Vershun’s Brain Dump

Well it’s been forever since I’ve written anything and for some reason I keep getting returning hits so I assume you people want something from me.  So here’s my boring quick-and-dirty post about my life and then things to expect from this site in the future.

For those of you unfortunate enough to talk with me during my existential/quarter-life crisis; it’s over.  I’m now a Nihilist for the most part and I’m loving every second of it.  I love to argue so losing my Athiestic beliefs have opened up a whole new range of debating: specifically the validity of math and science.  I’ve found that by believing in nothing I’m open to experience anything and that has changed my entire perception of existence.  So uhhh… I’m happy and stuff I guess :-B

So I have a couple of jobs now.  Working at ClickFox doing Flex and Java which keeps me busy.  Also working on a site called Vindogle, which should be up fairly soon.  Other than staying busy all the time I have a wonderful gal that I’m quite fond of and I’m excited to finally see Dougie in Paraguay.

OK so things coming sometime this year to this site because they’ve been on my list for a while.  I have a few articles that are quarter to half written that I never got around to finishing; I’ll do that.  Also expect some sort of Flash-based data visualization for decentralized distributed computing (that one might take a hot minute).

Anyway, I promise I’ll keep up on this more when I have free moments.

OK so I was going to just get rid of this blog but for whatever reason it has a PR rating so I might keep it around.  I’m definitely going to be changing quite a few things around here after I finish up the 3 projects I have queued up.  This blog will be moved to blog.vershun.com.  I’ll probably stop doing posts with any sort of substance (there’s pretty much none of that already) and instead become a lot more project-oriented, which is what vershun.com will be about.  This blog will truly be used as an outlet for my weird,which was its original intention (see identifying a zombie, smoking, and mediocre sex guide for more details).

BUT since I have a new server and haven’t posted in a while, here’s some random pictures.  I’m posting them just cause I’ve been playing with PS recently and have really nothing else to post right now.  Plus there’s not enough pictures on the internet yet.

The Badlands in South Dakota

The shores of New England are far cooler than beaches

These things are horrifying. There's no zoom on this but I was sure as Hell in my car at the time.

What's better to do in Salem than check out graveyards and abandoned buildings?

Lauren and Dave in Moab. Sheer cliff on all sides but back.

Through New Hampshire during autumn was the best drive I've ever taken.

Peruvian pelicans with a predisposition to petulance.

Bad picture but two of the best and brightest people I know, love, and miss. Amateur caving in Cusco.

Leaving the peak of Mt. Bierstadt, Colorado.

I might post again soon I have a few things I want to write I just haven’t gotten around to them.

I can only hope this is some sort of joke:  http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0480239/

And Angelina Jolie as Dagny Taggart?  Are they fucking retarded?!

It’s blasphemy in its most depraved form.

Not sure if I have ever been bedridden like that before.  Ty for the nice messages loves.

Btw if you were caught in the middle of my philosophical shitstorm this past week I apologize.  I have a much more sunny disposition now that virii aren’t eating away at my brain.

Off to Chi-town.  Adios.

Or maybe a dream.  Doesn’t quite feel like living yet.

Colorado seems so far away in my head; a clusterfuck of good memories that I know are rose-tinted and don’t even belong together.  There’s a weird, tiny part of me that illogically thinks everything is waiting back there.  That some sort of strange trip would get me scotch with Doug, coffee with T, parks with Laura, bars with Alex and Andy, seeing my family in our old house, playing with our deceased dog Misty, drinking with the Durango kids (Lauren, Greg, Kail, Brian, Matt, Amber, Kristin, Fred, etc) and finishing the night off with some wine and a movie with Haley.

None of those I’ve ever really had during the same time.  Half of them are geographically separated and most of them are separated by time.  Most of the things in that list I’ll never have again.

I hate absolutes.  “Forever” is the worst of them.

Not to say I’m not enjoying my stay here.  Not knowing a single soul was tough, but over the past few days I’ve met a few really cool people and hopefully there’s more like them.  Cinci is a weird city.

My goofiness is coming back too (not that you’d ever know if from shitastic posts like this), which I missed terribly.

Best of all, my obsessive, racing mind is starting to make itself present again.  It comes in little spurts, but with a little time I have a good feeling it’ll be back.  It’s the main reason why I left; that persistent uncomfortable feeling you get when you’re out of you are out of your element shoves my mind into a sort of abstract state.  I’ve caught myself wondering what periodic traffic models sound like on FM, what new geometries you can discover by ignoring different Euclid postulates (starting with the Parallel Postulate), and how you can use recursive methods to model thought (instead of say, weight matrices ::cough:: neural networks).

