Friday, December 31, 2004

Happy New Year... f#@!&% spammers!

Comments had to be turned off for now because a spammer go ahold of my comments script, and was blasting my blog with spam.

But Happy New Year anyway to anyone reading this.

Posted by Punkie @ 11:02 PM EST [Link]

Thursday, December 30, 2004

What Ever Happened to Late Night TV?

When I was a kid, and got my first black and white TV, I started watching late night television. Channel 20 had Benny Hill at 11, and then usually I'd watch Carson if I couldn't sleep. When I got married, I started watching the Channel 4 news at 11, and then we'd fall asleep to Carson. That was until 1992, when ol' Johnny retired. Then late night TV slid into mediocrity.

What happened to the news? God, it's turned into junior-high level tabloids. Channel 4 is the lesser evil, but now I watch the Daily Show with John Stewart. We started watching that show when Craig Kilborn was hosting it, and we didn't think he could be topped, but Stewart did a smart thing: he didn't try and imitate Craig, he came up with his own stuff, and made the show his own.

I rarely watch Leno or Letterman. I used to LOVE Letterman if I could stay up late enough back in the 1980s, but his show has been coasting on inertia for a long time now since the change in TV companies. When Dave first started, he was nuts. He was tossing stuff from buildings, had crazy guests, edgy comedy, and I still say some of his old, old catch phrases in my head, like "Them bats is smart, they use radar!" But now it's just the same crap over and over. Leno never quite made the Tonight Show his own, and what's left is a flabby, cheap sex joke factory with media guests that are made uninteresting by the maudlin environment. Conan O'Brien always seems a bit scared to really take his comedy over the edge, so he gets 80% there before most of his schtick falls short of the finish line. But he's the best NBC has right now.

I miss a lot of the older zaniness. Not the planned kind, but the half-planned kind,where anything could go wrong and often did. I miss people trying new stuff. I miss guests who came on half drunk or stoned, or interacting with other guests like it was their own living room. I miss running gags that were subtle, which made them funny, and then they stopped before they became overplayed and unfunny.

I also don't like the newer trend shows have that send some guy on the street to act like a jerk or make common people look stupid with rolled eyes and straight lines. It makes those with odd talents seem less like individuals, and more like losers who had nothing else going for them. That guy may look funny because he can imitate owl calls or play flamenco guitar with a hand mixer, but he's got people who love him, good friends who know his secrets, and fond memories of his childhood. Give him some respect.

If I had a late night talk show, I'd have guests pile up on the couch. I wouldn't introduce them one at a time, I'd have all three of them come on in the beginning and then take turns speaking to them for an hour. I'd let other guests ask questions. I'd take one or two from the audience. I wouldn't have skits, I'd have running gags that framed the show, but I wouldn't play them into the ground. I'd have fake commercials like SNL, but only once a week, and keep people guessing. I'd have bits where things blew up or got destroyed in a violent manner. I'd take suggestions by e-mail. I'd never make fun of guests, audience members, or people on the street. My opening monologue would be short, and in front of a curtain, kicking it old school. I would never make fun of people's physical features, love life, or something that could easily be construed as a personal attack. My monologue would introduce a theme from some recent news story, and carry the theme throughout the show. I'd have a sidekick, maybe a small band, but no big number.

It would flop in the ratings, but hey, I'd have a good time.

Posted by Punkie @ 12:06 AM EST [Link]

Wednesday, December 29, 2004

What Happened?

Late at night, part of me wonders, "What happened?"

What happened to that teenaged kid who was sure he was going to go into astrophysics? He bought all the books, watched all the PBS shows, even met Carl Sagan. He had a plan to do his undergrad work at George Mason, then transfer to Carnegie Melon, UH, or ASU. He was going to study the stars, try and prove that FTL was possible, and study the nature of time itself. In his basic astrophysics course, he wrote an essay on tachyon particles. Well, his life took a serious turn in another direction, that's what. It was never meant to be.

I really don't have many regrets. Now and again, I have a pang of loss. I was watching "Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban," and they were in some pub-like setting, where a wizard was reading, "A Brief History of Time." I recall buying that book the moment it hit the shelves, and reading it, cover to cover. I understood it then; I couldn't even begin to tell you what it said now. Turns out he was wrong anyway, but I have deep respect for a man who not only admits it, but paid his bets. I have grown to disagree with some of what Carl Sagan said, too, but I think I still agree with him on most points.

When I look back at the semi-goth kid who came from the wasteland that was the McLean suburbs, I can't say that his plan for his life was very realistic. I would say the most likely scenario, supposing his mother didn't commit suicide and he did go through with college, that he would burn out or end his own life after a series of immature decisions that ricocheted into a chain reaction of that ended in eventual self-implosion. He was attracted to the wrong type of girl, had a few bad apples for friends, virtually no parental support or approval, and if he didn't mange to end his own life, he'd still be living at home, taking care of a drunken mother slowly being driven insane by her constant drinking, creeping memory loss, and desperate denial. His mathematical desire for control would curdle into a mental psychosis with no spiritual guidance, and all the scenarios I play just doesn't end well.

Someone had to die, apparently.

But late at night, after reading some manual or web page about some technical gobbledegook, my mind tends to wonder "what if" with the past. It's a dangerous and useless endeavor, but a familiar place. Sometimes I feel overwhelmed with all the technical knowledge I have to contain in this mass of nerves in my skull, and I wonder if I have "strayed to far for The Plan," fully realizing that "The Plan" is not something I fully understand, and I am definitely not in control of. Some of the spiritual advice I have gotten over the years speaks of a sort of path we are sent along to learn something. I also realize that "my" soul is not really "mine" in the same sense that, say, personal property is. One of the best lessons I have learned is that my brain is a tool. My life on this planet is finite; it has a beginning and an end. This mass of carbon atoms that contains my soul is merely a vehicle, like of like a tour bus. I am supposed to learn from everything I see. Instead of fighting for control of the tour bus, I watch as things go by, and become delighted by the things I am learning. I think every experience, every person I meet, and everything I read or watch on TV has some significance in some lesson. Most of the time, I am not paying attention to the lesson, I am obsessed with the hair of the passenger in front of me, or how uncomfortable the seat is. But then I think, should I surrender all control and merely take life passively? That seems wrong. There has to be a balance somewhere.

When I was a young teen, I studied Buddhism. I learned from the lessons of Sidharta, learned about "the middle way," balance, life force, and all that stuff now slapped around the New Age Crystal Business as merely keywords to hook the eyes of people who link money to answers. It influenced me greatly. Part of why I turned to science was it was full of balance; nature's accounting spreadsheets. Every action has an opposite and equal reaction, mass cannot be created or destroyed, it comes from or turns to energy and vice versa. The zen of computers can all be reduced to a balance of ones and zeros. All logical switches of on or off. And when you combine millions of ons and offs, you can create wonder like this web page. And that was what I was searching for in astrophysics; the basic components that make the universe. I wanted to get to the core of things. I wanted to break down the cosmic clock to its individual gears, then sort them, label them, group them, and reassemble them back into a working system. Perhaps even a different one.

So, really, I kind of ended up doing something similar. I may not be working on the cosmic secrets of the universe, but why you can't reach a certain network, why your printer doesn't work, or how to make your text all kinds of funky colors!

That's what happened.

Posted by Punkie @ 04:00 AM EST [Link]

Tuesday, December 28, 2004

A Cold, Sunny Tuesday

Well, it's a nice and boring Tuesday.

