Didn't get to go to juggle night again tonight. Third week in a row. Work seems to be taking over my life.
Kimberly and I watched the first season of Buffy over the past three days. It's okay. I personally think it's like the The X-Files with slightly different assumptions and a superhero. It's not bad, but it didn't change my life.
Work just likes to find different ways of becoming crummy every week. If there were words to describe it I either wouldn't use them, or I shouldn't for fear of getting in trouble.
Self censorship is weird, but I have to do it because YOU are reading this right now.
Sometimes I'm very alone in my own mind. It's rather strange. My mind isn't alone, but it gives me time to unravel my thoughts. Not that I really enjoy that very much. Holli emailed me Sunday. Very odd. Not something that I expected.
I was thinking about asking Kimberly how she was a little while ago, but I did't because she hates that. Then I started thinking about how people ask, "How are you doing?" and what that means. That reminded me that the proper response is with an adverb to describe "doing," such as "well" or "poorly." I remembered the Save the Adverb page which no longer exists, but for which I still have a button on my main page. When people say they are "good," do they realize that they used the wrong part of speech? Probably not. Do they care? Probably not. Then I started thinking about thinking. About how I had unraveled my head from thinking about something useful and important (Kimberly, for those who are having trouble keeping score at home) and I had wandered into thinking about something useless, like a dead internet page about adverbs.
Why should anyone really care about the adverb. Language has to evolve and change in order to permit full expression. Words die. New words are born. It's part of a process which allows someone to communicate with someone else.
I always thought communication was a bit odd. I mean, I can sometimes barely keep my own thoughts and ideas in order. To think that I can take those abstractions and use bare words to make someone else understand what I am thinking is insane. The fact that I'm writing this surely indicates that I am insane. How often have you been in a discussion and realized that you didn't mean the same thing as the person you were talking to when you were using the same word do describe something? Language in flawed. A word that may carry great emotional weight for one person may be meaningless or silly to another.
Words strain,
Crack and sometimes break, under the burden,
Under the tension, slip, slide, perish,
Will not stay still.
-- T. S. Eliot, from The Four Quartets
I had a bad experience with that poem, but that is a different story.
Douglas Adams died last Friday. His books meant a lot to me. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy had a profound impact on my life growing up. I read it when I was in middle school and it was like a bible to me. To this day I make references to it without even thinking about where those references came from. I am very sad.
The stupid bank has yet to do anything about fixing our car loan. It's been six months since Kimberly wrecked the thing. This may never end.
I love computers, but users make me sad and politics makes me downright depressed.
I like to make computers do things. I'm currently trying to build a new firewall based on Linux 2.4.x so I can do neat things like not degrade download performance for Kimberly when I use gnutella or napster. I'm having trouble getting iptables et al to behave the way I want, though. I will eventually. It can just be a bit frustrating. I love getting computers to do what I want, though, so it's worth it in the end.
Well, you've wasted another perfectly good hour listening to Car Talk. See you next week.
Malachi B-J Brown malachus+spencerandbrown@gmail.com