20 years old - Another Year Older, Another Year Closer to Death.

And I still can't rent a car.

Today is my 20th birthday. I used to get excited by my birthday but I've noticed the past couple of years that it's gotten pretty unexciting. A birthday nowadays is more or less an excuse to get completely wasted. As fun as that is, the consequence of getting a year older is that every year seems less and less important. There's a reason that time seems to go by faster and faster the older that you get. The more time you spend alive, the shorter a year is in relative terms. Man, when I turned 7, that was a big deal. Know why? Because a year was 14% of my life. Now a year only constitutes 5% of my life. That's barely significant at all. Every year that we tack on, the shorter a year gets in relative terms. Is it weird for me to be scared that I'm gonna wake up one day soon and realize that I'm 82? Nobody wants to be 82. That would suck.



A mostly unrelated picture that makes me smile. ---------->>>
Fuck off, it's my birthday. I'll put an unrelated picture if I want to.



Anyways, I just felt like complaining about something that everyone goes through and nobody can change. It's my party and I'll complain if I want to. Just saying, life is really fucking short. Every moment is very fleeting and it gets more fleeting the further along you go. I'll write a blog sometime soon about the nature of time. In the meantime, I'm going to work on the massive post that I keep promising and haven't finished. Not that anyone really cares if I keep my promise or not...

Also, here's a picture of an adorable kitty.


UPDATE: Earlier I mistakenly wrote that 1/20 is equal to 0.5. This is entirely incorrect. A year in the life of a 20 year-old is actually equal to 5%. But one day, when I turn 200, it'll be equal to 0.5. With medical technology, I don't think that's entirely unreasonable.

My Psychoactive Experience

This post is dedicated to Josh Kay. Thanks for cleaning up the vomit man.

Almost two years ago I had a crazy psychoactive experience. So everyone knows, I have never done any hallucinogenic drugs.

It was 2009 and I had just made a delicious salad at my now ex-girlfriend's house. I put on some ranch dressing and gobbled down my food quickly as I always do. When it comes to eating for me, it's shoot first, ask questions later. After eating this bowl of salad, I was bored waiting for my ex to finish her own food so I read the ingredients and other written facts on the back of the bottle. There, on the lid, clearly labeled, were the words - best before 07.05. Yes, you read that correct, 2005. As in the dressing was expired for 4 years. My ex's grandmother had a habit of holding on to old things. At the time I didn't feel sick so I didn't worry much about it. I knew it was a bad thing to eat expired salad dressing but I didn't quite grasp how bad.

A few hours later I was sitting around my friend's garage as I always did, just shooting the shit and you know, doing things that people who are unemployed (or employed part-time as I was), and not in school do for fun. All of the sudden, everyone's voice got distant and my head ached terribly. I closed my eyes to reduce the light sensitivity as all of the colours seemed to get more vibrant. With my eyes closed, and light shining through my eyelids, the hallucinations began. I got flashes of strange shapes and colours that seem strangely familiar, reminding me somehow of my childhood. The room started spinning and upon opening my eyes, all of the room was filled with these indescribable apparitions. My friends had no idea what's going on with me, I just seemed off in my own world. I closed my eyes again and felt like I was spinning around in a roller chair. It's then that I started to feel sick to my stomach and the hallucinations go from bad to worse. The products of my cubist painting world seem to be tormenting me. I felt like I was going to die.




My field of vision kinda looked like this -->






I got up because-as I exclaimed, "I CAN'T TAKE IT ANYMORE!" and I ran outside where I puked all over my friend's grass. The vomiting went on for a good while until all of the contents of my stomach spilled onto the grass. You know when you burp and you can taste the hot dog you had two days ago? Ever puke and see the hot dog you had two days ago? I did. Disgustingness aside, vomiting completely cleared my mind. That's how I knew such an experience was due to the dressing and not due to any other substances I may or may not have inhaled that night. I have not had a psychoactive experience since then but just tonight I was reminiscing about it and decided to search the internet for anyone having that same experience as me from ingesting salad dressing. The search turned up nothing. It seems that there is nobody else dumb enough to eat salad dressing that expired. In fact, from the search, I have learned that I might be lucky to have survived the experience. Eating dressing even a couple months expired can give you very bad food poisoning that in some cases leads to death. This is especially true with creamy dressings that are made with milk products. Mold grows well in those products. I think that the dressing was so expired that my body rejected it hard core, maybe saving my life.

Anyways, that was my experience with hallucinogens. Doing some research, the effects I felt are similar to the effects felt by people on mescaline. So in a way, I've kinda done peyote. If anyone else has eaten expired salad dressing and hallucinated, please let me know. I wanna know if it's just me.

Also, I sincerely apologize, followers. Not just for this pointless post, but for having been gone so long, and having promised a monster post on facebook. It's in the process. I promise. Should be up tomorrow as I finish writing on the train. It comes with a new gimick...ahem...I mean...segment. Look forward to it. But not too much. Don't want your expectations to get too high.

Dear Blog Readers,

I just moved out to a new place in Ottawa and I'm just getting settled in, trying to find a job and attempting to build copious amounts of Ikea furniture... damn Swedes with their fantastically priced pieces of wood and metal that one day will look like a sofa bed...
Anyways, I figured I should let my loyal followers know what's up. I plan on posting much in the near future so please stay tuned. Unfortunately, since I am no longer living with my brother, I'm looking for something to fill the void left over from the Chris Murray Quote of the Week. Also, as I promised all of my former colleagues at the Laser emporium, there will be a formal goodbye letter and kick-ass poem waiting for you as soon as I have the time to write it. Also, as soon as I catch up with current affairs, I'll write on some sort of controversial issue.

