theadana's
questions - and I guess I owe an interview to anyone who wants one now, so
post here if you do.I'm sitting at Ashokan next to a stove in the building which serves as a dining hall. Everyone else in our party went down to the lower level or something like that. I'm feeling very unenergetic, mostly because I only slept for about five hours last night. It's boring here, but that seems to be okay.
I remember one time while I was going out with Alison, I was going to meet her by the Capitol. I found a bench in front of it and I had to sit there for probably close to an hour. I remember thinking that in the past, I would have been bored sitting in one place with nothing to read or watch or listen to and no one to talk to, but now I was able to just sit there and think. It seemed like a strength, but maybe boredom is a necessary state to impel me to action. It seems like this is tied into the extreme lack of energy I've felt for so long now. But I wonder if I ever really had more energy. Maybe it's just that my parents or others used to take care of a lot of the details that take so much out of me now and leave me with so little.
Summary of media consumption over the past few days: Six Feet Under (entire first season), The Fifth Element, Requiem for a Dream, and The Matrix Reloaded (for the fourth time now).
Ed came to Catskill to visit on Friday afternoon. We watched The Fifth Element, then went down to Main Street and ate at the Thai place. After that, we went to the point and talked for probably an hour or more, mostly about The Matrix series and what the plot might mean. We found a place to sit by the water, which was very nice except that I got a whole bunch of bug bites due to my attire. When we left, we got ice cream, and by that time I had completely forgotten that I had parked in the municipal lot over on Main Street. It's a good thing Ed remembered, or I literally would have lost the car.
When we got home, we watched Requiem for a Dream and then Ed took off.
On Saturday my sister, my dad and I went to the Dumpling House for lunch. Then I dropped my sister off at my mom's house, went back down to Catskill for a couple of hours, then came back up to Albany to take her to The Matrix Reloaded.
When we arrived at Crossgates, I was surprised to see that the show was sold out, although Betsy tells me that happens a lot with popular movies at Crossgates, even weeks after their release. So we bought tickets for the next show. I've ceased to get much plotwise out of the movie - although it's still entertaining, I really need to see the third one before any of the numerous questions I have are answered. (By the way, a lot of the plot analysis in my earlier entry is almost certainly wrong, but I don't feel like correcting it in detail at the moment.) Seeing it has become sort of a compulsion, though, which is unfortunate since it costs so much each time. Oh well, I'm sure I'll get over it.
After the movie, for some reason I didn't feel like driving, so I asked my sister to do so. This turned out to be fortunate, as she faced a number of challenges on the drive. First, it was dark and raining pretty hard, making it difficult to see at times. Second, there was an ambulance for which she had to pull over (something I've never had to do, nor had she before that). Third, there was a pretty bad accident and we were unable to use the route we had been expecting to, and Betsy had to find a different way back to her mom's house. I hung out there for a bit before taking off for Catskill.
On Sunday, after I wrote the previous entry, my father and Nance announced to everyone there (my paternal grandparents, Ken, Sue, Brian, Tasha, Edith and Tara) that they were engaged. He had let this slip the previous day during lunch, so it didn't come as a surprise to me.
The guy from the cable company said Tuesday was when they would install everything. So I was surprised when on Monday afternoon, the cable guy paid my house a visit. He didn't care that I wanted it installed upstairs, and seemed to respect the fact that I had some vague clue what was going on. He didn't even try to install any software on Robert, just hooked everything up and had me make sure the cable was live. I've had it for several days now, but having internet access at home still doesn't seem normal.
After going out in the woods at the point with Ed on Friday, my legs itched excessively. I assumed it was bug bites, but the back of my left knee was still quite irritated and red on Monday, so my father set up an appointment with the doctor for me on Tuesday - not exactly the way I had hoped to start the month of June... I went and he gave me a prescription for a cream and an antibiotic, which don't seem to have had much effect yet.
Listening to music that has the sound of sirens in it while driving is not advised.
