hope that i get old before i die…

i find it strangely satisfying for some reason when i look over at the car next to me and see a very cute girl driving a sports car, acting like she’s got so much attitude. then seeing her reach up to pick her nose. AND THEN EAT THE BOOGER! it’s too bad that it’s considered creepy to take pictures of people in their cars when they don’t know you’re watching them.

well, i thought this would be a good time to dust off the cobwebs of this place and get writing again. today’s subject has to do a little bit with quantum physics theory, so i will provide some background on that first for those who are too lazy to look it up, or who can’t understand the reference material. we start with the fact that at the quantum level, the pieces of matter we know and love like protons, electrons, neutrons, and all the rest do not have a well defined area of space and/or time that they exist in. in other words, they are impossible to measure without highly specialized and expensive equipment. werner heisenberg said that not only are they impossible to measure, but that you can’t know one set of parameters without totally messing up some other measurements in the process. for instance, you can possibly measure a particle’s position but you can’t really know its momentum once you measure its position accurately. in physics we call this collapsing the waveform, because most particles act similar to waves at that level, and the equations that describe them closely fit equations for waves. the reason the waveform is collapsed though, is because once you measure a piece of that information you forever change the way that particle/wave is observed and it will never go back to the state you found it in from before you measured it. understand? taking the measurement of quantum particles forever changes the nature of those particles.

so there’s this girl that i’ve known for about a year and a half. we’ve had some good times and some better sex but for the most part we had an understanding that we were mostly friends with benefits and that was the end of things. all that changed about six weeks ago when we took a small road trip together. we found ourselves enjoying each other to the point that i started thinking that we were finally taking that step from friends with benefits to potential girlfriend material. over the course of this year and a half we had our moments where she started to let me in but then would push me away. then she’d let me in again but then push me away. lather, rinse, repeat. this time around, she didn’t push me away when we started getting closer. so i operated under the assumption that we were actually making something work together and it would not be long before we became “official”.

…and that’s where the happiness ends. because last week an old friend from high school came to town. an old friend who happens to be a guy. an old friend she hasn’t seen in over four years. an old friend that she thought about trying to sleep with on several occasions long before i came on the scene. my more astute readers are already knowing where this is heading. yes, she spent a total of three days with this old friend and has decided that he means more to her than anything else in the world, and i should just understand because “we didn’t have a commitment to each other anyway”. needless to say, i’ve spent the last week in a range of emotions that nobody should have to endure in their lifetime. i think i’ve lost several pounds on the “crushing depression” diet. and she knew i had feelings for her but didn’t think i was going to be as good to her as this guy. who she hasn’t seen for four years. who, although they knew each other before, is almost certainly not the same person she knew in high school. and so everything i’ve been working towards this past year and a half is gone in one weekend.

what does this have to do with quantum physics? it is this: my relationship with this girl was measured. the waveform collapsed — big time. and it is now forever different for the future. the fact that she has been one of my best friends i’ve ever had just adds insult to the injury, we can never go back again. she’s set determined to be with this guy now and she’s convinced herself that he cares too. and i can’t talk too much about how fast they’re moving because i was in a long term relationship that moved almost as fast. but most of my time with this girl was actual time spent together, and that means that as long as he’s around i will not be able to be around her. and she wants him to move in with her soon. so in the space of three days, we’ve gone from hanging out almost every day to we may never see each other again. if ever there was a candidate for the phrase “collapsing waveform” outside the realms of physics, i think this definitely qualifies. nothing makes sense right now, and every day is a challenge to make it through till tomorrow. but i have a lot on my plate this week, so i’m hoping it will be enough to help me get over the fact that the potential current love of my life is now no more than the proverbial dust in the wind….

an open letter to the person who stole the stamp off my cable bill this afternoon:

are you *that* poor that you can’t afford to drop 42 cents on your own stamp? hell, even if you bought a stamp at the store down the street you would only be charged 50 cents for it! i’m sure you could’ve stood on the corner outside of that shop and *begged* for that much money within about 5 minutes! it’s not that hard to come up with the money to send a letter these days you know.

