April 15, 2001

It's like 1:51am and I can't believe I have been on E2 for hours now. Worse then that I can't believe that he could just not call. I really thought we were friends. Or maybe it was me thinking I could trust him with my deepest thoughts, emotions, and feelings for him. It isn't like I want a marriage or even a commitment right now. Just someone to spend quality time with. I always thought that person should be your best friend. Or at least start out as good friends then if something happens you can prepare yourselves to remain friends. Famous last words....Oh well!

"He who makes a beast of himself
gets rid of the pain of being a man."

Hunter S. Thompson

I'm not me anymore.

Although this may not sound entirely terrible or shocking; I'm not the same person I was six months ago.
I don't like the change.
I'm not trying to stay the same person for my entire life, change is the only constant (to quote some Zen Buddhism). I accept change, but I don't always like it.
What bothers me about my most the changes I've undergone since around July of last year is that I didn't know anything about the changes.
Basically, alot happened in 2000 for me, and I was aware of it all, I played an active role in my change. It seems that 2001 has brought on a new type of change to my life, that which I am not only unaware of, but that which I have no control over.
The way I'm changing is changing.

I think my standards have been lowered for some reason, I'm not so selective about what I do. Last year (meaning around April or June of 2000) I wouldn't have done something if I didn't feel like it. Now, on the other hand, I see myself going through all these motions and not caring about what is happening around me. I've seen my friends grow away from me, although we still talk and hang out, it just seems like motions, like what friends are supposed to do, but there is no direct intention or meaning behind our friendship.
Don't get me wrong, I value the few friends that I have, I would never want to lose them. I just feel like I've become "just another person" to them, like they've grown accustomed to me, and I've changed from a person who they liked to a person they know.
Tonight I had the first really meaningful conversation with a friend of mine in a very long time. This wasn't even much of a conversation it was basically him saying "You've changed... in a bad way, and I care". It meant alot to me in so many ways.
Other than this, I can't remember the last really meaningful conversation I had with a friend.

I'm also much more antisocial than I was a year ago. I haven't made a new friend in a very long time, (my last girlfriend was probably the last "new person" that was introduced into my life, and she has sadly fallen to the wayside of my life).
I like meeting people, I like talking to people, I'm just not good at making new friends, or approaching strangers. I do fairly well with the few people I know, I never get into real fights with friends or girlfriends, I just don't do well with the induction of new people into my existence.

I used to be able to.

Happy Easter! I said that to someone at a local fast-food joint and they didn't know what on earth I was talking about.

I have been (I am a broken record) busy at work. This is mainly because Boston has still been cold. BUT, things are getting better. It has been warmer than freezing all week. (I still have to wear a jacket, but that is mainly because I am a wimpy Texan.) Today was nice enough so that most during most of my walk I carried my jacket...but still had to put it on after about 30 minutes. Since it is so sunny, people have seemingly come out of the woodwork.

I've managed to get all of my taxes done...I paid about $500 less than I expected on my federal, and ended up getting a surprise! refund on my state taxes. Still...it hurts to write the big check.

You'd think that I would get over it by now, but I renewed my dislike for our local subway. The T can be like a roller-coaster... start, suddenly start, go quickly around a curve...suddenly stop. Creeking all the while. And why must the train be constantly crowded to the point where there are never enough seats?

I would write more fluidly if I had the brain, the character or the fingers. All of these things have been laid to waste over the course of some enchanted evening. With this in miand, I am handing the fingerwork over to Ms. deeahblitah. Take it, kid.

We had no idea what was gonna end up happening this evening. One of us had expectations, and one of us was just trying, trying her damndest to keep a blank slate and now we find ourselves sitting here, all sorts of ratty, but feeling much better off than we did in the beginning. And that's not even what the boy is feeling.

Oddly, the biggest lesson we're walking out of here reminded of: Baltimore is just a Bad, Bad, Bad, Bad, Really Bad, Bad Movie....

tiffany? are you scared yet?

We've passed the torch.

Okay....me again......Um.......whew! I'd tell you, but I don't think you could even begin to comprehend it. This HURTS....but it's going to be okay. He's going to be okay.....she'll make sure of it. And I'm going to be fine. IF I CAN DO THIS......anyone can.

