Monochromatic Outlook

Today I’ve seen too many peo­ple who are deflat­ed and dis­ap­point­ed by the elec­tion results. Of course, I share your dis­ap­point­ment. I felt despair myself as I watched the red stain spread across our nation last night. This morn­ing I felt some small twinge of hope as I saw that Ohio had not yet been decid­ed, but it still looked grim. With Ker­ry’s con­ces­sion, of course now it’s all over.

But today I feel no defla­tion. This is not an ide­o­log­i­cal … Read the rest

As elec­tion day nears, I’m remind­ing myself of a few impor­tant things that the Repub­li­cans would like me to ignore.

First: Believ­ing that Sad­dam Hus­sein should have been removed from pow­er is not the same as believ­ing that an essen­tial­ly uni­lat­er­al first strike was called for. I believe the first, but not the sec­ond. As I believe that democ­ra­cy works only when cit­i­zens par­tic­i­pate, I believe that inter­na­tion­al treaty orga­ni­za­tions like the UN can only func­tion when mem­ber states, and … Read the rest

From http://www.pigdog.org/ (the quote gen­er­a­tor is kin­da ran­dom, so you won’t see the same quote that I saw):

Behind every pathet­ic worth­less los­er of a man is a woman who fig­ured his sor­ry ass out and stabbed him in the back.
–The Com­pul­sive Splicer

Some­times my bit­ter humor hor­ri­fies me.… Read the rest

Trou­ble sleep­ing again last night. It’s strange; almost all my life I’ve had trou­ble get­ting to sleep and trou­ble wak­ing up. Even as a child, I remem­ber watch­ing the hands of the clock go an hour or two after I was put to bed. Every morn­ing there was a strug­gle between me and my par­ents to get me out of bed and ready for the day.

This is why, although I’m pay­ing atten­tion to my recent trou­ble sleep­ing with some con­cern … Read the rest

I ran my five mile Twin Peaks route today in 47:01. I was hop­ing to do the hill run in 45:00; I’d like to be run­ning nine min­utes to the mile even on the hills. But that might not be real­is­tic right now. I pushed real­ly damn hard and that was all I could do. My legs were hurt­ing pret­ty bad up the hill, prob­a­bly because I ran yes­ter­day and then fol­lowed that up … Read the rest

Slept eight hours, from 10pm to 6am. Got up and did 20 min­utes of sit­ting med­i­ta­tion. On the scale at 176 pounds, which some­how seems safer than yes­ter­day’s 174. Maybe psy­cho­log­i­cal, but los­ing sev­en pounds in nine days is less scary than los­ing nine pounds in eight days. I’m chalk­ing those oth­er two pounds up to dehy­dra­tion and call­ing it a day.… Read the rest

Start­ed with bare­ly eat­ing yes­ter­day. I guess I only ate break­fast the day before, but my stom­ach has been tied up in knots and I haven’t been hun­gry. I’m hav­ing to choke down Clif bars just to get by. Of course, liv­ing on Clif bars is con­ceiv­ably enough to cause my stom­ach to be tied up. Must look up “causal­i­ty” in the dic­tio­nary some day.

I slept OK Mon­day night, but last night I went to sleep at about 11pm … Read the rest

Went out on a date tonight. Saw Hero at the Park­way, which was OK, and then to cof­fee on Pied­mont in Oaktown.

We had some pleas­ant con­ver­sa­tion, and none of it was exact­ly forced, but it was all real­ly basic “oh, so what’s your job like?” stuff. I recall think­ing that she’s real nice and all, but that we did­n’t seem to have any­thing in common.

Oh well. Gath­er­ing infor­ma­tion and all, right? I got to go to a movie … Read the rest

Every­one got anoth­er mes­sage today with my race results. Here’s my lat­est missive:

Thanks again for this expla­na­tion, but I still don’t see why I and every­one else on my list are con­tin­u­ing to receive mes­sages from your com­pa­ny 72 hours after the race fin­ished. Sure­ly this is not what you intend­ed your sys­tem to do. It’s def­i­nite­ly not what was advertised.

This is absurd. Is there any way to stop these mes­sages from spam­ming my friends? This was sup­posed

I signed up for a ser­vice that was offered on the USHalf.com web­site. For $3 per num­ber, this com­pa­ny said that they would send my split times and fin­ish­ing time to the cell­phones or email address­es I spec­i­fied. Now, in my mind, three dol­lars is a bit steep for send­ing out an email to an SMS gate­way, espe­cial­ly when I had to do the work of find­ing out the email address­es of my friends’ SMS email gate­ways. But it … Read the rest