yes i realize the post office just raised the rates, which means that stamps will cost you ONE WHOLE PENNY more than they did last week. i’m sure if you walked the five blocks to the nearest post office you’d probably find at least one penny lying on the ground between here and there. the post office is real good about trading in currency for postage, even pennies that you pick up off the street.

you do realize that it’s technically a felony to tamper with someone’s mail? so you could be facing prison time over 42 cents worth of postage. lucky for me that it wasn’t a very important bill, it was just the payment for my cable. if you’re gonna commit a felony though, you should have gone all out and just taken the whole thing. you would have had my checking account information — everything but my social security number, which you probably don’t need to make any online purchases on most websites these days.

anyway, i want to personally thank you for destroying the last vestige of my faith in humanity. or at least my faith that nobody will mess with the mail once it goes into the outgoing mailbox. if you looked at the return address then you know where i live, so come on by sometime so i can properly show my appreciation for your thievery. give me some advance warning and i’ll make sure to put on the steel toed boots before you get here cause i just want to go that extra mile for you to show you what i think of what you did.

sincerely,
moondog

well, my internet buddy callatya has tagged me with reaching into the current book at the top of my reading list, flipping to page 123 and posting the next three sentences after the first five sentences. today’s entry comes courtesy of frank herbert’s God Emperor of Dune and goes a little something like this:

“He did not like this place with its high walls all around from which attack might come. Idaho had sent scouts up there in the night and Moneo knew that some of them still lurked on the heights, but there were also ravines ahead before the marchers reached the river. And there had not been enough guards to station them everywhere.”

if anyone wants to play along, just take the current book you’re reading, open to page 123, read the first five sentences, then post the next three. and drop a line here if you want me to read what you’ve posted

yes, that is a check for a whopping NINE CENTS that i just received from an old 401k account i had from a job i haven’t worked in almost three years. the best part? they took two cents out of it for federal withholding tax! i can’t wait til next year when i get a statement from them for that enormous sum so that i can properly file my taxes

unfortunately, this is going to be an emo post. but i’ve come to a realization lately that what i think of as friends are nothing more than close acquaintances in the big picture of things. maybe it’s the digital age or maybe it’s LA itself, but i find that people who are true friends to me will actually call/text me back if i should call/text them first. the ones who don’t even answer and don’t even acknowledge that i sent them a message should be a hint that they don’t value me in their lives at all. i’d like to chalk it up to LA, because i know that the friends i had in austin would at least give me a yes/no answer to a yes/no question. none of this “i’ll answer you if i feel like it because i’m too busy to text a simple yes or no to your message”

anyway, i was hoping to meet some people out tonight for a night of great music but of course nobody can answer me i really don’t care if they can’t make it or don’t want to go out, but if i ask “hey, want to check out this show tonight?” and get *nothing* back? yeah, that really pisses me off. especially when it happens from people who i *have* spent some time with and who i thought i was close enough to that i can at least get a “hey maybe next time” or something similar. the upshot of the whole ordeal is that even when i ran into some girls i knew were going to be there tonight, i didn’t get much more than a couple sentences from them either, despite the fact that we’ve all hung out together and again, i thought we were closer than we apparently are. somehow i always end up as that person who gets interrupted mid-sentence, or find myself suddenly talking to nobody but me when i thought i was having a conversation with someone. maybe i should just take the hint and find someone who does want to talk to me. well, i ended up leaving early, which i *never* do on a normal night. i’m usually the one who is last to leave, or near the end at least. but something about tonight just put me in a foul mood.

thankfully humanity redeemed itself in the form of tommy’s burgers where i had an actual conversation with some people waiting in line. not only that but found that we even had a shared experience from a dodger’s game in the not-so-distant past. i had more fun waiting in line for a chili burger than i did listening to some awesome musicians, and for some reason, that just doesn’t seem right….

– they say noam chomsky is the most quoted intellectual of our time. for anyone who has never seen him speak, the reason he is the most quoted is because nobody can sit through a whole lecture without falling asleep at his monotone delivery. much better to have someone else quote you the good stuff later, trust me on this one.

