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!

wow - this is different

these guys must have been blotter artists in the 60's

http://homepage3.nifty.com/kazano/gallery/index_e.html

the company christmas party was too much of a blast. i think i have to figure out how many shots to allow myself per night. also, what fucked me over, or what contributed to fucking me over, was the fact they ran out of tequila and so i switched over to vodka. stick to one type of alcohol tommy! would 10 shots be a good limit? i'm lucky i've got good friends and a great fiancee. they took care of me when i've obviously had enough, got me a cab, put me in it, somehow found out where i live and told him, as well as got him not to fuck me over. you hear stories about asshole cabbies all the time, i even know this girl who was almost raped by one. maybe i just cashed in some good karma that night, who knows. the dude didnt even fuss when i had to get him to do an emergency pull over so i could toss me cookies. maybe 7 shots would be a better limit. phx took really good care of me, and deffinitely tried, even when my conscious self wasnt there anymore, just the primal sub-conscious. i've heard about people lapsing in and out of consciousness after severe physical trauma, reverting to their mother toungue, but even my mom, when in the emergency ward when she had that concussion, was able to sorta communicate in english. i thought i would always be able to, no matter what. and it didnt even take a concussion to prove that theory wrong. the lights were on, but there was nobody home, so i guess the home automation system had to take care of things. so 7 shots sounds like a good number. and NO pot when drinking heavy! that was just stupid. actually, that was probably what ultimately did me in! my drinking do's and don'ts learning curve is pretty horizontal... :(

is marijuana prohibition any different than the old alcohol prohibition?

just got to thunking, is all. i dont think its very different, except perhaps for the length of duration. also got to thunking that if "fighting" the prohibition doesnt seem to be doing much good right now, then probably if things simply continue developing in terms of cannabis' popularity, there will be no one to prosecute in a generation, because the majority of the north american population will be smoking at home and with friends by then. just hope marc emery doesnt have to wait that long...

so the first un-happy tears have been shed over the wedding. very nice. i'm one of those classic cases of the dude being stuck between his mother and his... other woman - wife, girlfriend - what have you. fiancee. that, plus culture difference. phx wants a small wedding, mother thinks she's obliged to invite a bunch of ppl whom she knows, but phx doesnt. phx had a set idea of what things were gonna be like, and doesnt really want it any other way. i agreed with phx about keeping the expenses down, but since its turning out that our parents are gonna be paying for most of it all, if they wanna invite some more ppl, then why not. to me, its "the more - the merrier". to phx, she wants a small wedding. i'm easy going, and i guess i just didnt have a strong opinion about what its all gonna look like, so what do i care if there's more ppl - at least it would be a bigger wedding! :)
but i guess its a bit of a struggle of the wills here - phx and mother. i guess both are strong minded, but i guess mother ceded, since she noticed it was quite a big deal. i'm just thinking - what the fuck?! this isnt supposed to be a stressful thing. i'm going from one strong-willed woman to another, but their approaches to things are different. well, phx doesnt make me work in the garden yet :)
so i feel like smoking up, but dont wanna be an escapist, so i'm sitting here feeling pretty crummy. if i have a couple drinks, my head is gonna hurt tomorrow morning. my family and phx dont mesh too well. i guess she always feels outnumbered and stuff, but is not always easygoing, so she gets stressed out/pissed off, and then that puts tension on me, to mediate between her and the family. it was like that in spain, and here sometimes too i guess. its these people that are picky eaters, they're picky about more than just food. they dont like this and that, hard to bend their barriers, expand their horizons. in some respects. i dont know tho - i know a guy that doesnt like tomatoes, but he seems pretty lax about everything else. maybe its just girls then? my stupid bitch ex was pretty set in her ways too. maybe its me bringing these things out in my gf's? maybe i'm too open, easy going, or whatev? maybe used to getting my will bent, so i dont have very firm walls within which to brace up? phx just stormed around the bedroom, then into the can, and growled something about the typing noise keeping her awake. i just had to tell her to get some earplugs. guess maybe its better to vent a bit at a time than just go all out after the pressure is just too high. i donno, i dont think i blow up at people. maybe its the trait of a pussy. fuck, just when u think things are going awrite. well, i guess there's always gonna be shit blowing up in ur face. maybe i just gotta accept that and work on solving these things? channel my tension/pissed-offedness/whatever to solve a problem rather than just reacting to fire with fire? its kinda hard, and its tempting to just go off the deep end, but maybe i should act like the adult i unfortunately am forced to face that i am.

i donno, i must be bi-polar or something, i get so friggin pissed off and depressed recently. maybe its that seasonal affective disorder, but its really getting to me. i hate my job, hate the cold, hate the driving in this town, hate not having time, i feel tired all the time, i dont wanna do anything, but theres so much to be done...

feelin' a'ight :)

maybe cause i only worked like 3.5 hours at my side job tonight, with no precipitation, and hardly any cold. poor phx is not feeling very well these days, feeling so tired, nauseous, puking, not eating much, head aching... i wish i could do something to help her with it... but she endures it all, because it is our baby... i feel so grateful for her, and i know she will be a great mommy and wife :)
its still such a novel idea, but i guess nothing will really change, other than the formality. well, with the baby there will be changes. but somehow, since finding out she's pregnant and then asking her to marry me, seems to me like my love for her got a boost, got rejuvenated. i'm very glad this is all happening :) i guess i kinda wish we had a bit more time, but what the hey - its all that much more exciting :)

i love my babies! :)

