12-31-02 3:42 PM

I feel so dirty. I finished my college apps 8 Hours and 20 Minutes ahead of schedule. I wonder if that qualifies me from early admission? Oh well...

As for my lack of updates: sorry, they'll resume when school resumes.

12-20-02 12:20 AM

There are not many things in this world that I can honestly say that I enjoy; skiing is one of those precious few. 

There is absolutely no way that I, using my infantile language skills, can convey the pure ecstasy that is skiing. There is something so profoundly enjoyable about it that it transcends logic. Logically, it makes no sense to waste time going up a mountain on a chair lift, only to unsafely plummet down that same mountain attached precariously to two glorified planks of wood. However, there is obviously something that draws me back to the slopes; after all, skiing is physically tiring, time-consuming, and financially draining; there must be something wonderful about it that justifies these negatives.

Perhaps the reason that skiing is so enjoyable is that it demands my complete attention. Both my mind and my body must wholly participate in the struggle to control the enormous forces that act on me as I careen down the slopes at the border of control and chaos. At that moment, when my wellbeing demands my complete concentration, I am the happiest.

For this fleeting moment, I’m untroubled by the demons that haunt me at all other times. My fear, my sadness, my loneliness: they all disappear, as into their place creeps the pure visceral joy of speed.

When I ski, perhaps like no other time in my life, I am blissfully ignorant of the realities of the world in which I am forced to exist. Like a child, I can experience happiness without it being tempered by the realization that it is trivial.

Skiing is my one opportunity to defy Descartes, and “be”, without thinking.

12-17-02 9:20 AM – (Stat. Class)

In the play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, one of the characters, the Player, complains, “You don’t understand the humiliation of it – to be tricked out of the single assumption which makes our existence viable – that somebody is watching.”

This reminded me of the purpose of making this website – I assumed that somebody would read it.

Amazingly, they have.

I can now understand the buzz that authors and journalists get; there is something extraordinarily rewarding about people reading what you write. They don’t even have to like it, so long as they read it. For that moment, as you contemplate the fact that someone, somewhere, is reading your words, you feel important.

Now back to the quote: imagine the horror of realizing that nobody reads what you write.

The sinking feeling that this realization causes is so powerful that it is utilized as a punishment throughout grade school. When children to something “bad” in class, the teacher often responds by forcing the student to write “200 words about how you’ll never do that again”; on the surface, the very act of writing this may seem like the punishment: it isn’t. The cruelty starts when the student finishes the assignment. The teacher looks at it only to make sure that it is completed, and then throws it out. At this point, the student realizes that they just wrote something, and that no one read it. And that is where the punitive power of the assignment stems from: being “tricked out of the single assumption which makes our existence viable – that someone is watching.”

Teachers are assholes.

12-16-02 1:51 AM

People really think that I’m an asshole.

When I tell people that I have a dog, they respond with the most profound amazement I have ever seen. It’s like I told them that I have a 6 foot wide pubic wart … their eyes just open wide in disbelief.

They assume that I torture animals for fun, not keep them as pets.

Well guess what. I have a dog. She’s a cute little cocker spaniel, and I love her more than I’ve ever loved any person.

Which brings me to the topic of today post: the love that a person has for their dog is the most pure and profound love that there is.

It is the one of the few types of love that is unsullied by sex. If I ever say that I love any person outside my family, then immediately it would be under suspicion as something sexual. If it was towards a woman, then forget about it: it’s off to the rapist prison for me. Towards a man: then I’m obviously a faggot.

But if I say that I love my dog, only the sickest pervert (Matt DeCarlo), could ever make that into something sexual.

So there, I’m not totally a heartless bastard, regardless of what you may believe.

I love my dog.

12-12-2002 11:49 PM

Wow, I've been having a shitty week. For some reason, I felt compelled to emulate Jon, and go to sleep at wholly unreasonable times; unlike Jon, I couldn't take this kind of self-inflicted abuse, and suffered headaches almost every day. Everything has been a blur; however, there is one event which I do remember clearly. Yesterday, wallowing in the pain of one of the aforementioned headaches, I decided to take a long walk. This may seem normal, except that, at the time (approximately 9 or 10 pm), the weather consisted of wind and freezing rain. Undeterred, I took a nice 1.5 hour stroll. It was wonderful. I was completely alone, only encountering one other unlucky soul walking his dog. I love my walks. (I don't know what the point of this paragraph was, I'm sorry.)

