mahiwaga

I'm not really all that mysterious

2010

Jan 2010 Feb 2010 Mar 2010 Apr 2010 Jun 2010 Jul 2010 Aug 2010 Sep 2010 Dec 2010

Jan

I am trying to blog again. It used to be such an important thing for me. In past nine years, it has helped me crystallize a lot of my thoughts. It has helped me tease out a lot of recurrent themes in my life. It has made it easier to isolate a lot of my self-destructive behaviors and thoughts. (Whether or not it has actually helped me deal with them is another matter entirely, but, as they say, knowing is half the battle.)

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the quest for chilaquiles

I realize how pathetic it is that I grew up in L.A. and I don't have any idea where to find a place that makes chilaquiles. I never even had chilaquiles until I moved to Chicago, and found this place within walking distance from my apartment that I would go to as often as feasible. In San Diego it was pretty much a Sunday morning routine (at least, on the Sundays I would actually wake up at a reasonable hour before all the breakfast places were mobbed.)

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that's probably pretty low on the differential

So I've got this pain in my right foot that's been bugging me for the past couple of days. It's not terrible pain, it's just annoying. Over the years, it's come and gone, and it's never really lasted long enough that I've thought much of it. What it probably is is just run-of-the-mill plantar fasciitis. I should probably just take some NSAIDs and do some calf stretching exercises.

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the book of eli SPOILER

You remember how Ray Bradbury sued Michael Moore for just using the title "Fahrenheit 911"? Well, I hope Ray Bradbury doesn't sue the Hughes Brothers for stealing a major conceit from the book.

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trying to remember that there is good as well as evil in this world

The first time I encountered the clinical aspects of child abuse was when I was a third year medical student doing my pediatrics rotation. The outpatient portion of my rotation had me going through all the various subspecialty clinics. One of these subspecialties was child abuse.

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Feb

to be and not to be

This is the first chapter of the Tao Te Ching I ever read, and it totally blew my mind.

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There is a trend in the fantasy genre that I kind of wish never took root: the multi-book series. Every author seems intent on publishing ten-thousand page epics, each one longer than the last, with no end in sight. The most egregious of these seems to be The Wheel of Time, by the late Robert Jordan. The twelfth book in the series just came out in October of last year, nearly twenty years since the first book came out, and there are still two books to go. And despite the fact that since the sixth book, I've felt that I've just been strung along on a wild goose chase, I still plodded through the monstrous volumes, still wanting to at last reach the end of that gargantuan tale.

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Mar

oh noes! something on the internet pissed me off!

I'm still not really in the right frame of mind to write a well-thought out blog post to explicate the thoughts that led me to stop visiting Friendfeed for now.

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One of the other reasons why playing Final Fantasy XIII has been therapeutic to my mind is that I don't have to be online to play it. I don't have to read the idiocy that is part and parcel of World of Warcraft's Trade Chat, where racism, homophobia, and misogyny are frequent features. I don't feel the need to Command-Tab over to some social media site and read about atheists bashing Christians, Ayn Rand-inspired insanity, and people jumping all over other people who happen to react viscerally to racist terms, even when they realize it's being used ironically, and not in a malicious manner at all. Instead, all I have to do is watch the pretty animation and mash on a limited number of buttons.

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not so final fantasy

I'm a total sucker for this series, having played the very first one on the original 8-bit NES, back when I was still in 8th grade. I played FFIV (originally released in the U.S. as FFII) right before I started college, FFVI (originally released in the U.S. as FFIII) in my (I think) sophomore year. When FFVII came out, I ended up buying myself a Sony Playstation my senior year in college. I played FFVIII during my first year in med school. I skipped FFIX and FFX/FFX-2, and have never played the MMORPG FFXI, but I played FFXII during my 3rd year in residency, while on vacation, right after one of my cousins died and I was feeling decidedly antisocial. It's kind of weird realizing how all these games bring back these memories of things that happened right around the time I played them.

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it's always darkest right before it goes pitch black

I've always believed that despair is not synonymous with the absence of hope. But it now just occurs to me that despair is actually when you begin to believe that having no hope would be preferable to the slim fragile sliver of hope that you're clinging to, even as it wounds you with its seeming impossibility, like a piece of shrapnel inching its way slowly through the flesh of your heart with every beat, as your life's blood seeps away drop by drop while you pine away for something you can't figure out how to achieve, no matter how many nights you've spent lying awake in the darkness, your gut paralyzed, silent, and still, acid gnawing and rasping at your entrails.

