2006
Jan 2006 Feb 2006 Mar 2006 Apr 2006 May 2006 Jun 2006 Jul 2006 Aug 2006 Sep 2006 Oct 2006 Nov 2006 Dec 2006Jan
- Jan 10
- pissing time away
Well, would you look at that? Ten days gone already?! Time flies when you're experiencing madness.
· Read more… - Jan 19
- not enough time
Despite my best efforts, hours completely evaporate like fog burning in the morning sun. It doesn't look like I'm ever going to catch up with anything that has left me much too far behind. Love, money. Hell, even sleep, health.
· Read more… - Jan 23
- the last search query
This is completely derived from "The Last Question" by Isaac Asimov which I randomly stumbled upon today. If it sucks, who cares? I'm DRUNK!
· Read more…
Feb
- Feb 7
- neverending
It's been several days since I've gotten a decent night's sleep, what with this irritating non-stop cough. I caught the cold or maybe the flu about a month ago—the whole nine-yards—runny nose, congested sinuses, fever, muscle aches. As expected, that got better in about a week, but ever since then, I've just been coughing and coughing and coughing. It's gotten to the point where my chest muscles are actually sore, and I don't think I've slept more than 2 hours in row uninterrupted until today, and that's only because I was completely exhausted. (On Monday, I had woken up at 4:30 am, didn't go to sleep until about 1:30 am, then had to get up around 3:30 am today. I didn't go to sleep until 11 am today.)
· Read more… - Feb 15
- oww my brain
to quote The Comic Book Guy: "Oh, I've wasted my life."
· Read more… - Feb 17
- interim
I don't understand it. My brain is, I think, locking up on me. Or I'm just getting old or something. It's terrible.
· Read more… - Feb 23
- unknown quantity
This is stupidity at its finest. Richard Cohen decries the necessity of the existence of algebra and uses the old argument that people shouldn't need to learn what they don't want to.
· Read more… - Feb 27
- trying something new again
So I think I’m going to try and use Wordpress after all. While I fondly used blosxom for almost three years [the beginning][the end…maybe], I found it got harder and harder to maintain since I have less and less time to write Perl scripts. It has even got to the point where I find it cumbersome to sync my local archives (where I do my posting) with my live blog since I pretty much use both my desktop computer and my laptop for blog posting. I just don’t have the energy to dig through the man pages of
· Read more…rsyncandcvsto try and figure out how not to nuke my file system. - Feb 27
- octavia butler - rest in peace
I discovered that one of my favorite science fiction writers Octavia Butler has died.
· Read more… - Feb 27
- social bookmarking
Man, the web is a weird wild place these days. I still remember when Gopher was the hypertext king, when Mosaic first came out, and when the original browser wars started, but even the more recent days when I first discovered Slashdot and when I first started blogging are now ancient history.
· Read more… - Feb 27
- trying a new blog engine
So I tried this once before but then I lost my admin password and so had to delete the nascent blog (previously at chronos.fatoprofugus.net, which no longer exists), and there are all sorts of things that have kept me from jumping onto the Wordpress bandwagon, which I will go into detail later, but since Dreamhost makes it blindingly easy to install Wordpress, I figured, what have I got to lose but a little precious sleep and a little rarefied sanity. (By the way, don't let the term SQL Server scare you, even though it scared the crap out of me, and is one of the reasons why I've been slow to adopt the newest shiny thing. Just fill in the blanks in semi-random fashion, just making sure that you write things down somewhere. Especially that admin password.)
· Read more…
Mar
- Mar 3
- affirmative action
Just been watching Chris Rock’s routine “Never Scared.” I like how he describes how affirmative action actually works:
· Read more… - Mar 3
- skill vs time
Now I’m not an MMORPGer (for the non-nerds out there, MMORPG is a massively multiplayer online role-playing game. Dungeons and Dragons ported to the Internet with pretty graphics.) This is not because of some inherent virtue. I might be very well have become one if I had a little more free time in my life or if I had started taking amphetamines, since God only knows I can’t really sacrifice anymore sleep than I already do. But that is another rant.
· Read more… - Mar 5
- kai "say you’ll stay (jazzy jim remix)"
I thought I had mentioned this before, but I can’t find it in my blog archives. In any case, I swear it seems like sometimes my iPod can read what mood I’m in. On my 2 hour trip back from L.A., it kept pulling up all these down-tempo, super-chill, and melancholy, reflective songs, and while this cheesy song by a Filipino American group may not really fall into this category, it is attached to a somewhat melancholy memory.
· Read more… - Mar 5
- everything but the girl “time after time”
I guess you could say that “Time after Time” is one of my most favorite songs, and I have different cover versions of it attached to various memories. For example, the version by INOJ is attached to the summer after graduating from college, when I tried lingering in the Bay Area, but then ended up going home in defeat. Now that was an extremely depressing time. This was also the time when A and E (whom I mentioned in the previous post) finally actually got together, and I remember hanging out with them and feeling superfluous and stupid. Ah memoreez.
· Read more… - Mar 5
- what’s the use of knowing the future
I seem to be experiencing blogorrhea right now. Ah, nothing like insomnia.
· Read more… - Mar 6
- immigration
One would be hard pressed to convince me that anti-immigrant sentiments are not synonymous with outright racism. The arguments that immigration foes posit are specious at best. The whole, “they’re taking our jobs” idea just doesn’t fly. I really don’t see too many white people lining up for a back-breaking season of crop harvesting or signing up to clean out rich people’s toilets. These aren’t jobs that white people want, although in a lot of cases, they are jobs that need to be done. A more informed argument is the idea that we have to discourage them from taking these jobs because it only encourages rich bastards to pay workers poorly. There is a lot of truth in this. The problem is that (1) it doesn’t directly address how we can get the rich bastards to pay decent wages and (2) it doesn’t address the economic pressures that drives people from developing countries to find jobs in the U.S. And, realistically, I just don’t see people voluntarily paying top dollar for their lettuce and tomatoes just so my black and brown brothers and sisters can have a living wage, undocumented or no.
· Read more… - Mar 6
- insomnia
Man, this totally sucks. It’s 1:30 a.m. and I can’t get to sleep. Of course, this means that now I am screwing around with the new blogging engine. As you can tell from the header, things aren’t exactly fixed quite yet, and probably won’t be
· Read more…tonightthis morning unless I decide not to sleep at all. - Mar 7
- the mechanisms of cultural transmission
Wow, this post is going to be extraordinarily geeky. By clicking on various links, I stumbled upon some very well thought out posts regarding the inexorable programming language clashes that in reality actually affects the average Net dependent webhead in ways that may not be readily apparent.
· Read more… - Mar 7
- Gödel’s incompleteness revisited
- Mar 7
- evolution and worse-is-better
Again, perusing posts about computer systems implementation, I come upon the debate between “the right thing” and “worse is better,” I can’t help but think about the way natural selection works.
· Read more… - Mar 7
- desktop blogging: blog thing
I’m testing out Blog Thing which is a simple Cocoa app that supports the Metaweb API. Ah, the wonders of the Web (version 2.0)
· Read more… - Mar 7
- desktop blogging continued: bleezer
So now I’m trying Bleezer which is written in Java. Ah well, no Cocoa for me, I guess. But, this, on the other hand, has a lot more features, many of which I will probably never get to use. Neat.
· Read more… - Mar 8
- simplicity and blogging
I find myself missing emacs, which is clearly a sign of pathology. The silly thing is that I clearly don’t use even 10% of its features. It’s pure nostalgia. Emacs is the only editor (aside from Vi, I suppose) that I’ve been able to run consistently on all the platforms I’ve blogged on—Windows, Linux, Mac OS X. (Yes, I’ve blogged while using Windows, but only as a stop-gap measure.) I haven’t really ever used emacs for something that I couldn’t do with whatever basic text editor comes with the OS (Notepad, GNU nano, Textedit.app—although, interestingly, of these OSes, emacs comes preinstalled only on Mac OS X—in many Linux distros, you actually have to manually install it. Of course, these are the distros that favor Vi—emacs vs. vi is probably one of the oldest computing holy wars around.) I suppose there is something masochistically perverse about having to type CTRL-X CTRL-C to quit. (I still remember the first time I was faced with an empty emacs buffer in 1994, and I had to bug my UNIX guru college roommate to help me regain control of my machine—an already old-at-the-time 486 running at a paltry 50 MHz. Don’t laugh, I’ve computed on machines running at 1 MHz. Machines that you can actually play some pretty neat games on.)
· Read more… - Mar 8
- the fate of blosxom and other errata
Interestingly, as I am debating the merits of various blogging solutions, Robert Thomas “beau” Hayes Link posts to the Blosxom Yahoo! Group and basically asks what blosxom’s fate is. (Interestingly, I don’t know if he intentionally meant the pun by using “wither” instead of “whither.” Get it? Blosxom. Blossom. Wither. Whither. Anyway.)
· Read more… - Mar 9
- filesystem vs RDBMS
As I mentioned previously, I find myself conflicted about having my blog posts live in a database. And, really, I don’t see that much difference between a blog post and a generic XML file. (As I mentioned, I wish I could write posts in XML.) I feel that blog posts, like generic XML, don’t map naturally to a relational database, particularly if you want to have fine-grained access to individual elements. Matt Liotta and Chris Preimesberger discuss the possible performance problems you might run into by trying to store XML in an RDBMS, and how a more elegant solution lies in native XML databases that can be queried in more natural (at least for XML) XPath and XQuery instead of SQL. As the name implies, XPath (which XQuery utilizes) has a lot in common with file-system paths. Consider that the browser’s location field is better suited to handling a file-system path than a query written in SQL (and file-system paths are in fact how most blogs are queried—whether by date or category, regardless of whether the blog engine stores posts on the filesystem or in a database.) And, especially in a shared-hosting situation, I don’t know if a database really gets you all that much more performance than simply dealing with the file-system. Then again, considering that I don’t find hierarchical categories all that useful, I don’t know if paths are all that great either, except for accessing specific elements in an XML document. Decisions, decisions.
