On Sunday, we drove back. I started out driving, and after a few hundred miles, I decided that I would make the entire trip, to see what it was like. (It would also be the first time I'd driven that far in one day.) We ran into some nasty weather, in which I was forced to slow down, and I didn't go really excessively fast regardless, but I took very few breaks and drilled on. As reward, I arrived in 8 hours and 15 minutes, tying my father's previous record. To celebrate (or perhaps more to the point, since we had time to), my father and I went out to the Thai restaurant, which I think we've finally learned to find now. When I woke up on Monday morning, he was already long gone.
After Linear Algebra, I went with Ed to the KGB office and began to rebuild Ragnar, first by backing up all of his data onto Laura, then doing a clean install of OpenBSD 3.2 and setting up all the stuff that wasn't quite right. It looks like Mark made a mistake and he hadn't actually been cracked, but I had sort of been meaning to get around to upgrading him, and now I had a good excuse. It was relatively painless anyway.
On Monday I didn't eat nearly enough, and so I slept far too late on Tuesday, but the extra sleep didn't really make up for the lack of food, and I was hungry enough to get sort of confused, kind of a miniature version of something that's happened to me before. I did eventually get something to eat and it went away. That evening, I went out drinking at Sharp Edge with Chris, Mark (who only went for the wings, which were apparently pretty cheap), James, Dave and Shion. I admitted to Chris that I was very confused as to what the French word for "raspberry" - "framboise" - was doing on a beer menu, so he ordered me one. Well, it did taste strongly like raspberries, and was very good. I think I had about 3 and a half drinks that evening, and while I did make sure to have some food as well (chips and salsa and fried zucchini sticks), I got pretty buzzed. Eventually we went home and I fell asleep.
Then, at some point early in the morning, I woke up with what felt like low blood sugar. I ate a bunch of peach rings and went back to sleep. A few hours later I woke up feeling excruciating symptoms of high blood sugar. I immediately took 4 units of fast-acting insulin, and did a blood test. 400 or thereabouts. Ouch (normal is 100). I took 4 more units of insulin, drank some water, and waited for things to get better (unable to go back to sleep because of the intense discomfort I was in). When I woke up again at 8, I was feeling at least somewhat better, but my stomach was upset. I kept drinking water, and by the time I left my room for class, I was more or less fine again.
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I cannot preserve this moment. Within hours memories fade. Within months they often vanish. Oh well, I will try.
Laura emailed asking whether I wanted to meet to walk to Squirrel Hill like we usually do. She had interviews all day today, so she would call me when she finished. However, when she did finish, her phone was dead, so she emailed me instead, and I emailed her back and told her to meet me at the black chairs, which she did about half an hour later.
She looked (as she put it) very "adult", with a black skirt, black dress shoes and some manner of two-piece top the outer piece of which was black and the inner piece of which was some color (I already can't remember). She said that the shoes were very uncomfortable for walking long distances, and after going about a block, she took them and her pantyhose off (the latter without exposing herself to anyone ;-) and walked barefoot the rest of the way.
We talked about how I was worried about losing touch with her, and that thread was eventually resolved by her saying we could keep in touch through IM (I had never previously spoken to her on IM, which I guess is kind of odd, all things considered), journals and possibly phone calls.
The next topic was how I consider certain people (very few of them) to be "special", and how she is one of those people. I think she is confused by this. She said when I tried to describe this "special" property that she thinks everyone has the ability to attain it, to which I responded that if that's so, she's not talking about the same property that I am. I think she simply doesn't have the concept of "specialness" that I do, but that's okay. Almost no one else does either.
We came to a small grassy hill on top of which sat an apartment building, and we lay down in the grass and talked about some personal stuff. I mentioned to her how I had actually deliberately tried to sexually fantasize about her and been unable to do so. She thought that was good because it showed that I respected her and because that was when things with Thomas had started to become dicey.
I recognized afterwards, while I was shopping in Squirrel Hill, that I had had a thought pattern which ran something like this:
Yet this all happened automatically and subconsciously. These kind of responses are programmed into me at a level I can't consciously control. Hmm.
Laura was extremely reassuring about everything. I had an impulse to hug her, but instead I poked her. Then I had another impulse to hug her, but I did nothing. Heh, I have such problems with this. She bent a piece of grass and I ate it, and she worried that it might have had poop on it, to which I responded "and that's worse than pesticides?".
Eventually we walked on over to where her RP session was. She gave me her screen name on AIM. When we arrived, I almost forgot to give her back her shoes (and she had totally forgotten about them), but I remembered when I was only about a block away, so I returned and gave them back to her.
