Winter Social Life
December 31, 2001


Well, I'm clearly too stupid to be using Flash. I simply can not get the hitTest fuction to work, so I'm just going to give up for a bit and enjoy listening to some more b. fleishmann's "a choir of empty beds" and write myself into a trance.

I'm really not much of a computer programmer. I have the poor interpersonal skills for it, just not the extensive training or background. So when I get it into my head that what Jared Tarbell's doing on his site with Flash is great, bad ass, and decide that I, too, want to make that kind of stuff, I run quickly into a big old brick wall that I have to dig through. Sometimes there's no problem, a few days of pouring over documentation and examples and I'm good to go. This happened with Supercollider. Seemed daunting, but within three months of getting it on my computer I'd already produced several tracks and performed in public with it. Flash is clearly a different beast. Or maybe it's a buggy piece of shit and I just don't know it yet.

So anyway. I've spent about $100 since coming back from Pennsylvania. Where has this money gone? Well, I had a nice entertainment-binge after returning to comfortably youthful Austin from Northampton PA. Saw Waterfalls, Proem, Inkblot, and the Buddy System at Mercury Entertainment and Darin Murphy at the Hole in the Wall on Thursday with Brenna and Mason, and despite having brought with me a small bottle of Jack Daniels I got while riding first-class between Philadelphia and Atlanta on the return trip, I had about four beers at the usual rediculous rate of $3 or $4 apiece. That after two meals out that day put my expenses for Thursday at about $40. Several meals out, watching Amelie with Brenna on Thursday and The Royal Tenenbaums with Abby on Friday, making vanilla-rum-orange pudding served in orange-halves with Abby on Saturday, many cups of coffee, drinks out with Mason and Mike the Wednesday I got home, and a load of laundry yesterday have added up to Expensive and now it's time to chill the fuck out for a while and run again in conservation mode. Especially considering my current status as unemployed bastard. I'll probably buy some blank CDs tomorrow to make "Out the Closed Window Music" gifts for Sean, Brenna, Cote, and maybe Brooke, Meri, Jaylon, and whoever else the hell wants one or doesn't, and I'll probably be inclined to buy some booze for the NYE gitdown at Zane's place.

Relaxing music. So good. I'd been running in supercharge-mode since I got home and finally crashed yesterday and just sat around groggy reading Economist.com and Thislife.org most of today. I'd been supersocial boy with Brenna, Mason, and Abby since I got back. Now Abby and Mason have left town and Brenna's leaving soon. I just have these up periods when I love poeple and just want to hang around chattering, then come the downs, the moments of self-reflection when I wonder if I'm doing the right things for these people I know and myself. (Especially when I fail to correctly judge the difference between cheerfully friendliness and romantic advances from certian females which happens sometimes because apparently you have to beat me over the head with a fucking neon sign to get me to notice the latter.)

So now the music's stopped and I've found some fun images and I'm tired so I'm going to bed. And my nose is runny and it's about 45 degrees in this room but I've got a new blanket!