I should be asleep, but I'm not. Another new month. I watched Resident Evil. It sticks very definitely inside the traditional "horror" genre, and is nothing special, but I still thought it was okay. Also, Star Trek: The Next Generation still totally rules, at least enough to be one of the best ways I can think of to kill time (something which, admittedly, I shouldn't be doing right now...)
You know, sometimes I wish that my parents didn't read this site. There are some things I'd probably say to all the rest of the world without thinking twice about it (even if it wouldn't necessarily be such a great idea to do so) otherwise. But of course, this just serves to remind me of the fact that any information I allow to leave the space between my ears and a few relatively well-protected external places leaves my effective control at that point, and can pretty much be recirculated at will whether I like it or not. Some things really are better kept in my head.
One more piece of news: a couple of new additions to my lyrics page by Sugarcult, which was recommended to me (in a somewhat complicated way that I don't feel like explaining) by Chel. If you know me, you'll know why these are here. If you don't, why should I tell you?
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Just for the record: eugenics, eradication of some segment of the populace, or any similar policy is insane. These policies have a certain innate prima facie appeal to a mind like mine, which is why I often end up suggesting them in arguments, but when I do so, it's more of a knee-jerk reaction than a thought-out response. I do not seriously support any of these proposals. In fact, I propose that all those who do seriously support such proposals be eradicated.
Not.
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Is it safe to make an entry in a comment? No, of course not. But it sure is convenient. I'll use this for things I don't want to randomly disclose, but that are okay if someone smart discovers them.
I just have to note how interesting the situation where Laura was showing us pictures at the event and went to one of Thomas and said how he was an asshole (maybe not her exact words) was. See, there was the "simple" dynamic of me as conduit, Thomas as (unaware) object and Laura as actor. However, there was an additional element: Ed, who I had just told about the Thomas situation. His awareness meant that he was also aware of how I would react to Laura's statement/attitude, and that in turn affected my reaction, and so the whole mental flow of the situation became very complex, in an interesting way.
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Oops, I forgot to mention that I discovered Linkin Park. Their music is not only very good, but fits well with my current life situation. I dislike rap and hip-hop, but when you mix them with rock - at least in this instance - something very cool comes out. Crawling, Papercut and In The End are all amazing, and I'll probably post the lyrics for some if not all of them at some point, but not right now.
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I cannot afford to write this entry. Two things which are very important right now are occupying all of my time, and one of them has a deadline (I will explain this later in the entry). But I need to write this entry now, because the last two days have not been anything even vaguely resembling empty space. In those days I have discovered one of the most important things ever.
Okay, let's cut right to the chase. I found Thomas Annandale, a.k.a. (by Laura, although it is accurate) "atheist wanker", a.k.a. boredatheist. The significance of this will not be lost to me, and thus I do not need to explain it to myself (and I'm sorry, but this entry is for me, not for you, world, no offense intended). This happened about two days ago. For the last two days I have been reading his site when I should have been doing Compilers, and I am now in a world of hurt because of this. The assignment is due on Monday. I have less of it done than I should have had finished a week ago. I have four late days left, but even so, I am not sure I will be able to complete it, or even turn in something acceptable. Just so you know that I have my priorities straight, right? No, it's not that simple - I'm confusing importance and urgency. Thomas is very important, but not as urgent as Compilers, but my mind has trouble taking these things into account. Oh well, I'll do what I possibly can on Compilers. I still have a lot of Thomas' journal left to read, but I'll do so only when I'm deliberately, consciously taking a break for the next week or so.
Okay, now an easy part, since I'm just quoting something I already wrote. First, an intro: when I am disturbed, I often take a walk. Disturbed by Thomas' journal, I decided to do that. Now the quote:
First I went down 5th Avenue towards downtown. Unfortunately, 5th Avenue flows into a highway, and that highway loses its sidewalk after a bit. So I crossed a lot, climbed a small hill, and was on a new street. I continued going towards the tall buildings of downtown. The neighborhood at this point was pretty bad and I was half fearful. Then I did arrive at the downtown buildings. Unfortunately, I've done this before and the inevitable happened again: I was lost. I kept making short excursions which rapidly terminated with my giving up on a particular route, including one in the direction of the Greyhound terminal and the Amtrak station. Eventually I ended up going up a hill into what at first was a pretty nice residential area, but then became the Hill district, which seems to be a very large, poor, black neighborhood. This was a little scary as well, although by this time I was starting to be quite hungry, slightly cold, and my right hip was hurting quite a bit, and these combined with the constant walking had dulled my mind to some extent. I was scared when a black man asked me "Money?", though, and again somewhat disturbed when what I think may have been a drug deal was occurring and I accidentally misinterpreted the man who spoke first as talking to me, since the man he was actually talking to was behind me at the time and I hadn't seen him. (I said that I was sorry and quickly moved on so as not to let the situation get any more interesting.)
