I had a whole transcript of a chat between myself and Greg (frontman for Angeldeath). I'd gone to High School with him, and we discussed the loss of childhood wonder as one grows older. He expressed a need to use hallucinatory drugs to reach beyond the mundane. I expressed an opinion that the only thing required to bring yourself beyond the mundane was a change of perspective. A wonderfully dense conversation on the meaning of meaning and the nature of life followed, but alas I remember very little of it. I did, however, quote the following passage from Tom Robbins's Another Roadside Attraction, pg. 335:

"I promise. But, seriously, if life has no meaning—"
"To say it has no meaning is not to say it has no value."
"But to say it's all meaningless. Isn't that a cop-out?"
"Maybe. But it seems to me that the real cop-out is to say that the universe has meaning but that we 'mere morals' are incapable of ever knowing that meaning. Mystery is part of nature's style, that's all. It's the Infinite Goof. It's meaning that is of no meaning. That paradox is the key to the meaning of meaning. To look for meaning—or the lack of it—in things is a game played by beings of limited consciousness. Behind everything in life is a process that is beyond meaning…"

I also contacted my college roommate for the first time. First by phone, then by IM. He hadn't gotten his info yet. Boy was that awkward.

I would have given yesterday (technically two days ago now) it's own good and proper post, but I was exhausted last night, had to work this morning, and was up until 3:30 wrestling to get the awful ShopNav leecher off my computer. I got it to stop messing with my browser, but I still get the pop-ups. Alas.

This is not to say that nothing happened. Indeed, a good deal happened. I spent most of the morning finding the perfect laptop for college. There isn't apparently a mandatory computer for Computer Science. But if you choose to get a computer, it's got to have a whole shit load of expensive add-ons to work with their wireless network. It also fascinated me that I could customize to the same final configuration and get widely varying prices on Dell's website, depending on which link you started from. Coupled with a 15% off coupon I found via Google search, My total was $1928 and change after tax and shipping. But it's as close to state-of-the-art as you can get in a laptop for under $2k.

I also had quite the interesting adventure at Thatcher Park with my friend Alex (whose brother I helped move). I've always wanted to do the Indian Ladder trail, which skirts the edge of the the cliffs there and has several waterfalls, during the rain. So we headed up and walked the trail at a little after seven. After you finish, you have to walk back along the upper edge. To switch things up a bit, I decided to take us a long the edge of the road. Well, we'd only been walking on the curb for a minute or so, back towards my car, when a Park Police pulls up, and snarls in an Australian-esque accent. "The park's closing." I said that we hadn't known that the park closes at dusk and were heading back to the car besides. He told us we had ten minutes to get there before we'd get a ticket and drove off. After running the fastest mile of my life (and after a decent walk to boot) we got to the car as a park ranger truck was pulling into the lot. As I unlocked the doors and got in, he turned around. No ticket. Meanwhile, up in the mountains at near dark I'm feeling ready to puke and my glasses are blurred from the sweat that had been dripping down from my forehead. I get us out of the park and pull over to the side of the road, clean my glasses, and set off for home. Our friend Darren had had reservations about us hitting Thatcher Park at night the last time we'd wanted to. I guess he was right. The trail was an absolute blast though, and the donuts I got at Stewarts on the refill ($5 of which was kindly provided by my friend Alex) were some of the best I’ve had, period.