The Surname

I find it mildly amusing how often times the thing that finally gets me out of bed in the morning is the fact that after having pressed the snooze button once or twice, my brain very quickly goes through a process similar to a computer's boot-up and I suddenly find myself thinking way too much to be tired. Such was the case today. After getting a wonderful night of sleep (thanks to the fact that I finally got off my butt and went and bought some more of that melatonin supplement that I've been taking), I lay in bed trying to work off the last dredges of grogginess and, as usual, my mind started off on some random tangent.

The subject of the tangent was in regards to the surname. As a little background, a few months back, I had a discussion with a friend that found itself into the purpose and reasoning behind taking on the husband's name after marriage. Now from my perspective this was never really that strange of a concept. On the one hand, it was just what everybody did as far as I was concerned. On the other hand, my being male means that I'll never have to worry about the implications of having my identity 'changed' upon my marriage to my spouse. This friend, however, was not of the same mind as me. She had been through one unsuccessful marriage already and had developed a propensity towards adopting strange counter culture type philosophies and behaviors. For the sake of preserving this friend's anonymity, I'll refrain from going into any more detail about the circumstances that brought her to think differently about the whole last name business. All that is needed to be known is that she no longer felt it necessary or desirable to have her or her present and future children to have to change their identities for the sake of a husband/step father.

I was totally baffled as I listened to her explain her various reasonings. This was stuff that I'd never really put any deep consideration into before. My immediate reaction was my usual polite attentiveness over personal disagreement. This kind of a scenario was not uncommon in our discussions and I had learned quite well how to listen to her talk about something that I may have personally found completely absurd. (For example, she also is in particular disagreement with how society [apparently] imposes bras as a necessary garment for girls and women. Again not being female myself, I can't really vote yea or nay, but logic seems to dictate that women and girls still retain the freedom of choice as to whether or not they buy into the bra-wearing business. I have yet to see any bra police being deployed...) Ultimately, my conclusion to the conversation was along the lines of, "I really don't think it's an issue. I suspect people conform to it because that's just the way we do things. They don't have to if they don't want to."

But back to the present.

The predicament had bubbled back up to the surface of my waking mind this morning and as I still lay in bed, I began to consider what my actual stance on the matter would be. I began with the apparent purpose of the surname in general. It is also known as the 'family name.' In societies that follow this convention, the family name helps to identify and unify a particular group of people that are related to each other by blood or marriage. Everybody within this group generally has the same last name. The first and middle name(s), depending on how many names your parents feel necessary to give you, provide the unique part of your identity.

Alright, so why is it that when a man and woman are married, the woman is the one to drop her last name in favor of her husbands? Many would argue that that particular practice is just further evidence that our society is male-centric and oppresses woman and blah blah blah blah. Perhaps it was at one point, but I don't buy that crap. The changing of the last name signifies the joining of another family. But why only the women? I dunno. That's just the convention that we as a society have been following. It doesn't MEAN anything. You still don't *have* to change your name, so stop whining about it. Besides, you don't lose your identity by taking on another name, you expand it. If you're a Jefferson and you marry into the Rogers family, you're still a Jefferson. You're just also a Rogers. Get it?

Another thing that amuses me (and by amuses I mean makes my mind hurt): Some people would prefer that their children not necessarily have to take on the new last name if they get remarried. Normally this wouldn't be a problem, but in the case of someone who has multiple kids from different fathers... What a way to make keeping your family identity in track, right?

But moving right along. The conclusion to my thought process involved how this conundrum could be solved. Well, you could not adopt the new name and just have to deal with the inherent confusion that would come from that. You could be ridiculous and hyphenate your maiden and married names and deal with the appearance that you think way too much of yourself. I suppose that you could get your husband to adopt YOUR last name... But that doesn't really change anything. What if when you got married, both husband and wife adopted a new last name? Aside from making genealogy very difficult, that could satisfy the ninnies that insist on making this a problem.

As for the rest of us, I dare say we'll just shrug and get on with our lives. As it happens, there are far more important things to be worrying about.