I wandered around in the Hill district for quite some time. Eventually, I had gone up enough that I saw it: the Cathedral of Learning, a large and very distinctively illuminated tower that's part of Pitt, which is right next to CMU. Unfortunately, it was only visible from that one very particular vantage point, and I had to keep moving. Still, it seemed a godsend.
I wandered around, looking for another glimpse of the Cathedral of Learning, but with no success. Then, I caught of glimpse of what I was for some reason convinced was not the Cathedral of Learning, but was what I had seen earlier. In retrospect, I believe that it actually was the Cathedral, and that it looked strange because I could only see the top half of it or so at the time. In any case, though, I was disillusioned, and decided to head back towards the tall buildings downtown, which at least I would be able to locate.
On the way back downtown, I saw a sign that said "upper Pitt campus". Well, I didn't know exactly what "upper" meant at the time (although I think I do now) but I certainly knew that Pitt was close to CMU, unless it had two entirely separate campus sites. So I turned in that direction and headed up the hill. Eventually I reached a bus stop, except it was for Pitt shuttles rather than real buses, so I figured that I wouldn't be able to ride one (without asking an actual Pitt student, of course). Discouraged, I headed out of the area, but did so in a different direction than I had come in, thinking it might lead me back to a highway or something.
Now I was going down a fairly steep hill. Hold on a second - this looked a lot like the area around where Kung Fu sparring had been held the one time I went. That was on Pitt campus, right? I was cautiously optimistic, but didn't actually rejoice until I saw the Cathedral of Learning - absolutely unmistakable this time. It was my Ivory Tower. I was now back on 5th heading back towards Mudge. I could have taken a bus on 5th, and I would have gotten home faster, but I wouldn't have felt the same sense of accomplishment had I done that. (I also wouldn't have had to deal with the pain in my hip for as long, but whatever.) I also would have stopped for food (I was very hungry by this point), but I didn't have any insulin with me. Keep in mind I had been awake for about the past 31 hours straight, unless you count a few minutes of drowsing off in Value, Fact and Policy and compilers. Anyway, cold, hungry, tired but no longer disheartened, I did finally make it home.
I managed to take four pictures on the walk. The first was of the moon, although the moon itself is barely visible in the picture, and it consists mostly of just the sky. The second was a long exposure of the river and bits of the city on both banks. The third was a cute cat (I ran into quite a few cats in the Hill area, including one kitten, but only photographed one) - unfortunately I was forced to use flash, but I still like it. The last was of the Cathedral of Learning as I finally walked by it.
End quote.
I found Thomas because of Laura's announcement that she had banned him from posting on Livejournal. I tend to be somewhat curious about these things, and so I headed over to his website. What I found shocked and amazed me.
I told Charlie about it as soon as I saw him online again (which was a while). He's taking this seriously (he seems to be good at understanding what this means to me, probably because he can see it too).
Today (well, yesterday now) I slept through my 2:30 class despite going to bed around 3 last night because I had been awake for about 40 straight hours at that point (4 or so of which had been my harrowing walk). This evening I worked some on Compilers, then went to the KGB event. This might seem to be a colossal waste of time, but I saw Ed there, and explained the situation to him (this near the very beginning of the event). I have now marshalled all of the good, reliable mental resources I can on this issue. Ed will remember to look at Thomas' site when he checks Livejournal again, or at least he so told me. I then had a tremendous amount of fun. The first thing we did was play an anagram-finding word game as a group. It was a lot of fun, although the person typing seemed to have a bit of trouble hearing me, and I was really good in the first few rounds but got a lot worse after that. I took a few cool pictures, a lot of people (especially girls) seemed to love Spice, my stuffed kitty, who I brought with me, we watched Orgazmo and it was very enjoyable especially since Ed and some other people had never seen it and interestingly enough this gave me a way to almost experience it again for the first time, despite having watched it a mere week or two ago. We ordered food, for which I can again quote rather than writing myself. Begin quote:
From alisag@andrew.cmu.edu Sat Nov 9 02:06:49 2002 Date: Fri, 8 Nov 2002 21:26:54 -0500 (EST) From: Alisa Grishman <alisag@andrew.cmu.edu> To: KGB BBoard <post+assocs.kgb@andrew.cmu.edu> Subject: Stream of Conversation at the Slumber Party FOOD! Our choices are: 1. Chinese 2. Pizza 3. Other If you want Chinese, raise your hand!!! 2 votes Fine. If you want Pizza, raise your hand!!! 3 votes If you want Other, raise your hand!!! 1 Vote What do you want, Dan? Dan, you're weird. Jamie, do you want food? That works. OK, so it looks like we're ordering pizza. Oh, my god, girly screams. Shoot me. Shoot me now. Anyway, we're ordering pizza. How many people are having pizza? Are you having any, Yanna? OK, so it's just going to be Dave, Ed, Jason, and guy whose name I can't remember... Ahh... Kenn... Well, those four people having pizza? I suppose then two pies will be enough. Does that sound good? Hello? What kinds of toppings? 1. ANSI standard 2. Pineapple Laura, are you having pizza? So are those two good? Is this good? OK, then: 1. Pepperoni 2. Pineapple Where are we ordering from? Yes, I know, not Papa John's. Pizza Parma? That OK? OK. Who has a cell phone? Alisa Grishman Junior, Psychology Carnegie Mellon University "Hey there, those are some nice curves. Wanna get bezier?" -dkitchin "If you couldn't find any weirdness, maybe we'll just have to make some!" - Calvin & Hobbes
End quote.
