reasons i’d rather chew ice than smoke a cigarette:
1. colorless
2. oderless
3. when i drop it it slips, but doesn’t burn
4. free
5. i can roll it around on my tongue
6. it makes noise (and i like noise)
things currently saving my life:
1. Mactella which has allowed me to download almost…
2. … every marley song on every marley album recorded on island records
3. Kaya
4. Babylon by Bus which also just happens to be the coolest title…
this thing rocks: nColor8: Color Picker
the death of another dotcom (part 2 of ?)
ok – if it could be weirder in the office today – I couldn’t imagine it. A couple people are packing up and leaving. They were outright canned as in -don’t come back, ok?-. though they’ve been given whatever time they needed to come back and get their shit together. seems nice but really it’s strange. so meanwhile in our group we have a client deadline and we are working furiously, A. comes by to basically chat about the end but no one has time to talk to him. i mean this shit is weird.
is there no good way to do this? probably not.
mixed messages on the paris front. there are things i want to do here still. the first is smoking a fucking cig, but i am desperately trying to hold off.
another meeting – this time about a new function. i don’t want to leave but paris scares me frankly. without the language i am thinking i will be utterly useless – unless i miraculously begin to parlez francais, which R. says will happen….
meanwhile i was clued in to a new search engine, this one has all the answers. and they are impeccably organized goddamnit.
Yesterday was pretty terrible. At work they (that’s the “they” that gets to fuck up your life at will) have decided to shut down all development in New York by July 31. I was lucky to get an offer to work in the Paris office instead. It seems fabulous at first, but the pay is shit. “They” say that cost of living is much lower in France. I am skeptical. I am also skeptical about them picking up any relocation expense. Also I just moved into an apt I love and I finally started decorating and making into a real place. Plus my French isn’t very good, I won’t have any friends and I will probably be even lonelier than I am in NYC, which is a very scary thought.
Ok – so instead of moving I could look for another job here in the city. That is a pretty scary thought also considering how thin this whole web industry has become.
But the thing is I am really sad about my job. I’ve left places before but I was always ready to go. This time it’s like someone died. The people I worked with, our stupid little web application, I mean my fucking heart is in that software. And it was all finally starting to come together. I can’t imagine leaving it like this. I can work up until the end of July I suppose but it won’t be the same. I can’t imagine what it’s going to be like on Monday. And I really really can’t imagine starting this shit all over again.
So last night after a coupla beers, no lunch and no dinner, I pretty much lost it. My poor mother is on a plane right now from LA to make sure I don’t off myself I think. But I’m really glad she’s coming actually. I am so not able to deal with being an adult. I mean, after L. I never want to date again and after this job I never want to work again. I mean how many times are you supposed to get your heart ripped out? I fucking can’t do this once a year. It’s like everything is so temporary; it can just disappear with one meeting, one conversation, one broken promise. It could be worse, at least I have my sweet mom who loves me so much. The thing is, it’s supposed to get easier, you’re supposed to build walls around yourself, get thicker skin, that’s what they say, right? Well it only gets worse for me somehow. Every disastrous relationship hurts more than the ones before it… put together. And I can’t fucking take it. I’m not in lunatic-crying-mode right now – but I am in despair.
today i have been thinking about 2 things. the first is a question my friend G. asked about time:
> From your experiences
> (not from your socialization)
>
> Do you feel that time is
>
> a. linear (past to future)
> b. looping
> c. all of the above
>
> please respond quickly
i think he’s taking up a collection…
oddly enough i studied this extensively in college.
i had many nightmares and anxiety attacks about it. more in a dry academic brain meltdown kind of way than in a inner metaphysical crisis kind of way.
i can only barely remember the details but i think i held onto the… err… point? undergraduate years are so slippery…
so we talked about it mostly in terms of time travel. it worked in the context that if time is a linear or looping sequence, and we exist as points in constant motion than time travel should be entirely possible. by possible here i mean it should be a logical proposition.
i argued in a few papers (i wonder if i still have them) that time travel is a logical impossibility and inconsistent. this conclusion led to another that, time is neither linear or looping, but something more akin to a point. actually this didn’t lead to my “point” conclusion but came from it.
listen:
time travel? i say no way – the short explanation (and it’s gonna have to be short because i am halfway through a screwdriver and it’s been a hard day. details on that to follow). if i traveled to a point back in time where i might have met myself. say i traveled back to my college philosophy of science class and sat in on a class. let’s call time traveling neille, NeilleN and non-time traveling college student who is probably full of wild fantasies about her future (.. err more about that later).. we’ll call her NeilleT. so NeilleN, the meanie she is, takes an ax she has hidden in her backpack, creeps over to NeilleT’s chair, and in a fluid sweep, raises the ax over her head with both hands (cause that shite is heavy, duh) and chops off NeilleTs right hand.
our logical dilemma is perdy obvious. if NeilleN really chopped off NeilleTs right hand, NeilleN wouldn’t be able to lift the ax and chop off NeilleT’s right hand… but… but. yeah [gulp of screwdriver]. if you think about NeilleN taking a gun and bustin a cap into NeilleT, it’s even more obvious (but i like the ax story a bit better for some reason). anyhoo i think the guy who we read that disagrees with me (or i with him might be more appropriate) is a Princeton professor named David Lewis. He has an essay on this in Philosophical Papers , i think. i can’t be sure because i sold my copy after the class. my head hurt, ok. i can’t remember what his counter was to that, but i didn’t buy it. I did like On the Plurality of Worlds though.
beyond the logics and proofs of the exersize, i had and still have a personal feeling about the nature of time. that there’s no line, no loop, no spiral, none of that… time is experienced once and once only. if we are point, it’s a point, if it’s a loop so we are a loop. i think this because i can’t remeber what it was like 10 minutes ago. i mean really i can’t. i’ve tried this alot, mostly to torture myself by trying to relive bad things that happened to me, but i can’t do it. i can feel bad again but usually for new and better reasons. i guess it seems that “past”, “present”, “future” are so relative that one can only be defined by the other 2. they really are 3 parts of 1 thing, time, now, us, me, you, my cat is sleeping… ya dig? anyway – that’s all i got for the moment. i’ll let you know if anymore surfaces.
2 Haiku’s about camel lights. i wrote them weeks and weeks ago
oh my camel lights
i miss the sweet smell
nothing rests in my fingers
camels in your box
first plastic then foil
the first one is hard to get
New Angeles Monthly, June 2008
Weekend America, March 30, 2008
Los Angeles Times, March 13, 2008
Los Angeles Times, March 6, 2008
Nil by Mouth is written by Neille Ilel. Neille is a writer, reporter and user interface specialist in Los Angeles. If you think that's a lot, she's also got a host of meandering sidelines including improv comedy, tennis, cooking, drawing and thinking about learning to play the guitar.
Nil is her given name. It's a long story.
E-mail her here:
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