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 :)

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.

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.

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?

I guess I should let the cat out of the bag. I’ve been bidding on PowerBooks on eBay. I have my heart set on this sweet 867MHz 12 in. PowerBook titanium for $250. There’s five days left in the auction though, so someone will totally outbid me. But maybe not, the screen is totally shot to shit and it only works on an external display. But LCDs aren’t that hard to find, I can totally get a broken PowerBook on eBay for like $100, and there I will have a $350 PowerBook. That would be incredible. I sort of hope I get outbid so I won’t have to spend the money, but on the other hand it would thrill me to have a laptop.

The strategy of rearranging my keyboard keys to get me to stop typing hasn’t really helped. I just type anyway even though the letters say different things. I’ve been touch typing too long to even attempt to confuse myself.

I came home today and was overjoyed seeing a package in front of my doorstep, but I knew it wasn’t my iPod. It was the book for my math class that starts Thursday. I had checked the FedEx tracking site right before I left work, and my iPod left Alaska at 5 p.m. I don’t know where it’s going though. It’s really annoying to painstakingly wait for this thing. I should’ve just spent $10 for the expedited shipping. But it’s too late for that.

Blah blah blah, I’m bored. I should stop blogging. My life consists of waiting for my iPod. It’s sad what I’ve been reduced to. Ah, Ben is online. I should sign on and see what his lame excuse for never calling me is going to be. Nah, I don’t give a shit anymore. I had a bit of a revelation today.I realized that the time he stopped talking to me was the time he got his car. I wonder if that’s an unfair deduction. But then the thought strikes me thatI don’t care. So that’s that.

Amanda is going on vacation, and I feel quite jealous. Sort of. I won’t feel jealous once my iPod arrives. I will be glad I wasted away year #19 of my already dwindling life being the slave of Apple Computer, NaturalPoint, and Creative. Oh well. Everybody sells out, and at least I’m not wasting egregious amounts of money on drugs, like everyone else in this town. Well, technology is my drug. And my current high is on a damn FedEx truck in Alaska.

This Cassius album I downloaded, Au Rêve, is sorta good. It has a lot of Daft Punk-esque electronic interludes like “Telephone Love” and “Hi Water,” but there are some like, uberconformist hip-hop songs randomly flung into the middle. I’m confused by what kind of music the band was trying to create, but I like a few of the songs enough not to delete it.

God I’m bored. I’m basically waiting until my dad goes to sleep so I can watch Adult Swim. This is the week of waiting. I was flipping through my math book I got for my class, and it looked to really really easy. Like, high school stuff. I think that my mind is ready for math. I never was ready before. I had a social life. And drama. I can now devote myself to the infinity of mathematics like never before. Maybe I’ll finally get CSS. But I doubt it.

Expenses now:

$95 – car insurance
$50 – transmission payment
$50 – high-speed Internet
$90+ – gas (calculated for only going to work and back)
$300 / month

Expenses living on my own:
$140-ish – rent
$95 – car insurance
$ 50 – transmission payment
$50 – high-speed Internet plus bills
$21+ – gas
$50-ish?- food

$395

Wow. That would leave me with all of five dollars of disposable income. And a slow week or two at work would totally ruin me. And no toys. I’ll have to go over my figures with Misty though, cuz I really don’t know how much the rent would be or how much the bills are. And maybe my insurance would go down since I’m driving less. I’ll go to Progressive.com and quote the change. Hmm, results were inconclusive. I’ll call them tomorrow. I really want to do this, but I feel like it’s going to be way too expensive and I won’t be able to pay for my classes at CR next semester. Fuck. It’s 4 a.m. I never stay up this late.

Misty and I watched Faceoff. It was really predictable and lame. She fell asleep halfway through as always. I went home. We’ve hung out almost every day this week. I need to sit down with her and go over the numbers. Tomorrow perhaps. I’m totally doing the passive agressive thing about Matt’s website. Fuck it. I just don’t care. I never did to begin with, but back then he was paying me. I should tell him that. Can’t think of a way to word it. I regret buying this expensive webcam. I should have gotten a scanner instead.

