Tomorrow Never Knows
(21-30 May 2006)

30 May 2006
-Back to the "grind".  Luckily, it still feels nothing like a grind, & if this keeps up, it may be the last job I ever need.  My creativity seems bursting at the seams & all I want to do is work & do projects.  Isn't this exactly how it's supposed to be?
-When did so many people get iPods?  I can't imagine having portable music being that important to me.  Of course, I was always the kid with the $10 tape or CD player.
-Running into someone that one never thought they'd have to see in one's life again is likely to derail a day, doubly so when the other person probably feels the same way about one.  The universe seems to like rematches.  Which also leads to my question of the day... how is it that unpleasant & mean people can devote their lives to doing good things?  It's just so odd.

29 May 2006
-Worst.  Pub Quiz.  Ever.  A Memorial Tutorial, we are not.
-I will never tire of the way that Fish & I tend to tell stories.  I think others protest that the style of rambling on & on with twenty-nine tangents annoys them, but it really doesn't.  People are smiling & laughing too much amidst their claims of annoyance.  Some of the old standards never quite get old.  & finally, I ask the world:  Is it really that bad a thing to turn people down at high-school dances?  Really?  People make it sound like I'm the only person they've ever met (aside from perhaps John Schneider) who would turn someone down for a dance.  It's just saving everyone time & grief, people.  Seriously.

28 May 2006
-Quite frustratingly, both of my attempts at posting in the Craigslist gigs section were pulled by people reporting it as "spam".  Apparently there is some sort of feeling that even though Craigslist is filled with calls for internships & work that is paid in ways other than cash (like notoriety, as in this case), if a website does it, it's spam.  Or something.  Between this & Digg shooting down the Mep Report, I'm beginning to believe that no medium for democratic promotion is actually democratic or available for promotion.  But more compellingly here than the Digg case, where we just wanted promotion, I really did want to get artists to work on a project in this case.  I'm going to give it another shot in the artists community section.  At least before getting pulled the second time, I did get some responses from people who are interested.  Gonna need a few more to make things happen, though.
-The blog seems to be a fading practice amongst many of my friends.  I haven't had the energy to update the Italics Purgatory on the BP People page, but there would be a wave of italics if I got around to it.  Also, there are currently zero candidates for 2006 Best New Blog.  I'm just sayin'.  It could be you.

27 May 2006
-Spent a truly fabulous day playing baseball.  Well, not actual baseball, but we played wiffleball & baseball with a tennis ball & aluminum bat.  We had a ton of people out on a softball diamond a few blocks away (on the edge of Ohlone Park), & managed to play a total of 8 innings (3 wiffle, 5 tennis/aluminum).  Kevin nearly hit a homer over the right field fence that wound up being a long triple off the base of the fence.  I wound up pitching a lot, both adversarially in wiffleball & softly to my own team in the second game.  If we could do something like this every weekend, life would be so much better.

26 May 2006
-June is shaping up to be a great month, if I can make it over the usual speedbump.  Lots of fun to look forward to, including a visit, 2 Counting Crows concerts, an M's series in Oakland, 3 Giants games, & my first trip to Train Mountain.  Can that really fit in a month?  It's almost enough combined solace for me to deal with Fish leaving.  But let's not count our fun before a speedbump is behind us, eh?
-Tomorrow I will post the content of this posting around the actual site here & maybe some places other than Craigslist (artist forums?), but for now check this out & tell people who might be interested about it!

25 May 2006
-You know that old baseball analogy about hitters in the zone seeing the ball as a grapefruit coming at them with every pitch?  I used that to no end yesterday on the Mep Report to describe how my day went yesterday.  It's a zone I often get in, when I get closest to seeing straight through all the inner machinations & ridiculous superfluousness of much of life & can only seem to focus on core realities.  Once I'm there, it's impossible to be derailed by almost anything that happens & negative experiences just make me laugh instead of get bogged down.  People forget in bashing manic depression that the manic side is actually a state of euphoria that is better & more real than almost anything anyone else ever experiences.  & if one looks at manic depressives in history, the things they've accomplished on the manic side out-do most other peoples' greatest moments by a long shot.  The creators of the bipolar bashing want you to believe that the manic times are erratic & irrational, but they're quite the opposite... very focused & highly productive.  Anyway.  The point is that this life-as-a-grapefruit state seems even higher today already.  Get in the zone!!
-There are times when I believe that the human body is meant as nothing more than a water filtration system.
-So in talking to people and processing files at my new job, I'm slowly discovering that the top position at my Center is a little akin to the Defense Against the Dark Arts teaching position at Hogwarts.  Not necessarily that the people in the role are nefarious, but the position itself seems plagued by inconsistency & intractable turnover.  The current person is brand new & continues to remind me of Zirkin.  I like everyone at the job, and I would never mean to disparage the institution, but the little quirks like this are quite amusing.
-Squash.

24 May 2006
-You remember that thing about memory being a curious curse?  That phrase is one of those things that just never stops being boomingly relevant in the daily playing field of the mind.  The mind-field if you will.  Pun so intended.

23 May 2006
-Finding out that a day is going to be a Tuesday is never a good thing.  & I'm not even talking about today!  It might finally be time to get things in order, just in case.
-Nothing like investing 3 hours in an M's game that's close & getting closer only to have them give up NINE runs in the 9th.  Yikes.

22 May 2006
-Another week of the job & I'm feeling pretty good about everything.  Settling into a routine, starting to see the roadmaps for future projects & all.  Just getting in the groove of things.
-Giants 9, Cardinals 2.  This was a great game for a lot of reasons.  It was close for a good long while, but then wound up being a blowout with a seemingly endless 8th inning to pad the lead & make Armando Benitez' incompetence irrelevant.  Em brought her laptop from work, so Fish & I spent a decent amount of the game enjoying the M's-O's game on MLB-TV (free wifi in the ballpark) while simultaneously watching the live game in front of us.  Now that's getting a baseball fix!  This was also glorious because the M's won 8-6 & I got to watch Eddie Guardado actually wrap up a save (though I was furious at Hargrove for giving him back the closer job when he hasn't earned it & J.J. Putz has been great).  Regardless, the future is now.  If I hadn't sliced open my thumb shortly before the first pitch, it may have been the perfect evening out.  Oh, & if Bonds had hit 715.  But I guess I'm just not destined to see historic baseball milestones (see also trying to see Ichiro's record-tying or -breaking hit in 2004).
-Stina notes that my grammar is atrocious in my entry from 2 days ago & makes it sound like everyone lamented how old & tired Stina & Dav were.  Indeed, everyone was old, & everyone aside from me was tired.  But we did not lament only the couple's states of being.  This is why Fremont schools pay her the big bucks.

21 May 2006
Happy Birthday to Lauren Cusick
-It's been a good solid weekend, with lots of reading & movies & such.  "Da Vinci Code", which we saw on Friday night was a very clever plot that was horrendously acted.  & I very rarely say that something has bad acting.  Tom Hanks, usually Oscar-worthy in every role, was just terrible.  "United 93" (saw that today) was much better, with a documentary feel & a pretty even-handed approach to everything, including revealing some suspect slowness to react from some key people & agencies.


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