Christine had to work in Baltimore. I woke up, did some house cleaning, and then working on my home network for a while. I browsed the web. Played a few XBox games with CR. Sean and Chance came to pick up their fish (I was fish-sitting her Betta). Debbie is staying for the week, but she stayed in the guest room all day, which isn't hard to do since it has its own bathroom and kitchen. I didn't feel like entertaining, anyway.

Last night, Matt and Anya were over, and we just hung out.

I have the rest of the week off, and plan to do a lot of nothing. Or just catch up on other stuff. I might even get back to demolishing the bathroom, who knows? Some of the cleaning I did today was the kind of cleaning I had put off for a long time, and its all simple stuff. I washed the master bathroom floor, sorted all the plastic storage containers in the kitchen, and straightened up the kitchen pantry. Things have been so chaotic this year, a lot of little stuff got ignored, and if it didn't turn into "big stuff," like, say a leak, then it stayed ignored. It seems stupid, but a lot of these jobs were an hour or less, and I wondered why I never got to them before now. Then I remembered the feeling of helplessness most of this year, and how these were just symptoms of being depressed and not wanting to deal with anything that might get too complicated.

Speaking of depression, my seasonal depression comes and goes, but so far, thanks to the lack of personal disasters in the past few weeks, my depression seems to have been less pressing that normal. I only have periods of moodiness, usually late at night, or with migraines, where I want to curl up into a ball and cry my eyes out, but they seem less ... intrusive than they used to be. This has been a trend over the last few years, and I am wondering if I can actually beat depression, or at least permanently reduce it to be almost negligible.

Posted by Punkie @ 05:45 PM EST [Link]

Sunday, December 26, 2004

Happy Holidays - The Story so Far

Happy Holidays, everyone. I hope you got a lot of charisma presence this year.

My holidays started off on Wednesday evening, when I left half an hour early from work. I got the vacuum cleaner fixed with a little hot glue and a belt change. It seems to work as well as it used to, but it is noticeably noisier.

Last Insane Shopping Day
Thursday we had a full plate. I slept late, and then we had our friend Dan and his new girlfriend Liegh over for a while. We went out to Beacon Street Grill near my house, and talked about the music industry (Dan's a band teacher for Ohio Middle Schools currently, and Liegh is a musical theory professor at Oregon State). Then we came back to see Widget go nuts and run around in circle for about 20-30 times. That was a lot funnier than I make it sound, but you had to be there. Later that evening, we went out with our friends Nate and Jen, who then unfolded this... saga of a Soap Opera Horror House that's been going on with his family. A lot of it is private, but suffice to say, it could compete with a convention fandom love triangle any day.

Then I went to the mall to get Christine gifts. Now, before you laugh and think I just kept putting it off, let me tell you why. When it was announced a few months ago that there would be huge layoffs in our company in early December, we had to put off spending any money on gifts until the layoffs were final, which didn't happen until two weeks ago. THEN we had to do our shopping. I relied a lot of wish lists this year, which I don't usually like doing for Christine because... it seems impersonal. I like to find rare and unique items for her, you know? Well, I placed a huge order through Amazon.com, and I made sure that I chose items that were in stock (some were backordered), would deliver in 2 days or less, and I chose the shopping that would arrive before Christmas (which was 10 days away, so I chose the 3-5 day option). This order also had her birthday gifts in it. Well, Amazon split the order up, because, and I am sure they said this somewhere and I didn't see it, two of the items were "allied merchants" or something, and were shipped separately. One was from Sharper Image, and another was from some obscure massage product company. Both tacked on their own shipping charges on top of what Amazon charged me, which was annoying in itself, but those gifts arrived 4 days later, so I guess that evened out (but the $5.99 item with a $11.95 shipping charge was annoying). So, after all that, Amazon sent me a notice the rest of my delivery would be shipped January 6th! WTF?? So I called them, and that number was really hard to find, let me tell you. On top of that, I was on hold for quite a long time before I got someone (who did speak English, thankfully), and she said that, yes, my shipment had been delayed because I was ordering from two warehouses in New Jersey and California, and due to some recent vendor shipping issues, all orders from those locations were delayed unless I had selected FedEx Priority or something, and even then there was no guarantee. Gaaaah! So now, half of Christine's gifts would not arrive until Jan 6th. I got a lot of apologies, told I wasn't the only one affected, and so on, but that didn't help much. In desperation, I placed an order with Newegg.com on Tuesday, thinking, "I can get her some gifts this way, but they'll arrive the week after."

Even though I ordered standard shipping, Newegg got my order to me Christmas Eve. About 40 hours from order to doorstep. Damn, they are good! So now, I had more than half of Christine's presents, but no "big gift," really. When I gave Christine her birthday presents (a massage kit with a vibrating neck thing, a weird vibrating head spider, and some knobby back massage thing), I explained the problem I had with Amazon.

Turns out she was having the same problem with my "big gift." She got it from a seller on Ebay, but this had its own complications (explained later). So we agreed that we could give each other pictures of things we meant to give her. But a lot of what I had would not leave her much, so that's why I went to the mall.

The mall wasn't so bad; I have seen much worse. CR and I literally went the entire length of Fair Oaks Mall about 6-7 times in the two hours we were there. I wanted to get Christine one of those "all-in-one" retro video game controllers, but the cart that sold them when CR, Chance, and I were there was gone. So I wanted to get Christine a Shiatsu massager, but Brookstone was out of them. I did find "Mario Party 5," which was a game she wanted. Finally, I manager to convince Brookstone to sell me their display model, which they did an a sizeable discount (25%), so that was a double bonus.

Christmas Eve
Friday, Christine went to West Virginia to get her sister Debbie. The plan ended up for me to stay home, and get the house ready, while she left early, drove to West VA, picked up Debbie, drove Debbie to see her biological father (whom she hadn't seen in 30+ years), drove back home, picked me up so we could do some last minute food shopping. I mean, we played it down to the wire. So, while she was gone, I set up her present, which was setting up wireless in our home. I had studied how to do this securely, and spent most of Friday multi-tasking in helping CR make a gingerbread house (he did most of it himself, and did a pretty good job), cleaning the kitchen, setting up a wireless network, getting the Windows laptop hooked up, wrapping all my gifts to people, vacuuming around, picking up stuff, washing some clothes, and I pretty much only got "rest" while fooling with the WiFi. My biggest issue was getting my Linux laptop working, but I gave up quickly because it wasn't as important as everything else. Oh, and I upgraded the memory in our HP Laptop from 120mb to 632mb with a new 512mb SO DIMM. It makes the laptop run a lot faster, but I think the BIOS is having some issues with Shadow or something, I'll have to look into it.

Warning: the following paragraph is not for those of mild stomach who think kitty barf is disgusting. Artoo, who has no sense at all, kept trying to eat Christmas ribbon off of anything he could find. Normally, we don't use ribbon for that reason, but we received a box of gifts from a friend who used standard shiny ribbon. Artoo got caught trying to eat it twice, and I resealed the box so he couldn't get at it. Well, at some point, he tore into the box and ate a lot of ribbon. The bows were a mess of foamy spit and shredded tooth marks. And so the rest of the day, Artoo was barfing everywhere, I would say about 1-2 times an hour. And he just HAD to barf on Christine's side of the bed several times, on her pillow, on a pile of her clean clothes, and so on. On top of all the work I was already doing, I was cleaning up after the cat and doing laundry. First, the barf was chunky, which meant that Widget ate it. Gross, but handy. Then the barf was watery, then foamy and clear until he finally stopped a few hours later. I had to clean up after him, and when I hear the familiar "gack-unk gack-unk" of my stupid cat horking foamy ribbon parts, I tried to get him to put him in a crate, but then he'd run away under a bed, and I didn't have time to get some broom and fish him out. He knew what he did was wrong, but didn't want to be punished. Days later, I am still finding more barf that he barfed near blankets or dirty clothes, then covered it up. The litter box was certainly festive this weekend, too. Man, I am mad at that cat. I called him "ass-cat" all day.

