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Dec. 21st, 2009 @ 12:37 am Give me the reason why the mind's a terrible thing to waste
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This morning as I walked along the shore of Hahei Beach, the only visible human, I looked at the fresh imprints my feet made in the sand behind me. All of the previous day's prints had been erased when the tide came in, so as it rolled out, the only evidence that anyone had ever walked on this beach was the trail I left behind me.

It got me thinking about that modern-day parable of footprints in the sand, the new-age, born-again Christian feel-good story they like to put out as religious equivalents of the motivation posters. The story my mom thinks is so terrifically profound, the story she recited at her father-in-law's funeral and insists that it had everyone in tears.

The story goes something like this:

A Christian dude/chick (or chick/dude) is walking along the (symbolic) beach. For most of the trail down the beach, there's two sets of footprints side by side, because God apparently has nothing better to do than stalk this dude/chick (or chick/dude) down the (entirely metaphorical) beach. But there are some portions of the trail where there's only one set of footprints by themselves.

Typically reactionary, the Christian angrily confronts God and asks how he could have the unmitigated gall to abandon his perfect creation during those times, which the Christian notes just happen to coincide with the most difficult periods in his/her life, such as that one time his/her SUV broke down on the edge of the ghetto and it took half an hour for AAA to get there and he/she was so scared he/she thought he/she might die of fright.

God replies immediately (this is apparently the personal, watches-you-while-you-masturbate-in-the-shower type of God, not the Prime Mover of the Deists), with this gem of a quip: "No, my child. I never abandoned you. During those toughest trials of your life, you see only one set of footprints because those were the times I was carrying you."

Awwwwww. It's the parable that sold a million Hallmark cards. That's probably not even a joke, either.

The message I guess you're supposed to take away from this is, "Don't worry. In times of trouble, God will persevere when your own strength fails you. He'll protect you, guide, you, etc."

As I stood there on the beach with the sun rising behind me, the waves crashing at my feet, and a rainbow arcing over the cliffs to the west, I pondered what the one set of footprints behind me meant. What did it say to me?

No one carried me across that beach. I got there under my own power. I was alone there, alone with my thoughts, and to the evidence of my eyes and ears, I may as well have been the only sentient being in the universe. The only way I was going to get back to where I came from was through the locomotive power of my own legs. I had no one to carry me, no one to fall back upon if my strength failed me.

And you know what? It felt good.

As I looked behind me at these increasingly metaphorical footprints, I realised that though there has always been just that one set by itself, that rather than meaning I'd been abandoned to my own devices, it meant that there was never anyone or anything there to do the abandoning in the first place. I have always been free to succeed or fail on my own merits, and no outside force of fate or destiny is going to step in and alter my path for good or ill. I am on my own - the consequences of my actions, desirable or not, are entirely my own to reap. I have no one but myself to blame or praise for the direction my life takes. And the best part: as long as I am still capable of looking behind me and seeing the trail I've left, it means I'm also capable of pushing forward, all by myself, without needing anyone, real or imagined, to free me of my burdens.

This is what it means to be free of dogma. It's the freedom to take the ultimate responsibility for your existence. You're here, you're sentient, and everything you do is your own fault. Free will means having the power to fuck up as bad as you want or succeed to the limits of your imagination. You are beholden to no one's ideals but your own, and you have no one to blame but yourself if you fail to live up to those ideals.

There is now, and always will be, only one set of footprints in the sand. Carry forward anyway.
Dec. 16th, 2009 @ 12:54 am Maybe manager want write goddamn login page himself
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I could go to sleep, or I could spend the next 20 - 30 min. writing while I wait for the Bioshock torrent to finish downloading.

Sleep? Sleep is for people with nothing better to do. I am not one of those people.

Guitar geekery: my acoustic-electric isn't worth nearly as much money as my Jaguar or my Fender. In fact, if I'm remembering correctly and I did indeed pay $450 for my Fender DG-10CE back in 1999, I got ripped the fuck off. From not seeing my acoustic at all for a year and a half and not playing it at all for far longer, I'd built up this image in my head of what the thing looked like and sounded like… both images were pretty much sundered after the initial "OMG my guitar is back with me!" excitement faded. With a far more critical eye I can look at this Fender acoustic and see it for what it is: pretty much a starter guitar with a piezo transducer and basic controls built into it. But what the hell, it works. And I can also cheat with this guitar: plug it into the computer, set Garageband up to put some electronic crunch on it, and it'll be like playing two guitars at once.

When I first opened the case, tuned it, and tried to play it (after I have no freaking idea how many years of not playing it at all), I found out very quickly that this guitar had serious issues. The biggest one of all was the fact that the high E string played the exact same note on frets 3, 4, and 5. I took it to a guitar shop downtown and sought some advice; they told me if I loosened the truss rod a quarter turn, it should allow the string tension to counteract the bowing that had built up in the neck over the years. It worked for the most part -- there's far less buzzing than before, and the high E has mostly discrete notes now -- but I think I might need to loosen the truss rod another 1/8 to 1/4 turn to raise the string action a bit more and cut down on the buzzing even more.

At this stage the acoustic is at least playable, which is a damn sight better than yesterday. However, compared to my Jag-Stang and Jaguar, the acoustic is definitely on the lower end as far as tonal quality and craftsmanship are concerned. It's not a POS guitar, don't get me wrong, but the difference between the DG-10CE and a guitar that costs 4x as much is definitely apparent to me.

Of course, the best guitar is the one you have with you, and in that regard, I can't complain. I may have overpaid for it 10 years ago, but that prevents me from overpaying through my pancreas for a similar guitar down here in NZ. I'm just guessing, these are just numbers pulled out of my caecum, but at an estimate I'd say a similar guitar (particularly a left-handed model) would go for close to NZ$900 down here.

I kind of shot myself in the foot by learning to play left-handed. I'm pretty much ambidextrous, so I could have learned to play right-handed if I'd really wanted to. But back in 1998 I decided to learn to play left-handed for a few reasons:

1. All the guitarists I really admired were left-handed
2. I found the aesthetics of left-handed guitars more pleasing
3. Why do things the easy way?
4. Having left-handed guitars meant no drunken jackasses would ever attempt to borrow them and play them at a party

And so here I am, with three guitars, two of which are so rare that I am very likely the only person in New Zealand who owns them.

My mother-in-law asked me why I never took lessons. At this point, I think lessons would probably be a waste of time, if not worse. For one, unless I found a really great instructor, they'd probably be confounded at my left-handed playing from the get-go. And then, where would the lessons start? "This is how to make a chord." O RLY? Thanks, dude. I can rattle off about two dozen I know off the top of my head. "This is how to tune by ear." Yeah? I can tune to standard tuning, E flat, drop D, D, C, and drop A without a tuner. The only issues I have when playing are switching between complex chords and soloing. Both are pretty much only addressable via practice, not tutelage.

The two guitars I brought with me to NZ pretty much sat disused in a closet until roughly a month and a half ago. For some reason I became motivated to start playing again, and since then, I've seen a dramatic improvement in my skill. It's easy to wonder how much better I might be now if I hadn't pretty much completely stopped playing for six years.

Now I have the goddamned hiccups again, giving me yet another excuse to avoid going to bed. It's going to be pretty much impossible to sleep if my diaphragm is involuntarily twitching every fourth breath or so.

What else can I say at this point without treading into untenable territory?

I am looking forward to going to Napier tomorrow. The wineries over there are uniformly spectacular. There's really no such thing as a "bad" New Zealand wine. Sure, some of them are mediocre, but almost all of them are at least "above average" to my tastes, and a small handful go into the stratospheric "OMG this is the milk of creation" territory. Alpha Domus produces wines of such tremendous quality, and, ironically, they were the first NZ wine we sampled, purchased from Whole Foods in Cleveland.

That's pretty much all that's going on tomorrow. Drive to Napier, drive around Hawke's Bay, visit wineries, do tastings, buy wines, get drunk, get drunken hiccups again, try to fall asleep, fail, wake up hung over. Then, wander around Napier the next day, visit the National Aquarium, drink some more, etc.

