Kablammo!

It’s gotta really suck to be deaf, and not just for the obvious reasons I won’t bother going into. Imagine you’re deaf and you attend a seminar or a lecture or something, and they know to expect the presence of a deaf person. There’ll be a sign-language interpreter there, specifically for your sake, listening to what the speaker is saying and relaying it to you in an intelligible manner. No matter how boring the lecture is, you have to keep paying attention to the interpreter, because he’ll know as soon as you zone out. You don’t have the privilege of drawing pictures of racecars while pretending to listen intently, the way the hearing people can.

Would it be worth it to take two two-hour-long train rides tomorrow night so I can pay a $20 cover for a party I’ll only be able to stay at for an hour, when I know for a fact in advance I’ll desperately need to sleep tomorrow night?

…

And why am I even considering doing so?

A document I’m dealing with right now includes references to a German document—which I’ve asked for a translation of, as it appears particularly relevant—as well as a French one. Just for the hell of it I started perusing the French one, and to my delight I found that I could actually follow it, more or less. I’m not versed with the more (or even the less) technical terms, but putting context clues together with the provided figures gave me a pretty good understanding of what was being said. And of course, words like glissière are loaded with other clues (that’s just gotta be legit- and not false-cognate).

I checked several of the words on Babelfish, and they did mean what I thought they did (glissière apparently means “slide”, who’d have thunk?). Based on that, I decided to see how good a job Babelfish would do with a longer passage. The last time I tried that was in my 11th grade French class, which is a[n altogether uninteresting] story for a different time, but suffice it to say that Babelfish didn’t do a very good job.

But I thought that perhaps, 7 or 8 years later Babelfish might do a better job, especially because what I’m looking at is rather stilted and unnatural prose to begin with, and not what would pass for leisure reading. I was pleasantly surprised.

Here’s a few paragraphs of the original text:

Un socle 1 reposant sur le sol et pouvant avoir un profil quelconque est solidaire de deux glissières verticales 2 constituées chacune de quatre fers plats convenablement entretoisés en 3. Ces deux glissières sont, en outre, reliées l’une à l’autre, à leur partie supérieure, par une traverse entretoise fixé 4.

Dans chacune de ces glissières est prisonnier un coulisseau 5 guidé par des galets 6 et solidaire d’une barre 7 servant de support à des traverses 8 constituant le berceau sur lequel vient reposer le meuble bureau par son assise normale au lieu de reposer sur le sol.

Une barre compensatrice 9 est montée également à coulisse dans les glissières 2 mais dans des passages 10 indépendants de ceux des coulisseaux 5 de façon à pouvoir se croiser avec eux sans se gêner.

And here’s Babelfish’s rendition:

A base 1 resting on the ground and which can have an unspecified profile is interdependent of two vertical slides 2 made up each one of four flats suitably braced into 3. These two slides, moreover, are connected one to the other, with their higher part, by a cross-piece braces fixed 4.

In each one of these slides is a prisoner a slide 5 guided by rollers 6 and interdependent of a bar 7 being used as support with cross-pieces 8 component the cradle on which comes to put back the piece of furniture office by its normal base instead of resting on the ground.

A compensation bar 9 is also moved up to slide in slides 2 but in passages 10 independent of those of slides 5 in order to be able to cross with them without obstructing itself.

Really, not too shabby.

I drink, I drank

I blink, I blank

I think, I thank.

Menomena tonight, Sonar, Baltimore.

Can’t fucking wait.

• Sometimes I get bored or distracted at work and I wish I could play some ADoM.
• Not that I’m ever actually going to, mind you.
• Speaking of ADoM, it kind of sucks (for non-chaotics) how Kranf Niest is so much better at teaching the Healing skill than Jharod is.
• “Kranf Niest”, the nefarious doctor, is clearly derived from “Frankenstein”.
• Frankenstein — what is that, Franken-stone?
• Maybe Al Franken knows.
• Babelfish tells me Franken means “Franconia”.
• Interesting how a region in Germany shares its name with a stop on the DC metro.
• Vienna is a metro stop as well.
• And what’s the deal with Vienna Fingers?
• Does the city of Vienna actually have anything to do with light-colored cream-filled sandwich cookies, or did they just go with “Vienna” because light-colored sweets seem to automatically imply “vanilla” and “Vienna” sounds kind of like “vanilla” but with more cachet?
• But then what about Bavarian Fingers? “Bavaria” sure as hell doesn’t sound like “chocolate”.
• Shapes aside, it’s interesting to note the color sequence: Vienna Finger, Oreo, Bavarian Finger. Like day turning into night.

I hate routine.

And yet here I am, day in and day out, snoozing the same alarm at the same time, hurrying to catch the same shuttle to make the same metro train, to sit in the same windowless room and do the same stuff. And then every day I’m also using the same stall in the bathroom, washing my hands beneath the same faucet, and every afternoon at low-blood-sugar time, buying the same beverage from the cafe thing downstairs. I’m that guy who knows what he’s getting to the point where he has exact change ready before he even leaves his office.