I just finished cleaning my room. It’s incredibly clean. I even did my bi-annual vacuuming. I unpacked all the boxes, threw out a bunch more trash, and put everything I’m not using in the closet. I don’t know why I decided to clean today, it just seemd to happen. My homunculus willed it, I guess. I was dancing around to cool music earlier in my 5 square feet of floor space that wasn’t covered with my stuff, but now that I have a gigantic dance floor I just feel tired and vaguely hungry. I was trapped work until like 4 p.m., so I wasn’t able to register for school today. I must do it before I have to go to work or just won’t get done since I seem to be saying there so much longer nowadays. I have one of my cool things I make on the front of tomorrow’s paper. Anyway, I want to show you guys something, I should go get my digital camera. Oh good, it was just in my backpack. When I was cleaning, I found some really cool stuff from ages past, like my incredible obsession with making chain mail, circa 1999. I found this gigantic piece of mail (gigantic due to the tedious work involved to make it) that I had made myself from a spool of wire and some wire cutters purchased expressly for that purpose. This was my result:

I always was sad because I didn’t have enough money to get a bunch of professionally-cut rings to make myself a suit of mail. Now I think I’m going to check it out.

I really really want my iPod, but I also really want that $20 student discount. I know it sounds like an insignificant amount of money, but with the amount that I used to work, I would make that much in about a day. So to me it’s a day’s worth of work that I’m saving.

Anyway, I took a picture of my newly designed computer alcove, complete with TV hooked up to my computer, the woofer from my surround sound system strategically placed in the center, and of course Navarre, my computer, who is looking lame in this pic but is really cool. The setup looks hella tight in person. Trust me.

Ben said he’s going to call me tomorrow. It would be cool to do something, although I have to work that night. I’m listening to an album by this band called Lacquer, it’s pretty nondescript electronic-ish music. It’s kinda like Fischerspooner. Kinda like if you look at two fractals, you’re certain that they’re both fractals, but they do look quite different, but it’s impossible to quantify in words how one fractal is different from another. That’s kind of the difference.

I totally failed at my governing duty last night in my latest Caesar III assignment. I had all this unemployment, so I built schools, libraries, academies, theaters and amphitheaters to get my culture rating up, but I neglected my prosperity rating and now I have this incredible need for workers, but the province doesn’t have enough farmland to increase the population anymore. So I have a workforce of 1,800 with 700 needed. And the citizens need pottery if they’re going to become patricians, and I have no workforce to make the pottery…so I’m stuck at 45 prosperity when I need 50. It’s infuriating. I’m going to have to build the whole goddamn city from scratch again. Either that or take the military assignment instead. The military provinces are usually much much bigger than the provinces in which you must demonstrate your finesse with governing.

Every other time I played the game I would always take the cities where I had to maintain immense armies, but I decided to take the other route this time. I thought it would be cool, but it’s just annoying. I would rather have the Celts or the Goths destroy one of my cities quickly, my legions mauled by charioteers and trampled with elephants, than to be stuck in the purgatory of the 45 prosperity rating. One time I had to build guard towers all over my city (hundreds of them) and use every single legion to defeat this one immense army. By the end of the battle the city would be halfway destroyed, but I would be victorious because the ballistas from the towers would take out all of the elephants and straggler bettalions not killed by my legions.

I’m really hungry. I need to make some food.

This is the first time in a very long time that I have been truly bored. Before, I had friends to do stuff with. Me and Joe would go all around Crescent City hanging out and eating sushi and talking about the future. Or me and Selena and Misty and Ben would hang out and watch cool movies. But no. I can do none of those things now. Ben won’t return my phone calls. I don’t know why. So I’ve been reduced to this life of exercising obsessively and eating very little because I feel that I’m fat and ugly because that guy blocked me and I never see my friends.

I have been wholeheartedly devoted myself to excercising myself to a bag of bones and my endless work. Ihave nothing else to do. All I can do is surf the Web looking at things I want to buy as if that will make my life better. That new sound card will improve my voice recognition, but what is the point? I have nothing to say anymore. I feel like my life is wasted.

Today I paid my dad the first installment of the $50 a month for the rest of my life for my transmission. I really can’t afford to drive my car anymore. I can afford to pay insurance on it and pay my dad, but not much else. I didn’t ride my bike to work today because my legs were killing me, but I’m going to attempt to do it tomorrow. Even if it’s raining. My MP3 player broke again but last night I got out the soldering gun and the superglue and fixed it. It took almost an hour for me to find that soldering gun. I even found a handgun my dad had cleverly hidden in the kitchen somewhere before I found the soldering gun. Well, at least I know what to do if there’s a burglar. I wonder if it’s loaded. Hmm.

