I'm on vacation. For two weeks, my mom will be on a cross-country drive with her sister, leaving the house entirely to me. I know I can 'officially' do what I want regardless, me being 30 years old and all, but with her gone I find that my lifestyle changes. I usually stay up until 4 or 5am, at which point I'll sleep untill noon or so. The house is very messy, cluttered with clothes, dishes, audio equipment and egg cartons, and I enjoy it. I can totally abandon all standards of social propriety. I'm naked roughly 80% of the time I'm indoors.
I didn't go to bed last night. When dawn rolled around, I was full of energy (possibly because I took too much medication -- I might have confused my doses, since I'm so 'off schedule'). At 6am, I took off on a bike ride. I had vague plans to go to white's ferry, but had no idea how far away it might be, or if this was what I really wanted to do.
White's ferry is a lot further away than I'd thought. 20 miles later, when I arrived at the ferry-launch, I found a diner open. They didn't take credit cards, but the cook agreed to feed me if I agreed to mail in the total (which I will). I was hungry, and thought I needed a 'hearty breakfast', since I'd ridden so long and far and without having eaten beforehand.
I asked the cook to give me a heap of the unidentified brown glop frying on the stovetop. She piled it on my plate, and it was pretty disgusting: two sausage patties, a wad of bacon, and a wad of home-fries, all drenched in animal fat. The sausages and the meatier of the bacon slices would have been good in smaller quantities, but the home-fries were inedible. They tasted nothing like potatoes, but only of old bacon fat. I didn't eat them, part of a sausage patty, and several strips of the more-undercooked bacon.
After breakfast, I lounged around on the boat-launch pavement, on some rocks by the river, and on the grass next to some picnic tables. I even dozed off a few times, until various bugs attacked.
Biking to white's ferry had only taken me less than an 1.5 hours, but I lay a round there until 9am, watching the ferry make its run back and forth between Maryland and Virginia, carrying cars. It's counter-intuitive to me that the ferry serves a very practical purpose, rather than merely being a historic curiosity, especially considering Maryland's penchant for such things. But there's simply no other way to get a car across the potomac that far out.
I owe the white's ferry diner $5.50, even though breakfast there was sort of awful. I rarely, rarely, if ever, leave a plate half-full of food, so this incident aroused all sorts of strange and new sentiments, such as 'don't I get a refund for the remaining food?', 'can you wrap this up so I can attach it to my bike rack?', and guilt over not eating the cook's offering.
As I thought to myself over and over, as I biked back with little energy and burping animal fat-burps from a queasy stomach, I should have asked for a piece of fruit, a bowl of cereal with milk, and two pieces of toast. That would have tasted good.
The ride back was hellish. The potomac river is about 200 feet above sea level and at the bottom of a pretty steep hill. On the way over I thought to myself, as I rolled down at 30mph, 'this is going to be hell climbing back up'. It was. All in all, by the time I got back to gaithersburg, I had stopped to rest something like five times, sometimes flat on my back on the grass next to my bike, propped up with its kickstand on the shoulder. I got beeped at a few times.
Gaithersburg-to-white's ferry is a sequence of up and downhill runs, and so isn't an especially harder or easier overall ride coming or going (except for the initial hill up from the potomac -- that alone makes the ride back worse). But, I was so exhausted on my return trip that I could barely make it. I even started to get pissed off, and took it out on some poolesville store clerks I asked for directions when I thought I might have gotten off the main road (which I hadn't).
I rode almost exactly 40 miles in total, from my house to the potomac river and back. I don't think I'll be making that trip too often, if ever again. There's a much easier way, about half as long, to get to the riverbank.
This is how I keep my readers coming back: variable rewards. You never know when I'll blog again, so its more of an event if I do than if I did it on a regular schedule. This has all been planned, of course.
I just got dumped by eharmony.com, a popular internet match-making service that's recently been advertised on prime-time tv. Their claim-to-fame is their in-depth prodding, based on which they're supposedly able to choose a tailor-made robot-mate for you. After about half an hour of filling out a detailed questionnaire, eharmony.com determined that I am undatable by any human in their database. Allow me to re-print their message to me:
EHarmony is based upon a complex matching system developed through extensive research with married couples. One of the requirements for successful matching is that participants to fall within certain defined profiles. If we find that we will not be able to match a user using these profiles, we feel it is only fair to inform them early in the process.
We are so convinced of the importance of creating compatible matches to help people establish happy, lasting relationships that we sometimes choose not to provide service rather than risk an uncertain match.
Unfortunately, we are not able to make our profiles work for you. Our matching model could not accurately predict with whom you would be best matched. This occurs for about 20% of potential users, so 1 in 5 people simply will not benefit from our service. We hope that you understand, and we regret our inability to provide service for you at this time.
You can still receive your free Personality Profile by clicking here.
Wow, thanks! A free personality profile! It was totally meaningless, and could have applied to anyone. It was like a horoscope. It reminded me of an experiment performed on a bunch of psych students by a researcher -- he gave them a questionnaire, and told them that based on their answers he would prepare personality profiles. In fact, he gave everyone the same profile, but all of the students indicated, on another survey, that for the most part they strongly agreed with the assessment.
