a full weekly - part iii

[... continued]

wednesday:

wednesday morning wasn't as ugh as usual, until i arrived on time to discover that class had been cancelled. fortunately, a flash of inspiration has struck on my way and i occupied myself with research for an hour or so before heading off to work.

i picked up a falafel on the way. i'd asked for a half-portion, and commented to that effect when i saw the guy stuffing a whole pita. he said "yes, yes, i know" and carried on, i paid the half-portion price and walked out, figuring that he used a smaller pita and feeling silly for not noticing the size difference. when i mentioned the experience in the office, the guys laughed and informed me that what i'd gotten was a full-portion.

i'm not exactly complaining, but that was strange, no?

i spent the day producing band-aid solutions, finally creating an on-the-fly interface for a system i'd hacked together recently and through it discovering some interesting bugs. interfaces and automation make qa better. i know this. i've had to fight to convince the others, who have finally begun to embrace one of my automated-qa solutions. but these things need time to build...

this evening, i knew where to purchase flowers and arrived home with a bunch of pink roses. i then went to the weekly creative writing meeting. that morning, on my way off campus, i'd cobbled together my answer to the homework assignment, and the response to my reading it was nothing short of glorious! the guys actually applauded, and i was extremely pleased. now that it's posted, i have to admit that i keep noticing bits that demand improvement, but i'm not entirely comfortable with modifying it.

it's not that there was too much candy on the table, it's that i could barely control myself and i consumed far more than i wanted. i left the place feeling a bit woozy on the sugar-rush :(

more hellsing, and bed.

---thursday:

my day began with enthusiasm for duolingo: they've just opened french lessons in beta. the idea is brilliant, and not only can i now say that the lessons are fun and well presented, but the fact that the translations you perform have an actual purpose is inspirational. it's kind of like the reverse of gamification.

on arriving on campus, i received a phone call from the boss informing me that the servers were down. it would take a couple of hours on the phone and remotely using my pitifully underpowered netbook, spread over the day, to determine that it was one of the hack-n-slash patches i'd been asked to perform that was killing everything. we don't know why, because the code all makes sense and everything *should* have worked, but because microsoft's azure doesn't provide basic connection information we had no way to determine who was at fault. all we know is that azure's table locking is the pits.

class: not to be a killjoy [said the killjoy], but bo burnham's sonnet 155 would be a lot funnier if shakespeare had written like that and if bo hadn't chosen to tack it on to the sonnet sequence. plenty of poets wrote sonnets that weren't numbered, and besides: his content more closely resembles barnfield.

---"just roll with it," said wordsworth, which made me recoil with disgust. "i don't roll with things that are wrong," i said, and continued silently to myself: "because doing that is what makes people mediocre."

later he annoyed me by stating that music theory is exactly like string theory, with absolutely no references whatsoever. and then i found myself arguing evolution with a couple of idiots because they don't get the difference between hypothesis and theory.

---of the stranger things that were occurring at work, scr informed me that someone had contacted the office looking for me. considering i am not officially employed by the company, this is in decidedly bad taste. when i called the person back, he was exceedingly unclear, talked in circles, and all i could get from him was that he'd found me through the company's website where i was listed as "freelance advisor". considering the fact that not even the ceos are listed on the company website, this is all wrong. the follow-up email that he sent me is incoherent at best.

*cue twilight zone theme*

---i must note here that throughout the week, girls both familiar and unknown have become increasingly flirtatious, some simply nodding and smiling at me and one even going so far as to tell me that she would be staring at me. i suspect the hair has something to do with it.

included in the list is a particularly foxy girl who was sitting near me while i was working; sometime after i overheard here telling a guy that she was too busy to talk and super-stressed because she was having her period, she moved over to my table and seemed only too happy to chat.

*scratches head*

pg tells me i'm imagining it.

[continued...]

nine-to-fiver

it doesn't matter how much time i've spent in bed, nor at which angles i spent it, my back is driving me demented. it's not even pain anymore, just perpetual, intense discomfort.

i woke up early yesterday and sat in front of my computer until evening. i'd talk up the wonders of working from home, except that after realizing that i pulled the equivalent of a nine to five without leaving the apartment, and didn't have any time to focus on anything else, i wasn't feeling them.

shit :/

---i did get an hour of studying done afterwards. i got all itchy again, and i suspect that i'm allergic to the book - and not just the content. stephen booth may be interested in a completely different aspect of shakespeare's sonnets than i am, but i think it's more the ink or the pages that are setting me off. my father was allergic to newspaper ink, and we used to laugh at him reading his paper with a handkerchief over his nose and mouth.

...

in the evening we watched bright star. pg didn't enjoy it as much as i did, and i only thought it was passing good. one thing that especially caught my attention: fanny's brother picks up the violin at some stage and plays what sound like somewhere out there. looking at wikipedia, that's a song what wasn't around in the early 1800s. just saying.

we watched the first two episodes of futurama. good news, everyone! pg's never seen it. i now have an excuse to watch it all again =D

going to bed early, rising late, returning to bed in the hope that it'd sort my trapezius out, waking up just as badly...

