good and evil

good? evil?

i read lord of the flies in high school. it’s a book based on the idea that mankind is evil. without defined rules and police men with mustaches and aviator glasses, mankind will turn to violence, deceit, betrayal, murder, and revolt against ‘the man’.

is mankind evil? or is mankind good? if man was completely evil then where did these institutions of ‘good’ come from?

it’s my opinion that mankind is both, life just ain’t that simple yo! mankind is both good an evil. –what a concept.

there are conditions to this hypothesis. man is anonymously evil, and personally good.

before i elaborate, this idea is not as clear cut as one may initially think. the ideas of evil and good are too vague as it is, i’d rather use words like considerate or caring and malicious or immoral. still, i want to throw out a disclaimer that men (and women) are evil and good all at the same time.

the basic idea here is that people can be heartless towards that which they have no connection to. ignorance isn’t bliss, it’s an excuse to do the immoral act and be guilt free. a person hurled a brick thru my friend’s art studio window. he’s a starving artist, and makes money working a crappy part time job that requires he be out of the house at 4:30am. there’s a possibility that he’ll have to pay for the replacement window [$1,000.00]. i’m assuming that the people/person who threw the brick didn’t have it in for my friend, he's a nice guy. most likely it was some kid with idle time and mischief on his mind.

had the mischievous kid known my friend, he wouldn’t have smashed the window. seeing all the pain and stress he put on my friend’s head would haunt his conscience.

simply put, if the bastard brick tosser knew my friend, evil thoughts would have been overridden by good.

thus i’ve concluded that people are anonymously evil yet personally good.

apple clock

idle time

on weekdays i’m busy. i’ll hit up happy hr after work, or go out to dinner with friends or coworkers. it’s not unusual for me to stroll in the front door of my apartment at 11pm on a weekday. weekends are a different story.

i’m different from 99% of the people i know simply because i lack a significant other. since i lack this time consuming entity, my hands sit idle. idle hands normally create mischief, but mine create clocks.

i had some spare sheet metal, a dremel, a broken clock, and a weekend. what to do what to do?



i printed out an apple computers logo, and cut it out. to the right is my broken clock. the mechanism works, but the face was just a piece of paper.



i traced the paper stencil on my sheet metal



then proceeded to cut the shapes out



here it is, all cut out! this took me about 15mins or so.



this is how she’ll look when i’m all done. the mechanism is on the upper right hand corner, and the hands just stick right on to it.



i drilled a hole



then i cut out some plastic packaging material from a saw blade that just happened to be hanging around, and superglued it to the leaf.



and here’s where she sits. all done!

so those couples out there, when you’re wasting time eating bland pasta at olive garden discussing why tom hank’s hair didn’t look that good in da vinci code, rest assure that i’m not doing something similar to you. i’m probably changing the color of the apple logo on my ibook computer, or sanding a wooden chair!

boarders adventure

adventures in borders

as soon as anyone asks me “have you ever read that book….” i immediately reply “no”. i don’t read books, i haven’t read books. in high school and college i’d read every 3rd page of our assigned reading. surprisingly one can attain c’s and b’s from every third page of a book. i wonder if mom will be proud or disappointed when she reads this (note: my mom does read my blog).

with that i’m going to break my personal blog rule number 1, talk about my day. that’s right, i’m regressing to 14 year old high school girl blog style for this entry. hey nobody’s putting a gun to anyone’s head here are they?

i went to the dermatologist today, his office is right near a borders book store. my co-worker, knowing this, gave me a half used gift card to borders. he said there was approx 10 dollars on there, and that i should just finish it up. now let the record show that i have been to borders by myself one single time, and was on a specific mission to find a book that almost didn’t exist for mom’s christmas gift.

i walked in planning to spend 10 smackers on something fun, and then go home and enjoy my friday afternoon. that didn’t happen.

i started out at the music section, when about fourtyeight seconds passed and i realized
a few things:
1. borders has a limited selection of the stuff i’m into: house/electro/dnb (which is lumped into a category called ‘dance’), and an abundance of trance (also labeled dance) which i’m not so into.

