the world has turned and left me here

everything goes wrong and i don't care

The last time I had a day which was even comparably crappy was back in October when I got stitches above my eye.

Here's the recap. The work day sucks as things fail & I find bugs & get stressed about making a release tomorrow.

I then go out to my car and find a $30 parking ticket. Thanks UNL Parking Police, you usually figure in to these kind of days.

Since I promised Jamaimer I would help her with her evening class I go to that. I get saddled with a crying 6-month-old who is totally freaked out by me, and tries harder than any baby I've ever seen to push his way out of my arms. I mean he was physically pushing off me & crying because he couldn't get away. So I would trade him for a quiet baby and then she would start crying and trying to escape too.

Aside from that I must after years of programming in solitude interact with a bunch of little kids, some of whom clearly hate me, and the multitasking nature of the situation overloads my brain. At the end of class it's like I've been run over by a truck.

I go home. After a cup of coffee I start working on my car in preparation for the frisbee tournament trip this weekend. I change the radiator fluid & take it for a test run. In way north Lincoln it blows its oil cap and the engine dies, and I barely manage to roll it down a hill and into a parking lot.

I walk a mile in the cold without a good coat to a gas station and back, where I grab oil in the hopes of filling it up and driving home perhaps, then I get back and discover the blown oil cap which spells doom. Shivering, I call a tow truck, and arrive at my house finally at 12:30 am.

But you know what none of this managed to really piss me off or bum me out. Probably because I'm just numb these days.

fading out of existence

Dream in which my great grandmother was very sick and close to dying. She had an oxygen hose because, they said, she couldn't live ten seconds without it. She laid there on the bed stiff as a board & people went in to see her almost as if it was already an open casket funeral. Then she suddenly decided to get up, tossing the oxygen hose aside.

For the rest of the dream she walked amongst us and said the most amazing things. She really had it figured out; she had no regrets, and she told people with utmost sincerity the things she had always liked about them. She was fun to be around.

In the middle of a conversation I asked her how she could still possibly be alive without the oxygen hose. "I can't," she said, and as I looked closely at her lips I saw that they weren't actually moving. She didn't seem distressed, just laid down as if she was going back to sleep.

As she died she continued beaming her thoughts into my head. I saw, as if under a microscope, a giant foaming cellular structure that looked like the surface of water as it is brought to boil. Every second, more and more cells left, and as this happened I heard her voice describe how it felt to fade out of existence. There was no terror in it. It was calm, and grew quieter and quieter until it was silent, and the surface of the water was still.

jesus throws a killer house party

Big house party at Jesus's last night. Many frisbee people in attendance, some old-timers even, but a lot of other people too, just a big cross section of wild drunken humanity. The first keg was gone by 11 pm and I have no idea how that was accomplished...there were maybe 25 people there when I showed up.

Maybe this guy was responsible? Note Nebraska Ultimate symbol on Andy's cup. This would make a great advert for the team I think...well it would be truth in advertising at least. Truth in advertising. I'd drink to that.

Jake was there (as I said, random cross section) with his business partner. When I called him before the party they were doing their taxes. My pals Mark & Jeff showed up & made fun of people.

Things started to clear out--the tide went out again--leaving only the truly drunk washed ashore. A sing-along (scream-along?) started in the basement. Have never seen this happen in America, there was no music playing or anything and we didn't even know each other mostly. But someone would start a song & everyone would join in at the top of their lungs. There was ACDC and Sublime and that one Dead Eye Dick song that you'd think people had forgotten by now.

Jake conducts. Note Capt. Jack Sparrow fingers. At one point he started screaming "Mary Had a Little Lamb" over the din, and I found this so funny that I had to lay down in the basement beer muck and shoe slime and roll around in it laughing.

The house lost power twice during the night, somebody tripped a circuit breaker or something & it was a blackout for 5 min. each time. What a great idea if it was planned. Everyone just grabbed the nearest member of the opposite sex and well you know.

Brennen chills, baldly, by the door. Things are winding down.

Jake & Brennen & I eventually headed for Hiway D where we ate sundry breakfast foods prepared by the alluring Mary. Not up for breaking on through to the other side like the three of us did last weekend (random jam session), we took Jake home at 4. Brennen & I then visited Mary after she got off work.

Walked around freezing in the streets until she called to us from the doorway. The three of us watched Road House, the worst piece of cheesy 80's crap I've ever seen, one of those so bad it's good things.

I don't even remember falling asleep. But then it was dawn & the title screen was looping. Time to end this. We got up muggy eyed and drove home through the light traffic of normal go-getter types preparing for yet another day.

on task

I was on task. I swear. That is, until I was seized by the need to figure out the piano to "December 1963." Lemme hear your best falsetto. Oh what a night.

deep freeze

Sitting in my living room here listening to Mogwai, reading On the Road a second time and watching stalactite icicles drip outside. Given enough time they will reach the ground. Nebraska is a big deep-freeze cave with all kinds of deep-frozen wonders to marvel at, and slip on. Glaciers creep and groan across campus, impelled by the force of mere shadows which give and take the gift of melting.

The Nebraska Department of Tourism should hire me. If Nebraska even has one of these that is. I'm sure I could make them a bangup brochure and attract, say, a team of arctic explorers.

party + an inquiry into human rights

A long night of partying this way & that. It begins with Mark & I eating sushi at Wasabi, a pleasure which has been denied me for the past month roughly, and I sit down at the sushi bar next a hippie chick with beautiful eyes. There is some amount of vibe on both ends & for this reason it is very uncomfortable, neither of us know what to say really, and so in nervousness end up misrepresenting ourselves. She leaves eventually & we do not give chase. But the sushi is good.

