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Time: Mon, 6 Nov 2000 00:21:14 GMT
Everything server: Apache/1.3.9 (Unix) Debian/GNU mod_ssl/2.4.10 OpenSSL/0.9.4 mod_perl/1.21_03-dev
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New Nodes: [Analingus] [Ordos] [Doctrine of Fun] [Pat Buchanan] [Saving a Train] [does this cock-ring make me look fat?] [My mind after she cut herself] [lawyer jokes] [SYSCO] [dream log: march 27, 2000] [The Rattling Boy from Dublin] [hickory sticks] [Bathroom Statistics] [Palatini action] [Redskins]

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JeffMagnus node count: 4038 (1 new since November 5, 2000)
JeffMagnus experience: 9663 (-7 more since November 5, 2000)
JeffMagnus experience to node ratio: 2.393 XP per node
JeffMagnus nodeshare: 0.544%
JeffMagnus node of the day: Microsoft

Why you ask?

Because they are the spawn of Satan. (No offense to Satan).

My proof of this. Last week, I was going to ZaphodBeeblebrox's place to do some much needed studying for the upcoming evil physics midterm. Well when I went out to the car, what do I see but a flat tire.

"Aww hell."

I then go about changing the tire. There tire changed. I get in my little car and go study all is good. Until this morning.

I'm going to go over to Zaphod's place again to study more. (Note, during the week I took the tire to Sam's club, they said it was fixed and yey.)

Well anyway I go out... take one look at the car....

"AW FUCK!!!!!"

Yes... the tire... was.. FLAT AGAIN!!!!!!! Now... all week this tire has been FINE. (Yes it was THE SAME TIRE). Monday: fine. Tuesday: fine. Etc:Fine. Today. Sunday. FUCKING FLAT! Now I stand there in utter disbelief for a moment or two then what do I hear but giggles from the lovely lovely children that live next door. ... So now instead of changing the tire I simply drag the compressor thingy that refills the tire and fill it up all nice and good and drive my ass down there. I'm at home now. Tire is fine, hasn't lost one damn bit of pressure. Now since I lack a garage I can put the car in I am at the mercy of these little assholes. My only alternative. Kill them before they start keying it.

(And those assholes at Sam's that didn't tell me there was nothing to fix on the tire need to die too.)

Today I learned a bit more about cashflow and liquid capital. It's amazing to see how long one has to wait until the cash the customer has to pay will arrive on your bank account. It makes on wonder why there exists such a thing as a bank lending money. Things get even more extreme in a startup company.

I went to my second wedding of this year yesterday. I also have three to look forward to next year. I never imagined being 25 would mean everyone I know would be getting married. It's rather perturbing. But the wedding itself was completely beautiful. The ceremony was held on the docks in Williamstown in the sunshine and light wind. The wind served mostly to eradicate the chance anyone might hear the vows being spoken, but the general gist of what was being said was pretty obvious.

At the reception I got myself utterly plastered on red wine, and enjoyed the stunning wedding food - oysters, steak, sticky date pudding, the works. The speeches of the bride and groom and their parents were impressive and not a little moving, especially the groom's speech which made me a little teary. An extremely rare occurrance.

There was a fortune cookie for each guest, and I recall mine being absolutely hilarious once I'd added the obligatory "in bed" but thanks to being slosheroo I don't remember what it was.

Today was the first day in my new office, 15 floors below the office my department left on Friday afternoon. It has its pros and cons - the main cons being the lack of air conditioning (we have some standalone fans set up) and the weird positioning of the office in relation to the rest of the building (to get to the cafeteria you have to physically leave the building and re-enter it through the main section to get to the elevators).

Tomorrow is a public holiday here in Melbourne, for our annual Melbourne Cup. I have no particular interest in horse racing myself, but a day off is always nice.

Goading me on to take the next step, because when you think your "friend" is slipping into a depression, and on the verge of suicide, you don't just make the mandatory report to the guidance counselor, and leave her to rot in a puddle of self- pity. If you are going to expose her to the humiliation of some stranger poking through her self-conscious and deepest thoughts, don't leave her and pretend everything is ok. You could at least pretend to care for a week or two. But its too late, because I drowned. Ha ha, the jokes on you.

