March 5, 2001

Monday 8:44am Australian Eastern Summer Time

Summer is still here, but autumn winds are starting to blow in. I love this time of year. The worst of the heat is now behind us, and a walk in the morning means sunshine, blue sky, high cloud, and a fresh breeze. Just fantastic. The birds love this time of year too -- we have many native and introduced species around our place, and they all seem to be busy, doing goodness-knows-what. Preparations for the autumn, I suppose.

Gemma made her way back from the Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras late last night -- she had a blast. She was stuck in traffic for over three hours getting from Darlinghurst to Bondi in the early afternoon, and called me from her car. She was enjoying a Stella Artois and said it was the happiest traffic jam she'd ever been in... Unfortunately she's been bit by some kind of insect (we think) and she has a painfully swolen thumb. I've booked her into my doctor at midday.

I see a /msg on my screen from Kalon, bugging me for info on The Great Sydney Fraptabulous Everythingian Get Together. Good for him -- I started to thump the tub amongst our local nodist population a month ago and haven't done much since then. So I appreciate the prod, and promise to get on it to set a date that works for all of us.

Work today will be more cleaning up and documenting, as I'm unlikely to be there much longer than six more weeks I think. In Australia, it's customary to give four weeks notice, and since it's crititcally important to me that I leave on good terms, I'll do that. I've a meeting with the headhunter again on Thursday. It feels really good having someone work for my future. Kind of like having a butler, or something (yeah, weird thought I know, but it's a weird feeling). Have to go to Sydney tomorrow morning for a couple of days.

Well, I got my two new 80Gb drives into our home server on Saturday, and sussed out grip, a cool Linux front-end to your choice of ripper and encoder. The only remaining problem was how to encode the CDs at high-enough quality so they can be disposed of. I know next to nothing about audio encoding, you see. So I started my search on Everything2, of course. I read twenty or so really good writeups around ripping, encoding, encoders, bit-rates, etc etc. Better informed but still undecided, I hit Slashdot and searched there. I found plenty of info but the difference in tone between E2 (measured, smart, accomodating of differing opinions) and Slashdot (flame, counter-flame, Macs suck, Windows sucks, you suck, etc) bears noding. Whine as we might, E2 is actually pretty special. Anyways, I've decided not to junk the CDs yet, 'cause it seems that Ogg Vorbis will be the way to go, although I'm not confident that the technology is mature enough to commit to yet. So in the interim, I'm filling up those drives with MP3s ripped by cdparanoia and encoded by LAME at 192 bits.

After I arranged links to my daylog in calendar format on my homenode, I spent some time reading my old daylogs. I've never really kept a journal before, at least not for a period of longer than a few weeks. Even though I only have 2 or 3 months worth of daylogs, I find what I have written interesting.

Through hindsight, it seems that I take things too seriously. I've thought about it a little, and I suppose it is because of a few reasons.. One, I am too scared. Of everything. I'm a worry rat. Two.. I seem to concentrate upon one thing in my life at a time. Thusly I lose context.. If that thing does not turn out perfect I get very upset. (I'm such a baby.)

The whole thing with the woman whose name I choose not to divulge here, I think I read too much into a casual relationship, where we made mistakes months and months ago. There wasn't enough communication back then.. My fault. Anyway, I am sad that it didn't work out, but, as cliche and naive as it sounds, I am more sad that we are not friends, and that we haven't been for months.. I wrote her an email after we made what we both knew concrete (which was about 1 week ago): That we wouldn't be dating. I ought to have a 24 hr waiting period on my emails. I bet I sounded pretty pathetic.. But I told her I want her friendship. I'm leaving her alone unless she contacts me.

Well, this week is spring break. I'll be working on setting up a domain run on win2000 server for the CV Lounge. I'll also mess with quake 3 map making. I really don't have any friends, just a lot of aquaintances, so I won't be very social this break. The lack of friends is really because of myself. I read DMan's node on Avoidant Personality Disorder and it seemed to ring true with me. I think it's just because I'm not really interesting.

Oh well. Not a very interesting daylog, but, there is one good thing. After this w/u, I'll be on level 2, and able to vote. Huzzah! ( :

In the Café Metro, they're pouring Portishead through the speakers, Beth Gibbons like a dying angel over dervish-spinning drunken Bristol beats. The windows and doors are all open to let in the cold-warm eddies of the outside citynight air, and the smoke thickens the air in the upper gallery. I wish I had some dope, in my lungs, in my blood, to sandblast the edges away from my scrambling monkey-brain ego, to simply be, and to see, this moment of the universe-indwelling-in-itself.

