Re:Creation

i feel sort of like a rain cloud. a dark, nasty rain cloud that whips the hair back with wind and stings the eyes with water.

and emily is a quiet, peaceful village. or was, before being besieged by the extremes of my temperament. now the peace is gone, the villagers have locked themselves inside, and the crops are dying.

and oh, how i wish i wasn’t a storm. but however much i wish i wasn’t, i’m full of blinding lightning and cracking thunder. powerful in wrath, and weak and sick of it. arrogance is anvil heads towering miles high, and the higher they go, the lower my soul lies.

driven by a vacuum, a huge low-pressure area: an unexplainable lack that twists and claws the ground.

i wish i wasn’t all these things, but like a storm it feels like i have no control over my nature. i’m stuck as i am until something more powerful comes along and assimilates or dissipates me.

it might be cool to be a storm over the painted desert, but it is sad to be a storm over a quiet, peaceful little village. and right now, that’s what i am.

—

on spin: “hallelujah” | jason killingsworth

if by the previous post you infer that i had a bad weekend, this would be false. the weekend was so good and relaxing–i saw three movies (count of monte cristo, lord of the rings, and harry potter) all for free, and that’s always a good thing. i worked for hours on enaselvai, since i’m designing a computer font that will be like the characters above, only typeable in any windows application. there’s one problem: there are about 435 distinct character configurations in my language. this is due to the fact that every consonant and vowel group is combined into a single character. now, it might sound complicated, but it’s not–once you know the characters (there’s only 20 actual characters), it’s very easy to write. a computer, however, can only write left to right or right to left–not left then up then down then right, as i happen to need it to. so designing a font led to some dead ends which i am trying to work around. no luck so far.

the font idea slowly fizzling, i decided to translate into my language the one text which every conlanger translates: genesis 11:1-9, the babel text. it’s become a symbol for many conlangers, since it tells the story of the original derivation of many languages from one language. so, i’m still working on it, and will post it when i’m done. it’s actually quite a bit of work, because i’m having to make up words and grammar as i go along, and make sure that everything fits.

that was my weekend. and you might wonder, why then the previous post? i’ll tell you–because it was necessary.

today itself has been great too. i went to class, did some work, did some language stuff, went to the climbing wall for an hour and a half, ran a little over two miles, and went to small group. i’m now pleasantly sore, pleasantly tired, and pleasantly ready to be done with this quarter. my contacts, however, are not pleasant–they suck (you might notice this being a recurring theme).

in other news, pending a notice from the financial aid office, i’ll be applying to co-term in philosophy for the next year to two years. this is a pretty big decision for me, but i feel like it’s a smooth, logical, and good step to take. i’m praying that by getting in or not getting in, god would show me what to do! and if i don’t get in, no bother–i’m only a sophomore after all and i’ve got another year yet to do virtually the exact same thing and end at the exact same time.

more news: this server was down yesterday for quite a while, and i apologize. my new web host is not treating me very nicely, and it pains me to say this but i might be thinking of moving again. sorry! of course, you probably wouldn’t notice because the site address would not change this time.

thanks for the recent comments. karin, the funny script at the top is a script i have developed for a language i’m currently creating, called enaselvai. a word of the day appears whenever i update it to the right!

virtual disc on spin: the faithful anchor | unwed sailor

at last, it is over. hell week, i would have called it. in all actuality, it was probably my hardest week at stanford so far. i had a 3,000 word page paper to write, a logic problem set to do, which turned out to be at least twice as hard as the previous problem sets, and a c++ program to write. i can’t remember doing anything but working on all that stuff, and working at meyer for my job.

of course, i didn’t actually have to write the c++ program–but i accidentally started on it, and i couldn’t rest until it was done, so i had to keep working on it until its completion.

by the way, the program is in 3 parts in the last entry, and can be viewed simply by clicking on the names. same with the philosophy of knowledge paper. the program, if you’re wondering, takes as input a data file which is a log of all accesses to every file that exists on my website. and it organizes the data and outputs it to a file that i can read and understand.

anyway, the week was cathartic–i finally feel like i’m actually getting things done and not being a slacker. so i feel completely justified in having a fun weekend doing whatever i want to do. that release is so beautiful…i’ve been living with tunnel vision the last few days, focused completely on my work, and it’s good to get out of that.

just about one more week to go, then i’m flying home. that will rock. now to dinner and then freedom! movies, computer games, any other form of indulgent media call my name! maybe i’ll write a song this weekend. that would be nice.

virtual disc on spin: i might be wrong: live recordings | radiohead

it’s late but what the heck.

i had a very eventful day, filled with unordinary things. first, i had greek, which was not unordinary. but, while i was in class i did still a cherry yogurt and an apple pastry, mmm.

then i went to the middle of the quad and read for an hour. what did i read? the proofs for the soundness and completeness of first-order logic. it’s completely insane. i’ve never done either of these things before, so they count as unordinary.

after that i attended a lecture by dr. john perry (prof i’ve had) on the existence of god and evil. i found out about the talk late last night. it wasn’t a bad talk by half, but as perry doesn’t believe in god, the focus was obviously on why evil hurts the idea of god’s existence. all the same it was well-given, if not particularly new, and i asked some questions that he seemed to think were intelligent. all that was unordinary.

from then [lunch] until 5pm, i worked on my philosophy of knowledge paper. it’s a paper on why gettier counterexamples are invalid. if you care to know what that means, you should talk to me, because very few people do. the paper is frustrating, because at times, i feel like i’ve really got something important to say that no one’s really said before, and at other times i feel like my main point could actually be completely wrong. it’s not a good feeling.

so at 5 i took all that frustration for a run. i ran the campus loop, plus a little extra, which is 4.5 miles. i’ve not run that much nonstop for close to 2 years! in fact i didn’t think i would be able to make the whole loop, but i just kept running and it all worked out fine. i did it in just under 40 minutes, which i felt was a great pace for me. this was very unordinary.

so, a quick dinner, a little more paper work, and then i was off to the last veritas lecture. it was given by os guinness, great great grandson of the guinness who founded guiness breweries. in fact, both the catholic priest who introduced him and he himself began with guinness beer jokes. heh. irish.

the talk itself was on truth and modern culture, and i found it fascinating. i love it when smart christians say smart things and can think on their feet.

to end the day, i came back to the room and worked a few more hours on the paper. still not being able to decide if the topic is worth pursuing or not. drat. then around midnight i decided to write a computer program, so i broke out the old c++ studio and started trying to remember my rusty coding skills. they’re starting to come back, so i’ll have fun working on this project. it’s a webpage statistics log analyzer for my website. sort of like those web stat things you can get added to your webpage, only i’m making one from scratch. stupid, eh?

so the day was full of lots of things. now i’m exhausted, but i think i’ll do a little working out, take a shower, and then hit the sack. over and out.

virtual disc on spin: supernova | the echoing green

just two more weeks. ready or not, here i come.