seems like i often "just dont wanna do" things when i'm feeling uneasy/apprehensive about the thing, like i feel intimidated by the task in some way - either i figure its gonna be a lot of headache, grief, its gonna take forever, is very important, or holds a lot of weight in some respect.

and if sober, i'll procrastinate until the last minute - which i seem to do a LOT, with many things. or if i get high or drunk, then i'll do it. this is probably not good. also, the drinking way doesnt seem to work as well - i need to be more intoxicated, at which levels i tend to not be very proficient.

this sucks. i need to focus on making my life enjoyable. i hate not enjoying my life. this cannot continue.

just started wondering if ppl would live happier lives if they didnt fight against their own natures. but would that work? if each of us was trying to do whatever we wanted, some of those wants would surely conflict with others' wants. out of conflict, the losing, or potentially losing party would probably come out with some kinda compromise with themselves = this is not important enough to me to get hurt over. enter the conflicting parties' friends and families. finally now the deciding factor might be how well liked each of the 2 original individuals was by whom they knew - enough to get their support in a risky situation? did one of the "originals" actually not even know nearly as many people as the other? the socio-political factor.

so back to an individual's freedom to do one's own will - i guess depending on the degree to which one's will conflicts with the wills of others in the environment, one whose natural desires dont encroach on others' should be able to expect to live a fairly happy life. or at least relatively conflict-free. would the absence of conflict actually lead to a happier life?

but how many of us have desires that would never seriously be in conflict with the desires of others? also, do we curb our desires more than strictly necessary to avoid undue danger?

i feel like we should all do what we like a little more. we just got to figure out how to free ourselves of some of these mental restraints. our self-restraint mechanisms are probably governed more by fears of social unacceptance rather than fear of physical harm. but how much acceptance do we really need? maybe if we find ourselves surrounded by ppl with values very different than our own, we should not persist in such an oppressive setup but rather leave and find others like ourselves? guess thats where the fear of the unknown might come in - leaving the relative safety of a known situation for an unknown, possibly worse reality. an individual would have to cross a threshold past which the risk is worth it. its a tangled web. still - i think one should try. even if just a little. at first. even realizing the possibility of doing something different is a start. then knowing that others have gone down that path is reassuring. having a support system, group, or even just a person to lean on during a transition would definitely help. and with the advent of the intrawebs, "finding the others" just got easier.

being "alive" :)

http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?pid=3276599&op=8&o=global&view=global&subj=607637039&id=795110103

everything was going fine, until...

i show up at the office of this company through which the boss gets a big chunk of our work. i'm told the owner's assistant cant connect to the dvr anymore to check footage of who's been coming in late or whatever she uses it for once in a blue moon. i check the IP addy on the dvr, its gateway and port, go to her office - she lost the IP addy - a-ha, gotcha, easy. no - it doesnt work. i check her setup - she should be on the same network as the dvr. try to ping dvr - comes back with timeouts, but it comes back from some other IP address. wtf? i quickly check that the dvr is connected to the router under the receptionist's desk - lights are blinking - all good. go to their IT guy. he gets mildly agitated, tells the boss' assistant she should have called him, he doesnt know anything about this, but ok - we'll try to figure it out. i showed him what i did, the ping, he tries to ping some other stuff, seems to find a nearby addy that pings, tells me to change the dvr to that address, still doesnt ping. now a girl comes to his desk saying she lost her connection to the server. "a-ha!" we say, she was the address we stole - back to change the dvr back to what it was. he reassures the girl that now it all works and everything is as it should. except we still cant ping the dvr. we check the router together, he finds there's some unused cables still connected to it, and one is actually looping back into another port. he gets rid of unnecessary wiring, and as we walk back to his desk to try pinging, the girl that said she was disconnected is saying she's still disconnected. and the girl from the next desk over. we go back to his comp, he's tweaking out, the head of accounting comes down to say accounting has lost their connection to the server. ooops... the IT guy says he's only been there for like a month or something, and he's trying to learn their setup on the fly, harassing them for documentation and information, no time to spare for masturbation... he's about to open up the server room when the boss of the company comes down asking if, when he has a spare minute in say the next 5 minutes, if he could install a mobile internet stick on so'n'so's laptop, because his father is dying and he's gonna be spending a lot of time at the hospital, but would still like to have access to his files... which in itself is pretty weird, to me. i mean, i donno, but work could wait, as i see it. all these rich fuckers living in these goddamn condos can make do without holding hands with their goddam property manager for a bit in case of extenuating circumstances, cant they? but maybe i got this out of context, maybe the guy is expecting that this will potentially take weeks on end and every now and then he'll sneak off to the cafeteria and take care of the most important stuff as he has a bite to eat.
alas, IT guy tells the boss he's having a serious issue with the server and cant get to the mobile stick for the moment, but he's not liking that others beside himself have administrative access to the server, and is wondering if that might be the problem. the boss tells him that the only person other than him that has admin access is the head of accounting girl, and why dont they go ask her right now. she says no, hasnt done anything. IT guy logs in right at his server, and it's like most stuff is missing. but there is a computer somewhere at the office from where he can still login to the server and see everything as it's supposed to be. at this point i say "see ya later, when you get your server up again".
i'm at another call, and i get a call from the boss' assistant telling me they need me to come back because the thing i plugged something into is whats bringing the server down, and they're getting nowhere, and i need to undo what i did... um, i didnt do anything?
so i get back there, because i need to drop something off anyways, and the IT guy has the DVR with the router completely disconnected from his network, and he's till having the same issues. he's starting to suspect the head of accounting girl might be messing with him, or just messing with the server. he doesnt know if he's being paranoid or is she actually guilty. he wonders if maybe it's somebody back east..? and he still has this login that allows him to see what appears to be an unpopulated version of the server. it appears to him that while he was trying to figure out the DVR problem, someone has created another user, and bla bla bla... i say "see you when you get your server back up."
paranoia seems to be the flavour of the year.

