Secondly, logic is not a set of rules which govern human behavior. Humans may have logically conflicting goals.

.: In truth, it feels like today was set adrift, floating still close to the shores of Reality (I can see it from here!) but moving at a very different pace, a meandering lazy current. I have a pervasive feeling of disconnection, like some better part of me is laughing and knowing that that which my senses is describing to me is not quite real, but let’s go along with it for the pure hell of it.
.: I keep looking up, out the darkened window, and expecting to see the hummingbird mother, tucked into her nest… but I don’t see her, or them– they have disappeared…

Tucker had recounted for me how the eggs did hatch, and for a day there were two impossibly small hummingbird babies, black and stunted, curled amidst the breast-feathers that the mother had patiently woven over the last number of weeks. But then, by the time I returned from New York, they were gone. I fear the worst.

Dark outside, and inside the silence that follows the angst-scream of Sunny Day Real Estate when the CD is finally stopped. Trying to find an anchor.

How To Become A Hacker
http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/hacker-howto.html

Which also led me to this goldmine:
How to be a Programmer: A Short, Comprehensive, and Personal Summary
http://samizdat.mines.edu/howto/HowToBeAProgrammer.html

And this– which is immensely important for the work-life as we just began shifting our framework-of-choice to Python:
Why Python? by Eric Raymod
http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/3882

The following I am not 100% sure about, as they involve some heavy-duty core changes to your OS X setup… and many of them I do not yet understand, so proceed with researched caution:

OSX For Hackers
https://gist.github.com/2260182
(which is apparently a fork of this: https://github.com/mathiasbynens/dotfiles/blob/master/.osx)

Lately I have been obsessed with reshaping my intellectual/emotional engagement with the world– which sounds quite heavy, and perhaps it is, but I have realized how many blockages and irrationalities have crept into my head from living a life (which I am sure is true of everyone) and now that I am in such a radically different work environment than I ever expected, planned for, or studied for, many of these issues are thrown into super-high relief. So it’s time to change them.

Mostly, thought, I need a new set of mental tools, and so I did some searching for “mental models” and came across a funny/interesting/insightful speech by Charles Munger (of Berkshire Hathaway fame) to the Harvard Business School. The first 1/2 of it, roughly, is what I am most interested in, where he lists (and extemporizes on) his favored “mental models” he uses regularly to apprehend his world and make decisions:

A Lesson on Elementary, Worldly Wisdom As It Relates To Investment Management & Business
http://www.readability.com/articles/zx7qstah

(I have this pumped over into the Readability service because the small fonts etc of YCombinator drive me batty, I am old now so I like my fonts robust and even serif-ed, when appropriate).

When I lump all these links together, I begin to see the shape of what I’ve been after… and though I am leaving some elements out (not for any particular reason beyond time/fatigue) which might flesh it out more, I think this is pretty sufficiently descriptive to be useful.

I must mention, even though we’re committed to Python (it makes the most immediate business/life/sanity sense) I am particularly crazed about learning LISP. I mean, all things considered, look at the compact elegance of the scheme solution to the Tower of Hanoi puzzle, especially compared to the other languages: http://programmingpraxis.com/2011/10/11/tower-of-hanoi/

A feverish exploration of the sonic fringe. Listening to the things you refuse to. Cannibal structures in MAX MSP and PD; eviscerations of late-80s guitar pedals; Furby Clusters tortured with Soldering-Irons; oceanic installations; reactive war environments; quiet whispered karmic pockets.

Unlike many of my nigh-pretentious run-on poetics from that era, this doesn’t make me cringe. It actually perks up the unused portions of my brain, gets me all eager to fire up PD again. And perhaps I will. But right now, I am going to upload some almost-totally-but-not-quite-unlistenable audio tracks to Soundcloud.

The issue sometimes comes down to habit, I am sure, or the lines/definitions we tattoo on our minds to make working for a living (a despicable thing, at core) actually livable. For example, it is nearly impossible for me to keep away from my computer… so I am poking at Python and Ruby, investigating WordPress themes, reading about Hans Zimmer’s studio. Even when I am not sitting here, in front of the computer, I am circling it like a wounded vulture, driven crazy by the scent of it.

Not sure, not sure, is it even worth it at this stage, where time is so limited I barely pick up the guitar– an instrument with decidedly less maintenance required (and, therefore, far less inertia to overcome).

But I am a firm believer in the axiom that “if you build it, it {whatever ‘it’ might be} will come”. Assuredly, if one does *not* install the tools, one will not be using those tools.

Ah, so, then, well..

