Well, I’ve found out that trying to type things out while there’s a TV running is nigh impossible, possibly because I never watch TV, and TV has been evolving to be visually/aurally addictive as possible. So I’m left without immunities to the viral memes (mental genes) of the TV… oh noes…

Well, have to try anyways.

So, day three of the trip: like all good tourists, we had to visit the Statue of Liberty. Unfortunately, it turned out that getting into the crown of the statue wouldn’t happen, since tickets had been booked out 3 months in advanced. In fact, tickets into the base of the statue were booked out a few days, so instead we spent the afternoon just wandering around the statue and Ellis Island. Life lesson learned: pre-ordering tickets online will beat getting tickets on site. We skipped a huge line by doing it, which hopefully makes a big enough impression that I don’t forget about it.

Interesting and slightly creepy: while we were navigating through the tourist trap mess that is the Statue of Liberty, I found a cute girl. Actually, I found a bunch of cute girls. Actually, cute girls are everywhere in NYC. Even after you subtract out an estimate for the fob girls (I don’t have anything against fob girls, I just think that it’s very unlikely that it would work out with a fob girl, and anything impacting the already astronomically small unlikelihood of my chances with the ladies is bad. Very bad.), then you still end up with a fairly sized population. True, I’ve been walking past which seems like millions of people, but still!

But Nathan, you may be thinking. That isn’t creepy at all, it’s just you being a guy. True! Anyone that doesn’t accept my dude-ness can go suck it, and noting special members of the fairer sex is nothing even puritans can frown upon (okay, they may frown upon it, but they can’t stop their genes from trying to reproduce, so I say HA!). What’s creepy is that while I was looking at them, one of them was looking back at me. Staring at me. From the back of the fast food serving counter-area-ish (she was more of 16 feet away, instead of just 2 or something like she would be if it were any other burger joint). I know, because I snuck a glance, and noticed that she always seemed to be looking at me. All. The. Time. It wasn’t an empty stare, either. Then she went and manned a register for a short time, and then went back to leaning on the back wall and staring at me again.

Okay then.

I must mention that didn’t exactly fit my cute definition, either, especially when she was manning a fast food register in what is possibly one of America’s most commercialized National Parks. So, a little creepy? Maybe a silent plea for help? Filling me into her mid-day fantasy about how a dashing young man leaps over the counter, punches her mean boss, and rescues her from her crappy service job? Filling away as much information so that she can stalk me later? Trying to obtain my phone number through mind-reading? Thinking about how ugly I am (similar to how you can’t look away from car wrecks)?

In any case, it was pretty gosh darn unnerving, and I sure hope she’s not looking into my hotel window, or that she won’t be looking into my dorm window. As long as it doesn’t come to that, I’ll be okay. What’s thaAHHHHHH

(Note that I’m only typing about this because I never expect to see her again. Hopefully. IF YOU TRACKED DOWN AND ARE READING THIS BLOG (AND YOU KNOW WHO YOU ARE) GO AWAY)

After the statue, we visited Wall Street, the WTC site, and called that a day.

Horray! Day three of the adventure finished.

Since trying to offset the blogging isn’t working out at all, I’ll also be blogging about what we did today! (day four)

Another touristy thing to do is go on top of a tall building and take a look around New York. The traditional building to do this on is the Empire State building, but since everyone and their unexpected-relation-here does that, we just went to the top of the Rockefeller tower (building?). Again, pre-ordering stuff online saved our sanity (or what’s left of it). It still surprises me just how freaking huge central park is, which the Rockefeller building gave us a really good view of. It’s also surprising that it all seems so small when you happen to be 70 stories above street level; the feeling of vertical stretch one gets from the ground floor dissipates once you get to the top of one of those uber-tall buildings. Doesn’t seem quite so hectic and amazing from far up above, eh?

Of course, getting back to the ground floor removed that particular illusion.

Unfortunately, we visited Greenwich Village, or what’s left of it. Probably would’ve been cool to be in when it was an actual cultural source in the last century.

And like good Asians, we had to visit ChInAtOwN (please don’t punch me for the caps)!!!!!!!!(or the exclamation points) Welp, there’s a bunch of food stores, and a bunch of stores selling dvds and clothes. You know what I’m talking about. And lots of signs with Chinese characters. I swear, one of these days I’m going to discover how to time travel and introduce a sane alphabet to the Chinese.