After the doctor's appointment, I went to Crossgates, since I had quite a bit of time to kill before Betsy's concert later in the day. I walked around looking at stuff, thinking about which of it might be worth having. I had pretty much decided to buy the Animatrix DVD and the Matrix Reloaded soundtrack (each $15) at Best Buy, but I was unsure as to whether to buy one of the power inverters there. I figured that the inverter would be more useful long-term than just getting a cigarette-lighter adaptor for Robert. I had no idea whether $70 for a 90-watt model was at all a reasonable price, though, and I kept walking by the Roadrunner booth to see if I could get online to check, but none of the computers were ever idle. Eventually I ended up going to Radio Shack and discovered that Best Buy's price was indeed unreasonable, as Radio Shack had a 140-watt model for $50, which I ended up buying. I also bought a 50-foot Ethernet cable since insufficient cable length had prevented me from connecting Laura to the cable modem yet.
That evening I went to Betsy's final concert, the Prism. It wasn't bad, but I failed to be impressed by most of the performances. The songs played by only a few people rather than the whole orchestra just weren't very appealing.
Media viewing summary: Fox Sunday night (including a new episode of Futurama and reruns of King of the Hill, The Simpsons, Malcolm in the Middle and Oliver Beene), Phenomenon (which my mom bought for me on VHS a long time ago, but which I hadn't gotten around to watching until now), and the Animatrix, which explains some of the Matrix universe's history.
I've written a piece of software to generate my journal for me. In fact, it generated the page you're reading right now. This is different than the software I already had to help me write my journal, because it runs each time the page is requested (that is, it was run specially just to generate the page you're reading now) rather than each time it is changed. The software emulates the "old" journal almost perfectly; thus, if you already liked the way my journal worked, you have no reason to care much about the change. (The only significant difference is in the title; I think having my name and the month in the title for each page is a significant improvement, especially if you bookmark it.) However, if you'd like more options, there are currently two which might be relevant:
Here are some sample links to demonstrate this:
The script should interfere as little as possible with you if you choose to ignore it, so if you notice any problems, please email me about them. Also, if there are any additional features you'd like my journal to have, let me know - I can't promise to write what you ask for, but if it's reasonable and wouldn't take too much time to write, I probably will, even if you're the only one who would use it. If I make any further improvements to the script, they'll be documented in later entries.
On Thursday at what should have been 10:30 but ended up being closer to 11, I left for Charlie's house. I ended up having a lot of caffeine there, in the form of Red Bull and various flavors of Mountain Dew, which I guess has become something of a pattern. We managed to get in a little bit of good discussion, but most of our philosophizing simply came down to a lack of any definition (or consensus that something is a basic term) for terms that were essential to the subjects we were debating. Overall my mental state during the visit was largely one of boredom.
In the evening, Charlie, Dan and I went to a restaurant where we were joined by Josh and his girlfriend. The place we went to had both Thai cuisine and sushi. The topics were fairly wide-ranging (a lot of them referring to situations in these people's lives with which I am not familiar), but one topic in particular which I think came up at this point was sex and relationships, although I may be projecting to later that evening and the next day, when it was a significant topic for Charlie, Dan and me. A large part of the reason I was bored while at Charlie's is that he seems to spend most of his waking time playing video games. I must confess that I find this behavior truly puzzling. Of late I've had a deep desire to have most of the activities I undertake be important somehow, at least to me, and although I do a terrible job of satisfying this desire, such obvious forms of wasting one's life as video games generally assume a seemingly intrinsic lack of ability to hold my interest.
On Friday Dan, Charlie and I (mostly Dan with Charlie and me tagging along) went shopping. Dan was buying stuff to take with him on his trip (of unknown duration) to Italy. He leaves at the end of the month. We also went to Best Buy and Hannaford, then went back home. We talked some more about relationships and sex, but mostly I just messed around online (as I would have done if I had been at home), and eventually I left.
Saturday and Sunday I mostly spent sleeping, despite the allure of Internet access at home.
Ah, summer, that time of year when my readership nearly evaporates. (I actually thought that there was no one at all reading my page for a while, but I must not have been reading my log file very carefully.) The difference is that this time, there will be no return to CMU to reinvigorate interest in me.
I suppose it may be just as well, since my life of late has been terribly, almost indescribably, boring. Even things that one might think would be of interest assume in my mind a quality of total dullness. For example, I started work on Monday, yet this fact seems nearly completely void of meaning to me.
