to create or intimate

I’m not really afraid of my life slipping into mundaneness. It’s inevitable. I’m just not an ambitious person. I like spending time alone, I like spending time with friends, and I’m just very comfortable doing nothing of importance. I don’t need to be recognized or powerful or even important, but even without these needs I’m not free from anxiety about the direction of my life by any means. Transitioning out of the school year and having a lot of free time brings these thoughts to the fore frequently throughout the day, as I try to convince myself to be productive. Generally, I fail at this objective, but at least in the past few minutes I’ve clarified some of my own motivations to myself. My life has been relatively easy on me, due to inborn talents, and as a result it’s taken me a long time to face the realization, or even just the possibility, of disappointment. Even more than failing at my chosen career path, these are the two ongoing failures that scare me the most:

First, I want to create meaningful art. Not graphic art, that ship sailed a long time ago. But I want to create music or words that express what I feel is trapped just under the surface. As far as music, I’ve been in the process of making lots and lots of excuses to myself to explain why I haven’t made a solid dent on something yet. I can speak through a couple different instruments, but I just haven’t thought of anything to say.

As far as writing, I know I understand things. I understand a lot of things that other people don’t understand. Yes, with regards to objective knowledge like math that is easy to express once your brain is wrapped around it, I can understand it and relate that understanding and that’s where I’ve found success. But I also believe that I understand other things about the world and people and their interactions and motivations, but only in a fleeting way and I am frustratingly unable to formulate that understanding in a meaningful way, even to myself. As I indicated a year ago in my first post, this is the reason for this blog.

In support of this diagnosis, it occurred to me why I’ve always been incapable of editing my own work. When I reread things I’ve written, even just seconds ago, the original meaning is lost to me, and it just frustrates me to rewrite things. No, writing is not my future. At least, not without a lot more practice.

The second preoccupation of mine is to find true intimacy, and I think this desire ties in closely with the first one. For someone else to truly understand me would be the same as creating meaningful art. I’m not sure exactly how to explain it, but it could be as simple as confirming that I am the person I imagine myself to be. I don’t think its impossible.

If this entry has a reflective tone, it’s not a depressed one; I hooked up with a new girl last night, a girl I met last weekend, and I actually think achieving some percentage of that intimacy I’ve been talking about might be possible. She’s funny, scatterbrained, perceptive, challenging, open, unpretentious, and smart, and not a bad fuck either. I’m going to make an honest effort, I swear.

Why do I think I’m better than that?

Why do I think I’m better than that?

E7200 PC Build Update – Overclocking

This is a follow-up to my recent post where I detailed my purchasing decisions for my PC upgrade.

Everything is great!  I took everything out of my old case, cleaned it and started from scratch building.  Some fun things I did before it got up and running:

-Since I planned to use my old graphics card I decided to clean it out.  In order to accomplish that, I ripped the metal plate off of the heatsink with a pair of pliers, and cleaned out all the dust.  Then I decided that the metal plate probably helped air flow, so I attached an aluminum foil replacement with two-sided adhesive.  Unfortunately, the graphics card is a noise disaster.  I don’t think its the foil, but since all my other parts are nearly perfectly silent, the noise alone is making me consider upgrading the card as well (or perhaps on-board video?)

-I love my six year old microsoft natural keyboard, so I decided to take it apart and give it a cleaning.  Taking it apart was fun and informative, but getting it back together was… an adventure.  It took at least an hour and some creative duct taping inside to get everything to stay in place but I managed to pull it off.  My roommate owes me $.50 for my success.

Other than that the process has been as smooth as possible.  The only frustrating moment came when I realized that there’s only 1 IDE connector and my DVD drive and old hard drive would have to be connected together, but I sorted that out.  I managed to get everything plugged in correctly the first time, Vista loaded up perfectly, and I was up and running.

