linterry's blogger

For the last few days I have been on a small dose of Xanax (initially 1mg/day now down to 0.5mg/day) to control my anxiety/depression. Life has somewhat returned to normal however I must admit that I no longer understand what normal really is.

I think in many ways I am the same as chynadoll18. A lot of her posts remind her of myself. I am very happy that she is able to make it through her own difficulties without any medication, however I was not so strong.

A little bit about Xanax. Whenever I take the medicine, I feel relaxed and calm. The effect is not dissimilar from alcohol however it is less stupefying and you get don't any sort of hangover. The only prolbem is if you try to discontinue Xanax suddenly, life becomes very depressing and it is difficult to maintain a positive outlook on life.

I'll write more when I have time.

i think i may be suffering from some form of panic attacks. it's driving me crazy. despite my best efforts, i was unable to sleep until around 3pm yesterday. if this continues for much longer i think i will have a mental breakdown. already i have destroyed my life and have imposed so much stress on shinobu, who doesn't deserve this kind of punishment.

well i have finally decided to go see a doctor tomorrow at the hospital and see if anything can be done. you have to undersatnd that along with the insomnia that i experience, the panic attacks make me crazy in general. i have fear of leaving the house. i have fear of anything unknown. i have fear of my own bed, of lying down and trying to close my eyes. i'm so afraid that the problem will compound itself so it double compounds itself. then i have fear that it will double compound itself so it quadruple compounds itself. i just can't stop thinking in circles. the agony is so intense, i am starting to rank it pretty much as equal to the suffering i experienced with the christine breakup.. the only thing that relieves the pain is talking to people, especially during the hours i am trying to sleep. i call my parents at the oddest hours, confessing my whole life to them, my insecurities, how much i love them, when normally there is a huge emotional distance between us.

oh, how i have fucked myself up. without a single change in the world, the whole world has changed - for the worse. i wish i could get help. but professional help usually involves some kind of outisde interaction, and i'm currently terrified of that.

i am so tired, so exhausted, but have completely lost he ability to sleep without medication. it's not even good medication, and the sleep i get is light and fitful at best.

i think i am suffering from some form of anxiety attacks, which is causing my sleeplessness. i went over my blogger over the last 1.8 years and i discovered that i have, on more than one occasion, been unable to sleep as late at 9am. However, the difference from then and now, is that now I am TERRIFIED of sleep. I have lost all confidence in my ability to fall asleep and I guess that's what's really killing me. The only time I can sleep is when I've gone way past my bedtime (which is what... like 10am now?) and I fall asleep from sheer exhaustion.

this morning (read: yesterday morning) my friend Allen was going to invite me up the mountain. already in a 1/2 zombie state i changed my mind like 15 times before actually heading out to taipei main station to meet him. I was dress like a slob and I packed random things. When I got there, I got a call from his mother that he had only just left the house. At that time I started to feel another panic attack. I called home to my girlfriend, waking her up for the 17th time that morning, just because I needed someone to talk to. I honestly felt that the whole world had become a hellish nightmare, despite it being all because of a ridiuclously tiny fact: my circadian ryhtym has shifted to a very late time.

What really kills me the most is that my girlfriend doesn't have even remotely the same kind of problem. She sleeps at will and wakes up at will. She's so HEALTHY. I truly envy her. I would readily give up any differences in intellect for her simple-minded approach to life.

I have realized that even though so many things have changed in my life, the old Torotno self in me is still alive and kicking. The one who wants to go through suffering and angst. It's been more than 4 years since I've looked up the web for pages on depression and angst. But I've been doing that recently. I live in fear of my own ability to sleep, even without a day job. That is just about the most ridiuclous thing ever. Nothing in my life has actually changed, only my perception of it. I don't know if there was a key event that triggered this. But I think it would be a good idea, after I finish the remaining projects, to take a week's vacation to Toronto. At least there, my sleep schedule will be normal - for a while.

