Eclectic Eccentrics

I don’t mean this in a literal sense, but I see the term “no homo” as a ridiculously stupid phrase that constructs and perpetuates a homophobic environment. I think that sad part about the fact that this phrase is so common (with males in particular) now is that it shows that people are afraid of being gay. They’re afraid of coming off as gay, feminine, or not masculine enough. It indicates insecurity. Not just with one’s sexuality, but with their public image. Not to say that this can all be blamed on the individual, we’ve been conditioned to behave like this since we were born.

If you can’t tell already, I’m fed up with our hypermasculine, gay-bashing society. As kids we’re all taught that in order to be a man, we have to play certain sports, like action figures, wear certain clothes, have sex with as many women as possible, only listen to certain music, this list can go on and on. Young boys’ role models are mostly large, muscular athletes, action stars and super heroes. When I was in elementary school, listening to the Backstreet Boys, N’Sync, Britney Spears, or other boy bands/female pop singers was taboo. You couldn’t do it if you were a guy, or else everyone would call you a girl, or a sissy. As a result, I grew to “hate” them all. I never even listened to them. In fact, it wasn’t until high school that I actually even heard some of their music. I hated them because that’s what I had to do in order to be a man. Thank goodness I (and most of my peers) outgrew that stage, but again, I see the same shit happening today, with Justin Bieber, The Jonas Brothers and Twilight to name a few. By no means do you have to like these things, but it’s stupid to unconditionally hate them.

If you’re straight, then you’re straight. If you’re gay, then you’re gay. If you’re a man or a woman, then that’s what you are (short of a sex-change operation), and nothing is going to change that.

NEWS FLASH: Noticing that a member of the same sex (a celebrity even) is attractive does not mean you are gay. It means that you have eyes, and an appreciation for beautiful people. For example, I find Joseph Gordon-Levit to be ridiculously cute, and people like Ryan Reynolds to be very attractive, but at the same time, I can confidently look you in the eye and tell you that I am a straight male with no intentions of “becoming” gay.

It’s hard for me to convey my exact feelings about this whole topic through a tumblr post, but I hope you get my gist. Stop being homophobic. Don’t be so insecure about yourself. Stop being so close-minded. Not to be cliche, but you are who you are, and that isn’t about to change. 

And if you feel the need to point out to your friends that you’re not gay after every little thing that you say, I think it’s time to find some new friends.

-Tomio

• Stuffed into the middle seat (bitch seat) for a 3 hour car ride with several bags sitting on top of me. Donny needs to learn how to fold his sleeping bag, I barely had any leg room.
• Squeezing near 40 people into a cabin with a max occupancy of 11. The cabin/house itself was actually really nice and spacious though. Besides, I’m used to living in cramped conditions.
• Two shower heads in the same shower for twice the clean-ness?

• Watched Zoolander again. That movie gets funnier everything I see it.
• Woke up to the upperclassmen making eggs and bacon before running out into the backyard to frolic in the snow. I didn’t actually go skiing or snowboarding despite the title of the trip. Too much $$$ that I don’t have :[
• Witnessed several hardcore snowball fights and wrestling matches. Took at least 5 guys to take Fred down.
• Donny is a very sexy snow mermaid. I mean merman.
• Quizzing Donny for his classical art midterm.
• The afternoon was definitely defined by people playing tetris and Donny playing Maple Story. Pretty laid-back.

• Played Taboo, and lost. Luckily, Dale (our appointed team captain) took the fall and had to eat a spoonful of bacon fat saved from the morning’s breakfast. 
• DRD Talent show. ACAF/FACA Tai Chi, Donny’s amazing hair, Kasey’s dancing, Eddie’s Vietnamese martial arts, Bruce, John and Jason’s light shows and of course, Jacson’s magic tricks. It was very entertaining.
• Craniummmmm and the backhand high-five. We so fly. 
• DAMN WHAT A SEXY FISH
• Asian glow. Drank a little bit too much too fast. Lesson learned.
• Watched most of 500 Days of Summer (only interrupted by several trips to the bathroom, see above bullet point) 
• Epic snowball fight in the field in front of the house.
• Snow Totoros with Kristen (KERstin)

• Very large snow penis, which after collapsing became a large snow-slide. You cannot ignore my girth.
• For dinner that night we drove to Harrah’s hotel/resort over the Nevada border to eat at a massive buffet. Yay freshman table.

