I Have I(rritable)B(owel)S(yndrome)

I finally did it. Pain, sweat, time, effort. All of these, which I am not too fond of, entered into my life yesterday. Yes, I reinstalled my OS. No more freakin’ third partition system volume. Hoo-rah! Downloading drivers right now in the hope that they will make my life that much easier, and pleasanter. I’m all about making things more pleasanter.

Apparently I broke Katie’s chair. I guess they just don’t make chairs as wearable as they use to. They need to make them more wearabler.

I got my first credit card yesterday. 9.99%! Woot! (I don’t know what that last word actually means. I need to be more literater.)

I’m thinkin’ about getting a card for recording on my computer soon. I have a Sound Blaster right now. It is 16-bit. I will buy something 24-bit. That will give me much more headroom. Then I can record more louder.

Alright. Drivers are done downloading. Thus I must reset. Hopefully this will have everything running more smoother.

What stupid internet identity quiz are you?

Seriously people. Genghis man, Genghis.

Here’s a little slice of life from Sears for you.

1-24-2003

Crashing sound is heard.
Coworker: What was that?
Me: Sign fell down the escalator.
Coworker: Seinfeld’s here?! (Said in serious tone.)

I seem to have fallen off of Mike's radar. I must have some sort of cloaking device. I have no cloaks. I do have a new leather jacket though, but it is only able to cloak my arms and torso. This has gotten me thinking about Star Trek. I only ever really watched TNG. I have only seen about half of the movies. Still no Wrath of Kahn yet. What follows are things that bugged me about TNG, the series that is.

•Whenever someone plays that rollout piano thing they always go to the Jeffries Tubes to use it. They say that is the location in the ship with the best acoustics. Couldn’t they just go to the Holodeck and make an even better room?

•There was only one public restroom in the Enterprise.

•In the episode where Jordie and Ensign whoever become invisible and pass through matter, they don’t fall through whatever floor they are on. Those must be some floors.

•They didn’t use Barclay enough.

•They had the weird whistle thing play whenever the PA went on in the ship during the first season, but then it just kinda disappeared. What’s up with that?

Anyway, it was still better than all the crap that was to come. What’s up with the freakin’ Enterprise theme? So lame. I be an nerd.

What follows is an actual review problem I had last year in Chem 1B. Thanks to Marie’s antiquated away messages for bringing this back to my attention. She points out that this is the type of question that would never fly at Stanford, but seems completely at home at Cal. Also, my E45, Properties of Materials, readers had quotes from “The Art of War” and Bernard Shaw. Anyway, enjoy.

“You have one proton. You are electron-rich, and I am electron-poor, but we co-exist in an electronically stratified society. What kind of spectroscopy and wavelength of radiation would you use to distinguish between our protons so that you could continue to oppress my proton? If there were no magnetic field, would such a class distinction be possible?”

So it turns out that in the last few years or so bike helmets have taken on the appearance of Darth Maul(sp?). I now own one of these helmets. I used to have a nondescript, forest green colored helmet. I made my friend, and brother’s girlfriend, Jeni wear it when she went riding with her new bike. She ended up actually using it. She’s fine now. But I have now entered into the world of bike paraphernalia.

I have bought lights for my bike. I have a 2.4 watt headlight on the front. It goes through 4 AA’s in about 3 and a half hours. I must purchase a battery charger now. I should also buy a U-lock. That is German for unter-lock. Or not. A new hand pump with a gauge and a water bottle are also not too far off in the future.

I am so bored lately. I think my work schedule is incompatible with everyone else, or they are just avoiding me. Maybe I should start wearing deodorant. I haven’t used any since Junior year. It made my sensitive skin irritated. Also, no one complained at all when I stopped using it, so it seemed like it wasn’t too useful in the first place. I also need new razors. I was tempted to buy the Rite-Aid Mach 3 knock offs today. I still might. When it comes to keeping up appearance I know that us men have it easier than women, but this still isn’t of much console when you’re staring at a $20 box of razors. That’s like 40 Jack-in-the-Box Tacos, or up to 100 Tina’s burritos. Maybe I’ll just Nair my face.

