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an excercise shop! freddie has just suggested going shopping to a mall so the little kids will get some exercise. now there's an idea that I need to try. so i went down in the morning, and the fan was sitting there. and I saw Colin playing with it after that, so maybe he took it away. i don't know. it's a shame if aaron takes heat for colin's stuff. and i keep seeing colin do stuff to assert his dominance over his parents. Merry Christmas! So, my nephew Aaron has some thing about playing with this fan I just bought to blow on the fire with. He had it upstairs in the afternoon when I wanted and I had to get him to bring it to me. Then when I had gotten the fire going again, he asked if he could have it, and I told him to keep it down here. It wasn't down here in the evening when I wanted to blow on the fire again, but he had gone to sleep. This has really irked me. It was hard to get, too. It was the last one, and on clear out, since it's out of season. I was lucky to get it. And I think either he or his brother broke the last one I had. So if I get it back, he isn't going to get it again. But I'm not so sure how to talk to him about it. He has shown me that I can't trust him, so I guess there isn't much point in telling him anything. And if I tell him not to take it, he would probably sneak it. He several times tried to sneak looks into my room where the presents were before I wrapped them. But I think it has other consequences for me. I found myself no longer caring so much for his dad, my brother. I was thinking that was mostly other stuff. We are different enough. But maybe it's just this thing with Aaron. And some kind of lucky break for me. There was no church service to go to. I didn't want to go, and probably wouldn't have, but they all bug me to go. and this year, I was starting to have theological problems with that bunch. they said the bread and wine (and they use grape juice) was symbolic. well, then I guess god is just symbolic, too. I had a dream a few days ago where i was explain transubstantiation, and how without the idea that there is actually a separate spiritual substance, the very idea that there could be a god is just pointless. so i will pose the problem this way: is god made of atoms? i think it points out a common problem with religious people today. they try to pretend to have a kind of factual religious truth that misses the point entirely. and yet they also want to hold on to a tradition, christianity, which has some very fundamental core principles that they just wouldn't be able to hold. and i keep seeing that these are very greek principles. a lot of plato. I hope everyone had a Happy Festivus! I would have linked to the main festivus site, but it has exceeded its bandwidth. Here's another festivus site. CNN did a bit about it, and I guess their link must have flooded it. It turns out that somewhere some seinfeldians took advantage of an equal time policy to put up an alternative to a nativity scene in a public place. I might have done something myself, but I didn't know where to go get an aluminum pole, and there was the little mini ice storm thingie that made it hard to get around. Oh well. Another disappointment. But now it's Christmasbe Eve. I just finished my wrapping a little while ago. Three hours. Twenty-one packages. Mostly just little stuff. Almost almost of it from Walmart. A couple of fairly biggish things, though. I should have done it last night, but I didn't feel so much like it. I was thinking that if I finished it last night, I might go out. so maybe it's better that i didn't. man. a couple of weeks at the farm. hardly did anything. played some computer games. actually loaded them up and played them. he had a disk of like 50 little games. i think they were supposed to be part of some online games thing. part of that whole dot com thing, i guess. the programs were .dxr files, whatever that is. they included a little lunar lander thing which i thought was pretty fun. plus a galaga type of game. but then i decided to go ahead and install mame. and i got the actual galaga rom. somehow the mame program i got wasn't the same as the one i loaded before on my computer. i remember that i had some kind of windows based starting screen. this thing had to be started from the command prompt. so i'm probably the only one who would know how to use it. i needed to write a batch file or something to start the games. and i got gauntlet. i'm not so good, i guess, and i just tend to burn health, since it don't cost nuthin'. it's nice to just wade through stuff. i remember that it used to get stuck after some level. i didn't play it enough to find out if these roms had that problem. and i should look for mame for jordy. that'd be neat. Happy Day that will live in infamy! so, pollution increases the GDP. people have to spend money to get clean air and water. that was in reich's book. agape adonai. translates to i "love you lord". a real biblical thing. but it can only be really said in the greek, though i don't know the aramaic, because the whole concept of christian love is that little word agape, which is different from the concept of love in all other languages, especially english, which has just one word and therefore has a complex combined concept. and that leads me to the idea that i just thought of. christianity is essentially greek. it is not about jesus and what he said at all. it is about this new idea that sprung up, around an odd core of a man. and the core is that of an enlightened person, in the hindu or buddhist, and yet educated in a jewish tradition, and at least trying to preach to them. that had to be a strange situation. judaism by that time was more a political group than just what we think of as a religion. our idea of religion is alot more like just a philosophy. but the jesus idea was so out there compared to judaism, that only a multicultural culture, like the greek with the empire that embraced and encompasses all sorts of different subcultures, could try to do something with it. i always heard than indian culture, or hindu religion at least, would just absorb different local bits, but i don't know if it did it in a way to make a great common empire like the greek. the romans did unify it politically and legally later, but people were still actually speaking greek out east for a long time when they were in charge. hmm. and i still am a little partial to the idea that there was no actual jesus, and he was invented as people were talking around the notion of this enlightened jew construction worker. and yes, carpenter now has a different connotation so it's probably a poor translation. it seems to be more like woodworker which can be more artsy. the greek word wasn't like that. anyway, one thing the world needs is more attempts to reconcile religions, and if possible also rational nonreligious thinking. so maybe i should work on that whole religious book i was thinking of after all. Sitting out here at the farm. dad has a fractured lumbar disk, and mom didn't want him to be alone. I'm hoping to use up the big box of ammo I have. I used up some today. I'm getting pretty rusty. Jordy froze. the off button didn't even work. i had to unplug the battery to turn it off. not nice. the reset would start it up again, but it would be frozen when the destop came up. a "hard reset" fixed it. taking the backup battery out and main battery and clearing out the cmos. but i lost all kind of installed stuff. i had to reinstall the wifi card. and ftp stopped working. and perl. who knows what all else. but i added some registry keys (in HKLM\environment) and ftp is back again. but i'm at the farm so i can't connect to anything. but pocket chess works. i don't know if i was ever that good at playing chess, but i have never been able to beat this computer program. and it isn't particularly good. but it is relentless. and doesn't make simple mistakes like a lot of people will, and i do far too often. i've been doing the sun salutation for the past couple of days. getting some use out of that yoga book i got just before losing my income. i say losing my income. i've made $250 on a few little computer projects since then. and i don't know if i should report it on the unemployment thing. i mean i'm theoretically supposed to, and it's punishable "fraud" if i don't. but i get the feeling that they don't really care all that much. man, that was an eye-opener. i googled "high school computer teacher" and one of the articles was this one on using scheme. i had been thinking how i might teach a class on computer stuff, and i was thinking transistors and architecture, but i that would just be boring. this article suggests that scheme, which has really simple syntax, would be good to start kids into programming. i really disagree, though. programming isn't really so much about loops and conditionals anymore. or even algorithms. it's more about calling routines that do the stuff you want. now, computer science is still about algorithms. it's just that now, most programming is not. if you want to sort, you call the sort routine. you don't write one. actually, i think perl might even be better than scheme to start off with. unfortunately, you really do have to deal with syntax. anyway, i tried learning a little more about natasha chen, who wrote that article. she ended up a math major, and then working at as an analyst at a investment services company, moody's. not a programmer. and she was in a really hardcore enriched math program. i mean, they did abstract algebra, and had a class on propositional logic. so it makes sense that she would like scheme, which is very close to lambda calculus, which is a kind of logical, mathy sort of thing with functions. and she had already been studying computer programming for, like two years and it was her third language. but it seems to me it would be much more helpful to get kids writing cool useful programs, which you can do calling all the library of neat stuff in java, or maybe perl. sitting here at the unemployment office. i looked at their list of available jobs, and didn't see anything. but the wage rates all seems pretty low. i said i wouldn't take anything less than $15 per hour. i hope that isn't too high. cnn had an article about the "geek squad" at best buy. i was thinking about talking to them before that. i was working on tark's computer and saw something that makes me think this whole virus thing is more serious than i have been thinking. i loaded a copy of win 2k, and got online, and after going to a few web sites, a process, svchost, started taking up 99% of the cpu. i google that, and that's a symptom of the blaster worm. i installed the patches for the blaster worm (which i would have thought ould have been in service pack 4, which i installed, but no) and it went away. so the thing got attacked immediately when it went on line. that's terrible. who knows what else will go wrong with it. while that trouble was happening, i was seeing "tftp.exe" processes. tftp is a file transfer program, so the worm must have been trying to load other files. another problem that was happening before all this was that i would try to open the registry editor, and it would close immediately. i googled it, and it was looking like it was probably a virus, but i didn't believe it. i did decide after that to reinstall win 2k, but only because i had messed up the modem driver, and since i couldn't edit the registry, there wasn't much i could do. but i guess it probably was a virus after all. those things are tough. i went into best buy, but i chickened out in talking to them. maybe some other time. or i'll send them an email. so for unemployment, i don't have to mail in cards. i call stuff in on the phone every sunday. it's going to take a few weeks for them to make a decision, but i have to start calling this sunday. it isn't a whole lot of money, but it should slow down the onset of bankruptcy, if i get it, which seems a little doubtful. i ought to be able to find something, though. schemata. foci. matrices. because latin and greek are no longer really a big part of education, we should give up the classical plural forms. say focuses. schemas, matrixes. i mean, i remember in college a dude saying matricee, singlular. lets just not confuse people. sitting here at the cognitive science seminar. kinch's contruction inegration model as a cognitive model. uh, oh. i'm in trouble now. i took the sample questions on the ets.org site for the test i'm going to take on saturday. 26 questions took me a whole 2 hours. some of that was me having to go back and look up how my calculator worked, so maybe it will be better. and some of it was just me getting stuck on some problems. but the real thing is 50 questions in 2 hours. and i missed 2 questions out of 26, which i guess is pretty good, if i can speed it up. i guess we'll see. and i'm really starting to feel like a three year commitment is not going to be worth it. especially in city schools. i need to try it somewhere first. or maybe teach college instead. or just get a real job. woke up at 4, and my stomach felt a little uneasy. didn't quite hurt. kind of like knots from stress. or maybe the orange juice. i still kind of deny to myself that orange juice gives me stomach problems. and i some dream that seemed unusually vivid, and must have been symbolic of something, but i forgot most of it, and don't really understand it offhand. but i know what the stress is about. i finally lost the job for bruce. there were problems with the accounts, and he had to go and figure them out very tediously himself, and in addition to the problems, and one of them was forgetting to pay the payroll tax one month which is pretty bad, if he has to do the work himself then he can't justify having me. so i'm not sure if it's my fault in the way that would make me not eligible for unemployment or what. he did say some of the problems had to do with how some other ex-employee had put things in the computer. but a headhunter from rhi called when i got home. this is the headhuntress brandy that i had given up on before, who doesn't seem very serious, but it at least gave me a feeling that i might be able to find something, that there are some java jobs out there. but i just spent about $400 upgrading my computer, and another $100 on books. and right after going home, i went and got the parachute book, which i figure is a good idea so i'll finally do the stuff it says. i'm just not that likely to do the stuff from the book a year ago. and i got two computer magazine, which i hope will help me out. one is a dr. dobbs, which is a general computer programmer toolkit kind of thing. for serious programmers, so i can get back into stuff. and it was only $5. the other was the java developers journal, which was $10. i tried to get it last month for the article about java jobs. but it comes with a cd archive of all the articles ever printed, so it really should be helpful. i did splurge and get a maxim for $5, because laura prepon was on the cover, as a hot blonde. with hair coming in red. mrowr. she says people come on to her a lot more now. well, she is pretty hot. "muy caliente". but she doesn't seem to have freckles. that just seems wrong. finished watching "stand and deliver". and then googled it and read more about the real story . and i have to agree with the author of that article. when they scrunched the story down to make it a movie, they changed the whole nature of the lesson about education that you might get from it. i think the point is that one very serious teacher can make a difference even in a poor school, but in the movie what happens is that a teacher takes a bunch of remedial math students and in a year gets them all to pass the ap calculus exam, which is basically the ultimate in high school math. i can no longer remember if i took the ab or the bc, (bc is for second year), and i checked my transcript and it doesn't say, but i did get a 5, which is the top. anyway, that's not what really happened. jaime (high-mee) escalante transformed the math program so that eventually there were a bunch of folks who passed. 87 in the best year, but around 18 in '82 when they had the controversy from the movie. he actually started in '74 and taught five years before teaching calculus. the whole miracle with converting the remedial students is a pretty serious distortion, but i'm guessing it's intended more as a metaphor for the more boring and abstract transformation he really did of changing a remedial program into a dynasty. but it seems like it says that you can take any random group and teach them to be great, whereas his best achievement actually was to be able to get 18 or 87 out of 1000 students to be really great, which is a good accomplishment, but an entirely different thing. having that many really good students was a better fraction than the rich schools, but the movie doesn't reflect what he did to the other feeder classes in the program, and how he changed the whole pool of math students so that there would be more of the really great. by raising the average or distribution, he made it so there were more at the top. but to do that he did things like require people who were taking basic math to take algebra at the same time. and he arranged for intensive little short summer classes. and by the time you had calculus, you had algebra 1&2, geometry, trig, and "math analysis", which i guess is function theory with analytic geometry and transcendental function analysis. another thing the article mentions is how the principal supported him, and how the program fell apart after he left. some of it could have just been how hard this guy pushed people, and acted like a coach for a team. but i'm sure busholini's testing program would squash attempts to have an approach where some people are made to do well, and others are "left behind". in fact, it sounds like the soundbyte name is intended exactly to discourage that kind of thing. the secret goal is to crush the spirit out of public schools, and if you can hinder an effort to occasionally have a few really good students, then, you not only suck out top students, forcing them to go private and thus continuously lowering the quality of schools, but you seriously discourage teachers. it might be necessary to take some kind of stand, or to develop computer programs to help. i might be better off working on a grant to write free web based-education software. i know memphis state has the big auto-tutor program. perhaps it could be expanded to other areas.i did find my good calculator, though. hp48s. completely forgot how to use it. found the manual, though, and i'm relearning how to use it. it does a limited symbolic integration. polynomials. simple functions. has no idea how to integrate by parts. one of the scenes in "stand an deliver" has a guy working out the integral of x^2 sin x, which is probably the classic integration by parts. i had long forgotten how to do those, so i had to look it up. which is good since i've got this math test on saturday. i also always forget the trig angle sum formulas. i know one is (sin x cos y + sin y cos x) and the other is (cos x cos y - sin x sin y) but i forget which goes with sin(x+y) and which goes with cos(x+y). then i figured that since sin 0 = 0 and cos 0 = 1, the only way for the cos of 0 + 0 not to come out zero is for the two cosines to be multiplied by each other. anyway, i need to go ahead and try to take the sample test. maybe a little more sleep first. and dude in the movie had of course started the integration by parts backwards, so his next term had the integral of 1/3 x^3 cos x. teacher dude shows a tabular shortcut which i don't remember and i don't want to clutter my brain with. i'll use a freakin' table if i have issues like that. went to see the incredibles. it was good. not great. i'm not sure what it would take for a movie to be great to me anymore. i do remember having the feeling "that was great!" after seeing joe's apartment. but i tried watching that recently and didn't think so much of it. but the incredibles. flexigirl was such ahousewife mom. i guess you just had this sense of people even though they were cartoon characters. and the action was diverting. so i decided to come by starbucks for a venti soy hot chocolate. haven't done it for a while. getting on towards christmas. sit here and write amongst the common folk. and i come in, and two of the good chairs in the middle are empty, and as i'm getting stuff, a couple of folks come and sit over there. grr. so i'm sitting on over in the corner. it's nice because i can rest my head on the wall. a couple of cute girls about twenty are sitting at the other end of he little bench thing here. talking about their relationships. what a cliche. a little toero much preening for my taste. i was trying to read the reviews of the incredibles before. on metacritic, in the reader comments, some girl said she was 18 with a 141 IQ and couldn't figure out what was going on. maybe she couldn't relate to the whole midlife crisis thing. and i get the feeling that there might have been some deeper stuff going on that i wasn't quite getting. and, i will admit that i can't relate to the whole breeder mid-life thing. the cute girls mentioned tests they have to take and studying they have to do. i still haven't taken the practice test for that praxis test. and the test is next saturday. i have to take the test, and then study if i don't do well. it was definitely one of the things i needed to do this week. too much procrastinating. and i haven't dug out the calculator i'm going to use. i'm sure it'll need batteries. if i can even get them for it. augh. it's just high school math, though. at some point i'm going to have to take the test which is long answer questions requiring advanced college level math. why, i'm not sure, but it is on the list of stuff i have to do. now i'm just making my stuff worried. it seems likely that i'll default on the whole contract thing. i mean, it turns out that it's three years total teaching in the high need districts. not just anywhere in tennessee, like i was figuring. and shelby count schools are out. they just did a rating thing, and i think shelby county got an a rating in high chool math. city got like a d. teaching people who don't care at all is just no fun at all. there's a little teeny bopper girl who was sitting in the other nice chair in the middle. white tank top. black bra that sticks out quite a bit. glasses. brunette. studying some book or other and writing stuff. kind of jewish-looking. something interesting to say. i don't know. it really does help to have a topic to focus on. so, talking to ben on tuesday over the oatmeal stouts, we were remembering that there are three subjects you're not supposed to talk about. religion, politics, and something else. we just couldn't remember what that third was. and those really are the fun things to talk about anyway. especially over good stout. i don't know what we were on about. something religious i think. i always pretend i know something about religion. the common enlightened state of the religious founders, that get's lost as the never-to-be-enlightened religious community needs guidance about how to live a good and proper life. i don't know. bonus! borders had stand and deliver on dvd for $8, saving me the time to make the copy, and not costing much more than the rental. well, ok, it didn't really save me any money, because, as it was my happy place, and a bookstore, i ended up buying a few books, for a total of $75. one of them was just an impulse that caught my eye, with the intriguing title of yoga, tantra, and meditiation in everyday life. it is short, and simple little sections easily digestible. maybe i'll get back to doing yoga. i used to take classes, but it really isn't as good to just go to classes and not practice every day. you don't really need classes. at least i don't think i do. a teacher is nice, but it isn't a great think to not take personal responsibilty for doing. this, book though, does have the little section on tantra with the naked pictures. it talks about two ways to practice. either just do it and let go, or sit in one of the poses and not move. the not moving seems a little strange. it all does make me wish i had managed to be with holly. maybe i should call her some time. so, i didn't eat anything all day. and i wasn't particularly hungry when i ate something. but i was hungry after i ate. one book i got is a book to help with a condition i have. it doesn't seem to actually have anything that can help me with how bad i've let it go. i guess it'll take some years for me to get it together. i was thinking about getting yet another copy of _what color is my parachute_. it didn't really help me last year, but i didn't really follow it then. and a cool thing about the movie was that it had a whole section in the credits with software engineers. well, that sucks. i think the new router has disabled my ability to transfer files with ftp, so this journal has actually been down. or partially, since it quits after only a little bit loads up. quite annoying. but i finally got doom3 going. some problem with my operating system installation made it not install, so i installed it to my second, much cleaner os installation. and then it had some kind of graphics problem and i had to get the new drivers, and for that i had to install the most recent service pack. my first os install fails when i try to load the service pack. and it's getting quite cluttered with stuff that it loads up. i tried battlefield 1942 again, and it still froze with the new motherboard. but in the clean and updated os install it played a lot longer, but did eventually blue screen. which is better than a freeze because it said what module crashed, and it was the video drivers after al i looked it up and it does have problems with my card, an ati 8500dv. maybe i'll work on it some more. i think i like having people-like images to shoot at better than zombies. and doom was getting quite annoying, because when i couldn't read anything with that graphics problem, all i was doing for quite a while was wandering around. which is boring. and battlefield was getting like that too, because of all the terrain to cover. first person _shooter_ not first person wander-around-trying-to-find-stuff. of course, in a real war, the shooting only comes in big burst, and most of the time is waiting for stuff to happen. unless you just get bogged down in a trench, and then it's just noisy. had saving private ryan on in the background when i was still working on getting everything together. i still couldnt tell if the guy going up to the tank with the sticky bomb blew himself up or what. it seemed like there was a camera angle switch when it happened. but you can't miss the guy picking up his own arm. such a lovingly-presented image. i wonder if any of the zombies in doom 3 do that. i didn't want to turn on the heat, because i can be pretty cheap when i get in the mood. but i checked it, and the temperature was 56 degrees in here. i have a definitely cutoff. 63 degrees is cold as i will take it. so, there's a potluck mensa meeting tonight. the only things i have ever cooked for other people are duck and wienerschnitzel. the schnitzel didn't turn out so good since i tend not to season things very much, and it's been a long time since i made it. and for some reason i haven't been so lucky with the duck either. i would have thought it's hard to mess up duck, but i think i somehow managed it. seems likely that i won't do anything. and there is usually a logical problem with potlucks. if everybody brings something, and everybody who brings something brings more than he or she could personally eat himself, if that's all he or she would eat, then there will be too much food. very simple math. but who would eat a whole pot of green bean caserole? probably no one. so there will be quite a few items that aren't finished off, and the occasional really good on that runs out. it just seems like they are naturally a mess. i guess now there are items that are meals in themselves, like pizza, which you might sensibly be able to do. or i guess sub sandwiches. i could bake some bread. that would be good. yeah, maybe i should bake some bread. that really can be a meal in itself. and it costs me almost nothing and is actually pretty easy. still, i really could go for some schnitzel. i'll think about it. local news blondie joyce peterson was interviewing someone this morning about some book, glory the hair. she said hair is the ultimate accessory. you don't have to buy it. and you fix it however you want. i just think it's horrible to have hair as an accessory, but chicks do that. and jp's hair color does sem to shift around. seems like multitoned is some kind of fashion thing these days. i mean, i always thought blonde with dark roots was just tacky, but maybe that's what people are going for. and there i some kind of site called "freecycle.com" where you can give away junk and get free junk. Happy Armistice Day! Or veterans day if prefer the new name. i'm just shy. yeah that's it. and hannibal the cannibal was just hungry. dude on sixty minutes, kind of a motivational speaker guy, suggests just not using credit cards because you spend more. it just makes it so easy to spend just a little more and not question the excessive prices. and now you wonder why grocery stores held off so long to accept plastic. sure, it costs them in the equipment and cost per transaction, but i bet they finally realize that it does in fact make people spend more. and dude mentioned bubba bob with his fancy new truck and bass boat sitting out in front of his trailer. it made me think, well, conservatives are generally people who think they are rich, and therefore want to keep it and not share. well, most people are not rich, but if people judge how rich they are based on how much th spend, as opposed to how much they make, then with all the personal deficit spending and plastic, people really do have reason to think they are richer than they are. a perception thing. chalk that one up for the regressives. i ordered a new motherboard and cpu on friday, and it came on wednesday, which was pretty fast delivery, i think. but i open it up, and the agp port says it only takes agp 1.5v, and since my card is somewhat older, i thought i was screwed. but i googled it, and ati on their site said that my card had been made compatible with the first two standards, and 1.5was the second, so i was in luck. but taking apart my old computer, i saw that it was a 250 watt power supply, i was hoping for at least a 300, but no. so i went out and got a 350 watt power supply, but not sure if the screw holes would line up. looks like there is some kind of standard. thank the market for standards! i was thinking i might just get a new case with supply, but the comp usa guy said all their cases are empty, and maybe i'll just wait on that. but in addition to the power supply, i got a new wireless router, so jordy is on the net again at home. oh frabjous day! went to the farm and left jordy at home. now sitting at the monthly mensa meeting. down with busholini! the talk tonight is about islam after 9/11. by a surgeon in town. i support the idea of the perennial philosophy that all religions are at heart the same, but islam does seem to be quite distant from the true core of religion. i got some junk snail mail recently, soliciting for the magazine, free inquiry, that mentioned an article suggesting that islam should just be eliminated. i'd like to read that. but i was thinking on the drive back what questions i would have. i'd wonder if islam is truly a living religion. does it have a way for new thinking to evolve in the tradition. are there contemplatives that thiink about current issues. thae monastic traditions in christianity really add value to that tradition. another thought, has he flown recently and been flagged for search? oatmeal stout, yum. dr akbic says, one god, man all linked together, and meaning something or other, i forget. mohammed the prophet. mohammed's life is about selflessness. he mentioned islamic schools. what is islamic truth that it would need a school. as for the interpretation, they have a scholarly approach. but they don't have the enforcement ability like the church. At tj mulligans. quite uncomfortable. no space at the bar. sitting at the little side bar across from it. and no cute bartending babes. some kind of football game with u of m and louisville. but i needed to come out and write. jordy can't get on the net at home, so i don't even use it. of course, i'm truly bummed that pubes won re-election, even though i was expecting it. and he got an actually majority, so he's gonna feel like he has approval to do whatever he wants. not that he ever would compromise or reach out. he even said that democrats are going to have come to him. so he's a godfather now. an evil crime boss. i'm not even supposed to be here today. work is going terrible. i'm going to take next week off. i doubt i'm going to finish everything i really should have gotten done. i made some serious mistakes, but bruce was still encouraging. it was julie's birthday. she's my brother edgar's wife. my mom had them all over for dinner. and after, i got daniel and nathan to make themselves some little electric motors, like the one i made, but they didn't have nearly as much luck as i had, and daniel got really frustrated when it didn't work right away. nathan didn't get it working, but did keep at it. i guess daniel is still a bit of a baby. it worked a bit better with a bigger battery. nathan really didn't seem to care much, though. i was thinking of getting daniel a copy of it, but it really looks like he isn't that kind of kid. oh well. disappointing. then again, things are generally pretty fine. man, i'm feeling boring today. but i felt like writing. maybe i was just wishing i had something to say. so wendy is moving to canada. i was thinking maybe i should go to a place that is a little less fascist, like russia or germany. it used to be that germany was looking for computer people. man, game over, u of m lost because of a loiusville td with about 45 seconds left. so people clearing out, and there's a spot at the bar. i was nursing the last one (also the first one), but i guess i'll have another. why the hell not? we're at war. so, last night i was much better able to remember what i was dreaming. that seems to happen when i skip a particular activity. one dream, though, had a deep sort of altered consciousness feel to it. i was watching a bunch of people, and i suddenly shifted perspective to in the middle of them, but it was like my internal dialog had stopped, like i was almost sort of catatonic or something. the woman who was right in front of me looked a little concerned and asked, "can you hear me?" and i nodded. i guess dreams are generally pretty weird, but this one was pretty intense and weird. a kind of peaceful state, though. but i definately feel the loosening of all the bonds of desire, and a greater movement towards peace. considering how angry i can be, i guess i'd pretty much have to move towards being peaceful some of the time. i guess one thing that must have effected me at some deep level, was an essay that some dude wrote on a web site somewhere that killing bush was really just a bad idea. i think it must be working on me. i think i had some counterarguments, but still. and another thing working on me. that guy who had me on his blog of how to be interesting. i like to think i am, but only once in a while, and not consistently. sometimes i have pretended i could really be a writer, but really i'm just a blogger. i don't have the discipline to really write well. and i probably wouldn't like the real pain of writing. i really should find a real job, then. that song, you're everywhere to me. is it about god, or is about love, and in a deep sense god is about love. the deep sense is that the belief in god is about our need for love, parental love, a love that cares about us and cares for us, and the sense that the world really gives us the feeling that we are cared for mysteriously. despite many problems and dissappointments because of our endless neediness, we do get by and are really treated fairly well, despite our nastiness and undeserving. i googled it a bit and i'm reading a little on michelle branch. just a kid. so nothing really deep in there, i don't think. one bad thing about me, i don't have that whole 'striving for excellence' thing going. i did get the whole mistaking notion that the striving and desire was bad in itself and should be avoided, when really, it should just be seen as the trap it is and moved beyond, without being avoided. avoiding too is a trap. the magic isn't in the signs, it's in the reading. Happy Halloween! the toe has definitely gotten worse. ouch. still no wireless here. i moved the router downstairs, so it's more convenient to play with, and i can see the status lights. i was hoping that would maybe help, but it didn't it's after 6. it's been dark almost an hour. just one bunch of trick or treaters. the only actual trick or treater in this group was a teeny little girl dressed like glenda the good witch, i think. but there was also a kid in a stroller, and the two moms. really cute moms. both a lot younger than me. next was a medium size girl with glasses all by herself dressed like a witch. nothing but onesies. a little boy. i think it was a lord of the rings something or other. it looks like i might have trouble getting rid of all this candy. i got about 5 pounds, and i already ate at least a pound myself. but it's going really slow. andwith the simpsons halloween special not being on, even though it's sunday? there was football on before, but it looks like they're showing the x-files movie. it's spooky enough. durn, i missed the intro to 60 minutes. it's now an hour later. 