Kenn's journal for 2003/09

2003-09-01

Today I slept in, woke up, had lunch, got drunk, watched the last two episodes of Six Feet Under crying a lot, sobered up, felt lonely, wrote journal entries, started an email but didn't feel like finishing it, did laundry, had dinner, played FFX, got my ass handed to me by Seymour, downloaded a few AMVs, and got pissed off at and was rude to Charlie.

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2003-09-08

My life is boring, as evidenced by the fact that I felt no need to make an entry for an entire week. Despite that length of time, I still have very little to report, although I may end up writing a lot anyway out of sheer ennui.

Final Fantasy X

Final Fantasy X has started to get very strange, and I'm not sure whether I like it or not. They put a lot of effort into making it seem like a certain part of the game might be the end (and I wouldn't really have felt that cheated, as I've already invested 50+ hours), but I knew it couldn't be because I didn't even have the airship yet.

Sometimes I feel like playing and sometimes I don't, but I've been averaging at least 5 hours a week, which is good. I mainly need to avoid any lapses so long I forget what I'm doing. In the past, when I've done that, I've restarted games rather than proceeding with no idea what was going on, but that would be a disaster with the amount of work I've put into this one already.

Gin

I've decided that gin is my favorite base liquor (although whiskey is still somewhat of a wildcard, as I haven't tried it yet). I've been trying various gin-based drinks and have pretty much liked them all. Saturday evening I bought a very expensive bottle of gin: Tanqueray No. 10, to be specific. It cost $29.97 for a 750mL bottle. I tried it and although I agree with Charlie that it's better than regular Tanqueray (that being the only other kind of gin I currently have with which to compare it; I intend to try Bombay Blue Sapphire and Beefeater at some point), it's so much more expensive that I think I'll end up saving it for special occasions.

Charlie - Argument

Some issues that I've had for a long time with Charlie's style came to a head recently. In particular, he sometimes tends to come off as abrasive, especially when we have a difference of opinion, yet nearly always couches his statements in such a way that literally speaking, I have no rational cause to object. This combined with his tendency towards dominance and, more strongly, my tendency towards submission leads to a lot of situations in which I'm upset with him but generally choose to just drop the subject.

I expressed these concerns, albeit in a not especially eloquent or clear manner, to Charlie, and he agreed to what he apparently thought was a request to repress his opinions, when what I actually wanted him to do was to be less abrasive (although the difference between the two may be debatable). He fairly quickly decided that this wasn't going to work, though (which I think was probably accurate, as I've noted in the past the near-total futility of trying to get anyone else to change in any significant way). The next day we had one of the least abrasive conversations we've had in a long time, which seems strangely incongruous given the context.

RSS Feed

theadana suggested that, in lieu of actually keeping my journal on LiveJournal, I at least create an RSS feed so that it could be syndicated there. This was more of a pain to write than I anticipated it would be, but it should in theory be done now. Ed's helped me test it, so I know that it at least mostly works, but I'm not totally sure yet. In particular, even though I think I'm using the same format for dates as Slashdot does in their RSS feed, I'm not entirely sure that things will show up at the right time on LiveJournal.

I also wrote a neat automatic summarizer for my journal entries, to generate the titles and descriptions for the feed. (You'll still have to visit my site to see whole entries.) By the time I post this, I hope to have had a paid user create the LiveJournal account kenoubisjournal, so you should be able to just add that as a friend. (This will take some of your syndication points. See the LiveJournal FAQ for more information.) I ask that you don't leave comments for me on LiveJournal—there's no easy way for me to receive notification of them, as far as I can see. If you do know of a way for me to receive notification, let me know. Also, feel free to point any RSS reader at my feed. The URL is http://ragnar.nilmop.org/kenn/news/default.rss.

Movies

There are a bunch of movies I've had sitting around for a while, and I finally got around to watching two of them. First is Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels. Although I watched it earlier this week at Charlie's as well, I was very sleepy at the time and missed a lot of it. It made a lot more sense this time. It's strange that it seems the principal value in watching the movie is trying to figure out what's going on, and that that nevertheless seems to be sufficient payback.

The other one was Saving Private Ryan. I found the battle scene at the beginning so thoroughly unpleasant to watch that I contemplated giving up on the movie entirely, but decided against it. I think this was the right decision, although I'm still not sure whether I'd be willing to see it again. It manages both to be gritty and to have reasonably clear-cut good guys and bad guys, which is something I'm not sure I've ever seen in a war movie before.