The Wireless/RAM upgrade was going to be a surprise, but because I got distracted with Artoo barfing everywhere to hide the evidence well. I left all the wrappers and boxes in the shipping box it came in, and Christine found it while digging through boxes to find the gifts she had to wrap. Dammit! Ass-cat!

Christine got home with Debbie, and I went to the store to get last minute items for Christmas dinner. The store was a madhouse. I mean, the mall wasn't bad the day before, but the food store, an hour before closing on Christmas Eve, was filled with dumbass people who didn't so much as act openly rude as standing around, blocking traffic. I mean, every aisle had at least one person who parked their cart in the middle of the isle, and blocked traffic to one side while they surveyed the shelves of groceries like an art student ponders a new gallery in Soho. Many people would be on their cell phones, gabbing away about something non-grocery related (I can forgive, "Did you say you wanted candied yams or regular?" but not, "So next week, I'll get my hair done because Mitzy said that Alice told her that Susan was going to do the same thing on Monday, and I can't stand she has to be the first don't you know..." if you are blocking aisles). Also, the store seemed out of so many things, it looked like they were going out of business. I am assuming that was due to shipment schedules around the holidays and all, but it made for some creative shopping experiences. Lucky for me, they had almost everything I needed, except unsalted butter. Then I came home, aggravated by stupid people standing in aisles, futzed around on the web, and then went to sleep.

Christmas Day
Saturday, I awoke with a TERRIBLE headache. I had run out of Zyrtec (which the pharmacy won't get back in until Monday), and my sinuses were killing me. My nose ran, my head throbbed. Ugh, not a nice way to wake up Christmas morning. Hot coffee, which sometimes helped, did not, and so I took some painkillers and hung around in a fog all morning. The gifts I got were good, which included two Lego sets, two tee-shirts, a headlamp, some chocolate, and other assorted goodies. My "gift that hasn't arrived yet" is a new Palm Pilot. Woo! CR got an X-Box system, which really wasn't a smart move financially, but I hope to get that back in our text return next year. Christine got a lot of the stuff off her Hot Topic Wish list, including a book, a pin-up girl calendar, and some assorted purses and bags.

Some gifts from friends of note:
- The Heare family, in a combined Christmas/Birthday gift to our family, got us $200 in gift certificates to Home Depot and Lowes. I was floored. This couldn't have been easy on their budget, and I was humbled by their generosity. They said it was to help get our bathroom redone, and that's what it's going to do, since I managed to fix the vacuum cleaner.
- Our friend April in Boston scored big points with the gifts that nailed our personalities. I am wearing mine right now, which shows the Family Guy's "Quahog 5 News Team" in a compromising position. CR got a shirt that says, "Note to self: Do Not Eat Pink Insulation; It is not cotton candy." Christine got some kick-ass socks (she's a sock collector).
- Matt (of Matt and Anya) got me a book on Ninjas. Not just any book, but this one. I had heard about this web site, and glossed over the first page, but the book is so hysterical, I can only read a few lines at a time. I haven't laughed so hard at tongue-in-cheek writing like this since The Gallery of Regrettable Food.

Bruce and Cheryl stopped by to say hello, and we chatted a bit. It was so good to see them. But after they left, my head hurt so bad despite the painkillers, I went back to bed and slept until about 6pm. Then I felt WAY better. I spent the rest of the evening being online, writing this blog, and playing some of CR's Xbox games with him.

Sunday was pretty uneventful, except for Matt and Anya coming over. We exchanged gifts, talked a lot, and then they broke to play cards while I worked on getting the WiFi to work on Linux. No luck yet.

I have the rest of the week off. I plan to to just bum around.

Posted by Punkie @ 08:17 PM EST [Link]

Wednesday, December 22, 2004

Ramblings about fandom and con attendance

I had this in my mailbox to post in my journal for a long time. I just re-found it. It was in response to this entry by someone on a list about why there's a drop in con attendance:

> For most of the mundane world Sci Fi rarely means something . . . oh,
> Canticle for Leibowitz, or the best of Heinlein (take your pick); the
> usual mundane attitude is bimbos in space, aliens seeking sex with buxom
> blondes, and other piffle.

This is not meant as a personal attack on you, or anybody, but I hear that comment a lot, and I don't totally agree with it, and find this to be a part of the problem of con attendance. We're not as ostracized as we think we are, sometimes.

I mean, maybe in the 70s and 80s, that might have been the case, but sci-fi now is mainstream. Reading and watching sci-fi is not considered exclusively a nerdy thing to do, with a stigma it used to have (although, it still seems to have a macho-male stigma to it, eg, Spike TV). Look at the latest blockbuster films: Spiderman, Lord of the Rings, even Star Wars. Plus there's been so much original SF&F that I'd say fully 25-30% of all blockbuster films now have sci-fi or fantasy elements in them like the Matrix, Gothika, Dark City, and so on. And many of them are GOOD films. Star Wars books making the bestseller list, I could go on. But this link will do it for me:

http://film.guardian.co.uk/features/featurepages/0,4120,1104848,00.html

And we're SO guilty of doing the same thing. I mean, the fact we use words like "mundanes" and "the outside world" shows that we think people not in fandom are a bunch of non-intellectual sheeple or something. True, there are a lot of dumb people out there, but personally, that applies to the same percentage of fandom as well. Stupidity knows NO cultural bounds...

I think a lot of people in fandom are still stinging from rejections they had as a teen, and think the world is still as cliquish. It isn't. I mean, any more than fandom is, that's for sure. Sure, there will always be people who don't like you because you are a sci fi lover, or "read too much" (I haven't heard that since the early 1980s, I would laugh at anyone who said that to me now... like if someone said, "You cook too much!"), or are overweight, look odd, or whatever. That's just humanity, and you can either deal with it, or not, it's a free country, and I am not in a position to tell anyone what to do.

So why do we have cons now? That's the question we should be asking. Some people have brought up a lot of good questions here, and comments about attendance, panels, and so on. I see fandom as having lost focus, and I don't mean that we've "strayed the path" or anything as grand-sounding, but a lot of the reasons we started to have cons are no longer as valid as they used to be, and maybe we need to sit down, find the core values we hold dear, and see how we can freshen them up a little, modernize them, get new ideas, and make our cons fun in new ways.

Who are we, anyway? Why do we gather? How do we "spread the word" and make new contacts?

In some ways, this has already happened. Like take the computer rooms at cons. Before, a "computer room" was a bunch of old-school, hardware jocks who loved tinkering with equipment work loaned them to display that lights here can activate lights there. Then it kind of became a game room. Now it's a LAN party, with ways to connect to the Internet. Compare the people who used to be in the computer room in 1983 with the people who are in it now. The focus shifted. That's not bad by any means, but it shows that things change.

Panels haven't changed since 1983. Why did we go to them in the first place? I can only speak for myself, but I wanted to see the people I had heard about, and see how they fielded questions, perhaps even my questions. Well, I don't go to many panels anymore because I feel not many panels hold anything of interest to me. I don't know the people, and the panels I do know ... uh, I am usually IN them. And my audiences range from nobody (it's happened), to a packed room. I find the "packed room" panels are usually what's currently hot, like anime, computer OS wars, and the like. Some cons I have known have panels based on what their people know, not "Wow, people want to hear about this, let's go to a college and find someone." Those cons have low panel attendance sometimes. "We have
this girl who can talk about SCA period-style dresses," says the con, and places said girl in a panel... without actually checking if that's of any interest to more than a few people. I am not saying "Can the SCA dress wench!" no, absolutely not. You never know what's going to be popular, and you should always try new things (or at least, provide those few seamstresses with something to go to if the room was going to be empty anyway). Like dinosaurs are not really sci-fi so much, but the late Hal Clement's Balticon panel on fossils was always packed, even though it was rated as "kid's programming." Hell, I have always thought "kid's programming" was so blurred at cons, anyway.