7:30. no more trick or treaters. three. what's up with that? ah-ight. a pair of boys came by at 7:50 maybe there will be a late bunch. nope. that was it. i didn't even use up one bag. the big toe joint (metatarsophalangeal) on my right foot hurts. nothing like when it hit on the other foot. and not so swollen. but annoying. it was hurting yesterday, but aimee offered me a beer (she was having one) and i couldn't say no, even though. orions. on star trek enterprise. an orion slave girl. they got a few of the crew for slaves. brent spiner is on it as a bad guy. and a bunch of cool genetically engi,neered folks. well they looked cool when they took over the klingon ship. but one tried to kill another, breaking the will of their father, and then the other one killed the first. really stupid. i feel stressed, or just frustrated, because the wireless is not working on jordy. it works at work. and my kensington wifi finder sees it. or maybe it's because it's extra warm in the house. i should turn on the air conditioner. and i got a new citibank credit card in the mail, and i go to replace it in my wallet. and the old one is gone. i called and i don't seem to have any charges, but it is annoying. i reported it, and i'm getting a new one. it had some automatic payment put on it, and i need to change those. grr. anyway, i'm feeling kind of stressed. i got some kind of spam about trading links. fbhome or something. just a bunch of links, and most of them seem to be fake. and i don't know how they do it, but the links seem to go to domains, but then it redirects to some bogus product page. one of the pages there did link to my site, actually this journal. so i googled a ba'b'ian to see where else there are links that refer to it the way it did. yeah, i know vanity googling is lame. but i found a guy David Brittanwho must be an associate of wendy. he wrote about me and my blog in april. i can't see where this blog has been updated much after that. i think he's actually a real writer, and his writing does seem quite clear and concise. it doesn't even seem like i aspire to that quality of writing. and i guess it is sort of 'journalistic'. writing about something. sticking to a topic. i look at it a little more now, and it looks like this was to be a themed blog, like the title says, about 'how to be interesting'. not an easy subject. i guess he gave up on it. sitting here in the dark, i heard a buzzing, like a mosquito. i wanted to get him, so i turned on the light to see him, and i could still hear him, but a few seconds later, the freezer's compressor turned on, and i can't hear him anymore. and it looks like she bit me on the top of the fourth finger on my left hand. aw, man. i wrote for a good piece, tried to save it, and jordy got stuck with the hourglass and i lost it. i hate when that happens. so, reading more from d.b.'s stuff. he has a bit where he talks about where someone writes about how blogs are all about ego. with jordy's wifi down, i'd have to type in the link, and that's too much a bother. i look at the thing, and it does say that, but it mostly does other stuff. it gives examples of blogs, and a bit of history. it's not an essay. d.b. seems to be into essays. anyway, my reaction is to think about what the alternatives might be to just being about ego. i just recently got the notion that real writing, for money, is all about the reader. fiction is written with the conscious intent to entertain. a focus on the reader. and other writing might be meant to inform, or persuade, but at least the writer is thinking about the reader and trying to be interesting. d.b. does seem to be thinking that way in his stuff. they do talk about the typical teenage girl blogger who is trying to let her buddies know what is happening in her life. that's a lot more about her. i know that i write mostly to keep thoughts flowing out, and not just sitting stuck. i don't know. i think this was better the first time i wrote it. i wasn't even paying attention, but it was on. the boston red sox won the world series. i fried a chicken. part of my plan to not spend so much on convenience foods and make my own. but it didn't turn out very good. kind of bland. i was looking forward to doing it, but when the evening came around, i wasn't so hungry. and somehow, my wireless nextwork here at home is not working. i think it's my card on jordy, but i didn't seem to have any trouble at work. maybe it's the router. i finally baked some bread again. i think it's been six months. it took longer than i thought to get the stuff together, but i guess it wasn't too bad. dinner was bread and butter and bologna, but the bologna was really salty and not so good. still it was filling. i don't know if i'm gonna go back to eating bread mostly. i still need to go to the store and get some halloween candy. and i miss the burritoes. i was thishinking, for like 10 4 oz. for 3.25,in i'm not sure i could make them cheaper. hmm. not if i had to buy cans of refried beans. i guess beans are not that hard to cook. maybe i should try it. it's a shame i spent all my extra money. so, even though i didn't get my nap, i'm at tj. mulligans. and it's already after midnight. but i felt like i should be celebratory. today was the last day for me to get my project done so bruce could show it to his potential new customers when he meets with them on monday, and i added three new features, as well as debugging some funky problem it had when it moved to the server. the problem on the server was especially bad because code that worked fine came up with "an internal error" and said maybe look at the log files. i tried sending the site admins a email, and it took quite a while for them to write back. before that happens, i used my quick script to examine the files on the server to hunt down first where the log might be and then to look at the logs. nothing in the log. then i had to use the old fashioned approach of playing with the code to see where the error occurs. and the error looks like a compile error, so i didn't know if that would even help. cutting out sections. it ended up being reallyclose to the top. the "http/1.1 200" first http response line. i thought i needed it, and i might for iis, but it messes up apache. hours wasted. i could have been sleeping. plus on thursday i helped jimmy jones with his new laptop and got some extra cash. i don't know. maybe i should go into more of this computer support stuff. it's hard to get enough jobs to really get a sufficient income. but there are a lot of computer problems out there in the world. and if i became a better perl hacker, i could handle a lot more simple stuff. java projects are just necessarily pretty long term. so, man, my thought was that while i was sitting here, i would make a list of the things i was go buy at the grocery store, except that more than likely i will spend all my extra cash here. cause i don't have any small bills to tip the band. so i had to give them a ten. dammit people, tips are not optional. i'm sure i would have tipped them eventually. this song was don henley boys of summer. i believe it was '84. now that was a year for me. whether it was a year to remember or forget, i don't know. but it was definitely a year. man, on one of those little cop shops, the reality tv cop shows, they had this cop who had a little 17 year old cadet with him, and he went to a little shoplifting call to maybe show him how these things go. a real calm, but caring, blue shirt. shoplifter bitch had this skinhead boyfriend sitting out by the car. (curtis lowe) dude walked up with his hands in his pockets . cop dude says take your hands out your pockets. dude says, i've got a knife. cope dude says, should i be concerned about my safety. cop dude gets behind him and pins his arms back, and, as you might expect, the gun comes out. out trick. i've seen it. have a gun and a knife. scare them with the knife. use the gun. skinhead uses the gun. shoots the cop in the face. face, not head, though. skinheads never were that bright. then arm. breaks the guys right arm. paralyzed. sometimes skinhead make thoughtful moves. then a few to the chest an side. because this cop is not out. surely skinhead is scared. but cop falls. and somehow rips the hell out of his left hand. they don't mention it, but i'm guessing it was knife in skinhands other hand. just a guess. security guy goes after skinhead. sh stabs guard. cadet, who, as minor, is gunless and cowering in corner. skinhead goes into car after cops backup gun. automatic rifle. primo. skinhead gonna kills some motherfuckers. having trouble with the latches or whatever they secure them with. cop tries to draw gun. right arm broken, so no good. cop calls rookie to draw his gun. and put it in his left (fucked up) hand. cadet complies. cop gets a couple off. skinhead pays attention. does not give up, though. cop shoots again. skinhead "removed as threat". skinhead later dies. he might have made it, i guess theoretically. cop demonstrates the value of experience and calmness in emergencies. cop still in risk of bleeding to death. cop falls back onto deep breathing training to prevent immanent death. cop impresses the hell out of one anarchist. tears well up thinking about it. jarhead with the cuffs is having dinner. tj's door gunner. i bet he would say something nietzshean like "where there's life, there's hope" as he strikes a match for his camel. i tried striking one of these camel matches with one hand. it's a box of stick matches, not a book of paper matches. those seem easier. i could hold the box down onto the bar. i like to do that just in case i lose an arm sometime. you never know. things i was thinking of getting from the grocery store, before i decided on spending all my money on beer and company: breakfast sausage, in a box, already cut out, not a roll; a box of corky's ribs; orange juice; some marie calendars pot pies; deoderant, mitchum. i don't know. it's harder and harder to find stuff that they are offereing that tempts me. i need to start baking bread again. man, back in the winter and the spring when i was baking bread i felt so free from this excessively modernized world. bread, man. the biblical saying was that man does not live by bread alone. but, shoot man, that was just to say that that all that a guy really needs to eat to get by. the occasionaly vitamin c bearing fruit probably would have helped, i guess. seems like wine has vitamin c. i forget. googled it. can't tell right off. so, the little satellite thing was doing come beach boys. forget which. maybe good vibrations. i was whistling. dana switched it to some more whiny alternate stuff. probably good to shut me up. but still. won't hold it against her. we all survive on the kindness of strangers. i'm eating vitamins now. i really don't need any fucking kind of fancy foods. i really should go back to bread. actually, i think about it. during spring and summer, there are lots of other things, but fall and winter, i could see just bread. we'll see. band base-player dude tried an intriguing mix. godiva some kind of liqueur, and jaeger. some kind of german thing but balanced out. offered me some. had dana taste it with a straw. dana said this was her favorite song. i don't wanna be anyhing other than what i'm trying to be or me. whatever this song is. man, so becky pulled out a cigarette, and i wanted to light it for her, and i lit a match, but she did not make any motions to have it lit. and some flashdance tune was on. i son't even know if she smoked it, but i certainly did not light it.so, becky, just now, squatted down in front of the cabinet with the radio. and she pulled out a brush. and she was brushing her shoulder length hair. feeling disordered. she's tired, and she looked before like she had a headache. maybe just tired. she said allergies. stopped up. those were demons in his eyes. it's cold in here. i'm naturally cold. threatening movement next to me here. jarhead checking it out. becky yawning. dana smiling. such characteristic actions. and becky didn't finish her dinner. she's so skinny, i guess that's characteristic as well. so, becky is cold. i'm cold. dana is hot. don't know what that's all about. anyway, at about 2:34, jarhead turned on the lights. and yet, i finished one off, and becky still offered to get me another. chicks next to me are shooting "piece of ass"--southen comfort, peach schnapps and something or other. and they're pulling out quarters. hitting a smoke. dana told me. jason is the name of the jarhead door-guy. i was gonna ask becky. i think it's much better to have his name than to think of him as jar-head door guy. so, they tried to charge me for six. but i only had 5. and i challenged becky. and she redid it for 5. dana was the one who cashed me out. we'll see how it ends up. it's after 3. my question was whether they'd letme finish i off after selling it to me. it looks like they will. but i've been going pretty fast. so i was wondering if i was the only person who thought that someone should tornadoes in the area. so the cbs station has full-time storm coverage. i'm bummed because jeri ryan (seven of nine her own self) was going to be on two and a half men. but no. shoot. she's hot. i decided to go out to my happy place--the bookstore. i wanted to see if they had robert reich's book, reason: why liberals will win the battle for america. i could use something hopeful. they didn't have it. there were some other books that i might have bought if they had that. s and i wanted the java developers journal, which i had seen in there a week ago. gone. it had an article on java careers. grr. i was thinking of getting one of those test help books for praxis. i've signed up to take the praxis mathematics content test 0061. i need it to go for the alternative c licensure program. i've gotten e-mails from somebody at u of m about the program. since i'm not really doing anything, i might as well sink into teaching. but they have sample test at ets.org and list of requirements, and that might be enough. i'll take it some time, and worry about studying harder if i don't do so well. i did notice that one of their math tests is really hard--it looks like it's for college math majors. i'd like to try to take it, but i think it would be beyond me. i think i saw a question about "abelian groups". i'm not sure i know what that means. i think "abelian" means it is commutative. i can't remember if a group has one operator or two. i actually saw it talked about in a book i'm reading on real analysis, but the way i was reading it, without doing the homework and exercises, i guess it isn't really sticking. i could get multiple choise questions, but i think this was a short answer or essay question. the test i'm taking is really just all high school math, though there is a fair amount of calculus. it even will have one computer question. the one they had one the sample was annoying. i only glanced through the thing and saw this problem. it was a little flow chart of an algorithm. it had one answer that was "A/2" and another answer that was "[A/2]". now, i don't know what square brackets are supposed to mean in this magical flow chart language they seem to think exists. I know a lot of programming languages, too. and i've been programming a long time. square brackets usually mean array reference. my guess is that they wanted the "floor" symbol, which is like square brackets with the serif (little horizonal nub) only on the bottom. maybe when i look at it again, that's what it'll have. that is a real mathematical notation that corresponds to a computer function that is often called "int" which takes the integer below or equal to the number. the correct answer actually does require that, because dividing by 2 at one point would start creating answers with fractional components. but if they're going to have bogus questions, i'm gonna be upset. it's the kind of test where, you can afford to miss a few, and they don't expect you to get them all right. but that's no excuse for having bogus questions. 50 questions in 2 hours. graphic calculator required, though i probably wouldn't need it-- calculators are such a crutch. let's not forget that people were using slide rules during the space race. maybe i should bring a slide rule. of course, they don't allow mini-computers, so jordy is out. durn. so a few people died in the storms. the weather guy on cbs said that's why they were doing this. he makes no apologies. i admit, i was upset at missing blondie, but he didn't need to get defensive. i did mention that jeri seven of nine ryan was the first woman to make me think that barbie isn't that unrealistic after all.
ok, so leaving the bookstore, i saw a piece of paper on the ground outside by the trash can with writing on it. it's quadrille--the one with the little squares. it had some kind of schedule written on it, and i thought it might be interesting, so i picked it up. and it even had a couple of phone numbers, which i'm probably going to reverse lookup. here's all that was written on it: Tues 5:00-6:30 (pink ?) Art 6:45-7:30 (pink ?) wed 5:30-7:00 Thur 5:45-7:15 SAT 9-1030 Jazz 11:45-1 (other half of page) Ballet 7 Jazz II Begin Aug.16 4 per week 737-7322 (other side) 1-877-989-3268 MTCN 905 3825 791 Robisen 4383 2200 ------ 2183 2025 ------ 155 (that's what it says. i'm guessing she needs to work on her subtraction, it could be that it's 2028 and not 2025, but it sure looks like a 5) Katie Mae Poodle (a column of multiple choice answers. one column is blue, and presumably corrections in black) Aa c c ac ca a&d b c d c c b a a cool. the 737- phone number is for ballet memphis on trinity, which is near doug. so it's for dance class. i hate when i can't sleep. so i've googling for airguns and squirrels. it looks like my airgun, a crossman 1077, is just basically underpowered for squirrels. i haven't quite figured the ft-lbs, but it only puts .177 cal at a max of 625fps, so i'm thinking maybe 9ftlb. dude on one page said minimum of 12. 15-20 is best. i have been able kill three of the durn tree-rats, but maybe i was lucky. i've found a .22 at 900 fps with 18 ftlbs for about $160. i'm not sure i'm ready to spend that. i also found the rat zapper which might work fine. i really want them fresh, though, so i can eat them, and i'm not sure if that's so likely with a trap. probably fine in the winter. about $50 and darn it but i forgot that they were going to show all the regularly scheduled stuff again starting at 2 am. i just missed seven of nine. again. grr. i mean, it looks like i thought of it and turned it on five minutes after it was over. double grr. saw team america: world police. it was pretty good. seemed like it could be funnier. the puppet sex scene was interesting. i wonder what they cut out. it had a bunch of positions. the last one was very different. girl on her head and the guy standing behind her. don't know what that's called. roger ebert gave it one out of four stars. it might have just been personal. he didn't like it because it was nihilist--they didn't have a message or any particular thing that was bad. i thought that was their point. it's all silly. whatever. lots of blood. heads being blown off. i think one had just the top half of his or her head. i think it was janeane garafalo. there were a lot of songs, and i can remember the lyrics, but i can't remember how the tunes go. and yes, there is a song at the end of the credits wheim jong il explains what his deal was. he's an alien. it was a prelude to invasion thing. bug creature that controls people like in star trek wrath of khan. anyway, so, i'm here at tj mulligans again. some kind of band. has a girl singer. otherwise lame. green something or other. maybe green dream. and off-key. ouch. then again, the place is empty, so who cares? then again, people are sounding a little annoying with it. but, shoot, man, they gotten people up of their old saggy asses and up their dancing. celebration and get down tonight. gotta love disco. i was gonna go up and tip them, but they don't even have a jar or a hat or anything. man. if you're so bad not to even expect a tip... argh. mean green music machine so, they did joan jett's i love rock and roll. it was horrible. but i had to go tip them $5. and dude said they sucked. and i just had to quote tom petty: "it's rock and roll. it doesn't have to be good." i just wish this guy wasn't standing right in my face. his girl was putting her hand on his back, and i was thinking, i'd love to stick a knife through her hand and into his back, with the edge pointing toward her so that when she pulled it towards her, it would cut across his back. man, that would have been sweet. so, i went to the in depth discussion group mensa meeting at mcallisters earlier this evening. david moncrief and brent milton were there. david was on about some lecture he got a notice from u of m about-- jonathan weinberg, the case for neopragmatism in normative metaepistemology next friday at 3:00. and some site disputing the big bang theory cosmology something or other. what a freak. talked to brent about politics. he is thinking about a third party, and has a probram in mind to start everyone with a million dollar grant for education. he couldn't go to the strong computer science college he wanted, even with his gi bill money. had to settle for number 5. aw. i guess they remind me of my own underachievement. nothing but guys here left at the bar. it's pretty freakin' sad. ok, man, so this is trippy. i decided to head out. and then i decided to get some cash and head out to platinum, and the first tennessee cash machine said it was out of service, and the amsouth bank machine said it was out of service. i guess the network is down. shoot. i suppose i'm out of luck. ok. it is called "piledriver". here's about what i remember them doing: missionary, cowgirl, doggie, standing with man behind, reverse cowgirl, and, as i said, piledriver. and this was all in a little 30 second or so scene. so you wonder what the original scene was. just puppets and no plumbing, but i could see not wanting children to see it. the heads blowing off is a little nasty too, i guess, but i'm sure that doesn't get it an nc-17, since that's all still there. oh yeah, the passion of the christ proved you can't get an nc-17 for violence. a dream. i was at a hotel, and my mom had left me there and was going to come back in a couple days, but not just a hotel because folks were getting help for mental problems. and i was just accepting being stuck there. but there was one guy i really pissed off, like that guy at tj mulligans. so it was about the feelings of being left here. the folks came here for a day and left. i almost went by tj mulligans yesterday, so it through in though feelings. and i was trying to get away from him, so at the end of it, i tried to go back to my room, and clean service had cleaned up, and i was scared i had lost all my stuff, but i found it, and i went and lay down to sleep. i am afraid of losing my stuff, i have to say. so it's another nightmare. working through fears i'm having. and it woke me up, so i'm having trouble going back to sleep. i guess that's what nightmares are. the dreaming mind dealing with fears we're having, and they get scary enough to wake us up, and sometimes they keep us awake. if dreams are a way for the brain to use an opportunity to imagine how things are without the senses of the day intruding (so they can be much more vivid) then i guess we risk dealing with stuff that scares us too much. so they are just an opportunity that brain dna has exploited. sleeping clearly is an opportunity to rest and not think or move when it's dark forget our troubles. if we were awake, we'd probably be moving around, and since our animal ancestors were probably always hungry, we'd be out looking for food when it was most dangerous. asleep we forget being hungry and cold and stay more safe. it makes sense for these to have appeared in evolution. i admit that i've always thought monetary success and having a lot of stuff could be a trap, but i should also admit that being in debt a lot has been a trap for me. i was reading about a comic about some old japanese warcrimes, and some possible historical revisionism about it. an interesting thing mentioned was that there is some japanese shrine for lost veterans, and they say it honors war criminals as well. that could be a little bit of spin (from the losers) but it does sound rather japanese. they are a little bit into their fighting. like kerry said, we commit war crimes too. what else would you call nagasaki and hiroshima?and i didn't realize until i saw the frontline special yesterday. in vietnam we had "free fire zones" where you were allowed to just shoot anyone you caught in there. that's a war crime. man. and, officially, the invasion of iraq itself was illegal. it is such a big bad deal that there is no way for regressives--it is just too ironic to call them conservatives since, in addition to being against environmental conservation, they are trying not to keep the country the way it is or has ever been, but to change it to a cold and mean-spirited place-- to admit that it is wrong. if they do that, it would follow that they are criminals. is it a crime to go out and kill someone for just saying they want to kill you? it is self defense to kill them when they try, but it is premeditated murder to do it before they try. that's what we have done. of course, we haven't killed saddam. so it's only attempted murder for him, but we did kill a lot of other people. osama is a little different. he is guilty of conspiracy, and because of that he continues to be an actual threat. but iraq was just cold blooded murder. for the iraqis, it's a different story. he was a threat to them. and so, actually, since it is acceptable to kill someone to save someone else, i guess you could justify it. but that's an internal thing. the big shift is the thinking that killing bad guys is good. that happened in the comic book world (i wonder if it has anything to do with the conservative campaign to change american values). but really, killing bad guys is bad, and we always thought that until recently. we sometimes thought it necessary, but we did at least think it was bad. we needed to get rid of al quaeda before taking on iraq. we let them go, and then gave them, not just a great recruitment tool, but thousands of unemployed trained army guys that they could recruit. man, that was a serious mistake. it might have all been ok except for that. that's almost trying not to win the war on terrorists. or maybe that was the plan. nah, probably it was another bumbled decision from w the pinhead. that's what you get when you elect a well meaning idiot. just the occasional major foul-up. it doesn't matter if you're "god-fearing" if you're as incompetent as that. i'm sure he did it as a simple matter of right and wrong. they were working for a bad army, so they need to be punished and not given a free job. it follows from conservative values. and yet it is a total disaster. sitting at tj mulligans. ashley has left. it's just becky at the bar. gennon is here. kind of boring. but i finally got some vitamins. for me, they seem to prevent hangover pain, so going here was my bribe to go get them. jesus, ass-fucking, christ. wendy is getting married to joey. man. i asked becky what she thought about it. she said it's gonna happen, but she's so young, that it isn't on her mind. so, what do i think about marriage? black dude sitting next to my just talked about chick who came up to him in a wedding dress and cheetah shoes, cummerbund, purse, and cat in the hat top hat. and fucked her good. marriage is a sacrament. it lets you go from wild, live-for-yourself, fuck when you want, to acceptable, good person. questionable to accepted. forget the past. but it's just a convention. there was never a problem but thinking made it so. society offers it as a solution to a problem it made. it's just that, for me, accepting a solution to a false problem seems to me to encourage the system that creates the problem. now, controlling sexual relationships is one of the big things that defines a culture. it has tremendous effects. the puritannical nature of the u.s. is one of the things that makes it into the sublimated industrial powerhouse that it is. it's got me all twitchy, now. it is intended as a source of frustration, a frustration which gets pushed into economic achievement. economic in the sense of scarcity, and sex is made scarce. one day, i will have that vorpal weapon. i can just see how nanotechnology will make it possible. fuck light sabers. though, the whole retractable thing is kind of neat. i would probably want the vorpal weapon to be retractable like that. yeah, light sabers are magic swords, for super knights errant. bfd. ancient mythological archetypes. the knights in the star wars series as it is developing don't even seem marginally enlightened. yoda, almost. ok, yoda is enlightened. personally, i would insist that the defenders of the realm be enlightened. the whole thing was presumably based on the buddhist notion, with samurai warriors as the knights who were at least seeking spiritual attainment. ok, so how did i get from marriage to the jedi way. man. it's about ideal traditions and how a society should work. a society must have defenders. the star wars universe has a greatness because the defenders required are very few, and they are idealized heroes. it all lets you think about the right way to live, and what is really, really good, what is an ideal. so, what do i think? marriage is mediocrity. the very essence of safe sex. still. it makes a lot of people happy. which can be good. satan sits in the center of hell, frozen in a lake of ice. but does he have a smile on his face? i need to read dante. adonai, lama sabachthani? man, so now they have little micro-sized atomic clocks. typical digital electronic clocks use quartz oscillator, which can vary based on temperature, so they aren't all that accurate. an atomic clock uses the oscillation of cesium atom and are about a thousand times more accurate. this new micro-atomic clocks put a teeny bit off cesium gas on the silicon chip, which a little micro laser. right now it costs about $100, and uses a good amount of power (73 milliwatts), but i tell you right now, it's going to change clocks. the pricewill keep coming down, and hopefully the power. it will take a bigger battery, and maybe it will just go into cell phones, but having an atomic clcok will make it so we can have super duper position finding gps. that's a serious techincal development. proper time-keeping was a central accomplishment to good navigation a couple centuries ago, and led to empire building. modern quartz digital watching didn't really change much, since they really weren't that huge an improvement, except in cost, but portable atomic clock accuracy could really change some stuff. or maybe not. one thing that might change. right now, most computers use an external quartz real time clock, but now they could encorporate the atomic clock on chip. orat least on board in a much smaller setup. the computer clock gets used to manage the dynamic ram, so it turns out to be important to the computer. one thing that computers can do is to synchronize over a network. computers now have a battery backup clock to maintain the time when it's turned off, but a networked computer (and they do this now) can call a a remote server to get the right time. they havge to do this now because quartz clocks aren't that accurate, but it could just work that when you turn the thing on, it gets the exact time. i guess that would open up some other great applications. robotics would really be helped be super accurate positioning which would be enabled by gps based on this. so maybe that's what the conservatives have against gay-marriage. they see homosexuality as a punishable moral failing, and marriage, as a sacrament, is a way to wipe the slate clean and forgive. they can't do it. no self-control? what is the self that i could be control? it is a phantom. it is unreal. an illusion. it is just a delusion that it can be controlled. there can be stability and consistency in behavior. this ain't self-control. discipline is based on a false premise. it is a lie that they must support and propagate at great cost. it gets harder and harder. but the lie gives them power. a little lip to snag and pull on to yank people in the direction they want. so, i suppose technogocial cultures eventually become krell. and beyond krell, they must do something. ok. the krell had machines that could take what they were thinking and make it happen. i don't know the whole story, but that is, of course, not a compatible thing, and they thought themselves out of existence. but probably, occasionally, krells survive. they would be pretty freaking godlike. star trek voyager had a cool episode that made me think about post krell-stage society. it's likely that you would have the remnant biologicals, who would keep a traditional society, and a split off godlike group. anyway, i think it's an interesting thing to think about. so, a guy walked up and asked if this was a jornada. he has one. and becky seems to pay him a lot of attention as he's sitting at the end of the bar. i asked. he works here at night. and comes in for lunch. one of her good friends. aw. i made becky mad. i said she was lying, and she was being sarcastic. i've been talking with this guy, who said he was george when becky said she was victoria, that there isn't any difference between lying and sarcasm. he's been on about how lying has the intent of gain or harm, and sarcasm has humor or i forget what. all bullshit. peace through social isolation, that's what i seem to be going for. freeze me in carbonite. it's fairly late at night, but the cnn headlines have been changing. updates about the fight in iraq. so much for pint night. it was thursday, but i was charged 4.50 per pint instead of 2.50. well, i did notice that it wasn't written up on the board. i guess that's what you get when you piss off the bartender. dependency is death. that's something tyr anasazi said on the tv show _andromeda_. he's a nietzshean. genetically engineered human. or was. they killed him off. why do i think of it? nietzscheans did not need vitamins, and i just ate a vitamin tonight. they are able to synthesize them internally. they do need some kind of organic energy source, but they could live on wood if they had to. the ultimate survivor. but he died off, though that was just because the actor moved on to another gig. i suppose he moved on because it was such a boring concept. not much interesting is likely to happen to you if you have no significant needs. but that's just what an ideal is. it doesn't have anything missing. so, my aproach is this: don't complain, don't protest. remember. make decisions based on what i remember. write stuff down to remember when i can. people will always try to take advantage. just try to keep track. do something different when i need to to trick them. Happy Wednesday the 13th! So I'm finally sitting at starbucks. the cantenna doesn't seem to have enabled me to hit any open wifi points. grr. bummer. i'm trying a venti strawberries and cream frappuccino. one of the highest calorie items here. it's like a strawberry milkshake. i didn't see what he poured in there. probably half and half. some grey-haired guy asked if i had wireless. not here. and was this a psion. no, it's an hp. there's this red head sitting outside, and there was a guy standing up about to sit down at the next table. she's just preening like a daddy-fucker. some matronly woman is sewing. or spinstressoid. i felt like being among folk. and maybe i wanted to see if there was anyone studying math. as for the wireless not working, i think i should just get doug in )here with his laptop and hack the connection from upstairs. i think it's time for mere anarchy to be loosed on the world. i'm just in that kind of mood. so, matt and trey were on sixty minutes 2, getting some free publicity for team america: world police. i'm pretty psyched, though i'm a little bummed since i learned they were libertarian. libertarians are such pussies. it was interesting that they said that matt was a math whiz. heh. and to tell the truth, i'm sitting here to avoid the debate. if i was home i'd have it on in the background, or switch it on and off. i really just want to let it go, but it has that whole train-wreck fascination thing. this cream thing is starting to get nasty towards the end. so there was a guy with a laptop,and i saw him get ready to go. coiling up him power adapter, and i decided to finish my drink, and easily manage to get up and leave before him. i love how convenient jordy is. wow. a mom in arizona died about a week after her son was killed in iraq. just after the body came back. now that's grief. and the doctor said the chest pain is probably reflux. i guess. so i'm just a wimp. season premiere of star trek enterprise. time travel. i hate time travel shows. i just watched a classic trek episode "tomorrow is yesterday". it was a time travel one. it made even less sense than most time travel ones. i'm trying not to watch the debate, but man, these guys are getting worked up. i turned it off once but turned it back on. it's off again. on again. off. i need to let it go. i was wrong about the other evening. the stuff i wanted to go to is on the second tuesday, and that was only the first tuesday. oh well. but now that i'm resigned to have missed them, i'm not so intereanssted in going. if i ever really was. man, i blew my whole evening. i was thinking i might finally go to the tai chi school, except in the back of my mind there was something i was wanting to do. then at like 6:30, when dinner was coming out of the microwave from being warmed, i remember that i wanted either to go to the monthly mensa meeting, or the ham radio. grr. the mensa meeting was at 6:30, and the ham radio meeting 7:00. i thought, well, maybe i'll watch