Buddha, Buddha, Buddha, Buddha, rockin’ everywhere.

I’ve successfully avoided video games for the past few days and will continue to do so tonight.  I plan to return to the state of San Andreas sometime tomorrow, though.  Maybe even shoot anal probes into the citizens of Santa Modesta on my Xbox… haven’t decided.  Surprisingly it hasn’t been hard staying off the computer and Xbox the past few days because there is still lots to do.  I have Blockbuster Online so always have some kind of movie or something to watch, which I did.  It was called:

The tagline (incase it’s too small to read) is:  Every bullet leaves a trail.

And what a trail it is!  But I’m not afraid to say I wept like a little bitch at the end.  Yeah, that’s right.  Want to fight about it?

Elizabeth Mitchell is in it, and for those not in the know, she plays Juliet (the not-so-other Other) on Lost.  In this movie, she plays the creepiest role I’ve probably ever seen.  It was genuinly (sp sp sp sp?) disturbing.

Speaking of Lost, I have a new idea about what-the-hell-is-going-on.  As much as I’ve learned to enjoy the ride and not worry so much about the overall mystery, I still like to pay close attention at things and try to guess what certain things mean.

Well, remember a few episodes back when Kate, Sawyer, and Alex (the young Other girl) went to rescue Alex’s boyfriend Carl from “Room 23,” where he was strapped in a chair being forced to watch some kind of brain washing movie?

If you play that movie backwards, you hear a female voice say over and over:  “Only fools are enslaved by time and space.”

Hmmmmm, that sounds like it might be cool.

Upon furthur research, this is a principle from something called “Buddhist Prespectives on Time and Space.”  Upon furthur furthur research, I read the entire text, and here is a paragraph that stuck out to me (relax, you don’t have to read the whole thing if you don’t want, you can just read the bold):

The holy practitioners of Buddhism, being well cultivated in meditation, can stop the mind and calm the heart. They can venture into the profound, subtle, and wondrous realm of Dharmadhatu (realm of the Dharma). They can break through the boundary of form and liberate themselves from the constraints of time and space. To them, “A shortened ksana is not necessarily brief, and a lengthened asamkhya kalpa is not long.” Master Hsu Yun, a Ch’an master in recent history, once retreated to the Ts’ui Wei mountain in Shensi province. While waiting for rice to cook, he decided to take a short meditation in a cave and quickly achieved samadhi, an advanced state of meditative concentration. When he came out of his meditation, the rice was already completely rotten. He eventually realized that he had actually meditated for half a year! This is just like the saying, “Seemingly only seven days have passed on the mountain, yet thousands of years have gone by in the world.”

We know that it’s still 2004 on the island (Ben said so, and Sayid just said that only 80 days have passed).  However, there has been speculation that it’s “real-time” in the real world, meaning that it’s actually 2007 (I could explain why, but that’s another blog in itself.  Basically, an “officially” released video this summer as part of Lost’s summer “experience” was a video from a Hanso Foundation executive saying the Dharma Initiative failed, and the video was dated in 2006.)

Could the Others, or the mysterious and elusive “Him,” be a grand master in Buddhist’s concept of “Dharma?”  Could he have been so powerful he warped the realm of space-time on the island?

The holy practitioners of Buddhism can escape the constraints of time and space and venture into the dimension of Dharmadhatu. Their pure true nature fills the universe constantly and they are at ease every moment. Their Dharma body is omnipresent and always at peace everywhere.

Could this be the whispers heard in the woods?  Could this be why, when Cindy and the rest of the survivors who were ‘captured’ early on came back and told Jack they were “watching?”

Will any of this even matter?  I have no idea.  It’s not really even an attempt to explain all the mysteries (because it sure doesn’t.)  Just sounded like it would be pretty cool.

[End of story.]

