If I Launk These Nooches, You Will Cist to Exease

So. I wrote what very important scientists call "The Coolest Thing Ever." :) It's my first essay ever in college and my incredibly lucky literature professer gets the pleasure of reading it.
It's 50% Tamara's creation and I give her all the love and thanks in the world!!
The prompt was to choose any piece of text (books, movies, music, video games, etc...) and dig past the surface, into a theme of our choosing, and expand and continue our thoughts in a way which is not the norm.
So, of course, I chose the best piece of media I could ever imagine: The Dark Knight.
I present for you now, one incredibly excellent essay...

On the Blindness of Justice (and Bats)
We are living in Gotham. Every day, animated, conscious, and breathing, the society of our world is not unlike the fictional universe of The Dark Knight, Christopher Nolan’s 2008 masterpiece. This is not to say that we exist in a world of superheroes and villains, where regular people take it upon themselves to incite chaos or deliver vigilante justice on a daily basis. No. Instead, this parallel suggests that we are neither better nor worse than the imagined characters which compose such a comic-book world; after all, our realities are defined by personal ideologies of ‘good’ and ‘evil,’ much like the variable realties of Gotham’s citizens. We are ruled by the push and pull of either side, torn by the conflict of what we are taught we should do versus what we want to do. Such meager struggles define our very existence, so how can we be distinguished from our fictional counterparts?
Both in and out of Gotham, people—that is to say, the average, everyday citizen—generally try to be ‘good.’ Society is constructed upon foundations of order, diplomacy and even kindness, the benefits of which keep children educated, streets clean, and cities developing. Batman, a symbol of basic human ‘good,’ would say that people are inherently moral; that at the base of human nature is a spark of light and beauty. He believes that we are born tabula rasa and that only tragic circumstances create in us any ‘evil,’ which is something pitiable. Gotham, according to him, is “full of people ready to believe in good.” However, the brutal fact of the matter is that, almost without exception, people have to try. If we are essentially ‘good,’ moral, right and decent, why is such a concerted effort involved in acting accordingly? Why must we fight to retain our sense of justice or teach our offspring that it is ‘wrong’ to fight, steal and kill? How are characters such as Batman and Commissioner Gordon justified in attesting to the fundamental innocence of humanity?
Immersed in his world of lies and secrecy, the Caped Crusader himself is the first to pollute this ideology. Widely considered a hero, he claims to deliver justice for the betterment of Gotham; in his words, “I’m whatever Gotham needs me to be.” Despite his laudable motivation, he perpetrates many an act of violence against others. During the course of the film, he leaves behind a wake of explosions, property damage and bodily harm to criminals and innocents alike. Particularly troubling are the five murders he indirectly causes, murders committed because of his refusal to reveal his identity. Considering every reckless act of heroism, every explosion or overturned car for the ‘greater good,’ there is an infinitesimal likelihood that not a single innocent person was maimed or slaughtered as a result of Batman’s rationalized rampage of justice. Batman’s path to order is irresponsible, dangerously single-minded, and self-contradictory. Simply because the Winged Avenger refuses to directly murder someone, we are expected to believe that he is the ‘good’ guy. The moral pedestal provided by this “one rule” conveniently elevates Batman over those he seeks to punish, somehow giving him the powers of judge and jury. Perhaps Batman’s critics have a point: “Gotham needs… elected officials, not a man who thinks he’s above the law.” The Batman is guilty of his own form of hypocrisy, his own unique manifestation of evil, and arguably the worst: evil that takes the shape of good.
At the very least, it is admirable that unadulterated, unapologetic iniquity does not lay false claim to its identity. When considering the top ten greatest film and television villains—and, for that matter, performances—of all time, Heath Ledger’s Joker easily tops the list. It is immediately evident that this man, this villain, is living in his own world of darkness and chaos, a world rejected by the light-and-bright principles of the everyday citizen. That aside, it cannot be said that there exists a more liberated or self-conscious individual within the confines of Gotham. The Joker has embraced his own night, his own madness, and he feels no desire to deviate from this, his norm—nor to adhere to the norm of the masses. He considers himself Gotham’s liberator, its teacher and its owner. “The only sensible way to live in this world is without rules,” he says, and who are we to argue? Better free, lawless and chaotic, than guilty of the same hypocrisy that plagues the Batman and so many other “civilized people.” The Joker would call this the worst evil; that lying and cheating—especially cheating ourselves by way of self-deceit—debase humanity more than stealing or destroying ever will—those acts, at least, are honest.
