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9/15/2001 10:14:14 PM iamamonsteryouknow
After all is said and done, I don't have much to say about the attacks of the 11th that hasn't already been said. I think what little I feel the need to say is important, and so here goes.
After all is said and done about what happened, why it happened, and how it happened, we are left with the question of what to do about it. I have heard many declarations of war, and that saddens me. It saddens me because in the end, if we over-retaliate we are no better than terrorists ourselves, attempting to bully people into leaving us alone, and many innocent people will die in the attempt. I think the best thing we can do is to capture Bin Laden, bring him here to stand trial, and execute him for his crimes should he be found guilty. His organization must be dispersed, and individuals within that organization handled as appropriate to their level of involvement. We should also seize his assets, worth several million dollars, and give them to the relief fund. All this must be accomplished with a minimum of innocent casualties, ideally zero. It will require the insertion of ground troops to accomplish, as only individual human beings are capable of the finesse required. Bombs and missles don't care who or what they hit. This will undoubtedly lead to a few military casualties for us and for Afghanistan. I for one, however, would be honored to serve my country in this way. After these steps are taken, we must stop. We must display our strength through restraint. There are those who may see this as a sign of weakness, but the opinions of a few misguided individuals do not in any way detract from the strength of character this would show. It would show that we refuse to be like our enemies. It would show the terrorists that there is no place for them in this world and they will be removed, and we will do so on our terms. We will not follow their rules, we will set our own standards for our behaviors. I would hope that we would follow this or a similar plan of action, and in doing so, history would judge us to be wise.
9/13/2001 12:25:27 AM iamamonsteryouknow
I am collecting my thoughts on the terrorist attacks, and will post them when I'm ready. Expect one of my rare, brief moments of clarity. Hopefully I'll have something new and meaningful to be said.
9/8/2001 11:07:28 PM iamamonsteryouknow
I hate it when I can't sleep. I'm not tired, but I don't feel like doing anything. Everything is very quiet, and I just sit in my chair and stare into space. But I don't get sleepy at all. Quite annoying, only realizing that I'm even doing that when I start to notice that I'm losing feeling in my extremities due to them freezing from the lack of bloodflow. It's too cold in here, and all I'm wearing is a t-shirt and shorts. Not boxers. Actual shorts. With pockets. Standard sleeping attire for me. Except I can't seem to get the sleep part right.
9/8/2001 11:00:13 PM iamamonsteryouknow
Note to self: in the future.. don't push friends into doing something just because I enjoy it. I do my own thing, they do theirs, and if it happens to be the same, GREAT, if not, that's cool too. And it saves a lot of aggravation. It's sad that it's taken me almost two decades to realize that.. and even worse that it'll probably be another ten years before I can really take it to heart. I fear being lonely. It's a natural human thing.. the desire to do nothing that requires you to stand out from the crowd.
9/8/2001 10:48:06 PM iamamonsteryouknow
To the moron in the white mid-eighties Thunderbird, 2 feet is not a safe following distance at 80 mph, nor is it wise to pass someone when you have a solid yellow line on your side, especially when there is oncoming traffic not more than 50 feet off. Be very thankful I decided to be nice even though you were a jerk and didn't speed up to trap you. You know who you are. :)
Ok, now that I got THAT out of my system.. hooray got me a torque converter today. Gonna get my C-4 checked out at a local tranny shop, order up some parts to finish off my engine, and I should be ready to put that sucka on a stand, bolt it all together, fill it up with the required quarttage of RedLine synthetic 10W-30, and drop it in the Mustang. Yay. Then I just gotta finish the priming job.. and I'm really getting tempted to do it the quick-and-ugly way opposed to the slow-and-better way. Mostly, the recent cold snap here is scaring me. I'm beginning to wonder if I'll meet my goals of running and rustproof before winter arrives. I hope I do. Especially rustproof. It'd be lame to have a pristine desert car rust cause I didn't get it prepped right for winter.
