http://money.cnn.com/2009/02/16/news/economy/gas_prices/index.htm?postversion=2009021612

All gas news is ridiculous.
Refiners have, for the first time in some time, not made as much profit as they usually do. They’ve been losing a little money.Crude oil still at a very low price, somewhere around $37/barrel.

In relationship to the crude oil price/barrel gas should realistically be at a maximum of somewhere near $1.40. Having relations to someone who works the oil industry, and just by typically being observant of people, it is very clear people are driving less. Habits have changed because of price gouging and people are straying from low MPG cars. The demand for gas currently is very low.

So it only makes sense to raise the price of gas?
Whatever happened to the price of crude oil/barrel directly effecting the price at the pump? Wasn’t that why gas was $4+ this summer? Direct reflection of gas/barrel to pump level.
Now gas is at a lower level and it’s a different reason for it to go up?

Switching from winter mix fuel to summer mix fuel is an excuse to raise the price - as they do the same thing from summer to winter, claiming it’s costing more because of the mixture content.
And like my dad will tell you, that’s absolute crap.

marco:

(via Mike Hudack)

Statue dedicated to man who threw shoe at President Bush

The statue is inscribed with a poem honoring Muntadhar al-Zeidi, the Iraqi journalist who stunned the world when he whipped off his loafers and hurled them at Bush during a press conference on Dec. 14.

I’m so glad this isn’t an Onion article.

I realized, today during Bio lecture, that it is inevitable for me to go back on medication from my attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. I realize that I’m not catching on as quickly as I should or use to and that it is progressing into something that needs to be controlled with something other than sheer willpower and behavioral technique.

But, really, I still wonder.. is it really the ADHD holding me behind or is it a sheer unwillingness to make school top priority in my life? My hate of college structure boils back in relation with harsh personal issues in my freshmen year of college.
Or is it that I really have no negative or positive reinforcement when it comes to school? As an elementary student my parents paid me for good grades. That began to fizzle out in junior high. They paid my brother all the way up through school, through senior year also. His grades were subpar in comparison to mine..
I try to keep myself motivated, thinking about maybe getting a new Jeep or.. something. But materialism doesn’t work with me - I’m not materialistic. I like money, but not for what it buys me but for the places it takes me to.

Point is: There is nothing positive, right this moment, about being in school for me. There’s actually a lot of negative. It destroys my self-worth, it cuts my hours for work, it costs more gas for me. Thinking about the future is nice, but right now the price is very heavy on my shoulders.

I have fairly high self image, self esteem. But I have fairly low self-worth.
And, yes, there’s a difference.

I’m sitting in bio lecture beginning to already demolish that my career choice was a positive one. Yes, PTA is a very nice job. It’s a calm environment, you help people. But the schooling is very much not how my brain is functioned. I am very highly right-brained. I do not think analytically or mathematically (although I am good at math). I always struggled with remembering biology in high school and freshmen year at UMF in BIO 104. It’s challenging - we all like to challenge ourself but there’s a difference between challenging and doing something that just isn’t correct for you.
But if I give up on this, it’s just another black hole in career goal.

Really, without a career goal or a job other then this monkey-type I have now, I feel I begin to hold no purpose. Everyone in my entire life always makes a point to say I’ll change things or be more than average. But without knowing or having an illusion of some sort of destiny or path to follow, I feel nothing more than the average person who works retail there entire life, lives in a shitty apartment, and dies at the age of 75, still currently employed.

(or rather, alone at the age of 93 with a dead wife ,no kids and a case of Alzheimer’s, FREEZING TO DEATH in my home because a limiter has been placed on my electricity- I having no clue as to what is happening, because I am so far gone I don’t realize why my electricity has been shut off.)

I think the weight of responsibility that’s been put on me since I was.. oh, around the age of 11 (when I started recieving income for things like mowing yards, shoveling driveways, etc;) is beginning to tear through my muscles and gnaw away at my skeletal structure. It’s so honorable and all those synonyms for grandeur to feel the weight and bear it, but I’m honestly past it. I’m tired of having to be so responsible in my life while my parents reward my brother because they feel he’s unaware of life and “how it works” (or how we’ve tried to believe it’s suppose to work). He’s not ignorant, he’s just stupid.
I could act all noble and not take this moment to bitch about how I’m frustrated or how for once I just want things to be easy. But I’m going to be honest and realistic about it. It’s never going to be easy, though. My mind cannot focus without the help of an amphetamine, some sort of stimulant; it makes me feel crippled.

I’m done for now. It’s time to go to work.

..someone give me some positive reinforcement for school. I really need some more motivation.

Glorious.
Absolutely glorious.

Happiness has a five month lifespan here.

I’ve realized, or observed, lately quite a bit how I try to fill the holes in my life with unnecessary things. I try to fill voids with material things, as if they will make me somehow more whole or give me a feeling of contentedness. I can’t help but wonder if these feelings are actually realistic and of my own mind or somehow a way that visual media has implanted a need for being a consumer in me.

When things are going wrong or something is subconsciously extracting the appeasement out through my toes, I start feeling like I need things. Lately it was a desire, superficial at best, to purchase the Macbook I’ve been leering over for some time now. My HP Pavilion has been having spyware problems (Vundo virus, to be more exact) and instead of looking further into it and removing it myself, I began to have the notion that I should pitch it and just buy the Macbook. I combated the feeling for at least two weeks. Yesterday I fixed the Vundo virus and subsequently updated my system. Was that so hard? No, it took me a matter of almost an hour. And it didn’t cost me approx. $1300.

When did we begin to feel we can fill voids with materialism?
Is it actually a learned behavior due to today’s society, or is it more primal than that?

I don’t need money to be happy.
I just need it to be warmer then -5 (as it was today here in Flint, MI) so I can longboard.

(via trey)

cakeface:

via www.made-in-england.org

(via icanread)