analyze | predict

Today is Arbor Day. Go plant a tree. Everybody likes oxygen. It keeps you alive. Trees provide shade. I like shade. Some trees produce fruit. Fruit is yummy. Trees are made of wood. Wood is useful, it can be used to build dog houses, park benches, swings, people houses, and much more. Trees have leaves. In the fall the leaves fall to the ground and can be raked into big piles, good for jumping into.

Trees are wind breaks which keep the wild winds from sweeping across plains and creating sand storms. Trees have roots that burrow into the ground and help prevent erosion. Trees are homes for birds, squirrels, and other wildlife. I like animals, they should have homes.

Trees are nice to look at. They are generally brown and green (I like brown and green), but they can have other colors too thanks to flowers and leaves. Trees look nice in a yard, a park, by a stream, all over the place. Some trees can be used for decorations like Christmas trees and bonsai trees.

Trees are fun. Trees are good to climb on. I like to climb up trees to see farther. You can hang a swing on a tree. You can use a tree as base in a game of tag. Army guys can use trees to get over fences and to spot bad guys.

I like trees. You should like trees too.


Growing up in the home of arbor day we celebrated this holiday every year. In grade school we would often draw pictures or write essays (like the one above) for contests or school assignments. But we also got out of school to go to a park and play and listen to a tree awareness rally. At these rallies we would be given a sapling. If the sapling survived the journey home my parents would help us (my brothers and sisters and I) plant them in the yard or at the my grandparents' farm. I have fond memories of this and some of those trees still stand.

For a little work you can have a part in the process of nature. It is little awe inspiring to see a big strong tree 20 years later that you planted when it was tiny and weak. If I had children and a yard I would make this an annual event for the family. Children aren't going to understand or find it as exciting as I do, but if they are like me, when they grow up and pass by that tree, they will feel a little pride and nostalgia.


As I got older (the teen years) I thought Arbor Day was a joke. A lame local attempt at environmentalism. I really didn't think much of it or care about it. I didn't see much point in it.

Since then the The National Arbor Day Foundation has been more active in publicizing the day more widely. They have a pretty informative web sight, distribute literature, and organize tree planting events. They even sell saplings. *hint*


Why am I writing this? Since I can't do much for the holiday myself, I'm trying to raise tree awareness. People talk about the rain forests depletion, but mostly it is just talk. Look to your own back yard. Can you do something that besides helping the environment, beautifies your yard?

The last Friday in April is National Arbor Day, but many states celebrate during the best time of year to plant trees in their climate. Check the Arbor Day node for dates by state if you are curious.

To who ever soft-linked The Lorax, Thanks.

a daydream log

I’m completely drained, exhausted mentally and physically. Work stress, life stress, extra-curricular stress. It’s nonstop whining and handholding at work, a stack of papers to grade that make me realize that we’re in a post-literate world, I’m getting no work on my thesis done, and my life sucks. On Wednesday, I forgot to set my alarm and woke up three hours late. I’m also eating like shit, getting no sleep, I don’t have time or energy to play racquetball, and I’m drinking so much coffee that I’m dehydrated all the time. And I have to spend tomorrow driving up to Chattanoooga for dorkus bowl all weekend.

It’s 4pm, and I’m staggering around near the front desk with an empty water bottle when she walks in. I’d seen her before, but now I knew I was in love. I have no idea, nor do I care, how high she’d score on amihotornot.com, but there was just something about her, that mane of magenta hair swept back from her head, those Lisa Loeb glasses, with a little bit of that riot grrrl thing going on, I was hopeless. I wouldn’t do anything so unprofessional or so gauche as to hit on her in the office, or at all really. A few days of rest and daydreaming will clear this right up.

Like so many people I see, she didn’t know what to do with her life. Teaching maybe, and of course the state of Florida makes it as difficult as possible for students to become teachers with their inane and irrelevant requirements and then it whines about the teacher shortage. A science lab for a foreign language teacher? That makes sense. And then the College of Education is staffed with idiots who spell worse than my students, if their memos are any indication. She thought she might want to teach theater, but of course USF did away with the theater education program, and she wasn’t sure what else she might want to do, and was feeling enormous pressure to find her way. So beautiful, and so lost.

She left shortly after five, and when I finally staggered out of my office at 6:30, I saw her on the way to the garage, walking with two of her friends, I guess. I wanted to talk to her and ask her to get in my car and we’d drive to Tennessee up into the mountains with a bottle of wine and we’ll dance under the moonlight and drink until our problems disappear and we smile again.

