cyberpunk lunch

what tahoma and i mostly talked about yesterday was related to a video on a truly free society: for the first ten minutes i thought "this guy is SO right" and then switched off as he began describing how little he understands of human psychology. you cannot remove violence from people. but even if he's totally wrong in that respect, the state and statehood is and isn't everything he says it is and isn't.

1. right now, we make laws that define a "normality" that is completely off the mark for most people. criminality and insanity are defined in opposition to normality, so debate on the topic is limited to irrationality.

2. our education is both cause and feature of the current system. its industrialized nature ensures societal norms, and it is a major factor in the primary drive of our civilization being to work ourselves to death in order to consume things we don't need. i didn't make this up.

3. we have the technology that we need to self-govern, but we're terrified of choice so we put power in the hands of people who are stupid enough to believe that they can do a good job of it. an hierarchical power structure requires bureaucracy, which forms its own unrelated power structures that piggy-back on the others...

4. pharmaceutical and insurance companies interfere with free market forces in the medical industry: medical care should not be as expensive as it is. also, in the near future machines will be able to perform most of the important tasks and that means that costs should be driven down.

5. social security? the stupidest system ever invented. taking from the present working generation to support the previous is inspired in its reinforcement of my second point

6. no risk, no reward. that's an over-simplified expression that neatly covers all that's bad about letting a bunch of arrogant, conniving monkeys decide what risks we should and should't take.

this is not the first time i've said it: i'm an free-market anarchist and i believe that as cruel as our cyberpunk future would be it would also be entirely fair and far more sustainable for the species.

the strongest point is that we, as subjects to our current systems, cannot imagine solutions to all of the problems posed by a transition (we don't solve them now anyway) to a free civilization, but that's because we would need to break out of our cage in order to develop the tools and techniques that a new paradigm would demand.

the transition itself would be traumatizing, destructive and painful. but necessary for our survival. tahoma's question to me: would i personally want people close to me (or myself) to die in order to make that transition a reality?

of course not. but this is far more important than what i want personally.

the race to nowhere

i woke up at 4.30am just to check that my alarm clock was set for the correct 5.30am.
*yawns just thinking about this*
waking up at 5.30am turned out to be a mistake, too - it was too late and the pressure to get ready and equip myself was intense. of course, under pressure and half-asleep is a recipe for disaster: everything went pear-shaped :(

i slurped half a cup of coffee and raced to the starting point, and by the time i arrived i was already exhausted. half-marathon? 6.30am? on 4.5 hours' sleep?

it had never occured to me to wear a helmet, which is mandatory at this sort of event. a bunch of us turned out who'd forgotten / didn't care, and that's been cited as a major cause in what appears to be the city council's decision to cancel inline skating next year :(

those of us sans helmet began in the middle of the pack, crouching to get by the guards. unfortunately, rollerblading awkwardly bent over put me on bad form even when i straightened up and it took me more than half the marathon to realize that i was being completely inefficient: by that time, it was far too late.
it didn't help none that i hadn't thought to pack an energy bar, and my blood pressure dropped during the first stretch. at least it wasn't drastic enough to pass me out of the race, but it made for an exceptionally uncomfortable 21km, in addition to the bad form and the bitter wind being against us for a lot of it.

i was in such bad shape that at some point i hallicinated that one of the guys holding out water was offering yoghurt, and i thought "wow! what a great idea!" before expending excess energy in circling back to be tremendously disappointed. it was only a half a minute later that i realized what utter nonsense i'd imagined.

[i just received my results: my place was pretty close to the middle, with an average of 20kph. i could have done better.]

i had breakfast with pg's parents (her mom came in second place!), and we returned to our neighbourhood together. i was going to shower and go straight back to bed, but tahoma called while i was stretching and i decided that a cup of coffee wasn't impossible.

we had a fun debate in the sun, which i chased with a meander through bicycle-only tel aviv (they just did it for the day, but it was peaceful and comforting) on my way home for a nap. the nap didn't work out, and pg arrived home from her adventure down south so we went out for a great lunch and returned for a proper sleep.

we crashed until dinner time, joining her family for a big dinner. i decided that a movie was in order, and dragged pg along on a mission of spontaneity: we had no idea what was playing. pg got to choose, and she went with mirror, mirror.

what a great film! there were a couple of things i didn't appreciate - but i won't spoil them - and the beginning was a bit awkward, but overall it's entertaining, witty, and aesthetically very pleasing.

we ran into a bunch of mongoose's friends on the walk home, which was a bit awkward. the more i think about it, the more offended i am by him.

