Last night, john and I drove around in the 'gentleman farmer' territory north and west of damascus. Maryland is full of this sort of thing -- even the rednecks here are relatively wealthy. We started off at an abandoned shack we thought might have some venue-potential, but found it to be overrun with weeds, damp, and not really having anywhere to sit. So, we drove around some more and arrived at a waste water treatment plant in one of those little Maryland-ish cities: timonium, westminster, boyds, clarksburg, etc. I'm not sure which one, and they're all more or less interchangeable. We found a long driveway that randomly ended in the woods somewhere, parked, drank coronas, and worked on perfecting our evolving martial arts system until I wounded my finger while cutting a lime in the dark during a corona-break. Neosporin treatments began last night and continue into the day.
Without a referee, sparring presents a problem in that it's often unclear who has 'won the game.' to attempt to circumvent this difficulty, rules need to be introduced. For instance, the last time john and I sparred the goal was to get your hand around your opponent's throat and keep it there long enough to sing one verse of 'alouette, gentile alouette.' last night, each warrior stuffed a paper napkin in his collar, and his opponent tried to snatch it out.
Sparring is inherently flawed. The goal in a physical confrontation is to prevent your opponent from hurting or killing you, usually by hurting or killing him or her. Since this isn't (usually) an issue during sparring, it suffers a kind of existential vacuum -- a loss of purpose and immediacy that makes sparring sometimes seem like a chore. I suppose the best way to practice achieving one's goals in a fight is to go out and achieve one's goals in a fight, maybe driving around from bar to bar. But since this is dangerous and socially unacceptable, the student of martial arts has to be content with drills and sparring, which is really just another drill. The nature of physical confrontation is such that it's impossible to reproduce, or even simulate with any degree of accuracy if preservation of physical health is an issue to consider. The best one can hope for is a number of reductionist approaches to training that, when coupled with some creative instinct, will fall into place when the time comes, synthesizing a whole fighting approach.
Typically, john and I bought twelve beers and I had, I believe, three.
5:56pm
I just got back from a bike ride with nick. My mom is home now, bearing about sixty pounds of halloween candy. Last year, we didn't get a single trick-or-treater. The holiday gorge starts here, now, tonight, with several thousand calories worth of hersheys miniatures, and doesn't end until January 1st's alcohol-and-hors d'oeuvres binge. Essentially, two full months of almost nonstop fat-accumulation.
No trick-or-treaters so far. I must abstain from candy consumption. I must.
11:43am
Happy halloween! I've outgrown both trick-or-treating and halloween parties. Well, not halloween parties, necessarily, but the fact is that I haven't been to a party I've enjoyed for a long time. Back when I used to enjoy parties, I think the key elements of that enjoyment were drunkenness and knowing at least three people at said party. Mainly drunkenness, and the complete disintegration of all standards of social propriety that comes with it. What's even more fun than being drunk at a party is being stoned at a party -- then everyone gets subjected to my psychosocial experiments. At college parties, people sort of expect that kind of behavior, but I don't think anyone would take too kindly to my degree of party-weirdness at some of these uptight, wealth-aspiring young adult gatherings. I might ask people if they want to spar with me, or share my theories on the fifth dimension (pronounced 'g'nai,' with an accompanying hand gesture. The only clear example of g'nai I've yet experienced is mental telepathy). The possibilities are manifold.
In recent years, I've wanted to seek some kind of new, personal meaning that halloween might hold for me, since trick-or-treating and parties have fallen by the wayside. I'm thinking along the lines of something weird and ritualistic in the woods at night. It's serendipitous that nick's making me aware of the 72 goetic demons coincides so nicely with halloween. I'd be a fool not to seize the opportunity; morax calls.
