This is why I'm still awake. ;D

Wow. I found the introduction of some longer story (currently stands at around 20 pages) that I started writing a number of years back, and to my delight, a good bit of it still holds up! I think it could use some help here and there, but it's actually kinda exciting.

I might try to do something with that!

I think I need some water.

It's funny how some days you get a lot done on one thing, some days you're scattered in a million places, and some days you have a few big, chunky things that you work on and (hopefully) complete.

Today was, all told, one of those last ones. I spent some time finishing up some existing work, had a few meetings about a new project, and generally... well, spent big chunky amounts of time on several things.

Not so bad.

I'm having a spectacular time making up blogs around here for every imaginable sort of writing I might like to do. I haven't even used half of them yet, but it makes me happy just to know they're there. Some day I may actually get around to writing stories again. At the moment, it doesn't seem like I'm able to pull together the mental energy to do it. Maybe I need to go back and re-read some old stuff to get in the spirit of things again.

Where is all that? I'm sure I have it around here somewhere...

I'm not sure how to balance that with making music. It's hard to have two time consuming hobbies, one of which demands practice, the other of which simply demands time.

There's a part of me that thinks that I would be okay if I just stopped taking music classes and lessons. I just can't decide if that part is correct. It would be pleasant to be able to spend more of my time working on programming and writing (two things at which, as I've said before, I'm already pretty good), but I don't know that I really want to just stop what I'm currently doing, either.

Unfortunately, I think the next semester is starting at the Conservatory, and I kinda need to figure that out right now.

I think that's my final thought tonight.

Resolutioners Delight

A more or less effective work day. Finishing the day with a big check-in that you feel good about is a pretty nice way to leave the office.

After work, Julia and I converged on Central Sq. to hit up the BSC there. We hung out, doing our thing, from around 6:30 PM or so until 8:00-ish. The place was pretty packed, though she reminded me about the New Year's Resolutioners who are, undoubtably, crowding the place. Hopefully in the next few months the place will calm down. Or, well, rather, I'll wish that the people crowding it find alternate means of exercise somewhere else. Wishing that they just stop going is, certainly, selfish.

After the gym, we took the T to Harvard and wandered over to her place, where we had a lovely greens, spinach, peanut, tomato, goat cheese, balsamic vinegar salad with some stone ground crackers. And a Red Stripe, cause she and Paul still seem to have oodles of it from New Year's. We half-paid-attention to some show called... Better Off Ted, was it? I don't remember. Then a bit of Scrubs. After that, we had a lovely time analyzing and making fun of the poor guy on Deal Or No Deal, which I don't think I've ever watched an entire episode of before. By the time I looked at the hour, it was 10:00 PM, I went "ack!" and decided I should probably get home.

Now, I think I'm going to sit in bed and read. A simple, good day.

What a jazzy outfit!

I did a total of three useful things today.

Number one!

I mostly-sorted out the project I've been working on at the office. There's a few bugs, but things seem mostly good. With any luck, it can be wrapped up and I can move onto other things very soon. If anything, I think I'm going to need to take some time to do a few other high(er) priority things. (There is always, apparently, something.)

Number two!

I went to Jazz Theory, chilled, learned a bit about the blues, and went home. After two weeks (or so) away from class, it was sorta difficult to get myself back into the correct headspace. There are two classes left, to my understanding: next week's will be a review, and the week following that will be the dreaded quiz (Dun, dun, DUHH!). Not terribly worried or anything; everything makes sense.

Music is a strange thing. I often think that there must be a better way to represent a lot of this stuff. Half steps, whole steps, A, B, C, D, E, F, G, sharps and flats, the circle of fifths/fourths, the staff... it's all very organically grown over the past millennium or so, dreamed up by a bunch of people that occasionally appreciated math when they were feeling geeky, but were otherwise, by no means, logical or methodical about creating a consistent, easily understood system of notation and representation. I can't say that I know what would be better, but geeze, it shouldn't be a matter of rote memorization to remember sharps and flats in a key signature. You can walk the circle and sorta see how it all comes about, but notation is such an archaic system. It relies very heavily on being able to instantly identify a bunch of arbitrary relationships and symbols. Can't we get some physicists or software developers in here to refactor this whole thing into something legible? Crazy.

And number three!

I picked up The Scheduler again and realized it's better off than I realized. The app has a few large functional areas that haven't quite been fleshed out yet, namely saving/loading data and a complete satisfaction system (I love having a class called "SatisfactionAuthority.as"). Otherwise, the technical hurdles in the UI have mostly all been overcome. It's getting close to being a matter of just banging it out. I can't tell f I'm going to be able to finish before Dave needs it this semester, but it's getting cooler all the time. It is, all told, a fairly large hunk of code.

