too much of a good thing

i'm tired to the point of hallucinating and i'm certain i'll pass out if i don't get to bed soon, but it's about 9pm and i'm expecting a call anytime soon to tell me that i can upload my work... a problem with the system earlier has made us think it's unreliable so i can't put code into production from home without someone in the office just in case :S

---i handled the reveal really, really badly. the march hare will happily advise and he doesn't not believe me, but i wasn't academic about it and i served as an example of "how not to" for the rest of the class :/

my mother called me up because she was concerned that my recent posts, coupled with my being ordained, are an indication of an unsound mind.

in my defense, she's not familiar with the sonnets but now knows as much as she can without actually reading them, and she understands why i'm so excited. and is disappointed with me for revealing my discovery at all! but, fair's fair, shakespeare told me to.

i'll write up a real article that doesn't just make wild-sounding statements, and as soon as it's out there academically i'll expound all here too. that shouldn't take as long as any other planned work of mine, because this is going to be my seminar paper this year and we have a very definite deadline.

---i met with the plumber at my apartment, who quickly made me unhappy by informing me that the prep work for the roof replacement is big work and quite costly. *sigh*

i thought i'd nap a bit then go to work, but upon getting up off the couch i was convinced that leaving the apartment in my present state would be a bad idea.

right - department website / work / video editing (don't ask) then bed. i don't give a damn about the french class in the morning, even though the test's on sunday and i don't have a good feeling about it.

touch of a ghost

i thought i was going to get some rest, but i still couldn't sleep. that was two hours ago, and since then i have... i can't say what i've gone through without, umm, ruining the surprise. but this has been without a doubt the most magical moment of my existence. perhaps every thing that has gone before was mere forerunner to this: i have communed with the dead. and i can share this experience.

manic buzz

i'm physically abuzz with adrenaline; it's a long-running ecstasy and i haven't yet had an opportunity to meet with my advisor (he wasn't on campus today)... i'm about to introduce him to the man he's been studying for quite a while now.

i keep thinking that it's absurd that nobody's stumbled upon this until now, and if i didn't know that the idea of studying contemporary culture only really began in the early 1900s, i'd think i was going insane. but cognitive contamination is a powerful thing, and all it takes is one presumptuous idiot to make a mistake early on for everyone else to pick up on and carry.

i retract yesterday's comment about his bravery. not that it didn't require bravery of a sort, but he really was compelled to publish his sonnets. and talk of him about town demanded that he dedicate it the way he did.

shit. i'm communing with the dead, here. this is - i feel like i'm living in a movie, as the israeli expression goes.

it was way after 5am that i finally managed to shut down, having spent the intervening time (after my last post) pouring through the first third of the sonnets again just to double, triple, quadruple-check that i hadn't made some phenomenal mistake. but each pass has only reinforced my sense of certainty.

---
after two hours in bed, i snoozed my alarm for about half an hour, zombie'd myself out of bed and was almost overtaken by time as i hurried (in slow motion, apparently) to leave the apartment on time. french simple future tense: not so bad. are we ready for an exam? not a damn.

i sped through to see if my advisor was in, and walked off campus with my heart pounding (thank you, fifth floor up the stairs) and my brain reeling. then i magically arrived at work, had time breeze past me there, too (although more productively), and returned to campus for our last lesson on postmodernism.

it was a great class, and began with our professor thanking me for presenting her with in praise of doubt and advising everyone else to read it too. we spent the class munching farewell cookies and summarizing everything we've learned and then it was over.

i really enjoyed that course.

i went past my old office, but it was locked and the alarm was going off so i decided not to get involved. i waited a long while at the bus stop, had a physical brush with a really rude girl (she was in enough of a hurry to storm past me, violently, onto an empty bus. i didn't back down, then felt bad because i'm bigger than her even if she is a total asshole) that annoyed me for most of the ride, then arrived home in time for spicy chinese take-out and...