— speaking of chomsky, i would LOVE to be in line to a speech by him, or someone of his ilk and stature, and have people hoping for classics, similar to the banter overheard at a big name music concert. “oh man, i hope he does the iran/contra speech again tonight” “yeah, i bet he encores with panama and the spread of US hegemony in latin america”

— arizona is reporting tainted melons. does that mean that they have melons with big balls?

— easter is supposed to be celebrating the day that jesus rose from the dead after being crucified. in other words, the church is celebrating the zombification of jesus? i guess that’s why there’s no record of any sermons after the resurrection. can you imagine a zombie jesus roaming the countryside, people come from miles around just to hear him say “braaaiiinnnss…..” of course, with the zealotry of today’s chrisitians, we’d have a veritable zombie army by now….

— i realize they call it faith because you’re supposed to just accept that it actually happened, but i still think that someone arranged to have jesus’ body removed from his tomb, hid the body, then told everyone he rose from the dead and made this whole “son of god” mystique around it. “no seriously, he rose from the dead! well of course there’s no body, he ascended to heaven because he’s the son of god!” “ooooh, that explains it alright”

Jesus was way cool
Everybody liked Jesus
Everybody wanted to hang out with him
Anything he wanted to do, he did
He turned water into wine
And if he wanted to
He could have turned wheat into marijuana
Or sugar into cocaine
Or vitamin pills into amphetamines

He walked on the water
And swam on the land
He would tell these stories
And people would listen
He was really cool

If you were blind or lame
You just went to Jesus
And he would put his hands on you
And you would be healed
That’s so cool

He could’ve played guitar better than Hendrix
He could’ve told the future
He could’ve baked the most delicious cake in the world
He could’ve scored more goals than Wayne Gretzky
He could’ve danced better than Barishnikov
Jesus could have been funnier than any comedian you can think of
Jesus was way cool

He told people to eat his body and drink his blood
That’s so cool
Jesus was so cool
But then some people got jealous of how cool he was
So they killed him
But then he rose from the dead
He rose from the dead, danced around
Then went up to heaven
I mean, that’s so cool
Jesus was way cool

No wonder there are so many Christians

i read on another blog a question about time travel. i decided that this would make a great post, since i haven’t written much lately. my take on time travel is like this:

let’s say we have a 3-d coordinate system, much like the one we exist in every day. time is considered the 4th dimension after length, width and height. but what happens is that time is not one more set of axes based at the “center” of this 3d coordinate system, it’s yet another set of axes which moves along the set created by the 3-d universe.

now, being that time is always flowing forward according to our perception, to me that means that our consciousness filters out the extraneous time caused by existing in a 3d system within a 3-d universe. the way we travel through the time dimension is very similar to the way a function is plotted on a graph. we make smooth transitions from one time frame to the next, but our traversal of time doesn’t necessarily follow a linear path, we just think it does because of our built-in filters.

this means that time travel *is* technically possible, if we can only figure out how to go back to a previous set of (x,y,z) coordinates in our life “function”. this is where it gets a little tricky, because we can’t guarantee that we will set down in the EXACT time coordinate that our perception originally recorded. to give an example that i just pulled out of my ass, we can travel back to (3,4,5) but if we perceived ourselves to have existed at (1,2,3) in time, and we suddenly find ourselves not back at (1,2,3) but (1,2,3.1) then we may find ourselves in a *similar* time frame, but not quite right. or we may find ourselves totally out of place from where we thought we would be, even though we came back to “the same time” that we left.

so yes, i think that time travellers from the future have been coming through for quite some time, but we may not even perceive their presence because our relative coordinates may not have lined up, even if we existed in the same (x,y,z) space as each other. because even if the majority of our time coordinates were the same, they would still be different enough that we may not even see each other. coincidentally, this also gives some basis for the concept of alternate realities, because each moment in time that we exist also exists as an infinite number of other moments, none of which are exactly alike. by making the choices that we make in our lives, it changes the direction we follow through the time dimension and also creates new branches in the future that we may or may not ever catch up to again.