I've only been sleeping about 5 hours a night for the past 6 nights. Today it was because my father woke me up and I didn't feel like going back to bed afterwards, but it started because I have to get up around 6 to get to work, and my body seems to want so badly to stick on a 24-hour schedule that it seems to make it impossible for me to fall asleep before 1 despite my sincere attempts to set my bedtime at 23. I wonder if it's actually possible for me to get used to this little sleep, but I doubt it. I am definitely starting to appreciate the value of coffee in the morning in keeping one from slumping over at one's desk.
I've been thinking that I waste an awful lot of time in the car. Although I find driving enjoyable, about the only things I can usefully do at the same time are have a conversation with a passenger if I'm lucky enough to have one or listen to music. So, I realized that it would be incredibly useful to have comprehensible voice synthesis. I tried the one that comes with Windows XP, but it's not that great, and isn't designed for what I really wanted to do, which is have it read books or other large chunks of text to me. So I investigated Festival and MBROLA for Linux, and have now rendered the text of The Count of Monte Cristo into spoken words (with the one female voice I was able to find). It doesn't sound quite like a human being, and it almost croaks at the end of long sentences (it seems like it's trying to simulate a human being running out of breath, but any normal human would pause and take a breath in the middle of a sentence that long). Still, this is very good, both because it enables me to make better use of my time in the car and because it allows me to convert what would otherwise be an "active" type of entertainment / information intake into a "passive" type during which all I have to do is pay attention and absorb what is being said. Also, I think it's incredibly cool that we have free software to generate comprehensible speech. It can't be too long until we get reasonable inflection and so forth as well, unless that turns out to be a strong-AI equivalent problem.
Since I've been sleeping only 5 hours a night or so, 7 or 8 feels like a ridiculously long time. Of course, I'm still finding it very difficult to adjust my schedule to tht of the rest of the world.
This evening I went up to Albany to meet Ed one more time before he goes back to Pittsburgh. We met at the Academy, then I drove us downtown, where we went to Shalimar. After dinner, we went to Flights of Fantasy, which has moved yet again. There were a whole bunch of somewhat unusual people there playing various CCGs or other games, but I found that most things there weren't really able to hold my interest. Ed bought some book by Niven, though, and then we went back to Academy.
Once there we easily climbed over a fence and with slightly more difficulty found an open window, since Ed wanted to use the bathroom. After that we wandered around the fields, sitting down in several different places and talking mostly about stuff that had happened at Academy. Ed reminded me particularly of how we had made signs with a hypodermic needle announcing "Natty Fleck's One Stop Drug Shop" and posted them around AAG, for which I don't think I got in serious trouble, although I can't really remember... I was in trouble often enough during grade school that it may have just not made much of an impression on me.
On Sunday, we went out to Connecticut to Edith and Jim's for a family get-together / for Father's Day. I was glad to get to see my relatives. However, it's already been so long since this happened that most of the details have faded from my memory, and for some reason even the ones that haven't seem almost inconsequential at this point.
Still nothing new, really. Some of the Six Feet Under episodes I've been downloading for weeks now have started to finish, and I've been watching them as they come in. Good show.
Laura (a.k.a. Theadana on LiveJournal) gave me some interview questions there, the answers to which I reproduce here (they were also posted to LJ):
[[[
Here are my answers to theadana's
questions - and I guess I owe an interview to anyone who wants one now, so
post here if you do.
1. What has been your most shining academic moment? What has been your most dismal academic failure?
My most shining academic moment would be, I think, a photo-finish between my kernel, my filesystem (both for OS) and my raytracer. The kernel and filesystem were done with Mark, both in probably half or less of the schedule that they should have been allotted, and both received A's. The raytracer was written alone, in roughly 3 days, for what should have been a 3-week project, and darn it, I'm still kind of proud of that thing.
My most dismal academic failure would have to be Compilers, in which I received an incomplete which eventually became a C when I did nothing to make up for the work I hadn't completed, which was actually almost the entire course (I really didn't deserve even the C). Not that I haven't received equivalent or even worse grades before, but this was the only one in something that I really cared about, and was just too damn lazy to ever pull off.
