For those of you that give a damn, my sore throat left me during my day off, and I felt good enough to go out to eat with my lovely wife.

of course, this all translated into my having extreme stomach cramps and nausea at three in the goddamn morning, leaving me feeling worse than before.

i did manage to go to work today, though. to call in sick twice dirung your last week at a job is bad form.

yeah.

i have imbibed wine. i have inhaled the smoke of burnt cannabis. forgive my typing.

i just got off the phone with my boyfriend. i really am quite lucky to have someone who really loves me. i am even luckier that he constantly tells me with both words and actions. perhaps my relationship preferences are different than other girls, but if i had to give advice to the men about the ladies i'd say "TELL HER HOW YOU FEEL WHEN YOU FEEL IT EVEN IF IT SOUNDS CORNY OR SILLY". then, as a side note i'd say "hold her hand in public if and when you feel like it".

my usual food list will have to wait, since i haven't had any food yet today. shit, it's barely today, since it's only 12:37AM, EST.

i'll be heading to bed soon. i may smoke some salvia beforehand to help me relax and shut my eyes. more in the morning when it seems more like today (tomorrow?).



well. i feel kinda poopy this morning, no doubt from the wine last night. i woke up late, bought a crappy breakfast (included in the list below) and just arrived at work to see the stocks i watch down.

the cool thing is this though: when i got into work a poster had been delivered to me. it's a poster of ME. and it's elite. that's all i can say about that for now.



FOOD:

1 mild jamaican meat patty
1 large glass orange juice
several cups of coffee with cream
some trolli-O sour apple candy
sausage and peppers



i was reading some fight club quotes. one of them caught my eye:

"How much can you know about yourself if you've never been in a fight?"

i've been in a fight. one big one. and i lost it bad. my family still mentions it a lot and seem to be amazed that i got through the situation. having happened to me, it now seems mundane.

i take martial arts. and i'm good. it's a skill that i am trying to perfect. sometimes i find myself hoping that someone tries to bother me so that i can put my skills to real life use. the one big fight i was in, i wound up pinned to the floor. he was sitting on my chest and relentlessly pummeling my face. i remember being amazed at how much it hurt but that i hadn't passed out. i know firsthand what being on bottom feels like and now i am curious about how it feels to be on top.

and i don't mean fighting in competitions. i've done that. i'm good at that. but that's sport. there's no real fear involved there. we fight for points, not self-preservation.

anyway, i probably sound like a maniac about now. but that was just the train of thought i followed. i'm not going to go out and jump someone. that goes against everything i've been taught. i'm just curious to see how i would handle myself.



and werd to you Asamoth.
14:00

I am technically unemployed for a few days. My old contract ended yesterday and the new one is still in the works. So I'm just chilling out at the office. Discussing random things with friends on IRC, listening to some laid back electronic music by a Bavarian (!) artist called Console and idly noding out the day. All this is quite nice, actually.

The following weekend there will be a lot of drunken partying here in Finland with the first of may being a day for boozing, colorful balloons and whatnot. I am probably going to have fun while sober, since excessive consumption of alcohol just doesn't feel tempting. Screw the finnish goverment for giving the chemical used to manufacture GHB a controlled substance status!


23:00

Damn. I forgot to buy ramen noodles while I was at the store.. Now I have to improvise tomorrow's breakfast. But variety is a good thing, right?

I just got an SMS from a friend, telling he just bought another groovy lava lamp. Soon his place is going to look more psychedelic than mine! *jealousy*
Oh well.. The summer is approaching, and with the poor air conditioning in this house, I won't be able to keep my lava lamp and space projector on for extended periods of time anyway.
Maybe I should move all that stuff to the well-ventilated office? But then again, the boss most likely wouldn't appreciate the workplace looking like an LSD trip.
Yesterday, I got promoted to Tech Crew, which means I can't call Tech Crew anymore to fix all the problems that go wrong when I am on duty. Interesting tidbit, I decided for a change and bought a pack of Camels instead of Basics....In the world of cigarettes, Basics are the favorites of poor college students and mullet-sporting rednecks, while camels are for the choosy bunch seeing as they are $3.60 a pack currently. It ends up being that I am so used to the harshness of Basics as a form of oral fixation that the Camels taste like air. $3.60 for a pack of air...whew boy.

another thing I figured out was I am somewhat bitter now that my friends are dating each other1, but hey I am dealing with it2.