---i've finished with the graphical aspect of the revised presentation of the poem that i constructed for the poetry event last year, and am now on to the tedious one which involves making an html version of my spreadsheet. wordsworth and co-conspirator amaze me with their disorganization - we could have been done within a week of the event if anyone had known what was going on. nope, i won't be doing anything like this with them again.

i now have two hours to prepare my character for tonight's gaming session... aaargh! not enough!

---ZOMG: a new version of syndicate that i might have to play. if it's the same world strategically as the first, i'm in.

thank you, ben franklin

late to bed and early to rise, makes a man slightly psychotic and a bit irritable. first class was tough, but ended with a great telling of a story about the creation of memory. i was on my way from that to the old office, in good spirits, when i got a phone call from the new office.

the upgrade i performed hadn't been functioning at all. i had to go back.

fortunately it wasn't too tough to sort out, but i wasn't feeling particularly positive about having caused them a day's loss of data. the cto shrugged, i shrugged, and i was on my way out when the ceo made my day: i suspect he reads good management articles. he took me quietly aside and informed me that they're incredibly pleased with me and my work.

you know what? that made my day.

i had a great breakfast for lunch next door with pg and my mum, and then we went together to campus. aside from a bit of touring before class, i sat down to get some of the reading done and was interrupted by pg's brother and his girlfriend for a pleasant chat until i had to run. the class was sometimes interesting, but mostly i just played sudoku between points of "oh, cool".

the event that wordsworth and co-conspirator organized was surprisingly good. most of the participants were interesting, all the items were short, and it was all done with a sense of humour and i think that it was remarkably successful overall.

my mum and i headed back home to pick up pg and then meet with some cousins for a very pleasant dinner nearby; pg has made cookies and i've now given up on the readings (perhaps i'll manage some more before class).

chest pain

i went to bed around 2am, and around 4 or 5am i was up and incredibly uncomfortable. pg must have sensed it, because she woke up soon afterwards and both of us lay in bed, miserable, until the alarm went off at 6.30am. except for when i got up to go to the toilet. on my way back i yawned and stretched, and somehow the stretch made the area around my sternum really sore, like i'd pulled a muscle or something :S

early mornings aren't good for us. but my disk-on-key had not only been found by the caretaker, but he'd sifted through its contents and discovered my phone number. i'm surprised and impressed! i arranged sound equipment for the shakespeare lecture i'm auditing, sorted out thursday's room confusion and had coffee while discovering that while my kindle may be cool, it can't handle indexing thousands of books without draining the battery (so i've just deleted everything except for what i need for my studies). what a silly issue!

french class - not bad, although annoying can't-keep-his-trap-shut dude sat right behind me.

i was buggered by the time i got to work:
"have you lost weight?"
"not really"
"oh. well you look like shit."

the guys left for lunch as i arrived, and it was only after they got back that i was told that there was no reason for me to come in. thanks. rabbitcvs / nautilus / whatever was ruined by the previous upgrade and couldn't be reinstalled, but i did manage to get svn workbench running before i left and it's actually quite a neat little package.

back to school: nim is away for a couple of weeks, and the class was way more interesting without her crowding it. afterwards, a quick snack, excellent mocha at aroma with wordsworth and co-conspirator, and then the three of us walked to our favourite professor's for a long meeting that had both highly entertaining elements and a bit of group shouting therapy. the hardest part was right at the end, when i informed the professor that i'll be cancelling her class; it's true that it's for financial reasons, but i felt uncomfortable when her line of thought turned to "how can we help you more" (my bursary award is quite sizeable) and it was tough to explain that i'll be in a much better position if i defer the courses and don't overload myself.

at least i think i managed to not offend her. i say hopefully.

wordsworth gave me a ride back home, and i would have done some work if i hadn't been so occupied with my kindle, pg's computer re-install, and a train of thought that stretched from checking my bank account and discovering that i've been underpaid this month, to determining the likelihood that i was underpaid last month, to whether or not i'm familiar enough with the tech to take the job i've been interviewed for, to sending mmf a letter of resignation stating all of the reasons for my general unhappiness and expressing the hope that we can still be friends.

although, as pg pointed out, we might well be past that judging by the way i've been treated.

as i said to my mum: i'm feeling better about it already. and tomorrow's a strike; no studies and no public transport, so i've an excuse to work from home.

the dark side of midnight

it's close to midnight, the other side of it, and i have *so* much to read and do...

the meeting with wordsworth this morning went well. auditing a class on shakespeare's comedies is fun! and i managed to impress the lecturer by informing him of the "benign violation" theory of humour and using it to justify the original folio's categorization of william's works.

the sonnets class i'm registered for was cancelled on account of a huge rally in continuation of the protesting. too much sun on my face.

big lunch, running into kc's sister, walking into class late for the lecturer who everyone's nuts about. she is great, and i'm pretty certain i made a really good impression.