But I'm leaving now, as this is how things play out.

She's a good girl, Ms. Dee.

love you.

Interesting day today. I wake up at about 2pm because of the sounds around the house and smell of a bbq. My uncle came down from Winnipeg to visit his parents and us. My other uncle came to visit too. Now we have 4 kids running around the house. Obviously no sleep done. I come down to the back yard, wave my "hi"s. Everyone is looking funny at me as i say "good morning". Whatever. Carpe Noctem I say! Fools. I'm offered a hamburger and a beer. Beer five minutes after I woke up? "Sure!". I down a few bottles and go to watch Battlestar Galactica.

Gym is alright. Someone was supposed to show up but didn't. I didn't really expect anything so I'm nonpulsed. Blargh. My friend tells me all our highschool friends got married or in the process of. Just another sign of the passing time.

2am, a game of Brood war is started. 3 humans vs 5 CPUs. We rock ass as one of the guys is an awesome player. I bow down!!! The game is done about hour later. I feel hungry. Stromgald39 suggest we grab some congee, as the chinese food place is the only thign open this ungodly hour of the night. I pick up Strom, and we head to the mall where the restaurant is. We wait for Dave as he drives down from the UBC dorms. The parking is curiously full this time of night, and a bunch of asian people keep entering and leaving the place. Some guy is throwing up outside. I wonder whether that's the indication of the food inside. We get in and the hostess shows us to our seats. We order food. Waitress' english is strangely worse then mine. I vainly attempt to understand what sort of beast a congee is. At the end I order beef congee with extra vegetables. For $5.50cdn that aint bad. As we wait for our orders to arrive a female friend of mine heads toward the exit. I don't register it, and she notices me first. She's studying (for her finals) with a cute girl whos name is "Mona". Hah. We proceed to chat. Everyone around the table then makes fun of me. I dont mind. I'm always the comic relief. Strom is high on prescription and alcohol, but he doesn't make an ass out of himself. Weird. Evelyn and Mona leave. We finish our congees in relative piece. I can now order food in most restaurants. Yay!. On the way home my mom calls me (it's 5am!!). She wonders where I am. I love my mom....good day.

Greetings from South Plainfield. As they say, New Jersey is here, wish you were beautiful. It seems like every time I come up here, everyone else goes down to Baltimore to play. Is it something about me?

I'm feeling very creative without anything really specific to talk about, so here's some daylog glue dedicated to Easter.

Some questions that have crossed my mind today:

If you're reborn, then go back to being athieist or to a hedonist depravity, are you redeathed?

Contrary to popular opinion, the two aren't necessarily synonyms. As a recovering Christian still trying to get along with my family, Easter and Christmas tend to highlight just how beliefs and perceptions change how people treat you.

When Templeton and I were talking about that last night on #everything, I wasn't looking forward to the Easter morning service. But, it turns out that church was actually pleasant. I felt very extroverted this morning and I got a chance to show off my new car to a bunch of people that have known me literally since I was born. It may not have filled the promise of spiritual fulfullment, but it was a fun social event, and it made my parents happy.

All in all, it was two hours I consider well spent. If church always made me feel that good, perhaps I'd go more often. It's too bad I bore easily.

The second question, the one on everyone's mind:

How is Jesus doing?

Who knows. I'm not really sure how I'd feel if I knew that thousands of people were running around doing what they do in my name like they do in his. I hope he's a good sport.

According to my friend Jabba's Christmas rant last year, if Jesus would just get him a new job, a new apartment, a new girl, and a new drug connection, his work here would be done.

Of course, that that would still leave me without a new DVD player, which can't be right. I mean, gosh, Jabba's not going to get anything if he doesn't start thinking of people besides himself. Damn it.

I'll leave you with my solemn tip of the day. No matter what they tell you, the single-click buffer paste is not your friend. And neither are its unfortunate victims, after you misfire. Save yourselves! Disable single click buffer paste under X Windows!

You'll thank me one day. Honest. If only someone had warned me last night.

