Hi boys and girls, let me take you into the exciting world of Windows XP. I recently aquired a copy of XP Pro from a friend of mine and have been toying with several new features. My personal favorite so far is the voice recognition feature. That's right, Windows finally has it's own "you talk, it types" program.

If you wish to see how well it works, go here.

Aside from toying around with XP, I learned today that my girlfriend spent a fair bit of yesterday looking up my nodes and reading them. Especially September 13, 2001 (I scored big points with that one :D).

Aside from this, today was relatively uneventful. I schedulled myself to retake the SATs on the 13th so I may possibly transfer to MIT (a 1270 may be good enough for a 10th grader to get into UNT, but not MIT - so they think anyway).

I'll close this daylog with a few very random quotes taken out of context from today's happenings (most occurred during meals):

    "There's the in, the out, and then a couple of legs..." - Will Warner: My roommate

    "Take that phallus off your head!" - Kelin Myers

    "Quiet fool or I'll rape you with my hat!" - Myself

    "Friends, Romans, Countrymen - lend me your queers!" - name withheld by request
This is more a weeklog than a daylog, but I feel I'm going to have to write this before it disappears down the pit of my procrastination. I've got sucked into the same old routine all summer - get up, go to work, go home, sleep. Wait for the weekend. Sleep. Occasionally revise.

But that changes now.

By some bizarre miracle, I've actually passed all my resits, and I'm going back to university next week. I'm anticipating this will come as quite a shock. I've got used to having my evenings and weekends to myself; not having assignments, assessments, etc. The past two years, I've had this masochistic burst of initial keenness, joining societies, becoming a class rep, taking interesting outside courses, instead of mickey mouses like history of science. And then just kind of subsiding into staying in bed, playing braindead computer games, not going to lectures, failing assignments, pleading, resits, more pleading. This changes now, because I've chanced it too many times, and this is the last time.

And now I've got into third year*, by the skin of my teeth. My parents don't have to disown me. I can keep my summer job part time, while still claiming a fat income tax refund from Her Majesty's Inland Revenue. I'm carrying a resit at the end of the year. No second chances.

But hopefully I've learned from the last two years. I'm not joining any societies unless I can be bothered coming along to the first meeting (Irn-bru society, anyone?). I'm not taking on any positions of responsibility. I'm going to do my assignments on the day they're handed out. I'm going to do my best, not just what's adequate. As, not Ds. I'm going to get a 1st, and it all starts now.

And now that I've written this, there's no going back.


*(A brief overview of the scottish university system: For most courses, the first two years are very broad, with a focus on providing interesting asides, and getting everyone to the same level in readiness for third and fourth year, where everything changes. Suddenly there are no resits, no second chances, attendance grades, group projects, dissertations. Scary stuff)
So today I read Fight Club. I didn't see the movie (last year I tried to watch the movie but I'm a goddanm girl and I don't watch much in the way of moving pictures and I actually had to stop half way through because of the blood) today, I read the book.

It's all there. The dysfunctional American habit of blaming the victim, the achingly moderntimeless sense of alienation and hopeless disinfranchisment, it's fascism American style, emphasising the individual while sacrificing him for the terrible ends of a criminal, it's everything that's gone wrong with the world, and the world turned upside down. It was a rush the same way a punch in the nose is a rush. It is A Farewell to Arms it is On the Road it is modern America in all of the gritty fucked corners under the main stream and the aging dominant paradigm

to me anyway. This is all good news, because Chuck Palahniuk and Ralph Waldo Emerson have got to have a conversation about being a scholar in America by next Wednesday or else I'm screwed.

No pressure or anything. Just get Tyler Durden and Man on the Farm or perhaps Man thinking to have a reasonable chat, then analyse the use of scripture by two particular english renaissance writers. Oh yeah, and deal with Art history. I don't think anyone else at Wells College has even read Fight Club, and I thought I'd overheat if I didn't say something about it to someone somewhere.

I've read JB and Prof. Pi's analysis of E2's numbers. The times they are a-changin', it seems, but their charts and graphs show merit, in my estimation. I will be interested to see what comes of this.

