It's all moist and weird in there...

Thinking about thinking about thinking...

I don't know how to handle my own mind.

--Which is to say, my mind works in ways that are mysterious even (especially?) to me. Furthermore, the more in examine my mind, the deeper I probe, the odder it feels.

I think there some kind of equivocation here about odd and peculiar vs unfamiliar. Both are synonymous with "strange." But the more accurate meaning is probably the latter, in that the deepest recesses and mechanisms of my psyche are not thoroughly reconnoitered yet. Unfortunately the

Earn a living?

Don't go around saying the world owes you a living. The world owes you nothing. It was here first.
--Mark Twain

Okay, granted. But walking down Pike Street the other day I was struck by what a monstrous thought the concept of "earning a living" really is. I was coming out of the QFC and it occurred to me that I the checker who'd helped me does that for hundreds of people every day: it's his job, as my job is mine, and it's how he earns his living. Then I thought, that's sick! You don't earn a living. You have one or you don't. If you don't, you're probably not reading this. If you do then you have a whole set of problems to deal with if you want to maintain it, but you haven't earned it.

I finance my living through my job, but what work I do or don't do doesn't determine whether I've justified my existence. I suppose in a hunter-gatherer sense one can earn one's continued sustenance. But...the prevailing work ethic seems to be that sans some value-added employment one hasn't earned a living.

I reject this.

There are other metrics of a person's value to a society, but I don't think one can earn living. Nor do I think that value to society should be considered in determining whether someone should be permitted to continue to live. Again, living is something not a possession but a quality, not to be earned, and not to be revoked. It's not granted by anyone or anything except the happy accident of your birth and all the things that haven't killed you up until now. I suppose one can choose to forfeit living, but it's not something that can be justly taken by anyone.

(Good iff !Bad) = True (!)

I am no longer nearly a week behind in my homework. Not bad, therefore good!
I have a computer that works. Good!
I have a bunch of work to be done with my roomies to get our house in order. Not bad! Actually kind of fun.
I'm seeing Gordy on Friday. Good!
Not having to pay for the Microsuck software (Visual Studio.NET 2005) I've had to install for my classes. Not bad...so good...I guess. I think 3.8GB is excessive for pretty much any program, though. Yes, it's an IDE and enormously powerful, but GCC doesn't take up that much fucking disk space and manages to get by just fine, thank you very much. But at least no money went from me or to Microsoft, so that's not bad. So it's good.
I'm going to NYC in June to hang out naked for a week. Excellent!

All's well, I guess. At least nothing is critically wrong, and that's a leg up if I've ever had one.

Wait...what's this? A hole in the crotch of my pants? How does this shit happen to me?

Khayah is in the [new] hizzouse

Man I'm so awesome. I put my underwear on inside out and sideways this morning and didn't even notice until almost 1pm.

Man I'm so tired. After months of truly gruelling searching, Jack and I have found a new place to live that completely exceeds our expectations, with an awesome housemate to boot. That's right, we found a stranger who is cooler to live with than nobody at all...on the Internet! The house is an unpretentious 3-bedroom gig on MLK off Union. It's cute and about four times the size of our apartment. What a relief! The roomie is a bespectacled, dark-haired scientist named David who is not played by Jeff Goldblum (to my mild disappointment) . It would be fair to say that Jack and I are somewhat in awe of him. I'm sure it will wear off, but the truth is he's kinda living the dream and we both really respect that. He's also a giant nerd and seems pretty fun. Nevertheless, as I have stated before, the social awkwardness in a room increases exponentially with the number of geeks in said room, and this makes the icebreaking that is normally a little awkward with new roomies that much stiffer. Ah, well.

We found out on Friday morning that we got the place, and my friend volunteered her van on Monday, so I spent the "weekend" busting my ass to pack up the whole house in like a day and a half. It's pretty much done, except for my bed that has a stuck screw delaying its disassembly and a couple baskets of clothes. And the cats, who are staying behind until the very last trip to prevent their running away. Until then, we're in limbo, sleeping on the floor at what is now "Nick's Place" to babysit the cats while all our stuff is half a mile away. I can't wait for everything to be settled in and unpacked. I cannot wait for a return to order. Man, all my books are just stacked in boxes arranged by size! It's a good thing I used sticky labels to facilitate their being returned to Dewey decimal order.

I miss using real dishes. Paper plates suck. I miss my microwave. I miss being able to browse LotR or Ender's Game whenever I feel like it, and in such tumultuous days as these, that would be a real comfort.