... i dunno. i need to get some work done, and i'm pretty certain i should get to bed soon.

too much over the moon

i can't sleep. not a wit. i feel like an archeologist who's dug up some famous, sought-after treasure and is about to become rich beyond his wildest dreams. i feel like the first (as far as i know, of course) to actually have an inkling of who this great man was, and through his works still is.

i'm more in awe of the fact that he had the stones to publish the sonnets. i wonder if they were appreciated properly at the time?

hopefully my professor will be able to meet with me today. this sensation is far too overwhelming to keep it locked up.

the selfish meme

i stupidly opened my mouth in front of our whole class last week regarding the idea that is now the kernel of the book i'm writing, and i regretted it the second i realized how marketable it is.

i'm usually pretty free with my ideas.

now, in light of that experience, i'm concerned about approaching the march hare with this new one in case he does me out of it. that's just silly, and i'm going to tell him everything, but dammit! this sensation of "mine-ness" exists!

the more i've thought about it (included a review of something i wasn't sure of in the beginning), the more certain i am - i know who W.H. is. and i understand clearly sonnets that up until now have been really opaque.

william shakespeare - you really are too smart for your own damn good.

---
so - still completely over the moon about this. i've also solved an annoying problem with work, and am ready to report my hours and go to bed.

poor bill

i am feeling wired and inspired, because i just discovered something absolutely incredible while preparing for my final assignment in our sonnets course. i'm not going to go into detail, because there might be fame and fortune in keeping it on the down-low (that's the second time in a week - awesome!), but i can say with certainty that shakespeare was not gay.

i'm not saying that being gay is a bad thing, only that poor old shakespeare's sonnets have been completely misunderstood for a very long time and i aim to show that they are far less ambiguous and mysterious, and far more intimate, than we've suspected.

---i've just returned from a meeting with our student rep - there were three of us altogether, out of five departments, and i was the only one who'd done my homework and had a list of issues that need dealing with.

it looks like all of the issues i raised are shared throughout our side of the faculty, so we're about to start pushing :)

yesterday:

i slept almost until noon [does that seem excessive?] and around 2pm sorter and -someone arrived for a really good meeting! i'm quite amped, because we now have an idea that really is special and could change the way we watch videos online ^_^

after dinner i was exhausted, but we watched the original a nightmare on elm street. some of it was kinda scary, but what ruined it was the early 80s lack of understanding vis-a-vis the function of dreams.

i slept like a baby.

saturday:

i spent a lot of time staring at the mock french exam and thinking that we have not been prepared for something so complex. i'm not happy with it at all :(

i'm on a total high from these sonnets. at least i know i definitely have something to write for the final paper that's due in a week =D

executive discount order form

harvard business review, your special offers are unappreciated.

i was about to send an email to about ten of the kind-of-could-be-the-right-one email addresses i managed to find on the hbr.org website that looked as follows:

Hi there

I'm contacting you in utter vexation and desperation. Your company website has made it impossible to figure out who precisely I should be addressing this to, and there is no "unsubscribe me" functionality available anywhere online.

I am unable to discover a way to stop receiving offers from Harvard Business Review in my (physical) mailbox.

I do not want to pay more postage to send you back another physical form with a tick in the checkbox to unsubscribe me because apparently it isn't enough to stop bits of dead trees finding their way back to me.

Could you please assist me in this matter? In addition to annoying me with spam, I feel like you're destroying forests in the names of your already paying customers. If this continues, I will not be renewing and I will attempt to find resolution in a less polite manner. Somehow. Your company has me at wits' end.

Thank you, please show mercy,

<total waste>
Tel Aviv, Israel

PS. The return envelope is addressed to the Netherlands, but I couldn't find any Netherlands contacts on the site.


On Sun, Oct 9, 2011 at 1:52 PM, <total waste> wrote:
Hi

I keep receiving "special offers" from Harvard Business Review for other subscriptions, and I'm really not interested. Please stop spamming me. If there are any details you need in order to stop these offers from arriving on my doorstep, I will be only to happy to provide them.

Thank you,

<total waste>
Tel Aviv, Israel


and then, like a massive, shiny, outstretched arm breaking through the storm clouds, i found a chat link tucked away on their login page.

