emphatically static
Delineate exists to prevent posts like these. Obviously, it’s not doing a very good job.
Since our dirty little friend was dying,
I decided to open her up and prod her insides,
and then ceremoniously drove a stake through her heart,
ending her misery. But rather than grieve, I went onto do other things.
I’m looking into alternatives. It’s a pity I can’t wait for the Apple Intel Powerbook I’ve salivated over since it was announced.
Ah well.
In response to my earlier post on lacking companionship, I received this via e-mail; from this talented woman.
hey…i remembered this fwd when i was reading your lacking companionship post. Girls whose eyes light up when they talk to you(and the rest), may not be otherwise engaged. Half the time they’re lamenting how correct this is/seems:
1. The nice men are ugly.
2. The handsome men are not nice.
3. The handsome and nice men are gay.
4. The handsome, nice and heterosexual men are married.
5. The men who are not so handsome, but are nice men, have no money.
6. The men who are not so handsome, but are nice men with money, think we are only after their money.
7. The handsome men without money are after our money.
8. The handsome men, who are not so nice and somewhat heterosexual, don’t think we are beautiful enough.
9. The men who think we are beautiful, that are heterosexual, somewhat nice and have money, are cowards.
10. The men who are somewhat handsome, somewhat nice and have some money and, thank God, are heterosexual, are shy and NEVER MAKE THE FIRST MOVE!!!!
11. The men who never make the first move, automatically lose interest in us when we take the initiative.NOW ….WHO IN HELL UNDERSTANDS MEN?
Men are like a fine wine. They all start out like grapes, and it’s our job to stomp on them and keep them in the dark until they mature into something you’d like to have dinner with.
It’s by the grace of God that we live!!!!
Honestly, I’m somewhere between 8 & 11, depending on my mood, and the ambient lighting.
Need more detail? Here you go:
8—Sometimes you just don’t find her attractive. It’s not a crime. What is a crime is the way men handle it. We (at least I) can never tell that straight to a woman. So we (I) will concoct numerous (even if implausible) stories and weasel our way out; somehow always breaking her heart.
9—We aren’t being cowards. Sometimes, when you are attractive, in a waaay-out-of-our-league way, we just save you the trouble of having to shoot us down by shooting ourselves down. It’s not a crime, it’s a defence mechanism.
10—Same as 9.
11—This is weird, but only because it’s partially true. If a random hot woman makes the first move on us (us, of all people), she has to have some issue. And I can do better than a woman who’d want me. (Of course?) I lose interest.
Happy?
But these admissions are not why I put this up. The reason I’m putting this up here is to get feedback from the women in the audience. Are these the sorts of things that run through your minds? Does this mean, hypothetically, that if the guy is nice, somewhat-handsome, somewhat-brave, heterosexual, somewhat-rich, thinks you’re beautiful, doesn’t think you’re after his money, won’t be threatened by you making the first move—you’ll make the first move?
Men can chime in too. But your words will be gleefully ignored.
After years of torture and abuse, my computer is now officially “quite fucked up”. It barely stays on for a few minutes in the freak chance that it does come on. Time to dump it and start afresh I think.
Happy, or whatever sentiment, new year.
I keep trying to put my finger on what exactly my problem is, but the more time I spend pondering, the farther I really feel from the answer. No matter, since it’s that time of year, I’m going to stop feeling sorry for myself and chart out a few concrete steps to dig me out of the hole that is my life. I know we go through this year after year, and that it rarely does any good, but this time I’m going to define some clear, quantitative goals. At least this way I’ll have a clear metric of success, or failure.
Most of the following centers around returning to feeling good about how I look; as in marketability.
Now all I have to do is sit back, relax, and will these things into reality.
Clearly, the geniuses behind this piece of facial recognition software aren’t all that geniusey. The deal is you submit a picture, and it figures out which celebrity it most closely resembles.
So I did,
and apparently, I look like a Katrina Kaif. (Now just who is this person? How the fuck should I know? Just google her.)
But it’s OK, because the software is only in beta.
It was all going so well; my life I mean. It’s strange how the most trivial of events can open up the door to emotions and broken dreams you’ve kept so well hidden.