i feel like a bit of a loser getting on my blog just to bitch, but i guess i need some sort of outlet.
just everything sucks. too much to do, not enough money and time to do it, and it all sucks anyways. i cant just think positive, i get into these fucking downers. feels like an uphill battle. maybe its late and i've been working late most evenings, and its winter so theres a lot less sunlight, and its cold, and all my clothes are dirty, and the appartment i keep referring to as a fucken pit, and my car is just overloaded with shit, and i keep hauling stuff to and from it numerous times a day, and i cant just slow down and do one thing at a time because i'm getting married and have a child on the way, and i dont wanna drink to relax because i'll feel like shit tomorrow, an dont wanna smoke pot or do acid because phoenix is gonna get upset, and besides, i have a feeling it would just get me into a downer tomorrow or the next day, i havent even done my taxes for last year, let alone this one, and my mom's computer is a pile of shit that i just dont have enough knowledge to deal with, but she wants the goddam pix from spain burned onto a cd, and my car needs a coolant flush, and the fucken side job just wont go away, but its my way to a decent engagement ring, and probably wedding bands, and i'll have to get an appartment or townhouse soon, and theres too much garbage and filth all around me and i dont have the time or energy to deal with it. fucken showering is a goddamn chore now - i used to love showering! i guess i'll have to jus try and somehow engrain in myself positive thinking. dont get down about shit - just deal with it. easy to say - brilliant idea from the shower by the way - but for some reason i just keep getting these downers every now and then. fuck. well, i think i feel a bit better, but also somewhat ashamed for being such a loser and blogging about my stupid shit so people can read it. what am i really trying for tho? if overpopulation doesnt kill us - well, it wouldnt be overpopulation itself, just die of lack of resources of some sort, or a resource war, or we'll over-toxify the planet, or nuke the place...
and here i was - getting all giddy about listening to terence mckenna talk about marshal mcluhan and his clever ideas about language, writing, printing, reading and media - instead of digging in for the fucken apocalypse. my shoulders hurt from all this typing. fuck it.

for those of u who dont read my fiancee's blog... thats right - i'm engaged! :)
AND i'm gonna be a dad! :D
but before that i'm gonna be a husband :)
and before that i'm gonna get my bibi an engagement ring. and i guess thats what i'm working at these days. i'm hooking up a dude with all kinds of security goodies for his jewellery warehouse, actualy just installing them, and he's gonna hook us up with a nice engagement ring at cost or below. but until that gloroius day, i'm gonna werk like until midnight every nite it seems, then get up at 6:30 am and go to werk...
but every now and then i think about how i'm gonna be a daddy, and a husband, and my heart lightens up :)
ok - i keep falling asleep in front of the comp. i think its time to hit the hay.

congrats welcome! :)

tomek

well, i was gonna post about what a shitty night it's been, how what was supposed to have been a stupid 2-3 hour side-job finish-off turned into an over 5 hour stupid clusterfuck until 12:40 am that i still have to go and finish off tomorrow, or die trying, while having to call my parents to tell them that unfortunately their moron son cant come to celebrate their other son's wedding as he'd promised, because he has to work another 3-4 hours to try and finish this stupid job which will probably end up paying under minimum wage, judging by the amount of hours its taking. i drove home yelling at myself about how unbelievably, ridiculously, extravagantly, fucken flamboyantly idiotic this whole thing was. it just rates above and beyond anything ever before, at all, and has set a brand new, astronomically unattainable standard of... of... there's just no proper word in the english vocabulary for this kinda thing just yet. but here's a few markers, just to point toward the general nature of this: idiocy, stupidity, brainlessness, braindeadness, retardation, unfitness for survival, un-human-worthiness, time waste, ...

well, i feel a little bit better now. man - that was incredible. just so stupid. ugh...
and then i get home, shower, and read on phx' blog about how she's still hemorrhaging about my brother's email, and which has now spread to doubts about our relationship again. why me? i change lanes in morning traffic, and my lane immediately starts slowing down, and my until now slow lane starts speeding up and everybody gets ahead of me. i'm sure my car will break down tomorrow, and i'll try to fix it in the rain, and get sick, get fired, get sicker, krista will leave me for an acid dealer, my parents and brother will die, and so will i and dogs and cats will shit and pee on my grave, and my name will be deleted from all records by some freak virus, and so all this pain will have been in vain, and that's the end. fucken bullshit.

The decline and fall of work

i just happened upon what looks like a chapter out of a book online, and its a pretty wicked read :)
at first it just screams some of the feelings and thoughts i've had about work, having put them into words. and how! and then it goes further and talks about things i didnt know about and havent thought of. cant say i agree with all of it - seems like in some instances substance was sacrificed for the sake of flare - but the flare is largely what makes me like it - kinda like terence mckenna :) enjoy!

recently i've been thinking about the movie "7 degrees of separation" or somethig like that. i've never seen it but i've got the idea that its about how everyone is separated from anyone else in the world by a max or average of 7 people - meaning, i know a guy that knows a guy that knows a guy that knows a guy that knows a guy that knows a guy that knows the president, or something like that. i thunk of it because i found it kinda cool that i know a guy whose nephew plays in the NFL for the florida team - whoever they happen to be. and then i thought how i also know a guy whose aunt used to be married to a guy who was a drummer for bob marley for a while. funny enough, same guy has an uncle who either IS like a world renowned crickett superstar or he has another nephew who is - dont remember exactly anymore - i was told after a few mojito pitchers and some smoke. both famous dudes are related to my friend by marriage though, because he's white as my ass :) but he's a very cool dude, so let the record show that the similarity of pigmentation of my friend and my posterior has had no detrimental effect on my friend whatsoever. man, i'm starting to write weird - must be late. then i know this dude who used to run a hair salon with a buddy, which was really only a front for their drug superstore. then i kinda know this chick who went out on a date with samuel l. jackson. i know dudes who used to hang out with biff naked when they were all small time hardcore rockers. she got big, but they still supposedly chill occasionally. seen a few NHL stars around, worked in some of their houses when they were being constructed. my buddy's gf used to babysit for one of them. etc etc
so i know ppl who know ppl. hehe - too bad i dont know any celebrities personally :) but its an astoundingly small world sometimes. like my ex gf in toronto, turned out to be a longtime friend of a buddy of mine from accross the country. or my brother's ex gf like 2 or 3 years later met up and dated my bob marley related friend. shit - i think that guy must be the best 'connected' yet. damn, i think that must be right. apparently he did some work at a place that belongs to the richest man in china - then they hung out a bit - dude is supposedly a sweetheart. i wondered out loud to my friend whether the nice rich old man got rich because he was a ruthless businessman in his youth, and now that his hormones have chilled out he's nice and everybody likes him. but lets not kill yet another ideal and hope he's always been nice and thats one of the keys to his astounding success :)
ok - time for beddy. but i gotta rent that movie. or borrow it from the library :)

20 random things

i've just been informed that i'm a little shit-fucker. and that i'm mean.
who do u think said it? :)
whoever it was, they said they dont like me anymore and i didnt get to write ahead of time that they were gonna throw a paper ball at me :(
i dont think i'm mean. i mean, i have the potential to be, but i dont think i ever really am anymore.
but anywho, here's 20 somewhat random things...

1. vodka used to be my hard liquor of choice, but i think i like gibson's whiskey better now.

