Is flying a Chinese flag showing disrespect to veterans?
My town is struggling to come to grips with this question. We have a boardwalk that goes along the waterfront at the harbor here. Along that boardwalk are flown flags from different states and countries. Recently, one of the local townspeople bought and dedicated a Chinese flag to be flown there, not as a political statement, but as a memorial to her mother, who lived in China for awhile. The veterans groups here, particularly the Vietnam Veterans threw a fit!! They threatened to take the flag down by force and refused to participate in the Memorial Day festivities held there until the flag was removed.
I'm struggling with this. I think buying and flying the flag was a gesture of peace, a tribute to the PEOPLE, not the Government of China. But, at the same time, I sympathize with the veterans, who feel flying the flag somehow diminishes the importance of their sacrifices. Some of the veterans (not all of them) still consider China "the enemy". Those of us who have never fought in a war, never seen our friends and brothers die can never understand how that must change a person. By the same token, a person who HAS experienced those horrors can never understand how we can hold out the hand of peace. It's a difficult issue, and I don't know how I feel about it.
Is wishing for Peace a belittling act to those who have fought for freedom?
Can anyone tell I'm a Libra?
I just got e-mail from my stepfather telling me my mother is in the hospital with advanced diabetes. It came from nowhere and just hit her like a ton of bricks.
Please make it stop.
Please.
My mother's health has been a yoke on her back ever since she got a staphlococcus infection from a botched hysterectomy in 1976. She's had to deal with cervical cancer, breast cancer ...
and now this. It's not fucking FAIR.
I don't want her to have to think about amputation or dialysis or insulin or FUCKING GLUCOSE LEVELS or DIABETIC COMAS. She doesn't FUCKING DESERVE THIS FUCKING SHIT. Her brother, a multiFUCKINGmillionaire, drank himself to death and was in good health and good humor all the way down, selfish bastard. My mother, a non-drinking, non-smoking, hard-working single mom has had NOTHING but physical and emotional anguish for nearly thirtyFUCKING years. Her mother died from Alzheimer's Disease. Her brother died because his liver finally gave up. Her father's had a lung removed. Her first husband was an ass. Both her sons have had to battle addiction and crises relating to their adoptions. Jeezus, I feel like Billy Bob Thornton's character in Primary Colors going on about what a wonderful, cursed person my mamma is. But there you have it.
I don't know what to do. There's nothing I can do. Please don't die, Mommy. Please, please, please, be well. Please be safe and all right and warm and loved.
Afterward Ben and I walked down Telegraph Avenue and got dinner, and talked about the film. He's going to be moving to LA in a few months so he was really into it. We got these amazing sandwiches at Intermezzo, which I guess is something I've been sadly unaware of for 5 years about Berkeley. Wow. Marinated tofu on artichoke-rosemary roll. yumm. Then we got on the BART and headed back to the city.
I got off at Civic Center because I was headed next to Kimo's to see the Evolution Control Committee perform. It was 11:30 or so by the time I walked up Polk Street from the BART station, which is late for me to be out, on a Tuesday night. I didn't really feel like going but Mark Gunderson (the real identity of the ECC) is a friend and is not in town that often, and he was heading back to Columbus the next day. He called me Monday and that was the first I'd heard about the show or that he was even in town. I guess he was too busy or I didn't get his previous messages, or something...
Anyway, Mark was supposed to go on at 11:30 or so but they were of course behind schedule. I had arrived just in time to see this really really bad act called "Loose Bitches UK". Which was really just one guy, sort of done up like Alice Cooper, playing distorted industrial beats on some drum machines and shouting into a microphone, and occasionally making annoying squeaky sounds with a theremin. My god it was soooo bad. And he was not joking. It was not irony. The funniest thing was the way he introduced himself: "Hi, we " (he really said "we"), "are Loose Bitches UK. The U-K stands for, uh, United - Kingdom. Are you ready to ROCK!?!"
That's really what he said.
Actually this kind of thing is pretty typical of Kimo's, which usually is a pretty weird goth/metal tranny bar. A sort of post-ironic 80s sub-cultural kitschiness pervades the place. Playing between bands most often is alternating tracks by The Sisters of Mercy and Kiss.
Anyway, so this goes on for 30 minutes or so - oh and I failed to mention above that he also occasionally played some "shocking" samples about sodomy and pedophilia and anal rape. Sorry dude but you're about 20 years to late to shock anyone with that routine. Anal rape is used to sell Nike shoes these days....
