Idle pondering: I'm looking at my mass-produced desk, and it has Formica laminate over the surface of the wood on the desktop—the question of the day is, How do they get such huge sheets of Formica to adhere to the desk surface without going on crooked? Perhaps, though, I'm just sick and rambling...

Too little of teh [sic] inhibitory neuronal stuff happenin'...

Yes, I've succumbed, I'm finally starting up one of those evil, vile...leiv.....veil......blogs. It's going to be horrible, I know it, but Austin made the Jablog code work ever so well...

Contrary to popular opinion, I'm not dead. In the future, look forward to a possible blog—I'm beta testing Austin's blogging site, Jablog, and if he works out some of the kinks in his code, I might include a framed blog somewhere on the site. He could use more beta testers, so go check it out.

Well, I've now won a 2003-2004 Golden Web Award. That's pretty exciting...I suppose.

Mmm, fabulous—this site is now listed as a top site by Comtech Enterprises, a web design and promotion firm. Many thanks to the great people at Comtech!

I came up with what I think is a great idea, namely programs that self-spawn an installer program upon uninstall. That way you can uninstall the program if you don't have enough space and install it again at some later point without having to visit its site or buy a CD or any of that crap marketing people came up with. Some programs, of course, already do this—but it would be great if all programs would.

I dreamed about cheeseburgers this afternoon while I was still semi-asleep...I've rediscovered hamburgers, you see, as a viable food source in my quest to vary my diet a bit more.

Action movies rock. I lived under a rock—or at least lived in my house—throughout the '90s, the heyday of blow-'em-up action flicks, hence didn't really get to see much of the genre. Re: Demolition Man, which I saw last night, I understand that the whole idea of having a pansy society where people don't have real cops and then having to have Sylvester Stallone come in and curse a lot, kick ass, and bolt down burgers and beer while trying to beat Wesley Snipes is the kind of thing geared toward macho middle-aged men with pickup trucks, but I really liked it! I suppose this may be me being reactionary yet again, considering I live in this bastion of political correctness and anti-violence here at the university, but yeah...I'm going to have to see s'more blow-'em-up-and-kill-shit action movies.

"'Cause I am hanging on every word you're sayin'...even if you don't wanna speak tonight, that's all right, all right with me...'Cause I want nothing more than to sit outside heaven's door and listen to you breathing...it's where I wanna be, yeah..."

No, the reason Kim and I get along still, I think, is probably because we know when to quit with each other, to say, ok, I think they've had enough—we can maintain those boundaries and limits and know who the other is, because we're not saying, "I am, she is, we are one and the same." It's different than it is for either of us with the people we [respectively] crazily love, 'cause those relationships seem to hold this absolute urgence... Kim and I can take each other at face value when we need to, and read into things from context and memory when we need to...we can bend truth to be what it needs to be, yet it's still a maintenance of integrity, it's like size constancy with object observation, we know the moon is always the same size...it's that shifty sort of integrity whereby you always know what the other person means, or if you don't you can pretend, you don't have to spend hours hashing it out, begging the question with the minutiae of your soul...but with other people it gets distorted when we try to make things be what we want, make people believe what we want them to believe. Especially with people who are, despite our best perceptions, relatively new to us... Kim and I hardly knew each other for so long, and I still get the impression that I don't really know her, we don't really know anyone until the other person agrees that we do, it seems, so I wait for the connection, when we have those, "YOU UNDERSTAND!!!" moments. This relates, again, to last winter's epiphany, that although we believe we truly know someone, because we talk to them and have a supposed "psychic link," we never do really know. That especially applies early on in these relationships, because there's the tendency to want to generalize reactions and thoughts and beliefs to cover all instances of the other's existence...but oh, if only people were that simple! Instead, you get to know someone over time, no matter how well you connect at first. Heh, I mean, for various periods of time, I couldn't talk to Kim without being shot down. I didn't like it. But now Kim and I have that—I suppose that's it, then—lack of pretense... I try to maintain a lack of pretense with the guy, but it ends up with me wanting to have a different kind of authenticity, one of complete unadulterated truth, and then there's that certain point where to continue being authentic to the one person you can talk to means scaring that person away, so you have conflicting first-law imperatives—Should I always be absolutely truthful? Or should I always work to maintain what I have, even if that means omitting or fudging or rephrasing at times? Prof. McClelland said that that was the key, you learn eventually that you can't always tell that unadulterated truth to the one you love. He's something of a relativist, though—is that credible? It has some ring of truth, in this context...It's the Ayn Rand thing, can one ever hold something absolute, be absolutely honest? It'll always have bias, after all...I've "learned" that before, that fudging and muddling through are key. But then you almost want to merge souls with the person, to be one, but can you? Cosmically, is that allowed? Or needs must you always maintain that separation, if only to maintain being together? I'm visualizing the "Ben's Life" ideal couple, the people who can sit on the same bench coolly holding hands while not even looking at each other. It's a paradox—you can only be one by revealing all, yet to reveal all is to reveal how your minds differ, and thus push you apart, render you not one. It's sad...how does one transcend that? How does one maintain the idea, the insistence that, "No, I'm not crazy, please believe I'm not crazy, I can be normal for you," without even that insistence pushing the other person away by its need and its sharp, ferocious character? Is this the fundamental paradox we live with? Is this why we can only just muddle through, because our experiences are all tinged by earlier perceptions, rendering them different, the actor-observer bias, and we all think we're right, so we can't see that we're pushing others away by our fanatic insistence... I'm talking about different things, really, but the fundamental issue at hand remains: Do we all see things differently? Well of course we do, just like in "Washing Dishes"—if I were black, I wouldn't be me, and ditto for any other switching of that sort. We consist of both nature and nurture. But then again, in the end, it all comes down to the big question in there, "Will you marry me?" What if I'm just too crazy to remain in good graces? What if it's really just fundamentally my problem, that there's some fundamental hole in my soul I can't patch, and there it is, and it's keeping me from the person I love by its existence, by the things it makes me do and explain? If it's not fundamental, wouldn't I have recognized its existence as a personality trait by now? It's the question I asked Deej earlier: Don't you think that if I were racist I would have noticed by now? Well, likewise, wouldn't one think that if I were crazy, there would be some outward signs of it? Heh, but then there's the thought that, no, perhaps everyone just hides that from you, and they're really cringing inwardly at your very presence, like I've always thought that they do at my hair. Perhaps it's my jerkiness, I've always seen myself as a "jerk." Perhaps it even has to do with the way I've never really seen myself as a normal girl, I have dreams where I'm a guy, and that just makes sense in the scheme of things. Well, there we are then, spiraling and spiraling in these fractal, ever-repeating patterns of thought, the self-conscious downward spiral. How to escape it? Stop thinking about it. But it's only through mistakes and subsequent thought that we achieve consciousness, neh? At some point or another I'll have to think about it, I know that—hence my insistence at always resolving everything right away, making sure that all is ameliorated, everyone has the "right" perception of me...and that attempt at amelioration merely makes me seem guiltier of transgressions then I truly am. Back again to the top, neh?