work in herzeliya: surreal moment of taking mmf outside and berating him for bad practices after i discovered that everything's going to go through another redesign. the rest of the evening was kinda boring, aside from a moment wherein i lost patience with our secretary talking over me (i shouted, she shut up and listened, then i felt bad) and about half an hour of being super-puzzled until finding a bug that's been irritating me for a while.

an interesting conversation with mmf in the car, wherein i convinced him (more or less) than my world-view isn't as enslaving as normal ones (although being aware of the fictional nature of one's inner mapping doesn't mean one doesn't get carried away sometimes - that's the problem with human psychology) and got him to agree (for what that's worth) that paying the price of immediate mobility in favour of public transport is worthwhile in spite of the infrastructure not being nearly as good as it should be.

issues at work in the other office up the wazoo, but some of the evening was fun. fretting about policemen on the way to the bus as usual, reading on the way home, tasty dinner waiting for me, and basically spending about an hour clearing emails; i'm ready to buckle down and get some serious reading done.

and then magically learn french in the morning :P

americans aren't stupid

so aside from the green card scam, i had a day at work wherein i made a bit of progress but didn't give a damn about it. on my way out my boss offered to get me a book on css, an offer i declined without hesitation.

do not want.

in the other office, i fine-tuned something that was giving us trouble and convinced the boss that the change i requested to make last week (a request that was slammed immediately at the time) is a good idea for a number of reasons. it looks like it'll be a fun challenge, and when we succeed i'll have less bureaucracy to deal with during my night shifts :)

wordsworth gave me a ride to co-conspirator's birthday sleepover; i would've slept over if i didn't have other responsibilities... her attitude towards her birthday was a bit off-putting, though. i almost decided against going just because she was testy about it being important.

it's just a birthday.

the food was pretty good, but although it was nice to see everyone the arrangement was a tad awkward. once things got going i settled in, however, and overall the experience was pleasant and i might have enjoyed staying the night...

coming back home was a bit of a mission - i think all the buses i needed were finished for the night. pg had already gone to bed by the time i walked in, but i discovered something at my desk that made me smile and say: "best - girlfriend - ever". a pillow re-sewed to the first step of an invader zim-style costume (think bloaty's pizza hog).

*sigh*

---
stupid is as stupid says: a denier of global warming writing for the wall street journal?
more slamming of the same moron

a little yellow tablet from goa

i'm watching garbage warrior, and michael reynolds is a hero. we need more of him, and desperately! i wonder if i can find architects doing that sort of thing in israel... wanna make a positive change? watch the video, consider supporting sustainable housing. or better yet, get involved. (for a summary review, look here)

---
i slept well last night - i almost didn't get to sleep because i got stuck into reading a friend's thesis paper and it was riveting... i stopped myself because i knew i'd have to be up early. my nose was still gunked up, and i found the last three pseudo-ephedrine tablets that i bought in goa. their expiry date is 9/2011, so technically it's still good... the one i took was quite effective.

i bladed down to george to meet with wordsworth and urchin for breakfast and one hundred thousand poets for change debriefing. when wordsworth left urchin and i did some planning apropos the photography project i'm so excited about, and then it was time to return home. i finally got some work done - nyromodal is the only jquery lightbox solution that actually works. a deep sigh later, and since then i've been chilling. getting ready for a lot of driving this evening...

lessrest * 100k

i couldn't sleep again, so much so that i took a couple of melatonin tabs to get through the night. i didn't feel entirely rested when i got up this morning.

the day was hot, humid, rainy, windy, and on my way to the first event things weren't looking good. in spite of that, the sun came out and people began to arrive, someone bought me coffee and random passers-by participated and we ended up having quite a bit of fun - even if i did get a bit sunburned... we're constructing a poem made of words "donated" to us by people on the street and poets; some of the choices were fascinating.

great english breakfast, home to change (and discover that i'd put an open permanent marker in my pocket), then waiting under the municipality building for a ride through to bookworm. things were looking good when wordsworth and i left to set up the park event. which didn't happen in the park: cafe lavender in gan meir didn't have what we needed, not least of which being the right attitude. fortunately, cafe cafe across the road were more than willing to host us, even at ten minutes' notice, and for that we were only too happy to deal with the fees when the evening was over.

dinner with well-known israeli poets, then a night at pappa's with the cream of the crop. some of the evening was a bit boring, but by and large it was excellent and entertaining.

it was all a bit stressful, but i don't think i had as much to do as most of the other organizers. all in all, i'm well pleased with the day; i'm happy with how it went, glad that it's over, and intrigued that in spite of all the things that didn't go smoothly only one person was upset, and quite a few are looking to see how we can get balls rolling.

---of course, of primary importance to me is what *i* read and how it was received. at the cafe cafe reading, i went through my first double dactyl, the wrapping, and should i compare that to the summer's thrust?. my poems were received positively, but not with nearly as much enthusiasm as my first double dactyl, lava people, death song revisited and evolution when i read at the main event! additionally, i dedicated should i compare that to the summer's thrust? to the march hare and the head of our department caught a look; i was touched by their responses :)

weekend something

it's late, i gotta be in bed already. a list! a list will solve the problem!

