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Dear friend,

We recollect you, which if a frugal phrase, has sumptuous meanings.

E - Dickinson -

Being wanted is so much better than being needed

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And your own life while it's happening to you never has any atmosphere until it's a memory.

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Something beats nothing by an infinite amount.

poem emerging from the fog of drifting asleep:

Unlike This

In a world not too different
from this one
I'm the person
fluent in telling you
things you need to hear

Found on tumblr with the caption "incel bimbofication" So, Incels/"Involuntarily Celibate" guys are kind of obsessed with their perception of how a "few millimeters of bone", the chin and brow, are what make up good looks in men, and therefore eternally determines a dude's luck with romance. This is one of the most memorable photoshops showing off the transition.

As a sort of faceblind guy, I'm sort of amazed by how this works, and how much diversity there is in the geometry of faces. I really wish there was the reverse of "make a character" software that some videogames have that would scan your face, then give you a bunch of sliders that would A. show you where you are on various face geometry bellcurves and B. let you mess around with how you'd look if settings were different.

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But now I want to watch episodes of Monster Factory

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Once bigotry or self-loathing permeate a given community, it is only a matter of time before deep metaphysical significance is assigned to the shape of human skulls.

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I come from St. Paul, Minnesota, a city full of angry maudlin Irishmen and flabby chinless men with limp mustaches waving their shrivelled dicks at the cruel blue sky.

Surprised I never quoted it before here in my commonplace, it's really stuck with me - For more WLT see kirk.is/2007/08/22, I added this quote and a few other choice ones that really have stuck in my head for decades now... it must've tapped into my college-aged virility at a critical time.

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God Save the Lobster Queen In React Training. Biggest take away: "Burrito: it's kind of the same as a taco, but it's bigger, and a cylinder" I've been thinking that maybe I could get my inner toddler to become, like, an inner precocious teen (though it's odd to think that I can't tell it "use your words!" because that's not how it operates) but I'm concerned I might lose some kind of vitality in that process, some part of essential Kirkness.

And also concerned that I'm not sure what to trust to tell me if that is a risk of being the case, because I don't know to what extent the inner-narrator/rational self vs subconscious self is the same for everyone. Various paths of self-improvement call it different things (the Id, the inner child, the right side of the brain, the unconscious mind, etc) and imply different functional relationships.

Even something like meditation has contradictions in advice about its methods and goals. Like, is it to have that zennish empty mind, where my verbal inner-narrator is finally silent and my whole self can enjoy purer sensation, unmitigated by simplification into verbal simplification and categorization? Or is it to be 'mindful', and allow that inner narrator to calmly process and analyze and pontificate but without encountering spikes of anxiety and other disruptive emotion? (Which, in my current way of thinking, tend to emerge from my inner toddler.) I kind of prefer the latter; it's less work and a lot more fun.

In "Eat, Pray, Love" Elizabeth Gilbert writes

Like most humanoids, I am burdened with what the Buddhists call the "monkey mind"--the thoughts that swing from limb to limb, stopping only to scratch themselves, spit and howl. From the distant past to the unknowable future, my mind swings wildly through time, touching on dozens of ideas a minute, unharnessed and undisciplined. This in itself is not necessarily a problem; the problem is the emotional attachment that goes along with the thinking. Happy thoughts make me happy, but--whoop!--how quickly I swing again into obsessive worry, blowing the mood; and then it's the remembrance of an angry moment and I start to get hot and pissed off all over again; and then my mind decides it might be a good time to start feeling sorry for itself, and loneliness follows promptly. You are, after all, what you think. Your emotions are the slaves to your thoughts, and you are the slave to your emotions.

The thing is, to me it feels backwards... like the thoughts are the slaves to the emotions, and then I'm the slave to the thoughts. Or something. But basically, the process is more my inner rational narrator teaching my wordless sometimes-raging sometimes-fearing sometimes-frolicking subconscious self about the world. You know, it feels a bit like the relationship between Anne Sullivan and Helen Keller.

So I feel there's lots of room for that inner toddler - who will probably never grow up to have words - to mature, and develop a real camaraderie, rather than the current paternalistic relationship. And without assuming that subconscious part of me is only feeling, not thinking. I suspect feeling and thinking are the same thing but at wildly different time scales, feeling taking in the long term evolutionary wisdom and near term immediate reaction, with thinking occupying the middle ground.

