Okay, decent day. Got a couple of the exams back. Scored very well, thank you. Yes, I am a brutal genius with great hair. Still I was beaten by the end of the day. I’ll never get used to this 9-9 stuff.

I haven’t been keeping up on guitar.

I haven’t been keeping up on writing.

So much for the hobbies, folks! Oh well. Cat’s happy, car’s lubed, weekend’s here , got some new games and DVDs to bite into, got some photo-tastic ideas to screw with… Not bad at all. We’ll have a nice one, provided I can keep those upcoming papers out of my mind. Damn.

4th of July soon. My least favorite holiday. Why? Because a) I’m not very patriotic, and b) neither is the stinking holiday. I get more out of memorial day or even out of arbor day. Plus all that blasting freaks the cat. Neigbors are at it already, illegally. Maybe they burn their house down. Oops!

We can work it out.

;^)

It’s a beautiful grey day in Salt Lake City… almost like it’s fall already instead of early summer. I wish they all could be like this. Somebody give me a hint: where is the climate always grey and a little damp, without necessarily having to rain all the time?

…so I said goodbye to all my friends
and packed my hopes inside a matchbox
’cause I know it’s time to fly…

Okay, got back from the big wilderness trip that I didn’t mention here before. Why didn’t I mention it? No reason. But I’m back. It got cut short, but that’s okay because things weren’t going all that well anyway.

When I got back, I had a long weekend, so I figured it was a good opportunity to do the upgrades I’d been planning. Things I’ve learned: Windows 2000 is a steaming pile of shit that will wipe your Linux drives without asking rather than just ignoring them like Windows 95 and 98 did. So I’ve been restoring from tape… Also, I’m having to give up my beloved emacs because somehow the anti-aliasing of fonts f*cks it completely up. And Netatalk freezes kernel 2.4.6-pre5 rock solid. But nobody really cares so I’ll shut up about this tech shit. The sad thing is, most of the recent photos of things like Tami’s graduation… got erased. My fault.

I bought an illegal Star Wars DVD set, but it doesn’t play quite right on my cheap Apex DVD player, not to mention that the guy was “out of stock” on the Return of the Jedi discs, so he’s promised to send it Monday. Nothing ever goes right. Shit, shit, shit.

Speaking of DVD, I keep feeling like I want to watch a film before I go back to school tomorrow but every film I can think of isn’t the one I want to watch. I hate that feeling.

And there are more papers and midterms to come this week. Damn. DAMN. Right now I’m feeling like I did a lot when I was younger. I want to burn things, cause harm, be dirty and alienate people generally. Trouble is I have no f*cking idea how to do that these days… Every chump on the street has twelve tattoos, fifteen piercings, green hair and a drug habit. I can’t hope to compete on that front. All I can figure out is that I should stop talking to people and stop bathing generally. I don’t know if that will drive them away, but at least it will make them uncomfortable.

I feel like I want to go to India or to Egypt or nach Bayern or something. I’m tired of here, I’m tired of school, I’m tired of the people I know, I’m tired of f*cking with my computer, I’m tired of not having any money, I’m tired of driving a Volvo, I’m tired of every damn thing I can think of.

Right now, this moment, film school is feeling very good. I’m not sure about Anthropology anymore. I’m not sure about anything anymore. I need a beer. I haven’t had one in weeks. I can’t afford one.

None of it matters. None of it matters after two world wars, Berlin and Tienanmen Square. Where is the purpose? Has God run out of calamity ideas to give people something meaningful to do? Or am I just “lucky” enough to live in the land of corporate rape and honey? Man lives for triumph, not for contentment. Think Milton. And for everyone who’s about to tell me that it will be a triumph to become a Ph.D., buy a boat and marry a pretty wife: you have no idea about anything at all…

Shit, shit, shit. I want a silver cross as a talisman. But I can’t afford one. “A talisman?” you ask. Yes. I’m an anthropology student. I can do such things. F*ck off.

Hundreds of lost photos… I’m fairly depressed right now.

What is my weekend like?