2. i used to say that given the choice between dropping alcohol or pot from my life, i'd say i would drop alcohol without hesitation.

i was just informed i bought the barbed wire of toilet papers :)

3. after screwing around in college for a year and a half and then just sitting at my parents home for a year i finally went to a technical institute for 2 years just to get some kinda profession, to have something to make a living from while i figure out just what i'd like to study. that was 5 years ago and i still dont know what and where to study. i have too many interests - just like 10 years ago.

4. my last big purchase was the tv i guess, but the last REAL big one was the trip to spain.

5. my brother is in azerbaijan right now, getting ready to get married to a girl he met and "dated" online for about a year or so, whom he hadnt met in person until a few weeks ago. they wanna have one wedding in azerbaijan and one in poland - which is gonna be my next big expense. too bad i wont be able to catch the one in azerbaijan tho.

6. i used to have a beverage can and bottle collection - i dont know how many hundreds of each i had anymore. i sold most of them for what turned out to be pennies, but kept the more interesting stuff at my parents place.

7. i now live like 8 or 9 time zones away from where i was born. my brother is now directly on the other side of the planet from me.

8. i've owned a dodge omni, then an oldsmobile toronado, now i drive a talon, and i also have another dodge omni now :)

9. i'm starting to dislike snowboarding more and more - the hills are still focused on skiers, and so the flat stretches just kill me. plus the ridiculous prices, the fog, flurries and other visibility impediments, icy slopes, too many people, blah blah blah...

10. i've started to suspect my grandfather might have been something of a spy. just dont know for whom.

11. my last name has 13 letters. only one of them is a vowel.
hehe, just kidding :)

12. i still have a little plush-ish doggie that i got when i was a baby, but to which i became much more attached when my real dog died. i named it "bacek" (little shepherd) after the real dog.

13. my real dog died because he got really sick from getting a cold from being tied up outside in the cold and somewhat wet, because i walked my brother with him to the bus stop, and when i got back home i realized i lost my key and couldnt find it, and then it was time for me to go to school, so a neighbour offered to keep my dog in her yard, spotted me the bus change and some paper and a pen. it was winter and snow was on the ground. i found the key later that year, after my dog died.

14. i have stupid regrets that come back to haunt me every now and then. i used to be really bothered by this pretty silly one about having inadvertently burned part of my brother's kids magazine centerfold cutout toy thingy. still kinda bugs me. these things used to get pretty bad, and it seems like they finally started triggering something like a tourette's response when these regrets get a bit overwhelming - my head might twitch to the side, or i might say something like "fuck off!", "stupid fuck", "asshole" etc. but i'm happy to say its subsided considerably.

15. i am more nervous about running into the guy who used to be my friend and with whom my ex gf of almost 3 years started getting involved when she was still with me, and to whom she's now engaged, than about running into her, and i think it is because i'm more physically intimidated by him than her.

16. i can make waves with my belly like, um... a belly dancer :)

17. no matter how interesting i find something, as soon as it becomes something i have to do, or something of importance, i tend to get apprehensive about it and go and get occupied with something else, usually something completely useless and unproductive.

18. i'm kinda afraid i may be a coward. i dont think i've ever made an important decision in my life - fate just sorta seems to have put me into situations and places, and all i had to do was just to take the opportunity, not even that - just go with the flow, play the role. i guess being passive like this is quite conducive to determinism. which might just be the actual, true state of things.

19. the only actual important "decision" that i can think of having made is deciding that god probably doesnt exist. but i still havent told my family. i dont know how i ever will.

20. i started this feeling somewhat positive, but finish feeling pretty down, and i think the decline started with the story about my dog.

time to get groceries.

a friend of mine is trying to force me to take some action towards bettering my future. he wants me to get my life on track. he wants me to figure out what it is exactly that i think i want - do i want riches and dont care what i do? do i want my work to do something for me in a non-materialistic way? what would i like to do for a living? how much money do i want to be making? when to retire by?

so i guess i want to be able to do whatever i want. i want freedom, independence. for work, i'd like to do something that i'd be excited to get onto. i now know that i dont want to be wet and/or cold at work, but i dont mind the fresh air and mobility. i'd like to be able to do my work from anywhere in the world, and/or travel a lot to see how ppl live in different places, check out the achievements of cultures and individuals everywhere. i'm thinking translator, architect, designer?
i've worked in security for 4 years. i know a bit of stuff, some of the finer points interest me. i've recently realised i like drilling into metal, screwing bolts and nuts, threading - but somewhat precision work. i guess i like details. one thing thats keeping me in security is that i now have a bit of experience and so get paid ok. thats 2 things. i guess i could get into it. but would i be good? would it be fulfilling? maybe, but i'd never know if languages might have done much more for me.
so maybe i should continue within security, trying to learn as much as possible, but keep eyes open for more learning opportunities, better working conditions. but i'd like to get to a place i guess, where i'd work more freelance, do cool little projects that would be rewarding, learning experiences, and very profitable, so that I could then re-route a lot of time to going back to school (after some self study first, maybe), and really exploring all the aspects of language/communication, and then being able to narrow down my interests and doing more and more interesting stuff. and if i like it better than security then i can change fields.
another thing i wanted to play with is t-shirt design and producing, maybe even a wider variety of clothes. maybe i could do this sorta on the side of security. see if it flourishes.
or maybe some different types of design.
i dont think working on my car could ever turn into more than a hobby, but i'd deffinitely like to learn more about this hobby and become more proficient at it. it would also be cool to build remote controlled and AI robots. i like electronic gadgets and would like to work more with them, get more experimental, create.

hehe :)

in spain, creativity seems to abound wherever you look. even traffic signs get embellished ...
:)

-props to my habibi for finding this pic for me :)

taggage

i've been tagged

1. Delve into your blog archive.
2. Find your 23rd post (or closest to).
3. Find the fifth sentence (or closest to).
4. Post the text of the sentence in your blog along with these instructions.
5. Tag five people to do the same.

here's the sentence:

life sucks. (Tuesday, January 18, 2005 posting)


ha! this is hilarious :D

i'll try and put tags to 5 ppl's blogs soon.



