Saturday, November 29, 2003

I still hate banks - Part 600

Today, I am yet again reminded of why I hate banks. I specifically hate corporate banks, which are run by low-paid morons, and managed by overpaid morons who care as little for the customer as they can get away with. My bank, Small Local Bank, was swallowed up by HugeMegaCorp Bank, which I knew was inevitable. While Small Local Bank was not perfect, it was the best bank I could find back in 1993 that wasn't run by inept non-English speaking tellers and Slim-fast junkies with pancake makeup for managers. But part of my biggest beef with Small Local Bank was that, for some reason, my company and Small Local Bank could NOT figure out how to do an automatic deposit to my checking account. Every time they tried, it either got rejected or put into the wrong account (my son's savings - this was also a problem with all bank transfers I have ever received). So for the last few years since my company went to a "paycheckless" system, I have had the money deposited into my son's account, and then I would transfer that money, by hand, into my checking. Twice I tried to have this fixed, and twice the bank claimed they never got the transfer, and my company (whose HR and Payroll people also have English as a second language), claimed my bank "rejected the tape," which they were never able to define what that meant without using an annoying circular logic. And each time it would take a month without pay to sort it all out. I mean, I'd get all the money owed to me in the end, usually by a hand-written check I had to pick up at our main branch, but I am not in the financial position to go a month without pay. And since my wife, who runs her company's payroll, was able to deposit her paycheck into the correct Small Local Bank account without a speck of a problem, I suspect the morons at my company for the mistake.

So anyway, it's a few years later. My new bank has issued me new account and routing numbers, but they said the old ones would be good for a year until the "buyout was finalized." I fear that day. They also started charging me monthly fees for my accounts, which will be waived if I maintain an average balance of $5000 a month or more... but if I had that much money just lying around, I wouldn't give a crap about an $8/mo fee.

So at the beginning of November, I went to my new bank to find out why the hell I couldn't transfer money from my son's savings to checking anymore. Long story short (or read the link), all my stuff was messed up. They did say they fixed it, and for the most part, they seem to have fixed it... I still have the money, and no checks have bounced, and they let me have access to my account online. Transfers made easy, right?

WRONG!

I did a "test transfer" of $1, and it said it would take 48 hours to go through the system. Well, it never did. And now I find my son's savings account is no longer authorized to withdraw from! Ha ha! That will show ME! I could transfer all the money I wanted TO it, but not FROM it. %$@!$^%#*&!!! And because I had some heavy bills to pay, I erroneously trusted the bank to do as they promised, and I'd be able to deposit the money with no problem. God, I am gullible. Plus they have been closed since Thursday due to the Thanksgiving long weekend, so I wasn't able to do this when I was off from work. No, that would have been convenient!

So... looks like I will have to sort this all out on Monday, face to face with someone, again, to sort this stupid crap out. Plus to explain why I haven't gotten any statements since the buyout. Then I am going to try my best to get the "eediots" at my company to get the correct account and routing info to deposit my paycheck into the CORRECT account, so I won't have to deal with hand-transferring money anymore. Maybe, in some way, HugeMegaCorp Bank can work with my company where Small Local Bank failed.

Posted by Punkie @ 06:40 PM EST [Link]

Friday, November 28, 2003

Turkey Day and Black Friday - Recap

Thanksgiving and Black Friday

Thanksgiving has come and gone. Attendees were Christine, CR, Sara, and myself. We ate the usual: turkey, mashed potatoes, sweet yams, green bean casserole, stuffing, cranberry blob, and gravy. Nothing went wrong. Food was good, company was good, and no one fought or anything. Sometimes, boring is good!

I made the mashed potatoes and did a majority of the cleaning, because I am good at both. The mashed potatoes are nothing spectacular, but everyone always says how good they are. I just do 5-6 large Idaho baking potatoes, cut into half-inch thick round slices, boil until they start to break up (15-20 min), drain, put in huge steel mixer (I love my Kitchenaid), mix until mashed, add half a stick of butter, add milk until desired consistency, then salt to taste. Add fresh pepper if you like that sort of thing (I do). Cleaning is what I do, and since I am from the "clean as you go" philosophy taught to me by my mother, I almost never leave a mess behind (in fact, in most cases, the kitchen is left cleaner than when I arrived, because while waiting for the potatoes to boil, I am right there with nothing to do, so I clean).

Then Sara had to leave, and so Christine and I spent the rest of the night, relaxing in the bedroom.

Today, I got up, and went to Fair Oaks Mall for my annual "Black Friday" celebration, and it was boring in a good way, too. No one was rude! Well, there was one fight, but it was between some teen and a mall worker, but that was verbal dissing only. People said "I'm sorry," in an apologetic way when they bumped into you. Most stores were crowded, but manageable (again, politeness goes a long way). Most salespeople

The only store that was INSANE was KB Toys, which was so packed, they had a girl directing traffic. You could only enter in one side, and exit another (those not used to mall stores, it's usually just one big, wide entrance, but they partitioned off corridors simply by the sheer amount of toys piled everywhere). There were three lines from the front of the store's registers that went all the way to the back. You didn't go in that store to browse or shop: you went in knowing what you wanted, you grabbed it, then waited 30 minutes to pay for it. It was a madhouse.

Another crowded, but more "roamable" store was one of my new favorites since 2002: Hot Topic. I swear, that store is better than cake, and almost as addictive. It's sort of "Glam-goth," but who cares. I got even more small buttons for my backpack. Too bad I am a guy, though, because I have no use for a coffin-shaped purse, but I want one anyway! I liked the new Dry Ice store as well. Ugh! I am like half teen goth girl, I swear. Spooky.

Then there was Mogu. The only thing saving me from buying a Mogu is I am cheap bastard, and won't pay $38 plus tax for a pillow. But damn, what a ... well, they appropriately call it a "relaxation aide," but it looks like a soft cylindrical pillow. I had heard about it from some of my Japanese friends, but quickly forgot about it as JAWJT (Just Another Weird Japanese Thing). Now I understand. Brookstone was carrying it and it's irresistibly touchy-feely. It's made of a stretchy skin (like a spandex leotard, but much softer to the touch, like a mircoweave fabric of some kind), and inside are thousands of mini foam beads (much, much smaller than a beanbag chair... more like a foam sand), creating a feel that's impossible to describe. It feels slightly liquid, slightly foam-bean-bag like, very soft and squishy. It's like the most huggable object ever. It can be used like a teddy bear or a pillow. It's hard to put down, and I passed by the store three times before I had to tear myself away, mumbling something about not being cat-proof and justifying $38 for a pillow.

[howls at the sky, camera pans back in the rain] MOGU!!!!!!

[pant pant]

I'm okay now. But I have had a good day, as you can see.

Mogu... m-mogu... moooguuuuu....

Posted by Punkie @ 03:38 PM EST [Link]

Tuesday, November 25, 2003

Work Rating Silliness

Someone's IM today reminded me of how lucky I have it in this job sometimes...

In a former tech job a long time ago, we used to have a rating system that was 1-10, where 1 was totally bad, and 10 was uber-super-riffic. But in reality, it was a 3-8 rating system, because if they got below a 3 you had to fire them, and no one was "allowed" to score over 8 because ... well, "it left no room for improvement." No, really, a manager would have to get approval to rate higher than an 8, and if he or she got it, it would always be a 9. No one, in the history of our company, it was said, ever got a 10. So why have it?

For example, on one review, I rated the highest ever in our group. Out of 25 people, I did 35% of the work. I was always picked for special tasks because not only was I proficient, but nice and friendly. I was touted for high muckety-mucks, given special projects, and became a kind of guru for other workers. I totally redesigned how we screened bugs, and implemented a plan that saved thousands of hours, qualified data, and generated a new and efficient way to target problems with our software. It was such a master plan, so logical and totally new, that the company still uses it to this day. Even though higher managers took credit for it and laid me off, I am not really upset by this: business is business. But when I got my review, my boss gave me all 8s, stating this was the highest rating upper management would allow. I asked him, "How come I didn't get a 9 or 10?" and he looked to the side and gave me the answer with posture. I knew the answer. It wasn't allowed. I told him not to feel bad, and he just laughed and agreed with a shaken head, open mouth, and a tongue click.

It kind of reminds me of supply clerks who will never give you last few of anything because "then I would be out of them, and what if there's an emergency?" But then they can't order anymore until they get rid of what they have, so you end up in this limbo of wheeling and dealing just to get staples or toilet paper.

Posted by Punkie @ 02:28 PM EST [Link]

Black Friday Weekend

It's Tuesday, and I am at work as normal. The thing in Baltimore has been postponed yet again to next Tuesday. In other news, we are losing Thanksgiving attendees rapidly! Bruce and Cheryl can't make it, Rogue has to work, and Sara is unsure. We haven't heard back from Brad, Matt, or Anya. It may just be the three of us ... which means a lot of leftovers, which, when you are changing how you eat, is not a great thing to have.

But the weekend is coming up! It's a short work week, which is always nice, unless you have to roll out new software that requires a framework to be installed on the machines you are working on (.NET). Thank you Microsoft. But what am I doing this weekend?

My Black Friday Ritual, of course.

Friday is, as I have called it since 1987, Black Friday. Why is it Black Friday? Because I worked retail until 1996, and I will always look at the Friday after Thanksgiving as a Day of Chaos. The Friday after Thanksgiving, as most people in the US know, is the first official day of the Christmas Season. Which means it's usually one of the top three shopping days of the season. The other two are the day before Christmas Eve, and sometimes the Saturday before Christmas.

It's pretty amazing, Black Friday. From both sides of the counter. When I worked retail, and never saw direct results of customer flow and my paycheck, it was a day to fear. My first memories of Black Friday stem from when I was a bookseller. Most customers who go into book stores are a fairly educated, polite, and civilized bunch of patrons. But around Christmas, you get flooded with customers who usually wouldn't set foot in a bookstore unless they were fleeing something terrifying, like a barrage of angry killer bees. These people look like your regular customers, except they are rude, impatient, and have no patience for your normal browsing crowd. My first witnessing of violent acts came from such customers. One threatened to beat up my manager after his wife, who had pulled a whole shelf full of books onto the floor in protest and then threw a book at the cashiers, was refused a refund. I saw customers actually steal things from other people's baskets, and when confronted, gave a smarmy grin of victory, and said something like, "Until you actually pay for it, it's not yours ... nyah nyah." Maybe not with the Nyah Nyah, but you get the idea. Just wait until the killer bees, lady.

When I was a manager, and working with store bonuses or commissions, I liked Black Friday better, but the anxiety of "am I going to beat last year's figures ... please?" was always in the back of my head. Plus I had to be extra nice to rude people. I developed a disturbing "the ruder you are, the nicer I'll be" sort of revenge tactic on those people. It was almost a form of passive aggression sometimes, because you could make comments like, "I am sure you are very angry I can't refund your money," or "We are out of those, and while I am not sure when I'll get my next shipment, rest assured I will remember your comments towards the matter."

When I left retail (hopefully for good, but you know how the economy is), I made a pledge to always be in a mall on Black Friday. I need to remember where I came from. I need to see the chaos, and give deep thanks I no longer have to be a part of it. It's become a ritual, with a combination of light shopping, helping out people who seem to be in trouble, spreading good cheer to people behind the counter, and a lot of people watching. I usually just take my son, because my wife is saner than I am and doesn't want to go near a mall near Christmas.

Posted by Punkie @ 09:35 AM EST [Link]

Monday, November 24, 2003

Happy Turkey Week!

I had three really good, long entries this weekend, and then got paranoid someone would think I was talking about THEM. Thanks a lot, Sara A. Pbpbbbtpthth!! :-P

So instead, I will talk a bit about something a random person from my past (which might have been Cheryl Evry, not sure) coined, "Happy Turkey Day." Yes, Thanksgiving is this week, and we're doing the same thing we do every year: offer our house to random friends who might have nowhere to go or where they would have gone would suck. The guest list expands and contracts every year. Sometimes it's just been CR, Christine, and myself. Other times we've had up to six other people. Many times we leave an invitation open to a friend who has somewhere else to go, but they are looking for a way out. Like those friends who have families prone to psychodramas. I mean, more than normal people.

I have already spoke of my past on this issue, and the only memories I have other than misery are few. If my mother was sober enough to make the big dinner, it was just us three, some turkey, some potatoes, maybe stuffing and cranberries. We'd cook the giblets and give them to the cats. I didn't even know of stuff like "pumpkin pie," "green bean casserole," and "sweet potatoes," because my mother never cooked those. I learned about them when I got much older, and started spending Thanksgiving at friend's houses. I never even knew cranberries came in a column of gelatin, my mother made hers from raw cranberries, that were stewed in something slightly sweet, and they went on the side of your plate and were eaten like one would eat a vegetable side. Of course, those Thanksgivings weren't a wonderland, either, since I recall most of them were eaten in silence, and when I tried to start a conversation, I got, "Shhhh... TV's on." TV was a small color TV on a windowbox at the end of the table, and it almost served like a revered guest.

The first, GOOD Thanksgiving I had was when I was 19. I was living with Bruce and Cheryl, and it was a blast. One day in late October, Bruce and I were shopping at Magruder's, when Bruce saw a sign that said, "Pre-order your turkey." We planned to have a lot of people over for Thanksgiving, so we went to the table, and they man asked "how many pounds?" We asked how big they got. "I dunno," said the guy at the table. "I don't have a limit on this sign-up sheet." So we said, "35 pounds," because we figured that would be way more than enough, and we doubted that a turkey over 30 pounds in weight existed. The guy at the table agreed, but saw our logic, and put down 35 lbs. A few days before Thanksgiving, we got a call that our 35 lb turkey was ready. "How big is it?" Bruce asked. "Thirty-five pounds, sir. Wow!"

It was 35 pounds. It was huge. It wouldn't fit in a normal roasting pan, and finally we resorted to taking two large disposable roasting pans, breaking the sides out, and making one big pan out of it. It took a while to cook, but when it did, the meat fell off the bones. It was tender, juicy, and wonderful. Our guests included Bruce's sister and her family. One of them was a kid was 13 (Kevin?) who we were told puts ketchup on "everything." I assumed that was an exaggeration, but no, he put it on everything: turkey, mashed potatoes, cranberries ... everything. He even brought his own bottle.

When I started dating Christine, I went to her house for Thanksgiving. She grew up to this HUGE family affair, like the kind you see in magazines. See, at the time, the whole family was held together by one dominant matriarch we all knew as "Nanny." Nanny was Christine's maternal grandmother, and the whole family centered on her. Many people thought she was mean and cruel sometimes, but I never got on her bad side (it was at Thanksgiving that she official approved of me, and said so to everybody), so all I have to prove that was stories from the past. When Nanny died a few years later, the family just fragmented and hardly any of them speak to each other anymore. Christine misses the huge gatherings a lot.

So that's kind of why we open our house to friends. We don't have a big family, and we like a lot of people, and we want to help out those who want somewhere to go where it won't be all formal, stuffy, and psychodramatic. "I don't want to cook a big meal if it's just three of us," she says.

This year, we've invited Anya and Matt (whose both sets of parents moved away this year), Bruce and Cheryl, Sara (Sawa), Brad, and Rogue. Plus if anyone needs us at the last moment ("My mother is driving me MAD!"). We're not sure if all of them will come, because some will come only if other plans fall through, while others have no idea if they are working over Thanksgiving or not. But the inivitation stands open.