Also through all this, I feel my rational, verbal, narrator self is trying to reassert the throne of being "The Actual Me", the real me, that it lost when I read Dennett's "Conscious Explained". I think it's time for a reread of what I pin as the "most important book I read", even though it's mighty long.

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We sometimes say that adults are better at paying attention than children, but really we mean just the opposite. Adults are better at not paying attention. They're better at screening out everything else and restricting their consciousness to a single focus.

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Time to go to bed... I thought I saw a headline about Zuckerberg stopping a Donald Trump "pregnancy" It's my 15K Day - I am 15,000 Days Old, exactly.

To commemorate this, I revamped an old Javascript toy, and am launching it as TIMETOY.net/...

Plug in a birthday or other big date, and it will show you the upcoming interesting superday milestones, or you can use its calculator to figure out the seconds / hours / minutes / days / weeks between 2 dates (or vice-versa)

'Colonialism: When bees bust their asses to make honey, but the bottles are all shaped like bears.' tumblr gem of the day!

This is fun:

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In 2001, the Supreme Court put into place one of the worst presidents ever, and we have the charts to demonstrate that: George W Bush's Presidency in 24 Charts

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You don't just find true love. You team up with somebody, and build it from the ground up.

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http://mightygodking.com/2013/04/25/the-family-tattoo-problem/ -- the problem with Obama's clever idea for pre-empting daughter's tattoos parallels his problem with the GOP: things break down if your opponent doesn't give a damn about the common good. (Amber didn't actually say the last two things, but it would have been funny if she had!)

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'Obama wants to create a secular, post-Christian pagan/hedonistic technocracy!!!!' If only, man. If only...

Yesterday Kjersten and Raya came over with a whole egg dyeing setup!

here is the fruit of our labor, except it's not fruit, it's eggs.

Detail:

The center egg is mine: I made a K with electrical tape, then died it green, the orange. Clockwise from top are two electrical tape colored ones, a neat orange-pink one amber made by using a Q-tip to remove color, an Alien Bill I made using the Q-tip as a paintbrush, Raya's GI Joe/Rambo-ish egg with the tap still on, Kjersten's polkadots, one with the tape technique and stickers, a really ambitious and lovely flower in wax by Amber (with green grass on the bottom) and then an egg I started with Ambers "remove color" technique that came out weirdly so I decided to use a sharpie for outlining. It came out kind of cool and funky, actually.

Comedy gold was me grabbing my glass of beer, noticing it was kind of vinegar-y, and then running to the bathroom to get rid of the green dye before it did too much staining...

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Make love when you can. It's good for you.

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http://www.thisisaurl.com/ - Leukemia Blog of Austin Castaldi, a guy I knew from a brief stint working in Andover. Man, screw this universe.

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http://www.cracked.com/photoshop_67_the-20-worst-possible-ideas-prequels_p20#20 - I grinned

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I love the passive-aggresive audiophile wankery of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Headphones

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Searching for video for King Missile's song "Dick", I was surprised how much Malcom X comes up in a search for "King Missile Dick".

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UI FAIL: iTunes smart playlist, enter dates only via typing, illegal dates (like "June 31") make you redo the whole process; Apple != great UI, at least not always

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Wow, Wall-E was great- funny where it hit a few notes I aiming for w/ my Young Astronauts in Love test panels http://kisrael.com/2006/10/30/ I heard that Kelly Clarkson was performing before the Pope conducted that massive Mass at Yankee Stadium. In fact during public radio's coverage of it you could hear "Since U Been Gone" in the background. Weird.

She also helped kickoff the 2008 Salvation Army Christmas Kettle drive at the Dallas Cowboys' Thanksgiving halftime. So maybe she just digs that whole church and charity scene.

Still, "Warm-Up act for the Pope" -- it's hard to top that without being Pope yourself.

I've noticed that pretty much everyone wears backpacks the way they were meant to be worn these days, i.e. square on the back using both straps. But back in high school, the only people who did that were serious backpackers and nerds.

I use a courier bag right now, but if I ever switch to a backpack, I am probably always going to sling it over one shoulder, no matter how bad it is for my back, or how much extra wear that one strap gets. Because, you know, that's what was cool in 1991.

Sigh.