typing this post has made me want to go to grad school just to study enough math to prove this. but unless someone out there is willing to fund my “research”, i don’t think this is going to happen….

i was listening to the radio on the way home from work today and they said the title of this post on the air. of course, they were referencing “attacks across iraq today” but it definitely got me to thinking about the peculiarity that is the english language. what other language exists that has so many words that sound alike but have completely different meanings? for that matter, what other language has so many words that are *spelled* the same but have different meanings? i haven’t studied all languages ever in the history of the world, but i have yet to find any which have these problems the same way english does. i’ve heard stories about japanese being similar in this regard but if someone who knows japanese can set me straight on this issue i’d love to know more. still, it’s a wonder that those of us who speak english can understand each other at all considering how these words stack up against each other.

and in other news, i found this story online while waiting for my work email to load. apparently there are a lot of registered sex offenders taking correspondence courses by applying for financial aid which is set aside for those needy students who can’t normally afford a college education. also apparently, there are a lot of lawmakers in this country who think that these ex-criminals don’t deserve to be using this money to actually pay for an education. now, i will completely agree that they should not be spending the leftover money on things that are not related to their education, but this is true for ALL students who receive pell grants and college financial aid.

when i used to get pell grants for college, i sure as hell didn’t spend the leftover on books and school supplies. unless by “books” you mean pizza, and by “school supplies” you mean beer. every college student does this, this is nothing new whatsoever. there are even students who sign up, get their financial aid check, and then drop classes for a full refund of the money. this is also nothing new whatsoever. where the outrage is coming from is the fact that these are sexual predators, registered as such with the various state agencies that deal with such crimes. and in our “tough on crime” society, we have politicians who would rather lock these people up and literally throw away the key than spend one single dime on educating them so that they can one day possibly be released into society again.

we already have laws which decide where these people can live, whether or not they can drive their own vehicle to and from work (assuming they can even *find* a job), how much time they can spend on the internet (if at all), and other limitations on their lives. but now that some of them want to get themselves an education using the law as it is already written, suddenly there is an outrage. yes it’s true that there are some registered sex offenders who have committed truly horrendous crimes against humanity. and some of them definitely deserve to be locked up for most of the rest of their lives. but the ones who are able to finish their sentences and get released back into society should not be held back if they want to better themselves.

as i have always said, it used to be a badge of honor to work yourself up from the bottom and make something of yourself. not only that, but supposedly with a little hard work you *can* make something of yourself in america. but more and more our society is closing its doors to all but the ones who can pay to play. if you don’t already have money, you are not as likely to have a chance to lift yourself up out of your situation. and god help you if you should be convicted of a sex crime, or a drug offense, because that means that you will never be allowed to go to school if you can’t afford to pay for it yourself. but if you were convicted of a sex crime or drug offense, good luck finding a place to hire you that will let you make enough money to afford to pay for college yourself, even a community college or correspondence course….

well, it’s roughly 7 hours until kickoff so i’m going to make a prediction about today’s game. there’s a lot to consider when you look at today’s game between the giants and patriots. on the one hand, the patriots have literally been unstoppable all year. on the other hand, the giants are 10-1 including the playoffs when they play on the road. and this year the giants are the road team, so hopefully that means they’ll be 11-1 on the road including the playoffs.

but in reality, every year it’s always the team with the most commercial break segments who comes out on top, and i don’t think this year will be any exception. until about 8 or 9 years ago, the nfl used to put equal time on the segments they would show both from the game and individual players’ comments about the chance to be in the superbowl. but i’ve had plenty of people insist that the superbowl is fixed, and i didn’t believe them at all until the game between the raiders and the buccanneers. that was when i first noticed this phenomenon.

in that game, there was something like 8 players from tampa bay talking about playing in the big game, and only jerry rice from the raiders as i recall. every year since then it’s followed the same pattern. so look out for which team is favored in the commercial segments to be the ultimate winner in this game. and if it happens again this year as it has over the past 8, i will finally believe that this game is more corrupt than a heavyweight boxing match.