Today is:
New style (Gregorian): 5 August 2000 Old style (Julian): 23 July 2000 C.E. Fixed: 730337 R.D. Astronomical (at noon): 2451762 j.d. ISO: Saturday, Week 31, Year 2000 Coptic: 29 Abib 1716 A.M. Ethiopic: 29 Hamle 1992 E.E. Islamic (until sunset): 4 Jumada I 1421 A.H. Persian:15 Mordad 1379 A.P. Baha'i (until sunset): N'ur Kam'al, B'ab of V'ahib 9, Kull-i-Shay 1 B.E. Hebrew (until sunset): 4 Av 5760 A.M. Chinese: cycle 78, year Geng-chen, month 7, day 6 Hindu Lunar (from sunrise): 6 Sravana 2057 V.E. Hindu Solar (from sunrise): 20 Karka 1922 S.E. French: Decade II, Octidi de Thermidor de l'Annee 208 de la Revolution Mayan (long count): 12.19.7.7.19
Everything Day Logs Yesterday | Tomorrow
New Nodes: [EINSTEIN U.S.A.] [Dunadan] [node0] [up conversion] [God does not play dice with the universe] [living forever] [How did you choose your nickname?] [today's best music] [How did you choose your nickname?] [You know you're a child of the 80's if...] [The Photoflex School of Photography] [piccolo] [belief] [E2 Copyright Violations] [E2 nuke request]
Users Online (41): [Deborah909] [jessicapierce] [General Wesc] [hamster bong] [Uberfetus] [Lord Brawl] [CaptainSpam] [kessenich] [kenata] [Xamot] [tftv256] [ShadowNode] [Jinmyo] [whizkid] [Halcyon&on] [hamstergirl] [loothi] [Fruan] [pealco] [mcc] [Citizen Aim] [Gorgonzola] [urbanmisfit] [siren] [Michalak] [ithron] [spacklequeen] [Infinity] [izubachi] [WickerNipple] [dead] [Andromache01] [sydnius] [jm229] [stitchley] [Johnny5D] [Shijef] [PinkPenguin] [KetsuYa] [Ancient] [Scotter]
JeffMagnus node count: 4016 (1 new since August 4, 2000) JeffMagnus experience: 9252 (11 more since August 4, 2000) JeffMagnus experience to node ratio: 2.304 XP per node JeffMagnus nodeshare: 0.628% JeffMagnus node of the day: what will occur the day after Windows NT becomes open source
What else happened today? Ah yes, my parents went out to dinner and brought me back some food and a paper umbrella.
I think that not just the existance of these experiences, but the fact that I notice these moments has significantly affected my life. I can no longer see a world in black and white, but in highly blurred, unclear shades of gray.
I had another moment like that today. I was listening to Portishead on my Walkman while I went running this evening and, as I was walking for a little while, I saw an abandoned old house with, among other things, a decrepid old highchair with food still on it on the lawn.
And I wonder how, at the same moment, I can find both hope and dispair.
Yesterday | Dizzy->Day_Logs() | Tomorrow
10:15 BST
My house is a mess. Letters on the floor, beer cans everywhere, books scattered anywhere but the bookcase, clothes forming fractal patterns on my bedroom floor and plastic bags with chocolate bars inside them.
The less said about my Kitchen, the better.
I know I need to tidy up. I know I need to collate my CDs and put them together. I know I need to start my weekend laundry. I know I need to at least make an attempt on my hell hole of a kitchen.
But I don't want to.
Mental Note: Instant gratification is not a right.
13:40 BST
Nyaah! Nyaaaah! I have a tidy kitchen now! I feel so happy with the accomplishment that I decided to node Tips for overcoming Procrastination as a reward.
Ugh, I read "Bruckheimer is convinced that Perabo, who resembles an amalgam of Julia Roberts, Liv Tyler and Angelina Jolie, will be Hollywood's next best thing." from http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/entertainment/newsid_865000/865916.stm . I'm convinced that Hollywood will be genetically engineering it's stars within a decade. It reminds me of that university research into the most popular female face - they averaged the results and made a vampish monstrousity, proclaiming it to be the perfect female.
Ah well, at least nefarious uses for a beard trimmer cheered me up.
20:10 BST
Finally got the email address of the girl who's been trying to contact me via the internet dating site - Now I'm in a silly panic about what to write in my reply. The site in question is mentioned in dating through a score out of 9 - which iirc was my first cooled node. If you want a laugh, my homenode has the address of my page on that site :)
Hmm, http://www.shorewalker.com/design/design28.html says that the optimum width of a text line is between 6 and 12 words... (sorry for that random thought) Oddly enough, my font size gives me about 14 words per line in a node...