8:43pm
'Will and grace,' 'ally mcbeal,' 'sex and the city,' 'friends' and many other tv shows represent something insidious in our culture. The scripts of all of these can be summarized with the phrase 'tee hee hee sex,' uttered over and over in slightly different manifestations. Saying 'tee hee hee sex' is similar to saying 'tee hee hee feces,' to which both the prudish and the prepubescent will often default. 'tee hee hee feces' is actually a version of 'tee hee hee sex' -- 'tee hee hee sex' in infancy. It's essentially the same impulse, but is less threatening to social morality and the utterer's own lurking, carnal, subconscious beasts. Many sexually repressed people will say 'tee hee hee feces,' when they'd really like to be saying 'tee hee hee sex.'
I will use the tv show 'friends' to illustrate an important marketing principle: that it is far more important to sell a lifestyle, an image, the way someone wants to be, than it is to sell a product. Not only is it more important, but it's much easier. For instance, 'friends' portrays young, white, rich, stylish, attractive people interacting and going 'tee hee hee sex' every few seconds (another principle is illustrated here: the indistinguishability of entertainment from advertisement -- they have become one and the same). People see this engineered spectre of a lifestyle, and they covet it with all the concupiscence of the marquis.
So, then it becomes an easy thing to wave, say, a jennifer aniston haircut in front of someone's face with the implication that 'you too can go 'tee hee hee sex' if you cut your hair this way.' no need to sell the product, in this case the jennifer aniston haircut, because it's already been sold -- the person wants to *be* jennifer aniston's character on the show 'friends.' so, it becomes a remarkably easy thing to simply hand them the proper haircut for the role.
You won't often see advertisements in which people are not portrayed, either seamlessly enmeshed with the product being sold or even in lieu of the product altogether, looking a certain way, implying certain character traits, and communicating a certain social status. One doesn't convince people with money in their wallets to exchange it for particular goods or services. This is difficult, if not impossible. What's much easier is to show them something that you know they want (to be loved, accepted, powerful, wealthy, etc.) and associate this with the product. They already want these things -- you don't need to convince someone that s/he wants love, power, sex, beauty -- nous sommes devant un fait accomplis. All you need to do is associate your product with those universally desired things.
And this, too, is easy. Associating, say, a golf club with love is as simple as putting a golf club in the hand of someone surrounded by family. Or an investment portfolio in the hand of a beautiful young woman. Or a lite beer in the hand of a wealthy young man. Etc.
In case you didn't guess, I just watched part of 'friends' and 'will and grace' with my mom.
I'm off to the store to buy grapefruit juice. Today I had: a bowl of pasta, a pbj, and another bowl of pasta. They were huge bowls of pasta.
10:24am
The problem with exercising in the morning is that it takes a big bite out of one's energy reserves, and that bouncy, morning feeling isn't preserved. Or maybe it's just my imagination. Until someone hires me, I need to think of some other things to do besides ride my bike, blog, check my email, and surf the web. I just had a pbj.
8:21am
I woke up with a lot of energy this morning at 7:15am, and made a big bowl of spaghetti. As soon as it digests for another 15 minutes or so, I'm going for an early-morning bike ride in seneca park. That's not a very interesting link, but it was the most interesting of the top ten or so.
I asked my mom last night to compare living in the u.s. And canada, simply because I was only 10 when I left montreal and don't have a very objective comparative analysis to make about everyday life in both countries. She said canada was nicer, on the whole. Specifically, she mentioned that it's not as infested with criminality as the states, you're less likely to get attacked by a terrorist, and that friendships seems to be less superficial there. I asked about the quality of canadian health care, since that tends to be a hot-button issue, and she couldn't remember waiting inordinately for treatment or being dissatisfied with the quality of care. However, she did mention that the mental health benefits were dreadful. Of course, they're general dreadful in the u.s. Too. I've heard a similar thing about americans regarding the superficiality of relationships: that the 'hey howya doin' with accompanying back-slap is more a friendly appearance than it is an expression of genuine friendliness. www.lonelyplanet.com mentions that america has 'arguably some of the most approachable natives in the world,' but if they're grinning ear-to-ear and making violent/affectionate body gestures at everyone, I'm not sure how sincere or indicative of genuine affection they can be. People are gregarious creatures, but we're not *that* gregarious. Shoot, that didn't even kill five minutes. I was hoping a quick rant would bring me closer to my allotted 15 minutes of digestion, and I could say 'whoops! Where did the time go? Time to leave!'
