My grandmother and grandfather seem to be recovering fairly well from their injuries. In addition, they got a new stove and refrigerator to replace the very old and troubled versions of same they've been using.
Robert III had been having problems, and then he refused to boot. I tried to fix him to no avail (in fact, I think I broke him worse in doing so). I bought a replacement and swapped in the old hard drive, which fortunately wasn't the defective part, and now I have a lot of spare parts should anything else break, but this was obviously very expensive, and I'm going to have to start tightening up a lot very soon, especially if I don't find a job that pays better than DMV.
Having finished my 4-week abstinence from masturbation and nearly finished the one from alcohol, I've been thinking about making giving something up for 4 weeks a longer-term project. I've come up with four ideas so far: soda, speeding, discretionary spending, and websurfing. Websurfing would probably be the most difficult, perhaps so difficult as to be impossible.
Somehow in my websurfing adventures (perhaps while looking for fiction writer's guides) I stumbled across NaNoWriMo, short for National Novel Writing Month. I realized that if I gave up websurfing during that month, the huge amount of free time I'd be left with would make it much easier to devote enough time to a novel. In addition, I might finally be able to let go of caring about whether my story is terribly coherent or valuable and just write it. After all, it would be better for my first novel to be done, even with serious defects (which then might be correctable) than a nonexistent Platonic ideal.
Over the weekend, once again, there was nothing to do. Once again, I visited Charlie, and played tons of Final Fantasy X. Although it seems that there's no reason I shouldn't be equally able to play at home, somehow being at Charlie's allows me to let go of incessantly checking AIM or LiveJournal or my email and just play. I'll have to develop this into a full-fledged theory of how different physical locations affect my thought processes at some point, because I've noticed this in several cases—even though it seems like anywhere with internet access ought to be more or less equivalent, it really isn't. (And places without internet access can be interesting too; I normally find nature stultifyingly boring, but with someone like Ed to talk to it can be a great backdrop.)
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On Monday night, I took Charlie up on an offer he had made and a proposition I had been considering for years. This is the first time I've ever intentionally eaten meat (assuming you consider fish to be meat). It was a very interesting experience; the things I liked better tended to be the ones that were less fishy, as might be expected. I did think the eel roll was very good, but as there was only one of those for each of us, I'll need more before I can form a final impression.
The sake, however, was incredible. I'd never had an alcoholic beverage served warm before. It came in hard-to-describe (but easy to recognize) “pots” with small tea cups. It was good to be somewhat intoxicated; it helped take the edge off of the weirdness of eating sushi. After dinner I was very glad we had decided to walk rather than take the car, as there was no way I was in any condition to drive.
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During lunch today, the weather was just unbelievably beautiful, but the line at the Greek place where I usually buy lunch was excessively long. I decided to take a walk and made more use of my cell phone than I probably had in the previous month. I called Ed to make plans for driving to Pittsburgh, Betsy because she had a couple more problems with her computer, and Laura to see what her schedule was next week. (In the last of those calls, ironically, I walked out of range of the cell tower just as the conversation had wrapped up anyway but without the opportunity to actually hang up.)
When I got back from lunch at 13:00, I had email waiting that told me that all “non-essential” state employees (which definitely includes me) were to leave at that same time. So I immediately took off, went over to my mother's house to fix my sister's computer, then went down to Catskill and started preparing myself for the trip.
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Note: there's a missing entry chronologically preceeding this one. The notes for it are on Laura, to whom I don't seem to have access at the moment. When I write it, I'll put a link to it in the next entry I post, so you shouldn't have to worry about it.
At around 8:30, I left home for Stewarts to get gas and coffee and meet Ed. I also began my long-planned Happy 2b Hardcore marathon. Ed took a bit longer than I expected he would to arrive, and only a few minutes later I would have called him, but he got there just before that. We set off on the Thruway with me in the lead.
The transition from the Thruway to I-84 was fairly smooth, but the one from I-84 to I-81 (I think) was somewhat less so. All day we were driving in and out of highly localized rainstorms. Well, at the end of I-81 the road narrowed down from three lanes to one, and Ed and I got separated by a bit, but I figured we would rejoin after traffic picked up again. Immediately after traffic did pick back up, though, we drove into probably the worst of those rainstorms. I called Ed and told him where I was by mile marker. I thought I was a few miles ahead of him, but as it turned out the mile markers ran the opposite of the way I thought.