Today I am feeling wracked with guilt. Last night at 2am I heard what sounded like a girl screaming in pleasure. I wasn't really paying much attention because I was listening to the Fight Club soundtrack. However, after a while, the girls screams penetrated through the sleepy haze that I was in and I went to stare out the window. I could still make out the girl screaming, but couldn't distinguish any words or even exactly where it was coming from. I thought the noise might have been coming from across the road from one of the university Colleges - the lights were certainy on - maybe they had a party - maybe some College chick was getting lucky - anyway i couldn't be certain. After a little while, the noise stopped and I went to bed.

Today, I found out that a girl was raped on the road in front of my dorm. It occured just 10 metres away from my room but because of the shape of the building, I could not see her. Now I am feel shamed - I could have done something if I had not comfortably assumed that everything was okay. Damn it. To that girl that I don't know ... I am sorry.

So, Today is sunday :( That means I have school tomorrow. I took a week off from classes because i got chickenpox, it sucked... but now i have to go back.

Me and my roomate made an attempt to clean the house today, but well.... we wound up making a bigger mess in the kitchen making lunch, then we rearranged the living room....failure!

What else... I saw Charlie's Angels lastnight, it was a decent movie... not great. It's the type of movie I'd see in a theater for a matinee ticket, but it wasnt worth paying $8 to see. I wouldnt wanna watch it on TV either, unless it was a bigscreen w/ widescreen/16:9/letterbox format. Pan and Scan sucks.

That about sums up my day. Couple of nodes I've done recently...:


film at eleven.
-doug

Cleaning feels wonderful when you're done. Tonight my inbox went from 180 or so to 5. I unsubscribed myself from the mailing list I wasn't really reading anyway, finally wrote that perl script that will allow me to report SPAM to spamcop with only a single keystroke (mutt is indeed a gift from the gods), and caught up on correspondance I let age for too long.

Now I just have to convince myself to do the same to the physical objects in my room. I happen to be sitting next to a stack of 8 cinder blocks that my roommate got with the intention of propping up beds on them. Unfortunately, it turns out there's a new rule against that this year, despite the fact that more than half the rooms on campus do it. So they sit there and dissuade me from any attempts at cleaning, because if the room cannot be immaculate when I'm done, then what's the point?

I'm also amazed that every time I think I'm figuring everything out, I'm shown just how much of a mystery it is to me. Some of my factual nodes such as why it's impossible to tune a piano perfectly and BFS seemed to be well-received, and I know a lot about things like that, so I figured I'd go Know What I Know. But then no one seemed to care about figured bass and double sharp. Now I'm not complaining or whining, I can take it, my self-esteem is not that fragile. But I don't want to waste my time noding things that no one else cares to read. So I continue my quest to figure out which things people want to hear about and which things they don't.

I'm due for a node housecleaning soon...

11:29

Hey, I'm alive!
No thanks to the gravity bong, though. That thing was a lethal weapon. :)

But seriously, the IRC party was a lot of fun. A bunch of geeks stuffed in a house full of booze, herbal remedies, DVDs and Dreamcast games isn't a bad combination at all. Actually, some of the alcohol-people got a bit too saturated with the legal drug, resulting in shattered glasses, honest words and enough beer'n'cider spilled on the floor to swim in. There was also an incident involving two guys, a girl and a whole lot of duct tape from the Finnish military. (Rexx got nice photos of it, of course) Too bad I have probably forgotten lots of funny details due to the sheer power of that red bucket.

At least something good came out of this ordeal: At least one friend and his fiancee are swearing they'll never drink again.
Yeah right.


15:17

Oh, great. A company christmas party trip to Tampere coming up in a few weeks. This would be all nice and good if I was into hard liquor and drinking until passing out. But spending time sober in a smoky bar is not my idea of fun. And I can't really weasel myself out of this either, without catching a near-fatal disease or something similar. A deal you can't refuse.

I've been filled with an odd sadness as of late, more of a misplacement of feelings, where I'm not sure how to feel and I'm on the verge of a feeling but it could be anything. It's a place I don't like to be because it feels strange to me and I feel like I'm left in the air and my wings were just cut, but I haven't yet fallen.

I needed something to either pick me up or to throw me down, and to escape it I usually throw myself down. That's better, at least, than being there hanging in the air.

