Monthly Archives: January 2004

Talking to the Walls

Why do I write? Mostly because I feel like it. I can’t write with a pen because a com­put­er allows me to orga­nize my thoughts much bet­ter. I choose to pub­lish my thoughts online. Yet I don’t write for an audi­ence, I don’t care who reads, I don’t know who’s inter­est­ed.

Does it take a read­er to val­i­date my thoughts? Not quite. I doubt I’d feel as good as I do after post­ing an entry if I just typed it in a text file and saved it on my hard dri­ve. Everything I write is post­ed and made pub­lic. So why do I post if it does­n’t mat­ter whether some­one reads or not?

It’s the act of pub­lish­ing that makes me feel val­i­dat­ed, not the belief that some­one will read it. My sat­is­fac­tion comes from self-expres­sion, not pop­u­lar­i­ty.

This is sim­i­lar to my style of dress. The clothes I wear are a reflec­tion of my mood, even though I don’t think any­one takes notice or actu­al­ly cares.

An exer­cise in expres­sion is its own reward.

Post LAN Exhaustion

Must stay awake until 11. I’m try­ing to bake some­thing in the oven but I can’t seem to do sim­ple math to cal­cu­late how much time is left. I hate it when I get like this. It’s why I always always always need to sleep well. Whenever I don’t have enough sleep, I can’t func­tion for the rest of the day. I don’t need a lot of sleep, just eight hours will do, and I’m fine. Take away a few of those hours and I can’t con­cen­trate for the life of me. I can’t do any work, I can’t read, I can’t think, I can only sit and watch movies or play games until it’s time to go to bed again. That’s why I can get fair­ly grumpy if I’m dis­turbed by some­one sleep­ing with me or the fuck­ing false fire alarms that hap­pen so often in this build­ing.

It was worth it though. As Trolley said, home is a nice change, but can’t com­pete with cig­ars, ses­sions, games, some Trailer Park Boys on DVD, and a fun group of peo­ple. I think that hav­ing no real friends for most of my life has made me real­ly appre­ci­ate the time spent with the ones I have now.

A Few Moments Of Insomnia

It’s sev­en in the morn­ing, and the sun still has­n’t come out yet. I’m com­plete­ly exhaust­ed. I’m going to try to take a six hour nap, and then stay awake until night to put my sys­tem back on track. Nick says he’s going to go to sleep now and wake up at noon. I say, “Hahahhhahah good luck bud­dy”. I’m too tired to go to prac­tice (I’d be scared of falling asleep on the bus ride there), so I’m just going to spend the day fight­ing sleep. Maybe I’ll watch Midway, Ghandi, or Seven Samurai to keep me busy. Maybe I’ll install Sands of Time so I can stay awake. Gaming is the only thing that I can do with­out falling asleep. After all, I’m still awake at this hour.

The Mont Blanc

I’ve been dream­ing of get­ting a Mont Blanc for years, ever since I tried one out at a jew­ellery store back home before I bought it for my boss. I loved the way it felt in my hand, the per­fect weight, the bal­ance, the shine, the smooth­ness of the nib, the effort­less­ness of the writ­ing, the click of the cap, the ele­gant but time­less design. A few years lat­er, I went for a sur­prise vis­it to my old work­place, and when my boss went to sign some­thing he pulled out the Mont Blanc, my Mont Blanc, from his blaz­er pock­et. That made me hap­py.

The thing is, I could nev­er jus­ti­fy buy­ing one for myself; I would always tell myself to wait until I could cel­e­brate my grad­u­a­tion or mar­riage. My boss was a busi­ness­man, so he could use a nice pen to sign his con­tracts. Every time I’d pass the Mont Blanc dis­play in the mall I’d check out what the most cur­rent series was.

While I was in Hong Kong, I found a lit­tle shop sell­ing them at very low prices.

Then I real­ized that I had already grad­u­at­ed.

I bought a jet-black Meisterstück Classique Rollerball with plat­inum fin­ish right then and there, and my god how sweet it is. I can’t imag­ine using anoth­er pen for the rest of my life. Sometimes I put my hand in my pock­et and then real­ize, “Holy shit, I have a Mont Blanc in my pock­et”. So far, this is the only thing that I can think of putting in my will.

Sometimes I’d walk the streets of Hong Kong and see a guy sell­ing fake Mont Blanc’s, a bunch of them clipped to a cheap felt board. It’s as easy to spot a fake Mont Blanc as it is to spot a fake Rolex. The price I got mine for in the lit­tle shop was cheap­er by more than $150 CAD than the price in stores here. I want to get it engraved with my sig­na­ture but it costs $120 to send to the Mont Blanc main head­quar­ters, which is fuck­ing insane (it’s a cool process though, where they take four of my sig­na­tures, then mix and match the best parts of each to come up with the engrav­ing). I sup­pose that for some­one who’s buy­ing a pen from the Meisterstück Solitaire Platinum line, $120 is almost noth­ing. I’m con­sid­er­ing my next Mont Blanc pur­chase as a foun­tain pen from the new super sweet Starwalker series Resin Line, but that’ll be some­time far into the future.

LAN, Already Tired

Just when I thought I was over my jet lag, along comes a LAN par­ty at Trolley’s and Wheaties’s. I haven’t played games in over a month (aside from some addic­tive Tony Hawk Underground on my GBA), so I’ll be pret­ty damn rusty. It offi­cial­ly starts tomor­row, but I’ll be head­ing over there tonight with Nick to get an ear­ly start. We’ll be hav­ing the usu­al sus­pects, along with a few less famil­iar faces. This should be good.