That's not why I put fingers to keyboard at 2 AM, though. Okay everybody, it's time to

Help ClockworkGrue Solve His Moral Dilemma

Tonight was the night my open-stage brainchild at the campus coffeehouse began its third year. It's called "Public Humiliation Night," in an attempt to convince those shy persons among us to throw caution to the wind and show us what we can do. It runs under the motto: "Public Humiliation is Therapeutic."

Tonight we had our first actual public humiliation.

Meet Russ Nothisrealname. Russ has Asperger's Syndrome, which is like a light version of Austism. We're about half way through the night, and Russ asks me if he can contribute. I pull him outside, since I don't want our conversation to bother the people performing at the moment, and ask him what he wants to do.

"I want to do some sort of a wacky comedy routine."

"So, what do you want to do it about," I say, not wanting to give Russ a license to just ramble aimlessly on stage.

"I want to talk about stereotypes."

"What kind of stereotypes?"

"I want to talk about pornography. How guys drool over these women in Playboy. WOMEN THAT THEY CAN'T HAVE!!!"

It's worth noting that Russ has recently gone through some problems due to unwanted affection on his part towards certain women at my school. They ended in a restraining order.

He doesn't have any actual jokes. He just wants to contribute. I tell him that, since he hasn't come with anything prepared, he probably shouldn't go on stage, because everybody else spent time working on the things they're performing tonight, and he needs to respect that. That's true, too, we hadn't had anybody flow that night. I also make sure to tell him that if he actually works on a comedy routine and practices on his friends, or gets it written down, that he's as welcome as anyone to get up on stage. That's true, too.

So we go back in, and my friend Matt is finishing up this amazing rap about being a spaceman. This gets Russ, Trekkie that he is, real excited. Then some blonde girl does a monologue about getting up on stage and not taking off her clothes for once, and that pushes Russ over the edge. He runs up on stage, and I can't do much to stop him without causing a scene.

Russ rambles in his way, often dropping off in the middle of sentences, and using "and another thing" or "but what I really wanna say is" about every fifteen seconds. After five minutes it becomes blatantly obvious that he's not going to finish on his own, because he has no main point, and thus cannot ever reach a conclusion. He's just yelling and swearing and spelling the words L-U-S-T and P-O-R-N. And it's hillarious. We are all laughing. I am laughing. At him.

I start to tap my watch, in a more and more exaggerated manner. Eventually Russ notices.

"I guess [ClockworkGrue's name here] is tapping his watch... do you want me to do something?"

I tell him to wrap it up.

He manages to finish up after another minute, thanks in part to my prompting the audience to clap for him while he stops for air.

He loved doing it, and doesn't seem to have understood the reason for the audience's laughter. He told me he wishes Public Humiliation Night was every week. He said something about maybe doing a repeat performance at the Poetry Slam, "even if it breaks the format a little."

The goddamn point:

What Russ did was wrong. That is not the kind of atmosphere I want to see at my events. It was horribly negative laughter, and utterly non-supportive. It's not that he was trying to do that, obviously, but he does things like that all the time in similar situations. I feel bad for him; he's got a lot of crappy things in his life, not counting his Asperger's Syndrome.

Still, as I see it, I have 3 options:

  1. I can tell him exactly what I think, and be a jerk.
  2. I can tell his friends to try and talk him out of it gently, or misdirect him, and be a passive-agressive jerk.
  3. I can do nothing, and let my vision suffer in the name of letting him humiliate himself repeatedly.

I'm leaning towards choice number one, but there's one other thing that weighs in on this.

I can't stand Russ. I've had classes with him that he has interrupted almost to the point of preventing teaching. I'm good friends with the girl who had to file a restraining order on him. I despise him with a quiet fury.

My greatest fear is losing my mental clarity or control. The only movies that scare me either involve insane asylums or their escaped inmates, or something like that. The Princess and the Warrior scared the hell out of me at times.

I cannot allow this fact to affect this decision.

/msg me with any advice. I'm aware that a few Everythingians share Russ's Asperger's. Having read their work, having seen how intelligent people with Asperger's are, does not make my task any easier.

walk slow
CwG

You know those situations where two people are stubborn about opposing points of view, and every time one of them talks to the other they begin by saying "Look" or "Listen", because they're so convinced that they're the one who is right, and the other person is wrong?