...

the long day of nothing (the marathon seems a separate date) was followed by a good night's sleep. i've done a couple of chores, greatly reduced the size of my todo list and i'm now ready for a pre-wall climbing lunch and a bit of work before i go.

youtube ads: you're doing it (half) wrong!

as much as i appreciate the need for advertising, forcing users to watch an ad before seeing the video they're interested in is primitive at best. at the very least give us the option of paying the ads away!

micropayments, pre-paid, flat fee: these are all ubiquitous methods and there's no longer justification for not employing them. if i'm going to be forced to see an advertisement, at least give me the satisfaction that i'm "saving" money. you need money to support youtube? let me give it to you and enjoy the experience without promotional peacockery.

please - these ads ruin the experience.

hero to zero

i woke up this morning with an overwhelming sense of well-being... i've been like this for a couple of days now, does it mean that i'm somewhat healthy?

thought for the morning: the only problem with cake and wine in the first class is that the next part of the day seems a bit rubbish by comparison :)

i wasn't too long in the office, and for what feels like the first time in ages, something that i'd developed and tested actually ran properly when put into production. scr would have to install my newly created distributed service on multiple machines without me... i wondered how that would go.

i hit early rush hour on my way to campus, and that kinda sucked because i really wanted to read more wired. now that i'm finally back into it. what i couldn't stop staring at instead were the signs on the backs of the seats: "stressed at work? try our tranquilizers!"

because if your work is stressful, the problem is OBVIOUSLY you!

anime afternoon: too much shouting, a weird moment of "hey! he's sleeping!" when i nodded off during appleseed (which is brilliant, btw), bad cookies, racism (the culprit did promise to stop, after realizing that i really was offended by his use of the word "nigger"), and a harsh reminder that the middle east is possessed of a culture of clapping (in delight, along to music, whatever). i've said it before, and i'll say it again, clapping is *only* acceptable when applauding a live performance of some sort.

the anime itself made up for all that, and the breathtaking sunset that i witnessed on my way out felt like a pat on the head from the universe for having gotten through such a long week.

that sensation might have been contributed to by scr calling me up to tell me that something was wrong with an installation: "wtf? oh - everything's working fine. cheers."

i ran into eidetic and the chemist waiting for the bus, and we met up with botchman for dinner: it was fun, but i had plans afterwards that needed cancelling because i suddenly realized that the marathon's tomorrow and i was super-tired.

before catching some z's, i learned that my shakespeare paper has been returned to the secretariat already. dum - dum - DUMMM...

i passed out, disturbed briefly by a call from pg to say goodnight and remind me to rotate my wheels (damn - i'll do that now), and an hour later i got up and prayed that in a reasonable amount of time we'd find the weird bug the boss had described earlier.

thanks to all powers that be, i did find the bugs. and *knocks wood* (i do that a lot lately) everything appears to be functional.

in addition to having to wake up at 5.30 tomorrow morning, israeli clocks move forward an hour tonight so effectively i have to be up in 4.5 hours. good grief.

one burning man

not me, actually - one of my coworkers appears to have an anger management problem and instead of asking for help, he dug himself a hole that eventually got so deep that even though i could help him out, he was too busy raging about it to notice the escape route. i actually had to invest time in calming him down in order to extract the data i needed to solve the problem.

*sigh*

it was a long day packed into few hours, with yet another delicate job to be done under crazy pressure... i've just completed and tested the tough part, and tomorrow when i get in i'll be magically finishing the rest, performing a migration to the cloud, solving another set of unrelated issues that we seem to be having, and be back on campus three hours later.

no problem.

i wonder: am being paid enough to be doing the work of three people? i suppose that as long as i don't let the stress get to me personally, it's not really my problem.

...

aside from consuming a lot of junk food, this evening was fun: the creative writing workshop was entertaining as usual, and watching les 12 travaux d'astérix was probably more helpful than the others because the subtitles were delayed so much :P

strange day

backwards!

1. just read a friend's (doctoral student) criticism of my shakespeare paper, and i'm left with a slightly bruised ego and a prayer that i can easily reconcile his criticism with my advisor's...

2. i've just spent the morning in bed, even though i was awake early enough to get up and get stuff done. i did get up, in fact, but then decided that an opportunity to simply do nothing for a while couldn't be missed.

3. i passed out on the couch reading the comic version of othello, pg waking me after a couple of hours of angel interfering with my dreams.

4. leaving work at 11pm after a twelve hour stretch of fire-fighting with a single half an hour break for dinner and no coffee: soul-crushing. but for some reason, i was more wired than tired.

