seasonal_ineffective_disorder epitome of incomprehensibility Part 25 It's a trend, in the sense of general direction. Local warming. Past the summer solstice and our subject's twenty-sixth birthday, the temperature continues to rise. At first, she's on her way to the library, which seems to have always existed. The bus is warm, younger than her in degrees Celsius. Proud of her reading choice, mostly the fact that she's reading it in French, her eyes skim over the lines: J'aime le souvenir de ces époques nues, Dont Phoebus se plaisait à dorer les statues. Alors l'homme et la femme en leur agilité Jouissaient sans mensonge et sans anxiété, Et, le ciel amoureux leur caressant l'échine, Exerçaient la santé de leur noble machine. Golden Phoebus (by which Baudelaire means the sun, our subject nods wisely) - Golden Phoebus shining through the bus window shimmers over the black leggings of the young woman next to her. At this juncture, our subject is not thinking about the fact that she lost her own (matte) black leggings in the move from Ontario to Quebec. Our subject is thinking about legs, and legs almost touching hers. She looks up, sees a man across from her in modest shorts - modest, but what calf muscles! And well-defined knees. You know you're uncharacteristically horny, the subject thinks, when well-defined knees are a turn-on. Writing a story set at a swimming pool, trying to convince herself that summer was sexy, had been a chore. The latter part revealed itself as truth, the ephemeral truth of sun-soaked Bad Flowers. Bad in a good way. 140701 ... e_o_i Part 30 There are degrees missing. Third, or nth, or PhD. Our subject attends an air-conditioned presentation on Natural Language Processing without her programmer friend. She eats cool vegetables and gets the general idea: to get computers to "get" language (real-people language), you have to give them a large body, or "corpus" of examples. Wikipedia's a good one, and one of the presenters uses it, but you can't just open your Python shell and import Wikipedia. So, cloud computing... links... interweb, like her former poetry prof said jokingly... She no longer understands. She is out of her element. A friendly Chinese girl (she chides herself for the mental label: the girl could be not Chinese, maybe not even friendly, and isn't really a girl; why does she label female people younger than her as girls when she doesn't refer to college-age males as boys?) but yes, anyway, a fellow human being with a different accent but a familiar-sounding name comes up to her and confesses, "You know, at Python, I'm a total beginner." Grins. "Me too. I, I did English in school and I sort of work like in a library. What do you do?" Doctorate. Genome sequencing. Taught herself programming to better understand technicians dealing with lab worker data. Open course from MIT helped. Here's the name. She misspells "video" but our subject walks away overwhelmed. It didn't even have to be hot, did it? 140721 ... unhinged la_vie_en_gris i couldnt bring myself to work today. i called in sick. ive been crying or doing drugs ever since. i wish i could have more of the same tomorrow 140721 ... e_o_i Sometimes we all need a break. It's just hard to know when the self-preservation instinct stops and the self-destructive one kicks in. If I can think of my brain like that anyway. I didn't really need to watch YouTube for three hours today either. I wanted to do more writing, but I lazily blamed the heat. 140721 ... e_o_i In the early spring, starting in late February (not really spring in Quebec, but hey), I find I have trouble sleeping because the mornings are getting noticeably lighter. This can lead to a sort of funk. I don't know if this relates to actual seasonal affective disorder or not. All I've read on that says it's about not enough light, not too much. 210228 what's it to you? who go blather from