I’m typing this on Dragon NaturallySpeaking inside of VMWare… I mean, I really liked MacSpeech Dictate, but there is absolutely nothing built in to the software to allow you to to correct its mistakes.

It could be the best program in the world in terms of accuracy, but you can’t fix its mistakes without typing… which is just bad for my wrists. With Dragon NaturallySpeaking, even if the thing types an entire sentence wrong I can go and correct each word with voice commands.

I’ve been having so much fun this week. On Tuesday, I had my marathon painting class until 10:30 p.m., and then rendezvoused with Mario to go to Lipstick. I was hesitant to go, it but then it just kind of hit me that I’m not a 13-year-old girl and I can be around people that I don’t respect without making a big scene about it. After all, going to the club is about having fun, not dramatic bullshit.

I ran into Conor at school on Tuesday, I guess he has the math class right before mine with the same teacher. I rather like my math class, we’re studying probability right now. I just did my online homework and found out the probabilities of events that I would never have been able to conceive of two weeks ago.

I’ve been flipping through the other Jean Baudrillard book I got while I was in New York, Cool Memories, which is excerpts from his diaries. They are downright prophetic. Here’s one of the interesting ones I read today:

They estimate it cost $25 million to prepare the World Trade Center attack. The budget for a future film of the same event is put at $250 million.

Fiction is far more expensive than reality.

I’ve been meaning to start Milan Kundera’s The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, but I’ve been instant messaging all day. It’s such a waste of time, yet barring some kind of data catastrophe I’m going to basically have a record of every conversation I’ve ever had with anyone. I’m hoping to make it some kind of interactive exhibition in the year 2025. Art is endlessly self-referential anyway.

On Friday I got a message from this guy named Crash (real name is Josh but I know like five Joshes so I’m just calling him his MySpace name for clarity). We traded messages on my lunch break, and he invited me to Old Ironsides on Saturday for this DJ night that a friend of his was doing.

After I got home, I logged on to AIM and I started chatting with him and a few other people. Over the course of the night nearly everyone I knew logged on… it was really cool to have this sort of panel discussion about what they were doing with all of my friends. I even talked with Patrick who never signs on. Crash and I ended up talking until like 5 a.m.

Saturday was a good day… I woke up rather late, and went to get a haircut. After that, I got ready to go over to Mario’s house (we had planned to watch this Jean-Luc Godard movie). It was pretty crazy… all about the character played by Anna Karina becoming a hooker. It was really odd… she kept asking everyone she saw for 2000 francs… and by the end of the movie is she would’ve just asked each person for like 10 francs she would have had at least 3,000 45 minutes into the movie.

I was hoping for a more creative plot that focused more on Godard’s notions of love. He seems fixated on this kind of neo-gangster thriller movie, and I don’t see that as his strength at all.

After that, Mario and I biked over to the Safeway on Howe and got dinner (I don’t eat out, I pick up fruit and baked goods from grocery stores). There was this gaggle of frat boys and sorority girls that were checking out at the same time as us… and it was just really depressing (disturbing?) that this was what their lifestyle entailed. Men making lame jokes at flirty yet stuck-up girls. No wonder our society has a one-way ticket to destruction with the grown-up versions of people like that at the helm.

So of course I insisted on talking to Mario about how tedious straight people are.

We biked back to his place and started this Almodovar movie. Crash called me, and I headed down to this place that he was at downtown while Mario headed to the Merc to meet some of his friends.

Over drinks, Crash and I talked about our mutual friend from back in the day (Sacramento is so weird… you end up knowing everyone). Turns out Crash was intimately involved in this situation regarding Patrick, back in like 2003.

I finished off my drink, and we piled into one of his friends’ cars to go to old Ironsides. The music was a bit too EBM for my taste, but they did play all the classics (The Cure, Depeche Mode, the Smiths, and even the Presets). I spent a lot of the time outside talking with the people there, which was fun. We were pretty trashed and taking crazy pics.

After the music was over, he invited me to this house party at his friend’s place near ARC. Oddly enough, it was like three blocks away from where Kelly and Christen used to live. The first person I was introduced to was *drumroll* Nicole.