5. ordering a giant americano and then realizing that i didn't particularly want coffee in the first place. wr let me down, we'd arranged to meet on his break and he didn't take one because the big bosses of another company were in the area. i fail to see a logical connection. i used the time to work on my fan fiction short story, doing some exciting fact-finding...

6. french class. early. i was a bit out-of-sorts, but it was alright nonetheless.

---nutritional info for the day:

broccoli and cancer - and not EVERYTHING needs to be raw (although broccoli does)

no such thing as low fat?? say it ain't so!

egg measurements - i'm with her.

hah! i just read the alt text for http://xkcd.com/1028/. xkcd: always right.

good. good good.

good morning. good day. good readings (stanza). good half-marathon inline-skating prep. check.

now for waking up stupidly early in the morning to do french homework.

---
coming into campus from the other side gives fresh perspective. i've begun writing a short story which i'm quite excited about. work was fun enough to make up for yesterday, even if i got stuck there half an hour after i needed to leave. dinner was a surprise - it turned out to be happy hour snacks. the readings were almost all great.

eye water

*releases inner bitch* co-conspirator's on the dean's roll?! damn. someone's missing something here.

---
ye gods, early mornings suck. but the french has become kinda-alright. it was the second class, *still* lacan in spite of it not being about him, that was tough... at least i used the opportunity to pound out some thoughts on free will as requested by the woman who interviewed me yesterday:

free will is a paradox. it's not that a person has no choices, but the choices that a person makes are a function of that person's experience (read: culture). the human mind begins in a form that is essentially tabula rasa - not precisely empty, but in terms of what differentiates humans we all begin on a similar baseline position and from there each experience, and each reflection upon that experience (feedback loops), affects our configuration and directs our choices. in that sense we are just like computers: although everyone begins with the same operating system, our installation of applications (skills) and acquisition of data (knowledge) turn each of us into an entirely unique entity.

although our choices have been pre-programmed, as it were, this does not remove one's responsibility for one's actions. it is the use of the term "free will" that forms the illusion that such a thing exists and is inherent to the human experience: but even though there is no free will in the sense in which we use the term, that does not mean that there is no such thing as choice. each choice is made by an entity determining whether

a) for a "morally negative" act, acquiescing to his desire is worth the penalty of being caught doing so

b) for a "morally positive" act, whether the prize desired is worth the effort it demands.

to carry that idea back to notions of society and morality:

if an entity poses a danger of any kind to a society, then society is obliged to defend itself by removal of this threat. whether that defence is to remove the entity, or to forcibly change that entity, is a choice. if that choice is to force change, there is no definitive method of determining success. if we send a criminal to prison, and he claims to have found religion (or some other moral framework) and accepted society's behavioural requirements, we have no machine that can inform us of the verity of these claims. all we can do is allow him back into society, and punish him again if he returns to a life of crime.
that's if we can catch him, of course.

the problem with a legal society is that one is only punished if one is caught, and therefore morality has come to be defined in terms of one's skills vis-a-vis keeping one's bad behaviour hidden from the police. as it is, a criminal is someone who behaves in a way that at some point was defined as socially unacceptable in spite of the fact that what is socially acceptable is entirely dynamic and in constant flux. insanity is defined in a similar manner: someone who is insane is outside of the norm. considering the fact that there is no way to accomodate a definition of "normal", even internally, being insane is therefore the norm and to be a criminal is to be insane, and so society has no clear method of defending itself from itself and there can be no claims to an absolute morality. this does not preclude the need for morality, however.

for reference: william james - the stream of consciousness (1892), terry pratchett - the science of discworld part ii, james hillman - re-visioning psychology, berger and zijderveld - in praise of doubt - those all happen to be things i consider to be important and entertaining reading in any respect :)

aaaaaand back to work.

including lunch with the office doofus; he has this really annoying habit of categorizing everyone based on random observation. for example, today he tried to determine if i'm a vegan because i eat salad. ugh :S

it was a long day, issue followed issue, and it ended with me heading off to the boss to say goodbye and getting stuck in his office for forty five minutes explaining to him that the reason for me making a mistake with the business logic is because i'm not part of the business processes. i think he was immensely disappointed, but he seemed to get what i was saying and tomorrow we'll begin hunting meaningful statistics as opposed to performing heavy guessing.

between dinner and getting a few important bits of work done, scrapper and i had a back-and-forth on two ideas we'd traded on friday: he's turned a poem of mine into a musical moment, and performed a good chunk of a dark cover that struck me by way of random inspiration particle a couple of weeks ago. very cool.

