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! :)