actuality.log

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.

I just got back from dinner with three women. Now the conversation kept veering toward things like how many women faculty there are in our departments, where they are in their career, how hard things might have been at various earlier points in their careers and so on.

Now my question is this. In fields such as applied mechanics or some such clearly dominated by male geeks (and by dominated, I mean nothing more than there are many more of them in number, I am in no way referring to intellectual ability), what’s the chance a woman is going to be treated any less than perfect?

I mean, as far as I’ve seen, as a student, the number of women are usually so small in comparison with men, that the few are treated like goddesses. No matter how smart they are, capable they are, attractive (whatever criteria of judgement you choose to judge by) … they are.

From Lincoln, NE.

Everything seems larger.

Everyone’s larger and more-fully clad.

And much whiter.

– You shouldn’t start packing for a trip at 12:10 after your ride calls and says she’ll be there at 12:30. You’re bound to forget something. Something important.

– When your boarding pass says row 11, you assume that means you’re going to be somewhere waaay up in the front of the flight. Not the last row.

– Duct tape is not a safe way of securing, oh, 10% of the hull of an aircraft. (Picture probably later.)

– Beware of places where their idea of “variety in cuisine” is degrees of raw to well done steak.

[Halfway through typing up last night’s post, I realized I had at least three quite unrelated thoughts I was trying to cram into one block of text. Before I probably do something similar today, I’d like to say in my defence that it was almost 2 A.M when I typed that up, and I wasn’t particularly concentrating on what I was saying, just desperately trying to do anything but the ton of work I had piled up.

Needless to say, I still have all that work piled up. Hence the existence of today’s post.]

My second pass at this. The “let’s try to make some sense” variant.

Men and women are rather different. We can feign things so that we appear similar enough on the surface, but we’re rather different. Case in point, levels of communication. I am fairly certain we each have a certain treshold-number-of-words we’re capable of handling in a day. On average, I’d say a woman can handle some 8000 whereas the guy can handle some 1000.

Yes, I made up those numbers.

Anyway, guys just don’t talk as much about certain things. We don’t even talk as much at all, let alone about specific things. Which is a root cause for a lot of confusion, as at many points, women like things explicitly stated. They’re not tremendous fans of the ambiguous flows guys have little trouble wallowing in. So during dinner, it came up over and over how this guy never calls, or never writes or never anything. But then again, out of the blue, at random points, he is still capable of extremely sweet gestures.

Of course, since I was there, and I was a guy too, I was quite obviously asked for my take on things, in a how-could-he-possibly-be-seeing-me way. My first instinct, which was what I went with, was for god sakes the please don’t label him as “generally nice”. He is being nice, specifically with you, for reasons he will not state, but ones you must magically read. I mean, you are the woman right? Aren’t you supposed to be extremely perceptive to this sort of thing? Why should he say anything? Why should he call when he does what he does?

Of course, it later dawned on me that that was a spur of the moment, erroneous judgement call. In most cases, someone being nice is being nice expecting some sort of payoff, but that isn’t always true. Even cynics have to have that much faith in humanity. I mean, the nature of some of these “sweet gestures” could fall under a general sort of carey-safeguardey-providery “state”, which is nothing more than a natural response to “take care of and be nice to” someone close who needs help at the time.

Meaning, read into it or not, don’t trust a clown like me to make the call. And definitely don’t take my take on things as sufficient reason to go ahead with your “make yourself stunning so he doesn’t stand a chance since he likes you but just doesn’t know it, yet” plans.