I wrote this earlier today:
Today is the day a new Alias episode airs. Fun for me, if I remember to set the VCR. I should go do that now………..ok, it’s set. Uber. I’m kinda thirsty. I should drink something, but not a soda because I’ll get addicted!!! Caffeine! Yeah.
My statistics course is fun so far. Easy, too. There are only 8 people in the class and today we had 2 problems for homework, so I’m not complaining.
And the weekend starts tomorrow. It’s not that I don’t have school on Friday - I do. Everyone knows that the weekend starts on Thursday. I’m not sure what I’m doing tomorrow, Friday Jay mentioned going to see a movie so I may do that, or I may do something else. Saturday I’ve got the big W - work. Sunday….church and some new teen group for church.
I hate PE with all my being. It makes it so I’m too tired to skate when I get home, and I REALLY want to skate. Theb weather’s getting soooo nice, although it’s forecasted to snow on Saturday. I hope that doesn’t happen. At least I’ll be working.
Finals are over! Finally! I can actually do something other than study. The past few days have been very uneventful, and I think I’ll get back to real blogging soon….like this weekend. Three days, too! So I leave you with this:
Haven’t posted anything here in a while…..wow…..that’s bad. Today I’ve pretty much been studying for finals. The big final tomorrow is Chemistry..uuuugh. I don’t feel like I’m going to do well there. At least this cd is good!
I’m tired. Work was taxing today. I think I’ll go sleep.
I just preodered the new Eisley cd. You can too, and if you’re one of the first 1000 you will receive an autographed copy! Check it out
Just read this and thought it was great:
How Can Someone Who Lives in Insane Luxury Be a Star in Today’s World?
As I begin to write this, I “slug” it, as we writers say, which means I put a heading on top of the document to identify it. This heading is “eonlineFINAL,” and it gives me a shiver to write it. I have been doing this column for so long that I cannot even recall when I started.
I loved writing this column so much for so long I came to believe it would never end.Lew Harris, who founded this great site, asked me to do it maybe seven or eight years ago, and I loved writing this column so much for so long I came to believe it would never end.
But again, all things must pass, and my column for E! Online must pass. In a way, it is actually the perfect time for it to pass. Lew, whom I have known forever, was impressed that I knew so many stars at Morton’s on Monday nights.
He could not get over it, in fact. So, he said I should write a column about the stars I saw at Morton’s and what they had to say.
It worked well for a long time, but gradually, my changing as a person and the world’s change have overtaken it. On a small scale, Morton’s, while better than ever, no longer attracts as many stars as it used to. It still brings in the rich people in droves and definitely some stars.
I saw Samuel L. Jackson there a few days ago, and we had a nice visit, and right before that, I saw and had a splendid talk with Warren Beatty in an elevator, in which we agreed that Splendor in the Grass was a super movie.
But Morton’s is not the star galaxy it once was, though it probably will be again.
Beyond that, a bigger change has happened. I no longer think Hollywood stars are terribly important. They are uniformly pleasant, friendly people, and they treat me better than I deserve to be treated. But a man or woman who makes a huge wage for memorizing lines and reciting them in front of a camera is no longer my idea of a shining star we should all look up to.
A real star is the soldier of the 4th Infantry Division who poked his head into a hole on a farm near Tikrit, Iraq.How can a man or woman who makes an eight-figure wage and lives in insane luxury really be a star in today’s world, if by a “star” we mean someone bright and powerful and attractive as a role model?
Real stars are not riding around in the backs of limousines or in Porsches or getting trained in yoga or Pilates and eating only raw fruit while they have Vietnamese girls do their nails. They can be interesting, nice people, but they are not heroes to me any longer.
A real star is the soldier of the 4th Infantry Division who poked his head into a hole on a farm near Tikrit, Iraq. He could have been met by a bomb or a hail of AK-47 bullets. Instead, he faced an abject Saddam Hussein and the gratitude of all of the decent people of the world.
A real star is the U.S. soldier who was sent to disarm a bomb next to a road north of Baghdad. He approached it, and the bomb went off and killed him.
A real star, the kind who haunts my memory night and day, is the U.S. soldier in Baghdad who saw a little girl playing with a piece of unexploded ordnance on a street near where he was guarding a station. He pushed her aside and threw himself on it just as it exploded. He left a family desolate in California and a little girl alive in Baghdad.
The stars who deserve media attention are not the ones who have lavish weddings on TV but the ones who patrol the streets of Mosul even after two of their buddies were murdered and their bodies battered and stripped for the sin of trying to protect Iraqis from terrorists.
We put couples with incomes of $100 million a year on the covers of our magazines. The noncoms and officers who barely scrape by on military pay but stand on guard in Afghanistan and Iraq and on ships and in submarines and near the Arctic Circle are anonymous as they live and die.
I am no longer comfortable being a part of the system that has such poor values, and I do not want to perpetuate those values by pretending that who is eating at Morton’s is a big subject.