---
i gave $4.1 on captain wossname's behalf: charity water - it's for his birthday! good man, that. better than me, at least.

these are the sounds of "i feel old". have fun.

terence mckenna
take back your mind is sweet, followed by calling a spade a utility for digging in the dirt as opposed to a black inverted heart-shaped figure

lowered gear

in the cartoon, an israeli politician and an iranian politician stand behind opposing podiums with empty, missile-shaped speech bubbles above their heads; their index fingers raised, their eyes closed and their teeth bared while shouting into their microphones. below them, holes have been cut into the podiums and hands reach out from either side to trade red roses.

i find this image very touching. a less-touching observation was made, though:
the image compares between the leaders of iran that call for erasing the zionist entity from the map of the world and actively support organizations aiming at liberating palestine from this "temporary" regime by deliberate murdering civilians, and the leaders of israel whose only narrative is protecting the existence of the state of israel by destroying iran's nuclear facilities. this comparison is outrageous, false, and is nothing but anti-israeli propaganda.

while i agree that a comparison of the speech bubbles does render this off the mark, that is not the point of the cartoon. the focus of the image has to do with war rhetoric vs the people's wishes, and the final statement "and is nothing but" is not valid. wouldn't it be nice if we could all just get along?

it's a nice idea, and worth nothing more nor nothing less. i've read the comments, and it seems that some people are into it and some aren't. and that doesn't make it any less of a good idea.

do i think it'll make a difference? not really. is the israeli war rhetoric the same as the iranian? not even a little bit.

---thursday:

the day arrived. i got up early (i'm still sore at having gotten used to the times), and spent two hours on my paper. i arrived at the poetry conference just as it was beginning, and the first couple of hours were mostly very interesting. the head of our department gave the opening speech, as usual, and i have to say that i was blown away by its poetic nature - the conference title was "poetry in unexpected places", and to hear it in a description of a clinical case was too meta to go unrepeated:

a young woman in an institute for psychotic adults repeatedly takes slices of bread out of her bag, carefully peels them, bites holes into them; periodically, she goes for walks in the institute in which she occasionally touches the walls and mounts the rims of sidewalks, tracing circuits around an emptiness she makes emerge, an emptiness that is the rudiment of signification that for her is never guaranteed but must always be made, poeien, anew. poetry addressed to no-one, in a language, if it is a language, absolute in its singularity. a language for which there is no dictionary, no treasury of signifiers. and yet creating a hole in the real that makes the dwelling of this subject in this world, on this earth, possible.
- professor shirley sharon-zisser

the first session ended with a discussion with one of my fellow students - she's incredibly sensitive (for better and for worse), and lacking in self-confidence for the simple reason that she, like most students, doesn't understand what the academic institution is all about. what i explained to her was then re-explained to me on another level: on my way from that chat to continue working on my paper, i ran into another fellow student who told me that it is possible to resubmit a paper once it's been returned. amazed, and especially hopeful in light of last week's paper being a disaster, i send last week's paper's professor an email asking her if this was the case:

that's the whole point of a graduate seminar - to prepare you for the academy where revision and resubmission are normal.

well, i'll be.

aside from a side-quest to pick up something for a friend of mine, i spent the following three hours working really hard and finishing my paper. my original plan was to cut it down to size - a "referat" submission is supposed to be 10-15 pages, and a seminar paper 15-25 - and then restore the cut elements for the seminar submission due in a month and a half's time.

hah! shortening a paper. that's *never* possible. so i emailed it to the lecturer, printed it out, handed it in to the secretary, and walked outside:

the perfect moment
i step outside
it's quiet, with a light breeze to round of the edges of the suns rays
and my heart quivers
bursting with uncontainable excitement
nervousness
after releasing my son into the wild
sending him off, in the hope that he is ready to do me proud

yes, i know, it's a crappy poem, but that moment was as sweet as all that. i hadn't realized just how much that paper meant to me; it's the first step towards doing my duty to shakespeare, the most innocent and mind-bogglingly intense poet / playwright ever. now that it's all written down and formalized, i've gotten in touch with airplane in the hope that we can turn this into a graphic novel... i already have some wicked ideas ;)

---after a cup of coffee with the friend i'd run the errand for, who made an interested point about most of us being incapable of stopping and reflecting, we went to the anime screening. romeo x juliet: too soon. too soon. it's absolutely wonderful, the mix-and-match shakespearean stories and stories-within-stories, and that being just the first episode, is inspired. and the dragonsteeds? no problem, even if i think that's a terrible name for them. but william shakespeare himself, portrayed as a sex-starved paedo, is offensive precisely because i have just demonstrated that he most certainly wasn't.
speaking of offensive: the boondocks wins first prize. it's horrible, and i will be watching more of it. finally, the japanese x-men is highly reminiscent of akira. which is weird. and not uncool.

i was exhausted, and the guys were a bit too loud for me, but it was still a fun screening.

