I finally found a number this afternoon which connected me with the US embassy here in town, and hearing a person on the phone calmed my nerves somewhat. They're open 8 am - 4 pm (Monday to Friday) and so if I get a chance, I'll try to get over there next week, transportation permitting.
I spent most of today trying to work on the twin loose ends; the microanalyses and the Chapter 5 discussion. I wouldn't mind going out tonight, but there isn't really anything on at the movies, and I'm not sure what other people are up to. I won't go down to DX tomorrow, even if I don't have anything productive to work on, I'd feel better for at least trying.
I chatted with Illara this afternoon, and she had written a short piece in her diary about my diary and said that it was true to it's name "Steph's HTML Waste-Land". I didn't intentionally name it because of my sparse style, it just developed that way because of my preferred style i.e. fast-loading, Java and applet-free, no music and only the occasional picture. The content itself is what's important to me, and the most basic HTML is all that it takes to get it onto the internet and that is fine by me. Of course, the content can be fairly dry to I know, for the last week I've basically talked of nothing but the ominous "Chapter 5" but that's simply because everything else has been pushed to the back of my mind.
Actually, there is something I was going to talk about a while ago.
Back when I was having my foaming rant about "micro-cults", I also wanted to talked about the "two-worlds" hypothesis. It's a very old idea, and was originated by Plato. His theory was that there is a world of matter and a world of ideas or "forms". A good example is numbers, which exists in front of eyes, and yet in some transcendental "other" place at the same time, or the idea of a rock is not "this particular rock" or "that particular rock", but a rock in the mind which encompasses all rocks. It's a very enticing idea, and obviously completely untestable which is why it's been around for so long. I begin to disagree with the idea when Plato decided that only certain "enlightened" thinkers could nut out forms from their distant untouchable place i.e. philosophers in his case, and later priests. Plato believed that the changing, material world was inferior to the constant, unchanging world of "forms" and this idea was adopted vigorously by the early Christian church to justify their disdain for the earthly world. For me, the idea is interesting, because of how it suggest that appearances can be deceiving, that in reality the appearance of something belies it's true nature.