Either I've been in a really pissy mood lately or there's been an explosion of stupid people recently. Prolly a little bit of both. Given my attempts to be less jerk like and more nice like, I hope it's more idiots less pissy. That or I'm really failing in my attempt. Though given my current backlog of homework.. I could very well just be pissed off. Lunar is evil that way. I spend way too much time playing that game and not nearly enough doing homework. I've just been doing the absolute minimum to keep bad things(tm) from happening. I really would like to get ahead on some of this stuff.. especially since I'm actually interested in some of my classes. Like Japanese, for example. I have a really awesome teacher and the subject matter interests me and is very useful. So dangit.. I'd like to be doing things like going back over my katakana flash cards to make sure I really have them down, and practice writing them so that I can actually use them. I'm doing ok with numbers though. Helps working with money.. lots of numbers to practice on. I'm driving my coworkers crazy though. I will have to try to come up with some way to make it up to them.
I'm gonna stop now.. I feel myself slipping into ramble mode.
9/8/2001 10:32:58 PM iamamonsteryouknow
BLARG. Very blarg.
9/7/2001 10:27:22 AM iamamonsteryouknow
Heh. Just when I think I'm done with one set of stupid kids, another one starts up. Seems some idiot's been trying to crack into my ebay account. 'Course, it probably would work better if the moron would figure out that the same insecurities that allow them to try that kind of stuff also allow me to track them down.. so I got their IP and the name of their ISP and I suspect they're not going to have an account much longer. Won't mommy and daddy be pissed when they find out junior's been doing stupid things on their computer? I bet that poor little kid's gonna lose all computer priveleges for quite some time. Lesson of the day kids... don't hack unless you're smart enough to cover your rear end. AT LEAST spoof your IP when screwing around, OK?
9/6/2001 01:00:35 AM iamamonsteryouknow
Yay.. haven't seen the stupid kids out in the street lately.. that's very good. Anyway, work was kinda.. I dunno lame I guess is a good word. But even though I got a bunch of stupid jobs dumped on me right before close, I still managed to get out of there before midnight. 'Cause I RULE. Which, in my job, is sorta a bad thing. Ruling pretty much == fast, and since I'm hourly, that means the better I get at my job, the less I get paid. And I can't pick up too many more pay raises. For my position, I'm only allowed by corporate to be paid 25 cents more than I'm making right now. And they can't even do much if they promote me.. same pay limit as I have right now, but I'd get bonuses, and besides, I don't really want to be promoted (but I'd accept if offered) and they haven't mentioned promoting me. Anyway.. yeah. One thing that's more important to me though, and I seem to be succeeding at it better than getting paid what I should be and only slightly less than getting out of there as quickly as possible each night, is being nicer. I dunno, it just struck me that maybe I was being a jerk. I don't know for sure, and no one said anything to me to that effect, I just sorta felt like it. I could be totally wrong.. but it doesn't hurt to improve yourself anyway. Besides, working on being nice makes me feel less lonely. And that's a good thing, because I've been feeling very lonely lately. I don't know the exact cause of it.. other than the constantly nagging feeling that I'm missing something being 21 and having never been out on a date, let alone been kissed. (Didn't they make a movie about that? :) Plus, as things slow down at work during our off season (pretty much anytime school's in session is an off season), I have more time during my shifts to think about things. I'm not as rushed as I am during the summer, and I have longer breaks between deposits. And I've been thinking about some people from my past. Mindy, a little bit.. prolly because I've been talking to a mutual former friend of hers about mustangs.. he's somewhat of an expert, and I'm buying some parts from him. And I saw her ex there the other night.. horrible as it is it does make me feel better to see him going to the movies all by himself and looking very pathetic.. but I guess I should expect to feel that way after what the guy did and how much he was a jerk to me. Probably just working on the mustang reminds me a little of her too.. they're her favorite cars. I had to consider that when I decided to get one, but I didn't think it would be much of a problem, and for the most part it hasn't. I had enough good reasons.. my admiration for Shelbys and the similarities with the fastbacks that they share.. the car Eleanor from Gone in 60 seconds surely influenced