journal.wiredreflexes.com

The thing that is starting to get to me more and more lately is the fact that less and less people seem concerned with their garbage and where it ends up. I am not talking about their accumulated waste, or the environmental consequences of a society, but rather of cigarette butts and candy-wrappers. So many people are prone to just toss them on the ground without even giving it a passing thought. I have started to wonder if my objection to this is another symptom of the mild neurosis I think I might be affected with, where I try my best to minimise the clutter in my life.

I never really saw it as a problem until Moulsari told me several months ago that she didn’t want to be subjected to my insanities when I felt the urge to tidy up the kitchen a bit while she was preparing a meal. I’m not a clean freak, but I do get uncomfortable in a chaotic and messy environment. I start to get distracted and annoyed at the disorder, and I start to wonder if all the stuff that’s bugging me is really stuff that’s even necessary. Can’t we just get rid of it?

I like my environment like I like my supermarkets; spacious, clean and with limited options. Why have twenty types of breakfast cereal when a maximum of four will be more than enough to satisfy 95% of the shoppers? Do we really have to bend over backwards to cater to that last five percent? I am sure the market will take care of it. If there’s really a demand for those other sixteen types of cereal someone will open up a Fussy Douchebag Store that has a selection of 101 Different Breakfast Cereals, with a whole section of East Asian breakfast cereals to cater to the Yellow Fevers among us!

Just like physics and fashion, life is most beautiful when it’s clean, streamlined and simple, leaving you with enough space to pay attention to all that life has to offer. All the stuff we clutter our lives with we keep to mask our self-loathing or to superficially placate our dissatisfaction. Rant over.

The skin on the top of my right foot, just above my big toe, as well as several other, smaller places, had been chafed off during BJJ. In order to do a proper single or double-leg take-down you have to kneel and step through, and oftentimes it makes you slide the top of your foot across the mat, which sometimes scrapes the skin off your feet. Eva, who came to watch, luckily had some awesome bandages for me. I just tried to remove it and found that the skin underneath, which hadn’t healed very well yet, was stuck to a part of the sticky bit of the band-aid, and when I removed it it took the scab, and a large part of the skin along with it, making everything a hundred times worse than it was before I put the band-aid on. Ouch.

My company is going indoor skydiving this afternoon. Turns out my boss hired a stretched limo to drive us there. Economic crisis? Really?

I think I might have gone back to training too soon after my shoulder injury, because it keeps giving me grief. I think that several muscles and ligaments around and attached to my shoulder have become inflamed and that I strained them too much during and after my recovery. I started getting almost RSI type feelings in my elbow, and a constant pressure on my shoulder of which I can’t find any relief. There’s a spot between my shoulder blade and my spine that feels like there’s a muscle that runs along the length of my back that’s pulled. There’s a big knot underneath my skin there that is painful when massaged, and I’m not sure if it’s just a result of tension because I’ve never had that type of tension in my back and shoulders before. For all I know it’s a torn muscle or muscular infection that’s causing the swelling, so I haven’t gotten a proper massage yet. I’ve scheduled an appointment with the doctor on Friday to get it all checked out, because today something happened that really made me very worried. I thought I should start getting back to doing my daily amount of push-ups, but my arm felt strange while I did them, like it was unable to support my weight. I could barely do ten push-ups without feeling like my arm could give way at any time. I hope I get some good news and won’t require time-consuming physiotherapy.

Since I’m wasting many, many hours a week in public transport nowadays, reading pulp fiction and wishing I was somewhere else entirely, I thought I could start a new project, something to keep my mind occupied. I thought I could start developing some simple applications for the iPhone. I registered with the Apple Developer Program and was looking at all the specs for the iPhone SDK. To my great surprise, it appeared that the SDK can’t be run under windows! I thought it would’ve been a great opportunity to show developers that not everything that is produced in the Apple forges is frivolous waste of time, but instead, I have to either get a VMWare installation going, or I have to get my hands on a Mac. And so the search for a suitable way to waste my time continues.