Southwest in the Northwest

Editor’s note: As I wrote this, I started nodding off. It has been a long day. I may revise it later, to make it a bit more clear.

My friends and family, and fellow Americans:

We did it. We stood up across the country and made our voices heard. Republicans, Democrats, and independents alike flocked to the voting booths in incredible numbers, and many Americans made it clear: it’s time for change.

But as our new President-elect, Barack Obama, spoke from Grant Park in Chicago this evening, he made a point that rings true with me now. He said that this election has always been about us. It has always been about the American people. The change we want, my dear friends, is not something we should lazily expect from Washington. This is a government of the people, for the people, and by the people, and we have to remember that we have the power. Not gigantic corporations, not faceless entities. We do. This is our country, and we must remember to make our voices heard– and listen to those that are speaking.

Listen. Now that’s something none of us have really done in the last eight years. How many liberals, myself included, have shut out President Bush as soon as he mentions “nuke-yuh-ler weapons” in a speech? How many of us have become so proud and angry that we’ve begun viewing the opposing party as a bunch of enemies? How easy has it become to look at someone– a well dressed businessman, or a casual-looking college student– and think, “Well, they’re a conservative,” or, “Well, they’re a liberal”?

The unfortunate fact is that we’ve allowed ourselves to make our political parties more than political. What was once only an issue around election time has permeated every day of our lives, and “Republican” and “Democrat” carry weight even when they shouldn’t. We see our neighbors as “like us” or “not like us,” and no idea has ever been more divisive than that.

There’s a line in the Pledge of Allegiance, a document which I disagree with in principle but still find important. It says, “one nation, indivisible…“ Unfortunately, as the past has shown us, we are divisible. We allowed ourselves to divide up into two large and exclusive groups, which began breeding contempt for their opponents. We saw these effects during the campaign, where the idea seemed to become popular that “if the other guy wins, America will be ruined!”

We have to dispense of this “us and them” thinking if we are ever to unite again. Republicans may not share the same values as you, but they’re still Americans, real people who have real concerns. Same with Democrats. Nobody wants to destroy this country. We have tough times ahead, and unless we can see past the petty party differences, we’ll get stuck.

The need for this tolerance was illustrated for me tonight, as John McCain presented his incredibly gracious concession speech. Every time he mentioned President-elect Obama, the crowd booed. This is exactly the sort of stuff we can no longer stand fror. We are all Americans, and we’re all in this together. It’s okay to be upset, frustrated. But understand that this next step is all up to us, and we’ll have to join hands and swallow our differences if we want ever to be a mature country.

So, my fellow Americans, I’m going to call on you. Disregard now what button I wear on my shirt. Disregard my bumper stickers, or my T-shirts, or how you heard I voted. Disregard what you think you know about my politics, because my politics are done right now. Instead, regard me as your friend and an American, and together, we can rebuild a stronger America– the America that we all deserve.

Southwest in the Northwest is now running a newer version of Wordpress, and has a sexy new theme. Isn’t it awesome?

And that’s all.

Tonight, I opened my giant chest of Legos and built things.

I was in the bin of plastic bricks, my face inches away from those tiny little choking hazards that were my childhood, hearing the roar of a plastic ocean as I  pushed wave after wave away from my face, looking for that one exact piece.

It was so much fun.

I stumbled upon the listing for a geocache today that really intrigued me. It’s called “Key to Insanity”, and it’s a puzzle cache, meaning that in order to get the coordinates, I have to solve a (you guessed it!) puzzle. On a five-star difficulty scale, it’s rated a four and a half.

The really puzzling parts of the cache listing are as follows:

Does hunting for geocaches make you feel a little manic? frantic? craz’ed? uncontroll’ed? abnormal? bereft of reason? brainsick? daft? unsound? irrational? loco? mad? mental? meshuggah? off? reasonless? senseless? tetch’ed? unhing’ed? derang’ed?

If so, you are in the right frame of mind to deduce where this cache is hidden.

