> Lacquer - Track 11, The Tosser’s Song
> Depeche Mode - Policy of Truth
> Dondolo - Peng
> Black Eyed Peas - My Humps

So I guess that guy from Brookings didn’t block me at all. He instant messaged me last night while I was talking to Kelly, and we had a long conversation. He had been been hanging out with this friend almost exclusively that is going into the army sometime very soon. The guy (Thomas) said he’s going to be in Crescent City on Friday, so I guess we’re going to see see a movie. He was a bit vague as to whether there were going to be any other people. We had a great conversation over the phone weeks ago, so I hope the same will follow for meeting in person.

I just did the Dragon NaturallySpeaking tutorial, and I have now found out how to do all of the things that required me using the keyboard. Why I didn’t do this before, I have no idea. It’s timed very well, because I totally blew out my wrists typing obituaries today. They still hurt. And I have two more to do tomorrow, at the least. I hope I feel better tomorrow. Why can’t they just use PC’s there? Well, if they did, I’m sure that they would be incredibly crappy and completely unable to run Dragon.

My math class is Thursday, and I need to do a bunch of homework. I’m really hungry, and I can’t focus. Not to mention the searing pain in my arm. After work I walked over to Rite Aid and bought a tea ball so that I could make some of the loose red tea that I bought ages ago. Joe’s still hasn’t e-mailed me back, but he’s probably busy with classes like I should be.

My dad made chili for dinner, and it was actually palatable. I’m very surprised. Last night I slept for about 12 hours. Misty called me around midnight, and I was totally asleep. I hope she calls tonight, mostly so I can tell her the gossip about the Brookings guy. I think he was flirting with me, but I couldn’t be sure. Jordan has been obsessively messaging him. The one lesson I learned from The Persian Boy is to never be importunate. And Jordan definitely excels at that. How pathetic.

Since the auction on my laptop didn’t go through; I bought books yesterday and they shipped today! I got:

Neuromancer (remembering tomorrow) by William Gibson
The Atrocity Exhibition by J. G. Ballard
Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card
Concrete Island: a Novel by J. G. Ballard
A Scanner Darkly by Philip K. Dick

The Ballard titles I have wanted for ever, but didn’t want to play roulette with whether they would be good or not. But come on, it’s Ballard. I guess I was just disappointed by reading Player Piano by Vonnegut, and having it sort of suck. I read later that it was his first novel, so I can understand it’s sucking… but if Ballard sucked, it would destroy my precarious world. Anyway, I have been reading Jane Austen and Mary Shelley for way too long and I need the testosterone/semiconductor-crazed fantasies of some cyberpunk pulp. I have wanted to read The Atrocity Exhibition and Concrete Island since like 2003. It will be incredibly cool to finally get them. And I always wanted to read Philip K. Dick. I heard ages ago that they were making a movie out of A Scanner Darkly, so that was the reason I wanted to buy it. I wonder when it’s coming out. I should ask Josh.

I can’t wait to hang out with Thomas Friday. It probably won’t happen, since he has stood me up before, but it would be cool to hang out with a stranger for once. Well, not a stranger. But someone that I don’t know everything about. I stayed up to 5 a.m. two days ago pulling Misty’s hair through a cap in order for her to put blond highlights in it. She totally owes me a haircut. I don’t know how I would look short again. I am sort of accustomed to this scraggly Beatles-esque look now. I hope me and Misty will hang out tonight. I will bring over my tea, if she wants some. Oh yeah, I promised her I would bake her cookies. I will once I don’t have any more math homework to do. I really need to get on that. I will put some soft music on my iPod and get to it. Now.

Oh, PS: I was overhearing a conversation between the Insipid Coworker of Doom and my boss, and she was assuring him that we absolutely couldn’t scan is one thing in because it was too big. I wanted to walk into his office, smack her, and say “Shut up, lazy bitch. I scan big documents all the time. You just scan it in section by section and knit it together in Photoshop. It’s amazing that since your primary job is to use Photoshop that you have absolutely no idea how to use it. Go suck a cock, you inept cunt.”

OK, must start the homework.

I am not going to sleep tonight. There is simply too much to do. I took a bunch of photos and a video of me and my iPod in action. Now I’m making a little video that will hopefully be posted later. I have been incredibly busy, for no reason. I guess I should catch you guys up on the last few days when I was lazy and didn’t blog. It’s funny, I blog so much when I have nothing to say but when interesting cool things do happen, I’m busy doing them and not writing them down.

