I just gave $20 to a random guy who walked up to me on the street. He told me that he needed to get to somewhere around Saratoga (I would have considered driving him there myself except that I didn't have a car and it was lunch time anyway), and that people elsewhere in the city had been very rude to him. He also said that perhaps I could help him out as he and I both had beards, and that he hadn't been raised to do things like this and he would give me the money back, so I gave him my address. In theory he could stalk me, but in practice I think that the chance of that, at least, is minimal.
I fully realized, even while it was going on, that he was probably just trying to con me. However, I'm putting the world on notice. He said he'd give me that money back. If I never see it again, I will never intentionally give money to a beggar again in my life.
I also feel dumb for not exploiting the situation more by asking for his name, his age, etc. I can't guarantee that he would have given me the truth, but I know that if he had been lying, there probably would have been an unnatural pause in his speech; that always happens to me when I have to actually make something up.
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Over the weekend I went to Charlie's again.
Charlie's had a bunch of swords made out of PVC pipe, PVC foam and duct tape lying around for just about as long as I remember knowing him. I think he may have been saying for years now that I should make one, but it never actually happened until this weekend. He had extra materials lying around, so he let me have some of them to build a sword to my own specifications after testing out his to see how mine should differ.
After that we fought for a while, until my thumb got whacked. It wasn't actually injured, but it stung enough for me to stop for a while.
I wanted to play Final Fantasy X while I was there, but I wasn't able to find my memory card. Later, after I got home, I found it in my backpack, just where I thought I had put it before leaving. That was annoying.
On Monday I finally finished up giving up swearing. I think it may have made me more careful about my language long-term, but I still was disappointed in the fact that I caught myself swearing no less than nine times during the four week period. I'm fairly sure there weren't many times that I swore and didn't catch myself—almost certainly fewer than the nine that I did—simply because I was so much more careful about my language, frequently rephrasing and occasionally using “word I am not allowed to say” when making an otherwise direct quote.
My new abstinence may well be my toughest one yet. I've given myself $100 to spend, for the next four weeks. (In addition, I won't use my credit card unless I deduct the same amount from that sum.) This will have to pay for any food, gas, or other miscellaneous items I need. I stocked up on food and liquor and filled my tank. I think I should be able to make it, but there will inevitably be times when I see things that I want to buy and am unable to indulge myself. I've vowed not to give it up except in case of a genuine emergency, though.
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I bought a little notebook at the grocery store the day before my 4 week / $100 experiment began, for the purpose of keeping notes on what I'm going to write for NaNoWriMo. I've been working on creating characters and setting, giving myself helpful hints, and writing down plot ideas and ways to help me reach 50,000 words. Although I was feeling a bit less enthusiastic about NaNoWriMo for the past few months than I did when I first discovered it, I think I now have a renewed interest in it, combined with at least some degree of determination to see it through even at the cost of writing stuff that isn't quite perfect. I just hope that that attitude persists through all of November; without it, it will be difficult to finish, even with the other major adjustments to my lifestyle that I'm planning for that month (no purposeless websurfing, dramatically reduced time spent watching movies or TV shows, less availability on AIM/ICQ, and changed sleep schedule, for starters).
Oh, and I definitely won't be posting my story as I write it (both because I don't want to post utter crap before I have a chance to edit it, and because I tend to work somewhat non-linearly), but I am considering whether or not to publish it on my site once I'm completely done. The principal counter-argument would be that it's probably a bad idea if I ever intend to try to get it published, since publishers typically want first publication rights. If you have any thoughts on this, feel free to drop me a line; assuming that I end up with something remotely readable, I'll be happy to give a copy to anyone I know personally even if I decide that sharing it with anyone with Internet access is a bad idea.
You have probably noticed (albeit perhaps not until reading this very set of updates) that my journal updates have gradually become very infrequent and spotty. I tried to figure out whether this was because little is happening in my life, because I don't receive enough positive feedback from my journal, or simply because I'm lazy. At the end I realized that it's probably the intersection of all three. There really hasn't been all that much going on in my life, which means I don't feel compelled to record it; but it also is true that there aren't even that many people who read my journal (even having created an RSS feed which can be syndicated to LiveJournal, the only result is that people who already read my journal now get to read it somewhat more conveniently), and part of it is sheer laziness, since updating sometimes feels like a chore. (I'm writing this right now in the car on the way home from work, when I would otherwise have very little to do. It helps to have a strong “no-wasted-time” ethic; I've developed this principle to some extent, but there are still too many occasions when I do nothing useful for an extended period.)
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Since Monday was Columbus Day, I had a vacation (read: was forced to take a day off without pay). Due to my strict limit on expenditures at the current time, I judged that it would be a good usage of my time to go to Charlie's this particular weekend, thus achieving a good gas-money to time spent in 'toga ratio.