---one of the guys (a doctorate student) gave me a lot of helpful advice, and as i waited for the bus i checked my email and received the first comment on my paper from my advisor: on the one hand, he's enthusiastic about reading my paper. on the other, there are a couple of points that are going to upset him and i KNOW my tone was arrogant. i need help with that, unfortunately, i don't actually know how to take that down a notch.

pg and i went to maker's for dinner, and after that i wasn't feeling so good. i went to bed early and hoped it wasn't food poisoning.

---friday:

8.30: wake-up

noon: on blades to an awkward picnic birthday party
- i was the only bringer of beers, nobody brought a bottle opener
- most of the time was spent in a circle making introductions
- some of the time was spent with a frisbee. i was the only one who could manage it.

2.30pm: bailing for a sandwich and coffee, with no time to return home
- the sandwich was vegan, and oddly so
- the barista mistakenly gave me regular milk
-- i didn't notice
-- she felt terrible
-- we're both lucky my lactose intolerance isn't serious
-- i had to explain to her that she deserved her tip, in particular because she'd warned me

4pm: a lot of us arrived for the rollerblading
- only to discover that we were supposed to be there at 4.45pm
- we'd all have planned our days differently
- i practised some jumping, and i think that was productive

4.45 - 7pm: a good roll.
- good exercise
- pg's mum and i convinced her to join us, and all in all it was a pleasant afternoon.

*time slows* a shower, dinner, coffee, the rest of astérix et la surprise de césar (i can't believe i remember it so well from the comics!), and scrapper visiting for three hours of music, words and ideas.

hmm: etymology of the word remember, as in to put together the pieces of the bodies? (from the myth, can't recall the speaker's name)

---today:

what kind of day was today? it was a perfect day. it began with a two-hour interview for a british woman doing her doctorate research on the conflicting morality of political views, which is a topic i'm almost always happy to wax lyrical on. if i can get a hold of the transcription i'll be making it available online. from the coffee shop, i stepped out into a beautiful spring day, and it wasn't hard to convince pg to join me for breakfast at our new local hangout, clementine.

i ate far too much, it was all delicious, and read jazz poetry (it's an assigned work for one of my courses) with jazz playing in the background (coincidence?), and i was halfway through my coffee when i began feeling sleepy. i paid, shuffled home, and passed out on a chair in the lounge in the sunlight, woken sometime later by pg telling me to go to bed. what followed was the deepest, most peaceful nap that i recall having for the last while, and i guess on some level i'm still in that moment, hanging on, as it were.

...

pg and i went to pick up our numbers for the rollerblading / half-marathon on friday, i bought running shoes because they look cool and were reasonable priced at %50 off (and i've been looking, it wasn't *really* impulse shopping), and then we stopped at le guffre for a perfect waffle and tea, great music in the background and a warm, european atmosphere: it was more pleasant and romantic than any of our experiences in austria. go figure :P

home, salad, futurama; a chat with my mum, and now it's time to either get productive or crash. tough call, if tomorrow's 6.30am wake-up is to be believed :P

---oh, america. defeating science? that's just sad. it looks even sadder after reading about new firehoses.

piracy economics: rob reid on numbers mythology

elon musk is my hero. speaking of heroes, he almost looks like he's going to cry when discussing neil armstrong.

again?! how??

how the heck is it past midnight already??? i recall waking up stupidly early for four *hours* of lacanian theory, which was painful in spite of it being a beautiful morning and having been jumpstarted by marilyn manson - slutgarden.

---
i haven't discussed the latest security situation. we're all on edge because of the iranians in particular (see the last part if you're in a hurry), and in addition the palestinians are bombing our southern cities again. let's not even talk about the french murders... things are tense and unpleasant, and as usual we are not top dog, no matter what palestinian propaganda assures you.

as i stepped out of the building to pay a quick visit to the library, sirens throughout tel aviv began blaring. considering the fact that we're on alert due to our strained situation, and that i was not aware that a warning had been issued, i was certain that horrible things were going to happen soon. but nobody else ran screaming into the supposedly safe zones, so i carried on towards the library, hoping that it would count for some protection.

as i approached the corner of the building i heard booming noises off to the south, and a quiet panic set in. then the booming became distinctly paced, and i realized that it was the sound guys setting up for the weekly performance on the grass. then i wondered if perhaps the sirens had been a part of the sound check too...

but no, those were real. "but there were warnings all over!" i was told later - but i don't know a single person who'd heard or seen them. wtf?!

