Welcome Reader!

Hello!
If you are reading this, then you have followed a link from my new blog.
This is my old blog. I started it on August of 2009, and finished it on August of 2010. Almost a full year. Alas, it has been retired at its prime, but it was a necessary task.
My old blog has 22 posts, written in no particular pattern, or in any particular order. Some posts are pointless rants that make no sense. Others are completely meaningless. But a few posts are actually worthy enough for you, the reader and follower, to read. Bellow are links to specific posts that I believe are worth the read. Not only do I consider the posts bellow are worth reading, but the readers of this blog have also given me feedback about which ones are worth mentioning, and which ones to ignore.

If you wish to read any other post not on the list, you can locate them to your right. I would suggest sticking to the list. The rest is all a bunch of crap.
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2010:
Blast from the Past: A look at what my thoughts were as a young Sophomore in higschool, and what my life was like back then...
http://aerlenbach.blogspot.com/2010/08/blast-from-past.html

Waste of Life: Technological vices in today's society.
http://aerlenbach.blogspot.com/2010/07/waste-of-life.html

Fear: My secret and what I do about it.
http://aerlenbach.blogspot.com/2010/07/fear.html

Butts County: A true story of my travels to Ohio, and what I saw while going there.
http://aerlenbach.blogspot.com/2010/07/butts-county.html

Paranoid: A look at what the internet has become, and how it freaks me out.
http://aerlenbach.blogspot.com/2010/06/paranoid.html

Language: My personal favorite. A look at an important part of the English language that I feel has been deliberately ignored by educators in modern society.
http://aerlenbach.blogspot.com/2010/03/language.html

2009:
New Email: I get a new email, and then I get real hypocritical.
http://aerlenbach.blogspot.com/2010/03/language.html

Reason and Emotion: A must read. I take a look at why we do things, and why robots are bad.
http://aerlenbach.blogspot.com/2009/11/reason-and-emotion.html

M: The true story of my first love.
http://aerlenbach.blogspot.com/2009/09/m.html

My first Entry: exactly how it sounds. It also explains where I got the idea for the name of this blog, in case you were wondering.

http://aerlenbach.blogspot.com/2009/08/my-first-entry-im-so-proud.html




-Æ

Blast from the Past

So I figured out how to change the name of my blog. Remember when I said that I got a new email in the post "New Email"? I'm original... Well I have to log in to my old one on order to change the name. But since I don't like that one, and I already said I'd do it anyway, I plan on making a whole new blog once I go off to college. I will then have a link in every new post on there that goes back to this blog.

Anyway.
So I was rummaging through my old school stuff and I stumbled upon my journal from 10th grade. Back when I was a dinky little Sophomore, my English teacher told all of us we had to write a one-page journal about anything we want. This was my first blog. Although I guess it was just called a log? Because it was with paper and pencil instead of a keyboard and wifi? I don't know... So I started reading my old journal, and came to realize that this stuff is pure gold if I can put it on my blog! There's like 10-15 entries on there, and I would really love to use at least 5 of them. I do not, however, want to put any of them in my new blog, and since I only have about 2 weeks until the creation of my new blog, I'm gonna hafta start cranking these babies out.

This was my first entry, written in August of 2007. I will keep the ideas as a whole, but I do plan on changing parts of it, and adding to the ideas because I was a very bad writer back in those days, and I only had to fill up one page of a Composition notebook...


Journal
Entry 1
8/29/2007
Every day I get made fun of. I have been called things, been insulted, and have received various nicknames over the course of my lifetime that I wish to keep to myself for the time being. Although such treatment toward certain people may push them to the edge, my feet always stay firmly on the ground. This is because, over the course of my life, negative feedback of a mocking nature has lost all of its strength when it heads my way. Ever since I was small, my three older sisters tortured me with their sarcastic comments and hurtful statements. But I grew from their torture. I grew into a person that I will never change from.

I have come to the conclusion that people make fun of other people for one reason, and one reason only. To make them feel better about themselves. Now this reason can branch off into any number of sub-categorical reasons, such as: trying to point out a flaw in you to help better yourself, to get a laugh out of someone, and to be a jerk. They all ultimately revert back to the same primary reason. It all boils down to a self-esteem issue. Although there's nothing really wrong with people who make fun of other people. It's a common human action that has been going on for the extent of the human race. Just because someone makes fun of you, doesn't mean they're a terrible person. It's entirely possible you deserved it in the first place.

People seem to get insulted too easily these days. I don't. Unless you are a true friend, or a member of my family, nothing you say to me or about me will make me upset. Of course this has caused a bit of an inflated ego on my part, but I know you, the reader, haven't figured that out yet...

End of entry one.