I should instant message Amanda. She sent me the cutest text message ever and it totally made my day. Usually I only get text messages when I’ve used up all of my free minutes and so when I checked it I was definitely pleasantly surprised.

I have been staying at work a lot more lately since the semester started, which is a bit strange. Now I hang around until five o’clock or so where the work shifts back into low gear and we have all sorts of political conversations in the office. It’s a really great to work with college-educated people who know how to logically support their premises and that understand that a debate is different from an argument.

I, of course, take the completely jaded and cynical Caterine Vauban perspective, mostly for comic relief. Sometimes I fear that my coworkers think that I’m being serious when I’m being sarcastic. Today one of my favorite coworkers was talking about the failure of the FEMA after hurricane Katrina, while in the last disaster in Florida everyone seemed to have been rescued in a very timely fashion. The difference in her mind (and, of course, in my mind) is that this time the victims are mostly black. So of course I quipped “Well, Kat, I think that we really should follow Bush administration policy on this one: black people just aren’t important.”

I love bringing racial issues right into glaring focus. It’s probably just the endless rhetoric of the uberleft that makes me feel this way, but as a white guy I always have this sneaking suspicion that since I live in this highly insulated white culture, I might be somehow subconsiously a racist. But I really doubt it. It’s all just subjective anyway. Someone could say that when me and my cousin say “What’s up in the hood” for comic relief, that we’re being racists in our own politically correct American way. But I wholeheartedly disagree. I object to what passes for black “culture” just as much as I object to what passes for white “culture.” All the crap about rappers is just as vanilla in the scheme of race relations as the last Jessica Simpson album. Real black people don’t act like those imbeciles on television gloating over their cars and diamonds, nor do I regurgitate the platitudes of Jessica Simpson. But I still feel like I can’t escape our societal bias. I was riding my bike today and rode past a black person. And I was all, “whoa, a black person in Crescent City.” And I wasn’t really sure if it was a “Whoa, that’s cool” reaction or a “Hmm, things are changing” reaction. Well, I guess having a neutral reaction is the best way to respect people for individuals, but I have a hard time doing that for the inbred Crescent City scum I have to deal with on an all too regular basis. I guess I would think that way about any minority Crescent City. I don’t know. I guess I have a unique perspective on things because I view the white population in Crescent City as the biggest problem.

A lot of people give lip service to “diversity,” but I feel like the sad truth is that what passes for American culture (a conglomeration of five or six media companies) doesn’t want a world of individuals, it wants a nation of blacks and whites and latinos and gays and Muslims and more and more groups to fight amongst each other so the Republican power elite can steal our money and outsource our jobs to China. But I guess that’s the future. Once we don’t have skin color to fight about anymore, what will we dream up next?

I read this really depressing study one time about a classroom where children were divided up by eye color and by the end of a certain amount of time the groups of one eye color would fight groups of a different eye color. Oh well.

I just have to keep living. That’s my one imperative. This six months of my life will be wasted. This year will be wasted. The best years of my life will be wasted. For what? The only reason I can think of to live is to buy new technology as to better separate myself from my empty life. God, this post is incredibly long. I should stop this.

I’ve said it once, and I’ll say it again. I need a personal Jesus. (That’s a Depeche Mode homage, for the culturally illiterate.)

I never blog this much when I have friends to talk to. I’ve probably said ten or twenty sentences this whole day. That’s it. And they were all work related. I can can only pick out five or six sentences I said today that weren’t work related. And now Amanda signed off. I’m alone forever. In a cold room. Lol. Me and Kelly would joke last time I was down in Sacramento about melodramatic darkies (“goths”) talking about their life as being like a cold dark room. It’s sad how jokes will slowly morph into reality. And then they’re not funny anymore.

