Category: General Life

What is the real purpose for sex in our society? How has the way we view sex changed over the past few hundred years? From the coldest and most technical definition sex is for the purpose of procreation. Why do we as a society shield our children from how they came into being? Sex is considered by some people to be a very natural and wonderful thing, while others (most) feel it is something to hide and keep in the unknown. It is obvious from the amount of masterbation that occurs in our society that sex is a thing of pleasure, not just purely procreational. There are very few males that I know who don’t masterbate. Some do it just a few times a week, others do it many times per day. It is pleasurable to them with no chance of anyone becoming pregnant. One of the things I find strange in sexuality is that some people view raw, instinct provoked, animal-like sex to be the “purest” and “most beautiful” form of sex. I personally find it disgusting and a little on the barbaric side. We are in a society that values refinement and dignified ways of handling things. We as humans are supposed to have some amount of self control and not have the need to go around humping on each other all day when the urge strikes us. In my world sex should be something that is at least semi-planned between two (or more) adults who have some capacity of caring for each other, not just to satisfy a sexual desire.
One of the worst topics that can be covered in academic discussion is “abnormal sexuality”. In order to have an abnormal there must be an established norm. How many people have sex in only the form of heterosexual vaginal intercourse? Not as many as would try to claim it im sure. Homosexuality, Heterosexuality and Bisexuality are all normal, but just not to everyone. Those 3 (or 2, since one is a variation of the others) are about as simple and normal as you will find. It is when we probe the depths of all of these variations and begin to look into the different fetishisms and other related interests that exist that we find a maze of different things that people find to be sexually gratifying. The normally thought of things are revealing linguere, and mild bondage. All of which still involve some amount of interaction with the primary sexual desires and the “want” of sexual beings to interact with their partner’s sexual organs. Some things that aren’t so normal or so thought of in the normal relam of sexuality are things like footwear fetishes, things that involve pain and the more drastic dominance and submission based relationships. Can any of us truely say that these things are not normal or aren’t acceptable? With the way this culture tends to do, does it even matter? If we as a society don’t care about what goes on in other peoples’ bedrooms, then why is it such a problem for someone to be openly homosexual? Being homosexual isn’t a direct admission to participating in anal sex with another male, or whatever it is that lesbians to. It is possible to be homosexual/gay/queer/faggish while being a virgin. It is the same as most normal teen guys who are virgins to be considered “straight” even though they haven’t “gotten any”. It is my opinion that it is better to be homosexual than to be someone who hates everyone and abuses women (or men). Perhaps the problem in this world with all of these tenancies towards violence, backstabbing bussiness manuevers and other assorted issues of ill ethic is that several very natural forms of love are being supressed, some violently. Before you southern baptist bible thumping convervatives decide to put me on your list of people to be burned at the stake (or have you backwards hethens converted to lethal injection?) and added to your email list for your supposed reasons why homosexuality isn’t natural, look around you. Dogs have no serious predispostion to either gender, they take what they can get when they get the urge. The thing that annoys me most about the southern baptist clan against homosexuality is that they love to screw with the facts, draw pictures of events occuring where none did. I don’t put much faith into a religious group who has a large number of people who wish to kill or do servere harm to fellow humans because of who they love. There is a select group amoung the religion who are ignorant of the truth about what homosexuality actually involves and don’t show any hate towards anyone. They follow the real word of God (the one that carries a message of love all living beings). I am of the opinion that real Christians don’t seek out members of any group for any reason with the purpose of scaring, hurting or killing them. In this world it is fine to disagree with opinions, ways of doing things or whatever, and you can dislike someone because they are short, have blond hair or whatever you want, but nothing in this society should trigger the need to kill. I think I was near a point before the image of an angry southern baptist bubba popped into my head.
Sexuality is one of those topics that is about as cloudy as origins of the universe and the reason why humans are truely existing on this planet. We all have our own definition of what sexuality is, and what love is. Love is actually very underdefined in our culture. When we were moving from older languages (Latin, Greek, etc) we certainly fucked that up. How did we loose such an important concept? There is more that one type of love and in English all we have is love, LOVE, love, love and love [insert cute little tennis ball icon here]. Greeks had many clearly defined words for love, one for a brotherly, a friendly love, an erotic love and a purely sexual love that was mostly empty (can you guess with one 9 out of 10 college frat guys reccomend?).
In a weird twist to this entry, lets analyze the actions of some of the most macho of straight guys…jocks. The things that go on in a locker room could probably be applied to about 10 shades of sexual harrasment, homosexual activity and pure cruelty. Jocks participate in ass slapping, wet towl snaps, wedgie giving and things like that. There are also other things that go on that are less violent and more normal, such as when football players take time to hug each other and show affection through other forms of bodily contact. One of the weirdest straight guy obsessions has to be the need to inflict pain upon the testicles of other guys. What is up with this? Does it take knocking someone’s nuts to establish pure manlyness or something? Jocks are a central figure of another aspect of sexuality. Jocks are the most physically fit of people, therefore they are natureally more attractive to women and idolized most by men (and the opposite). The key to most of the diet and excercise enterprises is the focus on the rock hard six pack abs. Abs are the most central and most relied upon group of muscles in the body, everyone either wants great abs or wants to be sexually involved with someone with them. Its a weird obsession that centers upon humanity’s goal of becoming more perfect and being based upon the strongest and most reslient of the species.
All of you are probably wondering what got me started on this, as far as I can tell it was started by a combination of my reading for Abnormal Psychology and the closeted nature of one of my gay friends, even though he has met a guy he thinks might be gay and is attracted to. Sometimes it takes guts and balls to approach things like that, but if everyone in this world wants to be happy it has to happen. I
I leave you all with this thought: In order for your world to more perfect, someone elses must be more scrambled and confusing.