In some ways, I believe that I have been scarred pscyhologically for life. Much like how my dad and my uncle have been on sleeping pills for the last 5 years, I somehow think I will eventually suffer the same fate. These last three years in Taiwan have been great, but I think I have cheated too much happiness out of life. This is why in some ways, those who are stressed in moderate amounts are blessed, because they can live a reasonably balanced life. Can somebody really be perpetually happy? Well, in many ways my girlfriend is a great example of such a person. She has such a healthy outlook on life: and that is: she has practically no outlook. She just lives life without worrying too much about the past or the future. I must stress that this is not something a person can accomplish consciously. You can't force yourself to not worry about the past or the future, because all the will do is make you worry even more about it. Just like how you can't force yourself to sleep because all that will make you do is NOT sleep.

I think mentally, physically, and psychologically I am in such a weak state right now. I have no willpower, no toughness, and I am not even 1% of a "man". This probably has to do with the fact that I have lived such a relaxed life for the last three years. I am somewhat afraid that if I continue this life sometime in the future, a drastic breakdown is imminent. Shinobu is just about the last pillar between relative happiness and complete darkness. If she were to disappear, i think I would lack the means to survive in this world by myself and would probably seriously start conmplating suicide. Death of a spouse = 100 points on the stress scale. The moment I write this time I feel that I have a duty to protect shinobu, a duty to protect myself and protect the future. Perhaps this is the hope, the oath I will swear to msyelf - the only real objective in my life is to protect her from harm, and to keep her in good health. Perhaps this bout of panic attacks is something that I can profit from, a way to reset my outlook on life, a way to invest for the future. All this time I have been trying to life for myself and myself. Only caring about my well-being. But is this the source of all my angst? That I am incapable of genuinely caring about other people? This will be my goal: to be a better man, to be somebody who is worthy of my girlfriend, and not some selfish prick. Yet by writing that I am already met with a bout of cynicism. No change has ever happened overnight. But perhaps this will be the start. I'm not sure. I went through three days of self-inflicted hell for no apparent reason.

I have another plan. Go back to Toronto. Reset my timeclock. Get a fresh persepctive on things. and then when I come back, I'll try to find some kind of a regular day job. Not 9-5, but something easy like teaching. I hope I can adapt. Because yeah, I don't think I continue what I'm doing for the rest of my life. It's a nice life yes, but somehow it feels like something isn't right.

thank god last morning i was able to get some sleep. i honestly swear to god promise i will never try to mess with my circadian ryhtyms ever again. I slept lightly but soundly from 11:10am'ish to 5pm. i guess that's just my body's ryhtym - and any attempt to change it was met with pain, anguish and all the crap that is associated with sleep deprivation.

some search on the internet reveals that i may have what's called DSPS (Delayed Sleep Phase Syndrome), whereby my circadian ryhtym will gradually shift forward as i tend to sleep later and later. i guess over the last 2 years, my rythym has shifted so far forward that now i wake up at 4-5 and sleep at 10-12. basically i'm on a very healthy toronto time.

i am seriously considering going back to toronto for like a month. i will need almost no adjustment. then when I come back to taiwan again

anyhow, here's my plan. since fighting this with abrupt measures (as I tried twice already) is completely futile, instead I will just live this life as it has been given to me by ... "God". The most depressing phase is between 5am-11am - 5 hours of total isolation from the world, let alone my girlfriend. But I guess I should find something meaningful to do within that time. Like go shoot hoops or something at 6am, or walk around NTU. The worst thing is to still be moping around the house thinking i should have gone to bed long ago.

i feel that no matter what i do, my body just will not cooperate iwth what my mind is tryign to do. one of the bibgggest ironiesi is the expression "trying to sleep". the moment you try, you can't sleep. and now i guess i don't really want to try, but i want to sleep. i want to have a nice long SLEEP. yet it won't come. i have called so many people and they haev given me their suport and yet at the en dof the day i am still lying awake, staring at teh ceiling, as feelings of dread, despair and hopelenesless endlessly wash over me.

why did i becmoe like this. i don't nkow. a week ago i found life to be a hundred times more nejoyable thatn this. but now it i is nothing more than a rotten hell. i won't say it's as bad as the breakup, that was pure utter comlete hell, but this is pretty bad enough.