Ever since I reached the point in Final Fantasy X where I needed to complete a lot of tasks peripheral to the plot of the game if I was ever going to do so, particularly Blitzball, I'd been stalling on playing the game. I both remembered and was able to find my memory card this visit, which was a relief. On Friday evening I had Charlie figure out what a good Blitzball team that wouldn't need to be changed at any point to be good enough to always win would be, and started playing. Saturday Charlie was meeting Greg in Albany for lunch, and I played for what was possibly the longest mostly uninterrupted gaming session I've ever had—probably somewhere between 7 and 9 hours. Surprisingly, I did not get bored. I augmented it with music and conversation with Charlie when he was around.
Sunday I still had some more Blitzball to play in order to get everything out of it that I cared about (all of Wakka's Overdrives and his sigil). It did start to get less fun at that point, but we put on economics lectures or Futurama episodes and continued talking, and it wasn't that bad. It probably did contribute to the information overload, so to speak, which I experienced on Monday, though.
At the end of the previous visit, Charlie remembered that we could have been discussing character archetypes (an idea we'd had the visit before that), and I wrote it down. This visit we worked a lot on it, coming up with around thirty different archetypes. We worked mostly be choosing a fictional character, then trying to place him or her into one of our existing categories, and creating a new one if necessary. We also looked for proper names and gender assignations for them (from the set male, female, neuter and hermaphrodite).
On Monday, I experienced a state of mind that I sometimes do, but rarely in the presence of other people. (In fact, Charlie didn't get Columbus Day off from school and was gone when it began.) The way I attempted to describe it to him was that it consists in not wanting to process data; generally when it happens I abandon the book or website I'm reading, game I'm playing, TV shows I'm watching, or what have you, and either go to sleep if physically able to do so, go for a walk to think, or just sit around doing nothing. I think that explanation was as accurate as any I could give, then or now, but I still don't know that it really reflects what the state means to me. It's something that's happened to me enough times that I have a very clear internal concept of it, yet I don't know that it is really expressible in words, or at least that I personally am capable of that.
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I knew exactly what to expect from Armageddon—an asteroid or meteor heading for Earth that would destroy the entire planet if it hit, a team trying to defend humanity, a plot built out of utterly standard Tinkertoy components, and a score that could make me cry even without the movie.
Knowing that, last night I got drunk and watched it. It fulfilled my expectations exactly.
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Do you like my writing style? Does my prose jump off of the screen at you, or does it sit there limply waiting for you to absorb it? Do you read my journal for its aesthetic value, or for its interesting ideas? Neither; for not only are those not the only two options, but in fact, you read my journal because you know me and the cost is minimal.
This should make me happier than it does.
The fundamental difference between my journal and all others I can recall, excluding Thomas', is that looking only at my journal, you can get a pretty good idea of what that period of my life was like. Perhaps that quality is illusory, but it seems actual. Most journals are fragments of experience, complaints, dull recountings of external events with no focus on the mind of the author. My mind tends to work by focusing on a few practica at a time, overlapping in a pattern such that each one lasts for a few days, though they can intertwine into epiphenomena that last for months or even personality characteristics that endure for years. I try to write these down. A few I leave out because I don't want to discuss them with the world at large; many more I omit through forgetfulness or a perhaps misguided belief that they are insufficiently important to record.
With that in mind, I think it's time to examine a few of the larger structures of my life, only bringing in details to illustrate or exemplify generalities.
I have a very obsessive-compulsive personality. The compulsion aspect is muted sufficiently by my laziness so as not to pose a problem most of the time. Of late, the obsessions also, while they haven't abated, have been far from omnipresent and generally not caused me severe difficulty.
Still I pick at the skin on my fingers, sometimes until they hurt. Still I find it difficult to keep my nails clean enough not to annoy me when my thoughts wander (which is odd, because I am generally unconcerned with uncleanliness below the point at which it starts to cause functional difficulty). Still I spend hours per day repetitiously attempting to exploit resources with diminishing returns—especially websites. That will change soon, though, at least for a time.
Under this category would fall my oft-used heading “Abstinence”, under which in turn would follow the things from which I have abstained so far, for a period of four weeks each (though not always to a perfect degree): masturbation, alcohol, artificially sweetened drinks (other than alcoholic ones) and swearing. My current project of spending under $100 (so far I have spent $27, and a week and six days now remain) and my planned project of giving up pointless websurfing also would fall into that sub-category.
I chose the number of things to give up so as to make the time when I gave up websurfing, probably my biggest time-waster, coincide with NaNoWriMo, which also falls under the category of Willpower. In addition, my situps also fit into that category (I'm doing 50 per day now). Something that easy might not seem to belong in the Willpower category, but I have much more difficulty in keeping up habits of any kind that don't have immediate negative results when broken than I do in single acts. I've found, in fact, that when I truly decide to perform an action, actually attempting to do it is automatic, and the only way I can fail is through incapability. However, deciding to do something is itself frequently difficult for me. I waffle and fail to convince myself that I truly must do whatever it is, even knowing that if I did thus convince myself, doing it would be easy.