• Playing the “sugar game” with Derrek and Bruce. Eating Sweet-N-Low packets is kinda disgusting.
• YOU AREN’T ALLOWED TO CALL YOURSELF AN ARCADE IF YOU DON’T HAVE THE JURASSIC PARK GAME. Okay well they did but it was broken. Shame on them. Sandy was crushed.
• Watching people beast it up at the “Jumpin’ Jackpot” game and DDR
• Combined DRD won 647 tickets, and used 500 of them to get another 20 game tokens in the hopes that they could win more at the Jumpin’ Jackpots
• Despite Jesse’s and Bruce’s best efforts, we only won another 100 tickets (spent 500, won 100 or so back).
• Won a whoopie cushion and inflatable hammer for our “success”
• Learned how to play Mahjong from Ryan. Yay, I’m now that much more Asian.
• Woke up, packed and left, but not before taking a “fuzzy hat” picture with Kristen and Derrick and several team shots. My feet got cold.

• My computer is getting pretty hot so I’ll give it a rest, but to wrap it up, I’m really glad that I had the chance to go on this trip. I bonded with a lot of the team and mostly the other freshmen on the team. Joining DRD was a great idea. 
• Hopefully I will have plenty of other stories to tell soon :]

Just in case you haven’t already seen this picture, I just thought I would leave it there. It makes me happy to look at it.

- Tomio

was just this morning cleared completely of HPV and officially declassified as high at risk for cervical cancer.

you have no idea how happy i am right now.

“not to be sappy but i just want you to know that i care a great deal about you and if you ever need to talk about anything you can talk to me if you want.”

and i’m inclined to be doubtful, but the seriousness with which he spoke and regarded everything i was saying to him instead of the typical eye roll i’m used to makes me second guess myself. 

and i’m just so glad now.

he helped me to realize that i don’t miss him. i miss what he did for me- listening and making me laugh and just always being there when i needed someone because he always came through. but the way he dealt with my problems wasn’t the right way at all.

and he said something along the lines of, 

“No. What you needed was someone to support you and be there for you and his way of helping was leaving. And that’s not okay. That’s the exact opposite of what you needed.”

and he’s right.

and that’s what i’ve been saying to him all along.

and the fact that he recognized what i want without me having to say it outright gives me hope.

it gives me so much hope

What defines a crush? Is a crush “low” on the “scale of love”? Is it below or at the same level as “liking”?

Let’s say it’s lower. Let’s say the Scale of Love goes like this:

“hey, that person is of the gender I’m attracted to”
“Boooooooooooooooooobs” (or another variation, if attracted to males.)
“Physical attraction due to specific qualities”
“Crush”
“Like”
“Totally in like”
“Love”
“Totally in love”
“Obsessed”
“Die with me so we can be together forever and ever and ever and ever, etc.”


Would that, you think, be an appropriate viewing of the Scale of Love?

It’s been a while since I last posted. If I recall correctly, the last time I posted was sometime in 2009 (or early 2010). A lot has happened in that time. I’ve been in and out of an entire relationship since then. And now the cycle has almost reached the start again. But it’s a little different this time.

I like somebody. No, I guess you could say it’s a level higher than that. I’m “in like” with somebody. Somebody my friends will all know. Some may even be shocked.

And yet, I must save the name for now. I do not think it is fair to her for me to be going about and telling everybody that I like her, only for the words to reach her ears. It would be…unfavorable.

More than anything else, though, I’m concerned. I wonder who will be hurt by this “in like”. Rather, it’s not a question of “who”, but of “how much”. My hope is for “none”, but…well, my hopes rarely become reality.

here’s hoping this post doesn’t reach the wrong eyes.

-hayden

P.S. The h key is still broken, so the lowercase “h”s must be tolerated. My apologies.

So the other night, one of my roommates (I’m in a triple) Alan just kinda packed most of his stuff up and left. HE refused to tell Michael (my other roommate) and I where he was going, or what the fuck was happening. He took a lot of his clothes and his bedsheets, so it looks like he won’t be staying here in the dorms for the rest of the week. My guess is that this is for his frat, which to be honest sounds really weird.

He was apparently spotted by other people on my floor standing in the middle of a bike path under a bridge just staring at the ground. 

Well…I guess for the time being I’m living in a double now. Very tempted to borrow his PS3 and his TV for the break. And maybe for the time being remove the bottom bed in our bunk (his bed) and replace it with a couch from the floor lounge.