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Apr

the glue of civilization

It's like some people completely ignore the fact that a civilization cannot survive without people giving a shit about other people who aren't related to them. The higher the proportion of stupid, selfish assholes there are in your civilization, the faster it will collapse. Cooperation with non-relatives is the only reason why we managed to evolve from the savanna and not get completely wiped out by other animals who are bigger and stronger than us. Behavioralists have classically called it altruism but, in reality, it's enlightened self-interest.

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random completely out-of-context thought on a slow tuesday afternoon at work

It's not much of a sacrifice, to hold back so she could be with the better man, if there wasn't any chance she'd be yours anyway.

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a dearth of creativity

For some reason, I started looking back at my blog posts from exactly 3 years ago and I just realized that somehow, despite working 80 hours weeks which included 30-hour calls every four days and some rather intensely harrowing experiences, I somehow managed to write a lot. I honestly don't know how I did it. Now that I have more free time, I can't seem to put two words together into a coherent thought.

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orphan is down SPOILERS

I missed ToC25 again because everything seems to conspire against me making it home before 7 p.m. PDT. Besides, I've been having problems with terrible latency, as bad as 3,000 millisecond pings, which may actually be a problem with the latest patch if the forums are to be believed. So I ended up finally beating Final Fantasy XIII instead.

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picking through the debris

in the shadow of the white mountain gleaming
still ice-crowned though the cherry trees blossom
the sky pale blue as the warmth of daylight fades
I'm lost in a memory of a dream forsaken

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fantasy genre mashup

Because I read all four existing books of A Song of Ice and Fire right before I started playing Final Fantasy XIII, I keep wanting to call one of the characters in the game "Jon Snow" instead of just "Snow".

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help, i'm trapped in a disney movie, and i'm not the hero, or even the sidekick

The Americana at Brand is one of those hybrid residential/commercial developments that sprung up like weeds during the housing bubble, featuring high-end boutique shops and restaurants with condos on top of them. They're basically the next-generation mall, carrying on the long tradition pioneered by Southern California, of creating quasi-high-density pseudo-urban experiences in the setting of a private development (see also the Paseo Colorado, L.A. Live, The Grove, Universal City Walk, Downtown Disney, etc.)

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the future is already here, it is just unevenly distributed

So I finally got a look at an iPad today. Surprisingly, I haven't been to the Apple Store at the Glendale Galleria in a long time.

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life? don't talk to me about life

The other day I was eating by myself at a restaurant and happened to overhear a heart-to-heart conversation between (two people who I assumed to be) a father and his teenage son. The father had (something like) this to say:

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I think it's naive to believe that for every argument, there is someone who is right, and there is someone who is wrong. The most fractious arguments I've witnessed are between people who were both right in their respective contexts, with no obvious way to harmonize their conflicting mind sets. The question is, in an argument, do you go for the win and try to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that you're right and the other person is wrong, even if it means destroying a relationship? Do you try to aim for common ground, even if it means compromising on your beliefs? Or do you just keep arguing until the other person gets exasperated and quits entirely? Or is there some other option that I've never managed to consider?

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you seem a decent fellow. i hate to kill you.

So I just finished watching "Kick-Ass" and starting thinking about revenge fantasies.

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little girls who will stab the hell out of you if you cross them

(And of course, this reminds of the time when my sister was six, and she got really mad at our neighbors and chased them down the street wielding an axe. True story.)

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face it, there are a lot of advantages to centralized control

I've been struggling with playing Dragon Age: Origins on my MacBook Pro, mainly from problems that have nothing to do with actual game play. From the system requirements, I would've thought that I have an adequately spec'ed machine to play the game, but I'm plagued by mysterious intermittent slow downs and lock-ups. I'm fairly certain it's the game, since I don't seem to have problems running other apps. But what it reminds me is why I tend to stick to consoles for gaming.

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You may scoff at this as being mere political correctness, but I say it's about precision.