Thank God that’s coming back.  I was pretty sure that was lost in the haze of my freshman year at college.

So this is the start of a new passion; I want to either set my mind completely at ease and accept mathematics as the best method of abstraction for modeling our world, or I want to destroy it.

For those who know, please keep my mother in your thoughts/prayers today.

<3 yall.

I sometimes wonder,

With my thirst for new experiences

And your passion with finding new words,

If our pieces really didn’t align

Or if we were just trying to fit the wrong sides.

Twice today.  So it goes.

Shooting some handguns helped.

I love everyone I’ve interacted with since I’ve left; I’m perpetually impressed with them.

So thank you to Drug Wall knife lady, guy who chased me down a couple city blocks because my water bottle fell out of my backpack, the “open trail policy” ranger, the Dubai chick, the sleepy gas station guy, the laundry mat laser lady, and I suppose (semi-begrudgingly) even Subway girl.

Thank you Liz for your fantastic phone-tour of Rapid City.

To Mira and her sister for meeting me randomly in Iowa for lunch.  No doubt kicked some ridiculous ass on the MCATs.

Thank you Lauren for your understanding and always willing to talk when I’m down.

To Laura who is one of the most intelligent and hilarious girls I know.  I can’t get enough of you (we’ve tried multiple times at supersaturation).  I hope you enjoy your time in South America and I’ll be seeing you in New York.

Doug.  What can I say?  Even thousands of miles and months and months gone you’re still one of the biggest influences in my life.  I’ve always been amazed with how you can talk intelligently about anything.  Thanks for dealing with all my math shit recently.  I miss you man.

Of course my Mom and Dad, who fund a good portion of my nonsense and who are always there when I need to talk.  Thank you Dad for talking with me about math today; formulating a concrete question really has helped focus my argument.

Thank you Sam, family, and Morgan for letting me stay with you and being fantastic hosts.  I’ve never felt so welcome.

Thank you to Q, Posp and friends for letting me hang out for the night with you guys.  The shish kabobs were amazing and if I ever need to hula hoop in a life-or-death situation you guys basically saved my life.

Special thanks to Ryan and Asia.  You both spoil me entirely and I can’t express how grateful I am for you both letting me stay with you.  I’m learning so much here.

And lastly, to my new (or new project at least) business partners.  Let’s makes some monies.

If work settles down this week expect a huge rambling blog about the fallibility of mathematics.  I’ve been thinking about it way too much not to go on some stupid and meaningless tangent about it.

Driving to school today someone cut me off and I was actually angry.

A normal response I guess, but I never used to get angry at silly shit like that.  I remember laughing on multiple occasions when someone would perform a minor traffic infringement at my expense.   So what was different?  Why do I let things upset me now in ways I never did before?

By the time I reached school I knew what had changed; I was serious. Never mind the catalyst of the change, it could have been a million things in the past 2-3 years.  But the way I related to the world had fundamentally changed and the humor I used to see in everything has been extinguished.

The world, and in particular our lives, are a sort of satirical comedy.  A crude and exaggerated mimicry of the “ideal life” we have compiled from friends, family, the media, and a million other sources.  I lost this view and completely bought in to the fact that things actually matter.  I was watching a satire but believing it to be truth.  I don’t want to belittle the depth of other people’s feelings, but for myself and a whole host of other people like me you need to take our feelings in context; and that is that we’re living jokes of lives and anything “deep” we happen to mutter or “great” insights we have are no more profound than the climatic ending of a Saved By the Bell episode.

In short: I need to stop taking everything so fucking seriously, especially myself.

Been trying my best to stay busy, to stay focused, to not let my mind wander down paths that would be hard to find my way back from.

It’s for the better.  She will be happier and I will be too.

I love her, very much so.  Nothing will change that; love doesn’t equate to possession.  But the separation is a constant bruise that even a fleeting thought about makes me wince in pain.  Experience tells me that old memories will fade and new memories will soon overcome them; if only time would move quicker.

What stays with you is the feeling that you have burdened the one you love so much that the only way to fix it is to be expunged completely from their life.  We all want to be part of that we love, and the thought that being a part of it is equivalent to destroying it weighs heavily on everything I do.

I miss her smile and her laugh.  The way she smells, tastes, kisses.  How everything faded so quickly when she curled up with me for the night, and how every morning I woke up to her she was all I could think about.  I miss her perpetually cold feet on my stomach, her head on my shoulder, her hand in mine.  I MISS so much about her, but it’s not what hurts; it’s not why I’m upset.