[ BEAUTY // THURSDAY 1.25.01 // 7:49 PM ]

I need...I don't know what I need. Something else. Something better than this.

Everything is so incredibly pointless, don't you think? Pointless, petty, insignificant, banal. Immature quarrels and arguments that mean nothing. Words that mean nothing.

People say anything without realizing what hypocrites they are.

The human race is damned. All of it. You. Me.

I believe if time passes, everything turns into beauty
If the rain stops, tears clear the scars of memory away
Everything starts wearing fresh colors
Every sound begins playing a heartfelt melody
Jealousy embellishes a page of epic
Desire is embraced in a dream

But my mind is still in chaos, and...

[ FOREVER AND EVER // TUESDAY 1.23.01 // 2:53 PM ]

There's always an ending...to everything good and bad. Even if it's the best thing that's ever happened, someday there still will be an ending, somehow, somewhere. It might turn sour, or the magic might fade. But sooner or later it all breaks apart.

Why is that?

There's got to be something...something eternal, maybe. I don't know. Something that won't just be a "so long, it's been fun, have a good life" and vanish into the void of past great memories. Because that's all they become in the end, really...memories. And memories fade. When people say "thank you for everything," why can't they just say "goodbye?" Sayonara. It's the end.

People are cowards.

forever and ever itsu no hi mo...forever and ever kawaranai...forever and ever kono omoi...forever and ever

It's all pointless, really. So why do we do it? Why do I do it? I don't know. Carpe diem...but that's a lie too, because I couldn't care less about the day. I want infinity, a lifetime and after. I want forever and ever.

I can't think...I can't breathe. I am drowning in the fluid chaos of my cogitation and my own despair.

[ SEX AND BLOOD // TUESDAY 1.23.01 // 12:23 PM ]

Good lord...I haven't updated this since last Thursday. Life's been hectic and I've been in the middle of it...I think right now you can spell life with four letters, and it's not L-I-F-E.

You could try R-O-T-C.

Ah well. Things happen and life goes on. At least the ROTC part of it does. The flight t-shirts are done and the flight board got done tonight. I'm pleased. Can't say I'm happy, because certain people and/or things are pissing me off to no end right now, but all in all I think it's been a productive two weeks.

As to what's pissing me off, let's just say it's the same as always and I just have to learn to get over it. *sigh*

On the bright side, flight t-shirts will be done by Friday and we will have them for the PFT on the 30th! I'm very happy with the way the design turned out. It kicks Viper Flight's ass. Our ghost Marauder will be the talk of the det once the shirts and the pennant for the guideon come in.

Gomen to everyone who I haven't seen online in a while. I've been on away forever, it seems, and people (Laurel, etc) just haven't been on. Which is good in a way for me, because I know even if you would have been on I wouldn't have talked to you. I'm just in the instrospective/not-quite-depressed mode, I suppose. It must be that time of year. I actually am very glad that I am in POP this semester. I thought all the extra training and the harder military atmosphere would make me more depressed, but it's actually made me feel better. It's given me a purpose, I should say. Last semester all I did was yell at people and get yelled at. That's not a good combination, trust me, especially when the people who are yelling at you have no idea what the fuck is going on.

><

I'm done ranting about last year's cadet wing, though. It's a new semester and, as I told my Director of Training in counseling today, I will strive to become as good a cadet as I can without stressing over it. I think it's time I stopped trying to do everything and let everyone have their fair share of blame. If I'm not there to take care of things, well then, someone better step up and do it, because it sure as hell ain't gonna be me. Being GMCA in charge of about 60 GMC, more than half of which were delinquent, was enough of an experience for me.

End of story.

