I am now the proud owner of a 12″ PowerBook. I love it beyond belief. It is the most beautiful thing I have ever owned.

I was originally planning to get an iBook, either the 12″ or 14″. When I visited the Apple Store yesterday, I liked the 12″ model much better than the 14″. The 14″ looked big and clunky andd ugly, but the 12″ was cute and perfect. I initially dismissed the PowerBook because of cost, but the 12″ isn’t actually very expensive. It ended up costing less than the 14″ iBook would have, mostly because I wanted to add more RAM and disk space to the iBook, but the PowerBook’s standard configuration was good enough. And with my student discount, it only cost an additional $100 to upgrade to the superdrive (which gives one the ability to burn DVD’s) and get an extra 20 GB of space.

Here is it, because it gives me joy to type it out:
12″ PowerBook
1.5 GHz G4 Processor
SuperDrive (DVD-RW, CD-RW)
80 GB hard drive
512 Mb RAM

This is the first time I’ve had my own computer. It’s very exciting.

I’ve been thinking about scrapping this blog and starting a new one. I no longer want all the entries dating back to 2003. I’m about to graduate high school and start a new life. New life = new blog? What think you?

Part of the reason I say this is because I constantly struggle with the website/livejournal balance. I have a livejournal that I update regularly- much more often than this. I like it because it’s a good way to meet peole and stay in touch. I’ve met a whole group of friends that I’ll be going to school with next year through livejournal. There’s a also the fact that my livejournal is more widely-read than this website. Thus, I get much more feedback. And I love feedback just as much as everyone else.

I’m not willing to give up my livejournal for the reasons mentioned above, and I’m not willing to stop updating my website because it’s something I really enjoy working on. Plus, I write more formally in here, and I think it’s a good idea to do at least semi-regular pseudo-formal writing. The problem is that I can’t seem to update both on a regular basis. I tend to write daily life things in my livejournal and more idea-realated things here. It’s much more difficult to write here- often I’ll have something I want to say, but I get so frustrated with trying to find the right words that I give up. For instance, I’ve been trying for a while to write a post on how I want to be a scientist, but I don’t agree with a lot of the methods I might be using or the goals I might be working toward.

The most logical course of action would be to give up one altogether and commit to the other, but I can’t. And the problem may get even worse next year, when I will have less time in which to update things. I’m not sure what to do. I’ll have to think about it.

In episode five of Serial Experiments Lain, a girl and several other people are handed packets of tissues by a boy on the street. When she opens it and takes the first one out, there is a message written on it. I love stuff like that - anonymous communication between strangers.

We live a very crowded world with relatively few personal connections. It’s a paradox that’s referred to all the time: the more people surround us, the lonelier we feel. In the small towns that used to be common, you might know the face of everyone in a three-mile radius. But if you live in a city, you’re lucky to know the name of everyone on your hall in your apartment building. We walk around, surrounded by people we try not to look at. I’m just as guilty of it as anyone else. I don’t smile at strangers. But I should.

I think that’s why situations like the one referred to above really make me happy. They make it seem like someone in that vast sea of people is trying to make a connection. I love seeing signs that aren’t advertisements or gang signs, just people trying to make your day better. I was in Chinatown a few months ago and saw a piece of paper on a lampost that said “She loves you” at the top and “yeah, yeah, yeah” at the bottom. It was great.

One of the coolest things I’ve heard about in a while is Bren Bataclan’s Smile Boston Project. Bren does paintings like these and attaches notes like this one. Most excellent. Boston could use more smiles.