Month: October 2004

I woke late. But I’ve been feeling tired all day. It’s like, you’re in this state when you aren’t really awake, but quasi conscious. I drag my dazed self across my home to find an empty fridge. There is nothing really exciting to eat. And by exciting, I’m including milk for some overly colourful, overly sweet cereal. I step out, hoping to rectify the situation. Either snap myself out if this, or at least gather groceries. It’s very cold, and very wet outside. I walk straight past the grocery stores and stumble into a coffee shop.

I hate coffee.

Not that I’ve ever tried it, but I can’t stand the smell. I end up drinking more hot chocolate than is good for a person. I leave the place at what? 5 – 6 in the evening? Yes, I just spent my whole day in a coffee shop.

I still hate coffee.

I buy tickets for this show at a neighbouring comedy club hoping that’d brighten my evening. Instead, I hobble home and crash into bed. I end up missing the show.

Now it’s past 1 AM. I’m cold, hungry, sleepy and have this eery feeling I’ve ordered way more games and things for my gamecube than I really need while not-entirely-awake.

There will be a lot of returns in my future.

It’s a pity coffee doesn’t come with fortunes like fortune cookies. Not like it matters, I hate coffee.

[This was typed up last evening, but due to flakiness of the stolen internet connection, I only got to post it today.]

It feels nice to be at home and in my own bed again.

I got back home late in the morning to a ton of spam, a bunch of packages (surprisingly? unstolen) at my doorstep (including a free, as in libre, copy of the book Free Culture courtesy of the FSF) and a bunch of notices informing me my Gamecube had gotten here while I was away. In a little while, I attended some classes and got back to work. I left relatively early, (after all the tales of the journeys had been exhausted, of course). I’ve been feeling insanely sleepy and tired today (I mean, I had to leave to the airport at some 5 in the morning). I had some plans for the evening with someone, but canceled to stay in and go to bed early. I ended up sorting travel receipts and other such nonsense instead.

And I cannot believe how much goes on in this little town and how colourful and alive it is. I feel spoilt, and I love it.

And in other news, I removed my earring for the first time. I am not entirely sure I know how to put it on again however. I really don’t think these things through as carefully as I claim to.

If you have nothing to say, you express yourself in other ways.

It’s funny how things change. As a kid, birthdays were happy times. Plenty of presents and fun times with friends. Baking (rather complicated and cool) cakes with mom, and then pigging out. You know, just fun stuff that makes you … happy to be alive. You haven’t a care in the world, and everything’s going great.

And then things eventually morph to how my birthdays are now. It’s so weird, I go into this sort of introspectively-evaluatey mode where I’m constantly comparing where I am in my life with where I’d assumed I’d be by now. Feeling past-my-time and worthless that I am no where near where I could have been. It’s depressing and I end up feeling quite losery and sorry for myself. It’s a good thing I was quite preoccupied with getting results so that I have something to talk about, so I really didn’t have that much time to ponder over all this stuff.

I mean, I am somewhere right? Shouldn’t that be some sort of achievement to make me feel happy and have a sense of accomplishment?

Where did I expect to be by now? Be happily married with three kids in this picket fenced house? Win the Nobel prize for curing some deadly disease? Be some sort of super accomplished athlete dominating a field? Be this millionaire rock star with 3 multi-platinum albums?

Jeez, I hope I snap out of this already.

• My talk’s done.
• In order to commiserate my aging process, my folks got me a GameCube (bundled with Metroid Prime). Now all I need is Paper Mario 2 and I’ll feel like an 8 year old or so again.

To steal lines from one of the greatest classics of all time,

Sally sobs, “I’m going to be 40 …”.
“When?” says Harry.
“Some day,” she responds.
“In 8 years” says Harry.

Of course it’s definitely not 40 and 8, but I’m officially old. (TM)

– I wasn’t kidding when I said this place has absolutely nothing. I walked around for 3.5 hours yesterday and didn’t come up with one photo op. You could say I am blind, but I seriously doubt that.

– More male-female difference observations. I was at this one session for most of the morning where they were dealing with continuum thermodynamical descriptions of tissue development and related computational methods (the sort of things that put food on my table). It was actually relatively crowded, but there wasn’t a single woman in the audience. Not until the last talk anyway, where this person spoke about how aging (and gravity) affects (sagging of) facial muscles and related it to how they could deterministically come up with good and lasting plastic surgery procedures (to remove wrinkles, say).

What to make of that, I don’t know.

– I need to buy one of these massaging shower heads for my home. My goodness they’re soothing.

– I’ve been thinking a lot about my next potential camera for a while now. But I just implicitly assumed since my current camera has made me very lazy (since it’s quite easy to take decent pictures), I wouldn’t want part easily with it. But it dawned on me just 12 minutes ago that I probably am not as attached to it as much as I was a while ago. I just gave it away, and it’ll end up with someone I don’t even know to take some pictures of some event thingy tomorrow.

But then again, that could also be because this place isn’t particularly happening when it comes to things to see and photograph.

– I give my talk early tomorrow morning. I better prepare some slides or something. I’ve been told that my previous favourite colour combination involved a certain red that 15% of males are colour blind to, so that’s another thing I need to remember.