My being dumped by eharmony might have had something to do with my indicating '$0' in the 'annual income' field. But, I didn't get a chance to specify that i, myself, didn't want to date people who make $0 a year. So, I think I'm such a big weirdo that I have no matches. This is ok -- it's what I've always suspected.
Time to start hanging around outside junior high schools with a bag of lollipops.
No, really...I'm not upset by this. It's fine. I realize that I'm totally undatable. I've accepted it. It sort of sucks that I'm not able to work in a self-supporting capacity -- this is pretty much the key to datability, I think, unless I were to drive down to the retard-clinic and court the other retards. I think of a girl at the head-injury clinic whose eyes looked in two entirely different directions. She was overweight, had grotesque dress and cosmetics, was sort of zitty, and kept flirting with me.
Maybe I was missing an opportunity there.
I also think of another girl, anna lam, who asked me to prom in high school. She was beautiful, super-smart, and super-sane. I think I told her 'no' because I was dating helen at the time, on whom I was totally hung up, perhaps irrationally. I think I would have been happier with anna, and should have said 'yes'. It's silly that I'm stuck on this incident in high school that happened about 12 years ago. Maybe there's a parallel universe where I said 'yes', and then everything worked out for me after that.
Ain't gonna blog today.
Something's not right.
As I was telling mark while he drove me to the airport a few days ago, I looked at the bay area with tunnel vision. My time there comprised hanna's apartment in concord, the BART, 'the art store', and mark and wei's place on weekends: the drive there and eating food at their dining room table. For me, that was 'the bay area'.
I realize I do that everywhere I am. I set up routines and follow them, and they totally constitutes my focus and experience in any place. The place ends up being pretty irrelevant; there is always a workplace, little apartment, and transportation back and forth.
Here, at my mom's house in gaithersburg, my world consists of sleeping in my bedroom, sitting on the couch flipping channels, sitting at the computer, and wandering about in the kitchen. I've never, for instance, sat on top of the washing machine and thrown balls of crumpled-up paper at the work-table while singing old metallica songs.
I'm sure this is true of everyone, but I'm also sure that my view of the world is narrower than most others'. This is an anti-zen tendency, I think. Zen masters talk about being awakened, about suddenly seeing the world in a different way. I try it, and reality appears to be the same old shit lying around.
I just killed a bug because it freaked me out, and I don't feel bad about it. If a bug freaks me out, I feel that it's within my reasonable rights to kill it. I guess the buddhists wouldn't agree. Thich naht hahn says he kills mosquitos if they nibble on him, although he does so with reverence.
I hate wasps, hornets, yellow-jackets, and flying beetles. They freak me out. If the offender is a wasp, hornet or yellow-jacket, I run away. If it's a flying beetle, my first step is to violently bat them out of the air. Then, while they're dazed on the ground, I crush them with some object, grinding it back and forth while gritting my teeth and saying 'you like that, motherfucker?'. When I put it down in text, it doesn't seem entirely healthy.
Immediately after I heard the story of thich naht hahn and his relationship with blood-sucking insects, I killed a mosquito (i was in the woods at the time). Just to try it out, I held the crushed corpse up to my face and said 'HA. YOU LIKE THAT, YOU LITTLE BITCH?' or something along those lines. As soon as I said it, I saw it's little eyes and crooked legs, and the thing looked pathetic and cute. I felt awful afterwards.
Most of the time, when I search the depths of my soul, mashing insects into exoskeleton and goo doesn't seem like an awful thing, even though I wouldn't do it to a hermit crab. Where might I lay down the size-limit?.
When my mind is over-active (such as it was, in the woods that day and under the influence of THC), I feel bad for killed insects. But most of the time their casual murder doesn't bother me. It's a slippery slope, though, from there to coldly exterminating humans because there are too many of them, or one doesn't like the look of them. We do it to deer, organizing controlled hunts to reduce their population. Certainly humans are more harmful to the biosphere than are deer.
When I started off on my way to the airport to catch my flight out to california, I hit a possum in the dark of pre-dawn along the unlit road; I felt the muffled 'thud' against the bumper. My concern wasn't that I'd killed the possum, but that the possum might be suffering because it had been crippled and not quite killed it. I wanted to turn around and check, and run it over if necessary. I hadn't thought about it again until now, at which point the possum is undoubtedly dead. Does that make its possible past-suffering a moot point? I'm not sure.
Most people seem to think killing something is the worst thing a person can do, and that one should never kill, for any reason. Sometimes, killing is clearly the best thing. In san francisco outside a club, some idiot girl was freaked out by a brownback (a huge, wild cockroach), and squeamishly kicked it away, in the process crippling it irrepairable. To end the poor thing's pain, I ground it into the pavement with my boot. Everyone was horrified.
In high school, I saw a bird that was horribly injured, but was still alive. I stomped on it several times, until it was basically flat.
I see death as totally neutral, and the option of death is very often better than a life of pain and suffering. Outside of the club, I thought about the brownback I'd killed, and the words 'angel of death' occurred to me. An angel, a merciful, loving creature, who gives the gift of death. People don't see that.
