ES.O has a new look, obviously. Vertical rows of squares get old in a hurry. I like the aesthetic, but something like that needs to be more subdued, or made so blatant that nothing else exists on the page. As the saying goes, too much is too much, but way too much is just right.

I spent a lot of time over the weekend reading, and writing, and thinking. Much of it was random and uncoordinated (like this site!) but I think I came to some realizations about the nature of cause and effect. The way I understand Nirvana (from the Buddhist perspective) is that to achieve Nirvana is to escape from the cycle of birth and death, cause and effect. But is it possible to even conceive of such a state?

Here is an excerpt from an email I recently sent to someone very close to me:

“…I have been writing a lot, trying to stay sane during all of this insanity. One of the side effects of keeping a journal is that you tend to get a lot of free psychoanalysis: I did this. Why did I do this? How does that make me feel? What does that feeling remind me of? How does that make me feel? What does that feeling remind me of? How does that make me feel?”

And so it goes. The next major changes to this site will (hopefully) be completely invisible to you-all, as I am working on rolling my own extensible XML-driven web logging application. In theory simple, but in practice… a whole lotta work.