the world has turned and left me here

the plugged-in life

Lower and more apathetic than I've ever been...doesn't seem to be any point in doing anything at all. Yesterday enough coffee and a nice New Mexico sunset brought the answer to me. If you don't perceive reality then of course you don't give a hoot about anything real. Even though it's all a fog, I feel dimly as if I'm on the cusp of something, as if the very next step I take will be down one path or the other, from which there will be no turning back. I could renounce the plugged-in life for good and try to find something real to interest me, or I could just withdraw into a state of full-blown computer geekdom. Seems like it's one or the other though.

Too much thinking, too little doing. I lead a contemplative life in which all kinds of ideas pour in and out but nothing leads to action. But what, after all, is the point of contemplation if not action? I complain about my life having no drama, no narrative, but this is just the result of not taking action. They don't call a guy a "man of action" for no reason; taking action is practically a definition of what it is to be male.

But action without purpose is equally as bad as inaction (borrowing this idea from Rand now). Purpose, however, presupposes a goal to be reached, which must be a goal both perceived as worth attaining as well as perceived in the first place. So the problem here is once again not perceiving reality.

In my plugged-in life though I am a man of action, I do have purpose, and I do have goals worth achieving. Somehow though everything in my plugged-in life seems, ultimately, totally inferior to things in real life. Is this because most people around me are living real lives rather than plugged-in ones, and all this a simple case of feeling like the odd man out? Maybe so--and if I arrived at this conclusion you know what path I'd take.

But I've got some internal dissatisfaction with the plugged-in life that I can't shake. I imagine it's the sort of uneasy feeling that in a drug addict eventually grows until he voluntarily commits himself, no matter how great the alternate reality was for him, in order to rejoin the land of the living.

Nora Tschirner

Nora Tschirner you are the cutest girl ever. Please forsake German MTV's Hitlist and elope with me.

a trail of beer

Back in America now. The trip was a long one, and Canadian customs confiscated the good luck bamboo stick that I had bought for my brother. Also I was dumb enough to pack Augustiner beer bottles into a non-rigid suitcase, and one of them broke, a realization which only slowly dawned on me. I noticed a funny beer smell several times and that my bag was dripping but it took a while to put two and two together. The line to U.S. customs in Toronto was long, snaking back and forth, and I left a telltale trail of beer the whole way...thanks to me, the entire waiting room for U.S. customs probably smells inexplicably of Augustiner Helles.

But I'm in good old Rolla, Missouri now, and have been for the last three days. I went shopping at a supermarket the day after I got back. It was like being in a nightmare in which everyone is fat.

Saw my friend Kate yesterday. We talked about all kinds of junk over Denny's coffee, then went in for some blind pillow-testing and other randomness at Wal-Mart. There is a difference between "Firm" and "Extra Firm" and don't let anyone tell you otherwise.

the structural vs. the conditional

I am going to break my own unwritten code (no pun intended) and mention my life as a programmer. But just to make an analogy.

I've noticed that all software projects, if they last long enough, eventually reach the "feature bloat" stage. That is to say, what the program "does" becomes not a well-defined thing but a laundry list. I usually do not have the patience to see my own projects to this point, or even to analyze why I hate this stage of development so much. But I'm starting to. It is because the program itself becomes conditional instead of structural. The beautiful layout of objects, and the relationships between them, is slowly eroded by piecemeal if-statements and case blocks meant to deal with features as they arise in the necessity of the moment.

And now to the analogy part. I think that I detest language for this same reason. There is still an element of the structural--we have grammar, I suppose--but by and large this structure has been eroded by conditionals. Or "exceptions to the rules" if you please. The original rule for making a noun plural in English might have been "add an s to the end", but after the onset of conditionals we have

• if the noun is moose, the plural is moose
• if the noun is goose, the plural is geese
• if the noun is mouse, the plural is mice
• unless by mouse you mean the computer thing, in which case the offical plural is actually "mouse pointer devices"
• ...

And so on. Language is ugly, or at least severely lacking in aesthetic quality. Like some hideous software project that's been going on for thousands of years...shudder...

give muh nee

Feels like I've been halfway around the world and back again today. Woke up early and took a train to Heidelberg, then proceeded to visit as many castles as I could along the Burgenstrasse, the "Castle Road," that overlooks the Nekar river. Took a lot of pictures with a regular camera so unfortunately they won't appear here for a while.

Well I completely forgot the most memorable experience of Stuttgart yesterday: being panhandled by Santa Claus. When this fat ill-kept old women dressed in a Santa Claus suit, beard and all, approached me, I initially (because I have been conditioned to) had good will towards her. Even after she extended a box for me to put coins in. Only slowly did it dawn on me, through slow translation of the German message written on the box, and the unusual closeness with which she thrust it and held it in my face, that the charity she was collecting for was herself. Unfortunately my initial good will--the conditioned response--made getting rid of her a bit of an ordeal. I tried at first to play the I don't understand German game with her. But beggars can beg in any language and I had forgotten that. When she heard me speaking English, she adopted the mantra, "Give money." To hear her pronounce these three syllables was a disgusting thing.

