Archive for September 2001

10 September 2001

ComputerWorld has an article about us.

In the men’s room of Algiers Coffee House, Cambridge.

I’ve always wanted to do a comparative study of the graffiti in men’s rooms vs. women’s.

Ottawa.

9 September 2001

Catherine Camus, on her late husband: “This mixture of austerity and sensuality, the will to speak for those not able to speak for themselves.”

I finished Down and Out in London and Paris tonight — excellent book. My dad says that it falls in the same category as This Side of Paradise and Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: a “novel of initiation.”

A germane entry from my diary:

 Mon Oct 12 00:29:22 1998 We met in front of the church between harvard square and Matt's apartment, right near the theatre. I was standing there listening to some bums on the steps talk. One of them said: ``I wasn't homeless before last year. I used to have PILES of gold!'' 

Peter Mulvey: “And if I sound like all the world, all the world will sound like me.”

Geeks and golf.

I even have an MPEG of Ryan’s graceful swing.

Bunker Hill.

That picture reminds me a little of San Francisco the way it looks in Hitchcock films. Joe and Ryan and I played catch on the lawn with a half-empty bottle of Gatorade until it split along the top and started to leak.

T.S. Eliot: “I have measured out my life with coffee spoons.”

A couple weeks ago, I found an old manual typewriter at a yard sale down the street from my apartment. I bought it from a senile, toothless man for five dollars. This weekend, I finally got around to getting a ribbon for it. The output is absolutely beautiful:

(800×570 2310×1644)

I especially like the X-outs.

On the bathroom wall of a bar in Ottawa.

This struck me as a pretty funny sequence:

 Wed Dec 2 00:33:02 1998 Sick. Worried about classes. Can't sleep.. need a few hours shuteye so I can finish my problem sets and be ready for today's quiz. Ugh. Not a good situation. Okay, off to bed. Wed Dec 2 03:34:37 1998 Oh my god. I somehow woke up. I MUST NOT GO BACK TO SLEEP. Staring at screensaver... Wed Dec 2 03:43:51 1998 Still awake by some miracle. Another few minutes and I might be up for good. Suppressing urge to crawl back into bed for "just a few minutes..." Wed Dec 2 03:46:45 1998 Still awake... but I haven't gotten anything done yet. Going to stare out window. Wed Dec 2 03:47:39 1998 Pretty out, but boring. Wed Dec 2 03:50:14 1998 Getting more and more tired. Wed Dec 2 06:49:49 1998 Fuck, fell asleep. 

Sadly, the above is fairly representative of the tone of most of my entries from back then. It seems that I mainly wrote in my diary when I was unhappy, so it’s not a very good cross-section of my life.

This whole posting-old-diary-entries-on-the-web thing is starting to feel hopelessly self-absorbed.

Jacob Berkman, feeling the flow.

Holy shit.

6 September 2001

The press keep saying nice things about us: The Washington Post profiled Miguel and SFGate has some laudatory comments to offer as well. It’s like early 2000 all over again.

Maddog came by for lunch today.

Maddog and Ian Peters

More retrospective dreamlogs:

 Thu Nov 19 09:13:16 1998 Bizarre feature-length-movie type dreams. Battling female aliens. Columbian drug lords. Leg sticking through the ceiling. Sliding down spiral escalators amid flickering fluorescents. It's slipping away from me now. 

For twelve months in 1998 and 1999, I went through this phase of trying to “diversify my interests,” and signed up to take piano lessons. My teacher’s name was Peter, this rigid Eastern European math major who instructed piano to idiots like me on the side. In our first lesson, I was showing off that I knew a few notes of Fur Elise, when he abruptly interrupted, shouting: “What? Beethoven? Do not try to express what you cannot understand!”

I thought Peter’s outlook on life — bleak, futile, absurd, but good-natured — was hysterical, and really enjoyed spending time with him. Here are a couple entries which hopefully get some of that across.

 Thu Feb 26 12:04:55 EST 1998 Just returned from a piano lesson. Peter had shaved his head - he and Matt Loper have a lot in common, but with Peter there's this accidental humor: "Nat I'm sorry I must cancel - I hit four children with my car and cannot find the car" but both want to experience life fully and personally. 

And months later:

 Wed Nov 11 02:19:55 1998 I handed in the 18.701 at about 9:45 this morning. Oh, and I had a piano lesson at 8:30pm.. woke up at 8:39pm to the phone ringing. When I picked it up, I realized that it was peter, and so banged the phone around on the desk a bit and then hung it up. ``Nat, it was funny when you answered.. I heard the phone drop, and then nothing, and then sounds like someone crawling around.'' Anyways, the lesson went ok. 

Sometimes I wonder where Peter is these days.

Stupid punk dogs. No respect.

 Wed Mar 4 09:18:37 EST 1998 Awake. Coffee brewing. Strange dream involving buckey-balls-embedded-in-buckey-ball shaped deserts, 19th century sensibilities, and 9mm guns. Kidnapping, prostitutes, and short order delis. My right eye is doing that I-need-more-sleep stinging thing. Skipping 6.863 this morning for sure, substituting a little coffee and some Bode plots. 

 Thu Mar 5 07:14:28 EST 1998 Awake. Left eye doing that stinging thing this time. Lord, I do not get enough sleep. Coffee brewed, sipping now. I'll write up 6.003 in about 30 minutes. Music. Dreams weren't so strange last night. Chomsky as a young man lecturing me, switching e's and o's in all his sentences. Dinosaurs in the background. I can't remember much more. The phrase he wrote on the board, and that I repeated, with all the o's and e's switched, was like some sort of mantra in the dream -- very meaningful. I wish I could remember it. It had to do with me personally.