In other news, I have been "hired" by a friend to help them rewire an old building in downtown Baltimore tomorrow to a modern computer network. It's more of an exchange for information and experience kind of thing, but I think I am getting the better end of this bargain. I have to connect some antique computer equipment (we're talking dot matrix printers the size of water coolers), older computers, and newer computers from three separate crude networks into one streamlines network on a new DSL line. The building I will be working in is like 120 years old or something. Some other claims to fame, it was used as a set in the Chris Rock/Bernie Mac film, "Head of State." I wonder if I'll meet any rats! This is charity work because the group I will be working with can't afford to pay anyone the $150/hr for a network dude, so it will be me and four other people trying to upgrade this network. But the experience will be very gratifying. I have ordered their supplies, so I hope they are there when I get there tomorrow...

Posted by Punkie @ 09:37 AM EST [Link]

Friday, November 21, 2003

An apology to Azwan Teh

It was September of 1982 when I received a letter from a kid in my sixth grade class, Azwan Teh. He was a kid that I kind of made fun of, because I thought he looked like an Eskimo, especially when he wore a winter coat. I didn't know many Malaysians back then, and I feel kind of bad I called him "Hi, ho, Eskimo!" back then (which was spoof of a local horse track jungle, "Hiiiii hooo.... Pimlico!"). I didn't dislike him, he always seemed pretty cheerful, but I was just a kid. To be honest, I didn't think much about him at all, and considered him part of the background noise of the rest of the school (I was kind of a loner).

The letter was addressed from Kuala Lumpur, and was in a small air mail envelope made out of what looked like onion skin. I read the letter, and it said how he loved moving back to Malaysia, and where he lived he had some chickens, and he wanted to hear back from his friends in the US! I think he kind of missed his US friends.

I never mailed him back. I meant to, but I kept putting it off. Once in a while, a pang of guilt crosses my mind, and today I saw this odd, addictive video. It mentioned Kuala Lumpur, and then I flashed back to that letter, which I had always kept in a drawer, and even took with me on several moves. I don't know if I still have it, I think it might be in with Neal's old letters if I do.

If you are out there, Azwan... first, I am sorry I called you an Eskimo. That was dumb. Second, I am sorry I never wrote you back, and I hope in these 21 years, you have had a good life. I just kept putting it off because I was a lazy bastard or something. I hope you weren't too hurt.

Posted by Punkie @ 02:27 PM EST [Link]

Loose lips sink ships

Today, I saw this article about doing tech support for the mob. I don't know if it's made up or not, because like the Internet, you can't always be sure that the source knows what they say they do when their job is to keep everything secret anyway. It probably comes as no surprise that he has no regrets at "being a hacker for the mob." Personally, having worked with people into secrecy, someone with his kind of ego would never be given a job like this. But what do I know about the mob?

Living around here, I have known a few people with Secret Squirrel jobs. Maybe not actual spies or agents (as far as I know), but mostly people doing the high-security level paper shuffling needed to run such organizations. Those who talk more do less. No one who works as a CIA assassin would ever say that. If someone you know claims to be a secret agent for some government, they are not. The people who are have jobs that seem normal, like "I am an accountant for the Navy" or "I inspect aircraft parts." They don't even have a "hint" phrase of any kind, only a phrase that might explain where they go every day, "I work as a janitor at Bolling AFB," but even that can be misleading on purpose.

In my neighborhood, we had this one guy who lived behind us that was considered an "Israeli spy." How did they base this rumor? He stayed in his house, with his wife, no kids, and built a high fence around his yard, and didn't talk to anybody. And he had black hair. Many thought my dad worked for the CIA because he was antisocial. No, he was antisocial because he hated everyone and considered the human race too stupid to bother conversing with. People sure gossiped a lot in my neighborhood.

I know one guy who works at the Pentagon. I don't know what he does, but he works a lot of late hours, and bitches about "The Colonel," a lot. In fact, I know a few people who have worked at the Pentagon. In the 80s, even I had a job where I went to the Pentagon, but never unescorted. When I had a low-level clearance job, they had rules like "don't wear your badge outside of work," and "if anyone asks what you do, tell them you work as a clerk for the Federal Government." I never dealt with anything super-secret, but I am sure spies and those who "know what's really going on" are given the same speech.

Because of this, I know I must know others who do secret stuff, but I have no idea because they say they deliver pizzas or something. And I like it that way. Secret knowledge is a dangerous and heavy weight, and I don't want any of it.

Posted by Punkie @ 09:50 AM EST [Link]

Thursday, November 20, 2003

A New Way to Eat

I hate my scale. Not for the reason a lot of people do, but I think it's inaccurate. It supposedly measures up to 350, but I think it's like most scales I have had, it's flaky after the 300 mark. Even my doctor's scale is like that. What I end up doing is "best of 3," which is weight myself three times, and get a guess based on the digital readout (usually taking the highest weight). This morning, it teased me that I was only 298 lbs, but since I was 311 the night before, I knew that wasn't right. I shifted my weight around, and got it to 307 three times in a row, which seems normal. I have lost 7 lbs in 3 weeks with my new way of eating. Not bad. I am hoping that while I may not actually weigh 307 pounds, I have probably lost about 7 pounds from where I was before. That's almost a sack of grocery store potatoes I don't have to carry with me anymore.

I have "fallen off the wagon" a few times here and there, notably my own birthday party, and I found that I can't stomach eating poorly again. My body just won't take it. I am not approaching this new way of eating with some degree of harsh seriousness, because everyone I have ever seen who went on a "diet" this way, failed.

This is why I think most dieters fail:

They Fail to See The Big Picture. Most dieters I know just want to loose weight, not really change how they eat. I know this because they say they are going to "diet to lose a few pounds" like one might say "I am going to the auto shop to get the oil changed." When I say "diet" I think more permanent, like "I am getting a whole different type of car." A lot of dieters eat "rewards" like, "If I lose 10 lbs, I'll reward myself with a chocolate sundae." I mean, this seems like tempting a torture victim with illusions of freedom. What a way to break your spirit! You have secretly admitted that you still crave an ice cream sundae to the point it will manipulate you to do something you normally don't like. I am saying, "I am changing my daily eating routine to be more balanced, so I stop feeling so bad. One day, I might eat a sundae, and that's fine. But I should eat a lot less of them than I have been. Instead of half a bag of Oreo cookies in one sitting, I'll eat 2-3 every few days."

They Diet for the Wrong Reason. Biggest screw up? Diet = punishment. God, people, think about it! You are trying to persuade yourself to do something you don't want, only fueled by your self-hatred, embarrassment, and physical loathing. That will only put undue pressure on you, and you will naturally start to resist this assault on yourself. Imagine for a moment if your anger towards yourself was from another person. Imagine being stuck with someone who constantly insulted you, called you fat, pointed out how dumb you were by your mistakes. You'd really start to resent that! I don't care how passive you are, anger is a poor long-term motivator. This is the most common mistake. Now, I am fat. I know that. I have accepted that I am fat, and I am not really taking it personally. I even laugh at the few people who would insult me because I am fat, because that's just weak. Not that many have. I am changing what I am eating because I want to feel better, I figure I deserve it, and it seems illogical to eat the way I used to. I know I am breaking a bad habit, which starts off living day to day, but you have to start somewhere. I don't blame my body for craving sugar, sweets, high-carb, and fatty foods because it's just being honest. Back in the prehistoric times, before processed sugar and high volumes of fatty foods, sugar, processed carbs, and fat were great ways to get quick energy. It was just that we processed, extracted, and magnified the effects over time. Our body still thinks "sugar, carbs, and fats = good for you," but hasn't learned "too much sugar, carbs, and fats = uuggghhh." Our brains tell us that. Now we have to make our brains enact willpower over physical craving, and that's no easy task! Especially if your body got used to eating this way. It all started with the concept of "bread" but I won't make this a history lesson, too. So knowing that my body is just craving something right, and I was eating it in wrong amounts, helps me readjust what I eat.

The second, and sadly all too common "wrong" reason is outside pressure. "People don't like me because I am fat." Bullshit. I am fat, and people like me. I know plenty of likable fat people. "People see me as a glutton and blah blah..." Horse Hockey! Some people will always think bad things about others. Its because they don't feel good about themselves, and it's easier to tear someone down than to build yourself up. They don't know you. You have a tremendous advantage over them. Those that point out how fat you are FEAR being fat themselves. If they didn't care, they wouldn't even notice. You can't control others or how others see you. You can't. Ever. No one can. Your wasted efforts it manipulating others should be spent fixing things about yourself because you DESERVE good things. Not them. So, now you have Mom who has been telling you "You'd be so pretty if you lost weight..." or "Don't eat that pie, dear, have some celery..." This actually ENCOURAGES you to eat badly because you have to balance the damage such comments can make. It makes you addicted emotionally to food, too. I think if someone said to me, "Don't eat this pie, eat this celery," I'd say, "What wrong with the pie? Has it spoiled? Or are you greedy, and want more for yourself? Or maybe you own stock in a company that grows celery! Stop manipulating me!" or maybe even, "I have to eat pie so I stay fat. At least this way, it makes you act like you care about me." (oh, ouch).

They Give Up Too Easily. I know many programmers who are perfectionists to the point where it's either 100% or nothing. Many dieters give up because they screw up, and say, "Fuck it, it's over. I am a failure. I didn't watch what I ate, I failed, I will die a fat loser, and I hate myself ... why bother going on?" You should go, "I overate at Thanksgiving, then devoured a plate of Christmas cookies at mom's house, but that's over, and I am still ahead from where I was a year ago." Toddlers fall down a lot when they learn to walk, but they get up and keep going. Every time they fall down, they learn a little. By the time they are older kids, they fall down a LOT less. And face it, even as an adult, you still fall down once in a while. But you never sit on the floor and bawl, giving up trying to walk ever again. Unless you are real hard-core and can just suddenly change your diet cold turkey (unlikely), accept that you will have a hard time starting, LEARN from your "mistakes," do not DWELL on them or take them personally, and continue down the path.

My goal is not to give up. I don't care if I am still 307 six months from now. The benefits of changing my diet have already started to show benefits beyond losing weight. Losing weight is just one of the symptoms of eating better, not my true goal. My true goal is to better myself, like I have done with other parts of my life (job, writing, friends, etc.). It's given me encouragement, a challenge, and sort of an exciting new thing to try. I can't fail because failure at this point is immaterial unless I just quit. And I can't quit unless it severely damages me in some way (doubtful), or I give up on myself (also unlikely).

They Have a Poor Incentive Program. I already mentioned the dumb-ass "rewards" issue, but there's a second problem: poor short term results. Many try to diet to "lose weight so I can do this and that," but "this and that" is so far away, and is so gradual, it's not a very good incentive during those days you are depressed and want to eat half a cake. So what are good short term rewards? This is what I use, and you may find help here:

- I save money. I used to eat lunch in the cafeteria every day, which was about $6/day, 5 days a week, so let's say 4 weeks in an average month, and that's about $120-130 a month. If I bring lunch from home, it costs about $2-3 a meal, less than half! I have now saved a whopping $60 or more a month! I can use that money to buy cool, nonfood related items. Computer gadgets, Legos, and other toys. Of course, right now that goes to stopping a huge financial leak, but it won't always be this way. When I estimated how much I was spending on junk food I didn't need (including takeout, fast food places, daily lunches, and just plain store-bought junk food), I would save about $110 a month. Damn! And that's just me! When I want to "splurge," I don't go and buy a bag of Oreos, I go on Half.com and get a book or CD. Oh, and I don't have to buy new clothes because I got too fat for my old ones. Yeah, when I lose like 30 pounds, things are going to start getting baggy, but I have belts.

- I weigh myself and record the results. Weight Watchers knows, for instance, that unless you actually see progress in any way, you'll probably give up on what essentially is such a long-term goal, it might as well be as abstract as a Pollock painting. Now, WW tells their folks to weigh themselves once a week, and not daily or you'll get discouraged. This is probably true for 99% of you. In my case, I want to know when I gain weight and lose it, because my fluctuation was so wild, I wanted to granulate the data to see if I could trace what's going on. So far, I can't find anything but I do gain or lose 3-4 pounds a day. This is a sample week for me: 309, 307, 311, 312, 308, 310, 307. I weigh myself every morning, right before I step into the shower. Had I done it the WW way, I would have seen 309, 307. I lost 2 pounds that week. I can see how WW works for most people, because that seems more like progress

- I re-enforce the positive, even if I have no "proof." My ankle, which had been hurting me worse and worse, suddenly stopped. Was it just because it was 7 pounds too much for my ankle? Maybe. I'm saying it is. Ha! What do you think of that, world?

- At one WW place, the leader there said she used to re-enforce results by having people buy bags of dog food equal to the weight they had lost. So if you lost 50 pounds, you brought in 50 pounds of dry dog food. This really hit home how much they had accomplished. "I used to carry this weight on me!" The dog food was then donated to a local pet rescue organization or shelter. Another leader compared everything to a 10lb bag of potatoes. "See, Francis here lost 2 bags!" Both of these really help put the abstract into something real. Look at how far you have come. Good for you!

- I save time and wasted brain power. You know what? In my unique experience (that I probably wouldn't recommend to most) is that I hate eating. It's boring, time-consuming, and then I have to find something I like ... bleah. Lazy lazy me. But if I don't eat, I get dizzy (my hunger alert system has been nonfunctional since I was 12 - I equate dizziness with need to eat, which is a problem if I get, say, the flu ... or just dizzy from spinning). Now I eat most of my meals in pre-measured boxes (Weight Watchers, Lean Cuisine, and others), so I pop it in the microwave, and just eat a well-balanced meal of processed goodness that's low in fat I don't need. Okay, TV-style dinners are NOT the best diet, true, but right now they'll do until I have enough energy and experience to cook my own meals again. I also eat other stuff, but I go by what Christine cooks because she's the one taking WW, and I'm just tagging along. I love not having to THINK about food. I have ate better in these last three weeks than I have eaten since ... ever. Let's be frank. I did not grow up in a very structured household, and never developed good eating habits.

Will I make mistakes? Yes. In fact, I hope so, because you never really learn anything without mistakes guiding you along the way as lessons. Will I fail? Only if I give up. I hate to call what I am doing a "diet" because our society usually says "diet = temporary weight loss for looking good." To a scientist, diet means "what the organism normally eats." So I don't say diet, I say "I am changing what I eat."

For good. Forever.

My life has had a lot of unlucky stuff happen for a long time, and I deserve this at least. Maybe I'll at least get to a weight where scales are more reliable...

Posted by Punkie @ 01:21 PM EST [Link]

Wednesday, November 19, 2003

Too tired to sleep... and my web pages celebrate 8 years of ... web

In the words of John Aston, "I am feeling much better now..."

Part of severe lack of sleep is total emotional instability. I had to seriously check and recheck my emotions before they got out, which was thankfully made easier by the fact I didn't have anything go particularly wrong to me yesterday. In fact, I got told that I would be working more with Linux and Perl, which I love, but I also requested to continue my VB.NET path, so I always have at least one foot in MS Windows. But by the end of the day, I was totally wasted on sleep dep. Christine let me have the bedroom to myself, and then something I forgot about happened again: I was too tired to sleep.

