Urban guilt

I nearly ran into a homeless guy on my skateboard as I was heading back to the apartment to grab my helmet. I gave him a friendly smile and a "sorry." He asked me for a quarter and I gave him a dollar. He thanked me, and as I was riding away, told me to look out for people like him. Or was he warning me to look out for people like him because the donation of a dollar was the only thing that kept him from wearing my skull as a trophy?

I find my compassion for people in a bad spot is more or less always at war with my assumption that the homeless are mentally ill and therefore potentially dangerous.

I'm not sure what that says about me.

Things I am learning

Thinking a lot about how I interact with people these days (yes, more navel-gazing dear reader [omphaloskepsis? was that the word?], but it's my blog and I can cry if I want to). Largely because interacting with people just seems painful to me right now. I have finally gone back into therapy with a promising Hakomi practitioner, so I can spare you too much emotional out-pouring, but I feel like writing something out and I might as well put it on my blog.

Here are the things I've learned about myself and interacting with people in the last year:

- It is very difficult to let people you care about distance themselves when they clearly need to.

- It is very difficult to become estranged from a friend.

- There is a big difference between understanding my relationships intellectually and understanding them emotionally.

- Not only is it hard to lose a friend, it is hard to lose all the friends that came with them.

- Not only is it hard to lose a friend, it is hard to be fair to mutual friends (emotionally speaking) who still like both of you.

- It is hard to watch your former social circle whirl merrily on without you, even when everyone recognizes (even me) that it's reasonable and appropriate for me not to be in it.

- It is hard to relate to people in any good way when you can't get through a conversation without feeling hurt.

- It's really easy to distance yourself from all your close friends and leave yourself feeling lonely and isolated.

- it's really hard to pick yourself back up and get out there when you've left yourself lonely and isolated.

- I'm really super good at making myself miserable.

- There is nothing more constant about friendships and people than that they are always changing.

- it seems wise to me to learn to adapt to the every-changing closeness/distance with my friends without letting it cause me suffering but I don't know where to begin.

- I'm a little bit of a drama factory right now.

- I have a hard time managing a social life emotionally. I largely attribute this to lack of practice.

- I someday hope to deal with all of this much better than I do now.

What is. . . IS

Oh sweet blog, your hero does not normally subscribe to half-baked philosophy from comic books, especially from Marvel who wrote the following ideas around the same time they thought evil/good/boring clones were the foundation of all good storytelling. In any case, they also wrote about a fictional tribe in the future called the askani (as part of one of their less egregious clone story lines of course) who lived, also of course, in a future ravaged by war. Because any and all of them could die horribly in any given moment, they had a very pragmatic outlook on life: what is, is.

This is pseudo philosophical mumbo jumbo I know, or at least written in that spirit. But, I have been thinking about this a lot today, oh dear, sweet blog, because my biggest struggle this week is to accept what is. Sometimes doing the right thing leads to sadness in the short term, sometimes doing some wrong things leads to the same place, and sometimes things just ARE sad and you just have to get through it. And sometimes those 3 things happen all at once. And there's nothing to do about it but accept what is, and try to build a better life going forward than you have so far.

To accept what is and hope for better is oftentimes hard for our hero.

For the record

Oh, sweet blog, it's been a roller coaster few weeks. An awful weekend, followed by an awful weekend, followed by a good few days, followed by a good weekend.

I am grateful for my friends.

Soylent Reminder

It cannot be overstated how much the banner personifies my internal emotional life.

an old favorite

What has two thumbs and a hard time focusing on work?

THIS GUY.

RIP Max

Max
Originally uploaded by hbot3000

Max was only my pet while I was with my ex in Reno. And for about a year after that (it's a CRAZY story). Anyway, he apparently died today and as I was genuinely fond of him, I'll post the best picture I have. He was smart, affectionate and good-natured. He cheered me up a lot. I'm sad he's gone, even though he's long since been my responsibility.

The crazy email from the ex, blaming his death on me and insisting he lost the will to live since I left her (or she left me) I could have done without however.

Report Card

So, in the last year since I moved to Portland, I have manage to alienate the 4 women I reconnected with, and hurt the one I cared about the most, and somehow distance myself from my traditional confidants.

Yay fucking me. It doesn't matter where I move to, the problem is me.

Therapy here I come.

Moving

I'm moving this weekend, and am super stressed out. I'm going to go into the office tomorrow and hope to recruit more help. Gah. Moving sucks.