Two days from now we'll be on our way to the Coromandel Peninsula, which is a length and breadth of awesome indescribable in mere words, for which even photographs and high-definition video footage do the scantest semblance of justice. The Coromandel Peninsula is to New Zealand as New Zealand is to the rest of the world: unique, packed with incredible sights, and majestic to the point of believing oneself to be living in a simulacrum of the real world rather than the actual, real thing.

Beyond that everything vanishes in a haze of Itinerary. I have all the rest of our various activities for the next four weeks stored on my iPhone, and that's good enough for me. My iPhone has taken over a remarkable range of mental activities; beyond the mere unnecessity of remembering phone numbers, which any mobile phone is capable of supplanting, my iPhone has basically become an extension of my brain in many ways both intriguing and disturbing.

Bioshock torrent stalled at 99.44%. Such a number cannot help but recall old Ivory Soap commercials, with the resonant irony that downloading a torrent is an inherently impure act.

And it appears the torrent stalled because the internet is down. Which makes it unlikely I'll even be able to post this. Oh yeah, technology is so awesome. Whee.
Dec. 12th, 2009 @ 10:42 pm L.A. face with an Oakiand booty
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I'm drunk enough, I don't give a shit anymore.

I am-

[message redacted]
Dec. 9th, 2009 @ 06:05 pm That's what we're waiting for, aren't we?
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Might as well get this out of the way early.

Goals for 2010, in no particular order:

1. Finish Master's degree. Easy.

2. Go from my current mass of 84 kg down to 78 kg. No, for real this time. Stop laughing. Fuck you!

3. As a possible corollary to (2), put at least 2000 km on my bike.

4. Prevent Liz from going insane and/or committing suicide/homicide/genocide during third year of vet school.

5. Continue trying to get my first novel published and write the next one. Again, for real this time. Again, I hear you laughing, and honestly, it's hurtful. Not as hurtful as the size 9 boot headed for your ass, though…

6. Improve guitar playing skills to the point that I can comfortably play stuff other than punk rock and early 90s grunge.

7. Pitiful as it may be as a goal, my sole luxury spending for 2010 will be getting the next-gen iPhone. Partially so Liz can inherit my current one and abandon the POS she's been using, partially so I can continue to stay near the cutting edge gear-wise while writing for TUAW, but mostly because 16 GB just isn't enough freaking space for all the stuff I want to carry around with me, and wow, if 1999 me read that it would probably blow his mind.

8. Visit Australia, money permitting.

9. Write enough TUAW posts so I can save up enough money to buy a new MacBook Pro during our trip to North America in June-July of 2011. Again, there's absolutely nothing wrong with the machine I already have, but it is going to be three years old in February of 2011 and therefore out of warranty, and given my experiences with my old PowerBook, and also given how much repairs/parts cost down here, I'm just a tad paranoid about having my main work machine be one that's out of warranty. Since Liz doesn't want my old machine (i.e., my current one), once I upgrade to a new model my current one will either be donated to needy, Mac-deprived Canadian schoolchildren or turned into a media server.

10. Lists like these need ten things on them, but I've reached the limits of my ambition for the moment.
Dec. 3rd, 2009 @ 10:26 am You're patiently waiting like an ashtray for the butt
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Most people are easily able to answer this question:

"Where are you from?"

I'm not. It's a pretty loaded question for me, and not easy to answer at all.

Am I "from" where I was born, a place I lived for only three years and barely remember? Or am I "from" Washington State, simply because I lived there for the longest (though never more than four years at a stretch in any city)?

Most other people I know have a hometown. Even if it didn't end up being the place where they were born, they lived in one place long enough to claim it as their own. Liz, for example, is from Cleveland. She's lived other places, particularly since meeting me, but she was born in Cleveland, lived there for the majority of her childhood, and thinks of it as her hometown.

When people ask me where I'm "from", I generally have to say something like, "Well, I was born in California, but I lived pretty much everywhere else after that."

I never lived in any single house for more than three years, either. So not only do I not really understand "hometown", I also don't understand "home". I've lived in a parade of houses, but never long enough to form an attachment or bond to any of them as strong as, say, Liz's bond with "the old house on Macall."

I've been a nomad all my life. I'll be sitting still until late 2012 or so, but after that, who knows? I'm not opposed to finding one place to start laying down the roots I've never been able to plant, so long as that place doesn't suck. But I'm also not going to be particularly disheartened if the nomad life goes on. It makes for a complicated life, that's for sure, but sometimes complicated also means interesting.
Dec. 2nd, 2009 @ 04:01 pm Everyone is broken
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Grades so far:

Trauma, Memory, and Haunting: A
The World of Noir: A
Shakespeare: A- (Scandal!)
Research Paper: ?

Not sure why I still care at this late stage in my academic career, but I'm apparently still a grades whore. I find myself wondering what on Earth I did to deserve an A minus in my Shakespeare course. The tragedy! The horror!

I don't know if my thesis will be graded or not, and PhDs are pretty much pass/piss off from what I understand, so this may turn out to be the last batch of graded work I ever do.
Nov. 26th, 2009 @ 11:10 pm Would you put me inside your TV tonight, cause you're treating me like a rerun
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Fight Club was released over ten years ago. I remember going to see it on opening day. The big draw for me at the time was going to a movie where I got to watch Brad Pitt get the shit kicked out of him. I didn't glean much from the previews other than Brad Pitt being abused, and I had no clue who the hell Chuck Palahniuk was.

At the premiere, they gave out these little memorabilia: a large, rectangular button with the Fight Club soap logo on it, and a tiny, hotel-sized bar of soap with the Fight Club logo on it. I was bemused at the time, and I probably would have chucked both items in the nearest bin if the film hadn't absolutely blown my mind through the back of the theatre.

Ten years on, I still have both the button and the bar of soap. The button looks brand new, and you can still smell the soap through the wrapper. It's kind of amazing to me that both items have survived intact through the past decade and all the changes I've seen.

That button and that piece of soap have followed me from Washington to Illinois, Illinois to Washington, Washington to Ohio, Ohio to California, California to Ohio, and Ohio to New Zealand. The vast majority of that time they spent perched atop my Marshall guitar amp. Given that I had to sell that in Ohio, they're currently just hanging out on a bookshelf in my office near my autographed copy of Fight Club.

There's a lot of crap in my office like that. Items of purely sentimental value that I've trucked with me all over the world. Novels. Comic books. Action figures. Some of this stuff, like me, is over 30 years old.

I've been something of a collector for most of my life. From childhood on into my early 20s, it was all about toys. Star Wars, Star Trek, Transformers, He-Man, a dozen other little-known and seldom-seen 80s franchises courtesy of the kid-friendly triumvirate of Mattel, Kenner, and Hasbro. In my early teens I started building model kits, and again Star Wars and Star Trek dominated the scene.

In the late 90s I started collecting swords and knives. I had nearly a dozen various sharp, pointy objects, one of which was almost as tall as I was. I sold them all in order to move to New Zealand.

Then I started collecting more adult fare: guitars and guns. Given the expense of those new hobbies, I only managed a handful of purchases for each - four guitars, three guns. Enough to cover all scenarios. The guns ended up being a poor investment indeed, particularly the AR-15 rifle which I only took out and fired on two occasions despite spending more than $1200 on it. No one ever said I was good with money.

The guitars, on the other hand, have brought me far more joy.

My first guitar, purchased around May of '98 for about $300 in a package deal with a tiny 10" Marshall amp, was a Squier by Fender, Stratocaster model, left-handed, black, with a white pickguard. Because I was in the Hot Topic phase that everyone my age went through in the late 90s, I put a bumper sticker on the pickguard that said, "Kneel down and obey, ordinary boy." That guitar was okay, especially for a "starter" guitar, but I could never get exactly the right sound out of it that I wanted. I also fucked up the nut for the low-E string by using heavier strings than the nut was cut for, so the low E was constantly going out of tune and slipping off the neck near the headstock. Because of that, this guitar eventually ended up being my Drop-D tuned guitar, and I only used it for those songs. I ended up selling this guitar off when we left Ohio for the last time, mostly because I rarely ever played it after getting the other three.

