another one gone...

Just sold my Talon. always feels weird when they take away your car. but it had to go. it was getting on in years, and more and more things started getting buggered up in it. i was getting into deeper and deeper mechanics territory, and while every time it was a learning experience, every time was also a bit of an ordeal - not knowing, needing to read up and look at websites and forums, buying parts, buying tools i didnt know existed, and it always took sooooo looooooong. these 2 guys put a new arm in right there on the spot in like 15 minutes. it took me hours and hours to get all the shit off. mind you, it always seems harder to take shit apart in a car - shit is seized up, cant see a screw or bolt thats still holding it all together...
that was the first "good" car i bought with my own money. actually, it was the first one i bought with my own money, period. the previous one was bought with student loan money.
this car went with me to San Francisco, then almost to LA, then to Las Vegas, Hoover Dam, back home, then to Toronto... and then back again :) well, there were little excursions to Niagara Falls, Windsor, Detroit. got quite a few speeding tickets with it, including one that might still make me wanted in California :)
when i bought it in 2001, it had about 60K on it. 7 years later - it has 235K

fastest i've ever gone in it was 215 kms/hr (133 mi/hr for you 'mericans) - 215 was also its nominal horsepower.

...

i wrote the above like a month or 2 ago, then just saved it - to be edited and added to later. well, that never happened, and i'm not sure what i was thinking of adding to it, so here it goes.

Łukasz

you were born on january 27 - a month premature. i knew that a month early, especially these days, is not bad at all, but watching you suffer like that right from the get-go felt really shitty. they plopped you down on the scale, all naked and cold and screaming, then put you on some examining table, squirting antibiotic cream in between your puffy eyelids, repeatedly vaccuuming your nose, mouth, throat and lungs with this tube, to clear out as much fluid as possible, injecting you with all kinds of shit to help with this and that, hooking up the intravenous, cutting your heel and squeezing and squeezing and squeezing to get way too much of your very thick blood for tests. other babies get to rest a lot with their moms after they're born. not you, little guy. your mom was in the recovery room, drugged and vomiting and being pumped with other drugs that were supposed to help but only exacerbated it. finally they ran out of things to inject her with, and she stabilized.
what did it do to you, baby - being born to pain for hours, and then subsistence for weeks - almost no comfort of human contact, just machines: checking your heart-beat, your breathing, your blood oxygen saturation, keeping an elevated air pressure to your nose with extra blows of air when you're supposed to be breathing, machines dosing intravenous fluid with an added fat solution and electrolytes, and a tube taped to your little chin and going down into your tummy to make sure air bubbles come out easily. and a UV lamp on for 2 days straight to help get rid of your jaundice. people would come around every now and then, to stick an IV in a different hand, foot, thigh, both sides of your head, and all you got to show for it is a crappy mohawk and tracks and bruises everywhere.
the nurses said that you were doing pretty good for a premie, but there wasnt much to be rejoicing about. i felt fucked up, and all i did was look.
but sounds like you've been doing better and better - too bad we havent even been able to visit with you more often, but we've been sick, and we dont want to risk getting you sick. wonder if the nurses think we're shitty parents. fuck'em if they do - i think this is unfortunately the best course of action. maybe they know and understand. here at home we've all been going through a stomach flu, a cold, boogie's teething, and trying to let mommy heal from the c-section. your babcia has been helping with your sister, so that's been great. times like this you feel the value of being part of a community, a family, having someone to help you when you need it - its survival of the group, not survival of the fittest.

i was on some web page when i noticed a link that said something like "video of heath ledger snorting coke". huh??? they're actually showing this?? after clicking on the link, i found myself on one of those celebrity-following websites, and an article talking ABOUT the video having been bought, but not released, yadda, yadda... so, disillusionedly reading down the short blurb i happened upon this line:
"Referring to his love of cannabis - an illegal drug often smoked in cigarette form - Heath added: "I used to smoke five joints a day.""