But it didn't happen like that today. I felt I couldn't express myself and so I went away into myself for a while and I tried to not think. And it frightened me, feeling that way. And then I came back and I sat on my chair with screws that come loose, and I logged onto e2. I was welcomed with a node a friend wrote for me, and it made me cry. And it lifted me from the air and I wasn't left there anymore, and I don't know how to thank him, except to fill a space with words for him. My mind doesn't feel so blocked anymore, my hands aren't clenching, and my feelings are no longer misplaced. And sometimes it's so good to know that you affect people, even in the slightest of ways, just to know I'm not alone in that.

I give these words to you and I hope that it's enough. Thank you.

i was overweight, but I'm working on it.

I've been feeling uninspired the last few days. It took the re-reading of CowboyNeal's beautiful words in sensitivity and fat people, and prole's words in I'm not anorexic, but I'm working on it to remind me that even completely experiential stuff has a place on Everything. I find purely Getting to Know You nodes trite, so I will attempt to relate this to you, the reader. Let me know if I fail.

Eating disorders are incredibly common in the United States. Both kinds, your anorexic/bulemics and your "mmm...I think I'll have another muffin"s stem from insecurity and low self-esteem And, in both cases, the results of those eating habits will affect the person with the syndrome for years after they improve their self image and regain security in their lives.

In my case, genetics just begged me to get fat, and when the events of my life took a turn for the less than charming, I happily complied. I have a metabolism to laugh at, and most of my interests are fairly sedentary. That, combined with horrible eating habits, led me to be very overweight at the age of only 11. The details of my life turning upside down have litte to do with this topic, so I will avoid discussing them here. Suffice it to say, they changed my existence (in the end, for the better), and left me with very litte solid in my life. So what did I do? I ate. Feeling down? Have some tuna. Rough day at school? Have a cookie. Nothing better to do? Why not get pizza? I would hazard to guess that by 8th grade, I was around 5' 6" or 7", and likely around 200 pounds. This made my transition into high school juuuuust fun. But, thanks to my using comedy as a defence mechanism, my being overweight quickly fell away as one of the defining problems in my life. I made friends, etc, etc. Thanks to making healthier life choices, I'm now much closer to what I should weigh. I'm a large man (stupid shoulders), and by no stretch of the imagination am I thin. Every time I read those government reports on what we're supposed to weigh, I laugh my ample ass off.

We all have our crutches and weaknesses. Overweight people, regardless of whether they can help it or not, are still people deserving of respect. In fact, most of them fill me with admiration. I have been lucky enough to have supportive people surrounding me most of my life. I'm in the state of health I am because of a lack on my part. My brother was in a similar situation as I, became a vegetarian, and now looks like he could play the scarecrow in Wizard of Oz. So I'm not treated differently because of it, and I know if I buckle down and follow through with healthy lifestyle choices, I can make a difference. Most of my fellow "large boned" friends are not so lucky. They have to put up with a world which is much more understanding to anorexics and bulemics. "Oh, of course she didn't eat," the world thinks "everyone wants to look like a model." But what of those who simply have a different way of dealing with stress? Revulsion and ridicule. I'm not trying to marginalize the experience of those with undereating problems. But it's fairly obvious that the public at large is more accepting of that kind of an eating disorder than the opposite. Even while Americans themselves are statistically increasing in mass. (heh...that's a great node : I was fat before it was trendy) This kind of hipocracy makes the reception that overweight people get even harder to swallow. (ha ha)

For those folks who want to read more from this standpoint, I suggest you check out one of my favorite columnists at Salon, Steven A. Shaw. His article Fat Guys Kick Ass is the best single condensation of fat people attitude I've ever read.

So hug your token fat person today. You'll be glad you did. (And remember, we're bigger than you. So none of that Poppin' Fresh stuff, or we'll be wiping your appropriately proportioned corpse off of our meaty hands. :)

13:23

"And tomorrow, exam in L4..."

::gasp::

Well, fortunately I remembered that my OO design exam is in mid December... =)

OK, I had another dream about Everythingians. Weird. Really weird.

I'm now bashing through news, more stuff to come later...

16:48

Rain...

It was raining today. Again.

As soon as the winter came it went. Well, I hope the winter will come back and we'll get a white Christmas or something... =)

23:02

OK, after last night's stuff, I'll propose some new tags. These would be temporary node flags (except for C! and K!)