So Ed slowed down to 55, but it was taking me a long time to catch him, when by the side of the road I saw the sign for the exit we needed to take. I immediately called Ed and said "if you didn't take it, I think you just missed the exit". Ed was in fact mere hundreds of yards before the exit and was just able to make it, after which we switched positions again.
The longest stretch of the trip was on I-80, where we were able to safely make good time. The road was clear and I think we saw only one police officer over about 300 miles of road. We stopped once for gas since Ed was running out, and again just after turning south on I-79 at Sheetz for food. Eventually we arrived in Pittsburgh, which I somehow managed to navigate correctly by intuition despite the extreme rapidity of the decisions that needed to be made, and we arrived at Ed's house, where it looks like I'll be staying.
Ed and I rested at the house for a while, and a couple of hours later we headed over to Jammy Jam, Mav's party. (Mav is how he refers to himself; I had been informed of the party through Ed and had never met him before.) The party overall was pretty enjoyable, although it ended on kind of a bad note, and lasting impressions are often formed by the ending of something.
In any case, it was definitely the most I've ever enjoyed a party; all previous such events have found me walking away depressed before the end. I attribute this to several factors. One possibility is that my personality has changed, which it probably has to some degree. I've become a little less shy and a little more capable of dealing with small talk, although I still greatly prefer actual conversations. However, the defining difference between this party and all previous ones at which I've found myself is probably that this time, I was willing to get drunk.
The details I remember are instantaneous flashes—walking out to the porch and back in again, drinking a gin and tonic or a Black Russian or eating a piece of vodka-soaked fruit, going up to the top floor where dancing was going on and realizing how completely incapable I was of actually dancing myself, sitting on the middle floor talking to Laura for a few minutes, the karaoke as the party wound down. Now for some generalizations (quite possibly overgeneralizations, since they're based on only one instance).
Alcohol does seem to help me enjoy myself, but it's not a panacea. I have no proof that the differences in how I handled this party aren't due to changes in my personality as well / instead, although I don't think so. Also, alcohol seems to makes me more of a creep, in that it makes me more likely to act on my impulse to touch girls, but doesn't make me seem more attractive or interesting. Sometimes this is accepted, but not usually.
At the end there was a bit of a complicated situation. Most people had already left, and the few of us that were still there were sitting around downstairs at the karaoke machine (well, except for those who were participating). I was sitting to the left of a girl named Ratha, and Ed was sitting to her right. We were all touching one another. I had probably had more to drink than I thought I had. Ed and Ratha had interacted earlier that night in such a way that Ratha became smitten with Ed, although I was unaware of that at the time. Anyway, eventually Ratha pulled away from me and closer to Ed, and I think I acted upset for a few minutes, then sullen.
One last thing: although I've now discovered that parties can be enjoyable, they seem unlikely to produce valuable memories.
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I wake up at 14:30 with the last traces of the first hangover I've ever experienced. A few minutes later, Ed comes downstairs and informs me that he's going off to find Rachael, to which I reply with some form of assent. I lay back down on the couch and try to go back to sleep, as I had done several times earlier that night, but it's not happening this time. So I get up, realizing that I haven't had any actual food in nearly 24 hours.
I decide to walk to campus and see if the Moonlight is open. When on Beeler I belatedly realize that I never noticed what number Ed's house was; fortunately it's easy to find. I have a strong feeling of utter aloneness as I walk. There are a few people on the street, but they just make me feel more alone.
In front of the UC I see Ed and a girl who I assume (correctly, it turns out) to be Rachael sitting together. I might like to talk to them, but instead I stay about a hundred feet away and pretend to mouth some words at them, to which Ed responds in kind and Rachael makes an expression as if I had said something naughty. I continue walking towards Tech Street.
As I'm walking, I see crowds of freshmen clustered around Orientation Counselors and I think how I'm really an outsider here now; in particular, it's very unlikely that I'll encounter anyone I know, since they'd practically have to be a junior (now senior, but I still think of people in terms of their class year when I was a senior) OC. Of course, while completing the final stretch of the walk past CFA and Heinz towards Tech Street, I see unicycle-Rebecca, who is neither. Sometimes I think the universe likes to make fun of me this way.
