28 July 2001 
 
I am so damned wired.  I should know better than to partake of more than 1 shot 
of coffee (yes, it's espresso, but we dilute it with an equal amount of water - 
so it's besically likw regular coffee, but it tastes better.  Yes, I know, too 
many clauses.  I recently attempted the editing of a piece with a structure akin 
to this:  dependent clause, dependent clause, dependent clause, small verb 
(usually something from the "to be" or "to do" family (do be do be do)), 
dependent clause, dependent clause, =conjunction, and then more of the same. Now, 
I could've rewritten the thing to make it more intelligible, and more punchy but 
#1 -- the author would have noticed the change and #2 - it's not like anything 
interested or new was being expressed, and #3 - I can't imagine much of anyone is 
going to read the finished product as it is. 
 
Hmmm, speaking of not many people reading a finished written product... (howdy 
Brenda!  Hey Stubaby!) 
 
Where was I?  Yes, rambling.  So this is a warning right now that I'm severely 
affected by caffeine (and maybe even effected, if a person can ever be 
effected... perhaps that double-speak for conception (but anyway..)), so I can't 
promise that anything here is going to make much sense.  An additional note: I am 
not wearing my glasses, and as much as I "exercise" by ocular globes, I've 
noticed a worsening not a bettering (ugh) trend in the vision area.  (What was it 
that Bush elder said... he had trouble with "that vision thing"?)  So there may 
be major gaffes.  At least I'm not trying to touch type right now -- I have a bad 
tendency of having one of my hands being one key to the right of where they 
should be.  I noticed when I was playing guitar on Friday that on of my fingers 
was always off by a string, and when Chris forced me to do everything p-i-m as 
opposed to p-i-m-a, it all went well (I never use c, my poor pinkie feels so left 
out.) 
 
So let's see.  Stuart is watching "The Art of War" on HBO (now, here's something 
I can't remember -- I know that magazine & book titles are underlines (or put in 
italics, which is the same difference), but things like article titles and short 
story titles are put in quotes.  So what about movies?  Are their titles 
underlined, or put in quotes?  As you know from reading these pages, I tend to 
emphasize using either underscores, or equal marks.  I much prefer using equal 
signs, don't =you=? 
 
Which reminds me that there's a 24-hour blogathon going on right now, which 
sounds a lot more fun than the jump-rope-a-thon I did in elementary school.  I 
don't think I've ever done one of these a-thon things before, and you know, I 
probably should, but I have a feeling that this journal might not be considered a 
=blog= like the infamous bloggers now - I don't post interaction up here (that's 
for livejournal), it's all plain text files (as opposed to those oh-so-classy 
skinny columns with big graphics filling the other part.  That's just as well, 
because it forces many blatherers to stick to short entries. While I, Meep the 
Egoist Extraordinaire, can just go on and on and on and should you have any 
comments, you can email them to me, but noone else will get to see your wisdom. 
 
MWA HA HA HA HA! 
 
Marypat.org is all about =me=!  That's why my name is on it!  Don't you 
understand? 
 
Now back to other stuff.  Let's see.. how about self-hood...  Now I'm not talking 
about some nebulous theory of identity culled from Jung or whatever.  I'm talking 
about force of personality.  I'm talking about having a clearly defined being. 
I'm talking about being identifiable as a person, and not being confused with 
someone else.  (It is thoughts like these that make me angry to see =other= 
people named Mary Pat, or to see the use of meep in so many other ways (dammit, 
the Roadrunner says "beep beep"!  =Beaker= on the Muppet Show says "meep"... and 
now I'm not going to even talk about the other things that go meep in the night. 
There's not been much reportage of me saying things in my sleep of late, though I 
share my bed every night with someone who has the habit of going to sleep a 
couple of hours after I do. No "batch files... batch files...", "Don't you see, 
Carey, it's the molecules around her...", "What's a bush?", and screaming in 
Japanese (allegedly).  Perhaps this is a sign that my mental disturbances are 
fading away... 
 