I WILL SLEEP ANYTIME I PLEASE, ANYTIME I PLEASE ANYTIME I PLEASE. IT DOESN'T MATTER IF I SLEEP OR NOT. IT DOESN'T MATTER IF I SLEEP OR NOT. I WISH I COULD BELIEVE ALL THESE WORDS

as i thought, i stayed up from 1:30am to 7am. my life has become a living hell. and i don't know why. i think i'm going crazy. i feel like i've just broken up with my girlfriend, as if my whole world has fallen apart. and yet, nothing has changed. which drives me insane, because i don't know where the problem is. well, maybe i do. the problem is inside of me. but that doesn't help alleviate the pain one bit.

my life ryhthym has been thrown completely out of whack. and it is hell. pure hell. hell hell hell hell

why whwy hwyw hyw hwy why

i am going up the mountain with my friend allen. a buddhist dorimtory of sorts. perhaps i will find peace there. perhaps not.

well, it didn't work

i tried so hard today, i stayed up all afternoon, i had a temper tantrum, i broke my keychain, i felt at one point my heart was going to implode because it was beating too fast. yet i perservered and I made it to 10pm without sleeping. and then what happened? i got a nice 1 hour nap. lol. this is even WITH a sleeping pill. i woke up at 11:30pm, then somehow i fell alseep until 1am, and now i've been up until now (4am), my body is still wired as ever.

i think it's time for me to go back to toronto for a little bit. one things for sure i'll be able to sleep like a normal person, if my bio clock hasn't already been fucked up beyond all hope of repair. but the logistics of it terrify me. i will be without my girlfriend, who is unquestionably the foundation of my life. i will mope around my house which find I rather depressing. but strangely, i find that the house i live in now has become rather depressing too. just the sight of my bed terrifies me...

my friend allen invited me to go at 8am to a mountain in Ilan. If I still can't sleep that's exactly what I'll do I guess.

i have decided to try again and stay up as long as possible this time before sleeping in another desperate attempt to restore normalcy into my sleeping schedule. while this failed miserably 2 days ago my mother told it was because i slept too early (5pm), this time I will make every possible attempt to extend my awake hours to 9pm or ideally 10pm. just writing this number down i feel a wave of despair washing over me. thank goodness my girlfriend does not have class today otherwise i would most certainly, most definitely not be able to muster the willpower to stay awake. it is 1pm now and i have taken 3 bathss and 1 shower in the span of 5 hours just so that I don't doze off. i have pissed off my girlfriend in so many ways, messing the house up, screwing up the laundry (that i should not have touched), waking her up a billion times because i am lonely.

my body seems to be failing and undergoing severe repercussions. my heart seems to be on fire and beating irregularly and my stomach is also feeling unusually warm. if this time it fails i will seriously consider going back to toronto because i have just about had it with this retarded problem.

i've really done it now: i've fucked up my sleep schedule beyond belief. today for the first time in my entire life, I took at NAP from 4am to 5:30am. It was unbelievable. I tried to wake up super early today (2pm) and thought that if I slept a good 14 hours later (4am) without any napping, then I would entier Real Sleep and restore a semi-normal schedule. Silly me. You just can't fuck with Circadian rythyms.

I feel really depressed, because it is the worst thing in the world to be awake at 9am, thinking you should be sleeping, having nothing to do, mentally incapable to do any work, and just sitting there agonizing over why I can't sleep. The solution would be to just stay awake. But I don't want to be a fucking zombie everyday. While previously there were times when I stayed up until 8am or so and slept, these were aberrations of a fairly decent sleep schedule, and the next day or so it would return to normal. Now, somehow, over the last month, I have fucked up my Circadian ryhtym so badly that sleeping at 10am has become NORMAL.

Now it's a bit ironic that someone who works at home with his own hours is complaining about a sleep schedule, but I really can't stand it. It's killing me, because I've lost my normal rythym in life. I sure as hell don't want to wake up everyday at 7pm, but that's what it looks like now. It's unavoiable. I guess I should just cycle through another day slowly, but that will take fucking weeks, and I can't stand weeks of being awake all night long while my girlfriend is sleeping. It's so fucking depressing, that there is NOTHING I can do to cure this problem.