We go to play pool at the Spigot. After the first game a group of macho guys challenge & beat us. We retire to the back, and the evening is at this point looking pretty lame.

Then Ben calls up & says come on over, we're having a seventies party over here with an emphasis on drag. I stop by my place, and Jamaimer makes me try on a dress, but it is like 10 degrees outside and I don't look outrageous enough, so I fall back on that old pair of stupid white corduroys from Germany and a blue polyester shirt.

Half the guys at the party are indeed dressed in drag. One shows the world to us while we're playing twister, and it is indeed disgusting. As all parties at Ben's this one fails to disappoint.

Jake arrives on the scene. The party is dying down, so we go with some people to Perkins, where every last person is our age, and drunk. Jake tries to hit on this rugby chick but she keeps going off on long tangents about geology, her major. Bad form, Peter, bad form.

On the way home Jake & I get into a conversation about abortion. This has happened before. I introduce the idea that the right to life is not a real right, though it is in most practical cases derived from the other two, liberty & the pursuit of happiness. Because I believe that if you are killed swiftly & painlessly (as you could be at any time of natural causes, let's admit) and have no foreknowledge of the event, neither your liberty nor pursuit of happiness has been impinged upon. These only apply when you're living and as soon as you're not, it doesn't matter. You don't feel outrage that your rights have been violated because you don't exist. Or even if you believe you continue to exist on some other plane I don't think you'd feel outrage anymore; it just wouldn't matter.

However, that said, killing is considered wrong because (a) the victim sees it coming, or suffers horribly, violating his liberty or pursuit of happiness and (b) all the people who knew & loved that person are affected, and suffer, violating their rights. What I'm getting at here is that what's really wrong is causing others to suffer against their will. That I believe is the axiom behind the axiom that killing is wrong. Rather than accept the latter as an axiom, I have tried to question why, and believe I have found a still more basic reason. One that makes sense to me at least.

Anyway this was just the starting point for my argument, which I finally finished explaining as the sun was coming up three hours later. It led to some shocking conclusions that, I am sure, would produce knee-jerk reactions in just about anyone, as they run counter to mantras chanted at us since birth. It produced knee-jerk reactions in me as I reasoned to them.

Jake for his part made me think about a lot of things I wouldn't have otherwise, and now I understand his own position much better. At some point in a real disagreement between two rational people you get down to axioms which differ on either side, and then you can't go any farther. Then you just have to say, well, I am a different being from you & so of course my axioms are different. Not willing to leave it at that has led to more wrongly inflicted suffering over the course of human history than anything else, I believe.

And Jake & I did leave it at that, and continue to respect each other. It was one of the best conversations I've had in years.

a formal apology

To all the girls over the course of my life that I've hit on, I issue a formal apology if you found me to be yucky or unattractive. Tonight a chick who was both of these things hit on me & it felt like crap, a totally uncomfortable situation. I'm so sorry, seriously.

expected value goggles

Before going up to the casinos this weekend Jake had me all excited about playing roulette with the well-known martingale strategy. A friend of his made $1200 in one night this way. Of course, after I remembered my probability theory & did the math I realized it was bunk.

Bunk because, although your chances of winning your meager base (say $5) are good, the small chance of losing everything (say $155) offsets this. As a result your expected return is about -$1. It's not about probability, it's about expected value, which is just weighted probability. And of course you'll never catch the house playing a game for which its expected return is negative.

I was glad I remembered all this...sitting there calculating that crap for a couple hours turned me into cold hard expected value machine. I began seeing everything through expected value goggles, people & their silly tortured groans or converse screams of delight made no sense. People, I thought, these are just random events, you aren't "lucky" tonight, you shouldn't change to red because there's a long streak of black. If you do win, so what. There are no emotions here. Only expected values which are always slightly negative. This same principle probably applies to your whole life, in fact.

Still, screw it I said, and martingaled with a meager $40. After winning $20 I stopped & from then out bought drinks for those in need of drinks, which included myself. Poor Jake needed it the worst. As we played blackjack I was reading the optimal strategy off a cheat card, for which we were ridiculed mercilessly. (My hammer & sickle shirt also did not endear me to the Bulgarian dealer.) Even with the optimal strategy & martingale betting you have that small chance of losing everything. Which is what happened.

His friend won $580 on roulette. Oh well there is no emotion here. Except perhaps the secret desire to throttle your friend who has just won $580.

chinese water torture

A question I've been posing to people recently: if you were undergoing Chinese water torture, would it be worse if the drops came relentlessly at regular intervals, or if they always kept you guessing?

About 2 out of 3 people think the first is better because you could possibly tune it out. The other 1 out of 3, myself included, think the irregularity would at least keep things interesting, and that the sheer inevitability of a regular beat would drive one insane.

Well, this is by no means an exhaustive study, but I tried it out in the bathtub tonight. I was definitely wrong about the irregularity keeping things interesting. Although the beat was fairly regular, every once in a while the faucet would machine-gun me with 10 drops in rapid fire; not knowing when this would happen was awful. If the drops come at small, even intervals you could tune it out I found. Still, if the interval is like 30 seconds, you're not going to be able to time them anyway, and in this case forcing the victim to watch the drop form and anticipate its fall will probably drive them crazy on a longer time scale. I also found out it's still pretty bad with your eyes closed...when the drop suddenly detonates on your forehead it scares the crap out of you. This too would drive you nuts though in a jittery sort of way. So I guess it's all about your intended psychological effect.

I hope this information will be of use in your future endeavors in the field of torture.