Nilknarf Journal
Current Journal Entry
Current Journal Entry
Quote of the day: People who think that it is smart to choose *not* to have children are depriving the gene-pool of people who are smart enough *not* to have children... me, 1998
Yep, it's a dilemma all right. For some reason I was thinking about overpopulation and the fact that the average person is pretty dumb and that half of the people are even dumber 'n that...
There were seven people killed in the wreck up by Horton on Saturday night, according to the paper. And the other wreck wasn't mentioned in the paper at all, though I know for certain that it occurred... but I've never been impressed with the veracity of our local rag, or the completeness of it either.
They do have good funnies, though.
I stayed up all night last night and got a lot of stuff done... mostly on the mailing list that I'm working on. And no, it is still not working, and additionally, I messed up the rest of my mail on nilknarf.net too. So I put that back together. I did get the guestBook entry looking better, though, but the output still looks the same, I can't find the file that does the output so I can't change it...
My knowledge of how the system works is increasing incrementally, though. Slow and not real sure. Linux learned by necessity. Permissions and ownership of files is strange from a basically DOS point of view, but the more I get into it the more sense it makes.
Actually, the less sense DOS/Windows makes. Am I the last one in the world to realize that?
Well, my reasoning is that people are wrong, dead wrong. Realism and atheism go hand-in-hand, of course. Illusions are nice, but not practical. More importantly, they are not real. And people who base their actions on illusions may be harmful to your health if you aren't suffering from the same illusions. That's a historical fact.
And, based on the above, cynicism is simply having a sense of humor about the whole thing. It isn't a negative thing, but a way of dealing with reality without having to resort to illusion.
And happiness is nothing more than a realistic approach to life. It's here, it's now, and here and now is when we must enjoy life. We can't be waiting around for something (or someone) to come along and make us happy. This is it, this is all there is. If you can't be happy with that well, then, damn you, be sad. It's a choice that you make. It should be a conscious choice, something that you do... if it isn't, anyone or anything can come along and take it away.
So... I feel that nothing, nobody, can keep me from being happy. They can make me dead, but they can't make me unhappy.
And this was basically something that I was born with. Yeah, I screwed up along the way, before I figgered out the rules. I spent some time... 
some years, actually... allowing thing/circumstances/people to make me unhappy.
Strangely, that all ended when I quit drinking. Huh. What a coincidence. I got a chance to use my mind, and I made myself happy.
Imagine that!
And I think that I'm giving up on the mail-list thingie, going back to to old original way of doing things. So if anyone wants to get on the reminder-list, just drop me a note at nilknarf@nilknarf.net and I'll put you there.