Damn the torpedos! I'm going to go riding now and risk stomach cramps. Right after a spell check (thank you james).
7:57pm
Today I ate: a 3-egg-and-cheddar cheese omelette, a medium peanut-chicken bowl at ricky's rice bowl, and two pieces of bread with peanut butter and jam. I didn't get the chance to go bike-riding today, because it was piddling in a decidedly autumnal way. I bet all the cock-rock radio stations are falling over themselves to be the first to play 'November rain' when it's first seasonally appropriate.
I don't understand why ana finds me attractive. Well, I don't understand it from a man's point of view, which is that there is some objective physical standard of beauty and attraction. From what I've seen, girls are more inclined to find you attractive if they like you, whereas guys are inclined to like you if they find you attractive. Lucky for me. Whenever I get a photo of myself these days, I'm absolutely horrified beyond measure. But the thing is, I don't think I'm unhealthy at all -- I eat healthy things (albeit too many of them), I don't smoke, and I ride my bike a lot. So I think my body is pretty happy, to tell the truth. Unfortunately, I look absolutely awful by the current cultural standards.
I used to have this theory: that those traits that speak to fertility or health (such as large breasts and hips, muscles, a healthy body fat percentage, etc) are universally and innately programmed to be appreciated as 'beautiful' qualities, whereas those traits that don't have anything to do with fertility or health (such as nose size, eye color, facial configuration in general, hair color, etc) are culturally determined. However, some research uncovered that standards of facial beauty are almost universal across cultures and history, whereas the cultural variance enters into things like body size. So if you're ugly, you're ugly. But if you're fat, take heart.
It's comforting to know that our national obsession with thinness is a figment of our media-manufactured cultural imagination, but at the same time it's kind of horrible to discover just how susceptible we are to this kind of thing, let alone allowing steadfast convictions like 'NO FAT CHICKS' to flutter out the window.
10:03am
I think the best way to handle yesterday's james/esr incident is to move along and pretend it never happened -- today is a new day, and a blog is supposed to log your current feelings, not dwell on past events, especially past blog-related events. That's just silly. Maybe I shouldn't have gone back and edited out some of my more vicious cruelty (i had originally pointed out that esr's eyes look in two different directions and that he has an ugly wife -- not central to high-minded criticism of his politics or social responsibility as a self-proclaimed leader in the hacker culture). My mind has shifted to esr issues again. He really rubs me the wrong way. There's something extremely unhackish about the sheer ego with which he presents himself; I don't see rms or linus torvalds or anyone else, for that matter, who is so aware of his or her social status, and who presents this awareness in such a childish, egomaniacal way.
Anyway. This morning, I made a cheese omelette.
8:16pm
My friend james made me feel guilty for bashing esr so cruelly -- what remains now in the previous entry has been edited after james's chastising, and now only sneers as opposed to revels in schoolboy cruelty. I think james was sort of annoyed at my tone throughout this blog, and this lead me to a hypothesis: that it's nary impossible to avoid coming across as a snide little prick over the internet. This applies to email, blogs, instant messsenging, and really any communicative internet medium. I guess all you can do is take it all with a grain of salt, and keep reassuring yourself over and over: 'there there...it's not real. It's not real...go back to sleep. Shhhhhh...' of course, maybe this is the kind of overgeneralization that gets one/me into trouble on the internet in the first place. Ok...*I'm* A PRICK...IT'S IMPOSSIBLE FOR *ME* TO AVOID COMING ACROSS LIKE A SNIDE LITTLE PRICK OVER THE INTERNET. Madness ensues.
