February 27th thru March 5th, 2005

Sunday February 27th, 2005

Monday February 28th, 2005

It was determined that before attacking the day, DDR needed to happen. And so it did. Now THAT was fun. They all caught on pretty fast, but more importantly, became absolutely obsessed with certains songs ("Exotic Ethnic," "Tsugaru") and HAD to play them over and over again. That pleases me.

We showered (not together) and we out for more birthday shopping and lunch. Blue C Sushi. Wasabi Mashed Potatoes. Heaven. They also took a look at some local Fremont shops, including an antique mall that sells homies! I might be able to complete my collection! I need to check what I have/need and go back. After Fremont it was back to Capitol Hill for beads, clothes, and a drink at Julia's. I had a Cosmotology. It was fruity. Then we took Patience to the airport, and I went to bowling.

Bowling was our end-of-season awards party and nine-pin-tap tournament. My teammate, Dr. Strikesalot, won THAT hands down. Good golly, but he's a good bowler. I didn't get to talk to the cute chick much, but I did get to say hello at least. Same with every other guy there, and nothing cools my jets like other planes on the tarmac... that was a weird analogy. Anyhoo. Frecklepants gave me a ride home I and introduced her to the remaining blondes. That was good. Then she left and sleeping occured-- oh, but only after I ate a fistful of the best damn potstickers I have ever had in life.

Tuesday March 1st, 2005

As I sit here, the aromas of 3 blondes, their soaps and shampoos and whatnots, linger. Mmmmm...

Plenty Ducks
Lots of ducks were gained from gifts and my own discoveries this weekend. I finally got them all photo'd for the collection. Here's them en masse:

The Rest of the Day
Nothing more than work, coffee at Revolutions, and sleep. Yawn.

Wednesday February 2nd, 2005

I got a hankering, and decided to DDR. And so I did. I had a pass for two free months of XBox Live and so I signed up for that and downloaded some new songs. Just five of them-- which I proceeded to pass with As and Bs on Heavy mode. Not too shabby for a man that's flabby. I also managed to score a C on a 9 footer, though it broke me. I switched to Ultramix 2, which I bought a long time ago, and I find that I had not played it at all-- there where no scores saved. So I aced a bunch of the Heavy 7s and embarrassed myself on some of the 8s and 9s. The music selection is not so good, in my opinion-- too much rock, not enough Electric-J. And no TaQ, the best DDR composer of al time. Oh well. Big belly's can't be choosers.

I Laughed, I Wept, I Perspired, and I Wished I'd Bought French Fries
Also in the day I managed to watch "The Office: Special," a two part-er showing the life of the lads and ladies in Slough a few years after the end of Season 2. It was very satisfying-- I won't give it away, but I am glad what happened happened. And it was as much fun watching the "making of" feature as it was to watch the thing itself. I wonder what's next for Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant? IMDB says something called "The Extras." Who knows? Is any else reminded of Rik Mayall et al? Not in terms of style, but in terms of potential? I am. I have my fingers crossed.

My workout buddy THE ANT and I met up at the Aurora Gold's for some good workout sweating. After that I took a wee nap and showered and popped downtown to pick up Jestavril to attend a Poetry Slam. Ahem. Well. I am going to try and not be a jerk. I can't pass judgement because everyone there was entertained and the poets felt good about what they were doing, so who am I to say it was a bunch of nonsense? I have often called poetry nothing more than masturbation, but I would be a hypocrite if I said masturbation was a bad thing. And, sure, okay, political poetry preached at a choir is not going to change the worlds-- but at least they felt involved. Right? I mean, just because, personally, I feel that using a creative voice to describe racial strife is so predictable that it ceases to be about texture and only becomes a series fo clever rhymes, that's no reason for me to condemn someone who might have actually written something good. These people win awards, nationwide, so who am I? Nobody. And not going back, either.

