al_haraka

For all three of you who still read this piece of crap, I have created a completely new website with a wiki and blog. If you still can stomach reading the random thoughts that I feel compelled to write about, check out:

http://www.flamingarmadillos.com/blog

Grandpa, I have been thinking about you a lot to day. Just hope you will know that I miss you everyday, and I will never forget you.

Oh, come on friends! If you don't know me from experience or at least my previous posts, I always choose not to work. I am going to get drunk instead. This means heavy Python coding tomorrow. Oh well, it could be Perl.

Later kiddies.

Today I am actually happy. I have a lot of work and I am kind of stressed out, but that really isn't bothering me. I got emails from two of my good friends, my Chinese students from Nanning. One was pissed and slightly amused by flurry of pinyin, which she finds unreadable, and the other says she just started high school in Australia, which means her English is pretty good by now. I am miss them a lot. I miss China so much. I just want to go back, even though it would probably mean a failed future. Oh well, I miss them so much. I miss everything different. I can't wait to go back, and truly realize that my Chinese sucks.

For reasons that cannot be fully elaborated on this evening, I have never felt so guilty in my life. As has happened before, I feel like I should sacrifice myself on the behalf of others, but the truth is that I have no opportunity to do so and actually save somebody from their problems. So, I drink myself into a state of stupidity.

I began a small novel today. I felt with my complete lack of free time, that I needed some more hobbies to prevent me from being a productive person. All good authors base their work on experience. Since I am a selfish prick, I am putting a lot of me into the character. There is only one so far. Maybe something good will come out of this . . . I hope.

I want to make an artificial natural (as in a human spoken) language with perfect scoping (like variables in programming languages) to answer a simple question:

Can human beings create a language that is both a) efficient b) devoid of ambiguity?

That is an obviously long term project, but after some linguistics under my belt I feel that it is an important question.

After fulfilling my duties at work today, I decided I would fool around with an old PowerPC Mac G4 that is underneath my desk at work and get Ubuntu Linux and Mac OSX on it to make it a mean little machine (catchy, isn't it). Anyway, I got more or less got through the bulk of the initial ncurses installation process (for those of you who don't know, ncurses is a "state-of-the-art graphics library for terminal applications; if you have ever used the circa 1980 computer at your local library to look up call numbers, that is what it looks like) and then I got an error. After some snooping around some Forums, I realized that I had been completely moronic and forgot to create a partition in the HDD. I feel so foolish. That is one of many false starts this week. I also ran into a girl from my Arabic class twice, and I stupidly asked her how much homework we had. The answer: plenty. I haven't even finished my lengthy homework for syntax or even touched my chinese essay about Spring Break. That is ironic, considering that I can only sum it up in two words in English: work and nothingness. Oh well, I needed a vacation from the self-imposed stress that is school. I will not until either Saturday or Sunday. Tonight, I fancy an all night drunken bender. Yeah for me.

Later kids. And don't drink and drive...unless I give you the keys and laugh maniacally.

What ever happened to Kevin Smith and his brilliant independent movies? (I mean Clerks, not Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back.)

While at work today, I have decided to bring along my USB hard drive full of my favorite TV shows since I need to wait for all the computers to re-format. After what might be my eighth or ninth viewing of the wonderful show Arrested Development, I still don't know what went wrong. I know the reason it was cancelled, twice, was because of pitifully low audience numbers. I still don't give a damn. It isn't the show's fault, in this case it is the viewers' fault. It is not my problem so many people choose to watch downright shitty material. People who religiously watch Desperate Housewives, American Idol, etc., you know who you are and you should be shot. Arrested Development was, and will always will be in my mind, a crowning of achievement of television. If you do not like the acting, there is no way you can fault the writing, which is perfectly timed and coordinated. I cannot recall a show that so finely exhibits the traditional qualities of a standard television series. And what happens to it, you might ask? Cancelled, TWICE! (Have I said that before?) All joking aside, this situation isn't new. Many people, or at least the intelligent among you, would probably insist I mention Family Guy, and I will. I have never been so proud; finally, a show that puts my sick sense of humor on the screen and really makes people laugh. Unfortunately, Fox Network executives are really good at making these kind of mistakes, which I cite the aforementioned show and another personal favorite, Futurama. When will that show come back? Bender once made a joke about the show being way ahead of its time. Boy, was he not kidding. In a several week period, I downloaded all the episodes of that show, sans the ones I cannot find on P2P networks. And speaking of the eternal litany of good shows gone astray, WHAT THE FUCK HAPPENED TO DAVE CHAPELLE? Let's face it folks, the network executives, Fox or not, have let us down. Now is a new era of Pax televisiona (sorry Latin buffs, this is my best guess at how declension would be (nominative, 1st declension singular to be exact, if a television existed in the Roman Empire). Now that they have reaped gigantic prophets, there is no interest in any show with a niche audience, unless that niche is conservatively estimated in the tens of millions. And with that, I will go back to work and watch Arrested Development on my computer, since I will perhaps never see it on my television again. Thank God for Aqua Teen Hunger Force and the rest of Adult Swim exists to partially curb my rage.

