OK, it's hit that time of the day when I can't be bothered doing anything more than the minimum of work I can get away with, so I'll daylog.

I think I've finally got these annoying people off my back about this problem they were having, due to Cameron coming back to work. (He's been here longer, he set up the product, and he can talk to people a lot better than I can. Hence, they respect him more). The annoying thing is, I fixed their problem last week, and another problem came up, but they're treating it as if we haven't even done anything to help them since they first reported problems. Grr.

I have my driving lesson tonight, a double lesson, since I'm preparing to get my license in early December... I shouldn't be worried, but I always seem to dread the lesson, even though it's never as bad as I expect, I'm not a bad driver... I'm going to be shitting myself the first time I get out on the road by myself though. I don't ever see myself just driving for the sake of driving.

I have to ask to get my test date changed too, since I accidentally double-booked it with my first day of Summer Semester at uni. I doubt he'll be able to change it, but I need to ask. This is the sort of situation where I would rather just let it go and miss my first classes, rather than request the change, due to my low conversational skill. I'm going to find it hard to bring up, I'm sure. Stupid brain.

Anna was over last night, which was great, because I was expecting to have to go to her place, which is never as good (due to the extreme lack of nakedness and privacy). But she came over, and we got to watch our last movie, and be close to each other all night, emotionally, physically and mentally. Incredible.

I've only spent 5 dollars today, I'm proud of that. I'll need to keep it up to make sure I have enough money to pay my uni fees up front next year.

I realised, during a work-related conversation, that I really don't have much time left here, on my IBL year. I'm going on leave in 2 and half weeks, 3 weeks off, which pretty much brings me to Xmas, so I won't be in here much till after New Years... and then my contract finishes January 15! So that's only just over a month left of actual work. Wow. Then I'll be on part time, and have so much more free time, I might actually get some of the stuff done that I've been meaning to.

I just wish I didn't have to do a half hour presentation about my year here. I'm not good at public speaking, even if it will be to people I've been working with. Grr.

Back to November 12, 2001 | on to November 19, 2001

Why I Need A Deity Firewall

I went to log in one of the CS department's Redhat workstations. Nothing happened. This was not agreeable to me; my life is on that network. Luckily, the system administrator were around.

"O great ones!" said I, "Wherefore does this network vex me so?"
"Foul disk hog!" said they, "Thou art over thy quota!"
"Zounds!" said I, "Wherefore speeketh I like a dork?"
"I dunno. Let's see what we can delete to get you back on to the system..."

So we started looking through my directory. Everything was pretty normal, except for one of my old class directories. Five megs of C++ code? I don't bloody think so. We ended up finding a file named something like .nfsOED5. I had never seen that file before, and had no idea where it came from. So, we opened it up with vi.

::pause::

"What's the book of Genesis doing in my code directories?"

That's right, Genesis. The contents of .nfsOED5 were as follows (minus some syntactic stuff)...

Genesis
Being the first book of Moses
Chapter 1
In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.
And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.
And God said, Let there be light: and there was light......

Somehow, some way, the Almighty hacked into my directory and implanted his version of how the world came in to being amongst my doubly linked list code files. This scares the bejeezus out of me; how do you stop a hacker who (according to some) CREATED THE WHOLE UNIVERSE?! What's next, Psalms cluttering up my Mozilla? Joshua popping up in my makefiles? There is only one answer. A God-proof firewall. Perhaps something to shunt divine energy into an alternate plane of existence, or some kind of Godhead IP Denial system. For the time being, I'm simply instructing the network on existential philosophy, hoping it will come to atheism on its own. ClockworkGrue suggested teaching postmodernism, so the computer would see God as just another user, but I'm willing to bet that God has some l33t h4x0r skillz, quickly defeating any conventional security.

Tonight at the newspaper i used a negative scanner rather than going into the darkroom, printing up the photos, and scanning them in. It was quicker and easier, and arguably better quality.



I was walking along Snelling to visit Kelly and a man was out walking with his dog trailing behind, without a leash. It was one of those big, sweet dogs that could kill you in two minutes if it felt like it, but would never feel like it. I said to the dog, "Doggie!", let it sniff my hand, and scratched its head and patted it a little bit. As i walked away, the man said to me, "Thank you!" I smiled back and said, "Mmm-hmm."


