just finished listening to 1984 by george orwell - fucking depressing. the last 1/3 of the book is just the dude's ordeal - i felt like i was just being pounded by it over the head, just wanted to get thru it, one part nearly put tears in my eyes. i would say the book is interesting up to the point when he is taken. after that i would advise to use whatever substance or technique to detach oneself from one's feelings to continue. maybe i'm just a pussy. i get down easily. i dont wanna work. i dont wanna do anything. nothing productive. its cold out there. fucking benzino is still not talking - i stopped talking to him too. but its tense. that sucks. all i wanna do is to get stoned. or do whatever that captures my attention without requiring me to do anything. movies. stories. tripping. reading. my head seems to be hurting often now. my psoriasis is flaring like its going out of fashion. i hate christmas. when i first heard someone uttering this phrase i was outraged. now i'm a full convert. the only thing one can count on is change. i dont know how phx is putting up with me.

just doing a little light morning reading on crowd psychology... :D
i dont know how it all pans out in the end yet, but i found it interesting how they go thru the theories that gained and lost popularity, and i started thinking about how that seems to be the case in many areas of science: they have a theory, then they find too many exceptions, so they come up with a better 'story' for it, and so it goes, until hopefully the theory is accurate enough. that may well work in some cases. but this crowd thing got me thinking - what if a hybrid theory is needed? like the backbone of a crowd are people of similar beliefs who come together to act in a certain way, together, and then the rest are followers - easily influenced 'sheeple'... :D
like in a concrete construction - you have a steel frame to provide a degree of flexibility, and the concrete encasing it to provide the rigidity - at a low cost. as much as some would like to have it, people are not all the same, there's a variety of individuals within a crowd, and perhaps thats a key strength of a mob - versatility - not just pure strength in numbers. maybe there are more kinds of people in a crowd, if no 2 people are alike, which might make a crowd even stronger, more versatile, more decentralised - i'm thinking kevlar. or the interweb. :)
i donno, maybe its too early in the morning. maybe i should just stick to wire pulling. but i like this multi-prongage idea.

feeling pretty shitty lately. i dont think that gingko shit is good for me. sometimes it makes me feel a bit dizzy, slow and stupid - kinda like a stone, but without the pleasure. i should read up on it and probably quit it. maybe my moods have been rubbing off at work, because benzino has been having some hardcore hissy fits. i can tell he's pissed off, but he just wont talk. i think he's been hanging out with girls way too much. i think he said most of his friends are girls - no benefits tho. i donno.
totally losing grip on the work situation. benzino is now de facto running the site, and i'm the helper. except i'm also like a consultant. i like that part of it. i could chalk most of it up to seasonal affective disorder or something, and the recent cold temperatures. the closing in of christmas. the crappy situation on my account. the unfinished side jobs, people calling about new ones. i dont wanna do anything but listen to my stories and watch movies. and boogie. she's so cute. but sometimes she drives us up the wall. most often me.
i just wanna be a spectator for a while. an extended while. get stoned and enjoy. go to sleep when i burn out.
looks like i'm actually gonna have to read some books. count zero and monalisa overdrive are apparently not available in audio format. it might look weird for people to see me there, just sitting at the site. maybe if i went and read it on my coffee breaks at the starbucks...
pattern recognition was really cool. now i just started listening to virtual light, but its somehow different. i think i should do some kinda course that would improve my information extraction from spoken word. i really wanted to use the word 'aural' though... :)
that and speed reading. if i could speed up my reading speed, maybe reading books would be a more plausible activity for my tight schedule. as i perceive it.
i should go. my parents are waiting for me. i said i could install an outside outlet for their christmas lights. this is gonna be interesting.

i'm trying out a new drug - gingko biloba - see if that expands my horizons... :)

"...dude, its like totally not a drug, man, its an herb, and like the man says: "whats from the earth is of the greatest worth.""

driving up from oregon was fucking fucktarded - slow spots everywhere, humble folks without temptation ( which i kept thinking was "homophobes without temptation" until benzino corrected me), then the snow and sleet, trucks passing my slow ass, spraying the goddam sleet all over the windshield so i couldnt see anything, then accidents and jack-knifed semi's turning the I-5 into a friggin' parking lot back-to-back-to friggin' back, so we didnt get home till 2 am or so. even on the way down there was a few serious bog-downs, one of which turned out to be a friggin' burning minivan on the side of the highway! the heat was very noticeable even thru the closed windows. kinda reminded me of the treasure island show they used to have in vegas - really surprising how much you felt the heat of the explosions from such a distance. too bad they killed it.

listening to another story by william gibson - "pattern recognition". still having the same problem with the density of information sometimes - the dude packs so much info into a phrase, i cant do anything else while listening to it. well, i do anyways, cause i mostly listen while driving, but i often regret it because i miss stuff at times and have to rewind if i can. was happy to hear that the main character dislikes those square-toed shoes - i dont like them either! was happy for a moment in knowing that i'm not alone in this, until it dawned on me that, after all, it is a fictitious character. hrrumpf...
it was cool to find out that gibson lives around these parts. wonder if i'll ever run into him while doing a service call. might already have, before i knew who it was... i also just found out the other day that tom selleck - the dude that played magnum - also apparently lives around these parts! i was also surprised to find that apparently he is NOT gay.

i was really miffed today at the apparent disappeareance (hehe :D) of free wifi at coffee places around where i worked. i had to drive down a back alley to where i thought there used to be a weak signal as barely detected from a little coffee place before, opened my laptop, and found a weak-ass connection - free! kept my fingers crossed that the battery would last long enough for me to go to hotmail, login, attach my time sheet and email it to my office so i could get paid tomorrow! :O to my relief, it showed that it went thru... :)
felt like a bit of a back-alley techno-cowboy though - what a rush! :)

ok - gats ta git to sleep. shower first.

i think intelligence is the ability to solve new problems. hmm, maybe its more like intelligence can be measured by the ability to solve new problems. of course an intelligence may choose not to solve problems, therefore scoring poorly on our little test. maybe intelligence is too clumped a concept. i think it should be mostly about learning and applying new knowledge. making guesses. guesses that have a good chance of being correct. i've noticed that iq tests seem to often include questions on "classical" knowledge. knowledge of facts. knowledge and understanding of the pythagorean theorem. i'd level the field by giving the test takers new rules to solve problems with.