---friday:

friday's early morning meeting at cake art. i'm fairly certain the waitress was flirting with me. the keish was great.

one-legged beast-fighting: i couldn't use my left foot and was made to fight, one-legged, against the big dude. that could've gone badly, but it didn't so i feel good about it.

buscope (bush cafe?) dinner with pg: it's a place right close by that does steak and eggs breakfast all day. it wasn't the best steak, but the service was sterling and the music was great.

i was in time to get a ride with scrapper to his and botchman's farewell. we made it up to botchman for nobody having rocked up to his twelfth birthday party, only to discover that the story he'd told us was meant to be a joke.

---saturday:

another early morning meeting. this time at landver, with a good breakfast but a terrible table vibe as co-conspirator and wordsworth had... words. all sorted out fairly quickly, though. the second part of the meeting bored me to lots of angry birds.

i promised pg i'd take her to the "luna park" - and so i did. it was a hot day, and my system doesn't handle quick direction switching at high g's. i managed four rides, having saved myself for the big ones, and enjoyed them even though they made me feel horrible. it took coke to fix me up after the first two, and another coke and an ice-cream after the second - it was the only thing i could consider eating :P

watching the people was an experience and the cultural incompatibilities were blatant. also - the games are a rip-off.

we had frozen yoghurt for dinner, which was delicious, and then i left for gasoline's house-warming. most of the evening was awkward - especially with her flatmate - but some of it was a lot of fun and overall i drank too much.

---sunday:

another stupid-early meeting. i was barely functional and then the coffee machine, as is its wont, stole my shekel. we spent an hour building the presentation - the good stuff was all mine. everyone loved the "0 = A LOT" slide. the head of the department even quoted that after we were done :P

the talk with the new students was long and i'm fairly certain i wouldn't have understood much if i hadn't studied this last year, which only makes the case for us giving an orientation course that much stronger. during my bit, i really did need the guys standing near me reminding me not to leave things out: of course it's an actual course! didn't i say so?!

back to work. still tired. the boss found the flaw that was annoying me last week, the fix was quick. lunch with harry potter was more fun than lunch with the girls: they spotted me and i couldn't not join them :/

jquery's sexyselect add-on is a bitch. after much struggling to tweak it according to the design i was given, i gave up and performed all the bits manually. it took about half an hour; setting up the add-on has cost me at least a day or two so far.

i was under time-pressure to save my work and pack up at the end of the day; that sense of urgency didn't leave me until... nope, still here. after doing some quick editing in the other office, i rushed off to return to tel aviv to meet with kc's father, who'd brought a couple of boxes of books that i'd left with them in 2004.

and i'd been wondering where some of them were, and automatically assumed grootbek had sold / lost / stolen them. [the discussion that led on from that got pg really angry with me for still being friends with him - what??? we went to his wedding after he did all that horrible stuff to you?! - i suppose she's not entirely wrong...]

nothing more frustrating than finding my old copy of shakespeare's complete works after spending a semester squinting at the shakespeare iphone app... *sigh*

i took apart, after more than five years - marathon man's computer. i've tried enough to contact him about it, it's now on its way to being recycled. it had a internal zip drive that might work.

facebook lists don't help: you have to manually click on everyone you're trying to invite. and some of those invites don't get sent, so you have to do them again. and i'm trying to invite a lot of people to saturday's events...

i was fasting for tomorrow's breath test, and pg offered me watermelon when i wasn't concentrating. i double checked the amount of time i needed to fast, and it's changed from ten hours, to six, and now one. one hour. i could've relaxed about food this evening :(

twingling nerves

yesterday was exciting! well, the second half at least.

i got up stupid early (7am) to get some work done on the event website, and was fairly productive until i had to leave for work. the meeting with the insurance guy was set for 11am - it was only about noon when he finally rocked up. turns out he's from the same company :S

i got a bit of work done, but not enough that i don't have to do anything on the weekend. my 4pm meeting on campus had completely slipped my mind... boy, were we all surprised when i jumped up at 3pm, explained the situation, hurriedly handled most of a meeting that had been deferred from the morning while simultaneously packing up...

i made it to the university in good time. unfortunately, i arrived without my beloved phone cover: i'm guessing i must have dropped it on the bus. as soon as i realized it was missing i called up the bus operators, who registered the details but explained to me that they have no way to contact their drivers.