It can be deduced, then, that the concepts of ‘good’ and ‘evil’ must be matters of personal opinion, and that whether or not a person wants to be ‘good’ is the force with the potential to actually make them ‘good,’ at least from their own perspectives. It’s all a self-fulfilling prophecy, reduced to the question of how one sees oneself. The Dark Knight justifies his actions by claiming that they ultimately aid the people of Gotham and also create for him a sort of inner-peace. He is viewed as a hero, a fighter of ‘evil,’ a perpetuator of justice, and, surely, to him and to those situated under his banner, that is the reality. But to the Joker and the criminals against whom he campaigns, he is the enemy: a naïve, ill-advised amateur, blinded by his narrow assertion of what is ‘light’ and ‘good.’ That is their reality, and it is no less real or true than the rest of Gotham’s. In this way, the term ‘reality’ is a misnomer, because the relative nature of perception makes what is true and real to one person a blatant lie to another. Thus, there can be no absolute ‘good,’ nor an absolute ‘evil,’ except in the mind of the individual. Unfortunately, that individual is virtually always affected by the lessons of others and influenced by a lifetime of experience.
The Joker sees this. He sees past the illusions of ideology and status quo, past the accepted boundaries of deeds and beliefs. He maintains that, under it all, people are animals: “You see, their morals, their code, it's a bad joke. Dropped at the first sign of trouble. They're only as good as the world allows them to be… When the chips are down, these... these civilized people, they'll eat each other.” We’d love to believe that we are ‘decent,’ that in our souls we are above evil and depravity. According to the Joker, we’re not. When confronted with the immorality man is capable of, we convince ourselves that these are remarkable exceptions, that something went wrong with the individuals behind criminal acts, and that such crimes are not representative of human nature.
In one way or another, each of us wears a “mask,” weaving words and actions into a guise which conceal our true selves. The Joker simply paints himself on the outside, allowing the clown face greasepaint to express his personal truth far more explicitly than anything he could say or do. We reject this idea of casting aside our civil, ‘good’ facades because doing so would bring to light the harsh truth about who we really are. Looking past can force us to see the human in the hero and the genius in the villain. It terrifies us because very seldom do we find ourselves actually faced with what we expect; the truth we uncover is not likely to align with our pleasant, accepted personal reality.
The Batman believes that we need our masks, our ideologies and constructs of ‘right’ and ‘wrong,’ to continue functioning as a healthy society. He says, “Sometimes the truth isn’t good enough. Sometimes people deserve more.” By playing the hero, he personifies this belief and, in the eyes of the people, becomes something which protects Gotham from itself. Ideally, he would operate only within the bounds of light, delivering justice with a fair and even hand. However, Batman’s humanity essentially prevents this from being the case. With humanity comes vulnerability and so the mighty Batman falls victim to the same things we all do: fear, sadness, anger, and vengeance.
Something cannot be essentially, organically, completely ‘good’ if it can be perverted or changed. In fact, such a descent into darkness would only go to prove that ‘good’ and ‘right’ simply don’t exist. The Joker attempts to pervert things considered innately pure by giving them “a little push;” that is to say, by tweaking one’s realities and perceptions of ‘good’ and ‘bad,’ he can change who they are. If this can be accomplished, if even the best among us can turn out to have darkness at their cores, then what is the world but a cesspool of rot? During one scene, the Joker orders Batman to “take off your little mask and show us all who you really are.” His tone of voice suggests that he knows of the hero’s weaknesses and wants them exposed in order to demonstrate that none of us are purely ‘good,’ not even the superheroes. The journey of Harvey Dent is a prime illustration in the Joker’s portfolio: the corruption of a man who is all that is ‘good’ in Gotham. As the stalwart District Attorney, the “White Knight of Gotham” furthers the cause of justice publicly, without deception or disguise. Moreover, he truly, passionately believes in what he preaches—that fairness and order can “clean up [Gotham].” When his fiancé, Rachel Dawes, dies at the Joker’s hands, however, his perceptions of right and wrong, justice and equality, are forever warped by the cruelty of the world. His reality becomes misplaced, erratic and centered on flipping a coin. The previously unshakeable Dent comes to believe that chance is the only righteous force in the universe. All the Joker did to bring about this complete transformation, to forge the villain from the hero, was convince Dent that his views were incorrect. In the Joker’s words: “I took Gotham’s White Knight and I brought him down to our level. It wasn’t hard.” People cannot be inherently pure if their corruption is but a tragedy away.
