livingtech

my entire life in blog. I’ve never wanted fame. Maybe a recognition from peers I admire. An “oh, I know who THAT guy is!” every once in awhile might be cool, but otherwise, who cares who knows you?

I’ve been cultivating the concept that there are two states of self awareness. (with infinite shades between, of course) The first is an inner understanding of the workings. The details, knowing why you do things, and how you make the decisions you make. The second state is merely being aware of the things as they happen. Suprising yourself at times, living life more fully perhaps, or at least more passionately. Maybe I’m just re-inventing the extrovert/introvert dichotomy, but I don’t think so because it seems like a person can be an entirely introverted person and still life life for the experience, and care nothing for the why.

This is of course related to blogging. I ask myself repeatedly why I blog. In fact, I probably ask myself that far more often than I actually do it! I ask the same question of everything I do… and I usually have good answers for myself. (now, as to whether I’m rationalizing, or actually discovering those answers, I’m not sure even I can know.)

At the same time, I’ve been loosing that sense of wonder when I ask. More often as of late, the answer is “who cares?”. Perhaps the biggest why question recently has been why do I play video games. I’ll fully acknowledge that I have an addiction. It’s pretty severe even. I’ve skipped work to play. Sometimes, the why question is entirely absent. I don’t even care. I just want to play this game, or go see this movie, or go have sex, or go do THAT.

I think my poetry is somehow deeply tied to the root of the why question. I used to think I was manic depressive, and I’d only really write when I was at the low and high ends. The best stuff was when I was manic, and the worst when I was depressed. But there were “sane” stretches in between where I wouldn’t really do anything at all, and I wondered if that’s what it was suppose to feel like… just living. Not really doing anything special or particular. I feel that way more and more. Just eeking out an existence. The worst part is that it’s really not disturbing. In fact, I feel no remorse, or I’d change things. If I really wanted to be a famous writer (as I secretly wish everytime I see the clock at 11:11), I’d just fucking write. I wouldn’t play video games, and I wouldn’t juggle three times a week.

Juggling is very much on the “who cares” end of the spectrum, I think.

I wonder if you can read someone’s blog, and make a judgement about where on the scale they fall. I wonder if this even makes sense to anyone but me.

Comments should be working in the next fifteen minutes or so. Tell me what you think?

Today was decent.. involved. a good day. a meaningful day. I said goodbye to those aforementioned co-workers, and we all went out for lunch and drinks. Drinks evolved into drunken discussions, which are sometimes (seldom, I’ve found, but were today) the best kind of discussions, because they are open and uninhibited.

I also found out I’ve got a raise. This from our new boss… who did not attend the goodbye party. This spoke much about her, I think, and, at least for now, I’ve a newfound respect. Perhaps, she was not invited.

This was mentioned on blogger (itself!) but I’ll reproduce the link because I found it fascinating. Keep Trying is a blog seemingly devoted to blogging about blogging. Meta blogging? It’s a popular discussion topic. Someone mentioned it’s really something only newbie bloggers do, but I’m not so sure. If you don’t keep examining yourself, how do you know who you are? Do those who no longer blog about blogging no longer realize they are blogging? Is it merely something they “do” as habbit, as ritual, as instinct? (Yes, instinct can be learned.)

I suddenly had an epiphany… I can host my comments script on livingtech.net, and still keep my blog on blogspot. I don’t know why this didn’t occur to me before. I’m probably just an idiot.

We’ll see if I can get that done tonight, but I’m still drunk. Thousands of open source programmers can’t be wrong though, and I’ll probably do a better job while I’m drunk.

I’ve decided to make a commitment to longer and more meaningful posts. Less crap, less random jibberish, innane observation, etc… You may or may not have noticed, but unfortunately, so far at least, this has meant fewer posts as well.

At the moment, I’m sitting at work, watching two of my former co-workers pack up and leave the building. They were both above me, the president and creative director (of the company before the merger), and now they’re leaving because that’s what everyone here would do, given a choice. I really have no choice. My choice is this: how much money should I borrow to buy a car so I can get to work every day after it moves? I’m thinking two or three grand at most. I have a list of things I’d like in a car, but unfortunately, I can’t really afford to adhere to it. In fact, it yet remains to be seen whether I’ll be able to afford anything.

