Something softer

Hair between my fingers, I screamed to make the noise stop to just make it quiet in my head, if only for an instant.

She couldn’t hear me this time; she was crying, she had to be crying, the way I am, with how I deal with these things. I don’t know how she could know me and not cry.

I can’t tell how long I’ve been like this. Months? Years? Everything turns blue when I try to remember. Nothing makes any sense, nothing tells me what I need to know, what I need to do to just turn it off.

Two hundred miles away, I was the one being wronged.

…

I’ve never been able to express how strongly I feel about her, and so I shy away from the attempt for fear of misrepresenting myself. By doing so, I misrepresent her.

How I feel can only be expressed in the space between words.

…

I walked with five thousand angry people to protest the war on Iraq, but it was an impotent anger. As a Canadian, there’s no real target for me to direct my rage, no culpable authority to subvert.

I watched Iraqi mothers and Israeli citizens alike scream at the American embassy, but the five RCMP officers that were there to keep the peace and take photographs made it difficult to maintain any sense of imminent threat; just five tired men working crowd control, and an empty grey monolith with the American eagle on the door.

Sleep or Übersleep?

The Uberman’s Sleep Schedule is a method of scheduling your waking hours so that you jump almost immediately to stage 5 (REM) unconsciousness when you fall asleep, allowing you to function up to twenty-two hours a day.

In essence, the technique involves a series of twenty-minute power naps throughout the day to allow your brain to get the necessary amount of REM sleep. Leonardo Da Vinci used this technique to great success throughout his life, as did Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, and many others.

The drawback is that large periods of uninterrupted activity are nearly impossible, as your body becomes very reliant on rest periods every four or five hours. If you miss a nap, you’ll be exhausted for a day. If you oversleep, you’ll be exhausted for two.

I used this technique myself for about nine months, during which time I was energetic, social, healthy, and frighteningly productive. Not to mention, I didn’t experience any sleep apnea or nightmares, both of which I normally suffer from.

I was, however, very high for the first week.

French Fries?

A comparison of French and American school cafeteria offerings:

French: Iceberg lettuce with radishes and vinaigrette, grilled fish with lemon, stewed carrots, emmental cheese, apple tart.
American: Zweigel’s™ hot dog on a roll with tater tots .

French: Potato salad, filet of fish with creamed celery, sauteed lima beans, yogurt, fruit.
American: Stuffed crust cheese and pepperoni pizza.

“The dirty fact about American school lunches is that they are a dumping ground for surplus and substandard beef, chicken and dairy products. Many of these foods cannot be served fresh because they would be too dangerous to eat. This is especially true for ground meat, which is at times so contaminated with bacteria that it would not be legal to sell it in a supermarket. “

Blog stuff…

I’ve updated the backend behind my website to allow for a bunch of new features, including a real-time list of what is being played by Winamp on my home PC, and a modular data system that will handle mini-reviews of books and movies I’ve recently watched, without me having to do stupid amounts of coding everytime I want to input my thoughts on a bad film.

More nifty things coming soon.

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“…the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country.”

– Herman Goering, Nuremberg Diary.

A half-remembered dream I had, some nights ago…

So it had come down to this, for some reason.

The lines were drawn in the sand (chalk, actually, on pavement) and Crowd was there, ready to decide who would live or die.

The fight was just between him and I, of course, but Crowds always know before you do, they speak to each other with a wall of noise that shapes fate for everyone who can hear.

I was going to bloody up his pretty-boy face. I had him on size, skill, and hate.

I had my cane with me, and it was Excalibur.

Life, As Is.

The little things get to you, sometimes.

…

Hearing him talk, wishing above all else that he’d shut up, just shut up.

Looking at pictures of places I will never see, wondering what the air tastes like.

The way that everything, everything is different when you’re the only one awake.

Hearing her talk, wanting nothing more than to take forever in this moment, and watch her behind dazzled eyes.

Decompression

The last two days have been madness.