The whole evening I had Deep Inside from Happy 2b Hardcore 6 stuck in my head. I'll probably always associate it with today.
After that I got some groceries and then walked back because a bus had just left and I was too impatient to wait for another. I timed how long it was between when the first bus went past me and when I arrived where it would have dropped me off - 8 minutes. That's 8 minutes gone forever because of impatience, although I suppose that I got some exercise, which isn't totally worthless.
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Today I tried to get stuff done, but I had no energy and it just sort of fizzled out.
I hadn't been able to access Bloodgod the previous evening, so while I was in the KGB office setting Ragnar up anyway, I switched the console to Bloodgod. I discovered a text file left by someone who had cracked into the server and demanded that we allow him to make use of it. While I was still working on Ragnar, Django showed up for the same reason. Ed let me keep his key for a while longer and Django and I worked on getting Bloodgod back into a state in which he hoped that Bloodgod was secure, although my first instinct was to take the system down and immediately back everything up. I volunteered one of my 120G hard drives after I could clean it off to help back up.
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After Linear Algebra today, Ed and I sat on the grass between the UC and Purnell (yes, I know that area has a name, probably the Cut, but since I'm not sure I figured I'd just describe it) and talked. I mentioned how I've been dealing with some issues lately by dividing myself into multiple selves, and Ed said that he's actually been trying to avoid doing that himself lately. We clarified that to Ed's having one personality which he views as central, which he has usually described as the "last one standing". His core goals are stored in that personality, and that is who he wants to be, while still taking all of his other aspects into account. A committee structure is indeed unworkable for one's life, I agreed, but the personality I think of as my ruler is not someone I want to be in day-to-day life. Rather, he deals mostly with emergency situations, when no one else can. I also tend to spawn off a new personality in response to each major situation with which I deal. I find this way of dealing with the world to give me a lot of flexibility, but I can understand why others wouldn't choose it.
This evening was move-on. That involved carrying all of our wall sections and other junk onto Midway. Unfortunately, it was raining, so they held us off for quite a while. A pretty large portion of the KGB sat around the cage waiting to be given the go-ahead.
I sat there in a couch, feeling isolated as I usually do in social situations, but not really lonely. I think it was because some people in the KGB are my friends - in a much weaker sense of the term than I usually use, but still people I like, not just people I know. I felt... respected?
A bunch of people eventually realized that we had a stairwell and a rope, and began climbing the wall. I have a couple of pictures of Misha posing in the doorframe looking like he's scaling a skyscraper in a movie or something.
At about 21:15 or so, the Carnival people finally said that we were allowed to move on. I helped carry a wall section and a flight of stairs from the Cage over to Midway.
At the end of move-on, Laura showed up for a bit when Erik came onto Midway with his truck loaded up with wall sections. I carried one of the wall sections with Erik, and I didn't really feel any animosity towards him, which is good. Laura was about to leave, and was hugging her boyfriend. Then she walked over to Ed and hugged him. I had walked to a "safe" distance and was facing the other way, thinking that now was the moment when I had to get over my obsession with her, when she called out my name. I turned to face her and she came over and hugged me, and my resolve melted.
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I've been burning tons of CDs, freeing up disk space so I can lend out a hard drive to Bloodgod. The cracker left another text file, so it wasn't secured, and they really need to make a backup to ensure that none of the data gets lost for good. I eventually finished synchronizing my backup disk and my main disk, and swapped them. Then, since I had burned copies of the install CDs anyway, I installed Mandrake 9.1, which of course broke KDE. I'm in GNOME now waiting for KDE to rebuild.
This morning when I woke up, my left ear felt like it had water in it, and the feeling wouldn't go away. I know that I get pretty bad accumulations of wax if I go too long without cleaning them (it's genetic, or heritable in any case - my dad has it too). But since doing so is a maintenance-type task, I'm horrible at doing it on a regular basis. I'm supposed to do it once a month, but it had probably been half a year.
Anyway, while I was waiting for my data to back up, I put some hydrogen peroxide in that ear and let it sit for ten minutes or so. Then I did the same thing with the other ear, and then I brought the ear syringe into the bathroom, where I filled it with water, pushed the tip into each of my ears, and squeezed as hard as I could.
Well, I saw a thingie on the bulb after squeezing it that I couldn't believe had come out of my ear, so I assumed it was just gunk left over from some other time, but then when I did it to the other ear, another one of comparable size came out. Everything suddenly sounded funny - in particular, my hearing for high-pitched sounds was orders of magnitude more sensitive, although at normal and low pitches it was more or less unaffected. And I realized that hey, I probably hadn't actually heard anything in weeks, if not months. On the minus side, the things that I hadn't heard for that time which I now could included Laura's 80G hard drive (which, fortunately, I'm using only for backup now and I can tell to shut down when I'm not using it). Still, I immediately had to listen to a bunch of the music I'd first heard in that period of time again, and it felt so much more... real. In fact, the whole world feels more present. This is very difficult to describe. You'd really have to experience it yourself to know what I mean - not that I recommend it.
