Monthly Archives: August 2003

“Dimujin and Family”

Posted on by

Just got back from dinner. The waiter was pretty cool, gave us a flyer to the music gig he does down in Belltown. It’s “Hip Hop Infusion” by DJs Dimujin and Family, down at this Japanese restaurant called En. The name of their music style can’t help but remind me of Dakah, the hip hop orchestra that I was introduced to by my friend Aleksasha.

Yeah, I think Seattle will be alright.

In other news, I got a LiveJournal account thanks to my wife. I’m not using it, though (I’ll likely just post a link to here whenever I update). It’s mostly so I can have ownership over my comments when I post in livejournal pages. Not a big fan of the “anonymous” thing (hence why I have anonymous posting turned off here… and am considering making user accounts for my site as well).

Just a quick post, I’ll talk more tomorrow, I’m sure.

Zombies

Posted on by

I think I’m going a little stir crazy. This is being exhibited not in me running around or getting particularly irritable (at least, I don’t THINK I’ve been getting irritable), but by me zoning out for no reason whatsoever. Just staring off into space for extended periods of time, becoming more and more distant and non-communicative.

I’m not really communicating with anybody: Mickey is off at work each day, which leaves me without a car, and without anyone to talk to. I think it’s started to affect me in a way similar to a zombie. In modern mythological definitions, zombies eat brains. They NEED brains. It’s not that they’re necessarily bad creatures, so much as that they are overwhelmed with an insatiable hunger for the grey matter. I’m finding myself identifying with this hunger for brains. Each day, I feel like mine is atrophying, not for lack of study so much as the lack of interaction with other people in a third place.
Continue reading →

Ramble, Light

Posted on by

Just a quick ramble, not more of the rambling I’ve been doing the past few days.

I’ve been spending most of the day finding things to do other than write my essay. This is partially because a cluttered house is a cluttered mind, but mostly it’s just avoidance. Our last set of shelves arrived this morning while I was out getting our car serviced, so when I got back I set them up (Mickey had to go to work). After building the shelves and setting them in place came the fun task of getting all the devices onto the shelf and plugging them in appropriately. This involved much craning around and contorting myself into a pretzel to get behind the tv, a place which at this point is fairly inaccessible.

I finally gave up being a contortionist and did what I should have done in the first place: moved the TV away from the wall and hooked everything up, then moved it back into place (I also moved it a few inches to the right, per Mickey’s suggestion/request).
Continue reading →

Passion vs Obsession

Posted on by

Before I get into the central topic of this thread, I’d just like to give a shout out to my cousin Cortney. Happy Birthday, hope it was a good one!

I’ve been sitting around the house for most of the day, not really doing much of anything. I read some email (not much, though, as I don’t have much lately), and chatted on IRC for a while (in fact I still am, in #applegeeks over on the Aniverse servers). Mostly what I’ve been doing is thinking about what is important to me, and what things no longer are, or at least not AS important. I’ve been thinking about streamlining my life a bit, organizing it, pursuing my personal goals more and worrying about other people’s expectations less. I haven’t come to any concrete conclusions yet, but I think overall it has been helpful.

Now, it’s around 8:50 in the evening, and we’re back from trying another restaurant in the area (sushi, so my choices were a little [self]limited, but I managed alright). I’ve discovered the music channels on the cable service, and have some jazz playing in the background. Now seems to be a good time to reflect.
Continue reading →

“The Normal Life”

Posted on by

I have never been one that could be called “normal.” I know, I know, normality is a very fuzzy concept, but put aside the “everyone is a unique snowFLAKE” circle-jerk for a moment and realize that there IS something called “normal,” and that a lot of people are just that. Normal. That does not make them sub-par human beings, or without talents, or a unique identity that makes them who they are. It’s just that when you add up all those talents and personality traits and actions and thoughts, it comes out to “normal.”

To claim that I am not normal like other people may seem a little egotistical, what with the current fad of “doing your own thing, just like everybody else.” This is by no means how I mean it. I’m talking about the ever-present sense of alienation from one’s peers, of doing things differently despite yourself, of trying to fit in and be like other people even though a part of you inside is screaming out and rebelling against normality as hard as it can.
Continue reading →

On Halo (and Other Things)

Posted on by

This past weekend I was inundated with Halo. (For those not familiar, Halo is an extremely popular Xbox first-person-shooter made by Bungie, one of my all-time favorite game companies.) Let me explain what I mean. Early last week, I received an evite inviting me to a Halo LAN Party by my friend Robert. Now, I hadn’t played Halo in about 9 months, and hadn’t played it with ANY degree of regularity even then (I’ve logged less than 12 hours of Halo time, even after this HaloFest), so I dug out my xbox and copy of Halo and played an hour or two (long enough to get comfortable with the controller again), and then headed over to the party. Mickey opted to stay home, sending me first to see what it was like (since she doesn’t play video games, if EVERYONE there was a gamer then she’d be pretty bored). She sent me armed with pie, though, so that’s fine.