Part of my "insomnia" problems is that my body sometimes wants to keep going even though my mind wants to rest (it's usually the other way around). Then I develop a kind of physical psychosis where my body itches like crazy, all over. Stabbing itches. Like I'll be falling asleep, and then BAM! My leg itches so suddenly, the muscle jerks. Then my arm. Then my head. Then some spot I can't get to on my back. I figure this is my nervous system melting down. Usually a hot shower takes care of this, but when I am that out of it, even if a glass of water is in front of me, I won't drink it, complaining I am too thirsty. I also become oversensitive to any type of noise, movement, or light. I finally took a hot shower, and tried to hypnotize myself to sleep by doing deep breathing exercises while petting Artoo in a slow rhythm. That worked, and I finally was able to go to sleep at 11:15.

My 42 hour day was over.

It's funny, it feels like Tuesday because my brain keeps thinking it was just a really long Monday I just had.

Anyway, in the shower this morning it occurred to me that this website turned about 8 years old this month. This website has been online since 1995. Wow. A little history:

It started in late 1995 when Brad gave me an account on Digex. I was http://www.access.digex.net/~glarson for a while. The web site was at first one page, then one very long page, then two pages (part one and two of one large page), and then it was organized and split into three pages: Main, Diary, and Links. Then I was on Silverdragon as http://www.silverdragon.com/punkie. I started several sections, most due to a job where I was on a very slow (4 calls a day) phone queue, and I had a lot of time in front of a computer with an Internet connection. This is when I debated the "frames vs. tables" thing because having frames a was a volatile topic back then, but I ended up going with frames because of the ease of updates. Then Silverdragon crashed, and I was on two websites on members.aol.com that was hidden as one by a series of clever links. The Silverdragon was back, and I was back. Then Silverdragon burned down. So I was on Simon's server, Chaosart, for a few years, and got the punkwalrus.com and punkadyne.com domains during those times. Then Chaosart was screwed over by Comcast, and had to be shut down because the outages were just too much for Simon to take. Brad had a new Silverdragon, and I am still on Silverdragon now! So I started with Brad, and I am still with Brad.

Thank you, Brad!

I have also been on the Internet for about 14 years, but I am not sure when that happened exactly. I think it was late 1990/early 1991 I got my account on Bessel at the University of Maryland, thanks to Allon Stern. Allon was the server admin, and was responsible for keeping the machine up and going. Since he didn't want to babysit it, he had some of his friends have access to it by dial up, and WE were supposed to call him when it went down. He also installed a MUD on Bessel (for the same reason, and it ended up being one of the top 40 MUDs for a while), and we helped keep it working and connected. In exchange, we got free Internet access, as well as free Unix admin training. I used to dial in using my Atari ST, a vt100 terminal emulator, and a 2400baud modem. Later, this became an IBM XT. Then a dumb terminal connected directly to a modem. I learned CLI because I didn't HAVE a GUI! Then Allon graduated, and we all lost our access. I was on Capaccess for a while, and then I got AOL. Now I connect high speed using Cox High-speed Internet (and work).

Posted by Punkie @ 09:12 AM EST [Link]

Tuesday, November 18, 2003

Zombie Man

I blacked out this morning. It was somewhere between 3:10 and 3:15 that I have no recollection, but I think I "fell asleep." Today's sarcasm is brought to you by 5 minutes of sleep. Literally.

Side note: I have always been sick of people misusing the word, "literally." Literally means, "to the exact letter of what I said." It does not mean "very" or "really" or "extremely." If you say you "literally were bored to death," that means you were so bored, your life signs stopped, and were declared clinically dead. So when I say, "I got literally 5 minutes of sleep," I mean I have only slept 5 minutes between now and 6:00 am Monday morning. Not "I slept 5 hours, but it felt like 5 minutes," or "I didn't measure exactly how much I slept, so I'll say 5 minutes to look all macho." I am sick of people who do this. I mean, if you slept 5 hours, and said, "Man, I feel like I have only slept a few minutes," then no problem. But today I have a short temper on a lit fuse because I have slept from 3:10 to 3:15 this morning.

What kept me up? Oh, a lot of things. Worry started it off. I worry a lot about money this time of year, and that hooks with my seasonal depression, and then I put a spin on how this rates me as a husband and father. So I watched some TV. I tried to watch something boring, and so I watched 3 hours of the movie "Hiroshima," about the decision to drop the atom bombs in 1945 on Japan. I actually thought the movie was pretty interesting, and that kept me company and off my worries until 3am. When I tried to go to sleep, I fell asleep I am guessing around 3:10, and then at 3:15, my body had other things to do!

Like I have this sleep problem that comes from eating certain types of food. This started a few years ago, when I took that night job, and while it happens a LOT less than it used to, it still happens from time to time. My stomach never has worked properly, so some foods don't get digested (notably vegetable matter), and so they sit and ferment in my belly, creating gas. And gas isn't the main thing. It's what the gas does: presses on my heart. My heart, which is faulty, suddenly goes into overdrive. When this first started happening, I swore it was a heart attack because my heart races, my chest feels heavy pain, and my left side tingles like my old migraines used to before I took medication for it. My doctor said, "Well, if burping relieves the symptoms, then it's sort of related to acid reflux," and then went into a long spiel about what I had, and how it was related to nitrogen bubbles divers get when the don't decompress properly. Solution? Pepto, Pepsid, and change diet. And that seems to work. But I haven't eaten well since Saturday, so it came back to haunt me. What also works is sitting upright, but I can't sleep that way since I strangle myself when my head droops, and get a sleep apnea thing going (this was great for staying awake in class, but terrible on long overnight plane trips to Sweden). So I went on my computer in my den and played around. Then it was 5:30, and I still wasn't sleepy. I walked around, and decided to just take my shower and give up. Oh, then, around 6:30, before I left for work, THEN I get sleepy. Ha ha! Too late NOW, body! You should have thought of that when I told you to sleep at 11:30pm! Or 2am! Hell, even at 4am! Grrrr...

So, here I am at work, zoned like nothing else. Hot coffee helps, but then I know will come step 2 of lack of sleep: body shutdown. Parts of me just stop working properly. Like one of my arms or legs will lose most of its strength (usually the left side). My stomach will just start hurting. My typing will get worse and worse (you should have seen this entry without a spell checker). My temper will get shorter and shorter. My mood will get worse, and I'll start "graining," which is my word for this weird thing that happens when I get too tired: I get the illusion I can see the grains of reality that make up my universe. No, really. My vision gets grainy like a bad film, and I start seeing rainbows around people, weird blobs of moving air hovering around, and sometimes I swear I can hear random voices saying totally random things. Not thinks like "Kill your boss!" but stuff like, "If I planted the lettuce earlier, I would have gotten a better crop," "I'm bringing up Betty," or "I wonder if I left the iron on?" Thoughts that sound like random snippets of other people's thoughts or conversations. I figure this is my brain trying to jump-start the dream state after it gave up on the sleep part.

And you can never tell people how little you've slept, because people, for some reason, try and top it. Even if they don't have a record to beat yours, they make it sound like they do. "Man," I'll say, "I only got 5 minutes of sleep last night." Then some guy will say, "Yeah, I only got 4 hours and I don't know HOW I am going to get all these reports done..." But I don't listen to my advice, and blurt out that I have only slept for a few minutes since two days ago, and then get mad they try and top it. I'm hopeless in this state. I don't know why I expect sympathy. I guess I am just needy that way when I am grouchy.

Feh.

Posted by Punkie @ 08:35 AM EST [Link]

Sunday, November 16, 2003

Exhausted

Another party down. Christine ran a great game of a murder mystery with a circus theme (last year's was a goofy Goth theme). Next year, she's going to do one based on cartoons. But about 20 people or made it to my party, I lost count. I got to meet a few new people, too, and everyone had a great time. I got a few presents, too, like some antique Legos (thank you, Matt), gift cards (thanks Travis and Dave), and a lovely quilt hanging by Missie (who on top of being a librarian, dancer, and head of a woman's eating disorder charity, is also a gifted seamstress and artist). Some of the costumes people wore were awesome, and we gave out prizes to the person who solved the mystery (April), best costume (Sawa), and the guy who pulled Duck #1 (Tim, husband of Melissa the teacher, not to be confused with Missie, her friend). I said the following at the party, and I'll say it here again:

When I was 15, in theater, a guy named Kurt Van Quill gave me some really good advice. First, he told me that if I was such a loner, and wanted friends, to go find other loners and form a group. Most of them want friends, too. Second, he said to always surround myself with people more skilled than I was. That way, I will become a better person by learning things. I have taken this advice all my life since then, and because of this, I am blessed to have the best and brightest friends anyone could ever hope for.

That's why I like to give them a good time at my birthday as a sort of thanks for making me a better person.

Yes, photos are forthcoming!

Some highlights:
- Rogue got to tell "the Bear" story about someone she works with, who used to be a homicide detective in DC. Sadly this person has explicitly stated stories about "the Bear" cannot be put on the web (or it would be on Rogue's site in a heartbeat), so I must honor his request, or he might break jump on my table, break my arm, and sit on my cake.
- Dave and Travis played Siamese twins, and their characters were fighting most of the party.
- I, for one, am glad Travis and April have found each other because they make a great couple. I also found it was April who was the source of the story that ended up giving us the phrase, "Cooking with the octopus." See, she was in a skit as a pirate cook, when her fake parrot fell off her shoulder into the cooking pot by accident, leading to her explaining the fate of the parrot.
- For those keeping score, cjae's character, the dog trainer, did it.
- Kris Trader got stuck at another party, and came very late, but I was glad she came just the same!
- Widget was kid of freaked out at first, but we let him mingle with the people. he didn't bite anyone this time, and I think he's getting better with large groups of people. Although he still barks a lot if someone comes in the door. Ahfu loved everyone, of course. Except if you stole his duck.
- Sorry to all those who went into the condemned bathroom. I'll put up a sign next time.

Posted by Punkie @ 04:11 PM EST [Link]

Friday, November 14, 2003

[sniffle] Habby bud-day du beee... [sniff sniff cough] Habby bud-day du beee...

And so today I turned 35.

I woke up so sick this morning (head cold), I called in sick from work. My wife and son were also sick, so my birthday was pretty much everyone leaving each other alone in their head cold misery. Now it's later in the afternoon, and I feel a lot better. I hope I am well for tomorrow's party. I am a wee bit bummed I have to clean the whole house for it, as well as make my own cake. But my wife spent the better parts of her free time in the last few months planning a murder-mystery LARP, so I can't really complain. And the house needed a good cleaning anyway.

I have been thinking about that book, "The Games People Play," all day. The stuff I read mulled around in my head, as I tried to find out if any of my friends used those games. And I concluded if I can't tell when they lie, I won't be able to tell if they play those games, either. But I tried to find out the depth of any games I played, and found some interesting games I do play... and some maybe I should, or at least should be aware of.

For instance, sometimes I thought people would praise me at the most inopportune times. Like I'd be confessing how bad at something I was, and people would say, "Oh, you're a lot better than you think. You are too hard on yourself." Deep down, I resent this a little, kind of like someone was taking my confession and throwing it back at me like it was worthless, and somehow my honest impression of my work is somehow flawed. But I didn't say anything, because I never detected malice in their responses. Maybe I felt a sort of, "Well, you should spend a day in my shoes, then you'd KNOW how bad I was at this... and it's not EASY confessing how bad I am," but no real anger that lasted more than a few seconds. And maybe my self-assessment is flawed, but I do feel like that I at least should know better than anyone about my own skills. But now I think I understand why some people might get angry at my insistence of, "No, I really am bad at this. Here's eight mistakes to prove my point..." They may think I am "fishing for complements." Now, this way of getting complemented doesn't seem logical to me. How could one derive complements from pointing out flaws? I certainly don't do this at job reviews! "Here's my software, but it took me a long time to write it, correct constant mistakes, and I am not confident it is bug free!" Uh... no. But apparently this is a game a lot of people play (or at least Dr. Berne thought so in 1964).

This explained two how I must have pissed off two people in the last few years. One guy kept going on about how bad of a father he was, and while another guy guy went on about how he was a good father, all fathers feel that way, I essentially said, "Well, what have you done to improve yourself?" The "bad father" didn't have an answer for that, and played the "YDYB" game ("Why don't you... yes but"), giving excuses about how little time he had, how non-supportive his wife was, and so on. I had a name for this in my own head, "addicted to the problem, not interested in the solution," and so after a few rounds of trying to give advice and getting vague excuses without any indication he was interested in advice, I told him if he's tried all those things, and they didn't work, I didn't have an answer. I have had to take that stance recently in my life; to only have sympathy for people who are trying to solve their problems. I have to accept I cannot control other people's will or habits; I simply do not have that power. But I did not realize that the correct thing to do would have been to keep my mouth shut earlier into the conversation, and maybe just given a little more sympathy to a coworker I'd have to work with for the next year. he expected sympathy. The people who get mad at me for pointing out my own flaws must think *I* am playing this game! Holy crap! And I doubt saying, "I am not asking for your sympathy, just listen to my confession and offer advice," would make it worse.

I think I went through half that book going, "No... way!" like a 1980s Valley Girl.

Part of me is still resisting. "How can one guy know all this? Maybe he's like Freud, and the obsession he has is projecting onto his patients." There have been times in my life I thought someone had all the answers, only to be let down that they were just as flawed as everybody else. So I am cynical. But it seemed like a lot of the stories he had about people was like suddenly seeing a whole new side to an argument. I can accept he's right about some things and wrong about others. Just which ones is he wrong about?

What is truth? What is reality? I feel so like Charlie Brown right now. Auuugh!

Posted by Punkie @ 09:13 PM EST [Link]

Thursday, November 13, 2003

Happy Birthday to my Scorpion Sistas!

Today was Scorpion Sista Sawa's birthday, and we had it at the The Amphoras in Vienna. Good memories. Made even better by the following phrases:

- Cooking with the octopus .
- Who's the bear now?

Don't you just love the private jokes? In addition to me, Christine, CR, and Sawa, we had Rogue (another Sista), Missie, and Travis. My god, we were the loudest, most obnoxious people at that table. My birthday is this weekend, and Rogue's is next week. Our present to Sawa was the dinner and cake (Amphora's world-famous double chocolate mousse cake), and for Rogue (who has no car at the moment), we're driving her to see her mom next weekend. Happy birthday, guys! You rule...

Oh, and Happy Birthday to my friend Neal's brother Glen! Another Scorpio.

Speaking of Neal, he went to my Amazon.com wish list and got me a book, "Games People Play: The Psychology of Human Relationships," by Eric, M.D. Berne. I got it when I came home today, and started reading it right away. It was not the kind of book I thought it was going to be, but it was very useful, and I think I'm going to refer to it a lot in this blog over time. It was short reading, too, I finished it in a few hours, and a whole new world was open to me. Some of it was very elightening. I had a lot of "projection" issues to work through, because I kept going, "Oh, MAN, I would NEVER do that, how... wrong!" but I knew that even if this book was written in 1964, most of it is still true. I thought some of the "games" were appalling, hostile, and incredibly manipulative. But if they are true, that would explain a lot. This could be the key to better understanding how humans react because two of the "games" I read right away unlocked the myserty of some incident in my past that left me going... "What? What the..? What was THAT all about?" Now I can say, "Oh, they call this the 'Frigid Woman,'" or "I totally misunderstood, but he must have thought I was playing 'The Schlemeil' or "The Wooden Leg.'" The book isn't all right, for instance. One of the huge errors I noticed right away was near the end where a therapist and patient have a "logical conversation" without any manipulation. It seemed so odd and stilted, that I am sure that in the real world, you would have immediately been viewed as "hinding something," even if you weren't. Even I knew that. But I am not throwing the baby out with the bathwater on this one; there's a lot of good stuff in this text, even if a lot of it is dry reading.