The Moonlight is there, but closed, presumably because it's Sunday. I make a note to go there some time during the week and continue walking, now with a destination of Squirrel Hill. As I walk up the big hill on Forbes I remember how many times I've walked this way, how a couple times on Thursday evenings Laura and I walked this way to her gaming session. I think "This trip's purpose was memories. But was it the memories I'll make or the ones I already have that I'm trying to relive?" This thought makes me sad, and then I immediately see a license plate that starts "EKA". "EKA-3123", specifically. I saw another "EKA" last night, though I don't remember the rest of it; Ed and I were walking to my car and he thought that one was it until I asked him what he was doing trying to unlock it.
During my walk I decide to go to Bruegger's for food, but when I arrive I change my mind as I'm walking by Panera and go there instead. I get a soup and salad, as I usually do, and a large iced tea which is ridiculously huge. Once that's done, I walk over to Barnes and Noble, browse for a short period of time and find a 100-page Searle book on mind/body issues. I sit down and read the entire book, then leave, briefly checking the movie theatre. Pirates of the Caribbean is playing and I make a mental note to ask Ed if he's seen it yet. I stop at Panera again to pick up some pastries and then walk home.
Earlier I was thinking how ridiculous it is for me to have driven 500 miles to Pittsburgh only to find the best use of my time to be walking several miles to Squirrel Hill and back to buy food and to have experiences which could easily have been roughly replicated in hundreds of places, including home. I was depressed because I realized there was no way this trip was going to fulfill the expectations I had had of it. But on the way home, I guess I gave up some of my expectations, and now I have mostly hopes.
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First, backdated entries, so you don't miss them (may or may not also be included elsewhere on the page you're already viewing):
In the evening a bunch of us went to Fuel & Fuddle for dinner. I had a veggie burger which Stiger briefly thought was hers until she realized it wasn't made out of meat. Some other people were annoyed that we had allowed ourselves to be seated as a group of 8 leaving the other group of 4 to wait a pretty long time to get a table, but I figured if we'd told them there were 12 of us we'd just have all had to wait that long. Entrees at a bunch of Pittsburgh restaurants are half-price after 23, a way to keep up business especially among college students, I suppose.
There seem to be an awful lot of people staying at the house, at least tonight. In addition to the people who actually live here (Wes, Ivan, Ed for a few more days, Stiger) there are Ivan's brother Chris, Rachael, Betsy and me. Nevertheless, the house is decently sized and could probably accomodate twice as many people without extreme discomfort if it were necessary for some reason. I'm sleeping on the couch, which I've staked out as my own for the week.
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Laura gives me warm fuzzies. Forget everything negative I said before. This trip was totally worth it.
Early Monday afternoon I called Laura, in accordance with the schedule she'd given me on Friday. She wasn't doing anything, so she instructed me on how to find her house and I walked over. She gave me a tour of her house, which was enjoyable but seemed like she was trying too hard to impress me (apparently not having realized or not being able to convince herself of the complete lack of any need to do so). I did get to meet her cat, Tankor, though (that's not his real name, but honestly I can't remember what is). He's very cute, as cats are wont to be; a bit starved for attention, but that really doesn't bother me.
At some point we decided (I forget the process) to go for a walk, and when we sat down on a stone wall and I told her about the situation with Ratha, it sparked a discussion over personal identity. The theory I defended was basically the one I use in practical terms—certain of my personality characteristics are core, others are peripheral. The core characteristics constitute who I am, and it would be at least logically and physically if not practically possible for something living in my body to no longer exhibit those core characteristics; however, present-Kenn would no longer identify with that person. Laura believes that change is inevitable and thus, it seems, wants not to identify that change as an “identity death”. I asked her whether the personality characteristic of being open to any possible change that she espoused as characteristic of herself was itself open to change. She answered yes, but I think she saw the reductio ad absurdum into which this led. I was unable to fathom any criteria by which she would judge personal identity other than bodily identity until she stated that she believes that the most core characteristics—what I would refer to as my core personality traits—are both the least changeable and the least controllable, whereas those traits that are less core and more changeable are also more open to control. This theory, if true, would agree with the essentials of my theory but make all my worrying about “identity death” pointless. It seems perhaps a bit too neat in that regard, however, as if the purpose for postulating it was specifically to avoid worrying about identity death, not independent evidence towards its truth.