Interestingly, Lil’ Italy is right next to Chinatown. I don’t have any idea how it happened either, since it’s more like little Italy runs directly down the center of Chinatown. Little Italy came first! Why did the Chinese see fit to just hop over Little Italy? An effort at cultural hegemony? Economic warfare? A mysterious and spooky turn of events? I’m no sociologist, so I probably won’t find out for a while. However, it did not escape my notice that Little Italy has outsourced their t-shirt-and-other-junk shops to the Chinese.

I’m not sure why Korea Town is so far away from these other ethnic enclaves: maybe they knew the Chinese would try and take over. Anyways, we’re going to have to visit it again, since we just passed by it while trying to catch a train back to the hotel.

Some final thoughts: I originally thought that I wouldn’t really settle into New York, even after the second day of taking a look at the city. It seemed so gaudy, hyper, grimy, technologically impotent, noisy, and lacking wonderful weather that I’ve been taking for granted for most of my life. And yeah, it is all those things, but it feels like I can have some fun living around here. There’s definite life in this city, and they might need an uber-geek in residence to spice things up more (ha) (ha). (ha)

(ha)

Plus, there are hot girls.*

WHEEEEEE!!!!

* Don’t give me that look.

So my l my life sucks, it’s so boring.

HAHAHA.

Right.

I’m posting this from my shiny new Android phone while in the middle of New York, which is about as exciting as something can get without involving large amounts of wonton destruction.

And like any good blogger, I need to give my inexpert opinion and do a review.

So the phone is a Samsung Captivate running Android 2.1, with Swype preinstalled, with a gorgeous screen. Ahh, le amour… Surprise! I haven’t rooted it yet, but I certainly plan on it, since it looks like the only way to really dev things is with a rooted phone…

Oh, you wanted to hear about New York? I guess I’ll start from the beginning and go from there in chronological order…

Flying here and sleeping weren’t interesting, so we’ll skip those parts. We started off by checking out my new institute of higher learning, which is, like I’ve said before, is really tall. My dorm is pretty far away, considering that the rest of the campus is pretty geographically dense. Nice buildings are to be had by all, although I have a bit of a premonition that using the elevator to get to class won’t be weird in a week or two.

I’ve been rambling for a bit too long without a tangent, so I’m going to riff a bit on some engineering thoughts from an unlikely source. While coming back from my summer stint in california, my cab driver commented on the age of New York’s infrastructure and how it contributed to the hectic nature of the city. I can see evidence for this thesis; everything seems so old, for better or worse. It gives us the cool greek columns that adorn oodles of buildings in NYC, but the bathrooms behind the facade tell a different story. We’ll see what sorts of constraints this tosses on my stay, but I’m fairly sure it’ll contribute to capping my stay to a few years.

<\end tangent>

Next place…

Holy. Crap.

I don’t think I’ve ever seen a bigger museum in my life. To get an idea of the scale, we burned off almost an hour to get through 1/18 of the entire Metropolitan Museum of Art. I could’ve spent a few days really exploring the entire thing. To be honest, I’m not that a big history buff, so I’d rather be doing other stuff, but man does it bring out my inner geek.

Also, central park is freaking huge. Enough said..

And Times Square is… Just as gaudy as I imagined.

Yup.

Okay, I’m not going to write blog posts on here anymore… It’s taken me pretty much the entire day to finish this one and I don’t relish the thought of doing it again.

Out.

Hi. Have a story. It’s rough around the edges, but I think the fundamental idea is of at least some interest. No, a foot soldier wouldn’t think like that, but I didn’t want to waste time trying to get into character.

—

Status: remember it’s just a game! you don’t have to scream like they’re actually killing you every time something hits you or when you fall off the road… repeat after me: it’s just a game! 😉 hahahaha!

just a game… just a game…

the controller had visited him earlier today, an unimaginably huge honor for a common foot soldier like himself. he should have been ecstatic to receive his orders directly from the supreme commander of the battlefield, but instead it had somehow left him feeling… empty.

It was very much unlike being briefed by his commanding officers, who seemingly knew exactly how to rile up the squads for battle, calling on their patriotism and honor to gird themselves against the visceral horrors. They talked at inane speeds, and knew exactly what to say at all the right moments. Once you’ve been through a few battle preps, the patterns fell into place, and it felt so right to cheer at the behest of the sergeants.

