00:35:24 Tuesday December 02 2003
I was reasonably productive today. Actually I am still at work. I got a great deal accomplished on the Internet emulator that Brad and I are working on for CS590N. After that I decided to go to work and try to get something accomplished. This is actually a major flaw in my character. If I have accomplished something for one project in a given day then I feel entitled to slack off on the others. So once I arrived here I immediately began chatting with Chris and working on setting up a MonkeyFilter account. Then I decided to go back and read all of my roommate's old livejournal entries.

I have to admit that this is my favorite entry. And I quote: Dan is always in a bad mood these days, I'm not really sure what it is, he's just fucking lonely and spiteful I suppose, I'm lonely, and probably a bit spiteful, but not nearly to the same degree, I think he's given up on being even remotely human. Those of you who don't know me might think that I would become irritated by this. But the reality of the situation is that I laughed out loud. I mean man's inhumanity toward man is a classic literary theme, but a better theme for most people's lives would probably be man's inhumanity toward self.

Matt's livejournal is filled with all kinds of slightly worrying and slightly annoying references to suicide. It seems fairly juvenile on the surface and I react to it somewhat on that level. I hate to say it now, because I have had this theory for years, but on another level talking about suicide is really just another form of terrorism. Just like the folks who went on a hunger strike in the memorial mall a few years back. Essentially you are holding yourself hostage until you get the attention that you crave. It makes me feel manipulated. Of course the level that is actually worrisome and not just annoying is that I think he might actually do it some day. I mean all it would take is one really bad day. I even bought a gun lock on buy nothing day because I felt that it would be criminally negligent of me to keep the old gun my grandfather gave me in the same house with him.

The thing I admire most about his livejournal is the immediacy of the writing. It is evident that he wrote down exactly what he was feeling at exactly the moment he started typing. It isn't white washed. He didn't spend too much time thinking about who might read it later. I used to write like that back in high school. Six years of technical writing without a creative outlet does take its toll. I guess my log here really serves a different purpose. It marks the passing of time, steady as a metronome. However, it is not nearly as engrossing to read as Matt's livejournal.