The big trouble is that sometimes taking time to think things through carefully is appropriate—in particular, for decisions that can't be undone and that have potentially large consequences—but my waffling is more like a mental freezing up that doesn't actually get me anywhere, but consumes a substantial amount of time and mental energy. I've recently discovered that I'm at least occasionally capable of breaking out of it at a cognitive level, but it isn't easy.
Although actually doing NaNoWriMo will take willpower, its result will be something I've held as a core goal for a long time now—a creation. Perhaps my website isn't worth reading, one voice inside my head says, but my novel will be. But then a different voice reminds me that in order to put out 50,000 words in one month, I'm probably going to have to write a decent amount of crap, which makes me wonder: even if I complete NaNoWriMo, will the result be something of which I can be at all proud?
As I told Ed recently, I'm not deriving value from work right now. I'm deriving money from work, and value from other sources. This is somewhat of an unfortunate situation; I'm not making a great deal of money at my job, but enough that there is really no pressure on me to find another one, and my job is unfulfilling, but it's easy enough and well enough matched to my disposition that again, it fails to strongly motivate me to look for other work.
Of course, that's the negative way of looking at it. The positive way would be more like this: my job involves working with fairly nice people, no close or annoying supervision, and it pays pretty well relative to the (for me) minimal responsibility it entails. Sure, I work to live rather than living to work, but so do most other people, and it's not like my job prevents me from doing everything that I do find valuable.
My financial situation appears to be reasonably stable. I have a good amount in my checking account (enough that I really ought to invest some of it), and now that I should be receiving health insurance nearly for free through my job, I'll be making thousands of dollars more per year than I have in anticipated expenses, which I hope to mostly save, invest, or use to pay off loans faster rather than spending, in hopes of improving my long-term financial situation.
I wonder how much money I'm actually saving by my current project to spend no more than $100 over 4 weeks, rather than merely pushing the expenses to other people or to myself at an earlier or later date. I imagine it might not be that much. During NaNoWriMo, I anticipate being much looser with my money—not that I'll intentionally waste it, but that I'll place a much higher value on free time rather than money.
However, my finances would change a lot if I moved out.
Basically, I'm getting housing now “at cost” or possibly even below—I'm paying $100 per month, the cable modem costs $50 per month, and I might well use $50 per month in electricity and water and so on. If I moved out, it would probably be unrealistic to expect to keep this cost below $500, which comes out to nearly $5000 per year, which would nearly wipe out the advantage I get from receiving health insurance at my job.
So, although my finances are reasonably solid, they don't give me a great deal of flexibility in how I organize my life at this point.
It isn't happening, it hasn't happened for a while, and I don't expect it to happen any time soon. I'd like for it to, but I know that it's two giant leaps between my current lifestyle and dating—first I'd have to meet girls who might want to go out with me, then I'd have to actually ask them out. Thus far, I guess that my desire hasn't been strong enough to overcome even the first of those challenges, and I don't see that it will.
I suppose that I could apply a certain philosophy to both work and romance—wait and see. As long as I continue to be myself and keep my eyes open, maybe something will just come along even without my looking for it. The thought is appealing, but I have no good reason to believe it's not delusory.
In the sense in which most people think of it, I have no social life. I hang out with a friend of mine about two out of every three weekends, and that's about it.
Of course, I've often had as little of a social life as I do now, sometimes without any prospect of that changing in the near future relative to that point in time, so this bothers me less than it would some people, but I still miss the KGB and my friends in Pittsburgh, and though I know that I should have it in me to make new friends here if that were what I wanted, the first step towards that is meeting them.
In the literal sense, I interact with my father and Nance on a near-daily basis, and to a lesser extent with some of my co-workers. I talk with Charlie and Ratha online and exchange emails with Ratha. Occasionally I post to NaNoWriMo or talk to someone else. I rarely deal with anyone else in person in an even arguably social role; buying something from the grocery store doesn't count.
This analysis didn't come out quite the way I expected and hoped that it would. This is probably because I wrote it in multiple sittings and lost the initial spark of inspiration that made me start it after the first one. Also, I'm leaving the issue of “Media” (as well as any other issues of which I'm not thinking at the moment) off of the list so as to publish this, since my journal is starting to get dangerously out of date.