Euphoric revelations sometimes hold water

Today, Eric, Jason and I went to see Avatar. Jason and I for our second viewing, Eric for his first. The red line wasn't running from Harvard to Davis, unfortunately, so I had to take a shuttle bus from Porter to Davis to grab Eric, take the shuttle bus back from Davis to Harvard to get on the train, and we finally made it to the theater (Boston Common) half way through the preview for Despicable Me. (Which is fine, cause I've seen it what feels like a million times now.)

After the movie, Jason peeled off and went home, Eric and I went to Park St. station, and went our separate ways. Hopefully, by the time I write this, he's back home in New York. After the movie I went to Harvard Sq. and tried to find a place to sit and read.

Dado was completely full of people, so I regretfully left. Crema Cafe was also packed, so I wandered out, still having never purchased anything there. Following that, I tried Algiers and found it to be only about half full, and delightful. I had some falafel, fries, and a small-ish salad for a late lunch, and then a cappuccino. That place is nice - it has a quiet, cozy atmosphere. I haven't been upstairs yet, but I imagine it's not half bad either.

After I left Algiers, I decided to walk home from Harvard Square, rather than take the shuttle bus to Porter. It was a beautiful night, and while I started to take a quick way home up Concord St., I instead decided to take Mass Ave. and Walden St. home, just to extend the walk a bit.

On the way home I thought about what I'd like to do with life. I think I was somewhat euphoric after the cappuccino, which strikes me as an interesting reaction. Something about caffeine after 4:00 PM.

I thought about what we can do, as humans, to create an impact on the race. I thought about collective memory, oral history, and the telling of stories. I thought about the Wheel Of Time novels, and the world Robert Jordan created in their pages. I thought about James Cameron and Avatar, and how he created a world and a people that we as modern people would feel good and proper to be a part of. I thought about the appreciability of a good story, and how it can leave an impression on us when we hear it. How stories can teach us morals, can change the way we think, can give us an appreciation for the world around us, can bring us together, can shed light on things we would rather, but shouldn't, forget.

I thought about how I spend a great deal of time these days learning things about music, which is both familiar and very foreign to me. I used to spend a good chunk of my spare time writing, which, in a sense, I am trying to return to with this log. I thought about how my love for , and skill (such as it is) in writing are a part of my life that I've neglected for quite some time, despite the fact that, at times, I have been very good at it.

Music is new and unfamiliar, and I can't say with certainty that I am particularly good at it. I would love to qualify that with "yet," but having no concept of my capacity for improvement, will dispense with the qualifier. Perhaps I'm studying the wrong thing?

Maybe I've hit upon something that I'm uniquely qualified to do in life, given my history, passions, and skill set. It seems like a good idea. I want to help people tell stories.

I need to let that sink in a bit, and see how it holds up.

Upon arriving home, I spent a bit of time paying some bills and cleaning here and there. Eric suggested we watch There Will Be Blood, which we eventually did around 7:00 or 8:00 PM. It was an intense, spectacular movie. Definitely worth watching.

And here I am.

Tomorrow I head back to work, and also, I think, class. Yes, indeed, Jazz Theory.

It's been a strange couple of weeks. One would think being "lazy" would be relaxing, but that's not really the case. Lazy tends to equate to neglect, which is, in general, not a good feeling. I think I'm ready to be done with laziness for now.

Chickens, truckers, and journals, oh my!

For the last fifteen minutes, I've been mentally singing, "She's got a chicken to ri-ide! She's got a chicken to ri-igh-iiide!" and, in falsetto, "My baby don-key! My baby don-key!"

It has, boys and girls, been that sorta day.

We will start at 12:30 PM, because this is the point at which I woke up.

Following my slow, methodical reaffirmation of consciousness, I proceeded to sit on the couch and read Crossroads of Twilight (again, nothing to do with Twilight the teen phenomenon) until 5:30 PM. Lazy Saturday, this is how you began. Around 6-ish, I called Jason and Eric to inquire when they expected to be back from their ski trip (which I declined to go on at the last minute). They said they'd be back in about an hour, so we all planned to go to dinner around 8:00 PM. In the intervening hours, I took a shower, got myself presentable, and wandered out to de-snow my car and drive over to Arlington where we were going to eat.

We ended up at an Argentinian restaurant called "Tango," or "Tanga", or some such. Regardless, it didn't seem to have any Argentinians in it, and the wait staff was very, very North American. And by North American I mean Bostonian White (Mental note: suggest "Bostonian White" as a Crayola color). Dinner was fine, we had Jason, Kat, Eric, Mike, Ria, Jess, and myself. There was a pitcher of sangria. It was pretty good. There was a crepe, which I ate, which struck me as more of an Italian enchilada, baked, and absolutely smothered in cheese. Over all, the food was good, but the company (as usual) better.