nova. but it ended up being about pearl culture, and i didn't really care about it the first time i watched bits of it. and, great, Jordy's screen is starting to flicker off. i would hate to lose such a nice tool. and i know what did it. this morning, jimmy jones came by the office and was asking about laptops, and i show him this one, and was talking about internet connections, and i was saying how nice wireless is, and how jordy has wireless, and i pulled out the wireless card, and i knew it was a bad idea. it had a bunch of dust on it. last time i did that, i had some kind of trouble. hopefully it won't be too be this time. problems with dust can just go away on their own. i've got the vice presidential debate in the background. it's about 40 minutes into it. after the first-- wait i just heard from edwards "that was a complete distortion of my record" and something about "shocked" and now there's some smiling. i'm really not paying attention to this. i've deicded just don't really care about this stuff anymore. anyway, i was gonna say that in the response after the first question, cheney looked like he was almost snarling and going to break out in a growl. for the past few minutes, he's been looking like he's back to his stone face. i don't know how this is gonna go. and i don't care. and actually, now, after a few minutes, and after pulling out the wireless card a couple of times and trying to blow out the dust, the screen isn't flickering. we'll see how it goes. cool! i made a motor! my ingredients were a piece of cardboard (dude's recipe asked for a battery holder, but the cardboard works fine) which acts as a frame for sticking the wire through and holding the magnets. i use two batteries on either side of the cardboard. it turns out that the battery has a steel can so it is held on by the battery, which works well. and a foot of 18 gauge bare wire and about a yard of 22 gauge enameled magnet wire. it spins pretty fast, too, though it seems like maybe the connection is bad and it isn't so steady. right now, i have to hold the wires to the ends of the battery. but still, it's cool. really kind of trippy. so, i guess i really need to have a tinkering mensa meeting. and i feel good that i didn't pig out quite so much for dinner. mom maybe me some food yesterday--chicken with some kind of mushroom tomatoey sauce. she said it was enough for three days-- it was 3 leg quarters--but i ate half of it yesterday. well, mom and dad came into town sunday afternoon, and made a barbecue, or technically my dad called it a "mixed grill"-- some steaks, some lamb, and some fancy sausage and a couple shishkabobs. serious grease fire in the grill. my dad had a dental appointment in the morning, and they left in the afternoon. but my mom was nice enough to cook something extra, and they didn't even have anyhing. but it was done at around 3, so i had a leg then. so then, at dinner later i had a leg and a thigh, so half of it was gone, and i figure i'd just finish it off today. but no. i only had a thigh today. so i still have a full portion tomorrow. and i made the rice using the stock that i made. like a week ago, i was watching a cooking show, _simply ming_ i think, and he was making a stock, and he recommended freezing it in cubes, which sounded like a good idea. so i decided to make some. i didn't freeze it into cubes, though. i put it into zipoc bags measured with two cups each, which is a good amount to cook with. it heats up easily in the microwave. i used it for the rice, and i also used it with some canned peas. at the time i did it, i also tried making some risotto, because it sounded interesting how they did it on ming's show. they first sauteed some onions in oil and toasted the rice a little bit with it before adding some wine and then the stock. i didn't have any wine, and it all didn't seem to really make any difference. but it seemed an interesting thing to do. maybe i'll try it again. woah! where did that come from? bill o'reilly is on dave. and o'reilly said they should lay off what happened 35 years ago. and dave said back then, in '69, he was classified 1a and was sitting waiting to be called up and shipped out, but they started the lottery, and that's why he didn't go. but he knew people that went and didn't come back. and there's two schools of thought. you can join the national guard, or volunteer to go there twice. dude. watching matt and trey. funny guys. shame they were on jay. i don't care for jay. if we had had a president who believed in communicating with people, instead of being tough and handling things himself, maybe the public might have been warned about 9/11. the plane that went down in pennsylvania was taken out. people went along with the rejaks one the other planes thinking it was just a hijacking because they had no idea what was going on. but a memo "al qaeda determined to attack in us" could have gotten a wiser president to at least get people looking. but the pubes mindset was to not appear weak. but it's much better to try to get help from people, even if it might make you look a little weak. that's just something pubes can't do. and cnn said it was hard to tell why kerry won the debate. it's because everyone hates whiny bitches, likeque bush was off in his corner. in a debate people try to judge character, and if they can't get it from the words, they'll get it from body language. i'm watching supersize me. in dude's beginning checkup, he did thirty-six push-up, which they said was average for his group, and i thought i could that easy, and dang, but i barely managed thirty. i swear i used to do better. shoot, like 5 years ago i did 4000 push-up over a couple of weeks in sets of 50. aimee had said she liked big shoulders and i asked what i could do, and she said do 5000 pushups. i gave up, sure, because it was pointless. but still, i could do them pretty easily. i've really been lazy lately, i guess. but i'm gonna get back into it. i did some squats two. hey! memphis isn't even in the top 15 fattest cities in america. least healthy city in america my ass. no child left untested. relief from paying your bills. yeah, it used to be we could count on an assassination every twenty years or so. they messed up ron's. maybe they can back on track i came up with the monogamy rights reframing, but lakoff's idea seems a little better. you just ask if they think the government should be able to say who you can and can't marry. this can hit conservative where they live. i was talking to terry and dial today a a mensa book meeting thing, and got terry with this, and she went on about marrying your relatives, which i thought was a little strange, i think her point was that the government already tells people that, and i was willing to take that as an exception, except she never really came clean as to what her position was. i think she actually was in favor of the government interference and had some kind of reason for the anti gay stuff, like there presumably was reason for the anti family stuff, and yet she also said something about how it has been shown that in-breeding isn't a risk, which i think i wrong, but hey. but i thought of something bad that could happen if bush does get elected, and now it turns out that it's about tied again after bush seemed to pull ahead after the repubican convention. right now, the rest of the world kind of hates america, though more than anything else, they hate bush and the government, and not really all of america. but if we were to reelected him, they might just figure that we are really like that nimrod after all. i mean, four years ago maybe we just might not have known what a snot-nosed little evil shit he actually is, but if we go along with him for some more, then maybe we are just his little bitches after all. i mean, what's with this trying to scare everybody that the government is trying to pull? so some ragheads got lucky. are we a bunch of little scaredy pussies now? couldn't average joe sixpack have kicked any of their hairy asses? and seriously what happened to two wrongs don't make a right? 2,752 more wrongs will still not make a right, and i'm sorry to say, killing a bunch of ragheads not only will not make us safer, it has already made us a lot less safe. hopefully it's made bush a lot less safe. he has something coming, if you ask me. then again, the adminstration wants us to be scared so it all works out for them. maybe we'll get back to being nice to people soon, though. but not the french of course. Nope, Doom 3 does not work on my desktop. not enough juice, i guess. doesn't even install, though it doesn't give an error message. it just quits silently.i guess i'll just have to finally upgrade my motherboard. a poison is something you do not recover from. there is a church in monterrey that is using an israeli cell phone jammer to keep cell phones to ring in services. one initeresting thing that Lakoff says is that tax cuts is about making sure that there isn't money for social support programs. they don't like social support. they think everyone needs discipline and shouldn't be coddled. and they use and repeat the phrase "tax relief" so it looks like paying bills is a bad thing. it is a strategy. it turns out that quite a while ago, like 30 years ago, when we were becoming a more sensible place, "conservative" was the dirty word it should be. the regressives decided to get organized, and set up bunches-- dozens--.. of think tanks and groups of thinkers to write stuff and come up with plans. lots of money invested. the progressives don't have stuff like that. when they have money, they end up spending it on helping people, and not on planning, organizing and creating strategy. lakoff does talk about one progressive think tank that he's a part of, the rockridge institute. so right now, just based on the amount of work being done, it's no wonder that the regressives are doing so well. even though they really are pretty obnoxious. if you're poor, it's because you're bad. and not because they just really need the cheap workers and they've made sure that some people stay poor. pinheads. another coolly insidious thing the "no child left behind" program is about testing. where there's testing, there will be failures, so they can punish the failures and not pay for them, and then crush the public school system, and move toward a system with vouchers and private schools where people have to pay for schools. again, another indirect strategy. and tort reform. turns out that public protection lawyers are major contributors to democrats. so if they can limit settlements, they reduce the funding of the dems. plus big corporations can do whatever they want without fearing significant penalty. so kerry won the debate. and he won mostly because of the reaction shots which were against the official rules. good thing the tv people didn't listen to those. pubes just looked really annoyed. and he was ready to explode. that would have been cool. when someone finally gets him in the head with a high powered bullet, i bet someone else will catch it on video. but they're gonna have a vice presidential debate. i saw one commentor say watch that one. the gloves will be off. not that the first one was a love fest. Happy Rocktober! Man, I had a dream when I was taking a nap this afternoon. i was playing guitar. and i was playing better than i actually play, but more in the sense that i played effectively by ear-- i could get the notes i wanted from the sound instead of just sort of randomly getting stuff from the chords and scales. but then it got into the freaky symbolic stuff. the neck go all bendy, rubbery, but i could still sort of play, and then i set it down, and it was broken in the middle. i was thinking probably mostly about the programming i'm doing, which is a fun thing for me, but lately i've been having frustrating problems. then again, i haven't been playing guitar like i wanted to before, and training up my ear. and doing the other stuff i want. so went out shopping for the parts for the science projects in gstronzo gizmos. i had left my lights on, and i guy who works there said hey, your lights are on. not a great start to an evening of shopping. home depot at about 9:45. they closed at ten, so i just wasn't gonna go in, but that guy said you still got fifteen minutes. i was looking for 1/8" copper tubing. nada. plenty of 1/4". so i'm thinking, it sure seems like the guy with the book has written up the recipes with obscure little parts so that you have to go to his web site and buy the stuff from. i'm sure you could do it with 1/4", but he put it with 1/8" which i'm not sure i'm gonna find. and he has a really cool project he calls a gauss gun, with magnets and iron balls, but he uses gold plated iron molybdenum bismuth something or super magnetic alloy super magnets. fuck him. fuck him up his greasy pale white nerd ass. so i went on to the land of the walmartians. i wanted to get a copy of doom3, and maybe some cheap 1/4" copper tubing. but no. denied. and they didn't have the basic 18 gauge wire that i was looking for, which was sitting on impulse buy display at homje depot. i guess walmartians don't do potentially hazardous repairs. lots of extension cords. so i'm thinking, i need to go look at the shotguns, and if by chance walmoron asks what i'm looking for, i'll say a cheap shotgun. something good for shooting niggers, but cheap so i can chuck it in the river when i'm done, but in the back of my mind is that i want something i can use as a grenade launcher. there is a cool recipe in ragnar and the black books for a grenade launcher using a shotgun. you take a shotgun, take a shell and take the shot out and half the powder, and a wooden dowel. you need something on the end of the doel to hold the grenade, but that's pretty much it. simple recipe. something every patriotic citizen should know about when the government starts getting fascist, like it is with pubes in charge. it's funny, i take odd comfort in the thought that when he's reelected, that'll be four more years of opportunity for someone to scramble his brains with lead. so, i got doom3. i don't know if it will even work on my computer, since i don't have the minimum requirement of a pentium4 1.5Mhz. jeez, freakin' hogware. but i also sprung for neverwinter nights. the d&d game. we'll see how it is. so with the guitar think, and the growing extreme distaste for the human race and personal survival, i decided to go to tj mulligans. i've got, like, two serious medical reasons not to drink. but, now that i'm having chest pains, and alcohol can be good for that, i decided, why the hell not? we're at war. wonderful time for being crazy. and speaking of crazy, king's trio is playing "purple rain". brings me back to the wonderful '84-'85 people in my life. ah, the reagan years. so, it's ashley's birthday. i think i heard that right. dana and becky are tending bar. she's sitting with us little people. she did smile at me quite a bit when she stood next to me getting her next coke sort of drink. and she was tapping my guinness as it sat here empty after i had ordered a new one. i thought she was getting one. but she didn't. i don't understand. boo. so, i'm thinking i shoot start praising the name of jebus. just to fuck with the heads of cross worshippers. will they get that it's a simpsons reference? maybe, maybe not. the elderly black lady checking me out at wally world, before picking up my stuff, gave me an intense look in the eye for like a second or two before getting to my stuff. did she know the venom in my heart? was she looking for some reason to deny service, or call in the guardians of a safe world? it was an intense moment. and i don't remember if i backed off, or she did. goddammit, becky got me my third guinness and when she brought it to me, i said, thanks dana. i didn't even really look at her, so with the short straight hair, she seemed like she was her, but then i felt terrible. grr. i tried to make nice and ask her about her house, which she said she lovers. argh. i wonder if actual enlightened people make careless mistakes like that. cool, so i asked dana, doesn't she have a boyfriend? and dana said, she's my sister, her boyfriend is over there somewhere. well, i thought she had just been over with ashley, but it was someone else. interesting reaction, though. and i think dana told ashley about it. in truth, all there is is unchangeability. is there virtue? man is not a being attached to truth. there would be no man without lies. truth is an ideal that is separate from life. but often, people chase this ideal. i don't want to be anything other than me. ok, my count was five, but the tab said for. i guess i could well have lost count. confusion. so I was looking for an OT Hebrew English interlinear bible. i found a couple that looked interesting. one, the cheaper one, actually, by jp green has both the ot and the nt, but has small print and is hard to read, and i already have a greek one. it might be a little better, though, because the other one is an niv one, and the "literal" word for word translations tend more to just match what the niv said. a little too much bias, i think. anyway, looking over the reviews, one mentioned john 21:15, so i looked it up. it's a bit after jesus has risen from the dead and is talking to peter (and remember that peter denied him before this). jesus asks several times, "do you love me?" and peter says back, "you know i love you, lord" and jesus keeps saying tend my sheep. this tubingart i remembered. but there is something you see in the greek that doesn't come out in the translation, that really adds something. first, you gotta remember that there are 3 words in greek that come out as the one word love in english: eros (romantic love), philos (brotherly or family love), and agape (now called christian love but back then they were figuring it out, maybe unconditional love or my greek dictionary says charity). what is actually happening is that jesus is asking "do you love me unconditionally [agapas]?" and peter says "you know, lord, i love you like a brother [philo]". the people reading the english just see this passage as "jesus reinstates peter" which is what my translation puts as the heading of the section, but in addition it has a more profound statement to make. jesus or god wants us to have this special kind of love (agape) and peter (or the solid (rock) christian) has this brotherly love. and it seems like peter is thinking they are the same thing. or maybe even he knows they aren't quite the same, but all he has (right now) is the brotherly love. or maybe he has trouble telling them apart. it is actually one of the central problems in chistianity. paul spends lots of time trying to explain love (agape). and in addition to just having that confusion, peter doesn't just say he loves jesus like a brother, he says jesus knows that. jesus or god knows that there is this situation. what can you do? so he call on peter to tend his sheep. plus he predicts his doom. but another subtle point in there that you can think about with the new interchange, is that maybe it is precisely because he still needs to learn about agape that he is called to be the religious leader. he still has a bit of travelling on his path to do. and so the relevance to us--religious leaders in being teachers are following the path of peter, still trying to perfect their unconditional love while what they may still only have is brotherly love. ok. it's after four in the morning. i was really wound up from reading in "moral politics" by george lakoff, so maybe i should say a little of what struck me. his main thesis is that conservative and liberal politics come from two different views of proper family life, and the notion that the nation is a big family and the government acts as parents. conservatives believe that there should be a strict father who controls with discipline and punishment, so welfare and coddling is bad as are drugs and permitting homosexuality--it's quite complex but a lot of conservative attitudes can fit into this explanation. liberals in a nurturing family, where the more important thing is caring and supporting. it seemed pretty clear reading it that I did know much about this nurturing family concept, which is kind of sad I guess. any kind of asceticism or denial (which i have always been into) can only be seen as a good thing with the strict father mentality. and one thing about the nurturing family concept that hit me is that it is very important to sustain and support and try to maintain social relationships. that's clearly not my thing at all. in fact, i think it's just not an introverted thing, but introverts do like one on one relationships, they just don't like big groups. except that i personally don't care for many one on one relationships either. so it's like finding about a whole different way of living and looking at the world. where having fun is always a good thing. not like some people who are always afraid someone somewhere is having a good time (i forget who that's supposed to be, maybe baptists, but it's generally a protestant thing). and in that world view, i have some pretty bad attitudes, which is probably true. one of the things i did, to pass the time, in addition to looking up interlinear bibles was looking at match.com. there is this one girl, who they match me at 82%, which is the highest of anyone, is this gorgeous girl, who seems to be a little jesus freak, but works as an it manager. and maybe a bit of an airhead, but she said one of her favorite things is intelligent conversation. which i expect is pretty one-sided on the rare occasions that someone provides her with it. so i was struck by my own bitterness. plus i think i already wrote her once, like maybe a month ago, and she didn't write back, but match.com decided to send her to me again in their periodic list of matches. grr. unfortunately, i don't think i'm actually a match according to what she is looking for. turns out, she makes more than $75k and is only looking for someone who makes a comparable amount. reasonable enough, i guess. for a stuck-up jesus freak. i was going to write her again, but Jordy's browser crashes when i log in to match.com. it will let me see the prospect's profile when i click the link from the email, but if i go to sign in to try to send an email, it crashes. very frustrating. and in the hours since then i could have turned on my desktop, but i moved on to other things. plus it's probably best if i cool down for that one. another thing i did was to write aimee with a link to bible the stuff up at the top here, and to ask about chatting, but her autoemail at work sent a message back out of town. more disappointment. i guess i'm just lonely. i even read some of wendy's page, and even her bf joey's. joey had stuff about the childfree section of livejournal. trippy. i probably would have been more into that, but lakoff's analysis of family values and political attitude has me looking at it in a new way. and now it's after 5, so i really need to try to sleep. one thing that might be promising, i'm doing a little perl at work, so maybe i'll get around to doing my web page interface thing now that i'm getting a refresher. another disturbing thing is that bush has the values that must be more ingrained in me, and yet they are values that i reject. plus he's anti-intellectual, and i have to admit that i pretend to be intellectual, so he's against me personally. and it's mutual. they got the whole debate thing tonight, and i'm expecting a defeat for kerry unless bush comes across as the pinhead he is. and this is a nonconfrontational debate where the candidates can't talk to each other, so kerry can't stump him with a surprise and fluster him like mccain did. i expect kerry to lose it because he's going to be boring. georgie-porgie is going to keep saying he flip-flops and make him look weak, which is morally bad in the conservative mind-set (says lakoff). kerry needs to shoot for caring and helpful and try to be a little upbeat. maybe he could show how pubes is a cold baby-killer. so, i had a craving for burritoes a while back and i got some today (or yesterday by now). ate two, wanted some more. ate two more, felt pretty full, but still wanted some more, then ate two more. then i read how many calories there were. should have done that first, i guess. 300 each. so that was 1800 calories all in a bunch. that's a whole days worth. grr. luckily, i didn't eat much else. and i hadn't eaten so much the day before. oink. decided to try writing people from match.com. it's nice just to write to people. and one of them actually wrote back tonight. so i got to write again. it's better writing to someone who was written. went to the bookstore. this time i actually found a book i had previously made a special trip for. looked in a different section this time. gonzo gizmos. very simple little science projects. nothing like the spud gun, which Freddie successfully put together. I'm just not yet much of a tinker, but I'm hoping success with these simple things might encourage me to do more. because, hey, I do have a couple of degrees in engineering, so i know theoretically how to do stuff, but i haven't really done enough (actually any) completed projects to have confidence or the kind of practical experience and improvising habits that it really takes to get stuff done. there's a little steam powered boat (no moving parts, just a steam jet) made of a plastic bottle, a candle, some 1/8" copper tube, and some tape. i really should try that one. and i should make the motor and finally try that crystal radio experiment that cub scouts do. man, he talks about how troops in world war one made radios with rusty razor blades. grr. the girl who wrote asked me if i ever came out of the computer to play. i'm not so sure. man, this thing does not do well in full sun. i'm sitting out in the overton park shell. some kind of pagan fest thing. so, this morning i had a couple of dreams that mad me think in a different way about interpreting dreams. i had a dream with a theme that i have fairly often. i was in school, but i had trouble. finding where my next class was. when i woke up, i realized that it was probably more about the feeling. and the feeling was not knowing what i should have been doing. so it was about my concern that i don't where mylife is going. and i had another dream where we had been sitting on a hill, and the other peoplein my family had been packing up to go away, but i just sat there trying to pick stuff up and i didn't go on. which i guess is about my not moving away, and getting on with my life. some kind of harvest celbration. i will admit that there was one table where people had some canned stuff., so at least one person did, presumable have a harvest. "pagan pride" another thing i thought of this morning. atheist need to establish some sort of source for optimistic feelings. christians have going for them the whole things are the way their supposed to be, and the world is good. but rationally, we can see how people have realy made things pretty good for themselves. i mean, even people with stupid delusions can do well. man, no sooj. :( i see her sitting up here at the top. don't know what happened. bit of a waste of an afternoon. saw people. drunk girl victoria introduced herself. and some fag bob. there were lots of cuties. some lady who sat next to me with an animal rights magazine. two-toned blonde brunette. some girl who looks to be about 6'5". an extremely pale girl. there's a subway that just opened up nearby. next to the blockbusters. i got a six inch turkey on wheat with provolone and lettuce, tomatoes, onion, and mayonnaise. it was pretty good. man. this morning i found in my mouth a little chip of something, that looked like a little piece of tooth or bone or egg shell. but it's probably tooth. and i reach back and feel the farthest back tooth on the right top, and i feels jagged like it's broken off. i think it's a wisdom tooth, though and it doesn't come in flat, so it isn't really used. and i'm afraid it has a cavity. i've never had a cavity before. i guess i'm due. but i had just eaten a hotdog. maybe it was from that. it seems to me the headline should be more like "cnn supports tyranny" instead of Laura Bush heckled by mom of soldier killed in Iraq. and i know they'll change their gripper line on this story. suffice it that another protester was arrested by the bush campaign. i guess every time they do that, it becomes less newsworthy. it really should chill the blood of any american, but i'm guessing they figure if they do it enough, people will thing its ok, instead of the creeping evil act it really is. they really are chipping away at the freedom-loving nature of american society. and it really seems to be a cold and calculated plan. scaring people, and making it look like bush protesters are lawbreakers. yeah, i rented south park's _the passion of the jew_ dvd. those guys really like to make money. one of the episodes was about illegal music downloads, in addition to christian rock, which gave is a theme close enough to put on the dvd. they may have been conceived as a set to put out as a dvd to make money from mel gibson's passion dvd. and i mention that episode because i went to copy the disk, and it said it was copyrighted. i don't really copy much, yet, so i hadn't seen that before. pissed me off for a second. i googled to find out the scene, then i just had to use another program that was already installed. the bums. i paid money to rent it, so at least there was a possibility that they weren't just out the money. video stores really should just get masters of everything available, and make copies if the need to rent more. blockbuster has such a pitiful selection. i really need to look into some of those by mail things. happy ides of september! happy monday the 13th! es ist zeit für rache. wir mussen die juden ausrotten. well, it's ten till three in the morning. can't fall back asleep, though i'm still kind of tired. or maybe i'm just not waking up so i can have an excuse not to do work. so at 8:00, i really wanted to take a nap, and then get up and do work. but first i wrote a little in my journal, the various trivial little things that had just happened to me, and then it took me a while to fall asleep,so it was maybe 10 or after when i fell asleep. and i was thinking that if i got up at 4, given the 2 hour nap in the afternoon, that would make 8 hours sleep, which would be plenty, but what would more likely happen is that i'd wake up at 3 and not be able to go back to sleep, and then not really have enough. but of course, it has ended worse than the bad situation i was expecting. i don't like not getting enough sleep. but then i thought that maybe i could manage today getting ready to go to work before everything, and then taking a nap just before, when i'm usually waking up like at 6:30, and getting up at 7:45 and then leaving immediately. something new to try. and i decided to wake up and read about that one famous really successful american who was well known to have an alternate sleep plan. i googled edison and catnaps and i found a page of quotes. and i know that a little of this is just more procrastination, but i wanted to write about some of my reactions to them, now that i've thought a little more about life and all. first, edison got a lot of stuff done. he was successful, and he worked hard or long at getting useful stuff done. and it's important that he didn't just work, but always kept an eye on doing stuff that was going to help people out in some way--he focused on what people needed. he said he got maybe six hours sleep, with four or five hours a night and catnaps during the day. i read a while back a description of what happens when you don't sleep enough--you fall asleep right away, which clearly describes someone who catnaps, and really describes most people. having trouble or taking time to fall asleep means you're getting plenty. my experience also has been that once you get about the right enough, you slip fairly easily into too much, and then it's easy again to keep sleeping, which is probably not a good thing. so it seems easier to sleep 9 to 14 hours, then a reasonable amount of 8 or so. i'm not really sure what to do with sleeping 7. it seems like if i have slept too much the day before, like yesterday, i naturally wake up such that i would get about 7, like today, but i feel tired in the morning. but i get the feeling that an important thing in there is that the time of day has a lot more to do with when i feel tired or more awake. whatever. enough about sleep. edison also said something kind of deep, which i don't buy. "show me a satisfied person and i'll show you a failure" roughly. but the whole spiritual quest seems to me a matter of seeking the ultimate satisfaction. i could actually be wrong about that, though. giving up the whole attachement to personal ego and desire thing isn't actually satisfaction. but it sounds like it. anyway, this constant striving does seem like a whole western way of doing things, even calvinist if i might use a silly social studies concept. it does lead to the kind of material success that edison exemplifies. and he was proud not to have invented implements of killing. whatever. like having light bulbs didn't let other people plan and carry out wars and such. what else. he was happy to take other peoples ideas and find things to do with them. and he was concerned that people don't learn to think. learning math is supposed to be about learning to think. i think learning to program a computer is a little better for it, too. though maybe i'm not quite seeing it right this second. clarity, precision, and working till you get to the end are a big deal in math. here's quote: "The three things that are most essential to achievement are common sense, hard work and stick-to-it-iv-ness....." i think you get that in math, and if that's all you get, it's worth the work. i get the feeling that in school, that's all they are really going for. the ability to do math is needed sometimes, but it is not so important as the habits of methodically working through stuff. and the greek word "mathemas" means learning or science. and i looked up mathematics on dictionary.com for the etymology. it doesn't exactly agree with me, but i looked up the word in my greek dictionary. one other thing i got from it, is that they say math has three parts-- arithmetic, geometry, and analysis. analysis uses letters, and includes algebra, analytic geometry, and calculus. i'm not sure i an quite go along with how they break that up since analytic geometry really sounds like it is geometry, and trigonometry uses letters too. actually geometry uses letters too. i guess i'm really not clear on what they mean. but it's an interesting idea that there is a kind of math that is "analysis". i hadn't really thought of it with that term. so, great, now it's four o'clock when i wanted to get up and do work, but i got two hours less sleep than i wanted. grr. at least i thought and wrote a little more about life and stuff. i really do need to try to be more practical and focus on helpful stuff. some computer stuff i want to do is to get something simpler for using a computer as an answering machine. they could be doing that, but aren't, so i think something is wrong. then again, kim did have it going on her computer and was using it, so just using it as an answering machine is not a big thing. that whole phone tree thing, though, seems like it could be done. information and help menus. i wonder what people use for that. one thing people would like is a secretary that would call people for them. making appointments and ordering stuff. it's just the kind of thing a computer phone thing could do. maybe not very well, but it could do it. and certainly, a computer could call a person up and remind him of his appointments. there are all sorts of gadgets that can do appointment books, but the phone and talking really is the proper interface. nagging. it's not great to get a machine to nag you, but who else is going to? you've got alarm clocks, that's a start. the lentil soup tastes better the next day. got the cantenna. the signal in the house is only one bar less than full, so its putting it to maximum doesn't tell me much. and i'm pretty sure this scale is logarithmic anyway, so it might not make much difference. i don't feel like going out to starbucks tonight because i need to get that laptop worked on. i haven't worked on it yet tonight, though. not good. i tried making a lentil soup, but it turned out pretty tasteless. i didn't have any carrots or garlic or sage, and i didn't put in any sausage. i had peppers and onions, but that didn't make much difference. it isn't terrible, it just doesn't taste like the good lentil soups that i remember. it just tastes like boiled lentils. it's food, though. and i did gain a couple of pounds from that steak yesterday, so it's better if i don't eat so much. i didn't have a vegetarian day. i had a turkey sandwich for lunch. with onions, lettuce, tomato, and cheese. it was quite tasty. unlike this lentil soup. but eggs for breakfast, thought that's more octo-lavo vegetarian. and i googled octo-lavo vegetarian there were 45 hits and i was on page 2. i bet if i keep talking about it, i might make it to page one. it's just such a silly term. washing eight times. and yet it gets used. and i went ahead and ordered the star trek original series, first season, from amazon. just $85--that's where i got how much i was willing to spend when i went to buy it around here. and free shipping. no chekov this season, though. and i watched "joey". i don't think that character can carry an episode, much less a series. it wasn't very funny, but friends wasn't very funny either. i will admit that i did laugh in a couple of spots. the physical stuff is good. but some bits were kind of painful, and having a "rocket scientist" nephew and roommate just doesn't seem engaging. just fake.