my decision to some degree, the fact that my other car is also a Ford so I get to stick with a single brand (interchangeable parts make me happy), and the fact that most camaro drivers seem to be jerks, and most firebird owners seem to be elderly fat ladies with platinum blonde dyed hair.. neither group is who I wish to be associated with. Of course, the 5.0 crowd is mostly jerks too, but the classic owners tend to be a little more.. human. They still have got sticks up their butts, especially the concours guys, but hey.. I'll take what I can get. Not every group of people can be as cool as the air-cooled VW crowd. Now there's an awesome group of people. If you ever get a chance to attend a VW meet, I highly recommend you go, even if you don't like the cars. The people are just awesome. Anyway.. yeah.. don't know why I keep thinking of Mindy.. my personal preference would just to forget about her and move on.. as I suspect the hour after I last spoke to her she had forgotten about me.. she was always forgetting me even when we were friends. I have much fonder memories of Michelle.. and I hope that maybe I'll see her at Metro sometime.. I know she's going, but I haven't seen her yet, and despite the fact that I could probably hack the computers to get the info I'd need to contact her, that just seems wrong and creepy and I'd much rather bump into her sometime or not at all, rather than do that. She was just really cool to talk to, when she wasn't high. Pot had a really odd effect on her.. it made her mean. At least with me.. but when she was sober she was a really cool person. I don't think I'd even consider dating her unless she stopped smoking pot, besides that I've heard rumors that she's getting married, but I'd really love to see her and get to talk to her at least once more. She wrote really awesome stories.. I wonder if she kept writing after she left Front Range. Anyway, I KNOW what reminded me of her today. I was out in box closing out this girl's drawer because she was going home.. and for some odd reason she was trying to get everyone in the box office to flex their arms. Anyway.. that reminded me of Michelle.. one of my fondest memories of her was from one class period where someone had commented on how strong she was.. and she really was. At the time, she worked as a baggage handler for a major air carrier, and she was buff. Not gross like having muscles bulging all over, but just.. buff. She had biceps almost as big as mine. And she makes this muscle with her arm.. goll she looked so sexy right then.. and she says while patting her arm, "if you get tired, just sit down right here," of course implying that her bicep was big enough to sit on and she strong enough to hold someone up on her arm. Neither was really true of course, but.. it just is a wonderful example of the kind of person she was. Anyway.. thinking about old friends like that is bound to make anyone feel at least a little lonely. But that's ok for the next few weeks or so.. And all I have to say is that working designs is evil and lunar is awesome.. and they've sucked me in again. I'm about to go play right now. Perhaps after I am done beating the game I'll seriously start looking to make some new friends at Metro, now that I'm not at a school for the rich and stupid. Later.
9/1/2001 12:51:03 AM iamamonsteryouknow
Grr.. something really pissed me off today. It also scared me silly. I mean I was REALLY shaken up. Some stupid kids who live on a street that's on my way to work like to play a stupid game. I'm sure most people have heard of it. It's called chicken. There's two catches. They're like 10-12 years old, and they try to take on cars and motorcycles on foot. This is the second time it's happened to me. Thankfully, my skid marks gave me a good indication of where they live, and tomorrow I am going to have a talk with their parents. I'm sick of their idiot kids jumping out in front of me on purpose because they think it's some kind of game. My Galaxie weighs 3200 pounds. That means that getting hit by it at even just 20 miles per hour would do more damage than getting shot by a .45 magnum THREE TIMES! I'm afraid one of three things might happen. Least important, I'm gonna wear down the tires on my car always having to lock the brakes up to avoid hitting them. Second is that I may be on my bike, and trying to avoid them will cause me to lose control and injure/kill myself and damage the bike. If either of those two occurs, I'm likely to sue the idiot parents who are letting their kids do this. The third and final possibility is what scares me the most, however. I fear I might not be able to stop in time, and I'll kill one of them. I don't know if I could live with myself after that. I don't much fear my life being ruined by the parents at that point.. I have witnesses who have also been in the same situation with