Once these prevalent ideals of ‘good’ and ‘evil’ are melded—as in Dent’s case, virtue becoming corrupt and twisted—they can be disposed of as mankind begins to see the subjectivity and uselessness of such concepts. The naïve world of ‘good’ will thereafter cease to exist for society. When that happens, no law of man will prevent people from doing anything and everything they desire. Authority would be exposed for the arbitrary scheme it is. The state of nature—the urge to fight, kill, eat and take, ‘animal’ instinct, anarchy and spontaneity—all of these would reign supreme over the masked, proper, “civilized” society. All civilization ever did was cage up and stow away any and all ‘bad’ thoughts or impulses we feel and even made us guilty over them. Chaos would be the only god. As “an agent of chaos,” this is the Joker’s ultimate goal.
In a world where civility and self-deceit are the practiced standard, very few people ever find out who they truly are. They are caught in life’s mindless repetition of work and to-do lists, each day stuck in their custom-tailored prison cells, confined to the endless cycle of niceties and lawfulness. They climb the ladder of ‘success’ rung by rung in order to someday, perhaps, find themselves comfortable and happy. Comfort and happiness, come to it, are the ideas which turn the cogs of monotony in these folks; they assume that by doing what they always do—working hard, going to school, getting a job, obeying the law (except for the occasional speeding ticket)—they will achieve contentment. People are living every day in ignorance and consequent bliss. The Joker shocks us from our reveries, making us rethink these values. He urges us to reach towards awareness of self. Rather than see the world through rose colored glasses, he beckons us to perceive things as he does—dark, dirty, decayed and dead. Anarchy emancipates us; doing what we want shows us who we are. The Joker knows this. He is a self-conscious, perhaps even enlightened, individual among the cattle of Gotham, who blindly follow each other through the unremarkable gates of social conformity. By embracing who he is and owning his actions, the Joker knows himself, arguably, as well as one can. There is a truth in him more illuminating than any ideals Batman or Commissioner Gordon have to offer.
Despite the Joker’s honest examination of self and his understanding of moral relativism, he cannot claim a monopoly over the one true reality. Seeing past masks and lies does not mean the Joker can truly tell us what ‘is.’ He is, like the Batman, only human after all, a being of flesh and blood who perceives his environment by way of his senses. He never pauses to consider whether or not he has it right, whether or not he is guilty of exactly what he opposes in characters like Batman, Dent and Gordon. Although he doesn’t put much stock in the concepts of ‘good’ and ‘bad,’ the Joker is kept from seeing the objective truth by his own, rather darker, philosophies. Instead, he perverts and inverts the morals of others to craft his own ideals. Knowing this, it is impossible to definitively say that the Joker is right or wrong with any certainty. Reality defies any ‘general’ explanation; any individual attempting to define reality will unavoidably make it personal and subjective—“reality according to me,” more or less. It can be surmised that reality is ambivalent and apathetic. It does not have any beliefs whatsoever, which makes it operate neither within the realm of ‘good,’ of order and benevolence, nor of ‘bad,’ of chaos and malice. No human being can live in a pure, untainted reality. As creatures of belief and theory, our very nature dictates that we form preferences and see differences, thereby choosing a custom path to follow… even if ‘in reality’ the paths don’t actually exist. All ideals are contained within the human mind. The universe doesn’t care.
Or is that true? It cannot be known, certainly not by the likes of this student. The idea of reality as an indifferent state is only, after all, an idea itself. It is a theory concocted by an ideological human mind with a clear belief of what is right or wrong, a mind just as affected as everyone else’s. No different, one could say, than a citizen of Gotham.

