Liquid Nonsense

Of all the The Postal Service's, I think my favorite is "your heart won't heal right if you keep tearing out the sutures."

This one little line has earned itself a special place in my heart because every time I hear it I am reminded of my own little quirks. Specifically, I am reminded of one in particular that manifests itself as me wanting to look to the past, or less-positive parts of reality at the very least, and start stacking myself up against what I find. This oddity sometimes has the power to make me a little depressed, sometimes frustrated, and other times it does not make me feel anything in particular. At first glance I wonder if this is really some kind of deep-seated, self-destructive tendency of mine. Part of me secretly hopes it is serving a higher function, mostly to make me more resilient and mentally stable.

Several months ago Phil and I traded blog archives for our respective web sites that we no longer operate or maintain. It was a unique chance to read about someone else's past in a very visceral way; all the writing was done at the time. I guess what distinguishes this from reading any other friend's blog is my personal relationship with Phil. I maintain it is essentially impossible for me to maintain any sort of objectivity when reading things in the past, no matter how far removed I might be at the time of writing. There really is not any way to read about your love's previous encounters with other men.

Is it jealousy? Is that part of the emotional mish-mash? Sitting here and pondering it I suspect that it is. On some level I think I am jealous of men in his past. Is that even remotely a healthy response? I would imagine it is, mostly because I refuse to accept that I am the only person who ever feels this way. Well, that does not make it healthy, just more common.

In my heart of hearts I know a large part is my need to feel significant in a big way. Phil has made me feel like a king, but sometimes glimpsing in to the past divorces me of my modern-day-relationship context and it is like I lose touch for just a brief second. Those brief seconds serve as semi-uncomfortable grounding experiences. It gives me a chance to ask questions like "do I make him feel that way?," and I know the answer is simultaneously yes and no. Yes, because three weeks from now we will be celebrating the one-year mark of our relationship, and No, because I am a wholly and completely different person.

It is a very rare time when I do not know what I am feeling or what function something serves, but why I like inducing this sort of ennui in myself is going to have to remain a mystery for a bit longer. I talk with him about it and that usually gets me a kiss on the forehead and a "silly boyfriend," comment. And I am totally all right with that. Actually, I bet it is because once and a while I really do like being emotionally taken care of and sometimes the associated feeling of vulnerability brings me all that much closer to him. Ultimately, who knows?

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Side note:
A coworker of mine did something that kind of comes off as a mini-tribute. This is easily the most flattering thing he's ever done for me. Details are here.

Friday, the day after the company Christmas party, I woke up with my legs feeling like they had been thoroughly worked out. At the time I did not really give it much thought; they were probably just tired from all the standing the night beforehand. By the time Friday evening rolled around my legs hurt, I had a headache that I will only describe as "horrific," and a fever somewhere near 100 degrees. This lousy state of affairs continued until about midday yesterday when it finally decided to largely resolve itself.

First and foremost, I do not get sick. The last occasion I can recall having been placed this far out of commission was sometime during elementary school. I missed neither a single day of high school nor college due to illness (do not read that as "I did not miss any days"). So to be this non-functional for five days sort of strikes me as absurd.

To paraphrase George Carlin, my white blood cells are currently working their way into the rebel camps to assassinate the invaders silently in the night. I will not stand for this sort of rebellious uprising in any one of my organ systems. They will slice the leaders' heads off, and place them squarely on pikes in my heart as a warning to all other pathogens that would dare enter here.

I am in a foul mood as a side effect of recovering. My coworkers have somehow managed to be able to piss me off with "hello." Under most normal circumstances I am nowhere near this punchy. I should have known something was up Friday night when I was walking with Simon around Fashion Square in Scottsdale. I was crossing a driveway when an older woman driving one of those (needlessly) large SUVs charged in front of me as if to say "no, pedestrians don't have the right of way as long as I drive my Deforester 9000(tm)." Being a little punchy at the time I noticed that her window was down, looked her dead in the eye, and called her a cunt rather loudly. She was far, far less than pleased, but I felt a sense of smug satisfaction. I always know something is up when I start getting that particular emotional response from my actions. It says, very concisely, "I don't need to be clever, I just need to make you upset." I would say I am semi-upset about this in retrospect, but that bitch really did deserve it.

