In which nothing much happened

I just felt compelled to post another post so that my post count can go up to 333, only half evil.

OK, so what's going on? Been working, the amazing thing that happened when I started working was that I lost all impulse to buy things. When I don't have money I want to buy lots of things, when I do I don't wanna buy anything. All in all it's a good thing.

How's work? Well, it's work, I spent most of the time in competition with the customers to see who's gonna be the first to say "Hi, how are you?". It's ridiculous really because they always say "I'm well thank you" then proceed to tell me they have this horrible migraine that kept them from sleeping. What kind of "well" is that? How about me? I'm well thank you, well, apart from losing all of what little motivation I have to do anything productive I'm very well.

So what I really feel about my job is that it can do with a lot, a LOT of excitement. I don't hate it, especially after I've seen this picture.

So You Think Your Job Stinks

Yup, there definitely are worse jobs.

Something quite hilarious did happen to me, albeit not on the job, someone called me a "faggot" the other day. That was interesting, I've never in my life expected to be called a faggot. Who would call someone they don't know, whom they have never seen before in their live, names, that can't even be applied since last time I checked I don't have a Y chromosome? You know the answer: stupid freaking idiotic idiots. Pardon the redundancy, I wanted to express the frantic eye-rolling-inducing effect these idiots had on me. At the time I wanted to give them the finger, but I didn't, I'm just chicken civilised like that. I had a good laugh afterward though. Idiots.

How's your holiday going so far? I guess since you take time to read this you're probably bored out of your brain right? I can understand, if I had other things better to do I wouldn't read this anyway. Good news for you is that since you've made it this far down the post, here's a little something something for you: another ten-song mix. You know the drill, download and unrar. How was the last mix? I know a whopping number of people downloaded it. Three to be exact. Count that, 3, you can count it on one hand! (sorry about the sarcasm, I've been reigning it in at work so now it just busted out when I'm off work).

Download

And last but not least, funny quote of the week (the Alarmist thought it was funny).
You know why you should not buy a MacBook? Because you're not gonna be able to cope and you're gonna have to ask me to help you and I won't have time to do that.
- Me dispensing wisdom on laptop choices to the Alarmist.
________________________________________________
I used to dream about saving the world
Now I just dream about the holidays

tagged

I've been tagged by Jacob over at Bent My Wookie on the subject of "Five Quotations that I like". First of all I have to say that I don't like being tagged. It's too much work. I'm lazy and I don't like to think more than I have to.


The last time I was tagged it was something about a list of books that change your life or something along that line. And of course I didn't do that. I read a lot but all the books that I read are for entertainment only and I definitely don't want to display my taste in books for everyone to see. What if Gone with the wind is among my books that change my life list? (I'm not saying that it is ok? I said if). Someone would die laughing at that.

Besides, participating in this tagging business is sort of conforming. I don't have a problem with conformists, I don't. What I do have a problem with is doing the act of conforming myself. Once you conform, you're open for comparison. It's like once you write down the list of whatever and tag somebody else, sooner or later someone will think to themselves: "my list is better than yours, your list sucks". I don't like comparing or being compared because every time I do I would get seriously jealous and then depressed or my ego would be blown up to the size that it can block out the sun and reduce global warming. Usually the former happens.

----begin off-topic----

I have to go off-topic for a bit here, this is a great time to share another of my personal "how to be positive" notes:
Don't frakking compare yourself to anybody.

----end off-topic----

I know not everybody goes around comparing themselves to other people. I think it's sort of an Asian thing. Don't blame me, blame my parents. I was brought up on comparisons. Why can't you be like your older sister? Why can't you be just as good as your cousin? Why did your friend get 100% on that test and you only get 97%? Seriously, Asian parents should go to Antarctica to chill.

It's sort of hard not doing something you were brought up to do, but hey I'm happy so I guess I'm making progress with not comparing myself to anyone. But I still don't like conforming. Not in the same sense as when emo kids say they don't like conforming. What I meant was I don't like to be so predictable that I can be pigeonholed.

With that said, here goes my list of quotes that I like. I guess I'm doing something that's quite unpredictable because, believe it or not, I started this post not wanting to list anything. I guess you can be unpredictably predictable.

The world is going to end and when it does, something will happen that has never happened before.
---Beauregard, The Muppet Show

God has no place within these walls, just as facts have no place within organized religion.
-- Superintendent Chalmers, The Simpsons

Facts are meaningless. You could use facts to prove anything that's even remotely true!
-- Homer Simpson

Anyone who can worship a trinity and insist that his religion is a monotheism can believe anything ... just give him time to rationalize it.
-- Robert A Heinlein, from Job: A Comedy of Justice

If I was any more open-minded [...], my whole brain would fall out.
-- Buffy

That's it, please don't compare. And to end this unpredictably predictable on an, well, unpredictable note, I will not tag anybody (and it's not because I don't have anybody to tag).

How to be positive

Back in July last year I did this post on ... well, I'm not sure what it was on actually. It got started because of an article about angry atheists then I moved on to talk about North Korea and Israel. I ended up talking about the-glass-is-half-full blogs. The strange thing is that was the most searched for post I've ever written.