g'nite! :)

i'm tired

back from eurotrip

so we're finally back from a 3 week crazy trip mostly to spain. it was deffinitely packed: on the way to spain we had a half a day layover in london so we blitzed thru some of it. then got a hotel, waited an hour and 15 minutes for a pizza delivery. fucken retarded. the worst thing about london is how un-fucken-believable expensive it is - things cost at the very least twice as much as they do here, and from there there is no ceiling. 80 pounds for a cab from london gatwick to downtown london - PLUS like 7 pounds i think to be able to drive into the london core. thats like over $170. i could probably go to fucken seattle for that. and the retarded pay-per-minute internet machine at the airport just blocked gmail, so i could only check my hotmail account. but once ur in london i guess there's things to see. but it was still just crazy.
then to spain. people smoking everywhere. well, in london too. stupid designated smoking areas that the smoke simply drifted out of - completely retarded. man, am i on a negative trip eh? :)
in spain and portugal - the road and highway signage was "inadequate" - often there was no signs, and when they were there, they were tiny and right at the turn u need to take. and confusing as hell - a huge sign above a highway that ur on, with up to 10 different highway signs and 2 cities - all going in ur direction - all these highways on one road? plus they've been changing their highway denomination system, so even the maps wer just piss poor, and even the newest ones werent well updated. they've been on this change for a couple years! the spanish just dont give a shit. often rude customer servie. half the stores were closed for vacation. 90% bathrooms had no toilet paper - especially annoying for girls. timers on lights in all public areas, sothe light would turn of like 3 times while ur taking a shit. everything in public areas was sticky - in england too - i guess they just wipe stuff down semi-anually. kitchens in bars etc close at like 2 or 3 pm or something - so u might be able to get a cold sandwich only. but the coffee was great - espeially in portugal - strong and delicious. but they dont even fuck around with brewing the stuff - they just do espresso, with steamed milk if u want coffee with milk - which eliminates the need for big coffee cups. but - no coffee to go other than starbucks - which tasted like piss compared to the 1 Euro coffee u could get at any bar - which, at an average of 2 bars per city block, makes a shitload of bars. and the starbucks sizes are all messed up too - theres no tall, grande and venti, there small, medium and large - and the small is tiny, the medium is like a tall, and the large is like a grande - there is no venti. and it costs 1.5 times as much as here. forget about burger king and mcdonalds - they cost maybe twice as much as here. thats why there's precious few of them there.
of the cool stuff: i got to spend some time with my 81 year old gramma, who, when asked how old she is says she just flips the digits and says she's 18 - she's hilarious :) got to hear her sing some old folklore and military songs, got to hear some wartime stories, and some stories from her lomg and hard life. grampa is still a mistery - he wont explain why he left for like 40 years, where and when he was born, what he did before and during the war, and recently he added more questions to the mix revealing that in the 50's he went to portugal and the canary islands. must have been while his wife was trying to feed her 3 daughters with no money and a broken wrist in the city. we're starting to figure he was a spy. he is quite intelligent.
ok - time to take a shower and back to dusty old construction. i'll continue this later ;)

i'm tired and feel like puking. i want to shut off the wants of the world around me. i want my way. pot or alcohol dont deal with the problems that make me feel like this, but they can ease the symptoms so soothingly...
i always forget that i probably only need a few minutes with a distraction, not focusing so much on my disomfort, and i'm much better :)
thats my theory on how pot and alcohol do their magic - they "dilute" the chemicals in the brain that let me think, making me a little less efficient, because less focused, and/or perhaps its the screening process - thoughts which are not driven by a high priority impulse are not weeded out as efficiently anymore - i get distracted, derailed from an obsessive train of thought. the priority loses its priority. tension dissipates. the realisation seeps thru that life can be beautiful.
i wonder if everybody is downer-driven. things have to be at the very least bi-polar - we must be motivated by bad things to avoid those bad things, and by good things to seek more of those good things. pretty blind process. i think we give ourselves too much credit when it comes to free will. the brain is just a convenient mutation of the nervous system. a complication of it, a turbo-charger on an engine inevitably bound for self-destruction. we'll just get there faster. we're a pest colony thats just too greedy for its own good. we keep inventing ways of taking more. and the less there is to take, the more aggressive it'll get. a healthy degree of aggresion in the individual will be more and more often the ticket. i wonder if society will wind tighter and tighter, the more docile portion of the population continuously being fucked out of existence. the ratio of competition versus co-operation will keep growing... but on the other hand, i wonder if we're actually heading in completely the opposite direction. the solitary, ultra-aggressive alpha-male is every now and then beaten by one who has a different trait, or set of traits to make up for his somewhat more mediocre aggression - smarts of some sort, charisma, pheromones, killer smile - whatever it is that makes other people like him. he harnesses the power of many "lesser" individuals - he's the politician. i guess there has to be some kinda balance between the push and the pull, the stick and the carrot - kiss babies, kill the competition. but nothing is static. things keep moving around and changing - until a new way of being for a system is found. all the different ways that people on earth can and have lived circumscribe the limits of how the human can live, as limited by the environment. and we have an impact on our environment - like any self-respecting life form would :)
but even that environment has limits on how much it can be changed, and although we can probably reach this limit - i dont think we would survive it. Terence McKenna pulled out from somewhere this theory that the earth is like some sort of embryo or otherwise a somewhat alive in a fringy sense "organism", and part of its "growing" or "becoming" (conscious or not) was the ocurrence of life-supporting if not outright life-spawning conditions, where all the life that has sprouted up since, is but a subsystem, not unlike all the friendly bacteria we have living inside our bodies, doing whatever it is they do, with the end result of us functioning well. its symbiosis at best. u lose some of them or have an imbalance - u might get diarrhea for a bit. but one of you survives, while their population is decimated. or maybe this is not nearly the end of the road yet. maybe all the flora and fauna is but the base of a huge pyramid-like support system for us... so we can make something really worthwhile and produce and network enough electronics and gather enough data, until we have wrought an "artificial" super-intelligence out of the earth's minerals. we've been messing around with what the earth is made of forever - working the earth, farming, mining, refining, building, shaping - that was just practice. we're starting to get better at it, so we can do finer work with it, until we build the earth a brain out of itself, out of its minerals. we might not recognize it for what it is until its too late. look at the internet. are we just blindly performing our function? here we are, thinking we're the shizznit. in the meantime we're a horde of blind slaves pushing huge rocks around, not realising we're being made to build a pyramid.
time for beddy - its 12:48

was Amundsen a man or a woman? for years i was sure it was a woman. i thought thats what they said in the song Heroes of the Antarctic (Heroes de la Antartida) by Mecano, a spanish band. but recently i thought i heard mention of Amundsen somewhere, and they said "man". so i checked online, and sure enough - a man. but the song wasnt about him. it was about the team that failed. the english, led by Scott, got to the south pole about 21 days after the norwegians. and they all died on their way back.
you can find the grueling story here.

