That's because I live at work for the most part now. I spend anywhere from 8-14 hours at work: in the lab, the machine shop, the office; anywhere but home because, well, I like it at work i guess. I get all my things done there. Home is just a place to rest and watch some TV, do laundry, dishes, and push the lawn mower. I let my roomies deck the place out in all the stuff that single guys put in their place: liquor bottles, DVDs, lots of home electronics, road signs, and girly mags. It's cozy, just nothing there that I contribute really. Reminds me of my college days living in the frat house.

Work is my creative escape. I can work on no less than 5 things at once there and be surrounded by a dozen people doing the exact same thing. When I want to escape them, I go somewhere else, again at work, and work. Honestly, it shouldn't be called work, it should be called my hobby. My degree is coming along, slowly but steadily. I got perhaps one more years of good quality work, a few more papers to get out, meetings, presentations, all the fun of sciency research. Maybe one day i'll mention what it is I do.

Surprisingly, I still log into the MUD. I work there a lot too: writing mprogs, building, answering notes, chatting with other players, and making my mark. That much I have fun with. And, to add to the pile, i've been seeing a girl for 8 months now (wow yeah that's a good amount of time). To be truthful, when you're as busy as me and her (she's in the same line of study), time moves faster, days fall in the span of weeks, and 8 months seems like 3. I don't think it would work quite so well if the other person wasn't on the same wavelength, but I guess that's pretty much applicable to most all relationships. I got a good feeling about this one though, we'll see.

Liquid helium is in the stockroom. I have to go pick it up and do my monthly duty. That's all for now.

To dream those things which are so close to reality that they seem almost trivial to think of in such terms.

To grow sick when idle, and obsess with productive.

To create beauty, and hide it from the world.

And to know what I want, yet fail to come to terms with the fact that it might not exist...

How long then does one search for something that may never be obtained?

So why the corrective eye surgery? I dunno really. I've always wanted to get it, and on a whim I just upped and did it. So far i'm about 75% to full acuity, which is awesome. All you bastards with good eye sight don't know how good you got it. I had acute astigmatism which limited me to thick glasses or very expensive glass contacts, so it wasn't a hard decision. What's the surgery like you ask? Well, it's quick and painless and actually looks more painful than it feels. The worst part was the grinding tool shredding my outer membrane of my eye so that the laser can get to cutting away. That and the smell of burning flesh when the laser was doing the actual cutting. You're completely awake for it with little instruments to force your eyelids open. The laser is fully automated and scans your eye while it makes the cuts. It's about 2 minutes per eye, and as long as you're perfectly still for that long, the procedure is flawless. I won't tell you what can happen if you flinch. Well i'll spare you the gruesome details of the grinding tool and what I saw when it contacted my eye. Suffice to say that despite all that, it was well worth the trouble. I'd do it again if given the choice.

Every morning I wake up I can see a little better. It's a great feeling. In two weeks I'll be near 20/20 and ready to hit the grind with a new set of peepers. What i'm looking forward to actually is getting back to the MUD and finishing up a few dozen things that have been hanging since last year. I think most people are in that situation, which isn't all that bad of a place to be really. Boredom rarely comes, at least guilt free boredom.

In any event, i'm going to cut this entry short here as work calls. This weekend will be a busy one with us getting the place in order, so i'll be holding out a little longer on picking up those obligations. Until then, adieu.

So, what better thing to do than to procrastinate. I still can claim my obsession with the gym as the hobby of '04 if this venture doesn't work out. For more realistic reasons, I will be moving out of my apartment into a duplex with some friends come July, and one month will give me ample time to start planning my studio. During that time, I will look to finding that inspiration.

Until then, I still have the car repair manuals from the summer of '01, the electric sander and varnish from the summer of furniture repair, circa '02, and last year's trunk of camera equipment and accessories (for that hobby, I had decided to go digital, which will take me another year to gather the equipment for). And of course, there's the gym and the promise I made to myself to start taking people up on their invites. My future still is in that PhD, but I can meander a little in the meantime. At least that's what I keep telling myself.

