a temperate, calm afternoon. great friends. good conversation. a long walk around town. a little coffee and a nice meal.

that’s it. that’s all my afternoon consisted of, and i wouldn’t have ever wanted anything more.

given our current economic situation, i can only hope that as we all move forward that we can redefine the “american dream”. somewhere along the way things got skewed and suddenly the simplistic white picket fence turned into a gulfstream and a bentley. i hope we can all be reminded that we really don’t need a whole lot to be content. as i was walking around town, i thought about how great it must have been 60 years ago, not but a decade after our last depression, when people smiled as they passed and were happy to see each other. there was community. you rode your bike to the nearest general store to get ice cream on a cone, and life was good. there was no such thing as a 10,000 square foot home. people only had what they needed, nothing more.

what changed? when did we become a society of excess? and why? i just don’t get it. example: do you really wear every item of clothing in your closet? probably not. then why so much? and why is so much so acceptable? i can almost fit everything i own into my 4-door sedan and i still feel like i have too many things.

i think people need to reconsider where they’re getting their happiness from. i think we need to start fresh and simplify. i hope the “american dream” can become what it once was: not too much, but just enough. and personally, i miss the look of a white picket fence.

we invented it. we invented it to track where we’ve been, where we are, and where we’re going. we use it to catalog events and history. we created the concept of time based on a given planetary cycle. we invented sun dials. we invented clocks. how long is a second? you can’t answer that, because it’s a series of moments with an undefined length. we’ve put systems in place to try to consistently and accurately measure the different lengths of time we’ve created, because we invented time.

time doesn’t exist.

and yet, time is the only thing that forever exists.

I would like to first and foremost recognize the fact that the following is not meant to be directed at any single cheese, like cheddar, for instance, but is directed at all cheeses. Even though each is so different in it’s own unique way, they are still created equally and each distinctfully stored in a special place in my heart.

Cheese, you have always been there for me. From the time I was a mere toddler and I discovered you melted amongst a plethora of shell-like noodles. Then later, you were found a grand companion to things that had become dull to me, like salad. All the way up until I was lucky to have come across you, brie - how did I survive so long without the knowledge of your existence?

You make so many things that would be considered lack luster by many, and make them incredible works of art. In this great country, I am one of the lucky few to reside in the beautiful land of California. But you, cheese, you’re the “real California”. How do you go about your day knowing that you are compared to such greatness? Under such pressure, my feeble knees would buckle, but you hold your ground.

The way provolone thrives as it’s melted amid grilled chicken, or, when heated, the way swiss becomes one with pastrami; the way brie brings people together at small gatherings, or the way gouda is named gouda; There’s no single place you aren’t accepted. Sporting events, no, you’re there. Extravagant outings, there you are, staking your claim. Galas and the sort, you’re all around us.

What other nutriment is said everytime a photograph is snapped? There are no other provisions being adorned atop ones head in below freezing temperatures, are there? If I happened to be enjoying myself and get carried away, am I not referred to as “cheesy”?

There are some close to me who have strong arguements against you, cheese. But when faced with adversity I look my opposer in the eye and say, “nay, for cheese has always stuck by my side, so, likewise, I will continue to stand by it.”.

Keep on doin’ your thing, cheese.

Love always,

Parker

sequoia advantage voting system

let me get this out of the way at the beginning,… this IS NOT a blog entry promoting apathy or the fact that “my vote doesn’t count”, so if you were thinking about passing on the following entry for those reasons, read on my friend, read on.

even though i do live in california, the bluest of states, and my vote may very well not count or make a difference, i have recently been persuaded in the opposite direction of my self-defining apathy and i will probably find myself in a booth, behind a drawn curtain or a closed door on the afternoon of november 4, 2008. i had finally justified voting in my own apathetic mind, coming up with a myriad of reasons why i should do the research, educate my self, and vote for what i believed in, no matter what the outcome. right when i found myself in a place of contentment about the whole situation, i was, again, thrown right back on the path i had struggled to veer off of.

i found this article.

(feel free to click and draw your own conclusions, or continue reading to hear mine)

in the technological age it’s obvious we weren’t going to continue manually counting each vote,… i mean we all remember the florida debacle of 2004, it was only a matter of time before every booth in the country had a couple options, hopefully colored with a red or blue squares for ease of use, where you walk in, x gets the square, you go get dinner. great. ………not great, because you’re casting your vote on a computer, and computers can be hacked, and in this instance, they can be hacked in 13 seconds. and not just one voting machine, all of them, remotely.

so, now it’s not a matter of which candidate has the most votes, but which candidate has the best hacking squad. what has this world come to? have people gotten so lazy they don’t want to count to 1000, because if i have to count to a four-digit number once every four years just to make sure things are done the right way, i will. and i’m the most apathetic person i know.

so, come november 4, get out there and vote, or not, or maybe someone or something will vote for you, or someone will change your vote for you. whatever you decide, remember we’re america, and we have hella awesome people who are good with computers and stuff.

fact 1.
halloween began due to the celtic festival known as samhain.  samhain, yea what does that even mean?  well, the festival was a celebration of the end of harvest season in gaelic culture.  now, what this means is that the festival was a time where ancient pagans would take stock of supplies and slaughter livestock for winter stores.  thus, bonfires, bones, masks, and a throwing away of the line differentiating between the living and the dead happened.  faaaa-reaky.

fact 2.
halloween.  this comes from the term ‘all hallows even’, as it is the eve of ‘all hallows day’… which, ironically, used to be called ‘all saints day’.  further proof that halloween is dumb.