"Sara Smile
Oh, won't you smile a while for me, Sara…"

Pleasant surprise in my mailbox (the real one, not the e-one): a package from home. Considering my home is Bratislava, Slovakia, but I live in Rhinelander, WI, a package from home is a precious rarity for me.

The package contained two things: A copy of Slovenka magazine (it can be translated as "Slovak woman", or "Slovak girl", or just "Slovak" but with the understanding it is the feminine gender of the noun), and a CD, published by ista, my brother's indie label.

On the cover of the magazine was the picture of a beautiful young woman. Another picture of hers was on the cover of the CD. The CD contains 10 songs in Slovak, plus three "bonus" songs, two in English (Somewhere from West Side Story, and Mack the Knife from The Threepenny Opera), one in German - Heimatlied (Largo) by the Czech composer Antonin Dvorak.

While I did not recognize her picture, I did recognize her name: She is my niece, my brother's daughter. I have not seen her since late April of 1990, when I was able to visit home and celebrate my 40th birthday with my family and friends. She was 12 then. She is 23 now. Quite a difference!

I went to the grocery store and showed the CD to several people. They all commented on how pretty she was and wanted to know who she was. So, I told them: "My niece!"

Then came the hard part. I had to listen to the CD and wonder if she was a good singer. Please understand, my mother was an opera star. She taught me how to sing (and, naturally, my older brother, my niece's father). My mother was a perfectionist when it came to music and singing: You either were absolutely perfect or you had to shut up. Thus, she was a merciless critic. And some of that has rubbed off on me.

For some reason, I felt I had to be twice as strict a critic when it comes to my niece. I mean she shares the family name with me and my mother. I listened to the first song, one she wrote the lyrics for herself. I thought it was OK. But it was a typical modern rock song, while a nice song, not really challenging for the singer.

I then skipped straight through to Somewhere. Let's see how she can handle Leonard Bernstein!

I was overwhelmed. Her voice is beautiful, and she sings well. My mother--her grandmother--would approve (she died long time ago). Yes, my niece deserves her family name. I am proud of her!

BTW, her name is Denisa Stanislavova. It will not surprise me if you hear her sing in your own corner of the world some day.

Today is for writing. Writing cannot be done without a routine being established. Write every day for one hour. Write what is true to you, what you feel. So what if you have never been shot in the head? Don't you remember the desparation of a general anasthetic creeping through your body, or the horror of realising your first tooth had gotten wobbly? 'man, I'm falling apart. My teeth will fall out! My skeleton will rot! I'll die'.

See? Easy as...

see cliche

Jack London said "You don't wait for inspiration, you go after it with a club." How right he is. Somebody else said, and many have quoted, that the loneliest person in the world is a writer in front of a blank sheet of paper. Inspiration is the single hardest thing in the world to get. I think that writers are so often procrastinators because of the terrible fear of that blank fucking paper. It's so beautiful, that paper. The white is so white, the cream and snow and wind and spirits and white oh white. It is crying out for a beautiful poem, a story, anything... but who can bring themselves to sully the beauty of the whiteness? For that white is purity, and when your smutty blue pen carves it's vile graffiti on the white, the magic white magic will be destroyed.

It's just a piece of paper, dammit, get another one and start again. Now, for sixty seconds, as many words as you can about tree
about chair
about me
about real
about

about

about

I write as straight as I can,
H. G. Wells is talking to me from the quotation dictionary in my mind. Fuck off!
just as I walk as straight as I can,
not that I love his writing or anything, but who's going to turn down good advice?
because that is the best way to get there.

But what is that for me? It is to be one with the language. Feel and be the words. Love the words. I am the words.

Er... now about this blank page. I have to, er, go and write on it. Now. You know...that routine and...stuff.

Well, since I'll be off on my little trip most of Friday and Saturday I figured I'd get this weeklog done a little early. Unlike last week, giant flaming dodecahedrons of good karma have been striking me repeatedly all week. I'm happy as a clam filter feeding. A response to last week's weeklog:
  • She wrote back! I've been silly and grinning like a maniac and feeling like I'm in 7th grade all week. I must be a very annoying to be around. Is this what crushes are like, usually? I should have done this earlier. As I must've said a billion times this week, everything is so cool you could store a side of beef in it for a month.