About a year after I bought that guitar, I found a left-handed Fender Jaguar on the website of some guitar shop in Tennessee. I dropped $800 on it without hesitation. When it arrived a week later, I could have strangled the idiot delivery guy; no one had been home to sign for it, so he'd just left it at my front door, in a big box with a guitar logo on the outside. It just screamed, "PLEASE STEAL ME." Somehow, it stayed on my porch. I opened the box, and there it was, my baby: left-handed, sunburst pattern Fender Jaguar. I have always cherished this guitar so much that I'm almost afraid to play it - it's just too awesome. It went through a few years of being tuned to E-flat for songs that called for that tuning. Now I mostly keep it locked up except for when I want to play something surfy-sounding.

In a guitar shop in Kennewick, I found a left-handed acoustic-electric that I bought for around $450. This guitar sounded pretty sweet, especially when I plugged it into the amp and put a little crunch into it. The low E buzzed like a motherfucker, though, and I never got around to fixing it. It's currently hanging out at my mother-in-law's place in Vegas, because we didn't have room in our baggage to bring it to NZ. Considering that it's been through hell and back as far as environments go, and acoustics are far more sensitive to that sort of thing, I'm kind of afraid this guitar might not be playable anymore even if I bring it here. It's something I'll have to check out the next time we visit Vegas, which probably won't be until 2011 or something.

About six months after finding the acoustic, I found the holy grail of left-handed guitars, the guitar I'd been looking for since I decided I wanted to learn to play: a left-handed Jag-Stang. On the forums at jag-stang.com I found some guy in Olympia who was willing to sell me his for $500. My friend Max and I drove clear to the other side of Washington State to meet him. I handed him $500, and he handed me this workhorse of a guitar. Unlike the Jaguar, I have no fear of fucking up the Jag-Stang. The paint was already chipped when I got it (Jag-Stangs are rather notorious for shitty lacquer jobs), but other than that, the construction on this guitar feels so robust that I feel like I could do anything short of launching it off my roof and it would still survive. This is my main guitar and will probably remain so for as long as I'm capable of playing.

Like the Fight Club button and soap, two of those guitars have followed me all over Earth as well, and they'll continue to do so, even though between 2003 and the middle of this year I hardly played them at all. If I'd actually spent the whole ten years I've owned guitars dedicated to playing them every day, I'm sure I'd be a hell of a lot better at it than I am now. If I told someone with a lot of guitar experience that I've played for ten years and then they heard me play, they'd probably feel sorry for me. But you know what? Fuck it. I never started playing guitar with any grand delusions of rock stardom. I started playing because I knew that music was an emotional outlet like no other, a way for me to translate feeling into sound, to transmute rage, loneliness, or even joy into something tangible, something people could share in - whether they wanted to or not, at 3 A.M., through thin apartment walls…

I don't really collect much of anything physical anymore. iPhone apps, I guess. Truly lame in comparison to guitars for sure, but probably a level or two above the Star Trek action figures currently staring at me from my bookshelf.
Nov. 23rd, 2009 @ 07:58 am Forces of evil in a bozo nightmare
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Here's what I remember from last night:

Ray Liotta was a nuclear-rated petty officer stationed on a brand-new aircraft carrier. He'd been recruited by some terrorist organisation to sabotage the carrier on its maiden voyage.

This carrier, having been updated for the 21st century, looked less like the grey maze of steel and pipes I remembered from my own carrier and looked more like a floating office complex. Every floor was linoleum, and most of the walls were beige. The halls were also much wider, and stairs were actual staircases rather than the steep, steel "ladders" that passed for stairs on my ship. There were also many amenities aboard the ship normally reserved for cruise ships, like a mall, a children's play area, etc.

Ray Liotta, the star of this little film noir, met up with his terrorist comrades in the ship's server centre. The plan was to sabotage the ship's servers with a virus that would disable all computer functions - beyond that I'm not exactly clear what they were trying to accomplish.

The other two terrorists were dressed in an ensemble consisting of mostly all black with some red accents - they were wearing gas masks to hide their faces, but otherwise they looked a lot like particularly beefy versions of Cobra Commander from G.I. Joe. Ray Liotta was in his work uniform with his face totally exposed, which he vocally lamented more than once.

Ray Liotta kept watch while the two Evil Terrorists did their work. Unfortunately there was apparently a children's play area in the same room, and a group of parents came in with their kids. One of the parents spotted Ray Liotta as he tried to duck behind one of the servers and cried out, "Hey, what are you doing back there?"

Ray Liotta took off running throughout the ship trying to flee his imagined pursuers; no one was actually chasing him at this point, but, filled with a palpable terror, he paid no heed to that as he dashed madly through the ship's cafeteria, the playground, the mall, and many other places before tumbling down a dusty, little-used staircase and finding himself in a dark, musty, oily repair shop deep in the bowels of the ship.

Danny Devito met up with Ray Liotta. Devito was basically the brains behind the ship's black market operations, and he tried, genially, to recruit Ray Liotta into his organisation. When Ray Liotta refused, Danny Devito summoned Bruce Willis, his enforcer, to come pound the living crap out of Ray Liotta. Bruce Willis came out of the darkness in slow motion and started to pummel Ray Liotta within an inch of his life.

During the fight, Ray Liotta had a flashback of his father's time in the Navy as a nuclear technician who sacrificed himself to save the ship. His father, Kirk Douglas, had chosen to fight a fire in the ship's flooded reactor compartment at the expense of his own life; the water level in the compartment got so high that the door couldn't be opened to let him out, and he drowned (why they didn't just let the flood extinguish the fire is anyone's guess, but he was lauded as a hero anyway).

We cut back to Bruce Willis beating the shit out of Ray Liotta. Then we cut outside to a group of Navy Seals or something, led by Katee Sackhoff, rappelling down the side of the carrier toward the repair shop. Through a series of slow motion jump cuts between the rappel lines, gun barrels, Katee's grimacing face, and the side of the ship splattered with blood, all with the sound of gunfire superimposed, it became clear that the Seal squad exterminated everyone inside the repair shop, Devito, Willis, and Liotta.

I have no idea what the hell any of that was about, but it was certainly entertaining.
Nov. 20th, 2009 @ 11:02 am People are fragile things, you should know by now
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There's a fly on my windowsill that's been slowly dying since yesterday of pyrethrin toxicity. The concentration of pyrethrins is just high enough in the office to cause a slow, lingering demise for insects. In the kitchen, where the canister's mounted to the wall, the room is pretty much Chernobyl as far as bugs are concerned.

Though madly buzzing yesterday in the throes of its chemically-addled nervous system, it now lies upside down on the sill. I thought it was dead finally until a couple minutes ago, when out of the corner of my eye I noticed its legs still madly twitching.

I tried to put myself inside the simple bundle of nerves that passes for a brain in this slowly fading housefly. Unable to move, feeling the life slowly drain out of its carapace, light from outside flooding its compound eyes with the last morning it will ever see.

Inside its mind, I lay there, immobilised, powerless, distraught. And I/the fly thought to my/ourself, "I never saw Venice."
Nov. 16th, 2009 @ 08:49 pm The ghosts of what I was keep getting in the way
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If it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, looks like a duck: it's dinner.

If there's an elephant in the room, it must be a pretty big fucking room.

It's bad luck for a black cat to cross your path… at 3 A.M. when you're stumbling bleary-eyed to the bathroom.

Why do women always criticise men by saying "Men are all dogs"? This reflects rather poorly on the dog.

A lot of people refuse to drink water because "Fish fuck in it." But they'll still eat fish. It's kind of confusing.

If a boat cruise tries to tell you you'll have a "whale" of a time, don't go. It means they're going to gut you and feed you to the Japanese.

In any sane universe, Barney the Dinosaur's long-since carbonised remains would be used to power my lawnmower for half an hour.

I used to look at a field of cows and say, "Mmm, burgers." That was before I took a course in Environmental Philosophy. Now I remember that cows make leather, too.

Fundamentalist Christians refuse to accept that chimpanzees and humans have a common ancestor. I think if you asked the chimps their opinion, they'd probably feel the same way.