But that's unlikely.  I'm pretty much in equilibrium all the time.  Which reminds 
me of an ad for "Dinner with Friends", the HBO adaptation of the =extremely 
recent play= (as in, Cindy was working on that show, and it closed only a couple 
months ago)   --  and Greg Kinnear's character says something on the order of 
"Don't you just want to chuck it all, and start all over again?"  Well, Stu had 
comments as to the undesirableness of starting over again, psychic and monetary 
expense I guess, but I've never restarted.  Branched at various points, yes, and 
various things begin and end, but that's to be expected.   I've always been the 
same Mary Pat (Meep: being the very best Mary Pat she can be), and I don't see 
that it's likely that I will stop being Mary Pat, barring a severe head injury or 
massive stroke.  That's always a possibility. 
 
Speaking of Mary Pat, the physical entity, it seems that there's less of me of 
late.  Thjere is a downward trend in the reading from the scale at the gym (which 
is the old compound lever type of scale, not a dial or digital scale... in a way, 
these are more reliable, because it's based on very simple physics, and doesn't 
require power... and it's difficult to warp anything on these suckers).  I did 
think that I'm on a body modification project of the oldest sort, trying to 
change the shape of my body.  There's only so much I can do -- short of starving 
myself down to 100 pounds (and this isn't necessarily a bad thing (don't get on 
me as a pro-anorexic, you don't know where I'm going with this) -- I just went to 
the genomics exhibition at the natural history museum, and one of the things they 
noted was that not only are genes related to the aging process, but that there 
have been studies showing that vastly reduced caloric intake (but adequate 
nutrition) has made marked gains in longevity.  Of course, those studies were on 
rodents, but they also had a pic of a guy who is trying this out on himself - I 
think he subsists on 1000 calories a day.  That is his lifelong diet - and he 
hopes that this results in a long life.  But he's only 52, so who knows.), I'm 
gonna have big calves.  It's just something I will not be able to get away from. 
I don't work out my legs at the gym -- I think they really don't need any work 
right now -- and really, in my usual week, I don't walk that much (though 
probably more than anyone here who regularly drives a car, or doesn't live in 
NYC).  My calves are just naturally big.  I have no problem with that. Likewise, 
I have a small cup size; short of implants, that's not going to change.  However, 
I hope that I =can= change stuff like those damned flappy underarms... My biceps 
are developing nicely, but the triecps are definitely lacking.  Or, perhaps they 
are there, but masked by the fat (in a previous body mod project, I had done 
about 100 crunches a day, and noticed =no= change in the outward appearance of my 
tummy... then I poked around and found my abs were rock hard... under an inch of 
fat.  So that's something I need to keep in mind.) 
 
Well, enough about the actual details of the bodymod, I just wanted to say that I 
had been thinking about the other popular ways to modify the body, and noticed 
that almost all of them involved pain -- tattoos, piercings, implants (yes, 
there's a great deal of pain to deal with after the surgery), foot binding.  Then 
there is the relatively painless mods of hair dying and cutting, but really 
people feel those things to be somewhat transient, and thus such things don't get 
as much respect as things like tattoos.  I can't say that I'm impressed with 
bodymod farther than sculpting of fat and muscle through non-surgical means. I've 
got my ears pierced, but my holes stay empty almost all the time.  What does that 
say about me?  I think it means I should probably not get a tattoo.  As it is, 
I've got a wildly fluctuating change in circumference at various points, and then 
where it =doesn't= change, I have texture problems (aka acne, scars, and 
cellulite).  The only place I could possibly put a tattoo is on my skull, and as 
I'm in the middle of a hair-growing project, I'll have to wait for the necessity 
of hair-shaving (cancer, brain surgery, or lice) before I get a tattoo.  I know I 
have mentioned this before, but the tattoo I have in mind is a crack from ear to 
ear with a claw sticking out of it. Or perhaps (as opposed to an armband) I could 
do a headband.  That would be interesting.  Or is the hair loss is going to be 
permanent, I could do an Escher tesselation on my head. 
 
This is a bit long for pointless blather, don't you think?  HA HA HA HA HA You 
don't know me very well, do you (escuse me, I think you do -- very few strangers 
read these things) You know the time I spent at least a half hour going on about 
the difference between "crying out dismay" and "crying out in dismay"?  You 
don't? Well, I did it, much to the annoyance of the author of the "cry out 
dismay" line, but I greatly amused myself.  And this entry greatly amuses me.  I 
can barely keep a hold of my stream of thought, I can't read what I =have= typed 
without getting about 6 inches from the screen and squinting, and caffeeine has 
seeped into every nook and cranny of my body... 
 
Stu's movie is over.  Excuse me, I need to attack him. 
 
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