You can't win when an ex-girlfriend starts seeing someone else. Especially if you were on the wrong side of the break-up

You run into her,.. somewhere,.. and she's with the new man. He could be

1. Like you
2. Unlike you

... and you lose in both cases

If he's like you:
For some reason, even though this new bloke is exactly the same as you, he's better than you. She just didn't like "you" you.

If he's unlike you:
She never liked you anyway, and finally found the triangular-shaped beefcake of her dreams

Some people say I'm bitter and twisted.

Whilst making lunch, I had an epiphany - There's only one kind of fly

Without really being aware of it, I'd always (subconciously) divided flies into groups. There were your flies that hung around dog shit, and there were the flies that hung around your kitchen, and there were flies that sort of just buzzed around when you were outdoors. Today, I realised that there's only one type of fly that just happens to do those many different things.

Flies on food had always just been "bad" - but non-specifically bad. They just weren't something you'd really want on your food - with vague explanations like "they carry germs". Well, I realise now, that they don't just "carry" them around like a wallet. They carry germs because they've just been out there dining on dog poo - walking around in it - and now they were walking around on your food. And when was the last time you saw a fly washing between meals? Straight from dog poo to your sandwich.

Now, anybody reading this will think - what a fucking idiot, and I can live with that. A number of years back I had this weird realisation on why there was a rail on a second story balcony (to stop people falling off) - but it was such a new thought, rather than something inate - that I expressed it to all and sundry. The words "fucking idiot" were the most kind of the statements which followed.

I guess I just need a life.

Spent the day coding instead of working - mind you, the work I have to do is coding. So, basically, I was coding instead of coding.

I, like most humans I suppose, would rather do anything except what they're being paid to do. Instead of studying for exams while I was at uni, I'd spend hours and hours doing washing, cleaning my desk, painting the lounge and shaving the cat - anything but putting my nose in a book.

Today, I'm meant to be coding for a uni project. Instead, I wrote merkac dot which is a slashdot summary page - sort of like alterslash but a bit less professional looking. I also wrote a little tool to convert links in a story to google cache links.

The google-cache link thingy is just a start for what I want to do - instead of having to wade through a bunch of karma-whoring posts, you'll only have to find one. This post will contain google-cache links, nytimes registration-free links, a link to mirrored copies of the texts, and anything else I can think of.

I only wrote them because I like slashdot, but I'm sick of wading through crap to find the "good" stuff. Hmmm. "good" is such a relative term.

People are morons

In any sufficiently large group of people, most will be morons

You know how dumb the average person is? Well, by definition, half the population is dumber that that.

People are infinitely adaptable, but they still tend to do things in a certain way. There's no real guarantee that the way they do it is fast or efficient - they're probably just doing it the way they first saw it done.

A classic example of this is folding socks. Nearly everybody folds their socks in the same manner as their mother.

The main methods are:

• aligning the socks and folding the top of one sock over the top of the other to link them
• aligning the socks and folding them both about 3 times. The top of one sock is then looped over the other to form a sock-ball.
• one sock is placed inside the other (unfolded)
• knotting the two socks together

I have no life.

I hate this theory: love is a matter of time

She could be pretty. She could be ugly. She could be an interesting combination of tall/short/fat/thin/stupid/strong/muscley/intelligent. If there's an inkling of any sort of mutual attraction then all you need is time

The time has to be a special sort of time. Time together doing Stuff(tm).

• hanging out
• going to the post office
• blowing up balloons
• watching people go by
• debating the finer points of queue ettiquette.

Time that shows that the two of you probably wouldn't strangle each other if left alone for more of it.

It's finding the time to find someone that will stick around for long enough to even share this time - that's the problem.

The best things in life happen by accident.

Some things happen by design, planning and perseverence, but more often it seems that pure blind, deaf, quadriplegic chance brings along the best things in life. (It's also mostly responsible for the bad things in life because you really don't want to admit that you designed, planned and persevered to get the shitty things you deserve.)

A date is one thing which is perfect when it's accidental.

The courting phase is hazardous. Planning a date in the courting phase is a sure way to give yourself an aneurism or a subdermal haematoma or something deadly and dangerous. To wit:

• Where do you take her?
• How do you dress?
• When do you pick her up?
• What conversational topics have you prepared for the uncomfortable lulls?
• What stunning answer do you have to the question "What music do you like?" ?
• If the topic of [any controversial topic] pops up, do you go (a) pro (b) con (c) claim ignorance (d) ask her what she thinks?
• How are you going to cope with the "I don't know what do you want to do?" circular loop?
• etcetera etcetera etcetera[/king of siam]

If the date is accidental then the pressure's off. You didn't plan it, so there's not chance of it going astray - whatever happens, happens.

