The Insidious Letters at the End of the Alphabet

I don't know why it is that I find the last few letters of the alphabet seem so much more devious to me. They just seem so dark and mysterious. Alluring, even. Seductive?

How can you think of the letters at the end of the alphabet like that, you ask? Think about it. What's in a name? I think names have power. You know, girls named monica and leslie are never far from the top of the social scale, small boys named damien are likely to have demons inside of them, men with middle names of van are often German...

But what of the letters that make up the names? Maybe that's just it! It's the letters that make a name sinister, and it's the name that makes the man. Or the fictional character.

As something of a writer, I know that the names of our fictional characters are a bit more influential concerning the character's personality. With regular people, they have their whole life to define their own name however they please. When I sit down and try to think up a name for one of my characters, I'm trying to sum up as much of my character's personality and past (or even future) as I can.

For instance, I named a main character of mine, a conflicted villain, Damien. It does not actually mean devil child or anything in the like. It means "to tame". I only gave my character that name after days of deliberation. It was perfect, once I finally found it. It's good because it has all the connotation of someone possessed by a devil, but none of the meaning. The meaning, to tame, may refer either to his leading armies against all the people of the land with great victory, or to his inner struggle to tame his feelings and the chaos inside.

Now Damien hasn't got the dark letters of the alphabet (I'd say they start at "R"ish). Another common "dark" letter seems to be "D". But there are a lot of sinister words and names that do have those last letters. DracUla, WereWolf, eVil, tWiSted, lUcifer, UnderWorld, Yeti, chUpacabra, monSTer, SuSpicioUS, etcetera etcetera etcetera. How many words can you find?

Some names start with these letters, others have them mixed up in the middle, and some words just have them tacked on the end. But then again I am talking about over a third of the alphabet, here. It must just all be coincidence. Yes, a sinister coincidence indeed.

Ah, the good old Dark Ages...

As I sat through a droll college algebra class in the dark hours of the early morning I drifted in and out of the edge of consciousness. In one of my weaker, conscious moments, I heard my instructor spit out another one of those math teacher classics, a "real life" application.

Any math teacher worth his salt has used one. It must be some secret cardinal rule that every math instructor should come up with ridiculous, far fetched ways for his students to apply what they learn in the class room in real life. Sometimes an exponential something or another equation can help you to find out what rate your coffee cools at in a cold room. That's ridiculous. Drink it while it's hot. That's all you need to know.

Really, there's hundreds of applicable but ridiculous and time consuming uses for math for the not-mathematically-motivated people of the world, like myself. I'm going to college for a fine arts degree and an english degree. I don't need a whole lot of math. I think the highest level of math required for a college student in a non-scientific degree should be geometry and algebra 2.

For some reason or another, the application my teacher told us in my brief moment of consciousness struck me as particularly funny. We could use what we were learning today to find the trajectory if we fired a missile. If I fired a missile? Sure, it happens all the time! I smiled a little bit, into the face of this cruel irony. Why in all of God's green earth would I be allowed to or even want to fire a missile?

The most I'm going to use the little math I need to know is to budget my paycheck in order to have enough for groceries after I pay my bills. And that budget is laughably small (being a starving artist and all). I certainly don't need higher math to figure it out.

Math may be behind the whole of the physical universe. I will still regard it as magic, and the mathe-magicians should be glad we don't still burn them at the stake, like they did in the good old dark ages.

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past...

Time is an illusive thing. Now you have it. Now it's gone. They say that time is money. I think they're right.

What has greater value than time? Think about it. What are the most precious moments and memories of our lives? The time spent with the ones we love. Our life's work, which we spend hours, days, months or maybe years on, be it for a functional project, or just to show it off and be proud that we did it. The precious items we hold dear? If it is an heirloom, then it shows the time that someone else spent earning it, just to end up giving it to you. If it's something special, made by your own hand or purchased from a store, it is by your own time well spent that it is yours.