Ixnay on the Oupling-Cay
I got home, ate some leftover banana bread-- whoever made that, I am in love with you and want to have your children. Then I started watching season 1 of "Coupling"-- the UK version. I'd heard the American version was bad, and now I see why. I only made it through two and a half episodes. I suppose the writing was okay, and the acting was as good as it could be, but the directing/editing sucked. It need to be way tighter more snappy. The characters where way off-- I know it was supposed to be a bit like Friends in the UK, but come on. There's a Ross-Rachel thing going, and a definite Joey character. The "Phoebe" character, Jane (Gina Bellman, right), actually, was the reason I'd wanted to see it in the first place. She seemed to be the only one who knew how to play the goofiness of the farcical situations. The Rachel character, Susan, was almost embarrassing to watch. The actress was good- it was the characterization that was awful. This was every man's fantasy in 2 dimensions, a pretty, succesful, sexually aggressive woman who laughs off boys' hijinx and puts out when requested. Meh. So I put it back in its envelope and will be sending it back to Netflix. Bye bye.

Thursday February 3rd, 2005

I started reading Motherless Brooklyn by Jonathan Latham. I have to be honest-- in the beginning I felt it was too "clever" and didn't make it past the first page. But a very close friend had wanted to me to read it, so I gave it another try. I am glad I did-- it's pretty good. The only problem is the protagonist starts the book while eating White Castle sliders, and that made me hungry for 'em. Well, the closest approximation round these parts is Dick's so off I went. Oh the conspiracies to keep me away. I took wrong turns, backtracked, and then there was construction... but I persevered. Some might take this as a sign that higher powers didn't want me to eat them cheeseburgers. I, however, took it as a sign they just wanted me to want the damn things all the more. And buddy I did. And buddy they were good.

Later in the day I'm home working and I simply can NOT stay awake. Gods. I took that as sign that higher powers didn't want me to work. Ha. Naps happened, in chairs, on couches, in guest beds. Eventually I shrugged of most of the seratonin and made my way into a shower and then downtown to meet people for Seattle's First Thursday Art Walk. We met at Elliot Bay Bookstore, where I forgot to buy The Other Hollywood by Legs McNeil. I'll get it later. The walk was okay, and after we went to Cafe Paloma for some Mediterranean food. Then me and Philoplinkton went to her place to play games and listen to tunes on my i-Pod. Pirates, which was dissapointing, and The Game of Life Card Game, which was okay. And we had cookies. And cake. Thus endeth the Thursday.

Friday February 4th, 2005

Life Goes On
And mine did. I worked, I napped, I cleaned the house, did chores and what not. Had a con call. Then I went to the gym on Broadway-- I bought a green plaid suit jacket from Red Light first, which I shall model for you later, and then rode one of those step machines for an hour, 6 miles, and 1000 calories. Then I joined the ANT in a "body-pump" class, which nearly killed me. Good lord. Think of aerobics with a barbell, that's sort of what it was. Although the sum total of my barbell was about 25 pounds, I couldn't match the instructor for all his reps. Still, I'm very glad I went, of course. I'm looking forward to the next one.

I went home, cleaned my self up, got dressed, and went downtown to meet Aberhomie at Tini Bigg's. But alas, there was no parking. And I mean NO parking, owing to the Sonics Game. That sort of made me mad, and then getting lost, and I do mean trully lost, somewhere in Queen Anne, REALLY made me mad. But I got over it, went to Daxamoni's house, where we chilled till Aberhomie arrived, then off to Denny's. A burger. A conversation about things. It was good. Then home, where finished off Motherless Brooklyn before going to sleep.