I actually looked up some demographic information about this town, which was somewhat interesting. I'll share it here for lack of anything better to talk about. The population is about 68k, and the student enrollment is hovering at 45k, meaning this town is composed of 2/3 students. It says here that the average age in the city is 22, which explains why i'm always complaining about how old I feel. It also explains the number of god awful drivers out and about, which I always attributed to my overly high standards associated with automobile navigation. We had two murders last year. The biggest crime as far as amount is, perhaps no surprise, rape.

It's a nice place to visit is a good phrase for this place. I don't see myself hitting keggars and dance clubs when i'm 30, though for now it's interesting enough to hold some attention. Which is why I think it's a good idea to always keep moving in the course of your life, either physically or mentally. After all, only dead fish swim with the current.

There are two pivotal moments in graduate school: the preliminary examination and the final defense. Friday, I passed my prelim, and all the stress and pinned up crap that swam around inside me just up and vanished that night when I sat in front of a frozen margarita. So this entry is going to be light on sarcasm and wit. They tell you it's hell, but that's what they're supposed to do. You see, it's a rite of passage to have to sit in front of a committee of professors and defend your proposal. And while I do believe for many it's a hellish moment in their otherwise painful graduate career, mine was almost pleasant. Mine lasted 3 hours, which is not uncommon. There's no rules really. They tell you to go in and give a half hour presentation on your proposed research and then allow an undetermined amount of time at the end to answer questions. I was five minutes into my talk and the questions started. My shirt was damp with sweat from the Texas humidity and I stared out into a dark room through the projector lights and saw nothing. It was just a voice--a question, and in some deeply programmed state, I began to answer with both hands, a piece of broken chalk and full use of all the space granted to me in the five or so feet from the front row to the board. I was in a daze, because even now there are memories that are just coming to me. Every day since December it was in my thoughts: the day that would decide the rest of my life. It was dubbed "Judgement Day" by a group member on my dry erase board. The numbers beneath slowly counted down day by day, and on that decisive morning I stared at the number 0 and thought "I'm not ready for this." But I was, and I did, and all is good in the world again.

That was why I left the MUD. As stated before, I had creativity withdrawal, and came back a little early to get my fix. The day after, I was back in full swing. So what does this mean for our fearless protagonist? Superficially, I am guaranteed a chance at that phd, but deep down that little voice which said well enough was good enough is no longer speaking to me. Instead, another more assertive voice calls from within, saying do not leave well enough alone when perfection is just around the corner. So that's how I feel at this point and time as I sit here at my desk with a cool breeze blowing from the open window and the sounds of birds singing and some girl calling her dog...it's not perfect. It's the way it is.

The MUD now will commence to take a large part of my internet time, but rest assured that I will not neglect this blog for too long of a time while I am busy with not leaving well enough alone. After all, here and there are mutually exclusive things. Having the cake bears no influence on eating it.

I sleep in on the weekdays, mainly because I can.

The alarm sounds at around 8 a.m. and I crawl out of bed by 9 (yes that's sleeping in!)

Most days I end up catching the shuttle. After all, the early bird gets the good parking spots. Thursdays and Fridays are deemed skip school days by the students, so usually those are the days I can drive in to work.

My drive lasts all of 10 minutes. I listen to perhaps two tracks off of a randomly selected CD from my collection which I bought four months prior and only recent have taken the liberty to remove the shrink wrap. The windows down and the amp up to just under the threshold for smoking speakers. Sometimes I play a game of road rage.

By bus or car, I make it into my little cube by 10 a.m. and check email and any little post it notes that appear randomly about my desk. I then start planning out my day and shooting the shit with my fellow group members. We can easily keep it up until lunch.

By 11:30 i'm asking a group mate when (or where) we want to catch lunch (asked in perfect Mandarin as is my now chosen language to learn). Mondays and Wednesdays are designated bring lunch days, so Sundays I get to hone my cooking skills. Either way, we usually are out the door by noon.

After lunch (and running errands if we opt to walk to the strip of bars and restaurants lining the uni) I settle back into work and spend a few hours running about aimlessly from place to place. This is about the time everyone who needs something from me finds me. During the course of the chaos, I usually find my way back into lab and tinker a while. This is when I'm most productive.