There's this problem two guys I know at work are trying to solve. They both insist upon solving it in different ways. I'm reading this e-mail exchange where they keep saying things like: "You just misunderstood what I said...", and "Look, it's like this..." I'll have to jump in tomorrow with some sort of a compromise to end the dispute, and right now I'm still trying to figure that out.

The situation mirrors this other situation I know. I want to find a way to keep in touch and keep talking to someone. And I think they wanted to find such a way, too. But I had my hopes about what it'd mean, and they had their hopes about what it'd mean. And lately a lot of e-mail we exchange is about the differences between our hopes. And our letters begin with "Look" and "Listen", because we're both being stubborn and just expecting the other to change their minds and conform their hopes to our own.

I don't know exactly what compromise I'll offer at work, but it'll probably be some seemingly random mix of technical details taken from their two opposing views. As far as the personal situation, well I don't know. I guess the general difference between work and relationships is the nature of the consequences of giving up. If we give up on solving disagreements at work, then we produce nothing and the company goes bankrupt. If you give up on a relationship, then I guess life goes on. But in the back of your mind you always feel lousy that it had to end so bad, and that you just couldn't work out some sort of way to understand and respect one another enough to retain the friendship.

It's three AM and the old inferiority complex rears its ugly, though oft revealed, head.

The combination of reading the E2 statistics, the best users list, and my nodes, I may have come to the realization that I am, in fact, not good enough. This is one of the worst feelings. Logically I can reconcile my existence but not technically nor practically. Upon taking issues relating to E2 more seriously, I shall have to reevaluate my contribution to E2. I'll be here most certainly, some day people will care whether I'm here or not, I will simply exist in the database, gleening what I can from the gel. Learning from the best, I hope that I will reach the end of this Pilgrimage to find a better me. I love everything2. I want the best for it, and I have not been giving it my best.
Thus begins my quest to node for the ages.
/msg me with anything you'd care to share.
Thank you all for your contributions, E2 is forever

You know what's missing today in the teaching profession? Trust.

Teachers have to fill out so many forms, it's unreal. If a kid needs some help, extra tutoring say, there are forms to fill out, permissions to secure, asses to cover. No person-helping-person ethic, it's a service documented and delivered.

Sure frameworks are important, articulated curricula and scope and sequence exist for good reasons, but then come the tests, the checklists, the assessments of matrices and standards exposure and understanding. Check the line next to 'Above', 'At', or 'Below' grade level. For each kid. For all subjects. Teach to the goddamn standards. Make sure you have documentation that you've exposed all students to the standards. Guess what standards will be emphasized on the tests, lots of folks try to impart the kernel of it. That's as far as we're trusted, it seems. To assess.

I used to teach math art, line design, tesselation, budgeting... I used to teach exponential notation while teaching astronomy, my kids built orreries and separated out the salt from a mixture of salt and sand. They drew the moon nightly for a month, figured out long it would take to fly to Pluto in a 747. They wrote papers for me on their discoveries and conclusions, and we talked about reasoning, and thought processes, observation and reporting and how to support your conclusions with data. Heh. Somehow I don't feel trusted with the whole child anymore. I have to deal with my sector, hone in on key points and drive them home. That's the main goal, beauty can come after that's done.

So is it me, or is it the swing of the philosophical pendulum? Am I now no more now than a delivery mechanism? I can check the boxes that say student x knows the Pythagorean Theorem, but can I check the box that says they care? Does it matter to the data collectors? I'd like to find the upbeat here, but until the day comes that I'm trusted to teach a child to grow and learn as best they are able, I just won't feel like I matter much in the mix.

Electric Sheep.

*Goddammit* I don't care about the new possiblity of a new E2 voting system!

I am 3 nodes away from level 3 RIGHT NOW. It's so close i can feel it. I want it. I need it. All I have done is spend the last 3 days thinking of nodes, not just nodes, but good nodes! Ahhhhhhhhgggggg.

I have node block.

I went a quest to find good node worthy stuff - I hunted around the house looking for cool things to node about.

Ah-ha! rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead. grrrr.

oh- boy! space food sticks, awwww.

I went back and softlinked a few of my older nodes, and corrected spelling mistakes, waiting for inspiration to hit me. NO joy.