Doctor Unheimlich has diagnosed me with Supertomek's Disorder
Cause:	old library books
Symptoms:	excessive heartburn, howling at the moon, belching
Cure:	psychiatry
Enter your name, for your own diagnosis:

i hardly write anything in my blog these days. and when i do, its boring, stupid, mundane stuff. my thinking doesnt seem to ever go beyond my immediate, every day reality. this sucks.
but i guess at least i'm sorta past my "another week without pot!" stage.

so thanx to getting my little piece of paper, we promptly had a meeting in the office. i'm to become a project leader, being responsible for one site at first (which i've sorta already done before for them for $12/hr), then 2 and then more - for a new rate of $18/hr. to be re-evaluated in october. 18 is not much, but i guess it'll do - a raise is a raise.
i also think my gf and i are getting sick again :(
and we're supposed to go drinking with the guys this afternoon to cele-ma-brate my TQ/raise and i guess as a bit of a good-bye party for my present project manager who's moving back to his home town of calgary. we're all afraid of how things are gonna go like when he leaves. he was basically responsible for 3 sites, comprised of 7 towers and an ammenities/recreational building. that's pretty impressive. they wanna replace him with 2 guys. i think we might need 3 at the beginning...

yes! :D

finally got an answer from the industry training peeps - and yes, they're pleased to inform me that i got it! :D i passed the TQ exam with a head spinning 91% - woo-hoo! so now that i'm a full fledged and certified alarm dude - time for a raise :)
and hopefully more interesting work. my baby took me out for din-din at earls, we had some martinis, pigged out on some good food, and agreed that we're gonna shoot for moving to europe for a year next summer. we'll see what comes of it, but we'd both like to see the world, and it just seems more plausible when ur based close to where ur trying to visit and then make trips here and there and everywhere... uh, from there :)
and having a specific deadline for it should definitely help in achieving it. we should also draw up a schedule - probably what kinda money we need to have saved up by when and what has to be taken care of - passports, loans, new jobs, stuff...
man - all of a sudden i feel so excited and it feels like i didnt really waste the whole weekend - even though i probably did...

:)

oh wait, how will this affect my linguistics/translation plans... it doesnt have to though. i have to make sure they mesh, thats all :)

i'm just a big, steaming pile of optimism right now :D

You Are 55% Normal (Somewhat Normal)

While some of your behavior is quite normal... Other things you do are downright strange You've got a little of your freak going on But you mostly keep your weirdness to yourself

How Normal Are You?

does this city have enough friggin' potholes?!

it pisses me off - they make a road, and THEN they dig trenches every 5 feet to run shit into new houses or whatever, and then they patch them really shitty - what the fuck is the point?! isnt there any kind of inspections to make sure the road is repaired to a nearly identical state as it was before they dug it up? these assholes should be fined and then made to repair it until they get it right! i dont have an SUV because i didnt think i needed it living in the city! or *think* before u jump: when building any kinda road, account for all, or at least most, of the possible wiring and plumbing needed on both sides of the street and build pipes into the road as ur building it! no digging needed later! and the innumerable manholes on some roads - ALL like 2" below the level of the pavement! what the fuck is going on inside ur overpaid, fucken useless heads?! get those manhole covers that are flush with the pavement that fasten to the actual manhole so that car wheels dont slip them out of the holes. these things already exist! they're in use. this is the fucking 21st century! my fucking tax dollars hard at work.
same for cops. i pay the fuckers' huge salaries so they can pull me over and give me a ticket? fuck you! go fight some real crime! fucking east hastings is crawling with bums - they're all dealing crack, stealing shit to get more - breaking into cars of hardworking people, the insurance doesnt cover it because the window costs more than the deductible - what are u supposed to do? and the bums just keep asking for spare change. I DONT HAVE ANY SPARE CHANGE! i need all my change - i worked hard for it - its mine! get to fucken work. and hospital staff. why the fuck does it take so long to get into emergency? get more workers in there! there's ALWAYS a few hours wait - just get enough staff to take care of it. and the people working in there are completely apathetic because they're overworked and overtired - give them regular 8 hour shifts! or even shorter ones - since its a stressful job. but the hospital staff dont want short shifts - i found out they like the overtime! no overtime for you! it costs me too much! plus ur useless after working for a couple hours anyways! instead they bitch about how hard their jobs are and want more pay. hire more staff, pay them less, have them work shorter shifts so they're more rested and work better.
i realise i should spend this energy actually calling the politicians involved with the necessary decision making, but that would take more time and energy than i presently have. but if i do nothing - then i can be damn sure nothing will change! change has to be effected, someone has to push. and even if all the pushing i'm doing right now is bitching about it on my blog, my hope is that if enough people bitch about it, it will become a common enough topic of discussion and finally reach the critical mass needed to effect that change - be it by people feeling the power of the sheer number of people agreeing on the same idea and finally pushing the powers that be from all possible angles, or by the powers that be perceiving this potential and preemptively making the needed changes before the beast wakes up and wreaks some serious havoc.

phew. much better.