Nicole, if you don’t know, was Kelly’s friend in high school. It was really strange… Nicole and I had this conversation about how Kelly really changed once she got out of high school and became this raging bitch. She also told me that Jared went into a mental institution. So crazy.

I left at about 5:30 a.m. and actually had a pretty good night’s sleep. I had this dream where I was exploring the Metro system of some other city that I had never been to before and I kept meeting all of these people that I knew… and in the dream they were all actual people that I had ran into in the past year, like the girl that I ran into at the Presets concert.

I’m not sure what I’m going to do the rest of today… I wanted to go downtown and draw people at True Love, but it’s dark now, so I might go for a little jog and then go over to Crash’s. He’s trying to invite me to the Rage…which normally I would scoff at, but really, I’m leaving this town in December, so I don’t think I’ll be living down the ignominy of it for very long.

Music is “18 Ghosts II” by Nine Inch Nails, from Ghosts. He licenses his music as Creative Commons so I can use it for cool stuff :)

> Portishead - Only You
> String Tribute to Nine Inch Nails
> Lacquer - X
> Weezer - Island in the Sun
> Propellerheads - Winning Style
> Robots in Disguise - Boys, Diy

I can’t believe I’ve gone three days without writing. I’ve been in this really strange mood. I’ve been wondering if maybe Crescent City has won, and I’ve given in to the dark side. Maybe it’s just that I haven’t been getting enough sleep. I’m pleased with how today turned out though.

Last night me, Misty, and Katelyn watched Rosemary’s Baby. It wasn’t as scary as usual, probably because we were struggling to stay awake towards the end. And the lights were on. I got maybe five hours sleep, but it wasn’t so bad because I had gotten a lot earlier in the week. I was so exhausted today that I passed out as soon as I got home and just woke up maybe 30 minutes ago.

I checked my e-mail, and to my delight, Joe e-mailed me back! I had even been thinking to myself today about how depressing it was that he hadn’t gotten back to me, and he did! w00t. I will have to read it again because when I read it I was half asleep, but it was a very long one. I really love waking up in the middle of the night, it makes me feel like I’m recapturing some of my lost teenage years. I used to stay up all night all the time. I also watched some Daria as I made some oatmeal, which got me even more into nostalgia mode. Well, so much for that.

I restarted my Netflix membership because I was bored out of my mind with my existence. That and I want to rent and copy the entire Star Trek: the Next Generation series. I can’t really afford it, but I don’t care. I need some escape from this pathetic existence.

I’ve also been working on my chain mail. Even though was incredibly tedious, I was able to weave the 0.375 in. diameter rings. It’s the tightest weave I’ve ever done. I would post pictures, but I’m too tired.

Oh yeah, I’ve been meaning to post this for a while. Every time I listen to the song “X,” I love this one lyric and I always wanted to post it.

“I go spinning in circles in the nothingness of my heart”

I love that image. Anyway, it’s 1:50 AM and I have to do to sections of math today or I will get even more behind. But on the bright side, my boss is out until the end of the week so I shouldn’t have anyone chewing me out arbitrarily until Monday, at the earliest.

I just started downloading a bunch of new music (Mount Sims - Wild Light, Chromeo - She’s In Control, Cut Copy - Bright Like Neon Love). It’s 2:16 a.m. It should be done by the morning. I’m so tired. I should finish Neuromancer. For all of its now-hackneyed thematic elements, it’s actually very entertaining. I was always very disappointed at the ending of the Matrix trilogy since I loved the first one so much, so now I feel like I’m reading the real ending before those hacks (the Wachowski brothers) turned the novel into the movie.

I’ve been feeling really strange this week, like I’m a flat character in someone else’s novel. Perhaps I should get back to writing, but I can’t shake that feeling that I have nothing original to say. Well, that was like my feeling that I could never do better photography than Kelly’s. It’s not like I’m competing with her, and she obviously has the advantage in that she has an entire city full of people and things to take pictures of. So I have been trying to get back in the habit of taking photos and posting them to Flickr. Even if they’re stupid, I will eventually have some good ones. I just have to get thinking about what I really want to say with my photos. The first step towards creating something is doing something, so at least I’m halfway there.

Misty has been unintentionally getting me interested in starting painting again. It’s not like I think that she is a bad artist (she’s very good), I just feel that there are enough paintings of fairies and flowers to last us all until the end of time.