"Give muh neeeee."
"No," I said.
"Give muh nee to St Niklaus."
"Work."
"Give muh nee."
I told her to work in German.
"Give muh nee."
"Earn it."
"Give muh nee."
"Go away now."
"Give muh nee."
I tried ignoring her but my silence was continually interrupted.
"Give muh nee."
I stood up from the bench and looked down on her. She was much shorter than I, and she said in a scared voice,
"Give muh nee."

At this point in the conversation my U-bahn arrived, saving me the pleasure of further discourse with Ms. Givmuhnee. Tis the season to be jolly, happy Christmas, I just got panhandled by Santa Claus.

Stuttgart

Went to Stuttgart today. It's industrial and isn't really a tourist attraction. Ugly and alive, a hog-butcher-of-the-world kind of place, but I still managed to extract a bit of the aesthetic. The Staatsgallerie had a big Manet exhibition--the largest ever to come to Germany--and this was worth it. Or even a single moment like the following can make a day worthwhile.

On the train there I was looking out the window, listening to Rachmaninoff, and saw the first bit of blue sky I had seen in a week. I do not know what Munich has done to deserve this day-in, day-out blanket grayness, but it distinctly belongs to Munich, since every time I leave Munich I seem to return to the world of blue skies. This last week I worked on redesigning my home page, and realized only after I was finished that my color scheme was all gray--no color--just like the world around me.

I have nothing to drink or eat around here. Just one egg. (You know you need to go buy groceries when...)

last night at the keller

Went to the Keller for perhaps the last time last night. It wasn't a holiday or weekend evening so when I walked into Kunstpark Ost there was no one, absolutely no one around, and I had a bad feeling that I would be one of the only ones there. When I got there the attendance was pretty low and the party was late in starting...but indeed, it started. There was lots of room on the dancefloor--a change from the usual sardines-moshing-in-a-can scene--and I had a good time until the lights came on at 4am. Sigh. Keller, I love you and I'm going to miss you with every alternative bone in my body. What am I ever going to do with myself now?

customers who wear clothes

Ha ha I'd say Amazon's "related items" feature is getting a little bit out of control. The page for Ancient Echoes, an album of Russian orthodox choral music, has just informed me that "Customers who wear clothes also shop for:"

• Clean Underwear


• Ladybug Rain Boots


• Arm Warmers


• Cheetah Print Slippers

Customers "who wear clothes?" Are nudists also a large market segment now or something?

Nuremburg, Rothenburg

Met Martina in Nuremburg this weekend for the Christkindlmarkt, as she's kind of a local, having grown up nearby. It was a cold, rainy day, but this made the smells of Gluh-Wein (spiced red wine served hot) and Lebkuchen (a sort of gingerbread) coming from the stands seem that much more appealing. Both are Nuremburg specialties that, for many Germans, stand for Christmas.

To escape from the cold we went to the German National Museum at the south end of town. They had a decent collection of Durer and a famous Rembrandt self-portrait that I was surprised to recognize, but by far the highlight was the two-foot-high unidentified gold-plated object shaped like a missile. Some speculated that it was a hat worn in religious ceremonies, but honestly, it was rather obscene-looking and would have fit in just as well in the window of a Beate Uhse. It was anyone's guess. The surprising thing was that such an object would appear encased in glass under the blessing of a national museum.

We saw the second Harry Potter movie in the evening in what Martina informed me was Europe's largest cinema complex. We were both a little disappointed by it, though maybe for different reasons.

Sunday the weather was better. We drove to Rothenburg, an even better-preserved town than the pretty authentic Nuremburg. Rothenburg has an intact city wall over a mile long almost all the way around it. No cars are allowed inside the wall, and the houses are of the half-timber pointy-roofed variety that is probably summoned up when you think of a medieval village. Despite this--or rather because of it--Rothenburg is a bit of a tourist trap. There were a lot of tourists crowding the streets, and stone blocks bearing the names of Japanese donors in the city wall confirmed the impression. Okay maybe tourist trap is a bit of a misnomer...particularly if you use the cashed-out land of Wall Drug and Jesse James' Hideout as a frame of reference.

While in Rothenburg we visited the Medieval Criminal Museum, which sported a comprehensive collection of torture devices ranging from tongue-screws to chastity belts to iron maidens. For some reason I thought chastity belts were just a saying with no reality behind them, but in fact they do exist, and even have locks on them, to which paranoid husbands would pocket the key. There were of course a wide variety of executioner's swords and axes, but there was one form of execution that I had never heard of before: the lying victim was run over repeatedly by a wagon wheel, breaking his bones through sheer weight, or slicing him with a blade attached to the rim, or both. They saved this one for only the most serious offenders (usually murderers). Perhaps it wouldn't have seemed that severe in a society that plunged bakers into the river in a spiked cage for selling underweight loaves of bread.

Well, after some of the usual nonsense, Martina and I ate snowballs, a Rothenburg specialty made from strips of dough molded into a ball and covered with powdered sugar or chocolate. Then it was time to say goodbye, as Martina had to get back to KL before another work week began, and I had to go home an run myself over with some more with the wagon wheel of programming.