Extreme Makeover...

Geez, I just watched half of the Extreme Makeover show on TCS and I am saddened. The two people featured were people who had lived their lives ridiculed and insulted by people for their looks and thus wanted so badly to break out of that life that they allowed people to butcher their bodies to escape.
I don't really have anything against plastic surgery. What people do to themselves is totally up to them. But then I was watching the interviews and the two participants banked so much on the power of a makeover to make them better people and I kept thinking that they had spent so much of their lives SO concerned about what other people thought that they'd never actually be happy no matter what they look like.
Narcissism is one of the most powerful and addictive driving forces in the world. Basing one's whole being on how one looks is a downward spiral that can never be fulfilled, and yet people spend their lives trying to fill that hole. We all want to be loved and we all want to be desired and the world holds us hostage with that burning need to fit in. Unfortunately for some, the need becomes all consuming and before you know it, it consumes like a flame.
It's sad when you see someone who's been scarred that badly by unkind remarks that the world heaps on them. The guy on TV said that people had come up to him and asked him how he got through life that ugly...sadly enough, he thought so little of himself that he didn't see it as a problem on the feckless idiot's part, but a problem with himself. The world's cruel and society preys on the weak enough to make people internalise all the loathing placed upon them by all the nutballs out there...and pretty soon, it translates to a hatred of themselves, and no amount of plastic surgery will ever be able to cure that.
Extreme Makeover tries to lead us to believe that they're doing these poor sods a favour by bestowing on them a gift of a new body...but they're just adding a layer of makeup over a very scarred soul.

Snowballin' into an avalanche.

I'm back and I just realised that I'm in for reservist in exactly a week and a day. That put my (already sucky mood) into the crapper since I'm going back to school in another 31 hours or so.
O well...I think that getting back into NS would be a challenge for me considering the fact that I've been out of the service for the last 8 years.
On to other (better) things.
re: choice.
I love the idea that choice is out there, be it 1200 channels of crap, at least 2 dozen ways to make your arteries cry uncle in a supermarket (happily marked as the wholesale aisle)or a plethora of DVDs in the store awaiting perusal, I like the freedom to choose. I like the idea that my life is my own and no one can make the decisions for me. I LOVE choice.
And what I found in the north American continent was a world of choices that I didn't even know existed...far beyond the continent of Australia. It was a land that sold 15 hundred thousand crappy things that I definitely did not need and didn't even want but it was all there...And the world of choice basically said to me that there's a poor sucker out there who would love to own a slicer dicer thing that also juliennes soda cans and WE WILL CATER TO HIS NEEDS (while also making a huge profit off this bozo).
I know it sounds shallow but I like the idea of having almost everything at my fingertips. It's weird but I guess living in a place that restricts everything that I can have, leaving for a country where there is a plethora of choice and then having to return to aforementioned restrictive space would make a guy yearn for choice like it's water in a desert.
I know that there's a huge world out there and I have to keep reminding myself that my life's going to be way bigger than the onslaught of crap that I have to withstand from the narrow minded idiots in the world that I live in...but sometimes it's hard and it just eats at me.
On an even lighter note: I ate a Twinkie*, probably the most vile of all baked food products. It was not as bad as I was led to believe although the chemical aftertaste actually defied all senses...(ie, it probably killed my tastebuds...) but aside from the 2 kilos of sugar that they manage to inject into the 2 oz pastry and the cream filling that tastes like whipped cream with 2 kilos of sugar dissolved in it, it wasn't all that bad and it's an experience that I would totally reccommend to anyone who isn't diabetic.

*I am totally ashamed to say that the years of programming through comic books and repeated viewings of Inca Mummy Girl twisted my weak-willed mind into wanting to try a Twinkie.

Honey, I'm home!

I'm home...
Canada was great...I never imagined that when it was announced that Vancouver was the most livable city in the world, that it would be inherently so...but it is. The city's quite pleasant and the people are nice...And there's a large visible Asian population. It was quite liberating and refreshing...
I wish holidays were longer. And I also wish that I had the energy to write a longer post but I'm kinda pooped, so I'll just point form it now so that I can expand on it another day.

1) Ice cold water from the taps.
2) Friendly bus drivers.
3) Choice
4) Twinkie.
5) Paramount.
6) 1200 channels.
7) Live basketball with game breakdowns after.
8) 24oz cut of meat.
9) 21 degree weather.

That's all for now...will write more later...

Meanwhile, I'm just going to fret over the huge DVD bill I've incurred.

I meant to post this on the 31st of May, but...

There were many songs that were sung during my wedding. We chose the music that we played for almost everything, up to a point where we almost had enough for a soundtrack. Ironically enough, the one song that reminds me most of the wedding is a song that we did not choose at all, but one that was chosen for us by a man named Sam. It’s a song simply titled “For the first time”.

I walked into a beautiful ballroom with my wife of a day and the atmosphere was surreal, like a fairy tale. The lights were dimmed, or at least I think they were, I couldn’t really tell, and the piano was playing. And here was the thing, everyone was looking at us and I was just thinking that they were probably thinking the same thing as I was, “Who was this beautiful woman and why was she with this loser?”

And there was the song.

It was a song that spoke of a man who desperately looked for beauty everywhere but didn’t realise that he had it in his hands. It was a song about awakening and about sight and it was beautiful. On a night that I saw little and remember even less, the image in burned into my head of my hand on hers as I led her into the ballroom as well as the thought that I was so blessed. And that image will forever be associated with our song, borrowed as it were. It was made ours by Sam the piano man. It was almost Casablanca-esque, without the tragic ending or the seedy bar, or the gambling…OK…it wasn’t really Casablanca-esque but what’s a song played for a couple if it isn’t played by a man named Sam?