I should fly back to Toronto or something. Cuz right now I'm living in perfect
Torontno time. But my girlfriend can't come back with me and it'd be fucking depressing just moping around at home unable to do work. I sure as hell don't want to hang arond my mom all day, that is surefire way to make things blow up.

I should get a day job to fixate my rythym. But how the heck can I get a job now with my sleep schedule fucked up as it is now. In any case I've become so incapable of meshing with society that I'd probably be fired in a few days.

There is nothign I can do. I feel so goddamn helpless. I endured two full days of irregular sleep schedules and insetad of helping the situation, it's fucked it up even more. 9am. can't sleep. it's only 9am, maybe I should be glad. i slept at 10am the day before, and at 4pm the day before (which led to a series of naps all the way until the next morning). you can imagnie this is not a good life. and i have no fucking clue how to fix it. willpower is certainly not the answer. maybe I should just go with the flow. take the depression like a man. yeah. maybe that's it. just take the goddamn depression like a man.

Circadian Rythyms: the difference between Nap Time and Official Sleep

this was my schedule for "yesterday" (technically, it's still "today")

3:00pm: wake up
4:30pm: eat lunch
5:00pm: sleep
6:00pm: wake up

9:30pm: eat dinner with shinobu and her teacher buddies

1:30am: sleep
4:45am: wake up

11:15am: now

what i find fascinating is that the 3.75 hours of sleep i had from 1am to 4:45am don't count as "Official Sleep" but rather has been classfiied by my body as "Nap Time". what is blowing my mind is that sometimes i only get 3.75 hours of Official Sleep and I can feel alert and awake the next day. but the same 3.75 hours of Nap Time cannot be counted towards Official Sleep. so right now I feel overdriven. like I should've gone to bed ages ago. i have a hard time typing this blog. i have a hard time focusing on anything. those 3.75 hours of Nap Time meant jack shit. if I had 3.75 hours of Official Sleep I'd feel much different right now.

so what is the real difference between Nap Time and Official Sleep? they are certainly not the following:

- the length (naps are generally shorter but not always)
- absolute starting time (I just managed to "nap" from 1:00am to 4:45am, a time when most people usually "sleep")
- R.E.M. content (i actually have more vivid dreams during naps)

the real difference is this: Official Sleep can only occur at a very speicfic time in our daily circadian cycle: at the end of the day. sleep anytime else and it gets filed under Nap Time. this dichtomoy gives rise to intersting possibilities like... can you combo a Nap Time into Official Sleep? For instance, if you live on a normal schedule, can you have a Nap Time from 8:30pm to 11:30pm, wake up for 15 minutes and then go into Offiical Sleep from 11:45pm to 7:00am. My personal experience is no. If you take a Nap Time too close to the current Official Sleep.Start Time, the Official Sleep.Start Time will get pushed back. So you can't combo them, unfortuantely.

Can you trick your body into believing that a long Nap Time is the same as a short Official Sleep? From today's/yetserdya's epxerience, absolutely not. The body automatically knows whether any given sleep period is one or the other. So you can't have a 4 hour Nap Time and then go 12 hours without sleep like you would after 4 hours of Official Sleep. Well you could try but the experience would be very different, you'll feel like you should've gone to sleep 10 hours ago all day long.

whenever i walk into a store with caged animals i feel my whole body tingle with goddamn agony. i don't know why i do it but i automaticaly imagine myself being one of those animals, caged up, sitting 3cm away from my own shit and piss, having nothing to do except to sit there and wait for somethign to happen. one day if i ever lose it one of the first things i'll do is go into the store with a sledgehammer and bash open the cages setting the animals free. i'm not saying this because i want y'all to think i'm some kind of lovey dovey animal freak (although that will be an inevitable consequence). i'm saying this because i really can't stand the idea of a caged mammal. for some reason though insects and smaller fish are okay provided they are with good company.

