a barbarian journal

November 1997
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march, april, may,june, july,august, september october index

"Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherised upon a table;
Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,
Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels
and sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells:
Streets that follow like a tedious argument
Of insidious intent
To lead you to an overwhelming question...
Oh, do not ask, 'what is it?'
Let us go and make our visit.

In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo.

sometimes half a truth is better than none

So there was a guy on #phil, from UT chattanooga with an URL on his ident stuff. So i looked at it. turns out that he is an ISFP, and majored in phil and english, or whatever, seemed wimpy. But what it did remind of was wynne's boyfriend, (probably now her husband but i haven't gotten that confirmed). I met this guy last time i saw her. He seemed nice enough, he was like a phil major or something, fairly quiet. I didn't really get to know him, but i have sort of holding on to the belief that he was something like me. But i have to realize now that, no, he was nothing like me, i mean i would never in a million years actually major in philosophy, i don't know why i would have been kidding myself like that. But he was exactly like her. It was pretty stunning really, they were (probably are) very good together, a perfect match. So i can be sure that at least she is happy. And it's more evidence that she really doesn't like me. But it's her loss.

So i'm thinking in the deep future, there won't even be doctors, because machines will do a better job at these critical tasks. Maybe people will have little portable micro-surgical devices that can fix things way in advance. You wouldn't even have to go anywhere. The local computer could check you out. What are doctors good for, anyway? The can handle bacterial infections, i guess, though some of them are coming back. And then there are injuries, for which they can give you a band-aid. I don't know. I'm not much for doctors.

humor is a form of aggression. so it is interesting that women really say a sense of humor is something they look for in a guy.

im trying to buy a notebook computer. dell says they sell them, but they have a 5 week wait, so im not so sure. i need the computer over christmas.

i'm writing this on my upgraded computer. I still have a weird problem in netscape that it isn't finding the java classes, althought the file seems to be in the classpath it displays. still problems with the microphone.

i really don't feel sorry for people who are unhappy because they are magnifying there own problems. they have decided not to be happy, so let them be unhappy. if they do it from ignorance then it is just funny.

ok, i can admit that i don't know too much about women, but there's a trap that catches them which i find intriguing. Females of most animals species have to be attracted to aggressive males, and human females are no different. aggressive often turns out to mean really obnoxious and irritating, but they really have to go for that sort of thing, but then it's just naturally going to bite them if, say, they have their own goals and desires. too bad. makes me cry. if only they were able to be sensible. heh.

turkey day. yum. cooked a turkey on the barbecue grill.

my hard disk on my computer is too full to add nifty new stuff. i want to reformat one of the linux partitions, but first i want to boot to linux and try to save some of the stuff on it if possible. And my stupid sound card don't input the microphone sound at a high enough level to use well. I hope to get a preamplifier from radio shack to fix that.

people could enjoy themselves more.

i really thought i would have called wynne back by now. I guess i just don't really care.

I got the new motherboard installed, but i haven't really run anything good yet to test it. its only 200MHz, and not a P II, but it was only $500 and it uses the old (and slow) hard disk, so it's not bad. i'm still not rich. I'm planning to get a 233MHz laptop, and that should be all the computer power i need for a while.

Lately i've been seeing people get really upset when their talking to one person on the phone and someone else is trying to talk to them. seemed a little weird.

Learning emotional responses lags behind learning of knowledge.

censoring. ick. something about wearing a towel

i really don't things are funny anymore. i guess i've lost my sense of humor and i don't miss it, because laughing seems always about enjoying other people pain. I don't think it is good to enjoy even pretend pain. I'd rather everyone was just doing great. That'd be nice.

how about a review of what love is: love derives from feelings of a mother for her child, serving to get her to take care of the baby. The main three aspects are desires to care for, to be with, and to talk to. Love is naturally selfless, since babies can't really do anything. This basic emotion and behavior can also be transferred other people, and men also experience love. There are some seperate things that pulled into the general concept of love: possessiveness, lust, social need, need for touch. There is also an intriguing seperate concept, called being "in love", that involves an amphetamine-like reaction (can't sleep, can't eat), that is intended to keep a couple together long enough for a baby to be born (about a year) at which time love for the baby presumably would kick in. Anyway, really wanting to help someone is the main sign of love. Wanting to talk to them is also a big part, and i guess the extros got me on this one.