mr. mo

where i work, i've befriended this black guy from kenya. his name is mohammed. not sure if thats the spelling he uses but he's mr. mo to me. not that he's much older than me - i'd say he's 33.
i've seen him around lots. i know him because this guy who used to work with me - hash - was also muslim, so they had something in common. hash left the company to keep educating himself, but i kept saying hi to mr mo whenever i saw him. however, we never got past the smalltalk stage until recently, when i found out he's now married. he's been living in canada for a while, he's strayed from islam a bit - dating, partying once in a while. and in all those years, whenever he called home his mom would bug him about when he's getting married and all that jazz. finally he told his mom to find him a good wife over there, in kenya - he trusts her judgment. so a while later, his mom announces to him she's found someone. she told him what she knew about her. sounded interesting, so he asked for a picture. his mom talked to her family, and they gave her a picture of their daughter. from what i understood, she was wearing a burqa, so the picture wasnt very revealing. so mr mo asked for another picture. to which his mom responded that it would be inappropriate, since they'd already asked them for a picture, and received it. like it or not, mr. mo went to kenya, i guess got the equivalent of an engagement, and was finally permitted to talk to her on the phone.
"good god" - i thought.
i guess she sounded awrite, because soon thereafter mr mo got married!
and bingo-bango - shortly after he found out he was gonna be a daddy!!
good job mr mo!!! :D
now he's back in canada, working his butt off to get ready for the impending arrival of his wife. the stupid thing is, even though they're married, she's not allowed to come here with him until she gets cleared by immigration or whatever - which might not happen until after she gives birth.
when he was telling me the story, i told him that i understand it's his tradition/religion, but that i just couldnt do something like that - my thinking on the matter now is that a couple should live together for at least a while so they can find out what each other is like day to day. because life is more mundane day to day than exciting dates, booty calls or just occasional hanging out.
but mr mo says that his approach to marriage is very different from the start. a successfully married couple has to be determined that this is a lifetime deal. to mr mo, "western" relationships have doubt and uncertainty instilled right in them in the form of anniversaries. mr mo sees celebrating an anniversary as being happy that "we made it thru a month! a year! two years!" to me it's not exactly like that, but i suppose theres a little bit of that in there.
then mo went something like:
"there is no perfect matches. if someone finds a 50% match that's very good. the rest is just being determined to make it work. and knowing how to approach the relationship. a woman will every now and then try to push you, push your buttons, she will be cranky, maybe she's having a bad day, maybe its that time of the month, maybe its the moon, but you have to understand that this is her nature, it will happen in every relationship. you have to treat her like a rose, and never mind the thorns - just keep on watering and taking good care of her and she will blossom beautifully for you..."

he just about killed me with that one - it was funny, but it was beautiful! thats an awesome thing to keep in mind. i mean, i still think i'd like a bit more certainty on whom i'm going to marry, and i do believe that there should be a lot of determination in a marriage, but the "watering the thorny rose" analogy is just priceless. i wonder what he meant by the moon affecting a woman's disposition. well, i guess in western society some people also believe that the full moon tends to make people a little more crazy than usual.

and after i told my dad about this, he laughed and said "and if it doesnt work, then you can always 'trim' her a little..."

but let the record show my dad is not a misogynist, and treats my mom well.

yesterday i saw gary brolsma's "numa numa" video and i loved it! :D
its totally addictive - the video and the song itself. i already have it on my mp3 player! :)
if you havent seen it yet - here's the link - turn your sound on first! :)

http://www.big-boys.com/articles/numanuma.html

Us

fuck dinner, fuck everything, stop everything for just a moment...
thank you
just got back from a wonderful walk, on this beautiful march 25th.
2005
;)
which will hopefully be inspiring me for weeks and weeks and weeks
beside the beauty of the cherry blossom petal strewn alleys, on the very busy intersection of willingdon and hastings, a black dude is standing at the bus stop. i was just crossing the street with a bunch of ppl, and as we walk toward that black guy, as the first people start walking by him, he starts telling ppl "happy good friday! happy good friday!"
"we're all brothers!" he says to some asian and italian kids ...
as we walked by him, smiling, wishing him a happy good friday too, giggling, i hoped after, that other people felt like me, happy and thankful for such a simple, heartwarming thing to say... hope next time i react fast enough after something like that happens, so that after passing someone like that i can turn around and say "thank you for saying that, man!" cause if anything, that brought a whole bunch of smiles to the world, and a sense that things are awrite.
what a beatiful day...
:)

just got woken up by my friend calling me from a line-up i was supposed to be with him in. i dont see him much these days since i have a full time girlfriend, but every now and then he tries to keep in touch by inviting me to hang out. i rarely actually do come out, but he keeps trying. this time i actually said i would come out - he and his gf and 1 or 2 other couples are going to an improv comedy show. but last night i went out with a bunch of mexicans and had a blast, so today i'm a bit hungover. i had to cancel 2 other plans for today because i wasnt feeling too hot, plus my gf was quite upset with me going out last night when she wanted me to stay with her. long story, but today i'm trying to make up for that, so that was a big part of the reason for the 2 cancellations. but i didnt wanna cancel on my improv commitment. we went out with my gf to do a map run and hang out together, and when we got back she went for a nap, and after a while i joined her. of course the nap extended a bit too much and now i didnt show up to line up for the show. fucken bullshit. i just fucken cant. i feel helpless.

so maybe enough bitching for a minute.
this morning i saw the remainder of the movie "Steal this movie", which i started watching probably a week ago. its about the life of Abbie Hoffman from the time he started his political activism. it would be an ok movie if it was just fiction - but thats just it - this is this dude's life. that actually happened. i'm gonna buy this movie - not steal it - because i want to watch it every now and then to keep reminding myself of the importance of standing up for whats right, i want to keep waking up from this apathy which seems to keep engulfing me like a dreamy fog. these days we know whats going on more than the people in the 60's, but we seem to have just given up. we're trying to keep up with the rat race, and the precious little spare time we have we want to enjoy. whether by design or not - this set up is effectively keeping the masses at bay. too much free time might make it too easy for a critical mass of people who might question and even try to change reality to form. agh - that was an awkward sentence. oh well - exercise that brain :)
thats another thing i thunk of today - not sure it was always like this, but it seems to me like ppl are more preoccupied with the way a message might be presented rather than with the message itself. the way something looks or sounds is more important than what its actually trying to convey. i caught myself leaning toward discrediting the validity of what some people were trying to say just because they were fumbling with words too much. they still had a message - they were just delivering it in a spontaneous, unplanned and so perhaps not the most logical or easy to grasp way.

*sigh*
glad i got that off my chest :)

the fun wee exercise

for some reason my gf's blog is acting up again, so i'll have to do this funny little fun thing on my blog...