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"an unquantified scientific degradation". a charming turn of phrase describing the effect of the crash landing of the genesis solar probe. i suppose they don't know for sure that it was a complete loss, hence it is unquantified. but if smashing into the desert doesn't ruin i, i don't know what would. i mean, they were going to catch it in the air, so presumably it would have been damaged, or contaminated simply by landing on the ground with a parachute. but it has a surprisingly hopeful sound because maybe they have something they can use. "negative drogue negative chute". laura prepon blonde. she was really pretty as a red-head, and is still pretty, but it just isn't the same. now she seems a little common. so i went out and looked for the classic star strek season one set. didn't find it at walmart. i might have missed it, i guess, but i didn't see it. and i decided i would only buy it for 86.03 or less. and then i tried borders. still nothing. i can't buy it if they don't have it. but it was early enough that best buy was still open, do i tried them. $107. blech. way more than i was going to pay. i guess i should order it from amazon. so i decided to go buy some food, and i went to the first tennessee machine at exxon. and i went in there, and they have an interent kiosk right next to it. i didn't try surfing, and they had a pitiful rate of 19 cent per minute. actually that might be less than what aol was charging ten years ago. i forget. anyway, i think it's cool. so i go to kroger. i found a porterhouse at $8 discounted like $5 because it seemed to be getting old. about 20 ounce. and some chips and some o.j. and i went home and ate the steak and chips and watched "natural born killers". so i tried to have fun. i should have been doing some work, but it's good to pamper yourself sometimes. or maybe i was procrastinating. i got my citibank bill, and i wasn't too happy. i owed more than i thought. so i looked at last month's bill, and this was right, i had just forgotten how much it was. also my limit used to be smaller, but it had recently gone up even before this latest increase. the one putting it at $25k was only a $300 increase. the thing that bugged me was that the minimum payment went up this month. the balance had actually gone down a little bit, the the minimum payment went up. one of the interest rates (there are several on this account) went up .25%, but i run the numbers and that made less than a dollar's difference. the big thing was that this billing period was for four more days. so 9/11 is coming up in a few days. today they had on the nova episode about why the towers fell. won an emmy. sounded like they en wouldn't have fallen if the insulation on the steel beams hadn't blown off in the airplane crashes. the floor trusses buckled and broke from the heat. a lot of stuff had gotten smashed, but it held after the crash. in the north tower, the plane hit the center and smashed the core, such that the people above were trapped, and the core collapsed first. in the south tower, the plane hit at an angle, not annihilating the core, leaving a stairwell for people to get out, and the shell collapsed first. i think it wouldn't be so bad for pubes to be reelected if he was assassinated after two or three years. i got an "it's over" feeling for kerry just a couple days ago. something about him saying something about being against the war, and the pubes team hitting him with the flip-flop thing again. plus they had a bounce from the convention. kind of a smell of blood feeling. oh well. those tomato plants have a serious will to live. most of their leaves are dead and brown, but i just picked half a dozen tomatoes. they're smaller than before in the season, but still nice. i just ate a burger. it feels more like a lead weight. oh man. i just found out that classic star trek's first season is out on dvd for $90. it's only a matter of time before i go out and get it. i should just go get it. i've been spending too much money lately, though. so rhi had already given away the java contract, but they talked to me anyway because they get them pretty regularly, and need people right away. not quite, but almost a waste of time. actually, probably a waste of time. seems like they wanted j2ee and websphere, whichi just haven't done. i think i have a book on it. and i didn't really care toomuor the l ittle blonde girl brandy. a marketter. and citibank raised my credit limit yet again. i think they are just trying to keep me afloat. still it was a nice, if silly gesture. and it's at that magical number $25k. but i'm at a penalty interest rate of like 28%, which i didn't think was legal. oh well. so i orderedSeptember 2, 2004 September? where does the time go. wherever morris day says, i guess. base, color, and topcoat. just aline from a nail polish commercial. but it just got me. women just work too hard. so, rhi called me up asking if i could do a five week java contract. i said no on at first, thinking i didn't want to give up the thing with bruce for something so short, but i talked to bruce, and he was cool with it, if i'd be available to help if computer stuff came up. so i called her back and i have to go in tomorrow. i'm afraid their going to make me take a java test, and i might be rusty.and from the certification test, they can be pretty darn tricky. maybe i should look over the stuff. watched a movie, the anarchist cookbook. actually, i just now listened to the commentary. the writer/director jordan somebody seemed really up and interesting, though his crew seemed a little quiet. it was cool. a little nonviolent given the book. and to tell the truth, it seemed to oppose most of the things in the book. go figure. took the thing back to blockbuster. then looked around for something. it made me sad. picked up club dread. i did want to see that. it was gone, but they had the box for "the passion of the jew", a south park episode from this season, i think. to go along with the release of "the passion of the christ". i need to get that. but blockbuster is terrible. maybe it's just the movies that they are making these days. so i'm at starbucks getting a venti soy hot chocolate. ran out of orange juice and soy milk at the house. i should have just gone to the grocery store, to be sensible, but i thought it's be nice to be around people. there were a couple of st. mary's girls studying math. algebra maybe. (tutoring). make me think that it would be a be a nice idea. there was a guy reading "the da vinci code". people are still reading that. cool. goobers in the corner with goatees, one with an A's cap. a publicly affectionate couple--squat blonde and dude with glasses. so, what am i doing? "humility means doing the right thing" some old guy in a yamulka talking to some girls. and something about charisma. oh please. don't redefine a value to conform to your own world view. and i had to move away from there. and something about if you aren't struggling, you aren't growing, and if you aren't moving forward, you are moving backward. a distraction. so, what am i doing? i have been sitting, economically maintaining, seeking peace, thinking about what to do next. maybe waiting for something to come along. accepting. settling. reacting. being lazy. but there were girlfriends in there. so maybe i've been taking time to have girlfriends. and recovering from having girlfriends. recovering from having girlfriends is a surprisingly tough thing. it was precal. the one girl is in calculus and just helping the other. ti 89. older (or maybe just smarter, she was heavier, too). little girl said if i teach it, teach it. she seemed disappointed with the teacher. just goes over the homework and assigns a new stuff. mr. miller, i think. so i'm a perennial seeker. i believe in the perennial philosophy, that there is a unversal basis for all religions. in my understanding it has a bit of a psychological character more than a supernatural character. and i'm still just a seeker, because i do not have the final satisfying understanding that ends the search. but the funny thing is, i don't so much feel that i'm getting closer so much as more satisfied. ok, so an even older guy in a yarmulke sat down in the corner over there where i was sitting. he isn'twith them, it's just the couch seat with the table, and he's reading several books. he was thumbing through right to left, so i'm thinking it might be hebrew, and he was rocking back and forth in that way that you see jewish scholars and (just made the connection) autistic people do. and bill gates and the little gatesians. and one of the two girls seems to be taking notes. need to find something else to write about. i've also been eating too much. i got more fried chicken today. i haven't been gaining as much weight from eating that stuff as i would have thought. i think i eat less when i eat that. and i have been down around 183-185. augh man. i need to get an antenna so i can surf from here. just need to break down. you have nothing at the end. if you are accumulating, you need to watch out for what you are doing to yourself while doing it. so i decided to go to kroger. i went by the bank first to get $20 out. there was a guy taking a real long time. i finally went in there, and asked if there was trouble. it was saying insufficient funds. i said sometimes it runs out of money. he gave up. i got my $20 bucks. i told him i got $20, so he concluded there was money. i don't know if he tried again. anyway, i went to kroger. they seem pretty expensive. i got a watermelon, a gallon of orange juice, two half gallons of soy milk, and some more turkey lunch meat. that took up the whole $20. man. i'll grant that i buy expensive stuff, but seriously, that's pretty steep. i should try just doing that at aldi's. but aldi's isn't open at 11. people need to be scared of this administration. they are arresting protestors. that's just scary. and they are working to make sure people are scared of terrorists, but they are the ones that are making terrorists come after us so they will scare us. and then there was something about beating protestors. it has certainly been a day. first thing at work, bruce was showing concern about getting a proper procedure for accounts receivables and payables, which he has been trying to make my responsibility and i basically didn't manage it properly. i said i was thinking maybe i should quit, but he asked if i had a place to go and i didn't, so he said i shouldn't, and to tell the truth, that wouldn't have really solved his problem anyway. i had thought about that response, and my harsh answer was going to be it wasn't really his concern, but since it seemed like he really seemed like he still wanted me around, i let it go. and i'm sure he really just wanted me to do a better job, which seriously i haven't been because i've just been wanting to move on. anyway, that's how it started. and then some stuff i had gotten faxed in turned out to be totally useless. grr. but it was payday, and i had more hours than usually, so i got more money. what else. today was my brother edgar's and nephew daniel's birthday. i couldn't reach them on the phone and just drove over there. i went past g'town high school and there were a bunch of cars, and i thought they must be there, and as i was driving past, i kept thinking i should go back, but i didn't. not trusting my intuition. so i get to their house and they weren't there, and i drive back. i call edgar's cell phone, and yup, they were at the high school. so i got to see the tv studio where my other nephew nathan works. that was nice. and i let nathan drive my car back. learner's permit still. good to let him practice. and i had ice cream birthday cake, and i got to see the stuff daniel got for his birthday. he got an iPod. they really do seem cool. and he got some additional motors and gears for some electric car we had. we worked on switching them out. it really looked like a cool toy to get little kids working mechanically. daniel's just turned 11. it was a little frustrating because the mini phillips screwdriver shaft came loose from the handle, and he couldn't undo the screws. i helped him with that, and when it was apart, it was already bedtime. i tried to work quick to get the screws started in putting it back, but i lost track of which size went where. i hope daniel doesn't get too frustrated with it, and actually becomes mechanically inclined, which i have not been. i probably could fix things, but i'm just not relaxed with it like you should be, and it isn't fun. maybe it helps when you work on a second car, and aren't dependent on fixing the one you have. so then i went to platinum plus. extra money. not suddenly out of work. needing incentive to try to look for something better. and it's been a while. there seem to be really tall chicks there now. a couple of redheads looked nice. i've decided i prefer redheads, though really i'm not in a position to be picky. anyway, one was big and sort of, i guess it would be athletic. not skinny. kind of muscley, with little teeny tits. danced very vigorously, if not with a whole lot of finesse. interesting. i was a little annoyed that she was shaved and i couldn't tell if she was really, and the lighting there isn't so good, anyway. but there was another girl that was tall and thin, and maybe reddish, probably tinted, anyway. but i found her a lot more attractive. name she told me was alex, short for alexis, but stage name heaven. i actually waited in a corner, trying to get her to come over, using the force, and she did. she was glad i got her away from the boring conversation she was in with the guy she was talking to, and she did walk away, despite what she told me twenty seconds later, and i asked her "what about a dance?". and then the story goes off into new territory for me. when she gets me to the back, she says they have different types of dances. she says the standard dance is forty, and i just gave her forty. fine. but then i get her to finish that out. forty sixty, it's a little "naughtier". she'll touch me. for a hundred we'll touch each other and three songs, or we can go by time. didn't get specific on that one. and she asked me what i do, and i said i work on computers. i think i said i'm looking for more stuff. i forget exactly. she said she might hire me, because her laptop is freezing up. when she dials up. hmm. maybe she could get my number and will call me. hmm. dance was alright. i was pretty distracted by thinking at that point though. she actually asked me about it, and that completely distracted me from whatever it was. i think it was the whole "menu" thing, but the computer thing could have been in there too. she said come back when i was ready for round two. girl knows how to fish. so i left, but i was just too curious, so i got some more cash and went back. and got a card to give her. it was actually one of my old FedEx ones, and i wrote my home and cell on it. so if she tries me at work, she's out of luck. but she said she was going to try to take it in tomorrow to get it fixed, but she would have to get up to do that. she might call me. sounded like flirty dancer bullshit to me from the very beginning, but it might not be too bad for me. we'll see. honestly, i do like fixing computers. and she was cute. she said i had nice hands. but she was shaved to a little line, and it was too dark to tell the color. it did seem pretty dark, though. it's a shame that brunettes have such a poor rep. and as we were walking back, she said to come back if i'm frustrated and want to be satisfied. she didn't mention it before, but part of going by time is that being satisfied is part of the deal. so i finally got solicited. trippy. and i saw her sitting with a guy that i though had brought some chick in that i swear seemed to be working. when i left there was a cop looking around, and i saw a couple sitting outside, and one cop seemed to be taking notes, and looking at something in his hand. man. another cute little story alex told me. she was talking to a guy before she went on stage. when i went to tip her she said i must be ready for round 2, and i said how did she guess, and she said maybe it was a lucky guess. not quite sure. anyway, when she was done, she said she had to talk to this guy, and she went and did and came back. well the story she said was that she had to go show him to her friend, because he wanted someone to go home with, and her friend said aren't you going to tip my friend for bringing you over, and he pulled out a dollar. hmm. rather disappointing. probably going home by himself. somebody needs to organize a group called "concerned citizens against the treachery and deceit of George W. Bush". It could be web based! i'm sitting here at tj. mulligans. i made pancakes at 2:00, but haven't eaten anything since, so i felt like i needed a bootstrap to get eating. and to see people. lauren is the big blonde waitress. ashley was here. and i came in, and lee bob was here. man. lee bob has taken a job selling life insurance for liberty in obian county. and i came in to be near peeps. i'm about to leave the job for bruce to sink or swim. most likely sink. called doug to see if he had any projects at apley. it seems more like that he'd rather i lost out on my loans, because it's something he did a long time ago. i'd rather not, but this hover pattern hasn't really worked. probably i can't get anything in the time before i default. so there's a brunette that came in, name of carly. lee bob was impd. big titted. low cut. she's here with some blonde in a 24hours fitness tshirt who seems familiar. i looked over once and she was looking my way. but i think she was more looking out that looking at. so, there was a kid with a t-shirt that said "math geek". friend of charlie, who works here. looks like maybe she works here because she went back in the kitchen. and the tshirt was for olive branch high school class 2004. so, like, 18. underage. in a bar. played some pool i went over to check it out. not a very good pool player. man. south park is on. no sound. i miss being able to watch south park new when it comes out. but i do have the dvds that are out. so that should work. something about an anal probe. and alien visitors. confrontation with mike gennon. think it would take ten years before i could tell him something he doesn't already know, heh. so there's this jarhead (has a marine t-shirt) with cuff. asked dana. he's the door guy. you never know. so, i bummed a cig off dana. man. bar professionals. more evidence that chocolate has health benefits.. it has some antioxidant properties. antioxidants prevent oxidation damage. weight gain from eating too much chocolate, of course, would nullify any benefit. and antioxidants in general, like vitamins a c and e, have actually been shown to be useless, as it says in this article. calorie restriction--eating less-- is the only thing i've heard of that is really definitely proven to be good for you. i wrote a description of what happened at work. i realized that it might contain some info that bruce would consider confidential, so i extracted it to a private document. i'm not sure i buy the whole secrets mentality, but for now, i'm caving. i'm losing my principles. a while back, the husband of someone i wrote about here called my up at work. i'm not sure how he tracked me down exactly. but he didn't like what i said about his wife,and i looked at it, and it wasn't very important to me, so i erased it. man. conceding to censors. whatever. so, talking to leebob, i said something that might be worth remembering. i said that responsibility was up there with animism. it's a belief that some spirit embues actions in addition to the simple pragmatics of the matter. and it looks like the fascista have even gotten the nigga's at the mtv music awards to tone it down. ah, the joys of progress. what do i mean by calling them fascist? they try to scare people with the power of the military and the police to get them to submit. they intimidate the rest of the world by invading other countries. they arrest protestors. it's right there. don't be surprised when it gets worse. luckily, they probably aren't using amphetamines like the nazis, so they won't go paranoid on us. but they are fascist, and that ain't good. great, now i've gotten into the habit of staying up late. not good for me. tonight i stayed up reading about, of all things, vector and tensor analysis. i always liked reading about math. abstract enough to distract from everything else, and requiring serious attention, which helps the distraction. so i didn't know what hexogen was--the explosive of which they found traces in the wreckage of one of the russian planes that went down. it turns out it is just another word for RDX, which i knew about. the explosive in C4. you can make it with formaldehyde, ammonia, and fuming nitric acid, though you probably have to make your own fuming nitric using sulfuric acid (which you can find as a drain cleaner) and saltpeter (potassium nitrate). fuming nitric seems lie a nasty thing to mess with, so i never tried. but it does seem like the kind of thing a terrorist might mess with. actually, nitric acid itself, mixed with lucite or polystyrene, makes a pretty good explosive all by itself, though it wouldn't be good to touch. the u.s. fascists, who have recently invaded two countries, have arrested more protesters. i just saw on the news where they arrested a couple of folks at a bush rally wearing anti bush t-shirts (bush with a red circle and line marked through). thugs. can't sleep. thinking too much. thought maybe i should write before i just forget whatever good things i might think of. realized that 'just do it' really is good advice that i don't follow. i'm such a contrarian. i resist doing the right thing and just think about them instead. or think about not doing them. i guess that's more like walter mitty. i have an amateur radio license. well somewhere. if i don't really know where it is, i guess in an important sense i don't have it. i'm not supposed to talk on the airwaves if i don't have it with me. and i think it was issued in '94 so it's either expired or about to expire. if i could find it, i could renew it. but i really need to find the local ham radio people, or a radio store. and i want to get a wireless antenna and a proper pigtail with reverse smc instead of an N connector so i can use the little wireless hub antennas. and there was another purchase i need to get around to making-- i need a sheet feed scanner to finally scan the books i wanted to scan. i'm just too lazy to use the flatbed for that. i've bought so many for work now that i think i know what's a good one. it's cheap, and generally not so great for continuous use, but the lexmark x125 is not too bad for the kind of occasional use it need. so, some of the things that i think about instead of doing is call people for a job. and i can't call at night, but i do tend to just think about it at night. i finally found out what i need to do to get licensed to be a high school math teacher. there is a teaching licensure alternative C program for math and science people that only takes 18 credit hours and a 2 year hitch, or maybe three with the internship. it's supposed to be a pretty fast way to get started, though i would have to wait for spring for the cycle to begin. if i had been patient enough to look at the details a few months ago, i would have already been started. the thing that got me was that it said math or science degrees, and that's not what i have. now it says that engineering is clearly related. thanks a lot. i'm pretty sure it didn't say that before. so i missed it. there is the thing where you take the test, work and then take classes. but i think you probably had to start at the school year. it seems like probably their biggest thing is that they have to have the teacher for the whole year at a time, so late is not worth anything. i guess. from some of the teachers i talked to, i really just needed to talk to a principal or something to get hired. grr. just do it, as i said. or i'd have to get a whole 30 hour masters. i think it can all be done online, though, now, which i could probably do if i had a real job. but i'm not sure i even want to do it. it's such an extroverted way of life. i might not be able to stand it. it was bad enough going to the occasional meeting in corporate hell. going to meetings as a job might well be intolerable. then again, several of the drones i worked with had been teachers before sliding into that pit, and one of them was still doing it in the evenings. and it just seems like teaching high school math is more honorable that teaching a computer something or other that could only end up sending people to those salt mines. i just wouldn't feel right. and i keep seeing the damn diploma mill ads. itt-tech. some lobotomized network engineer. they seem like they pay him some decent scratch. probably more like intravenous sugar/vitamin solution. i guess i should just try to get one of those tech jobs that probably actually are out there, though i'm sure it is not the great economic frontier that the commercials try to convince people. find a better life in the off-world colonies! so many companies are using computers and networks to shave off costs and get rid of thinking human beings that there is in fact a demand for people to set up and occasionally tend them. still, i'm sure it's more of a scam than anything else. nursing, of course, is a different thing. we are running out of nurses. they don't make enough money to sue, so the whole american legal system strangling of the medical system isn't an issue for them, except in keeping they're wages down. and i think they are actually wage-slaves instead of salaried drones. and i do me to use the word 'drones' because salaries do make people lazy sap suckers. you give them something fairly nice to do, and you have to give them a steady supply of honey to keep them around. as opposed to the rest of the workers where they have to work or die, and you just need to give them a bare minimum to live or they might break their chains and be free. luckily our economic system has a proper place for the feral free, as opposed to the poor reds who i think just wasted them. and i guess it's more a matter of how much time is spent on the leash. only the lucky few manage to spend all their time eating everything in the jungle and have thus reverted to their natural state. anyway, the teaching thing is no help to my financial situation. i need to just find some kind of tech job. i would hope to get a programming thing. so much of that is going out to india, but surely there must be some stuff around here. the technical administration stuff is stuff that has to be on-site, so it can't be sent out there, but it has to be limited. but really i need to be calling folk, which i just hate doing. so i haven't been. hmm. in fact it's worse than simply not doing it. i keep finding other things to do instead. just whatever i can do to avoid doing what i really should do. the other things are all more pleasant. and the loss from not doing the right thing isn't an immediate or obvious painful thing. it's just a loss that i can be distracted from if i do something else. this is all the very nature of procrastinating. there must be something wrong with my connection here at home. the ftp transmit here just doesn't work most of the time, but when i do i elsewhere, like at work, or even at tj mulligans where the signal strength is much worse, it works much more consistently. maybe it's something with the multiple routers or the dsl link. or more likely there is something strange in the radio transmission, like maybe the signal is strong but there is some kind of reflection that causes errors. i wish i hadnt blown off eve anderssen when her people contacted me about working and maybe teaching at northface u. it sounds like a mill, but she sure is cute. so the thing that most confused me, was that in the little bit of a phone conversation that we had. was that wynne said "we shouldn't see each other". it has always kind of bugged me that all i had from her was a conversation, because i can't remember all the exact words and being the analytic type i would have like to analyze it forever. all i could ever analyze was that one quote that i remember, and it isn't really much to go on. because it seems to me that you say you "shouldn't" do something if you really might want to, but have some other reason where it might be a bad thing. so i was stuck thinking maybe she wanted to hear from me, but thought better of it. and it was tough for me because i would have liked to do what she wanted, but i that she knew best. it caused a bit of internal conflict. and the thing was that it was possible that whatever the bad thing was might res''olve itself or be fixable. and it was all just a very different thing from her just not wanting to see me. i think someone asked me later if she had ever told me not to see her, and with the confusion i had over what she had said, i had to say no, she didn't say that, because honestly that is not how it sounded to me. saying something is not a good idea just isn't the same as saying not to do it. in one way of interpreting the speech act, it could be, and it seems to me now that it probably was her intent, but i was factoring in that she has a better understanding of english than i, and i assumed that she would speak clearly if she wanted to. but, alas, that is one of the the mysteries of the NFish. they aren't so into exactness and precision as making things feel as right as possible and avoiding hurting anybody's feelings. an easy source for confusion, them. i had one of those feelings today about not wanting to waste any time. the problem i have with studying tai chi and the chinese internal martial arts is that i don't believe the concept of chi is correct. there probably is something going on there, but it probably isn't chi that's doing it. some of it might just be from suggestability like in hypnosis. anything that only works for some special people always has a good chance of involving suggestibility. some of the abilities to throw people around could come from proper technique. so i was starting to spend at least some money going out and drinking beer, but with the gout, i don't want to drink beer, so i spend almost nothing, but i also don't go ouot, so i don't see people. i'm going to try to go somewhere. i used to go to starbucks. i need to find a coffee shop with internet. maybe i'll go to the place downtown. i'm sitting at the place that used to be the map room. having a hot chocolate. i was walking around downtown, actually the edge of downtown. there use to be a place with a first tennessee atm right next to here. but it was closed up. on of the first thing i saw on this short walkabout. was a gorgeous blonde. today i took match.com's personal attraction test. there was a hideous first bit where i was supposed to pick my chin type and nose type and overall body type. grr. but the thing i was interested in, learning about what i like. i'm not sure what they were after. they had pictures of a few dozen models, and they would have me pick the best in various comparison. i think they have some theories about what features people make decisions on, and they were trying to find the weights i put on them. they had one test where they have about 10 picture up at a time, switching to new ones every second or so, and you pick the most attractive, or in one, the least attractive. i think it just doesn't matter that much. and a lot of them were pretty plain or rather ugly. i guess they are trying to make some kind of decision tree model, and you really need negatives for that. but i'm sitting here looking at women now,and they all seem cute. i guess it's just that only young women are out and that's really the most important thing. anyway, i was walking around, and i decided to try the first tennessee that i knew was out there. i was thinking it was near fourth, but i couldn't remember if it was union or poplar. so i went to union and walked out it. and that put me past the baseball field. game today. lots of folks out. going up fourth it was really empty, though. the bank was actually at poplar an thomas, about a block east of fourth. and just my luck, the atm wouldn't scan the card. man, cuties keep walking down the street. but there was an exxon across the street and exxon has first tennessee atms. as i was in there and walking back, i saw a guy trying to work the thing. aw... anolder indian couple, and oriental girl, and a tubby blonde, i wonder what the story is with that. so i have some cash. walking back i walked past the jail. by the entrance there were folks standing around. now i'm just sitting here. having a hot chocolate. since he wrote me a note, i googled Wyman Brantley, whom I hear from now and again. his web presence seems to shift around a bit. and then i saw that his weblog links to mine. augh! i guess that's nice but it's bit of a surprise. maybe i should hunt down all links to me. i think i've down that before. it's not really a big deal i guess. it just increases the likelihood that i'm wasting people's time. and it might help explain why when i called wendy a slut there were so many hits on her site referred to from here. since his sight does have links to other sites, i had a few more to check out. but man, whenever i read anyone else blog, i never find that they have anything interesting to say. it's universal. so i know that my stuff is going to be just as uniteresting to other people. it's sad, but that's life, i guess. you just gotta say "la vee". e pleb nista back at empire coffee company. i asked for a smooth smoothie. i only cause confusing. and i wanteed a red one. strawberry banana. i went by tower records and peabody place. in peabody place, there was a strong wireless signal, but i couldn't reach the internet. blech. at tower records i found a couple of things, joe's apartment and jay and silent bob, but i just didn't feel like buying. or maybe i didn't feel like carrying them around. so i was thinking of just heading back, and walking towards the parking can be fun garage, there was a couple with two little bitty preschool kids walking that way. and when they were actually going to the same place, i was thinking i didn't want to go that way. i don't want to be like them. grr. breeders. so i came back here. and they are going to do something lame and have music and maybe apoetry reading. augh. but at least i'm having a smoothie. and at the tower records, i saw the indian couple and the asian girl and the tubby blonde chick. now brendan crouch is getting up there. maybe i just needed to sit down. too much walking. cartman was right. hippies suck. somebody shoot me in the head. ended up getting the movies. and watching jay and silent bob strike back. don't that beat all. girls on trampolines is an olympic event. they aren't wearing little skirts or underwear, but they do seem to have bigger tits than most gymnasts. a nightmare! by all accounts. i was staying in a haunted house, where everyon had killed themselves, and the ghosts did the shining thing where they made us relive they're day. but i wasn't afraid so much, because i realized they were disembodied and not physical and could only hurt you by making you sad and want to die. which is all i had to worry about,but knowing that, it wasn't dangerous. and i realized that they were sick souls and could be helped, and i ended up helping some of them feel better, like a psychologist. before this ghost story, i dreamt that i got suddenly married to michele, but then we annuled it. grr. then i started staying at the haunted house. at the end of it, i was trying to wake up. and the thing that makes it more of a nightmare, is that afterwords, i had trouble going back to sleep for thinking about it. one of the things i was thinking about was that believing in ghosts isn't opened minded so much as having the sheep-like closed mind of believing the tired old idea of disembodied spirits. but just dismissing the idea isn't very "open" either. there are things that happen to people that make them think there are such things. one of them has to be the sleep paralysis thing, were you feel stuck and there are people around doing stuff to you. the succubus thing. the one that also pops up as alien abduction hallucinations. a big difference between conservatives and progressive. conservatives believe in their hearts that most of the people are sheep and really needed to be led along (and manipulated) to acting their way, which is the right way. it's at least a bit fascist. progressives believe in letting people be however they have ended up, but then sharing stuff with them even if they are different. pubes has this thing now about the war was the right thing to do, even if he had to fool people into going into it. something in the way his pinhead brain thinks things should be done. you do things because they feel like something everyone would feel they are the right thing to do, even though there have always been plenty of bad things that everyone would think is the right thing to do. burning witches comes to mind. the whole culture is being altered be more like the witch-burning days. that culture of unknown fear. pitiful. pubes is an iniquisitor. they act like terrorists are magical evil. they even use technology and unfair interrogation like the witch hunters of old. Happy Friday the 13th!