But enough of that. I have a bad cold. Not a "massive martian death flu" like I was fearing last week, I think this is a separate issue. The "death flu" never came, but last night I got a horrible head cold, which is probably just a strong bout of normal rhinovirus. But it was a bummer to be sick all day at work (I left early and slept until it was time to go to Sawa's party), and now I'll probably have a cold through the weekend. And this sucks because this weekend is my big birthday bash!

I turn 35 (I don't "mature" like wine, I "turn" like vinegar), and I will be celebrating it with 20-30 of my closest friends. The guest list was up to 40, but a lot of people had other plans, so they've apologized, and sent gifts or letters of happy thoughts in lieu of their attendance. But our house will be packed with good friends, good food, and Christine has spent all year writing another murder mystery party for everyone. This year's theme is a Circus. Almost everyone has been really excited by the parts they got, and I hope they have a great time. I'll have a great time just by being there with them. I have some of the most awesome, interesting, and cool-ass friends, man.

God, I hope I remember to take pictures.

Hint: One of those phrases has to do with something naughty, and the other has to do with giving a swirly to some poor goth kid

Posted by Punkie @ 11:21 PM EST [Link]

Tattoo You, Tattoo Me?

I wonder about tattoos sometimes. I like them, personally, but I have done a lot of research and study on them over the years to determine if *I* want a tattoo. Here are my concerns:

Will I like in twenty years what I like now?
Twenty years ago, I might have gotten a stupid tattoo that said "Dungeon Master" or something. That would totally suck now. I recall a story by a tat friend of mine who said she saw a teenager get a huge black banner that said "Queensryche" (a popular band at the time) across her back. That was in the early 90s, I wonder what that girl thinks now? So I thought and thought about it, and certain themes seem to reoccur: cats, dragons, and the names of people I will always be fond of (Christine, my mom, my son). But then again, I have this fear I'll go to do it, see this great flash, and then get some stupid devil fighting an octopus or something. Part of me wanted to get a Linux penguin, but what will that mean in 20 years? Will I still be fooling with computers then? I also think that part of a tattoo is like a badge, like Christine got her first one after her enduring pain with a bad spinal tap. Her next one paved the way to her new weight loss program and letting go. They act as markers in one's life, which I think is neat, but what's my marker? What will I get?

Will it last?
I wonder how will tattoos be looked at in 2030. Since more and more people are getting them, I suspect it will not be so bad, but maybe a sort of recollection of a past fad. Or maybe it will be the same as always. Part of my concern, and this seems so vain, is the bleeding or the ink and sagging of the art over time. I have seen those who take care of their tats, and they look good, but I have also seen what happens to that hula girl on your arm after decades of sun, muscle mass changes, and general skin wear and tear. Then again, will I care? Hell, I might be dead by 40.

Will it hurt?
Yes, I mean, duh. I think the pain is not so much the needles, but after the first pass when the area gets nice and sore, and then they have to make a second pass to color it in. But how much? Will it be tolerable? Will my body react badly to the ink? I know certain, "bony" parts hurt more than "fleshy" parts, but how much can *I* tolerate?

Most of these questions are rhetorical, and I don't expect or need answers because they are either "well, it's up to you" and the rest have been helpfully supplied by Christine, Rogue, Suzi, Eden, Missie, and all my other tattooed friends (and coworkers).

Posted by Punkie @ 10:04 AM EST [Link]

Wednesday, November 12, 2003

Flaming Heterosexual

When I was a teen, I was reading Nancy's Button Catalog, and there was this button that said, "Lesbian trapped in a man's body." I thought that was funny, and fitting for me, but in the 1980s, "lesbian" was a swear word in my school, so I never got it because where would I wear it? My friends agreed with me, though: I was a lesbian. Growing up, bullies called me "fag" a lot, but they called everyone "fag" and "gay" they didn't like, so I am not sure if they really knew what homosexuality was other than an insult to upset other insecure guys. One friend said, "It's like you were abandoned by men as a child, and reared by women..." [snicker].

It's true. I have wondered if this is because I hated the male role model figure in my life growing up, but that's pretty much conjecture on a textbook theory. I just found women ... better conversationalists. Men were always about fighting and proving themselves physically, while women seemed to prove themselves to peers by their social behavior. I could deal with that. Women were ... funnier, wittier, and seemed to have less of a brain problem than boys my age. And thus, I became the dreaded, "sweet guy," and "like a brother, a good friend!" In reality, I didn't hate this at all, because I would gladly give up sexual urges to boink the girls just for their friendship. As far as I know, I am the only person who felt this way growing up. So I never dated, I never had any intimate relations with anybody, and my friends were usually women by 4 to 1. My best friend was a girl in high school, and while everyone thought we were a couple, we were only best buds.

Not that I didn't secretly lust after a few girls. I did. There was no doubt in my mind, after countless years of self-analysis, that I was as straight as an arrow. But I had to put those feelings aside, which was only a minor inconvenience. Except at sci-fi cons, where it was pretty distracting. So many perky, plump Goth girls... [drool]. But I digress. I kept my pants shut, and my mind out of the porno booth.

"I do have a cause though: It is obscenity... I'm for it. Unfortunately the civil liberties types who are fighting this issue have to fight it owing to the nature of the laws as a matter of freedom of speech and stifling of free expression and so on ... but we know what's really involved: dirty books are fun!" -- Tom Lehrer on smut

My view of smut has changed a lot since I was a kid. I never had a desire for it, and my parents were pretty open about the human body, so no topic was taboo, and I was allowed to read anything that was in the local library. My father had stacks and stacks of Playboys in his den, but I never looked through them much because all those women were older than I was, and I wasn't into the "Mrs. Robinson" type of relationships. Some of my male peers craved porn, and craved it a lot. Andy down the street had some dog-eared copies of porn buried next to his neighbor's sandbox (odd side note: the neighbor's kid, only a couple of years younger than us, got the nickname of "scrotum" because when he went into the pool, he wrinkled something awful). I recall one day, while a bunch of 11-year olds were looking through them, some went, "Daaaag! Look at that! What is that between her legs? What are those?" and so on. Yeah, your sex-ed tax dollars at work. I'd tell them, because I knew what breasts and the part of the vagina were, but they didn't seem to WANT an answer, they just wanted to marvel at the exotic ... thrill of seeing the forbidden. I didn't see what the big deal was about. And while I understand now, I still don't believe in porn as a worthwhile distraction. Frankly, women's breasts are like any other part of their body: everyone has different sizes, shapes, and styles. They don't go on and on about them (after puberty), so why should I?

But then as I got older, and heard the "male" and "female" versions of the same date story, I began to be sickened by men's attitudes. So many guys were "wham, bam, thank you ma'am," and so many girls wanted more. But the funny thing was, guys wanted June Cleaver who turned into a whore in bed, and most girls wanted a Joe Sensitive who was macho Indiana Jones in bed. But at the time, since my friends were mostly women complaining about what dogs men were, and I had so many male peers who were dogs, I just got sick of the whole dog concept. What I didn't know was that I was a teen, and this was pretty normal.

Then, when I managed a book store, I couldn't stand the trouble porn caused. I wouldn't have carried it, but the head office made me. I kept it behind the counter like the last manager did, and the bloated seals of horny men would beach themselves across my counter to have a look. Twice I threw someone out for masturbating in my store to porn, and I worked in a GOOD neighborhood! Then, there were kids who ... well, read this entry. Suffice to say, I hated porn and its ilk by this time.

But then I got married to a wonderful gal who is not uptight about porn. Then came the Internet, and slowly my attitude of freedom of expression lulled me back to a sensible feeling of "everyone's got a hobby." I don't look at porn except once in a while due to curiosity. But it's been less and less since it all seems the same. I sometimes think, "Man, naked people just look funny."

So, with all this in mind, it doesn't take a brain surgeon to guess why people thought I was gay in high school. Never dated. Liked talking with women. Didn't react to porn. Was a bit odd? On top of that, since I was "raised by women," I had effeminate qualities, like I did housework at home, knew how to cook really well. Hell, I was just a sequin suit away from Liberace as far as they were concerned.

On top of that? I like gay people. I love flaming queers. I love their culture. They are usually fun, fabulous, and smart people with a twang of life's irony in their attitude. Fandom is full of gay people, and once I knew what gay REALLY was, I didn't care how they had sex: that wasn't my business. It wasn't my business with heterosexuals, either. For instance, my friend Rosemark is gay, and a transsexual, and he's really fun to be with. I am sure I have other gay friends, but I don't even think about it, so I don't know if I could count how many, but I think quite a bit.

But the side effect of this whole view is that I really don't get along with fellow men very well. Fandom is different, because I think we all bond on that "outcast" vibe, but the "mundanes" or "normal people" who are into sports, guns, fast cars, and all that ... no clue. I mean, I don't hate them for it, I just ... don't fit in. And I feel bad about that, not because I want to be into sports, guns, and fast cars... I just want to stop feeling like I am putting them down. If some guy comes up to you (and this happens at work) and shows you some pinup of a woman who looks like she was caught during her gynecological exam, I can't say "I am not interested" without it sounding like, "You are low, dirty, sleazy scum." My boss and a coworker were drooling over one of Pink's videos last year (she's barely dressed in some tattered, skintight, black ... thing), and they got a bit miffed when I said, "Oh, she's so young. So not my type."

I can't tell them my type. I don't really have one, but I'll tell you what, it's not those rain-thin, Eastern European walking ribcages with no hips and small boobs. They are as attractive as a preteen in a badly fitting swimsuit. I guess if I had a type, it would be perky, plump Goth girls, or pretty Irish redheads. But why limit myself? I am sure there is some rain-thin, Eastern European walking ribcage with no hips and small boobs that's a pretty darn good conversationalist. But I also feel sorry for women who try and look like these rather unique models, and damage their beautiful God-given bodies in the process of desperate vanity.

But the men watching Pink writhe around her microphone stand don't want to hear that. They want to hear me and other males talk about how we'd "do" her. "I'd hit it," says one person. "Not Grig," said one guy, "he thinks she's too young. He's so lying ... why can't you just admit you want to pork her?" I wondered if I reversed the topic to talk about having sex with goats ("Just admit it, you want to screwed that goat until its horns fall off. Don't deny it. I can smell the mint jelly forming in your pants now!"), but wisdom tell me that they'd NEVER let me live that down. So I shrug and leave.

Not all males are like this, of course. I am friends with many men who are quite civil of tongue about the ladies. I am more friends with males now than I ever have been, and I think that just comes because of maturity. Some men will always be tail-chasers, but I don't hate them for it, or even pity them. We were all given goals in life, and I am in no position to judge them.

Just let me eat my tea and crumpets then, okay?

Posted by Punkie @ 07:27 PM EST [Link]

Babysitting YAPO

When we were in this lab at work, I'll call "The Upstairs Lab," we had some problems like cooling, minor theft, and some meddling. Once in a while, the network they put us on would be rank with virus and trojan traffic. So they moved us to an "official production room," which we'll call the "Computer Room," over a year ago. Part of the agreement to move downstairs was that not only was it far more secure, it was a production environment, and everything was stable.

They lied.

Today I have to baby-sit "YAPO," Yet Another Planned Outage, which we almost never had in the "Upstairs Lab." In this new area, we have had network outages, power outages, and equipment failures at a far greater level than before. Many of the "planned outages" are over the weekend, and I have had to baby-sit most of them. At least today's YAPO is during my normal morning work hours, and doesn't involve a section with servers (we hope, that's what they told us, only two of our rows are affected by this maintenance). Baby-sitting involves:

- Gracefully shutting down all systems on the netowrk/power grid affected
- Waiting to see when the workers actually shut the network/power off
- Keeping an eye on their work, making sure the Doozers build more crystal lattice
- When they give me the "all clear," I power everything back up, make sure it's okay
- I write a report on what happened, and what excuses they gave for being late

Some "production" system.

Posted by Punkie @ 08:18 AM EST [Link]

Tuesday, November 11, 2003

Never Have So Many Waited So Long For So Little

I haven't seen The Matrix: Revolutions yet, but I don't think I'll see it in the theater. I think I'll save money and see it when it comes out on DVD. I have heard an overWHELMING cry of disappointment from my fandom community sources, many whom I trust as having opinions similar to mine. I have heard that about the Star Wars prequels, too, and I must say while I enjoyed the films' scenery and special effects, I did find them hokey and trite (and although I love the original trilogy, they weren't the end-all to be-all of filmmaking, either). But I noticed something I have noticed for years with fandom and films like these: they not only hate the films, they actually get angry about it. If they showed the same passion towards real life that they showed towards these films, think of what they could accomplish for charities and so on... but I digress.

When Star Wars I: The Phantom Menace came out, I had a friend who said she was going to "protest" by not seeing any more Star Wars movies. "He ruined the series for the sake of money!" she said. Okay, first off, God bless George Lucas and all, but I would never fault him for wanting the money. He's a filmmaker, and everyone in America has the right to get rich. He doesn't owe us anything! I find sheer audacity in some people in fandom, who see films like Star Wars, Star Trek, and The Matrix as some sort of religious dogma that must keep its bloodline pure. Sure, it would be NICE, but frankly, you can't please everybody, and you never get rich from fan service. You don't. Sorry fandom, but in order to make back what they put into these films, they have to pander to what they think the most of the world wants to see. And most of the world doesn't think about religion, philosophy, and destiny. They live their day-to-day lives, doing what they know, and pausing for some entertainment. Thinking can be a burden and responsibility, and not everyone wants that. Hollywood assumes (and I think fairly accurately) that people want a simple story, lots of action, and lots of special effects in a sci-fi film. To me, good writing and editing are like icing on the cake.

Star Wars and The Matrix have an additional burden of having almost theocratic themes to them. Star Wars talks big about destiny, an omniscient force, and inner conflicts. The Matrix adds the "what is reality" into that mix. Man, people in fandom latched onto this intellectual seed, and hoped it would grow into a flowering plant in their image (which they fail to see how subjective that really is, even when they read message boards). But it didn't. And they felt disappointed, cheated, even embarrassed. They get angry, and feel like the victim. Hollywood doesn't care about you guys, and I am sorry you think they do or even should.

On top of this, Star Wars and The Matrix both suffer from overexpectation on new concepts. Star Wars was a groundbreaking film. Before Star Wars, all sci-fi was shiny ships, cowboy acting, and apart from moralistic endings, very little dogma or philosophy entered into the writing (there are some notable exceptions, like "The Day the Earth Stood Still" and "War of the Worlds"). Then Star Wars came by with gritty, broken-down ships, Campbell's hero and saga archetype concepts, a form of Kirasawa style, and of course, "The Force." But once you pull a neat "breaking new ground" trick like that, it's hard to do it again with the same impact. Star Wars raised the bar on special effects and changed how future sci-fi films were made. Same with Alien and The Matrix. But other films copied these ideas, beat them to death, and left the audience with "okay, we've seen that, now what?" Magicians know that people will only watch a certain act so many times, and films should know this too. But in the case of The Matrix, they peaked at the first film. And maybe purists thing they "should have stayed there," but Warner Brothers is a business, and they want to milk that cow until it's dry. And if you were an investor in that company, you'd want that, too. Fan service, a minority of the population, does not count.

