June 9, 2001

I'm in a GMT+12 timezone, which explains why this write-up appears to be early.

I just had a fight/domestic with my girlfriend jacqui. The core problem is that she won't let me be true to my body clock, she wants me to keep regular ``normal'' hours. She doesn't mind me working late, but objects to me sleeping days, because she doesn't think she'll see anything of me.

What she doesn't understand is that if i'm not true to my body clock then when i'm awake i'm 1/2 asleep and i never get a good nights sleep. If she let me be true to my body clock then i might spend slightly less time with her, but i'd be much more awake for it.

It's a question of quality vs quantity, but i have this sinking feeling that it's the end of the relationship.

What I really want is just a good days sleep.

Well I'm about to take a trip to see my friend married in Virginia (DC area). I have to get up at about 5 am tomorrow in order to catch my flight. I got prepared today by getting a suit, because I don't fit into my old ones. So sad.

Meanwhile, I have not yet gotten a hotel reservation. I wonder if this is going to be a problem ;-). I did rent a car, so the worse case scenario is to bum around with the wedding guests until the latest hour and then, sleep in the car, if I need to.

I'm not super excited about this wedding. I know my friend, and visited her a few weeks ago. She is keeping a lot of secrets from her new husband, even though they have been dating for 3 years. That worries me a lot. I think they might be in for a rocky road. But I wish her well in any case.

Never trust grown men eating ice cream.

I started out yesterday at about 11.00 Central European Time in Croatia. I was in the town of Pula, on the Istrian penninsula. A beautiful town it is, with a very slow and relaxed pace of life. I was taking a (what I thought would be) brief break from my travels about central Europe. I was ready to head back north, to Austria or somesuch. Tomaz in Ljubljana had recommended that I go to Venice, but accomodation there is expensive and usually full, so I deemed that impractical.

After a rather long and unfruitful search for information on transportation connections, I deemed it preferable to take the 16.00 bus to Trieste (or "Trst" in Croatian) and then make my way to a night train to Innsbruck from there. I had quite a bit of time, so I went to the beach for a bit of a swim before my trip, got some food, &c.—details are irrelevant.

I got on the bus, and sat acrosss from a guy who was in my room at the hostel in Pula. We chatted some as we headed north and west. We passed briefly through Slovenia and then into Italy, getting our passoports checked four times but not stamped even once. (Damn!)

Arrived in Trieste, my temporary companion and I went to the train station. My train left from the Venezia Mestre station after a couple hours, and I hoped I might be able to at least take a brief walk about the town before my train. I disappeared and didn't say goodbye to him. That's where my troubles began.

Alas, the station was not the one in town. I went to try to buy a ticket to Innsbruck, but as I arrived in the office all the windows closed. I tried the machines, but they were not valid for international travel. I helped a woman who spoke Italian to me and didn't have time to hurry and was dropping her coins. Then I wandered looking for another place to get tickets, and managed to ask someone in broken Italiañol (or is it Espaniano?) about it, and did learn that I could buy the ticket on the train.

I decided to go to Zürich rather than Innsbruck, because it was a direct train and I couldn't get information about the connection to Innsbruck with all the info windows closed. I had over an hour to wait, and I realized I was hungry.

I headed over to the café that had been open only minutes before—and it was closed too. Everything was closing just as I needed it. It was getting pretty frustrating. I made my way across the street to a Best Western of all places and had myself a croissant and orange juice. I later found a place to buy nuts and Ritz crackers. I managed not to starve.

The train station was full of all sorts of cute Italians and seedy scary grown men eating ice cream mulling about and ignoring me. If there's one thing I have learned from the movies, it's not to trust grown men eating ice cream. I wandered and waited, tried to get machines to work, and found a phone that took 5 DM coins, of all things. I called Kelly, partially to say hello and partially to hear something familiar to confirm my existence, which I was beginning to doubt. She wasn't there, but the voicemail greeting soothed me somewhat. I left an incoherent message.

In dreams, things that don't make sense make sense. I felt like I was in a dream, so I put my sunglasses on. It didn't help.

Finally the train. The one car to Zürich was full, and the man told me to go to the other part of the train and transfer in Milano. The train was packed far beyond capacity, and I squeezed through, full of "scusi"s and "Entschuldigung"s and "pardon"s and "excuse me"s. I finally stopped at the end of one car and stood. Next to me was an ugly man who seemed to think it would be better to try to stand where I was standing rather than get within 20cm of the Cantonese-(I think)-speaking girl on his other side. In the WC were at least two men who shouted constantly in grotesque cartoon voices. I'm not sure if they were drunk, fucking, dying, or just plain bored. I was at one point convinced that I was dreaming, and slapped myself and tried to read things to see if I was. I wasn't, it was actually real.