Overclocking worked as advertised!  Oddly, the default setting on the CPU was a 8.5 multiplier @ 267, even though the official 2.53 GHz mark requires a 9.5 multiplier.  I adjusted this and set the FSB to 333, getting up to 3.15 GHz, and everything booted normally.  Almost…

I used Prime95 for stress testing and was failing.  I busted out Gigabytes included tweaking software to diagnose.  Thankfully my CPU was staying under 53 C under full load, even with stock cooling, so things seemed to be ok there.  Checking out the overclocking options, however, I noticed that the memory speed was set to 999 MHz.  I recalled reading that the memory speed should be double the FSB speed in DDR2, and besides, my memory was only rated for 800.  Adjusted that setting down, rebooted, and passed Prime95 with flying colors.

In addition, I used PassMark to benchmark my CPU.  A score of 1977 put me essentially in stock Phenom 9600 range, AMD’s mid-range quadcore processor, which goes for about $250.  Yay!

Considering that I’m only bothering to overclock to levels attainable with default voltages and stock cooling, operating at safe temperatures, this result has me overjoyed.  Now to install Cubase and see what I can pull off.

Finally writing about sex again: a tribute to SP

Ambivalence towards my sexual partners became somewhat of a theme that correlated with my decreased posting activity. It’s not that I get bored with every girl I meet, see, it’s just that I get bored with the ones who are willing to have sex with me. Saturday night was a new high/low watermark in the saga of my sexual achievement/indifference. The tale goes a little like this…

About two months ago I had just been just friended by TCNC. I was not happy about this, as the combination of personal enthusiasm and achieved intimacy in the relationship had me fairly optimistic about the future. But this is what happens. The next weekend I am out at a bar and strike up a rousing conversation with a fairly attractive blond girl who was part of our party. A common interest in rival baseball teams drove a conversation to the point where it was clear that we wanted to have sex with each other. Then we did. Frequently. We’ll call her SP, for slam-piece.

Let’s count the ways that she has been functionally perfect. First, nice body. Off to a good start. Second, she makes no emotional demands on me whatsoever. No complaints there. Third, she orgasms just from sex. I mean, it doesn’t get any better than that. Foreplay? No thanks, just the D, thank you. But again, the ambivalence.

Finally, Saturday. I’m meeting a friend at a bar for his birthday party, and SP shows up. I keep expecting my encounters with her to be awkward, in retribution for my frequent avoidance of her in the online chatting and etc. However, this never happens; she’s always nice, always genuinely happy to see me, and always finding a way to subtly remind me that there’s a nice warm place to bury my penis, if I so desire. What a great girl! Still, I’m restless. Feeding off of my friends who have a strict no-approach policy, I obsess in a minor way over my lack of motivation to meet and greet, and spend way more time dancing awkwardly with my friends (yes some girls) than is healthy. We leave for another bar. Without SP. She meets us there. I realize I have to go back to bar one (to meet friends I inadvertently stiffed), and walk back. Without SP. (OK, so I’m no chivalrous hero in todays story). More awkward dancing with friends, more not approaching, although I do get roped into long intense conversations with a couple girls I had previously met. Not interested. As the bar is closing up, I go downstairs… and of course, there’s SP.

On the way back to my place she’s genuinely sweet, again. We have a coy jokey conversation about my lack of emotional investment and how sporting she has been, and then we fuck. She spends the night for the first time, and it’s actually kind of nice. This is the kind of girl people marry, folks. So what’s my deal? Ideally I could wrap this up in a 100 calorie fun pack, but this is the best I can do: my karma is seriously fucked. It’s not that I’m actually treating her poorly; she knows exactly what’s going on, even if we never talk about it, because she’s a smart girl. But, as they say in Texas, just ’cause no one’s getting hurt, that don’t make it right. (I’m not sure they say that)

Unrelated Observation #1: This girl came up to me and my friend to tell him he looked like John Krasinksi, which he definitely does (“My friends and I were wondering if anyone’s ever told you…”). Her main problem was that she was not attractive, but her second main problem was that she was extremely apologetic about the whole thing. For the love of God, if you’re going to go up and hit on someone, don’t repeatedly apologize and insist that you’re not looking for a boyfriend. It’s just embarrassing.

Unrelated Observation #2: I need at least one friend who will give me some moderate goading to go up and talk to girls, even if they’re not willing to do it themselves. I have no problem talking to girls. But I’m just awkward enough that if my friends are not going to back me up in any way the doubt starts creeping in and I don’t do it.