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After waking up a little bit early today to talk to Charlie, I went back to sleep. I kept waking myself up, to go to Networks, but when the time finally came I just said "screw it" and went back to sleep. I had so little energy.
I had very entertaining dreams of little substance which I already can't remember. I also specifically remember one time when I was laying here not asleep but pretty close to it, and I heard a song I'm almost sure I've never actually heard before in my inner ear. The vocals were all garbled and I don't think they made any actual words, and I can't remember it now. All I do remember, really, is that it happened and that I liked it at the time. I wish I could project sound out of my inner ear onto the computer, and then have adequate tools to manipulate it.
Yeah, that's my excuse for being unable to compose music. If they had telepathic computer interfaces, whoo boy, I'd show them.
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Booth.
I'm a graduating senior at CMU. Up until yesterday, I had never done Booth or Buggy or Carnival at all. After Linear Algebra, I went over to Midway to talk to Ed for a bit. Ed was the Booth Chair this year.
When I got there at 12:30 on Wednesday, Ed was asleep in a chair. I poked him and he became just conscious enough to notice I was there, then went back to sleep. Well, soemone (I think it was Kirsten, but I don't trust my memory at all at this point) asked if I was willing to help out a little bit, and I figured it was only fair.
What followed was about 30 hours of continuous helping with Booth. At some point I created a person who didn't really care about anything else but Booth and became him until we finally finished. I can't possibly reconstruct what happened, so instead, here are some people I worked with (or who I just happened to see working): Ed, David Kaplan, RJ, Cat, Kirsten, Alisa, Misha, Teki, Julie, that guy who does EMS who Julie knows (whose name, in case you couldn't tell yet, I don't know), Rolf, Ivan (I think), Matt Kehrt, Mark Tomczak, James, Max, Rebecca (pink-haired), other Rebecca (unicyclist). Apologies to anyone I forgot. Here are some of the things I did: paint wall sections, paint panelling, paint windows on exterior parts of wall sections, brace ladders while people stood on them, carry information back and forth, carry panelling back and forth, convince Misha to loan the KGB his car, say I wasn't confident in my abilities with a circular saw, use a circular saw when everyone else there didn't know how, say I wasn't sure I could wield an automatic screwdriver and let Teki drive screws, drive three last screws towards the very end.
The booth was, frankly, very nearly a disaster. At 16:00 or so today they cleared everyone off of Midway. They allowed us back on at 17:00, when Carnival actually opened. From that point on, you have 4 hours of "downtime" allowed to make repairs and so forth to the booth. Well, the KGB burned 2 hours of this time straight off because we simply weren't finished yet. It made me think. Although my only assistance prior to Wednesday with Booth was helping with move-on, I did so much in those 30 or so hours that it's very possible we wouldn't have had a legal booth at all. You see, we had to have an operating game and adequate railing for the raised floor sections in order to have a running booth. Maybe without my help, 2 hours of burned downtime at the beginning of Carnival would have turned into 4 or more hours, and we would have been disqualified. Of course, maybe someone else would have stepped up to the challenge if I hadn't. I can never know. But what I do know is that Ed was extremely grateful for my help, and that I feel good now even though I don't know why - even though I didn't let myself become part of a group mind, even though the booth will be torn down come Sunday evening, even though Booth as a whole has always seemed sort of silly to me. The best explanation I can come up with is that it means something to me to offer something of great value to Ed. It often seems like I demand more of my friends than I have a right to, and while the friends I keep for a long time generally seem to put up with it, being able to offer something back to Ed is important to me. I almost feel like I'm going to cry now... but maybe it's just all the sawdust that's gotten in my eyes over the past day... yeah, that must be it. Move along, nothing to see here.
Thank you, Ed. Thank you so much for being there for me to trust.
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Over the last two days I've mostly just been sitting around in my room. On Friday I did go to check out the booth. It was up and running, and that alone made me very happy. I also walked around with Ed for a bit. When talking about the concession stand, someone (I forget who) mentioned that Alpha Phi Omega were running it, and Ed pointed out to me that Alison was a member. When we went over to it, of course Alison was the cashier. I bought a funnel cake with cherry topping and a pink lemonade. Actually, to an external observer, Alison and my history wouldn't have been noticeable at all, and this isn't really noteworthy at all, except that I've been thinking about it, for a different reason.
