So I talked to an Army recruiter on the phone this afternoon, and I have an appointment on Monday. I'm not joining up, not yet anyway-I'm still waiting to hear back from a law school or two-but I'm trying to keep my options open and I mostly wanted to see if they'd even take me, being disabled. Apparently they will; the recruiter told me there was a situp requirement and pushup requirement (both of which I can do) and a distance run, but no vision requirement. So if everything else continues to go poorly, maybe this will give me a sense of direction and purpose. Or maybe I'll just end up adding "basic training washout" to my resume' after all the other amazingly fantastic things. Or maybe UT will move me from the waiting list and offer me a place in law school. I donno. I keep thinking that, if I were to join, it'd be for all the wrong reasons; needing something to do with your time is hardly justification for picking up a rifle and signing away four to eight years of your life. And yet, I believe in the current administration's plans to try to make the world a better place and bring the middle-east a more positive, less tyrannical and bloodthirsty voice. Meanwhile, my mom says I should look into how long it'd take to get my teaching certificate and try to get a job teaching high school TV production (I wonder if I could con 'em into letting me teach film history too? THAT would rule).

On another note, I've nearly finished A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole. Hilarious book. Go buy it.  ¶ 11:02 PM 1 comments

  Messed-up Dream Watch~! Okay, I had this screwed up dream a while ago. (I actually had one last night too, but it'd take too much explaining of background stuff to really be worth sharing right off the bat). So I thought I'd share it with you, the (purely theoretical) reader in lieu of self-pity or rambling and incoherent dissertations on middle-east policy.

It starts off with me on a long trip with a group of high school and college students, not unlike the one I took last summer to Japan. Only this one's not to Japan, it's to North Korea. Pyongyang to be exact. When we got there, evil dictator and movie freak Kim Jong-Il was waiting for our flight specifically (I guess American tourists *wouldn't* be there very often). He chatted briefly with the teacher in charge of the group while everyone else sat around the airport bored witless. He didn't really seem like an evil dictator, though, just some old guy having a nice chat with the chaperone. Subsequently, he asked me to walk with him for a bit. He took me out to his car, a Mini Cooper, and asked me to visit with him while he drove around town. Not being one to argue with heads of state, even corrupt and villainous ones, I agreed. He had me sit in the back, giving the bizarre impression of chauffering or something.Pyongyang didn't look like a major city, regardless of the strife of the populace or any other factor. It looked like a cross between some of the small towns we stopped in for lunch while we were in Japan, and the less-affluent parts of Corpus Christi, TX. I thought he was going to have some kind of profound thing to say, but he wanted to talk about old Termite Terrace cartoons. (I read an article last year that said that Kim is a huge fan of Daffy Duck. I guess he knew I am too.) And he still wasn't acting like a villainous dictator. Then, when we got somewhere and were getting out-I don't really know where; this being a dream about being in a place that I've never been in real life and know nothing about, it doesn't really matter where anyway-I tried to open the front door of the car for him, but while he was getting out accidentally (I swear) slammed the door on his hand and forearm. I think dream-me may have crapped his pants at that point, I don't really remember. I do remember Kim making a horrible face, clearly in a great deal of pain, and asking me nicely to open the door again. And that's pretty much the end of the dream as I can remember it...no big "wake up" moment so it may have gone on, that's just the part that stuck with me.  ¶ 8:58 PM 0 comments

  Self-Pity TIme So I've spent the last three days on the verge of a Howard Dean scream that never quite materializes. I just feel bad about myself this week for some reason. I think what it boils down to is my continued inability to find a job...hell, to even properly lookfor a job. I came to the realization a few days ago that, in spite of rapidly approaching 30 years of age, having a bachelor's degree and having lived on my own while holding a job in the past, I have never been prepared in any sense for life after college. Being something of a 'special case' with good enough test scores to get scholarships and my choice of schools left me totally unprepared for the world of college, and I blew it. When I grew up enough to get serious about college and plow through, I was on disability, and I was so scared I'd blow it again that I took it slow. REAL slow. I took 12-14 hours a semester, weaseled my way into a WP in one class where I probably shouldn't have had one, and never held a job while I was in school. Of course, this meant that it took me six and a half years of school to finish, plus the year and a half while I "grew up". So that's eight years it took me to graduate, never having held a job for more than five months, and THAT was teleservices. Now, I've been out of school for two weeks shy of a year. No direction (as law school is looking less and less likely for the fall), no marketable skills (YOU try getting a job in television when you walk with a blind man's cane) and no real desire to do anything specific other than leave my house on a daily basis and receive enough money for doing so that I can stop getting rent money from my parents, replace my broken PS2 (good thing my brother/roommate has one of his own, yes?) and not have to decide which DVDs I'm getting two months in advance. Oh, and no more telemarketing. I did it for two months, never again.