But rest assured my dear, sweet blog, I plan to add to you more soon. To create. I am slowly coming around to the idea that creation is happiness-making compared to consuming which is more "time-abiding". I have a longer post on that, that I'm sure you will ALL be fascinated by. Later. When there is time.

For now, I pack. And pack. Oh god the packing.

On GaGa

Ah yes, the title of my college thesis finds new life again. Anyway, via amphigory, comes this link to a good feminist article on Lady Gaga. Says everything I would want to say I think, such as:

The clip is just one more thing catering to pornographic male fantasies, part of a broader cultural story being read by young people forming their understanding of relationships and sexuality.

And also

This is not about being edgy. It's about playing to sex industry-inspired scripts. Fetishising sexual violence isn't all that imaginative. It's standard fare.

And now, I'm off to think about less annoying things.

Oldness and evidence thereof

I find it terribly amusing that new pop music videos are generally greeted by young people as an artistic breakthrough ("it's someone scantily clad and pretty singing and dancing in formation!!! Again!!!") and greeted by old fogies like me as a sign of the apocalypse. I'm not always so irritated by these things. The last Lady Gaga video (Bad Romance) was kind of interesting, if vapid, shallow and completely self-indulgent and self-absorbed.

Her new video though, ye gods. I hates it. I want those 9 minutes of my life back. There's no narrative, gratuitous product placement, has no relation to the song she's singing along to and is only shocking if you're 18 and easily titillated. Complete and utter train wreck. I'm not sure how the other dancers fit on the screen between Gaga and Beyonce's ginormous egos. I generally hate most pop music videos, but this is by far the worst piece of trash I've ever seen. That said, the song itself is tolerable if not inspired (would whoever is calling Gaga at the club please stop? she is busy dancing and doing fashion).

I know, I know, pop music is a young person's mug. Oldsters have the luxury of picking and choosing the good parts and dismissing the rest with no social stigma. Still, it irritates me. It's like mass training on how to be as stupid and vapid as possible. I guess I listed to songs like "unskinny bop" and "Rico Suave'" though, and I turned out okay. Right?

Also, you kids, off my lawn.

Comics! Comics! Comics!

SO, a brief break from work while I discuss something of vital importance. Comics! Well, we'll get to that in a second.

I'm in another vital round of "who do I want to be?" grappling with questions like "what do I want to let go of? and "what do I want to hang on to?" While these questions basically encompass every plane of my life, of specific interest to me as far as this post is concerned is the amount of STUFF I lug around with me. Some of it will be going and/or gone before I move. This we know. What I haven't had the time to figure out due to work stress is WHAT specifically will go and what will stay. It's thunderdome for pack rats! Two tchotchkes enter, one leaves!

ANYWAY, to return to the point which was fast drifting sideways at 80 miles an hour across the Australian desert, I think my 16 boxes of comics will not be trailing me for all time. I'd like to slim it down to a more manageable 4 or 5 or so. Or maybe none (I would love to have my entire collection be digital or in trades). So I will probably be getting rid of them soon. I'm pretty sure I don't have the patience to try and get "top dollar" for them on ebay and I've seen good arguments that they ain't worth that much in reality anyway. So I will either be selling them as bundles on craigslist or donating them to some people or just flat out recycling them.

This is where you come in. For those of you who know my collection and have any interest in it, shoot me an email and, depending on what you want, am likely to just donate it to you. If anyone wants a more detailed list, I'll see what I can do. But one way or another most of them will be gone in about a month and a half so now's the time to speak up if you're interested.

Just so you know.

one quick thing

I know I'm supposed to be fixing my server, but I have a moment while something is running in which I want to say:

Of COURSE the guy who crashed his plane into a building in Austin was a terrorist. He just wasn't an ISLAMIC terrorist. Terrorists can have skin other than brown and be things other than Arab! What kind of idiotic society is confused by this idea?

one more thing

I think part of what inspired the post just below, is, I took physics as an undergraduate major so I could get into astronomy. And it never happened. And I recently read that one of the physics majors from my very small physics school (there were only ever about 4 of us in the program at one time) is now working at NASA studying the moon Titan. I totally could have done that. I completely failed to even remotely get it together enough to even figure out how to pursue my dream. I don't even know how he got there. And it's a shame, because i was fucking great at orbital mechanics. Anyway, a piece of my soul bared for the internet. My life isn't so bad now you understand, atmospherics physics for our good old earth ain't so bad, but I could have made more of myself. I just never bothered to.

Okay, there may be a new life rule #2 in my journal, which is: No posting after beers.