We continued walking until we arrived at the house, where we stopped and got some water and cookies. Then we headed back towards campus, Laura to meet Erik and me to catch what I could of the KGB meeting.
Despite their small numbers, I was pleased both that the KGB seemed relatively unchanged in nature and that I got to see some individual members thereof. Misha apparently is going to attempt to found a Pitt chapter, and the other people are still themselves in all relevant respects.
After the meeting was an Exec meeting (never officially ended so that they don't have to officially open the next one). People were being very lazy about making plans for food, but I pressured them because I had left my insulin back at the house and knew I would have to leave relatively soon if I wanted to retrieve it and meet them wherever they were going.
It was eventually decided that people would go to Union Grill, but naturally this came too late for me to go home and back and walk with them there. As I was waiting at the bus stop, Ed called me and told me that they had found a potential free food opportunity and that he would keep me posted. A few minutes later, when I was just starting to think that taking off on my own two feet might be faster than waiting for the bus, Ed called again and said that the free food hadn't panned out and they were at Union Grill, and just as I was starting to walk a bus showed up. I took it home, got insulin, and half-ran, half-walked to Union Grill. I watched for a chance to catch a bus along the way, but none passed by. By the time I arrived, everyone had already ordered. Rachael had ordered me a salad with cheese and I think some kind of nuts and raspberry vinaigrette. Although I never normally order salads as entrees, that's really been more of an issue with needing to increase my caloric intake than anything else, I suppose; this one was quite good.
After dinner, people dispersed. Ed, Rachael, Stiger and I ended up walking over to the Den, which apparently is where Alisa lived until she moved out and houses a bunch of other CMU / CS / KGB / etc. people. The primary activity there for me was watching Run Lola Run, which I don't think I had seen in its entirety since the first time I watched it (though it had been playing with no sound as recently as Jammy Jam). It still managed to do funny emotional things to me. Strange, at least a little, as it never makes much of an effort to develop its characters.
I have also discovered, through this and a couple of other experiences, that I tend to be inconsiderate in that I'll unthinkingly take up an entire couch while everyone else is sitting on it normally. I think this gets me mentally labeled as annoying at best, yet for some reason I have a perverse urge to deliberately cultivate this behavior.
When we finally got back to the house, Ed sat down in the room in which I'd taken up residence. Somehow we got to talking about the situation with Ratha. Specifically, Ed said that he felt like a bastard for having to use the “f-word” (that being “friends” in this context) in response to her email, in which she stated that she was smitten with him. I told Ed that once I knew that a certain decision had to be made, I ceased to regret it; although this is generally true, it devolved into an argument with Ed stating that certain actions, even if necessary, were nevertheless painful. I had overstated my case, which I eventually ended up admitting. My belief was actually just that I couldn't see what could have transpired in a single evening which would make the situation so serious.
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I had a dream that I took Laura to a TMBG concert. I don't really remember any details, but it was neat.
I called Laura again and went over to her house again. By the time I got there I had pretty bad low blood sugar, and Laura hadn't eaten yet, so she made us couscous and soup. I asked her if I could help, but she said no, so I just sat there in my chair, looking intently at her and smiling while hoping she wouldn't turn towards me. Eventually our food was ready, and we ate. After that I think we talked for a bit, and then Laura called a bunch of places looking for a job. She got an interview with the last one she called, a day-care center, the next day. When I left, Laura apologized for not being more interesting, but I told her not to worry about it. Although I don't actually mind, it does kind of surprise me that even given what I've said to her, she still worries about that. I would think she would have accepted by now that I value her very highly and that it would take an awful lot to change that.
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Tuesday evening was the concert for which I had purchased Ed tickets for his birthday. Laura had told me I should get going in order to make it there in time, but once I got back to the house Ed and I sat around there a bit longer, and by the time we did leave it was rush hour. We did make it there just before the show started, but it was kind of close. Ed decided to wear an Academy uniform, complete with tie, just to confuse all the goths who would probably be there.