C! - Cool!
The writeup has worthy content.
K! - Kewl!
Not quite worhy of C!, but so good that mere upvote isn't enough.
S! - Sucks! or Slap!
"Hey noder! Take a look at this, this isn't up to quality standards." Will be only usable on writeups of negative rep and only after the user has voted. Reverts after the writeup gets 0 or better reputation.
J! - I'm Jealeous!
For levels 1-3 only. This is sort of like S! but used in trollish sense. On positively repped writeups only, reverts if J!-slapper (ever) gets to level 3.
W! - Wrong!, F! - Funny, P! - Plain Silly (or Python!)
Obvious.

Just some examples. OK, now this writeup deserves that P!...

02:33

Grr. Bloody Nazis. Why they had to make so scary things that people still get creeps over 50 years later?

I read denying the holocaust node, went to the referenced Nizkor page, and guess what? Now I'm so scared I can't sleep!

Too bad I don't have an equally horrifying horror movie to get me thinking of other stuff. I will need to see The Blair Witch Project (I'll go to see Scary Movie in Wednesday and Blair Witch 2 is coming in near future...)

Too bad I didn't tape Where Eagles Dare...


Other day logs o' mine...

Noded today by y.t.: Dream Log: November 6, 2000 StarFox 64 Plush Toys (yeah, it's silly... sorry...) Lickitung Sushi-go-round Paras Onix Scyther
Updated: Vulpix Ninetales Starmie (E2 Pokedex just got a more logical look so links to it needed to be updated...)
Nukerequested: A poll node about how did I learned about E2...

back | days | forth

Bones sinking like stones
All that we've fought for
All these places we've grown
All of us are done for

And we live in a beautiful world
Yeah we do, yeah we do
We live in a beautiful world

The person whom I pushed away last week has taken a week away from work; he asked on friday for this holiday. I hadn't realised he would be quite that upset. Thankfully my project leader has showed me just how human he is; we had a good chat about it and he agreed (based on my version of events) that I had done the right thing by asking to tone down the relationship. I'd like to apologise to my project leader but I'm too introverted to do it in person, so: I'm sorry andy for dismissing you as totally heartless, I was wrong.

Britain is being soaked again, scientists are mostly in agreement about the climate change we can expect, yet the main news items here are still the fact that people want cheaper petrol.

To hell with my grandchildren's lives, I want cheaper petrol!


More later when I calm down a bit, too much coffee!

14:05 UTC

Grr. For a while now all the news in Britain has been how bad the weather is and about the flooding. And I've been feeling smug because it's not so bad in Edinburgh. However, today I walked for 1/2 hour in the rain, and am not pleased. I couldn't even just skip my lecture I had to walk to, because I had to pick up stuff. Grr.

Anyway, last weekend I watched a few scary movies. Then last night I watched Wes Craven's New Nightmare on TV. Later, I head a funny noise in the kitchen. I thought I've probably left the window open. I walked into the kitchen, and sure enough, the window was open. There was also a large kitchen knife (psycho killer style) lying on the middle of the floor. As I walked up to the window, I seriously expected something to happen.

But since life's boring, nobody stabbed me and I'm still here.

15:50 UTC

Added a list of my daylogs to my home node, using a script I wrote, plus WWWWolf's Day MetaNoder and kaatunut's e2 Node Tracker. My script was supposed to make the node tracker get the list of daylogs I've done, and then the metanoder to node them up; I'll post the script when it works without hand-hacking. Has anybody noded a metanode for perl scripts for use with e2? I couldn't see one.

13:10 UTC the next day

And then I stayed up late procrastinating, followed by working on uni coursework. I failed to go to bed.

Exercise log:
  • Pushups: 50 (And I didn't really cheat, either!)
  • Side-kicks: 40, each side (I was careful to make sure I was doing them right, so I was doing them slower.)
  • Crunches: 60
Insomnia log: None. Even though I slept in the previous morning, and had only been awake about 13 hours.

The irish girl was acting a little strange on chat the last night. I wonder if maybe I said something wrong when we had our half-awake breakfast date. It's possible, but most of that morning is just a blur, anyway. She cut it short and went off to get her cards read. Except she called 'em Terot cards. Oh well. I'd try to ask her out on another date, but I know she's busy this coming weekend. Maybe we'll end up at the cast party together or something.

Crazy-ass dreams last night.

I don't know if the house is selling or not, since I haven't seen my mother since Thursday. We're a family of individuals, and don't really worry if we don't run into each other for a while.


- | +

Seems like everyone beat me to the log today....

I haven't noded at all, not even day logs since October. That's just not right. So here's a little wacky weekend recap of events.