I played with the E2 node traker some more, and even learnt some more about perl in the hope of finding a bright light of inspiration. light negative

It stuns me that so many of you seem to churn nodes out fairly contunially, and they are good. I mean _good_. They're fun to read, they are informmative. Frankly it's just shitfully irritaing, to personages like myself! (I mean that in the nicestest possible way of course ;)

Atleast I am driving my girlfriend spare talking about it though ;)

It's amazing. I just read the huge volume of contributions to the Everything Statistics - September 29, 2001 node, and I'm confused. For the longest time everyone's been ranting about how we should node for the ages, and stop worring about noding for XP, how your level really doesn't matter, and all that. Now all these people are putting tons of effort into creating some mathematical system to compare the average writeup reputation with the combined sum total of negative votes to writeups with less than median reputation divided by the number of seconds spent creating writeups minus the number of seconds creating daylogs times the number of times you've been borged divided by how worthless dem bones thins you are.

Sure, the XP you have is usually levels ahead of the number of writeups you have. (But there's no concern that the number of writeups on E2 is falling faster than a dot-com stock value) So what? It's not like it's going to result in noding for numbers, as the editors and gods pounce on crappy nodes with vengeance (and I mean crappy as in "not an amazing, professional piece of work). So what's to complain about?

(I miss the days of node it all! and there's room for everything on Everything)

Anyways... well, I've added myself to the E2 mentoring sign-up, as events yesterday have convinced me that I don't have the slightest clue what's acceptable to node anymore, other than daylogs and boring, pure factual information. So I'm going to enlist the help of someone else, so I can understand the full range of what's allowed - because I don't want to cross those lines, as the reactions to my doing that have been swift and vengeful (as if I know what's allowed and I'm doing the wrong thing just to piss them off). I want to contribute, but I want to do it properly. Hopefully, a mentor can provide the guidance I need to get me back on track.

Oh yeah... and while playing Diablo II last night, I once again found an item that was high in demand and everyone wanted a little while ago, but no longer really that tradeable anymore, cause everyone who wanted it has already got it. It happened before with Laying of Hands (which I've found twice), and now with the Immortal King's Stone Crusher. *sigh* when can I find something that I can trade for the damn items I need?


Wow, I've already received a number of /msgs from others confused about what to node... perhaps it's time for the administration here to write/rewrite parts of the FAQ to make it clearer?


I was just reading IKEA nesting instinct, and I remembered a little event from a few months ago. I was with a friend, shopping at Ikea, in preparation for her moving to a new apartment. She wanted to decorate up her apartment, instead of just moving the same crap she's had for a while. This particular evening, we were there looking at bedroom stuff.

While looking through the ailes and displays, a comforter caught her eye. Well, a duvet actually, but the difference isn't that important here. It was interesting, with some purple and grey, in various wild patterns (stripes and swirls and waves, oh my!). She knew that was the one she wanted.

So, we went about, trying to find what would go well with it. We decide on the grey sheets and pillowcases, a yellow throw to go with the yellow highlightes on the duvey, and a mix of small throw pillows. We spent the greater part of a hour going back and forth and holding things against each other, and getting it just right!

As we walk out of the section, having put together what we knew was a great combination, we both saw it, and stopped dead, right there next to it. A display bed. With the exact same combination we had put together ourselves. Dead on.

We actually felt pretty good, as surely they pay people some serious money to put together very attractive and inviting displays. And here we were, with the same thing, all by ourselves. :)

My day. I got up at 6.45, was at the university by 7.45 where the DSH took place, the most important exam for foreigners who want to study as regular students in Germany.

They have to pass the exam which consists of a reading comprehension, an essay and a grammar part- and later on-for those who passed the first part - an oral examination.

Not easy. It´s a four-hour exam and my first job today was to check them in according to their surnames. Crowds of faces at the entrance and me. Excellent.
They all sort of lined up and we waited in front of the doors of the Hörsaal the exam took place in.
A Russian boy started inquiring what I did ( my first reply: I ´m standing here, checking you in, his reply: no, I mean, in general, my reply: I´m a student here, his reply: what do you study ?? and so forth, till I asked round whether anybody else wanted to know anything personal about me, which shut him up ).
The doors opened and my boss asked me to watch out for people trying to cheat, openening the envelope early..excellent.
First a caught a guy who tried to hide a bilingual dictionary, other “incidents” followed and I felt really bad, because usually I am one of them, not the evil teacher-type person.
It finally made my day when at the end two men refused to stop writing and wouldn´t stop copying a text even though I asked them five times to stop. One of them started insulting me and I had to call my boss. It all ended in a near fight, the guy had to be thrown out, and somebody had to walk me to my bike in case he would get even more aggressive.