Well, I’m studying hard. Right now I’m working on a list of terms that I have to know for tomorrow’s exam. Definitions. That shouldn’t be hard at all, right? So what’s next on the list… I’m at ‘S’ so we’re working on “simian shelf” right now.

Simian Shelf: a distinct mandibular torus that projects posteriorly from the inferior surface of the mandibular symphysis (see also inferior transverse torus).

Hmm… Okay.

Inferior Transverse Torus: the shelf-like buttress on the inside of the mandibular symphysis (see mandibular symphysis).

Ummm… sure, why not…

Mandibular Symphysis: the anterior locus of union of the left and right components of the mandible.

Well, at least I know that the mandible is the jaw bone. Or at least, I think it is — if I remember my high school classes right… I wonder if I’ll pass… [*choke*]

Okay, things are getting complicated.

I already knew that I had a major exam Monday and two major exams Wednesday, which meant lots of studying this weekend and early in the week. Unfortunately, I just found out today that I actually have one major exam Monday and three major exams Wednesday. This makes things considerably more difficult.

To make matters worse, my laptop and Windows 2000 have been having a disagreement, so in order to get things working again and get access to all of my class-related documents stored there, I’ve been backing up the disk and installing Linux (I give up on Windows) — a process which has been taking a lot of time this weekend and making it difficult to study.

To make matters much, much worse, I found out that the battery on my webpad has drained completely since then and all of my notes — for any class — from 3 June to this week are gone forever. As if that weren’t bad enough, it also means hours of re-installing that software (my note-taker, my document database manager, etc.) as well. This is the one complicating factor I definitely didn’t need. I may be in for some serious shit…

Unfortunately, the cat has made a mess of this place completely, just to help me out. One two-liter soda with the lid off, one bag of popcorn next to the computer monitor and one large box full of peanut foam do not seem too bad… Until you leave a cat alone with them for the weekend. The whole place is a sticky, messy dump because in addition to his usual pushing of books off the shelves and dumping of the trash can, he has spread popcorn and peanut foam all over the place and then spilled two liters of Coke on it all.

Finally, there are a few other problems: my proxy account on campus seems to have been disabled for some reason meaning that I can’t get to half of my study materials until the administrative computing center opens up on Monday; I haven’t had a time to rotate the tires on my bike and adjust the gears, so riding will be very slow and difficult to and from school; I have a whole pile of money-related errands that have to be run Monday and Tuesday; Father’s day is tomorrow and my family will want to celebrate…

It’s now 8:30 PM on Saturday. By this exact time Wednesday, I will either have completed all four exams satisfactorily and cleaned this place up… Or I will be looking at another semester in school to rectify bad grades and a sticky mess which has dried to the point that it is almost impossible to tidy.

Wish me luck.

The DNS stuff is worked out and the site is now hosted somewhere fully legal. If you’re seeing this, you’ve made it to the new spot. Hopefully I can hang the page here for a year or so, but we’ll see. Anyway, if you already haven’t remember to update your bookmarks.

Also, I have my fist final for summer semester in hand now. It’s for the half-term class on mesoamerican archaeology. It’s going to be a hard test, I think — at least for me. I’ve found the class lectures to be a little diffuse and vacuous so far.

Just found out that NSI has screwed my domain forwarding somewhere, so for those of you that can’t actually read this right now… Sorry… The site will (hopefully) be back soon. It damn well better be, I’m paying for the domain.

The joys of city living: cycle for 14 miles, cough for 14 hours. I might as well start smoking all the time, considering the amount of pollution there is in the air around here. You should see the layers of smoggy crap that cake on my arms and legs just from a ride like that. And it’s all coating the insides of my lungs as well. Beautiful.

Hacked up my DVD player today to get rid of macrovision and region coding. Actually, it wasn’t much of a hack. Just a firmware upgrade — burn the new firmware to a CD-R, put it in the machine, and watch the MPAA/RIAA corporate machine crumble. Also tracked down an RCE defeat so that I can still watch any shitty RCE DVDs that may pop up on my (now) region-free DVD player.

Death to the capitalists! (Or something… I guess I buy too many DVDs to really wish them death… So what the hell are they so worried about? They need to have a little humility so that they don’t alienate their customers — like me!) Humility to the capitalists!