On the other hand, the controller seemed to stumble and hesitate over his words. He wondered at the time why this particular officer had risen through the ranks, when those less-eloquent leaders had been retired without a thought. There was something off about the controller: he didn’t hold his battle implement quite right, he fidgeted like his armor didn’t fit him.

“So,” the controller had begun, “I need you to scout out around here” he indicated a point on the map, “and keep in areas where the live feed can make it back to base.”

I was only a foot soldier, but I had just enough smarts to know a suicide mission when I saw one.

“Why don’t we just use an aerial drone?” Even though he sat on the top of the pyramid, I couldn’t just let him send me into the jaws of the enemy like that, especially when there was no need.

He sighed, “We need recon-“

“No we don’t, we got the last feed from the area 100 ticks ago-“

“Don’t talk back to your commanding officer, son.”

“I will if you are going to throw away my life!”

“And I can see why Professor Williams wants to erase you.”

What-

“It’s all just a game. All of you” he gestured out to the trenches “are AIs running in an academic simulation, and your aberrant behavior happen to be keeping this simulation from optimizing further. We thought we would make your death somewhat useful, but your behavior seems to have gone farther than the prof knows. I’m going to-“

The controller disappeared.

It was all a game.

Just a game.

They were fighting over nothing: there wasn’t a homeland, a family at home worth fighting for, leaves of absence or honorable discharge. It felt like it was all real, including the concrete wall his fist was pounding against, but it wasn’t. The pain wasn’t real, the blood from his knuckles wasn’t real, the steel wall behind the concrete facade wasn’t real, the locked door wasn’t real, the pitiful dents in the door weren’t real. The controller, or Professor Williams, or somebody else, had control of the world, and they would-

Well, it was fun while it lasted.

Wait, I don’t think I’ve ever told you guys what I was actually studying. So, I guess I better start there, especially since I have a better idea of what I was doing now that it’s over.

The REU (Research Experience for Undergrads) was based in Calpoly, with a focus on robotics. My particular project’s long term goal was to track/follow sharks with multiple AUVs, with the short-term summer goal of tracking/following a boat with one AUV. In short, we (research team had 4 people in it, with two of us ending up branching towards some very different target) failed pretty miserably at attaining that goal. If you don’t mind, I’m going to rant a bit on why that happened, instead of blabbering about the details of the project, which aren’t that interesting anyways.

If there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s that speed is incredibly important. It’s not a very good mantra for a plethora of reasons, but didn’t have the raw speed to make up for our other shortcomings. For instance, I only knew rudimentary opamp theory going into the REU, but I spent the better part of a day learning what I needed to know. Now, spending a day learning 30-minutes of information is bad, and that sort of situation happened over and over again. Sometimes it was inevitable, like learning to use Eagle taking two days. Much of the time, it wasn’t. Generally speaking, I was working full time on a series of problems, and once days started to slip by with token progress, I should have known something was up.

Another problem I’m going to peg our failure to score a goal on is the agonizingly slow start we got off to. Now that it’s over, it feels like if we started with what we knew at our 3rd week, then we could’ve really done some damage. Not doing homework before getting there was a problem, certainly, as well as the closely related problem of not pounding our advisors with more important questions. I don’t even think the problem was well-defined in our heads until a few weeks in, which in retrospect was a very, very big problem, and probably why we didn’t know what we were doing for the first two weeks.

A comparison might be handy: it was very much unlike the MCM, where we had a concrete goal and a very short time period in which to do something about it. Our project stayed undefined for a while, and stayed murky, and we had a relatively long time in which to do something (bad, since I only pulled my requisite all-nighter (of course! it’s not an REU if you haven’t pulled an all-nighter) on the last night (I do not recommend pulling it the night before a presentation, though). It feels like motivation goes way down when there’s too much time: much stricter goal setting and goal meeting insanity on my part would have ameliorated this somewhat).

So I guess I’ll end my rant here. It was a very valuable experience, and I was glad I got to do it. I just wish…

No. I’m really ending my rant, and going to go do something cool. Hopefully I’ll have something to show by the end of the week.

My gosh, so much happens in a week.

So, I got evicted (not my fault, although now I know that I have to keep tabs on the people I rent from, too), started *really* whaling on my internship (partly why I haven’t been posting lately), and played out in public. Granted, I sucked, and I’ve been out of practice for about a week (and my god, why can’t they leave a grand where I can get to it, and let me at it when I can get to it?), and there wasn’t anyone around to hear it, but it’s the thought that counts! Right? Right…

But since real life is boring (at least until I start finishing projects, which are all in varying states of incompletion, aka don’t expect anything soon), I’ll be talking about something that I’ve slowly come to realize. It’s been a feeling that’s been with me around a year, starting as something innocuous, but I’ve only recently figured out what it actually means (I know, it’s kind of late, so my word-smithing is somewhat off. Do forgive me).

