non sequitur

I don't think i have a real cohesive theme to this blog, but I feel the need for a vent, so I think I'll just fill it with a bunch of unrelated musings.

Firstly, I have 5, count em, 5 shifts at the hotel this week. I make upwards of twenty dollars an hour doing these events, and each of these shifts will be at least 5 hours long, probably more. I'm thinking I'll get 30-40 hours out of this week. Thats a good chunk of change for me, just in time for VEGAS!!!! I'm going to Vegas for a wedding the weekend of the 8th. I've never been before, so I'm pretty much looking forward to that.

Second, I had an enlightening weekend. This is tricky territory because, as we talked about before we can't mention people's names. But anyway, I have achieved the next step in singledom.

Third, people may look different but they are still the same. They may have a tan and a little extra facial hair, making them surprisingly attractive, but don't let it fool you. They still blow it just like they always did.

I came home today from Hell's Barrio toying with the idea of going to some sort of body of water. Every body else was going and the idea sounded good. I was gonna go to the Columbia since I live in Vancouver, lay on the beach, get a tan, and read my Apollo book. So I put my bathing suit on and had some lunch, then waited around to see what I felt like doing. Turns out I felt like taking a nap instead but that's not the point. The point is this is the first time I've put my suit on since last summer and I was not horrified with myself. I see rivers in my future.

I think I'm gonna make an artichoke.

Because of the aforementioned shifts at the hotel I don't think I'll be going out next weekend. We'll see. When I was dating the old ball and chain I didn't go out much. No surprise there, women often go into hibernation when they have a man. I try and blame my hiatus on him, and alot of it was because I lost my will to party, but there was another thing. Truth is, I really liked having my weekends back. I wasn't hung over and I got up early- well earlier- and got stuff done. Though I was missing partying when I wasn't doing it, now I am missing not partying. I am always tired on Sat and Sun. It may have something to do with the fact that I never sleep at home on the weekends because 'home' is in Vancouver and I can't drive after I drink, but I don't sleep that well. The last time I remember sleeping well was when I stayed at Melissa's because she drove. I really want to get a new place already. After I got all those shifts I mentioned to my mom that a few more weeks like that and I would have enough to move out. She was fairly adamant that I didn't need to, that I could stay till September. It's free, so you tell me: what would you do?

I want to buy a boat. I am so serious about this. Not a real fancy one, but something I could tool around in on hot days like this. I wonder what that would cost. I would use my student loans to buy it, of course.

That's all I have to say about that.

Warning: TMI ahead

So I figured out what my dreams are about: apparently I am actually gay. Not really, I like boys still, but last night a stripper gave them a real run for their money. I've been to the nudie bar millions of times and had much vagina in my face, and it's never really affected me one way or the other. Yesterday was my birthday and I wasn't expecting much. It's hard to get people out on a Wednesday, so I didn't even really invite anybody except a couple of friends, and one of them canceled at the last minute. I didn't even expect to stay out till closing. Honestly I'm okay with that, I'm not going to school this summer so I'm getting plenty of partying in. My fourth of July weekend was quite wild, thank you. So when someone suggested Sassy's I was game, cause it was more exciting than what I was doing: sitting at the Hut being too full from the mixed grill seafood dinner my parents bought me. We didn't even really sit on the rail till I started to get really buzzed. I told all the girls it was my birthday and they were awfully nice to me. So there's one really hot girl at sassy's and anyway, I'm gay now. Not really.