I had an idea today: I could paint the waveform of my favorite song. Wouldn’t that be postmodern? I’m sure it’s been done before, but the fact that I have to reconcile myself with is that I’m not original. I am a product in a consumer society controlled by corporations. I am not an individual. So I do not need to be embarrassed in the least about my crappy amateur art.

There was this really funny song on the self-titled Robots in Disguise album I downloaded this week called “Diy” about how they feel when somebody makes fun of their art. The lyrics are a bit tongue-in-cheek, “don’t make fun of my cut-and-paste art,” but I can see where they’re coming from, although no one really has said anything bad about my art. Misty loved my collage and the photos I took of her for her MySpace, Ben was all complements about my Photoshop abilities, and Josh had one of my photos as his desktop background for months.

Okay, precis: my banal art would excite me a hundred times more than Misty’s.

In Neuromancer, the characters tell their computers to compile precis on all sorts of things, and then the computer will give them a little presentation about whatever they need to be informed of. More than ever I’m realizing that without the classes I took from Molly, I would be helpless in the world of literature.

I really should go and finish that novel. My mom e-mailed me some pictures (she is so tech savvy now!) of her trip to South Jersey and of the christening of my new cousin Nicholas. I sort of wish I was there with her, but I don’t have any friends there (not that I have many here), and I would have to live with my grandparents who are the exact opposite of me in many ways. And I wouldn’t have the great teachers at SWOCC to help me with my math.

Well, I should probably get back to living. I have the nausea again. It’s not really the nausea though, it’s just boredom. Antoine Roquentin is revolted by existence, but I can’t reach that. I feel more like I’m watching the decisions and actions of my life through the eyes of someone else, like some sort of an incompetent, lazy homunculus. I look back through my memories on my blog and although I feel a very strong kinship with the person that wrote everything, the author isn’t me. Me six months ago isn’t me now. And I feel like the more books I read the more I’m distancing myself from people (including the old me). But that’s because I live here. If I was living in an area with intellectuals, I would feel like I could relate to people more when I had read more novels.

I find myself reevaluating everything: should I keep dyeing my hair and doing all this stuff to keep up the person that I was when I was a teenager? I hate my natural hair color, and it would really depress me to dress in colors, but I’m torn about one thing: painting my nails. I told myself that I would never stop painting my nails and that’s what would make me unique in this world. But nobody is unique. And I’m sure even though he wouldn’t say anything, my boss wouldn’t approve. So that’s how it ends. I compromise the person I am to make money. But I guess that’s not anything new. Everybody sells out. Everyone is homogenized. And the multinational corporations of the world win again. Eh, that’s that Liberty News show talking. I shouldn’t watch it.

Well, I should get going. I want to watch The Red Violin tonight in addition to the bunch of homework I have to do.

> Modjo - Rollercoaster
> Lacquer - Time for Yesterday

Today was pretty fun, I got off work early and got to walk over to beachfront park and take a bunch of photos. I posted them all on my flickr gallery.

I love this one:

Anyway, after that I went over to Misty’s house and we talked for a bit. Then I went up to my house, took a nap, ate dinner (spaghetti, yum!), and went up to my class in Brookings. I think that I’ve gotten over the part of the math that I was getting stuck on, but I’m having to solve these incredibly complex, tedious problems. I have to spend even more time doing my work now. Grr.

I don’t know why, but I have this incredible desire to create art now. Like, I can’t even fight it. I HAVE to take a million photos a day, even if most of them are crap. I think that the creative part of my brain is fighting the logical math part. I sort of enjoy the duality. Well, after my class was over I went into town and played dance revolution for a while. I was still pretty good, but I would always die on the last song. Like, right before it would end my life bar would run out. I guess I’m just not as good as I used to be. But I will soon fix that.

Today I told Misty that I couldn’t move in with her, and she was fine with it. That felt good. Now I have to tell Matt that I can’t work on his web site. I’m so tired today.

