ogicu8abruok

Wed, 02 Dec 2009 13:51:54 GMT

i'll add dreams i've had to this note as i have them.

december 1, 2009

i was walking around tokyo late at night. so late that everything was closed. but eventually i found a mall that had three or four stores that were still open and i went in and explored a bit and i realized after a while that there were other people in the mall all headed to this one area so i followed them and we reached a crowd of people who were all waiting to be allowed into this one store. i worked my way to the front of the crowd and saw that it was an arcade and they were letting people in only a few at a time, but somehow i got lucky and got inside. but once as soon as i got in, a sort of riot broke out and i realized we really weren't supposed to be there and these army-type guys came and i started running from them, trying to get into a safe area (i couldn't be caught inside the arcade, or certain other places where i wasn't allowed to go). so i was running but i didn't really know where i was going and i didn't know where was safe, but some really cool guy came up and he was like, hey kid, don't worry i'll help you out (i got the sense he'd done this before) and he led me to like a hideout for a while but then we had to leave and we eventually got to this really pretty cabin deep in a forest (we were safe at this point). the cabin was kind of big and the siding was really old, but not rotting, and it was built into a hill. i was told that this was the cabin where linux was first developed, and guy who invented it was still in there and hadn't produced anything new since linux, but he was supposedly working on other mysterious projects. i started to leave (i think i was alone at this point) and i realized as i was walking down the path away from the cabin that i was underneath these roots of a huge tree (kind of like those trees that grow on river banks whose roots are above ground, partially) but then i realized they weren't really roots, but multiple trunks that grew out of the ground in various places, but they were all really part of the same tree because higher up they would meet and sometimes they were even sideways (parallel to the ground) and they met at angles kind of like struts. i realized it was bigger than i ever realized up to that point. the entire structure was not unlike a "frame" in the shape of a huge radio antenna. then i started knowing that there were hundreds of these trees growing all around the planet and then these aliens came. they live in space and are huge (like probably about about a quarter of the volume of the earth) and they're translucent and they came and started feeding off the energy that these trees gathered from the earth.

july 20, 2009

brian schmidt and i were walking around somewhere, i think it may have been the campus of unh. we came across a stage where the old high school jazz band was playing (lineup from my senior year) and we walked on stage and then we were gonna get back off but someone handed me a trombone. bobo was conducting and ross took a solo, then he was like over to you dan! and dan took a solo and then dan had me take a solo after he was done and i was totally unprepared but i just went for it and i had no idea what key the song was in but through the course of my solo i realized A flat sounded better than A so i kind of guessed it was in A flat. after i finished my solo i checked the chart and it was written like four-part harmony with a treble and bass which confused me for a second, but then i saw it was in B flat and i was like oh (when i woke up i realized that didn't make sense for it to have A flat). so then ross took another solo (oh and we had a mic we were soloing into) and ross like, went psycho and made all these weird noises and then he put the mic in his mouth and slobbered all over it and bobo was like wtf and cut his solo short and gave me another solo and i played a B flat and then a bunch of F's all as dotted eighth notes and then i stopped after like three bars and tried to listen to the drums and bass to find the downbeat again but they were playing something really weird and i was like what are you guys doing?

june 22, 2009

watching too much tyt before going to bed gives me political dreams apparently. i had a dream that sort of had to do with the war, but it was a little different. i was in the US army, but it was the future, and i guess europe had been destroyed and america wasn't in very good shape either. we were fighting muslims in some country (who knows where). i think we were fighting because they had some kind of plan that was about to go into effect and we were trying to stop them. but it wasn't really like the real war in iraq because both sides were evenly matched, and it was like an all-out war. so i was sneaking around with eric lanouette and we found some muslim and shot him, and then some old muslim lady came out of a building and just stared at us like she was going to cry. she started telling us about how that boy we shot was a messenger who brought information and orders to the muslim troops and i don't know, but for some reason all of a sudden i just felt like i was one of them and i started crying and eric lanouette was there, not really understanding why i was crying but he was trying to help, and i just felt like i couldn't ever kill anyone again.