fact 3.
american’s spend an average of about 5 billion dollars on retarded costumes for this pointless holiday.  what happened to the bonfires and throwing of bones into them, or the slaughtering of livestock and the wearing of masks as to emulate evil spirits that were believed to come out on this day and ruin crops?  that’s all i’m wondering, and here we are spending billions of dollars on this stuff.

fact 4.
trick-or-treating has strayed far from what it used to be.  not that i’m complaining, because lets be honest, if you’re wanting to know what trick-or-treating really used to be about, you’d never let your small cute adorable children ever go outside on this fateful night.  what part of the legend that says ‘the spirits of the dead are free to roam by the earth in halloween’s night, among them being the terribly evil, floating from town and village, going from house to house asking ‘trick or treat’, ‘trick or treat’… and if treat were not made these evil spirits, feeling rejected and angry, would summon their powers to make a ‘trick’ upon the household having no treat.  and by trick, legend clearly means cursing all inside of it and giving them all kinds of misfortunes and sickness, killing their livestock with pests or burning the house to ashes’ seems like a great, full-filled night to send our young innocent children out into??  seriously people.  granted, things have changed a bit, but even still i don’t know how such a horrific thing got turned into a joke.

it’s not funny.

fact 5.
jack-o-lanterns were made to keep said (above) demons from household.  plus, they believed that the head was the wellspring of light and knowledge, and thus the candle was placed inside.

fact 6.
what the EFF.

so happy almost all hallows even day.  let us remember the good old days of halloween at this time, thanking my very own mother and father for this glorious pictoral:

when halloween was not about death and destruction.

I spent the day at UC Irvine. A local Southern California college that hosts about 26 thousand students each year. I was there with my job, which is to spread the good word about what exactly we do at Roadtrip Nation. Perhaps you’ve heard of it, maybe think about checking out our “Community” page if you haven’t. And get a life while you’re at it. 

Anyways, I spent the day in one of the most high traffic areas on campus talking to students and handing out info. This lead to a whole lot of observations on my part, most of which were very pleasant. I don’t know if you know much about UC Irvine; I mean as far as the demographics of the place. Well let me just clue you in real quick. It’s about 98% Asian, 1% Caucasian, and 1% Other. I also don’t know if you know much about white guys, but there is a theory in circulation that states that at one point in most ever white males life he has wanted to be with an Asian girl. This is simply a theory that I can not deny in any way shape or form. Not that I have to be, or think about it all the time, but there is definitely a small, but ever present, part of me that really wouldn’t mind have a cutie little Asian hipster girl at my side. With all of this said, today was a day where any white guy, with any ounce of this dream in him, would have been in heaven. And it’s important to say that the percentage of Asians that are girls is probably somewhere between 55% and 65%. And the percentage of Asians that are hipsters is probably somewhere between 45% and 48%. If you do the math, that leaves us with roughly 25% of Asians being both female and hipster. But given the racial statistics of UC Irvine, this left me with a whole lot of viewing options all day long. Needless to say my job became singling out cute hipsters all day and focusing my attention of recruiting them and only them. I was a pleasure having to deal with the inordinate amount of cute Asian hipster women today.

What the world could be if there were just a few thousand more hot Asian hipster girls.

hats

for those of you that know me, you know i have about 2 pairs of pants and maybe 5-7 shirts that i continuously cycle through. however, what few know is that i have a secret obsession,… hats and hoodies. i LOVE hats and hoodies/jackets. it’s a borderline problem. deep in the bowels of my closet you will find multiple bags full of hats. of course i’ll never wear them, but for some reason, i have to keep them. some are representative of places i’ve been, or times in my life, and as much as i don’t like having excess stuff, the hats will always be there. my jacket repertoire is lacking more due to monetary issues, but if i could, my closet would be my 7 shirts, 2 pants, and about 40 jackets. it’s a thing, and i’m owning it.

the OG of blogs
myspace
blogspot

some of these blogs overlap, and you can find many of the same entries on differing sites. maybe this is due to the ‘i have trouble fully committing to just one thing slash there is always something better out there’ attitude of our generation, in which case i have, though i hate admiting it, become a pathetic part of. what has become of us… of me? why must i feel that to blog is to somehow give meaning to this mysterious thing that i call my life? and does everybody else do it for this reason too? sometimes i think that we have all lost ourselves in this world of cyberness so much that the only way we can feel like we are still actually alive is to put our ‘lives’ up on these screens where they will actually be viewed from time to time; these places where those that choose to read will sit, if but for a moment, and spend time with us. even now, i feel as if i am somehow sitting down with a friend, you, to share some part of me that you might not have thought to stop and see otherwise. *sigh*

i can’t keep up with this. what is happening here people? chances are you’ll read this and then go blog about it, and i suppose i can’t be too mad about it really…

this is how much I love it

So here I am just chang-erangin’ doing a whole lot of nothing.  Well, I mean I am eating a cut up apple with nutella and that is pretty cool, I do love nutella.  I think I love nutella so much because I rarely get it, ya know what I mean?  I mean how often, really, does someone go, “Oh, hey there sir, care for some nutella with that?”  Cause to be honest, I wish that that did happen more cause I would never turn it down, never!  Nutella is just wonderful.  If you are saying to yourself, “Gee Noah, I have not had nutella in a long time, in fact, I would say that I don’t even know what nutella is,” I would say go out and get some, put it on something, anything, and just sit back, take a bite, close your eyes and let nutella take you on a magical mystical journey of tasty delight.

On a side note Parkee and I registered to vote, HOLLA!!!!!  So don’t be apathetic, go out and register!