That’s the trouble with holidays. There’s too much time to slow down and think. Time to mull things over; over and over. It’s a festive season. I am surrounded by laughter, warmth, rich colours and family… and through all of this, it hits me, cutting deep—the stark realisation of how alone I really am. So much time past, so many things changed, yet the severity of loneliness still eats at my insides.
I get all tense and begin to hyperventilate. I calm down, forcing myself to take deep breaths reminding myself there are many other fish in the sea.
And then I look around. Look around to see other senior grad students, my immediate selection pool, all in their mid-to-late 20s. It then hits me again, harder than before—I’m too late. Anyone whose beauty makes my heart skip a beat, who finds my dry sense of humour funny—laughing sexily at my tentative attempts, whose eyes light up in excitement when they’re talking to me, who’s passionate about the same things I am, who listens to me—really getting me, who’s informed and conversant enough to hold profound conversations we enjoy so much, whose dynamic nature inspires me out of my reserved shell, whose talent never fails to wow me… has found someone else.
I get tense again, and even more short of breath.
Update: I just got invited to another (strikingly attractive) woman’s wedding this evening. Well, whoopideedoo.
And so begins a true reversion to this journal to its roots.
One of my cousin’s birthdays coincides with Christmas, but that is not central to this story. I had a piece of a most delectable cheesecake on the occasion, but that isn’t technically what this post is about either.
This post deals with random preparation tips for cakes, and cheesecakes in particular, since I am your resident connoisseur of such things. (A silly little man who invites diabetes with open arms.)
In your hurry to sink your teeth into its deliciousness, DO NOT bake your cheesecake at a temperature greater than 170–200 °F. Just don’t[1]. When you’re baking a regular cake, as you know, you use a lot of flour. Now the gluten from the flour prevents the egg from coagulating, which is why it’s OK for you to bake at your usual 325–350 °F. If you do the same for your cheesecake, you’ll end up with scrambled egg interspersed in a cream-cheese matrix after baking; Not very appetising.
Now that you know, go on, impress the people around you with your newfound know-how.
While we’re at it, if you’re in the process of making a short cake dessert for your guests, why not impress them by coming up with your own homemade preserves/jams/jelly? All of these are basically the same thing with different fruit to fluid ratios, and they’re easy enough to do. Plus the women love things that are sweet!
Here’s what you do. Let’s suppose you’re making strawberry shortcake. After baking your base cake (or cheating with a bought out pound-cake), just chop up a bunch of strawberries and toss them into a bowl. Sprinkle generous amounts of sugar on them in the bowl, and leave it sit. After about half an hour, come back and toss them lightly to enjoy your juicy strawberry preserves to be poured on the cake! When poured, it will be soaked up into the cake nicely and look (not to mention taste) fabulous.
All you’re really doing is extracting water from the fruit using the sugar. Easy, and impressive!
Being the manly man that I am, I am chock-full of such useful information.
[1] Even though random sources on the web will tell you otherwise (they will adivice much higher temperatures and water baths). If you care at all about rich and smooth texture, you will listen to me.
From Clear Channel Radio:
“To all the rap fans out there, Merry Christmas, to all the rappers a Happy Kwanzaa, and to all the rap label-owners, Happy Hanukkah.”
The kinds of things I’d like to have said, but lack the inventiveness [src].
I saw Munich earlier today[1]. It was quite awesome—moving, intense and all that. Given the attention span of the average person here though, I’d say it was pretty long, but I guess that the gratuitous violence and gorgeous women in graphic procreative acts makes amends for that. It ends up asking the difficult questions, like, “Is extreme violence against your enemies really the answer for a happy ending?”, “How late into a pregnancy can you continue to have sex and still end up with a beautiful daughter?” … stuff like that. You know, the really important questions.
But here is where I stop talking about the movie, and break off into our tangent for the day.
The thing is, I was brought up in a cultural setup that’s totally non-confrontational[2]. The sort of, you slap me, I will turn and offer you my other cheek, mentality. Eventually you’ll vent your rage and move along; I will not be provoked into behaving like the animal you are. This in no way means I’m advocating being a wuss. In fact, it’s just the opposite. It takes a much bigger man, to forgive, forget and remain peaceful than it is to pick up a gun and vow to kill all your enemies.