The three reasons I haven’t been blogging, in picture form:

The iPod speaks for itself (it looks like it’s covered in cellophane becuase I made a homemade case for it out of an old CD-ROM sleeve until the case I want ships at the end of the month. It turns out that the Nano is INCREDIBLY prone to scratches, and as soon as I got a noticeable one on the LCD I McGuyvered a case for it. The chain mail took forever to make. That is HUNDREDS of links in those pieces. And I spent hours turning my old burned CDs into playlists for syncing to my iPod.

Thing to catch up on #1: we had a second going away party for Kat at Katie’s house on Friday, and it was really really fun. I felt very stiff and weird in the beginning, like I had somehow interrupted them and wasn’t welcome (not true). I kept thinking to myself how I always overanalyze social situations, but once I had a glass of wine I was fine. And by the end of the night, I had gotten to know the new coworker that is starting sometime soon. We both love reading, which is enough to give anybody in A+ in my book. We just got along really well to. I’m glad Kat isn’t getting replaced by some asshole. Not like anyone can replace her, but still. I was outbid on the computer I was wanting on eBay. And it happened when I was asleep too, which really pissed me off. I’m actually sort of glad. Now I have some money and a bit of a safety cushion. And it’s definitely a big enough monetary safety cushion to consider moving in with misty at the end of October.

Thing to catch up on number #2: Drunken Party:

I went over to Misty’s last night, and we had a bit of fun. First we watched The Wedding Date, which was actually not bad considering how much I was expecting it to totally suck. It was exactly as you would imagine it to be, if you haven’t seen it. It was totally cliché, but with just enough spice to entertain. I mean, it’s not like there’s going to be any sort of plot twist in any movie where Deborah Messing is playing a lead role. So we drank a bit and started playing Never Have I Ever, then Misty started talking about what she wanted in life, and I really didn’t know what to say to her. I don’t know what I want to do with my life either. And I guess it’s cool that we can both admit that. We have both unfortunately teamed up to hate Selena. It really makes me sad because I think that the Selena that I used to know was an amazing person, but when a really cool person starts totally ignoring you and rushing upstairs to fuck their boyfriend for the millionth time instead even saying hello to you then they quickly move to my shit list. Also, it didn’t help her shitlist rank at all when I was over there she was busily getting penetrated and I wanted to ask her if I could plug my iPod and one of the USB ports on the computer in her room to charge my iPod since it had died. It’s the little things that will turn me against people. I’m sure I would totally love her if she started talking to me again, but I don’t think that is going to happen. If you’re reading this Selena, I really don’t hate you. Call me or something sometime! Eh, the damage is probably done. Oh well.

That’s strange, I thought I had so much more to say. I’ve forgotten it all by now. Went too long between posts. Eh, it happens. At least I got the major bases covered.

Must show you guys pics I took of my iPod tonight. I tried to include some items to give you an idea of just how impossibly small it is.

Enjoying the sexiness of the pod.

Now I feel like my cell phone is gigantic.

Look how freaking small that is!

I’m working on this little iPod movie thingy and it just came out! Props to Intel for my 3.0GHz number-crunching sex machine, and Adobe Premiere and Flash for making bit of self-indulgence possible:

Turn up your speakers and check my self-indulgent, amusing ipod commercial out, cuz it’s going to be gone tomorrow. (fyi–the video won’t work on dial-up connections)

The rockout track is “Little L” by Jamiroquai.

I got my iPod today. There are no words. It’s simply amazing. And impossibly small. The pictures don’t do it justice. At first, I had a bunch of problems getting windows to recognize it, but I realized the problem was that my USB 2.0 (which was always finicky) needed to be set up with the right drivers. After that, it was amazing. The thing displays photos, has games, and all sorts of incredible extras. The one downside is that it doesn’t work on Macs and PCs. Well, it does but if you want to use it on a Mac you have to erase all the files on it. However, if you connect it to a Mac and it is PC formatted, it will charge the iPod. Which is probably all I would be doing if I connected it to a Mac. No one has outbid me on my computer yet, so it looks as if I will be in a world of brokeness. But at least I will have a PowerBook.
And that makes me cooler than you. :)

That Thomas guy from Brookings was online today. Either he unblocked me or he didn’t block me to begin with. I’m going with the former. I didn’t talk to him. I think the reason he blocked me was because I was far too eager to hang out. He posted new pictures on MySpace, and I really couldn’t picture us doing it. Maybe I will talk to him the next time he signs on.0

My dad is starting to doubt that I’m actually going to college. I need to stay in town longer.