may 6, 2009

i can't remember the order of any of these events, but i was with my grandmother and we were in some kind of huge plain, and there were mountains around and we were headed to this lodge. when we were almost there, for some reason i had to shoot an animal... OH YEAH before that, we had discovered a way to make bears talk in english, and it was awesome... but anyway, i shot this animal to defend us, but you couldn't hear the shot, you could only hear the echo, and me and my grandmother were trying to decide if the gun was working right, and i was like, oh, yeah, those mountains are far enough away that the delay on that echo was about right. but then she said there were mountains behind the lodge that it should have echoed off earlier, and we were trying to figure out why it didn't. and then she said, "see those notches in the mountains? humankind can make the moon bigger, hell we can even make the sun bigger, but we could never change the mountains." and i disagreed strongly with her, apparently. later, people were complaining, since tokyo was putting up these huge tv's on their freeways that blasted the volume so you could watch and listen to the tv from your car, and people were concerned about the sound pollution. and then obama was on the tv and he put in some dentures and started doing impressions of other presidents and then he did an impression of this character from "spaced". later, i was at some kind of fancy party and this dude mentioned that he was an agent for actors. this was a party for actors or something... people in the film industry. and then he was talking about ninja turtles and i was like oh man you have to get me in that movie, and he said he might be able to get me to play the voice of michelangelo and i was like o.o and i was wicked excited and then he started asking me to walk around and stuff to see if i would be a good actor and he taught me that when actors walk toward the camera or across the camera, they walk normally, but if they walk diagonally to the camera they walk slightly faster and they have this little tracking light thing that they follow to walk at the right speed and i was like, oh you gotta speed up by a factor of the root of 2? and he stared at me like, what?

april 16, 2009

i was in some kind of place where people go to bathe. there were lots of japanese people there. and i was taking care of a baby, except it looked more like a fetus than a baby and it had huge HUGE HUGE HUGE black eyes like alien eyes and it was disgusting and i kept yelling at myself for agreeing to take care of the "baby" (which was actually a pretty terrifying... THING). i didn't want to feed it because it was so gross looking. and as i was leaving i balanced the baby on my arm so i could open the door with my other arm and i almost dropped it.

april 9, 2009

tons and tons of dreams this night. i can't remember all of them, plus i need to jot this down quickly because i have homework i need to finish really quick. the dream i remember best is the one where i ran over into our yard at the lake house and everyone was outside. i think they had just set off some fireworks. but i looked in the water and there was all this ash and shit in it smoldering like lava or something. it's really hard to describe. but then i looked across the lake and all the houses had been burned to shells and there were little fires still going here and there and i remember saying "holy shit!" it didn't have anything to do with the fireworks though. it was a terrifying sight though. i think i learned later that pirates or something had come down the lake and set the whole opposite bank on fire but they left our side alone for some reason.

april 3, 2009

it's another dream with one of my little cousins in it, which is kinda odd... dunno why i'm thinking about them so much. but she was over and we were hanging out in my room, and this was before we turned the attic into a finished room. she went up there and i was talking to her through the ceiling from the floor below, and i was knocking on the ceiling and talking to her to try and figure out where she was, and there was a secret area in the attic apparently because i knocked various places on the ceiling but there were some places that she couldn't go because she said there was a wall. so i climbed through the ceiling (i dunno how, i guess there were panels that lifted up pretty easily). but once up there, it was really dangerous. it was really easy to fall through the floor and stuff. there were just these planks of wood about three or four feet long that were laid across the beams that you had to step on. (this was all in the secret area). and i walked around up there. this is where the dream gets really insane. i started having the planks of wood "stuck" on my feet and used them to step on different places, and there were higher areas i could go and lower areas, and i was making sounds with them that sounded like a piano. since when i stepped places i was straddling these beams that were running across the floor, i guess my brain decided that this was kind of like playing the interval of a third on a piano. so as i stepped around, i started playing the most third-heavy song i could think of. like literally by stepping on stuff i was playing the song. and there was sheet music up there that i was reading it off of and this is the song i was playing http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KQSquYeG1xk. but apparently i thought it was a song from the home alone soundtrack. and then soucy heard it and he was like omg i love that song but all the arrangements i've found of it don't sound true to the spirit of home alone.