By the way - I’m convinced that one of the survivor’s has been an ‘Other’ all along.  Maybe not an ‘Other’ as we’ve come to know them (we don’t really even have a firm answer of who they are, anyway, except that they are not affiliated with the failed Dharma Initiative).  I’m predicting John Locke will end up being someone other than just a ’survivor.’  In the pilot episode, when they introduced his character, they did it as if he was someone evil.  From then on he was portrayed as kind of a good-natured loner, but lately the music has been returning and his motives have started to get suspicious.

Ooooooo-eeeeeeeeee-ooooooooooo……

Coolest part of this week’s show, and a return to the creepiness I’ve been missing:

Namaste, bitches. (hilarious)

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I’ve always wondered if other people think about things and experience things the same way I do.  I think I have a very addictive personality so that, when I get into something, I really get into it for a week or two, sometimes more, and then forget about it for months until I get *really* into it again.

Reading, for example.  I’ll pick up a book, read it in a week, and pick up two more.  I’ll read during my lunch hour, get home and read, read before bed on Sundays.  Then I’ll set them down, half finished, until months later, when I pick up another book and remember all of the 30 books I bought on my last reading binge even as I go out and get more.

Recently the same had been happening with video games, or, one video game in particular.  I have been playing Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas almost every day for the past two weeks.  And it’s *hours* of playing, too, it’s not like I go at it for 20 minutes and move on to something else.

I’m not saying that’s wrong, I’m just saying it’s weird that I binge on things like that.  I’ve had it since Christmas when Katy got it for me but recently really got into it as I discovered there is SO MUCH to do inside the game.  The designers intended it to be played over a number of months, as opposed to a few hours or so.

For example:  in the game, you can look at your stats.  I’ve logged a total of 20 hours and am only at 19% completion of all the missions and side tasks.  Half of the time I get distracted and just have fun running around the city causing trouble, but even that counts to the overall game because you can defend your ‘hood from opposing gangs, wage territory wars with other gangs, and increase your criminal rating (you get one point when you kill someone, with the highest score being 1,000,000 points - I think.)

Anyway, I’ve played it so much and have not yet gotten sick of it that I’ve decided to NOT play it the next few days.  In fact, I will play no video game until the end of the week.  It’s not that I’m neglecting anything or failing to do anything else that needs to get done, but still, I’ve been occupied with it for the past two weeks, then get on here to make a blog or talk to a friend and then realize…

…I got nothing to say.

I should spend my time doing other things that actually give me something to talk about.  Or, say, work on certain business so I can get out of this nine to five routine?  My obsessiveness even goes into that — I’ll spend hours all excited about working on a new web site for the business and then the next two weeks saying, “man, I gotta finish that up.”

Unless you want to talk about how yesterday I flew over a skyscraper, jumped out of the plane and watched it crash into the streets below, and then sky dove off the building while shooting at a SWAT helicopter…

…or how I had to kill a valet worker and steal his clothes in order to pose as a valet, steal the D.A.’s car, drive it to a secure location and plant drugs in the trunk…

…or kidnap a music executive who wouldn’t listen to a friend’s demo and drive his car off a pier…

…yeah, nothing to say.

Anyway, does anyone else have an addictive personality?  Do you realize how much you love a TV show and then spend the next 36 hours doing nothing but watching the DVDs, not even sleep?  Or is that just me?  It’s probably just me.  I suck at life.

I wish I could get back into my addiction to fitness, because, man, I’ve gained some weight.

15 pounds since Christmas!  Some of that is muscle weight (hell yea it is), but a lot of it is GUT FAT, because my pants no longer fit the way they used to, and a lot of my shirts are tight right around my bitch-tittie area.

Back when I lost weight, I got rid of all my old clothes so that I wouldn’t have to go and buy new ones incase I ever started to get fat again.  Yesterday I was walking down the hall at work and caught myself thinking, “I should use some of my birthday money to go and get some new clothes, these don’t really fit anymore.”

::shakes head::

But now that warmer weather is here (?) maybe I can take up running again and do it err’yday.

