Home
Lionheart's Journal
 
[Most Recent Entries] [Calendar View] [Friends]

Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in Lionheart's LiveJournal:

    [ << Previous 20 ]
    Tuesday, November 17th, 2009
    6:42 am
    Sick on a Tuesday morning....
    I'm sick. I don't like being sick. I especially don't like being sick nights. Now this type of sickness is not a fever sickness as with a fever sickness I am usually unable to sleep, or, have to force myself to sleep only to experience the monotony of 2 minute dreams in which I perform a basic, boring task and somehow have my attention horribly focused upon it. i.e. the putting on of socks. I'd be forcing myself to remain in the sleep state only to wake up in hot sweat.And going back to sleep again. And the socks again. And waking up. Each period lasting seemingly a couple of minutes.

    No, I'm sick with a different sickness. Some sort of infection but no fever. My lymph nodes are enlarged, swollen. This started on Saturday the 7th. Maybe it was building up earlier. Recently my throat started to hurt. Maybe I should take up singing while sick. I lost my voice due to a cold once and had to force air through it to make loud noises that came out as high pitched squeaks. I could finally sing like a castrato with my balls intact. It was actually a good time knowing that I can do this for a while until my regular voice returned.

    When I went back to Moscow with my family in the summer of '02 I spent a whole day talking in my Stephen Hawking voice. That is that while we normally talk while exhaling I was talking while inhaling. My vocal chords, not being used to this, take upon a sort of vibratory machine/voice synthesis sound and I walk around sounding like the old English cosmologist himself. But after  of about half a day of this humorous endeavor something clicked and I started to sound normal while talking while inhaling. However, to my amusement, I discovered that now talking "normally" (as in when exhaling) I now sounded like a machine. This lasted for a bit. I think a few minutes because I didn't want my regular voice to remain that way so I stopped the inhale-talking and kept quiet for most of the rest of that day.

    I still remember a specific aspect of that summer. Sitting in the kitchen in the middle of a summer Moscow night, drinking tea, trying to write (pen on paper) and looking out the window at the boulevard below. It was the apartment of a family friend and he had not used it since his mother had died. If memory serves it was, like most Russian apartments, filled with books. With books placed perpendicularly behind the regular stacks in order to save shelf space. There is something inspiring about the written word and something magically weird. Two people can glance at the same written symbols and get a general meaning out of it with their heads, and personal experiences providing the more exact details. This hasn't been fully developed with films yet however a lot of good directors have mastered the half-revealing allure of books thus allowing their moving picture creations to hold enough vagueness to remain entertaining through many viewings. No, I'm not going to list those movies here. Well, maybe not yet.

    Drinking black tea ("English Breakfast".) 2 bags with a slice of lemon (lemon juice in tea is just awesome) and a spoon, stainless steel, inside a plastic blue mug with "Southwestern Bell" plastered on the side in gold lettering to the right of the Bell symbol.

    The sun has come up. It is now Tuesday. I'm semi-wrapped in a blanket and am slightly cold. My throat still hurts. The tea is helping.

    Paalam, you noobs. I'm out!
    Tuesday, October 13th, 2009
    10:15 am
    Stolen from IlyaG
    1. You can ONLY answer 'Yes' or 'No'.