umm, where do you begin....
do most people not know what cannabis is? certainly people who read about these celebrity "indiscretions". though, granted, people who follow the lives of celebrities are much more likely to learn a thing or 2 about coke than pot. but calling pot "an illegal drug often smoked in cigarette form"? i guess it sounds more sensationalistic than an "illegal plant". and describing it as such might focus undue attention on the ludicrousness of the concept of an illegal plant.
smoking 5 jays a day may be a bit much. the guy probably had either problems that he should have been dealing with, or too much time on his hands and nothing to do with it. still, i would say let him do whatever he wants if it doesnt hurt anybody. unless it does, then thats a different story.
i can see how idiots might right away point and say"gateway drug!" i would love to pound their stupid heads with the bottles of booze he'd drunk before he ever touched a joint. i'm such an angry little boy :)
lots of people go thru life snorting coke and having jobs, raising families, and not becoming junkies. lots of people go thru life like everybody else, while smoking pot and not touching other illegal substances. lots never touch anything illegal, and just booze it up. some never even drink. "drugs" are not as straightforward as misinformed or misinforming loudmouths would have us believe. we need truth and education - not sensationalism.

here's a fucking positive post of the day - i fucking hate how life keeps throwing me curve-balls, shit i'm not ready to deal with, dont know how to deal with, dont wanna deal with. life is a story of just barely good enough to procreate the species, processes out of control, but maybe just good enough for the moment. maybe i was right in believing once that bringing a child into this world is cruel - if i'm suffering thru it, then why the fuck bring another being into it too? its the fucking blind, mechanistic instincts - liking sex, finding babies cute, caring for those close to you. shit like that.
i find life to be a nearly constant hassle. maybe i shouldnt have procreated - then i wouldnt have passed-on the fucked-up genes that make me feel this way. people for whom life is great should procreate - chances are their offspring will perceive life in a similar way.
i dont want fucking hassles, i just want to be happy.

got phx' car maintenance taken care of = changed rear brake pads and rotors, changed the oil and filter, and even topped up the windshield wiper fluid = purdy sweet :)

phew - almost forgot to make my positive entry of the day - well, it is the next day but i havent gone to sleep yet, so that should be ok.
there's several i can think of - the morning started with remembering that its friday - so that was cool - and i'd slept-in like a mofo - so that was cool too. listening to the dopecast - sans dope - that was chill. bla bla, work crap - then sampling some "juicy fruit" was cool, brought back a taste i havent had in years. realizing that a lot of work stuff was done already was cool.
getting everything together to work on the jetta was a relief in itself - before even starting any work. hearing that a friend is pursuing happiness over the mammon was cool, even if it does mean that i wont be really working for him for any length of time like we thought - but it might not even turn out that way. and now the crimpins tree is sitting neatly in 4 boxes, ready to be shipped off to my 'rents' garage - so thats a win. ok - my's ready to hit the hays :)

the time leading up to the holidays was dreadful, the holidays themselves werent much better, and i'm back to the grind. hitting another low point on new year's day, i was thinking about a fellow blogger's advice to just force myself into a positive mindset, think happy thoughts, *make* it happen. but i just couldnt/wouldnt - didnt happen, i wondered if i was simply more comfortable because more familiar with the depressed metal state or something. but i'm not really depressed most of the time, i dont think... either way, fast-forward to to my shower today, and i suddenly felt that i wasnt really down, and felt almost... positive or something. and then i remembered trying to feel happier when i wasnt, and thought that its so much easier to do when ur not totally down. and then i remembered my ex's "therapy" as advised by her doctor once - put little red stickers at various places around the house and places you look, and every time you see one of those - think a happy thought - a way to get the mind in the habit of thinking and feeling happy. so i decided to finally try it too - i put one little penguin sticker on the coffee maker, and one above the comp screen - that way my earliest moments of the day should get the positive vibe going. and i thought to make a new years' resolution - even though a few days late - i'm going to try to post at least one positive thought on the blog every day.
so - ...
man, my happiness kinda fizzled there. think happy, or positive. its friday tomorrow! thats kinda good. hmm.
this is depressing - i get brought down so easily. i get to smoke up and listen to the dopecast's 100th episode tomorrow morning..? well, that, the fact that its friday, and the fact i made this resolution should count for something. we'll see tomorrow.

