Orientation: Day 2, and Flickr Photos

Announcement: I put up a bunch of photos from china to max out my monthly Flickr uploading quota. They're unorganized now, but hopefully by this weekend that will change.

Orientation:

Today we had a long day doing an Outward Bound program. For those of you that don't know, Outward Bound is a team-building and experiential learning one day camp for adults. Lots of companies send departments out for a day of Outward Bound training, supposedly to help people work better as a team.

I had rather low expectations for the day, because my previous experience with such things is that they tended to reduce to just being games- only rarely and tangentially did they relate to anything that might have to do with teamwork.

This time, however, I did learn something, and was very happy about that. Mostly, what I learned was the need to trust other people's judgement on some things, and that its hard to tell when you have over- or under- planned. It will be interesting to work on over the course of my time here: how much planning actually need be done, and how much can just be left to work itself out? what happens when the plan stops being relevant? and those types of issues. It will be interesting.

Having said that, tomorrow is the first day of classes, and I need to plan ahead by checking out what classes I'll have, and preparing ahead for them. Afterwards I'm sure I'll get a really good night's sleep.

Orientation

Starting the first day of school is always intimidating.

Here you are, on the brink of something totally new, and today you finally get the first glimpse of what will make up the next few years of your life. Strangers are all around you - you have no idea who they are, or what they are like. First impressions fly thick and fast. You hope that yours is a good one.

The day is kind of formulaic- the head administrators get up and talk about how glad they are to have you here, what a good class it is, and how bright everyone is. You, of course, wonder if you are going to be up to par with the class, or if maybe you were that dicey case that may not really succeed. It won't be you, but you always worry that it could be. Like the name tags, its just another part of the day.

Eventually, they ask everyone to get up and introduce themselves. This, of course, is the part that everybody hates- sum up your entire life in just a few seconds, make that ultimate first impression, and impress everybody else with how slick and together and cool you are. You'd think that because it invariably happens, people would have these rehearsed mini-speeches, a quick spiel that will capture them in the best light and make them fantastic.  But nobody does. Instead, they hope that such a situation will never happen, they will never be forced to caricature themselves.

The first people start to make introductions- seeming so confident, so suave, and everybody else begins planning what they are going to say. The room becomes thick with thought bubbles as everybody goes into speech-writing mode, and nobody listens to whatever the people are saying about themselves. They could be saying 'bubble gum' over and over again, and as long as they said it smoothly, not a single other student would notice. The faculty would, naturally, so nobody does.

Although in hindsight, I suspect it would be the most memorable introduction if someone actually tried to get the audience to participate in something silly like a choral round of 'bubble gum'  (I'm told that if a number of people do it, it will create a dull roar as though everyone were deeply engaged in stimulating conversation. Or, at worst, it would sound like an idling diesel truck, which is cool too.)

Then the tours start, but  tours are themselves self-defeating. After all, you had to go find the appropriate place for the orientation, which means that you've already got a map of campus and at least some sense of where you are. The guides also have to try to keep their charges in a tight knot in order to be heard, which quickly becomes an exercise in frustration-  trying to herd cats, as it were. If there's one thing to be said about people, it could be that the more educated they are, the less they are able to listen.

After the tours, you get into the more specific stuff, the kind of thing that might actually be useful. What your professors look like so you don't run them over on the road, for example. Who hides in the corner at huge events, and who stands up in front feigning importance. Useful stuff.

Then, homework and book lists were distributed, and you go in search of older students to find out  what you really need to know. For us, this took place in the form of a student panel.

Questions there focused on alcohol, and a relative comparison of the evilness of various professors. Professor Mom, for example, never really expects anyone to read the book, and baby talks you through the material, while Professor Genius goes through the material so fast you need a tape recorder. This is the real useful stuff, the stuff that we will need to know to survive: Come to class. If you're going to come drunk, don't come too drunk, and for god sake don't sit in the middle of the second row where you can't dash for the bathroom when you have to puke. Don't actually do the work you're assigned, delegate it to others. You're eyes *can* explode if you try to read for 36 hours strait.