I Had a Clever Title, But Then I Went Back to Sleep

Today is a good day. Today is the last day that I'll have to exile myself to the dark recesses of my room. (More literally dark than figuratively. The one-bulb ceiling fan is kind of pathetic in terms of lighting up the room adequately.) My roommate is LEAVING!!! For Christmas. In a few short hours I will be able to exist in peace and comfort and be allowed to live in my apartment without having to worry about the likelihood of anything I may be doing causing my unfortunate living companion to freak out over some insignificant thing I've done. Ah, how I've looked forward to this day.... It's just too bad that it'll only last for the remainder of the week. I'll be heading down to San Antonio on the 17th-ish to fly back to Columbus with my older brother and his wife on the 18th. Honestly, I'd probably be fine staying here the rest of the month for no other reason than that I'd be able to actually *own* the space that I live in. Even still, the isolation would likely be too much of a detriment to my health, and besides, I enjoy going home for Christmas.

But enough of that. I have other things to talk about. I think.

In all honesty, I'm not entirely sure that I do. This is a most frustrating thing for me. Why, do you ask? Well, the reason is rather simple. I feel like I should have done enough of something to be able to write an at-least-weekly blog entry. When I sit here and have nothing coming to mind, it makes me think, "Well, am I really just that boring or what?" I can tell you right off the bat that, in spite of what I tend to tell myself on an unfortunately regular basis, I am most certainly not that boring. It is true that perhaps I may not do a whole lot in the manner of physical activities or whatever, but I spend a fantastic amount of time thinking about stuff. If you're okay with frequent critical assessments of things and the likelihood of encountering subject matters of an awkward nature, my mind can be a very interesting place. Actually, speaking of all this, it reminds me of a segment of a dream that I had this morning...

Okay, so it started out as the continuation of another segment that I don't remember well enough to go into detail about, but it left me trying to create some kind of a semi-real oil pipeline over the living room floor of a house (that was presumably mine, but was certainly not reflective of any of the houses that I've ever lived in,) with some kind of rubber tubing. For whatever reason, I was making all sorts of branches and complicated loops in the pipeline. I think it had to do with a brief aside that my brain had during the initial moments of the dream in which it considered how a civilization that was just developing oil purification technology with a severely limited amount of oil could build a pipeline that would allow them to easily integrate new purification technologies into the system without actually knowing what those were at the time, in addition to making it so that they didn't end up wasting any the oil that they produced, but didn't actually have  demand for yet.

It takes a minute or two to explain in words, but keep in mind that this was a nearly instantaneous thought that was integrated into my dream without making it any less coherent than my dreams naturally tend to be. (Which is really saying something because my dreams tend to be incredibly coherent, if not mildly wacky at times.) The brain is rather astounding for being little more than a semi-solid blob of nervous goop.

So the initial problem occurs when I realize that I've made far more cuts and branches in the little rubber pipeline than I have rubber connecting sleeves to patch them all together. To make things worse, the oil was apparently already flowing and the carpet was BRAND NEW!!!! If I got oil stains on the carpet, I'd be sooo dead! Needless to say, I spent a few minutes freaking out about this until I apparently found a solution in the form of something along the lines of very uncooperative electrical tape. With that problem now solved, I completely forgot about solving my oil production efficiency issue and suddenly decided that I needed to go meet up with my Dad, who was somewhere else outside the house. I get up and run out the door and quickly meet up with him along a dirt road with a T in it. As we approach the T, a question comes up about the land mines that my brother Tobi and I had apparently installed there at some earlier point in time.

(I do recall doing something in this area prior to this part of the dream, but it wasn't burying land mines. Whatever we were doing just became land mines to fit with the rest of this particular segment. Gotta love it.)

Well, it turns out that now we're all in some kind of WWII scenario and my family is part of an Allied force whose objective it is to repel the initial Nazi invasion of... somewhere. At this point, we are discussing our land mines as we step carefully over them. Mine, of course, were better laid out than Tobi's. I insisted so even though I clearly saw that mine were all too close together and would all go off at once when any one of them was triggered. To be fair, all of the land mines in question were packed into an area of about ten square feet. In reality, Tobi's were laid out in a more efficient pattern, but all of them were way too close to each other. (Tobi tends to get shafted a lot in my dreams. There's no reason for it, though. He just does.)