"Hmmm... you're an awfully big kid...!" (I guess we all are, in fandom)

So that's for us. Now we need more people. Why? Well, in my personal opinion, I meet new friends that way. Every con, I make at least one new friend, or rediscover a friend I hadn't known that well before. So how do we attract more people?

Ads are one thing, but with no good target market, we might as well put a message in a bottle and put in Lake Eire, saying, "Hey, sci fi people are curious, one will surely pick up the bottle..." What ever happened to going to colleges and high schools? Con's haven't done that since... my high school. Colleges are rich with free-thinking, fun-to-be-with people (I see fandom as the same demographic). How about computer clubs?

Does your con have a marketing department?

Okay, this letter is a bit long, and I rambled, so to summarize:

- We should stop thinking in terms of "us and them"
- We should try and define who we really are, instead of "not them"
- We should start thinking about the goal of the con, stick with a theme
- We should rethink how we are doing the cons by department
- We should have a marketing group

Posted by Punkie @ 09:21 AM EST [Link]

Sunday, December 19, 2004

The weekend - Christine's Birthday Party

Yesterday could have gone better.

It was Christine's Birthday Party, and she was sick. I have had a minor cold/asthma for about a week, but things have been so bad this year, I felt it was hardly worth mentioning in comparison. I got it from CR, who gave it to me, and now Christine has it. The Zyrtec I normally take has taken the sniffles out, but I have a lot of congestion in my lungs that has triggered multiple asthma attacks for over a week. Luckily, no one has asked me to run a marathon, so I have been able to sustain most of the attacks simply by resting.

But first, I don't think it's fair Christine's birthday gets fucked up every year because of Christmas. Not only can we never really celebrate with friends on the day itself, but finding a weekend where people are free near Christmas is a task an a half. I am very grateful to those who CAN make it every year, because even though we planned this WAY in advance, it was also the same date as my company Christmas party (I didn't really want to go anyway), a Yule things that some friends of mine were having, a date I was supposed to help Kory demo a game, FanTek Bad Movie night... you just can't win.

On top of this she was SICK, which it totally unfair to her, and I must protest that Christine works so hard all year for the family and friends, and to be sick on her birthday party is a really a low blow that The Powers That Be. I love her so much, and she gives so much, and she is such a great person that... well, I could go on, but the point is I am just mad at the germs that decided to infect her on this weekend.

Fuck germs!

The moment I got home Friday, I went into high gear and hit the ground running. Because I had been so busy and under the weather, my usual housework duties had slid, so I spent most of Friday and part of Saturday morning cleaning the kitchen (it was so comically bad, I almost took a picture, but Christine would have KILLED me if I posted it), doing laundry, and doing the bills, which I had been avoiding because it depresses the hell out of me.

The raise I got? Now negated because our health insurance at work went up about $150/month and mortgage went up $110/month. Now I am actually taking in LESS than before the raise. God dammit. Just when I thought I was getting ahead. To cut costs, be have lowered the thermostat in the house to 65, and it seems gas prices are dropping, so that will help a little, too.

Then the vacuum cleaner broke. Actually, it broke a few days ago when I got too close to a shoe, and it sucked in the shoestring, and before I could turn the vacuum off, it snapped the beater belt and stripped a gear in the motor. I might be able to repair it (I have spare beater belts), but it's now got a lot less power with the stripped gear. Bad timing. I don't really want a cheap vacuum, because we vacuum a LOT (4 cats, 2 dogs), but I don't have the cash flow to spend $200 on a new one, either. Maybe I can get a used one from somewhere. Or a new motor.

Saturday, Christine went out and got her cake, and then we went to Hama Sushi for her birthday dinner. In attendance were Matt, Moria, a friend of Moria's whose name I never got, Anya, Matthew, Brad, Gay, Josh, Sean, Louann, Chance, Scarlet, Keiran, and Mark. Later, we went back to the house for cake, where Missie and Sawa joined us.

So far on Sunday, we're wrapping gifts. I got everyone at my office a giant Hershey's Chocolate Kiss (I figured it was harmless/non-denominational within my price range). But the cold is trying to take over, and I have been groggy all day.

This really sucks because I have to go to bed early to get up at 3:00am to go to work, and do a 4:00am install. Luckily, I have pretty detailed instructions, and since this is my first install, I'll have someone there with me (who was not to happy about it, either). I hope it goes well, because if it screws up (and multiple things could go wrong, my group is just the people who throw the switches, as it were), we'll have to do this the next morning, and then the next, and so on and so on, even through Christmas, to get this right.

But I only have 3 days of work next week. I have Thursday and Friday, then the whole next week off.

Thank God.

Posted by Punkie @ 05:20 PM EST [Link]

Saturday, December 18, 2004

Yes, Virginia, there is... a drunken woman handing out presents.

I think I was about 8 years old when I first figured out Santa Claus was my mom.

Kids had been talking about it at school, and the majority swing was that Santa didn't exist, he was your mom or dad, and the older kids had convincing arguments, like, "how can he visit all those houses in one night?" So I finally asked my mom, who told me with a stone cold face that there was a Santa. She used the same tone of voice that she used when she lied about other things, so I immediately knew something was up. I didn't say anything, which she knew meant I was thinking, so she tried to counter with the fact that kids who don't believe in Santa don't get presents. This didn't work in the way she had planned, I guess, because I became even more convinced she was lying to me for two reasons. First, it seemed like a desperate threat, the kind used by potential kidnapers in films we saw in school about not getting into cars with strangers. "If you don't come with me, I'll tell your mom and dad you were VERY bad!" Second, I knew older kids got presents from Santa, even those who told me there was no Santa, and their parents still kept up stockings because it was a second set of gifts.

So I did what I usually did, assumed I was on my own, and planned to catch my mom in the act. We had a large blue couch in our living room at the time, and I was starting to get big enough so that I could no longer squeeze under it. Often my parents sent me under the couch to retrieve cat toys, cats, or other things that rolled under there. It was a sneezy, dusty place, but after my parents went to bed (they went to bed at 9, which even then was kind of early), I managed to wriggle myself under there. I almost didn't make it; I was so fat now that my belly was pushing my back against the wooden support beams and the springs. Twice I lifted the couch up in the air, where it fell back to the carpeted floor with a soft "thump." I paused, hoping that my parents didn't hear, but if they did, they never got out of bed (our house was so creaky, you could tell where people were on the second floor if they moved around). My father was started a lot of his heavier abuse around this time, so already I had learned how to sleep under my bed and stay very still if he was looking for me, and this skill helped that Christmas Eve.

I waited.

I waited until about 7am, I guess. Whatever dawn was. I slept on and off, scared the bejesus out of Shasta (our resident scardey-cat) when she tried to go under the couch, and tried not to think about the bugs that might be crawling around at night. But a little after dawn, my mother came to the tree, slightly drunk, and giggling. She put the presents in the stockings, wrote the Santa thank you card, and ate the cookies and milk. Then I lay in wonder as to what to do next; I hadn't entirely thought this through yet. I could rise up from the couch, knocking it back, and going, "RAAAAWWWWRRRR!!!!" I had done that to her from around corners before, but then I thought the couch was too heavy to just toss aside like a blanket (but it was light enough for me to move around and tip over, if I was so inclined). Now that I look back on this thought, it would have probably given my mother a heart attack. So thankfully, I did not chose this option. I just stayed there. I kind of half-figured it would solve itself in time, but after she ate the cookies, she went back to bed.