I start my math class tomorrow, but I think I’m registered for the wrong one. The lady bamboozled me me into registering for something that she thought was the right thing, but I don’t know. If I show up tomorrow and they tell me to leave then I will know.

I put all sorts of pictures on my iPod, photos of Ben and Kelly and Dan and all my past friends. So no matter where I am, I will have cool people with me. Or at least their JPEG equivalents.

Well, not much else to report. I went on a three-mile bike ride as soon as I got music loaded on my iPod, and it was so great to just get out there and ride again. Luckily my car stereo has a line-in port, so I can just connect my iPod directly to the stereo with no FM transmitter. I do want to get a FM ransmitter, but I want one that complements the form of my nano, and those probably won’t come out until Christmas or so.

I’m absolutely excited about my iPod. I can’t wait to show it off at work tomorrow.

Today I’m totally paralyzed. I woke up, checked the tracking number on my iPod, and it’s now in Kansas or Kentucky or some bumfuck nowhere place. It’s probably going to take another week at least. I went to work, got done with that, and walked over to the library to drop off Ulysses. Their Internet was down, so I couldn’t find the titles of any books that I wanted to check out, but I remembered that I wanted to read Snow Crash and something by William Gibson, so I typed to those into the library’s search database. Nothing. I wasn’t surprised. As I walked through the aisles, it amazed me to see a biography of Hillary Clinton. It seemed like every book was published in some year before 1945. I glanced at all of these great authors: Dostoevsky, Faulkner, Dante, and I’m just bored.

What do these dead people have to tell me about my life? How is any of this still relevant? All of this ridiculous musing about God makes me want to fall asleep. There is no God. There is no ultimate justice. What is the point of these novels? Partly because it’s gotten less implausible, and mostly because I have nothing better to read, I’ve been working on Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein again. The writing style is just so different from modern writers. Every two seconds the characters are crying about the beauty of something and then crying with suffering or so moved with glee that they’re floating on air. I wonder if today’s prose will go down in history as being so incredibly unrealistic. But then again, what is literary realism? If I read a truly realistic novel, it would be about me sitting here for two hours blogging. Or the 18th century equivalent. Yawn.

I read the Wikipedia entry for James Joyce yesterday and absolutely lost every interest I ever had in reading that book. He adapted it from Homer’s Odyssey. At one point in the drafts, every chapter was named the same as the chapters in the Odyssey. Way to go, James Joyce. You can not only write a painfully boring novel, you can rip it off from a poet that’s been dead since the eighth century. Fucking uberyawn.

So I stalked around the library for a few minutes longer, trying to find something. I saw one novel by Philip K. Dick, but it wasn’t one of his well-known works. And I had this thought that there was no point. That all of these people were dead and would have no idea how to relate to modern society. Me and Amanda were talking online yesterday, and we couldn’t find anything to say to each other because we already knew everything about each others’ lives via blogs. What if we lived in a world where everybody’s thoughts were immediately published and all information was instantaneously available from anywhere? There would be no point in conversation. It just makes me very uncertain that we are living in such times where were blundering ahead into this brave new technological world with absolutely no reflection going on about how this is going to change people and our whole society. Maybe there are people writing about it, but I haven’t heard about them.

J.G. Ballard is losing his touch. He predicted the 90s. Bravo James, but we need some new prophets, and I don’t see them in this cultural wasteland of cut and paste philosophy. I feel like I want to write again, but I don’t know what I want my theme to be. I sort of want to write something creepy about someone who lives in Crescent City for a time and eventually all the veneer is peeled back and he realizes he’s in hell on earth. But I think that’s been done. I picture this scene where the protagonist is running from someone that’s going to beat them up or something, and he keeps knocking on doors but no one will open because they are all high on methamphetamines. Later in the book everyone he meets is high on meth. I’m picturing a character who’s a correctional officer. Maybe all of the hate and violence that they see at the prison would spill over into their real lives and they would all go crazy and try to destroy the town. But that’s all been done before too. Should I bother retelling these themes of paranoia and loneliness in society? Or are they new because technology has compounded them?