What about Philadelphia? I’ll look into it.

I’ve moved entirely to Mozilla now, as of 0.9.1. Still some image bugs, but also less crash-prone than Netscape 4.77. No IE because I use Linux all the time. I can run IE 5.5 in my Windows 98 VMWare window, but that’s a pain and I hate supporting hegemony anyway.

I’m gonna drive over and buy a slurpee.

All the things I have missed… on this overgrown road… How can you know when you’re second-guessing? Will I ever return, or is this spot, this moment once and again forgotten, passed only for a moment by a solitary wanderer?

Perhaps I won’t let it be so.

It’s been different…

One of those days. I totally botched everything. At least I got my homework in. I’m too disgusted to talk about it any more, so no details. Just hoping the weekend is better. Hoping…

Okay, here’s a little bitch and moan: why don’t more word processors have two-page mode like WordPerfect 9? Word 95, Word 97, StarWriter, OpenOffice Writer, Applixware Words, AbiWord… It’s probably the most important feature for a writer or even just for any academic that has to write a lot of papers, but it only seems to exist in WordPerfect 9, which isn’t available everywhere and which is fairly unstable under Linux. Is nobody else working at 1600×1200?

Went to a graduation tonight. Always makes me think.

I am so damn tired!

I am going to bed.

It’s 3:00 AM on a Monday morning. I’m turning off the light, flipping off the tube, and sitting in the dark. Got to leave for class in under five hours. I hate that feeling… knowing in advance that you’re not going to get anywhere near enough sleep and that you’re going to go through yet another day snoring at your professors from behind the backpack on your desk. Time just gets away from me…

I was looking in the mirror earlier and I realize that I look like a felon now… too much weight-lifting has given me the biceps and shoulders I always wanted when I was in high school, but now they just look frightening, like people will start to suspect me of things or avoid me on the street. Time to cut back on calories a little and stop lifting for a while.

Still don’t know what to do after I graduate. Options include [1] a graduate degree program in one of: film, english criticism, creative writing, anthropology, archaeology, egyptology, journalism or even (!?) linguistics or Middle Eastern studies; [2] no graduate studies at all — just heading right out into the big white-collar creep-up-this-ladder world; [3] an odyssey of sorts — maybe to Alaska to work the fishing boats, maybe into the Peace Corps to try and do some good, or even into the AmeriCorps; [4] total bumness — I get my backpack on and disappear, maybe for a decade, maybe forever.

Right now it seems like I change my mind about once a day. It’s pretty obvious that I’m still not a “driven” person, in spite of the fact that I’m finally getting somewhere in school. I can’t give in concrete terms exactly what I want from life. I can only dance around it in abstracts. I definitely don’t want happiness — too tiring. Nor do I want peace — too boring. I suppose what I want is translucency — just a glimpse, not of life, but through life — just once. I want visions — endless walking and seeing. Call me a new-ager, but I feel like my mission in life is as a kind of seeker — only I’m not sure what it is I’m supposed to be looking for.

Maybe at some point I’ll find out. Or maybe I’ll simply know when I’ve found it? Or is that too trite? Probably it’s all too trite. So shoot me.

Woah… Wall of Sound has closed. Bummer. I was just going to see if they had reviews of Beyond Good and Evil or Amnesiac up. Guess now I’ll have to rely on Amazon.com and the All Music Guide. I hate it when sites I use often disappear. On a related note, I’ve just been soaked renewing my domain name registrations for another year. I was also sad to find that BruteForce is taken. Oh well.

On a completely un-related note, I’ve just learned about Cliff Island. I think this may be the place I want to end up, when all is said and done. Sounds perfect. Only problem: no work. I guess you have to have work… God knows why. Ugh — sacrifice, indecision, planning, limited time… Why can’t everything be exactly as you want it all of the time?

Got an open-book essay exam for Mesoamerican Archaeology to finish this weekend. Basically that means late Sunday night / early Monday morning. If I do it any other way, I won’t generate nearly enough stress to make it worth my while. Betcha didn’t know I was a clever smartass.