I keep praying for some sign from God, some indication as to what path I need to be taking (although admittedly I don't pray as often as I should) while I look to myself for the same thing. And I come up empty on both counts. God fish-hooked my brother in high school, told him "You're going to be a church youth minister. You'll be successful at it and love it." It took some time and nearly got derailed by events that happened while he was in college, but it happened, and that career path led him to the girl of his dreams. But that's Aaron in a nutshell; eminently comfortable in his own skin, able to get away with almost anything at the time he does it (sometimes things come back to haunt him later) and, while he doesn't always land on his feet, seems to always roll to a stop and get up with just cuts and bruises. He gets clear directions from God, and follows them. So does my younger sister. I listen, and it's not like I never hear God speaking, but never anything that I can use to bootstrap myself out of the holding pattern I've been in through high school. When I get a wild idea of my own, like law school or moving to Indiana or something, either it works at first but I screw it up or it never quite happens at all. And so I find myself a 27-year-old layabout on disability whose social horizons are so narrow that I started a weblog to hear myself talk. And that's enough self-pity for this evening.  ¶ 10:14 PM 0 comments

  Looks like I'm not much good at blogging, yes? So I seem not to have the discipline necessary to update a weblog every day (I also have an unnerving tendency to start thoughts with "so"). I do, however, have a thought for the day.

I HATE PARK-AND-RIDE BUSES.

Seriously, I think they should be smitten from the roads of the greater Houston area. For the uninitiated, park-and-ride buses are an attempt to compromise between the desire for mass transit among city officials and environmental groups with the burning American need to own a car and use it as often as possible, all the while whining that gasoline is too expensive. Say you live in the suburbs. You drive to a big fat parking lot, get on a bus that makes very few stops, ride it to a transit center (hub for bus routes) and take a bus or walk to work, if the in-town stop is close enough. Saves money on gas, no need to find a parking place, etc. Then in the evening you reverse the process. Unfortunately, the buses used for this noble process are utterly mortifying beasts. In Houston, at least, they're significantly taller and longer than the normal street-to-street buses, and since they don't stop at every corner, they go much faster. So you've got, say, a handicapped guy who just happens to be walking up a road that these buses travel on during rush hour. Let's further say that said road's sidewalk is the type that is narrow and stops at the curb, no grass or railing or whatever like there are on some streets. Suddenly, as said pedestrian is ambling up the road already uncomfortably close to stepping into the street because of the narrow sidewalks, a two-story tall lsteel larva of death comes past with enough speed to kick up significant wind (it's probably only 30-40 mph, but it feels like they're going eighty from my vantage point), block out the sun and just give me an odd feeling of space-invasion that I don't get from other vehicles regardless of size. It's like DEATH is two feet away from me, and if I twist my ankle or trip over something (not all that uncommon given that I can barely see) I am as dead as the new leader of Hamas should they ever name him. These things *terrify* me, more than just about anything else God or man put on the Earth, as pathetic as it makes me sound. Bleah.  ¶ 10:26 PM 0 comments

  Israel and "extra-judicial execution" So nothing of interest happened to me at all this weekend. The Punisher movie is not very good; maybe I'll write something on it later, maybe not. So instead I'll put down briefly my thoughts on the ongoing series of events in Israel. For the uninformed, last weekend the Israeli air force liquidated Hamas's grand high genocidal assbiter, for the second time in under a month. The first was Ahmed Yassin (who the day after his death showed up in a bizarre dream I had), and the world shrieked about how they'd eliminated "an old man in a wheelchair" , ignoring the fact that he was instrumental in the genocide business of the last seventeen years. Then this past Saturday they dropped the proverbial hammer on Abdul Aziz al Rantisi (I may have gotten parts of the name wrong, but honestly, this vulgar man doesn't deserve the effort to check for accuracy), often referred to as "the pediatrician of death" by various anti-Palestinian webloggers. And again, though this time there is no handicapped status for the deceased to hide behind, the world's press and governments are having conniptions.