What some people in fandom should do is pool some money together, get a whole bunch of people writing a sci-fi script, plan it as a trilogy, get some good actors, and make their own film. If I had the time, money, and resources, hell, I'd do it. I could write fan service, but unless I get lucky at Cannes, I have to fully realize it will have a limited market. Hollywood is a shallow, glittery, moneymaking machine. That's its design. It is no more good or evil than a bunch of rocks. It never claimed to be anything else, but people put faith and hope into films and actors that really aren't there. It's all an illusion, just like the story of The Matrix. And to quote one line from an independent film, a farce called "Hardware Wars," the character Ham Salad says to Fluke Starbucker:

"Take it easy kid, it's only a movie..."

Get over it. I have seen many bad films in my life, and I don't carry on about it (unless it scarred me, like the 1986 remake of "The Fly"). I think, "Whew, what a stinker," or "Haha... dear God, that was bad. Oh well." You guys find disappointment in a source that doesn't know who you are, care about what you feel, and I don't feel sorry for you. Boycott what you want, but the difference between "boycott" and "just never wasting time with that series" is only an investment of passion.

Is it worth it?

Posted by Punkie @ 09:47 AM EST [Link]

Monday, November 10, 2003

And now for some good news...

Man, those last few entries were pretty depressing, huh? But man, do I feel like a weight has been lifted from my shoulders. Nothing like confessing and purging guilt. No wonder the Catholics like it so much.

But, I seemed to have defeated the "pending doom flu," because it never came. By Saturday, even though I was in some spiral of depression, I was glad that I wasn't sick. I totally credit my care of myself, staying warm even when I "didn't need to," and all the vitamin and herbal supplements I took. I am glad, I was scared there for a while!

Then I cleaned out a TON of paperwork I had lying around. Most of it was just old bill statements, receipts, and notices of change of address. I must have shredded and tossed two bags of trash from my den, and although it doesn't look THAT much cleaner, I am glad I don't have piles of paper all over my desk like Cosmo from Jeff MacNelly's cartoon, "Shoe." Of course, I didn't throw out all of them. I only tossed what I assumed was safe to toss, which were bills for stuff that were over a year old. And I saved even some of them. The rest went into a large box that I will be using instead of my desk, because honestly, I don't go through those old papers much, but need them about twice a year to pull up a bill dispute of some kind. Honestly, it amazes me when some utility company claims I never paid them, and I have a canceled check to prove it. Or a previous bill that shows I did pay them (Sprint used to do that a lot). Sometimes American Express sends me a bill for $0.00, and then the next month, they have two bills and a late fee. Uh ... no? Hello! Yes, that's YOUR fault, thank you. Thank goodness I only use Amex for emergencies (plus $7.99/month for a credit protection/checking service which I adore). But sometimes they are a pain.

We also dropped Sprint as a long distance carrier. We got sick of them. See, we have three phone lines. Two of them we pay for, and the third one Christine's company pays the bills. Sprint's billing system is totally whacked out. In a complicated series of repeating problems I don't want to relive, they often double-charged us, charged us for the wrong line, or they couldn't quite figure out how to "automatically" bill us via the credit card (once they cut off our service because we didn't pay because they forgot to charge us). On top of this, when we asked to go to a different plan, they'd screw that up, too. So we went to Verizon, and switched to a flat-rate long distance and local bundle plan for both lines. I figure this will save us $25-50/month, even though we don't really make many long distance calls. It was just the fees of Sprint on TOP of our local plan, plus the double-charging, constant hassle, and who knows what else. This comes at a good time, since we really need to save money. I am wary, though, because I deal with Verizon at work, and they hire some pretty dumb-ass people. But we've had Verizon for our local calls and voice mail, and those haven't failed yet.

I have also lost some weight, so my new eating plan is working so far. My plan? I let Christine dictate my diet (she's using Weight Watchers, so I just "piggyback" on her "points" system), eat mostly healthy frozen dinners (for dieters, with premixed and balance proportions), and try and stay off of bad food. Part of my logic was to analyze WHY I ate badly. I eat badly because I hate eating. I always have. I don't get hungry (a condition I have had since I was 12), so the only time I know to eat is when I get dizzy. Then I cram whatever is the easiest, pre-made, least labor intensive food near me. Which is usually junk food, and then I just overate because I was so starving. I think I started to do this when we were really poor from 1991-1993. My body thought I was living in a feast-or-famine environment, so it craved high-carb foods, and stored them in body fat because it didn't know if I was going to get a meal again. This made my blood sugar go up and down, and was totally messing me up. I just never thought about it; I have always looked at eating as a "distracting necessity" like going to the bathroom or sleeping. True geek thinking, there. So, two weeks ago, I started to measure my weight with granularity of daily measurement. I have done this before, and knew my weight could fluctuate as much as 15 pounds in a month! When I'd go see the doctor, I'd get "you have lost weight!" or "You need to loose weight!" and I'd think, "check me next week, the cycle changes." So I am not sure if I have lost weight, or I am in a down cycle, so I will have to stick with this for at least a few months to try and gather if my body will get me down to my first goal: cross the 300lb border. My weight has been as high as 323lbs, but when I started this new way of eating, my weight was at 315. This Sunday (which is considered a goal weight day), I was down to 308. This morning, I was up to 310 again, but that's been happening a lot, and I still think the trend is downward in scale. They tell you not to measure your weight daily, I guess because you'll get discouraged, but I kind of need to see trends. I consider this to be "purely scientific," so I don't take anything personally. I think I'd get concerned if it got back up to 315 or higher again, but I won't "give up" the diet unless I think it's bad for me. At least I am eating BETTER, whether I loose weight or not.

My plan is to set "goals" in amounts I made up, based on my past "thresholds." First, I'll be happy to cross 300 into the 200s. Then my next goal will be 285, then 265, 250, 240, and finally stop at 220. I have seen what I look like at my "ideal weight" of 180, and that's TOO skinny. I looked terrible. Look at this picture. That's me at 186, when I was 18 years old, at my full height, with the same bone structure I have to this day. I look like a cartoon with a huge head on that skinny body. I think once I start getting down to 250 or so, I might try ... although the concept is making me giggle with ridicule currently ... to work out. At least build some muscle mass. Right now, I get a good workout just climbing a flight of stairs, and to try and exercise beyond just my day-to-day needs to get around would be kind of a strain. besides, I have this mental block that I totally hate exercise (thank you, childhood PE/Gym trauma!) and I just want the diet to work first, than hopefully I'll have extra energy I don't know what to do with, and then maybe ... no, I am so in denial. I just hope I get some magical desire to exercise from a dues ex machina or something.

Also, I upgraded my main Linux box, which was Red Hat 7.3, to the new Red Hat replacement, Fedora (Core 1). It went really well, although I found out it didn't like my network card. Luckily, I had spares. Through this upgrade, it fixed a lot of stuff I messed up originally, and it wasn't slower than the previous Red Hat, unlike Microsoft, which can eat and eat resources like a hog when you upgrade. But this isn't a technical journal, so enough of that.

Last note, I have been speaking with someone off and on about having a real sci-fi convention in the DC area. I am going to keep the names anonymous here, because he (or she) wants this to be quiet for now until we know we're really going to do this. Let's call the person "Felix." Felix has experience running conventions, and hobnobs with people in the industry at other cons. Recently, Paramount approached Felix via complaint on "how come there are no real sci-fi cons on the East Coast?" Apparently Paramount is sick of one well-known Trek con, and bemoans the fact that there are no fan-run, sci-fi media conventions that attract a lot of people. This has been the complaint of Hollywood about the East Coast for a while. I agree. Most sci-fi cons around here are 1500 people or less. Felix doesn't think the convention will even be planned until 2005 (with a possibility of a 2006 for a first con), and this works well with my writing schedule. Felix has already been approached by a new hotel and convention center they are planning near Potomac Mills, but we're not sure if their target opening date of 2005 is realistic, because they haven't even broken ground yet, and construction projects around here are strapped for labor because of the boom. But I am VERY excited about this. This is what I have always wanted to do, and see in the area. Being part of it would be a thrill.

Posted by Punkie @ 10:54 AM EST [Link]

Sunday, November 9, 2003

How My Mother Died - Part 4: Final Thoughts

I decided to add some more final thoughts on this whole mess before I can give it a rest.

First, I don't think of my mother as a bad person for what she did. I have forgiven her for the most part because I do remember that she was such a wonderful person when she was sober, and she had a lot of friends, even at the end. My mother had a big heart, and cared a lot about people. I personally think, based on stories I have heard about her past, that she married my father because she saw him as a good provider who knew where he was going and what he wanted to do. And when she realized that everyone was right that he was a jerk, too, she was too stubborn to admit it. And the longer she blocked out all the signals she had made a mistake, the deeper she dug her grave. When my father said he wanted no children, ever, he meant it. She defied him and had me. At a very bad time. And I was the beginning of the end of their relationship. She couldn't face her own life, and so turned to drinking to hide it. We all make mistakes in life, and I know I've had my share. While I think her life choices were unfortunate, I think she was just trying to live out a dream she carved for herself, but couldn't tell the difference between a dream and denial at the end. I bet if she could see me now, she'd see I succeeded anyway, once my father was out of the picture. I think she'd be happy to see me as I am now.

One of the most annoying things about this is I have no gravesite, no closure of any kind to my mother's death. I have that with my grandmother, since I had her buried back in Iron Mountain next to her husband. It is far away, and I won't be able to visit her grave often, but I can visit it if I really have to. My mother? Dust in the wind. I have no idea if my father did scatter her ashes across the Chesapeake, or just tossed them in the garbage. So my last memory of my mother is that she was a purple corpse on her bed, and the last thing I said to her was a poor way to say goodbye.

As for my father? The complex man that he is, I don't really fault him with "causing" her death. He didn't force my mother to take those pills. My mother could have easily up and left him, but she never would. Although I never saw or suspected my father ever laying a hand on my mother, if you want to know why she stayed with him, go to your local battered women's shelter, and ask all of them; you will be sickened at how educational this will be. His reactions to her death were personal, and he dealt with them the only way he knew how. I would honestly say he controlled the whole event, and ended it in a neat little bow. He always has to be in control, it means more to him than anything. He could have only made it even more perfect if he's have gotten rid of me or something, which he sort of did (remarried, moved away, won't speak to me), but not in any effective way for me to shut up. I recall he said, "Don't worry about her death, in the end you will only remember the good things, and never remember the bad things." Well, I am sure he did just that.

I try and comfort myself that having no parents is a blessing. I won't have to deal with all the crap that most of my friends are dealing with now. I don't have to deal with Alzheimer's, sibling rivalry, inheritance, or retirement homes. I don't have to worry about grandparents spoiling my son or telling embarrassing stories about me as a child (although, honestly? I'd love to hear any stories of me as a child, but my family was too isolated for anyone have any anecdotes). Yes, my father is still alive, and in San Diego somewhere. My father's death will be swift when it comes, because he doesn't believe in doctors. The very idea of someone knowing something he doesn't would be too terrifying (which is my reasoning why he's an atheist), so my guess is he'll get sick and refuse to see anyone about it, and then die from something that might have possibly been curable. I wonder if Nicole will tell me when he dies. I hope so, and if asked to be at the funeral, I'd go and be civil, of course. But I suspect if she does, it will be one of those, "Oh, your father died a few months ago," just like my paternal grandmother did to my father when his father died. Yeah, that side of the family has its share of strangeness.

But sometimes, like in the last few days, there is a kind of nagging, sucking loneliness. I try an rationalize, "You wouldn't want your parents around now, would you? Your dad's a jerk, you mom would be calling you drunk several times a week..." But sometimes, I do feel a bit like an orphan, abandoned by some hellish flaming spawn of a marriage that consumed itself and left me as only a cinder. Like if I do something really successful, I don't have anyone to congratulate me. I mean, I have my wife and friends, but no one... no one authoritative. Same with consolation. I have to structure or role models other than ones I just adopt. Sometimes, I am a little jealous of people who still have a parent or two that cares and supports, and at times get angry when that's taken for granted ("My father won't pay for my honeymoon, he's an ass!"). But, I try not to let that get to me, and I get over it, and go forward.

Last thing to say is that I debated whether to post this story at all, because it is pretty personal. Will my father see it? Maybe. He'll claim I made it all up, of course, because he always accuses me of being stupid and a liar, and I don't mind anymore because once you realize that he always says that, about most everybody, you just stop hearing it. Will someone like Benny post mean things in my comments section about what a whiny Goth-wannabe I am? Yes. Will one of my mother's old friends read this and go, "It wasn't a stroke? Yes it was, it HAS to be! Oh my God... I never knew, someone should have told me... aaaaahhhhhh!" I hope not. Sorry to all those people I lied to about how she really died. But the cathartic release of finally writing all this down was really, really worth it. I feel now I can stop thinking about it.

Thank God this is over.

Posted by Punkie @ 11:09 AM EST [Link]

Saturday, November 8, 2003

How My Mother Died - Part 3: "...the little crabs can eat her remains"

It think it was Monday when I called him back. He was a lot calmer, and wanted to see me, but I had called the police Sergeant first and they guy at the Sergeant's desk said my father was "wildly unstable" and had acted violent towards hospital staff, the police, and the people at the morgue, accusing them, of all things, of stealing my mother's jewelery. They assigned me a social worker, and she drove me to my father's house, and said that I was allowed 15 minutes with him. I convinced her NOT to get involved, because I feared for her safety as well, and thought a social worker would just make my father suspect this was all some kind of ruse.

When I came to the house, my father squeezed me in a loving sort of headlock, patted my head, and said, "You big, dumb, brave kid..." That was the HIGHEST complement I had ever gotten from him, so I knew that he knew it was no lie, and I was safe for now. Then we sat in the living room and chatted about what to do next. Oh, and he still thought my glasses were fake, and forced me to take them off. So I had to wander around in a blur through all of this.

The next day, we went to the funeral parlour. My father's crass disconnection was shocking the funeral director. He kept looking to me, and I kept shrugging and giving apologetic glances. It didn't seem real, but my father's anger was the only constant that never changed. My father wanted the cheapest, non-secular funeral possible. Not a hint of religion was allowed! Furthermore, he kept arguing price. He wanted my mother cremated as soon as possible. He didn't want to pay for a casket "that would just end up burnt up." Then he balked at the price of urns. One phrase that got the funeral director's ire was when my father asked, "Well, what do you do if the people have no money? I know you don't let homeless people just rot where they are found." My father did get a casket "reserved for the homeless" (to the director's disgust) and the cheapest $120 urn, which was a bland plastic white box "also used for pet cremation remains," according to the director (who was hinting strongly, as you can see). All this time he spoke to me about the funeral director in the third person, right in front of him, like, "These goddamn people have a monopoly, and they rely on people's grief to get the best deal for them. They make a killing off of other's miseries." He then said he wanted this over and done with as soon as possible. By the time it was over, I am sure the director thought my mother had been murdered.

Later, we were eating at a Chesapeake Bay seafood house, where he ranted about funeral monopolies, hypocrisy, how people never care about you and you're on your own, and you have to look out for yourself. I recall he said this phrase, "Like for instance, I am the only one who cares about you, and I don't even like you." Great. Then he said that he was going to try and get the rating from "suicide" to "stroke," because, one tends to get a stroke when one takes sixty tranqs, right? He also told me not to tell ANYONE, or I'd be in big, big trouble. I didn't think he could do it, but by gum, he did. I have the death certificate to prove it, although I hope no one goes into the police records for that year. Oh, and the neighbors. Now that I am older, I am almost SURE he did this for insurance reasons. And you know what? For two years, I let him. I felt guilt about her suicide, and told no one until I woke up one day and thought, no. No, what do I care if people know the truth? Goddammit, I have spent the last few years doing what he asked me, and the guy doesn't ever give me the time of day! I don't owe him anything! And I felt bad, living a lie. Secrets have a way of eating you up, and I wasn't going to let this simmer. The only thing my father ever mentioned about the suicide is when he said, "when I got rid of the old bed, I found the bottle that killed her."