My cousin goes to Buffalo State College, and her boyfriend lives here in Rochester. We've become pretty good friends, so when he visits for a weekend, I generally tag along. Apparently there's something in the water over in Buffalo. Girls like me - they really like me. I don't understand it. I might as well be a perverted homeless hobo here the way they look at me.

So I have a stalker in Buffalo, I have a sane girl who unfortunately may be getting back together with her ex, and then I have a psycho girl. The problem lies in the fact that I have some sort of odd attraction to psychotic girls. I can't help it. I talk to the sane one online every once in a while - the other girl has no computer (!) so I talk to her every once in a while when she hops on my cousin's computer or my cousin's roommate's. So anyways a while ago we agreed to be nice to one another (we had a very bad weekend one of the times I came up). And then I asked for her number, so I think she'd been expecting me to call. Last night I did. We talked for over an hour, which I'm afraid of because it's long distance and I have no clue what the bill will look like. My parents won't be too happy, but I'm obviously going to pay for it.

We talked about our weekends and stuff like that. After a while she mentioned something about wanting a boyfriend and I asked if I was on her list. She told me I fell into the category of guys who she likes but who don't want a girlfriend.... Hey! Whoa! Don't want a girlfriend? When did I say that?
I guess my cousin told her I didn't after the two of us, um... hooked up one weekend. I had never said it, though. I think my cousin's just trying to protect me because she knows I fall for the psychos. Anyways - so I told her she was mistaken. I think we'll keep in touch and I may go visit sometime soon - on a weekend or during finals week or break (I'm on an odd RIT time here).

Oh, I met a girl at RIT. She's in my CS class. I've never dated a girl like her. She's sweet, and nice, and innocent, and she likes computers - I mean she must, she's taking CS (one of about 10 girls in a major having 250 people), and she lives in the Computer Science House. I'm taking her out to a movie and dinner this Saturday. She really seems like a warm caring person, so I'm pretty happy about that....

School was going not so hot for a while. Bad grade on a CS test, missing a quiz and homework for Stats. But I've tried to turn it around and I did well on the second CS test, and I've aced my test and quizzes in Stats. I did a good job on the first CS project, too. Hopefully I'll end up with a 3.25+ GPA this trimester.
Oh my. It's Monday. I made it.

/me breathes a sigh of relief.

This weekend took a lot out of me. I mean, it added a lot to me as well, but learning is always exhausting when it's the hard way.

It all started out on Friday night. My friends and I had been looking forward to this night all week. We were going to dance up a storm. We were going to have a great time. Everyone would be happy. Except, as we were getting ready, I got the feeling that everything was about to go terribly wrong. An hour later, we were dialing 911 for a friend who was vomiting blood and had just gone limp in our arms.

I don't know why, but they sent a fire truck. And an ambulance. And a police car. Maybe they thought it would calm us down or something. I don't know. We moved my friend into the archway until we couldn't carry her any farther. The paramedics took over, asking her her name. She said "Skankor," and puked all over them. I couldn't help laughing just a little bit, especially since that's the only word she said all night.

At the hospital, they gave us dirty looks. I could tell they were thinking "Stupid students, getting their friends drunk and making the public pay for it." Like it was our fault. Like we shoved the vodka down her throat. Like she wanted it to happen that way. I'm sure if she knew she would end up in the hospital, she wouldn't have worn a bright blue thong. And I'm sure if she knew that I would have to bring her into the hospital bathroom and force her to pee in a cup for a urine test (we won't go into detail about that), again, she would have reconsidered her choice of underwear.

So we stayed by her side until six, taking shifts, sitting out in the hallway holding her hand because they wouldn't give her a room. The nurses looked at our shoes and called us Spice Girls. The one day this month I choose not to wear Birkenstalks, this has to happen. Fucking shoes. Fucking hospitals.

So we left the hospital at 6am when our friend woke up. We were almost sad to go. By the end we had gotten to know Peaches, the male night desk attendant, and I had been asked out by the security guard who talked endlessly about economics.

We dropped her off and went home, only to discover that our friend's roommate had passed out and puked all over herself. Not just regular puke, but piles of chunky yak, almost like it had never been digested in the first place. I had to work at 8am. This was not what I needed. But we stayed up and watched both of them. And at 8 I went to work, like every weekend.