So I arrived in a fantastically cheerful mood at the Akademisches Auslandsamt, where I spend another 5 hours working. Generally I like working there, even though at times the American students are a little too much.
First my ex-favourite student came and again started talking about his bed-sheets I had called tasteless earlier on ( they were really tasteless, in a kind of cheap tiger pattern ) when he had shown us pictures of his room and half-naked people in the bed.
It always appears to end in talking about sex one way or the other. So today he told me, he knew the sheets were tasteless ( ok. interesting ) and that he wanted to wear a skirt one of these days, apparently a tight one. He is clearly crazy or desperate.
I more or less left him standing where he was. After my morning, I wasn´t in the right mood to go on talking senseless rubbish.
And now I´m home! Thank God!

I met with Angela last night and we talked, and I told her about my concerns, that she would never be anything more to me than a dating partner. And she said, she felt she could be more than that to me, no, she wouldn't sever her marriage for me, but she could see doing anything short of that.

And I came to realize that the truth is, I wouldn't want to move in with anybody for a couple of years anyway. And should I really give up something this special (so far it really appears to be) because of a possibility that I might want that with her? So I've gone back and forth in my mind, cause I really want something very real and permanent in my life. And I thought I had decided to just stop seeing her. And felt calm. And safe. And - numb.

But I wanted to see her for one more time cause - well - I just needed to. And I realized as we talked that I had numbed all my emotions, and my true emotions were that I wanted to be near her, get to know her, take the chance. So - with every relationship you take a chance, and I've decided to take a chance. She's very honest with me, has been from the start. And I know I will get nervous again, and scared, and anxious. And I also know I'd be scared of anyone and I can find a reason to run away from anyone that will sound legit, believe me.

But she is so full of life, spirit, openness, freedom, everything I have wanted in a partner (male or female) - I just can't walk away from that cause I'm scared. So - I'm going to be with her, and try to hang in there. She is going to the burn with me, she wants to! She really has values that correspond to mine - she is spiritual, prays, teaches kindergarten, and has a really warm and generous heart. So - I'm going to really really try. I think I need to. One of my biggest issues is trust and allowing some one to get close to me. So - I'm going to try.

I got a Job!

I expected the phonecall to take at least a week. But here it is, less than 24 hours after an interview that went altogether far too well. The very nice man at the end of the telemaphone informs me that he needs references, and that he'll contact me about salary soon. Of course I fall to pieces and start thanking him profusely - he's gone before I really embarrass myself. So I have a job! Whee! It's a Systems Administrator post at the University of Michigan Business School. I get to manage ~6 Sun Enterprise 250s, a couple of Redhat boxen and some NT boxen. Sound like the perfect job for me, really.

At that moment I get an email from kurtthepope asking me if I wanted to go out with him, clampe and cmdrtaco. (yah yah, namedropping). I respond enthusiastically without realising that a) my wife and I don't have money, and b) that I really should celebrate with my wife. It's too late for that, however, and the damage is done. So now I'm feeling fairly awful about upsetting katyana and I find a poor reason to flee the scene of the crime; I'm supposed to work tonight at Blockbuster so I walk there to convince someone to work my shift. No one's answering their phones in some cruel twist of fate so I now have another inconsequential tiny thing to obsess about.

Dana, I'm sorry I thought of my own pleasure before thinking of you. I'll make it up to you, I promise.

Which brings me to my recent studies. I've been reading Emotional Intelligence by Daniel Goleman. This book talks a lot about awareness of one's emotions, the ability to empathize with people and other such important life skills. It's amazing how much control I can exert over myself in an argument, how valuable it is to keep the larger picture in focus over the heat of the moment. I'm not saying I think I'm the greatest emotional genius diplomat ever, but I've surprised myself a few times recently. So I wholeheartedly recommend that book.