huge bust in my city - 100 perps arrested, literally tonnes of drugs and drug-making materials and $2 million seized, along with ... 17 guns - this must be canada :D
but... another bust will not solve anything. a void was created in the supply side of the drug market, and it will be quickly and eagerly filled. prohibition didn't work with alcohol, neither will it work with drugs of any sort. the only viable course of action i see is the legalization and government regulation of all products people want to buy - including drugs. the population needs to be educated and reminded of the effects of all consumer products, whether they cause cancer, cirrhosis of the liver, asthma, or what have you. the government should regulate drugs like they do all legal drugs, including alcohol and tobacco, and in addition taxed accordingly to offset their cost to society - like projected costs to the healthcare system, and services that help cope with addiction (already in place in the gambling industry.)
its not the addicts who are the real victims here, either - nobody forced them to get hooked on anything - they're just a product of bad circumstances, lousy character and "unfortunate" genetic makeup. the real victims are their families, friends and every one of us who's ever had to suffer our cars and homes being broken into, our things and money stolen, all who've ever been assaulted for money, and every one of us who gets constantly harassed for "spare change".
i dont pity the bums - i fucking hate them. they're vermin. a lot of the dealers are scumbags too - thats why regulation is needed - the substances would be pure, the quality would be standardized, the prices of drugs lower, and... no more shady dealers.

i've been promissing myself that i'd put up a post about this or that for a while now - so i'll do it now - just before going to bed. btw - holly shizznit - its almost a quarter to 1 am!!!

i just farted a midget fart, and after i "cought wind" of it, i said something like "man, i need a filter". Phx didnt hear what i'd said, so i said louder "i dont think i'd pass aircare!" she giggled :)

and i just got an emergency page - some dude freaked out b/c their condo alarm was going off in the middle of the night, and he didnt know how to turn it off. they'd managed to chop the siren wires before i called them back, though. so i encouraged him to chop some more, since he sounded concerned that it might start going off again :)
a few nights ago the pager went off and i actually had to go downtown at 2 am because no card-readers were working at one of the highrises at this one project. people werent able to get into their building and up to their floor, unless the concierge was escorting them with his keys. of course, it turned out to be a loose wire - how cliche. but i'm supposed to get $300 for emergency service, so hopefully i actually get to see this money. if not, i'm throwing the fucken pager away - the boss can go look for it.

and in BIG NEWS - WE'RE GONNA HAVE A BABY BOY!!! :D
so thats gonna be cool - have one of each. so much for my aunt's prediction that i'll have two girls and my brother just one boy.

still havent fixed my car - but i'm working like crazy now, so i dont have the time. i dont think i've posted about the car, but my wheel basically fell off - good thing i was basically standing still. one of the ball joints tore apart. it turns out that crappy ball joints caused a recall in those cars. i believe the dealer said they checked out every recall and performed it on this car, but maybe i should check on that particular one - would they fix the car for free? i guess its worth checking. if i ever get any time from work. i've got 3 projects, and all of a sudden i find out that all 3 of them will need to be completed by the end of november. that's not looking very promising now, maybe mid-december - certainly before christmas, at least i hope so. i knew one of them was happening this year. i thought another son after it, but the 3rd one i was counting on not finishing until spring or summer. so i asked and asked for more guys, and the bosses kept brushing me off, until i told my boss that occupancy is in a month and we got fuck-all done for access control runs. that finally seems to have gotten through to him, because i started getting more and more guys. all of a sudden i had to switch from physically working to just running around, trying to plan and make sure that i know what needs to be done, what can be done, how many guys i'll need for that, find something else to do for the rest of them, make sure we have enough materials and tools - which we never do, and just do a lot of babysitting and hand-holding, because the morons i keep getting just hardly know how to do anything. but if i plans things well enough, at least something will get done. so thats a different kinda stress. now i'm there when they're all there, and i'm there after they've gone, to clean up, organise, and try to plan what can be done soon. keeping the other 2 sites in mind and trying to prioritise between all. i never got any training on managing anything, so its pretty hard. i guess i'm learning, but i hate this sink-or-swim shit. and since i'm on salary, all i can do is to hope that all this overtime will convert into time off for christmas - but i'm kinda skeptical that the projects will be done in time. i just want it to be over. and then every now and then the boss or the receptioninst, having some stupid little service or project for someone to do ask "Tom, how busy are you?" to which i answer "extremely". but there's still some things that no one else can really do very well, like service at a project that no one else has ever been to but me and 2 guys who no longer work for the company. i dont know who's gonna be servicing that when i quit. maybe they could sub it out to me - i'd get a bigger cut of the service monies, i'd say a bit over half would be good.

