Actual work

To-day I planted soybeans for my dad. I didn't really want to but it's not like I had anything better to do and how could I refuse? Now I'm tired and I want to take a shower, which I think I'll do shortly. Planting isn't really work; it's like mowing the lawn with a massive riding mower, but a full day of it can leave you pretty tired. I doubt I'll get paid for it, but free room and board is pretty sweet, and my time isn't currently worth anything anyway.

I always feel bad when I read other people's blogs because it seems like they have much more interesting lives than I do, even if they are just writing about boring stuff like blogging (metablogging!) or funny things their friends said, or where they went out last night.

Now listen to me, friends, blogging sucks. Don't do it any more. Writing about your life after it happens does not enhance the experience, it diminishes it. Just think and feel and live without trying to transcribe it all into words that will impress other people. All those times you wish you had your camera with you, you should have let the image imprint on your mind instead, because the moment will always mean more to you than it would to anyone else. If you want to know what's going on in someone else's life, just be friends with them and be a part of their life. Otherwise you don't really need to know. May I suggest that providing others with the vicarious details of your life keeps them from living the ones they've got? I don't even care to know who reads this (though there is still that little part of me that makes me come back here to see if anyone has commented), but I feel obligated to write anyway. But really, why should you open part of your mind to someone when you are not ready to share the whole thing?

Hey, while I was driving the tractor back and forth, endeavoring to sew every spot approximately once with Roundup-ready seed, I thought up a couple of jokes:


Q: what's worse than finding a worm in your apple?

A: Not having an apple at all.


Joke Number 2!
A pirate walks into a bar with a car's steering wheel sticking out of the front of his pantaloons. The bartender says, "Hey, buddy, what's with the steering wheel?"

To which the pirate replies,

"Yarr, it be somebody's idea of a joke."

Mildly entertaining stories of little importance

So the other day I put something in the microwave and I punched in the time and was about to push START when my mom came in. She looked at the microwave, and I looked at her, and we just stood there for a LONG time. She was waiting for me to start the microwave so the light would come on and she could see what was I was cooking. My finger still hovering over the button, I said, "You really want to know what's in here, don't you?"

She reached over and hit START, then looked in. Satisfied in knowing that I was heating up half an apple turnover, she went on with what she was doing.

Such is what happens when the overly nosy meets the needlessly secretive.

HILARIOUS LINK OF THE DAY

I LMAO'd.

Literature time

Each evening he walked the two miles from the quarry to the little town where the workers lived. The earth of the woods he crossed was soft and warm under his feet; it was strange, after a day spent on the granite ridges; he smiled as at a new pleasure, each evening, and looked down to watch his feet crushing a surface that responded, gave way and conceded faint prints to he left behind.

There was a bathroom in the garret of the house where he roomed; the paint had peeled off the floor long ago and the naked boards were gray-white. He lay in the tub for a long time and let the cool water soak the stone dust out of his skin. He let his head hang hack, on the edge of the tub, his eyes closed. The greatness of the weariness was its own relief: it allowed no Sensation but the slow pleasure of the tension leaving his muscles.

He ate his dinner in a kitchen, with other quarry workers. He sat alone at a table in a corner; the fumes of the grease, crackling eternally on the vast gas range, hid the rest of the room in a sticky haze. He ate little. He drank a great deal of water; the cold, glittering liquid in a clean glass was intoxicating.

He slept in a small wooden cube under the roof. The hoards of the ceiling slanted down over his bed. When it rained, he could hear the burst of each drop against the roof, and it took an effort to realize why he did not feel the rain beating against his body.

Sometimes, after dinner, he would walk into the woods that began behind the house. He would stretch down on the ground, on his stomach, his elbows planted before him, his hands propping his chin, and he would watch the patterns of veins on the green blades of grass under his face; he would blow at them and watch the blades tremble then stop again. He would roll over on his back and lie still, feeling the warmth of the earth under him. Far above, the leaves were still green, but it was a thick, compressed green, as if the color were condensed in one last effort before the dusk coming to dissolve it. The leaves hung without motion against a sky of polished lemon yellow; its luminous pallor emphasized that its light was failing. He pressed his hips, his back into the earth under him; the earth resisted, hut it gave way; it was a silent victory; he felt a dim, sensuous pleasure in the muscles of his legs.