I'm also pondering the overwhelming drive in many people to exert their superiority over others. I see it in the boyfriend of a friend as he tries to remind everyone that he lived in Seattle, that the body modification 'scene' is so exclusive. It's so apparent in conversations overheard in Denny's, where men tell each other about how their sports teams are better, or which equipment they have for their hunting escapades. It's kinda sad that so many people's words to each other are laced with such overtones.

The snot coming out of my nose is the same color as the background of my e2 theme. Guess which theme i'm using!

Coupled with my current lack of employment, the sickbed is an enlightening experience. My field of view has narrowed from the Seattle metro area to the street map pin-prick that is my Capitol Hill apartment. The enforced isolation only adds to the sense of unreality that a good head cold brings. All of this business is combining to pack my nose with something besides mucus; the odor of possibility.

It's time for a change, and I'm talking geographically here. My mind's eye is occupied by a map of the continental US, pins stuck in cities of interest. Atlanta, Boston, LA, DC, even our beleaguered and beloved NYC. It's terribly tempting to just sell my shit, buy an iBook, point my bike south, and just go. It's still warm in the south part of the country, and $4,000 has a lot of go. Anything to avoid another afternoon of watching the soaps.

I am in an irrational mood.

I had compsed a very nice little writeup for the Misfits of Science node yesterday when all hell broke loose. All that brilliance, now gone, vanished, never to return.

Perhaps this is just as well.

In any event, I am now of the mood to create a new writeup for myself, but am very drained from my email correspondence with Jaez, in which I have tried to be rational and eloquent, but have failed quite miserably. In short, I have little to say. The day (since this is in fact a "daylog") has been quite uneventful. But this is where the irrational part comes in.

Many have been the comments against Professor Pi's statistical analysis and level-related reengineering thoughts. But in all the furor, one point in favor of the proposed changes has been missed.

I stand to personally benefit.

Yes, gentle noder, I am one of the few that would gain two levels in the restructuring. And dammit, I want to put a f*ckin' picture on my homenode (hell if I know why--does a salmon know the why?). "But wait," you say, "aren't you being a little conceited?"

Yes.

"But am I not the Rook?" he asked, conceitedly adding the definite article, "May I not therefore crow?"

Please think of me when you make up your mind. Do you really want to see a picture of me? Do you?? Must I remain forever shrouded in mystery???

Gimme gimme gimme

10/4/01 3:48 pm

Note to self: Stop drooling over this hot guy in front of you and pay more attention in Psychology.

10/4/01 3:51 pm

Argh, why are you torturing yourself by indulging your id? Hey, maybe I am learning something. Hmm. I wonder if this guy is consciously reinforcing my behavior or if he is doing it purely unconsciously or if he isn't even noticing that my leg is resting on his shoulder... Sigh. I'm just a giddy little school girl.

10/4/01 3:55 pm

Well, fortunately, it's just a review. I'm allowed to not pay attention since I already know this stuff. Joe Hottie has a scar on the back of his head. I wonder how he got it... This diary entry is going to take on a very interesting stream of consciousness pattern, and that amuses me.

10/4/01 3:57 pm

Erin just looked at me. I wonder if she realizes that I'm writing a diary entry and not taking notes. I wonder if she realizes that I'm gay. I wonder if she knows I think Joe Hottie is hot. Only time will tell I guess. Joe Hottie just shifted positions so now my knee is no longer against his shoulder. But he seems to want to sit back where he was... Does he not even realize what he's doing?

10/4/01 4:02 pm

Dr. Mann has an unhealthy crack fixation even though he doesn't actually do the drug, at least, to my knowledge.

10/4/01 4:03 pm

This class is so boring. No wonder I'm trying to distract myself with Joe Hottie.

10/4/01 4:04 pm

The Myelin Sheath has always amused me. I wish I knew why. It's still a little boring, though, I guess. I think it may remind me of a condom with its tip cut off. I have no idea why. Just the term "sheath", it sounds so dirty, and not in the way that Baldwin uses the word dirty.

10/4/01 4:07 pm

Interesting analogy for the nerve impulse and a party, the action potential resulting in sending out for pizza and beer. Sigh, beer. Do I hate it so much because it's ingrained in my DNA?

