i have been a lame ass about updating my site. see, i do all of this while i'm at work and i had to move desks and computers and all my files got lost for awhile. then i got them back but was actually busy doing *work* for the past couple of weeks, if you can believe that. i decided not to apply to grad school after all, at least not right now. it's just too much work for something that i'm not even sure that i really wanna do. and if i'm gonna do it, then i damn well better be doing it for the right reasons so thanksgiving was yesterday and i had dinner at my friend nate's house. he lives in santa cruz. this is important for what is about to follow. there were some friends of his family's there and they were like, your average run of the mill aging hippies, with flowing "indian" clothes long hair blahdeblah. the guy was wearing a yoga t-shirt and had some beads around his neck. how new age. and it's santa cruz so i'm sure y'all can picture exactly the type of person i'm talking about. and i realized that new agers really annoy me. i hate the way they go to india, brazil, "the jungles of africa", etc on these "spiritual voyages". and it's all like pre-packaged travel deals with itineraries of which ritual is right for you to go to shit. and they take it so seriously. and they talk about how close they feel to the indiginous cultures. whatfuckingever. like those "authentic indiginous religious ceremonies" presented to you by your trusty travel agent are anywhere close to the real thing. i guess like, i sorta look at it as the same as the "authentic hawaiian luau" you'd get if you went to hawaii--camped up for the tourists. but i believe there's a subtle difference between the two. i think that someone who goes to a luau knows on some level that what they are seeing is camped up for the tourists. but these new age dupes don't. maybe i'm wrong. the irony here is that i have many of the same spiritual beliefs as the new agers; i, too believe that as far as spirituality goes, there are other cultures that are far more right on than anything that judeo-christian faith has to offer. but i would never ever ever pay to do some spiritual workshop in *insert country here*. i'm gonna take a class in java soon, paid for by my company. woohoo! mail|past entries|headtrip