I realize just how cool of a place UPS was, and I wish (in a way) that I could’ve stuck around for a little longer, or maybe gone back and done some things differently.

Of course, I only realize that UPS was a delightful place to be when I’m leaving it, as such things are apt to happen. In this case, the relationship is not entirely coincidental: getting to know how other schools do bureaucratic work gives me an appreciation for the close knit-edness of us around UPS. For instance, I just need maybe 2 days to a week in a machine shop to finish the mechanical bits of my Mendel. The fact it’s not finished doesn’t mean that I’m lazy, just that it’s nearly impossible to get permission to wrangle around in a machine shop here at Calpoly. I can see why (not a student, summer quarter, safety up the wazzoo (although I think that everyone should adopt metrix:createspace’s liability release, hehe)), but it’s frustrating to be right in the middle of an engineering school and not be able to engineer something. So, I’ll have to use up part of my week back home to hack at it, or figure out how to navigate Columbia quickly and get access to a machine shop there.

But so what? No one cares about how Universities handle machine shop access. Rather, it is indicative of the larger ways and methods of how things are done, and it is with regret that I now know I haven’t been using my professors as much as I should have been. Now that I actually know that, I fear that Columbia is going to be a much different sort of place. Maybe not quite so different: professors that are enthusiastic about teaching are everywhere (the converse is also true, unfortunately). However, Columbia is big enough to have TAs teaching classes, rather than having professors teaching every single class, all the time. Time lost getting to know the actual prof.

Then, there’s the geekiness factor. But Nathan! you may be thinking, Isn’t that one of the reasons you didn’t like UPS? Because geeks that you could engage with were few and far between? True, but not being surrounded by geeks means that I’m not completely cut off from the larger world, that I can have a direct impact on the world of those around me just by being geeky, especially being enthusiastic about being geeky. Of course, I missed this sort of chance to really engage people, although I really wasn’t quite geeky enough most of the time back then… so I guess I’m only partially off the hook. Cause, you know, a real geek would have already been geeky enough.

And there’s some of the usual suspects: leaving behind friends, a familiar place, a familiar admin system, and a campus small enough to sprint across in less than 5 minutes. That last one was still causing me trouble up until last week; this last week of work has been me coming in and working until I get too hungry for dinner, so I haven’t been strictly keeping tabs on getting to work on time. Gonna have to fix that before I get to Columbia.

So, didn’t know what I had until it’s gone.

Mind you, I’m really anticipating a different flow in New York, a new chapter in life, and a whole lot more learning, so I’m not going to change my mind about moving. These are just some thoughts about what insights hindsight has given me concerning the past few years.

Enough rambling. Guy is still playing with his flash editor on the couchahemmy bed, so I guess I’ll get him to move.

So a friend of mine recently-ish filled out one of those Q/A lists about books on tumblr, and it got me thinking about books I haven’t read, and it got me thinking. Specifically, one of the books mentioned happened to touch on an anomaly in my reading habits, one of the few books that I’ve read out of sequence in a series without going back to read everything. I do believe I read it for a book reading contest in my junior high days (Battle of the Books, I do believe. Came close to winning the school-wide contest a few times, but those last couple rounds were always too tough to break), which meant that I wouldn’t have spared thought to reading an entire trilogy just to get at the last book.

However, this recent touch rekindled my interest in the Abhorsen series (Sabriel, Lirael, Abhorsen, by Garth Nix), since, well, it sounded like there was a whole lot more character development happening than the last book let on (you mean that warrior was a librarian earlier?). So I grabbed the entire series, sat down, and started reading last night. And well, now it’s tonight, and I’ve ended the last book in the last hour. Not sure if my game is slipping speed*comprehension-wise (yes, I’m multiplying them together), but any reading should help, right?

So thoughts… I’m actually not that tired. Sitting all day and reading doesn’t drain that much energy. Yes, this is what I did all day rather than go to San Fran.