  • Eh, the car isn't that bad. Yeah, it's dented, but you know? Life goes on. It'll still drive me where I need to go, minus a little more energy lost to wind resistance compared with pre-crash. But since the Golf is essentially a box on wheels, I don't think it's a huge issue.

  • Got the Difficult Equations test back, and didn't do quite as badly as I thought I had. Yay for mediocrity!

  • The Guiness is supposed to taste that way. It's good.

As for the counseling session, I'm beginning to think:
  1. The "avoiding relationships" thing is bullshit -- I simply don't like most of the people I meet at my school

  2. That I don't need counseling. It's absurd. I'm happy, apparently pretty well adjusted, and the "being down" thing was simply a phase that I had to go through. I just don't really see how talking to some guy about my complete lack of serious problems (other than a retiscence to really apply myself in boring classes) is going to do anything other than spend the insurance company's money.

I've been thinking, just in the last couple days, about my place on e2. I've been here for a while, now. Far longer than most, shorter than some. But still, I read dannye's writeup in Earn Your Bullshit (which, by the way, you should do as well, right now. Just hold down shift and click on that and read it right now, and if you've already read it read it again), and I can't answer that question in the affirmative without a "I think" tagged on the front...Am I noding for the ages? Am I earning (retroactively) my bullshit? I'd like to think that I've become a good noder. I've cleaned most of my shit (or had it cleaned). In the last 3 months, I've made an effort to do no ugly, bad, bullshit nodes (except these weeklogs, which I don't think diminish the database too badly). But there's something that is still missing from my writeups...I've never been a really good fiction writer. Those seem to be the nodes that I enjoy reading the most. If you look at the last few months of nodes, everything's been Factual noding. I feel sometimes that I don't do enough here. I'm on a lot; I read, I vote, and once or twice a week I get the itch to do a node. Is that a bad thing? (Why do I feel a responsibility to the database? But I do...) I'm not even sure what I feel is wrong with me as a noder. Perhaps the drive down to the city to the south will provide me a bit more quiet time (well, as quiet as a Golf gets when you're going 75 on Washington roads) to ponder.

My point is...Never be perfect...Let the chips fall where they may
--Tyler Durden, Fight Club


sleeplog:
time |               |
   8 |               |
     | X             |
     | X X X X X     |    4-22: 4:00am-11:45am - 7.75
     | X X X X X     |    4-23: 3:15am-10:15am - 7
     | X X X X X     |    4-24: 2:45am-10:00am - 7.25
     | X X X X X   X |    4-25: 2:45am-9:45am - 7
     | X X X X X   X |    4-26: 3:00am-10:15am - 7.25
     | X X X X X X X |    4-27: 4:20am-8:45am - 4.5
     | X X X X X X X |    4-28: 2:30am-8:00am - 5.5
     | X X X X X X X |
   3 | X X X X X X X |
     | X X X X X X X |
     |_______________|
       s m t w t f s
Why am I doing this?

For several years I have been working on a software project in my spare time. I want to release it as an Open Source project. Why?

Every month I see one or two horror stories on Slashdot about people who try to work on open source projects and the many conflicts it can cause with their day job.

So why would I want to put myself in that kind of mess?

The answer is simple ... but long, so bear with me. When I was younger, especially in high school, I thought I wanted to be a novelist. I wanted to write The Great American Novel. So I tried for a while. But it didn't take long for me to realize that you can't just say, "I'm gonna write The Great American Novel," and just go and do it. It doesn't work that way at all. In fact it's sort of the opposite. Sometimes there is a story (or painting or song or whatever) inside you just trying to get out. That's the one that's going to be great. But you can't plan it. You have to just live your life and try to be ready for it to happen. And go with it when it does wherever it takes you.

So that's where Open Source comes in. I have all of these ideas about software. Everyday I go to work and witness how not to do it. And every night I go home and try to get it right.

I think software can be rightly compared to art in the way I have suggested above. It is just one of many means of expression. I don't mean to imply, however, that I see myself as a Steinbeck or Hemmingway, or a Torvolds or Stallman. Anyway, that would be for others to decide and I don't really concern myself with it.

And I'm not doing this to "be like Linus" or to "further the cause". Which are the typical reasons (especially the latter one) I see listed (again in /. type stories) about why people work on open source software. And certainly not for the money (though I would take some if it was dropped in my lap).