Anyways, about to start reviewing for my chem midterm, which is later in the evening. Fuck.

but seriously guys, you need to all calm down. recently on my dashboard, i’ve been seeing an awful lot of posts about why religion is bad, why religion is wrong, why people hate religion and so on and so forth.

but you guys are just as bad as every religious activist who is trying to shove their beliefs down other people’s throats under the guise of “educating them”. just because you don’t believe in a god or gods doesn’t mean you have to outright hate religion, and there are plenty of people who don’t. hating religion is like hating asian people or fat people, the way i see it, and it’s wrong. 

being an atheist is about choosing not to believe in a religion. the definition of an atheist is not “one who hates religion”. i’m all for people doing what they want and believing what they want, but all of the hate is honestly very very offensive to me.

now, i’m not what most people would refer to as “a religious person”, because i don’t talk about it. very few people even know what religion i belong to, what/how i practice, and what i believe in, because i see virtually no need to spout it all to strangers. my close friends know. my family knows. that’s all i really care about. but really people, this sort of thing is just begging for me to rip it a new one. for all who know me, when i have to step in and defend religious people, you know shit is going down. 

so seriously, please calm yo’ tits about this whole “religion is a sack of bullshit” spiel. it’s great that all of you want to learn about religions and try and disprove them, and challenging religion in favor of science, which is a great thing. i love science, and would really like to know more about our world and how it works. please continue to question, to politely inform others. stop hating on religious people like they’re glenn beck. seriously. 

quite honestly, hating people is a shitty thing to do.

or, “Does Anyone Else Wash Their Fucking Sheets?!”

Today I decided to finally do laundry. I haven’t done laundry since I had my nervous breakdown and the health center lady gave me 3 Xanax, partially because I’m lazy, partially because I haven’t needed to, and partially because I have no money. So today I put $5.00 on my laundry card during lunch and began the daunting task of paying $1.75 to wash and dry one load of laundry.

However, being the clean-freak genius that I am, I decided that today was also a good day to change my sheets and wash all of my blankets (3 including the comforter makes 4), because you should change your sheets about every 2 weeks and should be washing your blankets and things regularly. Well, apparently I’m the only person who does either of those things because when I asked around how the fabulous washers/driers hold up against comforters (cheap, yet still larger than most laundry items) I received answers that were all along the lines of “Why are you washing your comforter? What have you been doing/done to/on/with/in it?”

Sigh.

So, I decided I would try for two loads of laundry. The first I would wash my comforter and the larger blanket, and the second would go the smaller two blankets, my old sheets, and the few clothing items I had (mostly socks and underpants, a few undershirts and a hand towel). 

After the 45 minutes of waiting for my laundry to come out of the washing machine, I opened the front loading doors to discover, to my horror, that there was still soap on my blankets. So, I hand rinsed both items in the sink between the washing machines (we have two washers and two driers, but one of the driers has been broken since October), wrung them out as best I could, and shoved them in the drier with very shallow hopes that they would dry on one cycle. The other load of laundry went in, and I went back upstairs to “study”.

An hour later and, viola!, they were still damp. Not sopping, but too damp to hang up above the tub nobody uses until bedtime. So, after putting Load 2 in the one drier, I stuffed my damp blankets into my laundry bag and hauled them to Stewart (which the dorm Odell, my dorm, is connected to, conveniently enough). 

Stewart (aptly sharing the same name as an abusive ex-boyfriend of mine, though spelled differently; this is also the “Wellness” themed dorm, which I thought could only be more ironic if I was actually living there) has six washers and driers, a dry rack, and three space heaters in the laundry room. Those sober bastards. So I put my comforter in one drier, the blanket in another, and spent another $1.50 on drying them. Again.

By the time all of my laundry had finished drying (a total of 3 separate loads that I had to collect and tote back to my room on the second floor of Odell), I had spent $5.00 on what was really half a load of clothes, one set of sheets, three blankets and my comforter.

And the comforter and the larger blanket are still damp.

Time of laundry adventure start: ~12:00PM

Time of laundry adventure end: ~5:00PM

“Hey, can you ask Julia if she’ll buy me a pack of cigarettes next time she’s in town? I’ll pay her.”

So I told Julia and she said, “Well, I guess, but it won’t be any time soon. I have finals to study for.”

Me: “I’ll just do it when I go to the train station to pick Stuart up Friday. Why did she ask you, anyway?”

Julia: “So she can keep it, like everything else I’ve touched in a shrine like in Hey, Arnold!”