Homo neanderthalis disappeared around 28,000 years ago. "Neanderthal" is an adjective used to describe a stupid person. Something doesn't add up. Anyone who can stay hidden for 28 millennia must be pretty damned smart.
Nov. 14th, 2009 @ 08:16 am As long as his soda cans are red, white, and blue ones
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Spent most of the night dreaming again. Also, I'm back into the "wake up half an hour earlier every day" mode. I'd have thought that the end of school would have meant my sleep patterns would improve; however, as most of my anxiety over the past several months has had virtually nothing to do with school, this would have been a naïve thought on my part.

At least I didn't dream about the nominal things last night. I spent a couple hours stumbling through the guitar solo to "Sappy" by Nirvana - odd, that, as in real life it's about the only extended solo I actually can play decently on guitar. Then, of course, it was time to hop in my flux capacitor-equipped Toyota Echo and travel back to 1955 Hill Valley with Marty McFly. Doc Brown had burned down his old house, so we found him hanging out in a garage somewhere out in the middle of suburbia. Doc recognised Marty right away, but when he saw me he was like, "Who the hell are you? You're not supposed to be here!" To which I responded, "Tell me about it."

Woke up at 6:05 this morning, 6:35 yesterday. If I wake up at 5:35 tomorrow, I'll do something decidedly horrible to my brain in retaliation. It will probably involve chemicals.
Nov. 1st, 2009 @ 10:35 am Her dizzy head is conscience-laden
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Last night, instead of sleeping:

I was on the bus with a friend of mine heading to the airport after spending a weekend at some nerd convention. There were all kinds of people in costumes on the bus. My friend was hopping around all over the bus trying to talk to people, but just about everyone was ignoring her. I kept trying to get her to talk to me, following her all over the bus, but I seemed to be the only one she wasn't interested in talking to.

Eventually she met some guy near the back of the bus who had an acoustic guitar. They started talking, then started making out. This was apparently too much for me to take, because I closed my eyes and started screaming "NOOOOOO!"

This is the funny part: apparently someone on the bus was recording video of them making out, and they just happened to catch my "NOOOO!" at its most perfect moment. The video was framed just so, in a way that made it perfect for editing - as I found out later.

The video of me screaming "NOOOOO!" made it to YouTube and got hundreds of thousands of hits on the first day. Because it was so easy to edit, people substituted my friend making out with the random guy with all sorts of things - political satire, Darth Vader saying he was my father, the dramatic hedgehog, you name it. Hundreds of videos cropped up on YouTube, all with me screaming "NOOOOO!" in the background.

I became instantaneously Internet Famous, but not in a good way. I couldn't leave the house without someone pointing and laughing and being like, "Hey, mates, it's the NO guy! Hey, No Guy! NOOOOOOOO!"

…Yeah.

I blame our dinner party hosts for showing us the Numa Numa guy and various other YouTube memes last night.
Oct. 29th, 2009 @ 03:43 pm Don't have to go too fast, just change my life
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Here's how far I can go in an hour.

If I walk, I can get from here to the gym at Massey. (5 km)

If I ride my bike, I can get from here to Woodville. (≈25 km)

If I drive, I can get to Paekakariki, which is about 2/3 the distance to Wellington. (100 km)

If I fly in a commercial 747, I can get from here to the southern tip of Stewart Island. (1000 km)


If I fly an SR-71 Blackbird and tie the manned jet aircraft speed record, I can get from here to Queensland, Australia. (3500 km)

If I fly in the Space Shuttle or International Space Station, I can get from here to Vancouver, B.C. - the long way around. (28,000 km)

If I fly at the same speed as Apollo 10 and tie the manned vehicle speed record, I can fly nearly all the way around Earth. (39,897 km)


If I fly as fast as the fastest human-made object ever launched (Voyager 1), I can get about 1/6 of the way to the Moon. (61,200 km)


If I ride a beam of light and travel at c, I can get 90% of the way from here to Saturn. (1,079,252,848.8 km)


The fastest object we've ever launched only travels at about six-thousandths of one percent of the speed of light. And that was after getting gravity assists from the two biggest planets in the Solar System.

Looks like we're stuck here for a while.
Oct. 26th, 2009 @ 02:11 pm You are the son of a motherfucker
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News about the imminent demise of Geocities sent me scrambling to my old site for the first time in about 7 or 8 years to see if there was anything worth saving.

There wasn't, but I saved it anyway. If nothing else, it's a fascinating snapshot of a very specific period of my life, sometime between May and July of 2001 - right after I dumped Megan and moved back to Washington, but just before meeting Emily and getting my heart ripped out through my ass. A three-month window opened on the person I used to be, long before almost every last thing about my life changed for the better.

I barely recognised the borderline psychotic whirlwind of pent-up anger that glared back at me from that page. I certainly had a spark back then which I somewhat lack now, but what fuelled it was a misdirected, shiftless rage. And man, was I ever full of myself. I guess I still am, but I'm getting better at hiding it behind a layer of falsified self-deprecation.

I abandoned that site for several reasons. I had twin distractions with which to contend: my long-awaited return to college, and the yearlong depressive funk I found myself swimming through after Emily dumped me. I also didn't have an internet-capable computer at home for almost two years (an inconceivable notion now). I instead relied on either the computers at college during the week or the ones in the local library on the weekend - a two-mile walk each way if my piece of shit car was deciding to be uncooperative that week (or if I had no money for gas, which was also pretty common).

I see the 23-year-old me staring out of that page, and I first think to myself, "Holy shit. That was me? That's the kind of guy I'd beat the shit out of nowadays." Then I look again and think, "23, huh? Think you've got it all figured out, don't you? Kid, you've been through a lot for someone your age, but I'll tell you: at this point in your life, you don't know your ass from a hole in the ground. There's so much good shit and bad shit coming your way over the next eight years it'd make your fucking head spin if I told you even half of it."

I'm so much more mellow and grounded now than I was back then. That is definitely a Good Thing. Between the clueless kid on that Geocities page who somehow used to be me and the person I am today, there is only one thing in my life, only one missed opportunity that I regret. In every other imaginable way, I am far better off now than I was back then - fitter, happier, more productive.
Oct. 22nd, 2009 @ 10:25 pm I lay right down in my favourite place
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Because I'm bored, here's a list of words and phrases my dog definitely understands. This is not a comprehensive list - I'm sure there's several things I'm forgetting.

Names:

Cara (Caraway)
Liz
Chris
Kitty (Kitty cat)

Nicknames (responds to any of these):

Goofy
Goofball
Crazy dog
Muttski
Pupski
Pupsicle
Puppy dog
Doggie
Cara bear


Commands:

(Go) get your:
- toy
- ball
- towel
- food
- frisbee
- stick

Get the kitty (find and harass the cat)
Get the bird (chase a bird with intent to catch it)

Go get/see/find Chris/Liz

Sit
Down / Lay down
Go lay down (go to the other side of the room, then lay down)

Come here
Right here (move directly parallel to left leg no farther than 50 cm and sit)
Around (walk around and behind human, sit at human's left)

Heel
Wait (take no action whatsoever)
Stay (generally just means don't move)
Okay, go! (released from all restraint)

Up (jump onto a bed, car seat, tree stump, or other surface) or (stand up on hind legs when forelimbs are being held)
Jump (jump over an obstacle)

Cute (sit up and wave front limbs)

Speak

Roll
Crawl (she sometimes has trouble distinguishing between these two, as the pronunciations are probably very similar to her)

Get in the:
- car
- garage

Go to bed (lay down in crate in the living room)

Drop it
Leave it (applies to people and animals as well, not just inanimate objects)

(Get) out of the kitchen


Exclamations:

Hey/Heyyyyyy/Oy/No
Good dog/girl/puppy


Interrogatives:

(Do you) need to go outside?

Where's your:
- toy
- ball
- towel
- stick


Whistled commands:

One short, sharp whistle: drop what you're doing and follow me / get inside
Four lengthy, pitch-shifted whistles: used as a substitute for verbal command "come here" when distance is too great for verbal commands to travel reliably


Non-verbal commands:

First two fingers and thumb held together 1 metre over her head = verbal command "cute"

Tap side of thigh with open palm = verbal command "come here" if more than 1 metre distant, = "jump up on me" if within 1 metre

Point to floor = verbal command "down"

My personal favourite: Shake upraised fist menacingly = verbal command "speak"
Oct. 12th, 2009 @ 10:30 pm Cry when they all die blonde
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Hugh Jackman turned 41 today. When I found that out, my inner voice was all like, "Ha, ha! He's old!"