After that, the official activities ended for the day, and there was a stampede for the bookstore. Books are expensive.  Even not- really- real books that are just photocopies glued together by the school. Ironic how we pinch pennies for months to spend $150 a book on things we may not even read.

After the bookstore, the pinnacle of the event for many, we adjourned to a bar a few miles from campus. Introductions were made. Names exchanged, forgotten, re-exchanged, re-forgotten, and occasionally remembered, if the person was of the opposite gender and good looking. Thank goodness I brought a pen and paper. Now i just have to remember who these people actually are.

Possessed.

The computer is possessed.

Not my laptop, but the desktop project computer that I have. Oh, how it frustrates me. I started it up a few days ago, and it was crawling along so slowly that I thought it was broken. I mean, the thing took more than a half hour to start up!

I wanted to get the thing running along decently and then lend it to my aunt and uncle here in Boston. After all, it seems like the perfect thing for them: a one-stop media center computer in a house that has entire walls dedicated to CDs, DVDs, and VHS tapes! All they would need then is a super-duper sized storage system that could handle all that data and keep it safe. I haven't figured out what that system would be, but that's okay. It would take them a while to get to the point where they needed it.

It seemed to perfect a match. Something had to go wrong. After I wiped the computer and re-installed the OS, I discovered that after a restart, the computer sometimes would be unable to find the hard drive. That seemed pretty strange, and made me wonder if the drive is dying, but then other strange things started happening: Sometimes on startup, even if it found the hard drives, it wouldn't find the keyboard. Other times, the computer would reboot itself unexpectedly, even in the middle of a task. Hence, I conclude that it is possessed.

Now, I need to find a magician of things computatorial, and figure out how many chickens I need do sacrifice to get the thing to work properly. Does anyone have any ideas?

A good mechanic!

I finally gave in to the realization that although I could be good at tinkering around with my car, there were large and hairy problems associated with that tinkering. The ugliest  problems were the fact that I don't have any tools, or any way to get and store them, or any good place to even use them.

So, rather than just living in with the knowledge of being unable to fix my car, I took in to the mechanic yesterday, to have the squeaky belt adjusted (so it will live longer and not bother me) and have the break pads checked (because i'm paranoid from having seen so many problems in the past) more specifically, although i didn't suspect there was anything really wrong with the breaks, they would occasionally decide to sing opera arias when used. I wanted to know if this was a problem, maybe the signal that the pads needed to be replaced, or that something called 'glazing' had happened, where the brake pad stops being rubbery and starts being smooth and slippery (like a glazed pot maybe?) I don't know where the term came from. I just wanted to find out if it had happened to me.

After about 4 hours at the mechanic, the car was ready, and my peace of mind was restored. But moreover, he gave me strait, honest answers and charged me a very fair price.

This brings me great joy, because I've always expected mechanics to be exploitative. After all, when you need it fixed, you need it fixed. and chances are you don't know exactly what is wrong. Hence, I've always worried that mechanics take advantage of the situation by charging 'desperation premiums' and inventing expensive parts that are broken. I used to expect that going to the mechanic meant getting charged for a broken transmogrifier thingy, only to discover weeks later that such things didn't exist.

So my faith in humanity is strengthened once again. Oh, good mechanics of the world, how I love thee!

Exploring

One of the things that I have been meaning to do for nearly two weeks is to get out and get comfortable in the woods. After all, if I'm going to be spending a lot of time with my Native tribe, then I had better work to overcome the 'city kid' approach to the woods. I should learn to take note of my surroundings. To observe and identify plants and animals and stuff, right? So one of the things that I thought I would do is go for a walk in the woods every morning, and try to find a medicinal plant, or a certain kind of tree that is good for starting fires, or explore what this whole forest thing actually is.

Needless to say, it took me a while to get around to it. But, this morning i took an hour and went looking around for a certain medicinal plant that my herb-master friend told me about. I'll be honest- I didn't expect to find it at all, though I was given a detailed description of the plant, and then went and looked it up in an encyclopedia to try to find out even more. I was told that the plant grows in damp shady areas, and so I decided that my best bet was to look near the bog that I had found on my first jaunt through the woods. (The bog, it turns out, has a name- the old berry bog. I think I had better find out when berries come in season.) After biking around to the trailhead nearest the bog, I meandered in, trying to find a path that ran right along the edge or through the bog itself.

