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I was walking back home from work the other day and I saw yet another car on the streets with a big Decepticon decal plastered on the hood (for the cartoonistically-challenged amongst you, the “Decepticons” are the bad guys from the Transformers series, out to conquer the universe and all that good stuff). That makes 3 sightings in a span of 2 weeks. And that got me thinking: why is it that i’ve never seen a car here with an Autobot (the good guys from the series) logo on it?On some level, it must reflect the mentality of the drivers, who invariably own colorfully pimped-up coupes with modified body trims and massive, ugly spoilers that serve no functional purpose. The Deception logo is yet another piece in their facade with the implicit message ”look at me, I’m such a badass”.

My personal opinion is that If someone needs an 80s cartoon emblem to prove his machoism, he’s got some pretty serious credibility problems. But the other issue, though, is why is it so fashionable to be perceived as “bad” or dangerous? Our obsession with it is evident. Gangstas rap about drive-by shootings and slapping hos in the ‘hood, punks decorate themselves with piercings of all sorts, and Singaporean wannabes with their decepticon logos - all of which are essentially declarations of their ostensible “badness” (albeit to different degrees), and the rest of us (chicks especially) readily gobble it up as if it were so.

I can understand this from an evolutionary point of view. After all, 20,000 years ago the aggressive bad boys in our cavemen society were also the likely to be the ones in the ruling class running the show. If you were living back then, you wanted to ally yourself with the bat-swinging alpha male of the group, not the sensitive copper-age pansy painting on the cave walls. In that epoch, being an aggressive and dangerous in general conferred a certain amount of social and practical advantage. This tends not to be the case anymore, but the more primitive portions of our brains just hasn’t realized it yet.

Still, just because evolution has been slow to catch on doesn’t mean we have to be stuck in a paradigm that tens of thousands of years old. The pseudo-badboy image in particular is a cliche that’s been packaged, commercialized, and sold to unsuspecting wannabes in a fashion not dissimilar to emo rock. Admittedly, I may be overly optimistic about humanity’s prospects for change, but If humanity can get over major crises like the cold war and the backstreet boys, there may yet be hope that one day it could be cool and fashionable to be seen just a “nice guy”. Imagine that.

And to prove a point, I intend to buy a T-shirt featuring an Autobot logo the next time I come across one, just so people know which side of the fence I’m on.

It is said that Buddha once delivered a silent sermon to his disciples where he simply stared at a flower and smiled. The gist if it was to get them to appreciate the “stillness” of the universe and the beauty inherent within all of nature. Something along those lines, anyway.

Yesterday as I was sitting in Carl’s Junior munching down a supersized onion ring I took a moment to admire its crummy asymmetry and cholesterol-laden goodness and wondered, “why couldn’t it have been an onion ring?” Surely Buddha would have been equally happy staring at a big onion ring. Who wouldn’t be? Everybody loves onion rings.

And I smiled like an idiot because, for a moment at least, I was dead certain I was the happiest person in the restaurant.

I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again: Vladimir Putin looks looks like a textbook James Bond villain. So happens I stumbled upon this picture of Putin err… thinking about something and I knew I had to blog it. Isn’t amazing this guy has exactly 1 expression he wears all the time? You couldn’t tell if he was plotting world domination or thinking about doing the laundry.

My friend sent me this rather amusing web comic the other day. “You’ll like it” he promised, and to his credit it did bring a smile to my face. But one thing that was immediately clear to me was that the whole evolution-creationism controversy no longer pumps me up like it did back during college. I just don’t care that much anymore.

A little background info: Kansas in 2005 was a hotbed for the Evolution-creationism debates. The state board of education was about to introduce creationism into the school curriculum and as the only columnist in the K-State collegian with any sort of science background, I felt like I had the burden to say something. Yes, college. Where everything you do happens with an exaggerated sense of self-importance. So I wrote a couple of columns in the school paper on the matter and promptly received a mountainload of hate mail (of varying degrees of coherence and profanity) from fervid believers as far away as Florida. Not that I was ever deterred by them; the articles did give me some serious street cred with professors.