10/4/01 4:08 pm

I can't continue to sit with my leg on Joe Hottie's chair back. It hurts my knee a smidgeon. Hmm. Was he just looking at me? A glance means a lot when you aren't in that person's normal field of vision. Then again, maybe I'm just making excuses because I want him to want me.

10/4/01 4:11 pm

I have resumed my attack, and my leg is back on his chair. He still elicits no response, though. The nervous system sucks. I like circulatory and digestive much much more.

10/4/01 4:12 pm

Sympathetic, parasympathetic... Who named these things? Afferent, away from the sensory neurons. Reminds me of my mnemonic device for arteries. Joe Hottie is getting closer to my leg again. I feel like a spider.

10/4/01 4:14 pm

Raphe system. Reminds me of the raphe of the scrotum, though the two are entirely unrelated.

10/4/01 4:15 pm

We're touching again.

10/4/01 4:16 pm

I always felt my temporal lobe had issues. I wonder if there's any merit to that. Still touching. Mmm. There's something to be said about a gentle, light, uncertain touch. You can tell nothing about the person or the way they feel but at the same time you feel an incredible connection. I just scared him away for a half a second by moving, but he returned just as quickly and seems to have adjusted to the movement.

10/4/01 4:19 pm

He's gone back to his previous position on the right side of the chair, but he still seems to be trying to touch me a little, which is strange because he's stretching a little abnormally. Just remembered that I wanted to use Rocky Horror Picture Show as our art/culture group activity for the HONR100 class, but Majorie told me that we can't do that. Maybe I should protest. It's a beautiful form of art.

10/4/01 4:22 pm

Some girl back in the back of the class just screamed a scream of the first death. That was uncalled for. Joe Hottie looked at me again. He seems to be chewing gum.

10/4/01 4:24 pm

More knee pain. Aborting mission. I wonder if he's noticed the "Safe Person, Safe Place" sign on my door, whether he's gay or not and whether he's interested or not. Billy came and dropped off a thermometer and some aspirin. Great. I really don't need a thermometer. If I have a fever, I can tell, and if I have a deadly fever, by George, I would hope I could tell that, too.

10/4/01 4:27 pm

I read an extra chapter for class today. oops. I guess it could be worse. at least the test is only on chapters 1-5.

10/4/01 4:28 pm

Leg back on chair. Resuming mission.

10/4/01 4:29 pm

I wonder why the brain fixes the image so it's upside right. I wonder if there are any species that have brains that don't. That would be really funny to see the whole world upside down.

10/4/01 4:30 pm

He's almost touching me again, though less obviously than before...

10/4/01 4:31 pm

It's becoming a real pain to continue hitting on this guy. Is it worth it? Why does time pass so quickly when I'm trying to study but so slowly when I'm in class?

10/4/01 4:33 pm

Aborting mission even though he was still touching me. I wonder if he's noticed that I start typing every time he touches me...

10/4/01 4:35 pm

Attempting to resume mission.

10/4/01 4:38 pm

Erin just asked me a question, in the middle of it Joe Hottie moved away again. Oh well. I couldn't even give her an answer.

10/4/01 4:40 pm

Class is almost over. Sigh. Looks like Joe Hottie will remain a mystery for one more week.

I forced myself to wake up late. Again. I have to get into my rhythm of waking up really late and going to sleep even later. It's my new shift at work. Whatever.

I groggily decided what the hell difference does a hundred dollars make anyway, so I went up to my local native american casino and threw it away. Drove back in to town, cruised around, went to a friend's house. We hung out there for an unimportant amount of time, and went over to bible study. Whatever you believe, getting your beliefs reinforced in a community setting is always a good and empowering thing. I recommend it.

After that we randomly drove over to the local university. I wanted to find a piano. I was also Tom's ride so he didn't really have a say in the matter. I don't think he really cared though. That or study anatomy.

It was getting on 11 o clock so the main concert hall was locked, as were the practice halls. The door to the recital hall was, however, conveniently ajar. Tom wanted to leave. I wanted to check it out. I went inside. Tried to be quiet, but Tom accidentally(?) slammed the door, so the people inside heard us. It was a pianist and a cellist. I asked if they minded us listening. They kinda did but neither one wanted to say it, so we stayed and pretended not to realize it.