Oh, you mean about the actual books? First, I should say that Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality has completely ruined fantasy genres for me. Okay, maybe not completely, since the Abhorsen series has a particular sticking point that engaged my mind, but I’m sure can’t read about magical worlds without hearing “I do now claim this territory in the name of SCIENCE!” echo through my head. Particular to the Abhorsen universe is the fact that magic and technology do not mix (not unique by a long shot, but useful as a category). I can’t help but think of a quote from the Clark, who said “Sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic” (or something like that). From that perspective, you have one magic, and another, and they oppose each other. Since one is ‘deeper’ than the other, it wins when the two conflict. Simple enough. However, when one can see (or at least outline) all the steps involved in making a grenade, then it’s much less apparent how the tech-magic conflict works. Decomposing all the steps leads to mechanical steps you can undertake anywhere (or else swords couldn’t be smithed in the Old World, for instance), such that it doesn’t make sense that there is any tech-magic conflict.

I know I’m complaining about a fantasy story not making sense. Shush.

So, the plot makes so much more sense now. Nix tries to recap at the beginning of each book, but they really have to be read in sequence, as separate volumes of a large work. Actually, the first book and the last two are fairly decoupled, and the recapitulation from the second could cover for not reading the first (although it would smooth out the story telling to just read everything; sometimes obscure cross-references are made).

Forgive me for skipping through, I’m getting pretty tired.

However, I must say that this might be the first time I’ve consciously noticed character development. I personally think that it’s just due to heightened awareness, and Reading Marathon powers, but I’ll have to burn through a couple more stories before I figure out if I got the hang of it or not.

Anyways, I’m really tired. I’ve been staring at the screen for a few minutes, so I’ll take my leave here.

So, not 20 minutes ago, I decided something. I was very confused, and probably didn’t make the best decision. Nothing life changing, mind you (in the way that you don’t expect significant life changes from the mundane), but importantly character revealing.

Have some background: I am still in SLO (San Luis Obispo), which is between LA and San Fran, which also means it is essentially in the middle of nowhere (comparatively: it’s still California after all). I’m doing a robotics internship at Cal Poly, and our professor suggested we check out some of the labs over at Stanford. Plans were made, and while a bunch of us research dudes were going to Yosemite after checking out Standford, a couple of us just wanted to get home after poking around San Fran and San Jose. Since I’ve been to Yosemite before, and know just how long the drive up there is, I wasn’t too keen on the idea of driving all the way up there and then climbing half dome, especially on a minimal amount of sleep. So, we plotted about how to get home from San Fran, since cars were in short supply among us. Coming home by bus seemed like the most attractive option, although it left San Jose at around 10PM.

So I wake up this morning, earlier than usual in order to get ready to go. I get out to the pick up point, and then I find that the rest of the guys skipping Yosemite had flaked out, effectively leaving me alone for the 2nd portion of the trip. That threw me into a slight panic as I tried to figure out what I should do, and I eventually decided to flake out, too. After I spent some time on top of a toilet contemplating what just happened, I finally figured that I should have gone. But then, my butt was parked on a toilet, and the caravan was already 10 minutes away.

So what’s the big deal? I missed out on a day trip to a larger city, so what? I’ll soon be parked in the middle of one of the largest cities in the world, for at least 2 years to boot. What I think is the big deal is that while I came up with the right answer to ‘What is my utility for going to Standford?’, I came up with it much too slowly (while sitting on the toilet no less). An event that I hadn’t considered (the rest of the non-Yosemite team flaking out) blindsided me and (I’m guessing) temporarily overwhelmed my utility function, causing me to make a decision that I didn’t want to make in retrospect.

It was also clear in retrospect that I should have seen it coming, and then pre-cached my thoughts about it (humans think relatively slowly, so we (probably) cache a whole lot of our thoughts to keep up our mental quickness. In this case, trying to come up with a 30-second utility evaluation wasn’t so stable). The guys I was going to be coming home with have had a history of flaking out, and the time/cost investment of the trip would only have raised the probability that they would flake out. In retrospect, it was so obvious that the probability was going to be high that I can’t figure out how I missed it entirely. And if I can’t catch obvious branches like that, then what else am i missing?

So maybe this episode wasn’t character revealing; oh well.

Now I have an entire day ahead of me. Wiped empty. Well, better get to filling it.

Here’s a thought: similar to how martial artists strive to not use their skills, printmen should strive to not use their printers.

