yesterday’s downtime was thanks to a dying ups, ironically enough.

so i just realized maybe ten minutes ago that tomorrow would have been mine and adam’s two year anniversary; of course we only lasted like ten months or whatever it was but it’s still sort of interesting to contemplate. in some ways it doesn’t seem like it could possibly have been two years since i met him at that used cd store in harvard square, but on the other hand i’ve gone through so much in that time. i’ve been living in my apartment for almost a year now, and supporting myself; i’ve gotten and lost a job; i’ve gone to school and left it; i’ve met people and left them too. i guess this is the sort of reflection most people do around new year’s but that particular day has never really been important to me. i tend to remember days with personal signifigance, i think. i wonder what my life would be like now if i had accepted the spot i was offered on the harvard waitlist - i found out after the fact that i would have gotten in, if i had done so. i might never have moved to new york, i would never have met spencer, i wouldn’t have spent a year working as a web designer. i might never have broken up with adam. i never would have met jim, or krystal, or james. i wouldn’t have gotten mono, so i probably wouldn’t have left school. such a very strange idea. i would now be finishing up my sophomore year there, assuming i lasted this long. i’d be living near my parents and my brother. i wouldn’t have my own apartment. i don’t know if i wish it had worked out that way, although i guess it would have been simpler. maybe easier. maybe not.

i woke up around six this morning, despite the fact that i didn’t go to bed until around two am. i think it’s because i was really thirsty - as soon as i got up i drank half a brita pitcherfull of water and about ten minutes later i drank the other half. nobody else is up really except for people getting ready for work; i talked to tycho for a while though since he hasn’t been to bed yet. he’s still writing the newspost.

i just walked over to dunkin donuts for a bagel sandwich and coffee; it’s gorgeous out. the sidewalks aren’t full yet and it’s not obscenely bright - the sun is still sort of behind the buildings and the sky is still sort of pinkish. the city is so much quieter in the morning than it is at any other time of the day. even at night there’s still people around, going to or coming home from clubs or bars or whatever, but i think between five and seven am is probably about as quiet as new york gets.

i’m brushing up on my php for one of the sites i’m working on right now; it’s so much fun. i think someday i might move more into the programming aspect of the web, but i’ll probably always dabble in design because i’m too much of an art nerd not to.

unf. hazelnut coffee rocks my socks. later today i might head into the city and go to a movie or something with gundam; i’m getting sick though so i might try to get some more sleep. either way. i wanna see memento, and tycho has told me that i absolutely have to do so, but i guess there’s no rush.

i’ve been pretty busy for the past few days; i reoptimized a lot of the graphics on penny arcade; the difference isn’t really noticeable unless you’re on a dialup, but multiplied by the almost seven million pageviews they get monthly it should make the hosts at monsterlabs a bit happier about bandwidth usage.

i’m also working on my dad’s site and on the caoine.org redesign, as well as the project i’m doing with hot soup and safety monkey. should be really cool when we’re finally done with it.

db_, i will serve you a midnight snack. there will be grilled cheese, and the bread will be toasted with a hello kitty toaster such that there are little hello kitty faces on each piece. the cheese will be of your choosing - perhaps an exquisite cheddar or provolone. there will be grapes, and sliced celery, and cornbread with butter or a butter substitute. there will of course be cloth napkins. you will get to choose what flavor milkshake you would like to wash all of this down with. i will bring it to you on the finest tray that can be purchased in manhattan; if it does not please you i will search even the outer boroughs for a finer tray that is more to your liking. there will also be belgian fries, fresh from the finest belgian fry vendor. and i will whisper sweet nothings in your perfectly shaped ear, and you will be smooved. damn.

so sleepy. i was awake most of the night playing dead or alive 2 because i am silly. i will probably go take a nap shortly i think. also there was tony hawk 2.

saw that stupid tom green movie with gundam yesterday; it was predictably awful but entertaining nonetheless. the weather yesterday was fucking gorgeous and it seems to be equally so today; it’s less hot than it was sunday and there’s a breeze. unf.