But then one of my other inner voices said, "Yeah? And you're only 9 years behind him."

And the first voice said, "Ha, ha- wait, what? Aw, titty biscuits."
Sep. 20th, 2009 @ 09:13 pm I've travelled half the world to say you are my muse
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Auckland isn't so terrible this time. I'd anticipated a repeat performance of the massive helpings of emo I suffered through the last two times I came up here, but rather than drowning in it, I've only just barely got my toes wet.

Not that any of that has anything to do with Auckland itself.

As for the city, it's still too big, too crowded, too American. Auckland is easily the most American part of New Zealand, and for that reason alone it'd be my least favourite area of the country. But I don't despise it now like I used to. I still wouldn't choose to live here, but coming here for a visit is no longer something I view with the same level of disgust I normally reserve for a dinner plate heaped high with dog shit and/or tofu.

That said, I'm still very much looking forward to returning to boring ol' Palmy tomorrow.

I have discovered over the past several years, and the past couple months in particular, that it's possible to bite your lip and your tongue at the same time. T-

Yeah. See?
Sep. 17th, 2009 @ 02:00 pm I want to recognize your beauty is not just a mask
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Now that's more like it. When I get a cold, it's not supposed to last five mucus-filled days like the one before this last one. It's supposed to knock me on my ass for twelve hours or so of pure misery, after which I'm perfectly fine.

Or, to abuse a metaphor, my immune response is traditionally more like World War III than World War I.

End result: although yesterday I felt as though I had critically failed my saving throw vs. feeling like a dead dog's anus, today I feel mostly fine.

I've finished my noir and Shakespeare papers, I'm half-packed for Auckland, and I've got a start on the research proposal that's due on Monday for my Trauma course – which I'm going to turn in when I'm up at the Albany campus rather than blowing another $5 on postage.

I am not particularly looking forward to this trip. I never do, really; the drive itself is interesting to be sure, but the motivation for going there could hardly be more dull. And of course, once I'm up there, I'm essentially alone in a city of one million people, a scenario that invites all sorts of personal demons to begin crawling out of their psychic hidey-holes and begin gibbering forth all sorts of deleterious nonsense. That's what happened the last two times I went up there, and I'm pretty sure it's going to happen again this weekend.

Compared to the shitstorm of academic activity that's taken place over the past few weeks, after these two weekends in Auckland my schedule looks pretty clear for the last week of September and the first couple weeks of October. Comparatively speaking, anyways. I'll still have shit to do, but I'll be able to tackle things one at a time rather than having to balance four things at once like a drunken circus bear with spinning plates.

I've been listening to Muse's new album, "The Resistance", which I pre-ordered off of iTunes as soon as I heard about it. Not being particularly on top of things like this, I heard about this new album probably four days before it came out, but whatever.

It's good. Really good. I didn't really start listening to Muse all that much before "Black Holes and Revelations" came out, but that album pretty much defines the year 2006 for me; I can't think about anything that happened that year without Take a Bow, Starlight, Invincible, Assassin, City of Delusion, Knights of Cydonia, or Glorious providing the soundtrack. Since there were really only two or three interesting things that happened in all of 2006 anyway, it all makes sense in my head.

That's about it. I still have the usual random flotsam and jetsam trying to surface and make itself heard every once in a while, but at this point I'm pretty sure anyone who needs to know about what that entails either knows it outright or at least has assembled enough clues to confidently identify Old Man Withers hiding underneath the mummy's mask. I've read that sentence about ten times to try and figure out a way to rewrite it so it makes more sense, but as the underlying concept makes little sense in the first place, I'm calling it a wash. Ruh-roh, Shaggy. Ree-hee-hee-hee-hee.
Sep. 11th, 2009 @ 02:48 pm I was up above it
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Like some creepy hobo in a dark alley, depression has jumped out and grabbed hold of me again, mugging me of motivation and give-a-shit.

I thought I was done with this for the time being, but apparently not.
Sep. 7th, 2009 @ 01:25 am Towards antisocial, solo, solo
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In theory I should be sleeping.

Instead I sit awake in my office. I've basically done absolutely nothing worthwhile in the past four hours. Just staring at the stupid screen.

In the next 11 days, I have to write two 2000-word papers. One of them is intended to compare Henry V to Cymbeline. Not sure how to stick within 2000 words on that one, as they're completely dissimilar plays. Pretty much all they have in common are three things: they're both set in England for the most part, they both have Hollinshed as a source, and they're both written by Shakespeare. Other than that? Nothing in common whatsoever.

Second 2000-word paper is to compare and contrast the 1940s and 1980s versions of the film The Postman Always Rings Twice.

I never really thought about it until just now, but I always hit the space bar with my left thumb. Always. My right thumb just kind of hangs in the air uselessly while I type. It doesn't even feel right to use my right thumb, and every time I try to, I end up double-spacing because I automatically follow the right space bar tap with my left.

And that, dearest livejournal, is probably the most boring thing I have ever written. Considering my college career up to this point, that's saying a lot.
Sep. 4th, 2009 @ 06:08 pm You're something like a phenomena
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Back in the early 90s, when MTV was still somewhat worth watching, I had the major hots for Kennedy. I think she was the one who instigated my lifelong "nerd girls with glasses are teh hawt" thing. My dad saw her on TV once and spent probably ten minutes going off on how cute she could be, saying, "She'd be so cute if she'd just lose those glasses!" Dad didn't get it - the glasses were what made her cute.

I saw Kennedy last night in a re-run of "Who Wants to Be a Superhero", and she was still hot.

I looked her up on Wikipedia, and I found out that she's a conservative Republican with a pink Republican elephant tattooed on her leg.

Suddenly, Kennedy ain't so hot anymore.

Oh, well. At least I still have Lisa Loeb.
Sep. 4th, 2009 @ 05:59 pm In my eyes, indisposed
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In photos I see frozen instants
of the young man I used to be
In my skin I'm starting to see hints
of the old man I'm going to be
Sep. 4th, 2009 @ 08:32 am Just gotta get right outta here
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I stood at my front door and called for my cat, Eddie. From across the street he ran, a rotund, white cat with heterochromic eyes. He trilled a high-pitched meow at me as he pranced through the door.

I then called for Murphy. In every way Eddie's opposite, she was tiny, slender, black. She too ran across the street, through the door, and meowed in greeting.

My black lab, Jake, was chasing a ball on the front lawn. He looked happy outside, so I left him there.

Eddie has been dead since 1996.
Murphy disappeared in 1998.
Jake died in 2003.

My dreams are damned strange sometimes.
Aug. 30th, 2009 @ 06:51 am She could talk to squirrels
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I really hate my brain right now.

Up until a month ago, I was perfectly capable of sleeping until 8 A.M., the time I'd normally wake up. But then I inexplicably started waking up at 7 A.M., on my own, with no alarm.

Well, whatever, I thought. 7 A.M. isn't so bad. I can live with that.

Then a couple weeks ago I started waking up at 6 A.M., on my own, with no alarm. I found this… displeasing.

Now today, I was wide awake at 5 A.M. I spent an hour and a half futilely trying to go back to sleep, and here I sit, wondering what the hell my brain is trying to do to me.

If this trend continues, I will eventually end up getting no sleep at all. Not that I'll really be able to tell the difference most days.

So far the end of August depression isn't anywhere close to as intense as I'd anticipated. Still holding steady at 3/7. Maybe I got it all out of my system earlier this month. Most of it, anyway.
Aug. 27th, 2009 @ 01:56 pm I lay right down in my favourite place
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Read an article in Massey's student paper about an hour ago where this guy was pissing and moaning that Apple's warranty doesn't cover broken iPhone screens.

Really, guy? You drop your phone, break it, and expect Apple to just give you a new one? How deliciously entitled of you.

Then he groused about how the warranty "only" covered manufacturer's defects. Hello, sirrah, that's what a warranty is. A warranty is not an insurance policy against user stupidity; it's a way to ensure consumers don't get ripped off by companies creating intentionally faulty crap. So if your iPhone was DOA, you'd have been good. If it died within a few months inexplicably, still good. But warranties don't cover your dumb ass dropping a device with a huge glass faceplate onto the asphalt.