· Read more… - Mar 12
- fuck human nature
I am, ultimately, an idealist. However, I can understand that there are limits to trying to achieve utopia. There are physical laws—thermodynamics, relativity, quantum mechanics—that make certain things impossible. But when someone tells me that something is impossible because of the recalcitrance of human nature, I call bullshit.
· Read more… - Mar 12
- the finest in disturbing hyperbole · Read more…
- Mar 12
- stopping time
The vagaries of consciousness? Or quantum mechanical effects?
· Read more… - Mar 13
- inanity and the needless consumption of CPU cycles
After reading these suggestions for the improvement of Mac OS X, I can’t help but think of the manager in “Fight Club” who asks “Can I get this icon in cornflower?” Cosmetic changes, while entertaining, do not an OS major revision make, and can sometimes even break it. Now I’m no Cocoa guru, but if the APIs are exposed, maybe what would be more reasonable is for someone who is not necessarily Apple write a viable Dock or Finder replacement (and at least for Finder, I believe there are already a few around, although the best ones are not free, either as in beer, or as in speech.) Why does the OS itself have to contain millions of bits and pieces that are not essential to an OS?
· Read more… - Mar 14
- munged
Bah. Another reason why I distrust all this stuff-it-into-a-database business. On one of my last posts, I think I may have missed a closing quotation mark, or maybe a closing angle-bracket. Which will understandably make the rest of the post unreadable. Unfortunately, because I am using the built-in text-editor for Wordpress, the editor decided to url-escape everything after the mistake. While I was able to extract meaningful text from some of it, some of it simply fell into
· Read more…/dev/null, never to be seen again. - Mar 15
- tommy’s
So I went to the new Tommy’s in San Diego on Clairemont Mesa Boulevard between the 805 and the 163. It, like the Tommy’s in Hollywood (on Hollywood Blvd.), has an indoor sit-down place to eat, unfortunately essentially resembling an In-n-Out.
· Read more… - Mar 16
- internet explorer is an atrocity
But I think we all know this already. I was perusing an article entitled On having layout, and I am appalled by absurd inner workings of IE. Man, screw this madness. Designers should design solely for pure CSS and XHTML. There is a quote in there that I find incredibly disturbing—is this just something that folks who design for IE subscribe to, or is this philosophy applicable to software engineers who design Windows software?
· Read more… - Mar 16
- HOWTO: create a horcrux
Now I haven’t read Harry Potter and the Half-Blooded Prince yet, but I stumbled upon the concept of the Horcrux randomly following links. The concept is familiar to any J.R.R. Tolkien fan, and clearly, there is at least one way known to create a Horcrux.
· Read more… - Mar 16
- economic discrepancy
This article is stupid. It discusses the evolutionary advantage of a patriarchal society, with definite disregard for the value of human life. While it is true that a rapidly growing society tends to overwhelm less rapidly growing societies, this article completely disregards the reasons—both biological and economic—why population growth slows. My feeling is that the natural tendency of populations is to grow rapidly. And while we have, for the most part, in industrialized nations, made the specter of starvation less prominent (although we all know people in the U.S. who are citizens who are starving), what we have not gotten a handle on is the cost of generating children.
· Read more… - Mar 17
- maternalistic society
I was just thinking, with regards to my post about paternalistic societies and how some people keep using word that word, and I do not think it means what they think it means. What is probably even better for Empire building is a maternalistic society.
· Read more… - Mar 18
- spirited away
I had thought that I had written something about some long time ago, but I guess I haven’t. (Although I must admit, I don’t really feel like digging through my entire blog archive.) I admit, I haven’t watched “Nausicaa” in a while, but I think my favorite Miyazaki movie is “Spirited Away”.
· Read more… - Mar 19
- music and the oddest memories
Bizarrely, as I’m trying to sew closed a gaping wound across a toe, MTV plays the following songs:
· Read more… - Mar 20
- selling out to da man
Now, granted, a good number of my friends are artists, so that is what my ideas are informed by.
· Read more… - Mar 20
- out of the ashes
I have always been someone who backs the underdog and have very little use for the de facto Establishment. I am, perhaps, overly idealistic and at times unreasonably dogmatic, but this instinct has driven many of my trivial and not-so-trivial decisions. For example, OS choice: so it was that I decided to run with Linux in 1998 sucked into the Open Source hype, then Mac OS X in 2002, still attached to GTK and GNOME apps. I had long grown weary of Microsoft and their works. Browser choice: I continued to use Netscape, then Mozilla, then Galeon, then Camino, eschewing the bug-laden, unfixable mess that is IE (and while IE on the Mac is much nicer than its Windows counterpart, it is now ancient) I continue to be a resolute Dodger fan, and can’t help but find the Cubs endearing. And I chose Pediatrics as my specialty, because I want to help those who can’t help themselves—that is the nature of children, for one thing, and I feel that pediatricians tend to work more with underserved populations: minorities, immigrants, the undocumented.
· Read more… - Mar 21
- web 2.0 and server-based applications
Shel Israel asks a very Zen-like question: what is web 2.0? I don’t know, but that’s my personal definition of web 2.0: server-based applications, which Steve Yegge briefly discusses in his article discussing programming language choice and Paul Graham mentions (in 2001, mind you!) in his article discussing programming language popularity.
· Read more… - Mar 21
- how far can a people be pushed?
Issa reminds me about Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, whom I actually randomly met in the U.S. when she was still a Senator, trying to push extraordinarily broad suffrage—where even Filipino Americans who have long been U.S. citizens would be allowed to vote. I remember parts of an interesting conversation with her daughter, which would be quite typical amongst people in their late teens, but which has interesting undertones in someone involved in politics, in fact, whose family has been a political dynasty. (Like George W Bush, GMA is the daughter of a former president.) We were discussing how it is that our parents have so much say in our destiny when it comes to choosing what we end up doing in our lives. In my own case, for example, it is no accident that I ended up in health care. Both my parents are in health care, and so are almost all of my aunts. I swear it wasn’t until I was almost in college that I realized that there were other careers available out there in the world. But I wonder about what that means for someone who is part of a political family. Do you feel inexorably driven to do the same, to seek the power and the responsibility of leading?
· Read more… - Mar 23
- desperation and despair
Reading random blog posts, I find this sentence incredibly sad:
· Read more… - Mar 24
- ladyhawke
Watching this on cable right now. The soundtrack is awesome. It sounds like a cRPG soundtrack, like an early Final Fantasy. I dig the electronic underpinnings that, while echoing the disco feel carried out of the ‘70’s into the early ‘80’s, also reminds me of the sound chips of the early microcomputers/personal computers like the SID chip of the Commodore 64 and the more primitive sound generators found in other 8-bit classic machines like the Atari 400, the Apple IIc, and the Nintendo Entertainment System.
· Read more… - Mar 25
- blosxom and XSLT
My dream (heh, that sounds really bizarre and grandiose but there it is) is to write a blogging engine that is centered around entries written in a custom XML language and transforming it to XHTML and RSS via XSLT. The only real reason I’d like to do this is because I spent an awful amount of time learning XML and XSLT back in the day and I think it would let me do things that I otherwise am not able to do easily without massive amounts of perl kludgery.
· Read more… - Mar 26
- the sin of pride
I was walking through the Science Fiction and Fantasy section of the Borders in Glendale when a totally random thought occurred to me. I think what brought it to my mind is the question: what is the cause of evil? I was flipping through random fantasy novels where characters are neatly pigeon-holed into Good or Evil, and clearly in the real world nothing is that obvious.
· Read more… -
- Mar 31
- the long march
Now I know that there are plenty of months that have 31 days in them, but for some reason, March seemed unbearably long. I don’t know if it’s simply the fact that it’s Lent and like the good brainwashed Catholic that I am, I feel like I’ve been sent into exile to the Desert, bandying words with the Devil himself.
· Read more… - Mar 31
- god’s role in this debacle
I have been thinking about God a lot lately. Which is interesting because I have been experiencing a severe crisis of faith for the past five years at least, and it has only become worse and worse and worse, to the point where I have considered becoming completely atheist.
· Read more…
Apr
- Apr 1
- over and over
Days like this I feel like I am trapped in some kind of existential loop, a la “Groundhog Day,” forced to live and relive excruciatingly painful parts of my life. I suppose it is simply the fact that I really haven’t learned any of the lessons I was supposed to have learned, so I haven’t really learned to avoid these situations that make me want to weep, and maybe even sometimes writhe in agony.
· Read more… - Apr 2
- it’s a trap!
Here I am pondering the chances of actually breaking out of the Black Iron Prison when I am reminded of a quote by Douglas Adams, author of the cult classic The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (who by the way was an atheist and is a big influence on my philosophies regarding the universe):
· Read more… - Apr 4
- on the nature of loneliness
In the sad, sorry state that I am currently in, I can’t help but wonder if loneliness is in fact a cumulative thing.
· Read more… - Apr 7
- rabbit holes (a tale that's been told over and over)
I finished rereading Memory, Thorn, and Sorrow by Tad Williams, which has been (like many other fantasy novels such as The Sword of Shannara and The Wheel of Time series) compared much to The Lord of the Rings. While there exists much older literature that could considered fantasy (for example, The Faerie Queen by Edmund Spenser written in the 16th century), I believe that it was Tolkien that allowed booksellers to actually have an entire marketing category devoted to such stuff.
· Read more… - Apr 7
- on the nature of fear
I think I just realized that it’s not the loneliness itself that’s getting me down. It’s the fact that I’m starting to dread the future. I can’t get rid of this idea that I’m on this doomed path that’s leading to nowhere, and that things are at best going to remain forever unchanged and unchanging until I die, but more likely, things are going to get worse.
