written on

I've been through a few involuntary changes this week. For one, I wake up too early, all by myself (note that this is being written at 8am on a Sunday). Also, I suddenly want to read a lot of books again.

That second one is only kind of involuntary. I read the book that instigated it, Written on the Body, under my own power. But I didn't anticipate its effects. First I tried to get Matt to read it, to no avail. He doesn't really read books. To me that's similar to not liking meals. I just don't get it. Now I wonder: is there something like Pitchfork but for books? Does it have a message board? I also like talking about books.

For what it's worth, I've also been thinking a lot about the difference between contentment and happiness, and it's brought me nothing but trouble.

seven with one blow

This morning I spotted an ant on the kitchen floor. I followed it to the corner, where I discovered more than one ant on the floor. This discovery sparked a wave of destruction unprecedented in my interactions with insects.

I swept up the raisin that was the goal of the ant-caravan, which pretty much guaranteed they would eventually disperse, but that wasn't enough to satisfy my need for vengeance against the crunchy little invaders. Matt set up a few traps, and I laid out a perimeter of ground chile peppers. Ants became Palestinians, confined to the corner by a demilitarized zone of delicious barbecue flavor for us, chemical burns for them. (This works reasonably well, by the way. Determined ants will cross it, but they won't make their little caravans across it or anything.) We put on our fightin' shoes and executed surgical strikes against any ants that escaped the border of their new territory. When it seemed like more ants were leaving than were coming in, Matt settled down to play Zelda and I left for work. The whole thing took about an hour.

salon.mom

Salon's "life" section, which is really just thinly disguised "light things for women to read," has recently gone into pregnancy overdrive. (How come I read it in the first place? A girl can only study so much.) But now, every single article is moms this, babies that. Is it suddenly the style for everyone of medium-professional age to plop one out? Have reasonably smart liberal women become just a chorus of biological alarms going off in unison? I feel like my aversion to the floppy, swelling, morning-sick glory of motherhood is 30 years behind the times. It was all right to not want children in the past, but now if you're a feminist you have to have both kids and a career, and when it comes down to it you have to choose your earth-mother roots above your man-impersonating professional life. What am I supposed to do, just skip straight to McSweeney's for the next nine months and hope the moms get over themselves?

you can leave your friends behind

I think part of the reason nobody danced at Friday's party was that we had too many chairs. A successful dancing party requires the right density of people, but there is also a chair threshold. When you have too many chairs, people feel out of place dancing in front of people who are sitting down. That's something that can be corrected, though - and soon, because Matt's going to get a graduation party one of these days.

Pinky's move-out has made me really want to put up some posters. When it was super full in here, it was hard to notice that the walls were bare because everything else was cluttered. Now it looks like the ceilings are really high, just because the walls are empty.

I am about to practice a little guitar, and I think I've begin to understand why it's kind of hard for me - I know how to make chords, and I know how to play a single note, but I can't translate between the two or play notes that fit in a certain key. Oh yeah, and my fingers still get tangled up a lot.

I'm looking forward to getting that gamecube we just bought on ebay. It should come in the mail relatively soon - say in a week or two. Just in time for finals to be over. This summer is going to be awesome, what with having a gamecube and throwing parties and Matt not taking classes and me learning Chinese and doing a lot of kuk sool.

counterproductive

Last night I swam for half an hour before kuk sool practice, because of that thing where you have to work out for more than half an hour in order to actually burn any fat. So going to practice after that was interesting but good, and I think I'll do that again. The bad news is, I had an ice cream cone immediately following practice.

I don't feel like I'm very good at studying.

quick fix

I've noticed that sometimes when I load this page I get a bunch of junk characters where posts ought to be. I'll check that out, but for now you should know that if you reload it everything seems to be fine.

communicative funk

I'm feeling cramped, tired, bored, resentful, and restless. I wish I could go on vacation from being obligated to be polite and responsible. I had a mostly good weekend with a few ambiguous parts - but the ambiguous parts were flattering. I feel guilty because of the nature of my resentments. I'm not going to get into it.

guy who got a headache and accidentally saves the world

I read a notesfile post today from a girl who saw a guy have a seizure on the street. He fell down and apparently got injured pretty badly. She went to an apartment building and called 911, which was good, but her next comments completely floored me: apparently, she is so afraid of strangers that she wouldn't go near one even if he was all bloody from seizing and then hitting his head on the sidewalk. Maybe it's my lifelong first aid training talking, but I just can't understand that reaction. It's not like cracking your head open and getting all bloody is something you can fake in order to do something malicious to your rescuer. Your head's busted! You're no threat to anyone! They will be able to tell if your head isn't really busted! I mean, she apparently doesn't have any training, but there were people there who did and who started taking care of the guy. She could at least go ask if they needed her to go get anything.

