depression is such a narcissistic disease. only when you value yourself so highly, do you feel so utterly worthless. sorrow is one man’s struggle to be happy. want of strength is a desperate independence. loneliness is the incapacity to love.

so on.

lose hope in yourself, so you can finally feel hopeful in others.

I can’t drink very well. Last night I had 3 shots of tequila and
2 shots of whiskey. I was completely floored, literally rolling
on the floor, crying, twitching, in spastic, orgasmic sadness.

My body knew how to express sadness that my mind couldn’t, or
wouldn’t. I didn’t know I had so much inside. I cried like a
bomb.

I don’t know if it was good for me… but I seem to feel better,
for now. I don’t have the alcoholic in me (I hope not!). The
drunkenness that was intended as an escape turned into a
semi-religious experience of the ordinary.

I, of course, will move on with my life, whatever that means. For
this morning, it means going to the gym (as usual), and this
afternoon, going for an interview.

But I do not want to run away, and I do not want to let cognitive
dissonance get the better of it, or to intellectualize it to
Stoic blandness. I want it to remain a real sorrow that is truly
mine, rather than of the world, displaced, vicariously
experienced.

For once, I want to be honest.

And all my friends that cared, you are more dear to me than
anything else in the world. I will love you, when I can.

God I feel wretched. Really shouldn’t… but who wouldn’t? Here goes the sublimination.

Fantasy

Have you heard of the giant who stood taller than
a giraffe, so that he was frightened by the thought
of crushing others by the weight of his love?

His hands were the size of the jaws of a
hippopotamus, and his step could flatten a
horse. When he was fired up by passion, the ground
trembled to the rhythm of his heart, and those
close by could feel the wind of his radiating
heat.

But he dared not to love, for fear of crushing
others. He stood far away from everyone else, so
at a distance, he would seem smaller, and more
ordinary, so more acceptable.

He fell in love with a tiny girl, smaller than
anyone he had ever seen, yet more real than anyone
he had known. She smelled like grass from a
faraway continent, wet with morning dew. And she
laughed her tiny laughs that (it seemed to him)
are louder than thunders. He didn’t know her name,
for her name tag was too tiny to read.

Nor did the giant know how to love her. How, with
his outsized arms, could he hug her tiny peapod body?

So he walked further away from everyone, and her,
so he may seem still smaller. Just when he was so
far away that he could no longer hear anyone
speaking, he realized that perhaps she seemed so
tiny only because he imagined her so close. She
was in fact a giant much larger than him, standing
far far far away, whose love could crush to dust
every bone in his body.

He dared not to go back.

Sadness

He forgot where he left his sadness.

He looked everywhere for it. He seemed to remember
to have put it in a box labeled “no. 37″ in the
guestroom closet, along with memories of her, books
half read, and heroes still adored, but no longer
worshipped.

The search took possession of his mind.

Precisely because he couldn’t find his sadness
anywhere, he expected to find it everywhere. He
knew he looked under his pillow countless times,
each time finding nothing there. Yet every morning
waking up, he looked under the same pillow
nevertheless, with the peculiar expectation of
finding something out of nothing.

His sadness is still nowhere to be found.

Reality

“She never existed!” the philosopher concluded,
victorious, “for all that she was, she who I loved
so much, was the construct of my mind, figaments
of my imagination.”

He smiled the satisfied smile of a sage.

“Ah yes, but you feel pain– and I refute you
thusly,” said a passing-by Sameul Johnson, as he
kicked the philosopher’s shin.

Feeling the pain, the philosopher sat down on his
favourite rock, and started to think.

Hope

A daemon sat by himeslf crying, for he no longer
could fly. There were still so many blessings and
love in his charge to give, but he could no longer
fly. The joy and happiness he must share, but
could not, weighed heavily on his shoulders,
anchoring him to Earth.

So the daemon of happiness and joy became known
among the villagers for his profound sorrow. A
river of tear ran through the village, springing
from where he sat. But the water was too bitter
for fish to thrive.

“If only the sun would come out for long enough,”
muttered the daemon, crying into his hands, “then
the wetness that weighs down my wings would
evaporate, so I can fly again.” But the sun never
did come out for long enough, so the daemon kept
crying into his river of tear.

Parents warned their children of ever going near
the unlucky daemon, for fear of their drowning in
his sorrow.