It turns out that nobody traverses bogs for good reason- the mud can be knee deep, and when your foot sinks in, it can form a vacuum around the shoe. It's a good thing I wore my old nasty shoes, and no sock! I ended up having to take my shoes off because they kept getting stuck in the muck and carry them till I got back on dry ground. It turns out that the plant doesn't grow in the bog anyway, but grows with pretty good frequency in the soggy, leaf-strewn underbrush on the side of the bog. I was pretty pleased with myself as I squelched along and identified between 15 and 20 small patches of the plant. I only picked three specimens, though, because I didn't feel like I actually needed the plant, and I'm not entirely sure what it does anyway. The three I picked looked dead, and i figured thats just as well because then they would be easier to try out, store, and show off.

I must have been a sight as I emerged from the bog- muddy, wet, with leaves in the hair, grinning broadly at my discovery of three tiny brown twigs. The people I passed on the trail must have thought that I lost my mind.

New Bike, and Spagetti by the Pound

Yesterday was a fun and exciting day. I got to play around on my new bike, generously given to me by my uncle Chris. It is an old 1980's racing bike, and while it doesn't look like much to the untrained eye (no sparkly paint job or speedy look) It does get the job done, and get it done fast. I think that it has to do with the gears, which are set to the 'really fast' end of the spectrum that balances speed vs. power. I say that because any noticeable hill has me either feeling like I'm in a fighter jet, or pulling a semi loaded with bricks. The problem is that I'm entirely unused to road bikes, and mountain bikes have this feature called 'bunny gears' because they are so far towards the power end of the spectrum that if you try to use them for anything less steep than mount everest, your legs fly up and down so fast you look like you're trying to bounce around like a bunny. for road bikes, the bunny gear doesn't exist, so when you're trying to get over anything larger than a speed bump or steeper than a driveway, well, you do the only other thing you can- get off and push. At least, that's what it feels like, because i'm out of shape.

Now, after a day full of playing on the bikes, I built up quite an appetite. I decided to have some spaghetti for dinner, because it is filling, tasty, and easy to cook. So cook it I did- about a pound and a half worth. And eat it i did, with sauce and curry powder on top. Afterwards, feel bad I did. It turns out my stomach can only handle about 3/4 of a pound of spaghetti, and here I was so famished that i went and stuffed twice that down my throat. oops.

note to self: eat slowly enough that you figure out when to stop eating, or your stomach may explode.

I'm glad we got that all cleared up.

Thinking about that death thing

After going to a funeral on Sunday, I have a few thoughts that came up about death. First let me say that I'm not a teenager with a morbid fascination with death, so don't take this the wrong way. This is just some thoughts occasioned by a funeral. This was the second funeral I've ever attended.

Death isn't something that we should be afraid of. Death is a change. It is a good change, although it is unknown, and therefore scary. We go through changes all the time. This year alone, for example, I went through a number of changes: graduating college, fearing for my future, doubting my ability to succeed, buying a car, moving to Boston, starting graduate school. None of these were comfortable changes, and I was afraid of each and every one of them beforehand. Afterward, though, I was glad that I had gone through each of these changes. I think death is the same way, but more so. It is terrifying, sure, a bookend to our life. But the other bookend was scary too.

Being born is just like dying. Imagine you are a fetus at term, just about to be born. You are warm and comfortable, nourished and protected. It is a pretty heavenly situation, but then it happens. You didn't want it to happen- the world is cold, bright, and hard- but you had no choice. It happened to you, and you couldn't stop it. You got born. You didn't like it, and you let everyone know by venting your anger the only way you could- by screaming and crying. But, now, on the other side of that bookend, you are glad that you went through it. You celebrate the occasion. You measure yourself by how long ago it happened to you. Maybe death is exactly the same.