• Sitting in a broken down car for 2 hours waiting for the tow-truck talking about past car disasters and the people they were with.
• Grabbing a really shit cup of coffee waiting for the tediously inaccurate 'While-U-Wait Service' at the dry cleaners and commentating on the people who walk by.
• Sharing a 10 minute wait in the greasy chairs of the local fish-n-chip shop, before heading back to her place with a greasy paper load of hot flake and potato to laugh at some crap on TV.
• Hanging out at the library studying at the desks near each other. Breaking for a chips-and-gravy at the refectory and eating it on the grass under the trees.

The accidental date has limitless scope.

It's just a pity they can't be planned

My mate D, likes this chick.

The details are long and involved and I'd like to note some of them. They're inconsequential. But so is my life.

D first met K at a party. The party was good. The level of drunkeness was high and the crappy weird conversations were at a peak. Vodka was flowing like water, and the spoken crap was flowing like Niagra.

D & S had thought they'd hit a gold mine. Two drunken uni students. Single. Available. Involved in a conversation. Of course, S had diddly chance - his significant other was also at the party - but he liked to keep his hand in (but his tuning technique was rustier than mine, so he had diddly chance anyway). D, however, had an SO about 1000 miles away, and so felt free to play out the hand.

Since D & S were both too drunk to remember that it was polite to ask a girl's name before going in for the tune, she was conspiritally referred to by the males at the party by the distinctive colour of her outfit - only weeks later was it revealed that her name (like most others at the party, strangely) was K.

After an hour of conversation between D & K, the following facts were revealed:

• K was sort of single. Or at least her SO wasn't present.
• Her shirt was advantageously cut to Reveal and Accentuate (tm)
• D was drunk

Nothing eventuated at the party. But K popped up in quite a few of D's conversations over the next few months. A little 'fatal attraction' and a whole lot of unrequited droolings.

Scroll forward through to last week. A 30th birthday at the local old-man's-pub-turned-hip-spot. D spots K serving drunks from behind the bar. A hurried and heavy-breathing phone message to a mutual friend reveals that K's SO is going OS in the "near future". D's ears perk up. The chase is on.

D & K enter the courting phase.

Except I don't think K knows about it just yet.

It has come to my attention that the phrase "infinite sadness" is used too glibly.

Sadness is only semi-infinite at best. It starts at some definite time, and then continues on forever - decaying and asymptoting towards zero as a function of time.

There are two scars on my left foot.

The scars are non-descript.

I was swimming in the pool with a girl I thought I loved ('lusted after' is probably the better term) - she was on a floaty-ring-tube-thing and I was hanging onto one side of it - and thinking I'd be smart I ducked down under the water with the intention of popping back up and tipping her over, but as I reached the depths of the pool and turned upwards to pounce, I discovered that I had misjudged the depth and as I kicked to swim upwards the 'knuckle' of my right foot scraped the bottom of the pebbled pool and broke the skin which later healed over to be two little white scars on my foot.

Pretty soon after I discovered she didn't love me ("hated me and all that I stood for" might be the better term).

I was crushed because not only did she not love me - but in the same breath she told me she loved someone else. God it hurt.

And now, I have two scars.

JFK gives a speech sometime in the early 60s. It's quoted everywhere. It's about him setting course for the moon. The only bit that gets played is him saying "We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon and do the other thing.".

I'm not sure whether it's "other thing" or "other things". In the context in which it is always quoted, there's no indication what these things are.

I wonder what he was thinking about...

merkac

Why are there so many movies that suck?

There must be quite a few million bucks floating around hollywood - waiting for that one movie that the investor thinks is going to win him the big time. So why does hollywood turn out so much crap?

Granted, I like crap movies as much as the next guy - jackie chan movies, anything with the word 'alien' in the title, low-brow teen movies (tautology). However, why must they make things like "lake placid"? The plot was taken from somewhere else, the effects were OK, but the predicability was beyond level 10. You're sitting there knowing what's coming next, knowing all the pseudo-twists and just yawning your way through as if you've seen it 4000 times before.