The Year in Review

Since this time last year I:
Moved to New York
Moved back from New York
Changed careers
Ended the longest relationship of my life
Crammed 2 years of physics into 1
Got accepted to grad school
Got accepted to the Nano Crystallography research group
Bought a car
Stopped drinking
Started drinking again
Stopped going out
Started going out again
Fell in love
Fell out of love
Saw 2 movies in the theater
Saw the Guggenheim
Saw the Statue of Liberty
Got a degree
Got a tattoo
Saw the Chrysler Building
Made tons of new friends
Cut off 1 1/2 feet of hair
Moved out of downtown
Moved in with my mother
Had a friend die
Had my Grandma die
Got sick only once
Built 12 computers
Learned 2 programming languages
Fought with my sister (who knows how many times)
Faced a fear
Made up with friends
Went to central park
Saw the restaurant from Seinfeld
Changed my mind
Changed it back
Changed it back again
Had a crush. Or two
Went to Macys in new york, the one from "Miracle on 34th Street"
Drove to California
Saw the view of San Francisco from the Berkely Observatory, I will never
see a view like that again
Went to places in San Jose that broke my heart (I used to live there)
Visited Petaluma
Visited Oakland
Aced my GRE math
Missed Denise. Alot (My best friend who lives in SC)
Hung out with Lynne. Alot
Graded other peoples papers
Taught some people how to do math. I loved it.
Saw the Moon through a telescope for the first time (I know, a bit late. I just
bought one this year)
Read for pleasure, but not much
Attended St. Johns University for a month
Cried
Laughed, more than I cried
Lied, but not on purpose
Admitted I lied almost every time
Quit tutoring
Had a crush on a teacher
Was crushed on
Did not drive drunk a single time
Hated the president
Voted
Sewed pillows
Had my heart broken

If it sounds a bit like that "sunscreen" speech, eh.

addiction

I like to think I don't have an addictive personality. I drink on occasion, but I do it for no other reason than to get buzzed and have a good time. I'm not a weekday drinker, never have been, and I don't think I ever will be. My parents like to tie one on, and, well, let's say they ARE weekday drinkers. Most of my friends drink much more than I do and my boyfriends have all been big drinkers, among other things. I'm the same with smoking. I have been smoking since I was 18, but after about age 23 I graduated to social smoking only. Once again I'm not a weekday smoker. Every once in a while I even go without smoking while drinking. Many people are amazed that I can put it down in that way and not think twice about it.
I had a minor video poker addiction several years ago when I was still waiting tables. It lasted 6-8 months, and it was kinda bad. There were nights that I would put my entire nights tips into the machines. I would feel terrible about it, but it was sort of okay because if I needed rent or something I would just pick up a shift and make it up. Then it just sorta stopped. I don't remember quitting, I just didn't do it any more. I guess it was just a phase.
Lynne and I have been made fun of at length about our dedication to the Sandy Hut. We pretty much always go there. In fact, I know people that, when they want to see me (or her for that matter) know that they just have to pop in on a Friday or Saturday and there we'll be. I'm sorry, I can't apologize for that one. We chase the dream from time to time, hit a few other bars, but we always end up there. Often if we'd just stayed put we would have gotten what we were looking for. It's just too damn easy. We sit down and start drinking and eventually people we know will start showing up.
People have also pointed out to me that I am on Myspace alot. That's actually the point of my blog. I am getting concerned that my Myspace addiction is rivaling my video crack phase. As soon as I was single I was instantly on it alot. Now, I enjoy the blogging and I'm not sorry about that, but I am on my page alot. I can't help myself. Hopefully it's just a phase.

Seti's Paradox

All my blogs of late have been of the  'emokowski' variety,  whining about  my 99  problems (but a bitch ain't one). I have neglected my scientific duties. I intend to remedy that right now.

