The powers-that-be will always try to tell you that you can't make a difference. But that is and always will be bullshit. This year, the Dems grok it. The promise of America has always been about the little people. This isn't some brainwashed mob following some messianic figure out into the desert. These are people who have been kicked into the ground for the last eight years, who finally realize that, by banding together with like-minded people, they do have the power change things. Obama is only one person. At best, he can only try to get the doors open. It has always been, will always be, only ourselves who can get us over the threshold.

I don't know why. I've been once again obsessed with the sad and sorry life of Severus Snape, and how he lost the only woman he loved, and how his life was effectively ended after she was murdered.

So I managed to teach myself how to use Rails a little, mainly, how to utilize the magic that is ActiveRecord (which unfortunately probably took me at least 48 hours of sustained effort spread out over the last six days.) ActiveRecord makes me almost forget that I'm dealing with a SQL database. I don't have know any arcane syntax. I just have to know Ruby, which is an extremely Zen-like thing to know. (I know it's a stereotype, but, damn, you've got to hand it to the Japanese.) OK, I'm oversimplifying. I haven't really gotten the hang of join tables, but its nothing that convoluted kludgery can't get around.

I just wanted to say that there is a beautiful girl sitting across the room from me and it just reminds me how fucking hopeless I am. Hahaha.

When you get down to it, Mephisto has all the things I want in a blog engine. Non-crufty permalinks. (Only Wordpress formats its permalinks similarly, although you can easily get this from Blosxom.) A clean interface (Simplelog is probably the only one that is as clean.) A templating system that doesn't utilize nested angle-brackets (something that every single templating system out there has a problem with, except for Liquid, XSLT, and Erubis.) A templating system that strives to separate business logic from presentation (this is something I hate about PHP, and it's the thing that drove me away from Wordpress and which keeps me away, despite the fact that it has been the easiest blog engine to deal with so far. This is the thing that I love about XSLT despite its obtuse, arcane syntax. This is what I fear about Erb, because it makes it so easy to insert Ruby into your templates, leading to the potential of a PHP-like mess. Granted, Ruby is a much cleaner language than PHP, but still.)

A meditation on the not-quite cyclic nature of time, and how both the linear and circular models of time may be correct simultaneously. Soundtrack: “Clocks” by Coldplay and “Time after Time” by Cyndi Lauper

Dawn

Hope
is sweet honey
but is also bee stings in my mouth

Hope
is sweet  honey
but is also      like
                bee stings in my mouth

I know my desire
and yet I do not know
how I can make it Be

An electromicrograph-like etching of a 2D flower and the sky stained red.

All complex processes (life, economies, the Internet) occur upon a matrix of complexly organized homologous units that, observed in short time scales, appear to defy the laws of thermodynamics.