In any case, with the mines behind us, I see this very tall mountain-slash-hill thing up ahead of us. I turn to my Dad, who is apparently the commander of our force (as well he would be), and point out the hill. I explain that in my mind, the most important thing that we need to do right off the bat is get a force up to the top of that hill and begin construction of a fortified artillery installation. Not only does the hill give us a wonderful vantage point of the surrounding territory, but it's practically on top of our house, which has now become our base of operations. Well, just as I'm finishing my argument, I turn around and see a number of German Panzers and bulldozers chugging up the ramp towards the top of the hill. Damn those Nazis! They've beaten me to the punch again! Clearly, things are going to be getting very unpleasant for us very quickly, so we start to make our way back to the house/base thing. Now, any reasonable person would have thought to take the road that we had used to get to where we were back to the base. It was well out of range of the enemy guns at the moment and was otherwise perfectly safe. I even argued this point in my head as we began our return march. But, alas, in this sort of dream you don't always do what makes sense. Instead of taking the quick and safe path, we all just started heading down the portion of the road that, while leading back to our base, also went straight through the Nazi outpost that apparently had been there the entire time.

(Those Nazis build things really fast. Especially considering everything in this fictional world was built out of, like, bamboo and secured to the branches of trees. Don't ask, I don't get it either.)

So the four of us - me, my dad and my brothers Tobi and Rory - make our way to an entrance of the Nazi base and quickly try to sneak through without being detected. It should be mentioned that while this was turning out to be a war scenario in which we were soldiers, we were not equipped like soldiers. The only weapon that I ever had just appeared in my hand at one point. I'll get to that in a bit. Anyway, as we're climbing up the ladders into the small circular rooms that led to the aerial walkway back to our also-now-built-in-a-tree base, we run into some trouble. A Nazi soldier sees us and attempts to stop us. Being the point man, I grab the enemy soldier and proceed to toss him over the edge of the platform and into the water below where he presumably met his fate. While he was the only one to see us, this dream decided that it was going to follow old video game patterns and make it so that once one enemy knows where you are, they ALL do!

Now we're in trouble. The base has been alerted to our presence by the nifty instantaneous neural transmission system that these Nazi soldiers possess. We have to get out of there fast. For some reason, the next room that we have to go through isn't directly connected to our current one. There's a gap between the doors and a ladder on the other side leading into the next room. Curiously, Tobi and Rory, or rather, the two men that have taken the place of Tobi and Rory, are able to get across by moving their legs back and forth really really fast, which apparently now endows them with the ability to cross the gap as if walking on air while looking like Marvin the Martian. I, on the other hand, have to jump it. I successfully do so, but my Dad - who I believe was still being played by my Dad - had some kind of a fumble and lost his grip on the ladder and now has to climb all the way up from the bottom. I'm not about to leave someone behind, so I hang back to cover him while he makes the ascent. Unfortunately, this setback allows another Nazi soldier to catch up with us. He's nearly to the top of another ladder when I see him, but I have enough time to pull out my conveniently existent pistol and shoot him several times in the head.

I must make another aside to explain a rather annoying tendency within my dreams concerning these sorts of encounters. Every time I have a dream where I am engaged in some kind of mortal combat with another person, no matter how realistic it starts out, any time I have to kill or otherwise harm someone it suddenly switches to where I'm just pretending to be holding a gun or that I'm using psionic powers. Often times my enemy ends up looking at me funny and then proceeds to shoot me. Rare is the occasion that the dream stays in character when I have to use my weapon.

Anyway, so I shoot the guy on the ladder two times in the face. However, he still manages to pull out his weapon and shoot me twice in the chest. (I think this is alluding to my frustrations with Battlefield 3, in which my constant latency issues make it so that whatever I happen to do when confronted with an enemy is rarely what the game server says is what happened. So while I've just finished putting a full magazine into some guy's face, the server says, "Nope!" and suddenly I'm dead and the bad guy has 83% health left.) Anyway, in this case, I decide to call out the inconsistency and say to the guy on the ladder, "I totally just shot you in the face. You're dead." He disagrees, of course, saying that I apparently only shot him in the feet, but I elect to ignore any damage that would have been caused by his body shots and the dream continues in my favor. The errant Nazi is defeated.

