The blog of J. Brendalaen aka Haesslich

Farewell Live Journal (rantish)

2004-09-25T10:57:21Z

Well I haven't posted anything to Live Journal in six months. I find LJ massively inferior to Modblog and there's something about using LJ I find utterly irksome. I can't put my finger on it... vainglorious fuckoffs around each and every corner? Communism? I don't know. The only thing that LJ really has over others is a large userbase and communities. Therein lies the problem, however, as the former works against the the latter. As a clique of any nature grows it becomes more and more indistinguishable from a faceless mass of raving morons.

This post is really just an official last entry. I'll still be lurking around others' LJs and posting inane comments, fear not.

Coinnig nuacht a thabhairt,
Ta gra an domhain i mo Chori duit,
Slan leat,
J. Brendalaen aka Haesslich

My Journey to the Negaverse, Part Three

2004-04-20T12:22:32Z

Friday, April 2nd:

We wake up late (~10:30am), again, after a long night of drinking Erdinger and Chimay. Jason, Kevin, Sandy, Mark and I stroll down the street to this hot-pot place. Sandy wasn't a big fan of preparing his own food but I thought the food was totally off the hook. Delicious. There wasn't much there that Mark could eat. You see, Mark has ATES or Aversion To Everything Syndrome which more commonly know as Wuss-ass disease. Actually I just like giving him a hard time, the problem is that he's truly allergic to everything under the sun; there are few things he can eat without going into shock of some sort. We linger for probably an hour devouring everything in eye-shot. The rest of the afternoon was fairly uneventful. We head downtown and hang out in a Star Bucks (Empire Coffee) waiting for the rest of the guys. We meet up with Ed, Allen, Lone, and Ben to go camera/gizmo shopping as there is a section of Taipei known for it's densely packed electronics shops; you can get good deals if you are a good haggler. Most of just go along to stretch our legs. I'm not entirely sure how this got put on our agenda but no one really minded.

After all of that business we head over to Les Suites to freshen up a bit and meet up with the rest of the crew: Nate, Adam, Gloria, Bret, Courtney, Drew and Angie. We're off to the famous Snake Alley (You can locate Adam by his being the only white person in this picture). Snake Alley is a night market where you can eat pretty much eat any type of animal prepared in any type of way. There are also a lot of dealers peddling flea-market type things. The food there was really good and I got to use my entire Mandarin vocabulary: hello, please, thank you, numbers, could I have x# orders of, and the rather important I don't want it but thank you. Pretty pathetic on my part. Anyhow as far as the food goes... I had an oyster and onion omlette which freaked out some others as it looked like eyeballs in my egg. =) I also had some roasted duck, thousand-year-old egg, skewered snake, chicken hearts, and the best calimari I've ever had! My adventurous spirit stopped at the goose feet stand however. For desert I tried a dozen different types of donuts and had some fresh squeezed juice (I have no idea what tropical plants these were going into it, but it was good). Drew and Angie seem concerned about what people are eating. To me it was actually quite refreshing how food is marketed there. In the metropolitan area where I live everything is so highly processed that you need to have labels on everything just so you can tell what it is, this is pork, this is beef, this is sol, this is flaunder, this is trout, etc. In these markets you get to see the actual animal in its original form before it is prepared. I had a great time there.