One day a little girl from the city came to visit,
picking daisies and finding four-leaf clovers in
the meadows. She was delighted to find the meadow
where the daemon sat blooming with daisies of all
kinds and constellations of the lucky clovers,
nourished by his tear.

There she met the crying daemon. With daisy petals
and clovers in her hands, happy as only a child
could be, she looked at the crying daemon. Not
knowing who he was, the girl asked,

“Why are you crying?”

“My wings are heavy with wetness, so I cannot fly.”

“But they will dry. Will they not?”

“The sun never comes out for long enough.”

“Your wings are heavy because they are wet with
your tear. You don’t have to wait for the sun. All
you need is to stop crying,” said the naive little
girl.

“Stop crying?” the daemon blinked, “but my wings
are wet, and I cannot fly.”

“Well… there,” the little girl kissed the daemon
on the forehead, “you can stop crying now.”

as a friend. as a friend. as a friend. as
a friend. as a friend. as a friend. I guess she’s
exonerating herself. Oh, I already said it’s “as a
friend”– it’s your own stupidity that’s the
problem. If it works out, hey, count yourself
lucky. If it doesn’t, go fuck yourself…

What an enviable position to be in.

“She”, generic, and in particular.

I was talking to Guillaume.. and I was reminded
how hard I struggled with my depression. And I
felt so sad. I am so much better now. But to know
that there’s this beast in me that has to be kept
in chain, that for whatever random reasons, it
might break loose again, I feel scared. I’ve done
everything I can to keep that from happening, and
more and more. That possibility is tending toward
statistical insignificance. I am proud.

Thanks, everyone.

I need a girl that really squeezes me dry. I’d hate her, but she’d be good for me.

I’ve changed my rhetorics. I’ve not changed. Every moment I long to move on. It feels like a waste of time.

I always move on, finding unfounded what I found.

I need banality.

My avoidant attachment style is showing.

I work so hard, so hard, so hard, so hard.

The moment I stop to take a breath, I feel like I am going to puke. Damn it all.

Damn brain, I’ll cram you more!

hey all,

i am moving to my own domain, finally.

the new feed is http://feeds2.feedburner.com/metacircus

hope we meet again : )

howard

I do not believe in God.

Nevertheless, can I still believe that God gave me
depression and anxiety, so that I may heal in others
of something I know so well myself?

This is a rhetorical question.

How do you believe in something True, but strictly speaking, untrue? This is the question.

My god, I hate it.

The world’s smartest man apparently is not smart enough to not use the title of a book on his desk as the password. Yup, there’s the classic scene of let-me-guess-your-password-is-it-your-dog’s-name-oh-i-got-it-on-my-third-try-just-before-you’d-lock-me-out!

Next time I’ll listen to Anthony Lane.

I think it was too entertaining. I want my boredom back.

Some people cope by watching TV, or taking drugs, or beating their children.

I cope by memorizing neuroanatomy. It works!

So her grandpa died.

I feel like a big idiot having said what I
said. At the end, I still couldn’t step out of
myself. I am still talking to myself,
self-absorbed, self-important, narcissistic.

These are the symptoms of loneliness.

This is sad, and funny at the same time. My hyper
awareness to what is being said, and obliviousness
to what is said. My inner gears grind too loud,
making it hard to hear. I compulsively want to
place things in interpretive frame. But when there
isn’t any context, I’d invent one, conjuring a
djinn out of smoke.

Maybe this is egocentrism, or existential
isolation, or whatever. I call it epistemological
loneliess, a lack of trust for language, and
transitively via language, toward people.

Hmmm.

Here’s a positive thinking way out of this: if
she’s worth liking, she’d forgive me. If q is
false, so is p.

The double irony, though, is that this can’t
possibly mean that much to her. Just another guy,
sort of thing. That’s fine, and I am not too
bothered. It’s just this absurd mental circus that
goes on in my mind. Stop it. Stop it. Stop
it. Stop it. Stop it. Stop it. Stop it. Stop it.
Stop it. Stop it. Stop it. Stop it. Stop it.

I’ve developed an unhealthy fascination for
twisted shell commands. This fascination helps me
to stay sane when unix doesn’t even try.

Just now, strace taught me a new way to be
inconsistent. So I wanted to trace my ruby process
to help me figure out why piping isn’t working
properly between the processes i forked.


