Heat is stupid

I’ve taken two showers today. I’m not bragging.

The first was hurried, my girlfriend woke me up with a phone call asking me to come take pictures of she and her sisters for a photo album they are going to make for their parents. I was to meet them at Kerry park, about two blocks from my apartment, which has panoramic views of the Space Needle and Seattle proper. They were coming from breakfast. I hadn’t been invited.

I was however, the guest of honor at the wake your ass up and come take pictures of us outside on the hottest day of the year party. I don’t get invited to many parties.

It was unbearably hot then, at 10 in the morning.

The second shower, scant minutes ago, came after I spent several languid hours failing to avoid heating up the few cool pockets of air in my apartment. The project was doomed from the start.

It’s an unforgivable design flaw in the human mechanism that we should give off all this heat.

There are two engineers sitting near me. I know they're engineers because when I got here they were complaining about some flawed structural paradigm. They now seem to be talking about religion. They're discussing Christianity specifically. Both seem to be for it.

Maybe they can shed some light on this.

Christian engineers might have some special insight into how the God of Love could fuck up so badly. This is the kind of blatant disregard of thermal properties that engineers get fired for, they would know this. The problem, I'm sure, is seniority. They higher up you go, the more mistakes are tolerated because there are less people above you to piss off. 

Being chief engineer of the universe probably affords you a mistake or two.

That is a flawed structural paradigm.

It is doubly unfair that, of all human beings, I would give off the most heat--ever. This divergence from the norm can be expressed in powers of 10—in this case, 10 hojillion. This is what the conversion looks like: H_(Luke)=[H_{(Normal Human)}]^{10 hojillion}. That's heat in watts, in case you're keeping track.

Weather.com gives today a 9 on the sightseeing index. That sounds great. I feel like I should take advantage of that. I like to take the advice of indexes, especially when they're for something like sightseeing. The only sight I can see at the moment is the sweat beading on my forearm. Sweat has no business on the human forearm.

The second shower, then, was to try and recapture that old feeling of not leaking body fluids faster than I can replace them.

It worked, but not for long.

I managed to make it here in relative comfort, clinging to shadow, avoiding sunlight. I tried to look stealthy in a nonchalant way, which, to the observer, probably looked like drunken hopscotch.

Heat is bad for the way I'm percieved by others.

Heat makes men think it is a good idea to buy "unbifurcated garments"--utilikilts. I'm sternly opposed to this.

Heat is bad for civilization.

Now I'm just rambling like an idiot. It's because of the heat.

There is a woman here sipping a shot of espresso with a spoon. The spoon is twice the size of the shot glass. 

This is what heat does to you--makes you crazy.

Read the full thing here.

maybe something good will happen

If you have a few free minutes--and if you  even happen to be reading this blog you probably have more time on your hands than necessary--you should read Ben Kromer's maybe something good will happen. He's funny. His latest blog is a theoretical analysis of leftist and rightwing political strategy during wartime. All of this is simulated via Warcraft III on his painfully slow computer. His conclusion (if there was one) is "that I suck at Warcraft 3 even worse than I suck at life."

Ben reminds me that, despite all the people I see on TV, there are a few thoughtful, intelligent conservatives out there.

If not for a few friends who don't have blogs, I'd think the same about liberals, and libertarians for that matter. And on and on.

Mike Sheffler's Cone of Ignorance, similarly, reminds me that math majors, though generally not to be seen with in public, can be interesting human beings and are worthy of our friendship--or at least interesting to put behind glass and study.

**Bonus points if you can pick out the sentence I stole directly from Kurt Vonnegut. This is getting ridiculous.

Read the full thing here.

I may have miscalculated

I think I just had the kind of experience people refer to as epiphenic. I think I had an epiphany. It's 8 PM right now more or less; I got home from work around 4. I watched the Simpsons, made dinner, watched more Simpsons then read for a little while. It turns out I was reading the best goddamned book of all time. Shannon wanted to go to a coffeeshop, and after our usual rigamarole I decided I probably did too, so I stood up. It hit me then. I didn't feel a trace of the shittiness I felt at work today, that whole period of my life seems really far away. There's a radical disconnect between my work life and my life after work. That is good I think.
 
It also explains some things that weren't explained very well by my rambling sociological commentary of a few days ago. Like why I only feel pressed to get a new job whilst at my current job.
 
I think what put this contrast into such stark relief was what a staggeringly shitty day I had today. I mentioned that the bossman more or less read me the riot act in the passive aggressive way businessmen do business. Today he more or less hovered the entire day. Hovered around me. His desk is close to mine and he was probably just doing all the things he normally does, but all those mundane actions took on a sinister palor. All the things I thought were funny or quaintly annoying were now cunning devices of torture. His jokes made me want to put the sharp ends of pencils in my ears. His whistling made me want to drown myself in the toilet. He asked me, at one point, what I'd taken care of today; I told him. He replied, "Alright, keep going."
 
No fucking shit Rob.
 
I wanted to turn my lungs inside out screaming that. All I could manage was, "Okay."
 
I think work today was just perceptibly worse than other days, but today I was forced to own up to it. I was good at this job once, and I enjoyed it. Now I don't, but not because I'm not good at it anymore. I'm not good at it anymore because I hate it. That makes this job the most torturous prospect I've ever faced. Bills make it worse. I have lots of them.
 
Bills are the kinds of thing you get yourself into when you think your life is going to be great from now on. They're the kinds of thing that really suck when you realize just how bad your life has become. You realize how much you despise the thing that helps you pay your bills, which was also the thing you got the bills for in the first place. To have something to spend your money on.
 
I have an apartment, a car, insurance for that car. I have a cellphone. I have loan payments from college. College helped me learn how to articulate all of this, and in a round about way forced me into the situation I'm now articulating my feelings for.
 
Now I want to go back to college to better learn to articulate myself. I can only assume this will lead to a situation I'll despise even more but that I'll be much better prepared to articulate. 
 
Right now I sound a lot like Kurt Vonnegut, who wrote the best goddamned book of all time. This is why I don't think I'll ever be able to write anything. I end up emulating whomever I'm reading at the moment.
 
I was going to write all about how my epiphany changed the way I look at my life. I was then going to explain exactly what that life was really like. I was going to use a lot of big words. I don't really want to do that anymore, so I'll say I feel bad when I'm at work, but when I leave, it's like I'm never there.
 
I said before that I thought that was a good thing, but now I think it's the worst thing possible.
 
Some kids in Middle school used to make fun of me every day for years. This made me feel like shit and I used to throw up a lot. Two or three of them were especially bad. Ten years later one of them asked me to be a groomsman at his wedding. I said "yes, of course." I became their friend when I started treating other people like shit.
 
A similar thing happened in college, with similar results.
 
I forget things too easily.

Read the full thing here.

Did I say cosmic nudging?

I'm working on adding a few more thoughts to why I'm such a screwup, but there's been a bit of a snag.
 
My boss emailed me last night. He asked me what he could do to help me increase my productivity. That's business speak for put up or shut up. So I guess this is the cosmos once again telling me something needs to happen. Either fake-happily do my job like I used to, or radically break from my circumstances . . . it'll more likely be the former.
 
So I'll have to split my time between painstaking self-analysis and trying to figure out what this strange meter is supposed to measure and why the readout looks to be full of cod-liver oil. For that matter, why does this cautery transformer reek of burnt human flesh? Oh, right . . . that's what it's for, charring human flesh.

Read the full thing here.