I love cooking with garlic; my hands smell like it for days. A lot of people don’t seem to like how garlic smells, but I can’t get enough of it. I don’t use as much of it as Emeril though. I think I’ll move to Gilroy and join a commune.

I think it was a success. Everybody stayed until about 11, and really seemed to enjoy the food. It was so good to see them all again and catch up with everyone’s lives. My wife made a couple of perfect cheesecakes (but gave most of them to our guests to take home grrr), and both the garlic bread and the mushroom sauce were hits. A good time was had by all (as far as I know anyway). I was also able to schedule the Northern Lights. Seriously, we saw them (at least the red part) all the way down here. It was so cool, just this red cloud floating over the horizon. It changed brightness, and moved around the sky. It was the first time I’ve seen it, I was just so amazed. Thanks to Jack for needing a cigarette right then and noticing the weird sky.

Well, thanks to the quick thinking of my wife, the dinner party is back on. It will probably go well, we’re all pretty good friends. I haven’t seen a couple of them in a long time, so I think we’ll have a good time. I’ll write how it goes.

My wife makes among the best chocolate chip cookies known to man.

My car registration finally came. I almost made it to six months delinquent. Maybe I’ll try again next year. Now that I’m paying to be allowed to drive my car, I have to figure out some place to take it…

I want a mocha from starbucks. Damn me for living in a mountain town without a 24hr coffee shop. My espresso machine is in a storage unit that closes at dusk. Not that I make good coffee with it anyway. I guess thats what I get for losing my job and living with my parents.

I went to the driving range outside Fresno for an hour today. The irons section was on grass, so I had a pretty good session. I think my swing is really improving, and I did pretty well on the putting green too. Now if I could just take that out to the course I’d be set. I ripped my favorite pair of shorts with my second shot though, an errant pitching wedge. I need to play more, it’s just so damn expensive. It’s a lot cheaper in the city, but the munis in Fresno are pretty crowded, and it’s an hour drive both way. Maybe I should try to get a tee-time for Monday morning. I don’t know if I can afford twenty dollars. I need to find a cheaper driving range. In Bakersfield I went to one by my office that was between a couple oil refineries. It smelled kind of funny and a train went by now and then, but I could get 150 balls for just a few bucks and they were always on grass. I could get through that many during my lunch hour with enough time left to get something from Jack in the Box. Mmmm. I miss Jack in the Box. I have to go to Fresno to get that too. But I can’t eat a sourdough jack anymore. My wife and I have stopped eating beef because the American beef industry isn’t taking enough precaution against mad cow disease. Basically we won’t know if it’s here until people start getting it. Anyway, I was getting pretty good when I was going to the range everyday. Then I lost my job and didn’t play for months. I think I’ve played five times in the last six months. How depressing I can’t even practice in the back yard — I hit my nine iron just to the fence. We have five acres, but the house is right in the middle making it impossible to hit balls from edge to edge. Damn my brother-in-law for getting me hooked on such an expensive game. My dad bought me FootJoy Terrains for my birthday last week (and a pair for himself). They’re so comfortable; if it weren’t bad for the spikes, I’d wear them everywhere. We got them for pretty cheap because they were made before 2000. Thats better though, because they don’t have the Fast Twist(tm) system that I’ve read sucks. I really wanted the solid black, they looked so sweet, but nobody had them in my size so I got black on white saddleback. They look pretty cool, reminds me of this cool ska band Darin hung out with sometimes (I think they were called The Gadjits, I can’t remember). I tried on a bunch of gloves too, and the only one that would fit was the Nike Elite Feel XL Reg. Of course, that one is $14.95. When I can justify paying that much for a glove that will probably wear out in six months or so, I’m going to get the black one. It looks so cool, I look like Luke Skywalker in Return of the Jedi wearing it. I think I’m getting obsessed with golf. But that’s okay, it gets me outside, get some exercise. I just wish it wasn’t so expensive.