The end.
Perfection?
I know.

Lol... Humans are n00bs...

Is it sad that I'm bored with everything here? I mean, my brother told me I would be, but there was a lot of stuff going on this summer and I was having a blast.

Not that I'm not having fun anymore.

I love hanging out, but all this drama and crap going down... It's like, we're OUT of high school, children. Grow up. One of my besties completely bores me, others have moved away and at the beginning of the summer I lost my boyfriend/best friend. My social circle is dwindling and I find I care very little. Because I'm getting out.

I love friends and I love most of the people who are my friends. But I'm so done living here. Just a few weeks ago I was terrified of relocating. Now I'm excited. I will miss a lot of people but I'm bored with the past and being tied to it.

I'm bored with high school dramas and twisted love triangles and stupid, slutty behavior. I'm bored with facebook deletions and over-dramatizing EVERYTHING. I'm bored with "I hate her so she hates me so we hate each other so waahh" and I'm bored with sitting at home during the day and playing Splinter Cell.

Of course I know college won't be completely separate from high school. There will be a lot of immature, stupid people there and a lot of drama because humans NEED it. Because we want our lives to be a movie because that's how we think it's normal to be.

It's not.

I want my life to be serene and happy, like night time walks with Katie.

I'm working towards it, too. That whole not-letting-things-get-to-me thing is a LOT harder than it sounds but I WILL keep at it. And I found out recently that I'm a lot more gifted spiritually than I thought I was. I was told that I was a very gifted healer just two nights ago. And then there's that whole gnome thing...

I met a gnome. I guess I never said that here. But I did. Centaurs, too.

I find it doesn't matter whether or not people believe me. I know what I did and what I saw and I know it was one of the most intense experiences of my life. I know that, if you don't believe me, you just don't know as much as me. You can't see as much as me.

And, hey. That makes me fucking superior.

I hate non-believers. Anything can happen.

We just don't let it.

Humans are inherently selfish, and we're also addicted to failure. It's sad. But we're also very amazing creatures.

We just think too much of ourselves.

It's not that we're less magical than any other being in the universe. We just like to think, since it's not easy to reach that state of awareness, it's not real. And we think we're better than it. Our race is so cocky and young and naive...

And the unseen world is like "Lol... Humans are n00bs."

Wow. How did I get here?

I do digress, don't I?

Huh. I'm gonna go to Katie's now. She's one of the people I'm really going to miss.

Like a Butterfly, I Have a Face On My Back to Scare Away Predators

The title is a lie.

I had to mention a butterfly because of this change factor, but then my imagination went rampant and things fell apart.

So. 20 Goals For The Rest Of 2009 And Into 2010:

1.) Finish You Can't Spell and move on to other 300 page projects.
2.) Survive my first quarter of college in Seattle and learn to like my roommate
3.) Stick to the change thing with Katie and Lyndsey, ESPECIALLY when I feel like I can't. Act chill no matter what life throws at me. I honestly think it'll help.
4.) Meet a decent guy or start dating one of the ones I already know.
5.) Like my Tarot reading said yesterday, let go of what happened because once I turn my back on it I'll reach my goals.
6.) Get a move on with Year and a Day.
7.) Develop a crush on AT LEAST one professor. I mean, come on.
8.) Buy Star Trek
9.) Stay healthy and active and don't give into the temptations of dorm food.
10.) Start writing something that actually has a chance at maybe being published one day and don't give up on the two I started recently because they rule.
11.) Slap that person I despise. BUT THEN BE CHILL ABOUT IT!!
12.) Get a job.
13.) Take a bath, hippy.
14.) Buy UP.
15.) Get some. (Somehow, these are deteriorating in meaning)
16.) Drink more tea. Eat more vegetables.
17.) Maybe ACTUALLY go vegetarian, you flaming hippocrate. (Idk how to spell that...)
18.) Learn how to spell hippocrate... hyppocrate... hypocrit... panda
19.) Follow my planets and stars closely, thanks to the help of my Personal Astrology Planner 2010.
20.) Make a drastic change for the better to my person every chance I get. Become well rounded and knowledgable and in tune with the earth. Learn to work with energy. Come to peace.

I totally cheated on that last one. :)

Well. There they are. Reinvention, on the way.

Whether Texas Exists

I had a pretty enlightening weekend with my friends. It was my eighteenth so we went up to my lake cabin and spent a few nights there. It was a lot of fun and we had some pretty deep conversations... :P

Anyway, I'd like to share with you now a little nugget of wisdom granted us by Katherine, who had previously misheard one of my thoughts about travel, being in the kitchen, and when she reiterated what she'd thought I said, it was so far off, and yet so mind blowingly perfect, we wrote it down on a piece of napkin.

I've never been to Texas, she said, although this could work with any place you've never personally visited: Timbuktu, Venice, the Hanging Gardens of Babilon...

