LiveJournal Project - March 2003

Apparently I still believe that someone will listen to me.

Date: 2003-03-01 15:28
Subject: weeeeeeeeee!
yeah, so i just bought an xbox, and two nifty games - halo and panzer dragoon orta. i always said that i wasn't going to give in to the evil empire, but after playing halo at mark's house for like 3 hours a couple weeks ago, and getting sucked in, i found it hard to resist. especially when you consider that there just aren't really any games for the PS2 (that i already had) that i felt like buying. that, and, well, i'm generally bored off my ass and need something to keep me entertained. yeah. so who knows how often i'll be poking my head out into the daylight in the near future. =/

Date: 2003-03-03 13:04
Subject: 3 more weeks
went to the doctor today to have my ankle looked at, three weeks after my snowboarding incident, and it looks like i'm going to be off the slopes for at least 3 more weeks. nothing's broken, but apparently there are three components to the main ankle ligament on the ouside of your foot, and as a result of that nice little "pop" sound heard when i biffed it, i'm now minus one of those components. the doc says that this sort of thing is treated just like a fracture and it's a 6-week recovery time. so for the next three weeks, i have a bunch of ankle exercises to do in order to strengthen it, and then i'll be ready to mess it up again. on the plus side: the doctor said that in 3 weeks time if i do all these exercises, it'll be stronger than it was before, so the likelihood of a repeat performance is actually less. woohoo.

Date: 2003-03-04 07:54
Subject: whack-ass dream sequence
ok, so i just woke up, even though in my dream i felt like i'd been awake for days. and it wasn't like i was even really doing much of anything in my dream except crying. yeah, that's it. weird. very, very weird. both because of the activity in the dream, but also because of the level of realism. most of my dreams (at least the ones i can remember) feel like, well, dreams. even if i can't control them, i generally know that whatever is happening is just inside my head and nothing to really be concerned about. so i'm a little disconcerted this morning. what i don't know, though, about the dream is whether or not the loss of the person that i was crying over was literal (i.e., the person died or something) or just metaphoric (i.e., said person doesn't talk to me anymore or something more like that). either way, it all fucked with my dream-self pretty good.

other random bits of dreaming last night told me that stormshadowsong is going to hook up with an arab guy and get pregnant, and that borders and barnes n' noble are not the best places in the world to search for music. yeah, as if i didn't already know that second part already.

and i didn't even have any oreos before bed!

edit: as i think about it a little more, i know exactly what that first dream means. and i guess that's just the way it goes.

Time: 11:27
Subject: oh, the mental image...
this is by far the winner for quote of the day:

"I am truly protected. I know now that the only thing between the virgin membranes of my tender rectum and the pus-dripping cock of terror is the condom of the CIA."

a comment made regarding this: http://www.cia.gov/terrorism/buster.html by Woodchuck on the dc-stuff mailing list.

Time: 22:06
Subject: just some stupidity to pass the time. =)
you, too, can be an international crime lord! (link to dead game elided)

Date: 2003-03-05 13:24
Subject: (no subject)
ravyn's word of the day is ..... spun.

