impasse of the soul

I wish life had an undo button. I wish I could go back at the time and place where all the daily crap could be brushed off as not relevant. I have no idea how other people can be happy with the way things are, I can't. I am bailing out.

Colorful dust falls from the sky, but I cannot touch it. And soon, I will not even want to touch it. I shot my own capacity for happiness in the stomach by being a people-pleasuring idiot, I want my fucking self to crawl into a hole and die.

People smell of sun lotion in a crowded bus to nowhere, my electronic devices hate me, and in a sense, who can blame them. They're trying to get away from me every way they can.

I always had the abstract idea, in my mind, that things will somehow turn out to be okay, that there's something for everyone, that there's always some way out, if you just think things through long enough and ask enough people for advice, stick around and try to make things right.

The truth is, there's no such thing as okay. Trying to fix one thing always ends up messing it up worse, or creating an unforeseen problem. Like I told my psychologist in October, life has some very stupid errors in the source code, debugging it is virtually impossible, and like I have recently realized, you can try and try and try and the misery will never go away.

I am never happy. In fact, I am incapable of emotions outside the regret-guilt-resentment-anxiety-anger range. And I have no freaking idea what to do about it, nothing seems to work, not meditation, not talking it out, not positive thinking, not escapism, nothing. When I wake up in the mornings, I get this feeling that I am somehow loading myself, my past and my attitudes onto my brain, a split second after waking up. It's a strain, to go through the day with myself resting so heavily on my shoulders, I wish I could just get a new one. But even that wouldn't work.

Fuck off, and die

It's sweltering in Boston, and a dozen Tufts University coeds are out in shorts and tanks, attracting the usual stares. Only today the stares are for a different reason: the girls are huddled around a 750-pound machine that looks like a spaceship, long and wide with a bubble-shaped cockpit open to reveal a mass of pipes and wires. It's actually a solar car—one they've built from the ground up and hope to race next year. Suddenly sparks fly, and the girls jump back. They may be engineering whizzes, but they know a hazard when they see one. They call a teacher over to help solve the problem, as Alex McGourty, 21, gets ready to take the wheel. A junior with blond hair and freckles, she built her first car engine in high school: a biodiesel "veggie mobile" she ran on McDonald's fryer oil. McGourty revs out of the driveway, and almost immediately dislodges the car's chain. Campus police block off the street, and the baseball team, just returned from practice, lines up to watch. "Look out," a construction worker yells. "It's the Nerd Girls!"

The Nerd Girls may not look like your stereotypical pocket-protector-loving misfits—their adviser, Karen Panetta, has a thing for pink heels—but they're part of a growing breed of young women who are claiming the nerd label for themselves. In doing so, they're challenging the notion of what a geek should look like, either by intentionally sexing up their tech personas, or by simply finding no disconnect between their geeky pursuits and more traditionally girly interests such as fashion, makeup and high heels. In fact, calling them "nerd" is no insult at all—the Nerd Girls have T shirts emblazoned with the slogan. The crew includes Cristina Sanchez, a master's student in biomedical engineering (and a former cheerleader) who can talk for hours about aerodynamics. Caitrin Eaton, a freshman, asked her boyfriend for a soldering iron last Christmas. Juniors Courtney Mario and Perry Ross giggle when they talk about what fascinated them most about "No Country for Old Men": how did the assassin's air gun work?

These girl geeks aren't social misfits; their identities don't hinge on outsider status. They may love all things sci-tech, but first and foremost they are girls—and they've made that part of their appeal. They've modeled themselves after icons such as Tina Fey, whose character on "30 Rock" is a "Star Wars"-loving, tech obsessed, glasses-wearing geek, but who's garnered mainstream appeal and a few fashion-magazine covers. Or on actress Danica McKellar, who coauthored a math theorem, wrote a book for girls called "Math Doesn't Suck" and posed in a bikini for Stuff magazine. Or even Ellen Spertus, a Mills College professor and research scientist at Google—and the 2001 winner of the Silicon Valley "Sexiest Geek Alive" pageant.

-------------------------------------------

there's more, but no.

στα ελληνικά

Θα ήθελα πολύ να μπορώ να πετάξω τις σακούλες απτο μπαλκόνι μου κατευθείαν μέσα στον σκουπιδοντενεκέ. Το είχα δοκιμάσει μια φορά, αλλά μάλλον δεν γίνεται. Αυτό δε σημαίνει ότι είναι κακή ιδεα για flash παιχνιδάκι. You'd just have to get the physics right.

Απολογισμος της μερας: Τα ρούχα μου βγήκαν βιολετί γιατί τα σπάω, οι φακές ανθίζουν δίπλα στις κίτρινες καρέκλες, δεν υπάρχει ίχνος φαγητού στο ψυγείο (πάλι έκανα πλούσιο το κυλικείο στη σχολή, πρέπει σοβαρά να σκεφτώ την εκδοχή του σπιτικού σαντουιτς τυλιγμένο σε ασημόχαρτο) και το laptop σφυριζει μελαγχολικά πάνω στα έδρανα.

Θα ήθελα να μπορώ να νιώσω κάτι.