anywho - there's work to do and phx is having a tough time being 6 months pregnant, so i better quit fucking around on the comp and go help. i'll probably write again when the kids go to school :D

i've just seen 2 friends who have got chem related bachelor degrees, and one of them is working as a driving test guy, while the other is working at his dad's machine shop. BUT: the road test guy has a higher wage than me - he just started, i've been doing my thing for 7 years, and have the responsibility of carrying through the low-voltage installation on 3 construction sites, with 6 guys under me (though that number will dwindle to probably 2 or 3 once these projects come to a close). the other guy is basically his own boss since his dad doesnt seem to get involved too much with the shop, and buddy just pays himself, pretty much. he doesnt wanna go to work for somebody else anymore. i need to start working for myself. but i dont wanna work hard - let other people do that. i need to seriously startr pursuing my interests with the goal of probably eventually picking out one of them to pursue all the way - it will be one that will guarantee great income, one i will be good at, and one i will like a lot. for a while i've been thinking about translation - i've sorta gotten started on that already - just gotta keep it going. another one would be automation/robotics. then there was the t-shirt/clothing idea. i need to pursue these in parallel to hash out which one will be best. if i cant pursue them all at the same time, i'll have to time-share them - a week or 2 each, in constant rotation.
another friend of mine is working sorta part-time for a great company - he's getting an engineering degree, and when he's got the time, he lets them know and they throw some work his way if they go any. i'm pretty sure they're paying him $40/hr as a contractor or consultant, since he's not actually able to work for them full time at the moment. $40/hr is almost twice what i make. yet there's this girl i know who works for a cancer research institute for something like $8.50/hr - but she's a total humanitarian, so i guess her personal income at the moment is not her greatest priority right now - she's in it for the long run, wants to help, and hopes she'll start getting paid well eventually.

howcome i seem to mostly post when i'm tired and/or depressed and/or bitching.
i guess its a rhetorical question, since there's no question mark at the end.
and i just went to dictionary.com and found out that rhetoric doesnt really mean what i thought it meant. i thought it meant speach/speaking, probably public, "spieling". oh well.

been listening to the last harry potter on my mp3 player - havent caught up to the point i've read to, and its pissing me off.
i called around to see who would like to chill out with me and phx and boogie this evening - one couple showed up.
it sucks that i used to be pretty close with my buddy voider, but now it takes like 2 hours just to melt the ice and start having a nice flow of fun. and by then his wife gets tired of not getting whats going on and they go home.
life sucks for quite a few people, it seems - did things ever use to be different? or more precisely - better?
i cant imagine a way that i could direct my life to be truly happy - there always seem to be drawbacks. maybe i'm aiming too high.
i'm really tired, but i wanted to do something enjoyable before succumbing to sleep.
and last but not least - everything sucks, and i want a device installed in my brain that would make me happy and glad all the time.
bla bla bla...

