Originally written 04.22.2002.

up until 02:30 revising. finished all my computer security stuff. just need to go over it one last time before the exam. fell asleep listening to this american life. realized that i could use shutdown -h +60 so my box would shut down after the episode finished and i wouldn't have to hear the fan running all night. just as i was about to fall asleep, heard ruckus in courtyard. bastards.

had a dream where i wasn't really an active party in the dream but an omniscient third party. it was like watching a movie. something about a middle-aged southern woman who ran a small-town hotel and who was content servicing others. her teenaged daughter dreamed of a different life. really weird. don't know why i've been remembering my dreams lately.

woke up at 10:00 to study transaction processing (synchronisation, conflicting operations, dirty reads (hence today's title), premature writes, etc.). breakfast was a dr. pepper slushy.

an anectdote from a few days ago that just needs to be recounted: it was the middle of the night and i heard iain squeel, "oh my god, anne's doing horny dancing". it was late, so i just rolled over and went back to bed. the next morning i got all the gruesome details from iain. anne, an american (and an ugly american, in every sense of the word), got really drunk and knocked on our door. iain answered, and to his horror, encountered anne singing "i'm horny. horny, horny, horny". there was an acompanying dance. i believe it goes hip thrust, hip thrust, booty slap, booty slap, booty slap. good thing i went to bed early. yikes!

quick run to tesco to get some food for the next couple of days. quick and easy food for study nights and reward food for after exams. trying to find a good vegan chili recipe. bought some 52p/2L generic cola to get me through the night's revision.

realised that i don't remember the last time i showered. i don't really care much normally, and girlfriend across the ocean + exams = complete disregard for personal hygine.

Originally written .

dreamt that i was hanging out with erin on a front porch somewhere in columbus when some vagrant tried to attack us by hurling a beer keg at us.

studied crypto hardcore: elgamal, rsa, diffie-hellman - doing my head in. math behind it is hard enough in itself. wasted time coding up sha-1 hash algorithm just for kicks.

got a phone call from erin. followed same format as usual. sad part->talking about school->me ranting->talking about music->just joking around about random stuff (best part)->cutting call short so we can both get back to studying. frustrating. i like getting calls, but i always feel sort of unsated after them. it's like eating a really good dish at a gourmet restaurant but getting too small a portion. worried about being able to compartmentalize my life so easily, force myself not to be bothered by things. i think that big things that happen in the world or attrocities that happen to strangers upset me more than events that impact me directly. i don't know why.

thank goodness iain got new records over the holiday. been borrowing some discs. liking in/casino/out from at the drive in a great deal. more post-emo/post-hxc sounds heard on that record than relationship of command. also digging this disc by scottish punk-twinged indie group idlewild. finally, rocking out to jawbreaker. that's what punk rock should be. of course listening to the old mp3 collection as well: source tags and codes (appropriate cs study music) from trail of dead, go forth by les savy fav, propaghandi's last release, and some fifteen.

played a little football in the meadows w/ rob, andrea, and anais(sp?). managed to escape the impending rain of dark scottish clouds. more running around than actual football skill, but still fun.

Originally written 04.21.2002.

when i am gone, in my arrogance, part of me wants the notariety to receive a public response such as that of the queen mother's that i witnessed whilst in london. but all of me, even the arrogent part, does not want mourning by strangers, or by anyone for that matter. what i want is examination, the kind of examination that i think everyone wants in their life. i want someone to seek out the meaning behind my "rosebuds", but not with the voyeurism of this modern age, but instead with the quiet inquisition of childhood. i want someone to break the lock on my old rooms and imagine where i would have hung the posters and photographs. to sit at my desk and dust off the titles stacked on the bookshelves. to page gently through their pages and try to imagine what i ever saw in them. to boot up my computer and scan through the directories, forming a connected graph of all the seemingly independent nodes. i want people to read what i read. to read what i write. i want people to hear what i heard. to listen to the cds neatly organized in their pockets or the tapes, ancient relics of my evolution, less neatly organized, strewn in boxes long forgotten in closets. i want people to trace the steps i might have taken through my cities. i want people to live the small, quiet moments of my life so that they might for a second feel all the contentment and the pleasure, the disgust and the pain. in my absence, they are the ghost, possessing for an instance the vacancy left by my escape instead of the other way around. i am a great collector of things as i think many people are. but why do i and my good company keep these artifacts of existence, these physical memoirs, these forget-me-nots? some would say it is so that they do not forget, but i say they are like the smith's branding iron, a cold, meaningless hunk of metal whose indellible mark was made somewhere else. these artifacts are not for me. they are for those on the periphery -- to examine, to speculate, to steal and to covet. to add substance to my assertions, to make clear what a lifetime of overt expressions could not clarify.

Originally written 04.17.2002.

rob brought home a football today, so rob, marco, and i headed over to the meadows to kick the old football around. we played a bit of heads and volleys which is a game where one person plays keeper and the rest try to score, but only from balls in the air. i realized that i was a bit out of shape, and that my football skills totally suck at this point. my fitness was at least better than my flatmate's, but i just couldn't finish and put the ball between the posts. oh well, it was a good study break.

i'm watching this show on channel 4 in the uk called the mark thomas project. iain says that mark thomas has been doing this thing for quite a while now, and i would describe him as a uk version of michael moore. but better. the show is part highly political activist stand-up comedy and video of michael moore-esque antics against corporations. it's like tv nation, but arguably better because it seems like thomas has has more money with which to pull his antics, and as an individual he's very angry and confrontational, but in the way that most stand-up comics appear to be. so on tonight's show he's talking about going after multi-nationals who plan to build dams in turkey which, besides having devistating environmental implications, will also displace thousands of kurish people living in the region. before marco switched the station to watch football, it looked like thomas was posing as an artist and building a giant ice-sculpture version of a dam in front of the headquarters of a french company involved in the dam construction. rad! this show is entertaining and empowering in a way that just makes you feel good. it makes me feel like i do when i watch the truth anti-tobacco tutorials. it's a amazing. i wonder if i can get it back in the states.

Originally written 04.16.2002.

So I've decided to start writing my dreams down because I noticed that Patrick keeps track of his dreams on his web journal and I realized that if I find my waking life relevent enough to document, I might as well document my dream life as well, since the two are no doubt more closely intertwined than may seem apparent. My dream accounts are by no means as cool as the dream journals described by one of the characters in Michael Chabon's excellent The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Klay, but I hope they're worthwhile nonetheless.

I've found myself dreaming a great deal more since my excursion to London. Perhaps it's just because I've been exhausted ever since and have just been crashing harder. I don't remember my dream from last night, so I'll just recount some recent dreams.

A few nights ago, I dreamt that I went home and that I ran into Kerry Tingle, a girl who I went to elementary school and jr. high with. I haven't seen her in ages, and probably won't, and I don't even know if I've spelled her name correctly. But in my dream, we just hung out. Really random.

Two nights ago, I had another back home in PA dream. I dreamt that I was driving around Mt. Holly Springs, PA with my mother and brother. I think there was some argument or other point of convention, but I don't really remember all that part. All that I remember is that Mt. Holly Springs, PA was, as is only possible in dreams, distinctly Mt. Holly, and at the same time, completely not. The dream town was laid out on the reverse axis of it's real-life counterpart, and the architecture of the town was distincltly similar to Edinburgh. Not only that, but the dream town had somehow gained an archway that was formed by a toppled over, minature, version of the Eifel Tower. I'm sure Freud would have something to say about that imagery. Again, random.

other stuff:
difficulty concentrating in class after long hiatus

sudanese coffee and revision

political discussion with agatha