mahiwaga

I'm not really all that mysterious

2005

Jan 2005 Feb 2005 Mar 2005 Apr 2005 May 2005 Jun 2005 Jul 2005 Sep 2005 Oct 2005 Nov 2005 Dec 2005

Jan

not feeling right

maybe it's just the fact that i've slept 2 hours, no more than 15 minutes contiguously, in the past 40 hours, but i keep getting this "squeaky" feeling in my head, kind of like the sound of metal scraping against metal. the hypochondriac in me keeps worrying about blowing a blood vessel in my brain, but i really don't feel good.

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what is it like to have that sense of purpose, that burning force, that blessed fire, that animates your sinews? what is it like to desire, keeping you whole even against the shearing forces of adversity, the crushing weight of the universe, the downward pull of futility?

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brain gasps, grasps, futile struggle, gripping, fingers digging, crumble fall

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My dog died two weeks ago.

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I feel really out of sync right now. I just don't feel right, and it's nothing I can explicate by blogging. I feel like I need to sit still upon it, bore holes into the issue, and figure out where I'm going wrong.

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where did that come from, that look, like "yikes!" or "i don't know what's going to happen, but we'll find out soon enough," like lightning flash, freeze framing everything searing it into my retinas recognition like an elbow to the head where have i seen that before a hundred lifetimes ago perhaps this infinitely unraveling distance between us sending me spinning and twirling out into space no, not us, there is no us but this memory of a dream and the things that I've happened to pin upon your visage shimmering in my mind half-remembered things that never were striking true in some backhanded fashion

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Figures.

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On R's advice (as you can see, I am very suggestible), I headed up to the Central Coast and am hanging around Cambria and vicinity (which includes such places as Cayucos, San Simeon, Morro Bay, San Luis Obispo, Atascadero, Templeton, and Paso Robles, among others.) Mostly, I just want to stare at the sea. (There is clearly something very wrong with me.)

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how the story ends

So I finished reading through most of the e-mail I sent to N when we broke up. It's kind of funny to be reading just half the conversation and yet still getting the full emotional impact without knowing what the response was.

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executive dysfunction syndrome

it's bizarre how they pretty much have a name for everything, how it has become fashionable to call every little personality quirk a syndrome.

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Atascadero and back

I realized that I didn't have my charger for my phone (I swear I brought it with me) so I had to go and get one. This required me to go inland.

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Currently Playing: The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou Original Soundtrack

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GNOME build order

This entry is obsolete. See GNOME 2.9.91 build order for updates.

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I got tired of the way my old site looked. I was never really happy with it, actually. So this is what I've been working on for the past week in fits and starts. The actual amount of time I worked on it probably adds up to no more than a couple of hours at most, but what took up most of the time was the setup. Which is what most rational people would call procrastination.

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Feb

last dance for half a year (the theory of many-worlds)

in the background the soundtrack of my private despair

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hi-ho, hi-ho, it's off to work i go

so endeth my gloriously noneventful vacation. I am apprehensive about surviving the next 4 months, which are likely to be quite grueling and mind-bending, but nothing lasts forever, I guess.

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Now, mind you, I don't have one of these myself, although I am currently saving up for it. A review of the Mac Mini entitled "The Emperor's New Computer" has been penned by Jorge Lopez, a Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer, which rehashes a lot of strawmen arguments about Apple Computers in general that have been circulating since the early '90's by Windows/x86 die-hards. I couldn't help wonder if this wasn't a piece of satire, since the arguments are way off base.

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Like many aspiring authors often do, I had a "hey, I thought of that" moment. This occurred while reading Broken Angels by Richard Morgan, the second book about Takeshi Kovacs, a Japanese-Slavic mercenary from a colony world 100+ light years from Earth who used to be a U.N. Envoy, which, contrary to its diplomatic connotation, really describes someone who has been trained to be a preternatural super-killing machine.

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it is 9:30pm, and I have to be awake again in 6½ hours, and I basically pissed away an entire weekend off.

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My most hated month, the dreaded month of February, is at once living up to all horrible expectations, but at the same time, isn't as bad as it could be.

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bluetooth ipods

I knew it was only a matter of time. Bluetooth-enabled iPods. (It's only a rumor.)

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I can't remember the first time I ran into Hunter S. Thompson's work, but it was relatively recent, and it all started with "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas." I think it might have been in the awful aftermath of the 2000 election which destroyed the American Republic. On first glance, the movie is incomprehensible, almost literally so. The lines are half-muttered, the characters addled on drugs, and insanity is the only logic to the course of events. Which, if you think about it, is really what the world is like. And in time I realized what "Fear and Loathing" was: a requiem for the American Dream. Not just the end of the freedom of the '60's, but a generalized regression. The loss of potentiality. The Republic finally failing against the forces of history and entropy, and decaying into Empire.