Abstinence

My period for giving up soda (and other sugary drinks) ended, and man, did that first can of Code Red taste weird. It also caused me to have only 5 hours of sleep for the second consecutive night.

I decided that giving up speeding would be simply impossible due to a couple of nasty spots where it's barely even safe to go the speed limit, and no one does. I decided to give up swearing instead. This will be very difficult, and indeed I'm not totally confident in my ability to pull it off. However, it is a lot more “even” than giving up speeding, in that it requires me to constantly maintain a reasonably low level of vigilance, rather than do nothing most of the time and do something extremely uncomfortable every once in a while.

I've also been keeping an expense log, in preparation for the period in which I try to live on a minimal amount of money. So far my biggest expense category is actually alcohol, but I doubt that's representative, and certainly hope that it isn't.

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2003-09-10

Work

Yes, my life has gotten so boring that I'm actually forced to write about work. My project has apparently raised some anger among various people it will affect, but fortunately I've managed to deflect that to my manager, and it seems like the disagreements of which I was informed with regards to the standard message database were mostly imaginary in the heads of those who informed me of them. It also appears that I'll be staying at DMV at least for a while, so I've asked to be assigned to a real project once this one concludes, and I should also be eligible for health insurance, which will save me a substantial amount of money from the COBRA I'm currently using.

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2003-09-11

On this, the second anniversary of the destruction of the World Trade Center, I am afraid. The march of the United States towards a police state appears slow but inevitable. I am optimistic enough to believe that there are those who will resist this momentum as it becomes more and more obvious. Thus, I believe that we are on the path to civil war.

I do not fear that a civil war may occur. I believe that the defenders of liberty would have at least a fighting chance, and if so, it could be a healing process for our nation, giving us an opportunity to purge much evil and many wrongdoers from our midst. No, I fear simply for my own life in the event of armed conflict, and for the lives of those about whom I care.

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2003-09-17

Charlie

If I tell you to assume “I went to Charlie's over the weekend” under any heading of “Charlie”, would you remember to do so? Heh. The first thing we did after I got settled in is watch Meet Joe Black. It was quite long, but fortunately since Charlie warned me about this, I didn't get too antsy about it. Brad Pitt had an excellent performance, and the plot overall managed to keep things moving even with a very powerful main character.

I tread a fine line when discussing movies on my site, since I strongly prefer not to spoil them for anyone who hasn't already seen them. I suppose I could use white-on-white text (so that you'd have to select it to see it), but that would come across as sort of tacky. I may end up doing it anyway, though.

Anyway, this led into one of our main discussion topics this visit:

Fiction

We first discussed what was the best way to divide a novel into sections. Charlie dislikes the typical horizontal bar for an intrachapter scene change, and prefers a single blank line. This seems reasonable to me, as it interrupts the flow less, and any place that one wants to interrupt the flow probably ought to be a new chapter.

Our discussion next moved on to characters and plot structures. Specifically, Charlie's favorite characters are those who start out strong and stay strong. I think that this is often the cause of plot weakness; although it does make those particular characters enjoyable, it also makes it difficult to challenge them in any meaningful way, and thus difficult for there to be any real sense of achievement. Charlie's feeling was that “if a story fails to deliver any tension, that is not the fault of a powerful character therein”. He also stated that he enjoys some stories that don't really go anywhere, and typically although not always finds character development to actually be a flaw in fiction. I could see what he was saying about stories that don't go anywhere, I guess, but that seems to me to be a very limited genre, and I think of character development as fairly core.

However, Charlie also mentioned that anything which is a truly exceptional member of its genre can to him transcend its boundaries and become genuinely valuable. So perhaps I can still make use of his æsthetic advice even if I disagree with his æsthetic principles.

Caffeine

Another topic of conversation was caffeine addiction. Charlie estimated that he consumes the equivalent of 30 to 50 cups of coffee's worth of caffeine per day. Other than the fairly minor cost associated therewith and constantly needing to use the bathroom, he finds no detriment, and likes the way it makes his mind work better than he does without it. However, he also mentioned how difficult it was for the first few days of the Lent he gave up coffee, which seems to me like a substantial detriment. I also mentioned that even a few cups of coffee make me kind of jittery, but he says that doesn't happen any more once you're addicted.