Happy Christ on a stick day, everyone.

I just now figured out why I hate my job..and I wasn't even trying...

There's no gratitude there...
none

And that's really what sucks...Whatever you do, it's expected of you...however much...no gratitude...the pays not great either

sleepless night-before's, i remember these above any holiday. dark room hushed discussion of what we might find buried in a closet, underneath a jacket draped just so, but i do not think i ever truly believed in a rabbit that magical, at least not fully. i did know that it made us smile, and it gave us a reason to be together despite busy schedules and distance. i guess that is why today feels strange. it is my first year in nineteen, that i did not wake to some element of excitement, for whatever varied reason. change... but i still remember setting carrots on the window sill, and i'd have thought of it last night had i not found sleep so early.

i am very tired, and i feel too old. (tell me, how silly do i sound, go on, tell me. i am pretty sure that it was not supposed to happen, yet.

You only really get one hour of downtime in a neighbourhood adjacent to a Chinatown - the old men are gambling until 4 am and the old women are already doing tai chi in the park by 5.

...

Due to a strike of Translink employees in the Greater Vancouver area I have been doing an uncharacteristic quantity of walking recently. A couple of days ago I plodded 32 kilometres, which is a lot more wear than my feet are used to. Generally I would have employed my bicycle, which was in the shop undergoing repairs at the time. Travelling the route by bus I tend to curl up in the back with a book, while the rigours of predicting the movements of automobiles occupy my mind when on two wheels. The mere monotony of foot-after-foot, however, is practically automated reflex, leaving me at the risk of boredom without sufficient distraction.

Boredom while crossing a bridge can be a dangerous thing.

So I scrutinize my environment, looking for inconsistancies and errata - evidence that it's all a mock-up designed to fool me into believing that other people live around me - and artifacts of other people's lives to convince me of the frightening complexity of the simulation. I take a particular and perverse desire in graffiti and reading things I pick up off the street and more often than not, they appear as the sole constituents of my day logs.

aha! A page from a notebook!

but why would someone stay with a girl who puts more time into some one another relation ship instead of focusing on her own and as for you moving out I have one thing to say to that you need to find a heart because it's clear to see any bodyelses is stronger than you'rs.

Delicious. Clearly emerged from the pen of some high schooler... a rough draft? It's too bad I only have the one page preventing me from framing it in any deeper context.

One block later I catch a flutter in my eye and, following it, come upon another page torn from the same volume.

Dear Mark - today I work 10-6

Same handwriting - and now I have a name to work with!

Another page follows after another block:

For you to turn your back on some one in time of need makes you a weak person and for you to try and tell a person what to do makes you cold. There was no reason to take any thing going on with your insacuraty to my work not only did you loose my respect but that of many others

Hm. Presumably the "you" here is different from Mark who was invited to work? Or did the scribble-over indicate a change of heart?

Another block, another page:

that you just can't share with others. I think If you are as good of a friend to Mark as you say you are you should step out of our relation ship compleatly Mark makes his own disitions. The one thing understandable is no longer will I let you take advantage of him

Makes me curious in Mark's POV. I know at age 16 I was just dying for someone to take advantage of me... halfway to the bridge, the pages are coming faster and closer.

Dear Mark - I don't know what I could say to make you feel better just know

Nope, looks like she forgot what it was she didn't know what to say.

Dear Trish - Coming from my eyes I see some one very confused although I under stand you are hurt I can't seem to find the fairness in you'r actions. Some time ago I came to realize that every one is different but the one thing you & I have in common are feelings toward Mark. I need to let you know

...

the reason for the message was because you'r coming across as a person waiting to give approval of Marks happy ness when all you'r causin him is pain & confusion. you need to know that I am very disapointed in you. Ovosially there is something going on with you in regards to you'r lack of interest of resolving what you have caused

About the same time I start feeling guilt for traipsing through someone's emotions uninvited, the trail ends. Perhaps the scatterer turned at the last right, but I definitely have enough to mull over to tackle the bridge before me.

Hours later, East Van is found to have more paranoid-conspiracy-theory graffiti and less high school sentiment. A very different but still-quite-interesting(-to-me) literary idiom.