I walked back home in the night and fog. The fog was foggy, and it was good. Maybe it will rain again tomorrow.

Whoa... I'm, a bit of a newbie here, lucky enough to sign up on everything2's second birthday. Not that I knew when I did it.

Anyway, I heard this joke today, and it really made me cringe. I know that September 11, 2001 is a sensitive subject, and I didn't know whether to laugh or cry. If I have understood it right the daylog should be a inconspicous enough place to post it. Otherwise, let me know.


This New York guy left home for work on Sept. 11 at about 6am to go to his office in the World Trade Center. When he got to Manhattan, he went to his mistress's apartment in the Village, turned his cell phone off, and thought of spending some good time with her.
At about 10:00am, while still at her place, he turned his cell phone back on, and a second later it rang. He answered, and it was his wife who screamed at him, "Where are you? I've been trying to call you for an hour. I've been worried sick about you!!!" So he answered,"Where do you think I am? I'm in my office!!!"

First update. "iandunn says that isn't just a joke,I heard that actually happened."
she has stopped sleeping.
she really want to sleep though.
she's trying to be healthier
but all the drinking and smoking isn't helping.
everyone wants her to quit but she
probably never will.
she's been living on candy and rice
sugar and salt.
she's been drinking cups of coffee
and laughing hystiercally at 5am
when she and her roommate have insomnia.
she remembers when the boy she loves
used to be so close.
she remembers when her best friend
used to be so close.
she likes to remember.
salt and sugar.
she just wants to feel alive
she lies in bed at night reliving every
moment from before.
oh well
she's cold and self-centered.
try to get over her.

On a lighter note, someone wrote "Nodevertising," I thought I was going to die. Thats the best thing I've ever heard.

Bringing her to my room, the first girl to sleep in my bed since I bought it - the first girl to sleep in my room since I moved in, a year ago - and the shifts in our connection are immediately apparent.

I slept in her bed last week, twice, with little inclination in me for things sexual. Yet with her laying on my futon, I recalled that she was a woman, and I a... well, you get the point - she was desirable, and I desired her.

We lay perpendicular, her head against the north wall, supported by my feather pillow, my head resting on a bunch of blankets, just beneath the west window. The night was unusually warm. We had just returned from a dinner party, and such was out course that I can say it was one of the best evenings of my stay here in Portland, which if it were not for her, I would probably have never moved to.

I laid my hand on her arm, below her elbow, and stroked her almost too-soft skin with my fingers, whispering “I remember when I was in high school and I went on this weekend youth group retreat and my first girlfriend and I made out in the rain, completely livid and overwhelmed by that strumming our bodies made together—I remember on our ride back home, in this football-team-sized van packed tight with high schoolers and horny youth pastors and she spent the ride touching my face for two hours straight and I could feel every touch she made, every movement of her hand, and I have never been able to feel that perfection again, but it was perfect what she did.”

She smiled, we connected eyes, my hand no longer moving, but resting on her shoulder gently, my eyes following her body, her beautiful body I could see with eyes neither pornographic nor obscene but melodious-erotic drifting over every curve and slope as her hand made an arc from her ear to her belly.

What happened? We moved. The lights were dimmed, my pants were taken off, the covers were placed over us. She did not speak. We moved, the furiousness seeping from my heart that I swear sometimes is a yoni wide open and bleeding sap for whatever presence excites it. We moved in tangential and muffled concentrations until she was breathing hard and solid and deadweight beneath me, relieved as was I by the breaking or binding we had instigated. I lay on top of her, my hard force softening and sipping at her.

I rolled over, she took off her shirt.

“Good idea,” I said, removing mine. What fun to touch so much skin with all my skin that for over a year now hadn’t felt that charm distilled and terrible, that woman body, and we spooned but soon recovered rhythm, now not so emotional, more sexed up, more thrusting and rubbing and arching in unmitigated reproduction of all those things my mind has tried to trick itself into witnessing through the cheap dot matrixes of print and pixilated near truths of photography, but really hasn’t known, has never known, not even now, because even though they cannot be forgot, those touches remain their own, locked safe inside the experience, within the drawing of the two. And there we lay like cards flipping random and folding through their cheats just blind enough to make sense of the absurdity of sex.