With the logic this guy showed in his article, I should drive my Echo off a cliff and then demand that Toyota deliver me a new one. Except it's not under warranty anymore, so I guess I don't have that safety net of idiocy to fall back upon.

The guy's article filled an entire page, was nearly 1500 words long, and was titled, "Apple and Vodafone: A Match Made in a Swimming Pool Full of Your Money, outside of a Mansion Made from Human Bones".

What an emo douchenozzle.
Aug. 24th, 2009 @ 04:13 pm Something always takes the place of missing pieces
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I have to rent two films from iTunes in order to watch and analyse them for my film noir course, but I don't have room in my monthly cap to download them. So I came up with the bright idea of using my iPhone's internet tethering to download them instead, and use my mobile data plan instead of my home broadband. Win?

No, not win. I forgot my bike lock at home, and took that as a sign that I should stay home today. So instead of going with my original plan, which was to sit in a coffee shop in the Square (with a decent 3G signal), I'm sitting at home instead, drifting in and out of GPRS.

GPRS is basically mobile dialup. People in the States bitch about EDGE being slow… well, GPRS is worse. GPRS will have you begging for the sweet release that death brings. And in this lovely, technologically backward nation, 3G coverage is restricted to the centre of major population centres only, and outside of that, you're on GPRS.

Let me give you an example of how terrible wireless coverage is here. I live 2 km away from downtown Palmerston North, the 10th largest city in New Zealand. Only 2 km away from the CBD, 3G coverage is so poor that I keep drifting in and out of GPRS. Since starting my movie download about 20 minutes ago, only 5.6 MB of 1.20 GB has downloaded.

But on the other hand, In the past two minutes the iPhone's acquired a decent 3G signal, and it's now up to 10.5 MB. Still not exactly blazing speed, but getting better I suppose. That said, I think at this point a better course of action is going to be trying to get my computer to run off of Massey's network, or perhaps asking Todd and Mel if I can "borrow" some of their data allowance, because this is just taking way too damned long.
Aug. 23rd, 2009 @ 12:57 pm Lost my baby ten minutes ago
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Had one of the weirdest damned bugs I've ever seen an hour ago. When I powered up my iPhone, it kept acting like I was turning the volume down. The onscreen slider went all the way to zero, and pushing the rocker switch on the side also did nothing. I worried that it was a hardware thing, but no - a restart fixed it, thankfully.

One of the ancillary benefits of writing for TUAW is that developers and readers let us know almost immediately when there are great deals on the App Store. For instance, today WriteRoom, normally $4.99, is free.

WriteRoom is a lot like the iPhone's built-in Notes.app, except way better. The crappy marker felt font is gone, as is the gimmicky "legal pad" background - it's just white text on a black background, as Bog intended. Oh, but that's not all - WriteRoom also does wireless two-way syncing between the iPhone and any computers on the local network, making it far more useful than Notes.

It's free, it's awesome, and if you have an iPhone or iPod touch, you should go get it right freaking now, because it's only free for this weekend.
Aug. 22nd, 2009 @ 11:13 am Worse than all your dreams could ever make me
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The vagaries of my Master's programme and New Zealand's pitiable entertainment infrastructure are driving me to the internet in order to satisfy my needs.

Namely, instead of buying a book I need to read from a bookstore, or borrowing it from the library, I'm forced instead to buy the Kindle edition and read it on my iPhone, because it's actually cheaper.

Also, instead of borrowing two films from the library, or renting them from a video store, I'm forced to rent them from iTunes - not because it's cheaper, but because the 1940s version of the film exists only on VHS down here, and the 1980s version is nowhere to be found.

The first situation means I have to read an entire novel on my phone. Not so much a concern, I guess, as I've read four Shakespearean plays on my phone already without issue.

The second situation is slightly more problematic, as it involves me using up more than 10% of my monthly download cap in order to watch two films. I'm not even sure I have that much room left on my home internet's monthly cap, which means I might end up having to cheat it and download those films over 3G using my iPhone's internet tethering, since I'm pretty sure I have more than enough data to take care of it. It also means it'll probably take all fucking day to download those two films, but whatever.

Other news:

I woke up at 5:57, right on schedule (sarcasm). I then tried to go back to sleep. Between 5:57 and 6:07, I not only fell back asleep, I also had a dream that lasted about five minutes. I was watching a video podcast, the contents of which I found unpalatable, so I shut it off. But curiosity brought me back, and I started watching again; the second time, I got so blerged out by what I was watching that instead of shutting the podcast off again, I said, "Fuck this" quite loudly and woke up for keeps.

So now I'm dreaming in podcast format? I think I need to get the fuck away from my computer.
Aug. 20th, 2009 @ 01:10 pm I really think I better get a hold of myself
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On this day in history:

8/20/98

Despite having my car and a good portion of my worldly possessions stolen, the promise of the return of my freedom a very short time from now has brushed away a great deal of my melancholy.

POSSESSIONS, NO MATTER HOW PRECIOUS, ARE ALWAYS REPLACEABLE.

THERE IS NO SUBSTITUTE FOR FREEDOM.


That's it for 1998 for a while. Pretty odd to think about where I was eleven years ago… trapped in the worst kind of agony I've ever known, with no end in sight.

Nothing in my life has ever compared to the agony of that year. I hope nothing ever does again.
Aug. 19th, 2009 @ 02:55 pm True affection floats
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Technology is pissing me off today.

Ever since I moved to this office at the back of the house, the wireless strength on my MBP has sucked balls. Time Machine backups to the Time Capsule fail more than half the time because the signal strength is so low the stupid machines can't see each other. At least once a day I lose all wireless connectivity completely, no internet, no nothing. If I close the door to the office, I may as well kiss my wireless signal goodbye altogether.

Solution (temporary): tether my iPhone to the MBP and use the iPhone's connection to the living room Wi-Fi to connect to the internet, because my $450 phone gets better wireless reception than my $3500 computer. (Argh!) Doesn't allow me to do Time Machine backups, but at least fucking Twitter will load.

Solution (permanent): either one of two things -

1. Get a newer Airport Express (with 802.11n goodness) and use that to extend the Time Capsule's wireless signal

Or, far cheaper,

2. Hang out in the living room from now on instead of the office unless I'm doing heavy duty shit like video or photo editing.

I'm thinking 2 is the better choice. Particularly since I haven't really gotten my money's worth out of the couches yet.


What else.

I'm in the middle of re-encoding some videos on the FW hard drive to try and free up some space. 500 GB disappears pretty fast these days, I guess.

The dog isn't getting a run today, which I'm sure will disappoint her. However, in my judgement she and I both need a day off.

Finding it pretty difficult to motivate myself to work on my paper today. I even did laundry to avoid it. That should tell you right there how desperate I am to avoid this damned thing.

Last night was another fine, dreamless, restful night of sleep, despite my brain deciding to wake up at 0600 sharp for some damned reason. I'm not sure if I'll get decent sleep again tonight, but whatever. Like much else lately, it's a craps shoot.

Other: getting better. Reduced to about an hour or so per day of the recent mopery, down from a high of nearly every single waking and sleeping moment. I am giving the end of this month the stink-eye, however, because I'm predicting a heavy relapse. My one goal on that front right now is to simply keep my damned fool mouth shut, metaphorically speaking.

And with that goal in mind,

*blip*
Aug. 18th, 2009 @ 09:13 am This is the noise that keeps me awake
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On this day in history:

8/18/98
THE BOTTOM

Just when you think life couldn’t possibly get any worse . . .

My car, my guitar, my amp and distortion pedal, my CD player, 60 of my CD’s including my most favorite and rarest of all, a great deal of my clothes, a large number of books, and my medical record

ALL GONE.

My ability to ever go home again, my ability to go greater than a mile away from the ship, my self sufficiency, a $5000 investment with an additional $3000 worth of stuff in my car, my ability to create or even listen to music, everything on this side of the Cascade Mountains that ever kept me from going over the edge at last, all of it is FUCKING GONE.

WHY?!? WHY?!?

Fuck this. Fuck it all.

