Here's the gratuitous Channukah pics I mentioned. While I know that the holiday (and Christmas, for that matter) is over, I'm going to post these pictures anyways because I had meant to post them while the holiday was still in-session.


I try to celebrate the holiday as regularly as I can, as it's the one period in this stretch of time between Halloween and New Year's that I can truly celebrate my being different and not being driven insane by a several hundred-billion dollar bombardment of music, commercials, decorations, food, and other societal artifacts celebrating a holiday I don't participate in

To start with, I uploaded as my music Tsum Balaike performed by the awesome Klezmer R's, a klezmer band from Hungary that is only like the best klezmer band ever. If I were a rich man, I'd have them as my wedding band (if I ever get married). Not exactly Channukah music, but festive enough.

On with the pictures.



First night. Accidently forgot the proper ordering of the candles (place right-to-left, light left-to-right, it's just so confusing).



With the lights off it looks cooler.



The sixth night. This time with aluminium foil under the menorah; wax kept dripping on the heavy silver plate tray I recently bought and resurrected, and I didn't want to make the job of cleaning 8 days worth of bee excretion from it any more difficult than it already was.



The eighth night, all candles blazing at full burn.



I spun the dreidel, just for kicks. I've toyed around with the idea of replacing the chocolate gold coins (aka gelt) usually used in the game with shot glasses--it would make for an excellent drinking game.



Dreidel frozen in mid-spin. The magic of photography and a lucky shot. The Hebrew letter hay being shown wins half the pot, if you land on it.



Another frozen-in-spin picture, this time with the litter gimmel, which wins the entire pot.



I finally made latkes! (potato pancakes). The first batch I made, back when I went to school in Ithaca, was a total disaster. I don't remember whether (e:lizabeth) remembers the horror, but I sure do. I managed to acquire a good recipe that my dad uses, which only adds about a zillion critical ingrediants that my first batch 10 years ago didn't have. This second batch was really good--good enough that my third batch will be next year when my cholesterol has declined to reasonable levels again.

My family sometimes has, er, strange tastes in gifts. We usually get each other weird/utilitarian stuff, but then each one splurges on a single expensive gift as well that we ourselves want and hand it to the family members to "give" to us on one of the eight nights. My splurge gift was a PCI graphics accelerator to make up for the fact I bought an underpowered, non-upgradable emachines computer (no AGP/PCI-E slot--second life is intolerable). I already put it in, so I can't very well take a picture of it.



What better way to say "I love you" than with a level?



The commemorative pins are cool. I don't care what people up here will say.



I got this one night; it's one of several gifts my parents left here when they visited me a month ago. I really didn't know what the hell it was, figuring either it was a sculpture or something that wasn't art but rather served some boring mundane purpose, like hanging ties or propping up ironing boards. I cam to the conclusion "it's art, I should display it prominently", and hoped that my mother wouldn't rib me for making a tie rack or shoe tree into an objet d'art. Turns out I was right and it was a sculpture after all.



What were you expecting, Joy of Sex?

Tomorrow I'll think that I'll post a worthy Channukah post with gratuitous menorah shots and the most recently opened of the 8 bizarre gifts my family left me when they were in Buffalo. I would post it tonight, but I'm not worthy. I spent 30 minutes in Tops getting all these supplies necessary for latkes, and it's like 12:50 and I still haven't made them because I could set aside the time due to other errands. In keeping with Jewish tradition, I feel very guilty about this.

I haven't posted in probably close to a week, so I should record the few events that transpired.

I pretty much blew the weekend and did nothing but sleep. If I hadn't been lacking sleep for the most of the previous workweek, I would have been very upset for how little I did.

Yesterday, I finally did three weeks worth of laundry. Yes, I'm a bachelor. I admit it. I'm better than most, and I don't try to get one more day out of already worn boxers by hanging from the chandelier to aerate. That counts for something, right? Surpisingly, time at the laundromat felt like it went a lot quicker than expected, which is great, but I have this sinking feeling that it went so quick because I left some load of clothes in a washer (even though I did double-check before I left).

And the ex called yesterday, saying that she's finally ready to come up and visit me in Buffalo (in June) and that she wants to get back together. After 9 months of stonewalling and refusing to come to Buffalo and wanting me to always go down to NC to see her. I feel very mixed about this. On one hand I miss her, because we always related on so many of the same levels. On the other, I wonder how much of me missing her is fear that I won't be able be able to find another woman up here (or anywhere). Ever. (The most physically intimate I've gotten with any woman up here is a stripper putting her arm around my neck while she was doing her act for other folks). It's hard to tell which feeling is more predominant, and whether I'm really looking for love or security.

Today I was feeling really angry. Okay, I feel angry most days, but I always hold it in and don't express it (towards animate objects or in front of people). But today I was feeling especially angry. About a lot of things. My past relationship, the fact that I typically have to wait years before I can get into another relationship, the unfairness of being a short man in a world where tall dark and handsome counts for everything, stupid stuff at my job, programmers who make life difficult, the economy, being a moderate in a country where hardcore right/left wingers find moderates more offensive than folks in the opposing camp, the fact I've been a lazy idiot who hasn't yet done his laundry, the intense isolation I experience up here, the idiot on the road, etc.