When you do anything enough, devote your full attention to it, it begins to show up in your dreams. Read, write, program, play games, do drugs, have sex, whatever - focus on them enough, let it filter and percolate down to the mid-brain, and your dreams'll begin to arrange themselves around this focus. I think that the way we percieve reality when we're awake is the same way. The objective universe, if there is such an animal, gets thrown against the walls and screens of our senses in great big reality-bloodied chunks, till they get filtered in through the great incomprehensible network of the limbic system, till it comes out processed and patern-recognized into some form we already know how to deal with because we're used to it. Of course, it's equally possible that there is no outside, and when you get to the edges of the senses, all you see is your own eyes, blinking back at yourself. Better not to think about it.

I saw a rich man on the city bus today. At least I assume he was rich - he had all the right caste markers, Rolex, barely tucked in silk shirt, worn just so, country club crags and weathering on his face, relics of genteel excesses. He didn't act rich though, he acted old and tired and confused, twisting around to look at things from awkward angles, coughing into the back of his hand, talking under his breath, for all the world like the best-dressed homeless man in the city. I'm not sure what it means.

Through tonight's haze of fatigue and anxiety, it's hard to believe that I will be delighting in the sights and sounds of New York City at this time next week. Tonight's rehearsal was a bugbear, with the stage manager uncharacteristically terse and demanding...drunk with power. We ran the show in just under 2 hours, a mild achievement in and of itself.

I've been asking Wayne what he would like me to bring back from New York. Having gone last spring, I find that I still remember quite a few of the interesting shops around the island, and gave him a litany of the sorts of things he might enjoy. The answer, although expected, was still enough to set my teeth on edge: whatever you think I'll like, dear.

This rote response closely echoes his answer to my questions of "Where would you like to eat?" or "What movie would you like to see?" "Whatever you want, dear." Courtesy and thoughtfulness are one thing, but it gets damn tiring to always make the decisions. I have said so, numerous times. His practiced response seems to be that his upbringing/personality-shaping events have charged him with the impetus to demonstrate his remarkable doormat impersonation at the risk of losing touch with his kinder nature and transforming into the Incredible Hulk at the first display of assertiveness. (As evidenced, I suppose, by his stumbling first attempt at BDSM, in which he thought a Dom should demonstrate his control by yanking me from the couch in the middle of doing homework to go play with chains and dog collars)

Granville and Robson:

I lost my thrill
On Blueberry Hill
On Blueberry Hill
Where I met you...

If you have seen or encountered it, please contact me.
i miss it terribly.

YOU NEED TO GET A TV AND PLAYSTATION 2
AND DO 2 CROSSWORD PUZZLES EVERY DAY.

...

As I pass by, homeless people shout out "NO!" With that negative perspective, it's no wonder they're in the predicament they find themselves in.

While cleaning out the back yard, removing trash that's been there since before we moved in over two years ago (including a buried jar of what one roommate identifies as what was once pickled eggplant) I stumble across evidence of a nest in the crawlspace under our back porch. Not a bird nest or an ant nest but a human nest. I ponder the pros and cons of rendering it unsuitable for further habitation but come across evidence that it hasn't been used since before we were here, so I let it remain.

Trekked across town on foot to a reading at the Railway club celebrating Freedom to Read Week - a noble cause, but someone should have clarified the homonym for the performers and let them know that they were also free to read strong - the place was packed (literarily reassuring but logistically inconvenient) and I regretfully left after an uncomfortable hour confident that I'd be able to hear the rest of the featured readers (a stellar lineup - I bumped past the upcoming Ivan E. Coyote and Susan Musgrave on the way out) as well from the comfort of my basement as I could from my nook wrapped around the peanut vending machine; if I wanted to lip-read I could watch TV with the volume off.

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

My chair is broken.

Really broken.
It's a metal ladderback, looks like something Van Gogh would paint.
But it's broken.
The weld on the left front leg support parted last night. Now every time I move, the leg bends.
Metal fatigue is going to set in soon.
My chair is broken.
I can't stop touching the broken weld.

The History of The World is the history of warfare between secret societies.

From the front page of Highway61.com (every luddite's favorite search engine) -- Silent leges inter arma. - During war, the laws are silent. ~ Marcus Tullius Cicero

American English is going to hell in a pushcart. Doesn't anybody realize that if your advertizement reads "best prices" it means you don't have the best prices?