The concert was the “Nintendo Fusion Concert”, which in practical terms just meant that they had a few Gamecube stations set up in the back (well out of the way of the actual musical performances) and gave away a couple of autographed Gameboy Advances. The groups which performed were Cauterize, Revis, Cold, and Evanescence (the headliner). I didn't like Cauterize all that much for the first few songs, but either they grew on me or they started to play better songs. I didn't feel like I got a whole lot out of Revis or Cold, largely because I was completely unfamiliar with all of their songs. Evanescence was predictably awesome, although I wished that they played more songs. They played a few songs from earlier albums which I didn't recognize, but I sang along with the first few songs literally so loud that it was painful and I became unable to sing at that volume. I think there may have been a second encore, but Ed was very tired at that point and wanted to take off, so we did so. The reason Ed was so tired was that throughout the concert, he had managed to defend a pretty good-sized dance floor area (the concert was open with no chairs) reasonably close to the stage.
Wednesday I got drunk and wandered around parts of Pittsburgh I've seen before. I found out how well I could cope first with drunkenness and then with low blood sugar. I ran into pink-hair Rebecca near the beginning, and bought some apple juice and popcorn near the end. I was terribly lonely. I can't make any claim to sympathy, though, since I did the entire thing self-consciously aware of how pathetic it was. In my defense, it honestly seemed like the best thing to do at the time.
When I got back home I played Final Fantasy X for about 5 hours, which was both more productive and more fun, although the people watching were occasionally loud enough to be irritating.
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Thursday I wanted to see Laura again, but I tried calling her house a couple of times and she didn't answer, so I gave up. Friday, after probably near half an hour of stupid nervousness, I called again. As I hoped, she was free, so I went over to visit again. We ended up playing Super Monkey Ball for most of the time I was there. We played pool and bowling and she played a few mazes in story mode. This might sound boring, but to me it was fine.
Around 16 we began to walk over to campus. We talked about how it sucks that I'm stuck in Albany, and we did a quick calculation as to how much money I'd have to make to afford living in Pittsburgh by myself, which more or less confirmed my previous beliefs: $40,000 per year or more and I should be able to get by, any less and I'd be cutting things very tight. As we were walking she received a call from Erik. They agreed to meet one another at CMU in a bit. We continued walking, eventually ending up in the CS lounge with 6 or 8 other people, where I became my usual quiet self and Laura dominated the entire group. In a bit she realized that she had to leave to meet Erik, and I sat there for a while longer thinking.
On Saturday I mostly sat around playing Final Fantasy X. I somehow managed to beat Chocobo Racing in about an hour and a half, despite the FAQ saying it would take me between three and five hours. By the way, although I do find Final Fantasy X very interesting, I'm not writing much about it because I don't want to spoil it for anyone who hasn't played it yet (although I'm definitely a straggler myself) and also because those who want to find out what I'm talking about could just play it for themselves.
Eventually a group including me departed from the house, bound for India Garden. We met still other people on the way, and ended up with 16 people total. Misha saw one of the girls who had participated in the orgy in which he had lost his virginity there, and Ed insisted on going over to her and discussing this with her in front of the guy with whom she was dining, which Yanna found to be in extremely poor taste.
At the end of the meal, Ed was dancing along to some Indian song which had been an Internet meme a while ago, acting very smarmy. Combining this experience with that I had had with Laura yesterday, I came to a definitive realization: although I value certain people very highly, that value exists almost solely when I interact with them alone. In situations involving other people, I become part of the background and feel neglected by the people I know and more or less uninterested in the ones I don't. I feel guilty about trying to monopolize these people's time, and worried that they'll get fed up with how demanding I am; nevertheless the extreme value I put on them makes it easy for me to ask, yet again, to deal with them alone.
After that Stiger, Ed, Rachael, I think one other male person I'm forgetting and I went over to Roselawn, where we hung out for a few hours. At the end of that I said goodbye to Ed and went back to the house, going to sleep relatively soon after I got back.