Malice Mizer is my new obsessive band, as Lyra knows. They're the most extremely visual jrock band I've come across yet, and their songs are amazing. I can't believe I hadn't discovered them sooner. On a whim, I ordered Merveilles the other day. More money. ^^;; Good thing the Air Force is paying me...though I think they'd cancel their funding if they heard I was spending it all on japanese stuff. Anyway, the CD should come in some time next week...not that it matters, because I have it all on mp3. There's some amazing songs on there, including Illuminati, Le Ciel, and Au Revoir. If you haven't seen the (very artistic and extremely disturbing) video for Illuminati, take a look at the title for today's blog.

Yeah.

Moving on, my ramen is waiting for me on my desk and I have hirigana to learn and Latin nouns to decline, so I will leave you with the following quote:

"PT SUCKS!"

~Ger ^_~

[ NO PFT!!! // THURSDAY 1.18.01 // 8:04 AM ]

Getting up at 5 AM is NOT FUN.

So the first PT of the semester was going to be a PFT, but as it's wet and drizzling and miserable outside, Solis decided (wisely) to have workout indoors in the REC center. ^___________________________^ NO PFT!!!! We'll have to take it next Tuesday, then, but any extention is nice. I just really dread that 2 mile run. Sit-ups and push-ups I can do just fine on, though I doubt all the food I ate all the holidays will allow me to max either of them, but the run...><

I made a webpage for my POP class, in case any of you guys are wondering what all this ROTC stuff I'm blabbing about is. The link is here.

I'm currently obsessed with X Japan's ballad Tears. In terms of melody it's not that great (Moonsong agrees with me on this ^_~) but the lyrics...wow.

    loneliness, your silent whisper
    fills a river of tears through the night
    memory, you never let me cry
    and you, you never said goodbye

    sometimes our tears blinded our love
    we lost our dreams along the way
    but I never thought you'd trade your soul to the fates
    never thought you'd leave me alone

    time through the rain has set me free
    sands of time will keep your memory
    love everlasting fades away
    alive within your beatless heart

    dry your tears with love
    dry your tears with love

Again I say, WOW. ^__________^

Anyway, I'm off to take a shower and iron my uniform. As luck would have it, I'm the only one in blues today out of the whole corps. Prosser is doing a briefing on uniform wear and she needed a "sharp cadet who knows how to wear the uniform." Go figure.

Be back after class...

~Ger

[ MARAUDERS // WEDNESDAY 1.17.01 // 12:14 PM ]

Well, the big news of the day is that we are no longer Hellcat flight. The Navy plane thing finally got on everyone's nerves, and of course the new name was suggested by Kevin. So we are now the Marauders, after the WWII Martin B-26 bomber. Thank you, Marks.

Stayed up last night doing the flight t-shirt design. Let me tell you, getting five cadets to agree on the same idea was horrendous and I don't ever want to go through it again! And them lounging about in my room, with Kevin refusing to get off the computer and Spike with his greasy feet on my clean clothes basket and Brent sprawled out on the bed, didn't help a bit. >< With that out of the way, here's the back of the shirt without the lettering:

The idea was sort of a nazgul-ish design, and I think it turned out rather well. The funny thing is how I made it. As everyone knows, I can't draw people worth a damn, so I had to find something on the net. At first I was looking for pictures of nazgul, vampires, etc etc, but no luck. So surprise, Gerald turns to anime. This freaky undead guy is composed of two pictures of Zechs Merquise and three pictures of Larva from Vampire Princess Miyu which have undergone heavy mutilation and/or editing. Never would have guessed, huh? ^_______^

New design for the Landover site. I decided Saionji had had his glory days and replaced him with Camui Gackt of Malice Mizer (or formerly, as it is now). I'm rather proud of the design....go look! Go look! ^___~

Not much else going on today. Japanese was interesting, as usual. I wonder how long we're going to continue learning OHAYO GOZAIMASU! Not that I don't like saying good morning, it's just that I'd rather learn something else after a while. ^_~ I got class from 1-3 so I gotta jet. Ja ne!