... anyhoo.

i'm just loving the new speakers. my ear has healed completely and i can enjoy making music again. can you believe that a a pair of super expensive flat freuqency monitors could totally ruin someone's thoughts and feelings about music? what's scarier is that the spekears don't sound "wrong" in any way, it's just that, by listening to music through them, i don't get any feeling. i just hear sounds. it's the scariest thing in the world and i swear to god i will never ever ever buy another pair of lousy "monitors" for my primary audio system. i hope you won't to. it's a caveat to think we can get higher audio "quality" by buying monitors. in fact all you are getting is a sonic scalpel. it's not much fun to play with.

my girlfriend drew this pic of me yesterday. i really got a big laugh out of it. because that's really the way i am at home, captured to a T. for Terri.

i sold the msp5's
i got a new pair of altec lansing cs21, which only cost 1/4 of the msp5's
and now i'm back into music again
it was those goddamn speakers! i swear to god i fukkin hate yamaha products now. those lousy pieces of shit just sounded so goddamn harsh and artificial, even though they seem to come off as super clear and precise.



now back to the altec lansing cs21's. in a testing room full of practically every altec lansing and klipsch speakers, this one really stood out above the crowd. why? cuz it sounded NORMAL. man i swear to god it's absolutely disgusting how speakers are sold with all the whizbangs and gadgets. one of the altec lansing speakers was so screwed up, it was like a "multi-speaker", the left and right channels had three speakers firing in different directions. it sounded okay but nothing sounded as natural as the cs21's. which were so cheap, it's unbelievable that such good quality is available at such a low price. i guess speakers, like televisions, have long reached their "peak" technology wise, and all that's left is for marketing to corrupt them by adding all sorts of screwed up features so they stand out of the crowd. i guess this is because speaker quality is not measurable. well technically people try to measure it's quality by the frequency response chart. but if that's the case then the msp5's would've been way better. instead it's the goddamn other way around.

what did i learn from this whole stupid speaker replacement fiasco? that even if you have money, you can't buy quality. one thing's for sure, even if i had a zillion dollars, i would NEVER buy one of those horrific "flat screen LCD's" for my primary TV. i have yet to see one that has proper color reproduction and can render NTSC signals as naturally as a good old CRT. and given my addiction to checking out all the electronic showrooms, i've seen some prety expensive ones.

the best stuff is the old stuff, made at a time when people were not so obsessed with novelty and when engineers and companies had more old-fashioned values: simple designs done well. i actually feel EXTREMELY lucky that i could find a speaker set like the CS21. it sounds sort of like the klipsch (which cost twice as much when i bought it), but even better.

it's 9:24am and i'm still not asleep. i think i'm going to go for a mcdonalds breakfast. damn those mcmuffins are the shit. thank god i do not have a 9 to 5 routine. or else i'd be seriously fucked.

anyways, i'm real happy now that i can listen to all my music again and not have it be some kind of freakin mental exercise in musical deconstruction. to tell you the truth i think the msp5's hurt my ears in some ways, becuase while i was talking to my mom on the phone today i noticed my right ear was really irritated by certain frequencies, while my left ear was fine. i sure hope that shit heals.

of all the video games in the world, street fighter 2 is by far the greatest of them all. to this day i still load up sf2:ce in winkawaks and have a go. having logged in probably over ten thousand hours of my life to this game and all its variants, i have pretty much memorized all of its peculiarties. things like: how guile's flash kick is actually the strongest at the beginning animation when he smells his armpits. now does that really make any goddamn sense? it should be the strongest at the peak. but instead, it's when he's smelling his armpits. of all the guile flash kicks ever executed in this universe probably 90% of them have connected like in the pic above. it's too bad they removed this quirk from charlie in the alpha series because i just love it. that frame of animation is just so goddamn perfect yet it doesn't make any sense.

