"Life's greatest happiness is to be convinced we are loved."
- Victor Hugo
"Love is a snowmobile racing across the tundra and then suddenly it flips over, pinning you underneath. At night, the ice weasels come."
- Matt Groening
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February 27, 2005
It has finally happened. This evening at 9:37 Kyoko-chan (my van) rolled over her one hundred and eighty-thousandth mile. That's 180000 miles, or 289681.92 kilometres for all you metric types out there - which really isn't as exciting. Tell you what: when I hit 186411.36 miles, I'll have another little celebration.
The theme will be "Kyoko-chan breaks the speed of light".
"You seem talented, but you're lazy. You need to work harder."
Sage words from an anonymous who shall remain strange.
No wait, that's not right.
February 24, 2005Alright. Before anything else gets written today, the Enteric Nervous System or, the abdominal brain. Yes, you read that correctly. There is a brain in your gut. Granted, it consists of a mere hundred million neurons - which translates to about 0.1% of the number of neurons in your melon - but even so, that's a lot of smarts for a seven-metre-long sausage casing.
More to come. My sister just called looking for someone to play some pool.
February 22, 2005I've always felt that a lot of people have a difficult time discerning the difference between the erotic and the simply dirty. Beautiful Agony makes the distinction awfully clear, methinks - although this fact still does not make it safe for work. You have been warned.
However, if you're at home (or are the president and CEO of the office) and have an appreciation for beauty in eroticism, then you should check it out. I think the site's byline "facettes de la petite mort" sums it up perfectly - it sure has touched a nerve in the online community. Google it and see what happens.
It's not the sexuality or the titillating aspect of the clips that keeps bringing me back to the site (although I will admit that it helps), but more the fact that these people are letting the world into this most intimate part of their lives. I am captivated by the details of the films: the flushing and colouration shifts, the subconscious tensing and relaxing of various muscle groups, or the look in the eye when you know the person is no longer there. I believe these people are not performing for our collective stimulation and amusement, but rather they are capturing a fragment of their youth and vitality, taking these purest moments of life and displaying them in crystalline form. This is beauty as I have never seen.
I keep catching myself with my face right up against the screen, trying to spot the details that make each a uniquely familiar experience. As both an aesthete and a scientist, I suppose I enjoy the opportunity to analyze and observe the event externally. It isn't often that one gets to disassociate themselves entirely from such a situation - at least not in my life... I like to participate, an you blame me?
IN OTHER NEWS: I've been poking around the few poems and such I've posted on this site... is there not a single one of you that could have told me that these poems suck? I'd have appreciated the honesty, if nothing else. Granted, I know what I'm on about in most of them, but tonight I looked at them with a critical eye, and I find almost all of them sorely lacking. Self-indulgent, formulaic or simply boring they are. I don't know if other poets are the same, but I have a hard time putting myself in the shoes of an outside observer when reading my poems, so it's difficult to be analytical when editing them. I mean, how much do I love the personal pronoun? I graduated from high school a long time ago - not that you can tell from my writing.
Ergo, I humbly beg: if you find anything here that strikes you as banal, mundane or merely trivial, please let me know. It's the only way I'll ever get any better. Be as abusive as you can, I won't take it personal.
Hunter S. Thompson has died. He was my last surviving hero.
Again with the photobooth.
February 20, 2005A dream.
February 18, 2005Slow. Today. My brain is rather upset with me. Here's a rambly-shambly kind of story that sums up how I feel today:
I'd like to tell you a story. It's a story about a boy, and it's also a story about a girl. Most of the good stories are. Now the boy - let's call him Orange - woke up one day feeling quite hungover. He had somehow managed to stay out until five or so in the morning, yet hadn't bought a drink from about ten-thirty on... someone else had done all the buying for him. Which is a whole other story in and unto itself.That's as far as I got. It's a real cliffhanger, huh? It might get longer, it might get changed, it might get posted beneath Tea Set. I don't know. Feedback would be good. February 15, 2005
Anyway, the boy decided that what he needed to cure his hangover was all the burger he could handle, so he wandered on down to the local diner and placed his order. He was sitting there, trying very hard to work on a crossword puzzle (it gets a lot more difficult when one's brain has been dipped in alcohol) when all of a sudden, a girl walked in - we'll call her McIntosh, or Mac for short. As Mac passed by Orange's booth she turned to look at him just as he looked up to see who was coming in.
Then everything stopped for a second.
The girl sat down with a couple of friends, and it just so happened that Orange and Mac were seated in such a way that everytime one of them looked up, they saw the other. Which wasn't a bad thing. Still unable to do anything other than sit and wait hungrily for his food, the boy politely tried not to stare, and also politely pretended not to notice when the girl was looking at him. And vice-versa.