So there were some things i wanted to tell maggie about. I guess i don't do well with blondes. Lisa came in today and tried to engage me in conversation, but i just blew her off. she asked me what i was working on. what could i say? maggie showed a really mean side. She said she wished some guy was dead. later, she kind of apologized about it, but that only seemed to emphasize it. I mean, the bullet don't go back in the barrel. So there was some stuff:

Driving. First one clue, it's a passing lane. It works best if you stay out of it unless you are actually passing, and don't just have the cruise control on. When turning, if you step on the gas, more weight will be on the rear wheels, and they will be less likely to slide out from under you, if you step on the brake its the opposite, and more dangerous (I totally my car one night coming back from nashville on a curve because i hit the brake), also on the brake can take away some steering ability. The problem of course is that you need to be going slow enough before going into turn. Brake in the straight. Change speed in the straight and direction in the turns. OK, i'm not a great driver, and i have some trouble seeing signs and things with my old glasses. The thing for really good drivers is to practice taking cars into slides and recovering, which i haven't done. One specific thing to help in a turn is to take it with a little less curvature by starting early on the outside, hitting the inner edge in the middle, and ending up again on the outside. You need to keep the steering in one place through the turn, so you have to judge the whole curve at the begining, so it takes a little more effort than just staying evenly between the two sides of the lane. Making the curve shallow by cutting through the other lane is probably illegal because Cali requires you to signal lane changes 100 ft ahead--still, on some of those mountain roads it isn't too bad, but eventually you will run someone off the road.

Getting to sleep. Personally i seldom have any trouble falling asleep, and i have effective ways of dealing with any problem. There's that weird thing from marilyn, virtual dreaming--you just sort of daydream as if you were having a real dream, going over some dream you remember is also good. I had some trouble one time i tried it with thinking about stuff that i actually would never dream about, and i don't often use this method. In Timequake, kurt recommends that old standby, alcohol. whatever it takes i guess. Howard Stern says he uses masturbation. maggie actually mentioned hitting her on the head with a hammer. I would have also like to tried getting her to talk about whatever the problem was, she said something about how she stayed up with someone when he was sick and not being able to get back to sleep after it.

emptiness fills my heart

if you aren't thankful every day, you're doing something wrong

there are ten gross minutes per day

computer still not together. bummed

some people can be bad

some people have a kind of surface goodness, and they do superficially good things, but really they do them merely out of selfishness. You can't expect them to appreciate real love.

gosh. it really has been a long time. I've been busy with work, though that's not really a good excuse. The past week I've been out of town at Comdex, and i haven't been on the net at all. I had like 150 e-mail messages to get through. I hope i don't fall behind like this again.

I got a 200Mhz pentium and intel 430vx chipset motherboard. i need to install it still. 32MB ram, S3 virge graphics.

I saw the most enthusiastic dancer at a topless club in Vegas called the crazy horse II. She was really athletic. i've decided that's the best thing to look for in a dancer. Not thin and wasted but muscley and vibrant. And she really seemed to be having fun. Vegas has the deal where there are no naked chicks where there is alcohol, but they do have lap dancers at the topless places with alcohol. There are other clubs in North Las Vegas (which is past of the same sprall but a different county) which doesn't have this restriciton, but i didn't go there. There were like maybe five places within walking distance of my hotel, but i only tried a couple. Not too expensive really. I think they've settled on a system that works. No touch, although they had a back room were the action might have been. It's funny because in counties other than the ones with big cities, nevada has legal prostitution. I didn't try any of those. too busy or too poor.

A strange thing developed with the girl maggie from the ofice, who was in Vegas. I found out that she, like, doesn't sleep. It sounds really cool, but she says she's tired all of the time. I really wished i could do something for her, because i personally have bunches of things i do to sleep. One night, after our stuff was done, i was going to go with her out to do some Vegas stuff, since she used to live there and new the good stuff. But somehow i missed her :( and had to go off on my own (though that was fun :) . The next night, we all got back at 1am, and i was thinking i was going to maybe sit with maggie and watch tv (she doesn't sleep), but i was surprisingly tired, and i wasn't really up for all the other issues. And even when i got back to the room i thought if i were still awake in 15 minutes, i might call her, but i was asleep in 5. She is a very attractive woman, athletic, used to be an olympic swimmer.

Something about her that i really like is her spots. I have spots, my mom (a red-head) has really prominent spots, and there's that trill jadzia-dax on DS9. But maggie is blond, with really fair skin, and she has really light spots all over. Delicate. I find them very interesting. She really isn't my kind of person, and she already has a boyfriend, but she has nice spots.

I was reminded again of Stacy Guster, my first love. Up till i was 5 or six, i was actually a pretty sweet little kid, i think i used to kiss her and everything. but we moved away. And she was killed by a drunk driver when she was 17.

Starship Troopers was really an adolescent fantasy, but i thought it was pretty cool. There was this long shower seen with about a dozen people and an average age of nineteen. I think i mentioned something like that sometime. The special affects really seemed good, and lots of decapitations and dismemberment. One guy got flogged and you could see the skin tear away. Much grossness. Doogie Howser shows up. and really cute and enthusiastic kids. There was all this strange fascist stuff, and the war stuff got kind of campy. There is the idea that only people who have performed military service should vote, because voting is a form of force, and should only be wielded by trained people. heh. silliness.

I keeping seeing these women in distress. i really need to give them a hug, but i think it would be awkward.

I am finding that i am really bad at guessing people's myers-briggs personality types. I would have sworn that maggie's type would have been ESFP, a performer, but she took the test and came out ENFJ. NF people, idealists, are pretty rare, and unlike techno-geek NTs like myself, don't have a natural place to congregate. Well maybe they do, they tend to be writers. So now i have a chance to watch one and get a little insight, maybe. They tend to be completely alien to me, and while i tend to be interested in them, my experience is that they find me irritating, too cold, too "serious". One interesting thing about them i think is that they tend to be really sensitive to other people's feelings, but they aren't very comfortable discussing their own feelings. And that kind of bothers me, and it must be irritating to them that i can dispassionately talk about mine. And maybe what i like about them is the mystery.

I think people communicating honestly makes thing a lot better. But i just saw a person who really seemed to be communicating a lot but it really didn't work. I suspect she just wasn't very honest with herself. then again some goals are just going to be frustrated. I wish i could have done something, but i have found that you can't force help on people, they really have to want it. So i didn't bother, grr.

At the bar on halloween night, there was a woman who sort of lirted with me. She threw some little happy halloween glitter on me, and hit me on the head with a toy ball and chain. Maggie (the singer who i was there to watch) said the next day that she (the barfly, i think her name was shelley) really liked me. I replied that it was a shame it didn't work out for her.

I think i'm pretty happy. The things that seem to bother people seem utterly insignificant to me. Theres was this one girl, susan, she was smart and pretty cute, but really unhappy. I was at a bar watching this band, and they seemed quite happy.

so instead of wearing jeans and a white t-shirt, i wore white pants and a blue silk shirt, but i don't think there was anyone there who would have gotten it.

success does not come from happiness. (and the reverse is often true).

i found out a little more about susan. she is ENTJ (i'm INTP). she likes things to be just so, and pretty much wouldn't like my more easy-going nature. and she really seemed not to particularly like me. I showed her the page with the kiersey personality test, and she seemed to really like it, but i don't think she showed any kind of appreciation for my having shown it to her. I printed out some pages for her, and she seemed to get confused because it wasn't one of the things she had printed out. It didn't seem to occur to her that i might have printed it out for her, and i had to say that i had done so. But i still think she is nice. I don't need any emotional display.