The long awaited return...

Haven't been on here in forever but who gives a shit? The lack of followers attests to that but whatever. I'll eventually get more I guess

So I'm in college now, going to class, behaving (yeah right), doing things I haven't done in a while or at all before. The biggest thing that I find is a problem isn't drinking, partying, illegal drug use, or women. I either am not involved in those or can handle them (I'll leave it up to the reader to find out which of those I'm not involved with). The biggest problem is sleep, the lack of it, and when to get it.

When it comes to girls, I'm where I usually am, on the edge of trouble. There are several I'm involved with and these are the problems associated with them.

In order to maintain their anonymity I'm going to avoid being to obvious with them.

Girl #1
She's really cute and sweet, has a lot of the traits of girls I've dated in the past and lacks many of the cons. She has other cons: too cute at times, a little odd, oh and she has a boyfriend. I've liked this girl for a while now and we've seen each other several times. Her boyfriend is an alright guy I guess except for the fact that she comes to me for consolation when he gets verbally violent and comes closer every time to becoming physically violent. Their highs are high and their lows are low. I don't want to be a hero so I hope it never comes to violence and she gets out unharmed. She is a long term goal.

Girl #2
She just came out of a long term relationship with a guy who turned out to be a dick from what I can tell. We hang out quite a bit and aside from a few stray kisses and one or two (or more) nights where I didn't come home till real late or maybe just the next morning nothing really serious is going on.

Girls #3 and #4

They're pretty much the same. I can't see any possibility of long term relationship. They're not my type at all. We hang out, party and maybe a little more together, but have a strict unspoken no attachement policy. We're just friends.

With all of them, especially number one, I feel weird hanging out with them. I don't know if it's guilt exactly or what it's about. With number one it's obvious that I feel a little guilty about hanging out with her when she has another guy and just waiting for him to screw up. I know what it's like to be the other guy just screwing up enough for her to go for the backup. Because he has days where he treats her like shit, I don't feel nearly that bad.

I feel worst about the thought of a long term relationship because I've noticed that I have an expiration date where all my charm dries up and I start acting like a douche bag. I'm working on that because I don't want to sink a ship and take someone down with me again. Also, miscommunication is a big problem there. Maybe I'm just trying to forget, maybe I'm just trying to learn how to not screw up and lose something that matters that much to me anymore. I find I push relationships to the point where they're all but impossible to recover.

My biggest enemy is my own mouth.

I'm never speaking up again

It only hurts me

I'd rather be a mystery

Than she desert me

Sleep.... mmmm...

Sleeping is weird, I don't get enough sleep, and when I do, it's because I sleep at really odd hours. ROTC isn't helping because I have to get up really early and PT some mornings. The actual working out isn't very difficult at all. I just hate getting up at 0530. I sleep at random intervals during the day whenever I can and then I stay up all night.

Studying
Studying is a little rough at times, but none of my classes are that difficult.

I'll finish this later with a second post, but for now, Chick-fil-a calls me. Yum.

Eddie Floyd...

I don't want to lose you, this good thing

that I got cause if I do

I will surely surely lose a lot

cause your love is better than any love I know

it's like thunder and lightning

the way you love me is frightening

you better knock, knock on wood, baby

Why do Americans still dislike atheists?

Long after blacks and Jews have made great strides, and even as homosexuals gain respect, acceptance and new rights, there is still a group that lots of Americans just don’t like much: atheists. Those who don’t believe in God are widely considered to be immoral, wicked and angry. They can’t join the Boy Scouts. Atheist soldiers are rated potentially deficient when they do not score as sufficiently “spiritual” in military psychological evaluations. Surveys find that most Americans refuse or are reluctant to marry or vote for nontheists; in other words, nonbelievers are one minority still commonly denied in practical terms the right to assume office despite the constitutional ban on religious tests.

Rarely denounced by the mainstream, this stunning anti-atheist discrimination is egged on by Christian conservatives who stridently — and uncivilly — declare that the lack of godly faith is detrimental to society, rendering nonbelievers intrinsically suspect and second-class citizens.

Is this knee-jerk dislike of atheists warranted? Not even close.

A growing body of social science research reveals that atheists, and non-religious people in general, are far from the unsavory beings many assume them to be. On basic questions of morality and human decency — issues such as governmental use of torture, the death penalty, punitive hitting of children, racism, sexism, homophobia, anti-Semitism, environmental degradation or human rights — the irreligious tend to be more ethical than their religious peers, particularly compared with those who describe themselves as very religious.

Consider that at the societal level, murder rates are far lower in secularized nations such as Japan or Sweden than they are in the much more religious United States, which also has a much greater portion of its population in prison. Even within this country, those states with the highest levels of church attendance, such as Louisiana and Mississippi, have significantly higher murder rates than far less religious states such as Vermont and Oregon.

