(Phaysis)

Spread a little thin tonight. Finally did laundry, which I’ve been meaning to do for days but put off because 1) I hate doing laundry and 2) I’ve been feeling a little ill (just a little) all week (not sure if it’s the cedar, the weather, or just my time of the year for a cold). My problem with laundry night is that I have to change into older (read: tighter) clothing, and then devote several hours of my night to the boring, unsettling task of going to the laundromat. Chores suck. During that time, I get way too many inspirations and desires to do something else, desires that never manifest any other night. Pity, that.

While packing up my clothes and supplies, I had an inspiration, a melody, a phrase of song. Ran to my keyboard and pecked it out. Luckily, I remember a little of where I put my fingers, but the sound of the inspiration is gone. Disappeared like a vapor, like a cloud of breath on a cold day. You breathe it out, watch the cloud shift, and then it’s gone forever. Best you can hope for is to remember what it looked like.

Since I was feeling a little inspired musically, I took my drum machine with me to the laundromat. Had high intentions. The problem with hammering out a rhythm on this machine is one of mechanics: in order to record a drum track, I need to find an empty slot for the pattern and select from a dizzying range of drum kits before I can even lay down a loop that sounds something like my idea. With practice, this dance would become easier, but until then, it’s an obstacle of frustration. Most musicians develop habits and methods to move through these problems, but not me. Not yet.

It’s as though I need a studio engineer on retainer, ready whenever I am inspired to record something. In this regard, I’m jealous of the artist known as Prince, who is rumored to have his entire mansion wired for recording, and has a staff on-hand to press “record”. If only we could all have the help we need when we need it. Or our own laundry appliances.

After pecking on the drum machine, I got tired, fatigued really, and my will to thump beats dissappeared like a vapor. Eyes glazed over. Just too ill, I guess, to create my own stuff. I hate that feeling. So I pulled out “Cryptonomicon” and picked up my reading. I should’ve done that from the outset; would’ve gotten farther just focusing on one thing than timesharing between urges.

My battle in life is one of focus and attention, the fact that to actually get anywhere in my life, I need to cultivate the dogged determination to see a task through to its goal. To win by crossing the finish line in due time. A marathon is not run in chunks, with breaks for distraction; it is run by one foot in front of the other for 26.2KM, no matter how much acid builds up in your veins. It is run by determined rhythm. It is run by measured breathing. It is run until you cross the line.

I hate Ciprofloxacin. It’s an antibiotic, one of the harshest. Most prescriptions of the stuff last a week. My prescription, however, lasts a month, and I’ve been on it one week, long enough to have it doing its ill effects. Not my first time on it; hopefully it is my last. UTI‘s are a bitch.

One of the worst side effects of cipro, aside from stomach cramping, excess acid production, the requirement to supplement your digestive bacteria with yogurt, chance of tendon ruptures, fatigue, and insomnia, is that cipro makes me paranoid. Not “the feds are out to get me” paranoia, but the “o god, I didn’t say that the wrong way, did I?” kind. Sure enough, it makes my social awkwardness that much worse. Like I needed the help.

Typically, I can go to the coffeeshop and hang out with others or alone. If someone comes to visit my table, I can greet them, invite them to sit, and we chat. Or, if I visit a friend at theirs, the chatter is good and friendly. Not so on cipro. I kinda stand there and watch it all happen. I see myself doing it, but the thought never occurs to me to quit the creepiness. I just see the unfitting awkwardness, get uncomfortable, and excuse myself as I walk away. I don’t like it; not in the least.

Sometimes I think I’m turning into that old, creepy man who’s got the stink on him that everyone can smell. The guy people put up with only because he’s a customer. And that’s the paranoia talking; I must keep that in mind at all times while I’m on this stuff. Sure, when I grow up I want to be a dirty old man, but don’t want to be a creepy old man. There’s a marginal difference between the two: one is more socially adept; the other just lecherously leers from an uncomfortable distance.