It’s on public property in Oregon City, Oregon. The cache container is hidden on a man-made structure at this site.
-DoodleCat & MisterKrrk, “Key to Insanity“

A little bit of poking around has made me suspicious of a jail that once stood in Oregon City but then mysteriously burned to the ground. There are no addresses anywhere on the web, which means I’ll have to rely on some outside resource… like who? Hmm.

I’m also incredibly confused by the list of synonyms for “crazy”. There are twenty phrases (twenty-two words if you count “bereft”, “of”, and “reason” separately), and the third, fourth, eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth phrases are all interrupted with apostrophes.  The phrases are of various lengths, and I’m considering how to analyze them– I get the feeling there must be some numerical significance to them somehow.

Reading the logs has also given me some thoughts, although they tend to be more questions than answers.

“I thought I was going to go insane!”

“It drives you insane!! You truly have to be ADDictED to get this.”

“Gotta wait for my friend Gassafrass to solve it too and maybe will both get our sanity back. Insane!!!”

“It did, however, make me determined to solve this thing, or end up in the nut house trying… I am glad this is over, and I can seek some professional help …”

“With a nudge from a fellow cacher, the light went on about 10:00pm the night before we went out. Took some old fashioned work and not computer work to solve this one.”

“That’s the sound of us going insane, that is! … Long story, short - we were looking at the information we needed for a couple days, before the light came on - and we saw secret revealed.”

“Tried hard on this one, but we were a bit off. Boy, were we tick’ed! But got a hint, heard the unsound of wheels turning, crack’ed the code, and, while still a bit unbalanc’ed, were able to sign on the dotti’ed line. Felt a little like calling in some of those fake Nazgul from Azkhaban.”

“The way I was going about it could truely cause a person to go over the top. In the sanity department that is.
The funny thing is that after seeing an obscure little article in the paper several months ago, h8nwork and I looked at this exact spot for a cache…”

“Boy, talk about guessing right. I made a commitment in the “public land” category and pursued that one. Needed to expand my list of places so I visited their office this morning, got a better list and looked for a good candidate. Found one and applied the “clues” on the page and got the address of the location and sure enough there it was. I was shown a cool web site that solved the puzzle as well
This cache was very fun and got to meet some great city servants along the way.”

There’s a common theme here of insanity. Maybe it’s just that cachers working hard on puzzle caches often describe themselves as losing their minds, but combined with that, the twenty different ways to say “insane”, and the name of the cache, something smells a little fishy.

And damn it, that list is just driving me mad.

Hmmm…

Week 3 of school, and this is what’s on my plate:

• Read a chapter of my A.P. World History textbook every other night
• A.P. Physics homework every other night
• Read and analyze at least one short story and its supplemental poetry every other night for College English
• Constant work on a scene for Acting
• Write one general college application essay for the Common Application
• Write one supplemental application essay for Whitman College
• Write one essay for the National Merit Scholarship Competition
• Fill out an application for the National Merit Scholarship Competition
• Acquire letters of recommendation for the National Merit Scholarship Competition
• Look up and apply for scholarships (whenever there’s time; i.e., never)
• Cut 15 minutes off of my Senior Seminar presentation (and practice, practice, practice)
• Build a small model as a visual aid for my Senior Seminar presentation
• Create a new poster as a visual aid for my Senior Seminar presentation
• Rewrite my abstract for my Senior Seminar
• Finish my SSE portfolio
• Create a poster for the first play of the year, Play On!
• Take someone’s senior pictures
• Touch up and turn in said pictures
• Volunteer for the Portland Pirate Festival on September 20th

And I’m not sure if that’s exhaustive.

If I seem a little frazzled, it’s because, well, I am.

Dear Disaffected Youth of America:

What haunts you?

I see you every day, walking down the street in your heavy black jackets or your baggy skater clothes. I’ve watched you angrily kick over the sign of a local business simply because it was nearby. You’ve shouted at my car, “What the fuck are you looking at?” when I took a look at you to see if I recognized you. You’ve tried to break into my theatre department late at night, and almost succeeded.

