Loopy

Though this may come as something of a surprise to some of you, I went on the Loop last night. Yes, the Halloween Loop was more or less everything I expected. Though being among the masses that much isn't exactly my idea of heaven, I did go out dressed as the Joker which had the effect of creeping out a lot of people, so that was a ton of fun. I was dragged out by my sister and her fiance, but I made the best of it by hanging out with people who were fun and meeting a few new people. Yes, even I meet new people occasionally. I even remember one of their names. Today I awoke with a smidgen of a hangover, but I beat it into submission with the proper application of Gatorade and FF7.

We also pre-partied for the loop by playing beer pong at my sister's soon to be domicile that her fiance is currently living in. I was at least reasonably good at beer pong since my sister and I had gotten in plenty of practice the night before. And we'd gotten quite hammered in the process. My plan of going over, having dinner, and then going home to deal with bleaching and dying my hair became a night of get drunk and forget about all that stuff you were planning to do. Worked out find in the end. My hair was green on time, and now it's multi-hued dark reds and purples. Slightly more work appropriate.

For those of you who know what I'm talking about, you surely feel my pain: I have the Golden Saucer theme stuck in my head. Yuck.

In other news I finally beat the game Psychonauts the other day. It's easily the best game you've never heard of. It's demented, hilarious, and very fun to play. I wish it would get itself a sequel, but the dismal sales for the game don't seem to give it much of a chance. Woe, oh, woe is me. Fortunately I can assuage my pain with the many other games I've been putting off. I also now have a serious chunk of coin in the form of games to sell back at GameStop, so I won't have to spend any money on video games for a while. That's good, because I need new DS games in a serious way, and I definitely shouldn't be spending any money.

Part of why I'm not spending money right now is that I just picked up a nice new trench coat. I've needed one for well over a year, possibly two, so it's nice to finally have one. It's a trifle large on me, but I really don't care. It's hella warm, looks very good, and it's soft enough that the ladies will like it, so that's all I really need. Yes it's black. Duh.

Now I must go eat the dinner that my sister has cooked. If I type much more she may kill me, so I'm off!

What would my life be like if I weren't a perfectionist?

Let's start by stating that one who strives for perfection isn't necessarily a perfectionist. Someone who seeks to better himself or herself isn't mistaken; indeed it is a noble goal to try to become a better person. The problem, or more specifically my problem, is the obsession with perfection that changes it from a worthy goal to a self-destructive driving force.

Someone who strives for perfection isn't one who never fails. Nor do they get discouraged by failure. In some ways that kind of perfectionist looks forward to failure as a way to learn and grow, as a way to do better the next time around. When things go wrong, they may be disappointed, but they don't then feel worthless or stupid for making a mistake. Not so for a perfectionist like me.

As an example from my life, I am a electricity nazi. I'm not quite to the point where I have one lightbulb that I move from room to room, but that's mostly because the people who lived in my house before liked Ikea lights and those things don't take normal bulbs. Anyway, every night I try to remember to turn off every source of power in the house that I don't need to keep running; things like my fridge get preferential treatment and stay on. If I wake up in the morning and find that I didn't remember to turn something off, I have that moment of "I'm an idiot". If I wasn't so obsessed with getting things right, perhaps that "idiot" thought would be a "woops" thought and bother me little if at all.

I'm not a perfectionist about everything. Anyone who has seen my lawn would agree with that. ;) What I am obsessed with doing "right" is enough to disrupt my day anyway. So I guess I should just say what would be different about my life in general.

• When driving, other people doing stupid things wouldn't bother me so much; perhaps I wouldn't even think them stupid, but commiserate their bad day.
  
• When having a rough night at kung fu, I would praise myself for sticking with the class rather than belittle my abilities for feeling so weak.
  
• When I made any random mistake my first thought wouldn't be one of irritation or anger, just acknowledgement and possibly an effort to remember not to repeat that mistake.
  
• When dinner burns, my egg yolk breaks at an inopportune time, or my dough just won't rise, I'd just roll my eyes and start over instead of growl with frustration.
  
• Since I wouldn't be as busy thinking about what's wrong, it's quite likely I'd do everything in general better. In an odd way, being less of a perfectionist would allow me to be a more effective perfectionist.
  

