Today’s soundtrack: Hellbound, hellbound, hellbound, hellbound
Today at 2:32pm: Me and Shady grabbing “breakfast” at Dragon Land (Chinese bakery).

HipstompKitchen

One of my favorite things to do is lie in bed nearly naked and read Newsweek. Sometimes the news is depressing though. I was reading this article and it says Hitler started out as an artist, a painter. They showed one of his oil paintings and it was fucking awful, this really hackneyed Alpine landscape, and it’s signed Adolf Hitler.

Anyways, as a young man Hitler applied to this art academy in Vienna and was rejected, twice, which presumably diverted him into politics and set him on his insane course of megalomaniacal genocide. It’s hard for me to fathom that six million less people might have died, and a World War been averted, if Hitler had a better sense of composition. It’s times like this when I regret my own literacy.

I just came across a joke in another magazine that reminded me of when Shady and I saw a bear in Pennsylvania:

Two hikers come across a large, feral grizzly bear. The first hiker immediately drops his backpack, pulls a pair of sneakers out and begins lacing them on.

“What are you doing?” asks the second hiker. “Those sneakers won’t help you outrun the bear.”

“I don’t have to outrun the bear,” says the first hiker. “I just have to outrun you.”

I’m taking a belt test in Hapkido this Friday. I’m in no hurry to advance but Shanghai Betty has been on my ass about it. She’s a black belt and she told me I have to meet up with her tomorrow night so she can test me in advance. I don’t like the sound of that!

My Sabumnim (Master) likes to get creative with the belt tests. When Betty took her last test, he kept them up until four in the morning, making sure everyone was thoroughly wiped out--and then he subjected them to the test. I guess the idea is that if you can’t perform when you’re exhausted, you haven’t grasped it yet. Gotta make sure I stay out of bars this week.

Pass or fail, I’ll let you know how it goes. Regular readers of my old journal will know that I can be relied on to recount humiliating personal experiences with, well, humiliating accuracy. Unless they’re trivial events. Like lately I’ve been getting hard-ons at work for no reason but I didn’t think it was worth bringing up.