September is when I set sail
under duress
amidst the crashing waves of disappointment
driving me far from shore

Since you and I never came to be—

It's odd, but I'm starting to look at the disaster that has befallen Wall Street like something akin to a person having a stroke or a heart attack. Sure, the symptoms are most dramatic during the acute phase, and it's the acute phase that's probably going to kill you, but it's important to recognize that what a stroke or heart attack means is that this person has been sick for quite a while. Coronary artery disease and cerebrovascular disease don't just develop over the course of a week. It takes years of unhealthy living to get you to the point where you are vulnerable to having a heart attack or stroke.

trust not to hope
hope will have you believing in things
that have no hope of coming true
and despair is not the absence of hope
no, despair is hope so thin and frail and fragile
hope so deadly, so fell, so fraught with peril
a thread of hope so sharp, so razor-thin
cutting deeply, jaggedly, viciously

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.

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.

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

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

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

The Galileo space probe meets its end in the atmosphere of Jupiter. The [last day of summer][x1] always leaves me [cold][x2] [x1]: /2001/09/22/the-last-day-of-summer “The Last Day of Summer • 2001 Sep 22 • Foobar” [x2]: /2001/09/30/last-days “Last Days • 2001 Sep 30 • Foobar”