i like the idea that the internet, being the massively interconnected network that it is, with memory, might one day just spontaneously achieve consciousness. but it must have been something mark pesce might have said, that got me thinking that it might actually never happen spontaneously.
do we know any other intelligence than human? well, animals have intelligence - which we can see by observing them as they try to solve some kind of problem - like get to food. but then you see your dog barking at his own reflection, and your illusions of ur pooch's intelligence get rudely shattered. nevertheless - there's some intelligence there. but we're looking for conscious, sentient intelligence, arent we. if we're looking to create an intelligence that we could "hang out" with, then maybe we should try following the path we took to get here. who knows how life started, but maybe we could start at some kind of "thing" that would somehow react to stimuli. i guess we might be aiming at something like having a child - something in the end autonomous, that we could co-operate with, and be proud of its achievements. autonomy would be a life of its own. it would pursue its own goals. if we're looking at the internet achieving conscious intelligence that we could relate to, it would need goals. at least something to fear, something to work away from and something to work towards, a reward, a pleasure. a fear could be the threat of ceasing to exist, and a pleasure would be something that would be a plus towards survival. and perhaps as a strategy to ensure survival in face of changing conditions of life, environments - an interest in things "different", an exploring streak. and ensure the exploring streak is different in strength in the different representatives of the species, so that if curiosity kills one cat, it wont kill them all. i guess we could wait until something we do with the web unexpectedly gives it a purpose, a vector, or construct something like that on purpose. but maybe the web itself should be viewed more like the environment rather than the entity. i mean, there are people who personify the earth, but i dont know. well, if the earth gets wired enough with the net, it will be like its nervous sytem. its kinda like terence mckenna's idea, which i think he'd developed on someone else's - that the earth is like an embryo, still evolving, and the net is its nervous sytem, made out of the raw materials of the earth. that kind of scenario i could kinda see... and when the net is configured to manage itself, and figure out for itself how to solve its problems, thats when things might start looking interesting. until it figures out that we're a pest that needs to be gotten rid of. hopefully we're viewed as at least maintenance bugs, and just our population and exploits need to be curtailed a bit. but i cant see the net itself being configured to manage itself. it would be a maintenance program. actually, probably every part of the net would get its own, proprietary kind. it would be like multiple personalities. in the end they'd probably duke it out leaving a single one. unless they're created in a "flock", to have to cooperate with one another. but over time the different individuals of the flock might become integrated parts of the flock itself as an individual, for the sake of efficiency. i guess we'll have to see. we should probably run simulations of all these scenarios in isolated sytems, that the programs inside it would think that was the world. and we'd see from the outcome which programs are worthy. hehe - an eerily familiar scenario - i knew god was testing us! but for what purpose? what are we gonna be worthy of? or not...

why does life have to be such a fucking hassle. the side jobs full of unforseen shit. the expectations others have of me that i just cant live up to, but try and get stressed the fuck out. the eternally filthy place we live in. while trivial shit like silly curtains are being taken care of. it really sucks to realise we're slobs. i hate it. and i cant even come home to a relaxing shower because the fucking water temperature wont stay put. the bath tub fucking green. the shower curtain sticky. i walk around all day in my filthy work clothes. cant make love like normal people because the mother in law is sleeping in our bedroom. and this post probably wont bring anything good, either.

weird dreams

its like id heard or read somewhere that a politician somewhere punches another in the nose at their assembly-thingy, so the other guy shoots him. somehow i knew that would be the sequence of events when i started seeing it in my dream, on some tv. a few dudes were arguing in front of the main speaker-dude's chair, and then one of them punched him in the nose. the dude got up shocked, started arguing some more and produced this big WWII German looking pistol, and started chasing the guy around with it. when he had him pinned against the wall, antonio banderas appeared, trying to dissuade the guy from shooting the other guy. but i didnt actually see the shooting - i think i looked away. boogie looks away from me when she's pissed off at me or when i'm too much in her face. that couldnt be a learned behaviour. she hasnt learned much yet. so then the dude starts running around, i guess looking for someone else to settle a score with. i thought the people behaved like schools of fish - peeling away to the left and right from the line of fire, moving like a homogenous, uniform mass. and then one older lady didnt move - so he approached her with the gun. and i forget what she said exactly, but it was something to the effect of "i'm with you - lets kill those sons of bitches."

kinda weird, like another dream i had recently about being at some surfing location, and they had this tour for people, where you got on this bus, and then the bus drove very fast on this road that went out into the sea, and then ended. i guess they had to time it somehow, because we went into the water, and for a while there it looked like we were gonna drown, the bus started filling with water, i started breathing deeply, but tried to hold off with taking and holding a huge breath until the last possible moment, then i'd try to swim up to a window, open it and go for the surface. but i still wondered if the bus would move around too much and disorient me. but then the bus started coming back up, and then the bus was surfing! and then this guy with a ford suv was passing us on top of the wave. and i was like "where the hell does he think he's going?" and then he started sinking, and i thought that it served him right for trying that with a car obviously not good for that. hehe - like a bus is more intended for that kinda thing :) but then when he was almost sunken, the wave started sinking faster, and then receding, and the son of a bitch in the suv never slowed down, he just kept on driving, never missing a beat! i guess he knew what he was doing :)
ok - off to work.

just had this half-baked idea that if the 'mind' might be divided into conscious and subconscious, then maybe the subconscious tends to learn from everything it experiences, whether it be reality, movies or imagination. this somehow ties into something i heard from an ex once - she was getting pretty down after her ex and her broke up, and a doctor she went to, gave her a bunch of small round red stickers and told her to stick them in places she looks at throughout her daily routine, and every time she sees one, he told her to think of something positive. the idea was to 'force' the mind into thinking positively, give her a positive mindset. it also ties into my observation of how the ideas we seem to just 'get', seem to just pop out of nowhere, already formed. but i think i've also noticed that sometimes the conscious 'guides' the direction of these ready-made ideas - like when i'm trying to think of a solution to something, and i get an idea, but after analysing it realise that it wouldnt work perfectly, but most of it seemed to make sense, and so i keep thinking 'in that direction'. or maybe whats happening is that after getting a 'half baked' idea, i keep the part that seems to work and now focus on the smaller problem of making the rest of it work..? think, think, think, thats all i do... :)

i was goin' to be witty, and pretty, and gay - and comment to shenry's comment on phx' blog re: ascii smooching, so i painstakingly constructed a goddam ascii room with me and phx smooching, only to have blogger fuck it up and automatically delete all empty spaces but one in between actual characters in said goddam ascii room, forcing me to painstakingly fill all empty spaces with periods, which resulted in the revelation that unlike in the comment editor, the posted comments' periods take up less space than backslashes, resulting in further ascii room mayhem. after some more trouble that i must have blocked out, i finally decided to capture the screen of the goddam room as seen in the comment editor, chopped it to size in paint, and will now try to post it here, with perhaps a link from phx' comment thingy. what a clusterfuck.

i fucking hate bums. but i just thought - what if there's just a number of bums that are simply ruining things for people who actually might have got down on their luck and need some help, but are otherwise 'normal'. is there actually justification for these bums to live on the street and beg and steal? should i feel sorry and try to help any of them? and how? i should read up on this - there's probably been some kinda research and studies done on the matter. i wonder if anyone's done a project where they'd start from the ground up, as it were. start off with no money or anything, knowing nobody in the city. how would they do? would it be possible for them to get food, shelter, a job, an appartment, a car - move on up, like the jeffersons? how long would it take? of course it would be easier on the individual if he or she came from a 'normal' home, had no drug problems, no mental problems, their life was 'normal' up until that point. but i posit that it would still yield very valuable insight into the problem. a point to start from, a piece of the puzzle solved. then maybe the drug piece of the puzzle could be solved - how to get the bum off the drugs and into a position where the previous 'contestant' started. then follow the dude's path, hopefully learning from his mistakes. of course that might not easily apply to someone who's abusing whatever they're abusing because of a psychological problem, but that would be the next step to study, wouldnt it. i'd call it "the bum project" :)
then have an expose on the tele - so that people would know whether to give money to the bum, or the oraganisation that would help the bum better, or not to give money at all but instead form death squads and purge the streets and back alleys until they're clean. i wonder if any city has ever successfully dealt away with their bum problem... and how...

gonna be late for work again, because i just couldnt stop browsing thru Lorenzo's pics of Burning Man 2006.
i gotta make it out there one day...

apparently i'm an agreeable neurotic :)