5 rolls around and people start shuffling out the door. I take another half hour to check news and more emails and then run to catch the shuttle home before it switches to the night route at 6. If I drove, I still run out by 6.

Dinner at home and more errands. By 8, most everything that needed to be done is done, and I either a) goof off at home or b) go back to work. Usually this is the time to get calls.

If it's a Tuesday or Thursday, we're at the gym by 10 p.m. and by midnight i'm back home eating another dinner.

I then burn a few more hours doing whatever I can find to do and call it a day around 2 or 3 a.m. Shake and repeat. I'll save weekends for another post.

So I'll write myself to sleep. I think I was rambling last time about my stories, for why I have no idea. Today I'll ramble about...road rage. Yes, lots of well to do people have it, and despite them, I have it too. Yesterday I almost ran a guy down for passing me on the right. No reason other than to target some driver who looks more aggressive than me. He did the fast accelerate behind you and then quickly pass maneuver, which I despise mainly because to do it to me, you'd have to be going 15 over. So of course I catch up to him and ride his blind spot until he's forced behind some slow grandma. I'm half wishing he won't see me and try that maneuver again, but alas he's a smooth criminal and opts to tailgate grandma's poor old buick as if she's going to suddenly break out the nitrous or something. So here we are cruising along, locked in formation, me sporting my totally oblivious look with the radio up so high the speakers are smoking. I missed my turn two blocks ago, but that's not important. What's important at this juncture in my life is that I annoy the shit out of this guy as long as possible for no rational reason whatsoever. Eventually he turns off at the next light, probably just because it's his turn, but in my mind i'm thinking: "I gotcha you little shit. You couldn't hack it so you had to bail. Cubs win, cubs win. Me 1. Dumbass 0." So my day was complete after that, and after cruising the 10 mile scenic route to work, I had a really productive afternoon.

So the brief thought does cross my mind occasionally that perhaps I'm the dumbass driver and everyone else is just trying to stay the hell away from me, and in the process it just appears that they are two days out of driver's ed. I don't know. And I play this game a lot, and my win rate is somewhere around 75%. There's always a riced up piece of shit that's going to smoke my little pickup, and then there's circumstances beyond my control that force me into a decisively illegal maneuver or letting it all go. Only on a few rare occasions did I opt for the former, and not since I've gotten into grad school. I also wondered how far would I take it if it got ugly and some roided up shotputter decides to settle it in the parking lot. I went as far as to store my tire iron under the front seat. I guess we're all proned to our bouts of denying our own mortality. That's one of many I still indulge. Without drugs or extreme sports, I have to do something that will offset my decisively overrational, compulsive, and emotionally detached mentality. Maybe the world would be much nicer if we all did drugs. Damn hippies. Get a tire iron.

Oh and a side note: I added some links to pages I routinely visit, some more than others. Many omitted due to the sheer volume of pages I visit in any given day, and some I just don't think anyone here would have any interest in (e.g. Ion Trap Tutorial @ http://physwww.mcmaster.ca/~kingb/ion_traps.html).

About five months ago, I took a break from all things related to the MUD, which was quickly becoming the third most time intensive routine of my life, next to sleeping and screwing around at work. I justified it by the amount of creative things I did there, but then that started to decline. It was time for a little break, to organize my thoughts and secure the next couple of years of my career. During that time, I picked up several routines to take the place of the newly made vacancy in my day. Frequent trips to hone my photography skills was chalked in about every other weekend. I extended my working hours by three on most nights, and caught up with movies and the news, which I had neglected continuously for the past five years or so. I dated sporadically, which proved unreliable in keeping a permanent block of my time. All this still left a few hours every other day that I didn't have anything to do, so I made a wager with some friends at work: we'd agree to hit the gym three days a week and the last person standing would get a free lunch out of the deal. I'm now in pristine shape awaiting my free lunch. There's some merit to what my friend told me shortly after the wager was made: Going to the gym is all a plot to suck you into the healty lifestyle bullshit, and once you're locked into that mentality, you're doomed to spending bucketloads of your hard-earned money on crap you think will help, and doomed to always feel guilty. It's almost as bad as church. (His words, paraphrased) To this day he refuses to set foot into the rec center. I say there's some merit because even though I essentially won our little bet, I still maintain that routine religiously for no reason in particular. I find it helps me collect my thoughts and ideas, and gives me a couple of hours to catch up on the latest music. I refuse to be one of those 30 year olds listening to bad 80's music on their tape deck. To that end, I bought a nice mp3 player and make it a point to load up a different CD a week which I conveniently borrow from the internet.