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It being Lent and all, and me being a Catholic caught in the vortex of a now 4 year crisis of faith[1][2][3], I was watching Comedy Central today. Since it's Monday, the Daily Show wasn't on. Instead it was an old Damon Wayans stand-up routine. He got to talking about the hypocrisy of preachers, and how religion is just a way for people to commit evil acts and yet still feel good about themselves. And, inexplicably, I had the urge to want to go to Church.

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serious mental problems

Tomorrow is my first day off in 12 days. Without question, I believe that this has had a negative impact on my emotional status. This morning I had to all but drag myself out of bed and get into the shower, and I showed up to work 15 minuntes late, thinking of nothing but of the hour when I would get out and free myself from the shackles of daily drudgery.

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I should've known better than to go to sleep drunk and without taking my meds.

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spammers must die (reprise)

So I've disabled trackbacks since some bastard has started pinging pr0n sites at me, which is not that great of a loss since no one has pinged me since I started using Blosxom as my blogging engine. I wish I could eviscerate these spamming scum.

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He arrived at the club two hours late, hamstrung by his own scatter-mindedness, without any real hope that he would still find her there. But he headed out anyway into the night, amidst the teeming swarms of barhoppers and thrillseekers. There was a time when he would have revelled in the illicit goings-on of the night, the whoring and the drug-dealing, the generalized debauchery. But in this strange place, he only felt desolate, having been gone too long from this lifestyle.

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This season has traditionally been a time of giving up things, but perhaps because of Vatican II (when hippies apparently infiltrated the Catholic Church), when I was growing up in Catholic School, the emphasis was on making a life-affirming change. Instead of negative reinforcement, the idea was to do something positive. Instead of giving something up, the idea was to do something new to make oneself a better person or make the world a better place.

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Mar

red shifting galaxies

I came home today all-of-the-sudden completely fried. I'm working in yet another different place, and once again went through the rigors of the First Day™ The day went surprisingly, swimmingly well (as they say.) But as soon as I got home, I crashed on the couch and curled up into a fetal position.

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dreaming while the house burns down around me

Now I should probably know better, but for those of you who know me well, this is probably not surprising at all.

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sleep is for the weak

So as I noted, I stayed up for 32 hours the past couple of days. I figured that I'd take a four hour nap, pack, and then head up to L.A. to visit my parents. Heh.

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the hour of barking madness, long ere the coming of the dawn to sleep now would be folly oh but to await the sunrise… this floating space and time of going nowhere fast

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only hope can keep me together

I seem to always come back to this song.

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Another day off pissed away. Not to mention a couple hundred flushed down a couple dollar slot machines.

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obnoxious cel phone users

so of course I can't go to sleep, despite the fact that I have to go in to work on Easter Sunday at 6am. For some reason, I feel all wired. Of course, it could be all that caffeine I consumed today.

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Innocently, M asks me why it is that some Asian men get pissed off when they see a white guy dating an Asian woman. M is a Pinay in the Midwest who has only ever dated white guys.

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things never turn out…

…the way you plan them to.

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Today I had the day off. Unfortunately, I had forgotten to leave the intern pager at the hospital, so I had to wake up early in the morning to get it to the intern taking over my service. Which is just as well, because I had 13 dictations to do.

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Apr

serious brain damage

I don't know why I care, but times like these, I'd like to know why I'm as brain damaged as I am. Having self-diagnosed myself with executive dysfunction syndrome after reading this book, I wonder if it's simply something congenital, or if I really had a hypoxic event when I was anesthetized as a little kid for my tonsillectomy. Not that I'm interested in suing anyone, but I think it would be interesting to know. After all, I think I'm relatively pretty functional, with the occasional nervous breakdown now and again. I don't know, if I was brain damaged, I could probably be a poster child for how you can recover from very subtle mental deficits.

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configuration 4

So here I am again trying to rearrange my furniture. I realize that the main source of pathology in this apartment is the fact that I have too many goddamned wires running around the house. I wonder what the book about Feng Shui has to say about that? (And on a random tangent, as usual, does electricity count as water? It does, after all, flow like a current, from high potential to low potential… all right, I'm betraying my geekiness again…)

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gamma ray burst

Even my dreams are laced with nothing but work, work, work.