In Verona I decided I had had enough and decided I could probably get a connection from there. I got off the train, never having paid. In the station, my suspicions were confirmed; I had about an hour to wait for a train to Innsbruck. I tried to sit down on a ledge, but a man chased me away. I put the money together to buy some water, got a phonecard from a machine, and tried calling again. Kelly wasn't at home or at her mother's, but I did have a good conversation with her mother, Bev. I was reassured, and believed I was real.

On the next train, again full. Well, the compartments could hold 6 sitting, most were full with 3 lying down. I sat in the corridor for an hour and a half and didn't sleep at all. Eventually some people got off and I got into a compartment, where I got less than 2 hours of sleep.

I slept through the stop at Innsbruck. Had I gotten off there, I think I would have completed a journey of several hundred kilometers without paying. But the conductor came at last and I bought a ticket from him. Got off two stops past Innsbruck, and decided that Fate had deemed it best I not go there. Got a ticket to Munich, wrote some postcards, got on the train and read the International Herald Tribune. Arrived around 10.00.

So now I'm here, at easyEverything. I had two hours of sleep and spent 18 hours travelling. I can't quite balance, the world is spinning. Sounds like a good time to visit Dachau.

A couple of mediocre ideas by a tired man.
Actually I slept quite well; for a long, at least. On Thursday we were in Bangor. Wonder how many people really know Bangor. We had a wee laugh at this concept of "Bangor goes global" when we saw a graffiti like that.

It was great fun there but my I have a problem with my daily cycle. You see, I'm not able to sleep till late. My inner clock wakes me up around 9ish anyway and I can't really sleep after that unless I really turned my cycle around and I don't want to do that. So I went to bed around 4ish and slept only that 5 hours.

For my surprise, Friday wasn't too bad but the Simpsons double bill was cancelled thanks to m*f*ing election results. They really don't know how to prioritize. So I thought to go to run 40 minutes ahead of my timetable. After the bog I put my running gear on and rested in a bed "just a wee second". That second was 3 and half hours.

I've lost my point, sorry about that. One of the ideas was this:
Q: Why day logs tend to be depressive?
A: If you're happy you don't run to a computer for a wu.

Or maybe I'm not just geek enough! You see, it was found out that my nerdiness reaches only the level of 24%.

Other idea was about drugs; presumably about ganja. I felt a wee bad because of my latest wus. Now, I don't know how to prioritize: The greater reason for my bad-feeling is the fact that I'm sometimes too m*f*ing honest, or should I say plain-spoken when it comes to myself. I don't like talk nasty things about other people, especially behind their backs. Gossiping ain't for me. But I think I don't have that level of instinct of self-preservation that the prevailing distorted society assumes/requires. At least I lose the instinct once a while.

I should change the subject. Thinking these things does nothing but makes me angry. (I did not write even quarter of the thoughts I brainstormed about this issue.. They are just too sad.)

It was that I don't want to encourage anyone to do drugs. I've seen they may cause nasty things. The same is the case with alcohol. Some of my relatives had suffered from alcoholism.

The paragraph just above is almost exactly what I meaned by the lack of self-preservation. Now I was able to avoid names but often it goes into more detail. I think about relationships, both general level and one particular personal case near past. Sometimes I wish to be someone else. Having more social skills -- not really. Hypocrisy is not for me. It's fucking wrong hypocrisy sometimes pays. (Note the synonymization!)

Well, off to the Old Museum. There should be a group exhibition titled "The Value of Straight Thinking" and later at the evening physical theatre titled "Cracked" that tells about the people who were mentally ill in Ireland at 40's and 50's.

I'm well-sleeped, saw one odd nightmare though, and I try hard to forget what I was writing above. Ignorance is bliss.

And finally the happy end: In Bangor happened something that increased my self-esteem. I've been quite comfortable with that lately anyway but it's always nice to know that you're not the greatest fuckhead around.

Ps. Very characteristic, but the happy end above reminded me about things that are going to happen within a week i.e. I'm moving away. I don't want to ruin happy endings and therefore let's consider this bit as a post-end story.. So: Think that you have just found out what I did above. Now, you're a non-fuckhead who's not going to see the people who think about you like that at least for a half year maybe, and probably, even more. I hate that.