384x224 pixel art. it's goddamn beautiful. even when pixel resized to 640x480.

since i have stopped playing warcraft i have realized that my life has pretty much lost most of its meaning. as sad as it sounds, i refuse to give in to my escalating desires for "i want more". it's so silly. yeah, maybe i want more money, maybe i want more studio equipment, maybe i want a more successful career, but the thought that it's only a matter of time before they will mean nothing pretty much dampens the motivation, which was already a passing thought to begin with.

yeah pretty much the only thing that gives me a kick nowadays is food, coffee and alcohol. but i can only consume so much in a day before my body normalizes and i start to feel nothing. i think i have perma-normalized my brain to any form of recorded music. it's so awful, i really can't listen to anything anymore. everything just seems like annoying noise. i am suspecting that perhaps the yamaha msp5's are the culprit, because this whole phenonemon began with their arrival. but i'm not sure. i've disconnected them in an attempt to restore my original taste for music, but after two days no luck. i can no longer hear music. i just hear multiple sequencer tracks in pro tools. my mind automatically goes searching for the required hihats, kicks, the bass line, backing harmonies, and once i've found them all, and i've identified the sounds, my mind loses complete interest. i still like singing at random outside. that still feels good. but i just can't stand the idea of reproducing the exact same music again through speakers and just sitting there and listening, becuase there's really nothing to listen to. i'd much rather listen to a random conversation snippet with my girlfriend.

likewise, i'm having a very hard time finding inspirattino to write any music. i just think it's so dumb and silly that everytime i have to write something, it can't just flow from me. i have to meticulously enter the MIDI data piece by piece into the sequencer, then quantize it, then shuffle it around, then fill the obligatory holes so that the music flows well from beginning to end. it's a lot of annoying and tedious work. the inspirational part is so short, so fleeting. i think the only thing that would get me excited again maybe is if I got a chance to play live with a band or something. the sheer energy and synchronization would probably be something to relish. but as a solo composer, sitting in a chair for hours without end constantly inserting part after part to complete the "full sound", it really does get old after a while. and when you already know the results are only going to sound at a certain level, that kills the motivation even more.

oh, how i crave something new and worthwhile to pursue. it is such a childish impulse, and yet without childish impulses i feel like a robot, just doing my duty to society. oh, and i've been whacking off on average two times a day. it must be a symptom or something.

one thing i love being in taiwan is that i can watch all the big european football games. in particuarily i just love watching the champions league. the best football clubs in europe playing against each other, it's just incredible to watch. the results seem to be much more volatile than the domestic leagues, and i suppose that can be explained by the fact that some times are more dependent on knowing the opposition's style. of the remainig four teams (liverpool, chelsea, ac milan, and psv), only chelsea and milan are domestic league leaders.

this year i would like to see either liverpool or ac milan win. i like those two clubs. i sure as HELL do not want to see this man's team win



jose mourinho, manager of chelsea. supposedly brash, arrogant,and disrepectful. also really brilliant. for some reason even though I don't know all the details of what goes on with him and chelsea, he seems to play a lot of mind games.

i've gotten myself into a rut lately and i don't even know what's causing it. i'm still getting good work, still hanging out with my girlfriend, still doing all the same shit i've been doing before. i'm still seeing people, going to the studio more often than ever these last few weeks. it's just, everything feels the same now. dull. same. my mind is craving for something new. i find that i shoudl be the least qualified to say somethign like this because as a musician i have the perfect outlet for "new" i guess i'm just too used to the whole "making music" thing. it's always beats, bassline, melody, and chords. i suppose the next level would be to increase production values (which is really the only way to make people listen to stuff nowadays) but i've already went down that dark path briefly and i realized it's useless trying to compete with people with multi-million dollar budgets and a whole team of talented producers and engineers. i sure as hell don't want to be famous. i don't even want to "succeed" and have a bunch of money sitting in my bank account. i have no clue whatsoever on how to manage money. i'm not even interested. i'd probably just wire the bulk of it to my dad and let him handle it. he's pretty good at that stuff. i don't want to bury myself with possessions that i can't let go of.