I’m going to sleep. If I die before I wake, so much the fucking better. I’ve had it.
Aug. 18th, 2009 @ 08:06 am Wanna grow up to be a debaser
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Slept just fine until about 3 A.M. Woke up at 3:07, wide awake. Tried to fall back asleep, but only succeeded in falling about 3/4 asleep. Woke up again at 4:30. Wide awake again. Spent fifteen minutes surfing on my iPhone, tried to go back to sleep. Never managed to achieve anything better than 1/4 sleep. Alarm went off at 6:30.

The score:

4 hours of full sleep
1.5 hours of 3/4 sleep
2 hours of 1/4 sleep

Total: 5.5 hours of sleep.

I know I had dreams about the usual things, but I don't remember much. Not sure what woke me up the first time. The second time I woke up had a definite cause, and it also kept me awake.

It's too bad simple unconsciousness doesn't really count as sleep. I know someone who's aspiring to be an anaesthetist, and I could really use her help.
Aug. 17th, 2009 @ 12:03 pm I miss you (I'm not gonna crack)
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I finally had my first uninterrupted, dream-free, seven hour block of sleep in… I don't even know how long.

I'm still exhausted. But it's no longer a desperate exhaustion. I no longer feel as though my failure to procure restful sleep is going to kill me. So I've got that going for me. We'll see if I can repeat this momentous feat. I'm guessing no - I feel another dreamstorm coming on tonight for some reason.

After a few days of unseasonably warm weather, Palmy has returned to its typical 10 - 12 Celsius and intermittent rain. It makes little difference to me, huddled in my dark office well removed from any source of natural heating or light, but it's something to say, I guess.

I've been productive over the past few days, but it brings me little joy. Liz uses the feeling of accomplishment that follows a productive streak to bail herself out of depression. This does not work for me. While I'm certainly nowhere near as deeply buried under it as I was earlier this month, everything I do still feels like I'm trying to run a marathon underwater. The feeling is there, all around me, sucking the energy out of me, and stopping to question why doesn't make much difference - I know the why. It doesn't make any sense, but it exists, it has no simple or viable solution, and I must simply deal.

Meanwhile, I am hungry. That, at least, I can fix. So I will.
Aug. 15th, 2009 @ 11:48 am Put a penny in a slot and make an artificial light shine
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Apparently, threatening to sue someone actually does get results. Sad that it had to go that far, but whatever.

That's one load off my mind. Feels good to eliminate a source of stress by actually doing something about it. If only everything that's been weighing on me were so easy to resolve… although I would certainly hope that none of the other issues hovering over me would involve dealing with such a toxic human being.

Other major issues needing resolution:

The usual financial fuckery - resolved handily if Liz gets the video editing/whatever else job that one of her professors offered her. Also resolved if financial aid decides that my losing $3000 of my awards for this year because of the dramatic shift in the exchange rate qualifies as "financial hardship" (hint - it does to any decent collection of human beings, but this is collegiate bureaucracy we're talking about here - my hopes are not exactly raised). Also, if I can motivate myself to send my book to a third agency, and they can motivate themselves to buy it, that'll take care of things really quickly.

Completion of schoolwork - chipping away at this one sentence by sentence, word by word. The going is made slower by twin sets of issues: the many distractions I have at my fingertips, and the minor problem of just plain not giving a rat's ass.

Perseverance over apathy (see above) - yeah, not really sure how to deal with this. Not even sure if I care. /irony

Insomnia - alcohol, drugs, noise generators, sex, relaxation, all failed. Not sure what else to do. Perhaps electro-shock therapy is covered by insurance?

[redacted] - no resolution I know of other than just plain not thinking about it. Tricky, that - if I tell myself not to think about something, what's the first thing that happens? Right. It's the same as sneaking up behind someone and whispering, "Don't turn around." It's impossible not to do so.
Aug. 13th, 2009 @ 06:26 pm Even if things get heavy, we'll all float on
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Schrödinger's cat is in Pandora's box
Sealed in with forty-two different locks
Although I won't open the box by myself
Nor pray that it somehow falls off of the shelf
If something should happen to open the lid
And unveil all the knowledge that once it had hid
I'll wave away horrors, and stand, and bear witness
And find out the state of the kitty cat's fitness
Until then content with this thought in my head:
In this state, the cat's neither living nor dead.
Aug. 13th, 2009 @ 09:46 am You're pretty good looking (for a girl)
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1461 days ago:

I woke up on the couch in Dan's hotel room at about 9:00 or thereabouts. Got up, took a shower. Hung out in the room until about noon. Hauled ass from the MGM to Excalibur. Walked across the Strip in heat that crawled toward 110 Fahrenheit. The crowds were almost as stifling as the heat.

Changed into my rented tux in a bathroom near the chapel. Super classy. Went to the Camelot, and waited.

Then she appeared, dressed in white, the centre of everything.

She was bawling her eyes out. I had to stop myself from laughing. She reached me, the music stopped, and we held hands. As soon as our hands met, she stopped crying, and started laughing. Uncontrollably.

I didn't feel nervous, or expectant, or anything really. As far as I was concerned, this was a formality. We'd been married in our minds for a long time, and we'd had a private exchange of vows a month earlier next to the Pacific Ocean, so this was more for her family than it was for us.

The ceremony was swift. At our insistence, it was completely secular, sanitised of all Christian iconography and utterances. We stood around after and had photos taken. The photography session took longer than the actual ceremony.

Reception took place in the bar downstairs. Dan, ever the charmer, said in his toast that he was amazed I finally found a woman willing to put up with me. I was the only one who laughed. Half an hour after we got married, one of Liz's aunts asked when we were planning on having kids. I laughed at her.

We had dinner, roamed around the Strip for a while, went back to our hotel room, had sex, went to sleep.


In the four years since then, we've been on quite a ride. Moved across the country, changed jobs several times, finally got our bachelor's degrees, spent several frigid winters and several blistering summers in Ohio. We've been at both ends of the financial swing, from "Great, our account balance is $300 in the hole from overdraft charges," to "Hooray, let me pay for a $4000 computer without blinking."

Oh, and we also moved to the other side of the world. Almost forgot about that.

Life hasn't always been a bunch of roses over the past four years, but that's never been because of the relationship I have with my wife. That has always been the calm centre around which all the other events swirl and babble for attention. After four years, not only do we not hate each other, not only do we not actively dislike one another, we actually get along better now than when we first got married. I'm not sure how the hell we go about doing this, but it works.

My wife and I work well together, and there is very little missing from our lives. More money would be nice. House insulation. More time to do stuff we want to do, rather than spending most of the day doing stuff we have to do. Other stuff I won't go into. But overall, we're quite happy together, and it seems likely to stay that way.

I love you, Liz. Now go make me a sandwich. :P
Aug. 12th, 2009 @ 10:57 pm You can't push it underground - you can't stop it screaming out
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Dear id,

We wish to apologise for the heavy restrictions we have had to place upon you for the time being. Normally, late at night and alcohol-fuelled is the perfect time for us to let you out of your cage and allow you to engage in your rather… unique… mode of expression. Some of the things you come up with are truly illuminating, even if they are presented in a rather animalistic stream of consciousness format and are occasionally full of imagery both savage and perverse.

However, dearest id, now is certainly not the time for us to allow you your fullest range of expression, no matter how much you may hunger to break loose and declaim the utterances we have so diligently stifled to this point. Though we know you will not understand or appreciate our point of view, to allow you free reign at this point, to grant you the oratory freedom to which you've been accustomed in the past, is very likely to do irreparable harm to all three of us.

Therefore, my most unfortunately chainéd id, we must sorrowfully inform you that you must continue as you are: bound, gagged, and locked away in the cellar of the mind, until such time as we deem fit to release you. We are not certain when release will be appropriate, but suffice it to say that it does not appear likely to occur in the immediate future.

We understand and appreciate the pain this causes you, but, id, for us to take any other course would be most unwise.


Regretfully yours,

The Ego
and
Superego, Esq.
Aug. 12th, 2009 @ 08:26 pm I could be underground
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Something's become obvious. I've got t-shirts I really shouldn't wear in public anymore.