I've never been to Texas, so it's not a place that truly exists to me. It is just a place I think about existing.

The reason I write that here is to immortalize it, in case I ever lose the napkin. It is such a crazy theory, like the "If a Tree Falls in the Forest" one. Of course we know Texas exists. We know people who have personally been there. But it has never been proved to us that it does.

QED it does not truly exist. To us, at least. Sure, it exists to the Texans and all those who have visited the state. But to us it is only an idea, at least until it is realized.

Makes you think, huh?

Makes you scoff, then makes you think.

I mean, REALLY think about it. Mind boggling.

Why Texas?

I don't know. I suppose I should put in some place more romantic. Like Venice.

I've never been to Venice, so it's not a place that truly exists to me. It's only a place I think about existing.

See? Totally works. That one gave me shivers.

Bittersweet

My last night in Paris. It's crazy that I've been in Europe for two weeks already and now I'm just going home. I loved it, though. It's beautiful and loud and old here and I can honestly see myself living here one day.
This vacation has also given me a much needed break from the total crap that was going on in the states. It's given me time to stew and think and realize that I honestly don't really care, you know? I guess I knew from the start that it wasn't going to last (I mean, really... and I was getting these bad feelings anyway) and I'm sort of certain there's some karma going on here, for the bad way I've treated guys in the past. Besides, there's that maturity issue that always bothered me anyways.
My knight of cups is on his way to me.
And he's not the person who kissed me the night before I left... uhh...
So, Paris has let me forget (and given me a dash of self confidence... the men here aren't afaid to stare if they think you're pretty) and relax. I also got a serious tan, which isn't the first thing I'd assume I was going to get, but between trekking the city under the hot sun every day and strolling the totally shadeless gardens of Versailles, those UV rays have done their job.
Speaking of Versailles, I feel like i've been there before. The whole time I kept thinking "I've walked these halls... I've visited this room..." It's not all surprising, I suppose. Everyone who was anyone moved to Versailles with Louis XIV so if I was in France and nobility, or even a servant, in that century in a past life, chances are I was there, too.
But that might be my imagination running completely rampant.
In any case, I will miss it here and I've decided to bring back Dette and Vieve. They'd like London more, I think...
I started my new story, inspired very much by the area around Honfleur but set in Scotland-- I've never been to Scotland... that and Italy are my next European goals. The story's got supernatural in it, as always. I think someday I should try to write something that could plausibly happen, but I think I shy away from it because I run to writing when I want to escape reality, you know? So any story without a hint of the fantastic doesn't hold my interest for long. Just a personal preference. I know a lot of people, including my father, who would rather read a non-fiction or realistic fiction novel over one with magic or monsters.
I'm a bit of a juxtaposition in that I love books like Abarat but cannot stand most books under the "Fantasy" section in the library. It makes shopping for me difficult but... eh. I'll buy my own books. Get me a certificate to Barnes and Noble.
Whoo... Well. I've been rambling. Not even sure how I got there.
I don't know why I'm doing this blog thing. I have nothing interesting to say. But, I suppose if there are those out there who are actually interested in me or who are voyeuristic and love reading random folks' random inner thoughts, this is the blog for them.
Or, it can be an online diary.
I think I like that.

A Short Apology

My friends have been doing this, so I figured, why not me? I don't really care about followers or anything like that but, as Katherine said, it's a cool creative outlet and maybe it'll get me past some writer's block. I need to start a diary anyway.
Thanks, Katie. You I love.
Um um um...
Oh! I was gonna explain the title of the blog and the address. See, I've been re-reading Clive Barker's Abarat: Days of Magic, Nights of War for the millionth time. It's my all time favorite book (beats out even Harry Potter, House of Leaves and Riddles of Epsilon) and so when I was trying to quickly think of a title, of course a poem from Abarat came to mind. Its first line is "Do not blame the wind" and goes on to talk about how the wind is just bringing along whatever noises are on it, be them messages of love or war. A sort of don't kill the messenger story. And the Babilonium, from the address bar, that's the name of an island in the book, the carnival island. But the name reminds me of babbling, which is what I'll be doing here. So I used it.
Thanks for being a freakin genius, Clive Barker. I love your work.
So. That's all for now. There's my reason for starting this thing (everyone ELSE is jumping off the bridge) and there's the explanation behind the title.
And that's all for now. No deep thoughts to leave you with, except "Do not blame the wind."