After dinner, I returned to my car and drove myself over to Mike and Ria's, where the hosts, Eric, and I played a game of Galaxy Trucker. Good on me for getting it as a Secret Santa gift for Mike (not so secret now, is it!), cause it's a lot of fun! I think I'd say that even if my beginner's luck hadn't kicked in and given me a spectacular third and final round.

Prior to heading out to dinner and at some point after my stint of reading, I downloaded a LiveJournal client and then, using said client, downloaded a log of my entire LiveJournal post history. My first entry was sometime in March of 2003, and the last was January of 2009, though I hadn't seriously posted in it since 2006/2007 or so. The log is approximately 1.5 megs of XML formatted text. I read through a few at the beginning, and a few painful ones in the middle, before filing it away in my Documents folder. I'm glad to have it. It documents a particular portion of my life which is, often, difficult to think about. It's easier, perhaps, to keep all that knowledge and time tucked away in an XML file.

It would, somehow, feel good to connect that log to this blog somehow. I think. It would help me feel like less of two separate people, and connect the life that I lived during that time with the one I live now. I'm not sure if I have anything to learn from it, or what.

I've said many times that in November of 2005 or so, I essentially ceased to exist and became a new person. I've avoided butterfly and phoenix references (and, actually, hadn't even thought of such a metaphor for it until now), but in my mind there is this very definite six month period where I went from being one person to being something completely different. In a sense I reinvented myself, though that implies a certain amount of intention to do so. Rather, I was reinvented. Reset, maybe. I went from having one group of friends, one set of relationships, one set of family, one job, one set of possessions, one personality, one way of dressing, one financial outlook, one living arrangement, and one future, to having my life change, almost utterly, in every single one of those areas, all at once. If it's possible for stress to knock years off your life, I imagine that happened somewhere in there. It was at that point, I think, when my LiveJournal died. I couldn't write in something connected to all that. Maybe, in the last couple years, I couldn't bring myself to really write anything at all as a result. I think, perhaps, that I've spent the last four years recovering, though there were certainly substantial milestones of recovery that I reached quite early in that process. I don't know, and it's probably not worth speculating on. I am where, and what, and who I am, at this point, regardless of how long it took me to get here, or how long I go on changing as a result.

I have never been comfortable defining my existence by any of that, so I won't, and haven't. Someday, though, I may get myself to the point where I'm one continuous person again, rather than a 23 year old and a 4 year old (generally speaking). Acknowledging LiveJournal and everything there, downloading it onto this computer, and bringing that history into my life, however, somehow feels like a good step in that direction, even if it's merely copying some 1's and 0's from a server somewhere to this machine, where, as I type, they just finished being backed up (along with everything else) via Time Machine.

Not bad for a lazy Saturday.

She's got a chicken to ride

Today was particularly social.

After last night's lovely evening over at the Wagner residence, I woke up at around 8:30 AM so that I could get out to Sudbury for brunch with the subset of the usual crew that was able to drag themselves to Stephen Anthony's by 10:30 AM or so. This included Jason, Daved, Dave FR, his sister, and Jamie, Graham, and Tracy and Joe. Not a bad crew.

I feasted on blueberry pancakes, an egg (over easy), coffee, and orange juice. The usual. Post-brunch, we descended on Dave FR's house for an afternoon of board gaming. We played Ticket To Ride and some detective game (I won the first - woohoo!), and then I proceeded to sit around and play Dave's sister's guitar for a while during what appeared to be a rousing game of Manhattan.

We all left Dave's around 5:30 or so, and I went back to Cambridge to pick up Eric at Mike and Ria's. Eric and I drove back to my place, I parked the car, and we took the T from Porter to Harvard and had dinner at Le's. Curry tofu and fresh summer rolls. Stuffed with veggies. I had a "33", which is apparently a Vietnamese beer. Delicious. We decided, prior to leaving my place, that we wanted to go watch Avatar at Boston Common. Eric hadn't seen it, and I'd be glad to see it again. There was a showing every hour or so for the remainder of the night, so we just winged it and decided to show up when we showed up.

Bad idea.

Apparently, after all this time, Avatar is still selling out shows. The 8:15 PM show was completely sold out, and we decided that 9:15 PM was going to be a bit too late, given that it's like a three hour movie. Following that, we walked from Loew's Boston Common down to Boylston, checked out the Starbucks near the Arlington T stop, and then got back on the Green/Red line and went home.

A few hours later, after returning Eric into Ria's custody, here I am. I think I need to learn some more songs that we can all sing along to. Currently, my repertoire is just sorta... limited. It would make these sit-around-and-play sessions much more fun.