REALLY?!?! and this on the bus line that has wi-fi? so the drivers have internet, the drivers have cellular phones, but the company can't get in touch with them??? bloody liars.

the worst part of this story is that the bus line goes past our apartment, and i only realized that i could have simply called pg and asked her to hop on and check after i'd finished talking to the monkeys. by that time it was too late :(

it was super-heated on campus. the walk up had me disgustingly sweaty. i was surprised to discover that the girl that i thought i was going to meet was the *other* girl-with-the-same-name from the master's students...

the hand-over was very different to what i expected. i thought i was going to get a bunch of info, tips and tricks, who-knows-what - instead, i was informed that i already know everything there is to know about the content management system and that i already had the keys to the department's blog (it's on blogger).

i gave her a lot more info than she gave me: i'd been talking to the head of the faculty's IT department in the morning and the english department on the way from the office, and i've secured permission from both sides to join the faculty dev team for the express purposes of moving our website from the completely unusable and unsupported cms to joomla. the alternative? waiting for them to get around to it during the first semester... i don't think i'll really have enough time to do stuff then :P

on the way to meet the dev team, i ran into gco's girlfriend and she offered to arrange the meeting for me (it turns out everyone had left for the day anyway) - then i headed to the bus stop to go to the old office.

that didn't work - wr and co-conspirator caught me waiting for the bus, and there went an hour of my day. it was a fun, interesting hour, though - we've got a candidate for class rep and a platform on which to push her; wordsworth and i have found a way to let co-conspirator participate in the orientation course (i had reservations at first, but we resolved them in the interest of avoiding group politics), and she taught me a thing or two about the master's course registration process... it's good to know people who have time to harass the entire faculty :)

our enthusiasm for the course is contagious, apparently: wr, now going into his final - no really, his FINAL year* - wants to take the course too :P

* he has one course left to go to complete his degree... he's been studying the same degree for about seven or eight years now.

it was on that note that i left (again) for work. the first person i ran into was sorter, and we sat outside for coffee and business for a short while - i was happy to report progress, he had a lot to say about financial sources, and between the two of us this little project has rather a lot of potential. the best part is that as soon as this month is over i will have time to dedicate to it, and it's fun regardless of whether it succeeds or not. we don't have to invest in anything else until we're ready to release an alpha version... so an even split of the profits might be good pickings :)

i'd had a long email argument with -someone in the morning about the way i'd written one of the classes, and it continued as soon as the two of us were sitting together. much flurrying on the whiteboard later, and i finally managed to untangle my proposal into a flow diagram. it's funny how the second it was drawn up properly it became so simple and sensible! and how important it is to have two people working on the same code.
that freed up my next hour or so for documenting things before grabbing the bus home.

i decided i'd spend some time with pg before working, and we sat reading together after dinner, then playing tekken... tekken was interrupted, though, by a phone call from pg's ex. she disappeared for a while, then returned with a pile of cash, a guitar, and a retelling to raise the hackles. at least she told the creep off, and explained that she never wanted to see or hear from him again. story over - i'm glad i didn't have to intervene.

we played a bit more, and then i did a *little* bit of work... but sleep overpowered me. and not just any sleep - a complete, deep, *satisfied* sleep in appreciation for a week well done and *knocks wood* my life being in a good place right now. it's taken what seems like forever, but i'm financially stable and doing jobs that i like, i'm reading and gaming again, i'm making time for friends in addition to being in a fantastic relationship, and i believe that if i work really hard i might be able to keep this up ^_^

---getting up at 7am was night impossible, and 7.30 was only slightly easier. i've now posted, done the translation for the event, and am off for breakfast with urchin.

[twingling]

the down-wedding - part i

[post divided retroactively]

thursday:

could there have been any advantage to picking the wrong bus when i was already late? perhaps. i wasn't *really* in a hurry, and five minutes walking through and appreciating a city still half-asleep and beginning to stir at 10.45am was heart-warming. and almost tripping over a door, which in my experience is not a normal thing to find in the middle of the pavement, amused me.

a thought occurred: observing israelis talking on the phone, i'm beginning to suspect that a truly israeli cellular phone design would incorporate a phenomenally solid microphone and no earpiece. i think it's redundant here in enough cases to warrant some marketing consideration.

the place we met to study at is in a really nice little nook just off campus. the only people who showed up were myself and wordsworth, and a study group of three that primarily consists of reading notes because the other two hadn't been in class isn't particularly productive. the home-produced tea was delicious, our host's boyfriend crapping us out for putting our bare feet on their new couch was a bit weird.

quote of the day (completed in unison): huckleberry finn's plot was described as "a circular movement from a to b".
"the only movement i can think of that fits that description... "
"is a bowel movement"

i headed off to work, picking up a falafel on the way. this one was cheaper, larger, tastier, healthier and faster than western "fast food". the introduction of crap fast food into israel is a shame.

i had an argument with yogi about market research, which reminded me of nystire's link to let me google that for you. work was, to quote my boss, pretty blah. some jquery functionality that should be incredibly simple doesn't work. and that stinks.

i was totalled by the time i got up to leave, and i rested on the bus because i failed in my attempt to begin reading joseph conrad - heart of darkness. i had barely enough time to get ready before pg and i stepped out smartly dressed into the bright hot late afternoon sun... i had sweat patches on my back by the time we made it to the wedding shuttle.

as the years go by i find myself more and more estranged from certain people that i used to consider my friends. the bus ride had a few of those. it also took a long, long time to arrive. just before arriving, i discovered that i'd sat on chewing gum. in my nice black trousers. frack.