i think what i would really want right now, more than anythign else, the one thing that would make me smile so much and probably help me sleep, is if my girlfriend's sister rino came to live with us. this will never actually happen. but i imagine that if it did, the whole incident would affect me in a very positive way. for one thing rino is probably the only person on this planet whom i feel i don't comprehend at all. i feel like i can reach a mututal undersatnding on certain terms with pretty much everybody i meet, not a big deal really, just like how niggers will say "i feel ya, bro". they want money, they want success, they want to experience something new, they want to get away from the boredom and monotony of their environment, they want attention and social respect... and this reflects in their actions. but rino wants nothing more than the simpliest of simple lives, and she is content. for me that is probably what i want more than anything else. i want to stop craving for new things all the time, because i believe so strongly in the dy/dx theory that i almost feel like an idiot everytime i try to upgrade something in my life. i still end up doing it, but i feel like an idiot. actually shinobu is quite a bit like rino. she has little desire for ugprading. she's annoyingly simple too. but i guess i'm a bit tired of shinobu. i'd like her sister for a change. i don't just want any girl right now, i want rino. even though we can barely have a conversation without the awkwardness meter shooting straight up, i think just being near her makes me feel alive again. i can't believe i'm saying this but this is how i really feel. of course, i have to play along with reality, so nothing will ever happen. but that's okay. i'd just like to be in her presence and at least see her and see if any kind of "special" relationship develops. besides shinobu is my outlet for sexual needs and affirmation. rino is more of an expansionist desire. i'm intersted in the chemistry.

today i took chisato morshita's body and put rino's face on it. i showed it to my gf. she didn't really care.

i just saw this really wicked good quality clip of a hot girl getting fucked at a mardi gras party, for all that i can tell it was real. she looked like she was really high on something, which makes it believable. i don't have the link but just hop over to http://www.puretna.com/top_torrents.php and look for a mardi gras clip. it's really good, even though you don't see much and there's like only two positions, that's what makes it so hot.

for some reason watching that clip made me reminisce of the one single time i went to a trance party, got high on ectasy + marijuana and just got lost in the music. i think if i had friends who could hook me up with going to these places on a consistent basis i would have gotten lost in such a crowd, very easily. i derive so much pleasure from the senses. Indulgence is my number one sin. without coffee and alchohol every day i think life would be pretty difficult. in fact i'm already fearing the summer because there will be no more soccer and no more basketball, which are two great ways to kill time.

i guess i have my parents to thank for keeping me out of trouble becuase they really overprotected me for most of my life, and sort of planted a "Conservative Seed" inside of me. but i think the power of that seed is waning and I have difficulty controlling myself. between [What's Good for Me] and [What Feels Good], i tend to stray towards the [What Feels Good]. I dont' think I'll make a responsible parent. I've never been a responsible person anyhow. I guess that's just my nature.

Man, what I wouldn't give to go to a huge trance hall, full of old school techno/trance from guys like Paul Oakenfold and Chemical Brothers and any artist that puts at least some chords and melodies above the beats. Get high on E, and just dance like an idiot. Yeah, fortunately, such places are not accessible for me. So I just resort to coffee and alcohol and maintain relatively modest stimulation. It's just that it has a tendency to escalate.

i know i spew tons of crap on this blogger from time to time. when i review some of the stuff i wrote i usually can't even read it over be cause it's so awful. but the one theory that i find has held true time and time and time and time again is the dy/dx theory. that most happiness is derived by motion, by difference, not by static states.

two years ago if you told me i could have the life i am living now i would have been real pleased. five years ago when i was still moping around in toronto with a total shit life i probably would have died out of sheer ecstasy. but now that i've stablized in my job i find that there are really only a few staple things that really make my day shine. those are:

1. coffee/alcohol
2. great food
3. relaxed conversation with people i like
4. sex/porn
5. watching/playing sports
6. music

but how about:

1. having a job that i get to wake up and sleep anytime i please
2. relatively zero stress compared to most jobs
3. total financial secruity thanks to my dad
4. nearly complete freedom to do whatever i please
5. having a customized built pc that is super quiet hooked up to flat frequency monitors for audiophile quality sound
6. being able to look up any kind of information on the internet instantly and download porn/videos/xangas at incredible speeds and listen to gigabytes of mp3's on demand.
7. living in a nice apartment next to a night market
8. i graduated from university and i'm not a total bum.
9. i can write music, speak japanese, chinese and english fluently, and know more about say computers and music technology than the average person.

the truth is, right now, i just about derive zero pleasure (or pain) from these things. the only time they would matter to me is if:

- it disappears or is degraded. then i will frantically try to replace it
- it is upgraded. then i will derive about three coffees worth of pleasure from it.
- i am able to witness something that reminds me how great it is. then i will derive about one sip of coffee's pleasure worth from knowing that i still have it

the real difference betwee the two lists is that the top list of pleausres are most animalistic and thus are not dy/dx dependent. you can enjoy good food all the way till you die. the second list however is strictly dy/dx dependent and thus any type of happiness derived from these categories comes only from the upgrade. you cannot milk the fact that you have a no-stress job to perpetually bring you glee until you die. it will eventually mean nothing to you (side note: a stressful job however will perpetually torture you until you die - tragic isn't it?) the other problem is that you can also derive much angst and pain from the possible degradation. the more you have, the more you stand to lose, right? but the great thing from food is that unless you are forced to eat the same stuff or really awful stuff everyday, it will always make you feel good. as long as you don't overdo it, you're fine. i should following my own advice re:music. i'm going to stop listening to modern music for a while until my appetite returns.

now for the important thing: i think any life filled with an abundance of the first category stuff is a good one. as long as you have stable access to them, life will be good. but in order to make life fantastic, you probably need a good helping of upgrading from something of the second category. since life can't perpetually keep getting better without it escalating to some kind of 24-hour orgy fest, life cannot be perpetually fantastic. but life can be perpetually good if one strucutres his or her own life around getting good access to stuff from the first category. i think as north americans however we have an addiction problem to dy/dy type orgies. hence the endless amount of upgrading this, upgrading that, buying new tv's new speakers, new this, new that, more money, more capital, better investments, higher profit margins. it's a vicious cycle. this is probably the key difference between most people in the world and say simple people in tropical countries. tropical country emphaisize the frist category and care little for the second (unless they are living in third world conditions of course), whereas everyone else in the world pretty much focuses on the second kind. what's scary is that many people tend to sacrifice the first category for the second. the second is unsustainiable. you can get orgies from the upgrading but the more you upgrade the easier it is for all of it to fall apart. the first is very easily sustainiable. hell you just have to live on a small primtiive village on a tropical island and you've got pretty much all of category one covered. but let's think of all the stuff that is required to say sustain's a CEO's life. on second thought, let's not. he's so far up the spiral i cannot even begin to picture the web of complexities that surround his life.

i should point out that it's not that north american people are guilty or somehow "genetically greedy". it's the culture really, and how it came into emergence is probably a deep historical problem. the north american world pretty much looks like one big fucking ladder - a ladder to "success". but if i say go to okinawa, very few people think like this. at first i though they were just all liars or people in denial, but i swear to god after being there five times it's for real. these people live in such a simple world. there really is no struggle, no rush to "make it happen". they just want to eat/drink, do some kind of simple job, and then relax at home in front of tv with the family. for some reason the same kind of life, viewed in a north american context, seems a bit... lame. in north america unless you've got a kickass apartment and a kickass car and a kickass job with a kickass salary you are not there yet. and the pressure is on. to work hader, make more money. in the small economic context of okinawa even if you work at a conveneicne store all your life you are not deemed a failure.

well i know it's suspicious that i make okinawa sound like paradise. it's not paradise though. because they don't get much pleasure from the upgrading department, their life is just good. but at least it's consistently good. the same can't be said about my life. even though i have good amoutns of the first department, for some reason that probably has to do with my north american upbrginging, a lack of upgrading of the 2nd department equals disappointemnt. i guess despite all my conscientious efforts to stop putting pressure on myself, i still do. i still feel like i haven't lived up to what i should be. except i have no clue what that is. but my girlfriend, and her sisters, they've got it made already. because they have no expecations. they just want to eat/drink/sleep/hang out with bf and that's it. they do not need a fancy job in a skyscraper with a fancy business card to feel like they've made it. but i probably do. if i had such a job i'd feel like a kickass person, for the first 10 days. anyhow. yeah. i guess it's too bad i can't "okinawanize" myself. i'd really love to. i really want to uncomplicate myself. it's just too bad i can't. i'll just focus on the lovely cup of coffee tomorrow. yeah baby.