California has their earthquakes, midwest has their tornados, we, the wonderful east coast of the United States have hurricanes. In a normal year we barely recognize the fact that they occur. The spin up, live for a few days, blow some stuff around and then they go away. This year is a little odd. We are having about a hurricane per week and we are getting tons of rain, some wind and other assorted goodies from these massive thunderstorms. I used to not mind when the occasional hurricane would blow by my way, but now I have a 33 mile commute each direction each day. This is not fun in rain and wind, especially not with the way I drive.
Hurricane Ivan’s eye passed on to land at about 2:45am, I didn’t know this until about 11AM when I woke up and found myself glued to Weather Channel. Storms are more interesting when they will be passing by your way and possibly be causing problems in your life. I personally do not want any more rain. When I go to class I have to go outside and between buildinds that don’t share a common covering.
I just came back from a particularly long and confusing physics lab, at this point with the hurricane coming closer to us I am contemplating returning home early. I still have another hour left until my next class. It would take extra time to get home from this point because of the excess traffic, but I am starting to think that it would be safer than attempting to wait until late tonight after the rain gets heavy to return. I will decide in a few minutes what my course of action under these conditions will be. I can get just as much out of my Psychology notes that the instructor posts to the web as I can from being in class, so the benefits of staying on campus are not currently justified in the entire safety to education equation.
There is supposed to be rain for the next several days, im not looking forward to it and I would like to return to my nice calm days of summer again. On that same thought, I miss my CPCC classes now. I didn’t even have to leave my bed to take those classes, just do the assignments online and have no physical class to attend. That method would be bad for me though, I need to be out here in the world and be around people near my own age, at least closer than my parents who are currently acting about 5 and 90.
I guess I should do something productive, like revise a draft or analyse a nut…ooooh…chocolate, Ive got things to do I think….