4:22pm
I've been overblogging, I think. But it's just so much fun. I used to do a similar thing when I'd endlessly write emails to people, and actually, I did put them online a while back. So today, I'm going to try to keep things brief. Talking about how I'm going to keep things brief doesn't help to keep them brief.
My mom was on the computer today, telecommuting, which was nice in that it gave me a break from my obsessive computer use. Instead of staring at a screen all day, I practiced the trumpet and went on probably a 10 mile or so bike ride: first to kinko's to fax my resume to the veterinary office, then to the bike shop to get some air in my tires, and finally to the asian grocery store to get about $7 worth of really bizarre fruit, including a quince, which I'd never had. Unfortunately, it's clearly not ripe, but I bit into it already, so now I'm in a world of pain.
This is still the blog of peace and love -- no hatred on this blog.
8:35pm
Various sdf servers have been down all afternoon. However, what served to quash my rage was discovering that smj (the founder and netbsd monarch of sdf) dislikes esr. It's nice to see that there are others around in the internet community that recognize esr to be an angry, neoconservative misanthrope, writing and technical ability notwithstanding. He's really pretty despicable, both personally and politically. It's very easy to let a bad mood push one over the threshold from libertarianism into the realm of unabashed conservatism, and it looks like this is where esr is headed with ill-conceived foaming-at-the-mouth like his 'why we are in this war' nonsense. Talking like that is going to mangle his hacker-credibility beyond repair.
Move through his site for a few minutes, and I'm sure you'll arrive at the same conclusions (that esr is an asshole). In fact, I'd put him in the same category of asshole as jesus and maddox: egomaniacs who have been stepped on and rejected by society for so long that when they finally discover a forum in which they're in no danger of encountering something so frightening as another human being staring back at them, all those years of being unable to posit their opinions results in a rushing forth in great surges of obnoxious html-rants -- the kind of self-important, spanish-inquisition-style rambling that you'll find on these (esr's, jesus's and maddox's) sites. And, if they are in fact extroverts in real life (as esr purports to be) then they aren't even deserving of our sympathy for being withdrawn, wounded nerds, but are all the more despicable because their antisocial behavior doesn't spring from any apparent mechanisms (like compensation for being relegated to an introverted state in real life), but is apparently an accurate description of who that person is, both online and off.
Nah...that's silly. Peace and love. You see, the eternal question is always: 'do we find humans to be fundamentaly repulsive or fundamentally endearing, as they scramble for crumbs the way they do?' the answer to that, like my political orientation, depends on my mood.
I feel bad now...i shouldn't be so mean. I'm sure esr, maddox and jesus are nice guys. That's the problem with presenting one's self on the internet: you can market yourself any way you want, and if you're angry about something, then you can market that, and everyone will hate you. I must reiterate: peace and love.
What we internet junkies sometimes forget is that the internet doesn't represent a social reality. It seems obvious, but I tend to forget it. The esr I just finished bashing is nothing more than a website and some images. I've never met the real esr, and I'm sure he's perfectly nice. Same for maddox and jesus.
It's remarkably easy to be cruel and angry on the internet, because one isn't lashing out at any one in particular -- you're just lashing out into space. So in that sense, it can be a useful and therapeutic tool, but being nasty online can generate consequences or even be injurious to real people.
2:21pm
I completely forgot what I was going to blog about. Oh yeah, I was going to complain about my general inability to accomplish anything on the computer, such as setting up a random signature, setting up a guestbook, or setting up my server logs. All are too hard. Does this mean that I'm stupid? I think it might. If my memory and visual processing centers worked better, I would have fewer problems. Reading things is hard, understanding them is hard, and remembering instructions while I execute them, and then remembering my place in the original instructions, is hard. I know what the implications are for any employer -- they're not good.
