Do not eat this blog.

It’s cool to have lots of anonymous enemies, right?

• Woke up
• Ate breakfast
• Went to train station.
• Got in train. It was reasonably on time today.
• Had free pass ripped up, because apparently it’s not enough to validate it anymore.
• Train got to within a half-mile of Alexandria. It stopped. Switch was frozen ahead.
• Waited 20 minutes.
• Train started moving.
• Train arrived at Alexandria.
• Left train, went down staircase.
• Ignored homeless man living under the bridge. Felt bad about it.
• Took copy of the Express.
• Got in bus.
• Bus went to school.
• Got out of bus. Went to school.
• Told everyone who would listen that Minecraft is going to beta on the 20th and everyone should buy it before then.
• No one listened.
• Went to English class.
• Learned about plagiarism in 1999. “We have to keep them young whippersnappers from telegraphing in class!”
• Went to concert. I do look forward to the concert each year.
• Heard good music. “Eternal Father, Strong to Save” could have used a choir, though.
• Left concert, went to computer class.
• Finished editing film.
• Went to lunch.
• Made jokes at the expense of girls at table.
• Ate lunch.
• Went to Responding to the Wilson class. Took quiz.
• Saw presentations.
• Went to study hall.
• Performed dramatic readings of “Seventeen” magazine.
• Gave Robert Pattinson’s image in the paper a mustache.
• Went to Precalculus. Took test.
• Went to Journalism class. Looked at Minecraft server’s progress. 
• Went to Physics class. Reviewed things.
• Went to crew.
• Did three twenty-minute pieces. Died horribly.
• Received gift from crew little brother by proxy.
• Ran to train station to buy ticket.
• Barely made train home.
• Slept on train.
• Got to Burke Centre, got off train.
• Waited in parking lot for my parents for 20 minutes so they could spare me the 10-minute walk home.
• Nearly froze to death.
• Got home.
• Took shower.
• Logged on to Minecraft.
• Logged off of Minecraft, because I’m still glitched.
• Ate dinner.
• Looked up lyrics to “Eternal Father, Strong to Save”. It is a damn good piece of music.
• Published this to my Tumblr.

Yet another exciting day in the life of Justin Roczniak.

See day 1.

Haven’t really. Seems to be no point in it.

So long as you are alive, there is a potential that things will get better. If you kill yourself you just lose that potential.

Plus when you get to the line for registration with St. Peter at the pearly gates, you’ll probably end up in line with a bunch of people who lived their entire, much more miserable lives much more fully than you did, and they’ll be struggling to keep in their laughter the whole time.

And that will be embarrassing.

Furthermore, it’s really inconvenient for me to kill myself.

There’s no rope in the house so I can’t hang myself, there’s no readily accessible razor blades so I can’t cut myself and bleed to death, there isn’t enough medication in the house to overdose, we have no garage so I can’t turn on the car and die of carbon monoxide poisoning, there’s no tall buildings around to jump off of, there’s no gun in the house to shoot myself with, the knives in the house aren’t big enough to cause substantial damage unless I stabbed myself many times, there’s no bears around that I could entice to attack me, there are no mafia people after me that I could surrender to, jumping in front of a train would inconvenience thousands of people and would be very distasteful, and I haven’t got a piano so I can’t decapitate myself with piano wire.

I am NOT going all the way down to the Home Depot just so I can kill myself. It’s just too much work.

I’m single. I have been for about 17 years now.

It’s a low-maintenance relationship.

Haven’t had terrible difficulties from this situation yet; the crippling depression and ennui of single life doesn’t really set in, as I understand it, until you’ve experienced a fulfilling relationship.

I haven’t experience a fulfilling relationship, or any relationship at all, so I’m fine in that department. I’ve made vague attempts at relationships, certainly, but nothing concrete.

However, I have weighed the issue from the angles of many fields of study…

Academically, having a girlfriend would bring benefits and drawbacks. Discuss.

Aesthetically, it’s much more pleasing for there to be two people in a scene rather than one, so that’s a plus.

Ecclesiastically, such a relationship would have to result in marriage, if we followed Church canon.

Epistemologically, what is a girlfriend? How is a girlfriend acquired? How does one know that one has one? How can one be certain that a girlfriend exists?

Ethically, is it really “right” to get one girl to dedicate one’s life to oneself? Does a normative right or wrong really exist?

Existentially, I can only find out whether a girlfriend is right through my own beliefs and feelings, and no outside authority can impose on me.

Financially, it seems like a bad move, because I’d have to buy her nice things.

Legally, it seems to be within the scope of the law for me to get a girlfriend.