Instructions:

• Grab the nearest book.
• Open the book to page 123.
• Find the fifth sentence.
• Post the text of the next 3 sentences on your blog along with these instructions
• Don't you dare dig for that cool or intellectual book in your closet! I know you were thinking about it! Just pick up whatever is closest.

and i was happy that the book i found was this particular one... :)

A second explanation, the one Ev and I leaned toward, took a biochemical rather than a psychological approach. It said that Dennis, through his unusual diet of alkaloids and the experiment he performed, had inhibited some enzyme system that would normally return one from the heights of a hallucinogenic trip, but in this case had somehow become inoperative. The most likely candidate for this would be the monoamine oxydase (MAO) system, which is responsible for rendering many hallucinogens into inoperative byproducts.


mind you, this is not the first time i've read these rules, but i didnt wanna do it before because only my gf's books were around me.
that was from "True Hallucinations: Being an Account of the Author's Extraordinary Adventures in the Devil's Paradise" by Terence McKenna.

some sweet-ass sites out there. i surfed instead of getting onto the comp problem and happened upon http://fusionanomaly.net/networks.html
fusionanomaly seems like a wicked web of pages about a great variety of subjects, with many hyperlinked words, pictures, etc that refer you to pages on the subject of the hyperlinked (i hope i'm using the appropriate word here) word/pic/whatev that u clicked on that took u there. i may not be explaining it very well, so just go there and check it out for urself.
in the process of writing this wee entry i actually started working on the comp problem. my friend's HD is fooked - first i figured out that the floppy drive wasnt working b/c the ribbon cable was plugged into it with the wrong connector - i was supposed to use the one with the few wires in the middle twisted around, not the straight-thru. so the maxtor HD utility said it fixed whatev was wrong but each time i tried to start the comp i got the same prob. and every time it would find a prob and say it fixed it and every time it wouldnt boot up. so the HD is toast. now i'm checking my HD. i have 3 HD's on my comp - the maxtor one is the one that failed - whichever time in a row. the short test of the maxtor utility prog detects a problem, the full on one doesnt. plus my chip recently started overheating sometimes. right now i got my gf's fan sitting in front of the comp, i took the housing walls off, and the beeping stopped. my bro told me to just raise the warning temperature in BIOS to like 60 C. its at 56 right now i believe. he says he's got his chip running at 80 C. i donno - its not really solving the prob. when i have time i'm gonna have to give that comp a good dusting. talked to my buddy's gf yesterday and she swears by her mac. e-mac i believe. never got a virus. her comp crashed once in the last year and change. all she had to do was to turn it off and back on. never happened again. its quiet. takes up no space. looks cool. got it for a grand and they threw in the printer. it came with speakers - she just recommends maybe getting a base speaker. i rarely use my comp speakers - if anything i use the headphones. she uses firefox mozilla so she never gets popups. got some email prog that brings in emails from 5 diff email accts she's got out there. i'm gonna go over to her place soon and check it out for myslef. i think it would be worth it - save on all the hassle, AND have a cool looking comp :)
realistically, i use (or used to use) my comp to strictly check email, surf the net, do my banking, download songs, some anime, but not much, play music. i dont really have the time to play games. no patience to learn to play very involved ones. sometimes i rem with nostalgia the duke nukem, doom, warcraft II, starcraft, myst but dont even have time to play those again. so if i get a mac and have the time one day, i'm sure i can play those oldies thru a win emulator or whatever they use.
but we'll see.
man, i noticed that sometimes i can bog down a bit into chat typing mode with my abbrev's... :D

friggin' simon posford rules. his "music name" (check out the eloquence! not) is hallucinogen. i wonder if he uses psychedelics, or if its just a clever name. and if he does then what, how much, how often, when, with what intent, how. a lot of stuff is "fun", but i'm kinda shying away from simply frivolous use of "stuff". i dont know that many smot pokers who speak of pot addiction. i guess it depends what u consider an addiction. luckily the stuff doesnt kill, but for me, very frequent use has started to encroach on my life in ways i hadn't thought it would, or even could. i did hear about the adverse effect on memory. but didnt realize it could unbalance my moods. when i wasnt smoking that is. when i found what i like about it, i couldnt believe more ppl didnt smoke it. when coming up, it was relaxing as hell, a bit euphoric, my worries were put in perspective, i didnt mind doing my chores, the amazing ideas and trains of thought that occured to me while doing some mechanical, thoughtless activity like driving home in traffic or showering - really cool ideas and realisations. plus, everything seemed so much cooler - going for a walk was awesome! but shortly after, when it leveled off, i'd start feeling tired and sleepy - so that was not a good thing in the middle of the day. and my memory just wasnt as good even when i was completely down. and adversities really brought me down - thats just nasty. me and a friend both really like pot, but we both think we do it too much and it occurred to us that it would be really cool to bring it to the same level as our alcohol use. we'd drink like once in a blue moon. smoking once in a blue moon like that would mean that we'd still be able to enjoy all the good things that pot brought to our lives, without its negative effects. ppl should be more educated about the "stuff" available out there. alcohol was prohibited in north america for a while too. it came back. it has a good side and a negative one. i'd still vote for the legalisation of marijuana - but coupled with EDUCATION.
i havent yet seen any negative effects of mushrooms or acid. i wonder if its because i havent done it enough times to get the full picture. it took 3 years to come to my conclusion about pot. then there's also the factor of everyone being different. i work with a guy who has one shot of alcohol or a beer, and he turns red right away and gets buzzed. thats quite a low tolerance. cheap for him to get drunk tho - when he does drink. i'm like that with pot. a friend dubbed me a "one toke wonder". i wonder if it would have sounded better if he stuck with the original expression of "one hit wonder" :) either way - to me the song "smoke two joints" is just unreal. but i know there are ppl like that.
i'm just raaaambling... :)
so back to simon posford = hallucinogen. some really cool trax. i love his style. what he does is magic. one of his more recent trax includes a sample from what seems like an interview with some 60's acid advocate:
"There is an area of the mind which can be called unsane, beyond sanity. And yet not insane. Think of a circle with a fine split in it. At one end there's insanity. You go around the circle to sanity, and on the other end of the circle, close to insanity, but not insanity, is unsanity." i think the dude later goes on to say that acid helps to bring us close to the unsanity region. but that kinda sounds like quite dated pop-psychology talk. what is sanity?

