mahiwaga

I'm not really all that mysterious

May 2007

My oldest friend whom I’ve known since we were in third grade is getting married to a wonderful woman sometime in 2008, and I can’t help but marvel. It seems like it was just last week we were playing Wing Commander II and listening to the Cure, the Smiths, Soft Cell, and Front 242, or walking up that godforsaken hill while playing some weird word game. There were all those hours spent in front of the Commodore 64 and the 8-bit Nintendo. There was Robotech. Voltron. Bastketball in my backyard. Junior high football. Watching movies at the AMC in Burbank. I could stop and reminisce for hours on end, and my memories may be astray. But it all goes by so fast.

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early morning awakening

I’m not quite certain what compelled me to get out of bed at 4:45 a.m. I didn’t even set my alarm. Supposedly, early morning awakening is one of the cardinal signs of depression. Meaning I still haven’t beat this disease.

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the colors of time

I’m starting to make this an April/May tradition. Take the quiz.

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definition of insanity

Listening to: “Only Love Can Break Your Heart” by St. Etienne

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they can always hurt you more

(quoth the Fatman: the 8th law from The House of God)

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mika “any other world”

In any other world
you could tell the difference
and let it all unfurl
into broken remnants.
Smile like you mean it
and let yourself let go.

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How is it that I did almost essentially nothing today, and yet by early evening I’m already exhausted?

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like the weather

So maybe it wasn’t as hot as I thought it was. The record high in San Diego for May 8th was 81°F in 1941. Today’s high was supposedly 86°F.

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the fire above hollywood

I’m enthralled by the ongoing drama about the fire in Griffith Park. It is apparently continuing to spread, now encompassing 300 acres, and forcing evacuations of residences.

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the fire continues

jozjozjoz is also blogging about the Griffith Park fire and points me to laughingsquid’s surreal pictures.

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holding on to a thin strand of hope

I suppose if that’s all the medications accomplish, I’m still getting somewhere. For the first time in a long, long time, I actually believe that there’s a good chance that my life will get better. I’m actually looking forward to the future.

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containment of the griffith park fire

So it looks like the Griffith Park fire is 75% contained as of 6 hours ago, although they still expect at least another day of fire-fighting before full containment. The blaze has consumed more than 800 acres, which is about 20% of the park’s total land area.

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the witching hour

It’s 1:30 a.m. and I just woke up about half an hour ago. Ever since I finished up my last call month for this year, I’ve just been exhausted. I suppose I have about a month of sleep to catch up on. But this makes my sleep schedule completely screwed up.

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griffith park fire: flickr stream

People posted a lot of awesome pictures of the fire on Flickr. What is it about fire that fascinated me so?

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The Griffith Park fire is now mostly contained although there is still work to be done, but now Catalina is on fire.

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happiness, the continuing elusiveness of

Now I realize that happiness in of itself is a rather empty goal, reserved for victims of unusual strokes, the congenitally mentally incapacitated, and the clinically deranged. You lesion a few tracts in your brain, and you can be permanently happy until your dying day, singing “zippy-de-doo-da” out of your asshole, your face guaranteed to freeze with a rictus grin. I can see it now, a corpse grinning maniacally in his/here casket.

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Well that was unsatisfying.

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The question is: what the fuck were you expecting?

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Well, here I am, moderately hung-over, not only listening to an owl hooting continously, but someone also decided to blast some rock en español. At freaking 6 a.m. So now I am awake, and I can’t get back to sleep. Wonderful.

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returning to normality (normal for me, at least)

We have normality. I repeat, we have normality. Anything you still can’t cope with is therefore your own problem. — Tricia McMillan AKA Trillian from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

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the parable of the cave

I have come to realize that the living room of my apartment resembles a terrorist command center. I have three computers and four LCD screens, seven speakers plus a subwoofer, a TV, and a receiver as well as all the requisite cables and hubs and what not in here, because (1) I couldn’t fit it all in my room anyway and (2) the first rule of sleep hygiene is to only use the bedroom for sleeping.

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Is this aching in my belly anxiety or dysentery? One wonders.

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journey "don't stop believin'"

I woke up at 3 a.m. for no good reason and couldn’t get back to sleep.

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Reminiscing about distant journeys
lost in the murky mist of my fading memories
down that Mother Road, and the paths of generations past
to the south side and the lake shore
and back again
to the mountain pass and to the Sea
the years wash upon the sands, wave after wave

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I’m feeling sick to my stomach for some reason. I don’t know. I don’t know.

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glen campbell “wichita lineman”

Driving back from Harrah’s on the Rincon tribal lands, my iPod suddenly popped up ”Wichita Lineman Was a Song I Once Heard” by the KLF. (The KLF?!?) This immediately took me back to my childhood, when I couldn’t go to sleep without the radio on, and the station I would listen was the easy listening station. It used to be called KJOI 99, but now I think it’s Star 98.7. Crazy.

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the fray “fall away”

I am now reduced to merely posting song lyrics.

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there is clearly something wrong with me

Man, that was an incredible waste. Three hours down the drain just to get a stupid RSS widget to work in MySpace. I wish that Myspace would just let me crosspost to their blog engine, but noooo.

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alphaville “forever young”

Did you know that Tiffany did a cover of Alphaville’s song? Weirdness.