Oh, and he said, "People will be sending money. You are not supposed to accept it, so I am taking all the money and donating it to..." he looked at the place mat. "The Chesapeake Bay Preservation Fund," he said, reading it. "She always loved the water and the yachts. I am going to scatter her ashes across the Chesapeake, where the little crabs can eat her remains." God, I shudder when I think of those "little crabs." Jesus, he was callous.

The funeral was on a Thursday. I stayed at my old house overnight (without telling the police, who I am sure would have objected), and listed to my father memorize a three-page speech he prepared for it. He said it over and over again. For hours, he practicing like he was going to go before Congress. It was so FORMAL, like not funeral formal, but corporate Annual Stock Report formal. I had an index cards with five lines of stories I wanted to tell about her.

Relatives came in. My cousin Claude brought my maternal grandmother from Michigan, and Uncle Charles, Aunt Angela, and their son David flew in. My father was so awake and happy, it was creeping everyone out. I have pictures of my father laughing and smiling at the dinner after the funeral, and asking the relatives to do the same. Here's one, where you can see us all smiling thought our teeth like, "What the hell is this crap?"

TONS of people showed up. They liked my speech. They didn't care for my father's, even though his was shorter, and when he said how much my mother loved the yacht and to give to the Chesapeake Bay preservation Fund, I later heard everyone immediately gave their money to the American Heart Association (because she had a stroke, right? Everybody nod their head yes...). My father got angry when my grandmother's church sent flowers because I think it had some religious theme to it, and so he wouldn't allow it, which got my grandmother upset. We didn't have body for viewing, just the small white box that was smaller than a cement brick. It looked like a shoe box, dwarfed by the huge amount of flowers. Then it was over.

By Friday, my mother was erased.

Time sped back up. Shortly thereafter, I was sent to a mental hospital because my school thought I'd be suicidal (they had had three suicides in the last four years, and were not taking any more chances), but I was released a month and a half later when it was determined that my mother's death was a "normal reason for depression" and I was "not a threat to myself." Asshats. Because I had to "play sane," (a great feat of acting on my part, I doubt I could pull that off now), I never really got to mourn her death, and so I know it's all bottled up, deep inside. I never told anyone about my heart condition for years, just thinking I'd up and die and no one would care, and that's life. Truthfully, I didn't want to face it, although I had to tell Christine when we got engaged that her husband may be a short-term thing. I think I hoped it would just go away. Then my heart severely improved when I was on my own, and when I later had it checked out, I do have a bad heart (I will probably need a pacemaker one day), was told the previous diagnosis was VERY overstated (but an easy mistake to make), and it's not anything anyone can really operate on without making it more of a risk that just living with it. Part of me wants to believe it was just the stress, but then I feel bad if my mother's "pushing decision" was based on doctor error. My son had the same heart condition (it's genetic), but they removed the bump right after he was born (I think it was called something like "Tetralogy of Fallot via ventricular hypertrophy").

That's a story I have had brewing in me for a long time to actually write and organize, and I am glad to let it out. My mother's death was tragic and unfortunate, although because she died, a series of events occurred that pushed me in the right direction. If she had lived, I think I would have gone to college (and dropped out), never gone to Balticon, and never met my wife, or had a son. Also, her deterioration condition would have been very stressful on me, not to mention my father's negative influence on me. Her death made him let me go, and so while I have no parents now, I won't have to take care of them when they get older. My heart got better, so no operation was done that might have killed me. Maybe I am bitter that I never left the nest so much as I was dumped out of it as it fell apart from neglect, but I learned to fly, with the help of friends, and I am a much better person now than I was then.

Thanks for your time.

Posted by Punkie @ 01:37 PM EST [Link]

How My Mother Died - Part 2: "I can never love you, until you love yourself."

When we got home, my mother started to drink. My father had left for another business trip (these trips are where neighbors have all speculated he was seeing another woman, Nicole, whom he started dating several months after my mother's death, and married a year or so later), and so that Friday night we were all just wigging out. There was a lot of screaming going on, because suddenly the whole "I want to be an astronomer" dream was shattered, my mother was doing this, "what about MY feelings," and I couldn't take it. She lapsed into the "don't you love me?" guilt trip (a classic of hers when she didn't get her way with me), and like a lightning bolt through my head, fueled with anger, despair, and the quest for some witty saying reminiscent of an after school special, I said the following line: "I can never love you, until you love yourself."

I can never love you, until you love yourself.

I play that line over and over in my head, because it was literally the last thing I said to my mother. I stormed into my room and locked the door. I heard my mother crying, wailing, and carrying on, although she didn't actually speak words, and she didn't seem to be directing them at me. We had argued like this before, but I felt a bit smug that I trapped her in such a true statement. She had no self-respect, I thought, and so hopes others will love her when in fact, they pity her. I she didn't continue the argument, and I went to bed.

I got up the next morning, and got ready to go to Kate's house for a D&D game. It was a cold January Saturday morning. Just before I left, I went to tell my mother, if she was still lucid, to tell her where I was going because I felt that if I did this, she wouldn't call Kate's house asking if I was there (which she'd do, because when she was at this level of drunk, she was totally loony, and could call random people to say she was not drunk). I saw her sitting on the edge of the bed, very still. This was not unusual. Sometimes she passed out sitting on the toilet, so I thought the least I could do was to push her back so she was lying on the bed.

When I did so, her body felt oddly stiff and cold, and when she fell back, her face was a deep purple, and a death rattle came from her lungs. I called 911, and the circus began.

Parts of this start to fragment as the shock spread through my system like a slow poison, so I am sorry if this seems distant and disjointed. I called 911, and the very nice operator asked me questions, and said yes, she's probably dead, I am sorry, sweetie. The ambulance came in like 5 minutes. They established she was dead within a few more minutes, but they seemed weird about the whole thing, like something was amiss.

I called Kate. I was trying not to flip out. She said she'd be right over.

The paramedics called the police, and then the neighbors all started to show up. Later, I found out some of them thought a murder took place, because my father was "that way." I swear, some neighbors just started walking in the doors like it was a museum, so the police started to cordon off the area like a crime scene. First, a policeman started to ask me questions. Then, the detectives started to ask me essentially the same questions, which was pissing me off. Then the Sergeant started asking me the same questions, and I recall he was very annoyed and called more police to keep people out of my house. There were several questions they asked over and over again:

- Were you aware you mother had several prescriptions to tranquilizers from several different doctors?
- Did you mother say anything or act differently when you last spoke with her?
- Is there a history of suicide in your family?
- Where is her husband?

Found by her body were two empty bottles of tranqs, 60 count in total, that were filled just a few days ago, according to the label. A glass was next to her with strong alcohol residue. I didn't want to face the truth, so I kept saying she was fine the night before, when I knew this wasn't true. The police knew it too, because I am a very poor liar.

In between interrogations, I felt I had to call relatives. The first was my maternal grandmother to tell her that she survived her only daughter. I recall her denial of "No no no this is a mean joke, this isn't true, you are lying!" She started to cry and hung up on me. I called her back, and she yelled at me for a while. First it was "you are making this up," and then a sort of acceptance that "she should have seen this coming," and then she fainted (or at least dropped the phone off the hook and wouldn't talk anymore - we spoke again later, so she was okay). Then I recall calling my Uncle Charles, whom I was officially "not allowed to know exists." I had to introduce myself, and he said, "Yeah, I know you you are! Wow, what are you, 18 now?" I had to tell him the bad news. I recall this exact phrase he said, "Oh wow. [off hook] Hey, Angie! [his wife] Guess who died! [back on hook] No kiddin'!" He said it like he was announcing some newfound discovery like I said I had won the Nobel Prize or something. Aunt Angela got on the phone, and was more appropriately subdued and sympathetic. Uncle Charles, if you are reading this, don't take this badly; everyone reacts to things their own way. I have never taken your comment as a personal snub on anyone, and I still smirk at remembering, "Hey Angie, guess who died?" That is so you :). What a weird way to be introduced to your aunt and uncle, though, at 18.

After making some of the most difficult calls of my life, the Sergeant sat me down and said, "We have been asking neighbors about your situation, and we have pulled some county records on you, and given your family situation, we're going to ask that you NOT be home when your father shows up. For your safety, is there a relative's house you can stay at?" I wanted to stay home, but the Sergeant was so insistent, that if I didn't find a place to stay, I'd have to spend it in jail. So I stayed at Kate's house. The Sergeant left his card to me, and I left a note on one of the more prominent the kitchen cabinets so he could see it when he got home. I don't recall what I wrote, but it was something like, "Please call me at this number, and call the Sergeant at this card."

I think later, at Kate's house, I finally started to cry for a while. Kate's Pekingese were very comforting, but I think Kate's family was totally wigged out about the whole thing. I didn't know what to do. I mourned less about my mother and more about my survival. Where would I go now? Would I get to finish high school? And part of me felt unfair that my mother committed suicide, when that was supposed to be me! That was MY method of control. Then I felt guilty that somehow my suicidal tendencies had "rubbed off" on her, and I was somehow responsible for her death. And I dreaded facing my father. Would he kill me? How would he kill me? I assumed he'd beat me to death, because he never used weapons or tools like a belt or anything. I was terrified, and going to to a free-falling fear spiral.

Then, Sunday night, Kate's father came down to Kate's room (she lived in a finished room in the basement), where we were watching TV in silence. "Grig's dad's on the phone. Grig, you don't have to talk to him if you don't want to, he doesn't sound like he's in a good mood." But I said I would because how long could I delay it? He'd only get madder. And it was his wife, after all. I picked up the old black rotary phone in the laundry room, right on top of the washer and dryer, next to 500 canned goods that Kate's parents collected like for a bomb shelter of something. This was roughly how the conversation went:

Grig: Hello?
Arv: What the HELL is going on? Where's Glady?
Grig: Please sit down, I have some bad news...
Arv: Don't FUCK with me, where is Glady?
Grig: I am sorry to have to tell you this but she's dead.
Arv: Oh, bull SHIT, where are you? Did she put you up to this?
Grig: She'd dead. She took some tranquilizers and the police said...
Arv: WHERE ARE YOU TWO? PUT GLADY ON THE PHONE!
Grig: She's DEAD, okay? The card on the note is for a police Sergeant who handled the case. Call him and...
Arv: I. WANT. TO. SPEAK. TO. HER. RIGHT NOWWWWW!!!! Is this one of your goddamned therapist's ideas? Huh? You think you can do this? You will GO to JAIL, Greg-gry! Now PUT. HER. ON. THE. PHONE!!!!
Grig: I can't, she's dead. If you don't believe me, call Fairfax Hospital, she's in the Fairfax morgue awaiting your positive identification.
Arv: I will find you two, and when I do... oh, you are so useless!!!! [click]

Deep inside of me, there was a complete systems failure overload about to happen. I roughly recall going back to Kate's room, and then when I came to, her parents were over me, rousing me to wake up. I had apparently fainted, but I don't know how I ended up in Kate's bed. I told them what had happened. They said my father had called and was a lot calmer. They weren't sure if he finally believed me or it was a ruse. Apparently Kate had told them my father was so loud, she could hear him over the phone from her room, so they thought it best not to allow him to speak to me.

Posted by Punkie @ 01:36 PM EST [Link]

How My Mother Died - Part 1: "You will probably never see the age of 20."

Soon, the 16th "anniversary" of my mother's death is coming. I don't celebrate it, in fact, I often block it out, so I thought while I am bothered by her death, I want to illustrate a little as to why. I originally had this big entry planned about it, but I always get emotionally sidetracked, so this is the 10th or 11th attempt to write the story.

Several things were going on at the end of 1986 that really changed in our family. The process of family erosion and the collapsing of my mother's denial fortress was really starting to crumble. Her drinking had now shifted patterns, and tranquilizers had been added to the mix. She was seeing two doctors, and both were giving her prescriptions for tranqs. This had been an ongoing process for years, but it was now to the point that even when she was sober, most of her life seemed to be a glazed acceptance towards the inevitable doom that was surely to come.

I had a newfound sense of independence. I already had been working for two years by this point, paying for my own clothes, books, school supplies, and other essentials. I can't say I was really financially independent, because I didn't pay rent, taxes, utilities, or for half my food but pretty much everything else I paid for. I was cheap, too, and rarely bought anything I didn't need, because I was saving for college. In fact, I think the only "frivolous" thing I ever bought were a few sci-fi books. I had also had two years of court-ordered (and my requested) therapy which unscrewed me a lot, although looking back, I still took myself and life WAY too seriously. Therapy ended badly in 1987, but that's another story. By the end of 1986, though, I was already thinking how to live on my own. I didn't need my parents anymore, I thought. My father, since the child abuse trials, pretty much ignored me (which was good), and I was starting to resent the repetition of my mother 's drinking habits. I was becoming smarter, too, and not falling into those guilt traps she always set up. I spent most of my time either at school, after-school clubs, my job, or Kate's house. I really only used my house to sleep at, and occasionally get food from (when food was to be had).

In October of 1986, our old cat Daisy died. She was old (16) and had been having seizures, so on the vet's advice, we had her put to sleep. This seemed to be the beginning of the end. I was really upset, and my mother just got drunk to deal with it. Something else had changed, though, and I knew it. I felt that when Daisy died, it was the first marker of the biggest change of my life. Things rapidly went downhill from there. My mother, in her anguish, bought a dog named "Prince Charming," which was a puppy from my friend Kate's mom's previous litter (she bred Pekingese for show). My mother had always wanted a dog, and in 1970, she had gotten one from the pound, and it had died ten days later from heartworms. This was always a symbolic excuse why we never had dogs, the "heartbreak." So getting a puppy was a big step in my mother's life. But then she got totally wasted and I had to take care of it, which, honestly, I didn't mind at all. I was trilled, because I knew this dog's parents and grandparents. But my father came home from one of his long business trips, saw the dog, and totally flipped out. He said that I had killed the cat to get the dog, taking advantage of my mother's drunkenness, and that this was proof I was a very bad and evil person indeed. My mother was passed out on her bed, so she couldn't explain anything. Luckily, Kate's mom took back the dog without complaint, stating she should have known better that something was wrong with my mother (she knew my family very well, and knew of my problems). When my mother came to a few days later, she did apologize to me, but she was devastated about losing the puppy.

But good news came when I found I had been accepted to George Mason University, as well as the University of Hawaii at Hilo, although I could not afford out-of-state for the latter. This was good news, but then my mother started to worry how I was going to pay for college. I had saved up money, but only enough for one year. My father did NOT want to pay for my college, although he said if I didn't go to college, I was even MORE of a disappointment. I always thought of this as part of his ongoing hypocrisy (that an taking money relatives gave me since I was a kid for "my college fund" which I never saw). What I *didn't* know, and found out about 5 years later, was that my grandmother had sent money to pay for my college for two years. Wonder what became of that money, Arvid? Yeah. Along with my mother's family heirlooms, they are gone into the black hole you call your soul. My friend Neal also told me that his Christmas present from his parents was to fly me down to Texas to be with him right after Christmas, into New Year's. Then I got even better news: my friend Julie and I were to be guests artists at Evecon 4! Wow!