march 25, 2009

i was taking a test for csc280. that's the computer models and limitations class. actually, it was a final. and it was kind of hard and i wasn't happy with my answers. for some reason there was a little bit of vector calculus on the test too. and i was getting frustrated, but steve was taking the test too and he was right behind me and then when he finished, he passed his test up to me for some reason, and then i started cheating off of his paper. but the ta came around and collected it before i was finished. having bombed the test, i didn't really feel like taking any of my other finals, so i started summer break early by flying to my friend's college to hang out with him instead of going back home for the summer. on the way there i started feeling really guilty about skipping the rest of my finals and i started freaking out, but then i discovered that i could take the finals online, so i did. i met my friend's roommate playing guitar hero, and then i had to go in an elevator and someone shoved this box with a kitty standing on it into the doors of the elevator at the last second, so the box was wedged in the doors with the kitty on it, and the elevator started to go up really fast and the kitty started freaking out, so i put out my hand and let the kitty climb on me. then i adopted the kitty and played with it for a while and my little cousins were there, somehow, and they played with mah kitteh also.

march 11, 2009

the first thing i remember was somehow ending up in papa gino's in londonderry. it was closed, but i was with a friend whose father owned the place, and he worked there sometimes and he had keys. for some reason, since he had keys, when he let us inside, there was a dude there ready to make pizza for us. people outside were jealous because they wanted pizza but the place was closed, and we wouldn't let them in. then somehow i was suddenly some kind of leader in the military. i had about twenty troops under my command and we were all walking down these train tracks, with a bunch of other troops, but not all of them were in my unit or squad or whatever. we were walking north and there was a little bit of snow on the ground, and i was very suspicious that we were about to be attacked. so i was looking around very carefully for any signs of an enemy and then i decided to line up my troops and have them watch the trees on the side of the train tracks. i walked down the line giving them orders just to keep them on their toes, and then i saw something land in the trees beside the tracks farther up. it looked like a bomb or something so i told them all to run away from it and i started running too. we were the first ones to see it. we ran but more and more started landing, forming lines across both sides of the tracks and then they made a line behind and in front of us, boxing us in. they were turning out not to be bombs. me and my group of troops ran for the edge of the box that was trapping us and so did a bunch of other troops who were also starting to freak out. but at the edge, the devices like, magnetically repelled us or something and we couldn't get past them, and more and more started landing, filling in a grid. they were each about five feet apart. then they somehow forced us all towards the center of the grid where a big spaceship started to land. at some point someone yelled out that you shouldn't let the devices touch you or you'd never be able to get them off. but i was being pulled toward the center, so i decided not to fight it, in favor of trying not to touch any of them. i ended up right in the middle. the spaceship landed and this huge huge huge thing of speakers descended from it which amplified all the sounds that we made. eventually everyone stopped struggling, trapped by the devices, and everyone had been pulled in towards the ship. then the ship told me to sing a low a into the speakers (which were also microphones, i guess?). i don't have perfect pitch and i didn't even have it in the dream, but i knew that the aliens were ruthless and evil so i just tried my best and guessed. i got it wrong and they told me to try again and to try not to suck as much this time. i think if i had questioned them, or complained that i didn't know how or that i wasn't a singer, they would have killed me. but i just tried again, with my best guess and they seemed satisfied at first but i was having trouble keeping a constant tone in such a low register. then suddenly i was back at the part of the dream where we were trying to escape from the grid of bomb-looking thingies (i guess my mind got bored of the dream and figured it would have been better if something different had happened back at this point in the dream). we tried to escape, and i had the idea that maybe the farther from the center we got, the weaker would be the force of the devices. so my group of troops ran for the corner of the box and we eventually got there and i managed to escape past them into the woods, but nobody else did. so i just ran through the forest, which had some snow on the ground and it was full of pine trees. but then it was actually more like a tundra and i was on the arctic ice sheet. (it's not like i was transported to the north pole, more like my mind just decided that we had been there the whole time). i walked and walked for about twenty years and eventually made it back to civilization (i don't know how i got over the ocean). i knocked on the door of the first house i saw and asked to use their phone, but they wouldn't let me. then there was a montage of me knocking on doors and being rejected. but eventually i told someone that the scientists were all wrong and there was LIFE at the north pole!!! (what?)

february 21, 2009

i had to sort regions of australia and new zealand by order of power consumption.

february 12, 2009

*censored for excessive sexual content*

february 8, 2009

i was at someone's vacation house. their house was on a nice, clean pond, and you couldn't see any other houses around because it was pretty heavily wooded, but they had an awesome deck on hilly terrain and you could even jump off the deck into the pond in one area. i was swimming and i climbed up onto a hill near the side of the pond and someone drove by me, driving a sort of boat with a big fan/propeller type thing on the back... sort of something you'd see in a dystopian future. and the person driving it was holding an electric guitar and as he went by me, he played the progression major four, two fully diminished, major one, and this progression caused me to fall off the hill into the water.