~Ger

[ OHAYO GOZAIMASU // TUESDAY 1.16.01 // 2:08 PM ]

Well, the only word I can think of to describe the first day of class is...interesting.

No, seriously. It was. I'm taking Japanese, Latin, English, and 2 Air Force classes this semester and each one was a little adventure in itself today...I didn't have English because that's a MWF class, but the other ones...#_#;;;

First I walked into Japanese late. Wasn't because I didn't get up on time, but for a whole different reason which I'll get into later. Anyway, I walked in and the professor says "OHAYO GOZAIMASU!" Of course, I didn't think anything of it, but then I started to wonder why she'd be saying it in a first year Japanese class on the first day. Turns out that class is JPN 507, SECOND semester Japanese. Oops. Yeah. Gerald stands up, in full blues service dress uniform, and exits the classroom, looking for JPN 506 which is on the other side of the hallway.

Ah, much better. Kind of. The hour and a half class consisted of 45 minutes reading the syllabus, boring me half to death. All Asian language classes operate on much the same schedule at UT, and having gone through 3 semesters of hell (aka Chinese 506-412K) I patiently sat through the gasps of horror from the other students as they found out that there would be ten billion hours of homework EVERY DAY and there would be twenty billion quizzes a week and so on a so forth. So after that, the professor gets some stuff out of her bag. Oh, fun. I thought we were actually going to learn something.

Shows how optimistic I actually am.

Professor: Ohayo gozaimasu!
Class: ????
Professor: Repeat after me!
Class: O-ha-yo? Go-za-i-masuuu?
Professor: Here is some new vocabulary!
Gerald: zzzzzz
Professor: Oops! I forgot to teach you this word!
Class: ?
Gerald: >< oyasumi nasai
Professor: [astonished look] o.O

That was about the least excitement I had all day. It got worse from there. After about 20 minutes of vocab (watashi wa GERALD-SAMA desu ^_~) we finally got out of class. Just my luck, because LLAB this semester is on the first floor of RLM right when you walk in the door. So I go trotting on my merry way down to LLAB.

Big surprise. My class was sitting on the front six inches of their chairs, at attention, holding knowledge books parallel to the ground and studying intently. Oh the joys of POP. LLAB wasn't so bad, considering we had to sit at attention for about half of it and have all the 100's, POC, and cadre snickering at us. It was after that kind of sucked. Vazansky is flight commander for the week, and Boris gave us his little DoT talk about training us and making us better cadets and stuff. I think he'll do a good job. I'm crossing my fingers as I type...well, ok that's kind of impossible. I'm crossing my toes then.

We have a flight meeting at 2100 tonight and I'm hoping that something will actually get done there, if we don't all kill each other. *sigh* It's going to be weird not to be able to call Boris by his first name all semester.

After some hangar time and picture sharing and general POP bashing in the hangar after LLAB, it was off to Latin. I got the right classroom this time, and decided that since it was 12:55 when I got there, I should just walk on in, right? Yeah, big shock there...the previous class was still there. Heh. Then during Latin, I noticed a cable on my service dress jacket. So I pulled it, and one of the buttons came off.

^^;;;;;;

It's currently residing in my backpack, and I hope we don't have to wear service dress for a while so I can get un-lazy and fix it. Or maybe get the people in MPC to do it...Anyway, the point of this story is that while my day wasn't BAD, it was...INTERESTING. The only great thing about it was that Latin got out half an hour early.

Anyway, the whole thing that got this started is that I finally bought another domain name! Chaoticempire.org is mine...and no, it's not up yet so don't go there ^_^ Registered this morning and hopefully it will be active in 48 hours...I'm currently looking for someplace to host the domain that's not too expensive.

And that's my life story...for the day anyway. If someone dies at the flight meeting tonight I'll be sure to let you know. ^^;;;;;

~Ger

[ VANISHING FREEDOM // MONDAY 1.15.01 // 8:55 PM ]

New layout! Inspired by Gundam Wing, Wing Zero, and the awesome song from the Top Gun soundtrack, Mighty Wings. Appropriate for Gundam, don't you think?