See it's my thing. I made it and it should have my name on it. I want control of it and I don't want it to ever be locked away from me in some bureaucratic bit closet when the vicissitudes of business life cause projects to get canned or divisions to get reorganized.

Can I just have that?

WolfDaddy's Practical Guide to Getting Tickets for Madonna's Drowned World Concert Tour

  • Be a geek.
  • Live in Hollywood North
  • Work (or have worked) for a movie producer whose brother and father are (or were) A-list movie stars
  • Ensure that a television and movie studio CEO sits on the producer's company's Board of Directors.
  • Teach CEO how to use his Palm Pilot effectively.
  • Download his address book to your computer, call David Geffen directly and skip the remaining steps Avoid temptation.
  • Have enough chutzpah to ask CEO for an "in".
  • Obtain number for very exclusive ticket "broker".
  • Call broker, marvel at the recording which states, "If this is an emergency please dial ..." and wonder what kind of life people lead wherein the inability to speak to someone right away about concert tickets is considered an emergency.
  • Speak to broker.
  • Drop name.
  • Avoid shaking in voice when asked if you'd like backstage passes with those tickets.
  • Answer question in the affirmative, but with dispassion, like it's an everyday thing.
  • Supply credit card number.
  • Thank broker.
  • Wait until September 9th.
    Well, as it turned out, the date I would have gone to the concert was September 11, 2001. Needless to say, I didn't go, but not because of the attacks on my country. Rather, the ticket prices, even through the broker were four. thousand. dollars. apiece. And that was without all access passes. Sigh
  • a girl--another young woman, a soul trapped in a helpless body by a merciless aneurysm. aneurysms don't care if you have children, if you have dreams yet to fulfill, if you are in love. they certainly have no remorse for leaving a daughter, granddaughter, mother, sister and friend with no means to express herself other than tears. so in her bed, she lay, the receptacle for so many tubes and wires as well as for the love of her family, friends and and the one person who kept his hope alive until the very end.

    the person--a man, also young and nice looking, came to her room every afternoon and usually again at night to sit and hold her hand until she fell asleep. as the months passed, we all waited for his visits to slow down but he was there, without fail, talking about the weather, music, who had visited her, what he had done that day and often, just sitting there with his hand over hers. every day he asked if anything had changed, would she come out of it soon, did we think she would come out of it ever, was she hurting, could he stay for just a while longer, j u s t a w h i l e...

    once i knocked, then walked in to find him asleep--his chair pulled up to her bed, with his head resting by her shoulder and his hand behind her ear, cradling her head. upon waking, his first words to me were "you know, we were supposed to be married three weeks ago".

    "i didn't know, no".

    her head was shaved from the surgeries and was only an inch long all over except for a curling tendril at each temple. he tucked a curl behind her ear and said, "nothing's changed, has it, baby? it's just postponed a little".
    and then again to me, "i love her".

    "i know".

    i explained that i would come back with her medications that night and stepped out. i was halfway down the hall when tears blurred my vision. i sat down up against the wall and cried...
    for her, for him, for the unfairness of fate.
    what a cruel blow to dangle love and happiness in front of hungry eyes only to cruelly snatch it away.

    this was a place for the elderly, for those who had lived life, not those just beginning to wet their feet in it. it wasn't for young people.
    it wasn't for her.
    she wasn't supposed to be here.

    friday night...
    they should have been out laughing together, reminiscing about their recent wedding.
    but it never happened.

    no, instead she was here. a girl, pretty and still, able only to cry and blink.
    and cry she did...
    when he would leave at night, she would cry herself to sleep, when certain songs played on the small portable radio by her bed, she would cry...

    and as she was dying today, he asked some of us to stay. as her last breath shuddered, a tear fell. he thanked us all, hugged each of the nurse aides who had tended to her as though she was their own sister, then asked to borrow a phone to call the funeral home.

    he had walked beside the stretcher as she came in,
    ridden beside her in the ambulance to her many hospital visits
    and would stay with her, it seemed, until someone said 'no more'.

    i told him to take as long as he wanted to say goodbye and then, if he would let me, i'd arrange a ride home for him. he nodded, went in and shut the door.

    about ten minutes later, he walked out and met the gentleman from the funeral home coming down the hall.

    and so today, another petal fell from the flower of mankind.

    i told someone tonight "it isn't right"

    to which he responded

    "it's never right".

    i know that but
    i don't know.
    i'm tired.