Someday in the future, when I'm a rich genius, I'll invent some funky gadget that can give one person's time to someone else. Imagine what some people would pay for a few extra hours of time! I could charge a hundred bucks an hour and take just forty percent for myself, and sixty for the man who has time to spare. While other people's work days drag by like a snail chained to a rock crossing a tar pit, it would be over instantly for the employee. He'd arrive at nine in the morning, bottle up eight hours or so, and walk right back out only what seemed to him like five minutes later, at five. Side affects may include but are not limited to longer life span for employees and slightly accelerated aging for buyers. (obviously there are some flaws, but then again they'd only be shortening their life spans by eight hours at a time)

Actually, maybe it'd be funner to be an employee, rather than own the business. Then my career wouldn't wear away at my life until it killed me, as so many other people's careers do to them. I would never be tired after work ever again. Of course at times I might find myself wishing I could have some of my time back... but then again I'd barely have to work at all, considering what time probably sells for.

Time is money. It's true! But it is part of everything else, too. It's what we buy and sell, it's who we love, it's what we do.

Nothing is worth anything if it doesn't take time.

A lazy afternoon

I found myself observing the rather famous painting, Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte. Never before have I been impressed by it. I had always found it boring. Oh, look! A park! My, you never see paintings of those! So rare and original! Pffft. Not hardly.

Of course, that was then and this is now. As I looked at it, the teacher's voice blended into a mumbling background noise pointing out the use of shape and line and vanishing points. I saw a shadow I hadn't seen before that put everything into a new perspective. I imagined someday making a movie, and in that movie having a scene that copied the positions of people and water and trees in this painting. There was beauty and interest there that I can't put into words. Suddenly this simple, over-publicized painting was as fantastic as it must have always been. If only I'd seen it sooner.

I sat in a room full of people that seem to be from every walk of life, to a very ridiculous scale. Really it was truly amazing to see the large variety of people that take the early morning classes at a community college.

We have true to the 'T' starving artists, lazy college students that need a fine art credit (how such a species manages to get to school so early is truly a mystery to me), a druggie or two, a hippie (different from a druggie- he's a druggie with class!), a pretty Belgian transfer student, about three to five attractive guys from all different genres of macho male (ya know, gear-head, jock, rich kid, musician, et cetera) that all took turns hitting on transfer babe, Belgian transfer babe's posse composed of the remaining top 5% most attractive women in the class, a couple of those who love art and like to think of themselves as art buffs but really couldn't do anything artistic well enough to save their own lives, one handsome and inspired Mormon, and me.

Out of all of us, which ones looked up at the famous painting on the overhead and were truly impressed with what they saw? I always wonder, when I see a piece I'm not impressed with. Who likes this? And why? Are they seeing something that I can't see? Are they better artists than me and that's why they see it?

Or do they just look at it long enough to finally see its genius?

The crimes and punishement of being late

Whoops. There I went and did it again. No. I've never messed with your heart. I was talking about being late. Again. I'm late for life. Is that gonna affect my final grade? Because I've already got a pretty solid D-, and I'd rather not push my luck.

Although it may have taken your grade down a letter or so, I doubt lateness at school is going to affect your quality of life in general, in the end. Really it's what you do in your life, and with it, that will affect your "grade" in life.

Grade is really just another word for "judge", isn't it? Rather, I think judge is a bit better, when discussing your life and eternity or lack there of that you may think comes afterwards. Perhaps your destiny might be based on how you judge your own life in the end, once all is said and done. What if you find yourself lacking?

What kind of scale are we using, anyway? One to ten? Can we choose someone else to judge us? What if we're too hard on ourselves? What if we have no conscience but we're actually a psychopath? What then?

It is easier to believe that there's someone bigger who knows better.

Or maybe it is easiest to make sure that we are satisfied with what we did or didn't do with our life as we go. Do what you'll be proud of later. Yeah, that's even easier than a scale from one to ten!