Leslie and I just finished the third two-day Dark Carnival festival, and while it was a resounding success, it has left us feeling quite drained. There were a lot of technical problems that we had to overcome, in addition to the more mundane stresses of putting on fourteen hours of event time in two days. There were seven different musical acts (not including Leslie and myself), and at least a dozen artists involved this time around, and co-ordination took a lot of time and effort.

Plus, we have another event in a week or so that we need to start polishing up, and perhaps another two in the month following that… and another half-dozen in the works, with plans stretching as far as October.

We’ve been doing pretty well with the finances for the events, which means that we haven’t lost more than a thousand dollars on any given show in the past half-year. Being able to support ourselves full-time with promotion work would be nice, but I think at this point we’d kill to break even two shows in a row.

…

Leslie’s birthday was yesterday, but with everything going on, there wasn’t much celebration time. I feel pretty bad about this, she made sure that on my last birthday, I had my every desire fulfilled, and not being able to do the same for her doesn’t sit well with me.

I think we’ll take a day off sometime soon-ish and do a belated birthday celebration, but it would have been nice to be able to give her the birthday proper that she deserves.

…

Work continues to progress on our not-so-secret Cafe project, and while things are slowly coming together for it, my inability to attend work over the last month has really hit us financially. Almost all of that lost income was earmarked for use by the Cafe, and my insurance company has yet to rule on my application for short-term disability.

While the disability would be retroactive to the day of the injury, the possibility of my application being rejected is very real, and very upsetting. The temptation to try to attend work regularly, even at the cost of permanent damage to my knee, is overwhelming.

I’m really not sure what to do about this, except for work full-steam on our business plan and funding applications, and hope for the best.

…

I need to spend more time doing nothing, sometime soon.

-28c and sucking.

I’ve been inside my house for three weeks straight now, having made it outside only three times. My knee shows no signs of spontaneous recovery, although I hold out hope.

…

I’ve began working on a remix of an Iszoloscope track for an album to be released in the near future, but I’m not very happy with my work. I took a heavy noise/gabber track, sped it up, and tried to turn it into what is essentially hard techno. Instead, I think all I’ve done is make 7 minutes of dull, uninspired trance.

To be fair, I’ve only been working on the track for two days, I’ve only been working with these music-creation tools for two days, and this is the first time I’ve tried to make music in any serious capacity since I was sixteen (when I was quite prolific within the tracker scene), but I find it incredibly discouraging nonetheless.

I have three weeks until the remixes need to be submitted to Ant-Zen, and I may or may not continue work to try to have something by that time.

…

Most of my hair is in a garbage bag in the washroom. I’ve shaved a good portion of it, leaving a wide strip of blue hair along the top of my head.

Rarely have I been so immediately happy with a change in hair style/cut/colour, but I’m really pleased with the way it looks. With that said, I have not discounted the possibility that being indoors for a month has caused me to lose all sense of style.

I hope to have added a piercing or two before I go outside again, and perspective returns.

…

In other news, I’m very happy with Restraint‘s recent facelift, even if most of the non-journal material isn’t currently available. Having a new look does wonders to motivate me to keep writing.

Think of the children!

There’s a report of neurological damage in the children of vegan/vegetarian women that was published in a recent Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report. It relates primarily to the effects of a lack of cobalamin/B12 which are well-known in adults, but less so in children.

Most vegetarians and vegans I know haven’t educated themselves on how to eat healthy without meat, and do themselves much more damage than benefit with their diet. If you’re going to make a lifestyle choice as big as becoming a vegan is, please take the time to learn about your choice.

90

I’m trying to put together a collection for [info]dirtybunny‘s birthday on Feb 25th… I was hoping I could draw on you fine folks for help with her gift, which I have in mind but don’t wanna say over LJ, just in case she manages to read this friends-list-minus-Leslie entry somehow…

Could all interested parties please email me at jairus@restraint.org? No substantial financial commitment is required. Thanks. :)