Why do the developers of MovableType give me the Title field? My entries are usually about my life, from some aspect or another. Today’s entry was sort of planned, but has not a central theme to use for the title. GITI’s Journal utility, which is used for my personal journal (sorry to burst anyone’s bubble, but I dont put my deepest thoughts in my blog), uses only dates to file entries.
I was informed this morning that my father will be working nights this week. I was initially agitated by the news because it usually means more interaction between me and him is required. I realized something though, for most of the week I will be leaving while he is still in bed and then when I come home he will be gone at least until I am in bed. Friday I will be arriving a few minutes after he leaves and have the house to myself for several hours. This should actually be a very calm and peaceful week if all plans are followed correctly.
In my technological world some unexpected (but controlled) shake ups are occuring. I have decided that GITI has a great deal of functional completeness and at this point doesn’t really any more code to be stable and functional, because of this I will be focusing on creating a new interface for GITI. Background code will likely remain the same, but the front end will change drasticly, starting with the implementation of CSS. As of 3:45PM this afternoon GITI version 1.0, front end, back end, and database were stored to a backup directory. This is in anticipation of the pending changes to GITI as a whole. It is unlikely that I will do a complete rollback of GITI, but depending on what I do to it, it may be required that both a development and stable version run at the same time. I remember a time in my life (August 2003) when GITI wasn’t required and was just a development project for me to work on. Now I rely on GITI for my daily functioning, especially in an academic sense. For GITI’s new interface I plan to make it smoother, less framed and somehow not square. I used to pride myself on the fact that any HTTP 1.1 compatible browser could read GITI and interpret it correctly. This was a nice little fantasy, but sometimes technology needs to grow up and developers need to work with what is availible to them. At this point my standard will be verifying that IE and FireFox both can work with GITI correctly. I use FireFox at home because I like it and IE in campus labs, because I have to. This project should be a nice little adventure for me to take on.

With the way things in my life have been lately, me being out of the house and in class or other locations constantly it is time for me to rededicate my commitment to my body. Over two years ago(May 2002) I began a series of life changes to make me into a more acceptable me, based on my standards. During the 2002 summer my weight changed from 185 to 135 in just a few weeks, due to me feeling fat, ugly and generally unhealthy. The 135 weight was abnormal and didn’t last very long, I bounced up to 145 where I stayed for a while. This year after some growing and muscle gain I am now to 150. When I look at myself I still see myself as unacceptable and fat. I have been trying to convince myself that my weight is normal and that nothing is wrong with me. During early Summer 2004 I discovered the true problem, I lack muscle mass in key areas, such as the abs.
I have been working on my abs and other muscles on and off for the past few months, but I think it is time for me to commit to the task and actually take on the mission seriously and develop some muscle. I have no intention of letting my Freshman-15 be because of fat intake. At some point in the next 5 days I am going to establish an official daily schedule for my life which will include time slots for exercise and other tasks that I need to complete during my days. This level of organization will help me stay focused on my current goals. I have committed myself to a project similar to this before and succeded. I can and will do it again!
Let the crunches begin!

No matter where you are, there you are. I fairly decent day today, up until now. I was with my best friend, Chris, for most of the day, but now I am back home. I find myself feeling very alone at the moment. A combination of being alone and my lack of sleep from this morning is leaving me feeling very depressed right now. Everyone I attempt to have a conversation with is either not responding or is on their way to going to bed. Tried calling Chris to talk to him for a few minutes, that didn’t work. I don’t know what is up with him at the moment, may be the same thing as me, or may be doing something logical like sleeping (as I should be doing). It is 2:15am, I have no valid reason for being awake at this time. I should be sleeping and not worrying about stuff that is going on with my external world or the worlds of my friends and other associated people.
Somehow I just don’t feel like I can go to sleep at this point of my night. My friend Jake in California and I are having issues at the moment, and there is presently a problem left unresolved between me and my parents. This type of stuff just isn’t designed to wait until morning to be resolved. I can’t resolve any of it tonight because my parents are in bed and Jake is being cold and closed minded. I can’t go down my messenger lists much farther before I hit the bottom of the barrel for people to talk to. I feel like I just need someone to talk to before I sleep, I guess tonight it will be just me and my blog. I guess I am done now, im going to bed.

