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DarthYoshi
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Name: Eric
Location: Portland, Oregon, United States
Birthday: 1/24/1986
Gender: Male
Interests: Alto and baritone saxophone, classic rock, Broadway musicals, speech and debate, political activism, prayer and religion, meditation and spirituality, poker, reading, writing, whatever sport happens to be in season
Expertise: Nothing that's going to make me any sort of money in today's job market
Occupation: Student
Industry: Other
Message: message meEmail: email me
AIM:  DarthYoshi888
MSN: Anarchist@democrat.com
Member Since:
1/6/2004
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| You can now find me at thedarthyoshi.blogspot.com . As always, the DarthYoshi name goes on with me.
Peace,
Eric
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| Am back from Arkansas, where it was very fun during the day, but royally sucked at night. When sleeping in the open air in July, it doesn't matter what bug spray you use, you will get eaten alive by mosquitoes. It is a surer thing than death or taxes.
I take the GREs one week from today. I've taken several practice exams, and I think I'll do pretty well on it. After the GREs, I'll be packing up all my stuff for the school year and will leave Kansas for the University of Wyoming on the first of the month to spend two weeks at the college debate cooperative there. From Wyo, it is a one and a half day drive to Portland...so this is my last week in Kansas until the December holidays.
I think this will also be my last real post here at Xanga. For the old South crowd that I always hung out with, Xanga has been slowly withering away for years now. The number of people I know on Xanga who still regularly update their blogs has dropped from around eighty to maybe a dozen or so, and almost nobody from LC uses Xanga. I'll probably be moving to Blogspot, where a number of my LC and debate friends, as well as my girlfriend Emilie, now have blogs. I will still maintain my DarthYoshi Xanga for the means of reading the few blogs of my friends who still regularly update here, but I will otherwise be setting up camp elsewhere. I will post the new URL here (probably tomorrow), and then that will be it for DarthYoshi at Xanga.
Peace out, Xanga. See you at Blogspot.
Eric
"Character is destiny." -Heraclitus
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| I am about to leave for Arkansas to chaperone the church's junior high kids on a four-day trip. In the boonies. Whee.
In the meantime, our fourth roommate for our apartment has bailed on Matt, Claire, and I. So, LC friends, if by some stroke of fate you are still looking for housing for next year and might be interested, send one of us an email.
That is all. Now back to your regularly scheduled lives.
Eric
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| http://www.cnn.com/2007/WORLD/europe/07/10/pope.churches.reut/index.html
According to Pope Benedict, Protestant denominations shouldn't really be referred to as "churches." And the Pope knows best. But hey, at least Orthodox denominations count as true churches, although they are apparently "wounded" because they do not recognize the Pope as leader of their church (why oh why did the Byzantines decide to split from Rome so many years ago?). After this, plus Benedict's ignorant, tone-deaf remarks about Islam last year, I'm beginning to wonder if Benedict and John Paul II don't have a little Bill Clinton-George Bush thing going...as in, JP II travels the world, reaps a ton of goodwill, works incredibly hard for social justice, and is generally well-liked despite disagreements with his personal views (kinda like Clinton, unless you happen to write for the Wall Street Journal editorial page), while Benedict plays the follow-up act and appears mostly concerned with pissing the rest of the world off (much like GWB). The best part? How Protestants are referred to as "ecclesiastical communities originating from the Reformation." That sounds so much more impressive than simply saying, "Uh, yeah, we just kinda quit the Catholic Church several hundred years ago. And it got pretty bloody." The worst part? This is something I'd count upon the right wing Protestant whackjobs to concoct, not the Vatican, as, sadly, there is an abundance of anti-Catholic prejudice in some evangelical Protestant circles.
In other news, the Bush White House cares more about politics than public health, according to its own former Surgeon General. But that is nothing new. Either I'm being overly cynical, or it is pretty bad when you read a story like this and simply think, "Par for the course." So much for "do no harm," I'm pretty sure Hippocrates would be rolling over in his grave.
And this just coming in, too--Eric's life in Kansas is officially boring. Nothing happens.
That is all.
Peace,
Eric
"The world may be hard to love, yet we must love it because we have no other. To not love it is to not exist at all." -Mark Van Doren
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| I have been asked why I haven't been updating more during the summer. Mostly, it is because my life in Kansas is too boring to warrant many entries. And partly (this is sad), because it is the off-season for debate, and debate kinda comprises a lot of my school year entries.
Emilie spent the 4th of July week here, and it was fun. I think she may have earned my parents' stamp of approval.
Other things that have been on my mind--
The Tour de France has started again, and I'm catching bits and pieces of it on television, once again prompting my parents to ask me what the hell I happen to see in a sport that my dad claims can be summed up in two words--"they pedal." I tried to draw an analogy for my dad by comparing cycling to another sport that much of America rags on but that he personally enjoys--soccer. You wouldn't sum up soccer as simply being "they kick the ball," because there is a lot more strategy involved than that. It is the same thing with cycling, even if all it looks like is pedaling, and I am strangely fascinated by it. It is a sport that has been dragged through the mud lately, what with all the doping scandals (see: Floyd Landis), but I'll still keep watching it, at least until the Republican party tries to convince the French government to rename the race the "Tour de Freedom."
One of the things that Emilie and I did together was visit the new Bloch addition to the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, Missouri. It houses a lot of modern art, which Emilie adores and which I frankly do not understand (but am trying to). It is worth making the trip, though, to see the Constellation exhibit that is in the center of one of the individual galleries. I may be an art dummy, but good art can still captivate me. It's a democratic medium in that way.
To all the Republicans pointing to Clinton's ridiculous pardon of Marc Rich as a justification for Bush commuting Lyin' Libby's jail sentence--two wrongs don't make a right. PS: The justifications GWB used in his commutation (Libby did good work, this would be an undue burden on his family, he's learned his lesson, he is secretly the reincarnation of Saint Francis of Assissi, and so on) are the exact same justifications that your Justice Department has been trying to get rid of in federal sentencing guidelines. It sure makes sense to be more merciful and flexible in meting out justice when the recipient happens to hit a whole lot closer to home, don't it? There's a word for this, isn't there? Chutzpah?
And finally, this last bit I consider to be within the realm of typical discourse, but for anyone sensitive to a somewhat frank discussion regarding male pattern baldness, this might be "too much information." Whatever.
I'm still debating what I want to do with my hair--keep it in the ponytail, cut it back to the fairly short length it was in high school, or shave it off entirely (at the beginning of the summer, I wanted to shave it off, but figured that I'd sunburn the top of my head on a regular basis, so I temporarily nixed that idea). Even though I began noticing my hair was thinning by the age of 17, it hasn't really started falling out until the past several months...but now my hair is incurring casualties in ever-increasing numbers. This has had a few ramifications--first, I decided I should go for the full Jesus look while I still could and I grew a goatee. But it also means that unless I want to take my grandpa up on his offer to get me Rogaine, I have a decreasing window of time to decide what to do with my hair. Sadly, I didn't think I would have to go through this thought process for another ten to fifteen years.
Peace,
Eric
"Before riches, before fame, give me truth." -Henry David Thoreau
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