genius and insanity
Hah! I knew there was something to my style of planned chaos! This interview with theoretical physicist David Deutsch perfectly illustrates the kind of lifestyle I like to lead, much to the chagrin of my mother, my sister, and my ex-girlfriend (not to mention my roommates, past and present.)
On the other hand, there is always that fine line between genius and insanity, and it would be quite presumptious of me to claim genius, considering I have yet to produce anything of substance. But we will not dwell on such things.
I am reminded of this quote (which I originally mentioned in an entirely different context):
often, the state of the kitchen is the state of the mind, confused and unsure men, pliable men are the thinkers. their kitchens are like their minds, cluttered with garbage, dirty ware, impurity, but they are aware of their mind-state and find some humor in it. at times, with a violent burst of fire they defy the eternal duties and come up with a lot of shining that we sometimes call creation; just as at times they will get half drunk and clean up their kitchens. but soon again all falls into disorder and they are in the darkness again, in need of BABO, pills, prayer, sex, luck and salvation. the man with ever-orderly kitchen is the freak, however. beware of him. his kitchen-state is his mind-state: all in order, settled, he has let life condition him quickly to a basened and hardened complex of defensive and soothing thought-order. if you listen to him for ten minnutes you will know that anything he says in a lifetime will be essentially meaningless and always dull. he is a cement man. there are more cement men than other kinds of men. so if you are looking for a living man, first check his kitchen and save yourself time.
ass monkey disease
My winters are spent simply ENDURING. Distracting. Hurrying to the next warm spot. Driving through sludge and muck and sleet with my head down. In NYC I spent my winters standing on the above-ground Queensboro number 7 platform. Grinning maniacally into that horizontal sleet that seems to fall only when there’s a slow down in train service and you know you’ll be there for 45 minutes.
I want blistering fucking heat. Blazing sunshine that burns my bones. Long drives with the window wide open and bugs exploding against my windshield. Exposed midrifts. Feet up, light breeze, birds chirping. Call it seasonal affective disorder or call it “ass monkey 2000”, I don’t care.
I’ve been bitching and moaning about SAD since I’ve had a blog 1,2,3,4 Yeah, the part that causes serious damage to my mental health begins in March (because surviving February is not an easy task for me) and often extends all the way to May. December and January are endurable only because of the holidays. Of course, the build-up is taxing as well. The waning sunlight absolute kills me. By the winter solstice, I am pining for sunlight the way a drowning man gasps for air.
I’m hoping that by taking pre-emptive action, and high-tailing it to California this winter, it won’t be as bad. So I’m crossing my fingers.
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Colder than Hell • 2000 Dec 5 • Fato Profugus ↩
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Contractions • 2001 Oct 14 • Foobar ↩
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Brown Buffalo • 2001 Nov 15 • Foobar ↩
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Long December 2003 Jan 9 • Congestive Soul Failure ↩
i don't buy it
While the author of this blog post about how it is difficult to write clean XHTML in a corporate environment makes very valid points (e.g., you can’t control the output of the CMS, and most WYSIWYG editors emit borked code), I still can’t stomach the fact that you have to compromise your professional integrity in order to satisfy the corporate master.
True, I have yet to earn a serious wage, and, while I fantasize about staying free from the corporate task master, chances are, I will be 0wn3d. (In fact, I probably am already 0wn3d, considering how much debt I have.) So if it’s your job on the line, you just might have to cut corners. I can understand that.
But the thing is, there are advantages to properly coding, in terms of semantic correctness, and you throw these advantages away by using kludges and hacks like tables. Ultimately, I really think that content should be king, that content must be accessible, meaning being able to be read by XML parsers, being viewable on non-standard browsers such as cel phones and handheld computers, being transformable to PDF, and providing all the interop niceties that well-formed markup gives you, and if you can’t get that layout perfectly right, a redesign may very well be a good idea. After all, all the content should still be right there, accessible, and self-describing. And if your corporate task master throws a fit that it doesn’t fit the specs to the exact pixel, you should point out the fact that these intact interop niceties will save a lot of time and effort (and money) in the long run, while that piece of eye candy really isn’t going to do much other than tax the patience of the next guy who has to maintain this slop (and possibly crash the browsers of their prospective clients.)
Sure, you shouldn’t have to bear stigmata for using transitional code. There’s no need to wear a scarlet letter. But I think that some of this criticism is necessary and bears hearing out.
As Internet Explorer grows obsolescent, as Mozilla and other Gecko-based browsers take the lead, as novel rendering engines like KHTML (which drives Konqueror and Safari) become more ubiquitous, as we move away from the personal computer as the only pardigm for displaying content from the Web, there is going to be a lot of breakage going on. And, while, perhaps, in the short term, it may be beneficial to web developers, as they’ll have jobs fixing these sites, in terms of the big picture, it’s just a big waste. If you tried your best, and got caught by the 11th hour, that’s one thing, but to just blithely ignore these recommendations because this how you’ve always done it, it renders fine on all the major browsers, is extraordinarily short-sighted.
maybe god doesn't like you
I’ve come to hate my own creation. Now I know how God feels. —Homer Simpson
insomnia
I just can’t get to sleep. As I was walking home from Y and R’s place, I felt kind of drowsy and I was pretty sure I’d be able to get to bed OK, but of course, the phone rings, first M, then N. (And why is my life filled with all these people, and yet I feel so horribly, so irredeemably alone?)
The conversations I had were relatively benign. There was no heartache, no metaphoric knife digging deep into my chest. (It’s just that I often reflect on my inability to connect…. OK I promise to stop harping about this eventually….) I’m yawning, but I just can’t make my brain stop from going around and around in circles.
Today was a really bad day, in terms of how little work I got done, and in terms of the emotional nadir I experienced for no good reason. I just had this overpowering sense of everything going wrong, of me being paralyzed and unable to do anything to alleviate my misery. I can’t avoid it, nor can I accept it. (It is the vast nothingness of oblivion, the endless emptiness of non-existence, clawing for my soul.) I can’t just suck it up, and try to rise above it.
But, for no good reason, it leveled off at the end of the day. (Normally, I get really depressed when the sun begins to set.) While I couldn’t say that I was happy, I wasn’t despondent. Things were OK, as long as I didn’t think too far ahead of the present.
Maybe all these thoughts are neurotoxic. Maybe I am just caught by an overvalent idea. So that my only relief is to spew them out somehow, whether to a psychiatrist or to the mindless ether that is the Internet.
I don’t know. Maybe I can sleep after all.