2. What philosopher do you find yourself agreeing with the most? What core idea of theirs do you find most enjoyable? Is there a philosopher who disagrees with this idea? What argument do they offer?
This depends a lot on what you mean by "philosopher" - I have a good friend, Charlie Dake, who largely introduced me to philosophy and with whose own philosophy I still find myself mostly in agreement. As far as historical philosophers, I think that Descartes, Hume and Kant each had a seminal idea - cogito ergo sum, the logical invalidity of induction, and the noumenon/phenomenon distinction. There's no single historical philosopher with whom I find myself in agreement on most ideas. Of the ideas that I listed, no one really denies cogito ergo sum, except perhaps for those who deny cogito itself. Some do argue that it's unnecessary, though, since they think that the perceived world is just as "basic" as - if not more basic than - the inner mental world. There are those who argue that induction is logically valid, but mostly they either beg the question or try to redefine logic to suit their arguments. After all, no matter how many white swans you've seen, it would always be logically consistent if every swan you had never seen was black. The noumenon/phenomenon distinction is, I think, more controversial. In fact, a lot of modern philosophers assert that the noumenon is void of meaning or use and therefore nonexistent. I agree that it doesn't have a whole lot of practical effect, but come on, this is philosophy, not physics! I think it makes a lot of philosophical problems a lot simpler to think of things this way. (For those who don't know about it, the phenomenon is the perceived entity or the best picture a mind is able to form of what underlies it (I further divide these two items in my own philosophy, but I'm pretty sure that Kant conflates them) and the noumenon is the pure object-in-itself.)
3. You have the option to raise your ability in some skill by similarly decreasing your ability in another skill. What would you give up, and what would you give it up for?
An obvious and "fair" trade that I'd be willing to make is to lose all my knowledge of the French language (except for that possessed by any competent English speaker) in exchange for an equivalent enhancement of my knowledge in Japanese. Unfortunately, that's also fairly boring. A more interesting trade that I might be willing to make is to lose my ability to write fiction in exchange for an equivalent ability to write music, although I'd have to think about it, and I wouldn't be willing to lose my general ability to write well. Of course, given the ability to write well I think that the ability to write fiction isn't that hard to develop, which makes it seem like this answer is just dodging the question...
It's hard to give a more interesting answer, because I haven't really spent much effort developing abilities that I don't want quite a bit, so there are a ton of abilities I'd like to have but not much that I could sacrifice for them. I wouldn't be willing to give up any of my more important abilities, such as logical reasoning, good command of spelling, grammar, diction and phrasing, the ability to retain large amounts of information in my head at once or to manipulate same with relative ease, etc.
4. Does your beard have psychological significance? Or is it grown out of pure indifference?
There are several factors that play into this. First, my high school required students to have short hair (above the ears was the official rule, I think, although you could get away with a bit more than that) and be clean-shaven. I really didn't like that, and I probably started growing a beard in reaction to it. That said, I have trouble maintaining any kind of a regular routine if it doesn't cause me immediate and significant annoyance or pain to disobey it (the qualifier is necessary since I have little difficulty managing my diabetes, because if I miss a shot, I feel it), which obviously makes not having to shave on a daily basis a natural for me. Also, the beard is part of an image which I kind of like - I always hated how I looked in middle and high school, but I actually think I look kind of cool now. Last, although I don't think this one is necessary for explanation, it's possible that subconsciously, I'm trying to drive away girls who might want to go out with me by having a long beard, since I've been repeatedly told that most girls don't find it attractive, and one would think this would likely overrule my other considerations if it were something I really wanted.
5. Sometimes, you write stories. Could you write one right now? Please provide a story by writing on the fly, without planning, in a time not to exceed one hour. You may begin now.