Suffice it to say, she probably would have had a ball. There was a nice mixture of gamer and non-gamer, and lots of good conversation was had before we sat down and started playing Halo. (They all loved the pie, too. With a Strawberry and Blackberry pie, how can you go wrong?)
Continue reading →

The Long Rant Goodnight

Posted on by

First off, Mickey finished working on another image recently, and will likely be posting it later tonight, so do check the visual gallery sometime soon. I’ve seen the image in question already, and I think you’ll be well pleased.

Next: sorry for the lack of posting. Hopefully you’ve all noticed that Mickey at least has been posting regularly on her LiveJournal account. I simply haven’t felt up for posting lately, in the midst of getting everything set up and such. That is not to say that I don’t have a lot I want to say, merely once again making it clear that desire [to speak/write] is not always enough of a motivating factor. What finally got me motivated to post? Frustration.

We ended up going with cable modem instead of DSL, because Qwest was dicking around with us and we got fed up… we’ve been pretty satisfied with the results of that decision, which I’ll talk more about in a second. For now, please bear with me. There is one (1) cable connection in the apartment, which is downstairs by the front door. Rather than pay lots of money to get the house rewired (foolish since we don’t know how long we’ll be here, and it’s not THAT big a deal), I’ve moved the cable modem and my airport base station to that location. While this is good in some ways (I can run wire directly from the router/base station to the hub housing the console connections), it means that I’ve had to find a solution in getting my PC connected adequately upstairs in my office.
Continue reading →

The Long Haul

Posted on by

Okay, so I’m finally getting around to posting about the trip across the country. The delay in posting about it is purely because I’m a lazy slacker who sleeps away the days in a lackadaisical fashion not dissimilar to a coma patient. That, or I’ve been busy unpacking and generally want to go to bed by the time I have a chance to sit and write a blog.

The truth is probably somewhere in the middle.

I don’t have it in front of me right now (and don’t feel like trudging outside to the car to get it), but I kept a logbook of the starting mileage at the start of each day of the trip, plus departure time, date, and location. The starting times would probably be more useful if I also wrote down ending times, but c’est la vie (Emerson Lake and Palmer?). I’ll post it sometime later, for the truly curious (or truly bored… some days, there isn’t much difference). [Worth a passing note but not much more: I also keep a running logbook of date, mileage, gas, and location that I filled up at in my car. It’s not that hard a habit to get into, and being able to look back over the past 50,000 miles of your car is pretty damn cool.]
Continue reading →

Long Day’s Night

Posted on by

It is currently 11:30 (or so) in the evening and I’m bushed, so I don’t think I’ll be posting my next travel installment today… hopefully tomorrow though.

Just a quick post to say that Mickey said it would be okay to link her livejournal account… so I am. Be sure to give her all sorts of grief… err, I mean, comments. Yeah, that’s it. Comments.

We bought a TV today, and did some swimming, and hung out with Eli and Megan (on their great cross-country sojourn): more on everything later. For now, sleep. Mmmmm, sleep.

Back on the Air

Posted on by

Before I get into a long ramble about the recent not-so-rambling trip across the country Mickey and I took in order to get to our new home in Bellevue, I’d just like to say: No Dad, the title of this post does not mean I’ve been getting on the radio (KB1EKQ, in case any of you other hams are wondering). :)

That out of the way, on to the rest of the post.

So, when I last posted (August 1st), I was waiting for the movers to arrive, it was pouring, and we were wondering when the power would shut off. Just as I began thinking about posting another entry just that damn bored, the electric company shut off the power (as they said they would, and as we asked them to). Yet another reprieve for you poor folk that I’ve managed to cajol into reading the site.

Since there wasn’t much point in waiting for the movers to pack the electronics (since they could no longer verify that they WORKED), we packed up the stereo and the computers, and waited for a while longer. Finally, the movers arrived (not saying they were late: we just wished they’d gotten there sooner), and in a mere two hours of two guys hauling our stuff down the stairs and into a 53′ tractor trailer, we were on our way.
Continue reading →