Also, this week marks the beginning of that horrible time when college admission boards decide the futures of so many people in our grade. Already, for a variety or reasons, inferior people have begun filling the spots that competent people should be in. Of course, there are always pleasant surprises, such as Jedwin not being summarily rejected from Princeton (he got deferred). That's a funny thing, deferral: I don't know whether I'm supposed to congratulate or express regret. Whatever.

Tomorrow, Harvard will announce upon whom they shall bestow the honor of using the name "Harvard" on their future resumes. Personally, I'm amused by the fact that, amongst the "intellectual elite" (yes that's sarcasm) of our school, there is already a consensus about who will get in and who won't. (I won't pretend to be above this sort of speculation: for the most part, I agree with the group.) I am, however, curious as to how accurate this consensus is. Personally, nothing would make tomorrow greater for me than if the general opinion was wrong, and Jon T. got in at the expense of some overachieving, transcript-padding intellectual wannabe. (I direct that at no-one in particular, as there are plenty of them in our overly competitive school, and I don't differentiate between them, and so don't remember who applied where.) After all, what is more important: innate cerebral ability and scholastic aptitude or the tendency to aid sick puppies and the homeless? I'm not sure I want to hear the answer to that anymore.

I apologize for the lack of profound incites into the existential nature of man, etc. in this post, but, as I said, I've been having a bad week, and am physically, intellectually, and emotionally drained.

And it gets worse. Today was supposed to be the last day of my week, as I was supposed to go skiing tomorrow. However, due to the fact that work is just as much a piece of shit as school is (except they pay you at work), my father was forced to cancel that. So now I have to endure another day of miserable school. Of course, I don't know what I'm bitching about, since my weekends are even worse than my weekdays, as I spend them subconsciously torturing myself about not completing college apps. Whatever, that will be over soon. Hopefully after that, my mind will allow me to relax.

I don't plan on staying up until ungodly, Jon-esque hours tonight, so, goodnight.

12-10-2002 12:19 AM

My life is profound misery interrupted by moments of trivial ecstasy.

What I'm trying to say is that my new watch arrived, it kicks ass, and I still hate life.

Goodnight.

12-9-2002 12:47 AM

The play “Krapp’s Last Tape” by Samuel Beckett, reminded me chillingly of the pitfalls of the now-popular practice of creating Blogs.

Essentially, creating a Blog is what the unfortunately named character, Krapp, did. Each year, he would record himself speaking about his life. He would then listen to these tapes as he aged. Obviously, his perceptions of himself changed over time, and so each tape captured a particular state of mind for his future retrospection. (There is more to the play: read it, its only 8 pages long)

Anyway, the play showed how capturing your current mindset can be at once powerful and dangerous. According to the play, looking back on you life through the eyes of a long-gone version of yourself can lock you in perpetual nostalgia for that time in your life. However, I believe that the benefits outweigh the risks; I do not believe that ignorance is bliss; I would rather risk the perils of my past mindsets than lose them forever.

Therefore, I attempt to parse my mind into text, and store in within this site.

I have come to a realization, however: Our websites are imperfect vessels in which to store our current selves. They are terminally skewed by our cognizance of the fact that they will be read by others; we, therefore, innately portray ourselves as our social persona, not as our true selves. In many years, when we look upon our old posts as a window into our past selves, we will instead by confronted by the opaque haze of our farces and fronts.

I propose, therefore, that if you ever want to look back and analyze how you thought, then you should keep a private diary, separate from you public musings.

You will be less likely to adulterate yourself if you know that you will be the only one reading what you wrote.

On a side note, I hope that my return to thoughtful posts pleases you, my sparse and precious readers.

12-8-02 12:28 AM

First of all. Sorry for missing a day.

That being said, I'd like to apologize for having nothing to say today.

Feldman instructed me to go to www.mp3.com to download songs by Electric Doormat and by Three Dead Trolls in a Baggie. Both are amazingly funny and talented, so enjoy.

Also, I've noticed that a lot of people frequent my website, albeit occasionally. Being that I shop at starving-for-attention.com, I love this. So please, all of you who are reading this, instruct a random person you know to read my website.

As grows my hit-counter, so does my ego.

Again, I apologize for the waning quality of this site ... give me time to improve it.

12-6-02 12:35 AM

I'm not the only one who has disgustingly severe mood-swings.