After everone gets their fill of the bazaar it's off to celebrate Jason and Cathy's last evening of singledom. Everyone heads over to the well-known night club Plush. It was indeed plush, plush and posh. We ordered up a ridiculous volume of alcohol and most everyone proceeded to have a good time. Here's Ming and Christina sitting on one of the very plush couches as the night starts. Kevin busts out on the dance floor. Kevin's moves are all original. I believe this one is the "Cloud 9 Shuffle". Other more impressive routines include "Whew, boy am I hot" and "The Hungry Cowboy" and let me tell ya, the cowboy was hungry. I talked to a few cuties but it was hard as there were serious language boundry issues. It didn't take long for the fact that I was essentially just a big novelty to get to me either. I really would have rather just had a nice conversation with someone but everyone was already 1) involved in apparently exclusive conversations 2) trying to convince me to talk to more girls in a demeaning manor like I'm some desperate slut with no interesting qualities or 3) some native girl treating me like some slut with no interesting qualities. Don't get me wrong, I like to party, but something about the way I was being treated by everyone really ticked me off. I decided to just sit back and drink a whole lot of Belvedere (a good brand of vodka). Apparently some of the people in our group thought that I was just being un-fun and I got the vibe in succeeding days that they held it against me. Anyway, I was extremely drunk and I really don't remember much from that point on until we left the club at about 4am. Nate, Ed, Lone, myself, and some others went to get something to eat which really helped sober me up a little. A nice donut-type-omlette thing and a bowl of fresh hot soy milk. It was really good (you can tell I liked the food over in Taiwan no?). Nate was beyond the point of help however. Nate let me crash on the floor of his hotel room which was very nice of him. On the way back to the hotel Nate voiced that he had the same basic annoyance I had with the way people were treating him at the club. It made me feel better that it wasn't just me. It's 6am by the time we get up to the room, everyone's still extremely drunk. We pull the blinds shut so the sun doesn't bother us (we have to rest because the wedding is in the evening) and everyone basically passes out.

As I'm transcribing this I decided to go outside and get some fresh air. As I opened the sliding back door this brown fuzzy blob dropped from the top of the door sill and floated to the ground... then proceeded to jump at me, Ack! I looked down at what it was as it had interesting stripes on it. It was some weird looking spider so I caught it in a jar. It's really interesting and looks sort of like a wolf spider as it has a turret-looking head with forward-pointing eyes. I looked it up online and I think it is this guy. Outside of the garden variety spiders, we mainly have black widows, tarantulas, and wolf spiders in the area. You can find a black widow in about five minutes if you look. I've encountered a few wolf spiders in the garage befoe as well. Even though wolf spiders are shy and run away when disturbed they are by far the most alarming... they have way too many eyes!! It's not natural! They are also quite large and don't run away as much as they jump and bounce away. Gives me the willies.

Back to the story. Most everyone wakes up around 3:30pm which is perfect since we are meeting downstairs, ready to go, at six o'clock. As I was not at home-base for a few days, the battery on my camera died so I did not get any pictures of Jason's wedding. I'll have to wait until the file-sharing begins to get any. The wedding was really beautiful and everyone was looking sharp! It was a mixture of Eastern and Western traditions but mostly what I'd just call modern. The banquet was twelve courses of delicious seafood entrees (tapas?). Seating was for probably 300 people (big extended Chinese family)... by far the largest wedding I've been to.

I have what is one more post's worth of travel logs. Almost everyone left the day after the wedding. Mark and I have a few more days of stay left and we get to do some cool adventuring (finally, partying gets old). There are so many pictures it's been hard to organize them all and pick out a few select ones to post online.

More soon.

Always forgetting to cross-post to LJ from ModBlog. =/

Noise Filling Room: Frederic Chopin, Piano Concerto No. 1
Mood: Anxious

My Journey to the Negaverse, Part Two

2004-04-14T19:40:36Z

(Again, the gallery has been getting pretty hammered so if the links are slow, sorry)

Thursday, April 1st:

We woke up around eleven o'clock which is pretty much standard operating procedure for me anyhow. I'm pretty sure that our jet-lag is effectively cancelled. Today Allen, Kevin, Sandy, Mark, and I are off to the National Palace Museum in (north of) Taipei. The National Palace Museum is the host of thousands of artifacts collected by the Chinese emperors and royal families. The collection includes ceramics, porcelain, calligraphy, paintings, wood and bone carvings, and ritual bronzes. The impressive display that we were able to see used only about one fifth of the palace's real estate as it was being remodeled at the time. Even when they have the entire palace open with exhibits, there are so many artifacts that if they cycle the entire display every three months, it will take twentytwo years to complete a full cycle. And in fact this is what they intend to do. There are more exhibits than I'll be able to talk about here but I'll list a few.