I don't want to keep blaming abrahamic mythology for the woes of the world, because that's become tired and boring. But I think, in this case, it's warranted. Unwillingness to take a life when necessary comes from the religious edict that only god is authorized to do so.
It might seem a slippery slope from killing bugs and birds because they're in pain to snapping someone's neck if she's distressed by not being able to find her house-key, but it's not. The angel of death only need descend if the suffering will never cease until death. Eventually, the key-misplacer will either find her key or get a new one. On the other hand, the brownback outside of the club was partially crushed, and would have died slowly and in pain. I only extinguished it, like a candle. I gave it the gift of death.
I don't think of spiders in the same way I think of those flying insects I listed a few paragraphs back. I don't have to be stoned to feel affection for them -- all they want to do is hide and be left alone. They're predictable in their behavior, and besides looking somewhat creepy, are benevolent, and even helpful.
Back at hanna's apartment, I remember one in particular. He had built an enormous web, with great depth, length and width, consuming the entire left planar joint of the balcony wall and balcony roof. Inside the thick network of spider-silk were literally hundreds of moquito corpses, sucked dry. They were attracted to the outside light, and the spider ate them all.
He sat there, in the middle of his web, not moving, the carcasses of all his victims suspended everywhere in the network of the finest strands. He looked positively regal, like a dragon in his lair, atop his mound of gems and surrounded by the charred armour of knights. I was impressed, and a felt a good deal of reverence and awe for this war-master as he hung there, motionless and head-down, in meditation.
It's 4:18am. Bad habits resurface.
I'm back in Maryland. For some reason, I haven't wanted to blog. I guess it's because this was one of the defining activities of my time in Maryland, which was more or less spent in this chair. I read wikipedia, chatted on AIM, chatted in the SDF chatroom, read the SDF bbs, did some minimal emailing, and blogged. Sometimes I'd do some other random web stuff. For instance, today I applied for a job at the humane society.
But for the most part, my activity is restricted to reading, socializing and writing on the internet.
I was a pretty active blogger while I was in california, but that was ok, because it was in a different place. Now, here, back in gaithersburg and settling into old routines, I feel like I've never left, although my room is totally bare and my luggage is still strewn in the front hall.
The chair, keyboard, lamp, and rushing hiss of the central air are exactly the same. For the past two days I've not exercised, and my eating habits are returning to 'normal'. My bike is still in its box. I went to the neighborhood pool, where the lifeguard and teens by the poolside were hostile; I'm not sure that I want to explore that option anymore. People in california are so much more pleasant.
I want my privacy, but at the same time I like the attention. For the most part, readers heed my warning and keep fairly quiet, except for the occasional outburst of a variant of 'I READ YOUR BLOG AND BLAH BLAH BLAH'. So, I can pretend that readers aren't real people who will make faces at me and variously affect my life in unpleasant ways, and still enjoy the fact that in some distant, far-off way, people are reading what I've written.
Blogging is really a terrible thing. I'm clogging up google's cache with utter nonsense. You should google my blog sometimes for the word 'i', and see just how often I talk about myself. Pretty often. Or, what's really depressing is to preform the search 'blog OR blogging OR blogged OR blogs). Nothing worse than a blogger talking about his blog, or a blogger talking about talking about his blog (meta-meta-blogging).
Every once and a while, I write some essay or something, but most of the time I'm just prattling on about myself. I'm shocked that anyone reads it, actually. It's possible (even likely) that I have few regular readers, and that the bulk of hits come from google searches.
SDF has no referrer logs, so there's no way to find out. So, let's go through just those people who accessed the most recent page, and sniff them out.
1) pool-151-196-14-232.balt.east.verizon.net -- baltimore, Maryland 2) 159-134-184-63.as1.cre.castlerea.eircom.net -- dublin, ireland 3) 66-50-89-18.prtc.net -- san juan, puerto rico 4) fw12.sbt.siemens.com -- chicago, illinois 5) static-64-115-164-22.isp.broadviewnet.net -- unknown 6) ucommons-117-174.pooled.umbc.edu -- catonsville, Maryland (duh) 7) Non-existent host/domain -- san jose, california 8) cache-rtc-ae01.proxy.aol.com -- chicago, illinois 9) host-7.131.54.159.gannett.com -- geobytes says waldorf, Maryland, but I know gannett is in mcclean, Virginia. So, nyeah. It doesn't look like they have an office in waldorf; I googled 'gannett waldorf' and didn't see a thing.
That was really time consuming, so I won't be doing that too often, if ever again. I'm trying to get my sysadmin to resolve all of the IP addresses in the log automatically, but I don't have high hopes. As it is, I had to run a reverse-DNS on every...single...IP...address. Well, in this case, just nine of them. But it was still a pain. However, if it can be done, then it can be scripted, somehow.
Anyway, I have a pretty good idea who some are, based on the host names and locations. But, I can never be 100% sure. I'm using geobytes.com's IP-locator to get an idea of the geographic location of an IP address, but sometimes it's off. For instance, it puts my home IP address in silver spring, Maryland, which is a fair ways away from gaithersburg.