My Personality

Neuroticism	73
Extraversion	47
Openness To Experience	59
Agreeableness	80
Conscientiousness	31

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saturday morning

so our boogie went to sleep around 8:30pm or was it 10 pm..? then maybe around 4 am wanted to eat plus pooped her diaper a bit. after that i stayed up for a while to look at some stuff online. then went to sleep. then maybe around 8am boogie woke up again - took a big dump, then wanted to eat. after it was all done we tried to put her crib together - turned out we couldnt find the baggie with half the screws. we went thru a lot of our shit still in boxes and bags - no sign of the screws. i made myself a coffee before starting the crib project. after failing to find the screws i made myself a little breakfast. after breakfast i finally finished my stone-cold coffee. i want another one. i need another one. maybe i could ask tina's friend across the street if she could score me a little rock to put in my coffee
i think i'm complaining. boogie is starting to cry again, and phx is trying to finally have her breakfast. gots ta go.

tired. dont know what to write. have fleeting glimpses of ideas, but i'm tired and there isnt enough time to write anything out. at least thats how i feel. maybe just how i feel.
our friends voider and nicole came over yesterday, brought food, cleaned up, showed us a bunch of pics from their euro trip. those two have helped us so much, that now i feel bad because we havent been able to reciprocate yet, and they just keep giving. they are the peeps that left our wedding reception when it was just getting rolling, to go back to our appartment and get the cases of wine we forgot. we better do something soon, or we'll never get out of the hole with those two.

and again no time to write about tina the crack whore...

it being september 11th, i saw a piece of some kinda show or whatev on the tele about 9/11 this morning, and got slightly miffed about people missing the point yet again: if 9/11 is revealing anything about the nature of god, it surely must be that he is NOT as christianity portrays him, and in fact he probably doesnt exist at all. maybe the vengeful god of the old testament would impart on mankind all these wars, hunger, and general suffering, the least of which was 9/11. whats with this religious/spiritual impulse in people? "thank you sir, may i have another!"
fucken bullshit.

got back home late because benzino and i worked till 7:30pm because peeps are starting to freak out that my shit is not gonna be ready for the occupancy inspection - whenever that may actually happen. i'd say fuck the peeps, but one of them peeps is my boss, so when my boss starts to freak out, i start to freak out. so i wired up the front door so that even if they have a fire alarm test tomorrow, my shit will pass. and thats all the boss really cares about. and everybody else, really - even if nothing else works, in case of fire residents must be able to exit the building safely and the fire department needs to get in trouble-free.
then i had to drive to home depot to pick up a longer concrete bit, because the ones the boss got dont cut it for more than 3 or 4 inches. then i'll have to find an opportunity to submit the goddam receipt to the orifice for reimbursement.
then i drove home and made myself a coffee and checked out my email, etc, finally giving into the fact that i've been needing very badly to at the very least rotate my tires, because i was already wearing thru the bare threads that were exposed on the corner of my front left tire. i finally did it. i've been trying to do it for like a week. another thing i've been trying to do for like a week is to swap out the existing light in Lily's room for the Ikea sun we got. but that had to be put off for yet another day.
and i'm falling asleep in front of the comp.

this was a comment i wrote on someone else's blog, and it was so good i had to make it a post in its own right :)


"ah, the unmistakeable call of that bitch, nostalgia...hit me pretty good one time when i was about 12 - my parents were balding and going grey, me and my bro realised they were feeling pretty nostalgic about us growing up into adolescents too, getting hair in odd places and all, which only served to deepen the overwhelming feeling. to boot, it occurred to my lil' bro that we'll probably never see gramma again, because she was already very old and we werent expecting to go back to poland anytime soon. we had a good cry that night.
dude - are you really trying hard to be cool? (or hip, as the case may be.) i remember trying to be cool in highschool, maybe sometimes after that, but i figure most people stop trying hard to be cool before they're 20. i donno if its hormonal, or psychological as a result of a shift in social pressures, or something else, but it seems like it just happens. maybe it wasnt as much trying to be cool, as trying to fit in? maybe its trying to fit in first, and then trying to be cool, from the platform of teenage normalcy. maybe "a" platform - there's the skaters, the goth, the gangsta's (apostrophe is not to separate the "s" but is rather the last char of the word "gangsta'" (now, that doesnt make it much easier to notice, does it)), the geeks. actually, now that i think of it - the goth WERE the geeks - they were the ones playing rpg's [ :) ], etc. but i think also the more of a "computer geek" you were, the less goth you were, and viceversa. so where was i? trying to be cool. or hip, as the case may be. so were you really trying to be hip, or were you just doing what you wanted because u thought it was cool, or hip, without much regard of what it might look like to others? {i love changing tenses within one sentence :) actually, maybe i dont actually lurve it, but i do it for some reason, even when i realise i technically shouldnt. in this case i think the way i wrote it sounded more natural. or looked like it would've sounded more natural, were it actually spoken out loud, that is to say ;) }i wonder if highschool-aged kids tend to take criticism harder because of their hormones, but also tend to be harsher critics because of said hormones. i remember hearing highschool girls going on and on about hating this and hating that, but loving something else or another. no lukewarm feelings about anything at all. but thinking a little more about it all, i also remember kids who seemed innately "just cool". :))i remember this one guy in particular - chris - long mane of hair, surfer/stoner talk, loud, somewhat obnoxious, smoker, laughed loudly a lot, had a cool girlfriend, was funny - people just looked up to him in some ways, or had some kinda respect for him, even though he didnt do that great academically. he didnt seem to be affected by the whole 'trying to fit in' thing. that was junior high. he started piping down in senior high - chopped the hair, wasnt quite as loud anymore. then i saw him a year or 2 ago - he was just a plumber. (maybe the piping down was forshadowing :D) hehe, on the other hand i accidentally ran into one of the highschool geeks at a party a while back, and he'd just sold his roleplaying paraphernalia store and was going to england to blow his monies on bigger and better things. how things have changed :) but yet another twist - i asked said geek about another geek - saul - whom he knew, who was in a few of my classes. this guy was so intelligent, i thought for sure he musta by now got on some kind of UN committee, or is lecturing at some university, or works for some animation studio, since i knew he'd gotten a gov't grant to do a short animated film right after highschool. nope. he did his short film, it fell through the cracks, and that was his last achievement in that department. he now apparently works as some clerk somewhere or something. that just shocked me. he was one of the most intelligent and eloquent people i've ever seen, and i last heard him speak in grade 11, in like '94. just sad.hehe, this should be an entry on my blog, not a comment on yours. ah, whatev :)so where the fuck was i going with this..? i'm at like a tangent off a tangent off a tangent here...right - shenry said, or seemed to have implied he was trying to be hip, and also seemed to be down about it. what i think happened, is that shenry remembered all the good times he'd had at stella's, but then he started realising that those times are probably gone for good because he doesnt hang out with his peeps there like they used to, and the kind of peeps that hang out there now has changed, making even more remote the possibility of those good times ever returning, and it made him sad that he lost something that he cherished so much. people dont like to lose things. adding to those 'negative' or 'low' feelings was the realisation that the new crowd hanging out at stella's was comprised largely of these 30-something year-old yuppies - people who in shenry's subconscious were catalogued as intrinsically uncool, they werent 'real', they were suburbanites, with "real" jobs and money to blow, family people for christ's sakes, yet they were 'trying' to do, to awkwardly emulate, what was defacto reserved for people actually 'living' their lives - namely hanging out at cool spots such as stella's. they invaded it and blanded the shit out of it. then a chilling suspicion creeped into shenry's mind. he was there too, shoulder to shoulder with these, these people. some might even say he fits their demographic... shenry is kinda like, one of them... this probably got shenry into such a pit that his fight-or-flight mechanism kicked in and he bounced. will this episode cause a mid-life crisis type of reaction in shenry? or will he re-evaluate his old preconceptions about "these people" from his "seasoned" point of view, and start looking at them like people who are perhaps like himself in some ways...?
sorry about the "seasoned", dude - it was just right there, i couldnt help it :D
but i agree with ghost, dude - ur cool, and i hope u dont think u've lost something along the way, but rather built an even higher coolness off a platform that kids cant see yet ;)
unless i'm completely wrong and you were actually trying hard to be hip. and you didnt like that because trying hard is just not cool. would your near-obsessive work-out and diet routines, careful personal grooming, playing hackey-sack in public places, frequenting cafe's, bars and clubs which rate high on the rosicrucians' coolness lists, all be manifestations of the odious and repugnant drive towards ultimate hip-dom?
why does shenry do the things he does? and whatever his drives - are they evil? if he cuts, does he bleed..?
;) "

