the diary of antoine roquentin

I did a whole bunch of stuff today, and I am Superman.

First, I look up before noon which is an achievement in itself in my world. I woke up, got dressed, and headed out to the college to talk with a counselor. After watching music videos on my iPod for a half-hour or so, I talked to the lady and she went through all of my classes at College of the Redwoods and said which ones mattered.

Apparently College of the Redwoods didn’t send my transcripts to American River, so I have to do that again. Such BS. However, all of my classes count towards my degree, and I only need two classes to graduate. Technically, three because I can’t take transfer level math.

So next semester, I’m going to be taking geology with a lab, and hopefully intermediate algebra, which is going to be so difficult, but since it’s the only thing between me and my degree I’m going to work extremely hard on it. So, as they say, I will be “Jerkin’ it hard.” (TFO joke)

The second thing I did was I headed down to the Trader Joe’s. It was my first time going there, and for once I felt like I will never starve to death. They had apples for like $.50. Everything was organic and everything was cheap… I had reached nirvana. I think I’ve ranted about my love for organic and non-processed foods before, but this produce…I felt like I hadn’t lived until I tasted their organic apples. I mean, what makes corporate produce? It’s all petroleum-based fertilizers. You are eating gasoline. Not like it’s toxic, but it can’t be any good for you.

Anyway, I’m digesting a bunch of whole-wheat organic pasta that I made myself for dinner. It was so damn good. My yoga teacher was talking about how it’s very important to eat healthy food if you are to be a practicing yogi, and I totally understand what she means. I remember when I was living with Adrian we were eating disgusting shit from the Big Lots across the street (or Blots, as we affectionately referred to it). Now, with the exception of my insomnia, I feel amazing…like I can conquer the world. I got two huge tasks done today. I know when I’m going to graduate, and what I have to do to get there.

The other awesome thing about today is that I was worrying about losing my entire music library in the event of some nuclear attack or coffee splashing incident, but I discovered this amazing Mac backup product called Bandwagon. For $25 per year, it syncs up your iTunes music (and TV shows and movies, if you want) to either Amazon’s S3 storage service (very reasonable) or disk space on your web host. I happen to have an incredible amount of unused storage on my current host (Dreamhost, which I am torn about actually recommending. They offer amazing features, but they have a lot of downtime, as you may have noticed). I guess it’s impractical to want cheap, high-tech, and ultra-reliable service. However, I must say that Dreamhost is very responsible about fixing my site when he goes down. I submit a support ticket and they tell me what’s wrong. Anyway, I have a rather massive music library (30 GB, without music videos), and it’s been patiently backing it up for me all day. It should take eight days for it all to completely upload.

It’s a really cool service, however I kind of wish it uploaded everything in a format that I could use on any kind of computer. It stores it in this weird proprietary way, not just a copy of all the folders with each artist and each song. I think they do that on purpose so that you have to pay them for the service. I could use some kind of homebrew method with scripts and iCal, but that’s a pain in the ass. This way is automatic. I like automatic. This method also backs up play counts and other metadata, and will offer music library syncing across multiple Macs (hello, work computer). Anyway, I’m very happy about it and it has a really slick interface. You can make the menubar icon one of like 20 music artists, and one of them happened to be Madonna, so I have a little icon of Madonna sitting in my menubar patiently backing up my music. It’s very cute.

I had a rather disturbing conversation with Patrick this morning. Well, it was really disturbing only because I had woken up and barely had any sleep when I got this text about how he was really dating Shane this whole time and that they had just broken up for the “final time.”

So it all comes out in the end.

Don’t get me wrong, I love Patrick to death, but I’m rather ticked that he lied to me. I was saying the whole time to Christen “I mean, if he was dating Shane still I would understand that he didn’t have as much time to talk to me, but this is just weird that he never calls and has nothing to say to me when I call him.” I kept having the sarcastic flashbacks to when I was crying and he was saying that we were going to be really good friends for a long time. I don’t know, everyone makes mistakes and I don’t really blame him, but it was disappointing. The rest of the conversation was really depressing, he was talking about how he had failed in every endeavor in his life and didn’t know what to do about it. He said that moving away never helped and that no matter what he did he was faced with all this failure. It was horrible. I think there’s some underlying issue that he’s not willing to come to terms with, but I don’t know him well enough to know what. It could just be that he needs someone else to validate his existence.

I don’t think even he knows what he wants. I felt that way most of my life, but I feel like I’ve carved out some bit of happiness in my existence. He is sick of all the things that he does. Maybe I will be sick of my hangouts in a few years. I didn’t know what to tell him. It was hard to fight the old feelings. I wanted to tell him that I would hold him and it would be all right. But such things don’t work in the real world. And any chance for those feelings to bloom into anything died a long time ago. So I guess he’s at an impasse.

My mom is going to Switzerland on Saturday. I thought that she was going after I came to visit her, but I guess she’s going before. She’s going to get me a T-shirt from Zürich. I don’t know if I’ve ranted before about how much I love Zürich, but I do. I guess it’s the inverse of Europeans wanting to go to New York City. She’s going there to visit her friend Res (it’s said “reece” like Reese’s pieces) that she fished with and lived with for umpteen years. She found out later that all of her fishermen buddies thought that her and Res were lesbians. She tells me it wasn’t true, but I think she totally has gay bones in her body.

In other news, I want to go to Switzerland! She says that we can go once I get my degree, but after I get my degree I will just need to do more and more school so it’s kind of improbable. It might happen though, who knows.

So I think I’m going to go to Sacramento State. The counselor said to just apply and see if they give me financial aid. It’s better than doing nothing at all. The bad news: two semesters (another year) until I graduate. Shittacular. But at least the last semester I’ll only have one class so I can get a second job and move out if I want to. Or so I tell myself. Statistics is going to be extremely hard.