...

it's not that i don't think the whole iran / israel "we love you" campaign isn't a brilliant idea - i really do respect it and think its intentions are wonderful, however familiar they may seem. unfortunately, it holds absolutely no meaning because neither of our countries has a meaningful democratic process. even if we could get every israeli on facebook on board, nothing would happen.

---
i picked up a salad on the way to the office, having a little trouble with the cashier who wasn't concentrating and put a bunch of other stuff on my credit card. i arrived at work when everyone was out for lunch, and walked in to discover that my station had been pulled apart. it's one thing to have to hunt for a chair - a regular occurance - but it's another thing entirely to lose one's desk. i ate lunch, then took my leave: i think i offended the guy i share a room with because i told him i wasn't interested in wasting time setting everything up again.

once home, i crashed for the better part of an hour and woke up only slightly less buggered than i'd been. i had lunch with pg and watched the final episode of the second season of community, which was awesome, and then spent the next couple of hours writing formal process documentation.

then it was time to get cracking on my paper that's due tomorrow. i am very, very lucky - it turns out i was right, and that the indexing was the hard part. the rest of the paper, while wordy, is flowing now that i have the key set up and i'm fairly confident that i'm going to be turning in a good paper tomorrow.

first world /rich people's problems: having to decide which parts of the paper to cut for tomorrow's hand-in, that will be restored for the paper due in a month and a half and carrying a heck of a lot more weight.

eyesight blurred, perhaps it's better to rest now and work early. what's happening to me?! :'(

the late list

waking up: just as tired as when i went to bed

dusty prepositions: the dust was in the air all day, in my throat, even

sans coffee: i had an appointment in the early afternoon with the oral hygienist and didn't pack a toothbrush; i broke down around 11am and had an apple, though. it did make the french class tougher; i still learned a lot.

purging: i ran into a fellow student, and we hoped that the gravity of our quick chat would lead to catharsis and not just bum us out for the day

super-productive: work was great. i Got Shit Done. and was pleased.

dentist's office: i arrived early, the previous guy hadn't arrived, so i didn't have to wait for the tooth scraping to commence. it felt like... a great scratch for an itch i didn't know i had.

a moment's pause

proust: sounds like some interesting reading. i was dazed and bombed and should've walked in with a larger cup of coffee.

referat wrongs: so apparently i've been overdoing the sonnets paper. or not, because i have plans for it - but i probably shouldn't have been this stressed.

yeats reading: yeats is cool, but the aged french teenagers sitting in front of me most definitely weren't. playing with their iphone and whispering incessantly; this wasn't school, why the hell were they there if they weren't interested?!

sour-faced: me on my way home having left after the evening turned hebrew.
bed: but not rest. caffeine, perhaps? i got up for dinner and community when pg returned.

i began working on my paper by not working on my paper (see below), and then had a revelation!
there was this moment, a few minutes ago, where everything that i've been bothered about vis-a-vis my paper for thursday just became abundantly clear. and with that realization came another one: my paper has magically doubled in length and i didn't even notice. maybe just wishing for something enough IS enough.

i know the identity of the dark mistress, and i'm pleased about it.

---
a quick look at serj tankian's poetry

bill hicks' cut scene: not his best, but not bad. the homosexuality bit was weird - i can't figure out what he's suggesting only because the audience reaction is so off. (for the whole letterman apology, which is actually quite impressive, click here). hicks' reaction is interesting too.

on a completely different note: this is a great article on gaming of the 90s.

early morning redeath

it's late, and i'm exhausted again - and i've lots to do on my paper. i've also got a bunch of other things that need doing...

i lost an hour and a half of my life this morning to co-conspirator and another half an hour to wordsworth, who took over our class and repeatedly said nothing intelligent or interesting while doing so in the most patronizing of tones.

ugh.

it was another beautiful day, and after i got home i took pg to lunch. the food was delicious but contained far too much dairy for my poor system; i wouldn't have ordered the kiesch if i'd suspected. i suppose the new israeli version of top deck that i had for dessert didn't contribute for the better, either.

i napped for a while, then finally got around to a piece of work that i have not been looking forward to. it took a while to figure out what i was supposed to be looking at, then a while longer to get the test data sorted out, and *just* as i got a handle on everything i received a mail informing me that i needed to produce a report that nobody's asked me for yet: in this case, they were doing it by hand. i created a function that would have worked like a shot if not for all three applications i was using crashing randomly, but once they were done having their moments i could sign off and join pg in taking the dog from her parents for a walk.