I had a taiji breakthrough yesterday. I think I finally got the legs right in standing meditation. It's a lot harder if I do it the right way. But a neat thing happened: my legs' "tired" response somehow got cut off from my brain's "want to stop" response. I got pretty tired, but found that I wanted to keep at it. After a while I quit anyway, which was wise - even the little bit of standing I did totally used up my legs, and I was a big wimp at kuk sool practice. I'm trying to make a habit of doing this more frequently, so maybe that won't happen so much in the future. Taiji is the most expensive thing I do besides school, and I spend the least amount of time on it. Not good.

my DJ

I have this idea that I kind of like, in which I blog as though I am the guy in this McSweeney's story and I have a DJ who follows me around exhorting everyone to get down. On one hand, it'd be fun to have a DJ, even if he's not real. On the other hand, that's kind of copying. Maybe I'll come up with some other kind of cool theme to do.

p.s. As of this posting, that link is actually broken, but hopefully mcswy will fix it.

lower than Lo again

Adventures at the library today: after a couple of months of asking around I found out where UIUC keeps old technical reports, like to the NSA and stuff. In a corner of the basement of the engineering library, I dug up one of two precious (to me, anyway) copies of "On the theory of randomly spaced antenna arrays." It's beat up. It looks almost archaeological. It was written on a typewriter! So I take its yellowed, scribbled-on self upstairs to the desk and they say, "Um, I'd better look up how to check this out to you. Where did you get this, anyway?" I felt kind of like Indiana Jones. I'll post a picture.

np: Rooks - "Down"

Rashofranciscomon

The other day, Matt and I talked about the vacation we're going to go on this summer, and he said some reasonable things that bothered me. But I had trouble explaining what they even were, let alone why they bothered me. Basically, he was planning this road trip from a standpoint that assumed he wouldn't be able to find an out-of-college job before early August, and I had been assuming he would. So we had a funny little tiff in which I scolded Matt for being pessimistic and he at first didn't know what I was talking about, because I'd just latched on to some subtleties of language and not any outright statements. My idea was that if he believes he won't succeed, then he probably won't, so he should treat any non-job plans as backup. He didn't want to count on something that wasn't a sure thing. We were talking about the same plans, just each giving a different one verbal priority. For some reason that really bothered me. But today he had an interview that sounds like it went well. I guess next week we'll find out who won that non-argument.

-- I want to see more Kurosawa movies.
-- My dad has seen Starman and been to the crater. We talked about how it was a dumb movie.
-- I cut myself while washing the dishes yesterday and subsequently freaked out a little bit because it involved a very sharp knife. I did bleed some. Being injured by a knife is, to me, inherently worse than being injured most other ways. I was fine.

jammin'

I stayed home from work yesterday, which led to me getting more work done in one day than ever before. You'd think I would get distracted more easily, but I worked pretty steadily all day, and then I cleaned the bathroom and did laundry. I was a high-energy chick. Today I'm back at work... and posting to my blog. Ha.

Matt and I haven't decided yet whether to go see the Mekons this weekend. On one hand, I like going to concerts. On the other hand, that would be the third weekend in a row we've spent in Chicago, and we already plan to go next weekend for another birthday thing. That's a lot of trips.

Theo's coming over to jam tonight. I hope he isn't too disappointed when he finds out I'm really not any good at guitar. I've been practicing, though, which is good for me even if the improvement isn't all that great yet. If I were a baby, this would be like playing with a kid who knows how to walk when I just learned how to roll over. Maybe we should get some drinks so I'm not so self-conscious.

island of un-misfit toys

I am posting this from my new laptop, which is one of the least unwanted toys I've ever had. Wowie! I had begun to worry that maybe I wouldn't like its touchpad or it wouldn't be big-screened enough or something, but the truth is, this is exactly what I had in mind.

It helps that this has allowed us to rearrange the living room, since my old desktop is out of the way. There's more space, Matt doesn't have to keep his borrowed keyboard on the floor, and the comfy yellow chair is back in the living room where it belongs.