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Slate of the Moment
Explainer on the end of the Catholic doctrine of limbo for the unbaptized babies. What caught me was the footnote:

On the other hand, some Lutherans, Anglicans, Episcopalians, and orthodox Christians hold that everybody remains in an "intermediate state" until the return of Jesus Christ on judgment day.

As far as I know, the whole idea of going off to heaven or hell immediately upon dying is "extra-Biblical"; or at least I realized that the Salvationist doctrine I grew up in claimed that people were just stone cold dead until bodily resurrected at the end of the world... the thing is, I think most Salvationists have the common kind of image of souls quickly winging their way up or plummeting down.

Actually, the whole idea of a body/soul separation doesn't show up all that much in the Bible I think.

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Cartoon of the Moment
Today's xkcd was especially clever... I guess it's the same charm I pointed out for indexed... geekish humor that you have to work to figure out, which makes it that much better.

My cellphone kind of died the other day, it refused to take a charge, and there was a whiff of smoke around it.

Before settling on bringing it in for repair, or rather replacement, I took a look at the handset offerings from Verizon, T-Mobile, and Sprint.

Man, cellphone design in this country ain't a vast wasteland, but it's no Garden of Eden either.

No one makes "nice and compact" a priority these days. Even the phones out to make themselves super-thin end up being tall and wide. And then everyphone has to stuff itself so full of gizmos that it ends up fat and bulky...especially with the clamshell design, which is the only type I'll go for. (I'm tempted to go back to my 2001 Samsung but I guess it doesn't do text messaging. But now I appreciate its design; compact screen, and a flip design with a thin cover that merely protects the keypad rather than having the keys embedded in it.)

T-Mobile had the Motorola PEBL... as you can see by the "artsy" timedisplay it seems like they're giving a lot more thought to the aesthetics of it... the appeal for me was the nice rubberized texture of the outer shell. But even with that I'd worry about the strength of the cute little special hinge it has.

But Sprint/Nextel swapped my phone for free, and I couldn't really justify the expense of a new phone...it's not a bad model despite my gripes with it. (Pity that Samsung/Palm hybrid was such crap software-wise.) I had to manually move numbers over, and I lost the video of the Euclid municipal Fireworks that was my "video wallpaper". Oh well.

Oh, and I have one more new grip about the current phone: I can assign custom ringers to individuals in my phonebook, and there's a feature for a distinct ringer "with caller id" vs "no caller id", but no distinct setting for "in phonebook" vs "not in phonebook", which would actually be useful to me, instead I'd have to set the ringer for each phonebook entry seperately.

Am I that much of a UI prima donna, and/or assuming too much that people work the way I do, or are the people who make these things just not all that bright?

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Sports Quote of the Moment

Baseball is the only major sport that appears backwards in a mirror.

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Scariness of the Moment

Dunkin' Donuts is spreading its wings. The chain is expanding nationwide and plans to triple in size within the next 10 years.

Ugh, maybe Candi is right, this is like a mold. I like the vibe relative to Starbucks, but still... they're frickin' everywhere, popping up in stripmalls and inside regular malls and other places that still seem weird to me.

Gotta give them props for They Might Be Giants tunage though. Funny of the Moment

The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man in falsely shouting fire in a theater and causing a panic.

Holme's famous dictum on the limits of free speech was shaped by personal experience. On March 7, 1847, the six-year-old attended the Boston Lyceum's Theater's world premiere of the new musical comedy, Hey, Everybody, There's a Fire in the Theater...We're Not Kidding.

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Quickies of the Moment

• A foot of snow over Cleveland...ah dear old "lake effect snow", how I haven't missed you.
• CNN says that the Pope 'prayed not to be elected'--hmm, wouldn't catholics want someone God actually listens to? (Actually, that whole "will of an omnipotent and omniscient God" has always presented a few interesting philisophical issues, leading to awkward bet-hedging like "let this happen, if it be Thy will"...)
• Slate reports that Americans are starting to pay off credit card debt! Good.
• Some guy's amazing home cinema setup...just tacky and garish and wonderful.

Open house today. Crossing my fingers, and several other parts of my anatomy.

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Passage of the Moment

The world is like a ride in an amusement park. And when you choose to go on it, you think it's real because that's how powerful our minds are. And the ride goes up and down and round and round. It has thrills and chills and it's very brightly coloured and it's very loud and it's fun, for a while. Some people have been on the ride for a long time and they begin to question, is this real, or is this just a ride? And other people have remembered, and they come back to us, they say, "Hey - don't worry, don't be afraid, ever, because, this is just a ride..." And we... kill those people.