    It was another late night for me in the computer lab. I was working feverishly on a compiler project. I was able to get half of the project completed, but not without some frustration along the way. The biggest problem was making sure my index pointer was pointing to the correct token in my array of tokens while doing operator-precedence parsing. I decided to call it quits at 2AM, knowing I have to finish the project and turn it in tomorrow.

    sigh.

    This isn't a daylog proper.. Rather a middle-of-the-night log of sorts. (By my body and digital clocks, it's the wee hours here.) I swear, I only stopped by E2 to look up two terms! (Yes, I use E2 as a reference... It's fairly useful as such, and sometimes seeing the opinions of everythingians helps provide me a path for thought or research.)

    sigh.

    Two hours, two hours I've spent wandering E2 following softlinks or clicking on interesting writeups popping up in the new writeups box. (And I did it some more because a few *more* links caught my eye as I was scrolling to the bottom of the day logs page to get to the write up box.)

    Who needs the web to surf when you've got E2?



    sigh, bet ya can't eat just one... half an hour later and I'm still surfing. This is worse than smoking.

    On the subway into uni yesterday, a girl got on and sat opposite me, carrying a big bag from Fopp. (Fopp being a music store whose bags are clear plastic). As well as a couple of records, there was a CDR with God Bless Napster on the label. Me likee.

    Yesterday was a waste of time. The maths lecturer didn't turn up, and I wasn't planning to go to my only other lecture. Today was similarly useless - maths tutorial at 9, and a lectuer at 11.

    And now I have a metric fuckload of work to do for PDE, which will take up my entire weekend. I'm not looking forward to it.

    A lesson, kids: don't leave things till the last minute.


    Incidentally, very best wishes to dizzy and katyana for tomorrow.

    Yesterday was a bizzare day.

    I got a copy of a CD I engineered with another person. It is a very strange thrill to see my name after:
    Engineered and Mixed by:
    in the liner notes. I'm a big shot now.

    After work, I improvised for nearly five hours straight. First, I played my computer instrument with two acoustic musicians with whom I had never played before. A violist friend, a saxophonist, and I played for an hour or so trying to get to know each other musically. We're going to be working together to improvise music for a showing of a silent film by a professor of mine, and we don't have much time for rehearsals before the show at a Cleveland gallery. It will be OK, I hope.

    Then I went to rehearsal with my laptop band. One of the guys couldn't make it, so we made do as a trio. We made some good music, but it was quite obvious to the three of us that something was missing.

    I came home, ready for sleep, but I indulged a bit with some friends, then rode my bike, red-eyed, to the practice rooms and played a piano like a madman for an hour. The improvisation was so strange... it wandered between pulsed tonality and completely free gestural playing. I wonder what people who were walking past the rooom thought.

    When I had completely exhausted myself, I found that I still had a strange manic energy, which I would have normally expected to have dissipated through playing so much. But maybe it was the fact that I had primed the pump, so to speak, and that I had gotten those creative moment-to-moment juices flowing wihtout an easy way to dam them back up. I got myself to my friend's room, and she and I spent some time breathing deeply and holding hands, and slowly, I came back down to the planet again.

    I know I am a food addict. And M. is as well. I am so angry with him today! I started to write him about this, to finish off what I told him yesterday, then thought I should write about it first, and let it simmer for a little while. My point in communicating this to him is not to hurt him, but to express myself and maybe shake him up a little more. So maybe this time around, his abstinence will stick.

    I am so very unhappy about his being 90 pounds overweight. I know I have no right to ask him to stop being an addict, or to change his food plan to exclude some of the fatty substances he continues to eat, every single meal, every single day. I don't like his choices, and I have no say over his choices. I feel helpless in the face of how he deals (or actually, doesn't deal) with his addiction. I am really sad that he hasn't lost any weight this year. He even gained weight.

    He has told me over and over that he had so much to deal with since December of 1999, and that has been his excuse for not paying attention to his addiction, or binging over and over. He lost his fiance, he lost half of his so-called friends (Because his friends were really her friends? Is that the real truth?) He had to find an apartment and move out of her house within two weeks, during the Christmas season, screwing up his dissertation study as he had to use that money to move instead. And he got even more clinically depressed than he already were.