In the first phase of our “plan” to get hella sexy bulk up for the upcoming spring dragon boat season, everyone on DRD (Davis Racing Dragons) is taking before and after pictures and body measurements before the start of winter quarter (when hardcore team conditioning starts) to track improvement. It was decided that we didn’t perform as well at the College cup race partially because we did not train as hard as other teams. The pictures and measurements are aimed to provide some extra visual motivation to work out harder.

All you have to know however, was that in order to take these pictures, we had ~12-20 people at any given time cramming themselves into Donny’s room/suite stripping and posing, making things really awkward for his suite-mates. The funniest part was sending a steady stream of half naked people up and down the hall to weight themselves while one of Donny’s neighbors was brushing his teeth in the shared bathroom. At least he got a free show.

So much bromance on this team. I love it.

and since then, i’ve thought about it a lot more than i probably should’ve.you’re pretty, but you should try harder. what was that supposed to mean? i should try harder at what? should i wear more makeup? wear revealing clothes? smoke weed and drink every weekend so that i get so drunk i can’t remember who or what i did the night before? should i be more promiscuous? flirt violently and take every chance i could hope to get to get in some random guy’s pants?

uh, no.

i may not be all that pretty, or i may want to “try harder”, but in all honesty, who cares? 

yes, i understand that there is an important physical component to every relationship. whether or not you say this isn’t true, there is hard scientific evidence to back up the fact that people want to and will associate with people they find either a.) more attractive than they believe themselves to be or b.)just as attractive as they are. so what it boils down to is even if you “have a great personality” or prove to be beneficial to someone for whatever reason, your chances of forming any sort of relationship with them (romantic or not) are impacted by how attractive they find you, regardless of gender or age. 

but that isn’t the only thing, you know. i’m not gorgeous, but i’m notugly. i’m hygienic, in the least. i brush my teeth at least three times a day, shower up to three as well and have this weird obsession with dusting and changing my sheets. i brush my hair and change my socks. 

and i get it, i really do. i’m really really short. i wear glasses and i have crooked teeth. my hair is usually unruly or it’s up because i don’t want to deal with it. i have terrible skin and thin lips that are always chapped. i don’t wear makeup because i can’t be bothered. i’m pudgy and can’t really dress myself well for my body type. i have a deep voice for a girl and i talk really loudly. i get it.

but i don’t really care. i’m comfortable being all of that. i do what i want- what makes me happy- and what makes me happy are not contact lenses or braces. i’m usually forget to put on lotion or chapstick but i suppose that’s something i can work on. i don’t wear make up on a daily basis- i have to get up early enough as it is, it will take me forever, and when it rains i don’t want it to run. i’m slightly overweight for my height because i’m freakishly short, but i’m not going to starve myself to get skinnier. i like to eat. i work out not because i want to lose weight, but because i like to be active and it makes me happy. no, i don’t have the best fashion sense, but i want to be comfortable- jeans and sweatshirts are the way to go. 

and regardless, i clean up pretty well, if i do say so myself. when i want to. but half the time, i just don’t want to. i know that the people who care about me love me (for the most part) regardless, and for them i will wear the make up and uncomfortable shoes, throw on the contact lenses and break out the hairspray.

you only get to see the “pretty” side of me if you try harder. 

Today, I watched the movie “Departures” directed by Yoshiro Takita with Chris, and I have to say it was one of the most touching and beautiful movies I have seen in quite a long time.

It follows Daigo Kobayashi, a man who leaves behind his career in Tokyo as an orchestra cello player and moves back to his hometown with his reluctant wife. By happenstance, he takes on a job in which he ceremonially prepares the dead for burial/cremation in front of their loved ones.

It’s more than just the story of a man preparing the dead, it’s a story about a husband and wife figuring out their differences. It’s the story of a man dealing with his absent father. It’s a story about life and death, and celebrating the beauty in life, and what we have. It’s really hard for me to explain everything about this movie, but I really suggest that you all go watch it. It won the 2009 Academy Award for “Best Foreign Language Film” if that makes any difference to you.

It’s always nice to watch a foreign movie every once in a while, shake the Hollywood formula off for a bit.

fuck you guys i’m writing a novel.

Sean: “Thats exactly it. I was going to but you’re already writing! Once nanowrimo was done I would have thrown it to you”

Hannah: GUESS WHAT SEAN. NANOWRIMO IS OVER.