what to do?

85 year old lady, single (widowed, i think), seems in pretty good health for her age, has lived in this house for a long time, has been doing gardening there all that time, apparently at some point won 1st prize for that town's gardening contest. not too long ago had to have her german shepherd put down. got another one, 8 or 10 year old, from the shelter, because she doesnt think she has that much more to go...
has probably 14 cameras around the house, hooked up to 3 DVRs, figures somebody wants her house, and is trying to get her out of there, messing with her garden, trimming her hedge 6 inches lower than it used to be, taking chunks out of her trees, taking her garden stones - which she got for a fair bit of change (apparently stones are good in garden b/c they help retain moisture). she's had 2 security companies install the cameras and DVRs for her, but at least one of them seems to have been gouging her, and she doesnt wanna be involved with them anymore. she wants to get good footage of her neighbours coming into her backyard to steal her stones and damage her trees. she pretty sure the neighbours whose backyard is kitty-corner to hers have 3 cameras pointed at her house. either they are the police or they got some kinda deal with someone who's in the police, so she doesnt feel she can go to the police with this anymore. she's suspecting someone's been inside her house because she's heard ppl speaking upstairs where her DVRs are, and she suspects they took one of her harddrives out of one of her DVRs, and so now she's lost some valuable footage that would prove... i forget what.
she really wants me to help her out.
on the one hand, she's a customer, she wants a better view of a certain area, i suggested a different camera, she's all for it. with the missing footage, i told her likely one of the harddrives failed and thats why the footage is missing. i saw her receipt for the purchase of this DVR, it says 1 terabyte, the dvr says its got 500 gigs, it should still be under warranty from the company she bought it from, they should fix it for free - which i told her. there's probably some more work she'd have me do there.
on the other hand, as much as i am willing to entertain the idea that someone could be messing with her, damaging her garden, taking garden stones - more likely unrelated things than a concerted effort, i have a strong feeling that this lady is suffering from some senile dementia or something, suspecting that people are out to get her, to get her out of this house, because they want it, and they want it cheap, and she doesnt want to be pressured out of there just because she's an old, lone lady.
i dont want to feed her probable dementia, though i dont know whether anything i'd do would change things either way. i feel like doing this work she wants done is taking advantage of her, because its probably all in her head, and so she doesnt need to spend this money, and all the money she'd already spent getting ripped off by one of the previous security companies she dealt with. she seems aware that these things she says may sound crazy, but she doesnt think she is. she asked me something like "you dont think i'm crazy, do you?" to which i answered "no, not really". i've never really had to deal with this kind of thing. now i think i should have said how it all sounds, somehow try to tell her gently. hope that big friggin dog wouldnt freak out on me for upsetting his owner. but she's not crazy enough to be dangerous, so nobody can really step in and lock her up. nor should they - she's not doing any harm. just to herself. spending all this money and worrying that ppl are trying to screw her out of the house.
i dont want her to spend more money and persist in her paranoia. but if i walk away someone else will come in and gauge her again. and she really wants my help with the security setup. what to do?