The question is, am I disabled or not? I think I am to some degree. My cognitive disabilities might be categorized thusly, as problems with:
1) fluid reasoning. Fluid reasoning is the ability to adapt thought patterns and problem-solving strategies to changing scenarios; it takes me a long time to establish learned patterns of successful behavior in a fixed situation. So, when that situation is changing or unstable, my brain has a hard time keeping up. One example that comes up frequently is when I have my hands full, and I have in my head the goal of picking up something on the table. Let's say I'm holding my wallet and keys, and I need to pick up my cell phone and put it in my bag. I'll visualize the goal of putting my phone in my bag, but I'll forget about the fact that my hands are full. So then, for some reason my brain isn't able to conceptualize putting down the wallet and keys for a second in order to put the cell phone in the bag -- it just kind of gets stuck, and I freeze for a few seconds. Maybe that's not the best example of a fluid-reasoning deficiency, but it's something weird that goes on with me cognitively that is interesting to note, and that I'm intuitively convinced has a lot to do with fluid reasoning.
2) memory. This is pretty straightforward -- my memory doesn't work as well as it should. Actually, the information is stored there, but there's something wrong with whatever mechanism actually recalls it, as evidenced by the fact that it sometimes takes me a really long time to remember what I did the previous morning.
3) visual processing. I can look right at something, and not see it. It's as if I have some kind of tunnel vision; if someone points to a house or a tree they want me to acknowledge, I'll usually just tell them that I see it when I don't, because it's embarrassing to make a huge public project out of showing me something. It also manifests in difficulty reading; it's as if my brain/eye mechanism gets really tired really quickly, and as a result I start skipping down the page. If I'm interested in what I'm reading, it helps.
Another thing, that's sort of related to reading -- it's as if my brain gets 'full,' and can't process any more information. I'm not sure if this happens to other people, but at any rate it happens to me inordinately quickly. When I'm reading along, my brain will get 'full' after a couple of sentences, but I'll keep trying to continue anyhow. This, I think, leads to the worsening of some of the visual tracking problems that result in my eyes skipping about the page. So, maybe a solution would be to read one line at a time, and then take several hours off to eat muffins and watch tv.
4) proneness to overstimulus. This is maybe the more complicated issue, because it features kind of a feedback loop. If there's a huge amount going on (any kind of stimulus, but usually visual images) I have difficulty processing the mess, and other problems become more prevalent. Also, if I get upset or angry, then my brain stops working as well, firing out of control and clouding my perceptual field with intrusive thoughts and emotions. As a result, other deficiencies also get thrown into relief. This kind of thing is difficult to write about -- for anyone, but especially me, since I have to draw on memory of brain processes that are themselves damaged.
12:16pm
I applied for a job at greenpeace, doing web stuff. From the ad, I sounded like I might actually be qualified. So, it's either greenpeace or the bank. Also, I have two ads that I clipped this morning, but they require phone calls and faxes, to which I haven't quite adapted my mail-out-resumes mindset. So, this is what's on the table now: greenpeace, the bank, driving a cab, or working as a vet-tech. I wouldn't mind doing any of these. The taxi driving job requires a phone call, which is kind of horrible. Maybe I'll just fax off a resume to the vet place tonight.
I can't believe I'm having trouble making my ample food budget last until the end of the week. I have about $15, four days, and three boxes of spaghetti left. I find that it's helpful, when trying to prevent yourself from eating all of your groceries within a few hours, to buy things that are 1) somewhat difficult to make, or 2) somewhat bad-tasting. So I guess the ultimate would be some weird goulash that takes two days to simmer down to a gelatinous goo that tastes like rotten ass. I just don't have the self-control to restrain myself from devouring something that tastes good.
3:49am
Here's my personal contribution to the emacs vs. Vi war: both are horrible. Emacs is a little bit less frustrating to use, but it's so big that it's impossible to justify on a public system. Solution: vim -y, or vim in 'easy' mode. That's enough -- this kind of thing is incredibly boring to read. And the sad thing is that I really could go on about it if I had no scruples.