You know what I’ve always wanted to do?  I’ve always wanted to end a story with the words ‘End of Story.’

Or, period.

That’s it.  End of Story.

Period.

Gross.

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Below is a crude-yet-disturbingly-accurate-and-sadly-I-actually-put-time-in-on-this graph I made.  It charts my enjoyment of Lost with various events shown in grey.

Clearly, I enjoyed Lost very much over the first two seasons, and, if I had a laser pointer I would indicate it by showing you the upward slope of my graph.  Season 3 started out strong, too, but for some reason felt oddly different.  I didn’t really say anything about it but I noticed I wasn’t looking forward to it week to week as I had in season 2.

Things really went down-hill upon Hurley’s line referring to Desmond’s sci-fi powers:  “That guy?  He can see the future, dude.”  I mean, I was hoping all along that this was a sci-fi show, and it was pretty much confirmed at that moment (among others), but for some reason it just felt kind of cheesy to me.

One of the reasons this season has not been good, to me, is because it’s almost answering too much, and not really in the best way.  Who were the strange and mysterious others on the island?  Turns out it’s just some guys named Tom, Ben, and Danny and they have a village where they do things like bake muffins and read Steven King.

I realize a big part of why I enjoyed the show so much before was because it was actually scary.  And it was scary because you didn’t know everything.  I liked it better when Tom was just referred to as “Mr. Friendly” or “The Bearded Man” because he didn’t have a name.  And I loved how Ben was introduced as “Henry Gale,” and then you later found out that wasn’t his name at all, and didn’t know his name–because that was scary.

But what did Henry Gale’s name end up being?  Oh, it’s just Ben.

They could answer the question of who Henry Gale really was without ever giving his real name.  That would have given us “answers” while still retaining enough non-essential-to-the-overall-story mystery/scariness.

But, if they had to give him a name, couldn’t it have been something better than Ben?

“How about Tom?”  -lost producer

“No, you’re not understanding…”   -me

“Danny?”

“No, you’re not getting it…..”

“Oh, I got it!  Carl!”

It kind of reminds me of back in grade school, me and some friends would create these big, bad-ass, mean looking drawings of people (Napoleon would call them ‘warriors’), and then someone would ultimately suggest a name like “Captain Fart-A-Lot,” whose secret weapon is not the chaingun arm but a mechanism in his mouth that lets him expell fart gas.  You’d laugh it off — “they can’t possibly take that seriously” — but watch in horror as your friend wrote in the name.

Same feeling.  Waste of time, waste of opprotunity, because even if you go back with an eraser and put in a better name you still have that image in your head and you take it less seriously from then on.

However, you’ll notice the graph beings to climb again around the time “Enter 77,” last night’s episode, aired.  This episode was great, not quite a throw back to the greatness of season 2, but did a great job in balancing the characters with the overall mythology of the show.  We found out who the eye-patch guy was, but not everything, and his name wasn’t Joe-Bob or Commander McStinky, it was Mikhail.  And one of the Others from last season, one of the strange/mysterious ones, was lurking around in the basement, staying in shadows–in other words, actually being scary.  My only regret is that Locke didn’t take the opprotunity to study more about the Dharma Initiative before blowing things up.

Don’t get me wrong, this is still my favorite all-time TV show but I kind of got the feeling of late that maybe the writers got in over their head.

“Dude, we should totally have a random cow just walk through the forest!”  -Lost Producer

“Dude, totally, and the cow could be telepathic and be all getting ready to tell Locke why he can walk now, and then Sayid could bust in and torture and kill it before they found the answers!”

“Dude, and then in the flashback we can learn why Sayid tortured the cow!  Let’s just make him get all pissed off at his cat so he goes out and tortures this cow that looks at him funny!”

“I love bicycles and pancakes, ahh!!!”

“Save those for season four!”

“Dude!”

“Dude!”

“Dudes.”  -Hurley.

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