nothingness

so i've been thinking... what the heck do i talk about in a blog if i don't really do anything with my life right now? why do people keep blogs anyway? and how are people always able to write a crapload of stuff in their every entry?

well, one of the conclusions i came to was that i'm a bit lacking in imagination haha. and, i don't feel like i think that much about stuff.. like if someone sees something like.. i dunno.. let's say you see someone being really picky about the vegetables at the supermarket, and in the end, they choose a bundle that's buried at the bottom of the big pile. most people would think "i wonder how she's choosing them? is there something wrong with all the ones at the top? why'd she choose one from the very bottom?? " or something like that. but not me.. if i saw someone doing that i'd be like "oh... vegetables." and move on to the next aisle, because you know, i just LOVE vegetables.
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ok maybe that's a bad example. here's a better one: let's say.. while driving, you see tire skid marks running across the lane and then up the divider. i know at least one person who thinks that "these tire tracks tell a story about a unfortunate person >_>" (thanks to 기문 for the example~ i don't do this type of thinking so i couldn't think of one ><) anyway, if i saw something like that i'd just be like.. "oh." and that's if i even bother giving it a thought. so i guess my point is, i don't really like to think, hence, thinking of things to write (whether it be in a paper for an english class or a blog like this) is pretty hard for me. if only i could get away with 1 word messages haha anyway, i think that my dislike of thinking is not a good thing... i guess i've always known that, but it kinda hit me a little harder after seeing this one speech by huang chun ming (黃春明) at uci a couple months ago. brilliant guy... ok so maybe he isn't that book-smart but he's very creative-smart. he was supposed to give a speech on i think.. art and life, but ended up just telling experiences from his own life, which was pretty interesting nonetheless. one of his big things was creativity, and how the way we do things today isn't really as meaningful as they were in the past, and so, he told a story about a taiwanese farmer to get his point across:

if you were to ask people nowadays how they would take care of a rat infestation, you'd probably get pesticides or mouse traps as an answer, as they are methods perfected with the knowledge that our modern society has. one answer you probably won't get is to use the rats themselves to get rid of the infestation.

how do you do this? well... (skip this part if you are easily grossed out haha) you catch one of the rats without harming it, and then you stick part of a crushed peanut up it's butt. (i'm dead serious, he said that!! in chinese though) why would you do that? well.. supposedly if you were a farmer, you'd know that when crushed peanut gets moist, it expands a lot. and after it expands, you feed the rat a lot of food, which it subsequently can't dump out thanks to the peanut.

so after a feeding it a few times, you let it go. why, you ask? because a constipated rat is an unhappy rat, and an unhappy rat isn't nice to anyone, not even fellow rats haha. letting the rat roam free, it'll bite any rats that come near it, and the other rats will remember that, eventually causing them to go away altogether. so voila, you're left with only one rat to deal with, and it's gonna die soon if you don't do anything about it anyway.

ok so i don't know exactly how well that works in practice, but i have to admit, it seems like it would be a heck of a lot more fun to watch (maybe not to prepare) than poisoning them using rat traps ^^

i guess a lot of the stuff he talked about dealt with the "good old days," which is not to say that he is someone tied down by tradition. there was a lot of stuff he talked about that defies convention but makes perfectly good sense~ he told us about when he was in school, and he was using the abacus when the teacher came around to check up on everyone. all of a sudden, the teacher hits him... because he's using the abacus upside down (the side with 5 beads was away from him and the side with 2 was facing him). so he gets really mad and punches the window, subsequently breaking the window. his teacher, who is now in utter shock from the blood that's gushing out of his student's arm, tells him to go see the school nurse, but mr. huang says "no, not until you tell me why you hit me." and after some argument, the teacher gives in and tells him that he hit him because he was using the abacus upside down.

but who's to say which way is right or wrong? using it the "right" way would put your thumb in charge of the 5 beads at the bottom and your index finger in charge of the 2 at the top, which, to mr. huang, didn't make sense because the thumb is bigger, and, therefore, slower. so why should it be used to move 5 beads instead of only 2?

well of course, you can't really beat that logic, so the teacher had no response to that and apologized and then sent him to the nurse. who would've thought that after a thousand years of using the abacus, there'd be a way to use it better?

his talk had a lot of fun stories about his life like that, and after hearing him speak, i guess i've felt like i really need to think more, and think more creatively too...

anyway, one last thing before i sleep...
youtube's viewer analysis service, called "inspire," is pretty interesting. apparently my video, this one, apparently 8.7% of its hits from searching "garbage truck" haha. go figure