1my roommate who I have known since high school and another friend for a couple of years are 'hooked up' which makes me somehow irritable ...seeing as how 2/3 of such friendship are involved in sexual humanism.

2I am courting a fair maiden as we speak.

Today is Friday for me! I'm taking tomorrow off. Why? Because I can. I've been working here since 1997 and I haven't taken more than two days at a time off. I think I'll start making all of my weeks 4 days instead of 5. I also think I'll dedicate my entire day to noding.

Things to do today:


Well it seems that I got a little sidetracked. Its 2:11pm (EST) and I'm just now creating my first node. ::sigh:: I hope the rest of my day does not go like this.

squirrels drift past my window There is a crazy gray squirrel I see outside my bathroom window every afternoon, devouring maple keys (when I was a kid we called them "helicopters", for the way they spin when they fall). He stands on one branch and reaches like a little monkey for a bunch of maple keys on another, flimsier, branch.
Mortality. One of the packing clerks died this week. He had complained of headache and dizziness, so one of the other fellows in the shipping department brought him to the hospital after the shift ended at 3PM. Turns out his headache was caused by an aneurysm, he went into a coma, they pulled the plug on his life support late yesterday. His funeral is Saturday. I worked with him for a year when I first hired on here; he spoke very little English, a little shy, but a hard worker and always had a friendly nod and a smile ready. He was 53. I blame alcohol and tobacco.
All you need is a dollar and a dream. Lunch was a buffalo chicken sandwich and a Killian's at The Pub with K-. She was on vacation in the Bahamas last week. She says Eddie Murphy has an island there, right by Nassau. Must be nice, to have your very own private island in the Caribbean. I will never know, unless maybe I hit tomorrow's $100M lottery drawing. I don't think I would buy an island, even if I did win $100M, though.
Organizing Principles. I'm starting to accumulate a small pile of assorted notes to myself, correspondence that needs attention, receipts to file, etc. Tonight looks good for a filing party. I'm a bit torn, though: Last night I made quite a bit of progress in The Rape of the A*P*E*, it's very entertaining, so what I really feel like doing is reading, not filing...
When in doubt, node. So, instead of filing or reading, I finished noding the county-level government of the 50 states of The United States of America.
Today my XP-to-writeup ratio just crept over two.

Given that there are users on at this very moment with ratios of 10, I have come to the conclusion that pre-vote, pre-XP seniority (a couple thousand of 0-vote nodes' worth of drag factor) is actually a handicap in the present XP system.

Still, it's hard to complain when you're in the #1 position 8)

Went back to the radio (CiTR) after the novelty of my MP3 rotation began wearing off, where I just heard that a bid for the female Transformer (RC?) just reached $600 on eBay. Sigh.

Got another unsolicited postcard today! Thank you, Bob the Cow, and your vocabulary flashcard for capricious: tending to change one's mind suddenly.

Despite knee-jerk negvoting for gratuitous XP-system criticism, my smile still stays on... 8)