It's a beautiful day today but i've been inside looking at 2 or 3 types of screen most of the day. The usual email and random surfing, but also editing video for my semi-big screening tommorrow. If anyone here wants to come, it's at CCAC in San Francisco, Sunday 10 June, 6:30 pm, in Timken Lecture Hall. No, I'm not a student there, I just have a friend who works there and can get the hall for free.

Most of the stuff is footage from the San Francisco Electronic Music Festival and the Big Sur Experimental Music Festival. And a few other nuggets. It will be cool to see this stuff I've been shooting and editing projected really big. And for lots of friends to see it at once and laugh and talk about it all at once.

Anyway, I finished that up. the whole thing is 77 minutes long. a nice length. So anyway, it's weird when I was editing there were 4 screens - the little screen on the camera, the Mac monitor where Final Cut Pro was running, the NTSC video monitor (green monochrome, but better than nothing), and then the monitor of this other computer, which i was using for email and noding while i waited for stuff to dub or render. Jeez, it was confusing.

Adding to that confusion was the fact that I'm still a fucking total newbie halfwit about Everything. Till a few minutes ago I didn't know that Cool Man Eddie was not a real person! Did you know that my very first writeup got cooled, almost immediately? Suddently this guy Eddie was emailing me about it. That was a few days ago. I actually wrote back and thanked him. What an idiot i am. I thought, man this place moves fast. So today on the chatterbox I get informed that that is not a user, it's like a feature, an automatic thing. You learn something everyday at Everything....

Anyway Jay just called me twice in the last 5 minutes to remind me that i was supposed to cook her dinner tonight. I better go get some sun before I have to start slaving over the hot stove....

I dislocated my kneecap.

My sister was going to her friend's end of 8th grade party. I was invited too, so I went with them to the catering hall. There was a DJ, and a dance floor, food, pictures, leis, and some glowsticks.

This means we'll be looking forward to raving, skanking, and some ska first.

So, they're playing ska first. Somebody ripped their lei and started twirling thier new ribbon around. I thought "cool" and decided to do the same, this time with 2 and walking backwards as Save Ferris is played. Suddenly, somebody slams into me from the side and I go down. As I fall in slow motion, I think, "darn."

I land on the ground, and twist my leg, bringing a stab of pain. The guy rolls off me, and I suddenlyh feel the urge to make sure I didn't break anything. I try to move my leg. I can't! I freak out, and my sister wonders why I am not getting off the ground. I start palpating my leg as I learned in EMT class, and I got the shock of my life. Instead of my kneecap, I feel a large gap of sagging skin. I freaked. My sister kneels, a look of concern. I tell her call an ambulance, I think I broke my leg.

I sit up, because I start to hyperventilate, sure I'll pass out. Suddenly a bunch of parents and chaperones run over. 3 of them are doctors one determines I have dislocated my kneecap. All I am thinking is how this will put a damper on my day, and I'll need crutches.

I look up, and I am drawing a crowd. I crack a smile, and say how this is ruining the party. I wasn't really feeling lots of pain, maybe it was shock. I start singing along to Jennifer Lopez to take my mind off the pain as the ambulance shows up. Even though I am making a few people panic, I still made the crowd laugh at how nonchalant I was, commenting on how good the music was.

Finally, the ambulance shows up, and I am asked what happen. Without even breaking a sweat, I calmly explain how it happened. He puts a pillow splint on my kneecap. I am loaded into the ambulance, my sister comments on how well I am taking this, how I am acting like Spock. We get there, and I go right through the crowded waiting room, (yes!) into the ER and this doctor who looks like Andy Dick takes one look, says "Tell me when it hurts."

Pop!

"Ow!"

"Done!"

"Cool!"

There were 4 other dislocated kneecaps that day in the ER. I got a lot of icepacks to take home, and had to take some X-Rays taken with a lead cup to shield radiation.

I went home with some Tylenol #3s with codeine. I got to use a wheelchair the next day, downgraded to crutches, then limping. The upside is I get an elevator key in the high school, and a late pass until the end of the school year. Oh, and I can ask people to get stuff for me, not me getting up.

Since I collapsed in front of half the middle school, I've been getting a lot of get well IMs, but I missed the raving, the skanking, and the glowsticks.