anywho - a few hours have passed, i went to dictionary.com for a good deffinition of sanity - that window is still frozen - no sanity deffinition. but i managed to get my own comp running- for some reason my old installation of windows now works, so thats kinda cool for the moment. about the sanity circle - i guess more or less what i was trying to get at was that ppl seem to like paraphrases - i suppose its a way to try and understand something unknown. when u deal with the unknown further, u come to know it for its own unique qualities.
paraphrases and cryptic sayings. something about these being key factors in the success of Jesus, Confucius, Shakespeare, etc. but the sanity thing - i dont know - i think the word "sane" has its roots in the meaning "healthy" - its just that it now is used of mental health. we say that someone who is mentally healthy is normal. normal as in conforms to the "norm" - what seems to be thecase for most ppl. but evolution is a history of change, of taking the risk to deviate from the norm. ppl who are insane are just ppl who are different than the norm in the mental health department. for now - the norm is the way to go - works in favor of millions of ppl surviving. but as genetic mutations, different ideas and different environments keep throwing up "different" models, or variations on the "norm", one day we might see that a certain "model" of human seems to be better and is becoming the new norm. or environmental pressures change in favor of a till-then minority - the norm will get forced out of existence and the new norm will fill the void. there - what a nutshell! :D
ok - i'm going :)

it is becoming apparent to me that i dont "like" to "create" or "produce", and am most at ease observing. such a lifestyle is doomed to fail. extinction. i mean, i work for a living but i dont really like it most of the time. one has to contribute to the world, the society one lives in - otherwise one's just a parasite. hehe - isnt one :)
i like to listen, read, watch, look, accompany, but rarely if ever do i actually "generate" anything. seems like i just respond to stimuli - a friggin' glorified cuckaroach. right now i'm supposed to be fixing a comp for a friend of my rents' - and it involves having to learn and troubleshoot and figure out just why the bloody thing wont work. this could be viewed as an exciting prospect - exploring, learning and all that jazz. but i got some internal brakes firmly on. i think it was easier to "just do it" when i smoked pot. i think i'm more productive when i smoke pot. then i dont seem to mind nearly as much getting into unfamiliar territory or whatever adversities. or doing something i dont really feel like doing or dont like. seems like i'd rather talk about it instead of just doing it.

i'm really starting to get annoyed with blogger - the layout keeps getting messed up for no apparent reason and its just so cumbersome when it comes to pics. i almost had a coronary yesterday, trying to put my pic in my profile. first i had to download/install "hello", then upload my pic - but that was ok. i rem'd my gf saying something about having to actually post a pic and then open it, copy the addy from the bar and then insert that in the pic url space in the profile editor. then it turned out that my pic was by far too big. as in gi-normous: a wild science-ficionesque size of 1.2 megs or something, compared to the until-then undisclosed top limit of 50 kb. 50 kb? i envisioned having to reduce the quality of the pic until the pixelization (or is it pixelation?) made it impossible to tell whether it was a pic of a weather balloon or a kettle. THEN i had to resort to using my gf's pic software "mgi photo suite" - which had severe problems with the adjustments i wanted to make AND save. but i managed. then the friggin' "hello" crapped out and just kept going to a settings screen and after that it was invariably to an error page. i loogged out and back in - same thing.
but in the end i got an under 50kb pic that doesnt look like a tea pot and my gf somehow managed to get that pic onto my blog, and i really shouldnt bitch nearly as much because her comp at least works :)
i'm not sure i like my tendency to just use blogger for venting these days. i'd rather contribute to a positive world. almost 3 weeks no pot! :D

yet another day as an ant. how bad does this get? i guess i could still lose my job and have to move back to my parents' AGAIN and get some terminal disease.
my gf just got pissed off at me for not coming to bed with her. life sucks. shouldnt things be on the up now that i'm not smoking? its only 10:24 for fux sakes.

2 weeks no pot

thats right - 14 days :)
i like pot, but there's a time and place for it. without me realising it, it'd invaded my life and i kept turning to it for feeling good - but it was impairing me in some ways and finally i decided that i needed to level out emotionally *without* being adversly affected in terms of memory, sexual performance, concentration and comprehension. it may soom odd to some that a shroom trip helped me crystallise these thoughts and finally the decision :)
true - i've been turning to beer for a sort of consolation a bit, but even that's pretty much gone now,so thats awrite :)
if i'm having this much trouble with pot then i'm thankful i never got into anything hardcore :)
i'm sorta toying now with the idea of trying to get somewhere deeper with psychadelics, some sort of understanding, revelation, illumination..? and i still havent really hallucinated yet... :(
sometimes i wonder whether its all bullshit, but then i remember my friend alek's amazing, if frightening, mushroom experience. so it is possible. but perhaps not for everybody :(
but no more unexamined, purely recreational substances :)
but so often, like this evening, i find myself a bit low: i passed yet another day like an ant: went to work, did my stupid work for chump change, under supervisors who are less knowledgeable/intelligent than me, drove home, did some chores, tried rushing off to help parents' friends with their comp problem, got stuck in traffic, wasted a bunch of time, didnt solve the problem, bothered my brother in edmonton with a friggin' free tech support phone call, ended up taking their comp with me to hopefully fix it home, got back home, did chores to only slightly diminish the depressing backlog of shit that still needs to get done and needed to get done for a while now, and then the gf wants to go to sleep... i havent LIVED today yet! i refuse to live out my life doing stuff i dont like or barely tolerate! i'm here for me! it's got to be worthwhile!
so at least i messed with the blog for a bit. oh, did i mention my comp died? good thing my gf's got one of her own - that way we're not *totally* cut off from the world. real life kinda sucks. or maybe i'm going about it all wrong. maybe i'm too pessimistic. how do i get more optimistic?
still gotta shower before hitting the sack...

so, my new year's resolution was to quit the pot - well more like reeeeally minimise it - to like once or twice a month. so far its been a week and i guess i'm doing awrite - although i've been having a beer or 2 almost every day - phx is not too happy about that - we'll see how things develop. sometimes i feel like life is shit and there's no fucken way i wanna go thru it sober - its just too shitty. i dont know a single truly happy individual who has to support themselves. ok maybe there's my friend montoyo - but he's finding it really hard to quit pot. so i guess thats taking away from his happiness. life is a constant struggle. i guess that s one way it can be seen. i dont wanna believe that point of view tho. i dont want it to be all that there is to it. i try to see it in other, more positive ways. i need to be happier, or else its not worth it. who am i gonna suffer thru life for? but it seems like to get to a point where i might be happier i must first fight an uphill battle against myself - my nature, my character/personality. i have to work hard to get to a hopefully better existence. i've sorta been trying but can i actually do it? i know i should just do it - but its so unbelievably hard! i m trying and i'm hitting my head against a brick wall. i dont wanna work hard at some stupid shit - and there's no way of living any kinda lifestyle without doing just that. but i gotta keep on trying.

re: the universe as a readout

turns out that the universe as a readout idea has already been thought of - like when i was a year old. i was just listening to the hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy when it dawned on me - that's my idea!
:(
but hey - life keeps moving on.
ok - time for beddy