May 8th thru the 14th, 2005

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Sunday May 8th, 2005, Mother's Day

Happy Mutha's Day (yo)
Slept in, finished Freakonomics, puttered about, had myself a Chai Latte, which I obtained from a Starbucks drive-thru, while talking to my moms on the telephone. My Moms is good. She and dad went to Fiji, just got back. Truth: she claimed that if she had been using her film camera (not the digital) she would have "only taken maybe 50 rolls of film." You gotta underastand, Fuji film and Wolf Camera (film developers) exist only because of her. When, God forbid, she passes away, I'm going to petition and the Smithsonian and blow a few congressmen if I have to in order to get her life's work archived. It'll be an excellent 'point-of-view-alog' of life from the 50s to, hopefully, a century or more later.

La La ala Sunday
Played some GTA:SA. Mostly spent all that time collecting the 50 horseshoes in Las Venturas. Eventually ate spaghetti, then went to Larry's, Blockbuster, watched the first half of 9 Dead Gay Guys which is just a gay version of Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels. Will watch the second half Tuesday. Will tell you more at that point.

Monday May 9th, 2005, Squidevil's Birthday

Happy Birfday, SD!
He's a good guy. Eccentric, brilliant, fun and funny. Loyal and caring, innovative and sharing. All of this and only 25! Thanks for being you, Dude.

Multicultural Experience
Watched Shaolin Soccer. Whatta hoot! The DVD had both the American Theatrical Release, as well as the original Chinese, so I watched the Chinese one, since I had heard to was so much better. One assumes that there are as many kung-fu movie styles out there as there are, say, action styles, and that the ones we watched on Saturday afternoon cable as kids was just one programming directors attempt at some sort of style-cohesion. And mean, they were all the same. And this movie parodied that particular style perfectly. I love seeing how other cultures handle not just humor, but satire and parody in particular.

Bowling
Today was the first day of the new bowling season. Through subtle manipulation and not-so subtle threats, I have ensured the prolonged presence of our league Secretary. When she is gone, the balls will still roll down the alleys and knock over the pins, but it just won't be the same. I want her to stay with us as long as possible, right up to her departure date, if possible. What she needs to understand is we're not bowling purists. It's not JUST that we like to roll balls down alleys at pins. It's that we like to do it AT Leilani Lanes, we like to do it on Monday nights, we like to do it in groups of three, and we like to do it with her there. She's our spirit.

I tried to bowl poorly to set my average low and my handicap high, and semi-achieved that goal. I tried to get drunk to do so, but only achieved partial results. Damn you, Vegas! You have waxed my liver. I am impervious! Damnnation! In the third game I was doing so well, I turned to my new teammates and said "how many shall I knock down this time? I'll bowl anything EXCEPT a strike. And so I was challenged to bowl a 7-10 split. For a dollar. No problem. I sent the ball straight up the middle, and voila. My milkshake brings all the boys to the yard. After that I went home, ate a pizza, put people to bed, and slept in a slumbering fashion. p>

Tuesday May 10th, 2005

Coffee Is All That Occured Today Worth Noting
Except for the fact that I ripped my pants. They were old, but I liked the way the fit. Basically, I caught the hammer-loop on a drawer knob as I was walking out of the bathroom, and sha-rook! Grrrr. Oh well. AT coffe later (with different pants on) things were cool and groovy. Lots of people showed up.... but no noew people. On girl brought her dog, a 2-year old black Lab. He was the bomb. I sat outside with him for a while, fielding phone calls, including one from a friend who wants to become a travel agent, and another who wants me to be a spy. I am SO down with the spy thing. I love "Alias."

After coffee, at home I finished watching 9 Dead Gay Guys and ate salmon. The salmon was amazing. The movie was crap. Which was weird, because I had watched most of it on Sunday, and up that point, I thought it was good. I guess the spell wore off. Oh well. Such is life in the big city, the big Emerald city. The city witht the trees and the lakes and the sunshine, yes, lots of sunshine, no matter what anyone says. Better than Austin, anyway (inside joke).