If you're expecting some literary masterpiece then don't click on the link to that post. The post was awful, even the synopsis I gave above sounds bad. What attracts people to that post was the phrase "how to be positive". If I'm one of those really negative people who got the link to that post I would probably put my blog in the never-ever-visit-this-blog-again list. I don't suppose anyone find any positive help from my tip on being positive. I wasn't trying to intentionally direct search engine results to my blog, here's one example when I was actually trying to achieve that feat.

To rectify that fortuitous manipulation of my dear friend Google, here's the real tip to be positive straight from the 3vil g3nius: look elsewhere, preferably real professional help. If you're thinking "no can do" then I suggest Nine Inch Nails music, that has always been my negativeness-bane ever since I discovered NIN. It wouldn't make you feel extremely positive though, just less negative.

I did try to do a simple dot point list at the start of last month when I borrowed this stack of self-help books to read. One thing I learn from that experience: self-help books don't help with anything except wasting time. The pieces of wisdom on how to be positive I got from those books are:
- Think positively
- Don't think negatively
- Happiness is only a state of mind
- Do things that make you happy
- Tomorrow is a new day

My response to all those? DUUH! It's kinda hard to think positively or not think negatively when you're depressed to the point of slashing your wrists and say "goodbye cruel world", is it not? And the umpteenth examples of how slightly depressed people, whose names have been changed to protect their identities, overcame their negativeness do not help with anything. Me thinks those people are just figments of the authors' collective imagination.

After reading all those books, or rather the first 2 books and skimming through the rest of those extremely similar books I can say that the experience is positively negative and that I will never ever venture near a self-help book again. And now if you would excuse me, I'm feeling a negativeness-attack coming so I'm gonna need some NIN music on immediately.

in which YOU get a break from my angry atheist rants

I was reading this article on about.com about angry atheist. The article was just trying to resolve the myth of angry atheist. I was hoping the reason was something like atheists aren't angry, they're so hyped up about not believing any crap that they appear to be angry. Surprise surprise, the article didn't mention anything about that. The whole thing boils down to atheists are angry and there are many reasons why they're angry and by the way there are some non-angry atheist too, the end. The whole article kinda defeat the purpose of the word "myth".
So that article got me thinking, am I just another angry atheist? Of course I am, look at this blog, three quarters of the recent posts are about how ridiculous christianity is and how absurd the bible is. And that leads to the second question, what am I going to do about this? Don't get me wrong, I'm proud to be an atheist and even an angry one but being angry all the time just can't work. It's gonna do something to my moods. So, today I'm gonna have a break from the absurd existence of a God and talk about something else.

Let's talk about the current crises [weird word, crisis, the plural form of crisis is not crisises but crises, weird] in the world. So North Korea has finally showed the US how much it loved the US of A huh? What a fireworks show for Independence day! Too bad your fireworks show was a big dud. Even the people in Alaska couldn't see squat of your fireworks. May be some Japanese fishermen might have seen something of NK's big bad Taepodong-2, a supposedly deadly long-range missile that can reach Alaska and/or LA. What is the deal with those North Korean anyway? They pretty much advertised to the whole world that they have a missile that can strike the US and the said missile failed 40 seconds into the test. Talking about big overture, little show!

That wasn't much of a crisis for the US in my opinion. Now they can laugh their head off about how stupid the North Koreans are and cut all sanctions to NK. Oh and persuade the rest of the nations to cut all sanctions to NK in the process too. May be the North Koreans have something up their sleeve, may be they're trying to lure the US into some false sense of security and then kaboom, a few nuclear missiles to all the US's buddies near NK. Just my humble theory.

What's other crisis? Oh, that new Isreal airstrike that killed Palestinians. I figure this should be ranked higher on the crisis scale over that long-range dud crisis since there were actually some human casualties. However, it didn't make it to the front page. May be it's what I call the the-boy-who-cried-wolf complex. No, I'm not implying that they're lying about people dying in the middle east. It's like you hear too much about the Palestine-Isreal conflict and you figure there are always some kind of airstrike or terrorist attack going on over there so you tune out anything that has anything to do with middle east. Or may be it's just me.

Any other crisis? Of course there are, people dying in Africa, people starving in Asia, Falun Gong practitioners being killed and their organs harvested for sale in China, ... Oh well, it's just another day. And tomorrow is yet another day.

Talking about tomorrow is another day. I suppose I've always been a bit cynical and pessismistic but I really don't get those people who blogs about "tomorrow is another day". May be they're all positive all the time and they're just super hyper positive. But you can't be positive all the time. There is no way that anyone can be positive all the time. It's just like you can't be negative all the time. Me? I might have a the-glass-is-never-full view of everything but I manage to be positive sometimes so those the-glass-is-never-empty people have to be negative sometimes. I suppose I need to find out about what those people write in their tomorrow-is-another-day blogs. It's a shame that those people always have to write in Chinese or some other language. I rarely come across similar blogs in English that's talk about similar things and manage to not try to sell me some obscure self-help books on how to be positive.

The 3vil g3nius's extremely short guide to be positive:
Tatoo positive signs (ie. plus signs, do not, I repeat DO NOT tatoo crosses, 3vil g3nius does not condone the practice of tatooing religious signs) all over your body. Then you can always be positive or at the very least, remind yourself to be positive.