Today was very depressing. I woke up at around eleven and started washing my clothes because I thought I was going to hang out with Thomas at 2 p.m. I went to take a shower around one, and when I got back there was a message on my voicemail from him saying he had been delayed at work and had to stay until six. I called him back a few times and he didn’t answer. I even left a message. And I never leave messages. Anyway, since we obviously weren’t hanging out for a while, I decided to go for a bike ride. I rode into town and back (around twenty miles or so) and got back around four. Right then my mom called me and wanted me to proofread like three of her papers. A quarter of the way through the first paper, Thomas signed on and I really wanted to talk to him but I had to spend another two hours on these retarded papers. And then my dad is calling me to eat dinner. I felt like everyone was pulling me from all sides and it was INFURIATING. An hour and a half into my mom’s papers, Thomas signed off. He hasn’t been on all the rest of the day. So nothing happened today. And I wasted another weekend. I’m wasting my life.

As I said to my cousin earlier today, life is a spiraling black pit of despair with occasional moments of false hope. Having fun this weekend was one of my false hopes. I am in a foul mood. And I feel like I’m the one responsible for fucking up the social engagement I was supposed to have fun today. And I had it planned out so perfectly too. We were going to go out to the seastacks off of Pebble Beach at low tide. It was going to be cool. But no.

I’m so depressed, bored, and alone.

Amanda graciously invited me to drunken Scrabble night: revolutions, but I’m definitely not in the mood to hang out with people. I’m 90% sure that hanging out with them would make me incredibly happy and I would have a great time, but the small chance that I would sit in the corner sulking because I’m alone in this horrible ugly world is just too much to risk.

I broke down and got that computer case. It was $140. It had better be worth it. I always buy shit when I get depressed. Fuck. Why do I let people do this to me?

This is the person I’m going to turn into if I don’t leave this hellhole or meet some cool people. Fuck.

I need to buy a new computer. Only that will make me stop thinking about my disappointment about moving away. And my disappointment about wasting my life. That was my dream, to leave this place. But dreams never come true. I’m going to try and read that novel that I don’t really like to get it out of the way and to make myself stop thinking about my life.

And I jerked off like six times today because I had nothing better to do and no one to have sex with. I didn’t even know that was possible. It could have concievably been seven times. I am so lame. I would get so much more done if I were a eunuch. But I can’t deal with that high-pitched voice crap. I’m going to sleep.

I didn’t do much today except for go on my normal 3 mi. bike ride and do a whole bunch of packing. I am amazed by how much stuff I have. But I’m whittling away at it. I’m thinking is telling my boss today that I’m leaving at the end of the month. Nah. I’ll tell him next week, a week ahead of schedule. I get paid Wednesday. I hope it’s enough to pay my bills, save some away, and buy that new hard drive I want for my computer to set up a RAID array.

Me and Ripley talked a few days ago about if he wanted to go out with me, and he said yes. But I feel like it’s not really true… but it’s all just a scheme…but then again I find it hard to believe that people like me as much as they do. I don’t know. It just really hurts to know that you’re the number two. God this post is boring me. I’m going to take some NyQuil and go to sleep. I have to be up at like quarter to six tomorrow. And then I’m going to have to waste an entire day in town because I’m lying to my dad that I’m starting college today. Motherfuck. Maybe Ripley will call me. Or maybe the sun will explode. Well, at least I’ll possibly get some reading done. I’ll put my novel in my car before I go to sleep.

Today sucked. I’m going to owe my Dad $1800. I’m going to have to call the lady at the car repair place tomorrow and tell her that I want the rebuilt transmission with the six-month warranty. I’m going to go to Sacramento and sell it. Pay my dad back. Pocket the difference. Save up for a sweet computer.

I built the computer of my high-end but slightly conservative dreams on alienware.com, and it was around $3500. It had a dual core 3.8GHz processor with hyper threading technology. It supported DDR2, the new hella fast RAM. All sorts of bells and whistles. I can’t afford bells and whistles right now. Although I do have $800 saved up. I talked to my boss today about taking on some more work, and I’m going to do two new tasks, one that I will hate and one that won’t be hard at all. I’m subjecting myself to that task because I want to leave this town so bad.

Hopefully, I will be making about $400 per pay period. That will definitely allow me to move by Nine Inch Nails in September, but I might stay a month or so more just so I can buy myself a Vespa or car or something. Why did this transmission thing have to happen now? Now I effectively don’t have a car. I went to Wal-Mart today got a back pack, a bike lock, and I drink holder for my bike. I’m going to be riding it a lot. My dream is to be able to ride my bike to and from work, even though it is 10 miles each way. I would save about $180 a month, but I’m not sure if I would be able to live like that. I could definitely do it if I lived in town, but I don’t. At least I can blame all my problems on my father for living in this shithole in the middle of nowhere.