2. i’m a computer geekazoid, i could download any album sitting on boarder’s shelf, and if i really put some effort, i’m sure i could download stuff that’s soon to be on border’s shelf! (but that’s morally wrong)

3. i lack the morals necessary to prevent myself from queuing illegal downloads!! (mom, you should have stop reading this post a while ago…)

those three reasons got me out of the music section and on the hunt for a 10.00 purchase. i needed to purchase a real book. paper, glue, cardboard, dust, etc.

i know, journals! i like to write. i could always use a cool nifty journal. i walked over to the journals, but not before buying a nice hot fresh boarders coffee. a lady with blonde hair past her ass wearing a matching pink felt jogging suit with stripes was standing there. 15 years ago she was getting attention from all the boys, but her prime had obviously long since passed… i was apparently the only one informed of this. she quickly asked me which journal was a better buy for a boy. little does she know that i tend to gravitate towards hello kitty when it comes to stationery.

somehow i feel that she got the impression i wasn’t standing there to look at journals, i think, that she thought, i was there checking her out!! so i sipped my coffee, tried to answer her ‘you must be a manly man’ question with a short fragment sentence, and went on checking out journals. and i sipped my coffee, and again. she persisted to ask me questions of which was more manly, and why. with a long sleeve shirt on, a jacket over that, and constant ingestion of hot coffee, i started to sweat. i noticed i was sweating, and didn’t want to give her the impression that i was nervous talking to her, because she wasn’t attractive!

somehow it ended with me spilling a bit of coffee on my hand, pointing to the wooden covered journal held by her left hand –leaving a drip of coffee on the journal. she put the journal back on the shelf, grabbed a coffee drip free journal off the shelf, and quickly scuttled off. i was sweating, had a wet finger, and didn’t want any of those journals.

i meandered over to the reference section, perhaps i was in store to purchase a c++ programming book. what could i do with c++??

“how to make music on the mac” caught my eye, but after a glance-over, i knew that throwing $14.99 into a flushing toilet would teach me more than this black and white book.

borders had dvd’s i remembered! how about purchasing the big lebowski special edition to replace the normal edition i have have at home. why does the transporter 1 cost only $19.99 and the transporter 2 retails at $29.99??? has anyone at borders seen the transporter 2?

i was obviously desperate, so i broke the glass and pulled the alarm. call the person i know who frequents borders the most that is. she didn’t answer!!! what was i to do?!?! i’m at borders, i need to spend this gift card, and i can’t find anything worth the free credit i was given… it was almost like a demented torture.

minutes later lilly called me back, i followed her advice and purchased a comic type book, glad that stressful situation had blown over. i’m going to be much more careful next time i accept free credit, much more careful.

youtube

me tube

youtube is the new black:






i was trying to make a short about me going to home depot, i stopped filming half way due to lack of hands. more to come? (link: my youtube page)

pass it on

pass it on

people don’t want to die. it happens tho, dying that is, and so how do we deal with something that we don’t want to do. in my case, i change my perspective.

in the beginning, my goals were to passing classes, eating junk food, playing video games, and above all having a good time. if mom and dad were happy, i was for sure pretty happy.

after school, my goals changed. get a stable job, and somehow contribute to society. my goal to please mom and dad had not changed, but the things that pleased them did change.

after getting that stable job, and becoming financially independent from mom and dad, i found another change of my goals. happiness. mom and dad wanted me to be happy at a stable job, and financially independent from them. but this time there was a twist, what made them happy was for me to be happy. this was completely new to me. in college they didn’t care what i wanted to do, they cared about classes, i needed to get good grades. in grade school, what i wanted was irrelevant, if grades weren’t good, i wasn’t good. but this time, they wanted what i wanted.

my parents work hard, they have come from families who struggled (so they tell me!!). why did they work so hard to attain what they have now –was it just for them? or were they working hard, for me?

the thing is, they were working for themselves –me.

i am my parents, they are their parents.

---

i recently looked back one generation. my father specifically. he was born in iran, and at 18 moved to the states for school on a scholarship. he spoke no english. he then managed to marry a beautiful blonde (not easy for a foreign man i tell you!!) and then had 3 successful (and very good looking might i add) children. that’s the american dream folks, and now he’s thriving in one of the most sought after cities in the world, america’s finest city, sunny san diego. i see him attaining grandmas goals which were also his.

i never met my father’s father, and have seen his mother all of 2-3 times in my life. but i know that they are proud of him, he’s reached his goals and he’s taken their position.

grandma was probably afraid to go when she did. like i said, people don’t want to die. but she knew that her three children have achieved success, and are now the parents with children on their way to success. grandma mahin (everyone calls her by first name, even me) may have passed away, but she’s not all dead. i’m one of many still around, striving to reach my goal.

me & gene in hs

me & mr. shi

 


year: 1996ish?
here's a foreshadowing picture if i ever saw one. me and gene in high school. like the long hair and mustache? chicks dig it i swear. (btw we didn't drink that coors, it went back in the fridge.)