So I wriggled out from the couch, and went to bed, too. I fell into a deep sleep, and had to be woken up by my mom, a first of many to come for Christmas. Apparently, they waited until 11, because my father thought I was in some waiting game, and he was going to win. My mother finally checked on me to make sure I wasn't dead. I woke up, looked at my electric clock (I had this old, white-dial electric analog clocks that hummed all the time, anyone remember those?), and saw it was 11. Oh no, did I miss Christmas? No, my mother assured me, but it was odd I got up so late. Did I wait for Santa? she asked.

"No," I lied, annoyed at the question on many levels. I was never a morning person.

I didn't say anything that morning, or the next. In fact, I didn't say anything until Spring, when my mother started with that, "Maybe Santa will bring you that..."

"You're Santa," I said. We were in a shop at the time, and I was annoyed at her patronization.

"W-what?" she asked.

I told her, play-by-play, what I had seen. She tried to tell me I was dreaming, but I explained three other things she could not explain:

- She used the same wrapping paper
- The Thank-you note was in her handwriting
- Several things I had asked Santa, and Santa alone for, were not there
- But everything I asked her for was
- How did the cats and fish get Santa gifts? Saint Nick was not the patron Saint of animals, St. Francis of Assisi was (I found this out from my Catholic friends).
- All the other kids knew, anyway

She was a little heartbroken. I didn't care at the time, but my stern nature was a result of my weakness at being patronized at the time, and I probably could have handled it better. My mother "forgot" the incident at least a few times more a year, and each time, I explained, in detail, that I knew. I would later discover that my mother thought I was eight until she died ten years later.

Christmas at our house was turning sour anyway. It's probably best Santa skipped our chimney. After that Christmas, I stopped getting up early. Fights between me and my father were becoming the norm, and a few Christmasses, my mother was too drunk to get up. Sometimes, Christmas would roll around noon or so, with my mother in various stages of sober, drunk, or hung over. Stockings were still stuffed, albeit sometimes after Christmas when my mother remembered where she put them. And when I became a teen, I often spent Christams day with friends who had slightly more sane families (thank you, Wickland and Tredwell families).

The last time I told my mother she was Santa ended up like, "GODDAMIT I AM 17!!!" During one of our many, many pointless, "I'm not drunk/Yes you are, mom!" debates. Hell, I pointed out that I had stuffed the stockings twice.

Heh.

Now I always feel the standard, "Santa is the spirit of giving," even with my past. Maybe in spite of it. So, when Christine and I had CR, we surprisingly came to agreement right away that we would tell CR there was no Santa, and if he asked again, he'd be eaten my evil flying spiders that lay hidden in his closet.

Just kidding.

Actually, I am hoping Christine tells the story in her blog, because in the end, I think CR and Christine summed up the whole Santa thing nicely.

Posted by Punkie @ 01:32 PM EST [Link]

Friday, December 17, 2004

Real reply from a company we ordered from this year

We thought we should let you know that your order has been shipped! Here's our tale of how it all went down:

Your ordered item(s) have been gently taken from our shelves with a set of sterilized, contamination-free gloves and placed onto a satin pillow. A team of 100 employees inspected your order and folded, polished and spit-shined it to perfection, making sure everything was in the best possible condition before mailing.

Our packing specialist from Japan lit a commemorative candle and a hush fell over the crowd as he put your item(s) into the finest corrugated cardboard box that money can buy. We all proceeded to have a wonderful celebration afterwards and the whole party marched down the street to the post office where the entire city of Vancouver waved "Bon Voyage!" to your package.

We hope you had a wonderful time shopping with us, we sure did! Your picture now hangs on our wall as "Customer of the Year" amidst the endless rows of other "Customers of the Year". We're all very exhausted now, but can't wait for you to come back again so we can once again hold our sacred shipping ceremony.

Posted by Punkie @ 02:13 PM EST [Link]

From the eyes of a zombie

I can't believe it. I was so tired yesterday, that I left work early to go home and sleep. I was tired, stressed, and feeling sick. I went to sleep in the guest room at 3:30pm and woke up this morning at 6:30am. I slept 15 hours straight. Damn.

I am still tired, too, with a head cold, but I didn't call in sick from work because there's an important meeting today which is preparing me for a 4am install on Monday. Lately, I have been even more tired than usual, which I kind of attribute to the seasonal depression. The SAD is still on the mild side. It started to get worse about two weeks ago, but then leveled off to a kind of mild level funk which is about what it did last year. There were a few dips last year, which I expect will happen this year.

I feel like a zombie. Although, thanks to a "Josie and the Pussycats" cartoon from my youth, I keep thinking of Melonie, when she was hypnotized, "Yes... mustard... tee hee..."

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

Thursday, December 16, 2004

Doldrums are good...

I'd like to say that so far, this hasn't been a disastrous month. I didn't get laid off, I am still alive, and I have hope that 2005 will be a lot better than 2004. I don't have any proof to back this prediction up, I just want to think this way.

There's also some really hopeful news on the job front, but it's only "a sign" and if anything happens, it won't be until late next year. I won't say anything about it, because I don't want to jinx it. No, not management. I have seen how management works here, and I want no part of that disaster. They'd have to pay me a 6-digit salary for management.

I won't make any plans for 2005 other than two, which is to work on that first item a little, and to try and make it to Sweden. I have to renew my passport, keep an eye on the USD/SEK exchange rates, and send mail back and forth to my cousin, Sven. I think 2005 will be a rebuilding year, trying to recover from the disaster that was 2004, so there will be no plans for a novel, no plans for cons, and nothing more than trying to get all the wreckage back in order. I really hope 2005 is dull and uninteresting. I could use the nap.

I haven't mentioned it but in passing, but CR is really turning out to be a good human being. He's usually kind and thoughtful, but he's set his own goals for the first time this year. It's his first year in High School, and so far he has successfully lost weight, became and stayed a vegetarian (on his own accord), gone off of chocolate, soda, and caffeine (again, his decision, we didn't ask him), and now he's trying to go off of sugar altogether, but admits this is his highest hurdle, yet. His grades have been good as well, with a 3.0 average - his best yet. His compassion for people is not fleeting, either, it is gaining the depth of an adult, and barring any horrible calamity to steer him off course, I think he's going to be a fine adult.

Christmas shopping was delayed because I didn't know if I was going to have a job or not until last week. Thus, some of my online shopping got delayed until last Thursday, and now it looks like some of it won't get here until AFTER Christmas. One major site, which I can't name in case the recipient is reading my journal, has backed up to half my Christmas order as "out of stock" (even though it said it was in stock) and "scheduled delivery - Jan 6" on some items. But they've done this before, only to deliver it within a few days. They usually follow it up with a letter telling me to ignore the "out of stock" letter.

Once I got the delivery twice.

Posted by Punkie @ 02:59 PM EST [Link]

Wednesday, December 15, 2004

Gaaah... I am so hungry.

I am stuck in a building with no cafeteria, no ATM, and the nearest place to eat is about 2 miles away. No one will give me a lift, I don't have a car, and I am STARVING.

See, I was led to believe we were getting lunch today. There was an all-hands where lunch would be served, but then "stuff happened" and no lunch was served. I had about $2.50 left, which I spent on some vending machine munchies. That's not enough to sustain me; two pop tarts and a small bag of chips.

I guess it serves me right not having a car.