Date: 2003-03-06 05:32
Subject: wells fargo can suck my ass
i don't understand it. i have a checking account with wells fargo. i don't use it that often, it just keeps a small amount of "holy-fucking-shit emergency money" in it. most of the time it just sits there, neither growing nor shrinking, since i don't get interest and there aren't any monthly fees. ok, fine. so i actually decide to use some of the money in there to buy something because it's the most convenient way to do it (foreign currency, you can order it directly from the wells fargo website): they'll just deduct the fee from the account and fedex me my alien dinero. yay. after said purchase i should have had about 18 bucks left in the account. but as i log on to look at it this morning, out of abject boredom and a total inability to sleep for the second night in a row (well, i think i may have slept a few hours somewhere during the last 12, but i'm not sure, and generally if you can't remember if you've slept or not, i think that means that either you probably didn't or it wasn't very restful), i find that instead of having my lowly $18, which i wouldn't care about anyway, i'm actually ten dollars in the hole! what the hell? they've charged me an overdraft fee of $29?? maybe this is the "new math" or something - zero isn't really zero; 18 is actually zero? i wouldn't have a negative balance had they not charged me $29 in the first place, and of course there's no explanation on the website as to what caused the fee to be charged - no bounced checks (last one i wrote was in february), no electronic purchases (don't use the account for that), nothing. apparently they think that they can just make up this phantom bullshit. so i've sent an email to their customer service people, and if it isn't corrected today i'll be marching my happy ass down to the branch tomorrow to watch as they fix it in person. and if they don't, well, i'm sure they won't give a shit about losing my piddly +/- $10 account, but they might be a little more concerned if the rabbit decides to take up a new financial home. assholes!
what's really sad about all of this is that wells fargo probably isn't any worse than any other major bank out there. you'd think that banks would WANT your money, so they'd be a little nicer and more professional. oh, wait, that must've been a dream of utopia. and i didn't have any of those since i didn't sleep. blah.
Mood: aggravated

Time: 07:56
Subject: doubleplusungood
http://www.azcentral.com/news/articles/0304NEWS-IRAQ-USA-SHIRT-DC.html

NEW YORK - A lawyer was arrested late Monday and charged with trespassing at a public mall in the state of New York after refusing to take off a T-shirt advocating peace that he had just purchased at the mall. According to the criminal complaint filed on Monday, Stephen Downs was wearing a T-shirt bearing the words ''Give Peace A Chance'' that he had just purchased from a vendor inside the Crossgates Mall in Guilderland, New York, near Albany. ''I was in the food court with my son when I was confronted by two security guards and ordered to either take off the T-shirt or leave the mall,'' said Downs. When Downs refused the security officers' orders, police from the town of Guilderland were called and he was arrested and taken away in handcuffs, charged with trespassing ''in that he knowingly enter(ed) or remain(ed) unlawfully upon premises,'' the complaint read. Downs said police tried to convince him he was wrong in his actions by refusing to remove the T-shirt because the mall ''was like a private house and that I was acting poorly. (more available if you follow the link)

all hail the thought police! but you know, one thing i don't quite understand about this story. according to the article, the guy bought the shirt in the very same mall that he was ordered out of. well, fuck, if the security guards thought that the shirt was a threat to public safety, why didn't they attempt to close down the store or have the merchandise removed?

update.... the mall dropped the charges.
http://www.timesunion.com/AspStories/story.asp?storyID=112620&category=REGION&BCCode=HOME&newsdate=3/6/2003

Time: 16:40
Subject: sometimes ya just have to wonder
WASHINGTON - Iraqi President Saddam Hussein has ordered uniforms replicating those worn by U.S. and British troops and will issue them to paramilitary fighters who would attack Iraqi civilians and blame it on Western forces, the U.S. Central Command charged on Thursday.

now, we all know that saddam's a bastard, and he's attacked his own people before, but with continually-rising opposition to the war, both at home and abroad, this sort of story really seems like something pulled straight out of the CIA propaganda lab. trust no one, agent mulder.

Time: 19:14
Subject: fuck the little shrub and his propaganda
ok, i admit it, i've been a bit of a post whore today, but anyway, i've been watching shrubya's news conference on the whole iraq business, and it just makes me ill. aside from not even answering some of the more direct questions (and you could actually see him get flustered at points), apparently mr. bush doesn't even know the name of the new south korean president (even though he sent colin powell over there for his inauguration). the james bond villain's name was "no" - the SK president's name is ROH. moron.

i suppose i can't really expect the little bush to actually answer questions put to him, i mean, hell, he is a politician, but if his goal was to try to convince the anti-war crowd that he's doing the right thing, being more forthcoming with the information would be a logical step.