The caligraphy and paintings were amazing. Mostly from 13th - 17th centuries AD these works are phenomenally detailed and many are truly larger than life. Many mural-sized scrolls appear, to an untrained eye, to be months of painstakingly detailed work. Unfortunately due to the nature of the scrolls, photography is not permitted (like in most museums) as the flashes from cameras excelerate deterioration/oxidation. The wood and rhinoceros horn carvings were beautiful and amazingly intricate. Similarly the jade carvings such as this single piece elixir goblet are fantastic works of art.

What I found the most interesting were the developments made during the Shang (also Yin, 17th - 11th century B.C.) and Western Zhou (also Western Chou, 11th - 8th century B.C.) dynasties. Forgive me as I segue into a miniature history lesson:

The Shang state was what is now nothern Hunan and Huang He (Yellow River), reaching from the Yellow Sea north into the steppe. The Shang dynasty is considered the emergence of civilization in China. Cities, occupational specialization, and the use of writing were not prevelant until the Shang. The two major archeological sites of the Shang are the Zhengzhou, north of the Yellow River, and the Anyang, south of the Yellow River, the latter being the actual seat of the Shang house (Yin Xu) and richer in archeological findings.

The first appearance of writing is on the famous oracle bones, or Jia-gu Wen. Unfortunately there were no oracle bones on display at the time I visited. The oracle bones are generally ox scapulae (shoulder-blade) and to a lesser extent the tortoise plastron (breastshield). A diviner, sometimes the king himself, would then heat the bone by holding it over the fire or inserting a heated bronze rod. This would produce cracks in the bone which were then interpreted by the diviner. The results of the divination, the actual events that transpired, and the current topics of discussion were then etched into these flat bone surfaces by a scribe and filled with cinnabar or lamp soot (lampblack) to make them readable. This practice is called scapulimancy and was used to aid the kings in decisions of hunting, weather, warfare, household affairs, ancestral rites, and favourable days for ceremonies.

These inscriptions consist of three basic elements: pictograms which directly represent an object, ideograms which represent an object or concept through association, and phonograms which represent sounds directly. In these early scripts one can see the same basic positional grammar that became classical Chinese. Some 100,000 oracle bones have been discovered. Of them, there are roughly 5,000 distinct characters 1,500 of which have been deciphered. It is important to keep in mind that while writing was a unifying element for the entire land, literacy was restricted to the elite.

In addition to the oracle bones is the appearance of writing on cast bronze objects (Jin Wen) such as ritual bells, sacrificial vessels, and seals. These new cast bronze vessels were introduced by the Erlitou and modeled after traditional pottery to be used in sacred ceremonies. There are over thirty types of Shang vessels, most of which were of sarced ceremonial importance: the cooking vessel (ding, or ting), the wine container (guang, or kuang), the wash basin (p'an), and various drinking vessels (gu, or ku, and the jia, or chia) are a few among many specific types, all of which had a religious importance.

This appearance of writing was not only on a new medium but was a new stage in the development of the script. This script is known as the Greater Seal, or Da Zhuan and appeared predominantly during the Western Zhou. Aesthetics are a dominant element of the Greater Seal script with curved flowing lines and an asymmetrical balance in the characters. This dominance of aesthetics is often attributed to the religious importance of the artifacts. During the Shang and Zhou dynasties many gods of nature were worshiped such as the god of the Earth, gods of various rivers and montains, and a high god (Di, or Shangdi) which controlled all of the powers of nature. Complimentary and integral to their religion was ancestor worship. The bronze vessels often depict animals that were sacrificed and images of human heads. It turns out that in many royal tombs remains of not only sacrificial animals were found, but also sacrificial human victims. Why these sacrifices were made is not fully known but what is known is that they were extremely important part of life. With such religious importance of the vessels, it follows that the script had a sense of beauty and quickly blossomed into an artform of its own.