-Æ

Waste of Life

I've been thinking a lot about buying a PS3.
I have a PS2 and a Gamecube, but I feel it's time to invest in something better.
I talked about this to my sister, but she thinks it's all a big waste of time and money.
I've decided to only invest in it if I know I'll use it for useful things.
But in the end, like most things people do, it's all just a waste of life.
Video games, computer games, cell phone games, watching non-educational TV, watching movies, practically everything we do is just a waste of time. But of course we still do these things, because if we only spent our time wisely, we'd be really really weird.

So we all have our vices. Some of us play Halo, some of us download 100 different games to our phones, and others, like myself, are addicted to Facebook. Very very addicted to Facebook. I check my Facebook maybe 10-20 times a day, depending on what I'm doing that day. I post things all the time. I spend over an hour on facebook in the course of a day. It's ridiculous. Within the last sentence I checked it another 2 times. So would I be doing a service for myself if I used Facebook less and played more videogames? Probably not. What to do then?

I want to read. I really really wish I could just pick up a book and read it for 2 hours easy. I'm just not focused enough to do that. My sisters claim I have ADHD. I don't know... I think that's just a made up problem so parents can drug their kids to get them to shut up. I don't know... I'll probably get it when I go off to College.

Speaking of which, I'm thinking I wanna change my blog. I'm starting College in a month, and I think I should make a new one, mostly because I don't like the name and want to change it. But I can't without making a whole new blog. So I think I'm gonna do that. If you want, tell me what you think, about my blog, about me making a new one, anything at all.

-Æ

Fear

I tell people that I don't live in fear. I say I do things without fear of reprocution. “I do what I want,” is a phrase that has passed through my lips a number of times. It is important to not live in fear. If fear dictates your life, you are not in control. If you are not in control, your life is meaningless. I like to believe in a philosophy of never living in fear. I do as I please, as long as it’s legal...usually. I don’t go around killing people, but I don’t let any punk push me around either.

If you, the reader, haven’t guessed it yet, I’m pretty good at articulating what I think and feel easily. I choose my words wisely, and get my point across. I mean what I say, and I say what I mean.

As I have said before, in today’s society, our personal lives and our public lives are slowly but surely merging together. With social media these days, our entire lives are revolving around the technology we so desperately need.

Then we reach a problem.

I...have a secret. Well...actually it’s not a secret at all, if you really know me. It’s a very public fact about me. And there is where we see the problem. My “secret” is something that, at this time, not very socially accepted. It is slowly becoming more and more socially accepted, but just like any social “issue,” it shall take time to break such “taboos.”

I just wonder if being so open about this secret might lead to closed opportunities, loss of friendship, or general disdain from others. This is why I’m not saying the secret on this blog post. This secret, if it were known by everyone, would mean I could not be president, could doubtfully be a congressman, and could doubtfully manage to become mayor, especially in this town...

I live in a relatively liberal state, I go to a liberal college, and I still have to keep my secret a...secret. The majority of the population that is different from me can take this specific difference and flaunt it. Use it to their advantage. Use it, even to cause trouble or even harm.
Not me. People who share my secret do no harm, although the majority disagree. We're just like everyone else, though some claim we aren't real Americans. We are strong, our numbers are increasing in yet we are told that...
I have said too much...

So what do I do? Do I come out of the proverbial closet? Or do I play it safe? Do I reveal who I really am and what I really think, or do I swallow my pride and hope that acceptance of people like me shall continue?

(BTW, no, I’m not gay. The secret is not that I’m gay. There’s a gay congressman so my congressman sentence wouldn’t make sense if that was the secret)

I guess the future is the only thing that will tell me the answer. I fear my actions as a child and young adult may ultimately lead to my (theoretical) political downfall, if I were to ever go into such things. Who knows?

-Æ

Butts County

As I write this, I am going to Ohio, via automobile, to see my grandparents, and then to Michigan to see my cousins and their awe-striking children. Half black/half white children are, in my opinion, the most good looking children on the planet.

At this very moment, I am crossing through the lovely state of Georgia, roughly 40 miles south of Atlanta and closing. Interestingly enough, we are in “Butts County.” Yes, that’s right, B-U-T-T-S county. Fascinating.

I find it interesting that a mere hundred miles or so from my home state yields such a peculiar difference in how the social norm is. I are smart.

I saw a large billboard where the biggest word on it said “STRIPPERS.” I was no longer in Florida anymore. I saw a second billboard with four attractive women surrounding the words “Liquor Store.” Another one showed a man and a woman and a website to “bestmarriage.com.” One can only imagine what that could be about. Those were the only billboards that I actually got a good enough view to see since I was too busy watching a movie. I feel that there were much more peculiar billboards around.