It's the first piece of gym equipment that we've been able to assemble, let alone use, without cursing. It's very well made. It's also very enjoyable to use - you can feel the appropriate muscle groups doing their thing. (If you really want more details, look at their website (www.totalgym.com in the US, I forget the UK site we ordered through - it might be www.pilates.co.uk).)
I'm incredibly relieved - I was starting to think mail order gym equipment was all going to be disappointing. Even the quality of this kit is motivating! Now to get an exercise program sorted out for my wife and me and we'll be away!
Downsides? It's big (but it does fold up). The video accompanying it isn't up to date (two of the attachments have become one and doesn't work quite the same). Other than that, it's better than we expected.
Late update - the video would have had to be re-done very recently, it appears, not to have been out of date. They've just revamped the machine. No, I'm not really any less irritated by it, just slightly more forgiving.
Yesterday | Tomorrow
Unfortunately the British summertime is grounded for bad behaviour and as a result I am probably looking worse than ever, having lived on a diet of beer, take-away food and more beer and take-away food for the last week coupled with the inadequate toilet facilities in my hotel leading to me going for a McShit once too often.
What's more and to pour salt into the wound I find myself an internet cafe to get a hit of e2 and notice that the good friend with whom I began my noding career has noded so heavily over the past week that I fear the friendly (yet with serious undertones) nature of our noding competition is all but lost as she races away with ching! after ching!
This morning is all a bit surreal, I have had various dreams of the most bizzare nature, woken up sweating and nervous and have acquired a strange tick in my left eye. I fear the consequences of 4 nights of 10 pint beer abuse have caught up with me.
I am also finding the fact that a best friend and former long term SO of mine is leaving the country for a year on Tuesday a little weird and keep wondering would my life have turned out better if we'd got married and had kids like she wanted. I know i'll miss her and don't really want her to go but that's another story.
Perhaps the most odd thing is that today is actually really sunny and the town is full of life and I'm choosing to spend my time shacked up in this little room telling you guys why I'm not enjoying myself when the world and his wife are having it large not 50 yards away.
My head is spinning, my brain is twitching like a man on too much coke and I feel like i'm dreaming. See ya when I wake up!
In Jonathan Swift's 1726 classic, Gulliver's Travels, there is a statement that Mars had two moons, at a distance of three and a half diameters from Mars respectively, the nearest one revolving in ten hours and the outermost in twenty-one and a half hours.
This statement is a remarkable one, because the existence of those moons was not established until August 1877 by Asaph Hall. Their distance from Mars, and the length of their orbits also corresponded to Swift's suggestion. The inner moon is the only known body in the universe that revolves around a central body faster than the central body rotates - this fact is also included in Swift's writing.
A few crackpots over the years have attributed this phenomena to Jonathan Swift being from Mars; More likely he read Galileo's discovery of the four moons of Jupiter and (wrongly) assumed that each planet had moons in geometric progression: no moons for Venus, one for Earth, two for Mars, and Jupiter four.
-it's a fact!
Wednesday, I went in to work to find a message on Groupwise from the girl I am supposed to have a first date with that evening. Not good. Apparently, she decided she was going to go meet her sister up at the airport, so she canceled the date we made Monday. This confused me a lot. She was interested, but this is just rude. But I guess i'll give her one more chance. Regardless, asking her out was a big step for me in the first place. Oh well, I guess. Thursday was boring, nothing special. I spent five hours at a coffee shop studying. ick.(the studying, not the coffee) Friday I woke up at 7, drank a pot of coffee and studied some more. I left at 930 for Calculus to take my final. That went fairly well, i thought. But that either means I did great or I had no clue what the fuck I was doing. I passed though, I'm confident of that. After the final, I went to work for four hours, and I haven't had a friday afternoon drag on like that in a long time. So then i was sittin around at my computer, reading some nodes and trying to get ahold of a friend that was gonna come over, but she had to cancel. And then my friend Angie walked in the door. This was completely unexpected since she sorta lives 6 hours away. I was happy. Angie makes me happy. I am happy. She's tubing down the Apple River in Wisconsin right now with some other friends from down here. (She goes to college here.) We went to the store this morning and got eggs and milk. Then we made breakfast. It was good. I'll update later, but I think we're going out to dinner at The Old Spaghetti Factory tonight :) yummmm!
I'm not sure this is something I want to delve into - but it's relatively simple: I don't have a lot of joy these days. I'm working towards nothing that I believe in... I have dreams that I can find no desire to work towards... Everything I do seems to be the same as the things I did before... And the people that I love seem to be slowly driving me insane.