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- Apr 8
- Nausicaä of the Valley of the Winds
Watching the Disney redub on the Cartoon Network right now. I still think it’s pretty cool. The first time I watched it was as a fansub in 1999, I think. I don’t know if being in the original Japanese makes it just seem more epic or something, although at least the Disney version doesn’t have any cuts like the first dubbed version which most Miyazaki fans find completely abhorrent.
· Read more… - Apr 9
- dark elves and sithi
Just pondering Memory, Thorn, and Sorrow still. I think I thought this the first time I read it, and I’m not usually the gushy, romantic type, but I think the thing that sticks the most with me is the relationship between Simon and Miriamele and how painstaking Tad Williams actually fleshed out its nuances. I think my most favorite scenes are when Simon and Miriamele head out on there own to return to the Hayholt in their bid to try to stop the Storm King and to prevent the End of the World, and they have to seek shelter in people’s abandoned houses, and I was struck especially by the scene where she is doing common, domestic things that you wouldn’t expect a princess to know how to do (not that I’m suggesting that that’s women ought to do)—there is a sort-of Snow White and the Seven Dwarves quality to it. I guess the mundanity of it all really struck me, and how what moved that section of the plot along was the developing romance between the two characters. For some reason, these scenes actually seem to capture the sense of Home for me (which also happens to be a major theme in this book.) Whereas Tolkien touches upon the fact that “you can never really go home again,” particularly when he turns the Shire into a totalitarian state, Williams reiterates the (admittedly disgustingly trite) idea that “home is where the heart is,” which may or may not actually represent an physical place. In retrospect, I suppose maybe Tad Williams had the same idea that I did when I read Book IV and VI of LotR: how different the scenes would’ve been if Frodo and Sam weren’t both male (or, I suppose, alternately, how different it would’ve been if J.R.R. Tolkien wasn’t an old school Catholic and had tried to tap the homoerotic side of it all) and indeed I do find it very touching.
· Read more… - Apr 10
- random thought
OK, I admit it. I’m weird. But I’ve been reading up on the Roman Empire lately for no good reason. (Maybe it’s because it’s Holy Week, and I’ve been thinking about Rome and it’s relationship to Christianity, specifically Roman Catholicism.) And you know that saying, “All roads lead to Rome”? Well, with all the driving I’ve done this week going home and back, I’ve realized that all freeways lead to Los Angeles.
· Read more… - Apr 11
- whenever i feel terrible
…and I don’t want to face the world, I am reminded of this conversation from “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off”:
· Read more… - Apr 21
- meaning (and the lack thereof)
So I should know better than to write when I am intoxicated, but I don’t know, I’m overcome once again by this sense of numbness. What does any of this matter?
· Read more… - Apr 23
- waste
I foolishly decided to take a nap at 6:45 p.m., but my alarm failed to go off, so I didn’t wake up until 10:30 p.m., which is a shame, because I had intended to go to the bookstore. Ah well.
· Read more… - Apr 24
- northbound on the I-5
As I was driving to work this morning, I thought about how it’s been a while since I’ve been up to the Bay Area and how long it’s been since I’ve seen my friends from college. Immersed in this reverie, I almost passed my exit, and I thought about just driving all the way up the I-5, past L.A., down into the Central Valley, out to the Bay.
· Read more… - Apr 26
- from the ground up
On one of my therapeutic albeit expensive trips to the bookstore, I was arrested by a book entitled Undoing Depression. What I found unique (in comparison to the many books about depression that I have browsed through) is that the author writes as someone who simultaneously helps other people with their depression, being a psychologist. At the same time, he is dealing with his own problem. He is a fellow sufferer, and yet he does have some practical suggestions that might help. It’s a lot more cheering than various books that describe the author’s depression simply from the point-of-view of suffering (and on occasion, overcoming it.) Mainly, this is because the author has the other perspective of taking care of people who are depressed. And it works better than all those books written by people who may never have been depressed. While they say things that are really no different than what the author of this book says, the fact that they don’t identify as a sufferer of depression makes it, I think, harder to swallow. But maybe that’s just me.
· Read more… - Apr 27
- random links
I am randomly scouring the net. You’d think that using del.icio.us would satisfy my need to bookmark random sites that I will likely never visit again (a technology that I wish had been available when Netscape had first come out—you should’ve seen the madness of my humongous bookmark file.) Alas, that is not to be. Of course, a sideblog would probably work better, but, I’m too lazy to write code right now.
· Read more… - Apr 27
- pretty colors
This quiz reminds me of one I took a while ago which now apparently defunct.
· Read more… - Apr 28
- words and nothing more
I am reading a book whose main character is a linguist, so I can’t help but ponder the use of words. What is language for, really? If not for connection?
· Read more… - Apr 28
- words continued
I find it amusing and disturbing that China Miéville repeatedly uses the words “judder,” “nacre,” and “moil,” to name a few.
· Read more… - Apr 28
- crisis energy and the continued expansion of the universe
One of the concepts in Perdido Street Station is “crisis energy.” From what I understand, it is a magical energy created from crisis situations that ends up acting in opposition to what seems inevitable. For example, one of the possible applications discussed in the book is the act of flying. Let’s say you cast yourself aloft by throwing yourself off a balcony. If you have a crisis energy engine, the impending catastrophe of splattering on the street below ends up propelling you upward instead. The higher you go, the more catastrophic your plunge downward would be, the more crisis energy is generated.
· Read more… - Apr 30
- inspiration
Three things today:
· Read more…
May
- May 3
- personality tests revisited
(Inspired by my cousin J)
· Read more… - May 7
- bed-ridden for science
Once upon a time, I randomly blogged about NASA’s study about the effects of prolonged bedrest, something I would’ve totally participated in if I hadn’t been in med school at the time, but apparently one of the test subjects has her own blog.
· Read more… - May 12
- diffusion
I’ve thought once or twice about how pretentious it is to quote yourself, but I like these paragraphs I wrote a few years back:
· Read more… - May 13
- the journey not taken
let this not end, I thought to myself
· Read more…
as the children yawned
and the conversation died
and I thought of the moon
shining only because of reflected sunlight
otherwise it is a dark, lifeless place - May 14
- an even more perfect sunrise
So, yeah, I clearly have my issues with regards to how things in the past have (and, more relevant) have not gone. I mean, we’re talking a good eight or nine years now of what-never-was and what-cannot-be, and I really can’t think about these things without getting disordered. Er, more disordered than I already am.
· Read more… - May 15
- in the beginning, in the middle, and in the end was the word
Ursula K. Le Guin, in her fantasy world of Earthsea, comes up with a brilliant system of magic, one predicated on, essentially, words.
· Read more… - May 15
- impossibilities: imagine this kind of society
I just thought about an imaginary society that decided that it was a bad idea for the wealthy to become powerful, and for the powerful to become wealthy. I think this idea came forth when I heard how former Governor Jerry Brown (now mayor of Oakland) was decried as a hippy for not wanting to live in a mansion and not wanting to drive an expensive car.
· Read more… - May 15
- marxian crisis energy against orwellian global capitalism
Before I completely lose sight of this thought, I wanted to talk about this post on crisis theory and this post on the world of 1984. I think crisis theory does make useful analogic predictions about the future. (OK, I don’t for a moment purport to truly understand crisis theory, but I think I have some gist of it.)
· Read more… - May 16
- drive-by blogging: trains in literary naturalism and in weird fiction
Odd that parts of The Octopus by Frank Norris (sighted on makeweight) makes me think immediately of The Iron Council by China Miéville, although I suppose this is not surprising considering Miéville’s political sympathies and literary background.
· Read more… - May 16
- the metropole-province axis
Another concept that definitely informed my conception of the imaginary city of Cantral Araban is the metropole-province axis, which is basically the dialectic between the central city of a region and the surrounding countryside. This dialectic is especially characteristic of ex-colonies. I learned about this paradigm from Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism by Benedict Anderson, which was one of the required texts in the Southeast Asian Studies survey class I took as an undergrad, and analyzing Manila through this particular lens was very enlightening.
· Read more… - May 20
- i was less anxious when i was nihilistic
In the aftermath of September 11, I actually don’t think I was as afraid of world destruction as I was when the Cold War was still going on. I remember having recurring nightmares about nuclear holocaust. What has especially haunted me since I was a little kid is that image of Hiroshima where people’s shadows were blasted permanently into the walls, the only thing really left of them. It gives me the willies.
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- May 21
- what if the savior were a woman?
I just watched “The Da Vinci Code” and while the idea that Jesus Christ and Mary Magdalene were married or at least were lovers is a popular one that has made it to the big screen on more than one occasion, it made me think of another unorthodox (and actually quite heretical) idea that I remember hearing sometime ago (although for the life of me I can’t find it on Google.)
· Read more… - May 22
- the line between “different” and “truly abnormal”
I don’t know why I’m thinking about this now. I suppose I am reacting mostly to this blog entry by a 4th year medical student somewhere out in the Midwest discussing his current situation vis-a-vis women (in general, as a demographic constituency, rather than specifically.)
· Read more… - May 23
- when the evening falls
The problem with all this is that all good things must come to an end. At least for me. I feel like for normal, well adjusted souls, they are able to weather the changing tide. Me, I get sucked into the riptide, then spat up again onto the rocky, unforgiving beach.
· Read more… - May 23
- zero sum
I don’t know. Maybe I just like misery. Lest my last post mislead you, nothing terrible is happening right now. It’s just this feeling of evanescence that is haunting me. I’m too content these days, and I worry that there’s something horrific awaiting me in the days to come.