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less than single

For various reasons, including a conversation this morning of which details I will elide at this point in time, I am feeling extraordinarily alone today. It could be simply because I've run out of one of my medications. I still have plenty of the other one, and I think taking it on its own might have simply unmasked some of my bipolar tendencies. I found myself laughing out loud a lot today, and, like the stereotypical manic, I went on an absurd shopping spree, spending money I definitely do not have. Then, of course, I would have histrionic dialogues going on in my head. (They're not voices, damn it.) I've probably swung between abject depression and ludicrous joy at least seventeen times today.

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the exhaustion of self

So I just finished reading "The Mask" by Stanislaw Lem, which is in his collection entitled Mortal Engines and I was thoroughly haunted by it. (SPOILERS to follow) The story is about a robot built to assasinate an enemy to the crown. The robot is ensconced in the body of a woman, whose purpose is for the enemy to fall in love with. Prior to consummation of this passion, the robot frees itself from the fleshly disguise and, despite a rebellious disposition, is forced to run along with its programming to kill his target.

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I have, for some bizarre reason, been pondering the fact that two of the most famous transcendental numbers are so close to each other. Namely, π and e. As most geeks know, π is roughly equal to 3.14159265 and describes the relationship between the circumference of a circle and its radius, i.e. C=2πr. e, on the other hand, is roughly equal to 2.71828183. I am not as familiar with e, being currently unable to comprehend math that is more complex than high school algebra, although I do know that it governs such processes as the doubling time of bacteria and the radioactive decay of uranium.

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starship dimensions

For all us sci-fi geeks. A comparison of the sizes of different starships from various books, movies, and video games.

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darth vader has a blog

One of the universe's favorite galactic killers posts his thoughts via Blogger. Who knew that a genocidal maniac could be so funny?

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May

chicago really is my kind of town

found on my sister's Xanga

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what are words for?

(if you are a child of the '80's, and/or a fan the erstwhile Flashback Lunch on KROQ with Richard Blade, you will recognize that the title of this blog entry is stolen from some song lyrics.)

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what are words for? (before the tangent)

OK, I got distracted there from what I was trying to say. The reason why I scraped this fragmented lyric from the inside of my brain is because I am musing on something a girl once wrote me, a long, long time ago in a galaxy far, far away…

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against all odds

For some stupid reason, I have Phil Collins in my head. Wonderful.

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postmodern and transhuman

Postmodernist

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scattered and remote

Something as innocuous as a touch on the shoulder… "We missed you the other day." words and gestures that I want to take out of context, to launch me off in a daydream, hopelessly fantastic wishes.

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what you do for love

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in a galaxy far, far away

there was a point yesterday when I contemplated driving all the way to L.A. so I could watch Revenge of the Sith, but I am still traumatized by The Phantom Menace (what a dumbass title!) and I can't stand the fact that Hayden Christiansen is a major gimp, and that they digitally stuck him into Return of the Jedi. Still, despite Lucas' recent asshattishness, he managed to redeem himself somewhat to me (there is still some good in him, I can feel it…) by making explicit the parallels between the Star Wars Saga and the neocon usurpation of the American Government. I would not be surprised if George W Bush revealed himself to be a dastardly mastermind able to shoot lightning from his fingertips, despite his apparent substandard IQ.

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staring at the sea…

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soy un perdidor

I have been cursed with two virulent pathologies that plague me to this day. One is the perverse belief that all emotion is not meant to be expressed ad lib. Passion should be channeled, in controlled burns, outside the confines of civilization. The other is the bizarre idea that if someone is abusing me, I should not abuse them back, because after all, I am much better than they are.

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In some ways, I am careening off the edge of sanity.

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little brown fucking machines

JRM forwards me an interesting read.

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I sunk into a depressive mood this afternoon. Maybe it's just adrenalitis or something. All of the sudden I was exhausted despite it not being a strenuous day at all. The stress of the past 11 months, especially of the last four, has finally caught up to me, and, frankly, I want nothing more than to pass out saturated by tequila catching some sunlight on the beach.

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nowhere but nowhere

The only time I felt at peace during this weekend was (1) when I was asleep (and they were sleep periods of epic proportions—I do not doubt that I slept more on the three days of the long weekend than I have in the two weeks preceding) and (2) when I was in transit.

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Jun

the killers "mr. brightside"

the chordal and rhythmic structure of this song makes me think of Beethoven's 9th Symphony.

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matrical metaspace

I skurffed a random essay through Blogdex about Los Angeles and the way it is depicted in various media. The author in particular talks about the abstracted representation of Los Angeles in Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas and how strange it is to have been to a real place and find it recreated in a video game. I imagine the emotional impact is quite different than if one had grown up in L.A., where one becomes naturally trained to appreciate the gradations between "real-real," "fake-real," "real-fake," and "fake-fake." (Or maybe it's just me.) I tend to assume that the rest of the world tends to simply dichotomize experiences between "real" and "fake," since that seems to be the most useful distinction.