fully back

so i'm fully back - work is still crazy, rains like a motherfucker, i'm depressed and tired and wishing for a toke while getting nothing done, and phx works her ass off and finally gets depressed too - life officially sucks again - fucking wonderful. its just all bullshit - happiness is some abstract concept, almost within arms reach when fucked up on something, anything. fuck everything.

time flies

wow - so much has happened since my last post...
...we started getting hints that phx might be pregnant again, we went to toronto to visit phx' family, then we went to niagara falls and got thoroughly soaked by mischievous winds, flew to germany, got one of our bags lost by an arrogant LTU check-in lady, visited phx' family in germany, went to the town where they make jagermeister - very cool town, went to poland for 3 weddings, got sick, got followed by rain everywhere we went, spazzed out time and again at the horrible roads and drivers in poland, and the lack of clothes dryers, decided that the european union has no idea what they're getting themselves into accepting poland into their ranks, because poland is evidently a 3rd world country, trying to get into the 2nd world. we ended up spending more time on the road than sightseeing, and forget about relaxing. then we drove back to berlin, flew to dusseldorf, and got separated by LTU which wouldnt allow me to fly back to canada because they didnt think my canadian citizenship card was proof enough that i'd be allowed back into canada. their single nice employee helped me get in touch with the canadian consulate, and i got an emergency passport about 3 hours after phx and boogie flew off to canada. i got a cheap hotel, a delish doner kebab, check out enchanting dusseldorf by night, and flew off back home next day. an eternity later i was greeted by the very pretty vancouver airport, and a retardedly long wait to get past the customs booths, followed by a nearly as retarded wait at immigration, where nothing was moving, where i was just supposed to drop off my stupid emergency passport, followed by another retarded wait to get out of the carousel area - the vancouver airport may look pretty, but has an unworkeable system of getting travelers through. next time i may fly to seattle. i've come to hate travelling though.
finally past all the waiting, i was greeted by phx and boogie with a flower - i was very glad to see them :)
in a couple of days we went to a carepoint walk-in clinic - this chain seems to hire mostly 'doctors' who are unprofessional enough to have their own successful practice, where one of their 'dudes' confirmed that phx is pregnant, and proceeded to prescribe her antibiotics which she'd just told him she allergic to.
i went back to work, which is still a clusterfuck, and my right front tire fell off - i'll be retiring my car, i think. then we went to visit phx' parents, enjoyed some great mother-in-law cooking, and saw the abomination that is 'stomp the yard' or whatever - which i give a rating of 5 beers to get through. it was like the fast and the furious of dancing, but worse.
found out dopefiend is in vancouver, visiting uncle weed, and hope they have some sort of meet-up with the fans before dopefiend goes back to london.

and i'm late for work again.

Halina 9000

got an e-mail forward from my cousin in spain about how ikea's got this automated assistant on their website - anna - which you can ask ikea-related questions in natural language. the email suggested to ask her some non-ikea-related questions though, and see what she says. i gotta say - the creators did a good job! :D to find out who the creators are, just ask anna "who's your daddy?"
i finally found out where the name "ikea" came from. but when asked if she's just a big database of answers she said she'd rather not discuss this delicate topic right now. of course she doesnt always get the question right, but her answers are often ingenious, despite of, or because of constraining directives like political correctness and insisting on talking about ikea-related stuff. hehe, i practically got bitched out after asking the polish anna some downright lewd questions. she told me that if i wanna talk about stuff like that, i'm in the wrong place. then she suggested to call one of those phone lines where someone would be more than happy to continue talking with me on that subject. and another time she almost put me to shame by reprimanding me about using highly inappropriate language in front of a lady. totally sweet :)
anna didnt know what a Turing test was, but i did find out from her that her creators review difficult questions from people, so i took the opportunity to congratulate these "creators" on a job well done. i wonder how long its gonna take before too many people muck around with anna before ikea pulls her plug as a waste of resources. but if they dont - could she ironically become the first AI, if she runs for long enough..?