    Sorry, but I have to say I just don't buy that. I never have. If anyone has had a lot to go through this past year or so, it certainly has been M. - AND me. And at least four other people that I can think of. Tell me something new. I know when you are going through a shitty time it feels the hardest to get clean, but that's the best time to do it. Life sucks, life is hard, it gets harder, that's just reality!!

    It's really been frustrating to me to watch M. continue in his addiction. He's been nothing but supportive to me this past year as I've dealt with my favorite grandmother's death, being in a relationship with M. (the love of my life) after an absence of over ten years, and gone back into therapy with the express purpose of integration. And for the past 15 months, I've been clean with the exception of a total of four weeks, most of which have been in the past two months.

    I know you can't compare one person's journey to another's, but I'm really, really angry and disgusted with M. It's just been one excuse after another as to why he couldn't do it. I just don't want to hear about it any more.

    I feel as though I am moving towards a place away from M., because he keeps being an addict. And I just don't want any parts of it. If he changes, great, my heart will be full. But if he doesn't, soon, I will probably have to go. And just be a friend. And that will break my heart.

    Dear Infinite Burn I hope you are having a fun trip. Say hi to the gang for me. Here is your Passions recap for Thursday, April 26:

    Julian and Rebecca are playing headmaster and naughty school girl. While Jules waits for her to come be disciplined he plays with the Luis mask and remarks that it worked successfully once before to break up Sheridan and Luis. He hopes it will work again so he doesn't have to kill them. Miss Hotchkiss comes in and it's time for Julian to discipline her.

    Ivy worries about Sam. She doesn't know what she'll do if something happens to Sam!

    Eve tells Grace it's ok to worry about Sam despite what has happened to them in the past few months. Pilar comes back and Theresa explains that the men went back into the house with fireproof SWAT shields. Reese decides he has to help. What kind of a man would he be if he didn't try to help his sweet Kay?

    Luis warns Sam to stay back. Sam insists he promised to save the kids and that's what he will do!

    Tabby chastises Timmy for going behind her back and trying to throw the [monkey paw|demon's claw into the fires of hell. Timmy says he wanted to do the right thing. Tabby says she didn't raise Timmy to do the right thing. Timmy tells Tabby that the angel girl told Timmy to use the claw to save Charity as well as Father Lonigan. Tabby demands Timmy give her the claw. Timmy won't.Tabby calls Timmy an ungrateful little imp, which he totally is.

    Becs and Julian have fun with their little game. Spank spank!

    Grace goes to Sam to see if he is ok with Ivy on her heels. Pilar grabs Ivy and tells her that Sam is Grace's husband not hers.

    Simone runs into Chad's arms and tells him she is glad he is ok. She doesn't know what she would do if anything happened to him. Whitney looks on and remembers what Tabitha says to him.

    Sam wants to go back in. Fr. Lonigan tries to stop him to no avail. Luis tells an emotional Sheridan he has to go back in with Sam. He tells her he loves her and goes back to Sam, as do extras the rest of the men.

    Tabby tries to convince Timmy not to throw the demon's claw into the closet. The demons tell Timmy he will be destroyed if he uses the claw. A devil comes out of the closet.

    In the middle of their disgusting little sex game, Rebecca finds the Luis mask and asks Julian why he has it.

    It seems that "Damien the demon" is an old friend of Tabby's. He and Tabby caused The Great Chicago fire. It seems as if Tabby was the one who went to milk Mrs. O'Leary's cow and Damien was waiting for her inside the barn. Damien wants to know what the deal is with the pin cushion? Can she stop him form using the claw?

    Damien isn't impressed with the idiot mortals that are trying to come back into the house. He shows Tabby what they are up to in his "mirror". Sam and his group enter the house. Damien says those dopes signed their death warrant the minute they opened the door.

    Rebecca wants Jules to tell her about the mask. She gets him thinking about being able to tell her when she tells him that they will soon be married and a wife can't be forced to testify against her husband.

    Tabby is thrilled with all the fun that is about to happen. The serpent tells Charity to be quiet. Timmy won't let Charity be destroyed. Tabby goes to stop him again.

    In the middle of all this, Grace still wants Ivy and Sam to meet. She has to be sure that Sam loves her and only her.

    Pilar tells [boss|Ivy} to leave Sam alone. Sam is Grace's husband, not hers. Ivy insists that Grace is pushing Sam into her arms. Pilar is shocked, but tells Ivy that using this situation to get Sam back is appalling. Her son, Kay and Charity are in hell and all Ivy can think about is getting Sam back. She tells Ivy that unless she wants to stay there and pray with the rest of them, then she suggest she leave. Ivy is outraged that Pilar is talking to her like this but Pilar doesn't back down. Go Pilar!!! "Start praying or get out of here!"