That evening was the They Might Be Giants concert. I had missed the last They Might Be Giants concert due to a misunderstanding with Priya. At the time I had been very upset and thought I would never have a chance to see them in concert again. Well, that almost happened. I completely forgot about the concert. Then, at 19:25 or so, since I had run into Alison earlier, I checked her away message. It reminded me of the concert, and I left my room within a couple of minutes. I had missed the first half-hour, but fortunately, they had an opening band, so that was what I missed.
TMBG were a very crowd-friendly band... injecting things into the middle of their songs and so on. I was worried I wouldn't know most of the songs, and indeed I didn't know some of them, but I didn't realize until halfway through or so that I actually had heard one of their recent CDs. I stood up front (very close to the stage) with a bunch of KGBers. At one point we were instructed to form a conga line. :-)
I had totally forgotten about New York City despite the fact that it's probably my favorite TMBG song, but they played it dead last. It was a very emotional experience for me, singing along as images flashed through my head.
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Today was teardown. It was a fairly quick and efficient process, and really not all that interesting.
On the way home for a brief period, I saw two guys run by, and they were talking about running. It occurred to me that talking about whatever you're doing at the time, even discounting cases where your discussion is immediately pertinent to the situation at hand, is very common. The reason for this is probably as obvious as having a known shared topic. Also, I've noticed that if one is too nervous to say something, frequently one can still get oneself to state that one thought of saying it. It's much weaker, but also much less potentially embarrassing because of that.
Anyway, next I headed over to the post-Booth party. Laura was there for a bit, but then she had to leave. We talked for a while and ordered pizza, and eventually put on Dead Alive, a B zombie movie which some people found so gross they had to leave (or maybe they did really have other things to do...) Misha drank a whole lot of vodka (mixed with soda) and was humorously picking fights with everyone, and eventually Ed and he went outside, but of course nobody got seriously hurt. Eventually things started to wind down and I got a little depressed. I didn't have any alcohol, which in retropect may have actually been a mistake, although my experience with alcohol so far is that while it definitely does affect my thinking, it doesn't really lower my higher-level social inhibitions.
Now that I'm home, I'm quite depressed. I have only a few weeks left at CMU, weeks that I wish I could stretch to months if not years. I feel like I largely wasted my freshman year here, and almost totally wasted my sophomore year. If I could have done the equivalent of my junior and senior years here two years earlier, I could have gotten so much more out of CMU. It looks like the most likely thing to happen immediately after I graduate is for me to live at home and work for DMV again. This is very bad. I need the money that a job can provide, so I'll be locked into this one to the extent that I can't just leave. Thus, looking for a "real" job will be a big drain on me, since I'd have to do it at the same time as I worked 7.5 hours a day for DMV - which, frankly, I don't think is very likely to happen. I'll be very isolated socially - I don't know that there even are many people my age is Catskill, and if so, I doubt they're people I'd be interested in meeting. I rely so much on the community of friends I have here now that I'll be very distraught not to have them available, and I see myself dealing in the only way I know - by shutting down most of my function. I always told myself through high school I'd find a job that I actually enjoyed, but now I'm finding that the prospect of work is very unappealing. If you know any get-rich-quick schemes that require me to be a bit crazy, but that have any significant chance of working, pass them along. Or if you want to, you know, offer me a job in Pittsburgh or something crazy like that. Come on, I'm really damn smart. Too bad the people reading this are my friends and parents, not those who might hire me.
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So I headed out to investigate some fireworks, but by the time I got outside, they had ended. However, I had a hunch, and headed over to the CS lounge. Ed and a bunch of other KGBers were there and shortly headed out to dinner. I had left my insulin at home, so I rushed there to get it and rushed over to Fuel and Fuddle to meet them. The food was decent, and we played Ghost and so forth.
Afterwards, when we were walking home, Stiger split off from the group, and Ed split off to walk her home. I also split off, and walked with them for a bit, until they reached Stiger's building. This got me thinking. Ed seems to be pretty good at getting girls to like him, and he has the whole polyamory thing. He seems to be pretty committed to Priya at this point, but if it weren't for that, I think he'd be pretty damn good at propagating his genes. Compare this to me. First of all, forget about the days when homo sapiens was a young race, I'd have died at the age of 8 if I'd been born a mere hundred years earlier, due to insulin-dependent diabetes. Leaving that aside from a moment, I've had fairly little success in attracting girls even when I have wanted to. A large part of that, of course, is that I pretty much flat-out refuse to look at doing so as a task. This reminds me that recently, Ed mentioned a conversation we had had long ago. At some point in high school, Ed had told me that he had low self-esteem, because he couldn't imagine any girl being attracted to him. I had replied that Ed had the highest self-esteem of anyone I knew.