heroes

we dont have cable - or time - so i'm not up to speed with whats happening on tv these days. i've been hearing about this "heroes series", just that its pretty cool, and i've had the first 12 episodes for a while. phx and boogie just went to k-town, so i thought i'd take a look at some of the footage thats been sitting around, accumulating dust.
i gotta say - heroes is a whole other level of primetime tv. it just keeps undulating, the separate story lines are starting to coalesce, a new reality is starting to emerge, solidify, its rules are becoming more pronounced and coherent. and is that a shmoozy attempt to ensnare geekdom - probably the core target audience for the show in the first place, anyways - into an awed army of loyal fandom? or is it an originally unintended, but brilliant money-maker of a side effect?
although sometimes it does seem to be moving a bit too sluggishly. i mean, a bit of suspense is alright, but come on.
awrite - back to it :)

spring is here, and summer is surely just around the corner :)
we've been having some truly summery days recently, and i'm totally hyped about the prospect of going for little picnics with Phx and Boogie on the various beaches around town, and even in the park across the street :D
i love it when i get up in the morning and already the sunshine is trying to burst in through the blinds :)

congrats to romek + monika on the arrival of their first baby!!! :D
just yesterday i was putzing around the pad, and i thunk: "i wonder if monika gave birth yet. she'd be overdue by now."
a few short hours later on, as i'm doing something or another that requires my undivided attention and both hands, the phone rings. ugh! dammit. so by the time i get to it it's just stopped ringing. now who was it... romek! oh, i think i know what this call is about! :D
so i call him right back, he answers, "hello", "hello", he's like "how are you", i'm like "good, good, and how are you", to which he answers "i'm very good!" son-of-a-bitch :)
finally i'm like "well, out with it!" so he finally says "i have a son!" awrite! he should have followed with "so did you see the game last night?"
we went to the store and picked out a card. there was one that said in the front "Children are gifts from God" or something like that. i thought it would be funny if inside we wrote something like "...too bad you're a bunch of fucken heathens! well, congrats anyway :)"
phx didnt think it was that funny, but it kept me giggling for the next few minutes. i gotta start printing my own brand of cards :)

started a new blog - port-a-potty art

its been eons since i last posted here.
i was lying on the bed, because i just felt too tired and bleah to sort thru the excess of shirts in our closet. phx and boogie came too, and we all started drifting off to sleep. and then one of our neighbours started pressure-washing the concrete pad in front of his place. and phx said: "that guy doesnt do anything but smoke pot and pressure-wash his sidewalk".
that slowly got some thoughts in me rolling. i wondered how active he would be if he didnt smoke pot. but then i remembered that i tended to get onto doing stuff i normally didnt feel like doing, after having a toke. so maybe it worked like that for this guy too. or maybe i'm just different.
then i started wondering why that would be - why something like that would affect me in that way. sometimes having a slight consistent pain or being sick just got me on working at what had to be done. all these things seem to just take some kind of edge off for me, and i dont terribly mind getting onto doing something i'd normally not want to do. how does that work?
then i started thinking that maybe our brains have a couple different centers that work independently towards their own goals, but what the body ultimately does is either some kind of average of the different agendas that these brain centers are pushing, or these stimuli get all submitted to some kind of editor, which then decides what to do out of all these choices. but maybe something happens during the editor's development that skewes his tendencies one way or another.
or maybe the process is more automated than that, and the brain centers simply submit a request together with some kind of a priority value, and then its not so much a conscious "choice", but rather a kind of an average or a sum total i mentioned earlier. and either because of nurture or nature, or a combination of both, some centers tend to output higher priority values than others.
likely it would be a combination of approaches - for simpler things, the process would be automated, and we'd be only dimly aware of it. for processes with which "conscious" mucking might jeopardize the body - the process would be completely automated and we'd not be aware of it at all. so what processes are we conscious of? is it the ones that deal with the outside world? unless they're boring, then they'd get demoted to the automated department, and awareness would be rerouted from it to more "interesting" things. awareness... attention? conscious attention. what is consciousness? being able to operate with ideas? whats an idea? something which can be described to a degree with language? hmm, phx just told boogie that i'm the next ernest hummingbird :)
but i think awareness, which is probably the same thing as consciousness, is possible without language. language just institutionalizes awareness. you can operate with ideas without language to a limited degree. but to do that you need memory. awareness probably doesnt exist if all ur doing is reacting to stimuli as they come. but if u can compare an experience to a previous experience...
this "comparing" might happen at an even deeper level of automation in the form of the evolutionary process: a mutation that gives an advantage to an organism when dealing with a situation as compared to its peers will give the organism better chances of survival and procreation. over time this type of organism should become the norm. its kind of like learning, but for a species. hardwired biological memory.
but when individual members of the species can learn to deal with situations in a better way, that catapults the learning process for the species hugely. then the members of the species learn to share this knowledge, so that mistakes dont have to be made over and over again, but the learning process can be picked up and continued by the next individual. add parallel processing by sharing information between many individuals at once and testing many new paths of progress from that point, and the species becomes a supercomputer. too bad we often think of ourselves as completely separate individuals and dont feel that connection to everybody else.