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I woke up and no one was around, so I left $10 for the food I'd eaten with a note for Wes in the kitchen and took off at 12:15. As it turned out, Laura emailed me at 14:30, but by that time I was over a hundred miles from Pittsburgh, and wouldn't receive the email until after I got home anyway.
I barely got lost leaving Pittsburgh (I had to go around a block once when I made a very slight wrong turn) and from then on it was smooth sailing. I used a playlist of “different” music (in particular, no Happy 2b Hardcore was included) and stopped only once, at a Sheetz for gas, food and to try to fix the joystick control plugin on Winamp. The weather was very good for driving (no rain, unlike the trip the other way), and the roads stretched for hundreds of miles with little traffic and even fewer police officers.
I did get slowed down a little bit for construction a couple of times, including one time when a van beside me, presumably having noticed my Carnegie Mellon bumper sticker, asked if I were a student there and whether I was a computer programmer. They then told me that they were a bunch of CMU students as well working on digizaar, which apparently will be a micropayment system of some kind. Other than that, it was smooth sailing, and I managed to average 64 miles per hour and to beat my father's and my previous tie of 8 and a quarter hours for best trip time with only 7 and three-quarters.
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Sunday evening when I got back home, it having been a couple of weeks since I'd seen Charlie, I called him and asked if Monday would be good for a visit, seeing as how I had to bring my car with me anyway. It was. We talked mostly about my past week in Pittsburgh.
I've started watching those last few episodes of Six Feet Under. The show is exceptionally well written and acted, and I imagine produced and directed as well. I'm glad Brenda came back as a character; I was really hoping that she would. You should watch it too.
On Wednesday Ratha sent me an email explaining how she had written a long email to me but then decided she couldn't send it because I might think she was trying to reach Ed through me. She also offered to converse with me if I would like to. We've now exchanged several emails, mostly about philosophy, psychology and politics (with a bit of tech mixed in).
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Friday evening I went to Ken and Sue's for dinner. Edith and James were there as well. The food was Chinese and was very good. I also checked out a problem their computer had been having: the CD-ROM drive wasn't working. It would open and close, but wouldn't spin anything up. While I was there, though, for no apparent reason it developed a more severe problem—neither the CD-ROM nor the burner were recognized at all. I worried that this might be symptomatic of a drive controller problem, but I told Ken to buy a DVD-ROM drive (which should be pretty cheap) and about how to connect it. Later, he did finally get it to work.
After dinner, we went out for ice cream. I had a sundae, and Sue had a minor fight with her husband over whether the dog would get any ice cream, in which I found it humorous to intervene by offering to lend her the money if Ken wouldn't buy it.
All Thursday and through Friday evening I tried to get in touch with Charlie, but failed, so I ended up going home Friday evening rather than to Charlie's as I had hoped. As it turned out, he had been building a shed. Saturday I finally got in touch with him and went up to visit.
The activities included going out shopping. While at the video game store, I saw a new copy of Final Fantasies I and II for only $30 and decided to buy it. When we got home, I played that while Charlie played GrandiaXTreme. Later we watched Wall Street, which Charlie had also bought on the shopping trip, although I didn't pay all that much attention to it. I realized that I'd never really had a drink containing tequila, so Charlie suggested that maybe mixing vermouth and tequila would work. I had him do so as if it were a martini on the rocks. This tasted okay (certainly better than I remember the one sip of tequila I had before), but I now think the reason tequila has a reputation as kind of a nasty drink isn't so much the alcohol content (80 proof, the same as rum and vodka and less than gin) or the taste as the fact that it gives you a nasty hangover. All the next day I had a headache, but didn't realize why for quite a while.
Other activities at Charlie's included my typical playing of Final Fantasy X. We discussed my draft constitution. Charlie pointed out both a few places where I had misspoken and a few places where his ideas differ from mine, but got too burned out to continue having read about 60% of it. We also attempted to come up with a set of archetypes into which most human females fit. By the end we had a list of seven, although it would be hard for me to come up with terms for them which would be meaningful to any random person who stumbles upon this page.
Eventually Charlie had to leave to have dinner with his parents, so I drove home.
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Kenn Hamm
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Last modified: Mon Aug 4 19:38:31 2008