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radiohead "creep (acoustic)"

Interesting flash animation set to the melancholy strains of Thom Yorke.

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the future is now

As I waxed speculatively the other day about the development of a topographic symbiosis between the virtual and the real, apparently I've missed the boat because it's already here.

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Jul

strings of memory

(disclaimer: all that I understand of m-theory is what I have read from Brian Greene's excellent popular texts The Elegant Universe: Superstrings, Hidden Dimensions, and the Quest for the Ultimate Theory and The Fabric of the Cosmos: Space, Time, and the Texture of Reality. I am hampered by my inability to do calculations more complex than integration, and in reality don't really use much more than basic algebra these days.)

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compelled to distill some sense from the gnarled mass of thoughts like a tangled skein of yarn convoluted into incomprehension pathetically conflating this sensation, this phenomenon of not feeling any pain merging this concept with happiness

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questions for miss manners

now I'm no etiquette nazi—far from it—but the following wedding goings-on strike me as just a little gauche:

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Sep

a lot of crazy, fucked up shit has gone on in the past three months since I fell off the blogosphere (and, remarkably, none of them have anything to do with unrequited love, for once.)

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Uugh. Hard drive crashes. Very sucky. My iBook lies on a Apple-certified repairer's workbench. The hard drive is actually no longer the problem, since I successfully tore open the plastic case, unscrewed 30-40 screws, popped off the aluminum shielding, took out the clattering 40 GB factory-installed hard drive, and popped in a fresh 100 GB 2.5" hard drive from (you guessed it) Fry's Electronics. The iBook actually works OK. The problem is that (1) I've managed to render the CD-RW non-functional and (2) the latch has snapped off, so that the laptop fails to close. I won't even mention the lack of audio. I had accidentally torn out the wires that connect to the built-in speakers. (I had also accidentally torn out the wires that connect to the power switch.) I managed to fix the power switch, but since I didn't want to go screwing around trying to figure out which wire was live and which wire was ground, I just remnants to the inside of the case and let it be. That's what external speakers are for, anyway.

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chi-town revisited

so to be honest, I decided to come out here because of a girl. now M can't say I've never come out to visit.

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memory lingers in the streets

in today's trivial minutiae: I am typing this on my brother's Toshiba Satellite, horrifically missing MacOS X. It's really just the little things. Like how I don't have to reboot the stupid computer every time I wake it from sleep because I can't get back onto the Internet. Like how I don't have any built-in Firewire ports and therefore can't charge my iPod (because, like the scatterbrain that I am, I left my stand-alone charger in San Diego.) I've had to sort of shoehorn a UNIX like system onto Windows XP (by installing Cygwin) feh. the spacebar is screwed up for some reason, and I have to really pound on it to make it type a space.

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trying to envisage my future

it is moderately distressing that every time I come home, my mom(!) bothers me about my love life (or more accurately, the lack thereof.) it is painfully obvious to me that she wants to be a grandmother rather soon, and it baffles me how this is supposed to transpire.

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waking the sleeping dragon

so I guess the weather really does fuck me up pretty good. I've got to make it a point to move to an apartment that gets better sun exposure than where I live now. hopefully with air-conditioning, especially since direct sunlight will only heat the place up a bit.

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nyc — revisiting the big city (continued)

In some ways, Gotham has been on my consciousness for a slightly longer time than the Windy City has. The first time I came out here was in January 1993, and from what I remember, it was not yet fully Giulianified. Me and others from my high school were only there for a night, I think, on an East Coast college tour. I remember being cold, staying in a place infested with roaches, with holes in the walls where some guy on probably PCP decided to take out his aggression on the building. Ah, those were the days.

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i am so fucking doomed

so I watched 2046 with BD today at the Sunshine Theaters. it wasn't what I was expecting, but I found myself engrossed by it anyway. the protagonist is a writer who churns out smutty science fiction. the time frame is the late 1960s. the setting is hong kong. he is a seriously damaged character, basically unwilling to let himself get attached to anyone, and even when he realizes what he's doing, he just lets it tragically go on anyway, resigning himself to eternal loneliness.

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my tarot card reading was rather ominous today. basically the gist of it was that everything is fucked up in your life and will continue to be so in foreseeable future, and that the only recourse is to go with the flow. the creepy thing is that my horoscope for today basically said the same thing—that despite things failing to go my way, there's no use getting pissed off about it, and that I should just roll with the punches.

