The first one is sausages, but really small. Nanosausages. They’re small, like pills, and you take them with a tall glass of water or gravy. So it’s like taking pills, but they are delicious sausages.

The next is the MacBook shuffle. Open it up, and something happens. Looks like you get to edit photos today.

The last is a crazy new social networking platform. Here’s how it works: you go and make some friends and then you talk to them with some regularity. Support for phone calls and several different types of handshakes is forthcoming.

The worst thing happens to me when I take tests. My nose runs constantly and with prodigious flow. I’m not even sick, or allergic to anything present, but I have this thing to deal with on top of the pressure of the test, and everyone hates me for being noisily congested. Probably Jesus punishing me for not knowing enough about paintings of Him.

So now that I’m done with class I’ve got two whole weeks off, and I have to spend the first of them in lovely Utica. I have just no idea at all what to do with my time besides filling up a ream with sketches (doodles) and writings (drivel). Do I really think I’ll be motivated enough to work productively? No, I think the creativity will be sapped out of me entirely within the first two days. I also suspect that I will eat terribly and get fat, and that I will not be able to stand my family and become irritable. Fortunately I will have a week back home to recover before the next quarter starts, and I’ll score a new car and maybe some furniture.

I don’t think I can throw a softball far enough to get it across the room.

This week’s flowers are… these things. Greenish-yellow. They look like wheat.

Like the sticker says, I completed my democratic imperative on the way to class this morning and am ready for a minor revolution. I’ve been glued to the New York Times website since this afternoon, and am super pumped for this.

Made a real quick dinner tonight, just some steamed mixed brown and basmati rice with mirepoix and some organic sunny-side-ups on top with a smattering of hoisin and sriracha sauce. Sorry I’ve been so sparse with the food updates

You may have noticed today that, no matter where you are within our expansive borders, the weather has been just terrific. Isn’t that just a little suspect? Perfect weather on one of the most important days in recent American history? The conclusion that I’ve drawn, barring Barack having really been born in a manger, is that there is some sort of conspiracy.

It’s no secret that weather has a large impact on voter turnout, generally favoring Democrats as do any gains in turnout do. It’s also not so much a secret that China can control the weather, and with the latest economic shake-ups, they definitely have a stake in our election results. If this is, in fact, the case… well, I hope they do it more often.

I’ve been yelled at by a lot of people, many times, for many different reasons. Most of those incidents have been while I’m riding my bicycle on city streets from irrational road-ragers. In those cases they’ve usually been upset for having to share a lane or slow down a slight bit; no matter how disproportionate they’ve usually responded to something. Tonight was a first for me, as I received an intense and completely unprovoked reaction as I was riding home on a suburban road. I was nearly at the entrance to my apartment complex and some dude rolled by in a luxury sedan at a moderate, constant speed and yelled “FUCKER!” out the window at me with such complete, consuming furious rage that I thought perhaps he had mistaken me for the man that murdered his family and burned his dog down. I don’t know what his deal was but I laughed all the way home.

Delacroix - Liberty Leading the People

Consider this my endorsement for Senator Barack Obama.

I have barely more than nothing to show for it.

That may be unfair because in the next two weeks I have a small number of very large and impressive projects to complete. I desperately want to start putting together a portfolio to try to at least convince myself that I’m a hirable proto-professional, or maybe to convince myself that I haven’t been sitting on my hands for the past three months. Maybe I have.

Today I’ve set some goals: to get some real food from the farmer’s market, go through some miserable paperwork, and bake delicious cookies for the bake sale. Tomorrow will be dominated by the sale and class, which is a lot of fun, but will leave me with no free time at all. At least there’s a gallery opening!

I feel that I thrive with a full, busy schedule. Lately I’ve thought about my freshman year of college, when I lived in the residence hall, ate at the dining hall, was a ten-minute walk from class, had a full closet of warm clothes that fit perfectly, sixty instant friends, easy classes that I had no emotional investment in, no money and no need for money. My life was so ridiculously comfortable and easy, and since that time I have done nothing but complicate it. I would hate myself if I didn’t. You could say that I gain nourishment from shit storms. I wish my life was harder, that my work was challenging, that I had more complicated relationships, that I had more school work to show off. It was kind of nice getting fat and complacent, though.

Tonight I rode home from campus in thirty-eight degree cold, and it’s made me aware how quickly fall has settled in and will soon fade away and leave me with the blistering cold of winter. Winter is the season for baking bread and manufacturing soups and makes me realize that I need to start eating a lot better. My diet is nutritionally sound but emotionally unsatisfying – and Lean Cuisine is pretty much a bad policy.

To help set the mood, here are this week’s consumables: fresh-cut purple limoneums, and Nat Sherman naturals with mint. Still working on last week’s roll of Delta…

I want to live the life of a nomad, being able to pack up and move my entire life with minimal notice. The idea of living out of a yurt or a converted Volkswagen or a bike trailer exhilarates me; in addition, I don’t see why a culturally rich urban life must necessarily be reconciled with the a life of adventure and impermanence. Could every city be a Black Rock City? Could every permanent city contain one? Probably – have you seen how many parking lots take up downtown parcels?

I’m not sure where I’m going with this. I think that maybe I want to build a society and material culture of aesetic urban nomads. I don’t feel that this is an episode of cognitive dissonance; I could see that the concept of a designer wanting to abolish consumerism may be perceived as such but design is the creation of experience and I don’t believe that empty consumerism is a fulfilling experience. Design is even more important when only a few objects and systems are in your life. Design is even more important for a life of impermanence; disassembly, reuse and recyclability are long-term design goals. I didn’t get into this to make a lot of money, I did it so the objects that I want will be available to me and the rest of humanity. So I don’t care if everyone has a thousand items that I’ve designed, only that they love the few that they do have.