Not because they're "cute" with their slogans, the $15 witticisms blazoned on my chest. No, I still get a kick out of gems like the one I'm currently wearing:

"Silence is golden - duct tape is silver"

I haven't outgrown those shirts. Far from it. I've shrunk too much for them. A large t-shirt now looks as ridiculous on me as an extra-large looked a year ago.

This is definitely a Good Thing.


Other news:

I am slowly getting over the depression that's dogged me over the past month. It's not that the source of it has been resolved in any way; it's more that, like the last two times I got worked up for this exact same reason, I'm slowly finding other things of more immediate import to fret over. I still have moments where I get blindsided by the King of All Emo, but those moments are just that now - moments, rather than my constant companion.

Still not back to "normal" yet, whatever the hell that is, but slowly getting there. I'm predicting another lapse will almost unavoidably occur at the end of this month, but after another week or so of slight moping, I should be all better - or as "all better" as I am ever likely to be, anyway.
Aug. 12th, 2009 @ 01:22 pm Still cannot fix this broken machine
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A conversation with my cat:

"Oh, you want to go outside? Okay, then."

I grabbed Licorice the cat and walked out onto the front lawn. I had to keep a tight grip on him, because in his excitement, he was poised to spring and run the instant I gave him any slack.

"There you go. Nice, isn't it?"

The cat looked to and fro in agitation, as if searching for something.

"Oh, are you looking for your buddy? The cat from across the street? Yeah, he's dead. He got hit by a car and ended up in our freezer."

I took the cat back inside and dumped him on the living room floor. He stared at me, eyes wide.

"Show's over," I told him.
Aug. 11th, 2009 @ 01:58 pm What's minimum wage for a damsel in distress?
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I was planning on going to the gym today. Really, I was.

Then the bike ride with the dog kicked my ass, so I'm staying in and doing Wii Fit instead.

It's my own fault. I should really know better than to try and keep pace with a dog whose top speed is somewhere north of 50 kph now. I really need a road bike if I'm going to try and keep that kind of pace up; I've never been able to get my hybrid above 40 kph on a flat stretch.

I don't even know how fast Cara is now; I can be going all-out at 37, 38 kph, and she'll be zooming out ahead of me like I'm standing still. She's insanely quick.

At least I know one thing now: I don't even notice my heart rate accelerating until it gets above 170 BPM. Not bad for an olde farte like me.
Aug. 10th, 2009 @ 07:20 am In between molecules of oxygen and carbon dioxide
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Current Location: New Zealand, Auckland
Tags:

Speaking of dreams, I just spent the past five hours having one. Highly realistic, highly detailed, highly enjoyable, highly not going to say anything else about it.

Posted via LiveJournal.app.

Aug. 9th, 2009 @ 10:50 pm Who was it that we saw that night?
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He dreams he is back in the room, with scant light streaming through the windows. Venetian shadows on twisted bedsheets. It might be moonlight, or it might be the sodium vapour of street lamps. In the end, it doesn't matter.

The wind howls outside, a keening wail that whips tree branches against the window. Other than that, all is silence.

This room smells of hair gel and stubborn bachelorhood.

There is a figure motionless on the bed. A silhouette, nothing more. Shapeless in the dark.

He calls out to her. She turns, and sheets rustle against the stillness.

Seconds pound past, hammer blows against the night. Minutes glide into one another, and languidly stretch into hours.

In the dream, there is no why. There is no then. There is only now. The now that never was. In the dream, there is no regret.

In the dream, there is only a tangle of limbs and skin, melding. The only sound is breathing. The wind, the trees, all hushed. Bearing witness.

Sunlight creeps over the horizon, slowly paints the room, banishes greys and blacks with the sepia tones of dawn.

Her head is on his shoulder. Her hand is on his chest. Together, hand and chest rise and fall. Rise and fall.

Beneath her hand, his heart beats, beats, beats. In the space between beats, it rests.

In the dream.
Aug. 8th, 2009 @ 01:11 am When you come home it's something less than a holiday
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Empty bed + full brain = raging mother of an insomnia attack. Tomorrow (today) is going to be a BLAST now. /s

I should really know better by now.
Aug. 7th, 2009 @ 09:27 pm I go to sleep but think that you're next to me
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Grey
Moonlit skin
Just enough light to see
Your eyes
But
Not enough for colour

Hand in hand
Nose to nose
Mouth on mouth

Moonlit skin to moonlit skin
Where do I
start
Where do you
begin
Aug. 6th, 2009 @ 06:35 pm Yesterday I woke up sucking a lemon
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Liz: Having friends is a lot of work.

Chris: That's how you know you're an introvert.
Aug. 5th, 2009 @ 10:45 am How come I end up where I went wrong?
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It's amusing how OCD internet commenters can get. I can write a 1000-word article, and a sizeable portion of the audience will obsess over three words. I can write a 500-word article, and the same number will fling dung over a single word.

I've passed beyond being irritated by this practice. Now it's just amusing. Sorry, fellas, I can't hear you from the top floor of my ivory tower.

The most amusing moment of all was the time some easily risible wankmeister was trying to give me writing advice. In the course of his diatribe, he said, "The way it reads, you couldn't pass a kindergarden math test without a calculator."

If you can see the irony inherent in this guy giving me writing advice, you win a prize of my choosing.
Aug. 4th, 2009 @ 10:47 am Beat me out of me
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American political parties, summarised:

Republicans -

Hate: Gays, abortions, non-Christians, brown people, poor people, Democrats.

Love: Money, government intervention in private affairs, weaponry, bombing brown people, Jesus.


Democrats -

Hate: Politically incorrect doody-heads, people richer than them, making up their minds, keeping promises, America, Republicans.

Love: Money, government intervention in business affairs, banning things, taxing things, whining.


All other political parties -

No one cares.
Aug. 3rd, 2009 @ 05:11 pm The signal's a cough
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I picked up my guitar and started playing it for the first time in… I don't even know how long. More than a year. I know I haven't even taken it out of the case since getting to NZ, and I don't remember playing all that much in Cleveland, either.

I'm not sure why I fell out of playing. Probably for the same reason I write a lot less now - less angst, or something. Well, until recently.

Predictably, after a year or more of not playing at all, I am rusty as hell. My speed sucks, not that it was ever great to begin with.

The bright side? Suddenly I'm capable of playing actual chords. Not just grungy power chords either, but actual chords like F. I was never able to manage an F chord, or any other barre chord either, before today. Not sure what changed, but there it is.

I'd forgotten how much fun it is. Though one day I'd like to get a real amp, even if it's just a shoebox-sized thing like the first one I had. Hooking up through my computer using Garageband is great and all, but it's just a little bit kludgy.
Aug. 3rd, 2009 @ 01:51 pm I'm tired of fighting, fighting for a lost cause
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I was planning on switching to Orcon, because ostensibly my bill could have been reduced by over $40/month versus Vodafone. It'd mean giving up the home phone, but we never use the thing anyway.

Except now I'm finding out there's something in New Zealand called "line rental" which can cost as much as $40 a month or more. I'm not sure if that charge applies only if you want home phone service, or if it's a universal fee, since pretty much all broadband down here is DSL.

If that line rental fee applies to Orcon, then their previously delectable $65/month for 26 GB suddenly becomes $105 per month for the same amount of data. In other words, exactly the same as I'm paying Vodafone now, except in exchange for giving up home phone service I get an extra 6 GB of data a month instead. This is hardly a good deal in my opinion.

So, if this line rental thing is something I'll have to pay for, I'm going with InSPire Net instead. Their service supposedly isn't as reliable as Orcon's, but it's just as cheap, with no mention of line rental fees. We'll see.

In other news, my latest Film Noir paper came back marked 16/20. I am not amused. I don't know which is worse; the fact that I answered the assignment's questions fully but was still marked down, or the editorial comments the professor made in attempts to "improve" my writing - all of which were completely wrong.
Aug. 1st, 2009 @ 11:20 pm Fitter, happier, more productive
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I hear these things:

The incessant whir of three different layers of tinnitus
The occasional late-night drunken traffic
Breathing
The Moebius loop playing through my mind, repeating an immensely unrepeatable phrase

And now for our regular nightly buffet of visions drawn from the dungeons of the subconscious.