My attitude there was great. Being driven like this totally helped me. It's hard to explain to someone non-me.
Everyone trickled out as time passed (a few also trickled in, but the net flow was negative after a few hours). The next long activity was Misha playing in an online chess tournament while Ed taunted his opponent in German and English. I wish I had a log of this, and should have, except that Yahoo's applet didn't allow copying the text. It was hilarious, though.
After that I don't really remember what we did. Talked mostly, I think. People kept trickling out, and when it was down to 5 people and Ed was leaving, I left as well. On the way home, first, while I was crossing the street, a man in a car yelled at me either "You're all in black, I thought you were going to kill me" or "You're all in black, I'm going to kill you", I couldn't tell which. It was an interesting experience since I didn't feel at all in danger, being on campus and everything (unlike last night, during which I was actually scared a couple of times). I also discovered that there's an "Ultraviolet loop" of buses in Pittsburgh, in addition to those more traditionally colored in the visible spectrum. How cool is that?
I am not going to act on my Thomas discovery yet, both because I can't afford to timewise and because I am very certain that if I acted rashly, I would fuck things up. I need to think this through carefully before I act, and I will.
I had the thought (on the way home from the KGB event) that I should reverse my journal, i.e. put the more recent events toward the bottom. It will make the journal slightly less convenient to check on, but much easier to read straight through beginning to end. This was inspired by Thomas' journal. It probably won't be too hard to write a script to do it for me, if I do decide to, and no one who's reading my page now should be confused, since I'm mentioning it now (this is probably why I'm bothering to put this here).
Well, that's all I can afford now. It's far, far less than the situation deserves - I could write pages if not whole volumes about the thoughts coursing through my head - but it's just barely enough.
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I almost forgot to post this picture of my whiteboard and what I wrote on it. I like it.
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Should I be awake now? No. My sleep schedule is broken again. Oh well. Compilers is moving along. KGB meeting was fun(ny). I got my trackball today, to replace my mouse, which I broke by taking it apart. The trackball is awesome. I've been carrying it around since I got it just to play with it.
Ran into Laura on the way back from picking up the trackball. Did that on the way back from meeting with Mark. I overslept both Continental Philosophy and that meeting, but when I went to Mark's office to sign up for another appointment, he didn't have anyone, and he let me come in. I need to really declare myself as a philosophy double-major, but other than any possible requirements for that, I can take anything I want next semester. Cool.
I've realized that my journal is rather boring, which is probably one of the reasons so few people read it (although I hardly make an effort to publicize it either). See, in the past I've tried to excise meta-level comments like this one, because I thought they were boring. Unfortunately, this has reduced my journal to the possibly even more mundane level of a mere reporting of the events that occurred during the day, giving neither my audience (what little I have of it) nor future me any insight into my thoughts. From now on, to the extent that I remember, I will try not to be deliberately non-introspective. I'm naturally a very introspective person.
Charlie and I are working on unifying our languages. He expressed interest in doing so, I indicated unwillingness, and then immediately started planning for how to do it. We've got the vowels done now (vowels represent connotations or ways of being, in a way, and include a duality (plus and minus), a trinity (cardinal, mutable, and fixed in this case) and the four elements). I don't think consonants will be too much of a problem, since Charlie basically told me he'd give me the alphabet except for the letters needed to spell "eka".
I'm moving through Thomas' lifetime at a rate on the order of a year per day. If my rate stays close to the same, I'll be up to the present day in two days. Of course, I'm also reading his most recent posts in realtime just to make sure I don't miss any crises.
I'm always influenced by anything that really impresses me to try to imitate it, at least for a little while. I admit that this entry is both consciously and unconsciously inspired by Thomas.
I should write down things about my past. I can never get the level of detail I would have had if I'd kept a journal, but I think I can still find out enough to be worthwhile. I wonder if I wrote about real events in any of the journals I was forced to keep for various English classes? I have a feeling I always just wrote stories.