I'm back at school. We got back late last night, and Josh, Kelley, and Shannon had the distinct pleasure of helping me move everything out of my dorm room to my new single. It was quite a pain and after they left, I still had to arrange stuff and unpack. That ended in me going to bed at about 3 AM. ^^;; But I really like the new room. I have movie, Star Wars, and anime posters wall-to-wall. Never could have done that in my old room.

And tomorrow school starts. Winter break was DEFINITELY too short. *sigh* oh well. I suppose all good things have to end sooner or later. I'm looking forward to my classes, with taking Japanese and Latin and all. The only thing that might suck is POP this semester. Not that I don't love my flight, but I have no idea what kind of wing commander Griffin is going to be, and if he's just going to turn into another Dieringer I might as well just shoot myself and get it over with than go through another semester of the same crap. Though I'm not GMCA this semester, which is a big relief. I'm cheering for Vu...he definitely deserves the position and it's a big job for a 100.

And that's enough of my blabbing...it's good to be back! I think I'm ALMOST ready for the new semester to start...almost but not quite. Ha. We'll see how things go. And now I really should be writing that Noin part for SnK so we can post on Friday...^^;;

~Ger

[ DOLDRUMS // TUESDAY 1.9.01 // 11:34 PM ]

Ho-hum. It's a boring day. We were going to go snorkeling and jetskiing and/or waterskiing in the Florida Keys, but as the current temperature outside is 61 degrees Farenheit, I think we're staying inside today. Which is nice cause I get to sit around and do nothing, which is my favorite pasttime, but which is also bad because the I get to suffer in silence as the continuing soap opera between Shannon, Josh, and Kelley unfolds into a new saga. WHO WILL GET JOSH TODAY, I WONDER???? >< I feel bad for Kelley...it's not her fault. But still, the whole love triangle thing is so pointless it's almost funny. No, I take that back. It is funny. Too bad Amber and Brent aren't here. That would make it a love pentagon *dies*

Josh is sleeping. Shannon is watching a movie. I have no idea what Kelley is doing, but I'm again in front of the computer typing this. I just read through all 10 chapters of Butterfly's Sleep and boy were the first couple of chapters good, and boy did the last couple of chapters suck. ^^;;; This is one of the times I'm glad I wrote Fate, just to redeem myself from the horror that is chapters 7-10 of Butterfly.

Mearl got a blog!!! Yay! And my WK manga came!! ^___^ I'm excited...can't you tell? QS hasn't updated her blog since December 26th...and Laurel is off at school right now...Chrystal Shanda Lear? o.O;;;; Oh, Laurel...on your blog a couple days back you wrote that the Gundam W manga that came was the Blind Target manga...I thought you ordered Endless Waltz Episode Zero. Or was that just a typo? I don't mind Blind Target...just thought we were getting Ep 0. Tin, your Freudian Slips layout is absolutely fabulous, as usual, and I agree...what IS it with the hentai keywords to anime sites anyway? ^^;;;;;

*blinks* Oh dear...Shutter Speeds no Teema just came on...Jiro tries hard, he really does, but the boy just can't sing. *hides*

*reads above prose and realizes that it says absolutely nothing* Maybe I should go bug Kelley now...*wanders off*

~Ger, bored beyond belief

[ JROCK // MONDAY 1.8.01 // 9:03 PM ]

Yeah, I know I promised I wouldn't check in here until a couple of days later, but it's been a long day, Shannon went to spend a couple of hours with her grandparents, Kelley isn't being talkative, and Josh is in a pretty bad mood. So here I am, in front of the computer again. Not that I mind. ^_~

It's been a while since I've really listened to any of my Japanese music so I sat down and popped Laruku's Ark into the CD-ROM drive and am currently basking in the great music...funny how you just kind of assume things will always be there and don't even realize some of your habits until you don't have a chance to indulge them anymore.