Please wait while we find an agent to assist you...
All agents are currently busy. Please stand by.
An agent will be with you in a moment. Thank you for your patience.
You have been connected to <helpful support person>.
<helpful support person>: Thank you for contacting Harvard Business Publishing. How may I help you?
<total waste>: hi there
i'm absolutely at my wits' end, vexed and desperate.
i cannot find a way to unsubscribe online from the special offers that keep arriving in my mailbox
There's a form for reply, and I'm supposed to tick the checkbox and mission off to the post office and pay postage so that your company will stop spamming me?!
I'm so sorry for the trouble. I can contact our marketing department and make sure they get everything removed.
That's a little unfair, and very frustrating. This is not the first time I've tried to contact HBR, but apparently emails are disregarded over there.
Thank you
Are you getting both emails and physical mail? Or is just postal mail that is coming?
And please - pretty please - if you could ask them to make it easier to get in touch online
It's just postal mail - but I don't want email offers either. I have a subscription and I'm happy with it
I'll definitely do that -- I've been working on a lot of requests to opt-out this week and it's become clear that we could use an easier process!
It seems absolutely ridiculous that there's no "unsubscribe me" from the HBR or the Wired sites.
Thank you - you have all my details in front of you, I assume?
I have your email address and phone -- if you can bear with me one moment, let me see if I can pull up your subscription and address information.
Did you happen to have any of the mailings with you right now?
I ask because there's a code that can help our marketers confirm which mailing list you're on, so they can more easily remove you.
Thank you - you're doing a good job of rescuing me from website hell. Yes,the offer is in front of me
I'm glad I could help! Let me find an example of the code we're looking for.
Do you see a code that looks something like this?
XXXXXXXXXX XXXXXXX XXXXX
If so, we would be interested in that last five digit code.
I have a Wired subscription, so for me it should end in XXXXX?
That sounds like the right one -- does that appear after the other two codes? If so, I'll send that along with your details.
XXXXXXXXXX XXXXXXX XXXXX
That's perfect, thank you. I will send that along to our marketing team and let them know you wish to be removed from special offers.
I know they plan their mailings about two weeks in advance, so I would say by mid-February you will stop seeing mailings.
If it's okay with you, I will share this conversation with them so they have it as a reference. If you have any future questions or continue to see any special offers, you can refer to this conversation if you chat with us again.
Fantastic! And please pass along my suggestion that they add the "unsubscribe" checkbox from the physical form to the virtual one at www.success.hbr.org
I'm more than happy for you to share it - I was tearing hair out for about fifteen minutes before finding this chat
I'm so sorry for the trouble. I will definitely pass on your suggestion.
Is there anything further that I can help you with?
No, that's about it. Thank you so much!

so you see: i CAN uses capitals when i need to.

pre-fried neuron steak

if you don't know what you're doing, frying a steak in a pan can be daunting. it's made even worse when there are two steaks at the same time... that shit's expensive.

what made it even worse is that i got so caught up in the "simple" instructions that i found online, that i ended up with a messy kitchen counter and two weird-looking, mostly raw flesh.

and i felt really, really bad about the whole experience.

i took one bite, and spat rather than swallowed. it was that bad. and i saw myself throwing out these two previously good-looking pieces into the trash, and the idea did not appeal to me in the slightest.

i had nothing to lose, so i reheated the frying pan, added more margerine, and proceeded to do everything the internet had told me not to do. i left them longer and i flattened them shamelessly with my spatula. i'd seasoned them since removing them the first time, and was now cooking against the explicit instructions of the butcher.

and the smell... improved. and they began to look good. and after two to two-and-a-half minutes, instead of one-to-one-and-a-half, i put them on a plate and i didn't leave them to "keep cooking".

the one i consumed tasted great and it was done to almost-perfection (i like my steaks rare, and this was just past medium-rare). the other one is now cooling down in preparation for refridgeration, so i know that tomorrow's breakfast will be a good one.

on the whole, the story turned from a tragedy to a comedy; pg can deride my efforts as much as she likes (and she's right, i really did make some remarkably stupid decisions and i was an idiot for not asking her for help), but the end results are just fine AND i think i've actually learned something about cooking.

almost examing

t'was a beautiful, springy day! in spite of some distractions, the actual classes were interesting. the orientation course was fun, if a little less productive than usual.

the anime session was great, except for the bit where two of the (now much larger) group didn't take to hunter x hunter at all. i had less of a problem with that than i did with the fact that while trying to explain the series the odd kid (the one who wanted to know what religion i subscribe to after i explained god; also the guy who accompanied me to the bus the other day) kept talking over me, and he's *LOUD* by default :S

chasing samurai champloo with a lecture on the differences between gone with the wind's original text and the movie (and their accuracies, inaccuracies and bi-directional influences) was really interesting, but relatively relaxing after having seen another episode of bobobo-bo bo-bobo :P

pg was not particularly impressed by my being ordained this morning. it did, however, lead us into interesting territory regarding common-law-spouseness.

