Writing is soooo hard!!! It’s so hard!!!! How does anyone ever even write a single sentence?! It’s like pulling teeth without the anesthesia.

Pain! Great pain! :-((

Btw, I’ve been reading a lot of shoujo manga. I am sooooooooooooooo very very very sick (read: amazingly super unbelievably sick) of the “girl meets cute boy, likes boy at first because he’s cute, then discovers boy is an obnoxious jerk and doesn’t like him, then slowly falls in love with him despite the fact that he’s a jerk” story line. Bleh. Are there no other interesting stories for young girls? Why are we sticking to this formula which was a bad formula to begin with. I’ve never liked romances where the love interest is a jerk.

That’s why I’m writing my own romance. :-))

The internet is huge!! HUGE!!! I can’t feel the size of the Earth or the Universe, but I can feel the size of the internet. Once again, I’m reminded of a passage from Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and the description of the Magrathean factory floor:

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He continued: “I should warn you that the chamber we are about to pass into does not literally exist within our planet. It is a little too … large. We are about to pass through a gateway into a vast tract of hyperspace. It may disturb you.”

Arthur made nervous noises.

Slartibartfast touched a button and added, not entirely reassuringly. “It scares the willies out of me. Hold tight.”

The car shot forward straight into the circle of light, and suddenly Arthur had a fairly clear idea of what infinity looked like.

It wasn’t infinity in fact. Infinity itself looks flat and uninteresting. Looking up into the night sky is looking into infinity — distance is incomprehensible and therefore meaningless. The chamber into which the aircar emerged was anything but infinite, it was just very very big, so that it gave the impression of infinity far better than infinity itself.

Arthur’s senses bobbed and span, as, travelling at the immense speed he knew the aircar attained, they climbed slowly through the open air leaving the gateway through which they had passed an invisible pinprick in the shimmering wall behind them.

The wall.

The wall defied the imagination — seduced it and defeated it. The wall was so paralysingly vast and sheer that its top, bottom and sides passed away beyond the reach of sight. The mere shock of vertigo could kill a man.

The wall appeared perfectly flat. It would take the finest laser measuring equipment to detect that as it climbed, apparently to infinity, as it dropped dizzily away, as it planed out to either side, it also curved. It met itself again thirteen light seconds away. In other words the wall formed the inside of a hollow sphere, a sphere over three million miles across and flooded with unimaginable light.

“Welcome,” said Slartibartfast as the tiny speck that was the aircar, travelling now at three times the speed of sound, crept imperceptibly forward into the mindboggling space, “welcome,” he said, “to our factory floor.”

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Apparently, without realizing it, Douglas Adams was very good at describing the internet. 🙂 Anyways, I think the description of the factory floor is a perfect description of the internet. Every now and then, this feeling hits home as I surf or investigate a new technology. And I’m feeling it again as I read about and play with IRC, and toy with the idea of setting up my own fserve.

So there were some nice pages about time management. Most of them were university pages written to help students manage their time. There was the occasional scary page that resembled a written infomercial complete with crap testimonials and bone-chilling web design created by the marketing and sales staff. But I found some good information. I wonder if I’ll get more done now, or at least feel less snowed-under and anxious by everything that needs to be done….

There isn’t enough time. No matter how I rearrange things… no matter how twist, swap, or contort all the things I would like/need to do in the day, I still am desperately short on time. I wonder what Google has to say about time management. Although I have a dreadful feeling that “time management” is just a couple of words used to sell expensive books and courses to people like me with too much to do and not enough sense to see a scam surrounded by fancy words, but we’ll see…. surely the Oracle has the answer…

Things have been soooo emotional recently. We’ve had the rollercoaster ride of money and jobs as the economy stumbles along, dragging us with it. We’ve had the emotional rollercoaster ride of trying to have a baby…. which is very emotional. Many people have been on the money/job ride and know what it feels like. But only a few have been on the terrible baby ride. It hurts more than you would imagine– more than I ever imagined it would. (Check out this site, if you feel up to the sorrow: http://www.babycentre.co.uk/tips/1809.html.) And then Savannah died.

I just want it all to settle down. I just want a breather.

I’ve never been an “It’s not fair” or “Why did it happen to me” kind of person. Having been a victim, you quickly learn not to be a victim. But lately, I could really use a personal favor from the universe.

It’s been so hard lately….

I finally managed it!!! As I write this, I am using mIRC to download Da Gurlz latest Power!!! manga releases!! *sob* I’m so proud of myself. I was having a hard time coming into the 21st century with fansubs and scanlations. (Of course, back in my day, we didn’t have scanlations yet.) The last I time I ordered anime, it was fansub VHS tapes. 🙂 Now look at me! Using mIRC and everything!

You’d think I was in my early twenties, not some techno-over-the-hill thirty-something. Of course, my grandma who is 76-years-old, is on Yahoo instant messenger. 🙂

I haven’t updated this in a long time. I actually haven’t updated any of my webpages in a long time, even though I have some lovely pictures of flowering cacti to put on the garden page.