I suppose it serves me right for paying money to see something which I know will be shit. But there's shit, and there's complete fucking shit.

Bring on more of the likes of

• amelie
• princess mononoke
• three colours (blue, white and especially red)
• rushmore
• the big blue

When they say "you get what you pay for", is that why I ain't getting any lovin'?

A recent personality profile doobrie had me as being an extremely high tactile person. That is, I learn best when given the opportunity to touch and get my hands on things, or draw or make use of methods involving tactile feedback.

And it only just occurred to me this week, that as a tactile person, I don't really get a lot of human touch. (refer to yesterday's rant). The human touch I do get sticks in my memory something fierce

• In an 11th grade chemistry class, K brushed past me on the way to put away her testtubes or something, and to this day I can still remember the feel of the fabric of her blouse brushing past my arm.
• B giving me a head scratching.
• KA putting her arms around me before we went out.
• The salty kiss of B as she walked out

You know how they say "you'll find love when you're not looking for it"? They suck, whoever they are.

I've been strenuously not looking for love for the last 2 years and it hasn't come within shouting distance. So busy have I been not looking that I've avoided even smiling or making eye contact with any female I don't know. If I looked, then I'd be looking for love, and hence if you look for it, you'll never find it.

So what do you do with such a paradox? Is it merely enough to appear to be not looking? Or does one actually have to have a solid committment to not looking, and not simply be fooling one's self that one is not looking? And how much looking is allowed? Is casual perving fine? Or do you need to limit yourself to glances only? Are you allowed to partake in nightclub-type love?

2 years is long time between drinks, and I'm almost resigned to the fact that I will actually have to look for love if I'm going to find it. Which brings me to my second point for this rant...where do you meet women these days?

A friend at uni once say a poster for a women's action thingy called "reclaim the night" - and commented that it'd be a great place to meet chicks. Mind you, this guy also thought the "women's counselling services building" would also be good. Knowledgeable women's magazines ('knowledgeable' only because they know guys read them too, and thus cater to them as well) claim that a couple of likely places are bookstores and libraries. In a word - bullshit. I've spent more time at bookstores and libraries (mainly because I really like books. Remember, I haven't been looking,..) than many people actually spend breathing. Never (to clarify "never" - i mean "never fucking ever ever") have I come close to meeting anyone in a bookstore/library. But then again I haven't been looking. But then again, you're not supposed to look, because you'll never find love when you're looking for it

To summarise: I'm stuck in a rut. Everyone's advice is wrong and I'm living my life as if it were a movie. The last available female I met went psycho (fatal-attraction-ish) for a friend instead. And at the rate at which I meet available women, even with a success rate of 50%, I'll still be waiting till doomsday.

To summarise the summary: My love life bites, but I'm doing very little about it besides passive-agressive behaviour and rants in a journal very few will read.

To summarise the summary of the summary: Accept the fact that you'll die alone.

The guy who came to install security screens was called Lloyd. He'd been doing it for 28 years.

The first comment he made as he came through the door "That's one-way view secrity mesh. I invented that. But I didn't have the money to patent it." I nodded and said "uh-huh". 28 years of doing the same job, the one good idea he'd had was not in his control anymore. I felt him searching for validation from me - I knew nothing about security screens, so this guy was trying to be the security-screen-doyen. A poor claim to fame in life; but if it's all you've got, then milk it. And so he did.

• As I was walking in, I saw that the guy next door has (technical name for old model security screen) installed. Even though he's on the second storey, I could tell at a glance.
• You can see what's happened here (points to popped rivet hole)... someone's crowbared the window and the rivet has just popped out. Probably used a 2 foot crowbar.
• That mark there is an attempt to break in. And judging by the corrosion on the marks it's less than a month old. You can tell things like the age of scratches after you've been in the business as long as I have.

28 years in the job, and his claims to fame are meagre and reaching. He wants validation that he has serious security screen knowledge, that his worth is in this knowledge. And yet, I looked at him sadly as he measured window after window with his battered tape - what could you have been? Why are you still doing this? Couldn't you do a course in criminology and be doing forensic type work or being an expert witness or something

And then I got down off my high horse. Who was I to be thinking that he'd wasted his life. If it was my life then I would feel it had been wasted. But it was his. And from the way he spoke, he was damn proud of his knowledge and the work that he did. He wanted me to be too. But i couldn't.