This is the part where the boy makes his first mistake of the day.
Eventually the time came for the boy to go, so he, in his stupor, paid his bill and wandered out the door and down the street, thinking about the girl the whole time. He ran a few errands, used a photobooth, and was taking a shortcut through an underground mall when all of a sudden, the girl appeared - only this time she didn't see him. Orange froze, not knowing what to do (it's a well-known fact that pretty girls make boys dumb) and she disappeared into the crowd.
Well, they boy spent the next little while wandering around kicking himself for not speaking to the girl, but figured that he was probably a little stinky (see: hangover, above) and should just head on home. This was likely the boy's second mistake of the day.
Still thinking about the girl, Orange had made it about halfway to his apartment when he had a realization. Or a revelation. Whatever - they both start with the letter 'r'. He had been amusing himself by thinking of all the witty and clever things that he could have said had he been a little more on the ball, so to speak. He had developed quite a pleasant little story in his mind when he realized (not reveled) that he had unwittingly become caught up in a real story - one that he couldn't conjure up an ending for, no matter how hard he tried.He needed the girl to finish the story for him.
The bestest Valentine's photo ever: 
- stolen without permission from my friend Adrian's site. Don't worry, I'm not leeching bandwidth, I took a copy for my very own. I think I might make it my desktop... if I can stop laughing.
Here it is: the brand-new XHTML format. Pretty sweet, huh? There's nothing like having to put in all sorts of extra effort to end up with fundamentally the same thing I started out with. Except it still gives me grief in Mozilla - ergo, any 'zilla heads or Opera fans out there will have to be patient with me, I fear. I just can't seem to get the layout to work out the same in all browsers... but everything should still be legible at least. That's got to count for something.
Next up: Javascript. That should bend my noodle a bit.
I suspect most of you are expecting something special for Valentine's Day... you ain't gonna get it from me. I've made it twenty nine years without a date on this day, I don't intend to start now. Don't get the wrong idea; I've been in relationships that have encompassed this particular evening, but for whatever reason, either myself or the femme du moment have been otherwise engaged. I've never been particularly concerned with this, as I feel that Valentine's day is about the most "Hallmark" of all the holidays.
I'm sure everyone is well aware of the origins of the day, so I'll refrain from mundane repetition (that's what Google is for, anyway) but I will point out that there was not one, but three St. Valentines - all of them rather brutally tortured and killed. What better mascots for a day of love and romance?
My cynicism gauge is already topping out, best drop the subject before I go off the deep end.
Hit the photobooth this afternoon.
February 12, 2005Man, I hate going to the medical clinic in East Van... it's always so much more hassle than it is help. I went in this afternoon just to get a referral to see a dermatologist (I got a rash that all of a sudden appeared out of nowhere... weird), and instead got an appointment for a blood test. Every time I go in there, they try to set me up for an HIV test - I swear, you walk in there and say "I've got a splitting headache" and their response: "Have you been tested for AIDS recently?". Today I just didn't feel like arguing the issue again. What the hell - it's only a few minutes of my time, and I'll finally find out what blood type I am.
A second (a likely more valid) reason for my particular disdain for my local clinic is the simple fact that there is a certain amount of... oh, let's be polite and call it 'unprofessionalism' that goes on. The first time I went in, Dr. Love (I kid you not) diagnosed my perpetual slenderness not as the resulf of an overactive thyroid or hyperactive metabolism, but rather as a parasitic infection. Tapeworms, to be precise. I had recently returned from the Far East, after all. He then proceeded to give me three containers for the stool samples I had to collect for analysis. Eew.
However, I performed the required task (but did not put the samples in my fridge as recommended) and brought the samples to the nearest lab. Imagine my chagrin when the lab tech took one look at the samples and said: "Uh, these are no good. These are urine sample containers. You'll have to do it again with the proper... equipment." Goddamnit. Another round of poo-poking and a return to the lab. Time passes. A long time passes. Finally, I call the clinic and ask if they have received any results.
Care to hazard a guess? You got it - they didn't even know who I was, let alone have lab results for me. Turns out that the good Doctor Love lost my file somewhere between the examination room and the front desk - a distance of about ten feet. I tell you, if it ain't gross ineptitude, it's inquiries into my sexual history peppered with commentary suggesting disbelief: "Oh really? ... Hmm, are you sure about that? ... Never?"
There's nothing I love more than Doctor Love trying to dredge up sordid details of my past when there are none. Really. First-time or recent visitors to this site should check out the archives and see just how (sadly) true that is.
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