i am craving some god damned coffee. i suppose i shall go out and get some. tonight i might go the pyramid with gundam and strict9; i guess we’ll see how lazy i am later. either way i’m definitely going to need to get some sleep.

gundam burned me a cd with like eight albums of mp3s, it’s fucking great. a bunch of and one stuff i didn’t have, also apop and funker vogt. i’m listening to and one right now.

i think i might wander down to coney island today. it’s gorgeous out and i haven’t been down by the ocean in a while. it’s hoodie weather. unf.

two sounds are better than one

went to go see the pokemon movie with gundam yesterday; as expected it was pretty fucking awful but entertaining nonetheless. the little animated short before it was actually way funnier. plus we got cherry slushies. you just can’t go wrong.

after the movie we browsed forbidden planet, since it’s right next door, and i got a little stuffed pikachu. i can’t help it if he’s obscenely cute. referring both to gundam and to pikachu there. unf.

we played mad jet grind radio at my house and watched part of schindler’s list over some domino’s and then called it a night since we are dorks. DORKS.

db_: stop being sick immediately. over.

<jonathans> ham demon

how right you are, jons.

a lazy morning so far. i woke up fairly late, partially because these stupid fucking drunk russians were fighting outside my house on the sidewalk and the resulting noise was enough to keep me up for longer than i’d have liked.

i took a shower and made some coffee and read my usual webcomics - penny arcade, of course, as well as jerkcity and dieselsweeties - and what should i see but a link to me on ds. thanks muchly rstevens!

at the moment i’m waiting for my hair to dry and talking to bryan. i don’t get to talk to him all that much right now since he’s busy working on the new vac album, but once in a while we’re both around at the same time, so it’s all good.

tonight i’m heading into manhattan to go see a movie with gundawg; what we see depends primarily on what time he manages to get out of work but it’s possible we’ll hit the last show of the pokemon movie. gundam has a giant stuffed pikachu. it is cute. i covet. we will be the scary people who sit in the back and are hostile to the little kids. if not, we might go see crouching tiger, hidden dragon again, which would be mad cool. i’ve seen it twice already - with gundam, even - but it’s well worth seeing multiple times. plus that theatre has an arcade version of tekken tag. unf. either way there will probably also be dinner and consumption of original sin.

i would like to take a moment to assert the fact that db_ is adorable. neener.

also on my list for today is working on pa; i was talking to tycho about it and we agree that the frontpage is growing too large again, since new stuff keeps getting added, so i’m going to work some reoptimization magic. the monsterlabs people will love me forever.

sorry about the brief chunk of downtime earlier today; there were some connectivity issues with the server’s network.

so yesterday was gundam’s birthday; he’s a grand old twenty three now. gundam the geez0r. strict9 and i met up with him at his office and we all wandered over to this restaurant next to irving plaza; it was called galaxy or something like that and the menus looked like they were trying to be websites. they make a damn good veggie burger though. we started off the night’s drunken debauchery with a healthy quantity of cider at dinner and had intended to continue it at some event or other at true, since it was nearby, but for some reason they made it 21+, which i found odd since i go to another night at the same venue that’s only 18+.

so instead we met up with piz0r and headed over to korova where we all proceeded to get very, very drunk and watch independence day with no sound on a tv over the bar. todd sabretooth showed up with some other gothy people but other than that the crowd was sort of bland; we all had fun though. i don’t even remember exactly what i drank, but i have to say for the record that caffeinated stuff like bawls and red bull makes a good mixer with vodka or what have you.

eventually we vacated the premises as both gundam and strict9 are gainfully employed and everything and thursday is a weekday, so they ended up crashing at my place so as to avoid the long island commute. i sent them off to manhattan this morning and promptly went back to bed until about one o’clock this afternoon. hee.