The Christmas party ended up being all right. Phil was not able to make it due to Star's funeral being on the same day (totally, totally understandable), so I invited Heidi. She felt bad about me not being able to go with my boyfriend, so she decided to dress up as a man to make me feel better. All I am going to say is that I was there with the hottest chick in the place. The company had photographers on site, so I have a single picture that I may be able to get up onto my Flickr account. Phil got back Sunday night during a window when I did not feel like absolute shit, which was nice. Monday night he helped take care of me, which I am still extremely grateful for his rescuing me from the drudgery of my couch. Tonight is apparently bowling with friends who are visiting, so we shall see how that goes. I am just going to offer morale support. I loathe bowling.

My job description is perilously close to having "statistician" added in the requirements. For nearly the last two months I feel like the primary function of my job has become in depth data analysis. This is strikingly similar to the research post I held with my dark oppressor Dr. Xue at ASU. I essentially write programs that gather data. I then write more complicated programs that analyze the data the first set of silly programs produced. What always manages to astonish me is the shear volume of data a single engineer can produce when he or she is attempting to find something to analyze. It helps to impart a sense of perspective as to why data mining exists as a proper subfield of computer science.

5 machines
1 program
6 samples per minute

43,200 data points from that program per 24 hour period.

My personal datamart here at work currently is a MySQL database with several hundred thousand rows generated exclusively by my tiny little apps. I have written a whole array of programs that exist solely to filter and make some of this junk meaningful.
Without geeking out about the problem I have been attempting to solve, I will simply say that it has proven to be beyond a bitch to track down. Hence the reliance on statistics and pretty graphs to illuminate it. This last week was a major breakthrough with this specimen:


Hopefully no one needs a degree in statistics to realize this graph has some issues in the same sense "global warming" has some issues. Five separate computers, identical software, identical hardware, and dissimilar traffic loads all experienced an identical perceived drop of incoming packet data. Identical to the real world problem, and has only been reproduced in captivity once.

All I really know at this point is that I am absolutely thrilled that I have something I can wave in front of management as if to say "Look, see! This is why you pay me my salary!" It also makes me think of the term no-brainer and why I am going to bludgeon someone should it be uttered in my presence. Specifically because I recall someone once saying that the risk of presenting irrefutable evidence related to a previously unknown problem is that someone above you will say "obviously that is a problem! Look at that graph, it's a no-brainer," without giving a second thought to all the research and work that went into simply producing the damn thing. One battle at a time though... Right now I am still enjoying the breathing room this graph has bought me.

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In other news, last week I sent an email message to Dr. Sen asking if the department needed any TAs for the low numbered classes in the CS department. I have yet to receive any kind of response, but I can not help but feel the answer would be "yes," since so few grad students actually want to TA those courses. I would liken it to a bunch of English graduate students begging to TA or teach English 101. The difference being a lot of computer science graduate students actually suck at programming, whereas I sincerely hope a bunch of English graduate students can all decently write. Anyhow, it is essentially my clever plan to reintroduce myself back to academia slowly to see if I want to pursue more classes. I feel myself becoming increasingly jaded toward the process of enrollment and vastly more critical of the entire academic institution day by day, not to say that corporate America is any better. At this exact moment in time both paths sound like folly.

I have spent the last two and a half hours crying off and on, and reflecting...

The majority of today was spent with Phil, doing nothing in particular, which invariably means it was a good day. We parted ways like we do in the later part of Sunday afternoon so he can study and so I can take care of what few errands I have. Tonight at around 10pm he calls me. Upon answering the phone I immediately know something is wrong... This morning his friend Star, in Philadelphia, passed away from the effects of a sudden pulmonary embolism. No warnings, no signs, no indications, no nothing.

So many thoughts are racing right now, asking to be unraveled. I never had the opportunity to meet Star, and for that I feel unquestionably upset. Even though she and I never talked I am still feeling the loss like a kick to the ribs.

I truly feel that sudden gap is the sign of a person who led a magnificent life. It is never about our money, popularity, or even power. It is about the people we gather around ourselves, those we live with, and the people whom we grieve for. I strongly believe in the structural power of the tribe. Our tribes are formed from the intersections of friends, family, acquaintances, allies, compatriots, and the like whom we strongly associate with because of mutual beliefs, thoughts, feelings, or whatever. Essentially the family we are born into versus the Family we choose for ourselves. The people we would offer our time and our spirit to if they were ever in need. The people whom we cannot sacrifice our time to because we have already willingly offered it. When something tragic happens to one of these individuals, the loss is profound.