Finally that's over and Mark G. and his buddy Mark Welch get on stage. They tune the Thimbletron and then Mark Welch gives a little pseudo-scientific humorous introduction about the ECC and their research in their secret labs discovering Napster Nuggets and thimbletronium. Then he leaves the stage and Mark G regales us with his amazing sample-collages, partially created live by triggering sounds with the Thimbletron. Anyway, to make a long story short, it was a great show. Mark has such a great performance presence, and the Thimbletron makes it even better because it gives this physical aspect to the music making, rather than just a guy sitting behind a laptop.
After the show, Mark, his girlfriend Mara, Wobbly, Chris Ball, myself, and a couple other fans and friends decide to go have a drink. But dammit the bar is closing and it's 2 am and probably all the bars are closing (except for, as Wobbly noted, "the bars which are open for a purpose which is not ours"). Remember, this is San Francisco, not New York or Helsinki. At least it's not Tokyo or we'd be already home in bed, which maybe would be a good thing but anyway, uh... anyway, so I volunteer that we all go to my house and drink there. We buy some vodka and stuff and head over there.
It was a lot of fun, though I was afraid I'd piss off Jay and my other house mates with noise so late at night. But everyone was pretty quiet and we had a good time, listening to Senor Coconut and Stock, Hausen, and Walkman, and the Language Removal Services CD.
Everyone had finally left by 4 and I went to bed, and I'm still recovering from lack of sleep. But anyway it was worth it. Too bad the ECC isn't in town more often, or that vistors in general didn't visit more often. That's what's cool, having cool people from other places visiting, to give you an excuse to live it up a bit.
'Unbreakable' is coming out on video/DVD soon, and it got me thinking about when I went to watch it. It was my first date with this guy that I really, really liked. We had been talking about doing something together, but with Thanksgiving break, family vacations, etc., we didn't really have time till about the middle of December. He ended up asking me to the movies and suggested 'Unbreakable'.
I wasn't so sure about the movie. It didn't seem like it would be a real great 'date movie'. It ended up being a really good movie. I won't recount the movie; you can watch the movie if you want to know about it.
On the way home it was basicly all we talked about. It has some very deep themes, that can be discussed at great length (the nearest theater is an hour away). The ride home is something I will never forget. We discussed the movie and listened to Holst's 'The Planets'. It was dark out and snowing. The effect of everything was amazing. If you have never experienced snow at night, think of all the Star Wars movies, when they are flying through space, ame idea.
On a side note, if you have never listened to 'The Planets', do. It is a great collection of songs. I usually listen to it while doing homework. Some songs are very slow and relaxing while others are loud and exciting.
Regarding e2 politics:
ukyoCE makes some good points about things some editors and gods do. The way I see it, most of them work hard to keep the nodegel clean. It must be quite a job to read every wu with an eye out for trolls, nonsense, or crap.
Still.
If there's one thing I've seen it's that if you make a "funny" wu that is not funny to others, it will be mercilessly downvoted and then nuked. This rarely applies to editors and gods, however. Truth be told, some of their stuff is rather funny and deserves to stay. On the other hand, some of the stuff is inside jokes that make no sense unless you are an M-Noder remembering the good ol' days of E1. These are not nodes for the ages. One thousand years in the future, when aliens find the e2 server in the rubble of the apocalypse, they'll boot it up and wonder why we were so preoccupied with lesbians and soy.
If you don't like it, downvote it. Oh sure, it may not impact a god's xp in the slightest, but it will affect the reputation of the wu, bringing it a bit closer to oblivion.
A warning: every so often, stuff like this crops up. Remember Everything2 is unfair to new noders? But be very careful in what you say. Stupid, bitter infighting is, IMHO, what killed h2g2. And I swear, I will not have another online community that I love go down because of it!
Peace.
Oh yes, and before I forget; I am going to Vancouver for the Radiohead concert on sunday. I was going to write about that, but now I'm tired. I'll tell you all about it when I get back.
[ Dream Log ]
(Happy b-day, nine9! =)
Last couple of days were mostly uneventful.
For couple of times now, I've seen Linux getting to edge of reboot. Yesteday, I actually needed to reboot. Apparently Mozilla 0.9.1 has a major memory leak somewhere and it ate all of my memory (128 megs physical, about 130 megs swap). Linux doesn't like "out of memory" conditions. Last night, I needed to reboot because my fingers slipped and did Magic SysRq trick with key l, not k. (K = fry whatever's running on the console - in my case, wdm. L = kill every process with extreme force, including init.)