Then my mother, in an act of defiance, cancelled Christmas. The story is in this entry. I actually thought this was good news, too! Ha ha. Hind sight is always 20/20.

Then, I got devastating news in the beginning of December. For years, I had been having a lot of problems with physical exertion, and my heart rate had always been erratic. They found a heart murmur, and did a whole lot of tests on me. I didn't give us the results until after I got back from Evecon 4. Bad news, Grig. You're dying.

I recall everything with granularity at that moment. I recall the doctor's office, the wallpaper, the brown vinyl doctor's table, the smell of iodine,. everything. Looooong story short, I was born with a heart defect, undetected probably since birth, and one of my ventricles had a huge lump on it, which stunted its growth, and when the rest of my heart grew, it did not. So I almost had a 3-chambered heart, which accounted for its rapid beating and irregular rhythm. I needed massive heart surgery, and my chances for survival, since this went undetected for so long, was scarce. That was the only time I have ever openly reacted to bad news with nervous laughter. "You mean," I said, "I spent half my life trying to attempt suicide, and when I am finally cured of wanting to kill myself, my own heart is going to do me in?" I didn't want surgery. I didn't want to have to be in the hospital, where people go to die. "What if I do nothing?" I asked. "Then you will probably never see the age of 20," said the doctor. He looked like he was going to cry. My mother was sobbing. Jesus H. Christ, WTF? Time out, God! Unfair! This game is rigged!

I am 35 this month. I am not going to go into a side story of what happened with this, but you can probably guess I did not die. This is why this story is so hard to tell in a straight line; there's so much stuff interwoven into it. This entry needs like 50 footnotes, and parts of me go, "Oh, and THIS happened, too!" But to satisfy any short-term curiosity, it turns out I was probably misdiagnosed, my heart got better when I was on my own, but I spent a lot of my life (and still kind of do), thinking at any moment, I am going to keel over. Between the end of this sentence, and when I am 75.

Continued...

Posted by Punkie @ 01:34 PM EST [Link]

Friday, November 7, 2003

On fighting sickness, OJ, and how life could be worse

I wanted to post some good news because this journal has too much bad news in it for my tastes: I seem to winning the war on the "doom flu," whatever it is. This morning, I felt a lot of junk in my lungs (which I didn't have yesterday), and prayed I didn't have pneumonia coming on, but I feel a lot better this afternoon. Last night, I ate a lot of mediocre (Ace brand) Sushi because I craved it. I also drank some Minute Maid Orange/Banana/Stawberry juice, which, unlike any other OBS juice, didn't have any sugar in it!. No, really! I was stunned when I read the contents. It tastes the same as sugared, too, although, yes, I do know that just because corn syrup or sugar is NOT listed as an ingredient, doesn't mean the juice hasn't been artificially sweetened. See, the ... liberty, I should say, that juice manufacturers have is that they often do everything from concentrate. So your "unsweetened" orange juice from concentrate could be 1 part water, 1.5 (or more) parts concentrate, so you are getting a kind of "super juice" you wouldn't get from just squeezing the orange yourself. Of course, all the calories and carbs come from the actual concentrate, not the water, so read the nutritional listings on the side. Then there's the centuries-old selective engineering of making sweeter and sweeter oranges ... but I digress. The juice and sushi made me feel better.

I am also trying to eat a little better. Lately, my eating has not been so good, and I am sure my health will suffer in the long-term because of it. I mean, I take a multivitamin with my meds, but I really need to cut down on sugar. This Halloween, I ate less candy than I ever had since I was a teen, so that's going well. I also seem to have this ability to not taste "the difference" between aspartame and real sugar, so switching to diet sodas has been effortless. I mean, I turn 35 soon, and I can't eat like a dysfunctional teen anymore. I mean, lord knows I try! Hee! But, no, I should stop before I get diabetes or something.

I have also found out that, while I am allergic to eggs, I am not allergic to "Egg Beaters," a yolk-less egg product where they use the whites, put in vitamins and nutrients, and pasteurize it. True, you can only make scrambled-egg-like products from it, but it has a lot less calories and cholesterol.

I also want to thank Malle Babbe for her kind words in yesterday's comments section, and want to agree with her that the 1950s were not "ideal" in many ways. I have often thought to write a book on this, but that would take lots of research and I am lazy. Unlike Al Franken, I do not have a "Team Punkie" to do research for me. But someone has done something similar and I strongly recommend people who romanticize about history read Otto Bettmann's, "The Good Old Days - They Were Terrible!" Otto is the founder of the famed Bettmann Archive in New York, one of the world's great picture libraries, and he compiled a lot of Victorian woodcut material for this book. It basically shows that the Dickens-esque, rosy, Victorian utopia people go on and on about was anything but. Women weren't allowed to vote, health care was nonexistent, child labor was rampant, disease and squalor filled the city streets, and crime and corruption existed pretty much openly among the upper class. Even if you don't care a fig about the American Victorian era, it makes for some pretty cool reading (it's not boring, like a text book, but reads more like a tabloid-level, "Dude, look at how BAD things were!").

Posted by Punkie @ 01:18 PM EST [Link]

Thursday, November 6, 2003

In sickness and in health

I am on the edge of a massive illness. So far, though, I have not fallen off the edge into the darkness disease, but for the last few days, my feet have been ice-cold no matter how warm I keep them, which I have now learned is the first warning. I have also smelled the second warning, which is an odor I can smell everywhere. Last time it was garlic. Today it's a rancid mildew. It's so strong I can taste it, too, so I have been chugging mints. I took some echinacea, zinc, vitamin C, cold relievers, and tried to keep warm. So far, I haven't gotten more than a slight fever, some chills, and I am exhausted, but I haven't gotten really sick yet.

Here's to hoping I can win this fight!

Posted by Punkie @ 04:06 PM EST [Link]

Fighting the good fight

I thought I'd share one of my paragraphs...

"Why me?" asked Tony. "Why does this sort of stuff always happen to me?"

"Because you are fighting the good fight," said Lady Sarcastia, with some level of comfort. "You only get hurt because you care. That is a strength, not a weakness. You have the inability to give up, and the resistance of your fate strengthens your character. I'd be more afraid if you noticed nothing in your life had gone wrong."

Tony sulked and chewed on his soft pretzel, now going a bit stale. "I don't want to fight anymore. I am sick of this. Why can't I have a normal life?"

"Returning to normalcy requires a model of comparison. Normalcy is the mean or average of all summed experiences, and thus, an abstract concept and not a physical thing independant of your own thoughts or will. Normalcy shifts according to mood."

"That's a lot of goth mumbo-jumbo," said Tony, standing up from the stoop. "The truth is, you are saying life is just not fair in fancy words."

Lady Sarcastia sipped her orange smoothie. "If you say life is not fair, what is your basis of comparison?"

"Death," said Koko, snapping out of her funk. "That's totally unfair. All those flowers, and for what? Too late. Then come the bees..." and she started to winggle her fingers in the air like she might have imagined a swarm of insects decending on the mourners.

"Death IS a part of life, Koko," said Sarcastia.

"Trouble is, you goths celebrate it too early! Sickness, death, bad facepaint. Little Lady Glumfrown and her cloud of poetic mourners wailing to the tune of a drunken lone piper on a hill. Spouting out words like a sprinkler of dispair, baptising other's ears with... crimminy, now I am talking like YOU!"

"See?" Sarcastia cracked a mild smile of victory, her lips shiny with orange smoothie. "Death always wins..."

Posted by Punkie @ 04:01 PM EST [Link]

Why do I hate banks again?

Oh, that's right... because they are run by incompetant ninnies. My bank, formerly Small Local Bank, got bought out by a larger fish, HugeMegaCorp Bank. I have chronicled my past issue with banks, and how I hated big-name corporations. Well, this buyout hasn't been without issues, and the transfer of everything has become enourmously complicated. So, there I was, trying to transfer money from my savings to my checking via ATM, like I have been doing for years. But now I get the message to call my bank. So I do.

I used to program for call centers, and I am betting that I was not really reaching HugeMegaCorp Bank, but a call center HugeMegaCorp Bank hires to answer their hotlines that's really in Minnesota. I spoke to a girl with a slightly northern country accent named Peggy, who to her credit, was very nice and polite in the face of adversity. She did everything she was probably trained to do as far as dealing with difficult situations. Her only fault was that she never heard the numbers I was speaking, and often narrated her own mistakes with a summary:

Punkie: My account number is 1234-58-1234-5190
CSRep: That's... 123... 4.... 98
Punkie: 58
CSRep: 98?
Punkie: Five. Five eight.
CSRep: Okay, begin again...
Punkie: My account number is 1234-58-1234-5190
CSRep: 9234...
Punkie: One. One two three four!
CSRep: There I go again with that nine! I don't know why I keep doing that... I am sorry, sir, I am having a bad day...

She thought she was having a bad day! She also told me I had no accounts. Then she said I had accounts, but with a different address. Then she said a lot of other stuff that contradicted what she had said earlier. Finally, she said to go to the bank in the morning and straighten this out. So I did, pretty much expecting a fight with someone who didn't speak English very well.

It started off bad. The rep who handled me at his desk spoke with a thick accent. I don't mind that immigrants come to this country not knowing English, my granparents came over with the same problems. But they didn't get customer service jobs right away. If I went to Pakistan, Sweden, or the Republic of Togo, I would expect that I would have to know Pakistani, Swedish, or French fluently before I was allowed to speak with the citizens about their money. This has been a worsening problem as of late, and it's very frustrating when you realize that the last few minutes you spent explaining something to someone has been wasted because they only nodded to be polite and only understood every third word you said. I can't claim to have any solutions, but I am very frustrated when I have to spell things like "Virginia" repeatedly to someone who works in that state.

Long story short: They had indexed my accounts wrong during the merger. I had three accounts. One was to my correct address, but listed as dormant (true). One was for an old address in Reston I haven't lived at for many years, and another was a Rural Route Box in West Virginia. Oddly enough, they mailed all my statements, ATM cards, and account number changes to the right (current) address. One was to a social security number I hadn't even heard of. Luckily, all the accounts had the correct names and balances on them. *Phew*! And I got money transferred with receipts, and all the neccessary corrections. And the guy did speak English well enough to get my points across.

But the manner in which he handled our security and ID? Sloppy. I saw at least six major flaws in what he did which I am not going to repeat because I don't want anyone hacking my bank, but suffice to say I knew more about his computer system, passwords, and software flaws than he did. In fact, when I wanted a receipt of my transactions, he just sent a screen shot to the printer. A black and white printer. On regular paper. Not like I could make a similar image and then later go back and claim I had $30,000 in my account, here's proof, now where is it...?

I'd leave this new bank, but where would I go? Other banks are just as bad if not worse. The real problem is they just don't give a damn about customers anymore. This is a problem with a lot of companies these days, true, but banks can hold you by the balls with your finances. If I had enough money to spread around, I'd have multiple banks to ensure odds, but with a lot of the buyouts these days, I might end up with one bank again.

Posted by Punkie @ 01:46 PM EST [Link]

Wednesday, November 5, 2003

Birthday Wish Lists

Yes, my birthday is coming up, and a few people have asked about wish lists. I feel a bit greedy putting them up here, but hey, if you want to buy me something... I'm certainly not going to stop you :-D

- I'd love stuff from my Thinkgeek.com wish list
- And here's my more generic Amazon.com wish list

And if you do buy me something... thanks! :) PLEASE be sure to sign the e-card or whatever, so I don't wonder who it's from and not thank you properly. I have gotten two gifts this way, so far. A Bigens ball and a Wil Wheaton clock. Both I never did find out who sent them... This doesn't mean you HAVE to get me anything, or have to chose from those lists, BTW. This is more for those who have asked, or those who want to see the kinds of things I like.

I will be turning 35 in less than 2 weeks. I don't really feel one way or another, although if I really think about it, I feel a little bit cool about reaching this age alive. I've fought pretty hard to survive against the odds. When I was 18, I was told that I wouldn't live to see past 20, because of my heart condition and all. This whole life from 20 to 35 has felt a bit like extra credit, an extra bonus round, or even an apology make-up gift from God for the first 18 years of my life. "Sorry your childhood sucked, yo," he'd say. "So I went ahead and pushed the hour hand of your death clock back a few notches. Have fun while it lasts, kid." Yeah, life has had its tough moments. The online journal is pretty representative of an average year in my life, which is kind of why I started it; I want to reflect with more granularity. And as I said earlier this year, look for patterns.

Posted by Punkie @ 03:02 PM EST [Link]

Tuesday, November 4, 2003

Taking the day off

I took today off. Why? Well, I was *supposed* to have Monday off, but then I got a call stating that our main Linux server was down, the new hard drive we put in was bad, and then two people went in and broke it further trying to "fix" it. So I went in, and with the help of another guy, we realized that some asshat had changed the fstab (directory that Linux uses to tell where stuff is on the hard drives and such), and left a typo. Thankfully, I fixed that and had it working shortly thereafter. Then I had to fix and placate people and services affected by this outage. Then I changed the root password so no one could "fix" anything while I was gone today. Again, I was rewarded by my insistent backups.

Then, more bad news, my son was tested for allergies, and he is allergic to 30 out of 35 major things they test allergies for. The places they pricked his skin swelled up like a relief map of a lava plain, and his arms looked like they had been scalded with acid and a ballpoint pen. Now, we knew he had this weird allergy to cold. If his skin is exposed to cold, it breaks out in hives. He's had this since he was an infant. Apparently, this is deadly, and now he has to carry some sort of adrenaline pen with him wherever he goes. Plus, he's allergic to animals, dust, mites, mold, pollen, and a bunch of different foods. Heather, Christine's niece, had the same thing, and so we're turning to her for advice.

On top of this, our company's insurance decided they aren't covering stuff in full anymore. They dropped to 90%, and will shortly drop to 80% with rises in co-pays and so on, which means CR's new medicine is only partially covered, which means our medical bills have skyrocketed. My company has been petitioned about this, so they decided to hold a meeting about it... after the insurance window has closed. So I have to either choose whether or not to renew based on no facts whatsoever. I think we're going to go with my wife's company's plan, since she's the head of their HR and everything. Today, she told me, "Thank god none of us got into an accident, we'd have gone bankrupt!"

On top of this, I did a full detailed analysis of our family's financial status, and learned we are losing $230/month more than we are earning. Savings are depleting at a rapid rate, and we have to take emergency action to try and stop this leak. If another disaster occurs to our family that involves money... we're screwed. Totally screwed. A few years ago, we were doing okay, but when I tried to figure out what happened, I realized that almost every utility bill we have had has doubled or tripled (not in consumption, in $$$/unit). Same with gas, car insurance, and a bunch of other bills. Also, our pay has not increased very much. I have had two raises since we moved here, both of them 3-4%. Christine has never had a raise, because her company is barely making it as it is. So our income has not kept up with inflation. I don't even want to talk about our investment portfolio. The economy stinks, and I don't think I can hold out much longer before I have to cash in what little I have left, no matter the loss.

My family won't let me take a second job, either. I figured I could make money as a part-time cashier for $10/hr at the shopping center behind our house. I figured if I worked part time at 20-30hrs a week, I could bring home about $600-900 more a month, which would put us in the clear. But they won't let me, citing health and sanity. At this point, worrying about keeping my house payments on time erodes my health and sanity. If I am going to be in a depressive funk, I might was well earn money while doing it. So we're butting heads on this.