february 6, 2009

it started with me being dropped off by my mother at the airport. apparently, i had signed up to spend a semester abroad in france. however, no other students were participating in the same program as me, and i would essentially be alone in france, not knowing a single person. i was supposed to do some vague "studying," but i wouldn't be meeting any other students while i was there. i was kind of horrified and i wondered how i could have made the horrible mistake of ever signing up for the program. i got on the plane, which had several layovers. on one of the flights, we were flying over a city. we were going west, which doesn't make sense. it also doesn't make sense how i knew we were going west. anyway, this city was quite a large one, and it had this enormous television screen. i mean this screen was about 10% taller than the tallest skyscraper in the city and it was just showing stuff of interest to the citizens, i guess. i was shocked because i had never seen it before. you'd think that such an impressive landmark would be well known around the world, but i had never heard of a city with this huge screen. i asked someone, and they told me we were flying over an obscure city way up in northern russia. then i saw a tornado that was bigger than tornadoes can actually be. it was hundreds of city blocks wide and maybe fifty times taller than the tv screen. it started destroying the screen and much of the city.

unknown date

i was in school, leaving, when i realized that i had left something i needed back in my locker. i started walking back to go get it, kind of frustrated, when i realized i was dreaming and could therefore just fly to my locker to get it so it wouldn't take so long. so i jumped in the air and fell on my face, then i woke up.

unknown date

i call this the math dream. occasionally i'll go to bed while i'm really worried about finishing up some homework i'd been working on. then, all night long, i try to solve the problem. being asleep, this is of course very difficult to do. the dream is plagued by half-logical thoughts and every time i think i've made progress toward solving the problem, i realize i've done something illogical and gotten the wrong answer. i've talked to other people who've had these dreams. i can assure you they are an order of magnitude worse than nightmares, and you wake up feeling like you literally stayed up all night doing homework.

burnt out on life

Fri, 13 Nov 2009 15:52:58 GMT

last night i couldn't fall asleep all night because i was worrying about stuff, which i guess isn't very interesting, because i do that all the time. but i dunno, last night was pretty rough. on the ship, i pretty much stopped going to my classes and i haven't really been doing the work for them either. before i left on the ship, my mom had been trying to convince me that this would be good since i would have all summer to relax and then i would get to contine relaxing on this ship, before i had to go back to rochester and tackle my classes again. it sounds logical, but i disagreed. i think i was right, because i do not feel any more rested, i really just feel like if i go back to rochester right now i am not going to be able to graduate because i don't have enough energy to get through the rest of my classes. and if i DO go back and try to force myself to graduate, i think i'll end up getting C's and stuff which'll ruin my perfect record so far, so it's like, i'm better off just not going back until i'm ready, you know? but then, if i don't go back this spring, i'll probably just never finish. which i'd be kind of okay with, honestly, because being a college drop-out does not sound like anything that would make me any unhappier. the fact that i'm thinking this way is why i'm afraid i won't finish. i believe they call this being "burnt out". the other thing i was worrying about that was preventing me from sleeping was a crush that i got on someone on the ship. i sat down next to him one day to look at the DVDs he bought and one of them was brokeback mountain which made me think, perhaps he's gay. and then once i had that thought i realized he was ridiculously cute. since that happened, i've been crushing on him. being gay and shy throughout high school, i have been trained to resist crushes and push them out of my mind. to hunt down all the little hopeful thoughts that the crush spawns, and kill them. and to never, for the love of god, act on it. i realize this is counter-productive so i did my very best to act on it. the result of my efforts are incredibly feeble but they took a lot of effort: i managed to *gasp* TELL someone about it and i got them to agree to help me find out if he is, indeed, gay. and by "help me find out", i mean "try to find out with no intervention from me whatsoever". this person who has agreed to do this has also agreed not to tell me anything if she finds out that he's straight. i'm actually pretty terrified that she'll come to me one day and say she found out he's gay, because at that point i have to decide what to do next, and the next step will be even harder than the first one. that's so scary that i almost hope she just never brings it up again and i can forget all about it after this trip is over. this is only my third or fourth crush that i would categorize as "strong", and at this rate, and assuming 5% of the population is gay, i'll be around 30 by the time i have a decent chance of being in a serious relationship. this calculation also has many other very optimistic assumptions, so it's probably much later than that. but that's depressing. what's not depressing is that this boy is super cute and i want him to like me. right now this is about 97% fantasy but a relationship that is 3% real is pretty decent for me, and i am enjoying it so far. my other crush is on a video game i discovered in an arcade in hong kong called jubeat. i have been thinking of it ever since i played it. hong kong is a huge city, by the way. and it has awesome rhythm games i've never heard of in its arcades. i played guitar freaks, ddr, taiko, jubeat, and another one i've never heard of. and they had at least two or three more rhythm games i didn't try. but jubeat is the best and i am going to find it when i get to japan and play it for five hours straight. oh and i found this sick book in the book exchange by neal stephenson called "anathem". it's about these monks except instead of religion they do math and science.

