Journal entries for June, 2006

Yesterday as I was driving down my street on the way home from work, I was surprised to see a large green iguana waddle across the road in front of my car. "Weird," I thought.

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I've finally started working on processing those 30 sheets of large format film I shot with the Pink Cow back when Andrés and Amy were here last month. Enough time has passed that I've forgotten what I took pictures of, so it's like a sense of discovery to pull them out of the tank and go, "Oh, yeah! Awesome!"

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As I bent over the sink in the bathroom to wash my hands, I noticed that I could see my head reflected twice in the metal of the faucet: once normally, and another one upside down, the two reflected heads nearly touching at their tops. I thought, "What an odd optical property. I guess the curve of the faucet causes there to be one focal point where the reflected image shifts upside down." I tried moving my head forward to see what happened to the image when I crossed that point. Suddenly my head bumped into the mirror on the wall. Oh, yeah.

I just found a dead mouse in the bathtub. I've been really busy with work lately, so it's been a few days since I last showered. I'm guessing he fell in there and then, with no one to come along and discover him, must have starved to death. I knew my bad hygiene was gross, but as far as I know this is the first time it has actually killed anything. I'll consider showering more often.

Feeding a dog canned dogfood is something that everyone should be allowed to experience. For the last five or six years Chelsea has eaten only dry dogfood — because of a liver condition, she can't process protein or sodium very well, so she has to eat special, low sodium food. As a result, eating has never been a particular thrill — eating what she's supposed to, that is. She's always been all too eager to snatch up someone's untended burrito, never making the connection between that and her stomach pains later.

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Down the street from my neighborhood there are two identical urbanizations on opposite sides of the street, the dark tinted glass of their respective guardhouses facing each other across the street. When I leave for work at midnight and drive between these silent, opposing sentries on a deserted road, I feel like Atreyu passing between the sphinxes that guard the passage to the Oracle. Fortunately, they haven't incinerated me yet.

I realized recently that I understand the bitterness that gay people feel about how it's "cute" to be lesbian these days. I see the same thing occurring with nerds. Everyone loves to say how much they love nerds these days, or how they're a big nerd, but I suspect very few of them would really enjoy sitting in on a Linux install or helping to calculate 100 digits of π with pencil and paper for the fun of it. I think this recent infatuation with nerds is similar to the same way that I like cows or Japanese like Americans: They like the concept, but the actuality is less glamorous and a lot more Cheez-Doodle-encrusted.