i dont wanna work, i just wanna bang on a drum all day - lalala...
my work starts in 10 minutes. i now live probably a 45 minute drive from work. instead of sitting miserably in traffic, i'm still at home, surfing the net off somebody's unprotected wifi. maybe i could go to the supplier's and pick up something for work, thus excusing my retardiness to nearly zero.

had a brilliant idea today - white rappers should be called wrappers :)
sure you cant really tell just be listening to it being said, but they'll know what you mean... :)

ah, the joys of daddyhood :)
just spent my first (nearly) sleepless night for my boogie :)
first i was researching whether its ok for babies to drink cows' milk - turns out they cant process the protein very well, and it has to be broken down. basically all websites now seem to be saying that baby formula making is so strictly regulated that it is impossible to ever achieve the quality that commercially available formula have, if u were to try and make ur own at home, so dont even try! that just sounds wrong. even if it is true. so other than mother's milk, you have to pay for a chemical soup for you baby, and it is unconscionable to do anything else. phx and her bro's were raised on home-made formula. i know ur not supposed to apostrophesizeate "bro's" but i felt it should be made immediately visually clear that "bro" is the root of the word, and then its just a small step for man to jump to the conclusion that its an abbrev of "brother". and thats right - period after quotation mark, because the period wasnt part of the quote. other than that, i got very lazy about putting apostrophes where they belong, if the meaning is clear. i didnt stop using them because i didnt know where they go. went. omg, torture... hehe, where's the verb in that one, eh? ha! and i used an apostrophe! maybe i just delude myself that there's reason to my apostrophe madness.
our boogie is breastfed, but recently she's been wanting to eat a lot more, it seems. this seems to have coincided with a new feeding regimen recommended by a lactation specialist we went to the other day. maybe the new regimen fucked it all up. how are we to know? everybody and their fucken dog seems to have a different theory about baby feeding.
so boogie woke me up around 3 something this morning. maybe it was around 4. phx fed her according to the new regimen - still hungry. i burped her while phx expressed a bit more, then we fed her that - still hungry. i warmed her up some milk we had stored from last nite - still hungry. phx and her mom bought the ingredients to make home made formula tomorrow - but we needed it right now! who knew. so daddy put on his shirt and shorts, because his full length pants were in the bedroom where phx' mom sleeps, and scooted off to the local 7-11. they only had one kind of formula. scoot home, prep it, feed boogie - finally she got so drunk that while walking her around to relieve her obvious need for burping, she passed out. daddy was so happy :) happy are the parents whose child finally falls asleep content :)
look at me - blogging away about baby stuff - how things have changed :)

i'm not the avid, or rather addict blogger that my wife is, so i havent posted about the very recent arrival of our long awaited little bean - no aka Liliana - but we seem to just call her Lily :)
she's very cute, but recently mostly when she sleeps :) the poor thing has been having trouble with breastfeeding - she knows to suck, but gets freaked out when something actually comes out - i dont think i'd have to ask shenry to refrain, but then again, i just wrote this, so, where does that put us..?
awkward moments aside, i think Lily's jaundice was also making it harder for her, but she seems to have turned the corner just last night - after sunbathing for the whole afternoon, her jaundice seems to have subsided considerably, although the white of her eyes is still somewhat green, but her skin doesnt look like an orange anymore, and since about midnight she's been eating every 2-3 hours, like everybody says babies should, not every 7 like before. so it's been a bit of a sleepless night, and poor phx is just exhausted. and Lily has also been eating more consistently, with a much higher amount of long latches. hehe - look at me, using da baby lingo like it aint nuthin' but a thang, yos :) but she still gets these frantic lil' bouts when she's just too agitated to latch on and stay on.
ha! i just heard her cry out - back for another feedin' :)
but we love her so... :)

i was thinking recently - a dangerous pastime, i know (where is that line from, anyways?) - and i think i've finally been able to make the distinction between terrorists and guerrillas/partisans - they're both small (para-) military organisations, much smaller than their enemy, who usually happens to be a government, with an actual, full-sized, well funded military, but to me, the guerrillas, partisans, resistance forces, etc, focus on just fighting the man = the government and its military, while the terrorists attack regular, normal people. i got no respect for terrorists. leave the average joe out of your stupid conflicts! attack only those that you have a problem with, and leave the people who are just trying to live their lives, raise families, work at their jobs, and just lead normal schmuck lives. if you have a problem with someone, deal with that person, not with everybody in their country. stupid massive armed conflicts made me a firm believer in assassination - kill only the person you have a problem with - you'll let normal people keep living, and it might end up costing you less.
of course this post is about the most recent killing spree between israel and hezbollah, but its also about all other armed conflicts out there. so some hezbollah jerks had enough sitting at home and trying to live a normal life, which they probably were never good at, so they kidnapped some israeli soldiers and killed some of them. well, at least they were military. so israel starts bombing whole residential neighbourhoods in lebanon! i'd call that a terrorist act. even 9/11 was an attempt to get at get at the man's financial (twin towers) and military (pentagon) sides (if the pentagon was actually hit by a plane at all). but even 9/11 should have been done with no civilian casualties - it can be done! so the hezbollah launch rockets at a rush-hour train station crowds, etc, stooping to israel's level. not that they havent done that before. i still believe that israel is in the wrong to start with because they're the ones that invaded and occupied the land and called it israel. sure, historically they used to live there, but then they were gone, and all of a sudden they came back en masse because they were tired of being kicked around and persecuted in europe. well guess what - that land wasnt just sitting there waiting for you to come back, other people were living there! but every conflict can be resolved without resorting to mass killing.