one of the reporters asked bush: what would saddam have to do to show that he's complied with the un resolution on disarmament? this seems like a reasonable question - hell, what i've read from the iraqi side is that they think that no matter what they do, bush is going to bomb their asses. bushcroft just says "disarm, disarm, disarm" -- well, maybe if they had some concrete guidelines and a timetable with specific deadlines, it wouldn't be such a nebulous clusterfuck. bush was also asked about the protests and anti-war sentiment, and he didn't really address any of it, except to say that one can't protest in iraq. big fuckin' deal.

i don't know why the little fuck even bothers to lie; he's going on and on about how war is a last resort, how he's praying for peace, and how he hasn't decided to go to war, blah blah blah - i agree with the retired general that was interviewed on CNN: unless something miraculous happens in the next few days, it's pretty definite that this (war) is going to happen.
Mood: annoyed

Date: 2003-03-13 16:19
Subject: another boring thursday in suburbia
apparently, scooby-doo and shaggy live in phoenix somewhere, as i saw the mystery machine van (well, more like the mystery machine minivan) on the way to the bank, and the guy driving it did bear a striking resemblance to fred. weird. but then even stranger, as i was on my way home from various errand-running, i noticed an ambulance on the corner of elliot and some side road about a mile from my house. a quick turn of the head revealed a one-car accident; the car had flipped over onto its roof in someone's driveway. i guess the dude really had to take a piss and took the corner a little too hard in his race to make it to the bathroom without having an accident. and i think it safe to say that the aforementioned strategy probably didn't work. =/

in other news, i discovered that my cats are even noisier in my dreams than they are in reality. no dreams of dragons last night, but instead i spent a bunch of dream-time just listening to raven and his incessant "mrrroooowww". strange. very strange.

wells fargo still owes me $29.00.

bring on the vegas.
Mood: bored

Time: 23:58
Subject: s-l-o-w-a-s-s computers.
i don't know, maybe i'm using the wrong collection of software or something, but it seems to me that i should be able to listen to mp3s and burn CDs at the same time without the playback of my mp3s fucking up on me. it's not like i have a slow computer (dual athlon 1700mp, 1.5GB of ram) or a slow ethernet connection (switched 100mbit). hell, there's really nothing slow about any of my hardware. all my mp3s are stored on a 3-disk raid 5 array on my other box (with is about on par with this one in terms of hardware speed) and i listen to them on the winblows machine via a samba connection. i suspect that the network connection and protocol probably doesn't have anything to do with it, since even as i'm typing this entry, sometimes the cursor freezes up and there's a momentary delay before the rest of the words appear. so what's the freakin' deal? is nero that much of a CPU hog? i'm only burning at 16x.
Mood: frustrated

Date: 2003-03-18 02:18
Subject: here comes the war!
since saddam doesn't plan on stepping down, and bush doesn't plan on backing down, it seems to me that we'll be at war with iraq in just a few days. so if we look back to my post from 1/22/03 in which i asked y'all to predict when the shooting was going to start, we have three people left in the running:

soulcuttr, who predicted 4/1/03
katryn, who predicted 3/18/03
stormshadowsong, who tried to get two guesses in but i'm only counting the first one: 3/21/03

looks like one of you is going to be right. in fact, if we give saddam 48 hours, that would put the earliest war might start at 3/19/03, and i'd be willing to bet that war will begin over the weekend, so my guess is that stormshadowsong is going to win the poll.

what a mess. there just seems to be something fundamentally wrong with the concept of starting a war to remove a dictator who hasn't directly attacked us. but, it looks like we're going to do it anyway. we live in interesting times. may we live to remember them.
Music: New Model Army - Here Comes the War