Though the Western Zhou overthrew the Shang, it was not the same fate for their culture. Technology and cultural trates evolved smoothly over the course of the two eras, progressing smoothly from the Shang to the Eastern Zhou. During the Western Zhou changes in bronze work is apparent. The inscriptions become much more complex and comprehensive, sometimes with as many as 500 characters. The animal forms of both the characeters and designs become more decorative and smooth. Designs such as the Taotie (t'ao-t'ieh), a mythological being which guards a corner of heaven, are popular during the Zhou. The Taotie have smooth flowing symmetrical designs.

As the designs on Zhou bronze work change and become more and more decorative, a change in their usage is also revealed. They were used less and less as ritual vessels (often sacrificial rituals) and, as we can tell by their inscriptions, were used more and more as gifts and family heirlooms. These changes in the appearance and function of the bronzes are evidence of a slow and gradual process of secularization in the upper reaches of society, a process which was to accelerate in the centuries immediately following the move to the east. Parallel to this particular change in religious activities is the decline of divination and thus the decline of scapulimancy. Human and animal sacrifices also decline as religious emphasis lay more and more on the relationship between god and men. Over time the Zhou's religion transforms from the worship of ancestors and many gods to the worship of an ultimate natural authority (Shangdi), to eventually a divine ruler ("Son of Heaven") with supreme authority and the Mandate of Heaven.

Like in many early civilizations, writing was created out of necessity but evolved by virtue of religious importance. Shang and Zhou scripts closely reflect the religious practices of the time. Oracle bones display a prominence of supernatural fortune telling while bronze design and inscriptions reflect refined beliefs and ritual. As an art form, writing directly represented the religion and belief system of the Shang and Zhou peoples. I'm already getting out of control here (and also toward the edge of my knowledge) so I'll just tie in that after the Western Zhou came the Eastern Zhou (8th - 2nd century B.C.) which is further segmented into the Spring and Autumn period (722 - 481 B.C.) and the Warring States period (403 - 221 B.C.). It is during these times that you have Confucius (born ca. 551 B.C.), Mo Zi, Mencius and the rise of confucianism, daoism, Xun Zi, and Han Fei Zi (promoter of the stately legal system or "Legalism"). And well, the rest is history. =)

Sorry about that, you know how people like to run their mouths when they hit a subject they are interested in and happen to know something about... I'm no different it seems. hahahah. Anyway, we finish our tour through what we can of the museum (I pretty much mentioned everything except the ink blocks and personal seals) and head over to the garden. The garden has a large main pond with quite a few large koi. The garden is actually quite large as you might not be able to tell from that picture. There are many little nooks and crannies and you can find interesting little things all over the place... as well as some interesting not-so-little things.

We do a little more walking around in the garden and head over to the aptly named Grand Hotel to meet up with everyone else. There's actually an interesting story as to why this huge hotel was built but this post is already reaching critical density so I'll forego the tale. No one is around so we wander about inside and admire the grandiosity of everything and settle in the lounge for some drinks. Thank god it was happy hour because they were expensive. We finally get ahold of someone who knows what's going on and apparently we are no longer meeting at the Grand Hotel but at Les Suites in the downtown area... naturally. We head over and after some great difficulty finding the place (we did not have our map). Drew and Angie as well as Nate are staying at Les Suites (a gorgeous and nicely priced hotel) and they let us use the facilities to wash up a bit (even a short ammount of time outside in Taipei coats you in a thin film off pollution/soot, yuck!). We collect everyone and head over to J's Place, a nice little bar downtown that had every type of european brew from Belgian Chimay to Bavarian Erdinger Weißbier (yay! I used to live in Erding and love unfiltriertes dunkles Hefeweißbier... lecker!). We stay there the rest of the evening; It was quite enjoyable. Here's a pic of Mark, Jason, Marisa (Jason's sister), Sandy (behind Drew), and Drew.