steal this interview

the most recent installment of the viking youth power hour is a previously unreleased interview with abbie hoffman, conducted during the course of the chicago 7 trials, with a bunch of commentary by the then 16 year old aspiring journalist tommy laporte, and the viking drunks. towards the end of the show i could swear you can hear some of them snorting right at the table. again.
all i knew about abbie hoffman up until hearing this show was from "steal this movie", and like the extra features on the dvd. i've never read "steal this book". i gotta say that actually hearing the actual dude was... disappointing. he didnt sound like the leader of a concerted anti-establishment effort i thought he was - he sounded like a rebel looking for a cause, or someone who sorta felt what was going on, but didnt stop long enough to think it thru, so a lot of his thinking and acting seems to me now, was done on the fly. who knows, maybe he was bigger than that - maybe he wanted to appear more "wild" in this particular interview than he was, maybe he didnt care about how he appeared thru this interview at all, possibly also because of the trauma of being on trial, and on such a scale. but even the dude that interviewed him was confirming my present feeling about him: that the dude was more of a force of nature than a logically thought out activist.
during the course of the of the interview he argued against any notions of impartiality and objectivism - he wanted people personally involved in the situation - the political situation in the states at the time - he wanted people to feel. hmm, maybe he wasnt so much against objectivism, but against apathy. anywho - gotta go to work.

i think the weekend was pretty good - went for a nice walk, in very windy weather; finally bought a nuker, but the stupid, no-name Danby piece of shit doesnt work - something wrong with the keypad, have to return it to fucking walmart; got a service van from work, but it smells, and its only for a month; finally cleaned out my car and installed the car seat in it, until phx' car is fixed. so i guess my car tips the balance :)
oh, actually i took some stuff out to value village and our storage unit, so we have a tiny bit more space now. and we looked at closet organizers - a titillating experience - and figured out (mostly) what we're gonna use. and i changed out 2 ligtbulbs, but only 1 was burnt out, but the result is brighter. but the stupid nuker pissed me off.

finished listening to "a scanner darkly" by philip k dick - wild ride, but somewhat somber. especially when in the epilogue the author divulges that some of the characters were based on some friends of his, then talks about how he and people he hung out with during the 60's all did a lot of drugs, then started realising how it was fucking them up, and how reluctant they were to stop. he concludes with a list of his friends that ended up committing suicide, and/or suffering irreversible brain/nervous sytem damage.
now i'm listening to "the man in the high castle" - so far its pretty cool.