... much later ...

i've just spent over two and a half hours going crazy because no matter how much i tested every element of the system, it all worked perfectly; but as a whole, nothing happened when it was running. and no errors were being reported, either. there's nothing worse than an exception NOT being thrown when it should be - the joys of working with windows services.

i'm totally stumped and stymied, because my error is in telling the compiler exactly what it needs to do with an unknown object. when did programming become not being specific?!

twice, i came close to firing off emails giving up and being at a complete loss; it was nothing less than shame that brought me to give it one more try each time.

*sigh*

sod this night. morning. whatever.

mysterious!

i have just been ordained!

you know, it suddenly occurred to me that if we got organized in this country, we could sort out the civil marriages issue fairly quickly. all we need is enough registered pastafarians to be taken seriously, and the current system will crumble under the weight of its own stupidity.

i'll happily marry believers of the invisible pink unicorn, too. or atheists, even.

first lines

i don't know how i manage to get up so soon after going to bed, but i do. i barely left the apartment on time, and arrived in class a few minutes late. i'm not sure if it was the coffee, the early morning exhaustion, or the class topic into and out of which i floated at random - perhaps it was a combination of it all - but i churned out a solid starting outline for this book that i now feel welling up inside of me, churning and vibrating in its excitement to get out.

i have something to say, i can back it up academically, i know how to express it in an interesting way, and i already have the support of a professor i admire. i spoke to her about it at the end of the day, thanking her for the mixed blessing; it's really important, but what about all the other stuff i'm doing?!

once first class was over i headed to work, with sorter catching me just in time to turn around and head back home. i dropped off my sweater (it was nice and warm today) and met up with sorter and the roofer to go over the options - i'm totally satisfied (so far as impressions go *knocks wood*) and he should be getting the job done within the next two weeks.

hooray!

sorter gave me a ride to work, and i crammed in as much as i could but i had to run out unfinished :(

my presentation was supposed to take ten minutes, and i ended up with twenty and the feeling that i'd gotten it right. i'd picked up on the interesting stuff the professor wanted to discuss and actually enjoyed class participation, which is fairly unusual :D

i came home, worked, ate, worked some more, and now i'm beyond tired and ready to crash.

...

i'm usually exhausted, but every now and then i have these manic periods that lead me to wonder: perhaps i do have a problem, but my refusal to turn it down a notch when i feel shitty is the equivalent of self-medication?

---
thought for the day brought to you by tim minchin: storm, the animated movie. this is an absolutely superb piece. as a cross between a hippie literature student and a pastafarian science fan, i wholly endorse this video and humbly request that you pass it along.

argu-mental

french class: not so bad.

lunch: a bit too political, and the liver was so bad that we had to wait in the queue all over again to change it.

to the bus: accompanied by a first year, so unable to put on headphones to block out the world. then the sun came out. the extra layers quickly became a difficult burden, but the glimpse of sunshine and natural warmth made it lighter :)

work: finally, the inevitable reorganization took place. unfortunately, my project management got hit too (coincidence, as a matter of fact), but we seem to be getting sorted out. what hasn't been sorted out yet, however, is my payment... it's supposed to have been processed by the freelancer company, and i'm not even sure if it's left my employer yet :S

other work: over. as in, we couldn't do anything more if we wanted to, not even documentation. so i tidied up my account and was getting ready to format when i discovered that there's a good chance i'll be able to take my fancy-schmancy equipment home with me! that would be really neat, i could use the upgrade :P

i had a chat with sorter over his project, and by the time we were done brainstorming we were both excited - we're having a meeting on friday, and i think we've figured out what will make this thing great ^_^

hurrying home, hurriedly eating dinner, hurrying to the cinema...