we got to discussing our apartments and our plans for my tenant, and the debate was long and involved. her parents were home by the time we returned, so we included them in the conversation and i'm really pleased we did - at least three of us now agree wholeheartedly about the way to proceed, and pg more or less as well so we're all good :)

one of the tasks i've got to do right now involves filling in another form for the insurance company that's supposed to have released my severance pay three months ago - it's taken them a month to get back to me since our last interaction and of *course* they called when i was in class :S

*sigh*

i can see myself crashing early again; i've got another early morning to look forward to... and my eyesight's all fuzzy already...

half of half-and-half

early morning: i now have a delightfully competent french teacher! so the initial total french freakout was worth it. she just talked and the rest of us looked silly. the rest of the lesson was an absolute pleasure.

i spent the lacan lesson yawning, and it ended on a discussion of frustration and privation and i could totally feel that.

it was a beautiful day today. pg and i bussed home, stopping at the pharmacy where i had the idea that they'd save a heck of a lot of time if they'd have one pharmacist available for consultation to deal with all the people who wait forever in silence only to have to ask their questions when they get to the counter, which holds up everyone else. we then continued on to the lawyer's office.

last week we consulted with a lawyer who sits in plush offices and gives really good advice. this week we consulted with a lawyer who sits in less comfy offices, gives really good advice and gives it at less than half the price.

well, shit. pg signed the first check and in a week i'll take the rest of it, and we'll be covered.

we stopped for lunch breakfast at benedict's, and we both enjoyed the meal thoroughly. we both ate too much, even. afterwards, when i had to be heading to work, we together discovered just how tough finding the tel aviv - herzeliya line can be when outside of our neighbourhood...

we ran into a friend of mine who's sick, and i immediately got paranoid. once on the bus i started feeling awful, almost certain that it was related :(
on the bus, i began to worry that my hearing's overly-sensitive - although it could just be that the two people i asked to turn down the volume in spite of their using headphones, even the one four rows away, might well have been listening too loud.

weird moment: my phone told me that it was raining, and i looked up and saw nothing but sunshine. eh???

work was fun but tough, and definitely constructive. my boss and i sat arguing over algorithms for a while, and after all taxing my brain i returned home to put together some premeditated poetry for the reading i thought was going to be tomorrow night but will only be next week.

dinner and a half a movie: astérix et la surprise de césar reminds me how beautiful the original artwork is - what an incredible translation! unfortunately, we're having trouble with the subtitles :S

now it's late, and i can't decide if i have it in me to work on my paper or if i need to crash first and wake up early. i sense the latter happening :$

icewind psychobabble

another mopey day, spent mostly in front of my pc with sore legs and an entirely impatient and unmotivated brain. i got remarkably little done.

in the afternoon, i took a walk to the beach to meet with urchin. it was a visually beautiful day, only the wind was strong and icy and i wasn't dressed for it. the day turned miserable and shivery pretty quickly. i hope it doesn't make me sick.

urchin and i had a long talk about terrible things (although there were some silver linings), one of the most awful bits being that she told me what happened when she went to see a psychiatrist about it.

---
psychiatrists are dangerous. they apparently know next to nothing about psychology, and their methodology is essentially "prescribe drugs, if they don't work prescribe different drugs. repeat if necessary". particularly horrifying is the combination of drugs that urchin was prescribed and what they tell us of the psychiatrist's attitude towards traumatic experience: when life deals you lemons*, sleep lots and put on a happy face.

* in this case, really fucks you up with a curveball

shit, i could prescribe sleeping tablets and anti-depressants to anyone too.

---
i got back home so cold that my hands weren't functioning properly, and as soon as they were warm again i dressed properly and headed off to an evening of fluxx and munchkin. it was fun, didn't run too late, and i was completely exhausted by the time i got home. that, coupled with the academic strike finally being over and pg and i having early classes three days a week now, was a good excuse to go to bed early.

---
after days of existing with my pants around my ankles (metaphorically, of course), i have decided it's time to pull them up and head back into the breach.

for science!

it appears that it's more likely that the neutrinos apparent speed was due to a testing issue.

in completely unrelated news, this take on america pulling funding from unesco is quite poignant. you only need to watch the main segment, you can skip the first half guilt-free.

on a similar note, though: alec baldwin makes a good case. i don't like peta, but that doesn't make this point less correct. zoos too are terrible, by the way, even though they're definitely not bad as circuses.

---
we watched synecdoche, new york last night, and suffered in spite of my appreciation for the mise en abyme. i have come to the conclusion that i absolute loathe philip seymour hoffman and the movies he plays in. this, red dragon and happiness completely destroy the impression made by his choices of working with the big lebowski, punch-drunk love and boogie nights (although i hated his characters in those movies, they're still awesome movies).

early night, early morning, and i should be getting cracking with something now :P

closure

the afternoon was full of awkward moments, applying for jobs online, contemplating how much of an asshole "the boss" is*, and then, finally, having it all out with pg.