As individuals, atheists tend to score high on measures of intelligence, especially verbal ability and scientific literacy. They tend to raise their children to solve problems rationally, to make up their own minds when it comes to existential questions and to obey the golden rule. They are more likely to practice safe sex than the strongly religious are, and are less likely to be nationalistic or ethnocentric. They value freedom of thought.

While many studies show that secular Americans don’t fare as well as the religious when it comes to certain indicators of mental health or subjective well-being, new scholarship is showing that the relationships among atheism, theism, and mental health and well-being are complex. After all, Denmark, which is among the least religious countries in the history of the world, consistently rates as the happiest of nations. And studies of apostates — people who were religious but later rejected their religion — report feeling happier, better and liberated in their post-religious lives.

Nontheism isn’t all balloons and ice cream. Some studies suggest that suicide rates are higher among the non-religious. But surveys indicating that religious Americans are better off can be misleading because they include among the non-religious fence-sitters who are as likely to believe in God, whereas atheists who are more convinced are doing about as well as devout believers. On numerous respected measures of societal success — rates of poverty, teenage pregnancy, abortion, sexually transmitted diseases, obesity, drug use and crime, as well as economics — high levels of secularity are consistently correlated with positive outcomes in first-world nations. None of the secular advanced democracies suffers from the combined social ills seen here in Christian America.

More than 2,000 years ago, whoever wrote Psalm 14 claimed that atheists were foolish and corrupt, incapable of doing any good. These put-downs have had sticking power. Negative stereotypes of atheists are alive and well. Yet like all stereotypes, they aren’t true — and perhaps they tell us more about those who harbor them than those who are maligned by them. So when the likes of Glenn Beck, Sarah Palin, Bill O’Reilly and Newt Gingrich engage in the politics of division and destruction by maligning atheists, they do so in disregard of reality.

As with other national minority groups, atheism is enjoying rapid growth. Despite the bigotry, the number of American nontheists has tripled as a proportion of the general population since the 1960s. Younger generations’ tolerance for the endless disputes of religion is waning fast. Surveys designed to overcome the understandable reluctance to admit atheism have found that as many as 60 million Americans — a fifth of the population — are not believers. Our nonreligious compatriots should be accorded the same respect as other minorities.

Gregory Paul and Phil Zuckerman

Prom Today

Songs of the Day:

Ridin' Solo

Jason Derülo

Symphony #9 In E Minor, Op. 95, Adagio, Allegro Molto and Largo

Dvořák

Well, prom's today and that's a scary thought. It's my first time, and I can't wait. I'll be going with my lovely girlfriend Katie DB. If you want the details, just read her blog.

I went out to her grandparent's house which is, like Katie said, out in the boonies. Just driving down their driveway though, you get a sense of how beautiful the place is. You follow the twists and turns through the woods until you can tell you're getting closer to the house. Flowers are blooming everywhere and the air feels alive. I went out on their porch when I was there, and I was speechless at the view. The house overlooks a shallow valley that is heavily landscaped. I'm told that there were around 600 trees in addition to the many already there before the mother's day tornadoes a while back. Now, the effect of the valley is magnified because of the tall trees on the surrounding hills.

We're having dinner and camping in one of the many gardens, and I'm about to leave to help set up right now. It'll be beautiful and fun.

Bye for now

My quest to learn how to tie a bow-tie.

It's either a lot harder than it looks, or I'm just uncoordinated...

It's probably the latter rather than the former. I need to go ahead and learn how to do this before Friday, senior breakfast. So now I'm consulting several tutorials and infographic charts...

We'll see how this goes. Hopefully, it'll go well because I love bow-ties and want to try to 'pull it off'.

My first couple of tries were rather unsuccessful...

My first tutorial was this one by monkeyseevideos: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ws0g31zufr0

The guy in the video seems pretty dapper and know's what he's talking about. He uses a pretty simple and quick method, but the video is a bit too quick for me... I'm a slow learner, especially when it comes to tying knots (I was a terrible boy scout)

The next video came from Howcast (a personal favorite), the providers of many how to services to men like the 'How to Undo Her Bra with One Hand' video, the 'How to Tell Real Breasts from Fake" video and many more.

This video was very interesting but I was a little distracted...

Here is "How to Tie a Bow Tie (with Playboy)": http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jbvjaUGiM4A&feature=fvsr

Finally, I checked out the aptly named "How to Tie a Bow Tie" from Howdini: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vui9Lzg7o_Q&NR=1&feature=fvwp

In the end I was despaired and kept messing up. The end part, where you make a second bow with the short end of the tie, was confusing. But eventually...

Success...

Don't believe a word...

We live in a pretty bleak world. Not many recording artists still know how to eloquently address world issues...

Thanks to my APUSH and Sociology teacher, who is pretty cool I guess, I have been enlightened to the apostolic lyrics of Third Eye Blind. I love their music and can't wait till their next album comes out.

Here's "Don't Believe a Word" - Third Eye Blind

Oh well, I'll be posting more later, especially when I'm done with all of my finals and papers...

QvZ