Date: 2003-03-19 04:58
Subject: he who controls the spice, controls the universe!
ok, so that subject has absolutely nothing to do with this update, except that i finished watching the "Children of Dune" miniseries on the sci-fi channel tonight. it was pretty good, but having not read that book in the series, i don't know how faithful it reproduced the story. guess i'll be making a trip to borders or something to pick up a copy and find out. in other news, mindvirus, spacekadette, myself, and some people i don't know went over to theklute's apartment to engage in some musical exchanges. i haven't had a chance to listen to everything i picked up, but i will say that i've got some interesting new tunes to listen to. i'm not sure if i'm going to like it all - some of what i've checked out so far doesn't really do a whole lot for me, but hell, i've got another 90GB free on my server, so there's no point in deleting it. someone, somewhere, might be made happy by the acquisition of a copy. =) and besides, i did get a copy of a cruxshadows CD that i didn't have, so that makes for happy ravyn.

there will most likely be a repeat of said music-sharing event, perhaps at my humble abode next time. my feline companions are, i'm sure, already set to harass the laptop users and play with the cables. wee!

it's almost 5am. i should really go to sleep.

Time: 15:11
Subject: the spice must flow.
in keeping with the dune-related theme of my previous entry...

ugh. regular followers of this inane collection of blatherings will note that every once in awhile i'll make a post about how things in the world just don't feel right. this is one of those days. a night filled with rather strange dreams and those dreams filled with people i haven't seen or talked to in a long time (one of whom i've been meaning to trek out to the renfaire this year and see, assuming that she's working it this year, to make amends for something i said about two years ago - how weird is that??) has led into a day in which my sense of things is just completely boggled. i don't even really know how to describe it - it's not a depression, or an anger, or anything like that. more like a sense of anxiousness - a "splinter in my mind" as morpheus says to neo. hell, there is a war right around the corner, so i guess it shouldn't really be all that surprising.
Music: Cruxshadows - Marilyn, My Bitterness (v2.0)
Mood: discombobulated

Time: 17:28
Subject: quote of the day, courtesy of the woodchuck

"The hell with slow-simmering the frog", spake the Grand Lizard, "Dip him in the god-dammed batter and deep-fry the fucker, I'M HONGRY!"

Mood: amused

Date: 2003-03-20 02:10
Subject: ...
this is a sad day in the course of human history.

one thing that strikes me as particularly ironic, though. people from bush on down talk about the horrors of war, how war is a horrible thing and so on and so forth. but when you stop to think about it, none of them really know what the horrors of war really are. they've never been there. in fact, i think it's a fair statement that most of us don't understand the horrors of war. i know i don't. i've never fought in the military. i've never had my hometown continually under threat of bombing. people say that 9/11 was a wakeup call, that it reminded the people of the US what the israelis and the palestinians face every day. but that's not really the case. 9/11 was an isolated incident, just like the oklahoma city bombing. even pearl harbor, which initiated US involvement in world war II, was just an isolated incident. none of these events represented a full on armed conflict on united states soil. and in fact, with the exception of wars fought early in the nation's history, there's never been a war fought on US soil. we've never had to deal with the prospect of rebuilding our ravaged nation in the same way that much of europe has over the past centuries. i guess one could say that we've been lucky to be separated from the rest of the world by vast oceans, to have friendly nations to our north and south, and a large, powerful military. but at the same time, i think these make us painfully ignorant of the true costs of armed conflict. war is always something that happens far, far away; a game played over long distances with consequences that always happen to someone else - never here, never to us.

we talk of fear: fear of war, fear of terrorist attacks, fear of fear itself; but how much of this fear is real, and how much of it is just media-induced paranoia and sensationalism brought on by ashcroft's reading rainbow of terror? nobody i know lives in any real fear that tomorrow s/he might wake up and sometime during the day be blown to pieces by a terrorist attack or some angry bomb from a hostile foreign power. maybe we need to be a little more afraid. but not fake fear - real fear. maybe if we understood what the horrors of war were really like, we'd be less apt to consider the use of force as such a viable instrument of statecraft. during one of his many speeches of the last few months, bush claimed that the most difficult decision he could ever have to make as president is that of committing the nation to war. perhaps if he experienced it first-hand, rather than via CNN and his history books (which he probably never read anyway, given his C-level, coked-out performance in college), he'd actually be able to make that statement and mean it.

where things go from here is anyone's guess, but it seems to me that it can only get worse.