Motherless Brooklyn by Jonathan Lethem
I enjoyed this book. It's the story of mafioso-cum-detective with Tourette's syndrome. In that respect it's not unlike The Curious Incident of the Dog In the Nighttime-- the one about the young man with autism who is trying to find out who killed his neighbor's dog. Motherless won some National Critics Award, I suppose for the whole Tourette's thing, because frankly, the mystery itself was not all the intriguing. I've read mysteries before, and there's usually some clever plot twists which embody the "point" of the whole thing. But this one was about character development, I guess. But I did enjoy it, and when I read a book I like I am usually compelled to read more by the same author. I don't know, this time. A description of another of his books reads as follows:

Saturday February 5th, 2005

Okay I'm back. So I had some thoughts and I have the believe I am not the first person to have them, but I am not familiar with the intricacies of the various philosophies, and so I'm not sure where to go look. I thought maybe logical positivism, but I was way off on that. Anyway, here goes:

Consider a card that has printed on it simply the statement "If you are reading this card, you are drunk." The statement might be true or false, unless we know for certain that some necessary condition of drunkeness was fulfilled before the card was given to a reader-- perhaps a bartender passes them out to notify people that they have been cut-off, or perhaps it is discovered in an envelope who's location is only indicated at the bottom of a full glass of whiskey. I would call these phenomenalogical indications of the card's truthfulness, and they are exterior to the card itself.

What happens if we decide the card's truthfulness is dependant solely on its own existence? Simply put, the if-then statement is fulfilled only by what we know from reading the card? That would yield a different meaning of the word "drunk." In this case, "drunk" means "performing the act of reading" so that the card means "if you are reading this card, you are reading." That's a tautology, and therefor irrefutable (and also pointless). This assumes alot, but it works when you consider that a language act is not 100% strictly confined to an infallible authority on the meaning of words. For the most part people agree on what words mean-- otherwise communication would be far less effective. But in an isolated instance of a person reading such a card, irrespective of the phenomena of the card's existence, such an agreement is not as necessary.

So, what's going on with the classic card that has on one side "The statement printed on the other side of this card is a lie." and on the other side "The statement printed on the other side of this card is the truth." Most people have encountered reference to this simple paradox. But what if we decide that it is not a paradox, that the card is logically consistant? Then all we have to do is come up with a defintion of the word "is" that makes it work. We can start by saying that "is" really means "tells," and this is not even such a far fetched decision. And since we know that the statements are read one-after-the-other, we can even decide "is" means "will attempt to tell." And now there is no paradox at all-- both statements are true, and its just that one of the statements failed in its attempt.

(Let me be really silly and say that tis reminds me of what little I have learned from studying quantum mechanics. Unread, the card exists with multiple "waveforms" of meaning, and as soon as we read the card, the waveform collapses into a tautology. Metaspeech has transformed "is" from two statements existing in the same place to an understanding of the movement of meaning as we go from one statement to the next.)

What do we call this line of reasoning? This point of view that claims "truth" is created by the singularity of contexts and that metalanguage follows metarules of logical movement? I bet I have done nothing more than come up with some watered down and internally inconsistant version of some other philosopher's dusty old pamphlet that he tossed off one day on a whim because it was so obvious and he was bored. Its not logical positivism, though-- I looked that one up.

Diary, Record, Journal, Affidavit
I got up early enough to blog my way through the yesterday, and the la it was me, off to the gym for my first spinning class in well over a year. Garsh. Jocelyn tried to kill me but I managed. The worst part, actually, was my feet, as I have not worn my biking shoes since the STP ride. Then it was back home to become clean like the day, and I'm off again to pick up Orangetoes for a visit to the Seattle Arboretum's Book Sale. I found no tomes I wanted. OT wanted to hit some garage sales, but failing that, we popped ovee to the Redmond Value Village. I again came up empty, but she found some household things she needed. Dropped her off, home again to watch a few episodes of my Netflixed Mr. Show, and then Safrani came over and made organic burgers n' fries. Then she and I went to a wine and cheese party that friends of my neighbors were hosting, and we stayed chatting for longer than we thought we would. But this was the weekend, so the night felt young enough on our return to watch the David Cross documentary Let America Laugh. And then I went to sleep.