A quote which is hanging up at the office: I came across two new Erins today, other than the boss-lady at work who is also named Erin. One was someone applying for job at the office. I probably won't see her again. The other I didn't see, she just sent me an e-mail, but didn't send her e-mail address, so I guess I won't write her back (she was using her parents' account). This Erin is Hutichison graduate, and had a comment about what i said on this day about austin chu and ashley mcarthur. she knows them both, and seemed to say that austin is smarter, and ashley is actually more the nerd and works harder at stuff. i don't know. i think the working harder to me says she's smarter. anyway, the coolidge quote also was the kind of thing i was thinking of at the time. i was really feeling sad this morning, and i felt better getting a note from a cutie, even if she didn't want to hear back from me. and maybe i will finally work on getting some code so people can post comments. (yeah, that'll happen). i'm watching the alien vs. predator making of special on fox. it makes me really want to stay away from this moving. somebody said something like they have 3-d model that can make the predator look like it's invisible. um. i just don't expect dumbasses to make a good movie. it is making me totally not care. and, like, part of the story is that the predators have set up a hunting outpost where they have to go hunt aliens to prove themselves. mercy. augh. the pigtail i ordered for jordy's wireless doesn't fit the antenna i have. i guess i should have done more research, or dug out my wireless hacks book. oh well. more wasted money. so, a few days ago, i bopped around on the channels, and on pbs there was a special on peter paul and mary. it got me to look up whether _puff the magic dragon_ was about marijuana. i had never really followed the analogy. and they just deny it. there are a few little word correspondences. it was based on a poem from some guy at cornell in '59. so they might have shifted it around when the original joke was in there. and the most ludicrous thing about it was that they said that in '59 no one at cornell smoked pot. gimme a break. but looking at that stuff, i also found that "lucy in the sky with diamonds" was supposed to not have the name because it spelled LSD. The story that john gives, and paul said it too, was that it was the name julian gave a little drawing of his little girlfriend lucy at school when he was 5. i'd like to see the picture. anyway i don't by it. john was doing a lot of acid at the time. i might believe that julian had made up the phrase his own self to use the letters LSD. I wouldn't expect him to remember. and john said he didn't notice it till someone told him later. but, seriously, that was such total bullshit, that even though i have always been a fan, i really lost a lot of respect for them. either they were just pathetically lying, or they were idiots, and neither is a good thing. but back to peter paul and mary. i had a strange reaction seeing mary. young mary at first seemed kind of cute, the way young women often do, but the old mary is just horribly ugly. she looks like a frog. or maybe a hutt. just nasty. but looking at clips of the old mary, and then switching back to the young mary, i started looking at the young mary differently, and she started looking ugly too. i was starting to kind of see her as having a really wide froggy looking mouth, and blocky face. she just didn't look good anymore. ron palillo vs dustin diamond. on celebrity boxing. arnold horshack vs. screech on saved by the bell. screech has 50 pounds and 6 inches on him. horshack. started in short. in the seocond round, a knockdown. chin in the air. a blowout. second knockdown. called. total mismatch. and now he's got a shiner. so one of the books i have, _strategies in unarmed combat_ actually talks about strategies for different size and strength mismatches. for example if you are stonger but shorter than the other guy, you want to just get in close and slug it out, or maybe even wrestle. if taller but weaker, like minute bol versus refrigerator perry. you want to stay long and jab. if you are unlucky enough to get the total mismatch, weaker and shorter, you have to stay on the outside and go for indirect and flank attacks and move a lot. horshack didn't go for that. he started hanging back after he was clocked good. but the fridge vs. minute. professional athletes. it's going to be points. it keeps going to a clench. the problem is that there is just no way the nute can hurt the fridge. it looks like they have one minute rounds. what's up with that. pitiful fight. from what the fridge said, he couldn't see anything but his belt. he hardly even fought. now they got a guy vs a chick. i don't know. joey buttafuoco. i don't know who the chick is. some wrestler. i hope she wins. or at least looks like she knows what she's doing. but it sounds like another total mismatch. joey looks like he's got some heat. 245 pounds. vs. 170 (big girl--chyna- joanie laurer)-- oh man, it's chyna, i think i saw a book about just her. first round is just abuse. and there isn't time for her to wear him down with these short rounds. she has no chance. he pushed her down a couple times. boo. joey gets it by majority decision. I'm sitting here at the starbucks at poplar and white station. an open wireless router "testmat" gives a solid light, but shows "out of range" on strength. maybe if i had an antenna. doug the it recruiter whom i've seen at temperance is sitting in here. there's another guy with a laptop. i bet the wireless works for him. didn't sleep well last night. maybe started falling asleep at 5. but then, if i had a decent antenna, i could probably hit one of the several routers that are around the starbucks at ridgeway. but i'm getting to see them change the billboard. it said "peer-to-peer", so i wonder if it could have just been the guy's laptop poling. but the signal was weak. i don't know. tark came by yesterday. he was looking at the teaching company stuff ansked if i had got any new ones. i don't have a commute, or a lot of extra cash. but there is one on the philosophhy of religion that seemed interesting. the overview said it talka about both the question whether it can be proved if god does exist as to whether it can be proved that god does not exist. well, if i remember my atheist dogma, part of the problem with the proofs of existence is that they don't ever prove the existence of a specific god, like the angry god of abraham or the kind forgiving god of the new testament (and i think the bible actually has other versions as well). but my main thought was that part of deeper religious thought is that god is not any of the limited visions of him that we create, so it is sort of trivially true that no particular conceptualized version of god actually exists. i'm not sure if the inductive conclusion is valid that since none of the specific versions is true there is no real god out there. that might persuade some. god is mysterious. but there is the the "via negativa", and the "not this, not that" approach of some hindu seeking. i had a vegetarian day. usually if i eat anything, there will be some meat. but not today. maybe more octo-lavo, though. a couple of microwave boiled eggs for brefkist. nothing for lunch but the venti soy chai at starbucks. and for dinner i fried up some freedom fries. potatoes, canola oil, and ketchup. filling. and a quart of lemonade in there. not starving for want of carbohydrates. few vitamins to speak of, but they aren't such a huge deal. actually, eggs have vitamins. and i had orange juice (with calcium). i guess it wasn't all that terrible. looking up swollen joints on the internet, i am sure i have gout. i think my dad has it too. the joint on the big toe is called the first metatarsophalangeal joint, and it's the most likely one to have gout. and the ankle is up there, and i just happen to have it there, too. great. gout. i guess i need to go to the doctor, since it's a long-term thing. one thing i read said that if you treat it within an hour of starting, it could be gone in a day, if you start after a week, it could take days. reading a little more, probably losing that weight did it, and i think it's just coming back. and eating a lot of meat hasn't been good for me. but it says around a week should be it, though walking around will probably make it last longer. and i see there's a word for gout in the big toe: podagra. i killed another roach today. i had been hearing him run around in the dark. but i caught him in the kitchen under the overhang of the cabinets. my foot hurts. augh! i think i said it was my toe, but it's the second joint on the big toe on my left foot, so it's sort of at the ball of my foot. i just limp around. and it's started sort of throbbing. not constantly, but every 10 or 20 seconds it has a little spasm of pain for about a second. really annoying. i've been walking around too much tonight i guess. trying to do some laundry. i should probably take an aspirin or something. i don't think i have seen most of the episodes in the fourth season. that was interesting. but i think i must not be in such a good mood, because i didn't have the awesome kind of reaction i remember from the other ones. and the commentaries didn't seem quite so good. probably just my mood. i went to aldi and spent $7, which i think is less than what i would have spent at kroger. 2 loaves of wheat bread. they had some for 70 cents, and some for $1.30 and i got the more expensive. a quart of soymilk. some salami. and some vienna sausages. not too much, but good enough to last a little while. maybe it'll get me to start baking my own bread. i had a hankering to watch some south park. i put one in in the dvd player in my room. the one in the den, the apex, that i thought i fixed, doesn't work after all. anyway, i decided to look on amazon to see if season 4 was out yet, and it was, so i went to wal-mart and got it. we'll see how it is. there are probably episodes that i haven't seen. and it has commentary-mini. i love the commentary mini, and i was thinking that this came out before i ever got around to going on the website and saying how i loved the commentary mini. sitting here waiting for _harold and kumar go to white castle to start_. trailer for a new exorcist movie. ho hum. noisy. soldier with no name? a quentin tarantino martial arts movie (hero). blech. and i came in during the commercial. the coke c2 commercial, though, i have to admit, seemed pretty cool. break dancing. guy spinning on his head. haven't seen that in a while. a new blade movie. blech. i tried renting on of them. it was unwatchable. the scale said i weighed 184 pounds this morning. so i've lost ten pounds in the last few weeks. and there was a bucket of kfc chicken in there a few days ago. but my toe hurts. started when i woke up this morning. i don't know i could have hurt it when i was sleeping. bad movie trailer after bad movie trailer. please make them stop! it was ok. not as many laughs as i'd like. but a few. i got some money to go grocery shopping, and went into the kroger's right there. looked around. things were just so expensive that i didn't feel like buying anything. and i didn't see where the soymilk was. i think i'll just go to aldi. they aren't open on sunday, but their stuff is pretty cheap.. that is just irksome. like the soul of the city died. it's just before 3 in the morning, and i can't think of anywhere to go. there used to be the map room downtown. but it's a coffeeshop, closes at 11 now. 24 hour diners are just sad places, for drunk people to sober up. that place was a cool place to be. maybe there is somewhere that i don't know about, but i don't know. maybe there's some place out east. or maybe on beale street. seems like i would have known a place on beale street. jordy is getting creaky. i was browsing on a web page at st.jude, and it froze up. it freezes up more and more often on web pages. probably 8fancy javascript with some kind of busy loop because of changes in the language. doesn't parse right anymore. so i've been thinking of a replacement. and something i just recently saw in _free inquiry_. i went to my happy place and charge some books, including that magazine from the skeptical inquirer people. i looked at the skeptical inquirer this month, and got the feeling that they were just having the same articles over and over. i used to read that magazine cover to cover, but eventually i guess it got boring. it would only come every other month, so it took a while for me to be saturated, but eventually i did. they did seem to capture my questioning sensibility, though, and that must be what made _free inquiry_ seem interesting. they had an article, by richard dawkings, on what the function of religion was, something i've thought about, and that article was the main reason i picked it up. it was a bit dissappointing. dawkins of course was taking an evolutionary perspective. things that waste resources, like religion, get selected out. he finally gets around to the fairly obvious (I thought) idea that it must be that religion used other features that evolved because they were useful. the social tendency to obey dominance roles in a pecking order, which for everyone means to be submissive to the people above you, is critical for surviving in a complex and thus truly human society. and you also have to have the tendency to dominate others sometimes, so we have the internal conflicts of our wolf nature and our sheep nature. so everyone relates to there being a big guy in charge, and we look for the god within, but we also have the little person inside that needs a sky father to look up to. all very simple psychological projection. the dissappointing thing about this article was the thing that has alienated me from the pure atheists. _free inquiry_, by the way, is a magazine of secular humanists, which is a fairly fancy word for a calm branch of atheism. the problem i have with them, which robert orr pointed out to me, is that they suffer from the exact same kind of material, literalist interpretation of religious teachings that fundamentalists do. if you're a baptist, i have to sympathize, but good intentions don't make up for willful ignorance. this poor point of view gets such people to miss the real religious messages, which are of course answers or, maybe it would be better to say, solutions, to psychological issues, and are not about matters of fact. perhaps it is unfortunate but it is sometimes true that delusions, beliefs that are not literally true, are sometimes psychologically helpful. like john said, whatever gets you through the night. i have to say, a lot of religious people are messed up enough that religious false beliefs are the best they can do. and i'm afraid it can be a "local maximum", to use a little engineering jargon. if you have a system that tries to get better and better, it may find the best place that is near it, even though there is a better place somewhere out there, and it would have to go out in the rain, or go to a worse place temporarily to find it. plus, it doesn't know if there is a better place, and it doesn't really know where it is. (i just killed a big roach. i heard him running around as i'm writing this in the dark. i've been hearing him for a few nights now. i need to clean this place up a bit.) ok. so i got it for the article about religion, but there was also one about how things are going in the future, and it says that in japan they have a saying that they have the "thumb generation". kids text messaging with their phones. but it turns out that thumbs, which are almost ignored in typing. on this keyboard, i don't even use my thumbs, but i don't look at the keyboard, so i do touch type, though not as fast, probably, as with a real keyboard. i'm sitting in the dark, which is probably why i heard the roach come out. but it turns out that thumbs are quite dextrous, and you can get pretty good typing out of them, though it is hunt and peck, i'm sure. i think i remember seeing a long time ago that you could get something like 30 wpm out of hunt and peck. it think my best touch-typing speed was 50, not really very good, but typing for programming is not really held up by typing speed (at least that is a conceit i've had for a long time), so i never really tried to push my speed. doug types very fast. and he's a crappy programmer. annoyingly overconfident, though. anyway, i'm thinking of getting a new pocket computer toy. i write so much on jordy, though, and the typing is so wonderfully unconscious, that i don't know if i can go with anything but a keyboard. i might actually like one of those seperate ones, like on the palm VII that i gave aimee. or maybe i could find something that uses some kind of wireless standard thing. the compaq internet appliance that is my internet connection in the den uses a big battery powered keyboard that is separate but connected wirelessly to the screen. and i've also been thinking about getting the picture phone thing with the keyboard. i've been seeing jordy's screen flicker. i've already have one of these things die. i think there is an issue with the connectors on folding screens. my laptop, did the same thing. anyway, now it's 4:20. i don't really feel like going out anymore. maybe i'll try to go back to sleep. there was something i forgot about. i saw george lakoff talking on _now_ on pbs. linguist from berkeley. i've read several books by him. cool ideas. anyway, he was talking about how the regressives--a much better word than conservatives, i think-- use little language word tricks to reframe issues. by saying a repeating the phrase "tax relief" you set up a concept. being civically responsible and paying your dues in society is set up as something bad, like a catastophe, that you need relief from. i can see that "fiscal responsibility" was one on the other side. he had other examples too. now "liberal" has been charged to be a bad thing. they talk about people being the "most liberal". the cool way lakoff had of dealing with that is to call them "progressives". he also talked about how the phrase "war on terror" helps the regressives. making it a war gives pubes war time powers, which legal limits what you can say about the government. and "terror" makes it about everything that could ever be bad. the response Lakoff suggests is to say war on "terrorists", because there are only a limited number of them, maybe thousands, and they actually are quite a defeatable enemy, no match for 250 million americans, and they have no big government backing thing. and if they just saw we are "not safer" after little pubes' iraq war, that's just like nixon saying "i am not a crook"-- not convincing. they need to be positive and saying it is more dangerous and there are more terrorists now, which, i guess i have to concede, is true. i like to think we make up for it by now being the scary, killing gun-crazy bastards we have always been. finally people really know what we're like, but maybe there are still americans who aren't like that. like nick machiavelli said, it's safer to be feared than loved. but, darn it, people all over the world were starting to love us for our rock music and mcdonalds. go GI! but it was always our crazy gun-toting ways that got us into those other countries in the first place. i wonder if buddhist countries have serial killers. and they define the issue with the term "gay marriage". maybe if they say "monogamy rights" it would help. these are people who have decided not to be permiscuous, which is good for everyone. it would be good to have the extra little government benefits that they are asking for. but it you say the term "gay marriage" you have to think "gay sex", and if you ask someone if they like gay sex, um, they will be uncomfortable. they probably don't even like to think about the image. just one of the many ways that the regressives have been using word choices to frame the issues. i guess i might have been caught up with them a bit. i can always sympathize with both sides. i just saw on cnn.com the title of star wars episode 3. revenge of the sith. it parallels revenge of the jedi, the original title of return of the jedi. i wonder how he's going to finagle a happy ending out of this one. and i still hope someday to use computer movie making technology to make "revenge of the jedi" as i heard the original conception. that luke is a clone of vader. that ob1 is a clone, of the same line as the evil emperor (didn't they bothe have the same vaguely british accent?). that luke turns to the dark side (if you look at the way he uses the force, it's always pretty evil), and the emperor corrupts him. actually, i think about it, trying to kill the emperor in anger like that was pretty dark. one thing we know that happens in sith, though. princess gets knocked up. but they are married already, so i guess it's alright. would you weep for all the christians in hell? there are a lot of them. bush says he is a christian. it'd be nice if he said he trusts in god, as muslims do, so he doesn't always look like he is against them. i'll admit a weakness i have. i like to read about martial arts secrets, but i don't like physical training in martial arts. i got a lot of books. it turns out there is a lot of pressure point stuff buried in everything, but most martial arts training is just collections of fairly easy to do, but clumsy and not very effective stuff. i remember reading a long time ago, and i don't remember now if i tracked down a copy and it's sitting somewhere in a box or hidden back in a shelf , a book on secret martial arts of the world. there was one guy who had mastered the knockout punch to the chin. couldn't do anything else, but could knock you out with a tag on the chin. one thing i have sort of studied is bruce lee's power punch. i've got a book in it, and i actually did take a short class on it. one of the books i got a few days ago was "secret tactics" some stuff by various old dead japanese guys. and today i found _moonstone_ at bookstar, so i decided to spring for _the power of internal martial arts: combat secrets of ba gua, tai chim and hsing-i_. i have been thinking of taking tai chi at a place that's a fair drive from here but in town. it's called wu shu tai chi, so it is actually fighting tai chi, instead of just the form. i've actually got a bunch of tai chi books by one of the world's expert, yang jwing ming, but he puts so much in them that i just can't seem to get anything out of it. this guy in this new book has a little section of the main ideas, and that's all i really want. not technique after technique. all the chin na stuff in every move. i actually also have a couple of books on dim mak techniques, culled out of the tai chi form by an aussie, something like earl montague, and a long time ago, i learned his little form. i read the section on tai chi. worth the money. very clear and straightforward. i'm not sure how interested i am in studying it for the ten years required to learn it, but at least i have an understanding of what it's going for now. the book has no index, which is annoying. but flipping through it, there's a list of where and when and what he studied. studied many different styles since '63. and dude studied with O-Sensei Ueshiba in 67-69. now that's damn impressive. and he is almost positive that o-sensei studied ba gua in china, but with the nips attitude about the chinese, there was no way he would ever admit it. one thing from the book, though tai chi is more popular (100 million people do the form in china, though not many do it as fighting), he says ba gua is better, and they do the form fast so it is an aerobic workout too. so i'm reading a bit in the section on ba gua. they don't know the origins, but i sounds like the founder was the old guy in kill bill II. uh oh. from the history of tai chi, it seems that wu shu, which mean martial techniques, was a tradition that watered down the thing. it focuses on the external movements and not the internal meanings and fighting techniques. it's like doing it as a dance form. so maybe this placein town isn't such a good place. the most important thing is to love oneself. without that, a person is quite pitiful, though i suppose life is generally easy enough that one might not seem to do so bad. there is a strong element of self-hatred that is created by this culture. so i guess somethings happened that i don't love myself so much. it's certainly not thing where either you do or you don't. the more you love yourself, the better you will do for yourself. not that indulging is what you do in love. you help. you understand. you reveal. you pay attention. you accept. and you do some fun things. mostly you're just happy to be with the self in question. so this dream was lucid. and thinking about it, i realized that thinking in words even as fast as you can speak, is still very limited. and as slow as i type on this little keyboard, it's an even slower way to think through things, but thinking in words has the great advantage that it is 100% analysis. everything has to be broken down into pieces that are regular, recognizable words. real thinking is what a brain is doing when it's dreaming. it includes visual imaginings, and sound imaginings, and speaking and thoughts. actually, dreaming might be considered even a little purer form of thought, because when we're awake, we hold ourselves down with the sensations from the world, and imaginings are much shallower. in dreams, the whole fabric of the world tears away like paper, but in waking, only the mental part tears, which is usually just the train of verbal thought. the world appears constant because the flow of things comes from the fairly constant material from "out there". the matter is pretty stable. mass in itself means stuff that resists moving. but i didn't really want to get into ontological metaphysical philosophy. i guess nightmare isn't the word. but dream that scares me into thinking about my life doesn't have a good term, for it. so i was dreaming. and i realized i was dreaming. and i was wondering want i wanted so i could try to dream about it. something that happened earlier tonight, i dream i woke up at 2:64 or 12:56, depending on which time i looked at the clock (my clock has stuff in front of it so i dont always see all the digits. and i turned on the tv to a classic star trek with resstors, and replicating aliens, and then some other interesting sci fi show i have forgotten. some time after that i realized that with the clock wrong, i must have been dreaming all that. skip forward to the most recent dream. i was typing or playing on this computer at a table in a school sort of place (and i had argued with my mom and been angry about using this for notes instead of paper and more general for not doing things in the day but just doing intellectual stuff) and people came by, and sat there. there was a young woman, who mentioned getting out early (from the military) talking to an older guy. and i said in there the thing from _starship troopers_ that citizenship requires service. i got up and went out, and started to realize i was dreaming. trying to think what i really wanted to see. i went into a place that made me think it was ut med school. and i thought of a name--never actually imagined her. i started going through doors, into little rooms covered with soft, fancy cloth-- just comfortable places to be with nothing really happening. i just couldn't think of anything, though i'm not really good at conjuring up places when i'm dreaming lucidly. and i woke up. and thought about how slow verbal thinking is compared to what a brain does in dreaming. and how i don't really know what i want, and maybe have been afraid to try to get it, maybe felt betrayed by things i wanted, or maybe absorbed in a foolish way the buddhist idea that desire causes suffering. christianity has a thing against greed and other kinds of desire, probably for the same sorts of psychological reasons. they can get you into trouble, because they are ultimately unfullfilling. but as for my life, i let myself get pretty stuck in not at least working harder for stuff that i really want. and i did go and buy things on credit without doing the work to pay for them first. sucked into that one, perhaps. but more important, i have not tried hard enough to use the abilities i have to work. i only kept in the computer thing for a couple of years. though, granted, i thought i was going to move on and do other stuff, working for myself where i could make money from my own projects, but i didn't manage it. talents are given and must be used or they're taken away. hmm. and i feel a little nauseated. the world is getting silly. at&t is pulling out of the long distance market. cnn had a heading something like "beheading perverts law". aw man, i just turned on 'who wants to me a millionaire', and for $8000, it was a medium question, dude was asked where is beale street, birthplace of the blues. and he was going to guess (you shouldn't guess on this show) charlotte. then he used a fifty-fifty, and it was eliminated. so at this point he should know he doesn't know. and then he guessed new orleans! augh! where is our chamber of commerce? and hooters has an airline affiliate. i thought i heard that. so, aimee gave me a hug at the meeting tonight. she is such a little sweetheart. sitting here at tj mulligans. ashley and becky. such cuties.
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cool. my apex ad-1100w dvd player, the cheapest one you can get at walmart for like $65, stopped working. it would always come up with "no disc". I opened itup, and it wasn't even spinning the disk up. so i look on the interenet and found this discussion. I tried moving the little lens thing back on the rod, and that made it work, though that would have been a pain to have to do. Then I did what RustyNail said, and unhooked the little black plastic thing from the bottom, and now it works alright. It seems to have some other problem on on of my south park disks searching for scenes, but at least disks play now. I also noticed when doing this, that you don't need to remove the case to do this. the little tabs stick out the bottom of the case, and u could just unhook them from the bottom without opening it up. There actually are a lot of tabs sticking out the bottom. These are the ones that are closest to the center on the bottom. Two little quarter inch wide black tabs just forward (maybe an inch) and back of a teeny little positioner nub that is dead center of the bottom. Squeezing them and pushing in should unhook them. This little piece hold a ribbon cable that goes to the lens, and it seems to just get too tight wo the lens can't slide back into position properly. Anyway, it's easy, and now it works. It even reads vcds, which I had trouble with before. Though i have to say the video output on the vcds is terrible, compared to what comes out on my other player. i probably won't play them on it. I know Kim has one of these models. maybe she'll try it and get it to work. I have some little amplified speakers (about 30W) connected to the audio output on it (so i can have good sound for movies), and now i'm playing a music cd. steppenwolf's greatest hits. I think I'm just going to skip watching _I, Robot_. maybe I'll watch it when it comes out on DVD. I didn't go out on thursday. i had been looking forward to it, but i slept instead. i didn't get off work till later than usual, and didn't get a proper nap. and i didn't go out friday either. saving money, i guess. ouch. the cd seems to occasionally pause. not good. oh well. it is probably scratched. i hate having a fly in my room. swatting tends to be more of a reflex unconscious kind of thing for me, but it manage to be pretty good. i can usually hit them out of the air. so i had a fly in here, and i was swatting at it in the air with a fly swatter, and i look at the fly swatter, and a fly is stuck in one of the little holes. i didn't notice it before that. and there was no buzzing anymore. i guess i got it. but that's a trippy way to swat a fly. last friday a headhunter sent me an email about a 6 month contract programming at java at fedex. i'd like to do it, but i'm not holding my breath. she said they want to make it a permanent position, but it isn't contract to hire. they haven't gotten the approval for a position yet. and she asked who my manager was. i don't know if that's a good thing. stn thill, if i could get just a little paid down on the debts, i might have some space to move on. four in the morning. we don't need no water, let the motherfucker burn. burn motherfucker. did michael moore go to iraq? his movie had footage there from march before the war of kids playing, and then he was talking to troopers about the music they were playing. they can plug their cd players into the tank sound system. adrenaline. and anger and fear. it reminds me that sixty minutes thing where they said that sean penn is so full of rage. and how angry he makes me, for marrying and divorcing madonna. and that one time atthe map room at three in the morning when he and it might have been his wife and some other girl were looking for an after hours beer and i held the door for one of them but not him. didn't even see him, or he can hold his own door. still, i can't say i really would have wanted to see him. i have that kind of rage. so the deal with seeing sauron's eye is that jordy's little rectangular screen leaves an eye-shaped afterimage. i read _job_ by heinlein. wasn't even speculative. more of a parallel worlds fantasy. and it had an odd kind of mccartney-style switching switching of themes at the end. they were switching between parallel worlds for most of it, then there was the rapture, and dude was in heaven (which was silly) and hell, which didn't seem so bad. it was ok. bit of a page-turner. forgettable. went to see anchorman. i liked it. maybe i should just stick to comedies. there was one thing where brick says he read that women's menstrual cycle attracts bears, and that just made a whole lot of the women giggle. much silliness. which was good. christina applegate had really terrible acting, which seemed like the plan--the lines just didnt seem real. nice heinie, though. great tunage. i really liked the a capella skyrockets in flight. went to see fahrenheit 9/11. i thought it was pretty good. maybe a little boring towards the end. or just meaningless tearjerky. i really got the feeling at times he was making a more of a deal about things than they really were. like then getting the bin ladens out of the us. they have a crazy cousin. i'd want them to be able to get out of the country too. but the tunes were good, and there were some chuckles. i didn't find it edifying, but somewhat entertaining. over the weekend i read a couple of books, _perfume_ and _i, robot_. _perfume: the study of a murderer_ was the book discussion group book for this month, and i though it was quite good. it was quite strange though, which i like. and it was odd for me in that i thought it was just not really believable, but it got me to suspend judgement. maybe it was just so far out there that it didn't matter anymore. it bothers me when things come close, and clearly the writer us trying to be real, but just out of ignorance they make mistakes. and it had some kind of allegorical sounding character, maybe, but i couldn't figure out what it was trying to parallel. or maybe it was just this intriguing character study. the main character, grenouille, is a genius with scents in paris in the 18th century. he perceieves the world clearly through smell, and even walks in the dark using smell. and he gets a job with a perfumer and creates amazing perfumes, and makes a lot of money for the owner, but is only paid minimally. he learns how to distill scents and tries to get the scent of glass (which he can smell). as a kid though, he discovered the best scent of the world, and it's this little red-head, so he goes up to her, strangles her, and then smells her. he has a great memory for smell, too, so he spends years living in a cave and just indulging in the memory. then he goes to a really important perfuming town where they use even better techniques to extract scents, and he learns about them. while there, he detects yet another perfect scent, and it's actually just the promise from someone whom will reach her peak in 2 years, so he plans and waits. he's going to extract her scent! and a few months before the big day, he realizes he can do better if he establishes a less good base to add it to, so he bashes two dozen girls over the head and uses a process involving wrapping them in oily cloth (which pulls out the scent--they put some flower petals in oil to extract their scent--that's the technique from that town). the scent is further extracted with alcohol. the super girl is again a redhead. i don't know what that's about. and he gets his perfume. there's a weird thing in there about how people don't realize it's the scent, and they just think the girl is beautiful and charming and a great person. so they catch him, and are going to have him tortured to death--have all his bones broken and then strung up, and he puts on his perfume, and starts a spontaneous orgy and they can't believe he did it, and they let him go. trippy. and at the end, he decides he doesn't want to go on, and he p ours the whole bottle on himself, and a crowd rips him into pieces and eats him. double trippy! and i read _i, robot_ since the movie with that name is coming out. i hear the movie doesn't have much to do with the book. actually that it doesn't really follow the spirit of it. the point seems to be that robots are better than people because they obey rules not to do harm. fine. great. so it isn't really about robots, so much as how people aren't so good. and yet the robots are just slaves. technically the 3 laws of robotics don't even seem possible,because they require predicting the consequences of action in a way that would just be too hard. and it was mostly written in the 40s. that's a long long time ago. you have these robots which are intelligent, but "computing machines" are rare. so it was ok, but not all that great. dated. i'm in a good mood. it's strange for me. maybe it's cause i've got money. i think it's because i went to my happy place and bought a book and a magazine. and charged it. that always makes me feel empowered. a bit silly, perhaps. or maybe i was looking at my prospects, and they didn't looks so bad. the job at bruce is getting intolerable. yelled at me twice this week for lack of attention to detail and insufficient product. the details was because i didn't write the reference number on a document like i usually do. the productivity i'm still not sure about. i thought about it since, and i don't remember him being specific or giving suggestions, just general complaints and a general open ended, fairly vague, admonition to look for creative improvements in procedures. and i think about it, and that's just asn't very helpful. it was a long month, so i got more hours. whiff of perfume. tamara came in. i'm sitting here at the camel, merely waiting for temperance, since no one else is here. and lee bob was sitting at the bar. blew him off to sit by myself with uncle albert. and i looked at it. i only work about half time, maybe less. i could make just as much if i got half as much and full time. even half is quite abit above minumum, though. still, i've got a college degree, so i think it wouldn't be too hard to find something. I just need to be aware of my actual requirements. they ask about that. salary requirements. and i don't especially have expenses, so i always figured i don't have real requirements. but i guess i do. so i was sitting there at the table writing, and david norris came up, and i asked "how's the world treating you?" and he said something like, "the world is neutral" so i asked about the people. and i think he said it depends. So i said that the world includes people, and i didn't really get a disagreement, it seemed like so i took that as a concession. and then i went on to say that if on average the world treats you merely neutral, that's pretty harsh. at which point, he bumps my beer over with his coffee cup. whatever. perhaps as a representation of fate, or how some things can be, but in fact an actual instance of how he reacts. So his speech acts after that must be informative, but i'm not sure i was catching it all. he asked something why is it that people for whom things are going well have to come done on those for whom things don't go as well. i don't know exactly. there had to be nuances of personal responsibility and the action of fate in what he said that were lost on me, so i couldn't really follow. and something about people not helping others out. so i asked him what i could do for him. and he said i could leave. that was a bit of cheek. i was just sitting there. i had been there before him, and he just came up, and had knocked over my beer. but then, i'm no longer a regular, and i'm sure he's had to sit there by himself before. anyway, since he had knocked over my beer, i felt that jordy might be endangered, and i put him in my pocket. so i wasn't able to do was i had been doing. we sat for a few minutes not talking. and i got up, said i felt generous. and i went over to talk to leslie. but she said not to bother her. hmm. perhaps a pattern. she said she was kidding, but kidding must have a hint of truth. i forget what all we talked about, but she suggested that david might just not have wanted to talk about it, and that i go back and apologize for being intrusive. I think i get that from my mom. but it's probably a true fault of mine. it's good to have these pointed out. i thanked leslie for the advice, and now i'm sitting at the bar, writing and reflecting on it. i told leslie it wasn't worth. david n. is really a lost case. and i'm not interested. but leslie also said something interesting. she said something to which i replied "be sensitive? me, that's a girl thing" and she said that guys are actually more sensitive. that i find intriguing. hmm. so i got out of there and came to tj mulligans. if i'm going to write, it's much more convenient to have the 'net to look stuff up. but i don't know what happens. this place is too distracting. tony sitting next to me. from chattanooga. been in memphis a month. likes. talking to me about corporate and rich control. mscdonaldization was the word i was looking for. asked me if i was going to vote. i told him i'm an anarchist. which is true. he said something about it's a holiday in cambodia where everyone wears black. tonight might be a good night to drink too much. imperfection is the gauge of the world. we see the nature of the world by examining the flaws between what we really think should or want to happen, and what really does happen. we judge it through the flaws. man, ok. cute bar tending babes dana and ashley. they walk around a lot. that is really the natural thing for humans to do. so it was making me think it should do that. but the parental experience tells me it's really hard, and shouldn't do it. dana is eating turkey and cheddar. she asked me if i was hungry. i'm really not. which was a clear disappointment for her. so i quit writing for a bit just to look around. so much going on. nice things to look at. dana asked ashley if she wanted any of her dinner. one size fits all. skinny little girls like them just don't need to eat as much as the average joe. overstimulation. hmm. anyway. so ashley bends over to reach for stuff. it's her job. and her little short top slides up. silly, but it's something. i had to close my eyes in modesty or something when i saw it. finally, the band started playing. it's 9:30. just a cover band. king's trio. singer has a quasi mohawk with the rest of the hair growing in. the wild one died. the godfather. marlon brando. i didn't know, and when i heard that brando refused his second oscar, and said that acting was an empty profession, that changed things for me. fame is hollow. but people revere the famous. acting is a pretend shallow thing. you must live, not escape to fantasy. it is a mind-poison. a great oportunity to ponder what are my favorite rock tunes. they are covering the zz top thing, riding the bus. jesus done left chicago. that's up there for me. brings a tear to my eye pretty much every time. i just close them and imagine being blind. i been out to california. through the forests and the pines. the center cannot hold. some steppenwolf. i forget which. dumb-ass crowd. o man. band on the run. i remember when i was maybe 5. and this came out. it was my freak song. i appreciated really good pop back then. danced a bit. or maybe it was a different one. it was a long time ago. i remember it was mccartney. i became a beatles person after that, but i was into mccartney just after the split as a wee littl'un. a thing about me, i'm not very sensible. i do not attempt to follow the rules about what is best. they are just rules of thumb, sort of average approaches. to do better than the typical average, one must explore the areas that are not tried by the rest. i always try to look in new directions. i don't want to do what other people are doing. if you do what other people are doing, you can't do better than they. and the correct word is 'they' not 'them', for those of you who are a little bit ignorant about grammar. so, i guess my biggest problem with mr. david norris is that he seems to assume that what happens to him, and how the world treats him, is not a matter of what he does. it's the law of karma. we read what we sow. we get back from the world a reaction from what we have done. if we treat the world with kindness, we natural experience kindness in return. even multiplied. but to him the world is merely neutral. what does this say about him? how must he have acted? what expectations must he have? life is not easy. why should it be? life is a hard, grand challenge to rise to. the world is a rock we stand on, and build on. if we do nothing, we can expect nothing to happen. if we just attempt to escape, we will get nothing, and we will lose things while running away. ok, the pulling up the pants thing is a turn off for women, but ashley just did it, and it seemed hot. of course, probably anything ashley does will be hot. battery almost drained. had to stop writing and browsing. nightmarish dreams. so i'm awake at 5:30. And I really have been sleeping too much lately anyway, so it's better that i get up. and i haven't written in a while, so i should take time for that. i really do a lot of time-wasting sorts of things. i watch too much tv. too much in the real sense of having other things i would be better off doing--hurting myself by using tv to avoid thinking about the other things i should be doing. so tv indeed can be an actual mind altering technique. and thus can be like a drug in being habit forming to the point of addiction. which casts a greater inner light on those people who seem proud at not owning a tv. i'd say that sound to me more like they just can't handle it, like teetolaters. makes them feel holier than thou. but it's more a sign of weakness. It's just that i ran into maybe a couple of people with the whole thing of not ever watching tv. one was aisa carrera. she was intriguing to hear about yesterday. the mensa bulletin has done a special issue thing where they are talking about famous mensans. there are damn few of those, if you ask me. they had to