Thanks for keeping yourself updated.

Chris Murray Quote of the Week: August 16/10

About playing baseball in gym class:

"I hit it right back up the middle and hit my supply teacher in the stomach. I kinda felt bad for running to first."

Who the Hell is in There?: The Vader-Fett Complex

If I wasn't nerdy enough before, this will do it. Those of you who know me probably know that I'm a huge fan of Star Wars. There's something about the original trilogy and the lore surrounding the Star Wars universe that I can't quite explain, but I just love it. Anyways, I watch the original trilogy quite often (and the new ones from time to time to give me a laugh or a Jar Jar Binks drinking game), and it came to my attention that although we know the voice actors of some of the greatest villains of all time, pretty much nobody knows who the people are inside the costumes. I mean, Darth Vader, voiced by James Earl Jones is probably one of the most well-known characters in all of North American pop culture. And for some reason, despite his meager number of appearances and I'm pretty sure only 3 lines in the whole series, Boba Fett is also one of the most recognizable characters. He has a cult following of sorts.

What I'm trying to get at is that it would kind of suck to be the guy in the Darth Vader or Boba Fett costume. First of all, the pay for an on-screen actor with no lines is really shitty. I mean, you can pretty much be replaced by anyone who has the same build. But the fact is, you're in one of the most influential film series of all time and you're in all of these awesome scenes and nobody except maybe your mom knows that it's you. It might be cool to be able to say to yourself, "Wow, I'm fuckin' Darth Vader." but when you go to tell other people, nobody would believe you. And it isn't even the same as with R2-D2 or C-3PO, or Chewbacca. The guy inside C-3PO at least does the voice, and you can at least believe it when a 7-foot tall guy tells you that he's Chewbacca or a little person tells you that they're R2-D2. But poor Darth Vader and Boba Fett. Forced to live life in anonymity, their place in history completely unknown. Why does this bother me so much? That's a good question. Image via Wikipedia

Anyways, I went and looked up who the fellows in the costumes are, and this post is dedicated to them - English bodybuilder David Prowse (Right) as Darth Vader, and Jeremy Bulloch (Left) as Boba Fett.
May the force be with you guys... always.

Work With No Chance of Laser Tag? WHAT???

Today I went to work with my Dad. My Dad works at a metal processing plant. I worked at a metal processing plant today. Holy shit does real work ever suck...

As many of you may know, I have a part-time job at Laser Quest (Live action laser tag at it's best). A job at Laser Quest can sometimes be stressful and definitely tiring. But at least no matter how tiring said laser-based work can be, it is not tiring all of the time. We have down days, we have days where we do nothing at all. We have days where one person comes in, we have days where hundreds come in. But I have never found LQ to be mind-numbingly boring. Unfortunately though, LQ doesn't find me valuable enough to give me more than 9 hours a week... So here we are.

Anyways, today I woke up at 5:30 am. Yes. For those of you who don't know, there is a 5:30 in the morning. It is still dark out at said time. Then we embarked off to work where I learned how to make the aluminum bases of industrial smoke detectors (the ones that set off sprinklers in office buildings). So from now on, when you see newly installed smoke detectors in your school or place of business, know that I probably made part of that. Anyways, in order to make this part, you take a bowl-shaped piece of aluminum, about the size of a CD and place it on a press. You then press a button which stamps a weird shaped hole in the top. Then you take that off the press and put it on another stamp while placing another bowl on the first stamp. Press button. Remove first piece and put in a bin. Repeat about 4000 times. That isn't an over-exaggeration. The odometer on my machine read 3820 at the end of the day. I literally did the same three motions for eight-and-a-half hours. One can only wonder how much it would cost to train a Rhesus monkey to do this job. I mean, after the overhead, you wouldn't have to pay it anything because it doesn't have human rights. It was really that easy.

A 70 ton press, the machine I sat at all day -->

The thing about this job was that it was so easy that my mind was not being challenged and there was nothing to keep mind occupied other than the numbers on the odometer. The radio was too far away to hear over the roar of the other machines, one which sounds exactly like an airplane flying low overhead. Not to mention that with the noise you kind of need earplugs. So in your head you're trying to think of other things but really you're just counting every time you hit that button. I made a game of this. You know when Bart gets detention on the Simpson's and he has to lick all of the envelopes? And Skinner gives him advice on how to make it go by faster? I did that. I would count how many I could do in an hour and then try to beat it the next hour. This led to some serious productivity. Another thing I would do is get excited with the patterns in numbers. For instance, I would get excited when I hit 111, 123, 222, 234,333, 345 456, 2345, etc. You have no idea how excited I was when I hit my birthday, my pin number, 2112 (Temples of Syrinx), and especially 3456. That was a high number and a pattern. Now you see why this kind of job can be freelanced out. If you had the same person doing this everyday, they'd probably kill themselves.

It is from this experience that I am even more set on a University education. I definitely won't survive in a world with no mental stimulation. So to all of you, don't give up hope, or you too will be counting numbers on a machine. Or worse! You'll get a machine without a counter!

Another thing I've decided on though, is that I also love money. So I'll be working there tomorrow and all next week as well. Hey, it's not forever.

Chris Murray Quote of the Week: August 9/10

At Canada's Wonderland having been kicked out of line already, Chris is trying to sneak on one more ride past closing:

Ride operator woman: Hey, I remember you!

Chris: What if I used one of those Men In Black things on you?

Ride operator woman: Men in Black?

Chris: Yeah, you know, one of those flashing things?

...Moments later: What a bitch. I can't believe I held a straight face through that.

Me: I can't believe you made a Men in Black reference.