Logically, we can assume that A) Having a girlfriend brings happiness and B) Not having a girlfriend does not bring happiness.

Therefore, if I have a girlfriend, I am happy, but if I don’t have a girlfriend, then it does not necessarily mean that I am not happy. However, I cannot be unhappy when I do have a girlfriend.

So, I am forced to make the conclusion from logic that it would be better for me to have a girlfriend then to not have one, because it would guarantee happiness.

Logistially speaking, it’s difficult. I have no car, and have to take the VRE everywhere. I would have to acquire a car for such a relationship to be successful.

Mathematically, we must first simplify the problem, so we must assume that all girls in the world are identical and spherical.

Now we must determine the relative benefits and drawbacks of having a girlfriend, especially in terms of time and money spent with her, and how this time and money affects one’s own and her happiness.

To enumerate all the time and money one might spend with one’s girlfriend is outside the scope of this post, and is left as an exercise to the reader. From here, it is a simple matter to determine whether the benefits outweigh the drawbacks enough to justify a relationship.

This, of course, does not take into account that one is dating a sphere.

Metaphysically, we cannot be sure whether or not we “exist” per se, so how can I even start to think of other people when I cannot be certain their existence?

While Descartes made a strong argument for one’s own existence, but his logic simply cannot be applied to beings other than oneself.

Nihilistically, life is a meaningless howling void which nobody can or ever will fill.

Politcally, having a girlfriend would likely increase one’s power and influence, socially speaking, at school.

Psychologically, I imagine it would boost my self-confidence and sense of worth. However, I’ve never cared about either of those things, so it doesn’t matter.

Quantum Physics would assert that I would be able to know where my girlfriend is, or what her velocity is, but never both at the same time with decent accuracy.

I haven’t come to any solid conclusions from this information.

I Wouldn’t mind terribly having a girlfriend though. I’d like to be able to worry about something or someone other than school and crew.

Glurge is a hateful thing.

Glurge is an umbrella term which describes those sickeningly sweet stories about disabled children, Jesus, puppies, and white people. The word comes from the sound the reader makes as he or she reads the glurge in question.

Why does glurge cause physical illness in the reader? Well,

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Recently, I had the pleasure of riding in a friend’s new convertible Mustang. (Rich bastard.) I was in dire need of transportation to the nearest Metro stop on that day, because I was unwilling to simply walk there with my bags from crew practice.

Along the way, we were faced with the difficult decision as to which music we would blast along the way there. I offered no opinion on the matter because no one under 40 likes the music I listen to.

Eventually we settled on a piece of music with which I had only the vaguest familiarity. The song was “Blah Blah Blah” by Kesha, a popular singer with whom I also have only the vaguest familiarity.

As we listened, I grew more and more discontent with the content of the song.

The song begins with Kesha making an allusion to her male acquaintance’s tendency to speak at length, which she refers to insultingly as “[his] blah, blah, blah”.

This subtly introduces us to two characters who exist within the song: the female lead and her male acquaintance. I pictured them to be two reasonably normal American youths, perhaps in high school or college. Perhaps they read the great classics and have a taste for opera. Perhaps they take weekend excursions to the art museum to inspire their young minds to strive for something better.

Sadly, my idealistic image of these two was almost immediately proven incorrect.

This introduction is followed by a simile wherein the female lead compares her male acquaintance’s mouth to some strange form of padlock which one zips in order to close. (“Zip your lips like a padlock”)

She then instructs her male acquaintance to accompany her to an unspecified “back”. Exactly what this refers to (backstage, the back of a bar, the stern of a large merchant ship, etc.) is unclear to me.

She also tells him to bring “the jack and the jukebox”, a line whose meaning I admit that I am at a loss to explain.

This happens in the space of four lines.

The female lead then tells her male acquaintance that she “don’t really care where [he] live[s] at”, indicating her lack of interest in her acquaintance’s life at home and seeming entirely unconcerned that she ended a sentence with a preposition. Had I been in the position of the male acquaintance I would have been somewhat offended by this total disregard for my affairs and would likely attempt to terminate the conversation.

The song then takes a decidedly risqué turn. She tells her male acquaintance, presumably by this time walking away in disgust after experiencing her rather unexpectedly vapid attempts at leading the conversation, to “turn around, boy, let me hit that.”

“Ah,” thinks the male acquaintance, suddenly revealed to be equally vapid. “She is offering me the opportunity for sexual conduct. I, being desperate for sex at any time with anyone, shall gladly accept this offer.”

The female lead, in a sudden fit of gender confusion, then tells the male acquaintance, “Don’t be a little bitch with your chit-chat.”