its been bugging me. i keep trying to think it out, and what i got in my mind at the moment is to try to find some kind of volunteer senile/demented service to keep an eye on her, possibly take care of her somehow, if she's not far enough gone yet then when she does. this was phx' idea, which i like. but does such a service even exist? i also want to call her and tell her what i think of her situation, but ultimately say that if she wants, i can do some work for her, but i'm hoping she takes what i say into consideration, talks to her doctor about it, i dont know. is there even meds for this kind of thing? it seems obvious that her judgement is impaired, so how can i trust her judgement when i tell her what i think? but i dont think she's messed up enough for "the government" to step in. what to do?

a good new year's eve from my point of view involves being optimally smashed at a nice bash. probably the best one of these that comes to mind was at some friends' dad's warehouse they'd just bought and havent put machines in yet - some of the friends were sorta forming a band at the time, so they played some tunes, there was a 2nd floor overlooking the ground floor, so thats always nice, there was a ping-pong table on the 2nd floor, a keg on the ground floor, one of the guys kinda officially came out of the closet and brought his BF, so that was in interesting detail. unfortunately the BF was a total chachi. and we have some nice pics of us from there :)

how i think of it is that the mind sometimes gets overzealous trying to spot patterns and assigns all kinds of significance to coincidence. however i have heard some interesting talk of "attractors" - end scenarios that might seem to coax themselves into existence by "pulling" their "causes" towards themselves through time and space - a funny way to model fate from our perception of time.
regarding things seeming to be given to you while you were creating, i too find it interesting that we are given credit for our "creations" when we are actually handed them from our subconscious. i visualize it as a brick wall with some small holes in it, and i - the conscious spectator am handed little scrolls of paper with ideas written on them through these little holes from the other side of the wall. i get to marvel at them, or reject them, or try and group some of them together and hand them back thru the wall for further processing - so it seems like i'm the editor or conductor, but not the actual idea generator. then again - why only define myself as that which is conscious - unconscious can be beautiful too :) its all me. especially if i'm a solipsist... :D

what if humanity evolved enough over time, to the point that each of us would be as a lord unto himself - owning whole galaxies populated by beings who would "farm" other, "lesser" beings themselves, which in turn would have parasites, which would in turn have smaller parasites living on them - all an absurdly gigantic pyramid scheme to produce or distill some sort of energy or even diversity or novelty, whether useful, or as a form of art or even a collectible. or a battery. what if we were not just the beings at the tops of our pyramids, but only small parts of some other ultimate being's mega pyramid or polyhedron or what have you. how many individual "gods" would tell their farm animals what they're actually a part of, were the animals able to comprehend the situation to any meaningful degree? how many might concoct a story to tell their livestock, if they found such a story gave better yield, like a mental steroid, or vaccine or just a supplement? a story or even an idea that would polarize a species, or at least a sub-section of it, in just the desired manner, like the concept of good and evil, a struggle between them, god and satan, good cop vs. bad cop, the carrot and the stick?

or love.

my dad almost killed my mom

he was backing up the trailer towards a loading dock at night, and she was back there, trying to help guide him. at some point he realized he is not seeing her in either of the mirrors, and he was not sure how close he was to the concrete dock - he didnt want to hit it and damage it and the trailer. he put on the hand brake (or whatever its called in these trucks) and went to the back. his trailer was maybe 2 feet from the dock. between the two was my mom, crumpled up on the ground, crying. she told us later that when she realized she was probably gonna be crushed between the trailer and the dock, she instinctively braced her back against the dock and  made as if to stop the trailer with her hands. lucky for all of us, that was when my dad decided to put on the e-brake and check how far away from the wall he was. i think trucking is not for my mom. she means well but takes risks she shouldnt. hasnt cost her her life or limb yet, though. but i wouldnt call it a very successful go.