I left UNCC at 2PM on Friday and I don’t have to be back until 6PM on Tuesday. I visited with family on Friday afternoon and into the evening. On Saturday I didn’t do much at all, sort of recovered from my week. Today has just really begun for me, ive only been awake for about 3 hours. Today I will likely work on doing some stuff that is due in my classes next week.
Last night I was talking to Chris on the phone and I realized how much I immitate his behavior in certain areas, such as the way we deal with defective computer equipment or the reactions we have to certain events in our lives. I don’t mind this that much, but it is kinda weird how it has started happening without me noticing. Both of us are very excentric at times, but perfectly calm at other times. There are so many times when I am glad that I found a friend like him, there aren’t many like him.
As I mentioned in an earlier entry, college causes a lot of changes in a person’s life. This was made disturbingly clear to me this weekend when I was talking to Matt Lamb. Matt has always been the quiet guy who does nothing wrong and is the perfect straight A student. This image of him was changed dramatically this weekend when I was informed that he was upset because there were no good parties on campus and he couldn’t find any decent alchohol. I instantly found myself reevaluation my previous perceptions of his personality and strength of character. In reevaluating I had to remind myself that people are dynamic and not everyone is as anal as I am about living a clean and healthy life. From birth I have been constantly trained to do what is healthy, right, ethical or proper. In this training the aspect of allowing for some amount of fun and experimentation/exploration was left out. I am too stable, too normal and perhaps too boring as a person as a result. I find myself at times wishing to change the way things are with me, but find that I only come out of my pre-trained shell when forced, and even then it is just temporary.
For so many years I have done only what is required or scheduled for me. Now I am in a situation where I have control of my own life more than I ever have in the past, it is going to take time for me to learn to deal with this in a correct mannor. In the past year everything I have done during my day has been scheduled in GITI. It probably is neither safe nor sane to have every detail of my life electronicly recorded and planned like this.
Until the next unscheduled blog…im out.

Current Musical Selection: Garth Brooks – Standing Outside the Fire
Tonight is one of those nights where I have multiple moments of contemplation about various events in my life. For the first time in nearly 4 months it is NOT about academic related things. I am focused primarily on the organization in my life. I tend to have order, structure and organization when I have a manageable amount of stuff to deal with, but I somehow always end up with clutter, missing things and paper trails everywhere. Is it worth it to attempt organization even with so many previous events making it seem like it is a pointless and impossible battle with fate? (feel free to use the comments function).
Another thing on my mind is the lack of social interaction I have in my daily life. I have a small network of friends that I rely on when I am not in class or out doing something else. Tonight a very limited amount of the network, 1 person, was actually availible and that person seemed very busy. Perhaps the time has arrived for me to spread my social wings and take flight myself, without my safety line of my limited network. For healthy human survival communication must exist. The intellectual stimulation of communication is required for humans to have sufficient cognitive development to be self sustaining organizims. I know these facts, but yet still can’t convince myself that I need to find more friends and be more social. Since I have graduated my extended social network has been severed, everyone I know is somewhere else, and the ones who haven’t left me seem to be pulling away from me. The graduation proccess includes a lot of changes, including the relationships between people. The relationship between academic and social interaction has always existed (i know i said i wasn’t in an academic, this is my blog i can deviate if i want to). As the peak of an academic scenario occurs, so do the friendships associated with it. We then move on once graduation/commencement is over. Starting a new academic career has strange effects on social interaction. In my observation there is an odd period where a group of strangers who registered for the same course section gradually changes into becoming familiar with each other, even the Freshmen or their equivilents (yes, im a First Year Sophomore, got a problem with it?). Friday and today I myself felt like I was being accepted by a few people from each of my classes. I noticed some initial attempts by some people to talk to me early on Friday, but didn’t really pay much attention to it. This morning it finally hit me and I began to recall my “training” from Interpersonal Communication. I started with some basic strategies for initiating relationships, eye contact, reciprocity of verbal communication, etc. With me what is odd is that I am perfectly comfortable overhearing someone’s coversations, and then butting in with a response to some type of problem the communication partners is having, but starting a conversation is like sitting in a dentist chair. Last week this occured with two freshmen females that couldn’t locate Colvard. Due to my overpreperation for navigational catastrophe I was able to direct the two to their desired destination. In some ways I feel light an outsider on the campus, but sometimes when I sit down and relax somewhere on campus I begin to feel like I do belong on campus.
Its funny how music can change your personality in a very short time. I opened on one song with a specific topic for this entry, but i have found myself deviating with several musical changes behind me.
I was talking to Guy earlier and we were discussing blogs and the level of publicity we wished them to have. We both agree that we like for ours to be public, but not listed in any type of directory. The ability for a mysterious stranger to come upon our blogs doesn’t bother us, but a directed audience does.