I laughed. She asked me why. I told her why. I told her I felt I could demolish sheet rock with my penis. I wanted to take myself, display myself to her, put myself in her hands, let her feel my force, my frictive solidarity, the pounding violent extension of my source, my anti-muse, my reaching wanting toward inspiration.

Drifting in and out of dreams all night. Such dreams you cannot let return with you to waking life. Such images which shrivel either the sun or in the sun. It’s not likely that my rights extend too far towards owning her: I know I cannot have her. But sating myself with her reception reflection dawning origin I know something now that no body else will ever know. That is the meaning of a secret. I can share it, and you can hear it, but it remains forever mine.

Fair Warning: The following daylog entry contains one or more of the following: Please exercise care in disposal. This item not recyclable. Thank you.

-last night-

The jet pilot fantasies induced by the sussuration of air through my soft plastic facemask weren't enough to keep me flying happy in my dreams. I have only fragmentary memories of what I saw/did/flew/was/heard/felt; a few coins of brightness scattered through a dull musty brown velour that is the remainder of my night.

I have sleep apnea, and have to wear a silly mask thing called CPAP, which does an absolutely amazing job of keeping you awake and drying out your throat to something around the level of the Gobi at three o'clock on a Sunday afternoon.

In any case, I do have some few crumbs on the dreamtime trail to follow. I spent much time with someone, in my dream; someone without a face or name, without a voice or a scent but a powerful golem of personality and want, waiting for me to find them in the waking world. Without seeing her, I felt she was beautiful; without hearing her tones I could tell she was eloquent. Without talking with her I knew of her genius; without feeling her I knew of her warmth.

We were friends, newly met, hesitant, awkward, all those things, and more, made worse by my desire for her companionship and the underlying desperation for anyone that poisons such fragile ripples as our interaction. I beat it down, and tried to smile past the lump, feeling us sliding down that slope to friends.

My fault.

I could feel the rationalizations starting, the familiar throbbing pain arise to be stifled. In the busy chaos clockwork of my mind, plans A through Z were flying through the gears in stacks of filigree paper cards so fast that they were burning. Their smoke tinged the world with a sharp acidic flavor of resignation. We talked gaily; we spoke of inconsequential things, of personal things, of grandiose things, of us. The familiarity and the ease with which I could talk to her slipped easily around the barriers built; inside, I raged in anguish at myself as I coolly and adeptly wove a disengenuous web of reserved affection and platonic connectivity.

There was a gun in there with me. I didn't use it. No matter what the dream, the setting, the people, the crash, I have the gun. I know that. It is cleanly functional, too elegant to be evil and too severely practical to be beautiful. It holds fourteen rounds. I'll only need one.

In my dream, we went to an event - I don't know what. A party? A wedding? A ballrom dance? A reception? All I do recall is that we were dressed quite well, friends on the move. She was wearing white, not black, but it suited her so well, the small demure yet eye-winkingly nasty dress, in silken flows of white. We were entering the hall, talking and laughing as I bricked up the wall ever higher.

I recall, then, of her spying some friends or acquaintances and moving off towards their group, asking to meet me at the bar in five minutes. I somewhat weakly told her that there was no need, she should feel free to hang with the friends she'd seen.

She gave me a slightly angry look, which cleared, and with a somewhat rueful smile said "No, I'll meet you at the bar."

… to which, in my ever-so-perceptive autoimprisonation, I said "Why?"

There was a pause in which she stopped and half-turned back to face me, laid her right hand on my forearm and moved her face up to whisper in my ear-

"Because I love you."

...and like that, she was gone, leaving me to stand in the thunderous rain of barricade and barbed wire that even now was invisibly and silently smashing down around and onto me as the obsessively-constructed walls split and shattered before a simple, truthful phrase that had little and everything to do with me at all.

Unable to recover, I watched her walk to her friends, turning at the last moment before reaching their table to give me a secret but eloquent smile.

I had time for the prickling hotness of my eyes and nose-

I woke to the humming rush of the airmask, my nose and thus breathing completely blocked with sudden swelling, with hot angry wishing tears rolling down the outer corners of my eyes to race hot across the cartilege of my ears before diving into the fabric of the pillow.

Memory is faint but clear. I awoke with the mask thrown across the room, a nastily sniffly nose and a murky stain of lost and empty hopes around both sides of my head.

This is why I don't own a gun.

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