Yesterday, I mostly hunted for WinAmp skins (for use with xmms). I found some really cool skins from winamp.com... oh, and I finally found the skin I was looking for, called "VT100 Amp - The Hacker's Choice". Guess what it looks like =)
Anyway, bye bye, uptime record...
On the upside, I actually was able to read some lost MPEG clips from VideoCD! Linux refused to do that (whined about I/O errors) but Win98 was actually able to help.
I think I need to try Black & White and Baldur's Gate with the EAX now... Let's see if it can beat A3D on two speakers or headphones (I've been told it can't).
Slashdot speaks of size of Linux kernel and utilities?
And just last night, I thought of how hard it would be to build a different operating system atop Linux kernel (Instead of making kernel to start /sbin/init, it would run some other binary instead to handle stuff...)
I ordered a new cover for my Palm m100... I hope this one is indestructible enough, at least the description seemed to hint that way =)
Other day logs o' mine...
Late news: (All "late news" for a longish time...) Osborne 1 cc65 Sound Blaster Live! Smart Tags VFAT cluster BananaQuest Star Wreck Pokemon Red & Blue Pokemon Stadium Super Gameboy Lugia
Noded today by y.t.: Dream Log: June 21, 2001 Pokeball
Updated: Some. And: NoCeM (sacrilegious Nov13 writeup update!)
(Seems that I've broken something. The 10000 XP mark. Oh, the irrelevancy of the world! Vanity of vanities! The only good thing is that I finally could spell "Ecclesiastes" correctly =)...)
I was sitting around a random campfire, like you did before festival campsites turned into attempts to fence off tent burbclaves so that you only ever have to talk to your mates, and somebody asked me, like you do at free festivals with anarchist organisation and no fixed dates or anything, "How long have you been here, mate?" "Twenty years", I replied, with all the solemnity that taking dodgy acid on your birthday can produce.
It rained a bit, my tent collapsed (I probably helped it) and then I lost it; I spent the early hours of the morning with about eight people friom Blackpool jammed into a two-man tent, and then ended up in an apparently immobile camper van with some punks from Salisbury.
None of it was very important.
I'm at work now. Not actually working, though, which should be evident since I'm writing this. This is my second-to-last day at work actually, and unsurprisingly, a relief. It's amazing how repulsive can work which you perceive as useless be. It got better now that my hours aren't strict, but still at mornings I feel sometimes this overwhelming need to just stay in bed. It's a tech support/errand boy sort of summer job as trainee at Sámi Oaphahusguovddas, or, Sami Educational Center.
Funny, though, you'd think I'd be delighted to get money from doing nothing. This week I haven't done a shit - some errands, but mostly hung out at reading room (computers for use by the public), which I'm supposed to be supervising in case of trouble. We have this World Reindeer Herders' Conference, WRHC, this week, you see, and that means lots of reindeer herders, some of which might be actually housebroken, literate and able to use a computer.
Did you think I started teeny-angst whining yet? No, but now I do; it feels as if I've wasted my youth. Really, I spent my underage free time almost completely tinkering with computers. What did I get? Expertise? That's what I thought, but lately I've realized I don't have even that. It's really quite depressing when, after all the praise from mathematics teachers and all that time spent in dark room alone, you realize you're no better than the guy next door who you tell about php one day and see him do it better than you the next (not that it happened to me, but you get the general idea).
Someone who used to be my friend and someone who might have been my girlfriend if things had worked out differently announced an engagement a couple of months ago. They were 17 and 18, respectively, I think. I'm older than either of them, and well, I don't think I need to say more. Oh. Hmm. Want more? Of course not, but do I look like I care? So here I sit, suddenly realizing that not only I wasted my teenages, but I'm going to waste the rest of my youth moaning about it. Then I realize I don't have much to show for it; I'm working for lower pay than my friends are. Another old childhood friend wrote an email a while ago. He asked if I was having any summer job, and suggested I rent a room for summer from HOAS (some kind of organization for arranging apartments for students) and get a job quick. I don't know why he told me that, but in the following short exchange of mails it turned out he had a rather well-paying job for his position and was planning on starting his own firm. He's 17 days younger than me, and at the risk of sounding arrogant, not as smart as me. I think I need to get a grip. Of course, I think that every day, only to assess my alternatives and end up in the same conclusion: wait.
