Rational Action

Oh god, I’m fucking myself over so badly. I don’t care. Onwards certainly, upwards maybe.

I saw Brother’s Past + The New Deal last night at the Bowery Ballroom. It was incredible. I took pictures, and I just got them back. They came out badly. Dammit. Not enough white light, and a poor attention to detail by yours truly. Blame the music, just please don’t blame me.

Maybe I don’t know enough about the whole scene, but I’m going to try to describe how I felt during the show. The New Deal do an excellent job manipulating the crowd. It helps if you’ve heard the song beforehand. They’ll start with a basic pattern, just enough to get you dancing and keep you interested. They’ll play that a bit. The energy builds and you start wanting to hear that beautiful riff. You know it’s coming, the question is how long will you have to wait to feel it. And I think ‘feel’ is an accurate verb.

They build towards the riff, maybe even hint at it a bit. Maybe play a few notes from it, but not enough. You’re not there yet. Then back to fast, fast drumming. They’re going to break into that riff and reach the high of the song, but you don’t know quite when — The New Deal keep you guessing better than anyone I’ve heard. Then, finally:

Bliss.

I’m not trying to say it’s sexual or anything.

Another very odd experience. (Click on the “Dream” category link to see my other one) with sleep paralysis. This time I was taking an afternoon nap (it always happens with naps for me). I popped out of my dream and into semiconsciousness.

It actually took me a few seconds to realize I was paralyzed, since I often lay in my bed with my eyes closed as I wake up. I noticed a slight buzzing in my ears — I tend to hear that during these episodes. I attempted to move my limbs but no go. Then I tried to breathe faster, and noticed I couldn’t, and became slightly panicked. Actually, I think I might have had some control over my breathing. I noticed some control of my body coming back, in fact. Then the weird thing happened:

The buzzing in my ears increased, and I actually fell back further into the paralysis. I then made a more concerted effort to wake up, and did so successfully. I walked across the room and realized that I had only started napping 12 minutes earlier.

Zie frankenpantsen are here. Looken:

I called up the Bowery Ballroom and found out their wonderful photo policy: I just need to be on “The List.” Then I gave a ring to the manager of Brother’s Past and got the band’s permission. They said I’d need to speak to The New Deal as well. I was worried, because The New Deal is a more popular band, and as bands get more popular, their photo policies seem to get more restrictive.

I was wrong! I called their “Tour Cell Phone” and got the immediate OK from the manager. I can take pictures there on Saturday. Sweet!

In case you haven’t figured out yet, I downloaded the Tears for Fears song Head Over Heels. It’s the one that plays at the beginning of Donnie Darko during the cut through school with the kid snorting the coke or whatever in front of his locker.

After much anticipation, Marisa and I successfully patched my pants yesterday. Now they are Frankenpants with an odd sewed square around the hole. But so much warmer!!

Chris, Marisa, and I all played pool. I was on fire. I eliminated Chris. It seemed that our plan to hustle people at 1020 would be a surefire success. We saw moneybags before our eyes.

However, when our masculinity was finally put to the test, with Marisa, Emily, Jenn, and her 2 friends watching our every move, we turned into little girls. We cracked under the pressure and lost big time.

Our failures behind us, we decided it was time for an adventure: Soha. Tension was running high this time because rumor had it that Soha failed its food inspection tests. Of course, that didn’t stop us. No one could stop us. No one, except some sketchy guy.

Sketchy guy sticks his head between Jenn and Jenna.
SG: Hey girls, can I see some action?
(They make lively conversation, but ultimately decide no, no action.)
Jenn: NO WE ARE WITH ADAM
(At this point I wedged myself between SG and the girls to protect them with my manly strength “to talk to Chris”)
Me: CHRIS WHAT DID YOU SAY?
Chris: Huh?
And sketchy guy vanished into the abyss.

If you ever catch me trying to pick up drunk girls in a sketchy bar, just hit me. Say, “Adam what has become of you,” and look down at the ground like you’re real disappointed at me. Because in that case, you should be — but your shame should be of no comparison to my own.

When I awoke… I registered for classes. More on that later.

