I will get back here eventually; I've just been busy. Below are some notes I wrote in the morning at work ten days ago -- kinda just to keep up, as documentation -- which was the last time I wrote anything, even though I'm supposed to be warming up for November. I don't even know what I've been doing since ten-days-ago, but somehow it's precluded writing.

10/16/2003
The last couple weeks have been dominated by the Grandpa Project, comprised of Grandpa: The Party, Grandpa: The Footstool, and Grandpa: The Book (of which the previous entry was an excerpt). To give a sense of this domination, here are a few examples of efforts related to element #3 -- The Book -- over the last few days:

���� 1. Last weekend, my dad spent probably 10 hours researching, composing, writing and html-ing an 8-page, super-corny, fake-news-article fan fiction that mentions every member of my extended family. It adds nicely to the 20 pages of super corny fan fiction that Jeff generated in previous weeks.

���� 2. Getting 65 MB of SCFF files off my old computer and to Kinko's for a color-laser printing was a patience-testing experience that involved zipping, splitting, 35 floppy disks, and trying to get True See to step aside for an hour Wednesday morning so I could use his computer and CD burner. 2 of the 35 floppies turned out bad so it was lucky I'd played it safe and lugged my whole computer to work as a backup.

���� 3. My mom is reconfiguring an italian leather coat to bind these pages. This cover is ultra-soft black leather, hand-stitched with a silky lining, stiffened with a thin polyvinyl core and neatly finished on all edges.

���� I'll have to take tomorrow off work to help set up for the party (transporting tables and chairs, ping-pong table, decorating, etc.). It's taking place in a rented house with a barn, somewhere on Cape Cod. Approx 22 people will attend, and I'm only excited about 4 of them.
���� Damn! I forgot to put the overdue history books in the car this morning.

���� Last week I heard on the radio mention of a contest in which for a week 5 contestant men are chained to a radio woman and five contestant women are chained to a radio man, and each day 1 gets voted off by radio listeners, winner gets $10,000. So I figured I'm a pretty patient person, and all the relevant tolerance muscles are in shape, things are kind of dull right now, I have no friends at the moment, etc etc, so why not? I'd meet some people, and I might even win some money.

���� So I wrote a 50-word email (4 sentences) that they request about my enticing features (unbalanced, retarded), and today they called me for an interview, which will happen next week.

���� Hm, diary, what else?
���� Well, I came up with a possible (more possible) alternate control scheme for the prize, because the original one was maybe impossible and definitely driving me mad. So as soon as I have some time I'll get back on that. I also have some drawing to do for it and I'm not too good at drawing.

���� It's nothing new, but I continue to not know what to make of life. Whether to care about it, whether to hate it, what to want from it, etc, and then further -- whether caring or hating or wanting, etc, is even a good idea. Last week I tried to explain to True See the meanings of "analog" and "digital" (he's taking a computer class). I mentioned cassettes vs CDs, magnetic recording, waves, digital images vs film, the robot cell phone voice, 1/3 vs. 0.33333333333..., whatever I could think of that was even remotely related. Given the student, there was only a very remote chance that I'd succeed and sure enough, I did not. I started wondering what it means for the world that the distinction has become important -- that the digital/binary/boolean concept that was once only relevant to logicians and mathematicians is now turning up as an actual and crucial parameter in things that ordinary people do all the time. Does or will it affect the way we think? Will it work its way into natural, or at least, socio-economic selection? What are the implications for whether caring or hating or wanting is even a good idea? Today, goggle-glasses, stale-smelling Phil, who for some reason has taken up researching Colby College -- "You paid THAT MUCH?!!! Only 1800 students?!! You got a football team?!! You know any of these people in these pictures?" -- pointed me to this article, full of intimate-seeming statements from a person who did a monstruous thing and has a lot to say about it, his thoughts sounding at once sincere, suspicious, on-point, and astray. It got me thinking about the well-worn paths our thoughts rut along in, as we try to understand the world -- cultural paths formed over crappy, crappy, psychopolitical discourse that have us dutifully puzzling happenings with solving-intentioned applications of theory, rather than reconsidering homo sapiens by way of things we do.

���� There was sort of a tie-up developing for all that, where personal existentialias and dementias and murder turn out to be analog, and absurdity is digital... but I didn't finish, and besides -- who writes crap like that? it's ridiculous.


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