sunday, july 7

Which Cartoon Cat Are You? Quiz by gypsydance

--1:14 AM

      saturday, june 29

visited my favorite teacher from high school today. every year he sets up a fireworks stand to make money for the wrestling team at my good old h.s. i told him about my long-term idea of getting a ph.d., and i think i have his approval. it's funny how much it means to me. it means far more than any approval my parents might give, which will always be grudging and fearful, because my parents are grudging and fearful people. bless them for they have had a hard life as immigrants (although we have always been middle-class immigrants), but they just don't have the stomach for the rough-and-tumble of life in america. i want a ph.d. so i can expand my mind and my soul, and die a better person. they hope that i can get a government job so i can have a comfortable life. confucius said (and this is true, it's in the Analects), it's best neither to be the first nor the last, and that's what my parents are about. keep your head down. live a comfortable life, and don't make waves. i don't think they realized when it all began that starting a family in america would mean that their kids would be american, have american values, perceptions, and aspirations (although, what else would you expect? i often ask that myself), but that's what happened. that's what i am. i am fundamentally different from my parents; we're forged from different molds. and so i've had to find my own parenting. it's a lonely road.

--1:50 AM

      thursday, may 23

how to decide what to do in life? i am at a point right now where i could conceivably shift paths onto any of many different careers:

1. marketing
2. writing
3. professor (history, chinese, or sociology?)
4. urban planner
5. architect

but you know what i have learned? it's that the best purpose to pick for your life is the one about which you have the neurosis. there's no point in attempting to be healthy about it, or attempting to solve the neurosis in any other way-- psychotherapy, for example. there is something in all our lives that bothers us, and the only way to work it off, the only way to settle things, to make ourselves happy, is to sweat it off, to grind it down, to worry and strive and whittle (as opposed to, say, maintaining a zen-like calm) because worrying and striving and whittling is hard-wired into our brains. there was something on npr just today about this, only they called it tending, as in the tending instinct.

so, what i think i have a fire under my ass currently to do is marketing. marketing, i choose you. i'm neurotic about you because the job i got laid off from, and have still not replaced, was a marketing job and i feel i need to prove that i can succeed in a marketing job. i can't avoid it. so i will do it.

--11:59 PM

      friday, may 17

last year i had an experience that has been like a scourge to my soul. it has taken away much of my self-hatred and replaced it with a better understanding of love. but i am learning that it has not solved everything. it has not solved the below.

--1:34 AM

update: personals guy has fallen off the face of the planet. i emailed him last tuesday and haven't heard a peep since. oh well. on to more pressing matters.

i screwed up. i didn't pay a traffic ticket in time and now i'm faced with a bail amount four (count 'em, FOUR) times larger, and a suspended driving license. i hadn't really thought about it, but honestly, i thought they'd just slap me with a hundred dollar fine or something. i'm seriously freaked out. i had to take two days off work because i can't drive.

why did i do this to myself? i don't understand. i used to be more responsible. although, i was never as responsible as i think i could have been, not like one of those people that never pays a bill late, never steps over a line or colors outside a box. oops, i sound a little resentful there of the people that i'm supposed to look up to. in my experience, obeisance has always been something shoved down my throat, arbitrarily, by people of dubious moral and ethical standing. I HATE THEM!! I HATE THEM ALL!!! deep down inside, that is how i feel. i have a problem with authority. there. i said it. behind every time i've been late to work, or missed a deadline, or held up a meeting because i had not managed my time correctly, was my stewing, roilling, festering, green hatred of authority. of constriction. of forced conformity. and now... now i don't know what to do. because all of this hurts only me.

--1:14 AM

      friday, may 10

sort of strange the situations we find ourselves in (sorry, by the way, for not blogging in ever-so-long. don't know what's gotten into me, or out-of). i've been corresponding with someone off the personals ads run by spring street networks. i access it through nerve.com, he does through salon. i am trying not to make a big deal out of it. but i'm impatient to get his e-mails. it's like a chess game... he advances information about himself, i respond in return. i take a risk by mentioning something i like, then he takes a risk. but we're not playing in person, like dating. we're playing chess by mail-- correspondence by e-mail. why? he currently lives on the east coast and won't move to l.a. until july. so, here we are.

--1:48 AM

      friday, april 19

my psychiatrist is not a happy guy. how do i know this? well, his office is immaculate, yet contains some exceedingly ugly items: two smooth blue zoloft marketing items (one a hideous clock) that attempt to be sexy, yet scientific-looking at the same time. a small wishing-well planter made of beveled mirrors that looks conceived and assembled by a five-year-old. several diplomas framed in matching, bargain-basement brand gold frames. the diplomas represent at least six figures' worth of education, yet the frames can't have cost more than $6 each. what kind of mind willingly displays this sort of dreck? and it's all lined up with millimeter-precision, with the rest of the office left perfectly, immaculately bare.

i'm angry at him. today i arrived at my appointment 15 minutes late and he did nothing but guilt-trip me. as soon as i got in the door to his office, he demanded, "why were you late?" what happened to presumption of innocence? and i wish i could have been rude enough to remind him that i am, ultimately, the one that pays his bills, and then tell him to step to. but i didn't. he huffed his way through my tri-monthly checkup, stared at me like i'd grown a third eye when i said that i didn't always take my medicines at the same time of day (hey, it says "at bedtime," so i take it when i go to sleep, ok??), and contradicted something he'd said at my last checkup. then he cranked out the same prescriptions in the same dosages that i've had in the last six months, without any comment on the vast improvement in my state of mind since then, and hustled me out the door. argh! at my last visit i'd said that i wouldn't switch away from him to another psychiatrist at a closer office, but i am so wanting to do just that.

yeah, and he looks like frasier crane.

--3:20 AM

      tuesday, april 16

why is it that a hiring company can drag its feet, drop the ball, and be as uncommunicative as it wants while you're applying for the job, and fire you should you do the same once you get hired?
Enron is but one (grotesque) example of corporations that show no loyalty to their employees yet demand loyalty in return

--2:42 AM

      saturday, april 13

oh yeah!! i'm destruction!

Which Member of the Endless Are You?

--12:50 AM

      friday, april 12

just saw ben affleck on the tonight show. i suppose he is post-rehab now. and he looks like a different person. he isn't a cocky young ingenue anymore. he's looking humble, as if he's known chagrin and known consternation, seen his own mortality. good boy— good for him.

--12:17 AM

      monday, april 1

viva nerd humor!
The secret technology behind Google's amazing accuracy.

--1:51 AM

people should be wary writing to the net. they should be aware that ideas and views are amplified by simple virtue of being in print, and ponder their shortcomings and insecurities accordingly, so they do not appear ugly when publishing to the web.

--12:08 AM