Now I'm a Part of You

Today, I will begin with a Top 5 list: Top 5 Funniest Things about Insanity for Humanity

5. Demetrius swinging a baseball bat.
4. Cole Griff's tan/sunburn/melanoma
3.Shane Spencer becoming Scuba Steve
2.The Saller vs. Girod Feud
1. Cole Griff and The Mayor bringing hilarity to a new level with statements like "Rhetorical Theories of the Renessaince." This was probably the ultimate "you had to be there" moment.


One of the best things that has happened in the last week besides trying to recover sleep loss has been the resumption of reading for no other reason besides personal pleasure. I ordered about 5 books from Amazon about two weeks ago and they all started coming in about 5 days ago. I ordered We Wish to Inform You that Tomorrow We Will be Killed with Our Families-Stories from Rwanda by Philip Gourevitch, Fight Club by Chuck Pahalinuk, You Shall Know Our Velocity by Dave Eggers, Under the Banner of Heaven by Jon Krakauer, and Endurance: Ernest Shackleton's Antarctic Voyage by an author whose name I have forgotten at the moment. I am sure that this author is incredibly angry at the moment. If I wrote an entire book and some jerk like me could not remember my name, I would be pretty hacked off as well, but I digress.

Current Listening: "White Ladder" by David Gray.

I read Fight Club during Insanity for Humanity, which was probably not the best thing to do since the book is so subversive and wickedly funny. While you are reading the book, you begin to question everything and wonder what you have become enslaved to. Many may despise the book and movie for their graphic violence, but the message is undeniable. We have bought into a consumer culture and lifestyle that promises happiness and perfection, but even when that culture says we should be complete, there is still something missing at the core. In order to find out what is missing, you have to deconstruct and destroy your entire world. The book ends with the complete destruction of the narrator's life before he is able to put the brakes on a life that has no brakes, but the point that I draw is to always be aware of things that truly give happiness and joy and the things that only purport to give those things.

Yesterday, I began to read We Wish to Inform You by Philip Gourevitch. I don't know if I have anticipated reading a book this much in a long time. I hesitate to use the word excited simply because of the subject matter, but reading reviews and talking to people who have the read the book, I think it is going to be a powerful and harrowing experience. I normally don't quote from books at length on here, but a section in the first chapter struck a chord yesterday as I began reading.

"Like Leontius, the young Athenian in Plato, I presume that you are reading this because you desire a closer look, and that you, too, are properly disturbed by your curiosity. Perhaps, in examining this extremity with me, you hope for some understanding, some insight, some flicker of self-knowledge-a moral, or a lesson, or a clue about how to behave in this world: some such information. I don't discount the possibility, but when it comes to genocide, you already know right from wrong. The best reason I have come up with for looking closely into Rwanda's stories is that ignoring them makes me even more uncomfortable about existence and my place in it. The horror, as horror interests me only insofar as a precise memory of the offense is necessary to understand its legacy."