I had a wild and feverish dream. In the dream I was sitting at a kitchen table looking through a list of classified ads.

"Ha!" I exclaimed. "I am qualified for all of these jobs! Don't these people know that the only thing you need in order to do what they're talking about is have a basic set of computer skills? Apparently not-- look how much they're offering!! These skills must be in short supply if they're offering that much for these jobs." I continued looking through the jobs. Every job reaffirmed the fact that the skills that I had were exactly the ones that they were looking for. My unknown companion nodded obligingly over his or her orange juice, busy reading a different part of the paper.

I woke up with my body and face drenched in sweat and the blankets twisted around my legs like ropes.


So the moral of the story is...

If this is an example of what my dreams are like when I have a FEVER over 100 degrees.... I wonder what my real job search is going to be like?

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Inside the world of my book, a ragtag group of unlikely companion is being chased by legions of Trollocs, coursing through wilderness on horseback, staying just ahead of their pursuers. Their protrectress is growing more weak with each time she must call upon her magic to keep the army of approaching darkness at bay. The lads, previously untested in battle, are still smarting from their close encounter with death, the wild beating of their hearts as yet unquieted, the sweat on their brows in the midst of the cold winter's day unnoticed. Not enough time has passed for them to process what has happened.

Inside the real world, yes, where most of us live, I am sick. This is some kind of karmic retribution for the entry I wrote earlier, because I forgot to mention that nobody, NOBODY likes being sick in the summertime. GRAAGGGH! Now I have a slight fever but I took some medicine... all day it seemed like the medicine hadn't been working, but I think just that I had gotten a bit worse during the day and the medicine had staved that off until it ran out a bit ago. So during the day I just thought the medicine was doing NOTHING. But maybe that's not true.

Now I'm trying to eat some dinner but I've lost all sense of taste. I was wondering what the hell was missing from my meal as I spooned it into my mouth and then I had my answer. No taste. Tomato soup: no taste. Baked beans: no taste. I downed a cup of my very tart cranberry juice. Nothing, just the barest glimmer of taste around the edges when I licked my lips. My friend at work had it the worst though, she had a bad cold and when it left her, she couldn't smell, and worse, she couldn't taste but three things. I can't remember what they were, but any three things would get tiresome after a short while, because sickness distorts all smells and tastes, and EVERYTHING she ate smelled like one of those three things. It's been months and she went to see a specialist about it, but he told her only time would give her her senses back. In the meantime, nothing she eats tastes good. It's a wonder she eats at all.

Now back to my dislike for taking any kind of medicine, perhaps I'd better explain. This dislike extends to many other things: drinking coffee, alcohol, smoking cigarettes, etc. I kind of thought that I was alone with my strange reasons, until one day I was talking to Justin about it. I admitted to him this aversion to all of these items, and when he asked I explained that it was because if I were ever kidnapped or my plane crashed or whatever and I suddenly found myself in the middle of the wilderness (I usually think the jungle... maybe the Amazon... it did happen once in Animorphs), then I was going to need every advantage I could get to survive. If I usually used pain meds to get over my pain, the pain I was about to feel would be ten times worse. If I was addicted to anything- coffee, cigarettes, anything--- I would have to get over that addiction, which would bias me just that much towards not surviving. I wasn't going to take those kinds of odds.

"Or," said Justin, "If you went back in time."

Justin doesn't do any of the above things (except drink alcohol, the reason for this discussed below). Not because he thinks he might at any moment be dropped in the middle of the Amazon rainforest, no... but because what if suddenly he were transported back into time, to a time that didn't have a Starbucks on every corner or readily available Advil for his every pain? WHAT WOULD you DO??!?! You'd be struggling with all of the changes associated with another time period PLUS you'd have a ripping headache from your caffeine addiction!! You'd never survive. Alcohol, as you might have surmised, is usually available in other eras, that is perhaps the reason it gets the go-ahead, though I don't know. It's easier not to be addicted to alcohol than cigarettes or coffee, though you can become socially addicted fairly easily to all three.

Now whenever I talk about stubbornly not taking medicine I bring up the Amazon, and Justin rightfully appends "or back in time".

........ because you never know.

...............are you ready?

Well looks like my modern CRUTCH, that is, DayQuil, has taken a little bit of effect. Guess it's time to get back to the world of my book, where their problems are obviously way simpler than mine.

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So I'm having sweet peas for dinner. Big bowl of sweet peas. I was just not going to have dinner because I randomly had an onion bagel around 6, but it was 8:30 and I was hungry and I have all these random cans of sweet peas and when am I ever going to eat them amirite?
Haha, I joined this facebook group called, "8th Graders need to back off 9th grade guys especially other people's BF's" haha. Cause man, those hoochie-mama 8th graders totally need to step off. The group description says, "This is a serious issue."