resort to company owners and ceos, which hardly makes a person famous in my opinion, and authors, like there aren't millions of those. isaac asimov is like the most famous member, i think. geena davis. then maybe that bald guy from law and order. i think that's all that really comes to mind to me. marilyn vos savant doesn't count, because who really knows who she is, anyway. her column, parade, in the sunday paper has her face-lifted picture, and people remember faces, but, jeez, lady, get a clue. say something interesting instead of playing ms. know-it-all. but in their list, one name and face really stood out: asia carrera. she's a porn "star". yeah, like porn actresses can be "stars". maybe in the same way that pigs can be stars. i suppose if you are in enough things to have name and face recognition, you qualify as a star. and yeah, some of them do go on tours of strip clubs and bring people in, so i guess they are stars. that doesn't seem to happen so much in memphis anymore, or maybe just not at platinum plus. well, so asia carrera is a mensa member. and not just a mensa member, an extra specially smart one, 155 IQ or so. what do they say about her, hmm. new jersey spelling bee winning. played piano at carnegie before 16. now a big webmaster geek. does her own html. gotta like that. went to her site, and she explains her life story thing. japanese father and german mother, so they pushed her really hard, and she doesn't talk about this, but she managed to get the nationalities that are the most notorious about racial purity, and then was a half-breed, so i bet there was a nasty unspoken overcompensation thing going by the parents, and they pushed her way too hard. they beat her for getting Bs for god's sake. sounds illegal. she ran away. sometimes went to foster care. which i'm sure ended up with the same treatment. they always try to put you in a comparable environment, and from the comments she mentions, that might be some kind of standard asian practice. on her own she said she had to sometimes sleep with people for food and a place to stay sometimes. so you see the whole beginnings of what would be called a "moral breakdown" from desperation. and she got a full scholarship to rutgers. then went out there, got some bartending or waittress job while going to school, then saw you got more money being naked, and i think the big step down was like one party bartending topless, then made connections, and got into porn. where she made a good amount of money. and in her mind, the reason is the money was good. and that's intellectually sensible. she's a smart girl, like i said. but there are hidden costs that even she doesn't seem aware of. one other bit i should add, germans i know, like most of the world except the mid-east and the US, don't have this thing about nakedness being indecent or obscene. i don't know about the japanese, but i suspect they have that thing too. and, shoot, it has become a common thing in japan these days for girls to go on dates and have sex for money. something that would be considered at least morally odd is going on in that culture. so asia, a pretty smart girl, went into porn and dropped out of college. actually, i don't think she gets that she is too smart for the way they teach at college. they teach pretty slowly and quite boringly. they really don't adjust themselves for the intpish, bounce around smart person mentality. she'd really sounds intpish. i'd really like to find out for sure. and she invested her money in mutual funds and stocks. again sensible. says she'd like to be a stock analyst. dad's a physists, so she said she used to be into quantum physics. recently she played with her web site and computers. they are such a mental toy. she got married a second time and moved to hawaii. now she's getting fat, and she's pregnant. i think letting your body go to hell is probably one of the consequences of having a moral slide like that. indulgence. i'm getting a little tubby, myself. but she doesn't watch tv. too many other things. and on her site she has a little chat thing. and i saw someone on there who said he didn't watch tv. time for internet chats on a porn actress's web site, but not tv. hmm. been reading ulysses. stream of consciousness, and a lot of the times the things referred to, i can't even make out. but i think it's great even so. maybe a bit of a challenge, the way tv is not a challenge, so i end up putting it down for a bit, but it is quite good. but the nightmare. for some reason, i was with aubrey, in some kind of park, and up a cliff he was climbing and i was below him. he wouldn't walk up the trail, but had to take a short cut climbing almost vertically, and fell, about 20 feet, but stopped breathing. it was only maybe a quarter mile to the part hq, and a went there, and there was ahospital next to that that they sent me to to get help, and i went over, and couldn't find the emergency room. grr. and the other one, i got annoyingly angry at my mom when she wasn't explaining what she was saying, something about a place to go swimming over the summer. watched spiderman. didn't like it. i knew i should stop going to movies, but this was really supposed to be good. for me, though, it was just getting too unbelievable. doc ock's back would have just been ripped out or broken. and the balance with the huge heavy arms never seemed right, and they kept getting longer and shorter, which didnt make sense. and i just didn't have much sympathy for parker. the open air fusion reaction really killed it for me. really really stupid, and it looked like a little tthe surface of a mini sun, which again was stupid. the surface of the sun isn't where the fusion happens. open like that it would just leak away, and if you actually could see it, it would be blinding white, not that dim orange. it's fiction, buti just won't suspend judgement like that. i mean, i was willing to buy the silly spidey stuff, but if they're going to pretend to go for real science, they need to do better than that. and i didn't notice any cool tunes like in the first one. and no wet t-shirt shot. i thought about walking out, but i didn't want to ever have to waste my time on it again. sitting here at tj mulligans. went to aimee's book discussion meeting. talking about _grumbles from the grave_. aimee hadn't read it. whatever. not much happening right now in my life. soon we will rise up against our oppressors. they will feel the sting of the whip. their iniquities will be repaid a thousandfold. the dogs will lick their bones. watched most of the api thing on the top 100 movie tunes. didn't see 100 to 70. no hard days night? and i think barbra streisand should be tossed into a wood-chipper. i could see somewhere over the rainbow as number one. paid off the car insurance-- the last bill this month. borrowed off three credit cards, to spread it around. i hate having to do that. went into schnucks after that, and they had 10 pound bags of chicken leg quarters for $1.90, so i got a couple. i was out. tonight i baked a chicken, with rice and green beans. so i'm still eating ok. i was thinking of getting some fried chicken, but maybe i should fry my own. so, seven of nine, jeri ryan, is in the news. ex-hubby jack ryan is running for the senate. court papers from a custody hearing a few years ago say that he took her to some sex clubs. sounded fairly tame. but it's in the news. and memphis made the cnn page for the $3 million of stuff (guns and drugs) stolen from the police evidence room. what a wonderful town this is. and yeah, if i had spent the time looking for work instead of writing, i'd probably have a real job. but we wouldn't have all this wonderful garbage to read. happy first day of summer! maybe my hair is too short to be caught in the drain. or maybe it just isn't falling out. i got four viruses in the email this morning. and no spam. pitiful. watched most of bicentennial man last night on abc while i was playing with burning videos to disk. awful. way too much anthropomorphizing of the robot. why the heck would he want to be human? he wouldn't. it's just sad. people need to get over themselves. and it explored android rights, but poorly. slavery is just wrong because of abstract human rights. it's just that there are better ways of doing things. and i was thinking of slavery in the star trek universe. klingons used slaves. but at one point they became allied with the federation. they must have had to give up slavery after that. five rolls of pennies, and one roll each of dimes, nickels and quarters. $19.50 in change. enough for the monthly few for a few months. and the checks cleared before the monthly few went through, so there wouldn't have been any bouncing. i'll probably take out ten bucks, though, and not leave it all for the monthly fees. i finally looked at cliff's page. mike told me where it was. and i just don't care. a tremendous feeling of not being interested. and i went to livejournal's root page,and they had a link for the most recent posts. they say they get like 300 posts a minute. total garbage. boring, useless nonsense and self-indulgent garbage. so i was thinking about this crap i write too. i think it must be just as bad. blech. it's discouraging. ugh. i have friends who tell me they read it. i guess i should feel more sorry for them. and i could try to write better. i should develop some skill at telling ripping good yarns. on the nbc news, the had a disgusting sow who had had liposuction. and some folks involved checked her blood tests, i guess as part of a greater study, and she had not metabolic improvements. she's diabetic. since overweight is a contributing factor, it might have helped, i guess they were thinking. i hope she didn't do it for vanity. because she was still a disgusting sow after it. it took off 22 pounds, which is probably pretty close to maximum for the operation. but no help, metabolically. eat a salad. get some exercise. actually, i was thinking about it today. operations are expensive. get a personal trainer. much cheaper, and it would probably actually work. so they learned more about the 9/11 plot. wanted to hit 10 planes. two of the pilot-trainees turned out to be fuck-ups and basically didn't learn to fly, and didn't even learn english. so, people seem to be taking this as sinister news. that al-qaeda is flexible, and was really planning big things, but gimme a break people. all it makes me think is that they are really just a small time joke after all. they got lucky, sure. and the fear-mongers are sucking in lots of tax dollars by exploiting it. but give it a rest. laugh. star trek enterprise on today. only watched a bit of it. it's the one where all the vulcans get sick and go crazy. because of the shielding material which t'pol later becomes addicted to. but there's a bit where they are stunning the vulcans, and they don't go down easily, and security dude wants to switch to kill. there's no medium setting? i mean, seriously. they should be able to blow someone's leg off, and have it cauterized so they don't die, but can't move anymore. sci-fi writers can be so thick sometimes. and i'm sure they would have medical technology to sew it back on if they needed to. but no. they have a stun setting, and a kill setting. at least the kill setting doesn't still vaporize them so no body is left over. that was really, really stupid writing. can you imagine the smell? then again, maybe they just converted them to energy and scattered the energy into subspace, like a transporter. actually, that's probably what phasers did. just one time, i'd like to hear, "phasers on blow their fucking legs off!" happy bloomsday centennial! ulysses takes place on june 16, 1904. i've gotten started on it three times, but haven't gotten very far--it seems thick and boring. leo bloom is guy corresponding to odysseus (ulysses) from homer. i've seen several blogs mention it today. i was almost about to go to starbucks and write, when i saw one other guy mention it, and i picked up my copy of _ulysses_ and got really tired. probably boredom associations. i was feeling lonely, and i guess i'm depressed, but now i'm just tired. and poor. i'd have to get money from the bank to go to starbucks. i didn't get my nap today. so i decided to come out to starbucks anyway. instead of writing, I just sat here reading a little bbc summary of ulysses, and the comments. the comments were funny. people who hadn't read it. people who thought it was pretentious and boring. people who liked it. people who thought it was sad that people who didn't read it thought it was bad. and i was watching this table of two blondes and a guy in a pink izod, kakhis (oh shit, i forgot how to spell it!) and sandals. one of the blondes sat on his lap, and the other had the same binder of whatever they were studying. couldn't quite tell, and was thinking about asking, but couldn't quite bring myself to. i think at one point, studying blondie (who had glasses) said "lactose hypersensitivity". and they said atropine hypersensitivity. and girlfriend blonde said something about something lasting 33.7 hours. wtf .7 hours? nothing is that precise. and cute little brunette next to me hunched over writing answer to homework questions very slowly from the begining of some textbook. my eyes were to blurry today (and maybe the light is too dim) for me to read any of the titles on the stuff they were all reading. one of the comments said the last chapter of ulysses, with mrs. bloom, was one of the greatest things in lit, so i looked at some of it. just a bit of the first page. pure stream of consciousness internal dialog. of a gossipy woman. epic. i might have to actually read this thing. what i get from the comments is that it is more like poetry than a novel. no real plot. but not imagery like in a prose-poem like _on the road_. stream of consciousness exploration and wordplay. puns. and it might help me sleep. i am tired! the scene from the old man shakespearean actor from old star trek, daughter crazy. i need to collect them all. it's only two seasons. how much could it be? maybe i could copy them. so i took 10 dollars out of a checking account, leaving 83.54. I have outstanding checks of 40 even and 37 and change. i think my monthly charge is six bucks. so i'm not sure. i may or may not bounce. i've found that if the monthly charge takes it below zero, they don't do anything. but if they clear after that... i don't know. maybe i should get a guinness for bloomsday. i see a bit of bad advice in buddhism. then again, it could be the guinness talking. no cute bartenders today, though. anyway, part of the eightfold noble path is to not intoxicate the mind. but the mind has things intoxicating it constantly. i guess it's something meant to be avoided, and that's possibly good, but it's just more preachy advice. too much advice is just a bad thing. and all of his preaching, while good for a big body of people overall, is not ever the best thing for each individual. when sid was talking, he talked to each person appropriately to that person. the stuff we get as the core of the buddha's teaching is just general stuff, which was meant for all the generations in the future, and people who weren't going to be directly helped. plus, people are all at different levels of, not maturity, not quite development, though maybe spiritual development might be a good way to put it. i wouldn't want to do the whole evolution is progress kind of mistake that we are all climbing a ladder to enlightenment, which climb can take many lifetimes. that's just bullshit. hindu and then buddhist myth trying to explain the differences in people. let's me just be western, and thus christian-influenced and just say that some people are no good, some people are middlin' but need work, and some people are just good, and don't need to worry. for whatever reason and however it works out. the funny thing about it is that self-image makes a big freakin' difference, and to make matters worse, a person simply doing what he wants is doomed. the problem is in "wanting". if you want something, then by definition of "want", something is missing. thus you are doomed. there's always something missing. you run your life based on that, and you have no hope. is there some other option? well, duh. just live. some nice ways to look at it might be to give up your personal issues to "God" or dissolve the ego, or love your neighbor as yourself, but it pretty much has to be about not being tied to your pitiful, unending stream of wants. i mean, it's only logical. but it has to also have an emotional acceptance, because the mind rebels against the thought, since the mind's job is to deal with all the things we want. so i got home and looked at it. i'm going to be ten cents short. i need to roll some dimes and nickels and pennies. maybe some quarters, even. warm your bones by the fire, and listen. the sky father is crying. men still die in distant lands, but it was ever thus. the poor still struggle, pathetically. we can sing the great kings, at least the many iron kings, who live in splendor and command a glorious string to fill the hall with entertainments. hail caesars! chase away the rain. i just, well, over the weekend, finished _grumbles from the grave_ by robert heinlein. it's this month lit. discussion book. it's a bunch of letters from heinlein, and gives a sort of look into the life and career of the author. a lot of letters to his agent. he was a navy guy. he really tried to be technically accurate in his writing, having worked as an engineer (mechanical). But after reading it, i can't say i'm particularly interested in reading his stuff. i looked around the house to see what of his we had. i had a collection of early short stories "assignment from eternitand read a short story of his, "gulf"--which has a superman idea, uebermenschen. i didn't particularly care for it. i mean, it had esp stuff. i hate that. and it had that quick speech bs that i thought i knew from wrinkle in time. and dude is pretentious enough to prefer the term "speculative fiction". oo, ick. still, he gave me a little bit more insight into how a real professional writer is all about entertaining the reader. he writes yarns. interesting stories. his focus is creating an interesting world with real living characters. he did write quite a few juvenile books. he was occasional afraid of being a "hack" and early on decided against ever just writing out other people's story ideas. there was one editor who mangled his copy, and he gave detailed descriptions how very small text changes completely changed the characterizations he was working to build. it was a nice choice of books to read. but i'm not a heinlein fan. i guess i am a writing fan, and it's nice to get to know a person. i'm sitting here at starbucks. it's a nice place to sit and write,if you aren't a serious writer, which i'm clearly not. after reading _grumbles_, i think i can really give up that whole writing conceit. i'm not out to give the readers what they want, so that pretty much makes me not a real writer. and i couldn't spin out a yarn, so i'm not even close. just vanity writing. it happens. i'm tired. eyes tend to lose focus. i wish i was a catfish, swimming down in the deep blue sea. just trying to live. and it's hard these days. i need to go play some blues. but i know what the most serious thing was that set me off tonight. they had a thing on the news where bush was hosting clinton as they were unveiling his presidential portrait. they were both really cheerful, and bush said it was nice to see chelsea. and i have to admit she was looking good. i've always liked her, though. so i googled her to see what was up with her. in, like, 2002, she got really drunk and fell down in london. but the sticky thing was that last year, just out of grad school (well, it was oxford), she got a job for 100k. grr. i'm a little dissappointed that she didn't go into medicine. still, that's pretty impressive. some business consulting job at mckinsey & co branch in new york. it reminded me of how i am doing nothing with myself. so the venti chai at starbucks and watching the two kids play some card game with some game deck (as opposed to regular cards) wasn't enough for me. i s a nice thing.decided to come to tj mulligans for a guinness or two. plus internet access. that's nice. and there's a poker tournament here tonight. so it's busy. no becky :(. but some cutie with short light colored hair. not blonde. maybe red. hard to tell in this light. ashley asked me if i wanted a double shot. i think they have some deal with them. then, right here, ashley stuck here finger which she had cut on a broken bottle in some lime juice. said it hurt so much to give her hot flashes. hmm and i wanted to review my situation. i did a couple years in corporate it to get some experience in big machine projects. ugly management. then, as the project seemed to be about to move towards maintenance (plus i had enough of support calls at 3 in the morning, and having been on call for 3 weeks straight and they were about to give me my own personal pager), i wanted to try working on my own. bad economy. plus, i'm not such a self-starter and certainly not a salesman, and that's a big thing. and then for a while, i was thinking about other stuff. the writing. maybe teaching. but meantime, i dug myself into a hole. and at this point, i have to concede that i really need to be a computer person. maybe look after a teaching degree while doing that. i'm sunk enough that i can't even really do the education thing. but with a little more computer work, i could really teach, and then do computer projects in the summer. that would be a sweet life. what to teach? (laurens her name, i think) that's been some of the issue. if i really felt like teaching computer stuff, i wouldn't have blown off that cute blonde pi-loving chick out in the desert. what the hell was her name? eve anderson. man. maybe i shouldn't have blown her off. one of her minions called me long distance. grr. now there's bad karma for you. this whole thing about exporting it to india thing has gotten to me though. i seem to have bought into it hook and line. no future in it. what a joke. maybe it's true, but it effected me too deep. i haven't really even believed in looking for it work. that's been some of my issue. so i'm thinking my future is teaching high school math in a couple of years. i could have gone to medical school. now i'm sunk too low. driving home from starbucks, (or maybe it's dana, i don't know) i was thinking about giving it all away (well, declaring bankruptcy and doing that) and becoming (cueballs name is mike genn or maybe denn.). (it's definitely dana. maybe i knew that). a buddhist monk. for real. i'm more of an adavaitist, of course. i could clear out the score, ave a little money,and maybe not have to beg. go to india. perhaps. but, nah, that's just silly pretence. don't do foolish thing. give to citibank what is citibank's. jimi's cover of watchtover clicked on the box. i think it's more just light brown. genie-like. so there was a poker playing girl and a poker-playing dude, standing next to me. and they were talking, and i saw the girls eyes drop down and back up. if it was a guy, he would have been checking out her tits. but was she checking out his package? coulda been. maybe checking for interest. who really understands the female psuche? i'm thinking light brown. but she is quite cute. or maybe i just like any woman who brings me guinness. what has it got in its pocketses? dana works wednesday, friday,sunday . really long shifts. three days a week. can be with her boyfriend more. so, dude asked me why i was on jordy. i told him it was good for looking up drinks. i'm trying to find a proper recipe for a pan-galactic gargle blaster, that might be doable here, and yet not fucking wimpy. there's several things that include only stuff found in a bar. completely missing the point. it was meant to be poisonous, semi-legal. mostly stuff that is too chemically simple too be illegal. artifacts of particular planets for nostalgic reasons. im thinking, pour in ina can of starter fluid (for the ether), certainly start with a fifth of everclear. dump in some freon on watch it bubble away. some of the ingredients were stuff that he (zaphod) could have pulled out of his pocket, and/or smuggled through planetary customs. think--brain smashed out by a lemon wrapped around a large gold brick. it would certain have to be something likely to cause liver, kidney and/or brain damage. so, maybe some of that puffer fish toxin. ok, this is the third time now. somebody bought me a guinness. after i had decided to stop, but then, i decided to stop because i was out of money such that i could still tip excessively. this was some old guy that had asked about the computer, and yet. i scared him, i think. last guy was lee bob. so there's this cute blonde. such as she is. studying swahili. nakutaka pia. as opposed to acuna matata. george, maybe? shane and liz, the two babes. blondie (swahiliist) has no money. dana grew up on dee. now in cordova. dude, horse trainer going to california is 47. dana has the memphis accent. very flat. almost midwestern with a hint of southern. sounds like no accent to me. but then, i have the memphis accent. doesn't sound like anything.
terran gargle blaster (not one of those earth/hitchhiking-wannabe concoctions):
start with 200 ml of pga, which real drinkers use when they wanna get drunk. last night on nova, they did a thing on several brain damage patients with weird symptoms. phantom limb guys, blindsight, visual neglect, i forget the name, but a guy who sometimes thinks his parents or house are duplicates, and a guy with temporal lobe epilepsy who sometimes thinks he's god. the doctor, ramachandran, had an explanation for the god dude. and this is the guy often misquoted as saying there is a god center in the brain. anyway he said the seizure brain activity caused him to be confused about the salience of things. the temporal lobe has to decide when things are significant or important, and this guy just thinks things around him are really important, or meaningful. i think i've felt that way sometimes. but that makes him think he's god. happy D-Day +60. i guess. they've been talking about it all week. ronnie reaiegan's death seems to have overshadowed it. it's about time he finally kicked. i saw the harry potter movie yesterday. i just didn't care. and they pulled the time-travel thing, which i hate. blech. Jingle fish! Apple nut! Popcorn banana-rama daiquiri! Happy Memorial Day! I went to see _Troy_. It was "inspired" by the Iliad. It mostly was a short version of the high points of the Iliad, plus the framing of the story of the beginning of the situation, and the end. I liked it. A tough thing to make a movie of. It could have been a little better, I guess. It didn't have the depth of characters as the Iliad. Hector wasn't the pretty boy. Achilles was more like Brad Pitt than the leader of the myrmidons. The myrmidons weren't really established as ant-like warriors. And instead of taking ten years, it seemed to take about 3 weeks, and that's including the 12 days to mourn hector. I mean, the little girl that agammemnon steals and pisses off hector is caught on the first freaking day. that was supposed to happen after 9 years of war. and that's the beginning of the iliad. so the movie has made 2 or three more days of battle. troy routs greece, patrocles dies, achilles goes after hector, that night priam visits and gets back the body, and the 12 days mourning happens. and its during that time that they build the horse, and the trojans bring it in that day. talk about short! man. that's some pretty freaking serious artistic license. priam was a whiney little kid, which was reasonable. actually, pitt developed achilles more than the iliad, but not in the same way. pitt tried to be the lover, fighter guy. i remember achilles being the passionate, but a bit pissy brute. the iliad was cool because of all the different characters. the movie just couldn't cover all of it. and, really, the iliad had all the detailed descriptions of the horrible deaths. I don't know. i did like the neat touch of paris giving the sword of troy to aeneas, who was helping old anchises. so then i went to see shrek 2. ho hum. ok i guess. forgetable. didn't have the whole underdog cinderella thing going for it. i guess it was nice to have seen for curiosity sake. so I was thinking of Holly, whom i presume is living with guy, and I started wondering about common law marriage, so I googled it. you know the usual idea. you live with some and after some magical bit of time, you're married. that's not really how it works. the idea is that it used to be out in the sticks that the priest wouldn't come by so often, so it wasn't so easy to actually get married when you want to. you could be living together for a while, and planning to get married, but not manage it officially because of that and be waiting, but in the mean time you call each other husband and wife. and then maybe one of the couple dies, and it wasn't really official, but they both meant it to be, at least eventually. so the courts recognize it anyway. only a few, (maybe 15) states recognize common law marriage, since the original rationale--that it's hard to get a real priest to do it-- is pretty lame. california doesn't. neither do tennessee or arkansas or mississippi. some states that do--texas, montana, utah and alabama. i guess potentially, you could be pretty far out in the sticks in those places. but it's not like you live together and after a while you just are married. you have to really be acting as if you really were. like filing taxes jointly. because if you do that, you have to get an actual legal divorce to break it off. and one of the two can't just decide that that's the way it is, though i suppose some of the legal cases might be when they both have been acting like it, but one tries to pretend he wasn't really, and doesn't want to deal with a divorce. man, the saudis stormed a hostage situation. 50 hostages. 11 people died. including, i guess, the bad guys. they did something like that in russia, too. they don't do that crap in the us because people will sue, and legally they will be entitled to be awarded damages. they have to take the nondamaging alternative. personally, i like the whole shoot the hostage approach from whatever it was, that bus movie with sandra bullock and ted theodore logan. in this case, there were already some dead. hostages, so they were already actual capital murders, and would have been up for the death penalty. and it showed that there was a real threat of more death. without something like that, it might be hard to justify killing the bad guys. but in a situation like that, maybe even the us cops would have whacked them. they tend to use fancy sniper stuff, and might have been more likely to avoid the extra casualties. but that's probably just national pride talking. well, actually, as i read the story a little more, it's not clear whether the dead were the ones already killed by the bad guys or what. maybe the freaking cnn writers are being a little unclear to play into my anti-raghead bias. what is the islamic penalty for calling for people to fight in a jihad (holy war) but it isn't an actual jihad, they are just doing something like using the lord's name in vain? it sounds like something that would be in the koran. got the paper today. in the east memphis news section, they had a whole article on austin chu, the valedictorian from MUS, who got perfect SATs and ACT and is going to MIT. just what the world needs-- another asian nerd. and yet, they also had a full page on hutchison's graduation. they mention ashley mcarthur, who also got a perfect SAT, and was top in class, but that's about all they said, and it was really only a mention in the whole piece. the whole thing was pictures showing how beautiful they all were, standing in the arched walkways and stone buildings, and how they all have little flower girls with them. Grr. now that's an evil perpetuation of sex roles. And I bet Ashley is smarter than Austin, though not so much of a nerd. to me, nerdliness is a form of stupidity, or at least foolishness, but some people still persist in thinking that "book-l'arnin'" still really means something. Double grr. and what's worse for me, this whole thing had me for a bit in there considering finally writing wynne, since i don't know anyone else who went to hutchison and this is something that kind of relates to us personally. madness. in me it inspires madness. to be sure, some of it is anger at how i was deflected from the path of success. i do not fully accept the path of the renunciate. back at tj mulligans. ashley came up and said hi first. then becky asked me how i was doing. hadn't seen me in a couple weeks. i was here saturday and missed her. how am i doing? i just left aimee's house. we each had an abita light. randy and mike were there. ashley said she is 21, and becky is 21. i was thinking 23. hmm. talking about "the shipping news" not much to say about that. well writing. well defined characters. good imagery. we ended just talking about other stuff. i asked becky if she knew brad mccabe. she's only been here since november. i googled him, hoping to find a picture. there's another brad mccabe that does microsoft stuff. and evil twin brad mccabe. dude here thought i was someone he knew from raleigh. i have a good (according to him evil) twin out there. i get that sometimes. aimee noticed that i cut off all my hair. she's thinking ng that too. but her hair is really short. silliness. i don't think there is any web remnant of brad. i wish i had his site somewhere. i've been looking at the memphis mensa site. nothing. kathy wayne, his sister in acron ohio. katherine. dude making the mistake is richard. so becky is catholic. not strict. but that says a lot. i was scared to talk people. lee bob said. true. it's not that i'm trying to sabotage myself, it's just that i'm avoiding things that are unpleasant, specifically talking to strangers about work, which would be full of rejection. and from my experience with strangers, it seems clear that i would not like seeing them. the first thing about a stranger is that they don't like you. now, in fact, it happens around here that people are friendly, but what happens to me when people get to know me more, is that they like me less. i have a conceit that this is because i'm just a very unusual person (maybe strange), but probably more important is that i always tended to be challenging intellectually, and therefore quite annoying, in a Socratic "gadfly of Athens" sort of way. so Joey deVilla is asian. Wendy's boyfriend. somehow that changes things around for me. maybe makes him more of a defined person and less anonymous. or maybed i hink less of wendy, if that's possible, since she's gone interracial. but one thing that makes me more sympathetic to joey is the little analysis he had of the asian mind. 10% is devoted to seeking enlightenment, something i sort of have running around in my head. i don't think it's common in westerners. trying to get to heaven is not really comparable since it is by convention taking so damn fundamentalistically literally. that's wrong, by the way. heaven is the same thing as enlightenment. you see that in the book of thomas, but the church suppressed that concept because the literalist notion was basically more profitable. you can sell instructions on how to get to a better but far away land, but the concept of freedom from ego is much harder. too abstract. i'm kind of surprised that the buddhists even manage at all. most of the common folk probably don't even understand the concept enlightenment that they are supposedly holding up as an ideal. maybe they have some strange literalist understanding of it. like it's some permanent orgasm or something. i kind of think joey has some kind of mistaken understanding like that. may i should write him about it. anyway, the other thing about it, is that the buddhist, since they are pursuing something possible, though rare, have a long history of success. i doubt christians have ever had anyone get to heaven that they can show for sure. they take so much "on faith". except that occasionally, even they have people enter the kingdom, as it were, in the real sense of letting go of themselves and really giving themselves over to God, which is the corresponding way of looking at enlightenment for them. i guess they are successful that way, except that they don't acknowledge that that's really all they were shooting for in the first place, not some magical mystery tour after they die. om. hare krishna, hare krishna, hare hare krishna krishna. sitting in starbucks. a little freaked out by all the people. happy folk. cute chicks. some little 20 somethingish short haired brunette. studying. looking very intent, maybe concerned, but serious. but she was talking on the phone and smiling. but that transition from smiling happy talking on the phone (had to be a guy from the glint in her eye) to serious took like one second. the spirit of the water. it is called the subtle and profound female. cool dream. it was in a warehouse under construction (from the outside). but on the inside it was a training facility for nanodroids. sort of human looking replicants made from nanobots. but like anything intelligent and autonomous, they need to learn things on their own. the cool thing i did, was walk into a group of kidb uts practicing meditation. i first asked for the class leader. then i asked them questions about the meditation (i;ve been reading _living advaita, and this part of the dream came from that) . the whole place reacted in an odd sort of dream-like way, but one that nanobot androids from an alien culture investigating us might well have. i think one of them described meditation as "vast". as i explained, it can help us get used to having the space to sit back and not be bound by the thoughts and desires that arise. another said it was not settled. which, yes, is another point. the mind does not settle down. it is it's nature to constantly produce new thoughts. one of the possible experiences of an advanced meditator, is a very tranquil pure, quiet mental state, and it's the kind of thing that people do seek out but it isn't "the goal" of meditation. it's just another thing that arises. i said meditation is not a procedure. it is a path to walk on, like you take a stroll for fun. while this was happening, an old school marm type of teacher showed up (presumably going along with my playing along with the conceit that this was a group of school kids in class). it was like they were doing it with a general education teacher that didn't really understand or care about meditation specifically. i was getting the kids to respond to my questions (like what the mediation was like for them) in pairs. after she came in, the room got full, and they were sitting at desks, so i told them to right about it. quickly and in class. a couple wadded the paper up and pitched it at the end. i bopped one dude on the head, and flipped him. and second dude I flipped, but the nanobots must have gotten confused, because her brushed against the first dude, and they merged together. trippy. now i'm thinking i might like to see that last matrix movie, because i'm guessing they were exploring weird sci-fi-esque zen shit like this. it used to be that broadcast tv stations, because they have to fill up 24 hours, would play old movies in the morning. now they have junk. like infomercials. now i'm sitting at tj mulligans. dead, considering it's saturday night. relatives have gone to the farm. and tomorrow theyre going to nashville. no band. haven't been here on a saturday, i guess. like i was never hear before. ashley. and some big blonde. went bowling yesterday with the aunt and uncle. lost 4 games. bowling around 80. and my wrist hurt. pitiful. but i saw this girl, maybe around 15, who had these huge tits. at least a D. I had to wonder what they've been feeding her. it was absurd. i mean, fake tits aren't usually as big as these. trippy. and she was just a few feet away from me. we had too many bowling balls in the thing, and i took one of the little girlie ones away, and she wanted it back. oops. Wow. I was sitting in the waiting room for an hour and twenty minutes. my appointment was for 9:00, and they called me in after 10. now i'm sitting in the exam room. who knows how long this will be. and i saw the doctor come in in a few minutes after me, so i knew it probably wasn't going to be good. and blood pressure 159/94. not a happy thing. i haven't been coughing, though, and my wrist doesn't hurt anymore. so i guess that's better. it was only ten minutes in here before he showed up, so they're just doing it different. sitting here at the med. actually, in the elvis presley waiting room at the elvis presley memorial trauma center at the med. my mom and her little brother edmund managed to get hit by a tour bus at graceland. mom hit her head when she fell, and she feels nauseated, so their giving her tests. brain scans and such. but she gets sick whenever she see's blood, so that's probably all it is. hit by a bus. i hate when that happens. dream. in a bookstore in a kind of mall, but it's late. it wasn't locked, but there didn't seem to be anyone working. was looking for a book i couldn't find anywhere else, (actually, that's what the guard sitting in the guardroom near the exit suggested as the reason as i was trying to get out of the place, everything was dark). It was an extended instruction book for playing a game. and adventure sort of computer game. i put the money down for the thing, and then read through it. it didn't tell me everything i'd like to know, or at least it didn't make it as easy as i wanted. for example, i wanted to know how to make fire. it talked about some special items you could get. in the game, it didn't really seem to me like they'd really be the kind of things that would really work. so after reading through it, i was disappointed, but i didn't just take my money back and leave it. i'm funny about buying books that way. for me i don't want to just read it. which is bad. i should go to the library more, though they don't really have the latest and greatest. and for some reason, i had take off my pants, and had to put them back on when i left the store. i left it, and the mall was dark, and i knocked on the guard's window to explain why i was there, and he buzzed me out. and the exit didn't go