More soon.

Noise Filling Room: Rachmaninov's Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini
Mood: Blogtacious

My Journey to the Negaverse, Part One

2004-04-14T19:38:07Z

As far as I can tell these posts turned out to be part travel journal, part rant, and part essay. My bandwidth is pathetic, so if I get hammered that's why the pictures/movies are downloading slowly.

Warning: This is not nearly as interesting as an episode of GlobeTrekker may be. =)

Monday, March 29th:

This will turn out to be the single longest day in my life (I delimit days by any ammount of sleep and not the normal solar cycles). I wake up late (as usual) around 10:30 and have to snap to. The lawn is already a bloody mess as I've neglected it the entire winter quarter of school so I'd better mow it as a courtesy to my neighbors. Ahh hey look who made a nest in the yard during the late winter months... A large collective of wasps! It was fun mowing extra slow and circling in towards the nest all while trying to not step on them or get them extra pissed. It didn't exactly work out that well though and I got stung once in the shoulder. I spend the rest of the day tieing up loose ends and packing for the trip.

Sandy drives up from SLO (San Louis Obispo) and picks me up around 8:30pm. We drop off his truck at the Colma BART station and scoot off to SFO intl. airport. I meet up with my buddy Mark (also my housemate) and check in. It was a coincidence that Sandy was taking the same flight to Taiwan and some other good friends Drew and Angie happened to also be taking the same flight over! Here's a pic of Drew, Angie, and Sandy taking the edge off at the airport (sorry about the red-eye). The flight was thirteen hours long and I can never sleep on airplanes, this time was no different. Luckily my natural insomnia has prepared me for low-sleep conditions. What is really unpleasant however is that I'm 6'4" and those planes, particularly the ones for China Air, were just not set up for people of my stature. Anyhow the flight was uneventful and we arrived 5:30 in the morning Wednesday (yup, we flew right past Tuesday). As you arrive in the ROC you'll see a nice big sign warning you that drug trafficking is punishable by death so all you youngins need to leave your cigaweed at home.

Wednesday, March 31st:

Jason and Cathy, both of whom are very good friends of mine, and the reason why I'm starting travels off in Taipei, were gracious enough to come pick us up from the airport even though they surely had plenty to do for their wedding. Brett, Courtney, and Kevin arrive a little later (eventually there would be close to twenty Californians there for the wedding) and we all go to drop off our baggage at Cathy's brother's house (his name is also Kevin). We clean up and I grab some much needed caffeine from the local Sevo (Seven-Eleven, a quick-market), those damn places are everywhere... there's probably more of them in Taipei than the whole Bay Area! (as I observed later)

Jason and Cathy have some errands to run so Kevin, Mark, Sandy, and I decide to get out and start doing some exploring. After all, the best way to fight jet-lag is to get out in the sun and move around. The first thing one will notice if they are from the states is that the major mode of transportation is scooter. The second thing that one will notice if you're from the states, or any other environmentally progressive locale, is that the scooters all have two-stroke engines. This means that the lubricant and fuel are one and the same and they are essentially burning oil. The effect of this is that the air in the entire downtown area is toxic during the day. There are so many unburned hydrocarbons and other shit in the air that you get woozy walking on the streets. If you stand still you'll notice just how dizzy you are. We're talking direct competition with Mexico City circa 1995 here. Because of the low quality of the air during the day the locals mostly wear surgical masks (or similar) when on their scooters. In fact, the surgical mask is quite popular there as it is also a courtesy when one is sick. Others, of course, wear them because they wish not to get sick. It's common enough that there are "designer" face masks... need something to go with your Hugo or Gucci (if you can afford such things)? No problem!

