In Turkish, there is a saying. The closest translation is ‘monkey appetite.’ It’s used for a person who wants everything. Someone who can’t have enough. That’s exactly how I feel about my life. I want to do everything. I don’t want to choose. I want to spend more time volunteering. I want to learn how to write better. I want to finish my novel. I want to get published. I want to learn how to draw better. I want to learn how to play the saxophone. I want to speak Japanese fluently. I want to remember all my German. I want to perfect my Italian. I want to learn Russian and Hebrew. I want to learn how to do graphic design and 3-D graphics and animation. I want to get in better shape. I want to eat healthier. I want to read more, much more. I want to keep a more detailed diary. I want to sign like a pro. I want to learn all about art history and American history. I want to understand physics and biology. I want to be a much better programmer. One of the best. I want to teach and work with little children. I want to have a dog. Dalmatian. I want to live by a lake and take walks in the morning. I want to have children. I want to fly a plane. I want to learn to let go. I want to learn to forgive myself.
I don’t want to choose. I want it all.
I convinced Jake and a bunch of other friends to go to Neal Pollack’s reading tomorrow. After having read the interview with Dave Eggers, I’m interested to see what their readings are like. I’ve never been to an actual book reading before but I have a hunch this one will be quite unique.
Last night, we watched The Story of Us. The movie never did well in theaters and got quite bad ratings overall, but I liked it. I first saw it on one of my trips to Japan and bawled on the plane. Even though last night was my second time, I still cried during the last scene. I think the movie is a somewhat accurate depiction of how bad some marriages get. Anyhow, I enjoyed it and would recommend it. I would like to warn, however, that it is quite sappy.
Go out and enjoy the last days of summer. Here in New York, the days are getting shorter and colder. Tonight, Jake and I went to the park for his birthday and had a picnic. It was so wonderful to sit among squirrels, dogs, birds and the trees. We had a small bottle of wine and some candles. It was wonderful.
Afterwards, we went to Toys R Us and bought some toys. A perfect ending to a beautiful night.
Sometimes, it’s hard to keep things in perspective. I spend many hours of my day thinking about writing. About how I wish I were better at it. I read what I write and I cringe. I ask myself why I even bother to try. Why is it so important to me? Why can’t I just give it up and do the things I am good at? Inevitably, I then wallow in misery and tell myself that I’m not good at anything. I can’t write, I can’t draw, and I can’t play any instruments. I can’t even code all that well. I speak seven languages, all of them half-assed. I did well at school, but what does that mean? Nothing in real life. I’m decent at many things, but I’m not great at anything. And I want to be. I really do.
I swear to myself that I will no longer try. I say that I will just read amazing books and appreciate the people who are capable of creating them. I will enjoy good movies and masterpieces of art. I don’t have to be an artist to be a great person. It’s okay to not have the talent to write. I have to stop the torture of putting myself out there just to get disappointed over and over again. If I don’t try, I can’t fail. Yes, I say, I will stop. I’m not writing anymore.
Until the next morning, when I wake up with an idea and run to the keyboard. This is the one, I fool myself, this one will be my masterpiece.
And the vicious circle begins once more.
A truly enjoyable moment, for me, is when I wake up but I know that I don’t have to get up. I lie in bed, not exactly awake but not in deep sleep either. That’s the time when I have most of my lucid dreams. If I worked from home, I could have those moments everyday. I wonder, tho, whether they would lose their meaning if I had them all the time?
I remember sitting at a speech Kernighan gave at Carnegie Mellon my junior year. He was funny and interesting which is a lot to say about a computer science person. Especially one as bright as he. A student at CMU recently interviewed him for a Romanian magazine and translated the interview to English and posted the link to slashdot.
If you’re into programming, I think you’d find the interview informative. Even if you don’t care about programming, I think it’s fascinating to hear what he has to say. When asked about teaching programming classes he comments on how schools should not be teaching things people can learn in trade schools and goes on to say, “That’s not what universities should be doing; universities should be teaching things which are likely to last, for a lifetime if you’re lucky, but at least 5 or 10 or 20 years, and that means principles and ideas. At the same time, they should be illustrating them with the best possible examples taken from current practice.”
Another interesting point is when the interviewer asks him what areas a student who’s interested in computers should enter, amongst other things, he says, “I think unfortunately the best advice you can give somebody is “do what you think is interesting, do something that you think is fun and worthwhile, because otherwise you won’t do it well anyway”. But that’s not any real help.”
As I said, it’s an interesting interview.
I just saw a Rick Lazio ad about how Hilary Clinton is running ads bashing him. The ad talks about how she has nothing better to do, etc. Isn’t he doing the same thing by running this ad?
I really don’t understand why candidates run ads that put down their opponents. Do they really think that people vote for them because they said something negative about the other person?
The same behavior bothers me in corporate ads. When Pepsi runs an ad bashing Coke or vice versa, I feel like they must be so pathetic that they need to put down the competition. Their own product obviously must have no redeeming qualities.
Home at last. Another seven-hour trip and we’re back in the beautiful city of New York. My little bird jumped up and down when he saw us and my flowers seem to have survived the weekend. So far so good.
Have you read any children’s books lately? I checked Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs from the New York Public Library after reading a delightful amazon review of it. I highly recommend it. It’s neat to read creative and entertaining children’s books. At the back of the book, in the blurb about Ron Barrett, the illustrator, is the following note: “Mr. Barrett says his drawings of meatballs in no way endorses their consumption. He’s a vegetarian.”
Goodbye summer.
Wanna read all the candidate’s speeches? As a non-American, I don’t qualify to vote, but I still think it’s kinda cool that all the candidates have their own homepages. The fact that they can’t afford not to have an online presence says so much about the importance of the Net.
I’ve spent a major part of today going through brig’s portal and I must say there are a large number of weblogs out there. Obviously, expressing one’s thoughts is not a new hobby by any means, but it’s interesting to me that many of the sites have the same links. I wonder if that means that the people behind the pages are interested in similar subject matter. Or does it mean that the people are doing what they think will get the hits to their page? Just wondering.
I also noticed that the list of ‘my favorite blogs’ varies only slightly amongst pages. What do these people have that the others don’t? I wonder if weblogging has gotten to be like high school where you’re either ‘in’ or you’re not. How do you get in?
Maybe it’s all just random and most likely, it doesn’t even matter.
I guess I am just curious cause I just started this journey and I like to analyze things to death.
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projects for twenty twenty-six
projects for twenty twenty-five
projects for twenty twenty-four
projects for twenty twenty-three
projects for twenty twenty-two
projects for twenty twenty-one
projects for twenty nineteen
projects for twenty eighteen
projects from twenty seventeen
monthly projects from previous years
some of my previous projects
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