Lose-o-matic slots in Laug
hlin NV casino MSG's & sec
urity are stupid! Awful!
Deplorable! Terrible! Putrid!
Disgusting! Repulsive! They haven't any feelings.

Who was the smart guy in social work who issued thesauruses to the rabid homeless?

THINKING
START
WALKING
STOP

Wait a sec, I was reading that upside-down, coming across it on the sidewalk from the wrong direction.

STOP
WALKING
START
THINKING

Strange. It seems to me that I'm thinking more when I'm walking, at least relative to my being able to close my eyes and magically be delivered to my destination by wheeled fossil-fuel furnaces.

I HAVE NOTHING TO SAY!

Really? Why don't you tell us more about it?

Around the corner from home, I am issued one final guerilla missive:

HUG SOMEBODY

Regrettably, no one is to be found on the premises for me to carry through with it.

in our last episode... | p_i-logs | and then, all of a sudden...

Today I realized this:

I sit and stare for hours at the wall. I don’t know why so don’t ask. But I do that. It helps me to pass time. When I'm bored I will sit and stare. It helps me think. Think about everything, everything that's wrong in my fucking life, everything that’s good (not many things) and compare 'em. Then I cry because I realize that my life is just not worth living.

Yet I go on living it. For what purpose I do not know. Yet it feels as an obligation for me to live even though I hate it. I want my life to stop going on, for someone to come and end my life, to take it away from me. I have no purpose for being alive. So why am I alive?

Because my parents fucked up and brought me into the world. They say they want me....and maybe they do just doesn’t seem like it. They rarely show affection for me.

Very little affection at all. Someone take me away from this place. Take away my life and the bitterness that I have felt. Either bring me happiness or just give me death. My life is no longer worth living. I'm lonely, I'm sad, I'm depressed. The wall has become my only friend.

I heard the announcement of Joey Ramone's death on FMU, at the beginning of a hastily-assembled 15 minutes of Ramones tunes. I'd like to think it's a mistake.

By the time of Leave Home, I thought, "I can do that". By the time of Rocket to Russia, I thought, "I will do that", and so, instead of being some unhappy math professor today, I'm an aspiring renaissance scoundrel and tired coder. As the years went by, Joey revealed himself to be the R'n'R version of "a gentleman and a scholar", a passionate historian and valued co-keeper of the nebulous flame of le rock and roll, as important for the intelligence behind the noises he made as for the noises themselves.

---

But I am a tired coder, even fixing bugs in my dreams on occasion. I carry a company beeper these days, and if one of our servers even sneezes, we on the beeper list get an automated message announcing the cold. It (uh...) inspires you to make sure the code is bulletproof and the servers' properties files glitch-free. I was awakened at 2 AM a few days ago by a steady series of alerts from the beeper, as our sites went kaput, one by one; to make it worse, I discovered it was my fault -- an EJB of mine was failing to load (for an obscure reason that I've yet to smoke out; it didn't need to be on the servers anyway). I logged in and fixed it (by removing all mention and trace of the EJB), but instead of going back to bed, did some work on resuscitating my own site, part of the neverending struggle to make it operate on its own -- as a bunch of bots, in a sense, freeing me to do things like sleep and cavort again. No sleep and no cavort makes Homer something something.

---

The finishing-the-move-to-Nueva-York index is up to 80 (on a scale of 100). It's now almost possible to walk from one end of the apartment to the other without tripping over a box or pile of clothes. Someday -- this year, I think -- I'll think about getting furniture. And a TV. At least I've got DSL ...he said, as he surveyed his domain from his flat, linoleum throne.

I realized this morning that I don't believe in God.

I have this saying: "Faith is about believing in God, not believing that God." By which I mean that faith isn't simply the intellectual knowledge that God exists; I believe that my wife Angela exists, but when I say I believe in her, I mean that I love her and trust her. So it should be with God.

Isn't that CLEVER? Couldn't you just see that on a HALLMARK CARD or a BUMPER STICKER?? Boy, am I proud of that saying. Bully for me, being so witty and all.