People talk about living forever. I would hate that. Living forever is a curse, I would have to watch everyone I ever knew and loved get old and die. I would not only have to bury my children, wife, and friends, but my grandchildren, and great grandchildren. I would watch my family get so far removed that they would forget about me, their distant ancestor, eventually becoming like strangers, with no connection to this old-eyed young man. No thanks. Nor would I want everybody to live forever. That too would be torturous. After a few trillenia, the universe would get boring. Every person would know you like an intimate friend. Every skill that you wanted would be mastered. Every idea created. No thank you.

No, I have to say that I rather like life the way it is. It is messy and changing, but there is a place for me. I will grow up, watch my parents die, bring children into the world, watch them get started, and then follow my parents, grandparents, and great grandparents on to the next chapter. Will I be able to look back at the world? Will I come to understand my part in it, the outcome of my efforts? Will I be able to influence those still there? To all these questions, my answer is the same: I hope so, but if not, thats okay. Even if I couldn't, I'd do it anyway.

Death isn't bad, sign me right on up. In fact, put my name on that list twice! ;-)

[Odds/Ends] Maxims to Remember

As I recall, grandpa once gave me a cutout list of Kelly Perdew's 10 Leadership Principles:

1. Integrity: Take the harder right over the easier wrong.
2. Duty: Do what you're supposed to do, when you're supposed to do it.
3. Passion: Be passionate about what you do, or do what you're passionate about.
4. Impeccability: If it is worth doing, it is worth doing right.
5. Teamwork: There is no "I" in TEAM.
6. Selfless Services: Give back.
7. Planning: Fail to plan, plan to fail.
8. Loyalty: Up, down, and across your organization.
9. Perseverance: It's not the size of the dog in the fight, its the size of the fight in the dog.
10. Flexibility: The person with the most varied responses wins.

Funeral Bound

I'm off to a funeral, will be back on Monday. I'm sick, and really frustrated. please understand that I will be out of touch or crabby if contacted. 

Pictures up on Flickr

I took some of my favorite pictures taken between last summer and now and put them up on flickr. Use the link at the right to see them!

Also, I looked at the previous post and realized it didn't make much sense. So much for blogging dreams. I thought the image of brad pitt as floyd landis on sheepback was funny though.

A great movie idea based on a dream I just had.

Starring Brad Pitt.

A cyclist and his gang of miscreant biker buddies rally against the odds to qualify for the tour de france. The cyclist is talented, but keeps running into a sundry of problems- the wheels on his bmx bike keep going flat, he keeps getting lost, and, eventually, his lady friend gets kidnapped- leading him and his biker gang to save his woman on the only means available to them- a herd of sheep in the french countryside.  

Woven through the storyline are numerous cameo appearances by the author, who is also trying to qualify on his eagerly anticipated new 7 speed. I avoid many of the star's more unique problems, but join the sheep crusade when I realize I can't make it up a particular mountain at all- not even if I get off and walk.

Call me if you want the movie rights.

New Feature: Photos on Flickr

Doing photos directly here on blogger turned out to be a pain in the butt, and so I signed up for an account on Flickr, which promises to be much better at doing the picture thing. I put up the pictures of my apartment for a test run, and you can view them here. I'll let people know when I put new pictures up, and even put a link over on the side of this page so you don't have to remember another silly meaningless URL. It's enough to ask you to remember to come here and not one of the 4 older blogs, right? Go check them out. See my pimped out bachelor pad. Love it. Maybe even love it enough to come visit!

Home Safe, and Busy

I'm safely home from the vision quest, and extremely happy that I went. It has given me time to carefully think about why I am making some choices, accept them, and really get ready to be completely focused when school starts. Having said that, I'm back in Boston now, and putting that new found focus to use.

Today was the deadline to get my resume submitted for inclusion in the database that employers will use for recruiting MBA candidates- I had submitted one earlier but somehow I screwed the formatting up big-time. I got that sent off late yesterday afternoon, and am waiting until the office opens this morning to make sure they received it correctly this time.

I also need to look into financial aid. I miscommunicated with some members of my family, and as a result really misunderstood how we were going to proceed on that front. Currently, I'm still not sure what the issue is, but am going to find out as much as I can, the way I would if I were going to take on all the loans myself- the only difference is that I'm going to call them before committing to anything.

