| Not my week |
[27 Aug 2002|01:41pm] |
Apparently I need to start using a wallet again--some lucky person went to Marshall Fields (in Schaumberg, Illinois, wherever that is) and racked up $350 worth of purchases on my debit card. (I realized it was missing a couple of days ago, but I figured it had just sliped into whatever strange pocket dimension holds the rest of the myriad items I tend to misplace--speaking of which, anyone seen my boxcutter knife?) The nice WaMu lady (she set up my account a couple of months ago; she said she recognized me by my helmet *grin*) said the bank would most likely reimburse me, but I wish there was a good way to see exactly what my erstwhile thief spent $350 of my money to buy. Clothes? Furniture? A lifetime supply of underpants? I mean, if I'm going to get stolen from I'd like it to be done with some *class.*
Also, the Solaris box against which I have been beating my head most of the summer is broken. It's not as broken as it was this morning (before Steve the Techno-Paladin came in and cast some kind of Magical Fscking Aura on it) but it still has bizarre login problems, a wonky video card, and who knows how many other things that I really, really don't want to fix. Struggling through a complicated repair process for the reward of--oh joy--continuing to run Solaris just doesn't seem worth it. *sigh* I'm still bizarrely attached to it, though. I think I just have a perverse preference for associating with things which are immensely frustrating and in conflict with me at least half the time--which would explain my otherwise mystifying fondness for the Catholic Church, my late canine companion Laddie, and Steve. (hehe--just kidding, Steve...mostly...*grin*)
For some reason I've also decided, more or less unilaterally, that all of my interpersonal relationships are dysfunctional. I'm pretty sure that's just a minor brain-bug--I suspect if shut down and reboot it'll go away. But it is rather amusing.
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| Damn elusive happy mediums. |
[24 Aug 2002|06:12pm] |
I am quite undeservedly lucky in my family. It was marvelous to see them, if only for a week, and talking to my mother and father about my questions and concerns and ponderings was vastly useful. They seem to understand all of it, and from the perspective of people who have thirty-plus years more experience than I, it's very helpful. Just knowing that they went through the same adolescent stupidness and the same consuming angsts as I, and still turned out successful and happy, is comforting, and they also have good advice about most of it. It's good to talk to my sister, too, who is growing up nicely.
*sigh* And yet, here I am, doom-and-glooming again. I think I just enjoy wallowing in angst and hoping someone will come and rescue me. *thwack* No one is going to rescue you. *thwack* That's YOUR job. *thwack* Lazy, lazy Gina. *grin* OK, go, and be cheerful! All good things come to those who don't expect them.
Adrienne gave me a *fascinating* book about the History of Celibacy for my birthday--I intend to condense it into an essay for the LiveJournal forum, at some point, but you should all read it too. Incidentally, apparently both the saints memorialized by my middle names--Catherine of Siena and Kateri Tekakwitha--were insanely fervent proponents of the mortification of the flesh, and spent most of their time thinking of new and inventive ways to starve and torture themselves. Gives me hope for my future, it does.
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| Gleep! |
[16 Aug 2002|12:11pm] |
13 hours, 41 entries on my friends list... some quite long and thoughtful... (the comments on this one, for instance, do a good job of explaining something I'd been trying to articulate to myself and a few other people: that to love someone unconditionally, and be there for them if they need you, one need not be friends with them or even necessarily like them much. (Although it helps, and there is often a correlation.))
Am in Buchanan, hence somewhat uncommunicative. Glorious, marvelous thunderstorm last night--almost constant strobing lightning, and some gigantic cracks of thunder that woke me up this morning. I wish I had an alarm clock that imitated a thunderstorm. Hm...spent some time yesterday ripping siding off a garage (referred to by all of my cousins as a "barn") with my cousins Luke and Sam, of whom I am quite fond in non-religious contexts. Have been enjoying the Berrien County Youth Fair (my cousins Angie and Ellie trounced the competition in the poultry barn, as per their usual practice) and the extra-thick-chocolate malts and hot fudge sundays and Green River floats that are the bounty of Marz Sweet Shop.
Have just been informed by the librarian that the Internet may go down at any moment, so I will post now to prevent potential loss of data.
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| Neglector of fish |
[12 Aug 2002|02:06am] |
Accidentally gave Pookmonster water too cold for him--he went distressingly shocky and pale. His condition seems to have improved, so hopefully I was not irrevocably careless. Sorry, roommate-san...
Went in to LA today to visit Rin/Kate/David; engaged in talking, shopping, and eating of Chinese food. Quite spiff. Must do that more often. In similar news, have contracted to meet Ejwu in Buchanan for malts. Should be interesting.