Oh, and I dyed my hair black. My natural hair color used to be darker than it is now, and its new lightness was starting to get to me. Now it's darker than it's ever been (but still a brownish, natural-on-white-people-looking black), and I'm far more at home. I wonder if I'll want to keep this up for a while. Odd how my mental picture of myself somehow diverged that much from what I actually looked like.

eyes peeled

A couple of days ago it snowed again, after the snow had all been melted for a few weeks. Apparently a few weeks is long enough for me to become unused to the sight; that morning, the shock of seeing everything coated in heavy white was as strong as it is in October. It was cottonball-weight snow, on a morning in mid-March following a warm day. Surprising. I think that kind of shock is what makes people like seeing. We've all been looking at things for so long that when something surprises us it's shocking in such a way that we'd like to be shocked again. Surprising visuals are the best thing about getting up in the morning. (I think I see them disproportionately in the morning because I spend the rest of the day at work, where I have already seen everything.) I want to carry a digital camera around to record all the new things I see, and post them here.

In the past, I have seen these things that I can immediately think of, which were new and strange when I saw them:
a man walking backwards with his dog following him, walking forward
a guy who plays a banjo on his porch on summer afternoons
some Korean students learning collectively to ride a bike
the library stacks, when I got lost there

tried so hard to please her

I've been listening to those MP3s that Pitchfork posts periodically, and I don't like any of them. I don't know if that's because I'm just being difficult today, or if it's because none of them are good. Some days I just don't like anything - it's hard to tell.

edit: Matt tells me they're paid advertisements, not stuff the fork likes. That explains why they're mostly dumb.

I laughed, I cried, I beat king koopa

These Mario animations are surprisingly moving.

Part 1
Part 2
Part 3

may I make an observation

The building I work in was built in 1947, and my floor was added in 1965. Walking around here sometimes reminds me of what they had that we don't. Back then, there were adventures in science. Engineers built an antenna to track Sputnik from the roof of this building. Little kids cared about secret codes and radios. Besides being a "who's better at thinking" fight with Russia, the space race was also a time when it wasn't as dorky to be interested in those things for non-corporate reasons. The architecture of this building reflects that. The walls and doors are solid and plain, but certain details make this environment belong to the science that happens within it and to the attitudes (good and bad) of the time. Door handles and railings are made of copper in a nod to the metal that does it all. Women's bathrooms have obviously been converted from men's, because back when this place was built women didn't do this kind of thing. It's a fallout shelter. This summer we cleaned out a closet and found 50 pounds of "carbohydrate dietary supplement," stockpiled in the 50's by a now-deceased professor, in case the building's fallout-sheltering capability was ever used.

Things are just as dramatic these days, but no one believes anymore that science solves problems. Only money solves problems, and the new buildings on the quad are monuments to money, not to research.

it was fine at the time but the laws have changed

I am angry at everyone who is against gay marriage, and confounded by the subset of those people who are not religious. I've met some, so I know they exist. I'm pretty sure my mom is one. Is it because they think gay sex is gross? I think my mom having sex is also gross, but that doesn't mean she shouldn't be allowed to be married.

My short list of books to read is getting too long to be called a short list. It now includes Gravity's Rainbow, The Virgin Suicides, Written on the Body, Reading Lolita in Teheran, and The Paradox of Choice, plus several others that pop on and off the list depending on my mood. This has already happened to my previously-short list of new music to listen to. I think I've told myself to go out and get at least 10 or 15 new albums, none of which I've actually picked up, or even downloaded. I'm such a slacker.

fly in the works, wrench in the ointment

I am beginning to accept that my linear algebra textbook is irreversibly lost. Just when I started to do the homework again! I really don't want to buy a new one. I'm buying a laptop. Those are expensive. So are books, to a smaller degree. I can only buy so many expensive things.

In better news, Matt and I made a cheesecake yesterday. It's chocolate, with cruhed oreo bits in it. Delicious. Why make a plain cheesecake when you can make something amazing?

no talking, no driving too fast

This bothers me: there are people out there who drive too fast in the snow, crash their cars, and don't admit it was their fault. I met a guy today who spun into a ditch when he tried to pass a truck that was going 45 in bad weather - when the left lane hadn't been plowed! He tried to go 55 in an un-plowed lane! He's lucky he didn't hit the truck. Cause and effect, dude.

This weekend Matt and I went to see "The Triplettes of Belleville." I can't put my finger on what it reminded me of. I've been trying to think of it for days now. When I was a kid, did I watch a lot of cartoons with no talking? Did anyone else ever see one called "The Point," where there are a bunch of cartoons with round heads and one with a pointed head (or maybe the other way around), and the round-heads don't like the pointed-head, and then the conflict is resolved in some sort of heartwarming way? I am pretty sure that had no talking.

np: Things in Herds : "People Trap"