No one's here to give me a lift, either. I have been sustaining off of other's candy jars (which they let people take from, I am not stealing someone's personal stash) and the free hot cocoa in the kitchen (which makes me gassy, but who cares, no one is here).

Man... soooo hungry...

Posted by Punkie @ 07:26 PM EST [Link]

Monday, December 13, 2004

Here's some advice, kid...

Sometimes, when I think about how bad things were as a kid, if any advice I have now would have made a damn bit of difference. Like, if someone else had told me, "School is a game; beat them by their own rules." I was told that in my senior year of high school (by my AP English teacher), and it seemed like the biggest revelation in my life up to that point. I recall, after thinking about that statement, how clear it all seemed. I remember wishing someone had told me that back in grammar school. But would I have listened?

People did try and give me advice. But a lot of adults missed the point entirely. Some of the worst advice adults gave me were among the following:

- These are the best years of your life
- The real world is a cruel and horrible place
- Things at home are not as bad as you make them out to be
- Your father loves you

The first one was by far the most damaging. It was the type of advice that pretty much said, "You think it's bad now? It gets worse." The second piece followed the first in most cases, but even back then, I was smart enough to realize that the adults who gave that to me were pretty messed up to start with. Like my dad had a variation on this that "Everyone is out to get you," and I think he meant the plural you, like everyone is on their own, and should treat others like enemies. Sometimes, when I am depressed and feel really bad like the world is crushing around me, it helps put things in perspective that someone like my dad went crazy because he couldn't tell the difference. I can't imagine living a life where I thought this was true. I'd be terrified beyond my current comprehension. The third one I got from adults who couldn't fathom how bad things were. Even today, people who have never met my dad find this hard to accept. "Oh, he loves you in some deep, hidden way." No. He doesn't. This is what was my last hurdle into letting him go.

But that last hurdle would have never worked when I was a kid. I desperately wanted him to love me. No matter what anyone could have said, even if I found a time machine and went back and told a younger me, I probably wouldn't listen. I may have agreed. I knew, by about 8 or 9, that he didn't love me, but I didn't believe it. I didn't want to. I couldn't accept it, and so the anger, hurt, and resentment at his treating me meant that, deep down, I thought I could change it.

But sometime this year, after he didn't bother to show up to his own mother' funeral or even acknowledge the presence of his family, some part of me finally accepted that he could not love me, and never would. I don't even want to call it a "cold hard fact" because that implies that it is somehow against what "should be." It simply is. It is not my fault, I cave him many chances, but he did not love me. And I think, for the first time ever, I made peace with this. I knew there was nothing I could have done, and buddy, I tried everything. I gave 120% and it still didn't work. He's gone. It's over. I have to give him up to the drifting winds of his own fate.

This is the final path to forgiving him. I have crossed over the hump, and the downhill journey to the end will sever the last remaining strands. All the cruelty he has done to me, the senseless random abuse compiled with neglect, the comments, snide remarks, lies, violence...all have started to become abstract and impersonal. Sure he may have pushed me down a flight of stairs, but he was crazy. Yes, he took all my mother's heirlooms and threw them out, had her cremated, and tossed the ashes, and erased her. He isn't human the way we know human to be, and for reasons that are no one's fault but his own, he became a sociopath. He is an autonomous force, like a tornado. You can't spent all of your life wishing a tornado spared your mobile home, and maybe if you had known ahead of time, you could have moved your home. It's over. The tornado didn't know you, it wasn't out to get you; it just happened. Take what lessons you can from the wreckage and move forward.

Many times, I have fantasized about going back in time, knowing what I know now. Sometimes it would be fun to think how different Junior High might have been if I stopped being such a wimp and really whaled on a bully. I wonder if I could have faked "discovering advanced math" in 1st grade, like, "I realized that if you take a square, and it has perfect L-shapes for corners, that the length of the diagonal line from opposing corners is equal to the square root of the sum of the squares of adjacent sides. I tried doing that with a circle, but I am doing something wrong because the number I keep coming up with won't end, like 3.1415926535... and it won't repeat. I never had a decimal do that before, can you check my math? I can't find the error..." I bet I'd blow away that smartass in GT. Oh, wait, that was me. Never mind.

But when I seriously think about it, I mean really analyze what reality would be like, it always ends in disaster. My life, despite momentary disasters like this year, is pretty good. Many of the good things that happened to me can be traced back to a single decision or stroke of luck that would not have occurred if a single tiny thing changed.

So this is why giving advice is hard. I mean, you may be right, but will it matter? To a kid? What do you think, if you gave advice to your younger self, would you have listened? And while we're at it, if you could go back in time, what would you do to "right some wrong" or make yourself obnoxiously powerful with knowledge from the future?

Posted by Punkie @ 04:41 PM EST [Link]

Sweden in 2005?

One of my goals for 2005 was to go to Sweden with CR. Here's what needs to happen to reach that goal.

1. Airfare. This may be mostly free because I have a buttload of airline miles.

2. Hotel/Place to stay. This is the first hurdle. My cousins have places to stay that they own, but getting to them might be a problem. I used to stay with Sven, but he's moved from his single pad in Ornskoldsvik in with his new girlfriend, Karin, in Sundsvall.

3. Travel in Sweden. Luckily, because petrol (gas) in Europe is so high, owning a car is kind of a luxury for many, so the public transportation is far, far better in Europe than the US. Trains, busses, and rentals are common.

4. Cost of food/incidentals. Here's a big new problem. Things have always been a little expensive in Sweden, that's a given. But now, thanks to 51% of the people being total dumbasses this past election, the American dollar is severely weakening in our horrible economy, which will continue to fall for the next 4 years. When I went in 2000, it used to be 10 SEK (Swedish crowns) to the dollar. As I enter this, it's now 6.7 SEK to the dollar. That's the lowest I have ever seen, and it's bound to get worse. Right now, a budget room is 595 SEK, which was about $60/night. Now, it's $88/night. In the summer it will triple that rate, and the dollar will be even less. A night's stay, in a budget hotel, might be over $360/night if the dollar goes down to 5 SEK. Then there's food. Bus fare. Knick nacks, batteries, and so on.

Issue #4 is wouldn't be as much of an issue if I just flew to Boden and stayed with my cousins Karin and Jon Eric, since they have a stuga, although I have to ask permission, of course. I could swing expensive food for CR and I. But then I'd miss Sven, and that would kind of suck. He's the best interpreter and tour guide like person of the bunch. Most of my older cousins don't speak more than a few words of English, which I can manage because I speak a little Swedish, but that leaves intelligent conversations out of the enjoyment of the stay. Then there's how long I'd stay, a week or two weeks? If I am in Karin and Jon Eric's stuga, that might get dull pretty quick since it's deep in the woods, next to a river. I'd really like to travel, and see more of Sweden, especially in the south.

Ack... I have to make up my mind, speak with some of those guys.

Posted by Punkie @ 12:35 PM EST [Link]

Sunday, December 12, 2004

Dear Journal: Sorry I haven't written...

... but this week has had its moments.

Well, we had the layoffs, and then everyone consoling me about said layoffs. Like I have always said, I have some of the best friends in the world that anyone could ever ask for. One of them made me an interesting offer that, while it's not immediately gratifying, should pan off in about a year. I don't want to jinx it, so I will defer on the surprise until it's official. But it's seriously good news.

This week has been a lot of being on call, almost every night, losing tons of sleep, and being groggy during the day. I would say I only got 3 hours of interrupted sleep a night for a week until last Friday.

We also decorated the house for Christmas. Actually, Christine did most of the decorating, I only fetched everything from the attic, did the outdoor lights, and set up Christmas music. Christine got a new artificial tree, did the tree, did the banister, and decorated the rest of the house with CR's help. I was so tired from lack of sleep all week, I wasn't much help.