approaching the transcendental object at the end of time

things are speeding up and getting crazier and crazier. or are they more and more crazy..? bah - no time for semantics. or propper grammar. "the crib project" is still going strong. bought a used wooden crib. noticed it had some scratches on it. thought i could sand them down and touch it up. then thought that it would be obvious where it was touched up, even if i found a good match for the veneer or whatever it is. so i thunk i'd just sand the whole bloody thing and recoat it with some thing nicer, more transparent. sanded one surface of one endpiece down with an electric sander, and thought there must be a better way. home depot sells these paint-on strippers - jusrt remove them mess with a putty knife. big mistake. the crap softened the wood more than the veneer, and so it was impossible to get it all off properly, so most of the crap just dried on, making the wood even darker, but still sticky, and the putty knife scarred the wood like a bitch. we went on to try and wipe at least some of the goop off with a paint thinnner, and sand the rest down. this has worked ok. i must have put like 4 full days of work into this by now, with other people helping too. i could have bought more than one brand new crib by now if i'd spent the time working. thats a big price to pay to learn a thing or 2 about woodwork. the crib is finally sanded and i test painted the first coat of the veneer onto a small area of the crib - we'll see how it turns out. its a crazy heat wave over here. i had sweat dripping down my face when installing the car seat for the baby. lots of swearing, but its done. noe just gotta certify it or whatever it is they do. phx' feet keep swelling like crazy, but she keeps helping. i'm very lucky to have her for a wife :)
i better get going help her prep breakfast and then onto our new place - try to fix the walls and test wash the carpet - see if its worth keeping.

thx for the birthday wishes toi! ;)

yeah, my birthday was a nice surprise, although it almost wasnt a surprise because i started to pick up too many little suspicious bits. but i like to be surprised so i usually let my surprisers do what they set out to do :) and it was fun! put on some tunage i like, started pounding back the brewskies, talked about some cool shizznit wit' da peeps, had a toke, went to the bar, had 2 rounds of tequila and a round of goddam 151 - that shit is just vile. and some more beers. then we drove thru mcdix and pigged out on greasy-ass food to coat our guts in grease so less alco-ma-hol would get absorbed, as well as having some of it absorbed into the bun, and diluted it all with the pop - think i had root beer... i like root beer :) only possibly second to sarsaparrilla :)
next morning / mid-day was... delicate, but didnt get to do any heaveage, which is always a deffinite bonus:) just watched the world cup final, and by the time the italians won, i was ready to be happy with them :)
good times were had by all:) except for the bit when Tara freaked out a bit after toking a bit too much and almost losing her eyesight and hearing for a few minutes. hehe - or like the last time she forgot she'd been eating black liquorice and then freaked out when she noticed her tongue was black - wish i'd been there :D

ah, what a turmoil of events - Phx' bros stayed with us for a few days, the edmonton oilers are doing surprisingly well on this comeback of theirs - we'll see if they actually win the cup tomorrow! :)
poland got their asses kicked by germany - kinda played hookey from work to see that one, or at least half of it :) it was a good game, but finally in the first minute of overtime the better team scored a very good goal. too bad the fans couldnt keep their pants on later.
went to the annual dragonboat races, which turned out to be mostly a big corporate presence gig with a lot of crappy volunteering and seemingly only a few decent volunteers actually trying hard to hold it all together. i dont know what they feel they get out of it. maybe i should ask them.
finally finished rigging together a semi-acceptable automated irrigation dealy for my 'rents, only to realise that i could have probably just used an off-the-shelf $20 timer and a lot less work for probably better results. where's that critical thinking when u need it. oh well, at least didnt spend $20 and learned a little something.
started wondering about maybe moving way out of the city and getting a job way out there, but then got into a catch 22: if i change jobs now, i wont be able to get a mortgage based on zero months at a company. if we buy a place out there somewhere, i'll have to commute from very far away in horrible traffic until i find something better out there. if i find something better. so we finally decided that we'll just comtinue with the present plan, and then slowly start looking at a better job out there, and if i do find one, its always easier to commute against traffic than with traffic. but i'll lose the 3 weeks vacation i should start getting this year.
a buddy wants me to do a job in a remote location - they'd fly me out into the bush and hopefully i'd get this done in 3 days. they'd pay well. but i'd probably have to take those 3 days off during the week - meaning it would come off my vacation time. the company i'm working for full time might not feel comfortable at the moment giving me 3 days off on short notice, especially in light of the fact that i'll be asking for like a week or 10 days off when our baby arrives - very soon. but the pay would be very good.
i've been thinking again about how to increase my income, while at the same time decrease the effort put into it. i thunk about how i had a few mediocre ideas, but didnt actually try implementing any of them, partly because they were mediocre. but then i got to thinking about how probably most ppl who finaly made it big with an idea, tried a few different ideas first, which didnt work out. and that brought me to a fact i am well aware of - that i'm not a doer, but rather a thinker. so i thunk i should really start exercising my will, not be such a spectator, but actually set some goals, set out a plan of action to achieve them, and then just follow the steps to achieve them! right now a big time waster for me is the computer - i use like i used to use TV: it's an escape. i should set out what goals i want to achieve before i turn the damned thing on. i sorta did this already - i wanted to write this blog entry, then go into the classifieds to lower my car price by $500, check email and go to sleep.
we'll see how it turns out! :)

booze, sun, and philosophy

ok, so it was gonna be "booze, drugs, and philosophy", but the druggiest it got was tylenol extra strength. oh, and there was pot.
went camping this may long weekend, same bat-place as last year, but in my fuzzy recollections there was a lake, not a river. well, this year it was a river :)
the boyz improved on their last year's hot tub design, and instead of digging a hole in the ground and lining it with a tarp they just bought a ginormous inflatamable pool. and used a bigger pipe to make the heating coil with. but only one pump. there was some fancy hydraulics in the plans, but i dont rem why it ultimately wouldnt work, or what the hell it was to actually do in the first place, although it kinda looked like they wanted to suck the water directly out of the river thru these pipes instead of using buckets. or actually just big coolers, or bins of some sort.
by evening the thing got hot enough that it was still comfortable when it started to rain. when it started getting colder somebody brought a tarp and we just pulled it over ourselves and the pool. it was awrite :)
oh the fond memories - passing the bottle of vodka around, followed by the chaser cup... being slammed into the pool from behind and hurting some chix legs with my jaw. i think nothing happened to me because i was so drunk :) and i got back at the dork that pushed me in by dragging him into the pool when he got near enough :)
nobody got my new favourite joke of "whats blue and doesnt fit anymore?" though... :(
and nobody liked my tunage, like "rubber bullets", by 10cc apparently.
oh well.
had some cool wondrous moments. i hatched a theory on my buddy that sounded something like "a high incidence of stupid but good looking chix in a society may be advantageous to said society by way of lowering the average level of sexual frustration and aggression of intelligent but aggressive males, thereby promoting cooperation as opposed to competition." sounds chauvinistic, but it was funny at the time :)
then i really got to wunderin', and started wondering why the earth's magnetic polarity keeps shifting and even reversing. i believe that the earth's overall polarity is the sum effect of the polarities of all the magnetic particles in earth, but my questions was: what makes all those particles face the way they face? what about other planets' magnetic fields - are they aligned with ours? or is every body independent? i guess i should look for the answers online...
another thunk i had was "why are there so many relatively small rocks in the world?" when big earthquakes happen, do they make the bedrock brake into all these small crumbs? or are there first huge rocks and then the elements break them down over eons? i start feeling impatient when i consider that to be the case. that would just take too long.