She quickly corrects herself, however, telling him just to “show [her] where [his] dick’s at.” She still seems uncaring about how she continues to end sentences with prepositions.

In the chorus, the female lead demands that her male acquaintance “stop talking that blah, blah, blah” and that he will certainly not be “getting this” if he continues his conversation. She also further cautions him that he will not be “getting this” in the rear seat of her vehicle, and then emphasizes her original point by restating her initial command to cease verbal communication.

The song continues, making allusions to the fact that the female lead dislikes wearing pants, or indeed any form of clothing at all. She also appears unconcerned that her male acquaintance is reciprocating her uncaring attitude about him. The male acquaintance finally gets a verse, in which he removes all doubt as to how vapid he really is. The song ends with yet another command for him to stop talking, which I heartily seconded.

Now, I’m not here to insult Kesha’s song. (however entertaining it might be to do so.) She is merely reciprocating years of male rappers demeaning women in even more spectacular ways.

However, the song did make me extremely depressed. It wasn’t because it was demeaning or anything, but for a very simple reason:

I talk a lot. I like to talk. I like to express my thoughts, be it in conversation or on paper. (that’s why I have this blog.) As I left the vehicle, several questions immediately came to mind:

“Surely, then, by the logic expressed in this song, I can’t get laid? Is this the way society really works, where the vapid and inarticulate is valued far above any real meaning? Is that really all there is to life? Do people have no respect for culture, for art, etc. etc. etc.”

Then I got out my iPod started listening to Yes and I felt a lot better about life.

(Also I got a seat in car 6026 which is the car with the nice cloth seats and the linoleum floors.)

Many times in my life I have explained a complex and difficult social situation to a peer in the hope that they may assist in some way. Things like “Dude, I don’t have a prom date, what should I do?”

Every time I get the same response. “DO A BARREL ROLL” they yell, often accompanying with excessive arm gestures.

I am still at a loss as to how exactly to reply to this statement.

Now, I must admit, barrel rolls are useful things. They deflect enemy lasers. They can also be used to disorient your friends when in cockpit mode.

However, barrel rolls only work in this manner in Starfox, which does not often correspond to real-life situations. In real-life situations, things can go quite differently:

SITUATION 1

John have been assigned to do a group presentation in school, but he had a particularly bad case of the stage fright. As he nervously shuffled to the front of the class, he started to wonder to himself how to overcome his fear of presenting.

In a flash of insight, he realized the correct course of action to cure him of his phobia:

DO A BARREL ROLL.

He broke into a run to the front of the room. He jumped and began a spinning dive. His class and his teacher stood amazed at this sudden and quite unannounced performance.

Just as he was about half-way through his first rotation, the stunt was brought to an early halt by the classroom wall. His skull collided with it at about 14 miles per hour. He broke through the first layer of cinderblock, but was stopped dead by a load-bearing steel beam behind it.

The ambulance arrived 17 minutes later. John never regained consciousness. His family was forced to pull the plug after they ran out of money to pay medical bills.

His teacher gave the group a failing grade at his funeral.

SITUATION 2

Bill had been looking for a creative way to ask Jill out to the prom for quite a while now. He had toyed with several ideas: setting all the computers’ desktops to a prom-asking-out desktop, hiring a skywriter, blackmail, etc.

Suddenly he remembered what his buddy John had told him before his tragic end:

DO A BARREL ROLL.

Yes, thought Bill. This was clearly the best way to ask Jill to prom. He would simply do a barrel roll directly into her arms, produce a bouquet of flowers from his sleeve, and then ask her out right there and then.

Now, Bill wasn’t stupid. He realized John’s mistake, and picked a location far from any walls for him to accidentally kill himself on.

He picked a picturesque spot on the school’s mezzanine level. (It was a fancy school.) He decided to surprise Jill when she walked by that spot to her locker at the end of school.

Sure enough, Jill walked right by at about 3:02. Bill was prepared. He ran at her, jumped, and started spinning. He did a full 360 degree rotation, and landed right in Jill’s arms, producing the bouquet along the way.

As Jill staggered backward, he popped the question. “Jill will you go to prom with—”

However, Bill had forgotten to take into account the law of conservation of momentum.

Jill continued to stagger backward, right over the balustrade. They both fell 30 feet head-first towards the floor below. Blood and gore splattered everywhere, ruining several other girls’ prom dresses which they were showing off to each other.

Jill’s autopsy later determined that her next word would have likely been something along the lines of “Ah, no.”

SITUATION 3

Joe was attending a teenage house party. He had been to several teenage parties before and had survived with his morality intact: he hadn’t drank, he hadn’t smoked weed, and he hadn’t had sex. And yet he still had a lot of fun.