This afternoon I'm going over to the Ryan's to attend a combination Birthday/ Goodbye party. It's Corey's Birthday (Note to self: get a card), and Devin leaves for another year of school in Chicago tomorrow. That will tie me up for part of the afternoon or evening, but I'm hoping to get a lot done this morning. 

Out of Town- Vision Questing

I'm leaving today to go down to PA. It's early, true, but I have much to do in the way of preparations for my Vision Quest, and I found out yesterday that there was a death in the tribe. So, going down a bit early is the least I can do. The funeral, and my sister's vision, are throwing curve-balls into my vision quest, which has me sitting a little on edge. However, I feel good about the whole process, and am eagerly anticipating the whole thing.

I'm not sure when I'll be back. The vision quest itself is slated to end sunday the 14th, but I'm not sure how long it will take me to recover, or whether I will stay in the area for the funeral (the timing of which has yet TBD).

I'll post as soon as i can to let everybody know that I survived, and give some idea as to when i'll actually make it back to boston.

I wonder if he has a brother in boston.

In tinkering with the car, it has become painfully obvious that to be really effective, one needs a lot more tools than I have, and maybe some of those little ramp-things. I don't have room for any of that stuff, which means that someday, and possibly someday soon, I will need a mechanic.

There was a certain mechanic back in LA that I was very fond of. He was a kind, quiet man, who i knew was going to be honest about what was wrong and how best to fix it. He got a lot of business from us, because the car we had (an old Volvo) was falling apart. We came in, said "guess what, this is broken" and he could just fix it. We trusted him to be honest and do it right, and he always did.

How do I find a guy like that?

Starting to work on the car

Today I have been antsy for something to do, so I started tinkering
with the car. I want to replace the belt, whose squeaking has gotten
irritatating. I want to get a car cover, because every time i drive
it, there are always leaves and junk trapped under the wipers. I
don't know why, but it just bugs me.

I figure if i'm doing car-stuff, i should go all the way and actually
wash and wax it. I also bought some rain-x to put on the windshield.
(Rain-x is hydrophobic, meaning water never forms a sheen, but
instead stays in round droplets and runs off. Its basically window-wax.

anyway, hopefully when i'm done the car will be running spiffy and well!

It's time for me to put down some thoughts on the girl situation.

I am still recovering from a relationship that lasted almost a year. The girl was a wonderful person: smart, caring, and good looking. But for some reason the relationship was difficult for me. I spend a lot of time unhappy. I'm not really sure why. When we were together, in each others physical presence, there were very few problems of any kind. But on a telephone, our relationship could do no right. Through the rest of this post I will try to evaluate what relationship baggage that I may have going on. Nothing like putting your dirty laundry on display to make you want to wash it, eh?

I've complained vocally about this girl wanting constant attention from me, and my frustrations with that. But the deeper question, and the question that I am faint to ask, is what is it with me that made this trifle such an issue?  I have called people frequently in the past. Why not this time? Was it laziness? Procrastination? Disinterest? Fear? To tell the truth, I am not sure.

My best guess is that it has to do with me being deeply afraid of commitments - especially commitments with consequences. I didn't want to make a commitment to call on a schedule- What if I forgot and missed the call? I didn't want to make a habit of calling at a certain time- what if I had other more pressing things to do? So I simply said "I'll call as often as I can" and put it on my mental to-do list. Invariably, I forgot. Invariably, she felt that my silence meant that I didn't care. I felt guilty about it, vaguely promising to "do better next time" but still without committing to anything. It became a spiral that produced hurt for her, and guilt for me.

Guilt. Guilt is one of the most often felt emotions in my life. I feel guilty about not working hard enough, about not doing things fast enough, about not saying or doing the right thing, about not following up the way I told myself that I should. Guilt for not saying no, even though I didn't care. Guilt for not caring, even though I was supposed to. Guilty for making her feel bad. Guilt sucks time and energy out of me, because I waste energy feeling bad, waste time thinking about what could have been done, and robs me of confidence in my next decision.

If I am to heal and be the person I want to be, I need to let go of the guilt.