the wedding: substandard. beautiful venue, great food, but both the ceremony and the reception were a little too enthusiastically "traditional". highlights included contemplating the possible correlation between a shy bladder and an unhappy childhood, the sweets table, and the realization that i'd consumed far too much alcohol. fortunately [he says, sarcastically] the return shuttle only arrived at 2.30am so i had plenty of time to sober up for the relentless attack of the "oriental" music over the speakers in the bus. and not the bus driver's, either, but some ars relative of the bride who hijacked the microphone with his cellphone and maintained a stupid grin while refusing to lower the volume until the very end of our miserable journey. i really, *really* wanted to beat the snot out of him. judging by their reactions to the eventual raising of my voice, i think the austrians would have fully supported me.

pg was even more disappointed and irritated than i was after all of that, and tensions exploded on the way home and it took us a sleep before we could talk them down. *sigh*

---funny story: the guy whose book i reviewed? it turns out he's not just a friend of friends, he's the brother of one of them. it turns out that my assumption that he's "TheThinker" was correct (because it wasn't totally obvious</sarcasm>), and i'm amused that he strongly suspects me but wasn't entirely sure. i was certain he knew. either way, "Listen to me wannabe 'intellectual,'... I would recommend you therapy" after his assertion that he "[does] own a second degree in psychology" is just... well, if you want to read his book anyway, don't say you weren't warned.

[continued...]

argu-vegetative

i just got off the phone with wordsworth: i kept asked him what he'd like me to do now that he's found a hole in our temporary solution for an issue we have with organizing the student forum for the humanities faculty, and he kept responding with answers as vague as "find a better solution".

*sigh*

that's after leaving campus on a rather awkward note. the girl i sat with was very sweet and helpful, but she wins quote of the day hands down:
"no, no - it's not a bureaucratic issue, it's a procedural one".
uh, huh.
the best part was watching her asking someone in the middle of the chain if she's absolutely sure that requiring more than three referrals to book a classroom is entirely necessary, and seeing her exasperated when the answer was simply "that's the way it's going to remain".

trauma tune: sharing - part iii

[... continued]

sunday:

sunday had a tough start. i'd received an inspirational sms from co-conspirator... more so when she refused to even look at me.

the class was about pregnancy, and afterwards i convinced our professor that sonnet 116 is quite possibly about sex. i had lunch with pg, then walked down to the highway to catch a bus... forgetting to draw cash, walking all the way to the mall, returning again... i bought a ticket for the month. i don't know if i should have.

---the first meeting of my new job was really cool. it felt right. i had shit to contribute. the guys are smart and interested. i have a good feeling about this.

---what is it with anonymous phone callers not leaving messages???

on my way to the old job, i was engaged in a bureaucratic battle over classroom bookings. i think i came out on top, by being given direct contact with the person who is actually responsible for the building.

a productive work session, then the discovery that about NIS 1000 was missing from my salary. this is NOT the month for that shit to happen...

leaving with the sun still up?! absurd! pg and i went to play frisbee, but the park we chose was too dark and i wanted to play on the grass... so we returned, strapped on our blades, and did a proper run for an hour or so, wearing ourselves out completely but discovering a good frisbee park on the way :D

i burned the eggs. i gotta get used to the new setup.

---monday:

i studied till late last night, with the sound of thunder and rain accompanying me.
i woke up at 6.30am mid-dream to continue, and felt as prepared as could be by the time i walked in to the exam.

which ended bitterly. "i have come to register a complaint!" i announced, when the teacher left the classroom. most of us had had the same trouble, even though we'd done all the readings...

"hi, friend!" said the stranger as i slowed, raising an eyebrow quizzically. i don't know what he said once he put his hand on my arm - don't touch the south african, dude. he got the message immediately, and only then did i discover that he's in my class...

it was raining, and i had no umbrella, so i wasn't going to meet with our class rep who isn't our class rep...

our second class was on hamlet, and was enlightening as usual. the idea that hamlet could well be a metaphor for the audience is mind-bending.

wordsworth and i had a loud and aggressive argument while waiting our turns at the cafeteria... he made an outrageous claim about shakespeare being nobody special and that took a while to resolve. if we resolved it at all. i think we were interrupted by a confused spectator. discussing literature in the science building? what were we thinking?!

we had a problem with the room for the shakespeare screening - this then became even more of a thing again, and i took it to the woman in charge of the building. i have acquired another direct contact, score!

the screening was interesting, but i nodded off a few times. i'm tired. i arrived at work to discover that the last paycheck is not the only one i've been shortchanged on, so it looks like this month might be okay. and like i shouldn't trust the company as much as i have been trusting them until now.

i've got some work done this afternoon / evening, but not enough to satisfy me. i'm going home, i'll make up for it in the morning.

ah! just got a phone call praising the manifesto... looks like the ball might begin rolling soon :D

trauma tune: sharing - part i

[post divided retroactively]

wednesday:

i walked out of the office on wednesday and into a maelstrom of dark and disturbing, beginning with sketching out listlessly and resulting in my arriving home frustrated and rambling.
"honey, you're talking nonsense," she told me. and she was right. only she was wrong, too. because all the nonsense was spot-on, only it really doesn't make any sense. i really needed a stiff drink, and that's what i had.

and it helped, along with the purging. and along with the fact that pg put up with it. she distracted me by leading me into the study, where she'd set up the giant cupboard door as a whiteboard. i spent a short while setting up my calendar and scribbling my to-do lists, and then we went to bed.

night fears: waking up from a dream about grim warriors whose mission was against vampires whose intentions were pure violence; and me being given a knife before being sent into battle against tooth, claw and raw, unnatural, unbridled power. unpleasant.