straight to the outside, but went through a bit that was still open, which had a couple of restaurants. the one it went straight into was a cafe, but just a little ways over was a bar. and oddly metaphorical dream i think it's like selling back textbooks. do you really not want to be able to go back and review the stuff? first, i don't want just the rules of the game, but more something with tips and strategies to do well or win easily. i should look for something like that for d&d. and, lying awake, i was considering the advaita philosophy. what really causes what you call 'your' actions? that would logically have to be you, except that it include everything in the world. everything contributes to the action that you think is just your little action. your perceptions have a similar aspect. so, just rationally, there isn't some special little bit in there that is the self. realization in advaita, which is like nirvana in buddhism, isn't a logical understanding of this. and it isn't an experience of it. but it is involved with that finally being who you are, and no longer making this little somewhat deluded attribution to your self. ok, man. now i'm sitting here at t.j mulligans again. friday night, i like this place. becky got a guinness started before i even asked. bonus. went to temperance. there was a chick there. rose. and brent. and david norris wasn't talking to me. double bonus. likes bagpipes. bought her a bourbon and coke. left with brent to get his card after the band started and didn't come back in. i went back to bruce's. it was the most sensible. i get there, and there was stuff that i hadn't gotten to that only i could do that i needed to work on. niceto feel needed. job hunting just seems to tough, and i don't think i would find anything before being completely broken. retreat to comfort and safety. but sensible. i did go and interview with rhi, a consultant bunch, the afternoon after i went back. java is sporadic in memphis. one thing she told me, though. when a company lists a position, they get a flood of resumes, and some of them, when they get duplicates, just disqualify them, so you have to be careful where your resume is. sounds like head-hunter scare tactics. i'm just going live my life. right now i'm sitting here listening to the band. certainly wants and desires arise in us. what do we do with them when they arise? do we attach them permanently to us? as often as they arise, we must often be disappointed. or do we watch them arise and let them pass? applying for jobs on web sites. it really seems pointless. there's one that i saw that rhi had, but i couldn't find it today when i looked for it, but another consulting company had obviously the same one. and one was a lead position at fedex. i get the feeling i'll probably go back to bruce's on thursday. it just doesn't look good. my mom had mice in the dash of her car. four dead babies and a live one. there might still be one they didn't find. i seems like this might not be a 'blog' after all. which i think is good, since it's such a gooberly word. short for weblog, it usually means something where you actually use the web to make entries. i'm much happier typing into an editor on Jordy here. plus, because of comments, there are all like little portals. extroverted sociable crap. i hate that. i'm glad not to be like that. still, i might eventually get around to dgthat script to pull up individual entries so i can do searching, and then it would be easy to add comments. ok, that's annoying. ftp client wouldn't upload for the past half hour. grr. Looked at the want ads. Not a lot of computer stuff. There was one for a visual foxpro guy, and I emailed in for that. never used it per se, but I've used a lot of foxpro 2.6, which is a previous version, and visual c++ and enough visual basic to understand the concept. And I applied to Google. So I've at least gotten started. It takes me an hour to write up a cover letter. This is going to be a slow process. Mayday is right! Augh! that's two and a half days with no siginificant job-seeking activity. i need to get on the ball. i'm thinking about stuff, but i'm not talking to people. i need to be talking to people. and i could have at least gone to the mensa things and networked a bit. grr. but what about dick shaw? he's been out of work for a few years now. depressing is what it is. i gotta lose that pride and get some begging done. _science_ for april 23 has in several places has gone on about how jocelyn bell burnell should have shared the the '74 nobel in physics with her teacher for discovering the tbe first pulsar in '67. she was just the lowly graduate student, but she had done a lot of the real work. plus she's a chick. a '93 nobel on pulsars did include the grad student. that result gave evidence for gravity waves, a bit of general relativity. i think she (with these other whiners) needs to let it go. that issue also talks about the mouse with no father (and two moms). scientists can really be freaks. the cough seems to gradually be getting better. so maybe it's not pneumonia. just a lingering cold. made a mistake at work. i didn't really so much of it at the time. but bruce considers it a breach of trust and it caused a problem. suspended me from work for a week. i consider myself fired. i think it happened because i just don't really care to be there. it isn't what i'm good at doing. and i really have been needing to move. time to get a new job. the school year is almost over. maybe i could substitute teach a bit still to see how that goes. but i really just need to get a computer job. but that's tough these days. but now i have more time to look. and i got my hair cut. decided to come sit here at tjmulligans among employed people and surf the web for java jobs. the barbabes got some kind of bare midriff thing going. they do both have some kind of piercings. i just keep thinking of (kill) bill's brother budd. 20 minutes late to his job as a bouncer. there was no one there, he said. but arguing that he wasn't necessary just made the boss mad and he just cut his days and said to wait till he was called back. except one chick had a job for him. toilet overflowed. he cleaned up the shitty water off the floor. he had this whole fatalistic, waiting for the bride coming to kill him thing going. it set up when he masterfully caught her with two barrels of rock salt in the tits. i've been looking at this one site for itasoftware.com. folks from the mit ai lab broke off to do air-fare optimization. seriously tough problem. serious geeks. not that i think geeks are really great human beings. but the cool thing about their approach to attracting programmers is that they've posted little programming puzzles. neat :) i think i should try a couple of them. got lisp stuff and java stuff. their "software engineer" position seems to be asking for someone to write an operating system (or hack it). seems a little strange. i'm guessing linux kernel hacker. cool. i'm in lust. arg. becky, barbabe, is very much able to sell me beer. and she's a buc. i thought for sure she was a tiger. she's really smart. i was talking to chem e dude about whole situation. dude said i was a purist. true. but we're all little people and becky is in charge. and she's just a sophomore. i think that makes 7. i should admit defeat. consider god's situation. you want to make everyone happy. not easy. inevitable dissapointment. and yet. there is happiness. increasing ever so slightly, subtly. a very tricky, but impressive act. there were some iowans here. i think i love the corn-fields of iowa. but dude bought me a beer. talking about heavy metal. bid me good luck as he left. again, consider god's perspective. we want things to always get better and better. it's quite possible for it locally to look like it's always getting better the thing is, we always fool ourselves into thinking that we have the only correct way of looking.. actually, becky was so in charge that i need to reevaluate what it means to be in charge. i'm afraid i might have pneumonia. coughing up phlegm. nasty. got the tax refund. it wasn't in the bank friday evening so i could go to temperance. but it showed up on saturday. ate a 27 ounce steak. otherwise just sat around. happy earth day! so, i forgot about the first big thing on april 19, which the other two were done in memory of. that's the massacre of the branch davidians in waco in '93. the two men in a hot tub south park episode (the second of the meteor shower trilogy) talks about that. for me, that all happened over what seemed like such a long period, that i don't really think of the particular final day when they torched them all. probably had it coming, though. went to aimee's book discussion group meeting. fahrenheit 451. i was thinking it was next thursday, and about an hour and a quarter before it started, i checked and it was this week. i had only read i little under half of it, but that never seems to matter much. i actually ended up saying almost nothing. i don't think i would have had much to say if i had read more, but it did make me especially reticent. and i didn't even admit it. randy was the only other person there, and he had only read it a long time ago, but he managed to ramble on and on about stuff. not so much about the book. long-winded, i guess. since it was about censorship, i talked about the thing with wendy. they seemed to be rather sympathetic to wendy. whatever. and aimee was looking particularly hot. maybe i should stop going over there. messes with my head. but randy helped clarify the issue between him and brent. randy said to brent that the bible said everyone lies. well, the direct quote from romans (i forget) is that everyone is a sinner everyday, or something like that, and add to that that all sinners are related, then i guess a direct and short conclusion is that everyone lies. which i'm not sure i would dispute. i think brent wanted to go get his bible and show that that was wrong, but randy did want that. but something i noticed when randy was talking about it, was that he was being a smart-ass about basically saying that brent was a liar. he denied that was what was going on, but that won't reasonably work. clearly there was subtext going on. and according to randy, brent was getting visibly angry, and said apologize or let's not talk. i think about it now, and i'm thinking he probably said let's not talk about this, but i don't know. anyway, i don't see randy at stuff anymore, and i tried to get him to come to stuff. i did also complain at not seeing aimee, but she has real reasons. she's got a hubby to be with and other stuff to do. she acted to me a bit like she was feeling slightly bad about it (but only right then because i said something), which annoys me because i don't ever want her to feel bad about stuff. of course, guys naturally try to discount feelings. like i said, maybe i should just stay away. but she is always very sweet, and nice to look at (although maybe too nice). "the ides of april is the 13th". i posted that as a comment on wendy's page on the 15th of april where she says it's tax day, the ides of april. but it wasn't. look it up. i don't think she's the only person to make that mistake, and it bugs me when i hear it. trying to study latin again, i'm a little more concerned about roman culture. the interesting thing, though, is that it isn't there. i guess she deleted it. or maybe i'm blocked. which is reasonable, i guess. she's entitled. and maybe i didn't hit submit correctly, but i think i remember seeing it going through as a post. if she did delete it, at least she saw it and might not make the mistake again. or maybe willfull ignorance is another of her propensities. i've noticed it in aimee, whom i use to help understand her. so, i was thinking i should forget about her, and rey, i'm not interested in what she says, but she does look at a lot of blogs, and some of them are a little more interesting. i'm not sure i'm into that blog community thing. they seem to be celebrating columbine today. and it is also the 9th anniversary of oklahoma city bombing. happy american terrorist day! some folks spent $60k to send a 3 year old autistic kid to school for a year. why is 3 year old going to school? and seems like a waste to spend that much on someone who probably will have a limited life anyway. it does seem like they are reaaly going to get anything like that kind of value from it. seems like someone is taking advantage of pity. plus i wish theyd spend money like that on us smart guys. so i walked into the bank today, and from across the room, i smiled at the tall four-eyed brunette teller (supervisor actually) marcia. she's cute and liked to see her. and she smiled back. after thatshe really seemed to be in a happier mood. and she was talking about some movie, and it was kill bill, which she really likes. she's already owns the first. i said i just saw them both. i wasn't very smooth. but still, she was in a good mood talking to me. i'm definitely going need to check for a wedding ring next time. coughing and sneezing. i have a cold. grr. quite a bit of klingon in the simpsons today. i don't know much, but it sounded like much of it was fake. but they were doing a wedding ritual, and it sounded like it might well have been real. too bad i didnt tape it. actually,that reminds me that my vcr doesn't work and i need to clean the heads. i think i dont have any alcohol, though. one of the trailers showed that they are going to make an action epic about troy. it won't be the iliad, it will be about the whole war. sounds like a boring excuse to have hundreds of guys with spears watched kill bill 1 on dvd, then went to see 2 to finish it off. generally shallow. and quentin in the making of renewed my feeling him as not well-educated. coarse. it kind of bugs me. but ww1 opwened with the quote "revenge is a dish best served cold" -an old klingon. i reecently found my klingon dictionary. it was in a box, not on the shelf where i used to keep it handy. in klingon, with the lettering that it uses it goes "bortaS bIr jablu'DI'reH QaQqu' nay'" typing all that stuff on thursday really made my hand worse, the doctor wasn't much help. he was going to prescribe a muscle relaxer, maybe, but just gave me a script for tylenol. what do you dowith a prescription for tylenol? cute blonde-blue-eyed pill-counter terry just said you can justgo get it over there. happy tax day! some times you just want to drink a beer and surf for porn. tj mulligans here on has internet access. im sitting here at the bar and it shows as marginal. it waffles between red and yellow. but the name says "tjmquince" so it must be here. or at least done for them. i'm guessing it's sitting across kirby at time warner. so we'll see if it works out for me. i decided to go check out wendy's blog again. obviously, it still bugged me. she's over it. the immigrant song is on the box. little spineless wuss pansies bother me more than sluts. i should have been a viking. the one i know is cool. raping and pillaging just sounds like a neat way of life. anyway, wendy. i'm just thinking i need a parting shot. i had to transliterate some greek today. bruce is moving some stuff from or to greece, and the address was handwritten on a fax in greek script. i found a site to translate greek, and thought i'd have some problem putting in greek, but windows has a faily neat utility to put in different character sets. had to use mouse clicks. but i could get it. there was one letter i wasn't sure if it was an omega or a lambda. still, when i put it through the translator, it just came back transliterated. it was an address, so i guess it was just names. i got an email from bruce which i read last night. erin was complaining about me. she's not happy with me this week. not good when the boss gets mad at you. or worse, when someone who has recently risen to become the boss is mad at you. a week ago, she said she was happy with how i was helping out. so bruce sent me an email saying we'll talk about erin when we get in before she shows up. so all night and morning i'm thinking i'm going in to get yelled at. and feeling bad and wishing i had a different job. he suggested me getting in a little earlier so i have more time before she's in. he was nice about it. he personally wasn't unhappy with me, but really erin does all the work and she needs to be kept happy. he's going to cut my pay if i'm for doing just clerical. fair enough. shine on you crazy diamond. cool skinny brunette barbabe here is a biology major. and i asked her what she thought about this evolution stuff an she said. "I don't know". that's hardcore silly. trying not to get into it in a bar i guess. sitting next to kids. stoner smart ass who can do calculus. sociable pretty boy tall blonde dumbass. bitter four-eye buc. yuppie scum. die uppie scum. die. one of them snuck the grenadine from the parents as a young teenager. one of them went to germantown. i think pretty boy. pretty boy is talking about getting his ass-whippd a year ago. four-eyes talking about how he doesn't know why he would get into a fight, but people like to up and hit him for no reason he is aware of. my wrist has some kind of damage. played a video game with a mouse too much. i've heard horrible things about carpal tunnel, and a site on repetive stress injury was talking about how it can take months or years. but bruce said he used to get that from playing pinball. i don't know. i think the boxing aggravated it. but it was such a good way to get my heart rate up for morning exercise. stoner dude is a chem e at right in arlington doing medical stuff. 5 years at some tech in new mexico. and in think four eyes mentioned some party where they stole a tank of nitrous. losers. and then dude describes acid after doing a lot of it. just unsatisfied i want some thing. maybe this pen in my hand. funny guys. one of them. i think four-eyes. asked becky how old she is. and she won't telll. a lady wouldn't. but dude keeps pushing. they guess. it's a cute interaction. a flirty kind of test of etiquette vs. male boorishness. four-eye said she could be his sugar momma. he said he'd be here wednesday, but she works at cordova on wednesday. they left at about 10. got to be at work in the morning. poor little salary slaves. so they playe that liz phair average everyday sane psycho thing. tried to get the lyrics. tried googling and they didn't come up fast enough. didn't actually find the lyrics, just links to liz phair crap. so much for internet access. becky is buying a house in bartlett. made an offer. waiting on answer. boyfriend is in a frat. so. i'm not sure i quite buy owning a house. nothing is permanent. ownership is a strange illusory social construct. so, my parents own two houses. we're all working on building the cottage. fred and grace own two houses and a condo. i think they have outstanding loans, but probably only because it makes tax sense. edgar and julie just have the one. but it's freaking huge, and edgar built it himself. does a family really need more than one? freddie and grace use their spares as extra income. i just mooch. but we have extra. maybe i should get with the program. but sounds like the program is about starting a family and building up a string of houses. i'm going in on the cottage. so i got something started. i got a doctors appointment tomorrow that i'm worried about. i'm wearing out. getting old, i suppose. i'm going to ask about the wrist damage, but i'm also going to get the results about the state of the kidneys. monotonic decline. they won't get better. eventually i'll die from them, if something else doesn't getme first, which it could. holly had a kitty die of kidney failure just before i met her. *sigh*. becky's boyfriend is majoring in mechanical engineering. she says he's really smart. i asked becky what her favorite poem was and she didn't have an answer. i wonder now about who is the best living guitar player. i'm thingking carlos santana. his latest hit is on the thing. that's why i'm thinking about it. one guitar player i talked to suggested jeff beck as his favorite guitar player. i need to look him up. let me add a bitof personal psychology. we have deep fears. maybe we would call them phobias if not dealt with. the fears of spiders and snakes are genetic, and they could be phobias, but many people deal with them, work through them and overcome them. but we can develope them. i developed a phobia of being locked in, and worked through it, and it was no longer a phobia. but i just found out that for me, it is still a lesser fear. it might not even bother most people, but it kind of disturbs me. i found out at closing time. my right wrist hurts. and i don't care about wendy and her little conniption anymore. i gave a talk, without getting a good nap, and not being prepared as i wanted to be, but people seemed to have fun. it doesn't really helpme with one thing this was supposed to help me with. i wanted this little talk thing to help convince me that i wouldn't like teaching. and it just wasn't as bad as i was expecting. grr. but afterwards, i drank threed scottish ales and a london porter and read from my partially scanned copy of i am that. the porter seemed tasteless. and i talked to the cute four-eyed barteder. she's a photography major and graduating in 2 weeks. i asked her about digital photography as opposed to film. she said she liked working in the darkroom and it was expensive to get into digital. and it's helpful to understand where it all comes from. i g uess i still don't really understand photography. what did i talk about? turing machine as computer. then turing test. then folks started talking. got to moravec and computer power. then chinese room. that things are no longer considered ai once they work. i said very little, really, it seemed. i provided an opportunity for other people to talk. but marsha said it was the best monthly meeting she'd been to, and i think brent or david s said it was a good example of how a more interactive discussion is better than just a pure lecture. just looked at cnn.com. bush said we will keep with it in iraq. and he thinks he will win. he's a pin-head. but what else could he say? iraq was a mistake. people said so at the time, and now it has certainly turned out to be a mistake, but there is no way they can admit it. probably democracy will work and he just won't get re-elected. personally, i think there's enough to impeach. and there's a pretty simple connection between tax breaks for the rich and sending jobs overseas. it takes a lot of money to invest to send work overseas, but you get it back later because it lowers your cost. if you give more money to the really rich, that's what they will do. if you are more equitable and give money to the middle or lower income people, they aren't able to effect things to send stuff oversees. now, it does make for cheaper goods for stuff to be done oversees, but now almost everyone makes less, exept the really rich, who now make more. feelings have very definite causes, but not reasons, at least, they are not rational and logical causes. they happen, and you can understand them, but they don't work for the definate and provably correct end. their main advantage is that they are quick, don't take a whole lot of effort, and overall work out for the best, but again, each individual case has a good chance of not leading to the best possibility. having a little space to free yourself from being always tied to emotions is a nice thing. successful experiments are not proof. a repeatably successful experiment is proof. they accepted my return. i guess i shouldn't have worried. and my mom found my keys, which i lost last summer. an auspicious day. grr. the number that hr block had for my income last year was like one dollar off from what i had on a different document. i needed that number for my digital signature, and i'm afraid it's wrong and they are going to reject it. it needed to be exact. hopefully,i'll find out in a few days. an i had more trouble with it than i'd like. next year i probably won't do it with them. in _nature_ i just read about a technique for disabling a gene by adding a bit of blocking RNA to catch and prevent its expression. there are quite a few details but it is a way to investigate individual gene expression in living critters, or maybe cell cultures. there's lots of fancy things they can do these days. and it's been a few days since i looked over at wendy's stuff. i guess it's not so good that i still think about it, but i think it's good that i haven't looked over there. nothing good could come from it. i was off from work for good friday. really wasted the day. slept more. i hate crime dramas. and what's with the "top three" episodes of _friends_? they weren't funny. i liked one of the subplots in number 2, where chandler breaks down the perkiness of monica. i don't care so much for perkiness. but 3 and 1 weren't funny at all. annoying. i liked the brad pitt one with the "i hate rachel green" club. but seriously those other sucked. maybe i never was that into friends. it wasn't _seinfeld_. maybe i've been in a bad mood lately. but still, i don't really care about their dorky relationships. i should stick to _south park_. my fingers are not as sensitive as i might have thought. i brush a loose hair across my fingertips, and i can't feel it. i brush it across my face and i can feel it. i can even feel it on the back of my hand. but not the front of the finger. it must be getting too tough. yak, yak, yak. condoleezza rice. long intro. presumably under oath. trying to take time out from the questioning. or bore people to sleep. so i did a quick EZ form tax calculation, and i have money coming back. i put it off because i thought i would owe. oh well. and i made less money than i thought. grr. i was using some ammonia (to kill ants) and i wondered why basic solutions feel slippery. i googled the question and found the explanation that they feel slippery because the react with the oils in the cell membranes of our skin to create soap. so then i needed to know why soap is slippery. couldn't especially find that answer. there is actually a kid's book titled "why is soap so slippery" that gives and answer--roughly that the water gets around the soap molecules and lets it slide around. but it doesn't particularly explain why soap molecules slide around and other things that water gets around don't. i mean, water slides around, or flows, and is somewhat slippery so why would soapmake it more slippery? soap, has two parts, an alkali bit that is attracted to the water and a fatty hydrocarbon chain that is not attracted to the water. water molecules do like to stick together somewhat, but they really bounce off the fatty bits. it's probably just more slippery because the fatty part and the water really bounce off each other. dry soap, of course, isn't slippery. but glycerin is slippery even without water. hmm. i wonder what that's about. and for that matter, oils in general are pretty slippery. maybe not as much as soapy water. or maybe, i dunno. somewhere in there, i saw someone talking about why ice is slippery. they said it was friction that melted it and created a layer of water. i remember hearing that this was wrong, and it was because the pressure from contact lowers the melting point. but it could be friction too, i guess. also, someone said that the water molecules at a solid surface vibrate more so they actually act somewhat more like a liquid anyway. don't know about that one. memphis made it to 60 minutes. makes you proud. in a bit where they are talking about how car dealers add a few percent to the interest rate on car loans they arrange, called "dealer reserve", and then get it kicked back in cash, they interviewed a couple guys from covington pike toyota. my mom just bought a car from them a few years ago. smart enough to pay cash, though. I was looking at my web server logs, and found the hit that started it all: 140.247.216.41 - - [31/Mar/2004:09:00:44 -0500] "GET /journal/ HTTP/1.1" 200 64684 "http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/red/stats/referers" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.5) Gecko/20031007" I do an nslookup on that ip address, and it's an address at law.harvard.edu, so it must be wendy. and about five minutesffac after seeing that, she looks around more at my site, going to home, and then my 'i' link, which when i check, has broken image links, so she didn't get to see the purty picture of me. i look back at the thing, and it's from '97. that's a long time ago. i fixed the pictures links (i've moved pictures to a subdirectory), but the stuff is still from seven years ago. and i'm thinking wendy needs to let it go, 'cause i'm just thinking of fun things to do to play with the situation. but one thing i did learn from looking at this, is a neat feature that wendy has. the referral link that wendy surfed from is a page that shows all the referrals that went to her page. maybe a little too much information, i guess, but somewhat neat. and another thing that i saw looking through my logs was that someone did a search on "add frame buttons" and got to one of my java programs. the thought that i might have helped out a fellow aspiring java programmer just puts all this personal whining crap in perspective. and i think ginny is right. it's "discommodation". i looked them both up in the dictionary, and it seems like it should be "discommendation" which means roughly disapproving of, and not "discommodation" which would mean putting to an inconvenience, but i remember them saying "discommendation", too. it's from the st:ng episode "sins of the father". you google it, and that's the word they use. and recently, i finally edited the ftp client start-up file on jordy to add some macros to make it a lot easier to upload. i hadn't done it yet because i needed to be able to edit it in unix mode, and none of the editors i have on jordy do that. actually, emacs might have, but it still isn't installed right. had to schlep it onto the server and use ultraedit. but anyway, i probably have been uploading more often because it's a lot easier. oh man, that was chilling. some general, talking about the up-coming lock-down of fallujah, said that they were giving up on hearts and were just going to break them down by force. then gain, some raghead said that innocents were likely going to die, clearly implying that four americans who were ambushed and mutilated weren't innocent. there's gonna be plenty of ass-kicking soon. and now i'm feeling really angry again. like back when i just wanted to push the button and launch the nukes. i'd like one of them to actually come at me with that baseball bat. he'd only be wanting to beat me up, but i'd be wanting to cut open his abdomen and spill his guts on the ground. that's how i'm feeling. savage. i need to let it go. and now i'm thinking, when i was feeling entertained, that was me just enjoying being angry again. that used to be who i was. it's warm and familiar. i thought i had gotten over it. but i guess it's still with me. some things are just poison. wendy really amplified the anger in the situation. and all her contributors just pitched in and had a little fest. makes you proud. maybe that whole forgiveness and compassion stuff is a good idea after all. one of the striking things i saw was that joey, the boyfriend, though he was pissed, made a serious effort at being understanding. the little cock-sucker. what do you expect from a guy with an accordion, though? i mean, sure, i have an accordion, but i don't carry it around with me. meaning is the derived intentionality of language, according to searle on tape 10. i've been listening to it again to get that quote right. he spends the first half of the tape explaining intentionality, so there' a lot of content in that description that one might not get right off. also, wendy and her cling-ons have been yakking about me. heh. and i went back and read the spooge-slurpers' emails. joey told me not to call his girfriend a slut. sounds like the kind of thing a boyfriend would feel like he needed to say. sort of quasi-gallant, i guess. on her site he talks about kicking my ass. sounds like posturing to me. the other guy, nathan seemed to go intellectual on me, but it's clear he was simply trying to coerce me. he said i had a right to my opinion, but then asked me why i felt i needed to broadcast it. it was posed as questions, in that sort of argumentative way, i guess "rhetorical" is the word, but it was just him having that collective hissy that wendy's people are having. i do have reasons for not self-censoring, and i had specific reasons to think wendy is indeed a slut (and her defensive reaction is to say that i don't know her, but why does she write if she thinks that people aren't getting to know her through her writing?), but none of them, i think, really cares about that. they're just pissed, which is understandable. maybe they haven't being sucking up they're fair share of spooge. they have a valid complaint, though. i still don't have comments on my entries. they say it's because i'm cowardly, but i think i just haven't gotten around to doing because i'm lazy, and i want to use my own program. the one wendy uses has a bug where the calendar actually covers a bit of her text in my browser. bummer, dude. sitting here at the beer and wine bar at the paradiso, trying an amber bock, but the internet signal isn't stong enough to sure. grr. the silliness continues. but then, you probably knew that. it really cracks me up now. the clingons are considering "discommendating" me. as if they had honor in the first place. anyway, talking to bruce about the whole libel thing, it would be hard for them to prove damages now, not that that's ever easy, because they've gone and escalated the thing. couldn't just let it go like rational folk. i guess it's all in fun, then. and i would have to prove the truth of my claim, but at this point, i'm not even worried about that. someone was nice enough to admit being a slut, "too", so it appears the claim is not challenged. just girls (and other effeminate types) being emotional. and personally, i always thought feminism was all about them accepting their inner sluts. got a disease vector in the theater. sneezing without covering his mouth. typical. adn the commercials. one thing about them, it's not good ettiquette to talk during the movie, and maybe the previews, but fuck the commercials. somebody should get some rockyites and do protests. or at least have some fun with it. oh man. i should probably just quit going to movies. maybe my expectations were just too high. or maybe i'm just depressed. hellboy wasn't all that good. i was thinking, just not worth the eight bucks. might have been worth matinee price. and i wasn't wishing i had my two hours back. not quite so funny as i was hoping. didn't care about the whole love story thing. maybe not as much violence as i would have liked, or it was to silly fake. it was ok, i guess. not great. so, i'm getting stuff from the clingons. while i'm not really getting wendy's whole deal of linking to something she doesn't like, it's entertaining. some girl ginny said she didn't like my not having punctuation and capitals. and that's nice to know, because it was intended to annoy real fussy people. plus it's laziness. one of the virtues of the programmer. but peter, who was talking about my writing about searle reminded me of something i didn't write about that maybe i should. Wednesday before last, Searle came to U of M, and gave a little talk. To me it seemed like just and hour condensation of a lot of the stuff in the lectures, but it was nice to see him. the deepest thing for me, was his answer to lee's question. lee is the guy teaching the cognitive science seminar this semester, which is on the symbol grounding problem and all that searley stuff. which is why he got him to come speak. an hour of lecture on consciousness, including an approch to studying it scientifically. i think that was something that wasn't in the teaching company lectures so maybe i should mention it. he said that most people studying consciouness pick some particular piece, like viion or something, and think that once they explain the one bit, it will all unravel. Searle thinks a more promising approach is to look at consciousness as a whole field, which just gets modulated. probably at this point, my raw notes are going to be unintelligible to me, but maybe i'll look over them again. i'm more of a nervous note-taker, and i need to go back and fix them up pretty quick to make them coherent, and after this i didn't really feel like it, since so much of it just seemed to be repeating the same lecture stuff. anyway, an hour of lecture, a half hour of questions, and lee reserved the last question for himself. he asked if there could be intelligence without consciousness, and searle's answer i thought was telling. he said basically that it depended on what you meant by intelligence. you could have stuff that acted as if it was intelligent, but it wouldn't "really" be intelligent. and i just thought that that was just chauvanist, a kind of consciousness chauvinsm. but searle so often has had to deal with the strong ai guys, that maybe he just needs to be dismissive when they come up with the same tired idea that we just manipulate symbols. at the reception after, lee put it nicely with a quote from somebody, whether computers can be really intelligent is about as valuable a question as whether submarines swim. anyway, i'm going to talk to the mensa group at the montly meeting in a couple of weeks about artificial intelligence, and this probably helped me a bit. and i asked the little camera girl who was doing a journalism project on the thing, and she said the best thing about it was that he gave good examples. i need to remember them. and this past wednesday at the cog sci seminar, people talked about their reaction to searle. they weren't all that convinced, but they didn't really have any serious counterarguments. and art (graesser) was pissed because he has made it harder for people doing research. whatever. wow, that's trippy. a couple of ass-rammers wrote me emails about what i said about wendy the rch. i didn't read them, cause i figure they're just pussies, and pussies never have anything interesting to say. one of them had the subject "purported sluts" or something, so i figured the porn-spammers had found my address, and i glanced at it, but the first line mentioned "redhead" or something, so i realized it must have just been some pole-smoker. i had gotten one before that from joey somebody, who i think is her boyfriend. i had surfed his page, which is why i recognized the name. i think it's titled "the accordion guy". man. i need to stop looking at blogs. it's depressing. then again, mine's pretty sad too. so maybe should issue a south-parkian disclaimer: NOTE: THE VIEWS EXPRESSED HERE BELONG TO NO ONE. THE INFORMATION IN THESE PAGES MAY BE INAPPROPRIATE FOR ALL READERS AND SHOULD NOT BE READ BY ANYONE. NO ANIMALS WERE HARMED IN THEIR PRODUCTION. supposedly cliff has a blog somewhere, but i didn't find it googling his name so i guess i don't really care. anonymous blogging seems pretty weak. i guess i can sympathize a little bit with girls, because they tend to get hassled, but still it's lame. wendy doesn't put her name on her stuff, but it's not like other people don't talk about her. and one of the stories they tell is that at one point there was some creepy guy who kept emailing her, and she finally told him to stop, and that worked. but let me guess what happened before that. maybe she wrote something fairly friendly sounding. or maybe not. but at some point if not immediately she ignored him and thought he would just stop. i hate when stupid bitches do that. but i've talked before about how silence isn't a message. i probably should let all that stuff go. poser-bloggers. little shrines to little egos. i'm looking forward to going to see hellboy. so far, metacritic.com only gives it a 50 something rating though. but it's a comic-book movie. it isn't going for an oscar. one of the worst reviews, though, compared it to _the hulk_, which i must admit was pretty weak, and _the league of extraordinary gentleman_ which sounded so lame that i had no interesting in seeing it. i haven't been seeing enough movies, though. i need something so i can forget about the piss-on of the christ. and critics seem to go for the chick flicks too much, and i'm just getting tired of those. i need to find my copy of _joe's apartment_. or watch fight club again. the world is all about getting stuff done, but some of the stuff that needs to get done is imagining new stuff to do. thought of in a dream where i was having an exciting (even romantic) time at home. backwards. that's the typical base for the mental model that ai people use. they try to say that mental processes are made from using words, instead of the more correct idea that words are made from using mental processes. and for them, it's easier. computers are great at manipulating words. you just can't push that rope to get mental processes out. playing on google, i looked at their listing of extra services, and down below their thing on blogging, i found something on dating and blogging. and i found a popular blogger, thehead in harvard crimson, wendy koslow. i wrote a comment on one of her wishes for men . she sounded interesting, but now i'm thinking a bit of a slut, and her personality type seems to explain it--enfj, like aimee. it's happened several times tonight. i close my eyes and see an afterimage that looks like a big single eye. with pupil. maybe sauron is trying to contact me. happy birthday to me! it's my birthday. another year. hmm. i didn't go to any of the things i could have gone to last week. there was midsouthcon, which i was thinking i would go to, but when i saw the program, i just didn't seem interested. and i didn't go to the book discussion group. i was feeling sick that night. and i had read the book, too--camus's _the plague_. didn't go to temperance or the saturday meeting. i had been waiting for jersey girl to come out, and it opened, but i read the reviews and it didn't sound interesting. and there was a film festival in town, but i didn't go to see that. i didn't do anything instead. except watch south park on dvd. just being lazy, i guess
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sitting here at the bar at the camel after temperance with an empty bottle of beer.