There are plenty of other stars in the American firmament. The policemen and women who go off on patrol in South Central and have no idea if they will return alive. The orderlies and paramedics who bring in people who have been in terrible accidents and prepare them for surgery. The teachers and nurses who throw their whole spirits into caring for autistic children. The kind men and women who work in hospices and in cancer wards.
Think of each and every fireman who was running up the stairs at the World Trade Center as the towers began to collapse.
Now you have my idea of a real hero.
Last column, I told you a few of the rules I had learned to keep my sanity. Well, here is a final one to help you keep your sanity and keep you in the running for stardom: We are puny, insignificant creatures.
We are not responsible for the operation of the universe, and what happens to us is not terribly important. God is real, not a fiction, and when we turn over our lives to Him, he takes far better care of us than we could ever do for ourselves.
In a word, we make ourselves sane when we fire ourselves as the directors of the movie of our lives and turn the power over to Him.
I can put it another way. Years ago, I realized I could never be as great an actor as Olivier or as good a comic as Steve Martin–or Martin Mull or Fred Willard–or as good an economist as Samuelson or Friedman or as good a writer as Fitzgerald. Or even remotely close to any of them.
But I could be a devoted father to my son, husband to my wife and, above all, a good son to the parents who had done so much for me. This came to be my main task in life.
I did it moderately well with my son, pretty well with my wife and well indeed with my parents (with my sister’s help). I cared for and paid attention to them in their declining years. I stayed with my father as he got sick, went into extremis and then into a coma and then entered immortality with my sister and me reading him the Psalms.
This was the only point at which my life touched the lives of the soldiers in Iraq or the firefighters in New York. I came to realize that life lived to help others is the only one that matters and that it is my duty, in return for the lavish life God has devolved upon me, to help others He has placed in my path. This is my highest and best use as a human.
As so many of you know, I am an avid Bush fan and a Republican. But I think the best guidance I ever got was from the inauguration speech of Democrat John F. Kennedy in January of 1961.
On a very cold and bright day in D.C., he said, “With a good conscience our only sure reward, with history the final judge of our deeds, let us go forth…asking His blessing and His help but knowing that here on Earth, God’s work must surely be our own.”
And then to paraphrase my favorite president, my boss and friend Richard Nixon, when he left the White House in August 1974, with me standing a few feet away, “This is not goodbye. The French have a word for it–au revoir. We’ll see you again.”
Au revoir, and thank you for reading me for so long. God bless every one of you. We’ll see you again.
FRIDAY! ELEKTRA COMES OUT!
February 8! Eisley’s first full length cd comes out!
I can’t wait!
Other than that nothing much has been happening in my life lately. Just working on school and finals and projects. I have an English project due Friday. Had a Civics due this past Monday, and finals are next week.
This week I’ve been listening to:
I just wrote this entry on xanga and feel like I should put it here as well:
Right now I think I’ll take the opportunity to voice my political views on xanga. I don’t think I’ve done much of that here. So here are some of my views on two political topics:
Military: US military presence should remain in all current locations. No withdrawal. No draft, voluntary service ONLY. Defense of our country when necessary. Side note: why is everyone saying “bring our boys home”? They volunteered for this! They wanted to defend our country. Let them do their job. And also, the complaining about 1300 dead? NOTHING compared to Vietnam, WWII, or the Civil War.
Civil Liberties: Human rights protected. Here defined as the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. The three rights are also in order of importance: life takes precedence over liberty which takes precedence over the pursuit of happiness. Fairness and equality. All other freedoms should not be hindered. No invasion of citizens privacy.
Civil Liberties in depth: If a drug is a plant, it should be legal. Think about it this way: you could smoke a tomato plant. Abortion is illegal, seeing as it is taking away the babies right to life. Life > woman’s control of her body. Affirmative action should be illegal, as it is racist. Guns for everyone. Even if there are gun control laws, thats not going to stop the criminals from having guns! They already have them and don’t care. That’s why they’re criminals! Gay marriage is legal. I’m not going to do it, but if they want to FINE. I know it’s wrong, but the government shouldn’t be able to tell me that. RELIGION BY FORCE DOES NOT WORK. EVERYONE KNOWS THIS.
Whew…ok. So those are my opinions on a lot of major topics. On the civil liberties part, I could go much more in depth, but I will refrain. Feel free to post your opinions as well, seeing as you have a right to them.
Now I think I’ll talk a bit about stereotypes and the like.
I hate stereotypes/cliques/classifications. Whatever you want to call them - I despise them. I hate when people try to put people into a pre-made, processed piece of crap class that no one really fits into. Everyone is different, no one is the same. People are individuals, not groups. If people would realize this, then they would stop complaing about people not being “punk” enough, or people being too “preppy”. Just be your SELF. Don’t be something else. YOURSELF. I don’t know how much I can stress this.
Here’s what I’ve been listening to this week: