Monthly Archives: February 2003

Inferno: Canto III, Line 9

I always won­der who reads this. I try to nev­er write for any­one else; after all, the things I write about are things that both­er me, that I need to get down. It puz­zles me some­times when I read peo­ple’s jour­nals, and they start to talk to their friends about some­thing, or to some phan­tom audi­ence. I can under­stand why one would do that though, since the point of some are to inform friends of how one is doing. More often than not, how­ev­er, it seems to be an exer­cise in nar­cis­sism.

I won­der what some­one would think of me, if they were read­ing this with­out ever meet­ing me. Would they be able to see all sides of me? Would they be able to under­stand who I real­ly am? Most of the time, what I write is out of neces­si­ty, and ends up being some sort of com­plaint, rant, or con­fu­sion.

I think most peo­ple would believe that I’ve lost hope. It’s quite the con­trary real­ly. Ever since the sum­mer, I’ve gained hope to a degree. Of course, I’ve often stat­ed that hope is a bad thing, and I still feel that way to a degree.

What I’ve come to real­ize is that I should pos­si­bly try to hope for the future, but not get my hopes up. The dif­fer­ence between the two is in length of time. Getting one’s hopes up has a more short-term con­no­ta­tion for more tange­able ideas, where­as hop­ing for the future is thought of as hop­ing for some­thing that is cur­rent­ly unknown. If the future is ever to become the present, I’ll try to keep myself more ground­ed.

And if the present were to come to fruition?

Maybe it would be a good thing.

Thoughts After A Bad Phonecall

Leave it to a sin­gle phone call to fill me with wor­ry. Now I’m anx­ious about my marks, my mid-terms, my projects, my grad­u­a­tion, my life. Pat gave me a pep-talk yes­ter­day, and it helped. Graduation seems uncom­fort­ably close. I’m dying to know how the sto­ry ends.

Patrick was nice enough to come up to me and start a con­ver­sa­tion the oth­er day. I asked him how his work was going, and he told that he’s real­ly enjoy­ing it. He let me know that the Montage project in becom­ing real­ly big, and they might be look­ing for more work­ers, and that if I send Chau my resumé and let him know that I can work full-time dur­ing the sum­mer, I might be able to get a job in devel­op­ment, instead of infor­mat­ics.

God, my sen­tences are becom­ing more and more struc­tured like some­thing Henry James would have writ­ten, although I’m sure I’m not able to be as descrip­tive, or as bril­liant, since he’s a well renowned author infa­mous for being gar­ru­lous, where­as I’m sim­ply a com­put­er sci­ence stu­dent, only able to write when nec­es­sary.

There seem to be a few Five Alive flavours on the mar­ket, such as “Tropical”, “Citrus”, or “Peach Passion”, but none taste as good as “Berry”. Aaron, Trolley, and I all agree that it tastes like Skittles. The juice from con­cen­trate has a slight­ly vary­ing taste from the one in the bot­tle; I find the lat­ter to be a lit­tle more tart and a lit­tle sweet­er.

I’m get­ting a new Intellimouse Explorer sent to me via snail mail, thanks to Trolley. I called up Microsoft, told them that my mouse but­ton was dou­ble-click­ing when it should have sin­gle-clicked (as instruct­ed by Trolley), and they told me that they would send a new one, free of charge. I don’t even need to send my cur­rent one back. I got my cur­rent one four years ago, and I remem­ber spend­ing $100 on it. The pads of it have been worn out uneven­ly, caus­ing a notice­able wob­ble. The lat­est design of the Intellimouse Explorer has a low­er, sleek­er pro­file, and more eas­i­ly acces­si­ble thumb but­tons. Yay.

After talk­ing with my geol­o­gy pro­fes­sor I feel dumb as fuck. I almost failed my mid-term; my mark was the sec­ond low­est in the class, even with a gen­er­ous grade curve. I think I did con­sid­er­ably well, con­sid­er­ing the fact that I had three mid-terms that day, and the fact that I find my mind to be dead when I have my Tuesday lec­tures after a 7:30am lab. Apparently, I have very lit­tle com­mon sense. Although I know that zinc is the main ingre­di­ent is sun­screen, or that soft-drinks con­tain car­bon, I don’t know that nitro­gen is an impor­tant ele­ment in fer­til­iz­er or that graphite is a pop­u­lar indus­tri­al lubri­cant. The list of what I don’t know goes on and on. I had no fuck­ing clue that bak­ing soda is sodi­um bicar­bon­ate. To my prof, all of this is gen­er­al knowl­edge, so it’s assumed when deal­ing with the course. I was nev­er good at chem­istry, and my pro­gramme of stud­ies isn’t even close to relat­ed. I also took the pre­req­ui­site at the begin­ning of uni­ver­si­ty, which is four years ago. Fuck.

Imbalance

I think Dolly may be inter­est­ed in hav­ing anoth­er cat around the house. I’ve been play­ing some cat sounds, and no mat­ter where she is in the apart­ment, she’ll com­ing run­ning into my room. A sec­ond cat is some­thing I only start­ed to con­sid­er this term. Last term it felt as if I would­n’t be able to han­dle the chores, let alone dou­bling my annu­al vet­eri­nar­i­an bill. Sometimes she seems lone­ly though, like when she imme­di­ate­ly starts to cry when I walk in the door after a day of school, her protest­ing only being soothed after pick­ing her up, and being replaced by a low purr. I’ve always seen myself as a one cat per­son; I think I’d feel a lit­tle imbal­anced if I had more than one. If I do decide to get one, it will def­i­nite­ly be after I grad­u­ate, def­i­nite­ly after I find a sta­ble job, and pos­si­bly after I can pur­chase a con­do. It would be more for Dolly than for me though. I can’t imag­ine find­ing anoth­er cat that is as well-adapt­ed as she is, so the idea scares me a lit­tle.

One time I dis­cussed with Pita whether he would ever con­sid­er get­ting two dogs. He said that he could­n’t, not just because it would be much hard­er to han­dle, but because he would feel more favourable to one or the oth­er.

The idea of favour is one that I haven’t been able to under­stand. How can par­ents love all their kids with­out lik­ing one more than the oth­er, espe­cial­ly when one fol­lows the desires of the par­ents more close­ly. It might be some­thing I don’t under­stand, being an only child. If such a bal­ance is pos­si­ble, would­n’t polyg­a­mous rela­tion­ships work as well? I think part of the mis­un­der­stand­ing stems from my con­fu­sion of rela­tion­al love and parental love as well.

For love is the root of my imbal­ance.

Old School, Frozen Carrots, Etc.

I was exhaust­ed yes­ter­day. I worked almost all day on my graph­ics project, and Aaron came over to work on his Scheme assign­ment. I was able to talk to him for a few hours before start­ing the work. We caught Old School at the Coliseum near his place, but it was still a thir­ty minute walk in one direc­tion. The movie was too pre­dictable, but had some very well done scenes, such as Will Ferrell get­ting shot in the neck with a tranq dart. I thought some parts were almost insult­ing though, like a com­plete­ly gra­tu­itous cam­era shot of Elisha Cuthbert’s ass while she was lay­ing on a bed. It’s not that I don’t find her behind to be a thing of beau­ty, it’s that it feels like the pro­duc­ers are adding shit like that in just to get more peo­ple in the audi­ence. I guess it’s been hap­pen­ing for a while now; ever since Shannon Elizabeth bared her twins in American Pie, teen movies have been becom­ing more and more sleazy. I still enjoyed Old School though, and gen­er­al­ly laughed my ass off.

Watching Old School allowed me to dis­cov­er a decent song called Dust in the Wind by Kansas. I’ve also been down­load­ing a lot of Canadian singer Holly Cole, who has a beau­ti­ful­ly expres­sive, olive oil voice. I enjoy Bagdad Café in par­tic­u­lar. I found two ver­sions of the song, one live and one stu­dio, which are good but with their own unique flaws. I pre­fer the live ver­sion because it has a sim­ple piano and bass, instead of synth sounds in the stu­dio ver­sion, but at one point she becomes obnox­ious­ly loud, as if she was over­sing­ing the notes, the way a trum­pet would sound if the trum­peter was blar­ing. It makes her voice seem almost mas­cu­line, which is a big turn-off. The way she mix­es her vibra­to with her flar­ing is very seduc­tive though. In the stu­dio ver­sion, how­ev­er, she seems to start off one line a lit­tle flat, before push­ing her diaphragm to hit a note with­out going falset­to. It sur­prized me, since stu­dio songs tend to be a lit­tle too per­fect.

I final­ly put up my poster of Dominique Swain. Aaron helped me decide on the linen clos­et door, since the walls in my room are so big they dwarf my mod­est­ly sized poster. I haven’t put it up since sec­ond year because it did­n’t seem to fit into the sim­ple­ness of my room.

I’m not espe­cial­ly hap­py with yes­ter­days entry, but I des­per­ate­ly felt like I had to get some­thing down. It’s a lit­tle too trite for me to be sat­is­fied.

I bought a bag of frozen car­rots and pearl onions to try out the last time I went gro­cery shop­ping, since I’ve been try­ing to eat more veg­eta­bles. I found out today that I real­ly don’t like pearl onions. They taste like what I imag­ine an onion would taste like after being soaked in water overnight. I tried to have the car­rots only, but the bag is sup­posed to be a mélange of the two, and the taste of the onions ends up seep­ing into the taste of the car­rots. I real­ly enjoy hav­ing a bunch of onion slices sautéed before adding in a pork chop or what­not to the fry­ing pan, but pearl onions seem to be a dif­fer­ent breed of onion.