How long do I wait while the bartender doesn't ask me if I want another? should I just take it as a hint? i ended up taking the hint. everyone was older than me, anyway her hand was shaking as she handed me my venti soy hot chocolate. the blonde behind the counter. i think i've seen her sitting here among the plebes. chocolate is better for me than alcohol. still i guess i just wanted to get out. i talked to sammy at temperance. he works for emergency management he's heard of my brother. told me to ask him about joe lowry. big guy. 6'7", 450#. sammy plays guitar. i'm thinking i should schedule a jam. i also told him to look up the bluegrass at lord of life lutheran. and maybe i'll go by there, finally. or maybe not. i'm not at rock bottom. but i am in a very wide sandy valley. desert. nothing in any direction. but we were talking about chicago. the band. they were playing "color my world" i said it's the song i don't get. it's on chicago's best of. it's the one song i don't like. and they were playing that one. chicago is heavy on the horns and plays jazz rock. sammy, turns out, plays jazz and rock. 25 or 6 to 4 is his favorite. i said i especially like the vesion on chicago 17, i think it was, with the harder edge. he hadn't heard it. i should rip it and put it on my site as an mp3. ok. so there's a really cute blonde here at the starbucks. sounds like a foreign accent. with a girlfriend. i think they are even speaking in another language. she has a shirt that says new york. tourist? trippy. sounds eastern block. maybe one of the big serbian group around here. says "ee" a lot. and "hai". and they have these forms or something out and pens. maybe they're just kids. that's it. a distraction. oink. i feel like such a pig. fat. distracted by eye-candy. she said she's writing a letter to someone on the phone. and she mentioned school. kids. typical consider this perplexing problem. how would you create a world in which everyone was free? notice this, you have created it, so you pretty much decided how everything would work and what everyone would do. so, to you, everyone is completely predictable. but you're making them so that they are free. sounds like a contradiction, maybe. but actually, it's just a restriction on you. a bit of ignorance. not everything can be known for sure. at tj mulligans, i was sitting next to a blonde dance instructor from fred astaire studios. i probably danced with her. she's married. she's tired of being married. and she lives a little further away, towards willow. she said her husband isn't worthy of her. and somewhere in there, she asked me if i knew her, i guess to question whether i could question that. in there somewhere, she also said not to get married. i'd probably go along with that. but, if you do get married, it seems to mean that it is all about helping you to be a better person, one who won't just give up on it, when, inevitably, it is dissatisfying. of course, on has to wonder about one of humanities heroes: the buddha. he gave up on his wife to pursue enlightenment. i think history doesn't talk about it much, but it sounds like it was abandonment. and it's possible that jesus did the same thing. maybe mary magdalene was his wife after all. . ouch. that was a painful phone call. mbna bank. a credit review. and in the end, they decided to close my account. the card that was paid off. and now it's cancelled. not a good thing. and he suggested credit counselling, and would have recommended someone to talk to, but i didn't want to know. as i've said, what i need it a job. that actually makes it a bit harder, because i have nothing to spare for expenses i might have if i need to move. grr.here's what i got from _thirteen_ after sleeping on it: loveis not being able to "kill someone" when they really deserve it. from this, we can see that god really probably doesn't love us. sitting in the doctor's office, again. i've gai wned some weight. it's winter, i guess it happens. i'm thinking, maybe people are easier to deal with than computers. people are generally at least trying to be nice. computers just do screwy things with no intent at all. amoral. and evil when they want to be. or when microsoft gets involved. i don't remember what tv show blurb i saw it on, but it conveyed my sentiment exactly. someone sarcastically said something "i guess it's all better then since you said your sorry". i just think apologies are stupid. i said i was sorry to nancy at ag for whatever i messed up on friday. she pretty much had no reaction to that, but she did seem happy that new orleans agriculture had released the stuff, which i guess means she didn't have any work to do. well, it's been about 40 minutes sitting here in the little room waiting for the doctor. i guess that's the way things work these days. but it was a month between when i made the appointment and when the appointment was for. that's a problem. if i had been sick, whatever i had either would have killed me, or gone away by itself. now, the kind of thing i'm thinking of is the vague "flu-like" sysmptoms. if it is actually the flu, it's viral and there's almost nothing they can do. if caught in the first couple of days, there is a pill that might shorten it. but a month and a half is quite a bit far off from the first couple days. i think it's common these days to give antibiotics, which might make some sense to prevent secondary infection. i think, actually, one of the big things that kills people in flu is that they get pneumonia because of it. a lot of people die from the flu each year. i'm not sure if there is much that can be done other than to not get it, such as by getting the vaccine and washing your hands a lot. and while i'm thinking of being sick. the boss at the office sneezes like almost every day year round. that's not right. and bruce sneezes a lot himself. i'm hoping not but i'm afraid that the office is a bit of a toxic environment. and she's early 20s and already her doctor was saying something about her having heart issues and something was stress related. ick. took about an hour. saw chip crismaru. somebody new. he's from romania. i said i wasn't too sure about specialists. he asked if i had been to a nephrologist. i told him, yeah sure. put me on maintenance meds, and didn't really narrow down my diagnosis. dr. crismaru said specialist can go overboard on tests and biopsies, but they may know more about rarer kinds of things that they can look for. so they may be benefit for diagnosis. It's like I just saw a ghost. Not in a scary way. Blood draining from the brain sort of one. but first, a group of people linked arm in arm in a starbucks. some kind of prayer circle. ostentatious public display of religion. i wish i had a cell phone camera. anyone. the ghost. it makes me think more of the time carlos castaneda saw a glimpse of don juan after he had escaped the eagle. and i'm listening to jimi in the car. so i was in blockbuster. and there was this tall brunette slumping at the counter. just locked like angela. wasn't quite that tall. with some guy. i guess she has a fairly common face. but it caught me up. a ghost from the past. and i don't think for sure it was her. she did kind of scunch like she was avoiding being seen. but the common face. she looks like mia sara, the girlfriend in ferris bueller's day off. it makes me think of calling her. i mean it's been fifteen years. could she still be mad at me? anyway, i needed a hot chocolate. so i'm here at starbucks. man. another wasted weekend. should have done my taxes. tried to look at the java speech demo, but it was looking for some kind of acoustic model and i didn't know what it was talking about. plus i was getting drowsy right then, and rather felt like taking a nap. some excuse. maybe i'm a little bit emotional drawn. and i really should be looking for a job. what else is new?
paul winfield just died a couple days ago. character actor. he played dathon in the star trek: next generation episode "darmok". darmok and jilad at tenagra. one of the best episodes. i thought i had it, because a remember seeing it not too long ago. i must have seen it on cable, though. it's season 5 and i only have season 2. i need to finish out that collection. $100 a season, though. it's pretty pricey. anyway, i was looking up the episode and there was a review on amazon or something. we learn a new language in that one. pretty cool. temba, his eyes wet. shaka, when the walls fell. and i've forgotten the name of the planet. another episode refers to it when the max headroom guy comes back from the future and says "picard and dathon at
i looked up the location in my nitpicker's guide to the next generation. picard and dathon at El-Adrel.
there's got to be a lesson here somewhere. about a couple hours ago, i found a slug on the kitchen floor. i tossed him in the toilet, but didn't flush it. i just went back in there, and he was sitting out on the rim. this time i flushed him.
and i just watched thirteen. little girl got sucked into drugs. mom was a recovering something, so she must have had some addictive tendency. and she was into cutting herself. i'm going to need to find out what that's supposed to be about.
so, i spent about the last 12 hours playing diablo 2. took a break for dinner.
the biggest problem i had with it before, which got me to stop, was that if my character died, which happens, it doesn't end it, but it goes back to the beginning location, andbecause the later stuff is further away, it would take a long time to physically move in the game to where new stuff was happening. i'd spend an hour or two just getting to where i was. but i hadn't realized that the fix for that was built in. there are these little teleport things that move you around to places you previously have been. it's completely changes things. and i found theres a stage two that i didn't even realize. grr. but it's too much of a time waster. i need to do something else. like hunt for work. but the job was very emotional disturbing today. out of confusion, i told somebody else something wrong, and they got upset, and they didn't need to be upset. and the boss just took over from me.
i'm finally getting some stuff done on my computer. i installed the new hard disk and loaded it up. it's hard to copy operating systems over, because they refuse to copy files while they are using them, the new dvd writer has been in there, but i have't used it yet. linux finally installed after several years of not working. i think it was probably the partition problems, but it also might have been the cdrom not working because it was on the secondary ide contrller. the old one is bootable now that it's on the primary and i finally downloaded cygwin, and got cvs, which i needed in order to get sphinx, a 100% java speech recognition system. so now i have that to play with.
the movie was crappy. they had it in the original languages, but there were big pieces when people would be talking, and no subtitles, so you just didn't know what they were saying. i was very annoyed that they mispronounced the letter 'v'. in latin, it was pronounced the way we pronounce 'w', not the way we pronounce 'v' today. i don't think they actually had two different letters 'v' and 'u', but we always spell things like that now. same with 'j'. i think they messed up the vowel, and they used an american 'r' and not a rolled 'r' (like in spanish or italian or even german), but i have trouble pronouncing that myself, so that didn't
bother me. still. jesus was speaking it. out of respect, they should have gotten him to say it all correctly. the crucifixion details were stupid. nails in the hands where everyone knows it would rip. and ropes. i mean, come on. ropes? i know they have to do that because the actors wouldn't be able to hold there arms up and make it look like they're dangling, but give me a break. the flogging and scourging was very violent, but he just didn't bleed. blood was sitting spattered on the ground, but nothing was dripping out of the wounds. extremely fake looking gore. and as bad as they appeared to whip him, he would have died from blood loss. it was way more than the traditional 39 lashes. they counted in latin, but i also counted. 32 lashes, and then they started scourging, and hit him with more than that many. and he would have been dead from that.
a guard actually complains that they weren't supposed to scourge him "ad mortem". they did make it a jewish thing, to. pilate tries his best to let him go, and finally has to basically let him be crucified to satisfy the crowd. give me a break. i doubt he was quite that much of a wuss. and they have this freaky devil character in and out of this thing. and demons flit around. it was just a really stupid portrayal. mel gibbon (i like the monkey name better) made a point that he was trying to be realistic, which was his excuse for the violence. that's obvious bullshit. i think he's got some kind of serious issues. lots of people are going to watch it, and it's going to make money. but it's crappy. and pointless. it doesn't really have anything interesting that it says. and jesus' death isn't anywhere near as important as his life, or the cult built on the story of his resurrection, which even many if not most theologians these days don't take as literal truth. That actual might be a surprise most of the 'faithful', who probably wouldn't know theology if it bit them in the ass. i think "baptist theology" must be a contradiction in terms. pinheads.
so maybe i know what triggered this overstimulated day. theirs this tall, cute blonde that works at schnucks as a checkout girl. she kind of was memorable, because she doesn't have a southern accent, and i was thinking i should ask where she's from. and somehow she alsways had her nametag covered up. today when i was going to buy 20 lbs of chicken legs and some soy milk, she was working as a bagger at one isle that was pretty empty, and i went to it. as i was picking up my stuff, she was standing there and said "thank you and have a nice day" i was a little stunned, and couldn't even make eye contact, but i stared off into the distance and said "thank you, you too" or something. pitter patter. set me off balance, i would say. and there was this match.com person i had been wanted to write, and i finally did. hmm.
man. top of my head blown clean off. jimi doing johny b. good. the thing is, jimi always plays kind of sad bluesy tunes. so it was wild to hear a happy one. and not just a happy one, but really rocking. i guess i didn't realize it before, butbeing more of a beatles person, all the sad blues stuff did kind of get me down, and i haven't really been listening to jimi so much anymore. it just put a whole new perspective on things.
so, i was thinking about dr. shannon whitten today. she's teaching psychology and florida state university at palm beach. she severely shot me down a few years ago in an email when i was giving up on the serious graduate stuff and part time work. last year i wrote her again, to ask how things were in the cog sci department, because i was thinking about trying to work there as a grad student. and as i was thinking about it, she said was just too busy with finishing her dissertation to help me out, but really, she was shooting me down again. and then thinking about that, i remembered joseph cambell talking about the myth with the knight and the girl, like a jumping bed. they rock and jump, but you have to hang on till they settle down. in fact, women have developed a tendency to put up a fight, and they have to be won over with some endurance, but it is a way to select out for more dominating and agressive men, who in truth, should be better providers. and it really creates that feminine mystique. it's not just playing. they have evolved to be hard to get. and the thing is, there seems to something natural that makes men want to chase them when they do that. and it can cause problems when they don't know to let it go.
the next show was on perception. i'm not as interested in that. they talked about how full of holes the visual system is, and how a rotating quare might seem to shrink if there are things that cover up the edges. a common theme seems to be that we reduce the information or number of objects as much as possible. perceptual constancy. analytic seeing and wholistic. perception here is pretty much all visual. a problem i have with it is that there are probably other ways to do visual processing than how people do it, and they would work better. we get pretty adapted to particular environments. square rooms. they started this thing with the freaky perspective breaking room that they always use in psychology. this time, they were nice enough to show it from a different pesrpective where you could see the tilted floor and ceiling and the big oval clock and small circular clock. and the odd angles.
speaking of clueless. bill gates is very functional, but borderline autistic. the rocking back and forth he does is a classic sign. doesn't quite get other people. has compensated with some basic sorts of mental models of what other people are up to. but borderline autistic can also be borderline psychopath. not really caring what other people feel. that would be him to. i assume it's his wife that got him finally into philanthropy. melinda. the scary thing is how so many computer people with the same mental deficiencies all think that they are good things. it makes them think their work is worth more than it is, so as a group they manage to hold up their salaries and prices. that indians do the same for less really shows that it's more about over-inflated perception of self-worth. there is a bit of the "sanitation engineer" aspect. it is such unpleasant work (ie mind-numbingly boring and impersonal), that they should get extra money. but because only special people can stand it--left-brained analytic social retards--they've managed to make it exclusive, and thus raise its cost as if in a cartel. and possibly a little worse is that software in general is just done poorly. bloated with unusable extras and almost never made to work with anything else. but that's kind of how geeks are socially.
man. more errands. seems like it's only on sunday that i feel recovered enough to venture out among people. and things are open. during the week, i just like to be asleep during the afternoon. emotional hibernation. anyway, i went to barnes and noble, and even though i had ordered the iliad part 1 (they have part 2 on the shelf), they got in the odyssey part 1. bastards. so i'm way out in the boonies. i went to the little wolfchase mall music store and picked up the jimi hendrix experience box set thing, which was on my list. godiva was out of the hearts. they would be on sale, if they had them. the medium hearts, which have 13oz of chocolate, costed $65 before valentines day. i bought one for erin, the office lady boss. but you could get a plain gold 16oz box for like, $40, so whenn i was sending stuff to the girls on my valentine's day list, i sent them the plain box, because i figured more chocolate is better than a fancy box that they're pretty much going to have to throw away. i think i've gotten them the hearts in the past.
i hope people don't think i'm just being cheap. it was just such an irrational rip-off. and then, off all the evil things, the week after, they send me an e-mail saying they have the hearts on sale for $29. gimme a break, people. i wasn't going to send out stuff late like that, though, i have to confess, i didn't get the order for one of my friends early enough to get it to her by valentines day, so i just said for them to get it there "as soon as possible". and in that case, it was more a matter of that i was thinking about her around valentine's day, and she sounded like she was feeling a little down, and i thought she could use some chocolate. but now i'm sitting at huffman's deli, fairly ostensibly typing away at my computer. no one offers to give me the password to their wireless connection. it doesn't really even look like there's anyone who would know about it. if i have to find someone and ask, that's a hassle i'm not interested in. and before i came here, i was telling myself i was coming this time mostly to check out the food. i had a blt. cold bacon. the wheat toast seemed a little stale. or maybe it felt funny because it was dried out from being toasted, and yet it was cold. they have potato chips that they cooked themselves. i've done this myself, and it isn't easy to do right. one thing i know from experience is that they cool off very fast because their thin, so it is really hard to have the, hot. so maybe i shouldn't bitch because they were cold. but they also had the problem i've seen that they will stick together, so some of the inside stuff will be raw. undercooked, limp potato chips. now that's weak. i also tried the little fruity ice tea slushy thing. equivalent to starbuck's tazoberry, which i really miss. they aren't carrying them till spring. i mean, starbucks is only good because of it's wide selection (i go there for soy hot chocolate-- i don't know any other places that have that.) but the fruity ice tea thing is pretty good. not good enough for me to come back. the other reason mabe to come here is to see other wireless computer geeks. but i see nothing but the sunday after church crowd. church-goers make me gag. then again, the feeling is probably mutual. actually, being around people while they're eating i find a little distasteful. while sitting hear i just heard a manager looking dude talking about how the restaurant is doing. they are about to be breaking even. and they were baking bread every day, but now they are having to rotate it a bit, go 2 or three days, and use it up. that would explain the stale tasting bread. also, about it being cold, i didn't quite hear it the first time they feebly called out my number, and i went up a litle after that, an they called out the number before me, and then wnet back and checked and recalled my number out. a bit chaotic. so i guess i did lose maybe 3 or 4 minutes for it to cool off. and as i get up to leave and turn around. i see a couple of fat-assed geek looking dudes with two laptop. get me out of here, and i hope i never come back. the cute four-eyed blonde notwithstanding.
played some of disc 4 of the jimi set. track 4, a little instrumental blues jam called "country blues" just blew me away. he played inspired guitar, i must admit.
and i finally lost the antenna on my phone and tried replacing it with a paper clip. the signal strength with the paper clip is better than with the old antenaa that came with it, and it doesn't stick out as much in my pocket, since i have it running don the side. i have't tried talking with it, though, and it might introduce some static. it looks, funky too, but it's better than having to buy a new phone, for now. i still want a picture phone, but now the treo 600 phone with mini keyboard is making me think about switching. it might be enough for me to stop carrying the jornada. i guess i can put off the decision if the phone is going to stay alive. the "special" offer from cingular for the picture phone expires at the end of this month, but it seems like a bit of a rip-off its own self.
as for the different way of doing the web pages, i need just a journal.pl that creates a form page with the selected paragraph (default the latest), and buttons for next paragraph, down a day, or up a paragraph. or day. or month. (maybe a radio button for skip by paragraph, month, day. and switch to main file. and blank for keyword search.
maybe that's my problem: there aren't enough geeks around here. we don't have a proper critical mass.
i finally had whole wheat pancakes this morning, made from wheat i ground then. it was easy to do. they were pretty tasteless, and kind of crunchy. good with syrup. i need to make some biscuits or yeast bread. wheat flour, an egg, baking powder and soy milk. maybe it needed salt and butter. and maybe vanilla.
saw prince on the travis something or other show. he seems pretty brainless. and yet with an enormously swollen head. and the music he played seemed boring. i guess the "jehovah" can do that to you. he's a witness now.
How do I love the evil in others? People have selfish, greedy parts of themselves.
How do I cherish that in them? I need to accept that too. Help them to be happy. And yet I'd like to try to discourage things that I think are bad. Hmm.
so, doug went to huffman's deli, and they gave him the password. so it's free. but it is restricted. i don't feel like trying them out at this point.
my hands are getting wrinkled. i don't know what that's about. i'm just looking at the back of my hand, and the texture just doesn't seem smooth. it's just a mesh of straight scratches, and a couple of red line scars. i'm fading. maybe i should just go home. i guess it won't hurt to wait a little longer.
there is no real reason for me to be here. the chinese lady that had an office up in the corner of the top floor of the psych building just walked by, and asked me, "what are you doing here?" i said, "nothing". seems to me that maybe something has happened and they aren't meeting here and since i'm not in the loop i don't know about it. maybe they went somewhere else. so what can i do? i could be working on a project or something, other than just writing a rambling bit of garbage.P>
the topic of the cognitive science seminar this semester is the symbol grounding problem. Strong AI holds that a computer can be intelligent just by being an instantiation of a computer program, and thus by manipulating formal symbols. Searle's Chinese room argument suggests a thought experiment where we sit in a room, and manipulate squiggles according to a rule book about squiggles, such that we can send out pieces of paper that look like we are speaking chinese, but if we do that, we just don't understand chinese. the symbols never have meaning. the symbol grounding problem is the problem of getting a computer to actually connect a symbol, such as a word or something, and a meaning. one of the first fairly obvious things to consider, is that for us, a lot of time,a meaning might be just an image. when we hear the word "horse" we imagine an image of some typical horse. one issue i see with this is that when computer people think of "image" they think of a matrix of color values, which isn't really exactly how the brain deals with it. Our "images" have already broken objects down into logical pieces, like legs, body and head, and don't really sit as a dots on a canvas. Our internal view has depth and sitance information two. Logically you might then think we have a 3-d box, but that would just be way wrong. I get the feeling that the
analytic model has an ability to feed back to something like a retinal map, creating a kind of feedback from representational image to dot grid image, but this mechanism is complex. And it's just not a matter of colors and lines on a flat page.
now that spamming is illegal, maybe I should contact the feds about working as a spam law enforcer.
doctors treat the disease and not the cause.
the world will be a better place when we use fuel cells mostly, instead of all the other sources or power at a location that we have: batteries, combustion engines, public electrical grid. Fuel cells and local fuel storage can actually handle all of those specific problems quite well. The problem of energy creation is quiet a different thing. In a fuel cell "economy" the problem is to go from the energy to the fuel. Right now in our fossil fuel economy, we simply use supplies of created energy that occur naturally, but that is ultimately not sustainable. It is a basis like that for an economy that makes people think gloomy thought--ie that the world might end, or we need to do desparate things like invade other contries to sustain the diminishing power supplies. It is the stuff that wars are made of. But when it is accepted that you need to create energy if you want to use it, then we can really have a better world. I hate to bring up solar energy, but really, once a good way is found to go from solar energy to fuel usable in practical fuel cells, it may be a primary actual fuel source. Unfortunately, the most obvious fuel product is hydrogen. It's easy to take water and extract out the hydrogen with solar energy, but hydrogen is not a very good fuel, mostly because it is a gas. Fixing it with carbon is what lifeforms do naturally--it is the best thing to do with it--because the hydrocarbons are stable, dense, and very portable. One of my fears is that hydrogen is such an obvious (but wrong) solution that people will get stuck trying to work out the problems with it. But a similar problem is that people will stick with combustion technologies, and just try to produce the hydrocarbons to maintain that system, and never actually move on to fuel cells.
i've just realized a proper way to index these journals. I'm able to go to any day by an anchored url, but not to specific paragraphs. it will take a little script, but it wood be quite straightforward to be able to call up a paragraph by number on a particular day. I can then search by paragraph and go to the paragraph or call it up. An automatic indexing program can also call up a paragraph, do whatever word extraction or indexing algorithm i want, and then save that index. hmm. sounds like a project.
man. i found half a dozen nitrous oxide whippets in the gutter by the neighbor's house. i'm thinking about calling the cops, bcause you don't want drugs to get into your neighborhood. just kids, maybe.
why am i sitting at starbucks? i just went to the monthy mensa meeting. i guess it was unsatisfying. the speaker was john vergos, a city council member and owner of the rendezvous. he compained that the city schools are getting so much money that there must be something funny going on. the city budge is $450 mill and the schools system is $810 mill. in 95 they both were around $250M. and he complained that the bus routes make no sense. i don't know. maybe i just needed a hot chocolate. i think i really should have gone home and right to sleep.
Augh! went out for errands. some shopping, maybe to see how to get the window fixed. I also wanted to check out some internet "hotspots" because there was an article in the paper about a few places. Specifically, I'm sitting next to Huffman's deli, in a little salon/tea shop called Belle Ame. Truly a girls' place. I'm not so comfortable here. i talked to the bar-girl about tea. All of the tea's are aromatic blends. I said americans don't like tea because the don't know how it's made. Anyway, I've also checked out the "internet connection" from huffman's while i'm sitting. Grr.! SonicWall Host AP. some kind of login required. Greedy bastards. I hate you guys. I really, really hate you guys.
So I was starving. I was going to pay for the overpriced deli food from the greedy
bastards, but assholes close at 2:30 on Sunday. I needed a drink. Huey's is in the same parking lot. I had already walked over here, and the wireless doesn't reach.
My glass was still 2/3rds full when the blonde-by choice waitress asked if was ready for another beer. I hate being rushed. I am not in a hurry. And there's a band with a mandolin, a banjo, and various other strings warming up. no drums. it's cuntly music. but i was hoping it wouldn't suck too much ass, so i wanted to stay to at least hear some of it. i've been wanting to get more into bluegrass. there's a thing on saturday afternoons that i blew off yesterday. and they keep noisily messing up connections on their amplifiers. And that reminds me. These days, people play loud because it covers up for poor musicianship. There are six guys up there in a small room. they should not use amplifiers. to me, it looks a bad as it sounds. But I think what it is is that they need to amplify their voices in order for them to be heard. I guess. They're taken so long to get started, I might leave before that. And a violin. Augh. It's a hoe-down. Where's my pitchfork?
How much did I lose? Word fairly often locks up now when I turn this computer, Jordy, my palmtop, on and save what I had on it. I think it's because the wireless
is trying to find a connection and locking some resource. Only of those very deep operating system kind of bugs. Or device driver. So I have to reboot the computer and I would lose whatever hadn't already been saved. It can get annoying. And I might lose something. I actually did lose my place in an online book I was reading because I had to close the exporer window. _Mein Kampf_.
So, some dudes I recognize from shadowcon. dude in a bowler who it seems like I remember running a game. long black haired bearded geek. Ah, there it is. bearded dude has a starbucks cup. None of the other four people at the table do. I did see that for a while and I was a little stumped by the concept of going to starbucks and not getting anything. But the third guy that sat down is the bald artist guy who sold me his little short story thing. And he brought in some chick. I guess having a girlfriend is expensive. And his stories were too embarassingly bad for me to talk about to him.
i bought way too much. i bought a detector for open wifi. With the frustration from Huffman, I'm thinking of doing some "wardriving". i bought the sims. a serious time-wasting game. I did see some dvd-r with an instant rebate, so that a pack of 50 cost $13. I ordered the loeb classics iliad (which has the greek with english translation on the opposite page). I got a dvd of species. it's been a long time since i was stunned to see it in the theater. 'cause i was just watching south park, and the boys were sopround to have gotten the chick from teacher to be on there show. i know resident evil had a twat shot, but this girl was pretty hot. what else was a stupid impulse buy. there was a collection of movies from some director. andy sidaris. bullets, bombs and babes! was trying to get season two of andromeda, but best buy didn't have the full set. i also when by the wolfchase mall to pick up the hendrix box set i had seen and put on my christmas wishlist, and unbelievable. it was 6:15 and the mall was closed? man. they really want you to be in church on sunday here in the bible belt. I guess. what else? i bought some books. how to think like einstein. a book of latin quips. and the book that really intrigued me. in the philosophy section at barnes and noble. i have it sitting here at starbucks. _astonish yourself: 101 experiments in the philosophy of everyday life_ by roger-pol droit. I have heard a bit about experimental phenomenology, and this seems to be in that area. The introduction said something about discovering that "I" is always another,and how the world is an illusion and time is a (hold on let me find his exact word...) "lure". It sounds like it's playing around in the headspace i've been sitting in for a while. We'll see.
grr. they weren't dvd-r. they were cd-r. no wonder they were so cheap. grr. my mistake.
killing floor, and a trippy, a little fast, but danceable "you are wonderful tonight." real blues.
so here'sa trippy question: can God see God? I'd have to say, no, only his parts, or merely a relection of his parts. so what does it mean for all of us? well, pretty obviously, we would never be able to see God either. The Jews have been thinking about it for a long time, and pretty much decide that God is unknowable. But if God is an infinite, all powerful creator, then he is everywhere, at least in his reach and ability to touch. That is, his parts are everywherre. So where can you look and not see God? Well, what you think you see is mostly decided by what you expect to see, or what you think you will see. So you will only see God where you think you see him, even though, because of his divine nature, he is everywhere.
So I went to "Senses", a dance club around here. They have actual dances who work there, and they dance on these four little stages around the dance floor. I was trying to think of a way to decribe my reaction to them. "Awe" is really about the only thing I could think of that fits. It's like they are dancing machines,and yet they they are also beautiful women. And they get paid. I haven't quite wrapped my head around it. I was hoping it might be a place where I could go and dance for exercise to get into shape, but the techno dance stuff seems to require alittle more endurance than I'm really ready for. It really developed for people doing X, which is a kind of amphetamine. Keeps you moving steadily for along time. Not something I'm quite up for.
i especially liked the girl with the fruit-roll-up-red hair.
i'm sitting here at starbucks now. i looked at some catullus. whew! steamy. and the chubby dark red-head with the st. mary's chicks belly-dances. yummy. same little st.mary's bitch came in after me, and took the chair i was going to sit at. grr. spaced out. clerk asked her if she wanted anything else, and she was just talking to her bud. i asked asked her that. holding up the line and all. and what was the deal with the dude with two computers on, and doing math on a calculator in from of something that looked list a list of questions. and two phones. i think one was connected to one of the computers. cute blonde chick (debbie) came in. was crying as she talked on the phone. i offered her the chair at the table i'm sitting at. didn't get anything. i should have offered to get her something. she was sad. again i fail to to the kind thing when i have an obvious chance.
and to top off various frustrations and failures at work, at lunch i went to get some mrs. winners fried chicken, and when I said "classic", fat black girl heard "spicy". i guess she's used to hearing it said "spah-see". and they had to make a new batch, so it took a long time. i figured since it was going to be fresh, i'd let it go. but generally, spicy hurts my insides, and sure enough, i've had a tummy ache most of the evening. and later, i've had a headache. i only ate 3 of the 5 pieces, too. only 4 bucks. it was fairly cheap for fresh. not a good price if it's going to cause physical pain, but whatcha gonna do.
got emotionally worked up an involved in a dream, so that i had trouble falling back asleep after i woke up. something about a university project and robotic wheelchairs, which an associate drove away too fast for me to keep up. sounds symbolic, though it may be a mars lander thing.
ack. so now i have the rest of my christmas wish list. one bad thing about christmas is that i wrote down a bunch of things that i want, and getting all of them would cost quite a bit. what's bad about it is that even though some of it i dont want all that much, because it is so clearly written out, somehow i have this definite and intense desire to have all of it. i probably wouldnt be any better off with those things, and i already have plenty of stuff, but greed it like that. it feels good just getting more stuff. grr
i looked ay my list. the only big thing left is a small difital camera and some classic movies, like bruce lee, aliens, old star wars, terminator. i need to get them from the library and copy them. i also want two towers, though aftger the last one, i hardly care. and i'd like the concert for george.
another thing i just realized is that most movie making is in little scenes. thoselittle cameras that hold a couple of minutes might actually be plenty. you never really have long continuous scenes. just a bunch of fairly short shots. hmmm.
i went to the bookstore today. in a magazine, i saw them mentioning two cameras:panasonic sv-av50 and kodak ls743. Both are pocket-sized and both shoot real full speed vga resolution video. not out till the spring though. the panasonic also doubles as a mini-tv player and music box. i want. gimme.
so much for my having good credit. i got two bills in today and they both say they were paid late. i know for sure I mailed them a couple of days before. i don't know if i should call and try to get my reputation fixed up. damn mail. or maybe it was their slow processing. i think they raised my interest rates because of that. plus it made me feel bad. grr.
grr. i miss the little battery powered fan for starting the fire in the morning. colin broke it. they seem like they are somehow not quite spoiled exactly. some odd variation. they aren't greedy so much. but they do whatever they want and have no concern about consequences. their parents put them in charge, and since someone else deals with the disasters and loss that inevitably ensue, they can expect to do what they want without dealing with the consequences. not a good way to bring up kids, i'd say, but i'm sure they'll learn a good way of coping with it eventually. the kids i mean. the parents are too old to change.
a dream aboujt walking around at night in some downtownish place. it was almost a naarrative.
i've definitely become afraid of success. though maybe i'm just thinking of wage slavery as success. i wrote to eve andersson about teaching at northface u, because i saw her asking for folks on her site. and i got a call from someone wanted to set up phone interviews, but i totally chickened out and didn't call back. of course, it is in utah, but still. maybe i dont really want to start an independent life. or maybe just not as a teacher. so eve has emailed me back, but i haven't been brave enough to read it. i fear the warm fuzzy wrath of cute blondes. bad karma, as it were.
"when you meet the right girl, she'll know"--maxine friedman. um, for one thing, yes, girls know when guys are interested, and it has really always been up to them to decide about who is with whom. guys are just too easy and don't have the cunning to make good decisions about that stuff. and i suppose i'd have to advise women not to let the man make the decision for them. not a good thing.
it is called the subtle and profound female.
my mom was just saying how good aaron has been. that's one perspective. yesterday, i had colin's helium balloon because i was going to tie the string back on. i had taken it to my room, because i was going to get my book on knots. i had tied it the first time and it came loose because the plastic was so slippery. and as i walked out into the hall, aaron asked for balloon. i didn't give it to him. and he started yelling. maybe not at the top of his lungs, but he was yelling. i did ask freddie about tying a good not, and he suggested something with more loops, which they used for fishing line. i actually had recently tied something like that, and i ended up with a lash, something like an figure-8 knot with extra loops. but just now, as i was sitting here writing this, freddie and aaron were sitting next to me, and aaron was being loud and freddie told him to be quiet. and he just resisted. but he seemed to be ok a little better ok with it when freddie made it a matter of aaron being in charge, and him being a subordinate making a request, although, he did at one point just start hitting freddie with the balloon. he has put the kids in charge. a few days ago i heard him asking colin for permission to sit down ("can i sit down?"). that can't be good. but, i don't have kids, so maybe i shouldn't criticize.
and now, about half an hour later, aaron is still being defiantly noisy. what general lesson can i take from this. a parent wants to be a buddy of the child, but this is in direct opposition to the more important role of being the person in charge.
from the paper, an article about someone who succeed in following last years resolutions: don't have negative ones like simply don't spend or don't eat so much or don't do this or that. have positive ones like go to they gym 3 times a week or spend some fixed x amount per month. and have a plan. and it's up to you to make it happen.
things softened up after the feast. and i got emails from people. roy's and some married chicks, but it's better than just giving up
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