Sometimes, when you have so many confusing memories about your childhood, like I do, you forget the really good ones.
Today is a fucking great day. I stayed up all night long, reading Wittgenstein and Real Analysis texts, contemplating the ceiling, and preparing things for this Friday's weekly trek back to school to present a bit of mathematics to my department.
The seminar itself is not too terribly important, so I'll get to it later.
At around 6:30 I left my room downstairs (yes, I live in the basement of my parent's house, how cliché) to complete a task that has been plaguing our property for some time. You see, the neighbor next door is this old, dying lady and the Fence that separates us is completely shot. It's rotting at the core. There is one section that has been down since last winter, and I had been told repeatedly that it was my filial duty to raise it back up.
Let's get one thing straight from the outset: I hate carpentry. I hate most of the things my father taught me as a kid because they took me away from my first love: reading. I always used to moan, "What kind of father keeps his kid from reading?" Regardless, I got dragged along on the most mundane of 'manly' domestic tasks. After the first couple soirées, when I expressed no desire to learn any of his 'sacred' craft, he merely dragged me along to be a gopher, grab tools, stand around watching him, and, of course, clean up after him. It's a good thing one can't die of boredom, because I certainly tried frequently throughout my childhood.
This leads up to the main reason I don't get along with my father. I love the man dearly, but we simply do not work well together. He wants to be in charge, but lacks the engineering skill and logical thinking to do a project properly. Projects with father typically take three times as long as they should, usually because he must take the item under question apart and repair it several times in succession before it works slightly worse than it did before he attempted to fix it.
In any case, my plot was to leave the fence standing, more or less, and be presentable before he woke up. As you can tell, I'm sitting in front of my iBook, nice and clean, wearing my typical college clothes, while his alarm blares poorly tuned FM classical music and his sleep apnea machine forces lightly compressed air into his nasal passages. And I'm so fucking high on adrenaline, it really should be illegal. It reminds me of my days in this summer camp group, called "The Frontiersmen." It was a honour camping group, like the Order of the Arrow claims to be, but instead of being all politicky and farcical pseudo-Native American bullshit, it's loosely based on Allan W. Eckert's somewhat famous book. The membership requirements aren't terribly complicated, but the spirit that surrounds the program makes it special. The program encourages and develops the secret biological pathway in all men that links the testicles into the information super-highway that is the spinal cord and uses the excess testosterone for metabolism, adrenaline production, and, yes, YELLING REALLY LOUD!!!!!
So now, as I begin to feel the weight of my efforts weigh down on me, I think for just a few moments back to a night, only two years past, when I was knighted into this loud, crude, and so totally not me order. We'd hiked up the path that led up the valley, to the top of the mountain. There is a cliff there that is near and dear to my heart, where, like rabid wolves, we howled at the moon, from balls to bones. Snow Crash has taught me this: there's a time, before your mid-life crisis, when a man feels like he still could become badass. If your family was killed by Columbian drug-runners, you could spend ten years training at a shaolin monastery and go kill every last one in a blood vendetta. If you really had to, you could take a shotgun and a plane to China and cap every last one of the Yakuza (or whatever) who kidnapped your girlfriend.
I've still got some time left, I think.
Oh, and I lied. This daylog has gone on long enough, and to talk about some esoteric mathematics would just ruin the mood I'm in. So cope. | 