· Read more… - May 23
- time travel
The possibility of time travel is actually still an open question. There is nothing in Einstein’s theory of Relativity that prevents it from happening, although the conditions that would be required to allow it to happen seem pretty insurmountable. (For example, you would need a rotating universe, or a nearby cosmic string, or some exotic material that exerts anti-gravity which could keep a wormhole conduit stable and open, none of which are within the technological abilities of humanity at this time.) Still, I am hopeful.
· Read more… - May 24
- there is no suffering without desire
I ran across this phrase on a random blog, and this phrase happens to be a major tenet of Buddhism. I have waxed philosophically much about the Art of Not Wanting and it is such a tricky thing. As I’ve noted, this particular state of bliss has nothing to do with the avolitional state which undergirds atypical depression and schizophrenia. Instead of a lack, an emptiness, the Art of Not Wanting is a sense of completion.
· Read more… - May 24
- normalcy (whatever that means)
Despite my rhetoric of never wanting to fit in, of always wanting to be strikingly unique, of striving to stand out, to make my own unique mark on the world, I am burdened by evolutionary baggage. Like it or not, human beings long to belong. To be one of the tribe.
· Read more… - May 24
- thrust out in the spotlight (this is blogorrhea)
I don't know why I worry so much about things that haven't happened yet, and aren't going to happen any time soon. It's not like I can do anything now to mitigate whatever will happen.
· Read more… - May 25
- twisting paths
a vision as I stare into the western sky
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clouds looming up like a great wall
impenetrable marking the boundary between
the land—what must be
and
the sea—what is possible - May 26
- may, might, shoulda, coulda
I think I probably wrote this somewhere else before, but I always find the month of May filled with possibilities. I have always identified it with the end of the academic year, with graduations, with confirmations, with Pentecost. The point of transition, the time when the old order slows down, and the hint of new beginnings tantalizes.
· Read more… - May 26
- self-sufficient
I hope against all hope that I remember this simple fact the next time I am faced with extreme crisis.
· Read more… - May 27
- mine, and mine alone
In this tired hour
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of spent beer cans
and cigarette butts
the chewed ragged ends of
hoping for some sort of change
waiting for the winds
to turn aside the drifting course of the clouds
for the sun to shine forth - May 27
- radiohead saved my life
I am currently watching Showtime where they have Radiohead in concert (2004), and I am amazed at how the first few chords and guitar strums of their songs can evoke such vivid memories and even bring a smile to my face.
· Read more… - May 28
- apologia for the art of not wanting
I understand I’s point about the Art of Not Wanting smacking of rationalization and sophistry, but I think there is some profound truthfullness to the Art. One, there is the fact that it is one of the central tenets of Buddhism—without desire, there is no suffering. Two, it also ungirds much of the philosophy of Taoism—desire can only lead to imbalance, but desire is unnecessary because all that you need has already been provided for. The Way is all you need. (I find it interesting that Jesus Christ sometimes refers to himself as the Way.)
· Read more… - May 28
- the undercity
Watching “Batman Begins” I am reminded of what struck me first about Chicago in 1998 (never knowing that I was actually end up there for a substantial portion of my life. Also interesting that they chose Chicago instead of NYC for their depiction of Gotham.) It’s the lower level of the city, reserved for truck shipments and serving as a quasi-expressway leading into the Loop. For the longest time, it was a haunted appearing place, since the intersection of Lower Wacker Dr and Lower Michigan Ave had been dismantled, in the process of retrofit. It reminded of the section of Midgar (from Final Fantasy VII) which lay completely underneath the “Plate,” which is the upscale downtown district overlying the slums.
· Read more… - May 30
- the senselessness of radical intentionality
There is a meme floating about on the blogosphere that illustrates the stupidity of Jeff Goldstein AKA Protein Wisdom (Thersites also joins the fray.)
· Read more… - May 30
- power that is not force
I am rereading Ursula K Le Guin’s rendition of the Tao Te Ching and come across a wonderful phrase: power that is not force.
· Read more… - May 31
- the universal solvent
It’s amazing how much more relaxed you can feel after downing enough tequila amongst friends while watching the sunset at a bar overlooking the ocean. Life has been good. I wish I didn’t have to go back to an 80 hour work week come Friday.
· Read more… - May 31
- intention is only a subset of meaning
This is extremely useful in post-colonial theory, because most of the literature examined in the neo-colonial era is fraught with racist and nationalistic assumptions that white writers assume their white readers already know, but which often times will be completely alien to anyone else. We are not just talking about the fraying of meaning under the lens of multiculturalism, however. The fact of the matter is that convention is completely arbitrary, and deconstruction tries to make what is unspoken explicit.
· Read more…
Jun
- Jun 3
- portents
What is the most likely explanation is that the only thing I've had to eat (at least since 11 a.m.) is practically pure unadulterated sugar. Never underestimate the fact that sugar is actually quite a potent psychotropic agent.
· Read more… - Jun 4
- deconstruction and democracy
Yes, I agree, it’s a little too facile to connect the stance of eminent intentionality with fascism, but I look at eminent intentionality as the antithesis of deconstruction, the bread and butter of post-modernist and post-colonial literary criticism.
· Read more… - Jun 5
- forgiveness is not forgetting
I was inspired by this meditation on racism, which describes the well known evils of over-generalization.
· Read more… - Jun 5
- intuition ain’t all it’s cracked up to be
I wonder if maybe the main reason why guys don’t listen to their sixth sense is the fact that most of the time it tells us completely freaky stuff over which we have no control over.
· Read more… - Jun 5
- less portentious than that
OK, I didn’t mean to make my last post sound ominous. Maybe it’s because tomorrow is June 6. (You know, 6/6/06. I don’t think the Devil really gives a damn about the vagaries of the Julian and Gregorian calendars, so it probably doesn’t have any significance to him, although it may very well have significance to some Satanist or nihilistic terrorists a la Columbine.)
· Read more… - Jun 8
- the quest for water
I have developed the habit of coming home from work and making a beeline to my bed. I seem to be running out of gas much too early these days.
· Read more… - Jun 9
- never had a dream come true
Yes, I realize that this is the title of a cheesy pop song by S Club 7, of which I have disgracefully written about quite a few times before.
· Read more… - Jun 9
- magic/imagination
I’m too lazy to look it up, but I can’t help but feel that there is some cognate root shared by these two words.
· Read more… - Jun 11
- meditation on inadequacy
I find it interesting that my mind is unable to remodel the emotional trajectory of my life through at least the last 10-15 years. I remember being someone who was a perfectionist, inordinably hard on myself, always thinking that I was a failure, that I wasn’t good enough, that I wasn’t smart enough, that I’d never succeed. I recognize that a lot of this was in response to a mother who was excruciatingly demanding, who couldn’t stand things being done in any other way than her own, and who would just do things for me instead letting me do things my own way.
· Read more… - Jun 12
- utang na loob
I always forget whether it’s na or ng. I have this propensity for tacking on unnecessary -ng enclitics and eliding necessary ones. My cousins in the Philippines always find my mangled Tagalog highly entertaining.
· Read more… - Jun 12
- giggles
- Jun 13
- sunset over the sea
This was one of those days that I wish I could bottle up and save for when times get bad. With my iPod as my personal soundtrack, I felt unstoppable. There were moments of such heartbreaking beauty that I felt that I could die.
· Read more… - Jun 21
- summertime
The sun stands still for the longest day of the year, and I can’t help but pause and reflect. There are less than 90 days before I turn 30, and for the first time in my life, I feel like I need a long-term plan.
· Read more… - Jun 23
- purpose (portentiousness on a friday night)
Now my philosophical and spiritual beliefs have been very murky these past years, ever since I found myself entangled within a crisis of faith. On one extreme, I do often feel that we live in an uncaring universe, on an ill-regarded planet, orbiting an unremarkable sun. We are victims of chance, the end results of a trillion, trillion, trillion dice rolls, random points along the lines that form the trajectory of the quadrillion, quadrillion particles spewed out from the Big Bang.
· Read more… - Jun 24
- simple pleasures, small magics
Before work today, one of my chief residents was on one of the alternative music stations in town, which was bizarre and very cool. She won an hour to guest DJ and she broadcast her own playlist.
· Read more… - Jun 24
- songs for another journey on my own
I immediately hearken to “10:15 Saturday Night” by The Cure, although I’ve long stopped waiting for the telephone to ring. It seems that that long, dark tea-time of the soul hits me long before Sunday, and it’s kind of sad that I’ve forgotten how to enjoy a weekend on my own.
· Read more… - Jun 27
- one perfect sunrise
The irony is that I am always looking for the sun precisely where it is not.
· Read more… - Jun 28
- last words for a long, hard day
Oh. so. tired.
· Read more…
Jul
- Jul 1
- dc universe
Just watched “Superman Returns” with my brother and my dad yesterday and I find it bizarre that the city of Metropolis is New York City (while Gotham City is depicted as Chicago.) I found the Messianic allusions a little disturbing (although more sincere than most of the insanity spouted off by Christian fundamentalists) <rant style="post-modernist post-colonialist" method="deconstruction" tone="hyperbolic ironic">What person-of-color would feel comfortable with their savior depicted as a square-jawed, blue-eyed, tall, and muscular specimen of the Aryan race, who is omnipotent and all-seeing? (At least the bad guys aren’t homogenously depicted as blacks and Chicano/Latino.)</rant>
· Read more… - Jul 9
- consolation
I am trying to trace down the etymology of the word “consolation,” wondering if it is necessarily related to “isolation.” Alas, there are no clear answers, but are there ever?
· Read more… - Jul 10
- self-annihilation is painless
Nothing like Radiohead to give you a sense of futility and meaninglessness.