Enough whine for now. I'm heading to confluence (see www.confluence.org) in two weeks or so; this particular confluence, located in northern Lapland, is in the Lake Inari, 10 kilometers from land and 40 kilometers from Inari, the village where I live. I'm planning to go there by rowing, from Inari, as crazy as it might sound. A friend is coming along as a rowing boat is surprisingly hard to keep in course without someone to steer it. Some might wonder why the heck I want to go that way with rowing boat when we could take instead a motor boat, or at least drive a road to somewhere on the shore closer to that confluence, but I wouldn't. Not only would using such mechanical aids feel like cheating (OK, so I use GPS to find the confluence; that doesn't count!), but this is a good opportunity to do something I've wanted to do for a while, a prolonged physical exercise combined with spending the night in wilderness with little or no supplies. I wonder if I should take a sleeping bag along. Well, I suppose the airborne blood consumers common to our climate make some sort of protection necessary.
Well, I'd like to complain more about my situation, especially with females whom I find highly pleasant to look at yet as impossible to initiate a social interaction with as with any human beings, but I intuit that I've already talked about this in daylogs more than my quota. But honestly, just recall what you thought about when this age and my behaviour should become understandable.
Hmh. Still over 2 hours left. I wonder if they would notice if I just went home. Thank god I won't have to take this much longer; if I'm like this after three weeks, I wonder what I'd be doing after a year of this. Writing bad poetry, maybe?
Sigh
Feeling pretty flat right now. My mother, who has been over for a fortnight, has just left. M, B and I drove her to the airport this morning. M dropped us off - he had to get to work - but B and I lingered with her until the very last minute.
It was a great visit. Our relationship has changed since I got pregnant. At last, after 31 years, I am a real adult in her eyes. She didn't mean to treat me as less than an equal before B came along; she didn't even realise that a closer relationship was possible. Since her own mother died shortly after my elder brother's birth, she had never seen how it could be.
Of course, it was also hard having someone around for two weeks while we do the baby work. She helped out, but as a guest, she had a certain claim on our time and energy. We even took her - and B - on a day trip to Amsterdam (EasyJet flies there cheaply and often). All I want to do now is stay at home and pull the drawbridge up.
Still, it was hard to see her go. We bummed around the airport for the maximum possible time, sitting in the cafe, buying presents for the family back in California, chatting to the shop assistants about B, and finally sitting down on a bench by departures and talking quietly. Then waving her off at the "Passengers Only" sign and the long bus ride back home.
A further disappointment awaited me, like a sting in the tail. I've been in touch with H, a woman living nearby, first to reassure her about getting a C-section, then trying to support her in breastfeeding. Scottish culture is profoundly ambivalent about breastfeeding babies - the health service promotes it, but very few new mothers make it work. H is a case in point - she was determined to breastfeed her baby. Then, deep in the baby blues, she started doubting that the baby was getting enough milk. So when I called her today to ask how things were going, she admitted she'd changed to formula feeding. I was nice - she's made her decision, and there's no point kicking her about it.
Even as a Californian, from a culture where breastfeeding is ingrained, I was vaguely worried in the first weeks. Bottle-feeding mothers can see how much their babies are eating. And since a newborn's stomach is the size of a walnut, there's very little perceptible difference between the breast before and after feeding. The contrast between even a full breast and an empty one pales in comparison to the huge engorgement that happens when the milk comes in. I got through that time on faith in the natural system, based on having seen it work. H had no such basis for confidence. She didn't want to starve her baby out of a stubborn desire to breastfeed.
Now I'm sitting here, B fussing on my lap (he has mild colic), my mother's forgotten hat visible on the coat rack by the door.
Happy birthday, nine9!
Noders who use their votes to dv daylogs...how sad can you get?
What a week. Sigh. I don't think I will ever have a real chance to get lonely. First off, I'm living with six other people, four cats and a dog. My daughter moved out of my house some months ago. That left my son living there, and my youngest son on the weekends and summer break. And I rent out two rooms in my house to help make ends meet. Lots of guys, I know, and all of them very nice ones I have to say.
My daughter moved back in for financial reasons two nights ago. My one roommate moved out the same night. So my living room is packed full of bags of clothes and stuff. My art car is filled with furniture. That's all fine, it's okay. Then my nephew, who had been staying with me, came back from a two week road trip to Arizona and I had to tell him to go back home to his dad cause I was out of space.
Why am I out of space? Don't I still have a vacant sofabed in the living room? No. My daughter also brought an out of work, out of home, friend of her "boy friend". He's going to renovate my kitchen though, so I told him he could totally stay.
He's actually going to stay in her room on the spare bed. So my nephew left (hope he took his stuff) and soon my living room will have less stuff in it than it does right now.