P.S. Don't listen to your parents. There is no such thing as too much television unless your eyes are bleeding. If so, consult doctor immediately.

I haven't written a single word in what feels like several months, probably because it has indeed been that long, so I thought I would check in for the two people who read this yearly (yes, John Brockland, I am talking to you. Unfortunately, the other person is myself.) I am writing at this very moment because I am suffering from a mild case of boredom, since all I am doing in sitting at work while I reconfigure all the computers in the computer lab. In the span of two hours, I have exhausted all my interests on the internet, including a 15 minutes research period on graduate programs around the world in the field of semiotics (if you don't know what that is, I suggest you go to Wikipedia and discover a very fascinating topic). I did so because, with all this free time, I have once again felt a strong desire to solidify my plans for life, post college. I don't much about the "real world", but from what I here that place is very scary and I don't think I can hack it. That would mean I will two things to survive: 1) Prospects for a graduate education (which I just discussed tangentially) 2) Alcohol (which is most certainly referenced in a majority of my posts so far. If you are new, you might notice that right about . . . now.)

That's all for this week kiddies. Try not to hurt yourselves unless I am around and/or I tell you to do so.

Wo lei de ji si le.
(I am so tired I could die.)

Even though it is an English class about Gershwin, which means a lot listening to music, this class is slowly killing me!

Well, depends on the scale you are using. I will use 7.5 on the standard 10 scale. I got really drunk last night, which was not unusual for me on Friday, but continued to drink until I was ripped enough to say something inappropriate to one of my best friends, and volunteered to make our relationship very awkward for the time being. I continually amaze myself with my own stupidity. Well, I am going to take a short break from drinking for the reason mentioned above and the insane amount of work I have currently. I just wish I could put things back the way they were, when I was angry impulsive but didn't let anyone know it in a very personal way. Well, that's another awesome rant from. Who wants to drink? Oh, that's right, not me. Now where is that razor I left lying around for emergency purposes?

I discovered how much fasting really sucks today. But to be honest, the food is not the problem for me right now. If I didn't promise to fast from food and luxuries, I would finish my pack of cigarettes in fifteen minutes flat. Thankfully, I got my iPod working early in the morning before class. This miracle occurred after two music-free days attempting to fix my crashed iPod. C'est la vie....c'est la vie. I am trying to get more into programming this year and trying to think of a badass concept for the STAND website in addition to all my NLP programming. All of this has led me to two discoveries:

1) Programming is hard and tedious.

2) None of my teachers were kidding when they said that Perl is the ugliest language ever.

And that is the end of my tangent.

I thought that this was funny enough to warrant my first humorous post. I was talking to a friend, who is a girl and more importantly a girl who does not nor do I think has ever tried masturbation. Suprisingly, I am not a prude and not necessarily a horndog, but what other options do you have when you are horny and no girl or guy, depending on your preference/orientation, to satisfy your needs. Am I wrong here? Don't girls masturbate. It is okay if you consider it sacred (I sure as hell don't but whatever), but how can you deny yourself. I mean come on....just not me.