I ended up running into Misty and Katelyn (the one that I went on the trip with) at the movie theatre, and we met back at Misty’s house. We ate this delicious ham and lima bean soup that Misty had made and watched the end of 50 First Dates. Then we got this puzzle out that Misty had been working on for a few months and we started on that while watching Will and Grace. After Will and Grace we got such a craving for ice cream, so I drove us over to Safeway. I got all natural mint chocolate chip, and it was de-freaking-licious. We kept going on the puzzle for hours, watching Sex and the City and this prurient “cheaters” show, finishing the puzzle around 1:30 a.m. I put like five pieces in, but still…I helped. Me and Katelyn had this cool convo about David Lynch and weird movies, and I was able to supply her the name of Lost Highway, a David Lynch movie she’d seen but couldn’t remember the name of.

I’m hungry and tired. Last night I dreamt that I took my iPod swimming with me and it got in the water and the headphone plug broke, turning into a plug made of clear plastic covered with thin tin foil that was flaking off. But it was still playing music even though it was all full of water. Weird.

Oh yeah, I have great news. One of my coworkers is going on vacation so I’m going to have to cover for her for three weeks which means I basically have a full-time job all through November. And guess what I’m going to get!

I really want the 23″ display, which is $1100, but I probably will only be able to afford the 20″ display, which is $700. I really like my current monitor, but I have outgrown it. I can’t deal with only 18 in. of workspace. That means I have to cram every single thing I do into 18 in. Yes, I know. Not possible. With this new display all be doing lots more work and less alt+tab. I hate it when I think that I’m done toning a photo, then I zoom out and realize that I’ve just done the rectangular center of the photo and it looks ridiculous.

And I also want a great digital camera. My current one is perfect for taking pictures for online viewing, but it only makes prints that are like 8×6 in. and I really want to get into the whole digital photography thing where you print out your prints instead of just uploading them to flickr, and to do that I’m going to need a camera with more than three megapixels.

Omg. The more I read William Gibson’s Neuromancer, the more I realize that the Wachowski brothers (creators of the Matrix trilogy) basically stuck Neuromancer on the copy machine and made millions of dollars. Guess what the orbital space station where the characters are staying now is called? Yes, you guessed it. Zion. And the descriptions of the characters that inhabit this place are exactly like the ones that are in the Zion from the Matrix movies.

It’s still sort of interesting though, to see what the moviemakers took from the book and what they didn’t. I wish this was a Philip K. Dick novel, because I would know that there was going to be some incredible twist at the end. Well, they’re still might be. I just have to be patient.

Crap. I need to go to bed. I put off doing some work yesterday, and it’s going to catch up with me tomorrow. Damn people. Why do they have to keep dying? They bore me by dying. When they die in droves, my workload goes through the roof. Old people are lemmings. Well, I should go to sleep.

> Kraftwerk - Tour de France (radio version), Radioactivity
> Cassius -Telephone Love

I’ve read about 70 pages of A Scanner Darkly and I finished another section of my algebra while watching some of the more boring Adult Swim shows. The author must’ve totally known some druggies… the dialogue is impeccable and inexplicable. I absolutely love the world of that novel.

I’ve been watching previews of some upcoming movies, and a few of them look like they could be good. I want to see (of course) the film adaptation of A Scanner Darkly and then the Aeon Flux movie. I really don’t think that Charlize Theron can pull off the coolness of Aeon Flux, but I’m sure she can sort of do it halfway, and that’s all I need. The shorts never really made sense at all. I’m sick of how we’re just ripping off the nineties for every single original idea. Oh well. America can’t create art, everybody knows that.

I really should be asleep right now because I have to get up at 6 AM. But I’m talking to Charley, and it’s the first time we’ve talked and forever and I’m totally not tired at all and I feel like getting coked up on Rockstars and pretending they’re Substance D. I’m such a bad person. But I like it.

Ben was online tonight and he had the WebCam on, Charley dared me to view it and he wasn’t having WebCam sex as I suspected, him and that guy Zach were hanging around with sunglasses on and big lights in the background. It’s interesting, since the last time I talked to him he ranted to me about how vacuous Zach was. People like Ben depress me. I wish he would just tell me to go fuck off and die instead of all these ridiculous instant message conversations at two-month intervals. Obviously, he doesn’t want to be my friend. Why pretend? Eh, fuck him. He’s only 17. He has no idea what he wants in this world.

I don’t think I’m going to get to sleep tonight.

Bored. Tired. Horny. Hungry.

Will this life never end?