Just took an amazing trip to Yosemite for a photo shoot. It went well; I was fine, despite running a pint of blood lighter than usual. The phlebotomist said "No strenuous exercise for 72 hours" but they were probably just pulling my leg, right? And anyway, I didn't even pass out a little this time.
Unfortunately, my wide-angle lens is shot. There's fog on the inside, which I gather is not supposed to happen. I ended up getting some good macro and telephoto shots, though, and some fairly good landscapes with my film camera, which is full-frame and can fit a fair amount of horizon into a mid-range lens. Hopefully I'll be posting those soon!

Apparently, blood works better when it’s on the inside.
It was kind of annoying, though; out of all the people giving blood while I was there, I was the only one who swooned. Apparently I didn’t have enough to drink beforehand—something which I would’ve been willing to testify to when they broke out the harpoon they were planning to stick in my arm.
But! I got juice and Fig Newtons and a t-shirt that’s thirteen sizes too large, all for just a a ninth of a gallon of precious bodily fluids.

I heard something on the radio the other day that I found intriguing, and decided to try it for myself.
The idea is based on the Drake Equation, originally developed by the British explorer Sir Francis Drake to calculate how many continents could be expected to contain crumpets. On this particular radio broadcast (aired on Valentine’s Day) they talked about its applications with regard to romance and finding someone you would consider a potential significant other in any given setting.
First, I basically go two places, school and home, so we’ll start with the number of people in my school:
11,541
Now, I enjoy the company of men, but don’t consider them candidates for kissing, so let’s cut that number in half:
5,771
I find intelligence attractive. That’s a hard thing to measure, but let’s say above-average intelligence, so by default that halves it again:
2,885
Ideally, a romantic prospect would be within a year of my own age. I would guess that the proportion of people at my school for whom this is true is roughly 1 in 4:
721
And of course, who ever it is would have to be physically attractive enough for me to overcome my crippling social anxiety to actually talk to them, so, being optimistic, 1 in 5:
144.
I’d certainly prefer someone with similar religious beliefs, and a recent poll suggests that 2 in 5 Americans believe in the evolution of species:
58
In other words, 1 in 198 people at my school will fit these criteria. With an average class size of…30(?) The chance of one of these people being in any one of my classes is miniscule. Also, I may be biased or just pessimistic, but it seems to me that the likelihood of one of these individuals being in a relationship already is substantially increased.
…Happy Valentine’s Day?

Today is Feb. 12, the day on which, two hundred years ago, two very important people were born: Abraham Lincoln and Charles Darwin. We celebrate The former's birthday tomorrow, because that's politically popular, but we celebrate the latter's today, that being scientifically accurate. Darwin was not not the first to say that creatures changed through time, just as Lincoln was not the first to say that all men were created equal. However, both men stood up and took action, stating plainly truths we now hold to be self-evident. Both went against popular opinion. Both were men who came to symbolize their movement, exceeding, in the eyes of others, the limitations of their human virtues and flaws, coming to be known ultimately by the causes they represent. Let us therefore remember them on this day for the dichotomies they represent--deviders and uniters, paragons and heretics, heroes and villains. If there's anything we can learn from them, let it be the the courage to stand up for our convictions, and the humility to question them.