Every person has words they simply cannot spell.

"Consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds." -- Ralph Waldo Emerson

this is not a pipelink

Question about E2
• What's the protocol on praying for votes around here? I feel like I do it a lot, especially on weekends, when I'm here for more hours/day. Not all the prayers are answered. But I wonder if they are being ignored because I'm a greedy XP whoring pest, or if the gods simply didn't see them, and would rather get a msg? Should I pick one or two gods and just hit them up privately for votes? I don't want the votes for XP. I want them to improve the gel.

  My chair is broken, and I cannot think about anything else.

13:03

Shtuff done during the weekend? Not Much.

The highlight was that I invented a method for finding warez off the Internet. Based on web crawler and partial requests of ZIP files. The idea is tha ZIPs already have file checksums calculated and stored on the file indexes...

My Avocado diary probably tells more about it.

Today? Well, the cool thing was that There Was No Lectures. It's the winter vacation week...

More to come. I need to get my photos developed and see if I can get movies...

Time To Face The Challenges Of The Day.

16:39

Hmm, InterTran seems to be pretty interesting. It made an interesting enmanglement of All Your Base are Belong to Us =)

18:58

Got Terminator 2 on DVD... at least this one is slightly better thranslated than the VHS version I have somewhere...

...just that it doesn't have anything of the stuff mentioned on the DVD review writeup. =(

Curious thing: The cover says it's your plain ol' average Region 2 DVD, but the disc itself says it's Region 4. Plays fine on my R2 player, though, and has French/English soundtrack with European region subtitles. Strange???

21:29

(Okay, what the hell is going on with the reps? Up, down, up, down... What next? Left, right, left, right, select, start? =)

---

Other day logs o' mine...

Noded recently by y.t.: child process SIGILL layout SWiSH SWF old joke newsreader TVTV! Puzzle All Your Base Are Belong To Us The Words of the Illumined (advertisement)

Updated: Too many to mention...

I turned on my Air Conditioning last night, because my apartment was hotter than the air outside.

This morning, I woke up to a bit-too-cool apartment.

On top of that, I got up when my alarm clock said to get up - except it mysteriously lost an extra hour, so when it says it's 8:00, it's actually 7:00.

What's that mean?

That means it's another early day for me. WooHoo! (Yeah Right.)

I went shopping yesterday. Bought lots of soup, lots of TV Dinners, some lettuce, and other miscellaneous shit. My fridge has been empty for so long. Not because I'm low on money, but because I don't go food shopping all that often.

I bought all that, as well as a bag of chips.

I've decided to wait a day or two before I go back to The Blockbuster with the Girl. I don't want to come off as Stalker-ish, so I'll give it some time. I just hope something comes of it, or else I can't see what it'll do to me. Again.

Lunch Log: Campbell's Hearty Chicken Noodle "Soup-to-Go!" cup.

It was raining, I was on my way to the Walters Art Gallery to hang with a friend and shake the blues I've been going through; I hit a car. It was a silver mini-van that was 9 years old. The man driving was so rattled, his hands were shaking. Or maybe they always do, I don't know. I felt awful, horrible, started crying. He told me he had been hit from behind five years ago, giving him back problems. Now I feel really bad - have I exacerbated his pain?

I finally reached my friend to let her know I wouldn't make it. I knocked off his spare tire, and my car's hood is all smashed in. Driving back home, the steam just poured out of the radiator. The traffic was ridiculous and I was worried I wouldn't make it back. It looks pretty bad, but of course I can't open the hood to see the damage. So it might not be too bad.

I hope my car isn't considered a total loss by the insurance company - but it's certainly dealable either way. The thing is, whenever I start thinking about hitting this man in his car, I start tearing up and feeling utterly miserable for causing some one I don't even know such pain. I feel really, really terrible about it. He doesn't deserve it.

The thing is, this totally changed my whole day. I was supposed to either lay about the house and mope or go see a friend. I also was supposed to go to the gym and work out. The hangover from the party and this accident - a bit much.

Despite the fact that Caro and I seem to be falling asleep earlier and earlier each night, we also seem to be getting more and more tired by the day. This is largely due to the fact that my son (Luca) is in an irritable, insecure phase of his life. He got over an ear infection two weeks ago, and has been waking up every 45 minutes or so, and is very difficult to put back to sleep. I know you've probably all heard it before, but there's a big difference between eight hours of sleep uninterrupted and eight hours of sleep broken up into nine or ten equitemporal chunks. I seem to recall once reading that it takes an adult, on average, 3 hours to enter R.E.M. sleep, and also that if one is prevented from dreaming for prolonged periods of time, one goes insane. Well, it seems as though Luca is putting this to the test.