That was just Friday night. I won't go into detail about Saturday, but it involved one introverted geek (who I happen to have fallen for in a big big way), one best friend, one more huge crush on the introverted geek, and one crying fit in the bathroom of The Pita Pit.

But I made it. And now I'm here. And I'm glad, almost glad that I went throught all of this in one weekend, because now I know that someone up there owes me a relaxing rest of the month.

This is an experiment. A test. A trial. The goal? I want to see if I can cheer myself up by sheer will power. Verbalizing the process may help. Let's begin.

It's amusing, that I would try this. This in itself has already started to cheer me, brighten my mood. Already I have a devilish grin on my face, for no good reason at all. Why is this? Can one really cheer oneself by sheer will power. It's not something I read, something somebody did for me. It's just a way of thinking. It's easy, try it. But when your depressed, it can seem impossible. Why the bad mood? I don't know, but there it is. What can I do to get rid of it? I must try really hard. A bad mood can kill you; you end up thinking of all the bad things and worrying about every little detail, when that does no good. It's not productive work. It adds nothing. It affects people's reactions toward you. People don't like talking to or even looking at someone who's got a sour look on their face. So if you're socially inept as it is, a bad mood only makes it more so. Remember to smile. Open yourself to the wonder of the universe. Try typeing with your eys closed. It can be fun. It can also lead to a lkot of typos. Hmm.

Eat something. You're shaking like a leaf. Too much coffee, have to stop drinking the stuff. Makes you jumpy.

What can i do, what can i do? Think a happy thought. You are ultimately responsible for your own happiness, and your own well being. It's up to you; no one else can do it for you. So do it yourself. Take a deep breath, continue typing. Smile at a stranger. If they smile back you'll feel all the better. If they frown, smile all the larger, or laugh like a lunatic. Maybe be a lunatic.

What if there is no free will? There basically three possibilities. The first one is that there is a god, maybe God, maybe some other god, and they defined some initial conditions for the Universe, and are just letting it run. No divine intervention. Just running a simulation for the real thing. But the thing is, there's no free will, all thoughts, conscience, sentient life, all an illusion really, an excuse we make up so that we can think ourselves better than the animals. It's still all just chemicals, cause and effect, everything. We are simply the sum of our parts, but we've fooled ourselves into believing otherwise. This case required evolution, or punctured equilibria, or some sort of mechanism for improvement, but this is not at odds with the god who set the initial conditions. The god is just watching the simulation play out. So the entire Universe can be described by science, because the creator has made rules for how the Universe should operate. This is maybe not science humans could ever understand, but science none the less.

A second possibility, there is a god, or gods, and it or they participate actively in the world. It or they perform miracles, and so on, but they are themselves a product of the universe, and cannot exist outside it. The question about free will comes up again, and the existence of gods allows for things outside the realm of that which may ever be described by science. So maybe we have free will or maybe not. In this case science can never completely describe the universe; there is no grand unified theory.

Perhaps there are no gods at all. Those are a fabrication of humanity, created to give some guiding rules, something bigger than themselves, something to believe in. Or maybe a way for the stronger, more ingenious people in a society to control others. Cause and effect could again reign, or something higher than science could be at the root of sentience. It could go either way, a universe completely described by math, or a universe only partially describable by math.

Hmmm, I think I took a little tangent. This will be a daylog for a while, and maybe when I feel like cleaning up the logical fallacies and straightening the arguments, I'll put this little tangent in a node of its own. The above has far reaching consequences, especially in the area or human relations, particularially in love. It raises the question about whether love is something more than chemical and hormonal responses. I would prefer to be a romantic and say there is something more, some deep and timeless connection, but the more I think about the nature of the universe, the more I think everything is just cause and effect. This does not negate the illusion of free will, we still control parts of our lives, but cause and effect dictates a destiny of sorts. What I mean I guess is that saying that because the Universe is cause and effect, I don't have free will and therefore I an not responsible for my actions is wrong. That's an excuse, and not a very good one. The illusion of free will allows us to make decisions and control our own destinies as far as we are concerned.

Oh yeah, this touches death heavily too. If the universe is cause and effect, then when you die, you're dead, just dead. Not in heaven, not in hell, just dead. Plain old dead. Dead like a door nail. This does not allow one to behave badly just because there is no eternal punishment. That comes in how you affect those around you. How you are remembered is your risk or reward.

This is getting a little heavy. It's time for lunch. I'll straighten this all out later.