what kind of asshole comes to the cinema when they're sick and coughing uncontrollably??? to make it worse, one of the three that we had to suffer was sitting right behind me, and his mother never taught him to cover his mouth. i so wanted to put a foot in it! if i get sick, i'll know exactly who to blame and it won't help me in the slightest :(

that notwithstanding, i thoroughly enjoyed the new sherlock holmes. hah! over the top, spectacular, intriguing, and not quite as i'd envision him, but it totally doesn't matter.

it was warm coming home - weird. the ice cream was a good idea, arguing politics wasn't.

and now... work. and presentation prep. perhaps a little sleep, even...

shit, it's late. the so-manyeth time.

another very late night. just over four hours of sleep, then about four hours of class, about five of work, and then i scrambled home to discover that today was monday, not tuesday. instead of going rollerblading, i watched another episode of fry's planet word* and sorted out my presentation notes for wednesday's class.

* he doesn't really give any of the locals a chance to teach him anything. and where does he find these people? it's interesting nonetheless, but there's definitely room for improvement.

---
thought for the day (addressed to my mother, with specifics and personal bits cut out):

south africa is a wonderful country and all, but it's already too crazy and it doesn't have a very rosy future. physical distance is not the only distance that matters. i know this is a difficult, traumatic, cognitive dissonance inducing thing to ask. i know it's going to irritate you that i keep harping on about it, because that's what unpleasant reminders do. please don't force me to keep bringing it up - you really need to accept that our home and baseline really isn't a home and baseline any more. it's time to pack up our family history and heritage and get the hell out before south africa does for the whites what nazi germany did for the jews.

digitize. box. whatever. they're just memories. beautiful, meaningful memories, but just memories. they'll go with you wherever you end up.

i know that to anywhere will be a difficult move, but not moving is just as much of a struggle only without any potential benefits. and that's just plain silly.

i will always be a capetonian, i will always feel rooted at the tip of africa. the place and the people have shaped me, have given me as much hope as despair, and it will always feel good to go back and always be tough to leave. but it's not home anymore. it stopped being home the second people like nelson mandela became irrelevant and vengeance and tribal mentality took over.

back from a momentary lapse

the storm was so bad today that the canvas from our gazebo was ripped off. in retrospect, we really should have taken it down for the winter. what a waste!

my previous post pretty much summed up the day - it turned into an evening of shopping, dinner and reading twelfth night, which i'm fully aware that i read completely differently compared to my innocent, pre-course-in-shakespeare's-comedies self. i'm super-attuned to shakespeare's recycled materials, and super-attuned to obscure little phrases dropped every now and then that shift the nature of the play dramatically.

i still don't find myself laughing out loud, though. perhaps my sense of humour's broken.

i closed my giant volume of shakespeare's work and lay my head down on the couch where i was, with pg reading next to me and the air-conditioner finally warming me, and was just woken up a few minutes ago, dragged from the most oblivious, peaceful sleep back to reality, still half in a dream-trance and feeling more relaxed and rested than i have in a very long time.

ho hi. ho hi. go we work to off it's.

ready for the next step

the self-satisfaction, whether or not it lasts, was entirely worth hours of wet socks, a broken umbrella (which in grand total lasted almost half a day!), and most of the two hours between classes spent in competition with the elements and public transport.

i walked in, turned on my pc, built a new service and solved the problems with the old one, set them all running, locked my station, said goodbye and walked out with pride: all within twenty minutes and while simultaneously brushing people off as politely as i could.

---
that satisfaction was rounded off when we finally got to my turn (about three hours into the class) to discuss my paper proposal for the term.

