Friday, July 30, 2004

Spidey....

Today’s soundtrack: my mind spray

Today at 2.53pm: joyless lunch of instant noodles.

Spider-Man’s mask doesn’t have a mouth hole, which is crazy. Can you imagine trying to breathe through that thing? The mouth area would always be all wet and gross. I mean every time he’s got it on he’s doing hard work, all swinging around and stuff.

It doesn’t have a dedicated nose area either, so it must get pretty tight around the nose. Put your hand on your nose and press it tight--that’s what it feels like to be Spider-Man. Doesn’t seem like so much fun now, does it.

Because of how he gets around, the only city Spider-Man could live in is New York. He needs lots of tall buildings to swing from. Maybe some parts of Chicago but I don’t think the tall-building-area is as expansive. Definitely not in Singapore.

Just think if he lived in Singapore but didn’t have a car, how corny would that be. Like he would hear about some bad shit going on across town, so he’d put the suit on and just start walking. Waiting for the bus, then more walking. After an hour he’s like drenched in sweat and saying “Man I am gonna beat The Vulture’s ass when I get there. That motherfucker better bring it.”

Or, more than likely, he’d have to call up one of his friends ( that had a car. )

Movies I want to see:

- Spider-Man

- Fahrenheit 9/11

- Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle

- Coffee and Cigarettes

- Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow

- The Terminal (kind of)

- Harry Potter

- Good Bye, Lenin!

Goddammit, that’s sixty-eight bucks.

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My spider sense is tingling.

Day 4

Today’s soundtrack: Step by step.....oooo baby...

Today at 11:02pm: I don’t know ‘cause it’s only 7.34pm

Just remembered this book I read, Why Smart People Can Be So Stupid. It’s a fascinating collection of scientific essays that provide psychological breakdowns of stupidity.

I won’t go into the specifics of psychological drives and the acts of satiating them here, but I will mention a couple things. Chapter Four lists a bunch of conditions people can suffer from that may ultimately lead them to do stupid things. I was alarmed to see I possess most of these characteristics. They are:

Impulsiveness - i.e. you’re in the middle of doing something but suddenly decide you need to go out and get a bacon cheeseburger or an angora sweater or laid.

Neglect - The opposite of Impulsiveness. While Impulsiveness implies you act too quickly, Neglect means you act too late or not at all. Is my assignment finished yet? Er, no.

Procrastination - Not quite the same as Neglect, Procrastination means you actively avoid work you have to do, perhaps by busying yourself with other, more trivial things. What should I be doing right now? Working on my assignment . What am I doing right now? Updating my freakin’ online diary.

Vacillation - i.e. dicking around while you’re trying to make up your mind. What should I have for dinner, a Big Mac or a Fried Rice? The Fried Rice is cheaper. But wait, I’m in the mood for a burger. But the burger place is farther. But I had the Fried Rice yesterday. Fuuuuckk...

Backsliding - Backsliding is when you adopt a new practice, but soon lapse back into the established way of doing things. Like saying “I am going to get up early from now on!” and doing it for three days before oversleeping by several hours.

Indulgence - Indulgence implies engaging in excess. Like “Man that chocolate cake was good, I should probably have another 97 helpings of it.” Cigarettes and Tiger ain’t a bad example either.

Overdoing - Overdoing is when you disguise Indulgence as something effortful. Like writing a lot in your online diary under the illusion that writing a lot of anything is better than writing nothing at all.

Well at least now I’ve identified my problem. Or seven of them anyway.

Life.....

Help me, I am trapped. A heavy bookcase fell on me and now I am pinned at my desk and can just manage to reach the keyboard with one hand. That is why I haven’t been writing much lately. Definitely not because I’ve grown morose and uncommunicative from catching wind of events too horrific to recount or even think about.

Yes it is because I am trapped under many books and have been for days. First I tried to e-mail, then IM for help but no one is on. I shouldn’t have gotten all these books. Next time I buy a book I will give it away or sell it immediately after I finish it so that it cannot sit patiently on a shelf waiting to pin me to my desk with its brothers and sisters. In elementary school they told me books were good for me and goddammit they fucking lied.

She called me and told me she had become a junkie. I tried to listen and not freak out. I asked her if she was turning tricks or knocked up and she said no. Then I told her I thought that put her in the top 10th percentile of junkies and she laughed a little.

Later we met up and I saw her for the first time in a long time and I now know there is nothing funny about being hooked on nasty fucking drugs. A guy put marks on her too. I felt very, very bad feelings welling up inside me when I saw that.

I tried to help but I can’t do much. I tried but I just can’t do very much. I felt like an asshole. It’s like the time I called tech support and when I got to the second part of my troubleshooting question the tech guy said “Sir I’m afraid that’s outside the boundaries of the support I can provide.” But I think my failure to provide adequate support was less eloquent. It was decidedly unbeautiful.

I remember one time sleeping with a girl I was involved with. We were asleep and wrapped around each other. She kept waking up with a start--she was having nightmares that kept waking her up. Bad nightmares I think. So every time it happened, I immediately tried to hold her tight and stroke her hair, you know? But it didn’t work; she kept having them. That was a bad feeling but I'm sure it was nothing compared to her nightmares.

No one is coming to get this bookcase off of me. I am going to lie here a little longer and then I will try to move it again.

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Jesus, where am I going with this entry. I don’t know if these sentences are making much sense, I’m running on very little sleep right now. But I feel compelled to write ‘cause I’m fucking stressed out. I used to think it was severe workloads that brought stress on but now I think it’s the increased people contact that comes with severe workloads.

In secondary school my table tennis coach sat me down in the lockerroom for a heart-to-heart and an apology after he’d roughed me up for doing something I thought insignificant.

“The things you don’t like about other people are the things you don’t like about yourself,” he told me, and I’ve never forgotten it. I know that statement sounds obvious to you now, but to a 16-year-old virgin, stuff like that changes your little virgin paradigms.

A couple weeks later I lost interest in going to class, and later that month I lost my virginity. It was, on balance, a good semester.

So I guess the answer is, I dislike being around people because I am people.

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I’m going to bed now. I know in two weeks I’m going to read this entry and be like “Who the fuck wrote this?” But I don’t care because I’m going to bed.