Boy: “I hate your stories”

Woman: “I know a story about a boy who hated my stories”

Letters From The Sky, Civil Twilight

* Admittedly, admission was free in terms of finance. I estimate its actual cost in lost time, which was slightly less than 109 minutes (as I fast-forwarded through some of the predictable romantic fluff)

Things I have learned:

1. Don’t make the mistake of thinking that because one side of your mouth is at least semi-functional, that side can perform successfully the actions of the mouth as a whole. For example, drinking: it’s actually better to slip the liquids (and I do mean, slip) into the paralyzed side because you can actually seal the other side with the functioning lips. It’s so automatic to use the lips that work, I keep forgetting that limitations and liquids roll out the right side unchecked.
2. Vessels with spouts are the key, as they can funnel the liquid. But, if you’re a normal family, you probably have a paucity of available spouted vessels. On the other hand, we’re a Russo-American family with a) a former-baby/current-toddler with baby/toddler cups galore (though sippy cups are just not up to the job of your average thick meal-replacement shake) and b) a matriarch with a formerly-humorous-but-as-usual-devastatingly-on-it-obsession with plastic Chinese tea thermoses.
3. A significant portion of Bell’s Palsy sufferers experience heavy fatigue. I seem to be one, with a strange cycle of tiredness, usually with an onset of about 3:30pm — 4pm. It’s quite something, let me tell you, and not what I expected.
4. There is also an angle of this I am sure many of you would share, were you to be (or have you been) in similar predicaments… A thing I might express as the added psychological stress of being a burden to others. I think this is one of the most difficult things to deal with, since it alone can propel ‘the one who should be resting’ into moments of ‘semi-guilt-ridden activity’ which, I can only imagine, server to exacerbate the condition. It is a strange and gut-sinking thing to see yourself as a sort of deadweight eye of a storm, sort of like being a hunk of paralyzed lead dropped onto a pool tarp, pulling everything down into its heavy, distorting sink.

Image credit goes to: Yann Souetre from whom I borrowed without permission

Tillandsia ionantha is a bromeliad native to Central America that is classified as vulnerable by the World Conservation Union. This epiphyte is well adapted to its rather unique ecological niche, growing attached to the high branches of trees where it receives exposure to the sunlight that the canopy of trees shades from the forest floor below. The leaves of Tillandsia ionantha possess tiny grayish-colored scales called trichomes that both store water until it can be absorbed and act to reflect intense sunlight from the leaf surface, thereby preventing excessive water loss through transpiration.

Selaginellas are creeping or ascendant plants with simple, scale-like leaves on branching stems from which roots also arise. The plants are heterosporous (megaspores and microspores), and have structures called ligules, scale-like outgrowths near the base of the upper surface of each microphyll and sporophyll.
Unusually for the lycopods, each microphyll contains a branching vascular trace.

Ficus pumila (creeping fig or “climbing fig”) is a woody evergreen vine that is native to East Asia.
This plant requires the fig wasp Blastophaga pumilae for pollination, and is fed upon by larvae of the butterfly Marpesia petreus.

We had not been to the beach in a very very long time. Oh, there were reasons, even beyond our constant cries of “busy”-ness, but they all seems to dissolve into foolish caricatures today when we stood on the shore and watched the white-maned waves come crashing in.

There is a soft, unfocused haze that accompanies these ocean days, something that just registers on the visibility scale but is more like a vintage photo, a sort of summer softening that is, no doubt, a clouding of the atmosphere above the surf with microscopic moisture, but it makes your time there seem like an immediate memory.

So Lucian and I spent a good hour running along the beach and playing a sort of offensive/defensive line game where he would try to outmaneuver me so he might run headlong into the oncoming waves, and I would try to cut him off or, for those times he did slip past me with a head fake or other cleverness (like waiting for me to start texting a description of the stellar picture I wanted to send to Iryshka), catch him from behind with a valiant, stretching leap.

There was such a purity of pleasure, mingled with that specialized nostalgia not for things you actually experienced but for the belief you once had in the way such experiences would feel. I know that is confusing, so I will try to rework it: it felt like I was touching on the feelings I always thought I would feel when I came to California for my endless summer of warmth, love, and oceanic fun.

We have it so good here in California. It is a profound moment when you remember it, not idly but intensely. In a messy stream of days all choked with impatience and lost time, all blurred with fatigue and expectation, it is a gift to awaken (again) to the thought that everything might just be quite perfect.

But the “No” thing, it’s interesting, because it’s a power-word, and he tries to throw it around a lot, not as a command, but rather as a deconstruction. He wants to bleed it of its authority, and reduce it to the banal. Or so I think.