Went to Boston Market today for lunch. Never been there before. Awesome meatloaf.
While at work, my mom calls me and tells me that my cousin is going to be in town tomorrow, and that I should take the day off tomorrow to drive up and meet her. I normally would scoff at such a suggestion, since I try to keep pretty reliable and non-spontaneous in my work schedule; so getting a day off of work the following day is sort of a strange request coming from me.

I'm not really too eager to meet my cousin, even though we spent a lot of time together when we were like 7 years old because we were living nearby, I don't have any idea what to expect because she will certianly not be the same person 18 years later. I'm not much of a fan of meeting family members anyway. I don't really know very many of them very well, since my parents moved down to Florida 18 years ago, while most of the rest remained in Indiana.

Anyway, since tomorrow is voting day, I need to drive up to my parent's house anyway to vote. This is like 100 miles, so it kind of sucks. I don't like driving that far becuase it's just plain boring, and everyone drives like 80-year old pissed-off drugged-up alcoholic maniacs on cell phones in South Florida.


Since I got the day off tomorrow, I left a message at work on my desk:

じょせふ休本日


I've been studying japanese writing, if you can't decode what's above. I just paid $40 for a program called "kanji hanabi" by ordering through a store on amazon.com. It's supposed to send me an email so that I can download the program immediately after paying, but I've been waiting two hours now and haven't gotten anything. I hope it arrives before tomorrow, so I can keep practicing my kanji while I'm bored at my parent's house tomorrow.

I got a call on my answering machine from the gym today.. They want to schedule a time for them to show me around and set me up with a plan. I really need to lose some weight. I was hoping that I could get started right away, but it looks like it's going to be Thursday at the earliest that I can get a tour, since tomorrow I'm skipping work to go to my parent's, and I will have to return their call on Wednesday while I'm at work, so that I can set up a time to get the tour (which would be Thursday at the earliest).

I work from 12 noon to 9pm so sometimes stuff like this can be a bit weird, but it allows me to get some stuff done during business hours if I manage to get my ass out of bed before 11am.


I was reading through this node and saw Infinite Burn's comment that it would be cool to downvote candidates. I wish this were possible, it would certianly make things interesting since we're really choosing the least of the evils anyway. Perhaps people could have the option to choose to upvote someone or downvote someone (for those who don't really care who wins as long as it isn't candidate X). I'd probably choose to downvote GWB rather than upvote anyone.

Another good day... I woke up relatively late (6ish), and rushed to get to school for the newspaper meeting. I've got two articles to write in the next week, one on the Green Bay Packers and whether or not people like them anymore, and another on Teen Court.

I went off to first hour Language, avoiding any contact with my (ex-)stalker. Numerous sources have all agreed that she was angry when she read my letter, and that's she's planning on writing something nasty back. I'm looking forward to throwing it in the trash in front of her face.

Anyway, the rest of the day was pretty routine. I sold tickets for this Saturday's music dance. We only sold 5 tickets, but it's only Monday, and no one really knew about it yet. I still have to make up a huge Chemistry test (someday) too.

The real reason I'm so happy is that I got a whopping 13 points of extra credit on an AP History test... so I think I'm getting an "A" now.

Right now, I'm going to go and read the Oddysey, seeing as I have close to no homework, and all my friends are practicing for the musical orchestra pit at school.

The thermostat in my apartment is broken. Instead of being freezing cold, my heater pumps out heat without stopping. I didn't realize it was broken until I turned it off, then came home to find my apartment was at tropical temperatures. So, I turned the thermostat on, then off, then on again hoping that it would shut it off. I opened the door and windows, and it cooled off enough that I figured it was off, and went to bed. It was about 1am.

I woke up at 4:45 am drenched in sweat. The heater was still pumping out heat. So, I climbed out of bed and started fooling with the circuit breakers. I finally figured out which breaker controlled the heat, and got it turned off. I opened all the windows, then took a cool shower, and I felt much better. I called my landlordthis morning, and he is coming by tonight to take a look at it.

So, its been a Monday. I'm glad that its almost over. Only one hour until I can go home.

I went and saw Nina Gordon play last night. She was really good. My boyfriend was really glad that I wanted to go to the show with him. She was in Veruca Salt, and he was a huge fan of theirs. She played mostly solo material, but also performed some Veruca Salt songs, probably because she co-wrote them and has rights to perform them even though someone else owns the Veruca Salt name.