I feel completely and totally disassociated today - I was walking by the Empire State Building with one of my closest friends and his lover when he began to exclaim loudly how stupid going up in the building was... you know: to the tip top - to the tourist locale.
All I could think of was the faces of people around us - it's Saturday in lower Midtown, and we're wedged between the Empire State Building and the Manhattan Mall... who else is going to be there but tourists...? People who came to my new home purely for the purpose of enjoying themselves - a home that I truly love and find immense beauty in... probably the only part of my life that I'm actually happy with now... And fuck it - if their presence in Midtown on a Saturday riding an elevator to the top of a building that was once the tallest in the world gives them joy, who the fuck are we to take that away from them? Actual - honest - pure joy seems like such a rare commodity these days... I haven't seen it lying around for the taking lately, and I wouldn't mind having a small pocket of it tucked away - and it used to be so easy for me to acquire, from hand to mouth even...
It seems like this last year following graduation I've been waiting for something to believe in... I've lost most of my faith in interpersonal relationships - I've given up the idea of love, or on sexuality being remotely satisfying outside some skincrawling ephemeral context. I've grown more attached to humanity as a whole - more interested in the intentionality of action, but can't abide the personal connection that would be required to experience that first hand... I've become someone who watches everyone around them and wants to be so completely annonymous that no one would ever bat an eye my way...
Woke around one again. My middle bro was back from Florida and wanting to Playstation - fine, except both the power and TV adapter cord are missing. Oh well, I needed to wake up anyways. Everything is so unreal for the first few minutes after I wake up. Tunnel vision, blurred sight, lack of balance or attention. I stagger. It feels like a heavy wet blanket placed under my skin, or perhaps my personal gravity has been turned up a notch. Eating seems like an impossibility, but the hunger is still there. Quick and vicious exercise makes it go away, but often makes me feel bad in other ways. Once at college, I fell out of my bed, a neat trick considering it was a mattress on a five foot-high shelf. Luckily, I hit the desk on the way down. (That can't be a common phrase) The adrenalin woke me up with crystal clarity that morning - maybe I should throw myself off high places more often.
sibling psychosis
My youngest brother is grinning like a moron and making stupid noises. My middle brother is quietly surly, though I can't tell if it's due to losing baseball games or his inability to find the Playstation cables. He also bought a remote-controlled fart machine, and I know this is just going to end poorly. I think I'm going to smack him if he doesn't stop his passive-aggressive shit.
self-mutilation whimperings
I really really miss my tongue piercing, but I do appreciate not having one in so far front. Found out that I can pull my 6 gauge earlet out despite the flare, which means that hole's getting larger or more pliable. I might want to shrink it a bit. I feel an itch to get more earrings as well as the long-planned nipple piercings. For my left ear, I'd match the two in my earlobe and then have a cart piecing around the middle of the ear. The bead of the captive bead ring would fit right in the crevice between the outer fold.
everyone talks about it but little is done
It's hot today - when I walked out of my apartment the heat covered me. Surprisingly enough for LA, it's somewhat humid as well. I know if I lay back on anything the sweat will muster and roll down the small of my back, but it's too hot for a T-shirt. Looking at my bare chest in the mirror reminds me of my need to exercise. I don't understand how I can have fat in some areas of my body when you can see my ribs when I breath in and stretch. I still haven't found where my near-empty bottle of vodka went. Could she have just taken it?
kits for beats
I read Jack Kerouac's The Dharma Bums today with Bob lying on the bed purring. The cat's been around for almost 16 years or so, and he finally looks and feels old. This might be his final summer, and I'm trying to fix him in my mind so I'll never forget him. I hate having forgotten Muffin, and Arthur, and Cleo, and Smoky. I think I'm leaving one cat out here - I hate it like nothing else. Tarkitty was his name, and I forgot him because we gave him away. And there was Socks for about a week. She hurt.
I can't accept much of the Buddhist theology in the Dharma Bums. Even if objectively there is nothing and all is non-existent we give the universe meaning. But the joy in life in the story warms me. What a different era when one could hitchhike from one coast to another. And the little insights along the road are nice too. But I think the most precious thing from the Dharma Bums is the description of his mountain travels. It's been way too long since I've gone out of cities and roads and cars. One friend asked me to go hiking with her near the end of school - I'm regretting circumstances interfered. Keeping this in my thoughts will be another story. All the human relationships but a few in the book somehow felt subtly wrong, I don't know why.
purpose oblimates
What I write, here on E2 and elsewhere, is not what I experience. Even the best words can't give a full sense of what I'm thinking. It is a darkling reflection of my true existence. Yet years from now when I reread the past it will become a major portion of the truth as I know it. I only hope it improves in its temporal evolution.