We're trying very hard to get Luca integrated into his day-care, but not having much success. Our provider has nine children in total, and keeps them in an apartment designed for the children. It's a wonderful setup, but he's not really having fun with the other kids. He's the youngest, and I think he finds the older children intimidating. As it stands now, I can only work half days, since he refuses to sleep at the daycare. The worst of it is that he's also going through an insecure phase, and really doesn't want to be out of sight of his parents, so leaving him there in the mornings is a traumatic event for both him and me. I swear, starting your Monday morning off crying on the way to work because you can't get your child's frightened sobbing out of your head does not put one in the mood for work. Sigh.

There reaches a point where coffee tastes fresh on the tongue again, and diner conversations can sparkle and amaze. Sometimes gossip just isn’t as entertaining as it used to be, and the only valid currencies are good stories.

Midnight pillow fights that leave you laughing so hard, you can’t stand, let alone fight; trying to keep quiet and not wake anyone else up.

Okay, I'll bite.

BIND is finally up and running on my home box after many a night of struggling, and 'blockade', the noble box that handled my web serving and NAT has now been retired after about a 18 months. For one and a half years, his little Pentium 100 heart chugged, serving pages, shuttling mail and crunching packets for Distributed.net. DNS was the only reason he has been in service for the past 2 weeks, all his other functions having been inherited by another box or two.

He will be missed. He was slow, old, quirky and I never could figure out how to get his cd-rom drive to work right. He'll now be put out to pasture indefinitely until, perhaps, I need to invoke a reincarnation. A moment of silence.

Serving in his stead will now be 'Hanna', a bright, young, optimistic K6-2 500mHz with easily 10-times the effective speed and storage of her predecessor. I only hope I treat her with more respect than I did 'Blockade'. He had been acting up lately, no doubt because I tortured him by making him wear 'Windows NT' all day. I wanted to use a *BSD for Hanna, but her IDE chipset only had UDMA support in 9x or Linux, and since I need speedy database access times, Linux kernel 2.4.0 was the number.

Of course, this isn't sad. After all, Hanna was built using one or two parts from the box that was in charge of NATing in the years before Blockade came along, so it is certainly in the cards that his soul and hardware will live on in another incarnation.

I'm superstitious that way. I never built or used new machine... they're never completely 'new'. Call it ancestor worship if you will, but I have a custom that, whatever machines I use, they will inherit parts from those who came before. Maybe a Video card, memory, or even something small like the keyboard. It's a way of preserving their soul in the same way that you live on through your children. Blood is important. This way, the new youngster will inherit the life of her parents, maybe become better for it. And when her time comes, she too will live on through her children.

I'm too sentimental, I know, but it's one of my vices. I can't stand to have a machine that served me so well being pushed aside so easily. So much accumulated life and wisdom, I refuse to waste it. Everything has a soul, everything lives. My parents' computer is still using the original case from it's first life when they bought it in 1989, then a lowly 286, since upgraded by me to a feisty Pentium-II 450. If I were to draw out the pedigree chart of all the machines I've had, the amount of inbreeding would be extraordinarily amusing.

A song for the dead. A prayer for the departed... and a dream for the future.

A certain kind of twilight
echos in your sleep
turning into velvet
she pushes in so deep
sorrow you call sadness
close upon your day
darker than this dreaming
an empty passion'ed play.


...Christabel is sleeping
she doesn't want to play...

"It's funny when you go to get a facial and the first thing the woman says to you is "take your shirt off.""

-Terra

I don't have conflict in my life. I'm very prosaiac and moderate. I don't feel like this has been a choice I made, but it must have been. Everything is a choice, right?

I came to university in September, after spending a year working after dropping out of college. So now I'm in school again, and I am getting smarter. I'm not a terribly adept person, but I do have quite a capacity to retain things and put them to use. I remember things I learned in sixth grade as clearly as things I learned last week. The point is, though... is that really a good thing? I get the feeling that being smarter is only going to serve to alienate me further from the rest fo the world. Is that what I want?

what the hell is it that I want?

I guess it comes down to that fact that you can only work with what you're given, right? I'll never be popular, or gorgeous, or hilarious, but I can be smart. I might as well take that as far as I can, right? I think... maybe not right now... but someday... I can be happy with that.

