It really made me wonder if I’ve been so starved for genuinely stimulating conversation lately or I’m just like that—that no matter what I have in my life I’ll always be greedy for more, always be wanting to see what else is out there.

So I had a gig yesterday. Ended spending almost the entire shift—as much as I could, anyway—talking to this Mexican girl from Acapulco—she was super-rad, talking about neuroscience and studying psychology and teaching… When she mentioned going to school while working weekends I had to make sure I was understanding her correctly—it turns out she’s a junior in high school (though is technically senior-aged) (I had obviously not pegged her as that young). Also after a while she mentioned a novio that is?/did? go to UNAM. So it didn’t matter that her mum seemed to like me. That didn’t stop her from being someone I’d like to know better, yes, platonically. Kept waiting till our shift was about to end so I could act somewhat nonchalant, like, “Oh! by the way, let me get your e-mail address so I can send you those Sam Harris &c. links.” Or give her mine. But I was too nonchalant—I was called to work on another task while the girls who worked there were clocking out; I should have just pounced but really didn't want to seem like a overeager/DOM, and of course I had no idea it would be so difficult to casually mention something as I was saying goodbye. Holy shit it just occurred to me she purposely slipped out so she could avoid that? God, I hope not. She was just really smart + fun to talk to although she’s probably like that with everyone by virtue of being smart + upbeat and also I might have once accidentally sort of flecked spittle conspicuously in her direction while speaking animatedly. Yeah, OK, I guess that could be a dealbreaker. Oh, and also I nicked myself shaving and after the shift when I looked in a mirror I realized I’d had a hardened, blackened blood bubble on the edge of my nostril the whole day. Alright, I know, I’m disqualified. I’ll shut up now.
(Still really secretly hoping I run into her again somehow; pushing away thoughts of “accidentally” running into her again outside of her place of employment, omg too stalkerish.)
Also there was this other girl, who I have no idea if she worked there or with us, who I quickly picked out as the cutest girl in the place and kind of wanted to holler at, she had that je ne sais quoi that said, like, we’d get along, I’m cool, you know? But they assigned her to work a totally different floor and I barely got to say two words to her. Leaving at the end of the day without knowing anything about her + having no sense of whether or not Acapulco would have liked to continue the conversation left me feeling really frustrated and un-centred, still today.

Also planning on going back and finishing my conversation with Target girl, possibly/hopefully continuing it after she gets off work.

I’d forgotten I’d seen someone talk about the concept of cultural immunity—specifically to Western/consumer culture—elsewhere.

Weddings/brides are so fucking sexy

This comment from David the Aspie kind of blew my mind.

I think your opening line demonstrates just why Republicans love their "individualism" canard so much. It is much easier to impoverish us until we are rendered into neo-feudal serfs working for peanuts for their corporate masters when we are atomised. It is only through collective action that progress can be made.

Once again Sam nails it. But he also touches on something I’ve recently been writing to the Jewess about. The (in?)famous “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” article and Faye’s (as always ;) contrarian response.

Relevant to excerpt from Jaron Lanier interview from other day: surprised I don’t think I’d read this before.

Of course, the solution, I think, is that everything should be free. I don’t say this facetiously, but believe that, in a world where digital exchange makes all intellectual property immediately available to all at little or no cost, the whole of society is best served by providing its thinkers with a minimum guarantee of food, shelter and healthcare. But again, I think those are basic human rights, not just for the intelligenzia.

o btw, the crux was that I think it was inspired by the girl from the time bank meeting.

Oh, and I had a dream where I was with a group of other kids (but of course we’re all like grown-ups) and I had my eye on one + we ended up all going to sleep on mats and I ended up getting one sort of next to the girl I liked, I think maybe with like one person in between us, but there was someone behind me who ended up putting her arm around me and snuggling up and it was not unpleasant but the girl I liked raised her eyebrows like, “Heeeeey, you go,” and I sort of gestured like raising my hands like a shrug because I really didn’t want her to get the idea I liked this other girl.