Another thing that I complained about was that she always presented me with ultimatums: "I can't accept a person who does/doesn't do X, If you want to be with me you must accommodate."  This really was painful for me, because I felt like I was being threatened: "Change who you are or we are through." Needless to say, I never handled it very well. I got angry. I got defensive. I argued and clawed.

On one level I  recognized that everybody has needs in a relationship, and that everybody has to go out and find the person to best meet those needs. On another I rebelled at the non-negotiability of it: Become this or leave. There's not much wiggle room there, not much place for me. I didn't understand why whatever little thing was so important, and why I had to change to fit these weird requirements. So I tried to negotiate: "Why don't we just do that, which is so much better/ easier/ more convenient than this?"

At the end of the day, I didn't want to change. I was afraid that these changes were giving up my individuality, my burgeoning independence. I felt like I fought hard to be who I am, and I wasn't about to just throw away big parts of myself just to stay with someone.  To be fair, though, I don't think she realized that her requests were having the effect that they did. I think she thought she was asking me to bend on some trivial matter, when the truth was the opposite.

I need to be more clear about what is important to me and why. To do that I need to really know what my priorities are.

The third complaint that I had is that I always had the feeling of imbalance. I constantly felt like I was bending over backwards, doing things that were really uncomfortable. Rather than getting recognized, I felt that I was unappreciated, unnoticed,  martyring myself to some romantic stereotype. Why should I do so much uncomfortable stuff when she seems to do nothing?

I say 'seems' to be because she assures me that she felt  the same way. I'm sure that in her own way, she is trying just as hard as me. But that knowledge doesn't help me to feel more at ease. I don't feel better from just knowing that she is trying, I feel better when I see it firsthand. And that firsthand experience is missing. Never have I been surprised and exclaimed: "Oh, you did that for me? Thank You!" Instead, when I find out where her effort goes, my response is usually "please don't." She always put effort into my physical needs, with cooking and shopping, but these areas were areas that I have been consciously trying to take care of myself. Because of that, I think all her effort was seen as intrusive, rather than helpful.

I need to allow people to help me without resenting it.

Chestward Bound

And Its not my eyes this time.

My sniffles have decided that they didn't like being shot out of my
nose every few minutes of the past few days, and decided to migrate.
Chestward Ho! they said, figuring that coughing and hacking HAD to be
harder than forcefully exhaling. Little do they know.

[Odd/End] The first day of snow

Originally penned 11/18/05.

It's the first day of real snow in many a week. As I sit here this early morning, this first glimpse of the monochrome of winter brings back memories, simultaneously leaving me alone and surrounded by a warm blanket of past experience.

The world changes when it is covered in snow. Everything that was once colorful is now a shade of white or gray, as if color never even existed, not just buried and forgotten. In this old photograph, like so many others, texture takes the place of color, depth is replaced by shade. Looking out the window, the flakes of snow dance, swirl, and hang, and I am confused by the quiet trees in the distance. I don't wonder why, when, or how they became leafless, for it seems eternal. Instead, I wonder whether a particularly odd shape was one tree or two. From my seat, the truth seems impossible to determine. With only the shape of the branches to guide me, I hazard a guess that it must be either two trees or one horribly tortured, grotesque specimen. I stared, wondering how it could be possible that all sense of depth had suddenly vanished.

This colorless universe where such enigmas envelop me is somehow pleasing. I feel the urge to plump myself with heavy layers and walk about the town, marveling at all the texture that I had not appreciated before. On such a walk I would stop to admire the vivid detail in a rough stone wall, in the reflections in the surface of the pond, and in the turbid water of the creek. On a brighter, more colorful day, the greys and browns of these things would repudiate my interest, but on a day like today, they seem downright beautiful.

What makes people Tick? and other such musings...

Today I was thinking, as I am wont to do, about how people function. It is a topic that I spend a lot of time with, although goodness knows why. Questions like "What happens if you never went poop?" are just interesting to me. Would the orifice close up and disappear? Would we still have a butt crack? How would you get rid of bodily wastes? Fascinating. But butts were not the point of this post, merely the introduction.