> strace -p 7856 # 7856 is my irb
select(1, [0], NULL, [0], {0, 40000}) = 0 (Timeout)
select(1, [0], NULL, [0], {0, 100000}) = 0 (Timeout)
select(1, [0], NULL, [0], {0, 100000}) = 0 (Timeout)
select(1, [0], NULL, [0], {0, 100000}) = 0 (Timeout)
select(1, [0], NULL, [0], {0, 100000}) = 0 (Timeout)
select(1, [0], NULL, [0], {0, 100000}) = 0 (Timeout)
select(1, [0], NULL, [0], {0, 100000}) = 0 (Timeout)
select(1, [0], NULL, [0], {0, 100000}) = 0 (Timeout)
select(1, [0], NULL, [0], {0, 100000}) = 0 (Timeout)
select(1, [0], NULL, [0], {0, 100000}) = 0 (Timeout)
...
^C


Not interested in select calls. Let me filter them out.


# i don't remember if ^ is a shell metachar...
# what the hell, just quote it anyway.
> strace -p 7856 | grep -v '^select'
select(1, [0], NULL, [0], {0, 40000}) = 0 (Timeout)
select(1, [0], NULL, [0], {0, 100000}) = 0 (Timeout)
select(1, [0], NULL, [0], {0, 100000}) = 0 (Timeout)
select(1, [0], NULL, [0], {0, 100000}) = 0 (Timeout)
select(1, [0], NULL, [0], {0, 100000}) = 0 (Timeout)
select(1, [0], NULL, [0], {0, 100000}) = 0 (Timeout)
select(1, [0], NULL, [0], {0, 100000}) = 0 (Timeout)
select(1, [0], NULL, [0], {0, 100000}) = 0 (Timeout)
select(1, [0], NULL, [0], {0, 100000}) = 0 (Timeout)
select(1, [0], NULL, [0], {0, 100000}) = 0 (Timeout)
...
^C


wtf? why isn’t it filtering? I remember the regexp
inversion flag is -v… or is it -i (uh, i think
that’s case insensitivity), or is it -n??


# fuck. why do i still have to look up the man
# page for grep?
> man grep


OK, the inversion flag IS -v. wtf is strace doing
not using stdio (it’s writing directly to
/dev/tty, i guess). Security concerns? Whatever,
let me see the man page for strace to see if
there’s a way to by pass it.

Ya… I see, there’s the -o argument to
send the output to a file. Ooooo, weird, it says
if the filename “begins with ‘|’ or with ‘!’ then
the rest of the argument is treated as a command
and all output is piped to it.” That’s
crazy… whatever, let me try.


> strace -p 7856 -o \| grep -v '^select'
usage: strace [-dffhiqrtttTvVxx] [-a column] [-e expr] ... [-o file]
[-p pid] ... [-s strsize] [-u username] [-E var=val] ...
[command [arg ...]]
or: strace -c [-e expr] ... [-O overhead] [-S sortby] [-E var=val] ...
[command [arg ...]]
-c -- count time, calls, and errors for each syscall and report summary
-f -- follow forks, -ff -- with output into separate files
-F -- attempt to follow vforks, -h -- print help message
-i -- print instruction pointer at time of syscall
-q -- suppress messages about attaching, detaching, etc.
-r -- print relative timestamp, -t -- absolute timestamp, -tt -- with usecs
-T -- print time spent in each syscall, -V -- print version
-v -- verbose mode: print unabbreviated argv, stat, termio[s], etc. args
-x -- print non-ascii strings in hex, -xx -- print all strings in hex
-a column -- alignment COLUMN for printing syscall results (default 40)
-e expr -- a qualifying expression: option=[!]all or option=[!]val1[,val2]...
options: trace, abbrev, verbose, raw, signal, read, or write
-o file -- send trace output to FILE instead of stderr
-O overhead -- set overhead for tracing syscalls to OVERHEAD usecs
-p pid -- trace process with process id PID, may be repeated
-s strsize -- limit length of print strings to STRSIZE chars (default 32)
-S sortby -- sort syscall counts by: time, calls, name, nothing (default time)
-u username -- run command as username handling setuid and/or setgid
-E var=val -- put var=val in the environment for command
-E var -- remove var from the environment for command


Fuck you, strace. Hmmm, maybe there shouldn’t be a
gap between -o and |.


