odds, ends, this dream I had

In no particular order, here are a bunch of words:

Today I went down to DC with Tim and Leonard to observe/participate in the anti-war protests. Tims blog sums up my feelings on going down, so rather than mimic his post (which would be in my style, I guess) I will just say that while I have ideological reasons not to go down, it still beats sitting around the house and doing laundry, which were my other plans for the day. After coming back a few of us got dinner in Baltimore. Uneventful but filling.

I signed up at a Tae Kwon Do place down the street. I've been to two classes so far and have only discovered that I am horribly inflexible. It's fun when I'm not trying to do any high kick, when I am it's painful and pathetic. Watch out. Soon my horrible cognitive coordination will be coupled with horrible punch and kick coordination. I will be an unstoppable force.

Gooooooooooooooooogle is coming to campus on October 5th and I plan on going there and seeing if I have a ice cubes chance in hell of ever working with them. I figure my 6 years of work experience, BS in CS, and linguistic coursework will put me at a slight advantage against the teeming masses of CS majors. It would probably entail moving to NYC, which wouldn't be so bad considering that I have always sortof wanted to live in a city, but I would miss being close to my friends and family.

I finally got my act together and installed FC4 on my PC. When we moved to Laurel I couldn't get my computer to boot without getting a "kernel panic" and never bothered reinstalling Linux. Well I did it, and now all I need is a switch and some network cable and I will have it online, which means I will finally get access to the 60 some gigs of music on there, compared to the 20 gigs I have on my iBook. I've made do without the rest of my music, but I would really like it now.

I had an interesting dream the other night. I would like to explain it in detail but it's too nonlinear in my memory and countergeometric in spatial reasoning to do that. I will have to settle with a vague and sporadic description. It started with me, after having died, drifting down into a room. This I guess is the afterlife (phew, I would have hated simply ceasing to exist.) The room was setup like a classroom or library or cafeteria or computer lab. It's hard to describe. As I was approaching the floor I noticed that some of the people in the room (the room was peopled, by the way) were old teachers of mine. One was a generic elementary school teacher that doesn't correlate with anybody in particular, who said "you were the stupid one." implying that my achievements in her class weren't impressive. I remember that I was always fairly good in elementary school and simply said that I was at least smarter than her. I'm off to a good start. I somehow know that this is a holding area and not any kind of permanent environment for my thoughts, but never really leave throughout the dream. The walls were lined with books and upon inspection, and discussion with some guy there, I learn that the collection of books is determined by the population in the room. Every book you ever read, or knew about, was on the shelves. Since there are other people, there should be some new books. I notice a book by Isaac Asimov that I hadn't seen (and illogically wonder why it was there) but being even more bothered because this picture book I saw once that had images of fractals, biological tissue, natural landscapes, and astronomical images wasn't there. I was pissed because I really wanted to look at that book. Moving along, every person was represented by a colored liquid. This representation wasn't visual (everybody looked normal) but you sortof knew the color and texture of everybody's fluid. There were also bottles of colored fluid on some shelves. You could drink the fluid and it would mingle with yours producing a new color (closer to brown) and the closer to brown you got the closer to hell (not like the hell you've read about, just a sort of dead end, an analogy I like more and more every time think it.) There was an advantage to drinking the fluid, something having to do with experience or sacrifice, but it's hard to put into words. There was also a bottle of clear liquid you could drink, and while it seems to be that drinking it would dilute your liquid and bring further from this hell, it really just reincarnates you (when you drink it you get sucked towards this pure white space.) There are a few hallways connected to this room, but what lies in them, and what it all means, wasn't represented in any kind of spatially or verbally expressibly way. We weren't supposed to go in them, but only in the sense that you aren't supposed to wander the halls during class in public school. If you get caught you may get scolded, but in this environment where there really isn't any authority you can just scoff at the scolder and carry on. At some point things get more interesting, I make some friends (that, or some of my friends also died) and we wander around. I get into an argument with a dead cop about him telling us we can't do something. I bring up the point that while he may have been a cop in life, here we are all equals. I felt so rebellious and cocky it's pathetic. Standing up to the man and all. Anyway we all start exploring and discover that there is an outside world with what seems to be vegetation and landscapes, but to try to describe any of it would be silly. I really wish I could explain this better or make a movie out of it or something, since it was probably the most interesting dream I've had to date. Oh well, I'll have to settle for this. I've decided that now I want to dream about driving. I don't like video games because the input and output interfaces are poor (2D vision, buttons and knobs) and I don't want to drive crazy in real life because, come on, I don't want to die just yet. The only real option here is to dream about driving. Sounds fun to me. I think I'm going to go try to do that now.

carry on.