With my Dad now safely up the ladder, we continue towards our base. At this point I encounter difficulties involving not being able to move my limbs the way I should be able to. As a matter of fact, I've determined that when I can't extend a foot to the ground or get my arm away from my chest in a dream, it's because I happen to be sleeping on that particular limb in that particular position. It's really weird and very annoying to dream-me. In any case, this part involved my having to disguise myself suddenly and inexplicably as a German soldier in order to get past a Nazi officer. I just barely managed to do so and then escaped down the unfortunately short wooden catwalk to our base.

Now this part gets even funkier. Not only is our 'base' a bunch of not-so-fortified wooden tree houses, They are also not very well concealed, nor secured to their respective tree things. There is a point at which I end up doing something too quickly and the entire structure topples over, actually. (Granted, I was able to take advantage of dream-state weirdness and attempt to rewind  everything back to where I hadn't done the toppling maneuver. It took several tries and was rather aggravating, but I managed to get it. This part gets kind of lame, actually, so I'll speed through it. The points of interest include my realization that the little oil pipeline, which had suddenly morphed into our strategic oil reserve, was precariously exposed to enemy fire, not to mention minor shifts in the wind speed or direction. Not only that, but as I glanced out the window I noticed that the enemy had launched a few fighters on patrol and that they were headed right for us.

At this point, things got markedly not WWII-ish. The fighters they had launched were not Stukas, but rather they were some kind of cartoonish purple and blue things that looked vaguely similar to Naboo Starfighters from Star Wars. In fact, I actually referred to them as such. Anyway, the remainder of the dream consisted of us trying to remain undetected while we secured our base with very Total Annihilation-style components, namely torpedo launchers to protect from naval advances on the ladders that connected our aerial base to the surface o the water below. I was also some kind of an oversized rodent at one point towards the end. I had to escape being seen by ravenous crocodile/weasel things while I made my way through a marshy field back towards the base.

So, yeah. Very interesting stuff happens in this brain of mine... I'd tell you more about the other parts of the dreams, but as I've learned here, a relatively short and simple dream can take a *long* time to write out. haha

A Day That Lives in Infamy

Today is the 7th of December. It has been 70 years since the infamous surprise attack on the American naval base at Pearl Harbor by the Japanese. I would like to take a moment to recognize and give thanks to all those men and women who lost their lives in that attack and those that served their country in the terrible war that followed. We owe them an infinite debt of gratitude for their sacrifices.

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I will be honest, I had not remembered that today was the anniversary of the attack at Pearl Harbor until I happened upon a trivia banner while looking on Thesaurus.com for an alternate word for 'boredom' that started with an M. Given that I am sort of a WWII history nut, I feel rather embarrassed about forgetting the importance of this date. In my defense, however, I will state that I often get December 7th and December 17th mixed up. Both are anniversaries, but while one being the anniversary of an attack, the other is the anniversary of my parents' wedding. Also, I'm horrid at time-keeping. But enough excuses... :P

In other news, I have officially finished all (both) of my classes for this semester! The only thing I have left to do is a short paper for Philosophy, and then I'm done with it forever.

I'm pretty excited for this weekend. I have a couple of choir-related performances in Church with the ward choir, but more importantly, I have a date on Friday. :D

I normally don't give myself props for much, but I really do have to admit that I'm proud of myself insofar as my dating and social life are concerned. The last time I went on a date of any kind was to Senior Prom in High School, and before that, a performance of Brigadoon by the Liberty High School theatre group back in Missouri. And those were of the sort of 'practice dates' that we Mormons do when we are in our teens. Anyway, my point is that it's been a very long time since I've been on a bona fide date of any sort until only recently. I spent three, maybe four years hiding in my room either at home, in my apartment while I was at New Mexico Tech, or elsewhere. (And it wasn't just due to my natural reclusivity, but that's another story.) And now, in the space of five weeks, I've suddenly begun *doing* stuff again, *with other people!!!* If that's not a reason for me to be proud of myself, then nothing is.