    SETI, in general stands for the Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence. It can also  specifically stand for the non profit institute of the same name founded in  1984.  Currently the term SETI still refers to a large blanket of efforts to detect alien life, centered around the initiation and detection of communication, most of which is done by radio telescope. It is assumed for numerous reasons that any communication we detect will be in the form of microwaves, although this has been disputed. The work itself is really quite tedious. It basically involves pointing dishes at the sky and constantly moving them around, recording the data stream recieved, and later analyzing it for anomaly. The sky is very, very big, and there is lots and lots of data. You can only imagine the amount of computing power this requires. This led to one of the more interesting features of SETI. Thanks to the advances of the internet and availability of programming recipes, a scientist at berkely designed a program that could be installed on home computers and communicate with the hub recievers to take on some of the processing signals. SETI@home was born. Currently there are over 5 million users that have provided 19 billion hours of computing. Interestingly, this adds up to only the 2nd most powerful supercomputer in the world. On a side note, there is a similar @home program to search for new prime numbers. Thanks to computers we have already discovered many of them. Consequently the undiscovered ones are very large and take an enormous and complex algorithm to test. There is a program that can be installed on the home computer that will recieve a single number and test it. I believe it takes a few days to test a single number, but if your computer finds one you win something like $10,000. Anyway...
    We have actually recieved only 1 signal considered universally to be a candidate signal. It is known as the 'wow' signal, because the researcher on duty at the time circled it on the print out and wrote 'wow' on the paper next to it:

    Let that be a lesson to be careful what you do and say near the time of a major scientific discovery. The "wow" signal was very short lived, unfortunately, and many subsequent searches of the same area have failed to find anything.
    The discovery of said intelligent life is considered by many prominent and respected minds to be an inevitibilty. Enrico Fermi, a very important physicist authored a deceptivily simple paradox entitled "Fermi's Paradox" (go figure). The gist of it goes: "Where is everybody?" Doesn't seem like much of a paradox, does it? Well, what he is really saying is that in all likelyhood, the fact that we managed to evolve combined with the infinitely unimaginable size of the universe pretty much guarantees that there must be life elsewhere in the universe. So why haven't we discovered any?
       This discovery is also considered by other prominent minds to be pseudoscience. In fact, writer Michael Chricton criticized several of the major justifications for SETI and used them as a basis to label SETI religion, rather than actual research. Well if Michael Crichton says it....
    This leads us to what is commonly known as 'active SETI'  For all our attempts to recieve messages we have sent relatively few. They number less than 20 and include the visual message and gold record sent out on the Voyager probes. Incidentally, these probes are still transmitting data from locations outside the solar system. The most famous one is known as the "Arecibo Message", Many of you may know Arecibo as the location of a very large radio telescope in Puerto Rico, also known as "Big Ear", made famous by the movie "Contact" Starring Jody Foster and written by Carl Sagan (thats why it's so good, cause it's scientifically accurate).

    The message itself was, well, retarded.

It was transmitted in binary, similar to morse code, but distinguished by a series of 'on' and 'offs' corresponding to 0's and 1's. The total number of bits in the message was a semi prime number, a number that it is the product of two primes. This was so that the data could be grouped into columns and rows, and done so in only 1 way (actually 2, because you can switch the rows and colums). The data should then be imaged, much like pixels, where a 1 would represent white and 0 black (the color was added to this image to distinguish different parts of the message). This is where the image above is obtained.
The top of the message is the first 10 numbers in binary. Then comes the atomic weight of hydrogen and a few other elements. Then is a description of dna, followed by a picture of man (without a head?). Underneath that is a map of our solar system, earth being the 'up' planet, and finally a picture of the Arecibo reciever (upside down?). This retarded image was the result of hours of committe discussion and deliberation. Oh, and did I mention it was sent to a star that won't be there when it arrives?
    The title of this blog is "SETI's Paradox", and if you know me you know I love paradoxes. I mostly just wanted to talk about SETI, but I also wanted to discuss the subject of this paradox. Our SETI thus far has been focused on listening, almost to the complete exclusion of anything else. So what if everybody else is only listenening too? That could be a good reason we haven't found anything yet.

Thank You and Good night.

