English 125 - Guilty Pleasure

­­­­The euphemism I would use to describe my guilty pleasure would be ‘caring for my babies’. And although at the surface you may not see this as a guilty pleasure at all but rather good parenting, the perspective changes when you realize that my babies are my shoes. Each pair a different shade of flaming red, my shoes are cared for by me with the same meticulous dedication that a father would tend to a child. The highs I receive from ‘adopting’ them from the store, naming them by their traits, bathing them when they get dirty, and even sometimes watching them as they sleep can only be matched by a mother nurturing her newborn. Now the pleasure that I receive from caring for these inanimate objects may seem a bit obsessive and possibly insane to you but to me it’s perfectly logical. I dedicate my time in giving my shoes the best upbringing that they possibly could have and in return they grace me with the blessings of being a proud father with undoubtedly and awesome flamboyant taste in shoes. However, when I’m sometimes watching my babies purr in their sleep, I do often see the other side of the coin. As much as my shoes mean to mean, they are in reality only inanimate objects, ones that actually cost a lot of money. It’s during these times that I often have foolish regrets of spending so much time and money on objects that were only meant to keep my feet warm. But then as I hear Dragonfruit softly snore his baby snore, I put the thought out of my head and keep on feeling like the proud parent that I am.

English 125 - TV Episode

            How I Met Your Mother is quite the ironic title of a TV show as the show never delves into how the narrator actually met his children’s mother. I guess that’s something they’ll get to eventually once they’ve made enough money of rave TV ratings. But I’m getting ahead of myself. The narrator is a middle-aged Caucasian male named Ted telling the story (or not telling the story) of how he met his wife to his two children. But Ted doesn’t exactly like to get to the point so he instead tells fairly amusing and often insane and hilarious stories about the shenanigans he and his best friends pull while they were in their thirties. His best friends Lily and Marshall are a happily married couple since their gooey romantic days in college as Ted’s roommates and they provide the sane yet sexual aspect of the group. Robin, the independent and strong, career-oriented female of the group, struggles with balancing her infinitely mercurial love-life and her bipolar career path. And Barney, the ever-loveable black hearted smooth-talker has only one agenda: sleep with as many insecure women as possible while maintaining the utmost level of awesome-ness. These five compose the partners in crime that the show revolves around.  What happens in this episode is as predictable as any other. Barney makes vague comments about how being clad in a suit makes him superior to his peers while trying to get laid at every possible moment by chatting up a girl in the gang’s favorite bar, Mclaren’s. In the mean time, Marshall and Lily discuss various serious relationship phenomena (in this case, having a baby) while jokingly hinting at how they are extremely sexually active and Robin continuously whines about either how she doesn’t need a man to be happy or how her job is or isn’t approaching a dead-end. And all the while, Ted discusses various stories from his point of view involving the various women he dated, the ways his heart was broken, and the lead-up to how he actually met his wife. Predictable and gushy may not be the primary words to describe an top-class show but in it’s defense, perhaps predictable and gushy are exactly what this show needs. The texture of each show is secondary and the content itself is quite trivial when put in context too. But perhaps therein lies the rub. Ted, Barney, Marshall, Robin, and Lily don’t have to come up with outlandish tales because all of their stories are about life, and the ecstasy and hardships that accompany it. Even if these characters don’t exist in real life, versions of the gang does, trying to battle it out in the badlands of New York City. So if you ever get a chance, sit back and catch an episode of How I Met Your Mother and laugh and cry at the events that occur to five normal yet oddly unique people while not caring that the plot meanders and the characters never seem to really develop as age should have them do from episode to episode. When it comes to How I Met Your Mother, details take a backseat to the intricate and heartwarming group chemistry that we all can relate to.

English 125 - Glorifying the Mundane

                Beads of sweat sprint down my face and back, creating a sticky, icky fusion between my shirt and the supple leather seats. Futile is the air conditioning that misreads my discomfort as the sweat of heat and humidity. No, these are beads of suspense and paranoia, a much more stubborn annoyance. Writhing in my wet pit of disgust and despair, I shoot vicious glares into the skull of the driver in front of me. I squint to the point of severe discomfort in my efforts to burn a hole clean through his head but alas, my powers today have escaped me. As my fingers inch closer to that dreaded button on the steering wheel, tremors run down my arm like a San Francisco earthquake. “Please, oh please don’t do it. Perhaps one is tolerable but we all know that after one trigger happy palm commits the ultimate noise crime, none other than a chain reaction ensues,” I tell myself in attempts to ensnare my delirious digits, eager to not be the culprit. Blaring green orbs strike my eyes trying to coax me into frustration. ‘Go!’ they mock with their light. But in this spider’s web of steel and gasoline they don’t really mean it. I crack the window to taste the sweetness of fresh air and distract myself in the process but the only notes that reach my tongue are those of oil, exhaust, and hatred of life. Dehydration and misery slowly claw into my mind, pulling and gnashing at my sensible thoughts. But just as I drift into the surreal, someone snaps. BEEP! Suddenly snapped back into life, my heart pounds as if fueled by pure nitrous. Kicked into overdrive, I join to melee with insatiable hunger. Rabidly, I thrust my palm into the steaming rubber of the steering wheel, aiming to punch all the way through to the dashboard. The cacophony rages, stinging my ears with a piercing symphony of bloodlust. Readying my chariot, I rev my horses gearing for battle. This is war. And all of us know it.      

English 125 - The Best Writing Conditions

When it comes to the best environment for writing, I personally have no magic formula. I’m still on the hunt for that elusive set of conditions that’ll cause my mind to flow with ideas and my hand to start laying down ink at light speed. To those of you who have found your magic formula, I truly envy you. To all others like me who haven’t, I wish you all the best of luck as I’m sure you all know how fickle of a beast writer’s block is. That being said, I’m a truly sporadic writer, one who writes only in bursts and only when he’s inspired by both some of the strangest and most commonplace moments. Furthermore, it’s incredibly unpredictable when those moments are going to strike. I could be riding the London Underground and suddenly have the urge to jot down potential hooks or lying down on my futon when great ways to develop my conclusion pop into my head. But I’m not saying that there’s no method to this madness of mine, there are some things that generally help. Jake Shimabukuro’s sweet ukulele playing has some way of jolting my brain to find new ideas. Additionally, I always find that I write better when I pen down potential jigsaw pieces of an essay that I’ll later reshape, revise, and fit together into a finished product than if I start from the beginning and proceed in a straight line. So in my quest to find my magic formula, perhaps I’ve found two ingredients in ukulele music and the jigsaw method. But until I find the remaining parts, I have little to no idea when my next writing fix will come. I look forward to it.