Some college guy had this to say:

"Eighth grade? More like 'geighth' grade, amirite?"
and everyone was like, "yah, lol, usorite!"

Tomorrow the Mercury Messenger spacecraft begins its second flyby of the planet Venus along its winding path towards Mercury. You always have to go a really windy way to Mercury because it's one of the most difficult planets to go into orbit around. This is because it's so close to the Sun... since gravity is speeding you up constantly as you shoot toward the sun, by the time you get to Mercury you are going seriously fast. Complicating things is the fact that Mercury itself is so small and it doesn't have a lot of gravity to help stop you. It's really hard not to just shoot right past Mercury and go straight into the fiery inferno. In fact, that's all we've pretty much done so far when it comes to Mercury. Because of this, we've only actually seen half the planet so far. We have no idea what the other half looks like (only the barest of shadows seen by Earth-bound telescopes!) So in a couple of months, we'll have another look at Mercury.
This flyby of Venus is special because unlike the last time this same spacecraft flew by Venus, this time we'll be turning all the instruments on, just to test them out for the first Mercury encounter (we also have to fly by Mercury several times to slow ourselves down before we enter orbit). Unfortunately, since the instruments on Messenger are primed for looking at the small, rocky body of Mercury (aka it sees mostly in the visible), all we'll be able to see of Venus are its thick, 70km high-altitude hazes. BORING! Well, not for atmospheric scientists. But we aren't atmospheric scientists, are we? There may still be a few small wavelength windows where we might get to see something of the surface, but not much. Today they had a press conference in preparation for the launch. My advisor wanted somebody to go watch it because he's on the mission so he should watch it but it's really boring. He came in and asked us innocently if anyone was planning to go watch. Nobody moved. I didn't even take of my headphones. Caleb finally got up because he was seriously bored doing what he was doing and he'd been trying to get out of it all day.

"Oh, come on, guys! Look at you!" said my advisor. "Our mission is FLYING past another PLANET tomorrow!!!"

"And I'll go and watch it," I said, "TOMORROW!"

He just laughed and ducked his head out of the lab. Caleb came back less than five minutes later. "I couldn't stay," he said, "I told Peter (the guy who pipes in the NASA tv), I told him I had to leave."

But it's pretty cool we're flying past another planet tomorrow, huhn? If you have NASA tv (which you obviously do) or maybe it'll be on the internet, you should tune in.

In the spirit of this exciting event, here is a picture of the module that took the astronaut that I MET the Sunday before last to the MOON:



And here's when I burned my finger on the hot fudge:


Side view:


And a tree that looks like a heart!!!

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Just watched "The Prestige". I figured I would hate it, since I don't like magicians or watching magic shows.

After the first half I literally took it out of the player and put it in the box, that's how much I hated it.


But then I started thinking about it. And I got curious. And I put it back in the player.

Holy shit.

Total mind-fuck, ladies and gentlemen.

Watch it all the way through.

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I am amazingly free this summer.

I've got my own place, I've got my own car. I can drive it anywhere I want whenever I want. Absolutely nobody gives a crap when I get home. I can tell someone I’m going home, and if it takes ten minutes or three hours to get there, no big deal. Nobody expects me for lunch, nobody expects me for dinner, nobody tells me what I should eat or what I should buy or where I can and cannot go or when I have to get back. I have enough money to pay the rent and buy the groceries. Beyond those two my needs are few. Yes, I'm expected at work, but nobody really cares when exactly I come in or how I partition my day- all I have to do is get my work done. And even though nobody expects me to be anywhere, if I do show up then they are glad to have me. The other day I spent a ridiculous amount on fresh grapes. But nobody told me that it was too much and that I should spend my money more wisely. I bought some cookie dough, but nobody told me that I shouldn't because it's not healthy. I can decide whether I move or whether I stay put, whether I rent a moving truck or take it in my car, if I clean the bathroom or if I just let it stay dirty, anything. I can decide to take a trip to Utah. I can drink milk right out of the container. I can eat dinner at 10 o’clock. Or 3 o’clock. Or not at all. I can decide to drive to New York City at 4:30pm on a weekday. Or not. I can do anything I want! BWAHAHAHAHA!!

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I submit this song, (which can be listened to as the first song on the list to the left), as a kind of theme song for 2007, The Year of Our Triumph.

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Summertime, and the livin's easy

Yesterday morning I was in a bit of a bad mood, it is true. All of the Old Feelings... the ones from the winter... the feeling that everything I did was cosmically worthless... they were returning. Not just depressing thoughts like "in the vastness of geological time, a single lifetime is smaller than a mote of dust and just as influential"; but more just that what I was doing seemed so untied to anything important--- human existence, fraternity, kindness, service, duty, and everything else with any value in this world. Yeah. Those are hard feelings to suppress, once they grab a hold of you. I'd had a meeting with my advisor and I realized that for the next couple years I might have to argue with him about things that he isn't going to want to change his mind about. Either I was going to shut up and write what he told me to write, or I was in for a lot of arguments in order to write what I really thought was right. It broke the tide of mood that I had been sailing on since the summer came into my life.