Time: 02:21
Subject: quoted originally by raindrops
one more post about the war business, which i think says it all:

All right, let me see if I understand the logic of this correctly. We are going to ignore the United Nations in order to make clear to Saddam Hussein that the United Nations cannot be ignored. We're going to wage war to preserve the UN's ability to avert war. The paramount principle is that the UN's word must be taken seriously, and if we have to subvert its word to guarantee that it is, then by gum, we will. Peace is too important not to take up arms to defend. Am I getting this right?
Further, if the only way to bring democracy to Iraq is to vitiate the democracy of the Security Council, then we are honor-bound to do that too, because democracy, as we define it, is too important to be stopped by a little thing like democracy as they define it.
Also, in dealing with a man who brooks no dissension at home, we cannot afford dissension among ourselves. We must speak with one voice against Saddam Hussein's failure to allow opposing voices to be heard. We are sending our gathered might to the Persian Gulf to make the point that might does not make right, as Saddam Hussein seems to think it does. And we are twisting the arms of the opposition until it agrees to let us oust a regime that twists the arms of the opposition. We cannot leave in power a dictator who ignores his own people. And if our people, and people elsewhere in the world, fail to understand that, then we have no choice but to ignore them.
Listen. Don't misunderstand. I think it is a good thing that the members of the Bush administration seem to have been reading Lewis Carroll. I only wish someone had pointed out that "Alice in Wonderland" and "Through the Looking Glass" are meditations on paradox and puzzle and illogic and on the strangeness of things, not templates for foreign policy. It is amusing for the Mad Hatter to say something like, 'We must make war on him because he is a threat to peace,' but not amusing for someone who actually commands an army to say that.
As a collector of laughable arguments, I'd be enjoying all this were it not for the fact that I know--we all know--that lives are going to be lost in what amounts to a freak, circular reasoning accident.

--from Peter Freundlich: http://www.npr.org/programs/atc/transcripts/2003/mar/030313.freundlich.html

Time: 15:29
Subject: and the winner is...
i suppose it's a good time to declare the winner of my "predict when the war is going to start" contest. and, as a couple of you correctly guessed in a previous post, the winner is in fact katryn with a prediction of 3/18/03 - off by only one day.

and the prize for the winner is? free sushi! yeah, that's right, next time we all gather for sushi night, mary, your fish is on me. you'll still have to buy your own booze, though, that's not part of the deal. =P

i wonder if we should perhaps have another contest to see if anyone can predict when the war will be over. but hell, the definition of "over" is so nebulous that i probably would never have to declare a winner. even if saddam is killed or surrenders, we're still going to have a presence in iraq for a long time. =/

Time: 20:21
Subject: when people like assholes, it is my duty to out-asshole them.
if you cannot handle reaction to PUBLIC posts that you make in your journal, then you shouldn't be posting in public in the first place. grow up, get a thicker skin, and get over yourself.

Date: 2003-03-21 02:54
Subject: one more post before i attempt to sleep...
there's an old adage which goes a little something like this: "opinions are like assholes; everybody's got one, and they all stink." and to a certain degree, that's very true. but there's really nothing worse than people that form opinions and spout them off to the world without any justification. (no, chrisci5, this post is actually not directed at you - in fact, it's not really directed at anyone, specifically; i'm just in a ranting mood.) it's perfectly ok to examine the facts and come to a conclusion, and to say that "because of X, Y, and Z, i believe Q." even if your X, Y, and Z are incorrect data, and the premise on which you're basing this conclusion is provably false, at least you've taken the time to study something and then make use of a rational thought process to formulate your stance on a particular topic. hell, even people who don't actually KNOW anything but have the intellectual capacity to string together a coherent, logical argument are meritworthy in today's day and age of monosyllabic statements such as "bush is dumb" or "saddam must die." but for people who just pull their positions out of their asses and cling to them vehemently like some overused security blanket or a blindly-accepted religious dogma, your actions do little more than demonstate the vastness of the vaccuum that resides in your cranial area and the loneliness of those two brain cells that you cannot seem to rub together to form a half-coherent thought.