Waiting to exhale sobriety

No, that's not meant to be artistic. I just had 3 beers at the bar (2 bars actually) instead of the one I was initially aiming for, so I'm at work waiting to sober up, typing on my new netbook and decided to make a blog post. Plus my license is expired and I'm not sure DUI plus expired license would end particularly happily. I could talk about my new netbook but I think I'll save it for another time. It involves an operating system other than OS X that rhymes with "schmindows" so you can see it will be a post that sparks many strong feelings.

I have a new rule for my life that I wrote in bold letters in one of my journals that I still violate a little too frequently. That rule is: no more gaming blogs to watch the train wreck that is gaming forums. It is a waste of my life to spend time reading about all those other people wasting their lives. And yet, I can't look away. Probably because I am still working out what role gaming can have in the life of someone who is still growing, and working to be better than he/she is. I feel like the two things are largely incompatible. Like you can spend your life feeling good about new accomplishments like learning new languages, skills, or artistic outlets, or you can play games which give you an illusion of accomplishment, but that in no way actually made you smarter or has a lasting impact on you or the world at large. There are some good counter arguments to be made, namely that games are no worse than movies as an entertainment choice, but my counter would be watching movies as your sole leisure time activity would not necessarily be a fulfilling lifestyle either (although I think well crafted movies can inspire deeper though if they are genuinely artistic).

Anyway, that's a topic that can be argued later. What I want to talk about in particular is the arguments themselves. I constantly see arguments that are well thought out, and eloquent, and passionate . . . and it's about something like whether the death penalty is harsh enough in the game. Or whether the publisher did a good enough job marketing. Or whether the game mechanics are quality or not quality. And a lot of it about whether the game as a whole is good enough to suck them in from real life entirely. Like the lot of them are heroin addicts who have given up on real life entirely, and are now just bickering over which drug is the best destroyer of their potential. Like they've established what they are, they're just arguing about dosage. I'm being too harsh, I know. I just feel like if some of those guys could put the same amount of passion into their job, or their relationship, or anything with lasting and edifying effects whatsoever, it would be a really good thing. It just bothers me to see a whole bunch of men (maybe more teenagers than I think?) arguing about video game mechanics, with all the full-on alpha male posturing and seriousness of real-world debates. Like it's a symptom of the fall of the empire. Like we have a population and voting public full of people who make a great show of being very knowledgeable about tabloid fluff (because it's way easier to have strong opinions and involved theories about celebrity gossip and video games than it is about bridge engineering or governmental policy), and fewer and fewer who bother to learn hard things, which the real world is necessarily made of.

Okay, rant over. A lot of this is just projection on my part I know. Because I have mostly been the type of person to master easy things (games, comic book lore) instead of hard things (physics, astronomy) even though I have really good mental hardware and could do so much more with the resources I have. It bothers me. And it bothers me that it doesn't seem to bother anyone else.

I do like clever things.

Dolphins are Clever

Cat's Cradle review

So I'm trying out goodreads. Blogging some of my reviews. Most of my web presence recently has been twitter or goodreads reviews, hoping to change that, but in the meantime at least I can add those things to my blog.

A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole


My rating: 5 of 5 stars
I am unsure how I arrived at the ripe old age of 33 without ever having read this book. Or even heard of it. I believe was deprived for the lack. Ignatius J. Reilly may be the most interesting and entertaining protagonist I've ever encountered in a novel. He is both right and decent and introduced me to all that is proper in theology and geometry as well as the importance of being in touch with one's valve. Actually he's awful, but in the most entertaining way possible. And it's not just him, the whole book is full of extremely unique characters with plot threads that dance around ignatius as he stumbles around town in search of employment. Gah, my meager words don't even begin to do it justice. If you like great dialogue, if you like interesting and crazy protagonists, then read this book immediately. And then hug it. and love it. And keep it. It's so good.

As a side note, in the character of Ignatius John Kennedy Toole manages to lampoon just about every arrogant internet nerd with absolutely no self-awareness wallowing in online forums that I've ever come across. Either he is a mad prophet of the future, or he distills a personality type that probably always exists in the male population in some percentage, just in the 60's all they had were big chief notebooks with which to scrawl their grandiose ideas in between masturbation sessions. Read the book, you'll see what I mean.

goodreads

Cat's Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut


My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Again, I'm not sure how I got to be 33 without reading Kurt Vonnegut. I think I've been living under a rock. This was a great book, kinda weird, well written, in a sub-genre I have an affinity for. Who could have thought that the people who are acclaimed as great writers are actually great writers?

Ricky Gervais singing to Elmo.

Cute and funny.