I wish my attention span were longer than three months.

• “I’m Gonna Be (500 Miles)” is a pretty damn good song.
• The Proclaimers — are they Irish? Or are they Scottish? I can never remember.
• The Cranberries, now there’s a band I’m pretty sure is Irish.
• Are cranberries Irish, though?
• Because potatoes certainly aren’t Irish.
• What did the Irish eat before potatoes?
• Cabbage?
• What did people drink before potatoes?
• I mean in terms of hard liquor, none of this “wine” and “beer” stuff.
• Though mead is pretty awesome stuff.
• Shit, that reminds me, I was going to start homebrewing.
• Three months since I moved in here, and three months I’ve been meaning to get a homebrew kit.
• There’s a perfect place for storing a carboy or two, though it might actually be the polar opposite of the perfect place for storing such.
• But I’d also need to get a bigger pot for boiling stuff in, since our current pots simply wouldn’t cut it.
• Like when I made that bean soup and I had to leave out a quarter of the water the recipe called for, since it just didn’t fit in the pot.
• Of course, I’d have probably omitted that water anyway. I like soup I can eat with a fork.

Between late August 2004 and mid-July 2005, I wore my contact lenses each and every day and went through less than 8 ounces of saline solution. I know that because one of the first things I did after my plane landed and I learned my baggage was 4000 miles away was to buy a bottle of saline solution. The bottle was 8 ounces, and when I went back home some eleven months later I hadn’t used it all up.

In contrast, over the past two months or thereabouts I’ve used over 24 ounces of saline solution, and I haven’t even been wearing contacts every day of that time.

In the past week I’ve learned a couple of neatly complementary things:

1. There’s more to life than just work.

   I never really expected to be in a position to learn this, given my track record of being a lazy underacheiving slacker in everything I do, but that so-far-steady paycheck I’ve been getting for a little while now makes me feel like I should be earning it, and not just because if I’m not earning it it will dry up pretty quick.

   At my current employment status and pay scale ranking and whatnot, I’m legally barred from taking any unpaid overtime. Shockingly (to me at least), there have been times already when I’ve wished that weren’t so because I just know I could get a lot done if I stayed an extra hour or two that day. And while it does feel great to get the fuck out of the office at the end of the day, especially when you’ve used what meager annual leave you’ve collected to get yourself a 3-day weekend, I’ve never been tempted to leave early, even though I could probably get away with it. I mean, that would just be stealing.

   And anyway, more often than not the only thing I do once I leave for the day is to go back to my apartment, watch a little teevee, and eat dinner before going to bed and wishing I felt like doing some cleaning or working on one of one of my pet projects I keep meaning to begin and/or finish (see “slacker”, above).

   Often, the high point of my day is pressing Ctrl– to insert a soft hyphen in a word, so I can use justified text without the spacing being all wiggy. Nobody has complained, so I intend to keep it up.

2. There’s more to life than just drinking and debauchery.

   The punchline to point #1 above is that this past week-end gave me some perspective on things. I got together with a bunch of friends and had time enough and the right surroundings where I could just fucking relax and spend several hundred dollars on alcohol and various related expenditures. Silly or petty as it might be, I felt reminded of the reason I’ve been doing all that work in the first place. I don’t mind doing it, but I’m not doing it for its own sake.

   Of course, anything can be taken to excess. And if you’re running on five hours of sleep over the past two nights, and you know damn well you have to go to work tomorrow, maybe you should take it easy that day instead of spending another day at the Tiki bar downing oyster shots and daquiris. Maybe you should relax and maybe get some rest instead of making sure you’re fit for nothing but falling comatose in the passenger seat next to your friend who’s going to drive your wretched corpse three hours closer to home.

   Because part of that whole job-responsibilities thing includes showing up in a condition where you can actually, you know work.

So what ended up happening was that on Monday I actually felt pretty good, until I spent 3 hours in a very very air-conditioned room. If I hadn’t already been overtired I’m sure it wouldn’t have done anything, but then yesterday I woke up with a head cold and feeling like shit. I made my way to work, albeit later than usual, and finished up the document I’d been working on for a while. I submitted the draft to my supervisor, who told me to take the rest of the day off.

Today I woke up feeling a good deal better, but certainly not 100% yet. I thought I was in good enough shape to get some work done, but I went downhill pretty fast and got sent home again after a few hours.

I fucking want to work, and it’s bugging me that I haven’t been able to, and it’s bugging me that I’m so worked up about it. That it’s entirely my own damn fault I got sick, though, is a beacon of hope. Because maybe, just maybe, next time I’ll learn from this.

Fuck I hope I feel better in the morning.