I was in the zone today. The ZONE. I was resident at 457 Zone Street. The zone was in me, and I was in the zone.
- Two lab reports back. Grades: 98 and 100.
- Trig test. 100%.
- Beat down my discrete math review quickly and efficiently.
- Finished all but one step of a three-week lab in the first session.
And then I came home and started on my calculus homework, and realized that I really don’t know shit about shit and I really should just go home and hide in my house because this stuff is way, way over my head.
Damn you, Calculus, why must you always insist on ruining my highs?
and I’m so not ready for all these tests & shit that I’ve got coming up. Oh well, I’d better get ready for ‘em.
It was nice to see my room and my friends again. Moscow is slowly beginning to feel like home (even though I’ve got lots of friends in Twin that I always miss when I have to come back here.)
Hope everyone had a good break. I’m going to sleep now. Unfortunately, I have to get up at 7AM again.
Old, musty. Definitely leathery. Ancient… like it’s been gone for a while and isn’t coming back anytime soon.
How do I know this? Well, there’s a 1967 Gideons New Testament and three similarly leather-wrapped devotional books (Faith, Hope, Power) from 1947 in my grandparents’ bathroom. I’d wager they’ve been here since the house was built in the 1960’s, and they haven’t moved since. Those books were printed long before I was born and were probably put there several years before my mom met my dad. Those books, which my grandparents and parents have probably looked to in times of trial or sorrow, are pretty much the epitome of my understanding of religion.
It’s old, it’s musty, and whatever made them magical has been gone now for several decades. But they’re still there, and will probably be there until my grandparents expire and somebody else gets the house. Better yet, if it’s one of my family members, odds are fairly good they’ll be staying.
Maybe that’s what scares me about christianity - it has no way of forward-thinking because God never really gave us anything (besides the basics) to look forward with.
Huh, now lookie here people
Listen to my story
A little story ’bout a man named Jed
You know something?
That poor mountaineer
They say he barely kept his family fed
Now, let me tell you
One day he was shootin’
Old Jed was shootin’ at some food
When all of a sudden right up from the ground, there
Well, there came a bubblin’ crude
Oil that is Well, maybe you call it black gold or Texas tea
He gonna move next to Mr. Drysdale And be a Beverly hillbilly…
Before you know it, all the kinfolk are-a-sayin’
Yeah, buddie, move away from there
That little Clampet got his own cement pond
That little Clampet, he’s a millionaire
Now, everyone said Californie
Is the place that you oughta be
We got to load up this here truck now
We got to move to Beverly
Hills, that is
Swimming pools
Move-a-move-a-movie stars
Huh
Lookit that, lookit that
Beverly Beverly Beverly hillbillies
Y’all come back now, y’hear?
Beverly Beverly Beverly hillbillies
Beverly Beverly Beverly hillbillies
Beverly Beverly Beverly hillbillies
Seriously, summer is my absolute favorite time of the year. Fall absolutely sucks. Winter has its moments. Spring is just foreplay. Summer’s where the real action starts. I was walking back from the cafeteria tonight and suddenly, just for a moment, I could smell it.
Summer isn’t just a time of year. It’s primal, virile. And just for a second, walking back from the cafeteria today, I could smell it - that warm, strong, almost sexual summer air. You know the feeling… you’re walking around in the summer, ten feet tall and bulletproof, smile on your face, not a care in the world. Best feeling ever. That’s why I hate winter - all you can do is bundle up and trundle as fast as possible from place to place. It’s hard to just stop and enjoy where you are and what’s going on in the winter - the summer demands that on occasion, you stop and enjoy the action.
Maybe I’m wrong - spring isn’t foreplay. Spring is that moment when you realize yes, you are going to get some in the very very near future, and suddenly you feel really good. Bring it on.
Oh, and I updated the front page.
I’m 27. For years I have known exactly what I want to do with my life.
Unfortunately, like so many surgeons that want to be concert pianists and stockboys that just want to rock’n'roll all night and party every day, I have come to the incredibly depressing realization that the last 27 years worth of dreams have basically been worthless, and that I will never get to do what I really want to do.
So now I don’t know what to do. What’s life worth if you have nothing to dream about anymore? Can anyone be really happy if they don’t have something to aspire to?
So I pretty much failed my calculus test. I don’t know what to do about it. I guess I just don’t properly understand the material we’re studying but I really don’t know what to do about it.
At this point I’m really wondering if I want to come back this next fall. I don’t see what point there is in me being here if I’m just going to fail at this like I fail at everything else.
If I’m extremely lucky, I will be one-quarter as prolific as “Weird Al” Yankovic. He’s been making people laugh for 20 years.
Continue reading “LAUGH, DAMMIT!”
Douglas Adams strikes again.
“Rob McKenna was a miserable bastard and he knew it because he’d had a lot of people point it out to him over the years and he saw no reason to disagree with them except the obvious one which was that he liked disagreeing with people, particularly people he disliked, which included, at the last count, everybody.
…
Rob McKenna had two hundred and thirty-one different types of rain entered in his little book, and he didn’t like any of them.
…
And as he drove on, the rain clouds dragged down the sky after him for, though he did not know it, Rob McKenna was a Rain God. All he knew was that his working days were miserable and he had a succession of lousy holidays. All the clouds knew was that they loved him and wanted to be near him, to cherish him and to water him.”
– So Long, and Thanks For All The Fish.
For some reason, this chapter made me profoundly sad. No, I take that back; this chapter just managed to pretty much encapsulate, in less than two hundred words, precisely how I feel.
It did, unfortunately, offer little insight as to precisely what to do about anything.
So I’m working on Proteus and digging around on the message board and they’re talking about how Proteus can get kind of gummy (as in, text input gets kind of skippy) when Proteus is trying to write large history files. I’m thinking “Large? My desktop ICQ has history to 1997, now that’s large!” But anyway, I was trying to figure out a way to batch-manage all the histories at once, so I selected-all and chose Open User History.
it proceeded to open 72 history windows.
Did it lag? yeah, Proteus was lagging like a bitch. But I just switched back to Safari and surfed while it was opening and then when it finally got done, I command-Q’d Proteus and reloaded it. (Way faster than closing 72 windows.)
The system didn’t lag, skip, or stutter.
Damn, OS X is really impressive.