· Read more… - Jul 12
- saving the imaginary world
There is a city I dream of repeatedly that I believe is supposed to be somewhere in the Pacific Northwest, either in the U.S. or in Canada. The first time I dreamt about it, I thought that it was Seattle, although most of its features don’t at all correspond to what little I know of Seattle, and it doesn’t match with Vancouver either. The dream I had last night seemed to associate it with Calgary, but this is clearly wrong since it is not on the ocean, nor is it near any other bodies of water.
· Read more… - Jul 15
- old is not up
The funny thing is that, despite my lack of organization, despite my disdain of long-term plans and schedules, my dislike of homogenous order, my claustrophobia in the face of structure, I am, deep-down inside, a control freak.
· Read more… - Jul 21
- the conservation of mass and energy (a counterpoint to “donnie darko”)
Excerpt from Encyclopedia Mechanica Temporis (18th edition):
· Read more… - Jul 23
- return of saturn and other miscellany
This particular existential crisis all began over dinner at Tantra in Silver Lake. (Tantra is this hip quasi-Indian restaurant with excellent hipster ambience, which I enjoy in this snide, ironic, too-cool-for-this sort of way.) Joce was in town very briefly—I hadn’t seen her since my (naturally) ill-planned trip to the Big Apple some nine months ago. Joce was the de facto leader of our little clique back in college, and we all had some interesting adventures way back when. Chriscelle, another of my friends from college who is actually the one that I’ve known the longest, came out as well. I haven’t seen her since December. (I am a terrible friend.) She had recently started dating some guy, and somehow, the talk turned to my social life (or the lack thereof.)
· Read more… - Jul 24
- diametrically opposed beliefs
I recall a quote from F Scott Fitzgerald: “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.” There is coda to this quote that is often ignored, but unfortunately I’m too lazy to look it up. I’m fairly certain that it has something to do with brain damage, though.
· Read more… - Jul 27
- falling from grace
spun like fine threads
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of fraying axons clasping like hands upon
curled, crackly dendrites
like a mad forest of electrical wiring
exploding in a kind of chemical glee - Jul 28
- no man is an island
I think back upon this past spring, when my world contracted upon itself, and I couldn’t keep the darkness back, and how all I could do was hang on and hide in my cocoon.
· Read more… - Jul 28
- hope, and force of will
The problem with me is that as soon as the going gets tough, I start having serious self-doubt. Now, granted, there are a lot of things in life that I am bad at (normal human socialization being one of them), but for the most part, I hold up the illusion of being a functional member of society pretty well. Sure, as soon as the shit hits the fan, I typically want to hide under my bed and cry, but luckily I’m a masochist, and tend to take fallout head-on, right in the kisser.
· Read more… - Jul 28
- spin
dreaming
· Read more…
wheel of fire
blue green white
the twisting paths of sunlight
beams of starlight glinting across the warp and weave
of cosmic strings and singularities
mathematical catastrophes
eternal darkness - Jul 29
- final sky
I am singular
· Read more…
in this effervescing madness of destiny
swirling, quantum foam roiling
madness seeking
I am dreaming again
facing the finality of these decisions
made smeared across time, indistinct
and indefinable - Jul 31
- insomnia again
Another month gone, and we enter the final full month of summer, and I can’t help but wonder where my peace and clarity has gone. A month ago, you would not find me in this state, longing for things that cannot possibly be, pining and hopeless.
· Read more…
Aug
- Aug 1
- a meditation on why things fall apart
After work today, I went to the Coffee Bean to get some caffeine because of my impending caffeine-withdrawal headache. I basically spent the time sipping on my ice-blended caffeine drink and scrawling depressing passages into my notebook. Man, I’m on fire these days.
· Read more… - Aug 1
- mistakes have been made
What I probably shouldn’t have done was drink three shots of espresso in addition to the Extreme Black Forest ice-blended caffeinated drink from Coffee Bean. This makes it highly unlikely that I will be sleeping any time within the next twelve hours.
· Read more… - Aug 1
- sleep continues to elude me
Man, all that caffeine was a serious mistake.
· Read more… - Aug 2
- in complete disarray
I guess I need to start entertaining the possibility that I may very well be going insane.
· Read more… - Aug 2
- cultivating stillness: the art of not wanting revisited
I stumbled upon this book entitled Cultivating Stillness in the Eastern Religions section of Borders and immediately felt peace descend upon me before I even opened it up. It is a Taoist text, but with a little more mysticism about it.
· Read more… - Aug 2
- oh god. morning
My brain is on fire.
· Read more… - Aug 3
- perdido
the lost one
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wandering down the shadowed path
2 days since I’d seen the sun
panic, and then
peace - Aug 4
- radiohead “street spirit (fade out)”
This song just lacerates my soul. It is the epitome of the anomie of post-modern existence. We are force fed lies, sanitized versions of tragedy, white-washed and censored versions of obscene truths, and we are made to choose between two different, polarized existences. Either you accept all the bullshit as fact, live your happy-go-lucky senseless life as a consumer of goods, or as cannon fodder for the state, nothing more than a replaceable cog in the machine, or you refuse to bow down, and earn ostracization or excommunication, indeed forcing you to fade-out from the consensual hallucination known as Reality™.
· Read more… - Aug 4
- overcaffeinated
Don’t ask me why. I decided to drink a four pack of Red Bull. Hence, I am finding it extremely difficult to sleep.
· Read more… - Aug 5
- rite of renewal
What I have forgotten is how important it is to actually go in the water when you go to the beach.1,2 I haven’t gone in the water for three years, ever since that time I went by myself to Puerco Beach and let the massive waves pummel me, leaving me gasping and breathless. Contemplating the infinite ocean and its instrinsic power just seems to put everything into perspective. I guess I’ll figure out all this bullshit someday, even though that day is not likely to be today.
· Read more… - Aug 5
- dance of the macabre: is it cause or is it effect?
As I sit here typing this early morning—it’s just me and my ever-faithful dog awake—I think I’ve figured out one of the key components of my ongoing depression. The fact of the matter is that I don’t have much hope for the future. I’m sure I don’t need to tell you all the fucked up shit going on in America today—the country that I live in seems to be the greatest force of evil these days.
· Read more… - Aug 6
- seven years (not in tibet)
(I was thinking of the city of Lhasa this morning as I contemplated my dog, who is a Lhasa Apso-something else. I also thought of the cheery thought my sister shared with me a while ago: you know how we’re fighting wars for oil these days? She predicts that the next natural resource we’ll be fighting wars for will be water. Specifically, as the Himalayan snowpack starts to melt because of global warming, India and China will be forced into a standoff over water rights. I also think that contention over water rights will be the single most important factor driving the politics of California in the next few years. But that is neither here nor there.)
· Read more… - Aug 6
- ipod randomness
Making that familiar drive back down to San Diego, I found myself in a very sullen, sulky, and brooding mood. Maybe it’s just the fact that I have to go to work tomorrow. Back to reality, I guess. No use crying over impossibilities.
· Read more… - Aug 8
- opening a random box of memories
It’s the little things that I remember with the greatest poignancy, most of them existing only in my mind. She would likely be shocked and disturbed by things running through my crazed brain.
· Read more… - Aug 8
- severe brain damage
I don’t know why, but I’ve dreamt of my ex lately. Nothing disturbing, just brief snippets and vignettes.
· Read more… - Aug 9
- ephemerality of happiness
My closest friends always admonish me that I think way too much, which is most certainly true. If I had the knack for shutting off my brain at least partially, I would probably enjoy life a whole hell of a lot more. Unfortunately, when I give it a try, it seems like my brain shuts off completely, and a lot of untoward and sometimes disastrous things tend to happen.
· Read more… - Aug 11
- self-improvement is masturbation
Neuron by neuron, we are taking the centers out. What I would give to have this as permanent, this not giving a shit about the world. OK, maybe I exaggerate. Even as drunk as I am, I have misgivings.
· Read more… - Aug 12
- weddings and funerals
One of my cousins whom I grew up with just got married today, and I remember sort of zoning out, thinking about the possibility of someday getting married, which I find utterly ridiculous since I’m not in a relationship.
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- Aug 14
- can't stop the blogging
I guess I’m addicted. I told myself that I would stop blogging, that all I’ve been spewing is angst, guilt-ridden, self-pitying, depressing, angst, and no one wants to hear it.
· Read more… - Aug 14
- "starlight" by muse
This song reminds me of this poem
· Read more… - Aug 14
- skye edwards "stop complaining"
I don’t know why
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but I cant seem to find the right melody today
I can’t make the words fit how I feel
I don’t know when
was the last time that I slept the whole night through
and when morning comes around I feel tired - Aug 14
- hopeless
I feel so fucking hopeless.
· Read more… - Aug 15
- ten trillion ideas
I feel like I’m completely losing my mind. There are like ten trillion ideas whizzing around my brain. This can’t be good for me.
· Read more… - Aug 15
- running away at first sight
The real reason I grew confused and insane is that I realized that I still like someone else a lot, and there wasn’t a damn thing I could do about it. (And this is probably unwise and stupid to post here, but I really don’t care anymore. I’m like a tagger with a spraypaint can, leaving “Kilroy was here” all over the place, like a dog pissing on trees. If you can figure out who I am, and who I’m talking about, well, good for you, it doesn’t change a goddamn thing.)
· Read more… - Aug 16
- attack of the past ten years
What sucks is that I can’t do this vacation thing at all. I can’t fucking relax. It’s like all of the sudden all the thoughts and feelings I’ve been avoiding for the past ten years or so have come out to attack me.
· Read more… - Aug 16
- jumping, jumping
Maybe I have a problem. I like to joke that no one really leaves Berkeley without a substance problem.
· Read more… - Aug 16
- hypomania
Bleh, this beta version of Blogger is eating my posts. This sucks.
· Read more… - Aug 16
- muse "starlight"
Let’s see if Blogger eats my post again.