trying to pack for camping, but its midnight, i'm kinda tired, and theres still a bit to do. i had dreams of doing something different while camping this time - why go to all this trouble, drive so far into "wilderness", just to sit in one spot and get loaded, recover till noon next day, then repeat. twice. i mean, i think i tend to try and take some of this nature in a wee bit, but this time i wanted to do a little project - maybe build a raft out of whatever is available, or like a shack. but building a raft then trying to take it to the other shore of the lake, or to an island - that would rawk! :)
but i havent done my research, got no plan, so i guess we'll really have to try and improvise - big time. too late to grab a cordless drill from work and some big screws. but i wonder if i could find some big nails at my 'rents tomorrow morning... and a hammer. no - a hatchet would be more useful :) hmm, a couple more minutes pondering this and i will have a plan! :D but its supposed to rain a bit all day tomorrow. well, hope all the peeps already there have put up a tarp so we can have a fire... on which i can roast these kick-ass cheddar+jalapeno smokies i got today! :) man, havent had those in years... good times :)
talked to mr. mo for a bit today. the dude's got some interesting things to say sometimes. i thought he was from kenya so i asked him - yes he was. so i told him how i know this chick who went down to kenya to volunteer at a countryside orphanage for a bit, and then she's planning to make her way down to south africa. mr. mo said that apparently there's lots of volunteers and people like that in kenya, and quite a few english teachers, etc, but he said that a lot of them are "fubus". waza? "cia" he says. whaa???
turns out that kenya is quite the melting pot, with many different peoples, and among them refugees, as well as "terrorists" (he used the "finger quotation marks") and other people who are hiding out for some reason or another. and so there's apparently a bit of an intelligence agent community present, mostly to gather info. right away i thought of Interzone out of the movie "Naked Lunch", which i've vowed to one day actually buy and watch for a third time , but sober for a change. so far i think i quite like it :) i found out recently that it was made by the same guy that did "eXistenZ" or whatev the spelling, which i bought long ago but only recently finally watched. what a psychedelic dude - really funky shit. i think its david cronenberg.
so anyways, it was pretty cool to hear a bit of an opinion on africa from someone from there - i guess the word would be a "native". apparently theres quite an ethnic indian population in kenya, but apparently the perception of them by the black population is that they're not hard workers and all they do is talk about people behind their backs. but other than that, mr. mo says that people in east africa are generally friendly and welcoming. but the further north and west you go in africa, the worse the people get. apparently the people in northern sudan think themselves to be arabs and therefore superior to the non-arab population. cool to hear interesting little bits of info, even if it is somebody's opinion - right or wrong.
ok, its a quarter after 1 am - better finish packing and get to bed :)

the life quaquatic

we watched "The Life Aquatic" recently. it wasnt really all that, but it's got its points. i really like the locations, like in "The Royal Tennenbaums" by the same director. i think i've noticed the dude often sets the camera either somewhat low, or in some other way tries to include all of a room/space in the screen, with some really cool floor shots, cool looking lobbies, hallways, alleys, etc. and i dont know what it is, but it seems the picture is often crisper than in other movies. hehe - i wouldnt make a very good movie critic :) i've never particularly liked bill murray because his face seems expressionless most of the time, but i guess thats what he gets hired for - some people must like that i guess. he's much more alive behind the scenes in "the making of". there's a bunch of cool things in this movie, and i think its the unexpected stuff in it - like the pace or mood of the movie is pretty chill, but then there's these gunfight scenes - pretty cool. and the music is priceless - like the soundtrack is this cheap 80's synth tunage - pretty sweet :) another part of the soundtack is having this black dude, who later on i found is the brazillian musician seu jorge, singing acoustic adaptations of david bowie songs in portuguese. i like the sound of portuguese - it used to sound russian to me, and there's something about portuguese-language music that's unique, but i guess i dont know enough about music to really analyse it. actually, probably most of the examples i can think of are brazillian, so maybe i just like brazillian music. acoustic music especially, i think. i thought seu jorge sang/played out of tune sometimes, and maybe he did and they still put it in the movie, or maybe i heard wrong, but some other times i really liked what he did. i think he gave these classic songs a new, more sentimental sound, and it really fit well. supposedly his portuguese lyrics arent really that good, but to someone who doesnt understand, its just got this cool sound to it :) it seems like most people end up liking his version of "Life on Mars?" and something else - i was just taken in by the life on mars so much that i dont know what else i might have liked. plus the dude's deep, black voice, probably seasoned by what seems like chain-smoking, makes the tunes sound so much better! i never really got into bowie's whiny bits. anywho, looks like seu jorge is coming to town in june, so i'm pretty psyched and am gonna try to get some tickets :)

i havent posted forever, and just felt like doing it again after reading other ppl's blogs for a while. i keep seeing evidence of me being much more into "intake" of the world around me rather than any kind of creative activity.
phx is asleep - i presume. she's been having lots of trouble sleeping again recently. i still wanted to look at mortgage rates out there, and answer a buddy's email, thanking him for all the info on buying a place. and i wanted to answer my bro's email he sent me - 2 emails actually - but only pics in them. he went to azerbaijan again to visit his wife - they seem happy :) i'm worrying a bit about him - he was never into any kinds of drugs, but it seems since he moved across the mountains he's experienced some substances that i never have and would be reluctant to because, well, people turn into junkies and die from them. i dont know how much he liked those things, how much if at all he still does them, how much he's educated himself about them. maybe i should send him a couple links to erowid.org.
when he was in town a few days ago because he had a lay-over here on his way to azerbaijan, he mentioned something about how he felt all excited but like speedy, licking his gums as if he just snorted. this was relating to his general state of excitation about the trip, but the question keeps gnawing at me - why the fuck would he know that? it doesnt completely consume me, but it keeps popping up. i guess it bugs me enough, because last night i had a dream where he was telling me all about G. he used to know nothing about drugs, and he didnt care about them at all. if he were only the type to educate himself about this kinda shit. if he was getting into psychedelics, i wouldnt bat an eye, maybe i'd smile. people dont die off that. dont become junkies. dont spend big money on it. they usually have enriching experiences. at worst, they become burnouts after years and years of really beating their brains. people on uppers keep chasing the fleeting high, run outta money, steal, fuck up their bodies, probably eventually die. people on downers keep trying to get a little better every time, ruining their life and the lives of those around them in the process. until they OD.
maybe i'm seeing all black because its late at night. but i sure hope my little bro doesnt fuck it up for himself...

well, today is a decidedly better day :)
even though its 6:50 am and i still gota shower and go to work...
my recent raise to $21/hr left me feeling worse than any previous raise. probably because i went in with higher expectations. and i lost my nerve when the bosses spun the review a different way than i thought it would go. this conversion tool says i make $43K/yr, while my buddy used to make almost $75K like 10 years ago in a different city. he was self employed and subcontracting at that point. i believe thats what the "head tech" is making at my company right now. and he's been with the company formaybe 3 out of the 4.5 years that i've been here. the boss just seems to have favouritized him from the get-go. is that supposed to be hyphenated? mind u he's probably sold himself very well at the interview, as he has throughout his employment here. he's learned a lot straight from the boss here, and so now he actually probably does know the most out of all of us techs.
the conversion tool says that to make about a 100K the hourly wage must be about $48. like in 2 hours such a person would make what i used to make in a day. thats incredimable.
anywho, its after 7am and i still gotta shower and try to get to work by 7:30... good luck :D

