Never been one to let the carrier drop

added guitar straps (long) and guitar picks.

list is still at http://www.sheer.us/bday.html

Approximate breakdown by priority

Rent – 1/3rd
Utilities – 1/8th
Toys – 1/8th
Gifts – 1/8th
Misc 1/16th
Debt Paydown – (in a stoner voice) Whatever’s left over, man..

Items that need to fit in my budget:

Rent
Toys
Travel
Gifts
Utilities
Paydown on debt
Misc

I don’t want to be all magical and mystical about this, but this time it really does seem like things are getting better each day. I wouldn’t want to mess this up, because the endpoint might be above water, so to speak.

Of course, my typing isn’t getting better each day.. it’s not getting worse, either, but I definately have a higher tendancy to typo than I used to.

Then again, I notice misspellings a lot more. I was going through my journal the other day – gah, I spell horribly quite often. Ah well.

I’ve lost track of what’s In and what’s Out.. am I locked in, locked out, locked up, locked down, or just deadlocked?

Sheer, signing off, day 11 has ended.

I could buy a house. Then instead of worrying about the rent, I’d be worrying about the house payment, for 20 flippin’ years, or maybe 30 or 40. I could pay as much as I wanted up front, but when I missed a payment, I’d still be out on the street. And even after I owned the house, I’d still be renting it. The government woudl still show up asking for their property tax.. their rent for living in their fine country. The rent would just be lower, is all.

Is it too much to ask to have a place to live where you don’t have to live in fear of the day you screw up in the dance of life and they kick you out the door to become one of the homeless?

Without enormous quantities of a drug I can’t use any more, I have yet to experience messages from a higher power. But tonight, I’ll listen hard. Because there’s always that one in a million chance that everything will line up just right and a message will come through.

They said I didn’t need drugs to see or hear them. I am taking them at their word – after all, being higher powers, they know more than I do, one presumes.

How long before I don’t have to live in fear, hand to mouth, paycheck to paycheck, no matter how big the paychecks are? I can try to learn to budget, but jeez, we’re talking about Sheer here. Budgeting is not a strong suit of mine.. in fact, I’m not even sure it’s a weak suit.

Feeling: Sad, hurt, fearful

The delimma of a computer artist:

They can make better and better paintbrushes faster than I can finish one painting, and they’re always over there going ‘neener, neener, all your friends paint with these better paintbrushes and you’re still over there with your soda straws blowing paint onto the canvas’.. WELL AT LEAST I’M EFFEN PAINTING AT ALL.

Don’t know where that bit of anger and hostility came from.

Friends, when we total up the greats of the 20th century, Sheer is not going to be a name that comes up a lot. I get it. I’m sick. I see that now. I understand. I’ve read through my journal and I realize that it’s the rantings of a madman.. and yet I beg you all to find beauty between the lines. See what I was trying to say even through all the places where what I said either didn’t make sense or was full of anger or negativity.

1) I had a idea for a really cool app for tracking my emotional state. I’m going to write it over the next couple of weeks.. just takes a little Laz and a little php, and we be jammon’ man. Also a lot of reused code, but then, I’m known to recycle. Aint no shame in that.

2) Every computer should come with a fast processer, lots of ram, firewire and usb ports, CF and SD cards, and a pretty LCD color display. But more importantly, every computer should come with a salesguy who says, as you buy it, ‘The word obsolete doesn’t mean anything. Someone just made it up – a computer is a tool, just like a hammer, and you don’t hear about hammers going obsolete. You just bought a beautiful machine, and if you have the patience for it, you and this machine can do wonderous things. Upgrade when it no longer meets your needs, but pass it on to someone. Until then, remember when you get angry with it that it is a reflection of humanity, and so you’re really just getting angry at yourself, which isn’t a very productive thing to do’

3) Okay, so I’m an asshole. But, I’m in pretty good company. Thank you, Ani Difranco.

Okay, so my friend sent me a suggestion to try out a peice of software called ljArchive, because I was looking for a way to make a backup copy of my journal in case (the dieties forbid) livejournal should go the way of the dodo.

Holy cow.

This software doesn’t just back up your journal, it also graphs a attempt to do some kind of word frequency analasys and judge your mood, imagery, and a whole host of other interesting things.

I need to start keeping a index of what I think my sadness/positive emotions are doing, so I can measure it against this software to determine if it actually works. Actually, scratch the word ‘need’ there. I’ve got enough things that ‘need’ doing already, and this one is frivolous at best.

But, at the same time, I’ve been diagnosed bipolar.. (manic depressive, the disease that got Jimi Hendrix I sometimes think) and I’m not going to let it affect my life except in positive ways.. (hah.. like I have any choice..) so learning about my moods and how to provide damping on them when they’re threatening to go runaway in the negative direction seems like it might be a worthwhile goal.