Wednesday May 11th, 2005

Stupid Video Games
So I read something today, I think it might have been in The Onion, that convinced me I might like to try Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory. It's a video game. So when I dropped by Blockbuster to return a few films, I grabbed it and THUG2:Remix for the PSP. Also out there I bought ham because I had said something about ham sandwiches to someone in an e-mail and it made me then crave them. At Larry's I recognized from a far the posture of Erin, a girl who used to be a cashier there. She has aged, going from round-faced highschool senior to lipstick-splashed college sophomore. Her work clothes and sensible shoes were gone for slimming jeans and high-heeled sandals, making her look like an alien of herself. But not bad. Just different. I don't know if she recoignized me at all as I bought lettuce. But it was good to see her. I expect to see her again in a few years, beaming with a pre-graduate glow, then a few years later, squalid from post-graduate malaise, and then again later, back to what she was before, when she was still 18, but with knowledge lines around her eyes and contentment resting on her brow. Then I'll finally talk to her, and say, "so... which lettuce should I get?"

The theater by Larry's is spelling one of the movies "House of Waks." I wonder if they ran out of X's, just wanted to be funny, or ignorance played a part. I'm going with the first theory. At home, I couldn't play T2:R right away because I had a Luminous game to finish, and that gave me a headache. Then I played SplinterCell while eating the ham, straight, which made the headache worse and made me queesy. Stupid video Games. Then I saw that my garbage can in the kitchen was broken, that is, it would not stay closed, so off to Target to buy a new one. And other things. Then home again. Not much to do, really, so I chatted with a friend who was packing for a trip and I snoozed.

Thursday May 12th, 2005

Con Calls Suck
I woke up at some ungodly hour and took a friend to the airport. Since I was home by 5:30, I decided why not, and went to the gym. 30 minutes, no sweat. Well, a little sweat. Then I decided to start a diet. Diet is the appropriate term, I think. Anyone who ever had a brush with historical learning knows that a Diet was a meeting or general assemply, and that use of the word comes from a Latin word meaning, eassentially, daily. A diet in the sense of a being's daily or usual food habits comes from a Greek word, which itslef meant "to live one's life." People have also turned the word in a verb, which has come to reflect the act of reducing one's caloric intake, and then that verbifying of the word re-nouned itself into a calorie-shortened regiment. At any rate, I want to have a daily meeting with myself to plan my meels, to set a specific foot regiment, one that will have fewer calories than what I have been eating, but one that will have enough calories to sustain a specific weight for the rest of my days. We'll see how it goes.

I went to Larry's and bought the day's ingredients, got home, and decided to DDR for a spell after I had finished my smoothie but before the con call. Then the con-call got postponed, so I DDR'd some more. I literally nearly wept when I got a 'B' on a nine-footer that I had literally never even finished before. Does that mean my DDR sklills improveth? Not yet. Not as such. I am heavier than I was way back then, and I much out of shape. But I hope to achieve a fitness level that allows me to, eventually, AA that sumbitch. After DDRing got boring, and since the call was not eating up my time, I decided to clean the house. Including the downstairs bathroom. Too much energy, and it's only diet day one.

Haunted: Not a Good Book
I finished Chuck P's Haunted, at last. Thank God that's overwith. The deal is I am GIVING this book to a friend, but before I do that, I am going to LOAN it to another friend. I hope the future owner doesn't mind. I mentioned her in Sunday's Blog Entry, and she has been very good about adhering to the rules of the game. But since two people are going to be reading it, I'm going to hold back on much of a review. However, I will say this-- I think the LOANEE will find the book as disgusting as I did, and not bother finishing it, and as such the OWNEE will get it sooner than she might think. Also, I would encourage the OWNEE to read other books by Chuck P first, because IF there is a chance she would like his work after all, this would be a lousy way to start and find out. Other than that, this is what little review I care to make: I still think Chuck's writing is too "slick" and "clever," and I still think every sentence he writes feels like it's introductory writing, as if every page is the first page of the novel.

"Alias" Season One
I ended up watching the last several episodes of "Alias" Season One. Goodbye for a while, Sydney. I am glad I did that. I WILL buy Season Two, soonish, when I know I'll have spare hours in the day again. Besides, there was a HUGE season cliffhanger. Or should I Netflix it? Nah, I'll buy it. I like to collect things.

A friend dropped by to pick up her lost Salad Dressing. We turned the couch into a conversation machine, I showed her my PSP and my Crossfade and Kasabian. That was delicious, and then she went home to sleep. And so sleepethed I.

