Fuck you weatherman, I hope you get blown to Oz

Well, March 15th had been marked down as what was going to be a joyous day; Community returned!!  (Oh, and happy birthday to my favourite DAVIDsTEA girl, I hope you had a good 20th, Megan.)  PVR all set for the 5:00 airing, I went about my business knowing I'd soon be wishing I had a Troy to my Abed.

Bowties are cool.  Cool cool cool.

Around 9:30 or so, I turned the TV on, hit play, and....  A tornado watch weather chart was on my screen.  Um, what?  Exchanging a nervous look with Craig, we remembered that the recording had been set to begin 3 minutes early.  Phew!  So we began fastforwarding.  And kept fastforwarding.  By the 7 minute mark I was resigned to the fact that it had been preempted for a stupid tornado watch.  You really fucking Britta'd that one, weatherman!  Seriously, there's an annual tornado season, you should be prepared down there in the States, or, you know, don't live where Mother Nature throws temper tantrums.  You're lucky that watching TV online is a thing, or else the meteorologist would be pointing out Hurricane Tyler coming to fuck your shit up on his little green screen.

If you piss me off, I'll send Zeus after you; the two of us go way back.

Thanks for bearing with me through that little outburst, it just seemed so unjust.  Funnily enough, I just finished writing a short essay called The Injustice of Justice, and I really like the ending of it.  So humour me here and read it.  As a thank you, here's a picture of Annie's boobs.

Get your mind out of the gutter.

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Humans hold to the notion that there exists a concept called justice in the cosmic sense.  It is upon this flawed notion that we have built our society, and because of this, suffering can flourish.  This logical fallacy, seen clearly represented by the Just World Hypothesis discussed in The Myth of Justice, along with mankind’s selfish beliefs about justice, allow suffering to continue to exist.

For all the talk about empathy and togetherness that pervades society, at the heart of the matter, humans are selfish creatures.  Evidence of this can be found by examining the most influential text we have: The Bible.  Christianity is the largest religion in the world in terms of adherents and it is without question the most influential. At its heart is the text that has bred the notion that the human race is the center of the universe.  Genesis explicitly states, in fact, that the Earth is man’s to rule as he pleases.  This is important because it is upon these beliefs that most of today’s societies were built – North American society for a certainty.  For humankind, the son of God is the Sun of the solar system: the center.  Whether it is true or not is irrelevant; the belief exists, and from there, the problem of suffering is born.

Within our minds, we shrink the universe’s center down from our race as a whole, to an individual basis.  Each of us believes that we personally are of the utmost importance, and our worldview is consequently altered on a person to person basis.  It is difficult to fault anyone for doing this, after all, it is the underlying message of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs: the self is of the utmost importance, because one must ensure the self’s safety so as to continue experiencing life.  For example, one only worries about the respect of others so long as their need for food and water is being met.  Everything else is gravy, as it were, so when the headline reads “Two dead from blindside vehicle collision”, one of our first thoughts is “I’m glad it wasn’t me.”

Consider that headline again.  After our initial thanks for not having been killed, one word in that headline begins to muddle our conceptions of justice: blindside.  The victims did nothing wrong except occupy a physical space at an inopportune time, yet their lives have been taken away.  This event flies in the face of what both religious people and non-believers alike have taken from the Bible: behaving in the right way will yield positive results.  The religious person must believe that God is good and just, and adherence to His wishes will bring good fortune, or at the very least, ward off misfortune.  For the non-believer, this message exists in the Just World Hypothesis.  The Just World Hypothesis, in short, proposes that if one is good, good things will befall said person, with the converse holding true as well.  From the converse, we get perhaps the most quietly terrifying human mental process: victim blaming.

A police officer conducting a seminar on sexual assault was asked how women can help reduce the risk of being sexually assaulted.  His response was “Don’t dress like a slut.”  His words have been echoed by thousands of people who seem to think that women are at fault for someone else assaulting them.  Wearing a football jersey is not an invitation for someone to tackle you; nor is dressing provocatively an invitation to be groped.  Yet still there exist people who believe that dressing like a slut is why women get sexually assaulted.  Why?  Because, according to the Just World Hypothesis, for their worlds to continue to make sense, they must believe that women are doing something to deserve what happens to them in cases of sexual assault.

For the majority though, a certain level of enlightenment has been achieved, and they can plainly see that Mary doesn’t deserve to be raped just because she wore a short skirt and high heels out to the club, just as the (hypothetical) deceased car passengers didn’t deserve their fates.  It is far more telling, when discussing our misconception of justice, to examine scenarios in which the Just World Hypothesis checks out: what about when someone has done bad?  Do they now deserve to have bad things befall them?

Let us return once more to our hypothetical car crash.  What if the victims had just finished robbing a bank, when, in an unrelated car crash, they were both killed?  Are they now deserving of this misfortune, or at least more deserving than if they hadn’t transgressed written law?  On the surface, this scenario seems to be much tougher morally, but it really isn’t.  Justice cannot be administered by some karmic force that holds the ‘bad’ in check; only the courts can hand down justice, as written law dictates.  Just because these hypothetical robbers were objectively bad people doesn’t mean that it is just to have their car be blindsided.  An adequate application of justice would be for them to be apprehended, tried, and sentenced.  Just so long as the sentence isn’t the death penalty, in which case, justice is not being done.   Capital punishment is false justice, for murdering a murderer (or robber) only adds another layer to the initial transgression.  Yet the death penalty continues to pass for justice in certain places.  Dorris is spot on in proclaiming justice to be a myth on a cosmic level.