Sometimes, not often, he sat up and did not move for a long time; then he smiled, the slow smile of an executioner watching a victim. He thought of his days going by, of the buildings he could have been doing, should have been doing and, perhaps, never would be doing again. He watched the pain's unsummoned appearance with a cold, detached curiosity; he said to himself: Well, here it is again. He waited to see how long it would last. It gave him a strange, hard pleasure to watch his fight against it, and he could forget that it was his Own suffering; he could smile in contempt, not realizing that he smiled at his own agony. Such moments were rare. But when they came, he felt as he did in the quarry: that he had to drill through granite, that he had to drive a wedge and blast the thing within him which persisted in calling to his pity.

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She raised her head with a last spurt of rebellion.

"Don't you see what it is that I must understand? Why is it that I set out hinestly to do what I thought was right and it's making me rotten? I think it's probably because I'm vicious by nature and incapable of leading a good life. That seems to be the only explanation. But...but sometimes I think it doesn't make sense that a human being is completely sincere in good will and yet the good is not for him to achieve. I can't be as rotten as that. But...but I've given up everything, I have no selfish desire left, I have nothing of my own--and I'm miserable. And so are the other women like me. And I don't know a single selfless person in the world who's happy--except you."

She dropped her head and she did not raise it again; she seemed indifferent even to the answer she was seeking.

"Katie," he said softly, reproachfully, "Katie darling."

She waited silently.

"Do you really want me to tell you the answer?" She nodded. "Because, you know, you've given the answer yourself, in the things you said." She lifted her eyes blankly. "What have you been talking about? What have you been complaining about? About the fact that you are unhappy. About Katie Halsey and nothing else. It was the most egotistical speech I've ever heard in my life."

She blinked attentively, like a schoolchild disturbed by a difficult lesson.

"Don't you see how selfish you have been? You chose a noble career, not for the good you could accomplish, but for the personal happiness you expected to find in it."

"But I really wanted to help people."

"Because you thought you'd be good and virtuous doing it."

"Why--yes. Because I thought it was right. Is it vicious to want to do right?"

"Yes, if it's your chief concern. Don't you see how egotistical it is? To hell with everybody so long as I'm virtuous."

"But if you have no...no self-respect, how can you be anything?"

"Why must you be anything?"

She spread her hands out, bewildered.

"If your first concern is for what you are or think or feel or have or haven't got, you're still a common egotist."

"But I can't jump out of my own body."

"No. But you can jump out of your narrow soul."

"You mean, I must want to be unhappy?"

"No. You must stop wanting anything. You must forget how important Miss Catherine Halsey is. Because, you see, she isn't. Men are important only in relation to other men, in their useful-ness, in the service they render. Unless you understand that com­pletely, you can expect nothing but one form of misery or another. Why make such a cosmic tragedy out of the fact that you've found yourself feeling cruel toward people? So what? It's just growing pains. One can't jump from a state of animal brutality into a state of spiritual living without certain transitions. And some of them may seem evil. A beautiful woman is usually a gawky adolescent first. All growth demands destruction. You can't make an omelet without breaking eggs. You must he will­ing to suffer, to be cruel, to be dishonest, to be unclean--anything, my dear, anything to kill the most stubborn of roots, the ego. And only when it is dead, when you care no longer, when you have lost your identity and forgotten the name of your soul--only then will you know the kind of happiness I spoke about, and the gates of spiritual grandeur will fall open before you."

"But, Uncle Ellsworth," she whispered, "when the gates fall open, who is it that's going to enter?"

He laughed aloud, crisply. It sounded like a laugh of appreciation. "My dear," he said, "I never thought you could surprise me."
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From The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand