Me:
So I guess the time has come (the Walrus said?) to talk of many things.
Of cars and phones and handball courts
of words that rhyme with "things."
So if you haven't heard, I crashed my car. I was in too much of a hurry and never saw the person who hit me. My insurance will probably cover it, but I'm a bit apprehensive, since I have the minimum coverage that would let me legally drive, and I haven't gotten a for sure on anything yet. And if that wasn't bad enough, the next morning my phone fell out of my pocket and the back cracked in a bunch of places. Not a great series of events for the expensive stuff I use all the time.
Combine all that with the fact that the only place with racquetball courts that are free to use is becoming a paid facility, and you've got a pretty nonplussed person. I still haven't figured out exactly how much it would cost me to continue playing, but I'm sure it's not cheap.
The only thing that seems to be way too nice is the weather. In fact, it's so nice I'll probably keel over dead. (Can you tell I'm an optimist?) I got off the bike today and felt a bit shaky. I quickly ate what was probably too much food (leftover chinese, two large pancakes, three pieces of bread with jam, and generous amounts of chocolate) before heading off to handball. I started off okay, but quickly realized I was fatiguing rapidly. It got to the point where at the end I was just serving and hitting one or two shots before giving up. Ugh. On the plus side, I felt a lot more comfortable on the bike at the beginning of the ride than I did yesterday. I think I'll need a day off tomorrow before hitting the road again on Saturday. It's supposed to be 57 degrees! That seems a bit absurd.
Speaking of Chinese food, I ate it three times today! We ordered from a new restaurant last night and got way too much, which turned out great. It was delicious. I had three meals worth of leftovers, and my parents each took some for lunch. My favorite was probably the moo shu vegetables, which came with an amazing plum sauce. Unfortunately, the food defies description (or I'm just really bad at coming up with words to describe foreign food), so I'm afraid I won't be able to say much more than it was a pleasure to consume.
I should be hearing back about my most recent LSAT attempt next week. It's kind of strange to think that that news will play a large role in determining what I wind up doing with the rest of my life. But I guess that's how things go frequently. Perhaps we just don't realize it in advance very often.
Observation:
I was sitting at work doing typical routine things when my mind, in one of it's unpredictable twists, started puzzling over the concept of sound and speakers and whatnot. It occurred to me that when I think of a record player, it has become ingrained in my mind that the record has somehow captured the sound and relates its tones to the machine which emits them. This, of course, is completely wrong. The record is simply a crude way of letting the machine know what sounds it is supposed to play. This may not seem like a crucial difference, but when I thought of it, my mind immediately jumped to a question: if the record's only purpose is to let the machine know what sounds to emit, couldn't anything "readable" be substituted for a record? By this I mean that, as long as there is a thing with different "states," we can arbitrarily assign those states tones or pitches or inflections and thereby extract sound from anything. For example, take any uneven surface, or any fluctuation of light. If we have a way of recording the differences in these materials, we can extract sounds from them in the same way we extract sound from a record. Granted, there's almost no chance the sound will be pleasant, but (and this may be a bit lengthy) this leads to the next point I want to make. Given that playback is simply a matter of assigning tones/pitches to variables, if we were to isolate the variables that are caused by sound itself, we would be able to resurrect sounds from anything they had affected. Yeah, this is what is used in a telephone. We know how sound affects the microphone, it translates that sound into electric something-or-others and it is then decoded by a speaker. But what if we could find out how sound affected everyday things? Like walls, for example. What if the walls really could have ears? If we could figure out what changed when a wall is affected by sound, we could theoretically design a machine to replay whatever sounds had affected the wall. Anyway, that's what popped into my head when I was sitting at my microscope.
Me again:
When I got back from handball I got hungry again. A serving size of potato chips is 13 chips. There are 16 servings in this particular bag, so according to my calculations, by morning I will have eaten approximately 200 potato chips. In unrelated news, 13 x 16 - the dregs of a bag of potato chips = 200. But hey, it's not my fault. They are about to expire in four months. I consider this adequate justification, but in case there are dissenters, you should know that I've come up with the best combination of dipping materials to date. See, if I dip my potato chips in one thing for too long (~6 chips), I get used to the flavor and they stop being addictively delicious. But if I vary my dipping strategically, I can eat indefinitely. Today, I used french onion dip and sweet and sour sauce (also left over from the chinese food). Amazing!
As long as I'm confessing, I also ate an entire king size bar of hershey's special dark chocolate today. I feel fat.
December 29, 2011
December 26, 2011
Christmas post
It's been almost a year since I started this blog, and almost a month since I updated it last. But I've posted 95 times now, which is a decent average if you think about it. And if I wasn't so frequently overcome by bouts of malaise when it comes to posting, I probably could have done better. As it is, for a first year, I think it has gone pretty well. I'm not unhappy with the switch away from the stricter formatting I started with. It was good in that it forced me to work on the things I wanted to work on, but the more I think about it, the more I realize that it's not incredibly important to work on your weak points in that fashion. Yes, I have difficulty motivating myself to write fiction and to come up with ideas. But I've decided that the best way to go about tackling this is to wait. I generally hate saying much about my ambitions for writing, but recently I feel as though I have some ideas percolating and am optimistic they might find some sort of form in the weeks or months to come. Please don't ask me about this. It's all I want to say. I'll just leave it at "I have a computer of my own again, and I intend to use it."
I just got back from a trip to Wisconsin to visit relatives, and I must say that on the whole it was quite a success. Everyone was pleasant, and despite getting overwhelmed a bit by all the socializing on Saturday, it was good to touch base with everyone. I was beginning to get that nagging feeling that I hadn't seen these people in too long. I'm not sure when that feeling will strike again, but I'm glad we had the opportunity (and fantastic travel weather) to abate it for a while. As with every trip, I had some random impressions and thoughts.
The first problem I encountered was whether or not to be modest around my Dad's side of the family. Sometimes it feels like there is a bit of a competition amongst the cousins regarding who is doing well and whatnot. I played it safe and took the modest approach. When asked about my plans I said I was waiting to hear back about my second round of LSAT testing, didn't really say much about my score, and only gave further information if prompted. It was a bit funny, really, because the cousin I felt got the most attention wasn't even in attendance. Laura, recently-married, was the topic of choice when it came to people who were doing well. She recently changed jobs and makes a lot of money as the person in charge of the books for a large non-profit. The rest of the cousins there were sort of the deadbeats, I guess. I'm living at home, Joe is working nights at a heat-treatment plant, Jeanine is working while finishing up a grad school thing in an area she didn't really want to pursue in the first place, and my sister is still in college, and so won't warrant attention until next year, when plans are more required. But Laura always was the one with the work ethic, plans, and ambition. Plus, her wedding photos were beautiful. It left me in an awkward situation, since of course I feel like I'm still going somewhere, like I'm taking steps to make something of my life, but of course so do the rest of these people to whom I'm hesitant to give credence.
That whole thing led to another small realization: until you've actually done something as a writer, you're a joke. Joe is theoretically also interested in being a writer, to the point where when people are going around talking about what their kids are doing, he gets called the "famous writer-to-be" in the family. I almost choked. I've never read anything he's written, and he might be fantastic, so that's not really the point. The point is, I'm sure that's what people think whenever anyone says they want to be a writer. And when that person is me, and I don't really pursue anything to the point of submitting it, I'm sure it's just as ridiculous to hear. So now I'm the "famous lawyer-to-be" in the family. At least when someone says they're going to be a lawyer it occasionally means something to someone...
I have two more things to say about Saturday. The first is that, until I'd been to college, I never realized the significant role alcohol plays in this family, but this year I kept a bit more track of who was drinking what and how often. The growing boisterousness and increased volume, coupled with the further and further stretching for sexual innuendos, all of a sudden made a lot more sense than they did when I was younger. When almost half the gifts exchanged centered around alcohol of some sort, all I could do was shake my head. I don't see the point. It's probably just lost on me or something. The second thing I wanted to mention is that chocolate is delicious. The dessert of the evening was a chocolate-cherry trifle, and I'm going to cannibalize it into a chocolate-raspberry concoction soon.
Well, my parents are back from their bike ride, making continuing to write a futile endeavor what with all the conversation (feline and human alike). So I'll try to write a bit more soon. Maybe not as much about the trip. We'll see. I hope everyone had a great holiday. I know I count mine a success.
I just got back from a trip to Wisconsin to visit relatives, and I must say that on the whole it was quite a success. Everyone was pleasant, and despite getting overwhelmed a bit by all the socializing on Saturday, it was good to touch base with everyone. I was beginning to get that nagging feeling that I hadn't seen these people in too long. I'm not sure when that feeling will strike again, but I'm glad we had the opportunity (and fantastic travel weather) to abate it for a while. As with every trip, I had some random impressions and thoughts.
The first problem I encountered was whether or not to be modest around my Dad's side of the family. Sometimes it feels like there is a bit of a competition amongst the cousins regarding who is doing well and whatnot. I played it safe and took the modest approach. When asked about my plans I said I was waiting to hear back about my second round of LSAT testing, didn't really say much about my score, and only gave further information if prompted. It was a bit funny, really, because the cousin I felt got the most attention wasn't even in attendance. Laura, recently-married, was the topic of choice when it came to people who were doing well. She recently changed jobs and makes a lot of money as the person in charge of the books for a large non-profit. The rest of the cousins there were sort of the deadbeats, I guess. I'm living at home, Joe is working nights at a heat-treatment plant, Jeanine is working while finishing up a grad school thing in an area she didn't really want to pursue in the first place, and my sister is still in college, and so won't warrant attention until next year, when plans are more required. But Laura always was the one with the work ethic, plans, and ambition. Plus, her wedding photos were beautiful. It left me in an awkward situation, since of course I feel like I'm still going somewhere, like I'm taking steps to make something of my life, but of course so do the rest of these people to whom I'm hesitant to give credence.
That whole thing led to another small realization: until you've actually done something as a writer, you're a joke. Joe is theoretically also interested in being a writer, to the point where when people are going around talking about what their kids are doing, he gets called the "famous writer-to-be" in the family. I almost choked. I've never read anything he's written, and he might be fantastic, so that's not really the point. The point is, I'm sure that's what people think whenever anyone says they want to be a writer. And when that person is me, and I don't really pursue anything to the point of submitting it, I'm sure it's just as ridiculous to hear. So now I'm the "famous lawyer-to-be" in the family. At least when someone says they're going to be a lawyer it occasionally means something to someone...
I have two more things to say about Saturday. The first is that, until I'd been to college, I never realized the significant role alcohol plays in this family, but this year I kept a bit more track of who was drinking what and how often. The growing boisterousness and increased volume, coupled with the further and further stretching for sexual innuendos, all of a sudden made a lot more sense than they did when I was younger. When almost half the gifts exchanged centered around alcohol of some sort, all I could do was shake my head. I don't see the point. It's probably just lost on me or something. The second thing I wanted to mention is that chocolate is delicious. The dessert of the evening was a chocolate-cherry trifle, and I'm going to cannibalize it into a chocolate-raspberry concoction soon.
Well, my parents are back from their bike ride, making continuing to write a futile endeavor what with all the conversation (feline and human alike). So I'll try to write a bit more soon. Maybe not as much about the trip. We'll see. I hope everyone had a great holiday. I know I count mine a success.
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