I don't really know how I would feel if I were an Arab in the current Global War on Terror, but it appears I would feel skeptical and distrusting of everything Western (is it a small wonder that the word in Arabic for strange and western are not far apart?). Today, after a long day of Arabic classes, I went to Al-Jazeera's websites to read about the latest rash of car bombings in the north of Baghdad and saw an online poll in the corner of my eye about Tesiir Alooni (if you haven't been following European news, he is the Al-Jazeera correspondent that received a guilty verdict for conspiring with Al-Qaeda leading to the events of September 11). I decided to check out the statistics, where 85% of those polled believed there to be a "political impetus" behind the verdict. Seeing these two things side by side, I wonder every day why the most of the Arabs I read about in the paper side with self-annihilation via suicidal maniacs and anti-Western conspiracy theories. Then I see the Arabs who sit in class with me, and I wonder what it must be like for them. I feel for them; they are anomaly to students who wonder what is wrong with the Middle East, and see perfectly Western kids watch as people look at them with a slanted eye. Perhaps that is there problem, they are here and here to stay because there is little room for Western sympathizers in the Middle East and slightly more room to be a misunderstood minority. Ah, c'est la vie (or should I say haza hayaat?) I can't wait to got to Chinese, a culture that censors people so they can't have these psychotic monologues on their PC. Maybe they are on to something...

Well, it's good to be back. I noticed that my friend is still using his livejournal.com account, and I realized I had totally forgot about this. Anway, I will try to do a better job trying to keep it updated. If you get a chance, check out the website I mantain for Students Taking Action Now Darfur . Other than that, I am fresh out of new stuff to talk about. Drunken adventures of me and my friends forthcoming.

Well, what can I say about last night that I cannot say about every other weekend at college? Well, a groups of sages known as my floor mates decided to dance their drunken asses off in response to the masterful singing of "Heaven Is Just A Place On Earth." I thought it was extremely nostalgic of the eighties, a time when hair worse than your terrible musical preferences was not only acceptable, but encouraged. Unfortunately for the lot of them, our Resident Advisor did not agree and decided to hand out noise violations like cheap candy. As for the drunken masses, see my previous post. As a matter of fact, I wrote that while I was drunk as well. My night gradually calmed down. With my roommate and my good friend tucked away for the night, I found it increasingly difficult to sleep. So, I sat in my common room and wax philosophic about nothing, as does every college student. Then, some of my stoned associates introduced to the craze that is taking the nation, "Guess the Color of the Skittle" game. I am very good at it, but how could you not be. It's skittles! I then proceeded to smoke the last cigarette in my pack and had a good discussion with a friend. He asked how I could possibly let my friends drink all my booze and not enforce payment. The answer was painfully simple: "They're my friends and that's what friends do." I get increasingly irritated by the watered down meaning of friendship in college. I cannot believe someone will question my willingness to show my friends a good time. Loyalty is not an asset, but it is a necessity. That's what I think anyway. Well, I am looking forward to another night of hard liquor and sledding on stolen cafeteria trays. I am going to head out. Remember today's Aesop's fables: loyalty and alcohol (in sufficient quantities of each for the time being).

Well, another good evening to you all. This is me again, for all curious parties. If drunken stupidity was my norm, it has become a collegiate epidemic. Virtually every single person on my floor is drunk, including me. My roommate and a good friend are ill from the entire experience. Welcome to my world! All the vomiting and hacking and drunken stupidity. All the irrational behavior. From booze to weed, it does strange things to people, including myself. I sit here typing because I felt the world had a right to know. I am not the only one looking for an escape or a high on the weekends. We got into this discussion a few nights ago. One friend mentioned that his grandfather was off to World War II at the same age while we drink our future away. I can't think of anything more humorous and tragic. My grandfathers both risked their lives so I could down hard liquor at exorbitant levels. Oh well. I might as well forget about the irony and seize the opportunity. They say "Carpe Diem." I say "Carpe vinem!" After, the Romans discovered the first truth of the Western world, "in vino veritas." If you don't understand, I suggest you find the nearest English-Latin dictionary and enlighten yourself. As for now, I am still finding truth. By tomorrow, my quest will be complete and I will start anew on Saturday evening. Until then...

-You partner in crime.