Also, the moon was rising quickly enough to be perceptible, then as it neared the horizon it turned out it looked like a (still that peachy colour) cricket ball, then it turned out it was a balloon. My aunt got it and put it up in the yellow room at her house.

Todos nos sentimos little boys y buscamos a MILFs para salvarnos.

I need to blog this somewhere

To me a book is not just a particular file. It’s connected with personhood. Books are really, really hard to write. They represent a kind of a summit of grappling with what one really has to say. And what I’m concerned with is when Silicon Valley looks at books, they often think of them as really differently as just data points that you can mush together. They’re divorcing books from their role in personhood.

I’m quite concerned that in the future someone might not know what author they’re reading. You see that with music. You would think in the information age it would be the easiest thing to know what you’re listening to. That you could look up instantly the music upon hearing it so you know what you’re listening to, but in truth it’s hard to get to those services.

I was in a cafe this morning where I heard some stuff I was interested in, and nobody could figure out. It was Spotify or one of these … so they knew what stream they were getting, but they didn’t know what music it was. Then it changed to other music, and they didn’t know what that was. And I tried to use one of the services that determines what music you’re listening to, but it was a noisy place and that didn’t work. So what’s supposed to be an open information system serves to obscure the source of the musician. It serves as a closed information system. It actually loses the information.

So in practice you don’t know who the musician is. And I think that’s what could happen with writers. … And if we start to see that with books in general – and I say if – if you look at the approach that Google has taken to the Google library project, they do have the tendency to want to move things together. You see the thing decontextualized.

I have sort of resisted putting my music out lately because I know it just turns into these mushes. Without context, what does my music mean? I make very novel sounds, but I don’t see any value in me sharing novel sounds that are decontextualized. Why would I write if people are just going to get weird snippets that are just mushed together and they don’t know the overall position or the history of the writer or anything? What would be the point in that. The day books become mush is the day I stop writing.

—The Internet Destroyed the Middle Class

Tangentially related, that day I had looked up the Onion article “Clinton Deploys Vowels to Bosnia” article for angel, and found that it was no longer hosted on The Onion’s site, likely because it had been collected in book form, for $ale, but it was still available electronically, had been archived on several pages of “Internet humour.” Invariably, material had been truncated or added to this seemingly anonymously penned piece—which had in fact become a collective work—invariably not an improvement on the source material. But this isn’t even some snippet that originated from some long-forgotten poster on USENET in the ’90s—this is from The Onion, America’s Finest News Source! It should not be that hard to attribute accurately, and yet here it is, intermingled with the undifferentiated content pile-up that is the World Wide Internet.

Dreamt about the girl from class. It was wonderful.

I catch Laura look-

Some pages are omitted from this book preview.

I still, though, don’t think anybody else’s ever looked at me like that.

My favourite book

High Fidelity making me realize/think, stupidly, that maybe me and Speedbump could have worked out after all

Mujeres de IRC con las que me he enamorado, que luego desaparecieron

• Holly
• Liz (teacher)
• Liz (jammies)

It wasn’t just that. Thinking about freedom and exclusivity and “boyfriending” Boss/Ariadnæ/Blondie/whoever/Boss Lady a lot yesterday and therria was the last girl I really wanted to boyfriend and I regret not having the chance—well, not being better situated to take it before it was too late/not getting my shit together sooner—and I hope this one was a good one although she probably should have had some more training wheels first but, hey, we don’t plan these things, and I hope she’s happy.

Jesus Christ, was that another therria dream? I fear it was.

(Possible source)

I wonder if she was some sort of stand-in for Boss Lady, being as I’m repeating exactly the same stupid mistakes?

o noes!

Another dream about therria. This time it was just real easy and sweet. Co-starring a still-talking, not-dead Roger Ebert and who do I know from French-speaking Belgium? But there were decomposing rats in the area behind Safeway that didn’t used to be a street (but it was a lot bigger) so maybe he wasn’t as not-dead as I thought.

You are the worst people ever

http://pngboyd.blogspot.com/2012/02/greetings-from-papua-new-guinea.html