anyway, happy birthday to gundam and such and whatnot. i managed to escape the night’s adventures sans hangover, which i am very pleased about and i think i’m going to do some design work this afternoon for a project i’m just starting.

tuesday, 17 april 2001 | 11:09 am

so i wrote this long entry yesterday but i ended up keeping it offline. there are some things i want to say that i can’t really say in public. i’ve been feeling that a lot lately, actually, so i’m thinking of starting another paper journal, just for myself. i haven’t had a physical journal since high school; i used to have them all the time, and i had a stack of notebooks i filled from when i was thirteen until when i was eighteen, but they acciendtally got thrown out. that really, really depressed me. they had meant a lot to me and the idea of them being just gone was not easy to deal with. so i stopped keeping a paper journal and started this one instead.

the thing is though, as i’m sure you’ve realized if you’ve read a few entires, that while this is a journal in a sense, it’s also heavily edited. i have to think of my audience. unlike a paper journal, i’m not the only one who’s going to be reading it. frequently the people i mention in it are also people who read it, and then of course there’s my parents and everything. so i just can’t be as candid as i want to be. i know of a few people who sort of solved that problem by only giving out the addresses of their journals to a few people, or making them password protected, or something. but that seems to me sort of lame. if you’re putting it on the web, it’s public. you have to assume that. you can’t control who reads it; the address will get to those you don’t want it to and the password will be given out and everything. so to me it’s either assume everyone is reading it or no one is. in the case of middlegrey, of course, i have to assume everyone is. but i think i might like to keep a separate journal for myself. i miss having that privacy, that freedom of candor and expression. there’s also something to be said for the physicality of a paper journal - having a notebook that can be carried around and reread is something in itself. there’s something very appealing about paper that’s been written on. i know that sounds odd. but anyway.

so yeah, yesterday’s entry is going to be one for my private journal, i think. in future i’ll keep the two separate rather than doing one or the other, don’t worry.

so yesterday the plan was that gundam would come over, alcohol would be consumed, dreamcast games would be played, etc etc, except that he disappeared and never came over. is it me or does this happen every weekend? anyway, whatever. i ended up playing jgr for a while and then walking down to the beach around eleven; the weather was gorgeous and nobody else was out, so it was pretty cool. i stopped in at this ‘discount grocery’ i go to a lot because it’s the closest store to my house, and the middle aged iranian dude behind the counter was flirting with me. it cracked me up. i’m this scruffy kid who comes in for snapple twice a day and he wants to know do i have a husband.

easter, yeah. i guess. i don’t really celebrate it in the sense that i’m not christian, but i suppose if you want to get technical it’s not even really a christian holiday, just a pagan spring thing that was appropriated because of its convenient timing. but i don’t celebrate that either. my pretending-to-be-pagan days are long over, thankfully. chrissy and i did easter stuff last year, and it was fun and all, but i think that’s more a function of me liking jelly beans and egg salad and watching chrissy explode things in the microwave than anything else.

i think i’m going to hole up and work today; i’m not in the mood for gallivanting with others. i mean, i’m always sort of antisocial but i’m also sort of in a bad mood today. maybe i’ll hit the beach again when it gets dark. i do sort of miss being able to see stars, though. the price you pay for living in the city, i suppose.

yeah. i’m feeling rather unenthused in general.

hooray for taxes. hooray for the irs. apparently my old office fucked up and never mailed my w2, so i finally got them to resend it but of course i won’t get it in time to file on the 16th. no big deal, gundam and i are filing for extension today. it will be taxilicious.

uh, yeah.

i think i found a fix for my os x issues - turns out it’s an issue with multiprocessor g4s and their internal modems. some guy wrote a patch which i’m going to try out today, otherwise i’ll use my external modem. if it all works, i will be a happy camper.

didn’t really do anything yesterday except a little housecleaning, a lot of reading, etc. talked to bryan for a while this morning about the covenant show. i hadn’t been to the limelight since haujobb/vac, actually.