This was a tough question for an interview, and I have to admit that I failed slightly to comply with the terms; although I did start almost immediately after I read the question, I ended up taking a total of probably an hour and 15 minutes to finish, and I did some planning in the middle of that for the second half (not sure if that was allowed). Anyway, here it is: Incomprehensibilia
Keep in mind that an hour is an extremely brief period of time in which to write a story, so not only is it very short, I make no promises as to how well it fits together (as I had time neither to plan it nor to substantially revise it). That said, it has one interesting quality, which I'm curious to find out whether you notice. If you think you have it figured out, post a comment [edit for Ragnar version: here], and I'll tell you if you're right.
]]]
I guess I have nothing more to report, really. Life is slow, boring and irritating, yet seductively comfortable and easy.
I'm at the Lab School Banquet (well, it hasn't actually started yet). It promises to be as boring as ever, but since this year Betsy is actually graduating, I decided to go. As it turns out, I should get to see Tasha here as well, who I haven't really seen in years, so it might turn out to be worth it even not taking the obligation dimension into account.
I must either have an absolutely unbelievably bad ability to associate names with faces or be extremely memorable, because people I don't even recognize are constantly walking up to me and saying hello. In actuality, it's probably a bit of each factor. I was going to write this as solely a piece of information which happens to be true, yet not immediately relevant, but immediately before turning on Robert III some woman here told her daughter to "say hi to Betsy's brother", and I had absolutely no idea who either of them were.
Between work and the banquet, my father and I went to Borders for a while. I looked through a bunch of music, and in a habit which despite its futility I have maintained for years now, I went over to the "Soundtrack" section and headed for "F". I knew that Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within had had a soundtrack release, which in a cruel twist of fate had not been composed by Nobuo Uematsu, and that was all I was expecting to find there. But when I reached the spot and thumbed through the CDs, I saw Final Fantasy S Generation, Final Fantasy N Generation...
I saw the Final Fantasy IV OST and did a double take. I picked it up, hardly able to believe what I was seeing, and put it back down. At this point I walked away because there were people around and I was almost starting to cry.
I already own the CD, of course, but that's not the point. It may have taken 10 years, but the music to the first Final Fantasy I ever played, the game that introduced the Final Fantasy Theme to me, is for sale in a mainstream American store.
I'm in the car now, on my way to work. (Don't worry, my father is driving.) I didn't really have a chance to finish writing last night. I did see Tasha briefly after the banquet (which is always long and was especially so this year since the senior class was so big). By the time I got home, it was nearly midnight.
So, I've been thinking. There are certain topics that I generally avoid in my journal. I don't generally do this out of a deep-seated desire to keep things secret; most of the time, it's just that I don't want to appear foolish or don't want to risk offending anyone. But I've realized that neither of those is really a legitimate reason to leave out of my journal something that otherwise belongs there.
Anyway... I haven't masturbated in a week now. There have been many times in the past when I thought that not masturbating would be a good idea, usually to help develop my self-control, but I nearly always decided against it (which, I suppose, might itself have something to say about my self-control). This time my motivations are somewhat different (and I don't feel like discussing those; suffice it to say that they do not involve any alternate sources of sexual pleasure). The reason that I'm even mentioning this is that I seriously think it's having a weird effect on my psyche. I mean, I'm sure that it has decreased my sex drive (it's kind of like the oversleeping / undersleeping thing that way) and made any attraction to girls I have into a weird parody of itself - I can still recognize an attractive girl, but even having done so, I really don't find myself attracted to her at all. Even attempting to fantasize about anything sexual often disgusts and usually fails to interest me.
The effects seem more wide-ranging than that, though. But I can't describe exactly how, nor can I prove that the changes I've noticed aren't due instead to the 5 or 6 hours of sleep a night I've been getting lately and the cup of coffee I've needed each morning to help me stay awake.
Two mornings ago, as I was just beginning my drive to work, there was a squirrel in the road, stupidly ignorant of the approaching cars. I hit the brakes - hard, although not unsafely - and managed not to run over him. It almost seems like I shouldn't even care, but I guess I do anyway.
Betsy's graduation is in a couple of hours. For some reason up until this afternoon, I thought today was Wednesday. I'm glad it isn't, since I'm extremely tired, and the weekend will give me a chance to sleep more. Actually, my lack of sleep might well be why I was so confused.
Kenn Hamm
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Last modified: Sun Jun 29 00:05:42 2003