Allora,
sitting on the phone with my son Quinn who lives in Louisville, KY. We're talking about Star Wars figures. I got him some Euro packaged Episode I figures. I'm hoping him and my ex will come for a visit in September. I really want him to experience international travel at a young age.

Saw some great music this past weekend... a local Raggae band, that had sooooooooooooo much soul and jammed it out... very improvisational. Gonna see them again next saturday. I'm hooked.

Also saw Dave Douglas a great NYC trumpeter. Very out-there jazz, He used to play at the Knitting Factory, very much in the John Zorn, MMW, John Scofield new school of jazz. Very tasty.

Then on Friday I saw a local Piedmontese folk band called Lou Dalfin. Very coool stuff. I'll have a wu on them tomorrow fer whoever is interested. Also one on Dave Douglas.

Other than that all is well... got a letter from Paw and had a nice chat with Kristi. Going to see her in Hanover Germany in 2 weeks when I go up there for the Cebit technology expo. Work is paying for it all... airplane, hotel plus 1250$ cash for food, transportation, etc for the 10 days I'm up there. Whoopie!!!

Allora, (which means, "well then" in Italian), I'm gonna split. It's nearly 7pm local time and that means it's time for a hash filled pipe.

Ciao Everyone @ Everything2.

On this day, 29 years ago, the single most important event in human history took place. An event so earth shattering in its importance, it overshadows anything else you could possibly imagine.

I was born.

What? That's not the most important event ever? Fuck you! It is to me, pal, so there. Today is my birthday. The one day a year I'm allowed, no, compelled to be utterly selfish and demanding. Give me attention! Give me love! Give me cards, presents, adoration! Bollocks to this "oh, please don't make a fuss" lark - MAKE a fuss, dammit, or you're not my friend anymore, you're not in my gang ever again.

You can do it too - when it's your birthday, you are perfectly entitled to demand that everyone make a fuss of you, too. Your birthday is solely about you, a celebration of your birth, which in itself is amazingly selfish and self-congratulatory, so why not go the whole hog?

I'm 29 today. I've never been 29 before. Something else I've never done is forgotten it was my birthday. I did that today. Sure, I knew my birthday was coming, but yesterday I totally forgot. It was only today, at about midday, I suddenly said "Fuck, it's my birthday!" I'd completely forgotten. Senile old fucker.

I've been distracted a bit, but that's no excuse. I've just been in Yorkshire for a week, helping my sister out. She found a lump in her right breast in January, had it checked out, and yes, it was breast cancer. She was immediately booked in for a mastectomy, had the operation a couple of weeks ago. The family have been taking turns to go up and help out, with her and her 13 year old, my nephew. A couple of weeks ago she went back to the hospital, got checked again - she got the all clear. They caught it in time. No chemo. Thank fuck. She's going to be fine, well, relatively fine, considering the terrible trauma of having a breast removed. I can't imagine it, being a guy, but I'm sure it's not a barrel of laughs. Thing is, she's been great, she was optimistic throughout, and is now in great form. I'd have gone to pieces, but she was fantastic. She's happy now, looking forward to living, no longer having the death sentence hanging over her head. Any of you angsty teens who are listening, take note - a real problem! With real consequences! And nobody killed themselves, or made a pathetic attempt at it, or wrote fucking boring poetry/angsty daylogs about how terrible their lives are and if only someone would understand... See what I'm saying? Are you there, angsty boy and depression girl?? Shave, take a shower, open the fucking curtains and stop inventing problems to make your life all pseudo-gothic and interesting, you fucking self-important, pompous, whining cunts.

But I digress. I'd forgotten about my birthday, and as I was away in Yorkshire until just an hour ago, I haven't got any cards or presents or anything. But hey, I don't really care. My sister isn't going to die, she's going to be fine. I love her very much, and for a few horrible weeks I thought I was going to lose her. I have ten quid's worth of handmade fudge from the market that you can't get in London, two bags of honeycomb stuff (also handmade) like the stuff inside Crunchies, and a big bag of jellies. My sister and nephew have my old PlayStation now that I have a PlayStation 2, and are extremely grateful, and think I'm the King. I'm going to dinner tonight with my best friend. Saturday night, me and Felony (and fondue if I can persuade him) are getting done up in black and going for a heavy metal night out, so I can drool over saucy rock/indie/hippy chicks. Normally I'd say "y'know, with life's simple pleasures like these, I don't need presents" - and it'd be true. But hey, I won't turn you away if you have something for me...

