i will be gone for the next 5 days or so. i think GW is in the very same town i am going. at least he was, he has probably moved on by now. if i find him, i think i can make a positive first impression that will grant me the liberty and freedom to party with his daughters. he seems to be fairly easily amused, just like me. all it should really take is a good snowball fight, complete with forts and safety zones. extra points if you hit a secret service agent, and extra extra points if you knock their earpiece out. me and GW should get along famously. from here on out, it is nothing but posh, catered movie premieres at the white house and lines of coke off the big desk in the oval office. maybe i can have a three way with the twins in that big tub that taft or whoever died in. when i'm a diplomat in some unimportant yet swanky country like monaco, you guys can all come chill with me at the consul palace i'm going to renovate friv style and dine with royalty.

peace

frivved up by Ben at 10:32 AM

quoth the matt: "i wish i had more pies"

frivved up by Ben at 9:42 PM

self-control. self-control is a lost art. inside us we have the power to control ourselves. the power of conscious thought. the power over of our mind over our instincts. instincts are a means of survival for those too stupid to keep themselves out of potentially fatal situations. our bodies are preprogrammed to protect us until we learn to control ourselves. yet people let their instincts control them. they are turning over their minds to their instincts, and therefore turning themselves over to their own stupidity. we have the power to control ourselves.

i once thought that it was best to let my body protect me from such things, to trust my instincts above my mind. without my mind, my body is nothing. my mind has unlimited potential. i have learned that my mind can subjegate my instincts. under the control of conscious thought, my instincts make me more powerful. but thought first. instincts second. if we let our instincts rule us, we have chaos. that is what our instincts are for. to protect us in times of chaos, when the situation is beyond anything our mind can comprehend.

people live reactionary lives. when they are angry, they yell or throw a fist. when they are hungry, they eat. when they feel pain, they flinch away. they are weak. our society is weak. we live in a society filled with angry, fat, scared people. our minds can control all of these things. when i am angry, i calm myself, saving my anger for when it is necessary. when i am hungry, i ignore it, eating what is necessary to sustain my body. when i am in pain, i ignore it, until it threatens my body.

think, do not react. control your mind. do what is right. take responsibility and fix your mistakes. you can't rely on anyone but yourself. inside your mind, there is only you, and your mind is the key to your life. without your mind, you are nothing. you are responsible for everything you feel and do. you have the power to control every thought you have. you have the power to change yourself into who you want to be. people underestimate the power of their own mind. they are weak. it is easier to react, to blame, to strike out in anger. we live in a society with no self-control.

this is what i fear. i fear for the minds of everyone around me, and the potential that is wasted due to our glaring weaknesses.

i am stronger than everyone because of the control i hold over my mind and my body, and i am just now scratching the surface of the potential my mind holds.

frivved up by Ben at 1:36 PM

i've always been wary of meditation. i never understood the purpose, or the way to go about it. there is no purpose or way to go about it, i have decided. it is a personal thing.

for the first time, i guess i meditated, although meditation is such a fancy sounding word. all i really did was drive all thought from my mind. i didn't even do that, i don't think i'm good enough to do that yet. i was always skeptical, but now i'm kind of excited, because it was a really enjoyable experience. my house is filled with all sorts of wierd sounds, my heater, my computer, the buzzing of our dumb halogen light, our refridgerator. i was trying to listen to the rain, because rain sounds cool, but i couldn't because everything else was bugging me, and my refridgerator flipped on and was drowning out all the rain. so i closed my eyes, and listened to everything, and tried to remove all sound but the rain. i was moderately successful, so i tried to remove all thought but the word rain.

BAH BAH!!! i sound like such a fruit. what the fuck, i'm meditating now?! who the fuck do i think i am. i'm confused now. 15 minutes went by where i didn't do anything but try to pull the sound of the rain to myself and push every other sound away. it didn't feel like 15 minutes, time wasn't really relevant. i didn't want to stop, but my eyes opened a little and i saw my couch and it blew everything to hell. then i went and wrote a very pretencious little piece on my ://friv/ben blog. i almost put it in here, but i didn't because it was a little wierder than i wanted to portray without warning, but i didn't want to taint it with warnings about meditation and stuff.

man, do i sound like a thoughtless internet moron right now, rambling on about meditation and self-control. who the hell am i, anyways

frivved up by Ben at 12:48 PM

so this is combined email for everyone who was disappointed by the matrix. what exactly were you expecting? i wasn't disappointed at all. you guys must have puffed yourselves up all over the place if that movies wasn't exactly what you thought it was going to be. sam, being the crazy guy he is, wrote an excellent little piece on the legion of lions forums.

one of the main points he made is this:

the first one was the groundbreaking kung fu movie
the second one was the groundbreaking action movie (car chases and all)
the third one is the groundbreaking war movie

i mean, really, can you think of action sequences better than the ones in these 3 movies? i sure can't, with the exception of the lord of the rings, and i already liked those ones better, even though i loved all the matrix ones.

was it because it didn't have any more mind bending philosophical insights? how could they end it and leave you confused at the same time. i am so happy they worked to a decent ending like they did, instead of pooping themselves around in circles again.

so yeah, what did you expect? i'm trying to do this without giving anything away, which is kind of hard, but what would you change in order to have the movie live up to your expectations? do you even know what your expectations were? i'm just so confused that everyone is saying it was such a disappointment. i mean shit, watch all 3 at once, i bet you will love them all. its a trilogy, you have to take all three of them in context with the other ones. its a great story. they stuck too their vision and implemented it flawlessly. their special effects were leaps and bounds beyond anything anyone has ever tried. they had to transform the entire earth to this post apocolyptic machine ruled hell, which they did. they broke every rule of physics possible inside the matrix. they had kung fu. they had car chases. they had one person duplicated a billion times fighting people.

if it is disappointing, what would you rather have seen instead? do you really want to sit through terminator 3, or the texas chainsaw massacre to get your action fix? maybe love actually, if you were disappointed in neo and trinity.

its not like this movie was supposed to have sweeping cultural implications, it was a sci-fi action kung fu film, and the trilogy does things no movie in any genre has ever done. these movies were pretty freaking amazing if you ask me, all philosophy and whatever the hell you guys found disappointing about them aside. it wasn't supposed to be a really good movie, it was supposed to be an incredible action movie, which it was. i mean, seriously, what about it disappointed you?

i'm just at a loss, i just don't understand people sometimes :)

so, now that everyone didn't like the matrix, does everyone want to go see radio with me instead? maybe that will get your mind off your disappointment :P

frivved up by Ben at 2:24 PM