"We have a lot invested in this ride. Shut him up. Look at my furrows of worry. Look at my big bank account and my family. This just has to be real." Just a ride. But we always kill those good guys who try and tell us that, you ever notice that? And let the demons run amok. But it doesn't matter because: It's just a ride. And we can change it anytime we want. It's only a choice. No effort, no work, no job, no savings and money. A choice, right now, between fear and love. The eyes of fear want you to put bigger locks on your doors, buy guns, close yourself off. The eyes of love, instead, see all of us as one. Here's what we can do to change the world, right now, to a better ride. Take all that money that we spend on weapons and defences each year and instead spend it feeding and clothing and educating the poor of the world, which it would many times over, not one human being excluded, and we could explore space, together, both inner and outer, forever, in peace. Thank you very much, you've been great.

I'd like some examples of people who espoused that message who we killed though before I know if I agree or not.

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Update of the Moment
11:12. Been moving since like 7. Bought flowers, mopped a bit more, straightened, more vacuuming, last touchup yardwork, etc etc. All the housecleaning that's gonna get done is done.

I'm so nervous. Somehow it feels like my first audition for my life after Mo. The house sells well, I get to sit on a wad of cash, plus demonstrate what I'm able to do.

Many thanks to Peterman for working with me on this.

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Update to the Update
Not bad....11 parties showed up, 3 seemed to get pretty serious about it. Yay! In yesterday's comments, "reunion victim" asked if Classmates (.com I assume) was the only way I found out about my class reunion...I don't think so. I made a kind of proactive effort to stay in touch with the official Alumni page, but I think the organizers worked to contact people by e-mail, I don't know if they used classmates.com or something like this page (which I like a little more).

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Quote and Link of the Moment

Hey, underpants are a type of pants.

Kind of a choose-your-own-adventure, I haven't played it through very much...

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News of the Moment
Huh...they're gonna come out with a new nickel design. I guess we used to have redesigned coins more often than we do now (not counting the 50 state quarters, of course, which I still think are a very cool idea).

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Concept of the Moment
Quiet Parties, where there's no talking at all. Interesting idea!

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Strangeness of the Moment
So I bought a bag of minisized pretzels, mostly 'cause I like putting mustard on them. And I ate the pretzels. And I was still hungry. Like, not hungry hungry...mouth hungry. Truth be told, I wanted more mustard. You see where this is going?

I now have a new way of eating mustard. You can put a dab on the back of your hand and just lick it off. Preferably when no one is watching. Just be careful the mustard container doesn't spray when you apply it, and get it all off so you don't get yellow patches.

I know, I'm a total freak. But I really like mustard. Image of the Moment

Through my dirty windshield, it's the worst license plate in Massachusetts! ...at least for people who get the news from the radio so they can't spell "Geoghan". And to be fair, it is out of state, from California.

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Inspirational Thought of the Moment

What are you waiting for?

I think it's helping me not procrastinate, make me think if putting things off will help or hurt the situation. It's amazing how official one of those little label makers makes things look.

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Funny of the Moment
Thanks to Bill the Splut for pointing out the triumphant (or at least dang funny) Return of Seanbaby. The dancing in this instructional video isn't just "dirty"...it's downright squalid and might even leave a mark on your very soul! Quote of the Moment

Robin: When you think, Batman, with those 4 supercrooks hangin' around, it's amazing somebody hasn't already reported this place to the police!
Batman: It's a low neighborhood, full of rumpots. They're used to curious sights, which they attribute to alcoholic delusions.
Robin: Gosh, drink is sure a filthy thing, isn't it? I'd rather be dead than unable to trust my own eyes!

Super mega wicked campy. At first I thought Robin's final statement was just a goofy morality line, but then I read the IMDb entry and got the joke- he says that while the dynamic duo are 'climbing' the side of a building with their typical sideways camera trick.

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Office Toy of the Moment
I've collected a few too many office toys, thought I'd start making a collection of photographs as I bring them in to my new job. Scorpion Woman (from Monroe Salt Works in Arlington) sits on my monitor. She's the first toy I bring in to a new situation.