This morning we went to the sunrise Easter service. It was beautiful. We all lit candles from the Paschal flame, and it was dark and quiet and reverent. And then during the sermon, the priest quoted Jesus:

"Do not let your hearts be troubled. Trust in God; trust also in me. In my Father's house are many rooms; if it were not so, I would have told you. I am going there to prepare a place for you. And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come back and take you to be with me that you also may be where I am."

And I realized then that for the past several months -- okay, let's be honest, we may be talking about something that's been growing for years -- I haven't believed that at all. Scripture teaches that Jesus took our sins to the Cross with him so that we may be released from them. Jesus took my fear, my guilt, my shame, my anger, my anxiety, my failures, my abuses, and lifted them off my shoulders. They aren't mine anymore. They were nailed to a piece of wood two thousand years in the past, and with His death they were forever eradicated.

In their place He leaves His love and His peace. These things are to fill the Christian's life and flow out in the form of compassion toward others. We can do this because we know in our hearts that we can trust God to keep his promises, because he loves us fiercely and wants us to be with Him.

And that is not where I am right now. I have stopped believing that any of this can be true for me. After all, I'm petty and weak-willed, self-centered and lazy. The things I've done in the past come back to haunt me again and again, and each time I am appalled at what a bastard I can be. The knowledge of the depths to which I can sink, and the degree to which my good intentions fail me and others even today, has become the defining factor in my life. The peace of God, I think, must be for others. It can't possibly be for me. That, ladies and gentlemen, is my new faith. Here's how rooted in me it's become: knowing that I have a history of alcoholism in my family, I actually considered taking up drinking this past week just to help me cope with my daily stress. I mean, how stupid is that? It was practically a panel out of those hilariously dumb Jack Chick comics. "Jesus can't help me -- maybe I can find the answer in beer!"

So the words from the pulpit fell on me like a ton of bricks this morning. I realized that I spend all of my time wrestling with -- what? Not even my actual faith, but the idea of faith. I grapple with what I believe to be the Big Questions and manage to completely miss the point of this entire exercise, which is that Jesus died for ME. In the passage the priest quoted, Jesus flat-out ORDERS me not to worry about the state of my soul, or anything else for that matter. How could I possibly have missed that?

Repentance was the call of John the Baptist, a poor translation of the Greek word for a turning of the mind away from the old and toward the new. It's time for me to let go, and to truly repent.

Thanks to iandunn for starting the wheels turning.

Why the fuck is everyone always so melancholy?

I woke up this morning in a good mood.

It's sad that this is even notable. I went to work at 8:00 this morning and was happy about it, even though I am the antithesis of a morning person. One of my co-workers dressed up as a giant bunny, and handed out candy and balloons to people. Everyone at my work had nicknames today, and it showed up on our clock-in slips. The sour girl at work was called "rotten egg", one of the psycho Nazi-like managers was the "energizer bunny", and I was called the "playboy bunny". I had the pleasure of receiving this name only because I asked if I could wear my playboy shirt to work for Easter, because it had a bunny on it. Even the general manager got into the spirit and wore bunny ears today. I love holidays, even though it is only Easter.

I tried to get up and go to church this morning, but I had stayed up to late last night and knew that I would fall asleep during the service if I went. So I went back to bed. And ended up sleeping until 2pm. That felt good... I got up and ate lunch, watched anime, and thought about doing some homework. I watched a lot of anime, and didn't get any homework done. I went to the 7pm service. I was a little late.

Today didn't feel like Easter. I almost missed church..I ended up running there so I wouldn't be as late. I felt like if I missed church, that I would have missed Easter altogether. Maybe it didn't feel right because it's my first holiday away from my family, or because I didn't get an Easter basket (I don't really think this is it), or because this is the first time in over fifteen years that I haven't gone to see or participated in an Easter musical. After I got back from church, I had dinner and talked with my boyfriend online. I started on the homework that was due at 7:30 tomorrow morning and realized that I hadn't gotten *any* homework done this entire weekend. So much for being productive with my roommate and friends away for the weekend...

Roommate update: not only does she have strep, but now she has mono too! :(