Fuck.

My mom left today, she was in hysterics. Well actually, she leaves at 4 a.m. tonight. But since I didn’t have a car, I had to get a ride home with her friend. But at least I am prepared for tomorrow. I’m going to ride my bike home from work tomorrow. I’ve got my backpack and my water bottle holder and my cell phone, so I’m set. I guess.

I saw Joe when I went to Wal-Mart. It’s so depressing to say goodbye to someone for ever and ever. You lie to yourself that you will send e-mails, but you just get so involved in the drama and bullshit of your life that all you can do is complain about yourself on your blog… Or at least that’s what I do. I can’t talk to the people that I love over the Internet because it gets me very depressed. I know that’s a very selfish way to act, but I just can’t handle it. I’m balancing school and work and all of these horrible things keep happening to keep me in this town that I hate so much and around people that I don’t like. I can’t take on the responsibility of being lonely too.

This is my epic battle against Crescent City. I will win or I will die. One or the other. And I know which one it’s going to be. I am going to fucking win. I’m going to beat Paranoia on trick. I am going to get a master’s degree. I am an atom and nothing can break me down. Fuck everyone and everything that gets in my way.

On the good news side of things, I did finish Survivor. I hesitate to say it, but I’m growing tired of Chuck P.’s repetitive writing style. The book was great, but he just can’t break out of that flow. It’s fun for the first hundred pages, but I was just annoyed towards the end. He was just repeating random shit, like graffiti on bathroom stalls. What the fuck was the point?

I feel like a failure because I don’t have my car. I might not be able to take my kitty to Brookings to get his stitches taken out. I might not be able to see Amanda this weekend. Eh, fuck it. I’ll ride my bike out there if I have to…but it’s the ride back that creeps me out. It would be all too stereotypical to get run down by a drunk driver at 2 a.m.

I guess all of this is just fallout from the fact that I actually am deeply sad to see my mom go. Since we had that talk on the way to Bandon, I feel like I can really relate to her.

I’m all she has in this horrible world.

I’m so tawny. I had this raging erection at work today, it would have been so embarrassing had I had to get up. My mind was racing with all the hot guys I’d fucked and the ones I had yet to fuck. It really doesn’t help that I have a huge crush on one of my coworkers and with my brain being filled up with half-remembered scenes from pornos, I half-believe he’ll see my hard-on and just blow me right there in the office. I hate how I’m just a slave to my endocrine system. I hate how with enough sleepdep, porn and reality fuse into one hazy, ersatz peep show. I really want to become a eunuch, but my voice would get all high-pitched…and I heard it’s bad for your health.

But I can’t really think of another thing to take the place of sex in my trinity of passions: technology, sex, and literature.

Nothing really fits into that hole. Gardening? Maybe extreme sports, but then again I am very lazy and get into hysterics when I have injuries. One time I passed out at the sight of my own blood.

I really could feel the message of Survivor. We all have the same collective memory due to the television shows we all watched growing up, so everything we do is preprogrammed. There is no free will. Nothing is exciting anymore. It’s just another plot. More jamais vu. The only mystery left is death.

I haven’t reached that point, but I feel like it’s coming. Thirties perhaps. Maybe forties. That seems to be the age of all of Chuck’s characters.

My face is coated in a permanent layer of oil. I could fry chicken on my face. Billions of bacteria are using my face to fuck. That’s sort of hot, in a very…protozoan way. I think I’ll watch some porn. It will bring me out of this shitty mood and perhaps free me from a repeat of today’s embarrassment.

So when we stopped the car and he got out I turned the car around and started driving the other way but immediately he teleported back and tried to make me drive it the way he wanted to go so me and these other peopl got out of the car and I guess we had been drinking so we were running and being all strange and then the creepy Dr. Montague guy was running after us and we just had to keep running and so everybody was snorting out of this little bag of methamphetamine (becuase Sara had been talking about how meth was the new cool thing at the high school) and they handed it to me and I took this giant snort of it and I thought to myself “what the fuck? I would never do methamphetamines? And then my nose started to burn like hell (because one of my friends told me that that’s what happens when you snort it) and so I just kept running and then I woke up.

It was a very unnerving dream.