In other news, I got some new headphones. I figure that if I’m gonna be a music production major I should have a decent pair of cans. These ones are quite decent. The bass in Sk8ter Boi is amazing. I have also been able to find more instruments in Geggy Tah songs. This brings me to my next point.

A while ago Brad had a post proclaiming Cake the most underappreciated band around. I love Cake, and they are underappreciated, but Geggy Tah is much more so. They have the ability to mix rock, pop, jazz, r&b, prog, moogs, love songs to dogs, songs about eucalyptus, fishing with explosives, male pregnancy, the relationship of a children’s song to crack, desert power outs, binary lovers, and ever thing in between, around, near, far, and yet to exist. They can take a 2 second sample from one song and turn it into a completely different song of its own. And why settle for a guitar solo when you can double that solo on an organ while singing about the lifecycle of chicken nuggets? Unfortunately the most success they’ve had is that one of their songs, “Whoever You Are”, was used in a car commercial. I shall now leave you with some words of wisdom from Greg “Geggy” Kurstin and Tommy “Tah” Jordan.

“What side of the tracks are you on?
Both sides, because the world is round.”

*****This was posted on Friday. Somehow it double posted, like some sort of strange bed. I had to delete the entry and republish it since I'm too much of a s < perfectionist > s to just leave it be. Anyway, that explains the date.*****

Happy Earthquake Day!!! Yup. I think it was nine years ago. I was woken up by a cup of water falling off the side table and landing on my head. A gas station up by my house exploded. There was very little traffic afterwards. We couldn't shower for a few days. A year later there was an even bigger quake in Japan. Well, it might have just been smaller and more efficient. They say fewer people we're injured than might have been since it was a holiday and few were makin' the work commute. It was Dr. King day. His birthday was actually on the fifteenth of January. My mom had the same birthday. The seventeenth of January was actually Kevin Leung's Birthday. He was one of my two best friends at Sepulveda in sixth grade. We were later in Mr. Van's AP Physics class senior year at Granada. He killed himself on December first in front of the school. About a year later another friend from Sepulveda, Myron Wise, died. He was hit by a bus. If you asked any of us who we thought the first to die would be, I'm pretty sure we would all have said John Clark. We were wrong.

After my dad's stroke we're supposed to be monitoring various vital statistics including weight, blood pressure, and blood sugar. We finally bought a scale a few days ago. It is one of those new fangled body fat ones, so not only does it tell you your weight, but also what percentage of that weight is fat. (If I want to be all technical and nerdy about it like I have been trained to be for the last few years I would be using the word “mass” instead of “weight”. In fact I think that is a good idea… for me to POOP ON!!! At any rate….) So after messing with it for a while I have determined that I weigh 135 lbs. with 9% body fat. This is low. The ideal male is 15% and the average American male is 23%.

So 9% of 135 lbs. is about 12 lbs. Take out the cushion needed for my brain and that leaves 9 lbs. of fat for me to do with what I will. That is approximately 32,000 Calories, or 32,000,000 calories. If somehow it were possible for me to bike completely aerobically with fat metabolism running near 100% and without fatigue or hunger, at my pace of about 16 mph, or 500 Calories per hour, it would take me over 64 hours, or about 3 days, of straight riding until I started to eat my own brain. That is assuming my body doesn’t react to the stress of such a ride and start breaking down muscles and other less vital organs, which it certainly would. Also, good aerobic exercise burns about 70% fat if I’m not mistaken. Biking has many spikes into anaerobic territory. And I would certainly run out of glucose, the brain’s fuel, by the end and it wouldn’t matter that I was eating said brain. Fat is an amazing substance. I doubt anyone has ever starved to death. Protein depletion and hypoglycemia would kill you off quite a bit sooner.