No sets of words by themselves have the kind of cleansing cathartic power necessary to truly ease this kind of transition. Personally, I have always felt silence to be the strongest thing I can say, so in these events I offer what emotional presence I can as well as a shoulder to cry on. Perhaps my own catharsis will come in recording my thoughts and feelings in a way which I can share.

My heart is aching for everyone whose life she has touched. I wish more than anything I had something more to say to Phil. It is always hardest to watch someone you love deeply, hurt in such a pervasive way. A hug? A kiss? Just something "more." I can always say "I love you," again... sometimes it helps just to know someone is out there thinking about you too. We all cope with these events in our own way, but it is taking a lot out of me right now to sit at home and not be more actively engaged.

The aspect of death I like the least is my own total lack of understanding. Death is the enigma that sits on the corner of my consciousness. I have no choice but to lump myself in the pool of people that claim to not be religious, but highly spiritual. Is death the road to awe? Is it a vast nothing? Is it something completely unfathomable? Is it the Christian-Judaic Kingdom of Heaven? I wished I knew. I really, really wished I knew. To be completely honest the thought of my own death creeps me out... though every time I deal with it I have a strong, moving sense of acceptance that "everything will be alright," and that whatever lies on the other side must truly be great.

At this point I have meditated, stretched, written, cried, smiled, hoped, sighed, and sniffled. Now maybe some healing and sleep.

Labels: reflection

So does this even resemble a human being? Since I have claimed to have no artistic talent for as long as I can remember, I'm actually somewhat proud of this. Leave me with my little piece of happiness.

Lately I've been mentally exploring what I think is one of the most amusing dichotomies. The relation between the amazing sexual force of human-ness and the equally powerful force of archetypal fantasy.

I suspect, and this is entirely guess work as I do not know many people who write about this stuff quite as openly as I do, that many people's sexual fantasies are based on broad generalizations as opposed to extreme specifics. I say that because if your like me, and you like pr0n, then it seems like a very reasonable extension to say that the content is setup to model the fantasy (i.e., it probably isn't a coincidence that hetero web sites have cheerleader sections any more than homo web sites have jock sections).

What I find interesting is that we sort of buy into these fantasies. That is not to say that I am disagreeing with it in any way shape or form, I am merely asserting I find the somewhat dehumanizing aspect fascinating. I do not want to have sex with the man; I want to have sex with the manifestation of the masculine energies I am attracted to. I do not think of myself as a fetishest per se, mostly because inanimate objects by themselves do not bring me sexual gratification, but I most definitely acknowledge that modifying context or "rising to the occasion" to be someone you are not necessarily (role-playing?) can greatly enhance the overall experience. When I, or anyone I know for that matter, is looking for, or at, sexually explicit material we are not terribly concerned with the universe outside of the immediate visual context. I do not find myself terribly concerned with what the pretending-to-be-18-years-old-captain-of-the-high-school-wrestling-team thinks about economic globalization and how it is disturbing the indigenous peoples of the South Pacific. I am not remotely inquisitive about the sultry stripper's desire to complete her bachelor's degree in electrical engineering while maintaining a self-reinforcing social life. It does not occur to me that an all male swim team that sits around in various sexual configurations in the locker room for hours on end will doubtfully ever compete successfully in inter murals. These are all simply things I do not care about. They do not lend themselves to successful sexual fantasy. These contextual questions that emulate reality seem like they are akin to masturbating to thoughts of your, or any potential, partner saying "I have a headache," or "I'm just not up for it." Totally acceptable in the real world, because that is how life works, but that does not change the fact they are decidedly not arousing