SAS base ten celebration extravaganza

Thu, 22 Oct 2009 01:08:41 GMT

i guess it's blog time. i feel like 5 AM is a good time to write my first entry. also on semester at sea is a good time to do it too. we're halfway through the voyage and at this point i think i overestimated how interested i actually was in learning about other cultures. either that or i am just tired of walking around in countries interacting with people. it's very stressful to do that, you know, especially when you don't speak their language and you are an introvert. i really just don't want to get off the boat at all in india, but i feel a lot of pressure from my family to have the absolute most amazing time ever and if i don't enjoy it as much as they want me to then they're going to be disappointed or something. they keep telling me to take lots of pictures and to tell them about things that have happened so far but i don't want to. i really just miss things and i want to eat doritos that aren't retarded-flavored and go to fast food places and play rock band and have the internet back.

i made some friends. i think about six of them... we were one of the cliques that formed when the cliques started coalescing about a week into the voyage. but i don't think they like me anymore and i don't think they like each other anymore and i really really just fit in less and less every month with the traditional nerdy types. although eric and i still get along well, which was a nice surprise. this past week i made a few more friends and they are superior to the original SAS clique. one of them is this girl that i noticed really early on but who i never talked to until recently, and when i noticed her, i thought, "i suspect that that girl is awesome." and it turns out she is. it's pretty easy to judge people by their looks, i think. you're not supposed to but it's usually pretty accurate, at least for me. your subconscious processes massive amounts of data and finds statistical correlations without having to understand why the correlation is there, and then it translates the results into a "gut feeling" about a person, and informs your conscious mind what it has found out. i think she's a lesbian or at least bi. i tend to get along with lesbians. and not gay men. the group of gay guys on the ship is predictably repulsive.

i drank too much on my 21st birthday so hopefully that won't happen again. apparently INTJs are prone to alcoholism so maybe i should watch that, heh. i didn't throw up but i gagged and almost threw up twice, which was a little embarassing but honestly whatever because it doesn't really matter. it wasn't very fun so i probably won't want to do it again. i don't even really feel like trying pot anymore because it doesn't seem like it would be very fun either. i also did a few other really stupid things. i sprained my ankle really badly because i was climbing on this rock/cliff thing on table mountain in south africa that i wasn't supposed to be climbing on (it was off the trail) and a huge-ass rock that had about the same volume as my body came loose when i grabbed it and i fell and if it had fallen on me i could have died. but the thing is, i knew it was horribly dangerous and i did it anyway, so i'm suspecting that i have self-destructive tendencies that i should watch for from now on so i don't end up killing myself. or maybe it's not self-destructive, maybe it's more just like i want something interesting to happen so i take risks.

i don't want to go back to rochester after this is over, i really don't. can't i just get a job at movie scene and share a shitty apartment with a friend and mooch off my parents? the plan was that semester at sea would give me a break, a vacation, from all the hard work at rochester, and then i'd be able to go back refreshed. but it's not working at all, because it's actually A) pretty boring and B) pretty stressful and C) reminding me constantly how bad i am at making friends. i won't be able to tell my family any of this when i get back home and they ask how things were because i'd feel like i wasted a ton of their money and like i was being ungrateful and also just because i never open up to my family.

positive things to end the entry on a happy note! um. well i miss my rochester friends a little bit at this point, so that's a good sign. oh my computer broke. that's a bad thing so it doesn't belong in this section but i just thought of it. eric says there is an 80% chance that my data is recoverable. that data is pretty much the only thing i own that i care if i lose. particularly my jpegs and such, and my music collection and a few movies. um so more good things. well this is just getting awkward because i'm trying to force it so i'll sign off now. oh i lied i have another good thing. mark bought me a copy of the pictures for sad children book, so i'm excited to get that when i get back home.