> strace -p 7856 -o\| grep -v '^select'
usage: strace [-dffhiqrtttTvVxx] [-a column] [-e expr] ... [-o file]
[-p pid] ... [-s strsize] [-u username] [-E var=val] ...
[command [arg ...]]
or: strace -c [-e expr] ... [-O overhead] [-S sortby] [-E var=val] ...
[command [arg ...]]
-c -- count time, calls, and errors for each syscall and report summary
-f -- follow forks, -ff -- with output into separate files
-F -- attempt to follow vforks, -h -- print help message
-i -- print instruction pointer at time of syscall
-q -- suppress messages about attaching, detaching, etc.
-r -- print relative timestamp, -t -- absolute timestamp, -tt -- with usecs
-T -- print time spent in each syscall, -V -- print version
-v -- verbose mode: print unabbreviated argv, stat, termio[s], etc. args
-x -- print non-ascii strings in hex, -xx -- print all strings in hex
-a column -- alignment COLUMN for printing syscall results (default 40)
-e expr -- a qualifying expression: option=[!]all or option=[!]val1[,val2]...
options: trace, abbrev, verbose, raw, signal, read, or write
-o file -- send trace output to FILE instead of stderr
-O overhead -- set overhead for tracing syscalls to OVERHEAD usecs
-p pid -- trace process with process id PID, may be repeated
-s strsize -- limit length of print strings to STRSIZE chars (default 32)
-S sortby -- sort syscall counts by: time, calls, name, nothing (default time)
-u username -- run command as username handling setuid and/or setgid
-E var=val -- put var=val in the environment for command
-E var -- remove var from the environment for command


Nope.

Or maybe ‘|’ should stick to grep??


> strace -p 7856 -o \|grep -v '^select'
usage: strace [-dffhiqrtttTvVxx] [-a column] [-e expr] ... [-o file]
[-p pid] ... [-s strsize] [-u username] [-E var=val] ...
[command [arg ...]]
or: strace -c [-e expr] ... [-O overhead] [-S sortby] [-E var=val] ...
[command [arg ...]]
-c -- count time, calls, and errors for each syscall and report summary
-f -- follow forks, -ff -- with output into separate files
-F -- attempt to follow vforks, -h -- print help message
-i -- print instruction pointer at time of syscall
-q -- suppress messages about attaching, detaching, etc.
-r -- print relative timestamp, -t -- absolute timestamp, -tt -- with usecs
-T -- print time spent in each syscall, -V -- print version
-v -- verbose mode: print unabbreviated argv, stat, termio[s], etc. args
-x -- print non-ascii strings in hex, -xx -- print all strings in hex
-a column -- alignment COLUMN for printing syscall results (default 40)
-e expr -- a qualifying expression: option=[!]all or option=[!]val1[,val2]...
options: trace, abbrev, verbose, raw, signal, read, or write
-o file -- send trace output to FILE instead of stderr
-O overhead -- set overhead for tracing syscalls to OVERHEAD usecs
-p pid -- trace process with process id PID, may be repeated
-s strsize -- limit length of print strings to STRSIZE chars (default 32)
-S sortby -- sort syscall counts by: time, calls, name, nothing (default time)
-u username -- run command as username handling setuid and/or setgid
-E var=val -- put var=val in the environment for command
-E var -- remove var from the environment for command


Would you please tell me why you are not happy?
Showing me the all the flags you take doesn’t
help! Hmmm.


> strace -p 7856 -o "|grep -v '^select'"
Process 7732 attached - interrupt to quit
ioctl(0, FIONREAD, [1]) = 0
read(0, "3", 1) = 1
write(1, "3", 1) = 1
...


Yay, it works! So I understood the man page as
“the rest of the arguments [sic] is treated as a
command”, when in fact it’s “argument”, singular,
so the pipe command has to be one shell token.

Then I got really curious why strace is violating
user expectation. I read the documentation for
the -o flag again. Ah, the last sentence explains,
“This is convenient for piping the debugging output
to a program without affecting the redirections
of executed programs.” So inferring backward,
strace can execute a command and then strace it
(rather than attaching to a pid). Like so:


> strace random-cmd-that-needs-stdio


I am not sure what the moral of the story is. I
guess on the one hand, you could prefer
consistency, and insist that strace always traces
a pid. Or you could prefer convenience, and
violate user expectations. This is a balancing
act.