bought a Saltskär bafroom cabinet at ikea - i thaught it had a cool pattern on the glass, so it wasnt all frosted, but kinda looked like, i donno - cool. for some reason i thought a few times what the pattern looked like - and i was drifting somewhere around the idea of broken up ice like on a river or lake, but still covered with snow. i mounted the damn thing, later had a shower, and as i dried myself off glancing at it, it finally dawned on me that it must be a city map! there's a few places in sweden named Saltskär, but most of them have no roads, and none of them seem to match up with this map. yes, i looked obsessively. for 2 days. not much of an obsession i guess. but i still wonder. maybe i should just give up and follow phx' advice and just email the designers and get it right from the source.

jumping on the bandwagon

...then again, i just watched blade runner, and i'm guessing it was the first time i watched it straight, because i think i finally got it, and liked it, and found out where this sound byte from one of paul oakenfold's albums is (just before the "piledriver" i think), and it turns out the movie was based on philip k dick's "do androids dream of electric sheep?"

and in other news, i'm thinking that if humanity survives long enough, with enough ppl living at once, we'll end up having all the possible human conditions occurring somewhere around the world, at once. if its possible - it will eventually happen. no matter if its right or wrong. nature doesnt have a moral code. so we can look forward to wellbeing increasing together with suffering. there will be more crime, because there will be more people. but there will also be more people living well. but then there's economy. depleting resources. that'll tip the balances in favor of suffering.

bah, its 4:20. am. i should really get to sleep.

phx and boogie went to kelowna to chill with gran and grampa, and i stayed at home. kinda weird - this appartment suddenly empty. felt lonely. but then i plunged into trying to fix whatever is wrong with the friggin' talon - battery got charged ok, car started ok, got it into the underground garage, cant say i feel like i found the source of the problem, why the abs seemed to be on, but not full on, until it drained the battery. maybe the nicked wires i found, dried and insulated? but it just doesnt feel like that was it. then by chance i discovered that the pin on which the alternator pivots has all but fallen out! i fucked around for hours, but couldnt get a new nut on there properly. i'll have to drain the oil, take off the filter, and then maybe i'll get enough space to get at it enough to just tighten it a little bit, so that i can hopefully safely get to my parents' place, where i can comfortably work on it, with the tools and good lighting there. our building's strata doesnt allow any kind of car work in the garage. i wonder if they'll slap me with a fine. it could happen, like the guy on the 2nd floor that installed laminate flooring in his suite - had to take it all off and pay a fine. our police state starts with our police strata :)
i worked until midnight last night. today i dont wanna go back there, hence this entry, but i gotta go. its felt like my life is too busy for a while now.
listening to some robert anton wilson and philip k dick - may both of whom rest in peace. the viking youth talked a bunch about them, so i wrote the names down and d/l'd what was available. ray kurzweil too - pretty sweet. watched a short bio on philip k dick last night - seems like he was just a crazy dude! there's a group of people out there who enjoy the creations of crazy people. you could probably easily extend that family to most artists. "most" - me and my weird preoccupation with always allowing for exceptions , alternatives, and exactitude. hehe - or exactness :) sometimes. to communicate as exactly as possible what i mean. or someone else. translation is like a riddle or a puzzle. i love it when i am able to use a saying or proverb, or any phrase that is not a straight-forward statement, to convey exactly the idea behind another such statement in another language, especially when the two statements use different subject matters to illustrate the point they're trying to get accross. now thats a convoluted tangent if i've ever seen one :D

i've recently been listening thru the viking youth podcasts - these guys are cool.

apparently in iran an unmarried woman will be punished with 100 lashes if she 'allows' herself to be raped, while a married woman will be stoned to death. was this mohammed's idea?

its fucking cold out there, and i got a shitload of stuff to do today. i dont really wanna do any of it.

why are there so few good books available in audio book format?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

ok - gats ta git to sleep. shower first.

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

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

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

weird dreams

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

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

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

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

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

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

apparently i'm an agreeable neurotic :)

My Personality

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

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saturday morning

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

approaching the transcendental object at the end of time

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

thx for the birthday wishes toi! ;)

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

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

booze, sun, and philosophy

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

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

the life quaquatic

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

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