my parents' friends' 24 y.o. son died. i thought i remembered hearing he was into coke, but it didnt sound like he OD'd, plus i dont think he had that kind of money. when i asked what he died of, my parents said something like "he did drugs!"
is naivete = harmless stupidity?
there was talk his organs got beat to shit by all these drugs he did. it seems unjust and even hard to believe that a 24 y.o. guy would wreck his body enough to die when all these bums downtown seem to live on and on forever. i've met people who have apparently done a lot of drugs and you couldnt tell just looking at them. i havent met any meth heads, that i know, but i hear it really ages you fast. i just saw some pics of this guy that just died and he looked healthy. my parents have met him and apparently he looked fine. his parents are obviously devastated. but they put on a prayer evening for his soul, and a mass at church on sunday... i said i wouldnt have done anything - just bury him and try to forget, because he did it himself, and he did it to his family, and since it was basically an extended suicide, i'm kinda surprised they had a mass for him at church. but someone said, they are his parents after all, so it shouldnt be surprising that they would do this for their son. makes me feel really sorry for them. so they cant help their nature and do what they feel they must for their son. and he apparently couldnt help his nature either, saw it coming, landed in the hospital a few times, there was some rehab effort, but in the end he died. ridiculous. fucked up. the flesh is weak. in some more than others. it's just sad. what a waste. seems like he just couldnt be helped. natural selection seems cruel, but i guess thats how it is. his nature just worked against him in his environment, which had apparently an abundance of things lethal to him. is this selection process leading to a humanity that is "smarter", with stronger will power, and a more robust physiology? i'm sure the race will survive, but the cost of this evolution to all the individuals around the "failing" subsets...

some people scoff at being immersed in stories and say ppl should go out more and experience life for themselves.
some people say reading is where it's at, and surely watching the tube does not lead to anything good. does anybody complain saying others should sit in front of the TV and not go on the computer/intraweb so much? will they complain in the future against more immersive media?
its just a medium. but i suppose each medium is its own message too. marshall mcluhan was cool. cool like fonzi. man i'm brainwashed.
maybe not everything you see on a screen should be measured on the same scale? educational programs versus commercials? but even the edu programs - whose points of view are they representing? who prepped content for you to perceive it in just that specific way? what was their idea of what's right and wrong? did they care if they misrepresented something to some degree if they made some money off it? are they just proliferating some false ideas that they bought at an age when they didnt have the logic faculties to process these ideas as they would now? are they reinforcing ideas that were handed down to them from authoritative sources, without actually experiencing or investigating these themselves? i figure the best lies are the ones closest to the truth.
truth - an ideal. maybe truth should be viewed more relatively - an IF-THEN relationship. under some circumstances, something may be so. under other circumstances, things might be otherwise.
we need better tools to understand the world around us. and inside us. we need to be taught these in school. we need tool-making tools - for new situations. i suppose this might be taking place somewhere already. just want to show support and help spread the meme, if it's out there. it probably is.
drugs - substances that affect our bodies to effect "abnormal" functioning. heroin, pot, alcohol, coffee, tylenol... spicy food? most people probably mean illegal drugs. legality is fickle. throughout times and cultures, things have been both legal and illegal like pot, alcohol in general, gin, opium, coffee... i suppose everything used to be legal when there was no one imposing their will on others as to what they can and cant ingest. gasoline is legal and obviously necessary in our world, but there's some communities where it's also the main intoxicant. what about fasting? Sun Dancing?
people need to be truthfully informed about the risks and benefits of things. people need to be informed about social pressures. people could use help learning about their own psychology - what makes them tick. people need to re-learn to experience and judge for themselves. but also people need to be allowed to make their own decisions, learn through their own mistakes. sometimes people need to be helped, not directed and punished. well, i'm sure some people love being directed and punished, too.

depression season has apparently started

one step forward, two steps back

my little girl's very first compound curse :)

i forget what i was doing, but i was at the dining table, phx was at the laptop, and LB was in the hallway - from where we heard her say "I can't get off my fucking shit sock!"
we're like "whaat?" to which LB repeated the aforementioned obscenity. it was shocking, and we wanted to laugh, kinda, but i dont think we did. phx helped LB get her sock off, and we figured we really gotta curb my, er, our cursing again.
which brings me to asking again - what's wrong with cursing? what happened, somewhere along the line, that has made some words "Bad"? this seems to have occurred in most human cultures - but why? like - what the fuck?