I suppose it's a good thing that mental processes and genetic ones move at such different speeds that the interaction between them is often subtle. If not, I imagine I'd be in continuous agonizing pain due to my pathetic failure to reproduce, or even make any serious steps in that direction. But at a mental level, I have hang-ups about reproduction. I'd never donate to a sperm bank, because if I ever have a biological child, I want to raise her myself. I'd probably be more content to never reproduce than to settle into a comfortable life that didn't meet my (possibly unrealistically) high desires and expectations.
God, I want to live forever. I want to live forever and always feel that the last major issue with which I've dealt is the most important, the most harrowing and the biggest cause of growth that I've ever experienced. I want to hear new music, see new movies, read new books and be amazed. I want to make things. I want other people to like the things I make. I want the people I respect to like me. I want to love every moment of my life. I never want to lose you who is reading these words.
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Yesterday was the KGB annual meeting. That means that most of the meeting was spent selecting officers for next year. I thought that the revisions that were made to the bylaws would mean that elections took less time this year. I was wrong.
Ed was elected President. Honestly, he doesn't really seem to fit the job to me. It's sort of like Ed's natural role is to subvert authority, but if he is the authority, that kind of makes it not work. I guess it might also have to do with resentment. If I'd been involved with KGB earlier, I probably could have been an officer at some point, although it probably wouldn't really have given me that much benefit, and I don't know that I would have wanted any responsibility... I'm just running in circles here. I'm sure Ed will do fine, my aesthetics aside. The other officer selections were not terribly noteworthy from my point of view.
I've somehow let myself get sick. On Saturday morning I woke up with a bad sore throat, which I originally thought definitely meant I was sick, until I remembered that the TMBG concert had been the past night, and I had been yelling and singing along loudly. It stuck around for a few days, though, and then morphed into a headache and congestion. DayQuil and NyQuil make me feel much better, but it still bothers me that I let myself get sick at all - probably largely because of staying up so long for Booth.
Lately I seem to be running into Laura for a couple of minutes at a time. I see her and we say hi and then she has to go, and I don't have a chance to have a conversation at all. It's frustrating.
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Over the past few days, I've missed nearly all of my classes. Mark and I just procrastinated way more than we were able to on the Distributed project, and we weren't able to pull it together. It's very likely the worst major project I've ever turned in since being at CMU. Somehow I can't make myself be very upset about it, though. Even if I fail the course, I'm still going to graduate and be out of here.
After finishing... err, deciding to turn that in, I had to do Databases, which thankfully was extremely easy, although it took a fair bit of time, and I had to use up my last two late days to turn it in. Fortunately there's only one assignment left in Databases, so I should be okay.
Laura wanted to see me Thursday night like we usually do, but I wasn't able to. I almost think I should have just said screw my grades and gone, although it would have hurt Mark as well, not just me. Still, I'm pretty sure I'm not going to do all that well academically, and really it doesn't matter, since I'm going to graduate anyway. I'm not likely to have all that many more opportunities to see Laura, though. It's hard to be rational about this.
This past evening, after finishing Databases, I found myself unexpectedly having a tiny bit of free time, and more expectedly wanting to get the heck out of here, so I went with KGB to Buca di Beppo. I sat with Kevin Shiue, two older people (grad students, I think) who I didn't know and one of whom spent a large portion of dinner explaining Kerberos to the other one, and Betsy Kolmus. I didn't have quite as much fun as I did at Priya's birthday party, largely because I didn't know the people I was sitting with as well. I did get a lot of food, which was good, although it meant that for a long time afterwards my blood sugar just kept going up despite repeated additional insulin injections.
I have noticed a pattern in my behavior which, aside from being near-useless in the first place, is starting to get really, really old. It goes more or less like this:
I suppose that this behavior is, depending on your interpretation, some weird vestige of an attempt to attract girls to me or the best I can do at attracting girls to me given my extremely limited experience with it and my extreme unwillingness to pursue it as a task. It seems to run at a subconscious or low-conscious level. I suppose I've never really made a high-level conscious effort to stop doing it for good, but I don't know that I'll do that even now.
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Big lyrics update. First Linkin Park, about which I don't have much to write. Three songs from Hybrid Theory:
which is all that I intend to put up from that album, and three from Meteora:which I'm sure are good enough to post. I'm not sure about any more songs from Meteora - although I like a lot more songs on the CD, I'm still not 100% sure which are the truly great ones.