I’ve talked to a lot of people who really enjoy the book-series Twilight. Some of them I actually respect, and as such I was inclined to, against my better judgment, read the first book in the series.
Let me say this first: it wasn’t the worst vampire novel I’ve read, not by a LONG shot. However, it certainly wasn’t the best. I’ll tell you why.
First, there’s the vampire portion. I’ve always found the thing that makes vampire novels compelling is the dichotomy they represent; that of human versus animal. We all find this dichotomy within ourselves, to some extent, when faced with issues of lust versus propriety, wrath versus civility, freedom versus responsibility and gluttony versus moderation. By emphasizing and exaggerating these basic human struggles, vampires are a metaphor for our own internal conflicts.
Twilight barely touches on these. Sure, there are vampires who go the ‘animal’ route, but for those who choose the ‘human’ route there hardly even seems to be a struggle. They get phenomenal superhuman powers at the cost of occasional peckishness. The blessings and the curse are held separate from one another, when they should be different aspects of the same condition.
The same simplicity exists in the romantic aspect of the book. For starters, the protagonist and her love-interest (who for a corpse, has remarkably little personality) feel nearly instant unconditional love. The problem is, that’s not how it works. That kind of love exists fairly exclusively within the parent-child relationship.
Now, it occurred to me that this kind of thing also happens in Romeo & Juliet, one of my favorite pieces of literature ever. However, in thinking about it I realized the significant differences:
1. Twilight’s author, Stephanie Someone, is not Emilia Lanier. Her writing is competent, but not scintillating. There was no point in the book that I felt excited by, or envious of the characters as one does when reading or watching Romeo & Juliet.
2. In Twilight, the characters seem resentful of their love. They act like they’re shackled to someone they don’t actually like (which I could readily understand, given their personalities). And unlike in Shakespeare’s play, in which the characters’ love has genuine negative implications, there doesn’t seem to be any reason…you know, other than the fact that the characters themselves are unlikable. They make excuses, such as the greasy vampire claiming that his presence is dangerous to the airhead teenybopper, but it seems like having a rabidly protective invincible psychic bodyguard would be less dangerous than not in virtually any scenario. It seems more like he’s just not that into her and wants to let her down easy.
Compare that to Romeo, who, unlike Edward, seems to genuinely enjoy his girlfriend’s company.
3. Some of the best writing advice I ever got apparently never got imparted to Twilight’s author:
Show, don’t tell.
Romeo/Juliet and Edward/…was it Bella? Anyway, both couples confess their unconditional love for each other. Edward and Bella express this by repeatedly saying it.
Romeo and Juliet express this by defying their families, their government, and their god to be together, ultimately downing a vial of poison each and stabbing themselves and others repeatedly to do so. This also applies to the vampirism thing; The author tells us that being a vampire isn’t fun, and gives us some half-assed reasons why not, but these reasons never seem to prevent the vampires in the book from having anything but an endless summer of fun.
4: Bonus reason. Twilight needs to skip the pretense. Teenagers don’t date each other because they’re soul mates. They date because they’re horny teenagers. In Romeo & Juliet, this is fully acknowledged (though if I met a hot girl at a party who could speak in couplets of iambic pentameter I’d probably want to marry her too). Friar Lawrence, who is possibly the coolest person ever, is under no illusions about the fact that those two basically just want to get in each other’s pants, and obliges on the basis that it might stop people getting stabbed all the time as much (he’s completely wrong, of course, but at least he tried).
But Dracula and Lucy keep going on and on about how they’re soulmates or some similar dross…look, I’m not saying that physical attraction is the only thing that motivates teens, but I find it hard to believe that in their case it’s the stimulating conversation and mutually enlightening exchange of ideas. The girl wants to jump the vampire’s bones, and the vampire…well, apparently he’s not actually that interested in sex, being way ancient. So what draws him to the human? Ostensibly it’s the fact that he can read minds, except hers, for some arbitrary reason, and the fact that he can’t tell what’s going on in her head makes her interesting. This would be an intriguing device, except that I can tell what’s going on in her head, since I’m reading it in a book, and I don’t find her interesting. I know multiple flesh-and-blood not-fictional girls who don’t have the benefit of an omniscient author planning their every move yet who are vastly more clever, insightful and pleasant to spend time with than her.
In fact, the only people I liked in the book were a small percentage of the minor characters; the protagonist’s father is mildly interesting in his hopelessness, a much better example of the consequences of obsessive love than his obsessive necrophile-wannabe daughter. The vampire has a kind of creepy extended family, among whom are a remarkably chipper clairvoyant who is the only one in the book to exhibit what could be approximated as intelligence and a huge hulking bruiser who has a refreshingly direct problem-solving style, i.e. hit it ‘till it stops being a problem. Even as I write this, though, I realize that while these characters aren’t actually bad, the thing I like most about them is that they aren’t any of the other characters in the book…
So the final word is, Twilight: On a character-empathy scale of Fountainhead to Cyrano De Bergerac, it actually rates below Fountainhead. That’s right: I actually would prefer to hang out with Howard Roark and Dominique Keating than Edward and Bella. On a quality-of-writing-style scale of Maximum Ride to Nation, it ranks well below Harry Potter but still far above Maximum Ride. On a vampire-novel scale of Dracula Meets Spider-Man to the actual Dracula…who am I kidding? This is not a vampire novel. This is a novel about magical superheroes who enjoy the occasional rare steak.
And on a romance-believability scale of Harry Potter to Much Ado About Nothing, again it does the impossible by exceeding the standard of awful set by my lowest benchmark.

You want to read an actually good teen romance book? Read Tithe, or Nation, or, hell, Romeo and Juliet. None of them are perfect, but they’re all a lot closer to it than Twilight, and you won’t have to wash your clothes in bleach afterward to get rid of the smell of horny teenage angst.