Below are the most recent 4 friends' journal entries.

Saturday, November 7th, 2009
behindpyramids	3:12p	Miss Manners Gets on the Phone I love my cellphone to the point where it might be a new born baby fresh from my womb oven smelling of cinnamon and apples. It beeps, I pick up. It weeps, I hush hush into the mouthpiece. But here’s the rub: everyone else owns one too and they behave the exact. same. way. And you get a world where people answer while they piss in public restrooms, yammer away while hanging out, and probably text while they’re doing unmentionable and scandalous things that I can’t talk about because I’m rated G. Quasi G. My cellphone addiction=cute, understandable, totally reasonable. Your cellphone addiction= Me take it and pitch it over the balcony. Final result, everyone should be required to pass a basic etiquette class before they’re allowed to own one, but Congress is involved in some teensy debate about health care and that shizzle and with the economy and well… I think I’ll have to take things into my own hands. I’ve come up with some basic cell phone etiquette rules. I have broken all of them except number six because I don’t know how to put people on hold. Actually, let me be more accurate. I’ve shattered all of these rules and made pretty pots out of the pieces. At the rate I’m going: A) I will have no friends B) I will have no one to call on my phone Therefore this is my attempt to save myself from a life of doom. These are the rules. These are the rules I must not keep breaking, but I’m writing about them as a victim because it’s so much easier that way. ( 1. Do not pick up the phone if you can't take the call. ) ( 2. Do not pick up the phone if you don't want to take the call. ) ( 3. Be mindful of where you use your phone. ) ( 4. When you're on the phone don't have side conversations with the outside world. ) ( 5. When you're hanging out with the outside world, don't have side conversations with your phone. ) ( 6. Don't put people on hold, call them back ) ( 7. If someone tells you they have to go, let them go. ) Naturally these are subject to change depending on the scenario and it really boils down to some cute punch like: when in doubt don’t pick up. Thoughts? Additions? Stories? Cookie? Cookies! Current Mood: aggravated (16 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, November 5th, 2009
behindpyramids	10:23p	to you, a year after the rape I posted this awhile ago and took it down, but here it is, written, because: Sometimes silence is a pustle that needs to burst. Sometimes it is the only gift you can give someone. For better or for worse, I don't believe in silence. I am addicted to the terrible act of profaning silences and blank pages, so I wrote this letter which I will never send to you. And I will never tell you this because we are so academic when we talk about what happened to you a year ago, and you tell me that all is well in the world but... Last night I dreamt that you ran about the world on your milky white legs and men chased you. They chased you through the continents, past the sea, and finally they found you, caught you, tortured you, and did they break you? When I heard about what they did, I fell against a cabinet, clutched it and cried like the women who lose their children, cried like a pig being sent to slaughter. For a while, no one could find you. You sent daily reports: you had retreated to the sea, your had your legs stitched together, you became a mermaid and were applying to join the school. "You have to apply to get into mermaid school?" I thought but said nothing, because it would be a good life. You would swim beneath the ocean with a fleet of strong woman, the water combing through your hair, seahorses bobbing alongside of you, and there would be music for mermaids always sing. Mermaid school rejected you. I don't know why, or how, or what they were thinking, and I hated them, but loved them because you finally left the sea and came back to us. You hobbled into the room on crutches, your mermaid's tail failing against the ground, as you moved forwardly propelled purely by the grace, the power of your arms. Your mother held you for a moment before helping you into a bathtub. We gathered around the bathtub and I wondered if you would have to sit in it for the rest of your life because of your fish's tail, if perhaps it would have been better if you kept your legs. You turned to me and smiled, the same old smile made of rubber and bounce-back. "So good to see you," you said, a girl turned mermaid, far from the sea. I starched my cheeks, smiled and did not cry. I woke up clutching my phone and nearly called you. Only, what would I say? "Are you a mermaid? Don't become a mermaid." I fell back against the bed and wondered how mermaids procreate. I can't imagine that they have vaginas, so like fish perhaps. How do fish procreate? They lay eggs. I thought about you with eggs and nearly screamed. Then I remembered. You are not a mermaid, and you are studying Arabic, baking muffins, and going on dates with a shy sweet boy you do not like. It is morning, and a new day. So I put down the phone. It was only a dream after all. Still, I said a prayer for you, as I have done every morning this past year, although I do not believe in God. And this too, I will not tell you. Current Mood: weary (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Sunday, November 1st, 2009
13th_einherjar	5:55p	Current State of Something If science were really easy, I'd take it just for the heck of it. This is partially the case in 1st semester postgrad bioinformatics, at least so far. I'm doing not-horribly and haven't actually done any readings or outside-of-class work. Therefore, I enjoy it. This is not the case with relativistic quantum field theory. This class takes a disproportionate amount of time for me to make half-assed progress on the problem sets. I wish I had not signed up to take the exam for this. Similarly, I have a large and difficult programming project in lattice QCD. Since I don't want to work in academia or research, this kind of study is unimportant and not rewarding to me. When it starts to eat up huge amounts of time that could be dedicated to more relevant tasks, I start to really hate studying. This applies both to physics and computer programming. I currently oscillate between being okay with taking a little more science and absolutely wanting to leave it for good. Fundamentally, there's nothing I hate about science - I just hate the fact that it takes an awful lot of effort for something that will never grant me what I desire. This changes under the circumstances that: 1) I find away that I can attain my desires through science. 2) Science becomes worthwhile for other reasons (such as being satisfying on its own). 3) Science becomes easy enough to do as a sidequest. I am currently focused on #1. My hope is that with Bayesian inference, a good problem-solving mentality, strong mental discipline, and great patience for complexity, I can learn social skills faster than normal. Social skills aren't necessarily an end in themselves, but I find myself wishing almost constantly that I had more. For this reason, I am going to try not to hate science. Because I already have it, and it's a sunk cost, so any benefit I can squeeze out of it now is better than nothing. I'm writing a LiveJournal post to remind myself of this. Plus, who knows, maybe in a year I'll discover a new way in which computers can solve all my problems. It is also worth noting that I hate science out of fear that I will be straightjacketed in a scientific or engineering career. I must take additional steps to resist this, but having a science background shouldn't force me into using it, at least not in the US. (Comment on this)
Monday, October 26th, 2009
behindpyramids	11:48p	My Man Godfrey I want out. There’s the kind of love they tell you never to have. It’s for, oh hell, let’s be original, let’s be fresh, let’s shake up the litany and say: a man named Godfrey. Godfrey is sitting down at the computer and vomiting all over the page until there’s nothing left inside of you. Godfrey is this poem. Read the poem all the time, read it between spreadsheets and homework assignments, send it to all your friends, read it until it echoes in your head, a great ringing bell and know— You’re nothing without Godfrey. But Godfrey appears once a month and it’s glorious and then he says, “Goodbye sweetheart,” and he’s out the door, to London, to Paris, to fucking Bali, who knows, who cares and it is goodbye. Goodbye Godfrey. Only it’s never goodbye, its Godfrey all morning, Godfrey all afternoon, Godfrey all night. Godfrey, as you walk to work. You chase Godfrey down white sidewalks lined with scarlet and mahogany trees that form a canopy overhead. Godfrey is in the golden mist of seven thirty a.m. when the city is just beginning to wake and the sun still believes anything can happen. Godfrey peeks at you through spreadsheets you work on midmorning, whispers, “What are you doing darling? Come here, come home to me.” You count the hours, count the minutes, arrive home, flip open your laptop and…there’s no Godfrey. Godfrey doesn’t exist. Godfrey is never coming back. You tell yourself you’ve given up hope. Any reasonable person would get out. Any reasonable person would invest their time in something more lucrative, or at the very least, if it’s that bad, board a plane, sail off into the sky, and find Godfrey. Look for him in the cobbled streets of London, hunt for him in Paris’s bakeries, coax him away from the beaches of Bali. Instead you wait. You bake jam muffins, take Hindi classes, talk to your coworkers and laugh at their jokes and ache a little inside. They think you’re mad: can’t talk about TV, can’t talk about sports, doesn’t understand pop culture references can only talk about Godfrey, Godfrey, Godfrey. “Give up,” they say. “Get a life,” they say. And you find, indeed, you have lost the art of conversation. You don’t have anything to say except, Godfrey, Godfrey. Goddamn you, Godfrey. You start going to the gym after work. You run on the treadmill because you hear that somehow, running on circles sets people free. You run like it’s going to turn you into a great white bird and you’ll circle around the poor pathetic gym and then bust out of the apartment soaring over the trees and you’re never coming back— And your lungs give out, your head spins and you slow to a walk, slow to a stop. Get off the treadmill. Walk around the gym, dazed. Crawl back to your apartment, cram a jam muffin in your mouth and curl up in bed with your computer, a half creature facebook stalking other people to live their lives and you open Word and write: “I want out,” and right there, there’s goddamn Godfrey, beaming at you. Suddenly you can live with yourself. Suddenly you rather like yourself and the future unfurls her red carpet for you and Godfrey and that is all you need.... And Godfrey doesn't show up the next day and you scream, and you bang your head against the wall, stop because it hurts, and then keep banging it because you know even if you pack up your books, throw down the pen and scream at Godfrey to go away, and he goes and you become an investment banker who speaks in spreadsheets, you’ll still wake up every morning thinking Godfrey. Current Mood: angry (99 Comments |Comment on this)