Category: Uncategorized

Last night I pounded out my most furious drumbeats as my sister sang praise over them.

I don’t think we committed blasphemy…did we?

I just overheard the phrase: “most ghettoest”.

My life is now complete.

Thank you Moon Temple cocktail lounge of Wallingford. Just when I thought my life couldn’t possibly be any more diverse, you’ve expanded my realm of experience ten-fold!

There I was a week ago, so proud of myself for making it through all of winter without being sick. I even knocked on formica as I proudly proclaimed it out loud. I woke up this morning feelin’ like shit run-over twice. I got a fever to end all fevers. And if it doesn’t break soon I feel like I’m gonna be pushin’ up daisies. Maybe that’s a tad dramatic–guess I’m a baby when I get sick. **Pleack**

I just moved into a spacious and cheap 1 bedroom apartment in beautiful Lake City (across the street from Rick’s strip club). As I got settled in, it seemed to be working out fine for the first week or so. Then one morning I got out of bed and noticed my bare feet were wet and freezing. The carpet in the corner of my bedroom was soaked. “Sheeee-it” I thought to myself, the water could only be seeping up from under the floor possibly from under the foundation or a bad pipe. In any event, this leak will be a major repair; one that will probably require my displacement to a new apartment. Nothing could be more fitting since a major reason for moving from my last place was its bad state of repair. Here I am facing the same situation again not even a month later.

A few days later (yeah I suck at dealing with this sort of thing) I called the manager in to take a look (I’m sure I’ve contracted some fatal mold-induced illness in the meantime). He flipped but apologized profusely. I thought to myself “shit happens–I just don’t want to have to move again”. He said that while they fix it, I’m to occupy the adjacent unit, for the same rent (until it leaks, the ceiling caves, the wiring shorts, the plumbing ruptures or whatever else could possibly go wrong).

And so it goes.

At a night club here in Seattle, I spotted a dude who frequented my former haunt in Sacramento. This was back in my early years of goth-poserdom (circa 1999-2002) that coincided with a rather lonely time in my life. Unlike me–for my regular attendance I actually met very few people there–this guy seemed to already know all the regulars (except me) and managed to befriend anyone new with relative ease. I wanted to meet people the way he did. I wanted to know his friends. But that never happened; I moved away from Sacramento and started a new life in Portland and then Seattle.

Running into this guy the other night struck a nerve. My girlfriend (of 5 years) and I have just separated and I know that I am destined to endure another stint of loneliness. Why did this guy have to reappear at this point in time to mark the occasion and amplify my insecurity?

Such is life.

…This kind of business would never happen on blogger!
Come check it out yo: right here

Some ass-jacks hacked into my previous myspace account and shat out a bunch of endearing comments to my friends. My apologies to those of you who were privileged enough to receive them.

Incidentally, I’ve been trying to get some semblance of a replacement page up–the myspace server (or whatever) has been suckin’ some serious balls. Sooner or later this page will be back up proper.

I’ve been a bit sad this past week. My bandmates dismissed me. It was nothing personal, and I’ve been contemplating quitting for the same reasons. The short of it is, our shows have been going better than we anticipated for how briefly we’ve been in the scene. We received a great review recently and we’ve been getting offers to play more shows. Of course my shitty-day-jobbed bandmates all want to step up our collective effort to take advantage of this good fortune. They know that I cannot afford to put in any more time into the band than I have been. So, I got axed. I’m as relieved as much as I am disappointed, I guess. My dissappointment will eventually pass and when it does, I’ll find some new folks and start the cycle over again.

Sometimes I do the ‘tardedest things.

This quarter I needed to take an elective class to fulfill my 10 unit quota. Rather than finding something low stress and easy, I opted to take graduate level equilibrium statistical physics. How did such a class even enter my radar you ask? Well, 1) it came “recommended” by my department as a suggested elective for my emphasis: computational neuroscience, and 2) a fraction of the course content exactly tackles the statistical mechanical basis of An Introduction to the Theory of Neural Computation by Hertz, Krugh and Palmer–basically the bible of neural networks.

For the first couple of weeks I reveled in the success of my class choice. I learned mean field theory and the Ising model of ferromagnetism that closely parallels the Hopfield network model of Hertz and Krugh. Even though the class is intended for second year physics grad students I understood the lectures and did quite well on the homeworks. All seemed to be going as I had hoped… and then came week three.

All of the sudden we delved into the realm of quantum operators and scaling theory and renormalization group flow–all of which are theoretical methods well beyond the scope of my book or my interest for that matter. But I made a commitment to myself that I would stay in this class no matter what happens, so these days, in addition to TAing a human physiology class and spending 4 hours a day in my lab, I spend all of my “free” moments trying to wrap my brain around advanced concepts of theoretical physics.

Once again, here’s to my superior judgement with regards to my academic choices!