(As an aside, while I give credit to the cast and crew involved in that production of Brigadoon I mentioned a moment ago for their skill and dedication, I can't help but mention that the story itself is absolutely awful... There was way too much time spent dancing around like ninnies for the amount of actual story material in the show. Like, seriously. Waaaay too much.)

So, yeah. I'm happy, excited and looking forward to the weekend. For those of you that don't know me that well, be aware: This is something that is highly, highly unusual for me. ;)

The Rest of the First Post

Yeah, so I got cut unfortunately short in my last entry... I left feeling that it wasn't a complete representation of what I might like to say in my initial post, though I honestly have no idea what all that might be. As an aside, this is why I say that I rant - I generally don't go into something with a plan of what I intend to say, and even when I do, I rarely stick to said plan. I will say whatever happens to come to mind that seems at all relevant or just interesting at the time. ;)

I should also note that I have an unfortunate habit of using excessive amounts of emotes in my writing. The reason behind this is that I have found through my experience that text alone does a horrible job of conveying the emotional state of a thought. Sarcasm, in particular, is almost completely lost, and since I'm hardly able to detect things from context myself, I'm pretty certain that I'm probably equally as clear about it in my own writing. Thus, I use my arsenal of smilies to show how a thought ought to be taken. Beware my many happy faces and the infamous sly wink. ;)

So, I realize that my... uh, blog's subtitle might come off as kind of confusing for someone who isn't so well acquainted with me. Allow me to shed some light on this particular curiosity right off the bat. Depending on my circumstances, mood, the subject and occasionally the particular alignment of Jupiter and Saturn in relation to Mars, I speak in many different voices. Everybody does this to some degree, yes, but my 'counterparts,' as I will call them, are much more than just more or less censored versions of what I really think. A few of them have actually developed to the point that, if I weren't such a horrid actor, they could very likely pass themselves off as unique entities. Another way to say this is that I have non-clinical split personality disorder. :P

The two voices that you should probably expect the most are myself (obviously,) and Dakroth. Now, who exactly is Dakroth? That's a great question. He is an ever evolving concept that has been with me in one form or another since I was but a wee lad in the second grade. He is a very grey character that I used to think exemplified an ideal, if slightly modified version of myself. I have since come to realize that that is not the case. While he does possess certain character traits that I wish that I had, there are many things about him that are uniquely detached from me. For example, I like to consider myself a very just person. I know that I am not perfect in that regard, but a more ideal me would be a just and compassionate man that sticks to his morals regardless of the difficulty that might come from it. Dakroth, however, does not see it that way. While he does have a comparable set of moral standards to mine, he is very willing to digress from those as circumstances require. As I said, he is a grey character. He is neither entirely good nor evil, rather, he maintains an effective balance of both to achieve particular ends. I realize that this description makes him sound rather dangerous and unlikeable. I assure you, he is aligned with good. He just doesn't have any scruples about getting dirty when necessary.

I can't say when he will feel like making his presence known. But I'm certain that you'll recognize him when he does. He has a very distinct manner from me. 

Anyway, I could go on for another couple decades, but in the interest of making this a readable document, I shall choose to cut it short here. Never fear, though, I shall certainly come back to it! I always do, for better or for worse. :P

The First Post

So, here I am. I thought I'd never succumb to this sort of thing... I mean, it's called blogging for pete's sake! That sounds like a noise I'd make in response to something mildly revolting. Oh well. Moving right along... :P

It's 11am on a chilly Tuesday morning and I'm sitting at my computer with my USB-powered warming glove on my mouse hand and a Dr. Pepper in front of me. (At least it's a diet. Leave me alone.) I have my second to last philosophy class in an hour and I'm considering skipping it. We've already finished covering the course-specific material and this week is supposed to end up being a brief introduction to formal fallacies or something similar. Though, come to think of it, that subject might be much more interesting than the over-thought nonsense concerning the proof of the soul and the like. While it may have been important in the development of the modern sciences, it remains a pain in the butt. :P

Alas, that is all I have time to say for now... But there will undoubtedly be more to come. When it comes to pointless ranting, I'm an expert. ;)