Now, however, was a new situation. The girl he had a crush on, Agnes, offered her a drink and asked him if he could hang out with her for a while “in private”.

Joe didn’t know what to do. This opportunity might not present itself again.

Then he remembered his tragically late friend Bill’s saying:

DO A BARREL ROLL.

Joe made sure there were no walls he could run into and no mezzanines to fall off of. Then he took off running. He did a diving leap into the air and began spinning.

He landed right into a mosh pit. Now, these moshers were particularly drunk, and most were somewhat violent when surprised. The mosh pit broke out into a fistfight.

The moshers gradually dispersed throughout the party, sparking conflict and confusion wherever they went. Soon the whole part was in an uproar. Chairs were thrown at people. Bottles were broken and used as shanks. Clothing was removed forcibly from the bodies of attractive girls.

Now, this massive party-fight did not go unnoticed by the neighbors. Soon the police arrived on the scene to contain the party. However, the police were misinformed as to the nature of the situation and sent a full SWAT team, expecting a hostage situation.

So the SWAT team arrived on the scene. They attempted to make contact with the partygoers, who were to drunk and in pain to respond. They sent in a negotiator, who went missing.

So they stormed the party. Shots were fired into the mosh pit and surrounding points. Fourteen people dropped to the floor, dead. The party cleared out quickly.

Joe could not live with himself afterward for causing the massacre and two weeks later committed suicide by jumping in front of a subway train. He ruined Agnes’s commute in the process.

SITUATION 4

George was driving home one day from work. He got stuck in traffic on the interstate—as always. Why don’t they just widen this road? he thought to himself as he passed by the historic buildings which stood inches from the highway.

He continued mentally fuming about traffic for several minutes. How could I get around the traffic? he thought.

Then it came to him like a bolt from the blue. Before his son Joe had tragically taken his own life and made George swear off public transportation forever, he had told George something:

DO A BARREL ROLL.

George swerved off the highway and onto the shoulder. He accelerated to about 120mph and turned the wheel sharply to the left. The car’s left wheels left the road surface.

The vehicle flipped seven times and ricocheted off the jersey barriers right into a gasoline truck. The truck exploded and sent twelve cars flying hundreds of feet into the air. They fell back to the highway as flaming wrecks. Forty other cars crashed into the heap of twisted metal on the highway. It took six weeks to reopen the road.

SITUATION 5

Ryan was a commercial airline pilot. He was in the middle of landing his Airbus A380 one day when the landing gear refused to go down. He tried every troubleshooting tactic in the operator’s manual, but none worked.

However, he remembered what his recently deceased friend George told him:

DO A BARREL ROLL.

The plan was just crazy enough to work. Perhaps the centrifugal force would knock the landing gear out of the plane, he thought.

Ryan turned up the throttles to maximum and deployed the flaps. The plane began to climb. At 10,000 feet he began the barrel roll. He retracted the flaps and shoved the control stick all the way to the left. The plane slowly began to roll. Several warning bells sounded, but Ryan ignored them.

About halfway through the barrel roll, the left wing sheared off.

The plane began to descend quite rapidly. The automated voice in the flight controls started yelling at him: “Woop Woop Pull up! Woop Woop Pull Up!”

Ryan tried to control the plane, but it was no use. The plane continued its decent, and the automated voice in the flight controls began yelling out altitudes: “100, 50, 40, 30, 20, 10…”

The plane crashed directly into the busy recently-reopened interstate and exploded in a massive fireball. All 800 passengers died, as well as about 70 motorists on the interstate. The airline he worked for went out of business shortly afterward because of the resulting media firestorm, resulting in the laying off of thousands of workers. The sudden bankruptcy of such a large airline proved to be too much of a shock for the already weakened economy, and it slumped into a deep depression that lasted ten years.

CONCLUSION

While useful in certain situations, a barrel roll is simply often not the best solution to every one of one’s problems. I suggest that one take a look at each of one’s problems individually and come up with a solution independently of one’s peers requests for one to perform a barrel roll. You may end up saving hundreds of lives.

Hey, I just started a blog! Woo hoo! Excitement! Happiness! Etc.!

Now you, the reader of this blog, can learn of my menial and pedestrian life! Within the next few days, you may expect to see posts on subjects as broad and diverse as

• My problems with women!
• My problems with my cellphone!
• How my problems with my cellphone affect my problems with women!
• Teenage angst-filled rants about school!
• Teenage angst-filled rants about suburbia!
• Teenage angst-filled rants about malfunctioning parental units!

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