    2. You are NOT ALLOWED to explain ANYTHING unless someone messages or comments you and asks.

    Kissed any one of your LiveJournal friends? — Yes
    Been arrested? — No
    Kissed someone you didn't like? — No
    Slept in until 5 PM? — Yes
    Fallen asleep at work/school? — Yes
    Held a snake? — Yes
    Ran a red light? — No
    Been suspended from school? — No
    Experienced love at first sight? — No
    Totaled your car in an accident? — No
    Been fired from a job? — No
    Fired somebody? — No
    Sung karaoke? — Yes
    Pointed a gun at someone? — No
    Did something you told yourself you wouldn't? — No
    Laughed until something you were drinking came out your nose? — No
    Caught a snowflake on your tongue? — Yes
    Kissed in the rain? — Yes
    Had a close brush with death (your own)? — Yes
    Saw someone die? — Yes
    Played Spin-the-Bottle? — Yes
    Smoked a cigar? — Yes
    Sat on a rooftop? — Yes
    Smuggled something into another country? — No
    Been pushed into a pool with all your clothes? — No
    Broken a bone? — No
    Skipped school? — Yes
    Eaten a bug? — Yes
    Sleepwalked? — No
    Walked on a moonlit beach? — Yes
    Ridden a motorcycle? — No
    Dumped someone? — Yes
    Forgotten your anniversary? — No
    Lied to avoid a ticket? — No
    Ridden in a helicopter? — No
    Shaved your head? — No
    Blacked out from drinking? — No
    Played a prank on someone? — Yes
    Hit a home run? — No
    Felt like killing someone? — No
    Cross-dressed? — No
    Been falling-down drunk? — No
    Made your girlfriend/boyfriend cry? — Yes
    Eaten snake? — No
    Marched/Protested? — Yes
    Had Mexican jumping beans for pets? — No
    Puked on an amusement ride? — No
    Seriously & intentionally boycotted something? — No
    Been in a band? — No
    Knitted? — No
    Been on TV? — Yes
    Shot a gun? — Yes
    Skinny-dipped? — Yes
    Given someone stitches? — No
    Eaten a whole habenero pepper? — No
    Ridden a surfboard? — No
    Drunk straight from a liquor bottle? — Yes
    Had surgery? — Yes
    Streaked? - No
    Been taken by ambulance to a hospital? — No
    Passed out when NOT drinking? — No
    Peed on a bush? — Yes
    Donated Blood? — Yes
    Grabbed electric fence? — No
    Eaten alligator meat? — No
    Eaten cheesecake? — Yes
    Eaten your kids' Halloween candy? — No
    Killed an animal when not hunting? — No
    Peed your pants in public? — Yes
    Snuck into a movie without paying? — Yes
    Written graffiti? — No
    Still love someone you shouldn't? — No
    Think about the future? — Yes
    Been in handcuffs? — Yes
    Believe in love? — Yes
    Sleep on a certain side of the bed? — No
    Wednesday, September 30th, 2009
    6:59 am
    Psychogeography
    Hmm, I moved to Manhattan. I didn't really expect it and it turned out to be a spur-of-the-moment type decision caused by me seizing an opportunity by the coat tails. But tonight (or, technically, last twilight) upon walking home I reflected that it was a good choice. Not  only because I'm in Manhattan and thus location-wise I'm quite close to the social and economic epicenter of New York but because, as I was walking home from the grocery store, I was reminded of how much this place feels like Moscow. Not the real physical Moscow of today but the vague memorable Moscow of my kid youth. The Moscow which lives on in the nostalgic remnants of memory within my mind. My childhood in Moscow, as well as the 2 subsequent trips back there, are my Kaddath in the cold waste. It reminds me of a story from a Russian book that I have called "The Troll's Gift". The book itself is a collection of Scandinavian children's stories most of which related in some ways to trolls. There is a story there about a kid who, alone in his bedroom one evening, hears a knock on his window. The origin of the knock is from some magical character who ends up taking the kid to this land which exists only in the twilight. A land that is a sort of overlay over our real reality. And as I was walking to my new Manhattan home today in the twilight I was reminded of how this story as well as the Twilight Zone series relays the concept that the twilight is somehow weird. And it is. It feels like that. The weirdest thing is that it always feels nostalgic to me. As if all twilights are part of the same time period. Like in that comics, "The Invisibles", some time/place combinations are related because they are spacial and temporal locations where another universe is intersecting with ours. That's how twilight feels like to me. Like it's the same event repeated whenever I'm outside experiencing that part of the evening. And I get a similar feeling looking out the window at night. It feels like home but from god knows when.

    Weirdness.
    Wednesday, September 16th, 2009
    7:00 pm
    [LJ2ME] I write random things
    He had a brilliant way of making money. He'd hang out at socialite parties and seduce rich female ceos and get confidential information from them while in bed. He used this information to play the market, raking in tons of profit. He called it "inside-her trading."
    Thursday, September 10th, 2009
    5:38 am
    Late night early morning thoughts
    So we think in words...but what if we don't think in words? What if words are just ..... identifiers? stretched around concepts or whatever sublayer it is in which we think in?

    Hmmm

    Ever have something in your head that seems logical? Or maybe something that seems to flow? As in rhythmically/rhyming? But when you phrase it externally (i.e. say it out loud) it doesn't flow or isn't as logical as it seemed in your head.

    Maybe the underlying layer of thought is plastic and easily mutable but the verbal concepts (I don't know if "identifiers" is the correct word. Maybe avatars? Like cookie cutters dipped half way into water. They give a semblance of shape to something shapeless) have limiters. And when the concepts are being phrased in our heads with verbal identifiers we might be ignoring some but not all of the rules that apply to that aspect of identifiers. Like grammar or something. But when we express this concept externally like by speaking we can't ignore the rules and limits of the identifiers as easily and need to fess up to the fact that they affect the external output of our thoughts more than we thought they did (i.e. what we end up saying might not rhyme or whatever)

    Uhm...this is hard to express properly. Need nap.

    Current Music: Deep Purple - Slow Train
    Tuesday, August 25th, 2009
    4:07 pm
    Weird dreams
    Some scattered memories.\

    Something about somebody not liking a beer cause it's "blue-ribbon flavored". Like Pabst's Blue Ribbon. In the dream apparently the "blue ribbon" is used to a blue ribbon dissolved in the beer to produce a specific taste.