Next, a song by Simple Plan, which I first heard at Charlie's house: I'd Do Anything. While listening to the song for the first time, I was enthralled, but immediately after it ended, both Charlie and Dan expressed fairly strong dislike of it. One of them said that they were obviously Blink-182 clones. Well, I listened to some Blink-182 for comparison, and while they are similar, I don't really see why that's important. It's like the people dissing on Linkin Park for not changing more from Hybrid Theory to Meteora. I have nothing against a band developing their talents, but frankly, if I like the way a band sounds, then when I pick up their next album, I want the fact that the same band made it to be pretty easily recognizable. Also, if another band "copies" their sound, I might well like them.
I guess what I'm trying to say boils down to two things: first, that if I like a song the first time, I'll probably like it the hundredth time (maybe even the hundredth time in a row, although I've only done that a few times), and I'll probably like other songs that sound like that song. Second, that I wish people would almost totally ignore image in music. I admit that I sometimes don't live up to this ideal myself. Still, I don't like Linkin Park's image all that much, and Simple Plan seems to be pretty clearly a sellout (and I downloaded the rest of their album; the rest of the songs aren't really that great), but I just don't see why that's important. I suppose I have to be prepared to admit the possibility that somehow, people benefit from taking image so seriously, but I just don't see it. It's all about the pleasant sensations and joyous emotions, conducing eventually to my happiness, that music is able to induce.
Last is a song I would have put up a long time ago, but somehow managed not to think of until They Might Be Giants played it in concert: New York City. Although it was not originally written by TMBG, I always think of it as their song, and actually don't like the original version (by Cub) all that much. I think it's my favorite TMBG song.
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I sit there on the floor, watching TV, my cell phone on vibrate mode like it always is, right on my heart. I know no one will call me. Those who could would know that it would cost me for every minute I used it, and would try my room phone or ICQ or AIM first. It makes me sad and comforts me at the same time.
I've started working on the next Networks project. It looks doable, I think. I don't have much other work in the next week.
There are other things I meant to write about, I think, but I can't remember them.
I miss Laura.
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I met Laura at 17 by the black chairs. She was (and probably still is) sick, quite possibly with the same thing I had/have (although at an earlier stage of development) and her mind was foggy because of this, so she wasn't terribly talkative at the outset, and wanted me to talk. Eventually we settled into a groove - I mentioned the major issues going through my head at the moment, and one of them was Evanescence, which branched out when I mentioned that Mark had wondered when AI would be able to compose credible music, and I had said that I wouldn't be surprised if it didn't happen in my lifetime.
I said that I thought making music as good as humans can was probably a strong-AI equivalent problem, so we talked about strong AI, why to bother doing it, and possible ethical questions raised by it and especially by experimentation on AIs (consensus: it will piss some people off, but it will happen anyway, and I don't think it really bothers either of us all that much).
We arrived at the area where Laura's roleplaying game would be held. We sat down and talked some more. Eventually Laura asked what time it was, and when I said 17:45, she said "wow, that is late" and went inside. As I walked home, I was sort of confused, because 45 minutes hadn't really seemed like that long to me, and I wondered if she had misheard/misinterpreted 17:45 as 7:45pm, although that would have been too late to be even remotely reasonable (she was kind of out of it due to being sick, though) or whether it was just that her schedule had less time allotted than I had thought. In any case, though I was glad to have seen her again, my principal feeling as I walked home was one of disappointment that I hadn't gotten more of her time.
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(Wake me up)
Wake me up inside
(I can't wake up)
Wake me up inside
(Save me)
Call my name and save me from the dark
(Wake me up)
Bid my blood to run
(I can't wake up)
Before I come undone
(Save me)
Save me from the nothing I've become
I've gotten myself into a bad cycle of going to sleep very late after avoiding it for most of the school year. This morning, I meant to go to Distributed and Linear Algebra, but I slept through both of them. After Linear Algebra had met, I met Ed. We walked somewhere for some reason (I can't remember why) and ran into Laura and some other people, who had gotten food. Neither Ed nor I were particularly hungry, so we followed them to the CS lounge, where we all sat down.
I ended up laying on the floor, trying to shut out the loneliness I was feeling due to Laura's not giving me more attention (despite my not asking for it or having any claim on it) by pretending to myself to try to go to sleep (I was very tired, so I almost half fooled myself). I wasn't going to let myself worry about it too much, because I figured that I would see Laura tomorrow anyway to walk to Squirrel Hill, and I didn't think that I was being particularly obvious about it, but Laura seemed to pick up on how I was feeling anyway, because she asked me to walk her to class when she was leaving. Or maybe it was just a coincidence.
When she looked into her classroom, Laura decided that she didn't really need to go to class right away, and we walked over to the stairs and sat down and talked. Actually, I mostly just sat there and let her talk. That was okay, though, since she was talking and I was kind of tired, and I was following along.