As for my heart, my resting blood pressure is about 120 over about 65 with a pulse of about 65. I haven’t checked my blood sugar. It’s probably normal. I still don’t know what my blood type is. My birth certificate says A+ and the Red Cross says it is O+. Maybe they are just trying to trick me into giving more blood. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a Red Cross nurse outside or in a mirror. Spooky, eh?

That "ss" thing at the end of the last post was supposed to be the sentence "Hoo-rah!" surrounded by the symbol that Katie Woo came up with for denoting sarcasm in online speech. Turns out that the way I typed the symbol is some sort of HTML tag that just made the stuff inside disappear. What it should have said was...

s < Hoo-rah! > s

Spaces are vital. Some sort of "Sarcastic Pause". What?! Anyway.

To conclude... Stupid Sears.

So I'm sitting here trying to log into the NSLDS, or the National Student Loan Data System, to check on the status of my Berkeley loans. I want to make sure that i am not inadvertently defaulting on them and what have you. So I type in all my information, click "Submit" and nothing. I do it again, still nothing. I do it again and pay really close attention to what I'm typing in, and there it is.... Freakin' Sears!

See, register numeric keypads are upside down compared to a computer keyboard. They are like phones. 7-8-9 on the bottom and 1-2-3 on the top. Stupid Sears. Stupid Sears. Stupid Sears. Stupid Sears.

On the upside, as of Tuesday I no longer owe any money to the UC Regents. I just gotta pay back the Feds now. ss

# posted by i have ibs : 10:34 PM  0 comments

It was so incredibly windy last night. The power kept flashing off and on. Wind makes the scary bumps in the night even more nerve racking. Paranoid. Para-Noid. Would that be Andy, the stupid Dominoes Pizza monkey from a few years ago? What was up with that thing? Bad Andy. Good Pizza. Inebriated Advertising Department.

For a while the wallpaper on my computer was a picture of the cover of the Harry Connick Jr. album "20”. The picture looks scarily like me, but this one also had a sticker on it that said “The Nice Price”. Does that make Matt the evil one? Anyway. I finally decided to change it. It is now the cover from “The New York Big Band Concert” DVD. This one also is fairly scary. With exception for the eye color, his are blue and mine are green, this could just be a picture of me. He is about 15 years older than I, so I have somewhat of an aesthetic roadmap. That is a bit comforting. He is considered an attractive man. Hopefully this “attractiveness” will help to push my timidity to a less noticeable venue. Hopefully I will only be attracted to girls that have a thing for guys who look like Harry Connick Jr. I don’t think I would be so content if I looked like say, Clint Howard. But at least his brother gives him a job every year or so. Long live nepotism.

Haven't posted in a while. This is due to a secret "Mike Impression”, meaning I have been covertly angry and depressed, although the depression usually is the more pronounced of the two. I tried to “share” (turned out to be inflict) what I was going through with someone I have a lot of respect and admiration for despite not really having much of a real friendship with. They were helpful, but I think I scared them off. If so, I’m sorry about it, but if they weren’t, I’ve got a lot to learn about reading people, and interacting with them, and respecting desires, and myriad other complexities that I have no idea about. I need to watch my run on sentences too. Yeah. I hope to have some semblance of normality in my life someday, if I can handle it that is. My dad is currently in the hospital. Brad and Carlos were here when the paramedics showed up. I don’t think they are used to that sort of thing. I wonder if it’s a bad thing that I am. Trauma and depression amplify loneliness. Waking up sucks. Social and artful distractions are welcome for a while, but in the long run do not comfort. Depressing blogs seem longer than light and lively ones.

Woo mentioned the other day that our “circle” or friends is very “square”. Moulin Rouge is a brilliant film. The new Beck album is amazing. Hours at work have been cut back. Thumbs way down. Can’t think of witty final statement.