Nothing much to report. I'm ready to go home and go to bed.

Nodes That I Wrote Recently:
nothing of interest

CD’s I’ve Listened To Today:
Liz Phair - Exile in Guyville
Garbage - Version 2.0
Sarah McLachlan - Fumbling Towards Ecstasy
DJ Icey - Essential Mix
Depeche Mode - Black Celebration
Siouxsie and the Banshees - Peepshow

Today’s Horoscope on my Calendar (Aries) - Ready to finalize major commitments? Think again. Mercury will not turn forward until tomorrow night. Focus on music, dance, theater, and film under Pisces Moon. Paddle a canoe downstream or fish for rainbow trout.

It's almost exactly 31 hours until my flight leaves.

If I can just make it through the next 31 hours, I'm OK.

I have to do my Math 311 midterm before I leave. I failed the last one. I'm a little scared. I haven't even started studying yet.

But after that, I'm pretty much clear. Laundry, packing, then heading out.

I'm so excited to travel again... I will be in Quebec City soon. It's somewhere I've wanted to go since I was younger, when romantic visions of wandering the cobblestone streets with my lover filled my head.

Alas, it is not going to be nearly as exciting as all that. My lover is staying at home and writing midterms. I am going to a physics conference. Well, it might be exciting...

Actually, I do get to stay for three days afterwards. A friend and his family are going to put me up and show me around town. So perhaps I will be able to wander the cobblestone streets.

I am so conflicted right now... sheer nervous energy (for my midterm and my presentation at the conference) and extreme ecstatic crazy energy for the flight, the city, the insane amount of alcohol I will be drinking over the next week. The flight... oh, I can't wait for the flight. Window seats all the way. (I am SO happy I booked early). I can't wait to be flying again... the feeling as the plane lifts from the ground... God, I can't wait.

This is going to be the LONGEST 31 hours of my life...

2000-11-06 00:45:44 Server Time, Kaatunut completes auto-noding the dictionary of sexology! It surprised the heck out of me when i woke up and checked my email to find it complete, i didn't know it was even going until it was through.

Girlfriend came over and we did chemistry. Ok so we copied the answers out of the answer guide. Why is it all AP/higher level classes have answer books? Either way, heat transfer is mind-numbingly easy.

Later that evening i needed pepsi/caffeine. We had been out all weekend. So we walked over to vons and i got a case of pepsi. Chips, ranch dip, and pepsi, dinner of champions! We watched father of the bride while we munched, then went back out to the couch and talked until she had to leave.

I was trying to force letters to words but they kept slipping, I would find myself halfway down a page sifting sentences between my eyes thinking somewhere far off drifting. Standing there waiting for the elevator taking in the boxed pastel angles and chrome I glanced over and caught her quickly stop looking. Silently wondering if she caught me moments earlier. And hours later inside under bright lights and scattered tables, pushing lines into letters and forcing shapes to will, there were portions of lives passing by that I unfold stored inside for later. The girl alone wait glancing each time the door creaked, the preacher done with his rendezvous attempt conversion scans and descends, the self concious boy repeats his same words to changing faces. And then that dry cold wind and lonely lights filtering through branches on the way home, just letting everything settle into all those little places.

Rain wouldn't have made today less enjoyable.

It was that weird sort of weather you only get at this time of year: half a second away from raining all day long, but it never does. It's been raining nonstop the last two weeks, so the roads are covered in after-rain mud. As such, whenever anyone drives close in front of you, you get road sludge on your windshield.

And I ran out of windshield wiper fluid on the way out of the parking lot.

So, at dawn, I'm driving to work, directly into the sun, with this grime kicked up on to my windshield. I was basically blind, in Dallas rush hour morning traffic. It sucked.

I found some compositions by Robert W. Smith on Napster. If you are into orchestral and symphonic music, I highly recommend checking this guy out.

Gotta get political on my website and get the last message out to vote.

My final year dinner was held this night. We went to the Mixing pot cafe in Glebe, Sydney.

There were about 40 of my classmates and their partners there (out of a class of around 50). The food was excellent. I had spaghetti with squid ink, which was black but delicious, beef fillet and tiramisu. And about 7 or 8 glasses of wine.

Awards were informally given out for various categories amongst our final year -- I was voted the winner of the "Dr. Evil award" for "male ambitions for world domination"... I think it fit.

Good time had by all and sundry. Took photographs with just about everyone. :-)

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