I got an email from Gayden Wren. :) He has not seen the show yet, but he did in fact read my name. Hopefully he read it in the program first, but then someone evidently sent him an excerpt from my blog. How embarrassing and/or awesome.

He wrote other plays, and books, for the record. The book I found particularly interesting: A Most Ingenious Paradox. It's about Gilbert and Sullivan's creations... The plays, for the record, are Ernest (A musical based on The Importance of Being Ernest) and Baseball, Sex and Other Facts of Life. None of which I've seen...

I'll have to try and see Very Truly Yours, and then the others, I suppose. I find myself somewhat limited, in that most of the musicals I know are Gilbert and Sullivan, and being that they only composed 14 or so.

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On Friday, August 21st, 1903, a man named Schuyler C Kelley was found to have been missing for a number of days. I just thought it was kind of neat, in a creepy sort of way. Luckily, my middle is Bertram, and this was over 100 years ago, so I'm relatively certain that there are no terminators out for me.

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In other news, I've been stumbling around again. I keep changing my mind, what I want to do. I am certain, beyond doubt, that I want to do musical theatre or at least theatre of some sort, and that seems like a solid choice, but I know very well that I want something else. The problem is, the something else I want is everything.

It is times like these that I get depressed, hmm? Thinking about all that I am interested in and curious about--sociology, anthropology, (which covers everything under the sun, so I could stop there, but I won't) computer science, algorithmic science, mathematics although I still despise the simple stuff. It bothers me that the simpler it gets the harder it is for me to do it. (Excepting addition, subtraction and multiplication) Other subjects too, I have a passing interest in.

But going back to the depression, it is because I feel that I will never be able to learn it all. That may be good for me, in that I will never run out of materials to study when I am bored. That's what I do, I think, when I get bored with one thing I move on to the next, but I never finish anything. At this rate, nothing of mine will be finished by a hundred years from now.

I was reading today about Scale-Free Networks, and I intend to read into it further--ways I could make use of it, for example. This is what started me off thinking about mortality and such, although it does directly apply to what I'm doing recently. (A lot of programming. MUSHcoding, but programming nonetheless--I'll finish learning Python one day. (At which point I will make a damn FICS client for FreeBSD that works)) I just don't know how it applies yet.

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I had a dream the other day where I was in a restaurant with my 12 year old brother, and I think 4 guys busted through the windows dressed as Ronald McDonald, brandishing weapons. 12-year old would not shut up, and I got shot for some reason. Grr.

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I'm trying a new thing where I separate subjects by three hyphens, see? I think it's working. I feel slightly more organized already.

I'm posting from inside Ubuntu, today. I booted my dad's computer into it, though, because my mom's computer can't handle it well... I've downloaded TinyFugue a grand total of like twenty times now. G++ too, among other things. (Flash comes to mind)

I really like it so far, although TF seems to be losing output somehow. I need a thumb drive so I can save settings and programs and the like.


As I have told you, my two or three (tops) readers, I have in the past, and again more recently, received many shining compliments about my acting, singing, and piano playing abilities. They have all suggested I pursue a career in one or all of these, (if I'm interested (I am)) and take lessons to further my understanding if not of the mechanics, then of the theory.

But there is a problem with such compliments when it comes to me: I tend to start worrying that my success was a fluke, and I won't be able to live up to whatever standard has now been set for me. I start to judge myself a tad too critically. We are all our worst critics, I have heard, and I suppose that's true. We shall see.


I've been thinking a lot recently. Not about a specific subject, but I mean just thinking. Philosophy and death seem to come up a lot when I'm just thinking. They sort of go hand in hand, but I'll list them both anyway.

For example, I was wondering recently about neurological diseases and the like. Taking a blow to the head, or suffering a stroke or catching a neurological disease et al, sometimes changes the personality. And that, I suspect, is the next worst thing to death. I would hate to wake up one day and be a different person, and not even realize it. I could lose all of my friends, alienate my family, and they might not even know I had changed either.

I suspect it seems almost as dreadful as death because of my reason for fearing the latter: If there is no heaven, I will not exist... I can't stand the thought of simply not being. If my personality changed somehow, my old personality might not exist anymore... He would be gone.


I had a strange dream recently, but I forgot almost all of it... I was hanging on to something above the ground, deliberately having grabbed it and swung off a ledge or something of the sort. I know I was there on purpose, whatever the reason.

As my perch was swinging back toward the ledge, which wasn't too much closer to the ground, I was looking down at the tops of the trees and wondering what it would be like to fall... I was afraid I was going to fall, actually, regretting having clung to this thing in the first place. But I was also wondering. And that's about all I remember...

I'm not sure what I want to talk about today. I had a topic all picked out, but now I forgot most of what I wanted to say about it, I'm afraid... That seems to happen a lot.

This last chess game, I lost. Every game I lost was because of a blunder, but so was the one I won. Not every chess game is decided by a blunder, although you wouldn't know it from watching me. It makes me question how sure I am about being half-decent at chess. It's the same way I wonder about my voice when people say I did well, singing. I never know if they're telling the truth or trying to protect my feelings for some reason... My feelings are jaded already. :-(

I had a dream a few days ago, mostly forgotten by now, where I was acting in a sort of sketch comedy TV series, although it seemed more like a movie... I forgot most of it except that it was similar to a series of five minute sketches on the Disney channel, though only by the set style. (All white, with some colour to depict certain objects) The only part other than that which I remember is the end, where I was pretending to smoke and another actor accidentally swore when she was saying her line, and everyone burst into laughter...



I've been thinking recently about my mind, and how it works. This came up when I was thinking about the mind of a character I have created, and how it works, and then thinking about how my own mind would influence the mind of the character. I developed a hypothesis, that my mind works better when I'm not just dealing with theory. The suggestion explained a lot for me, and seems to apply well to my interests.

When I say theory here, I mean things that don't actively present a challenge, and which don't yield any results that I can immediately perceive and manipulate. I need to be -doing- something. It could be that I find maths boring, for example, because it is mostly dealing with the theory of numbers.

The hypothesis doesn't apply so well to formulas, (c = (f - 32) / 1.8, to convert Fahrenheit to Celsius) although not in all cases. But this leads to a sort of anomalous side-point. I've been curious why I can so readily understand the flow of a program, if I try at it, easily (it seems) navigate logical labyrinths, (nested ifs and cases) etc. but I can't do a freakin' algebra problem without staring at it for ten minutes before I can think of the answer. It seems like the two should be closely related, programming and maths... c = (f - 32) / 1.8 looks SO MUCH like a line from a program. Perhaps that's why I can follow formulas easily. But you'd think algebra too... bah.

Back on the original point. So I have an easier time understanding things when I actually do something, than I do when I'm just listening to the theory behind it. More examples of this are music, chess, acting I guess, and probably at times programming and psychology. Psychology remains another anomaly for the hypothesis, you'd think it would be mostly theory. But I'll ignore that for a bit. I would find myself incredibly bored to look at the theories behind music, and I probably would find myself bored in short notice with chess, acting, and programming. Chess I can vaguely tolerate, and I have, because I can actively sort a database of chess games, and play them myself if I want using the theories as a guide.

Psychology breaks the hypothesis, like I said, although I haven't been as interested in it recently. (Says the guy who just wrote all of that about his own mind) It could also easily be that none of this is the case, and that I thought of it and clung to it simply because it is an idea that I can live with... I couldn't live with the idea that it is simply because I'm lazy, or don't try hard enough, spend too much time on the computer / watching TV, etc. (I don't think I do, those are just examples)

Good night

(edited because I got confused because it is four in the morning)