what a strange fetish - science fiction - science-based fiction. watchin the animatrix, i couldnt help but notice how it made me feel. i only had time to be forced to notice it when i went to the washroom to take a leak. i felt like things were possible, a coolness. the only thing i can think of that took me to a place like that before science fiction, was probably "kung-fu movies", ok - "martial arts movies", like "Enter the Dragon". (i am NOT putting the period inside the quotation marks. or the parentheses. or the brackets. the parentheses and brackets usually are contained within a sentence, and therefore will not contain the period, but rather the period will follow them, concluding the sentence, goddammit.) (the exception being the "aside" parentheses, containing a whole sentence, or several, that might be a commentary rather than part of the story - hence the parentheses - and so the sentences behave "normally", but these "asides" are demarcated by the parentheses. whether the period should be inside the parentheses or outside, should not be a rigid rule, but rather be dictated by whether or not the parenthesized content was itself a whole, a unit - um, i think i'm typing out my ass and so should check this out on wikipedia before opening my big keyboard.

um, i found in wikipedia that i had no idea of what i was talking about. in american english there is a convention or standard of having the period at the end of a sentence always inside the quotation marks, if there is a quotation at the end of the sentence, regardless of whether the period was actually included in the original of what was quoted. unless we're talking scientific or technical writing - then no. ( hehe, awesome sentence.) this rule was developed as a result of the need to protect the small and fragile pieces of type like the period and the comma behind the bigger and stronger quotation marks in the printing press.
and apparently the british convention is to use logical quotation.
and all this time i thought it was about parentheses - silly me :)
but i did find out that the british dont say "period" but rather "full stop", which in turn dispells some of my confusion about some of what the dopefiend says.
apparently "full stop" is sometimes used in canada, but i havent noticed. yet another word fallen victim to americanization here. right after chesterfield.

back to the main body, omitting parentheses and all, for now - martial arts movies and many sci-fi movies have made me feel like maybe more in life is possible than i've been led to believe. i wonder if anybody's done a study on what kind of class of people, what kind of personality trait is necessary to go for this sort of entertainment. what causes some people to be completely enthralled by this sort of communication, as opposed to ppl who love wwe wrestling.

what is it that makes us geeks?

a piece by one of my fave talkers set to some awesome art

sitting outside a starbucks

an obviously homeless and very fucked up looking guy is making his way up the sidewalk with a slow, shuffling walk. he's holding a can of turpentine. he stops to pour some more into a small rag he's holding in his other hand. takes a few more steps, the turpentine dripping from his hand. he then stops to inhale deeply from his rag a few times. turns around and walks into the starbucks. maybe for some paper napkins? stumbles out in a minute and slowly continues on up the hill.

this 60-something persian concierge was getting flack from a 30-ish resident who'd just gotten in the front door for not going outside and telling people waiting for the bus to not stand in front of the entrance. but the people were standing in front of the entrance because thats where there was some cover from the rain. the concierge got more and more agitated. started speaking louder and louder, with increasingly bad english, culminating in saying "Fuck You!" to the resident a couple times.

it got to the concierge's supervisor that i witnessed that incident, so i kinda confirmed it for him, somehow trying to save the old guy, but he still got the axe. he told me he used to be a fighter plane mechanic back home. i thought he sounded a bit bitter about his "career change".

i saw the old guy back at the concierge desk at that building the other day :)

2 guys put on balaclavas in the garage of a 2-tower apartment building. they make their way up the stairs to the ground floor. they enter the management office, get out their mace and demand all the money the ladies in the office have. the ladies answer they put all the money they get from residents into the safe through a slot, but they dont have the key. the manager has the key, but he's not at the building. so the boys try to pull out the safe, but cant. the lady in the leasing office right next door saw what was happening through the partly glass wall, dialed 911, and as she yelled into the phone "help! we're being robbed!" the would be robbers bolted out of there. i bet she dialed 911 and the operator went "police, fire, or ambulance?" and the lady just lost her nerve...

***

saw a video of a bike thief being tackled by 3 plain clothes security guys the other day. it felt so good. i wanted them to hurt him. bad. i hope they did. couldnt see - the camera looked too high up...

homie-cide

yet another brothel suite in another expensive downtown highrise. 2 asian guys enter just after midnight. about 15 minutes later the guys are back out with some laptops, this time hoodies up. a few minutes after they leave the building, police arrive. apparently the killing of the guy that was looking after the girls was quite noisy...

was it planned? simply a rip-off of an already illegal operation? thought no one would go to the police with it? was it to get the laptops, possibly containing the name of someone who really didnt wanna leave a trail? was it to get names of ppl for blackmail purposes? or was it just heat of the moment, hence hoodies on way out only? ... and laptops because they were repeat customers? or just thought theft wasnt gonna be as big a problem if they were caught?