Hey friends. A new entry.

friend: /frend’/ n. 1. a close acquaintance 2. one who has been befriended 3. one who reads Shawn’s journal even though there’s been no journal updates in over two weeks. “Hey friends. A new entry.”

As many of you know, I have fallen off of the wagon and back into the tobacco fields. This doesn’t surprise me, just depresses me. I realize now that I can’t hate the devil and still dance with him. Just doesn’t work like that. :sighs: The next time I quit, I intend to not have a cigarette, period. The crazy, intense dreams are gone. The hacking is back. The urge to be productive, waned. From this three-day-weekend’s round of smoking my throat is now puffy and tender. Perfect. I set myself up for an upper-respiratory thing; feelin’ it, too.

My health concerns aside, I called my family yesterday and got some disturbing news. My mother twisted her upper back pretty severe while at work about a month ago. If not for the cooler in front of her, she would’ve hit the floor. Some preliminary x-rays didn’t reveal any broken backbones, which is a relief. But there still exists the chance that a disc is blown. From what she said, it sounded like a loud pop; even some of her customers heard it. Geez. She’s been scheduled for an MRI later this month. I hope it reveals something repairable.

I also found out she lost her job. Some political b.s. involving a crooked coworker saying something to the owner. I dunno, but that whole bar was crooked. So much for that.

Called my sister, too. She and her family are doing well. Found out she’s been diagnosed with type-2 diabetes. It’s inherited from her father’s side. So she has to count sugar and sodium grams in her diet, measure her blood sugar twice a day, and take an insulin pill once a day. She has also quit smoking, and is sticking with it. I’m proud of her. She says her feet are no longer swollen; the fact that her doctors went overlooking this for so long astounds me — it’s one of the early, major signs of diabetes. Damned fools. But now that she’s watching her diet and taking better care of herself she’s losing weight and, as she says, she’s feeling better than she has in years.

As far as I’m doing, since I started smoking again (now almost back to a pack a day), I’ve been feeling rather cruddy. Especially now. Tsk tsk. (You can save your browbeating comments — I’ve enough of my own.) Stomach’s not as upsettable as it was, though. Thinking watching my own diet (sort of) is contributing to that. Dunno. It still tweaks every now and again, like it did about an hour ago at Mojo’s. Something about sitting for hours at my laptop while sucking on iced tea, peppermints, smoking, and generally not moving can kinda contribute to built-up internal pressure or something. Once I packed up, got up, and moved around by driving home I felt better.

This weekend, though, has allowed me to render several new chunks of code towards my website engine. I’m playing with a thing wherein disparate subobjects in my engine can communicate with one another and run each other’s methods transparently. What this means is that the master object in the engine, called “Kernel”, creates each subobject; when each subobject is created, it “registers” its methods and accessible data with the Kernel, and registers any messages it’ll “listen” to. Later on, during execution, objects can simply ask the Kernel to do something for them, and the Kernel looks up the task, calls the proper subobject to perform it, and then sends the results back to the original subobject that made the request.

Something like this is a huge improvement in the way I’ve been doing things in the engine thus far. By allowing this “proxy” subsystem to exist and by rewriting the current modules so that they use it, I can almost completely unlink the modules from each other; they’re no longer bound to each other, and they don’t have to know every single bit of information necessary about each other to make those calls. In the programming world, this is called “loose coupling.” If they want something, they call someone who knows where it is. Now, if I make a drastic change in how one module interacts with something from the rest of the system, everyone else is shielded from those changes; editing one part should not mean you have to edit everything else.

Pardon the geekout, but this is very exciting to me, and the fact that I was able to hammer out the guts of this in a few nights’ free time makes me feel excellently successful about it.

I think I’ll head over to some bookstore or something and pick up a ton of crossword books for my mother. She needs something to do while she’s laid-up on her back. I’m planning on sending her a care package with some books, a card, and some money to help her out. She’s in financial straits now, and if I was in her shoes, she’d do the same. She has for years, and now it’s my turn to help.