But then of course, there's not much creativity in repetitive lifting and going in circles for half an hour on a track, so eventually I needed another fill in routine. The music and thinking helps, but it's all too passive for my taste. Nothing tangible is ever created (that's a debatable point, but bears no influence on the remainder of my rant, so henceforth it shall either be taken as fact or ignored altogether). I opted to ease back into the web logs, and about the middle of March I started writing again. That brings up a rather interesting subject: my writing. Well maybe not interesting for you, but i'm going to pursue it anyway, mainly because I can.

I started with the Clausius stories several years ago on the MUD. Then it was something to pass the time, but I enjoyed it so much that I decided to keep at it. Over the years, the short stories would appear, with seemingly little plot and direction. They were just fun to write on whatever popped into my head. That's how they still are, though I think i've got the language down since my first few stories, having never taken anything other than core English courses in college (and I think in many respects I learned a lot more in my high school English classes). And i've taken to being a little more consistent, keeping tabs on dates and character names and what not. That aspect stems from deeply rooted retentiveness in my personality (approaching or exceeding anality). I was hesitant to do that at first, but eventually i said what the hell and it didn't take away from the fun one bit. I would argue it adds to it in some twisted and perverse quenching of my obsessive nature. I admit though, i'm quickly getting away from those easy to read hack and slash stories I used to write so often. It's as much entertainment as it is experiment, and sometimes experimental things are rather dreadful to experience. Case in point: the so called experimental music, which on rare occasions produces something redeeming and of deep cultural value. In most cases though, it's just loud and obnoxious. That's my opinion not to be taken seriously given my overall music experience spans less than a couple of hours every other day. But I do at least try to understand.

Ok, I digressed to the point that I lost the point. I was talking about my stories. If you didn't read any of them, then you can ignore most of this entry safely. They're still very much experimental. I tried the psychological approach, and overdid it to the point that it lost coherence. I tried the packed full of action approach, and it works, but it was difficult to be anything but superficial. I tried about a dozen different cliches: misguided youth, amnesia, blood vengeance, dreams within dreams, revelations (luke, I am your father), etc. I have yet to decide if those work or not. I'm currently working on a combination of those things, with some reinventing of fundamental concepts along the way. I think the big lesson thus learned is to be diverse, but in moderation. I haven't read enough to be truly diverse, but like all things, it comes with time. I guess if the whole writing thing doesn't work out, I can do something with the doctorate degree once I get it. Which is why I should get back to that proposal.

Let's see...

I guess I should talk about myself. I hate talking about myself! So all you're going to get right now is the following short bio that's prone to frequent digression:

I'll start with some basics. I'm a 25 year old graduate student. My degree is in chemistry, but I don't know a damn thing about it. You put me in a chem lab and i'll guarantee someone is going to lose an eye or a limb or in the least the ability to spread their genetic code. No, what I do is more engineering and physics stuff. I work with big lasers and even bigger magnets and crazy equipment that has 25 dollar screws on it. But they have to give me a degree, and it has to have a name, so they lump it into chemistry because somewhere way back when this stuff was being thought up, there was a chemist. So I guess i'm a chemist. Technically. Because I was quite indecisive after I got my first degree, I decided to postpone responsibility and go to grad school to collect a few more letters after my name. I found myself here in Texas, where the scenery is so-so, the weather is hot and everyone drives a bigger truck than the next guy. I have a truck, but i'm apparently the next guy because damn if I can't see over anyone when i'm trying to turn right at the stoplight. My reasons for coming here: a good program, good money, and a girl. No more mention will be made of the latter henceforth, but suffice to say the first two reasons still hold my interest here (and don't read into that. I'm very much heterosexual). I think that about sums up what you need to know for anything else I write to make sense. If more info is needed, i'll do my best to fill in the gaps.

