notorious grand am

notorious grand am
Originally uploaded by katymatic

a photo for friday.

next step.

what do you do with an art history degree?

more specifically, what the hell should i do with myself with an art history degree?

i am at a loss. i need outside interference in my life to guide me somewhere. how do people find jobs? how do they figure out what to do with themselves? i just don't seem to know how these things work.

i feel like i need a drastic change in my life, but i can't seem to figure out how to go about that. the world is not my oyster.

art history. i'm stuck.

flop.

for the most part, i just don't understand men in flip-flops. it just never looks quite right.

captain america in the window.

every day on my drive home from work i pass a house that has a life-sized paper cutout of Captain America on the front door.

i have driven past this sight hundreds, if not thousands of times. and still i have absolutely no idea why or how this came to be. because the house doesn't really seem to have any other distinguishing characteristics.

i don't think this mystery will ever be solved for me. i have no intention of bothering the people who live there just to ask for an explanation for Captain America. but every day that i see this i can't help but wondering about the reasons that this house is using Captain America as its mascot. i'm sure the explanations i can come up with myself are much more entertaining than the actual reasons anyway.

how about:
a family full of comic book junkies had a patriotic theme party...
you can fill in the rest.

customer service.

everyone has days here and there where they hate everyone else. i have those days a lot. my job has made me misanthropic. i would like to believe that this isn't entirely my own fault. i might be negative, but i'd like to think that i'm also polite. so why is dealing with the public so difficult so much of the time? i have worked in customer service in several jobs, but my current position has had more of a negative impact on how i perceive the human race than any of my other jobs. (i will admit that cashiering at a health food store comes close.) so many of the people i deal with on a daily basis are condescending at best and angry at worst. people seem so inclined to pick fights about such silly things. and that kind of behavior ruins it for everyone else. i come into contact with so many assholes that now i just assume everyone is going to be an asshole.

it's a vicious cycle.

but i'm wondering, is this country just getting meaner? there has to be a reason why people are like this. a friend of mine has said that as we move away from a manufacturing based society and toward a more thinking based society, people have all this extra energy and they don't know what to do. so they get angry. and take it out on all of us whose jobs are to deal with their mood swings. i'm not sure if that totally explains it, but maybe it has something to do with it.

regardless, the one thing i'm sure of is that in my future i need to have a job where dealing with the public is someone else's problem.

beefscape: river

just because i feel like posting something, but i can't think of anything to talk about.

white castle commercial

i found it!
the picture quality is not great, but you get the gist.

produce more. conserve more.

yesterday, on my drive home from work, i switched my radio to NPR to catch Marketplace. typically, i'm not really into economics or business, but i do enjoy Kai Ryssdal. also they play great music in between segments.

anyway, the introductory ad into the show was from Monsanto. as in: "Marketplace is brought to you by Monsanto." which struck my as odd because i just never associated the two things before, but also because apparently Monsanto is committed to "sustainable agriculture" which didn't seem quite right either.

from Monsanto's website:
Monsanto is an agricultural company. We apply innovation and technology to help farmers around the world produce more while conserving more. We help farmers grow yield sustainably so they can be successful, produce healthier foods, better animal feeds and more fiber, while also reducing agriculture's impact on our environment.

that's more or less what the ad before Marketplace said too.

the thing is, as far as i know, that's total bullshit.

Monsanto, before it was all about sustainable agriculture, was better known for producing things like agent orange, polyurethane, and DDT.
and still today they are a major producer of herbicides, the most popular, of course, being roundup.
but to make an even neater package of the whole organization they started bioengineering seeds to be "roundup resistant." meaning, you can buy their seeds and spray the hell out of them with roundup, killing all the weeds, without harming your crops! it's inspired, really.

and so Monsanto produces genetically modified seeds, which turn into genetically modified food. and they love their seeds. they feel a strong attachment to them. so much so that they can claim rights to crops that were not intentionally grown with their seeds. (nature has wind. wind carries seeds.) take, for example, this article from Vanity Fair. this also requires that farmers who do use monsanto seeds need to buy new ones every year. constant profit!

a bigger problem though, as far as i'm concerned, is that, politics aside, we don't really know what eating genetically modified food is going to do to us.


more on that later i guess. i only have so much internet time to devote to random rants.