OMG!!! I got the funniest e-mail ever today. It was from Taggart, my ex from Sacramento. I guess word got out that I was moving down there, and he wants us to “correspond like civil adults.” I guess by correspond he means fuck. I get those confused myself sometimes. It’s an egregious typo. God. Who the fuck does he think I am? Even if I was living down there, I would never talk to him again. As my mother would say, “A leopard doesn’t change its spots.” I was so thrilled at it though! To think that a hot guy actually would consider being my fuck buddy! Glorious. Oh my god, I just concieved of looking through my old posts to see if I could link to a salient one about Taggart, and around 250 posts came back when I typed his name in the search box. My god. I’m glad I’m over him.

I guess I’m going retro today and listening to The Golden Age of Grotesque. It seems very fitting. From “Para-Noir:” “I fuck you because I am your whore / I fuck you because you are a whore.” I should listen to something else. This is bringing back bad memories. Some Lacquer is in order.

If I had a band, I would call it Veneer in homage to Lacquer, but nobody would make the connection. And I’m sure there’s probably twenty bands that are called that. But I would do it anyway.

It was really nice walking around Crescent City today, this lady asked me for directions to the library. And she was about a block away. I sort of felt like telling her not to bother, but she might want some romance novels or something and then she would be perfectly satisfied with the selection.

This entire post has been so that I can stop thinking about how I haven’t e-mailed Matt back about the web site. And about how I bid on this $250 computer that isn’t worth $250. I found this much better one with a 1.3GHz processor for $200. And a working screen. But I guess I could use the broken screen one for my dad’s computer. Or follow through with my plan to buy a working screen off eBay and install it myself. I have two days for someone to outbid me on the $250 one so that I can buy the $200 one. I think that if pressed, I would get both…though if I got into some sort of bidding war, I would be totally out of luck. Well, it’s something else to occupy my mind while I wait for my toys to come in the mail. I seriously need to e-mail Matt today. I think the real reason that I’m not e-mailing him is that I don’t want to do the site updates, even if he pays me. But I don’t know. What I need to do is to do the work and then ask him for payment for further services, but that would involve doing the work. And I would rather sit here and do nothing.

So I’m paralyzed. I need to email Matt. I need to tell Misty I’m not moving in with her. I need to finish that web site. And I don’t want to do anything but complain about my pathetic pseudo-intellecual dillemas.

I voice-chatted with Josh until like 5 a.m. I was bored. And I wasn’t sleepy at all. Must have been the hot chocolate. I woke up around 5 p.m. and I immediately showered and got ready for Kat’s party, since I wanted optimal hangout time before I had to go to work. I got to the parking lot at 6:58, but stayed in my car until 7:01, when I walked over. I’m usually always fashionably late, but contrary to my own lateness philosophy, I was totally on time and the only one there. So me and Kat hung out, ate chile and listened to Ella Fitzgerald (name might not be correct), this cool jazz singer lady from the forties. We had a great conversation, and it was really cool to hang out one on one. Then the Insipid Coworker of Doom arrived, repeating like a ventriloquist’s dummy “I made five loaves of banana bread!” seventy fucking times. The banana bread was incredibly delicious though, I had to give her that.

It was about 7:45 by the time everybody else showed up, including about five twenty-something guys that I didn’t know at all but everybody else seemed to know, so I was a bit frazzled (as I am introverted around strangers) and was unable to come up with anything cool to say. But Matt and a bunch of the others that I knew had shown up too, so it was ok, we talked a bit about the Bill Stamps Jr. stuff before I had to go. Matt was all “you have no excuse not to come back [after work], it’s on your way home.” It’s really not on my way home, but I’m going to go back over there after my work is done here. And oddly, things have been going really fast and I just might get out of here way before I usually do. I only need two more pages.

I shaved off the little beard-ish thing I had been growing, now I feel like a twelve-year-old. I should have kept the stubble.

Anyway, I learned earlier today that my iPod is being shipped ground from Hong Kong. Okay guys, riddle me this. How is “ground” shipping between countries separated by an ocean possible? I’d better get it by the end of the week, or I will be very annoyed.

Well, my luck officially ran out. Something just broke on the press, and someone from Brookings has to come fix it. And the fixing process should take 45 minutes. Fun fun. I’d better go read some blogs.