got an opinion about something? great. you're no different from me or anyone else in the world. but before you decide to foist your wisdom upon the unsuspecting masses, make sure you know what the hell you're talking about and can present your point in an intelligible fashion. otherwise, someone who just happens to be feeling ornery may come along and rip your fragile psyche into shreds.

in case any of you had any doubt, i am an intellectual elitist. and this is my manifesto. (sorry, i couldn't help writing that last part. i really should go to bed.)
Mood: hungry

Date: 2003-03-22 05:04
Subject: no megabucks for me. =(
watching CNN this morning, i noticed a headline that someone won the $39+ million megabucks slot jackpot in vegas. i guess cory and i were a week too late. ah well, there's always blackjack.

Date: 2003-03-23 01:21
Subject: reason? unreasonable!
after probably several months of having it sit on my HD, i finally got off my arse and installed what is supposed to be one of the most kick-ass music-making programs out there - "reason" by propellerheads. i've spent about 5 minutes looking it over so far, and i'm already overwhelmed. when i got home tonight i had some inspiration to work on some tracks, but i don't know if this technology is going to bury me in its complexity. =/

edit... it's now 3 hours later, and this shit is starting to make sense. wee!

Date: 2003-03-24 03:44
Subject: a thought. (yeah, one of those late-night cryptic ravyn entries - gotta love 'em.)
through your deceit, i have found my liberation. i wonder if i should be grateful.
Ed: I wonder what I was talking about...
Mood: hopeful

Time: 07:37
Subject: prescience?
i wrote this essay entitled "the democratic theory of war" several years ago for a class on international security, and as i look it over (hey, it's 7:30 in the morning and i have more brain cycles than i know what to do with) i see some things which appear remarkably relevant to the current situation in iraq and the "war" on terr'r. want to read the whole thing? Too bad... I think I have it somewhere, but not in an easily linkable form. -Ed.

bush says that we're going to help the iraqis set up a democratic government, and this will thus promote peace. he says the same thing about afghanistan.

ravyn says:

[T]he world is currently more nondemocratic than it is democratic, and as Mansfield and Snyder point out, "countries do not become mature democracies overnight. They usually go through a rocky transition, where mass politics mixes with authoritarian elite politics in a volatile way."¹⁵ Mansfield and Snyder went on to describe a study in which they examined war and peace in various regime types from 1811 to 1980. They classified states as democracies, nondemocracies, or mixed, based on several criteria, and then examined transitions to more democratic government and whether or not war took place. They found that "democratizing states were more likely to fight wars than were states that had undergone no change in regime."¹⁶

Democratization typically creates a syndrome of weak central authority, unstable domestic coalitions, and high-energy mass politics. It brings new social groups and classes onto the political stage. Political leaders, finding no way to reconcile incompatible interests, resort to shortsighted bargains or reckless gambles in order to maintain their governing coalitions. Elites need to gain mass allies to defend their weakened positions....

Needing public support, they rouse the masses with nationalist propaganda but find that their mass allies, once mobilized by passionate appeals, are difficult to control. So are the powerful remnants of the old order-- the military, for example-- which promote militarism because it strengthens them institutionally.... Governing a society that is democratizing is like driving a car while throwing away the steering wheel, stepping on the gas, and fighting over which passenger will be in the driver’s seat. The result, often, is war.¹⁷

and all of you folks can keep protesting until you're blue in the face, but ravyn says:

Chomsky also notes that the masses are generally ignored when it comes to foreign policy decision-making: "Three quarters of the population may support a nuclear freeze, and some of them may even know that this is official Soviet policy as well, but that has no impact on the policy of massive government intervention to subsidize high-technology industry through a state-guaranteed market for armaments."²² In a direct attack to the democratic peace theory, he also notes that popular resistance to military aggression does little to impede its occurrence, but that the public can easily be coaxed into support of a military action. "Such resistance, while sometimes effective in raising the costs of state violence, is of limited efficacy...and it tends to dissipate as quickly as it arises. At the same time, a frightened and insecure populace, trained to believe that Russian demons and Third World hordes are poised to take everything they have, is susceptible to jingoist fanaticism. This was shown dramatically by the popular response to the Grenada invasion." ²³

...........
the footnote references aren't really important, except to note that all of the sources i've cited in the above paragraphs were written between 1987 and 1995.
Music: Autumn - All My Lovers
Mood: awake

Date: 2003-03-25 09:05
Subject: what the hell, i'm awake??
long-time followers of my happy (and not-so-happy) adventures through this minefield we call life will recall that i've made several experimental forays into the realm of nootropics over the past several months. i've tried piracetam, aniracetam, centrophenoxine, and vinpocetine, both singularly and in various permutations and combinations, all with the intended goal of squeezing some extra performance out of the ol' noggin. (and also to synergize with a certain four-lettered illegal synthetic entheogen, just because i can.) sometimes i've felt like the stuff's worked, sometimes i've felt like i've just been popping a bunch of pills and getting little to no effect out of them. i'd say that on the whole the experience has been decidedly mixed, but definitely less than what i was hoping for.

not that long ago, i saw this: http://slate.msn.com/id/2079113 -- it was part of a slate/msn series on building better, smarter, faster, etc, etc, people. sounded interesting enough, so after the obligatory research reading, my standard "hey, what the hell, i'll try that!" curiosity reflex kicked in and i picked some up from an online retailer in the EU.

_purpleglitter_ has been listening to me rave on about this stuff for the last couple days and probably thinks that i'm going to turn into a pusher or something, but damn, i have to say, this may actually be the nootropic-type chemical that i've been looking for. for anyone that's ever done speedy drugs (tweak, coke, E, etc) or been a heavy coffee or soda drinker, you're probably familiar with the standard amped-up effects. ya get spun, jittery, twitchy, and just so overloaded with energy that you don't know what the hell to do with yourself, and often the whole house ends up so sparkling clean that someone'd have thought a whole team of OCD-ridden maids had come through and stayed for a week. and then when the stuff wears off, you end up feeling like shit, getting bitchy, and depending on how much you've taken, unable to go to sleep; and when you do finally make it to the letter Z, you've racked up such a sleep debt that you'd need a split and two double-downs to pay it all back. sucks.

so what if one could get the increased focus, motivation and energy that one gets with amphetamine-type drugs without all the unpleasant aftereffects? to be focused and motivated but not bouncing off the walls, and then be able to go to sleep when desired without having to call in sick the next morning from your daily obligations to fill in the extra hours? wouldn't that be the shit?

i woke up sunday afternoon around 1:30 thanks to a loud black cat who didn't think i should be sleeping anymore, and around 3pm i took 200mg modafinil. picked up cory from the airport, and we hung out the rest of the night, went to dinner, watched some QAF and war coverage, and all-in-all it was a good, happy, energy-filled day. nothing too remarkable about that as of yet - but after i took cory home at 4am i was still quite awake, and for some unknown reason i actually felt like working on a project that i've been avoiding all week. that, combined with my desire to try to get my sleep pattern back to normal (well, whatever the hell passes for normal for me, yeah) led me to take another 200mg around 5am monday morning. i then spent the next eight hours sitting in my chair in front of the computer working on that damn project, completing it, and being totally amazed that i actually seemed to want to do it. combine this with very little feelings of being tired save for the physical reactions i usually get from my eyes when i've held them open for too long (dry, red, that sort of thing). continued going about my daily activities up until i finally went to bed last night around midnight. and i woke up this morning, ready to go, after only 6 hours of sleep.