Have you ever been just sitting around, in class, on the bus, in the sun, at work, just sort of zoning out and not thinking so hard, and all of the sudden the blindness of panic shoots through you as you feel yourself slipping off the edge of insanity? You rush to grasp for association because you know that if you let yourself slip there is no going back and your mind will be forever submerged in psychosis? It’s been happening to me all week and I think that one of my classes may actually be killing me.

Another strange thought pattern that I’ve had is that I want to fight someone. It started out as a joke in a context that I can’t recall but I’m finding that the more I think about it the more it sounds like a good idea. No malice or anger, just a fight. Just to feel what it’s like, satisfy some primitive visceral instinct, feel dangerous and alive. A Fight Club fight, but just once and without terrorisms.

I’m concerned that I’m going to fail my art history test because I have been writing poetry and making drawings instead of taking notes and don’t remember anything from the first two weeks. I remember when my notebooks used to be immaculate and full of useful information.

My months as an inner-city bike hipster, “freelancing,” are over and I’m back in school and living in the suburbs again. There is a Wendy’s at the corner. It’s extremely nice to have my days filled up with meaningful activities and to be getting paychecks again but I miss the city and its freedom like I can not describe.

So I’ve been thinking about the nature of faith and religion, God and eternity. I am not a lost soul, confused and trying to find myself. I know what I believe, and it’s astoundingly simple. My conversations with genuinely devout individuals – a very disparate group from the brimstone Baptists – have lead me to conclude that the beliefs of most individuals are nearly the same to my own in any way that matters. I, however, don’t believe in God. In fact, I don’t even care if he exists or not, it’s just not important, it’s not something that matters in the real world. The afterlife is beyond my scope of reason, and another unimportant semantic masturbatory target that has no bearing on how anyone ought to live their lives. I’ve come to see what religion is at its core, and in that I am a believer. I am not spiritual; I have no soul. I am not atheistic; I don’t know anything about God. I am not Agnostic; I do care. What I believe in is not a label.

At the center of Religion is an attempt at reconciling good and evil. At the center of faith is an attempt to convince believers that evil is a challenge or a part of the divine plan, and that good is normal. Many lose faith or are affirmed in their own haughty beliefs when they find that evil is the natural state of human behavior. This is a false premise, because there is no such thing as good and evil. There is no distinction. There is no continuum or benchmarks as to what constitutes a good person and an evil person. Religions attempt to make these distinctions by describing good and evil behaviors as a set of laws or rules. “Behaving in these manners makes you a good person, and deviating from them is sin, and causes you to be evil.” Furthermore is the abhorrent concept of original sin, wherein humanity cannot help but to be evil by virtue of being alive and breathing; wherein our birth marks the point at which we will be most virtuous and that anything we do in our lives are points against us. It is beyond my understanding how people can accept a life of guilt and penance for crimes they can not help but commit against a law decided arbitrarily.

The establishment of a spiritual law is an attempt at defining morality, which is not possible. Morality is governed exclusively by intent. If you perform an action with the intent of hurting someone, yourself included, your action will reflect the morals that you hold. An action performed with the intent of benefiting someone, again including yourself, similarly reflects your moral stance. Conforming your actions to follow a law blindly indicates a moral vacuum; regardless of outcome, benefit or hurt caused, the action was not taken with any intent but to follow. It is not evil, it is amoral. Morals can not be learned, as they are a reflection of intent. Intent is formed as a response to social forces. Where religion attempts to teach morals, what is really needed is to teach society. A successfully religious, spiritual or otherwise balanced person is as such because they were taught or learned to live in society, to realize that other people have thoughts, feelings and intentions just like the self has. What are generally regarded as evil actions are typically selfish actions that are beneficial only in the first person and hurt others. An individual who has not discovered society is most likely to think and act in this way. This gives the appearance that evil actions are easier to perform than good ones; in reality, it is that self-serving actions are more apparent to the individual, while social consequences need to be learned.

An action can come in three ways: one that benefits only yourself, one that benefits only others, and one that is mutually beneficial – listed in order of difficulty. Each type of action necessitates more mindfulness of intent than the last. Someone who acts only to benefit themselves is inexperienced, probably an infant or a socially stunted individual, liable to be ostracized. Someone who acts only to benefit other people while hurting their self is misguided and is probably following law blindly only to be unfulfilled and impotent. Someone who acts to benefit their self and others equally is fulfilling their social imperative – the benefit of others is implicit in what benefits you and vice versa. Intent is the core of morality, and even though the action may not be readily or obviously good, and might incidentally go terribly wrong, hell, at least you tried.

Any icing on top of that conclusion is all semantics. There is no need to complicate religion. Belief is unnecessary, explanations of the mysteries of the universe are a waste of time. Wasting more time by tailoring your behavior for rewards in the afterlife is committing to a life without satisfaction or fulfillment building up to a great uncertainty. Existence is a gift that can be revoked by anyone at any time, and I still struggle to understand why people squander the opportunity becoming tangled in semantics, arbitrary laws and all of the enormous hurdles in the way of true understanding. If that Chick Tract had changed my life, what would that say about the strength of my will and judgement? If I had been lured to the Baptist Church by the threat of eternal damnation, what would that say about how I value my life? I am fulfilled and enriched by the experiences of my life, why would I want to believe that everything I love subtracts value from my existence? Why would I replace pride with guilt? I can not understand these things.