i just saw "Desperado" - what a stupid movie. there's some cool-ish stuff in it, but i still dont get what the fuck was supposed to be happening. oh well.
i guess i feel like life sucks when whatever happens makes me feel crappy, especially when there's a couple of those things. emotions suck. those bad ones. wish i could turn those bad ones off and just logically figure things out. because i do like those good ones, just hate the bad ones. i guess its kinda like a drug - when u choose to live with one, theres good things and bad things attached. but i guess emotions are a kinda "logic" thats hardwired into us. there is no meaning to life - it just is. we're here - guess might as well do something with it. i keep thinking of getting stoned, but cant avoid thinking that a stoned lifestyle is not all that either - the memory problems, the mood swings after, the logic errors. a friend of mine recently said that life is as you perceive it, and thats all that matters. but just because a problem is not bothering you, doesnt mean that the problem is not there. just fucking problems everywhere. i dont even know what the fuck i'm saying

i just saw this movie "sideways" and this movie "hellion". hellion turned out to be an australian movie. sideways had a guy who was about to marry in a week , screwing this chick he just met 3 ways from sunday. i thunk it was kinda... uncool. i was hoping he would decide not to marry the chick he was gonna marry - would have been probably better for her too. but hey - he screwed her good. his wife not-to-be and his... fuck-puppet. well, he actually did marry the chick he was going to. after being severily beaten with a motorcycle helmet. felt pretty good :)
this must have been the first, or one of the first times that i'd gotten drunk on red wine. red wine and ginger ale.
pok 0 wine caa in ye poj0ghiste snnnns

ok - i have no idea what that that just said - but i sure hope that its not a nobel morir

which again - i dont kno what thsats about, but i hope every one enjoys themselves;)

ciao! ;)

i just saw my baby kick! :D
not only finally felt it for sure, but even saw phx' tummy move! :D
that was cool :)
my lil' baby is gonna be a boxer, or a vault-polist 'er 'izer 'person :)
apparently i was an active lil' fetus too :)

now it feels all too mundane to write a thunk i had a bout "artificial" sentience. well, it wasnt even a whole thunk. i was just on one of my kicks (that i hope something will come of some day) about how i should really strive for self-realisation. figure out what i really want, but - then just do a little self-check just to see why i think i want each one of those things, just to weed out stuff that might prove to really have been just a hype, and not something i'd personally really want. then figure out ways to achieve these goals, and get on doin', stopping to re-evaluate once in a while, but not too often, so that something actually gets done. unlike my side job - which has been with me for an eternity now, and just when i thought i got the bitch working, turns out the bloody thing crapped out over the weekend. too bad i didnt have the clarity of mind to think to do the calculations before i overloaded the goddam power supply. i guess its a tribute to its resilience that it worked a few times for an hour or 2 at a time before. it just couldnt handle it long term. i hope i dont have to cough up for a new one - i dont really wanna put any more into this.

so anywho - goals and achieving them. some peeps have posited that the web might achieve sentience some day. but what does that mean - awareness? out of what? why? i can see something of an evolution though. wonder if i should post my idea or might it not matter because someone else will soon enough..? maybe this already exists - viruses seem to have been pretty "stupid" bots till now, or so i think. but would programmers make a virus that would "work" with information available off the net? in what way? i suppose data extraction programs already do that. i guess to be more like life, it needs to get out of control, have some kinda morphing built into it. but that would be so random. wouldnt it be more elegant to give it intelligence to try and improve itself in some kinda reasoned way rather than purely by chance? hmm, but would it actually be more efficient..? i sometimes think that evolution seems to be working "vectorally" somehow - i guess mutations or differences seem to be thrown up pretty randomly, but then once a mutation seems to work, more changes seem to then happen in that "direction". but maybe its not really like that either - maybe its only that after a mutation establishes itself, it then limits the possible mutations that may happen after it. like a pair of gills might be an awesome mutation in the water, but once ur living on land, its kinda useless, and it just wont survive. but the gills in water may get constantly refined . until theres no more food in the water, and then it would pay to be able to breathe at least a bit above water.
i once read somewhere that british telecom was developing programs that route telephone network traffic, and they would actually like "mate" 2 diff progs, and a 3rd one would be made, and then it would be allowed to work, but if it didnt do a better job than its parents, then it would be terminated by its parent. something like that. they were hoping to get the programs to evolve themselves. i wonder where they're at with that now...
but anyways - the web is full of info, u'd just have too have a pretty good program with a goal, and it would do its thing, but then if it could actually set its own goals, and what would we think of those goals, and would it piss us off if we couldnt do anything about them? :) i guess it would take a good programmer to start with, to write a program that would survive the longest, or forever... :) including something that would let the goals vary, so that if survival is a priority, the chances of survival are actually good :)
i bet there's programs like that already... :)

CFA Solutions

went to help out a buddy today at the site he runs, and i guess he's somewhat frustrated with the way the company runs, especially at this point, when his building has to be ready for the occupancy readiness inspection, and he's not ready, in part due to the company. at any rate, we were hard at work at the local coffee shop, when phx calls me from her commute from her day-job to her tutelage-job, and got increasingly annoyed at the traffic while on the phone with me, producing ever more colorful expletives. i dont know, but somehow i thought at that moment that it was cute the way she cursed, maybe a good choice of words. at any rate, one particular "bouquet" stuck in my mind, and i told the guys how my baby just called her current traffic jam situ a "cluster-fuck of assholes" :D
to which my buddy responded that THAT is what our company should be named! that was funny :) i should get started on making a logo :) have t-shirts, put the logo on soup cans, cd's, what have you :)

i've just discovered podcasts - awesome! :)
i've so far only been listening to matrixmasters.com
was happy to find some terence mckenna there that i havent heard before, and started listening to some new peeps. some interesting shit, some not so much, this one dude who alternated between sounding too stoned to answer questions, and eloquently explaining some other points. this was from burning man though, raising the probability of him being at the very least burnt out, to near-certainty. the second last speech that i listened to today was by the dude, Lorenzo who runs matrixmasters and who undertook the podcastage, and i was really pleasantly surprised by the quality of his speech, and its content. i recommend listening to it :)

i've recently started feeling that the environment is beyond "saving", and that we can now at best hope to just keep it as healthy for as long as possible, until we can start moving "off-world", so more should be now spent on space technology. mind you, it would probably be cheaper to send garbage off-world than to try and terra-form a whole new planet or moon. still, we have to be able to master traveling and living in space soon, because the earth wont have enough resources for a second go...

GETTING MARRIED IN 5 HOURS! :D

phx is just getting her hair done, i already got my make up on, just gotta wax my armpits, and i'm ready! :D

well, the last 2 details are not true, but i DO have to return the baloon inflator and then drive like 2 hours in super windy weather to my 'rents", git my shirt ironed, get the 'rental blessing and git on out to the church - while making a gazillion phone calls trying to do some last minute micro-managing :)
i got asked yesterday if i'd be tossing and turning all night - i responded that i'm too tired to do that - and it was true - went to bed around1:30 i think and after getting an average of 6 hours of sleep for the last many days, there was no sleeping problem.
ok - i'm off to the rodeo! :)

its been a while since i've had a cool idea in the shower. when i used to smoke the whacky i had them a lot more often.
i was thinking about how i dont think i'm a very self-determined person, and how hard it is for me to make decisions, and most often i just choose to (or not to) ride the waves that come along.
i thought that maybe i should try to get onto the self-determined path and just think about what i want, and then a way to get to it. or better yet - 3 ways, just to force myself to think about the problem for that much longer, giving myself a chance to find a "better" solution. and then just go for it. i'm sure some of these goals will prove to be total blunders. but at least i'll start learning to play the game. maybe along the way i'll find a way to refine my aim. by then i should have good skills to actually get there. the process will be faster, more efficient, automated. noam chomsky says that automation was invented not in order to make things more efficient, but rather to give the management control over an operation - instead of having highly skilled workers, a machine would do all the work, and its overseer would require a much smaller set of skills, therefore he would be less paid and more easily replaced, the replaceability being the key factor. but in my case, i'm shooting for the propagandist purpose of automation - efficiency. i want to just be used to making decisions, determining where i'm going, determining the steps to take to get there. these days i only every now and then have some cool ideas, but they just evaporate away, i forget about them, or just dont follow thru with them. i need to start dealing more with concretes. on the one hand, people who insist on getting facts, concrete information, white or black - they just anoy me. things are often not that simple, there's many things to consider. but how much easier must this kinda behaviour make things for them! while i'm debating the pro's and con's of having white sugar in my coffee or none at all, because there is no brown, they're already driving away to order another shipment of white sugar because business is booming.
i guess thinking in terms of concretes, units, gave rise to spoken words, writing systems, letters and print, mathematics and computers, etc, but we now forgot the other model, the other way of looking at things - that all these seemingly individual things, are part of a whole sytem, our world, our universe.

