When colors turn back to vivid shades of gray
Erratic exclaims fading into the familiar drone
When pretenses of beauty
Yield to mediocrity
The clouds cast their caressing shadow and I'm home

Standing in the rain, the mind thirsts for a drizzle
Yearning for perfection in mistakes I make alone
When it longs to be the child that I can never be again
I don't shed tears in my sleep
I just dream that I am home.

You are an obsession.

She’s part of the sunshine-blue-skies world – where people who walk by you on the street smile, nod and wish you a good morning. She belongs where wild flowers bloom along a beaten path. She’d make you laugh. She’d make you want to say things that make her laugh. She’d have a tear in her eye every time she looks at the full moon. She’d make you want to grab her attention and hold it forever. She’d make you wish you could have another look at her after she has left. She would smile twice in all your life. She’d always walk ahead of you and tell you she’s OK. She does not have the most stunning eyes in the world. She doesn’t smell like roses or peaches. She does not giggle at your jokes. She has a twinkle in her eyes – it’s not because of you. She’s not you. You’re not her. She disappears without fading. You would forget her in a moment. You’d see her smile again when you take your last breath. You’d never know that she smiled just for you.

In some dark recess of the mind, there always exists hope. A dear friend once pointed out that hope and suspicion thrive on even the tiniest possibility of their respective existences. It is confusingly recursive but step back a bit and do a big-picture and it is plain as a pikestaff. More on that friend a little later… he does sound terribly wise though, doesn’t he?! He’s not.

Perhaps...

Perhaps it’s time to move on.

From Rushdie’s East, West:

“You laugh at my desperation. Ha! Go tell a drowning man not to clutch at straws. Go ask a dying astronaut not to sing. Come here and stand in my shoes. What was it the Cowardly Lion said? Put ‘em up. Put ‘em uuuuup. I’ll fight you with one hand tied behind my back. I’ll fight you with my eyes closed.”

-

“At sixteen, you still think you can escape from your father. You aren’t listening to his voice speaking through your mouth, you don’t see how your gestures already mirror his; you don’t see him in the way you hold your body, in the way you sign your name. You don’t hear his whisper in your blood.”

You have probably come across a dimwit or two who picks up a Michael Crichton novel and suddenly turns into a self-proclaimed expert in genetics. Calculated skims along the surface of biotechnology, with the occasional sprinkling of longish words – retroviruses with names like ACMPD3N7 (aminocarboxymuconate paraldehyde decarboxylase) that “seemed to modify responses of the amygdala and cingulate gyrus in the brain” – gives the proverbial dimwit a nice cozy illusion of having gained functional knowledge. Moreover, there are references to talking monkeys – apparently, it is just as simple as injecting the human genes responsible for speech into an ape’s embryo. Notwithstanding the pretension and the obvious lack of methodological depth there are certain sections which, when viewed as absolute entities for just the ideas they put forth, make a lot of diplomatic sense. Science and particularly geneticists have relentlessly been at odds with the notion of God and religion. Here is something out of the same book:

“The Bible tells us clearly, in Genesis 1:28 and 2:15, that God has given human beings the task, the responsibility to care for the earth and all the creatures on it. We are not playing God. We are answerable to God if we are not responsible stewards of what God has given us in all its majesty and biodiversity. That is our God-given assignment. We are the stewards of the planet.”

One has to admit that it is a decent attempt at thwarting the condemnation, which argues that God is the Universal Creator. More along those lines:

“Sometimes we hear that we shouldn’t change DNA, period. But why not? DNA is not fixed. DNA changes over time. And DNA interacts constantly with our daily existence. Should we tell athletes not to lift weights, because it will change the size of their muscles? Should we tell students not to read books, because that will change the structure of their developing minds?”

Regardless, an African grey parrot that can do math makes you want to shove the book where the sun don’t shine.

Narcolepsy.

I’m proud to the point of being conceited about having a sense of humor that nobody else “gets”. Simply put: it’s just funnier that way. Mostly, you can pretend you’re just a _little_ bit drunk and that everyone around you is brainless. And it’s an added plus when people actually make supreme asses out of themselves by, say, declaring the Internet ‘a series of tubes’, or by talking about something they have no clue about, over and above being the president of the United States. Agreed most observers find these things amusing. There have been other times when I was the only one laughing.

<TiGryphon> EvilJoven: This was taken into account when he was buried, and in fact, Darwin spins almost constantly in his grave.
<TiGryphon> THey hooked him to a generator, he powers Manhattan

-

<Botje> i'm waiting for vim's omnicompletion to become intelligent <decay> omnicompletion?
<decay> what does it do?
<decay> complete on all available sources? :)
<infi> you type in #!/usr/bin/perl -w, hit TAB, and it writes your program for you
<Botje> infi: that's for vim7.43
<infi> these newfangled neural DWIM interfaces kick ass
<decay> only question left: my editor wrote the wrong program for me, what can i do?
<integral> press tab again to begin cycling through the programs

-

<Knightmare> Well that was a night of fear and terror.
<Timork> ?
<Knightmare> I bought a bag of mushrooms and a bottle of Everclear.
<Knightmare> Settled down for a nice evening of mind altering psychadelia
<Timork> Bad trip huh?
<Knightmare> Horrible, I never want to go through it again.
<Knightmare> Somewhere along the line I installed emacs.

-

<Jim_McNeat> Is there like a way to put a compiler in "Just trust me on that one" mode?

-

And there are ones that are funny but hit too close to home to actually laugh at. You can snort though.

<malcolm> I would appreciate it more if I didn't have to set JAVA_HOME and ANT_HOME and HILL_DEPTH and AVERAGE_LIFESPAN_OF_INSECT and NUMBER_OF_LEGS and DIRECTION_OF_PREVAILING_WIND and BIRTHDAY

-

Setting classpath, among other things, is the bane of my existence.

'Dude! Take it easy,' said Yeats:

Down by the salley gardens my love and I did meet;
She passed the salley gardens with little snow-white feet.
She bid me take love easy, as the leaves grow on the tree;
But I, being young and foolish, with her would not agree.

In a field by the river my love and I did stand,
And on my leaning shoulder she laid her snow-white hand.
She bid me take life easy, as the grass grows on the weirs;
But I was young and foolish, and now am full of tears.