* and how glad i am, in retrospect, that they don't want me anymore. the rejection hurts, but what's really been bothering me is how terribly employers handle their companies. i almost want to hit fast-forward on my life just to get to the point where i'm running my own, because *damn* it kills me to think how pre-post-industrialized western society still is.

the big issue with pg is how she'll be if we move a long way away together. the big issue for me is that she's not prepared to think about it until she's on her way. i know that no change is necessarily ultimate or permanent, but i do believe that forethought is forearmed. and i like having strong forearms.

---
brené brown: listening to shame: good talk.

eeyore

i'm miserable. and mopey. and grumpy, frustrated, and everything feels dark and oppressive. it's so bad that it was rainy and gloomy when i went out to run a couple of errands, and when the sun suddenly came out and everything was perfect... i didn't care.

i met up with nystire who joined me on my mission; something that he said to me towards goodbyes upset me, and joined the rest of the causes in leading down a mental road to despair.

-- removed: a rant on humanity that really isn't fair --

i haven't wallowed in a long, long time. maybe i just need the catharsis.

errand

wednesday night i went to bed with a blinding headache - perhaps it was the cupcakes, perhaps it was the end of a world that i'd been slapped with. i woke up early yesterday morning and swung into the final push. what i ended up handing in was a huge improvement over what i'd gone to bed with, but still fell short of the required length and academic propriety. still, i handed it in and all i can do is hope for the best.

my boss called in the middle of the morning, and my heart jumped up into my throat. not only because i hadn't so much as picked up the phone since sunday, but also because i was horrified that there'd be some emergency that needed handling.

i cannot express how much of a pleasure it is to work for someone who can appreciate academic pressure and makes allowances for it - he just wished me luck and told me he'd like to meet in the evening.

after submitting my paper, and a telephone argument with pg about unloading the dishwasher*, it was time for two hours of anime and then i went to work for a half an hour status report and priority shifting. the interesting news is that they want to apply for a patent on the system i've built. i wondered, on my way home, about the fact that my name probably won't be attached to it even though its design really was a team effort. it's a good thing i don't care much for patents; i think they're irrelevant, they stifle the industry and i'd rather not get involved. also, this one probably isn't viable anyway.

* i'd unloaded unwashed dishes by mistake.

washing dishes: i can handle that. what i don't get is the damned dishwasher. ignoring the fact that i don't know what all the buttons and knobs are for, i just don't have what it takes to determine whether what's inside is dirty or clean. i'm also incapable of cleaning the dishes "just enough, but not too much" to be placed in the dishwater. if i'm already washing the damned things, then why aren't i doing it properly and ignoring the machine???

after getting home and resuming the dishwasher argument, the penalty for which was no dinner, we settled down with alcohol and asterix the gaul, then crashed early.

i've now breakfasted, and decided that it's time to get some friday stuff done before buckling down to work on a) the next paper and b) work. it's been a long, crazy two weeks and i'm going to try to be more focused for this one coming up.

---
just because "the majority of drugs tested in animals never make it to humans at all" doesn't mean that this exercise-free gluttony enabler won't. i wouldn't mind if it did.

almost nosebleed o'clock

today: exhausted. early four hour lacan notwithstanding, i came home early to try and make progress on my papers. the earlier bombshell didn't help. the talk with my mother and the mission to urchin's photography exhibit did, a little. acquiring tickets to the doof festival would have been a sweeter experience if an icy wind hadn't come up as i left the apartment, but hot soup in front of the tail end of asterix in britain righted that.

i don't know how much i've accomplished, only that i think i'm going to hand in the paper tomorrow in spite of it being sub-par. notice the singular: paper. reprieve! one of the papers is only due next week. still tough, but less so.

my head's splitting, my vision's swimming, and i don't feel so good. maybe it's the cupcakes.

running on empty

i just had the floor fall out from under me. after a week of excitement, thrills, distractions, expenses, long debates and general wonder, the offer that seemed too good to be true has turned out to be so.

after a couple of days of research, some on the part of my family, some online, some through friends, i called the boss up a few minutes ago to make my offer. not only did he not appreciate it, he refused to make a counter offer and *click* that's the end of the story.

---
i will carry on looking for work there, and i'll try to pick up what little pieces of my papers i can salvage to hand in tomorrow. i've learned a lot during this past week, and i've invested a lot of time and money in learning it. i hope he responds positively to my email, and if he doesn't, then i hope i'll find something equally as interesting.

but oh, man - this is a serious bummer.