With that, here's a little history about how I came to find myself writing this little history about my history. I like to think that if fate hadn't stepped in way back during my second year in college, I would never have known things such as MUDs or Blogs or the internet existed. Well maybe not the latter thanks to Al Gore, but the first two for sure. To sum up a fairly decent story: I was paired up with an oddball roommate in college who loved video games and role playing. I admit there was a little tension between us: I honestly thought he was a freak, and still do, though a pretty nice guy otherwise. He had an assortment of oddball friends, what you could safely call the misunderstood. One scene that still lies burned in my mind is walking into his room and seeing him and about six of his friends wearing makeup and strange costumes. It took me a good ten seconds to figure out that my roommate was the one wearing the purple wig and fishnet stockings. Ugh. All I wanted was notes from the class I skipped the day before and now I was subjected to this? I finally got the notes and an explanation: he was into live action role playing, then it was something called Vampire, and they would have a huge group meet at night in the local park to act it out. Later he got into making PVC swords coated in foam and getting together with his cronies to terrorize the campus with live action combat. They actually got the club approved as an official campus recognized organization, but that's another story. Though I still to this day don't quite see the allure in live action role playing or beating each other up with foam sticks, I did make a compromise my second year with that roomie, and decided to try and understand. And among other things that I could simply not appreciate then, there was one thing that I was at least willing to give a go at: online text based gaming. He was very much into MUDs and well, I am a firm believer in giving anything reasonable (the key word here is reasonable) a shot, so I tried it, and honestly I couldn't read fast enough to keep up. Reading for fun? What kind of crap is this?

Eventually I gave it another go, about six months later, because then my pride was at stake for quitting so fast. Plus he seemed to enjoy it immensely, so why not? That was the summer of 1998 when I logged into a fairly new and popular mud named Waterdeep and created a character named Clausius. I used a client called pueblo--the first free one I could find, and began to learn the ropes of text based gaming. I have to give myself a little more credit here: I used to love reading those choose your own adventure stories in grade school, and so this wasn't that far of a stretch for me. Plus, I had a hell of a lot of free time then, as most of my classes were general education requirements. I also led a more sedentary lifestyle then and never really got into watching TV or reading for fun, so all that free time was spent in front of my new computer: a blazing fast pentium 133. Oh baby, this thing runs windows 98! (Had I been a little older, I suppose I would have a little more room to talk here, but this is my bio, not yours you old fart!). Eventually, I started liking it, and kept up with it about an hour or two every night. Aside from a few times where I up and drop it for other stuff, as is the case now, I remained loyal to Waterdeep. I'll get to the now part later. There's a lot of empty space to fill in between first.

That routine carried me through most of my undergrad. Toward the end, studies became a little more serious, and you would think my play time would diminish, but I tend to play the hardest in the midst of deadlines. Incidentally, a very big deadline is quickly approaching, and here I am typing away. So pretty much you can guess the rest. Creative writing is one of those things I still try to keep up, if for no other reason than to keep my sanity. There's not a lot of room for creativity in scientific publications (though probably more than you think. A few brief departures to the absurd are generally acceptable if the science is sound).

Call this practice. Call it retribution for spending 7 years of my internet life in anonymity. Maybe someone will read these entries and say, hey wait! That sounds just like this dude I went to college with. And wait! I wore a purple wig and fishnet stockings once! If it happens it happens. I'm decisively a closet mudder though, so I doubt anyone I ever knew will read this, but if they do, drop me a line. I'd love to hear what's going on with you now.

I think I said this would be short earlier, but I lied. I do that you know. Anyway the actual bio is short, so I guess we can call this a fib. Or relative to some other stuff, this is pretty short. Whatever you want to call it. I don't care if i'm labeled a dirty liar.