Happy Birthday to me! And if it's your birthday too, well... fuck off, I was here first, me me me, pay attention to ME, I'm the best, LOVE MEEEEE...

---

Yes, I know I said that my previous (and first) daylog would be my last, but this is special. And I wanted a writeup with my birth date in it.

I sold out my kid for thirteen bucks

Guilt is a normal part of human nature. I wonder at my decisions sometimes. Did I make the right choice? Would I do it again?

My son, the one who disappeared Friday, had a performance Saturday. He was one of the chosen few percussionists for the valley's honor's band. All along he was telling me that his concert was on the 6th. I checked my work schedule and saw I was off. (not considering it odd for a concert on a Tuesday) Friday, when he finally appeared with tickets in hand for the concert, he told us he had been wrong. The concert was Saturday! AHHHHHHH! I was scheduled to work!

I called my boss to see if I could swap shifts, but she wouldn't even try. "No, come in as scheduled, you didn't tell me early enough".

I was angry. I was in tears throwing a two year old like temper tantrum because I wasn't getting my way. It was more than that. I was still in the grip of all those horrible feelings I had when he was missing. I didn't go to the concert. I went to work. I was more concerned about being fired. From what? A temporary job that barely pays minimum wage? If I had left two hours early I could have attended.

What made me angry with my boss at the time, was that I wanted to do something for my child. Granted it was last minute, but she calls me last minute on a regular basis to cover for someone else who doesn't give a rat's ass about showing up for work. I expected the same consideration. What made me angry was the fact she wouldn't even try. She couldn't be bothered.

What made me angry, was that I didn't insist, that I didn't place my child first. I made a decision that I should not have. I will never see my child play with this group again. It was a one shot deal. One night only. He forgave me, but I don't forgive myself.

I sold out my kid for thirteen bucks!

That thirteen bucks will go to buying a copy of the CD made during the evening so I can hear my child play whenever I want. It will be a reminder of how I made the wrong decision.

I had some minor annoyances this past weekend. Mainly, I've apparently been deemed worthy of having an impersonator or three on Slashdot, which is especially odd since:

1. I never post there under my own name.
2. Anyone who's opinion really matters to me either doesn't read slashdot, or took me 30 seconds to inform that the Slashdot user with my name wasn't me.

Ha, well, life's funny sometimes.

Another school shooting happened today in California.

I'm sure this is going to make things even worse than they are right now because of all of the huge media coverage and the fact that the shooter didn't kill himself.

I have a feeling this is all going to go the way of the OJ Simpson trial -- it'll be awful.

I'm kind of offended that adults simply think that it's 'the kids today' who are so crazy and out of control, and without respect to authority. As if all of the behavior being exhibited by kids today wasn't environmentally influenced in any way....

This is a sentiment that has been repeated over and over throughout history (I think there's even a Cicero quote about it), and I don't believe the fault has ever been more clearly on the shoulders of adults and parents everywhere for creating such an awful world to live in.

Adults are more afraid than ever of the horrible people that they are responsible for creating, and it looks like it's only going to be getting worse.

Bleah.

What a weekend - the whole family sick and miserable with another (yes, another) dose of the kindergarten plague. Or is it a relapse? I can't tell. Anyway, we're all sore-throaty and snot-nosey and headachy and just generally down, and all because of that same nasty little thing - type A streptococci.

So, with the whole family on antibiotics for the second time in a month, and both kids miserable enough to be difficult and whiney (two traits that, God knows, they don't usually display), conditions for my academic work are about as difficult as they can possibly get.

I'm not going to miss any deadlines or anything, but there's tons of fun stuff that I'm missing because I have to take care of the more dull stuff first. Oh well, I shouldn't complain. At least, the kids are already showing signs of improvement. Us older folks, with less recuperative power, are still feeling under the weather, though.

Today, someone drove by me as I was standing at a crosswalk, and one of his passengers screamed out the window at me : "FatAss!"

I shrugged, and walked across the street with the $30 worth of groceries I'd just purchased. I stood next to an annoying hippie who insisted on playing a bongo inside the reverberating bus stop, hopped the bus, and came home. *That* is what really happened.