    Sam et al attack the demons. The fire people start breathing fire from their mouths at the men and they put up their shields.

    Tabby and Timmy struggle over the demon's claw!

    Rebecca asks Julian if he is going to follow Alistair's orders to kill Luis and Sheridan? Jules says no, he doesn't have the stomach for it. He is going to use the mask to break them up. Rebecca loves it when Julian is plotting to destroy innocent people. His power and ruthlessness turn her on. She inspires Julian to come up with the perfect plan to destroy Sheridan and Luis.

    Theresa and Sheridan have a chat about all the evil that is going on around them and despite it all they both have a feeling of hope. Theresa suggests it's because they both have the perfect men. She still believes that her fortune cookie is right and they will have a double wedding. Sheridan hopes Theresa is right, don't you?!?!

    Ivy bugs Eve again about her daughters getting close to Chad. Eve tells her that the DNA search proves that Chad isn't her son. Ivy doesn't believe it and from what she can see, both her daughters are mad for Chad.

    The men try to go upstairs and the demons blast them with fireballs. The men are forced to retreat back outside as they are really being pelted. Their women come running to their sides.

    Timmy does it! He hurls the claw into the closet!!! Damien isn't happy. The serpent tells Timmy that now he and his creator will die. Tabby tells Timmy he has no idea what he has done.

    Julian whispers to Rebecca his plan. Sheridan and Luis will never know what hit them! She just loves it when Julian is like this. He really turns her on and the two of them are freaking me out with the old people sex.

    Sheridan is glad Luis made it out alive. Arent You?!?!?!

    Sam was sure they'd be able to get to the kids. Eve brings out a bunch of supplies to tend to the wounds of the men.

    We hear some more strange creaking and Fr. Lonigan says he thinks the creature has done what he set out to do. He has a feeling that this is the beginning of the end.

    The women all dress the men's wounds. Pilar stops Ivy from going to Sam. She tells her Sam is Grace's husband, let her take care of him. Reese is alone. He has to dress his own wounds. Grace is taking care of Sam and Sam sees Reese alone and tells her to take care of him. Grace leaves to take care of Reese and Ivy is about to move in on Sam. Just as she approaches him, Jessica cuts in front of her and says she will take care of her father. Go Jessica!

    The End Oh My God I Need A Drink
    i'm trying to get over a serious case of noder's block that seems to be symptomatic of the general lack of creative expression in the rest of my life.

    i can't find anything to write about. i pick up my guitar and i can only think to play emotionless versions of simple songs.

    maybe it's the stress. i moved fairly recently, and the job is starting to get more intense. my musical co-conspirator pissed me off the other day when he told me he sent a realy bad bootleg tape of one of the band's jam sessions to a label, and even more so when he told me one of the songs was his solo version of one i wrote. we managed to work things out, but i'm still somewhat angry.

    maybe it's the bed. i haven't slept right since we moved. my girlfriend and i were sharing a twin bed which is sometimes hard enough for one person to do. now we have a queen-size, and neither of us can sleep.

    whatever it is, it's driving me mad.

    every time i think of something to node, it's either filled in by someone who's already a much better writer, or my mind just goes blank. it's been the same way with any outlet.

    it won't be this weekend i get to relax, though.

    i just hope it goes away...

    WAITING

    jan.2001

    review of the aislers set show at the cafe du nord, in san francisco, on dec 30 2000

    waiting: like before the first kiss.

    waiting pressed up against a velvet curtain hearing this boy talk about something but i couldnt hear half of it because i just hear hit the snow playing over and over inside my head. we're just waiting for the curtain to open and everybody is maybe drinking or maybe sober but that doesn't matter what counts is that we're all happy and that we're about to fall in love. all the small girls find a way to slip up front but thats okay because thats where they belong because they always dance the best anyways.

    and then theyre standing right there maybe a few feet away right in front of you and it's like all the best basement shows you've ever been to or the time you all sat on the beach and listened to some kid play the most brilliant sounds on his guitar. and there he was right in front of you only a few meters of sand between you and the infinite. and from this side, it feels go good to just be breathing, just to be alive. (you say to yourself, yes sometimes it is worth it.) youre still waiting like before the first kiss. the first kiss, we all used to tell each other, is the best kiss.