So what haunts you?

There was a time, when you were little, when you accepted the sanctity of the beliefs and belongings of others. You decried the injustice you saw, with the canny eyes of childhood. If someone was being picked on, you realized it wasn’t fair, and you spoke up, because you knew it wasn’t right to cause grief to others.

I  ask you, what changed? What drove you to where you are now, angry at the world and eager to take it out on anyone and anything? What ground your respect for others into the dirt? Why, today, do you so eagerly cause the grief that you once spoke out against?

What haunts you?

Tell me “a cruel world” and I’ll laugh at you. The only thing making the world cruel are the people in it who prey on others, as you are doing now. You cannot honestly complain about those making your life miserable and then go muck things up for someone else. Or else, if you can, you are dreadfully out of touch with reality.

I ask you again, what haunts you? What drives you to these random acts of anger? Why do you feel that you are justified in releasing your inner problems by destroying the worlds of others?

I will not claim that the world is fair, nor will I make the naïve suggestion to “look on the brighter side”. I know despair, and I know depression, and I know anger; and I know that there are times in your life when the brighter side is eclipsed by an umbra so deep that it makes optimism a fool’s game. But I also know that acts of fear only inspire more acts of fear, until someone recognizes the progression and stops it with their own self. What haunts you, drives you so rabid with fear that you seek to inspire it in others? This I want to know.

I will say this: Your wanton abuse of that which others cherish is incredibly disappointing. You are part of a larger world now; you have the capacity to make changes and compromises without resorting to intimidation or barbaric destruction. It is time that you understood the world outside of your own bubble, and showed some respect for those who inhabit it– because life is more than what happens to you.

Pick your heads up and show some respect for the world you live in, as well as the people you share it with.

Everyone, please breathe.

Breathe in, and let the flow of air shake loose all of the rotten fruit you have hanging inside you, spoiling and souring and eating at you.

Breathe out, and blow it all away, spitting the black bitterness of jealousy and spite and anger far, far into the horizon.

We don’t need to fight. We don’t need to be so brutally angry with one another. What are you even so twisted about? Sum up the core of your problem in one sentence, and then say the sentence out loud. How important does it sound?

There’s way too much going on in the world to be angry at someone like that.

Please. I beg of everyone: Take a moment and just stop, breathe, and think.

I will not lie, this drives me absolutely bonkers. lol.

Seeing people stick those three letters at the end of sentences when there’s honestly no reason to indicate that the author is “laughing out loud” just drives me mad. In fact, I think it’s turning into a general hatred for the abbreviation itself. lol.

It’s just so totally unnecessary. Do you really need to denote every thing you write that may have a smidgen of possible humour? lol. We’re smart enough, lol, we can usually figure it out for ourselves.

I’m sure that for many, it’s just become reflexive. I honestly can’t understand that. Do you really put it after anything that might have some sort of humour? Lol, I can’t understand that mindset. If something is funny, we’ll pick up on it. If it made you laugh, you can say it’s funny, or, on rare occasions, simply say “ha”, or “heh”. But “lol”? It’s a non-word that has been bloated to the point of absolute meaningless, and I’m sick and tired of reading it. On forums, especially, because forums aren’t IM, lol. Granted, my IM conversations are rarely like typical ones, and neither are my text messages (lol), but I sure don’t like reading “lol”.

It’s part of the degradation of the English language, and that’s nothing I want to lol at.

Come on, people!

What’s happened to our conversation? We’ve become a bunch of spineless, light-footed lemurs, afraid to say anything that might step on someone else’s toes or offend anyone else in any way at all. All of us. We’re caught up in modifiers and justifiers, constantly making excuses in order to keep ourselves from pushing people too hard.

It’s too late at night to come up with examples, but watch your discourse with others. Watch others’ discourse. We’ve become ridiculously self-censoring, myself included.

I’m not advocating going out and being rude, that’s absurd. Manners have their place. But there are manners, and then there’s simply regularly cutting your feet out from under you, and the latter is happening one hell of a lot.

Random thought of the night.