I mean, where does that really get us? You kill my family, I yours, and your kids me, my kids (who somehow escaped) yours and so on. Seriously, what’s the fucking point?
And it is this root concept that most people in the movie—and in life—fail to see. Violence is never the answer. But there are several instances in the movie where people feel proud they’re fighters—”If we don’t fight for our land, no one will hand it to us”—and cases where they’re made to feel like traitors if they aren’t willing to give up their lives for their country.
I don’t claim to be unpatriotic, but there’s a big leap between being proud of where I’m from and giving my life for my country. I shouldn’t be made to feel guilty for not fighting for my country. It is my choice to make, and I will help her in productive ways, not “killing our enemies” or whatever grand crusade these people are after.
After all, no one is arbitrarily violent. Nothing is really unprovoked; It is always the sign of a bigger problem. Something you’re probably a part of. So fix the real problem. Be a little less inward looking (ignorant) and aware of other cultures. Peaceably go about your own life, and all will be well.
Especially if you have a super-hot loving wife and an adorable baby[3] on the line. You’re not screwing your country by leading the happy life you’ve built for yourself.
[1] I also got to talk to relatives who were in Munich in the ’70s for the Olympics when the incidents this movie is based on really happened (who’ve also seen the movie), and that was pretty enlightening too.
[2] I said I was brought up…. I didn’t say or mean everyone from where I am from was. So keep your “But my mommy taught me differently”s to yourselves. I don’t really care.
[3] This is a reference to the movie. Since I wanted to tie it in to close.
It’s that time of year, and I’ve been getting a ton of (obviously last minute) Christmas shopping done. For the few past years that I’ve been around here, I’ve sort of gotten away without having to do this with the very corny “I’m new to your customs” bit. I decided I wouldn’t do that this year, as it was getting a bit old. Besides, shopping’s fun!
I think I’ve amassed a nice collection of goodies—ranging from the pocket-hole-burners for materialistic kinds with expensive tastes, to the thoughtful hand-made-from-special-bits trinkets for the sensitive kinds. Having spent more than half my day in stores, as a side bonus, I ran into so many cute little kids. Words like adorable do not do them justice.
Anyway, this sort of thing always results in my inner spoilt-brat-isms to bubble to the surface.
I want a baby NOW! I want one I want one I WANT ONE! Now Now NOW!
*Flail hands randomly and stomp floor for effect.*
Don’t mind the fact that I’m not emotionally ready, financially nowhere near responsible enough and lack a willing uterus.
On another seasonal note, it’s cold. How hard could it possibly be to convince someone to be your snuggle-buddy for the winter? Because, you know, they’re probably cold too.
The following describes events in my life over the past few days. It attempts to quell the rumbling in the audience—generally tired by all my filler nonsense—wondering why I seem so preoccupied and distant.
The trouble with living life if you’re me, is that you think you have some inherent right to get by on doing only one honest day’s work each term (that’s ~4–6 months long, for those of you who’ve grown up and gotten real lives). I don’t really know when this originated, but for as long as I can remember, my life activity chart has read like a delta function. By which I mean, extreme activity over very short intervals—days—padded by copious lulls—several months.
Sure, this is extremely stressful at those peaks, but it is remarkably convenient the rest of the time. The truth of the matter is, that large lull period I spend “goofing off” is basically some sort of (emotional) build up to this moment, or the lick-my-wounds and recoup phase after the event has passed. The reason that I’ve seemed oddly distracted and there has been so much noise on here recently, is that yesterday was one of “those days”. It was clearly one of the more intense ones and has taken its toll on me, but at the end of the day, nothing went wrong. I got everything I needed done, and done well.
As always, because I’m just that cool.
If you’re a nerd, or really curious about the details, read on.
Since I am a kid, I still take classes and such, and the end term requirements for one was basically “Come up with something interesting and turn in a report at the end of the term”, or “Come up with something interesting worth publishing and turn in a report whenever”. Implied in this second scenario was that your academic transcript would sport an unsightly ‘I’ (for incomplete) until the deed was done. That being totally unacceptable, I decided to turn stuff in by the end of this term. But I didn’t want it to be “just anything”, I wanted my contribution to help advance a field of mathematics; to be publish-worthy.