In this state, I have seen three broken down pickup-trucks on the side of the highway, and all three of them were pulling trailers of watermelons. We got off of the highway because the traffic was getting bad. Then, the ultimate battle of wits took its course. Me vs. my mother. She wielded her atlas. I wielded my iPhone and its GPS application. It was the war of the route. Who could find a better route? Which one would be clear, and which one would go through Main Street in some random town? My mother won out, and we will probably be about 30 minutes behind schedule, alongside the time we will lose from getting off the highway. I’m not bitter.

I just passed what appeared to be a mega-church with a truck that said on the side: “our business is souls.” You know, collecting them, indulging them, robbing them blind, selling them false hope, scaring them blind, and ultimately “protecting” them from damnation.

After seeing that, I just passed another three churches, one of them was most certainly a mega church. We then changed roads and passed 3 more churches.

We were at a stoplight, and noticed a faint smell of burning rubber and saw smoke coming out of the back of the car. We pull into a Popeye’s chicken where my mother and I eat at while my father drives to a car repair shop to assess the damage. After eating in the Popeye’s, my mother and I go to BigLots to kill time. There I see a gentleman... I can’t describe him in words, let me show you...



Lovely, I know.

So now we’re on the road once more, hopefully going to get to Ohio. I told you, my reader, about Ohio once before. ‘Tis a lovely place.

If you hadn’t already noticed, I’m not writing this entire thing all at once like usual, I’m writing it in waves, as things happen. And now I’d like to tell you about a little place located in between Georgia and Kentucky. A place called Tennessee. It’s a very interesting little state, where the dialect sometimes gets lost in translation. This was the midpoint of our journey. We stopped at a gas station there and I saw something that I can only describe to you as...interesting...



Indeed. That’s “mamy.”
Little did I know that this gas station was secretly a time machine to 1901. Classy.

The next day, we finally get on the road. Then we enter Kentucky, or as my father calls it: Ken-damn-tucky. It was boring there.

We finally reach Ohio!!!!
We stop to get gas, and a young gentleman, no younger than 17, no older than 22, was inside and needed directions to some random place in town. Well I just whip out my handy dandy iPhone, open up the maps act, and say you must know how to work this, and hand the phone to him. His look implied that I might have handed him a ticking bomb and pliers and had said “you must know how to disarm this.” I take the thing back, and type it up, and get him the directions.

We have finally reached my grandparents’ house. Hooray for no cellphone service! If you go into an AT&T store, and look at the map of coverage, there is a little tiny dot in north central Ohio that my grandparents call home. My father’s computer is, somehow, the only one that can get internet, meaning I’m still typing this in a stupid Pages document! fakjls;dfjkl;kafl;sdjkfaskfd.

My grandfather read something very true: If people found out that computers caused their arms to fall off, the would still be typing.

We cannot disconnect ourselves from the world. It’s impossible. Kids these days do nothing but log on and update their Facebook status every 3 seconds. I myself can barely stand the fact that I can’t log onto Firefox right now on my own computer. It’s driving me insane!!!

I'll finish my fun time in vacation later...

Paranoid

I got a call from my favorite sister today, sister #2, and she started talking about something called Google Reader. Which I guess is another Google offspring where you can subscribe to internet sites? Basically kinda like Twitter but with actual sites, instead of links to sites? I'm not super sure.

The slogan for Google is "don't be evil." I find that a little ironic since it practically rules the internet, a virtually limitless source of information and connectivity. It could become the most diabolical corporation in the world if it wanted to. The next BP of interneting. Hopefully Google won't blow up a website and have pixels spew out of your computer screen for 3 months straight.

I do find it rather...unnerving that one internet website has so much diverse power. Google. Gmail. Google Earth. Google Chrome. Dozens of others, including, holy shit, Blogger. Hopefully when I hit "Publish Post," the Google swat won't break through the windows and shoot me on the spot. I guess you, my reader will never know. You search for my name and "Your search - "Alex What'smylastnameagain?" - did not match any documents." pops up. My blog will disappear off of the face of existence, along side my Youtube, Facebook, Gmail, Twitter, Google wave, and the rest of my internet identity. Well, except my Myspace, because no one cares about Myspace anyway.

My sister, sister#2, says I'm paranoid because Facebook is far more evil than Google is. I guess that's true. About once a month I hear something or see something about how Facebook is breaking their policies. Then I log in and try to make things even more secure. But there's no such thing as internet privacy. That's all just an illusion. Once you log on, the wall separating your private life and your public life starts to crack, then sooner or later, it crumbles, and once it does, you can never rebuild it again. Your friends, your enemies, your ex's, your employer, and your grandma can all find out everything about you. Once you hit 'post' or 'send' or 'share,' you might as well be posting it to time square. There was an episode of 'The Office' where one character asks another "Why do you have a diary?" His response, "To keep secrets from my computer." Funny, right? But in the end, he's the lucky one who can actually keep his two identities separate. He is safer, more secure, and can keep his privacy...private!