However, there is something overwhelmingly enticing about completely discarding the fantasy elements of a situation and focusing solely on the human qualities. I feel the best examples of this are represented in some very specific movie moments of the last few years. One of my favorites is between Tim Robbins and Samantha Morton in "Code 46". Without giving away the plot, there is a particular scene where Morton's character has essentially been biologically programmed to attempt to run away from Robbins. Her body wants to run, but her mind wants to stay. The conflict is both palpable and visceral. She tells Robbins that he has to make her love him. All of the context leading up to this particular scene (e.g. fights, talks, societal elements, Orwellian future, etc.) make it what I feel is one of the absolute hottest sex scenes ever recorded on film, not even counting the whole "violence and sex are inseparable" argument. The scene includes a lot of moaning, kissing, crying, and an amazing soundtrack. The human emotion is clearly the driving force. Another excellent example comes in the new Bond film. Prior to this movie I would not have said Daniel Craig is a particularly hot man. Attractive, yes; Handsome, yes; outright hot, no. One scene in particular in the movie, involving a shower and all characters fully-clothed under less than ideal circumstances, essentially left me breathless. That was the moment where I would have said "absolutely, yes" to Daniel Craig in my bed. Possibly even eating crackers, though that is difficult to say. Once again, it is the relationships between the characters and their humanity shining through that drives the scene.

So there we have two equal truths on opposite ends of the spectrum. The complete fantasy without context, and the fantasy based entirely upon surrounding context. The second case certainly occurs outside of cinema as well, but film works exceptionally well for illustrating the point. Surely I am not alone in this split. I have been to too many sex shops, porn vendors, and late night coffee shop discussions to not believe that this dualism does not cross the minds of other people. Maybe I am just exceedingly fascinated with the mechanics and logistics of what people like to get off to. Maybe I just really enjoy porn. Who knows? All I know is that I am going to continue with my overly-masculine-frat-boy-jock-type-standing-around-the-locker-room-wearing-football-pads-
and-a-jockstrap-questioning-his-sexuality-and-beating-off fantasy every bit as much as I am going to sit around and be turned on by deeply moving character conflict that drums up from some carefully scripted plot line all to a Hans Zimmer musical score.

Labels: fantasy, introspection, sex

The concept is simple: take the first sentence of your writing from every month and list them out.

January: I'm a lousy blogger.

February: I wish I had a semantic thesaurus that could act upon an entire sentence rather than just a single word.

March: Does anyone still read this??

April: I promised myself that once I had a legitimately being job that I would use a small portion of my income to engage in various frivolous activities purely for the sake of decadence.

May: My mantra lately has been "ask for help when you need it."

June: Do you ever notice little behavioral trends you get into under certain situations?

July: Day 1 Part 2: Today's tour of the city started off with lunch at a dim-sum style restaurant somewhere in downtown Shanghai.

August: So I'm sitting here watching the new Pinky & The Brain DVDs and having an ongoing discussion with myself.

September: Very nearly a year ago I set out on a mission of self-exploration and change to develop, and more fully integrate, things into my life I didn't have time for in college.

November: You know your training is effective when like an idiot you fall in the shower... not regular fall, but through the curtain and out onto the bathroom floor style fall, and somehow you manage to have enough body awareness to position yourself in the air as to avoid both the hamper and the toilet and catch yourself on finger tips with chin tucked as to avoid hitting the head on tile.

December: Several years ago I remember taking one of those EQ tests that supposedly analyzes the many different factors of your abilities, in contrast to an IQ test that only tests your "intelligence".

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With the exception of January and March it sounds like I have had quite the year. There has been a lot of hellish introspection this last season cycle, but it has also been one of a lot of self-exploration, a great deal of fun, and a lot of growing.

Hopefully 2007 will be something of a repeat year. That is with the fun and growing. Not so much on the hellish introspection.

Labels: meme, reflection

I know I have mentioned this to several people in the real world, but I have started house hunting. A few weeks ago I got in contact with a recommended agent, Maria, who has been helping me through the whole ordeal. To date I believe I have examined somewhere in the neighborhood of ten houses, most of which have been total crap.

Interesting story: The first day we went house hunting I actually found a place I really liked. The essential selling point on the place was that it happened to be a single-family detached house with a massive upstairs loft-like master bedroom. That particular room occupied the entire second story and had dimensions of something like 23x14 or something equally absurd. Anyhoo, I totally planned on using the upstairs as a combination open-air office, music listening, and movie watching room and using the downstairs bedroom (which was also a master, hooray for split masters) for my personal living space. So we make an offer and discover that the seller's representing agent is an absolute buffoon. She acts like we have made some kind of personal assault by offering her client less than the asking price and then proceeds to counter-offer us an amount *higher* than the original asking price. Clearly she is well known and sought-after for her prize-winning negotiation skills. The house had been on the market for 80-something days at the time of our original offer, which was something like three weeks ago now, and continues to sit on the market. We plan on giving it another week and then we are going to make the same low-ball offer again and see what happens.