Eventually the topic veered into what I'm doing after graduation, or more specifically the fact that I have no idea what I'm doing and that things will be really bad if I just end up working at DMV at home. Laura tried to motivate me to go to the career center. I told her that what she was doing was making me very uncomfortable, because it was making it impossible for me to mentally push aside how pathetic it is that I can't get myself motivated enough to really look for a job. Laura kept trying to encourage me.
When I asked her what she was doing the next day, it might have appeared to an outside observer (had there been one) to be a near-random interjection given our conversation, but we both understood exactly what it meant. I said "You're not going to meet me tomorrow unless I can prove I went to the career center", intending it as a command, but I couldn't tell whether Laura took it that way or as a statement of fact when she replied affirmatively. She hugged me and went off to her class.
After that, going over to the career center and making an appointment was not even a choice, it was a reflex.
While at Charlie's, the same time I heard the Simple Plan song, I also heard Bring Me To Life by Evanescence. Dan described them as Linkin Park with a female vocalist, but that's only really true of Bring Me To Life, since they had a guest male vocalist on that as well. Nevertheless, over the past few days, I have downloaded the rest of their album, and they have taken over my soul. The quote above is from Bring Me To Life. I have their CD ordered from Amazon. Their music is... umm... deep? Music criticism or even description in words seems almost useless, which is very unfortunate, because words are the only effective means I have with which to communicate.
Two days ago I had 3 full meals, and yesterday I had 2. It's not that I was trying hard to eat. Rather, I've learned to be an opportunist about meals because it takes me so much effort to get them, and a lot of opportunities seemed to come up. It was really too much food for my body, which isn't used to a normal diet, to deal with, though, and my blood sugar kept shooting up, so today I deliberately only had one meal.
Networks is moving along very slowly, because I'm so unmotivated on it, but it is moving, and I think we'll manage to finish. I think this is the last major project I have left - I really hope that the Distributed isn't too difficult.
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I just had a strange experience. My blood sugar was (and still is) noticeably low, and for probably a minute I seriously considered letting it stay low for a while, because it was having an effect on my mental state which is kind of difficult to describe. It was like everything was simpler, or like the things that I sometimes want to do but should think through seriously before actually doing seemed to clearly be the best things to do. Since I believe at a metalevel that many of these are just cases of my being afraid to do what needs to be done, the idea of being in a mental state that forces me to do them has some appeal. Of course, low blood sugar is probably as bad a choice of a way in which to accomplish things as alcoholic intoxication. The effects are actually somewhat similar.
Speaking of things I maybe shouldn't do but feel an urge to do anyway, I had a dream last night that I'm having trouble deciding whether to describe here.
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Yesterday, even though I had only had 5 or so hours of sleep (I stayed up late watching White Oleander again - I needed a "soft" movie, and it fit the bill), I dragged myself out of bed for Distributed. Mark spent a substantial portion of class arguing with Kesden that Mobile IP sucks, until I told him "Okay, let's learn how it works, then we can discuss how it's a bad idea". In Linear Algebra I half went to sleep.
After that Ed and I went to get food and sat outside on the grass talking. I can't remember what our first topic of conversation was, but I brought up how Ed wants to be self-reliant on personal issues. He told me that he tends to understand himself pretty well and not to think that others really have much to contribute, but beyond that, he actually tends to be somewhat secretive about personal issues, although not to the point where if someone flat-out asks him about something he won't tell. I feel very lost when I can't go to other people for help, and I think that may be a weakness in me. I need to learn to impartially consider advice from others, but I often only ask for advice to try to justify what I already want to do.
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Last night, after working on Networks until about midnight, I came back home and saw a bunch of people in the Mudge lounge playing Risk, mostly KGB members. I stopped there and watched the rest of the game, and after that the KGB members - James, pink-haired Rebecca, Luke, Stiger, Julie and I - went over the Roselawn 7 and watched the Rocky Horror Picture Show. I had only half seen it once with Alison, so this was the first time I learned the concept of callbacks and so forth.
In other exciting news, my mate-searching algorithm (I've determined that that is what it is, however flawed and ineffectual) seems to still be in full force, although it has become very weird and almost detached from its proper goal, that being to propagate my genetic material. It seems to have morphed into mostly a seeking-physical-contact-with-females algorithm, with little desire for or interest in sex attached.
I'm still unsure whether to put up a description of my dream. I have a feeling I'm putting more thought into this decision than it deserves, and therefore overblowing how important it seems even to me, which probably in turn makes it an even worse idea to post it.