    The other dream was actually a familiar one. In it I remembered having the same dream before or, to be more accurate, I dreamt about the same location before. Basically in the dream you can cross from Manhattan into the Bronx and maybe Queens by foot.. Not by going over a bridge, which is a possibility, but by going a second way. If you head north towards the Bronx (if I remember my dream geography correctly) you end up in a place where there's this factory type structure. This building that if you go into actually it a half-trap and leads you into this large enclosed town or something composed of rooms and stuff. It's this giant maze. In this dream, unlike when I dreamt about the same location before, I started off within the maze and had to make my way out (by following clues from memory) and then over the water into Manhattan. Just thought that is interesting. This makes me want to go and walk around New York more, exploring.
    Monday, August 24th, 2009
    7:38 am
    Crap poetry
    the darkness and the light
    what is wrong and what is right?
    the breath of death and sip of life
    marks the start of morning
    end of night
    7:38 am
    Movie editing
    So I got me a mac mini so I can learn how to edit footage. Well, I've been procrastinating by claiming that I don't have any footage to edit. So I decided to make my own. Current idea for film to be shot with my canon powershot:

    "Half-asleep"

    Guy wakes up in the morning and walks to coffee pot and drinks coffee. The twist is that he has super-powers when he's half asleep and he doesn't know it. So he wakes up, gets out of bed, walks out his bedroom door, ends up somewhere else entirely, walks through a door, ends up somewhere else, so on an so forth till he ends up in his kitchen. Pours himself a cup of coffee and starts walking back with coffee in hand. Takes a sip as he walks out the door and ends up in Central park. Wakefulness hits him with coffee thus taking away his powers and he stands there wondering "wtf?"
    Monday, July 6th, 2009
    9:20 pm
    [LJ2ME] A Work in Progress?
    The wall of wind spurned the air around it into a sort of frenzy. Like a scared horse trampling everything under hoof, snarling foam from its grimaced mouth, wild eyed with emotionless malice. The homes, just simple grey shacks in comparison with the magnificent tornado hovering its large all-devouring entrail beneath the blood black sky. Somewhere amidst the violence lay a sleeping child unknowingly trapped iin the backseat of a car. The turmoil around him just a gentle rocking of the automotive cradle that held him on its soft grey cloth seats. His eyes twitching 'neath the lids, a portrait of another world being painted inside his mind. Outside, in the real world, mother nature was herself awake and screaming the shrill shrieks of banshee tempests.
    Monday, June 29th, 2009
    10:49 pm
    [LJ2ME] Exploration
    One of my hobbies in life is exploration. There is so much we don't know in the places which we think we know. Your "tired old neighborhood" might hold the Emerald Kingdom within its boring old haunts. Venture everywhere!
    Wednesday, May 20th, 2009
    10:52 am
    Wednesday, May 13th, 2009
    10:16 pm
    What is implied options volatility?
    implied options volatility
    Tuesday, May 12th, 2009
    10:20 am
    lsof
    Friday, April 24th, 2009
    12:39 pm
    Interesting article about a guy trying to break the record for coast-to-coast driving
    http://www.wired.com/cars/coolwheels/magazine/15-11/ff_cannonballrun?currentPage=all

    This guy starts off sounding smart but then as you read on....

    "Needless to say, my attorney wasn't pleased," Roy says. "Actually, I think stupid was the word he used."
    Thursday, April 23rd, 2009
    5:23 pm
    Pass it On
    Barrack Obama doesn't understand technology.
    11:56 am
    Tuesday, April 21st, 2009
    11:52 am
    Friday, April 17th, 2009
    7:35 am
    [LJ2ME] Notacon
    Yesterday Rob and I went to Stamford, CT to pick up a car that we rented. It turned out to be a white Chevy Impala that gets really good mileage but has too many electronics in it and too many buttons. What can I say? It seems to be the luxury package.

    We met up with Bernie down west in Pa and then continued on westward. We arrived in Cleveland just about at the turn of 10 o'clock local time.

    I'll write more later as I'm about to step into the shower. Incidentally I just want to point something out. It's a bit of a personal philosophy (as much as I have anything resembling a personal philosophy)… I once was watching a special on PBS on photographers for the National Geographic magazine. One guy pointed out that the trick to getting good shots is by putting yourself into the right place and the right time with the right equipment so you just can't help but get good shots. Well when I was little I used to wonder how fictional characters got into so many adventures. Now I know that there are a billion adventures out there and instead of waiting for one to happen to you you have to go out and do something and the adventures will start. And, hopefully, like a good and interesting "young adults" novel all of the adventures will end happily on a high note. Like somebody I know likes to say: "Happy Trails!"
    Tuesday, April 14th, 2009
    9:47 am
    Thursday, April 9th, 2009
    9:21 am
[ << Previous 20 ]
My Website   About LiveJournal.com

Advertisement