Tomorrow morning I am meeting up with Maria again to check out several places in Tempe. Hopefully one of them will turn out to be promising. I am definitely antsy about getting my own space again, especially since this space will quite literally be Mine. Capital M.

Labels: house

Holy shit, it's reading day. I completely spaced out on the fact, mostly because I'm not actively a student anymore. For those of you not familiar with reading day or those of you that didn't have one in college, it's one day off between the last day of classes and the first day of finals. In years past I would have been gearing up for an anal pillaging at this point from a whole host of people.

Here's some crazy stuff:
1) One year ago, plus or minus 4 days, I became a full-time employee and a part of the US economic structure.
2) I am not currently a grad student.

And the creepy part? I'm not totally convinced I want to be a graduate student. Why? Because having spent a large portion of this last year doing statistical analysis and coordinating stress/scale testing at work I have a different appreciation of what contributes to research. I can now say that I have conducted research in the capitalist work place, as well as the academic institution. The only difference: the academic research doesn't functionally matter.

The papers I co-authored are functionally worthless. I have acknowledged that from the get-go. Interference reduction in fixed antenna environments with total modification to both link-state and routing strategy are a good THIRTY years away from being implementable. Academic research in computer science is roughly 30 years ahead of anything we can possibly implement. Not only that, but the vast majority of the people involved in it don't actually realize that. It's research for research's sake, which is fine... as long as the individual appreciates that the fruit's of one's labors are totally ephemeral. Think I'm wrong about that? 802.11b which has been in use for several years now, but is still reaching for broad adoption, is a set of modifications to a protocol called ALOHA that was first deployed in 1970. The vast majority of wireless technology, routing schemes, and all the other who-ha academically researched between 1970 and 2000 has only made tiny influences on the actual state of corporate development.

This conflict can best be summarized as: which bullshit is more tolerable? If I take the academic route I am effectively signing myself up for coworkers so far removed from reality and efficacy that I'm really just making shit up. If I take the corporate world I am essentially a cog in a larger economic institution where I have to listen to talking heads and the forces of "management" that often do not even have a technologically relevant background.

Maybe it is the Taoist in me, but I want to just not participate. I do not want the bullshit, I do not want the hassle, I do not want meaningless papers, I do not want to work 9-5. Life is going to make me choose a path one of these days. The trick will be in finding a path that can at least harmonize somewhat with my other goals.

I should definitely start acting on those "start my own business" impulses I have been getting again lately. That would be good for me...

Labels: employment, grad school, life

Several years ago I remember taking one of those EQ tests that supposedly analyzes the many different factors of your abilities, in contrast to an IQ test that only tests your "intelligence". Honestly, I hate the IQ test mostly because I think there's a lot more to intelligence then "pick the one that doesn't belong" and "complete the sequence." Regardless, I remember being exceptionally pleased with the results of my EQ. I remember scoring in the top 99th percentile of several areas (e.g., verbal, mathematical, and reasoning) which put me in the archetype of "the visionary." This all came to mind earlier this evening because when you do really well in several areas, you tend to suck it up somewhere...mine happens to be spatial reasoning/analysis. I rank in at a very impressive lower 30th percentile. Seventy out of one hundred people are substantially better at spinning and folding things than me. I cannot visually manipulate things in my head to save my life. No, seriously, I truly and utterly suck at anything that requires me to perform 3d modeling in my mind's eye, including path finding.

This evening I was set to meet up with Heidi at the house she is currently staying at in Paradise Valley. The directions were simple enough. I, like always, could not maintain all the steps of the path in my head. I think it was a total of like four turns between Shea and my final destination yet somehow I was still calling for confirmation. The mere price of $599 for a very nice GPS unit for my car is easily worth the savings in my dignity.

Ultimately though I am honestly not really upset about the trade-off. I would much rather have visionary skills, whatever those may be, than be really good at more visually artistic endeavors. Somehow I manage to do a passable job at photography, but mostly because I think the finer points of the art appeal to the more scientific part of my brain. Exposure levels, f-stops, aperture control, timing, focal points, etc.

Me and directions: fruitless endeavor.