I was looking at the various comics on the website that Jed linked to in Thursday's post, and I couldn't believe the incongruity. While Jed refers his readers directly to their hilarious Dragonball parody, "Buttlord GT", the website containing it also harbors a short comic strip called "under the stars 'n junk"; although the name implies comedy, it couldn't be further from.

So being that - primarily as a form of self-flattery - I give respect to anyone who does not limit themselves in the range of their expression, I hereby solute the people at http://www.atomictoy.org/ for their efforts.

12-5-02 9:15 PM

I didn’t know whether to laugh or get angry while reading the little debate that Sunil and Jon staged on Jon and Jed’s websites. (If that didn’t make sense to you, read Jon’s website and the comments of Sunil made about it on Jed’s website.) While trying to decide who, if anyone is right, I’ve come to the conclusion that one of you is an idiot, but I don’t know which one:

The problem is that I ran into an inherent limitation of the internet when compared to actual human interaction: solely from what each of you wrote, it is impossible to deduce tone. This is of critical importance in my analysis, because the idiot in this discussion is the first person who changed first tone from facetious to serious. Jon, if you were seriously offended by people celebrating snow, then you are an idiot. Sunil, if you were seriously offended by Jon’s post, you are an idiot.

Right now, I am forced to lean towards Sunil as being the idiot. You see, Sunil used my website as a synecdoche for anything that overanalyzes and pretentiously attempts to find meaning where there is none. Barring my ridiculous use of a watch as a metaphor for a person, such transgressions do not actually occur on my site. So, being that Sunil unfairly criticizes this page, I must weigh the possibility that he is an idiot more heavily.

However, it is possible that Sunil was joking in his criticism, both of my site and of Jon’s post. If this is the case, then Jon is the idiot, because his apology for his post sounded serious.

If, however, Jon’s apology was a farce, then Sunil is again the idiot, since his response to Jon’s apology sounded serious.

And, in the remote possibility that Sunil was still joking, then I am the idiot for analyzing a debate which is, in fact, a joke.

Or maybe my analysis is a joke, and you are the idiot for taking it seriously.

Being that it is impossible to precisely judge tone based solely on written words, the world will never know.

12-5-02 1:45 AM

I'd just like to say that, including breaks, the essay which I bitched about in the latest post took me 8 hours to complete.

No matter whose ruler you use to measure that, that's fucked up.

12-4-02 11:11 PM

I’m completely brassed off. I hate English essays. (And just because I can, I’ll write this post in real English, not American.)

The reason I hate them so much is that the teacher usually assigns a completely arbitrary minimum length. With this figure in mind, I can’t concentrate on what I want to say in my paper: all I can think about is reaching that sodding minimum length. It’s ridiculous. What if I have a really good idea (like I often do), but it can be proven concisely (as it usually can)? I can’t use it. Instead I am FORCED to write a minging paper about NOTHING, all because that prat of a teacher believes that we’ll “think harder” if he forces us to write some minimum amount. (Maybe if he wasn’t such a ponce, I’d give him some respect, but he was obviously kicked in the bollocks as a child.) As if half the people in that class can think. Please. And they still get higher grades than me. Bleeding wankers. Fucking pillocks. Filthy plonkers.

Now I have to go finish my paper for that blighter. Too bad I have sod-all to write about.

Ta Ta.

(If you need help translating this, try http://www.boadicea.net/buffy/dictionary.htm. It has most of the words I used.)

12-4-02 1:00 AM

I wrote a new poem: Khaki. Enjoy.

12-2-02 11:24 PM

While chatting with the ever-observant Feldman, I received this little piece of wisdom:

henry... your december first post proves that you're an uneducated dunce, not that the school made you one. because I figured out so much earlier than you that the only way to learn is by ignoring everything they 'teach' in school and learning on your own through literature that's actually quality. so I mock your feeble attempts to catch up!

In fact, he’s basically right. Although the school has done everything in its power to make me an idiot, I should have realized its intentions earlier. Therefore, it is my own fault that I am uneducated; while I’ve been bitching and moaning about how much school sucks, Feldman’s been reading. Now I’m screwed, and he’s ahead. Fuck.

In other “news”, I had my MIT interview today. Amazingly, I think it went rather well. The interviewer asked me “What would you like MIT to know about you that can’t be conveyed in you application”; I responded, “That my relatively low grades are not due to test scores or lack of understanding, but rather are due to the fact that I didn’t give inane homework the respect that the teachers claimed it deserved”; he thought about my response for a moment, and said something on the order of, “That’s the best answer I’ve ever gotten to that question”. Unless he was bullshitting, which is always a possibility, I think that I made a good impression. I wonder if my clever answer will outweigh my 2.0 GPA and my years of gross negligence. Yeah right.

