A Sith Does What a Sith Wants.

I've been swimming in dopamine this week for no other reason than I can.

For the past little while I've had more-than-average anxiety and I find that I could give myself temporary reprieve by not really thinking of anything beyond the immediate moment. It's my Christmas gift to myself. All I want to think about is my little Star Wars adventure.

It's not at all the most constructive use of my time in the typical sense of the word, but as a rule, I find it's pretty important to do what you want in life.

And This is the Mutherfucking Thanks I Get?

I've been panicking about all sorts of things lately. Why was I panicking? Because it's what I do. If you want a nice visual representation of how I feel when it happens, watch Natural Born Killers, and look at the black-and-white scenes that take place when Juliette Lewis is seducing the gas station attendant.

Like everyone else, I try to apply causality to my experiences, especially things that I take to be negative. Causality at least gives a sense of control and agency. "The reason I'm sad is because I haven't been eating enough carbs" means that you can feel better if you want to. The problem is that in our haste to identify the cause (and solution) to issues, we often get it wrong.

My life isn't some sort of existentialist pit, in which I sip on wine, lament, and regularly use words like "lament". But I have some "problems", and I've had them for as long as I remember. I've come up with lots of reasons that assuredly, 100%, without a doubt explain the cause of the problem and give me a clean answer to how to solve them. These assessments pretty much end up being bullshit. Time spent with friends, exercise, video games, love and sex... these are all good things, but while I had a pretty decent control over my emotions before, now I can count on seemingly small things to make me feel like I'm going mental.

This isn't My Problem(tm) , but I do worry a lot that when people, especially my girlfriend, realize what I'm like, they'll go away. If I freak out and go irrational for a night, I don't think that people will get mad at me, but I do think that they'll be treating me as though I peed on myself. For now, I think that I've given up trying to control when I lose it, but I'm insecure. Sure, I know that people like me when I'm okay, but sometimes I'm not okay, and I can't control it. It's those cases that I worry about... I wish people would just treat it like a minor epileptic fit. I'd like that a lot better than trying to pretend that I have it together. I usually do, but sometimes I don't. People who have been very close to me got very mad at me in the past because of this, and I don't blame them. It doesn't mean that I'm saying that it's my fault; it just means that they might not have understood the situation. Sometimes, no matter what I do, I go crazy. Then a few others make the mistake of thinking that I'm "really like that" and that when I'm happy, I'm really just putting up a front.

Look, I have no idea what's the cause or solution (if any) to whatever it is that I have, but I can say: when I'm happy, I'm happy. When I'm mad, I'm mad. When I'm absolutely psychotic, thinking very very nasty thoughts, I'm absolutely psychotic, thinking very very nasty thoughts. To the best of my knowledge, there's no "REALLY authentic" way that I am. That theory's as dumb and appealing as the theory that we somehow store every sight and sound that we experience in our memories, where they remain forever. Memory is largely a process of active reconstruction (not passive recall) , and my authenticity lies in the fact that I feel what I feel when I feel it (not in some "true way that Mia is" that gets masked whenever I feel or act contrary to that "true way").

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Now that you're thoroughly freaked out, something to keep in mind about my blog: when in a good mood, I'm generally too busy *doing* stuff to bother writing in here. It's when I'm in need of venting or pondering that I'll usually have the "let's write" vibe. So if you take my blog entries as a good indication of how I feel most of the time, you're wronger than Jon singing a long wrong song about smoking a bong with a Viet cong named Wong.

Pale September

I do a whole lot of thinking but not a whole lot of doing. I'm lazy and undisciplined and I sabotage myself constantly. I like to pretend I know better than everyone else but I fall into the same traps as everyone else. I refuse to sacrifice, to truly sacrifice.

I berate myself a lot after lacks of discipline. I don't know if it's good or bad, but it's how I function. If I told most people about this, they'd call me crazy. They'd say I'm too hard on myself. They're idiots.

There's this illusion of safety people have where 1. they will never lose what they have and 2. things will 'work themselves out' in the end.

It's generally true that if you keep doing what you're doing you'll keep getting what you're getting. If that works for you, then great.

I'm in need of something different.

I've risen from my physical frame, you can't touch me.

Sometimes, much too often these days, I feel my emotions overwhelming.

My curse is that I care too much.

From int to Binary to float

Quiet afternoon at work (which is quite rare), so I wrote a little java program that converts from integer to binary to float.

public class PracticeMain {

public static void main(String[] args) {

int number = 26;
int remainder;
String output = "";

while(number > 1)
{
remainder = number%2;
output = (Integer.toString(remainder)) + output;
number = number/2;
}

output = (Integer.toString(number)) + output;
System.out.print(output);

StringBuffer outputString = new StringBuffer(output);
outputString.reverse();
output = outputString.toString();

double floatnum = 0;

for(int i= output.length(); i > 0 ; i--)
{
if(output.charAt(i-1) == '1')
{
floatnum = floatnum + Math.pow(2, (i-1));
}
}

System.out.println();
System.out.println(floatnum);

}

}

Parts and Structure

"Knowing only the composition (the parts that compose a system) and the structure (the way those parts are connected), we can learn a lot about a complex system." -Prof. Ruths, TEDxMcGill