1:40am
I downloaded greymatter, and got it to work. However, it does a lot more than I want it to, and I don't like the web interface for configuring it. There's a reason all of these obscene little script kiddies' blogs all look alike: they all use greymatter. I refuse to partake in herd behavior, and will thus continue to have an uncommentable blog, until such a time as I learn to write my own cgi/perl. Either that, or use the script john told me he'd send.
I'm above it all.
My most recent thought is that I don't really need a complicated comment system here, or even a comment system at all.
I still haven't looked closely at the classified ads -- it's really discouraging. I took a few glances at them, and all I saw were positions for which I'm not qualified. Especially webdesign jobs -- they all require javascript and flash, neither of which I can do. Again I must reclarify the focus of blame: umbc. Part of me really wants a job, and part of me dreads it viscerally, with every fiber in the core of my being twitching at the thought. Frankly, I imagine I'd like any job that satisfies two conditions: 1) I can do it. 2) I like the people I work with. Most of the time, my biggest problem on the job is that I simply can't do the work. I learn things very slowly, and either i, my employers or both of us inevitably become frustrated and terminate the working relationship.
11:03pm
Last night, I took a shower at around midnight, and then returned to my computer/altar until about 2:30am. This was a mistake -- as I expected, I woke up this morning at 8am and felt horrible all day. This was compounded by some ice cream and cookies, and then an extended nap on the couch. So now, it's 11:03pm and I haven't done anything with the classified ads I brought home on Saturday. Oh well -- there's still time to get a few resumes together/call a few assholes on Monday before the mail goes out.
My next entry will see this file converted to the archives. Woohoo! Ana dropped out of college, just like I did when I was her age. Methinks this doth not bode well. But her mind is utterly made up. Of course, I'm not one to preach in any way about leading a socially responsible life, but it's hard to avoid pontificating when you have a gf who's so much younger than you. Poor ana -- she has to put up with two sets of parental lectures.
I tried to get a cgi script running for this page, but I wasn't able to figure it out. I'm thinking of trying greymatter -- ana tells me that it's extremely easy. But I really have come to enjoy hand-coding my blog; it gives me a smug feeling.
12:50am
My next day of entries (tomorrow) will see this past week's transferred to an archives section. If sdf.lonestar.org ever goes down, then all of this will be lost. I had a bad experience years ago losing a computerized journal -- when I was 16 or so, I logged about 300 or so typewritten pages over the course of a couple of years. Unfortunately, my mac (this was like os 3 or something) crashed beyond repair, and I lost them. I still think about this from time to time, and get depressed.
I sort of don't like the flow of this journal; the most recent dates are at the top of the document, but the most recent times within that date are posted toward the bottom of the entry. Well no more! From now on, I will post the most recent times towards the top of the document.
I haven't cracked open my enormous foreboding unix manual yet, preferring instead to post questions snottily and as they arise on the sdf bboard. I was using usenet before, but someone on usenet told me that sdf has its own bboard system. I really should have been using this all along, instead of emailing root@sdf.lonestar.org with tech support questions. It's pretty funny in and of itself -- mr. Root or whoever was sort of amused that he was getting emailed by this newbie.
Here's an idea about unix: that unix systems are inherently hierarchical, in that there's a root and groups and users, and that you can chmod files for different levels of access. So, it's kind of strange that so many unix people are these libertarian freedom-obsessed types -- a lot of them are 'libertarian socialists' (those who despise hierarchy, basically. The 'libertarian' refers to despising it in government, and the 'socialist' refers to despising it in industry. Basically, it's a code word for 'anarchist,' but they don't go around proclaiming themselves to be anarchists mainly because it'd sound like they were a bunch of graffiti-spraying punkers). So anyway, my point was (is?) that the intrinsically hierarchical structure of a unix system is ideologically opposed to the anti-hierarchical idealism of unix proponents. Qed.
Another unix idea: a system of martial arts based on unix. More elaboration to come.