The other reason I don't think I'll ever get lonely, is the social life I'm pursuing. I'm dating a woman, and will probably stop dating her soon, and am meeting other women, and may start dating men again soon (probably not though, actually), it's only theoretical. I mean, I won't pursue it, but I won't stop talking to guys or something freaky like that cause I do like them.
I'm writing this new story, it's pretty bad, it's turning into a horrible soap opera style of a story. I'm really excited about it though because it looks like the first story that I'll actually finish writing that's not for school. Well I have this friend that calls me everyday to find out what happens next in the story. We're on the phone for a little while, let's say like 2 hours. That's long then I guess. Well when she calls me back later, after 5:30pm she tells me that her sister is really upset with her. I can hear her little sister screaming in the background. Then I get the story.
It turns out that her cousin had been trying to call her forever, they don't have call waiting so he just kept getting the busy signal. He's in the entertainment business and he was calling so he could get her little sister to go down to the mall to meet him so he could introduce her to Angelina Jolie who was filming there from 2:30 - 5:30pm at the local Burger King. Angelina Jolie is my friend's Hero/Idol/Goddess, her room is covered in her pictures. Well he finally go through the phone later after they had left and he told my friend.
Well now you see why she's so upset, she was screaming and crawling into corners and attacking my friend. You know if it happened to me I think I would do the exact same thing, but then again I have call waiting. But I could've been at Starbucks like I am everyday. I called my other friend about this to tell her that I felt bad about it. My friend was laughing at first but then I told her, what if it happened to her and it was John Malkovich or Kevin Spacey, then my friend started screaming.
I then continued to tell Rex Mundi the story I was writing, but I told her briefly. She started using a crazy voice that I've heard before and I was like what? She starts screaming and tells me to tell her more about my story, I refuse at first but then I eventually continue. She then accuses me of raping her mind and spying on her life. Which never happened because I thought up the story out of nowhere the other day when I was sitting outside and talking to the first friend I mentioned in this write up on the phone. So there was no possible way. Now I'm all upset because my story is completely unoriginal now, just completely! RAWR!
Bloody builders. The bathroom is being redecorated at the moment, and the builders are noisy. Very noisy. And start work at about 8am. This does not fit in with my plan (ie, to sleep a lot, what with it being the holidays). Tuesday, it was taking down the tiles (with hammers). Yesterday was removing and then re-laying the floor. And today was putting the walls up again. I shudder to think what tomorrow holds in store, especially since I'm going out tonight. I think I'll find somebody else to go home with. I did have an excuse to get out the house today, though - my friend Jenni from Dundee (who, by some freak coincidence I met last time I was there) was in town for a bit of shopping, so I joined her for lunch and acted as a bit of a tour guide for the day. Jenni is the kind of friend I always wanted but never had. Outgoing, friendly (and gorgeous).. it's just a bit of a shame that she lives 80 or so miles away. I left her after a few hours to see the Art School degree show. The Fine Art was a little odd, but the design work is excellent - and the head of department is going to show me around the Produdct Design Engineering section of it later next week, so I can see where I'm meant to be heading. And tonight I'm heading out to a bit of a school reunion. Last week, I bumped into a few people from my school, and they didn't recognise me. I guess I've changed since leaving a year ago. But it'll be interesting amusing to see the reaction on people's faces when they work out who I am...
I did have an excuse to get out the house today, though - my friend Jenni from Dundee (who, by some freak coincidence I met last time I was there) was in town for a bit of shopping, so I joined her for lunch and acted as a bit of a tour guide for the day. Jenni is the kind of friend I always wanted but never had. Outgoing, friendly (and gorgeous).. it's just a bit of a shame that she lives 80 or so miles away.
I left her after a few hours to see the Art School degree show. The Fine Art was a little odd, but the design work is excellent - and the head of department is going to show me around the Produdct Design Engineering section of it later next week, so I can see where I'm meant to be heading.
And tonight I'm heading out to a bit of a school reunion. Last week, I bumped into a few people from my school, and they didn't recognise me. I guess I've changed since leaving a year ago. But it'll be interesting amusing to see the reaction on people's faces when they work out who I am...
This has to the longest fucking day i've ever had. And no it's not because of the summer soltice today...
I came in at 8:30 and since that time I have felt like doing exactly shit. And everyone of my co-workers agreed with me. Even a game of Computer Room Water gun fight didnt waste enough time today.
And on to something completely different... My gf has been on vacation since the first of the week and i'm about to go crazy with her not being here. Normally she drags my lazy ass out of the house and we do stuff, but this week has been nothing but work and go home.
Go ahead and vote this down, I just needed somewhere to vent my boredom.
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