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

I returned 45 library books today so they'll let me take out more. I went out for lunch with my mom and we ordered too much chinese food. I carried the extraneous cruft from my desk two floors downstairs. We're moving tomorrow so all is delightful chaos today. It's been casual day all week and today people are in jean shorts and have their hair tied up and are strong arming filing cabinets. Everyone's got the smiles. It's raining out and we're playing some weird reggae synth country fusion music that a weird friend of one of the managers (we have such a manager surplus here. eight employees: one is the president, one is the CFO, three more are managers.. (well, plus 45 associates in branch offices, but they don't count. they're the force of nature that give us orders to process..)) gave her. It's really bad but we're listening anyhow so we can make fun of it. We're a band of Heckle and Jecklers today. I spent two hours in word finishing up the newsletter. I like text boxes. They're the one good kludge that makes Word bearable to use at all as a DTP program. I got paid today. I hope we somehow lose the ficcus tree that sits next to my desk in the move. We're only moving two floors, but perhaps my powerful hatred will make it pop in to an alternate dimension. It's four trees, actually, braided together, which looks so sad and pathetic. It's not so much the getting-in-my-eyes-when-I-pass-it-on-my-roller-chair that bothers me as the your-tortured-existence-as-a-mutilated-houseplant-grieves-me sort of irritation. No hard feelings, ficcus, but we've just got to part ways.

I have Go Down, Moses stuck in my head again. I don't know why. The tune's not catchy. I think I'm just in a catching mood. An english teacher of mine in highschool said once to us "Sometimes when you just have an Ear, when you're ready for inspiration, and anything, any ordinary thing, can become something that inspires you and moves you to create change in your life." well, not those words exactly, but that's what I took away from it. Witness, thus, people who can take inane song lyrics and then with the wave of inertia they glean from them, move across the country and start a religion and get a doctorate in physics.

Humans are so cool.
Today, another of the pseudo democratic Mexican meetings took its toll over poor me and my Boss.
The idea is that the Big Kahuna gets the design committee in a room, together with people from other worthy institutions that might have some interest in the site - and that certainly have no fscking idea of how a WWW site is designed and run.

Everybody, very politely, vents and rants and is made to feel that what he said is worth something.
Subsequently the Big Kahuna asks random questions: the Lesser Kahuna answers most of them. Little baffo occasionally makes some totally inappropriate comment, today we were discussing forums and logins and authentications, and I mentioned the Slashdot Anonymous Coward system. Everybody was offended. I suspect that the word "coward" struck them as very very unsensitive. Bad baffo, no cookie.

Then my Boss and I went for a nice tasty 3000 chalories alambre. Now I am bloated, sleepy, and trying to caffeine my way into awareness, at least as much awaraness as is needed to do webmastering (estimates differ).

Dr. Foo declared that his wonderfully stable set of machines had three hours downtime over the last three months. I could have said that the mail system was DEEEEEAAAAAD for at least three days, just when we had to demo it.
Dr. Foo hired and believes strongly in a set of bureacuratic dolts that pretend to be sysadms. I am not a sysadm, but I can tell one when I see it.
Then Narciso Y., the graphic designer showed us his latest gob of dried puke, sorry, his lates graphic concept for the sign. At least this time it didn't have little animated things creeping into periphal vision. Nonetheless, the color scheme is like a Giant Eagle special offer leaflet on peyote. And on a big screen, it just hurts.

Tonight is pseudo single night, which means that my SO and I act as if we were just roommates. We don't even try to synch, no commonal food preparation or consumption: just civility. It keeps us sane.

Today a crazy lady followed me home. I noticed her because she was talking to herself. I smiled and she started telling me how dogs should not be on leashes, ever. Then she told me my bag was too heavy for a girl my size. I laughed, secretly straining under the weight. I wanted to get away quickly despite the feeling that she was seeking companionship. Then she quietly muttered that she felt alone in the world, and I wanted to cry I felt so guilty.

She was more right than she realized. Perhaps the bag on my back, all my precious books, were limiting me like a leash on a dog. Was the knowledge I had gained worth the price of carrying it with me everywhere? Someday, I would like to lose my education. I know this is crazy but so was the woman who followed me home, and she was right.

Up early for court. For future reference: don't bother getting to court early.

Drugstore for hideous bunnies. Home to nap. Cat thinks it is biting time.

I eat a decent lunch on the way to work, which is an accomplishment. Crumbs in my lap and all is well. Today is weird Catherine's last day and I am afraid the joy radiating from me may offend her.