Why do I say this? Well, printing is based on the idea that we can make any object our minds can think of, to fill needs that aren’t so easily met by the larger market; moving fulfillment of the long tail out to the long tail, in a sort of lingo-speak. Us print-dudes* believe that this is a net win, that the costs of printing adoption and sustaining a printing public are less than the benefits of having more creative power and flexibility available in the goods available to the public.

So if printers are a good thing, then why the proposal that print-dudes try not to use them?

Back to my comparison with martial arts**: the master and the novice know that their art is a last resort. To think otherwise would mean an abuse of power, a violation of the societal trust that restrains people from using firearms to settle petty disputes (usually). The difference between the firearm and the martial art is about 10 years, assuming that martial arts are among those things that take 10 years to really learn; then, one can imagine that a martial artist would struggle with himself over whether to invalidate all the effort put into learning the art, versus settling a dispute turning nasty in the quickest way possible.

Now, what does this have to do with us print-dudes? Now, I can’t add up all the externalities, but I am quite sure that printing is not a net-green-gain. For example, the reprap*** runs stepper motors and a heating element for a couple of hours in exchange for one object. True, it is custom made, but that’s still a whole ton of energy for one object. The reprap has other things going for it conceptually****, but the point is that if we can go without it, we should. Better would be recycling objects: not melting printed parts back down to filament, but re-purposing ready-made, old objects, and scraps to fill functionality we normally think ‘3D printer’ for.

So my thought went something like that. Meh.

* I’m trying to figure out what the signifier for print-men should be: print-men seems somewhat sexist, and printer refers to the actual machine itself. Hmm…

** Note that I am not a martial artist. You should essentially assume that I am bs’ing this entire paragraph.

*** I’m building a reprap, no offense intended. Also take this as a plea to ignorance about the true power consumption of the reprap.

**** On a different note, printers like the reprap can help decentralize the economy to the point that regions can nearly decouple from each other. Maybe I’ll write on this particular vision later.

So I’ve been a lazy butt, and I haven’t been keeping up with my favorite pet blog as well as I should be. Over the last week or so, I’ve been screwing around with interfacing a wii nunchuck with my laptop. Have some videos:

They’re pretty self explanatory. I’ve also done some work with moving the mouse with the nunchuck, but I haven’t actually gotten off my lazy butt and recorded it for a humiliating posterity yet.

The next step is to… do nothing with it. It’s very much less useful as a HID device than I thought it would be, to the point that I would curse working with such a thing if I had to use it as a mouse for every day activities. It might be useful as a gaming device (as Nintendo intended), but I can see the intention of the nunchuck as an accessory showing itself in such a function. So, it would be better to just use the entire Wiimote as an input device, or to use the nunchuck as a control device for the arduino itself.

In short: it was fun, but ultimately useless (as of right now). Having the functionality mapped out might prove to be useful later, but not yet.

I’m pretty wiped out, mostly from sitting and staring at a screen for most of the day. That usually isn’t a problem, but my old age is getting to me, gosh darn it, and I can’t just push myself like I used to. Where was I?…

Oh, right, dumping core or something. I have blogger guilt (again) so ya’ll are going to have to put up with my whining and complaining about absolutely nothing.

With that out of the way…

I’ve been loathe to update because nothing has happened. Well, nothing exciting. Reprap stuff is flowing in, and I have a nunchuck to play with once a breakout board gets here, but I’m still overextended and not very happy. My mind didn’t listen to my plea as put out in the end of my last blog post, and now I’m way too comfortable with these surroundings, and I just don’t want to do jack. Now that I think about it, this always happens when I’m on vacation, even though I’m really not this time around. Shoot, I don’t even want to finish this blog post.

Thought: I’m ruining my writing style (formal, informal, w/e) by writing stream-of-consciousness blog posts. However, I’m not going to start editing and revising my blog posts, so I guess even if it is true, it’s moot.

Oh, and apparently going to church makes me… feel guilty. Not in the traditional way, though. I’ve forgotten how inviting church communities can be, and it’s kind of strange since I haven’t really outed myself as an atheist. Oh, hi, I’m going to eat your food and socialize even though my goals are at least orthogonal, and perhaps opposed to yours.

And this sort of mental lethargy I was talking about earlier is also affecting this; I mean, I haven’t gotten thrown out of multiple churches yet. Well, I’ve never been thrown out of a church, so I guess I just lack balls. I mean, shoot! 2 mormon churches in close proximity!

I can’t think.

Blarghkeibat

Oh, and happy 4th of July. Not.

Because it’s the 5th of July now. Ha ha ha