Supermarkets.

Here I am, rewriting my site for the fifth or sixth time, and all I think of are supermarkets. I don't know why. I have no special fondness for supermarkets, no particular ties with supermarkets, I've never worked in one, and I don't invest in them.

And yet I have these memory markers of supermarkets. Shopping at 3am in the extra large Coles in Melton. Grabbing cheap and nasty junk food after Abyss in Brunswick. Hunting for spiritual worth after a night of insomnia in Toorak Safeway (found it in the ice cream section).

And then all sorts of odd memories bubble to the surface. Walking seven kilometres along a highway at night into Lorne for one beer (we thought there would be more). Going on my first pub crawl (those were the days when we walked out of the Armadale, grievously insulted that they were charging $2 a pot). Designing and going on my largest pub crawl (18 pubs, 5 people missing, 1 too drunk to talk at all, and I flirted with a member of the opposite sex). I remember having my first crush (vaguely), and I remember the first time I went wild all night on a dancefloor.

I used to think of memory as a chain, a line of time moving from one point to the next, changing and evolving, adding and growing. These days I think of things as a quanta, a constant mass that changes in constituency. I've reached the finite point of that mass, and now I swap and change, leaving a trail of waste memory and detritus behind me. I used to get sentimental and read over a lot of cards/email/letters, but now I do rituals like that less and less. I don't know if I want what I have to pop in and out, whether I want my quanta to change in constituency.

I've always done a lot of nostalgic memory dwelling. Every once in a while I look at something or someone and see a path I could've wandered down, and I wonder if it would've been better or worse for me (probably worse, but hey). Even rarer are times when I zone out completely and see the way history would've been changed if I'd done a certain thing at a certain time, or if certain fixed points hadn't been the way they'd been orientated.

I'd be married, I rather suspect.

Time will be time, though. I've always believed that the universe is deterministic, but my ego clashes with the concept. Still, I see probability waves expanding out, can still watch them expand and crash as the waves solidify. I can see certain patterns in history, from my own personal to a wider level. I think I'd probably rather dwell in my astrophysics, anyways. I just read these historical patterns automatically. I guess that people fascinate me in a detached kind of way. I've had an odd evolution. Not especially horrid or fucked up or filled with Freudian fantasies, but just a little different from anyone else I know. So, people reacted to me a little differently from the way they reacted around someone else, which was a little odd, and yet a little enjoyable at the same time. Human interactions I never quite 'got', and people have remarked to me that I can come across a little on the cold and distant side. I'm probably just analysing you. Don't worry. I'll just take your reactions and thoughts in and add it to my junk pile of a quanta, ponder over it for a while, and make a footnote about how I think about people, and how people think about me.

Maybe I'll get around to spewing it all out it written form.

I used to have a bit of a rant about depression, and my experiences with on this site. I had a few emails pop in about how brave I was to write that sort of stuff. Not really. It's there, I deal with it as best I can, and chances are that you'd probably think I'm a mopey type if you've ever met me. Generally people come here to find out the basic stats of a person, or to look at a piccy to see how cute they are. Well, chances are that you know me if you've managed to find this little corner of the web, so you already have a pretty good idea of these things anyways. Hope it helped.

Oh yeah. I'm one of these people in this photo of Miss Alex's.