· Read more… - Aug 23
- demarcation is futile
I’ve been experimenting with other blog engines, namely, Blogger and Typo. I really dig Typo, but unfortunately, I can’t get it to run on my Dreamhost account. There are instructions on how to get it to work but the code gods are not with me, I guess. And since today is my last day of vacation, it’s pretty unlikely that I’ll get it running any time soon.
· Read more… - Aug 29
- dreamtime
There seems to be this alternate reality that I keep coming back to in my dreams. There is a transportation plaza in a place that makes me think of Pasadena, except it really seems to be the civic center of an alternate Southern California. There are several mass transit lines that meet here: blue, red, yellow, orange, and green. There is also a shopping mall with extensive underground parking. The blue line can get you to the airport and to the ocean, ending in a seaside town that should be San Pedro, except it is much more tourist oriented, complete with villas and white sand beaches. The yellow line takes you to the downtown of this place which, for the lack of a better name, I have dubbed Todos Santos. This downtown area is sort of a mish-mash of Universal Citywalk, Old Pasadena, and Disneyland. The red line will take you to a bohemian/rapidly gentrifying/hipster-infested neighborhood that actually kind of reminds me of Wicker Park, but which will also take you to a shopping district that reminds me of Sunset Blvd in Echo Park, except with taller buildings. The green line, in one of the dreams I had, was what I was waiting for get home (whereever that is in this dream world of mine) and the actual platform is separated from the other ones, and it’s not always open. (The red, blue, and yellow lines share the same platform; the orange line is accessible by climbing a faux-Spanish era tower.) The orange line climbs a huge hill and ends up in an area that reminds me simultaneously of New York City and San Diego. (Yeah, I know, it doesn’t make a lot of sense.) It also takes you to an area that sort of reminds me of Michigan Avenue combined with Berkeley (Scary thought, huh?) There is a university campus there that sort of reminds me of a gigantic version of my high school.
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Sep
- Sep 1
- confusing the sacred with the profane
So maybe all Republicans aren’t religious fundamentalists, but I kind of wonder if there isn’t some sort of congruence between the two mind sets—namely, the kind of ignorance and stupidity that makes you so sure that what you know is absolutely right and anyone that disagrees with you is absolutely wrong.
· Read more… - Sep 1
- simple pleasures revisited
I was lying in bed, warm and comfortable, except somehow I had lost my pillow, and I thought I should just go to sleep and find it when I wasn’t so tired, but then I quickly found it to the side of my bed.
· Read more… - Sep 3
- fearing tomorrow
I don’t know if there was ever a time when I looked forward to the future. Some of this is probably depression clouding my mind, by I remember quite early on in my life that I was afraid of building for the future. As early as elementary school, I was always afraid that Reagan would press the shiny red button and effectively erase history, but somehow, it never happened. Among other things, I am afraid of falling in love, because love can always be lost. I am afraid of bringing a child into this world, because the world is such a fucked up place run by clearly evil human beings. I am afraid of trying to succeed, because there are always fuckwits out there who have nothing better to do than to see you fall on your ass, and point and laugh. And I am afraid of trying to succeed, because, ultimately, human beings tend to be selfish, and however noble my intentions are, they will likely fuck someone else’s life up, and the only rational thing for them to do is oppose me.
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- Sep 4
- envy
I stopped to think about all the people I know who are married or are in fulfilling romantic relationships, and I realize that I’m jealous, but what are you gonna do. If it’s not going to happen, it’s not going to happen, and I’ll slog on by my lonesome, trying to keep fighting the good fight.
- Sep 4
- trying to snap out of it
The thing that I’ve been mulling over is the fact that there have been so many Septembers in the past where I’ve been ever hopeful, with the intent of making a change in my life. And while I know it would be hard to convince many of you, there have been times that I’ve actually acted upon this impulse, only to be rebuffed, or even worse, only to be faced with puzzled indifference.
· Read more… - Sep 4
- perpetually courting disaster
The idea was that I was actually going to sleep early today, but somehow that failed to happen. I’m going to try yet again to wake up in time for work, although I’m not all that hopeful.
· Read more… - Sep 7
- no one is useless
If you can’t be a good example, then you’ll just have to be a horrible warning. — Catherine Aird
· Read more… - Sep 9
- maybe i’m a mutant
Beast
· Read more… - Sep 9
- last days of summer
There are approximately 3 days, give or take, until I turn 30, and I’ve basically hunkered down and accepted the inevitable. My life will not be visibly different in any way, no major milestones will be reached. It will just be another godforsaken Wednesday that will blow by faster than I can think.
· Read more… - Sep 11
- it’s time to move on
It’s natural to look back, I suppose. We are the stories that we tell, after all. But the beatification and fetishization of this particular day by the media—blogs included—is kind of disgusting.
· Read more… - Sep 12
- the last few moments of this particular age
So here I am, the last hours of my 20s, and there are no answers, really.
· Read more… - Sep 21
- the last days of summer
I can taste autumn in the air. Septembers have always been bittersweet. Since I turned 30, I haven’t really had much of a chance to reflect, although I find that regret frequently colors my reminiscences.
· Read more… - Sep 22
- always crashing
I was happy for about 15 minutes when for some reason the dark clouds of despair overcame me, leaving me a little pissed off, and very bitter.
· Read more… - Sep 23
- reading the paper on a saturday morning
On some Saturdays, I head out to the Mission Cafe in North Park before it gets overly crowded and buy myself an L.A. Times (because, frankly, the San Diego Union-Tribune is not fit to wipe my ass with.) On the front page, I found two rather depressing stories: (1) the beleaguered Charles Drew/Martin Luther King, Jr. Medical Center in South Central L.A. has failed a “make it or break it” federal inspection, thereby losing funding from CMS and (2) this character piece about a guy named Ronnie Wise who has been fighting illiteracy in the Mississippi delta for the past 30 years in the face of institutionalized racism, uncaring politicians, arsonists, and weather, and who has decided to retire early.
· Read more… - Sep 23
- coding, practicing medicine, and a brief word on blogorrhea
I stumbled upon this blog post about how most of the time spent developing code is actually spent rewriting rather than actually writing, which actually fits the aphorism about how most of writing in general is rewriting. But the thing that he discusses is that this is a function of the fact that most developers can’t immediately grok what code is supposed to do just by reading it, and a lot of them end up trying to rewrite what has already been written, which, in my estimation, is a glorious waste of time.
· Read more… - Sep 24
- equinox
Summer is officially over (despite the fact that today’s high was 76°F and I went out in shorts and flip-flops) and I can’t help but wonder where all the time went. Of course, I don’t know if it’s an artifact of getting old, but it also seems like it’s about a decade since it was June. (Yeah, I’ve been noticing this strange paradox ever since I started residency. The recent past seems simultaneously like it was just yesterday, and like it was 100 years ago. Go figure.)
· Read more… - Sep 24
- capriciousness of chance
So Mireya1 actually called me back and like a fool, I said, no, I can’t go out tonight. Stupid.
· Read more… - Sep 25
- time
It’s 2 a.m. and I can’t sleep. I’m not feeling well, physically speaking.
· Read more… - Sep 28
- starlight (continually redshifted)
gonna buy me a spaceship
· Read more…
powered by dark energy
take me to the outermost reaches
forever chasing infinity - Sep 29
- coastline by moonlight
In this shadowed hour, I find myself contemplating the nuances of timing.
· Read more… - Sep 29
- fascism declared in america
So what has really twisted my mind is the fact that habeas corpus has been suspended and the Authorities can basically disappear people, just like in corrupt developing countries. I really didn’t think I would see the Republic of the United States of America fall within my lifetime, but I guess I was just in denial.
· Read more… - Sep 29
- installing typo 4 on dreamhost
I struggled with this for awhile, abandoning it midway through, but I finally got it to work. Most of the instructions for installing typo 4.0.1 on dreamhost by Aiden Bordner worked for me, except you need to edit
· Read more…db/migrate/051_fix_canonical_server_url.rbas described by Chris H. - Sep 29
- disappointment (not unexpected)
It is funny how much a simple change in someone’s Friendster status can influence my day.
· Read more… - Sep 30
- hopeless (another september come and gone)
I usually know better than to hinge my hopes on someone else being around, and yet I still hoped that I’d get to hang out with [redacted] this weekend. Wishful thinking as usual.
· Read more… - Sep 30
- the problem of living in a vacuum
I’ve been living by myself for two years now, and I think it’s starting to wear on my soul. In the past, I’ve at least had roommates (despite the fact that I have wanted some of them arrested and/or shot by the cops) and this ensured a minimal amount of human contact.
· Read more… - Sep 30
- yin and yang (i heart huckabees)
I was watching “I Heart Huckabees” and dug the simplified dichotomy of relentless interconnection and infinite meaning versus eternal alienation and complete senselessness. The main character rightly discovers that one cannot exist without the other, and that both simultaneously operate. In essence, it was Taoism redux. There is no life without death, no creation without destruction, and all that jazz.
· Read more… -
Oct
- Oct 6
- lowest common denominator
OK, sure, this will definitely come out culturally elitist, but the phenomenon known as digg.com is yet another example of the principle of mediocrity in capitalist economies. (Or, for the more politically correct minded, perhaps we can call it the principle of democracy.) Like Walmart, the American public school system, Microsoft Windows, and our pathetic dependence on hydrocarbons for fuel, the “good enough” is the enemy of the “best” and, contrary to what Social Darwinists would have you believe, laissez faire capitalism leads to championing the mediocre.
· Read more… - Oct 7
- alpha centauri and final fantasy 7
These games came out almost 10 years ago, but I spent way too much time playing them both. Final Fantasy 7 defined my senior year in college, and Alpha Centauri was how I spent my year in existential limbo.
