Faux-riginal..?

I just had a pretty tremendous transition on my iTunes random play. I was only planning to listen to a little bit of Gin N Juice from the Snoop D O Double Gizzle but when that particular track ended I was pleasantly surprised with some Live Era Guns N Roses “Sweet Child O Mine.” Oh, baby. You know I like me some GNR most all of the time. So I got me some GNR at that particular time. THEN, the party continued to Alice in Chains' unplugged “Heaven Beside You.” I've got close to 18,000 songs in my library (within 300, not 3000, so it's close enough..) and music for days “(over fifty, actually, according to the neat little feature at the bottom of the window..) so it's nice to know that every now and again iTunes comes through and doesn't just throw out lame tracks when I'm on the random library shuffle. It hit some good, good tracks and that put a smile on my face. Nice evening, I suppose.

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Today is pay day. Pay days are nice. I'm training for a new position at the restaurant next week so I won't be able to work as many shifts for the next couple weeks as I usually do while I go through the training to be a food runner. When training I do not get tipped out, eight of my shifts over the next two weeks will be for $7.25 an hour. YIKES! TIC-TACS IN STOCKINGS FOR EVERYONE THIS HOLIDAY SEASON.

But yeah, food running. This means that from time to time instead of wiping down dirty tables I will be delivering food to hungry patrons. This means more direct interaction with customers, which I'm not entirely thrilled about but I guess I'll deal. Right now I can go amongst my tasks in relative obscurity and on days when I don't feel like talking to people (read: most every day..) I just, well, don't. I put my sunglasses on and stare straight ahead.

To food run I'm require to pass a test on the menu. Ingredient lists, cooking methods, etc. I've got a 20 page packet I need to memorize for a 200+ question test. I feel like I'm back in college (well, middle school..) and I'm not happy about it. I went to the local office supply store and bought index cards to make flash cards for all the menu items and dressings and aoilis and other random junk we serve. If I actually go through with making flash cards this could be the most effort I've put into studying for anything in my entire life. This is not an exaggeration: I've never made flash cards before in my life. I've never done more than transcribe jumbled notes into more concise notes, often because of insider info on likely test questions. It will be cool to know what's in everything. I'll certainly be able to bug the shit out of a lot of people with this rather useless knowledge. And let me tell you: I tend to jump at any opportunity I have to add to my collection of useless knowledge.

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Have you ever seen something and been like, “Fuck, that's such a good idea how had I never thought of that before?” Not like half the shit on the infomercials only on a smaller scale, something that probably won't make you a millionaire. I won't be saying, “Sham wow” any time soon. But a friend of mine has a facebook album (she's a real friend, though. Not just a facebook friend.) that she titled “3 6 5” and it contains a new picture every day. I just found this pretty cool and when I saw it awhile ago I found myself saying “Fuck, that's such a good idea how had I never thought of that before?”

It's not anything I'm thinking of adding to the 'Pad or stealing (facebook albums do absolutely nothing for me.) because, I don't know, I try to keep things original. But at the same time, what's really original, you know? Most everything that we do is the result of learned behavior, right?  Even if we're making an independent decision very few decisions in life, if any at all, are true coin flips, right?  I'm not talking about walking down the street and getting hit from behind by a car but just on a day-to-day, week-to-week, year-to-year, decade-to-decade, over the course of a lifetime can you ever actually say you had a totally original thought or action that wasn't prompted positively or negatively by something else, or a multitude of factors that occurred previous to this particular "original thought?" I don't really think of myself as having a deterministic worldview but at what point will nothing be original?  Are we already there yet?  Is building a faster microprocessor really anything "new and original," or is it just now a slight improvement over an already created process?  Will we ever reach a time when EVERYTHING has already been written down, and thoughts must regularly be footnoted?  

Where the hell am I going with this?  I don't know and I only had three beers six hours ago.  

I know I'm not the first to think this, so even this isn't an original thought. GASP! Think about that as you go about your Thursdays...Cheers (I was going somewhere with this but lost my steam. Then tried to revise and add and just made it worse.  Premature idea evacuation.  Sorry..).