James Paige

Current mood: Groovy

Yes it is true. Happyness is a hang-gliding hamster, flying free as a cloud, soaring over ice-capped mountains, then green fluffy forests, then over sun-bleached fields of wheat that spead as far as the eye can see, and finally out over the glistening sparking gemstone-blue ocean. At this point, a cold front being carried by the ocean currents causes the hamster to lose altitude uncontrollably, and he plunges into… er. No! Happy! Happy! Happy! …. um… then at this point, warm updrafts from a warm ocean current carry the hamster to dizzying new heights, and he soars all the way across the ocean, and finally lands in a crowded marketplace in Hong Kong, where in spite of an inability to comminicate verbally with the locals, he manages to trade his hang-glider for a questionably-packaged DVD boxed-set of several of his favorite Anime, before hopping on a cruise-ship back to the states.

Current mood: Sleepy but Overstimulated

Current mood: Alive

While I was watching Ryda play Baldur’s Gate II last night, it occured to me how incredibly useful it would be to have the powers of a necromancer in real life.

When I get to work in the morning, I would summon a skelleton, and say; Skully! Read and file my e-mail! And save anything important for me., and then skully would say yessss master.

Then I would be working on a programming project, and somebody would come to me with a spreadsheet project, and I would be all Skully! Do this boring spreadsheet for me!, and Skully would say Yessss master. Being an unholy damned creature of the netherworld, I have a natural proficiency with Microsoft Excel, and then I would say; But Skully, this is OpenOffice.org running on Debian GNU/Linux, and Skully would go AAAAAAAAAAAAAAArgh!!! and he would catch fire and crumble into ash, and then I would be bummed, because I would have to use up half my mana summoning a new Skully, and then I wouldn’t have enough mana left over at lunch time to cast Fire 3 to heat up my Cup-O-Noodles, and I would have to walk all the way down to the break room to use the stupid microwave.

Current mood: Apathyphobic

Today, I am going to sculpt a sculpture from clay, another from alabaster. I will draw a few sketches, finish a short story I have started previously and start writing a new one. I will read the rest of that giant Neal Stephenson novel I am working my way through. I will piece together the black-primed burned wood fragments I prepared last weekend, and paint a picture on them and mount them above the couch. I will clean my apartment and do the dishes and vacuum. I will run three miles. I will go to the swap meet. I will make phone calls to friends I haven’t seen in ages, and catch up on their lives. Then I will spend the evening programming, an hour and a half on an old project, and hour and a half on a new project. I will bake something.

… or at least I will lay on the couch with the windows closed and the lights off and think about doing all those things.

Actually, I will be happy if I do just one of those things. I will be very unhappy if I do zero of them.

Monday Morning Edit: Yay! I did two-and-a-half of those things, and therefore I am happy!

Current mood: Embarrassed and Hungry

So a fellow student in my sculpture class was working on a life-size torso. Just the torso, no head, arms, or anything south of the bellybutton. She had named it “Shark Attack” but felt the name was too traumatic, and was trying to think of another name.

I offered that I thought “Shark Attack” was a great name for it.

“You see, the thing about shark attacks is, as horrible, horrible, horrible an idea as it is, shark attacks are funny!”

“What?” she goes.

“It just automatically sounds tongue-in-cheek. Shark attacks are funny. You can’t take them seriously.”

I could see she wasn’t buying it. In fact, she was looking at me funny.

“Maybe because it is so rare?” I offered, “I mean, I know people have died that way, but, like” I searched for an appropriate hyperbole comparing shark attack victims to lightening strike victims or lottery winners, but came up dry.

“No, I don’t think so.” she says. Her friend shakes her head with a slightly disgusted look on her face.

“Is it just me?” I asked, reddening. Do I just have a sick mind?

A while later I realized what it was. When I think of shark attacks, my entire mental and emotional context for the concept comes from Gary Larson. Darn you Gary! You have made me look like a psychopath one too many times!

Today is a beautiful day. It is a good day for painting things that have been burned. I wonder why fire is not more popular in art. Pyromania is so artsy.

I am currently eating potstickers and california rolls, and thinking about how to use perl compatable regular expression rules (regex’s) to guess the appropriate material code and oversize value for a set of human-readable price page filenames. That is the sort of stuff I do at work. Today is a very good day.