Saturday, we went out with Anya for some errands. I stopped off at Ikea to get yet another new office chair to replace the piece of crap I bought at Best Buy earlier in the year. A few weeks ago, it finally broke enough that duct tape couldn't hold it together anymore, and lay apart in my den like the floppy bits of a gutted turtle exposed to the sky. I love Ikea, but I forgot that in order to see anything, you have to go through their whole showroom. I mean, the way they have it at Potomac Mills is done in such a way you have to walk through the maze of showrooms, seeing everything, before you can actually check out. There are no shortcuts; it's kind of like being forced to go through a tour at Disney in that you follow the footpath to the final ride at the end. I also got some Swedish food things, like thin ginger snaps, chocolate Dala horses, and some Glögg mix (Swedish hot mulled wine). CR got two new cheap lamps that hopefully are cat proof.

Then we had dinner with Matt and Anya at our house, and then they played Munchkin while I baked a ton of cookies for the cookie exchange the next day. I was so exhausted with the cookie exchange, that I went to bed right afterwards.

This morning, I woke up late, but since I had already baked all the cookies, and we had cleaned the house for Matt and Anya, not much needed done before the party. The party consisted of our friends Gay, Sawa, Sean, Lou, and their kids. We all made cookies, and exchanged them. Gay left early but the rest of the crew played Munchkin. I didn't feel well, so I had to keep going to out bedroom and lie down. I so severely tired, I couldn't even tell you.

This week, I'll be doing some of the last Christmas shopping, paying bills, and other boring stuff. Next weekend is Christine's Birthday party, and then the week after that is a short week because I am taking my last week off for the year.

Christine's sister Debbie will be staying with us this Christmas! Debbie is totally awesome. She is Christine's eldest sister, and the first one I had met when Christine and I were still dating. We always get along really well, and I like her company. She's coming that week, and staying trough New Year's. And New Year's, we're having a party at our house.

Posted by Punkie @ 08:26 PM EST [Link]

Tuesday, December 7, 2004

Sick Day for Layoff Season

Sick today. My stomach hasn't been so good since this weekend, and because I have been on call, I haven't been able to catch up with my sleep as much as I would have liked. This morning I woke up with a clogged chest and a sour stomach. The stomach is okay now, possibly because of weirdly good news.

I still have a job.

They had the "big layoffs" today. I am just glad it's over. So glad. It was hanging over our heads like the Sword of Damocles. Our team lost no one, our group lost one guy, and our whole department only lost 2% of the workforce, which I suspect was probably people labeled as "needs a firin', wait fer next layoff." I was glad I was sick today, too, because they I could avoid the drama.

My chest is still heavy and hard to breathe, but clearing due to some tea Sawa left and some blueberry drops (I think). The weather is depressing, but my SAD has been, like last year, surprisingly light so far, so the occasional spell isn't as bad. Last night I wanted to be unconscious, and again, I am glad I don't drink. Work is stressful, but now that I don't have this, "Who cares, I could be fired any day now..." hanging over my head, I can probably tackle my work with a new earnest fervor.

Last night, I felt that I hadn't had such a crushing depression is so long, I had the strength to analyze the situation with better clarity. I have always known depression was anger, but it was interesting to see how the curve worked. I have always pictured in my mind that my depression was anger that bent in upon itself, like a parabola. When I was a teen, I was so abused by me environment, that I felt depression was a better form of control than anger. Whenever I got angry, my brain misfired. This is embarrassing. All my wit and coordination drain from my brain like a ruptured boiler, spilling all over the place and mixing everything up. The mere presence of my father, for instance, has this effect; I become a gibbering idiot. Anger has its roots deep in fear, and while I haven't seen him for 6 years or so, I believe that if my father were to walk into my den right now, I'd resort to that bitchy 11 year old, saying random crazy things that had my father nodding in satisfaction that, yes, his son was a useless moron. Everywhere I went, the angrier I got, the more damaging the backlash was. I have always admired people who can be angry AND witty at the same time. My writings have all kinds of clever sayings I wish I had the nerve to say:

"I usually refuse to have a battle of wits with an unarmed person," said Julie, pushing her hair aside. "However, in your case, I feel that if no one in this room knows what a moron you actually are, that I have done a great disservice to Mankind."

"Say what you will, Julie. But I hardly expect people to listen to the chocolate-stained mouth of a little girl," replied Displeasia, who was still bitter the author gave her such a cheap personifier for a name.

"I wasn't finished," said Julie, rising from her chair. In a move that shocked everyone at the party, she actually put the two liter bottle of Mountain Dew she had been nursing all evening and rose from the oversized armchair that had all but dwarfed her. Julie's face was bottom-lit from the glare of a small fountain in the middle of the buffet table, casting an evil shadow into her eyes. "And when I am finished, you spineless creature, you will know it by the applause, because in the years I have known you, I have always known you were too stupid to realize you had lost an argument."

The room was silent. There was a long pause, interrupted by a nervous cough.

"I... I think your impertinence is the kind of thing--"

"I rest my case. You are a buffoon, Lady Displeasia. Your moth-eaten ideas are foul with the stench of a bitter life of should-haves and what-could-have-beens. From the dried husk of a soul that rattles inside your rib cage, only wisps of smoke rise to exit between your yellowed teeth, passing off words as symbols of intelligent thought that fool no one. No one here, no one anywhere. Your only attraction is your vast wealth, of which you did not earn a dime, but gained through the death of foundling husbands still suckling the teats of their elderly mothers, and you were just handy to take over from their maternal corpses to pump the milk of your attention to men who would always stay little boys. And if one of those man-childs should rise against you, you crushed their little spirits with the cruel hatred of what you think the world owes you until they died from the weight of their own crushing neuroses. You are a vampire of wealth and prestige, Queen of the Shallows and a lady who is only as deep as the papery skin that adorns her ragged face."

I totally wish I could say comebacks like that.

But I usually go, "Oh yeah? Well, you... you such are jerk bitch!" Yeah. Real smooth. And then I would get only angrier while the other kids laughed at me. The next logical step was to keep my rage silent, and turn the anger inwards where it did terrible damage. To minimize the pain, I opted to keep the depression on a constant slow simmer, instead of letting it cool from time to time until it exploded from a sudden heat. This probably saved my life, because my suicidal rages were pretty sparse, and rather diffused by the level of constant boo-hooing.

I was too depressed to kill myself. That seems funny to me right now, but it's true!

So, because of this... rather odd choice of behavior (and when I run all the scenarios in my head, it still seems like the best choice of all of the possible ones), I limped through my teen years in a dark haze, so when things really got bad, like my mother's suicide, I was able to deal better. It just seemed normal to me. Horror was my normal life.

But then I left my home, left McLean behind, and it all changed. My old way of thinking was no longer a useful shield, but a wall blocking out the sun. But I couldn't just change because Cheryl told me to cheer up, no, I had to do it piece by piece, bit by bit. The last 18 years, I have been tugging at the threads that make up this tangle, and trying to weave a better cloth of my life, so to speak.

You know what really helped? The fact the world didn't care.

Let me explain this. See, as bad as my life was, I kept getting "advice" from my elders that my teen years were my BEST years, and that any horrors I felt now would seem puny compared to being an adult. So, in my mind, things were only bound to get worse. God damn, why live at all? Of course, I didn't know that many of these adults were bitter, and probably DID have petty complaints as a teen, like zits, being stood up for a date, or losing the homecoming game. The truth is, the real world is NOT a clique, and if you're in one you hate, you can always move. Start a new life somewhere else. Over and over. You're pretty much responsible for your own actions, which was not like high school at all. You had no choice, you say there, and you took it. My father always said that everyone was out to get me, and that he was the only one that cared about me, and he didn't even like me. Gee, thanks. But he was so wrong about things, that I realized that if he said it, it probably wasn't true at all! And so far, so good.