the same kids, and / or have seen it happen.. it would be very hard for them to get anything more than manslaughter with a very minor sentence pushed through, and a wrongful death suit would have almost no chance... but still, I would have to live with the fact that I'd killed someone for the rest of my life.. and that itself is worse than anything any court could ever do to me. If talking to the parents doesn't help, I may talk to the police. I'm sure I won't be the only one to complain about it, and maybe if enough people speak up they police can do something about it. Anyway, I don't like how grim this all is, but the fact is something has to be done. I figured I had scared the kids straight the first time they did it to me. They were on bikes and stopped me on my motorcycle and kept circling around me to keep me trapped. I saw an opening and popped a wheelie and jammed out of there. Obviously, it didn't sink in that they're messing with some very dangerous machinery. So it's time to go to the source. The people who probably shouldn't have been allowed to breed in the first place. I hate to say it, but the area I live in has gone downhill.. it used to be a nice suburban neighborhood, but it's kinda turning into the town slums. We've got a lot of.. shall I say hicks and rednecks? now. Every other house on my street has an RV in front of it, and even my unpainted mustang and my dad's rusted ghia aren't the ugliest cars around by far. And we at least keep them in the driveway and covered. So yeah... I'm not so sure talking to the parents will help, but I should try. It just might save someone's life.
In other news.. logging into blogger today I saw a little blurb about how blogging might lead to romance. Highly doubtful in my case.. I don't know if anyone outside my circle of friends even reads this (anyone wanna email me and prove me wrong?), and I REALLY doubt that reading it would make anyone want to date me. I just talk about stuff that interests me, stuff I wanna post, stuff I'm thinking about, and it's all pretty raw data.. I don't edit or filter it much.. tends to ramble and wander a lot. Anyway.. if anyone was wondering how things turned out with the girl I mentioned on 8/3, she quit the next day or the day after. Not the first time a girl's left shortly after finding out I like her.. and though I don't know for sure it's the cause, it's not exactly easy on me. I don't know what's wrong with me.. I don't think of myself as incredibly attractive, but neither do I consider myself ugly.. and I think I'm somewhat interesting (anyone responding to my previous invitation to email is free to give their comments on this), and I try to be a good person.. interested in other people's interests, a good listener at times and a good speaker at others, I try to be supportive and sensitive.. maybe I'm not very good at it, but at least I try.. so I dunno what my problem is. Arg.. I'm just saying this stuff because I'm feeling depressed.. today was a bad day in a lot of ways.. but still, it truly does bother me even when I'm feeling better, I just don't think about it or talk about it as much. It's always nagging me in the back of my mind though.. why do guys who are total jerks and not really any better looking than me always have girlfriends and I'm at least trying to be a good person and I've never been out on a date in my life?.. I dunno, it might sound stupid.. but it does truly bother me.
8/30/2001 11:22:18 PM iamamonsteryouknow
This has got to be the BEST body kit out there for the MKIV Supra. If you have a MKIV and 13 grand to burn, you should really get it. I know I would!
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complex:a drag run doesn't really accurately measure power... aerodynamics play a big role. good for a general idea, but that's about it.
Cyan Shadow:Not always, besides it's cheaper than a dyno test. :)
complex:drag strips are boring anyway. winning a drag race is simply a matter of which car has more money put into it.
rubadub:Screw the dragstrips, you have one of those outside of almost every US city. Racetracks would be cool though.
Cyan Shadow:That'd be good, cause lswear promised me a grudge match against his Supra when I get my Mustang running, and I offered to pay for both of us.
complex:usually drag strips have an open night once a week.. i know here, SIR does it on fridays, for $5. and.. passengers are the devil unless it's a beautiful girl.
Cyan Shadow:This country needs more publicly accessible (and affordable) dragstrips and racetracks.
Cyan Shadow:Crossfire injection is a bad thing(tm).
Cyan Shadow:That is, if it exists. There was a Z06 and Z05 and I'm just assuming there was a Z04 beforehand. I think I could afford one.
Cyan Shadow:Come on.. if passengers didn't matter I'd be driving a Z04 Corvette.
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