God I’m whiny tonight. I think I’m upset because the dinner party we were planning for tomorrow has pretty much fallen apart. I was going to make tortelloni with butter sage sauce, but we had a test run last night. Good thing too. I found out that it’s a lot harder to make the pasta than Mario makes it look. Then I couldn’t roll it thin enough by hand, and I didn’t cut the pieces out straight. It ended up not tasting too bad, but the pasta was so thick that each tortelloni was 90% pasta and 10% filling. So rather than try to figure out and test something else for an entree, we decided to go to a restaurant. Now one of the couples (we only invited two) can’t afford to go. So damnit, any other time we schedule it at least one of my parents will be here.

Is there a free HTTP caching program for Win2K? I should write one. That would probably help speed up accesses through our LAN.

Three Kings is a surprisingly good movie.

I’m sorry this one is so disorganized, I just wanted to get something written.

I hate dial-up so much. In Bakersfield I had DSL in my apartment. I had two T3s in my office. Now I have an unreliable 56k shared among the household. <sigh> How am I supposed to watch Summoner Geeks on this?

And why the hell does Outlook take so long to load? What is the deal with Office 2k taking 180M when you’re only installing Word? I threw together an old Pentium 90 for my sister, and I was shocked at how much space Microsoft stuff alone took when I really looked.

Actually I don’t. I know Tae Kwon Do, though it’s not very useful, practically speaking. I’d love to learn Kung Fu, but I’ve been moving around so much lately that I really can’t start learning something like that. I’d love to start fencing again, but there isn’t anyone around here who does saber. I miss fencing a lot. Coach is at some college in either Indiana, Illinois, or Nebraska, I can’t recall which. My heart still quickens when I hear the song of steel striking. I wish I had been involved in individual sports from a younger age. I think I’m a fairly decent athlete, I just can’t play on a team for the most part. I have a big problem relying on people and having them rely on me. If I lose in an individual sport, I have only myself to blame, and be blamed by.

I grew up thinking I hated sports, because all the other boys made me feel so bad when I made a mistake on their team. Soon I was being picked last; the schoolyard analog to being a 45-year old unemployed virgin (I’m guessing). So I avoided sports as much as I could, dreading PE — except dodgeball, which should tell me something about my anger management as a child. I have to say that it turned out for the best, because I don’t know what would have happened otherwise. It made me focus on developing more valuable skills: computers, math, Boy Scouts (much more on that in another post).

But who knows what could have happened if my dad had been an avid golfer, or a fencer, or a tennis player. Maybe I’d be in college on a sports scholarship right now. I know that if I hadn’t moved to California before my Junior year I would have gotten a fencing scholarship. I don’t know if I could have taken the pressure though. I had hit a wall, and Coach didn’t do a good job of helping me persevere. It wasn’t really his fault though; I never talked to him.

Oh well, no need to dwell on roads that have already closed. It seems that these days we can have as many second chances as we want, except where it really matters.

I’ve been looking around at random journals, and it looks like most people just babble on about what they’ve been doing all day. Okay, nothing wrong with that. I guess that’s what a real journal is. I think I’ll try doing some of that now and then. Not right now though.

I started this journal for a couple reasons. First, I felt like I really needed to write. I know I need practice before I try stories, and I felt this would be the best place. The other reason is that I’ve always had problems communicating with people; primarily, I think, because I can’t trust people enough to give them a chance to say what I think isn’t good enough. My mom has always done that, nothing I do or say is good enough for her. So I guess in a way this is a combination of voluntary writing assignments and therapy for me. However, I think the main reason I won’t write much about the happenings of my day is that I’ve always hated chit-chat. I’ve never spoken when I didn’t have something important to say.

To make a long entry short (too late), this probably won’t be like most other journals.

It seems to me that feminists are always the first to tell women what they can and can’t do or think. You can’t be a house-wife or a stripper, you must wear suits with big shoulders and be aggressive business people. You must believe that all women are beautiful, but only if they don’t try to be. No conclusions yet, just thoughts.

