Energy Equals Mass Times the Speed of Light Squared

I failed only two classes in my educational history. The second failure was First Aid, my last quarter of college. It's OK to laugh, just don't break a bone and expect me to help you.

The first failure, however, was more significant. I failed AP Calculus, my senior year of high school. You may say to yourself, "Aw, Calculus is hard, no wonder you failed." That, however, was not it. See, just to get to calculus by the 12th grade means that A) you don't fail classes, and B) math is probably not insurmountably hard for you.

The problem was that by my senior year, I had become a disaffected disillusioned slack-ass fuck-about. No, it wasn't drugs. I just had better things to do with my time than math homework, and I held the class too long to drop it.

Up to that point, I had excelled in math. I loved it. Geometry! Trigonometry! Physics! But then, came the big fat red F, and my math career was over.

In college, standardized placement tests allowed me to waive any math pre-requisites for Statistics. So my only hurdle was going to be my general ed science credits. Amazingly, at Cal Poly, a school known for its math and science, they offered non-mathematical Physics for soft-headed poli-sci majors, like me!

That was how I found my way into a Physics class room with 50 sexy Asian women, and me. I was, no lie, the only man and the only Caucasian, other than the professor, in the room. It was a blast! We talked logically and intuitively about physics concepts without calculations. We crashed things. We blew shit up. We traded Hello Kitty stickers...

This class appealed to me, though, because it allowed me to think heavy ideas without the burden of formulaic notation. It is that idea, that you have to describe something to death to grasp it, that has frustrated me about so many things my whole life.

Music: Harmony, melody, and rhythm - these are parts of song!

Literature: Let's see, the pigs are an analogy for the socialist conundrum, while the farm horse was a metaphorical Christ figure sent out to the pasture, symbolizing man's struggle, ect...

Philosophy: Well, the German transcendentalists stand in stark contrast to the inductive process of the Greek Sophists, blah, blah blah...

Look, I deconstruct movies, and books, and music, and speeches, and art, and food recipes in my head all day long: You clap with the drums, and sing with the lyrics; Anakin was a dual Christ/Satan figure, and the Force more resembles Buddhist philosophy than Christian; the State of the Union was a series of non-committal fundamentalist code words without any clear policy statement or supporting data...

However, I don't have to hinder the process by labeling the pieces that I pick apart. That just causes distraction from the natural exercise, while I try to remember American literary motifs from Mr. Wilson's 11th grade lit class...

"Goddamn it Brian, What the FUCK are you getting at?" You may ask.

Well, let me tell you. I ♥ Huckabees. I watched it tonight for the first of many times, and it left me with that same indescribable tingly intellectual numbness that I had after watching Lost in Translation. The movie was a cross between Zero Effect, Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency, Being John Malcovich, and Rushmore. It was either about the nothingness of everything, or it was about the everytingness of nothing. It's about the process of intellectual breakdown (not to be confused with psychotic or emotional breakdown.) It's about figuring out that you world view is not so much wrong, as it is just not right, and doing it without lables.

The movie itself is imperfect, but it struck an existential chord. I won't try to label the elements of my analysis, because that would suck the joy out of it. Each of the characters is a living representation of his or her own philosophical pigeon hole. Yet, as the movie points out, they, like we, are all connected.

Or, as the movie also points out, perhaps nothing is connected, our existence is transitory at best, there is no meaning to it all, and we will all be forgotten by the cold dead universe when Earth falls into the Sun. In which case, this blog has no purpose, and you can just go fuck yourself (But go rent this movie first...)