Oh, and without any peripheral discussion on the Orwellian dichotomy of neoclassicism, I’d like to say that my watch shipped today, and will be arriving shortly. Yey!

12-1-02 11:45 PM

I just had the greatest vision:

It's 11:59 PM on Dec. 31, and the ball is dropping. Everyone is celebrating the approaching new year. I, on the other hand, am furiously typing my college essay .... 10 ... 9 ....8 ...7 ... 6 ... 5 ... 4 ... 3 ... 2 ... 1 .. "FUCK IT"  *a shot rings out*.  And so ends the short and un-storied life of Henry Kozachkov.

I just found that too amusing not to share.

12-1-02 10:48 PM

I apologize in advance for the lack of structure and logic in this post; I am so unbelievably angry that I’m having serious trouble maintaining my focus. I will turn this post into a well-developed essay at some later date. Now I will vent:

As part of an English assignment, I was required to pick a non-fiction book published this year, and read it. This was the most enjoyable assignment I’ve gotten all year; ironically, this very assignment, like so many other things, reminded me of how vehemently I hate school.

I realized, through some extremely indirect logic (which I will try to explain herein), that school has caused me to be an uneducated dunce.

You see, year after year, I was forced to read in school. More importantly, I was forced to read shit. And if that wasn’t enough, I was forced to write meaningless dribble about the shit that I read. Inevitably, I started to hate reading. Being that reading became associated with such things as writing about the meaning of “A Negro Speaks of Rivers”, I stopped. And so, I degenerated into a pathetically unlearned sac of ignorance. While I could have been strengthening my logical foundations by reading the classics of philosophy, and expanding my horizons of thought by reading modern works of science, I was instead reading the Sparknotes for Othello. FUCK OTHELLO. FUCK ENGLISH CLASS. FUCK SCHOOL. And if you like school, FUCK YOU.

Instead of allowing people to specialize in what they are interested in, that piece of communistic filth of an institution (school), tries to enforce uniformity of thought. “Everyone should read Shakespeare.” FUCK YOU, SCHOOL. How about everything else … don’t you think that, maybe, there is more to the world of books than fiction. If I hadn’t been turned off from books by years of your oppressively stupid attempts at making me “well-rounded” through exposure to “literature”, I wouldn’t today be hopelessly behind at reading what I truly need to be successful: works logic and science. I hate you, school. I want you to burn in hell.

Anyway … The book I’m reading is called Nexus. It is about complex networks. It is semen-pumpingly interesting. I’m serious, too. It’s great.

And somehow, that is why I hate school.

I really will write a good essay about this soon… I’ll use it as a college essay perhaps.

12-1-02 12:19 AM

In light of Jon's most recent post, I must apologize for my failed attempt at profoundness (See yesterdays post). Yes, it's true; I've been found out; I'm about as deep as an oil slick. However, my failed attempt at profoundness in reference to watches did not stem from a need to be the next Plato; rather, I needed a pretext for bragging about my new watch. I couldn't very well just say, "Oh, yeah ... I'm a materialistic prick: look at my newest toy." Instead, I tried to mask my own tendency to brag with some tripe about people being superficial. (Hypocritical, no?) Unfortunately, I made the mistake of underestimating my audience; I thought that you'd find my pretentious analogy to be insightful. However, being more intelligent than I gave you credit for, you were unimpressed with my infantile little metaphor. Good job Jon. Keep up the good work.

Now I will rephrase my old post, sans the philosophical gibberish: "Look at how nice my watches are ... I must be a better person than you!"

Ahhhhh, that felt good.

Now, onto things that don't feel good: reading Jedwin's website. Jedwin, you are amazing. Reading your website actually made me more depressed than I already was. Why? Well, as your mother so deftly noted, you are pathetic. Unfortunately, I poses many of the same faults that make you pathetic in her eyes. (Lack of female companions, aversion from social gatherings, etc...) So, by reminding me of my own inadequacies, you have managed to ruin what was left of my day. Good job Jed. Keep up the good work.

So, having nothing to actually say today, I'll go sulk in the shame and depression that I got from the posts of that dynamic duo, Jon and Jed.

Good job guys. Keep up the good work.

Assholes.