We have a lot of options, more than most, so I am grateful for several things. One, that our marriage is pretty strong. I am fairly confident we could both be destitute and not leave one another. Second, I mean, if push comes to shove, we can sell the house, a lot of our possessions, cash out our 401k, possibly get a roommate, and sell off what little investments we have left (not necessarily in that order) before we're living out of our car. We have emergency plans in case one of us loses our jobs similar to that. Third... well, we have had worse. I was unemployed for two years once. Yes, we starved, lived in the projects, and were generally miserable, but we survived. And finally, I could always just try and make money writing, but I don't want the pressure to MAKE MONEY to write, because the odds are so low of making a living wage as a writer.

So, yes, I took today off. I frickin' earned it. Days like these make me GLAD I don't DRINK!

Posted by Punkie @ 09:01 PM EST [Link]

Monday, November 3, 2003

Upcoming Holiday Blues

Well, my vacation is almost over. I have today (Monday) off because I worked that Saturday the 25th. I haven't done as much as I would have liked, but I did relax, and I had a good Halloween. My next vacation is over Christmas break.

Memories of the beginning of November were a little bleak as a child, and still I don't care for it very much. Report cards always came out a week before my birthday, and they were always "disappointing." My birthdays were always a mixed grab bag of bittersweet anticipation. First off, I was from a middle upper-class family, and I can't really complain (in retrospect) that I kept getting told I would have gotten better gifts and stuff if my grades had been better. Because, honestly, only a few petty memories come to mind for things I asked for and never got, and I later bought them when I grew up so... hey, you know, why be sad about it now? But the worst was the upcoming holidays.

The worst part about the "mixed bag" of holidays was that my mother was an alcoholic. It was spinning some big game show wheel to see what was to be our fate. She could be sober and happy, sober and depressed, drunk and happy, drunk and depressed, or just drunk and passed out. Mostly the latter two as I got older. My father and I sometimes had our birthdays as awkward passages of "what do you do with a drunken housewife?" My mother did manage to be sober for most Thanksgiving and Christmas days, but towards the end, it was really hard. There were really only three reasons we ever were forced together as a family (meaning my parents and myself). The first was when I was in trouble. The second was for holidays, when I was allowed to eat at the "good table" (usually I ate alone in the kitchen), but this fate was almost as bad as the previous reason because my father used this opportunity to tease, belittle, and mentally torture me. The third was that damn yacht my father dragged us to, but that's such a huge separate topic, I won't go into it now, but imagine being dragged to a floating cabin where three very dysfunctional people were trapped in a room the size of a walk-in closet for a weekend, almost every weekend, for seven years. But this is about the second reason.

Birthdays, Easter, Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Years, and sometimes the 4th of July I had to endure the ritual of "eating at the good table." I'd wake up late, stay in my room or play outside by myself until the mid afternoon, kind of like awaiting jury duty. Then I'd be called when "the meal" was done. My mother, when sober, was a good cook. The food was never the problem, even though I was a picky eater until I was about 16. It was dreading being with my father, but enduring it because there was no way out. Sometimes my father would behave himself, but sometimes he'd have to make some snide comment about how stupid I was, that I (and my mother) complained too much, what mistakes he thought I had made with my life, and how I was essentially a disappointment to the world in general, which hated me, and hated everyone else, for that matter, so there! Great pep talk about how uncaring the world was.

Now, in my father's defense, I realized at about age 9 that "being stupid" was the role I had to play. After a lot of soul-searching about why my parents flew off the handle so much led to the discovery that, by gum, if I played the "stupid role," I got into far less arguments, and got abused a lot less. Sometimes, it was almost like watching a narcotic fix, like, "he's stupid right? I'm better RIGHT? RIGHT? YES? Oh, he is dumb... okay... ahhhh... much, much better... yes... mmmm... okay, everything can go on now... [happy sigh]" My big problem was I was still mad at the insults and the totally unfair and totally untrue accusations about me and my friends, so I tended towards a more "passive aggressive" approach. I sometimes played the part TOO well, like walking around into walls, eyelids half closed, forgetting to use the fork properly... like I was a total drugged out imbecile who needed round-the-clock supervision. It took a lot of practice to subdue the anger and just stay quiet and submissive, whimper when insulted, and cry a lot. Crying made my father laugh a lot, and was a good tension release in some sick and twisted way. It was always a mind game, and I was never really all that good at it because he held all the cards as to how he was going to act.

Sometimes, a fight would start mid-meal, and that meant that the meal would end with either me or my mother in tears. Now, my father never openly insulted my mother. He patronized her, yes, but never called her names or made accusations towards her intellect the way he did with me. My mother would usually start crying that we were always fighting, which was true, so I can't blame her for that. It tore her apart how much my father and I would fight. Of course, I didn't fight much in front of him, because a few times that I did, he beat me severely (he didn't lay a hand on me otherwise, just only when I brazenly stood up for myself and cornered him in his own faulty logic). But when my mother and I were alone, I would rant and rave about what an awful man he was. She stood up for him as best she could, stating I didn't understand, and how grateful I should be that I had all the things that I did that neither of them had growing up in the slums of Chicago. This was true. I got free rent, I was usually fed steady meals, and I didn't have to pay for my own clothes and school supplies until I got a job at 16. Again, I got most toys I wanted, and compared to some abused kids who got a lot less, I was "better off" this way. My trade for these luxuries, of course, were my landlords' insanity.

Part of this insanity was "gift-giving time," a strange medley of both my father and I refusing to give each other a gift, and my mother having to buy a gift, and trying to get one of us to sign a card of some sort. In the later years, my mother did without the cards and speech altogether, and what we got each other was almost as much a surprise to the giver as it was to the recipient. "Ah... I got him a shaving set, I see.," I'd think, while my father would openly ask something like, "Oh, why did I just give Greg-gry a D&D book?" followed by a disgusted sigh.

Hell, no wonder my mother drank.

This insanity built up for my whole life, and who knows what other baggage was carried over from the ten years they were married before I came along? Finally, in an act of defiance that was supposed to prove a point, my mother cancelled Christmas in 1986. She usually did all the decorating, all the cooking, all the fuss, and no one seemed to appreciate it. She was right, of course. So she decided in 1986 that, "Screw the work, don't even take the decorations down from the attic, or buy a damn tree, I'll buy a small 1-foot, pre-lit tree, put it on our coffee table, and there you go. Merry fucking Christmas." Those weren't her words, of course, but I think that's what she was trying to do, hoping that we'd try and convince her otherwise. Instead, we said, "Oh, okay," like she had just announced something mundane, like she was having tuna for her lunch instead of ham salad, possibly mixed with good news, like she had found a $50 bill on the street the other day. Great, mom, more power to you! I spent Christmas day at Kate's house, and then the next day, flew to Texas to be with my friend Neal through New Year's. "Hey," I recall thinking, "this is the best Christmas ever!"

A few weeks later, my mother swigged down two bottles of tranquilizers with a bottle of vodka, and cut the curtain on her disastrous life abruptly like a Broadway play that was going nowhere, anyway. There were other reasons, of course, why she did this, but I am sure the total realization that we were not a family didn't help matters.

While fall is my favorite season, weather-wise, it does have that bitter tang of all the baggage I mentioned above. My first birthday after my mother's death I vowed to totally forget, and thankfully, some friends understood, and I actually forgot about my birthday, until the next day, when my friend (and roommate at the time) Bruce said, "Hey, yesterday was your birthday, wasn't it? Uh... want to go to lunch?" (we were at a sci-fi con, Philcon, I think). The first Thanksgiving and Christmas I spent afterwards living with Bruce, who was Jewish, who had an oddball family, and invited oddball friends to our gatherings as well. My first Christmas without my parents was spent planning and helping set up Evecon 5. It was like my slate was being wiped clean to start my own traditions, and God bless them for that. Bruce, Cheryl, Liska, and Debbie really helped me move on, and were exactly what I needed at the time. I even decided to like Christmas, no matter what the odds were against me, just to be defiant towards my life. Even through retail. Even through the fact the woman I married was born Christmas day and is very bitter about it.

Continuing on a tradition that Bruce and Cheryl set, Christine and I try to have friends over for Thanksgiving who may not have a family to go home to, or have one but don't want to be with them (because their families are buttheads like mine was). Christine came from a big family, and she grew up with huge family gatherings that ended with her grandmother's death (she was the matriarch who held everyone together - when she died, it all fragmented), so she misses a lot of that, but doesn't want to cook a huge meal if it's only going to be the three of us.

Posted by Punkie @ 03:16 AM EST [Link]

Sunday, November 2, 2003

Storytime - The Canadian Pervert

I used to work for a telecommunications department that managed several call centers for various tech support and billing duties for a large ISP back in 1997.

One day, we were called on a rare security issue. Apparently, some guy was calling and abusing techs randomly. He would start out with a legitimate sounding question, and then after about two minutes, would switch to either an abusive rant, or go into disgusting sexual detail about what he was "doing" at the moment (usually to female techs). This was spread across all the call centers, so it took a while for everyone to say, "Hey, I got him too!" Finally, a bunch of call center managers asked to track this issue, and they gave us the pervert's caller ID. It turned out to be a very weird project.

After some research, we found that this guy made over 300 calls a week (at least from that number), with the average call of about 3-4 minutes. That's 15-20 *hours* of calls a week, or 2-3 hours daily in 3-4 minute increments, that this clown was taking out of his day to abuse random techs across the US. The number was traced to a number in Vancouver, but the locals were not very helpful in tracking this man down because, "He's in a rural area, and we can't get there until the roads clear, eh?" (it was deep winter). The Canadian authorities didn't seem very helpful in attitude, either, they thought this was kind of humorous. One even said, "Let the old timer have his fun, okay?"

But most of these call centers were on toll-free numbers, so this man's "fun" was costing them about $200 - 300 weekly. So we set up a program that would take his caller ID, route it to a test voice server (where we tested voice automation programming before releasing to live call centers), and set him in a continuous "RNA" (ring-no-answer) loop. This way, since we didn't pick up the call, we wouldn't get charged for the call, and all he would hear was continuous ringing like no one would pick up the phone. After we set this in place, we found an amazing thing: through a call monitoring system, he was "building up calls" in our fake phone queue, which meant that he was calling, letting it ring, putting it on hold, calling again, and so on... until he reached about 20 calls at once.

So my boss's boss (a guy named Rob) had enough of this, and dialed the number himself. To our surprise, the man answered, and the call went something like this:

Guy: Uh... hello?
Rob: Is this a business or a residence?
Guy: Why? Who is this?
Rob: I am guessing you're not a business because you didn't announce your company when you picked up.
Guy: Who told you to call me???
Rob: Can you tell me how you are building up 20 calls in my queue from this one number?
Guy: What are you talking about?
Rob: We are monitoring this number, and we are watching it dial repeatedly our call centers. Are you using a PBX?

Then the guy became abusive, and threatened to call the authorities if we called him ever again. So we called him again, but he either blocked our number or just wouldn't pick up anymore, so we knew that he was now tracing our PBX. So Rob called him from his cell phone, and the guy just picked up and screamed curses at Rob. After some research, we quickly found out he was calling behind a PBX. He must have figured we were routing out his number to a dead RNA loop, because after a few days, he seemed to manage to actually falsify his caller ID (it would come out as just the Vancouver area code, and we couldn't screen that or no one in Vancouver could call one of our centers).

Well, now the company brought the cost issue into it, and because this person was committing a federal crime across the US border, the FBI had to open a case. After months of working with Canadian authorities, we found out he was an accomplished phone technician of some status among his peers ("an upsanding citizen" was the term used). He was apparently making these abusive calls through a security hole in a Canadian/US toll free system, and probably using his own customer sites for making these calls. Shortly after this, the calls ceased. I guess the RMCP were prodded to do something.

I want to know how someone in that kind of job found the time and wanted to exert the effort to do such a weird thing. I guess he was lonely, or just hated our company or something. Some people.

Posted by Punkie @ 05:19 AM EST [Link]

Saturday, November 1, 2003

Halloweeny Two Thousand Threeny

I really had high hopes for Halloween this year, but after last night, I am never going to do Halloween again. First off, I had no idea those bracelets were flammable. Second, kids are so sensitive, and parents are really too permissive about coporal punishment. Those brats deserved to be beaten with my bamboo cane after knocking over...

Just kidding! Halloween was Great!

We had a blast last night. First, the weather was WONDERFUL. It was 75 degrees out, mostly clear skies, almost no wind (which, when setting up props, is a boon). Second, Sean came by with his wonderfuls kids (and, really, they are wonderful and polite, I know I keep saying that, but it should be noted), and Sara also came over to provide conversation about her new job, her parents, school, and other topics. The stuff we gave out was a hit, and we had more kids this year than I planned for, which wasn't as bad as it sounds, because I had a backup plan.

We first moved here in 2000, but that year, some pervert was prowling around our school playgrounds, and we hadn't caught him yet. We had maybe 15 kids. In 2001, it was just after 9/11, and we were all freaked out, Christine had broken her ankles, and Oreo was sick. We has about 10 kids that year because everyone was convinced we'd be attacked on every holiday. Last year in 2002, we had that sniper shooting at people around here. We had about 20 kids. So I sort of assumed about 25 this year.

We had about 45.

I had only made 35 goody bags, and then I ran out of the "good candy" as well as the squeezy monster horns, but we had enough glow bracelets (I got a 50-count tube), as well as "back-up candy" which were Tootsie pops and Smarties. After it was all over, we had a bag of spider rings (I know, from my past, that 144 will last you forever), some Tootsie pops, a lot of Smarties, and a few extra empty goody bags. The glow bracelets were a hit (especially with parents), so we'll do that again next year. I am not sure about the goody bags because they were tied close, so the kids/parents won't see what's in them until they get home. We know some of the neighbors with kids around here, so maybe we'll get feedback later on.

Most kids were aged 10 and under, and I saw NO teens. I usually expect like a few of them (and we have gotten them before), but not this year. All but a few kids had parents in the background, and most traveled in clusters of 3-4. A few kids were notably grabby (oddly enough, most were girls), but most were polite. There were no real clever costumes this year, and only a few looked hand-made. But I was just glad there were so many!

I noted, at least on this street (which is very long, only has one bend which we're on, so we can see either end in the far distance), only about 1/3rd of the houses were handing out anything (assuming they went by the standard porchlight alert system), and only about 10 houses bothered to decorate, But those that did, man, were pretty decked out. Three houses down, where a policeman and his family live, they had it done like a creepy crime scene. He had his cop car, police lights, and everything out. They also had a huge inflatable Frankenstein, a large skeleton, fog, and a lot of extra details that went for more whismy than scary. Another house has a realistic graveyard, complete with stone columns, iron railings, and realistic headstones. One house had a HUGE spiderweb made of ropes, with a huge wooden spider on top of it.

Christine set up the tombstones, the grim reaper, an a man crawling out of his grave. We also got a so-called "easy-to-assemble" coffin, which was not easy to assemble, and sprung apart at the slightest touch. I put up fake spiderwebs across the windows, and set up candles everywhere. Then we parked our two cars in a line, and sat under our eaves in some comfy plastic deck chairs, ordered pizza, and Christine, Sara, and I handed out candy and glow bracelets to everybody. Of course, I forgot to take pictures, but Sean took some, so maybe he'll send some to me and I'll put them up.

All in all, it was a good day, and I look forward to Halloween 2004.

Posted by Punkie @ 11:21 AM EST [Link]