"can we turn our referat into a seminar paper?" yes.
"and we can turn out seminar into a thesis?" yes.
then i proposed my idea, and i was told that it was such a good idea, and such a broad topic, that there's no way that either a referat or a seminar, or even a master's thesis, would be enough for such an endeavour. i have been advised to turn it into a non-fiction book, and been told that it would solve a problem that nobody else has an answer to yet.

same class, same sentiment. well, colour me pleased, i think i know what i'm going to do when i'm finished with academia ^_^

my beard's looking a bit grey

it's a frustrated night's sleep, fraught with stolen blankets and elbows, with a stiff neck and back on waking up and knowing that the week in all of its insanity has begun.
it's breakfast and a cup of tea before hitting the bed again, curling into foetal position to escape from the icy cold that's seeped inside.

it's the three alarm clocks that dragged me out of my quiet, blanket-smothered oblivion, and the hot chocolated coffee that threatens to cool while the sun shining outside shows me the leaves swinging in the freezing breeze that i'm going to have to face soon enough.

for the one class that i don't like, and must take regardless.

what did i?

what a disappointing weekend. i slept kinda late, tried to be productive (and mostly failed), went off in the cold to wait half an hour with wordsworth outside a miserable door only to be let in to argue bad poetry in an unconvincing manner without so much as a cup of coffee or a chair.

i think i'm out of the group.

i came home to eat in front of the end of the first season of buffy the vampire slayer, i've read a couple of pages for tomorrow's class and i'm beat so i'm going to bed.

tv snow. sans tv.

5am? oh. i don't feel tired, but i think i'm beginning to suffer visual hallucinations.

after performing my socialist student duties* we went to a delicious dinner with pg's family. i ate too much, and had a deep and meaningful discussion with her brother about religion and culture. it all started with why i don't want to work for the big aeronautics companies in israel, and ended with me discovering just how much i've learned since i resumed studying.

* scanning fifty pages of a book (fair use!). i've discovered that camscanner+'s ocr is absolutely useless. the scans themselves are fantastic, though, especially considering the low quality camera, and the only other issue encountered was that the file size is excessive (20mb for a pdf? sheesh.)

i've spent most of the past six hours working, finally getting the new service up and running in spite of being unable to resolve a logging issue. a few minutes ago i checked the logs of the working version just out of curiosity, only to discover that the service is functioning superbly but the target - an external, paid-for service - is down. figures :P

now that i've discovered something interesting enough to present about metropole, i believe i can go to bed.

head down

wow - i just put glow-in-the-dark yellow (english and hebrew) and pink (arabic) stickers on my keyboard to cover the faded ones, and it's totally defamiliarized. i've gotten so used to touch typing, but every now and again i recenter myself and BAM it hits me square between the... you know what i mean.

i got to bed late, and woke up early, and skeedaddled to dizengoff center to relinquish the router that hot so graciously loaned me. that was after i discovered that they'd been charging me for service since december, even though i'd called them to freeze the account and they'd (allegedly) acquiesced.

after almost a year of fighting with them about letting me cancel my subscription, i'm finally free* of their tyranny and abuse and i will never, ever be using their services again. the same goes for netvision - although i have yet to escape their clutches :(

* thanks to pg and her father. i don't know how they pulled it off, but i'm really grateful!

the rest of the day, up until now, i spent in bed dreaming really strange dreams** and feeling awful. i had a lot to do today. i still do. oddly enough, while i'm not quite back to feeling good (which i was this morning) i am feeling particularly bouncy with protoculture's dead or alive remix in the background.

** i found myself in the middle of the war, alone in the silence at the end of the bridge, in the middle of the straits and unsure of whether i was supposed to be building it up or tearing it down. blue skies and blue waters all around, the concrete reassuring underfoot and the heavy sense of the steel girders striking up into the heavens were overpoweringly real. i climbed over the edge and found the worker's entrance into the dark, dusty, hazardous tunnels below, clambering and climbing across and down in circles until reaching the broader, oddly habitable half-finished rest area between tunnels.
i don't know what the cooldrinks had to do with it all, only i'm certain that k-twang showing up had something to do with my decision last night to apply for jobs as far away from montreal as vancouver.

yawn

i'm too tired. i'm too tired to do the work i'm supposed to do, too. it's been a long, fascinating day.

i learned about wearing scarves (pg's is warm AND stylish), realized that my sister's getting married in a couple of weeks (and i won't be there), and i got a lead on a job overseas that looks interesting.

oh, and community does look like fun. and tiger and bunny was fun, as was... umm... the other anime that we watched.

gods - the five hours of work this evening wiped me out.