The point of the post is that lately I've been wondering about three things- sleep, health, and thinking. You see, in addition to the sniffles, I have been on a truly strange sleep schedule lately. Each night since returning from the wedding, I have gone to bed later and later. Not because i particularly wanted to, but because I wasn't tired and lost track of time. This morning, I finally got tired around 8-am. It makes me wonder about sleep. What is "natural sleep?" Have we always slept this way? What if a person's natural rhythm was not exactly in line with a day? Have people tinkered with sleep? What did they learn?

And because I was fooling around with that tiddlywiki thing so much last night, it got me wondering how people link ideas together in their brains. How would you maps someones mind? Would it be a flowchart, a dictionary, a cloud of words, some of which are bigger than others? would it be a web of related things, and all consciousness does is dance between the degrees of separation?

Yes, this kind of stuff is fun to think about. If I were a mad scientist, you well know what I would be doing to people. But luckily, I am not, and so my experiments are mostly harmless.

New toys are fun.

I finished the work that had me most stressed about getting into
school today, and all I have left are a few odds and ends to tie up on
campus. However, seeing as how it is hotter even satan himself could
stand outside, I've opted to sit inside and play with some new toys on
my computer.

First among the new toys is the writing program that I've always
wanted but never knew actually existed. Surprise surprise, I'm even
using it now. Heres what it is: A super simple vanilla text editor
that blackens the whole screen giving you a completely
distraction-free writing environment. By blackens the screen I mean
completely blackens it, leaving you with the really old style
green-on-black text that always reminds me of Pre-Color monitors and
DOS. But I like it, because I learned from experience that when
staring at a screen for hours writing a paper, the glaring white of
the background begins to hurt your eyes, making the words blur
together and my usual 8 point font virtually impossible to read. It
also offers the only other feature that I use during 98% of the
writing process- A spell checker. Actually, It just uses the
computer's built in spell checker, but the point is that it's there.

Another toy that I have been tinkering with is OnSync. Basically, what
this does is let me move information between my phone and address book
on my computer the way I want it moved. I tried using Apple's syncing
program a couple of times, and ended up with a flood of numbers and
email addresses that I didn't want sitting in my phone. After all, do
I really need the email address of that person I talked to once in a
telephone? NO! The other thing it does is let me pull numbers that I
saved on my phone (oh, thanks for calling, let me save your number)
and put them on my computer, where i can back them up. Or email them.
Or do whatever. It was a shareware program, but I have to say, it
turned out to be well worth it.

Another thing that I'm playing with is consolidating my blogs. After
all, who has time to keep track of 5 different blogs floating around
the web?
There were problems that led to me abandoning all of them at different
times, and I decided that I had better centralize them. And that quest
for standardization has got me doing all kinds of things: figuring out
a good photo hosting site (Flickr) figuring out how to mass import get
my 380 or so posts into Blogger, and other odds and ends. With luck,
There will be handy tools for all that stuff, and after a few hours of
tinkering i will have all my online history in one convenient
blackmail-able place.

In other news, I still have the sniffles, and slept till 11 this
morning. So much for the 7:30 yoga. I'm going to try to go to bed at
like 8 tonight to be up early tomorrow, but goodness knows if that
will actually happen.

UPDATE: In trying out cool stuff, I ran into this ultimate wiki program. If you don't know what a wiki is, check out WikiPedia. WikiPedia was the first famous wiki. The thing with wikis is that they usually exist in two forms: On a big, expensive web server somewhere far away, or as a stand-alone application on one computer. TiddlyWiki is the coolest thing on earth, because it is made to be a fully functional wiki within a single web page- making it tiny, cross-platform, and personal-computer or web-server ready. I'm hoping to use it for class notes/project collaboration.

Check it out here. To download and play with it, simply save that page as a html file.
Even more useful is the Getting Things Done version here. Same download rules apply, but this one can print directly onto 3x5 index cards for the Hipster PDA.

The only thing bad about it (because I know dad will have problems) is some apps don't have full functionality- it is well documented, though. So dad, tinker with it in firefox.


Its AWESOME!

[Odd/End] I have to pee...

