h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Well I really thought I was going to be posting this journal a lot earlier in the day, but not only has this computer been slow and unresponsive today, but also the hootoo server seems to be bosy today too... maybe 'coz it's still the weekend for most of the world. Also doesn't help that I've been feeling kinda fuzzy-brained all day, and I've sortof been waiting to wake up a bit so that I don't dribble on too much... oh bugger too late.

However in an effort to stay awake during this morning's lecture, (can you blame me? It included phrases like: "The transitive closure provides reachability information about a digraph." ) I started writing down the stuff that I'd been meaning to add to a journal entry and either I keep forgetting whenever I'm online, or I only thought of it during the weekend. So, because my brain is set to simmer, I'm just going to go through that stuff and see what spills out onto the page, rather than use this opportunity to say something interesting.

"I am driven not by desire, nor by the interpreted will of an unseen diety. I am driven neither by hunger nor passion nor instinct. My only calling is to a sense of loss, beckoned by the desire to fill my hollow and fragile spiritual shell with the trappings and artifacts of a materialistic age.
Siddhartha weeps."
I'm sure there was a point to this passage, but what seemed real at 3am this morning is, of course, completely fogbound twelve hours later. Some kind of analysis of my deeper desires in life, or something.

Is it healthy to be seeking emotional, sexual, and social fulfilment in three separate and distinct forums? Am I losing the capacity to successfully assimilate these three dimensions into one? What other choice do I have, at this time? Some advice would be nice. A RL hug would probably be better. It may be all I need, in fact. I don't know.

I recently came across a particularly lucid description of the physical properties of our universe, in a book on consciousness (written by a guy named Professor Edwin Boring! You know it's a bad day when...) The description involved the terms: 'intensity, extensity, and protensity,' thus the subject name of this journal. The basic idea is that each of these three relate to the measurement of the three basic dimensions of physical properties, using the cgs standard (centimeters, grams, seconds). They relate to the measurement of mass, volume, and duration, respectively. I figure it's worth noting here not just because it seems a particularly apt summation to me, and I get the impression I'm going to need to refer to it later somehow, but also because I figure I can use this concept for the responsive music generation software.
If I can somehow link representational objects to attributes in these three dimensions, I may also be able to use those attributes in the musical representation. Two points: obviously those dimensions have sub-dimensions themselves, for example the three volumatic dimensions of our perceived universe (x y and z), and also several dimensions for time - acceleration is measured in the comparison of two of them: acceleration is delta v over delta t, and velocity (v) is delta d (distance) over delta t (time), thus acceleration is distance over time over time; or distance over time squared.
Anyway. Um. Point two: these attributes make no mention of qualitative values, what we think of as adjectives in language must by their nature have a different representation both in music and in an object-based coded-value system. It's pointless to think of them as stochastic, indescrete entities. ("What a crumbly yellow voice you have...")
At this point I'd really like to try extreme synesthesia for a while. It might help me come up with a solution to this. Or it might drive me completely mad, but hey I'm willing to take that risk; there's no proof that I haven't already done so. At least traffic would look pretty. Probably.

As promised, a quick mention of my current name-quip: I realised last night that I'm spending a disproportionate amount of time mentally checking off song lyrics or other similar quotes for suitability as a name-quip. I realised that all of these phrases in the past have been either lyric shards, hoping to express my artistic being, stolen quotes, hoping to find a mutually relatable topic, or simple facts about myself, hoping to find a friend who can relate to me in turn.
It seems to me that this is, on the whole, an act of futility, and ultimately an act of one who is simply desperately seeking companionship and understanding.
So, in a blatant attempt to to quit my addiction to this self-eroding behaviour, I changed my name to Jerms... Cellar door.
This quip reveals nothing about myself. I hope. In fact it's a reference made in a movie about a quote that someone else had made previously, which I happen to like. I thought about simply reverting to the name Jerms, but I guess I'm not a cold-turkey kind of a guy. Obviously I need /some/ kind of security blanket, even if it's just a metaphor about a metaphor.

I was rather close to having another mental breakdown over the weekend. Luckily I was interrupted in a timely manner by my friend Reg... um. Yeh, Reg, I think I called him. And then R3 came over, too, but only 'coz she was annoyed at her boyfriend. Again. I haven't really been home since, which partially explains my mental fuzziness, but at least I haven't had the breakdown yet.
This probably won't be the last you hear about it, because I can still feel it in the back of my mind, crouching like a snake unblinking and waiting to strike. Also, it's vaguely worrying me that I had a mental breakdown around about this time last year, and the year before that, and the year before that, and the year before /that/. Which I hadn't realised before but it strongly suggests there's something wrong with septembers. It doesn't seem to be Seasonal Affective Disorder; I've already bought that t-shirt and it doesn't fit.

I would like to be full of gorm. I don't know what gorm actually /is/, but I figure it's probably better to be gormful than gormless.

Does anybody know what a pandanus is? The word keeps popping into my mind at the moment, and I've only ever heard it once, during my first-year linguistics paper, four years ago. I wrote a comment in the margin of my notes at the time, saying: "What the heck is a pandanus?", but the lecturor never mentioned it again and I forgot to ask. Why I'm thinking about it so much now, I don't know.

Yeah I think that's all. Unless something else rears its head in the next five minutes, like has happened every other time I've posted a journal in the last fortnight or so. Let's see... *posts*

Actully no I didn't post yet; I previewed the journal first. Lucky. I was also going to mention this: I did an online psychological test an hour or so ago, hoping that it would give me an insight to my current mental health, but no. It just gave me a personality type instead. Ah well, here it is anyway:

Your Personality Type:
Lover
Your kindness, altruism, and sincere enjoyment of people make you the Lover. You are the kind of person who genuinely enjoys and admires others and isn't afraid to show it. You value your friends and loved ones above all, and would drop any project to be at a friend's side. Your interactions with others are characterized by warmth, openness, and caring, and your empathy and altruism do not go unnoticed. Your emotional stability and ability to give to others are gifts.

Pretty flattering, but I wonder if that has something to do with the fact that the test also showed my depressive tendencies. Perhaps they try to word the conclusions nicely for people who seem too fragile to hear the blatant truth. Interesting concept, at least.

Screw it, I'm not going to preview this extra bit. Bite me. *posts properly this time*

ah jerms. it was a rather sad journal entry... and i'm sorry i didnt notice it sooner, its the first i hadnt posted to immideately since i started being notifyed about them... ...somehow i feel i've let you down by doing that...

"A RL hug would probably be better"
i'm much too far away to give you an rl hug.!!! its so intensly frusterating for me. i'd love to bef there for you right now! but for the time being all i can do is this...

"So, in a blatant attempt to to quit my addiction to this self-eroding behaviour,"
ack! is taht what that is??? i was afraid so... i do that too... i'm not creative to some up wiht anything myself... but i can certainly appreciate others creativity. especailly in music...

i think taht discription was very accurate for you... or atleast all i know of you.
in some ways it sounded a little like me as well. especialy "You value your friends and loved ones above all, and would drop any project to be at a friend's side."
and please believe me when i say that if i could be there for you right now i would.