I've even raped and killed a mountain panda in the hills of Shaanxi.

I managed not to blog about the hailstorm that hit when I got off the bus yesterday afternoon. I didn't take pictures, either. I just went inside, surfed a little web, then read for a while.

Thoughts permeate my head but only when I'm not at work; as soon as I get here they evaporate like so much bad beer, and I have nothing interesting to say at all.

On the bus they have this shitty poetry which I can't help reading in the mornings. In the afternoons it's different, my motion sickness seems to return if I read or even play with my cell for too long. I can't read on the bus because of that, apparently I'm the only person affected that way. So I feel like an aliterate but no, really, I just get carsick if I read on the bus. Anyway, the point is this shitty poetry is put up on the bus and it bugs me because I can't stop reading it even though it's so terrible.

This morning I couldn't stop thinking about how I feel like my life is put on hold and I don't know what to do to make it start again. I couldn't stop thinking "what if?" which I don't believe in doing, it's not as bad as praying I suppose but almost. "What if I'd just moved to Seattle after graduating instead of wasting two years in NC?" Well, really, who knows. I suppose I would have gotten a job, since they were being given out like beads to topless girls back then, but a couple years later it all crashed down too. And I don't think I would have gotten the same social network, or any at all necessarily. And maybe I would have died in the earthquake. Yeah, see, "what if" is stupid.

even with no money, a three-day weekend isn't the worst thing in the world.

A year ago - more or less - I was in Boston with my two best friends. We stayed up too late talking about things, since we never see each other, and talking on the 'net or on the phone is nothing like talking to someone you've known most of your adult life in person... we wondered if our generation's malaise and dissatisfaction was unique, or just something every generation has gone through. We decided that it was just more extreme now, for many reasons:

1. Our generation has no war or anything else to focus on. Cold War was around for a bit, but in the 80s it was pretty much a joke.
   
2. Not everyone in the world is as fortunate as in America or Europe, but in these societies most people are getting their basic needs met. We don't have to worry about making a living, so we worry about such nonsense as "happiness" and "fulfillment."
   
3. The prevalence of education means that most of us are literate - and even if we're not, TV shows and films exist - and can read/watch/learn about other people living life, doing whatever they want, etc.

This weekend hotcrab and I were talking about how TV and film really has fucked up our generation. Because, you know, it looks so much like reality, except nicer. It's a fantasy world where problems are resolved after two hours, and almost always with a happy ending. Happy endings are more marketable. You don't want to really get involved with miserable people for a couple of hours, right? Because that's the problem, it's so close to reality you can actually get emotionally involved.

And then you grow up and realize that there are no endings, let alone happy ones. This wasn't a problem so much with books - maybe with plays, since again, real people, but the movement of Realism in theater is also a fairly recent development - since you were always another level removed from their reality. But with film, you aren't. You grow up with TV characters and probably like them better than people you actually know in real life. They're so much more attractive and charming, after all.