Am terse and incoherent; it is late. I seem to be ill. Stress, or Chinese food? Probably stress. Wuss.
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| Strawberry milkshakes |
[09 Aug 2002|11:57pm] |
"See? That would go through my forehead.... Oh wait. My forehead's not styrofoam. Ahh, but don't I wish it were...no, wait, that would be bad. The first time I went into lab, my head would dissolve!"
...
Lucas is an exceedingly silly individual. (And both of us are overgeeked, inasmuch as the first step to writing something down is to pull out an electronic device.)
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| Nomadism |
[07 Aug 2002|07:52pm] |
So, I am an itinerant again, for the next few days. I have a deep-seated affinity for the nomadic lifestyle--I spend a fair number of my spare mental cycles idly pondering over the logistics of making a living as a freelance web designer/programmer/journalist as I make my way around the country. I feel suffocated, though, by all this *stuff*. I can't understand how I managed to amass so many boxes full of material possessions. It makes me want to just get out the flamethrower and start over.
I still haven't gotten onto anything like a normal sleep cycle--slept from 7:30 to 11 this morning. I can feel that my brain isn't working quite right, I just can't tell in what ways it's off-kilter. I took a short nap in the middle of the day, and had a vaguely unsettling dream that someone had used the su command to log into my brain as root and was twiddling with all the settings.
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| Circadians |
[06 Aug 2002|02:51pm] |
The past two nights, I've gone to bed shortly after five and awakened shortly before ten. Yet I seem to be *more* alert and awake than I generally am on six or seven hours--I'm coding faster, anyway. What gives?
KSPC plays some exceedingly strange stuff. I'm not sure this technically qualifies as "music," however cool it sounds. Where the heck do they get their DJs?
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| Pretty accurate. Especially the dating tip. |
[06 Aug 2002|12:11am] |
| You are 57% geek |  | You are a geek. Good for you! Considering the endless complexity of the universe, as well as whatever discipline you happen to be most interested in, you'll never be bored as long as you have a good book store, a net connection, and thousands of dollars worth of expensive equipment. Assuming you're a technical geek, you'll be able to afford it, too. If you're not a technical geek, you're geek enough to mate with a technical geek and thereby get the needed dough. Dating tip: Don't date a geek of the same persuasion as you. You'll constantly try to out-geek the other. |
Take the Polygeek Quiz at Thudfactor.com
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| Good Lord, it's contagious. |
[05 Aug 2002|02:38pm] |
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V. experimental, especially inasmuch as it needs inking and re-lettering. However, on the general suspicion that these things will fail to actually happen, I post it ( here. )
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| Grr. |
[05 Aug 2002|01:27am] |
Stupid nonworking scanner. Steve! This is your department, ITS person. Get in here and fix it. Well, by which I mean, "get to work at the usual time and hunt down the driver CD that goes with the scanner on the graphics iMac."
Heh. Apparently I become inspired to draw the same way I get motivated to write...
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| Why on Earth am I still up? |
[04 Aug 2002|02:39am] |
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I mean, really.
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| SharpThings |
[01 Aug 2002|11:22pm] |
Posted this to Schmack, forgot to do LJ.
So...Brian and I arrived here at ComicCon only to be greeted by a large
number of wackos with swords. Warmed by this promising reception, we
inquired as to the origins of the massive collection of shiny, pointy
objects and were informed that such things were on sale for $20 in a couple
of booths at the Con. We thought this was an opportunity that many of you
folk on Schmack would not want to miss.
The prices range from $15 and up, less for daggers; many examples of the
types available can be seen at SwordStaff.com. Email broney@hmc.edu or
rcc02000@pomona.edu if you happen to be interested in obtaining them without
the hassle of paying shipping and suchlike. In fact, of there's anything
else you would love to have that you think can be obtained at ComicCon, feel
free to request it. (a signed sketch by Scott McCloud or Pete Abrams, a
hard-to-locate anime series, a booth babe...)
Gina "Keen!" C.
Sometime later I'll post more about the spiffy people with swords.
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| Sleep |
[30 Jul 2002|07:28am] |
7:30 Fall asleep.
11:00 Wake up. Shower. Read slashfic & amuse self by calculating the change in the Earth's rotational momentum due to the high angular velocities achieved by Tolkien and Doyle.
12:30 Attempt to sleep again.
1:00 Toss.
2:00 Turn.
5:00 Hit snooze button. Enter half-dreaming state in which the process of getting out of bed takes on the importance of an international incident and requires equally many careful political calculations.
6:00 Finally convince self that it is possible to turn off alarm clock and get up without informing the French Ambassador. Be extremely annoyed that I have in effect slept for nearly twelve hours.
6:30 Drink tea.
6:35 Bemoan tarnished state of dishware.