PS:
 I had a GREAT 4th of July

these dreams

Last night I had a dream that I married a woman. She was about to marry some dude when I busted in, I think during the "if anyone knows any reason why these two should not be joined" part. I seem to remember that she was waiting for me, hoping I would stop it. It's actually someone I know (no, not Lynne, that's too easy) and it was strange to say the least. We went straight to the honey moon, however, I immediately began making arrangements with her to have an open marriage so that I could still sleep with men, either with her or without (I'm not really into threesomes, I think I was just being considerate). She was a bit of a bad girl in the past and my dad immediately started ragging on her for it and she and her cousins, who were male, left in a huff cause her feelings were hurt. I eventually went after her, only instead of the femme girl I married she was a butch lesbian who looked like a late-teens boy, complete with acne. I went to make up with her but was a bit embarrassed because I knew everyone was looking at us. I wasn't embarrassed about the lesbian thing, I think I was embarrassed about the butch thing. Weird.

update:
Last night I had another dream that I asked out a woman. In my teenage years  I would have been frightened by this as I was susceptible to any fear that I might be different, now I am just stuck wondering what the hell my psyche is trying to tell me. There were a bunch of us and we were trying to decide which girls were gonna go with which guys. I looked at this blonde chick and said "I want you". She thought about it for a minute, looked at the guys, and said "So listen, I'm gonna go out with her." We basically just walked around till we ended up at a McMenamins, where someone was having a birthday party.This woman who was running the party kept botching the starting of the birthday song, so thought I would help her out with my decible strength and started singing. She was still not satisfied and started yelling about how the colors didn't match yet, I think she even started crying. I got the hell out of there, leaving my date behind. I ended up in a car, which was actually a boat, with some talk radio personalities. They wouldn't stop the car so I had to wait till we were at a stop light in San Francisco. Earlier that night I had a dream my sister was hit by a car right before we were supposed to fly out of town. The driver hit and ran. They caught her later, dressed like a nun. Weird.

Any ideas?

reversal of fortune

"Good evening and what can I tell you..."

I think I will talk about the way your view of someone can change so fundamentally that you are amazed at the contrast. I began this blog with that quote because it's author is the perfect example of what I'm talking about: Dennis Miller. The years of his tenure on weekend update were some of the best years of SNL, and his segment was a reason to watch rather than just filler. He was so incisive, so witty, so sharp, much the way John Stewart is now. I fucking loved him. I continued to love him when he had his own show, and several comedy specials. I mean come on, who was cooler than Dennis Miller. Recently, though, I have come to find out he is a staunch conservative, and needless to say I was disappointed. I felt my feelings for him starting to slip. The final nail in the coffin was when I saw him rant (on Fox news, no less) about the myth of global warning and how it is a cyclic trend that has nothing to do with the industrial habits of man. I have a whole argument prepared for the day when I actuall run into someone in person who wants to argue that with me, here goes:

I will ask them
"And where did you get your PhD in Climatology?"

They will begin to answer with some rhetoric about not needing a PhD, bla bla bla, whence I will interrupt them with:

"Oh, you studied Chemistry, then"

They will start to be indignant and shoot back with some half ass argument, and I will again interrupt them, this time with:

"Geology? Physics? Biology?" I will continue, "Oh I see, you are completely talking out of your ass. Not only that, but you are making a mockery of people who actually did dedicate decades to living, learning, and studying the science behind all these processes, slaving away, day after day at research and exploration. Those people who actually know what they are talking about. And not just some left wing conspiratorial clique of scienctists, but ALL of them. They all agree. So in the future, please leave these discussions of professional opinion to people qualified to have them, and stick with what you are qualified for: giving handjobs at the GOP convention"

That last part was for when the argument was directed at Ann Coulter. But I digress.

Since that time I have felt my feelimgs for Dennis Miller slip irrevocably into oblivion, and I don't imagine they will ever return. I found out a similar fact about Adam Sandler, but his work is inane enough as it is that I think I can comfortably live in denial.

Of course, the obvious example is Michael Jackson. Who could have imagined when Thriller came out what he would one day turn into.

There are examples of people closer to me, of course, none of which I care to discuss, but you can use your imagination: people break up after all.

The interesting aspect of this discussion is the reverse. I will have to ponder it at length, but I can't think of any case where the reverse has occured. Interesting.