Sleep

The last two nights I've gone to sleep around 21:00 rather than my accustomed 0:00 or so. Doing so makes me lose an awful lot of hours of the day, but as I was both tired and bored these two nights, I didn't feel like I was missing much. I've gotten up at about the normal time, but felt much more awake than I usually have in the past few months, without the awful headache, congestion and so forth that I get when I oversleep by too much.

I doubt this is worth keeping up long-term, but I'll try to keep it in mind those nights when I'm tired and not doing anything anyway that there's no reason I have to stay up late.

Dreams

Due in part to the change in sleep habits, I've had (and remembered) some interesting dreams lately. Sunday morning at Charlie's I had one with possibly the best emotional content of any dream I can remember ever, but I feel that any attempt to briefly describe it would fall so far short of conveying anything like I experienced as to be a disservice to you and to it. I'm considering writing a short story about it, but I'm not terribly confident in my ability to pull that off either.

Monday morning I had a couple of dreams about some old issues in my life, but nothing that I feel like dredging up here.

Swearing

Just as I expected, giving up swearing is proving extremely difficult. I've already caught myself breaking it three times typing (though I immediately corrected it) and once in speech. I'm thinking I may set an amount to donate to the Catholic Church for each violation, but then give myself a chance to earn it back during the low-spending month by underspending whatever limit I set.

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2003-09-25

Sometimes I feel that my long entries lose some of their punch in virtue of their length. For example, take a look at my entry of 2002-04-06 at 23:06. I'll quote the whole thing here since it's so short:

I beat Final Fantasy 9.

To me it seems that that entry implies a lot more than it declares, and to explicitly write each implication would make it lose a lot of its punch. Part of the message, in effect, is that the entry exists at all; I found it worth my while to add it for the sole purpose of that single sentence.

Unfortunately, my predilection for laziness and procrastination with regards to my journal means that by the time I get around to writing an entry, I nearly always have quite a lot to write. I could fake a short entry now and then, but it doesn't seem right. Perhaps the very fact that I am so lazy is what enables the rare short entries to retain their punch, anyway.

Final Fantasy Unlimited

I've been watching Final Fantasy Unlimited as a substitute for sitting around bored doing nothing. It isn't very good. The characters are tolerable but only one is very interesting, the visuals are acceptable, and the music is okay, but the plot is horrendously predictable and simplistic (the average set-up time between the establishment of a problem and its resolution is probably 1–2 minutes) and fails to generate any real tension.

It's still uncontroversially better than sitting around doing nothing, though.

Abrasion

Charlie essentially requested that I eliminate mental filters on what I say based on the effect that I thought my opinions might have on people's opinions of me. I've been giving this a try, at least in regards to him, and just as I predicted, it's led to my making a lot of statements that I considered rude, some of which he also interpreted that way.

I've yet to decide whether I'll be able to keep this up long-term. I do know that I find it very unpleasant to be as rude as I have been, and the benefits seem dubious to me.

My Father's Hand

My father had surgery on his broken finger on Monday. He's been in a lot of pain which the hydrocodone he was given hasn't been able to entirely prevent, and hasn't gone to work yet this week. Nevertheless, he seems basically okay.

Recall

I've noticed this many times at a near-subconscious level, but up until this past week I had never explicitly noted to any other person that over the past few years, my recall (ability to remember things when not specifically reminded of them) has been more or less shot. My recognition (ability to remember things when reminded of them) is still quite good, and my recall is still excellent in a few key areas, but there are significant events and circumstances in my life that took place over weeks or months of which I can barely recall the faintest outlines, and my memories of book, movie and TV plots have in most cases been reduced to the vaguest of summaries, frequently so vague as to miss key points.

I believe that the decline in my recall began in a minor form while I was still in high school, but that it took its biggest turn for the worse while I was going out with Alison. I seem to remember that when we started going out, my memory was relatively good, and that when we broke up it was completely shot, and actually got better for a while after that. I half-wonder, though, whether the massive increase in the quantity of information to which I expose myself (mostly through the Web) might also have something to do with it. Perhaps I'll try cutting down on websurfing even after November and see if it has any positive effects.

...

I've had a lot of thoughts and feelings lately that I would describe as “deep”, but most of them don't really seem to be amenable to verbal expression (particularly in the very functional, unflowery style in which I usually write). The few that might be, I don't really feel like putting in the effort to adequately express, not to mention that I'm not really sure I want to share them.

