Good finance blog. Neville’s Financial Blog. This is a kid I can relate to.
Arabic and Islamic themes in Frank Herbert’s “Dune”
Fiona Apple reemerges from a six year hiatus. I might buy / download her new album. I liked the leaked tracks I heard.
26
Sep 05
Getting the heck out of Dodge
I’ve been driving on a lot of long trips lately. I’ve learned to like it as long as I have some music or something to listen to. I prefer to drive at night when the darkness closes in around you, your world constrained to what lies between the stripes on the road. I enjoy stopping at new places along the way: strange fast food franchises, the liminal zones we call truck stops. I like being somewhere else in a few short hours. New surroundings, unfamiliar places.
Thursday night I was chatting with a friend I used to work with about a technical problem I was having and I decided to run to Sonic to get a cherry-limeade before they closed. When I got there at 11:30 they were already closed even though I was sure they weren’t supposed to close until midnight. Disappointed, I got a wild hair to get out of Austin and show up on Jody’s door step. This seemed an especially good idea given the large volume of people fleeing the hurricane who were clogging up the highways. I reasoned that it would be a lot easier to get out when fewer people would be awake and driving. I ran home, threw some clothes into a bag and split. I stopped by work to take care of a few things I wouldn’t be able to do Friday since I’d be gone. By the time I left Austin it was almost one in the morning.
When I hit Waco around two, the traffic got heavy, I guess from all the people headed to Dallas and away from the hurricane. It was weird to see so much traffic so late at night.
By the time I got to downtown Dallas, it was four in the morning. Too early to call Jody and wake her up, so I went to Denny’s and read my book, Foucault’s Pendulum (highly recommended!) for a few hours. It was great reading about the templars and various crusaders so soon after finishing the unabridged audiobook series on Saladin. FP is an amazing book, one that I wish could go on forever. It occurred to me in Dallas, that Austin is very, very different. A veritable oasis of youthful insularity and ease. For one thing, Austin is very white. I remember having this same realization when I moved to Austin ten years ago from San Antonio. I would be curious about Austin’s racial demographics. It may be the case that Austin is just incredibly segregated. At any rate, one of the first things I noticed when I hit Dallas.
21
Sep 05
Slow it down
Someone made a good point during a Toastmasters meeting recently that resonated with me. The topic was about good advice someone once told you. One guy told a story about how his father had once given him the simple advice to slow down. It really made me think. It’s so easy to get yourself set in a fevered pitch where you’re just zooming past all the important thinking and contemplation you need to do. Not to mention all the important details essential to living a happy life, like thinking about other people, and taking care of small but important responsibilities. How often do you just sit and think?
I overload myself with commitments on my time and energies so much so that I rarely have time to decompress. I fill my environment with activity and noise to drown out the internal noise, but I should try to calm down my own thinking. How do you do that? If you can slow down your thought processes, you should calm down. Try to narrate your experience in your head like “I see the moon is bright tonight. I hear crickets. I smell moisture.” I find this calming and it helps slow me down.
19
Sep 05
Untitled
face transplants: “Your face will be removed and replaced with one donated from a cadaver, matched for tissue type, age, s.ex and skin color. Surgery should last 8 to 10 hours; the hospital stay, 10 to 14 days.”
16
Sep 05
Untitled
First their were inflatable mattresses. Now there are inflatable pubs, and infla.table churches.
16
Sep 05
Untitled
Adam of Eternia (better known as He-Man) performs 4 Non Blondes’ “What’s going on”. Excellent. It reminds me of the G.I. Joe PSA’s.
16
Sep 05
New ‘remaindered links’
I’ve added a new little section for kottke-style remaindered links. Sometimes you just want to post something a little less than a full entry, so that’s what they are. Over and out.