They were both really good, you could tell. Hadn't practiced much together, though. You could tell that too. I forgot to ask what they were playing. They finished, we applauded, as I'm sure is customary in those settings. Cellist packed her things and left. We spoke briefly... well actually tom spoke briefly as he is the chick magnet of our duo and I am the non-chick magnet. Her name was Stephanie, but she didn't tell us that.

Pianist did his practicing. It was a piece by Liszt. The name was french, so I was sure I would remember it when I got home. I didn't, not that I could ever play anything of that magnitude anyway. It was phenomenal. I'm talking tear-inducing good. Liszt is a romantic. So am I.

Somewhere in the second movement a thought emerged in the ether of my mind realizing that the cellist had been hot. And it was one of those cool, come from behind nerdy hot things too, which just made it ten times better. It took a while to grow on me though, and I didn't fully grasp it till pianist finished, we left, and I dropped off tom and went home. Now I wish I had said a word.

It would have come out lame though, I just know it.

Today my sweet neighbor died. She had a garden where she grew all sorts fo things; I remember it being in full bloom when I met her. She was very old. One year, they cleared out part of her garden for a makeshift parking lot. I remember from then on her health failing. She underwent Kimotherapy for colon cancer, but died today. I wouldn't learn about it until the 10th. I'll miss her. I wonder why there's so much death in the fall.

I was at the grocery store before work, and I saw something unusual. I should preface this by saying that I'm not a big fan of the grocery store, so I try to make my trips infrequent. As such, I usually buy a lot of groceries on any given trip. This time I was stocking up on spaghetti sauce, soup, cereal, and frozen dinners, as well as picking up a few others assorted things. Although I'm not fond of the grocery store, I do enjoy picking out what spaghetti sauce to buy. So because I enjoy that, and because I was stocking up on it, I devoted some time to poring over the available sauces. Of course I got some Ragu and Prego, because that's mostly what they have. But I like to check out the other brands and see if maybe there's some unknown sauce the taste of which causes instant nirvana. I haven't had that happen yet, but I have found some good sauces this way. Anyway, tonight I went to a different grocery store than normal, so of course everything was a little bit different. The milk and orange juice were on the wrong side of the store, the aisles were laid out differently, etc. Also, the spaghetti sauces were not arranged contiguously. There was the main spaghetti sauce area, and the smaller, secondary spaghetti sauce area. At first I only knew about the main one, so I spent some time there, and was pretty disappointed at the selection. But then I saw the other area, and it had a bunch of exciting sauces...and one strange sauce, the subject of this overlong paragraph. It was made by this TV chef named Emeril. He had a line of sauces, most of which sounded good. This one, though, was called Vodka Sauce. Now I like vodka, and I like spaghetti sauce...and I can even see that alcohol plus spaghetti sauce can be good, such as adding red wine to a sauce. But vodka? If your sauce isn't harsh enough, you can add vodka to get just that right level of bite? I dunno. It disturbed me, and I did not purchase it. I would like someone to try it and give me a review, though.

Once again I amaze myself by writing at length about a relatively dull topic. Maybe I should write a book and title it "Writing At Length About Relatively Dull Topics". I'm sure it would fly off the shelves.

A while ago at lunch (back when I worked during the day) I came up with the idea of having a chess league or a checkers league or something like that. We'd meet once a week and play. "That sounds boring." I can hear you saying. But wait, there's more. In order to make it more interesting, it would be drunk chess, or drunk checkers, etc. Each player would take a fixed number of drinks prior to the match (or perhaps a fixed amount of alcohol per unit of mass of the player), then wait a little while, and then play the match. Ideally I'd want to keep track of how effectively each player played at varying levels of drunkenness. At this point it seemed that maybe I could come up with an entire research project. I'd study how effectively people play chess/checkers when I'd vary the amount of alcohol and the type of alcohol. I'd like to award a prize to the best player while drunk on gin, best player while drunk on vodka, etc. Maybe one person would be good when drunk on whiskey, but would not be as good when drunk on tequila. Who knows? This project hasn't gotten off the ground due to lack of interest and general laziness. If I could get a government grant, maybe I could pursue it.

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