· Read more… - Oct 11
- swirling
Oh, what was it I had meant to say? There are a million thoughts careening through my addled brain at this benighted hour, and I sit here tongue-tied like an idiot.
· Read more… - Oct 13
- sheer madness
So I like to blame all this on damned cats. Now I’ve got nothing against cats, per se. I kind of like how they’re not literal ass-kissers like dogs are (and I am a dog person.) But the problem is that I’m deathly allergic to them, and on Thursday night I got a double dose.
· Read more… - Oct 13
- no day but today
There are three musicals that I used to know all the lyrics to: “Beauty and the Beast”, “Once On This Island”, and “Rent” Each one encompassed a particular period of my life, and “Rent” reminds me of my junior and senior year in college, especially because my roommate at the time was quite obsessed with it. Being in college, the Bohemian lifestyle, the conflict between making money and making art—these things all resonated.
· Read more… - Oct 14
- narnia, corruption, and perfectability
I think the book in The Chronicles of Narnia that left the strongest impression on me was The Magician’s Nephew[site by Keith Webb][on wikipedia]. The setting that I remember most strongly is the ruined and blasted world of Charn, destroyed by the White Witch Jadis by using magic that seems strongly allegorical to nuclear weaponry. I was struck by how the monarchy of Charn started off being benevolent and wise, then became corrupted and evil, eventually spawning the monstrosity that is the White Witch. I also remember the hue of redness encompassing Charn. (Was C.S. Lewis trying to evoke medieval visions of Hell?) What was interesting to me was the explanation for this reddish light—Charn’s sun is a red giant star. While this could’ve just been an idiosyncrasy of this particular world, it actually evoked in me the idea that the civilization of Charn had existed so long that their formerly sun-like star had exhausted its nuclear fuel and was beginning to cool and expand. For some reason (although this is apparently not the reason for its destruction), this also reminds me of the destruction of the planet of Krypton, but that is neither here nor there.
· Read more… - Oct 14
- expendability
The notion of sacrificing your life for others, embedded in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, closing paralleling the New Testament, brings to mind what I find to be a viable adaptionist claim: that some individuals need to die for the good of others in the same genetic pool, which is probably pretty harsh if you happen to be that individual so chosen by selection pressure.
· Read more… - Oct 15
- one sunset at a time
Nothing like a nice sunset to snap me out of a terrible mood.
· Read more… - Oct 15
- morrissey “will never marry”
I’m writing this to say
· Read more…
In a gentle way
Thank you—but no
I will live my life as I
Will undoubtedly die—alone - Oct 17
- mac/intel != win/intel
J Angelo Racoma looks back at the argument that Apple switching to the x86 would be tantamount to the suicide of Apple Computer, Inc.
· Read more… - Oct 20
- surrender is not an option
Saying “I give up” solves nothing.
· Read more… - Oct 21
- radiohead “go to sleep (little man being erased)”
Something for the rag and bone man
· Read more…
Over my dead body
Something big is gonna happen
Over my dead body
Someone’s son or someone’s daughter
Over my dead body
This is how I end up sucked in
Over my dead body
I’m gonna go to sleep
And let this wash all over me
We don’t really want a monster taking over
Tip toe around, tie him down
We don’t want the loonies takin’ over
Tip toe around, tie him down
May pretty horses come to you as you sleep
I’m gonna go to sleep
And let this wash all over me - Oct 21
- time marches on
So I give up. This is all there is, and there ain’t no mo’. God only knows what sort of fucked up crisis would actually get me to save myself, but I’m too fucking tired.
· Read more… - Oct 22
- thom yorke “analyse”
A self-fulfilling prophecy of endless possibility
· Read more…
You roll in reams across the street
In algebra, in algebra - Oct 23
- ipod turns five
Charlie White writes about what he hates about the iPod which is, I guess, praising with faint damnation. First off, the proper colloquial term is “hatorade” or maybe “hatoration” if you want to get pendatic. Get it right.
· Read more… - Oct 23
- a hundred million bottles washed up on the shore
I just read this post about depression by alison on bluishorange, and I am so there.
· Read more… - Oct 23
- 15 years too early
I stumbled upon this post about NeXTSTEP (the OS that Steve Jobs created after leaving Apple way back when), which basically already had almost all the features of Mac OS X. Which makes sense. Mac OS (what is now known as Classic) was an evolutionary dead-end with regards to operating systems, about on par with Windows 3.11. And while Apple worked on the vaporware that was known as Copland and even while they flirted with BeOS (what could’ve been, huh?), NeXT was already there and was already a decently established development environment. Hell, it had already spawned an Open Source project (GNUstep) before Apple finally decided to get their shit together and bring Steve back.
· Read more… - Oct 26
- the cure “untitled”
hopelessly adrift in the eyes of the ghost again
· Read more…
down on my knees and my hands in the air again
pushing my face in the memory of you again
but i never know if it’s real
never know how i wanted to feel - Oct 27
- My new topic on Consumating
Tell me, how many of you are Consumating from work, and how do you get anything else done?
· Read more… - Oct 27
- physics vis-a-vis racism and misogyny
Man, Lee Smolin, theoretical physicist to the nth degree, is my hero. The first I had heard of him was his book Three Roads to Quantum Gravity, a discussion of the possible unification of quantum mechanics and general relativity, which covers string theory and loop quantum gravity. I also noted his name in João Magueijo’s book Faster than the Speed of Light.
· Read more… - Oct 27
- Consumating’s Question of the Week
What brings out the devil in you?
· Read more… - Oct 27
- more than just aesthetics
x86 machines have been traditionally much cheaper than their Mac counterparts, but things have improved a lot lately. Still, a Macbook Pro supposedly costs as much as two similarly spec’ed Dells. Naturally, the author ignores certain things (which he at least acknowledges): built-in iSight, bundled software, faster RAM.
· Read more… - Oct 28
- waiting for leopard
I admit it. Apple has gotten me successfully hooked. I bought my Mac Mini when Tiger came out. I’m probably going to be buying another machine when Leopard comes out.
· Read more… - Oct 29
- feeling abandoned
I have spent the last 80 hours or so without speaking to another soul. (I am not counting buying stuff at the store, or communicating via computer.) I can’t help but wonder if anyone would miss me if I disappeared.
· Read more…
Nov
- Nov 1
- trapped in my own consciousness
Hat tip to my cousin J who has a thing for these things.
· Read more… - Nov 1
- finger eleven “one thing”
This is a scattered memory of driving up the Grapevine by myself, heading back to L.A. one February…
· Read more… - Nov 1
- there is a thought struggling to crawl out of my mind
I don’t know if it’s just the psychotropic drugs, but I feel like I’m evading something lurking in my brain. Something that I’ve tried to face down head-to-head, only to find myself defeated each and every time. So like the coward that I am, I’ve decided to try to just runaway from it and ignore it.
· Read more… - Nov 2
- excuses, excuses
The easy way out is to say that I’m tired, that I’ve been at work all day, and I just don’t want to deal. And it’s all true, I’m not making it up.
· Read more… - Nov 2
- coldplay “see you soon”
This song stopped me cold in my tracks today, and I think I might’ve cried had it been some other time, back when I was someone else entirely.
· Read more… - Nov 3
- death cab for cutie “what sarah said”
So who’s gonna watch you die?
· Read more… - Nov 4
- no on proposition 85
As a health care provider, and especially as a pediatrician, it’s pretty clear that parental notification for abortion is a bad idea. It’s not entirely clear what this would accomplish, other than cutting off access of teen-aged girls to not only D&C’s, but prenatal counselling and care in general.
· Read more… - Nov 5
- flashbacks (the theory of circular time)
It was fitting that I caught Alexander Proyas’ “Dark City” on cable the other day. In case you’ve never watched it, it is set in some noir city where it seems like it’s always night, and for some reason there doesn’t seem to be a way out of it. One of the characters comes to realize this and basically goes insane, repeatedly drawing spirals everywhere he goes. (Wow, that’s weird, I just realized that this happens in China Miéville’s book Iron Council as well—one of the characters goes around the city of New Crobuzon drawing spirals everywhere. Totally different meaning, though.)
· Read more… - Nov 6
- the magic of the ipod and other miscellaneous insanities
Cause its gone, daddy, gone
· Read more…
Your love is gone
Gone, daddy, gone
The love is gone away - Nov 7
- human nature
It is the curse of humanity that it learns to tolerate even the most horrible situations by habituation. — Rudolf Virchow
· Read more… - Nov 7
- direction
I’m grinding my teeth, thinking about what happens next, and what the next 18 months will mean.
· Read more… - Nov 7
- new
Excuse me sir
· Read more…
I’m lost
I’m looking for a place
where I can get lost
I’m looking for a home
For my malfunctioning being
I’m looking for the mechanical music museum - Nov 7
- random words keep seeping through
She was right, though, I can’t lie.
· Read more…
She’s just one of those corners in my mind,
And I just put her right back with the rest.
That’s the way it goes, I guess. - Nov 8
- synchronicity
The whole thing about things coming in threes. Again it’s one of those misconceptions that the pattern recognition machinery of the mind foists upon us, but enough about that.
· Read more… - Nov 10
- synchronicity revisited
Now that I understand the Laws of Probability a little better, I recognize that most coincidences are meaningless, or even more likely, most coincidences become significant in my mind only because my attention shifts for one reason or another.
· Read more… - Nov 10
- like a thief in the night
It’s 4 a.m. and I’m heading up to L.A.
· Read more… - Nov 10
- not really synchronicity
I caught the tail end of “Just Like Heaven” which is set in San Francisco, features Reese Witherspoon as an ER resident who works 24 hour shifts and ends up kind of undead, and is titled after a Cure song (and which Katie Melua does a pretty good cover version of.)
· Read more… - Nov 11
- random walk
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy also talks about love. It says, “Avoid if at all possible.”
