to Your Old Lady By. It’s awesome.  It’s very trip hoppy.  It’s kind of like a seedier, dirtier, Portishead. Almost like Goldfrap but not as polished? Maybe more organic.  It’s not just female vocals though; I don’t want to give off that impression.  It has a very methodical, driving feeling to it- I’m sure I’m going to play the crap out of it over the next week or so.

Anyway, that’s where my life has been the last month or three.  I have a lot of half-completed thoughts in my head.  I’m hoping to at least document them somewhere before they vanish into nothingness. Hopefully keeping the little book with me at all times will help there.

My methods are mostly boring, so I won’t talk much about them here.  They involve Pimsleur, Rosetta Stone, and various books.  One of the books is the Spanish version of “The Alchemist” by Paulo Cohello.  I also have and love the English version.  When I’m at the point where I’m not completely lost, I plan on going through it line by line, making sure I understand everything, grammar and all.  It’s kind of a self-immersion via book method I suppose.  If anyone reading this is interested in the book Cohello makes it freely available on his site in every translation available.  He does this in hopes that the book will spread and that anyone who likes the book will end up purchasing it anyway.  It’s an experiment in sharing/pirating and it can be found here. If you like it, buy it.

Something else that I’m doing is researching Spanish Music that I would like.  I’ve found TONS. It’s kind of funny thinking I’ve come along way with Spanish only to listen to a song and realize I only know a tiny handful of words. I tend to listen to a lot of House Music (electronic music in general actually) and a lot of the beats in Spanish music are right down my alley.  I have always been a “music person” in that I love all kinds and really let music take me away mentally and emotionally. A lot of the stuff I have been finding is really truly beautiful and unlike any English Speaking bands I know in terms of style.

I don’t even know what they are saying yet, but even if I never intended to learn Spanish, I think I’d still be downloading these artists’ albums

Belanova – Rosa Pastel

Ana Tijoux – 1977

Bebe – Pa Mi Casa

On a side note, I am now beginning to realize how frustrating YouTube must be for people outside of the U.S.  On multiple occasions, I’ve clicked on a video only to be told that it’s not available in my country or region.  First, I don’t understand why you wouldn’t want your video to be seen everywhere.  If you have justification for it to be seen in one country, wouldn’t that justification stand for any other country?  Secondly, I don’t understand why the videos even show up in searches and suggestions.  It seems like it would be easy enough to have them automatically filtered out of the results.

Anyway, that’s all for today.

¡Adios!

“Three to five years experience isn’t ‘entry level.’ I believe you meant to say ‘low paying.’”

“You state that all four items must be complete in order to be considered. I just wanted to point out that you actually listed six items.”

“It’s impossible to have 5 years experience with Office 2010.”

OK so I made the last one up, but it wouldn’t surprise me. Unfortunately none of the job posters ever respond to my emails.

This is more than just a productivity dilemma.  You see, I spend a good portion of my work day goofing off on the internet.  I spend a lot of time on reddit.com and the like.  I can not effectively alt+tab when I hear my boss’ footsteps coming if I can’t count on what I’m alt+tabbing into to load quickly. I need those rage comics and assorted memes off of my screen and I them off now.

So I decided to find another solution.  In comes Mozilla’s Thunderbird.  It functions much the same as Outlook. You do have to download a plugin to get calendar and task list functionality, but it’s really not difficult to do.  You can also download themes to change the programs looks.  But the biggest improvement for me is the speed.  Don’t get me wrong, it’s still sluggish in my work system.  But apparently it stores files differently than Outlook.  So far, it’s probably cut my loading and window switching times in half.  The interface is much cleaner as well.

In fact, it works so well that I’ve decided to use it with my personal email at home.  Unlike Outlook, Thunderbird is open source and free to use.  So if you want a good email/calendar/rss/task list app, and you don’t want to pay for it, Thunderbird is what you are looking for.  I have it synced with my personal GMail account, and I’ve even created a new email account specifically for this site: mike[at]theworldisawake.com.  It appears to be working flawlessly.

With the addition of another plugin, I’ve synced my Google Calendars with Thunderbird as well.  While I was at it, I even got my wife to create a calendar that we can both edit.  She immediately wrote in our next WoW raids, so now whenever I look at my phone, I can see which nights have already been planned for me.

Hopefully I’ll be able to incorporate it with the Getting Things Done system.  I just started reading the book last night and so far it seems promising.  I’ve having near meltdowns at work trying to manage my growing list of responsibilities.  But that’s another post.

The first thought I wrote down isn’t really true the more I think about it:

“Whenever anyone is being watched or followed in movies, it always seems like it’s always being done by a lone person, or by a group of people spread out.  Two or more people together would look less suspicious.”

The first part of that thought is incorrect; there are plenty of examples in movies where more than one person is taking part in the surveillance.  People in cars together with cameras,  teams of CIA agents trailing someone through the streets, or suited men sitting in cafes would be all good examples.  But I still contend that a lone surveillance person stands out like a sore thumb.

The reason I came to have this thought is because I spotted an official looking guy seated outside of a restaurant.  As I got closer, I realized that he was at the table with a woman and for some reason all of the “he’s on the job right now” vibes went away.

I’m sure the people who actually do that type of work are aware of that phenomenon, so this isn’t anything groundbreaking.  But it was something that popped into my head, so it made it into the notebook.  Hopefully if I keep writing these things down I will find something more meaningful to discuss.  In the meantime, look forward to a bunch of more random, probably meaningless, thoughts that pop in and out of my head throughout the day.