The world we live in...

Emails getting read.
Facebooks being hacked.
Phones being tapped.
Search engine searches saved.
Texts used against you in a court of law.

I miss life back in the good days when we didn't have the internet, and people wrote letters, and we had the threat of nuclear war at every waking second. I miss those days...

Anyway, I'm gonna get some grapes. Be safe interneters, you never know when you may be typing up a facebook update, telling your 450 friends that you just got out of the shower and are no planning on ordering a pizza, and all of a sudden your identity gets stolen, and your bank accounts have dropped to zero. That's the last time you give your pin number and checking account number to the Nigerian prince that sent you that email...

What was I talking about? Oh yeah! Grapes!



-Æ

Language

The English Language is filled with interesting words.
It has plenty of words that mean the same thing. Same, similar, identical, equal, equivalent, matching, alike. These words can cause tears and triumph. They can teach, and they can terrorize.
However, there are some words that people tend to find...offensive, vulgar, profane, blasphemous, dirty, filthy, foul, nasty, sinful, smutty, wicked. These words, are what I like to call, swear words.

There are loads of swear words; bitch, hell, bastard, ass, just to name a few, and words like these are very offensive to certain people. Other people, however, do not find these words, or any "swear words" offensive in any way.

George Carlin touched on the issue of foul language with his skit "7 Words You Can't Say On Television."
"I was thinking one night about the words you couldn't say on the public airwaves, the ones you definitely wouldn't say, ever, ... so I have to figure out which ones you couldn't and ever and it came down to seven but the list is open to amendment, and in fact, has been changed, by now, a lot of people pointed things out to me, and I noticed some myself. The original seven words were, shit, piss, fuck, cunt, cocksucker, motherfucker, and tits. Those are the ones that will curve your spine, grow hair on your hands and maybe, even bring us, God help us, peace without honor."

Try repeating this bit in a highschool and see how fast you get a detention, or worse.

The issue of swear words has even reached the supreme court...
The Supreme Court first confronted the issue of indecent (as opposed to obscene speech, which appeals to prurient interests) in the 1971 case of Cohen v California. Paul Cohen was convicted and sentenced to 30 days in jail for wearing in a courthouse corridor a jacket which, on its back, said "FUCK THE DRAFT" The Court reversed Cohen's conviction, finding his speech protected by the First Amendment. Writing for the Court, Justice Harlan noted that "one man's vulgarity is another man's lyric" and suggested that the First Amendment protects not just the intellectual content of speech, but the emotive content as well.
http://www.law.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/conlaw/indecentspeech.htm

Why are these words such a problem? How can words have such power to put a man in jail if they are used? How can people feel so strongly opposed to their use? One cannot simply be born with this opposition to swears. It is something drilled into the heads of individuals, most likely when the person is very young. Swear words have been taught to children to be the ultimate taboo. Plenty of children have had their mouths washed out with soap because of the slip of a swear. But why? How are they bad? What makes the word "fuck" worse than the word create? Doesn't it technically mean the same thing? "To fuck" is just another way to say "to make love." Creatures make love in order to create life. Ultimately it means the same thing. does it not? But in this world, it's the connotation that matters, not the denotation. I mean, gay means happy and fagot is a bundle of sticks, but no one cares about what things really mean. The connotation is key.

But I don't believe there is anything wrong with these words. Anyone who knows me knows that I use these "foul words" rather frequently. Why? Do I think it makes me cool? Do I think it'll make me more popular? No. I use these words because I believe that people shouldn't limit their vocabulary because of some up-tight people and their narrow-minded beliefs. I use all aspects of the English language, regardless of its connotation. We must open our minds and realize that we can not cross out the words that we find "bad." Or better yet, we cannot cross out words that other people say are bad.
This isn't North Korea.
We don't all just accept the social norm just because it's the "social norm."
We will not conform.
We will not be...sorry...getting off track.
..
..
One can use these "swear words" without causing offense. The key is to realize that these words are not offensive to begin with. They are just words. They are only offensive if you, the listener, let yourself get offended by them. But why should you? Why should you get offended by what sound wave is produced by the vibration of some asshole's vocal chords? You shouldn't, regardless of if the words are "swears" or not, but I'll talk about that in a future post. There is no sense in taking offense to what people say. That's feeding the troll, and I resent it. Fucking trolls...

Language is a funny little devil. It's our primary form of communication, in yet in this day and age, we communicate more by staring at pixels and typing on keyboards. The world we live in...damn...