Mississippi bound!!

Howdy folks, well it has certainly been a crazy year!  First I was excited for AmeriCorps NCCC, a chance to pay off loans, do good works, and make something of myself.  Then as time went by and I never heard back from them after my interview, that excitement faded.

Then, as my last semester drew to a close, rumors of the bookstore being sold arose, and suddenly the possibility of still having a job was there.  I graduated, it was much to do about something (not nothing), but over all somewhat anticlimactic... Follett became the new management of the Bookstore, and sure enough I was hired on with a nice pay raise! This seemed to fit in well with my not getting accepted to AmeriCorps. THEN, just as I am settling into my new life working for Follett, AmeriCorps calls me again.  Long story short, I was offered a Team Leader position doing disaster relief and trail restoration in AmeriCorps' Souther Region, which is based out of Vicksburg Mississippi and services Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennesee, Virginia, and West Virginia.  It is a very exciting opportunity, and I am very thrilled to be a part of it.  Right now I am still taking care of paperwork and figuring out the logistics, but I know that it starts in January and lasts for 11 month, which means I will be leaving Arcata (so all you wonderful Arcata people, we have 4 months left to hang out!!!) mid to late January.

Anyway, I just wanted to share this unexpected but amazing news :D

On "Cone-ing." Which is apparently a real thing.

So a friend mentioned a mutual friend being really into "cone-ing," which is an activity I had never heard of before.  Naturally my first instinct was to think it involved taking traffic cones and leaving them on someone's lawn, somewhat like Flocking (where you take a hundred pink flamingos and leave them in someone's lawn until they donate money to your fundraiser, at which point you remove said flamingos and put them in someone else's lawn, usually chosen by the person who just paid to have you remove them from yours).
Apparently that was completely wrong. Upon being informed of what this cone-ing activity actually is, I immediately refused to believe it, why on earth would ANYONE waste their time, money, and edible substances like that?  Upon getting home yesterday I decided to google the shit out of it. My results were disturbing on many levels.

Cone-ing is real, and it is in fact the act of ordering a soft serve ice cream cone from a drive-through, and then proceeding to grab it from the top.  Yes grabbing it from the ice cream part.  Clearly this is a prank of sorts that  was created by a group of socially aware and yet awkward youths, probably in their late high school to early college years being incredibly bored and looking to have some fun at someone else's expense.  Now in this instance the expense isn't an actual cost per se, but more of a loss of social cohesion. After thinking about it for awhile, the basic premise of cone-ing stems from the idea that we all know how to hold an ice cream cone (ostensibly from the cone part of the dessert), that is in fact what the cone is for.  Arguably in some of the better ice cream joints out there the cone is actually just as tasty a part of the dessert as the actual frozen goodness found on top, but as we all know, the kind you get from fast food joints are rather bland, mostly air, and have a consistency and texture that is suspiciously similar to that of Styrofoam, in other words the point of a cone in a fast food place is really just to hold the soft serve, even if it is theoretically edible.  Cone-ing operates on the principle that even though we all know how to properly take hold of, and hold a cone, it isn't really a law or a requirement of any sort, but rather just a social convention.  By grabbing the ice cream off of the cone, or grabbing the cone through the ice cream (the two accepted methods of cone-ing), one is essentially flouting convention.  People are just simply not prepared to handle that kind of social interaction, thus the humor of the situation, for those who find it humorous, derives from the feeling of awkwardness that the employee feels when someone inexplicably grabs the ice cream end of the cone, and then drives away.

Not exactly highly cerebral humor, but it does provide an interesting window into just how socially ingrained simple things can be, and how hard it is for us to think "outside" of the box so to speak when confronted with someone or some thing that doesn't follow the social conventions we live by.

Food for thought for anyone who actually reads this.

Seth

Weather the Wind Blows or Not

Tragically this beautiful and sunshine filled day is cooled by a persistent and pervasive wind.  Actually I kind of like it.  Out the window to my left is a scene of dynamic eloquence, the wind causes the tree limbs to flow amongst each other, none more beautifully so than the weeping willow stationed just outside the patio. Through my window the wind does blow, it brings with it the subtle and under toned breath of fresh air that I have come to know as being that of nature. Intertwined with the organic and heavenly scents of the world as it is, a faint odor of bleach lingers from my uncommon burst of cleanliness.  While unnatural and a little overpowering, it is clean, cutting, and sterile.  Nature and Bleach, allowing for a heady mix of perfection and radical dynamism, this brings a soothing salve to my compromised and trivialized soul.
Once I flowed verse and form, attempting to translate and elocute that which I conceptualize.  The results, of course, imperfect and absent the truth which I wanted for them to convey.  They were organic though.  Free form, natural and  shifting.  They were forms of incomplete characterization, never formed complete lest they suffer the loss of meaning within the pattern of uniformity.  Each facet of character provided a break in the purity and clarity of singular meaning and thought.
Then, as if a bolt in the night, I found myself schooled in the science of clarity and precision.  No word wasted on the flowing of thought to paper.  The pen makes way for the crisp sterile clatter of plastics, keys pressed in specific pattern, never slowing for four years of objective rendering.  Thoughts and mind form secondary to the obvious, logical, reality of facts in objectivity. The casual frivolity of transient word play turned to a red slash on the pristine white and black, no room for style or grace, only the precise charactered flow of raw, unshaped data.  The mind is not a tool of artistic expression, gracing the papyrus with significant and exuberant characters, but rather a vise, a mechanical tool for conveying the significant figures and perfect, precise, platonic numbers.
Enter the third age. As with all things of man or nature, time reforms and perfection is eroded into something new.  Now the words are alive again, nature flows again, and the perfect is intertwined in with the frivolity and suddenly it is new.  Like  that of bleach and wind, Nature and Sterile, words with form and style objective and explicative. Now we live again, academia ended but not forgotten, flowed and formed into the new, the better.