I always had trouble in English classes with assignments to write a story about a personal experience, mainly because I feel like I’ve had no experiences that would be interesting to others. Of course the response from the “teacher” was always, “Your job is to make it interesting,” then send me on my way. Now that I think of it, I think every year of my education thus far can be summed up by the relationship I had with the English teacher. I don’t really know why one person could affect a whole year, and actually every year after that.

Sometimes I think that I’m bipolar or manic depressive. I have no real idea what the symptoms are, but I seem to have highs and lows. I sometimes think that I have no interesting experiences, but other times I realize that I have experienced a lot. I think this has a lot to do with a quarter-life crisis (assuming I’ll live to eighty). I just turned twenty, and I’ve been thinking a lot about where I’ve been and where I’m going. I don’t know what the facts are, but the truth is I have little more than a bigger body, a couple of cars to pay for, and a deeper voice to show for twenty years of life.

I suppose it depends on who you listen to. The main point of most spiritual messages seems to be that life shouldn’t be defined by what we have attained, but rather by how we tried to attain it. This is a wonderful way to live if you’re a monk, but in today’s world one needs material posessions in order to meet Maslow’s needs. Perhaps the only bastion of true spirituality left is the homeless. I’ve always thought that anyone who wears a WWJD bracelet should give up all their posessions and gives sermons on mounds. I think Jesus was a pretty cool guy, and a lot more relaxed than most modern Christians are. After all, he did hang out with the lowest dregs of society: alcoholics (he could turn water into wine, who else would they follow), whores, the diseased, children. But I digress.

So sure, I’ve had some pretty great experiences, but after twenty years I’m right back where I started. I’m out of work, living with my parents again, back in my self-imposed isolation. Is this the way it’s supposed to work, going in circles until death ends it? That is pretty much the basis of Buddhism. I think it’s also what Mark Twain was saying with the end of Huck Finn. In the end, even after all he’s been through, Huck goes back to how he was at the beginning. I don’t think people change, they just try. Stevens, in The Remains of the Day, wants to change after he meets the old butler on the pier, but I don’t think he ever did.

So where does that leave me? If I can only go where I’ve been, what’s the point of going there three more times? Perhaps life is like a great movie; every time you watch it you catch new things. I think a better analogy might be driving through California in different seasons. Every season here, at least in the mountains, looks completely different. In spring everything is blanketed in lush green; I expect to see Mel Gibson riding a horse in front of a bunch of scraggly guys in kilts any day now. In summer it turns into a desert. A vast sea of light brown broken by the occasional butte or cow-buoy. Fall brings with it a landscape reminiscent of Jackson Pollock. Winter signals a death of the landscape. Another desert, but this one a frozen sheet of blinding white (now and then).

I think what it comes down to in the end is that the end doesn’t matter. The destination is irrelevant; the journey must be appreciated. It doesn’t matter if I keep going to the same place, as long as I get there a different way every time. Thats great in an idyllic world where one can reject all responsibilities. So does this mean that the only people who can be truly happy are those who don’t worry about money: bums and the extremely wealthy (with good financial managers). Basically yes. So what does that leave for the rest of us?

Moments. Our current culture tries to convince us that everyone can be happy and do what they’ve always dreamed of doing. That is simply the ridiculous degeneration of capitalism. The rich have to convince everyone else that if they keep grinding away at their job they’ll be able to be constantly happy some day, because if they don’t everyone would put down their tools and go home. The truth is not everyone can have everything they want. If that ever happened our society would collapse. Who grows up wanting more than anything to work in a headcheese factory, or be on vomit detail at a theme park? As Marx said, society could not exist without blue-collar workers. It seems as though the majority of people have a foggy view of happiness at best.

But what if we look at the acquisition of material wealth not as the journey, but as the means to prolong it? Then life, at least the part that matters, comes down to a series of moments. I guess the tough part is recognizing and holding onto the right moments. I’m still trying to figure that out myself.