So I sat down, for a day, in my little corner, pouring over what’s out there, figuring out deficiencies, pencil-pushing the required improvements, programming it and testing it, satisfying myself of its coolness, then wrote (PDF and nerdiness warning. Absolutely no questions about the implementation and document preparation will be entertained. On the math however, feel free.) about it.
What was unduly stressful about all of this, was that I had the 4 months or whatever to get it done. There was no need to have done it on one (and that too the last possible) day. Rationality apart, what my brain keeps telling me is that, “but I did do it”. I nabbed my A+, and will work on polishing the details in the near future making it publishable. And since my measures of success are totally different from most, I deem myself very successful (in such matters).
What you (and a lot of others) might chalk down to an extreme kind of slackerism, I deem as a test of “coolness”. Somewhere along the line, I’ve declared myself “extremely capable” (in an intellectual sense). What people take months to understand and evolve, I take hours. I don’t work on these things during all my copious free time, because I don’t need to. Doing so will sort of imply I am not “as cool” as I give myself credit for, and that’s totally unacceptable. The deal is, whatever the stress at those few peaks, the lack of sleep, the overdoses of caffeine, the clear physical toll on my body, from pain to droopy eyelids to hair loss, the sense of achievement derived from the feeling of “outsmarting the system” is immeasurable.
But, you’re probably right. Maybe I am just a slacker.
Remember though:
You can be lazy or incompetent, but you can’t be both.
While I’m licking my wounds and nursing myself, here is some breaking site news I thought you might be interested in.
For one, note the tiny change of URL. Currently, the old URLs work just fine, but may arbitrarily stop some day in the future. Please make any necessary changes before that. For those of you who’ve been spammed by my XML feed as a result of this shift, sorry.
Another little tidbit is my new pseudonym and e-mail address to commence the festivities: pundit at emphaticallystatic dot org.
Why pundit? From the nearest online dictionary,
\pun”dit\, n
- A Brahman scholar or learned man; a teacher.
- A source of opinion; a critic.
My, how deliciously ambiguously apt.
Now, I go rest. I will respond to all your exciting comments subsequently.
I kept telling myself I wouldn’t do this, but here it is: A partly-geeky, no-real-news filler meta-post.
I am clearly not qualified to comment on things of this nature, but that hasn’t ever stopped from opining before. On looking at shots of this journal rendered in Safari on MacOS X (looking just the way god intendedTM), I realised I’ve inadvertently gravitated toward a sort of Applesque way of doing things.
As a younger lad, I’ve spent an inordinate amount of time mucking with things like Xfree86 config files, tweaking device drivers for esoteric hardware support in the kernel, and much much more under the guise of “better performance” or something non-concrete like that. I’m calling it “non-concrete”, because I didn’t really have a metric of performance. I just felt that if I put in the time, the results would definitely be “better”. This is the sort of mentality that drives a good portion of the gentoo users, I am sure.
But as I’ve gotten older, I realised I “just want things to work”. I’ve stopped staying up-to-date with the latest hardware and OpenGL drivers just so I can get 3 more frames per second on some game. I’ve stopped modifying and building most things from scratch just because I can. None of that. I want to just push a button and everything to work automagically. I don’t want too many things to make-sense-of staring right at me all the time. I head home late in the evening, I power on the GameCube, within 5 seconds I’m mashing buttons—the way it ought to be. Nintendo realises this, so they’re going to make sure their next generation console caters to the less hardcore in the audience as well.
But what I really wanted to get into today was the redesign of this journal. Rather than get overly verbose, the following images just about exemplify what’s going on.
Which of those would you rather use?
I saw this earlier in the context of comparing GNOME and KDE, but the analogy holds here as well. Are things really that much more functional when you have 14,000 links on a page? What about when the text is teeny-tiny centred in a small column somewhere in the middle of the screen? Is that why people spent so much money on their large screens which can work at some egregious resolutions?
I think not. So, this is why this site is now the way it is. This is what I meant by an “inadvertent Applesque gravitation”. And, as much as I hate the company and its rabid community, they really do have some things going for them.