once upon a time i commented on shenry's blog...


"dude - so feel for ur paw... in the name of all canadians, i'd like to say that i'm very sorry.
i guess we've come to an understanding that border dudes tend to be frustrated cop wanna-be's, and i figure this attitude of "protecting" ur country and the qualified peeps in it is deffinitely encouraged from their superiors. on both sides.
my brother once wanted to go on a crazy motorcycle tour after he graduated from the local tech institute: down the coast, and then maybe a bit east, and then back up to canada. he was gonna check out area 51, grand canyon, umm... what else is there to check out? ;)
so anywho, the border-fuck asked him what he's doin', howcome he's got this big back-pack, so my bro told him, and then he was asked if he's working. "well, no" he said, "just graduated." i think they told him to pull over, and then that dude or some other dude came out of their little building and handed him this piece of paper and started telling him he's been denied entry and wont be allowed entry until he proves that he's working in canada and pays his bills, and bla bla bla. my bro was just astonished, looking at the paper he was just handed, trying to make sense of it, his trip took some planning, and now it wasnt going to happen. and the border fuck is like "look at me when i'm talking to you!"
anyways, my bro got turned around and sent back home, and hasnt had much inkling to go down south since.
recently, while crossing the border to visit phx' family, i glimpsed some kinda little poster-type thing, almost as if targeted at the border fucks, saying something about them being the representatives of their country, and so to act professional or something. maybe thats the thing to do: when one of them gives u attitude, ask to see his manager, and write to all gov't representatives above him, as far up as possible.
i seriously dislike going down to the states, and really mostly because of the attitude at the border. that and the flag-flying and ribbon-stickering everywhere. someone in china had a great idea and made millions off these new american nationalistic sentiments. they're doing canada pretty good too, but thank god we havent been hit by ribbon-sticker mania just yet. but other than that, i remember noticing how nice i thought some people in san francisco were, and i've heard from phx' mom that once people sorta got to know them, they, in general, turned out to be pretty nice too. i guess people are people, anywhere u look, but its not necessarily that governments are evil, either, because governments tend to be the mere shadows cast by big business. thank you noam chomski :)
that logic works for me: business creates the facade that government is, to create seemingly legitimate laws that create an environment that most facilitates the flow of wealth from as many sources as possible to said business. i wonder if, in their greed to harvest from ever larger markets, trans-national corporations will be the end of countries... oops! look at the european union :D i guess that will be the end of idiot border guards, and an influx of idiot mall security...
but in the meantime, there's plenty of businesses that depend on the countries they're based in for protection from pesky competition, in forms such as import taxes and duties, tax breaks for themselves, subsidies, etc. and if they can keep these convenient structures in place by making small, tax-deductible donations to political organizations, just so they can recruit more people for their cause, then why the hell not - its a very logical investment! as long as the politics game continues, government stays in place, the public's attention is on it, and not on the actual shadow-casting powers that be, and the money keeps flowing. so i guess the NAFTA problems are just the struggles between trans-national corporations and single-country based companies: the big guys want nafta, the "small" guys dont. seems to me like big corps got us little peeps in their pocket: we like the cheaper stuff they're able to provide, and we wanna work for them because they pay more, or at least got benefits or something. unless people start acting more along non-economic lines. but then i think of the fair trade coffee thing, and how corporations have adjusted to that. also - is that all the choice we have? support big business or huge? but it wasnt always like that - there was the seemingly business-less communist idea. but that didnt seem to last very long. maybe because of man's seemingly built-in sense of greed, in all its colors and shades. greed is such an ugly word - how about gathering instinct..? with the twist that jealousy provides, because even if you think you have enough, the next guy has more, and if the unforseen occurs and he survives because he has that much more and u die? i wouldnt think this would be conscious - more like a hardwired reflex which u inherited because ur predecessors survived thanks to that reflex, and those who didnt ... didnt. now, a question straight out of "Dune" - are u a human, whose mental ability has evolved to be stronger than the hardwired reflex of an animal? will you survive, or will u die?
hehe, politcs and evolution - i always seem to end up babbling about those :)
but back to paw - maybe the border fucks found it somewhat suspicious that anyone would want to go to a colder place for vacation. and there's plenty of pot up here too, so unless paw's got a killer strain and nothing else does it for him, or he doesnt want any pesticides... i also figure its good to go when its busy, so they just want to get everyone thru and be done with it.
i was also wondering what paw does out there, just being a hermit? just has enough daily chores to keep himself busy enough? or is he like writing books? just wondering what a guy would do all by himself all the time.
ok, time for beddy :) "

meandering thoughts

i sometimes think of a person's dna as a sort of switchboard, where different traits are either ON or OFF. same for traits of character. but some traits of character are controlled directly by genes that are on and off. maybe even all. some traits, of character or not, might be controlled by a single switch. some traits might be the result of a specific sequence or combination of ONs and OFFs. one such switch, or combination of switches might be the willingness to co-operate. or maybe thats a combination of relatively low agression, and an ability to recognize the benefits of working together versus working alone. thanks to those, we're able to live in societies. being able to learn by example is probably very important. maybe it wasnt even as lucid a trait as being able to recognise the benefits of working together, as needing to work together - for survivial. and all of a sudden, what no one individual was ever likely to reach, a diverse pool of people did attain. sharing of resources, pooling of efforts, parallel processing... would we have gotten this far if our agression was turned up much higher? (yeah, maybe it's more like an array of dials rather than switches...) if we were all agressive and no one was meek, how could the power of many ever be harnessed? or all meek and no agressives. there might be no direction, because no one would feel like imposing their will on anybody. maybe societies are something like pyramids - people who wont take direction from anybody either end up at the top, or die in the process. then people who just have a tendency to impose their will, but will take it up the ass for a time and with benefits. they control people with yet less drive behind their will. that way, a BIG push can be made in one direction. sheer brute force works ok, but greater yields seem to occur when ur underlings actually somewhat agree with u - that way they truly do push in the same direction as u. enter propaganda = public brainwashing. or the brainwashing of the public. the public being the masses with something of an opinion? a direction? a few fiascos in that department, and the name propaganda gets enough bad connotations that it must be renamed to public relations. a little stick and a bit o' carrot and the donkey hopefully runs more or less where u want it to. which might be towards a precipice, but all u can see is the paradise on the other side of it. oops!