This is when I should be creative, isn't it? When I'm doing very little of anything, just watching the rest of Interview with the Vampire, that's the time to just lie back and somehow just project this incredible magical creativity that college students like me are supposed to get. So why do I, instead, just feel utterly drained and devoid of passion for that sort of thing? Isn't college supposed to be where one can be their most creative, passionate self? Why do I feel like the "numb trolleybus" of Sylvia Plath's description? I don't know, and all I seem to be able to do about it is write this melancholy vignette prose of whatever all this is...

"Oh my god I'm getting sexiled no way."

What quaint and strikingly brilliant things the natives here seem to say. My, my, my, people here just have a way with words, don't they? How are the poets gaining the inspiration for these incredible works they're doing? We must have poets...what is a major university without its glorious poets, immortalizing its starry sky-kissed columns? Or do we just have the same inspiration-deprived jackasses of yore, the same thespian types who overran the high school with their maudlin, poorly expressed sentiments?

Am I too harsh? Oh, do tell me about how awfully harsh I am, when my roommate cannot wait for me to leave so she can have sex, the girls who live on either side of me are... [trails off and decides to go to sleep]

Being around people doesn't really make depression better. Depression consists of conflicting desires: the desire to simultaneously obliterate anyone and everyone around you and be close to someone, anyone, who can magically make everything better.

Something else interesting—I think that, with many of the activities I'm seeking out these days, I'm merely attempting to somehow regerate the feelings of satisfaction derived from being around people from high school... Case in point: I found myself, upon walking across campus, randomly thinking about joining set construction up here...

Another aspect of this, I think, may be automotive deprivation. Freshmen here may not possess cars on campus. And yes, I know, it sounds as though I'm complaining idly like some spoiled [surprise!] college student. But nonetheless, I find it demeaning that I am not allowed—in a city that is virtually defined by the ubiquity of cars—to own anything resembling that primary mode of transportation. I am forced to rely upon (1) my parents, because unfortunately I'm going to school in the city I grew up in (2) other students lucky enough to have easily accessible transportation, who I don't know, who it would be a hassle to get to know... (3) public transit, which is ridiculously inefficient, as any St. Louisan knows, or (4) activities that I can join where they'll—oh glory, hooray, yippee—transport me to the inner city, a night club, or some other unpreferred destination. Perhaps they believe this will foster a sense of closeness with my peers. Yet I believe it does the opposite—I probably grow more resentful of my peers and the school in general because I can never leave. There is no way to gain relief through escape from the other rats in the cage, so I must learn avoidance tactics, which probably harm my psyche far more than a lot of things.

*Phew* So those are my frustrated thoughts upon walking through the heat (and it will be the same in winter, just with more cold and chafing and slipping and suffering) past cars cooling on the lot that lies as an obstacle between me and my place of residence on the South 40. Some may think I'm merely bitching, and perhaps that's true. Yet, as with any gripe wherein someone actually bothers to provide examples and refutations, I just might be on to something.

We need more studies...always more studies to tell us what our intuition and common sense already know.

This is a research institution, after all.

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Me: I want to have a car
Boyfriend: why?
Me: and drive off campus
Me: just off campus
Me: nowhere crazy
Me: it's this cruel paradox
Me: the road out of here goes right past my dorm....right under my window, even
Me: it goes and goes....but I don't
Boyfriend: awwww
Boyfriend: what road?
Me: Shepley Drive
Boyfriend: oh.
Boyfriend: where's it go?
Me: around the dorms, out to the Place of the Backwards Stop Signs
Boyfriend: umm
Boyfriend: right
Boyfriend: this sounds like some weird pseudo-college but pseudo-african mythology
Boyfriend: The place of the Backward Stop Signs, where the pavement people dance when they have died
Me: haha
Me: exactly!
Me: That's the point—it's the mysterious Other, the Unknown, Out There. Not on campus...