People who are more skilled or qualified in terms of marketing or design may have conflicting views, but I am a simple man, with none of that knowledge.
Keeping with the sort of back-to-basics drive initiated a few days ago, this post purports to revert to our favourite topic in these here parts—the divide between men and women. Oh joy! In particular, we’re going to be concentrating on a few things that popup frequently, and lead to much hilarity; if you’re the kinds that thinks being yelled at is funny.
While men don’t usually see the difference between being neat and being clean, women clearly do. So there he is, sitting all proud that he’s kept things so tidy (stuffed out-of-sight under the bed), whilst she walks in, declaring his habitat “an uninhabitable dump”. She didn’t even have to peer under the bed; she’s referring to the substantial layer of dust atop the TV, something which our guy is entirely blind to. The trouble here is not from one such specific unpleasant incident, but stems from a basic difference in stance on just what “clean and liveable” means.
This shaky communication pathway between men and women is frequently plagued by many other such instances, when they’re probably using the same words, or superficially referencing the same concepts, but implying entirely different underlying notions. A much-celebrated illustration of this is the implication of the phrase “I have nothing to wear”. When guy says this, what he really means is “I have nothing clean (enough) to wear”, while the same words coming from woman probably mean more along the lines of “I have nothing that I’m in the mood for wearing”, or “nothing that I have the right accessories for”, or something like that.
I could’ve stopped there with this example, but again, this is just symptomatic of something bigger. While women pay careful attention to detail, men often seem to be stuck in a wishy-washy state, where only vague aspects of the grand, sweeping goals are apparent (e.g. “Bragging about this will so maximise my chances of getting into her pants, so I must keep talking.”). So while the woman has painstakingly set something up, be it subtleties in the plans for the evening or fabulously-intricate patterns on her accessory selection, men aren’t going to magically sensitise, make thoughtful observations, and come up with fitting compliments.
They’re just not equipped for this sort of thing.
Hell, we don’t even see more than a few basic colours. Biscuit, cognac, brun? No, they’re all “brown”. Try beating the subtleties over and over into our heads, and they’ll still be “brown”. Noticing that you’ve spent an entire afternoon mixing and matching these in some way, with some hidden special veiled message and deciphering it is not something you ought to expect from us. At best, after much prodding, you might get a “those brown earrings go well with that top, and you” (We fail to notice details; we just need to keep our vague goals in sight. Like, “Maybe a compliment will increase my chances with her. I must compliment her.”).
And during the course of your prodding, you’ve probably hit against another fundamental wall—men don’t want to talk. Men like to do things, like leer. Not talk. Men don’t even like to talk about things they’re obsessed with, like coition. I’ve noticed so many interesting gender-based patterns of responses that I’ve gotten (or not) on different topics via comments and e-mails over these past few years, but I will reserve those observations for another day.
What is “waaaay too much” talk for a man, barely scratches the surface in terms of what a woman decrees as a “healthy norm”. No seriously, what does she want? Does she want me to keep calling her until her cell phone minutes are exhausted (and she gets to pay those wonderful overages?) as a symbol of how lovely our relationship is? I don’t really know. This is something I don’t ever see ending well. From one end, it always feels like it’s too much and therefore something’s wrong, while at the other end, it always seems not nearly enough and therefore something’s seriously wrong! Basically, there’s no hope, and this is just another avenue for much confusion.
I could go on, but most of these things I’ve mentioned are rather deep seated, and aren’t trivial to fix. Before I begin to bring you down however, I’ve realised that the trick is to convince yourself into thinking, “fundamental incompatibilities aren’t bad, they’re just opportunities for much excitement and surprise!”
Yeah, right, if being yelled at excites you.
Every week, I get a letter from my cellphone service provider—T-Mobile—to upgrade my service (for free) from its current 600 or so “whenever” minutes per month to a whopping THOUSAND. Every time, I trash the envelope half-way through opening it.
Did you know I used a grand total of FOURTEEN minutes last month? And less on average every other month prior? And that 14 included 12 minutes of waiting on line to speak to a Comcast (my cable provider) service lady to argue a bill?
Sigh, I really need some friends.
One of my goals for next year is to overshoot my monthly allotted minutes, and pay huge overage charges, at least once.