rewind. yeah, almost 36 hours of full-on wakefulness and functionality and motivation, no feelings of being spun or cracked out. no discernable ill effects at all. 6 hours of good sleep. is this shit for real? who knows, at this point. from the reports i've read, this stuff isn't addictive and has few side effects, but i don't plan on consuming it on a daily basis (if for no other reason than i don't have bunches of work to do on a daily basis and there's nothing worse than being motivated with nothing to do) in any case (not to mention that it's $150 for 30 pills if you have to order it online).

that was my sunday/monday. but, as i said to mindvirus yesterday, life right now (well, the last 5-6 days anyway) is surprisingly good and also quite amusing in a twisted sort of way. is this solely the result of my latest neurochemical adventure? i really don't know, but i wouldn't be surprised if it's playing some part in it. i know that part of it is from a dream-triggered epiphany that i had a few days ago, too, in which i finally realized that the last of the shackles which had been binding me to what's been a sadly destructive situation have been removed, and, well, the ravyn flies high at midnight. i don't know what that's supposed to mean (no chemical references intended), but for some reason i like saying it.

ravyn's song lyric quotes of the day:
"no matter how hard you try, you can't stop us now."
Music: Autumn - Even Now
Mood: cheerful

Date: 2003-03-30 03:37
Subject: conflict terminology, propaganda, and newspeak
it was decided that my original letter wasn't angry enough, so i added some fire to it. here's the revised version:

(being sent to comments@foxnews.com)

to whom it may concern--

as i watch the fox coverage of the current conflict in iraq, i can't help but notice the use of the phrase "homicide bomber" to describe the iraqi who blew himself up along with his taxi, and several us soldiers, as well as the recent bombing which just took place in israel. the use of this term is both misguided as well as inaccurate, and points out a clear and unnerving bias on the part of fox news. how can you possibly claim to provide "fair and balanced" reporting when the very newspeak that you're foisting upon the unsuspecting populace fails to paint an accurate picture of the actual events which took place?

anyone with a junior-high-school level education knows what the term "homicide" means. it's very simple, really: homicide is the killing of one person by another, and it's also a very broad definition which does nothing to delineate attacker's intent or modus operandi. as a result, anyone who bothers to spend even half a second analyzing this one-sided, ludicrous term can see that it is painfully inaccurate and devoid of any useful information about the state of affairs. this sort of empty-skulled behavior is something that i've come to expect from our C-average, pretzel-choking esteemed president, but i would hope (a pipe dream, apparently) for a bit more objectivity and intelligence from the news media.

first, based on the definition, ANY bombing in which people are killed by the person or persons detonating the bombs can accurately be considered a homicide bombing. thus there becomes no difference between a militant who walks into a crowded cafe with some C-4 strapped to his chest and kills three people and the bomber pilot who drops tons of high explosives on an entrenched military position and wipes out the entire force. is it really the intent of fox news to equate the american military and islamic fundamentalists?

as i'm sure you're aware, as it's applied in modern poltical discourse, the term "homicide bombing" refers to what has traditionally been called a "suicide bombing." notice the definitional clarity of the second term that is not present in the first one. it provides a clearer picture of exactly what happened during the attack and distinguishes the attack from every other possible type of bombing. when wishing to describe a bird, one does not say "large flightless bird" when one can be more specific and say "ostrich".

second, the term "homicide bombing" contains much potential for inaccuracy. the recent attack in israel killed no one except for the bomber. so it cannot be called a homicide bombing. it cannot be called an attempted homicide bombing, as the bombing was not simply attempted. it was carried out; the bomb exploded and people were injured. the only accurate term, therefore, is "suicide bomber" - it describes exactly what happened and leaves no room for misinterpretation.

rather than delegitimizing suicide attacks, as president bush hoped to do with the coining of this phrase, use of the term "homicide bomber" just furthers the slow and gradual distortion of the information put forth by the media. the american people are fed enough lies, half-truths and intellectual horeshit from more sources than we can count. we don't need any more.

Wow, I actually wrote a letter to Fox News thinking that they would give a shit? Silly Blackbird....