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2003-09-25

Situps

I've started doing some situps every day. The day after I started, it hurt pretty badly, but that doesn't seem to be happening any more. I've decided that I would like to be in shape, although I fear I may not be willing to put forth the effort. Currently it doesn't seem too bad; one reason I started now is that, having adopted a “wasting time is bad” mentality, every once in a while I find myself with nothing to do.

Beefeater

I bought a bottle of Beefeater gin, in the interests of trying a good variety. It seems about as good as Bombay Sapphire (though noticeably different), and just a hair below regular Tanqueray, although my preference is weak enough that it could flip depending on my mood.

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2003-09-27

Saturday I fired a gun for the first time in my life.

Charlie's

I had been planning all week to visit Charlie over the weekend, so I drove up to his house after work Friday. We talked for a while. Then Chris met us there and we went out to get dinner.

Acquisition of a Cocktail Glass

Before going to dinner, we paid a visit to the liquor store. Although I'm not sure it's actually larger than both of the liquor stores in Catskill, it definitely is roomier, and I think has a wider selection as well. I bought a bottle of Myers's Rum—my father's favorite—and finally managed to acquire a cocktail (martini) glass. I also bought a set of bar tools and a single-shot bottle of Grey Goose.

After that, we checked out Sushi Thai Garden, but it was packed. We ended up getting take-out Chinese and bringing it home.

Frailty

Once home, we ate and watched Frailty, which we had rented. I think I can say that it was in the general genre of psychodrama without giving away too much. Maybe I wasn't giving it as much attention as it needed, maybe I'd had enough to drink that it affected my thinking, or maybe it just wasn't as well made as it could have been, but it failed to really grab me. The twist at the end was interesting, but failed to be especially convincing.

Eventually the movie was over and Chris went home, saying we'd meet him the next day. Charlie and I stayed up until almost 3 o'clock talking. When I did finally go to sleep, I slept for about 9 hours.

Chris ~ Shooting

Saturday Chris had told Charlie to meet him at his house at 16:30, but Charlie had mistakenly thought it was either 15:30 or 16:00, so we ended up getting there a little early. We met Chris, grabbed some targets, the guns, and ammo, and proceeded to Chris' back yard / makeshift firing range.

We had four guns in all—a .22, a .38, a .45 and a shotgun—and 6 different kinds of ammunition—.22, .22 Magnum, .38, .45, shotgun shells and birdshot. (I think those last two are correct; in any case, one of them had a bullet and the other had a bunch of little BBs.) I fired all of the guns, and even hit the target with most of them (at a range of about 40 yards). I had more trouble with the guns that had more kick, which makes me think that when I do get a gun, I probably want the smallest caliber that would be reasonably effective at stopping someone intent on killing me.

I guess a lot of my impressions of guns have come from TV shows and movies, and some of that was disspelled. In particular, I didn't fire “bang-bang-bang-bang-bang-bang”—the fact that the .22 and .38 are revolvers and need to be cocked each time before firing certainly had some impact on this. I'm leaning towards a semi-automatic, both for æsthetic reasons and because you can have multiple clips, greatly increasing the number of shots that can be fired before needing to reload.

Of course, I'd like to get my permit and own a gun right now, but it won't happen while I'm living with my dad, unless he has a pretty substantial change of heart.

After shooting, Charlie, Chris and I went out for food at someplace with the initials “GVI” whose full name I can't recall. I had a Guinness and a fettucine dish, and we talked about various things including history and re-enactments while I also thought about other things, in particular the nature of small talk (about which my email discussions with Ratha have inspired me to think of late).

Girls Out With Whom I Might Go

We went back to Charlie's place. Eventually Chris took off and Charlie and I stayed up for a while talking. He asserted that it wouldn't really work for me to try to find out a girl out with whom to go until I had some sort of an idea what I was looking for in explicit terms. I've now come up with that, though I still don't really think it's likely to help, since in my current life situation I don't even meet anyone my own age, and don't see how that's likely to change.

We stayed up late again. Charlie was planning to meet Chris for golf the next day. In the morning it was raining, but Charlie still didn't want to risk being late on the chance things were still happening, and I was barely awake at the time, so he actually ended up taking off before I did. I drove back down to Catskill somewhat cautiously, took a shower and a nap, and watched some more Final Fantasy Unlimited.

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Kenn Hamm
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Last modified: Mon Aug 4 19:38:51 2008