Friday May 13th, 2005, A Day for Triskadephobia

Osmosis
When I was younger there were jokes about osmosis floating around. Osmosis is the process of water passing through semi-permeable membranes. It's a cell thing. The joke was to do things "by osmosis," like sleep with a book under your pillow and "learn by osmisis." It's funny to think of knowledge in this way, as some sort of substance that exists in pure-form in a book, and that it can be passed into the brain for use. I know better now, that knowledge is not a substance, it's not facts, it's not evce truths. Knowledge is a functional perspective. Doesn't matter why apples are red, or what makes them red, or why we agreed that the word with an /R/ sound, an /Eh/ sound, and a /D/ sound would describe the wavelengths reflected from a shiny piece of tree-born fruit. All that matters is my brain sees a red thing in a tree a "knows" I can eat it to stay alive. You can put that in a book, but until my brain takes on the persective of seeing an edible thing in a tree, the "fact" of red things being edible is meaningless. It's philosophy.

And yet, for all of that, I still think we pick up truths and conditions of the world through a kind of textual osmosis. I don't have the facts of a right-wing agenda before me, in book form. I don't have evidence. I don't even have all the details on exactly how the government machine works. But I see the world, the state it's in, the way it treats me and the way it reacts when I treat it. And I form theories. I guess that's why, for me, politics has become more of a philosophy.

The way I see it, the world is run by people who have a vested interest in keeping a majority of the population poor and powerless, to tap as a resource. They do this through all of our social ills. Obesity, Illiteracy, Complacency. Can we combat this? I don't know. My "philosophy" merely describes-- it does not prescribe. I'll say this though-- this will be the state of affairs so long as the majority of the people are not self-aware.

Holy Cow. I think I just described The Matrix. "Whoa." Time for some Photoshop Phun!

Diet Day Two
So far so good. The eggs and peppers and ham were very filling. Lunch today is a chicken breast. They don't sell chicken breast 6 oz at a time, so that means I had to buy extra. Guess I'll freeze it. I know that cooking for myself is healthier, and cheaper, but damn. It's inconvenient. There's probably some truism there. Desire is incovenient. Hey, don't ther Buddhists say something about that? Could it be that all those people who engage in conveniences, who eat fast food, watch TV, go to church, read porn-- could it be they erase their self-awareness through conveniences, reaching a kind of squallid Nirvana? Could it be I'm so full of BS my eyes are turning brown?

Jillian's
I worked all day and watched a few episodes of Netflixxed "Tru Calling." Later, some of us went to Jillian's. Some of us tried to drink. Some of us think we're on a diet and so we had Corona Lights. It's good to know that in Mexico where they bottle Corona Light the local residents obviously have a place to pee, for the beer tastes like, well, that. Blech? If only new letters were invented for our meager alphabet, to better spell the deep emotional sorrow that truly makes up the "blech" of Corona Light. I had five of them. There was also some air hockey played, some billiards, and some "oh why bother." Oh well. The end.

Saturday May 14th, 2005

Heading
I rose from my dastardly slumber and high-tailed it to Greenlake, and lapped that mutha. Then I went home and forced myself to finish As She Crawled Across the Table by Jonathan Lethem. An okay book. Not as interesting as Gun with Occasional Music, or even Motherless Brooklyn, but scads better than Pahlaniuk's Haunted. Lethem has a subtle hand, though in the end he got a bit goofy. Having done that, I need some new books, so it was me and a drive to B&N. I picked up Lethem's Girl in Landscape and also Phantoms In the Brain.

What the Bleep Do We Know? We Know This Movie is Crap...
Watched the above film. Bad. Almost as bad as The Elegant Universe. This pile of bleep was supposed to be about how quantum uncertainty may mean our conscious realities can be manipulated and controlled. Horse pucky. I'm all for speculation and meditation. But when a movie's production and editing are more artistic than the very message it sends, well, there is no message, is there? Over acted, over scripted, over baked. And the parts that might have been juicy were glossed over and over generalized. For crying out loud, it had that wacko Ramtha broad in it. This was just another pseudo-intellectual feel-good piece of eye candy made to make pseduo-intellectuals feel all cool and hip about mixing science with spirituality. No thanks, I got done with that nonsense when I was a Freshman.

The reviews and commentary at IMDB on the film, by the way, are awesome. Couldn't have said/didn't say it better my self.

Out to the 'Quah.
I hadn't seen Minnilap in ages so I drove out 'Quahwardly to see she. We dined at some Indian place and then she challenged me to air hockey, so we went to Illusionz. But then there was money left on our play-card, so we bounced around between DDR and Ms. Pacman, with stops on some ride'em games and some shoot 'em games. Thing to note: this girl can handle a fire-arm. Thing also to note: Half the machines at Illusionz are broken. Thing also also: In the Groove MAY be getting sued by DDR, but tyhe have a fine dancing game on their hands.

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