My grandma was really nice today, she was happy that I got groceries. I was making some pasta and she came up and gave me a hug and said that she was happy I was there.

I’ve been watching Star Trek:The Next Generation all day (season three), and there are actually a bunch of episodes that I hadn’t seen. It’s the season right after they brought back Beverley after that horrible Dr. Polanski, so it’s very good. Or rather, I don’t spend the episode waiting for Dr. Polaski to die of a phaser malfunction, a turbolift malfunction *crunch* or a fist malfunction…anyway, I’m glad to be entertained.

Last night I watched a movie with Drew and his friend Jayne, and it was really fun, we watch this thing about this retarded crocodile… it was excruciating, the dialogue was littered with clichés and there were nothing but stock characters. The nameless, faceless soldiers that were randomly executing them had more character than the ones that we were supposed to feel bad about when they died. It was a whole bunch of fun though, Drew and I cuddled and drank orange soda and cracked crocodile jokes the whole time. I like his friends. They’re awesome.

Huh. That weird friend of mine (the crazed open-source software developer?) is inviting me to this electronica concert-ish thing. I don’t think I blogged about him, but his s/n is Kristopolous. He’s sharply intelligent, but instead of coming off as sexy, he just comes off as an odd mad scientist. Which is awesome for 2 a.m. chats when Drew isn’t online. That and he’s not like “interested” in me, which is awesome.

Eh, I might go…but that would involve taking a late-night shower, which would probably wake up the older people in the house. Maybe a late-night bath? I do have to work tomorrow. Eh, who am I kidding? I stay up until 5 a.m. every night. Might as well go to a concert. I dunno. I’ll decide later.

Categories: Ennui

My copy of Dragon arrived today! Not only that, but the new Interpol album was released as well.

I had pre-ordered it on iTunes, so I have access to presale tickets. I don’t know much they will be, but I hope they’re cheap.

Drew came over tonight and we watched In The Mouth Of Madness, with Sam Neill. It is one of my favorite movies. Well, I guess I should qualify that… it is one of my favorite trashy horror movies. I can’t stop listening to the first song from the new Interpol album. Fucking incredible.

I just can’t believe Drew likes me… he’s just so… cute and funny and sexy. We had to peel ourselves away from each other tonight because it was about 1 a.m. I swear, I want to cuddle with that boy forever.

Wow, I thought I would have so much to talk about, but I guess I don’t.

I don’t want to jinx myself, but I’m actually sort of pulling out of poverty, which is awesome. So I’m not worrying about money much. Not being in poverty makes you think about your time a lot differently. It sort of makes me feel like I’m not doing much with my time, I’m very busy with work and my class.

My grandma hasn’t been home since Friday, when she said that she was going on some kind of trip. She said it was only a day trip, but she’s not back yet. I rather like having the whole house to myself, but it’s a bit eerie that she hasn’t called or anything.

Oh, Brian has been busy on the interwebs. He’s been talking with Mario, this guy that Adrian would always hang out with that I always suspected that he cheated on me with. He says the guy is rather taciturn, which is the same way he is in real life. I saw him at Chris’s house (where the love is dead party happened) when I was hanging out with HorseCow Josh a while ago, and he didn’t say a word to me. I really don’t know how to work in “Did you fuck my boyfriend while we were dating?” into a conversation. Not that it would really matter or that I would tremendously care, but it’s still one of those things that I wonder about.

Tonight I’ve been watching videos of that cool phone’s operating system. The operating system is very slow, but the production version should have a processor that’s twice as fast and they are in the process of optimizing all of the built-in applications to run as fast as possible (which is the last phase of software development, so it makes sense that they are at that stage).

That and it’s going to be another three months until it actually ships, so I’m excited still. It’s not like Apple released videos of their slow, buggy preproduction iPhones.

It’s 2:30 a.m. I should try to sleep, but there’s really no point in trying. I slept in until like four today. Oh yeah, I went over to Christen’s last night and we watched Magnolia. It was a fun night.

I think I’m going to go read a novel. The Internet fails to excite me now that my web site is down.

Categories: Ennui

It’s called the Neo 1973, has many more features than the iPhone (a MUCH higher resolution screen, GPS, etc.) and it all runs on a completely open-source version of Linux, so everything on the phone is user-modifiable. The operating system, the applications, you can customize it all…which is amazing, and completely unheard of in the cell market.

What sucks is that the full version for consumers (with a faster processor, wifi, and more stable applications) won’t ship until October.

Here’s a chart of how it stacks up against the iPhone.

I’m a big advocate of open source software, so this phone is right up my alley. If people write drivers for it (which I’m sure they’ll do if the developer community takes off like I think it will), then this phone can have multi-touch too just like the iPhone. So I’m excited. I like actually owning a phone, not just leasing it from a company (which is what you do with the iPhone, it is unusable unless it is on an AT&T plan.

Well, it’ll come out in October so that at least gives me some time to save up :)

I added another story to the fiction page (an old one), and rewrote my bio. It’s 4 a.m. now. How am I ever going to get up and go to work? Insomnia sucks.

Categories: Ennui

“I don’t want to talk about AIDS, I’m trying to relax.”

Categories: Ennui

I just added my old stories I wrote in creative writing, click “fiction” on the top.

I also added Twitter integration, so I can send SMSes and such about what I’m doing and it’ll appear on my sidebar.

Voice-rec hasn’t showed up. I didn’t know first class mail took a week and a half. If I’ve said it once I’ve said it a million times, fuck the postal service.

Categories: Ennui