You might have thought, erroniously, that my lack of regular updates would mean I’ve been busy trying to move the blog somewhere else. No. I have made no progress. My life is lack of progress, sharply contrasted by my existence in video games, which is only measured by progress. Perhaps this lack of ready objectives in reality is what causes me to believe that I am more likely failing at it.

I like that: failing reality.

Reality Upstarts, a sasquach band of trumpeting rhino-riders. No random here!

There is some kind of link between creativity and sleep deprivation. This much seems painfully obvious. Synapses jump faster, or more eratically, or something. At the same time, other cognitive functions suffer… I never quite know whether I’m doing a good job, or whether it merely seems like I am. Is this RuPaul weblog really as interesting as I think it is? Or am I just terribly woefully tired?

Naked is fun. Unfortunately, when you’re in a relationship, I think there is this tendency for nakedness to get routine and, well, not boring, but just not as interesting anymore either. I wonder why this is. My room mate and I were speculating about the instinct for after-sex-talk. If all we (as males of the species) were interested in was progenation, then we’d probably never stick around for the after-sex-talk. Slam-bam-thank-you-mam… yet, it had to have been somehow advantageous for the man to get to know the woman, find out everything about her… from her eating habbits to her favorite hangouts just about any other nearly-useless detail we can wring from her.

I think that instinct may be a bit too strong in me. I’ve always found the first few weeks of the relationship to be the most intense.

Don’t get me wrong, I think there’s plenty to be said about stability and commitment. I just want very little to do with them.

observations from my bed:

light is often yellow, especially when filtered through a lampshade which is light brown, and probably also especially when it’s from a lightbulb.

my ceiling is speckled.

chaos needs no prompting.

doors are particularly useless when one doesn’t care if one’s roommates can see one naked. however, doors have the suprise ability to function as things to hang other things from. This is espeically easy to facilitate when one owns a door-hanger-thingy, which hooks over the door, and offers many hooks from which to hang other things.

I wish my wardrobe had a desaturate feature.

keys are an interesting phenomenon of modern culture. what is the importance of keys, and what does it say about a person who never looses their keys verses a person who frequently finds himself without them? I am of the former persuasion, (I don’t remember ever loosing my keys,) and I wonder if as such a person, I am missing out on exciting adventures I would otherwise be enjoying if I lost them more often.

water is heavy.

the space shuttle can’t launch in rain. This is because the special heat-resistent tiles are somehow not water resistant. (or perhaps–here comes the observation part, I thought of this myself–perhaps at the speeds the space shuttle achieves in it’s short flight out of earth’s orbit the raindrops are like tiny bullets. I wonder what the speed of a bullet is compared to the speed of the space shuttle. I also wonder what is the speed of your average falling raindrop.

last observation: there are many types of hinge. hinges are a crutial part of modern society. without hinges we are lost (or unhinged). open and close, all day long, only here and there a tiny hinge protest… fixed quickly with WD40. all hail our mighty friend the hinge.

this game is probably the coolest and most addictive web based game I’ve played since bejewled. Replay value is zero though, so I won’t post my password.

speaking of time… imagine 16 hours in a Home Depot. I read through that this afternoon, and it was somehow extremely heartening. I don’t know why, but I really decided life is better knowing that I would not (now) undertake 16 hours in any store. Ever.

had an interesting conversation about time today. I realized that I was absolutely right when I was a kid, wanting to never “grow up” so that time stayed slow, the way it was suppose to be. Now it feels like so little time has passed since I started the job I’m at now, or since I was in college, or since I’ve been dating laura… all these things seem like yesterday, and when I try to recall all the multitudes of days between those events and now, I fade out somewhere around a week or two. I know things happened in between, and if they were anything like the past few weeks, too much happened, probably, but I can’t hardly remember but scattered events.

I’ll probably end up one of those old men who tells you the same stories over and over again.

I have karma police stuck in my head.

my new favorite band of the week: The Weakerthans. they’re absolutely amazing. And better lyrics by far than my last favorite band of the week, The Strokes. The strokes don’t have terrible lyrics, but they’re deffinetly not up to par with the weakerthans. I must buy their CDs posthaste.

Jolly good. Bugger me, I’m off.

Winter has arrived, like a long lost friend, and snow has sprung up covering everything like green grass in spring. I felt a weird sense of nostalgia when I got out of the shower this morning and it was so cold. The white blankets and sense of urgency remind me somehow of my junior year in HS, which was probably the last time I had to really struggle to make it to class regularly so early, and so cold.