Buildings like this one placed in the middle of town don't help the pollution problem either (that picture may be a poor example as I believe that one may be the ventilation exhaust ports for the train station, but there were plenty of nasty buildings inside town). The massive push for industrialization without long-term planning in the 60's is to blame for most of it. Combine that with all the nasty polluting vehicles and I'm amazed anyone makes it past the age of 45. I'm not entirely sure how the ROC believes that this can go on forever; that public health and environmental concerns can be ignored. Not enough money? Inept? Doesn't care? All of the above? I won't get myself started...

As tourists we immediately noticed something that later proved to be extremely useful. If you want to locate yourself or a certain location you can do so very easily as essentially the entire city is broken down into Sectors -> Streets -> Lanes -> Alleys in descending order of size. On a map this facilitates a spiral pattern of search that allows you to locate a place extremely quickly. You wouldn't have the same luck in San Francisco... lemme tell ya.

Here's Kevin, Mark, and Sandy (on the left next to man with umbrella) as we take a stroll. As you can see there are even more scooters here, in fact all streets are lined with them. There's a reason for it... there are way too many people in Taipei. Another thing that this picture happens to illustrate is that there seems to be a much smaller middle/upper middle class. Taipei is extremely dense and commercially saturated to the point that the government actually encourages people to try and do business elsewhere. As you can see people either have a whole lot of money or just enough to get by (as actually is the case in many countries). The facts that automobiles cost almost twice as much as they do in the states and that most people don't make nearly as much doesn't help the scooter issue. Later I checked out scooter prices... a new one costs you the same US dinero that would get you a decent sport-bike in California.

We fiddle around exploring back alleys and hidden markets for pretty much the rest of the day. As a pedestrian you have to watch out, you do not have any right of way which makes bipedal navigation interesting as the roads are completely lawless (except at MAJOR intersections). Lanes are meaningless as are most traffic signs (suggestions?). A few noteworthy things are that you are to never step in front of the blue trucks, if you go there you'll know what I mean. They drive crazy and if they hit you they have to pay your medical bills... but not if you are dead... so they will make sure to finish the job if they happen to nick you (I kid you not). Something that is amazing to me is that even though both everyone drives how and where they want and there are just so many people, traffic flows better there than it does back home. It's like the emergent behaviour of a swarm of bees or school of fish... everyone just follows two basic rules: try not to hit anything and go the same general direction as the rest of the people. And it works! It lends itself to some interesting and fun-filled taxi rides. Taxis are cheap but not that cheap. It's best to use the metro or MRT (presumably metro. rapid transit). It costs you usually less than a US dollar to get to any point in Taipei via the MRT. The trains are always on time, fast, clean, and spacious (considering how many people there are). Incidently

Later we meet up with all of the guys for Jason's bachelor party, about ten of fifteen of us in all. Note that this is still Wednesday. We went to this sweet place called PartyWorld which is basically a large hotel but instead of hotel rooms you have party rooms. Each room has a wet bar, karaoke stage, a bathroom, and a well-cushioned couch that stretches around most of the room. Pretty much anything you can fathom can be ordered and delivered. It's brilliant! Needless to say we had pitchers upon pitchers upon minikegs upon minikegs of beer, "Taiwan Beer" that is. Ten minutes in and it's good to see Jason enjoying himself. After a few pitchers of beer the karaoke starts up and Ed busts a mad flow. A few pitchers of beer later and it's time for the obligatory female "visual entertainment". I'll just leave it at that. We pay for our drink consumption and the various entertainment fees and are on our way. It's now early Thursday morning, time for bed? NO WAY! It's off club'n for us! First we hit up Carnegies which turned out to have an older crowd and older music... it was pretty stodgy, we left immediately. Next on the list is Room 18. We had to wait to get in for about thirty minutes which wasnt too bad. The club is fairly small but has a good bar and there happened to be some US DJ's there spinning some decent hip-hop. The place was bumpin' and everyone had a good time. It's early Thursday morning and most of us have been up since Monday so needless to say we were just wasted. We head back to Kevin's place early (3am) and crash, hard.

More soon. =)

Noise Filling Room: Jeno Jandos playing Bach's Well Tempered Klavier #6 in D Minor
Mood: Blogtastic

Busy beezzzz...