    the music: the one thing to save your life. and what happens from there isn't exactly something you can really say anything about. you just have to remember it. you have to feel it. and if you weren't there then you never will be. and that's how good music can feel inside of a person. what happened? did they play it? oh ya, it was all the best songs it was anything and everything. dancing: everyone's occupation. the band: at that place where music always strives to be. and you find yourself with your arm around some kid you don't know. and he's dancing his soles thin and you just want to stay there next to him and you don't know him but that doesn't matter. and everyone falls in love with everyone else and it's like we're out there in the crowd just being beautiful even if it's only for half an hour. and then your friend introduces you to somebody in between a song and you say oh well we already know each other, remember this?, and then he shakes your hand and his smile is really big and then the music starts and he's jumping up and down behind you pogoing and he almost knocks you over but already youre in love with him. and then a. says there is a party at amy's house and you cant even hear the words unless you already know there is a party at amy's house. and everybody is going anyways because what else are you going to do on new year's? (well i almost stayed home all night just to listen to aislers set records, but at the last possible moment i thought 'well maybe i should just go anyways'.) ya and mary goes up and sings on the song and we all think it's the best thing that ever happened. everybody is dancing. we're all pogoing or whatever it is we want to do. no there isnt any room to dance. you end one song ten feet from where you started the last. but we don't let anybody fall down. and nobody is mad that they can't move an inch but we all still move anyways.

    everybody is going home with bruises but we arent sore about it. no way are we sore about it. these are love scars, kid, and we're going to make polaroids of the time we all got knocked around at the aislers set show and didn't even give a fuck. you couldn't stop moving if you wanted to because that music, that music that those kids are playing right in front of us, that music means everything right now. right now: is forever.

    and they stop playing their songs and they drop their guitars and slowly wander away. we know they'll come back up this time. yoshi wont leave anyways he just plays around at the keyboards. just waiting. for us it's the perfect signal. this time we'll hear all the songs and the music goes like the turntable that knows how to turn it's records over. right now: is forever. this kiss, just like the first kiss, it's never going to end. you sit back ten years later or five years later and you think about that girl or that boy and how brilliant they could smile and that look they hide in their eyes. you think about a face. no, that kiss never ended, did it? right now: i'm still kissing her. right now: is forever. that aislers set show we were at: it's never going to end. it's still going on right now, inside of us all. and if you werent there you never will be. and if you were there youre never coming back. i know i'm not. this is where i always wanted to live. inside this show and this first kiss.

    After staying in New Orleans for a week, I decided to return to Kansas City. My friend Bella came along, driving his own Ford Explorer, whilst my friend Jason took the wheel of my Ford Taurus.

    The drive went well. Then, while Westbound on I70, at 5:00 a.m., Bella fell asleep at the wheel, and we swerved onto the median. He overcorrected, and we went up the side of an overpass, cleared both guardrails, and landed at a 45 degree angle on the other side, putting a 1-foot crater into the Earth.

    My face slammed into the "a-frame," that bar where the windshield meets the passenger window. As a result, the bone in my forehead was split in half, my face was crushed inward, the vision in my left eye was destroyed, and the L2 lumbar in my spinal column was busted.

    Jason, seeing it in the rearview mirror of my car, turned around and came back. When he arrived, Bella had gotten out of the Explorer and crossed the interstate to a gas station to call 911. Jason removed my seatbelt, as it appeared to be choking me.

    The ambulance arrived and tended to both myself and Bella. They decided to call the Staff for Life emergency helicopter at the University of Missouri Health Sciences Center to transport me there.

    Once I arrived, a surgery was immediately performed on my forehead. Four more surgeries were to follow whilst I was hospitalized. I do not remember the first three weeks I was there: my brain had swollen considerably, and I was comatose for those three weeks.

    The other four surgeries consisted of rebuilding my face, removing two bone flaps from my skull to relieve pressure, and two surgeries to fix my spinal column.

    After I was discharged from the hospital, I was taken to the Rusk Rehabilitation Center, also in Columbia, Missouri. I was there for another four weeks, and while there, I underwent both physical and occupational therapy.

    On 29 June, I was discharged and came home home to Rhineland, Missouri, to finish my recovery here. On 14 August, I will have the bone flaps, which they put into a freezer, put back into my skull.

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