· Read more… -
- Nov 13
- traipsing around north county
And the way I feel tonight
· Read more…
I could die and I wouldn’t mind
And there’s something going on inside
Makes you want to feel makes you want to try
Makes you want to blow the stars from the sky - Nov 16
- sick but less twisted than usual
Be my friend
· Read more…
Hold me, wrap me up
Enfold me
I am small
I’m needy
Warm me up
And breathe me - Nov 17
- definitely broken, and unfixable
What is it in me that drives me to wander the empty ether on a Friday night, bereft of companionship? Why is it that I torture my mind with “could’ve beens”? Or worse yet, things that couldn’t’ve possibly ever happened, they were just thin, dry yearnings escaping from the cracks in my soul, as impossible then as they are now.
· Read more… - Nov 18
- filipinos
· Read more…
- Nov 20
- fragmentation and the retrospectoscope
…less and less of this makes any sense. I all of the sudden had to ask myself, what exactly am I hiding from? Why do I hide behind the shadows and the walls, cower in the dark spaces, and the corners? What was it that happened, that made me want to disappear, never to be seen again?
· Read more… - Nov 21
- fragmentation and the paradox of social networks
Mostly, I like the fact that it’s not MySpace.
· Read more… - Nov 21
- rescue mode
Damn it. My main blogs are down. Disordered Thought Processes and Starlight and Gravity are down for the count.
· Read more… - Nov 23
- in memory of indigenous peoples
Much like Columbus Day, Thanksgiving Day has the taint of Western Imperialism on it. It’s just the sad fact of history, and I do try my best not to make too much of it. Just like black people can reclaim the word “nigger,” and gay and lesbian people can reclaim the word “queer,” perhaps we people of color can simply re-appropriate Thanksgiving Day and recreate it so that it doesn’t underscore nor elide the destruction of indigenous culture, and perhaps still be a meaningful day of thanksgiving.
· Read more… - Nov 25
- w’s karma
Today I heard an awful story about an Iraq War veteran. 25 years old, beautiful wife, beautiful kids. On his third tour in Iraq, he runs into an IED. Now he’s paralyzed from the neck down, raging angrily in the Spinal Cord Injury unit.
· Read more… - Nov 25
- war and surgery (a metaphor revisited)
The problem with health care professional talking about the Iraq War is that we always seem to find ourselves with mixed metaphors.
· Read more… - Nov 26
- my mind is not broken, it’s just seriously sprained
I don’t know. This night, this night, my brain is filled with a foggy void. I don’t know if it’s just fatigue, just this irregular sleep-wake cycle that keeps me spinning in hopeless circles.
· Read more… - Nov 27
- tongue-tied
“You have a Midland accent” is just another way of saying “you don’t have an accent.” You probably are from the Midland (Pennsylvania, southern Ohio, southern Indiana, southern Illinois, and Missouri) but then for all we know you could be from Florida or Charleston or one of those big southern cities like Atlanta or Dallas. You have a good voice for TV and radio.
· Read more… - Nov 29
- some semblance of winter
The temperature was somewhere in the mid 60s today, which is chilly for Southern California. Combined with the Christmas carols and the mall displays, it’s actually starting to feel like December is coming.
· Read more… - Nov 29
- casualties
My mind suddenly wraps itself upon the topic of death once again. It is, I realize, a frequent topic of my profession, one that I am guaranteed to revisit again and again, and while intellectually, I recognize that it is a simple fact of life, viscerally, it still gives me the heebie-jeebies.
· Read more…
Dec
- Dec 1
- the first of the last (to sleep, perchance to dream)
(The track that is currently playing is "The Perfect Kiss" by New Order)
· Read more… - Dec 1
- sunrise (on a random november day)
· Read more…
- Dec 2
- the words are exploding in my head
I don’t know anymore. There are a million things that I need to say in a particular order, and it’s all coming apart at the seams. There’s just too much information out there, it’s like looking for a way to pick up one molecule of water at a time out of the ocean, making sure to pick each one up in a particular sequence.
· Read more… - Dec 2
- sleep?
Apparently not tonight.
· Read more… - Dec 2
- Consumating’s Photo Contest
You might not be addicted to Nintendo, but everyone likes to play games. Show us your game face!
· Read more… - Dec 5
- yet another sunset from some random day
sunset from Torrey Pines
· Read more… - Dec 5
- shadows, echoes, and reverberations
becomes a shadow
· Read more…
dancing on the line
thread upon thread
twirled into the mist
beneath the shattered steel
the dull gray concrete
I walk warily
banner unfurled
sword unsheathéd
dawn creeps nigh - Dec 6
- defying gravity
Now I’m a big fan of rewriting and reinterpreting mythology and fantasy. My initial ambition as a college freshman was to take Southeast Asian myths and rewrite them in the vein of Western European myths. I’m totally into China Miéville’s subversion of the fantasy genre and using it to explore the sometimes faulty assumptions we make about capitalism and Western Civ. I really liked Michael Crichton’s Eaters of the Dead, which is a version of Beowulf told from a quite-unexpected viewpoint, and even liked the movie that it became, “The 13th Warrior”. I sometimes think that this is what underlay my childhood obsesssion with Disney animated films. I grew up listening ad nauseam to the soundtrack of Disney’s “Robin Hood” where Robin Hood and Maid Marian are foxes, Little John is a bear, and King John and his brother Richard the Lion-Hearted are literally lions. (“Oo de lally!”) I was enchanted by “The Little Mermaid” and especially “Beauty and the Beast.” One of my more recent ambitions is to write a novel based on Middle Earth after it has been completely industrialized and paved over, dealing with issues of urban sprawl, pollution, and global capitalism. As for a more small scale project, I’m trying to write a story that is really “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs” and “The Hobbit” mashed-up together and set on a nanotechnology-permeated, post-Roman Empire-like society.
· Read more… - Dec 7
- where is my true love?
Your Birthdate: September 13
· Read more… - Dec 12
- where am i going? where have i been?
Kind’ve lost in transit right now, not sure what’s up, what’s down, what’s left, what’s right. Just going with the flow, fast and free on one hand, slow and languid on another, the eddies and the swirls drag me to the bottom of the deeps.
· Read more… - Dec 13
- i should’ve known it right from the start
There is a good kind of tired, and a bad kind. The good kind lets you know that you had a good, full day, that you were productive, that you made fairly decent choices. The bad kind is like getting kicked in the face after you’ve already been shot a few hundred times. (I am thinking of the Jersey tollbooth scene in “The Godfather” with James Caan.)
· Read more… - Dec 15
- it’s the same
Greg of Futility Closet writes about sentences composed entirely of one word. I think these are rather arcane, though. My favorite is Tagalog, where an entire conversation can be composed entirely by one syllable, and it’s something that has more common usage:
· Read more… - Dec 15
- brilliant thought of the day
(shamelessly stolen from a speaker at a morning teaching conference)
· Read more… - Dec 15
- serious brain damage
If you’ve been reading this blog for long enough, it’s probably clear to you that there’s something not right with my brain.
· Read more… - Dec 16
- procrastination is like masturbation
It may be fun for a little while, but then you realize you’re only fucking yourself.
· Read more… - Dec 16
- an addendum to serious brain damage
(In reference to how seriously fucked-up I am.)
· Read more… - Dec 17
- self-destructive tendencies
Here it is, 1:30 a.m., and I need to wake up in 4 hours.
· Read more… - Dec 19
- fatness and the tragedy of efficiency
Being a Person of Greater Mass™ myself, I understand the discrimination against fat people. (I think the epidemic of anorexia nervosa and body dysmorphic disorder among women is another thing entirely, and very bizarre and disturbing, but that is another tale in the telling. Seriously, though, there are way too many women who are either healthy or dangerously underweight who continue to claim that they’re too fat, and sometimes I have to repress the urge to send them all to the inpatient psych ward on the grounds that they are a danger to themselves.)
· Read more… - Dec 19
- life, death, trifles, and the fading sunlight
I read an intern’s blog post about a patient dying, and it sort of recentered me.
· Read more… - Dec 22
- free association (craziness)
So I was eating by myself at a restaurant the other day, and for some reason they were playing all these late ‘70s/early ‘80s songs, like “I Say A Little Prayer” by Dionne Warwick, and then “How Deep Is Your Love?” by the Bee Gees. The latter especially took me back to my early childhood. My dad used to own a blue AMC Concord and it had an 8-track tape player and I think he had tapes of Neil Sedaka, Kenny Rogers, and the Bee Gees.
· Read more… - Dec 23
- simplicity
I think, I hope, that it’s just the darkness that’s killing me. About an hour after the sun went down, I had to put my head down. I don’t know what I want to do. I can’t deal with all this free, empty time. I can’t even think crazy thoughts any more. I’m just…spent. I don’t know how else to put it.
· Read more… - Dec 26
- wordpress ate my post
Damn it, I had written a hopeful entry in my delirium last night, and as luck would have it, Wordpress decides to send it to the utter void. I guess it’s for the best. I was kind of blasphemous post. I’d try to reconstruct it in its entirety, but I can’t remember what I wrote. All I’ve got are snippets.
· Read more… - Dec 27
- swiftly changing
It’s amazing how fast time goes. It just occurred to me that we’re fast approaching the end of the decade, what with it soon being 2007 and all. Not quite how Stanley Kubrick or I imagined it. (Where are the flying cars, huh? Or the shuttle flights to Jupiter, hmm?) But then again, I never imagined anything like the Internet, or Google, or the ubiquity of cell phones. Certainly nothing like the iPod, or Wi-fi, or even the PS2.
· Read more… - Dec 31
- Meh
I don’t know if it’s just the anhedonia, or if things have just become increasingly meaningless lately. So it’s 2007, and the new year doesn’t really feel all that new.
· Read more…