The Sound of Settling

Our youth is fleeting,
Old age is just around the bend.
And I can't wait to go gray.


And I'll sit and wonder
Of every love that could've been
If I'd only thought of something charming to say.

I think I've forgotten

what it's like to like someone and be liked by that someone at the same time. Crap.

So it just hit me how much work I (1) didn't do over the Thanksgiving break that I was planning on doing, and (2) how much work that means I have to do this week to make sure I'm on top of things.

It'll feel so good to get it all done though, which is the only motivation I can find to actually get the work done.

Why nice guys finish last

I know you all probably have your own opinions on the topic. Here's mine. Of course this will include a lot of generalizations that may or may not apply to the reader, but honestly I don't care :) It also very much applies to everyone, guys and girls alike.

This also stems from things I've heard from a bunch of different sources, so this isn't new stuff by any means. Just a sad truth.

Here's basically what I typed into my phone when this thought came to my mind (again):

Kindness can come off as weakness. Jerk guys are seen as more confident and make a girl feel like she needs to work to make him want her. It's like a challenge. And it is intriguing. Someone who is nice and shows interest is too easy to obtain. There's no challenge. People like what they can't/don't have. So it forces guys to play a game where, even if he is interested in someone, he has to hide it and practically show apathy towards a girl. It's like a hook. When he does finally ask her out, she can feel accomplished, as if she "won him over."

However a guy who is a jerk (DB) never lets a girl get to the point of completely winning him over, but gives her just enough to make her feel like she is making progress. This is why some girls stay with jerks for a long time and overlook the bad things about the relationship (lack of respect, no heightened sense of self-esteem, or even abuse in more serious cases) because they feel like he is changing.

I'm not the only one to think of this

And it's so dumb to me that books like this teach women to play hard-to-get for the exact same reason: people want what they don't/can't have.

The game sucks. Nice guys finish last. The end.

I'm sorry, but...

1. "Separation of church and state," I believe, is very much NOT the same thing as "separation of religion/religious values and The United States of America." Check your context and stop taking everything so literally, people.

2. Even if "separation of church and state" DID mean a separation of religious values and the U.S., it cannot be used as an argument against Prop 8!;If you want so desperately to separate church and state, how can you argue that a church-instituted ceremony like marriage must necessarily be allowed to those not affiliated with the church? They're separate, remember? Keep church things in the church, right? I guess only when it's convenient? To me it's like saying that it is wrong to only allow baptism to those who believe in the church they are being baptized into. Or only allowing worthy LDS members to enter the temple.

3. Something is seriously wrong when the opinion of one person can overturn the majority opinion of millions of people. This whole overturning decisions thing is also the very reason things happened in my family the way they did, and why people I know are in prison for things they didn't do because a judge somewhere with little experience in the case based a single-blow K.O. decision on unsubstantiated evidence.

Here's a Washington Post opinion article about it

K, it's out of my system now. Time to go boating.

Why Soccer Sucks

1. They don't review the plays. All this technology we have now, and they won't look to see what really happened. Instead, much of the outcome of the game relies on what the refs think they saw in the mass of players on the field. Here's my point illustrated:





Oh yeah, I forgot you can get called for a hand ball when it hits you in the cheek. That makes sense.

2. Soccer players are the biggest pansies in the world. Here's my point illustrated a few times:





There's tons of other videos like that.

3. How much time is left?? Today in the USA - Slovenia game, it reached the 90 minute mark and the officials added 3 minutes to the game. Then just before the 3 minutes were up, someone got injured (or so they made everyone believe. See #2.) and they played until about 94:25 or so until one of the officials blew the whistle. The announcers didn't even know if that was a whistle that signified the end of the game. What a joke!

4. There's an exciting moment every, what? Ten minutes? Good grief. That's like worse than watching baseball. (Ohh it's a pop fly! It's going to deep center! It's going.... going... oh no wait, it was caught. That's just another out, same as all the other ones.)

Sorry soccer (football) fans, but your sport sucks. The only cool thing about it is that so many people all over the world like it, which creates a vortex of cyclical confusion in my mind.

Garbage

So BYU's L'Oreal Brandstorm team went to good ol' NYC to blow away the other schools in the National L'Oreal Brandstorm competition.

Unfortunately the world has gone to trash. The challenge: to create a new line of men's beauty product through Diesel. BYU's product line "Immortal" only got 2nd place to NYU's line "Foreplay." That's right, foreplay. It's a product that is basically a cologne/perfume for your not-so-public parts.

Everyone at the competition said BYU had the best presentation. Diesel was sold on NYU's willingness to push the limit. Now, I wasn't there and couldn't really say anything definitively, but from what I've heard (from a biased group, of course, but still...) it sounds like Diesel overlooked a lot of things from BYU's team simply because NYU dared to go where they did.

Gross. On the positive side, I heard that NYU's business school's dean told the NYU team he hoped BYU's team wouldn't walk out on their presentation because it was so raunchy.

Diesel is a gross brand anyway. I learned that first hand while preparing my own case study/product line a few months ago.

Unmotivation

A quick note about the following: it is one of my least favorite things about myself, so I feel a bit vulnerable writing this.

I haven't felt as unmotivated in a long time as I do today. It's a constant battle I always seem to have to fight, but at some point or another, I always seem to have days where I'm just not motivated at all.

Things that propel my unmotivation:

• Everyone else seems to be better at everything that is useful. I am not really excellent at anything.
• I struggle to find things that interest me. I just don't care about anything. Actually, what I should say is that I feel like I don't care about anything. Disinterest plagues me.
• I'm forgetful. The more I forget to do, the more I feel like I am unreliable. The more unreliable I feel I am, the less interest I have in doing anything because I feel like I will just fail.
• I feel like the things I learn in my classes are the "easy way out." Maybe (hopefully) all that really means is that I understand principles of advertising/marketing naturally, and that I'll be good at it for however long I actually am in that field. At the same time, I just feel like other people are learning much more sophisticated things in their majors, and it makes me feel less educated. But I'm not interested in those other things enough to actually study them.
• I'm lazy. It seems like I have no problem going out and getting my errands done, but I cannot, for the life of me, get anything else that I should be getting done, done.

I keep thinking about what my Comms 230 professor said about being a scholar vs. being a student, and I can't help but realize that I'm just a student. I can't bring myself to care enough about something to learn about it in my spare time. Nor can I bring myself to do my homework because I want to be better prepared for the world. Nor have I been able to search for/apply for internships or get involved the way I know I should be.

That's all for now. I just needed to get my thoughts written out. Hopefully my next post about my personal theme for 2010 will be more optimistic/less depressing.