To be honest, this attitude simply makes no sense to me. The Palestinians want their own state, and the self-determination they haven't had anytime, ever (it's not like they were a free society as part of Egypt and Jordan prior to the annexation of the land in the 60s). A fair number of them, including in the past and quite possibly today Palestinian president Yasser Arafat, want Israel to cease to exist. Hamas is one of those groups; they have repeatedly denounced any attempt at negotiation and indicated that simply granting the Palestinian territories sovereignty will not stop their campaign of child murder and propaganda. And of course the Palestinian Authority can't just say "Right, stop that" and expect it to happen. As such, there's really no incentive for the Israeli government to negotiate on any point with the Palestinian Authority. The first step in any peace plan has to be the abandonment of terror, but there's no one who can deliver that. So Israel HAS to stick around the annexed territory or they're SCREWED in the long run. And, while an end to these bad faith negotiations would certainly bring more rage from the UN, that's hardly a reason to maintain them in my opinion. The Muslim nations and a good chunk of Europe are going to condemn them no matter what they do short of marching into the sea and waiting to die. As such, it's really Israel's duty to eliminate the threat as quickly and efficiently as possible, thus making life better for their own people AND the average Palestinian who hates Israel but isn't prepared to go blowing things up. Because the sooner they stop throwing their lives away to make political statements, the sooner they'll get statehood, independence and security. It's kind of sick to deny someone something until they stop questing for it and then give them what they wanted or needed, but less so than teaching them that if you kill enough people you can make the enemy capitulate...that just leads to trying to get MORE concessions.

Of course, a lot of people will scream about escalation and giving the Palestinians MORE reason to attack Israeli civilians. Up to a point, that's true. However, eventually it has to either reach full-scale war in the streets or the Palestinians will run out of willing bombs. Kill a leader or a group of insurgents, and you convert more people to their cause. But get rid of THOSE guys, and show that you can take what they can dish out, then turn around and hit them back HARDER, and often the willpower of other would-be martyrs starts to fade. After all, dying to change the world is one thing, but dying for a hopeless proposition is far less attractive. (Of course, this relies on the Israelis actually BEING tough enough to fight this way). But sometimes you can't have peace until you hit full-blown war.

Steven Den Beste wrote something on the long-term plans that could inform the decision to dispose of Yassin last month. He seems to believe that the only solution for long-term peace is to create a power vacuum in Palestine, leading to civil war and subsequently a new leader who could unite all the different factions and bring peace to the Palestinian people, both among themselves and with Israel. I don't know how I feel about that concept, as I tend to think there is a shorter path to the Palestinians giving up. However, it was that post which led to a lot of my ideas. Of course, I'm not as intelligent as he is, nor have I had as much real-world experience or time to read as he has. And neither of us is likely to be making decisions for Israel anytime soon anyway.  ¶ 8:22 PM 0 comments

  So, I guess I have a weblog now? I decided to start a weblog today (something I've been considering off-and-on for months now) because, while I'm looking for work and that takes me out into the world, I don't really have much opportunity to really TALK, just say what's on my mind. For the world at large that may be a good thing, since I'm not entirely sure that I have anything worth hearing, but this is the Internet and nobody cares that nobody cares. So I'll start with an introduction. My name is Zach Adams (don't bother Googling it, as apparently there's an adult film director and "actor" of the same name, and you'd probably have to get to page 325 or something before you found a reference to Zachary Q. Adams instead of that guy). I'm a 27-year-old Houstonian, currently unemployed, who hopes to go to law school in the fall (still waiting to hear back on applications). I'm a devout Christian, formerly of the Episcopal church (and no, I didn't leave over the gay bishop thing), and politically what Larry Elder would call a Republitarian (that is to say, most of my ideals are libertarian in nature, but I am pragmatic enough to realize that for the most part the Republican Party serves those ideals better than the real Libertarian Party does). I love comics and cartoons (be they American, Japanese or something else entirely), videogames, and everything else a young man is supposed to outgrow the morning after his first real date. I have a degree from the University of Houston in Media Production (basically radio/TV) and my favorite musical acts are Dream Theater, Oingo Boingo, and Billy Joel, though lately I've been listening to a lot of Joe Jackson and cartoon soundtracks by Yoko Kanno. My favorite movies of 2003 were American Splendor, Confessions of a Dangerous Mind and X2: X-Men United in spite of its stupid title.

Also, I'm legally blind. For the uninformed, that doesn't mean there's such a thing as criminally or illegally being blind. What it means is that, due to physical deficiencies, I have eye problems that cannot be corrected by current medicine (in this case damage to my optic nerves). Glasses won't help. Surgery won't help. Prayer might help, but right now some kind of cure isn't in God's plan for me. And so, I'm stuck with eyesight that, even with glasses, is nowhere near "normal". And so, even though I can see, they decided that for legal purposes I (and others like me) am considered to be blind. They gave me a cane, put me in touch with the Texas Comission for the Blind, and put me on disability and social security so that I could finish school without having to work. I think growing up handicapped in such a way probably went a long way toward shaping my personality, and putting gray hairs in my parents. I guess that's enough of an introduction for now; I'm going to try to write here three to five times a week. Sometimes I'll write about national or global politics, sometimes entertainment (mostly comics and videogames since I don't have cable and don't get to go to that many movies), sometimes my freakin' life. So for the three people likely to ever see this...how's it goin', eh?  ¶ 11:12 AM 0 comments