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phil collins “take me home”

Maybe I’m just being morbid. Maybe it’s because I just finished working in the ICU and watched plenty of people die and signed plenty of death certificates. Maybe it’s because I had dinner with (among others) someone who works for the medical examiner. Nothing like talking about people who died in sudden, unexpected, and often gruesome ways while having Japanese food. Maybe it’s because the track before this one was “Mad World” by Tears for Fears, which has the classic line “the dreams in which I’m dying are the best I’ve ever had,” a song that was resurrected by Gary Jules and the movie “Donnie Darko.”

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You know what would be an excellent Turing test?

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crossing my fingers

The last time my sister graduated, I was seriously in love with S. While in the back of my head I suppose I always knew it wasn’t going to work, I had been doing a good job ignoring that particular fact. Naturally, when I got back to Chicago, everything went to hell, and I went into a patented downward spiral.

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back in san diego

Woot! I like flying back from the East Coast. It makes you feel like there’s so much time in the day because of the time zone difference.

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still moblogging

Hmm. The timestamps are kind of screwed up. This app i’m using is posting in Greenwich mean time or something. Or I wonder if it’s the blog engine. Good thing they’re both Open Source. Of course that means I’m gonna be pissing away a few more hours of my life screwing around with code.

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Oh yeah. Blogging on my cell phone. Booyah!

I have no mouth and I must scream

Suffice it to say that I am extremely pissed off right now. What a god damned fucking waste. It’s true what they say. In times of crisis, you find out quickly who actually gives a shit about you, and who is just using you for the sake of convenience. Some people really only know how to manipulate people as objects and have no interest in what you think or feel. C’est la vie. You live and learn.

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…and as Homer Simpson warns, this is the first step to failure.

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spiral despair
rif(f)ling through the trash
rummaging through the detritus
perimeters, delimiters,
we rage through time and distance
the memories well up untold
unbidden

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mistake. really.

so what this allows is drunken blogging. Perfect.

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car blogging? Unwise. Probably dangerous.

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something like home. I am so lost.

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In my dreams, evil is always man-shaped
the cockroaches and the worms
fill me with loathing
but they do not fill me with despair
hatred
disgust

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the promise of salvation

Could I have saved her—?
And thereby have saved myself?
Knowing what I know
doing what I do
and all I’m good for
is letting people slip through my fingers

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not-so-graceful degradation

cry for stillness
listen, that rhythm, that beat
crashing and burning
spinning and turning
we’re dancing, we’re diving
we’re dreaming, we’re scheming

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the trials and tribulations of a single week

How much changes in a single week. Anticipation has lately been more enjoyable than the real thing. My fault as usual.

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in transit (how to move your wordpress blog)

On the off chance that you actually cared, I’ve changed this blog’s URL. You will find the latest drek escaping from my vacuous soul at http://disorderedthoughtprocesses.com, and for once the domain name actually matches the title. This will be a transparent process, thanks to the beauty that is the Apache Web Server, and thanks to the beauty of Wordpress itself.

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in love (with a machine)

I’m seriously digging on The Hype Machine, a mp3 blog aggregator. Sure, there are probably less painful ways to try and find your favorite track currently being played by ~~the Evil Empire~~ Clear Channel, but for more of the underground, completely whacked-out stuff, you gotta check it.

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I have this agonizing sense of dysequilibrium.

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It’s definitely summer now.

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summer in the city (a flashback moment)

There are certain parts of the year that seem to get me down. That perception may simply be apophenia. A meaningless confluence of stimuli that cause me to believe there is some sort of pattern. Like listening for voices on blank cassette tapes. Or seeing the image of the Virgin Mary on a scrap of tree bark.

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I just finished watching ”Sand Pebbles” which stars Steve McQueen, and it’s a brilliant, intricately subtle anti-war movie that has excruciatingly painful relevance to the present day absurdity of the continued occupation of Iraq by the U.S. “Sand Pebbles” chronicles the tribulations of Jake Holman, an engineer in the U.S. Navy assigned to a gunboat patrolling the Yangtze. The setting is China during the tumultous revolutionary era, as Chiang Kai-shek attempts to oust the warlords whom the western powers support. The specter of Soviet involvement looms large, and so the U.S. characteristically sticks its nose into something that they probably shouldn’t have. Getting involved in other nations’ civil wars seems to be a pretty bad idea if you ask me.

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continued imbalance

isang pagkakataon lang… one chance only
minsan sa buhay… once in a lifetime

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years, then decades

You turned me inside out and you showed me what life was about only you, the only one who stole my heart away

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not exactly rocket science

Now I think Apple is doing the right thing by offering DRM-free music. Although, frankly, the DRMed stuff is not all that hard to crack. Just burn it to CD then re-encode it with the Apple Lossless codec. No loss of quality necessary. (I wouldn’t recommend re-encoding to mp3 or AAC unless you don’t care and/or don’t notice the drop in quality.) Hard drive space is cheap, anyway. My 30 GB 5G iPod cost me less than my (sadly, broken) 20 GB 2G iPod. And if you don’t want to waste a CD-R, I’m sure there are other hacks out there for removing the DRM.

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the sun still shines, the sun still sets

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disinformation (itunes 7.2 and itms)

At the risk of sounding like a raving, gibbering Apple fanboy, I’ve got to ask, what’s up with all the FUD? First there is the paranoia about Apple tracking you through your DRM-less $1.29 downloads, and now there’s this big deal about no longer being able to convert DRMed AACs to DRM-less MP3s (discovered via boingboing.net.)

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afraid of apple

Wow. This story has actually hit the mainstream media. The BBC notes that people are paranoid about all that personal information embedded in the DRM-free songs offered on the iTunes Music Store.

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