Savannah died. And it hurt so much. I had heard of people being completely devastated when their pet died, but I never really understood it. Even though I had Savannah and loved her with all my heart, I still didn’t understand how people could be so sad when their pet died– it’s just an animal, not a human, right?

But then Savannah died of cancer three weeks ago. And the world stood still. And I cried and cried and cried. I miss her all the time and want her to come home. I want to see her silly face and snuggle against her soft golden fur. And I’ll never get to do that again.

So I’ve been too sad to do anything. Just now, Matt has been watching “Showtime” and I was thinking of how common and normal it is to hear the sound of gunshots in the home because of TV shows, and that that was an unhappy thing. I was going to write about that, but first felt I had to update about Savannah. But, now having written about Savannah, the sadness is all fresh again and I want to crawl back into my dark hole.

I miss her so much.

My beautiful dog. She will live forever in my memory and in my heart.

My cat is sitting in the open window, basking in the full sun as she cleans herself.

Spring has definitely come to Texas.

The internet is huge!!! I mean HUGE. It’s a vast populated city complete with shopping, banks, storage facilities, churches, cults, libraries, schools, and on and on.

I have my particular neighborhoods and shopping malls that I enjoy visiting. And I meet people. I don’t know their age or what they look like or even where they live in real life. We just cross over because of a particular shared interest and start chatting and making bonds.

What started these thoughts? I joined a scanlating group recently and I was surfing the members’ personal sites today. I found out that one of the members isn’t even in high school! I’ve been talking to her on the Himechan mailing list for awhile and had no idea. I knew she was young, but I was thinking high school or college. She’s my cousin’s age.

So then I just started thinking about the internet in general. It’s such a bizarre intangible. But it’s real. But it’s not. But it is. But it doesn’t exist, not like a real city. But you can do many things in it that you can do in a real city. And it does exist. It’s just not tangible, like buildings and people’s faces are tangible and understandable.

Internet-megopolis City.

So Matt said, “What did you write in your journal tonight?” And I replied, “I went surfing for blogs again today which is always a bad idea. It always freaks me out. It’s like being put in the Total Perspective Vortex from Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.”

For those who don’t know what that is, here’s the passage from Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (technically Chapter 10 and 11 from The Restaurant at the End of the Universe or so Google tells me):

For when you are put into the Vortex you are given just one momentary glimpse of the entire unimaginable infinity of creation, and somewhere in it a tiny little marker, a microscopic dot on a microscopic dot, which says “You are here.”

The grey plain stretched before Zaphod, a ruined, shattered plain. The wind whipped wildly over it.

Visible in the middle was the steel pimple of the dome. This, gathered Zaphod, was where he was going. This was the Total Perspective Vortex.

As he stood and gazed bleakly at it, a sudden inhuman wail of terror emanated from it as of a man having his soul burnt from his body. It screamed above the wind and died away.

Zaphod started with fear and his blood seemed to turn to liquid helium.

“Hey, what was that?” he muttered voicelessly.

“A recording,” said Gargravarr, “of the last man who was put in the Vortex. It is always played to the next victim. A sort of prelude.”

“Hey, it really sounds bad …” stammered Zaphod, “couldn’t we maybe slope off to a party or something for a while, think it over?”

…

At that moment another dismal scream rent the air and Zaphod shuddered.

“What can do that to a guy?” he breathed.

“The Universe,” said Gargravarr simply, “the whole infinite Universe. The infinite suns, the infinite distances between them, and yourself an invisible dot on an invisible dot, infinitely small.”

…

“OK, OK,” said Zaphod.

He opened the door of the box and stepped in.

Inside the box he waited.

After five seconds there was a click, and the entire Universe was there in the box with him.

…

The Total Perspective Vortex derives its picture of the whole Universe on the principle of extrapolated matter analyses.

To explain — since every piece of matter in the Universe is in some way affected by every other piece of matter in the Universe, it is in theory possible to extrapolate the whole of creation — every sun, every planet, their orbits, their composition and their economic and social history from, say, one small piece of fairy cake.

The man who invented the Total Perspective Vortex did so basically in order to annoy his wife.

Trin Tragula — for that was his name — was a dreamer, a thinker, a speculative philosopher or, as his wife would have it, an idiot.

And she would nag him incessantly about the utterly inordinate amount of time he spent staring out into space, or mulling over the mechanics of safety pins, or doing spectrographic analyses of pieces of fairy cake.

“Have some sense of proportion!” she would say, sometimes as often as thirty-eight times in a single day.

And so he built the Total Perspective Vortex — just to show her.

And into one end he plugged the whole of reality as extrapolated from a piece of fairy cake, and into the other end he plugged his wife: so that when he turned it on she saw in one instant the whole infinity of creation and herself in relation to it.

To Trin Tragula’s horror, the shock completely annihilated her brain; but to his satisfaction he realized that he had proved conclusively that if life is going to exist in a Universe of this size, then the one thing it cannot afford to have is a sense of proportion.

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So anyways, that’s what it feels like when I surf blogs.