Not much else has happened in the last few days, except I made up a truly excellent bad joke:
Q: What did the polynomial say to the Distributive Property?
A: "Zounds! FOILed again!"

Aw, I kill myself.

Hey Seattle: Why didn't your mother teach you any manners?

Maybe this is a problem everywhere, but it seems like people in Seattle are exorbitantly casual. Not only do we dress, as a comic in The Stranger once put it, as if we're going to be sleeping outside. We have excessively lax attitudes about punctuality, and put dangerously low emphasis on the RSVP and courtesy call.

Seriously, Seattle: is it that bloody hard to call back when you say you will? Even if it's just to say no.

Sample conversation:
"Hey, this is 'Seattleite.' I got your message, and I can't make it that night, but thanks for the invitation."
"Okay, thanks, we'll know not to save you a seat. See you later!"
"Later! Bye."
"Bye."

Isn't that better for everyone?

Blimey.

I have a date on Friday.

This almost never happens, for many reasons.

I've been making fun of myself for a couple months, about how I'm too busy graphing esoteric things, or taking a red pen to badly spelt graffiti, or whatever it is that I do on Friday nights that keeps using them up. It would be funnier if it weren't mostly true (and I have the graphs to prove it). I've also been kind of avoiding dating. In the last six months, I've had three false starts. Two never got off the ground, because I just didn't even want to try. (One of them resulted in the aforementioned destruction of JANE. Lesson learned: never accept a date when you'd already planned a night of configuring your computer, like I did. It's trading a sure thing for a risky thing, and you probably won't come out ahead.) The other began too slowly, then accelerated too quickly and burnt out. Then I was fending off way-inappropriate advances from my not-quite-divorced coworker whose wife works in the same department...yuck. The evidence of boys' trips to Jupiter to get more stupider was mounting, and I was unimpressed.

I've been really apprehensive about dating anyone lately. I don't know if I'm overemphasizing how important it is to me that socialising not interfere with school. It seems like erring on the side of scholarship would be the wise thing to do. I'm also kind of disappointed with people, and it makes me reluctant to forge new relationships of any kind. It just gets so wearying to meet somebody and get excited about them, just to discover that you saw all the good parts in the first five minutes, like the trailer for a mediocre movie. This is part of why I have few friends, but good ones. And never go on dates.

But I "met" someone who seems, from what little I know about her, to be a really active, self-posessed girl who likes a bunch of the things I like, and a bunch of others that it'd be fun to learn about. I can't see how anything worse could happen than my making a new friend, and she's pretty cute to boot. My friends have never gotten kidnapped meeting people from the Internet, so I'm going to give it a try. It also totally helps that she made the first move, sparing me the agony of exposing my total lack of cool with girls I like. I'm almost as suave as a 13-year-old junior varsity wrestler with an overbite.

Wish me luck.

Geek dating: It's not just for sketch comedy anymore.

"You're a geek girl, Khayah, and that makes you a commodity. But remember, while the odds may be good, the goods may be odd."
--A precocious, intoxicated 22-year-old software engineer at a party in September, before petitioning me to take his virginity (I declined)

I've been gloriously single for about eight months, nearly half the total time I've been single since I was 16. The beginning of this period coincided with my resumption of being a giant science dork. Politics is not as endemically male-dominated as the sciences, at least not in the arenas I was working in (not that that's saying much). I have already experienced a little culture shock. To say you work for a non-profit working on universal health care is not so unusual. Saying you're a physics major considering a minor in mathematics or computer science, I have found, strikes some people as a non sequitur. They expect even less for me to say I want to do experimental particle physics, rather than video game design or something.

Maybe part of this is just that people who say they want to go to school for a good chunk of a decade just for a not particularly lucrative career in research is unusual. I can't help suspect, however, that it's partly because I'm a girl. This isn't diatribe about how old white bald men in glasses and ties are keeping me down. Being a female geek affects dating dynamics in ways I hadn't considered when I inhabited the more gender-balanced world of political activism.

Look at this picture of students at the US Particle Accelerator School in 2005:
[Source: http://uspas.fnal.gov/photopage.htm]



What do you see? Dudes! And one girl. This is an arrangement that never occurs in nature.

As a serious and ambitious student, school is my foremost priority. As a multiply-burned hopeless romantic, I'm a little reluctant to consider dating anyone. As a geek, I'm often in groups with severely skewed gender ratios full of brilliant guys I can really relate to. And as a seething ball of barely post-adolescent hormones, I'm horny and tempted as hell.