---thursday:

israelis are so aggressive that it's never comfortable to communicate with strangers: all i want to do is tell people who leave the engine running (cars or bikes) that it's not cost-effective.

the day began with a discussion over sex-work advertising on campus that turned into a laugh about fainting and then an awkward "discussion" with the slow girl who talks rubbish and got personal: she got on my nerves when she tried to explain to me that i'll eventually stop being a south african.

right.

...

i couldn't get i was touched out of my head the entire first class.

a brief chat about hawthorne and his take on transcendental scrambled eggs later, and then straight into second. i hate chairs that flip back automatically, because i replaced my bum with my netbook when i got up, forgetting that it would be catapulted straight to the floor :S

we had a problem with the room for the screening - this has become a thing. we eventually were assigned a new one, but the one girl who was coming late had forgotten her cellphone at home... figures.

i had an interesting run-in with the student union on a number of issues, and have gone over wordsworth's translation of the manifesto. it's good! now to get promoting.

i ran into an italian wearing a hat, and was surprised once again by how much he seems to enjoy talking to me in contrast to how much he seems to despise talking to the others in our class (O_o)

we had a problem with the room for the anime evening - this then became even more of a thing, because the guy in charge is friends with botchman so he sorted it out by moving a different class...

botchman himself threw a sock through the window when he arrived - and we were worried it was a bomb of sorts :S

durarara!! - wandering son - elfen lied

it was an awesome evening. the same girl from the previous section giving us the history of kanji... again. *sigh*

i kept mishearing things during the evening, my brain having been overloaded for a while...

i got home to find the first communication i've received from my health insurance company: a threat to sue me for not paying an amount that i hadn't been made aware that i owed. my favourite.

pg made great dinner, and we then took her new hookah up to the roof to smoke under the stars. it was the ideal end to a really tough week.

[continued...]

nerd-day

yesterday began with an email to a friend that leads me to assume that not everyone has a clue what nin is about. so here's the primer - not 100% accurate, but containing the general gist:

the first album trent reznor released (he [[kind of] ditched computer science to develop electronic music) is pretty hate machine

the second album, a lot rougher, is the downward spiral. it's a narrative album, and the main character slips to his destruction as the album progresses. the fifth track, closer, is possibly the only song about rape that makes most people want to sing along - disturbingly great track.

due to its popularity, meathead had a go at it. his version, closer to mario, is pretty off the wall and feels surprisingly right.

---
i was accused (by a fellow classmate) of not paying attention in the poetry class... i'm multi-tasking! i *think* i'm getting what's going on, at least :P

the phototaxis performed on campus after first, and their final song brought in the social-work students' rallying cries: yet another group of people important to the welfare of our society (like teachers) who won't earn more than the minimum wage. again: why do we have an education problem?

a two hour discussion and dissection of sir ronald harwood's collaboration: enlightening stuff! and good to feel a part of the MA programme :)

it was not the first time margaret thatcher's take on the parrot would be mentioned yesterday. brilliant! someone later linked me to some of graham chapman's funeral - touching.

wordsworth and i have begun putting together an orientation course for next year's first years... it would be really sweet to be able to train some innocents...

as quickly as i could, i bussed to the screen-test for beauty and the geek. after awkwardly finding the desk, signing away my rights and filling out the "how mainstream are you?" questionnaire,
i was invited in for the test. a fairly comfortable chat later - although i was uncomfortable answering questions concerning pg, i hadn't signed away *her* rights - and i was told "you're not a geek, dude".

the nerve! i was offended, and told her as much. i explained the difference between a geek and a nerd (firmly placing myself in the nerd camp for a moment), and that no, i hadn't actually watched any of the series or perhaps i would've known that, at least what i gleaned from her description, they're not interested in geeks or nerds but rather in people on the autistic spectrum.

creepy. a co-worker, and later pg, duly informed me that i don't want to participate on reality shows in general, and on that one in particular. i dunno... i thought it would be good for a laugh :P

i went to work, spending most of my hours back-seat driving xml verification. thrilling. then i bussed straight to pg's and we finished watching the seventh seal: fascinating film!

i got an early night, but woke up to take care of all the little things i missed yesterday and to catch up on the readings... here we go!