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nothing meaningful or constructive

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!

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so I ended up not doing anything today. I was another of those days where I wonder how I may have offended any deities or if I was an evil bastard in a past life. it didn't help that I didn't sleep very well last night (although, likely, that's part of the reason why today was such a waste.) I moped around all depressed for no rational reason, although I did get out to walk my sister's dog. I wasn't able to find replacement razors for my Mach 3, so I just said screw it and decided to get another razor. after shaving off nearly a week's worth of beard growth, I thought I was finally ready to head out to the city, around 4:30pm. then I couldn't find my 7-day subway card. after much cursing and frantic searching, I gave up and decided to shell out some cash. what made me finally surrender was that my iPod battery gave out. it was just not meant to be.

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approximating sanity

a summary of the rather depressing conversation I had with BD the other day:

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reality continues to ruin my life

I don't know what to say. Is it the weather? Am I simply having a premature episode of seasonal affective disorder?

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sympathy for the damned

So I actually made it out today and went to the Strand, where I immediately purchased way too many books. One of them is a book I've frequently stopped at and even flipped through but never before felt compelled to purchase. It is called The Noonday Demon by Andrew Solomon, and the very first paragraph sort of captured how I've been feeling the past few days:

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Oct

is it friday already?

the thing that sucks about my job is that for the most part I only get one day off every week. This means that, for the most part, Friday doesn't mean jackshit to me. Probably because I have just recently been let out of my cage and have actually been cavorting in the World Outside™, only to be penned back in again, I was acutely annoyed by how much fun the rest of the world seems to be having.

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so it seems that I have lost my voice. I woke up this morning and didn't realize that I didn't have one until I went to buy coffee. Huh. I guess that's what is unique about living alone (this is the first time I've ever done it) I can go for nearly three hours without having to utter a word to anyone. Even in the household where I hated one of my roommates, this wasn't really possible.

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how low are your sex standards?

Is this really any surprise at all?

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the days are getting short now, and I never really understood how people can claim Southern California doesn't have seasons. (I think I've waxed philosophically about this before, but anyway.) sure it doesn't get mind and limb numbingly cold, but there is still a significant, palpable change in the air.

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for some reason, I am fantasizing about time travel right now. sometimes when I grow weary of my life, I wonder if I somehow missed an important flash point early in my life. you know, like there was a decision I was supposed to make, but I didn't make it.

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maybe it will get better when I'm done with this ridiculous lifestyle of working, on average, 80 hours a week (and sometimes even more than that) despite getting paid essentially peanuts. but, knowing how my life has gone so far, I'm not going to hold my breath.

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so I forgot that we switch back to Standard Time today, therefore waking up an hour too early, which is, I suppose, not as bad as waking up an hour late. and now for some reason my stomach is tied up in knots.

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Nov

525,600 minutes

The heart may freeze or it can burn
The pain will ease if I can learn
There is no future
There is no past
I live this moment as my last

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found on eye.8.infiniti

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Dec

emiliana torrini "sunny road"

I think I have a thing for Icelandic women. I stumbled upon the single "Sunny Road" by Emiliana Torrini I think somewhere on the iTunes Music Store. The album it's on is "Fisherman's Woman" which juxtaposes her sweet gentle voice with pretty acoustic guitar accompaniment. I don't know why, but it makes me think of the California coast, and light rain.

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burnt out, trampled, bruised and scratched up
tattered and shredded into bits
was it dark purpose, cruel design
as the daylight waned
and darkness usurped the land
that I was made against my will
to face the dying and the dead
made to be Charon rowing the rickety boat
across that lifeless river

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As I sit here in front of my computer in my underwear, unshowered, and unshaven, procrastinating about going to work, I stare at the detritus of my living room, with weeks-old mail strewn across the floor, and tangled up wires all over the place.

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one step at a time (it's all about small, non-threatening things)

Probably around January, I'll have cleaned out of my apartment. Maybe. If I remain strong-willed and devoted. It's times like this that I wonder if I haven't got some sort of subtle brain damage. I've been reading Descartes' Error by Antonio R. Damasio, which deals with how, contrary to popular belief (and Vulcan culture), it is necessary to be emotional in order to make sane, rational decisions. He begins by pointing out certain brain-damaged individuals whose abilities to reason, to communicate, to manipulate abstract ideas, and to process information, are in fact intact, and yet they display the inability to navigate through normal life, often making monumental errors in judgement.

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the turning of the year

As I get older, I think I get more resistant to learning anything new, despite the fact that I know that I am currently in an extraordinarily maladaptive state.

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