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I didn't write an entry at 11:30 this morning, because I had to go finish up Networks. If I had written one, here's roughly what it would have looked like:
I just slept through my appointment at the Career Center. This is not fate. This is not an accident. This is just me being a colossal dumbass and staying up until 5 in the morning to read stupid web pages because I have no control over myself and don't cut back on my time-wasting even when I'm also working 6 or more hours a day on Networks.
I expect that a paragraph like the preceeding is likely to incite pity. Well, shove it. It's my own damn fault, and if you have any respect for me at all, you'll understand that excusing me because we "all make mistakes" is no help - is, in fact, worse than no help. Why does everyone have to be so soft, never pushing me to achieve anything? I guarantee that even if it makes me feel better, it doesn't help me.
I emailed Kevin Collins asking to reschedule and berating myself, and he told me not to be so hard on myself and I rescheduled for Thursday afternoon, since I'm obviously incapable of making morning appointments.
I received the Evanescence CD. Most of the songs I already had MP3s of, but some are different versions. It's definitely one of those things that I just had to own. I also bought The Fifth Element, because I remember seeing it a long time ago and liking it, and hearing many people berating it since then and not really remembering it well enough to make my own (re)judgement.
I can tell you everything about the dream in which I made out with Laura that makes me hesitant to discuss its content here in a subordinate clause like the one you just read. Having that out of the way, I might as well describe the whole thing:
There was a building with a tobacco shop (which also sold some other things) on the bottom floor, and on the second floor were these two large rooms with their own enclosures, more like separate buildings really except inside of a larger building. The rooms were unfinished, and on their floors was unpainted, unvarnished wood, with planks going from side to side, and random holes in the floor at places, and big (several feet in each dimension) unfinished wooden boxes lying around. A class containing Laura and me and other people I can't remember (but I think some of them may have been people I know from real life) met on some sort of a regular basis in one of these rooms.
One day, the class was going to a show (maybe a play? I don't really know) in one of these two rooms. After you walked up the stairs, you were facing down a hallway between the two rooms (the left one was the one we used). On the left as soon as you'd come up the stairs was a concession stand which sold beer (and possibly other things, I don't remember). Laura and I were talking as we walked up the stairs, and when we got to the stand, she asked me to buy her some type of beer, and I bought one for each of us.
I can't remember exactly how it happened, but somehow the two of us ended up on some sort of soft chair or couch, still in the area by the two rooms. I was lying on top of Laura, and we were kissing. I remember thinking that I wasn't doing it very well, which I think has to do with a comment Yanna made a day or two earlier in real life, about how she and one of her ex's kissing styles didn't match at all. It didn't progress beyond kissing, and I didn't have any desire for it to, although I can't really remember whether this required any self-control on my part. Actually, as strange as this sounds given the content, the mood was not sexual at all. It almost felt like we were just... I don't know, my waking self doesn't have a concept for this.
I had the sense that Laura was willing to go further, but I broke it off eventually, and she got angry at me. This wasn't because I had stopped it, but because she thought that the whole thing had been a mistake. We both headed towards the bathrooms that were on the other side of the big rooms, and she threw a pair of boxers at me (I can't remember whether they were mine or hers, or whether this was just random dream garbage) as we went there. I went into the men's bathroom and used the shower there, which had no curtain.
Then everyone else was leaving for some reason, so I went downstairs. I asked the tobacco salesman to give me 3 of his best cigars quickly, and rushed to my ride after getting them.
Then I "woke up". I realized that the first part had been a dream, and was trying to find a computer to write it down. Laura was there, and I told her that I wouldn't tell anyone about it.
Then I "woke up" again. I realized that the first and second parts had both been dreams, but still I thought that this time, it must be real. I was at my grandparent's house, I think, and I was downstairs and the TV was on. My dad was mad about the noise the TV made, but I hadn't been the one who turned it on. I heard Bring Me To Life playing, and I had a specific sensation that this part wasn't a dream.
I am ashamed to admit that I put off writing this journal entry for so long largely so that I wouldn't post it before seeing Laura on Thursday. The dream raises a question of interpretation. I don't find the theories of dream analysis I've heard to be very compelling. Freud and Jung both seem to read things into dreams that aren't there, whereas the theory that dreams are just mental static seems to dismiss them too easily.
Concerning this particular dream, although I have remembered a fair number of dreams having two layers (where usually the outer layer is a false awakening at the end), I don't recall one with three layers before. It seems almost like a part of my mind was trying to make me forget the innermost layer. I say "a part" because I also realized in each of the outer layers that I had been in a dream, and was specifically trying to remember the inner part. And of course, the final result was that I did remember it.
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Kenn Hamm
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Last modified: Tue May 27 15:00:48 2003