I did my radio show at 4am this morning, solo because Frankie mysteriously disappeared into the trenches of the Barnard library. Somehow or another I managed to fill it with some interesting music. I probably only had one or two listeners for the first hour, but for some reason after that two strangers magically appeared and started IM’ing WBARrequest. One even said I had a great radio voice! So that sort of made my day, even though I had been up for 20+ hours at that point. I even found the damn Wilco song I was looking for.

I awoke at 11AM and registered for classes. Here is my prospective schedule (Classes I’m sure about in Bold, others in Italics):

(This is probably going to be boring. Skip to the “My Analysis” section for something short.)

Yesterday I was working on my new site when I discovered that Mozilla 1.6 alpha wouldn’t publish it properly. I tried to downgrade to Mozilla 1.5, but it would go pause on startup, remaining alive but using 0% CPU. I decided to reboot.

When Windows XP started up, I got an error that shlwapi.dll could not be found, and hence winlogon.exe (the program that logs you into your computer) could not run. Huh? Where did it go?

Well, it was gone and I needed to get it back. I booted into Knoppix (a Debian-based Linux distribution on a CD) and checked out my directories. shlwapi.dll had ceased to exist. I made a friend send me her copy of it. Then I did something pretty stupid:

I enabled experimental NTFS write support on my Windows XP partition.

The attempt at copying shlwapi.dll back failed with some system error, and Knoppix refused to show my c:windowssystem32 directory from that point forward. Ooops, just a little filesystem corruption.

I used an old, burned copy of Windows XP to attempt to get to the recovery console, but lo and behold it wouldn’t accept my Administrator password. Huh? ntpasswd did the trick, resetting the Administrator password.

After some fiddling and following of the directions on some forum, I was able to get my system to start up and permit me to login. But Windows then refused to give me a start menu because it was missing shdocvw.dll. Huh? Looks like I wasn’t having a problem anyone had diagnosed before! I copied the file over from an XP cd, but Internet Explorer still wasn’t working!

I threw up my hands and did an in-place reinstall of XP. An hour later I was presented with an activation dialog, which refused to work over the Columbia ethernet because XP seemed to think I needed to dial up to my ISP. I called ‘em up and all went smoothly. Norton Antivirus popped up a dialog box saying that the Welchia worm had been detected. I quickly installed a few patches to keep my computer from being infected.

Mozilla still refused to work, so I created a new profile and copied the necessary files from my old one. I should not have had to do that. At least it’s working now.

My analysis:

Microsoft has released software with tons of security holes. They’re doing the right thing by patching them, but these patches may have little conflicts that can cause big problems. Especially with computer users like myself, who like to install things but reboot later. Somehow or another, some rather important Windows system files were deleted rather than updated.

The solution: more review of code, better testing of patches, and an increased focus on getting things right the first fucking time. I should not have to download 2 patches per week. How come the average Linux box can get by with so many fewer patches, when it has to focus on remote and local holes? Sigh.

(As for Mozilla crapping itself: at least I had the know-how to fix it. I was using an Alpha version, so if it happened because of that, I have only myself to blame.)

Yesterday I watched Donnie Darko for the second time in 8 days. It made more sense this time. Here’s an interview with the writer/director and an essay about it. I think the key has something to do with the motion paths. Everyone has them, but for some reason Donnie is capable of seeing them. As his teacher notes, by being able to see your path into the future, you are given the option to choose against it. So it seems Donnie is forced into a world where God gives him no predetermined direction and he must choose for himself. Furthermore, his conversation with his psychotherpawhatever provides this choice quote:

Dr. Lilian Thurman: The search for God is absurd?
Donnie: It is if everyone dies alone.

So Donnie doesn’t quite fit into the movie’s setting, which Drew Barrymore’s character explains as one of apathy. That all of this occurs in 1988 in the middle of a doomed Democratic presidential bid (President Dukakis?) only reinforces the conversative undertones.

Would it be correct to view the movie as atheistic and existential? I’m still a bit perplexed. Why does Donnie die? When he sees the motion path in front of him, does he get to choose whether to follow it? Or is he forced along for the ride? It would seem that the answer to that question would decide whether the movie was existential or not. Help!

Helpful thought: maybe Donnie was aware that only a chance saved him from being hit by that jet engine. Thus he spends the movie trying to cope with death (idea borrowed from the essay linked above).