The problem with most people is that they're almost never as awesome as they seem for the first week. Intellect is often immediately evident and is a huge turn-on (sophophilia is the word for it), but there are so many ways even really smart people can suck and/or be really boring. I've found that simply waiting a couple weeks makes it easier for people to dig themselves into a hole of stupid or asshole or whatever, thus anaesthetising me to the sexiness of their brains.

Maybe my point was not about geek dating after all, if avoiding it is what's really on my mind. And this doesn't even begin to integrate the double-awkwardness of being a geek girl attracted to women while being all awkward around hot ones. I could give Koothrapalli on The Big Bang Theory a run for his money. *sigh*

Hoppin' on the bandwagon.

So today's xkcd has popularised the google search term "died in a blogging accident" in to an insane degree. My first thought was surprise that anybody had died in a blogging accident. (It never occured to me even for an instant that Randall Munroe might be making up statistics. Surely not!) Anyway, I googled it and came up with a million (Well, ~7400) pages of people talking about people searching for "died in a blogging accident." Then I decided that people were boring and unoriginal, and I was one of them.

So I searched "died in a logging accident," hoping that Google would suggest "Did you mean 'died in a blogging accident'?"
Alas, no.

Lots of people have died in logging accidents, by the way, and there's nothing funny about it.

*********************************************

I think about Google a lot. I'm pretty sure this is not normal. Yesterday, I learned about a particularly bizarre one of Srinivasa Ramanujan's identities: 1+2+3+4+5+...+n = -1/12(R). Bizarre. Impossible, right? When the equation is rephrased as 1/1^-1 + 1/2^-1 + 1/3^-1+...+ 1/n^-1 = -1/12(R) it starts to seem less counterintuitive. Ramanujan's identities are so eerily beautiful, and this one would be my answer to #12 on the GLAT.

In other, sadder, news, there are more Americans who think the moon landing was faked than running Mac OS and Linux combined.

It's nice not to have to repeat math

Been back in school for a week now, and by a miracle of persistence combined with at least one awesome teacher, I got all the classes I needed. If I hadn't gotten into any one of them, it would have cut my financial aid and kept me from going to any. But I got them all! My books are like $400 this quarter, and I had to get them all new. But it's okay. I'm back in school! This quarter is PreCalc I, Intro to VB, and Technical Writing.

My being enrolled in this VB class entitles me to get Visual Studio.NET Professional for free! I'm going to pick it up tomorrow.

It's hard to resist the urge to ask "Is there an Open Source version?" or "Can I get that to run under WINE?" But I do.

Information Society was as good as I'd expected, and not nearly as good as I'd hoped. But I knew that Kurt Harland had turned into and old[er] computer geezery type guy since 1990, and they were neither as old nor as slow as I'd feared. It was fun. Brian hung out with the band after the show, but I went to bed.

Hmm...now that I have essays to write and problem sets due, I'm finding I have less energy for spontaneously doing the exercises in my old logic book and less to say about random entertaining bullshit. It's good that now that energy is channeled into something that is not merely productive (like the logic proofs), but that other people will view as beneficial, eg earning degrees. I'll try to keep blogging at least once a week, though. I know that I'm always happy to go back and read what I've thought about stuff, even if nobody else ever glances at it.

Avery and illicit public art: it's a winning combination!

I used Avery 5163 White Shipping Labels to make "Tux has a posse" stickers. Here they are as a Google doc, for your "copying and pasting" enjoyment (lol pun). They're not great, but I'm happy enough. I referred to the Wikipedia entry on Gentoo penguins for the stats for height and weight, although I realise than in very sad and lonely circles this could be a controversial choice. So shoot me.

The first day of the quarter was unusually lame, but ultimately all right. Andy McCone, my programming prof, seems pretty awesome. Fortunately his was the last class I attended on campus. I visited the Financial aid office the sixth, seventh, and eighth times today, finally getting them to process my file despite my mother's signature being missing from a single document. Why couldn't they have told me that was the problem any of the first seven times I talked to them? Who knows. But my aid award will be adequate to cover my tuition and books, with maybe 50 bucks left over, which is certainly sufficient. It's about freaking time!

My brother is here in town this week and week after next, which is awesome. He's coming to the InSoc show with me, too, along with Brian and Sarah. Khayah has a posse!