Category: Deeds

Sunny out today, finally. Exercise is in order, of some sort. The desktop team will be working long hours tonight. Me, I got some thinking to do.

Not thinking about the FCC, (ambivalent: while radio’s domination by ClearChannel is an obvious negative, there are many more independent media channels now, so it no longer makes as much sense to ensure diversity with the old regulations).

Not thinking about WMD (again, ambivalent: I’m guessing Bush and his crew are guilty of willful ignorance rather than deliberate falsehood, but I’m not sure that’s much of an excuse. And of course it’s done now, maybe even for the better, and we’re going to need to put more boots on the ground before we get out of Iraq safely, and if we get peace between Israel and Palestine we’ll be better off than before).

Not thinking about motorcycles, despite the obvious attraction of my hot new class-M learner’s permit.

I need to do hard thinking about me, and what I mean to myself, and to others. Thinking about what it means to be valued by others, to respect and love and befriend. What am I willing to sacrifice for love?

I imagine that in the past, people tried harder at relationships, although I have little evidence for this, except that the penalties for failure were higher back then. I don’t know that I’d be willing to try as hard as my parents did, at the outset of their relationship. I know few women, certainly, who would do something so risky and foolhardy as my mother did, embarking on a headlong, lifelong love at the age of seventeen and a half.

So, answer yourself this: What do you want from a romantic relationship? What are you willing to sacrifice for someone else’s love and happiness? What won’t you give up? What would make you abandon an otherwise healthy relationship?

I overthink everything.

I wonder if I will ever experience clarity of purpose in the way that I imagine my parents did, back in the day, casting aside doubts and leaping forward. Weighing options and making a decision and not looking back too much, knowing that the decision was made. I wonder if the 21st century will have any certainty– Dubya, with his moral clarity, certainly seems like a throwback to an earlier era (even to those who approve of it!).

Members of the Ximian team in the Boston AIDS Walk 2003: 5
Total people who arrived at the signup booth: 2
Total miles walked: 0
Total raised: $310

Most popular browsers at this site: Safari and Galeon.
Most popular post: Do We Need Nature, about the relationship between people and the world around them, with respect to that Shell/Economist Prize essay contest.

The Ximian team for the AIDS walk (June 1) has three members and two non-walking donors for a total of $100 in external donations. We need four for it to be an actual team though. Get those lazy programmer asses out of the chairs, willya?

I’ve got cream and eggs and yet I’m somehow hesitant to start up my next ice cream project. My last batch, strawberry-rhubarb, was something of a disaster and I ended up having to dispose of it, uneaten. I wanted to put it down the drain but it was quite a lot. I wanted to throw it away but I feared it would leak and get all over everything. So I flushed it down the toilet. I managed to avoid the complete disaster that of clogging and overflowing, but I had to leave it there in the bowl, deformed and pink like an abandoned fetus, until it melted.

Next time: orange-ginger. Not fetus-colored at all.

Remember, it’s a crime to document your life. It’s a crime to have the wrong friends and the wrong name. It’s a goddamn crime.

Today I went to work early so I could finish things up by five, so I could get out to Charlestown by six for the exciting evening I had planned: participating in an EEG/MEG scanning study. Yes, the whole mad scientist electrode cap and all.

It actually was like some sort of erotic sci-fi nightmare: after hours on a weekend at a huge medical research lab, uncomfortable equipment, two incredibly beautiful female scientists, one American and one Russian. Sadly, we all conducted ourselves very professionally.

For the experiment, I was supposed to look at words that flashed on a screen in pairs, and tell if they sounded the same by pushing two buttons. The idea was to understand brain wave activity in children and adults with and without learning disabilities. I was supposed to be in the non-disabled group, but for the first group of questions, I had the buttons backwards, and so I got nearly every one wrong. It reminded me of the time I was in the fifth grade, and I messed up on one of those test forms where you have to fill in all those little bubbles. I filled in the wrong section or was off by one row, and was crushed to find that I had scored in the fourth percentile.

By the end of it, my back and neck hurt and my hair was full of gritty electrode goop, and I was hungry because I’d skipped dinner. Still, I was kinda reluctant to leave. Maybe it’s the weather, but my experimentors had this completely mesmerizing combination of brains, beauty, and complicated electronic equipment that requires the application of conductive gel.

Maybe if you link to popdex.com you’ll be able to ENLARGE YOUR COALITION!!!

You know how when you were sick as a child, you got to eat ice cream or whatever? I’ve been stuck in bed with a back injury for days and my diet today has consisted of m&m’s, bourbon, and french fries. It makes the pain go away.

Well, it’s Friday. People keep stealing the campaign signs from politician
Pat Stoner. He’s amused by it, but he says he was born a Stoner and will stay that way. The folks over at Bong State Park aren’t so sure about their name though. Elsewhere, police investigated a man advertising crack sales but it turned out he’d just run out of room trying to write cracklins, as in pork rinds.

Commerce continues even in the midst of tragedy. It is, after all, one of the ways people can process the world around them: integrating it into their daily lives and rituals. So we get ads for chemicals of cockroach destruction. There’s a Taiwanese company making rice crackers that you can use to act out the conflict. Parodic products, too, like meals of mass destruction.

Of course, the world continues in ways that have nothing to do with the war, as well. It’s all very Auden and Breughel really. While allying with the US against North Korea, South Korea is still pursuing a WTO ruling against the US on tarrifs. Editorials in Taiwan use any opportunity to proclaim the Chinese government as despotic and awful, which is probably pretty accurate. Pioneers of technology and commerce die and are euologized.