What happened in my head in the 3 seconds following that moment, of course, was quite different. As I registered what was being screamed at me, I leaped from the sidewalk into the back of the truck, leaving my groceries behind. This mental me, of course, has no need to care about the 30 bucks I spent on that food, that money constituting the bulk of the money in my checking account at the moment. So, I leap into the back of the truck. I know that's some leap. No, I don't know whether I accomplished it because I was a cyborg or a mage or something, I only thought about this for a few seconds, please let me continue. Thanks. So I'm in the back of the truck, and I violently reach through the glass back window of the truck into the cab and pull the amusing passenger out into the rushing air and sunlight by the scruff of his T-Shirt. I leap again, onto the sidewalk, his friend coming to a squealing halt some ways down the street, on the side of the road. I'm holding him by the neck now, and I say to him, very authoritatively. "What the hell went through your head? Why did you scream, randomly, out the window at me? Of all the fat people you've seen today, you picked me, undoubtedly not the fattest person you've seen today, to throw insults at. Why?" At this point, I drop him to his feet, and allow him to speak.

This is the point where I stop thinking about it, of course. Someone who throws random insults out the window at people he doesn't know is, frankly, so far removed from my personality that I can't even begin to speak for him in my head.

The interesting thing about this encounter is the mixed feelings it brought up. Obviously, I don't appreciate being insulted by someone who I don't know. Made me a touch angry there for a moment, but that passed quickly. What I found interesting was that it actually made me feel.....normal. All through high school, that was pretty much my whole thing. "Get yelled at randomly by people in trucks" was a gig I had. Once a day during the week, twice on Fridays. Someone I didn't know, a young lady, screamed "FAG" out of her $20,000 car-what-her-daddy-bought-her at the last school dance I went to. I don't know what that says about me.

Today is notable as it marks the first real blizzard that the North Country has had this year. It's not really a blizzard, but schools are closed and everything has quieted down a bit since the snow began to fall. I take what I can get.

Yetserday saw my return to the Frozen North. The trip was fairly uneventful, save for a particularly annoying 4x4 with a pilot to match. It was somewhere between neon and lime green, jacked up on a rusty suspension supported by four huge tires, and with tomato soup cans for mufflers. Normally I wouldn't mind such a vehicle, but in being behind this monstrosity I was also forced to inhale lungful after dizzying lungful of the pale blue cloud exiting its blatting exhaust. He was also going about fifty when everone else was traveling ten mph faster. I managed to downshift and zoom past this guy once, only to be stuck behind a car at a light as he passed me in a small town. Followed him for the next forty minutes, getting a rather bad headache in the process. Passed him again, only to see him turn off the road in my rearview. Damn...

Today was rather uneventful, aside from the snow. While outside I slipped and fell twice. The first time I did a rather painful split while trying to keep from spilling my coffee, the other I just ended up on my ass. Didn't spill my joe, though.

Tonight everything has been canceled, and a good thing to as I am batting a fierce headache (unrelated to yesterday’s exhaust-ache, I think). Have taken three Excedrin and drank four glasses of water; that beat it back to a neutral corner in my brain. Currently listening to Elvis Costello and trying to forget about it. Not doing well.

It will be interesting to see what tomorrow brings. Will we be buried in snow and completely shut down? While I wish for it, I don't think it will actually happen. I can remember once when beautiful girl and myself were vacationing in Montreal in April last year. We were on the thirty-first floor of the Hilton there, and had slept too late on our last day in Quebec. We rose, she running to the bathroom as I walked to the huge window that dominated one wall of our room, ready to take in the spectacular view of Montreal I had grown accustomed to every morning. I pulled the curtains to find the city gone, completely buried under feet of snow. "Montreal's gone!" I shouted to the bathroom. We had to drive home that day. I hope that when I look out my window tomorrow, my northern world will have been swallowed by a great beast with a white stomach.

What does this have to do with a daylog? My head still hurts.

Today I'm about 3 pages from finishing The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. This book is so wonderful, I don't want to finish it.
I've also started "The Search for Truth" by Michael A. Singer. I'm not quite sure what to expect from this book, I know it's about spirituality, mostly eastern related stuff, you know, chakras, mandalas, mantras, prayer flags, and so on.
I've been told that this book is on of the best overviews of spirituality, so I'm expecting more than just the eastern type stuff, but that's all I've encountered so far.

My car's tape player is still broken, so I'm forced to listen to the radio. Radio music is terrible. I'm so accustomed to being able to pop in a mixed tape with everything from Bob Dylan and Ani DiFranco to Wu Tang Clan on it, or being able to toss some CD's in the car to listen to, that having no control over the music in my car really drives me insane. It wouldn't bother me so much if the music on the radio wasn't so terrible.