So I did what I usually do to make myself happy, I retreated to one of the highest floors of the library, and after I did some work for Project FG I samba'd around in front of the elevator until it opened, and then I did a crazy dance while the elevator descended ten floors. I walked on confining walls instead of the sidewalk... there were these two stones and I'd been thinking about just leaping between them but I wasn't sure I could jump that far... I just went for it (and made it!). My brand new MP3 player was key- I specifically listened to happy songs, and I imagined myself to be like one of those people in the ipod commercials, only I would be the shadow person, not the boring restrained regular person. There isn't anyone on campus anymore, so I get to dance like a maniac wherever I want.

Then I went and played some more soccer. I never want to go to soccer, but whenever I get there I always have a hilarious good time, because I love that game. We played two on two, Alida and I against Patrick and Gareth, so basically America vs Europe or perhaps girls vs boys. Alida and I CREAMED Patrick and Gareth... probably to the tune of more than ten to zero, though they almost scored a goal once- it went off the "post". Eventually it was getting a bit embarrassing, because the Patrick the frenchmen's manhood seemed to be at stake, and Alida and Gareth are dating. These kinds of fun events usually aren't that helpful to the old relationship. So Alida and I called off the game because of the mild rain but we'd still played for quite a while altogether and it was quite fun.

The honest truth is that when I started feeling crappy yesterday, I didn't want to feel like that. Ok, so you say... nobody likes feeling crappy, eh? But actually, if you examine it, oftentimes when you feel really crappy you do enjoy in some respect how crappy you are feeling and how complainy you are being and you don't really want to take the necessary steps to make yourself feel happy again (whatever those might be). It's like when I'm sick and I'm in some kind of pain and I complain to my parents and they say, "Take an Advil."
Logically I know that taking an Advil will make me feel better, but in addition to my general dislike of medicine in general, don't you ever just like being just a little pathetic and miserable sometimes? Quietly (or loudly) nobly suffering through some ill, the greater forces of biology seizing control of your body...!!! Just...suffering a little bit? I always think to myself that if I take a medicine that masks the pain, that I'm putting a damper on my body and I might not hear the important signals that it's trying to send me. (See: Injuring your leg and then taking like 6 Advils and running on it anyway) But then when someone tells you, "But you are suffering absolutely needlessly, for a silly and stupid reason, and you could easily stop suffering and get back to work." you feel a little bit sheepish, and not so noble or smart at all. Then you take the Advil, and then you feel better, and then you get distracted, and you find that feeling healthy is indeed actually better than being sick, and there aren't really any crazy consequences for ignoring some bad feelings, and off you go.

It's like that classic book I just love now, that my sister recommended to me: Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? They made the movie Blade Runner after it, I seem to recall. But in the world of the book everyone has a "mood organ". You just have to sit down at the mood organ and punch a code in and it will make you feel whatever mood you punch in. The main character's wife is constantly depressed, verging on suicidal. Sometimes she feels this way naturally, and sometimes she calls it up on the mood organ, something like, "utter despair" or some setting like that that you think that nobody would ever actually use. One day she's feeling glum and she sits down at the mood organ but she won't punch the number to make herself feel better. She says that she doesn't feel like dialing it. The main character says, "why don't you press 333?" (or whatever the number was) and she's like, "Yeah, yeah, I know, 333 makes you feel like dialing, and then you dial whatever you want." but she still doesn't do it, she just sits there, staying depressed and not feeling like dialing.

So a lot of times when I feel depressed I sit around and I think about how I don't even feel like dialing. I know perfectly well that there are many different things I could do that usually make me feel very happy but I just *don't* do them, because really I'm enjoying feeling lame and depressed and having a pity party for myself, and I don't actually want to change. Well yesterday it was different. Yesterday the cloudy morning gave way to a gorgeous afternoon, and in my mind I dialed 333. I convinced myself that I actually did want to feel better- that I actually didn't want to sit around being depressed and second-third-fourth-guessing my decisions. And then, like a switch had been turned in my mind, I started doing all of the things that make me happy... sluggishly at first, and then more willingly. I had a meeting with one of my favorite professors, which helped, and he and I worked through a bunch of bugs in my FORTRAN code... I learned so much from him in such a short time!
Then I did all the things that I mentioned above, and gradually I forgot about all of those dark feelings and as I was walking home today I started singing, "Summmmmertime... and the living's easy" and running my fingers along the soft tops of the bushes and thinking about how FREE I am right now.

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