So for 18 years, I have been trying to nibble away at my depression, turn some of my philosophies around like tuning pegs, and become a real person. Memories were my biggest asset and drawback here. Like last night, even though I am almost over my father, I had another fantasy bout of what I would have liked to say to him during all those times he abused me and I just stuttered and stammered. I was feeling pretty sick, so my defenses were low. I tried to sleep, but my mind and body wanted to be awake and suffering. There was a chest cold, asthma, sour stomach, migraines, and depression all banging off each other like ping pong balls in a trash can, making a terrible racket.

When I woke up this morning, I didn't want to get up. I hadn't slept well, I got paged at 3:30am, and I had this overwhelming sense of dread and doom. Turns out, this time I was right, and the layoffs were today. I didn't want to miss it, because I have this fear they'll lay me off, and I'll find out the next day when they tossed all my stuff out. But I did get to miss the shock, people being unable to work, and all the psychodrama that accompanies a layoff (although, truthfully, only one guy on our floor got let go, so it wasn't like we were in a building where different areas had different mood swings).

Some things happen for a reason.

Posted by Punkie @ 03:15 PM EST [Link]

Saturday, December 4, 2004

Weekend on Call: The pages keep a'comin...

This weekend should be interesting.

I got paged a lot starting around 4pm. That's why I am up at almost 3:00am, because of a page. At least this last page was pretty superficial; just a permission request to reboot a box that was non-production (memory errors). The rest of this afternoon had to do with a huge bunch of inter-dependant machines where someone shut some services down and forgot to turn them back on again. This caused a cascading failure that flip flopped all night until they all stabilized. There was a lot of, "This machine is d-- oh, it's back up, hold on... no, now another one is... oh, wait, never mind." I was on a conference call for an hour or two, while database people all pointed fingers around.

I didn't get to spend the evening with Anya and Matt like I had planned because of this. I am bummed out, but this is my own doing; I swapped this week so I wouldn't be primary on call for the week of Christine's birthday.

Tomorrow (today), I was thinking of going to Ikea to get a new office chair. My old (new) one broke to the point I had to steal CR's chair so I could work. It's not very comfy because it doesn't have arms and it kind of pitches you forward. I'd adjust it, but it's not my chair, and I hate it when someone adjusts my chair, so why do that to CR?

I am also watching the Heare kids for a few hours. They are coming over in the evening, so I can't take them anywhere (dark). I'll try and find some TV things to watch. I was thinking of Ah My Goddess (that's pretty G-rated), although that probably won't interest Kieran for long (he's 3). Luckily, I have trucks.

Posted by Punkie @ 03:09 AM EST [Link]

Friday, December 3, 2004

Random goings-on

I used to say about one of my friends, "If you haven't heard from her in a while, that means her life is doing good." That's kind of like this blog. There have only been three things that have happened in the past few days worth writing about.

One is that, due to an error in a Paypal transaction, our bank account has fallen dangerously short on cash. This was not Paypal's fault, really, but ours, although be careful when you do a Paypal auction - sometimes people don't want you to use your credit card. Luckily, someone paid us back in cash recently, and so we should have enough cash to get by until the 15th (next payday). On top of that, almost all transactions we have done for the past few years have been through credit card. I do this to get airline miles, which is how I can afford to fly to Sweden next year (and hopefully, I'll have enough money for hotel and food).

Next, I am worried about layoffs. Nothing's changed since I last mentioned it, except I have gotten a few rumors that our department won't be hit very hard at all, and then I got told my status in the employee files was "questionable" because my former boss (El Korbo) didn't file a lot of his annual assessments correctly (I don't actually blame him -0 long story). It's just aggravating because we can't do any Christmas shopping until I am sure I can pay for it. They haven't told us the date, but I am assuming it will fall around the 6th, 7th, or 13th, 14th. I dread those days, because every time, there's always someone I know who gets creamed, and I always hope it's not me. Twice, now, I have been told I got the axe, only to be saved at the last moment. Several times I have been "re-assigned" to a different department/division. And other times I have quit and started with another team because the team I was on was sinking fast. But the last few layoffs have been so... unsettling. This new company really makes moves that are hard to predict. It used to be, for any company I have worked for, you could tell you were going to get axed because you had no work to do. When I worked for wardialing, it was actually a big surprise, because I was crammed with work; work I was led to believe was important. So now I think it's totally random.

Lastly, we're being haunted. Not in some horrible way, but we're definitely having a mild prankster poltergeist/ghost issue. We have weird events in our house, and most of the time, they can be explained, or they are such isolated incidents, they are hardly worth mentioning. But here's a few things that have happened just in the last two weeks, most of them concentrated in the downstairs:

- Widget aggressively barking and growling at the hallway to our bedroom, acting as if he sees something, and is protecting Christine. Cats have been ruled out.
- In the guest room/laundry area, something is opening doors. We have those doors closed to keep the pets out of them. Even when I have been alone in the house, the doors to the guest shower, bathroom, and both in the laundry room have been opened, usually all at once. Same with the dryer door, but not as much. The pets are afraid to go past the laundry room, and this is new, because they usually zip right in.
- Sounds of people walking around upstairs, even though I am alone or I know Christine and CR are asleep. In my den, I have heard odd scissor-like "clicking" noises that seem to have no position in the room. I thought it was some fan on one of my computers, but when I shut them all off, I still heard it, only louder. The sound has no parallax, but always seems to be coming from right behind my head. This might be something with our AC system, or related to my nerve deafness, but I am not sure.
- Strange dark "areas" appear at night. I have poor night vision, but recently, I have noticed that when my eyes have adjusted to the dark, strange dark spots stay in the middle of the living room and hallways (not in corners, as you'd usually see darker areas). They have no form, reach like a soft column from floor to ceiling, and when I walk through them, they have little to no temperature difference or "creep factor." I do not sense they are "bad" in any way. These are new as of 2 weeks ago, and they have only happened a few times.
- Cold spots in the kitchen, usually in front of the oven and sink. They are not always there, and when you are in them, you feel no breeze, but they "feel creepy."
- The downstairs TV turns on randomly to no channel (black screen).
- The doorbell rings randomly in the late evening, even though the battery to the button outside is dead, and has been for some time.
- Things vanish, only to turn up in unexpected places. They are usually cutting tools, like scissors and knives, but recently the checkbook ended up in the guest room fridge.
- A sense, occasionally, that someone else is in the room with you. This happens in my den a lot normally, but now it happens in larger rooms. This might be psychosomatic.
- Speaking of my den, when I was testing my new Web Cam, I was testing the motion sensing software. The motion sensing software "picked up something" for a few days, about 2-3 times a day when I wasn't in the room. But the films, which only last about 20 seconds (the timeout for the software), show nothing. I have scrutinized them for small objects like flies, evidence of drafts, ghosts, whatever... nothing. I have not ruled out the software "just does that occasionally," or perhaps just random vibrations, but when I kept my camera lens covered, it stopped happening.

None of these things seem "evil" and we have had certain things like this before, only not as compact a time period. Recently, in the last few days, it has seemed to wane, and the last time a clump of these happened, it was around this time. Maybe they all have great scientific explanations, and my imagination is filling in the gaps, but I tried to be as objective as possible here. Think what you will.

Posted by Punkie @ 01:40 PM EST [Link]