I was sitting on my porch, eating a block of fancy cheese, like most normal people do at 10 P.M., when a black cat passed by me. It tiptoed towards where I was sitting, and I began to call it, then it high-tailed it like Usain Bolt. We could have had a really nice bonding moment; I would have shared my cheese with it, and it could have had a taste of luxury instead of the usual seafood medley it's probably used to eating.

Nobody at these apartments is supposed to have cats, officially, even though almost everybody does. For the protection of my neighbor, I will go on record here and say this is a stray cat.

I find it funny how close these animals are to their wild instincts. Us humans, who evolved from hunter-gatherers and mammoth chasers, now largely live sedentary lifestyles, occasionally driving to the YMCA for Zumba classes or whatever. The closest the average suburbanite gets to this primal animalistic instinct found in the house cat, is entering into a heated disagreement with their coworker about their county commisioner's fiscal policies.

Vocabularia

Here are some new-to-me words that I am beginning to integrate into my vocabulary:

Hopefully, by posting this list here, I will internalize these words better so that they may spring to mind more naturally. Though, now I'm too insecure to use them, because of imposter syndrome.

Quote of the Day

Love-making and Weeping, Secret-telling and Laughter: these Four Excellences I would place in the Quarters of my final hour. —Andrew D. Chumbley, Khiazmos (1993–9)

Current Media

Current Readings

I am reading two classics of psychoanalysis at the moment: Otto Rank's The Trauma of Birth, which I have been taking color-coded notes on in a small journal, and Sigmund's Freud's Dream Interpretation book (I forget the title). One of Freud's most daring and questionable claims is that wish fulfillment lies behind the meaning of every dream; he goes so far as to say that dreams whose manifest contents do not support this hypothesis are in fact wishes that he were wrong. I will have more to say about these books when I finish digesting them.

On top of these two books, I am slowly working my way through a dense vector calculus textbook by Bexandall and Liebeck, and carefully doing as many exercises as I can. I can only handle a little of this book at a time before I get burned out.

Lastly, there is a pell-mell (see what I did there?) of other sources I am scouring as I write a little paper which roughly falls under the umbrella of semiotics. I will share this when it is available, as usual.

Current Watchings

I found a new animation channel on the TV that has some good content on it, including Sassy the Sasquatch, a very smart but underrated show called DAP, and a show called Purgatony by the makers of Cyanide and Happiness. I rarely watch television, but I might do so more often. Most of the shows on this channel are deals with internet content creators, but even the commercials are entertaining, so I give my stamp of approval.

Currently Playing

Doing a playthrough of Dragon Warrior on the NES. I am at level 15 or 16 by now, and I am analyzing the game as I play it in preparation for a write-up on the review section of Polydactica.