7:30 Write pointless LJ entry. Wander off to work.
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| Epiphany |
[29 Jul 2002|01:53pm] |
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Wait a second. What am I doing trying to be happy, sane, and well-adjusted? What fun is *that*?
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| Aww. |
[26 Jul 2002|10:37pm] |
Steve is downstairs sleeping with his server. It's very cute.
So today I went into LA to get my wrists looked at (finally.) Katie and I took the Metro in early in the morning, I wandered down Vine and got Irish music and ramen, and we had Thai food for lunch before I wandered off onto a succession of buses. I though that leaving nearly an hour of extra time would make up for the vagaries of public transit with plenty to spare, but I ended up arriving at UCLA Medical Center only a minute or two before I was supposed to (rather than nearly an hour early, as planned.) Dr. Lief Havton proved to be an earnest young man with an unidentifiable accent, who performed a simple but thorough neurological assessment and proclaimed me almost certainly afflicted with classic carpal tunnel syndrome. He suggested I undergo a nerve induction test, a spiffy-sounding little medical procedure in which they stimulate some point on your nerves and measure the amplitude, strength, and speed of the signal at the other end. He also suggested I get wrist splints. The pharmacy gave me a set of splints which turned out to be comfortable, well-engineered, and snazzy jet black instead of Weenie Medical Beige. They look rather like some kind of sophisticated armor. Why can't all medical devices be this sexy?
I gave two dollars to a homeless guy on my way back. He was kind of a sketchy sort of homeless guy, but he wanted to buy a boba drink with it, and I just have to encourage that sort of behavior. It occurred to me rather belatedly that I should have given him some of my ramen. Ah well, next time.
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| oweeeEEEEOOOWWWWeeeee.... |
[24 Jul 2002|11:54pm] |
Bloody fire alarms never go off when I actually have *pants* on. Oh no. That would be too easy. And here I was going to get to bed early...well, earlier than two AM, anyway. I suppose I'll probably still make that deadline.
Got a little bit of organizing done on my room today. I really have to learn to separate "work" and "goofing off"; it makes both of them more enjoyable. Feh. Went to Home Depot today to get materials for a few physics department projects and spent quite some time drooling over the tools and hardware, thinking about all the spiffy things I could make. Both of my grandfathers were engineers, both spent a lot of time in the shop, and it's clearly bred true. I think my dream job is going to be something along the lines of making spiffy robots--messing about with big, powerful machinery and being a codemonkey on the side. I've never been entirely happy working with computers; it's that uncomfortable feeling I get at the end of the day that I've just spent hours pushing a bunch of electrons from *here* to *there*. It's nice to be able to hold your day's work in your hands. (Grant you, technically speaking I've just pushed a bunch of electrons-and-protons-and-neutrons from here to there, but psychologically it feels quite different.)
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| My parents are ridiculously spiffy. |
[24 Jul 2002|08:57am] |
Ode to Myriapoda
Percy lived, a detrivore,
Subsisting on the jungle floor.
Gina fell prey to her shiny charm,
Allowed the millipede to tickle her arm.
Two hundred footprints, and seventy-two,
Percy left with each step she took anew.
A sinuous motion propelled her on,
A graceful meander to her caged pond.
Many the days of sweet Percy's life -
Few the events and minor the strife.
Gina and friends in esteem held her high,
And Percy rewarded their favor, though shy.
Host of hundreds of smaller lives,
Grandparents, progeny, husbands, wives --
Mites and fruit flies, microbes and more
By Percy's life they set great store.
Her myriad feet scritched through the night,
Coded stories with wisdom, insight.
Percy's inhabitants tried to discern
The messages born in each random turn.
Demise of a star, death of a world,
Percy's passing is apocalypse unfurled.
Would that we all would be so missed
When our names are stricken from the karmic list.
[written by my mother--whee!]
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| R.I.P. |
[20 Jul 2002|03:00pm] |
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Percival Mordecai Myriapoda (age not known) was found dead of unknown causes today, July 20, at 2:30 PM. Percival's owner, Regina Carns, obtained her from an Anchorage pet store more than three years ago and has kept her as a constant companion since, even letting the giant African millipede share her stay at Pomona College institute of higher learning. Known to her friends and family simply as "Percy," this warm, charming, and many-legged individual brought joy to all who knew her (except the ones who thought she was creepy.) She will be buried with full honors, the service to be held as soon as her bereaved owner thinks of a nice place to hold it.
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| Arachnids |
[17 Jul 2002|09:30pm] |
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I just killed a spider that was scuttling about in the bathroom, because it looked far too much like a brown recluse for comfort. Reason #4,536 to live in Alaska: no poisonous animals.
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