What annoys me about unix, though, is that it too
often violates consistency for marginal
conveniences. Bash is pretty much a dung pile of
marginal conveniences. Somebody a lot smarter than
me probably can remember more of the corner
cases. My brain is too small for random details.

I still don’t know whether ^ is a metachar.

I actually ended up using,

> strace -p 7732 -e trace=process


Last month I was suspended in an epistemological fog. I saw vague shapes, and diffused sources of light I couldn’t locate with any certainty. I thought a lot.

What I think now, is I need to stop thinking. To stop this multiplexing stream of words that floods over my most basic, primordial feelings. Words, my yearning for syntactical certainty, is my way of masking the anxiety over these primordial feelings. These shifting things, the vibration, the glittering, the light of life.

Words infect feelings, take them over, and produce more words.

So I no longer know how I feel, or if I feel at all. But I can tell you what it is I am feeling. Words that I clung to evaporated into the epistemological fog in which I was trapped. I no longer could see past words. Funny, how it is, that my yearning for certainty is the source of its own uncertainty.

I think my loneliness is epistemological. But language is not the way to understanding, or the sense of being understood. As Wittgenstein would say, there is no Understanding as such. Yet somehow, we still manage to understand each other through the use of language.

It is a game of charade.

Roughly: Go Fuck Yourself

Tony says:
這就跟在前幾天在餐廳吃飯，那天在選要吃雞排飯還是排骨飯
Tony says:
可是，想一想，又不是最後一餐
Tony says:
沒必要花那麼多時間想，
Tony says:
想太久了，午餐時間都過了，馬上要晚餐時間了。
Tony says:
別人吃了兩餐，你就吃一餐而已

我喜歡豬排飯。

可雞排飯點了好像比較快可以吃～～（服務生說）

肚子餓啊啊啊！（怒）

最後也只剩骨頭。

Erlang is so weird. You can accomplish so much over a
couple hundred lines, but so little with one line. It has
infuriating local verbosity. I think the fair thing that
could be said about Erlang is that it’s a crappy
Perl/Ruby/Python, but a great Erlang.

So I was laid off yesterday. It was the kind of job
perfectly suited for a person who doesn’t like his job. Good
pay, flexible schedule (read: non-existent schedule), and
the presumption of good will.

*

I wanted to quit because it’s “uninspiring”.

(But it’s good money for minimal work.)

I wasn’t the best I could be in the best way.

(But I hardly have to go to the office anyhow.)

So I thought I’d stay till June.

*

I wasn’t laid off. I like how the piece of paper I signed
put it: a “release”. I lost the job, and regained my
internal locus of control, my existential self. Released.

I don’t think losing the job is a “problem” for me. Rather,
it’s an answer to something. This sounds like rationalizing
for the loss– but whatever, this is the perfect season to
rationalize: “hey, it’s the economic downturn, not my
bohemian work ethics”.

I was afraid too. I was just becoming healthy. I didn’t think
I was ready for “it” yet. I thought I’d spend more time to
make myself more robust, tougher, harder to kill. Then I’ll
take the plunge.

But this is the nudge.

*

I don’t want another job. I want Real Work.

I will be working like a novelist, yet I will not be writing
a novel. But just as writing a novel, I will project myself
outward, to create a world after our own imagination.

Note to self:

When you want to keep your job, try going to the office more.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Castration_anxiety

You might be curious how I ended up in this article.

In that case, may I quickly divert attention by suggesting
a fun hypothetical game to try next time you are bored:
given a random wikipedia article, play 20 questions to figure
out how you got there.

Fodor’s problems [with intentionality of his language of
thought] arise from treating the combinatorial structures
that constitute meanings/thoughts as symbols for something,
representations of something, information about
something. Instead, I am going to try to take them just as
pure non-intentional structure, as we did with phonology and
syntax. The problem will then be to reconstruct the
intuitions that notion of intentionality is supposed to
account for.

Ray Jackendoff (Foundations of Language p279).

Therefore we should not consider these gestures/expressions as
symbols of love, representations of love, information about
love, but that they ARE love, pure, and non-intentional.