So in order to avoid the assault of shit-music, I've taken to listening to the religious stations.
(Before you downvote this, just read on.)
I live in North Carolina, right square in the Bible Belt. So, naturally there are alot of Baptists around here. I've found two religious stations thus far, 106.3 WSKY FM (I've noted the Christian radio call letters similarity to "Whiskey", but ignored it as a coincidence), and 1230 AM "Inspirational".
From my experience, both stations are pretty bland. The religious music is worse than anything I've ever heard, however, sometimes, you get lucky, and hear something good.
What I like is when they take a passage from the Bible and tell all about different translations, how the meaning of a passage changed from it's original Hebrew state to the most common version of the english Bible, the King James Version.
I've also noticed that nothing on these stations is live. Nothing. It's all taped sermons, or taped music with taped DJ's between the songs. I know this because the date is never stated, no news, no weather, nothing... plus, sometimes you can tell the tapes are worn out.
(The only time there is anything live on, is sometimes when they are asking for money they do a live broadcast.)
Once or twice I've heard tapes being played at double speed (or what sounded like double), which was rather interesting. Anyhow, the coolest thing happened today, I heard two tapes being played at the same time. Two simultaneous sermons playing over the radio.
It was great.

I'm beginning to suspect I'm manic-depressive. But if I am, I spend 95% of my time manic.

The other 5% is where I am right now.

The day started out innocently enough. Got up in time to get to work on time. Had a full night's sleep. The morning went fine and I got to work only a little late, which is a bit early for me. Even work went fine. Mostly. Except for the receptionist's insistance that she has to spray scented Lysol into the air on a semi-regular basis. I'm positive that stuff's only making my throat trouble worse.

Things were fine through the day. I have some work I need to take care of tomorrow, but nothing too stressful. Work as usual, really.

Get home and dinner's ready. Roast beast with potatoes, carrots and gravy. And all is still well.

So I sit down for my evening session online. Check through my email, wait for the connection to get over a bout of trouble and proceed to play Diablo II for several hours without incident.

Then my husband gets home. Things are still ok. I'm coughing too much and my stomach muscles are starting to ache, though. My throat still isn't sore, just irritated.

It isn't until the internet connection drops again that the headache starts. And it all goes downhill from there.

I don't know what it is about certain levels of pain but they send me into a spiral. It's time's like these that I can understand why people kill themselves. I won't ever do that, but I can understand how more self-involved people would.

Tooth pain I can handle. Sinus pain I can handle. Sprains and strained muscles I can handle. What is it about tension headaches that cut through so thoroughly. I can ignore a sinus infection until the entire side of my face aches and I have to get antibiotics, but less than half an hour of headache and I'm reduced to tears.

I wish I cold figure out how to reach out to those I know care about me when I'm like this. I want to, but every time the opportunity is presented I just fold up inside myself and become a snapping turtle. All protective shell and sharp beak, unapproachable and pecking away at friends and innocent bystanders alike.

Why can I never let myself show weakness until after I've snapped. Why is it that the only place I ever admit I'm not some superwoman is when I'm writing. Never when I'm actually talking to someone. Never when the people I care about and who care about me can see that I'm troubled and want to help. Never when there's still a place where I can turn back. Only when it's beyond my ability to cope.

I'm not Atlas, I'm not Supergirl, and yet when I feel the weight of the world pressing down upon me, I still try to shoulder it all, not requesting help and even refusing what is offered. What is it I feel I have to prove and to whom?

I'm not even online as I type this. I got this far before the connection failed again. I had tried to "listen" to the conversation in the Chatterbox, but a few lines every three of four minutes just doesn't cut it. I don't know if this is even going to get posted. I'm resetting the modem now to see if that clears it. No telling. I don't know if I even care about it right now.

I wasn't kidding when I said I have two modes. I'm either quite happy and expressive or I'm flatline. I try not to let my family see me like this. It frightens them.

I was sick today. I really didn't feel like taking my Japanese mid-term either. It figures that I would get sick just on the day of my mid-term. I just woke up in time to get a small amount of studying done, although not much of it was covered on the mid-term exam that I took. I called into work and told them I wouldn't be in.

I really felt lonely today. Even just one day without anyone to talk to is really depressing now. I used to thrive on avoiding people, now I really get depressed when nobody's around. I spent most of the time sleeping and thinking about Sara. I wanted to write an email to her, but I didn't want to sound all pathetic about being sick and making it sound like I wanted sympathy (even though I did). I guess I didn't want to burden her with my problems.