Written during a long delay on the runway on 7/31/06. Would you believe that they made me sit there for an hour and a half while we waited? Torture.

Once I was a sage
full of moving, inspiring thoughts.
No longer am I he.

Right now, I am only a boy
trying to hide from my deepest desire-
To pee.

Maybe, someday,
after my bladder is appeased,
the wisdom will return.

Soon to come: Odds and Ends

As I was getting ready for bed, I made the mistake of opening the
folder on my computer where I keep all the little scraps of ideas that
I would like to do something with, someday, when I get around to it. A
lot of it was poetry, or still life descriptions written in prose.

I prefer not to call myself a poet, because for me it conjures
negative images: Would you share a label with pretentious people
wearing berets in cafes reciting the same soulless tripe, expecting
admiration for their rare skill at combining nonsense?

No, I am not a poet. But I do occasionally write something that might
look like poetry. I don't really know what it is, nor do I care.
Where it comes from, and what purpose it serves are much more
important to me. It comes from a moment, often quite ordinary, that I
want to capture, record, or hold onto. So I write down a word here and
there, so that later I can read it and that moment comes back to life.

If I had one great ambition for this writing, it is that I capture
that moment well enough for some other reader to bring it to life too.
Just think- for me, it is a memory returning. For them, it would be a
momentary glance through someone else's eye. I'll post bits and pieces
of stuff here, stuff that I think just might have a shot at making the
jump out of my creaky memory and into someone else's eye.

An Acerbic Update

I admit it, I haven't updated in quite a while. I moved in okay, and then immediately went back home for my Uncle Tom's wedding. His new wife, Jill, is a fantastic person and too cool to put into words.

Now, the wedding was in LA, and so attending required me to fly there and back. Naturally, I forgot the number one goal of all airlines: To cram as many people into as small a space as possible as often as possible. Forgetting this maxim means that I also forgot the corollary: Lots of people in close quarters means everybody gets everybody else's germs.

So I now have Ebola. Or maybe SARS. Or maybe- just maybe, mind you, because I would NEVER exaggerate- I have a case of the sniffles. *Gasp*  Oh, the horror. Yes, I am that guy: The one who flies cross country to a wedding, becomes very friendly with scotch-on-the-rocks, flies back across country, and COMES DOWN WITH THE SNIFFLES. Woe is me.

In other news, being settled in my apartment has given me a chance to look outward and begin to explore my surroundings. The weather is hot and humid. There is a grocery store walking distance to the south, and a "T" (as in meTro) station there too. I ended up talking to a nice lady about whether the T goes to a beach or not while at the supermarket, and an instant before she could tell me how to get there my ear exploded with ringing. Cell phone ringing, to be exact.

At the other end of that cell phone was a certain 88 year old grandparent who wanted to know about my financial aid. I tried to explain that I didn't know about my financial aid, as the information was sent to LA the day I left, and would not be forwarded to me until two years from now, and couldn't he just wait until then? Unfortunately, we couldn't seem to hear each other clearly- terrible reception, I'm sure- and we had to give up. But by then the nice lady who was going to tell me how to get to the beach was gone.

I went home and that ended my exploration for the day- until around a quarter to five I got to feeling good and decided to see if I could find my way into the gym for even more exposure to germs. After all, what good is having Ebola/SARS if you can't pass it along? I made it to the gym just in time to find a free Yoga class that was just starting, and into which I promptly dove head first. It turns out that even when you're not in a sauna, Yoga is Hard! And smelly! So I left feeling duly exercised and very manly- well, smelly at least. When I got home, I labeled exercise a "good idea" and "to do tomorrow." Which brings me to the forecast section of today's post.

Tomorrow we have a 33% chance of early rising, followed by a 10% chance of yoga. If yoga occurs, there is a stunning 82.5% chance of a productive afternoon, and watch out for those! A Busybody warning may go into effect. More likely, though, the yoga will not occur (the last time two consecutive yogas occurred was in July) and the chances of a productive afternoon will hover in the mid 40's. Now lets check in with our various forecasts: Laundry 20%, Exploration 35%, Sniffles 98%, Studies 68.5%.