2004-01-20T18:11:51Z

I'm short on time so this will be a short entry. I have to get to meetings with a client today to work out APIs. I think I'll treat myself to lunch at The Slanted Door (weird asian/fusion restaurant, but they have weissbier!!) since I'm sure the meeting is going to be a suck.

The unofficial non-tentative travel itinerary for April is laid out:
March 31st - Leave US to fly to Taipei
April 1st - Arrive in Taipei, stay at Les Suite Taipei
April 1st/2nd - Jason's bachelor party?
April 3rd - Jason and Cathy's Wedding
April 4th - Fly to Hong Kong, meet Mike
April 8th - Fly to Chengdu, stay at Sam's Guesthouse Hostel
April 9th - Get ticket/permit from travel agent
April 10th - Fly to Lhasa, Tibet
April 10th-14th - Stay in cheap hotel, Visit Lhasa sights
April 15th-22nd - Find guide in Lhasa, Visit surrounding areas, camp? (Namtso lake, monasteries)
April 22nd-26th - Hire car and driver to Kathmandu, Nepal see sights along the way
April 27th-? Stay in Kathmandu at Sam's place
? - Leave Kathmandu to head home

I'm not sure if it will be this long, I may have to cut it short.

Would like to be able to make some decent entries but my current schedule doesn't afford me the time (well, when I do have free time I spend it playing StarCraft with friends, LONG LIVE THE NERDS!).

Noise Filling Room: Anjali - Kali Came
Mood: Rushed

Today I am humane, today I am sad.

2003-12-20T12:33:02Z

I've been kind of down in the dumps recently so I haven't felt like writing or really doing much of anything.

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This month I've been totally financially strapped due to some overdue invoices. I had to take out a small loan to pay the damn rent and be able to get a haircut (which I finally got today, yeah!). My credit card bill is WAY overdue and probably has a nice big ding on it. This was a nice start to the month.

Then of course I was very sick during finals which was a wonderful joy. On the subject of school, I apparently signed up for instructors that are on the absolutely-do-not-ta ke-their-class-list. It's of course immediately too late to change my schedule after finding these trinkets of knowledge.

And to top it off: my cat Suess (pron. Seuss, like Dr. Seuss) fell ill towards the end of last week and it turns out he had both feline leukemia and FIV (much like HIV for felines, only it's an airborne virus). I had to put him down today. I'm not sure he would have made it another day anyhow. It's amazing, last week he was the same ol' spirited animal he always was... this week he was so sick that the most humane thing to do was to put him to sleep. The vet. said that both of his conditions usually show up they way they did, out of nowhere. He was rescued from the street about three years ago and was healthy (other than slight malnutrition at first). Apparently he still had contact with other farel cats. I'm glad that he got the chance for a warm home and good food before it was his time. *sigh*

I am sad.

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<div class="on_with_life ">

I read an article in Discover magazine about recent WMAP observations with figures that indicate (or so interpreted to indicate) that the universe is flat. This means that the average density in the universe is precisely the critical density (4 x 10^-30 g/cm^3) which yields that the universe will expand and grow colder for an infinite ammount of time (it takes an infinite ammount of time to slow to a halt). It's sparked a fit of fervent studying as I for quite some time have felt that there is a glaring contradiction in logic with this theory. I'll probably post a write-up about it in the not-to-distant future.

The quagmire of creation theories is apparently inescapable. Even cosmologists and astronomers find themselves stuck in the goop of their own hubris.

More on that later.

In other randomness:
- It's amazing how good a haircut can make you feel!
- Many of Chopin's Nocturnes and Impromptus are fantastically difficult to play!
- I'm DIEING to go snowboarding. I just waxed my board and got everything ready to go. Unf!
- It's late so I'm going to bed.

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Noise filling room: The heater because it's FREEZIN BULLOCKS IN HERE.
Mood: Melancholy