Eight-year-old Erin catches me in the bathroom licking my hands. My hands smelled all lunchy - there was no soap - I had just eaten an Altoid . . . I try to explain; she gives me one look and leaves the room.

There are free tattoos! in the bottom of the giant box of cookies!! I take them before the kids see them. Sadly the tattoos seem to have nothing to do with cookies.

I say something silly to cheer up Katie P. which falls flat as I knew it would. Later I pay for it when Katherine G. asks me solemnly, quietly, "Do you really think I'm a poop head?"

I learn how to make friendship bracelets, which I missed somehow when I was in fourth grade. I manage to escape work without surrendering my phone number to weird Catherine, and count the day as a victory.

This is for all you voyeurs out there, who love to read a life. if that's not you, ignore this.
So, uh, i call Scott back. The guy who answers says, Scott who? I don't know his last name! Just Scott. He called me. Ok, just joking, his housemate Terry, joke with you later. Scott asks, so, do you drink beer? Well. I have been known to do that on occasion.

He's gonna play some music with his friends, and then i'll go to his house (my house? not a good idea. i don't elaborate.) He'll call. I commence to make dinner, and wonder what reasonable excuse i could have. I decide to go with brazen ambiguity. So, while we're eating, i tell Dan that my friend Scott might call and i'll be going out. No reaction.

Lordy! he does call. I head on over.

They're sitting around, several of the walls are covered with concert posters and i look around to try to get some clues or context. They ask if i smoke. I say no, and pass the bowl on when it reaches me. Actually, i have in the past, but i always cough uncontrollably, and that's just not.. impressive. People and dogs are in & out of this house. We drink cheap beer. Eventually, they put on a video - this is neat - of a silent film version of Peter Pan, which they (the band) wrote a score for and performed at several art theaters around the area. It's pretty funny. The music is quite good. There was a child sitting near the cameraperson, and the comments sound like they are part of the score.

Scott's room, as he promises, is the smallest bedroom i've seen. It's a closet, with about 5 inches to spare outside of the mattress. The walls are covered with a silver insulating-type material like plastic packing bubbles, and the ceiling slopes all the way down to the head of the "bed". Above the door (which is a mexican blanket) it says

Welcome to the Cave!

Below the door is a solid-state television, on top of which is a VCR which doesn't work, a VCR which does work, a clock radio and a good ol' tapedeck radio. Not very high tech. As high tech as he gets apparently.

He's very - forward. And he's got a filthy mouth, which i find incredibly funny. Oh, and he seems to have a healthy ego. Signs point to this being my first purely physical and fun-type dalliance. Interesting.

I go home and straight to bed. Hmmm-hmmm hmmm. Thinking about all kinds of things, i'm glad i maneuvered my way into having my own room. I dream of colored eggs with mysterious contents.

Allister, Blue Meanies, Less Than Jake
Northern Illinois University, Dekalb, IL
April 27, 2000

Yes! Ska! Allister is a local band from NIU that seems to be kicking some ass. Check them out. They are real showmen, and an excellent band as well. They encouraged audience participation in their show. For example, when the sound guy had the vocal mixed all wrong, they asked the audience if it sounded fucked up, and had it fixed. The Blue Meanies looked like the Rolling Stones. No reason to really; they just did. They played their unique brand of ska and the crowd liked it just as much as any. The auditorium where this show took place (basketball court) didn't exactly hold the sound they put out as well as anywhere else would, but they still made a lot of noise. Less Than Jake are the big winners for the night. These guys have so many loyal fans (and excellent songs) that they could've played for 3 days non-stop and not lose momentum. They definitely got the most they could out of the crowd; at one point there was a huge bunch of people running around in a monstrous circle for one song...at the request of the band. These guys really blew me away, as I expected. Their music is so good in the first place, I wouldn't have expected less. Highlights of the show were the crazy dancing clown in a suit on stage, the dialog of the band, and "Johnny Quest Thinks We're Sellouts," which I believe got the absolute most intense response from the crowd. This is definitely a band to check out if you ever have the chance.

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