---
israel is not always to blame [EDIT: link broken]. in fact, it usually isn't to blame. (in case you missed it, because it didn't make international headlines, we had another event [EDIT: link broken] this week)
it's distressing to consider just how influential global media is, and just how selective it is. so many years pleading "poor palestinians", the chances of them suddenly turning around and saying "oops! we were wrong all along!" is about the same as the american government suddenly ending the war on drugs.

undead cash-centric

i met wr outside the main library, introduced him to the noise room and we spent most of the hour on ideation. then a little while on failed research before we had to go our separate ways. he has given me good food for thought, at least.

on the way into class, i spoke to the flash boss and we agreed that we'd meet between 1pm and 1.30 so i could drop off the tax document. he promised he'd be available and, just in case, gave me a phone number to call.

the poetry lesson was great fun, in particular when studying adelaide crapsey. last semester we learned to the dead in the graveyard underneath my window, and today we studied song. once i put the following (blacked-out) idea into your head, that she's making the shroud because she wants to be the best-dressed zombie, try to read the former without seeing what i saw. when i shared with the professor, she looked at me oddly for a moment and then burst into laughter :)

after desperately declaring bankruptcy to yogi over the phone (his father's out the country, so if i *am* working for them then i need to know how much and when i'm being paid), i had lunch with wordsworth and we discussed my seminar topic. he also had interesting things to say.

on the way off campus a girl wearing a greenpeace shirt asked if she could have a moment, and i told her that she was welcome to follow me to my bus stop.
"where're you from? you have an accent."
"south africa"
"oh! it is you!"
she raised her sunglasses, and became the girl from the specialist encounter. she informed me that she had, in fact, checked out the disturbing things i'd told her, and found me to be correct. we discussed nuclear power and left / right polarization of environmental issues (i hate it when political leanings interfere with universals), and then she surprised me again when the bus came by not only remembering my name, but knowing my surname too. what gives?!

---on the way to my once-upon-a-time primary base to meet with the flash boss, i called his phone. unreachable. i called the other number, and left a message with the secretary. when i arrived, i tried calling again, but his phone was still unreachable. i perched myself on a wall, and spent the next half an hour alternating between reading, calling his cellphone, or calling the other number. the secretary wasn't answering any more, and i was transported back to six years of frustration caused by military secretaries simply ignoring calls.

that's one of the reasons it's always better to do stuff in person. but there i was, no authorization (nor desire) to entire the base, and looking so suspicious that one of the GSS dudes approached and began an interrogation. producing my high-enough ranking reserve duty card wasn't enough, i had to prove knowledge of the base to push him to friendly mode.

all that, for nothing. i left for my interview in a foul mood.

---my mood was improved somewhat when the direction ru55 gave me took me to a building called camera obscura, but i then discovered that i was on the wrong street :P

did the interview go well? the guy seemed satisfied, the work looks really cool, and i felt... a fit. i would love to work with these guys. and i have relevant experience up the wazoo :)

---i headed to care to have my eyes tested for laser surgery. i had no idea what to expect, but the first battery of tests was funky as hell. lots of pretty swirling colours, retinal-scanner-style wiping, and that strange, amusing machine that tests both your eye-pressure and your courage simultaneously.

the opthalmologist who did all the differential testing shocked me with the results: i can't believe how awful my left eye has become. he put drops in my eyes and told me they'd make my vision blurry, but nothing happened and i sat outside reading until they called me.

just prior to them calling me something happened. it was barely perceptible, but suddenly i was having trouble with the words on the page and i had to hold my iphone at a strange angle to be able to follow the line. when i mentioned this to the doctor, he told me that when he was done i could look at myself in the mirror - so *that's* why the experience seemed familiar! my pupils were completely dilated :P

it appears that i'm an ideal candidate for laser treatment (gosh, i'll bet they say that to all the guys) and it would totally sort me out. the only problem is that it would sort me out in another sense as well: NIS 7800 after the NIS 1000 student discount? damn.
that seems an awful lot for bothering them for thirty seconds.

---work: i did a good night's work. as i said to one of the managers on the way home - i shouldn't be working so well for such a small amount of money; my conscience is screwing me over in the grand scheme of things. [see previous post]

i was horrified to discover that -someone's screw-up (and mine, that i didn't perform a code-review) was way worse than i originally thought. on sunday we have to rewrite what he did completely, and there's me at 10pm sending off reprimanding emails to him and tactful emails to the boss to explain without getting the guy into shit for the damage his lack of experience and guidance caused.

...

good news, good news, bad news. the good news is that my poetry paper scored me a 99! the other good news is that i scored a 92 for the narrative analysis course... the bad news is that it's a six point drop from what i understood was my exam score. it's not clear if my mark was penalized; but if it was there's nobody who won't stand for my having been the most active and vocal member of the class. and i suffered every - single - class. wordsworth called me up devastated, but there's not much i can do short of a few inane condolences. i hope he doesn't have to redo the course...

i got home, put a load in the washing machine and headed to pg's, who's already complaining about barely seeing me.

*sigh*

i need a cash infusion, a decent job, and for the world to right itself without my intervention for a while.