But that was back then. These days I look at the whole issue with only detached interest. Part of the reason, I suspect, is because I’m no longer in Kansas. After all, Its a lot harder to get excited about an issue if you’re not physically there to see any tangible implications. But the other reason is that the unabashed idealism I once had in college has since worn off. Coming to think about it, there there aren’t that many issues that incite the same kind of fiery passion I had for almost everything from the Iraq war to how I wanted my steak done.

Its not that I’ve become jaded, just that I’ve discovered other things to focus my energies on. Perhaps its a natural progression in the evolutionary course of the psyche, so to speak.

Dreams are fascinating (lucid dreams even more so. But that’ll be a topic for another day), and it seems to me such a waste that most of us have such splendid dream realities and experiences but no recollections of them. Contrary to what some people think, everyone has dreams on a nightly basis since they are necessarily part of the REM phase of the sleep cycle that everyone goes through. Its just a matter of recalling them that’s tricky. To that end, keeping a dream journal helps - a notebook beside your pillow that’s used to record your dreams the first thing you wake up in the morning. If you don’t write them down immediately upon awakening, you will forget the dream. And yes, it does takes a hell lot of resolve to do consistently.

So maintaining a dream journal is something I’ve been doing for the past 5 months or so, and it never ceases to amuse me what the subconscious mind is capable of conjuring. The conversations that you hold with dream characters, especially - some of which are astonishingly coherent and may even hold personal revelations, while others seem like bad drama scripts written by a particularly mischievous 3rd grader.

One such dream conversation involved my friends and I waiting outside a bakery where a stereotypical snooty French chef was inside baking a cake. For some reason, we wanted a cake really bad. But the chef wants to have his cake and eat it at the same time, so he hands us only a small slice of it. At this point, one of my friends remarks “Shit. Don’t you wish Dumbledore was here?”. “Yeah”, my other friend replies “But be careful of wands because they’ll burst in flames if you chew them”. And we all nodded in sound agreement because it made perfect sense.

Another interesting dream I have recorded happened 3 nights after I watched the movie 300 (you can see where this is going, can’t you?). Kim Jung Il was holding a world conference of tyrants and dictators ala Team America: World Police. For some inexplicable reason I was there and sitting at the same table as Fidel Castro, who seems eager to take me as an apprentice. “Tonight,” says Castro without the slightest hint of irony “We dine in Havana!”

In case you missed it, Stardust, with its unique blend of subtle humor, fantasy, romance and action was easily one of the best movies of 2007. Yet for all its starry-eyed romanticism I found lessons within that were uncomfortably close to home. 

There’s this poignant scene where the protagonist, Tristan Thorne is held captive along with the human incarnation of fallen star, Yvaine. Tristan’s heart is with a beautiful but cold woman by the name of Victoria Forrester back in his home town of Wall. “For her, I’ll do anything to prove my love” Tristan boldly declares, and Yvaine replies something to the effect of “Yes, but what will she do to prove her love for you?”

That was a line that struck a deep chord within me. It really makes you wonder why sometimes we continually fool ourselves with hope and try (and try and try), when unrequited love, no matter how genuine or desperate, often leads to nowhere but heartbreak.

I was looking through the archives of my past blogs the other day and it struck me just how much and how little I’ve changed over the years. From the artless naivety of circa 2001, to the raging emo-ness of 2003, to the vacant apathy of 2006 - in a sense, blogs reflect the zeitgeist of our personal lives. Fascinating, but I’m glad I never kept any of my old ones online. I was such a pinhead back then.

One very obvious gap in the blog records was the year 2007. And there’s a good reason for that.

A good portion of the past year or so was spent mired in an uncertain period sometimes called quarter-life crisis. I suppose most people experience that at some point after graduation from college. Quarter life crisis is strange - its not like, say, losing your job where the are ramifications are immediately clear. Rather, it seems to creep up with you insidiously over a protracted period of time. Depression sinks in gradually as it dawns on you that life now can no longer be dictated by capricious whims as before, and that you will become yet another (insignificant) cog in the vast and unforgiving capitalist world, nothing more.

A year of working in the army bureaucracy and a national laboratory made me realize that more than anything, I need a job that grants me a high degree of autonomy and freedom. Thankfully, I think I have found a couple of viable solutions. One of which involves the internet and the other, Grad school (though exactly where I’m still undecided). Either way, I’m glad I’m over with QLC. My motivational carrots are properly dangling in front of me now. Bring on the world.