Speaking of Jrock, I've been listening to some of the English music the others on the trip listen to, and wondering what it is about Jrock I like so much. I can't understand much of what is being sung (though I understand a lot more than I used to) and it's not like I especially enjoy visual kei. My friends especially don't get it, telling me they'd rather "listen to music we can understand."

I suppose the reason I like Jrock is that the music is real. I don't know about anyone else, but music to me is almost a religious experience. There's no such thing as "background music." When I put on a CD I listen carefully until the end, or when I pick a piece of music while I'm writing, it's because it helps me concentrate. Listening to music for me is basically the height of emotional experience, and I don't think any experience I've had has ever beaten that. Or if it has, it's because of the music that was playing, real or imagined, when the experience happened.

American music in general caters to the public. Look at the pop stars of today. It's not about the music, no matter how much they try to insist that it is, and everyone knows it. It's about glamour and being featured in magazines and raking in the cash. Anyone can be a pop or rock star in America now. As long as they have the body and the looks for it, who cares if they can sing or not?

I tend to feel that Jrock is different. Jpop stars are pretty much the same kind of idols that Britney Spears or the Backstreet Boys are, which is why I rarely listen to Jpop. Jrock artists, I've found, seem to love music more than the show. Oh definitely, they put on a good show with the visual kei and the stage presence, but the music to them is first and foremost. I've translated my share of Jrock lyrics, and I can tell you that they are unlike any English lyrics I've ever heard. Japanese lyrics flow like poetry, and some of the most beautiful lyrics I've seen come from Jrock songs. I can guarantee you won't find that level of beauty in English songs, and especially not in rock songs. Perhaps in the music of artists such as Loreena McKennitt, but she caters to a rather small percent of the population. Take L'Arc's Butterfly's Sleep. A very "weird" hard rock song, yet if you read the lyrics by themselves you'd expect something soft and "romantic." Or Glay's Biri Biri Crashmen. The lyrics to that are uplifting and happy without being "sappy." I challenge any English artist to write a song like that. And it's definitely not "filler" music. I'm a writer, and I know to write something like that, it has to come from true inspiration.

Jrock artists have a huge variety of song writing styles and aren't afraid to experiment, which is more than I can say for English rock bands. L'Arc~en~Ciel is a great example of this, which is why they happen to be my favorite band. To my knowledge, L'Arc has produced rock songs, pop songs, ballads, jazzy songs, blues-sounding songs, dark new-age songs, experimental electronic songs, and even a hawaiian-ish song. English rock bands seem to produce variations upon the same theme. The beat might vary, and there might be different tunes, but if you listen to the song you can tell right away that it's a song by that band. If you listen to a L'Arc song you can tell right away that it's a L'Arc song...but only because of Hyde's voice.

There's always a message to Jrock. There are always great guitar solos and the people who play the instruments are musicians in the true sense of the word. I respect Hyde and Ryuichi so much because they know how to sing. I respect Yoshiki so much because he knows how to play the piano. I respect Takuro so much because he's the best lyricist I've ever come across in my search for good music. In the Jrock world, the word "artist" doesn't simply mean being beautiful.

In short, I believe that Jrock artists care more about the music and not about the money and/or fame. Granted, there will never be an artist who doesn't care about the money and fame, because of course people like to be compensated for what they accomplish. But it seems to me that Jrock artists don't let the quality of music decline once they reach the top. There are very few American artists who do that these days.

That's why I like Jrock. People might disagree, saying that all that, especially the visual kei, is all for show and that I'm being misled. But I also believe that the Japanese culture cares more deeply about how music affects the body and the soul than America does. It's all in the culture, I suppose, and that's why I think Jrock bands are able to produce such great music.

Now if I could only explain this to my RL friends without them falling asleep on me...^^;;

~Ger