I suppose my fear in giving up on trying to be perfect is that I will lose that drive I have to strive for excellence. If I'm not pushing to be perfect then I might not be even leaning towards perfect, or even just trying to do well. The idea of aiming for "good enough" rather than "very good" doesn't sit well with me. To give up being a perfectionist I will have to find a way to continue to strive for greater things without having the anxiety or guilt of not doing as well as I think I should. Not sure how to do that yet, but CBT is today so pehaps I'll have something useful to work with in a couple of hours. Here's hoping!

Samurai Champloo

Though easily mistaken for Samurai Shampoo, Champloo is one of the better anime series out there. I've heard it said that what Bebop did for jazz, Champloo does for hip hop. I don't know that I'd entirely agree with that, but all in all the music for the series is impressive even for a style of music I personally try to avoid. There are definitely parts of the show that made me laugh so hard it hurt, and that never makes me unhappy about an anime series. All in all, I'd say it's not as good as Bebop, but it's rather hard to find anything that even compares to Bebop, so take that as still a good sign. Now I just have to decide if I'm going to start watching Technolyze or Those Who Hunt Elves next. Given how funny Champloo was, I'm thinking Technolyze. I haven't hurt my brain lately, even with .hack, so perhaps that's the way to go...

Speaking of hurting my brain, I need to find people to play Go with. If you don't know what it is, think a strange bastard child of Othello and chess and you'll be nowhere near close, but you'll get the basic idea. The game was developed over approximately 2k years in Asia, and it's really hard and fun. Sadly not many people play it, so I'll just have to keep looking for players. C'est la vie.

ugh... groan...

World War Z is an amazing book. A chilling, horrifying, and quite frankly depressing book, but amazing nonetheless. For those of you who don't know, World War Z is the follow up to the Zombie Survival Guide as written by Max Brooks. Yes, the son of Mel Brooks. Funny man has progeny that manages a very creepy book. C'est la vie. Anyway, WWZ is is a series of survivor stories from the great war with the zombies. The beginning of the book is the story of how the world royally fucks itself and the rest goes from there. I'm going to be trading the Frenchman this book for another zombie book, though the book he's giving me is even darker and scarier, a much more personal story of a father and son surviving after a zombie apocolypse (which I very likely mispelled). We're not sure I'll like it, but I'm damn well giving it a try. Zombies = very yes.

Sadly those groans were not from the zombies but from me. Kung fu just about killed me this day. I am very goddamn tired. I nearly passed out on my feet several times, almost couldn't stand up after a couple rolls, and sweat till I couldn't (that's bad). So two gatorade like drinks later, I'm feeling better, but this just reminds me why I don't like testing. This is the kind of total exhaustion I end up with, and I really don't like it. Getting this tired doesn't make me feel stronger, it makes me want to die. Maybe if I went to more classes a week I'd do better, but two days a week is it. Hopefully I'll get more energy back by test time in December, but I don't know how that will go. Ugh. Groan.

On the other hand, me nearly dying of exhaustion is probably better than 95% of people out there, so maybe I'm looking at this wrong. Comparing myself to the people who go to Kung Fu like five days a week isn't entirely fair. I'm tough, fast, and have more go juice than your average joe... I'm just not quite as full of energy as Aluicius. Oh well. That's ok. I'll never have his amazing hair either.

Huh... I guess that CBT stuff really works!

I don't know about you, but I'm not entirely comfortable living in a fascist country

Yes, that's right, fascist. With the death of right of habeas corpus, the Constitution no longer holds any meaning, because when you're imprisioned and cannot do a thing about it, what's the use of those other rights? Don't like a gun toting NRA guy? Label him "enemy combatant" and imprison him indefinitely. Don't like a environmental terrorist group? Label them "enemy combatants" and imprison them till they rot. With the loss of habeas corpus, our rights are no longer questionably being assaulted by the Bush administration, they are directly being assaulted by the assholes and all in the guise of making us "safer". I'll tell you somthing: I don't feel safer. I feel less and less safe the more this administration pulls in the guise of "safety". This is why we should not be trying to be a democracy, but a republic. At least in a republic, you have the hope that the a majority of the people voting are educated enough to know what things like habeas corpus actually means. The fact that no one has the right to challenge their imprisionment anymore, this does indeed include American citizens, means we live under the control of a fascist goverment. I'm going to quote Ben Franklin yet again because he's still right a couple centuries later:
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."

Personally, I'd rather be posting about how the Wii is going to crush all foes with its now 2 MILLION consoles ready for sale. I'd like to be excited about that, but the fact that now I could be thrown into prison with no hope of legal escape has kind of irked me a bit.