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So it's been a little more than a month since I stepped away from Friendfeed. To be honest, I didn't expect to be gone this long. I really did need to take a break though. My initial intention was to walk away for a few days and let the threads fall off my front page, and let my temper cool. But work got really busy, and the past month ended up being pretty rough. The whole episode pretty much took a back seat to everything else I had to deal with. But the longer I stayed away, the more I felt that I had to work through why I got so pissed off before I came back.

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Jun

the time of the elves is over

I was listening to 30 Seconds to Mars "Kings and Queens" before I went to sleep last night, and the first thing that popped into my head was the Exile of the Noldor and the end of the First Age from J.R.R. Tolkien's The Silmarillion

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I'm going to see how feasible it is to write a blog post on an iPad with my contacts off. The screen is probably only about three inches from the tip of my nose, and I have to do it with only one eye open because there's such a big difference in the power of my left eye versus the right.

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pondering the dream

It's been a couple of days already and I'm still obsessing about a fairly vivid dream I had. I think I need to sit down and reflect a little, and maybe write out some of my thoughts when I have more time. We'll see if that actually happens today.

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I seriously haven't been able to concentrate on anything today. I wonder if I just had way too much caffeine today. Or maybe I still haven't recovered from sleeping only for four hours Sunday night. Whatever the reason, it doesn't look like I'll be writing anything substantive tonight.

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Jul

unspooling ariadne's golden thread

So "Inception" totally blew my mind. A lot of thoughts have been streaming through my head since, and the synchronicity of some of these thoughts have been kind of unnerving.

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team composition, and the art of group dreaming

WARNINGS: (1) more "Inception" spoilers (2) more incoherent, meandering blog posts

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low quality dreams

I've been disappointed at the dearth of dreams I've been having since I watched "Inception". There are only two that I remember. The first one was fairly vague. All I remember is trying to hijack a Final Fantasy-style airship. The second one involved me and my ex from high school in an alternate timeline where we never broke up and we were supposed to go to a wedding that I first assumed was in Las Vegas, given all the casinos and hotels, and the fact that it was the middle of the desert. The only thing that was totally off was the fact that this dream city had a port, and I remember thinking in my dream "When did Las Vegas get a port?" The dream involved searching for a particular book in all of this dream city's bookstores. Yeah, not very exciting.

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Aug

So I had a dream that was a mashup of "Inception", Starcraft II, and the archetypical American Western.

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an idle mind is the devil's playground

So I've been in a weird mood all weekend. Maybe it has something to do with the recent solar flare and the incoming coronal mass ejection. Maybe I'm not getting enough sleep. Or maybe too much sleep. Probably, I'm not getting enough exercise.

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i need new hobbies

Maybe I need to find something else to do with my free time besides play games. I dreamt that a cadre of undead businessmen and their zombie minions were trying to strong-arm the mayor of my Sim town into letting them build a sprawling mall-and-parking lot complex that would cause untold ecological catastrophe. While the Sim mayor tried to stall during negotiations, a detachment of space marines from Starcraft landed in drop pods and annihilated the legions of undead.

simple is forgetting. i simply can't forget.

It occurs to me how much less angst I would experience if I stopped imagining certain scenarios as "what if" and just accepted them as "never gonna happen". What is gone is gone.

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wandering through these streets

If I dwell too much on it, it does depress me how much I feel like my life has shrunk. This was, to be sure, inevitable. Almost all of my energy is spent working so that when the day is done, I just don't feel like doing anything at all. Because, sadly, whatever remaining energy I have gets spent on the arduous commute home. The East L.A. Interchange is evil, and whoever designed this monstrosity needs to be punished.

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westbound on the 10

I'm starting to notice that the days are getting shorter. It swear it was only a few days ago when I could still make it home long before the sun would set. Now I'm driving home with the sun in my eyes most days, trying to make it before the sun disappears. But I guess I don't mind watching the sun set too much.

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i so rarely catch the sunrise

I've been in an odd mood lately. It's weird how the end of summer still gets to me.

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Sep

the end of summer

I can't believe how much it already feels like autumn.

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Dec

So I've been completely neglecting this blog, to the point where I didn't even realize my web host had suspended it (I'm not entirely sure why. I thought I was still paying for hosting, but I guess I was wrong.)

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