As selfish creatures, we’ve built our lives around the fact that each of us deserves prosperity, a fact that can unfortunately never be true.  We need to see that the world does not make perfect sense.  It’s time that we stop thinking God or the divine will step in and make everything right; He gave humankind the Earth to rule.  We’re steering the ship now.  “An eye for an eye only succeeds in making the whole world blind” said Ghandi.  It seems that even the words of one of the most revered people of the 20^th century are not enough to open our collective eyes to the injustice of justice.  Or maybe we’ve already been blinded.

Continuing the birthday wishes

The end of February and the start of March is birthday season in my family, with my sister's and my dad's within a week of each other.  And since Soph got a birthday post, then so does mi padre.

Happy Birthday Dad!  42 years young today; who knows, maybe people will start believing that we're father and son with you getting so old and matured in your age... Probably not though.

I had a really surreal thought recently.  In a couple of years, I'll be the age you were when I was born.  From the bottom of my heart, thank you for being such an amazing parent despite you and Mum being so young, Soph and I are fortunate to have such a caring faja.

See you at supper tonight.

Happy Birthday Sophie

Not a real post today, but one that's far more important.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY SOPH!  My little sister is 17 today.  While I could share one of many anecdotes about you Soph, instead all I'm going to say is that I'm so proud of you for how you comport yourself.  Have an amazing day.

Drinking and bad jokes

Well, I have an answer to a question I didn't realize needed answering.  What ratio of sleep to work, factoring in drinking can I have, and still function?  Until Thursday, I hadn't even been drunk in this calendar year; not as a result of trying not to drink, the situation just didn't come up.

Thursday was one of my friends' birthdays, but as he had a midterm on Friday, he wasn't celebrating until the weekend.  It was also the birthday of one of my former co-worker's sister, and I went out to dinner with them and several other co-workers.  This will be nice, I thought to myself walking up there, I'll have dinner, watch the Canucks game, and catch up with people.  Then people started ordering rounds of tequila...

I have a picture on my phone I meant to use, but I'm too tired to go to the trouble of uploading it from my phone to the computer.  Google Image to the rescue.

That alone wasn't an issue, but our third round of those coincided with the Canucks scoring, to which I jokingly said "Look, when we drink, the Canucks score", which then implied to the rest of our group that we must drink often in the hopes of another goal.  My theory was refuted somewhat by the Canucks losing...  But oh well.

A rather expensive bill later, and the remaining 5 of us were now at a crossroad: to continue or to go home.  The birthday girl wanted to go downtown, so that's what we did, me, birthday girl and her sister, and two co-workers.

For anyone unfamiliar with the notion of dancing, I will say only that it requires some level of motor control.  So the fact that the birthday girl had all but passed out during the cab ride from Broadway to Downtown was somewhat problematic.  Another cab ride later, and we were putting her to bed at one of my co-workers' places.  After several check-ups to make sure she was doing well, her sister decided that going dancing was still the plan.  At this point, it was 1 in the morning, and cold outside, meaning that we were going to the nearest place that was open and would serve us booze, preferably with no cover.  Enter The Junction.

Apparently, I'm quite the catch in gay bars; I was getting hit on  with abandon (although it could have just been that they were drunk).  It makes me feel bad that I'm not gay, like I've inadvertently leading the guys who were trying to hit on me on.  (The end of that sentence looks weird grammatically...)

Anyhow, we slept at my co-worker's apartment, because wow walking home in the cold would suck.  Also, did you guys know that 7 A.M. can be nice?  I didn't.  I had previously thought of 7 A.M. with nothing more than cold contempt, but when the sun is rising, the walk home over the bridge was actually both enjoyable and invigorating, two hours of sleep be damned.

A quick noon 'til 5 shift later, and I was free to relax.  Until later that evening, that is.  The plan for my friend's birthday was to meet at his house, then we would all migrate to a bar on Broadway after a while.  At one point, I turned around in his apartment, and realized there were roughly 25 people squeezed into his basement suite.

Like this, except apartments in Vancouver are smaller than that.

Trying to find a bar that can just seat 25 people is about as problematic as one would assume.  But thankfully, if there's one thing you can count on drunk people to do, it's to get lost.  Most of our group vanished, and we ended up with 10 or so people.  An important discovery was subsequently made: Appletinis and cosmos are de-fucking-licious!  Seriously, like nectar-of-the-gods-good.

Also, I'd like to share with you, one of the birthday boy's self-made jokes.  I warn you, it's bad, but in Alex's own words, "Yo, I've made up literally hundreds of jokes!"

What did the jokemaker's father say to his son?

You're a disappointment.

Alex told this joke multiple times, and I still don't think I get it.  What's the punchline??  Is it that there's no joke, hence why it's a disapointment?  But if that were the case, then shouldn't that be something the jokemaker says, seeing as he's a bad jokemaker, and not his father, who shouldn't be expected to invent jokes in the first place?  And is "jokemaker" a viable career option (I assume this is different than comedian, or else Alex would have just said that), and if so, I feel as if I missed a golden opportunity in high school when we had to do transition plans.  Somebody explain this joke to me, it's apparently too sophisticated for my sense of humour.

A luxurious 5 hours of sleep later, and it was time to work from 10-5.  Yay!  My body finally got fed up with me around 8 P.M., when I had finished watching the recording of the Canucks game (which we won, without even needing to take tequila shots!), leading to naptime.  For some reason, I got a second wind of sorts at 10:30, and needed to do something to justify being awake on 7 hours of sleep in a weekend, so I began this post.

As I said, drinking had been an unknown concept to my body, but I think my liver was in a forgiving mood since I wasn't abusing it.  This is a good agreement my liver and I have, I feel.  Now, my body is beginning to wind down on its energy, so bed time is a blissful future for me.