Cá fhad é ó an tús don stoirm

I hate money.
More accurately, I hate needing money.
Still more accurately, I hate people owing me money.

God, I had forgotten how much I love NIN remixes . . .

Fuck working in lab groups. It's an exercise in nail-biting, tooth-grinding frustration.
I fucking hate working with other people. I hate having to trust other people not to fuck experiments up. I hate having to trust other people not to record things incorrectly. I hate having people take the things I want to do and then fuck them up. I hate sitting around waiting for people to figure out how to do things I not only know how to do, but can do faster and more accurately. I hate having to trust people who don't know how to use analytical equipment. I hate having anything of importance riding on people who don't care to be as precise as I like to be. I hate having to use someone else's data for my own analyses. It drives me up the fucking wall.

One of my lab parters dropped a test tube halfway through a run, and had to start completely over. Moron. Now I'm in a shitty mood.

I got to play with a spectrophotometer in bio lab today! I got to do repetitive analyses requiring multiple tedious recalibrations and precise setting adjustments! I got lots of messy data sets and get to do linear regressions and T-tests and make them orderly and meaningful! And my lab partners weren't threatening to kill me for being furiously anal!

I'm going to have so much goddamn fun. I love this kind of shit. Call me crazy.

Cyanide & Happiness @ Explosm.net

why's it have to be this way?

Cyanide & Happiness @ Explosm.net

You Are An INFP

The Idealist You are creative with a great imagination, living in your own inner world. Open minded and accepting, you strive for harmony in your important relationships. It takes a long time for people to get to know you. You are hesitant to let people get close. But once you care for someone, you do everything you can to help them grow and develop. In love, you tend to have high (and often unrealistic) standards. You are very sensitive. You tend to have intense feelings. At work, you need to do something that expresses your personal values. You would make an excellent writer, psychologist, or artist. How you see yourself: Unselfish, empathetic, and spiritual When other people don't get you, they see you as: Unrealistic, naive, and weak

not sure i agree with all of it, but most of it is pretty accurate . . .

so goddamn close . . .

and i get to see almost all of the old gang, both for new year's eve and for my ex's wedding . . . i hate weddings, i hate them with a bitter passion, but i'm actually looking forward to hers.

nostalgia is a horrible, ugly thing.

thank god this shitty year is almost over.

I got the second highest grade in both of my hard bio classes!

on a lighter note, i managed to fix the blown seals in my clutch master cylinder (yes, it's a hydraulic clutch, for some reason . . . later models are cable clutches) so the clutch plates now actually disengage when i want them to . . . it still leaks dot 4 onto the clutch lever, but shit happens, and i don't have the cash to replace the piston assembly. yet.
but the electrical system is almost entirely functional (apart from the goddamn sidestand indicator light . . . fortunately the starter kill doesn't work, as far as i can tell) and it turns over. we don't have the fuel system in, so it won't ignite, but we got enough compression to blow the shop rags out of the exhaust ports . . .
things are looking good.
my buddy and i are seriously contemplating sending a box full of shit to the suzuki design team . . . so many things about that design are irritating, overly complicated, or just plain weird.
life is pretty good right now, other than decompression sickness from school being over. things people do are keeping me thoroughly entertained.

I always wonder why did we bother,
distanced from one, blind to the other . . .

my life feels so disjointed sometimes, so discontinuous . . . the only real connection between me now and me five or ten or fifteen years ago is spatial.
something brings back a memory . . . a book title, the feel of a warm breeze, the color of streetlights in an evening sky, the smell of someone's perfume, a particular tone of voice, a line from a song . . . and all that has become me dissolves, swirls away into inconsequence, and i am there, not here . . . all the emotion, all the sensation, all the colors and the blinding white light . . . i can see it, but all i feel is a distant echo of loss . . . it was so sharp, so beautiful, so unpolluted by reality . . . it seems like a faded photograph, now, a half-remembered dream, bled ink on a washed-out page . . .
sometimes i so desperately miss that illusion of clarity . . . i find myself trying to recreate it, force it into existence, transpose it onto the now, and it leaves me colder and more hostile than before . . .

so, i took apart my first complete motorcycle engine tonight . . . stripped it down almost to the transmission case, which is basically the final step. apparently, the mechanic who first evaluated it was full of shit and didn't want to spend any effort on it said the front piston was firing at an angle, but that evaluation was due to the carbon deposits on the piston head, which were hitting the valves (or vice versa), and didn't actually take the heads off . . . the motor itself is fine, other than the valve timing and the fuel mixture, and the oil blow-by from the piston rings . . .
my first complete motor disassembly! it's gotta be some kind of landmark, at least for me . . . i'm going to end up pretty well-versed in pain-in-the-ass suzuki motor assemblies by the time these two projects are done . . . the entire set-up is a lot simpler than i imagined it would be . . . almost completely intuitive, except for the tolerances and the torque settings . . .
my bike should be done by next bike night, which is wednesday, unless i can't motivate the primary mechanic . . . he better owe me, given the entire bottle of jim beam we downed tonight (which i paid for . . .) my bike is going to be so bad-ass, when it's finished . . .
i haven't been this wasted in almost a decade. scary, eh?
i'm beginning to realize that getting my hands covered in motor oil and road grease is totally different when it's my (or my [to be honest] best friend's) motor and transmission (both of which we had to strip almost to the case) . . . it's becoming increasingly apparent that the entire set-up was designed to require as many man-hours as possible to drop the simplest part for tune-up . . . goddamn suzuki engineers . . .

Mark Knopfler and Emmylou Harris . . . goddamn . . .

Kinda out of nowhere, Sean, Marty, and I all converged on the two boxes of parts that are my motorcycle, and got it about 2/3 built. Then one of Sean's roommates, Matty, showed up, and we went tweaker-project on the rear fender and chopped it in half and dovetailed it. Matty has a side mount for the plate, complete with brake light, and we're going to attach that to the lower shock mount on the non-drive-shaft side of the rear tire. Maybe LEDs under the chopped rear fender, as secondary (or primary, depending on your perspective) brake lights. If we can find the right tool, we're planning on reducing the let-off on the shocks and dropping the rear end a little, maybe one or two inches. The rear half of the saddle won't be there either, and neither will the sissy bar. We might lower the saddle a bit, too . . . jury's still out on that one . . .
All that needs to be done now is attach the carbs and the tank, replace the radiator and put the air intakes in, get the electrical system straightened out and hooked up, recore the pipes, and do all the little cosmetic stuff. On the whole, we made a shitload of progress in about four hours. We probably could have done the wiring tonight, too, but we ran out of light.
Pictures may be forthcoming.

I just got this kick-ass Nikon camera from my father. It has an auto-focus, an auto-aperture, and an auto-shutter-speed on it; basically, it is, at its simplest, a point-and-shoot, although everything can be adjusted manually, if I feel like tinkering.
Apparently it belonged to my grandfather, though I'm not sure why he had it . . . whatever the reason, it's mine now. All it needs is new batteries and some film, and hilarity should ensue.

I really hate it when I'm not in the position to make doctors do what I think they should do . . .

CoolKarmaPlace.com - Online Karma Test Click Here!
michael, Your Karmic Alignment is: Optimistic!





Score: 13 In general, you tend to create poitive actions. You have a caring personality which gives you positive Karma. Every now and then you slip up and harvest negative Karma. But, all in all, you follow lines similar to the Monks on their way to enlightenment.


who would have known?