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I had a dream that involved KGB people. It involved Laura (I guess I still think of her as a KGB person sometimes) and Yanna and Ed and although I don't specifically remember any other people who were in it, they were fulfilling the role of “KGB member”. I don't remember a whole lot of details, but it took place in a gym (that may have been representing the large gym in the UC at CMU, though it didn't really look like it) containing a large banner designed by Yanna, the text of which I have forgotten. I think the plot involved some sort of orgy (though the dream itself was not sexual at all), perhaps related to the jokingly suggested “officers' orgy” last year and Laura's recent posting of her LJMatch sexual compatibility results.
I'm not sure why that deserves its own journal entry, but there you go.
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Charlie's again.
In preparation for NaNoWriMo, I need to beat Final Fantasy X. In preparation for that, I need to do all of the sidequests that I think are worth my time, since realistically it will be a long time until I get around to replaying Final Fantasy X once I've beaten it, if I ever do. So Charlie helped me get hidden Aeons (I have all of them now) and ultimate weapons (it looks like I should be able to get all of those other than Kimahri's; Charlie found Lulu's too difficult, but to me it was just extremely long once I had a pattern in place). I'm planning to do as many as I can of the remaining sidequests before Friday night, and beat the game Friday night to lead into NaNoWriMo, which starts Saturday.
We also discussed what might be an appropriate schedule of mind-altering substances / behaviors (particularly caffeine, alcohol and sleep) to best enable me to concentrate on my novel during NaNoWriMo. Charlie suggested the equivalent of three cups of coffee in the morning, three cups of coffee when I get home from work, and three drinks (beers / glasses of wine / shots of hard liquor) starting a couple of hours before I was going to bed, and about 6 hours of sleep per night. I tried this out today (Monday) and so far it seems to be working pretty well.
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I feel like I have some kind of a mental disorder. Over the last few days I've noticed a drastic increase in how scatterbrained I am. I'll go upstairs or even into the next room to do something and have forgotten what it was by the time I get there. I usually can make myself remember what it was, but sometimes I can't. I've noticed myself “spacing out”, to quote Office Space, except that it's not just at work and I don't do it intentionally—in fact, I usually realize I'm doing it having little idea of how long it's been going on for and feeling disturbed that I could just lose it like that. This morning I almost forgot to bring my backpack with me to work, and I did forget to change the tie-dye t-shirt I put on to a white dress shirt before leaving (fortunately, I'm wearing a sweatshirt, so this isn't too noticeable, and admittedly I probably wouldn't have made the mistake were that not the case). I've been having to think for a second or two to be sure whether things I remember actually happened or were just dreams.
Every once in a while there will be a day when I wake up at 5:00, can't get back to sleep, and feel fairly lucid, but most of the time it's wake up at 4:30 because the cats want food, try to ignore them and get another half-hour of crappy sleep (I don't like to give them food before 5:00, though maybe I should change that rule), go back to sleep, wake up at 5:40, hit snooze, wake up, hit snooze, wake up, hit snooze, repeat until either 1) I forget to re-set my alarm (okay, so “hit snooze” was an oversimplification of what actually happens) or 2) I realize that I hit snooze one more time than I should have and I'm now going to be just-barely-on-time or late. When I do actually get up, I have trouble motivating myself to actually do the things I need to so that I can leave, and often get distracted by LiveJournal or email or whatever, making myself even later.
It still seems like I'm smart; I'm just making a lot more mistakes than usual. Of course, I'm unable to evaluate how much of that perception is just due to crystallized knowledge rather than any present ability to think clearly.
It started with the typos, I think. Well, in one sense it started years ago, with the deterioration of my long-term memory, but the recent exacerbation of it seems to have started with typos. I've always made a good number of typos while typing (if I had to use a typewriter, I'd probably have to slow down to something like 15 words per minute to avoid making errors, but I can fly on a computer as long as I can quickly correct my mistakes). But lately, especially in AIM conversations, even though I reread most of my messages before sending them I've still been sending a lot of messages with minor typos in them. My meaning is almost always still clear, so I suppose the functional difference at this point is just that it makes me look less intelligent or more careless, but I still find it a disturbing sign. And I don't know what to do about it.
I don't think it's caused by undersleeping, because it seems to happen just as much if not more on the day after a night when I collapsed fairly early on (like this past night) and got 8 or 9 hours. I have a few other theories that could possible explain what's going on:
I seem to be slightly more lucid at the moment than I often have been in the past few days. Maybe it's the caffeine, maybe it's the attempt to express this problem. Any ideas?
Also, on a side note, my mind has found an interesting way to make fun of me. I've had a mental module that seems to have no other purpose than to annoy me for many years now (trying to completely get rid of it just makes it stronger, but by mostly ignoring it I have made it a lot weaker in the past couple of years), but this time it's come up with something which the rest of me finds genuinely amusing. And no, I won't tell you what it is, so don't bother asking.
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Kenn Hamm
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Last modified: Mon Aug 4 19:38:38 2008