For me, anger is like a single drop of imaginary rain falling from the sky followed by two drops a second later, followed by four and whatever exponentially comes after that. With each additional cycle, I turn further inward and the roar that each successive raindrop makes when it crashes into the pavement grows louder and the stings of those that hit my body grow increasingly more painful. The rain gets to the point that its so loud that I can't hear myself think and the pain gets so intense that I start to feel numb to it. And right before the point at which I turn into mindless automoton of id, I say to myself "what are you doing? I can't believe that you're saying and thinking those things."

And then I realize this: that there is no rain. There never was. I've imagined the whole thing.

In fact, I'm all alone in a perfectly quiet, peace hot, bone-dry desert curled up in a fetal position trying to protect myself from an intolerable chill I was never having. I am shocked that I ever could have imagined this sequence of events in the first place, though I take comfort in the fact that if I really either was clincally insane or a bad person, I never would have listened to that voice inside that questioned what I was thinking. And at that point a warm current of air blows by and I start to feel better. End metaphor.

I think today my warm currents of air were the ex phoning me to ask how my x-rays came out and the thought of how wonderful the first night of Hannukah will be tomorrow.

There probably was no point to me writing this post, other than just to get it off my chest. Just like there really is no rain.

Out with the old plate:




In with the new plate:




"We're on the road to nowhere..."

Today (or I should say yesterday) at work, everyone all of a sudden couldn't get their e-mail. And who's the IT guy who gets called in to fix stuff (but doesn't get to make a single IT purchase decision): me.

So I look at what's acting as our e-mail server, which I shall now dub "Lime Betty"*. Lime Betty is a green 233 mhz iMac, circa 1998 or something like that. She has 256MB of RAM and a 5GB hard drive that's storing messages for the entire company, and it's doing no more good cause its all full. And Lime Betty's running OS X 10.3.9, just one step away from the current release of Tiger (the latest version), and it gets even freakier that the only way that the guys before me could get a computer that old to even be able to run such an advanced operating system at all is by the user having to type cryptic commands at the blank gray Open Firmware (equivalent to the PC BIOS) screen upon booting up. And the whole time, the hard drive inside Lime Betty is chattering endlessly, desperately trying to make up for her lack of available RAM. Lime Betty's only saving grace is that she's a very becoming shade of lime jello green and was joy to look at.

And the thing is, my superiors are wondering why this machine all of a sudden stopped working. All these years they've been using this thing, and have never gotten something more reliable and new because of a pervasive "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" attitude.

Some times, I feel like I'm not working at an IT job, but at a fucking lemonade stand. At least they agreed to replace Lime Betty with a more modern but less visually attractive machine tomorrow.

• Lime Betty is a reference to a mysterious old 70's mainframe computer named "Black Betty" featured in a Dilbert TV episode that ran the whole company and that needed to be saved to keep the company afloat.

Long ago, I predicted that there was an untapped marked for virtual worlds where people could create their own stuff. More than a handful of geeks scoffed at mybelief, dissing stuff like VRML "it's not anything lie doom" "why would you want to build anything and not kill stuff", etc.

But I believed. And after all these years, I've finally found Second Life [link]http://www.secondlife.com[/link] I'm happy that reality is finally catching up to my ideas about the world. About damn time.

Building stuff out of legos kicks ass, and I really want to learn how to program cool stuff, because it sounds interesting and because you can actually make money at it.

My craziest idea would be recreating a Elmwood Strip/Village/whatever, but that would require a ton of $$$ to buy land with. Maybe I should settle for my slightly less crazy idea of creating a small (e:strip) area.

I will have to re-watch my Shrek DVD tonight; I keep having that Smash-mouth song running through my head, and I fear it won't stop till I see the movie.

On this day, I turn 31.

And thus I face the disturbing reality that I'm now closer to 40 than 20, and that I'm not allowed to have any more late nights out, fun, or sex until I divorce my first wife, buy an expensive sports car, and pick up the second trophy wife.

Of course, I've never been married, have never owned a minivan, and I'm generally the type of guy that trophy wives tend to avoid. I'm totally failing society's expectations of near-middle age mediocrity. And that's even more disturbing, because it puts me in a kind of limbo where I don't have any well-treaded paths to follow and no herd mentality to safely cling to and use to disavow any accusation of stagnation or complacency by saying "I was doing what everyone else was doing."

I've somehow ended up driving the bumper car out of the theme park. So now what?

In hindsight, I reallly should have talked to the blond girl in horn-rimmed glasses. I am such a wuss. The worst fate I can meet is, after all, the current situation I find myself in.

Upon being sober, I'm sure that none of this will make sense.

(to the tune of Donovan's 'There Is A Mountain')

First there is a concert, then there is no concert, then there is
First there is a concert, then there is no concert, then there is

Donovan at Kleinahan's--I missed it cause I did not plan
Donovan at Kleinahan's--I missed it cause I did not plan

First there is a concert, then there is no concert, then there is
First there is a concert, then there is no concert, then there is

Reefer Madness ends next week, my ADD I've got to beat
Reefer Madness ends next week, my ADD I've got to beat

First there is a concert, then there is no concert, then there is
First there is a concert, then there is no concert, then there is